by Stephen Hunt
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jack was helped to his feet by Lieutenant McGillivray, the young sailor’s uniform covered in broken glass from the shattered compass next to the bridge’s map table. We’ve survived.
‘I don’t think that manoeuvre has a name in the rulebook, laddie,’ said McGillivray. ‘But back in the uplands, we’d call that a Coldkirk kiss.’
Captain Jericho was still standing by the forward viewing port, as if he had remained vertical right through their violent ramming of the third Cassarabian vessel. ‘Damn m’eyes, it seems that iron beats both carper and canvas after all. All stations report readiness and damage.’
Jack stumbled forward, half expecting to find the enemy airship wrapped around their nose cone, but it was drifting downwards, oily black clouds of smoke billowing out from what had been left of their engine room.
‘She’s breaking up, sir,’ called the sailor on the rudder wheel. ‘We’ve ripped her in half with our stern armour, right up to her lower lifting chamber. She’s lost equilibrium.’
‘They’re heading for the ground, gentlemen. Down-gas to our optimum ceiling,’ ordered Jericho. ‘I want their main fleet to spy us running low and heavy on first sighting. Flash the guardsmen’s flight leader when he’s finished having his fun with those two dead pigeons we left for him. Get him to the boat bay, I need his flyers on m’wing.’
‘Down-gas, aye,’ confirmed the officer on the gas board.
They didn’t have to wait long to make contact with the Cassarabian fleet sent to defend Mutantarjinn. A constellation of lanterns appeared drifting in the northern sky, running in close formation. The dark night suddenly felt a lot colder.
The guardsman’s senior officer in the flight appeared a few minutes later on the bridge, ready to confer with the Iron Partridge’s captain.
‘Good evening, colonel,’ said Jericho. ‘I am afraid the weight of numbers is not in our favour.’
‘Luckily for you, captain, all our training is towards harrying such a fleet — although traditionally, the enemy’s colours should be Jackelian. How do you propose to engage?’
‘With the only advantage we have, sir,’ said Jericho. ‘The thick skin around our hull. I’ll drive us into the centre of their disposition and trade blows at close quarters until we buckle. If you can take position on our wings and disperse before the first broadside to clog up as many of their engine cars as possible with your snarls, I believe we’ll buy our people in Mutantarjinn the time they need.’
Jack rubbed his tired eyes. The only advantage we have.
‘I wish to hear music,’ Lemba of the Empty Thrusters, the spirit of the sky, had commanded in Jack’s dream. ‘Play, Play.’
The words echoed around Jack’s head until he found them coming out of his mouth unbidden, as if someone else was speaking. ‘Captain, we have another advantage we’ve not brought to bear: the ship’s automated systems.’
‘You understand that the ship’s automatics never passed our trials, Mister Keats?’ said Jericho. ‘Our sailors manning them is the only thing keeping this iron-plated bucket in the sky.’
‘If I know only one thing, sir,’ said Jack, ‘it’s transaction engines. The ship wasn’t ready during the trials. She’s evolved, sir. She’s conscious now. I believe Mister Shaftcrank would bottle up the ship and send her back to King Steam to put her in a nursery body if he could.’
‘When I issue an order, Mister Keats, I expect her to respond on m’command, not at her own whim. Running on full automation is too dangerous.’
The guardsman flight commander chortled.
‘Do you find something amusing, colonel?’
‘I find your Jackelian gradations of danger an interesting notion.’ The guardsman gestured towards the sea of lights manoeuvring against the deep night. ‘I know little of your technology, captain, but I understand the empire’s feelings towards it. When we fight your people, it is never your discipline we fear, it is not your godless sailors, or the fact that you are a people so fierce and rebellious you imprison and mutilate your own king. It is this: every time you leave your rainy, frigid and sunless land, you come at us riding cold, soulless machines, not the warm flesh of a noble drak. It is that you trust all of this.’ He pointed to the armada of lights coming towards them, larger now. ‘There are some who call that progress, but if we begin to fight like you, how much longer will it be until we choke our cities with engine smogs, banish god from our hearts, let the Caliph Eternal be dictated to by bazaar hawkers, and become mere slaves to the cogs that are meant to turn in service for us?’
‘Maybe we must both trust what we know, colonel,’ said Jericho. ‘Those aerial mines your airships carry have a main chute and a guide chute — could your draks get you close enough to slice the guide chords?’
‘If the fleet release the mines, it would be simple work,’ said the colonel.
‘They’ll use the mines,’ said Jericho. ‘Now we’ve downed their three pathfinder vessels, they’ll want blood, eh? Everything they have, we shall see this night. A clear path, colonel, and as many of their engines snarled as you can attack, and may the gates of your paradise open for you.’
‘We already fight in the heavens,’ said the colonel, saluting, before turning to exit the bridge. ‘The trick will be to stay here.’
The captain looked at Jack. ‘The last time I bet against the house, Mister Keats, I ended up trading m’own for the accommodation of the debtors’ prison.’
‘Gambling is a sin, sir.’ But only if you lose.
Jericho pointed to a line of out-of-action boards covered with dusty green canvas between the bridge’s ballast board and altimeter station. ‘That’s what’s meant to connect the bridge to your transaction-engine chamber aloft. Let’s discover if building thinking machines into an airship was the worst or the best decision the admiralty ever made.’
Omar sat on one of the two bunks in the windowless cell, clutching at his gut as it churned in pain. ‘In the end, I hardly knew Farris Uddin at all, and then he was snatched away from me — just as my father was taken.’ It seems I must lose everything. My father, my great-grandfather. Oh Shadisa, how great my destiny, to be punished so.
‘Farris Uddin was a rum old cove,’ said the commodore, trying to make the boy feel better. ‘And if he had as many years under his belt as I think he did during his long service, you probably have half-brothers and sisters scattered all over the empire.’
‘Ah, the service of the empire,’ sighed the caliph from the other bunk. ‘To tell you the truth, I sometimes wondered if I was its master or its slave. To be bought up in isolation, knowing only my tutors and their lessons, then at the age of eighteen to be told I was one of septuplets, six of whom had just been murdered. To be wheeled out and briefly introduced to my dying flesh father, whose sole legacy before he was snatched away to heaven was to inject me with a changeling virus that filled me with snatches of a string of lives I have never lived. We are not so different, you and I, guardsman. Families we never knew. Lives we did not choose, and now both to be brood mares for the ambitions of the grand vizier.’
‘You must not say that, your majesty,’ said Westwick. ‘You were born to be the Caliph Eternal.’
‘I was born to be nothing else, sweet lady,’ said the deposed ruler. ‘And now I walk with the echoes of my ancestors in my ears, hearing the voices of god in my head like some sun-maddened hermit stumbling through the dunes.’ He reached out to touch Westwick’s arm. ‘So many memories within me. There are one thousand, seven hundred and fifty two discrete points of difference in your DNA that form the basis of your loyalty imprint to me. There is less in a beyrog, but they are simpler creatures — a lot of shark in their genetic composition.’ Seeing that his words meant little to his fellow prisoners, the young ruler shrugged. ‘Sorcerers’ secrets. Ben Issman was the first womb mage, but then, it was he who discovered the ruins of the original Mutantarjinn back in another age.’
‘Your sorcerers’ secrets,’ said Omar
. ‘Do they include whether this filthy magic they have inflicted on us can be undone?’
‘The grand vizier’s changeling virus must be recorded somewhere in the citadel’s library of spells,’ said the caliph. ‘With such knowledge we could restitch our base genome back to the normal order of things using another changeling virus. But I do not believe the grand vizier intends to let me peruse his private library.’
‘That will be a small matter to me, your majesty,’ said Omar. ‘I am the last son of your great and most loyal House of Barir. I have already achieved the impossible by rising from the rank of slave to serving as a guardsman. I am the apprenticed cadet of the great Farris Uddin, who taught me that no situation is without hope. We shall break out of here and make for the barracks where your bodyguard of beyrogs waits. With their strength we shall seize one of the producer’s tanks and expose the nature of the abominations the grand vizier had built his airship fleet around. The Sect of Razat might wish to hide the truth, but there are at least enough womb mages from other sects inside the citadel who are not party to the grand vizier’s twisted conspiracy that he must post warnings for them not to enter his flesh library.’ Omar knelt before the young caliph. ‘I am your guardsman, your majesty, and you are still the ruler of rulers.’
‘Well then,’ sighed the caliph. ‘It seems we still have our old roles to play.’ He looked towards First Lieutenant Westwick. ‘You have the teachings of both the Pasdaran and the Jackelian secret police. Have you no craft that might free us from this cell, sweet lady?’
Indicating the commodore, the deadly woman scowled. ‘We used specialist State Protection Board machinery to break the locks to reach you, your majesty, but my colleague here is reputed to have some small talent in that field.’
‘Don’t ask me that, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘Has poor old Blacky not done enough, already? Stuffed into an airship like the filling of some cheap sausage, shot and hacked at, dragged across the sands and led to some cursed pit in the ground filled with wicked sorcerers. Now you want to test my poor, tired genius against the most secure cell in this whole terrible citadel?’
‘You know your duty.’
‘It’s a mortal hard thing to be lectured about it by a Pasdaran double agent, lass. You only came down here to see why your handlers in the Pasdaran had vanished on you; why the side you were really working for had gone quiet.’
‘Our missions are both here, however they started,’ said Westwick, ‘yours and mine.’
‘Ah, well, blessed duty will have to wait until I have been fed, lass. I can’t work when I’m starving. They’ll have to feed us, won’t they, Maya? Two strapping young lads being made ready to give birth to their terrible monsters?’
‘We need to get out now, old man,’ said Omar. It was like coaxing a child. Is this how the old nomad Alim felt about him back at the water farm? ‘Before the grand vizier gets around to poisoning the Caliph Eternal’s beyrogs.’
‘My genius needs a little mortal feeding first,’ insisted the commodore.
And so, discovered Omar, it did, the four of them having to wait until four portions of lumpy gruel had been pushed through a slot in the armoured door. Omar felt so sick he could hardly look at the food, although the Caliph Eternal seemed able to eat the oatmeal and keep it down, while the commodore greedily finished his portion, then spooned all the others’ remaining rations into his mouth.
‘Ah now,’ the commodore noted, smacking his lips, ‘if only they had served us with a little wine along with their lumpy muck.’
‘Womb mages forgo such stimulants,’ said the Caliph Eternal. ‘It is part of the order’s code. You would be lucky to find a single bottle in the whole of Mutantarjinn.’
‘That may be so,’ whined the commodore, ‘but I have heard that the sultan of Fahamutla produces the finest wines in the world, the grapes tickled into maturity by the sea breezes on their slopes. A legend only among the vintners of my acquaintance, for none is allowed to be exported outside that province. No bottle has ever made it as far as the Kingdom.’
The caliph finally lost his patience. ‘For the love of the one true god, if you get us out of here, I shall give you a whole vineyard’s worth from the sultan’s private cellar.’
‘Well, my need is now,’ complained the commodore, collecting the four small spoons from the empty bowls. ‘I will have to imagine your wine’s fine taste on my dry lips as I toil.’ He began to rub the heads of the spoons, working as if to polish them.
Omar looked on, puzzled, as the cutlery began to bend. ‘What manner of fakery is this, Jared Black?’
‘This is my sorcery, lad. The sorcery of locks. Hard learnt from all the prisons and cells I’ve been thrown in over the years. The kind of sorcery you must master when you don’t have a little box of tricks pushed on you by some too-clever gang of enginemen in the pay of the State Protection Board.’
Omar watched in astonishment as the commodore fashioned a set of tools out of their eating implements, and then began to use one of them to prise open a panel in the cell wall, humming with pleasure at what he found. ‘Will you look at this, now. Such fiendish cleverness. Triple encryption on a set of three transaction-engine drums combined with three sets of physical locks too. You not only need old Blacky here, you need him to have the arms of an octopus to take on this challenge.’
‘Can you get us out of here?’ demanded Omar. God, please, make it so this old trickster is clever and not touched by the sun.
‘The fellow that designed this was a cunning one, lad. The kind of man who you’d frisk, lift five knives and a brace of pistols off, and he’d just reach out for a copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated News on your desk, roll it up, and kill you with that instead. Rare to find in the great game today. But is he sharper than old Blacky, that’s the question? Which of us is the better man?’
They were about to find out, watching the old man cursing and wheedling as he sweated over the exposed mechanism inside at times demanding complete silence from the other three prisoners, at times begging them to join him in humming obscure Jackelian ale-house songs. The commodore seemed to be possessed of a manic energy as he worked, shouting at the delicate machinery as if it could be made to leap to his command through the sorcery of his will alone, wheedling the locks, promising them riches and then threatening them with his makeshift tools.
There were times when Omar wondered if the shock of seeing their cruel fate mapped out for them had driven the old u-boat man insane. How had the infidel’s secret police ever trusted such a man with the fate of their nation? If half the things the cur of a grand vizier had said about him were true, his service could hardly be relied upon.
‘The fate of the empire,’ whispered the Caliph Eternal. ‘And it hinges on a set of broken cutlery.’
‘No, your majesty,’ said the commodore, as the bolts rattled open along all four sides of the vault-like door. ‘It hinges on the nimble fingers and quicker mind of the last great player of the great game.’
Captain Jericho stood in the centre of the bridge where everyone could see him and lifted the speaking trumpet from the central station that would transmit his words throughout the airship. ‘When we joined the RAN we took an oath to parliament’s name, but those of you who have studied the words in detail will know that we did not give it to parliament, they only took it as agents: our word was given to the people of the Kingdom of Jackals. To protect them — to guard our wives, our daughters and sons, our parents and our sisters and brothers. It’s what those who took the oath before us in the fleet have been doing for over six hundred years. That oath is without limit. No distance can diminish it; no number of enemy vessels can undermine it. I know of no god strong enough to smite the love I feel for our people; I know of no foreign emperor deserving enough to make Jackelians chattel, and I know of no better crew I would serve alongside here, today. There is a reason why the figurehead on our vessel clutches two bolts of lightning in her talons: those who would make slaves of Jackelians must fi
rst face the storm. What will they face?’
‘Jack Cloudie!’ roared the sailors on the bridge; echoes of the crew’s roar carrying from every part of the airship.
‘What will they face?’ Jericho asked again.
‘Jack Cloudie!’
‘Give them the storm, gentlemen,’ said Jericho. ‘To your stations and to your duty.’
The captain turned to Jack and indicated the old cardsharp’s station on the bridge. ‘See those covers off, Mister Keats — reset the vessel to full automation and if you are wrong, may our next life along the Circle’s turn prove kinder to us both.’
A sailor passed his cutlass to Jack and he sliced away the cords fixing the canvas to the metal board, every eye on the bridge hot upon the back of his neck as it slid away to reveal a long panel studded with dials and switches, a punch-card injector dead centre. Jack extended a small round seat on a metal arm from below the panel and pushed up the switches that would ease the ship out of her long sleep, the thinking machines in the transaction-engine chamber beginning to take control of wide swathes of the Iron Partridge’s systems.
‘Sir,’ called a sailor with his eye to a telescope at the front of the control car. ‘Enemy vessels closing on us fast. They’re breaking into two squadrons. Half their fleet appear to be staying at our altitude, the other half of their disposition are climbing.’
‘Should we climb too, sir?’ the man on the elevator wheel asked nervously.
‘A partridge must stay close to the ground,’ barked Jericho. ‘And an iron one has a particular reason to stay low, d’you see. Close with them and hold our altitude steady. Make to cut their lower squadron straight down the centre.’
Pulling a speaking trumpet on a chord out of the panel, Jack managed to get in contact with Coss up in the transaction-engine room. ‘The captain is with us; I’m pushing all systems to automatic. What’s the situation up there?’
