Jack Cloudie

blood, heads dropping to the ground to roll away down a slope. Surreal hideous visions of a painting of hell, a house guard tied between two sandpedes and slowly ripped apart, other men fixed to horses and dragged across the ground shrieking. Silhouettes chasing other shadows through the night, laughs, cries, jeers, challenges and curses, people jumping out of a blazing building. Survivors rolling across the ground beside him, their clothes ablaze. A column of women being chained and made ready for the journey to the slavers’ block, a dark-robed womb mage injecting them with a phage to turn them into temporarily submissive zombies, fit only to compliantly march across the desert until they reached market. Less water consumed. Fewer escape attempts. Less trouble.

Was Shadisa among them somewhere? Don’t think of the other possibilities, the brutes who’d carried Shadisa off, what they might do to her. She could die out there in the desert, a mute stumbling wraith. With her beauty, perhaps she would be lucky to. Before she reached a slaver’s platform where fat, lustful merchants would look upon her and reach for the purses dangling upon their plump guts, imagining what sport they might have with their fine new servant. His soul felt as if it was being crushed, his guts crumpled into a burning gemstone of pure grief. The agony of worrying about it was more than he could stand.

‘Shadisa,’ he tried to yell. All that came out of his mouth was a hollow gargle.

A corpse tumbled past Omar as he was lugged across the ground, the body’s leather armour sliced by scimitar cuts. Someone who was foolish enough to challenge the deadly killer carrying him away for the bounty written in his bastard’s blood.

Something will come along.

Right now, it was the darkness of oblivion as he lost consciousness again.

Omar came around feeling queasy. Not because of the pain in his nose or the spinning of his head, but thanks to the jouncing motion of the floor underneath him. He had been semi-conscious for some time. Was he on a ship? A fishing boat from the harbour? No, the hissing he could hear had a mechanical quality to it, and there was the smell of oil burning on metal, like the desalination lines just after they had been stripped, cleaned and reassembled.

Omar moaned as he pulled himself up. His hands were chained behind his back and he was inside the claustrophobic confines of an iron room, all pipes and boxes and controls.

Lounging against the wall opposite him on a pile of green pillows was the same killer who had broken his nose in Marid Barir’s palace. The shaven-headed man looked up from sharpening his scimitar with a whetstone.

Omar and the killer weren’t alone in the confined iron space. There was also a crimson-hooded man seated at the front of the room, his hands on a wheel like one of the ferry pilots that called at Haffa. But the pilot had no window in front of him, just a small flat table with a map under a wire mesh, a pencil locked on a metal arm tracing a vibrating passage across the paper as the room shifted and swayed from side to side.

‘Where am I, my new master?’ coughed Omar. ‘You will not regret sparing me. I will work as hard as ten men for you.’

‘Those who serve me know that I do not like to answer questions,’ said the stocky man. His gloved hand reached into his kaftan and produced the roll of Omar’s papers, Marid Barir’s last gift. The boy groaned. I must have dropped my ownership documents when I was taken prisoner by the first two brigands.

‘You father did not love you very much, I think,’ said the killer. ‘As a slave you were merely property, and property can be traded between one master and the next. But as a freeman and the last surviving blood of Marid Barir?’ He shrugged. ‘There is a great bounty to be collected on your head. The Sect of Razat demand the death of all of those that their rise to the Holy Cent have made into heretics, and the higher in the house’s ranks the survivors stand, the greater the reward on their heads.’

‘You have made a mistake,’ said Omar. ‘I am just a slave. All of master Barir’s children died during the plague years.’

‘Perhaps I am in error, then,’ said the killer. ‘But I was not confused when I saw a gang of freebooters running laughing to their camels carrying the hacked-off head of Marid Barir. They will deny he had the honour to end his own life. When they hand it in for the reward money, they will say that he begged them for mercy and that they sliced off the snake’s head as their reply.’

‘Do not say that!’ shouted Omar. ‘Marid Barir was a good man, he was-’

Omar ducked as the killer threw the whetstone at him, the rock bouncing off the metal rivets behind his head.

‘You curse like a freeman. Loyalty is not a bad thing, Omar Barir. But your house has fallen and a wise man would learn to hold his tongue and choose his battles.’

From the front of the metal space, the crimson-hooded man turned around and tapped a dial on the wall. ‘Pressure is at maximum, we must surface and blow.’

The killer nodded and Omar found himself sliding down the floor as it slanted to an incline. Then there was a jolt as the room righted itself. An iron panel in the front wall lifted noisily to reveal an expanse of endless sands and burning bright daylight outside.

‘We are on a dune whale,’ said Omar.

‘I do not like to attract the attention of competitors,’ said the killer.

So, the killer travelled under the sands. There was a screeching noise from the rear of the room and Omar imagined he could see the super-pressurized blast of smoke from the dune whale’s engine being funnelled through the blowhole above. They would not stay on the desert’s surface for long, for that dirty boom would have alerted every nomad and wild desert fighter for miles around that here was a prize worth taking. Omar could just see the corkscrewing nose drill of the dune whale turning at the front of the craft, and then he was swung about as the machine dipped forward and started tunnelling below the fine orange sands again.

‘That will be the last venting before we reach the caravanserai,’ announced the pilot.

‘You must be a rich man to travel this way,’ said Omar.

‘I will be richer still with the bounty on your head,’ said the killer.

‘Perhaps I will serve you so well that you will not wish to hand me over to the priests of this new sect.’

The killer walked over to Omar and unlocked his chains, dropping the scimitar onto his lap. ‘Start by sharpening that.’

Omar looked incredulously at the sharp blade that had fallen into his care.

‘Raise it against me,’ said the killer, ‘and we will discover what you are worth to the new sect’s high keeper with no hands attached to your wrists.’

‘What is the name of the man who owns this sword?’ asked Omar.

‘Farris Uddin. But master will do well enough for you.’

There was something about this man, Omar realized, something familiar: as if he had known him before, perhaps in a previous life. No, his senses must be playing him false — he couldn’t have met this deadly force before. Surely I would have remembered.

Omar started to draw the whetstone down against the length of the shining silver steel. Sharpening the blade for the man who might be his new master, or his executioner.

It seemed burning hot to Omar, out in the open again after so long trapped in the close shaded confines of the deadly Farris Uddin’s dune whale. The dune whale’s captain had set them to rest next to a line of similar giant teardrop-shaped craft. There would be no more diving under the desert for Omar and his captor; the deep orange sands gave way to rocky ground from here on in. Omar didn’t know precisely where they were, but if he had to hazard a guess, he would say that they had travelled southeast, away from the thin patch of civilization that ran along the coast, across the desert, and towards the great centre of Cassarabia; to where the empire’s true civilization was counted to start.

They had reached a caravanserai, a series of windowless buildings connected by rocky palm-tree shaded lanes. Merchants sat outside the crenellated walls selling dates, black bread and yoghurt. Omar could almost feel the cool shade and taste the spray of moisture from the fountains within.

A line of sandpedes emerged from the stables on the side of the caravanserai, the drovers crying commands and cracking their whips against the hundreds of bony legs straining under the weight of their enamel water tanks. Omar recognized some of the drovers — the water sloshing about their tanks had come from Haffa a couple of weeks ago.

Farris Uddin tied Omar’s hands together with a length of leather and bound it to the rail on a stone trough