Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

The grand vizier moved down the line to where Commodore Black was tied up. ‘And here is a strange fellow to turn up as one of parliament’s agents. The blood of kings runs through your veins, old man. I was led to believe that all of the Jackelian royalist rebels had perished with the fall of the u-boat fleet-in-exile at Porto Principe.’

‘Not the ones who swam from the depth charges, lass,’ said the commodore.

‘Eminently sensible,’ smiled the grand vizier. ‘Half the people who serve my cause have switched sides. I rather count on it, or I would be ruling over a very depopulated empire. When the Kingdom of Jackals falls, I think I will crack open the cells of your people’s royal breeding house and see if I can find someone malleable enough to become the puppet sultan for my new satrapy. A little continuity goes a long way in such matters. You shall act as my broker.’

‘Parliament already has a blessed puppet queen locked up in the palace,’ said the commodore. ‘And I would sooner have her the prisoner of parliament’s crew of dirty Jackelian shopkeepers than of some wicked Cassarabian caliph.’

The grand vizier’s smile turned to ice on his thin lips. ‘You’ll change your mind in time, I believe.’

‘No lass. I might feel sorry for you, but I won’t be doing that. Because you’re right about one thing, you’re a creature of the Pasdaran alright. They created you in the cruelty of the life of a girl born to the empire and the crucible of slavery, they made you just as surely as a womb mage creates a drak. They didn’t need a scalpel and blood splicer to do it. Just whips and murder and a slave collar.’

‘They made me strong!’ the grand vizier hissed.

‘No, lass. They made you hard, and broke you into so many pieces you’ll never be able to tell the difference. As one noble-born to another, strength has no purpose unless it’s used to help the weak. Not this, not what you’re about here.’

‘We shall see what the true currency of strength is, you old fool. When there are crowds of Jackelians kneeling on the streets of Middlesteel as my armies march in procession down your lanes. We shall see which of us is right, then. I will give the empire a victory no man has ever been capable of achieving, and how they will love me for it.’ The chief minister finished behind Omar’s chair. ‘And here we have the last son of Barir, the smallest and least significant of my loose ends. Of no account at all. I am told you were a slave on a desalination line, guardsman. How cruel for fate to push you so far beyond your limits. I clawed myself up through society one death at a time to get back to where I belonged. Perhaps you should have crawled back down to your natural station?’

‘I’ll crawl over glass to see you die,’ spat Omar. He struggled madly against his bonds but they were too tight. Too tight to let him slip them for a second and break the neck of the beast who had turned Shadisa into a twisted shadow of the spiteful politician. All this death, fate, all this suffering. Why have you put me here in front of this monster if not to kill it?

‘Just a proud, vain little peacock, that’s all,’ said the grand vizier, wagging a knowing finger towards Salwa. ‘I told you, even in one who used to be a slave, his male pride would prove too strong for him to defect to our cause.’ The grand vizier moved back to the start of the line of prisoners. ‘So, the guardsmen among you came looking for the Caliph Eternal, and here he is for you now, conveniently trussed up. While my two curious Jackelian friends came visiting to see how it is I now have celgas enough to float an armada capable of outgunning the Royal Aerostatical Navy. That too, I have to show you!’

The grand vizier went to a control panel in front of the mirrored wall, and as his fingers ran over it, the surface of the wall became transparent, revealing a spacious cavern on the other side. Pointing to a series of large glass tanks on the ground of the cavern carpeted with decomposed vegetation and filled with a green mist. Within them, herds of white, bone-like spheres, each with six human-shaped arms, progressed slowly across the tanks as though they were drugged cattle. They walked on their hands whilst scraping up vegetation into a round mouth where a double set of teeth was slowly, constantly chewing.

‘The creatures you see down there are called skoils . They have a voracious appetite for rotting foliage and the green gas you see is their sole output. Lighter than air, and you simpletons could barely understand the labours I went through to make it non-flammable.’

‘Save your womb mage’s tricks for someone who will appreciate them,’ said Farris Uddin.

‘Oh, but you should appreciate them,’ insisted the grand vizier, pointing to another series of tanks facing those that housed the strange, sorcery-born creatures. ‘It’s not easy to produce a skoil, only someone as brilliant as I could find a way around the hurdles that have defeated every womb mage labouring on the problem for half a millennia.’

Omar stared down to where the grand vizier was indicating. He had seen such tanks before, being dragged through the womb mages’ chambers beneath the caliph’s palace. The yellow nutrient fog inside almost concealed the poor slaves within, their bellies unnaturally distended to allow them to give birth to the products of the sorcerers’ art.

‘Of course,’ said the grand vizier. ‘The previous attempts to manufacture our airship gas were made by mere men, and my solution would not have been one they could easily countenance.’

As the grand vizier stopped speaking, the yellow fog of nutrients cleared and Omar saw the faces of the slaves, straining and sweating under the unnatural load their wombs were carrying. Bearded and coarse, they were the faces of men!

Farris Uddin turned his head from the sight in disgust. ‘Abomination, what have you done?’

‘When Ben Issman wrote of the two souls held in a body’s flesh, he was talking about something we womb mages refer to as a chromosome. And only the male chromosome can produce a skoil. Fortunately, the work I did on scouring away my gender can be modified for other uses … such as giving a male a fully functioning womb.’

‘You are cursed under heaven!’

‘Perhaps I am.’ The grand vizier shrugged. ‘Perhaps every one of us was. Not all of my sisters died on the long journey from the provinces to the heart of the empire. When I tried to locate my remaining two sisters, I found their death records here in the Citadel of Flowers — where they had spent their final years as producers. Do you know what they whisper to producers before their bellies are given a changeling virus to swell them to a useful size? This is your duty to the Caliph Eternal, do your duty, woman .’ The grand vizier beckoned to Salwa who removed a large syringe from the chest and passed it to him. The chief minister leant close to Farris Uddin’s head and whispered, ‘This is your duty to the Caliph Eternal, do your duty. Man .’

He plunged the syringe into Farris Uddin’s arm. ‘Of course, it’s not easy to give a man a producer’s womb, even now. It takes many days for the changes to complete, and fifty per cent of those we attempt to alter reject the virus and die within the first few seconds.’

Farris Uddin was shaking in his chair, his face turning purple. The grand vizier kicked the chair over angrily, enraged that there would be no chance to inflict the ultimate indignity on the last of his surviving secret police enemies. ‘Wasteful, I know. But there are always so many sons of the empire left.’

Omar looked on in horror as the chest of the man who had saved him from the sack of Haffa swelled up, choking Uddin, as the air could no longer enter his lungs. Omar’s kin, the last of his family, by how many generations removed? Their eyes met briefly as he twisted on the floor, the features of his face distending in automatic reflex, as if all the faces he had worn across the ages were surfacing in turn during his death throes.