All the womb mage novices inside the hall had fled screaming when the first of their number fell backwards into one of the skeletons, his chest broken by a beyrog crossbow bolt.
Commodore Black just counted his blessings that the beyrogs’ orders were explicit about trying to keep him and Maya alive. Along the sloping wall of the hall, long, thin windows looked out onto Mutantarjinn, and the commodore caught the distant thump of a grenade and a brief glint of light blossoming from the explosion.
‘The guardsmen are still out there, Maya. Harassing the city. Ah, what I’d give for one of those ugly flying man-lizards to land on the roof outside and whisk us to safety right now.’
‘The drak riders will fight to the end,’ said Westwick.
‘What about you, lass? Does that stand for you too?’
‘There’s only one way you’re getting out of here,’ said Westwick, in answer.
‘Now, I did rather figure that,’ said the commodore, his eyes narrowing slyly.
Looking up as snarls sounded from the beyrogs surrounding them, Commodore Black spotted a group of the grand vizier’s claw-guards fanning out across the end of the hall, Imperial Aerial Squadron marines too, the men trading shouted instructions between each other as they sprinted to take up position.
‘Well then,’ said the old u-boat man as he drew his heavy Cassarabian pistol. ‘Can there be a more suitable place than this to leave my weary old bones?’
When the Caliph Eternal had talked of an alternative route to reach the grand vizier’s twisted creations in the chambers below, Omar hadn’t realized it would entail a gusty detour down the outside of the Citadel of Flowers’ central tower.
While the maintenance stairwell corkscrewing around the tower was wide enough to accommodate their beyrog battalion marching three abreast, the stairs were completely unprotected by railings or a balustrade. It took every iota of Omar’s drak training to keep his sense of vertigo under control while descending. To keep himself from ducking as lightning forked over the giant spinning blades scraping their wind-driven passage around the chasm’s tallest tower.
At times it was hard for Omar to differentiate between the steady crack of the thunder and the relentless rumble of the beyrogs descending behind him. They were marching under the weight of yellow cuirass-style breastplates with gilded copper rivets, golden helmets mounted with red plume-like brushes on top, and a full canvas backpack loaded with canteens, rations, crossbow bolt quivers and scimitar sharpening stones. As much as their finery was designed to reflect their master’s wealth and power, putting beyrogs inside the showy dress uniforms was like trying to disguise the feral nature of a sand lion with a gem-studded collar. It only served to underline that these vast creatures really required nothing more than a length of sharp, shining steel with which to hammer their enemies.
The Caliph Eternal hadn’t ordered the beyrogs to change into their full field uniforms and he seemed almost blithely unaware of their presence as he walked down the lightning wreathed spire. Perhaps, Omar mused, it was as the caliph had confided during their captivity in the cells: his mind was full of past lives, all of the empire’s petty jealousies and ambitions repeating before him like a shadow play. But whether it was by accident of nature, blood, or the final changes the previous caliph had worked upon his replacement’s young body, Akil Jaber Issman had turned out nothing like the nervous, needy puppet whose life the grand vizier had preserved to install on the throne.
For Omar, there was nothing else left to him now but to follow this deposed ruler according to his guardsman’s oath, and take one final chance to smash the schemes of the wicked Immed Zahharl. Everyone else had gone to their inescapable end — his father, Farris Uddin, Boulous, the drak riders he had trained and fought alongside, even the two Jackelian spies and their sailors on their outlandish ironclad airship. There was just Omar left with the Caliph Eternal and he had never felt so tired or alone.
By his side, the caliph slipped on one of the stairway’s wet treads and Omar reached out to steady the ruler by his arm. ‘Are you alright, your majesty?’ Omar instinctively touched his own gut, noting the strange feeling of emptiness there. The changes being worked by the grand vizier’s sorcery had quietened for the last hour, but how much longer before he swelled up like a whale and could only survive inside the choking nutrient mist of a producer’s tank?
‘It is not the grand vizier’s foul virus that is making me sick,’ said the caliph, as if reading Omar’s mind — or at least his body language. ‘I am starving. Apart from that gruel in the cells, I haven’t had a meal for months that wasn’t fed to me through a tube stuck into my veins. Heaven’s silver gates, what I wouldn’t give for a roasted side of gravy-soaked lamb from the palace kitchens.’
Their scar-faced beyrog officer commented with a flicker of his fingers.
The Caliph Eternal shook his head. ‘No, I don’t need my sedan chair. This is not the Jahan, and I have been isolated enough from the empire, from the world. If it had been otherwise, the grand vizier would not so easily have been able to exchange my flesh brother and I as if we were both dolls from the same toy chest.’
‘The distance of command,’ said Omar. ‘That is what Master Uddin called it.’
‘It was an early lesson from my tutors, too. Detachment from those you must ask to die for you. I always used to wonder whose benefit that was for. My soldiers, or mine? When you detach yourself too much from life, the world and reality, I believe you start walking the path towards insanity.’ The ruler threw his hands towards the storm, as if he could command the very heavens around the Forbidden City. ‘I like the rain on my bare face. Have you got anything to say about it, all you caliphs who have passed before me? No whispers of advice for me? No pearls of wisdom to cast down before my sopping-wet toes?’
Protecting him from the wild discharges of energy in the sky, the beyrog formation gently eased the Caliph Eternal away from the open edge of the twisting staircase. ‘My voices seem quiet today,’ said the caliph. ‘Perhaps they have been embarrassed to silence by failing to spot the perverted nature of Immed Zahharl’s plot against me before it was too late. It was you and my two Jackelian angels that came to save me, guardsman, not the wisdom of the ages. When the time comes, I vow that I will see to it you do not suffer the producer’s fate the grand vizier has set for you.’
‘They all serve, those who do not oppose,’ said Omar.
The caliph shook his head. ‘Your faithfulness is much more than that, guardsman. Unlike that of my beyrogs, it is not instinctive. All that you have achieved, you have achieved for yourself.’
‘The famous Barir luck,’ whispered Omar.
He was about to find out how far it could be stretched before it snapped. As they rounded the bend on the tower’s stairs, Omar discovered himself facing rank after rank of the grand vizier’s claw-guards on the steps below, their talons already outstretched and glinting in the evil electric light of the chasm. And in the middle of the first line was Salwa, resplendent in the full regalia of the grand marshal of the imperial guardsmen; the faint, hidden pulse of Shadisa concealed somewhere far deep within the rain-slicked uniform.
Howling like a banshee, the claw-guard crashed back through the skeleton of a sandpede, hundreds of leg bones sent scattering through the air and spinning across the polished floor of the ossuary. Lowering his pistol’s smoking barrel, the commodore broke the gun and cleared its spent charge, feeding in a fresh shell while Westwick emptied her own pistol into one of the charging monsters. The noise of her shot was lost against the splintering volley of the grand vizier’s forces and the air-splitting thud of the beyrogs’ crossbows replying in kind.
‘There’s too many of the wicked things, Maya,’ coughed the commodore, snapping his pistol shut and pulling back its clockwork firing mechanism.
They were coming like a black flood through the exhibits, a vast, relentless tide of fury breaking against the beyrogs’ cuirasses and swords. While the claw-guards loped forward en masse, snaking past the displays of the ossuary, the Imperial Aerial Squadron marines had taken snipers’ positions at the rear of the hall, maintaining a constant rain of fire in their direction. Balls whizzed through the air, buzzing with the evil song of angry hornets.
‘That is rather the point,’ said Westwick. ‘A diversion must divert.’ She rubbed tiredly at her eyelids, just underneath where her forehead had been splashed by a claw-guard’s blood. ‘Damn my itching eyes; is the blood of these creatures poisoned?’
