Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

The man Omar had marked as Zahharl intoned, ‘Which of those is last among us?’

One of the golden masked figures stepped forward. ‘I am last.’

‘Then it is upon you to prove you will follow our true way,’ called Zahharl. ‘The Sect of Razat calls for blood, and from this maiden’s flesh will it be spilled.’ He pulled out a long silver syringe from under his priest’s robes and plunged it into Shadisa’s arm, filling it with the unconscious woman’s blood. ‘You must prove yourself to me and you must prove yourself to the will of the one true god.’ He lifted up the filled syringe as if it was a sceptre and the golden-masked figure stepped forward to receive it. The grand vizier indicated Shadisa’s prone body. ‘This slave’s name is Shadisa and she shall die. It is for you to prove yourself upon her body. As we honour progress …’

‘As we honour progress,’ intoned the circle of figures, ‘she shall die!’

Omar was flexing his legs to propel him into the leap down from the tree when the tiles below began to shake. A stomping sound echoed from the corridor the grand vizier had entered through and the first of a company of giant beyrogs emerged into the hanging garden from the pavilion. Ben Issman be blessed, Boulous must have told the guardsmen what Omar was about to do, and they had informed the Caliph Eternal. Here was the ruler’s bodyguard, come to arrest the grand vizier for his crimes. The caliph using the excuse, no doubt, to remove a thorn from his side who had grown over-powerful and dangerous. The sedan chair borne into the hanging garden by the beyrogs dropped to the floor behind Zahharl and a figure to the left of the grand vizier removed his mask, revealing a face that Omar had to suppress a gasp upon seeing — a profile familiar from any coin stamped in Cassarabia. It was the Caliph Eternal standing beside the grand vizier, Akil Jaber Issman himself, his immortal youthful features looking not much older that Omar’s own!

‘Take her,’ ordered the Caliph Eternal, and at the sound of his voice the shark-faced beyrogs came alive and lunged forward, ripping off Shadisa’s restraints and pulling her off the slab.

‘Careful, you wretches,’ called the Caliph Eternal to the beyrogs, pointing towards the masked man holding the syringe of blood. ‘The woman does not require her skin bruised as if she is an overripe banana. Prove your loyalty to progress and the Sect of Razat: this slave shall die this night by your hand.’

Omar watched in shock as the Caliph Eternal’s hideous bodyguards tossed Shadisa’s comatose form inside the sedan chair. The masked initiate who was to kill her stopped with one boot on the chair’s step as the grand vizier passed him a cork-stoppered vial of green liquid. ‘Use this to wake her up,’ laughed the grand vizier, ‘before you start with her.’ The initiate nodded and took the vial, entering the chair’s box.

The Caliph Eternal himself is a member of the grand vizier’s wicked sect. A man who should have commanded the loyalty of every sect of the Holy Cent as the voice of the one true god on earth. No chance of invoking the caliph’s law and trusting to the empire’s justice here. The only law now was the depraved whims of Immed Zahharl. Any one of the beyrogs would be a match for a dozen guardsmen, and Omar wouldn’t get more than a step towards Shadisa’s body before the caliph’s bodyguard cut him to pieces. He had to bide his time. Save Shadisa later.

Omar kept as still as a leaf in the foliage. The Caliph Eternal’s monsters would slay him if they scented him up here. Back in Haffa, Omar had heard a story once about a salt-fish farmer who had escaped a nest of sand vipers that had been tracking him by rubbing a salt-fish against his skin to disguise his scent. Omar quietly plucked one of the oranges and sliced it against his scimitar, squeezing its juices against his face, arms and legs.

‘I want no trace of her left,’ ordered the grand vizier. ‘Carry the chair to the lowest level of the womb mages’ library and do it there.’

No. NO!

Concealed inside the sedan chair, Shadisa and the initiate who was to be her executioner were carried away by the beyrogs, a couple of their number standing sentry outside the archway, the gold-masked figures of the sect striding solemnly behind the procession.

Shadisa. Omar had failed her again — a guardsman with a scimitar at his side, trained to hack apart her would-be killers, and he had been every bit as helpless to intervene as he had been during the sack of Haffa.

Omar’s self-recriminations ended as one of the beyrogs turned and sniffed the air suspiciously, growling like a wolf.

‘Stop,’ ordered the caliph.

Immed Zahharl turned. ‘What is it?’

‘There is someone else here,’ said the caliph. ‘My beyrogs’ senses are never wrong.’

‘Move on,’ the grand vizier called to the departing sedan chair and the masked figures. ‘Seal the garden behind you.’

‘Find the intruder,’ the caliph ordered the beyrog as it loped howling straight towards Omar’s orange tree.

Jack was helping Coss with a broken regulator on one of the transaction engines when a banshee-like wailing began sounding about the chamber and the two of them halted their work.

‘General-quarters,’ said Coss.

Jack was puzzled. ‘This close to our rendezvous with the Fleet of the South?’

John Oldcastle leant over the rail into the engine pit. ‘The bridge wants a check on the navigation drums, they need to confirm our blessed position.’

Jack saw why through the porthole when he went back up to the punch-card desk. There were dunes below — known as the great southern desert to the Jackelians, the northern to the Cassarabians — but the orange sands were covered with smoking debris and bodies. In the air clusters of gas cells drifted through the sky attached to scraps of burning carper, like corpuscles bled from the airships’ veins and set astray to wander the heavens.

‘There are no airships left intact,’ said Jack, injecting his query into the punch-card reader.

‘Aye lad,’ said John Oldcastle, looking out of the next porthole. ‘And unless both sides blew each other to bits, that’s the remains of one fleet while the victors have had it away on their heels.’

Results for Jack’s query began twisting away on the beads of his abacus-like screen. ‘All our compass points have been tracked correctly. Our navigation drums are turning fine. These are the rendezvous coordinates the vice-admiral gave us for the Fleet of the South.’

The master cardsharp reported the results down to the bridge and returned to Jack’s station a minute later. ‘You and the old steamer can get your tools. We’re to report to the boat bay and go down there — sift through the wreckage for anything resembling a ship’s record drums — Jackelian or the caliph’s.’

Jack couldn’t tear his eyes away from the sight outside the porthole.

Coss came out of the pit to take in the sight too. ‘How could one fleet wipe out another so completely in a single engagement?’

‘Perhaps the vice-admiral was right,’ said Jack. ‘Superior skymanship will out.’

‘Ah, that strutting popinjay,’ whined John Oldcastle. ‘If he’s right, there’s a first time for everything.’

If the Iron Partridge ’s skipper had been looking to find the remains of a captain’s log among the dunes of the Southwest Frontier, then Jack hoped Captain Jericho wouldn’t be too disappointed. There was enough of that to go around for everyone. While the figures sifting through the wreckage — John Oldcastle, Coss, Jack, their brutish captain of marines and a handful of his soldiers — had yet to find anything resembling a transaction-engine register in the ruins left scattered across the desert, there were enough bodies wearing the torn, burnt uniforms of the RAN to speak of which side had flown away victorious. So many ships’ names on the caps — the Audacity , the Guardian Kirkhill , the Javelin , the Parliament Oak , the Swiftsure and the Ultimatum — and not a single Cassarabian sailor among the bodies strewn half-buried among the shifting sands.