by Stephen Hunt
‘Being of Jackelian stock isn’t a taint, lad, it’s a windfall. You trace the roots of the word back far enough, and you’ll find Jackelian means lion-hearted in one of the ancient tongues.’
‘Nobody will doubt the bravery of anyone’s heart who enters the Citadel of Flowers,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Whether they be counted as guardsmen or Jackelian sailors. We must keep the raiding parties small — only the best fighters from our two forces. Speed and surprise will be our allies — for there are creations of the womb mages inside the citadel that I would not face. We shall trust in the one true god that we shall carry the day and return to the two airships in dock before the hive we are dipping for honey is fully roused.’
‘Ten rounds a minute, sir,’ said the brooding giant who was the vessel’s captain of marines to Jericho. ‘That’s what I’ll put my trust in.’
‘The crew and the ship and our allies. We needs must trust in them all, eh Mister Tempest?’
A flash across the sky outside the porthole caught Omar’s eye. They were sailing through a fury, but Omar would tempt far worse to reach the grand vizier’s home; just for the chance to reach inside the heart of darkness and see if he could squeeze the life out of it.
‘Is this my fate, father?’ Omar whispered to the shade he imagined hanging in the skies outside.
He heard the echo of his father’s words. ‘We are what heaven wills us.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Captain Jericho leafed through the ship’s dispositions in his cabin as he listened to Jack’s report about what he and Coss had discovered of the nascent intelligence turning on the drums of the ship’s transaction engines.
‘Well, well, m’boy,’ said Jericho, glancing up, ‘a pity the industrial lord that designed our vessel vanished years ago. I would have a few words with him about his notions of airship design.’
‘We’re doing our best with her, sir.’
‘Just rein the transaction engines in, Mister Keats. You and our steamman rating can coddle her, and whisper sweet nothings if that’s what it takes. Grease her drums as if you were combing the burs out of a mare’s flanks. Level flying until we reach Mutantarjinn — we’ll save her final gallop until our slippery pair from the State Protection Board have discharged the ship’s orders inside this dark den of the womb mages.’
‘Why am I here, captain?’
‘Have you anywhere else you would rather be?’ The captain raised an eyebrow before continuing. ‘A gentleman always discharges his debts, Mister Keats. Where he can, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’ What do I have to pay with, but my blood?
‘Your father was a good man in hard times. He always tried to look after people in the prison he didn’t need to. That’s how the navy’s patronage system is supposed to work, too. The skipper who saw me into m’first ensign’s position did it as a favour for m’family when he really didn’t need to. I think he saw something in a young lad just starting out that nobody else had noticed; that I needed what the Royal Aerostatical Navy had to offer, as much as the service needed me. Such lines of loyalty run up and down, crisscrossing the fleet as the invisible netting that binds our vessels and crews together.’
‘Does your old skipper sit on the board of the admiralty, sir?’
‘No, Mister Keats, Captain Taylor was luckier than that — he was promoted to the officer’s cemetery outside Middlesteel. But I stand for him, as do many others who were once ensigns and who are now captains and commanders and vice-admirals, as one day you will stand for me.’
‘The truth, sir, is that I just want to go home and take my brothers out of the poorhouse.’
‘An ensign’s pay will allow you to do that, Mister Keats, and a lot more reliably than chancing a second attempt at forcing the vaults of a bank or rattling the skylights of rich widows. Anyone who can fathom those damned machines inside the transaction-engine chamber can pass any board exams the navy has to set.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘The navy won’t abandon you, Mister Keats. You are the service and the service is you. We may kill you, but you have m’vow we will never leave you. Even after you’re pensioned out, your blood will sing every time you feel the shadow of a RAN vessel drift over your cottage. Give it sixty years and some young pup barely able to fill his dress uniform will be weeding you out of the hiring line at what passes for an airship field.’
There was a knock at the door, and when Jericho boomed ‘enter’, Jack saw it was the hulking form of Master Engineer Pasco, bearing news of his teams’ labours in bringing the engine room back to full capacity.
‘Smartly done, Mister Pasco,’ said the captain, congratulating the engineer on his people’s work. ‘When the time comes, I will need our iron-feathered bird to fly like a hawk out of the enemy city.’
‘We’ll soak the traction belts with ballast water and run the loops so fast the cook will be able to bake the ship’s biscuits in the engine cars’ back draft, skipper.’ Pasco hesitated.
‘Is there anything else, master engineer?’
‘When the time comes, Captain Jericho, you can count on us.’
‘That I believe I can, Mister Pasco. Dismissed.’
‘How can you trust what he says?’ Jack asked when the door to the cabin had been shut again, and the engineer had left. ‘He led a mutiny against you for the vice-admiral.’
‘Vice-admiral Tuttle was a politician, m’boy, and a politician is an expert at promising the world, even when it always keeps on turning ever the same.’
‘I wouldn’t trust him,’ said Jack.
‘Then you would be wrong. Never judge a cloudie without knowing their history, Mister Keats. Pasco was on the Resolute when she experienced an engine-room fire. A barrel of contaminated expansion-engine gas had made it onto the ship and blew half her engines away. Pasco was the engineer who received the captain’s order to lock the room down to starve the fire of air while they climbed high enough to put the blaze out properly. There were a quarter of the engine room’s hands still inside when Pasco sealed it down.’ The captain nodded grimly, as if the memory had been his, rather than another officer’s. ‘Pasco had to listen to his crew burn and suffocate every foot of that journey. The Resolute’s captain killed them to save hundreds more. It transpired that the barrel of bad gas was loaded by a convict labour crewman working on the field who would have been hard pressed to tell the difference between expansion-engine gas and the brass tank a Middlesteel lamp lighter carries on his back. I would have ordered the engine room locked down myself in the same circumstances. No choice in the matter, do y’see? He doesn’t like pressed hands, he doesn’t like officers, and for a long time he didn’t even like himself. A battle-hardened man like Pasco will follow you if you prove yourself. I did it by giving him and his crew another chance rather than the gallows for mutiny, but you had better be damned sure you know where you are leading him.’
Jack saluted. ‘I believe I will follow you too, sir.’
‘Too blasted right you will, m’boy.’
‘You have our report, sir. Is there anything else I can assist with?’
Jericho gestured mournfully towards the letter he had been writing on his desk. ‘Not unless you have enough skill with penmanship to explain to Admiralty House why the probable last action of one of their vessels is cooperating in an attempt to free the enemy head of state of a nation we’re at war with, while fighting alongside the navy’s oldest foe in the air.’
‘I would write that the two officers of the State Protection Board on the vessel insisted you follow that course of action, captain.’
‘Very good. Ingenuity under fire. Those ensign’s bars are already half yours, eh Mister Keats?’
Jack could almost feel their dangerous weight as he left.
Even at nighttime, Jack could see from the transaction-engine chamber how easily Mutantarjinn had earned its nickname the Forbidden City; there was little about the city that did not look forbidden or forbidding. From the black rocky plain veined with
blood-red crystal that sparkled with an evil patina when the lightning storms forked their violence down — a glamour that made it look as if the land beneath the Iron Partridge was running with rivulets of blood — to the sharp blade-roofed towers rising out of the canyon floor of the ugly circular chasm scoured out of the ground. It was obvious why the commodore’s archaeologist friend thought something ancient had preceded the Cassarabians’ presence here. There was an otherworldly nature to the city that went beyond the womb mages’ administration of the place. I would sooner live in the desert under a nomad’s tent than down there. The towers on the chasm floor resembled a series of bone-like spikes that had rained down and landed on top of each other. Many were topped with strange constructions of blades that turned and twisted in the gusts scouring the city, acting as windmills and storm conductors. Gazing on the vista was like watching a thousand erratic, insane carousels summoning bolts of lightning down from the thunderhead sky.
Alongside the Iron Partridge a great crack of lightning revealed the chasm drop to be swarming with six-armed creatures, the race of man made into spiders, dark net bags tied around their backs. They were stirring around even larger creatures — beetle-shelled things the size of houses carrying pagodas of passengers up and down the chasm wall.
Jack’s eyes moved ahead. There in the centre of the city, rising above all the other towers, was the core of the womb mages’ power — the Citadel of Flowers, though if flower it be, it was a decaying swamp lily. It was composed of five rounded wings, each a jutting ziggurat in its own right, pinned to the chasm floor by a massive spire in its centre. A rotating crown of blades encircled the spire’s rise every hundred yards, generating a hum audible even on the distant airship. Glinting light spilled from open hangars in between the rotating blades, small courier packets coming and going bearing the empire’s lifeblood of information. Nearby were the full-sized gantries for the larger vessels of the Imperial Aerial Squadron, although no other warships seemed to be docked at the moment.
If this was truly where the Cassarabians’ one true god had been wakened, burning a hole for the foundations of the Forbidden City to be laid, then he must have been an irritable sleeper. Through the porthole Jack could see the reflection of the ship’s helioscope running along their iron plates as they communicated with the ground, and he felt a twinge of uncertainty, beseeching the fates that Westwick’s methods of obtaining her information proved every bit as rigorous as she had suggested they had been. What if our stolen codes are old, or the enemy officer falsified them to get Westwick killed?
Finally, there was an answering flash from the fortification along the rim of the chasm, then the Iron Partridge nosed further over Mutantarjinn. Thank the Circle. Still alive. Alive for the most suicidal mission any airship in the navy had ever attempted.
There was a cry from behind Jack, and turning, he saw Coss lying on the bottom of the engine pit, the steamman’s metal limbs shaking as if he had been taken by a fit. The commodore was away on the bridge with Jericho — no time to get him back here. Jack slid the ladder into the pit, and pulled Coss away from the rotating drums of the transaction engine, saving him from rolling under the lowest one and getting his arms or legs crushed. What’s the matter with him? The diminutive steamman was shaking, a vapour leaking out of the joins of his body, as if his rivets were sweating a fog. Jack gawped as the fog seemed to form into a skull-like machine face, then, as quickly as it had formed, it disappeared into the oil-scented air of the transaction-engine chamber.
‘Coss, can you hear me? What’s the matter?’
‘I have been ridden by the Loa, Jack softbody,’ Coss warbled through his voicebox. ‘The spirit of my ancestor spoke to me — Lemba of the Empty Thrusters.’
The flying spirit from the steamman pantheon of the gods I glimpsed in my own dream. ‘Did the Loa speak to you about the ship?’
‘Vault my valves, it is more than that,’ said Coss. ‘This is a turning point in the weave of the great pattern. If we fail here, then the empire of the caliph will become the world. We will all fall — Jackals, the Free State, Quatershift, all of the nations of the north. Your flesh will be their flesh, and for my race, after an age of hiding like beggars in the Mountains of Mechancia, the people of the metal will finally be exterminated.’
‘Did your Loa suggest how we might avert that?’
Coss slowly shook his head. ‘He did not. All he left me with was the feeling of power in this land. Great energies that were once released here, long before the caliphate. They have faded; but while I was possessed, I could smell their residual half-life like the scent of diseased meat.’
Jack helped the steamman back to his feet, his head dizzy with the bleak implications of his crewmate’s words. It seemed the fate of the entire world rested on the success of their mission. And the world really should have picked a better champion than the old steamer and me to stand up for it.
Coss had just recovered enough to return to his post when the commodore appeared at the door of the transaction-engine chamber.
‘Time for you to make good your promise to me, Mister Keats. We’re a couple of minutes away from docking at the womb mages’ lair. Poor old Blacky — my unlucky stars have left me washed up on some bad shores before, but none as foul as this place. But at least I have misery for company this time, eh? For the grand fellow who was foolhardy enough to poke his nose into the fortified vaults of Lords Banks, this terrible voyage should be a rowboat across a sunny lake.’
Jack nodded grimly, his stomach bunching up with fear. Right now, I’d take a bank job back in the Kingdom any day.
‘Unholster your pistol, lad. We’re meant to be prisoners of war now, and prisoners don’t sport shooting irons. Keep the drums turning here, old steamer, for when we return, we’ll as like have every devil of the six levels of Cassarabian hell hot on our tail …’
The timing of the guardsmen’s attack on the defences of Mutantarjinn was every bit as precise as Jack had expected it would be. Sirens inside the great tower’s airship docking ring howled into life as the guardsmen and the Jackelians — the former wearing their stolen Imperial Aerial Squadron uniforms, the latter in their soiled crew uniforms — stepped out into the main hangar. There was confusion among the Imperial Aerial Squadron ground crew in the harbour. Jack had to turn to see the first gobs of fire arcing out of the shadows of the distant chasm wall through an open hangar door, the attacking draks rendered invisible by the darkness until a lightning flicker silhouetted their wheeling forms against the sky. Like the other Royal Aerostatical Navy crewmen, Jack’s hands were bound behind his back with leather ties, but using a cunning knot of the commodore’s devising they could be pulled apart with a twist of the wrists.
Something about the hangar appeared to be angering the guardsmen’s commander, Farris Uddin. Jack caught Omar’s eye — the boy just a little too gangly for his purloined marine’s jacket.
Omar indicated the walls of the Cassarabian script engraved across the walls of the hangar. ‘The hundred sects of the Holy Cent have been torn down and replaced by only one — the Sect of Razat. It is blasphemy of the worst kind.’
‘We’ve an old saying in our uplands,’ noted the commodore. ‘Find three Cassarabians and you’ll find two believers and one heretic.’
‘You should not bespeak the hundred faces of the one true god, old man,’ warned Omar.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t at that, lad. We need all the luck we can get in this terrible place.’
An officer who looked as if he might be the master of the harbour came running past the new arrivals and Farris Uddin grabbed him to halt his rush. ‘I have the officers from the prize vessel here, and the rest of the enemy sailors as prisoners inside.’
‘You are Captain Darwish? In the name of the blessed Ben Issman, get those infidels out of my way. And keep the ones on your transport ship chained up. Can you not hear the city’s call to war?’
‘Who attacks?’ demanded Farris Uddin. ‘Who is foolish enoug
h to attack Mutantarjinn?’
‘The thrice-cursed imperial guardsmen,’ said the harbour master. ‘Our own men, our own draks. The grand vizier has just passed us word that they have rebelled against the Caliph Eternal.’
‘What, the grand vizier is here?’
The officer thrust a finger towards one of the larger pocket airships resting inside the chamber. ‘His vessel arrived before yours. There is plague in the capital. The Citadel of Flowers is the Jahan now — we protect the Caliph Eternal!’
‘Not just one caliph, then,’ the commodore whispered to Jack. ‘A pair of birds in this dark bush, and one of them a cuckoo.’
‘What can we do to assist?’ asked Farris Uddin. ‘What are our orders?’
‘None from me,’ said the harbour master, ‘nor anyone else at the moment, running around like headless chickens. Just keep the filthy Jackelians out of my hair and pray for the guardsmen to be struck blind by the hand of god for their treachery before the fleet arrives.’
Jack felt the ripple of tension running through the party as Farris Uddin’s eyes narrowed. ‘The fleet?’
‘The fleet is returning from the north to defend the Caliph Eternal. We’ll catch these dirty rebels in the scorpion’s pincer — the city walls in front, and the hammer of our airships behind them. Then we’ll teach them the price of their treachery.’
‘A price that is much on my mind,’ said Farris Uddin as the officer ran off, barking orders at the ground crew scattered around the chamber.
Just behind the guardsman commander, Captain Jericho was looking as perturbed as everyone else at the sudden shocking turn of events.
‘You could see the true caliph freed,’ said Jericho, ‘and we can learn the source of the grand vizier’s airship gas. But it’ll avail neither of us if your guardsmen are slaughtered outside and we’re both left stranded here, bottled up by the entire Imperial Aerial Squadron.’
‘It is said that no plan of engagement survives a battle intact, captain,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘What do you suggest?’
