Jack Cloudie

CHAPTER SIX

‘Help me,’ begged the six-year-old stuck down the claustrophobically tight shaft. ‘I can’t breathe down here, I’m choking, please—’

But Jack couldn’t help. He was running for his life through the vaults of Lords Bank, hissing waves of poison gas swirling at his heels, the shouts and shots of the bank guards and the constabulary whistling around him. Maggie was waiting for Jack at the breached wall, trying to stop him ducking back out into the sewers.

‘Go back for them, you can’t just leave the boys in there.’

‘It’s little Tozer,’ said Jack, ‘he’s stuck – we’ll all die if we try to pull him out.’

‘It’s not just Tozer,’ shouted Maggie, ‘he’s in there with your brothers, Jack. Your brothers are thieves now, just like you.’

‘No!’ screamed Jack, but the bank’s wall had collapsed behind him. He scrabbled at the fallen masonry with his nails, digging until his fingers were broken and bleeding.

Boyd was laughing in Jack’s ear, shaking him by the shoulders until he felt as if he were rocking on the deck of a ship. ‘Leave them to die. Leave all the runts to die.’

Jack gasped as he woke, his cheeks wet with tears. For the boy he couldn’t save, or for the two brothers he had abandoned to their fate?

‘Damn me for a coward,’ whispered Jack to himself, rubbing his eyes as the makeshift bed swung gently. For that is what I am. Try as he might, Jack couldn’t get used to sleeping in a hammock, the sling of fabric between the boilers permitting its occupant no shifting or rolling from side to side. It was an all-enveloping swaddle that moved of its own accord with the trims and turns of the airship.

As if this alien way of sleeping wasn’t enough, there was the noise of the ship: the Iron Partridge’s croaking beams, the crackling from behind the closed furnace doors, the rattle and clack of the spinning transaction-engine drums – a constant low rumble even on their reduced-power setting. And now the Iron Partridge was sailing through a storm, the rain drumming on the sealed skylight above, the armoured glass failing to soften the whistle of the wind through the forest of mortar tubes running along the spine of her hull.

Groaning at the snores from the two Benzari stokers, Jack swung his legs off the hammock and touched his feet down on the deck, the surface every bit as warm as John Oldcastle had promised in the space between the boilers. But of Oldcastle himself, there was no sign. His hammock lay empty. Over in the transaction-engine pit, Jack could just see the metal skull of Coss Shaftcrank moving through the maze of thinking machines, checking the steam pressure of the dials as he reached up with an oil can to apply lubricant to a bank of rotating drums. Jack walked over to the rail.

‘Where’s Oldcastle?’ Jack asked, low enough not to wake up the pair of stokers.

‘I believe there is a game of chance being played down in the surgeon’s ward,’ said Coss. ‘Although the master cardsharp was rather insistent that there would be a degree of skill in its playing, which he believes he possesses in abundance.’

‘My father thought much the same,’ said Jack. ‘That and a couple of poor harvests was enough to lose our family everything we owned.’

‘The injection of unnecessary risk into a life is one trait of your people I have never understood, Jack softbody. By my rolling regulators, the great pattern of existence always seems capable of providing us ample dangers without going to the trouble of actively seeking them out.’

Jack leant across the pit’s rail and looked up at the rain lashing against the skylight. ‘What are you doing here, Coss?’

‘I require less sleep than you softbodies,’ said the steamman. ‘I can function reliably on a fifth of the rest you need. The extra shifts I can complete were one of the reasons, I suspect, why the master cardsharp was so eager to procure my services.’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I mean what are you doing here, on the Iron Partridge? I’ve seen graspers and craynarbians on the ship, but you’re the only steamman on board. I had no choice. For me, it was this or the rope outside Bonegate jail. But I saw you back in the signing queue … you were desperate to sign up.’

‘It is my destiny, my softbody friend,’ said Coss. ‘Do you know much about my people and how we are born? Have you ever visited the Steamman Free State?’

‘No,’ Jack admitted. ‘And there weren’t any steammen in the debtors’ prison or living rough on the streets.’

‘Kiss my condensers, but there would not be,’ said Coss. ‘Our kind cares for each other too well to permit the crime of poverty to be inflicted on our people. Normally, when a steamman is born in the Free State, it is the will of King Steam and the skill of the king’s architects that give him life. A steamman starts life in a nursery body which has been inhabited many times before, and after his education is complete, his intellect is then transferred into his final adult body.’

‘You said normally.’

‘There is another way a steamman can be born,’ said Coss. ‘Much rarer. The more advanced members of our race can simultaneously distribute their intellect across multiple bodies, their own main body and those of their drones as well. The drones are called Mu-bodies, and are treated as tools, or perhaps as you softbodies might treat a favourite suit of clothes.’

‘I’ve seen them,’ said Jack, remembering the time he and Maggie had been picking pockets outside the steammen embassy; a large tracked steamman with a crystal dome-topped head moving past with a retinue of gnome-sized metallic servants surrounding him.

‘Mu-bodies sometimes develop sentience,’ said Coss. ‘Occasionally spontaneously, more often than not as a result of being possessed by one of our ancestral spirits, the Steamo Loas. This is the other way of birth for the life metal. When such an event happens, the intellect is moved out of the drone, into a nursery body, and finally into an adult body when our years of education are complete. But our people feel a degree of disquiet towards those not born from the familiar, comforting designs of King Steam’s architects. I, press my unlucky plug rods, had such a birth. The population at large does not trust us, and we are regarded as the mischief of the gods, touched by madness. We are known as mutables, a term of little affection among steammen.’

Jack nodded. Maybe the steamman’s origins as a drone explained his unusually small size, a stature that was somewhat accentuated by a swollen back from which two stubby stacks emerged. Coss was barely five foot tall. He had a flat-plate of a face with a vision plate above a noseless grille, the visor mounted like a mask on a sphere of copper connected by one large neck joint and a smaller piston whose sole purpose seemed to be to raise and lower the mask. His torso was similarly connected to his pelvis by three pistons, three legs emerging from the pelvis unit, two large and one small and spindly, almost a prehensile tail.

‘My existence as a drone seems a blurred dream, now. But I remember one thing, the same dream, repeatedly: sitting in a garden in the shade of a tower, watching birds. Always, the birds. Marvelling at how well they flew, tracing the patterns of their flight. Modelling their miraculous ability with mathematics. That was my initial awakening of sentience. It is where my name comes from – the Rule of Coss, pure algebra.’

So that’s it. The navy might not have had to send a press gang out for this steamman, but he was as much an outcast as Jack had been the day he’d been scraped from a prison cell and thrown into the care of the navy.

The steamman tapped his skull. ‘There’s something about the master cardsharp you should know, Jack softbody.’

Jack looked inquisitively at Coss.

‘I have seen him in the dream from my previous life. I know his face.’

‘You know Oldcastle from when you were a drone?’

‘I think so,’ said Coss. ‘But his face and his name doesn’t feel right. I don’t think that John Oldcastle is his real name.’

Jack stared at the warrant sky officer’s vacant hammock. John Oldcastle seemed sure enough of his name, and the Royal Aerostatical Navy had a place for him on the Iron Partridge. If John Oldcastle wasn’t John Oldcastle, then who in the name of the Circle was he?

‘Are you sure about this, old steamer?’

‘It is possible it may be a false memory. Curse my vacuum pumps, there is not much that I am certain of from my existence as a drone, before my true life began.’

‘What’s the name you think of when you see the master cardsharp?’ asked Jack.

‘Jared Black is the name,’ said Coss. ‘I can see his face talking to the steamman I served when I was but a drone. His name is Coppertracks, and he is a great philosopher and scientist of the people of the metal who lives in the Kingdom. Jared Black has the same silver beard, much the same voice, but the master cardsharp was not dressed as an airship officer. I see another uniform. A civilian one, if that makes sense?’

‘Civilians don’t wear uniforms – unless he served with the RAN merchant marine before Admiralty House dumped him onto a warship,’ said Jack. ‘They’ve been short of skymen for years. You and I wouldn’t be here if that weren’t the case.’

Jack remembered his suspicions about the first lieutenant. Nothing about the deadly woman and the ageing soldier who reluctantly followed her rang true. What business could the officer have had with Coss’s ex-master? Whoever the master cardsharp was, whomever he answered to, one thing was true; Jack and Coss were stuck firmly under his command.

‘We steammen are usually a grounded people, in all senses of the word,’ added Coss. ‘All I know from my earliest years was that I had to fly. It was all I dreamed of in my nursery body, and the moment I was granted my adult form, I came to the Kingdom of Jackals and learnt everything I could about the Royal Aerostatical Navy; its traditions, its sailors and ships, its rules and regulations.’

Jack grunted, a smile flickering across his lips.

‘Tear my transfer pipes, but I am used to being laughed at,’ said the young steamman, his voicebox pitched with a sad vibration. ‘My friends back in the Free State say I must have been possessed by Lemba of the Empty Thrusters, the spirit of the sky. They say that he is the Loa that possessed my miserable drone body and blessed me with sentience.’

‘I wasn’t laughing at your story,’ said Jack. ‘It’s just that if you had left school a couple of years later and hadn’t got into the RAN, you might have signed up with the Cassarabian navy!’

‘Most amusing. I much prefer an allied multiracial society such as that of the Kingdom,’ said Coss, pointing to the iron clock above the entrance to their chamber. ‘The master cardsharp asked to be interrupted from his game before six-bells sounds. He also left a parcel that he wants you to deliver below decks, although I suspect he intended its delivery to be made during daylight hours.’

Jack retrieved the heavy waxpaper-wrapped parcel from the stool in front of his punch-card writing station. There was a scribbled note slipped below the string sealing the parcel, its instructions read: ‘For the cabin at the end of the middle deck’s main passage.’

‘I’ll fetch the master cardsharp,’ said Jack. ‘And see if I can drop this off too.’ Better that than listening to those two Benzari stokers snoring away. Perhaps the long climb down the lifting chamber ladder will bring some peace to my nerves. Coss might have dreamed of sailing thousands of feet across the world like one of his birds, but Jack was just happy to have avoided the six-foot drop that was to have been his courtesy of the hangman back home.

After clambering down the ladder, Jack considered the route, his new recruit’s training spinning around his mind. The easiest way to the surgeon’s ward in the middle of the airship was to head down the upper lifting chamber’s main gantry, then into the gun deck, another climb through the lower lifting chamber, before threading through the corridors of the middle deck.

Jack walked down the central catwalk that cut through the twelve-hundred foot length of the upper lifting chamber, the thin strip of metal bouncing underfoot, its handrail preventing him from slipping into the thousands of ballonets and their network of bracing wires. He was halfway down the gangway when he almost stumbled into the officer, a tattered well-worn cloak half-hidden by the shadow of one of the airship’s regassing towers. Jack caught a breath as he recognized the face of the man from the courtroom. Close up, his skin was pockmarked with smallpox scars, but there were the same intense eyes, the same mop of ginger hair. Yes, this was the RAN officer who had so annoyed the judge in the middle-court by saving Jack from dancing the Bonegate jig.

‘Mister Keats,’ said the half-familiar man.

‘Sir.’ Jack still felt awkward saluting, every raise of his hand an acknowledgment he was now reluctantly part of something larger than just his own life and survival, with very little choice in the matter.

The officer’s cloak was pulled tight like a poncho, so Jack couldn’t get a clear look at the man’s uniform. Was he one of their ship’s seven lieutenants?

‘You are up early I see,’ said the man.

‘The storm was rattling our skylight, sir.’

‘Ah yes, all bedded down in the transaction-engine chamber. Never draw a berth on the keel deck or the upper deck, Mister Keats.’ He pointed to one of the aluminium spokes radiating out like a wheel, giving the vast upper lifting chamber its strength. ‘The noise is passed to the decks at the top and bottom of a vessel through the supports. And we’re worse than most airships, the plates on our hull rattling around as if we’re some damn armoured knight riding off to battle.’ The officer walked briskly along, his swagger stick striking each of the gantry railings. ‘A strange bird, this metal partridge of ours, eh, m’boy? A cloud-borne ironclad – don’t seem natural. Everything different for difference’s sake alone.’ The officer pointed at the thousands of spherical gas cells corded together under the lifting chamber’s netting. ‘Even our celgas is bagged up inside some strange composite rather than plain honest canvas. The genius that cooked this vessel up was off with the fairies when they laid their pencils on the draughting board, alright. I understand that some call that progress.’ He spotted the package under Jack’s arm. ‘Ah, I believe that would be the parcel the commodore promised me.’

‘The commodore?’ said Jack, confused. ‘Don’t you mean the master cardsharp, sir?’

‘Indeed, indeed. That’s just a nickname some of the officers have for him – his manner, d’you see? Although I wouldn’t advise using it around the fellow, he wouldn’t thank you for it.’

Jack held the package out. ‘You have the cabin at the end of middle deck, then, I presume? Do you serve under First Lieutenant Westwick, sir?’

‘I think it would be fair to say that ultimately, we both owe our positions on the ship to her, Mister Keats.’ The officer took the parcel and removed the string and the waxpaper, revealing a pile of books with a receipt from the stationer’s stall where they had been purchased. ‘Capital. Just the stuff for a cold evening’s reading.’

The tomes in the officer’s hand weren’t the cheap penny-dreadfuls and lurid fiction that Jack favoured, but rather dry, leather-bound books of military strategy with titles such as Aerostatical Theory: Classical Practices, Principles and Historical Perspectives.

‘Our civil war, that’s the only time we’ve seen airships raking each other in the clouds. It seems we have to look back to history for a fresh perspective on how to take on the Cassarabians. All our tactics, all our weapons, are predicated on placing us in the sky and the enemy firmly on the ground. With the exception of warding off the odd mutineer or the occasional science pirate who has managed to cook up some mad scheme to get into the air, our sailors’ experience is completely sky-to-ground. Dangerous thinking for these modern times we find ourselves in. Keep up, m’boy,’ he said, half a command, half a booming laugh. ‘Twelve times around the ship is four miles. That’s what a sailor requires every day to keep his mind fresh and clear, d’you see?’

It was the laugh that did it. Deep and boisterous, resounding through the upper lifting chamber just as it had at the – debtors’ prison! That’s where he knew this man from. He had been one of the patients in the fever room of the debtors’ prison. Jack’s father had led the collection to try to buy medicines and food when the sickness had struck the Five Stones district of Middlesteel where the debtors’ prison squatted down by the river. Another of his father’s foolish, over-generous impulses in the prison to help everyone except those who really should have mattered to him. The last time Jack had seen this face was when he’d been doling out carrot broth to the inmates who had been separated off into quarantine. Then it had been blotchy and sweating under a coarse charity blanket, but capable of booming out a note of thanks even so. So, the ill man had been a navy officer? Well, they were as likely to be declared bankrupt as anyone else. Someone must have taken care of the officer’s debts for him, though, for him to be able to re-enter service with the navy. Jack’s recollection was shattered by a savage whistling from a stove pipe-like tube hanging above the gantry, the noise rising and falling like the scream of a banshee.

Jack covered his ears. ‘Are we crashing into Jackals?’

‘We haven’t been travelling the Kingdom’s skies for days,’ said the man. ‘We’re sailing over Benzari territory, and that, Mister Keats, is the general-quarters being sounded. Propellers ho! m’boy. The enemy’s been sighted.’

‘Are we at war, sir?’

‘Benzaral is disputed territory, Mister Keats. The caliph thinks it is his, but we have a couple of hundred marines on board that will swear it is independent and belongs to the free Benzari tribes. And they are our nation’s allies. The perfect place for us to do a little fishing.’

‘What are we hoping to catch?’

The stocky man reached out and slapped Jack’s shoulder. ‘An airship, Mister Keats. A nice fat Cassarabian airship, d’you see?’

Men from the night watch were swinging down onto the gantry, stowing their gas-bag patching tools in secure boxes and pulling the lifting chamber netting taut for action.

‘You know what to do, gentlemen,’ the ginger-haired officer called to them. ‘Back to your post, Mister Keats. Keep your transaction engines well and quiet; we don’t need the ship pulling at the reins of her own accord for the next couple of hours. Smooth and certain as you go.’

Jack saluted again as the man he had once served soup to inside a debtors’ prison sprinted down the gantry, his left hand steadying his officer’s cutlass.

‘Out of our hair, greenhorn.’ One of the lifting chamber crew pushed Jack back towards the ladder. ‘You heard the captain. Sharp to it.’

Jack gawped. ‘Captain!’

‘The honourable Donald Lawrence Jericho himself, lad. Now return to your post before I dirty the sole of my boot on the arse of your fine regulation breeches.’

Jack had barely cleared the climb back to the upper deck when the airship started trembling. Not the crack of a storm, but a different sort of thunder. The Iron Partridge’s guns were speaking, and then the airship shook as the enemy’s reply sounded in kind.

By the time Jack had stumbled back to his station, the transaction-engine room was a scene of organized chaos, the two Benzari stokers grunting as they shovelled coal into the furnace, John Oldcastle, chased back by the screech of the general-quarters, helping Coss down in the pit of noisy thinking machines.

‘Where have you been, lad?’ called Oldcastle over a booming sound echoing off the ship’s plates outside. Was that the sound of an enemy shell bouncing off their armour? ‘We need you on the punch-card writer up there.’

‘I was with the captain, master cardsharp.’

‘On one of his early morning walks, lad, to help keep the black dog at bay? A great one for walks, is old Jericho. Well, he’ll have his blessed exercise now, running around the Cassarabians!’

Jack sprinted to the nearest punch-card writer, keeping his footing as the deck trembled with the roar of the Iron Partridge’s massive thirty-two pounders.

‘I have an automated system activating,’ shouted Coss, his voicebox on maximum amplification as he read the symbols off one of the engine’s rotating calculation drums. ‘Kiss my condensers, it’s the gas compression on the ballonets. Lower lifting chamber.’

Oldcastle pointed up at Jack. ‘Shut it down. If the lifting room crew apply extra pressure to a gas cell that’s already been compressed, it’ll explode like a wicked volcano under our feet.’

Taking a blank punch card from the tray, Jack bashed out an instruction set to kill the airship’s automated system, pushing it into the injection tube and watching as it was sucked out of his fingers.

‘It’s back under manual control now,’ shouted Jack. ‘How long is our engagement against the Cassarabian airship going to last?’

‘Damned if I know, lad,’ said Oldcastle, pointing towards the porthole above the punch-card desk. ‘And it’s airships. There are two of the blessed things flying out there hammering away at us.’

Jack stood up on his toes to stare out of the porthole. He could see an enemy airship banking to broadside, just a silhouette against the dark backdrop of dawn’s first gleaming, spouts of angry orange light and smoke coming from the line of her gun deck as she exchanged fire with the Iron Partridge. Where was the other airship? Ah, there she was, a second shadow rising, the stern crossing the upper corner of Jack’s porthole.

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