Jack Cloudie

Aerostatical Navy uniform that the party had secreted in their baggage during their travels through Cassarabia in the vain hope that changing into it if they were close to being captured would save them a spy’s fate. ‘We’ll go back on board our ship like fine Jackelian gentlemen,’ as the commodore had boasted.

The pair of fine Jackelian gentlemen followed the boarding party into the transaction-engine chamber just in time to stop three guardsmen from testing their scimitars on Coss Shaftcrank, the steamman fending them off with a stoker’s shovel while another two guardsmen finished off the sentry who had been watching over the room.

‘He’s one of ours, the metal lad!’ shouted Jack. ‘Coss, belay your shovel!’

Coss warily lowered his shovel as the guardsmen withdrew to clear out the rest of the airship. ‘Those are the caliph’s own guardsmen, Jack softbody. Kiss my condensers, but has the world turned upside down while I have been chained up inside here?’

‘I think that would depend on which caliph you are,’ said Jack.

‘Explanations later, old steamer,’ said the commodore. ‘Anyone in drak-riding leathers is on our side. Anyone in Imperial Aerial Squadron uniforms you can clump with that old coal shovel of yours. Now, would you know if there’s anyone resembling a womb mage on board the Iron Partridge?’

‘There is such a one in the surgeon’s bay,’ said Coss. ‘Or at least so I heard from our cabin boy who has been topping up my water supply.’

‘Prize crew and prisoners?’ asked the old officer.

‘There’s around twenty of us and fifty of them on board the Iron Partridge. All the officers and the rest of our men are chained up on board an escort vessel.’

‘Is Jericho alive over there?’ asked Jack.

‘Indeed he is,’ said Coss. ‘Along with our cowardly Loa-cursed fool of a vice-admiral. Tuttle softbody surrendered the ship as quick as he could strike our colours when we ran into five enemy vessels along the edge of the Empty Quarter.’

‘Ah well, the only battles that ever counted for Tuttle were the ones fought around a dining table in Admiralty House,’ said the commodore. He looked over at the boilers, cold and shut. ‘What happened to the blessed ship? How’s she doing?’

‘The Cassarabians don’t trust our automatic systems. They think they’re cursed. We’ve been flying like a brick on full manual control ever since we surrendered.’

‘We’ll fire her back up later,’ said the commodore, leaving for the exit. ‘Right now we need to get down to the surgeon’s bay before their wicked womb mage realizes there’s been another change of ownership on board the Iron Partridge.’

Jack and Coss ran after the commodore and into the narrow corridor outside, the sulphur smell of weapons discharge hanging in the air.

‘Why the surgeon’s bay?’ called Jack.

‘Because we need a womb mage’s blessing, lad,’ said the commodore, cryptically. ‘Because we need his blessing.’

What’s he planning, the old dog?

When the three crewmen reached the doors to the surgeon’s bay, they found they weren’t the first to have tried to enter. A fatally wounded guardsman was rolling in agony outside the open doorway, a puddle of acidic green liquid sizzling across the carper planking by his side.

Jack unclipped one of the spherical grenades topped by a small clockwork timer to detonate the explosives inside, but the commodore stopped him from tossing it through the doorway. ‘That’s a little too much.’ Black quickly leant inside the bay and fired the single charge of his pistol, the crack of the weapon answered by a yell inside. ‘And that’s just enough.’

Jack and Coss followed the commodore in to find a womb mage slumped across the surgeon’s operating table, an uncracked vial of the green acid still clutched in his dead fingers. The commodore’s single shot had taken him in the chest through the heart, the blood of the wound like a marksman’s bull’s-eye on a paper target.

‘Tear my transfer pipes, but if you had hoped for a blessing from him, master cardsharp,’ said Coss, ‘I believe your shot would have been better aimed towards a less vital organ than his heart.’

‘Not so, he’s left his blessing behind, Mister Shaftcrank,’ said the commodore, walking to the womb mage’s case, abandoned under a cabinet of drugs and medicines that had clearly been broken into and rifled through. The commodore unclipped the case and lifted out what looked like a perfume bottle, complete with a rubber bulb to squirt out its contents. There looked to be dozens of similar bottles inside the bag. ‘Just the thing to lift a curse.’

Picking the bottle up, he sprayed the content in his eyes, and beckoned Jack over for a squirt of the same.

‘It’s itching,’ Jack said as the moisture burned angrily on his face.

‘No rubbing there, Mister Keats. Everyone who goes into Mutantarjinn will need a dose of this — even our draks, although you can leave the old steamer here off the list.’

‘This is not scent,’ said Coss, examining the bottle.

‘It’s not just a wicked legend that anyone who enters Mutantarjinn without the order of womb mages’ permission goes blind,’ said the commodore. ‘They circulate a sickness in the air around the city that attacks your eyes. There’s a virus inside this spray that changes your eyeball in a manner that makes you immune to their curse. Your vision plate won’t be affected, old steamer — which is one of the reasons why the Cassarabians don’t trust your race. Trust only flesh, is an old saying of the womb mages. Trust only that which their sorceries can twist.’

Jack blinked the tears out of his eyes.

‘They are not a kind people,’ said Coss.

‘Aye, they’re many things, but that they’re not.’

They were to see more evidence of that throughout the ship. Not a single Imperial Aerial Squadron sailor had been taken prisoner. The enemy captain they wanted alive for his knowledge of the route and any codes they needed to gain admittance to the city of sorcerers. The rest of the crew was a hindrance the guardsmen couldn’t afford to trust during the infiltration of the enemy stronghold, and the rival sailors met a savage end.

With the foe’s crew eliminated and word received that the Cassarabian transport airship had fallen — albeit with a higher price paid in blood — Jack went with Coss back to the transaction-engine chamber to help the steamman restart the Iron Partridge’s boilers.

‘The empire is fascinated with the Kingdom’s machines,’ Coss explained as they walked. ‘But they do not understand them. The master cardsharp is correct, they trust their ability to pervert the weave of flesh, but not our transaction engines and even less the life-metal such as myself.’

‘We saw their sorcerers’ work in their cities after we left the Iron Partridge,’ said Jack. ‘They don’t have trees to burn in their boilers, let alone coal. The creatures they breed inside slaves’ wombs are the one natural resource they can depend on.’

‘They had to put a gun to my head to get me to turn off the vessel’s transaction engines,’ said Coss. ‘Before we were captured I got to understand the ship. Kiss my condensers, but turning the boilers off on the Iron Partridge is like turning off my boiler heart — it is a little death for the ship’s mind. I don’t know how she will react to being rudely reanimated on our whim.’

‘You didn’t have a choice,’ said Jack. ‘No more than I did when I had to jump ship.’

Jack explained all that had happened to the marooned Jackelians during their absence from the Iron Partridge, their unexpected alliance with the guardsmen and the existence of two caliphs — the false one sitting on the throne, still dependent on the blood of the true ruler of rulers being held prisoner by the grand vizier.

Coss in turn explained how there had nearly been a second mutiny on board the Iron Partridge after the vice-admiral had given the ship up when they had been confronted by a flotilla of Cassarabian airships, showing more consideration for the preservation of his own skin than the welfare of his crew or his oath of duty. With the vessel already in disarray, her captain relieved of command and guarded in his quarters, the Iron Partridge had proved easy pickings for the Imperial Aerial Squadron.

Back in the chamber, Jack acted as both stoker on the boilers and cardsharp on the punch-card writers while