Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

Jack didn’t say how much he had envied the child, still going to school, instead of running through the streets, thieving and robbing for enough money to eat.

‘The child …’ said Coss.

‘The ship ,’ said Jack. ‘She was meant to fly and fight under full automation, and that’s what she was trying to do during the battle. She was working the controls even though she wasn’t connected to them.’

‘But the Iron Partridge never worked,’ said Coss. ‘In all her original proving flights, her automation consistently failed. The crew always ended up having to assume control and many of them were killed trying to take back manual command. Yet the results on that tape indicate a perfect flight, at least in simulation.’

Jack fingered the thick manuals chained to the punch-card desks, before delving back into the rolls of tape. Yes, there is a mystery here. Page after page in the manuals detailing the work the navy’s engineers had carried out re-rigging the automated systems for manual control. None of the automated systems had worked when the ship had first been tested in the air — yet here they had been during the battle, ticking along in simulated parallel with the crew’s manual handling of the vessel and seemingly running without fault.

‘Look at this,’ said Jack leafing down to a line of gunnery tables and trajectory plots on the tape. ‘After I opened up the magazine to the mortar tubes, our transaction engines were plotting a firing solution. Here are the orders to load another twenty shells and here’s the firing solution, right on top of the prize vessel’s lid. We would have opened up the Cassarabian airship’s spine if the mortar tubes had been running under the ship’s automated control.’

‘I can show you the original naval board’s report of enquiry,’ said Coss. ‘It’s in my air chest. During the test flights our engine-controlled gunnery proved as good as random. Some of the Iron Partridge ’s shells even dropped back down on her own hull. If they had been filled with explosives rather than target paint, I doubt we would have a ship to serve in now.’

‘And yet here they’re perfect,’ said Jack. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

But, Jack realized, it needed to, and fast. If their ship was becoming unpredictable, if she was undermining the navy’s extensive manual jury-rigging, then Jack, Coss and John Oldcastle had to make themselves the masters of the Iron Partridge by the time they sailed into their next combat. Failure to do so was going to leave the sun-bleached ribs of the airship as a memento protruding out of the Cassarabian sands.

Omar returned to the palace. There was a chiming noise resounding through the palace accompanied by an almost carnival atmosphere among the courtiers and staff moving around the wooded grounds. Two silk-robed courtiers came laughing arm-in-arm towards Omar, one of them spilling the contents of an iced cup as he stopped them to ask what they were celebrating.

‘Even the palace knows,’ laughed the nearest of the courtiers, pointing to the new script flowing along the dome’s inner surface. ‘It is war.’

‘War?’ said Omar.

‘The heathens in the north,’ said the courtier. ‘The Jackelians. They have finally provoked the righteous might of the empire.’

‘You should be pleased,’ said the man’s friend. ‘There will be many opportunities and promotions for everyone. You will fight for glory and when it is done, we will step in to the new provinces to run them as the Caliph Eternal wills.’

Omar remembered the words the old nomad, Alim, had once uttered when he was cleaning his knife in the shade of the water farm. ‘All fights start with two victors. All fights end with one proven right, and one proven dead.’

‘Yes,’ whispered Omar, watching the happy pair jump across a water channel to join a group of revellers on the other side of the lawn. ‘When it is done.’

The start of a war. What more perfect time for Shadisa to disappear from the palace? When every sinew of the caliph’s civil service and the court and the military was focused on victory over their heathen neighbours to the north. No time to look for one of Immed Zahharl’s servants disappeared from the grand vizier’s devious clutches; perhaps not even time enough to notice she had gone missing — until it was too late.

Following various courtiers’ directions towards the pavilion of Immed Zahharl, Omar found himself heading towards the very centre of the Jahan. Protected from the elements by the almost magical dome high above, the buildings here had none of the practicality of old master Barir’s great house. No need to keep out the fierce winter storms that would roll off the sea and smash into the harbour town nestled against the lee of the cliffs. The memory of it almost made Omar wistful for his old life. How he would go to sleep listening to the screech of the gulls and wake up to the crack of lightning, watching the great dark storm front sliding in across the ocean. There was no need inside the Jahan for protection against lashing rains coming from one direction and drifting sands from the other. Here, the pavilions were made of crystal-blown walls engraved with flower motifs and stylized borders; curves of glass with just the occasional columns of marble to anchor the onion-topped towers.

Made oblivious to the structures’ beauty by familiarity, the staff of the court at least gave some semblance of businesslike efficiency. Officials, some in military uniforms, strode about with papers and plans rolled under their arms. Commissions for the coming hostilities? Plans of supply, perhaps? Farris Uddin had lectured at great length about the logistics and supplies needed for any successful military venture. An army that was not provisioned adequately would quickly lose more men to sickness and disease than to the rifle fire of any enemy column. The organization that went into such things was the empire’s greatest weapon, a secret weapon, almost, given how the tedium of such detailed planning made it easy for incautious warriors to ignore it in favour of the glory and fury of a full cavalry charge.

Remembering the name of the slave Boulous had suggested he seek out, Omar asked a gardener tending a bed of orchids outside the grand vizier’s pavilion if he knew a woman called Nudar. The gardener nodded and duly went off, returning with a woman so short that Omar at first mistook her for a child. There was no mistaking the lines of her ancient weathered face, hair faded to silver and tied back in tight buns — and judging by her features and pale skin, another slave with Jackelian blood. Taken together with her tiny size she looked as if she might have been born old, but this, Omar suspected, was only his imagination at work. She must have grown old in service.

‘Boulous told me that I should seek you out,’ said Omar to the old woman. ‘He said you were to be trusted.’

‘He said that, did he, guardsman?’ muttered the old slave, her knowing eyes appraising him. ‘Well, he is right enough. Old Nudar was once wet nurse in the jahani academy and as much a mother as he and hundreds of other jahani ever had. My boys, my darling boys. All grown up now and scattered across the empire. No little jahani to bounce on my knee now. How is Boulous, little Boulous, so quick and clever?’

‘Not so little now,’ said Omar.

‘No, not so little. He’ll make old Nudar proud one day. He’ll rise further than them all.’ She grasped Omar’s hand suspiciously and turned it over in her fingers.

‘Can you read my future from my palm?’ asked Omar.

Her response was a gurgle like wet laughter. ‘No, but your past I find puzzling. Your hand is far too tanned to be that of a nobleman’s son and your sword practice calluses are new, yet formed across such skin as you only develop from years of manual labour. An aqueduct line worker?’