Jack Cloudie
A botched robbery earns Jack Keats a commission in the Royal Aerostatical Navy instead of the scaffold.
About this book
Jack Keats was a thief. Now he is in the Royal Aerostatical Navy and flying south to a war with the desert Caliphate. The other side has weapons grown out of flesh.
Jack Keats's family has fallen apart. Caught on the Middlesteel rooftops, he is given the choice between transportation and the navy. He chooses the navy.
What he flies into is the cycle's largest set-piece war: the Royal Aerostatical Navy versus the Caliphate of Cassarabia and its womb-mages, biological sorcerers who grow weapons, mounts and servants out of living flesh. Omar bin Barir, a young Cassarabian whose path into the conflict has been just as accidental as Jack's, is his opposite number on the other side.
This is the most invention-dense Jackelian novel, and the one most willing to dwell on the texture of being a junior crewman aboard a working ship of the line. The womb-mages get their proper introduction here, and the Cassarabian polity is explored from inside.
Cassarabia stops being a backdrop and becomes a fully realised culture. The Royal Aerostatical Navy gets a long, loving treatment, new technologies emerge that will recur, and the cycle's geopolitics tighten.
- you liked Patrick O'Brian's naval fiction and want it airborne;
- you enjoyed Naomi Novik's Temeraire and want a denser worldbuild;
- you want the cycle's strangest sustained invention.