Jack Cloudie

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Omar was running through the Citadel of Flowers’ oppressive halls and passages, a dozen beyrogs and the commodore fast on his heels, as the Caliph Eternal’s voice finished echoing out of the voicebox in the wall. His order to hunt down the grand vizier and the Sect of Razat was fading from the corridor, but the promise of a caliph’s fortune if the chief minister was handed over in chains had clearly had its effect on the commodore, the old u-boat man’s eyes twinkling with new-found zeal for their task.

Omar suddenly drew to a halt.

‘What is it lad?’ the commodore wheezed, catching up with him. ‘A stitch in that sorcery-poisoned gut of yours?’

‘The grand vizier didn’t come this way,’ said Omar.

‘This is the way to the blessed airship harbour,’ said the commodore. ‘Where that rascal’s private packet is tied up snug alongside all the other pocket airships.’

‘He’s not running for the harbour,’ said Omar, extending his senses through the citadel to confirm his suspicions. ‘I can feel the venom of his soul, and he’s not passed this way.’ He pointed to the floor. ‘That way. He’s going lower into the citadel, to the east wing — I’d swear it on the gates of heaven.’

‘Those gates won’t be opening for the grand vizier any time soon,’ said the commodore, scratching his beard as he recovered his breath. ‘The gates of your hell, now, that’s another matter. So, what’s he up to?’

‘Immed Zahharl must have realized we’d look to seize him at the harbour,’ said Omar. Always one step ahead of me, but not this time. I can smell your stinking soul, grand vizier. Soaked as it is with the blood of Shadisa and everyone else who’s died to keep you in power.

‘The cunning devil won’t be ducking into the city’s streets on foot,’ said the commodore. ‘He might be able to get away with one of the slavers’ caravans, but by the time he reaches the next town his mortal ugly mug will be plastered across the garrison’s walls. His scalp carrying a sum of gold so large that he’d have every wicked bounty hunter in the empire turning over barrels trying to cut his throat. He needs to act fast if he’s to stay in power and he knows it.’

Omar looked at the one-eyed beyrog officer waiting in front of his troops. ‘What’s in the east wing of the citadel, captain? What do they have down there that we won’t find in the rest of the fortress?’

Commodore Black looked towards the young guardsman for a translation of the beyrog officer’s rapid flicker of sign language.

‘It’s the great stables,’ said Omar. ‘Where the womb mages’ new stock is bedded down before being sent across the empire.’

‘Well, he’s not heading down there to help the stable hands clean out their stalls, lad,’ said the commodore.

‘No,’ sighed Omar.

What sly mischief would the murderous traitor who had corrupted Shadisa be working against them among the womb mages’ creations?

They ran, Omar driven by the frantic dread that the grand vizier would have vanished by the time they reached the stables. Vanished like a mist of pure evil, one of the life-leeching djinn of legend, reforming elsewhere to continue his perverted schemes. Something undead and unkillable. But I’ll try to kill him, fate, by the hundred faces of heaven, I’ll try. And you will let me. You owe that much to me for Shadisa’s death.

By the time they gained the arch to the vast series of chambers that composed the great stables, Omar found they weren’t the only ones attempting to hunt down the grand vizier’s cabal. A company of Immed Zahharl’s surviving claw-guards was locked in unequal combat with the stable staff — pitchforks and baling hooks no match for the monsters’ sword-length talons. The beasts were assisted by a mob of robed figures — keepers and holy servants from the Sect of Razat — along with a scrum of highly placed womb mages. So, the grand vizier’s inner circle had heard the Caliph Eternal’s commands and were trying to flee the sinking ship alongside their master.

Omar’s force raced into the carnage, the beyrogs battering aside Immed Zahharl’s twisted creations, the sounds of scimitars connecting with leather armour stifled by the racket from hundreds of sandpedes in one of the side-stalls rearing up and clawing in panic at the iron bars with their segmented legs.

But where is the grand vizier? The dregs of the regime were here, trying to save their skins, but where was the dog himself? Omar could almost taste Immed Zahharl’s rage, his hatred for the guardsman who had come so close to overthrowing his rule for good. He was still inside the great stable, his soul pulsing with venomous loathing for Omar.

Omar smashed aside a claw-guard, the beyrogs behind him covering his back as he sprinted down the central passage — fifty foot wide with two levels of cavernous stalls on either side, filled with creatures driven into a frenzy by the un expected violence that had spilled into the normally quiet stables.

‘Immed Zahharl!’ yelled Omar. ‘Come out. The smallest and least significant of your loose ends has come for you. Show me of how little account you find me now.’

‘Watch out lad!’ The commodore’s shouted warning almost came too late.

Catching the movement above him, Omar desperately rolled forward, tonnes of moving metal almost slicing him in half as a vast gate composed of thousands of bars dropped down from the ceiling, locking into place in a concrete groove in the floor. As he came to his feet, Omar found himself the only one from the caliph’s force on his side of the great stables — all of the beyrogs and the commodore still locked in battle against the grand vizier’s cabal and their claw-guards on the other side.

Commodore Black had a stable keeper pushed up against the gate on the opposite side. ‘Open the blessed doors.’

‘I cannot,’ yelled the man, looking in terror at the sabre hovering inches from his chest. He jerked a hand at a corpse on the floor wearing stable livery. ‘Only the stable master has the codes to unlock the stampede wall.’

Commodore Black banged the bars in frustration. ‘I’ll force the lock. Crack it and get the beyrogs across to you. Stay there, lad.’

‘He’s here,’ said Omar, feeling the intense ball of burning hate throbbing behind him. ‘Old man, if I don’t make it …’

‘Don’t say that, lad. Saying it can make it come true. You’re a guardsman, the blessed blade of the Caliph Eternal himself. You remember that.’

‘Yes,’ said Omar. That is all I have left. His house, Shadisa, Boulous, Farris Uddin, his family, all swallowed up by the ambitions of a single hellion in human form. But I’m still a guardsman. ‘Your friend, Jared Black, the Pasdaran woman. You know she’s going to kill you here.’

The commodore winked at him through the bars. ‘Aye, you might be right, but you worry about yourself, not me. There’s many a slip, lad, between cup and lip.’

Omar turned down the stable’s central passage, walking forward and ignoring the clash of swords and screams from the gate behind him. ‘You’ve left your people to die, Immed Zahharl.’

‘But the empire teems with so many people.’ There he was, the grand vizier emerging on one of the stone walkways built into the wall, standing in front of stalls on the second level. ‘And the future is always purchased by sacrifice.’

So it seems, but until now, never yours.

Omar pointed his scimitar up towards the grand vizier’s heart. ‘The future is one body short.’

‘I do so hate wasting a good breeder,’ the grand vizier called down. ‘How does your stomach feel, last son of Barir? The first wave of agony should have passed by now. The second wave will begin to burn inside you some time tomorrow morning. In a couple of days you will need a company of beyrogs to carry you to your new duty. How fine it would have been, to see you and the boy king in labour, your faces turning purple as you squeezed out another litter of claw-guards to fight for me. Why must you always disrupt my pleasures?’

Is that the secret the Caliph Eternal talked of keeping the grand vizier alive for? Does he believe that without the creator of the changeling virus, the other womb mages will have no chance of curing us?

‘Your little enculi wants me alive,’ laughed the grand vizier. ‘But do you think the empire’s soldiers and sailors will still follow their precious Caliph Eternal so readily after his belly has bloated large enough to give birth to a sandpede? What about you? Does the last son of Barir wish me alive, or as a corpse?’

Omar wrestled with the conflicting feelings inside him. What did he want, what did he need?

‘If I live, you are both dead,’ jeered the grand vizier. ‘If I die, you are both cursed. That is my revenge, guardsman, and it is purer than every last gold coin the caliph has placed on my head as a bounty.’

‘A guardsman is the Caliph Eternal’s right arm,’ said Omar, climbing a wall rail to reach the stable’s second tier. ‘Bound to obey his oath.’

Still retreating, the grand vizier laughed at Omar. ‘Come, little peacock, show me the strength of your oath.’

‘Here’s my vow. I’m a freed slave with the stench of the sack of Haffa still reeking in my nostrils,’ yelled Omar, pulling himself up onto the second level of stalls. ‘I was raised by water farmers and a tribesman of the Mutrah, a wild reformed bandit who was little better than a savage. I’m not going to take you alive, by the blood of my house and my family and Shadisa, I’m going to slice you into pieces.’

Immed Zahharl had stopped by the stall at the end of the row, stooping to unlock its gate with a key stolen from the stable master’s corpse. ‘That, at last, is the truth of it. And I am the last princess of the noblest house of Hakaqibla. You were given your pathetically limited existence only to serve me.’ The grand vizier stepped back into the open stall and disappeared.

Omar caught a familiar smell from inside the stall. Draks! The grand vizier had been heading down to the stables to saddle a drak and try to fly out to the fleet on one of his enemy’s own steeds. Omar entered the antechamber to the drak eyrie, a tack room racked with saddle storage, hay, bedding, forks and rakes, the draks held back by a second gate inside. The grand vizier had already reached a control panel on the far wall, and a hangar door in the outside wall was drawing back, revealing the towers of Mutantarjinn beyond, the storm still whipping through the chasm.

Unhooking a drak saddle from the wall, the grand vizier dropped it on the floor and drew his scimitar. ‘Leave me to escape and I’ll cure your infected belly, lowly slave. You do realize I’m the only womb mage alive with the skills to save you.’

Omar shook his head and pointed to the draks shifting about in the eyrie chamber behind them. ‘I would give birth to every drak inside there just for the chance to carve you into pieces.’

Immed Zahharl kicked the saddle aside. Angrily raising the scimitar high in a guard position, the grand vizier drew out a long dagger from behind his back, turning it between his fingers in an intricate, hypnotizing motion. ‘At least your stupidity has the benefit of consistency. Come, lowly slave, come and show me what you have been taught. My line’s blood is destined to be mirrored down the ages — while yours shall be spilled here.’

Ignoring mocking jibes that were only intended to drive him in anger onto the pair of blades, Omar circled the grand vizier slowly, marking the expert way he turned the weapons. Someone had trained him to fight. Someone every bit the equal of the old cadet master back in the palace fortress. But then, given the grand vizier’s wealth, he would have paid for the very best tutors from the finest duelling halls inside the empire.

There was a clash of steel as their blades lashed out at the same time, the grand vizier’s feet moving and twisting in the steps of a sinister dance. Their swords clashed again, Omar side-stepping the dagger in the politician’s other hand, kicking out with his boot towards Immed Zahharl’s knee and nearly losing his balance as the grand vizier darted out of the way with balletic grace.

‘Brutal and direct,’ sneered Immed Zahharl. ‘Every bit the guardsman and every bit the slave.’

There is nothing fancy about gutting a traitorous dog. Omar bit his lip and feinted left while changing his thrust at the last second and cutting right. The grand vizier swayed back, but a moment too slow, the tip of Omar’s scimitar nicking his cheek and drawing blood. Immed Zahharl wiped it off with the back of his dagger hand and Omar hissed in frustration as he saw the line of his cut fading from the grand vizier’s face as if it was being erased by an invisible pencil.

‘I didn’t just reverse my gender,’ said the grand vizier. ‘I remade myself into a weapon, a razor with which to flay the skin from my enemies.’ He cut out viciously and Omar retreated a couple of steps under the force of the blows. The grand vizier hawked a gob of spit at Omar and the edge of the guardsman’s sword began to burn and blister where the spittle had struck above the hilt. Acid, he can spit acid. ‘I am an instrument of heaven, little slave. Divine justice given human form.’

‘Tell that lie to the widows of Haffa.’

‘Your father was nothing more than a corpulent vulture,’ laughed the grand vizier. ‘Complacently subsisting on the inventions of his ancestors. His coward’s fear of a new age doomed your house and all its allies. I was only the cliff edge he and the fading glories of your failing sect chose to jump off. Truly, it was he who killed your people, not I.’

Omar grunted as they threw themselves at each other, blades crashing, thrusting and probing in a fierce exchange. The grand vizier was as thin as a whip, but Omar could see that his sorceries had done something to his muscles. They moved in strange, alien ways that gave him the purchase and raw strength of someone four or five times his size — as if his skin had been filled by a host of eels squirming and wiggling.

Another fierce clash, and the scimitar in Immed Zahharl’s hand seemed to speed into a blur, breaking through Omar’s parries as easily as a knot being severed. Omar yelled as the sabre sliced through his sword arm’s biceps, its sudden bite burning, his arm plunged into fire. He dropped his scimitar into his left hand, his right arm hanging useless by his side.

‘See how quick my new body is,’ cooed the grand vizier. ‘A little push from my mind, and you are moving so slowly to my eyes that you might as well be wading through a sand drift. Did your guardsmen tutors take pity on you, little slave, and teach you how to fight left-handed?’

Omar lunged out and the grand vizier easily turned his blade. ‘I didn’t think so. Tell me how exquisite my new body is, slave. Tell me how you want it, how you need it.’

Omar yelled in desperation, ignoring the burning pain and swinging out with the scimitar in his left hand, but the grand vizier darted aside, plunging the dagger deep into Omar’s left shoulder. The young guardsman fell to the floor as the scimitar was kicked out of his hand to the crack of two or three of his fingers breaking.

‘Heaven chose to make me this way,’ the grand vizier whispered in Omar’s ear, before stepping back and booting him in the gut. ‘I am beautiful.’

Omar was left doubled up, coughing on the floor, blood spluttering out of his mouth and onto the stall’s concrete and sawdust. ‘A terrible beauty,’ gagged Omar. ‘So fast.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the pacing grand vizier, the scimitar rotating in his hand, measuring the length of the killing stroke. The executioner’s stroke that will sever my head from my body.

‘There’s one thing I have,’ Omar moaned in pain, pulling the grand vizier’s dagger out of his shoulder with his numb, crippled fingers, as blood gushed out of the wound.

‘Ah,’ smiled Immed Zahharl. ‘The great knife fighter from Haffa.’

Omar rolled forward in agony, pitching the blade at the grand vizier, the lazy rotations of the dagger missing the devil’s side by at least a couple of feet.

‘Perhaps you are more of a pistol master?’ laughed the grand vizier.

‘The one thing I had wasn’t your knife,’ said Omar, pulling himself to his feet. ‘It’s six months of foul-tasting, foul-smelling guards’ rations inside my body.’

Omar let the keening howls behind the grand vizier distract the man, just long enough for him to pitch forward in a charge and carry both their bodies tumbling through the opening gate and into the drak eyrie. Perhaps the grand vizier’s quick eyes even had time to notice Omar’s stolen dagger still quivering in the lever of the stable release handle. Yes, after six months of cadet rations Omar smelled like something a drak might actually acknowledge as its rightful master. Even an unbroken, raw fledgling drak — even an eyrie full of the wild, untamed beasts.

A long sinuous neck lashed out, sweeping Omar’s feet from underneath him, before a pair of more mature draks snapped out angrily at the young upstart beast that was daring to challenge a guardsman. Grunting in pain and allowing the more developed pair to protect him, Omar limped to the side of the tall eyrie.

In the centre of the chamber, Immed Zahharl was on his feet, curving his sword threateningly in front of the dozens of draks now circling him. Such a fine, exquisite body. But to a drak, it smelled nothing like a guardsman should. Some of the draks were so young that their scales hadn’t turned green yet, but even a fledgling drak weighed as much as a rhino.

‘My womb mages created you,’ shouted the grand vizier. ‘I created you.’

Hissing and darting their heads forward, the draks began to test the grand vizier’s defences. His scimitar leapt out and the snarling draks’ heads snapped back.

‘They don’t care,’ Omar called. ‘They’re the past and the guardsmen’s traditions, thousands of years of them, and our traditions have finally caught up with you.’

‘You are cursed, slave,’ shouted Immed Zahharl as a drak snapped the grand vizier’s blade away from him. ‘You will never be cured now. My death has cursed you!’

Omar shook his head. ‘No, I’m a guardsman, not a slave. And I’ve cursed myself.’ My choice. For what I did to Shadisa. But you first, you mangy bastard!

Immed Zahharl tried to run, striking out with his quick hands at the draks, but as fast as his sorcery-twisted body was, he could not evade an eyrie full of angry, snapping draks, their powerful, muscled tails beating out at him, claws flashing. More and more of the enraged creatures emerged from the side chambers and launched themselves down on him with the force of falling sabres.

Omar backed away towards the eyrie’s gate, the pair of draks trailing him stopping only to gaze at the dozens of their cousins feasting on the unexpected treat that had been thrown into their midst. The nearest of the pair grunted and Omar gasped as he caught sight of the human eyes buried inside the lizard-like features of the drak’s armoured skull. His eyes. This was the drak he had sacrificed his flesh for back in the palace. Omar’s bonded drak. It hissed knowingly at him, attracted by the invisible affinity between them. They were the same. It would ride for him like no other drak would, sensing his every whim, anticipating his every command in the air. Together, they would become the ultimate living weapon.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Omar, pushing the eyrie gate’s closure lever. ‘You’ll feel the storm on your wings soon enough.’

Behind him, Commodore Black came running down the gantry of the stable’s upper level, a trail of biologicks in the stalls tracking his steps and hooting plaintively for a long overdue feed.

‘Immed Zahharl?’ asked the man.

Omar waved his crippled hand towards the eyrie.

Commodore Black grunted when he looked through at the sight on the other side of the gate. ‘Then we’ve won, lad.’

Omar propped his bleeding body against the wall. Shadisa was lost to him. Farris Uddin, Boulous, half the guardsmen, his father and his home gone. His very body was cursed with the grand vizier’s foul sorcery.

‘No.’

‘You’re learning, Mister Barir,’ said the commodore. ‘This is what victory tastes of. Clear your throat and spit the blood out, because you’re alive enough to sup on its ashes.’

From the other end of the stables came the victorious cheers of the stable hands and the animal-like bellows of the beyrogs. The last claw-guard had fallen, the corpses of the Sect of Razat’s inner circle left sprawled across the floor.

Victory had come to the citadel, but it wasn’t nearly enough to fill the hollow inside Omar’s soul. He had learnt the last lesson of being a guardsman, the one every soldier had to learn for himself.