Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

A beyrog struggling with a pair of the claw-guards came smashing down the steps, and both Omar and Salwa leapt desperately over the slashing, rolling landslide of bodies, but Omar was a second too slow, his boot catching on a trailing crossbow strap. Unbalanced, he landed a single boot on the stair’s blood-slicked surface and went falling down the treads. Omar saw Salwa following his tumbling passage like a mountain gazelle, leaping through the carnage of combat around the tower stairs. Omar landed hard by the edge, his momentum broken by the corpse of one of the claw-guards, the body nearly shifting over the stair’s boundary with the sky and sending Omar plunging into the chasm’s abyss. His scimitar had spun away in the fall and Omar desperately frisked the beast’s corpse for a pistol, a knife, anything, but of course, its weapons were its claws.

Your sword is not the weapon. You are the weapon. The cadet master’s words echoed in his mind. True for the grand vizier’s bestial new army, at least.

The point of Salwa’s sword turned him around, digging into his spine. ‘I warned you. My body is faster than yours. Stronger.’

Omar looked up into eyes he did not know. ‘Womb mages’ tricks.’

‘Call it progress,’ said Salwa, raising the scimitar and striking down to bury it into Omar’s chest.

Your sword is not the weapon. You are the weapon.

Omar seized the claw-guard corpse’s cloak and whipped it out, rolling and kicking as he wrapped it around Salwa’s leg. The new commander of the guardsmen was sent sprawling forward, meeting Omar’s sweeping leg and sent stumbling over the edge of the stairs with a surprised bellow. Omar looked down. Salwa was hanging just two feet below the ledge, body thrashing in the wind, one hand grasped around the rod of a rain-slicked lightning conductor.

Omar threw down the cloak, turning it into a makeshift line. ‘Take it!’

Salwa’s spare hand flailed up — trying to reach the cape, or perhaps the safety of the lightning conductor. ‘What for?’

‘For me.’

Salwa’s hand flailed up again, catching the lightning conductor, desperately holding on against the fierce gusts with both hands. There was a flicker of a smile around Salwa’s lips. ‘What will you give me if I win?’

‘A kiss.’

Salwa looked up, the rain cascading down the grand marshal’s face. ‘I’ve been a slave before, Omar, I didn’t much like it.’

Omar dropped the cloak as far as his aching arm could stretch. ‘Please, reach out.’

‘ Freedom !’ Salwa called up, the fingers of both hands opening, letting gravity catch hold. Omar watched the body turning and shrinking in the wind, swallowed by the darkness and the storm until there was nothing left but the chasm below and the raging battle behind. He let the useless cloak drop after the vanished body.

The press of the skirmish had shifted further down the tower’s stairs now, leaving dead beyrogs and claw-guards strewn in its wake. So many times I lost her. So many times. All she wanted was to be free, and now she is. Free of everything. What have I made myself into? A slave pretending to be a soldier, the last son of a dead house. A uniform filled with muscle and blood, a uniform disguising a killer, a uniform holding onto nothing but duty and sharpened steel. Which of us is the larger monster now, Shadisa, you or Omar Barir, truly the greatest of all the guardsmen? Falling to his knees, Omar turned his bleeding face to the sky and let the rain roll down his features, clearing away the blood from his cheeks. The storm ripped against him and he tipped his face back to howl at the heavens and rail at the fates. ‘What more do you want from me? Why am I still alive? Is my blood so noble you will not shed it? Am I so celebrated you cannot crush me or cast me off this bloody tower?’ Do I have to avenge everyone in Haffa?

He lay there weeping. It could have been for minutes, it could have been for days, until appearing through the litter of the carnage, the Caliph Eternal walked towards Omar. The guardsman’s lost scimitar lay balanced in his untroubled hands.

The Caliph Eternal offered the blade. He didn’t seem to notice Omar’s tears in the rain. ‘This is yours, guardsman.’

Omar rose shakily to his feet, grasping the pommel and cleaning its curved edge uncertainly against his trouser leg. As he stood, the shaking lessened, falling away until he was as still as the dark stones of the city towers below. Slowly then, his bearing grew straighter, his shadow longer across the stairs, darker across the dead. What was filling him? Destiny or inevitability? Then he looked at the weapon as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Your majesty, you are mistaken. It is yours.’

There were shouts verging on panic from the spotters on the bridge as the enemy fleet moved into position above them, bomb bays open and ready to fire.

Only seconds after Jack gave the order to engage the enemy, the spotters’ calls tailed off as the forward starboard engine car fell silent, matching the port side with its damaged rotors.

She’s compensating, the ship is offsetting the damage to port.

‘That’s the style,’ Pasco said in bewilderment to the airship. ‘Run us clear, old girl. Turn us back on bloody course.’

The Iron Partridge lifted upward, listing slightly, the manoeuvre accompanied by a strange clacking like a table of rapidly shifting dominoes being played. It was their armoured plates outside, rippling as they performed micro adjustments to the airship’s pitch and yaw. The metallic chattering was suddenly drowned out by an explosion, a hollow thump followed by an echoing infill of air as the first of the frill of mortar tubes along their spine spat out fire.

Then came the enraged roar of a leviathan, the line of mortars punching out a rippling salvo of projectiles right along the airship’s length. Each burning hot shell was visible from the bridge as an arc of red light, as though the Iron Partridge was a deep-water squid with multiple tentacles reaching out in the dark to seize every fish that surrounded it. A burning flower erupted at the end of each arc, quickly followed by crimson veins spreading across the envelopes of the Cassarabian airships, more detonations, as the enemy vessels shuddered and were torn apart.

‘Enemy bomb bays struck above,’ shouted the master pilot from the front of the bridge. ‘We’re putting our mortar shells right inside their magazines. There are mines and fin-bombs detonating all across the squadron’s loading frames!’

Jericho’s plan of action echoed in Jack’s head. ‘ We need to be exactly where they seem to want us, bosun. Put us right under the shadow of their bomb bays.’

Jericho had trusted Jack to do his work, just as he had trusted the ship to be about her business. The ultimate bet in the deadliest game, made with the only stakes the skipper had left to play … our lives .

‘Yaw warning,’ called a sailor from their inclinometer. ‘Brace for port roll.’

Jack grabbed the sides of his command chair as the Iron Partridge rolled twenty degrees to port, the bombardment from the gun deck outside a deafening roar with the forward viewing canopy blown out. She had never been built to elevate her guns, but the ship was sighting them on the roll anyway.

‘Yaw warning, brace for starboard roll,’ warned the sailor again.

Thunder lifted out from their other side, enemy hulls lighting up in the night. Draks could briefly be glimpsed diving out of the way as the engine cars being targeted were blown free from their moorings, falling towards the ground with their rotors still turning.