Jack Cloudie
‘Foolish boy, do you think it is a coincidence my kin have chosen this day to come for me? She had brought word,’ said Alim. ‘The whisper of the sands, the storm that is following the high keeper here.’
‘What storm?’ demanded Omar.
‘The Sect of Ackron is to be declared heretic,’ said Alim. ‘Not enough tithes have been offered by the sect’s followers to pay the Caliph Eternal the Holy Cent’s one-hundredth annual share. There is a new sect rising, the Sect of Razat. They now have the power in the capital, and they would take their place in the unity of the one true god. They will offer your sect’s tithe money instead. They will be the new fifty-third sect.’
‘That is just politics,’ said Omar.
‘Fool of a freeman,’ said Alim. ‘There can only be a hundred facets of the one true god, not one sect less, not one sect more. When the Sect of Ackron loses its place at the table, its followers will lose all protections under the caliph’s law. Everyone in your father’s house will be declared heretic. The first to arrive here will be brigands and bandits. Everything of value will be looted and plundered. Every man, woman and child healthy enough to be tied to a camel will be taken as slaves.’
‘No,’ protested Omar. ‘I am a freeman now.’
‘Free to die, perhaps,’ said the old nomad. ‘The bandits and slavers and freebooters are not the worst. All the houses willing to renounce the Sect of Ackron have already done so. Only honourable houses like Marid Barir’s have stayed loyal and not shifted their allegiance with the changing wind. The followers of Razat know that anyone who defects at this late stage will harbour hate in their hearts towards them, and they will never allow such vipers to be given sanctuary within the other houses, where they might rise to prosperity again and declare feud in the years to come. The houses that support the new sect will send their troops to Haffa and leave not even the children here alive. Your newly found blood, Omar,’ Alim touched the boy’s arm kindly. ‘It is a poison that has marked you out for certain death.’ He made a strange warbling in the back of his throat and one of the riders came galloping down the dunes, holding the reins of a riderless camel.
Alim smoothly mounted the saddle and threw down a thick leather purse filled with tughra, the paper notes of the empire’s treasury. ‘This is all the money I have saved tending the salt-fish with you over the years. It will be more than enough to pay one of the fishermen to sail you north. Travel away from the empire until you see the sands give way to scrublands, then hills that run green. Those are the uplands of the Jackelians. Tell them you are an escaped slave and you will find sanctuary there in the Kingdom.’
‘But the Jackelians are infidels,’ cried Omar. ‘It is said they deny all gods, even the heathen ones. Their cities run dark with evil smoke and dead, lifeless machines.’
‘They have a council,’ said Alim, ‘which they call parliament. Their ships and soldiers hunt all the empire’s slavers, for which their loathing is well known. They will protect you.’
‘Please, Alim,’ begged Omar. ‘Let me fetch Shadisa and we will travel with you. We will go to another town where no one knows us.’
Alim shook his head sadly. ‘There are family markers in your blood that will be known by any womb mage who chooses to test you, and the assassins that will follow after you will know both your markers and your face well. Whatever happens here, you must never travel across the dunes of the Mutrah, Omar Barir, not unless you are riding with a well-armed caravan. You will not like our punishments for trespassing. If I catch you in the sands after today, I will dig you a pit and bury you up to your waist. Then I will stampede my camels across your head. Filthy townsman.’
‘Please, Alim,’ shouted Omar, taking a couple of hesitant steps forward. ‘In the name of the one true god, Shadisa and I have nothing left here!’
‘There is the desert,’ Alim called back. ‘The desert is always left, and for you the desert is death. Flee, freeman, travel north and fly before the storm.’
Whooping in their strange gargling throat songs, the nomads rode away, Alim among them, without even a backward glance, disappearing into the last tinges of red on the horizon above the dunes. For as long as Omar could remember, Alim had been the one person he had counted as his family, and now he was riding away into the desert. Omar’s luck had vanished the moment he had received these papers of freedom: abandoned him just like Alim.
Omar looked back at the water farm, empty now except for him, and then he looked over towards the distant fortress of Marid Barir. My father is inside there, and Shadisa.
Picking up the nomad’s purse, Omar started to run wildly before the gathering storm.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jack didn’t know the name of the airship field the horseless carriage had driven him to, but First Lieutenant Maya Westwick and the soldier John Oldcastle seemed to know it well enough. The portly man threw the horseless carriage around, dodging past the field’s massive airship rails and docking clamps, some pulling RAN aerostats into colossal hangars, others holding airships stationary while the craft were regassed and provisioned with fuel, oxygen tanks, supplies and ordnance. There were no airships of the merchant marine here, no passenger and visitor enclosures. Just blue naval uniforms striding about to inspect the work of stripe-shirted sailors hanging off the side of their giant cigar-shaped vessels, repainting the navy’s standard chequerboard pattern on the lower envelopes or cleaning cannons that had been pushed through rubber-hooded gun ports.
As his carriage pulled up in front of a hangar with its doors shut, Jack saw there were multiple lines of people queuing behind desks while others stood ready for inspection. First Lieutenant Westwick jumped out of the vehicle and strode across to a line of sailors, men and women standing at ease as an official inspected them. Lifting a sheaf of papers from the officer, Westwick walked down the line, her eyes switching between the records and crew in front of her. She returned to the horseless carriage shaking her head as John Oldcastle climbed out of the driver’s pit and motioned to Jack to step down onto the grass.
‘Wasters and idlers to a man,’ spat the first lieutenant. ‘I wouldn’t trust them to keep a kite aloft on a windy day, let alone a ship of the line.’
‘There are other options,’ said Oldcastle, drawing Jack aside and moving him into one of the lines of people queuing behind a desk.
The first lieutenant glanced at Jack as angrily as if she had caught him with his fingers around a knife, slicing open her bag of shopping to catch the dropping food. ‘We’ve already scraped those barrels.’
She pointed to the lounging sailors she had just inspected and shouted to the navy official. ‘Send them back to Admiralty House, every one of them.’
John Oldcastle watched her disappear into the hangar and tapped Jack on the shoulder, calling out to the officer manning the desk at the front of the line. ‘Just administer the oath for this young fellow, Lieutenant McGillivray. He’s in.’ He glanced at Jack, before following the first lieutenant away. ‘You’ll do for now, Mister Keats, yes you will.’
‘That’s luck,’ said an old white-haired man with a wooden leg, waiting ahead of Jack. He rubbed a finger on Jack’s dirty torn jacket, his hand clutching a punch card, presumably his state work record. ‘Give me some of it, boy. You’re in.’
‘Yes, but into what?’ said Jack.
‘The service,’ rumbled an odd-sounding voice behind Jack. Turning, Jack saw it was a steamman, one of the foreign machine creatures queuing behind him. ‘Into the Royal Aerostatical Navy.’
The people of the metal tended to keep to their own quarter of the capital. Why would one of them want to sign up for military service? Did King Steam permit the citizens of the Steamman Free State to sign up in their neighbour’s aerial navy, even if the Jackelians were their ally of longest standing?
‘You’re going to join the RAN?’ asked Jack.
‘He’ll get in today,’ croaked the wooden-legged man. ‘We all will. Nobody else wants to fly in the Iron Partridge.’ He pointed to the colossal hangar doors that had started opening in front of them. ‘An unlucky ship, aye. That’s all anyone has ever said of her.’
Jack looked at what was beginning to emerge from the hangar with astonishment. The vessel had the basic cigar-shaped lines of an airship, but there her similarities with the other airships on the naval field ended. For a start, her hull appeared to be riveted over with metal plates from stem to stern. The top of her hull was decorated with a frill of massive pipes, as if some lunatic had inserted an oversized organ along her spine. Her lower hull wasn’t painted with the black and yellow chequerboard of a Jackelian man-of-war either, but streaked with grey and blue angular shapes. The only standard thing about her was the figurehead on her bow dome, a sharp-beaked partridge with a pair of iron fin-bombs wrapped by lightning bolts clutched in its claws. Jack had to cover his ears as the engine cars – double rows of eight along each side – burst into life, the propellers giving her an extra push out of the hangar.
‘How can she even fly?’ shouted Jack over the noise.
‘She flew out of the breaker’s yard right enough,’ said the old sailor in front of Jack. ‘Slow and easy, only a day before they were due to scrap her.’
‘Curse my valves, but I will serve aboard her,’ the steamman’s voicebox vibrated. ‘If it means I can fly, I will take her.’
‘She looks like she was designed by King Steam,’ said Jack. ‘She looks like one of your people with fins.’
‘You are closer to the truth than you realize, my softbody friend,’ said the steamman.
‘Listen to Coss Shaftcrank, he knows,’ laughed the wooden-legged man. ‘Haven’t we been in the signing-on line for months together, waiting for a berth. Me and the old steamer here, every day, without a single skipper in the high fleet willing to give either of us a chance.’
What is going on here? Jack gazed with shock at the unwieldy metal-plated whale bumping out of the hangar. Nobody in their right mind was going to climb inside that monstrosity and risk heaven’s command in her. Then the realization struck. Nobody who had a choice in the matter.
They had reached the head of the queue and the officer behind the table, his uniform half-hidden by a portable transaction engine set up to process the recruits, took in all three of them with a sober glance. ‘Pete Guns. Has the navy, by chance, stopped paying you your pension, that I have to see you back here in the signing line again?’
‘Nobody can tie a fuse as well as I, Lieutenant McGillivray,’ insisted the old man, ‘as you should well remember.’
‘And I have now reduced my weight to within navy board guidelines,’ added Coss Shaftcrank. The steamman pointed to the massive craft drawing up behind the desk. ‘The final requirement, as you stipulated to me at the start of the week. And kiss my condensers, but you will need engineers with an affinity with machines on board the Iron Partridge to fly her through the clouds.’
‘Aye, with machines,’ said the lieutenant, sounding resigned. ‘Not a machine.’ He stared at Jack. ‘And John Oldcastle’s wee thief. Well, it takes one to know one. You steal from a fellow cloudie’s chest on board my ship, laddie, and you’ll wish they had given you the rope, you will. Have you got your letters?’
Jack nodded and caught the card that was tossed at him with the oath to parliament printed on it. ‘I don’t suppose the judge furnished you with a state work record, laddie? No. Too much to ask. These two lubbers have the oath memorized already. Come on, laddie, let’s hear it from you, or you can go back to your courtroom and choose the knot for your noose.’
And just like that, Jack found he had a half-honest trade at last. For as long as his strange airship stayed aloft.
Jack stole past the back of the red-coated marine walking down the airship’s corridor, slipping into the keel deck’s loading station, and, exactly as he had hoped, found the Iron Partridge’s hatches still open. Peering through, Jack saw bales of supplies left on the grass of the airship field below. He shinned down one of the crane cables on the lifting gear. Touching down on the grass, which felt slightly damp in the evening air, Jack heard a cough and he spun around.
It was John Oldcastle, his borrowed marine’s crimson jacket swapped for the better-fitting but still untidy fabric of a warrant sky officer. The large man was rubbing the side of his dark salt-peppered beard with a mumbleweed pipe and didn’t look surprised in the slightest to see Jack trying to go absent without leave.
‘The locks I had put on your cabin were the best the navy had to offer, lad,’ said Oldcastle.
Jack shrugged.
‘But that’s not much for a mortal clever fellow like you, I suppose.’
‘The cipher on the lock’s transaction engine wasn’t random,’ said Jack. ‘It repeats itself every few minutes, if you look hard enough.’
‘They always do,’ sighed the warrant officer. ‘I know you have family in the care of Sungate Board of the Poor. Two brothers is it?’
‘They’re not old enough to leave the workhouse,’ said Jack. ‘And I wouldn’t have them run from it.’
‘It’s a hard place,’ said Oldcastle.
‘You don’t even know the half of it,’ said Jack. ‘Don’t try and stop me from leaving.’
Oldcastle slid a heavy bell-mouthed sailor’s pistol across the bale he was sitting on. ‘It’ll pain me to shoot you, lad. But I’ll do it for your own blessed good.’
Jack’s eyes flicked across the space between the pistol and the old sailor’s plump fingers. Calculating the chances he would be able to draw an accurate bead on Jack as he was dodging between the supplies waiting underneath the airship’s belly.
‘They’ll find you,’ said Oldcastle, ‘if you run. Navy provosts will come after you. They’ll stretch your neck, Jack Keats, and then what good will you be to your family? A dead man is no good to anyone but the worms.’
Well, what good have I ever been to my family anyway? What good would he be lying dead in the wreckage of the flying metal folly he had been sentenced to serve on board?
Oldcastle struck a match on the side of a crate and relit his pipe, puffing contentedly with the simple pleasure of sweet smoke. ‘I have a friend back in the capital. A Sungate girl herself, once, not that you’d know it to see the fine trim of her bonnet now. She’ll look in on your two lads and make sure they don’t starve on that poorhouse gruel.’
‘I’m nothing to you,’ said Jack. ‘Why would you do that for me? I don’t trust you or your friend First Lieutenant Westwick.’
‘She’s a spiky one, isn’t she?’ said Oldcastle. ‘As fair a face as ever graced a ship of the line, but don’t let that fool you; she’s a steel rose, with the petals of a cutting razor. And you’re right not to trust me, lad. For I’m aiming to get you killed. But not this evening. And not in front of a Bonegate gallows-day crowd. And my word’s gold for your two brothers in the workhouse, and that’s as good an offer as you’re receiving tonight.’
He brushed the barrel of his pistol to reinforce his words. The warrant officer’s veiled threat was interrupted by the appearance of a military carriage that could have been the twin of the one that had arrived to take Jack to the army. A man on foot was chasing it at speed. At first Jack thought it was the mysterious man he had half-recognized in court, but the runner was only wearing the same style of long dark cloak tied at his neck. This officer’s face was different: sandy hair flopping above an angular nose that looked too big for the measly pinched face that surrounded it.
First Lieutenant Westwick appeared like a ghost from behind the bales, and Jack wondered if she had been there all along as she glanced irritated towards the carriage and its naval pursuit. She pointed at Jack. ‘A little early for him to be helping you.’
‘Just two sailors, chewing the fat, Maya,’ said Oldcastle
Jack nodded a silent look of thanks to the portly warrant officer. I could have swung for what I just tried to do.
Overtaking the armoured carriage, the beaky admiralty naval officer stopped his sprint and pointed accusingly at the first lieutenant. ‘This carriage has no business being here.’
‘It has every business,’ said the woman. ‘Unless you have an order from parliament that rescinds our authority over the Iron Partridge.’
There was a hum as the carriage’s ramp was lowered, and a pair of marines walked down escorting a veritable mountain of a man, seven feet tall, with a neck like the trunk of an oak. His large hands were bound with chains and he was wearing a marine’s boots half-covered by the rough cotton robes that Jack well-recognized from the sight of the convicts shuffling around Bonegate jail’s exercise yard. Another convict, but this man’s face was concealed by a rubber mask.
‘A captain of marines must command order on a ship,’ spat the admiralty officer, ‘not disrupt it.’
‘The case,’ demanded Lieutenant Westwick, her arm outstretched to receive a wooden medical box that one of the marines had carried down from the carriage. ‘You received my original list of staff requests a month ago, Vice-Admiral Tuttle. Every one of the sailors I asked for has become unavailable or has been conveniently reassigned.’
‘I demand to see your captain,’ barked the admiralty officer. ‘Immediately.’
‘He’s not presently on board our ship.’
‘Drunk, gambling, or both?’ sneered the admiralty officer. He stared at the man mountain shambling down the ramp. ‘You will find there are not nearly enough marines in the naval stockade to crew your pathetic commission of an airborne hulk.’
‘Ah, that depends on how wide you cast the net, sir,’ called Oldcastle, pointing behind the carriage. Jack turned to see near a hundred horses bearing swarthy riders, curved short-swords hanging from their saddles. Benzari tribesmen! They thundered to a halt in front of the airship’s nose and dismounted, chattering approvingly at the sight of the vessel; slapping their thighs in amusement, as if the Iron Partridge had been pulled out of her hangar and onto a fairground lawn for their amusement.
The admiralty officer’s sharp face was turning a beetroot colour in fury. ‘The Benzari Lancers are an army regiment.’
‘Attached to our ship now, sir,’ smiled Oldcastle. ‘Courtesy of the fine fellows at House Guards. Always willing to honour a request for cooperation, the general staff, what with Admiralty House being so short of marines for us.’
‘You are both a disgrace to your uniforms,’ said the admiralty officer. ‘And we shall see how this matter is to proceed, that we shall. Your superiors will be hearing from the First Skylord about this outrage.’ He stared across at the barrels of expansion-engine fuel stacked below the airship, noticing the supplies for the first time. ‘Who ordered this gas here?’
‘Was it not yourself, vice-admiral?’ asked Oldcastle, in surprise.
The admiralty man shook his head in fury and stalked away, leaving Jack watching the milling Benzari warriors with a mixture of bemusement and uncertainty. Something was deeply wrong here. A first lieutenant and her warrant officer defying a vice-admiral in front of a greenhorn like Jack Keats and a rabble of Benzari warriors. What he knew of the RAN from the aeronauts’ alehouse boasts and tales did not include such things in the navy’s tightly regimented world.
Westwick reached up to pull the mask off the man mountain she had ordered released from the stockade and Jack saw a mist of green gas escape the mask’s mouthpiece, leaving the broken brutish features of the convict underneath blinking like a sleepwalker as she gently pinched his arm. ‘You’ve been sedated, Henry. Wake up.’
‘How perishing long?’ he mumbled.
‘Two years,’ she said. ‘Floating in the waters of the navy’s total security tank. But the captain needs you again.’
‘Yes,’ said the convict. ‘The captain. He always looks after me. Do I know you?’
‘Not directly,’ said First Lieutenant Westwick. ‘But I know of you, Henry Tempest. You are to be our captain of marines.’
‘I forget sometimes,’ said the brute. ‘Me mind and me dreams. What’s real and what’s not.’
‘Welcome back to the world, Mister Tempest.’
The man mountain made to salute the lieutenant, but his arms were pulled short by the chains clanking around his wrists. His dirty blue eyes turned wild for a second, his pupils seeming to dilate as he raised his arms in unison. There was a crack as the iron links were sent flying away across the field, then he dropped his free hands down, one of them stopping by his slab-like brow for the navy salute.
Jack realized he had been cowering beside one of the crates. They must have been old and rusted, the chains. Nobody has the strength to do that, surely?
The ship’s surgeon had appeared and, taking the medical box from the first lieutenant’s hand, he led their new captain of marines up into the Iron Partridge, the giant shaking slightly as if he had been smoking too many opiates.
‘Find the captain,’ First Lieutenant Westwick ordered her warrant officer. ‘Search every alehouse, jinn house and gambling house from here to the capital if you have to. We lift with the morning trade winds, before Admiralty House finds a way to reassign our bloody propellers to the board of engineering for maintenance.’
Oldcastle nodded grimly and weaved off through the Benzari regiment.
‘Do you trust me?’ the first lieutenant asked Jack.
How much did she hear of my conversation with the warrant sky officer before she appeared?
Jack shook his head, and as quick as a snake, Westwick had him by the throat, a tiny razor-sharp stiletto blade in her hand, pressing up against the bottom of his chin. Jack struggled to break free but her grip was granite-strong.
‘Do you trust me when I say that if you ever try to desert my command again, I will slice you a smile from here—’ she tapped along his throat ‘—to here? Look into my eyes, Mister Keats. Do you trust that?’
It was Boyd staring back at him. Boyd at his murderous worst. As if the street thug had been trained by someone and turned into something far more honed. She would do it, Jack could see that. In fact, part of her wanted to, just to set an example. Maybe just for her own amusement.
‘I do,’ coughed Jack.
She dropped him down to the grass. ‘Be about it, Mister Keats. You may re-enter the ship by the main boarding ramp, like the loyal skyman we shall make of you.’
Jack heard the snick of the springs as the hidden blade withdrew back into her sleeve. That was the weapon of one of the capital’s assassins, a topper, not a lady gentlewoman of the fleet. Circle’s teeth, what kind of mess had he landed into here?
Rubbing his throat, Jack staggered up the Iron Partridge’s main boarding ramp and back to the airship’s keel deck, his mind spinning with unanswered questions, the pain of his neck muscles made a collar – reminding him how near to death he had just come. Reminding him he was just as much a prisoner on board the airship as he had been in jail.
CHAPTER FIVE
Omar ran through the great house’s central garden. Everywhere there were gas lamps burning without thought for the cost, people moving about the colonnades and pavilions, some sprinting through the cold night air as the first stars slid across the heavens above.
He nearly ran into the house’s soldiers by one of the fountains, dozens of troops dragging struggling men in long black robes through the garden. With a start of recognition, Omar realized that these were learned men, the House of Barir’s womb mages. How could these powerful sorcerers be manhandled so? They held the miraculous secrets of creating the salt-fish that generated the house’s wealth from mere sea water.
‘Stand aside,’ one of the soldiers shouted at Omar, and he was pushed back with a rifle butt while the womb mages were hauled into the centre of the garden.