‘We don’t send traitors into battle,’ Salwa yelled down. ‘Before he died, the previous grand marshal was uncovered plotting treason against the empire. These two-’ he waved dismissively at Omar and Boulous, ‘-were leaders in his plot, leaders who tried to save their necks by silencing the grand marshal when they realized that the Caliph Eternal had uncovered their treachery. By your act of cowardice in refusing to fight, you have raised your colours along their side. The order of the imperial guardsmen is therefore disbanded. By command of the Caliph Eternal, emperor of emperors, your regiment is declared heretic!’ As his hand dropped, marines of the Imperial Aerial Squadron rose up from behind the parapets of the fortress, rifles pulled tight against their shoulders, and there was a horrendous crackling as if a hundred blocks of oak were splintering. Smoke drifted out across the sky as guardsmen screamed below, scattering and falling and dying, rifle balls buzzing like bees in the air.
Omar screamed in rage at the betrayal, Boulous struggling by his side, even as his legs began to be drawn taut, the drak at the other end of the parapet struggling against the sailors holding it, driven to take flight and seek combat by the sounds and sights of the slaughter occurring below.
‘The grand vizier wished for you to see the end of the guardsmen,’ Salwa said to Omar. ‘And he instructed me to make you this offer. Renounce the order now; join the Imperial Aerial Squadron as an officer. Act as an example that even the grand vizier’s most implacable enemies may prosper through shifting their loyalties away from the past and embracing the future and our glorious sect in the name of progress.’
Omar gritted his teeth and silently shook his head.
‘I was told you were a lazy fool who would always choose the easy way,’ said Salwa. ‘Choose the easy way, guardsman. Do it.’
‘There isn’t a drak in the fortress strong enough to pull my legs out of their sockets.’
Salwa shook his head sadly and motioned a sailor forward, raising his rifle towards Omar’s head. ‘Well, at least the foolish part is true. Being on the wrong side of history brings with it a savage burden. One it seems you must carry to your grave …’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jack rubbed his brow, half covered by a turban and sweating in the arc of the high sun. The relative ease with which the four of them had transformed themselves into citizens of the empire still seemed inconceivable to him. The skins of the three men had been darkened by dyes which the first lieutenant, with her half-Cassarabian parentage, hadn’t needed. They wore the local clothing that Westwick had pulled out of her supply crate, the lining along the hems of their robes sewn with silver coins stamped with the caliph’s head — legal tender throughout the empire. But then, the empire — as the commodore had explained — wasn’t a homogenous nation, but rather a civilization composed of disparate nations, all ruled, however unwillingly, by the Caliph Eternal.
Jack did as he was told and repeated whenever he needed to the fiction that he was a slave from the sultanate of Zahyan, loyal servant to the commodore’s spice merchant and his new wife, just married to seal a trading alliance, and travelling with their mute colossus of a bodyguard — the contents of his two flasks now hidden beneath his robes.
Having crossed the desert the locals called the Empty Quarter, in their pocket airship, they had deflated the stolen aerostat and hidden the open boat-like gondola under the cliff of a gorge in the wilds. They had landed a couple of miles outside a small village that the commodore entered before returning with four camels tied together. He had been muttering about parting with good money for the rangy, flea-bitten, bad-tempered creatures, and after a few days on the road with them, Jack came to see why. Jack’s camel was always grumbling; deep-throated complaints at being mounted, dismounted, ridden too close to the other camels, or just protesting against every flick of the rider’s crop needed to keep the beast pitching forward.
Along with their reluctant steeds, the commodore led them into the hill town of Sharmata Sarl in the south- western corner of central Cassarabia, a couple of days travel from the coastal towns where the royalist fleet-in-exile had docked in his younger days. It was a trading hub for the various caravan roads that crossed the empire, a place where the people that the four of them were impersonating should feel at home — and more importantly, where some of the commodore’s old contacts were located.
The commodore had used the spare time travelling to Sharmata Sarl to drill Jack and Henry Tempest in the mannerisms of the locals. Jack found there was as much to learn as there had been when the airship’s officers had been tutoring them back on board the
‘It’s the small actions that will give you away,’ the commodore had warned, ‘never the large.’
Small actions such as the need to fake indifference towards biologicks, the bizarre breedings of the empire’s womb mages.
‘It might be considered bad form in the Kingdom to have your body reshaped by a womb mage, but here in the empire it is a matter of blessed survival,’ noted the commodore. ‘Nomads with water-filled humps on their backs to see them through a dried-up oasis or two, or transparent eyelids so they can travel through wicked sandstorms without going blind.’
And there were enough of the twisted creatures tied up against the white-walled buildings of Sharmata Sarl. Caterpillar-like things as tall as a shire horse but seven times the length; carts pulled by pairs of sharp-beaked birds with human eyes, caravans guarded by gold-masked warriors with tails swishing behind them. ‘Nothing like growing out your prehensile tail for balance,’ explained the commodore. All the great scimitar masters should have one. It was, he explained, considered bad art to blend too much human flesh with the panoply of creatures whose templates the sorcerers borrowed from, although biologicks with human flesh were the easiest to be birthed by the swollen-bellied slaves who acted as the empire’s living factories.
‘I’ve never heard of this Cantara woman,’ said Westwick, looking at the door of the house that the commodore had led them to.
There had been camels stabled lower down in the town. Narrow, tall streets, steeped in shade now hemmed them in, while laundered items of clothing swayed on lines close to their heads. Further up the hilly incline, a group of old men played draughts in the street while thin hounds lay by their feet, noses laid out across the dusty white cobbles.
‘Ah, and that’s as it should be, Maya,’ said the commodore, his hand lifting a knocker shaped like a bat on the door. ‘Your dour friends in the State Protection Board are fine for winkling out the caliph’s agents hiding on Jackelian soil, but here in the empire the great game is played by the Pasdaran’s rules. Or at least, that’s how it used to be, back in the day.’
An old hook-nosed woman wearing a silk head-covering opened the door, her eyes widening in surprise at the sight of the commodore and the other three disguised Jackelians. ‘I see an old soul wearing the face of a young man I once knew.’
The commodore’s head bobbed knowingly. ‘Still in the house, Cantara, after all this time.’
‘It’s not easy to leave the house,’ said the woman. ‘As you must have noticed, the neighbourhood is quite different from the old days. Come in, come in you old rascal, come in for some yoghurt and sherbet.’
Jack walked in after the commodore, followed by the hulking captain of marines and First Lieutenant Westwick, her eyes surveying the street suspiciously for any sign that their entry had been watched.
‘Are your companions also tradesmen?’ said the old woman to the commodore, ushering them into a wide, awning-covered courtyard and bidding them to sink onto the cushions placed around a rectangular pool in its centre.
‘Of sorts, Cantara,’ said the commodore. ‘Tradesmen of sorts with the rival firm, whose wicked employ, I have to admit, has finally found my old bones too.’
The old woman nodded, humming thoughtfully. ‘Not so like the old days after all, then. You have heard from afar, I suppose, about how poorly our house has fared of late.’
‘Many of your servants have scattered?’ said Westwick.
