Jack Cloudie

you start with her.’ The initiate nodded and took the vial, entering the chair’s box.

The Caliph Eternal himself is a member of the grand vizier’s wicked sect. A man who should have commanded the loyalty of every sect of the Holy Cent as the voice of the one true god on earth. No chance of invoking the caliph’s law and trusting to the empire’s justice here. The only law now was the depraved whims of Immed Zahharl. Any one of the beyrogs would be a match for a dozen guardsmen, and Omar wouldn’t get more than a step towards Shadisa’s body before the caliph’s bodyguard cut him to pieces. He had to bide his time. Save Shadisa later.

Omar kept as still as a leaf in the foliage. The Caliph Eternal’s monsters would slay him if they scented him up here. Back in Haffa, Omar had heard a story once about a salt-fish farmer who had escaped a nest of sand vipers that had been tracking him by rubbing a salt-fish against his skin to disguise his scent. Omar quietly plucked one of the oranges and sliced it against his scimitar, squeezing its juices against his face, arms and legs.

‘I want no trace of her left,’ ordered the grand vizier. ‘Carry the chair to the lowest level of the womb mages’ library and do it there.’

No. NO!

Concealed inside the sedan chair, Shadisa and the initiate who was to be her executioner were carried away by the beyrogs, a couple of their number standing sentry outside the archway, the gold-masked figures of the sect striding solemnly behind the procession.

Shadisa. Omar had failed her again — a guardsman with a scimitar at his side, trained to hack apart her would-be killers, and he had been every bit as helpless to intervene as he had been during the sack of Haffa.

Omar’s self-recriminations ended as one of the beyrogs turned and sniffed the air suspiciously, growling like a wolf.

‘Stop,’ ordered the caliph.

Immed Zahharl turned. ‘What is it?’

‘There is someone else here,’ said the caliph. ‘My beyrogs’ senses are never wrong.’

‘Move on,’ the grand vizier called to the departing sedan chair and the masked figures. ‘Seal the garden behind you.’

‘Find the intruder,’ the caliph ordered the beyrog as it loped howling straight towards Omar’s orange tree.

Jack was helping Coss with a broken regulator on one of the transaction engines when a banshee-like wailing began sounding about the chamber and the two of them halted their work.

‘General-quarters,’ said Coss.

Jack was puzzled. ‘This close to our rendezvous with the Fleet of the South?’

John Oldcastle leant over the rail into the engine pit. ‘The bridge wants a check on the navigation drums, they need to confirm our blessed position.’

Jack saw why through the porthole when he went back up to the punch-card desk. There were dunes below — known as the great southern desert to the Jackelians, the northern to the Cassarabians — but the orange sands were covered with smoking debris and bodies. In the air clusters of gas cells drifted through the sky attached to scraps of burning carper, like corpuscles bled from the airships’ veins and set astray to wander the heavens.

‘There are no airships left intact,’ said Jack, injecting his query into the punch-card reader.

‘Aye lad,’ said John Oldcastle, looking out of the next porthole. ‘And unless both sides blew each other to bits, that’s the remains of one fleet while the victors have had it away on their heels.’

Results for Jack’s query began twisting away on the beads of his abacus-like screen. ‘All our compass points have been tracked correctly. Our navigation drums are turning fine. These are the rendezvous coordinates the vice-admiral gave us for the Fleet of the South.’

The master cardsharp reported the results down to the bridge and returned to Jack’s station a minute later. ‘You and the old steamer can get your tools. We’re to report to the boat bay and go down there — sift through the wreckage for anything resembling a ship’s record drums — Jackelian or the caliph’s.’

Jack couldn’t tear his eyes away from the sight outside the porthole.

Coss came out of the pit to take in the sight too. ‘How could one fleet wipe out another so completely in a single engagement?’

‘Perhaps the vice-admiral was right,’ said Jack. ‘Superior skymanship will out.’

‘Ah, that strutting popinjay,’ whined John Oldcastle. ‘If he’s right, there’s a first time for everything.’

If the Iron Partridge’s skipper had been looking to find the remains of a captain’s log among the dunes of the Southwest Frontier, then Jack hoped Captain Jericho wouldn’t be too disappointed. There was enough of that to go around for everyone. While the figures sifting through the wreckage — John Oldcastle, Coss, Jack, their brutish captain of marines and a handful of his soldiers — had yet to find anything resembling a transaction-engine register in the ruins left scattered across the desert, there were enough bodies wearing the torn, burnt uniforms of the RAN to speak of which side had flown away victorious. So many ships’ names on the caps — the Audacity, the Guardian Kirkhill, the Javelin, the Parliament Oak, the Swiftsure and the Ultimatum — and not a single Cassarabian sailor among the bodies strewn half-buried among the shifting sands.

Dirty rolls of smoke threaded across the sky for miles, hiding the hundreds of circling carrion birds. Pieces of smouldering carper jutted out of the desert like a field of thorns, and the saltpetre smell of matches from the residue of liquid explosive charges lingered in the air. The Iron Partridge must have missed the battle by no more than a day — or the desert would have reclaimed the scene of carnage, covering the wreckage with sand after scavengers had stripped the carcasses of the fallen to their bare bones. No need to post sentries here to guard against looters; only the vultures had turned up to avail themselves of the war’s bounty.

‘Nothing,’ Jack called across to Coss, poking an arch of a girder emerging from the sand as if it was a whalebone trapped on the bed of an evaporated sea. What in the name of the Circle happened to our airships out here? Apart from a few melted keys from a punch-card writer, Jack hadn’t found anything even approaching useful. There were thousands of tiny scraps of blackened material on the ground. Not paper, but more like a very fine cloth that had been burnt close to ashes. Jack picked up a brittle leaf of the burnt material. Nothing he recognized. Too thin to be the canvas of an airship envelope, but it had been left blowing all over the battlefield.

‘Kiss my condensers, but this wreckage is all wrong, Jack softbody,’ said Coss.

‘Too right it is,’ said Jack. ‘These are all our people. If we’d made the rendezvous any quicker, this would have been you and me lying here as vulture fodder. How are we even going to bury so many?’

‘You misunderstand,’ said the steamman. ‘I mean this wreckage is too small.’

‘You’ve got a good set of vision plates in your skull, old steamer,’ said Oldcastle. He had abandoned the search and was sitting on a piece of hull, shading his eyes from the high sun and gazing up at the reassuring armoured bulk of the Iron Partridge floating overhead. ‘You saw how much was left of our prize vessel after we burnt her down to her bones. And we did that with charges laid on the inside. This-’ he waved a hand across the sands ‘-wasn’t a normal battle. It was a slaughter.’

‘Something new,’ said Coss.

‘Aye,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Something new in the very old game we’ve been playing against the caliph these last few centuries. Something new come along to disturb an old man’s rest, curse my unlucky stars.’

Jack turned away from the sight of the sailors’ mutilated corpses in disgust. ‘Their faces …’

‘A tradition of the caliph’s army, lad,’ said Oldcastle. ‘They present their officers with sacks of ears and noses severed from the bodies of the fallen to prove the scale of their victory. It leaves little room for exaggeration of your triumph. It’s a wicked hard thing to be an infidel in this land.’

‘Yes, a hard thing.’

Was it just the dead and fallen, or were prisoners and wounded fair game too, Jack wondered? Alan, Saul, you’ve never seemed so far away. How he wished he was back with his brothers now — it didn’t even matter that he had failed to raise the money he needed to rescue them from poverty — even the grime and relentless destitution of a state poorhouse was better than picking through the terrible litter of this battlefield.

A call sounded out from over the rise of the next dune and one of their Benzari marines appeared waving a