‘There’s three?’
‘Four,’ Crake corrected. He showed Frey the compass. The needles were in a fan, all pointing roughly ahead. Frey frowned as he looked at it, and for a moment his vision wavered out of focus. He blinked, and the feeling passed. He swore to himself that he’d never again drink excessively the night before doing anything life-threatening.
‘Any of them directly in front of us?’
‘One’s pretty close. Twenty metres below. Oh!’
‘Don’t just say “oh!” ’ Frey snapped. ‘Oh, what?’
‘One of the needles moved . . . now it’s changed back . . . now it’s gone back again.’
‘What you mean, it changed?’ Frey demanded. He wiped sweat from his brow. All this tension was making him feel sick.
‘It moved! What do you think I mean?’ Crake replied in exasperation. ‘Can you stop a moment?’
‘Well, why’s it changing? Is there something there or not?’ Frey was getting flustered now. He felt a fluttering sensation of panic come over him.
‘There’s more than four of those things out there,’ said Jez, who had got up from her station and was looking at the compass. ‘I’d guess it keeps changing the needles to show us the nearest four.’
‘There’s one thirty metres ahead!’ Crake cried.
‘But is it above us or below us?’ Frey said.
‘Forty metres above.’
‘Then why tell me?’ he shouted.
‘Because you told me to! ’ Crake shouted back. ‘Will you stop this damn craft?’
But Frey didn’t want to. He wanted to get this over with. He wanted to be past these invisible enemies and away from this place. There was a terrible feeling of wrongness stealing over him, a numbness prickling up from his toes. He felt flustered and harassed.
‘What the bloody shit is going on, Crake?’ he snarled, leaning forward to try and see what, if anything, was above them. ‘Someone talk to me! Where are they?’
‘There’s one, there’s three in front of us, one behind us now . . . umm . . . two above, thirty and twenty metres, there’s . . .’ Crake swore. ‘The numbers keep changing because you’re moving! How am I supposed to read them out fast enough?’
‘Just tell me if we’re going to hit anything, Crake! It’s pretty damn simple!’
Jez was staring in bewilderment. ‘Will you two calm down? You’re acting like a pair of—’
But then Frey recoiled from the window with a yell. ‘There’s something out there!’
‘What was it?’ Jez asked.
‘We’ve got one twenty . . . ten metres ahead . . . it’s below us though . . .’ Crake was saying.
‘It looked like . . . I don’t know, it looked like it had a face,’ Frey was babbling. His stomach griped and roiled. He could smell his own sweat, and he felt filthy. He wiped at the back of his hands to try and clean them a little, but all it did was smear more dirt into his skin. ‘The ghosts!’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s the ghosts of Rook’s Boneyard!’
‘There aren’t any ghosts, Cap’n,’ Jez said, but her face was red in the lava-light and her voice sounded strange and echoey. Her plain features seemed sly. Did she know something he didn’t? A blast of maniacal laughter came from the mess, Pinn laughing hysterically at something. It sounded like the cackle of a conspirator.
‘Of course there are ghosts!’ Frey turned his attention back to the windglass, trying to will the mist aside. ‘Everyone says.’
‘Two of them are behind us now,’ Crake droned in the background. ‘One ahead, one passing to the side.’
‘Which side?’
‘Does it matter?’
Something swept past the windglass, a stir in the mist. Frey saw the stretched shape of a human form and distorted, ghastly features. He shied back from the windglass with a gasp.
‘What is it?’
‘Didn’t you see it?’
‘I didn’t see anything!’
Frey’s vision was slipping in and out of focus, and refused to stay steady. He burped in his throat, and tasted acid and rotten eggs.
‘Cap’n . . .’ said Crake.
‘I think something’s wrong,’ Frey murmured.
‘Cap’n . . . the second set of numbers . . .’
‘What second set of—’
‘The numbers! They’re counting up from minus twenty towards zero! It’s coming at us from below!’
‘Cap’n! You’re drifting off altitude! You’re diving!’ Jez cried.
Frey saw the altimeter sliding down and grabbed the controls, pulling the Ketty Jay level.
‘It’s still coming!’ Crake shrieked.
‘Move!’ Jez cried, and Frey boosted the engines. The Ketty Jay surged forward, and a split second later there was a deafening explosion outside, slamming against the hull and throwing Crake and Jez across the cabin. The craft heeled hard, swinging to starboard, and Frey fought with the controls as they were propelled blindly into the red murk. The Ketty Jay felt sluggish and wounded. Frey caught a glimpse of the compass on the floor, its needles spinning and switching crazily.
They’re all around us!
Crake started shrieking. ‘Daemons! There are daemons at the windows!’ Frey’s vision blurred and stayed blurred. There seemed to be no strength in his limbs.
‘Cap’n! Above and to starboard!’ Jez shouted.
Frey looked, and saw a round shadow in the mist. Growing, darkening as it approached. A ghost. A great black ghost.
No. A sphere. A metal sphere studded with spikes.
A floating mine.
Jez grabbed the flight stick and wrenched the Ketty Jay to port. Frey fell bonelessly out of his seat. Crake screamed.
There was another explosion. Then blackness, and silence.
Twenty-Eight
Jez Saves The Day—Legends Come To Life—The Dock Master—Some Tactical Thinking—News From The Market
Frey came to a kind of bleary awareness some time later, to find himself crumpled on the floor of the Ketty Jay’s cockpit. His cheek was pressed to the metal, wet with drool. His head pounded as if his brain was trying to kick its way out of his skull.
He groaned and stirred. Jez was sitting in the pilot’s seat. She looked down at him.
‘You’re back,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’
He swore a few times to give her an idea. Crake was collapsed in the opposite corner, contorted uncomfortably beneath the navigator’s desk.
Frey tried to remember how he’d got in this state. He was tempted to blame it on alcohol, but he was certain that he hadn’t been drinking since last night. The last thing he remembered was flying through the fog and fretting about the numbers on the compass.
‘What just happened?’ he asked, pulling himself into a sitting position.
Jez had the compass and the charts spread out untidily on the dash. She consulted both before replying. ‘You all went crazy. Fumes from the lava river, I suppose. It would explain all the ghosts and hallucinations and paranoia.’ She tapped the compass with a fingernail. ‘Turns out this thing is to warn us where the magnetic floating mines are. Someone’s gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure this secret hideout stays secret.’
Frey fought down a swell of nausea. He felt like he’d been poisoned.
‘Apologies for taking the helm without permission, Cap’n,’ said Jez, sounding not very apologetic at all. ‘Had to avoid that mine, and you were out of action. Close thing. The Ketty Jay took a battering. Anyway, we’re nearly there now.’
‘We are?’
‘It’s actually pretty easy once you work it out,’ she said, although he wasn’t sure if she meant following the route to the hideout or flying the Ketty Jay.
He got unsteadily to his feet, feeling vaguely usurped. The sight of Jez in the pilot’s seat disturbed him. It was an unpleasant vision of the future he feared, in which Jez—now possessing the ignition code—stole away with his beloved craft when his back was turned. She looked so damned comfortable there.
Frey rubbed his head. ‘So how come it didn’t affect you?’
She shrugged. ‘Once I saw what was happening, I held my breath. I only took a few lungfuls before we flew out of it.’
Frey narrowed his eyes. The explanation had an over-casual, rehearsed quality to it. As an experienced liar, he knew the signs. So why was his navigator lying to him?
There was a clatter from the passageway behind the cockpit, and Malvery swung round the door. ‘Allsoul’s balls, what were we drinking? ’ he complained. ‘They’re all comatose down there. Even the bloody cat’s conked out.’
‘You weren’t giving the cat rum again, were you?’ Frey asked.
‘He looked thirsty,’ Malvery said, with a sheepish smile.
‘Eyes front, everyone,’ said Jez. ‘I think we’re here.’
They crowded around her and stared through the windglass as the Ketty Jay droned out of the canyon. And there, down among the fog and the mountains of the Hookhollows, hidden in the dreadful depths of Rook’s Boneyard, they found at last what they’d been searching for.
The canyon emptied out into a colossal, gloomy sinkhole, a dozen kloms wide, where the ground dropped seventy metres to a water-logged marsh. Streams from all over the mountains, unable to find another way out, ended up here, tipping over the edge in thin waterfalls. Mineral slurry and volcanic sludge, washed down from distant vents, stained the surface of the marsh with metallic slicks of orange, green or blue. Ill-looking plants choked the water. The air smelled acidic and faintly eggy.
But here, in this festering place, was a town.
It was built from wood and rusting metal, a ramshackle sprawl that had evolved without thought to plan or purpose. Most of it was set on platforms that rose out of the water, supported by a scaffolding of girders. The rest was built on what little land the marsh had to offer: soggy banks and hummocks. Each part was linked by bridges to its neighbours, and lit by strings of electric lamps that hung haphazardly across the thoroughfares.
The buildings varied wildly in quality. Some wouldn’t have looked out of place on a country estate in the tropical south. Others had been thrown together with whatever could be found or brought from the outside. They were made of wood and stone, with slate or corrugated iron roofs. Parts of the settlement were a cluster of shanty-town huts, barely fit for habitation, whereas others were more organised and showed an architect’s touch.
Then there were the aircraft. There had to be two hundred or more, crowding around the town. Frigates floated at anchor, secured by strong chains to stop them drifting. Smaller craft ferried their crews to and from the ground. There was one enormous landing pad, occupying the biggest land mass in the marsh, but even that was nowhere near adequate to cope with the number of craft berthed here. Several large landing pads lay on the surface of the marsh. They were temporary-looking things, buoyed up by flaking aerium tanks filled from portable engines to prevent the pads from sinking.
Frey stared at the multitude. He saw freighters, barques, fighters of all description, double-hulled caravels, ironclads, monitors and corvettes. The air above the town was busy with craft taking off and setting down, a restless to and fro. A Rainbird-class hunter-killer, sleek and vicious, slipped past them to their starboard and headed into the canyon they’d just exited.
‘That’s a bit more than just a hideout,’ Malvery murmured, amazed. ‘There’s a whole bloody port down here.’
And suddenly Frey knew where he was. Nothing else matched the picture. He’d always believed this place was a myth, a wistful dream for freebooters all over Vardia. But now it was laid out before his eyes; decaying, shabby, but undoubtedly real. The legendary pirate town, hidden from the Coalition Navy and ruled by the famed pirate Orkmund.
Retribution Falls.
Frey could see no indication of where he was supposed to land, no spotlights to guide him in, so he squeezed into a vacant spot on the main pad. When he and his crew opened the cargo ramp to disembark they found someone waiting for them. He was tall and doughy around the belly and face, with one lazy eye and a gormless smile.
‘You signed in yet?’ he asked Frey.
Frey was momentarily lost for an answer. The man had just watched them set down. He considered asking how he might possibly have got to the dock master’s office and back while still in mid-air, but eventually he settled on an easier response.
‘No.’
‘You should sign in. Orkmund’s orders.’
Frey felt a thrill of excitement at the name. That settled it. This was Retribution Falls alright.
‘Where’s the dock master?’
‘You the captain?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Follow me, I’ll take you.’
Frey told the others to wait by the Ketty Jay, and then trailed after the man towards the dock master’s office. It was a grim, low-ceilinged affair, more like a large shed than an administrative building. Dirty windows were divided into small rectangular panes. The door stuck and had to be wrenched open: the frame had warped in the dank air.
Inside, the gloom was barely leavened by a single oil lantern. The dock master—a thin, old man with a pinched face—was hunched over a desk, writing with a pen. On the other side of the room was a lectern, where a huge book lay open. It was full of names and dates.
Frey waited to be noticed. The man with the lazy eye waited with him. The smell from the swamp lingered in the nostrils, faintly disgusting. Frey suspected that the locals didn’t notice it any more.
After a short time, the dock master looked up. ‘Well, sign in, then!’ he snapped, indicating the book on the lectern. ‘Olric, honestly! Why don’t you just tell him to sign in?’
Olric looked shamefaced. Frey went over to the book and picked up the pen that lay next to it. He scanned over the entries. Each line bore the name of a captain, the name of an aircraft, and the date and time of arrival and, in some cases, departure. At the bottom of each double page the dock master had signed his name and title in crabbed script.
He flicked back a few pages, idly searching for someone he knew. Maybe Trinica would be in here.
‘Busy recently, aren’t you?’ he commented. ‘You usually get this much traffic?’
‘Just sign,’ the dock master said impatiently, not looking up from his records.
Frey’s decision to confine most of the crew to the craft wasn’t popular with one man in particular.
‘You stinking bastard, Frey!’ Pinn cried. ‘You didn’t even believe Retribution Falls existed until now! I told you we should come here when we were back in Yortland, but oh, no! You thought: let’s all laugh at Pinn! Well I called it right, and I deserve to come.’
‘Shut your fat meat-hole, Pinn,’ Malvery said. ‘Cap’n’s given you an order.’
‘Oh really? Well he can stuff it up his arse with all the other orders he’s given me!’
Frey looked at Silo. ‘If he tries to leave, shoot him,’ he said, only half-joking.
‘Cap’n,’ Silo replied, priming his shotgun with a crunch.
Pinn looked around at the rest of the crew, finding no support, and then stamped back into the depths of the craft, muttering mutinously.
‘Jez, Malvery, come on,’ he said. ‘We keep a low profile, have a look around, keep our ears open. And don’t anybody call me anything but Cap’n, okay? I don’t want to hear my name spoken outside of the Ketty Jay.’
‘Right-o.’
‘Everyone got revolvers? Good. You never know.’
They headed across the landing pad towards the bridge to the town. Frey was rather pleased with himself for standing firm against Pinn’s outburst. Pinn was envisioning a night out in this pirate haven, but Frey needed to be able to effe
ct a quick escape if necessary, without the need to go searching under bar tables for his drunken crew. Taking the whole group out would be like trying to herd cats.
He reviewed the tactics behind his choice of landing party. Separating Malvery and Pinn was the key. Pinn wouldn’t cause any trouble without the doctor’s back-up, and since Malvery was coming along, he didn’t care what happened to Pinn. Malvery was useful muscle and had a bluff charm that would play well, but the two of them together in a place like Retribution Falls would result in alcoholic carnage, sure as bird shit on statues.
Jez would also be useful. She was smart, observant, and she had eyes like a hawk. Plus she was the only sensible one among them. He didn’t count Crake. Crake dealt with daemons: nobody could say that was sensible.
But he had an ulterior motive in bringing Jez. He wanted to keep an eye on her. As grateful as he was that she’d saved their lives, he was suspicious. It puzzled him that the fumes hadn’t seemed to affect her, and her explanation was weak. He didn’t want to leave her alone on his aircraft. Not now she knew the ignition code. He wasn’t so sure he trusted her.
The others wouldn’t mind staying on the Ketty Jay. Crake, as he was never a freebooter, didn’t understand the legend and allure of Retribution Falls. He had no desire to see the place. Harkins didn’t like crowds or strangers. He’d rather be secure in his quarters, living in terror of the cat, who would wait for him to fall asleep before trying to suffocate him. And it would be too dangerous to take Silo. A Murthian would attract unwanted and hostile attention in a town like this. Besides, Silo had work to do. He needed to check over the Ketty Jay and repair any damage from the mines.
All in all, he had the whole thing figured out.
Not bad, Frey, he thought. That’s the sort of thinking a real captain does. That’s how to handle a crew.
He was in the mood for self-congratulation, despite his near-catastrophic failure to lead them through Rook’s Boneyard. The triumph of finding Retribution Falls outweighed all that. This must have been how Cruwen and Skale felt when they discovered New Vardia. He was an explorer now. Whatever happened after this, he had to admit, he felt more . . . well, more like a man than he ever had before.
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