Jack Cloudie

surviving claw-guards was locked in unequal combat with the stable staff — pitchforks and baling hooks no match for the monsters’ sword-length talons. The beasts were assisted by a mob of robed figures — keepers and holy servants from the Sect of Razat — along with a scrum of highly placed womb mages. So, the grand vizier’s inner circle had heard the Caliph Eternal’s commands and were trying to flee the sinking ship alongside their master.

Omar’s force raced into the carnage, the beyrogs battering aside Immed Zahharl’s twisted creations, the sounds of scimitars connecting with leather armour stifled by the racket from hundreds of sandpedes in one of the side-stalls rearing up and clawing in panic at the iron bars with their segmented legs.

But where is the grand vizier? The dregs of the regime were here, trying to save their skins, but where was the dog himself? Omar could almost taste Immed Zahharl’s rage, his hatred for the guardsman who had come so close to overthrowing his rule for good. He was still inside the great stable, his soul pulsing with venomous loathing for Omar.

Omar smashed aside a claw-guard, the beyrogs behind him covering his back as he sprinted down the central passage — fifty foot wide with two levels of cavernous stalls on either side, filled with creatures driven into a frenzy by the un expected violence that had spilled into the normally quiet stables.

‘Immed Zahharl!’ yelled Omar. ‘Come out. The smallest and least significant of your loose ends has come for you. Show me of how little account you find me now.’

‘Watch out lad!’ The commodore’s shouted warning almost came too late.

Catching the movement above him, Omar desperately rolled forward, tonnes of moving metal almost slicing him in half as a vast gate composed of thousands of bars dropped down from the ceiling, locking into place in a concrete groove in the floor. As he came to his feet, Omar found himself the only one from the caliph’s force on his side of the great stables — all of the beyrogs and the commodore still locked in battle against the grand vizier’s cabal and their claw-guards on the other side.

Commodore Black had a stable keeper pushed up against the gate on the opposite side. ‘Open the blessed doors.’

‘I cannot,’ yelled the man, looking in terror at the sabre hovering inches from his chest. He jerked a hand at a corpse on the floor wearing stable livery. ‘Only the stable master has the codes to unlock the stampede wall.’

Commodore Black banged the bars in frustration. ‘I’ll force the lock. Crack it and get the beyrogs across to you. Stay there, lad.’

‘He’s here,’ said Omar, feeling the intense ball of burning hate throbbing behind him. ‘Old man, if I don’t make it …’

‘Don’t say that, lad. Saying it can make it come true. You’re a guardsman, the blessed blade of the Caliph Eternal himself. You remember that.’

‘Yes,’ said Omar. That is all I have left. His house, Shadisa, Boulous, Farris Uddin, his family, all swallowed up by the ambitions of a single hellion in human form. But I’m still a guardsman. ‘Your friend, Jared Black, the Pasdaran woman. You know she’s going to kill you here.’

The commodore winked at him through the bars. ‘Aye, you might be right, but you worry about yourself, not me. There’s many a slip, lad, between cup and lip.’

Omar turned down the stable’s central passage, walking forward and ignoring the clash of swords and screams from the gate behind him. ‘You’ve left your people to die, Immed Zahharl.’

‘But the empire teems with so many people.’ There he was, the grand vizier emerging on one of the stone walkways built into the wall, standing in front of stalls on the second level. ‘And the future is always purchased by sacrifice.’

So it seems, but until now, never yours.

Omar pointed his scimitar up towards the grand vizier’s heart. ‘The future is one body short.’

‘I do so hate wasting a good breeder,’ the grand vizier called down. ‘How does your stomach feel, last son of Barir? The first wave of agony should have passed by now. The second wave will begin to burn inside you some time tomorrow morning. In a couple of days you will need a company of beyrogs to carry you to your new duty. How fine it would have been, to see you and the boy king in labour, your faces turning purple as you squeezed out another litter of claw-guards to fight for me. Why must you always disrupt my pleasures?’

Is that the secret the Caliph Eternal talked of keeping the grand vizier alive for? Does he believe that without the creator of the changeling virus, the other womb mages will have no chance of curing us?

‘Your little enculi wants me alive,’ laughed the grand vizier. ‘But do you think the empire’s soldiers and sailors will still follow their precious Caliph Eternal so readily after his belly has bloated large enough to give birth to a sandpede? What about you? Does the last son of Barir wish me alive, or as a corpse?’

Omar wrestled with the conflicting feelings inside him. What did he want, what did he need?

‘If I live, you are both dead,’ jeered the grand vizier. ‘If I die, you are both cursed. That is my revenge, guardsman, and it is purer than every last gold coin the caliph has placed on my head as a bounty.’

‘A guardsman is the Caliph Eternal’s right arm,’ said Omar, climbing a wall rail to reach the stable’s second tier. ‘Bound to obey his oath.’

Still retreating, the grand vizier laughed at Omar. ‘Come, little peacock, show me the strength of your oath.’

‘Here’s my vow. I’m a freed slave with the stench of the sack of Haffa still reeking in my nostrils,’ yelled Omar, pulling himself up onto the second level of stalls. ‘I was raised by water farmers and a tribesman of the Mutrah, a wild reformed bandit who was little better than a savage. I’m not going to take you alive, by the blood of my house and my family and Shadisa, I’m going to slice you into pieces.’

Immed Zahharl had stopped by the stall at the end of the row, stooping to unlock its gate with a key stolen from the stable master’s corpse. ‘That, at last, is the truth of it. And I am the last princess of the noblest house of Hakaqibla. You were given your pathetically limited existence only to serve me.’ The grand vizier stepped back into the open stall and disappeared.

Omar caught a familiar smell from inside the stall. Draks! The grand vizier had been heading down to the stables to saddle a drak and try to fly out to the fleet on one of his enemy’s own steeds. Omar entered the antechamber to the drak eyrie, a tack room racked with saddle storage, hay, bedding, forks and rakes, the draks held back by a second gate inside. The grand vizier had already reached a control panel on the far wall, and a hangar door in the outside wall was drawing back, revealing the towers of Mutantarjinn beyond, the storm still whipping through the chasm.

Unhooking a drak saddle from the wall, the grand vizier dropped it on the floor and drew his scimitar. ‘Leave me to escape and I’ll cure your infected belly, lowly slave. You do realize I’m the only womb mage alive with the skills to save you.’

Omar shook his head and pointed to the draks shifting about in the eyrie chamber behind them. ‘I would give birth to every drak inside there just for the chance to carve you into pieces.’

Immed Zahharl kicked the saddle aside. Angrily raising the scimitar high in a guard position, the grand vizier drew out a long dagger from behind his back, turning it between his fingers in an intricate, hypnotizing motion. ‘At least your stupidity has the benefit of consistency. Come, lowly slave, come and show me what you have been taught. My line’s blood is destined to be mirrored down the ages — while yours shall be spilled here.’

Ignoring mocking jibes that were only intended to drive him in anger onto the pair of blades, Omar circled the grand vizier slowly, marking the expert way he turned the weapons. Someone had trained him to fight. Someone every bit the equal of the old cadet master back in the palace fortress. But then, given the grand vizier’s wealth, he would have paid for the very best tutors from the finest duelling halls inside the empire.

There was a clash of steel as their blades lashed out at the same time, the grand vizier’s feet moving and twisting in the steps of a sinister dance. Their swords clashed again, Omar side-stepping the dagger in the politician’s other hand, kicking out with his boot towards Immed Zahharl’s knee and nearly losing his balance as the grand vizier darted out of the way with balletic grace.

‘Brutal and direct,’ sneered Immed Zahharl. ‘Every bit the guardsman and every bit the slave.’

There is nothing fancy about gutting a traitorous dog. Omar bit his lip and feinted left while changing his thrust at the last second and cutting right. The grand vizier swayed back, but a moment too slow, the tip of Omar’s scimitar nicking his cheek and drawing blood. Immed Zahharl wiped it off with the back of