Jack Cloudie

his dagger hand and Omar hissed in frustration as he saw the line of his cut fading from the grand vizier’s face as if it was being erased by an invisible pencil.

‘I didn’t just reverse my gender,’ said the grand vizier. ‘I remade myself into a weapon, a razor with which to flay the skin from my enemies.’ He cut out viciously and Omar retreated a couple of steps under the force of the blows. The grand vizier hawked a gob of spit at Omar and the edge of the guardsman’s sword began to burn and blister where the spittle had struck above the hilt. Acid, he can spit acid. ‘I am an instrument of heaven, little slave. Divine justice given human form.’

‘Tell that lie to the widows of Haffa.’

‘Your father was nothing more than a corpulent vulture,’ laughed the grand vizier. ‘Complacently subsisting on the inventions of his ancestors. His coward’s fear of a new age doomed your house and all its allies. I was only the cliff edge he and the fading glories of your failing sect chose to jump off. Truly, it was he who killed your people, not I.’

Omar grunted as they threw themselves at each other, blades crashing, thrusting and probing in a fierce exchange. The grand vizier was as thin as a whip, but Omar could see that his sorceries had done something to his muscles. They moved in strange, alien ways that gave him the purchase and raw strength of someone four or five times his size — as if his skin had been filled by a host of eels squirming and wiggling.

Another fierce clash, and the scimitar in Immed Zahharl’s hand seemed to speed into a blur, breaking through Omar’s parries as easily as a knot being severed. Omar yelled as the sabre sliced through his sword arm’s biceps, its sudden bite burning, his arm plunged into fire. He dropped his scimitar into his left hand, his right arm hanging useless by his side.

‘See how quick my new body is,’ cooed the grand vizier. ‘A little push from my mind, and you are moving so slowly to my eyes that you might as well be wading through a sand drift. Did your guardsmen tutors take pity on you, little slave, and teach you how to fight left-handed?’

Omar lunged out and the grand vizier easily turned his blade. ‘I didn’t think so. Tell me how exquisite my new body is, slave. Tell me how you want it, how you need it.’

Omar yelled in desperation, ignoring the burning pain and swinging out with the scimitar in his left hand, but the grand vizier darted aside, plunging the dagger deep into Omar’s left shoulder. The young guardsman fell to the floor as the scimitar was kicked out of his hand to the crack of two or three of his fingers breaking.

‘Heaven chose to make me this way,’ the grand vizier whispered in Omar’s ear, before stepping back and booting him in the gut. ‘I am beautiful.’

Omar was left doubled up, coughing on the floor, blood spluttering out of his mouth and onto the stall’s concrete and sawdust. ‘A terrible beauty,’ gagged Omar. ‘So fast.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the pacing grand vizier, the scimitar rotating in his hand, measuring the length of the killing stroke. The executioner’s stroke that will sever my head from my body.

‘There’s one thing I have,’ Omar moaned in pain, pulling the grand vizier’s dagger out of his shoulder with his numb, crippled fingers, as blood gushed out of the wound.

‘Ah,’ smiled Immed Zahharl. ‘The great knife fighter from Haffa.’

Omar rolled forward in agony, pitching the blade at the grand vizier, the lazy rotations of the dagger missing the devil’s side by at least a couple of feet.

‘Perhaps you are more of a pistol master?’ laughed the grand vizier.

‘The one thing I had wasn’t your knife,’ said Omar, pulling himself to his feet. ‘It’s six months of foul-tasting, foul-smelling guards’ rations inside my body.’

Omar let the keening howls behind the grand vizier distract the man, just long enough for him to pitch forward in a charge and carry both their bodies tumbling through the opening gate and into the drak eyrie. Perhaps the grand vizier’s quick eyes even had time to notice Omar’s stolen dagger still quivering in the lever of the stable release handle. Yes, after six months of cadet rations Omar smelled like something a drak might actually acknowledge as its rightful master. Even an unbroken, raw fledgling drak — even an eyrie full of the wild, untamed beasts.

A long sinuous neck lashed out, sweeping Omar’s feet from underneath him, before a pair of more mature draks snapped out angrily at the young upstart beast that was daring to challenge a guardsman. Grunting in pain and allowing the more developed pair to protect him, Omar limped to the side of the tall eyrie.

In the centre of the chamber, Immed Zahharl was on his feet, curving his sword threateningly in front of the dozens of draks now circling him. Such a fine, exquisite body. But to a drak, it smelled nothing like a guardsman should. Some of the draks were so young that their scales hadn’t turned green yet, but even a fledgling drak weighed as much as a rhino.

‘My womb mages created you,’ shouted the grand vizier. ‘I created you.’

Hissing and darting their heads forward, the draks began to test the grand vizier’s defences. His scimitar leapt out and the snarling draks’ heads snapped back.

‘They don’t care,’ Omar called. ‘They’re the past and the guardsmen’s traditions, thousands of years of them, and our traditions have finally caught up with you.’

‘You are cursed, slave,’ shouted Immed Zahharl as a drak snapped the grand vizier’s blade away from him. ‘You will never be cured now. My death has cursed you!’

Omar shook his head. ‘No, I’m a guardsman, not a slave. And I’ve cursed myself.’ My choice. For what I did to Shadisa. But you first, you mangy bastard!

Immed Zahharl tried to run, striking out with his quick hands at the draks, but as fast as his sorcery-twisted body was, he could not evade an eyrie full of angry, snapping draks, their powerful, muscled tails beating out at him, claws flashing. More and more of the enraged creatures emerged from the side chambers and launched themselves down on him with the force of falling sabres.

Omar backed away towards the eyrie’s gate, the pair of draks trailing him stopping only to gaze at the dozens of their cousins feasting on the unexpected treat that had been thrown into their midst. The nearest of the pair grunted and Omar gasped as he caught sight of the human eyes buried inside the lizard-like features of the drak’s armoured skull. His eyes. This was the drak he had sacrificed his flesh for back in the palace. Omar’s bonded drak. It hissed knowingly at him, attracted by the invisible affinity between them. They were the same. It would ride for him like no other drak would, sensing his every whim, anticipating his every command in the air. Together, they would become the ultimate living weapon.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Omar, pushing the eyrie gate’s closure lever. ‘You’ll feel the storm on your wings soon enough.’

Behind him, Commodore Black came running down the gantry of the stable’s upper level, a trail of biologicks in the stalls tracking his steps and hooting plaintively for a long overdue feed.

‘Immed Zahharl?’ asked the man.

Omar waved his crippled hand towards the eyrie.

Commodore Black grunted when he looked through at the sight on the other side of the gate. ‘Then we’ve won, lad.’

Omar propped his bleeding body against the wall. Shadisa was lost to him. Farris Uddin, Boulous, half the guardsmen, his father and his home gone. His very body was cursed with the grand vizier’s foul sorcery.

‘No.’

‘You’re learning, Mister Barir,’ said the commodore. ‘This is what victory tastes of. Clear your throat and spit the blood out, because you’re alive enough to sup on its ashes.’

From the other end of the stables came the victorious cheers of the stable hands and the animal-like bellows of the beyrogs. The last claw-guard had fallen, the corpses of the Sect of Razat’s inner circle left sprawled across the floor.

Victory had come to the citadel, but it wasn’t nearly enough to fill the hollow inside Omar’s soul. He had learnt the last lesson of being a guardsman, the one every soldier had to learn for himself.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Omar winced as the gaggle of the citadel’s surgeons and womb mages poked and prodded at his body, the