Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

‘Everyone was ordered out of the gardens tonight,’ said the grand vizier.

‘I arrived late for my duty after supper, your eminence,’ pleaded the boy dangling from the beyrog’s grasp. ‘I never spoke to the master of the gardens, I didn’t know …’

‘What did you see here tonight?’ demanded Zahharl. ‘What did you hear?’

‘Nothing, your eminence. I saw nothing.’

‘A wise young slave, who sees no evil and hears no evil.’ The grand vizier turned to the caliph. ‘You know what to do.’

‘He is just a child,’ said the caliph.

‘You too must prove yourself to me this night.’

‘I cannot,’ begged the caliph, trying not to look at the struggling slave’s face.

‘Then have your beyrog do it.’

‘That would be the same as if I had done it myself.’

‘You are right,’ sighed the grand vizier. He grabbed the slave by his rough gardener’s robes, lifting him out of the hulking beyrog’s grasp. ‘And if you must do these things, they are better done by your own hand. Then you know they shall be done properly and efficiently.’ He took the boy’s head and thrust it down into an irrigation channel next to the path. ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, and now, speak no evil ever again.’

Omar watched in disgust as the boy’s legs spasmed and jerked while the grand vizier drowned him. The murder done, the grand vizier stood up and pointed past the foliage of the orange tree where Omar was hiding. ‘The poor lad. He must have slipped from the terrace up there and landed unconscious in the water where he drowned. A good thing he is of no account to anyone.’ Zahharl indicated the beyrog, standing dispassionately on the other side of the path. ‘Order your hound away.’

The caliph did so and Zahharl marched behind the beyrog, shutting the garden’s doors behind the bodyguard and the other sentries standing outside. As he returned towards the caliph, the grand vizier’s right leg lashed out and caught the empire’s leader in the gut, doubling him up.

‘I asked for one simple thing to prove your loyalty and you failed me.’

‘Please, don’t,’ coughed the Caliph Eternal as the grand vizier’s leg lashed out again, catching him between the thighs and sending him sprawling across the slave’s corpse.

‘You are too weak,’ said the grand vizier, advancing on the figure whimpering against the tiles of the hanging garden. ‘And if you want to see progress done, you must be strong, as strong as our brave new age demands. You want a strong empire, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ begged the caliph, raising his arms up to ward off any more lashes from the grand vizier’s boot.

‘That is good,’ said Zahharl. ‘For that is what I want also.’ He removed his boots and sat down on the slab where Shadisa had been tied down, soaking his feet in the water channel at the slab’s base before pushing his soles out towards the caliph. ‘Rub my feet for me, and then dry them on your clothes. Show me how much you love me. Then I shall reward you.’

Omar watched in silent horror as the empire’s ruler of rulers prostrated himself before Immed Zahharl, massaging the killer’s feet before rubbing them dry with the silk of his own robe. The Caliph Eternal could cry out in a second, call in his bodyguard of beyrogs outside and have them rip the limbs off this sly, devious murderer, one by one. Yet here he was, supposedly the most powerful man in the empire, bowing down before the grand vizier as if he was no more than a slave from one of the capital’s many bathhouses. What sort of devil is this grand vizier, that he can turn Shadisa against me and treat the Caliph Eternal like a hound to be whipped on his whim?

‘Kiss them now and I shall give it to you,’ said the grand vizier, and as the Caliph Eternal moaned and pressed his lips against the feet of his advisor, the grand vizier brought out a syringe filled with a blood-red liquid. ‘Stay still,’ commanded the grand vizier. He leant forward and shoved the needle into the base of the caliph’s neck, pushing the plunger down and releasing the substance into the ruler’s body as he lay down moaning. ‘Aren’t you glad I’m here for you,’ cooed the grand vizier. ‘Someone to look after you and protect you.’

‘Yes,’ wailed the Caliph Eternal. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, then,’ said Zahharl, tossing the empty syringe into a bush, ‘get to your feet now. We have a war to prosecute and the Imperial Aerial Squadron will bring you victory after victory. In the end, even you may begin to tire of accepting the triumphs that are to come.’

Once the caliph and the grand vizier had departed the hanging garden, Omar dropped to the ground beside the forgotten corpse of the gardener. He lifted the dead boy out of the channel and rolled him onto the path leaving him with as much dignity as he could.

‘I’ll send the ones that did this to paradise after you,’ whispered Omar. ‘You are of account to me , and that is my promise to you.’

Omar walked over to the bush by the side of the orange tree and carefully pulled out the syringe that had been used to inject the caliph. There were drugs of a thousand hues available inside the palace, served to its courtiers on trays like iced sherbet, but what drug could be so powerful that the grand vizier was using it to make such an utter vassal of the caliph? How addictive would such filth have to be? Omar didn’t know the answer to that, but there were chemists inside the capital who might be able to produce an antidote to it and restore some semblance of a ruler able to stand up to the grand vizier’s ambitions. Omar pocketed the empty syringe. The proof was mounting up against Immed Zahharl — the trick would be to stay alive long enough to use it.

Omar climbed back up the tree and used the vine to retrace his steps to the next level of the hanging gardens. He had other steps he had to retrace, too. One of the grand vizier’s murderous disciples was taking Shadisa down to the lair of the womb mages and Omar knew the way there — the lifting rooms by the library’s entrance burrowing all the way to its lowest levels. There was only one victory that mattered to Omar. I’m coming for you, Shadisa, I’ll follow you to hell and back.

He ran back towards the exit. Shadisa wasn’t dead yet.

Standing at the end of the wardroom, Vice-Admiral Tuttle indicated that he was finished with the ground party’s report on the caliph’s deadly new innovation — the aerial mine. Their find was, Jack supposed, one scrap of small comfort for the admiralty politician, his name now attached to one of the greatest naval defeats the Royal Aerostatical Navy had ever suffered — and at the hands of their enemies to the south, mere novices in the trade of airship flight. Jack could imagine the uproar when news of this defeat started circulating at home. The newssheets would send mobs flailing at the doors of parliament, demanding heads roll for this fiasco. The grim nodding faces of the Iron Partridge ’s officers seated around the table indicated they concurred with what Jack was imagining as their reception back home.

At least the vice-admiral would have an example of the enemy’s secret weapon to present to the fleet’s airship yards for their engineers to try to devise a counter-defence. Jack had already heard some of the wilder ideas of the crew on the subject — everything from protective nets, using rotors to blow the mines off course, or launching lead weights on miniature chutes to set the mines off early.

‘This is a devious innovation,’ announced the vice-admiral, ‘but one that will be easily exceeded by the navy’s air yards. We will carry the defused mine back to the Kingdom and present it to the admiralty with all haste, so that our next engagement can be made on more equal terms.’