by Stephen Hunt
‘I can say goodbye to my blessed chance to act as broker for the next king of Jackals,’ said the commodore.
‘I’m out of charges,’ said Westwick.
The commodore picked out the very last crystal shell from his cartridge pack and kissed it before tossing to the first lieutenant.
Westwick broke her pistol, pushed the charge into its breach and cocked her gun, sighting it along her forearm. She squeezed the trigger and a marine running past the grand vizier collapsed and went sprawling as the ball took him in the skull.
‘Luck of the bloody devil,’ she cursed.
The grand vizier looked across the marine’s corpse and spotted the two Jackelians behind the beyrog ranks, then yelled in red-faced rage, shoving his monsters forward with the flat of his blade.
‘And you’ve lost your chance to join the Sect of Razat,’ said the commodore.
‘For the Caliph Eternal,’ yelled Westwick. ‘For the honour of the Caliph Eternal, fall back and hold them in the citadel’s passages.’
With the logic of the move undisputed by the officer this time, two of the beyrogs sounded the retreat using circular trumpets coiled around their cuirasses. Giving ground, the caliph’s monstrous bodyguard marched back in lockstep even as the grand vizier’s claw-guards intensified their assault. Wave after wave of the beasts harried the retreating line, leaving corpses spilled from both sides, many fastened around each other in death. With no more bolts left to fire, most of the beyrogs had thrown aside their crossbows and drawn their scimitars, the hall echoing to the clash of claws against tempered steel, the snarls and growls of an animal pit fight filling the chamber.
His empty pistol discarded, the commodore held his position in the retreating line alongside Westwick, his sword hacking and thrusting as the number of claw-guards pushing them back swelled, both Jackelians made mere components in the living war machines savaging each other. Every metre they lost littered with dead. Every minute they gained for the main attack purchased with their blood and bodies; every second closer to their ranks being thinned to a complete rout.
No place for a man — no place for Jared Black’s unlucky bones.
‘Go back, Omar,’ called Salwa from the line of claw-guards blocking his passage down the tower steps. ‘You do not have to die here tonight for the sake of someone else’s palace intrigue.’
‘It is not a palace intrigue I die for,’ said Omar. ‘It is the Caliph Eternal and my guardsman’s oath. I already gave you my answer back on the walls of the palace fortress.’
‘You thought you were giving your answer to Salwa,’ called the new grand marshal of the guardsmen. ‘Not to Shadisa.’
‘No! I was right. Salwa did kill Shadisa, for I see nothing of her in you,’ shouted Omar.
‘Then you have been blinded by your stupid male pride,’ retorted Salwa, ‘for we are exactly the same. You never knew me at all, did you? Only the idea of a golden-haired girl you filled with all your hopes back in Haffa.’
And how I wish to the hundred faces of god that idea was still alive, somewhere.
‘Order your soldiers aside,’ demanded the caliph, stepping forward. ‘You have fallen under the glamour of the grand vizier, I can see that. Stand down your force here and I will see that you are pardoned for your treason. There are womb mages inside the city who can undo the evil changes that have been worked upon you.’
‘The changes that really count, little enculi,’ spat Salwa, ‘aren’t the ones your sorcerers can undo at your whim. You and your ossified regime have held back progress for so long that you have forgotten how to bend with the winds of change. And if you can’t bend, you must be made to snap.’
Omar rested his hand on the pommel of his sheathed sword. ‘I only hear the propaganda of the Sect of Razat. None of your own words.’
Salwa slipped the scimitar out of his belt and raised it ready to commence the attack as the leather-uniformed ranks of his claw-guards jostled each other, preparing to spring up the stairs and begin the slaughter. ‘Then you may hear mine now.’
There was a splintering sound behind Omar as the snarling beyrogs’ massive crossbows were cranked back and projectiles pushed into position, ready to release the first of their heavy three-fletched bolts.
The caliph spoke softly to Omar. ‘Let the beyrogs go in first. I heard your voice when you spoke of this Shadisa back in our cell; I would not order you to do this, guardsman.’
‘You do not have to, your majesty,’ said Omar, drawing his scimitar. ‘This is my fate and this is my choice.’
The caliph smiled sadly. ‘So be it, then. They are coming up the stairs while we are going down, with only enough space for one of us to pass. That’s a story as old as time. Let us settle it now …’
There was a moment’s silence, the claw-guards’ quivering talons left shaking in the air, the wordless growling beyrogs holding their oversized scimitars out high as though they were totems to the storm shifting above them. Both sides’ roars rose up almost simultaneously and the two ranks surged towards each other, Omar and Salwa’s swords clashing in the centre of the melee as they ran to do murder. It begins.
Biologicks from both sides crashed into their enemies in multiple waves of animal frenzy, the claw-guards’ charge fleet and furious, the beyrogs meeting them with the weight of moving mountains, beating aside sabre-fingered strikes with four-foot tall scimitars as bestial yells were hurled between the hacking, thrusting, howling forces. Dead soldiers spilled over the sides of the twisting staircase, living ones too, still locked in fierce combat. Lightning flashes illuminated the hellish scene while the heavens split and roared, two armies from a nightmare spiralling towards each other far above the black spires of the Forbidden City.
Lost in the sodden stench of the animal rage all around him, the world reduced down to his own private combat, Omar struggled against Salwa, his fingers locked around the wrist of his opponent’s sword arm, as Salwa’s were locked around his, the two of them desperately shifting and struggling for advantage.
‘Is this,’ Salwa panted through gritted teeth, ‘what you want?’
‘No,’ said Omar, his arm burning as held back the blade inching towards his nose. ‘But it is what we have.’
Salwa grinned through a snarl. ‘Yes.’ Their swords danced, and Omar turned one of Salwa’s thrusts a little too clumsily, the point cutting his left cheek and drawing a bitingly painful thin rivulet of blood there.
‘A duelling scar for you,’ said Salwa. ‘But there’ll be none left among your old guardsmen friends to appreciate it.’
Try for my heart next time. You’ve already filleted it.
They both fell back as a beyrog collapsed into their space, three claw-guards slashing at the giant’s yellow breastplate, taking out slices of metal armour with each swing. Free of Salwa’s grasp, Omar warily circled the new commander of the guardsman, both their scimitars held high in the classic duellist’s pose.
‘I am stronger than you, Omar. Faster.’
‘The grand vizier’s sorcerers refashioned your muscles well,’ spat Omar, not taking his eyes off the gently swaying blade. ‘And your soul too. It used to be as clear as a lake. Now it is a dirty puddle.’
‘The Sect of Razat freed me!’
‘I felt your soul!’ shouted Omar, turning aside Salwa’s blade as it came out in an exploratory tap. ‘You don’t even know what they’ve done to you.’
Again Salwa’s steel sprang out, far faster and more decisive this time. ‘I could say the same about you, Omar. Spouting dull platitudes about the honour of the Caliph Eternal. Is this what the guardsmen have done to you? Made you care about a dying age? Made you pick the wrong side of history when all you used to care about was a life of ease and your belly?’
Omar feinted right and cut left, but Salwa was too quick, blocking his thrust. ‘The guardsmen are right.’
‘This makes right,’ yelled Salwa, pushing forward with a quick sequence of thrusts so rapid that Omar had to give ground up t
he steps as he parried. ‘Victory and nothing else. You’ve picked a bad time to learn to care about something at last, Omar Barir.’
Omar nearly stumbled back over one of the dead claw-guards. ‘I used to care about you.’
‘Another lost cause. What a pity you didn’t join us when I offered you the chance. The future could have been ours.’
No future I want.
‘I am going to gut your sect’s future,’ snarled Omar. ‘And when I’m done with them, I’m going to hunt down Immed Zahharl and feed him my sword inch by inch for what he’s done to you and everyone I ever cared about.’
‘Through me first,’ said Salwa, meeting Omar’s blade with a chime of metal. ‘I’m the future! These beautiful claw-guards are our new guardsmen. More loyal and reliable than you and your men ever were.’
Omar fell back again. Perhaps this twisted shadow of the woman he had loved was correct. We’re too alike, too evenly matched. Salwa met every blow Omar gave out, turned every thrust, reversed every parry. Salwa was even wearing the same uniform as the claw-guards; monsters following their new grand marshal, in crude, bestial mockery of the brave men that Omar had served alongside. Omar’s jacket was soaked with rain, sweat and the blood of the dying biologicks still impaling and battering each other around him. His muscles and tendons seemed made of living fire as he tried to summon up enough strength to beat his way through Salwa’s guard. Is this the fight you wanted, fate? Is this what you have spared me for? I must kill the sole piece of Shadisa that hasn’t already been murdered by the grand vizier.
A beyrog struggling with a pair of the claw-guards came smashing down the steps, and both Omar and Salwa leapt desperately over the slashing, rolling landslide of bodies, but Omar was a second too slow, his boot catching on a trailing crossbow strap. Unbalanced, he landed a single boot on the stair’s blood-slicked surface and went falling down the treads. Omar saw Salwa following his tumbling passage like a mountain gazelle, leaping through the carnage of combat around the tower stairs. Omar landed hard by the edge, his momentum broken by the corpse of one of the claw-guards, the body nearly shifting over the stair’s boundary with the sky and sending Omar plunging into the chasm’s abyss. His scimitar had spun away in the fall and Omar desperately frisked the beast’s corpse for a pistol, a knife, anything, but of course, its weapons were its claws.
Your sword is not the weapon. You are the weapon. The cadet master’s words echoed in his mind. True for the grand vizier’s bestial new army, at least.
The point of Salwa’s sword turned him around, digging into his spine. ‘I warned you. My body is faster than yours. Stronger.’
Omar looked up into eyes he did not know. ‘Womb mages’ tricks.’
‘Call it progress,’ said Salwa, raising the scimitar and striking down to bury it into Omar’s chest.
Your sword is not the weapon. You are the weapon.
Omar seized the claw-guard corpse’s cloak and whipped it out, rolling and kicking as he wrapped it around Salwa’s leg. The new commander of the guardsmen was sent sprawling forward, meeting Omar’s sweeping leg and sent stumbling over the edge of the stairs with a surprised bellow. Omar looked down. Salwa was hanging just two feet below the ledge, body thrashing in the wind, one hand grasped around the rod of a rain-slicked lightning conductor.
Omar threw down the cloak, turning it into a makeshift line. ‘Take it!’
Salwa’s spare hand flailed up — trying to reach the cape, or perhaps the safety of the lightning conductor. ‘What for?’
‘For me.’
Salwa’s hand flailed up again, catching the lightning conductor, desperately holding on against the fierce gusts with both hands. There was a flicker of a smile around Salwa’s lips. ‘What will you give me if I win?’
‘A kiss.’
Salwa looked up, the rain cascading down the grand marshal’s face. ‘I’ve been a slave before, Omar, I didn’t much like it.’
Omar dropped the cloak as far as his aching arm could stretch. ‘Please, reach out.’
‘Freedom!’ Salwa called up, the fingers of both hands opening, letting gravity catch hold. Omar watched the body turning and shrinking in the wind, swallowed by the darkness and the storm until there was nothing left but the chasm below and the raging battle behind. He let the useless cloak drop after the vanished body.
The press of the skirmish had shifted further down the tower’s stairs now, leaving dead beyrogs and claw-guards strewn in its wake. So many times I lost her. So many times. All she wanted was to be free, and now she is. Free of everything. What have I made myself into? A slave pretending to be a soldier, the last son of a dead house. A uniform filled with muscle and blood, a uniform disguising a killer, a uniform holding onto nothing but duty and sharpened steel. Which of us is the larger monster now, Shadisa, you or Omar Barir, truly the greatest of all the guardsmen? Falling to his knees, Omar turned his bleeding face to the sky and let the rain roll down his features, clearing away the blood from his cheeks. The storm ripped against him and he tipped his face back to howl at the heavens and rail at the fates. ‘What more do you want from me? Why am I still alive? Is my blood so noble you will not shed it? Am I so celebrated you cannot crush me or cast me off this bloody tower?’ Do I have to avenge everyone in Haffa?
He lay there weeping. It could have been for minutes, it could have been for days, until appearing through the litter of the carnage, the Caliph Eternal walked towards Omar. The guardsman’s lost scimitar lay balanced in his untroubled hands.
The Caliph Eternal offered the blade. He didn’t seem to notice Omar’s tears in the rain. ‘This is yours, guardsman.’
Omar rose shakily to his feet, grasping the pommel and cleaning its curved edge uncertainly against his trouser leg. As he stood, the shaking lessened, falling away until he was as still as the dark stones of the city towers below. Slowly then, his bearing grew straighter, his shadow longer across the stairs, darker across the dead. What was filling him? Destiny or inevitability? Then he looked at the weapon as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Your majesty, you are mistaken. It is yours.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
There were shouts verging on panic from the spotters on the bridge as the enemy fleet moved into position above them, bomb bays open and ready to fire.
Only seconds after Jack gave the order to engage the enemy, the spotters’ calls tailed off as the forward starboard engine car fell silent, matching the port side with its damaged rotors.
She’s compensating, the ship is offsetting the damage to port.
‘That’s the style,’ Pasco said in bewilderment to the airship. ‘Run us clear, old girl. Turn us back on bloody course.’
The Iron Partridge lifted upward, listing slightly, the manoeuvre accompanied by a strange clacking like a table of rapidly shifting dominoes being played. It was their armoured plates outside, rippling as they performed micro adjustments to the airship’s pitch and yaw. The metallic chattering was suddenly drowned out by an explosion, a hollow thump followed by an echoing infill of air as the first of the frill of mortar tubes along their spine spat out fire.
Then came the enraged roar of a leviathan, the line of mortars punching out a rippling salvo of projectiles right along the airship’s length. Each burning hot shell was visible from the bridge as an arc of red light, as though the Iron Partridge was a deep-water squid with multiple tentacles reaching out in the dark to seize every fish that surrounded it. A burning flower erupted at the end of each arc, quickly followed by crimson veins spreading across the envelopes of the Cassarabian airships, more detonations, as the enemy vessels shuddered and were torn apart.
‘Enemy bomb bays struck above,’ shouted the master pilot from the front of the bridge. ‘We’re putting our mortar shells right inside their magazines. There are mines and fin-bombs detonating all across the squadron’s loading frames!’
Jericho’s plan of action echoed in Jack’s head. ‘We need to be exactly where they seem to want us, bosun. Put us right unde
r the shadow of their bomb bays.’
Jericho had trusted Jack to do his work, just as he had trusted the ship to be about her business. The ultimate bet in the deadliest game, made with the only stakes the skipper had left to play … our lives.
‘Yaw warning,’ called a sailor from their inclinometer. ‘Brace for port roll.’
Jack grabbed the sides of his command chair as the Iron Partridge rolled twenty degrees to port, the bombardment from the gun deck outside a deafening roar with the forward viewing canopy blown out. She had never been built to elevate her guns, but the ship was sighting them on the roll anyway.
‘Yaw warning, brace for starboard roll,’ warned the sailor again.
Thunder lifted out from their other side, enemy hulls lighting up in the night. Draks could briefly be glimpsed diving out of the way as the engine cars being targeted were blown free from their moorings, falling towards the ground with their rotors still turning.
Hissing a rain of ballast water from her sides, the Iron Partridge drifted upwards, rising like a wraith through the shoal of burning vessels. There was a different cadence to her manoeuvres now, the creaking carper decks almost silent as the airship picked a passage through the burning wreckage, ominously slow and deliberate.
They hovered on the crosswinds of flaming wreckage like a bird of prey, the telescope arrays in the crow’s nest and h-dome extending to their maximum magnification in the search for any resistance. Jack imagined the enemy airship damage tables being consulted on the calculation drums above, poor old Coss dancing around the transaction engines, cursing and working as the junior ratings they had pressed into service on the boilers shovelled in enough coal to meet the steam-driven thinking machines’ new voracity.
‘Station gunner,’ called Jack. ‘Magazine capacity?’
‘Magazine capacity, aye. Stores seventy per cent depleted on our cannons, and over eighty per cent empty on the mortar loading chamber,’ the sailor on the gunnery board called across to Jack, not bothering to conceal his concern at how fast they were rattling through the contents of the ship’s magazine. ‘Although all our fin-bombs are still accounted for, master cardsharp. Quarter gunners are reporting that our thirty-two pounders are running hot.’
