Jack Cloudie

CHAPTER TWELVE

The grand vizier angrily sent a goblet spinning across the secret gardens at the heart of his pavilions. Salwa cowered as the caliph’s chief minister digested the last of the news concerning the flight of the guardsmen. ‘They knew of our trap — they knew!’

‘It is so,’ Salwa insisted. ‘They had clearly been forewarned of the order’s dissolution. Most of our men who entered the fortress were ambushed and led to the slaughter dressed as guardsmen. The guardsmen’s supplies, their draks, were already departing even as we believed that we were surrounding them.’

‘It might have been bad luck,’ suggested one of the grand vizier’s retinue. ‘The guardsmen could have been preparing for the war — if they were mobilizing anyway, they could have just left when they saw our marines arrive.’

‘Fool!’ yelled the grand vizier. ‘The guardsmen had no orders to join the campaign and there is no such thing as luck. Someone within our own ranks informed them that we were coming, someone loyal to the old regime. Which of you warned them?’

There was a loud chorus of denials alongside protestations of loyalty from the toadies surrounding him.

‘We are loyal to you,’ protested Salwa, abasing himself on the floor of the pavilion. ‘How can you doubt us? All of us have undergone the initiation ritual, all of us have shed blood in your honour, in the cause of progress!’

‘I should ask those Pasdaran bastards I have planted out in the torture gardens,’ snarled the grand vizier. ‘There are still a few of the secret police’s cancerous cells left in our flesh, I warrant.’ He jabbed a finger towards Salwa. ‘You are meant to be the grand marshal of the guardsmen, what will they do now?’

‘What can they do, master?’ said Salwa. ‘They are detached from the army, with only the supplies they carried out of the fortress. They will avoid an engagement, practice banditry in a guerrilla war against us.’

‘That would be the rational thing to do,’ agreed the grand vizier, his eyes narrowing. ‘But they are not rational creatures. They are proud men. They could have abandoned the fortress and fled before we even turned up, but they wanted to give us a bloody nose before they left. As if to say, we are guardsmen, this is our palace, and we choose to leave here on our own terms. They used to be the caliph’s elite troops, a strike force of well-trained killers. And what does a strike force do? It strikes!’

‘They will not dare to take on the might of the Imperial Aerial Squadron,’ said Salwa.

‘Their soldiers have trained for centuries to disable and fight Jackelian airships,’ said the grand vizier, ‘I would not be so sure of that. Yes, I believe they will want to take a prize worthy of a song or two before they die, before their supplies run out and they slide into becoming just another band of bandits, scavenging for booty to stay alive.’ He pointed furiously at a clump of officers in the black and silver uniforms of the Imperial Aerial Squadron. ‘Recall four squadrons to reinforce the capital’s defences and recall another six squadrons to protect Mutantarjinn and the airship yards outside the city.’

‘But that will require the bulk of our invasion force to be pulled back from the north,’ said the senior officer.

‘Let the Jackelians stew for another month or so then, you dolts,’ shouted the grand vizier. ‘What will it profit us to gain another satrapy for the empire, if the Imperial Aerial Squadron returns back here to find the Pasdaran’s new choice of candidate sitting on the throne? How kind do you think the secret police and their guardsmen friends will be towards you if they succeed in mounting a counter-revolution?’

The men bowed in fear at his temper.

‘We will carry the day,’ said the grand vizier. ‘We will carry it because if we fail, we will all die together. Ensure our marines and sailors are billeted in the airfields outside the capital without leave to enter. We do not want them getting sick.’

‘Sick?’ said Salwa.

‘Yes,’ laughed the grand vizier. ‘Because you are going to have our womb mages release a plague inside the capital’s central souk. Use a milder variant of the one we used to depopulate the House of Barir and their allies along the coast. I need a plausible excuse to move our tame caliph out of the Jahan and south to the safety of Mutantarjinn’s walls for a while, and a little summer plague will do nicely. Nothing so virulent that the local womb mages won’t be able to cure it after a month or two. I don’t want mass casualties and wage levels creeping up again, not with a major war to prosecute.’

Salwa nodded and the grand vizier bent in close so only Salwa could hear his next words. ‘Our enemies are not stupid. When the guardsmen come, they’ll be coming for my head and the caliph’s — our little pet, or the real Caliph Eternal, perhaps both at once. And they’ll be coming for your head too, Salwa, last grand marshal of the guardsmen!’ He leant back and clicked his fingers, speaking loudly again for all to hear his commands. ‘Ready my personal packet for the journey south.’

Salwa allowed his heart to swell in hope. South, to the heart of the Sect of Razat’s powerbase, the Forbidden City of Mutantarjinn, the city of sorcerers, where those who entered without the ruling womb mages’ permission were struck blind.

Not even the guardsmen would be foolish enough to strike against them there, surely?

Jack walked alongside the young guardsman Omar as the draks were inspected. There had been a lot of contemptuous talk of the Cassarabian household guards and their flying biologicks among the sailors back on board the Iron Partridge. The only weapon the Kingdom’s ancient enemy in the south possessed that was actually capable of taking to the skies against the Royal Aerostatical Navy. But all talk of human-lizard hybrids and crude jokes about ham-fisted lancers on ‘sallys’ — naval slang for salamanders — appeared very hollow when confronted by one of the forty-foot long flying monstrosities in the flesh. They might not have seemed much of a threat when viewed at a distance from behind an airship cannon’s rubber hood, but up close its sinuous neck could whip around to take a bite out of you with its pointed alligator face in a second.

‘This is my drak,’ said Omar Barir, indicating his creature with what Jack thought was more than a touch of pride. ‘His original rider died. Normally we would put him down as a kindness, but we are short of steeds and every drak is precious to us now.’

The thing looked to be staring at them from the corner of its eerily human eyes — a cunning gaze that Jack recognized from the shire horses back on his family’s lost lands. A pernicious look that said, ‘Use me at your peril.’

Jack sighed. The whole plan seemed reckless to him. Hoping to pick up the trail of the Iron Partridge and its companion airship from the Imperial Aerial Squadron transporting the Kingdom crew as prisoners towards the testing facilities at Mutantarjinn. Assaulting both airships with the guardsmen’s legion of flying biologicks, attempting to capture the two ’stats intact enough to continue their journey and infiltrate the enemy stronghold under the guise of being a prize vessel. The commodore’s secret police contact seemed sure enough of the guardsmen’s ability to pull the mission off. They would utilize the four Jackelians’ knowledge of the best way to board the Iron Partridge and fight off the prize crew, hopefully with the assistance of the skeleton crew of prisoners of war being kept on board to assist with the foreign systems. But even if the ruse worked, sneaking into the Cassarabian den of sorcerers was one thing; getting out alive was quite another, let alone getting out with evidence of how the Imperial Aerial Squadron was manufacturing its airship gas. Did Jack owe the Kingdom this? Impressment into the navy was bad enough, but mounting one of these hideous hybrids on a suicide mission — he hadn’t exchanged his court sentence for that.

But there was Captain Jericho, who had gambled on pulling his poorhouse friend’s son off the gallows and into the service. What did Jack owe Jericho, hopefully still alive on a prison hulk heading for Mutantarjinn? What did he owe Coss Shaftcrank, who had risked his life to save Jack from the trumped-up charges of mutiny? Or the commodore, who seemed determined to drag Jack along in his trail, trying to keep them both alive despite the hard hand that lady fortune had dealt their party of intelligencers?

The young guardsman appeared to mistake Jack’s pensive face simply for reticence to mount the drak. ‘You have nothing to fear, Jack Keats. This bull drak may not be the steed that I was destined to ride, but by the hundred smiling faces of god, he will know the finest flyer in the guards is in the saddle when he feels my stirrups on his flanks.’

‘I was thinking more about the act of boarding and taking two airships in flight before they can be scuttled,’ said Jack. ‘It’ll be flash work up there.’

‘My strategy is sound,’ said Omar. ‘The Imperial Aerial Squadron are cowardly curs who need the protection of canvas and cabin just to brave the reach of the heavens. They won’t know how to operate your strange metal airship and will have their hands full with the prisoners they have made of your people. We shall swoop down on them with our claws reached out, like a flight of eagles taking a pair of fat pigeons.’

‘I thought the strategy came from your commander of many faces?’ said Jack.

‘Master Uddin values my advice,’ said Omar. ‘He asks it many times, recognizing the wisdom that I hold within me. Besides, the duty for all loyal guardsmen can be found in our oath to the ruler of rulers — this impostor Caliph Eternal must be toppled and the rightful light of lights returned to his throne to rule.’

Jack nodded. The oath a man makes. And what of the promises Jack had made to his brothers in the poorhouse, to come back for them with enough money to free them from that dirty, squalid place for good? To be together again as a family? I can only keep them if I live through today.

There had been a touch of iron in the young guardsman’s voice when he mentioned his oath. The kind of iron the leaders of the street gangs used back home when discussing which properties and marks to target for a robbery.

‘But there’s more than your oath at stake here,’ said Jack.

‘You are correct in that,’ said Omar. ‘The dogs who plotted this treason, the grand vizier and his minions and his precious Sect of Razat — they burnt my home and destroyed my inheritance and killed everyone I knew, everyone I loved. They have left me with nothing except my life among the guardsmen. Tell me, Jackelian, what would you do to such people as did that to you?’

What would he do?

‘Whatever I had to,’ said Jack.

‘And you will live to see it, Jack Keats,’ said Omar. ‘You will live to see the day I plunge my steel into their leaders. This I swear on the blood of my father.’

A pair of guardsmen emerged from the side of a tent holding long curled horns and blew a bugle-like summons, a haunting, echoing call. Everywhere around the camp, the draks’ riders appeared, guardsmen running towards the reins of their chosen mounts. Jack followed Omar to his creature, the sinuous neck rearing eagerly against the reins of the stable hands holding them, the young guardsman mounting the double saddle just behind the base of the neck first, extending a hand down to Jack to mount up behind him.

The stable hand reached up to pat the saddlebags beneath their feet. ‘All the grenades we can spare,’ he said, and tapping long dangling weaves of rope, added, ‘as well as propeller snarls for their engines.’

Omar raised his hand casually, as if to say, all this he already knew and did not need to be reminded of it.

‘Do you have the day’s smoke colours?’ asked the stable hand.

‘Yes,’ said Omar. ‘But I only need two of them. Red smoke for “dive and attack”, and green smoke for “release boarders”.’

‘May the Caliph Eternal’s blessings light your way. Tails up!’

A beating noise sounded, low at first, then louder and louder, like wet sheets being shaken out to dry, and Jack realized it was the talon wing of draks taking to the air. They were starting from the other end of the piece of land wedged between the hills, like a ripple of scaled flesh erupting down the valley. T-shaped silhouettes broke for the sky, pushing higher and higher as they curled around each other and filled the firmament with their din — the noise of their beating wings swelling as if a thousand angry spears were shaking in warriors’ mailed fists. On the rear of the saddle, Jack felt himself rock as their drak started to bound forward, its wings angling back as it built up speed, the ground shaking out dust with the weight of its charge. Omar was shouting something down to it, cracking his reins, but Jack was too terrified to make sense of the foreign-sounding cry, his knuckles white on the pommel of the double saddle. The ground below had almost disappeared in the mist of dust being driven up off the hard valley floor. The drak’s long neck was tilted down like the straight edge of a lance, and they were running through the kicked-up, wing-beaten powder of the draks who had taken off seconds earlier, now lost in the haze.

Jack willed himself not to bite his tongue. How did these monstrous creatures sense each other well enough not to pile into each other within such a damn soup? Omar shouted something back to him, and Jack was just hearing it as ‘Hold on!’, when the drak threw itself up and, still charging, fanned its wings out as though they were sails.

The first beat was followed by a second and a third as the drak angled up over the dust, the heads of its fellow flyers arrowing out behind them. To Jack, they resembled serpentine sea beasts emerging from the ocean on monstrously powerful wings. After four minutes, their drak gained its cruising altitude. Not so high that they would have needed the dangling breather masks Jack had seen being packed into the drak’s saddle bags, and well within the operating height of a pair of airships crossing clear skies over what they no doubt regarded as friendly territory. Now all of the guardsmen were in the air, the draks had formed into a double ‘V’ arrangement. Omar and Jack’s drak was towards the centre of the inner V’s left-hand wing. Such a formation, flying high, would resemble a flock of migrating birds to observers on the ground, with no way to scale the aerial legion against the cloudless, cerulean sky.

Omar pointed to the riders to their right with one of the big leather riding gloves he used to guide the reins. ‘There is your friend, the big one with a eunuch’s tonsure.’

Jack nodded. Henry Tempest. If the details of the pre-flight briefing he had attended still held true, all four Jackelians should be riding somewhere on the inner ‘V’. It was Jack and the commodore’s job to peel off and take back the Iron Partridge — the easier mission, with her guns theoretically silenced by the absence of her gunners and a foreign prize crew trying to keep control of the handful of RAN sailors they would have manning the airship’s stations. The captain of marines and Westwick were taking the harder task of assaulting the well-manned prison ship.

Jack’s mind went into a fugue as they flew for hours and hours, hypnotized by the cold winds and the beating sun above. The monotonously regular ground passing below like a backdrop painting from a stage set.

Eventually a faint spume of white smoke went up from the head of the formation — enemy sighted. The flight of draks began to wheel and climb and Jack was finding it harder to breathe. Each intake of air into his lungs felt as if two strong hands were pushing down onto his chest, restricting his muscles from working. Jack leant forward to tap Omar on the shoulder, indicating the saddlebags, and croaking: ‘Masks?’

‘No,’ Omar called back, flicking the long reins up to the drak’s vicious muzzle. ‘Enemy airships — running — semi-pressurized. Breach board will — be — our advantage.’

Our advantage. Jack was grateful they weren’t facing a fighting Jackelian crew — an experienced crew who would try to tire an attacking wing of draks by climbing further. Instead, it was the guardsmen who had taken up position at a higher altitude and, ready for a dive. Did the Imperial Aerial Squadron’s airships have their own version of a crow’s-nest dome topside and an h-dome on the bow, manned by experienced spotters with telescopes? And how diligent would they be flying over ‘safe’, friendly territory?

Then, there they were, below and ahead, two airships — the familiar glinting silhouette of the Iron Partridge, and to her port, the profile of a Cassarabian ’stat, matching the tortoise-like speed of the heavy prize vessel.

Red smoke fanned out from the head of the flight — the sight that every Jackelian sailor dreaded. Omar shouted something to Jack, just before the drak turned downwards and drew in its wings. As their monstrous steed plummeted, Jack realized he had called for ‘snarls’ — propeller snarls. He reached down to the middle of the saddle, where the long weapons were dangling — sticky white fronds like hundreds of pieces of string bound in the middle by a leather circlet. RAN lore had it that the material was secreted from human-hybrid spiders kept scuttling about in some womb mage’s dungeon — but whether that was true or not was irrelevant to the effect they would have when impacting upon an airship’s rotors.

‘Port, forward!’ yelled Omar as the drak’s velocity increased still further, pointing to the Iron Partridge’s front engine, which grew larger with each second they plunged. ‘Throw — on the — brake.’

The wind was whipping the propeller snarl in Jack’s hand, the dull metal hull of the Iron Partridge rising up fast — a trick of the angle, as if the drak was stationary and it was the airship and ground being hurled up at them.

They began banking left, Jack’s spare hand clutching the saddle pommel tight as he pushed down into the stirrups with his boots, struggling to keep the propeller snarl level enough to hurl. Seconds away from the engine car and the drak’s wings cracked open, slowing and throwing them to one side. Jack hurled the propeller snarl and let the velocity of their fall carry it into the blurred disk of the engine car’s blades. Jack hardly caught the explosion of white chords in his wake, another drak’s flank coming close enough to theirs that he could have struck a match on the beast’s scales. They were manoeuvring through the diving press of the rest of the talon wing so fast that it felt as if his body had turned to lead, his weight doubled. As another drak banked off, clearing his view, Jack saw they were wheeling under the iron belly of the Iron Partridge. Her guns were silent, as were her engine cars, the lion-headed motors trailing oily smoke as their traction belts tried vainly to rotate her badly jammed blades.

Then the drak was out from under the airship’s shadow, and Jack saw that the Cassarabian aerostat was putting up more of a fight; a few puffs of cannon fire from the rubber-hooded ordnance along the hull aimed at the cloud of draks corkscrewing around her length. Riding a thermal, their drak soared up past the starboard plating of the Iron Partridge, angling around to pass the crow’s-nest dome.

There were fighters atop the hull and their drak angled itself to swoop down and trace a hull-scratching landing in the lee of the frill of mortar tubes. Just as agreed. Jack dismounted, landing heavily on the top plates as Omar cut the saddlebags containing the boarding gear to slide down next to him. As soon as its baggage was cut, the drak went scrabbling off the side of the airship to catch another thermal, clearing the space for the next landing.

It wasn’t easy to see the boarding party scurrying around the top of the airship with the sun floating directly astern, but there was one figure Jack would know anywhere — the commodore with his rolling mariner’s gait. He bustled over to Jack, a tinted pair of guardsman’s brass goggles strapped over his salt and pepper hair. ‘Tell me you’ve got the fuses, lad?’

‘I have,’ confirmed Jack, hefting the saddlebags.

‘You’ve come on a fair wind, then,’ said the commodore, puffing for breath at the altitude. He took the saddlebags and rifled through its contents as he walked. ‘I nearly had to put a gun to the head of the guardsmen’s armourer to get him to part with enough of his precious explosives to force our hatch. I told him that Jericho had our ship reinforced and sealed down as tight as a drum after that pair of Cassarabian birds used the hatch to board us, but the fool wouldn’t listen to me.’

Guardsmen were tying up rappelling lines around the mortar tubes — another of the commodore’s ideas. ‘The guns, lad,’ he’d said back at the camp. ‘They’ll be expecting us to come through the top hatches, and we’ll give them some fireworks there to suit. No, the rubber hoods of our thirty-two pounders are where you’ll guarantee finding an empty deck — for what skipper would put his men to guarding prisoners who could touch off a broadside against their sister ship? Our gunners will be chained up on the Cassarabian transport, and the skeleton crew they’re keeping will be console men and engine-room stokers.’

The truth of the commodore’s conjectures was about to be proved in the field by an experiment in demolition. Jack stripped the fuses as the commodore got back to the job of shaping the putty-like explosive substance around the sealed maintenance hatch on the hull.

‘While there’s pleasure to be had teasing open a transaction-engine lock,’ the commodore wheezed to Jack as he worked, ‘this is the other side of a cracksman’s art. And look at the mortal cheap rubbish they’ve given us to work with. Sweating tears in the sun, volatile enough to split the drak that carried it here in half.’

‘I know locks,’ said Jack. I had enough practice back home. If I hadn’t, I might not have ended up here.

‘Nothing to learn from old Blacky, eh? If I’d been there with you in the vaults of Lords Bank we wouldn’t have come away empty handed. There’s a time for the cerebral game, and there’s a time for the physical game, and a little fun to be had combining the blessed two.’

‘They were pumping in dirt gas,’ said Jack, ‘and the bank’s guards were coming at us from above, with the police down in the sewers.’

‘That’s what this paste is for,’ said the commodore, running a finger down the explosives pushed into the wedge of the hatch beneath them. ‘Not too much. Not too little. Seal the vents and let the bank’s guards drink their own soup. Seal the sewer tunnels and make sure the only rats Middlesteel’s finest catch are the furry four-legged variety. That’s the problem with training just on transaction engines. Give a fellow a hammer and every problem starts to look like a nail.’

‘And what did I look like to you when Captain Jericho sent you to get me from prison?’ asked Jack.

‘Like a diamond in the rough, Mister Keats. In need of a little polishing.’ The commodore drew one of the matches he usually used to light his pipe. ‘And now let me show you what just enough looks like.’

He lit each of the four fuses pushed into the corners of the hatch and there was a dull thump as the hatch jumped up out of its hinges. ‘And that’s what you get when you ask that incompetent sod Mister Pasco to seal a hatch.’

At the sound of the hatch being blown, the guardsmen who’d fixed their lines to the mortar tubes began rappelling down both sides of the airship, the soldiers standing behind Jack and the commodore pulling at the broken hatch and lifting it out of the hull plates.

Drawing his pistol, Jack made to move forward, but the commodore laid a hand on his shoulder as the guardsmen piled past. ‘And here’s your last lesson, lad. Never be the first into the breach. That’s what the army calls the forlorn hope; you need a taste for death to accept that poisoned chalice.’

The dying followed quickly enough, the sounds of shouts and the rattle of pistol fire echoing around the enclosed corridors only seconds after the guardsmen stormed below.

‘Second wave, lad,’ said the commodore, making for the maintenance ladder revealed by his demolition art. ‘We don’t want our drak-riding allies thinking we’re yellow.’

As they had anticipated, resistance from the prize crew was as light as the numbers on board the vessel, a handful of corpses in the uniforms of the Imperial Aerial Squadron marked the deadly passage of the guardsmen. With their dark leather uniforms oiled against the elements, bandoliers of shells, grenades, knives and aviator goggles, the guardsmen looked like the aerial pirates from some cheap Jackelian penny-dreadful, their manners as fierce as the edges of their blades.

Jack felt like an impostor as he followed in their bloody wake — wearing the tattered Jackelian Royal Aerostatical Navy uniform that the party had secreted in their baggage during their travels through Cassarabia in the vain hope that changing into it if they were close to being captured would save them a spy’s fate. ‘We’ll go back on board our ship like fine Jackelian gentlemen,’ as the commodore had boasted.

The pair of fine Jackelian gentlemen followed the boarding party into the transaction-engine chamber just in time to stop three guardsmen from testing their scimitars on Coss Shaftcrank, the steamman fending them off with a stoker’s shovel while another two guardsmen finished off the sentry who had been watching over the room.

‘He’s one of ours, the metal lad!’ shouted Jack. ‘Coss, belay your shovel!’

Coss warily lowered his shovel as the guardsmen withdrew to clear out the rest of the airship. ‘Those are the caliph’s own guardsmen, Jack softbody. Kiss my condensers, but has the world turned upside down while I have been chained up inside here?’

‘I think that would depend on which caliph you are,’ said Jack.

‘Explanations later, old steamer,’ said the commodore. ‘Anyone in drak-riding leathers is on our side. Anyone in Imperial Aerial Squadron uniforms you can clump with that old coal shovel of yours. Now, would you know if there’s anyone resembling a womb mage on board the Iron Partridge?’

‘There is such a one in the surgeon’s bay,’ said Coss. ‘Or at least so I heard from our cabin boy who has been topping up my water supply.’

‘Prize crew and prisoners?’ asked the old officer.

‘There’s around twenty of us and fifty of them on board the Iron Partridge. All the officers and the rest of our men are chained up on board an escort vessel.’

‘Is Jericho alive over there?’ asked Jack.

‘Indeed he is,’ said Coss. ‘Along with our cowardly Loa-cursed fool of a vice-admiral. Tuttle softbody surrendered the ship as quick as he could strike our colours when we ran into five enemy vessels along the edge of the Empty Quarter.’

‘Ah well, the only battles that ever counted for Tuttle were the ones fought around a dining table in Admiralty House,’ said the commodore. He looked over at the boilers, cold and shut. ‘What happened to the blessed ship? How’s she doing?’

‘The Cassarabians don’t trust our automatic systems. They think they’re cursed. We’ve been flying like a brick on full manual control ever since we surrendered.’

‘We’ll fire her back up later,’ said the commodore, leaving for the exit. ‘Right now we need to get down to the surgeon’s bay before their wicked womb mage realizes there’s been another change of ownership on board the Iron Partridge.’

Jack and Coss ran after the commodore and into the narrow corridor outside, the sulphur smell of weapons discharge hanging in the air.

‘Why the surgeon’s bay?’ called Jack.

‘Because we need a womb mage’s blessing, lad,’ said the commodore, cryptically. ‘Because we need his blessing.’

What’s he planning, the old dog?

When the three crewmen reached the doors to the surgeon’s bay, they found they weren’t the first to have tried to enter. A fatally wounded guardsman was rolling in agony outside the open doorway, a puddle of acidic green liquid sizzling across the carper planking by his side.

Jack unclipped one of the spherical grenades topped by a small clockwork timer to detonate the explosives inside, but the commodore stopped him from tossing it through the doorway. ‘That’s a little too much.’ Black quickly leant inside the bay and fired the single charge of his pistol, the crack of the weapon answered by a yell inside. ‘And that’s just enough.’

Jack and Coss followed the commodore in to find a womb mage slumped across the surgeon’s operating table, an uncracked vial of the green acid still clutched in his dead fingers. The commodore’s single shot had taken him in the chest through the heart, the blood of the wound like a marksman’s bull’s-eye on a paper target.

‘Tear my transfer pipes, but if you had hoped for a blessing from him, master cardsharp,’ said Coss, ‘I believe your shot would have been better aimed towards a less vital organ than his heart.’

‘Not so, he’s left his blessing behind, Mister Shaftcrank,’ said the commodore, walking to the womb mage’s case, abandoned under a cabinet of drugs and medicines that had clearly been broken into and rifled through. The commodore unclipped the case and lifted out what looked like a perfume bottle, complete with a rubber bulb to squirt out its contents. There looked to be dozens of similar bottles inside the bag. ‘Just the thing to lift a curse.’

Picking the bottle up, he sprayed the content in his eyes, and beckoned Jack over for a squirt of the same.

‘It’s itching,’ Jack said as the moisture burned angrily on his face.

‘No rubbing there, Mister Keats. Everyone who goes into Mutantarjinn will need a dose of this — even our draks, although you can leave the old steamer here off the list.’

‘This is not scent,’ said Coss, examining the bottle.

‘It’s not just a wicked legend that anyone who enters Mutantarjinn without the order of womb mages’ permission goes blind,’ said the commodore. ‘They circulate a sickness in the air around the city that attacks your eyes. There’s a virus inside this spray that changes your eyeball in a manner that makes you immune to their curse. Your vision plate won’t be affected, old steamer — which is one of the reasons why the Cassarabians don’t trust your race. Trust only flesh, is an old saying of the womb mages. Trust only that which their sorceries can twist.’

Jack blinked the tears out of his eyes.

‘They are not a kind people,’ said Coss.

‘Aye, they’re many things, but that they’re not.’

They were to see more evidence of that throughout the ship. Not a single Imperial Aerial Squadron sailor had been taken prisoner. The enemy captain they wanted alive for his knowledge of the route and any codes they needed to gain admittance to the city of sorcerers. The rest of the crew was a hindrance the guardsmen couldn’t afford to trust during the infiltration of the enemy stronghold, and the rival sailors met a savage end.

With the foe’s crew eliminated and word received that the Cassarabian transport airship had fallen — albeit with a higher price paid in blood — Jack went with Coss back to the transaction-engine chamber to help the steamman restart the Iron Partridge’s boilers.

‘The empire is fascinated with the Kingdom’s machines,’ Coss explained as they walked. ‘But they do not understand them. The master cardsharp is correct, they trust their ability to pervert the weave of flesh, but not our transaction engines and even less the life-metal such as myself.’

‘We saw their sorcerers’ work in their cities after we left the Iron Partridge,’ said Jack. ‘They don’t have trees to burn in their boilers, let alone coal. The creatures they breed inside slaves’ wombs are the one natural resource they can depend on.’

‘They had to put a gun to my head to get me to turn off the vessel’s transaction engines,’ said Coss. ‘Before we were captured I got to understand the ship. Kiss my condensers, but turning the boilers off on the Iron Partridge is like turning off my boiler heart — it is a little death for the ship’s mind. I don’t know how she will react to being rudely reanimated on our whim.’

‘You didn’t have a choice,’ said Jack. ‘No more than I did when I had to jump ship.’

Jack explained all that had happened to the marooned Jackelians during their absence from the Iron Partridge, their unexpected alliance with the guardsmen and the existence of two caliphs — the false one sitting on the throne, still dependent on the blood of the true ruler of rulers being held prisoner by the grand vizier.

Coss in turn explained how there had nearly been a second mutiny on board the Iron Partridge after the vice-admiral had given the ship up when they had been confronted by a flotilla of Cassarabian airships, showing more consideration for the preservation of his own skin than the welfare of his crew or his oath of duty. With the vessel already in disarray, her captain relieved of command and guarded in his quarters, the Iron Partridge had proved easy pickings for the Imperial Aerial Squadron.

Back in the chamber, Jack acted as both stoker on the boilers and cardsharp on the punch-card writers while Coss went down into the vessel’s small but perfectly formed transaction-engine pit and spun up the drums. Jack’s striped sailor’s shirt was soon soaked with sweat as he shovelled high-grade coke into the furnace of the high-pressure system in between feeding the punch-card injector with initiation routines.

Slowly, they coaxed the ship’s systems back into life, and Jack saw that the steamman’s reflections about the nascent artificial mind held on the drums were well founded. The systems were acting with all the jittery nervousness of a hound that had been kicked and banished from the hearth, then reluctantly allowed to slope back into the house. All this time everyone had been treating the ship like a piece of malfunctioning clockwork, but she was closer to one of the guardsmen’s draks — a creature of free will that needed coaxing and coaching.

Jack must have spent an hour on the restart, his voice growing hoarse from calling out system details to the steamman in the pit and acknowledging all the processes they were teasing back into life.

Their labours were interrupted by the commodore, returning to the transaction-engine room with his pipe lit; a sure sign that there was quiet on the rest of the vessel.

‘We’re for the boat bay, lads — the rest of our crew has been ferried over from the transport vessel and the skipper wants a word with everyone.’

Jack dropped the punch card he was forming. ‘Jericho’s on board!’

‘That he is. The Imperial Aerial Squadron killed a few of our boys out of spite before the guardsmen took the ship, but we’ve a crew and a ship and we’re back in the game.’

‘I must stay here, master cardsharp,’ protested Coss. ‘The Iron Partridge’s boilers must be fed, or I fear we’ll never return the ship to her intended operation.’

‘You mind our jerry-built iron lady, then, old steamer. Mister Keats and myself will have to do.’

Jack and the commodore were passing by the engine room on the lower deck when a piercing yell split the air. Jack’s hand slipped down to his pistol holster by reflex, but the commodore just calmly tapped his pipe out against one of the corridor’s walls as First Lieutenant Westwick emerged from a hatch. She had taken part in the assault on the Cassarabian airship and was still wearing borrowed guardsman’s leathers that fitted her like a second skin.

‘That sounded like a familiar voice, lass,’ said the commodore.

‘Vice-Admiral Tuttle has resolved his predicament by taking the honourable way out,’ said Westwick. ‘The hatches to the engine cars were left open while we cleared the propeller snarls off the blades, and when he spotted the gap, he chose to jump.’

‘People will always surprise you,’ said the commodore. ‘He never seemed the mortal jumping type to me.’

Westwick just smiled her dangerous smile and Jack pretended not to notice as she checked the knife strapped to her arm was secure again.

The commodore clapped Jack on the back. ‘Lucky for us, though, Mister Keats. All those foolish accusations about the loss of the Fleet of the South can be put to bed, along with the court martial Tuttle would have faced for striking his colours in the face of the enemy. All you need to do is complete our mission, and you’ll have the crowds back home stand you free drinks for the rest of the year when they see the name of the Iron Partridge standing proud on your blessed cap.’

All? A couple of airships against an empire. That sounds like an expensive round of drinks to me.

Westwick blinked her eyes in an exaggerated way at the commodore, who nodded happily, as if all was well with the world.

‘We’re good Maya. And there’s enough spray for the crew on both ships, and our guardsmen allies with their mortal flying pets besides.’

The boat bay was full of the Iron Partridge’s crew, their uniforms dirty and the men and women unkempt from days of confinement by their captors. Among them was Captain Jericho with his mop of orange hair and piercing eyes, a lightning bolt moulded into human form.

His booming voice cut through the hubbub like fire, as if his confinement on the prison transport had been the closure of a furnace door, the heat of ignoble defeat inside him left to grow sun-hot until the guardsmen had released him back upon his crew of misfits. ‘This, given the choice, is not the ship you would have chosen. This mission, given the choice, is not the one you would have accepted. This crew is not one that has fought together and the only mention of the Iron Partridge on the rolls of the navy is on the very short list of vessels that have surrendered to an enemy power.’

The crew shuffled their feet, embarrassed, many too ashamed to look their captain in the eyes. ‘And your failure is m’own failure, the failure of those set to lead you. The same complacent assumption of victory that left the Fleet of the South scattered across the sands of the enemy and our brothers and sisters to be picked over by carrion and dune beetles. That failure will not happen again! I will not fail you again.’ He moved down the centre of the boat bay, taking one of the fire hoses from the wall and unfurling it towards the hangar doors to create a line. ‘Our mission was originally launched at the behest of parliament and its agencies, rather than the admiralty. Now we must make common cause with regiments of the enemy, guardsmen who we have known only as our most implacable enemy. We must strike directly at the heart of one of the empire’s cities. Not just to discharge this vessel’s orders, but to wipe the stain of her surrender from our logs. I will take only volunteers with me from here on in. Those who wish to go, may take the Iron Partridge’s launches back to the border and pass on word of what has happened here. Those of you that stay, you should know that your chances of returning are slight, and, in actuality, this is why Admiralty House gave us a vessel they did not want and a crew they expected to fail. But there is one thing I will not fail in, and that is m’duty. I stand here …’ The captain moved to the right-hand side of the line down the deck he had made. ‘Those who would follow a captain to war, follow me now …’

There was an almost imperceptible ripple through the crowd of aeronauts as, nodding grimly, the commodore stepped across the line after the captain, followed by First Lieutenant Westwick and Jack, then the other lieutenants. Soon the torrent of movement became a soundless flood, though if determination had a sound, then the boat bay might have echoed with the thunder of it.

They had been written off by their own side, shamed and used for fools by Vice-Admiral Tuttle, a coward who had struck the airship’s colours just about as fast as he could drop them when faced with a superior force. They were Jackelians — and old and young, they could remember the pride they had felt when first taking the Royal Aerostatical Navy’s oath. There was only one way to remove the stain on their honour. Within a minute there was nobody left on the other side of the makeshift line, even Pasco’s truculent enginemen had all slipped across.

They might have been flying through the heavens, but now they were following a course for the gates of a Cassarabian hell. And it didn’t matter a jot anymore, because there was nowhere else they’d rather be.

The glass portholes of the wardroom on board the Iron Partridge gave onto an appropriate backdrop as they sailed towards Mutantarjinn alongside the captured Cassarabian vessel — great forks of lightning illuminating the clouds off their port, the night flickering as if the long scuttled sun was now a gas lamp being toyed with by a child. There was some mineral in the mountains of the deep south of this realm that agitated the storm fronts when they rolled off their peaks, and the land in their lee was known as the Abras Arkk — or the angry ground. It seemed to Omar a fitting territory for the Forbidden City of the womb mages to be located.

Farris Uddin was sketching the layout of the city on a sheet of paper for the council of war that had been convened: himself, Boulous and Omar, Jericho — the captain of the strange Jackelian vessel — and the four spies who had been prisoners of the guardsmen, Commodore Black, Jack Keats, Henry Tempest and the beautiful but deadly First Lieutenant Westwick.

How fitting that fate should send me a woman as heart-breakingly beautiful as Shadisa was to help me avenge her death. Heathen northerners. Strange allies, but it doesn’t matter. I would fight alongside a legion of devils if it means bringing down the dogs who killed her; I would let the fires of hell singe my boots to lead the charge against the grand vizier and Salwa’s forces.

‘Mutantarjinn is a sealed city,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Movement in and out is strictly controlled. The caliph’s rule is administered by the order of womb mages, much like sultans rule a conquered province.’

‘How high are its walls?’ asked Jericho. ‘And what is the disposition of their defences?’

Farris Uddin tapped the table. ‘Their walls are high, but not in the direction you might expect. They start at the ground and run downward. Mutantarjinn is built into the floor of a circular chasm, scoured out when Ben Issman, his name be blessed, caused the eyes of god to reopen. Those chasm walls are three hundred feet deep.’

‘That’s a mortal powerful gaze,’ noted the commodore. ‘Although I have an archaeologist friend of my acquaintance who swears that Mutantarjinn was built over the ruins of an underground city that preceded it.’

‘The Cassarabian people were shaped by god, Jared Black, not descended from ants,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘What fools would want to live underground? There are lines up and down the chasm’s walls — lifting rooms — and creatures designed by the womb mages for porterage. More pertinently for this vessel, there are hundreds of anti-airship bombards mounted on fortifications that ring the chasm. Big ugly steel toads designed to spit out shells that would test even your carper’s resistance to flame. Shells filled with a substance that burns brighter as you toss water over it.’

Jericho shrugged. ‘If your plan works, we won’t need to test their defences.’

‘We have the signal codes to enter the city,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘As long as they are accurate …’

‘I believe I convinced the Imperial Aerial Squadron officer who held them to pass me the correct codes,’ said Westwick. ‘Eventually.’

‘That I believe you did,’ said Farris Uddin, sketching out more detail to represent the centre of the city. ‘And if the signal codes work, the good news is that we will be sent onto here, the Citadel of Flowers.’ He drew in a building that resembled a five-leaf clover at the centre of the city. ‘The heart of the order of womb mages’ power and the repository of all their knowledge and secrets. We would be expected to dock at its central tower and offload all the Jackelian sailors from the prison ship and prize vessel.’

‘What would happen to m’crew inside there?’ asked Jericho.

‘They would be induced to surrender all their knowledge of the operations of your vessel,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Afterwards, when they have no more information to reveal? Well, there is always an appetite for human bodies among the womb mages for them to hone their art — a demand that not even all of the empire’s slave traders can satisfy.’

‘The true caliph is being held within the citadel?’ asked Omar.

‘Yes,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘The grand vizier’s man we snatched believes he is being kept somewhere well out of public view, in their lower levels alongside their vats and their experiments and their most treasured spell books.’

‘Two parties, then,’ growled Captain Jericho. ‘One to locate your caliph, one to complete the ship’s mission and locate the source of the grand vizier’s celgas.’

Master Uddin seemed to agree. ‘We will time the attack of the guardsmen talon wings on the city for shortly after we dock at the citadel. The grand vizier is nobody’s fool, and he will be expecting us to act against him. We will give him the attack he expects, as a distraction for a subtler feint he doesn’t. They will be looking to the walls and the city defences and we will already be inside the Citadel of Flowers.’

Uddin looked across at Omar and Boulous. ‘You and I, Omar Barir, will have to bear the stench of wearing Imperial Aerial Squadron uniforms, while Boulous, I think, with the addition of a striped shirt and trousers, will make a fine Jackelian prisoner for us to escort.’

‘As he should,’ said the commodore. ‘For as a babe the lad would have been a Jamie or a Donnel, before he was snatched from an upland cot by some camel-riding raider.’

‘I am a jahani!’ protested Boulous. ‘My loyalty is to the guardsmen, whatever the source of my blood.’

‘Being of Jackelian stock isn’t a taint, lad, it’s a windfall. You trace the roots of the word back far enough, and you’ll find Jackelian means lion-hearted in one of the ancient tongues.’

‘Nobody will doubt the bravery of anyone’s heart who enters the Citadel of Flowers,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Whether they be counted as guardsmen or Jackelian sailors. We must keep the raiding parties small — only the best fighters from our two forces. Speed and surprise will be our allies — for there are creations of the womb mages inside the citadel that I would not face. We shall trust in the one true god that we shall carry the day and return to the two airships in dock before the hive we are dipping for honey is fully roused.’

‘Ten rounds a minute, sir,’ said the brooding giant who was the vessel’s captain of marines to Jericho. ‘That’s what I’ll put my trust in.’

‘The crew and the ship and our allies. We needs must trust in them all, eh Mister Tempest?’

A flash across the sky outside the porthole caught Omar’s eye. They were sailing through a fury, but Omar would tempt far worse to reach the grand vizier’s home; just for the chance to reach inside the heart of darkness and see if he could squeeze the life out of it.

‘Is this my fate, father?’ Omar whispered to the shade he imagined hanging in the skies outside.

He heard the echo of his father’s words. ‘We are what heaven wills us.’