had vanished from his heart.
‘You killed her!’
‘Yes, I believe I did. Who are you behind that mask?’ asked the killer.
‘The man who’s going to slice you into pieces!’
Salwa picked up something, a tray of human flesh bobbing in a darkening pool of blood. In his other hand was the golden-faced sun mask he had worn to conceal his face in the grand vizier’s hanging gardens. ‘I have a mask too.’ He tossed the tray of human remains into the pool of acid, a terrible stench emanating from it as it flamed away, then he pulled the mask down over his face. It was slicked with blood.
Omar grabbed the handle on the door in the mesh partition and yanked at it to no avail. It was locked tight.
The murderous priest laughed and pointed to a transaction-engine lock with a blood-testing spike mounted against the wall on Omar’s side of the mesh. ‘Only those whose blood has been entered into the sect’s records can gain admittance into the inner sanctum. And you’re not on it. You’re not even a womb mage under that mask, are you?’
‘Open the door and find out!’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Salwa. ‘Our sorcery is strong. You’ll have left some part of yourself down here — hairs, skin. We’ll find out who you are, my troublesome friend, and then you’ll be silenced.’
‘Come and find me now!’ yelled Omar. ‘I’m right here!’
‘Stay there, save me the trouble of hunting you down, then,’ laughed Salwa, walking towards the mesh. ‘You can wait while I summon the entire Sect of Razat.’
Omar kicked over a table filled with connected glass vials, the sound of their smashing mingling with his cry of rage as the killer stepped through the mesh door and clanged it shut.
The young guardsman was already running when the alarms began to fill the corridors of the womb mages’ lair.
Jack was pacing the small box of their cell in the brig, ignoring the snores of the master cardsharp and the dangerous, brooding silence of the first lieutenant. John Oldcastle might be able to lie down and sleep through their predicament without a problem, but every time Jack tried to close his eyes, all he could see was the fate waiting for him back in the Kingdom. The best he could hope for in front of a board of enquiry orchestrated by that slimy toad Tuttle was a dishonourable discharge that would see him handed back to the judge in the capital’s court — and a short walk to an even shorter drop on the scaffold outside Bonegate prison. The alternative was a charge of mutiny and the only difference there would be the location of the rope, this time hanging in the naval stockade at the fortress city of Shadowclock. He imagined his brothers weeping when they heard of his death in the poorhouse, the shrugs from the underpaid functionaries of the Board of the Poor at the news. Hanged as a mutineer or hanged as a thief. The result was inevitable, wasn’t it? A bad apple, from the same barrel as his father.
It was easy to listen to your own thoughts in the brig, swim in your worries insulated from the noise and vibrations of the airship by their position at the centre of the middle deck. No rattling beams or creaking hull. The only thing that Jack had felt of late had been the jolt of the landing anchors being discharged, one of Pasco’s henchmen only too glad to inform the prisoners that the Benzari marines had been left on their home soil on the vice-admiral’s orders, crowing about their marooning as he slipped stale rations through the cell door’s metal slit. At a stroke, the vice-admiral had repatriated the one contingent of the ship’s crew whose fierce loyalty to the ship’s captain was without question.
Jack heard clanking at the iron door and as it opened, three armed sailors threw the captain of marines, Henry Tempest, onto the floor of the cell. It looked as if he had taken a pistol whipping from their rifle butts, and the giant was shivering despite the controlled warmth inside the airship.
‘Henry,’ said the first lieutenant, on her feet immediately, inspecting the soldier’s wounds. She ran to the cell door, speaking through a thin grille. ‘His flasks, where are his two flasks?’
There was a laugh from beyond the door. ‘Hanging up outside here. You didn’t think we’d leave them with you, did you?’
‘Too much green,’ whispered the shaking marine officer. ‘I need the red. They tricked me, dosed me good.’
‘Give them to me, you bastards; send the surgeon down here to administer them.’
There was no reply. Their captors had left the prisoners alone in the brig to rot again. John Oldcastle had been roused by the commotion and it took all three of them to drag the shivering marine to the cell’s solitary bunk.
Jack looked out of the cell’s viewing slit. There was a pair of canteens hanging on the back of an empty guard’s chair. ‘He won’t be chasing the poppy powder any time soon.’
‘The big lad isn’t an opiate addict, Mister Keats,’ said Oldcastle. ‘That’s just scuttlebutt the crew has been spreading.’
First Lieutenant Westwick flashed Oldcastle an angry look.
‘What’s it matter now, lass?’ sighed Oldcastle. ‘Our cover’s blown. The navy’s as likely to hang us all before the State Protection Board ever gets a chance to spring us.’
‘I know that you two aren’t real naval officers,’ said Jack. ‘You’re agents of the secret police.’
‘Don’t wish that terrible trade on me, I’m not even that,’ said the master cardsharp, sadly. ‘Just a poor unlucky old fool the State Protection Board has blackmailed into acting as a pawn in their great game. My real name is Jared Black although my friends call me the commodore.’
Jared Black. That was the name that Coss had remembered from his pre-sentient dreams — the steamman had been right about the master cardsharp all along. And the commodore was the nickname that Captain Jericho had warned Jack not to use in front of the rest of the crew.
‘In the flush of my youth I used to be a royalist rebel, in the days when the cause was given mortal succour by the caliph,’ said the prisoner. ‘Arms, explosives and money — anything for the fleet-in-exile if it meant pulling parliament’s nose. Real boats, lad, submersibles, not these gas-filled sausages the RAN float about the sky; the roll of the ocean beneath your feet and the spray of water coming across your face in a blessed conning tower as you recharge your air. The years I spent in Cassarabia and the contacts I made down south are the only reason I’m here.’
Jared Black: John Oldcastle. The commodore. From traitorous rebel to stooge of the state. It seemed when it suited him, the old man changed names and identities as easily as he did uniforms.
Jack looked at the woman. ‘But nobody blackmailed you into making this voyage.’
‘I’m an officer of the state,’ said Westwick, ‘just the same as I was before, and that’s all you need to know about me, boy.’
‘What about him?’ said Jack, pointing at the shivering giant.
‘Ah, the big lad’s navy, alright,’ said the commodore. ‘He wanted to get in so bad he volunteered to take a potion the admiralty’s chemists had developed a few years back; a fearful formula to create the perfect marine. It worked, in a manner of speaking; took some stick-thin sickly cripples they’d scraped out from the nearest hospital of the poor and turned them into the kind of brute you see here. But the formula left its test subjects’ bodies and minds twisted — one minute in a raging fury, the next as placid as a lamb. The only way they can control their humours is by using the flasks. Green to calm down, red when they need to fight, and either a coma or a stroke if they don’t sip from the bottles at all.’
‘He joined the service he always wanted to,’ said the first lieutenant, protectively. ‘It wasn’t his fault that fate made him into something else. He needs to drink from the red flask now. They’ve overdosed him from the green bottle — the mutineers must have beaten the surgeon into telling them why he needs his drinks, then slipped the green’s contents into his rations.’
Maya Westwick seemed curiously sympathetic towards their captain of marines, as if something in the brute of a soldier had found a vein of softness in the deadly, dangerous woman that Jack would have been hard-pressed to locate otherwise. Jack went to the cell door to see how close the two flasks were and was startled by the sight of Coss slipping into the brig’s guardroom. The steamman raised an iron digit in front of his voicebox to indicate that
