The Court of the Air

Chapter Twenty-Five

The Whineside Strangler’s laugh of triumph turned to a howl of pain as a golden nimbus flared up around Molly’s body, the field of darkness surrounding his hands boiling away as his fingers recoiled from her neck.

The second convict entered the chamber on hearing the strangler’s screams and Slowstack headed the man off using his steamman voice. Shards of the Chimecan weapon blew off under the impact of the steamman’s attack, but the convict only staggered back, then extended a fist, tendrils of black energy lashing out and whipping off Slowstack’s chest. Slowstack was knocked over on his tracks, a fizz of dark energy chasing around a tear in his chest hull, exposed crystals black with oil leaking from fibrous pipes as the steamman moaned in agony.

‘Slowstack!’ Molly was caught off guard as the Whineside Strangler threw himself at her golden nimbus, his black field blending in a dance of colours, clawed fingers piercing and trying to penetrate the golden energy swirling around her form.

‘The things I am going to do you,’ snarled the strangler, his words mangled by the fact his tongue had split into two bony mandibles, the smell of burning meat from his throat making Molly want to gag.

She bunched up the energy within her body, collecting it in a golden coil inside her as she rolled with the strangler on the floor.

‘Help me,’ shouted the strangler back to his partner. ‘Help me hold her legs down.’

His compatriot left Slowstack’s body and drifted over on eight black lances of energy, a spider’s crawl. Molly detonated the charge that had been building inside her. The strangler was blown off her body and thrown down into the pit of the Chimecan death instrument. He rolled down into the body of the thing, blood-red crystals raining onto him as he collided with the instrument.

Detecting the energy of the Wildcaotyl entity, the weapon started to hum, a bone-grinding noise that made the walls of the chamber shake, showers of masonry falling from the ceiling. It was a song the earth had not heard for a thousand years, the music of insects, dreadful shortened notes that surfaced as if they were dying. Molly could see the glow from the machine where it was missing components, where the Chimecans had run out of beloved family members to sacrifice to complete the monstrous thing.

Molly did not need Slowstack’s faintly exclaimed warning; she turned and twisted the tendrils of black throbbing energy from the second convict, using them like the reins on a horse to toss the killer after his friend. Inside the pit the two convicts’ Wildcaotyl masters tempered the violence of their possession, fearful of damaging the instrument that when completed could summon their meta-gods.

She had no such compulsion. Watching the convicts floating and clawing their way up towards her, she reached inside the death instrument — its workings as cold and alien as the dreams of a locust. But even a device to crack the walls of reality had to be bound by the processes of this universe, the laws of mechanics. Her blood boiled inside her as she formed patterns, rolling through thousands of combinations of the hex-like keys that would unlock the weapon. She adjusted the pattern with each minor success, getting closer and closer to its activation cycle. The two killers were almost at the pit rim, their eyes dark and infinite, the human beasts within their hearts tempered now by the Wildcaotyl. They knew what she was trying to do — realigning the instrument, re-engineering the delicate forces within it. The wasps would protect the nest. Don’t look at them, focus on the task. She had a tune of her own to play.

The two killers cleared the rim and raised their hands to unleash a hell-storm at her, but she changed the pitch of the instrument, tuned the vibration to the Wildcaotyl riding these executioners. Behind them unearthly notes throbbed in the Chimecan device and the sheath of ebony energy that surrounded the killers was suddenly as insubstantial as meadow mist, wisps of force sucked towards the instrument. The Wildcaotyl spirits had consumed their host bodies. Without the black force feeding their muscles and reinforcing their frames the two convicts convulsed and fitted, the pain of the immortals’ withdrawal overwhelming.

Molly repeated the tune, watching the disruption of the apparitions with grim satisfaction. ‘You want to meet your gods, you filthy cockroaches? Tell the evil sods that Molly Templar says hello when you see them.’

The Chimecan engine vibrated wildly in its holding arm, the cloud of Wildcaotyl drawn into the blood-made mechan ism. It changed its ethereal pitch and finished with an almost human sigh. By the rim of the pit the two convicts lay sprawled, their bones turned to dust inside their skin, streaked black where the Wildcaotyl had burned them out. The Whineside Strangler would circle his fingers around the necks of no more victims in Middlesteel.

A warm breeze blew into the chilly chamber from the open door and Molly ran over to Slowstack, heaving his iron frame back onto his tracks. ‘Slowstack, can you hear me?’

‘We can,’ whispered his voicebox, the grill caved in and crumpled by the force of the convict’s attack. ‘We heard the song you played too. It was hideous.’

‘The Wildcaotyl thought so,’ said Molly. She looked around for anything she might use as a tool to work on the damage. There was nothing. She was stuck in the centre of the earth with the greatest engine of destruction the corrupt heart of the race of man had ever created, with not even a hammer to hand. ‘Stay with me, Slowstack. Don’t leave me down here in these halls alone. Please, not again.’

‘It is time for us to walk a different hall,’ said the steamman. ‘Our thread on the great pattern is coming to an end.’

Molly clasped the iron manipulator fingers of her friend. ‘I won’t watch you die again.’

‘We have been deactivate twice before, Molly softbody. It is easy. It is living as part of the great pattern that is hard. Do not mourn for us overlong.’

‘I am afraid, Slowcogs, Silver Onestack.’

‘Do not be afraid for us, young fastblood. We do not fear the darkness before we are made activate, why should we fear what may come after? We are notes in a song. The notes are played out and the song of the great pattern goes on forever.’

A pool of water was forming where Slowstack’s boiler was leaking and the light of his vision plate was fading. Molly was not sure how long she sat by his metal shell, empty of life now, before she felt the heat behind her. A white sphere hovered above the ground, the size of a bathysphere, a single silver eye sitting on its top. The face of a child appeared on the featureless white metal, like a real-box picture projected through a magic lantern.

‘Can you not save him again?’ Molly asked the Hexmachina.

‹Where there is life and will, I can show the way for the life metal. But he has passed beyond my reach. Slowstack is in the hymns of the people and the toss of the Gear-gi-ju cogs now.›

Molly wept, adding her tears to the pool of water from Slowstack’s boiler.

‹There are two soul boards inside his chest cavity fused together as one. Break them out, Molly Templar. Slowstack would wish them returned to the halls of Mechancia.›

She did as she was bid, the crystal boards as light as air. Had they weighed more when he was alive?

‹Stand in front of me now, child of Vindex. There is work to be done.›

Radiant with a golden luminosity, Molly stepped forward, two rivers of light flowing away from her chest, the beams joining together in a helix that slowly rotated between herself and the Hexmachina. From the sphere a similar golden beam extended out and encircled the helix, joining with it, twisting in joy before retreating back inside the Hexmachina.

‹Operator, you are recognized.›

Flowing back like quicksilver the front of the sphere formed an opening, a dazzling white space inside moulded like a handmade glove for Molly.

‘The enemy is powerful,’ said Molly, hesitating. ‘And there were seven of us before. Seven operators, seven Hexmachina.’

‹That is so,› said the Hexmachina. ‹But the Wildcaotyl have not changed in a thousand years, Molly. They believe they are so perfect that they would freeze us alongside themselves for cold eternity in amber. But we are capable of change, you and I, and the enemy fear that most of all. I have spent a millennium listening to the secrets of the earth whispered to me by my lover. Growing stronger, cleverer and wiser. And you, Molly, you are remarkable. Perhaps one Hexmachina and one operator will be enough this time.›

Molly pulled herself into the Hexmachina and the door reformed behind her. It was like floating in a sphere of water and she felt the surge of her blood as their two bodies merged, her senses extending in ways her mind could never have imagined, the taste of sounds, the colour of the throbbing veins of the earth, tiny details in the walls of the chamber opening up as if the stone had been placed under a microscope. It was all vibrations, all music, the song of the great pattern that Slowstack had talked of. There was something else. Great pain. The Hexmachina was trying to shield her from it, but their link was too strong — their body was being stressed by a shocking agony.

‘What is that?’

‹There is another operator, Molly. Tzlayloc is torturing him as he tortured you, to weaken me, to goad me into the Wildcaotyl’s trap. But I still have two operators to distribute my consciousness over. His work is agony, but it shall not incapacitate my function.›

‘There’s an anthill rising in my lawn, old girl. Let’s go and step on it.’

A lance of light speared into the ceiling of the chamber from their body and the Hexmachina rose into the sea of fiery earth that began pouring down over the Chimecan’s apocalypse trumpet. The malign device collapsed as the sea of magma filled the pit, brimming over and sliding across the two dead convicts, melting the shell of the steamman that had been Slowcogs and Silver Onestack.

Iron and liquid earth joined with a hiss and the Hexmachina’s lover reclaimed the scar that had been driven into her heart.

The streets that had been so empty under the occupation were now packed with Middlesteel’s inhabitants, the rookeries and towers emptied of their panicked residents as the aerostat bombardment levelled the capital. The Third Brigade and Grimhope’s revolutionaries had withdrawn, leaving the roads to the hysterical refugees. Oliver was glad that the Whisperer was maintaining his human form; the true sight of him riding on the back of Oliver’s gypsy mare would have caused a panic all of its own. At the other end of the street a group of riders appeared, Mad Jack and a company of his irregulars. Oliver urged the sixer through the crowds, the press of panicked Middlesteelians making her difficult to control.

‘Major Dibnah,’ shouted Oliver. ‘Where’s our army?’

‘Falling back,’ called the riding officer. ‘Old Guardian Tinfold must have delivered his invite. The Free State’s army has forded the Gambleflowers and is joining up with parliament’s forces. We’re going too. There’s nothing to do in Middlesteel but hide inside the atmospheric stations and take a drubbing.’

Reinforcing his words the shadow of an aerostat passed overhead, causing a stampede among the refugees for the cover of the street’s buildings. Screams sounded from the crush by the doors, people scrambling and slipping over the litter of looting.

‘Dirt-gas,’ shouted a refugee. ‘Dirt-gas!’

Mad Jack turned his steed and delivered a kick to the man’s head, knocking his stovepipe hat to the ground and sending him sprawling. ‘Bloody fool. They’re not loaded with gas-fins. Can’t kill a steammen regiment with dirt-gas.’

Oliver spurred his horse through the gap in the crowds in the middle of the street. ‘This way, major.’

‘Good fellow. The First Guardian has sent word for everyone remaining to follow the Third Brigade out to the east. If we can make a scrum of it with their troopers, the aerostats won’t be able to target us without killing their own regiments.’

‘Yes,’ said Oliver. ‘When the aerostats finish here they’ll head east.’

Mad Jack looked up at the sky. ‘They’re not handling well at all today. Must be shifties on deck. All the same, it’ll be a bloody business when they catch us out on the field. Our regiments aren’t used to sitting under the sharp end of the RAN.’

After the shadow of the airship passed, the throng of citizens returned to the streets as thick as ever. Oliver despaired of clearing the city. He could feel the dense pressure of the Wildcaotyl and the heavy mass of evil that moved across the land as the Third Brigade marched to war with the steammen.

Sitting behind him on the horse the Whisperer growled in frustration. ‘Now I know why you didn’t bring a saddle; you weren’t going fast enough to need one.’ He shut his eyes and imagined an aerostat floating above the streets, dark creatures like devils capering across the fin bays, flying so low that its weapon hatches barely cleared the spires of the Circlist church behind them. With terrified shrieks the refugees stampeded for cover. The cavalry company looked around them in confusion. The Whisperer had not extended the illusion into the riders’ minds, but they understood well enough to take advantage of the space that he had cleared.

‘I have a feeling this aerostat is going to follow us all the way out of Middlesteel,’ said Oliver, their horse galloping after Mad Jack and his irregulars.

With their way cleared by the escaped feybreed they managed excellent time to reach the city markers — the marble globes carved with the portcullis of the House of Guardians. Oliver could see trails of smoke out beyond the low hills of the east downs, towards Rivermarsh. King Steam’s assault on the Quatershiftian legions had begun.

‘They’ve abandoned their lines,’ said Oliver, pointing to fresh ramparts and trenches that had been dug outside the city, now lying empty and unmanned in the snow.

Mad Jack frowned. ‘Then it’s true, the Special Guard have gone over to the shifties to fight. Those fellas fight better in the open than in the confines of the rookeries. Circle, this is a damn bad turn. Now the Commonshare has the two things that have always swung victory our way: our stats and the guard.’

Mad Jack saw the faces of his riders and realized he had voiced the doubts that they felt themselves in this unequal war — their resolve was crumbling.

‘We have something they don’t,’ said Oliver, raising his voice loud enough that everyone in the irregulars could hear. ‘We fight as free citizens of Jackals, not slaves of a king or a first committee or a caliph.’ He pulled one of his belt pistols out and the lion of Jackals on the handle seemed to suck in the light of the afternoon, drawing down rays of sunlight that rotated, blinding the troops with a brilliance they had never known before. ‘We will not suffer the heel of tyranny, we will not bend our knee to unworthy gods, we will not see an evil without striking it down, and we will not pass meekly into the long face of darkness that is endangering our land. Because we are Jackelians — and our soul of freedom can never, never be conquered. Not as long as one free Jackelian has the heart to say, “No! I think my own thoughts. I choose my own leaders. I select my own book of worship and my law shall be the law of the people, not the whimsy of any bully with a sabre sharp enough to slice a crown off the previous brute’s head.”’

At the back of the column a lone voice started singing, the words trembling and slight in the cold wind. Then a second voice picked up the tune, and a third, the song rising in intensity as it rippled through the company. ‘Lion of Jackals’. The song grew louder, louder than the wind of the land; loud enough to drown out the thunder of falling fin-bombs behind them and the cannon clap in front.

‘I can make women see a god-given human form when they look at me, twist dreams like clay,’ said the Whisperer, ‘but you put something in their soul. That’s not a talent that came out of the feymist.’

‘Run your hands through the soil,’ said Oliver. ‘You’ll find your answer in the dirt.’

Another sound drifted in from the south, an unholy wailing like a wolf pack pleading to the moon. Out of the falling snow a line appeared, soldiers in the lobster-coloured uniforms of the regiments, kilts in garish tartan billowing in the cold. With bag-like sashes strapped around their tunics the front line played sackpipes, an unnatural noise, its fierce melody flaying the wind.

‘Uplanders!’ said Mad Jack. ‘By the Circle, I was never so glad to hear a cat being strangled.’

A woman from the head of the column rode up to meet them, the back of her brown coat strapped with three loaded rifles. Not fancy fowling pieces, but workaday Brown Janes, the standard rifle of the Jackelian redcoat. ‘Bel McConnell. Guardian McConnell. I have stripped out every bonnie boy and lass with a taste for a scrap from all the acres from Braxney to Lethness. We’re holding the caliph’s border with nothing but bairns and companies from the clan MacHoakumchild, and I’d rather trust a weasel in a henhouse than rely on a MacHoakumchild.’

‘Wanted to see the capital, eh?’ said Mad Jack. ‘Place ain’t what it used to be. Shifties have got the picnic blankets out for King Steam over at Rivermarsh.’

‘We were following the smoke of it ourselves, laddie,’ said Guardian McConnell. ‘We’ve been marching for days and have got a hunger on.’

‘Let’s inspect the shifties’ spread, then,’ said Mad Jack. ‘Your pipes can play us a merry tune as we ride out.’

‘Are you daft, man?’ said the uplander Guardian. ‘Sackpipes are the music of lament. We’ll play a dirge for the Commonshare and their shiftie-loving downlander friends. No offence meant.’

‘None taken, I am sure.’

It took half an hour to cross the downs, and by the time they crested the hill to Rivermarsh the dark leviathans of the air were moving after them, scudding across an ocean of black smoke where Middlesteel burnt beneath their hulls. Oliver’s sixer whinnied with fright as the vista of battle opened up before them. The Third Brigade and Tzlayloc’s revolutionary army held the west side of the field, King Steam and the remaining forces of parliament the east. Shrouds of smoke surrounded the clashing armies, the crackle of fire from Tzlayloc’s rifles answered by the saw-like whine of steammen pressure repeaters. On the higher ground at the rear of both armies steammen gun-boxes and Quatershiftian artillery fought their own duel, great gobs of earth erupting from the frozen ground and scattering troops as fire licked out from the opposing cannonry.

A fizz of energies punctured the shroud of war as worldsingers and the Special Guard traded blows, the leylines throbbing in Oliver’s sight as the land’s power was leeched out from the bones of the earth. At the far end of the plain gusts of snow moved like phantoms, shapes appearing and whirling around each other, then vanishing into white. The Steamo Loas were losing to the Wildcaotyl, Oliver could feel their fatigue, the presence of Tzlayloc at the rear of his army like the stab of a migraine. The leader of the revolution was different now, fused with his masters, an ant flattened on the boot of giants, his hate for Jackals amplified under their possession and leaking across the battlefield in waves of pure loathing.

Oliver could see Tzlayloc was channelling in the souls of the dead. Drawing strength from the screaming Jackelian on the plain with his leg torn off by a rolling cannon ball; drawing strength from the equalized revolutionary limping in circles, his head caved in by a steamman knight’s hammer; drawing strength from the two laughing Third Brigade troopers spearing a parliamentarian as he slipped on the blood of his comrade; drawing strength from the confused refugees running away from collapsing steaming towers in Middlesteel; drawing strength from the tears of Benjamin Carl and Hoggstone as they shouted orders that would send more of their people to the slaughter; drawing strength from the agony in Captain Flare’s heart as his guardsmen tore apart their own countrymen, Prince Alpheus hanging like a banner behind him on Tzlayloc’s cross of pain. Tzlayloc was feeding, growing stronger from the harvest of evil, and after the aerostats arrived and decimated the Jackelians and their allies, he would rip open the walls of the world and spill a sea of hungry insects into the land.

‘We’re losing,’ said the Whisperer. ‘They have the numbers and they have the guns.’

Oliver reached out to grab the reigns of a riderless horse that was galloping away from the skirmish, jumping over to the blood-splattered saddle and leaving the gypsy steed to the Whisperer. ‘You know where the bridge is, Nathaniel.’

‘Aye, there’s our spread alright,’ called Guardian McConnell back to her forces. She slipped a claymore out of her saddle and pointed it towards the enemy’s right flank. ‘That’s where we’ll take them. Strike up a tune, my bonnie boys and lovely lasses. Play “The Scouring of Clan McMaylie” for your Bel.’

Mad Jack’s company formed into two columns, one on either side of the uplanders, trotting along amid the howl of the sackpipes. The uplander troops pulled leather hoods out from the sash-like instruments, raising them up and covering their heads. They were meant to protect from the poison that rose from the feymist curtain, but the hoods also gave them a hideous bird-like appearance, striking terror into enemy hearts. They were marching to their deaths and they knew it, but the mountain people of the south lived freer than any other Jackelian, by their lochs and their glens, and it was only the toss of dirt on their coffins that could tame them.

On the battlefield the plumes of smoke solidified, slowly freezing as a silence fell over the plain.

‘Still not taken the rat tunnel, I see.’

Oliver dismounted from his frozen horse to face the Shadow Bear, the creature watching the battle from his bubble of suspended time. ‘That would be too easy.’

‘There never was any point in saving even a handful of you,’ said the Shadow Bear. ‘Look at you people. Look at the mess you’ve made of things. Even when everything is lined up for you, you won’t do what is expected. Tell you to run and you stay. Tell you to stay and you run. Frankly, the other side of the curtain doesn’t need vermin like your kind breeding and fighting and squabbling.’

‘I have been there,’ said Oliver. ‘And that is something we can agree on.’

The Shadow Bear pointed down towards the heavy weight of Tzlayloc, the pressure of his Wildcaotyl masters pushing into the world. ‘See that. That is what your race is. Condensed and packaged into a tight little ball of destruction and hate and pointlessness. My predecessor cleans out the weeds and your kind just let them grow back.’

‘That’s not us,’ said Oliver. ‘That’s not us at all.’

The thin slash of red that was the Shadow Bear’s eye turned away from Oliver. ‘They’re pretty furious, the Wildcaotyl. You’ve kept those wasps trapped in a jar for a thousand years, and now they want to re-paint the canvas without you in the picture. I might almost agree with them, except for the fact they don’t plan on leaving us in the canvas either, and that is something that is not negotiable.’

‘I thought it might be something that basic,’ said Oliver. ‘You handle the level of detail down here a lot better than my mother, but I suppose your function is rather basic too. And I would really rather you didn’t lecture me about the violence of my people. How many times have you destroyed everything, killed everyone?’

‘I do not kill all that is,’ said the Shadow Bear. ‘That is the job of entropy. How can you kill something that is not immortal? You are all going to die anyway; one day later, one week later, one star death later. No, I reset all that is. The same way your foresters burn out an overgrown copse to renew it. Your people are dead wood, Observer child, time to move along and make way for something more worthy.’

‘Ah,’ said Oliver, remounting his time-frozen horse. ‘Rules, rules. You do so hate to be broken. I wonder how you feel about being bent out of shape a little?’

‘You are so righteous,’ snarled the Shadow Bear. ‘But the rule-set is there for a reason. Without the rules to set a trajectory for growth all you have is the perfect tick of the perfectly empty clock, going round and round and going nowhere to the random froth and fizz of the universe. But it is within my power to save you. I could leave time suspended for you; you could still reach the feymist curtain with a few of your twisted half-breed friends.’

‘As you said, the more you try and get me to run, the more I seem to want to stay,’ said Oliver.

‘Where are you going, Observer child?’

‘I’m going to ask the Wildcaotyl to leave. And when I am done with them, I’ll be asking you the same.’

The Shadow Bear snorted. ‘It will be amusing watching you try. After you have rogered things up, I shall let you live just long enough to see how things really end.’

Time jumped forward to the whine of cannon balls scratched across the sky. Oliver kicked his sixer down after the Whisperer.

‘Lad,’ shouted the commodore. ‘You’re alive.’

Oliver caught sight of the submariner on the other side of a square of steammen, soldiers moving in tight formation singing a hymn of battle in their machine voices. A cloud of acrid smoke from the battlefront briefly enveloped them, and then Oliver was through it. ‘Commodore, where’s King Steam’s command frame?’

‘This way, lad, I’ll take you.’

Oliver checked the Whisperer was still following and fell in with Commodore Black. ‘You did it, Commodore. They listened to you and Guardian Tinfold.’

‘Ah, much good has it done us, Oliver. That devil Tzlayloc has had years to plan his campaign, while parliament’s forces are in disarray. These rag-tag companies have never fought beside each other, or followed the leaders that now ask them to die. I would not trust these green-legs to help me lift a harpoon at a slipsharp, let alone crew the guns of a man-o’war. They’re fine fellows when it comes to cracking a debating stick over the head of a rival, but they have never faced a charge of exomounts, or been asked to hold a square for an hour while the Third Brigade’s six-pounders give them a broadside.’

Oliver moved aside to make way for a column of steammen knights, their bright banners crackling like whips as they raced past. Then they were at the command post. Riding officers galloped into King Steam’s command position, shouting reports to the Jackelian officers there before riding out to their units with fresh orders. In one of the hexagonal frame domes the Free State’s own command staff sat cross-legged and track-still, slipthinker brains co-ordinating their mu-bodies, allowing the conscript army and orders militant to move as a single entity. It was a formidable advantage — a collapsing line would be rapidly reinforced from the rear, a sudden enemy advance countered by knights that always appeared out of the snow like sorcery, cannon fire on their lines answered by counter-battery fire from the gun-boxes in the hills behind.

Oliver rode past the giant war body of the King and spotting the child-like form of the Free State’s leader, dismounted. Hoggstone was there, and Ben Carl in his bath chair, still being pushed by the girl who had led them through Middlesteel’s sewers. The conservative dark jacket of the First Guardian was at odds with the medley of brilliantly coloured uniforms of the surviving officers of the regiments.

‘Oliver softbody,’ said King Steam. ‘So, you have chosen to stay and fight with us. Well met.’ He looked over towards the Whisperer. ‘And you come with one who is not what he seems. You choose dangerous allies, Oliver softbody. You have unleashed the weaver of dreams.’

‘These are dangerous times, Your Majesty,’ said Oliver. ‘And I seem to be running short of allies. Steamswipe and Lord Wireburn are dead. They died to protect me … they died well.’

‘Do not mourn for them, child of Jackals. The Keeper of the Eternal Flame now walks with the Loas and Steamswipe’s honour is restored. There is no better end for a warrior. They gave their lives to preserve the great pattern and I can feel their harmonics powerful and proud in the hymns of the people.’

‘Ah, Your Majesty,’ interrupted Commodore Black. ‘We are all going to end up in your mortal hymns now. Look!’ He pointed towards the hill Oliver had ridden down, the beak of an aerostat nosing over the snow-covered downs, then another and another.

‘Prepare to receive fire from the air,’ commanded Hoggstone, his officers running to give an order that up to a month ago would have been unthinkable for a Jackelian army.

‘It is time,’ said King Steam, relaying his orders to the slip-thinkers in the command dome. ‘Give the command to load the gun-boxes.’

From the dome Coppertracks emerged and bowed before the King. ‘Loading has already begun, Your Majesty.’

‘Gravity is on the shifties’ side, Aliquot Coppertracks,’ said the commodore. ‘I’ve seen boats trade fire with stats, and their ballonets take a fierce beating before they sink.’

Coppertracks’ transparent brain crackled with blue fire. ‘Dear mammal, Jackals has held a monopoly on celgas for generations, but we have always planned for the worst — that one of the other nations might discover their own supply. We are not loading with mere ball or grapeshot.’

Gangs of steammen pulled long silver shells on flatbed carts past their position, smoke from their stacks steaming in the cold with the exertion of dragging the heavy load. Oliver watched with curiosity, a memory of a siege jumping unbidden into his mind, giant mortars like bloated toads thumping out rounds as large as these — surely they weren’t going to use shrapnel against the coerced vessels of the RAN?

Oliver pointed to the pinned-down maps on the collapsible command table. ‘When I was coming down here, I saw our forces being rolled back on the eastern flank.’

‘That is where the Special Guard are fighting for the Commonshare,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Most of the Free State’s knights have been committed here, but they are being badly punished. Flare’s guard are holding back, but they are crawling with worldsingers from the Commonshare. A few of the guard refused to fight at the start of the battle and the shifties executed them by torc in front of us.’

‘What of Jackals’ worldsingers?’ asked Oliver.

‘We have a few,’ said Ben Carl from his chair. ‘But most of the order fled Middlesteel when the capital was invaded. I hate to say it, but we are out-gunned — those that have passed through the flesh-mills are slow, but they carry their own armour with them. The Third Brigade are veterans and-’ Carl’s words were interrupted by the thunder of the aerostats’ fin bays emptying their cargo on the body of the Free State’s forces.

‘-they have our navy,’ said Oliver. He shut his eyes as the ground trembled. The leylines were being sucked dry by the Commonshare’s worldsingers. Once pregnant with the land’s power, they were thin and barren now. He could feel the weather witches in the Jackelian lines trying to whip up the snowstorm to push the aerostats back, but the bones of the earth under their feet was too thin.

Oliver looked up to the brow of the downs. The mocking presence of the Shadow Bear was there, watching the advance of the Third Brigade troops, gloating as the Jackelian fighters wavered in panic at the shadows of the passing aerostats. It would not take much now to cause a rout. He could feel how close their soldiers were to breaking and running.

‘They’re about to run,’ said the Whisperer.

‘I know.’ Oliver turned his horse to the east and nodded at King Steam. ‘You hold the line against the aerostats, I’ll try my luck with the fey.’

Oliver flew across the Free State’s lines, the Whisperer’s steed hard-pressed to keep up. Nathaniel Harwood could convince the troops he was a six-foot fighting god — even convince his steed — but the illusion of a horseman’s skill was not the actuality.

Commodore Black watched the two riders disappear through the ranks of steammen auxiliaries, swallowed by snow and the swirling flags of the army.

‘That shootist has spirit,’ said Hoggstone.

‘He’s riding with the devil,’ said the commodore. ‘I’m just glad he’s riding for us.’

Black pulled his undersized greatcoat in tighter — it had belonged to old Loade before he pulled it off its peg back in Middlesteel and the blessed fellow must have been a grasper of a man. But it was warm Jackelian wool and helped shield a poor fellow from the biting cold of this perverse summer. On the command table the maps started shaking, a brass telescope rattling until it fell over. Gun-boxes jolted forward on their stubby legs. The house-sized artillery pieces had abandoned their position on the high ground and were settling down alongside the steammen formations. Rolling the strange-looking shells onto loading cradles, steammen conscripts heaved them into the loading position behind the gun-boxes. Sucked into the breach, the shells vanished, followed by the clank-clank-clank of crystal charges of blow-barrel sap being lowered into position to propel the missiles on their way. Commodore Black covered his ears. Their barrage had been deafening enough when they had been in the hills duelling with the Third Brigade’s artillery.

With the crack of a titan’s hammer on the earth the barrels of the gun-boxes flowered flame and flung their shells towards the chequerboard hulls of the aerostats. Some of the shells struck the airship’s gondola structures, smashing wood and metal, others tore holes in the hulls, the fabric of their catenary curtains left flapping in the wind. A few ballonets spilled into the air, the gas cells floating out of sight. Not even slowed, the aerostats continued to glide across the fields of Rivermarsh.

Black nodded sadly. History was repeating itself. It was just the same as when the RAN had raided his fleet of royalist privateers. You could pierce their hulls with ball, with shrapnel, hit them with fire, but the cursed vessels were almost indestructible. Celgas did not burn, and each aerostat was filled with thousands of ballonets, each man-sized canvas sphere swelled fat with the precious lighter-than-air substance. Puncture one with shrapnel and they still had a hundred more to lift them out of the range of enemy guns.

King Steam’s monster shells had failed and now their forces would be flattened, crushed without the option of slipping away beneath the deep waters of the ocean. The Duke of Ferniethian cursed his luck.

On the bridge of the RAN Hotspur, the revolutionary commander of the vessel pointed a discipline rod accusingly at the metal-flesher who had once been a first mate of the Royal Aerostatical Navy. ‘It is as I said, we should be running higher, Compatriot Ewart. We should be dropping our fin-bombs from a greater altitude.’

Ewart flinched as the pain stick passed his iron chest. ‘We need line of sight for the fin bay crew. A turn of the wind and we would be dropping fins on your people — this snow is working against us.’

‘This is more of your defeatist whining and sabotage. I do not want to listen to excuses, compatriot. I have had a bellyful of them from your crew.’ The revolutionary officer turned to one of his soldiers. There were as many shiftie marines and brilliant men on the RAN Hotspur as equalized sailors, getting in the way and issuing contradictory orders. It was a wonder the aerostat could hold a true course with the skeleton crew that had been assigned to each ship, let alone clear for action. ‘Take Compatriot Ewart and a crew of patchers to the larboard hull. I want full lift — any damage from the Free State’s gun-boxes must be repaired at once or there will be consequences.’

With four shiftie marines in tow, wet navy lubbers who didn’t know one end of a stat from another, Ewart followed the howl of the wind to the breech in the aerostat’s curtain. He tethered a holding line around his iron waist so he could climb securely around the ballonets and inspect the damage.

‘How many patchers are needed?’ shouted up one of the marines.

‘The netting is torn,’ said Ewart. ‘We need to-’ he stopped as he found the shell still buried in the ballonets, its metal buckled against one of the larboard girder stays.

It had not detonated and Ewart tapped it. This was his chance. If he could detonate it he could bring down the Hotspur and take some of these dirty shifties down with him. But it was not crystal-fashioned, so how could it be filled with blow-barrel sap? As Ewart felt the lines of the weld on the shell, metal plates sprung out and he fell back towards the torn curtain flapping in the gust from outside, a garbled cry issuing from his voicebox as he jerked on his support line and hung helplessly in the air.

The Quatershiftian marines laughed at him, thinking he had tumbled clumsily off the aerostat’s hull frame, still unused to the quirks of his new equalized body. Their laughter was cut short when the steamman dropped down to the repair gantry, a round sphere sporting six pincer-sharp legs and an armoured dome for a head with a pressure repeater protruding from it like a mosquito proboscis. With their rifles slung around their shoulders the marines did not stand a chance — the six barrels of the steamman’s nose spun around and a whining blizzard of small iron balls tore the soldiers to pieces, their corpses flopping off the gantry and into the ballonets. The steamman turned its attention to the ballonets, unleashing a wave of fire into the leather gas sacks. The lift bags exploded, deflating and leaking sweet-smelling gas into the cold air of the airship’s interior. Then the steamman — actually a mu-body of one of the slipthinkers below — swivelled its pressure repeater in the direction of the laughing metal-flesher.

‘Sharply done, mate,’ said Ewart. ‘I don’t mean to knock the gilt off the gingerbread, but you’ll be here all day if you’re trying to sink the Hotspur that way.’

On the ground the steamman slipthinker evaluated the facts in a fraction of a second. Equalized Jackelians were heavy, weight an aerostat could ill afford. Their presence indicated sailors captured at Shadowclock rather than revolutionaries. The slipthinker translated what the metal-flesher had said — knock the gilt off the gingerbread, an expression of nautical origin meaning to cut a tale short. The slipthinker controlling the mu-body made a snap decision and a pincer snaked out and cut down the iron body.

‘That’s it, mate. Now let me give you a black dog for a white monkey and show you where the Hotspur’s rudder lines are,’ said Ewart, picking himself up from the gantry. ‘And then we can visit the fin bay and drop a few shifties down onto their friends below.’

The information raced across the slipthinker council, fleeting from mind to mind like lightning before passing back into the mu-bodies already on the airships as well as those being loaded into the gun-boxes.

Metal-flesher and steamman warrior vanished together into the bowels of the aerostat. There was work to be done.

Earth and flame spouted across the snowy plain as Oliver’s sixer held to the direction he was urging her; the new steed he had stolen was raised in a Jackelian cavalry regiment and thought little of the thunder and chaos of war, while the Whisperer’s gypsy horse just followed because there was a friendly tail in front.

Riding through the confusion of the aerostat bombardment it was hard to tell which way to head. It was only the press of the fey — the concentration of the Special Guard — that allowed him to home in on the eastern flank of the battlefield.

A Jackelian soldier bearing a standard showing the parliamentary colours staggered past, shouting encouragement to a body of troops that was no longer following him. Two of Ben Carl’s rebels dragged a third man through the snow, shouting for the surgeon’s tent. Oliver pointed to the way he had come but they ignored him and blundered forward towards the Third Brigade’s guns. The man they were dragging was dead. Oliver tried to call out to the pair but cannon smoke had swallowed them.

A square of Jackelian infantry emerged from the carnage, their myriad shakos and tunics bearing testament to the fact that theirs was a motley assemblage of soldiers thrown together from the fall of Middlesteel.

An officer in the centre of the square called out to them. ‘Have you seen the shiftie exomounts?’

‘We haven’t come across them,’ Oliver called back.

‘Watch out, there’s a squadron of them riding around here. Lancers.’

The officer started to say something else but a bullet took him from the front and felled him to the ground in the centre of the square — the Jackelians looking in horror at their crumpled lieutenant. From out of the snow a banshee howl preceded a mob of fleeing soldiers, not a charge, but a retreating tumult. Jackelians. The aerostat bombardment had finally broken the army’s spirit. Some of the men on the edge of their square peeled off the formation and sprinted away with the deserters, their red tunics easy prey for any passing lancer.

‘Hold the line!’ Oliver shouted. ‘Hold the line!’

They ignored him, hardly hearing his shouts in their terror and desperation.

‘The sky,’ shouted the Whisperer. ‘Look at the sky.’

Many of the aerostats had fallen silent, drifting higher as if their control lines had been severed, but it was what lay beneath them that stopped the routed soldiers in their tracks. Long trails of smoke and snow cloud had formed into sword-carrying spectres, flowing around the aerostats with the elongated outlines of lions running by their sides. It was as if the heavens had opened and the soul of Jackals had spilled from the sky.

‘The first kings!’ roared the Whisperer. ‘The first kings have returned.’

All over the battlefield heads looked up and saw the ghostly army passing across the sky. Riding officers slipped in their saddles, brawling soldiers caught a glimpse of the sight and stumbled, sackpipers drew breath and their fierce sad music was stilled.

Next to Marshal Arinze, Tzlayloc raged at the Third Brigade’s troopers who had stopped loading their cannons to gawp at the sight. ‘It’s not real, compatriots. It’s not real. You fools, it’s not real!’ He clawed at his skull. ‘Get out of my head, get out of my head now.’

‘Our airships have been silenced,’ said Marshal Arinze staring upwards at the dark shapes gliding through the snow clouds. Stunned by the sudden hush he did not notice that Tzlayloc’s body was growing larger, the skin of the Chairman of the First Committee of Jackals swelling in uneven lumps as if beetles were breeding under his skin.

Arinze clicked his fingers for a telescope from one of the staff officers. The aerostats had been holed by the steammen gun-boxes, but it was damage they could shrug off — how many times had he seen Jackals’ airships take their own weight in lead ball from his guns and still continue to wreak destruction on the ground? Too many to count. Aerostats were invincible, the floating angels of death of Jackals. Every time Quatershift had clashed with its neighbour to the west the RAN had devastated their ambitions, and every time it was the terrible floating wall of Jackals that had laid waste to their place as the rightful masters of the continent. You could not lose with the aerial armada of Jackals behind you — that was an immutable law of warfare, of nature itself.

Arinze turned to Major Wildrake, whose beautiful muscles filled out his Third Brigade greatcoat like rocks. ‘What can silence our aerostats, major? Nothing in the world can silence them!’

Wildrake did not hear. He was hypnotised by the lions running through the sky, just like he had imagined as a boy, just like he had drawn so many times in pencil on his mother’s table.

To the east Oliver turned on his horse to look at the Whisperer.

‘So many minds,’ hissed the fey creature, the illusion of his human warrior’s body flickering. ‘Steammen, shifties, Jackelians. So different.’

Around them many of the Jackelian soldiers had dropped to their knees, tears in their eyes at having allowed their fear to overcome them and turn them coward long enough to flee the front.

‘For the land,’ shouted Oliver. ‘For Jackals!’

All around them the cry was taken up and the soldiers picked up their rifles and turned back towards the Third Brigade’s guns. Near the Whisperer the energy of the land had become inverted in an invisible vortex as his fey power disrupted the natural harmony of the leylines. Oliver grabbed the reins of the gypsy sixer and led them both away from the carnage and towards the press of fey he sensed.

‘No,’ said the Whisperer. ‘Leave me here. I need to concentrate. Everyone must see, everyone must see.’

Oliver nodded and rode off. If the fortunes of war turned again and the Jackelians were driven back the Whisperer would as like be speared by some passing lancer or bayoneted by pursuing Third Brigade troopers.

The eastern flank of the battlefield had lost any vestige of order — there were no columns, lines or formations manoeuvring for advantage in the intricate dance of infantry, artillery and cavalry; instead a sea of steammen knights fought, dotted with islands of Special Guardsmen, centaur-like warriors of the metal trading blows with the onetime protectors of Jackals. Away from the slaughter, a line of elite Third Brigade troops protected the worldsingers of Quatershift. Like their brethren in Jackals they showed no taste for getting their hands dirty while their fey slaves could be marched into battle to die for them. They stood ready to activate the suicide torc of any guardsmen tempted to flee the battlefield.

In front of them: the cruel theatre of the war. Voiceboxes vibrated with anger, the fighting screams of the orders militant breaking across fey bones where the knights could pin down the guardsmen. Standard-bearers lifted the Special Guard’s colours through the sea of deadly steammen, drawing attacks in wave after wave as the knights tried to seize the colours for their mountain halls. A steamman knight that could have been Steamswipe’s twin pulled himself past Oliver’s horse, his flank torn in half by a fey attack. Used to facing their enemies alongside each other, neither force had any strategies for fighting their former friends to fall back upon. It was the raw power of the feymist pitted against the physical strength of warriors who had been forged for battle. It was not warfare. It was murder being done here.

Oliver knew what to do. It came to him without thinking, a remembrance of the people of the fast-time, the strange shades of the land beyond the feymist curtain. His human vessel vibrated with the power of that other realm, the part of him that belonged to his mother turning and recycling the building force. It grew and grew, the strain of it building dangerously high. Shouts sounded from the worldsingers minding the Special Guard who could see the ripples in the natural fabric of the world. They were pointing in Oliver’s direction. Every inch of his flesh was on fire, dimensions that could not exist on Jackals folding around his body, spinning, circling in impossible ways.

By Oliver’s feet the damaged steamman was shaking, blue energy electrifying his juddering body, the unfortunate half-dead knight too close to the maelstrom. Bullets from Third Brigade marksmen passed through Oliver, lacking the match of reality to harm him. Oliver yelled in agony as the shockwave of ethereal energy lashed out, radiating across the fields of Rivermarsh in a blast that hammered over the steammen host, hurling fey guardsmen off their feet, sabres and pistols sent turning through the air. Steammen and Special Guardsmen staggered back to their feet, searching for the cause of the blast.

Something had changed. Hands reached for throats, feeling the pale skin of their windpipes for the first time in years. Their torcs had disappeared, the hexed collars of slavery gone from the Special Guardsmen’s necks. They were free — the freedom that Tzlayloc had promised them and the Commonshare had stolen was their own at last … the freedom to choose, to decide who to fight for. Like hounds that had been beaten by a brutal master they turned on the Quatershiftian line, the startled worldsingers still trying to activate the hexes that would slay the fey before they realized their slaves were no longer melded with the horrendous devices.

The steammen knights seemed as bewildered as the Commonshare’s ranks by the sudden about-turn of the Jackelian feybreed. Oliver watched as a general was hefted skyward on a walking platform. It was Master Saw, his weapon limbs dirtier than they had been in the mountain halls of Mechancia, covered in blood and stack soot. He pointed northwest towards the heart of the Third Brigade’s formations and his hymn voice carried across the armoured heads of the orders militant, the song picked up by voicebox after voicebox. The steammen host veered off and arrowed towards the centre of the Third Brigade’s lines.

‘Our advance is stalled,’ reported the riding officer to Marshal Arinze. ‘The Special Guard have broken their torcs and fight against us.’

Arinze glanced up nervously towards the chequerboard hulls of the fleet drifting uselessly in the wind, the rain of fire-fins replaced by a downpour of dead Quatershiftian marines and officers. A corpse had actually plummeted down onto one of the cannons in front of him, the body’s uniform obviously torn apart by balls from a pressure repeater.

Marshal Arinze tired to indicate to the scout that he should keep his voice down but it was too late. Tzlayloc had heard and stormed over, lifting the soldier from his saddle and crushing his skull as if it were a soft fruit.

‘There will be no retreat,’ Tzlayloc howled, dropping the limp corpse. ‘Victory is ours this day. It is written on the face of the earth.’

With each piece of bad news the leader of the First Committee of Jackals grew larger, as if he was feeding off their despair. He was as tall as an oak tree now, his muscles unnatural and multiplying like the growths of a sickness.

‘It shall be as you say, compatriot chairman,’ said Arinze, staring up at the creature. And to think he had regarded the labyrinthine politics of Quatershiftian revolutionary affairs of state as dangerous. A superstitious dread seized the marshal. It was one thing to call on the help of the deities — how many of his troopers still offered furtive prayers to the sun god while the political officers looked the other way? — but to become a god, that was something else again. Tzlayloc’s obsession was possessing him until it was hard to see where the man began and the Wildcaotyl ended.

‘Prepare the book,’ said Tzlayloc to his retinue of locust priests. ‘The book of Stinghueteotl.’

‘Is Xam-ku strong enough to be called?’ asked one of the priests.

‘I am Xam-ku!’ shouted Tzlayloc. ‘Do you not see how I am swelled by her grace? It is time for the Wildcaotyl to prove their fidelity to the cause. To seal the fate of these mill-master maggots and their Free State lackeys. Not a servant or minor calling, but the great ones — let them walk the halls of Chimeca again with their communityist brethren.’

In the shadow of the command dome, King Steam turned to Coppertracks and his warrior mu-bodies standing sentry. ‘Prepare my war body, the time has come.’

‘The seers have thrown the cogs of Gear-gi-ju, Your Majesty,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The auguries are unclear, poor at best. The Loas are exhausted, many are withdrawing. We feed on light and order and I fear today is a dark day.’

‘Thousands of the people lay deactivate, Coppertracks, in the aberrant snow of our friends’ land. I will not abandon the light. I will not abandon a millennium of harmony and evolution to the laws of superstition and the malicious will of the enemy. I will not ask the knights steammen to support a cause I would not myself fight for. The old enemy prepares to walk our earth again and by the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, I will meet him.’

The child-like monarch of the Free State watched the slip-thinkers and courtiers fall away as a platform raised him into the heart of his war body. A clatter of steel cage walls enveloped the King. Mu-bodies of a dozen slipthinkers swarmed over his frame, checking the pressure systems, filling the ammunition bins and oiling the joints of numerous fighting arms.

‘Bring me my arms,’ called the King. ‘Bring me my sword and shield.’

It took three knights apiece to carry the sovereign’s weapons to him, his shield made of transparent blue crystal with a rim of spiked metal that crackled with the power electric; his sword as tall as four steammen with a cluster of stubby barrels around the buckler. King Steam’s manipulator arms lifted the ancient weapons away from his retainers, and he tested the air with his blade, the fanned air blowing snow powder across the command post. Their service done, the steammen flowed away from his hull, leaving the monarch to face the mass of the enemy, metal feet juddering the ground as he turned.

Hoggstone and the Jackelian officers came running up to King Steam. ‘Your Majesty, what are you doing? Your place is here, coordinating your army.’

‘First Guardian, I was a warrior before I was a king,’ said the steamman, the spheres of his voicebox shaking in their mounts. ‘And a warrior defends his people.’

Commodore Black turned to Coppertracks as the King thumped away. ‘Sweet Circle! Aliquot Coppertracks, where is the big fellow heading off to?’

‘Where, commodore? I believe he is going to die.’

Oliver found the Whisperer collapsed in the snow, the warrior illusion replaced by the reality of malformed muscles and flesh without form. Of his gypsy sixer there was no sign.

‘Nathaniel?’ asked Oliver. Oliver had to shake the body before the feybreed started to come to.

‘Something pulled the ground from under me,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘I felt it in the earth, in the bones of the world. It smelled like the Lady of the Lights, but she was stronger, far stronger.’

‘It was not the Lady of the Lights,’ said Oliver.

This was dangerous. The Shadow Bear was making unauthor ized interventions of his own. The thing had become so desperate to finish the job he was designed for, he was tipping the balance in favour of the very forces he was intended to sterilize. He wanted the Wildcaotyl to win the day — to begin the work of birthing their own gods into a realm too small to contain them — to give him his mandate for total war.

‘I told you, she’s been replaced by something else, something fierce and wicked that wants us to fail.’

‘Whatever it is I hurt the bastard thing,’ said the Whisperer. ‘It’s not much good on detail, just like the Lady of the Lights. That is its weakness: you become the detail and it gets confused, like a slipsharp being attacked by a school of shrimp.’

‘Nathaniel,’ said Oliver. ‘If you have been unconscious, just who in the Circle’s name is doing that?’

The Whisperer looked to where Oliver was pointing. The sky was still full of the ghostly lions and ancient warrior-chieftains the fey convict had conjured across the armies’ minds, banshees whipped on the wind and riding the sky underneath the drifting aerostats.

‘Well I will be jiggered,’ hissed the Whisperer. His body rippled and transformed back into the ancient duellist from his storybook.

Oliver remounted and helped the Whisperer onto the back of his saddle when Captain Flare stumbled into sight, his guardsman’s tunic torn to pieces where the steammen knights had tried to pierce him with lance and repeater ball. There was a red weal around his neck where the torc had once been.

He looked at Oliver with a glimmer of recognition, his eyes widening when he noticed the Whisperer. In some way he saw straight through the feybreed’s illusion, his eyes as true as his demigod-like strength. ‘That is fey? Dear Circle, I have never seen a body so changed by the mist that wasn’t killed by it.’

‘You should have spent less time at the palace and visited the lower levels of Hawklam Asylum, pretty boy.’

Oliver touched his neck. ‘No more collars, captain. No more orders.’

‘You?’ said Flare, astonished. ‘There isn’t enough power in the world to remove the hex that binds.’

‘Not enough power in this one, perhaps. Yet here you stand, free — but free to do what?’

‘My son,’ said Flare. ‘I want my son.’

‘Son?’ said Oliver. ‘But you’re not married, man, the penny dreadfuls always made a big thing about what a marvellous bachelor you were!’

‘Oliver, you turnip — it’s Prince Alpheus,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘That’s his son, flapping like a flag on a standard by Tzlayloc’s side.’

‘Only a few in the Special Guard know that!’

‘I am in your guard, pretty boy. You might say I am the night watch.’

‘We’ll ride with you,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s about time Tzlayloc stepped down from the First Committee.’

‘Three fey boys to save Jackals,’ sighed Flare. ‘We’re not much.’

‘I reckon we’ll do,’ said Oliver.

Tzlayloc and King Steam closed on the battlefield, the armies of the Third Brigade and parliament breaking around their feet as the two titans clashed. The Chairman of the First Committee of Jackals was half again as tall as King Steam’s war frame now. His body had become a mass of writhing flesh, creatures with compound eyes and bones as sharp as craynarbian sword arms sprouting from his muscles, leaping off to decapitate Jackelian soldiers and feast on the corpses of the dead scattered across the snow. The two leaders fought inside a surf of two opposing mists, the monarch of the Free State supported by his weakening Loas — as insubstantial as stack steam under the assault of the Wildcaotyl — clouds of dark droning wasps which swung around the steamman, exploding then reforming like schools of black fish. Where they swarmed over the soldiers fighting in the titans’ shadows the warriors collapsed clutching their ears, the whine of the Wildcaotyl staying in their brains, intensifying and warping until their eardrums exploded, parliamentarians smashing their heads against rocks and rolling in the snow, as if the ice could cool the pain of the unholy song.

A thing with four clawed feet, hardly a body at all, erupted from Tzlayloc’s shoulder and leapt across the gap between the chairman and King Steam. The Wildcaotyl manifestation locked onto the pilot frame and tried to drive a claw into the skull of the King’s golden child-form. King Steam dodged the claw, twisting left and right as the razor bone plunged past him. One of the King’s chest-mounted pressure repeaters managed to find the right angle and depressed its barrel, hurling the clawing beast off in a storm of pellets.

Slipping the grip of one of Tzlayloc’s tentacle limbs King Steam arced his sword arm around, severing the branch of thrashing flesh. The limb fell onto the snow, crushing a Third Brigade trooper and growing millipede-like legs of bone, then rushing towards the King’s leg and wrapping itself around the steel in a circle of maddened, slathering tissue. A locust head with rotating jaws forced itself out of the stump where Tzlayloc’s tentacle had been severed, looking around and hissing at the monarch.

‘This is my time,’ jeered Tzlayloc. ‘Your reign is over. I have no need for the whir and tick of iron toys, of clockwork slaves.’

King Steam backed away from Tzlayloc, a rotating lantern viewer in front of his pilot cage showing him multiple perspectives of the Chairman of Jackals. ‘And I have no need for your stillborn vision for the world. You have become a sickness, Tzlayloc. You have made yourself a cancer on the belly of the world and to save my people, I will cut you out.’

Tzlayloc menaced the war frame with his tentacles and tilted his head back to laugh, shiny dark things like beetles spilling from his mouth as he did so. ‘I will place your soul board on top of the stack of broken components I shall build of your people, little toy. Your race’s very existence offends me — you are nothing but a conjurer’s trick of crafty mathematics slipping through ore and crystal.’

King Steam shut down his olfactory senses as the heat and stench from Tzlayloc’s throat carried across on the wind. ‘You shall not hunt my kind again. Never!’

The Free State’s ruler pistoned to the side as Tzlayloc hurled a ball of pulp and snapping claws at him. Tzlayloc made an obscene gesture with the fronds that used to be a hand. ‘Rust has not yet addled your memory then, I see, king of the toys. After the mountains of Mechancia have been buried under the advancing glaciers, I shall enjoy watching your children cannibalizing each other for food again and scrabbling to avoid my cull.’

Warding off the chairman’s swinging arms with his shield, King Steam riddled the trunk-like flesh with a line of soft eruptions from his repeater shells. ‘Listen to me, Tzlayloc; listen to me with the softbody heart that is still buried somewhere in that monstrosity of a body you have grown. Your allies plan to freeze our realm with more than ice this time. They would breach the walls of the world and forever silence the dance of time and energy. Whatever philosophies you hold to, whatever dreams you have for Jackals, the Wildcaotyl do not plan to honour them. They will betray you! Your movement is nothing more to them than a host body to lay their eggs inside — they will consume you and make dust of your plans.’

‘LIAR!’ Tzlayloc’s body writhed as if it were on fire, every inch of his bulk pulsing and coming alive. The Chairman of Jackals lurched forward, trying to break through the royal war frame’s defences. ‘They lifted the Chimecans to supremacy for a thousand years, saved them from the coldtime. Without their succour the race of man would be extinct. How much longer will the Wildcaotyl support our flawless Commonshare where we live in perfect cooperation, a precise mirror of their selfless association? There will be no slave revolt this time, little toy, no clever machines hiding under the ice to pour poison and sedition into the minds of the people.’

King Steam said nothing, but let his sword speak for him, the four barrels around its hilt detonating and carrying cannon balls filled with chemical poison, toxins from the Hall of Architects, into Tzlayloc’s chest. Screaming creatures fell out of the craters where the balls had struck and two enraged tentacles coiled out of Tzlayloc, one seizing the King’s sword arm while the other smashed into his pilot frame and sent him reeling.

The King looked down in revulsion as the centipede-like limb wrapped around his ankle started burning its way through the leg of his war body, clouds of molten metal spitting out as the Wildcaotyl sweated an acid of appalling complexity. King Steam fired a manipulator arm like a trident, spearing the burning thing, but it was too late. His leg parted, the armour foot-tread left burning in the snow as the King’s body started to topple backwards.

In desperation the falling king pitched his shield like a discus at Tzlayloc, the energy bleed from the spikes of the rim tearing at Tzlayloc’s face as he swayed back. The shield sailed past and embedded itself in the high ground behind him, Tzlayloc exultant as he looked down at the fallen monarch. King Steam’s body-mounted weapons were emptying their ammunition drums at the swarm of Wildcaotyl flowing off Tzlayloc, but it was to no avail — the chairman howled a victory scream. Loas swirled down, forming a shield that started to crumple as the black arrows of the Wildcaotyl broke against it.

Tzlayloc’s devils halted in confusion. Behind the wounded monarch, stamping across the battlefield and making the ground tremble, came a wave of war bodies, each piloted by a child-like steamman. Following the war frames a wave of steammen knights charged to the aid of their collapsed monarch, Tzlayloc’s demon creatures leaping and crawling to meet the attack.

‘How many mu-bodies do you have, little toy?’ hissed Tzlayloc, looking down at the fallen monarch. ‘It does not matter. I shall rip them all apart and cast your melted slag into images of the Wildcaotyl for the temples of the people.’

‘You shall not triumph, Tzlayloc.’

‘Have you glimpsed the future, little toy?’ laughed Tzlayloc. ‘I shall set a new future for you and your people. For all of Jackals and the world beyond. Did the roll of the cogs in the filthy puddle of your own juices show you your death?’

‘They did,’ groaned King Steam.

Tzlayloc watched in amusement as the weakening Loas faltered around the royal war frame and glanced across at the advancing drone bodies. ‘Then I shall leave you to it. You may live just long enough to see the last of your army trodden into the mud.’

Inside the pilot cage King Steam’s golden hand fell limply off the control levers. He had to stay alive a little longer yet. There was something he had to wait for before he departed the field of battle, before he moved along the great pattern. Tzlayloc had to be kept distracted. He dare not shut down his pain receptors, in case the lack of sensation carried him away. His time here was ended, but he had to suffer the pain a little longer. Each second became an eternity of torture for the monarch.

To the rear of Tzlayloc, Marshal Arinze’s trumpeters sounded new orders. The disciplined lines of the Third Brigade closed into a defensive formation, the equalized outlaws of Grimhope that had been held in reserve at last marching down in columns to lend support. Arinze had fought the Free State both under the flag of the old regime and for the Commonshare — he knew what to expect, as did his soldiers. Canisters of harpoon-like barbs were unloaded from the ammunition train and rolled towards their artillery.

A riding officer galloped up to the marshal. ‘Gun-boxes, compatriot marshal. Advancing from the east.’

‘Ride to the battery,’ ordered Arinze. ‘Tell the artillery captains to concentrate their fire on those royal war bodies. Halt them before they get to our lines.’

After the artillery crews had resighted their cannons and fired the first ranging shots it would have taken an observant eye on a telescope to notice that the four war frames seemed surprisingly resilient to the barbs of their canister fire. Or that explosions on the downs to the east were mirroring the explosions around the giant steammen — exactly where they would be falling if they were passing unhindered through the war frames.

Captain Flare jumped onto the dying monarch’s chest, the steel plates flexing under the impact of his dense fey bones. Oliver was quick behind him, climbing up handholds in the metal. The Whisperer stayed in the lee of the broken war body, muttering with the effort of creating the living illusion of steammen war bodies, a slightly different angle of view needed for every bystander in Rivermarsh. A roar of fury behind them indicated that the mountain of flesh that was now Tzlayloc had finally discovered the trick that had been played on him.

Flare gazed across at the terrible creature. He did not see the Chairman of the First Committee, or Jacob Walwyn, or any threat to Jackals worthy of his guardsman’s oath, he did not even see the betrayer of his fey people’s hopes for freedom. He saw the monster that had strung up his son like a rabbit to be skinned and used as a lure. Flare leapt down from the wrecked war frame and met Tzlayloc’s charge — Oliver swore the ground shook as the Special Guardsman ran.

‘Oliver.’

The Whisperer was climbing up the war body, his shape flickering back and forth from bronzed warrior to his true form.

‘Oliver.’ It was not the Whisperer speaking — it was King Steam. The steamman looked in a bad way, the right side of his body crushed underneath the crumpled pilot guard, the left pierced by bone-sword strikes and scarred by acid trails.

‘Your Majesty, your knights are coming for you.’

‘The hardest part of being a monarch is knowing the time of your own death,’ said King Steam.

‘Your people can save you.’

The King had barely heard Oliver. ‘How else can a route for the new king be prepared?’

Oliver pulled at the frame but it was too badly mangled; removing it by violence would tear the steamman apart.

‘Stop trying to save me, young softbody,’ whispered King Steam. ‘Instead, save both our races. The Wildcaotyl feed on souls and the worship of their kind, on the very life of the earth. The souls are of Jackals and the Free State and the Wildcaotyl need the bones of the earth to drain them; when you move along the Circle you move through the bones of the earth. We are the songs of stardust, Oliver, and like all insects the Wildcaotyl are drawn to our flame. Snuff out the flame…’

Snuff out the flame!

Captain Flare was surrounded by a sea of Tzlayloc’s devils, more and more of them emerging from that deformed body. Flare smashed and crushed the creatures, so covered in blood and the insects’ perverted pulp that he looked like a crimson golem come out of the kiln. Broken Wildcaotyl littered the field, swarms of their brethren climbing the wall of corpses to hurl themselves at the Special Guardsman.

Captain Flare was just one man. Soon his fey flesh began to weaken. His rain of punches slowed as more and more of the Wildcaotyl impaled and scraped at his iron body with their claws.

Snuff out the flame.

Oliver extended his senses over the battlefield, reaching for the bones of the earth, but there was so much evil to ignore. Parliament’s forces were wavering as they clashed against the disciplined ranks of the Third Brigade, too few professional soldiers and too many amateur street fighters and Carlist rebels filling out their companies’ lists. The steammen knights were bogged down amidst the Wildcaotyl horde while ranks of metal-fleshers and First Brigade reinforcements pinned down any scattered Special Guardsmen who had not fled Rivermarsh for freedom. But underneath all the confusion the lattice of the earth’s leylines still throbbed, weak and thin after being drained and tapped by worldsingers on both sides.

Around Tzlayloc’s misshapen form the lines were distorted and diffuse, the power of the Wildcaotyl a weight on the surface of the world that she could barely support. Now Oliver saw it, the pain and horror of the battlefield being channelled through the bones of the world, the earth a sponge soaking up the blood and souls for the Wildcaotyl to sup on, each new morsel allowing more of them to uncoil through the cracks in the world. The essence of the Jackelians was being destroyed like coke thrown into a furnace, with the world the insects’ boiler, an engine to power their insane mission for calling down their unholy high gods.

‘Oliver,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘Ware the enemy.’

At the foot of the fallen war frame a wave of Wildcaotyl demons were clambering up the steamman weapon, but Oliver did not hear the Whisperer’s warning — his attention was spreading out along the lattice of leylines, travelling along the bones of the world.

The Whisperer swore. These things were hard to fool, inhuman, their minds warped flesh that had been unnaturally multiplied from the hive of Tzlayloc’s body. Their dreams were cold alien things. He focused. With snarls of anger the creatures fell upon each other, seeing Special Guardsmen rather than their own foul forms, tearing into each other.

Oblivious to the carnage being inflicted at the foot of the King’s war body, Oliver started to realign the leylines around him, reforming and re-knitting the strength of the land, drawing the power into himself, a trickle at first — then a stream, then a torrent. Worldsingers on both sides of the battlefield fainted as the source of their wizardry disappeared, their hexes and spells falling apart even as they called them. There seemed an endless reservoir inside Oliver now, a well without an end to soak away the earth’s power. At the edge of the battlefield he could feel the Shadow Bear’s rage simmering at the intervention. Legitimate though, thought Oliver. The poor little fey boy was making good.

Below, the Wildcaotyl fighting each other were weakening, their mosquito barb into the repast of Jackals blocked. Tzlayloc realized the source of the threat as the shapes breeding inside his skin dried up, cracking and halting in stillbirth. Roaring he turned, wading through steammen knights and his own Wildcaotyl children without care, the mass of his horde heeding his call and breaking away from the steammen, flooding towards the fallen monarch’s shell. Captain Flare’s body lay in the snow behind them, his clothes ripped to pieces, his muscles scarred and purple. The Captain of the Guard was no more.

Above Rivermarsh the snow clouds had partially cleared, revealing a blue sky filled with drifting aerostats, their control lines cut and helpless before the whims of wind and weather. The Wildcaotyl were losing their ability to reshape the land now, to impose the cold perfection of the hive on Jackals. The false shadows of the steammen war frames flickered out of existence as the Whisperer turned his attention towards the wave of creatures heading towards him. Wildcaotyl stumbled and scrambled as they felt themselves plunged back into the icy angleless realm they had been exiled to, but there were too many for the feybreed’s illusion to hold.

Beneath his boots Oliver felt the King’s war body tremble. Had his interference with the earth’s power caused a floatquake? Surely not. What he was doing was only a variation of what the worldsingers did, tempering the earth’s passion to control the land that could be pushed towards the heavens on her temper. Earth fountained up in front of Tzlayloc, a geyser of molten worldstuff rising as tall as the chairman of the First Committee and showering burning rocks across the Wildcaotyl. The shambling mountain of flesh that had been Jacob Walwyn fell back, the spray flaming across the children of Xam-ku that had been birthed out of his tissue.

Something else was coming, surfing a wave of the earth’s fury. Oliver felt the bones of the world vibrate, his reformed lattice swept away as a tsunami of earthflow poured out of the hole, sweeping him aside, shattering against the feeding Wildcaotyl. Leylines reformed around the battlefield, impossible complex shapes, swirling around a white sphere hovering before Tzlayloc.

‘Sweet Circle,’ hissed the Whisperer.

Oliver felt a burning on his hip. His two belt pistols were glowing, pulsing to the rhythm of the sphere. ‘The Hexmachina.’

‘Not that. Its twice-jiggered friends!’ said the Whisperer, pointing up towards a cloud of dark spheres plummeting towards them from the firmament. Aerospheres, a rain of aerospheres. The Court of the Air had emerged out of myth; the wolftakers were protecting their flock at last.

Oliver drew his witch-blade as the first wave of Wildcaotyl demons mounted the King’s war body, eager to devour the feybreed who had interrupted their feeding. The Wildcaotyl had been driven into apoplexy by the appearance of the Hexmachina, and now they were boiling towards Oliver and his fey companion.

‘It’s time for Judgement,’ said Oliver.

United with the Hexmachina, Molly Templar felt the battle joined across a myriad levels, the Wildcaotyl immediately trying to subvert her modification of the leylines. They had already been weakened, the enemy starved. She recognized the presence of the strange fey boy from Tzlayloc’s cells. The unnatural barrenness of the earth around them was his doing. He had put a choke hold on the enemy’s windpipe, she could feel the souls of the dead moving uncertainly through the bones of the earth, and with a push of her will she created a puncture for them to escape to where they belonged.

Ignoring the pain of the other operator still burning across the Hexmachina, she pushed back the Wildcaotyl attacks, as if severing the strands of a spider’s web one by one. Memories of the previous conflict between the Wildcaotyl and the seven Hexmachina kept on passing through Molly’s mind, the other operators — the other races — the grasper, the craynarbian, the lashlite, the — she pushed them out, leaving just the memory of Vindex to advise her.

Xam-ku, most powerful deity of the Wildcaotyl pantheon, wrapped itself around her, trying to burn through the Hexmachina’s shields. So, it was still fighting the last war. A millennium of exile had taught the Wildcaotyl nothing. That was their weakness. The perfect order of the hive craved stasis. All end to the bubbling chaotic growth of the tree of life, the world remade in amber in their image.

‹I have learnt,› whispered the Hexmachina. ‹A thousand years of lessons from my lover, a thousand years of progression. Let me show you.›

Molly learnt too. She changed the set of the bones of the world, changed it again and again. Faster and faster. The Wildcaotyl howled as she transformed the great pattern faster than they could adapt to it. Pushing them a little further back into the abyss they had crawled from with each shift.

The thing that did not belong, the dark angel on the corner of Rivermarsh, bayed across inhuman frequencies as it saw its opportunity for total war disappearing before its senses. She — or was it the Hexmachina? — felt a twinge of sympathy for the Shadow Bear. It was intended for only one thing, and what was the point of a bomb that could not explode?

Now the Wildcaotyl strained for their life in this realm — feeling the cold depths of the angleless realm open up behind them — an eternity of hunger, an eternity of waiting, dreaming of nourishment. They flailed desperately, trying to find the souls in the bones of the world, trying to find the life of the land, but the ground around them was barren — it was the young feybreed from the cells, stealing their energy out from underneath their perverted weight on the world.

‹The sword,› whispered Molly.

Oliver ducked underneath the wavering tentacles of one of Tzlayloc’s demons, slicing out with his witch-blade. ‘The shield.’

Weighted cable lines whirled down between Oliver and the Whisperer, three soldiers riding the lines from their aerosphere towards King Steam’s war body.

Nathaniel’s body had changed; he wore the illusion of the incrementals landing around them, a black leather cape and menacing rubber tubes hanging at either side of his hood. Now the Whisperer looked identical to the Court of the Air’s fighting order, but he had plucked an officer’s insignia from their minds for his chest. The soldiers opened fire as they landed, steel boilers strapped on their backs hissing steam as they drew power for their odd-looking guns: thin metal lances connected to rubber belts implanted with crystal shells. No suicide guns these, they fired like a thousand windows being shattered simultaneously, as the shells were pulled through their lances.

They fanned out, firing down into the horde of Wildcaotyl devils trying to scramble up the corpse of King Steam, clouds of rotten flesh and demon-grown blood showering the snow and the side of the collapsed steamman war frame.

In front of them Tzlayloc’s flesh had hived off into a swarm of dark insects, attempting to enclose the golden halo of the Hexmachina, but the Wildcaotyl had entered Jackals too early and the seething mass was tiring, slowing, blinking out of existence as they expended the unholy energy they needed to survive. Jacob Walwyn was growing smaller and smaller, collapsing back into his man-shape as rolls of his giant’s flesh peeled off and cavorted in agony around him, being pushed and assailed from all sides: drained by their fey assailant, impaled on the steammen knights’ battle arms, shot to pieces by the black-clad soldiers landing in their midst. Behind the Wildcaotyl the disciplined lines of the Third Brigade were disintegrating as the aerospheres of the Court hovered over the battlefield, emptying fin-bombs into the shiftie ranks.

Marshal Arinze was shouting orders to his artillery to elevate their cannons, but it was too late. The only aerostats in this battle should have been on his side and the Court of the Air was blowing his batteries apart. His skirmishers were trying to meet the black-clad soldiers that had been dropped down around Rivermarsh, but the troopers were falling to the enemy snipers’ long guns and the impossibly fast rate of fire from the interloper’s weapons.

He was about to give the order to the forward companies to fight a rearguard cover while the rest of the Third Brigade withdrew to Middlesteel — the defensive plan they should have stuck with from the start — when one of the Free State’s advancing gun-boxes found the range of the Quatershiftian general staff. Shells thumped into the hard snowy ground and the issue of whether Arinze’s positions around Middlesteel would hold or not became academic.

On the royal war frame Oliver stood up from the buckled pilot cage. King Steam was deactivate, his body still and empty. Somewhere in Mechancia the seers of the mountain kingdom would be throwing the Gear-gi-ju cogs to locate the steamman child that would be the latest incarnation of their monarch. Across the field Oliver watched the Hexmachina swooping over Tzlayloc’s remaining demons, the golden halo burning their skin, beetles scrambling for the darkness of the cracks.

Oliver glanced across to the enemy lines shrouded in smoke from gun-box fire. The cross that had held the crucified prince was empty! There was no life left in Flare’s body, but his son had disappeared; had one of the Special Guard honoured their commander’s dying wish and rescued the young noble?

At Oliver’s side one of the Court’s warriors pulled down his leather hood, the rubber air tubes dangling around his gloves. It was the disreputable Stave! Somehow Oliver was not surprised. But if this figure was Harry, where was the Whisperer? Nathaniel had disappeared into the confusion of the battle. He had plans, and they did not include the Court of the Air or the worldsingers scooping him up for his cell back in Hawklam.

‘Damson Griggs always said you turned up like a bad penny, Harry.’

‘A bad penny with good timing,’ said Harry. ‘The shifties are being routed.’

‘Looks like they’re retreating back to the deep atmospheric line.’

‘Bloody good luck to them, then, old stick. The incrementals have already paid it a little visit. The only way back home for them now is a long trek to the border and a prayer to their sun god that their worldsingers have found the key to their cursewall.’

‘They’re all going to die, aren’t they?’

Harry shrugged. ‘A message, Oliver. You don’t poke your nose in Jackals’ affairs and expect to keep it on your face.’

‘Your people arranged for the worldsingers who knew how to take down the cursewall to be fingered in the purges, didn’t they? You were never in danger, Harry.’

‘A wall protects both ways, and I was always in danger,’ said Stave. ‘The hunt for us was real. We knew the Court had been infiltrated. The only way for us to find out how wide and deep it went was for me to act as bait. Make the shifties think I knew about their plans and go on the run, see who would come after us. It was far worse than we feared or suspected. The radicals had people in the Court of the Air, in the whistler network, in Ham Yard, in Greenhall, in the regiments and the navy. They called in all their favours to track us down and we followed the chain all the way back.’

‘A few more bodies floating down the Gambleflowers,’ said Oliver. ‘A few more prisoners for the cells of the Court.’

‘That’s the way the great game is played.’

Oliver looked out across the battlefield. It was twilight now. Had they really been fighting all day? He was exhausted; his body still aching with the power of the earth that had flowed through his fey bones. ‘My family paid the price. Our allies, our people, the people in Middlesteel. They all paid the price.’

‘Dear Circle, lad. We would have stopped this if we could,’ spat Harry. ‘That’s what we do. We didn’t know about Shadowclock or the Special Guard or Tzlayloc’s plans for a return to the old ways. When I volunteered to be the bait I just thought this was going to be 1581 all over again — a bunch of Carlist extremists with Commonshare gold jingling in their pockets who wanted Hoggstone’s head on the end of a pike. We watch, Oliver. But we are not omnipotent, we are not gods.’

Oliver stared at the remaining Wildcaotyl fleeing from the radiance of the Hexmachina and nodded. ‘No, Harry, you are right. No gods for Jackals. Never again.’

‘Your uncle knew the risks, Oliver. I’m sorry about Titus, I really am. But you know the man he was. He would have given his life twenty times over to save Jackals.’

The sound of sackpipes floated across the fields of Rivermarsh and Oliver heard a sixer whinny. It was Mad Jack, in the shadow of the steamman war frame. ‘Good hunting, young fellow?’

‘Yes, major. Where’s Guardian McConnell?’

‘There’s a bit of her over there, and a bit more over that way. Damn bloody shiftie cannon took her head off. Met that gypsy filly by the way, mad as hell at you. Wants her horse back.’

Oliver looked around. ‘I believe it ran off.’

‘Ah well, she’s a witch — she’ll call it back to her.’ Mad Jack stared up at Harry and the incremental soldiers. ‘You bally navy types took your time. Marine regiment?’

Harry tapped the gold lion on his leather tunic. ‘Political.’

Mad Jack tapped the side of his nose. ‘Ah yes, enough said.’

‘I would say the Commonshare are losing, major,’ said Oliver.

Mad Jack turned his sixer towards the fleeing Third Brigade troopers. ‘Of course. We’re Jackelians, and this is our land, eh? Best be back at it, there’s plenty of trees between here and Quatershift and a lot of rope for stringing them up.’

‘Good hunting, major.’

Harry watched the cavalryman kick his horse after the retreating Third Brigade companies. ‘We need to talk, Oliver.’

Oliver nodded. ‘Somehow I thought we might.’

The Court of the Air had weapon-smiths. Mother Loade had been right.