of blackened bodies were plummeting from the sky, smudged smoke trails spiralling behind them.
‘Their sails haven’t opened,’ shouted Molly. ‘None of their sails have worked.’
The commodore put aside his telescope to take in the terrible scene with his own eyes. ‘Ah, those poor brave lads and lasses. They’re finished.’
The crowd’s distant noise grew louder. Molly could imagine the astonishment among the ticket holders in Goldhair Park turning to screams as the corpses of the circus entertainers impacted among the watchers, at speeds fatal for the sail riders as well as any below they slammed into.
Coppertracks rocked on his treads, the energy in his transparent skull calculating the odds of so many sails failing to open at once. ‘There is only one explanation: the cannon charges must have been overfilled by the circus, the riders killed by the velocity of their launch, fired too high into the firmament to breathe without a mask.’
‘Then riddle me this, old steamer.’ The commodore pointed to the second wave of sail riders – the rocket-launched entertainers – now returning through the clouds. Unlike the human cannonballs, their sails had successfully deployed, but their silks were burning up between their plywood frames. ‘Did they fly too close to the sun?’
The second wave of performers was spiralling down, their silks an inferno. Even at their distance from the display, the three friends on the top of Tock House could see this was enough to finally panic the crowd into a complete stampede, a ripple that became a violent surge as the sightseers abandoned their once fought-over places for the relative safety of the streets outside the park.
‘I simply do not understand,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I have never seen the like before. There are geysers of volcanic debris from the Fire Sea that erupt into the sky and could burn sail riders like this, but the flues of the Fire Sea lie many hundreds of miles north of us.’
Flaming masses were striking the capital now, some of the smoke trails lost among the pneumatic towers of Sun Gate. All ability to control their landing had vanished – a rain of dead circus men and women striking Middlesteel’s streets. Finally, the sky was filled with the gentle fall of a thousand smouldering silk threads as the entertainers vanished out of sight. All save one, a tri-sail rider hanging limp as his mainsail was tugged by a side-draught while the glider’s tail-sails crackled into nothingness; a side-draught that was dragging the contraption high above the streets of the capital and towards Tavistead Hill. Towards Tock House!
The dot grew larger and larger in the sky. Embers from the disappearing tail-sail finally ignited one of the mainsails and the rider frame began losing height rapidly, falling out of the wind’s clasp above the capital. Down below, Coppertracks’ mu-bodies were running out from the house, crunching the gravel of the path, swinging buckets of sand unhooked from the fire point of their boiler room. If the sail rider managed to avoid being impaled on the tip of the steamman’s tower of science, then he was going to come down hard in their orchard. The three owners of Tock House were fast after Coppertracks’ drones, joining the little iron goblins converging on the likely landing point.
Down to a single sail now, the flaming craft swung across the clearing where Coppertracks’ celestial signalling apparatus stood spearing up towards the clouds. Then the rig blew into the line of pear trees, wrapping itself around the canopy of branches, burning silk billowing into dozens of pieces across the tree line. Where sheets of flaming material blew across the grass, the friends quickly extinguished them. Splintering, the main frame of the sail-rider rig folded in two, the limp mass of the rider swaying to a sudden halt, left hanging upside down from a tangled snarl of harness belts and sail pulleys.
Commodore Black pulled out a knife and shimmied up the tree to cut the pilot loose, Molly and Coppertracks waiting underneath to catch the body in the canvas rain cover they had pulled off the glade’s small Porterbrook steam engine.
‘The sail rider’s a lad and he’s taken some burns,’ shouted the commodore.
‘Is he alive?’ Molly called up.
‘He can count his lucky stars, but I believe the fellow is.’ The commodore was sawing his way through the nest of ropes. ‘His lucky stars and the fact that for all its bright rainbow colours, this sail frame is an old RAN chute. I can smell the retardant chemicals from his blessed burning silk, like bad eggs. Treated to exit a cannonshot-riddled airship when needs demand.’
With a final slice and a warning shout, the commodore cut the pilot free to flop down into their canvas. Molly pulled off a black leather glove from the pilot’s hand and felt the wrist for a pulse. Yes, he was still alive, but in what shape was anyone’s guess. ‘Send for the doctor and make sure she turns up half-sober.’
‘One of my mu-bodies is already on its way into the village,’ said Coppertracks.
Molly rolled the pilot over. What she had first taken for part of the sail frame caught up on his back clearly wasn’t. ‘Look, a travel case! Why in the name of the Circle would you sail-jump with the weight of a travel case tied to your back?’ She tried to open the case but it was locked. Damned heavy too.
Commodore Black landed down on the grass next to the pilot. ‘A queer thing to do, but it saved his life. The weight of that case would have kept him at a lower altitude than the rest of his circus friends. Whatever ignited the others’ sails only singed his poor head a little.’
Molly glanced up towards the firmament. Only the flat grey clouds of Middlesteel hung over the capital, but this carnage was no accident. The mystery of the disappearing stars might have been solved, but something else was deeply awry up in the heavens. The Jackelians were used to being masters of the sky. Their airships ruled the vaults of the firmament without peer or equal; a monopoly of aerial destruction that had long preserved their ancient kingdom from her many enemies.
But it appeared it was a monopoly no longer.
It took a lot to recall the Jackelian parliament from its summer recess. The honourable members of the House of Guardians didn’t collect much of a stipend from the state for their troubles, but at least they could usually rely on the long days of hunting, shooting and fishing on their estates. Estates that the members of the present Leveller government often lacked, so the grumbles went, hence their eagerness to recall parliament at the drop of a hat. The guardians’ resentment at the interruption of their amusements was slowly bubbling over while the speaker of the house’s lictors assembled the bones of King Reuben, his ancient skeleton dangling from a seven-foot staff of heavy Jackelian oak.
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