by Stephen Hunt
‘It would be good to see them,’ said Westwick.
The old woman hummed again. ‘Travel can be dangerous.’
‘Life can be dangerous,’ said Westwick. ‘You never know when you will have to serve a new master, one who may turn out to be most unkind.’
‘That is why there are a hundred faces in paradise,’ said the old woman, ‘so that we may always find at least one to smile upon us.’ She looked at them. ‘And which of the sects smiles upon you?’
‘I’ll take the fifty-third,’ said the commodore. ‘The old one, that is, although I’d say the new one if it was soldiers doing the asking.’
Remembering the cover story that they had agreed, Jack nodded in agreement. I just hope that I can get out of this land without the cause to pray to your gods.
‘A good choice for a salty trader and his two servants,’ agreed the old woman, leaning over to finger Westwick’s kaftan. ‘And wearing the sash of a newly wed, which of the sects did your house before marriage support?’
‘The Sect of Jabal, the seventy-seventh cent,’ said the first lieutenant.
‘Known for its fidelity and dependability,’ smiled the old woman. ‘Good, good. Very believable. If I didn’t know better, I would take you all for locals, rather than travelling tradesmen.’ She pointed at Jack’s turban. ‘Better you had been a jahani, with such hair — even concealed, but still …’ She seemed to make up her mind. ‘A reunion after all, then. We shall talk about business old and new.’
‘Tradesmen always find something to talk about,’ said Westwick.
‘There’s a lot of business about, my dear,’ said the old woman. She clapped her hands together and a thin young slave appeared. ‘Rooms for our guests, and I shall have to see if I can arrange for a few more visitors to arrive. Udal Lackmann. Yes, I shall send for Udal Lackmann.’
The commodore nodded in thanks as the old woman withdrew.
‘You know this Udal Lackmann?’ asked Jack.
‘Of old, lad, yes,’ said the commodore. ‘The caliph never supported the royalist fleet directly, but he used men such as Udal — a smuggler — to channel his aid. That way if the caliph was caught, he could throw up his arms and say, “Ah, what wicked criminals there are dealing with these foreign scoundrels.” Udal was the one I dealt with, always good for a torpedo or two, as long as they were being put in the water against parliament’s shipping and fired a deniable distance from the empire’s shores.’
‘Pasdaran?’ asked Westwick.
‘If he wasn’t, he was their creature,’ said the commodore. ‘Much as I am yours.’
‘I am flattered that you believe so,’ said Westwick, without a trace of irony in her voice.
‘Your old friends may not know about Cassarabia’s sudden leap forward when it comes to the caliph’s airships,’ said Jack.
Westwick shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure that the airships are the Caliph Eternal’s, boy. There’s been an unbalancing of power here. Yes. The Pasdaran are down, but they aren’t quite out yet. They’ll know something, count on it. If the empire is the foot that is kicking us, then the Pasdaran is a fungus attached to its sole. Even after you rip it out, the roots are still left buried deep in the flesh.’
‘You’ll tell me when you want me to try,’ said Tempest.
‘Not yet, Henry,’ said Westwick. ‘Your time will come, as soon as we find out where their celgas is coming from.’
‘Is he really immortal?’ asked Jack. ‘The Caliph Eternal, I mean.’
‘It’s how the empire controls all its client nations,’ said the commodore. ‘The velvet glove slipped over the iron fist. The caliph’s private drug, lifelast, is doled out to all the ruling families who keep their loyalty to him true. I’ve seen men down here who are over two hundred years old and still sprightlier than my creaking old frame. They say the caliph keeps the good stuff for himself and only gives out his diluted piss-water to his cronies. Maybe he will live forever.’
‘They also say that the caliph’s touch can cure sickness and that he can resurrect the dead with a drop of his blood,’ sneered Westwick, ‘and that only the one true god himself decides when a caliph’s reign is over, striking him down with lightning and calling forward a new member from the bloodline of Ben Issman.’
‘Don’t let your mother’s hatred for this land and what they did to her blind you, Maya,’ said the commodore. ‘I’ve seen some mortal unexplainable things during my years down south.’ He looked at Jack. ‘Next time you’re in Middlesteel Museum, have a look at the oldest coins they have from the empire. They’re from before the cold-time and the face on those coins is the same blessed one you’ll find on the silver loose change sewn into your robe.’
Westwick snorted. ‘Go into the town’s flesh bazaar, boy, any womb mage there would be able to give you the same face if it wasn’t a crime to do so. Tell us what you know of this smuggler, Jared.’
‘His mind is as fast as anyone’s I’ve ever known,’ said the commodore. ‘He’s a striking fellow right enough, with skin as dark as ebony and a presence that’s large enough to fill a room. His men told me once that he’s an exiled prince from the Red Forests in the deep south — one of the empire’s disputed satrapies — and he’d fallen in with the machinations of the forest people’s politics. He came riding out on one of those great bulls they ride down there, with just the clothes on his back and a single lance, so the story has it. He started off running contraband through the forest, between the empire and the Skirrtula. Now there’s not much that moves illegally in the harbour towns that Udal doesn’t have a hand in.’
‘Then he must be Pasdaran,’ said Westwick.
‘What can’t be stamped out must be controlled,’ agreed the commodore. ‘That’s the caliph’s way, alright. Always the long game, down Cassarabia way.’
‘You’re looking mournful, lad,’ said the commodore to Jack as the young sailor sat by the second-storey window looking down onto the street — taking his turn on the sentry duty that First Lieutenant Westwick had insisted on.
‘I just realized,’ said Jack, ‘that I haven’t thought of my brothers for days. How they are doing, how they are being treated …’
‘And now you are feeling guilty for how wicked selfish you’ve been?’ said the commodore. ‘Ah, you’ve discovered the terrible secret of why people take to the great game like a drunk holds to his bottle. You’re never so alive as when you’re walking with death by your side, and we’re cowards all.’
‘Cowards?’ said Jack. ‘We’re in the middle of the enemy’s territory wearing false clothes that would have us hanged as spies if that old lady downstairs takes it into her head to hand us in.’
‘Does that make us brave, Mister Keats, or mortal fools? Brave is waking up every morning and trudging into a mill or the fields before the sun is up, worrying about feeding your family, worrying about whether your children will get an education, food on their plate, or survive the next winter’s round of whooping cough. Worrying about whether the crops will fail or your manufactory will have enough work to be able to hire you on for the following month. That’s real fear, Mister Keats. Living an ordinary life takes real bravery. Letting danger chase that away from your mind is one escape, travelling on a u-boat and seeing a different shore every week is another; drinking yourself insensible or a pipe stuffed with mumbleweed are more. I’ve tried them all, lad, and the great game is the best by far.’
‘But the State Protection Board forced you to come here,’ said Jack.
‘It looks like it, doesn’t it?’ said the commodore. ‘And that’s what you tell yourself. They’ve found me. I’m too blessed old to run away and start a new life with yet another name. So it’s just one little favour, and then another. Run some cargo here for them off-manifest, no questions asked. Pick up a man on your boat in some far-off port; drop some documents off in another. Avoid the men-of-war hunting your boat; dodge the assassin in the shadows; draw your sword for a game of tickle-my-sabre when you can’t. And
all the time while you’re doing it you never think about the sister who won’t talk to you for getting her son killed, or the wife and daughter who’ve moved along the Circle before you.’
‘I won’t be like that,’ said Jack. ‘I’m getting back to Jackals to see my brothers; to buy them out of the poorhouse.’
‘Perhaps you will at that,’ said the commodore.
Down in the street there was a commotion, the sounds of running — a group of black-uniformed men with red cloaks and strange silver facemasks sprinting after a solitary runner. The commodore pushed Jack back from the edge of the window so they wouldn’t be spotted watching from above. ‘Nothing down there for us, Mister Keats. Keep your head down.’
The runners caught up with their victim just under the safe house, kicking him to the ground and then dragging him away as he yelled in horror.
Jack shielded his eyes against the sun as he risked a quick look outside at the figures pulling the prisoner away up the hill. ‘Were they priests?’
‘No, town police,’ said the commodore. ‘The masks are based on the face of Salofar, the twelfth sect of the Holy Cent. The face of righteous justice, which as you’ve just seen, runs mortal swiftish in Cassarabia.’
‘The man they grabbed … a thief?’
‘A merchant,’ said the commodore. ‘The silver sash he wore bore his bazaar trading licence. He must have been caught cheating his customers. Poor devil, they practice menshala in the empire.’ The commodore saw that Jack didn’t know the word and continued. ‘It is the will of the one true god that the punishment must always fit the crime. When I was with the royalists in one of the empire’s harbour towns back west, I saw a baker who had been caught adulterating his flour with sawdust. The local police baked him to death in his own oven. No judges or courts or juries here. Just menshala.’
‘Barbarians.’ Jack shook his head in disgust. And here we are, right in the heart of their land.
‘Don’t be so quick to judge,’ said the commodore. ‘Back in Jackals you can spill seed potatoes onto a field of weeds and most years you’ll pull some spuds out. You’ve seen what the heart of the empire is like. Dust and sand and rocks. Here, you can break your back all year long, then a single neighbour two hundred miles upstream can divert the irrigation and kill your entire livelihood within a day; or a band of wild brigands can turn up, and in one hour steal a year’s labour from you at the point of a scimitar. A hard land breeds hardy people and if you don’t have hard justice to go along with the land, then you have the rule of the gun and the blade and the club, and no civilization at all that’s worth the blessed name.’
‘We’re here to fight them,’ said Jack. ‘And it sounds like you admire them.’
‘Not so, lad, but I do understand them. Because it’s the way of the world. In bright, fertile waters, the fish you see are as shiny as rainbows and swarm in schools as large as clouds. But run your u-boat deep and into the dark barrens, and the fish are tough, bony-looking things, few and fierce. That’s the empire. The Cassarabians are warriors. Their land made them that way and they’ve rolled up all the plumper, richer nations that lady fortune tossed down for them as their neighbours. All but one, Jackals in the north, protected by our floating walls … the Royal Aerostatical Navy.’
‘And now they have their own navy.’ The Circle preserve us.
‘So they do, Mister Keats, and we must get to the bottom of the whys, hows and wherefores of the Imperial Aerial Squadron’s celgas. Because unless we can, they’re going to be swimming in our waters. And as you love Jackals, as you love your two fine young brothers, trust me, you don’t want to see the Kingdom ruled as a satrapy of the empire.’
When Udal Lackmann did reach the safe house, Jack was not on sentry duty, so it seemed to him that the smuggler had arrived as if out of thin air. The first thing that Jack knew of the smuggler’s presence in the building was when he noticed their safe house’s aged host whispering with a newly arrived traveller by the entrance to the courtyard and pointing towards the group of Jackelians. Commodore Black got up from the game of cards he had been trying to teach Jack and Henry Tempest, and approached the man with what seemed to Jack a touch of uncharacteristic apprehension. The traveller’s white robes were grey with dust, a sand filter hung off his neck, and a single curved dagger was tucked behind his crimson waist sash.
‘Al-salaamo alaykum, Udal Lackmann,’ said the commodore.
‘Wa alaykum e-salaam, Jared Black,’ said the smuggler, flashing a smile as white as the shine on the courtyard’s four pillars. ‘It has been many years since you were a visitor here.’
‘Many years for me, Udal Lackmann,’ said the commodore. ‘But they’ve been a mortal lot kinder to you.’
‘My life is full of little blessings,’ said the smuggler. ‘They help me hold to a path that fills its travellers with vim and vigour. I had not heard that your u-boat was back in port.’
‘I walked here on my dusty boots,’ said the commodore, ‘like a true son of the desert.’
‘There is not enough iron in your soul to be that,’ said Udal, ‘yet a little too much to make your merchant’s garb believable, at least to one who knows you.’
First Lieutenant Westwick appeared in the courtyard and the smuggler gave a small bow with one hand held against his heart.
‘The face I saw watching upstairs in the window,’ said Udal. ‘Tell me that you are not truly the wife of this old seadog?’
First Lieutenant Westwick raised the hem of her dress, revealing a brace of throwing blades strapped to her calf. ‘That’s not the point of me being here.’
‘Delightful,’ said the smuggler. ‘And a half-blood too, with a face exotic on both sides of the border. I shall buy you. How much for her, Jared?’
Henry Tempest leapt to his feet. ‘You touch a hair of her head and I’ll twist yours off your flaming neck!’
Udal laughed. ‘Sit down, giant one; it is too hot for such jokes. The price to be paid for such as she is paid in steel, not gold, and I have no wish to put to the test the accuracy of those deadly little blades.’ He looked at Jack. ‘And one not much younger than you were, Jared Black, when you first came visiting these shores.’
‘Aye, well age does funny things to memory,’ said the commodore. ‘Like the way I remember you so much the same, you might as well have just walked out the room all those years ago and strolled straight back in.’
‘I heard the royalist fleet met its end at Porto Principe,’ said the smuggler. ‘I raised a glass in toast to you and your friends.’
‘They were good ones,’ said the commodore, ‘in different times.’
‘It’s always different times,’ said the smuggler. ‘Are you bringing things in, or bringing things out?’
‘Ourselves in,’ said the commodore. ‘As for what we’d be taking out, my new wife here has a passion for airships. She finds them endlessly fascinating, especially the bit where they get floated off the ground. Isn’t that a miracle? All the weight of such a grand large hull, filled with all those sailors and fin-bombs and supplies, then you pack its cells full of gas, and up it goes, as long as a battleship and as high as the clouds.’
‘She should switch her temple tithes to the Sect of Razat,’ said Udal. ‘They find such matters endlessly fascinating, also.’
‘That’s what I heard,’ said the commodore. ‘And I thought to myself, I need a man of means, a man who gets about and will be able to introduce me to the right people. Why, my old friend Udal, he’ll do, that’s what occurred to me.’
‘I have very little against the Sect of Razat,’ said Udal. ‘For keepers and priests, they seem eminently practical people.’
‘A smuggler needs borders to cross, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘Without borders and taxes to avoid, you’re only in the haulage business. One continent, one empire makes a nice political slogan for the Caliph Eternal, but it’ll be wicked hard on your bottom line.’
‘To be an honest businessman,’ smiled Udal. ‘I long for
such days. But perhaps not quite so soon.’
‘We can help you postpone them indefinitely,’ said First Lieutenant Westwick.
‘The followers of Razat are a very insular sect,’ said Udal. ‘But I know one man who can help you with what you wish to know. We will need to travel towards the capital to meet him.’
‘May the light of the world shine on you,’ said the first lieutenant, in what sounded like a quote to Jack. ‘And all who are under this house.’
‘The light of the world has been burning a little too brightly lately for those under this roof, pretty lady,’ said Udal. ‘And you will do well to remember that the road to the capital also ends in the road to the Caliph Eternal’s torture garden.’
Jack could feel the throbbing sun above him like a living organism pulsing its heat down upon his neck. The constant scurrying noise of their sandpedes’ tiny-clawed feet across the dusty surface of the road provided a counterpoint to the noise of crickets that came from the marshy grasses next to the river. Jack hadn’t asked what cargo was strapped to the multi-segmented insect-like beasts of burden by Udal’s smugglers, and nobody had volunteered the information. How can riding in this heat be so tiring?
They were following one of the empire’s more out-of-the-way tracks towards the capital, accompanied by the twisting, turning River Hahran, thrilling-sweet and rotten. There was not much traffic along the road, but they passed plenty of locals from the waterside villages. Women sat in the shade of palm trees like little knots of black crows, weaving clothing while they sang songs with throaty voices that rattled and hummed. Many of the village buildings had wheel-shaped minarets, ornate constructions holding circular rotors that spun into action when the breeze picked up, supplanting the mechanical power being supplied by turning watermills pushed out into the river. Dhows in the water took advantage of both the wind and the drift of the river, their decks piled with large pots containing their cargoes: fish, vegetables and meat from the flood fields along the riverbank, all heading for the great souks of the capital.
