by Stephen Hunt
The vice-admiral shook his head sadly. ‘The word of a pressed criminal; well, at least we still have some real navy personnel left on this ship. Mister Pasco, do your duty. Westwick and her secret police lackeys are to be held in the brig. I want a loyal sailor with small arms on every station as we set a course for home.’
There was a cheer from the mob of armed sailors and Pasco’s men grabbed Jack, Coss and John Oldcastle, pushing them after the first lieutenant, the female officer surrounded by a ring of jeering armed mutineers. They would be lucky if they made it to the brig without being hanged first.
‘Not the brig for the old steamer,’ said Pasco, pointing at Shaftcrank. ‘Escort him up to the transaction-engine chamber. We need someone to prevent this albatross of a ship from killing us all on the way home.’ Pasco turned to Jack as he pushed a cutlass under the master cardsharp’s nose. ‘I told you, boy, and you, fat man, the day would come when we’d settle this proper.’
That day had arrived.
CHAPTER TEN
Standing in the corridor that led to the great library cavern, Omar could hear the clacking echoes of the womb mages’ copper-plated spell books turning under their fingers as he frantically inspected the buttons on the lifting room’s wall panel. Where would you go to assault, murder and dispose of a slave? Deep, that was what the grand vizier had told the initiate. Deep to hide the crime, deep to dispose of Shadisa’s corpse.
Omar had a name now for the golden-masked would-be slayer, courtesy of Nudar. Salwa. A name accompanied by a warning, for Salwa was reputed to be a keeper of the Sect of Razat, a priest who had already proved himself by questioning and strangling many of the men captured in Haffa by raiders. Men that Omar would have known of old. The priest’s murderous actions towards those who had been cast out as heretics should have already proven his loyalty to the grand vizier, yet here this devil Salwa was, about to snatch the greatest love of Omar’s life away from him.
Well, Salwa the priest is going to become Salwa the dead when I catch up with him. And if he had harmed so much as a hair on Shadisa’s head, then he would become Salwa the man who welcomed death on the day his fate crossed paths with a certain guardsman’s. If only Omar’s luck held until he caught up with them. Omar had already seen the sedan chair and the bodyguard of massive beyrogs exiting the womb mages’ lair, the chair held noticeably higher by its two porters now its occupants had been deposited somewhere below. Why set me this fate, god, why make a guardsman of a slave if you don’t mean for me to rescue her?
It was as if the heavens were blessing Omar’s plans, trying to restore the balance of justice here in the Jahan. Guiding him to alcoves to hide in and ledges to crouch on unseen while the sorcerers passed by. The fear of their craft among the people was both their strength and their weakness. They were so sure that nobody would dare to poke their nose in a sorcerer’s business, that they didn’t even require guards to watch their gates.
Standing in the lifting room, Omar pressed the button for the lowest level, and shuddered as the gate shut off the corridor and the room began to sink. There was a smell inside of chemicals that reminded Omar of the bleaches he had used to clean the water farm’s desalination lines out after their pipes clogged up with crusted salt. Omar’s heart was pounding as he tried not to think of what would happen if he were too late. It felt as if his guts were being wrung tighter and tighter as the lifting room descended painfully slow. When the gate finally opened again, the surprise of it almost made Omar jump. Focus, I have to focus. Remember the advice in scimitar practice. Master yourself before you master your opponent. As he walked the crimson-lit corridors the many different doors and passages seemed to create a maze. He picked one route and stuck with it, ducking into an alcove as a column of womb mages came marching down the corridor. He heard them before he saw them, each of the men humming the letters of a different spell. It was as if they were in a trance, their faces fixed on the bare concrete floor. They wore not the usual robes of the womb mages, but voluminous white garments. Matching white skullcaps covered their heads, while small gauze masks protected their mouths like the filters nomads wore when hunkering down during a sandstorm.
Silently following the procession at a distance, Omar passed an alcove railed with freshly laundered clothes in the same style. He slipped one of the robes over his guardsman’s uniform and donned a white mask, scented with a chlorine tang. It was an easy enough thing to join the back of the procession, muttering the same limited hum of letters in an order as random as those in front. If Omar’s spell was nonsense, none of the womb mages — focused as they were on their own sorceries — noticed.
The chanting line passed a glass window as tall as five men. The long chamber on the other side was stacked with large, gas-filled aquarium-like tanks, producers and their loads veiled by the yellow gas pumped in through long coiled pipes joining each tank’s roof from the chamber’s ceiling. The pipes had a glistening organic quality to them that made them resemble umbilical cords. Womb mages in their all-enveloping white outfits moved about the tanks, tapping dials on banks of machinery at the front and noting measurements down on clipboards. Glancing across, Omar couldn’t even see the end of the chamber, just cage after cage. How many biologicks were being grown through there? How many slaves inside, their bellies swollen like whales, hatching the womb mages’ creatures? Draks for the guardsmen to fly patrols on, beyrogs to march in the caliph’s bodyguard, sandpedes to bear the loads for the empire’s trading caravans. How many creatures whose creation spells were racked in the great library above; how many slaves who had given their lives bearing such biologicks into existence? Poor devils, I can’t save you. Only Shadisa. Forgive me.
Omar left the chamber behind and continued following the chanting womb mages. The teachings of the Holy Cent might have told of how after mankind had been cast out of the gardens of paradise, when Ben Issman — his name be blessed — was shown how to lead the tribes to prosperity in the deserts by casting down the thousands of false deities, moulding them into the one true god. How to pluck his own flesh and cast it down upon the sands to make the dunes bloom with plants and gardens, gardens filled with creatures that would serve mankind after god’s wrath had stilled their old machines. But their salvation came at a price; a price that could be avoided by most freemen, as long as they averted their eyes in fear and superstition when womb mages passed. A price that was paid by slaves and the conquered from all the subject nations of the empire.
As Omar walked the underground passages, he saw sights that he could not begin to understand. Another glass-walled chamber contained a tall, sloping wall divided into shelves and squares like a giant bookshelf. Each compartment was covered with about an inch of what looked like jelly. Womb mages pushed ladders along a rail to reach the different compartments, scraping off the gel with white swabs and depositing the residue into Petri dishes. They resembled worker bees intently busying away on the face of a honeycomb.
Another chamber could be observed through long armoured glass slits rather than a floor-to-ceiling window. On the other side was a spherical area where a womb mage was mounted on top of something like a cannon on a pivoted arm. Bursts of lightning flew from its needle-like barrel and forked around the chamber before striking a ball on a plinth in the centre of the space. The bottom hemisphere of the ball was plated with copper, the top half transparent and filled with viscous fluid. Omar watched as another womb mage walked out to the sphere to inspect its jellied contents with a thin metal instrument. Dissatisfied with the results, he made a sign towards the womb mage riding the cannon. As soon as the inspector had cleared the chamber through a vault-like door, the cannon began lashing the contents again with an angry discharge.
‘Animating dead flesh,’ whispered Omar as he noticed the procession of mumbling sorcerers branching off down a corridor. Are there no depths these demons will not sink to?
His way lay down another passage, however. He could sense that Shadisa had passed down there. Omar halted an
d glanced intently around the crimson-lit corridor. He was getting closer to Shadisa, he was sure of that, yet her presence was getting weaker — that couldn’t be, unless … an image jumped into his mind. Of Shadisa struggling as Salwa’s greasy fingers closed around her neck and he choking her struggling body to silence.
Throwing subterfuge to the wind, he began sprinting down the passage, desperately trying to sense where Shadisa had been taken. There. One of the heavily riveted iron doors, identical to a hundred he had already passed on his journey down here. Omar drew his scimitar from under his robe, threw the door open and had a second’s glimpse of a small narrow room divided in two by a metal mesh, two womb mages turning around to see who was bursting in on them. Omar smashed the nearest of the white-masked sorcerers in the face with the guard of his sword, sending the man stumbling back into a counter covered in scalpels and other instruments that might have been the tools of a womb mage, or a torturer.
The second womb mage tried to get to the counter, his hands diving down for one of the blades, and Omar kicked him in the side, overbalancing him, then took out the back of his legs with a second kick. As the womb mage went down, Omar slammed the man’s face into the blade-littered surface, before running to the mesh dividing the room.
On the other side was a circular pool filled with bubbling acid, its fumes drifting across a figure naked except for a wrap of cloth around his waist. He was kneeling down by the side of the pool dropping in blood-soaked items of clothing, each of them swirling away in a smoking hiss. He held in his hands Shadisa’s ornate silk tunic. The one that she thought had marked her out for the grand vizier’s attentions — and it had, but not in the way she had anticipated. This was Salwa. Salwa the killer, his taut muscular body covered in sweat and blood from his work.
‘Shadisa!’
Please, god, I have followed the fate you have given me. Don’t do this. Let her be alive. Give me a miracle, is that so much to ask? Too late. By heaven’s silver gate, he had failed her. Shadisa, beautiful Shadisa who had been the only girl he had loved. He had been too late when she needed him. Too late to save her from the grand vizier’s evil sect and the perverted initiation rites that had been demanded of this devil, this dog, this beast, Salwa.
The man stood and turned, looking at Omar through the mesh wall. Shadisa was gone, all sense of her soul had vanished from his heart.
‘You killed her!’
‘Yes, I believe I did. Who are you behind that mask?’ asked the killer.
‘The man who’s going to slice you into pieces!’
Salwa picked up something, a tray of human flesh bobbing in a darkening pool of blood. In his other hand was the golden-faced sun mask he had worn to conceal his face in the grand vizier’s hanging gardens. ‘I have a mask too.’ He tossed the tray of human remains into the pool of acid, a terrible stench emanating from it as it flamed away, then he pulled the mask down over his face. It was slicked with blood. Shadisa’s blood.
Omar grabbed the handle on the door in the mesh partition and yanked at it to no avail. It was locked tight.
The murderous priest laughed and pointed to a transaction-engine lock with a blood-testing spike mounted against the wall on Omar’s side of the mesh. ‘Only those whose blood has been entered into the sect’s records can gain admittance into the inner sanctum. And you’re not on it. You’re not even a womb mage under that mask, are you?’
‘Open the door and find out!’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Salwa. ‘Our sorcery is strong. You’ll have left some part of yourself down here — hairs, skin. We’ll find out who you are, my troublesome friend, and then you’ll be silenced.’
‘Come and find me now!’ yelled Omar. ‘I’m right here!’
‘Stay there, save me the trouble of hunting you down, then,’ laughed Salwa, walking towards the mesh. ‘You can wait while I summon the entire Sect of Razat.’
Omar kicked over a table filled with connected glass vials, the sound of their smashing mingling with his cry of rage as the killer stepped through the mesh door and clanged it shut.
The young guardsman was already running when the alarms began to fill the corridors of the womb mages’ lair.
Jack was pacing the small box of their cell in the brig, ignoring the snores of the master cardsharp and the dangerous, brooding silence of the first lieutenant. John Oldcastle might be able to lie down and sleep through their predicament without a problem, but every time Jack tried to close his eyes, all he could see was the fate waiting for him back in the Kingdom. The best he could hope for in front of a board of enquiry orchestrated by that slimy toad Tuttle was a dishonourable discharge that would see him handed back to the judge in the capital’s court — and a short walk to an even shorter drop on the scaffold outside Bonegate prison. The alternative was a charge of mutiny and the only difference there would be the location of the rope, this time hanging in the naval stockade at the fortress city of Shadowclock. He imagined his brothers weeping when they heard of his death in the poorhouse, the shrugs from the underpaid functionaries of the Board of the Poor at the news. Hanged as a mutineer or hanged as a thief. The result was inevitable, wasn’t it? A bad apple, from the same barrel as his father. I’m sorry, Alan, I’m sorry Saul. We always seem to let you down, don’t we? First father and now me. That’s it, perhaps I’m just carrying on the family tradition. I drew some bad cards in this game of chance we live, and I’ve thrown our lives away.
It was easy to listen to your own thoughts in the brig, swim in your worries insulated from the noise and vibrations of the airship by their position at the centre of the middle deck. No rattling beams or creaking hull. The only thing that Jack had felt of late had been the jolt of the landing anchors being discharged, one of Pasco’s henchmen only too glad to inform the prisoners that the Benzari marines had been left on their home soil on the vice-admiral’s orders, crowing about their marooning as he slipped stale rations through the cell door’s metal slit. At a stroke, the vice-admiral had repatriated the one contingent of the ship’s crew whose fierce loyalty to the ship’s captain was without question.
Jack heard clanking at the iron door and as it opened, three armed sailors threw the captain of marines, Henry Tempest, onto the floor of the cell. It looked as if he had taken a pistol whipping from their rifle butts, and the giant was shivering despite the controlled warmth inside the airship.
‘Henry,’ said the first lieutenant, on her feet immediately, inspecting the soldier’s wounds. She ran to the cell door, speaking through a thin grille. ‘His flasks, where are his two flasks?’
There was a laugh from beyond the door. ‘Hanging up outside here. You didn’t think we’d leave them with you, did you?’
‘Too much green,’ whispered the shaking marine officer. ‘I need the red. They tricked me, dosed me good.’
‘Give them to me, you bastards; send the surgeon down here to administer them.’
There was no reply. Their captors had left the prisoners alone in the brig to rot again. John Oldcastle had been roused by the commotion and it took all three of them to drag the shivering marine to the cell’s solitary bunk.
Jack looked out of the cell’s viewing slit. There was a pair of canteens hanging on the back of an empty guard’s chair. ‘He won’t be chasing the poppy powder any time soon.’
‘The big lad isn’t an opiate addict, Mister Keats,’ said Oldcastle. ‘That’s just scuttlebutt the crew has been spreading.’
First Lieutenant Westwick flashed Oldcastle an angry look.
‘What’s it matter now, lass?’ sighed Oldcastle. ‘Our cover’s blown. The navy’s as likely to hang us all before the State Protection Board ever gets a chance to spring us.’
‘I know that you two aren’t real naval officers,’ said Jack. ‘You’re agents of the secret police.’
‘Don’t wish that terrible trade on me, I’m not even that,’ said the master cardsharp, sadly. ‘Just a poor unlucky old fool the State Protection Board has blackmailed
into acting as a pawn in their great game. My real name is Jared Black although my friends call me the commodore.’
Jared Black. That was the name that Coss had remembered from his pre-sentient dreams — the steamman had been right about the master cardsharp all along. And the commodore was the nickname that Captain Jericho had warned Jack not to use in front of the rest of the crew.
‘In the flush of my youth I used to be a royalist rebel, in the days when the cause was given mortal succour by the caliph,’ said the prisoner. ‘Arms, explosives and money — anything for the fleet-in-exile if it meant pulling parliament’s nose. Real boats, lad, submersibles, not these gas-filled sausages the RAN float about the sky; the roll of the ocean beneath your feet and the spray of water coming across your face in a blessed conning tower as you recharge your air. The years I spent in Cassarabia and the contacts I made down south are the only reason I’m here.’
Jared Black: John Oldcastle. The commodore. From traitorous rebel to stooge of the state. It seemed when it suited him, the old man changed names and identities as easily as he did uniforms.
Jack looked at the woman. ‘But nobody blackmailed you into making this voyage.’
‘I’m an officer of the state,’ said Westwick, ‘just the same as I was before, and that’s all you need to know about me, boy.’
‘What about him?’ said Jack, pointing at the shivering giant.
‘Ah, the big lad’s navy, alright,’ said the commodore. ‘He wanted to get in so bad he volunteered to take a potion the admiralty’s chemists had developed a few years back; a fearful formula to create the perfect marine. It worked, in a manner of speaking; took some stick-thin sickly cripples they’d scraped out from the nearest hospital of the poor and turned them into the kind of brute you see here. But the formula left its test subjects’ bodies and minds twisted — one minute in a raging fury, the next as placid as a lamb. The only way they can control their humours is by using the flasks. Green to calm down, red when they need to fight, and either a coma or a stroke if they don’t sip from the bottles at all.’
