Jack Cloudie

Partridge? I’ve seen graspers and craynarbians on the ship, but you’re the only steamman on board. I had no choice. For me, it was this or the rope outside Bonegate jail. But I saw you back in the signing queue … you were desperate to sign up.’

‘It is my destiny, my softbody friend,’ said Coss. ‘Do you know much about my people and how we are born? Have you ever visited the Steamman Free State?’

‘No,’ Jack admitted. ‘And there weren’t any steammen in the debtors’ prison or living rough on the streets.’

‘Kiss my condensers, but there would not be,’ said Coss. ‘Our kind cares for each other too well to permit the crime of poverty to be inflicted on our people. Normally, when a steamman is born in the Free State, it is the will of King Steam and the skill of the king’s architects that give him life. A steamman starts life in a nursery body which has been inhabited many times before, and after his education is complete, his intellect is then transferred into his final adult body.’

‘You said normally.’

‘There is another way a steamman can be born,’ said Coss. ‘Much rarer. The more advanced members of our race can simultaneously distribute their intellect across multiple bodies, their own main body and those of their drones as well. The drones are called Mu-bodies, and are treated as tools, or perhaps as you softbodies might treat a favourite suit of clothes.’

‘I’ve seen them,’ said Jack, remembering the time he and Maggie had been picking pockets outside the steammen embassy; a large tracked steamman with a crystal dome-topped head moving past with a retinue of gnome-sized metallic servants surrounding him.

‘Mu-bodies sometimes develop sentience,’ said Coss. ‘Occasionally spontaneously, more often than not as a result of being possessed by one of our ancestral spirits, the Steamo Loas. This is the other way of birth for the life metal. When such an event happens, the intellect is moved out of the drone, into a nursery body, and finally into an adult body when our years of education are complete. But our people feel a degree of disquiet towards those not born from the familiar, comforting designs of King Steam’s architects. I, press my unlucky plug rods, had such a birth. The population at large does not trust us, and we are regarded as the mischief of the gods, touched by madness. We are known as mutables, a term of little affection among steammen.’

Jack nodded. Maybe the steamman’s origins as a drone explained his unusually small size, a stature that was somewhat accentuated by a swollen back from which two stubby stacks emerged. Coss was barely five foot tall. He had a flat-plate of a face with a vision plate above a noseless grille, the visor mounted like a mask on a sphere of copper connected by one large neck joint and a smaller piston whose sole purpose seemed to be to raise and lower the mask. His torso was similarly connected to his pelvis by three pistons, three legs emerging from the pelvis unit, two large and one small and spindly, almost a prehensile tail.

‘My existence as a drone seems a blurred dream, now. But I remember one thing, the same dream, repeatedly: sitting in a garden in the shade of a tower, watching birds. Always, the birds. Marvelling at how well they flew, tracing the patterns of their flight. Modelling their miraculous ability with mathematics. That was my initial awakening of sentience. It is where my name comes from — the Rule of Coss, pure algebra.’

So that’s it. The navy might not have had to send a press gang out for this steamman, but he was as much an outcast as Jack had been the day he’d been scraped from a prison cell and thrown into the care of the navy.

The steamman tapped his skull. ‘There’s something about the master cardsharp you should know, Jack softbody.’

Jack looked inquisitively at Coss.

‘I have seen him in the dream from my previous life. I know his face.’

‘You know Oldcastle from when you were a drone?’

‘I think so,’ said Coss. ‘But his face and his name doesn’t feel right. I don’t think that John Oldcastle is his real name.’

Jack stared at the warrant sky officer’s vacant hammock. John Oldcastle seemed sure enough of his name, and the Royal Aerostatical Navy had a place for him on the Iron Partridge. If John Oldcastle wasn’t John Oldcastle, then who in the name of the Circle was he?

‘Are you sure about this, old steamer?’

‘It is possible it may be a false memory. Curse my vacuum pumps, there is not much that I am certain of from my existence as a drone, before my true life began.’

‘What’s the name you think of when you see the master cardsharp?’ asked Jack.

‘Jared Black is the name,’ said Coss. ‘I can see his face talking to the steamman I served when I was but a drone. His name is Coppertracks, and he is a great philosopher and scientist of the people of the metal who lives in the Kingdom. Jared Black has the same silver beard, much the same voice, but the master cardsharp was not dressed as an airship officer. I see another uniform. A civilian one, if that makes sense?’

‘Civilians don’t wear uniforms — unless he served with the RAN merchant marine before Admiralty House dumped him onto a warship,’ said Jack. ‘They’ve been short of skymen for years. You and I wouldn’t be here if that weren’t the case.’

Jack remembered his suspicions about the first lieutenant. Nothing about the deadly woman and the ageing soldier who reluctantly followed her rang true. What business could the officer have had with Coss’s ex-master? Whoever the master cardsharp was, whomever he answered to, one thing was true; Jack and Coss were stuck firmly under his command.

‘We steammen are usually a grounded people, in all senses of the word,’ added Coss. ‘All I know from my earliest years was that I had to fly. It was all I dreamed of in my nursery body, and the moment I was granted my adult form, I came to the Kingdom of Jackals and learnt everything I could about the Royal Aerostatical Navy; its traditions, its sailors and ships, its rules and regulations.’

Jack grunted, a smile flickering across his lips.

‘Tear my transfer pipes, but I am used to being laughed at,’ said the young steamman, his voicebox pitched with a sad vibration. ‘My friends back in the Free State say I must have been possessed by Lemba of the Empty Thrusters, the spirit of the sky. They say that he is the Loa that possessed my miserable drone body and blessed me with sentience.’

‘I wasn’t laughing at your story,’ said Jack. ‘It’s just that if you had left school a couple of years later and hadn’t got into the RAN, you might have signed up with the Cassarabian navy!’

‘Most amusing. I much prefer an allied multiracial society such as that of the Kingdom,’ said Coss, pointing to the iron clock above the entrance to their chamber. ‘The master cardsharp asked to be interrupted from his game before six-bells sounds. He also left a parcel that he wants you to deliver below decks, although I suspect he intended its delivery to be made during daylight hours.’

Jack retrieved the heavy waxpaper-wrapped parcel from the stool in front of his punch-card writing station. There was a scribbled note slipped below the string sealing the parcel, its instructions read: ‘For the cabin at the end of the middle deck’s main passage.’

‘I’ll fetch the master cardsharp,’ said Jack. ‘And see if I can drop this off too.’ Better that than listening to those two Benzari stokers snoring away. Perhaps the long climb down the lifting chamber ladder will bring some peace to my nerves. Coss might have dreamed of sailing thousands of feet across the world like one of his birds, but Jack was just happy to have avoided the six-foot drop that was to have been his courtesy of the hangman back home.

After clambering down the ladder, Jack considered the route, his new recruit’s training spinning around his mind. The easiest way to the surgeon’s ward in the middle of the airship was to head down the upper lifting chamber’s main gantry, then into the gun deck, another climb through the lower lifting chamber, before threading through the corridors of the middle deck.

Jack walked down the central catwalk that cut through the twelve-hundred foot length of the upper lifting chamber, the thin strip of metal bouncing underfoot, its handrail preventing him from slipping into the thousands of ballonets and their network of bracing wires. He was halfway down the gangway when he almost stumbled into the officer, a tattered well-worn cloak half-hidden by the shadow of one of the airship’s regassing towers. Jack caught a breath as he recognized the face of the man from the courtroom. Close up, his skin was pockmarked with smallpox scars, but there were the same intense eyes, the same mop of ginger hair. Yes, this was the RAN officer who had so annoyed the judge in the middle-court by saving Jack from dancing the Bonegate jig.