Jack Cloudie

CHAPTER TEN

Standing in the corridor that led to the great library cavern, Omar could hear the clacking echoes of the womb mages’ copper-plated spell books turning under their fingers as he frantically inspected the buttons on the lifting room’s wall panel. Where would you go to assault, murder and dispose of a slave? Deep, that was what the grand vizier had told the initiate. Deep to hide the crime, deep to dispose of Shadisa’s corpse.

Omar had a name now for the golden-masked would-be slayer, courtesy of Nudar. Salwa. A name accompanied by a warning, for Salwa was reputed to be a keeper of the Sect of Razat, a priest who had already proved himself by questioning and strangling many of the men captured in Haffa by raiders. Men that Omar would have known of old. The priest’s murderous actions towards those who had been cast out as heretics should have already proven his loyalty to the grand vizier, yet here this devil Salwa was, about to snatch the greatest love of Omar’s life away from him.

Well, Salwa the priest is going to become Salwa the dead when I catch up with him. And if he had harmed so much as a hair on Shadisa’s head, then he would become Salwa the man who welcomed death on the day his fate crossed paths with a certain guardsman’s. If only Omar’s luck held until he caught up with them. Omar had already seen the sedan chair and the bodyguard of massive beyrogs exiting the womb mages’ lair, the chair held noticeably higher by its two porters now its occupants had been deposited somewhere below. Why set me this fate, god, why make a guardsman of a slave if you don’t mean for me to rescue her?

It was as if the heavens were blessing Omar’s plans, trying to restore the balance of justice here in the Jahan. Guiding him to alcoves to hide in and ledges to crouch on unseen while the sorcerers passed by. The fear of their craft among the people was both their strength and their weakness. They were so sure that nobody would dare to poke their nose in a sorcerer’s business, that they didn’t even require guards to watch their gates.

Standing in the lifting room, Omar pressed the button for the lowest level, and shuddered as the gate shut off the corridor and the room began to sink. There was a smell inside of chemicals that reminded Omar of the bleaches he had used to clean the water farm’s desalination lines out after their pipes clogged up with crusted salt. Omar’s heart was pounding as he tried not to think of what would happen if he were too late. It felt as if his guts were being wrung tighter and tighter as the lifting room descended painfully slow. When the gate finally opened again, the surprise of it almost made Omar jump. Focus, I have to focus. Remember the advice in scimitar practice. Master yourself before you master your opponent. As he walked the crimson-lit corridors the many different doors and passages seemed to create a maze. He picked one route and stuck with it, ducking into an alcove as a column of womb mages came marching down the corridor. He heard them before he saw them, each of the men humming the letters of a different spell. It was as if they were in a trance, their faces fixed on the bare concrete floor. They wore not the usual robes of the womb mages, but voluminous white garments. Matching white skullcaps covered their heads, while small gauze masks protected their mouths like the filters nomads wore when hunkering down during a sandstorm.

Silently following the procession at a distance, Omar passed an alcove railed with freshly laundered clothes in the same style. He slipped one of the robes over his guardsman’s uniform and donned a white mask, scented with a chlorine tang. It was an easy enough thing to join the back of the procession, muttering the same limited hum of letters in an order as random as those in front. If Omar’s spell was nonsense, none of the womb mages — focused as they were on their own sorceries — noticed.

The chanting line passed a glass window as tall as five men. The long chamber on the other side was stacked with large, gas-filled aquarium-like tanks, producers and their loads veiled by the yellow gas pumped in through long coiled pipes joining each tank’s roof from the chamber’s ceiling. The pipes had a glistening organic quality to them that made them resemble umbilical cords. Womb mages in their all-enveloping white outfits moved about the tanks, tapping dials on banks of machinery at the front and noting measurements down on clipboards. Glancing across, Omar couldn’t even see the end of the chamber, just cage after cage. How many biologicks were being grown through there? How many slaves inside, their bellies swollen like whales, hatching the womb mages’ creatures? Draks for the guardsmen to fly patrols on, beyrogs to march in the caliph’s bodyguard, sandpedes to bear the loads for the empire’s trading caravans. How many creatures whose creation spells were racked in the great library above; how many slaves who had given their lives bearing such biologicks into existence? Poor devils, I can’t save you. Only Shadisa. Forgive me.

Omar left the chamber behind and continued following the chanting womb mages. The teachings of the Holy Cent might have told of how after mankind had been cast out of the gardens of paradise, when Ben Issman — his name be blessed — was shown how to lead the tribes to prosperity in the deserts by casting down the thousands of false deities, moulding them into the one true god. How to pluck his own flesh and cast it down upon the sands to make the dunes bloom with plants and gardens, gardens filled with creatures that would serve mankind after god’s wrath had stilled their old machines. But their salvation came at a price; a price that could be avoided by most freemen, as long as they averted their eyes in fear and superstition when womb mages passed. A price that was paid by slaves and the conquered from all the subject nations of the empire.

As Omar walked the underground passages, he saw sights that he could not begin to understand. Another glass-walled chamber contained a tall, sloping wall divided into shelves and squares like a giant bookshelf. Each compartment was covered with about an inch of what looked like jelly. Womb mages pushed ladders along a rail to reach the different compartments, scraping off the gel with white swabs and depositing the residue into Petri dishes. They resembled worker bees intently busying away on the face of a honeycomb.

Another chamber could be observed through long armoured glass slits rather than a floor-to-ceiling window. On the other side was a spherical area where a womb mage was mounted on top of something like a cannon on a pivoted arm. Bursts of lightning flew from its needle-like barrel and forked around the chamber before striking a ball on a plinth in the centre of the space. The bottom hemisphere of the ball was plated with copper, the top half transparent and filled with viscous fluid. Omar watched as another womb mage walked out to the sphere to inspect its jellied contents with a thin metal instrument. Dissatisfied with the results, he made a sign towards the womb mage riding the cannon. As soon as the inspector had cleared the chamber through a vault-like door, the cannon began lashing the contents again with an angry discharge.

‘Animating dead flesh,’ whispered Omar as he noticed the procession of mumbling sorcerers branching off down a corridor. Are there no depths these demons will not sink to?

His way lay down another passage, however. He could sense that Shadisa had passed down there. Omar halted and glanced intently around the crimson-lit corridor. He was getting closer to Shadisa, he was sure of that, yet her presence was getting weaker — that couldn’t be, unless … an image jumped into his mind. Of Shadisa struggling as Salwa’s greasy fingers closed around her neck and he choking her struggling body to silence.

Throwing subterfuge to the wind, he began sprinting down the passage, desperately trying to sense where Shadisa had been taken. There. One of the heavily riveted iron doors, identical to a hundred he had already passed on his journey down here. Omar drew his scimitar from under his robe, threw the door open and had a second’s glimpse of a small narrow room divided in two by a metal mesh, two womb mages turning around to see who was bursting in on them. Omar smashed the nearest of the white-masked sorcerers in the face with the guard of his sword, sending the man stumbling back into a counter covered in scalpels and other instruments that might have been the tools of a womb mage, or a torturer.

The second womb mage tried to get to the counter, his hands diving down for one of the blades, and Omar kicked him in the side, overbalancing him, then took out the back of his legs with a second kick. As the womb mage went down, Omar slammed the man’s face into the blade-littered surface, before running to the mesh dividing the room.

On the other side was a circular pool filled with bubbling acid, its fumes drifting across a figure naked except for a wrap of cloth around his waist. He was kneeling down by the side of the pool dropping in blood-soaked items of clothing, each of them swirling away in a smoking hiss. He held in his hands Shadisa’s ornate silk tunic. The one that she thought had marked her out for the grand vizier’s attentions — and it had, but not in the way she had anticipated. This was Salwa. Salwa the killer, his taut muscular body covered in sweat and blood from his work.

‘Shadisa!’

Please, god, I have followed the fate you have given me. Don’t do this. Let her be alive. Give me a miracle, is that so much to ask? Too late. By heaven’s silver gate, he had failed her. Shadisa, beautiful Shadisa who had been the only girl he had loved. He had been too late when she needed him. Too late to save her from the grand vizier’s evil sect and the perverted initiation rites that had been demanded of this devil, this dog, this beast, Salwa.

The man stood and turned, looking at Omar through the mesh wall. Shadisa was gone, all sense of her soul had vanished from his heart.

‘You killed her!’

‘Yes, I believe I did. Who are you behind that mask?’ asked the killer.

‘The man who’s going to slice you into pieces!’

Salwa picked up something, a tray of human flesh bobbing in a darkening pool of blood. In his other hand was the golden-faced sun mask he had worn to conceal his face in the grand vizier’s hanging gardens. ‘I have a mask too.’ He tossed the tray of human remains into the pool of acid, a terrible stench emanating from it as it flamed away, then he pulled the mask down over his face. It was slicked with blood. Shadisa’s blood.

Omar grabbed the handle on the door in the mesh partition and yanked at it to no avail. It was locked tight.

The murderous priest laughed and pointed to a transaction-engine lock with a blood-testing spike mounted against the wall on Omar’s side of the mesh. ‘Only those whose blood has been entered into the sect’s records can gain admittance into the inner sanctum. And you’re not on it. You’re not even a womb mage under that mask, are you?’

‘Open the door and find out!’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Salwa. ‘Our sorcery is strong. You’ll have left some part of yourself down here — hairs, skin. We’ll find out who you are, my troublesome friend, and then you’ll be silenced.’

‘Come and find me now!’ yelled Omar. ‘I’m right here!’

‘Stay there, save me the trouble of hunting you down, then,’ laughed Salwa, walking towards the mesh. ‘You can wait while I summon the entire Sect of Razat.’

Omar kicked over a table filled with connected glass vials, the sound of their smashing mingling with his cry of rage as the killer stepped through the mesh door and clanged it shut.

The young guardsman was already running when the alarms began to fill the corridors of the womb mages’ lair.

Jack was pacing the small box of their cell in the brig, ignoring the snores of the master cardsharp and the dangerous, brooding silence of the first lieutenant. John Oldcastle might be able to lie down and sleep through their predicament without a problem, but every time Jack tried to close his eyes, all he could see was the fate waiting for him back in the Kingdom. The best he could hope for in front of a board of enquiry orchestrated by that slimy toad Tuttle was a dishonourable discharge that would see him handed back to the judge in the capital’s court — and a short walk to an even shorter drop on the scaffold outside Bonegate prison. The alternative was a charge of mutiny and the only difference there would be the location of the rope, this time hanging in the naval stockade at the fortress city of Shadowclock. He imagined his brothers weeping when they heard of his death in the poorhouse, the shrugs from the underpaid functionaries of the Board of the Poor at the news. Hanged as a mutineer or hanged as a thief. The result was inevitable, wasn’t it? A bad apple, from the same barrel as his father. I’m sorry, Alan, I’m sorry Saul. We always seem to let you down, don’t we? First father and now me. That’s it, perhaps I’m just carrying on the family tradition. I drew some bad cards in this game of chance we live, and I’ve thrown our lives away.

It was easy to listen to your own thoughts in the brig, swim in your worries insulated from the noise and vibrations of the airship by their position at the centre of the middle deck. No rattling beams or creaking hull. The only thing that Jack had felt of late had been the jolt of the landing anchors being discharged, one of Pasco’s henchmen only too glad to inform the prisoners that the Benzari marines had been left on their home soil on the vice-admiral’s orders, crowing about their marooning as he slipped stale rations through the cell door’s metal slit. At a stroke, the vice-admiral had repatriated the one contingent of the ship’s crew whose fierce loyalty to the ship’s captain was without question.

Jack heard clanking at the iron door and as it opened, three armed sailors threw the captain of marines, Henry Tempest, onto the floor of the cell. It looked as if he had taken a pistol whipping from their rifle butts, and the giant was shivering despite the controlled warmth inside the airship.

‘Henry,’ said the first lieutenant, on her feet immediately, inspecting the soldier’s wounds. She ran to the cell door, speaking through a thin grille. ‘His flasks, where are his two flasks?’

There was a laugh from beyond the door. ‘Hanging up outside here. You didn’t think we’d leave them with you, did you?’

‘Too much green,’ whispered the shaking marine officer. ‘I need the red. They tricked me, dosed me good.’

‘Give them to me, you bastards; send the surgeon down here to administer them.’

There was no reply. Their captors had left the prisoners alone in the brig to rot again. John Oldcastle had been roused by the commotion and it took all three of them to drag the shivering marine to the cell’s solitary bunk.

Jack looked out of the cell’s viewing slit. There was a pair of canteens hanging on the back of an empty guard’s chair. ‘He won’t be chasing the poppy powder any time soon.’

‘The big lad isn’t an opiate addict, Mister Keats,’ said Oldcastle. ‘That’s just scuttlebutt the crew has been spreading.’

First Lieutenant Westwick flashed Oldcastle an angry look.

‘What’s it matter now, lass?’ sighed Oldcastle. ‘Our cover’s blown. The navy’s as likely to hang us all before the State Protection Board ever gets a chance to spring us.’

‘I know that you two aren’t real naval officers,’ said Jack. ‘You’re agents of the secret police.’

‘Don’t wish that terrible trade on me, I’m not even that,’ said the master cardsharp, sadly. ‘Just a poor unlucky old fool the State Protection Board has blackmailed into acting as a pawn in their great game. My real name is Jared Black although my friends call me the commodore.’

Jared Black. That was the name that Coss had remembered from his pre-sentient dreams — the steamman had been right about the master cardsharp all along. And the commodore was the nickname that Captain Jericho had warned Jack not to use in front of the rest of the crew.

‘In the flush of my youth I used to be a royalist rebel, in the days when the cause was given mortal succour by the caliph,’ said the prisoner. ‘Arms, explosives and money — anything for the fleet-in-exile if it meant pulling parliament’s nose. Real boats, lad, submersibles, not these gas-filled sausages the RAN float about the sky; the roll of the ocean beneath your feet and the spray of water coming across your face in a blessed conning tower as you recharge your air. The years I spent in Cassarabia and the contacts I made down south are the only reason I’m here.’

Jared Black: John Oldcastle. The commodore. From traitorous rebel to stooge of the state. It seemed when it suited him, the old man changed names and identities as easily as he did uniforms.

Jack looked at the woman. ‘But nobody blackmailed you into making this voyage.’

‘I’m an officer of the state,’ said Westwick, ‘just the same as I was before, and that’s all you need to know about me, boy.’

‘What about him?’ said Jack, pointing at the shivering giant.

‘Ah, the big lad’s navy, alright,’ said the commodore. ‘He wanted to get in so bad he volunteered to take a potion the admiralty’s chemists had developed a few years back; a fearful formula to create the perfect marine. It worked, in a manner of speaking; took some stick-thin sickly cripples they’d scraped out from the nearest hospital of the poor and turned them into the kind of brute you see here. But the formula left its test subjects’ bodies and minds twisted — one minute in a raging fury, the next as placid as a lamb. The only way they can control their humours is by using the flasks. Green to calm down, red when they need to fight, and either a coma or a stroke if they don’t sip from the bottles at all.’

‘He joined the service he always wanted to,’ said the first lieutenant, protectively. ‘It wasn’t his fault that fate made him into something else. He needs to drink from the red flask now. They’ve overdosed him from the green bottle — the mutineers must have beaten the surgeon into telling them why he needs his drinks, then slipped the green’s contents into his rations.’

Maya Westwick seemed curiously sympathetic towards their captain of marines, as if something in the brute of a soldier had found a vein of softness in the deadly, dangerous woman that Jack would have been hard-pressed to locate otherwise. Jack went to the cell door to see how close the two flasks were and was startled by the sight of Coss slipping into the brig’s guardroom. The steamman raised an iron digit in front of his voicebox to indicate that Jack wasn’t to make a noise, then gently shut the door behind him. He slipped over to the room’s speaking trumpet, lifted it off a copper plate on the wall and began a brief whispered conversation with someone at the other end. A second after the trumpet was set back on the wall, there was a strange whirring noise followed by a series of thuds as the bolts in the cell’s door withdrew into the floor and ceiling. Jack tentatively pressed the door, and finding it unlocked, pushed it open. Outside, the drum on the lock set against the cell was rotating so fast there was smoke spearing up from the oil on the drum’s gimbals.

‘You’ve not come to hang us, then, Mister Shaftcrank?’ asked the commodore, pushing his way out behind Jack. ‘Not come to carry out whatever sentence the navy’s scheming vice-admiral has cooked up?’

‘No, master cardsharp,’ said Coss, making way for the first lieutenant to scoop up the two flasks before re-entering the cell.

‘Then it’s a grand old counter-mutiny you’re running?’ asked the commodore. ‘How many men do we have loyal to the captain?’

‘Just myself, sir, that I know of,’ said the steamman, before correcting himself. ‘Well, the ship and myself. Rot my regulators, but the crew knows the vice-admiral’s reputation for ruining the reputations of those who cross him — there aren’t many on board willing to take the captain’s side now he’s been relieved by a senior admiralty officer.’

The ship! Jack looked at the slowing drum on the transaction-engine lock and it suddenly dawned on him who the steamman had been whispering to using the speaking trumpet.

‘The ship, she’s like you!’ said Jack.

‘It takes time to come to full consciousness,’ said Coss. ‘The ship was never broken, it’s just taken time for her intelligence inside the transaction engines to develop to full self-awareness. The ship had to take the final steps on the journey herself, after her creator disappeared halfway through her construction.’

‘She’s alive …’ said the commodore.

‘Yes,’ said Coss to Jack and the commodore. ‘Her systems went up to full throttle when the two of you were imprisoned and weren’t around anymore to help me shut her down, and that was when she began communicating with me. She is like I was when I was taking my first steps in my nursery body. The proving flights, all that has gone before, the ship can only remember them as a dream.’

A dream. That was what the steamman god had been trying to tell Jack. And when the Iron Partridge’s gunnery systems worked in perfect simulation offline during their engagement against the two Cassarabian airships, they hadn’t been becoming dangerously erratic — they were functioning as they were meant to for the first time! Lemba of the Empty Thrusters had heard the ship’s song in the sky, the song of her burgeoning intelligence, and had chosen to answer it.

‘If the ship’s on our side, old steamer, can we use her to turn our trumped-up charges of mutiny into real ones against the vice-admiral?’

Coss shook his metal skull unit. ‘The Iron Partridge wasn’t built for that. The majority of her systems are external facing — the engine cars and rudders and gunnery. She needs a crew — not one as large as ours, and certainly not with manual overrides crippling her — but she still needs a crew inside her nevertheless.’

‘The mission,’ said the first lieutenant appearing in the doorway with the captain of marines limping by her side, semi-restored by the dosage from the red canteen.

‘The ship’s mission is why I am here,’ said Coss. ‘Just as failure is an orphan, success has many fathers. You must succeed in carrying out the ship’s original orders if a board of enquiry is to find in your favour and against the vice-admiral. I have discovered a way to get to the boat bay without any of Pasco’s men observing you.’

The commodore looked askance at the prospect of abandoning the safety of the vessel.

‘You always knew we’d have to go in on the ground in the end,’ said the first lieutenant. ‘It’s why the State Protection Board put you here.’

‘Boots on the ground, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘I just wished they weren’t mine.’

‘The skipper,’ said the brute of a marine from Westwick’s side. ‘I’m not leaving him behind on any ship filled with perishing mutineers.’

‘His cabin will be too well guarded,’ said the first lieutenant. ‘And even if we break him out without killing half the crew, by coming with us, Jericho would be siding with escaped mutineers. If he can even make the charges stick, the worst the vice-admiral can do for the destruction of a prize vessel is have Jericho cashiered. If Jericho comes with us and we don’t succeed, they’ll hang him for sure. You don’t want to see Captain Jericho led to the scaffold by the vice-admiral, do you?’

She might be telling the truth of it, but Jack caught the whiff of dissembling in her argument. She doesn’t want Jericho along with us in case he becomes struck down again by one of his dark humours. A genius in the air would be no use to the pitiless woman on the ground.

‘You won’t be able to come with us either, I fear, Mister Shaftcrank,’ said the commodore. ‘There aren’t any blessed steammen in Cassarabia, not even as slaves.’

Jack thought he saw the steamman’s vision plate pulse with relief. As the only creature within hundreds of miles with any idea of the process the nascent intelligence of the ship was going through, the ship was in his charge now, and he surely wouldn’t want to abandon her.

‘Don’t concern yourself with my fate, master cardsharp,’ said Coss. ‘I doubt if Pasco’s men will suspect me of helping you. They see me a simple soul, a loyal machine for them to command like one of their tools — and as far as they’re concerned, I haven’t left the transaction-engine chamber.’

And when Coss led them outside, Jack saw why. The door to the ship’s magazine was open, exposing the automatic loading station. Coss had ridden the shell-loading mechanism all the way down from the upper deck, unseen by any of Pasco’s mutineers, and they could travel up to the boat bay the same way. Jack knew who they would blame for the cell break, even without the tools of his old trade to hand — the thief who had nearly broken into the vaults of Lords Bank. Master Engineer Pasco would be only too glad to be proved right in his opinion of Jack.

Even woozy on his feet, the captain of marine made short work of the two sailors on duty in the boat bay with his pile driver fists. As they lay unconscious Jack held open the heavy hatch so the first lieutenant could access the bay’s cargo hold. She climbed down into the ship’s guts and re-emerged a minute later with a nondescript-looking crate. This case, the commodore informed him, contained the supplies the State Protection Board’s quartermaster had made available for covert infiltration into Cassarabia. Next, Coss helped Jack and the commodore winch open the bay’s doors as the first lieutenant and Henry Tempest prepared the vice-admiral’s pocket airship — still assembled with her envelope gassed — for launch. Jack watched his friends raid the other boats’ provisions for enough expansion-engine fuel for a long-range expedition. This was one flight where they couldn’t expect to be resupplied by the navy.

Coss pointed out of the hangar towards the peaks of the Benzaral Mountains passing below. ‘I have asked the ship to arrange a distraction inside both the crows’ nest and the h-dome when you launch. You’ll have enough time to conceal your aerostat behind one of the peaks until we have flown out of sight. I doubt if the vice-admiral will waste much time trying to search for you. He is eager to present his account of the loss of the Fleet of the South before any possible survivors beat him to it.’

‘Thank you, old steamer,’ said Jack. ‘The last people I thought were my friends saw me tossed to the hangman back in the Kingdom to save their own necks, and here you are risking yours to rescue me from the noose.’

‘Vault my valves, but it would be an unlucky executioner who tries to hang a steamman,’ said Coss. ‘Besides, we are serving members of the Royal Aerostatical Navy, you and I, and that is what shipmates do — they watch out for each other.’

‘Only the good ones, Mister Shaftcrank,’ said the commodore. ‘Look after your metal skin and see to the ship and her skipper as best you mortal can.’

Jack shook Coss’s cold iron hand. Here was a steamman who dreamt of flying and an airship that dreamt of being a steamman. As dangerous as continuing into the enemy heart-land to prosecute the ship’s mission with just the four of them might prove, it was the lesser of two evils. Coss was right; success in the mission was the only way for Jack to escape a mutineer’s fate. A handful of Jack Cloudies against the oldest, most powerful empire on the continent. What hope will we have out there, just the four of us?

‘I will pray to Lemba of the Empty Thrusters for our Loas to watch over you,’ said Coss.

‘Let’s be on our way, Mister Keats,’ said the commodore. ‘They can’t hang us if we’re killed in action, and you have your promise to me to keep.’

Jack boarded the airship and a moment later it was flung into the uncaring sky.

The priest Salwa bent on one knee before Immed Zahharl, who was raging at the courtiers scattering before the cushion-lined pool where the great man had been lounging up until a couple of minutes ago.

Their fear of his temper was all the greater because the pool was located beside the caliph’s torture garden, where the bodies of his enemy’s had been twisted into tree-like shapes twenty feet tall; their mouths sealed or removed by the mages, so their agonies could offer no disturbance to those who were invited to walk the gardens.

Some of the twisted forms were older than the oldest tree — life-prolonging drugs were mixed with the water the gardeners used to keep their victims alive. After all, there was no memory of betrayal longer than that of the Caliph Eternal. The grand vizier, it was known, liked to do his thinking here — among the contorted bodies of those who had fallen from grace and favour. Perhaps to look into the eyes of those he had manoeuvred into the garden; perhaps as a reminder to himself of the price of failure. Many of the empire’s great and good were summoned to meander through the grounds and witness the punishment meted out to those who rebelled against the empire, those who lost wars against Cassarabia, those who were found in the palace kitchen trying to add poison to the Caliph Eternal’s meals. Visitors could usually be counted on to draw the obvious lesson, with many cases of treasonous thoughts that never then progressed into action.

The grand vizier flourished the results of the blood-code test that had established the intruder’s identity beyond doubt — skin cells scraped from the broken-nosed face of one of the womb mages who had tried to stop the intruder. ‘And how was this wretch Omar Barir allowed simply to roam around the library’s lowest levels as if he was a senior womb mage? Are we to hold picnics down there outside our breeding vats and invite along every slave in the palace?’

There was no answer from the chagrined staff as the grand vizier pointed down at Salwa. ‘If the last son of Barir knew enough to follow you down there, if he knew enough to attempt to rescue his precious Shadisa, then the chances are he also knows the Caliph Eternal is bound to the Sect of Razat.’

‘I am sorry, master,’ said Salwa. ‘This is my fault.’

The grand vizier waved the keeper’s apology away angrily. ‘Barir, always a Barir. His father was a thorn in my side; continually agitating for trade rather than war, and his mongrel idiot of a bastard son is no different. Well, as Ben Issman once turned the wastelands of the world to gardens, I shall turn the guardsman’s interference into victory.’ He waved the cowering priest up from the floor. ‘I trust some of Shadisa’s blood and flesh is left?’

‘A little, master,’ said Salwa.

‘Remove a corpse from the library’s mortuary that matches Shadisa’s height, weight and age. I will change the body to be an exact match of the slave girl. After the corpse’s face is smashed in, we will leave enough trace of Omar Barir’s flesh on the body to ensure that he is identified as her murderer. We will let the guardsmen themselves jump to the obvious conclusion when they investigate.’

‘The flesh from his drak breeding …’ said Salwa.

‘Yes,’ said the grand vizier. ‘And how fitting that his drak will be the last one we need to grow for any guardsmen. Those meddling sons of the landed gentry, always bleating about tradition while holding back the empire from its greater destiny. It is time for those dogs to join the secret police among the ranks of the traitors to the empire, and Barir’s crimes have provided me with the provocation I need to act. In fact, a delicious idea has just occurred to me. The last son of Barir’s blood will come in useful for far more than just Shadisa’s murder.’

Salwa knew better than to press the grand vizier on the nature of his notion; the ambitious monster was never more dangerous than when being pressed. ‘We will need to find guardsmen who will confess to their order’s corruption, master.’

The grand vizier pointed to a figure the size of a cedar tree on the other side of the pool, a torso grown as hard as stone while the victim’s arms splayed out in a fan of thousands of bones, eyes staring wildly above a sealed mouth. ‘They always confess to something, Salwa. Just unsew the mouth of the head of the secret police, if you do not believe me.’

Omar looked as if he was having to resist grabbing Boulous and pushing him aside. ‘I must see the grand marshal of the order.’

‘Wait until Master Uddin returns,’ said Boulous. ‘We need his counsel on what to do next.’

‘He disappears for days and weeks at a time,’ said Omar. ‘Do you even know how long he will be gone this time, or where he is?’

‘On the guardsmen’s business,’ said Boulous.

‘This is the guardsmen’s business!’ shouted Omar, pushing the empty vial towards Boulous. ‘The Caliph Eternal has been made a slave with whatever drug was inside here. Our oath is to him, we are his justice.’

‘You are letting your anger over the girl’s death cloud your decisions,’ said Boulous. ‘The guardsmen’s position is precarious and this tale of yours will carry far more weight if it comes from the lips of Master Uddin. He is senior in the order, he might even be in the running to become the next grand marshal.’

Omar pushed past Boulous and opened the door to depart Uddin’s cell in the fortress. ‘I am going to face the present grand marshal and he will listen to my words. They are the truth and he will believe me. Are you with me?’

Boulous hurried out after Omar. ‘Hasty,’ he whispered. ‘Too hasty.’

Boulous had never seen Omar so angry. Normally he was as languid as a lizard lying on the sand, content to be still and drink up the sun. Now he was the force of a sandstorm that would send lizards scurrying away to their burrows, scouring the whitewash off the capital’s minarets below. No good would come of this, Boulous was certain. He hadn’t even needed the note of warning that old Nudar had sent up to him from the palace below to know that. This was a time for subtlety and nuance, the cold calculations that the grand vizier specialized in, not blundering about like a shell-blinded drak in battle.

Unfortunately, the last son of the House of Barir didn’t seem to practice subtlety, despite all of Boulous’s attempts to open his eyes to the machinations within the Jahan.

Getting to see the grand marshal was every bit as difficult as Boulous had anticipated. The jahani who administered the commander of the guardsmen’s diary ran his fingers over the pages, rubbing at a small pair of spectacles as he inspected the evening’s business, tutting as he read.

‘Not tonight,’ said the diary keeper, glancing up from the desk to look down the corridor that led to the stairs up to the grand marshal’s offices.

‘Please,’ said Boulous, ‘just ten minutes with the old man. You know me, Jizan, and you know the favours I have done you in the past.’

‘Indeed I do,’ said the diary keeper. ‘And my memory is not so short that I have forgotten their existence over the last hour.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Boulous.

‘I mean I already have officials of the guardsmen furious at me for allowing you two an unscheduled appointment earlier this evening; that was his last slot of the night. You can go away now.’

Boulous felt a sinking feeling in his gut. ‘We did not see the grand marshal earlier.’

The diary keeper shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is time for final prayers. It is time for food, and there is a campaign that must be planned from scratch. You have heard that there is to be all-out war, haven’t you? Come back tomorrow Boulous Ibn Uddin and stop wasting my time.’

But Omar had already pushed past the two sentries on either side of the corridor and was sprinting towards the spiral stairs at the other end. The diary keeper shouted for reinforcements from the guardroom down the corridor. Boulous threw caution to the wind and ran after the sprinting sentries, their ceremonial knives jingling on their belts as they pursued Omar.

Boulous gasped as he crossed the threshold. The grand marshal’s frail body had been stabbed through the chest with his own scimitar, pinned vertically against a bloodstained tapestry between two firing slits in the wall. He looked like an insect stolen by a collector, pinned to the fabric for display. Omar had stumbled over two dead guards sprawled across the floor, their throats cut, and the two pursuing sentries had seized the young guardsman from behind even as he took in the horror of the slaughter.

Boulous felt the cold metal of the diary keeper’s pistol jamming into his neck before he could even turn around. ‘What have you done, Boulous, and why in heaven’s hundred names did you come back here? You should have run, you two treacherous devils. You should have run.’

Boulous watched hopelessly as Omar struggled in the grip of the two burly guardsmen as they laid into him. ‘Yes, I believe we should have.’

Nuance and subtlety. Omar had barely understood how the game inside the Jahan was played. But the grand vizier does.

Omar could feel the blood running down his face as he regained consciousness. The painful swelling around his eyes blurred the sight of Boulous sprinkling him with dirty water from a puddle. Then he remembered the questions being fired at him, over and over again. Why did you kill the grand marshal? Who paid you to join the guardsmen? Which satrapy was he working for, which client state within the empire? Had the grand marshal of the order accused Omar of the crime of murdering one of the grand vizier’s servants, before Omar killed him to silence the old man? Had he and Boulous been plotting treachery with the grand marshal? Had they been trying to force Shadisa to put poison in the grand vizier’s food, or were they trying to assassinate the Caliph Eternal through the grand vizier’s office? Why had Omar killed the slave girl? When had he murdered her? Where was Farris Uddin hiding?

No sleep; lights, being drowned over and over again in a foul-smelling cistern. At least the physical pain distracted him from thinking of Shadisa’s blood-soaked clothes being destroyed by Salwa, of what her last few minutes must have been like at the dog’s murdering hands. He tried not to sob at the thought. Omar had been kept on his own for what seemed like weeks, but here he was — back with Boulous at last. They would escape together, and he would have his revenge on that savage Salwa and his dark-hearted master, the wretched grand vizier. Revenge, that was all the last son of Barir had been left as his legacy. Fate had taken Shadisa from him as a reminder of that.

‘It’s raining,’ spluttered Omar, watching rivulets running down the firing slit into their prison cell, darkness and a lashing wind outside.

‘This is not the rain season, it is an omen,’ said Boulous.

‘Good or bad?’ asked Omar, sitting up and feeling the bite of his empty stomach, before trying to rub the agony out of his temples. ‘What a headache.’

‘It is the drugs they injected into your neck,’ said Boulous.

‘Truth drugs?’

‘The sort that will make you agree with anything your interrogators suggest to you,’ said Boulous.

‘I will not have told them anything. My mind is too strong for them.’

‘It hardly matters,’ said Boulous. ‘The pain was to break us, to make us tell them what we knew; and all they found out was that we knew nothing. They are not interested in the truth now, if they ever were. Some of the ones questioning us were from the Sect of Razat.’

‘I did not murder the grand marshal,’ insisted Omar, as if it was the retainer he had to convince.

‘Nor I,’ said Boulous. ‘There are assassins that are said to serve the Caliph Eternal. It is whispered that their flesh has been changed by the womb mages so they can alter the features of their bodies and faces at will. Such creatures murdered the grand marshal, although I have no doubt it is traces of your blood the womb mages will have found on the sword sticking out of the grand marshal’s chest.’

Omar moaned in despair. ‘Immed Zahharl, this is his doing.’

‘Now he has everything he wants,’ said Boulous. ‘A war to consolidate his hold on the empire, the whiff of booty and glory to buy the loyalty of the last of the admirals and generals who opposed him, and for the coup de grace, the grand marshal cut to pieces and unable to oppose his ambitions.’

‘Not quite everything, jahani,’ said a voice through the bars of their prison cell.

Omar threw his aching body towards the door in fury. ‘Salwa, you filthy murdering cur!’

The man indicated the insignia on his shiny new guardsman’s uniform in amusement. ‘You are still a guardsman, at least in name. Do you have no salute for your order’s new grand marshal?’

‘Come through this door and I’ll carve you up like you did Shadisa!’

Salwa smiled sadly. ‘I did you a favour, guardsman. The silly girl’s beauty would have faded in the end and where would your lusts have wandered then? I’ve saved you the heartache of growing apart as she slowly became a crone, the expense of acquiring and feeding younger wives.’

Omar gripped the bars on the door so tight his knuckles went white. ‘I will repay your favour in kind, you filthy murdering dog.’

‘We must all prove our allegiance,’ said Salwa. ‘You have proven where your loyalties lie. You have chosen the past.’

‘How many men did you murder from Haffa?’ demanded Omar.

‘Heretics,’ said Salwa. ‘They were declared without Cent. I made their end painless. A silk rope to twist around their necks. They lost consciousness long before they died. I am not a cruel man, Omar Barir. My nature is merciful. I did not invent the rules of the game in the palace, but even you must admit I play them better than you. You cannot bleat about it after you have lost.’

‘You have no honour,’ said Boulous.

‘Perhaps I can afford none.’ There was a rattle at the lock as the cell door was opened. ‘You know what the laws of the imperial guardsmen demand from traitors to the order?’

‘Tied to a pair of draks,’ said Boulous, ‘and torn apart.’

‘One drak for your hands, one drak for your legs,’ said Salwa. There were six men waiting in the passage for them with rifles. Not guardsmen, but marines in the new black and silver uniforms of the Imperial Aerial Squadron.

‘A merciful man,’ spat Omar as the sailors dragged him and Boulous out and pushed them down the corridors of the fortress.

‘In this instance, the grand vizier asked that your ancient traditions be honoured,’ said Salwa, almost sounding as if he felt genuine regret at their fate. ‘But I will instruct one of my airship officers to put a ball through your brain before the pain grows too intense.’

They emerged onto an open parapet, the lashing rain whipping across the top of the fortress, the coloured lights of the palace dome shining from below like luminescent fish beneath the glowing sea, and in the air above them a squadron of airships escorting in the strangest-looking aerostat Omar had ever seen, metal-clad, her armour sparkling in the lightning dancing around her hull.

‘A Jackelian ship,’ said Salwa. ‘The Iron Partridge. Admiralty flagged, a magnificent prize. We captured her without a shot being fired. The vice-admiral commanding her was a coward.’

‘They will not all be so,’ coughed Boulous in the cold rain. ‘The guardsmen have flown into action against the infidel’s airships often enough to tell you that.’

‘Times are changing,’ laughed Salwa. ‘Locked in the cells you won’t have heard the news. We destroyed more than a quarter of the Kingdom of Jackals’ combined fleet in a single action. You know how many airships the empire lost? None, not a single vessel. The Imperial Aerial Squadron is already back rearming with supplies and ordnance. When we fly north a second time, we will bring the empire such a victory as your friends in the order have only dreamt of. Your kind is no longer relevant, little jahani. You are fading into history.’

As Omar and Boulous were pushed forward on the parapet, Omar saw that hundreds of guardsmen were lined up in the courtyard below, their leather armour shining in the rain and the lightning.

Salwa looked back towards Omar as he mounted a firing step on the battlements. ‘I am not a cruel man, last son of Barir, but I fear necessity has made the grand vizier otherwise. He commanded that you see this and told me to inform you that this is what the march of history looks like.’ Salwa turned towards the ranks of guardsmen assembled below. While he was speaking, Omar and Boulous were shoved down to the stone and spread out, their arms and legs tied with thick rope to two pairs of training draks, the large flying creatures jostling the troops holding their reins, spooked by the squall. The draks were never normally expected to fly in such dirty weather.

‘Two days ago,’ Salwa shouted down, ‘I asked for riders to volunteer to join the Imperial Aerial Squadron as scouts — and I see before me the answer to my request. A regiment of cowards who would rather patrol the safe gardens of the Jahan than throw themselves into action alongside the fleet.’

Hisses of outrage rose up from the courtyard in answer.

‘I am your grand marshal, you dogs!’ Salwa roared at them.

Calls echoed back. ‘You wear his corpse’s cloak.’

‘Send us into battle as guardsmen, not navy lapdogs.’

‘We don’t send traitors into battle,’ Salwa yelled down. ‘Before he died, the previous grand marshal was uncovered plotting treason against the empire. These two-’ he waved dismissively at Omar and Boulous, ‘-were leaders in his plot, leaders who tried to save their necks by silencing the grand marshal when they realized that the Caliph Eternal had uncovered their treachery. By your act of cowardice in refusing to fight, you have raised your colours along their side. The order of the imperial guardsmen is therefore disbanded. By command of the Caliph Eternal, emperor of emperors, your regiment is declared heretic!’ As his hand dropped, marines of the Imperial Aerial Squadron rose up from behind the parapets of the fortress, rifles pulled tight against their shoulders, and there was a horrendous crackling as if a hundred blocks of oak were splintering. Smoke drifted out across the sky as guardsmen screamed below, scattering and falling and dying, rifle balls buzzing like bees in the air.

Omar screamed in rage at the betrayal, Boulous struggling by his side, even as his legs began to be drawn taut, the drak at the other end of the parapet struggling against the sailors holding it, driven to take flight and seek combat by the sounds and sights of the slaughter occurring below.

‘The grand vizier wished for you to see the end of the guardsmen,’ Salwa said to Omar. ‘And he instructed me to make you this offer. Renounce the order now; join the Imperial Aerial Squadron as an officer. Act as an example that even the grand vizier’s most implacable enemies may prosper through shifting their loyalties away from the past and embracing the future and our glorious sect in the name of progress.’

Omar gritted his teeth and silently shook his head.

‘I was told you were a lazy fool who would always choose the easy way,’ said Salwa. ‘Choose the easy way, guardsman. Do it.’

‘There isn’t a drak in the fortress strong enough to pull my legs out of their sockets.’

Salwa shook his head sadly and motioned a sailor forward, raising his rifle towards Omar’s head. ‘Well, at least the foolish part is true. Being on the wrong side of history brings with it a savage burden. One it seems you must carry to your grave …’