Jack Cloudie

Forbidden City, the three of us against an empire full of enemies while our best chance of escape is sailing towards her end. Not even a drop of RAN rum to wet my lips while I sweat under these wicked robes. You see how cruel fate is to me, Maya?’

‘That is the nature of fate,’ said Westwick. ‘It runs, as our allies here would say, as heaven wills.’ She looked over at the captain of marines. ‘Sup from your green canteen, Henry. You need to stay calm until we get to the lower levels of the citadel.’

‘I’ve been taking too much green, tonight, first lieutenant,’ complained the officer from his watch post. ‘I’m going to bleeding sleep over here.’

‘Think of it as the milk that lines the stomach before the beer,’ said Westwick. ‘You’ll have your thirst quenched before we leave the citadel, that much I guarantee you.’

‘Does it taste good, lad, that blessed soup of yours?’ asked the commodore, as if the thought of its quality had only just occurred to him.

‘No, master cardsharp,’ said Tempest. ‘It’s just what you need, not what you want.’

‘A cruel fate, like I said, a wicked cruel fate.’

Jack had already received the order to ready for battle stations when the transaction engine’s main communications pipe began to whistle like a kettle coming to boil.

Another request?

He and Coss had just been warned by the runner from the crow’s-nest dome that three enemy vessels forward of the main fleet had been sighted, acting as a pathfinder squadron, each a match for the Iron Partridge. They and the drak-riding guardsmen accompanying them would soon have a quarrel on their hands.

Jack could almost hear the commodore’s comment on their situation. ‘A little appetizer for you lad, before the main course is served.’

Coss got to the communications pipe before Jack could slide the punch-card writer to lock and the steamman called across. ‘Captain Jericho for us, with an urgent request.’ The steamman switched the pipe to public address, the captain’s booming tones echoing over the sound and heat of their rotating, rattling calculation drums. ‘Bridge to the transaction-engine chamber. Check the archive of the ship’s schematics and see if we have a detailed specification for that exotic composite our celgas is bagged up in.’

‘Sir?’ said Jack. What’s he up to now?

‘It’s been said that the fellow who designed the Iron Partridge was the cleverest man in the Kingdom. It strikes me that if he replaced canvas with that peculiar cloth of his on our gas cells, there might be a reason for it, eh? Tensile strength, gentlemen, pressure per square inch. I require a swift lift for the vessel. I need to know if I can order our regassing tower crew to double the density of the cells — if we’ll hold or if we’ll burst.’

‘Double our celgas density over what time period, captain?’ asked Coss.

‘A minute, Mister Shaftcrank.’

‘Sir,’ protested the steamman, ‘there’s only one vessel that has ever attempted such a manoeuvre and she-’

‘I’m quite aware of what happened to the RAN Hotspur. Bring up those schematics from the engines’ archives,’ roared Jericho. ‘I’m going to play a little variation on the game of rock, paper, scissors. I call it carper, canvas, and iron — and I’m playing iron as m’hand.’

The captain’s voice faded from the chamber and Jack began working on dredging the dustiest corners of their records for the airwrights’ specifications. ‘He’s planning on ramming them, old steamer.’

‘By the copper beards of my ancestors,’ moaned the steamman. ‘The Loas preserve me from the mad schemes of you rash fast-bloods.’

‘The Cassarabians poked about on board when we were a prize vessel,’ said Jack. ‘They know we fly low and slow. Their ships are going to climb for height, and the skipper wants to bounce us right up into their bows.’

Jack gritted his teeth even as he said the words. They might dig up the tensile strength of their gas cells from the archives, but there wouldn’t be a solitary number on record to indicate whether the oddly crafted Iron Partridge could survive ramming a single Cassarabian airship, let alone three of them.

What was war anyway, but a collective, consensual madness between two nations? And they were under the command of an officer whose lunacy had been weighed by an admiralty that had judged him and run scared, leaving him marooned on the half-pay list. Only the next few minutes would reveal whether that was to make the Iron Partridge the deadliest ship in the fleet. Or the deadest.

Omar stopped at the door to read the elaborate script that had been traced on a copper plate by its side, but Farris Uddin did the job for him for the benefit of all the guardsmen disguised as womb mages, the commander’s tones inflected with a lisp-like quality by the length of his hunting nose.

‘Let only those womb mages of the Sect of Razat, or accompanied by the Sect of Razat, set foot beyond this boundary,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘And a saying from the twelfth book of Ben Issman, his name be blessed. “Let the efforts of your flesh be dedicated to progress, for in progress shall you be elevated.”’ Farris Uddin shook his head in anger.

‘Only the trusted may enter,’ said Omar. We are getting close.

‘Is this a warning or a call to heresy?’ asked Boulous.

‘One sect to control everything under god,’ said Farris Uddin. ‘This is the grand vizier’s vision — the destruction of the Holy Cent. He thinks he makes the empire stronger? He will tear us apart in ancient schisms by his perversions of the scripture’s holy word.’

Grimly, they pressed on through a series of narrow corridors, the end of the last corridor leading onto a gantry flanked by railings that crossed above a vault-like chamber perhaps a hundred feet high. The gantry branched out into smaller walkways to allow the womb mages access to the tanks below; hundreds of glass cases filled with every sort of creation the womb mages’ craft could call into existence. There were some creatures that looked to be related to the familiar biologicks that Omar recognized — the guardsmen’s draks, as well as the sandpedes the caravans used to cross the dunes — but the majority of the beasts were completely unfamiliar. Four-legged things the size of horses but with black armour carapaces, overlarge versions of the fighting beetles that Haffa townsmen used to set against each other while they laid wagers; water-filled tanks where dwarven oil-furred humanoids twisted and cut through the liquid — their child-like eyes staring out beseechingly; another creature man-sized, but lurching about, all exposed white bones with chords of muscle, as if someone had made a scarecrow by tying together dozens of bundles of sticks. With so many raw animal smells rising up in such close confines, Omar had to work not to gag through his womb mage’s mask.

The guardsmen stared uneasily at the howling, squalling, scampering mass of flesh beneath their boots. Even Omar felt the superstitious hackles rise on the back of his neck.

In an attempt to reassure the raiding party, Farris Uddin pointed down to the copper-plated pages of the spell books chained to each tank. ‘A flesh library. I have heard of such places. This is where the womb mages attempt to advance their craft. They alter their spells slightly to see what new creatures emerge from the wombs of their producers.’

They pressed on across the vault, windowless and dim except for a series of crimson lamps buried in the far wall. It was as if the flesh library had been made as a larger womb to store the children of the sorcerer’s craft. Boulous was the first to notice the ripples across the shadowed ceiling of the vault, pointing up and shouting a warning. What Omar had taken for tiles detached themselves in a black cloud and began wheeling down towards them.

‘Bats!’ shouted one of the guardsmen, sweeping his scimitar overhead as if swatting mosquitoes.

The creatures were the same size as bats, but their bodies were formed as bony flutes and they appeared to be eyeless and blind. They spiralled down and wheeled around the raiding party, keeping their distance from the brandished steel while emitting ear-piercing whistles. The occupants of the hundreds of tanks below started screeching and caterwauling in response.

‘They’re not attacking,’ called Omar. ‘They’re acting as a tripwire!’

Boulous wheeled around, looking at the circling creatures.

As if waiting for the word tripwire to be said aloud, the lights in the flesh library grew brighter, all the dim shadows banished — the trapped creatures howling in even greater panic.