Jack Cloudie

have been volcanic if she had been discovered out in the dunes with a male slave, aiding a girl in dishonouring her family’s name. Gamila had called her own fate down upon her; every slave knew there was only one crime worse than running from your master, and that was getting caught in the attempt. Shadisa didn’t deserve to join the careless house girl in her punishment, and frankly, although he had never voiced it, neither did Omar.

And a wantonly cruel punishment it proved to be. After Gamila had been dragged back to town, the old merchant quickly decided to break off their betrothal in favour of one of Gamila’s younger sisters. Her family then paid for a master womb mage — an expert in the honour-sanctions demanded by wealthy families — to travel to the town from the distant capital. The spurned suitor rejected the lighter punishment of giving Gamila two extra arms and sentencing her to a life of hard labour as a baggage carrier. Instead, the womb mage had buried her in the sand up to her waist on the outskirts of town and inflicted a changeling virus on Gamila, twisting and mutating her form into a cactus-like taproot. What had been her arms and head warped into fleshy green pads, the outline of her face barely visible as lumpy veins of spines. No eyes to see, no mouth to scream; Omar had often prayed there wasn’t enough sentience inside her barrel-like trunk to feel the cuts of travellers’ knives as they sliced wedges out of her body and sucked on the rubbery green flesh for her water. The desert wastes nothing, the travellers would mouth, before discarding the sucked-out flesh in the dust and continuing on their way.

But more than Gamila’s body had changed that day. Ever since then, Shadisa’s attitude towards Omar had cooled. No more walks. No more time together in the old oasis or on the beach. She barely smiled when he approached, and made every excuse to be out of his presence as quickly as possible. Perhaps she was frightened of receiving a similar punishment from her father; perhaps she had seen the price of flouting society’s rules and judged the potential cost of continuing to see Omar too high? Surely she still can’t blame me for what happened to Gamila? It was hardly my fault. You would think that given the time we’ve spent apart, on reflection, she could now see that it is only my quick thinking that saved her. Show me a little gratitude at least. The town’s hunters wouldn’t have just given up looking for Gamila. They would have kept on searching until they found her alongside us, and there wouldn’t now be one body twisted to serve as a taproot outside the town, but three. No, Shadisa’s scared, that has to be it. She’s seen what happens to those who defy their family and she’s fearful. Shadisa just had to be brought to see the greatness burning within her suitor, the infinite potential, then she’d realize that he wouldn’t always be fetching and carrying on a water farm.

‘Hey there,’ ordered Alim, flicking a pebble of limestone rock at Omar, ‘stop mooning over girls too fine for you and open the locks to the next tank. If the fish don’t purge soon, you’ll have a tank of spoiled water and a school of sick salt-fish.’

Omar nodded and made his way to the lock wheels. The last slave who’d killed a batch of salt-fish had been made to eat the sickening black things for a week and almost died of salt poisoning. Yes, the arbitrary punishments, just another perk of being a slave in Cassarabia. Alim helped the young slave in his task, walking down the line of water tanks, twisting the rusting wheels that opened the lock doors, the sloshing water sweeping the fish away to the next stage of the filtering process. The fish were biologicks, of course: the product of womb mage sorcery. Only the House of Barir and the other houses that worshipped the Sect of Ackron, all members of the guild of water farmers, understood exactly how to create and nurture the salt-fish. Adding special vials of hormones to the water supply through their complex life cycle to keep them thrashing and thriving.

Ackron was the fifty-third sect of the Holy Cent, informally known as the trader’s face, and those who embraced the sect often prospered as traders and merchants. That was the theory, at least. The rusting wheels on the water farm’s tanks spoke of a different reality, though. When the plague had spread through the northern provinces of Cassarabia, it had killed over two-thirds of the House of Barir’s people, leaving their coastal water farms undermanned and in the care of the house’s slaves and vagabonds-for-hire like Alim. The bones of the house’s faded glory were laid out in the sand dunes alongside the farm, a handful of metal arches that had been constructed to hold a water pipeline which had never been completed; pipes for fresh drinking water that should have reached all the way to Cassarabia’s capital, bypassing the water traders and the caravans.

It was through the broken arches of the house’s half-finished pipeline that Omar noticed the first visitor rising out of the baking sands, the dark silhouette of a scout atop a saddle raising a long spindly rifle in friendly greeting as the chattering of the sandpedes’ bony legs grew louder in the distance. The insect-like creatures that made up most of the caravan came slithering out of the desert with the dazzling white enamel of thousands of water butts tied to their segmented bodies, flashing towards the water farm.

‘Not good,’ murmured Alim.

‘They are early, old master,’ said Omar, watching the line of water traders coming down the dunes towards them, ‘but so are we. We have enough tanks to fill all their butts. The salt is counted and bagged.’

‘It was I that bagged most of the salt, Omar Ibn Barir,’ spat the old nomad. ‘It is not the traders I talk of. Look …’

Omar shielded his eyes from the sun and turned his gaze to where Alim was pointing. By the silver gates of heaven, the old nomad still had the keen sight from his desert days. There was a keeper on the dune line — one of the respected priests of the hundred sects — riding a camel, breaking away from the main caravan and threading his way through the pump heads that brought sea water up from the harbour. He was bearing straight for the great fortified house overlooking Haffa’s harbour — Master Barir’s residence, as well as that of the beautiful Shadisa, of course. Her olive skin, golden hair and wide green eyes be blessed.

‘It’s just a keeper,’ said Omar. The priests of the Sect of Ackron are always coming and going. The tithes from the House of Barir were important to the sect, and the holy men that received them no doubt said many prayers for the soul of Marid Barir and his profitable water farms.

Alim rubbed the stubble on his old chin. ‘Just a keeper? Have you no eyes to see with, young pup? Look at the green edging around the number fifty-three on his headdress. It is the high keeper of the Sect of Ackron himself.’

An emir of the church, one of the hundred keepers of the Holy Cent of the one true god! What business could he have so far beyond the capital’s comforts? There were no politics here, no court, no temples of note. Just the margins of the desert, a sea breeze, a distant fishing town and the house’s many water farms.

Omar ran a hand through his dark, slightly curly hair. ‘Clearly, my eyes are as perfect as the rest of me. Are you sure it is the high keeper?’

‘Yes,’ sighed the old nomad. ‘I am sure.’

‘He probably wants more money.’

‘Keepers are sent to demand extra tithes from their flock,’ said Alim. ‘Not the high keeper himself. This is bad. In a strong wind, an innocent man’s tiles are blown off a roof the same as the wicked’s.’

‘Is that one of the sayings of the witch that used to travel with your clan?’

‘It is but common sense,’ snapped Alim. ‘Even a town-born slave may drink from that well.’

Omar shrugged and went back to opening the rest of the salt-fish locks, leaving the old nomad to mull over his concerns. Yes, that was the only good thing about being a slave. When you had nothing to lose or hope for, you had little to fear. Worries only came, it seemed, when you had property and status to lose; as a slave, there would be a worker-sized dish of food on his table this evening — because when you owned a beast of burden, it made good sense to feed it and keep it working. And if I am lucky, tomorrow morning might even bring a glimpse of Shadisa’s heart-stopping face. Yes, something will come along for me. Fate will surely accommodate the wittiest and most handsome slave in the empire.

Omar began to hum one of the wild nomad ballads that Alim had taught him.

If he had known what the evening was to bring, he might have changed his tune.

CHAPTER THREE

Jack stumbled to the rail at the front of the stand, his feet constrained by heavy irons and manacles. This was his first time in the middle-court of the Jackelian legal system — his first time in any court for that matter. But even given his lack of experience with such matters, the crowd of illustrators and journalists sitting scribbling away in the public gallery seemed unusually large to his eye. Perhaps if Jack’s father had still been alive, he might have been able to offer some advice — he must have stood in a courtroom like this when the terms of the family’s bankruptcy had been read out. Although perhaps not one so crowded. What was debtors’