Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

‘You thinking about home, boy?’ asked Henry Tempest.

I was thinking about my brothers. If only they could see me now. They wouldn’t believe it. Jack nodded. ‘Don’t you?’

‘A marine carries his home with him,’ said Tempest, swigging from one of his canteens — just water to ward off the heat, rather than one of the two chemicals he needed to bring some semblance of balance to his mind. ‘It’s the decking of your airship, the lay of your hammock, the company’s colours and the crew you serve with.’

‘Yes, but the ship’s gone,’ said Jack.

‘The ship’s mission is here,’ said Tempest, ‘and so are we. Captain Jericho is depending on us. We find the enemy’s celgas and the skipper will be covered in glory. We fail and it won’t matter one perishing way or the other.’ He gestured to the marshy reeds waving in the river breeze. ‘It’s better than the four walls of the stockade, and that’s where I’d bloody be without the old man. Floating in a maximum security isolation tank with a plug up my nose.’

‘They’d have hanged me without him,’ whispered Jack.

‘So I heard,’ said Tempest. ‘They tried to hang me once, after I got into one of my rages with a provost. The rope didn’t take.’

Tempest was as rugged as the mountains in the distance. The wind didn’t touch the captain of marines. The sun didn’t burn him. The impossibility of their task didn’t faze him. He was a rock in the sea, waiting for the ocean to beat him with her fury; and the rock just sat there and took it — knowing no dread or doubt.

‘Didn’t you feel any fear when they put the noose around your neck?’

Tempest’s slab-like brow furrowed as if the thought had never occurred to him, as if the act of considering it now was bringing him pain. ‘No. It wasn’t a very scary rope. I should feel more things, I know I should. But they took it away from me when they gave me my strength. I think I was frightened before I was strong, I think I can remember what it was like.’

‘Maybe you’re better off not remembering,’ said Jack.

‘They made me into a man-of-war,’ said Tempest. ‘That’s what they call our airships and that’s what they called us. I’m the last of them, that I am. And I’m not done yet. Captain Jericho always says that when he comes to the stockade for me. You’re not done yet, Henry Tempest. Did you really break into the vaults of Lords Bank?’

‘Yes,’ said Jack.

‘Well, bugger me. It’s true, then. They would have tried more than two ropes on you outside Bonegate if your weight had flaming snapped your noose.’

From the reeds on their left a series of shouts rose from the wading fishermen. ‘Soldiers! Soldiers!’

There was a cloud of birds in the air, but as the wheeling, diving creatures drew closer, Jack saw that his eyes had been deceived by perspective. They were far larger than any bird he had ever seen, more like giant lizards, virtually dragons, with human riders saddled behind their long sinuous necks.

‘Those aren’t scouts,’ Jack shouted back towards the commodore. All around him, the smugglers were running towards the sandpedes, lifting long spindly-barrelled rifles out from under the bundles of contraband, breaking the rifles and pushing fresh crystal charges into their breaches.

There was no doubt as to where the creatures were headed. The caravan of smugglers was their target. This was no innocent over-pass. The smugglers raised their rifles, but they didn’t point them at the fast-approaching dragon riders. The four Jackelians on their camels found themselves surrounded.

‘Ah now,’ whined the commodore at the smuggler’s leader. ‘Is this how you’re being eminently practical these days?’

‘It is for the best, I think, Jared Black,’ said Udal.

‘The best for who?’ spat Jack.

Henry Tempest was half laughing, half gargling as he poured the contents of the red-lidded canteen down his throat.

‘Henry!’ shouted the first lieutenant. ‘Stand down. There’s too many of them here!’

‘Is that it?’ yelled Tempest. ‘Is that all you’ve got? A bunch of lancers on those flaming flying snakes, they couldn’t take a RAN airship even on our worst day.’ He reached down to the pair of smugglers covering him with their shaking rifles, seizing the tips of both barrels and bending them around into a u-shape. ‘No polish on your brass, no bayonets.’ The captain of marines twisted in his saddle, dismounting and kicking out at the same time, the two smugglers with the crushed rifles collapsing back from the force of the blow. He reached out with his left hand and tore off the leather saddle straps from his camel, grabbing the saddle and using it half as a shield, half as a mace, to lash down another two smugglers running at him with their curved belt daggers. Contemptuously, he kicked one of the fallen jewelled daggers, sending it arcing away into the reeds. ‘I wouldn’t clean my bleeding teeth with that toothpick!’

The smugglers had seized the reins of Jack’s camel. He wasn’t armed — no slave in the empire was allowed to wear a scimitar or carry a rifle, not even in his supposed merchant master’s name — so he lashed out with his boot, but one of Udal’s men clutched his ankle and pulled him off, others seizing him before he’d even hit the ground. A rifle butt connected with his skull and bright light flared across his vision, followed by a spinning darkness encroaching from the edges of his sight.

Just as he lost consciousness, Jack thought he saw Henry Tempest with his hand around a drak’s harness, swinging the giant lizard like a fairground ride, other riders swooping down to cast large nets across his massive form.

The giant’s voice faded into the black. ‘I’m not done yet!’

Salwa glanced over at a group of Imperial Aerial Squadron officers coming out of a turret towards the execution party before he turned back to Omar. ‘I do hope these four draks are strong enough to rip you and your friend apart, as they are the last ones left alive in the fortress.’ Salwa turned his attention to a half-full spherical container being lugged over by the sailors. ‘Why do you still have poison left inside there? The womb mages calculated the precise dosage to wipe out the guardsmen’s entire stable.’

‘Apologies,’ said the lead officer, raising his face from under his peaked cap. ‘Your men weren’t thirsty enough to drink any more.’

Omar’s eyes widened at the sight of Farris Uddin’s face. There was a sudden exchange of bullets between the guardsmen dressed as marines and Salwa’s men, the rasp of steel being drawn and the confusion of crashing blades. Omar was rolled about, the draks thrashing around in confusion amongst the melee, the troops controlling them having abandoned the reins for their weapons. His cry of relief at being reprieved from execution by Salwa turned to one of agony as his limbs were twisted beyond their natural tolerance.

Omar felt a burning pain lash across his arms and legs as the severed straps of the chords that had bound him to the drak whipped across them. Rolling to his feet he caught a scimitar tossed from one of the disguised guardsmen. Boulous rose to his feet beside him, then Omar ducked reflexively as a shadow buzzed overhead, the wind of a passing drak ruffling the hairs on the back of his neck. He barely had time to register a whole talon wing in the air before a series of detonations from the battlements on the other side of the bailey filled the air with dust and flying rock fragments.

One of Salwa’s men came sprinting towards Omar, his steel blade twisting in an intricate pattern in the air. Omar ducked down and kicked out with both his legs, going under the arc of the scimitar and sending his attacker flying. He rolled along the ground and pulled up into a guard stance to be greeted by the sight of Farris Uddin plunging his blade down into the man’s chest, swift and sure, as merciless as an executioner.