Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

The guardsman’s senior officer in the flight appeared a few minutes later on the bridge, ready to confer with the Iron Partridge ’s captain.

‘Good evening, colonel,’ said Jericho. ‘I am afraid the weight of numbers is not in our favour.’

‘Luckily for you, captain, all our training is towards harrying such a fleet — although traditionally, the enemy’s colours should be Jackelian. How do you propose to engage?’

‘With the only advantage we have, sir,’ said Jericho. ‘The thick skin around our hull. I’ll drive us into the centre of their disposition and trade blows at close quarters until we buckle. If you can take position on our wings and disperse before the first broadside to clog up as many of their engine cars as possible with your snarls, I believe we’ll buy our people in Mutantarjinn the time they need.’

Jack rubbed his tired eyes. The only advantage we have.

‘I wish to hear music,’ Lemba of the Empty Thrusters, the spirit of the sky, had commanded in Jack’s dream. ‘Play, Play.’

The words echoed around Jack’s head until he found them coming out of his mouth unbidden, as if someone else was speaking. ‘Captain, we have another advantage we’ve not brought to bear: the ship’s automated systems.’

‘You understand that the ship’s automatics never passed our trials, Mister Keats?’ said Jericho. ‘Our sailors manning them is the only thing keeping this iron-plated bucket in the sky.’

‘If I know only one thing, sir,’ said Jack, ‘it’s transaction engines. The ship wasn’t ready during the trials. She’s evolved, sir. She’s conscious now. I believe Mister Shaftcrank would bottle up the ship and send her back to King Steam to put her in a nursery body if he could.’

‘When I issue an order, Mister Keats, I expect her to respond on m’command, not at her own whim. Running on full automation is too dangerous.’

The guardsman flight commander chortled.

‘Do you find something amusing, colonel?’

‘I find your Jackelian gradations of danger an interesting notion.’ The guardsman gestured towards the sea of lights manoeuvring against the deep night. ‘I know little of your technology, captain, but I understand the empire’s feelings towards it. When we fight your people, it is never your discipline we fear, it is not your godless sailors, or the fact that you are a people so fierce and rebellious you imprison and mutilate your own king. It is this: every time you leave your rainy, frigid and sunless land, you come at us riding cold, soulless machines, not the warm flesh of a noble drak. It is that you trust all of this.’ He pointed to the armada of lights coming towards them, larger now. ‘There are some who call that progress, but if we begin to fight like you, how much longer will it be until we choke our cities with engine smogs, banish god from our hearts, let the Caliph Eternal be dictated to by bazaar hawkers, and become mere slaves to the cogs that are meant to turn in service for us?’

‘Maybe we must both trust what we know, colonel,’ said Jericho. ‘Those aerial mines your airships carry have a main chute and a guide chute — could your draks get you close enough to slice the guide chords?’

‘If the fleet release the mines, it would be simple work,’ said the colonel.

‘They’ll use the mines,’ said Jericho. ‘Now we’ve downed their three pathfinder vessels, they’ll want blood, eh? Everything they have, we shall see this night. A clear path, colonel, and as many of their engines snarled as you can attack, and may the gates of your paradise open for you.’

‘We already fight in the heavens,’ said the colonel, saluting, before turning to exit the bridge. ‘The trick will be to stay here.’

The captain looked at Jack. ‘The last time I bet against the house, Mister Keats, I ended up trading m’own for the accommodation of the debtors’ prison.’

‘Gambling is a sin, sir.’ But only if you lose .

Jericho pointed to a line of out-of-action boards covered with dusty green canvas between the bridge’s ballast board and altimeter station. ‘That’s what’s meant to connect the bridge to your transaction-engine chamber aloft. Let’s discover if building thinking machines into an airship was the worst or the best decision the admiralty ever made.’

Omar sat on one of the two bunks in the windowless cell, clutching at his gut as it churned in pain. ‘In the end, I hardly knew Farris Uddin at all, and then he was snatched away from me — just as my father was taken.’ It seems I must lose everything. My father, my great-grandfather. Oh Shadisa, how great my destiny, to be punished so.

‘Farris Uddin was a rum old cove,’ said the commodore, trying to make the boy feel better. ‘And if he had as many years under his belt as I think he did during his long service, you probably have half-brothers and sisters scattered all over the empire.’

‘Ah, the service of the empire,’ sighed the caliph from the other bunk. ‘To tell you the truth, I sometimes wondered if I was its master or its slave. To be bought up in isolation, knowing only my tutors and their lessons, then at the age of eighteen to be told I was one of septuplets, six of whom had just been murdered. To be wheeled out and briefly introduced to my dying flesh father, whose sole legacy before he was snatched away to heaven was to inject me with a changeling virus that filled me with snatches of a string of lives I have never lived. We are not so different, you and I, guardsman. Families we never knew. Lives we did not choose, and now both to be brood mares for the ambitions of the grand vizier.’

‘You must not say that, your majesty,’ said Westwick. ‘You were born to be the Caliph Eternal.’

‘I was born to be nothing else, sweet lady,’ said the deposed ruler. ‘And now I walk with the echoes of my ancestors in my ears, hearing the voices of god in my head like some sun-maddened hermit stumbling through the dunes.’ He reached out to touch Westwick’s arm. ‘So many memories within me. There are one thousand, seven hundred and fifty two discrete points of difference in your DNA that form the basis of your loyalty imprint to me. There is less in a beyrog, but they are simpler creatures — a lot of shark in their genetic composition.’ Seeing that his words meant little to his fellow prisoners, the young ruler shrugged. ‘Sorcerers’ secrets. Ben Issman was the first womb mage, but then, it was he who discovered the ruins of the original Mutantarjinn back in another age.’

‘Your sorcerers’ secrets,’ said Omar. ‘Do they include whether this filthy magic they have inflicted on us can be undone?’

‘The grand vizier’s changeling virus must be recorded somewhere in the citadel’s library of spells,’ said the caliph. ‘With such knowledge we could restitch our base genome back to the normal order of things using another changeling virus. But I do not believe the grand vizier intends to let me peruse his private library.’

‘That will be a small matter to me, your majesty,’ said Omar. ‘I am the last son of your great and most loyal House of Barir. I have already achieved the impossible by rising from the rank of slave to serving as a guardsman. I am the apprenticed cadet of the great Farris Uddin, who taught me that no situation is without hope. We shall break out of here and make for the barracks where your bodyguard of beyrogs waits. With their strength we shall seize one of the producer’s tanks and expose the nature of the abominations the grand vizier had built his airship fleet around. The Sect of Razat might wish to hide the truth, but there are at least enough womb mages from other sects inside the citadel who are not party to the grand vizier’s twisted conspiracy that he must post warnings for them not to enter his flesh library.’ Omar knelt before the young caliph. ‘I am your guardsman, your majesty, and you are still the ruler of rulers.’