Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

Farris Uddin moved over the cowering thug and pointed his two makeshift wooden batons towards the man’s forehead. ‘What is my name? What am I?’

‘Farris Uddin,’ spluttered the rascal. ‘You are a guardsman.’

Omar looked at the two ruffians lying crumpled to either side as Farris Uddin sent the surviving man scampering away down the street with a swift kick from his boot. Their noses had been pushed back into their skulls and both men were dead.

‘You killed them, master.’

‘Easy come, easy go.’

Had Uddin been telling the truth when he said he was an imperial guardsman? The caliph’s guardsmen kept the peace in the palace and served as the ruler of Cassarabia’s elite regiment of soldiers. But unless such a man was cast out and declared rogue, what would one of them possibly want with the bounty on a heretic like Omar? No, the killer was just a hunter of men who had been trying to bluff his way out of a fight. A particularly lethal example of the breed. That is the only thing that makes any sense .

‘I saw a guardsman once,’ said Omar quickly, trying to talk away his nerves. ‘He was travelling with a war galley that had come into our harbour, and he flew above the galley on a great lizard with wings as wide as this street.’

‘A drak,’ growled Farris Uddin, leading the way to the stables. ‘They are called draks, and the man you saw would have been an officer of the twenty-second talon wing. Draks do not like the open sea and they have to be specifically trained for such duties. The twenty-second has such steeds.’

‘Do draks like sand better?’ asked Omar, ducking through the stable entrance and entering into a dark space with a mud floor covered with straw.

‘No,’ said Farris Uddin, rolling up the sleeves of his robes before dipping an arm into a stone tank and lifting out a large, bleeding carcass with four small hooves still attached. ‘They like sheep.’

Omar hollered in fear as a head as long as he was tall lashed out of the shadows to lance the tossed carcass on its razor-sharp beak, throwing it up into the air like a cat playing with its prey, before swallowing the carcass in a single sinuous gulp.

‘And human flesh,’ added Uddin, gripping Omar’s shoulders tight. ‘When they are permitted it.’

Jack Keats yelled as the rush of air whipped past his face. A thousand feet above the ground wasn’t high enough to require the Iron Partridge to run pressurized, but it was high enough that no airship sailor would walk away from a fall. Even hanging upside down, Jack could just hear the reasonably voiced protests of the steamman Coss Shaftcrank from an open gun port.

‘I’ve done it,’ cried Jack, the blood rushing to his head. ‘I’ve kissed the ship’s nameplate.’

The lumpen face that belonged to the two hands clutching Jack’s ankles poked out of the gun port where the cannon’s rubber hood had been withdrawn, a brief distraction for Jack from the distant landscape whipping past below at seventy miles an hour.

His answer came back over the roar of the engine cars below. ‘You aren’t low enough to have done it proper, thief boy. Stretch yourself down.’

Jack felt his body jolt as the hands around his ankles swung him down still lower. As initiation ceremonies went, the Royal Aerostatical Navy’s seemed particularly brutal and pointless. At least when he had been running with the flash mob, his baptismal trial of breaking into a warehouse one night had yielded a few pennies of profit.

Pasco, the ship’s savage master engineer and self-appointed ‘tutor’ of the navy’s traditions to the new hands, leant further out of the gun port and threw a line down to Jack. At first, Jack thought that he was meant to grab it — extra security now that his ordeal was over — but then he noticed the bulky pair of gloves hanging at the end.

‘Put them on, thief,’ shouted the master engineer. ‘One at a time.’

It had been Pasco’s turn to teach the classes that the new recruits were obliged to sit — instructions on ship lore and layout, the navy’s rules, regulations, traditions — the thousands of obscure pieces of equipment that an airship sailor’s life depended on. Pasco’s teaching methods, however, seemed rather more direct than those of his fellow officers.

The gloves swung closer and Jack did as he was bid, discovering a handle inside each of the leather mittens just as the fingers holding his ankles released their grip. Jack screamed in panic, sliding head first down the outside of the Iron Partridge until he swung around on the gloves, gravity and the winds tugging his boots as he found himself miraculously clinging onto the side of the massive craft’s iron plates. The gloves are magnetic! When his hands had contracted inside the gloves, the gauntlets had activated — and releasing the handle inside loosened the invisible bond between man and the airship’s hull. Hair blowing in the crosswinds, Jack glanced up at the jeering faces, shouting abuse — or possibly encouragement — from the safety of their gun port.

Down below, the transmission belt running out to the engine car underneath growled at Jack, as if the engine moulded as a lion’s head was actually alive; its rapidly turning rotor waiting to carve him into pieces if he lost his hold. He could hardly hear the engine over the sound of his own heart hammering inside his chest. Crying in an unholy blend of rage and fear, Jack released the magnet’s activator on his left hand and threw his arm up to fix his glove on the metal plating above his head. Repeating the manoeuvre, using the rivets on the plates below him as barely functional footholds, Jack steadily, desperately, clanged his way back up the airship’s outer metal skin and towards the open gun port. There were thieves back in the capital who specialized in running the labyrinthine maze of rooftops and towers in Middlesteel, experts in rattling skylights. Jack was not one of them. Don’t look down. One hand in front of the other and whatever you do, don’t look down.

The young sailor cursed his tormentors with every freezing yard he climbed. Finally, Jack got near enough to the gun deck to hear a commotion inside — which explained where the jeering sailors who had just been observing his progress had disappeared to. Grasping the inside of the gun port, Jack tumbled back onto the airship’s deck and fell into the middle of a brawl.

John Oldcastle was wielding one of the flat-headed rammers the gunners used to load cartridge wad and shot as a stave. Two sailors had been laid out cold with its blunt end, and the large officer had Pasco, the master engineer, pressed down on the neck of a thirty-two pounder. His makeshift weapon was held tight against Pasco’s throat, choking the man. Coss Shaftcrank was also threatening some of the master engineer’s men with a wad hook, his voicebox sounding a warning in case they tried to save their chief.

Coss was still wearing the harness the sailors had used to dangle him out over the hull, none of the cowards wanting to risk the creature of the metal’s weight dragging them over the side during his brutal initiation ceremony.

‘Ah, there you are lad,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Me and the master engineer were just having a lively little debate about the use of a safety line during the kissing of the ship.’

‘What loss is that thief going to be?’ choked Pasco. ‘Fresh out of Bonegate jail. Another pressed man. Better the bastard drops now before one of his mistakes kills a real cloudie.’

‘I can find a blessed use for him on the upper deck,’ said Oldcastle, easing up the pressure on the master engineer’s neck. ‘And if you try to nobble the lad again, I’m going to take the harness off this old steamer and see if it’s long enough to swing you down onto the rotors of one of your own engine cars.’