of the Air.>
<I don’t know. I will find a way. I must, or we are all finished.>
<I never wanted to use my skills for war, you know,> sobbed Preston. <I nearly became a priest of the Child of Light, once, taking vows for the seminary. I was a pacifist, but the revolutionary government took my wife hostage, my three children. They said I was to dedicate my work to serving the Committee of War or we would all be banished to an organized community.>
<You deserve better than what happened to you,> said Kyorin.
<No, the devices I built were used to slaughter countless thousands of innocents during the Two-Year War,> said Preston. <Children no different from mine, who just happened to have been born inside the Kingdom of Jackals’ borders. I do deserve this. I sacrificed my principles for a mean, personal thing. And what good has it done me? My family have no doubt starved on a widow’s pension during my years as a prisoner. Even before the Court of the Air’s agents seized me, Quatérshift’s streets were full of soldiers’ wives begging in the streets for food, their children in their laps, babies’ arms as thin as shoelaces. The gratitude of our glorious revolution. I helped murder thousands of Jackelians in the Two-Year War and what has happened to my dreams, my nation, my family, as I rot away up here?>
<Your designs must be used as you once intended,> said Kyorin. <And if you once killed thousands, you can now save millions. I must go, we have been in communication with each other for too long. Your mind was not born to safely receive my thoughts over such a duration.>
Far above, Kyorin sensed the Quatérshiftian prisoner finally lying down exhausted on his bunk, left to wonder if the voice in his head was indeed his madness snapped free.
Kyorin rested the book down by his side and glanced miserably towards the strip of sky above the alley. He couldn’t see the Court of the Air from the ground, so high was the aerial city’s station. Wrapped in clouds generated by its steam-driven transaction engines as they modelled the ebb and flow of Jackelian society, in as perfect a simulation as such primitive technology allowed. ‘I’ll get you out, my new friend. I must, or we are all dead.’
The chequerboard hull of a Royal Aerostatical Navy airship went past, a brief thrum from its engine and then it was gone. For a moment, Kyorin thought its shadow had remained, but it was the shadow of the vagrant looming large above him.
‘I’ll trade you.’
‘Trade me what?’ asked Kyorin.
The vagrant pulled out a book from his own jacket pocket, in a better state than the clothes from which it had emerged. ‘Lifted this from the stationer’s stall at the Guardian Fairfax atmospheric. Finished it now.’ He pointed at Kyorin’s damp book. ‘You finished with that?’
‘Yes,’ sighed Kyorin. ‘I believe I have.’
Kyorin received the book from the vagrant and passed up his own. A sudden suspicion struck him as he saw how the vagrant was looking at the cover of his new book. ‘You can’t read, can you?’
‘No, squire. But there’s plenty on the streets around here that can, and they read them for me – Old Man Pew, Barking Billy. The words don’t make sense to my eyes, see. Got the reading sickness.’ The vagrant sipped another swig from his upland firewater. ‘This book any good?’
‘It’s a philosophical treatise on velocity science and its practical applications as related to gunnery and celestial mechanics. Royal Society Press edition as translated from the original Quatérshiftian.’
Belching, the vagrant felt the smog-damp wall of the alley for support. ‘Sweet as a nut.’
Kyorin glanced down at the cover of his new book. The Moon Pirates of Trell by Molly Templar. There was a lurid illustration on the front: three explorers in pith helmets clutching lethal-force weapons as they stepped out of a crashed high-altitude airship onto a desert-like moon. Now this was really very promising.
In the road outside the alley a hansom cab had collided with a brewer’s wagon and an argument was about to boil over into violence. The crushers would be here any minute. Time to be off before the first police arrived.
As Kyorin walked past the vagrant he quickly stooped down and laid his palm flat on the man’s forehead. The vagrant yelled at the terrible flare of burning in his skull as his brain reworked itself into a new pattern.
‘Ask Old Man Pew to teach you to read,’ said Kyorin. ‘I don’t think you’ll have problems interpreting written words any more.’
Groaning, the vagrant reached for his bottle, trying to gulp the pain away. With an obscene gargle he spat the whisky down onto the mud.
Kyorin smiled, disappearing into the labyrinth of the rookeries. ‘Unfortunately, intoxicants will no longer taste quite as appealing as they did to you before your healing.’
There was a Pentshire moon outside the farmer’s window. Round. Full. Easily enough light for the farmer to see by as the squire’s thug took his hand and raised it slowly up in front of his face.
‘Now, imagine your fingers are voters,’ said the thug. He gave the farmer’s fingers a little wiggle.
‘Pay attention!’ hissed one of the other two men pinning down the farmer’s body. ‘This is important.’
‘Nice, fat, plump little voters. Contented,’ explained the ringleader. ‘They know who to vote for. They know who owns the tenancy on their farms and crofts. But—’ his voice turned ugly ‘—now someone else comes along to stand for parliament, and look, they’re all confused.’ He wiggled the farmer’s fingers in a sad little dance.
‘Someone who’s not been paid off to throw the election for you in your rotten little borough,’ spat the farmer, spots of blood from his smashed face landing on his bedroom floor as he spoke.
‘That’s a terrible accusation to make,’ said the ringleader. ‘You see, when the voters are confused, they just need straightening out.’
The ringleader took one of the farmer’s fingers and pushed it back, the snap of bone nearly making him faint.
‘That’s a lot of work for us,’ observed one of the thugs behind him, hissing the words into his ear. ‘And the Circle knows, you’ve kept us busy enough this year already, organizing every labourer whose ear you could grab to pour your poison into their thick heads, setting up a damn tenants’ union.’
Another finger snapped and the farmer desperately tried to stop himself screaming so he didn’t wake up the others in the farmhouse, trying to keep his family out of this.
‘And you wouldn’t like parliament,’ added the second of the thugs behind him. ‘All those long airship trips down to Middlesteel, and the prices in the capital are diabolical.’
A third finger snapped and all the farmer could think of was how he was going to walk the shirehorse and the plough across his fields next week in this mangled state.
‘Don’t get me wrong, now,’ continued the ringleader, ‘but I just can’t see you sitting in the House of Guardians. They’re carriage folk, mostly, and there’s you with no carriage at all – why, I wager you wouldn’t even know which spoon to pick up from the table to use for your soup. You would just embarrass us all if you got elected.’
