Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

‘The true caliph is being held within the citadel?’ asked Omar.

‘Yes,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘The grand vizier’s man we snatched believes he is being kept somewhere well out of public view, in their lower levels alongside their vats and their experiments and their most treasured spell books.’

‘Two parties, then,’ growled Captain Jericho. ‘One to locate your caliph, one to complete the ship’s mission and locate the source of the grand vizier’s celgas.’

Master Uddin seemed to agree. ‘We will time the attack of the guardsmen talon wings on the city for shortly after we dock at the citadel. The grand vizier is nobody’s fool, and he will be expecting us to act against him. We will give him the attack he expects, as a distraction for a subtler feint he doesn’t. They will be looking to the walls and the city defences and we will already be inside the Citadel of Flowers.’

Uddin looked across at Omar and Boulous. ‘You and I, Omar Barir, will have to bear the stench of wearing Imperial Aerial Squadron uniforms, while Boulous, I think, with the addition of a striped shirt and trousers, will make a fine Jackelian prisoner for us to escort.’

‘As he should,’ said the commodore. ‘For as a babe the lad would have been a Jamie or a Donnel, before he was snatched from an upland cot by some camel-riding raider.’

‘I am a jahani!’ protested Boulous. ‘My loyalty is to the guardsmen, whatever the source of my blood.’

‘Being of Jackelian stock isn’t a taint, lad, it’s a windfall. You trace the roots of the word back far enough, and you’ll find Jackelian means lion-hearted in one of the ancient tongues.’

‘Nobody will doubt the bravery of anyone’s heart who enters the Citadel of Flowers,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘Whether they be counted as guardsmen or Jackelian sailors. We must keep the raiding parties small — only the best fighters from our two forces. Speed and surprise will be our allies — for there are creations of the womb mages inside the citadel that I would not face. We shall trust in the one true god that we shall carry the day and return to the two airships in dock before the hive we are dipping for honey is fully roused.’

‘Ten rounds a minute, sir,’ said the brooding giant who was the vessel’s captain of marines to Jericho. ‘That’s what I’ll put my trust in.’

‘The crew and the ship and our allies. We needs must trust in them all, eh Mister Tempest?’

A flash across the sky outside the porthole caught Omar’s eye. They were sailing through a fury, but Omar would tempt far worse to reach the grand vizier’s home; just for the chance to reach inside the heart of darkness and see if he could squeeze the life out of it.

‘Is this my fate, father?’ Omar whispered to the shade he imagined hanging in the skies outside.

He heard the echo of his father’s words. ‘We are what heaven wills us.’

Captain Jericho leafed through the ship’s dispositions in his cabin as he listened to Jack’s report about what he and Coss had discovered of the nascent intelligence turning on the drums of the ship’s transaction engines.

‘Well, well, m’boy,’ said Jericho, glancing up, ‘a pity the industrial lord that designed our vessel vanished years ago. I would have a few words with him about his notions of airship design.’

‘We’re doing our best with her, sir.’

‘Just rein the transaction engines in, Mister Keats. You and our steamman rating can coddle her, and whisper sweet nothings if that’s what it takes. Grease her drums as if you were combing the burs out of a mare’s flanks. Level flying until we reach Mutantarjinn — we’ll save her final gallop until our slippery pair from the State Protection Board have discharged the ship’s orders inside this dark den of the womb mages.’

‘Why am I here, captain?’

‘Have you anywhere else you would rather be?’ The captain raised an eyebrow before continuing. ‘A gentleman always discharges his debts, Mister Keats. Where he can, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’ What do I have to pay with, but my blood?

‘Your father was a good man in hard times. He always tried to look after people in the prison he didn’t need to. That’s how the navy’s patronage system is supposed to work, too. The skipper who saw me into m’first ensign’s position did it as a favour for m’family when he really didn’t need to. I think he saw something in a young lad just starting out that nobody else had noticed; that I needed what the Royal Aerostatical Navy had to offer, as much as the service needed me. Such lines of loyalty run up and down, crisscrossing the fleet as the invisible netting that binds our vessels and crews together.’

‘Does your old skipper sit on the board of the admiralty, sir?’

‘No, Mister Keats, Captain Taylor was luckier than that — he was promoted to the officer’s cemetery outside Middlesteel. But I stand for him, as do many others who were once ensigns and who are now captains and commanders and vice-admirals, as one day you will stand for me.’

‘The truth, sir, is that I just want to go home and take my brothers out of the poorhouse.’

‘An ensign’s pay will allow you to do that, Mister Keats, and a lot more reliably than chancing a second attempt at forcing the vaults of a bank or rattling the skylights of rich widows. Anyone who can fathom those damned machines inside the transaction-engine chamber can pass any board exams the navy has to set.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘The navy won’t abandon you, Mister Keats. You are the service and the service is you. We may kill you, but you have m’vow we will never leave you. Even after you’re pensioned out, your blood will sing every time you feel the shadow of a RAN vessel drift over your cottage. Give it sixty years and some young pup barely able to fill his dress uniform will be weeding you out of the hiring line at what passes for an airship field.’

There was a knock at the door, and when Jericho boomed ‘enter’, Jack saw it was the hulking form of Master Engineer Pasco, bearing news of his teams’ labours in bringing the engine room back to full capacity.

‘Smartly done, Mister Pasco,’ said the captain, congratulating the engineer on his people’s work. ‘When the time comes, I will need our iron-feathered bird to fly like a hawk out of the enemy city.’

‘We’ll soak the traction belts with ballast water and run the loops so fast the cook will be able to bake the ship’s biscuits in the engine cars’ back draft, skipper.’ Pasco hesitated.

‘Is there anything else, master engineer?’

‘When the time comes, Captain Jericho, you can count on us.’

‘That I believe I can, Mister Pasco. Dismissed.’

‘How can you trust what he says?’ Jack asked when the door to the cabin had been shut again, and the engineer had left. ‘He led a mutiny against you for the vice-admiral.’

‘Vice-admiral Tuttle was a politician, m’boy, and a politician is an expert at promising the world, even when it always keeps on turning ever the same.’

‘I wouldn’t trust him,’ said Jack.

‘Then you would be wrong. Never judge a cloudie without knowing their history, Mister Keats. Pasco was on the Resolute when she experienced an engine-room fire. A barrel of contaminated expansion-engine gas had made it onto the ship and blew half her engines away. Pasco was the engineer who received the captain’s order to lock the room down to starve the fire of air while they climbed high enough to put the blaze out properly. There were a quarter of the engine room’s hands still inside when Pasco sealed it down.’ The captain nodded grimly, as if the memory had been his, rather than another officer’s. ‘Pasco had to listen to his crew burn and suffocate every foot of that journey. The Resolute ’s captain killed them to save hundreds more. It transpired that the barrel of bad gas was loaded by a convict labour crewman working on the field who would have been hard pressed to tell the difference between expansion-engine gas and the brass tank a Middlesteel lamp lighter carries on his back. I would have ordered the engine room locked down myself in the same circumstances. No choice in the matter, do y’see? He doesn’t like pressed hands, he doesn’t like officers, and for a long time he didn’t even like himself. A battle-hardened man like Pasco will follow you if you prove yourself. I did it by giving him and his crew another chance rather than the gallows for mutiny, but you had better be damned sure you know where you are leading him.’