Jack Cloudie

Then long weeks of being moved on by shopkeepers angry at finding the three of them sleeping in the doorway, running from the constables of Middlesteel, one step ahead of the vagrancy laws and the brutal, enforced care of the poorhouse. They were falling away from him, Jack’s deathbed promise to his father stretched paper-thin by circumstance. Every job he tried to take on paying just pennies when the cost of life was measured in shillings and crowns. It was like being back on the farm when it all started to go wrong. Failed harvest after failed harvest. Debts. His mother and father arguing about having to let the tenant farmers go.

Fewer hands. More work. Their clothing growing frayed, the paint peeling from their house, fences on the land unrepaired and then the fields unploughed. Their mother dying of an old age arrived early, buried by worries. Not enough to feed all of them, going hungry for his brothers’ sakes, a little more tired and weary every day. Until he was falling, falling out of the airship and tumbling through a sky without ground. They were gone.

‘Alan! Saul!’ Jack yelled, his clothes whipping in the wind, the air fierce and angry as he fell. He raised his hands towards the distant shadow of the airship, but there was no help, only the distant jeers of Master Engineer Pasco. Thief. Thief.

Spinning through the air, the storm playing with him. No mercy, only the black mote of an eagle growing larger and larger, talons outstretched. But as it got closer Jack could see this was no bird — it was all steel and spikes, a moving machine of wings and razors, twice as long as Jack’s falling, flailing body.

‘Do you know me?’ hissed the machine, a beak of reinforced steel needling closer towards Jack as it spoke.

‘You are a Loa,’ said Jack. ‘One of the steammen gods.’

‘Not just any mere Loa,’ hissed the machine as it looped about the falling boy. ‘I am Lemba of the Empty Thrusters, the spirit of the sky.’

‘Save me,’ begged Jack, tumbling wildly as the Loa darted after him. ‘Pull me back to the airship.’

‘Why should I, little godless softbody? You who trespass into my realm in your ridiculous bags of lighter- than-air gas. And now there are two of your kind’s nations in my heavens, flinging iron balls at each other and filling the skies with smoke and noise. How am I to choose which of you to cast down? Maybe both, maybe both shall be my choice.’

There was blackness below the sky’s blue: icy blackness rather than ground. He was pitching towards his oblivion. ‘Save me,’ called Jack, ‘and I will help you.’

‘Help me, then,’ said the Loa, rolling in the gale and clamping a hold on Jack’s body with its hard, biting metal manipulator arms. Tighter and tighter. Jack yelled in agony, as he was pulled out of the dive and accelerated upwards towards his airship.

‘I wish to hear music.’

‘I have no instrument to play,’ cried Jack.

They were travelling so fast Jack’s eyes had difficulty opening against the wall of wind driving into his face.

‘Oh, but you do,’ said the Steamo Loa, opening its manipulator talons and letting Jack arc out. He was above the Iron Partridge now, sailing down towards its frill of mortar tubes and the vessel was blasting out a tune like an organ grinder.

‘Play,’ the Steamo Loa called as Jack tumbled towards the mortar tubes. ‘Play!’

There was a tiny glint of light in the darkness of the tubes, the light of — Coss Shaftcrank’s vision plate staring over him as he jerked upright in his hammock. He was in the transaction-engine chamber, waves of pain streaming down his back from the flogging he had endured.

‘You were just dreaming,’ said Coss. ‘And calling out in your sleep.’

Jack rubbed at his temples. ‘I never normally dream.’

‘Everyone dreams,’ said Coss. ‘Even my people. It’s probably that you don’t normally remember them.’

‘I wish I hadn’t remembered this one.’

Coss listened to what Jack recalled of the dream, the steamman’s vision plate juddering in surprise as the young sailor described his meeting with Lemba of the Empty Thrusters. ‘You have described this Loa just as he appears to my people, Jack softbody. Truly, the Loas are walking your dreams.’

‘He must have been aiming for your noggin and missed,’ said Jack.

‘Kiss my condensers, but the spirits of my people’s ancestors are not sponges tossed at a village mayor’s face in a summer fair,’ said Coss. ‘Loas do not miss; Lemba of the Empty Thrusters only crosses the threads of the great pattern with purpose.’

‘If it was giving me a headache to go along with the stripes on my back, he may consider his purpose achieved.’

‘This is unprecedented,’ said Coss. ‘I have never heard of one of our gods visiting a softbody as if he was a steamman throwing his cogs at prayer.’

‘It’s just a dream, old steamer. They never make sense.’

‘This one makes more sense than you seem to know. If you had taken the time to read through my newssheet cuttings concerning the air-yard trials of the Iron Partridge,’ explained Coss in irritation, ‘you would know that one of the unnecessary flourishes this vessel should be capable of is playing the Jackelian national anthem using air drawn through her mortar tubes.’

Playing music … Jack looked at the steamman in astonishment. ‘You are joking?’

‘I am entirely serious, Jack softbody. The Iron Partridge failed to do it, of course. One of the writers watching the vessel’s trials described the ship’s wailing in their newssheet as the cat-o’-nine- tails’ song, but a far better show than her gunners’ accuracy.’

‘That’s one song I’ve had enough of,’ said Jack, his spine burning at the thought of the flogging he had received. He rubbed his throbbing temples in annoyance. Whatever music the steamman gods had in mind for Jack Keats, they would have to sing along to it without him.

Now he was awake, Jack was glad to be out of the hammock; even the thin hanging fabric was rubbing raw against his back. But the start to the day’s roster of duties was swiftly circumvented by the appearance of the master cardsharp, who bore a more pressing appointment for Jack.

‘I need you, lad,’ wheezed the old officer. ‘It’s Captain Jericho — he’s feeling poorly and he’s holed up in his cabin and not in a mood to come out.’

‘Do you want me to fetch the ship’s surgeon for him?’

John Oldcastle shook his head. ‘It’s not that sort of malady. It’s the black dog chasing him, a mood as dark as thunder. When he’s up he’s up, and when he’s down he’s down. I’ve been trying to rouse the skipper out of his moonless humours for half an hour, but he won’t even come to the door of his cabin for me.’ The old officer saw the look on Jack’s face. ‘He’ll come to the door for you, Mister Keats. He still feels bad about you taking your stripes. The ship needs its captain and he just needs a little winding up to get him started. A few laps of the lifting chamber will see him set back on the mend. We’ll do it mortal discreetly, won’t we — no need to spook the rest of the crew.’

Jack did as he was bid. The gods of the steammen wanted him to make music and the master cardsharp wanted him to coax the captain out of his dark humours — everyone on the ship had something for him to do, it seemed. Jericho might, as the master cardsharp had intimated — and their recent improvised engagement proved — be a genius at the art of commanding a war vessel, but the flame of his genius was flickering erratically.

In many ways, their skipper was as broken as his vessel, and this was just the first of many times that Jack was sent down to bring Jericho out of his cabin. And always the captain came, shambling and ill shaven, and getting him out and ready to command the vessel was much as the master cardsharp had described it — a matter of slowly winding the captain up. Engaging Jericho in talk through the cabin door, getting him to open it, easing him into his uniform and walking him to one of the vessel’s two massive lifting chambers, where he would pace his way towards some sense of normality. Jericho would walk out his moods along the lifting chamber, marching the carper walkways between the gas cells as if the very act of driving himself forward and counting the rails along the walkways, would drive out the demons that haunted his mind. They worked too. Each mile driven forward stiffened the man and filled his uniform with command authority, until the doubting miserable wreck was replaced with a towering ship’s captain, his voice able to boom commands and direct the Iron Partridge with the skill of a fencing master directing a rapier.

This, Jack came to realize — perhaps even more than his talent with the ship’s transaction engines — was