slotted above the armoured cell door. ‘They indicate the potential of the prisoner to make trouble?’
‘Aye,’ said the warden, ‘and the care you need to take when interacting with the prisoner. The likelihood they might escape.’
‘Escape?’ The lad laughed. ‘There has never been an escape from the Court of the Air. Not once in five hundred years.’
Warder Twelve winced. This young buck didn’t see all the work that went into keeping things that way: the effort, the foiled escapes – many of them just mind games to keep hope alive in the prisoners, to keep their wickedness and ingenuity flowing in streams the Court could control and curtail. It was the curse of being a warder. Nobody noticed when you did your job well; nobody thanked you for decades of trouble-free internment. But let just one rascal escape, why then the rest of the aerial city would be complaining for months about how many staff it took to man the cells, how they did nothing but sit around and play cards out on the prison spheres.
‘This is a green-ten,’ said the warder, laying a hand on the cell door. ‘Green is the lowest level of threat and ten is the lowest level of prisoner intelligence.’
‘Ah,’ said the lad. ‘A politician, then.’
The warder opened a small slot in the door, a slit of one-way glass revealing a man in a faded waistcoat sitting by a desk before a sheaf of papers, reaching over to dip his metal stylus in a pot of ink. Writing memoirs that nobody would ever read – well, nobody except the Court’s alienists, as the surgeons of the mind perfected their understanding of the criminal soul.
‘Crimes against democracy. This flash fellow used to represent a district down in Middlesteel, until he started using his street gangs to intimidate voters on election day. We disappeared him after he made contact with the flash mob to arrange to have two of his opponents poisoned.’
‘He hardly seems worth the effort,’ said the boy.
‘You think so?’ The warder shook his head. Underestimating an opponent. Shocking. Hadn’t his tutors knocked any sense into him when he had first been apprenticed into the Court of the Air’s service?
The lad fingered the red lever to the left of the door, a wax seal protecting the metal switch, proving it was unbroken and had never been used. ‘Decompression throw for the cell?’
‘Yes.’ Warder Twelve pointed to a bigger lever at the end of the corridor. ‘That one up there will flush the whole level, in case there’s a mass breakout attempt. Back in the control room we can blow the entire aerosphere and disconnect all corridors into the rest of the city if it cuts up really rough across here.’
‘Have you ever had to blow a cell?’
‘On my watch?’ said the warder. ‘Once, seven years back. The science pirate Krook. He had decrypted the transaction-engine lock on his cell and was working on the last of his door bolts. He was a master of mesmerism and had hypnotized the warder walking his level. We killed Krook from upstairs. He left us no choice in the matter.’
The lad nodded. Explosive decompression, a couple of seconds choking in the slipstream of the troposphere, then unconsciousness long before the impact of a mile-high fall from the dizzying height of the Court’s levitating city removed his mischief from the face of the world. A fitting fate for an enemy of the state.
The lad looked up at the card above the next armoured door. It was purple, with the numeral one stencilled across it. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen that colour over here.’
‘A P1. So, you’ve a taste for the strong stuff?’ noted the warder. ‘Do you really want to see who’s inside this cell?’
‘I—’ he hesitated. ‘I think so.’
Warder Twelve laid his hand on the viewing slit. ‘Then gaze upon Timlar Preston!’
Timlar Preston? But this was just a man, not an ogre. Old and thin, in a cell wallpapered by white sheets, every inch thickly pencilled with formulae and diagrams. He was standing pushed up against a wall – so close you’d think he was trying to draw warmth from the riveted metal, his pencil scratching in ever smaller circles, the writing increasingly tiny now there was hardly any space on the papers left. He turned around to gaze at the viewing slit, a flash of wild eyes and wispy silver hair, then returned to his scribbling.
‘He can see us?’ asked the lad. ‘I was told that the door’s cursewalls allowed one-way viewing only?’
‘He always knows when we’re watching him,’ said Warder Twelve. ‘Don’t ask me how. There’s a touch of the fey about him, if you ask me.’
The greenhorn gazed into the cell again. Timlar Preston didn’t seem like much, certainly not the man who had nearly destroyed the Kingdom of Jackals during the Two-Year War, the Great War, the foreigner whose weapons had propelled the hell of conflict deep into the Jackelian counties. He was from Quatérshift, that much you could see, a dirty shiftie, no honest, round jowls of the Jackelian yeoman for this one; no honest fat from a diet of roast beef, beer and jinn. Thin, wiry, with a proud nose that lent him an hauteur distinctly lacking in his mad scratchings.
‘You still think you have what it takes to keep such as he away from our shores?’ asked Warder Twelve.
The lad held his tongue. Inside the cell, Timlar Preston was turning in a circle, waving his pencil. Conducting an imaginary symphony of madness.
‘You want to keep him dancing for us, rather than inventing bloody great devices of war for the shifties to use against your fellow Jackelians? Men like him aren’t controlled by this—’ the warden slapped the transaction-engine drum turning on the armoured lock. ‘They are controlled up here!’ He tapped his skull. ‘Walking the cells with a toxin club swinging from your hand won’t be your vocation in the prison spheres, any more than tapping the ivories on your key-writer was your job when you worked over in analysis. Getting into the minds of people like Timlar Preston, that’s the task for you and me. We drug his food once a week; change his pencil for one slightly fatter, slightly longer, a different shade. To keep him off balance, you see? Then we take his sketches, the ones we can understand, and change some of the formulae. Forgery section uses his handwriting to do it for us. Just enough to keep him wondering if it was he who wrote the maths or one of us. Just enough to keep him wondering if he’s going mad. And while he’s doing that, he’s not trying to break the hex we’ve got laid around his cell. He’s not thinking of creating weapons that could lay waste to our country.’
Timlar Preston’s mad dance in the centre of the cell had ended, the genius arriving at the other side of the viewing slit in three long, low strides. His shriek was relayed by the voicebox next to the cell door, the piece of paper he had been writing pushed up against the viewing slit, full of spirals, a procession of seashell-like geometries drafted with insane precision. ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’
The lad looked at Warder Twelve. ‘What is he talking about?’
‘Something new,’ said Warder Twelve. ‘He’s been ranting about it for days. He’s due for the old sleepy soup and a few mind games at the end of this week. When we search his cell, we’ll probably find the notes on whatever his latest obsession is.’
‘I can hear him!’ Preston yelled. ‘Talking to me. Telling me what to do. What we need to do to survive.’
Warden Twelve flicked the sound off the voicebox and closed the viewing
