Jack Cloudie

CHAPTER NINE

Omar returned to the palace. There was a chiming noise resounding through the palace accompanied by an almost carnival atmosphere among the courtiers and staff moving around the wooded grounds. Two silk-robed courtiers came laughing arm-in-arm towards Omar, one of them spilling the contents of an iced cup as he stopped them to ask what they were celebrating.

‘Even the palace knows,’ laughed the nearest of the courtiers, pointing to the new script flowing along the dome’s inner surface. ‘It is war.’

‘War?’ said Omar.

‘The heathens in the north,’ said the courtier. ‘The Jackelians. They have finally provoked the righteous might of the empire.’

‘You should be pleased,’ said the man’s friend. ‘There will be many opportunities and promotions for everyone. You will fight for glory and when it is done, we will step in to the new provinces to run them as the Caliph Eternal wills.’

Omar remembered the words the old nomad, Alim, had once uttered when he was cleaning his knife in the shade of the water farm. ‘All fights start with two victors. All fights end with one proven right, and one proven dead.’

‘Yes,’ whispered Omar, watching the happy pair jump across a water channel to join a group of revellers on the other side of the lawn. ‘When it is done.’

The start of a war. What more perfect time for Shadisa to disappear from the palace? When every sinew of the caliph’s civil service and the court and the military was focused on victory over their heathen neighbours to the north. No time to look for one of Immed Zahharl’s servants disappeared from the grand vizier’s devious clutches; perhaps not even time enough to notice she had gone missing — until it was too late.

Following various courtiers’ directions towards the pavilion of Immed Zahharl, Omar found himself heading towards the very centre of the Jahan. Protected from the elements by the almost magical dome high above, the buildings here had none of the practicality of old master Barir’s great house. No need to keep out the fierce winter storms that would roll off the sea and smash into the harbour town nestled against the lee of the cliffs. The memory of it almost made Omar wistful for his old life. How he would go to sleep listening to the screech of the gulls and wake up to the crack of lightning, watching the great dark storm front sliding in across the ocean. There was no need inside the Jahan for protection against lashing rains coming from one direction and drifting sands from the other. Here, the pavilions were made of crystal-blown walls engraved with flower motifs and stylized borders; curves of glass with just the occasional columns of marble to anchor the onion-topped towers.

Made oblivious to the structures’ beauty by familiarity, the staff of the court at least gave some semblance of businesslike efficiency. Officials, some in military uniforms, strode about with papers and plans rolled under their arms. Commissions for the coming hostilities? Plans of supply, perhaps? Farris Uddin had lectured at great length about the logistics and supplies needed for any successful military venture. An army that was not provisioned adequately would quickly lose more men to sickness and disease than to the rifle fire of any enemy column. The organization that went into such things was the empire’s greatest weapon, a secret weapon, almost, given how the tedium of such detailed planning made it easy for incautious warriors to ignore it in favour of the glory and fury of a full cavalry charge.

Remembering the name of the slave Boulous had suggested he seek out, Omar asked a gardener tending a bed of orchids outside the grand vizier’s pavilion if he knew a woman called Nudar. The gardener nodded and duly went off, returning with a woman so short that Omar at first mistook her for a child. There was no mistaking the lines of her ancient weathered face, hair faded to silver and tied back in tight buns — and judging by her features and pale skin, another slave with Jackelian blood. Taken together with her tiny size she looked as if she might have been born old, but this, Omar suspected, was only his imagination at work. She must have grown old in service.

‘Boulous told me that I should seek you out,’ said Omar to the old woman. ‘He said you were to be trusted.’

‘He said that, did he, guardsman?’ muttered the old slave, her knowing eyes appraising him. ‘Well, he is right enough. Old Nudar was once wet nurse in the jahani academy and as much a mother as he and hundreds of other jahani ever had. My boys, my darling boys. All grown up now and scattered across the empire. No little jahani to bounce on my knee now. How is Boulous, little Boulous, so quick and clever?’

‘Not so little now,’ said Omar.

‘No, not so little. He’ll make old Nudar proud one day. He’ll rise further than them all.’ She grasped Omar’s hand suspiciously and turned it over in her fingers.

‘Can you read my future from my palm?’ asked Omar.

Her response was a gurgle like wet laughter. ‘No, but your past I find puzzling. Your hand is far too tanned to be that of a nobleman’s son and your sword practice calluses are new, yet formed across such skin as you only develop from years of manual labour. An aqueduct line worker?’

‘Water farmer,’ said Omar. He looked at the woman with a newfound respect. She was as canny as a witch, but could she really be trusted when the colour of her skin suggested she had come from Jackelian stock?

‘I was not taken by force from Jackals by slave traders,’ said the woman, seeing the direction of Omar’s gaze and running a prune-like hand along her chalk-white cheeks. ‘I was found on the slopes of a mountain by a caravan, abandoned as a baby, when they took pity on my cries. Oh yes, it’s not only our nomads that do that. Uplanders like big strapping sons to carry on their crofts too. Old Nudar was lucky, as are you, I think. There are not many ex-slaves among the ranks of those who patrol the palace — you are the first I have seen.’

‘There are few men in the guards with my prodigious talents.’

‘Well then, prodigiously talented one, what do you need my assistance for?’

Omar told her the story, or as much as he dared. Of his and Shadisa’s origins in the far-off town of Haffa and how he had to find Shadisa again to tell her the truth of how her wicked new master really treated his slaves.

Nudar shook her head in astonishment that Omar would risk so much for another slave. ‘I don’t know who is the bigger fool, a guardsman who would want such a woman, or a woman who would not want such a man?’

‘You will take me to her?’

‘Old Nudar knows a little more than Boulous in this matter,’ said the old woman. ‘The girl you seek is already as good as dead.’

‘I saw her this afternoon and she was as alive as you or I,’ protested Omar.

‘Those who would enter the grand vizier’s inner circle must first prove their loyalty to him,’ said Nudar. ‘It is not just the guardsmen who have an initiation ceremony, although I am sure yours is far more honourable than Immed Zahharl’s. The rite is murder and I have heard that a new initiate stands willing to take his place in the grand vizier’s retinue. The slave you would help escape, Shadisa, is to be the sweetmeat the brutes will toy with tonight in the library of the womb mages, and when they are done, her corpse will disappear into one of their acid vats and all you will be left with are your memories of her.’

Shadisa! How could she have ever thought that the grand vizier was a master who meant well for her? Who would care for her better than I could? Is she such a fool?

‘What is the name of the man who would do this to her?’ demanded Omar.

Nudar shrugged. ‘I do not know. It is not wise to inquire too closely into such things, not in a court where even the secret police’s killers can be made to vanish without a trace. I can try to find out for you …’

‘Do so, and take me to Shadisa,’ said Omar.

‘Even if you find the man and deal with him, there will be other initiates,’ said Nudar. ‘The only female slaves who are safe in this place have faces that have seen as many seasons pass as mine.’

‘She will not die tonight. I will see to it.’ I saved her before, that evening in the desert outside Haffa, and she did not thank me for it once; let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself. It doesn’t matter, I’ll save her a hundred times if I have to, and carry her away from her murderous rich master screaming and kicking.

The woman laughed her wet rasping laugh again. ‘Well, why not? It’s been a long time since I saw such recklessness committed for a motive other than personal gain. Follow me and act as if you are assigned to the pavilion. Swagger, don’t waddle like a water farmer trying to conserve enough energy to get through a day’s labouring.’

Omar followed the old woman into the pavilion, a series of chambers and courtyards, walls inlaid with abstract frescoes in the traditional style, channels running with water threading through the corridors before veining out to opulent fountains that flaunted the grand vizier’s wealth. Omar wondered how Shadisa would react to his presence here. She has to listen to me this time, doesn’t she? Once he explained the true nature of her duplicitous owner, surely she would feel some gratitude towards him? Trust him enough to spirit her away from the wicked designs of Immed Zahharl?

Omar’s thoughts were interrupted by a ripple of awareness that seemed to pass like a breeze through the courtiers and staff in the courtyard he was walking through. Before he could question Nudar as to its cause, he caught his first sight of a phalanx of seven-foot-high grey-skinned giants advancing down a side corridor towards them.

‘The Caliph Eternal,’ hissed Nudar. ‘To your knees, boy.’

All around the courtyard, the staff were dropping to the floor in reverence, and Omar followed their example. Two of the giants were carrying a sedan chair, the windows on either side covered by purple curtains. The other grey-skinned creatures formed a bodyguard marching in a protective square around the ebony-black carriage. The caliph’s august presence was heavily concealed, which was just as well, as the stories of those commoners who had lost their heads for staring upon him were legion.

A green-robed courtier marching in front of the sedan chair banged a jewel-headed staff on the marble tiles, making the courtyard echo. ‘Make way for his most esteemed majesty, Caliph Eternal Akil Jaber Issman — Emperor of Cassarabia, thunderbolt of heaven, immortal prince of princes, eternal sword of the Holy Cent and protector of the hundred faces of the one true god.’

The caliph’s bodyguards might have been dressed as guardsmen in their golden yellow armour, but their phenomenal size and lumpen ugliness indicated they were anything but. Their eyes swept over the courtiers around them as they marched. As well as their swords they carried crossbows so large they wouldn’t have looked out of place in the outer circle of a city siege.

Suddenly it came to Omar where he had seen such hides before. Such ugliness briefly surfaced on the waters around Haffa in the hour when the town’s fishermen threw the spoiled share of their day’s catch back into the harbour. The harbour thrashing with the grey muzzles of … ‘Sharks!’

‘Quiet!’ whispered Nudar furiously.

One of the creatures broke away from the caliph’s bodyguard and loped towards where Omar and Nudar were kneeling. The shadow of the huge creature fell over them as Omar felt the monster’s hand land on the guard of his scimitar, drawing it out an inch as if to check it was genuine. The two nostril slits along the side of its muzzle sniffed at the nape of Omar’s neck, warm fetid breath blowing against his hair. The creature made a low grunting noise, as if satisfied, and loped back after the retreating sedan chair.

Omar watched the back of the column disappearing deeper into the pavilion. ‘What was that thing doing sniffing my hair?’

‘Your sweat,’ whispered Nudar, her eyes glancing up from where they had been fixed to the tiles with such intensity that he might have believed the secrets of the world to be engraved on the floor. ‘The beyrog was checking that you were a guardsman and authorized to carry a weapon in the palace, not an assassin waiting to attack the Caliph Eternal.’

‘How could it know that from my sweat?’

‘Your rations up in the fortress carry hidden ingredients,’ said Nudar. ‘That is why you are confined there for so much of your training. It takes time for your body to begin to sweat like a noble guardsman, giving you command of draks other than the beast that is born from your own blood. Beyrogs can smell steel and the charges of a gun, they can smell poison, and some say that they can smell treason itself. If it had smelt such a weapon on a mere slave like old Nudar, it would have torn me apart.’

That’s why my training draks became more compliant the longer I stayed at the citadel. And I thought they were just getting used to me.

‘Biologicks,’ said Omar, not able to hide his distaste of the dark magic. ‘I was not daunted by them, do not think that I was, not even for a moment.’

‘You should be, they are the caliph’s hand. And who else would you trust if you were the emperor of emperors, ruling for eternity across the ages? Men can be corrupted, even guardsmen like you. Beyrogs are created by the caliph’s womb mages to be loyal only to his person. Beyrogs have no family that can be kidnapped to force them to break their vows, they have no desires or lusts other than to serve the caliph, and they obey no orders other than those which comes from his mouth. And why not? Is the Caliph Eternal not the lawful seed of Ben Issman, his name be blessed? It is his wisdom that makes the deserts bloom with crops and keeps the people safe and fed.’ Nudar pointed towards the archway through which the beyrogs had disappeared. ‘Only the grand vizier’s personal servants are allowed into the inner pavilion. Old Nudar can go no further.’

‘And guardsmen?’

‘The Caliph Eternal’s law knows no boundaries, and neither do his guardsmen,’ said Nudar. ‘At least, not officially. I have heard that the slaves to be murdered are made to await their fate in the hanging garden at the pavilion’s centre. Look for your fool of a girl there.’

‘Thank you, Nudar.’

‘Boulous needs a good friend to keep him safe,’ said the old slave. ‘If the grand vizier’s men catch you with this girl, you will both die and my poor Boulous will have one friend less.’

‘He has a good friend who is a legend with a scimitar,’ said Omar. ‘And I will not die today.’

The old woman nodded and walked away muttering a prayer to Ben Issman’s name: a slave’s humble prayer.

Omar plunged into the lion’s den.

Jack was on the bridge, about to hand a list of automated systems they were having problems suppressing to the captain, when the signals officer received a communication from the crow’s nest and picked up the telescope to confirm the sighting. ‘Propellers ho, bearing forty degrees to starboard at ten o’clock.’

‘Confirmation on her silhouette?’ barked the first mate.

‘Smaller than fifty feet, she looks like a launch — Jackelian lines.’

‘Light her up with the helioscope,’ ordered Captain Jericho. ‘Standard fleet code. Confirm our name and ask for hers.’

Jack strained for a view of the approaching vessel through the bridge’s forward canopy. Confirming their own name was just a formality — there could be no mistaking the lines of the Iron Partridge with her strange spine of mortar tubes.

One of the sailors picked up the speaking trumpet and transmitted the captain’s orders to crewmen standing duty in the h-station below — the small keel-mounted dome holding a gas-fired helioscope to exchange messages between airships. There was a minute’s delay as the communication was flashed across to the approaching airship and her reply sent back.

The signals officer turned in his seat. ‘Reply given in well-formed fleet code. RAN Searcher requesting dock. Vice-Admiral Tuttle on board.’

Jack winced but didn’t give voice to his thoughts. That was the same arrogant arse that had threatened to stop the Iron Partridge leaving the airship field back home.

One of the sailors had the fleet list book out on his control desk. ‘The RAN Searcher is an admiral’s packet, sir, attached to the RAN Trespasser.’

‘The flagship of the Fleet of the South,’ said Jericho.

A murmur sounded around the sailors on the bridge and Jack realized why. A vice-admiral doesn’t have the authority to countermand the written admiralty orders held in the captain’s safe, but a fully flagged admiral does. Would their unpopular sorties into Cassarabia soon be over?

The captain nodded thoughtfully. The same notion must have occurred to him. The skipper pointed at Jack and two of the other more junior ratings on the bridge. ‘You three with me to the boat bay. Do you know how to pipe a vice-admiral on board, Mister Keats?’

‘Master Cardsharp Oldcastle taught the new hands during one of his lessons, sir,’ said Jack, falling in behind the captain.

‘Then the rascal’s probably taught you the tune from some stockade ditty,’ said Jericho. He winked at Jack. ‘Lucky for us that Vice-Admiral Tuttle is an inky-fingered Admiralty House politician who normally flies a desk. He’ll hardly recognize the difference.’

There were already two stocky Benzari marines standing sentry outside the boat bay hatch, rifles shouldered, when the captain and Jack arrived. The marines’ presence around the ship had become a lot more conspicuous after the master cardsharp informed the captain about the shot-rolling incident that had nearly seen Jack and Lieutenant McGillivray scattered like ninepins. Five more marines came trotting along to form an honour guard, while Jack helped a pair of sailors wind open the bay’s starboard hangar doors. There was plenty of room inside, the frames of their own three boats — in reality, small semi-rigid pocket airships that could carry up to ten crew in their gondolas — racked and packed on shelves with their small expansion engines, ready for assembly and independent action in less than ten minutes when they were needed to land crew or marines, act as scouts, or exchange sailors between vessels.

Each of the sailors had clipped a line to their belts as they entered the boat bay. Some small protection against an unexpected shift in position and a sudden tumble through the wide open doors, wind whistling in, setting the envelopes of their boats’ racked fabric rustling noisily in the blow.

‘Prepares for lines,’ Jericho shouted over the wind.

‘Beware the lines,’ called one of the boat bay men.

A second after the warning shout, a lead-weighted line was cast in from outside the Iron Partridge, hitting the wooden target against the hangar wall with a bull’s-eye. Jack and the other sailors ran in, catching the line before it could tumble back out, carrying the heavy head to a mechanical winch where it was locked in place and the equipment activated. Her rotors stilled, the vice-admiral’s launch was drawn inside the boat bay, still bucking in the sky against the crosswinds outside. Her crew was bustling about the open gondola of the pocket airship, the flash of the vice-admiral’s blue uniform visible between the sailors’ canvas rain cloaks. Jack and the other two ratings held their whistles at the ready as the launch was winched in. Just as the pocket airship was being tied down, First Lieutenant Westwick joined the reception party, looking about as happy as Jack felt.

The ratings’ greeting trilled out as the step-like doors of the small launch dropped to the boat bay floor, Vice-Admiral Tuttle walking down triumphantly, ignoring the red-coated marines shouldering arms with snap-lock precision. He at least had the courtesy to return Captain Jericho’s salute.

‘So, the evasive captain of our elusive Iron Partridge.’

‘We weren’t expecting company quite so soon, vice-admiral,’ said Jericho.

‘If you mean how did I find you,’ said the admiralty officer, ‘we’ve been bribing those sharp-eyed little devils from the Benzari tribes below to send word to our embassy of every airship they’ve spotted in the sky. Although I could probably have simply followed the trail of wreckage you’ve been leaving strewn across our ally’s mountains.’

‘A successful action,’ remarked the first lieutenant.

‘Really, my dear lady?’ said the vice-admiral. ‘An intelligence mission that measures its success in seizing, then burning enemy prize vessels? What a curious notion. Your friends back on the State Protection Board will be so pleased.’

Westwick’s eyes flashed angrily at the vice-admiral’s indiscretion. So, the Jackelian secret police were behind their voyage into Cassarabia. Does that explain a first lieutenant who seems to think she is the vessel’s commander, helped by a master cardsharp who swaps uniforms as easily as he produces the credentials to have me released from custody and press-ganged into the navy?

‘The nature of our mission is sealed as secret and this vessel is still operating under independent command,’ said the first lieutenant.

‘As inconvenient as it must be for you, I’m afraid a state of war trumps even the favours your board called in across parliament,’ said the vice-admiral. ‘I carry orders for the Iron Partridge to rejoin the Fleet of the South along the Southwest Frontier.’

‘This mission is vital,’ insisted the first lieutenant.

Captain Jericho nodded in agreement.

‘Your mission has been superseded by events, captain. Admiralty House doesn’t care two figs where the Cassarabians are finding the celgas to float their vessels. It is enough that they have it, and the point will be rendered moot when we take their fleet on and pound them out of the clouds.’ He raised his fingers archly to indicate the boat bay. ‘If this clanking carbuncle of a vessel and your crew of press-ganged misfits managed to bring down two of their airships, wholly unsupported, I don’t think the entire high fleet will have too much trouble seeing off this Imperial Aerial Squadron of the caliph’s.’

‘Even Admiralty House can’t be so blind,’ said Jericho. ‘We need to know if they’ve found a natural vein of celgas to mine or if they’ve synthesized it, d’you see. At the very least, we need to know if the caliph has enough gas to sell to other enemy nations in an attempt to open up a second front against us.’

‘Irrelevant, irrelevant. Superior skymanship, captain, will always win out. We’ll certainly discover where they’re getting their celgas from the wretches we drag out from the empire’s crashed, burning hulls. Finding an airship that can float is one thing; finding hundreds of years of fighting tradition in the men that serve in her is quite another.’

‘Only an admiral can countermand my orders for independent action,’ said Jericho.

‘I’m sure your loyalty to the first lieutenant’s paymasters on the board is quite commensurate with the amount they paid to buy you out of debtors’ prison,’ sneered the vice-admiral. ‘And as ironic as I find the sight of a maverick of your notoriety pettifogging on regulations, I took the precaution of making sure I was carrying the admiral’s written orders with me.’ He flourished a wax-sealed envelope. ‘Besides,’ he raised a thumb at the two armed sentries posted on the boat bay, ‘I am sure that the members of your crew who aren’t mercenaries or scraped out from gutters, prison cells and stockades would relish the chance to pick up enemy vessels that are left intact enough to earn prize money. There should be enough of those in the next week or so to keep the poorest of your Jack Cloudies in rum and beer until next winter sets in.’

‘And if we join the Fleet of the South,’ said Jericho, ‘the first two kills of the war go against the admiral’s name; I take it our engagement was the opening action of the war?’

‘And I was told you could only be relied on to ignore admiralty politics,’ smiled the vice-admiral. He looked at the first lieutenant. ‘Don’t worry, my dear, you’ll be able to get back to the normal run of bribery, assassination and skulking around in the shadows soon enough. We’ll slip the Iron Partridge in the rear of the line of battle and you’ll get your chance to see what a direct action looks like. A hard pounding or two and the empire will soon fall back to their natural boundaries. A clean pair of heels, that’s what we’ll see from the caliph’s sand-trotting lackeys.’

Jack watched the look on First Lieutenant Westwick’s face as the vice-admiral stalked out with Jericho in tow. She was clearly thinking about putting that hidden sleeve dagger of hers in the vice-admiral’s back, and calculating the chances that she would be able to get away with rolling his corpse off the ship and claiming him lost overboard in a storm. But that wouldn’t wear now. Not when the sailors in the boat bay started spreading word of what the vice-admiral had offered. Which the vice-admiral had obviously intended. The chance to ride into battle in their armour-protected tortoise at the back of a squadron. The chance to take the fleet’s share of the prize money and sail back to the Kingdom as rich men.

And to be honest, the prospect of such a deal was lifting Jack’s heart as much as any man in the boat bay. A quick victory and back to Jackals. Alive, pardoned and with enough money to take his two brothers out of the poorhouse and pay for a new start for the three of them. Only the nagging words of the master cardsharp sounded a warning deep within his mind. I’ve never been privy to an easy victory. No, indeed, I don’t think I know what one of those even looks like.

Jack soon dismissed the words. In that, he was wrong.

It was cool and shaded in the grand vizier’s inner pavilion, full of shadows in which Omar could hide, avoiding contact with any courtier or servant who might question his presence. Well, the caliph’s law knew no bounds, and Omar was meant to be its hand inside the palace. Murder, even of a slave, was against the laws laid down by the Caliph Eternal.

Eventually the shadows of the passages gave way to the light of a central courtyard, and Omar found himself on the first terrace of the hanging gardens the old slave Nudar had sent him towards. A maze of paths wound through trellised walks bounded by orchids as tall as Omar himself, vines and creepers hanging like a curtain over the side of the terrace. Flicking away a bright blue dragonfly that had drifted in front of his face and peering upwards, Omar counted five more terraces laddering up to the open sky above. On the central courtyard below was a slab of marble the size of a bed. The mist of water from the nozzles at its four corners partially enveloped Shadisa’s green silk-robed form. Her wrists and her ankles were tied to each of the nozzles and she was lying soaking like a human starfish fixed to the slab’s centre. Her eyes were shut and her face peaceful, as if she had chosen to sleep in the middle of this garden fountain. But she is alive — she has to be. Beyond being tied down there were no signs of violence upon her beautiful body. Surely nothing that looked so serene could be dead? He extended out his senses towards her. The same senses that had served him so well back in Haffa. Yes, she was alive, but the differences within her he had sensed under the palace were heightened — a drug? Perhaps, but it was more than that. Deeper. Her soul felt wrong. What had that devil Immed Zahharl done to her? What can change a soul? He begged the heavens that it wasn’t love. Not for the grand vizier.

Omar grabbed one of the thicker creepers and, using it as a rope, shinned down towards the courtyard. He stopped, hidden in the tree, as the sound of boots on one of the marble paths grew audible, two columns of men emerging, their faces completely covered by golden masks except for their eyes and mouths.

Omar would have recognized the man at their head by his malicious hooded eyes, even without the robes of the high keeper of the Sect of Razat. Leaving the grand vizier standing above Shadisa’s head, the two lines of men split off in opposite directions and slowly surrounded the slab where their victim was bound. The caliph’s law would be enforced as they were engaged upon their crime, with no excuses possible as Omar leapt down among them and slashed apart the first man to try to take Shadisa’s honour and her life. He would run his steel through as many as he could before they fled like rats and the grand vizier would run away, not daring to tell anyone that he had been part of this evil gathering.

The man Omar had marked as Zahharl intoned, ‘Which of those is last among us?’

One of the golden masked figures stepped forward. ‘I am last.’

‘Then it is upon you to prove you will follow our true way,’ called Zahharl. ‘The Sect of Razat calls for blood, and from this maiden’s flesh will it be spilled.’ He pulled out a long silver syringe from under his priest’s robes and plunged it into Shadisa’s arm, filling it with the unconscious woman’s blood. ‘You must prove yourself to me and you must prove yourself to the will of the one true god.’ He lifted up the filled syringe as if it was a sceptre and the golden-masked figure stepped forward to receive it. The grand vizier indicated Shadisa’s prone body. ‘This slave’s name is Shadisa and she shall die. It is for you to prove yourself upon her body. As we honour progress …’

‘As we honour progress,’ intoned the circle of figures, ‘she shall die!’

Omar was flexing his legs to propel him into the leap down from the tree when the tiles below began to shake. A stomping sound echoed from the corridor the grand vizier had entered through and the first of a company of giant beyrogs emerged into the hanging garden from the pavilion. Ben Issman be blessed, Boulous must have told the guardsmen what Omar was about to do, and they had informed the Caliph Eternal. Here was the ruler’s bodyguard, come to arrest the grand vizier for his crimes. The caliph using the excuse, no doubt, to remove a thorn from his side who had grown over-powerful and dangerous. The sedan chair borne into the hanging garden by the beyrogs dropped to the floor behind Zahharl and a figure to the left of the grand vizier removed his mask, revealing a face that Omar had to suppress a gasp upon seeing — a profile familiar from any coin stamped in Cassarabia. It was the Caliph Eternal standing beside the grand vizier, Akil Jaber Issman himself, his immortal youthful features looking not much older that Omar’s own!

‘Take her,’ ordered the Caliph Eternal, and at the sound of his voice the shark-faced beyrogs came alive and lunged forward, ripping off Shadisa’s restraints and pulling her off the slab.

‘Careful, you wretches,’ called the Caliph Eternal to the beyrogs, pointing towards the masked man holding the syringe of blood. ‘The woman does not require her skin bruised as if she is an overripe banana. Prove your loyalty to progress and the Sect of Razat: this slave shall die this night by your hand.’

Omar watched in shock as the Caliph Eternal’s hideous bodyguards tossed Shadisa’s comatose form inside the sedan chair. The masked initiate who was to kill her stopped with one boot on the chair’s step as the grand vizier passed him a cork-stoppered vial of green liquid. ‘Use this to wake her up,’ laughed the grand vizier, ‘before you start with her.’ The initiate nodded and took the vial, entering the chair’s box.

The Caliph Eternal himself is a member of the grand vizier’s wicked sect. A man who should have commanded the loyalty of every sect of the Holy Cent as the voice of the one true god on earth. No chance of invoking the caliph’s law and trusting to the empire’s justice here. The only law now was the depraved whims of Immed Zahharl. Any one of the beyrogs would be a match for a dozen guardsmen, and Omar wouldn’t get more than a step towards Shadisa’s body before the caliph’s bodyguard cut him to pieces. He had to bide his time. Save Shadisa later.

Omar kept as still as a leaf in the foliage. The Caliph Eternal’s monsters would slay him if they scented him up here. Back in Haffa, Omar had heard a story once about a salt-fish farmer who had escaped a nest of sand vipers that had been tracking him by rubbing a salt-fish against his skin to disguise his scent. Omar quietly plucked one of the oranges and sliced it against his scimitar, squeezing its juices against his face, arms and legs.

‘I want no trace of her left,’ ordered the grand vizier. ‘Carry the chair to the lowest level of the womb mages’ library and do it there.’

No. NO!

Concealed inside the sedan chair, Shadisa and the initiate who was to be her executioner were carried away by the beyrogs, a couple of their number standing sentry outside the archway, the gold-masked figures of the sect striding solemnly behind the procession.

Shadisa. Omar had failed her again — a guardsman with a scimitar at his side, trained to hack apart her would-be killers, and he had been every bit as helpless to intervene as he had been during the sack of Haffa.

Omar’s self-recriminations ended as one of the beyrogs turned and sniffed the air suspiciously, growling like a wolf.

‘Stop,’ ordered the caliph.

Immed Zahharl turned. ‘What is it?’

‘There is someone else here,’ said the caliph. ‘My beyrogs’ senses are never wrong.’

‘Move on,’ the grand vizier called to the departing sedan chair and the masked figures. ‘Seal the garden behind you.’

‘Find the intruder,’ the caliph ordered the beyrog as it loped howling straight towards Omar’s orange tree.

Jack was helping Coss with a broken regulator on one of the transaction engines when a banshee-like wailing began sounding about the chamber and the two of them halted their work.

‘General-quarters,’ said Coss.

Jack was puzzled. ‘This close to our rendezvous with the Fleet of the South?’

John Oldcastle leant over the rail into the engine pit. ‘The bridge wants a check on the navigation drums, they need to confirm our blessed position.’

Jack saw why through the porthole when he went back up to the punch-card desk. There were dunes below — known as the great southern desert to the Jackelians, the northern to the Cassarabians — but the orange sands were covered with smoking debris and bodies. In the air clusters of gas cells drifted through the sky attached to scraps of burning carper, like corpuscles bled from the airships’ veins and set astray to wander the heavens.

‘There are no airships left intact,’ said Jack, injecting his query into the punch-card reader.

‘Aye lad,’ said John Oldcastle, looking out of the next porthole. ‘And unless both sides blew each other to bits, that’s the remains of one fleet while the victors have had it away on their heels.’

Results for Jack’s query began twisting away on the beads of his abacus-like screen. ‘All our compass points have been tracked correctly. Our navigation drums are turning fine. These are the rendezvous coordinates the vice-admiral gave us for the Fleet of the South.’

The master cardsharp reported the results down to the bridge and returned to Jack’s station a minute later. ‘You and the old steamer can get your tools. We’re to report to the boat bay and go down there — sift through the wreckage for anything resembling a ship’s record drums — Jackelian or the caliph’s.’

Jack couldn’t tear his eyes away from the sight outside the porthole.

Coss came out of the pit to take in the sight too. ‘How could one fleet wipe out another so completely in a single engagement?’

‘Perhaps the vice-admiral was right,’ said Jack. ‘Superior skymanship will out.’

‘Ah, that strutting popinjay,’ whined John Oldcastle. ‘If he’s right, there’s a first time for everything.’

If the Iron Partridge’s skipper had been looking to find the remains of a captain’s log among the dunes of the Southwest Frontier, then Jack hoped Captain Jericho wouldn’t be too disappointed. There was enough of that to go around for everyone. While the figures sifting through the wreckage — John Oldcastle, Coss, Jack, their brutish captain of marines and a handful of his soldiers — had yet to find anything resembling a transaction-engine register in the ruins left scattered across the desert, there were enough bodies wearing the torn, burnt uniforms of the RAN to speak of which side had flown away victorious. So many ships’ names on the caps — the Audacity, the Guardian Kirkhill, the Javelin, the Parliament Oak, the Swiftsure and the Ultimatum — and not a single Cassarabian sailor among the bodies strewn half-buried among the shifting sands.

Dirty rolls of smoke threaded across the sky for miles, hiding the hundreds of circling carrion birds. Pieces of smouldering carper jutted out of the desert like a field of thorns, and the saltpetre smell of matches from the residue of liquid explosive charges lingered in the air. The Iron Partridge must have missed the battle by no more than a day — or the desert would have reclaimed the scene of carnage, covering the wreckage with sand after scavengers had stripped the carcasses of the fallen to their bare bones. No need to post sentries here to guard against looters; only the vultures had turned up to avail themselves of the war’s bounty.

‘Nothing,’ Jack called across to Coss, poking an arch of a girder emerging from the sand as if it was a whalebone trapped on the bed of an evaporated sea. What in the name of the Circle happened to our airships out here? Apart from a few melted keys from a punch-card writer, Jack hadn’t found anything even approaching useful. There were thousands of tiny scraps of blackened material on the ground. Not paper, but more like a very fine cloth that had been burnt close to ashes. Jack picked up a brittle leaf of the burnt material. Nothing he recognized. Too thin to be the canvas of an airship envelope, but it had been left blowing all over the battlefield.

‘Kiss my condensers, but this wreckage is all wrong, Jack softbody,’ said Coss.

‘Too right it is,’ said Jack. ‘These are all our people. If we’d made the rendezvous any quicker, this would have been you and me lying here as vulture fodder. How are we even going to bury so many?’

‘You misunderstand,’ said the steamman. ‘I mean this wreckage is too small.’

‘You’ve got a good set of vision plates in your skull, old steamer,’ said Oldcastle. He had abandoned the search and was sitting on a piece of hull, shading his eyes from the high sun and gazing up at the reassuring armoured bulk of the Iron Partridge floating overhead. ‘You saw how much was left of our prize vessel after we burnt her down to her bones. And we did that with charges laid on the inside. This-’ he waved a hand across the sands ‘-wasn’t a normal battle. It was a slaughter.’

‘Something new,’ said Coss.

‘Aye,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Something new in the very old game we’ve been playing against the caliph these last few centuries. Something new come along to disturb an old man’s rest, curse my unlucky stars.’

Jack turned away from the sight of the sailors’ mutilated corpses in disgust. ‘Their faces …’

‘A tradition of the caliph’s army, lad,’ said Oldcastle. ‘They present their officers with sacks of ears and noses severed from the bodies of the fallen to prove the scale of their victory. It leaves little room for exaggeration of your triumph. It’s a wicked hard thing to be an infidel in this land.’

‘Yes, a hard thing.’

Was it just the dead and fallen, or were prisoners and wounded fair game too, Jack wondered? Alan, Saul, you’ve never seemed so far away. How he wished he was back with his brothers now — it didn’t even matter that he had failed to raise the money he needed to rescue them from poverty — even the grime and relentless destitution of a state poorhouse was better than picking through the terrible litter of this battlefield.

A call sounded out from over the rise of the next dune and one of their Benzari marines appeared waving a rifle to indicate he had found something of note. Wading through the fine orange sand alongside the master cardsharp and Coss, Jack saw that the marines were pulling what looked like a white blanket off a man-sized canister jutting out of the sands. Captain of Marines Tempest was running down towards his men and cursing them for fools. Something glinted below the white sheeting, two glass hemispheres filled with liquid, separated by a thin membrane.

‘You perishing idiots,’ yelled the marine office. ‘There’s enough explosives sloshing around in there to blow you back to your barbarian mountains.’

Jack took in the find as he warily approached, the captain of marines shoving his men back. The object they had discovered looked like one of the shells the Iron Partridge’s gunners loaded into the breeches of their cannons, but a hundred times larger. And the material they had pulled off it resembled white silk, connected to the canister by guide lines, an oversized version of the sail rider chutes sailors would use in a last-ditch attempt to abandon a wrecked airship.

‘This canister was floating in the air,’ said Jack, pointing at the silk-like material. Dear Circle, this thing was designed to fly!

The master cardsharp pushed Jack’s hand back down. ‘Careful about it, Mister Keats.’ He pointed to a crown of metal spikes circling the canister’s rim. ‘Those are contact detonators. The ones on its side lying against the sand have been sheared off by a shockwave, which is the only reason this wicked contraption didn’t blast itself and half an acre of desert away when it hit the ground.’

‘It’s a mine,’ said Jack. ‘An aerial mine!’

‘The racks we found in the prize vessel’s bomb bays …’ said Coss.

‘Too big for standard fin-bombs,’ said Jack, ‘just the right size to mount these.’

‘Just waiting to be loaded for war,’ said the master cardsharp. ‘Hindsight makes wise men of many a blessed fool.’

‘You could only release such a weapon into the air if you were following the wind down onto an enemy squadron,’ said Coss.

The master cardsharp took the tool chest out of Coss’s hands and stepped towards the mine, waving away the captain of marine’s protests as he used a screwdriver to lever off a metal plate above the transparent explosive chamber, revealing a throbbing layer of yellow-furred flesh beneath. ‘A fair wind, Mister Shaftcrank, and the foul touch of their womb mages to guide its sails. Those great big flying lizards that their scouts ride can follow the scent of carper to track down an airship and I’ll wager these wicked things can do much the same.’

‘Those bleeding little Cassarabian sand monkeys,’ growled the captain of marines. ‘I’d like to get my fingers around the necks of the ones that did this to our boys.’

‘Here’s mortal progress for you,’ said John Oldcastle. ‘Our ships are racked with fin-bombs to see off their nomads and bandits, while theirs are racked with ship-killers like these. Get the master bombardier down here, Mister Keats. We’ll drain out the charge of this beastie and then load her onto the boat.’

‘How can we possibly defend against something like this?’ Jack asked.

Oldcastle pointed up to the Iron Partridge. ‘The answer’s blowing in the wind, Mister Keats. An iron skin to cover our carper guts. This spiny floating chandelier of the caliph’s is all blast — fine for ripping apart a soft-skinned vessel, but you need to shape an explosive charge if you’re to pierce armour plate properly. Still, I wouldn’t want to risk a cloud of these mines — they could blow off our engines cars and woe betide the skymen with their faces pressed against a porthole when one went off.’

Jack nodded in understanding. Their oddity of a vessel was so different from the rest of the fleet, it was the one thing that the Cassarabians hadn’t planned for when designing their weapons.

Omar’s heart stopped as the monstrous seven-foot-high beyrog sprinted towards the orange tree he was hiding in, ready with the blade of his scimitar to slash down when the creature came clawing up towards the foliage. But it never leapt, crashing instead into the bush beneath Omar’s feet and emerging a second later clutching a small slave boy, a belt around his waist hung with gardening tools.

‘Everyone was ordered out of the gardens tonight,’ said the grand vizier.

‘I arrived late for my duty after supper, your eminence,’ pleaded the boy dangling from the beyrog’s grasp. ‘I never spoke to the master of the gardens, I didn’t know …’

‘What did you see here tonight?’ demanded Zahharl. ‘What did you hear?’

‘Nothing, your eminence. I saw nothing.’

‘A wise young slave, who sees no evil and hears no evil.’ The grand vizier turned to the caliph. ‘You know what to do.’

‘He is just a child,’ said the caliph.

‘You too must prove yourself to me this night.’

‘I cannot,’ begged the caliph, trying not to look at the struggling slave’s face.

‘Then have your beyrog do it.’

‘That would be the same as if I had done it myself.’

‘You are right,’ sighed the grand vizier. He grabbed the slave by his rough gardener’s robes, lifting him out of the hulking beyrog’s grasp. ‘And if you must do these things, they are better done by your own hand. Then you know they shall be done properly and efficiently.’ He took the boy’s head and thrust it down into an irrigation channel next to the path. ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, and now, speak no evil ever again.’

Omar watched in disgust as the boy’s legs spasmed and jerked while the grand vizier drowned him. The murder done, the grand vizier stood up and pointed past the foliage of the orange tree where Omar was hiding. ‘The poor lad. He must have slipped from the terrace up there and landed unconscious in the water where he drowned. A good thing he is of no account to anyone.’ Zahharl indicated the beyrog, standing dispassionately on the other side of the path. ‘Order your hound away.’

The caliph did so and Zahharl marched behind the beyrog, shutting the garden’s doors behind the bodyguard and the other sentries standing outside. As he returned towards the caliph, the grand vizier’s right leg lashed out and caught the empire’s leader in the gut, doubling him up.

‘I asked for one simple thing to prove your loyalty and you failed me.’

‘Please, don’t,’ coughed the Caliph Eternal as the grand vizier’s leg lashed out again, catching him between the thighs and sending him sprawling across the slave’s corpse.

‘You are too weak,’ said the grand vizier, advancing on the figure whimpering against the tiles of the hanging garden. ‘And if you want to see progress done, you must be strong, as strong as our brave new age demands. You want a strong empire, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ begged the caliph, raising his arms up to ward off any more lashes from the grand vizier’s boot.

‘That is good,’ said Zahharl. ‘For that is what I want also.’ He removed his boots and sat down on the slab where Shadisa had been tied down, soaking his feet in the water channel at the slab’s base before pushing his soles out towards the caliph. ‘Rub my feet for me, and then dry them on your clothes. Show me how much you love me. Then I shall reward you.’

Omar watched in silent horror as the empire’s ruler of rulers prostrated himself before Immed Zahharl, massaging the killer’s feet before rubbing them dry with the silk of his own robe. The Caliph Eternal could cry out in a second, call in his bodyguard of beyrogs outside and have them rip the limbs off this sly, devious murderer, one by one. Yet here he was, supposedly the most powerful man in the empire, bowing down before the grand vizier as if he was no more than a slave from one of the capital’s many bathhouses. What sort of devil is this grand vizier, that he can turn Shadisa against me and treat the Caliph Eternal like a hound to be whipped on his whim?

‘Kiss them now and I shall give it to you,’ said the grand vizier, and as the Caliph Eternal moaned and pressed his lips against the feet of his advisor, the grand vizier brought out a syringe filled with a blood-red liquid. ‘Stay still,’ commanded the grand vizier. He leant forward and shoved the needle into the base of the caliph’s neck, pushing the plunger down and releasing the substance into the ruler’s body as he lay down moaning. ‘Aren’t you glad I’m here for you,’ cooed the grand vizier. ‘Someone to look after you and protect you.’

‘Yes,’ wailed the Caliph Eternal. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, then,’ said Zahharl, tossing the empty syringe into a bush, ‘get to your feet now. We have a war to prosecute and the Imperial Aerial Squadron will bring you victory after victory. In the end, even you may begin to tire of accepting the triumphs that are to come.’

Once the caliph and the grand vizier had departed the hanging garden, Omar dropped to the ground beside the forgotten corpse of the gardener. He lifted the dead boy out of the channel and rolled him onto the path leaving him with as much dignity as he could.

‘I’ll send the ones that did this to paradise after you,’ whispered Omar. ‘You are of account to me, and that is my promise to you.’

Omar walked over to the bush by the side of the orange tree and carefully pulled out the syringe that had been used to inject the caliph. There were drugs of a thousand hues available inside the palace, served to its courtiers on trays like iced sherbet, but what drug could be so powerful that the grand vizier was using it to make such an utter vassal of the caliph? How addictive would such filth have to be? Omar didn’t know the answer to that, but there were chemists inside the capital who might be able to produce an antidote to it and restore some semblance of a ruler able to stand up to the grand vizier’s ambitions. Omar pocketed the empty syringe. The proof was mounting up against Immed Zahharl — the trick would be to stay alive long enough to use it.

Omar climbed back up the tree and used the vine to retrace his steps to the next level of the hanging gardens. He had other steps he had to retrace, too. One of the grand vizier’s murderous disciples was taking Shadisa down to the lair of the womb mages and Omar knew the way there — the lifting rooms by the library’s entrance burrowing all the way to its lowest levels. There was only one victory that mattered to Omar. I’m coming for you, Shadisa, I’ll follow you to hell and back.

He ran back towards the exit. Shadisa wasn’t dead yet.

Standing at the end of the wardroom, Vice-Admiral Tuttle indicated that he was finished with the ground party’s report on the caliph’s deadly new innovation — the aerial mine. Their find was, Jack supposed, one scrap of small comfort for the admiralty politician, his name now attached to one of the greatest naval defeats the Royal Aerostatical Navy had ever suffered — and at the hands of their enemies to the south, mere novices in the trade of airship flight. Jack could imagine the uproar when news of this defeat started circulating at home. The newssheets would send mobs flailing at the doors of parliament, demanding heads roll for this fiasco. The grim nodding faces of the Iron Partridge’s officers seated around the table indicated they concurred with what Jack was imagining as their reception back home.

At least the vice-admiral would have an example of the enemy’s secret weapon to present to the fleet’s airship yards for their engineers to try to devise a counter-defence. Jack had already heard some of the wilder ideas of the crew on the subject — everything from protective nets, using rotors to blow the mines off course, or launching lead weights on miniature chutes to set the mines off early.

‘This is a devious innovation,’ announced the vice-admiral, ‘but one that will be easily exceeded by the navy’s air yards. We will carry the defused mine back to the Kingdom and present it to the admiralty with all haste, so that our next engagement can be made on more equal terms.’

Seated at the table of officers, First Lieutenant Westwick leapt to her feet. ‘We will not. Without the admiral’s presence to countermand our orders, the Iron Partridge is back under independent command.’

In the absence of a seance, Jack judged it unlikely the admiral’s ghost would be countermanding anyone. Was his corpse one of those I was poking through on the sands below?

‘Under whose command, my dear?’ the vice-admiral laughed, pointing at the captain’s vacant chair. Jericho was in his cabin again, struck by his dark humours and refusing to come out. ‘Yours? Your naval commission is caught somewhere between being a mere formality and a high farce.’

‘The source of the enemy’s celgas is more important than ever,’ insisted the first lieutenant. ‘The loss of the Fleet of the South has shown the failure of conventional tactics against the empire. We need to raid deep into Cassarabia for answers.’

‘This vessel is under the command of the Royal Aerostatical Navy, not the State Protection Board,’ the vice-admiral raised his voice. ‘I am a vice-admiral of that navy, your superior officer, and by my order we are retuning to Jackals.’

‘I heard you were a coward, sir,’ said the first lieutenant. ‘Always to be found at the rear of a squadron, as far away from danger as your position could afford you.’

‘You will not offer such vile insubordination to me!’ yelled the vice-admiral.

‘Marines,’ shouted the first lieutenant towards the two Benzari guarding the door, ‘arrest the vice-admiral and place him in the brig.’

The two marines advanced on the vice-admiral and seized his arms to an uproar from the officers around the table, some protesting the arrest of a senior officer, others supporting the principle of independent command in the absence of a living ranked flag officer to countermand it. Jack was pushed back against the wall in the melee. If only Jericho was here to call order on the riot.

Oldcastle clearly had the same idea. ‘Run to the skipper’s cabin, Mister Keats, Mister Shaftcrank. Rouse Jericho from his black dog and bring him here even if you have to shove a pistol in his blessed back to do it.’

Jack and Coss were attempting to leave by the wardroom’s exit hatch when the door swung open and a mob of sailors clutching cutlasses and marine carbines burst in. Master Engineer Pasco was at the head of the table, waving the rabble in.

‘Shut it down,’ yelled the burly engine master over the ruckus, his men fanning out down the sides of the wardroom, shoving Jack and Coss against the officer’s table with their rifle butts. The two Benzari marines were overpowered and pushed to the floor, the vice-admiral struggling to his feet.

‘This is mutiny, Mister Pasco,’ spat the first lieutenant.

‘So it is, my dear,’ answered the vice-admiral. ‘But it is not being committed by the master engineer and his men. You have chosen to go against the written orders of a flagged admiral and disobeyed the lawful orders of a superior officer and it is you that is to be charged with mutiny. I am relieving Captain Jericho of command, and you and your minions are to be brigged pending a court martial. Jericho will be confined to his cabin under guard for the rest of the voyage.’

‘You’re out of line,’ protested the master cardsharp. ‘On what basis are you relieving the master and commander of this vessel?’

‘Gross dereliction of duty,’ smiled the vice-admiral. ‘He burnt a Cassarabian prize vessel rather than handing it over to the admiralty as he was required by regulations to do. If we had properly examined the enemy airship you had captured, we would have discovered its aerial mines and the Fleet of the South would not have been lost!’

Jack groaned. The duplicitous navy politician had found a way to scapegoat the captain for the loss of the Fleet of the South after all.

‘There were no mines on board the prize vessel,’ called Jack. ‘Their bomb bays weren’t even loaded — the ship was rigged light for long distance patrol.’

‘Shut your mouth, thief,’ said Pasco. ‘You’re only on this ship because you were in the pokey with Jericho. We all know it. Nobody checked the prize vessel properly; she was burnt as fast as your Benzari wild boys could lay charges inside her.’

The vice-admiral shook his head sadly. ‘The word of a pressed criminal; well, at least we still have some real navy personnel left on this ship. Mister Pasco, do your duty. Westwick and her secret police lackeys are to be held in the brig. I want a loyal sailor with small arms on every station as we set a course for home.’

There was a cheer from the mob of armed sailors and Pasco’s men grabbed Jack, Coss and John Oldcastle, pushing them after the first lieutenant, the female officer surrounded by a ring of jeering armed mutineers. They would be lucky if they made it to the brig without being hanged first.

‘Not the brig for the old steamer,’ said Pasco, pointing at Shaftcrank. ‘Escort him up to the transaction-engine chamber. We need someone to prevent this albatross of a ship from killing us all on the way home.’ Pasco turned to Jack as he pushed a cutlass under the master cardsharp’s nose. ‘I told you, boy, and you, fat man, the day would come when we’d settle this proper.’

That day had arrived.