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 slit. ‘Back to the lifting room; the next level down is where we keep the prisoners with special powers– all the fey ones, the sorcerers and witches. You’re going to love them.’
They walked away, oblivious to the muffled banging on the other side of the cell door. Timlar Preston howling and throwing his papers around the cell.
Commodore Black looked over at his friend Coppertracks. It would take someone very used to steammen ways to tell that the scientist was nervous. But then, the commodore had lived with the steamman under the roof of Tock House for long enough that he could read the patterns of energy that danced under his iron friend’s transparent crystal skull like other men could read furrows in a brow or the nervous drum of fingers on a desk. And it took a lot to make one of the metal creatures nervous.
The patter of polite applause from the direction of the stage indicated that the previous presentation in front of the massed ranks of the Royal Society was going well. Well for the presenter, but not so well for Coppertracks’ chances of extracting the full financial and intellectual backing of the society if they squandered their time and resources on too many of his rivals’ proposed projects. It was a competitive business, this society of ideas, mused the commodore – as if the Kingdom of Jackals only had so much deck space for what its people thought about, and the pondering of one belief – one truth – left less room for any others to thrive.
‘You are sure you have all of my slides in the correct order?’ asked Coppertracks.
‘You know that I do,’ said the commodore. ‘Haven’t I practised enough on your blessed magic lantern back at the house? You keep your attention on the audience, I shall give your scientist friends a visual display of your genius that would put to shame the lantern operators of the theatres along Lump Street.’
‘There is really no need for you to assist me, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I could have brought one of my mu-bodies to operate the projection apparatus.’
Commodore Black nodded, but didn’t point out that having one of the steamman’s metal drones capering about the stage would only serve to remind the