Jack Cloudie

against their ranks, a giant soldier toppling over with his bright uniform torn to shreds and his cuirass opened up by the constant rain of talon strikes. By the commodore’s side, Westwick looked every bit as exhausted as the commodore felt, her coffee-coloured skin slicked with sweat and her blade arm still and raised for the next attack, no more of the flourishes and fancy spins that he’d noticed she favoured when they had started fighting. Biding her time and preserving her energy for the next claw-guard to break through the retreating unit’s lines. Only the one- eyed giant acting as the company’s captain appeared to be undiminished by the constant, harrowing withdrawal. He kept his blade spinning around like a small windmill, decapitating his miniature cousins as they came leaping forward, seizing others mid-air, throttling them and contemptuously tossing their limp bodies against the walls.

For all of their animal snarls, the beyrogs’ stone-skinned faces lent them a strangely stoical, immobile cast as they fought. Whereas soldiers from the race of man would have exhibited confusion, fear and anger in this relentless close-quarter’s combat, the only sign of emotions from the beyrogs came from their eyes, their most human feature. Fighting alongside them was like fighting alongside the trolls from some polar barbarian’s fireside legend. But even giants from legend could die when the odds were this appallingly stacked against their favour.

Who will remember me if I fall here? Who would remember poor old Blacky? His friends back home, perhaps. The friends with whom he shared his residence, Tock House? Poor old Jared Black, off on one of his mysterious little jaunts, and he simply never came back from his last journey. Lost like one of those mortal fool explorers in the jungles of the east. Not much time to grieve for him, not when he was lost to the storm that would emerge from the empire’s borders, sweeping the entire Kingdom before it. Everything he had lived and fought for all of his life. The forested roads of their green and pleasant land echoing to the jingle of the campaign kit of creatures such as these claw-guards, the last few red-coated regiments of the Middlesteel Rifles broken by the grand vizier’s forces.

Feeling a slight airflow on his neck, the commodore risked a glance behind him. Sweet Circle, they were running out of the passageway, the corridor opening out to their rear. He remembered where they were now, from their journey down from the barracks. The beyrogs were falling back towards the central chamber of the Citadel of Flowers, where the multiple wings of the evil construction joined in an inner concourse that had been speared through the core by a calliope of lifting rooms, dozens of the pipe-like conveyances linked by gantries and walkways. While the commodore’s beyrog escort had been ignored well enough on the way down by the hundreds of womb mages and their servants in the order moving through the chamber — just another military unit marching through the citadel — something told him the citadel’s denizens would find it harder to ignore a pitched battle being fought between two breeds of their own sorcery-created monstrosities. Damn his unlucky stars. A dim cavernous hall with minimal cover. Their depleted force would be overwhelmed within a minute of leaving the tight confines of the passage.

Westwick had spotted the danger as well. ‘Hold your ground! Hold them here!’

‘We can’t do it, Maya,’ said the commodore, dodging back as talons lashed through the beyrogs’ ranks, trying to reach him. ‘There isn’t enough fight left in the few bodies we have remaining.’

‘If they get behind us …’

‘We have to cut and run, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘That’s the only option we have other than planting our corpses here.’

‘The Caliph Eternal’s protectors will not turn tail and flee.’

Commodore Black hardly counted his tired old bones among that list, but perhaps the first lieutenant — along with all of the Pasdaran’s other agents — did.

‘I’ll give them their mortal lead, then. A clean pair of heels — a strategy that’s been used by many a great general.’

‘You try to run and I’ll bloody kill you myself. Hold them back!’ shouted Westwick, hacking out at the legion of beasts.

But she might as well have been yelling at the tides of the sea for all of the effect that her orders had. Another beyrog slipped on the bloody floor, weighed down by a pack of roaring, slashing claw-guards, the gap left in the line allowing the grand vizier’s pets to burst through. Westwick rolled across the floor, sweeping the feet out from under the attackers, the beyrog captain and Commodore Black hewing into the claw-guards before they could regain their balance.

The beyrog formation closed ranks, thinner then ever, trampling back across the fresh corpses, driven into retreat by the sheer weight and ferocity of the numbers coming towards them.

Even by the fierce standards of battle in Cassarabia, where the losers were so often given the sword, this battle was as bad and bloody as any that had ever been fought inside the empire. No quarter given, expected or asked for. Has Mutantarjinn ever seen anything like it before? The terrible city was no stranger to misery. The generations of slaves whose lives had leeched away here as they gave birth to the dark creations of womb-mage sorcery. Its dark towers squatting in a chasm cut out of a hellish plain and beaten by the devil’s own storms. And now the empire’s sorcerous armies were pitted against each other in a civil war that looked as if it would sweep across the face of the civilized world.

Inch by inch the beyrogs surrendered the passage to the foe, leaving the claw-guards’ bodies piled up in front of their ranks, the corpses pushed aside and clambered over by fresh soldiers howling their anger towards the caliph’s private bodyguard. Edging closer to the citadel’s cavernous central hall, until the cold currents of the open space were running like ice along the back of the commodore’s neck.

Commodore Black stumbled back. They had long since lost their two buglers to the sabre-like claws of the grand vizier’s pets, but the beyrogs didn’t need the orders of a trumpet to form the only disposition that could preserve their lives for a few seconds more. They fell back towards the hall’s centre, automatically making a square; their scimitars dripping gore and their cuirasses dented by rifle fire and talon strikes and streaked with blood. Hundreds of womb mages and their staff scattered across the ground level of the hall, clamouring as the tide of bloody violence spilled out into the open, while servants shouted on the walkways above and pointed down in disbelief. Pouring out of the passage as though they were a nest of angered ants, the claw-guards surged into the open, loping and circling the few beyrogs left alive, waiting until they had overwhelming numbers to rout the ruler’s bodyguard in a single charge. Imperial Aerial Squadron marines and armed sailors were assembling at the edges of the chamber, pushing shells into their rifles’ breeches. The commodore kicked an empty crossbow quiver in frustration. We have nothing with which to match their guns.

Then there was a strange sound that Commodore Black had never heard before, rising from the throats of the beyrogs. A wolf-like keening. Their death dirge, or — no it was directed at the figure emerging from the passage surrounded by claw-guards. Immed Zahharl. The grand vizier victoriously emerging like an emperor come to give the sign of life or death to gladiators lying in the sand. It was a song of pure loathing directed at the man who had dared to overthrow their beloved ruler of rulers and crown himself emperor over their master’s corpse.

‘Do you expect us to surrender?’ Westwick shouted from the middle of the square.

The grand vizier shook his head slowly, smiling all the while. ‘Knowing that this is the very last trouble I shall receive from a member of the secret police? Please, don’t deny me that.’ He pointed his sword at the huddled formation of survivors from the caliph’s bodyguard. ‘Make ready-’

He was interrupted by a shout from the gantry above. ‘Not the last trouble, surely?’

Commodore Black gawked up at the sight of hundreds of beyrogs with their crossbows pointed down into the hall, the caliph standing with the young guardsman Omar Barir in front of a number of glass tanks being manoeuvred out of the lifting rooms at the chamber’s centre.

‘I am sure the Pasdaran are still interested in treason and,’ the caliph flung a hand back towards the tanks, ‘the perverted sorceries of the grand vizier.’

There were gasps of outrage from the womb mages scattered across the massive chamber as they gazed at the faces of the slowly squirming men in the tanks, prisoners’ sweating bearded cheeks glowing in the nutrient mist; twisted, pregnant bellies laid out like hills of flesh before them.

‘Hear me. Hear your Caliph Eternal. This is the progress which the Sect of Razat brings you!’ shouted the young ruler, his voice carrying far across the quieted hall. ‘The progress of slaves and criminals who were born women and who have perverted their bodies towards the male form through the use of an illegal changeling virus. Criminals who have dared to use a variation of that foul virus to turn men into producers to breed unlicensed