Jack Cloudie j-5

by Stephen Hunt

  The guardsmen stared uneasily at the howling, squalling, scampering mass of flesh beneath their boots. Even Omar felt the superstitious hackles rise on the back of his neck.

  In an attempt to reassure the raiding party, Farris Uddin pointed down to the copper-plated pages of the spell books chained to each tank. ‘A flesh library. I have heard of such places. This is where the womb mages attempt to advance their craft. They alter their spells slightly to see what new creatures emerge from the wombs of their producers.’

  They pressed on across the vault, windowless and dim except for a series of crimson lamps buried in the far wall. It was as if the flesh library had been made as a larger womb to store the children of the sorcerer’s craft. Boulous was the first to notice the ripples across the shadowed ceiling of the vault, pointing up and shouting a warning. What Omar had taken for tiles detached themselves in a black cloud and began wheeling down towards them.

  ‘Bats!’ shouted one of the guardsmen, sweeping his scimitar overhead as if swatting mosquitoes.

  The creatures were the same size as bats, but their bodies were formed as bony flutes and they appeared to be eyeless and blind. They spiralled down and wheeled around the raiding party, keeping their distance from the brandished steel while emitting ear-piercing whistles. The occupants of the hundreds of tanks below started screeching and caterwauling in response.

  ‘They’re not attacking,’ called Omar. ‘They’re acting as a tripwire!’

  Boulous wheeled around, looking at the circling creatures.

  As if waiting for the word tripwire to be said aloud, the lights in the flesh library grew brighter, all the dim shadows banished — the trapped creatures howling in even greater panic.

  ‘They know!’ growled a guardsman, waving his pistol. ‘They know we are not of the Sect of Razat. We were warned …’

  ‘Quiet!’ barked Farris Uddin. ‘Lower your weapons. Even my hunter’s nose cannot detect what faith lies within a man’s heart. Make for the library’s exit.’ They sprinted forward, any attempt to resemble a muttering train of womb mages thrown to the wind. The doors in front rolling open matched the rumbling of the doors behind them sealing shut.

  Waiting for them was a group of womb mages, including a familiar face that set Omar’s blood racing. Salwa! The murderous dog’s hood could not disguise his effeminate, sneering features. The womb mages parted to reveal a company of soldiers advancing. But these were no ordinary soldiers. Their flat, stone-like features were reminiscent of beyrogs — but squeezed down into a normal human-sized frame. Each of the beasts wore a round metal helmet that fitted so tightly it might have been part of its skull, a pair of iron spikes rising from each helm’s edge like curling horns.

  ‘How appropriate,’ Salwa called down the gantry. ‘The Caliph Eternal’s old elite guard of soldiers meets their replacements. We call them our claw-guard. A new guard for a new age of glory. Do you like your replacements? Unlike you, their loyalty to the sect is imprinted. No antiquated notions of honour to get in the way of serving the empire.’

  ‘Serving you,’ shouted Omar.

  Salwa shrugged. ‘They are one and the same.’

  ‘The Caliph Eternal’s new guardsmen,’ scoffed Farris Uddin. ‘If you think those stone-faced monkeys of yours are guardsmen, then you’ve forgotten to give them a songbird each for them to call their draks!’

  As he spoke, talons extended from the paw-like hands of the claw-guards, each as long a short-sword. Loping forward and snarling, the grand vizier’s vision of progress charged to meet the steel and war cries of their predecessors.

  Sprinting through the raiders, Omar yelled in fury, seeing only an obstruction between him and the target of his scimitar. Time for me to feed you my blade. ‘Salwa! Salwa!’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Omar dodged aside as a miniature beyrog-like monster slashed at him with its talons. It was even wearing a guardsman’s riding leathers. That dog Salwa is intent on perverting our traditions beyond the limits of all endurance. Dipping its head down, the thing tried to skewer Omar with the twin spikes of its helmet and Omar beat it back with the curve of his sword. There were ridges under its clothes that it moved to intercept Omar’s thrust, bone as hard as armour. If this had been a normal guardsman, he would have been slowly bleeding to death from a dozen cuts by now. Omar’s sword managed to fend off its talons again, as the creature moved them with all the skill of a born fencer — or a sorcery-created one. The real guardsmen had already discharged their pistols into the charging horde, and with no room to break them and load second charges, the fighting had switched to close quarters — talons clashing against steel. Killers who had been trained as the Caliph Eternal’s finest, versus slayers who had been born to it.

  Omar’s opponent was joined by two more claw-guards, and he felt himself separated from the main press of the clash. He was pushed to the side against the railings as the mob of skirmishing fighters moved backwards, away from the exit and towards the sealed doorway his friends had used to enter the flesh library.

  All three of the claw-guards came at Omar — not in a coordinated way, like real guardsmen would have done, but as jostling wolves pressing their prey for the first choice of meat. Covered in a sheen of sweat, Omar lunged and thrust his scimitar between them, keeping the beasts at bay — barely. They were hissing back at him in wordless fury as if they were serpents. Maybe the grand vizier only required obedience from his new elite, not conversation?

  Then, suddenly, there was another guardsman by his side — Boulous. Two blades against three sets of talons. From the corner of his eye Omar noted that the other guardsmen were being pushed even further back down the gantry, but somehow brave Boulous had fought his way through to Omar’s side, leaving the pair of them as a little archipelago of resistance separated from their comrades.

  ‘They fight like savages,’ shouted Boulous, feinting forward and turning a taloned hand with a subtle twist of his wrist.

  ‘They are more handsome than you, Boulous.’

  Boulous kicked out with a boot, landing a blow on a kneecap that would have left any human guardsman limping with a broken leg.

  As the struck claw-guard stepped back, its brother charged at Boulous and the retainer moved sideways, using his womb mage’s robes like a matador’s cloak, confusing the monster as he speared the creature through its ribs. Boulous tried to slide his scimitar out, but something had clicked in the wounded, dying thing’s body, and the weapon stayed stuck. As Boulous was trying to retrieve his blade, the limping claw-guard returned, lowered its twin-spiked helmet and charged, catching the retainer in his gut and sending both of them sprawling back into the railing.

  Omar yelled, smashed back the third of the trio, near-decapitating it, then turned around and hacked at the exposed neck of the claw-guard that had struck Boulous. It collapsed and Omar pivoted and unbalanced the last creature, sinking his scimitar through the false guardsman’s uniform and piercing its heart. Swivelling, he pulled off the dying claw-guard that had rammed Boulous, flipping it over the gantry and sending it plummeting towards the flesh library below.

  ‘I can’t see them patrolling — in the Jahan,’ wheezed Boulous, as he fell back against the railing, twin pools of blood soaking his womb mage’s robes. ‘No style. Give them a guardsman’s — cloak — and they’d probably — put it on the floor and shit on it.’

  ‘Get up, Boulous,’ urged Omar. ‘The Caliph Eternal needs you.’

  ‘The Caliph Eternal,’ coughed Boulous, his eyes rolling in his head as if he was trying to find the empire’s ruler. ‘I want — a governorship — from him — Omar. A nice fat — little province.’

  ‘You’ll have it.’

  ‘Somewhere — shaded — with trees.’

  There was a bewildered howling down the gantry. The claw-guards were falling back, confused, while in front of them the womb mage’s robes that a second ago had been worn by Farris Uddin appeared to be worn by him no more. There was a new face inside them bark
ing orders at the creatures. The grand vizier’s face!

  ‘Don’t obey him, you fools!’ screamed Salwa. ‘It’s a Pasdaran trick. Use your noses, mark his scent. It’s not the real grand vizier!’

  The claw-guards were still retreating down the gantry, and when Omar gazed down at Boulous, his friend had passed away.

  ‘A forest kingdom for you, Boulous, if heaven truly rewards the deserving.’

  As Omar glanced up, he saw Salwa flanked by his claw-guards working the controls of a console, his efforts rewarded by a cry from one of the raiders as the gantry began to retract into the wall behind the guardsmen. There was an open space growing between the citadel’s claw-guards and the raiding party, a space getting wider as the gantry pulled back. Omar’s friends tried to force open the sealed doorway to their rear but it was no good. The floor beneath them was vanishing foot by foot, until the surviving members of the raiding party spilled into one of the tanks below. Its occupants, a troop of stunted monkey-like things, hurled a primitive tirade of abuse at the interlopers. The guardsmen were trapped — even standing as a pyramid they couldn’t scale the tank’s tall glass walls.

  ‘New blood is always welcome here,’ laughed Salwa as his hideous claw-guards loped affectionately around him. ‘Especially when we don’t have to pay a slave trader’s head price.’

  Omar rose up from Boulous’s corpse, pointing his scimitar towards the murderous cur. ‘Face me, Salwa! Set your half-sized beyrogs to one side and face me like a man, alone.’

  ‘That would be a hard thing to do, guardsman,’ said Salwa.

  ‘Your steel against mine — show me what the guard’s newly appointed grand marshal is good for!’

  ‘Ah, Omar Barir. How little you know me. It would be a hard thing for me to truly face you as a man, for deep inside I am not. Do you really not know your Shadisa …?’

  ‘Shut your mouth about Shadisa. You killed her, you dog. I saw you washing away her blood down the drains of your filthy lair!’

  ‘The blood of a womb mage’s sorcery — a changeling virus as the female parts of my body were twisted into new forms or fell away. Shadisa was my old name — as much a slave name as the Ibn you once sported. Salwa is the new name the Sect of Razat has blessed me with. An identity created and circulated by the sect, associated with dark deeds before the female “victim” received the sect’s blessing and assumed his mantle.’

  ‘No!’ shouted Omar. Salwa will say anything, any lie, to save himself from my scimitar’s edge. ‘You are lying! You murdered her!’

  ‘Ah, my proud, vain little Omar. You are still a slave, a prisoner to the way of thinking you were raised with. I let the old Shadisa pass away, so a new one could rise up and take her place as a power in society — not an adornment.’ Salwa shrugged. ‘The Sect of Razat doesn’t sacrifice women, it frees them. We are the half of Cassarabia that has been forgotten and overlooked and abused. You should appreciate us, Omar, you should applaud the Sect of Razat, for we are the first true slave revolt that the empire has experienced in over a thousand years.’

  Omar dropped his scimitar to the floor. The words had to be false, but he had reached out, grasping for the spark of Shadisa that had once fired his love — and there was something there, deep, hidden within Salwa, now that he knew what to search for. An image of the girl his heart had once quickened for, faint and indistinct — the twisted reflection of a chromosome.

  Salwa laughed again, a little more gently this time. ‘I asked you to join us, Omar. Become part of the Imperial Aerial Squadron. You of all men know what it is like to have been chattel. The half of the empire that is untapped is about to be freed, and then we will be unstoppable.’ Salwa pointed to the cloud of bat-like creatures circling under the vault of the flesh library. ‘You should have brought a woman here with you, Omar, or one of the sect, and then the creatures would not have sounded an alert. For you and your friends, all the guardians of the old order — the secret police and the guardsmen — you have been outmanoeuvred by mere women. How does that feel, last son of Barir?’

  Squatting on the floor by Boulous’s corpse, Omar could find no words, no boasts. Only tears dropping down through the metal grille into the tanks below. Now it made a terrible, sickening sense. No wonder he hadn’t been able to sense Shadisa in the palace until she was right under his nose. She had already begun the treatments to change into this thing, this monster. Sacrificing all that she was, and for what? Shadisa, his beautiful golden-haired Shadisa, remade as this horrific, ugly, power-hungry creature — as much of a traitor as the grand vizier. Of course, the grand vizier is another one of them too.

  ‘Kill her,’ Farris Uddin shouted from below. ‘In the name of the heavens, Cadet Barir, you must kill that abomination.’

  Omar barely even felt the paws of the claw-guards, their talons retracted, as they grabbed him and dragged him away.

  I am dead. You have murdered me, and you didn’t even require a scimitar to do it.

  By the time Jack returned to the bridge of the Iron Partridge with all the calculations of their gas cells’ tensile strength, the three enemy vessels in the pathfinder squadron were already manoeuvring for advantage against the RAN airship.

  Jericho was standing at the fore of the bridge with his personal telescope extended, shouting commands back to the signaller on the pipes station to relay across the ship. ‘Master gunner to run out our thirty-twos and have all quarter gunners starboard and port on short-fuse readiness, master bombardier to stand ready. Helioscope, flash the guardsmen talon wings to support on our forward quarter, I don’t want their draks getting raked in our crossfire.’

  ‘H-station reports flash from their forward vessel. Shall we flash the squadron some of the enemy codes we used to gain access to their city?’ asked the signaller.

  ‘Time to fly under our true colours,’ said Jericho. ‘We’ll leave the skulduggery to our State Protection Board friends. Flash the squadron this in Jackelian open signal: We are happy to accept your surrender. Please advise.’

  A minute later the enemy responded, the signaller reporting the reply. ‘Enemy captain’s suggestion involves the use of our seats of ease, sir,’ he said, referring to the circular room where the ship’s officers exercised their bowels.

  ‘Jolly good, that’s all the usual formalities dispensed with. Lieutenant McGillivray, sound general-quarters. All hands make ready to give and receive fire.’

  Jack moved forward and the captain noticed the young sailor in the reflection of the viewing port. ‘Their three pathfinder commanders are going for glory, Mister Keats. See now, they’re launching packets from their boat bays, no doubt headed back to the main fleet with word of our presence. All three of their vessels are coming for our throat.’

  Jack looked out: three airships visibly growing larger, silhouetted against the moonlit sky with their running lamps burning, a little triangle-shaped constellation cutting through the night. They’ll be on us soon enough.

  ‘They’re fast studies, m’boy. We call that formation the tricorn hat, the best disposition for a squadron of three against a single enemy. Now — m’gas cell envelopes …’

  ‘Mister Shaftcrank and I believe the cells will hold, sir.’

  ‘Believe?’

  ‘Our specifications were incomplete, captain,’ said Jack. ‘We had to extrapolate their pressure potential from the other properties that were on record.’

  ‘Well then, you and the steamman strike me as bright sorts. Double or quits it is to be, quite literally. Across to the pipes station with you. Tell the yeoman of the cells to increase the pressure per square inch of our celgas spheres by a factor of two.’

  Jack hesitated. You expect him to listen to me?

  ‘You’re acting master cardsharp now,’ said Jericho. ‘A warrant sky officer. I couldn’t issue a battlefield commission for Mister Shaftcrank; the First Skylord is a terrible stickler about allied nationals and promotions. I’ve already entered your temporary field commission in the ship’s log
. If the ship were running under full automation, you’d be of equal rank to the first lieutenant. No hesitation, now. The yeoman of the cells will listen to you and take your commands, or damn his eyes, I’ll want to know why.’

  Jack sprinted back to the communications station. The ship’s weight was about to lighten, but his own had already increased. Picking up the speaking tube to the gassing stations, Jack gave the order to the increasingly incredulous sounding yeoman of the cells at the other end.

  ‘We’ll be running the cells fit to burst!’ the man spluttered over the fizzing line.

  ‘Does he like it, sir?’ the captain barked.

  ‘He does not, sir,’ called Jack. ‘But he’s obeying the orders anyway.’

  ‘He’s quite correct, Mister Keats. Gambling is a terrible sin,’ laughed the captain. The airship’s master sounded like a boy in a sweet shop who had been given a guinea to spend. ‘And now, an order which no captain of the RAN has to m’knowledge ever been required to issue. Pipes, the engine room if you please. Tell Mister Pasco to run up his engines for ramming speed!’

  Commodore Black watched the last of the symbols on the door’s transaction-engine lock rotate towards the open position, the little portable transaction engine supplied by the State Protection Board cracking their encryption with smooth efficiency.