Jack Cloudie j-5

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘Perhaps I will serve you so well that you will not wish to hand me over to the priests of this new sect.’

  The killer walked over to Omar and unlocked his chains, dropping the scimitar onto his lap. ‘Start by sharpening that.’

  Omar looked incredulously at the sharp blade that had fallen into his care.

  ‘Raise it against me,’ said the killer, ‘and we will discover what you are worth to the new sect’s high keeper with no hands attached to your wrists.’

  ‘What is the name of the man who owns this sword?’ asked Omar.

  ‘Farris Uddin. But master will do well enough for you.’

  There was something about this man, Omar realized, something familiar: as if he had known him before, perhaps in a previous life. No, his senses must be playing him false — he couldn’t have met this deadly force before. Surely I would have remembered.

  Omar started to draw the whetstone down against the length of the shining silver steel. Sharpening the blade for the man who might be his new master, or his executioner.

  It seemed burning hot to Omar, out in the open again after so long trapped in the close shaded confines of the deadly Farris Uddin’s dune whale. The dune whale’s captain had set them to rest next to a line of similar giant teardrop-shaped craft. There would be no more diving under the desert for Omar and his captor; the deep orange sands gave way to rocky ground from here on in. Omar didn’t know precisely where they were, but if he had to hazard a guess, he would say that they had travelled southeast, away from the thin patch of civilization that ran along the coast, across the desert, and towards the great centre of Cassarabia; to where the empire’s true civilization was counted to start.

  They had reached a caravanserai, a series of windowless buildings connected by rocky palm-tree shaded lanes. Merchants sat outside the crenellated walls selling dates, black bread and yoghurt. Omar could almost feel the cool shade and taste the spray of moisture from the fountains within.

  A line of sandpedes emerged from the stables on the side of the caravanserai, the drovers crying commands and cracking their whips against the hundreds of bony legs straining under the weight of their enamel water tanks. Omar recognized some of the drovers — the water sloshing about their tanks had come from Haffa a couple of weeks ago.

  Farris Uddin tied Omar’s hands together with a length of leather and bound it to the rail on a stone trough meant for tying up camels.

  ‘I will not run, master,’ said Omar.

  ‘No. You won’t.’ Uddin disappeared into the stables, leaving Omar outside in the beating sun, tied up like an animal with only the half-shade of the palm leaves for shelter.

  I suppose I won’t at that.

  Watching a kestrel circling overhead, Omar’s glance fell down to the end of the street where one of the water traders was talking to three men and pointing back towards the stables where Omar was standing. He looked around nervously. There was nobody else here. Just himself, the trough and the stables. A coin was exchanged and the three men began walking purposefully down the line of sandpedes towards him. Omar pulled at the leather thong tying him to the rail. Too tight to slip. Too thick to chew through. Omar tried to keep calm. Perhaps the gang had just been asking for somewhere to stable their steeds? But the hope of that disappeared as they got closer. Three tall rangy thugs wearing crossed belts filled with crystal charges for the rifles strapped to their backs. Caravan guards, or hunters of men?

  ‘There’s a pretty parcel,’ said one of them, looking Omar up and down. ‘Left trussed for us to find.’

  ‘The wrist ties are mine.’ Farris Uddin’s voice sounded unexpectedly behind Omar, making him jump. The killer moved like a ghost. ‘As is the slave that is bound by them.’

  ‘A male slave is worth only fifty altun,’ said the thug. ‘The bounty on a heretic that served the House of Barir is ten times that.’

  ‘Then I have made a fine profit.’

  ‘A profit like that,’ said the thug, licking his lips expectantly, ‘deserves to be shared.’

  Farris Uddin glanced languidly about the street, as if he was surprised to see where he had ended up. ‘Is this the desert wastes? Is this the heathen borderlands? No, it’s the empire, and the Caliph Eternal’s law states that taking another’s property is theft. That’s sharing you can be executed for.’

  ‘There is no garrison here,’ snorted one of the thugs. ‘And you have not paid for the protection of the caravan.’ He tapped his neck, indicating the space where the bronze seal and chain would be if Omar’s new master had paid to travel under the immunity of one of the caravan trains.

  ‘A guardsman,’ said Farris Uddin, his voice turning low and dangerous, ‘does not need protection. He is protection.’

  ‘Oh, ho!’ The three of them roared with laughter, while one poked a finger at the preposterous Uddin. ‘You are a long way from the great palace, then, noble guardsman. Is the court of the Caliph Eternal coming up here to pay for dune whale trips around the town to amuse the great ruler’s harem?’

  ‘It is strange, noble guardsman,’ said the most sizeable of the thugs. ‘For I am sure you have been marked out to me before as Udal the Viperneck; a mere bounty hunter, just the same as us.’

  ‘My name is Farris Uddin,’ insisted the killer, pulling his collar down to reveal his bare throat. ‘And I have no tattoos on my neck.’

  Omar blinked in disbelief. The killer had possessed the tattoos back in the master’s palace at Haffa. Omar had seen them. What is going on here? All three thugs slid out their scimitars in unison and Omar groaned when he noticed that Uddin was totally unarmed. The careless fool must have left his weapons saddled to a camel inside the stable and he had come out here without his pistols and blades.

  ‘You are a stubby little liar, Udal, or Uddin, or whatever you are called. But we have just the thing to shave another few inches off your height.’

  Farris Uddin raised his empty hands in supplication. ‘There is no need for that. I can see you are set on stealing my slave. I would not have my death on your heads.’ He walked to Omar and untied the leather knot from the long palm-wood rail. ‘You are too much trouble to me already.’

  ‘Easy come, easy go, master,’ said Omar.

  As the three thugs came to seize Omar, Farris Uddin snapped the rail off the trough and jammed it like a spear into the face of the tough on the left, before sliding it around and shoving it into the features of the man on the right. Only the thug in the centre of the trio was left standing, looking on in astonishment as both his friends tumbled to the ground. By the time the man had remembered the sabre in his hand, Uddin had snapped the pole in two over his leg; he used the twin batons to dance a series of rapid strikes across the thug’s head and shoulders. With his scimitar falling to the ground, the third fighter crumpled to the dirt under the fierce tattoo of blows.

  Farris Uddin moved over the cowering thug and pointed his two makeshift wooden batons towards the man’s forehead. ‘What is my name? What am I?’

  ‘Farris Uddin,’ spluttered the rascal. ‘You are a guardsman.’

  Omar looked at the two ruffians lying crumpled to either side as Farris Uddin sent the surviving man scampering away down the street with a swift kick from his boot. Their noses had been pushed back into their skulls and both men were dead.

  ‘You killed them, master.’

  ‘Easy come, easy go.’

  Had Uddin been telling the truth when he said he was an imperial guardsman? The caliph’s guardsmen kept the peace in the palace and served as the ruler of Cassarabia’s elite regiment of soldiers. But unless such a man was cast out and declared rogue, what would one of them possibly want with the bounty on a heretic like Omar? No, the killer was just a hunter of men who had been trying to bluff his way out of a fight. A particularly lethal example of the breed. That is the only thing that makes any sense.

  ‘I saw a guardsman once,’ said Omar quickly, trying to talk away his nerves. ‘He was travelling with a war galley that had co
me into our harbour, and he flew above the galley on a great lizard with wings as wide as this street.’

  ‘A drak,’ growled Farris Uddin, leading the way to the stables. ‘They are called draks, and the man you saw would have been an officer of the twenty-second talon wing. Draks do not like the open sea and they have to be specifically trained for such duties. The twenty-second has such steeds.’

  ‘Do draks like sand better?’ asked Omar, ducking through the stable entrance and entering into a dark space with a mud floor covered with straw.

  ‘No,’ said Farris Uddin, rolling up the sleeves of his robes before dipping an arm into a stone tank and lifting out a large, bleeding carcass with four small hooves still attached. ‘They like sheep.’

  Omar hollered in fear as a head as long as he was tall lashed out of the shadows to lance the tossed carcass on its razor-sharp beak, throwing it up into the air like a cat playing with its prey, before swallowing the carcass in a single sinuous gulp.

  ‘And human flesh,’ added Uddin, gripping Omar’s shoulders tight. ‘When they are permitted it.’

  Jack Keats yelled as the rush of air whipped past his face. A thousand feet above the ground wasn’t high enough to require the Iron Partridge to run pressurized, but it was high enough that no airship sailor would walk away from a fall. Even hanging upside down, Jack could just hear the reasonably voiced protests of the steamman Coss Shaftcrank from an open gun port.

  ‘I’ve done it,’ cried Jack, the blood rushing to his head. ‘I’ve kissed the ship’s nameplate.’

  The lumpen face that belonged to the two hands clutching Jack’s ankles poked out of the gun port where the cannon’s rubber hood had been withdrawn, a brief distraction for Jack from the distant landscape whipping past below at seventy miles an hour.

  His answer came back over the roar of the engine cars below. ‘You aren’t low enough to have done it proper, thief boy. Stretch yourself down.’

  Jack felt his body jolt as the hands around his ankles swung him down still lower. As initiation ceremonies went, the Royal Aerostatical Navy’s seemed particularly brutal and pointless. At least when he had been running with the flash mob, his baptismal trial of breaking into a warehouse one night had yielded a few pennies of profit.

  Pasco, the ship’s savage master engineer and self-appointed ‘tutor’ of the navy’s traditions to the new hands, leant further out of the gun port and threw a line down to Jack. At first, Jack thought that he was meant to grab it — extra security now that his ordeal was over — but then he noticed the bulky pair of gloves hanging at the end.

  ‘Put them on, thief,’ shouted the master engineer. ‘One at a time.’

  It had been Pasco’s turn to teach the classes that the new recruits were obliged to sit — instructions on ship lore and layout, the navy’s rules, regulations, traditions — the thousands of obscure pieces of equipment that an airship sailor’s life depended on. Pasco’s teaching methods, however, seemed rather more direct than those of his fellow officers.

  The gloves swung closer and Jack did as he was bid, discovering a handle inside each of the leather mittens just as the fingers holding his ankles released their grip. Jack screamed in panic, sliding head first down the outside of the Iron Partridge until he swung around on the gloves, gravity and the winds tugging his boots as he found himself miraculously clinging onto the side of the massive craft’s iron plates. The gloves are magnetic! When his hands had contracted inside the gloves, the gauntlets had activated — and releasing the handle inside loosened the invisible bond between man and the airship’s hull. Hair blowing in the crosswinds, Jack glanced up at the jeering faces, shouting abuse — or possibly encouragement — from the safety of their gun port.

  Down below, the transmission belt running out to the engine car underneath growled at Jack, as if the engine moulded as a lion’s head was actually alive; its rapidly turning rotor waiting to carve him into pieces if he lost his hold. He could hardly hear the engine over the sound of his own heart hammering inside his chest. Crying in an unholy blend of rage and fear, Jack released the magnet’s activator on his left hand and threw his arm up to fix his glove on the metal plating above his head. Repeating the manoeuvre, using the rivets on the plates below him as barely functional footholds, Jack steadily, desperately, clanged his way back up the airship’s outer metal skin and towards the open gun port. There were thieves back in the capital who specialized in running the labyrinthine maze of rooftops and towers in Middlesteel, experts in rattling skylights. Jack was not one of them. Don’t look down. One hand in front of the other and whatever you do, don’t look down.

  The young sailor cursed his tormentors with every freezing yard he climbed. Finally, Jack got near enough to the gun deck to hear a commotion inside — which explained where the jeering sailors who had just been observing his progress had disappeared to. Grasping the inside of the gun port, Jack tumbled back onto the airship’s deck and fell into the middle of a brawl.

  John Oldcastle was wielding one of the flat-headed rammers the gunners used to load cartridge wad and shot as a stave. Two sailors had been laid out cold with its blunt end, and the large officer had Pasco, the master engineer, pressed down on the neck of a thirty-two pounder. His makeshift weapon was held tight against Pasco’s throat, choking the man. Coss Shaftcrank was also threatening some of the master engineer’s men with a wad hook, his voicebox sounding a warning in case they tried to save their chief.

  Coss was still wearing the harness the sailors had used to dangle him out over the hull, none of the cowards wanting to risk the creature of the metal’s weight dragging them over the side during his brutal initiation ceremony.

  ‘Ah, there you are lad,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Me and the master engineer were just having a lively little debate about the use of a safety line during the kissing of the ship.’

  ‘What loss is that thief going to be?’ choked Pasco. ‘Fresh out of Bonegate jail. Another pressed man. Better the bastard drops now before one of his mistakes kills a real cloudie.’

  ‘I can find a blessed use for him on the upper deck,’ said Oldcastle, easing up the pressure on the master engineer’s neck. ‘And if you try to nobble the lad again, I’m going to take the harness off this old steamer and see if it’s long enough to swing you down onto the rotors of one of your own engine cars.’

  ‘You’re just a warrant sky officer, the same as me,’ said Pasco, angrily rubbing his sore throat. ‘You don’t get to decide who has the new signings. Maybe the thief’ll end up in my engine room, and then he’ll know what it is to serve in the Royal Aerostatical Navy.’

  ‘The first lieutenant has already given me these two,’ said Oldcastle, indicating Jack and Coss Shaftcrank. ‘And we’ve got our own initiation ceremony up top.’

  ‘You and the first lieutenant,’ spat Pasco. ‘You’ve got your tongue so far up her arse it’s a wonder you can talk. She’s as much a greenhorn as these two. What’s this to her? First voyage for some lady noble with more connections at Admiralty House than sense? You and me, Oldcastle, we’ll settle this proper when we’re back on shore.’

  ‘Well you’d better be prepared to wait a good long while, then.’

  Jack saw a dangerous look cross Pasco’s face as the engineer realized that the old sailor knew how long they were going to be in the air. ‘You know where we’re going, fat man? You know what the captain’s orders are?’

  ‘I know your rotors are going to need to keep on turning to get us there, Master Engineer Pasco. And that’s as much as you need to understand to do your mortal job.’

  Jack followed Oldcastle and the steamman as they warily withdrew from the gun deck and headed for the upper lifting chamber — one of two on the airship — its vast space filled with thousands of spherical gas bags secured by netting. The ironically named crew of idlers were busily checking pressure and looking for rodent-teeth tears and leaks that needed patching. Metal ladders fixed inside pipework frames connected the Iron Partridge’s upper deck and
lifting chamber, but Jack was relieved when John Oldcastle led them to the frame that held the lifting belt — a privilege, he had been warned, usually reserved for officers. After the ordeal of kissing the ship, Jack didn’t think he could stand to climb by hand up one of the lifting chamber’s vertigo-inducing ladders.

  Waiting for one of the wooden steps fixed onto the rotating leather belt to come around, Oldcastle appraisingly looked over Jack and the steamman. ‘Master Engineer Pasco knows his engines well enough, lads, but he’s a rabble-rouser who’s spent time in a stockade for trying to organize the RAN’s engineers into a workers’ union.’

  ‘And we’re the only ship that would have him,’ said Jack, remembering the first lieutenant’s confrontation with the vice-admiral the evening before the airship launched.

  ‘All we could mortal get,’ said Oldcastle, grabbing a hand-hold on the belt as he swung his boots out onto its wooden step. Jack followed after Coss Shaftcrank stepped on, watching the floor of the lifting chamber drop away as he was carried nearly eighty feet up towards the highest of their airship’s seven levels, the upper deck.

  ‘Like our ship herself, perhaps?’ said Coss. ‘Due to be scrapped, but rescued at the last minute …’

  ‘A flying albatross right enough,’ said John Oldcastle. ‘And when we get to my kingdom under the crow’s nest, you’ll see quick enough why.’

  ‘I understand the Iron Partridge was a proving craft,’ said the steamman. ‘Built in the air yards of the House of Quest.’

  Oldcastle stepped off the belt as they passed through to the upper deck, ignoring the smells and sounds coming from an open door down the corridor where the airship’s stock of pigs and sheep were housed. ‘Aye, I can see you’ve done your research before signing on with us, Mister Shaftcrank. But all she proved was that the great industrial lord that built her wasn’t quite as clever as he believed he was.’

  Jack saw why once the warrant sky officer had led them through a series of narrow corridors past several doors labelled as stores. Nestled between the wooden walls, a short companionway led up to the last thing Jack had expected to see on board an airship — transaction engines! They looked down into a long deep pit filled with the massive calculating machines, and not in any design that Jack was familiar with. Multiple banks of transaction-engine drums slowly turned as steam hissed out of a labyrinth of copper pipes. At the far end of the transaction-engine room was a series of globe-shaped boilers. Two stokers were feeding the furnace, the sweat-soaked skin of their bare chests glowing orange against the flames.