Jack Cloudie j-5

by Stephen Hunt

  Jack and Coss ran after the commodore and into the narrow corridor outside, the sulphur smell of weapons discharge hanging in the air.

  ‘Why the surgeon’s bay?’ called Jack.

  ‘Because we need a womb mage’s blessing, lad,’ said the commodore, cryptically. ‘Because we need his blessing.’

  What’s he planning, the old dog?

  When the three crewmen reached the doors to the surgeon’s bay, they found they weren’t the first to have tried to enter. A fatally wounded guardsman was rolling in agony outside the open doorway, a puddle of acidic green liquid sizzling across the carper planking by his side.

  Jack unclipped one of the spherical grenades topped by a small clockwork timer to detonate the explosives inside, but the commodore stopped him from tossing it through the doorway. ‘That’s a little too much.’ Black quickly leant inside the bay and fired the single charge of his pistol, the crack of the weapon answered by a yell inside. ‘And that’s just enough.’

  Jack and Coss followed the commodore in to find a womb mage slumped across the surgeon’s operating table, an uncracked vial of the green acid still clutched in his dead fingers. The commodore’s single shot had taken him in the chest through the heart, the blood of the wound like a marksman’s bull’s-eye on a paper target.

  ‘Tear my transfer pipes, but if you had hoped for a blessing from him, master cardsharp,’ said Coss, ‘I believe your shot would have been better aimed towards a less vital organ than his heart.’

  ‘Not so, he’s left his blessing behind, Mister Shaftcrank,’ said the commodore, walking to the womb mage’s case, abandoned under a cabinet of drugs and medicines that had clearly been broken into and rifled through. The commodore unclipped the case and lifted out what looked like a perfume bottle, complete with a rubber bulb to squirt out its contents. There looked to be dozens of similar bottles inside the bag. ‘Just the thing to lift a curse.’

  Picking the bottle up, he sprayed the content in his eyes, and beckoned Jack over for a squirt of the same.

  ‘It’s itching,’ Jack said as the moisture burned angrily on his face.

  ‘No rubbing there, Mister Keats. Everyone who goes into Mutantarjinn will need a dose of this — even our draks, although you can leave the old steamer here off the list.’

  ‘This is not scent,’ said Coss, examining the bottle.

  ‘It’s not just a wicked legend that anyone who enters Mutantarjinn without the order of womb mages’ permission goes blind,’ said the commodore. ‘They circulate a sickness in the air around the city that attacks your eyes. There’s a virus inside this spray that changes your eyeball in a manner that makes you immune to their curse. Your vision plate won’t be affected, old steamer — which is one of the reasons why the Cassarabians don’t trust your race. Trust only flesh, is an old saying of the womb mages. Trust only that which their sorceries can twist.’

  Jack blinked the tears out of his eyes.

  ‘They are not a kind people,’ said Coss.

  ‘Aye, they’re many things, but that they’re not.’

  They were to see more evidence of that throughout the ship. Not a single Imperial Aerial Squadron sailor had been taken prisoner. The enemy captain they wanted alive for his knowledge of the route and any codes they needed to gain admittance to the city of sorcerers. The rest of the crew was a hindrance the guardsmen couldn’t afford to trust during the infiltration of the enemy stronghold, and the rival sailors met a savage end.

  With the foe’s crew eliminated and word received that the Cassarabian transport airship had fallen — albeit with a higher price paid in blood — Jack went with Coss back to the transaction-engine chamber to help the steamman restart the Iron Partridge’s boilers.

  ‘The empire is fascinated with the Kingdom’s machines,’ Coss explained as they walked. ‘But they do not understand them. The master cardsharp is correct, they trust their ability to pervert the weave of flesh, but not our transaction engines and even less the life-metal such as myself.’

  ‘We saw their sorcerers’ work in their cities after we left the Iron Partridge,’ said Jack. ‘They don’t have trees to burn in their boilers, let alone coal. The creatures they breed inside slaves’ wombs are the one natural resource they can depend on.’

  ‘They had to put a gun to my head to get me to turn off the vessel’s transaction engines,’ said Coss. ‘Before we were captured I got to understand the ship. Kiss my condensers, but turning the boilers off on the Iron Partridge is like turning off my boiler heart — it is a little death for the ship’s mind. I don’t know how she will react to being rudely reanimated on our whim.’

  ‘You didn’t have a choice,’ said Jack. ‘No more than I did when I had to jump ship.’

  Jack explained all that had happened to the marooned Jackelians during their absence from the Iron Partridge, their unexpected alliance with the guardsmen and the existence of two caliphs — the false one sitting on the throne, still dependent on the blood of the true ruler of rulers being held prisoner by the grand vizier.

  Coss in turn explained how there had nearly been a second mutiny on board the Iron Partridge after the vice-admiral had given the ship up when they had been confronted by a flotilla of Cassarabian airships, showing more consideration for the preservation of his own skin than the welfare of his crew or his oath of duty. With the vessel already in disarray, her captain relieved of command and guarded in his quarters, the Iron Partridge had proved easy pickings for the Imperial Aerial Squadron.

  Back in the chamber, Jack acted as both stoker on the boilers and cardsharp on the punch-card writers while Coss went down into the vessel’s small but perfectly formed transaction-engine pit and spun up the drums. Jack’s striped sailor’s shirt was soon soaked with sweat as he shovelled high-grade coke into the furnace of the high-pressure system in between feeding the punch-card injector with initiation routines.

  Slowly, they coaxed the ship’s systems back into life, and Jack saw that the steamman’s reflections about the nascent artificial mind held on the drums were well founded. The systems were acting with all the jittery nervousness of a hound that had been kicked and banished from the hearth, then reluctantly allowed to slope back into the house. All this time everyone had been treating the ship like a piece of malfunctioning clockwork, but she was closer to one of the guardsmen’s draks — a creature of free will that needed coaxing and coaching.

  Jack must have spent an hour on the restart, his voice growing hoarse from calling out system details to the steamman in the pit and acknowledging all the processes they were teasing back into life.

  Their labours were interrupted by the commodore, returning to the transaction-engine room with his pipe lit; a sure sign that there was quiet on the rest of the vessel.

  ‘We’re for the boat bay, lads — the rest of our crew has been ferried over from the transport vessel and the skipper wants a word with everyone.’

  Jack dropped the punch card he was forming. ‘Jericho’s on board!’

  ‘That he is. The Imperial Aerial Squadron killed a few of our boys out of spite before the guardsmen took the ship, but we’ve a crew and a ship and we’re back in the game.’

  ‘I must stay here, master cardsharp,’ protested Coss. ‘The Iron Partridge’s boilers must be fed, or I fear we’ll never return the ship to her intended operation.’

  ‘You mind our jerry-built iron lady, then, old steamer. Mister Keats and myself will have to do.’

  Jack and the commodore were passing by the engine room on the lower deck when a piercing yell split the air. Jack’s hand slipped down to his pistol holster by reflex, but the commodore just calmly tapped his pipe out against one of the corridor’s walls as First Lieutenant Westwick emerged from a hatch. She had taken part in the assault on the Cassarabian airship and was still wearing borrowed guardsman’s leathers that fitted her like a second skin.

  ‘That sounded like a familiar voice, lass,’ said the commodore.

  ‘Vice-Admiral Tuttle
has resolved his predicament by taking the honourable way out,’ said Westwick. ‘The hatches to the engine cars were left open while we cleared the propeller snarls off the blades, and when he spotted the gap, he chose to jump.’

  ‘People will always surprise you,’ said the commodore. ‘He never seemed the mortal jumping type to me.’

  Westwick just smiled her dangerous smile and Jack pretended not to notice as she checked the knife strapped to her arm was secure again.

  The commodore clapped Jack on the back. ‘Lucky for us, though, Mister Keats. All those foolish accusations about the loss of the Fleet of the South can be put to bed, along with the court martial Tuttle would have faced for striking his colours in the face of the enemy. All you need to do is complete our mission, and you’ll have the crowds back home stand you free drinks for the rest of the year when they see the name of the Iron Partridge standing proud on your blessed cap.’

  All? A couple of airships against an empire. That sounds like an expensive round of drinks to me.

  Westwick blinked her eyes in an exaggerated way at the commodore, who nodded happily, as if all was well with the world.

  ‘We’re good Maya. And there’s enough spray for the crew on both ships, and our guardsmen allies with their mortal flying pets besides.’

  The boat bay was full of the Iron Partridge’s crew, their uniforms dirty and the men and women unkempt from days of confinement by their captors. Among them was Captain Jericho with his mop of orange hair and piercing eyes, a lightning bolt moulded into human form.

  His booming voice cut through the hubbub like fire, as if his confinement on the prison transport had been the closure of a furnace door, the heat of ignoble defeat inside him left to grow sun-hot until the guardsmen had released him back upon his crew of misfits. ‘This, given the choice, is not the ship you would have chosen. This mission, given the choice, is not the one you would have accepted. This crew is not one that has fought together and the only mention of the Iron Partridge on the rolls of the navy is on the very short list of vessels that have surrendered to an enemy power.’

  The crew shuffled their feet, embarrassed, many too ashamed to look their captain in the eyes. ‘And your failure is m’own failure, the failure of those set to lead you. The same complacent assumption of victory that left the Fleet of the South scattered across the sands of the enemy and our brothers and sisters to be picked over by carrion and dune beetles. That failure will not happen again! I will not fail you again.’ He moved down the centre of the boat bay, taking one of the fire hoses from the wall and unfurling it towards the hangar doors to create a line. ‘Our mission was originally launched at the behest of parliament and its agencies, rather than the admiralty. Now we must make common cause with regiments of the enemy, guardsmen who we have known only as our most implacable enemy. We must strike directly at the heart of one of the empire’s cities. Not just to discharge this vessel’s orders, but to wipe the stain of her surrender from our logs. I will take only volunteers with me from here on in. Those who wish to go, may take the Iron Partridge’s launches back to the border and pass on word of what has happened here. Those of you that stay, you should know that your chances of returning are slight, and, in actuality, this is why Admiralty House gave us a vessel they did not want and a crew they expected to fail. But there is one thing I will not fail in, and that is m’duty. I stand here …’ The captain moved to the right-hand side of the line down the deck he had made. ‘Those who would follow a captain to war, follow me now …’

  There was an almost imperceptible ripple through the crowd of aeronauts as, nodding grimly, the commodore stepped across the line after the captain, followed by First Lieutenant Westwick and Jack, then the other lieutenants. Soon the torrent of movement became a soundless flood, though if determination had a sound, then the boat bay might have echoed with the thunder of it.

  They had been written off by their own side, shamed and used for fools by Vice-Admiral Tuttle, a coward who had struck the airship’s colours just about as fast as he could drop them when faced with a superior force. They were Jackelians — and old and young, they could remember the pride they had felt when first taking the Royal Aerostatical Navy’s oath. There was only one way to remove the stain on their honour. Within a minute there was nobody left on the other side of the makeshift line, even Pasco’s truculent enginemen had all slipped across.

  They might have been flying through the heavens, but now they were following a course for the gates of a Cassarabian hell. And it didn’t matter a jot anymore, because there was nowhere else they’d rather be.

  The glass portholes of the wardroom on board the Iron Partridge gave onto an appropriate backdrop as they sailed towards Mutantarjinn alongside the captured Cassarabian vessel — great forks of lightning illuminating the clouds off their port, the night flickering as if the long scuttled sun was now a gas lamp being toyed with by a child. There was some mineral in the mountains of the deep south of this realm that agitated the storm fronts when they rolled off their peaks, and the land in their lee was known as the Abras Arkk — or the angry ground. It seemed to Omar a fitting territory for the Forbidden City of the womb mages to be located.

  Farris Uddin was sketching the layout of the city on a sheet of paper for the council of war that had been convened: himself, Boulous and Omar, Jericho — the captain of the strange Jackelian vessel — and the four spies who had been prisoners of the guardsmen, Commodore Black, Jack Keats, Henry Tempest and the beautiful but deadly First Lieutenant Westwick.

  How fitting that fate should send me a woman as heart-breakingly beautiful as Shadisa was to help me avenge her death. Heathen northerners. Strange allies, but it doesn’t matter. I would fight alongside a legion of devils if it means bringing down the dogs who killed her; I would let the fires of hell singe my boots to lead the charge against the grand vizier and Salwa’s forces.

  ‘Mutantarjinn is a sealed city,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Movement in and out is strictly controlled. The caliph’s rule is administered by the order of womb mages, much like sultans rule a conquered province.’

  ‘How high are its walls?’ asked Jericho. ‘And what is the disposition of their defences?’

  Farris Uddin tapped the table. ‘Their walls are high, but not in the direction you might expect. They start at the ground and run downward. Mutantarjinn is built into the floor of a circular chasm, scoured out when Ben Issman, his name be blessed, caused the eyes of god to reopen. Those chasm walls are three hundred feet deep.’

  ‘That’s a mortal powerful gaze,’ noted the commodore. ‘Although I have an archaeologist friend of my acquaintance who swears that Mutantarjinn was built over the ruins of an underground city that preceded it.’

  ‘The Cassarabian people were shaped by god, Jared Black, not descended from ants,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘What fools would want to live underground? There are lines up and down the chasm’s walls — lifting rooms — and creatures designed by the womb mages for porterage. More pertinently for this vessel, there are hundreds of anti-airship bombards mounted on fortifications that ring the chasm. Big ugly steel toads designed to spit out shells that would test even your carper’s resistance to flame. Shells filled with a substance that burns brighter as you toss water over it.’

  Jericho shrugged. ‘If your plan works, we won’t need to test their defences.’

  ‘We have the signal codes to enter the city,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘As long as they are accurate …’

  ‘I believe I convinced the Imperial Aerial Squadron officer who held them to pass me the correct codes,’ said Westwick. ‘Eventually.’

  ‘That I believe you did,’ said Farris Uddin, sketching out more detail to represent the centre of the city. ‘And if the signal codes work, the good news is that we will be sent onto here, the Citadel of Flowers.’ He drew in a building that resembled a five-leaf clover at the centre of the city. ‘The heart of the order of womb mages’ power and the repository of all their knowledge and secrets. We would
be expected to dock at its central tower and offload all the Jackelian sailors from the prison ship and prize vessel.’

  ‘What would happen to m’crew inside there?’ asked Jericho.

  ‘They would be induced to surrender all their knowledge of the operations of your vessel,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Afterwards, when they have no more information to reveal? Well, there is always an appetite for human bodies among the womb mages for them to hone their art — a demand that not even all of the empire’s slave traders can satisfy.’

  ‘The true caliph is being held within the citadel?’ asked Omar.

  ‘Yes,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘The grand vizier’s man we snatched believes he is being kept somewhere well out of public view, in their lower levels alongside their vats and their experiments and their most treasured spell books.’

  ‘Two parties, then,’ growled Captain Jericho. ‘One to locate your caliph, one to complete the ship’s mission and locate the source of the grand vizier’s celgas.’

  Master Uddin seemed to agree. ‘We will time the attack of the guardsmen talon wings on the city for shortly after we dock at the citadel. The grand vizier is nobody’s fool, and he will be expecting us to act against him. We will give him the attack he expects, as a distraction for a subtler feint he doesn’t. They will be looking to the walls and the city defences and we will already be inside the Citadel of Flowers.’

  Uddin looked across at Omar and Boulous. ‘You and I, Omar Barir, will have to bear the stench of wearing Imperial Aerial Squadron uniforms, while Boulous, I think, with the addition of a striped shirt and trousers, will make a fine Jackelian prisoner for us to escort.’

  ‘As he should,’ said the commodore. ‘For as a babe the lad would have been a Jamie or a Donnel, before he was snatched from an upland cot by some camel-riding raider.’

  ‘I am a jahani!’ protested Boulous. ‘My loyalty is to the guardsmen, whatever the source of my blood.’