Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

‘I wish you had grabbed that bastard Salwa,’ said Omar.

‘The new grand marshal of the guardsmen?’ laughed Uddin. ‘A little too obvious.’

‘Where is the true Caliph Eternal being held?’ asked the Jackelian woman.

‘Where else, the Forbidden City itself,’ said Uddin. ‘Mutantarjinn, the stronghold of the womb mages, where the grand vizier and his disgusting new sect first rose to prominence.’

‘Say that isn’t so,’ groaned the commodore. ‘That’s a free city, owned and sealed as tight as a drum by the order of womb mages; crawling with your dark-hearted sorcerers and full of sicknesses and twisted abominations that should never see the light of day.’

‘It is also where the grand vizier and the Sect of Razat’s womb mages are producing the airship gas you have been sent to locate.’

‘You’re lying to me, Udal,’ said the commodore. ‘Another lie to go along with your damned false faces, just another wicked lie to get old Blacky to head down to that dark, terrible place and save your undeserving ruler.’

‘It is the truth,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘My agents were already investigating the strange new source of the grand vizier’s aerial power when the Pasdaran were declared heretic. The airship gas is not from a natural gas mine such as that which your people guard so jealously. Our gas is a product of womb mage sorcery. I do not know how, that is still their secret, locked away deep in Mutantarjinn, but I know it stems from the grand vizier’s position as the head of the order of womb mages.’

‘Don’t trust him,’ warned the young Kingdom sailor, Jack.

‘I told you that I would take you to a man who could help you,’ said Uddin, ‘it just happens that I am that man.’

‘And why should we assist you?’ spat the commodore.

‘Our agents once backed your royalist friends’ fight to try to restore your true king back to power in Jackals,’ said Uddin. ‘It is only fitting for you to help me restore our emperor to his throne. Now, as before, your enemy is our enemy, and together we might bring him down.’

‘You want us to fight alongside Jackelian heathens?’ said Omar, more than a little shocked by the idea.

‘We have been declared traitors,’ said Farris Uddin, ‘so we may as well act like traitors. And your guardsman’s oath was given to the real Caliph Eternal, not the weakling enculi that the grand vizier has sitting on the throne.’

‘And why should we trust a word you say, many-faces?’ said Westwick.

‘Because,’ smiled Farris Uddin, ‘as a token of good faith I am going to give you back your airship — the same one that your fool of an admiralty officer surrendered intact to the Imperial Aerial Squadron without firing a single shot in anger.’

Omar could see that Farris Uddin was smugly pleased by the consternation the news of their ship’s capture caused among the four prisoners.

The grand vizier angrily sent a goblet spinning across the secret gardens at the heart of his pavilions. Salwa cowered as the caliph’s chief minister digested the last of the news concerning the flight of the guardsmen. ‘They knew of our trap — they knew!’

‘It is so,’ Salwa insisted. ‘They had clearly been forewarned of the order’s dissolution. Most of our men who entered the fortress were ambushed and led to the slaughter dressed as guardsmen. The guardsmen’s supplies, their draks, were already departing even as we believed that we were surrounding them.’

‘It might have been bad luck,’ suggested one of the grand vizier’s retinue. ‘The guardsmen could have been preparing for the war — if they were mobilizing anyway, they could have just left when they saw our marines arrive.’

‘Fool!’ yelled the grand vizier. ‘The guardsmen had no orders to join the campaign and there is no such thing as luck. Someone within our own ranks informed them that we were coming, someone loyal to the old regime. Which of you warned them?’

There was a loud chorus of denials alongside protestations of loyalty from the toadies surrounding him.

‘We are loyal to you,’ protested Salwa, abasing himself on the floor of the pavilion. ‘How can you doubt us? All of us have undergone the initiation ritual, all of us have shed blood in your honour, in the cause of progress!’

‘I should ask those Pasdaran bastards I have planted out in the torture gardens,’ snarled the grand vizier. ‘There are still a few of the secret police’s cancerous cells left in our flesh, I warrant.’ He jabbed a finger towards Salwa. ‘You are meant to be the grand marshal of the guardsmen, what will they do now?’

‘What can they do, master?’ said Salwa. ‘They are detached from the army, with only the supplies they carried out of the fortress. They will avoid an engagement, practice banditry in a guerrilla war against us.’

‘That would be the rational thing to do,’ agreed the grand vizier, his eyes narrowing. ‘But they are not rational creatures. They are proud men. They could have abandoned the fortress and fled before we even turned up, but they wanted to give us a bloody nose before they left. As if to say, we are guardsmen, this is our palace, and we choose to leave here on our own terms. They used to be the caliph’s elite troops, a strike force of well-trained killers. And what does a strike force do? It strikes!’

‘They will not dare to take on the might of the Imperial Aerial Squadron,’ said Salwa.

‘Their soldiers have trained for centuries to disable and fight Jackelian airships,’ said the grand vizier, ‘I would not be so sure of that. Yes, I believe they will want to take a prize worthy of a song or two before they die, before their supplies run out and they slide into becoming just another band of bandits, scavenging for booty to stay alive.’ He pointed furiously at a clump of officers in the black and silver uniforms of the Imperial Aerial Squadron. ‘Recall four squadrons to reinforce the capital’s defences and recall another six squadrons to protect Mutantarjinn and the airship yards outside the city.’

‘But that will require the bulk of our invasion force to be pulled back from the north,’ said the senior officer.

‘Let the Jackelians stew for another month or so then, you dolts,’ shouted the grand vizier. ‘What will it profit us to gain another satrapy for the empire, if the Imperial Aerial Squadron returns back here to find the Pasdaran’s new choice of candidate sitting on the throne? How kind do you think the secret police and their guardsmen friends will be towards you if they succeed in mounting a counter-revolution?’

The men bowed in fear at his temper.

‘We will carry the day,’ said the grand vizier. ‘We will carry it because if we fail, we will all die together. Ensure our marines and sailors are billeted in the airfields outside the capital without leave to enter. We do not want them getting sick.’

‘Sick?’ said Salwa.

‘Yes,’ laughed the grand vizier. ‘Because you are going to have our womb mages release a plague inside the capital’s central souk. Use a milder variant of the one we used to depopulate the House of Barir and their allies along the coast. I need a plausible excuse to move our tame caliph out of the Jahan and south to the safety of Mutantarjinn’s walls for a while, and a little summer plague will do nicely. Nothing so virulent that the local womb mages won’t be able to cure it after a month or two. I don’t want mass casualties and wage levels creeping up again, not with a major war to prosecute.’

Salwa nodded and the grand vizier bent in close so only Salwa could hear his next words. ‘Our enemies are not stupid. When the guardsmen come, they’ll be coming for my head and the caliph’s — our little pet, or the real Caliph Eternal, perhaps both at once. And they’ll be coming for your head too, Salwa, last grand marshal of the guardsmen!’ He leant back and clicked his fingers, speaking loudly again for all to hear his commands. ‘Ready my personal packet for the journey south.’