Jack Cloudie

The soldiers carried crates with them that they spilled onto the carefully tended grass, and Omar heard the rattling of copper pages bound with metal chord hitting the ground. He scooped a book up, staring at the metal-stamped lines of characters, a handful of letters, – A, C, G, T – repeated over and over again in seemingly random patterns. This had to be one of the womb mages’ precious spell books. The sorcery that allowed the creation of such wondrous biologicks as the salt-fish. Omar nearly dropped the book in superstitious dread. It was said that to read such a miracle without a womb mage’s powers would cause you to go blind.

A soldier snatched the copper book out of Omar’s hands and thrust a glass jug of foul-smelling green liquid at him. ‘Pour it all over the pages,’ ordered the soldier. ‘Splash none over yourself.’

The soldier began to pour the liquid over the crate of spell books, acid turning the tomes into a bath of hissing steam and bubbling fury. Omar emptied the whole flask over a crate and then ran towards Marid Barir’s office, turning to see the womb mages flung backwards by the first volley of the firing squad. Bursting into the master’s office, Omar nearly tripped over the body of the house manager lying sprawled across the tiles, sending an empty vial of poison scuttling across the floor. Omar was still on his knees when he saw his father’s kaftan by the window. A richly jewelled dagger had been thrust into Marid Barir’s chest.

‘It is not fitting for the last of this house’s blood to die in bondage,’ whispered Omar, moving closer to the body, remembering his father’s words. His father of a single day seemed to be staring peacefully across the rooftops of Haffa below. I wish I could feel more sorrow than this, but I cannot. You were my master for longer than my father, a good master, but a poor father. Will my sadness serve your soul, as you are lifted into heaven? ‘I will go, master. And I take Shadisa with me. She does not deserve to be a slave. I think she will not care for such a life, even less than I did.’

By the time Omar reached the bottom of the stairs, the bells were ringing from the top of each of the house’s tall corner towers.

‘They’re coming,’ a soldier yelled, pushing a spare rifle into Omar’s hands. ‘Down the caravan road.’

‘Please,’ Omar said. ‘Shadisa of the golden hair, the kitchen girl, where is she?’

‘Down to the town!’ ordered the soldier, ignoring Omar’s question. ‘The women and children have first call on the boats. We will hold the raiders back. All men to stand and hold.’

‘I don’t know how to use this.’ Omar had been about to protest that as a slave he could be put to death for merely holding a rifle. But of course, he was a freeman now, free to die as their house’s enemies fell upon them.

Grabbing the rifle angrily out of Omar’s fingers, the soldier drew the curved scimitar from the belt by his side and pushed it at Omar. ‘Do you know how to swing and cut, idiot?’ he shouted, disappearing into the gardens.

Omar went looking for Shadisa, jostled and shoved down the corridors by the running staff and soldiers. The palace echoed with the sound of his boots as retainers bundled past him, ignoring his pleas.

At last someone came towards Omar who looked like he had more on his mind than bundling the house’s contents up into sheets, but the scar-faced fellow slapped the sabre out of Omar’s hand and grabbed him by the throat, waving a sword under his neck. ‘The house’s treasury, where is it?’

Brigands were already in the house! They must have scaled one of the outside walls in advance of the main party of looters. Another man came running behind the first bandit, fresh blood staining the front of his robes. ‘He won’t know,’ hissed the newcomer. ‘Stick this foul-smelling slave in the belly and let’s find someone worth taking back across the sands.’

‘I know where the treasury is,’ hacked Omar as the brigand’s grip tightened. ‘My master keeps so many coins down there – towering hills of silver, enough to blind you if you open the doors during high sun.’

‘Take us to the treasury,’ commanded the brigand who had his throat. ‘And your bones may end up on the slave block back in Bladetenbul, rather than within the ashes of this palace.’

‘Quickly!’ ordered the other. ‘We’re the first, and we’re taking the first’s share.’

‘You are fleet fellows,’ said Omar as he was released. He sped up his walk to a sprint in front of the two bandits. ‘But even such master brigands as you will be slowed by the weight of coins I shall lead you to.’

If our house guards hadn’t already spirited the money away, of course. Either on their own account or to help the House of Barir’s people escape with more than empty pockets and a heretic’s fate awaiting them. If that was the case, Omar suspected, he wouldn’t be getting to see the capital’s slave market. Please, fate, keep your servant alive for a little longer. I still have many great deeds to perform. I just need a little time to work out what they will be.

As they dashed down the house’s lower central corridor, a group of five or six brigands spilled out from a doorway, struggling women flung unceremonially over their shoulders. One of the women had golden hair and dark olive skin. Shadisa!

Omar yelled and was flung against the wall for his trouble, held there by his two brigands while the screaming line of kitchen staff and their new masters vanished up a stairwell at the far end of the corridor. Omar’s shout had gone unheard by the rival brigands under the racket of their newly acquired human cargo.

‘Adeeba’s men,’ growled one of his captors.

‘Fool of a slave,’ the other brigand slapped Omar’s head with the buckle of his scimitar guard. ‘There are quicker ways down here.’

I have to get her back. Think. ‘But the master’s counting rooms are yet two floors below us,’ said Omar. ‘Buried deep in the harbour cliffs. That girl with the golden hair was one of those trusted with the code to the lock.’

‘Liar!’ accused the bandit who had struck him. ‘Who would trust a woman with such a thing? You are trying to get us to save one of your little sweetmeats, eh?’

‘No,’ insisted Omar. ‘She knows. Marid Barir is a clever man. He knew a serving girl would never be questioned for the lock’s code.’

The first of the bandits sneered. ‘Too bad. Adeeba’s men will sell her on the trading block back in the capital like they always do. Such a secret will not be much use to the girl when her new master comes calling each night, eh?’

‘We know where to search for the treasury now,’ said the other. He drew his sword ready to plunge it into Omar’s heart. ‘I might waste explosives on the vault door and good water on taking your golden-haired beauty back out across the desert, but I won’t waste any water on your stinking carcass.’

‘Water for a water farmer,’ laughed a voice behind them. ‘You might consider investing in this one; who knows what secrets of salt-fish breeding he has been taught?’

Omar’s two captors turned, one of them too late, the ball from a pistol blasting into the centre of his chest and carrying him slamming into the wall. It was another bandit, a short stocky man wearing a voluminous kaftan, belts tucked full of guns and knives, a smoking pistol in one hand, a wickedly sharp scimitar balanced in the other.

Omar’s remaining captor pointed his scimitar towards the killer. ‘Are you one of Adeeba’s men? Have this one if you want him, take him and go in peace.’

‘But this is hardly a time of peace,’ said the killer, rubbing his bald, shaved head. There were tattoos rising up around his neck that looked like the heads of vipers. ‘Is it?’

‘Then you can go to hell instead!’ yelled Omar’s captor, lunging forward and trying to shove the point of his sword into the killer’s belly.

Dancing away, the killer easily avoided the brigand’s thrust. His cloak swirled out, seeming to swallow the two of them, muffling the repeated sound of wet slapping as his knife found its mark. When the cloak whisked back it revealed the killer crouching like a sand lion over the bloodied ruin of the brigand’s body.

‘There is money below.’ Omar’s shaking palms turned outwards to indicate he had no weapons. ‘A fortune.’

‘Yes, money,’ said the killer, wiping his sword clean on the bandit’s robes. ‘Money and blood. Always.’

As the killer’s fist connected with Omar’s face, he caught a glimpse of the bandit feeding a fresh crystal charge into his pistol’s breech, before darkness descended.

One last reeling thought crossed his mind. Who would waste a bullet in the head or heart for a slave? No. Not a slave anymore. He was a freeman. The last son of Marid Barir.

Omar moaned, darkness and sparks of light rolling across his vision. Through the blur of the pain and the fog of his awareness – drifting in and out of consciousness – he smelt the burning carnage, flames leaping among the screams. He was slung over someone’s back, but he spotted spinning glances of the sack of the town. Men kneeling, their faces bowed while fighters strutted behind a shivering line of captives, blades flashing, sprays of blood, heads dropping to the ground to roll away down a slope. Surreal hideous visions of a painting of hell, a house guard tied between two sandpedes and slowly ripped apart, other men fixed to horses and dragged across the ground shrieking. Silhouettes chasing other shadows through the night, laughs, cries, jeers, challenges and curses, people jumping out of a blazing building. Survivors rolling across the ground beside him, their clothes ablaze. A column of women being chained and made ready for the journey to the slavers’ block, a dark-robed womb mage injecting them with a phage to turn them into temporarily submissive zombies, fit only to compliantly march across the desert until they reached market. Less water consumed. Fewer escape attempts. Less trouble.

Was Shadisa among them somewhere? Don’t think of the other possibilities, the brutes who’d carried Shadisa off, what they might do to her. She could die out there in the desert, a mute stumbling wraith. With her beauty, perhaps she would be lucky to. Before she reached a slaver’s platform where fat, lustful merchants would look upon her and reach for the purses dangling upon their plump guts, imagining what sport they might have with their fine new servant. His soul felt as if it was being crushed, his guts crumpled into a burning gemstone of pure grief. The agony of worrying about it was more than he could stand.

‘Shadisa,’ he tried to yell. All that came out of his mouth was a hollow gargle.

A corpse tumbled past Omar as he was lugged across the ground, the body’s leather armour sliced by scimitar cuts. Someone who was foolish enough to challenge the deadly killer carrying him away for the bounty written in his bastard’s blood.

Something will come along.

Right now, it was the darkness of oblivion as he lost consciousness again.

Omar came around feeling queasy. Not because of the pain in his nose or the spinning of his head, but thanks to the jouncing motion of the floor underneath him. He had been semi-conscious for some time. Was he on a ship? A fishing boat from the harbour? No, the hissing he could hear had a mechanical quality to it, and there was the smell of oil burning on metal, like the desalination lines just after they had been stripped, cleaned and reassembled.

Omar moaned as he pulled himself up. His hands were chained behind his back and he was inside the claustrophobic confines of an iron room, all pipes and boxes and controls.

Lounging against the wall opposite him on a pile of green pillows was the same killer who had broken his nose in Marid Barir’s palace. The shaven-headed man looked up from sharpening his scimitar with a whetstone.

Omar and the killer weren’t alone in the confined iron space. There was also a crimson-hooded man seated at the front of the room, his hands on a wheel like one of the ferry pilots that called at Haffa. But the pilot had no window in front of him, just a small flat table with a map under a wire mesh, a pencil locked on a metal arm tracing a vibrating passage across the paper as the room shifted and swayed from side to side.

‘Where am I, my new master?’ coughed Omar. ‘You will not regret sparing me. I will work as hard as ten men for you.’

‘Those who serve me know that I do not like to answer questions,’ said the stocky man. His gloved hand reached into his kaftan and produced the roll of Omar’s papers, Marid Barir’s last gift. The boy groaned. I must have dropped my ownership documents when I was taken prisoner by the first two brigands.

‘You father did not love you very much, I think,’ said the killer. ‘As a slave you were merely property, and property can be traded between one master and the next. But as a freeman and the last surviving blood of Marid Barir?’ He shrugged. ‘There is a great bounty to be collected on your head. The Sect of Razat demand the death of all of those that their rise to the Holy Cent have made into heretics, and the higher in the house’s ranks the survivors stand, the greater the reward on their heads.’

‘You have made a mistake,’ said Omar. ‘I am just a slave. All of master Barir’s children died during the plague years.’

‘Perhaps I am in error, then,’ said the killer. ‘But I was not confused when I saw a gang of freebooters running laughing to their camels carrying the hacked-off head of Marid Barir. They will deny he had the honour to end his own life. When they hand it in for the reward money, they will say that he begged them for mercy and that they sliced off the snake’s head as their reply.’

‘Do not say that!’ shouted Omar. ‘Marid Barir was a good man, he was—’

Omar ducked as the killer threw the whetstone at him, the rock bouncing off the metal rivets behind his head.

‘You curse like a freeman. Loyalty is not a bad thing, Omar Barir. But your house has fallen and a wise man would learn to hold his tongue and choose his battles.’

From the front of the metal space, the crimson-hooded man turned around and tapped a dial on the wall. ‘Pressure is at maximum, we must surface and blow.’

The killer nodded and Omar found himself sliding down the floor as it slanted to an incline. Then there was a jolt as the room righted itself. An iron panel in the front wall lifted noisily to reveal an expanse of endless sands and burning bright daylight outside.

‘We are on a dune whale,’ said Omar.

‘I do not like to attract the attention of competitors,’ said the killer.

So, the killer travelled under the sands. There was a screeching noise from the rear of the room and Omar imagined he could see the super-pressurized blast of smoke from the dune whale’s engine being funnelled through the blowhole above. They would not stay on the desert’s surface for long, for that dirty boom would have alerted every nomad and wild desert fighter for miles around that here was a prize worth taking. Omar could just see the corkscrewing nose drill of the dune whale turning at the front of the craft, and then he was swung about as the machine dipped forward and started tunnelling below the fine orange sands again.

‘That will be the last venting before we reach the caravanserai,’ announced the pilot.

‘You must be a rich man to travel this way,’ said Omar.

‘I will be richer still with the bounty on your head,’ said the killer.

‘Perhaps I will serve you so well that you will not wish to hand me over to the priests of this new sect.’

The killer walked over to Omar and unlocked his chains, dropping the scimitar onto his lap. ‘Start by sharpening that.’

Omar looked incredulously at the sharp blade that had fallen into his care.

‘Raise it against me,’ said the killer, ‘and we will discover what you are worth to the new sect’s high keeper with no hands attached to your wrists.’

‘What is the name of the man who owns this sword?’ asked Omar.

‘Farris Uddin. But master will do well enough for you.’

There was something about this man, Omar realized, something familiar: as if he had known him before, perhaps in a previous life. No, his senses must be playing him false – he couldn’t have met this deadly force before. Surely I would have remembered.

Omar started to draw the whetstone down against the length of the shining silver steel. Sharpening the blade for the man who might be his new master, or his executioner.

It seemed burning hot to Omar, out in the open again after so long trapped in the close shaded confines of the deadly Farris Uddin’s dune whale. The dune whale’s captain had set them to rest next to a line of similar giant teardrop-shaped craft. There would be no more diving under the desert for Omar and his captor; the deep orange sands gave way to rocky ground from here on in. Omar didn’t know precisely where they were, but if he had to hazard a guess, he would say that they had travelled southeast, away from the thin patch of civilization that ran along the coast, across the desert, and towards the great centre of Cassarabia; to where the empire’s true civilization was counted to start.

They had reached a caravanserai, a series of windowless buildings connected by rocky palm-tree shaded lanes. Merchants sat outside the crenellated walls selling dates, black bread and yoghurt. Omar could almost feel the cool shade and taste the spray of moisture from the fountains within.

A line of sandpedes emerged from the stables on the side of the caravanserai, the drovers crying commands and cracking their whips against the hundreds of bony legs straining under the weight of their enamel water tanks. Omar recognized some of the drovers – the water sloshing about their tanks had come from Haffa a couple of weeks ago.

Farris Uddin tied Omar’s hands together with a length of leather and bound it to the rail on a stone trough meant for tying up camels.

‘I will not run, master,’ said Omar.

‘No. You won’t.’ Uddin disappeared into the stables, leaving Omar outside in the beating sun, tied up like an animal with only the half-shade of the palm leaves for shelter.

I suppose I won’t at that.

Watching a kestrel circling overhead, Omar’s glance fell down to the end of the street where one of the water traders was talking to three men and pointing back towards the stables where Omar was standing. He looked around nervously. There was nobody else here. Just himself, the trough and the stables. A coin was exchanged and the three men began walking purposefully down the line of sandpedes towards him. Omar pulled at the leather thong tying him to the rail. Too tight to slip. Too thick to chew through. Omar tried to keep calm. Perhaps the gang had just been asking for somewhere to stable their steeds? But the hope of that disappeared as they got closer. Three tall rangy thugs wearing crossed belts filled with crystal charges for the rifles strapped to their backs. Caravan guards, or hunters of men?

‘There’s a pretty parcel,’ said one of them, looking Omar up and down. ‘Left trussed for us to find.’

‘The wrist ties are mine.’ Farris Uddin’s voice sounded unexpectedly behind Omar, making him jump. The killer moved like a ghost. ‘As is the slave that is bound by them.’

‘A male slave is worth only fifty altun,’ said the thug. ‘The bounty on a heretic that served the House of Barir is ten times that.’

‘Then I have made a fine profit.’

‘A profit like that,’ said the thug, licking his lips expectantly, ‘deserves to be shared.’

Farris Uddin glanced languidly about the street, as if he was surprised to see where he had ended up. ‘Is this the desert wastes? Is this the heathen borderlands? No, it’s the empire, and the Caliph Eternal’s law states that taking another’s property is theft. That’s sharing you can be executed for.’

‘There is no garrison here,’ snorted one of the thugs. ‘And you have not paid for the protection of the caravan.’ He tapped his neck, indicating the space where the bronze seal and chain would be if Omar’s new master had paid to travel under the immunity of one of the caravan trains.

‘A guardsman,’ said Farris Uddin, his voice turning low and dangerous, ‘does not need protection. He is protection.’

‘Oh, ho!’ The three of them roared with laughter, while one poked a finger at the preposterous Uddin. ‘You are a long way from the great palace, then, noble guardsman. Is the court of the Caliph Eternal coming up here to pay for dune whale trips around the town to amuse the great ruler’s harem?’

‘It is strange, noble guardsman,’ said the most sizeable of the thugs. ‘For I am sure you have been marked out to me before as Udal the Viperneck; a mere bounty hunter, just the same as us.’

‘My name is Farris Uddin,’ insisted the killer, pulling his collar down to reveal his bare throat. ‘And I have no tattoos on my neck.’

Omar blinked in disbelief. The killer had possessed the tattoos back in the master’s palace at Haffa. Omar had seen them. What is going on here? All three thugs slid out their scimitars in unison and Omar groaned when he noticed that Uddin was totally unarmed. The careless fool must have left his weapons saddled to a camel inside the stable and he had come out here without his pistols and blades.

‘You are a stubby little liar, Udal, or Uddin, or whatever you are called. But we have just the thing to shave another few inches off your height.’

Farris Uddin raised his empty hands in supplication. ‘There is no need for that. I can see you are set on stealing my slave. I would not have my death on your heads.’ He walked to Omar and untied the leather knot from the long palm-wood rail. ‘You are too much trouble to me already.’

‘Easy come, easy go, master,’ said Omar.

As the three thugs came to seize Omar, Farris Uddin snapped the rail off the trough and jammed it like a spear into the face of the tough on the left, before sliding it around and shoving it into the features of the man on the right. Only the thug in the centre of the trio was left standing, looking on in astonishment as both his friends tumbled to the ground. By the time the man had remembered the sabre in his hand, Uddin had snapped the pole in two over his leg; he used the twin batons to dance a series of rapid strikes across the thug’s head and shoulders. With his scimitar falling to the ground, the third fighter crumpled to the dirt under the fierce tattoo of blows.

Farris Uddin moved over the cowering thug and pointed his two makeshift wooden batons towards the man’s forehead. ‘What is my name? What am I?’

‘Farris Uddin,’ spluttered the rascal. ‘You are a guardsman.’

Omar looked at the two ruffians lying crumpled to either side as Farris Uddin sent the surviving man scampering away down the street with a swift kick from his boot. Their noses had been pushed back into their skulls and both men were dead.

‘You killed them, master.’

‘Easy come, easy go.’

Had Uddin been telling the truth when he said he was an imperial guardsman? The caliph’s guardsmen kept the peace in the palace and served as the ruler of Cassarabia’s elite regiment of soldiers. But unless such a man was cast out and declared rogue, what would one of them possibly want with the bounty on a heretic like Omar? No, the killer was just a hunter of men who had been trying to bluff his way out of a fight. A particularly lethal example of the breed. That is the only thing that makes any sense.

‘I saw a guardsman once,’ said Omar quickly, trying to talk away his nerves. ‘He was travelling with a war galley that had come into our harbour, and he flew above the galley on a great lizard with wings as wide as this street.’

‘A drak,’ growled Farris Uddin, leading the way to the stables. ‘They are called draks, and the man you saw would have been an officer of the twenty-second talon wing. Draks do not like the open sea and they have to be specifically trained for such duties. The twenty-second has such steeds.’

‘Do draks like sand better?’ asked Omar, ducking through the stable entrance and entering into a dark space with a mud floor covered with straw.

‘No,’ said Farris Uddin, rolling up the sleeves of his robes before dipping an arm into a stone tank and lifting out a large, bleeding carcass with four small hooves still attached. ‘They like sheep.’