The Court of the Air. Stephen Hunt

boxlike rest chambers; plain bed-slabs carved from the walls. If their journey had been uphill rather than down they would have been glad of the respite. As it was, Slowcogs had already pronounced the fungal forest as their first rest stop. Eventually the path forked in four directions and Slowcogs started to lead them down the passage on the far left.

      The exit became a bright dot in the distance two hours later. Molly’s legs ached after the effort of tackling the stairs, her calves tight and cramped. She stepped outside the tunnel.

      For a moment Molly thought that there must have been some mistake – a trick of gravity – that they had walked back to the surface, the green lichen-light replaced by bright daylight. Her eyes watered after the dim darkness of the side passage. Blinking away tears, she saw she was standing at the foot of a cliff, a rock wall towering away into the mist a thousand feet above them. The fog was suffused with red light and crackled intermittently with raw, lightning-like energies.

      Below the mist, stretching as far as she could see, a forest of mushrooms crouched as tall and dense as oak. Many of the fungal growths were ebony-dark, but there were splashes of colour in the forest too, fluted fungal spires with bright mottled markings of scarlet, gold and jade.

      ‘By the Circle,’ said Molly. ‘It’s handsome. It’s like there’s a sun down here.’

      ‘Observe.’ Slowcogs pointed to a gap in the vapour along the cavern’s haze-wrapped ceiling. ‘Not one sun, but many. Crystals left by the empire of Chimeca’s sorcerers. They used the crystal machines much as Jackals uses her worldsingers, to direct and tap the flow of the leylines’ earthflow, to stop their underground cities being crushed by the turning of the world. The sparks you see are the violence of the world diverted into light.’

      ‘Shall we press on now?’ Molly pointed towards the forest.

      ‘Sleep first,’ said Slowcogs. ‘We are at the far northern end of the Duitzilopochtli Deeps. The outlaw city has most of its sentries to the south, where the easy entrances from Middlesteel are positioned – the sewer outlets.’

      Slowcogs led them along the cliff wall until they came to the façade of an old temple carved into the rock. On one side of the entrance a seated stone figure crouched, human except for an ugly beetle’s head. It was matched on the other side by a second seated man-statue, a mammoth spider-head rising from its neck.

      ‘I don’t like the feel of this place,’ said Molly. ‘Not one bit.’

      ‘The old gods lost their power after the fall of Chimeca,’ said Slowcogs. ‘The temples and forces of ancient Wildcaotyl have no capability here now. It will be better to sleep within these walls. There are prides of pecks living inside the forest.’

      Despite her misgivings, Molly accepted the steamman’s advice. It was only when she got inside the temple that the wave of tiredness overtook her. Molly shivered. Locust priests had once practised their dark rites down here … she could feel it. From what she recalled from her poorhouse lessons, the pantheon of Wildcaotyl gods still lingered over the world like an ugly ancestral memory; each deity more obscene than the last – from lesser gods such as Khemchiuhtlicue Blood-drinker and Scorehueteotl Stake-burner, right up to Xam-Ku himself, old Father Spider.

      It was the middle of the night in Middlesteel above, and she finally fell into a deep dream-filled sleep. Rachael’s ghost came to speak to her, warning that Grimhope was no place for a nice Sun Gate girl, telling her that she should find a respectable job as a seamstress. Next the Beadle came; his body still covered in the torture marks of the gang that had stormed the poorhouse. He shouted at Molly that she was headed for the gallows outside Bonegate – until he was decapitated by the refined old assassin from the bawdyhouse, whose cane split into twin sword sticks like a conjurer’s trick.

      ‘Where’s my father?’ Molly demanded of the killer.

      ‘I am your father,’ said the assassin. ‘And you are such a terrible disappointment to the family. I don’t think we can bear your existence any more.’

      ‘You shouldn’t be trying to kill me,’ said Molly. ‘I want to speak to my mother.’

      ‘She died of shame,’ said the assassin. ‘After you were born.’

      ‘That’s not true.’

      The topper shoved her to the dirt, pushing her red hair back from the nape of her neck. ‘Time to die, Molly Templar.’

      ‘Please,’ Molly pleaded. ‘I just want to see my mother once before you kill me.’

      ‘Hold still. I’ll send you to her now.’

      It was Slowcogs that shook her awake, rather than the kiss of cold sabre steel. Molly groaned.

      ‘It is midday in the world above, Molly softbody. Time to move on.’

      The first growths in the fungal forest were tall white mushroom trees with multiple cups and red mottling; then the lichen-covered ground grew denser with darker single-cup growths. At times they needed to retrace their steps so Slowcogs could squeeze through the thick forest.

      Molly watched a squirrel-like rodent chewing on one of the trunks. ‘You could live free out here, Slowcogs. If you didn’t mind a diet of mushrooms.’

      ‘Grimhope is safer,’ said the steamman. ‘Relatively speaking.’

      ‘Is it still like the legends of the Green Man?’

      ‘I doubt if it ever was the place of your tales, Molly soft-body,’ said Slowcogs. Then, as if it explained everything, he added, ‘It is an outlaw city.’

      ‘They will welcome us there?’

      ‘My people have not updated our knowledge of Grimhope for many years,’ said Slowcogs. ‘There are few outlaw steammen; although one of our kind does live down here. Silver Onestack. He is a desecration.’

      ‘You mean he is malfunctioning?’

      ‘Which of us does not, with age?’ answered Slowcogs. ‘No. He is a joining – a creature formed from steamman cadavers at the hands of one of your human mechomancers. His pattern has been violated, the architecture laid down by King Steam tampered with. Three souls of our fallen lay trapped within the corpses that make up his body by Onestack’s selfish refusal to deactivate. It is a great dishonour for him.’

      Molly remembered her dream of the night before. ‘Poor Silver Onestack.’

      ‘So he hides himself away down here in the undercity. But he is still steamman. Word has been sent by the controller – if he is alive I hope he will meet us outside the town.’

      ‘Word?’ said Molly. ‘Surely there is no crystalgrid network down here?’

      Slowcogs pointed towards the ceiling mist, where black dots rode the cavern thermals. ‘There are older ways to send a message, young softbody. Trained bird bats with leg clips do as well in the deeps.’

      They travelled at a steady pace for the rest of the day, uneventfully except for when one of the mushroom trees rained spores down on them as they passed. Molly’s eyes swelled up like the crimson ball from a game of four-poles and she sneezed uncontrollably for another two miles. Apart from the odd spike of earthflow-fed lightning, the bright red light from the crystals high above them never varied or dimmed. It was always day in the Duitzilopochtli Deeps.

      By the late afternoon the cavern floor started to slope upwards and the fungal forest began to grow less densely. The presence of fields of stumps in the dirt suggested heavy felling by the inhabitants of the undercity. Before the brow of a hill they came across a field of a different kind, the stone markers and headstones of a graveyard stretching back to the fungal forest.

      ‘This is where Silver Onestack will meet us, if he is still activate,’ said Slowcogs. The steamman rolled along a path towards a shrine at the corner of the graveyard. The temple looked as abandoned as the Chimecan structure Molly had slept in the night before, but with none of the half-human, half-insect effigies. She guessed the outlaw city, rather than the ancient