Jack Cloudie. Stephen Hunt

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