Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

Jack saluted. ‘I believe I will follow you too, sir.’

‘Too blasted right you will, m’boy.’

‘You have our report, sir. Is there anything else I can assist with?’

Jericho gestured mournfully towards the letter he had been writing on his desk. ‘Not unless you have enough skill with penmanship to explain to Admiralty House why the probable last action of one of their vessels is cooperating in an attempt to free the enemy head of state of a nation we’re at war with, while fighting alongside the navy’s oldest foe in the air.’

‘I would write that the two officers of the State Protection Board on the vessel insisted you follow that course of action, captain.’

‘Very good. Ingenuity under fire. Those ensign’s bars are already half yours, eh Mister Keats?’

Jack could almost feel their dangerous weight as he left.

Even at nighttime, Jack could see from the transaction-engine chamber how easily Mutantarjinn had earned its nickname the Forbidden City; there was little about the city that did not look forbidden or forbidding. From the black rocky plain veined with blood-red crystal that sparkled with an evil patina when the lightning storms forked their violence down — a glamour that made it look as if the land beneath the Iron Partridge was running with rivulets of blood — to the sharp blade-roofed towers rising out of the canyon floor of the ugly circular chasm scoured out of the ground. It was obvious why the commodore’s archaeologist friend thought something ancient had preceded the Cassarabians’ presence here. There was an otherworldly nature to the city that went beyond the womb mages’ administration of the place. I would sooner live in the desert under a nomad’s tent than down there. The towers on the chasm floor resembled a series of bone-like spikes that had rained down and landed on top of each other. Many were topped with strange constructions of blades that turned and twisted in the gusts scouring the city, acting as windmills and storm conductors. Gazing on the vista was like watching a thousand erratic, insane carousels summoning bolts of lightning down from the thunderhead sky.

Alongside the Iron Partridge a great crack of lightning revealed the chasm drop to be swarming with six-armed creatures, the race of man made into spiders, dark net bags tied around their backs. They were stirring around even larger creatures — beetle-shelled things the size of houses carrying pagodas of passengers up and down the chasm wall.

Jack’s eyes moved ahead. There in the centre of the city, rising above all the other towers, was the core of the womb mages’ power — the Citadel of Flowers, though if flower it be, it was a decaying swamp lily. It was composed of five rounded wings, each a jutting ziggurat in its own right, pinned to the chasm floor by a massive spire in its centre. A rotating crown of blades encircled the spire’s rise every hundred yards, generating a hum audible even on the distant airship. Glinting light spilled from open hangars in between the rotating blades, small courier packets coming and going bearing the empire’s lifeblood of information. Nearby were the full-sized gantries for the larger vessels of the Imperial Aerial Squadron, although no other warships seemed to be docked at the moment.

If this was truly where the Cassarabians’ one true god had been wakened, burning a hole for the foundations of the Forbidden City to be laid, then he must have been an irritable sleeper. Through the porthole Jack could see the reflection of the ship’s helioscope running along their iron plates as they communicated with the ground, and he felt a twinge of uncertainty, beseeching the fates that Westwick’s methods of obtaining her information proved every bit as rigorous as she had suggested they had been. What if our stolen codes are old, or the enemy officer falsified them to get Westwick killed?

Finally, there was an answering flash from the fortification along the rim of the chasm, then the Iron Partridge nosed further over Mutantarjinn. Thank the Circle. Still alive. Alive for the most suicidal mission any airship in the navy had ever attempted.

There was a cry from behind Jack, and turning, he saw Coss lying on the bottom of the engine pit, the steamman’s metal limbs shaking as if he had been taken by a fit. The commodore was away on the bridge with Jericho — no time to get him back here . Jack slid the ladder into the pit, and pulled Coss away from the rotating drums of the transaction engine, saving him from rolling under the lowest one and getting his arms or legs crushed. What’s the matter with him? The diminutive steamman was shaking, a vapour leaking out of the joins of his body, as if his rivets were sweating a fog. Jack gawped as the fog seemed to form into a skull-like machine face, then, as quickly as it had formed, it disappeared into the oil-scented air of the transaction-engine chamber.

‘Coss, can you hear me? What’s the matter?’

‘I have been ridden by the Loa, Jack softbody,’ Coss warbled through his voicebox. ‘The spirit of my ancestor spoke to me — Lemba of the Empty Thrusters.’

The flying spirit from the steamman pantheon of the gods I glimpsed in my own dream. ‘Did the Loa speak to you about the ship?’

‘Vault my valves, it is more than that,’ said Coss. ‘This is a turning point in the weave of the great pattern. If we fail here, then the empire of the caliph will become the world. We will all fall — Jackals, the Free State, Quatershift, all of the nations of the north. Your flesh will be their flesh, and for my race, after an age of hiding like beggars in the Mountains of Mechancia, the people of the metal will finally be exterminated.’

‘Did your Loa suggest how we might avert that?’

Coss slowly shook his head. ‘He did not. All he left me with was the feeling of power in this land. Great energies that were once released here, long before the caliphate. They have faded; but while I was possessed, I could smell their residual half-life like the scent of diseased meat.’

Jack helped the steamman back to his feet, his head dizzy with the bleak implications of his crewmate’s words. It seemed the fate of the entire world rested on the success of their mission. And the world really should have picked a better champion than the old steamer and me to stand up for it.

Coss had just recovered enough to return to his post when the commodore appeared at the door of the transaction-engine chamber.

‘Time for you to make good your promise to me, Mister Keats. We’re a couple of minutes away from docking at the womb mages’ lair. Poor old Blacky — my unlucky stars have left me washed up on some bad shores before, but none as foul as this place. But at least I have misery for company this time, eh? For the grand fellow who was foolhardy enough to poke his nose into the fortified vaults of Lords Banks, this terrible voyage should be a rowboat across a sunny lake.’

Jack nodded grimly, his stomach bunching up with fear. Right now, I’d take a bank job back in the Kingdom any day.

‘Unholster your pistol, lad. We’re meant to be prisoners of war now, and prisoners don’t sport shooting irons. Keep the drums turning here, old steamer, for when we return, we’ll as like have every devil of the six levels of Cassarabian hell hot on our tail …’

The timing of the guardsmen’s attack on the defences of Mutantarjinn was every bit as precise as Jack had expected it would be. Sirens inside the great tower’s airship docking ring howled into life as the guardsmen and the Jackelians — the former wearing their stolen Imperial Aerial Squadron uniforms, the latter in their soiled crew uniforms — stepped out into the main hangar. There was confusion among the Imperial Aerial Squadron ground crew in the harbour. Jack had to turn to see the first gobs of fire arcing out of the shadows of the distant chasm wall through an open hangar door, the attacking draks rendered invisible by the darkness until a lightning flicker silhouetted their wheeling forms against the sky. Like the other Royal Aerostatical Navy crewmen, Jack’s hands were bound behind his back with leather ties, but using a cunning knot of the commodore’s devising they could be pulled apart with a twist of the wrists.