Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

Hissing a rain of ballast water from her sides, the Iron Partridge drifted upwards, rising like a wraith through the shoal of burning vessels. There was a different cadence to her manoeuvres now, the creaking carper decks almost silent as the airship picked a passage through the burning wreckage, ominously slow and deliberate.

They hovered on the crosswinds of flaming wreckage like a bird of prey, the telescope arrays in the crow’s nest and h-dome extending to their maximum magnification in the search for any resistance. Jack imagined the enemy airship damage tables being consulted on the calculation drums above, poor old Coss dancing around the transaction engines, cursing and working as the junior ratings they had pressed into service on the boilers shovelled in enough coal to meet the steam-driven thinking machines’ new voracity.

‘Station gunner,’ called Jack. ‘Magazine capacity?’

‘Magazine capacity, aye. Stores seventy per cent depleted on our cannons, and over eighty per cent empty on the mortar loading chamber,’ the sailor on the gunnery board called across to Jack, not bothering to conceal his concern at how fast they were rattling through the contents of the ship’s magazine. ‘Although all our fin-bombs are still accounted for, master cardsharp. Quarter gunners are reporting that our thirty-two pounders are running hot.’

‘Swab them out between the volleys,’ barked Jack. ‘I don’t care if the gunners have to drop their britches and water them with last night’s rum ration. Cool them off.’

Then the reverberation sounded again. Their ship not, it appeared, satisfied yet. Echoing in the thin night air, the Iron Partridge ’s guns roared back into life, a ship-shaking snarl that became a constant thunder, one cannon after another, in perfect, timed synchronization, with just enough time for the first gun to be automatically reloaded on its shock-absorbing turntable mere seconds after the last cannon in the line had thundered to silence. The quaking under their boots grew stronger as the mortars added their voice to the massive barrage, Jack’s teeth literally shaking in his mouth as the bridge — opened to the air with her smashed canopy — trembled at the violence being worked in the heavens outside.

It was only as they rose above the burning enemy fleet that the extent of the devastation and how targeted their action had been became evident to Jack and the bridge crew. Every enemy vessel had its engine cars picked off, their bomb bays erupting volcano fire along their keel decks, and where the Jackelian airship’s recent broadsides had found their mark, the enemies’ upper lifting chambers were blown open, spilling rising gas bags into the night air in waves.

Sailors were leaping out of ripped envelopes on emergency chutes from a few of the vessels, their pattern obviously copied from Royal Aerostatical Navy standard — and their crew just as badly trained in their use. Only meant as a last resort, only intended to exit a burning airship with no hope of landing, the triangles of fabric were caught in the burning crosswinds and sent spiralling downward like burning moths, the ones that survived picked off by the guardsmen on their wheeling draks.

I would almost feel sorry for them, if they hadn’t done the same thing to the Fleet of the South.

Then, as if the entire wrecked fleet was merely an aerial display mounted only for the bridge crew’s benefit, the great mass of burning airships began to lose equilibrium at the same time, their sole remaining lifting chambers unable to support the loss of ballonets topside. The enemy fleet’s nose cones dipped, almost in salute, and began to sink groundward, trailing ugly coils of black smoke in their wake. Jack might have been mistaken, but he swore he glimpsed the shape of Lemba of the Empty Thrusters forming in the smoke for a moment. Then the Loa was gone and cold starlight filled the night sky.

Jack turned in the hard-backed command chair, gazing out at the devastation, trying not to be startled by what had been worked upon the enemy fleet, by what had happened to him. He had forgotten himself. It was as if he had become Captain Jericho during the battle, worn the position of captain as though it was an officer’s cloak, one possessed by the soul of its last owner. Was this what command was like? Death seen from someone else’s eyes; the deaths he had ordered.

They had won .

Lieutenant McGillivray broke the stunned silence that had descended over the bridge crew as an evil whistling split the air outside. ‘And what in the name of the Circle is that unholy caterwauling?’

‘That, Mister McGillivray,’ said Jack, leaning back into the hard confines of the iron chair, ‘is the air of a rather imperfect rendition of Lion of Jackals cooling the tubes of our mortars. I understand that some call it progress.’

Holding back the claw-guards was like breaking the tidal rush of a river, the narrow passage they were retreating down restricting the enemy ranks to four or five snarling, slavering monsters, the head of a column hundreds deep, surging and jostling at the swinging scimitars of the surviving beyrogs. All of the stench and the shouts and the screams of the conflict funnelled down to a few feet of lashing blades, the commodore’s arm aching from picking off the beasts that came leaping over the shoulders of the beyrogs. Flogging and slicing until his old shoulders were numb from the effort of it, his sword arm heavy with pain. I might as well be an oarsman condemned to the seat of a wicked slave galley.

Every minute or so they would lose another exhausted beyrog to the avalanche of claw-guards pressing in against their ranks, a giant soldier toppling over with his bright uniform torn to shreds and his cuirass opened up by the constant rain of talon strikes. By the commodore’s side, Westwick looked every bit as exhausted as the commodore felt, her coffee-coloured skin slicked with sweat and her blade arm still and raised for the next attack, no more of the flourishes and fancy spins that he’d noticed she favoured when they had started fighting. Biding her time and preserving her energy for the next claw-guard to break through the retreating unit’s lines. Only the one-eyed giant acting as the company’s captain appeared to be undiminished by the constant, harrowing withdrawal. He kept his blade spinning around like a small windmill, decapitating his miniature cousins as they came leaping forward, seizing others mid-air, throttling them and contemptuously tossing their limp bodies against the walls.

For all of their animal snarls, the beyrogs’ stone-skinned faces lent them a strangely stoical, immobile cast as they fought. Whereas soldiers from the race of man would have exhibited confusion, fear and anger in this relentless close-quarter’s combat, the only sign of emotions from the beyrogs came from their eyes, their most human feature. Fighting alongside them was like fighting alongside the trolls from some polar barbarian’s fireside legend. But even giants from legend could die when the odds were this appallingly stacked against their favour.

Who will remember me if I fall here? Who would remember poor old Blacky? His friends back home, perhaps. The friends with whom he shared his residence, Tock House? Poor old Jared Black, off on one of his mysterious little jaunts, and he simply never came back from his last journey. Lost like one of those mortal fool explorers in the jungles of the east. Not much time to grieve for him, not when he was lost to the storm that would emerge from the empire’s borders, sweeping the entire Kingdom before it. Everything he had lived and fought for all of his life. The forested roads of their green and pleasant land echoing to the jingle of the campaign kit of creatures such as these claw-guards, the last few red-coated regiments of the Middlesteel Rifles broken by the grand vizier’s forces.