uneasy alliance with their most ancient of foes. It was the fact that they were sailing into a war of aggression for the first time, breaching a covenant that was timeless for the people of Jackals. Jackelians kept to their borders and, as stalwart as they were in their nation's defence, they had no taste for empire. The very idea of crossing into another nation and taking the fight to an enemy they hadn't even caught sight of yet felt unseemly. And it was a wrongness that had seeped through the airships and unsettled every jack cloudie serving in the four fleets.
Hanning was still clacking out the message to the flagship when Ti'ive's sharp eyes spotted the Thunderbolt making a more basic communication, the craynarbian crying out at the sight of the all-ships command – a bright red pennant running up the flagship's spine ropes, flapping in the wind. Enemy sighted.
The flagship's h-stations flashed new orders for all to see, not bothering to single out any one ship of the line, and all the other airships picked up the message for general relay until the fleet fast became a sea of winking stars. Form line. Engage.
Hanning dashed out the orders on his pad, ripped off the top sheet and passed it up to Ti'ive. He might not have been sitting in the crow's nest up top, but the skyman could see the ruby-red storm front rolling in from the north. One minute it was sweeping in above the distant hills and the next minute they were swimming in it, thick, red, as if the blood of everyone in Quatershift below had been turned into steam and blown over the high fleet.
'Have you ever seen such a thing?' asked Ti'ive.
Hanning was trying to think what to say when a lance of light and fire jetted past the Revenge's aft, so hot that he could feel the glass of the h-station's dome burn with it, a sudden wave of thermals buffeting their airship and briefly clearing away the crimson fog. And beyond the Revenge, the Flying Fox, the lucky Fox – was revealed cut in two down her middle – the whole mid-section of the stat's hull vaporized in a cloud of superheated celgas. As broken now as her luck. Both the surviving sections of the airship tumbled away, spilling burning sailors and ballonets into the mantle of tumbling debris: the melted keel catwalk, exploding engine housings, celgas netting and flailing bracing wires, all steaming white hot from the enemy's strange heat ray.
Both sailors were struck dumb, but a voice sounded from the corridor above the tunnel that led down into the h-dome. 'They're above. They're above us!'
'What is it?' Hanning shouted up. 'Has the crow's nest sighted something? All I can see down here is-'
Seven or eight streams of energy similar to the last one jetted past, rocking the Revenge like a pigeon tossed by a tornado. Hanning fell off the operator's bench, Ti'ive sprawling about somewhere above him – his hard craynarbian shell cracking into the dome's glass.
Having lifted himself back up, dazed and bruised, Hanning blinked away the images torched on his retina to see a garden of bright red flowers – blooms of fire and smoke and blazing jack cloudies. 'Sweet Circle. How can they do this to us?'
Ti'ive tried to steady himself, as the airship and its h-dome rocked from side to side like a fairground ride. 'What's the matter with our damn airships today?'
Something caught Hanning's attention on the ground and he pulled his gaze away from the field of mushrooming destruction in the sky to look down upon the smashed ranks of the New Pattern Army in full ignoble retreat: the redcoats of the Light Infantry; the green uniforms of the Rifles; the cherry-trousered Hussars on their steeds, all retreating. Adding to the terror below was a rain of airship girders and the boiling ballast water falling from the Flying Fox. A few regiments of the infantry were trying to pull back in a disciplined line, but they were collapsing ragged against the sea of black – an undulating dark mass of the beast-soldiers of the Army of Shadows. Jackelian artillery units were attempting to set up their guns under the cover of the House Guards, each large cavalryman protected by an armoured gutta-percha cuirass, riding high and heavy on their exomounts; but the riders were encircled by a scattering of slats that had already broken through the collapsing squares of the West Pentshire Regiment. There were a few puffs from the heavy rifles carried by the House Guards before they were knocked off their mounts by streams of springing black creatures and torn apart.
The last glimpse of the ground Hanning had was the desperate uncoupling of artillery pieces from the trains of horses by their gunners before they too were swarmed over, then the unnatural cloud enveloped the Revenge and Hanning's dome was sealed once more inside a sea of dense crimson mist.
Hanning and Ti'ive looked at each other in shock. So used to flying above the carnage. So used to drifting high above the fog of war, dispassionate angels of destruction, directing the New Pattern Army and smashing any force foolish enough to break the Jackelians' peace. Now the two sailors suddenly found themselves as much subject to the vagaries of war as any confused redcoat, stumbling through the thick clouds of rifle and cannon smoke that settled over every battlefield.
Ti'ive yelled in shock as the eyeless face pushed itself up again the outside of the dome, tapping a curious, clawed finger against the glass.
'It's got a sail-rider's rig on its back,' shouted Hanning, not so panicked he didn't forget to draw his pistol from where it lay tucked into his belt.
Homing in on the sound of the two sailors, the beast drew its talons teasingly across the glass, leaving scratch marks on the crystal surface, then it threw itself back and disappeared into the crimson mist.
'It was whispering,' said Ti'ive.
'What?'
The craynarbian looked at his comrade. 'Didn't you hear it, Mister Hanning? It was whispering something in a language I didn't recognize and it was clicking, clicking like a blood bat. By jingo, they see by the sound of their throats – no wonder they prefer to fight inside this deadly red pea-souper of theirs. They must hunt by the screams and whimpers of their victims.'
Hanning shook his head – no, he hadn't heard the monster's whispers. The craynarbians were long diverged from the race of man through millennia of jungle survival, the hairs on the back of their skulls giving them a sixth sense lacking in their soft-skinned cousins. But Hanning heard the yells and shots from somewhere on the other side of the Revenge clearly enough, the distant echo of pistol fire reverberating through their wooden corridors. Hanning pulled a crystal charge out of his belt and broke open his bell-barrelled gun, pushing the shell into the breech.
He had solved the mystery of what had happened to the missing airships of the merchant marine. But after today – bar a few clerks of supply manning the inkwells of Admiralty House – there wasn't going to be anyone left in the Royal Aerostatical Navy to warn.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Coppertracks exited the long, low building of the camp's infirmary and indicated the door he had left open for Molly, Oliver and Purity to enter. 'The poisoning my patient is suffering has declined to residual levels. There is no danger of infection now if you talk to him.'
Hardarms had been dragged out of the smoking silver shell he had crashed in, and while the steamman warrior had accomplished his main charge – bringing Lord Starhome safely to the cannon project in Halfshire – the price of his success was the gradual failure of his proud metal body. For most of the time he had been unconscious – only Coppertracks' efforts had kept him alive even this long.
'And the steamman knight asked for me by name?' said Purity.
'He did,' admitted Coppertracks.
'But how did he-?'
'King Steam will have told him,' said Oliver. 'And that canny old steamer is so close to the Steamo Loas, he might as well be a spirit himself.'
'I thought King Steam was young,' said Purity. 'Barely out of his childhood.'
Oliver shrugged. 'The body, perhaps. His mind is the latest incarnation of a monarch older than the mountain behind us.'
'Soul,' corrected Coppertracks. 'King Steam's mind is unique to his latest body; it is his soul that is passed down through the generations.'
They entered the infirmary and were guided by Coppertracks to the room where Hardarms had been isolated. There was a smell of rubber in the room; wet, rotting and foul. One of Coppertracks' drones lay
