Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

Behind him, Commodore Black came running down the gantry of the stable’s upper level, a trail of biologicks in the stalls tracking his steps and hooting plaintively for a long overdue feed.

‘Immed Zahharl?’ asked the man.

Omar waved his crippled hand towards the eyrie.

Commodore Black grunted when he looked through at the sight on the other side of the gate. ‘Then we’ve won, lad.’

Omar propped his bleeding body against the wall. Shadisa was lost to him. Farris Uddin, Boulous, half the guardsmen, his father and his home gone. His very body was cursed with the grand vizier’s foul sorcery.

‘No.’

‘You’re learning, Mister Barir,’ said the commodore. ‘This is what victory tastes of. Clear your throat and spit the blood out, because you’re alive enough to sup on its ashes.’

From the other end of the stables came the victorious cheers of the stable hands and the animal-like bellows of the beyrogs. The last claw-guard had fallen, the corpses of the Sect of Razat’s inner circle left sprawled across the floor.

Victory had come to the citadel, but it wasn’t nearly enough to fill the hollow inside Omar’s soul. He had learnt the last lesson of being a guardsman, the one every soldier had to learn for himself.

Omar winced as the gaggle of the citadel’s surgeons and womb mages poked and prodded at his body, the spray on his shoulder leaving the skin inflamed. But as the commodore had pointed out before he left the surgery, better safe than sorry; the painful poison-cleansing sorceries of the womb mages weighed up against the chance that the dead grand vizier’s blades had been dipped in something corrosive and lethal to the flesh.

Lying in the shadow of machines the size of the desalination tanks on his water farm, Omar raised his voice above the womb mages chanting the results of his blood-code tests, loud enough for the Caliph Eternal to hear him over the racket.

‘They should be taking care of you first, your majesty. We-’

The Caliph Eternal rested a hand on the slab where Omar was laid out. A prize steak at a bazaar for senior members of the order of womb mages to tenderize. ‘I have just been seen by the order.’

‘They have already purged you of the grand vizier’s poison? So soon-’

The Caliph Eternal shook his head and smiled. He sounded distracted, as if he was talking about some event in the distant past that had affected one of his ancestors. ‘It seems that my blood contained dormant defences. When the first fever touched me, those defences emerged and turned into predator cells that burnt all traces of the changeling virus from my flesh.’

Omar’s eyes widened at the news — his elation that the ruler was safe followed by a more selfish notion. If only a humble guardsman is left infected, how hard will the senior womb mages work at developing a way of halting my transformation into a human breeding machine?

Squeezing Omar’s unwounded shoulder, the caliph indicated the womb mages clustered around them. ‘I am protected by the one true god, guardsman, and my protection will be extended to you. You have my word. There are no resources in this city that will not be spent on curing you.’

The bowing of one of the obsequious cluster of womb mages interrupted the ruler’s reassurances.

‘Speak,’ commanded the Caliph Eternal.

‘The guardsman is clear of the changeling virus, your majesty. He is not infected.’

‘But I had the fever,’ said Omar. ‘My stomach was in agony.’

Even the caliph’s normally ethereal manner seemed thrown by the news. ‘This guardsman’s pedigree includes partial inheritance from a Pasdaran officer, but his immune system would not-’

‘I have not adequately explained myself to your majesty,’ pleaded the womb mage. ‘Unlike your own noble body, the guardsman’s contains no traces of the changeling virus. The resequencing vector was blank and the carrier he was injected with was empty. Any discomfort he felt was purely as a result of the carrier itself, EE4208.’

‘A modified variant of E .coli,’ said the caliph, nodding in understanding. ‘You do not need my protection, guardsman, the hundred faces of heaven were already smiling down upon you.’

Omar felt only confusion at the sorceries being discussed. ‘I was injected, I was sick …’

‘Injected with one of two syringes, both prepared by Salwa. One syringe with the changeling virus, the other with a blank carrier virus that would only make its recipient ill enough to mimic the effects of the real thing.’

Omar remembered the sequence of events, Farris Uddin lying dead on the floor, Salwa holding two syringes, the Caliph Eternal struggling bound to his chair as the grand vizier poisoned him before ordering Salwa to do the same to Omar.

‘But Salwa couldn’t be sure which of us the grand vizier would choose to give the needle to first, you could have been injected with the blank virus instead of me.’

The Caliph Eternal smiled sadly. ‘Do you think Immed Zahharl could ever pass up the opportunity to test Salwa’s loyalty to the sect by demanding she infect you? Or that the grand vizier wouldn’t reserve the pleasure of injecting me with a changeling virus that could easily have killed me in front of his eyes? Salwa knew the grand vizier would order her to inject you, that is why she passed the grand vizier the live virus and kept back the syringe with the blank virus in her own hands.’

Tears rolled down Omar’s cheeks. It hadn’t been Salwa who had plunged the needle into his neck, it had been Shadisa. What had she been planning on doing — faking his death and pulling him out of the producers’ chambers, sending him out of Mutantarjinn with one of the slavers’ caravans? Risking her life by defying the grand vizier. By saving me . If Immed Zahharl had caught a whiff of her betrayal, she would have been slaughtered by her own claw-guards a few minutes after the discovery.

‘A miracle after all,’ said the caliph. ‘Saved by love. I have been witness to so many things over the ages, but that happens far less than it should.’

There was a tone of wonder in the ruler’s voice, as if he had found a long-extinct breed of butterfly alighting on his wrist; but Omar barely heard the man’s words.

Shadisa saved me. Omar hadn’t failed to rescue Salwa from falling off the tower, he had failed to rescue Shadisa. His father’s words whispered across the chamber.

‘We are what heaven wills us.’

Commodore Black was swinging supply bales into the open gondola of the grand vizier’s pocket airship when he caught the reflection of First Lieutenant Westwick advancing on him in the polished mahogany of the craft’s prow.

‘You’ve heard the news about the Iron Partridge then?’ said the commodore. ‘I was hoping to away and rendezvous with her without troubling you or any of the others here. Ingenious Jericho and his mad strategies. We made a grand choice in picking him, eh? Not that the list of candidates was that long to start with, and that’s the truth of it.’

‘No trouble,’ said Westwick. ‘In fact, we’d prefer it if you stayed.’

‘She’s a fine ’stat, isn’t she, Maya?’ said the commodore, patting the airship. ‘All her instruments plated with gold rather than brass. Her blessed wheel a single piece of carved ivory instead of oak. Where do you wonder they found tusks large enough for that?’

‘She’s the Caliph Eternal’s airship now,’ said Westwick.

‘They’ve very particular traditions when it comes to dividing out the plunder, do the locals,’ said the commodore. ‘And I was there at the grand vizier’s end. So technically, I would say this fine little beauty belongs to me now.’