Jack Cloudie

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Captain Jericho leafed through the ship’s dispositions in his cabin as he listened to Jack’s report about what he and Coss had discovered of the nascent intelligence turning on the drums of the ship’s transaction engines.

‘Well, well, m’boy,’ said Jericho, glancing up, ‘a pity the industrial lord that designed our vessel vanished years ago. I would have a few words with him about his notions of airship design.’

‘We’re doing our best with her, sir.’

‘Just rein the transaction engines in, Mister Keats. You and our steamman rating can coddle her, and whisper sweet nothings if that’s what it takes. Grease her drums as if you were combing the burs out of a mare’s flanks. Level flying until we reach Mutantarjinn — we’ll save her final gallop until our slippery pair from the State Protection Board have discharged the ship’s orders inside this dark den of the womb mages.’

‘Why am I here, captain?’

‘Have you anywhere else you would rather be?’ The captain raised an eyebrow before continuing. ‘A gentleman always discharges his debts, Mister Keats. Where he can, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’ What do I have to pay with, but my blood?

‘Your father was a good man in hard times. He always tried to look after people in the prison he didn’t need to. That’s how the navy’s patronage system is supposed to work, too. The skipper who saw me into m’first ensign’s position did it as a favour for m’family when he really didn’t need to. I think he saw something in a young lad just starting out that nobody else had noticed; that I needed what the Royal Aerostatical Navy had to offer, as much as the service needed me. Such lines of loyalty run up and down, crisscrossing the fleet as the invisible netting that binds our vessels and crews together.’

‘Does your old skipper sit on the board of the admiralty, sir?’

‘No, Mister Keats, Captain Taylor was luckier than that — he was promoted to the officer’s cemetery outside Middlesteel. But I stand for him, as do many others who were once ensigns and who are now captains and commanders and vice-admirals, as one day you will stand for me.’

‘The truth, sir, is that I just want to go home and take my brothers out of the poorhouse.’

‘An ensign’s pay will allow you to do that, Mister Keats, and a lot more reliably than chancing a second attempt at forcing the vaults of a bank or rattling the skylights of rich widows. Anyone who can fathom those damned machines inside the transaction-engine chamber can pass any board exams the navy has to set.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘The navy won’t abandon you, Mister Keats. You are the service and the service is you. We may kill you, but you have m’vow we will never leave you. Even after you’re pensioned out, your blood will sing every time you feel the shadow of a RAN vessel drift over your cottage. Give it sixty years and some young pup barely able to fill his dress uniform will be weeding you out of the hiring line at what passes for an airship field.’

There was a knock at the door, and when Jericho boomed ‘enter’, Jack saw it was the hulking form of Master Engineer Pasco, bearing news of his teams’ labours in bringing the engine room back to full capacity.

‘Smartly done, Mister Pasco,’ said the captain, congratulating the engineer on his people’s work. ‘When the time comes, I will need our iron-feathered bird to fly like a hawk out of the enemy city.’

‘We’ll soak the traction belts with ballast water and run the loops so fast the cook will be able to bake the ship’s biscuits in the engine cars’ back draft, skipper.’ Pasco hesitated.

‘Is there anything else, master engineer?’

‘When the time comes, Captain Jericho, you can count on us.’

‘That I believe I can, Mister Pasco. Dismissed.’

‘How can you trust what he says?’ Jack asked when the door to the cabin had been shut again, and the engineer had left. ‘He led a mutiny against you for the vice-admiral.’

‘Vice-admiral Tuttle was a politician, m’boy, and a politician is an expert at promising the world, even when it always keeps on turning ever the same.’

‘I wouldn’t trust him,’ said Jack.

‘Then you would be wrong. Never judge a cloudie without knowing their history, Mister Keats. Pasco was on the Resolute when she experienced an engine-room fire. A barrel of contaminated expansion-engine gas had made it onto the ship and blew half her engines away. Pasco was the engineer who received the captain’s order to lock the room down to starve the fire of air while they climbed high enough to put the blaze out properly. There were a quarter of the engine room’s hands still inside when Pasco sealed it down.’ The captain nodded grimly, as if the memory had been his, rather than another officer’s. ‘Pasco had to listen to his crew burn and suffocate every foot of that journey. The Resolute’s captain killed them to save hundreds more. It transpired that the barrel of bad gas was loaded by a convict labour crewman working on the field who would have been hard pressed to tell the difference between expansion-engine gas and the brass tank a Middlesteel lamp lighter carries on his back. I would have ordered the engine room locked down myself in the same circumstances. No choice in the matter, do y’see? He doesn’t like pressed hands, he doesn’t like officers, and for a long time he didn’t even like himself. A battle-hardened man like Pasco will follow you if you prove yourself. I did it by giving him and his crew another chance rather than the gallows for mutiny, but you had better be damned sure you know where you are leading him.’

Jack saluted. ‘I believe I will follow you too, sir.’

‘Too blasted right you will, m’boy.’

‘You have our report, sir. Is there anything else I can assist with?’

Jericho gestured mournfully towards the letter he had been writing on his desk. ‘Not unless you have enough skill with penmanship to explain to Admiralty House why the probable last action of one of their vessels is cooperating in an attempt to free the enemy head of state of a nation we’re at war with, while fighting alongside the navy’s oldest foe in the air.’

‘I would write that the two officers of the State Protection Board on the vessel insisted you follow that course of action, captain.’

‘Very good. Ingenuity under fire. Those ensign’s bars are already half yours, eh Mister Keats?’

Jack could almost feel their dangerous weight as he left.

Even at nighttime, Jack could see from the transaction-engine chamber how easily Mutantarjinn had earned its nickname the Forbidden City; there was little about the city that did not look forbidden or forbidding. From the black rocky plain veined with blood-red crystal that sparkled with an evil patina when the lightning storms forked their violence down — a glamour that made it look as if the land beneath the Iron Partridge was running with rivulets of blood — to the sharp blade-roofed towers rising out of the canyon floor of the ugly circular chasm scoured out of the ground. It was obvious why the commodore’s archaeologist friend thought something ancient had preceded the Cassarabians’ presence here. There was an otherworldly nature to the city that went beyond the womb mages’ administration of the place. I would sooner live in the desert under a nomad’s tent than down there. The towers on the chasm floor resembled a series of bone-like spikes that had rained down and landed on top of each other. Many were topped with strange constructions of blades that turned and twisted in the gusts scouring the city, acting as windmills and storm conductors. Gazing on the vista was like watching a thousand erratic, insane carousels summoning bolts of lightning down from the thunderhead sky.

Alongside the Iron Partridge a great crack of lightning revealed the chasm drop to be swarming with six-armed creatures, the race of man made into spiders, dark net bags tied around their backs. They were stirring around even larger creatures — beetle-shelled things the size of houses carrying pagodas of passengers up and down the chasm wall.

Jack’s eyes moved ahead. There in the centre of the city, rising above all the other towers, was the core of the womb mages’ power — the Citadel of Flowers, though if flower it be, it was a decaying swamp lily. It was composed of five rounded wings, each a jutting ziggurat in its own right, pinned to the chasm floor by a massive spire in its centre. A rotating crown of blades encircled the spire’s rise every hundred yards, generating a hum audible even on the distant airship. Glinting light spilled from open hangars in between the rotating blades, small courier packets coming and going bearing the empire’s lifeblood of information. Nearby were the full-sized gantries for the larger vessels of the Imperial Aerial Squadron, although no other warships seemed to be docked at the moment.

If this was truly where the Cassarabians’ one true god had been wakened, burning a hole for the foundations of the Forbidden City to be laid, then he must have been an irritable sleeper. Through the porthole Jack could see the reflection of the ship’s helioscope running along their iron plates as they communicated with the ground, and he felt a twinge of uncertainty, beseeching the fates that Westwick’s methods of obtaining her information proved every bit as rigorous as she had suggested they had been. What if our stolen codes are old, or the enemy officer falsified them to get Westwick killed?

Finally, there was an answering flash from the fortification along the rim of the chasm, then the Iron Partridge nosed further over Mutantarjinn. Thank the Circle. Still alive. Alive for the most suicidal mission any airship in the navy had ever attempted.

There was a cry from behind Jack, and turning, he saw Coss lying on the bottom of the engine pit, the steamman’s metal limbs shaking as if he had been taken by a fit. The commodore was away on the bridge with Jericho — no time to get him back here. Jack slid the ladder into the pit, and pulled Coss away from the rotating drums of the transaction engine, saving him from rolling under the lowest one and getting his arms or legs crushed. What’s the matter with him? The diminutive steamman was shaking, a vapour leaking out of the joins of his body, as if his rivets were sweating a fog. Jack gawped as the fog seemed to form into a skull-like machine face, then, as quickly as it had formed, it disappeared into the oil-scented air of the transaction-engine chamber.

‘Coss, can you hear me? What’s the matter?’

‘I have been ridden by the Loa, Jack softbody,’ Coss warbled through his voicebox. ‘The spirit of my ancestor spoke to me — Lemba of the Empty Thrusters.’

The flying spirit from the steamman pantheon of the gods I glimpsed in my own dream. ‘Did the Loa speak to you about the ship?’

‘Vault my valves, it is more than that,’ said Coss. ‘This is a turning point in the weave of the great pattern. If we fail here, then the empire of the caliph will become the world. We will all fall — Jackals, the Free State, Quatershift, all of the nations of the north. Your flesh will be their flesh, and for my race, after an age of hiding like beggars in the Mountains of Mechancia, the people of the metal will finally be exterminated.’

‘Did your Loa suggest how we might avert that?’

Coss slowly shook his head. ‘He did not. All he left me with was the feeling of power in this land. Great energies that were once released here, long before the caliphate. They have faded; but while I was possessed, I could smell their residual half-life like the scent of diseased meat.’

Jack helped the steamman back to his feet, his head dizzy with the bleak implications of his crewmate’s words. It seemed the fate of the entire world rested on the success of their mission. And the world really should have picked a better champion than the old steamer and me to stand up for it.

Coss had just recovered enough to return to his post when the commodore appeared at the door of the transaction-engine chamber.

‘Time for you to make good your promise to me, Mister Keats. We’re a couple of minutes away from docking at the womb mages’ lair. Poor old Blacky — my unlucky stars have left me washed up on some bad shores before, but none as foul as this place. But at least I have misery for company this time, eh? For the grand fellow who was foolhardy enough to poke his nose into the fortified vaults of Lords Banks, this terrible voyage should be a rowboat across a sunny lake.’

Jack nodded grimly, his stomach bunching up with fear. Right now, I’d take a bank job back in the Kingdom any day.

‘Unholster your pistol, lad. We’re meant to be prisoners of war now, and prisoners don’t sport shooting irons. Keep the drums turning here, old steamer, for when we return, we’ll as like have every devil of the six levels of Cassarabian hell hot on our tail …’

The timing of the guardsmen’s attack on the defences of Mutantarjinn was every bit as precise as Jack had expected it would be. Sirens inside the great tower’s airship docking ring howled into life as the guardsmen and the Jackelians — the former wearing their stolen Imperial Aerial Squadron uniforms, the latter in their soiled crew uniforms — stepped out into the main hangar. There was confusion among the Imperial Aerial Squadron ground crew in the harbour. Jack had to turn to see the first gobs of fire arcing out of the shadows of the distant chasm wall through an open hangar door, the attacking draks rendered invisible by the darkness until a lightning flicker silhouetted their wheeling forms against the sky. Like the other Royal Aerostatical Navy crewmen, Jack’s hands were bound behind his back with leather ties, but using a cunning knot of the commodore’s devising they could be pulled apart with a twist of the wrists.

Something about the hangar appeared to be angering the guardsmen’s commander, Farris Uddin. Jack caught Omar’s eye — the boy just a little too gangly for his purloined marine’s jacket.

Omar indicated the walls of the Cassarabian script engraved across the walls of the hangar. ‘The hundred sects of the Holy Cent have been torn down and replaced by only one — the Sect of Razat. It is blasphemy of the worst kind.’

‘We’ve an old saying in our uplands,’ noted the commodore. ‘Find three Cassarabians and you’ll find two believers and one heretic.’

‘You should not bespeak the hundred faces of the one true god, old man,’ warned Omar.

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t at that, lad. We need all the luck we can get in this terrible place.’

An officer who looked as if he might be the master of the harbour came running past the new arrivals and Farris Uddin grabbed him to halt his rush. ‘I have the officers from the prize vessel here, and the rest of the enemy sailors as prisoners inside.’

‘You are Captain Darwish? In the name of the blessed Ben Issman, get those infidels out of my way. And keep the ones on your transport ship chained up. Can you not hear the city’s call to war?’

‘Who attacks?’ demanded Farris Uddin. ‘Who is foolish enough to attack Mutantarjinn?’

‘The thrice-cursed imperial guardsmen,’ said the harbour master. ‘Our own men, our own draks. The grand vizier has just passed us word that they have rebelled against the Caliph Eternal.’

‘What, the grand vizier is here?’

The officer thrust a finger towards one of the larger pocket airships resting inside the chamber. ‘His vessel arrived before yours. There is plague in the capital. The Citadel of Flowers is the Jahan now — we protect the Caliph Eternal!’

‘Not just one caliph, then,’ the commodore whispered to Jack. ‘A pair of birds in this dark bush, and one of them a cuckoo.’

‘What can we do to assist?’ asked Farris Uddin. ‘What are our orders?’

‘None from me,’ said the harbour master, ‘nor anyone else at the moment, running around like headless chickens. Just keep the filthy Jackelians out of my hair and pray for the guardsmen to be struck blind by the hand of god for their treachery before the fleet arrives.’

Jack felt the ripple of tension running through the party as Farris Uddin’s eyes narrowed. ‘The fleet?’

‘The fleet is returning from the north to defend the Caliph Eternal. We’ll catch these dirty rebels in the scorpion’s pincer — the city walls in front, and the hammer of our airships behind them. Then we’ll teach them the price of their treachery.’

‘A price that is much on my mind,’ said Farris Uddin as the officer ran off, barking orders at the ground crew scattered around the chamber.

Just behind the guardsman commander, Captain Jericho was looking as perturbed as everyone else at the sudden shocking turn of events.

‘You could see the true caliph freed,’ said Jericho, ‘and we can learn the source of the grand vizier’s airship gas. But it’ll avail neither of us if your guardsmen are slaughtered outside and we’re both left stranded here, bottled up by the entire Imperial Aerial Squadron.’

‘It is said that no plan of engagement survives a battle intact, captain,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘What do you suggest?’

‘Your transport ship, sir, should be left here for the withdrawal of both parties. I will take the Iron Partridge, warn the guardsmen attacking the city, and then proceed to engage the enemy.’

‘One vessel against the bulk of our new fleet,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘How much time can you buy us?’

‘That remains to be seen, commander, but we shall at least have the element of surprise on our side,’ smiled Jericho.

‘I find this war of ours a funny sort,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘For the more I fight, the harder I find it to tell the sides apart. Tell the guardsmen that half the talon wings are to stay and harass the city’s defences, the other half are to accompany you in assaulting the grand vizier’s fleet.’

Jericho nodded, then glanced over at the commodore. ‘And for a ship in action, I will need more than Mister Shaftcrank manning that infernal calculating pit some fool of an airwright saw fit to drop into m’vessel.’

‘The master cardsharp’s skills are required here,’ said First Lieutenant Westwick. She held up the bag of supposedly looted booty from the wardroom she was carrying, silver plate and cups concealing the spies’ small, efficient transaction engine — the same one that Jack and the commodore had used to crack the enemy vessel they had boarded under the skies of Benzaral.

‘Well, there it is then,’ whined the commodore, looking at Jack. ‘The cold, grey wretches of the State Protection Board had their claws sunk into me long before they made me exchange my sea legs for air legs. My business it seems is here, which means, Mister Keats, that yours needs to be on the Iron Partridge.’

‘You haven’t got me killed yet, sir,’ said Jack.

‘I believe we’ll both get ample chances to make a go of that, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘You on the ship, and I here. Poor old Blacky. Alone, always alone. Well, they say that you go out of the world much as you come into it — on your own account.’

‘Don’t worry, old man,’ said Omar. ‘We have blades enough to keep you safe.’

‘Tigers to guard me from hyenas, so it is,’ said the commodore.

‘My place is by your side too, captain,’ the hulking Henry Tempest spoke up from within the party of officers masquerading as prisoners.

‘A captain of marines on board the ship, with all our marines left marooned back in Benzaral by the vice-admiral?’ Jericho shook his head. ‘Your place is here with our mission. Keep our two shadowy servants of the state alive. And Henry …?’

‘Sir?’

‘Try not to get yourself in the stockade again back home. I might not always be around to get you released. You may have your men escort the boy and myself back to the Iron Partridge, Commander Uddin. First Lieutenant Westwick, the command here in the citadel is yours — although I suspect in reality, it probably always was.’

Westwick shrugged almost imperceptibly. ‘Sell yourself dearly, captain.’

‘The Royal Aerostatical Navy knows no other price, m’dear.’

Farris Uddin started shouting commands behind them. Ordering the local ground crew to release the Iron Partridge and let their precious ironclad prize vessel sail to the safety of the landing fields to the south. Demanding that the torturers who had requested the presence of the Jackelian prisoners present themselves and lead the party to whatever hell-damned cutting rooms and cells they had ready.

The commodore waved sadly towards Jack, as Omar and another solider walked Jack and the skipper back down the harbour passageway, towards the vessel’s port walkway hatch. Whether the commodore was more concerned about Jack’s fate or his own was impossible to tell.

‘You and Jack Keats are very brave, captain,’ said Omar. ‘When you engage the grand vizier’s fleet, I believe you might almost be considered as courageous as me.’

Jericho shrugged off the praise. ‘Thank you, guardsman. Although to be that brave, I’d say I might have to mount one of those flying monstrosities you sally about on, d’you see, and if truth be known, I still suffer from air sickness after all these years.’

Omar cranked open the hatch door to the Iron Partridge while he and the other guardsman pushed down Jack and Jericho’s heads to enter, allowing them to slip their wrist knots as they entered the airship.

‘I shall keep my vow to my father’s shade, now, Jack Keats,’ pledged Omar. ‘If the grand vizier is inside the citadel, then so is that beast Salwa. And I will see them both suffer for what they have done to the woman I loved, to my people and my house.’

‘I’ll ask that god of yours to see you through to success,’ said Jack. If he’ll listen to a Jackelian heathen.

As the hatch closed, Captain Jericho called out, ‘A word of advice, guardsman, passed down from an old soldier. The trick isn’t what you do when you’re fighting; it’s more often what you do when you’re not.’ He turned back to Jack as the door clanged shut. ‘An honest hard pounding, Mister Keats, trading shots vessel to vessel. A lot better for us than all that skulking about in the shadows that the State Protection Board’s agents seem to enjoy so much, wouldn’t you say?’

‘The transaction-engine chamber will stand ready, sir.’

‘I trust that will be the case,’ said Jericho. ‘And Mister Keats …’

‘Sir?’

‘I don’t have any living descendents. When waterman’s sickness claimed m’wife, it took m’poor boy too. Before we left the Kingdom, I took the liberty of bequeathing m’navy pension to your two young brothers. The admiralty’s generosity verges on the skimpy, but it will be enough to secure them both means outside the workhouse.’

Jack felt his heart beat fast within his chest and for a second he did not know what to say to this mercurial, flame-haired officer. My captain.

‘Thank you, truly.’ It doesn’t matter if I die, now. Saul and Alan will have a future. They’re free! Whatever happens here, they’re free.

‘To your post, boy. Run. No dawdling now. Keep m’calculation drums turning and our course true, and we shall see what fashion in tactics these late additions to the party have to bring to our little soiree.’

Jack felt the deck lurch, as the connector arm to their nose lock was set free. The skipper was already down the corridor, his booming voice barking commands and banging on hatches.

However imperfectly crafted, the Iron Partridge had been manufactured for war.

Now, finally, she was to have one.

Omar, Boulous, Farris Uddin and the six elite guardsmen fighters in their party had concealed their pistols and scimitars under stolen womb mages’ robes. Along with the white facemasks they had tied over their mouths, the disguise was completed with the addition of a small paper skullcap to tie down their hair.

Omar could not contain his triumph at having discovered the womb mages’ robing room, which had also furnished disguises for their Jackelian friends who had since set off on their own mission, and come up with the suggestion of arranging their raiding party to resemble the mumbling line of sorcerers he had seen in the womb mages’ lair under the palace.

‘You are a little too eager to march down into the citadel, Cadet Barir,’ warned Farris Uddin as he adjusted the robes over his uniform. ‘Remember that we have come for the true Caliph Eternal. His freedom is our victory — nothing else. A little hatred keeps you alive, too much will make you dead.’

But it’s not a little hatred I feel towards Shadisa’s killers. I burn with it. My body is filled with it. My soul is a sea of it. ‘And which of the many men that you have been coined that saying, Master Uddin?’

‘All the uniforms I have worn across the years have been in the service of the Caliph Eternal,’ rebuked the commander. ‘As have all my faces. Although not quite as many as the hundred faces of the one true god, for that would be a blasphemy.’

‘You have my sword, Master Uddin,’ said Omar. ‘May the hundred faces of heaven smile on me when I sink it into those who deserve it.’

‘I have always had your sword,’ said Farris Uddin. He dipped his scimitar out from under the womb mage’s mantle. ‘For the true Caliph Eternal and the empire. Are we sworn to it?’

The others raised their swords and joined them in a circle of shining steel.

‘For thousands of years the bloodline of Ben Issman, his name be blessed, has ruled as Caliph Eternal on the throne of empire. Let us see what manner of man Immed Zahharl is, that he thinks he shall be the power behind the throne.’

‘Shall we seize a senior womb mage, Master Uddin?’ asked Boulous. ‘Tickle him with our sabres until the dog tells us where the Caliph Eternal is being held?’

‘There will be few within the citadel privy to the secret of his existence,’ said the commander. ‘In this matter, we shall have to follow our noses.’

Omar hesitated before speaking, ‘I think I know where he is. I saw the false caliph back in the palace. I can sense him here in the citadel — I can sense both of them, the grand vizier’s pet and the true caliph.’

‘A tracker’s ability?’ said Boulous. ‘That is a strange trait for the son of a water merchant to possesses.’

‘Do not be so quick to judge. Our people’s bloodlines have twisted and turned for hundreds of generations,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Mixing and becoming intermingled. There is many a young emir who has suddenly found himself growing a wild nomad’s water hump as he reaches his adult years and is sent, running in tears, to the womb mages to be cleansed of a great-grandmother’s indiscretion. The question is, can your senses distinguish between the false Caliph Eternal and the true?’

Omar shut his eyes and tried, but when he opened them he shook his head sadly. ‘No, I can feel no difference.’

‘It will be subtle,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Subtle and composed of a hidden reworking of the genes — blood engineering passed down from the Caliph Eternal to his chosen successor. For if it were not, everyone would be able to seize control of the beyrogs and the caliph’s private stables, and that would hardly do. Luckily for us, I possess a subtle nose.’ As he spoke, his nose began to grow longer, becoming muzzle-like. As if he were a wolf, Farris Uddin sniffed the air and grinned ferociously. ‘You are right; it is very hard to tell the difference. If you did not know there were a true Caliph Eternal and a false one, you would miss it completely. But I have the slight advantage of having met the real Caliph Eternal.’ He opened the door to the robing room and pointed down the citadel. ‘This way …’

‘Now,’ said First Lieutenant Westwick while she adjusted the settings on their tiny portable transaction engine, watching as the commodore fiddled with the cables hanging from a bank of the womb mages’ engines, ‘would be the ideal time for your young cardsharp friend to be in our company.’

‘This is a walk in the park compared to the calculation drums back home,’ said the commodore. ‘We stamp our art out in steel and steam, the Cassarabians write theirs in flesh and blood. But I don’t have to tell you that, eh?’

Henry Tempest gave a gentle whistle from the door leading into the womb mages’ transaction-engine chamber, indicating someone was coming down the corridor, and the pair briefly halted their noise until the officer thumbed them the all clear.

‘Keep the connection and their calculation drums turning while I get down to this,’ said Westwick.

‘Are you going to try and crack deep into their systems, lass?’

‘I would never attempt something so dangerous,’ said Westwick. ‘But you know how you can tell which chest a house’s really valuable silver is hidden in?’

‘Ah,’ said the commodore. ‘I see the board’s training is worth something after all.’

Westwick inspected the results on their portable transaction engine. ‘Here it is. The level of the citadel with the strongest data encryption.’

‘So we’ll follow the trail of locks, then,’ said the commodore. ‘Right down to their strongest, and let’s see how they stand up against the genius of old Blacky. Ah, it sounded such a slight little favour when it was asked back home. Just find out how they’re floating their airship’s envelopes, Jared. That’s all. Your old Cassarabian friends will remember you kindly, won’t they? Winkle out the secrets of their airships’ gas for us. And here we are in the Forbidden City, the three of us against an empire full of enemies while our best chance of escape is sailing towards her end. Not even a drop of RAN rum to wet my lips while I sweat under these wicked robes. You see how cruel fate is to me, Maya?’

‘That is the nature of fate,’ said Westwick. ‘It runs, as our allies here would say, as heaven wills.’ She looked over at the captain of marines. ‘Sup from your green canteen, Henry. You need to stay calm until we get to the lower levels of the citadel.’

‘I’ve been taking too much green, tonight, first lieutenant,’ complained the officer from his watch post. ‘I’m going to bleeding sleep over here.’

‘Think of it as the milk that lines the stomach before the beer,’ said Westwick. ‘You’ll have your thirst quenched before we leave the citadel, that much I guarantee you.’

‘Does it taste good, lad, that blessed soup of yours?’ asked the commodore, as if the thought of its quality had only just occurred to him.

‘No, master cardsharp,’ said Tempest. ‘It’s just what you need, not what you want.’

‘A cruel fate, like I said, a wicked cruel fate.’

Jack had already received the order to ready for battle stations when the transaction engine’s main communications pipe began to whistle like a kettle coming to boil.

Another request?

He and Coss had just been warned by the runner from the crow’s-nest dome that three enemy vessels forward of the main fleet had been sighted, acting as a pathfinder squadron, each a match for the Iron Partridge. They and the drak-riding guardsmen accompanying them would soon have a quarrel on their hands.

Jack could almost hear the commodore’s comment on their situation. ‘A little appetizer for you lad, before the main course is served.’

Coss got to the communications pipe before Jack could slide the punch-card writer to lock and the steamman called across. ‘Captain Jericho for us, with an urgent request.’ The steamman switched the pipe to public address, the captain’s booming tones echoing over the sound and heat of their rotating, rattling calculation drums. ‘Bridge to the transaction-engine chamber. Check the archive of the ship’s schematics and see if we have a detailed specification for that exotic composite our celgas is bagged up in.’

‘Sir?’ said Jack. What’s he up to now?

‘It’s been said that the fellow who designed the Iron Partridge was the cleverest man in the Kingdom. It strikes me that if he replaced canvas with that peculiar cloth of his on our gas cells, there might be a reason for it, eh? Tensile strength, gentlemen, pressure per square inch. I require a swift lift for the vessel. I need to know if I can order our regassing tower crew to double the density of the cells — if we’ll hold or if we’ll burst.’

‘Double our celgas density over what time period, captain?’ asked Coss.

‘A minute, Mister Shaftcrank.’

‘Sir,’ protested the steamman, ‘there’s only one vessel that has ever attempted such a manoeuvre and she-’

‘I’m quite aware of what happened to the RAN Hotspur. Bring up those schematics from the engines’ archives,’ roared Jericho. ‘I’m going to play a little variation on the game of rock, paper, scissors. I call it carper, canvas, and iron — and I’m playing iron as m’hand.’

The captain’s voice faded from the chamber and Jack began working on dredging the dustiest corners of their records for the airwrights’ specifications. ‘He’s planning on ramming them, old steamer.’

‘By the copper beards of my ancestors,’ moaned the steamman. ‘The Loas preserve me from the mad schemes of you rash fast-bloods.’

‘The Cassarabians poked about on board when we were a prize vessel,’ said Jack. ‘They know we fly low and slow. Their ships are going to climb for height, and the skipper wants to bounce us right up into their bows.’

Jack gritted his teeth even as he said the words. They might dig up the tensile strength of their gas cells from the archives, but there wouldn’t be a solitary number on record to indicate whether the oddly crafted Iron Partridge could survive ramming a single Cassarabian airship, let alone three of them.

What was war anyway, but a collective, consensual madness between two nations? And they were under the command of an officer whose lunacy had been weighed by an admiralty that had judged him and run scared, leaving him marooned on the half-pay list. Only the next few minutes would reveal whether that was to make the Iron Partridge the deadliest ship in the fleet. Or the deadest.

Omar stopped at the door to read the elaborate script that had been traced on a copper plate by its side, but Farris Uddin did the job for him for the benefit of all the guardsmen disguised as womb mages, the commander’s tones inflected with a lisp-like quality by the length of his hunting nose.

‘Let only those womb mages of the Sect of Razat, or accompanied by the Sect of Razat, set foot beyond this boundary,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘And a saying from the twelfth book of Ben Issman, his name be blessed. “Let the efforts of your flesh be dedicated to progress, for in progress shall you be elevated.”’ Farris Uddin shook his head in anger.

‘Only the trusted may enter,’ said Omar. We are getting close.

‘Is this a warning or a call to heresy?’ asked Boulous.

‘One sect to control everything under god,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘This is the grand vizier’s vision — the destruction of the Holy Cent. He thinks he makes the empire stronger? He will tear us apart in ancient schisms by his perversions of the scripture’s holy word.’

Grimly, they pressed on through a series of narrow corridors, the end of the last corridor leading onto a gantry flanked by railings that crossed above a vault-like chamber perhaps a hundred feet high. The gantry branched out into smaller walkways to allow the womb mages access to the tanks below; hundreds of glass cases filled with every sort of creation the womb mages’ craft could call into existence. There were some creatures that looked to be related to the familiar biologicks that Omar recognized — the guardsmen’s draks, as well as the sandpedes the caravans used to cross the dunes — but the majority of the beasts were completely unfamiliar. Four-legged things the size of horses but with black armour carapaces, overlarge versions of the fighting beetles that Haffa townsmen used to set against each other while they laid wagers; water-filled tanks where dwarven oil-furred humanoids twisted and cut through the liquid — their child-like eyes staring out beseechingly; another creature man-sized, but lurching about, all exposed white bones with chords of muscle, as if someone had made a scarecrow by tying together dozens of bundles of sticks. With so many raw animal smells rising up in such close confines, Omar had to work not to gag through his womb mage’s mask.

The guardsmen stared uneasily at the howling, squalling, scampering mass of flesh beneath their boots. Even Omar felt the superstitious hackles rise on the back of his neck.

In an attempt to reassure the raiding party, Farris Uddin pointed down to the copper-plated pages of the spell books chained to each tank. ‘A flesh library. I have heard of such places. This is where the womb mages attempt to advance their craft. They alter their spells slightly to see what new creatures emerge from the wombs of their producers.’

They pressed on across the vault, windowless and dim except for a series of crimson lamps buried in the far wall. It was as if the flesh library had been made as a larger womb to store the children of the sorcerer’s craft. Boulous was the first to notice the ripples across the shadowed ceiling of the vault, pointing up and shouting a warning. What Omar had taken for tiles detached themselves in a black cloud and began wheeling down towards them.

‘Bats!’ shouted one of the guardsmen, sweeping his scimitar overhead as if swatting mosquitoes.

The creatures were the same size as bats, but their bodies were formed as bony flutes and they appeared to be eyeless and blind. They spiralled down and wheeled around the raiding party, keeping their distance from the brandished steel while emitting ear-piercing whistles. The occupants of the hundreds of tanks below started screeching and caterwauling in response.

‘They’re not attacking,’ called Omar. ‘They’re acting as a tripwire!’

Boulous wheeled around, looking at the circling creatures.

As if waiting for the word tripwire to be said aloud, the lights in the flesh library grew brighter, all the dim shadows banished — the trapped creatures howling in even greater panic.

‘They know!’ growled a guardsman, waving his pistol. ‘They know we are not of the Sect of Razat. We were warned …’

‘Quiet!’ barked Farris Uddin. ‘Lower your weapons. Even my hunter’s nose cannot detect what faith lies within a man’s heart. Make for the library’s exit.’ They sprinted forward, any attempt to resemble a muttering train of womb mages thrown to the wind. The doors in front rolling open matched the rumbling of the doors behind them sealing shut.

Waiting for them was a group of womb mages, including a familiar face that set Omar’s blood racing. Salwa! The murderous dog’s hood could not disguise his effeminate, sneering features. The womb mages parted to reveal a company of soldiers advancing. But these were no ordinary soldiers. Their flat, stone-like features were reminiscent of beyrogs — but squeezed down into a normal human-sized frame. Each of the beasts wore a round metal helmet that fitted so tightly it might have been part of its skull, a pair of iron spikes rising from each helm’s edge like curling horns.

‘How appropriate,’ Salwa called down the gantry. ‘The Caliph Eternal’s old elite guard of soldiers meets their replacements. We call them our claw-guard. A new guard for a new age of glory. Do you like your replacements? Unlike you, their loyalty to the sect is imprinted. No antiquated notions of honour to get in the way of serving the empire.’

‘Serving you,’ shouted Omar.

Salwa shrugged. ‘They are one and the same.’

‘The Caliph Eternal’s new guardsmen,’ scoffed Farris Uddin. ‘If you think those stone-faced monkeys of yours are guardsmen, then you’ve forgotten to give them a songbird each for them to call their draks!’

As he spoke, talons extended from the paw-like hands of the claw-guards, each as long a short-sword. Loping forward and snarling, the grand vizier’s vision of progress charged to meet the steel and war cries of their predecessors.

Sprinting through the raiders, Omar yelled in fury, seeing only an obstruction between him and the target of his scimitar. Time for me to feed you my blade. ‘Salwa! Salwa!’