Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

All? A couple of airships against an empire. That sounds like an expensive round of drinks to me.

Westwick blinked her eyes in an exaggerated way at the commodore, who nodded happily, as if all was well with the world.

‘We’re good Maya. And there’s enough spray for the crew on both ships, and our guardsmen allies with their mortal flying pets besides.’

The boat bay was full of the Iron Partridge ’s crew, their uniforms dirty and the men and women unkempt from days of confinement by their captors. Among them was Captain Jericho with his mop of orange hair and piercing eyes, a lightning bolt moulded into human form.

His booming voice cut through the hubbub like fire, as if his confinement on the prison transport had been the closure of a furnace door, the heat of ignoble defeat inside him left to grow sun-hot until the guardsmen had released him back upon his crew of misfits. ‘This, given the choice, is not the ship you would have chosen. This mission, given the choice, is not the one you would have accepted. This crew is not one that has fought together and the only mention of the Iron Partridge on the rolls of the navy is on the very short list of vessels that have surrendered to an enemy power.’

The crew shuffled their feet, embarrassed, many too ashamed to look their captain in the eyes. ‘And your failure is m’own failure, the failure of those set to lead you. The same complacent assumption of victory that left the Fleet of the South scattered across the sands of the enemy and our brothers and sisters to be picked over by carrion and dune beetles. That failure will not happen again! I will not fail you again .’ He moved down the centre of the boat bay, taking one of the fire hoses from the wall and unfurling it towards the hangar doors to create a line. ‘Our mission was originally launched at the behest of parliament and its agencies, rather than the admiralty. Now we must make common cause with regiments of the enemy, guardsmen who we have known only as our most implacable enemy. We must strike directly at the heart of one of the empire’s cities. Not just to discharge this vessel’s orders, but to wipe the stain of her surrender from our logs. I will take only volunteers with me from here on in. Those who wish to go, may take the Iron Partridge ’s launches back to the border and pass on word of what has happened here. Those of you that stay, you should know that your chances of returning are slight, and, in actuality, this is why Admiralty House gave us a vessel they did not want and a crew they expected to fail. But there is one thing I will not fail in, and that is m’duty. I stand here …’ The captain moved to the right-hand side of the line down the deck he had made. ‘Those who would follow a captain to war, follow me now …’

There was an almost imperceptible ripple through the crowd of aeronauts as, nodding grimly, the commodore stepped across the line after the captain, followed by First Lieutenant Westwick and Jack, then the other lieutenants. Soon the torrent of movement became a soundless flood, though if determination had a sound, then the boat bay might have echoed with the thunder of it.

They had been written off by their own side, shamed and used for fools by Vice-Admiral Tuttle, a coward who had struck the airship’s colours just about as fast as he could drop them when faced with a superior force. They were Jackelians — and old and young, they could remember the pride they had felt when first taking the Royal Aerostatical Navy’s oath. There was only one way to remove the stain on their honour. Within a minute there was nobody left on the other side of the makeshift line, even Pasco’s truculent enginemen had all slipped across.

They might have been flying through the heavens, but now they were following a course for the gates of a Cassarabian hell. And it didn’t matter a jot anymore, because there was nowhere else they’d rather be.

The glass portholes of the wardroom on board the Iron Partridge gave onto an appropriate backdrop as they sailed towards Mutantarjinn alongside the captured Cassarabian vessel — great forks of lightning illuminating the clouds off their port, the night flickering as if the long scuttled sun was now a gas lamp being toyed with by a child. There was some mineral in the mountains of the deep south of this realm that agitated the storm fronts when they rolled off their peaks, and the land in their lee was known as the Abras Arkk — or the angry ground. It seemed to Omar a fitting territory for the Forbidden City of the womb mages to be located.

Farris Uddin was sketching the layout of the city on a sheet of paper for the council of war that had been convened: himself, Boulous and Omar, Jericho — the captain of the strange Jackelian vessel — and the four spies who had been prisoners of the guardsmen, Commodore Black, Jack Keats, Henry Tempest and the beautiful but deadly First Lieutenant Westwick.

How fitting that fate should send me a woman as heart-breakingly beautiful as Shadisa was to help me avenge her death. Heathen northerners. Strange allies, but it doesn’t matter. I would fight alongside a legion of devils if it means bringing down the dogs who killed her; I would let the fires of hell singe my boots to lead the charge against the grand vizier and Salwa’s forces.

‘Mutantarjinn is a sealed city,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Movement in and out is strictly controlled. The caliph’s rule is administered by the order of womb mages, much like sultans rule a conquered province.’

‘How high are its walls?’ asked Jericho. ‘And what is the disposition of their defences?’

Farris Uddin tapped the table. ‘Their walls are high, but not in the direction you might expect. They start at the ground and run downward. Mutantarjinn is built into the floor of a circular chasm, scoured out when Ben Issman, his name be blessed, caused the eyes of god to reopen. Those chasm walls are three hundred feet deep.’

‘That’s a mortal powerful gaze,’ noted the commodore. ‘Although I have an archaeologist friend of my acquaintance who swears that Mutantarjinn was built over the ruins of an underground city that preceded it.’

‘The Cassarabian people were shaped by god, Jared Black, not descended from ants,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘What fools would want to live underground? There are lines up and down the chasm’s walls — lifting rooms — and creatures designed by the womb mages for porterage. More pertinently for this vessel, there are hundreds of anti-airship bombards mounted on fortifications that ring the chasm. Big ugly steel toads designed to spit out shells that would test even your carper’s resistance to flame. Shells filled with a substance that burns brighter as you toss water over it.’

Jericho shrugged. ‘If your plan works, we won’t need to test their defences.’

‘We have the signal codes to enter the city,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘As long as they are accurate …’

‘I believe I convinced the Imperial Aerial Squadron officer who held them to pass me the correct codes,’ said Westwick. ‘Eventually.’

‘That I believe you did,’ said Farris Uddin, sketching out more detail to represent the centre of the city. ‘And if the signal codes work, the good news is that we will be sent onto here, the Citadel of Flowers.’ He drew in a building that resembled a five-leaf clover at the centre of the city. ‘The heart of the order of womb mages’ power and the repository of all their knowledge and secrets. We would be expected to dock at its central tower and offload all the Jackelian sailors from the prison ship and prize vessel.’

‘What would happen to m’crew inside there?’ asked Jericho.

‘They would be induced to surrender all their knowledge of the operations of your vessel,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Afterwards, when they have no more information to reveal? Well, there is always an appetite for human bodies among the womb mages for them to hone their art — a demand that not even all of the empire’s slave traders can satisfy.’