Jack Cloudie

CHAPTER SIX

‘Help me,’ begged the six-year-old stuck down the claustrophobically tight shaft. ‘I can’t breathe down here, I’m choking, please-’

But Jack couldn’t help. He was running for his life through the vaults of Lords Bank, hissing waves of poison gas swirling at his heels, the shouts and shots of the bank guards and the constabulary whistling around him. Maggie was waiting for Jack at the breached wall, trying to stop him ducking back out into the sewers.

‘Go back for them, you can’t just leave the boys in there.’

‘It’s little Tozer,’ said Jack, ‘he’s stuck — we’ll all die if we try to pull him out.’

‘It’s not just Tozer,’ shouted Maggie, ‘he’s in there with your brothers, Jack. Your brothers are thieves now, just like you.’

‘No!’ screamed Jack, but the bank’s wall had collapsed behind him. He scrabbled at the fallen masonry with his nails, digging until his fingers were broken and bleeding.

Boyd was laughing in Jack’s ear, shaking him by the shoulders until he felt as if he were rocking on the deck of a ship. ‘Leave them to die. Leave all the runts to die.’

Jack gasped as he woke, his cheeks wet with tears. For the boy he couldn’t save, or for the two brothers he had abandoned to their fate?

‘Damn me for a coward,’ whispered Jack to himself, rubbing his eyes as the makeshift bed swung gently. For that is what I am. Try as he might, Jack couldn’t get used to sleeping in a hammock, the sling of fabric between the boilers permitting its occupant no shifting or rolling from side to side. It was an all-enveloping swaddle that moved of its own accord with the trims and turns of the airship.

As if this alien way of sleeping wasn’t enough, there was the noise of the ship: the Iron Partridge’s croaking beams, the crackling from behind the closed furnace doors, the rattle and clack of the spinning transaction-engine drums — a constant low rumble even on their reduced-power setting. And now the Iron Partridge was sailing through a storm, the rain drumming on the sealed skylight above, the armoured glass failing to soften the whistle of the wind through the forest of mortar tubes running along the spine of her hull.

Groaning at the snores from the two Benzari stokers, Jack swung his legs off the hammock and touched his feet down on the deck, the surface every bit as warm as John Oldcastle had promised in the space between the boilers. But of Oldcastle himself, there was no sign. His hammock lay empty. Over in the transaction-engine pit, Jack could just see the metal skull of Coss Shaftcrank moving through the maze of thinking machines, checking the steam pressure of the dials as he reached up with an oil can to apply lubricant to a bank of rotating drums. Jack walked over to the rail.

‘Where’s Oldcastle?’ Jack asked, low enough not to wake up the pair of stokers.

‘I believe there is a game of chance being played down in the surgeon’s ward,’ said Coss. ‘Although the master cardsharp was rather insistent that there would be a degree of skill in its playing, which he believes he possesses in abundance.’

‘My father thought much the same,’ said Jack. ‘That and a couple of poor harvests was enough to lose our family everything we owned.’

‘The injection of unnecessary risk into a life is one trait of your people I have never understood, Jack softbody. By my rolling regulators, the great pattern of existence always seems capable of providing us ample dangers without going to the trouble of actively seeking them out.’

Jack leant across the pit’s rail and looked up at the rain lashing against the skylight. ‘What are you doing here, Coss?’

‘I require less sleep than you softbodies,’ said the steamman. ‘I can function reliably on a fifth of the rest you need. The extra shifts I can complete were one of the reasons, I suspect, why the master cardsharp was so eager to procure my services.’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I mean what are you doing here, on the Iron Partridge? I’ve seen graspers and craynarbians on the ship, but you’re the only steamman on board. I had no choice. For me, it was this or the rope outside Bonegate jail. But I saw you back in the signing queue … you were desperate to sign up.’

‘It is my destiny, my softbody friend,’ said Coss. ‘Do you know much about my people and how we are born? Have you ever visited the Steamman Free State?’

‘No,’ Jack admitted. ‘And there weren’t any steammen in the debtors’ prison or living rough on the streets.’

‘Kiss my condensers, but there would not be,’ said Coss. ‘Our kind cares for each other too well to permit the crime of poverty to be inflicted on our people. Normally, when a steamman is born in the Free State, it is the will of King Steam and the skill of the king’s architects that give him life. A steamman starts life in a nursery body which has been inhabited many times before, and after his education is complete, his intellect is then transferred into his final adult body.’

‘You said normally.’

‘There is another way a steamman can be born,’ said Coss. ‘Much rarer. The more advanced members of our race can simultaneously distribute their intellect across multiple bodies, their own main body and those of their drones as well. The drones are called Mu-bodies, and are treated as tools, or perhaps as you softbodies might treat a favourite suit of clothes.’

‘I’ve seen them,’ said Jack, remembering the time he and Maggie had been picking pockets outside the steammen embassy; a large tracked steamman with a crystal dome-topped head moving past with a retinue of gnome-sized metallic servants surrounding him.

‘Mu-bodies sometimes develop sentience,’ said Coss. ‘Occasionally spontaneously, more often than not as a result of being possessed by one of our ancestral spirits, the Steamo Loas. This is the other way of birth for the life metal. When such an event happens, the intellect is moved out of the drone, into a nursery body, and finally into an adult body when our years of education are complete. But our people feel a degree of disquiet towards those not born from the familiar, comforting designs of King Steam’s architects. I, press my unlucky plug rods, had such a birth. The population at large does not trust us, and we are regarded as the mischief of the gods, touched by madness. We are known as mutables, a term of little affection among steammen.’

Jack nodded. Maybe the steamman’s origins as a drone explained his unusually small size, a stature that was somewhat accentuated by a swollen back from which two stubby stacks emerged. Coss was barely five foot tall. He had a flat-plate of a face with a vision plate above a noseless grille, the visor mounted like a mask on a sphere of copper connected by one large neck joint and a smaller piston whose sole purpose seemed to be to raise and lower the mask. His torso was similarly connected to his pelvis by three pistons, three legs emerging from the pelvis unit, two large and one small and spindly, almost a prehensile tail.

‘My existence as a drone seems a blurred dream, now. But I remember one thing, the same dream, repeatedly: sitting in a garden in the shade of a tower, watching birds. Always, the birds. Marvelling at how well they flew, tracing the patterns of their flight. Modelling their miraculous ability with mathematics. That was my initial awakening of sentience. It is where my name comes from — the Rule of Coss, pure algebra.’

So that’s it. The navy might not have had to send a press gang out for this steamman, but he was as much an outcast as Jack had been the day he’d been scraped from a prison cell and thrown into the care of the navy.

The steamman tapped his skull. ‘There’s something about the master cardsharp you should know, Jack softbody.’

Jack looked inquisitively at Coss.

‘I have seen him in the dream from my previous life. I know his face.’

‘You know Oldcastle from when you were a drone?’

‘I think so,’ said Coss. ‘But his face and his name doesn’t feel right. I don’t think that John Oldcastle is his real name.’

Jack stared at the warrant sky officer’s vacant hammock. John Oldcastle seemed sure enough of his name, and the Royal Aerostatical Navy had a place for him on the Iron Partridge. If John Oldcastle wasn’t John Oldcastle, then who in the name of the Circle was he?

‘Are you sure about this, old steamer?’

‘It is possible it may be a false memory. Curse my vacuum pumps, there is not much that I am certain of from my existence as a drone, before my true life began.’

‘What’s the name you think of when you see the master cardsharp?’ asked Jack.

‘Jared Black is the name,’ said Coss. ‘I can see his face talking to the steamman I served when I was but a drone. His name is Coppertracks, and he is a great philosopher and scientist of the people of the metal who lives in the Kingdom. Jared Black has the same silver beard, much the same voice, but the master cardsharp was not dressed as an airship officer. I see another uniform. A civilian one, if that makes sense?’

‘Civilians don’t wear uniforms — unless he served with the RAN merchant marine before Admiralty House dumped him onto a warship,’ said Jack. ‘They’ve been short of skymen for years. You and I wouldn’t be here if that weren’t the case.’

Jack remembered his suspicions about the first lieutenant. Nothing about the deadly woman and the ageing soldier who reluctantly followed her rang true. What business could the officer have had with Coss’s ex-master? Whoever the master cardsharp was, whomever he answered to, one thing was true; Jack and Coss were stuck firmly under his command.

‘We steammen are usually a grounded people, in all senses of the word,’ added Coss. ‘All I know from my earliest years was that I had to fly. It was all I dreamed of in my nursery body, and the moment I was granted my adult form, I came to the Kingdom of Jackals and learnt everything I could about the Royal Aerostatical Navy; its traditions, its sailors and ships, its rules and regulations.’

Jack grunted, a smile flickering across his lips.

‘Tear my transfer pipes, but I am used to being laughed at,’ said the young steamman, his voicebox pitched with a sad vibration. ‘My friends back in the Free State say I must have been possessed by Lemba of the Empty Thrusters, the spirit of the sky. They say that he is the Loa that possessed my miserable drone body and blessed me with sentience.’

‘I wasn’t laughing at your story,’ said Jack. ‘It’s just that if you had left school a couple of years later and hadn’t got into the RAN, you might have signed up with the Cassarabian navy!’

‘Most amusing. I much prefer an allied multiracial society such as that of the Kingdom,’ said Coss, pointing to the iron clock above the entrance to their chamber. ‘The master cardsharp asked to be interrupted from his game before six-bells sounds. He also left a parcel that he wants you to deliver below decks, although I suspect he intended its delivery to be made during daylight hours.’

Jack retrieved the heavy waxpaper-wrapped parcel from the stool in front of his punch-card writing station. There was a scribbled note slipped below the string sealing the parcel, its instructions read: ‘For the cabin at the end of the middle deck’s main passage.’

‘I’ll fetch the master cardsharp,’ said Jack. ‘And see if I can drop this off too.’ Better that than listening to those two Benzari stokers snoring away. Perhaps the long climb down the lifting chamber ladder will bring some peace to my nerves. Coss might have dreamed of sailing thousands of feet across the world like one of his birds, but Jack was just happy to have avoided the six-foot drop that was to have been his courtesy of the hangman back home.

After clambering down the ladder, Jack considered the route, his new recruit’s training spinning around his mind. The easiest way to the surgeon’s ward in the middle of the airship was to head down the upper lifting chamber’s main gantry, then into the gun deck, another climb through the lower lifting chamber, before threading through the corridors of the middle deck.

Jack walked down the central catwalk that cut through the twelve-hundred foot length of the upper lifting chamber, the thin strip of metal bouncing underfoot, its handrail preventing him from slipping into the thousands of ballonets and their network of bracing wires. He was halfway down the gangway when he almost stumbled into the officer, a tattered well-worn cloak half-hidden by the shadow of one of the airship’s regassing towers. Jack caught a breath as he recognized the face of the man from the courtroom. Close up, his skin was pockmarked with smallpox scars, but there were the same intense eyes, the same mop of ginger hair. Yes, this was the RAN officer who had so annoyed the judge in the middle-court by saving Jack from dancing the Bonegate jig.

‘Mister Keats,’ said the half-familiar man.

‘Sir.’ Jack still felt awkward saluting, every raise of his hand an acknowledgment he was now reluctantly part of something larger than just his own life and survival, with very little choice in the matter.

The officer’s cloak was pulled tight like a poncho, so Jack couldn’t get a clear look at the man’s uniform. Was he one of their ship’s seven lieutenants?

‘You are up early I see,’ said the man.

‘The storm was rattling our skylight, sir.’

‘Ah yes, all bedded down in the transaction-engine chamber. Never draw a berth on the keel deck or the upper deck, Mister Keats.’ He pointed to one of the aluminium spokes radiating out like a wheel, giving the vast upper lifting chamber its strength. ‘The noise is passed to the decks at the top and bottom of a vessel through the supports. And we’re worse than most airships, the plates on our hull rattling around as if we’re some damn armoured knight riding off to battle.’ The officer walked briskly along, his swagger stick striking each of the gantry railings. ‘A strange bird, this metal partridge of ours, eh, m’boy? A cloud-borne ironclad — don’t seem natural. Everything different for difference’s sake alone.’ The officer pointed at the thousands of spherical gas cells corded together under the lifting chamber’s netting. ‘Even our celgas is bagged up inside some strange composite rather than plain honest canvas. The genius that cooked this vessel up was off with the fairies when they laid their pencils on the draughting board, alright. I understand that some call that progress.’ He spotted the package under Jack’s arm. ‘Ah, I believe that would be the parcel the commodore promised me.’

‘The commodore?’ said Jack, confused. ‘Don’t you mean the master cardsharp, sir?’

‘Indeed, indeed. That’s just a nickname some of the officers have for him — his manner, d’you see? Although I wouldn’t advise using it around the fellow, he wouldn’t thank you for it.’

Jack held the package out. ‘You have the cabin at the end of middle deck, then, I presume? Do you serve under First Lieutenant Westwick, sir?’

‘I think it would be fair to say that ultimately, we both owe our positions on the ship to her, Mister Keats.’ The officer took the parcel and removed the string and the waxpaper, revealing a pile of books with a receipt from the stationer’s stall where they had been purchased. ‘Capital. Just the stuff for a cold evening’s reading.’

The tomes in the officer’s hand weren’t the cheap penny-dreadfuls and lurid fiction that Jack favoured, but rather dry, leather-bound books of military strategy with titles such as Aerostatical Theory: Classical Practices, Principles and Historical Perspectives.

‘Our civil war, that’s the only time we’ve seen airships raking each other in the clouds. It seems we have to look back to history for a fresh perspective on how to take on the Cassarabians. All our tactics, all our weapons, are predicated on placing us in the sky and the enemy firmly on the ground. With the exception of warding off the odd mutineer or the occasional science pirate who has managed to cook up some mad scheme to get into the air, our sailors’ experience is completely sky-to-ground. Dangerous thinking for these modern times we find ourselves in. Keep up, m’boy,’ he said, half a command, half a booming laugh. ‘Twelve times around the ship is four miles. That’s what a sailor requires every day to keep his mind fresh and clear, d’you see?’

It was the laugh that did it. Deep and boisterous, resounding through the upper lifting chamber just as it had at the — debtors’ prison! That’s where he knew this man from. He had been one of the patients in the fever room of the debtors’ prison. Jack’s father had led the collection to try to buy medicines and food when the sickness had struck the Five Stones district of Middlesteel where the debtors’ prison squatted down by the river. Another of his father’s foolish, over-generous impulses in the prison to help everyone except those who really should have mattered to him. The last time Jack had seen this face was when he’d been doling out carrot broth to the inmates who had been separated off into quarantine. Then it had been blotchy and sweating under a coarse charity blanket, but capable of booming out a note of thanks even so. So, the ill man had been a navy officer? Well, they were as likely to be declared bankrupt as anyone else. Someone must have taken care of the officer’s debts for him, though, for him to be able to re-enter service with the navy. Jack’s recollection was shattered by a savage whistling from a stove pipe-like tube hanging above the gantry, the noise rising and falling like the scream of a banshee.

Jack covered his ears. ‘Are we crashing into Jackals?’

‘We haven’t been travelling the Kingdom’s skies for days,’ said the man. ‘We’re sailing over Benzari territory, and that, Mister Keats, is the general-quarters being sounded. Propellers ho! m’boy. The enemy’s been sighted.’

‘Are we at war, sir?’

‘Benzaral is disputed territory, Mister Keats. The caliph thinks it is his, but we have a couple of hundred marines on board that will swear it is independent and belongs to the free Benzari tribes. And they are our nation’s allies. The perfect place for us to do a little fishing.’

‘What are we hoping to catch?’

The stocky man reached out and slapped Jack’s shoulder. ‘An airship, Mister Keats. A nice fat Cassarabian airship, d’you see?’

Men from the night watch were swinging down onto the gantry, stowing their gas-bag patching tools in secure boxes and pulling the lifting chamber netting taut for action.

‘You know what to do, gentlemen,’ the ginger-haired officer called to them. ‘Back to your post, Mister Keats. Keep your transaction engines well and quiet; we don’t need the ship pulling at the reins of her own accord for the next couple of hours. Smooth and certain as you go.’

Jack saluted again as the man he had once served soup to inside a debtors’ prison sprinted down the gantry, his left hand steadying his officer’s cutlass.

‘Out of our hair, greenhorn.’ One of the lifting chamber crew pushed Jack back towards the ladder. ‘You heard the captain. Sharp to it.’

Jack gawped. ‘Captain!’

‘The honourable Donald Lawrence Jericho himself, lad. Now return to your post before I dirty the sole of my boot on the arse of your fine regulation breeches.’

Jack had barely cleared the climb back to the upper deck when the airship started trembling. Not the crack of a storm, but a different sort of thunder. The Iron Partridge’s guns were speaking, and then the airship shook as the enemy’s reply sounded in kind.

By the time Jack had stumbled back to his station, the transaction-engine room was a scene of organized chaos, the two Benzari stokers grunting as they shovelled coal into the furnace, John Oldcastle, chased back by the screech of the general-quarters, helping Coss down in the pit of noisy thinking machines.

‘Where have you been, lad?’ called Oldcastle over a booming sound echoing off the ship’s plates outside. Was that the sound of an enemy shell bouncing off their armour? ‘We need you on the punch-card writer up there.’

‘I was with the captain, master cardsharp.’

‘On one of his early morning walks, lad, to help keep the black dog at bay? A great one for walks, is old Jericho. Well, he’ll have his blessed exercise now, running around the Cassarabians!’

Jack sprinted to the nearest punch-card writer, keeping his footing as the deck trembled with the roar of the Iron Partridge’s massive thirty-two pounders.

‘I have an automated system activating,’ shouted Coss, his voicebox on maximum amplification as he read the symbols off one of the engine’s rotating calculation drums. ‘Kiss my condensers, it’s the gas compression on the ballonets. Lower lifting chamber.’

Oldcastle pointed up at Jack. ‘Shut it down. If the lifting room crew apply extra pressure to a gas cell that’s already been compressed, it’ll explode like a wicked volcano under our feet.’

Taking a blank punch card from the tray, Jack bashed out an instruction set to kill the airship’s automated system, pushing it into the injection tube and watching as it was sucked out of his fingers.

‘It’s back under manual control now,’ shouted Jack. ‘How long is our engagement against the Cassarabian airship going to last?’

‘Damned if I know, lad,’ said Oldcastle, pointing towards the porthole above the punch-card desk. ‘And it’s airships. There are two of the blessed things flying out there hammering away at us.’

Jack stood up on his toes to stare out of the porthole. He could see an enemy airship banking to broadside, just a silhouette against the dark backdrop of dawn’s first gleaming, spouts of angry orange light and smoke coming from the line of her gun deck as she exchanged fire with the Iron Partridge. Where was the other airship? Ah, there she was, a second shadow rising, the stern crossing the upper corner of Jack’s porthole.

‘One of the enemy ships is trying to climb above us,’ said Jack.

‘Wicked clever of them,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Our guns can depress elevation with the best of them, but they don’t lift up so well. The RAN fleet was designed to trade blows with regiments on the ground. But the Cassarabians? Their shipyards knew that they wouldn’t have the skies to themselves. They’ll have built airship hunters, that they will, and we’re to be their prey.’

A whistling from the chamber’s speaking trumpet called Oldcastle out of the engine pit and he barked a brief exchange of words with the voice at the other end before turning to Jack. ‘The Cassarabians don’t seem to know what the pipes on our spine are for, Mister Keats, not having seen their like before. We’re looking to give them a little flutter of the feathers on our back, but the mortar loading station has locked our boys out.’

Jack grabbed another blank punch card, leafing through the leather-bound instruction manual chained next to his punch-card writer. There were notes in pencil annotated alongside the armoury instruction sets, from a time when the transaction-engine chamber had possessed a full crew of navy enginemen who had hopefully known what they were doing better than the young novice currently manning their station. Jack winced when he noticed the date scribbled next to the notes. Their mortar tubes hadn’t been fired in over three years. It appeared as if the mothballed mortars had never been intended to be used again, hampered by a fully automated loading system with minimal manual oversight from the gunnery board down on the bridge. No wonder the airship was trying to shut out the crew from accessing her mortars; sailors had never been meant to manually load its shells. This is not going to be easy. Jack’s fingers danced nervously across the enamelled keys, each stroke of a symbolic logic icon punching a corresponding hole in the taut cardboard oblong.

‘Master cardsharp!’ shouted Coss. The steamman was pointing to the skylight. The dark shadow of the second Cassarabian airship was now illuminated by a spill of light from its fully open bomb bays. Was the Iron Partridge about to be rained on by explosives? No. Jack swore quietly to himself; cables were falling, human shadows riding the rappel lines down.

John Oldcastle ran to the wall and began to pull on a winch, the iron storm doors shutting across the skylight. ‘Prepare to repel borders!’ he yelled at the two stokers. ‘Mister Keats, today for the mortars would be mighty grand. Mister Shaftcrank, keep to your post. Read our systems off as they attempt to go live.’

Jack finished the punch card, pushing it into the injection mechanism, and the transaction engines began to rumble below, processing his new instructions. Oldcastle and the Benzari warriors were rifling through the air chests under their hammocks, the stokers pulling out sharp curved short-swords and the master cardsharp emerging with a bandoleer of crystal ammunition, three pistols and a short-barrelled carbine. He laid the weapons across the unmanned punch-card station next to Jack and began to break the guns, pushing a shell into each weapon’s breech, liquid explosives visibly sloshing about inside the shells’ transparent casing. ‘Turnaround is fair play, lad. We thought we were going fishing for a Cassarabian ship to find out what makes her tick, but instead it’s us that’s ended up wriggling on the end of their line.’

Jack hardly heard the old officer. His eyes darted to the abacus-like Rutledge Rotator above the punch-card writer, hundreds of beaded tiles turning and twisting to form line after line of results from his query. His last command had been accepted and processed but- ‘We’re still locked out!’

It couldn’t be. Jack’s instructions had been perfect, everything the manual said was needed to crack open the loading station for the ship’s waiting gunners; yet here they were, their mortars sealed deadly tight and still inaccessible to the sailors below.

There was a clanging from above the chamber’s skylight, iron doors being levered apart an inch or two. Enemy marines were clambering above their room!

‘A second attempt if you please, Mister Keats,’ ordered Oldcastle. ‘Cover the doors’ — that to the two stokers — ‘they’re not breaking in from above. That’s storm glass up there, good for gale, bullet or shell. But there are maintenance hatches aft of here that were never meant to be secured against our own boys repairing the hull. That’s where they’ll pile through. Ah, I’ll have a few blessed choice words with our shipwrights when we return back home.’

Jack fought down panic, trying to focus on the keys of his writer and block out the sound of Cassarabian marines scrabbling above them, swarming over the hull like ants. Coss had stopped distracting him by calling out the names of the systems that were interfering with the sailors’ tasks throughout the vessel. If Jack couldn’t allow their gunners access to the mortar loading station below, then an inconveniently sealed fire hatch here or there wasn’t going to make a whole lot of difference to the Iron Partridge’s survival.

‘Keep your eyes on your task,’ ordered Oldcastle. ‘Concentrate, now. I’ve got a warm welcome here for our wicked visitors.’

Jack was still trying to focus on his half-completed punch card when the first Cassarabian marines burst into the room with flashes of scimitar steel and pistol barrels. Their mouths were concealed by rubber breathing masks that made them look like beaked eagles, their black and silver uniforms covered by leather armour stained red with dyes — or the blood of the Iron Partridge’s unlucky sailors the invaders had already come across.

‘No man may mount a drak as a bonded rider,’ called out Farris Uddin, ‘unless they are able to kill as well as their drak.’

Omar blinked away the sweat rolling into his eyes. He held out his sword horizontally with his right hand as the shaven-headed guardsman officer walked down the line of struggling cadets. How much longer could he carry the weight of his blade like this, the steel heavier with every second? How much longer could he stand in the courtyard of the palace fortress’ middle bailey, exposed to the sun in full riding leathers?

‘And a drak,’ continued Farris Uddin, ‘is bred for nothing else but fighting and killing, which is-’ he stared down the line, ‘-more than I can say for you. It doesn’t take much to train as a cadet. I see the sons of generals and rich traders, I see the sons of guild heads and viziers, but I don’t see any here fit to mount a drak.’ The guardsman officer halted before Omar. ‘Is your sword heavy, Cadet Barir?’

No, you old goat. In my hands it is as light as a feather. And one day I’m going to use it to carve apart the people who burnt down Haffa and laid their fat, evil hands on Shadisa. ‘Yes, master.’

‘Yes, master,’ parroted the guardsman. ‘It will be a lot heavier when you have been pulling the reins for a day and are given the order to dive down on the enemy.’

‘I will dive like a falcon upon your order, master. A falcon with keen eyes and a willing heart.’

‘A falcon, well,’ sneered Uddin. ‘You believe, perhaps, that your training flights qualify you as a veteran? Let the weight of that scimitar sap away your irremediable optimism, boy. If your training draks could talk, the stables would be echoing with their laughter. A falcon must have talons, and most of you have, I fear, proved yourselves to be little more than songbirds kept too long in your perfumed cages. And back to your silk-lined cages you will go when you fail me.’

The guardsman stopped as a covered sedan chair emerged from a round tower in the curtain wall. ‘Ah,’ said Uddin. ‘It is that time. Our songbirds must line up along their perch. Command. Sheath your blades.’

Omar didn’t know what perch the guardsman was referring to, but he let his aching arm fall down like a rock, glad that the stocky man was not going to make them all move through the twenty-five basic patterns of scimitar thrusts and parries again. They had tasted months of this repetitive grind, and at times Omar felt as if he were training to be one of the dancing monkeys that capered for coins down in the bazaars. Life back on the water farm had not been nearly so regimented. Here, Omar was up early, to bed early, every minute spent being instructed how to act. How to hold, oil and sharpen a scimitar. How to check a crystal shell’s casing for cracks that could cause its liquid explosive charge to leak and shatter a rifle barrel in its owner’s face. How to saddle and care for a drak, or strip and clean a pistol; how to communicate silently in the air and on the ground using the hand and finger gestures of the language the caliph’s military called ‘war sign’. There was never enough time, it seemed, to adequately study all the skills a guardsman was expected to master in the service of the empire. He didn’t care. Every day I get stronger, every day I get quicker with the blade, every day my aim with pistol and rifle grows truer. Each day that passes is a day nearer the time when I will have the skills to track down Shadisa and punish anyone who has dared to hurt her. He was aching for the chance to go down in the capital and begin searching the slave bazaars for her. Someone down there would remember her, surely. Remember the house that purchased such a beauty and the price she must have fetched.

Well, at least weapons drill made a change from flying practice on the draks. Even as Omar discovered he had something of an aptitude for the task, the actual act of mounting a drak and taking to the air frequently left him dizzy. Belonging to no single rider, the training draks were used to having novice cadets saddle them, and could beat a path into the air, sail around and land back at the fortress with minimal suggestions from a guardsman’s stirrups or reins. Sometimes Omar felt like he was just supplying guidance to the mighty flying creatures. But by the silver gates of heaven, their training draks knew how to leave saddle stiffness in a cadet’s limbs; the day after his first flight, Omar hadn’t even been able to bend down to fold the sheets of his cell’s bunk.

Working the water farm’s desalination lines had been easy graft in comparison, once you got the knack of moving in rhythm with the salt-fish; always plenty of time left over to rest and contemplate the slow-moving clouds above or the beauty of kitchen girls below. In Omar’s old existence, the rituals of his life had been small, insignificant things. Here in the palace fortress all of life seemed a ceremony, the corridors and rooms of the stronghold perching on the rocky peaks as much a monastic prison as a protecting fastness. Omar hadn’t even left the confines of the fortress to see the palace below, let alone gaze upon the legendary marvels of the capital’s streets on foot. He was free in name, but not in practice.

Green silk curtains along the side of the sedan chair were drawn back by four bearers who had carried it into the courtyard, to reveal an old white-haired man wearing a golden tunic, the dark silhouette of a drak on his chest. Boulous, Uddin’s retainer, slipped forward out of the shade of the fortress. Uddin frequently disappeared for long periods of time on guardsmen business, and during such absences the retainer was expected to maintain the demanding schedule of training. Unfortunately for Omar, the young man had a serious manner and a thoroughly studious attitude to how a cadet’s timetable should be maintained. Perhaps that came from his northern blood. Weren’t they all said to toil away in dark mills, worshipping money more than god, busying themselves with unnatural practices? Many of the other cadets had retainers too, the sons of the greatest families and houses in the empire. But in their case, the retainer’s duty was to run after the cadets, fetching and carrying and generally kowtowing. Boulous did disappointedly little of this for the heroic future guardsman that Omar was destined to become.

Boulous whispered to Omar, ‘That is the grand marshal of the order. We go onto our knees.’

A relative latecomer to the cadet’s ranks, Omar saw that all the other cadets along the courtyard were already dropping down on one knee, and Omar followed suit with undignified haste, not wishing to be singled out again for the attention of Uddin or the other tutors. Two of the guardsmen in the courtyard helped the grand marshal out of his sedan chair and up the steps towards the battlements. He was very old, Omar realized. The grand marshal wouldn’t have made it as far as the iron finger pillory at the bottom of the wall without assistance. Omar counted his blessings that he hadn’t caused any infractions of the order’s many rules that would have left him confined in the pillory today, his fingers inserted in the slots of the punishment frame and kneeling like a fool with the undignified sight of his arse presented to the order’s master of masters.

After the old man had gained the parapet, the cadets in the bailey were lined up; then the front of the line began to march up the stairs, and Omar saw that guardsmen and the order’s staff were marching out onto towers and gatehouse all across the fortress in a courtly fashion.

‘Are we to hear a speech?’ Omar whispered to Boulous.

‘No, no,’ said Boulous. ‘Today is a holy day, the Dream of the Silver Tree.’

Omar started. Is it that time of year already? Inside the guardsmen’s fortress, time seemed lost and scattered like motes of dust floating in the sunlight. Omar wistfully recalled the festival back in Haffa, happy cooks and Shadisa bringing out white cheese and fruit to the workers on the desalination lines. Even the grumpy old nomad, Alim, had taken that day off to play draughts with him in the shade of the tanks. Where are you now, Shadisa? Not enjoying a feast, of that I am sure. Well, Ben Issman, his name be blessed, might have dreamed of the hundred faces of the one true god under his tree thousands of years ago, but Omar hadn’t yet noticed any white cheese, fruit or iced water being distributed, let alone lazy hours playing draughts in celebration inside the corridors of the fortress.

The cadets filed out onto the battlements, a panoramic view of the Jahan Palace sparkling in the afternoon sunlight below them while the white roofs of the city stretched out for miles, encircled by the dazzle of sun towers. A distant rumble of fireworks drifted up towards the fortress, strings of explosives hung between the palm trees, detonating and shaking the streets; sheets of dust filling the spaces between the domes and towers.

‘Oh, this is bad,’ said Boulous.

It appeared to Omar that the retainer also possessed a naturally pessimistic bent — especially given that his status as a jahani, a slave raised from childhood to imperial service, meant he had about as much responsibility to concern him as the birds that made their nests in the cliffs below the fortress walls.

‘What is the trouble now?’ asked Omar.

‘This is the first year that the order has not been required to fly in formation over the city. Instead we can only stand and watch.’

‘Watch what?’

Boulous unsheathed the scimitar and passed it hilt-first to Omar as the command to present swords in a salute echoed down the battlements.

‘That …’

By the prophets!

Omar stared down the length of killing metal he had raised above the fortress parapet, catching sight of the first of hundreds of cigar-shaped silhouettes riding out of the sun, light reflecting off silver writing engraved across their hulls. They were like the narwhales that dipped in and out of the waters off Haffa, but a school of titans that had taken to the air, long glinting rams made of steel mounted on their nose domes. The drone of engine cars and the blur of propellers vibrated across the curtain wall. Great ribbons of silk had been tied to the crafts’ cruciform tails, rippling behind the armada of airships as though rainbow lines were being drawn across the perfectly clear sky above the capital.

‘Do you feel pride, Cadet Barir, at this great new show of force?’ said Farris Uddin from behind Omar. ‘Or do you feel shame that command of the imperial Aerial Squadron was given to the admirals of the caliph’s navy, rather than those who already had true mastery of the heavens under god?’

‘I believe I may feel both, master.’

‘You may indeed feel both,’ said Uddin. ‘For while nothing may stand against the empire and the new range of our ambitions, I fear that you see before you the ruin of the guardsmen’s fortunes. For centuries we trained to fight such machines when only our heathen neighbour possessed them, splashed grenade fire against their canvas and carried propeller snarls crafted for their engine cars. Now we have our own fleet and at best we are cursed to ride in their shadows as mere scouts. What do you see, Boulous?’

‘I see a man,’ said the retainer, looking towards the grand marshal’s place on the battlements with a tear in his eye, ‘made old before his time.’

‘You are a good and true servant of the Caliph Eternal,’ said Uddin, kindly. ‘But watch whose ears hear you say that.’ He raised his scimitar and shouted, ‘Remember Cann-Khali!’

All down the curtain wall the cry was taken up. The greatest battle of the order, where fifty draks and their riders had held off an army of ten thousand Seyadi levies for a week in a lonely mountain gorge.

Their greatest battle, thought Omar, mouthing the cry, their greatest triumph. But still an eventual defeat that had left every guardsman who fought in it a corpse.

It took every ounce of willpower for Jack to stop himself glancing behind his back. The shouts and grunts of the Cassarabian boarding party intermingled with the war cries of their two brave Benzari stokers and the thunder of pistols as John Oldcastle calmly discharged one after another across the transaction-engine pit. Concentrate on the punch card he was composing, not allow himself to be distracted by the screams of dying men, or Coss Shaftcrank shouting his tinny curses, or the thud of swords against flesh and the explosions of guns. Concentrate on the punch cards, where Jack was used to bending the calculation drums on transaction engines to his will. And where they wouldn’t bend, you could always roll with the drums and see where they took you.

Another yell, closer. The master cardsharp swore and tossed an empty pistol down onto the deck, but Jack couldn’t spare the seconds to look around. Not with the door on the mortar-loading station still locked tight against their gunnery deck crew.

A rifle ball ricocheted off the hull near Jack’s head, but he was focusing on writing the lines of code for the loading arms that had been decommissioned three years ago: the automated loading arms, with a dumb waiter system that still ran into the magazine buried in the well-protected heart of the Iron Partridge. The original repair crew who had refitted her had locked the automated systems down tight. But they hadn’t counted on Jack Keats and his clever fingers overwriting their work. Luckily for him, they had done their job in a rush, the ship’s ability to automatically fire and load constrained by some basic and strikingly obvious safeguards. Delete, delete, delete. He was almost there, the automation almost back online. He ignored the yell of the stoker being pushed down into the pit, impaled on the bayonets of three Cassarabian marines. Ignored the sounds, as Jack trusted the crewmen in the magazine would be ignoring the live shells being drawn into the dumb waiter system, lifted up and pushed into the breech of their mortars. Don’t you pay those shells any mind, boys. You just let them slide on past without anyone reaching for the manual overrides. The automated mortars that according to the notes in Jack’s manual couldn’t hit the side of a barn door, unless, please, the enemy’s barn door happened to be drifting feet above their mortar barrels. Sometimes, you just had to roll with the drums and see where they took you.

There was a series of hollow metallic thuds as the mortars erupted along the length of their airship’s spine, followed by a trembling whine as the tubes back-filled with the cold air from outside, then an answering series of explosions from above them, a line of fire stitched along the belly of the Cassarabian airship hanging above their vessel. Seconds later Jack clung onto his station as a wrenching impact slammed him forward, the remains of a decapitated enemy engine car spinning down on top of the Iron Partridge, the rest of the ruined airship just visible through the crack in the skylight. It glanced off their armoured hull with another harsh jolt before continuing downwards on its fiery descent.

From the doorway there came a second explosion. Not a debris strike, but a blast of tumbling Cassarabian marines as Henry Tempest, their recently released captain of marines, erupted into the transaction-engine chamber. His rifle now discharged and empty, the giant soldier was using the weapon like a fighting staff, its butt lashing out and caving in skulls and ribs. The black and silver figures wearing Cassarabian marines’ uniforms were sent flying around him, as though they were kites launched into the air, while Tempest’s crimson features were distorted into a yell. ‘Get off my ship! Get off my perishing ship!’

There were others fighting in the corridor outside, its confines echoing to the clash of hatchets, knives, bayonets and cutlasses. Firearms took too long to reload at close quarters and Jack caught a glimpse of First Lieutenant Westwick entangled in the deadly melee of Cassarabian marines and short Benzari tribesmen.

One of the Cassarabian marines came at Jack from the edge of the tumult and Jack grabbed the empty bandolier from the station at his side, swinging it like a whip and catching the Cassarabian marine in the face, dislodging the man’s beak-like mask. Propelled by fear and fury, Jack ran at the marine and shoved him over the rail, watching him crumple onto the machinery of the transaction-engine pit below. As Jack turned, a rifle butt slammed into his gut and winded him. He collapsed back; the rifle’s barrel fell across his throat and forced him choking down against the rail. It was Henry Tempest, his eyes glinting like tiny marbles as his sweating face bore down on Jack. ‘Get off my ship!’

Jack could only snort, his fingers trying to find purchase on the rifle as the seemingly unstoppable force of the soldier crushed his larynx. It was true, then, what the sailors had been whispering about Tempest: that he had been left half-deranged by an addiction to opiate poppies. That he had to regularly slake his thirst on a mixture of drugs and rum just to stay sane.

‘He’s one of ours, Henry,’ the female voice spun out of the darkness that was beginning to envelop Jack.

Jack croaked desperately for air as the pressure eased.

‘Drink from your green flask, Henry.’

There was a grunting like a pig feeding and Jack focused on a green-lidded canteen being slugged back by the marine officer before being clipped down on his belt next to an identical red-lidded canteen. And there, next to him, was First Lieutenant Westwick, severe and proud, a pair of blooded cutlasses gripped tight in her hands.

‘Sorry, boy,’ said the brute, extending a giant hand and enveloping Jack’s trembling arm. ‘I was stuck in one of my rising rages, so I was.’

Well, that makes everything okay then.

Jack’s eyes slipped across the transaction-engine chamber, dead bodies littering the deck. Benzari tribesmen moved across the room with their short curved swords out, checking for any in the enemy boarding party that might be faking their demise.

‘Your leg,’ said Jack, pointing to a knife embedded in the captain of marine’s limb.

‘It’s not mine,’ said the brute, as if that explained everything, pulling the knife out as though removing an inconvenient thorn.

By his side, First Lieutenant Westwick turned at the sound of Coss Shaftcrank’s voicebox, the steamman kneeling over the corpses while he chanted prayers to his ancestors and the Steamo Loas. ‘Belay that racket. Pile them up and roll them out the nearest hatch.’

‘Wreck my relays, but their people have established burial rites,’ protested Coss.

‘Those are my rites, and those are your orders, skyman. Their god can clean them up from the ground below using the vultures as his divine instrument.’ First Lieutenant Westwick angrily spun Jack around, jabbing one of her fingers at his face. ‘That was a synchronized volley from our mortars. An automated volley.’

‘The mortars weren’t accepting manual control,’ protested Jack.

‘Do you know how many sailors died in the last voyage this malfunctioning metal hulk made under full automation? If those mortar shells had been loaded fin up and warhead down, you would have caused a full salvo detonating right above the ship’s magazine! You, sir, would have blown our bloody remains all the way back to the Kingdom.’

‘The lad saved the ship, first lieutenant,’ called John Oldcastle, still checking his pistols. ‘The Cassarabians were swarming over our top side like ants across a blessed picnic blanket.’

‘He gambled our ship and our mission and he got lucky,’ spat the woman.

Outside the ship a ripple of fire sounded — not the oak-sawing sound of their cannons, but the whoosh of landing rockets blasting out and the rattle of anchor lines running behind them, then the Iron Partridge started to shake from stem to stern.

‘Ah,’ said John Oldcastle admiringly. ‘There’s the wild genius of Jericho at work. He’s fired our anchors straight into the Cassarabian airship. That one’s not in the admiralty rulebook. He’s pulling them in. You’ve got your ship, Maya, if you’ve got the taste for another game of tickle-my-sabre with their crew.’

‘Open the hatches along the engine car repair gantry,’ Westwick ordered her hulking captain of marines. ‘We’ll board them at the broadside.’ She seized Jack by the scruff of his striped navy shirt, wiping off the blood on one of her cutlasses against his shoulder. ‘I’ll deal with you later, Mister Keats.’

‘You did the right thing, lad,’ said John Oldcastle, watching the first lieutenant sprint out with her Benzari warriors in tow. ‘Remember that. Not by the book, but the right thing, nevertheless.’

Jack felt a knot of fear tightening in his stomach.

Back in the unforgiving slums of Middlesteel, doing the right thing was often as costly a mistake as you could make. You only looked out for yourself, and at a push, for your family. Jack’s decision, would, he expected, end just as badly. In his world, no good deed went unpunished.

Jack watched the binds being tightened around his wrists, his face pressed between the frame of a fin-bomb rack, the closed bomb-bay doors locked beneath his boots.

‘For disobeying a standing order when pressed by the enemy,’ intoned the first lieutenant as she read out the charges. ‘For cowardice in the face of enemy fire and imperilling the Royal Aerostatical Navy vessel Iron Partridge while on active duty.’

‘Take this lad,’ said John Oldcastle from behind Jack, pressing a cloth-wrapped wooden handle between his teeth. ‘Bite down on it, it’ll help save your tongue.’

‘Skyman Jack Keats is sentenced to ninety lashes.’

‘What is this?’ the voice boomed from behind the crewmen lined up along the side of the bomb bay, Captain Jericho pushing his way through the press of sailors.

‘The maintaining of discipline,’ said First Lieutenant Westwick.

‘I did not order this!’

‘Under the articles of war, I have the authority to-’

‘It is customary to inform the captain before ordering a flogging,’ barked Jericho. ‘And those articles you are suddenly so familiar with allow me to set the number of lashes.’ He pointed to the Benzari marine holding the cat-o’-nine-tails, the knotted lines of the whip dangling dangerously by his side. ‘The minimum. Ten lashes only.’

‘That’s far too soft a sentence,’ objected the first lieutenant.

Not for my bloody spine, it isn’t.

‘This is not a flogging ship. You have duties to attend to, first lieutenant. The officers we took prisoner have been made ready on the prize vessel.’

‘I see no prize vessel.’

‘You will find her firmly tied off against our starboard side, first lieutenant.’

‘Read your orders again, captain. We have a very specific objective to accomplish and it does not include losing weeks we cannot afford on a round trip to tow a Cassarabian airship all the way back to the border just so you and your crew can line your pockets with Admiralty House’s bounty money.’

That drew furious murmurs from the crew. It was the greatest bugbear of any airship crew that the only time they got to claim prize money was when they helped the Fleet Sea Arm capture enemy u-boats and frigates on the surface of the ocean. Now the skymen finally had an enemy their equal in the air and they had shed their blood to capture one of the foe’s vessels. That share of the admiralty’s prize money was their right!

‘That is not our tradition, d’you see?’ said the captain.

‘Damn your bloody tradition, sir,’ said Westwick. ‘Orders trump tradition and the articles of war, both. We’ll learn what we can from the prisoners and take what we need from the captured Cassarabian aerostat and then you’ll mine her and you’ll blow her.’

Her words drew a collective growl from the crew. Whether it was seeing their captain treated like a pet hunting hound by the first lieutenant, or the prospect of losing a sailor’s share of a thousand guineas’ prize money, Jack couldn’t say.

‘Master Engineer Pasco,’ barked the first lieutenant, ‘I don’t believe our marine has the height to make a mere ten lashes count. Step forward and take the cat-o’-nine-tails from him.’

Jack groaned as the mean bullying officer did as he had been ordered.

‘This is your fault, thief,’ whispered Pasco, pulling Jack’s shirt up. ‘She’s only doing this out of spite because you wouldn’t take your ninety licks like a man. You’ve stolen six month’s extra salary out of the pockets of every Jack Cloudie on board the ship.’

The marine drummers started the rattle of their instruments and the count began. Pasco had the size to make the lashes count alright. Jack got to seven numbing lashes before he passed out, the biting taste of the saliva-soaked cloth fading from his mouth.