Jack Cloudie

CHAPTER EIGHT

Jack watched First Lieutenant Westwick walk across to where he and Master Cardsharp Oldcastle were waiting on the brow of the rocky slope, standing sentry over the Cassarabian prisoners on the floor of the valley below along with the other sailors from the Iron Partridge. She stood for a second silhouetted against the pall of smoke, the boom of explosions from the mined vessel crackling away just out of sight. The empire’s remaining airship had been scuttled beyond repair, and gone with the Kochava Saar was any chance of the crew collecting the prize money that should have been their due from her capture. Is she the most hated person on the airship now, I wonder, or is that still me?

‘Keep an eye on the prisoners, Mister Keats,’ said the first lieutenant.

‘They’re licked,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Good and proper.’

‘They know what’s waiting for them,’ said the first lieutenant, pointing towards the Benzari warriors whooping and hollering as they approached to take custody of the enemy crew. ‘Tribal hospitality with the slim hope of a prisoner exchange or someone back in the empire making their hostage price. Men without hope are men without fear.’

Westwick walked down the slope to greet the lead riders and Oldcastle muttered, ‘I think they know who to be afraid of here, lass.’

Jack saw the prisoners at the head of the column shy away from the female lieutenant, jostling back towards the marines’ bayonets rather than staying close to Westwick at the foot of the slope. The first horsemen to arrive began galloping wildly around the enemy sailors, singing a fierce whistling song and shooting their rifles into the air. Their Benzari marines started waving their navy carbines in response until the giant captain of marines cursed them for savages and they quickly fell silent. Jack had noticed the wiry little marines were treating Henry Tempest like their own god now, a god of war given flesh. His commands were no longer orders, they were the word of tribal scripture.

‘Ah, that’s bad,’ said Oldcastle.

‘The marines seem to be learning navy discipline fast enough,’ said Jack.

‘Not our marines, lad,’ said Oldcastle. He pointed to the wildly circling riders. ‘Them! Look at their guns. Brown Bess pattern rifles, freshly minted, and no doubt right off the back of our Corps of Supply’s wagons. If we’re openly supplying Benzaral with army rifles, that can only mean one thing.’

Jack was about to ask what, but Westwick returned with a sun-faded copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated News under her arm.

‘It’s begun then,’ said Oldcastle.

Westwick nodded and handed the newspaper to the master cardsharp to read.

‘Ah, this is a week old,’ said the officer, flicking through the pages. ‘Parliament imposed a wave of import duties on Cassarabian goods. The first traders that came up north along the caravan road refused to pay our taxes. A temperance movement mob attacked their jinn traders in the upland towns, took axes to their barrels and burnt the mortal alcohol in the street, and then they sent the empire’s merchants scampering back over the border tarred and heathered. Our newspapers are calling it the Great Jinn War. Great for their wicked sales, not so good for the poor devils who’ll be doing the dying and the bleeding for their stories.’

Behind them, the anchor cables holding the Iron Partridge above the hill-line started to vibrate as her engine cars tested their propellers before launch.

‘Then we were already at war when we engaged their two airships,’ said Jack.

There was a strange hissing sound from the armed sailors on the slopes as the news of hostilities spread, the kind of ugly noise a Jack Cloudie would make when whistling through clenched teeth.

‘Stop that disgusting sound!’ the first lieutenant shouted down the slope. She drew her pistol. ‘Captain of marines, any sailor you find making that foul noise is to be arrested and held for flogging.’

‘What is it?’ Jack whispered to Oldcastle. ‘Why are they doing that?’

‘In times of war,’ said Oldcastle, ‘Admiralty House triples the prize money for a captured vessel.’ He nodded towards the waves of heat and smoke rising up from behind the hills. ‘We’ve just blown up a small fortune, Mister Keats. If you can find me an unhappier ship in the navy right now, I’ll crack the blessed shell in your gun’s breech and mix the charge with tonight’s rum ration.’

The hissing from the crew was subsiding, like an angry snake sliding away to bide its time before coming back during darkness to strike.

‘We’re going to war with Cassarabia over some spilt drink?’ Jack said in disbelief.

Oldcastle clapped Jack on the back. ‘Now I know you’ve been in a tavern before, lad. All the finest fights start over a spilt drink. No need to play gently in Benzaral’s disputed acres now, lad. We’re heading over the border and sailing for Cassarabia proper. Into the bloody empire for some bloody action.’

Oh, fine. No prize money, but plenty of chances to die in action. They might as well appoint the first lieutenant as our morale officer. Jack stared at the downcast enemy sailors trudging away surrounded by Benzari horsemen. As prisoners of war their position seemed miserable, but at least they had survived. It seemed that the master cardsharp was going to have plenty of opportunities to make good on his promise to get Jack killed in action.

A whole war full of them.

Jack’s dreams were normally shapeless, formless things; flashes of memories and movement like treacle, and this one had started no differently. But clarity, terrible clarity, was coming, like sunlight streaming through parting clouds — his father on his sickbed in the debtors’ prison, telling Jack in between hacking coughs that the burden of being head of the family was going to be on his shoulders soon. All thoughts of his son’s engineman training forgotten, the fever running so high, Jack’s father was no longer aware that the farm and its lands had long since been sold off — trying to make Jack promise that he would find good positions for his two younger brothers when he took over management of the estate.

His brothers so young they had come to look on the four high walls of the debtors’ prison as home. Their bewildered looks as the three of them were cast out of its gates — the family’s debts annulled after the funeral. Then long weeks of being moved on by shopkeepers angry at finding the three of them sleeping in the doorway, running from the constables of Middlesteel, one step ahead of the vagrancy laws and the brutal, enforced care of the poorhouse. They were falling away from him, Jack’s deathbed promise to his father stretched paper-thin by circumstance. Every job he tried to take on paying just pennies when the cost of life was measured in shillings and crowns. It was like being back on the farm when it all started to go wrong. Failed harvest after failed harvest. Debts. His mother and father arguing about having to let the tenant farmers go.

Fewer hands. More work. Their clothing growing frayed, the paint peeling from their house, fences on the land unrepaired and then the fields unploughed. Their mother dying of an old age arrived early, buried by worries. Not enough to feed all of them, going hungry for his brothers’ sakes, a little more tired and weary every day. Until he was falling, falling out of the airship and tumbling through a sky without ground. They were gone.

‘Alan! Saul!’ Jack yelled, his clothes whipping in the wind, the air fierce and angry as he fell. He raised his hands towards the distant shadow of the airship, but there was no help, only the distant jeers of Master Engineer Pasco. Thief. Thief.

Spinning through the air, the storm playing with him. No mercy, only the black mote of an eagle growing larger and larger, talons outstretched. But as it got closer Jack could see this was no bird — it was all steel and spikes, a moving machine of wings and razors, twice as long as Jack’s falling, flailing body.

‘Do you know me?’ hissed the machine, a beak of reinforced steel needling closer towards Jack as it spoke.

‘You are a Loa,’ said Jack. ‘One of the steammen gods.’

‘Not just any mere Loa,’ hissed the machine as it looped about the falling boy. ‘I am Lemba of the Empty Thrusters, the spirit of the sky.’

‘Save me,’ begged Jack, tumbling wildly as the Loa darted after him. ‘Pull me back to the airship.’

‘Why should I, little godless softbody? You who trespass into my realm in your ridiculous bags of lighter-than-air gas. And now there are two of your kind’s nations in my heavens, flinging iron balls at each other and filling the skies with smoke and noise. How am I to choose which of you to cast down? Maybe both, maybe both shall be my choice.’

There was blackness below the sky’s blue: icy blackness rather than ground. He was pitching towards his oblivion. ‘Save me,’ called Jack, ‘and I will help you.’

‘Help me, then,’ said the Loa, rolling in the gale and clamping a hold on Jack’s body with its hard, biting metal manipulator arms. Tighter and tighter. Jack yelled in agony, as he was pulled out of the dive and accelerated upwards towards his airship.

‘I wish to hear music.’

‘I have no instrument to play,’ cried Jack.

They were travelling so fast Jack’s eyes had difficulty opening against the wall of wind driving into his face.

‘Oh, but you do,’ said the Steamo Loa, opening its manipulator talons and letting Jack arc out. He was above the Iron Partridge now, sailing down towards its frill of mortar tubes and the vessel was blasting out a tune like an organ grinder.

‘Play,’ the Steamo Loa called as Jack tumbled towards the mortar tubes. ‘Play!’

There was a tiny glint of light in the darkness of the tubes, the light of — Coss Shaftcrank’s vision plate staring over him as he jerked upright in his hammock. He was in the transaction-engine chamber, waves of pain streaming down his back from the flogging he had endured.

‘You were just dreaming,’ said Coss. ‘And calling out in your sleep.’

Jack rubbed at his temples. ‘I never normally dream.’

‘Everyone dreams,’ said Coss. ‘Even my people. It’s probably that you don’t normally remember them.’

‘I wish I hadn’t remembered this one.’

Coss listened to what Jack recalled of the dream, the steamman’s vision plate juddering in surprise as the young sailor described his meeting with Lemba of the Empty Thrusters. ‘You have described this Loa just as he appears to my people, Jack softbody. Truly, the Loas are walking your dreams.’

‘He must have been aiming for your noggin and missed,’ said Jack.

‘Kiss my condensers, but the spirits of my people’s ancestors are not sponges tossed at a village mayor’s face in a summer fair,’ said Coss. ‘Loas do not miss; Lemba of the Empty Thrusters only crosses the threads of the great pattern with purpose.’

‘If it was giving me a headache to go along with the stripes on my back, he may consider his purpose achieved.’

‘This is unprecedented,’ said Coss. ‘I have never heard of one of our gods visiting a softbody as if he was a steamman throwing his cogs at prayer.’

‘It’s just a dream, old steamer. They never make sense.’

‘This one makes more sense than you seem to know. If you had taken the time to read through my newssheet cuttings concerning the air-yard trials of the Iron Partridge,’ explained Coss in irritation, ‘you would know that one of the unnecessary flourishes this vessel should be capable of is playing the Jackelian national anthem using air drawn through her mortar tubes.’

Playing music … Jack looked at the steamman in astonishment. ‘You are joking?’

‘I am entirely serious, Jack softbody. The Iron Partridge failed to do it, of course. One of the writers watching the vessel’s trials described the ship’s wailing in their newssheet as the cat-o’-nine-tails’ song, but a far better show than her gunners’ accuracy.’

‘That’s one song I’ve had enough of,’ said Jack, his spine burning at the thought of the flogging he had received. He rubbed his throbbing temples in annoyance. Whatever music the steamman gods had in mind for Jack Keats, they would have to sing along to it without him.

Now he was awake, Jack was glad to be out of the hammock; even the thin hanging fabric was rubbing raw against his back. But the start to the day’s roster of duties was swiftly circumvented by the appearance of the master cardsharp, who bore a more pressing appointment for Jack.

‘I need you, lad,’ wheezed the old officer. ‘It’s Captain Jericho — he’s feeling poorly and he’s holed up in his cabin and not in a mood to come out.’

‘Do you want me to fetch the ship’s surgeon for him?’

John Oldcastle shook his head. ‘It’s not that sort of malady. It’s the black dog chasing him, a mood as dark as thunder. When he’s up he’s up, and when he’s down he’s down. I’ve been trying to rouse the skipper out of his moonless humours for half an hour, but he won’t even come to the door of his cabin for me.’ The old officer saw the look on Jack’s face. ‘He’ll come to the door for you, Mister Keats. He still feels bad about you taking your stripes. The ship needs its captain and he just needs a little winding up to get him started. A few laps of the lifting chamber will see him set back on the mend. We’ll do it mortal discreetly, won’t we — no need to spook the rest of the crew.’

Jack did as he was bid. The gods of the steammen wanted him to make music and the master cardsharp wanted him to coax the captain out of his dark humours — everyone on the ship had something for him to do, it seemed. Jericho might, as the master cardsharp had intimated — and their recent improvised engagement proved — be a genius at the art of commanding a war vessel, but the flame of his genius was flickering erratically.

In many ways, their skipper was as broken as his vessel, and this was just the first of many times that Jack was sent down to bring Jericho out of his cabin. And always the captain came, shambling and ill shaven, and getting him out and ready to command the vessel was much as the master cardsharp had described it — a matter of slowly winding the captain up. Engaging Jericho in talk through the cabin door, getting him to open it, easing him into his uniform and walking him to one of the vessel’s two massive lifting chambers, where he would pace his way towards some sense of normality. Jericho would walk out his moods along the lifting chamber, marching the carper walkways between the gas cells as if the very act of driving himself forward and counting the rails along the walkways, would drive out the demons that haunted his mind. They worked too. Each mile driven forward stiffened the man and filled his uniform with command authority, until the doubting miserable wreck was replaced with a towering ship’s captain, his voice able to boom commands and direct the Iron Partridge with the skill of a fencing master directing a rapier.

This, Jack came to realize — perhaps even more than his talent with the ship’s transaction engines — was why he had been fished out of a hangman’s noose at Bonegate jail by the master cardsharp and the menacing first lieutenant. Perhaps it was why Westwick had been so insistent on enforcing her whims upon the skin of Jack’s spine — to make sure Jericho would come to the cabin door when Jack needed to call.

Patching up their broken ship and patching up their broken captain.

‘What else do you have to tell me about Immed Zahharl?’ demanded Omar as soon as he and Boulous had reached safety. ‘I can see how powerful he is. Grand mage of the sorcerers’ order. The high keeper of the Sect of Razat. A grand vizier with the ear of the Caliph Eternal. Making an enemy of any one of those positions would be enough to crush me twice over. What couldn’t you tell me about him back down in the palace?’

Boulous walked beside Omar, as they climbed the stairs back up to the guardsmen’s fortress in the crags above the palace.

‘It is his dark tastes,’ said Boulous. ‘That girl you are so fond of is a bigger fool than you are, if she truly thinks that Immed Zahharl is a good master. He brings in many female slaves to his household, and when he tires of their novelty, he drags them to his bed and he strangles them with a silken rope he leaves hanging there.’

‘You are wrong!’ said Omar. The retainer had to be mistaken.

‘The whole Jahan knows of his depraved pleasures,’ said Boulous. ‘I have lost count of the women he has purchased who have vanished from his bedchamber. He fills his personal court with killers and sadists just like himself; men who share his evil tastes. He uses some of his victims’ flesh in his rituals, for the biologicks he creates — the rest of their remains he dissolves in the secret vats of the womb mages. The slaves are never found or seen again.’

‘You are wrong!’ Omar repeated.

‘Slaves talk among themselves, Omar Barir, you remember that, don’t you?’

‘The Caliph Eternal would not tolerate such a thing.’

‘Zahharl is the high keeper of a sect, he is grand vizier, he is grand mage,’ spat Boulous. ‘Never has a single man wielded such concentrated power within the empire. I told you, the Pasdaran saw him for what he was, and when they tried to remove him from office, it was the secret police that were toppled, not Immed Zahharl.’

‘Shadisa!’

Boulous grabbed Omar’s arm and restrained him from running back down the fortress steps. ‘Why do you think I waited until now to tell you this?’

‘I have to warn her, tell her about Zahharl,’ said Omar. ‘She must run away, leave him.’

Boulous shook his head. ‘Did you not hear her words, cadet? She doesn’t want anything to do with you.’

‘I shall warn her,’ said Omar. ‘Shadisa loved me once and with or without me in her life, she can still live. With my warning she will at least know to watch out for him.’

‘She will never accept you,’ said Boulous.

‘You do not know that.’ I’ll save her, then she’ll have to know what I feel for her.

‘Of course I do, I am a jahani,’ said Boulous. ‘I was raised as a slave in imperial service. Without tribe or house or sect, we are seen as a clean pair of hands, owing everything to the state. Jahani have gone on to command armies and fleets for the Caliph Eternal; as administrators we hold power throughout the empire — but no matter how high we rise, how much money and power we accumulate, no daughter of a respectable freeman would ever want to see their blood tainted by a marriage to someone such as me. It does not matter that your position is now reversed with hers. You were once a slave and she was once the daughter of a freeman; she can never forget that.’

‘I have made myself worthy of her. I am a guardsman, not a slave.’

‘Whatever you do in the future, you cannot change the past,’ said Boulous.

Omar threw his hands up in despair. ‘If that is how it is to be, what can you hope for?’

‘I will end up as an administrator in a nice fat province like Seyadi or Fahamutla, where the local sultan will know I am one of the empire’s eyes and will tread carefully around me,’ said Boulous. ‘I will grow old and fat and the province’s courtiers will elbow each other for the privilege of dropping dates into my senile mouth as I lounge in the shade of a fountain.’

‘No, anything is possible,’ insisted Omar. ‘At the start of the year I was tending the tanks of a water farm as a slave; today I have the grand vizier himself whisking my blood in his sorcerer’s cauldron to create a drak fledgling for me. In such a world, what is winning the heart of a woman like Shadisa, when there is a fellow as handsome and cunning as me ready to fight for her?’

‘You will see. That is, if Immed Zahharl doesn’t create a drak for you that is so sickly and blind it flies into a cliff on your first outing.’ Boulous pointed to the sun setting over the capital. ‘Zahharl will be back in his pavilion inside the palace now.’

‘Then the grand vizier’s staff are lucky, for they will have an extra guardsman to patrol their corridors tonight!’

‘This is no skirmish for you to be fighting in,’ Boulous pleaded. ‘When Immed Zahharl begins his war against the Jackelians, he will use the Imperial Aerial Squadron to consolidate what little military power he doesn’t already control into his hands. When that happens, he won’t be the grand vizier of the empire, he will be the empire. That is what we must fight. What is the life of one fool of a slave girl against such an outcome?’

Omar pointed down towards the palace as he started to run back down. ‘The Jahan.’

The world.

‘I can’t cover for your absence too long,’ Boulous shouted down. ‘You damned fool.’

But even as he said it, he knew it was the sort of foolhardiness that the guardsmen had once been famous for, from an age when they drew their blades first and only calculated the odds afterwards.

Boulous called out again, ‘When you get to the grand vizier’s pavilions, ask to speak to a slave woman called Nudar.’

‘Who is she?’ Omar shouted back.

‘A better woman than the one you are going for. I pray that she will be able to save you from yourself long enough for you to come to your senses.’

Boulous watched Omar disappear from sight; the last glint of the sun’s gleaming falling upon his scimitar.

The old days were coming back after all.

John Oldcastle stood up from where he was helping Coss and one of the Benzari stokers patch a line of boiler pipes, noticing Jack’s limp as he entered the transaction-engine chamber. ‘Have you slipped in the lifting chamber, lad?’

Jack shook his head. ‘I was walking down a corridor on the lower deck with that upland lieutenant.’

‘McGillivray,’ said the master cardsharp. ‘He’s a charmless dog, alright. Tosses his grog ration over the side every night and frowns on gambling. If he were walking the decks as the blessed captain, we’d all be sailing on a dry ship. Did he give you a kick for my sins, Mister Keats?’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I was passing by the rudder room and the lieutenant was walking the other way when a cannon ball came rolling down the corridor — an incendiary round, unsecured — we both had to jump out of the way and it staved in the bulkhead. I almost twisted my ankle trying to jump over it.’

‘The magazine is three decks up from where you were,’ said Coss looking up from the boiler’s pipes, his voicebox quivering with surprise. ‘Vault my valves, but what was a round doing rolling loose down there?’

‘Ah, you won’t find that trick in any of those manuals of official airship service you bought from the stationer’s stalls back home,’ said Oldcastle to the steamman. ‘It’s called “rolling shot”; a brutal little prank an unhappy crew likes to play on their officers to draw attention to their grievances. Someone was trying to play skittles using you as their mortal target. We’re sailing close to a mutiny here, lads. I had better let Jericho know. He’s respected well enough by our Jack Cloudies, but if the crew are rolling shot at the likes of McGillivray, we’re in for a choppy ride on the other side of the Cassarabian border.’

Jack watched the master cardsharp leave the transaction-engine chamber and wondered whether the sailors’ rolling shot had been aiming for the upland lieutenant. Jack was unpopular enough with the crew himself, that brute Pasco spreading the tale far and wide that the loss of their prize vessel was the result of the first lieutenant’s pique at Jack avoiding the full ninety lashes during his flogging. Mutiny. That would do for us all. Wouldn’t it be ironic to travel all this way and end up on the wrong end of a hangman’s noose after all?

‘As if we didn’t have enough problems,’ said Jack. ‘A whole empire full of hostile airships waiting for us and we’ve got to pick a fight among ourselves too.’

‘By my rotten regulators, that’s not our only problem, Jack softbody,’ said Coss. ‘There’s a good reason why our boilers are presently in such a bad shape up here.’ The steamman led Jack to the row of punch-card desks overlooking the transaction-engine pit and indicated a long stream of paper tape that had been printed out. ‘Read that. We were drawing too much power during the battle. The pipes and boiler were over-pressurized. We should have throttled the engines up to full power rather than running them cold; we’re lucky we didn’t blow half the chamber away the way we were holding back the calculation drums.’

Jack picked up the paper output and began leafing through it. ‘But we had the automated systems completely nailed down. We shouldn’t have been pushing anywhere near our capacity or tolerances …’

‘Nailed down, yes,’ said Coss. ‘But it was as if all the automated processes were running anyway, even though they weren’t connected into the physical flight mechanisms of the ship. I have never seen anything like this, Jack softbody.’

‘I think I have,’ said Jack, leafing through the tape. ‘Back in Middlesteel there was a horseless carriage that used to drive along the streets outside where I lived, one of the big expensive ones, with a driver taking a child to school every morning. The boy would sit in the back and pretend to steer it. Every day he would come past, working his imaginary controls.’

Jack didn’t say how much he had envied the child, still going to school, instead of running through the streets, thieving and robbing for enough money to eat.

‘The child …’ said Coss.

‘The ship,’ said Jack. ‘She was meant to fly and fight under full automation, and that’s what she was trying to do during the battle. She was working the controls even though she wasn’t connected to them.’

‘But the Iron Partridge never worked,’ said Coss. ‘In all her original proving flights, her automation consistently failed. The crew always ended up having to assume control and many of them were killed trying to take back manual command. Yet the results on that tape indicate a perfect flight, at least in simulation.’

Jack fingered the thick manuals chained to the punch-card desks, before delving back into the rolls of tape. Yes, there is a mystery here. Page after page in the manuals detailing the work the navy’s engineers had carried out re-rigging the automated systems for manual control. None of the automated systems had worked when the ship had first been tested in the air — yet here they had been during the battle, ticking along in simulated parallel with the crew’s manual handling of the vessel and seemingly running without fault.

‘Look at this,’ said Jack leafing down to a line of gunnery tables and trajectory plots on the tape. ‘After I opened up the magazine to the mortar tubes, our transaction engines were plotting a firing solution. Here are the orders to load another twenty shells and here’s the firing solution, right on top of the prize vessel’s lid. We would have opened up the Cassarabian airship’s spine if the mortar tubes had been running under the ship’s automated control.’

‘I can show you the original naval board’s report of enquiry,’ said Coss. ‘It’s in my air chest. During the test flights our engine-controlled gunnery proved as good as random. Some of the Iron Partridge’s shells even dropped back down on her own hull. If they had been filled with explosives rather than target paint, I doubt we would have a ship to serve in now.’

‘And yet here they’re perfect,’ said Jack. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

But, Jack realized, it needed to, and fast. If their ship was becoming unpredictable, if she was undermining the navy’s extensive manual jury-rigging, then Jack, Coss and John Oldcastle had to make themselves the masters of the Iron Partridge by the time they sailed into their next combat. Failure to do so was going to leave the sun-bleached ribs of the airship as a memento protruding out of the Cassarabian sands.