by Stephen Hunt
The ratings’ greeting trilled out as the step-like doors of the small launch dropped to the boat bay floor, Vice-Admiral Tuttle walking down triumphantly, ignoring the red-coated marines shouldering arms with snap-lock precision. He at least had the courtesy to return Captain Jericho’s salute.
‘So, the evasive captain of our elusive Iron Partridge.’
‘We weren’t expecting company quite so soon, vice-admiral,’ said Jericho.
‘If you mean how did I find you,’ said the admiralty officer, ‘we’ve been bribing those sharp-eyed little devils from the Benzari tribes below to send word to our embassy of every airship they’ve spotted in the sky. Although I could probably have simply followed the trail of wreckage you’ve been leaving strewn across our ally’s mountains.’
‘A successful action,’ remarked the first lieutenant.
‘Really, my dear lady?’ said the vice-admiral. ‘An intelligence mission that measures its success in seizing, then burning enemy prize vessels? What a curious notion. Your friends back on the State Protection Board will be so pleased.’
Westwick’s eyes flashed angrily at the vice-admiral’s indiscretion. So, the Jackelian secret police were behind their voyage into Cassarabia. Does that explain a first lieutenant who seems to think she is the vessel’s commander, helped by a master cardsharp who swaps uniforms as easily as he produces the credentials to have me released from custody and press-ganged into the navy?
‘The nature of our mission is sealed as secret and this vessel is still operating under independent command,’ said the first lieutenant.
‘As inconvenient as it must be for you, I’m afraid a state of war trumps even the favours your board called in across parliament,’ said the vice-admiral. ‘I carry orders for the Iron Partridge to rejoin the Fleet of the South along the Southwest Frontier.’
‘This mission is vital,’ insisted the first lieutenant.
Captain Jericho nodded in agreement.
‘Your mission has been superseded by events, captain. Admiralty House doesn’t care two figs where the Cassarabians are finding the celgas to float their vessels. It is enough that they have it, and the point will be rendered moot when we take their fleet on and pound them out of the clouds.’ He raised his fingers archly to indicate the boat bay. ‘If this clanking carbuncle of a vessel and your crew of press-ganged misfits managed to bring down two of their airships, wholly unsupported, I don’t think the entire high fleet will have too much trouble seeing off this Imperial Aerial Squadron of the caliph’s.’
‘Even Admiralty House can’t be so blind,’ said Jericho. ‘We need to know if they’ve found a natural vein of celgas to mine or if they’ve synthesized it, d’you see. At the very least, we need to know if the caliph has enough gas to sell to other enemy nations in an attempt to open up a second front against us.’
‘Irrelevant, irrelevant. Superior skymanship, captain, will always win out. We’ll certainly discover where they’re getting their celgas from the wretches we drag out from the empire’s crashed, burning hulls. Finding an airship that can float is one thing; finding hundreds of years of fighting tradition in the men that serve in her is quite another.’
‘Only an admiral can countermand my orders for independent action,’ said Jericho.
‘I’m sure your loyalty to the first lieutenant’s paymasters on the board is quite commensurate with the amount they paid to buy you out of debtors’ prison,’ sneered the vice-admiral. ‘And as ironic as I find the sight of a maverick of your notoriety pettifogging on regulations, I took the precaution of making sure I was carrying the admiral’s written orders with me.’ He flourished a wax-sealed envelope. ‘Besides,’ he raised a thumb at the two armed sentries posted on the boat bay, ‘I am sure that the members of your crew who aren’t mercenaries or scraped out from gutters, prison cells and stockades would relish the chance to pick up enemy vessels that are left intact enough to earn prize money. There should be enough of those in the next week or so to keep the poorest of your Jack Cloudies in rum and beer until next winter sets in.’
‘And if we join the Fleet of the South,’ said Jericho, ‘the first two kills of the war go against the admiral’s name; I take it our engagement was the opening action of the war?’
‘And I was told you could only be relied on to ignore admiralty politics,’ smiled the vice-admiral. He looked at the first lieutenant. ‘Don’t worry, my dear, you’ll be able to get back to the normal run of bribery, assassination and skulking around in the shadows soon enough. We’ll slip the Iron Partridge in the rear of the line of battle and you’ll get your chance to see what a direct action looks like. A hard pounding or two and the empire will soon fall back to their natural boundaries. A clean pair of heels, that’s what we’ll see from the caliph’s sand-trotting lackeys.’
Jack watched the look on First Lieutenant Westwick’s face as the vice-admiral stalked out with Jericho in tow. She was clearly thinking about putting that hidden sleeve dagger of hers in the vice-admiral’s back, and calculating the chances that she would be able to get away with rolling his corpse off the ship and claiming him lost overboard in a storm. But that wouldn’t wear now. Not when the sailors in the boat bay started spreading word of what the vice-admiral had offered. Which the vice-admiral had obviously intended. The chance to ride into battle in their armour-protected tortoise at the back of a squadron. The chance to take the fleet’s share of the prize money and sail back to the Kingdom as rich men.
And to be honest, the prospect of such a deal was lifting Jack’s heart as much as any man in the boat bay. A quick victory and back to Jackals. Alive, pardoned and with enough money to take his two brothers out of the poorhouse and pay for a new start for the three of them. Only the nagging words of the master cardsharp sounded a warning deep within his mind. I’ve never been privy to an easy victory. No, indeed, I don’t think I know what one of those even looks like.
Jack soon dismissed the words. In that, he was wrong.
It was cool and shaded in the grand vizier’s inner pavilion, full of shadows in which Omar could hide, avoiding contact with any courtier or servant who might question his presence. Well, the caliph’s law knew no bounds, and Omar was meant to be its hand inside the palace. Murder, even of a slave, was against the laws laid down by the Caliph Eternal.
Eventually the shadows of the passages gave way to the light of a central courtyard, and Omar found himself on the first terrace of the hanging gardens the old slave Nudar had sent him towards. A maze of paths wound through trellised walks bounded by orchids as tall as Omar himself, vines and creepers hanging like a curtain over the side of the terrace. Flicking away a bright blue dragonfly that had drifted in front of his face and peering upwards, Omar counted five more terraces laddering up to the open sky above. On the central courtyard below was a slab of marble the size of a bed. The mist of water from the nozzles at its four corners partially enveloped Shadisa’s green silk-robed form. Her wrists and her ankles were tied to each of the nozzles and she was lying soaking like a human starfish fixed to the slab’s centre. Her eyes were shut and her face peaceful, as if she had chosen to sleep in the middle of this garden fountain. But she is alive — she has to be. Beyond being tied down there were no signs of violence upon her beautiful body. Surely nothing that looked so serene could be dead? He extended out his senses towards her. The same senses that had served him so well back in Haffa. Yes, she was alive, but the differences within her he had sensed under the palace were heightened — a drug? Perhaps, but it was more than that. Deeper. Her soul felt wrong. What had that devil Immed Zahharl done to her? What can change a soul? He begged the heavens that it wasn’t love. Not for the grand vizier.
Omar grabbed one of the thicker creepers and, using it as a rope, shinned down towards the courtyard. He stopped, hidden in the tree, as the sound of boots on one of the marble paths grew audible, two columns of men emerging, their faces completely covered by golden masks except for their eyes and mouths.
Omar
would have recognized the man at their head by his malicious hooded eyes, even without the robes of the high keeper of the Sect of Razat. Leaving the grand vizier standing above Shadisa’s head, the two lines of men split off in opposite directions and slowly surrounded the slab where their victim was bound. The caliph’s law would be enforced as they were engaged upon their crime, with no excuses possible as Omar leapt down among them and slashed apart the first man to try to take Shadisa’s honour and her life. He would run his steel through as many as he could before they fled like rats and the grand vizier would run away, not daring to tell anyone that he had been part of this evil gathering.
The man Omar had marked as Zahharl intoned, ‘Which of those is last among us?’
One of the golden masked figures stepped forward. ‘I am last.’
‘Then it is upon you to prove you will follow our true way,’ called Zahharl. ‘The Sect of Razat calls for blood, and from this maiden’s flesh will it be spilled.’ He pulled out a long silver syringe from under his priest’s robes and plunged it into Shadisa’s arm, filling it with the unconscious woman’s blood. ‘You must prove yourself to me and you must prove yourself to the will of the one true god.’ He lifted up the filled syringe as if it was a sceptre and the golden-masked figure stepped forward to receive it. The grand vizier indicated Shadisa’s prone body. ‘This slave’s name is Shadisa and she shall die. It is for you to prove yourself upon her body. As we honour progress …’
‘As we honour progress,’ intoned the circle of figures, ‘she shall die!’
Omar was flexing his legs to propel him into the leap down from the tree when the tiles below began to shake. A stomping sound echoed from the corridor the grand vizier had entered through and the first of a company of giant beyrogs emerged into the hanging garden from the pavilion. Ben Issman be blessed, Boulous must have told the guardsmen what Omar was about to do, and they had informed the Caliph Eternal. Here was the ruler’s bodyguard, come to arrest the grand vizier for his crimes. The caliph using the excuse, no doubt, to remove a thorn from his side who had grown over-powerful and dangerous. The sedan chair borne into the hanging garden by the beyrogs dropped to the floor behind Zahharl and a figure to the left of the grand vizier removed his mask, revealing a face that Omar had to suppress a gasp upon seeing — a profile familiar from any coin stamped in Cassarabia. It was the Caliph Eternal standing beside the grand vizier, Akil Jaber Issman himself, his immortal youthful features looking not much older that Omar’s own!
‘Take her,’ ordered the Caliph Eternal, and at the sound of his voice the shark-faced beyrogs came alive and lunged forward, ripping off Shadisa’s restraints and pulling her off the slab.
‘Careful, you wretches,’ called the Caliph Eternal to the beyrogs, pointing towards the masked man holding the syringe of blood. ‘The woman does not require her skin bruised as if she is an overripe banana. Prove your loyalty to progress and the Sect of Razat: this slave shall die this night by your hand.’
Omar watched in shock as the Caliph Eternal’s hideous bodyguards tossed Shadisa’s comatose form inside the sedan chair. The masked initiate who was to kill her stopped with one boot on the chair’s step as the grand vizier passed him a cork-stoppered vial of green liquid. ‘Use this to wake her up,’ laughed the grand vizier, ‘before you start with her.’ The initiate nodded and took the vial, entering the chair’s box.
The Caliph Eternal himself is a member of the grand vizier’s wicked sect. A man who should have commanded the loyalty of every sect of the Holy Cent as the voice of the one true god on earth. No chance of invoking the caliph’s law and trusting to the empire’s justice here. The only law now was the depraved whims of Immed Zahharl. Any one of the beyrogs would be a match for a dozen guardsmen, and Omar wouldn’t get more than a step towards Shadisa’s body before the caliph’s bodyguard cut him to pieces. He had to bide his time. Save Shadisa later.
Omar kept as still as a leaf in the foliage. The Caliph Eternal’s monsters would slay him if they scented him up here. Back in Haffa, Omar had heard a story once about a salt-fish farmer who had escaped a nest of sand vipers that had been tracking him by rubbing a salt-fish against his skin to disguise his scent. Omar quietly plucked one of the oranges and sliced it against his scimitar, squeezing its juices against his face, arms and legs.
‘I want no trace of her left,’ ordered the grand vizier. ‘Carry the chair to the lowest level of the womb mages’ library and do it there.’
No. NO!
Concealed inside the sedan chair, Shadisa and the initiate who was to be her executioner were carried away by the beyrogs, a couple of their number standing sentry outside the archway, the gold-masked figures of the sect striding solemnly behind the procession.
Shadisa. Omar had failed her again — a guardsman with a scimitar at his side, trained to hack apart her would-be killers, and he had been every bit as helpless to intervene as he had been during the sack of Haffa.
Omar’s self-recriminations ended as one of the beyrogs turned and sniffed the air suspiciously, growling like a wolf.
‘Stop,’ ordered the caliph.
Immed Zahharl turned. ‘What is it?’
‘There is someone else here,’ said the caliph. ‘My beyrogs’ senses are never wrong.’
‘Move on,’ the grand vizier called to the departing sedan chair and the masked figures. ‘Seal the garden behind you.’
‘Find the intruder,’ the caliph ordered the beyrog as it loped howling straight towards Omar’s orange tree.
Jack was helping Coss with a broken regulator on one of the transaction engines when a banshee-like wailing began sounding about the chamber and the two of them halted their work.
‘General-quarters,’ said Coss.
Jack was puzzled. ‘This close to our rendezvous with the Fleet of the South?’
John Oldcastle leant over the rail into the engine pit. ‘The bridge wants a check on the navigation drums, they need to confirm our blessed position.’
Jack saw why through the porthole when he went back up to the punch-card desk. There were dunes below — known as the great southern desert to the Jackelians, the northern to the Cassarabians — but the orange sands were covered with smoking debris and bodies. In the air clusters of gas cells drifted through the sky attached to scraps of burning carper, like corpuscles bled from the airships’ veins and set astray to wander the heavens.
‘There are no airships left intact,’ said Jack, injecting his query into the punch-card reader.
‘Aye lad,’ said John Oldcastle, looking out of the next porthole. ‘And unless both sides blew each other to bits, that’s the remains of one fleet while the victors have had it away on their heels.’
Results for Jack’s query began twisting away on the beads of his abacus-like screen. ‘All our compass points have been tracked correctly. Our navigation drums are turning fine. These are the rendezvous coordinates the vice-admiral gave us for the Fleet of the South.’
The master cardsharp reported the results down to the bridge and returned to Jack’s station a minute later. ‘You and the old steamer can get your tools. We’re to report to the boat bay and go down there — sift through the wreckage for anything resembling a ship’s record drums — Jackelian or the caliph’s.’
Jack couldn’t tear his eyes away from the sight outside the porthole.
Coss came out of the pit to take in the sight too. ‘How could one fleet wipe out another so completely in a single engagement?’
‘Perhaps the vice-admiral was right,’ said Jack. ‘Superior skymanship will out.’
‘Ah, that strutting popinjay,’ whined John Oldcastle. ‘If he’s right, there’s a first time for everything.’
If the Iron Partridge’s skipper had been looking to find the remains of a captain’s log among the dunes of the Southwest Frontier, then Jack hoped Captain Jericho wouldn’t be too disappointed. There was enough of that to go around for everyone. While the figures sifting through the wreckage — John Oldcas
tle, Coss, Jack, their brutish captain of marines and a handful of his soldiers — had yet to find anything resembling a transaction-engine register in the ruins left scattered across the desert, there were enough bodies wearing the torn, burnt uniforms of the RAN to speak of which side had flown away victorious. So many ships’ names on the caps — the Audacity, the Guardian Kirkhill, the Javelin, the Parliament Oak, the Swiftsure and the Ultimatum — and not a single Cassarabian sailor among the bodies strewn half-buried among the shifting sands.
Dirty rolls of smoke threaded across the sky for miles, hiding the hundreds of circling carrion birds. Pieces of smouldering carper jutted out of the desert like a field of thorns, and the saltpetre smell of matches from the residue of liquid explosive charges lingered in the air. The Iron Partridge must have missed the battle by no more than a day — or the desert would have reclaimed the scene of carnage, covering the wreckage with sand after scavengers had stripped the carcasses of the fallen to their bare bones. No need to post sentries here to guard against looters; only the vultures had turned up to avail themselves of the war’s bounty.
‘Nothing,’ Jack called across to Coss, poking an arch of a girder emerging from the sand as if it was a whalebone trapped on the bed of an evaporated sea. What in the name of the Circle happened to our airships out here? Apart from a few melted keys from a punch-card writer, Jack hadn’t found anything even approaching useful. There were thousands of tiny scraps of blackened material on the ground. Not paper, but more like a very fine cloth that had been burnt close to ashes. Jack picked up a brittle leaf of the burnt material. Nothing he recognized. Too thin to be the canvas of an airship envelope, but it had been left blowing all over the battlefield.
