Jack Cloudie

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘Where is your mind today?’ demanded the cadet master, cutting left and right with the practice sabre as if he was punishing the air rather than Omar.

‘It is the day for the womb mages to sample his flesh for a new drak to be grown for him,’ called Boulous from the other side of the fencing mat.

The cadet master snorted at Omar. ‘Pray you can honour your sword when your drak is ready for you. It is not a womb mage’s ritual that is on your mind, cadet. Command. Tell.’

‘I was thinking of a girl,’ growled Omar, dripping in sweat from the exercise. ‘A girl I know who was taken by brigands.’

‘Well then,’ said the old swordsman, flicking Omar’s sword up to guard readiness with the tip of his sabre, the position called third tierce. ‘Brigands and guardsmen often meet, and when we do, the business is not much different from ours this morning. Except these brigands will not have Farris Uddin quite so angry at them for running a sword through a cadet’s foolish, mooning guts.’

Omar felt anger rise in him at the old man’s scorn and disrespect for his feelings towards Shadisa. Not taking his eyes off the old swordsman, Omar raised his free hand towards the weapons racked by the practice hall’s walls — swords of all shapes and sizes: sabres, rapiers, longswords, fencing foils, foreign blades. ‘I have mastered your weapons.’

‘Have you then, young fool?’ sneered the cadet master. ‘You are as blind as one of the snake charmers’ nobbled pythons down in the bazaar. Those aren’t weapons in that rack. Your sword is not the weapon. You are the weapon.’ Casting his own sword to the floor, the cadet master went over to the rack and pulled away what Omar had initially taken for part of the frame. He came back with two tall polished wooden sticks just shy of his own height, and tossed one to Boulous, throwing the other one to Omar.

‘What is this?’ demanded Omar. ‘Something for the palace gardeners to grow their beans around?’

‘A lesson,’ said the cadet master. ‘My father was a jinn trader and I grew up travelling with him across the infidel lands. Those bean sticks are what you get when you make duelling with edged weapons a crime for hundreds of years. The Jackelians call them debating sticks, and any Kingdom street rat would be able to stick one right up your sorry arse and make you twist around it as though it was one of their Maypoles.’

Omar felt the heft of the thing, deceptively heavy. Had it been weighted inside with lead?

‘Come on, boy. It’s not a real weapon, is it?’ said the cadet master. ‘Just a little stick. See what you can do against the commander’s retainer. Boulous’s blood runs Kingdom-red, even if his heart is as true a guardsman’s as ever walked this fortress. Have a little prod at each other. Show me your great mastery of my arts.’

Omar struck out at Boulous with the staff, but the retainer was as quick with it as he was with a practice scimitar, ducking back and not even needing to block Omar’s strike. Angered, Omar tried to windmill the staff, turning it and jabbing from multiple angles and directions, but Boulous was able to step around each strike, his boots flowing as though he were dancing. They hadn’t even touched wood yet.

‘Enough, Boulous,’ spat the cadet master. ‘Plant the cadet’s beans for him.’

Boulous swept his staff around, tripping Omar onto the floor before he could attempt to jump or manoeuvre, the flat end of the staff hovering an inch away from his nose.

‘That staff isn’t a weapon,’ the cadet master shouted at Omar on the floor. ‘A sword isn’t a weapon, nor a stick nor a stone. The guardsman is the weapon, and in his hands, so is anything he touches.’ He waved at Boulous. ‘Do I need to press my point, retainer? Shall I show this young fool how to take that staff away from you and give you a few lumps in payment for it?’

Boulous smiled thinly and shook his head. ‘I still remember you laughing at me during our empty hand sessions, cadet master.’

‘A little shame worked well as a spur with you, retainer.’ The cadet master shook his head sadly at Omar. ‘But you learn well enough without it, cadet. I don’t know why, but being a guardsman seems to run in your lazy, skiving blood. Have nothing on your mind when you train with me. Bring me some foolishness about a woman again and I’ll show you where the flat end of the length of infidel wood is meant to be inserted.’

Omar and Boulous bowed and left as the next cadet entered to receive his punishment.

Omar had imagined that his first visit outside the environs of the guardsmen’s towering fortress, venturing into the Jahan Palace below, would have been an occasion to partake of the legendary sensual pleasures of the Caliph Eternal’s bounty. Instead, Omar’s passage down the monstrous granite staircase that had been carved into the rock face in the shadow of the fortress was filled with dread. It was the retainer’s warning that had done it for Omar — that the womb mages who would sample his flesh to create a drak for him were bound up with the Sect of Razat. Omar had escaped the extermination of his house using the last of his slave’s luck, and now he had none left to protect him from the dark sorceries of his enemies.

What if the womb mages gave him a deadly disease when they sampled his flesh? Something to leave him gasping and rolling around the cells of the fortress in a week’s time, when the sect’s involvement in his murder could be denied? Or they might twist and warp his body in revenge for escaping the sack of Haffa. He remembered the work of the womb mages back in his hometown: creating changeling viruses to heal and cure, or curse and kill, depending on whose coin had been taken in payment. How welcome would Omar be among the ranks of the guardsmen if they found him growing a third leg or an extra set of arms one morning?

Omar felt a fraud every step of the way down to the great domes below, the wind whipping his cloak about his black leather armour. Even the presence of the retainer Boulous to lead the way and lend authority to his presence seemed only a salve to the situation.

‘A cadet is still invested with the authority of the order,’ said Boulous, as if sensing Omar’s mood. ‘You are a custodian of the Caliph Eternal’s law inside the palace.’

‘I will be quick to sever the hands of any courtiers I find fighting unlicensed duels,’ said Omar. ‘What did Master Uddin mean up on the walls when he warned you not to repeat what you said about the grand marshal? It is clear the grand marshal has lived a long life. Who would object to hearing that?’

‘It is not his age,’ said Boulous. ‘It is how the grand marshal came by it — or rather the speed by which he came by it. Until two years ago, the grand marshal was subject to the caliph’s bounty, you understand? He was given the drug that blesses a man with eternal youth. The grand marshal might have lived to be three hundred years old, but now its blessing is his no more and his true years advance fast on him.’

‘More politics,’ said Omar.

‘We are not in favour, Cadet Barir,’ said the retainer. ‘The guardsmen are traditionalists, and we live in an age of progress. That is why the Caliph Eternal’s new armada of the heavens was given to the control of the navy’s admirals, salt-stained fools who know more about tides and sounding depths than they do of aerial navigation in the face of sandstorms.’

‘There was an old nomad I was friends with at home,’ said Omar. ‘He would have shrugged his shoulders and said such a misfortune must be god’s will.’

‘Perhaps, but it is also the will of the same sect that saw yours cast down from the Holy Cent,’ said the retainer. ‘You need to watch your tongue in the palace below. It was not just your father’s house and its allies that were destroyed by the new sect’s rise to ascendancy. The Pasdaran was dissolved by the Caliph Eternal last year when they were supposedly discovered plotting against the empire.’

The Pasdaran! But they were the caliph’s secret police. Even in Haffa just the invoking of the name of the caliph’s shadowy torturers had been enough to scare overactive children to sleep. It was said they had spies in every town, spirits in every house listening in for any fool reckless enough to dare speak treason against the caliph.

‘They are gone?’ said Omar, sounding astonished.

‘Their reward for standing against the appointment of the new grand vizier, Immed Zahharl,’ said the servant. ‘Immed Zahharl is also the head of the order of womb mages and he stands as high keeper for the Sect of Razat. The secret police declared publicly that Zahharl’s appointment was contrary to the tradition that a vizier must renounce all house, guild and sect and accept only the Caliph Eternal as his one true prophet. The “treason” among the secret police was uncovered soon after they spoke out against the new grand vizier.’

‘I remember when I was growing up,’ said Omar, ‘I thought the Pasdaran were demons hiding under my cot. I felt such fear. Of course, I was not as brave then as I am now.’

‘Oh, oh, there’s still plenty to be feared in the palace. But not from the hands of the secret police, nor any more from the swords of guardsmen.’ He reached out and touched the back of Omar’s cloak imploringly. ‘It is not the Caliph Eternal’s fault, not when sorcerers whisper in his ear. Sometimes I think the new sect has him half-bewitched, and they will hate you twice over. Once for the house that was yours in your old life, and once for the guardsman’s mantle you wear in your new one. When we walk inside the palace, remember, in imperial script there is only one syllable’s difference between the word for favoured and the word for executed.’

‘Do not fear, Boulous Ibn Jahani,’ said Omar. ‘You are a servant of the order and the order’s sword is here to protect you.’

Omar almost managed to sound as if he truly believed it.

Jack gazed with despair at the small transaction-engine-room pit of the Cassarabian airship, as ruined as his red-raw back. The wrecked room had been adequate enough to give them navigational control of the enemy vessel, but Jack was struggling with the differing standards when it came to symbolic logic, not to mention the fact the enemy calculation drums had been scuttled by her own crew when they realized their ship was falling to the Kingdom’s boarding parties. The prize vessel’s crew hadn’t been very forthcoming so far, but the airship — named the Kochava Saar — was slowly revealing its secrets. Unlike the Iron Partridge, its main structure wasn’t made of the iron-strong paper composite, carper, but some light material that seemed to be part bone and part wood, no doubt secreted like silk by one of the twisted creatures given life by the caliph’s womb mages. There were other mysteries, though. Such as the non-standard racks in the vessel’s bomb bays, seemingly built to hold fin-bombs several orders of magnitude larger than any found on a Jackelian vessel, yet completely empty of ordnance — the pair of enemy airships running light for long-distance patrol. What on earth would fit inside one of those monstrous frames?

‘What are we looking for?’ asked Jack, running his fingers down the strangely arranged symbols of the enemy punch-card writer.

‘Anything that might indicate where these Cassarabian lads are getting their celgas from, Mister Keats,’ said John Oldcastle, helping Coss lift up a spilled bank of machinery, the metal casing bent out of shape by wrecking hammers.

‘Searching for the source of their celgas is our mission?’ asked Jack.

Oldcastle indicated the debris filling the enemy transaction-engine chamber. ‘An airship is just canvas and metal with some clever papier-mache and chemicals all brewed up together. But what the Cassarabians are using to float their ’stats with, lad, that’s pure gold.’

‘It is neither RAN celgas nor gold,’ said Coss, ‘that much I am sure of, master cardsharp. I helped our crew tap some barrels of enemy gas on the Iron Partridge. Tear my transfer pipes, it had a most unpleasant smell — although it is non-flammable and appears to have a similar lifting capacity to our own airship gas.’

‘Get the furnace going, Mister Shaftcrank; we’re going to tickle some life back into their calculation drums. Mister Keats, you’ll search for anything to do with the enemy gas. Where the Cassarabians loaded it, how much was taken on, and if you’ve even a sniff of how or where they get it from, you inform me right away.’

‘Their writer layout isn’t the same as ours,’ said Jack pointing to the punch-card machine. And it looks as if it’s been put together by a half-drunk blind man.

‘Best efforts, lad, best efforts.’

Jack was halfway through puzzling out the foreign systems, when two of their Benzari marines appeared escorting a Cassarabian prisoner, a thin-faced man whose sunken cheeks were covered with an elaborately greased and embroidered beard, his tanned skin still marked with soot from the fires that had been burning across the stricken airship.

The marines pushed him roughly down onto the chair and secured him to it.

‘Ah, just the fellow,’ said Oldcastle, cleaning his engine-oiled hands on a rag. ‘You’ve been fingered to us as one of the clever jacks that used to run this room.’

‘I have nothing to say to you,’ said the Cassarabian, ‘and you will find I am worth no ransom to your people.’

‘Here it is, my fine friend,’ said Oldcastle, ‘we might lock you away for a prisoner exchange later, but we won’t sell you, not even to your own side. We’re not slavers in the Kingdom.’

‘I know what you are,’ snarled the Cassarabian. ‘I have heard the screams of the others after they were taken away.’

‘That would be our first lieutenant,’ said Oldcastle. ‘She a direct lass, so she is.’

The Cassarabian spat at the master cardsharp’s feet. ‘I expect no honour from you, infidel.’

‘You’ll have to forgive our first lieutenant,’ said Oldcastle moving behind the prisoner and putting his hands on the man’s shoulders. ‘Her mother was one of your escaped slaves, crossed the desert to the uplands to get away from the empire. Not just any sort of slave, our good lady officer told me, but a producer.’ Oldcastle looked at Jack. ‘They’ve got some funny ways in Cassarabia, Mister Keats. All those creatures bred by their womb mages. They come out of the thighs of slaves when they’re born. Not a very pleasant job I would say; bottom of the slave pecking order when you draw that duty. The ones that are forced into the trade are known as producers. Most women that draw that wicked straw only last for three years, but the first lieutenant’s mother was a tough old bird. She was at it for five years before she escaped.’ He patted their prisoner on the back. ‘You can imagine the kind of stories the first lieutenant was raised on, can’t you? I think that’s why she treats her job so mortal serious. But it could be worse for you lads, you could have her old ma here, instead, asking you the questions.’ Oldcastle angrily spun the prisoner’s chair around. ‘So let me ask you, my fine fellow, how much honour is there in your desert brigands having to tie the hands of our upland lasses to stop them committing suicide when they’re snatched by you? Or is your honour measured in the number of luckless children the caliph receives as annual tribute from the conquered nations that have your wicked lackeys installed as sultans?’

‘I live by the will of heaven,’ said the prisoner. ‘Ben Issman’s name be blessed.’

‘And isn’t it funny how often heaven’s will coincides with the will of all the emperors and their armies and thugs,’ said Oldcastle. He leant in close to the prisoner and Jack only just heard what he whispered. ‘We’re devils, and the woman taking your lads out of your brig one by one, she’s the worst of us all.’

He drew his naval cutlass. For a moment Jack thought Oldcastle was about to cut the prisoner’s throat, but instead he sliced the ties around the Cassarabian’s wrists. ‘You’ve told me plenty, lad. No money to pay for a ransom, you’re just a dirt-poor scholar, and you can either help me get your foreign thinking machines working again, or I’ll let the first lieutenant have you for her entertainment. You’ve seen some strange creatures bred in your land, I warrant, but a woman that’s half-Cassarabian and half-Jackelian, that’s the most wicked unholy animal you will ever see in this life or the next.’

The master cardsharp’s cajoling had its effect. Seeming to crumple, the Cassarabian become pliable enough to do their bidding, inspecting the broken transaction engines and helping Coss patch up the damage. Oldcastle had brought over a portable transaction engine configured with translation filters from the Iron Partridge and patching it into the ruined Cassarabian systems allowed them to access the data they needed in a format that was intelligible to Jack. Wherever that box had come from, it wasn’t standard navy issue, that much Jack was certain of. Coss’s warnings drifted back to Jack’s mind, that John Oldcastle wasn’t who he claimed to be, but someone called Jared Black. Yes. The master cardsharp knew just enough about transaction engines to get Coss and Jack to do his bidding, but he lacked the real expertise that an officer in his position should have had.

‘What you were saying about the Cassarabians and the first lieutenant’s mother,’ said Jack to the master cardsharp. ‘That’s why there’s so few women sailors on the Iron Partridge?’

‘You’ve noticed that then, Mister Keats?’

‘They have an advantage in the weight tables against most male sailors. I expected to see more of them on board.’

‘Disappointed were you, lad? All those bawdy penny-dreadful tales about the airship lasses. Ah, to be a young buck again. As desperate as we were for a competent crew, old Jericho refused every female cloudie that tried to sign up. There are a few people who have a grand old time of it down in Cassarabia, living high on the hog, but you won’t find too many of them being women.’

‘We have First Lieutenant Westwick on board,’ noted Coss.

‘The skipper didn’t get a choice with her,’ said the officer, winking at Jack. ‘But then not many of us do.’

Jack knew what the old man meant. Pity the enemy that thought they had captured her.

‘I have a sister, Mister Keats, every inch as sharp as our prickly first lieutenant. Not that we get on that blessed well — truth to tell, she’d stick me with a dagger as soon as look at me. But mean as she be, if I had any say in the matter and push came to shove, I wouldn’t let her within a thousand miles of the empire.’

‘This is the softbody concept of male gallantry towards the opposite gender?’ asked Coss.

‘Not gallantry, old steamer. I’ve shipped out with some tough old birds in my time and pulled through more than a few tight scrapes with some brave lass guarding my back, and been happy for the privilege. But never down south. Never down there.’

He turned back to the console. To Jack’s eyes, their efforts seemed to yield little of interest when it came to the origin or nature of the gas being used to float the enemy’s vessels.

Jack showed Oldcastle the admittedly incomplete entries he had dredged from the enemy thinking machine, the results twisting on the abacus-like beads of the Cassarabians’ version of a rotator screen. ‘There’s nothing meaningful about their gas. Just leakage tables and regassing estimates.’

‘Don’t be so sure, lad,’ said Oldcastle. He tapped a series of unfamiliar icons on the top rail of the rotator. ‘I would say this is something. Mister Shaftcrank, switch off the translation box and let me view this in Cassarabian.’

All the icons on the beads rotated into patterns unfamiliar to Jack, but they seemed to make sense to Oldcastle.

‘So, lad, it’s a rising tide that floats all ships.’

‘You can read Cassarabian?’ Jack asked.

‘Indeed I can. This,’ Oldcastle tapped the corner of the rotator, ‘is the supply chit for the gas they took on. But it’s not the caliph’s military that signed it over to the airship.’ He glanced at their prisoner and gestured at the two marines guarding him. ‘Back to the brig with our scholarly friend. This isn’t for his ears.’ After the prisoner had been removed, the master cardsharp continued. ‘This gas came from one of the Cassarabian temples, the Sect of Razat. They’re a new crew, all for war and expansion and banging the patriotic drum.’

‘Temples?’ said Coss from the small transaction-engine pit. ‘Unlike the people of the metal, I understood that the Cassarabians allow for the existence of only a single true god?’

‘It’s the genius of their faith, Mister Shaftcrank,’ said Oldcastle. ‘One god maybe, but they have as many prophets and competing philosophies within heaven as your steammen have ancestral spirits. Well, a hundred of them, anyway. It’s a holy number in Cassarabia. A hundred sects for the hundred faces of the one true god. Anyone can sup at their priests’ high table, if they can command enough power and temple tithes and are willing to play by the caliph’s rules when it comes to mouthing platitudes about the one true god.’ He patted the rotator. ‘It’s like your transaction engines, Mister Keats. As long as you’re inclined to unconditionally accept the operating system and are minded to make your code compatible with it, you can merrily write punch cards and may the best cardsharp’s works prosper. Cassarabian myth says there was a wicked sea of bloodshed before the first caliph, Ben Issman, unified the sects down south. Now their faith evolves over the ages without all-out religious war, without the whole wicked empire murdering each other over whether their priests need to demand two or three days’ fasting to prove true penitence.’

Jack resisted the urge to touch his aching spine. ‘And this new sect wants war?’

‘Aye, from what I’ve heard,’ said Oldcastle. ‘The hundred faces of the one true god, and this new face is preaching that the Cassarabians have grown terrible soft, easy and complacent over the centuries. Trading silks, jinn barrels and spices with filthy infidels has fallen out of favour. Trading shells and scimitar thrusts is to be the new thing. Paradise will only come from the conversion of unbelievers at the point of a sword. That’s a rather traditional view, and I’m mortal unhappy to see it coming back into favour.’

‘Infidels,’ said Jack. ‘That would be the Kingdom, then.’

‘Sadly the case. It’s been an age since I’ve travelled south,’ said Oldcastle. ‘The Sect of Razat is after my time. I’m all for a little ease and complacency myself, but I don’t think this new crew are going to allow us much of that. Now, where is this cursed sect getting their mortal airship gas from? That’s the question we need answered.’

Jack tapped the information slowly flickering across the rotator. ‘Will the information be in their machine’s memory?’

‘No, lad,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Because such a secret is too sensitive, and because my unlucky stars are never that kind to these poor, tired old bones. A map with an “X” marking the spot of a newly discovered celgas mine would be too easy for us, not when we could happily sip our grog rations as we sailed straight back home before sending the high fleet down here with enough fin-bombs to wreck the caliph’s dreams of glory forever. No, we’ll be doing this hard and slow-style. Boots on the ground and sniffing around Cassarabia the old-fashioned, dangerous way.’

Oldcastle laid a hand on the back of Jack’s shirt and he winced from the pain of the weals left by his flogging. ‘My boots, Mister Keats and yours too. I haven’t killed you yet.’

Don’t worry, old man. You and the navy, between you, you’re working hard on it.

As Omar moved through the imperial palace he saw why those who called it home knew it simply as the Jahan, the world. The high crystal geodesic domes protected a universe in miniature, immaculately tended gardens filled with streams and orchards, gently curving brooks and jasmine-scented pools that had been expertly crafted around the luxurious pavilions and ornate buildings. While he and Boulous walked, they were sheltered by the palace’s crystal covering, shimmering as it matched opacity with the position of the sun burning high above the capital. Omar revelled in the expensive, luxurious sprays of water on his skin as he watched the calligraphy slowly tracking across the dome’s inner surface, an animated scroll from the writings of the Holy Cent. But the mournful retainer Omar was travelling with managed to spoil even the sight of this dazzling world when he pointed out that now, only the visions of the keepers of the Sect of Razat were present in the enchanted march of words, the teachings from the other ninety-nine sects’ temples relegated to the evening after the majority of the court had retired to bed for the night.

Omar looked at the courtiers walking around the cool waters, nodding respectfully at each other on their slow circuits of the landscaped paradise, and the knots of officials — some in uniforms, some in expensive silk robes — sprawled across the grass while tiny colourful birds fluttered in and out of the trees. This was the life, Omar decided. Being waited on by retainers with iced jugs of water under the magical shade of the palace’s domes. One day he and Shadisa would share it together, of that he was certain.

‘What do they find to talk about all day?’ Omar wondered out loud.

‘Who’s up, who’s down,’ said Boulous. ‘Who’s in and who’s out. Which sect of the Holy Cent is gathering the most worshippers and tithes, which sect is dwindling. Which viziers are to be replaced this year and who is to replace them. Which of our dominions will rebel and who the Caliph Eternal will trust to crush them. It is like a game of draughts with ten thousand players competing on a single board.’

‘I could play such a game,’ said Omar.

‘Yes, yes, but a better question is why would you want to?’ Boulous pointed to one of the retainers holding out a tray of delicate steaming kebabs for a small group of men wearing turbans. ‘Better to buy your food from a street vendor in the souks below the palace hills. Then at least you will know the true price you must pay up front.’

Why would I want to? So I can bring down the bastards that sacked Haffa and stole Shadisa from me. I can think of no finer game than that.

The two of them crossed the largest of the domes where the palace’s pavilions intertwined with numerous waterways, walking under an arched entrance and emerging into one of the adjoining rotunda. Omar noted that when seen from above, standing on the parapets of the guardsmen’s fortress, the palace domes’ crystal surface appeared to shimmer in a medley of colours, but from inside there was a uniform appearance of a slightly shaded sky — as if the roof hardly existed at all — and god himself was writing the words of the hundred sects’ holy teachings across the heavens.

As new to palace life as Omar was, it was easy enough to recognize the domain of the womb mages, the delicate sophistication of bulb-shaped pavilion towers and calligraphy-engraved marble walls giving way to a featureless ziggurat made out of a dull, brooding stone. The building was so out of place it looked as if a squadron of draks might have lifted it out one of the dark, distant provinces of the south and dropped it down onto the hills for the Caliph Eternal’s architects to raise a dome about its bulk. Unlike many of the palace’s grander buildings, there were none of the caliph’s soldiers standing sentry outside. For who in their right mind would want to disturb the peace of such men as dwelt inside the ziggurat? The main doorway at its foot was guarded only by the twin serpents from the garden of life, carved in stone above the entrance and intertwined in the shape of a helix, the womb mages’ ancient symbol, hung up outside their surgeries in bazaars. Unfortunately for Omar, the inhabitants of this building weren’t simple healers, able to encourage a fisherman’s finger to grow back after proving too careless with a scaling knife, available to craft a changeling virus to bless a soon-to-be-born child with extra height and strength. Here lurked the guardians of the caliph’s private library of spells; secrets that dated back to when Ben Issman, his name be blessed, had led his people into the desert and made life bloom there, rediscovering the one true god who had been lost for so long. Womb mages powerful and dark, trained in the heart of the sorcerer’s own city, Mutantarjinn, their dark domain scored out of the very rock by the sight of god when the highest of highests’ eyes reopened after sleeping for so long.

Even if the womb mages inside the ziggurat hadn’t embraced the troublesome new sect, Omar would have avoided them like the plague in the normal course of affairs. Avoided them in the same way people avoided an undertaker; because they touched dead flesh as well as living, and the things they did to slaves, especially women, did not bear thinking about. It was for good reason that when slaves were bred, the slaves themselves prayed for males and the masters — thinking about the resale value of their progeny — prayed for females.

Boulous placed his hand on a glass panel set in the wall and a light appeared as if a lantern had been lit behind the crystal; a short while later, a small iron sally door set within the larger gate opened. A eunuch wearing robes marked with the twin snake helix bade them enter, making a snide comment about having to open the gate to a mere jahani, a discourtesy which the retainer and Omar both chose to ignore. Inside, they were led through stone passages, corridors made an indeterminate size by an ethereal red illumination that revealed little.

‘It is dark inside your corridors,’ said Omar.

‘There are things grown here that would not benefit from brighter light,’ said the eunuch guiding them. ‘Does it scare you?’

‘Me? I am as brave as a sand lion. Besides, I prefer the darkness,’ said Omar. ‘In darkness all women look beautiful and even the stalest of bread appears a banquet.’

‘You will like it here then,’ muttered the eunuch.

They travelled further than the length of the ziggurat Omar had seen outside and he realized that they must now be travelling underground, the womb mages’ domain stretching to chambers and corridors carved out below the hill itself. Their passage intersected a far larger one and Omar tripped over the first of a pair of metal rails set in the floor when he made to cross the space. As Boulous extended a hand to help him up, the eunuch raised a palm to stop the two of them going any further. A rumbling grew louder in the half-light, a sled-like affair on rail-locked wheels being drawn down the passage by a team of twenty bare-chested slaves. The sled was mounted by a tall glass box, as if the slaves were pulling a giant aquarium behind them; a thick mustard-yellow gas swirled about inside.

Omar caught a glimpse of the glass case’s occupant as it passed and nearly stumbled again. It looked like a woman struggling underneath the crush of an albino whale, choking in the yellow stew. But as the mist momentarily cleared he saw it was the woman’s own body that curved out into a whale-sized appendage, her lower ribs as large as the archways around the palace pools and hung with rolls of flesh so gargantuan she looked as if she was drowning in her own frame.

Omar grasped the eunuch’s shoulder. ‘She’s suffocating inside there!’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said the eunuch, disdainfully removing Omar’s hand. ‘The gas is a nutrient bath. No producer can eat enough through her mouth to feed both herself and her load. The skin of her womb must absorb the food directly. That producer’s load is a mine worm. Not quite as large as a drak when it’s born, but large enough to need a gallon of food pumped into the producer’s tank every hour during her second trimester. Ours is not an easy vocation, it requires both precision and dedication.’

Omar watched the sled disappear down the rails with horror, imagining his mother’s face swollen and red, as she choked on the mustard-coloured fumes of her food. ‘What will happen after the birth?’

‘The mine worm will be taken to the mountains at Riyjhi — the Caliph Eternal’s prospectors have discovered many new veins of silver there.’

‘No,’ said Omar, ‘to her.’

‘The producer will be normalized and rested for a month,’ said the eunuch as if he was talking to a child. ‘You can’t keep them breeding constantly. Not unless you want to receive a whipping for a miscarriage.’ He pointed to the disappearing sled. ‘Lose an expensive load like that and you would be made to feel it. Two thousand tughra. And it will cost the caliph as much as that to raise your drak; remember the cost next time you choose to dive around the sky as if you are flying a five-coin hawk bought for you at the bazaar by your mother.’

What if that’s been done to Shadisa, what if that’s the life the bandits sold her into?

‘Be careful what you say,’ Boulous warned the eunuch, ‘and who you say it to.’

‘I know who the House of Barir is,’ sneered the eunuch, looking at Omar, ‘or who it was. Old money. A manta ray with a modified spleen system and gills that filter salt. Not so difficult. The witches that walk the dunes with the nomads no doubt consider salt-fish quite a feat of sorcery out in the borderlands. Here in the Jahan we are not impressed with such petty trickery.’

Omar and Boulous followed the eunuch down a passage lined with mesh-gated doors, each giving onto a lifting room that appeared to lead deeper into the catacombs beneath the palace. They passed by the doors to the lower levels, however, and the eunuch took out a punch card tied to the end of a chain from under his robes. Advancing with the card in his hand he inserted it into a small injection slot by the side of a door at the end of the passage. His key caused the door to retract upwards into the ceiling. Their shadows fell onto a long gantry, and stepping out, Omar saw that they were entering a cavernous space, the gantry emerging fifty feet up, carved out of stone as if a bridge. This was no natural cavern, though — its walls curving in and out like the surf of a sea frozen solid — the cavern floor and the gantry they were standing on the only flat surfaces to be seen. Down below in the blood-red light from wall plates, hundreds of womb mages sat dotted around circular tables, the copper-plated books they were reading from glinting under table lamps. Shelves had been carved out of the cavern’s undulating walls, filled with the same type of book Omar had helped destroy with acid in his father’s house at Haffa. There must have been hundreds of thousands of the mages’ spell books racked below, even the dozens of stone columns rising up to the cavern’s roof were carved with shelves and heavy with books. Standing on the stone gantry pushed out like a mooring into this sea of knowledge, Omar watched shelf stackers on rail-mounted harnesses being lowered and raised by slaves working winches to retrieve requested tomes. The vastness of the cavernous space echoed with a low humming as the seated womb mages repeated the letters of their spells, A, C, G, T, over and over again in seemingly random patterns. Committing to memory the structures of flesh that dark sorceries could create, their chanting interwoven with a gentle clicking from the turning copper pages.

‘So many books,’ whispered Omar in awe. It would take centuries to study them all.

‘This is the Caliph Eternal’s private library,’ said the eunuch, his chest puffing out with pride. ‘His private wealth. It is very old, but it pales in comparison to the size of the order’s own library in Mutantarjinn. There, just the indexing halls are larger than this library.’

Omar found that hard to believe, that this colossal space carved out under the palace hills had its equal, let alone its superior, in any of the other cities of the empire. Whatever he believed, its hold over him was disturbed by the throb of a familiar soul calling out to him. It couldn’t be her, not here. But it was. Omar was thrown into confusion by the sight of the female slave who emerged from an open-caged lifting room at the end of the stone gantry along with two servants girls as companions.

‘Shadisa!’ Why didn’t I feel her sooner, and her presence here is so faint? What have they done to her?

The look on her face turned from puzzlement to shock as she recognized the young man standing before her in the leather armour of a palace guardsman.

‘Shadisa, in the name of god, what are you doing here?’

‘I am in the service of Immed Zahharl,’ said Shadisa.

‘Thank the prophets! You survived the sack of Haffa.’

‘Obviously,’ said Shadisa, with no small degree of disdain in her voice. ‘We were brought to Bladetenbul and sold. Only the men in the town were executed by the troops loyal to the Sect of Razat. Well, most of them. Why are you wearing that ridiculous uniform?’

‘Quieten your tongue,’ said Boulous. ‘You speak to an enforcer of the Caliph Eternal’s law, and a slave that speaks with such disrespect will find herself with a finger or two less to do her master’s bidding.’

‘A slave I may be, now, but I am a slave in the service of Immed Zahharl,’ said Shadisa haughtily. ‘The grand vizier of the Caliph Eternal, high keeper of the Sect of Razat, grand master of the order of womb mages and keeper of the caliph’s spells. You would be well advised to ask his permission before you touch me, little jahani. He is a good master and you may lose more than a finger for violating his property.’ She nodded towards the eunuch as an indication of what the retainer could expect as payment for his effrontery.

Boulous snorted. ‘So you say.’

Shadisa looked at Omar. ‘You are the guardsman I have been sent to collect for the creation of a new drak?’

Omar nodded. She was every bit as beautiful as he remembered, but there was something different about her. Something had altered in her soul.

‘Well, how the world changes.’

The eunuch bowed and remained on the gantry, letting Shadisa and the servant girls escort Omar and Boulous into the lifting room, the fenced-in platform sinking towards the floor of the library.

‘Did you think I was dead?’ asked Omar.

‘Yes,’ said Shadisa, though with little of the joy that Omar had hoped she might display at finding herself proved wrong. ‘Most of the men died. The Sect of Razat’s followers burnt Haffa to the ground. We saw the flames as we were tied behind the bandits’ sandpedes and taken through the desert. As clouded as our minds were with those filthy drugs they injected us with to march across the desert, we watched the column of smoke hanging above the coast for two days.’

‘I tried to save you,’ said Omar. ‘I was coming for you, I saw bandits grab you in the kitchen.’

‘A fine job you made of it then,’ laughed Shadisa. ‘You protected me as well as you protected Gamila when her fiance’s servants were chasing her across the sands.’

‘I shall rescue you now, I will free you from this life,’ promised Omar, taking Shadisa’s hand. ‘You were not meant to be a slave — you were born the daughter of a freeman. I will buy out your papers of ownership.’

‘Was I free back in Haffa?’ said Shadisa, pulling away from him. ‘A couple of coins a week to work in the great master Barir’s kitchens? Buying food in the market, salting and smoking meats, cooking, washing dishes, serving the men of the house in the evening; up at five, not asleep before midnight. Do you know so little of what my life was really like?’

‘Back in the town, did your father …?’

‘He died too, I suppose,’ said Shadisa, sadly. ‘Unless he got out in one of the fishing boats. There were thousands of people in the harbour, fighting our own soldiers for the chance to escape. Begging, cursing, offering money to the boats that remained. Every man I knew is dead but you, Omar Barir. You have your damn father’s luck, alright. You could be thrown off a slave galley wearing only chains and you would wash up on some island with your shackles slid off, palm trees for your bed, dates to eat and a waterfall to bathe in.’

‘I have whittled my own luck with the tip of a scimitar, my great courage and my epic wits,’ said Omar. ‘And now my luck will be yours, too.’

‘Oh, your epic wits,’ laughed Shadisa, opening the gate to the lifting room as it shuddered to a halt. ‘Everyone in Haffa knew that the House of Barir had attached itself to a dying cause, that it was only a matter of time until the Sect of Razat replaced our own in the Holy Cent. Your father mistook stubbornness for honour, Omar, and our people paid the price with their blood as we always do. Recognizing you as his kin was just another selfish act, easing his conscience for his last few hours, and it should have seen you dead. We all knew our end was coming, but you, you and your epic wits, were lazing about on your water farm. You didn’t know and you couldn’t have cared less if you did.’

‘You are wrong,’ said Omar, stung by her words. ‘About my father and about me. I don’t know how he did it, but I know he saw me placed with the guardsmen. Now I have no house, I serve only the empire and the Caliph Eternal.’

‘Then we are alike,’ said Shadisa, leading them through the library. ‘For I serve a man who serves only the caliph too.’

‘I will set you free, Shadisa.’

‘Free to do what?’ asked the woman. ‘To be the wife of a common guardsman? To sit around on a hemp mat in a fortress cell and cook up a stew for the few days in a year when you’re not off with the army campaigning? I have seen another life here in the Jahan, Omar. A life of luxury; of water that flows out of a tap without an hour’s walk to a well head; of fine gardens and music and colour and splendour. Here,’ she tapped her long ornate tunic. ‘Silk, worth twenty times my slave price. Which of us apart from Marid Barir’s wives could afford to wear such silk back in Haffa?’

‘I would make you free,’ pleaded Omar.

‘A wife of a soldier, or a servant to the grand vizier,’ said Shadisa. ‘Which of those is more free?’

‘You ask the wrong question,’ said Boulous. ‘You should ask which of those is the right course under heaven?’

‘I have only been a slave for a few months, unlike you, little jahani,’ said Shadisa. ‘But I have been a woman for all of my life. I know which is the better course.’

Omar reeled in shock at her attitude. This was not the reunion he had dreamed of during the long, tiring hours of sword practice, during the hard days he had spent cleaning pistol barrels and oiling drak saddles. A grateful Shadisa falling into his arms as he beat off the slavers who had captured her was what he had imagined. How could she have fallen in love with the luxury of the grand vizier’s service so easily? She had never cared about such things back in Haffa. Plenty of the great house’s female servants had made it perfectly clear that a mere slave like Omar could never provide such luxuries and was therefore of no interest to them, but never Shadisa — this was not her. Has the grand vizier, this Immed Zahharl, bewitched her? Had Shadisa fallen under the chief minister’s spell as easily as Boulous had implied that the Caliph Eternal himself had?

He lay his fears for her aside and followed the girl. Shadisa led Omar and Boulous to an archway bordered by towering stone shelves, the copper plates of the spell books looking as if they were slicked by blood in the crimson twilight. She bade them sit on a bench cut into an alcove while she went to fetch Immed Zahharl, leaving the two of them under the watchful gaze of the other two servant girls.

‘So, your pretty friend serves Immed Zahharl,’ Boulous whispered to Omar. ‘Immed Zahharl himself — he should not come to personally collect the blood of a drak rider.’

‘He wants to see me,’ said Omar, speaking softly. ‘To observe what an unbelievingly handsome fellow the last son of the House of Barir is for himself.’ He nodded towards the two slaves standing sentry over them. ‘That pair served in my father’s house too. The grand vizier sends us a message with their presence, don’t you think, Boulous? That a certain quick-witted hero of your acquaintance who currently wears a guardsman’s riding leathers, should really be wearing a slave’s robes, or a corpse’s shroud.’

‘I see that Master Uddin’s teaching has not been totally in vein,’ noted Boulous, dryly.

‘You know the funny thing about playing the fool?’ said Omar. ‘People ignore a slave who is clumsy and stupid. They do not expect much of him. They don’t ask him to achieve anything too complex.’

Boulous grunted, as if in understanding. ‘Master Uddin said something to me in your first week at the citadel. He said, “There, Boulous, goes the best actor who will never appear under the lamps of the imperial theatre company. The very best.”’

Omar shrugged. ‘Have I won your applause?’

‘If you can remember where the actor begins and the act ends, I think it will be very wise for a fool of a freed slave to greet the grand vizier,’ whispered Boulous. ‘Your existence in our order is already an affront to his schemes. Give him a face to match what that slave girl you like so much has probably said about you.’

‘Shadisa would never betray me,’ whispered Omar. He imagined drawing his scimitar and plunging it into the grand vizier’s gut. Nothing personal — no more personal than unseating my house and supplanting our sect in the Holy Cent.

Shadisa returned accompanied by a wiry thin man with an intricately oiled and curled beard hanging off his slim cheeks. By the cut of his expensive purple clothes and Shadisa’s respectful distance behind him, Omar marked this as the man responsible for his house’s destruction. Confirming Omar’s suspicions, both the slaves watching them dropped to their knees, Omar followed Boulous’s lead in giving a low bow to the man.

‘The last son of the House of Barir,’ said the man in a purring, silky voice. ‘And following such a traditional calling, too: the imperial guardsmen. Nobles, always rushing to push their sons forward for the guards.’

Omar stared into the grand vizier’s strangely cruel, calculating gaze. Eyes so wide and intense, but with heavy hoods that looked as though they were trying to press his eyelids down into a sleepy slumber. ‘I like waving a sword about, grand vizier. It is easy work compared to what Master Barir had me doing on his water farm.’

‘And now you’re to wave it about on top of a drak.’ Immed Zahharl’s lips curled in amusement. ‘Down here, everyone prefers to use the title grand mage. Only in the palace above is it grand vizier, or high keeper if I am in one of the Sect of Razat’s temples.’

‘Truly,’ said Omar, letting an almost genuine note of awe creep into his voice, ‘you are a great man.’

He seemed amused by this. ‘So it seems. My airships have given the Caliph Eternal command of the very heavens themselves. His bounty is merely in proportion to my labours for his glory.’

Zahharl led them to a round chamber. There was a horizontal steel slab as its centre, surrounded by a ring of lamps giving off a more intense form of the blood-red light that seemed to pervade the womb mages’ domain. Shadisa and the other two slaves stayed by the door to the chamber. Boulous shifted nervously from boot to boot within the circle of light.

Zahharl looked at Boulous. ‘You have seen this done before, jahani?’

‘I have, grand mage.’

‘You will assist your noble guardsman in training. I would not wish to spill too much of his blood this afternoon.’

Boulous ignored the mage’s sarcasm and helped Omar onto the metal slab, then secured the leather wrist and ankle ties around Omar’s limbs.

‘Do not move,’ warned Boulous. ‘Clean cuts must be made. Struggle and you will bleed greatly.’

‘A pity that your father was not more progressive in his vision,’ said Immed Zahharl, moving behind a lectern-like bank of machinery at Omar’s feet and twisting at controls hidden from Omar’s angle of vision. ‘You could have had a commission in the new Imperial Aerial Squadron.’

‘Do they serve good food, grand mage?’ Omar coughed, trying to keep a look of panic from his face as a metal globe started to descend from a recess in the ceiling above. ‘To be frank with you, the rations up in the fortress are foul.’

‘In the years ahead they’ll be dining on the fruits of many victories,’ said Zahharl. He twisted the controls and a series of sharp razored tools and syringes pushed out of the iron ball. ‘But this is time for the old ways. Flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood.’

Omar flinched and the sphere swept down and jabbed painfully at his restrained arms, cutting an incision on his biceps.

‘Your flesh must be blended inside the arnay ball with the essence of the drak we are to create for you. Too little human flesh and the producer’s womb will reject the drak embryo. The drak will be you, Omar Barir, and you will be your drak. Is that not a fine thing? That is our magic.’

Omar yelled as one of the syringes on the globe found a vein in his leg and the arnay ball drank from him.

‘Too much of it, and well …’ the grand mage shrugged. ‘That would be unfortunate. Are there any body parts you don’t use much?’ The globe glided up towards Omar’s groin and he saw the metal arm bolted into the back of the cutter machine quiver as if in anticipation.

Don’t think of the blade, think of the drak that will be born mine from this ritual. A drak, fine and strong, a drak which might allow guardsmen to mount him, but will only fly like the wind for me, its mind and mine as one creature as we soar. Don’t think of the blade. A flying war machine. Unstoppable, invincible.

‘Your slave, Shadisa,’ Omar’s voice came out in a tremor. ‘I would buy her papers of ownership from you.’

A knife-like thing on the globe nicked his skin in surprise, Zahharl standing like a wraith at the other end of the bench. ‘This is an ancient and hallowed rite, last son of Barir. It is said that Ben Issman himself created the first drak on this very table millennia ago, and during this most blessed rite, you wish to haggle over a slave girl with the second most wealthy man in the empire? Is this a souk?’

‘Thank you for my drak, grand mage, but I would have the girl too. I would have Shadisa for my wife.’

‘Thank the Caliph Eternal and our foolish traditions for your drak,’ said Zahharl. He glanced back at Shadisa. ‘Do you know this dolt of a farm hand?’

She nodded.

‘And would you marry him?’

She shook her head. ‘Our time finished many years ago. Everything that was mine in that life ended for me when Haffa was razed to the ground.’

Shadisa, you fool, what are you doing? You can’t choose a slave’s life with him over me. What foul magic has he used to cloud your mind? He has done something to you, that’s why I couldn’t sense your soul until you were right under my nose.

‘In this matter, I think my slave is far cleverer than her perspective suitor.’ He played with the controls and the sphere dug into Omar’s thighs, the young man shouting in pain through clenched teeth.

‘A pound of flesh for your drak — that’s an old bargain. But for this finely formed and highly intelligent slave, I’ll take twice my weight in gold as her price.’

The globe retracted back into the ceiling and Boulous undid the arm and ankle restraints, one of the three slaves coming forward bearing a tray of bandages that the retainer used to staunch the cuts and wounds on Omar’s body.

‘Unfortunately for you, the days when a guardsman could earn such booty during a campaign are in the past,’ laughed the grand vizier. ‘The future belongs to others, last son of Barir. The old days are never coming back. That’s a lesson you should learn from Shadisa here.’ He snapped his fingers and Shadisa and the other two women from Omar’s hometown followed him out and left Omar and the retainer alone in the chamber. Her departure from his life again was almost more than he could stand, an abscess stabbing in his soul. How many more times am I going to have to lose her?

‘A little too good an actor,’ said Boulous, tightening the compress around Omar. ‘A little too good an act.’

If I play the fool so well, it is only because she makes one of me every time she stands close to me.

‘I have agreed a price,’ said Omar. ‘And I have kept my life to earn it, and I have the man who would see me dead walking away thinking that I am a fool.’

‘He is not the only one,’ whispered Boulous. ‘There is something you need to know about Immed Zahharl, but not here. I will tell you back on the surface when we are safely out of here. Now that you have met him, there is a dark secret that you must be told …’