Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

‘Shadisa!’

Boulous grabbed Omar’s arm and restrained him from running back down the fortress steps. ‘Why do you think I waited until now to tell you this?’

‘I have to warn her, tell her about Zahharl,’ said Omar. ‘She must run away, leave him.’

Boulous shook his head. ‘Did you not hear her words, cadet? She doesn’t want anything to do with you.’

‘I shall warn her,’ said Omar. ‘Shadisa loved me once and with or without me in her life, she can still live. With my warning she will at least know to watch out for him.’

‘She will never accept you,’ said Boulous.

‘You do not know that.’ I’ll save her, then she’ll have to know what I feel for her .

‘Of course I do, I am a jahani,’ said Boulous. ‘I was raised as a slave in imperial service. Without tribe or house or sect, we are seen as a clean pair of hands, owing everything to the state. Jahani have gone on to command armies and fleets for the Caliph Eternal; as administrators we hold power throughout the empire — but no matter how high we rise, how much money and power we accumulate, no daughter of a respectable freeman would ever want to see their blood tainted by a marriage to someone such as me. It does not matter that your position is now reversed with hers. You were once a slave and she was once the daughter of a freeman; she can never forget that.’

‘I have made myself worthy of her. I am a guardsman, not a slave.’

‘Whatever you do in the future, you cannot change the past,’ said Boulous.

Omar threw his hands up in despair. ‘If that is how it is to be, what can you hope for?’

‘I will end up as an administrator in a nice fat province like Seyadi or Fahamutla, where the local sultan will know I am one of the empire’s eyes and will tread carefully around me,’ said Boulous. ‘I will grow old and fat and the province’s courtiers will elbow each other for the privilege of dropping dates into my senile mouth as I lounge in the shade of a fountain.’

‘No, anything is possible,’ insisted Omar. ‘At the start of the year I was tending the tanks of a water farm as a slave; today I have the grand vizier himself whisking my blood in his sorcerer’s cauldron to create a drak fledgling for me. In such a world, what is winning the heart of a woman like Shadisa, when there is a fellow as handsome and cunning as me ready to fight for her?’

‘You will see. That is, if Immed Zahharl doesn’t create a drak for you that is so sickly and blind it flies into a cliff on your first outing.’ Boulous pointed to the sun setting over the capital. ‘Zahharl will be back in his pavilion inside the palace now.’

‘Then the grand vizier’s staff are lucky, for they will have an extra guardsman to patrol their corridors tonight!’

‘This is no skirmish for you to be fighting in,’ Boulous pleaded. ‘When Immed Zahharl begins his war against the Jackelians, he will use the Imperial Aerial Squadron to consolidate what little military power he doesn’t already control into his hands. When that happens, he won’t be the grand vizier of the empire, he will be the empire. That is what we must fight. What is the life of one fool of a slave girl against such an outcome?’

Omar pointed down towards the palace as he started to run back down. ‘The Jahan.’

The world.

‘I can’t cover for your absence too long,’ Boulous shouted down. ‘You damned fool.’

But even as he said it, he knew it was the sort of foolhardiness that the guardsmen had once been famous for, from an age when they drew their blades first and only calculated the odds afterwards.

Boulous called out again, ‘When you get to the grand vizier’s pavilions, ask to speak to a slave woman called Nudar.’

‘Who is she?’ Omar shouted back.

‘A better woman than the one you are going for. I pray that she will be able to save you from yourself long enough for you to come to your senses.’

Boulous watched Omar disappear from sight; the last glint of the sun’s gleaming falling upon his scimitar.

The old days were coming back after all.

John Oldcastle stood up from where he was helping Coss and one of the Benzari stokers patch a line of boiler pipes, noticing Jack’s limp as he entered the transaction-engine chamber. ‘Have you slipped in the lifting chamber, lad?’

Jack shook his head. ‘I was walking down a corridor on the lower deck with that upland lieutenant.’

‘McGillivray,’ said the master cardsharp. ‘He’s a charmless dog, alright. Tosses his grog ration over the side every night and frowns on gambling. If he were walking the decks as the blessed captain, we’d all be sailing on a dry ship. Did he give you a kick for my sins, Mister Keats?’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I was passing by the rudder room and the lieutenant was walking the other way when a cannon ball came rolling down the corridor — an incendiary round, unsecured — we both had to jump out of the way and it staved in the bulkhead. I almost twisted my ankle trying to jump over it.’

‘The magazine is three decks up from where you were,’ said Coss looking up from the boiler’s pipes, his voicebox quivering with surprise. ‘Vault my valves, but what was a round doing rolling loose down there?’

‘Ah, you won’t find that trick in any of those manuals of official airship service you bought from the stationer’s stalls back home,’ said Oldcastle to the steamman. ‘It’s called “rolling shot”; a brutal little prank an unhappy crew likes to play on their officers to draw attention to their grievances. Someone was trying to play skittles using you as their mortal target. We’re sailing close to a mutiny here, lads. I had better let Jericho know. He’s respected well enough by our Jack Cloudies, but if the crew are rolling shot at the likes of McGillivray, we’re in for a choppy ride on the other side of the Cassarabian border.’

Jack watched the master cardsharp leave the transaction-engine chamber and wondered whether the sailors’ rolling shot had been aiming for the upland lieutenant. Jack was unpopular enough with the crew himself, that brute Pasco spreading the tale far and wide that the loss of their prize vessel was the result of the first lieutenant’s pique at Jack avoiding the full ninety lashes during his flogging. Mutiny. That would do for us all. Wouldn’t it be ironic to travel all this way and end up on the wrong end of a hangman’s noose after all?

‘As if we didn’t have enough problems,’ said Jack. ‘A whole empire full of hostile airships waiting for us and we’ve got to pick a fight among ourselves too.’

‘By my rotten regulators, that’s not our only problem, Jack softbody,’ said Coss. ‘There’s a good reason why our boilers are presently in such a bad shape up here.’ The steamman led Jack to the row of punch-card desks overlooking the transaction-engine pit and indicated a long stream of paper tape that had been printed out. ‘Read that. We were drawing too much power during the battle. The pipes and boiler were over-pressurized. We should have throttled the engines up to full power rather than running them cold; we’re lucky we didn’t blow half the chamber away the way we were holding back the calculation drums.’

Jack picked up the paper output and began leafing through it. ‘But we had the automated systems completely nailed down. We shouldn’t have been pushing anywhere near our capacity or tolerances …’

‘Nailed down, yes,’ said Coss. ‘But it was as if all the automated processes were running anyway, even though they weren’t connected into the physical flight mechanisms of the ship. I have never seen anything like this, Jack softbody.’

‘I think I have,’ said Jack, leafing through the tape. ‘Back in Middlesteel there was a horseless carriage that used to drive along the streets outside where I lived, one of the big expensive ones, with a driver taking a child to school every morning. The boy would sit in the back and pretend to steer it. Every day he would come past, working his imaginary controls.’