The Court of the Air

Chapter Thirteen

Oliver stared with horror at his right hand, the wrist swelling up like a black balloon, hair and muscles rippling, more like the limb of a bear now than anything human.

‘I told you not to go near any of the ruins,’ shouted Harry.

‘I thought I heard someone calling,’ said Oliver. ‘Someone who needed help.’

The disreputable Stave brandished the witch-knife that Mother had gifted to Oliver. ‘You’re the one who needs help now, lad. Your arm has got to come off below the elbow before it infects your entire body. Mage-war, Oliver, the earth-flow particles are active in your bloodstream — you’ll go into shock in three minutes unless I take it off.’

Oliver held the arm out, bubbles of flesh climbing up the limb as he watched. ‘Do it now, before it gets to my shoulder.’

‘Let’s not,’ said the Whisperer, ‘and say we did anyway.’

Harry started in disgust at the deformed feybreed. ‘Circle be jiggered, what the hell are you?’

‘Real,’ said the Whisperer, passing through the man. ‘Which is more than I can say for you.’

Oliver was still yelling as his arm twisted and changed, but the dreamwalker reached out and held it, the limb returning to normal with his touch.

‘You’re losing your grip on your dreams,’ said the Whisperer. ‘Come on, Oliver, this is basic stuff.’

‘Whisperer. Nathaniel, thank you.’

‘Nathaniel is it now, Oliver? You’ve been charmed by our Lady of the Lights.’

‘You were there,’ said Oliver. ‘Before she appeared to me.’

‘She’s pure, Oliver. Or perhaps I should say raw — fundamental — even when she’s down here slumming with all the sentient bacteria on the skin of the world. Sharing a mind with her, well, I am like a moth trapped in the lantern room of a lighthouse.’

‘Yes,’ said Oliver. ‘She’s pure.’

‘Snap out of it, boy,’ spat the Whisperer. ‘She’s done a number on you, more than you know.’

‘What do you mean, Nathaniel?’

‘Nathaniel isn’t my name,’ hissed the Whisperer, rearing up. ‘Nathaniel was a frightened boy who was turned over to the worldsingers by his own father for the price of a couple of jinn bottles. I have better names now — there are tribes of craynarbians in Liongeli who worship me as Ka’mentar, the dream snake. Even the Whisperer is better than that stupid hamblin name.’

‘I don’t care what you want to call yourself, Whisperer, it’s all the same to me. What do you mean she’s done a number on me?’

The Whisperer scratched at his back with an oddly jointed limb. ‘Your memories, Oliver. Your early memories before you came to Hundred Locks to live with your uncle — they were always closed off to me. I thought it must have been some trauma keeping them buried, but it was her. Since her visit all the walls inside your mind have come down. I’ve been dipping into your mind, Oliver, and I’ve never seen anything like your memories before … even steammen minds make more sense than that mess, and believe me, I am a connoisseur.’

Oliver felt the skin of his arm, he could feel the hairs, touch the veins; dreams with the Whisperer seemed so real, something about the creature’s presence made the imaginings immensely vivid. ‘I don’t think you can understand their world on this side of the feymist curtain, you have to be there — live with the fast-time people to understand.’

‘You know, Oliver, call me a natural pessimist if you will,’ said the Whisperer. ‘But I have a sneaking suspicion that when the Lady of the Lights was geeing you up to lead all the beautiful people into the sunset across the feymist veil, there was not much scope for the poor old troll to crawl out from under his bridge and join them.’

‘I’m sure she didn’t mean that,’ said Oliver.

‘Didn’t she?’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘She is part of the rule-set, Oliver. When some Spencer Street trader complains about weights and measures, wags a finger at Greenhall and complains you can’t buck the system, she’s the system they’re talking about. All that if the angel had a hammer I would bethe nail nonsense. Right now, from where I’m standing, she’s rolling about a barrel of slipsharp oil, waving a match and shouting ‘fire, fire’. The Circle knows, Oliver, this turn of the wheel hasn’t exactly been kind to me — but jigger me, I still like it here. I’m not about to trade life in Jackals for that bad mumbleweed hallucination you call a childhood on the other side of the feymist curtain.’

‘We may not have a choice,’ said Oliver. ‘If our world is destroyed surely it’s better some of us live on somewhere else?’

‘We’re not meant to live there,’ insisted the Whisperer, raising a twisted arm with ears instead of fingers at the end of it. ‘Just a whiff of that filthy mist does this to more of us than not, those it doesn’t kill right off. Your children would not be human — you would not even qualify for membership after a decade more beyond the veil.’

‘Life is life,’ said Oliver. ‘I won’t let our people die out.’

‘Our people?’ hissed the Whisperer, laughing. ‘Oh, Oliver, oh, our great saviour. What are you, old man Panquetzaliztli, being visited by the gods and told to dig a warm hall under the mountains before the coldtime sweeps the land? You might be willing to roll over and help stock the Lady of the Lights’ menagerie of rare species, but I’m jiggered if I’ll lift one of my fate-cursed fingers to help her. Jackals is my country and this world is my home; if the landlord wants to move me on, she’d better send more than some abstraction with a poor attention span and some twinkle-twinkle lights — you understand? She’d better come mob-handed and be ready for a real fight.’

‘Nathaniel, Whisperer, you’re not thinking.’

‘I am thinking, Oliver,’ said the Whisperer. ‘I am just not trusting. You are waking up, boy. Best you reconsider who’s really on your side and what you are prepared to do to win.’

‘Whisperer,’ called Oliver. But he was being pulled down a tunnel, back to a cold camp on the Angelset moors.

‘What do you think, Oliver?’ said Harry. ‘Take the forest route or keep on over the bog?’

Oliver looked at the oak trees then glanced at the soggy ground of the hills. The shadows between the trees seemed darker than they should, and something about the shape of the trees was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but they did not look like the pine woodland at the foot of Hundred Locks. ‘The forest would give us cover. But I don’t know, something about it makes my skin crawl.’

‘Good instincts, old stick. The cursewall runs through the trees — the canopy of leaves masks its noise. We could be blundering through the forest one minute and dead the next.’

‘How close are we to the Commonshare?’

Harry pointed to the east. ‘Quatershift is half a mile that way. The people’s paradise, where everything belongs to everybody and no wicked lords trample the common folk of the land. And if you believe that, I’ll tell you another.’

‘You’ve been there before?’

‘I preferred it before the revolution,’ said Harry. ‘Less pofaced. Last time I was there they used the words ‘Jackelian spy’ a lot and didn’t seem to appreciate it when I pointed out that they still had a ruling class, it just called itself the First Committee. There’s always an authority, Oliver, usually mustered by the ones with the sharpest blades and the fastest rate of fire. Trust me on that. From the perspective of someone who used to be a thief — there’s always someone waiting to feel your collar. In Jackals they give you the boat or the drop — in Quatershift they shove you inside a Gideon’s Collar. You can slide a piece of paper between the difference to a poor old jack like me.’ Oliver shifted the weight of his backpack. ‘I thought you said you were an entrepreneur.’

‘Well, an entrepreneurial thief, perhaps. There I was at the heart of the Victualling Board, all the merchant lords making a fortune supplying the navy, all those cargoes and goods flowing across the land. I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t dipped my fingers in the honey pot a little — just to see what the taste was like, mind.’

Oliver shook his head. ‘Must have tasted a lot like the rope at Bonegate.’

‘Not my fault, Oliver. Some clever transaction engine worm at the treasury noticed a discrepancy in the books. You know the funny thing, it wasn’t even me! The quality that ran the board only had half the staff they were claiming wages for — the rest were phantoms on the books, drawing salaries that just seemed to disappear into thin air. Greenhall sent in truth-sayers, and the quality needed some meat to throw to the dogs to keep their own necks from being stretched. So they put Harry chops on the menu.’

‘And my father helped you escape.’

‘Wasn’t so much an escape, Oliver, as a graduation. The wolftakers might as well rename Bonegate as their finishing school. Normally the Court of the Air just fakes a death in the cells — but there were too many navy jacks and Greenhall types waiting to see me dance the Bonegate jig for the crowds, so I went over the wall. Of course, I would have escaped on my own if push had come to shove. My neck’s a little too precious to me to see it stretched for the sins of the penny dippers that sit on the Victualling Board.’

‘But you were defrauding them,’ said Oliver.

‘Spoken like the true nephew of a merchant,’ said Harry. ‘It’s the principle of the thing — you don’t let another jack hang for a crime which you committed yourself. The lowest angler in the rookeries, the slipperiest highwayman on the Innverney Road would tell you the same — but that’s one fashion that hasn’t caught up with the quality yet.’

Oliver pushed on across the wet ground. ‘I’m glad they didn’t make you catch the drop, Harry.’

‘Me too,’ said the disreputable Stave, fingering his neck with a shiver. ‘Now take the Commonshare over there. What a racket; I wish I’d thought of that one. I’d have got the rope for a few missing bales of aerostat canvas — but you travel a mile over the border and they stole the whole country and convinced everyone in the place to become an accomplice. Masterful. Bleeding masterful.’

They walked on, skirting the forest and then crossing the wet low hills that opened up before them. Oliver was wondering when they would pitch up for lunch when he stubbed his boot against an iron pipe, nearly tumbling over across the boggy ground. Angry with himself for not spotting the metal he gave it a kick. ‘Looks like someone’s chimney.’

‘Not a chimney,’ said Harry, pointing along the grass. ‘That’s a steamman stack.’

Oliver followed the sweep of the wolftaker’s hand. Fragments of metal jutted out across the slopes — broken fingers clutching for the heavens, the horns of helmet-like heads, ancient iron bodies smashed open — home now only to frogs and nesting moorhens.

The place looked cold, hard and bleak. ‘A graveyard?’

‘Of sorts, Oliver. This was a battlefield. We’ve reached the Drammon Broads — further east is the mouth of the Steammen Free State. The cursewall swings around their territory too; the Commonshare doesn’t trust Jackals’ oldest ally.’

‘Circle’s turn, Harry, how many dead are there here?’

‘Enough, Oliver. Marshal Adecole marched the Sixth Brigade of the People’s Army through the mountains at the start of the Two-Year War. King Steam’s knights broke the back of them down here. Most of the trenches have filled in now, but if you dug deep enough, you’d find the bones and rotting shakos of Quatershift’s elite troops — the pieces the foxes haven’t dragged away.’

Perhaps the old battlefield had unsettled the disreputable Stave too, because he kept up his commentary like one of the tourist entertainers who haunted the foot of the waterways at Hundred Locks, filling the eerie silence with the life of his voice. The rotting spokes of light artillery wheels, the shattered glass of old cannon charges, rusting harpoons from Commonshare anti-steammen ordinance, lead balls from Free State pressure repeaters — each picked out as landmarks on the gruesome wartime tour.

After the ranks of buried, mud-drowned corpses fell away, Oliver spotted a splash of red on the side of the hill — out of place, as if someone had spread a gaudy picnic blanket over the gloomy brown slopes. ‘That looks fresh.’

‘A bizarre enough sight out here, old stick,’ agreed Harry. ‘Let’s take a closer peek.’

As they got nearer Oliver saw that the object was not as uniform as it first appeared. What he had taken for a solid crimson swathe was a patchwork of oblongs stitched together, mostly red, but some with stripes and yellow suns sewn on. They were flags, pieced together by wiry cord — river fisherman’s netting by the look of it; the large wave of canvas lying crumpled over a mound.

‘What is it, Harry?’

The wolftaker looked towards the east, his lips pursed. ‘Let’s go, lad.’

‘What is it? It looks like flags.’

‘You don’t need to know — let’s just keep going south.’

Oliver took the corner of the canvas and tipped it up. There was a blanket underneath, a huddle of sacks with … a field of fungus-like balloons growing out of them. This was a strange way to farm mushrooms. But then Oliver saw the lines of legs, arms, hands, a couple clutching tightly at each other. Dear Circle, that was a baby they were holding between them, its feet as tiny as a doll’s — so small and grey he could not even see if it was a boy or a girl. Bile rose in Oliver’s throat and before he knew what he was doing his breakfast was vomiting over the grass as he stumbled towards the family to see if any of them were alive.

Harry seized his arm. ‘Don’t touch them. You can’t help them now.’

‘They might be alive, they might be.’

‘Oliver, no. They’ve been through the cursewall. Those things growing on them are from the hex — sometimes their hearts give out, sometimes they start sprouting plague spores, sometimes they might age a hundred years or have their blood turn to stone. They were dead the moment their balloon lost height and they blew through the wall.’

‘They can’t have had a balloon.’ Oliver was crying. ‘They don’t have balloons in Quatershift.’

‘They don’t have celgas, Oliver. They don’t have aerostats. But take canvas, fire, hot air … you have a balloon. Not good enough to get them over the cursewall, but how were they to know? I doubt if there’s many engineers left on their side of the wall now.’

Oliver couldn’t take his eyes off the human wreckage — bodies that once laughed, cried, walked, lived, now just bags of flesh, no spark of what had made them human. How could it be? One moment something vital with hopes and dreams, the next nothing — compost for a hex-born toadstool.

Oliver sunk to his knees. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘I wish you hadn’t had to find out,’ said the wolftaker.

‘But you knew, Harry.’

‘Most of the refugees come by water, Oliver. Can’t run a cursewall under the water — over it, but not under it. And yes, I’ve seen this before. During the worst of the famine years the refugees even tried building a catapult to throw themselves over the wall. It would almost have been funny, if you hadn’t seen how thin the bodies were that rained down on Jackals.’

Oliver’s throat had dried up. ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ said Harry. ‘For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea — could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your clan, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn’t matter, because the big idea is always the same — wouldn’t it be good if only everyone was the same as me — if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.

‘But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that’s where the trouble starts. That’s when they show up at your door to make the ones who don’t fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon’s Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can find only wickedness in it — you and them — the them become fair game, not people anymore but obstacles to the greater good, and it’s always open season on the them.’

Harry pointed at the bodies huddled in the wreckage. ‘That’s the true power of evil. You think the people that made those poor jacks’ lives so unbearable the only choice that was left to them was to trust their fate to the wind and a bag of cloth; you think they think of themselves as wicked? In their own minds the rulers of the Commonshare are princes on white horses, Oliver, dispensing justice and largesse and making the world a better place. Even as they’re tossing burning torches onto the thatched roofs of them, even as their boots stamp on the fingers of the children of them, in their daydreams the First Committee are heroes, beating down the obstacles to perfection one corpse at a time. Funny thing is, the litany of cant the victors chant over the bodies of the innocent might sound different for each big idea, but you know what, it always sounds like the same jiggering words to me.’

Harry threw the canvas back over the bodies in disgust, covering their empty shells. ‘They used flags to make it. That’s fitting. More flags in the Commonshare now than blankets.’

‘I can still see them,’ said Oliver.

‘Yes you can. And you will for years. And next time you meet some holy jacks banging on about how the Circle will save you, ask them what their views on the next election are. And when you meet Carlists banging on about how the party will make you free, you ask them what their faith in spirit is. Because the big idea suffers no rival obsessions to confuse its hosts, no dissent, no deviation or heresy from its perfection. You want to know what these poor sods really died for, Oliver? They died for a closed mind too small to hold more than a single truth.’

The wolftaker took out the jug of slipsharp oil and sprinkled black pools of the thick liquid over the crumpled skin of the makeshift balloon. ‘Time to burn the flags, I think.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Oliver. To the family, to the moor-bitten wind, to no one in particular.

Harry stuck a match and threw it onto the canvas, flames leaping up and crackling across the fabric. ‘One day you’ll face a trial, Oliver. A difficult task that may seem impossible. A choice you can’t confront. When that time comes, you remember these three here on this day. Remember all the details you’re going to try so hard to forget. Then you’ll know what you need to do.’

‘Is that what you do, Harry?’

‘Your father told me that, Oliver,’ said the wolftaker. ‘And he was right too. I’ve seen so many bodies for so many big ideas. Sometimes it’s the only way you can make yourself go on.’

The fire reached across the length of the quilt. At the head of the hill the remaining mist of the day was spreading out towards the sky as smoke billowed and curled around the wreckage of the flimsy vessel. Oliver looked on in amazement. The mist was coalescing into a body. Were the ghosts of the poor dead family returning to visit their own pyre?

‘Harry!’

‘I see it,’ said the wolftaker.

Slowly the mist took shape — a horned warrior in armour — no, not armour — the plate metal was its body … a steamman.

‘Harry, what in the Circle’s name?’

‘Steamo Loa,’ said Harry. ‘One of their gods — an ancestral spirit.’

As they watched, the spectral figure pointed a mailed glove towards the south, its head slowly shaking in warning, then it turned to the east and pointed a hand in the direction of the distant mountains — the Steammen Free State. The meaning was clear.

‘It doesn’t want us to go to Shadowclock, Harry.’

‘Jigger me sideways, now I really have seen everything. Unless there’s a worldsinger behind that hill laughing himself silly; but why?’

In answer to the disreputable Stave’s question a strange howl rent the air, like a human in pain screaming through the throat of a wolf.

‘What was that sound, Harry?’

Harry looked at the mist above the hill — the shape of the steamman now shredding into ribbons in the sky. ‘Nothing that should be this far north of the Cassarabian border. Run for the mountains, boy. Fast — NOW.’

Sprinting back through the graveyard of the battlefield, Oliver glanced behind them. Nothing. Just the wreckage of the Quatershiftian refugees’ escape attempt.

‘Your blunderbuss,’ Harry called across to Oliver. ‘The gun, unstrap it and load up.’

Harry was pulling his long pistol out of his pack as he ran, breaking it and slipping in a charge. Oliver’s bell-muzzled gun was jouncing along the side of his folded tent — strapped just the way the wolftaker had shown him. One pull of the fastening and the weapon was falling, its wooden handle in his right hand. Thumbing the release as he ran, he broke the gun in the middle so that the barrel was swinging towards the ground on its hinge. The crystal charge felt like ice in his hand, fingers fumbling to push it into the breach. It dropped in perfectly and the blunderbuss clacked shut with a gentle push from the heel of his palm.

Oliver scanned the landscape behind them. ‘I can’t hear the noise anymore.’

‘Close,’ puffed Harry. ‘Hunting silent.’

Something hammered Oliver into the boggy mud, arcing past and barrelling into the wolftaker; rolling Harry to the ground, a mass of exposed pulsing muscles — as if the creature had allowed its skin and fur to be flayed from its body. Oliver got back to his feet. The creature’s paws were smashing the ground and Harry was a blur, using his worldsinger tricks again, dodging the thing’s claws even as it had him trapped.

Like the crack of snapping wood something pinged off the rocks to Oliver’s right, showering his shoulder with flinty dust. Redcoats stood on the hills where Oliver and Harry had been heading before the spectre’s warning, holding long spindly rifles with bayonets fixed on their barrels, barrels that were pointing towards him.

Harry was rolling in the mud with the hunting monster. Even if he had been a marksman, not an amateur with a sailor’s boarding gun, Oliver couldn’t let a shot off without hitting them both. There was a growl and Oliver looked up at the granite outcrop he had backed into just as the second beast leapt down on him. Oliver screamed as the hunter clawed into his left arm, the weight whamming him down to the watery soil, desperately shoving the blunderbuss into the monster’s mouth. It was ripping the naval pattern out of his hand as he triggered the weapon, an explosion of buckshot and thunder ricocheting off the rock — most of it peppering the creature’s flank, one of the lead pellets glancing across Oliver’s cheek and tearing it open.

Oliver tried to scramble out from under the beast as its wounds momentarily distracted it, but it was too quick, the buckshot a mere inconvenience. Reaching out it cuffed Oliver in the back and sent him sprawling, then lunged forward, snarling. It sounded like it was talking, idiot words mangled by a lolling tongue and razor teeth. ‘Eta flug, eta flug.’

Terrified, Oliver met its gaze — the eyes of a human girl, long lashes and blue irises buried in its skull plate looking back at him — angry, angry inhuman rage. Those beautiful eyes blinked in surprise as the ground beneath them disinte-grated, boy and beast carried into the air as clods of mud rained down onto the earth. Floatquake or some desperate worldsinger magic called by Harry? But Oliver was tumbling off something, a rusting metal shell rising out of the soil, water pouring out of gashes and hollows.

The startled hunter had rolled off him, leaving Oliver’s left arm a furnace of agony, and leapt into the metal sculpture rising out of the mud. It was a corpse, one of the knights steammen, only one battle arm still intact — a pike arm with a rusted brown blade. Metal and muscle joined in a fusion of combat, the panther-sized hunting beast lashing back and forth with its claws, tearing gashes in the zombie’s already broken hull. For its part, the steamman corpse was twist-pumping its pike arm into the beast’s dense stomach muscles. The only sign of the damage it was doing was the red gore slicking its blade.

The centaur-like steamman fell forward and scooped up the beast with its skeletal manipulator arms. Another corpse was rising from the ground, two-legged and hump-backed, like a jumping rat but with a long metal beak. Soundlessly the iron knight slammed the hunting beast down onto the second steamman corpse’s beak, impaling the creature. It let out a reverberating howl so loud it seemed to rattle the heart inside Oliver’s chest.

Hearing more human-sounding cries, Oliver looked around to see the redcoats in the distance retreating, falling back in a disciplined skirmish line, the crackle of their rifles breaking against metal bodies uncovering themselves from the hillside. Harry was pulling himself out from under the corpse of the second beast. A headless barrel-sized steamman had pinned the creature to the ground with its pincer-like tripod of legs and the wolftaker was sliding his hunting knife out from the thing’s skull.

‘There’s a caliph across the border,’ coughed Harry, ‘who is going to be mighty jiggered that his prize hunting cats are feeding the worms in Jackals.’

Behind Oliver the shells of the two steammen who’d saved him were sinking back into the bog, one of the bodies weighted down by a tonne weight of dead meat. ‘The Loas, Harry, they’re riding the corpses.’

‘Well, it’d be rude to turn down good advice freely given,’ said Harry, looking at the iron zombies shambling after the company of redcoats. ‘And by the looks of it, possibly quite dangerous to boot. Let’s go and see what King Steam has to say.’

Harry looked at Oliver’s arm, feeling it with the fingers of both his hands. Oliver yelled as the wolftaker applied pressure to the bleeding muscle. ‘Make a bandage with your spare shirt. I’ll tie a tourniquet above the fang marks. You’re going to need to get that sewn and cleaned neater than I can do it.’

‘What about Shadowclock, Harry?’

‘Shadowclock will still be there after a visit to His Highness in Mechancia,’ said Harry, testing the dead corpse of the hunting beast with his boot. It remained lifeless. ‘So, who do we know who spends too much time in Cassarabia?’

‘The Jackelian ambassador to Bladetenbul?’

‘That was a rhetorical question,’ replied Harry. He took out a telescope and extended it in the direction of the retreating redcoats. ‘There’s a white wagon back there, medical corps — plague wagon.’ He grinned. ‘Bloody plague wagon. That’s old, Jamie. Let’s hoof it boy, before my old chum and his tame womb mage throw any more of the caliph’s pets our way.’

Oliver bent down for his blunderbuss. It was intact except for tooth marks on the butt. They left the bones of the hunting beasts to rot with the wreckage of the steammen and the broken divisions of the Commonshare.

Shortly after they had stopped for lunch, the boggy ground hardened up, the low rolling hills replaced by foothills, tall alpine woods and the start of a snow-capped mountain range. They must have crossed into the Free State — there were no mountains Oliver knew of this far east into Jackals. Most of the metal race’s villages and cities were up in the crags; this low down the only signs of people were the dried donkey droppings from trading caravans. That and metal rods with long ribbons of a paper-thin cloth fluttering in the breeze, the rainbow colours marking the path deeper into the steammen kingdom.

Maybe it was the icy mountain winds blowing down through the peaks of the Mechancian Spine, but after another hour of walking, pushing towards the steammen capital, Oliver started to shiver. At first it was just a chill and he buttoned up the collar on his coat, but it spread, fingers of cold creeping down across his back. Harry noticed Oliver was falling behind and waited for him to catch up.

‘It’s like winter here in the mountains, Harry.’

‘Winter? You’re sweating, Oliver. Let me see your arm.’

Oliver was trembling uncontrollably now. It felt as if just the breeze from the heights was enough to waft him up the slopes, carry him like a leaf spinning into the realm of the steammen. ‘I can’t raise it, Harry. The bandage has made it heavy, like a block of ice. But it tingles below the shoulder.’

Harry said something, but his voice had faded, then the wolftaker grew very tall — or was it that he was standing over Oliver now? The ground felt firm, almost warm, just the right shape for his body. If he had realized how comfortable it was he would have stopped before. On the slopes the pine trees stood like sentries, tall and clear, parading for his pleasure. ‘I’ve seen some interesting things, Harry. Since I’ve been free. It would have been boring to spend the rest of my days trapped in Hundred Locks.’

Harry was talking so softly now; he must have lost his voice. This was all very jolly. Oliver laughed. Then the blackness came and swirled him away into the dark.

In the ceiling above the Whisperer the lighting crystal grew brighter, throwing a line of reflections into the puddles of floodwater on the rock floor. So, one of the sorcerers was dropping the interlocking layers of cursewalls, peeling back the invisible barriers of his stone chamber. The black curtain covering the door went transparent. It was Shanks — even under the hex suit, dark, spined and shimmering with multiple worldsinger charms, the Whisperer recognized the current chief of jailers. He had two warders standing behind him with toxin clubs, and a purple-robed worldsinger. Unarmoured. Ah, so, it was him.

‘Hello Nathaniel,’ said the chief of jailers. ‘On your feet — or what passes for them. You have a guest who wants to talk to you.’

‘Shanks,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘You want to come and visit me sometime without that suit? Let’s see if those flowers you have tattooed on your face are worth their ink against my powers.’

Shanks turned to the unarmoured worldsinger. ‘Careful, sir. He nearly escaped three years ago. He broke the hex on one of the warder’s helmets and put her inside a waking dream, then convinced her it was her husband inside the cell and she had to unlock the cursewalls to save his life.’

‘I trust the sigils on your suits have been revised since then,’ said the worldsinger.

‘Don’t worry about me and Pullinger, Shanks,’ said the Whisperer. ‘We know each other from way back. You remember the last time we met, don’t you Pullinger? You were an acolyte fey-hunter, listening to your master promise my father how comfortable my life was going to be under the order’s protection. No more bad dreams for anyone in the village. No more angry fathers complaining that I’d convinced their daughters I was a blond-haired demigod with a physique like a Special Guardsman.’ He laughed at the memory. ‘Well, I was young. You use whatever advantages nature’s given you.’

‘You are no creature of nature, feybreed,’ said Pullinger, his features distorted behind the cursewall. ‘But you may be in a position to taste a little more freedom than you currently possess.’

‘You have my attention,’ said the Whisperer.

‘Our seers have just returned from a town called Hundred Locks,’ said Pullinger. ‘Does the name mean anything to you?’

‘Big dike wall up north — across the bay from the city-states and the Commonshare. My appreciation of Jackelian geography has been, well-’ he indicated the walls of the chamber ‘-somewhat restricted.’

‘How odd, then,’ said Pullinger, ‘that our seers detected the residue of manifestation there; fey manifestation, which they matched to the signature of one of our Hawklam Asylum residents. A continual and abiding presence was how they described it. Centred on a house recently filled with dead bodies — Seventy Star Hall. I suppose that name means nothing to you either?’

‘That pollen you sniff,’ spat the Whisperer. ‘It makes you prone to hallucinations. Communing with the spirits of the earth, hugging trees, all very naturalistic.’

‘I will make it simple for you,’ said Pullinger. ‘There’s a boy who I believe you have made contact with across the spirit plane, a boy who now seems to be in league with a rogue worldsinger, self-taught, outside the order and a criminal. If you tell me where they are presently located, I will be able to get the asylum board to move you to a better cell. Real light, real food, a bed — maybe even moved to assistance duties — put your talents to state service and send you outside every now and then.’

‘State service,’ laughed the Whisperer. ‘Hunting down my kind for the Department of Feymist, perhaps? You want answers, dance around an oak circle at night with your dullard friends and ask the trees where they are.’

‘It would be better if you co-operated. For all of us.’

‘Jigger you, flower-face,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘Let me make it simple for you. I don’t trust a word you or any of your purple-robed friends say. The last time I believed you, you motherless doxy, all it brought me was decades of rat-meat pie and a life-long problem with rising damp. I don’t know anything about Hundred Locks or seers or anything that’s been going on in the world since you jiggers shoved me down here. Now, are you going to send your pups in to try their luck or are you planning to talk me to death?’

‘I told you,’ said Shanks, thumping a toxin club into his armoured fist. ‘He’s as bad as they come. You’re not going to get anything from this one by reasoning with it.’

‘All right,’ said Pullinger irritated. ‘I will withdraw and you can try it your way. Your sigils will hold when I raise the cursewall behind you?’

The jailer nodded. ‘Things have advanced a bit since you last worked with us, inspector. We only enter with suit hexes personalized to the prisoner’s mist-cursed gifts. Give the creature long enough and it could work out a way to bypass them, but there are three of us and it’ll have some other … distractions to focus on.’

Behind the cursewall the Whisperer raised his body to his full height and spat at the shield. ‘Come on Shanks, you think I’ve got all day? It’s been years since I’ve killed a warder.’

Pullinger had withdrawn down the corridor, raising another cursewall as he backed away. Shanks nodded to the two worldsinger warders and pointed his toxin club at the misshapen inhabitant of cell eight zero nine. ‘You’ve some lumps coming, Nathaniel. Let’s see if we can knock you into something a little more pleasing to the eye.’

The inner cursewall fell and the mayhem began.