Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

When Udal Lackmann did reach the safe house, Jack was not on sentry duty, so it seemed to him that the smuggler had arrived as if out of thin air. The first thing that Jack knew of the smuggler’s presence in the building was when he noticed their safe house’s aged host whispering with a newly arrived traveller by the entrance to the courtyard and pointing towards the group of Jackelians. Commodore Black got up from the game of cards he had been trying to teach Jack and Henry Tempest, and approached the man with what seemed to Jack a touch of uncharacteristic apprehension. The traveller’s white robes were grey with dust, a sand filter hung off his neck, and a single curved dagger was tucked behind his crimson waist sash.

‘ Al-salaamo alaykum , Udal Lackmann,’ said the commodore.

‘ Wa alaykum e-salaam , Jared Black,’ said the smuggler, flashing a smile as white as the shine on the courtyard’s four pillars. ‘It has been many years since you were a visitor here.’

‘Many years for me, Udal Lackmann,’ said the commodore. ‘But they’ve been a mortal lot kinder to you.’

‘My life is full of little blessings,’ said the smuggler. ‘They help me hold to a path that fills its travellers with vim and vigour. I had not heard that your u-boat was back in port.’

‘I walked here on my dusty boots,’ said the commodore, ‘like a true son of the desert.’

‘There is not enough iron in your soul to be that,’ said Udal, ‘yet a little too much to make your merchant’s garb believable, at least to one who knows you.’

First Lieutenant Westwick appeared in the courtyard and the smuggler gave a small bow with one hand held against his heart.

‘The face I saw watching upstairs in the window,’ said Udal. ‘Tell me that you are not truly the wife of this old seadog?’

First Lieutenant Westwick raised the hem of her dress, revealing a brace of throwing blades strapped to her calf. ‘That’s not the point of me being here.’

‘Delightful,’ said the smuggler. ‘And a half-blood too, with a face exotic on both sides of the border. I shall buy you. How much for her, Jared?’

Henry Tempest leapt to his feet. ‘You touch a hair of her head and I’ll twist yours off your flaming neck!’

Udal laughed. ‘Sit down, giant one; it is too hot for such jokes. The price to be paid for such as she is paid in steel, not gold, and I have no wish to put to the test the accuracy of those deadly little blades.’ He looked at Jack. ‘And one not much younger than you were, Jared Black, when you first came visiting these shores.’

‘Aye, well age does funny things to memory,’ said the commodore. ‘Like the way I remember you so much the same, you might as well have just walked out the room all those years ago and strolled straight back in.’

‘I heard the royalist fleet met its end at Porto Principe,’ said the smuggler. ‘I raised a glass in toast to you and your friends.’

‘They were good ones,’ said the commodore, ‘in different times.’

‘It’s always different times,’ said the smuggler. ‘Are you bringing things in, or bringing things out?’

‘Ourselves in,’ said the commodore. ‘As for what we’d be taking out, my new wife here has a passion for airships. She finds them endlessly fascinating, especially the bit where they get floated off the ground. Isn’t that a miracle? All the weight of such a grand large hull, filled with all those sailors and fin-bombs and supplies, then you pack its cells full of gas, and up it goes, as long as a battleship and as high as the clouds.’

‘She should switch her temple tithes to the Sect of Razat,’ said Udal. ‘They find such matters endlessly fascinating, also.’

‘That’s what I heard,’ said the commodore. ‘And I thought to myself, I need a man of means, a man who gets about and will be able to introduce me to the right people. Why, my old friend Udal, he’ll do, that’s what occurred to me.’

‘I have very little against the Sect of Razat,’ said Udal. ‘For keepers and priests, they seem eminently practical people.’

‘A smuggler needs borders to cross, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘Without borders and taxes to avoid, you’re only in the haulage business. One continent, one empire makes a nice political slogan for the Caliph Eternal, but it’ll be wicked hard on your bottom line.’

‘To be an honest businessman,’ smiled Udal. ‘I long for such days. But perhaps not quite so soon.’

‘We can help you postpone them indefinitely,’ said First Lieutenant Westwick.

‘The followers of Razat are a very insular sect,’ said Udal. ‘But I know one man who can help you with what you wish to know. We will need to travel towards the capital to meet him.’

‘May the light of the world shine on you,’ said the first lieutenant, in what sounded like a quote to Jack. ‘And all who are under this house.’

‘The light of the world has been burning a little too brightly lately for those under this roof, pretty lady,’ said Udal. ‘And you will do well to remember that the road to the capital also ends in the road to the Caliph Eternal’s torture garden.’

Jack could feel the throbbing sun above him like a living organism pulsing its heat down upon his neck. The constant scurrying noise of their sandpedes’ tiny-clawed feet across the dusty surface of the road provided a counterpoint to the noise of crickets that came from the marshy grasses next to the river. Jack hadn’t asked what cargo was strapped to the multi-segmented insect-like beasts of burden by Udal’s smugglers, and nobody had volunteered the information. How can riding in this heat be so tiring?

They were following one of the empire’s more out-of-the-way tracks towards the capital, accompanied by the twisting, turning River Hahran, thrilling-sweet and rotten. There was not much traffic along the road, but they passed plenty of locals from the waterside villages. Women sat in the shade of palm trees like little knots of black crows, weaving clothing while they sang songs with throaty voices that rattled and hummed. Many of the village buildings had wheel-shaped minarets, ornate constructions holding circular rotors that spun into action when the breeze picked up, supplanting the mechanical power being supplied by turning watermills pushed out into the river. Dhows in the water took advantage of both the wind and the drift of the river, their decks piled with large pots containing their cargoes: fish, vegetables and meat from the flood fields along the riverbank, all heading for the great souks of the capital.

Greasy spiced mutton seemed to be the smugglers’ staple diet, leavened by tiny salted fish as small as a child’s fingers. They would stop and consume them in mud huts erected along the roadside for weary travellers to rest their legs.

When they were on the move again, Jack had to watch that the sling of his camel’s saddle, ornately frayed at the bottom, didn’t catch in the chitin of the sandpedes, the armour of each bony section clacking in and out as the caravan undulated over the dips and rises of the riverside route. The smugglers acting as drovers would walk alongside the pistoning legs, just out of reach, and crack the chitin with rhino horn-handled crops crafted specially for driving sandpedes. They would use the crops liberally, striking in the soft spot between the armour and the lashed-down cargo every time the sandpedes appeared as if they were slowing down, yelling out something that sounded to Jack like, ‘ Jebbal Kallgoa!’

First Lieutenant Westwick rode under the cover of an umbrella-like sunshade, and would demurely turn her head when the fishermen and farmers along the way called out in her direction — wishing her luck in her marriage or other, cheekier, greetings. It was easy to believe, Jack realized, in the lie of their deception. Just humble travellers, slowly journeying through the heart of the empire at a merchant’s pace as they went about their innocent business. It was only when the jarring sight of an airship passed by, distant against a cloudless sky or a jagged mountain range, that reality intruded. Not a Jackelian ’stat, but the alien serrated vessels of the Cassarabians, incongruous both in design and location in these exotic climes. Then the deadly weight of the young sailor’s mission rose like bile in his throat. Four Jackelians, disowned by their own side, dressed up like desert nomads from the cover of some penny-dreadful, sedately wandering through the heart of the enemy’s territory in search of the source of the power driving the most dynamic sect in the empire. And who were the four of them trusting to guide them? Criminal dregs, the beholden creatures of a foreign secret police force that had already been routed by the enemy.