Jack Cloudie

Down in the street there was a commotion, the sounds of running — a group of black-uniformed men with red cloaks and strange silver facemasks sprinting after a solitary runner. The commodore pushed Jack back from the edge of the window so they wouldn’t be spotted watching from above. ‘Nothing down there for us, Mister Keats. Keep your head down.’

The runners caught up with their victim just under the safe house, kicking him to the ground and then dragging him away as he yelled in horror.

Jack shielded his eyes against the sun as he risked a quick look outside at the figures pulling the prisoner away up the hill. ‘Were they priests?’

‘No, town police,’ said the commodore. ‘The masks are based on the face of Salofar, the twelfth sect of the Holy Cent. The face of righteous justice, which as you’ve just seen, runs mortal swiftish in Cassarabia.’

‘The man they grabbed … a thief?’

‘A merchant,’ said the commodore. ‘The silver sash he wore bore his bazaar trading licence. He must have been caught cheating his customers. Poor devil, they practice menshala in the empire.’ The commodore saw that Jack didn’t know the word and continued. ‘It is the will of the one true god that the punishment must always fit the crime. When I was with the royalists in one of the empire’s harbour towns back west, I saw a baker who had been caught adulterating his flour with sawdust. The local police baked him to death in his own oven. No judges or courts or juries here. Just menshala.’

‘Barbarians.’ Jack shook his head in disgust. And here we are, right in the heart of their land.

‘Don’t be so quick to judge,’ said the commodore. ‘Back in Jackals you can spill seed potatoes onto a field of weeds and most years you’ll pull some spuds out. You’ve seen what the heart of the empire is like. Dust and sand and rocks. Here, you can break your back all year long, then a single neighbour two hundred miles upstream can divert the irrigation and kill your entire livelihood within a day; or a band of wild brigands can turn up, and in one hour steal a year’s labour from you at the point of a scimitar. A hard land breeds hardy people and if you don’t have hard justice to go along with the land, then you have the rule of the gun and the blade and the club, and no civilization at all that’s worth the blessed name.’

‘We’re here to fight them,’ said Jack. ‘And it sounds like you admire them.’

‘Not so, lad, but I do understand them. Because it’s the way of the world. In bright, fertile waters, the fish you see are as shiny as rainbows and swarm in schools as large as clouds. But run your u-boat deep and into the dark barrens, and the fish are tough, bony-looking things, few and fierce. That’s the empire. The Cassarabians are warriors. Their land made them that way and they’ve rolled up all the plumper, richer nations that lady fortune tossed down for them as their neighbours. All but one, Jackals in the north, protected by our floating walls … the Royal Aerostatical Navy.’

‘And now they have their own navy.’ The Circle preserve us.

‘So they do, Mister Keats, and we must get to the bottom of the whys, hows and wherefores of the Imperial Aerial Squadron’s celgas. Because unless we can, they’re going to be swimming in our waters. And as you love Jackals, as you love your two fine young brothers, trust me, you don’t want to see the Kingdom ruled as a satrapy of the empire.’

When Udal Lackmann did reach the safe house, Jack was not on sentry duty, so it seemed to him that the smuggler had arrived as if out of thin air. The first thing that Jack knew of the smuggler’s presence in the building was when he noticed their safe house’s aged host whispering with a newly arrived traveller by the entrance to the courtyard and pointing towards the group of Jackelians. Commodore Black got up from the game of cards he had been trying to teach Jack and Henry Tempest, and approached the man with what seemed to Jack a touch of uncharacteristic apprehension. The traveller’s white robes were grey with dust, a sand filter hung off his neck, and a single curved dagger was tucked behind his crimson waist sash.

‘Al-salaamo alaykum, Udal Lackmann,’ said the commodore.

‘Wa alaykum e-salaam, Jared Black,’ said the smuggler, flashing a smile as white as the shine on the courtyard’s four pillars. ‘It has been many years since you were a visitor here.’

‘Many years for me, Udal Lackmann,’ said the commodore. ‘But they’ve been a mortal lot kinder to you.’

‘My life is full of little blessings,’ said the smuggler. ‘They help me hold to a path that fills its travellers with vim and vigour. I had not heard that your u-boat was back in port.’

‘I walked here on my dusty boots,’ said the commodore, ‘like a true son of the desert.’

‘There is not enough iron in your soul to be that,’ said Udal, ‘yet a little too much to make your merchant’s garb believable, at least to one who knows you.’

First Lieutenant Westwick appeared in the courtyard and the smuggler gave a small bow with one hand held against his heart.

‘The face I saw watching upstairs in the window,’ said Udal. ‘Tell me that you are not truly the wife of this old seadog?’

First Lieutenant Westwick raised the hem of her dress, revealing a brace of throwing blades strapped to her calf. ‘That’s not the point of me being here.’

‘Delightful,’ said the smuggler. ‘And a half-blood too, with a face exotic on both sides of the border. I shall buy you. How much for her, Jared?’

Henry Tempest leapt to his feet. ‘You touch a hair of her head and I’ll twist yours off your flaming neck!’

Udal laughed. ‘Sit down, giant one; it is too hot for such jokes. The price to be paid for such as she is paid in steel, not gold, and I have no wish to put to the test the accuracy of those deadly little blades.’ He looked at Jack. ‘And one not much younger than you were, Jared Black, when you first came visiting these shores.’

‘Aye, well age does funny things to memory,’ said the commodore. ‘Like the way I remember you so much the same, you might as well have just walked out the room all those years ago and strolled straight back in.’

‘I heard the royalist fleet met its end at Porto Principe,’ said the smuggler. ‘I raised a glass in toast to you and your friends.’

‘They were good ones,’ said the commodore, ‘in different times.’

‘It’s always different times,’ said the smuggler. ‘Are you bringing things in, or bringing things out?’

‘Ourselves in,’ said the commodore. ‘As for what we’d be taking out, my new wife here has a passion for airships. She finds them endlessly fascinating, especially the bit where they get floated off the ground. Isn’t that a miracle? All the weight of such a grand large hull, filled with all those sailors and fin-bombs and supplies, then you pack its cells full of gas, and up it goes, as long as a battleship and as high as the clouds.’

‘She should switch her temple tithes to the Sect of Razat,’ said Udal. ‘They find such matters endlessly fascinating, also.’

‘That’s what I heard,’ said the commodore. ‘And I thought to myself, I need a man of means, a man who gets about and will be able to introduce me to the right people. Why, my old friend Udal, he’ll do, that’s what occurred to me.’

‘I have very little against the Sect of Razat,’ said Udal. ‘For keepers and priests, they seem eminently practical people.’

‘A smuggler needs borders to cross, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘Without borders and taxes to avoid, you’re only in the haulage business. One continent, one empire makes a nice political slogan for the Caliph Eternal, but it’ll be wicked hard on your bottom line.’

‘To be an honest businessman,’ smiled Udal. ‘I long for such days. But perhaps not quite so soon.’

‘We can help you postpone them indefinitely,’ said First Lieutenant Westwick.

‘The followers of Razat are a very insular sect,’ said Udal. ‘But I know one man who can help you with what you wish to know. We will need to travel towards the capital to meet him.’

‘May the light of the world shine on you,’ said the first lieutenant, in what sounded like a quote to Jack. ‘And all who are under this house.’

‘The light of the world has been burning a little too brightly lately for those under this roof, pretty lady,’ said Udal. ‘And you will do well to remember that the road to the capital also ends in the road to the Caliph Eternal’s torture garden.’

Jack could feel the throbbing sun above him like a living organism pulsing its heat down upon his neck. The constant scurrying noise of their sandpedes’ tiny-clawed feet across the dusty surface of the road provided a counterpoint to the noise of crickets that came from the marshy grasses next to the river. Jack hadn’t asked what cargo was strapped to the multi-segmented insect-like beasts of burden by Udal’s smugglers, and nobody had