Jack Cloudie

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

There were shouts verging on panic from the spotters on the bridge as the enemy fleet moved into position above them, bomb bays open and ready to fire.

Only seconds after Jack gave the order to engage the enemy, the spotters’ calls tailed off as the forward starboard engine car fell silent, matching the port side with its damaged rotors.

She’s compensating, the ship is offsetting the damage to port.

‘That’s the style,’ Pasco said in bewilderment to the airship. ‘Run us clear, old girl. Turn us back on bloody course.’

The Iron Partridge lifted upward, listing slightly, the manoeuvre accompanied by a strange clacking like a table of rapidly shifting dominoes being played. It was their armoured plates outside, rippling as they performed micro adjustments to the airship’s pitch and yaw. The metallic chattering was suddenly drowned out by an explosion, a hollow thump followed by an echoing infill of air as the first of the frill of mortar tubes along their spine spat out fire.

Then came the enraged roar of a leviathan, the line of mortars punching out a rippling salvo of projectiles right along the airship’s length. Each burning hot shell was visible from the bridge as an arc of red light, as though the Iron Partridge was a deep-water squid with multiple tentacles reaching out in the dark to seize every fish that surrounded it. A burning flower erupted at the end of each arc, quickly followed by crimson veins spreading across the envelopes of the Cassarabian airships, more detonations, as the enemy vessels shuddered and were torn apart.

‘Enemy bomb bays struck above,’ shouted the master pilot from the front of the bridge. ‘We’re putting our mortar shells right inside their magazines. There are mines and fin-bombs detonating all across the squadron’s loading frames!’

Jericho’s plan of action echoed in Jack’s head. ‘We need to be exactly where they seem to want us, bosun. Put us right under the shadow of their bomb bays.’

Jericho had trusted Jack to do his work, just as he had trusted the ship to be about her business. The ultimate bet in the deadliest game, made with the only stakes the skipper had left to play … our lives.

‘Yaw warning,’ called a sailor from their inclinometer. ‘Brace for port roll.’

Jack grabbed the sides of his command chair as the Iron Partridge rolled twenty degrees to port, the bombardment from the gun deck outside a deafening roar with the forward viewing canopy blown out. She had never been built to elevate her guns, but the ship was sighting them on the roll anyway.

‘Yaw warning, brace for starboard roll,’ warned the sailor again.

Thunder lifted out from their other side, enemy hulls lighting up in the night. Draks could briefly be glimpsed diving out of the way as the engine cars being targeted were blown free from their moorings, falling towards the ground with their rotors still turning.

Hissing a rain of ballast water from her sides, the Iron Partridge drifted upwards, rising like a wraith through the shoal of burning vessels. There was a different cadence to her manoeuvres now, the creaking carper decks almost silent as the airship picked a passage through the burning wreckage, ominously slow and deliberate.

They hovered on the crosswinds of flaming wreckage like a bird of prey, the telescope arrays in the crow’s nest and h-dome extending to their maximum magnification in the search for any resistance. Jack imagined the enemy airship damage tables being consulted on the calculation drums above, poor old Coss dancing around the transaction engines, cursing and working as the junior ratings they had pressed into service on the boilers shovelled in enough coal to meet the steam-driven thinking machines’ new voracity.

‘Station gunner,’ called Jack. ‘Magazine capacity?’

‘Magazine capacity, aye. Stores seventy per cent depleted on our cannons, and over eighty per cent empty on the mortar loading chamber,’ the sailor on the gunnery board called across to Jack, not bothering to conceal his concern at how fast they were rattling through the contents of the ship’s magazine. ‘Although all our fin-bombs are still accounted for, master cardsharp. Quarter gunners are reporting that our thirty-two pounders are running hot.’

‘Swab them out between the volleys,’ barked Jack. ‘I don’t care if the gunners have to drop their britches and water them with last night’s rum ration. Cool them off.’

Then the reverberation sounded again. Their ship not, it appeared, satisfied yet. Echoing in the thin night air, the Iron Partridge’s guns roared back into life, a ship-shaking snarl that became a constant thunder, one cannon after another, in perfect, timed synchronization, with just enough time for the first gun to be automatically reloaded on its shock-absorbing turntable mere seconds after the last cannon in the line had thundered to silence. The quaking under their boots grew stronger as the mortars added their voice to the massive barrage, Jack’s teeth literally shaking in his mouth as the bridge — opened to the air with her smashed canopy — trembled at the violence being worked in the heavens outside.

It was only as they rose above the burning enemy fleet that the extent of the devastation and how targeted their action had been became evident to Jack and the bridge crew. Every enemy vessel had its engine cars picked off, their bomb bays erupting volcano fire along their keel decks, and where the Jackelian airship’s recent broadsides had found their mark, the enemies’ upper lifting chambers were blown open, spilling rising gas bags into the night air in waves.

Sailors were leaping out of ripped envelopes on emergency chutes from a few of the vessels, their pattern obviously copied from Royal Aerostatical Navy standard — and their crew just as badly trained in their use. Only meant as a last resort, only intended to exit a burning airship with no hope of landing, the triangles of fabric were caught in the burning crosswinds and sent spiralling downward like burning moths, the ones that survived picked off by the guardsmen on their wheeling draks.

I would almost feel sorry for them, if they hadn’t done the same thing to the Fleet of the South.

Then, as if the entire wrecked fleet was merely an aerial display mounted only for the bridge crew’s benefit, the great mass of burning airships began to lose equilibrium at the same time, their sole remaining lifting chambers unable to support the loss of ballonets topside. The enemy fleet’s nose cones dipped, almost in salute, and began to sink groundward, trailing ugly coils of black smoke in their wake. Jack might have been mistaken, but he swore he glimpsed the shape of Lemba of the Empty Thrusters forming in the smoke for a moment. Then the Loa was gone and cold starlight filled the night sky.

Jack turned in the hard-backed command chair, gazing out at the devastation, trying not to be startled by what had been worked upon the enemy fleet, by what had happened to him. He had forgotten himself. It was as if he had become Captain Jericho during the battle, worn the position of captain as though it was an officer’s cloak, one possessed by the soul of its last owner. Was this what command was like? Death seen from someone else’s eyes; the deaths he had ordered.

They had won.

Lieutenant McGillivray broke the stunned silence that had descended over the bridge crew as an evil whistling split the air outside. ‘And what in the name of the Circle is that unholy caterwauling?’

‘That, Mister McGillivray,’ said Jack, leaning back into the hard confines of the iron chair, ‘is the air of a rather imperfect rendition of Lion of Jackals cooling the tubes of our mortars. I understand that some call it progress.’

Holding back the claw-guards was like breaking the tidal rush of a river, the narrow passage they were retreating down restricting the enemy ranks to four or five snarling, slavering monsters, the head of a column hundreds deep, surging and jostling at the swinging scimitars of the surviving beyrogs. All of the stench and the shouts and the screams of the conflict funnelled down to a few feet of lashing blades, the commodore’s arm aching from picking off the beasts that came leaping over the shoulders of the beyrogs. Flogging and slicing until his old shoulders were numb from the effort of it, his sword arm heavy with pain. I might as well be an oarsman condemned to the seat of a wicked slave galley.

Every minute or so they would lose another exhausted beyrog to the avalanche of claw-guards pressing in against their ranks, a giant soldier toppling over with his bright uniform torn to shreds and his cuirass opened up by the constant rain of talon strikes. By the commodore’s side, Westwick looked every bit as exhausted as the commodore felt, her coffee-coloured skin slicked with sweat and her blade arm still and raised for the next attack, no more of the flourishes and fancy spins that he’d noticed she favoured when they had started fighting. Biding her time and preserving her energy for the next claw-guard to break through the retreating unit’s lines. Only the one-eyed giant acting as the company’s captain appeared to be undiminished by the constant, harrowing withdrawal. He kept his blade spinning around like a small windmill, decapitating his miniature cousins as they came leaping forward, seizing others mid-air, throttling them and contemptuously tossing their limp bodies against the walls.

For all of their animal snarls, the beyrogs’ stone-skinned faces lent them a strangely stoical, immobile cast as they fought. Whereas soldiers from the race of man would have exhibited confusion, fear and anger in this relentless close-quarter’s combat, the only sign of emotions from the beyrogs came from their eyes, their most human feature. Fighting alongside them was like fighting alongside the trolls from some polar barbarian’s fireside legend. But even giants from legend could die when the odds were this appallingly stacked against their favour.

Who will remember me if I fall here? Who would remember poor old Blacky? His friends back home, perhaps. The friends with whom he shared his residence, Tock House? Poor old Jared Black, off on one of his mysterious little jaunts, and he simply never came back from his last journey. Lost like one of those mortal fool explorers in the jungles of the east. Not much time to grieve for him, not when he was lost to the storm that would emerge from the empire’s borders, sweeping the entire Kingdom before it. Everything he had lived and fought for all of his life. The forested roads of their green and pleasant land echoing to the jingle of the campaign kit of creatures such as these claw-guards, the last few red-coated regiments of the Middlesteel Rifles broken by the grand vizier’s forces.

Feeling a slight airflow on his neck, the commodore risked a glance behind him. Sweet Circle, they were running out of the passageway, the corridor opening out to their rear. He remembered where they were now, from their journey down from the barracks. The beyrogs were falling back towards the central chamber of the Citadel of Flowers, where the multiple wings of the evil construction joined in an inner concourse that had been speared through the core by a calliope of lifting rooms, dozens of the pipe-like conveyances linked by gantries and walkways. While the commodore’s beyrog escort had been ignored well enough on the way down by the hundreds of womb mages and their servants in the order moving through the chamber — just another military unit marching through the citadel — something told him the citadel’s denizens would find it harder to ignore a pitched battle being fought between two breeds of their own sorcery-created monstrosities. Damn his unlucky stars. A dim cavernous hall with minimal cover. Their depleted force would be overwhelmed within a minute of leaving the tight confines of the passage.

Westwick had spotted the danger as well. ‘Hold your ground! Hold them here!’

‘We can’t do it, Maya,’ said the commodore, dodging back as talons lashed through the beyrogs’ ranks, trying to reach him. ‘There isn’t enough fight left in the few bodies we have remaining.’

‘If they get behind us …’

‘We have to cut and run, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘That’s the only option we have other than planting our corpses here.’

‘The Caliph Eternal’s protectors will not turn tail and flee.’

Commodore Black hardly counted his tired old bones among that list, but perhaps the first lieutenant — along with all of the Pasdaran’s other agents — did.

‘I’ll give them their mortal lead, then. A clean pair of heels — a strategy that’s been used by many a great general.’

‘You try to run and I’ll bloody kill you myself. Hold them back!’ shouted Westwick, hacking out at the legion of beasts.

But she might as well have been yelling at the tides of the sea for all of the effect that her orders had. Another beyrog slipped on the bloody floor, weighed down by a pack of roaring, slashing claw-guards, the gap left in the line allowing the grand vizier’s pets to burst through. Westwick rolled across the floor, sweeping the feet out from under the attackers, the beyrog captain and Commodore Black hewing into the claw-guards before they could regain their balance.

The beyrog formation closed ranks, thinner then ever, trampling back across the fresh corpses, driven into retreat by the sheer weight and ferocity of the numbers coming towards them.

Even by the fierce standards of battle in Cassarabia, where the losers were so often given the sword, this battle was as bad and bloody as any that had ever been fought inside the empire. No quarter given, expected or asked for. Has Mutantarjinn ever seen anything like it before? The terrible city was no stranger to misery. The generations of slaves whose lives had leeched away here as they gave birth to the dark creations of womb-mage sorcery. Its dark towers squatting in a chasm cut out of a hellish plain and beaten by the devil’s own storms. And now the empire’s sorcerous armies were pitted against each other in a civil war that looked as if it would sweep across the face of the civilized world.

Inch by inch the beyrogs surrendered the passage to the foe, leaving the claw-guards’ bodies piled up in front of their ranks, the corpses pushed aside and clambered over by fresh soldiers howling their anger towards the caliph’s private bodyguard. Edging closer to the citadel’s cavernous central hall, until the cold currents of the open space were running like ice along the back of the commodore’s neck.

Commodore Black stumbled back. They had long since lost their two buglers to the sabre-like claws of the grand vizier’s pets, but the beyrogs didn’t need the orders of a trumpet to form the only disposition that could preserve their lives for a few seconds more. They fell back towards the hall’s centre, automatically making a square; their scimitars dripping gore and their cuirasses dented by rifle fire and talon strikes and streaked with blood. Hundreds of womb mages and their staff scattered across the ground level of the hall, clamouring as the tide of bloody violence spilled out into the open, while servants shouted on the walkways above and pointed down in disbelief. Pouring out of the passage as though they were a nest of angered ants, the claw-guards surged into the open, loping and circling the few beyrogs left alive, waiting until they had overwhelming numbers to rout the ruler’s bodyguard in a single charge. Imperial Aerial Squadron marines and armed sailors were assembling at the edges of the chamber, pushing shells into their rifles’ breeches. The commodore kicked an empty crossbow quiver in frustration. We have nothing with which to match their guns.

Then there was a strange sound that Commodore Black had never heard before, rising from the throats of the beyrogs. A wolf-like keening. Their death dirge, or — no it was directed at the figure emerging from the passage surrounded by claw-guards. Immed Zahharl. The grand vizier victoriously emerging like an emperor come to give the sign of life or death to gladiators lying in the sand. It was a song of pure loathing directed at the man who had dared to overthrow their beloved ruler of rulers and crown himself emperor over their master’s corpse.

‘Do you expect us to surrender?’ Westwick shouted from the middle of the square.

The grand vizier shook his head slowly, smiling all the while. ‘Knowing that this is the very last trouble I shall receive from a member of the secret police? Please, don’t deny me that.’ He pointed his sword at the huddled formation of survivors from the caliph’s bodyguard. ‘Make ready-’

He was interrupted by a shout from the gantry above. ‘Not the last trouble, surely?’

Commodore Black gawked up at the sight of hundreds of beyrogs with their crossbows pointed down into the hall, the caliph standing with the young guardsman Omar Barir in front of a number of glass tanks being manoeuvred out of the lifting rooms at the chamber’s centre.

‘I am sure the Pasdaran are still interested in treason and,’ the caliph flung a hand back towards the tanks, ‘the perverted sorceries of the grand vizier.’

There were gasps of outrage from the womb mages scattered across the massive chamber as they gazed at the faces of the slowly squirming men in the tanks, prisoners’ sweating bearded cheeks glowing in the nutrient mist; twisted, pregnant bellies laid out like hills of flesh before them.

‘Hear me. Hear your Caliph Eternal. This is the progress which the Sect of Razat brings you!’ shouted the young ruler, his voice carrying far across the quieted hall. ‘The progress of slaves and criminals who were born women and who have perverted their bodies towards the male form through the use of an illegal changeling virus. Criminals who have dared to use a variation of that foul virus to turn men into producers to breed unlicensed monstrosities.’ His arm swept across the chamber. ‘They have done this so that you, all of you, will take their places in the tanks of the producers!’

‘He lies!’ yelled Immed Zahharl. ‘This is not the Caliph Eternal, only a twisted product of the womb mages’ arts created by rebels and traitors. Believe not a thing that this weak-minded dog says.’

Omar Barir moved forward to the edge of the rail, flinging his hand back towards the tanks. ‘Believe in the evidence in front of your eyes. And believe in the loyalty of the Caliph Eternal’s bodyguard. You all know that his beyrogs follow only the true emperor’s word, and they follow this man, as do his imperial guardsmen and every drak rider soaring in the sky above this city.’

‘As do the Pasdaran,’ called Westwick, pointing her sword at the grand vizier as if her blade might leap out and skewer the chief minister.

‘I am the future,’ railed the grand vizier. ‘I have given the empire a new golden age.’ He pointed at the Imperial Aerial Squadron sailors and marines, a tone of pleading intruding into the ice of his voice. ‘I have given you heaven’s command. I have given you victories and plunder. I have given you a new beginning. This, this is only the start of what we shall achieve together.’

High above, the beyrogs laid into one of the producer’s tanks with the butts of their huge crossbows, shattering the crystal walls and rolling its twisted, bloated occupant to the edge of the gantry.

‘Take a good look,’ yelled Omar. ‘This is her new beginning.’

There was a series of enraged shouts from the airship sailors at the end of the chamber, officers desperately trying to keep their men in formation, followed by a series of yells as the officers collapsed to the ground to the echo of rifle shots, their mutinous troops surging forward. Lost in the roar were the frightened yelps from sorcerers wearing the symbols of the Sect of Razat, dozens of them fleeing from a mob made up of howling womb mages and their servants.

‘I gave you the future!’ yelled Immed Zahharl, backing away as the provoked Cassarabians surged towards him, his retinue of beasts standing by his side, cutting the air nervously with their sabre hands.

‘The gratitude of kings,’ whispered Commodore Black, looking up at the caliph. ‘I told you it was a mortal poor thing, Maya.’ It’s a hard thing I do for the Kingdom today; as wicked hard as any, to save it by putting down a slave uprising down here. Maybe that’s why no Jackelian believes in hell … because when you find yourself in it, you can only pick the lesser of two demons.

‘He still has his regiment of monsters,’ said Westwick, pushing her way through the defensive square of beyrogs as the claw-guards fell back around the grand vizier.

The chamber erupted into violence as the Imperial Aerial Squadron marines opened up on the grand vizier’s claw-guards with their carbines, adding their balls and gun smoke to the rain of crossbow bolts suddenly being loosed by the beyrogs from above. Immed Zahharl and his bodyguard retreated out of the concourse under the fierce hail.

Omar Barir was sliding down the rails of the stairs towards their position and the caliph leant over the gantry to call down. ‘Take the grand vizier alive if you can, guardsman. He has many secrets to tell us before he can be allowed to pass.’

A ball from a marine’s gun buzzed between the commodore and Westwick, bouncing off the cuirass of one of their beyrogs.

‘I’ll keep the boy safe,’ said the commodore. ‘You make sure his majesty up there lives long enough to declare peace with Jackals.’

‘And the grand vizier,’ said Westwick, in a flat tone of voice that Commodore Black wasn’t sure was a statement or a question.

‘Best efforts, lass.’ He patted his sword.

‘The abomination will be heading for the citadel’s airship harbour,’ said Westwick. ‘It’s what I would do. Rendezvous with the fleet and then bomb the city into rubble. Leave no survivors alive to tell of what happened here.’

‘There’s a pity,’ said the commodore. ‘Given that surviving is what I do so blessed well.’

He ran after the young guardsman, the beyrog captain and his giant soldiers following and cutting a path through the ranks of claw-guards trying to stop them. All down to me, again, curse my unlucky stars. In the heart of enemy territory, two nations to save, and only the sword of an unlucky old fool to rely on.