Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

The officer pounded a fist against his gold breastplate in salute and the two Jackelians made to leave, a company of beyrogs falling into line behind them, drawing their helmets, weapons and supplies from racks on the side of the barracks, armour and weapons rattling as the creatures shook the floor with their massive boots.

Omar watched the two foreigners leave. There goes a brave man . ‘He complains like a slave, but he fights like a guardsman.’

‘No higher praise,’ said the Caliph Eternal, with what might have been a touch of irony in his voice. ‘I may be the most recent of the ruler of rulers, but there’s one constant in my chain of inherited memories. They all serve, those who do not oppose. Come, guardsman, let us ensure that our Jackelian friends’ sacrifice is not made in vain.’

‘Are you sure you are not related to Little Eli?’ the commodore asked the massive beyrog officer leading the company of flesh-twisted soldiers. ‘You’ve much of the same taciturn nature and a cold eye towards an old u-boat man down on his luck.’

Westwick translated the flicker of oversized fingers as the officer replied in sign language. ‘He says you talk too much.’

‘But I’m the only one doing the talking here, lass,’ said the commodore, indicating their surroundings. ‘If you discount the shouts of those unlucky womb mages that tried to stop us entering this dark place.’

The two Jackelians and the beyrog company were traversing an ossuary — a gloomy hall filled with the dusty bones of hundreds of generations of the womb mages’ creations, strung together with thin copper wire and marking the incremental evolution of the order’s most successful accomplishments. Draks that had started out as barrel-ribbed, short-necked things with almost wholly human skulls, before being bred towards their present, elongated arrow-like forms. Beyrogs that had begun as hump-backed giants, some with four arms, before growing slightly smaller and less crudely formed over the centuries. Less primitive. More deadly. It was a terrible, eerie thing to see the skeletons’ living descendants filing silently past the exhibits, fully flesh-laden and wielding mammoth weapons designed to strike fear in the hearts of any who saw them.

All the womb mage novices inside the hall had fled screaming when the first of their number fell backwards into one of the skeletons, his chest broken by a beyrog crossbow bolt.

Only our steel should be trusted.

Commodore Black just counted his blessings that the beyrogs’ orders were explicit about trying to keep him and Maya alive. Along the sloping wall of the hall, long, thin windows looked out onto Mutantarjinn, and the commodore caught the distant thump of a grenade and a brief glint of light blossoming from the explosion.

‘The guardsmen are still out there, Maya. Harassing the city. Ah, what I’d give for one of those ugly flying man-lizards to land on the roof outside and whisk us to safety right now.’

‘The drak riders will fight to the end,’ said Westwick.

‘What about you, lass? Does that stand for you too?’

‘There’s only one way you’re getting out of here,’ said Westwick, in answer.

‘Now, I did rather figure that,’ said the commodore, his eyes narrowing slyly.

Looking up as snarls sounded from the beyrogs surrounding them, Commodore Black spotted a group of the grand vizier’s claw-guards fanning out across the end of the hall, Imperial Aerial Squadron marines too, the men trading shouted instructions between each other as they sprinted to take up position.

‘Well then,’ said the old u-boat man as he drew his heavy Cassarabian pistol. ‘Can there be a more suitable place than this to leave my weary old bones?’

When the Caliph Eternal had talked of an alternative route to reach the grand vizier’s twisted creations in the chambers below, Omar hadn’t realized it would entail a gusty detour down the outside of the Citadel of Flowers’ central tower.

While the maintenance stairwell corkscrewing around the tower was wide enough to accommodate their beyrog battalion marching three abreast, the stairs were completely unprotected by railings or a balustrade. It took every iota of Omar’s drak training to keep his sense of vertigo under control while descending. To keep himself from ducking as lightning forked over the giant spinning blades scraping their wind-driven passage around the chasm’s tallest tower. This will not be my death, falling off a tower before I have a chance to remove the grand vizier’s head from his sorcery-twisted body. It is too ridiculous to contemplate.

At times it was hard for Omar to differentiate between the steady crack of the thunder and the relentless rumble of the beyrogs descending behind him. They were marching under the weight of yellow cuirass-style breastplates with gilded copper rivets, golden helmets mounted with red plume-like brushes on top, and a full canvas backpack loaded with canteens, rations, crossbow bolt quivers and scimitar sharpening stones. As much as their finery was designed to reflect their master’s wealth and power, putting beyrogs inside the showy dress uniforms was like trying to disguise the feral nature of a sand lion with a gem-studded collar. It only served to underline that these vast creatures really required nothing more than a length of sharp, shining steel with which to hammer their enemies.

The Caliph Eternal hadn’t ordered the beyrogs to change into their full field uniforms and he seemed almost blithely unaware of their presence as he walked down the lightning wreathed spire. Perhaps, Omar mused, it was as the caliph had confided during their captivity in the cells: his mind was full of past lives, all of the empire’s petty jealousies and ambitions repeating before him like a shadow play. But whether it was by accident of nature, blood, or the final changes the previous caliph had worked upon his replacement’s young body, Akil Jaber Issman had turned out nothing like the nervous, needy puppet whose life the grand vizier had preserved to install on the throne. I suppose that the empire should at least be grateful for that.

For Omar, there was nothing else left to him now but to follow this deposed ruler according to his guardsman’s oath, and take one final chance to smash the schemes of the wicked Immed Zahharl. Everyone else had gone to their inescapable end — his father, Farris Uddin, Boulous, the drak riders he had trained and fought alongside, even the two Jackelian spies and their sailors on their outlandish ironclad airship. There was just Omar left with the Caliph Eternal and he had never felt so tired or alone.

By his side, the caliph slipped on one of the stairway’s wet treads and Omar reached out to steady the ruler by his arm. ‘Are you alright, your majesty?’ Omar instinctively touched his own gut, noting the strange feeling of emptiness there. The changes being worked by the grand vizier’s sorcery had quietened for the last hour, but how much longer before he swelled up like a whale and could only survive inside the choking nutrient mist of a producer’s tank? Oh Shadisa, why did you do this to me? Did you hate me so much back in Haffa?

‘It is not the grand vizier’s foul virus that is making me sick,’ said the caliph, as if reading Omar’s mind — or at least his body language. ‘I am starving. Apart from that gruel in the cells, I haven’t had a meal for months that wasn’t fed to me through a tube stuck into my veins. Heaven’s silver gates, what I wouldn’t give for a roasted side of gravy-soaked lamb from the palace kitchens.’

Their scar-faced beyrog officer commented with a flicker of his fingers.

The Caliph Eternal shook his head. ‘No, I don’t need my sedan chair. This is not the Jahan, and I have been isolated enough from the empire, from the world. If it had been otherwise, the grand vizier would not so easily have been able to exchange my flesh brother and I as if we were both dolls from the same toy chest.’