Jack Cloudie

Overtaking the armoured carriage, the beaky admiralty naval officer stopped his sprint and pointed accusingly at the first lieutenant. ‘This carriage has no business being here.’

‘It has every business,’ said the woman. ‘Unless you have an order from parliament that rescinds our authority over the Iron Partridge.’

There was a hum as the carriage’s ramp was lowered, and a pair of marines walked down escorting a veritable mountain of a man, seven feet tall, with a neck like the trunk of an oak. His large hands were bound with chains and he was wearing a marine’s boots half-covered by the rough cotton robes that Jack well-recognized from the sight of the convicts shuffling around Bonegate jail’s exercise yard. Another convict, but this man’s face was concealed by a rubber mask.

‘A captain of marines must command order on a ship,’ spat the admiralty officer, ‘not disrupt it.’

‘The case,’ demanded Lieutenant Westwick, her arm outstretched to receive a wooden medical box that one of the marines had carried down from the carriage. ‘You received my original list of staff requests a month ago, Vice-Admiral Tuttle. Every one of the sailors I asked for has become unavailable or has been conveniently reassigned.’

‘I demand to see your captain,’ barked the admiralty officer. ‘Immediately.’

‘He’s not presently on board our ship.’

‘Drunk, gambling, or both?’ sneered the admiralty officer. He stared at the man mountain shambling down the ramp. ‘You will find there are not nearly enough marines in the naval stockade to crew your pathetic commission of an airborne hulk.’

‘Ah, that depends on how wide you cast the net, sir,’ called Oldcastle, pointing behind the carriage. Jack turned to see near a hundred horses bearing swarthy riders, curved short-swords hanging from their saddles. Benzari tribesmen! They thundered to a halt in front of the airship’s nose and dismounted, chattering approvingly at the sight of the vessel; slapping their thighs in amusement, as if the Iron Partridge had been pulled out of her hangar and onto a fairground lawn for their amusement.

The admiralty officer’s sharp face was turning a beetroot colour in fury. ‘The Benzari Lancers are an army regiment.’

‘Attached to our ship now, sir,’ smiled Oldcastle. ‘Courtesy of the fine fellows at House Guards. Always willing to honour a request for cooperation, the general staff, what with Admiralty House being so short of marines for us.’

‘You are both a disgrace to your uniforms,’ said the admiralty officer. ‘And we shall see how this matter is to proceed, that we shall. Your superiors will be hearing from the First Skylord about this outrage.’ He stared across at the barrels of expansion-engine fuel stacked below the airship, noticing the supplies for the first time. ‘Who ordered this gas here?’

‘Was it not yourself, vice-admiral?’ asked Oldcastle, in surprise.

The admiralty man shook his head in fury and stalked away, leaving Jack watching the milling Benzari warriors with a mixture of bemusement and uncertainty. Something was deeply wrong here. A first lieutenant and her warrant officer defying a vice-admiral in front of a greenhorn like Jack Keats and a rabble of Benzari warriors. What he knew of the RAN from the aeronauts’ alehouse boasts and tales did not include such things in the navy’s tightly regimented world.

Westwick reached up to pull the mask off the man mountain she had ordered released from the stockade and Jack saw a mist of green gas escape the mask’s mouthpiece, leaving the broken brutish features of the convict underneath blinking like a sleepwalker as she gently pinched his arm. ‘You’ve been sedated, Henry. Wake up.’

‘How perishing long?’ he mumbled.

‘Two years,’ she said. ‘Floating in the waters of the navy’s total security tank. But the captain needs you again.’

‘Yes,’ said the convict. ‘The captain. He always looks after me. Do I know you?’

‘Not directly,’ said First Lieutenant Westwick. ‘But I know of you, Henry Tempest. You are to be our captain of marines.’

‘I forget sometimes,’ said the brute. ‘Me mind and me dreams. What’s real and what’s not.’

‘Welcome back to the world, Mister Tempest.’

The man mountain made to salute the lieutenant, but his arms were pulled short by the chains clanking around his wrists. His dirty blue eyes turned wild for a second, his pupils seeming to dilate as he raised his arms in unison. There was a crack as the iron links were sent flying away across the field, then he dropped his free hands down, one of them stopping by his slab-like brow for the navy salute.

Jack realized he had been cowering beside one of the crates. They must have been old and rusted, the chains. Nobody has the strength to do that, surely?

The ship’s surgeon had appeared and, taking the medical box from the first lieutenant’s hand, he led their new captain of marines up into the Iron Partridge, the giant shaking slightly as if he had been smoking too many opiates.

‘Find the captain,’ First Lieutenant Westwick ordered her warrant officer. ‘Search every alehouse, jinn house and gambling house from here to the capital if you have to. We lift with the morning trade winds, before Admiralty House finds a way to reassign our bloody propellers to the board of engineering for maintenance.’

Oldcastle nodded grimly and weaved off through the Benzari regiment.

‘Do you trust me?’ the first lieutenant asked Jack.

How much did she hear of my conversation with the warrant sky officer before she appeared?

Jack shook his head, and as quick as a snake, Westwick had him by the throat, a tiny razor-sharp stiletto blade in her hand, pressing up against the bottom of his chin. Jack struggled to break free but her grip was granite- strong.

‘Do you trust me when I say that if you ever try to desert my command again, I will slice you a smile from here-’ she tapped along his throat ‘-to here? Look into my eyes, Mister Keats. Do you trust that?’

It was Boyd staring back at him. Boyd at his murderous worst. As if the street thug had been trained by someone and turned into something far more honed. She would do it, Jack could see that. In fact, part of her wanted to, just to set an example. Maybe just for her own amusement.

‘I do,’ coughed Jack.

She dropped him down to the grass. ‘Be about it, Mister Keats. You may re-enter the ship by the main boarding ramp, like the loyal skyman we shall make of you.’

Jack heard the snick of the springs as the hidden blade withdrew back into her sleeve. That was the weapon of one of the capital’s assassins, a topper, not a lady gentlewoman of the fleet. Circle’s teeth, what kind of mess had he landed into here?

Rubbing his throat, Jack staggered up the Iron Partridge’s main boarding ramp and back to the airship’s keel deck, his mind spinning with unanswered questions, the pain of his neck muscles made a collar — reminding him how near to death he had just come. Reminding him he was just as much a prisoner on board the airship as he had been in jail.

CHAPTER FIVE

Omar ran through the great house’s central garden. Everywhere there were gas lamps burning without thought for the cost, people moving about the colonnades and pavilions, some sprinting through the cold night air as the first stars slid across the heavens above.

He nearly ran into the house’s soldiers by one of the fountains, dozens of troops dragging struggling men in long black robes through the garden. With a start of recognition, Omar realized that these were learned men, the House of Barir’s womb mages. How could these powerful sorcerers be manhandled so? They held the miraculous secrets of creating the salt-fish that generated the house’s wealth from mere sea water.

‘Stand aside,’ one of the soldiers shouted at Omar, and he was pushed back with a rifle butt while the womb mages were hauled into the centre of the garden.

The soldiers carried crates with them that they spilled onto the carefully tended grass, and Omar heard the