The Iron jackal totkj-3

by Chris Wooding

  ‘He’s jealous.’

  ‘A little,’ she said. ‘He thinks you’re a threat.’

  ‘Am I?’ he said slyly.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Please.’

  He leaned forward, his elbows resting on the table. ‘You know, one day it’d be nice to meet up without all your chaperones hanging around.’

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t happen.’

  ‘Don’t trust yourself around me?’

  ‘People would talk.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘You’re a man, and I’m a woman,’ she said. ‘Your reputation would increase. Mine would suffer. I won’t allow myself to be weakened because people think you bedded me.’ Her eyes narrowed in faint amusement. ‘Besides, I doubt your ego needs any more massaging.’

  ‘It wasn’t my p›‹’ego I was hoping you’d massage.’

  She gave him a despairing stare. ‘I’m beginning to miss the days when we loathed each other.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You still loathe me a bit.’

  ‘It’s difficult not to.’

  He grinned, and there was a rueful acknowledgment in the smile she gave in return. She knew it would never be simple between them. There was too much history there, too much tragedy and regret. But Frey was content just to be near her and, for her part, she seemed content with the same. He knew what she’d been through in the years since he’d run out on their wedding. Those years had turned her from a carefree young woman into a dreaded pirate queen. That couldn’t be wiped away in a few months.

  But he’d wait. He had all the time in the world for her.

  ‘Any idea what this relic is, or why your buyer wants it so bad?’

  ‘I don’t know, and you don’t need to either. The relic will be enclosed in a case. You’re not to open it under any circumstances. It might well be delicate, and the slightest damage could halve its resale value. Are we understood?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Frey dismissively. ‘What do I care about antiques anyway?’

  She poured him more rum, then took some for herself. He picked up his mug and contemplated it idly.

  ‘Who’d have thought that one day we’d end up working as partners?’ he wondered aloud.

  ‘It’s a strange world indeed,’ she replied noncommittally. But he thought, as she said it, that she was secretly glad.

  ‘I prescribe another round!’ Malvery declared, as they stumbled out of the bar onto the street. His thick white moustache was damp with grog and his round green glasses sat askew on his bulbous nose. Sweat glistened on his bald pate and trickled into the horseshoe of thinning hair that remained.

  ‘As your cap’n,’ Frey said, waving one finger grandly in the air, ‘I order you all to take your medicine!’ General cheers followed. He beamed foolishly, full to bursting with an expansive love for his fellow man, the consequence of two bottles of some unpronounceable local liquor that he’d shared with the crew after Trinica had left.

  The streets of Shasiith were even busier at night, when the crushing heat of the day receded to bearable levels. Here in the heart of the city, the buildings that lined the streets were immense and extravagant in the lamplight. The thoroughfares were a snarl of carts and animals. People spilled across the road, heedless of the wheeled traffo theeled ic. Merchants haggled loudly by street stalls. The air smelt of strange spices, cooking meat and rank sweat.

  Everyone was on the move. Most of them were Dakkadians, but there were Samarlans here too. Some of the Samarlans travelled in motorised carriages of extraordinary design, or were carried in veiled howdahs by slaves. Others were shuffling beggars, their black faces marked with white patterns, the sign of the untouchable caste. Even the Dakkadians kicked the untouchables aside like dogs, or ignored them completely.

  Frey and his crew blundered into another drinking den, this one full of locals who eyed them disapprovingly as they entered. The Dakkadian bartender evidently wanted them gone, and pretended not to speak Vardic. This didn’t deter Malvery, who kept repeating himself ever louder and more slowly until the bartender gave in and poured from the bottles that the doctor pointed at. After that, they piled around a table in the corner and set to the business of getting properly out of their skulls.

  They were in a giddy mood. Success was still a novelty, and every minor triumph was celebrated by a night on the town. Since their misadventures in Sakkan, Frey had been on a roll. Everything he did seemed to work out. Confidence was high. They were looking forward to spending the proceeds of the heist, instead of grumbling about the likelihood of getting shot.

  Even Jez, who didn’t drink, had picked up the mood and was merry. She’d been making an effort to involve herself more with the crew whenever she could, trying her hardest to fit in. Little Jez, always loyal, always efficient. Jez, her brown hair tied back with a strip of pipe lagging, looking perfectly comfortable in her baggy jumpsuit even though everyone else was sweltering. Jez, who was half-daemon, and who was dead by most people’s standards.

  Next to her was Crake, who seemed happier these days than Frey had ever known him. He was a handsome fellow, with a close-cut blond beard, aristocratic features and the glimmer of a gold tooth in his smile. In the past he’d always had a haunted look about him, but the shadow had lifted from his brow of late. Frey didn’t know why, and he didn’t want to know. He was of the opinion that a man’s business was his own unless he chose to share it. It was something of an unwritten rule on the Ketty Jay. But he was glad that his friend had dealt with whatever was troubling him.

  Crake was a smart man, highly educated and eloquent. At the other end of the intellectual spectrum was Pinn, who could be outwitted by a whelk. Pinn was stocky, ugly and stunningly dumb, but he was an incredible pilot and good fun to drink with. Every group needed a scapegoat, a lightning-rod for abuse. Pinn was the best kind of target, because he usually didn’t realise they were making fun of him, and even when he did he forgot about it moments later. Right now he was barely coherent, his eyes drifting in and out of focus, swaying in his seat.

  Frey felt a sudden, overwhelming surge of affection for all his crew. It was almost two years since Jez had come on board the Ketty Jay and completed the group. In that time, his rag-tag bunch of no-hopers had found a balance that had seen them rise from bottom-feeding freebooters to bar-room celebrities. He couldn’t imagine what he amp;rsqr w what huo; d do without them.

  ‘A toast!’ he declared suddenly, surging to his feet. ‘To all of you! And Harkins and Silo, who can’t be with us, on account of how one is scared of his own shadow and the other-’

  ‘Cap’n…’ Jez warned, glancing round the room meaningfully.

  Frey swept the bar with a disparaging glare, suddenly annoyed by the presence of the locals, who were doing their best to ignore him. Sammies and Daks, any of which would attack Silo on sight. Murthians were considered dangerous animals in Samarla, fit only for back-breaking labour and concentration camps.

  ‘Yeah, well, we know why Silo can’t be out with us tonight,’ he said, then rallied with a flourish. ‘But he’s here with us in spirit, or something! So, anyway, I just wanted to say…’

  He fought for the words to express the warm feeling of camaraderie that had seized him, his gratitude to them all just for being here with him. But his head was too cloudy, and nothing came. Before he had a chance to recover, Pinn pounded his fist on the table, making them all jump.

  ‘I’ve made a… a decision!’ he slurred. He swept the table with a bleary gaze, for effect, then raised one finger. ‘I’m gonna be a famous… a famous inventor.’

  There was a pause, a perfect vacuum of incredulous shock, during which everyone stared at Pinn in amazement. Then, as one, they burst out laughing.

  Indignation roused him from his stupor. ‘I am!’ he protested, but nobody could hear him. Malvery was holding his belly, tears rolling down his face. Between his helpless guffaws he pleaded for everyone to stop laughing, because he was going to burst his appendix if they didn’t
.

  It took a full minute for everyone to calm down, by which time Pinn was in a black sulk, with a face like a thunderhead. Crake leaned forward over the table, hands folded under his chin in an attitude of intense interest.

  ‘An inventor, you say?’ he inquired. ‘This wouldn’t have anything to do with your absent sweetheart, would it? Whichever sweetheart it is; I lose track.’

  ‘ ’S only one woman for me,’ Pinn said, narrowing his piggy eyes. But, since everyone was paying attention now, he drew something from his pocket and placed it delicately onto the table.

  It was a small chrome egg on a pedestal. He tapped it, and it opened out into four quarters. Inside was a tiny clockwork bird in a cage, which began spinning around and making a feeble cheeping noise.

  It was a trinket, a gewgaw from one of the local markets. The Samarlans loved their clockwork gadgets.

  Pinn was mesmerised by it. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘What’s amazing is that you paid money for that piece of junk,’ said Malvery, still chuckling.

  Pinn closed it up and snatched it away resentfully. ‘Well, kicking around with you lot isn’t getting me rich, is it? Gotta get rich. Can’t go back to Lisinda till I do.’

  ‘Emanda,’ Crake reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, her,’ he waved in the air vaguely. ‘Anyway, reckon I’ll just invent something. Something… something no one’s thought of yet. You lot won’t be laughing then.’

  ‘Well,’ said Frey, ‘since you hijacked my toast, here’s to you. Professor Pinn, the inventor!’

  And they cheered, and drank, and Frey thought that all was well with the world.

  Three

  Sightseeing – The Duchess and the Daisy – Chain – Ghosts at Her Shoulder – Floodlights – A Deception

  The Ketty Jay groaned and shrieked as she lifted off her struts and began to rise above the landing pad. She was a solid, brutish thing with a humped back, short, downswept wings and a stumpy tail end: a hybrid cargo hauler and combat craft, built tough at the expense of beauty. With her belly lights shining, she ascended into the sultry night, her ballast tanks filling with ultralight aerium gas.

  Crake watched from the cockpit as the landing pad fell away beneath them. The aircraft on the ground were all Vard or Yort in design: this was a pad reserved for foreigners. Samarlan Navy craft glided through the sky, blade-sleek predators underlit by the city glow.

  Let’s hope we don’t have to tangle with any of them tonight, he thought.

  Jez was in the pilot’s seat. The Cap’n sat at the navigator’s station, bruised and battered and looking generally dejected. Crake knew how much he hated letting anyone else fly his beloved aircraft.

  It had been a few days since Frey’s introduction to Ashua’s boot, but his face had healed up quickly, although it was still a little lumpy and faintly discoloured. According to Malvery, the rest of him hadn’t done so well. His back and ribs were a mass of yellow and purple from the fall he took. He winced whenever he moved.

  Harkins hung by the door, pilot’s cap scrunched up in nervous hands, his hangdog face animated by some intern, bal distress. No doubt he was feeling lost without his Firecrow. The two fighter craft that normally travelled with the Ketty Jay had been left on the landing pad tonight.

  Pinn and Harkins had taken some persuading to leave their craft in Shasiith. Pinn entertained the strange belief that he could fly by instinct alone; Harkins was terrified of being separated from his aircraft. The Cap’n had finally convinced them both by making them walk around blindfold and counting how many things they bumped into. Then he reminded them what would happen if they did that at three hundred kloms an hour. They would be travelling over unfamiliar terrain without lights, on a moonless night, in near total darkness. The only member of their crew who could fly like that was Jez, due to her inhumanly sharp vision.

  Ashua was here too, leaning against a bulkhead with her arms crossed, keeping an eye on things. Crake found the young woman distasteful. She had a surly arrogance that bothered him. Someone from such an obviously poor background shouldn’t carry themselves with that kind of aggressive confidence. It offended his sense of the order of things.

  ‘There’s… uh… there’s not many aircraft about, are there?’ Harkins ventured.

  The question was addressed to Jez. He must have been plucking up his courage for several minutes before he dared speak to her. Crake felt rather sorry for Harkins. It was hard to watch him trying to get her attention. Everyone on board knew that he was sweet on Jez, except, apparently, Jez herself.

  ‘There’s not much aerium around since the embargo,’ Jez replied, to Harkins’ evident delight. ‘What there is is reserved for the Navy. Everyone else uses road or rail.’

  ‘That’s the whole reason they opened the Free Trade Zone in the first place,’ Ashua said. ‘To make it easy to smuggle aerium in from Vardia.’ She eyed the Navy craft in the distance. ‘But once you get outside the Zone, they’ll take you down hard.’

  ‘Unless they don’t see us,’ said Frey. ‘Which is pretty much the plan.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jez. ‘We really don’t want to be messing with the Sammie Navy if we can help it.’

  Crake walked over to stand behind Jez, in the pilot’s seat, as the Ketty Jay ascended and the city spread out beneath them. This was what he’d come to the cockpit to see. Darkness had swallowed the faraway mountains, the plains of yellow grass and the distant herds of unfamiliar animals that he remembered from the day they arrived. Shasiith was a cauldron of light below them, its muddled streets like shining veins. Sun-scorched domes and parapets cooled in the night, darkening to shadow as they rose. Buildings of breathtaking scale and complexity crowded together along the black line of the river. Dozens of bridges spanned the flow. There were buildings on the bridges with lights in their windows, a necklace of dirty stars reaching from one bank to another.

  ‘Isn’t that something?’ he said, a smile touching the corner of his lips.

  Jez murmured in agreement. He knew she’d get it. She was the only other member of the crew who had any appreciation for art and culture. While the rest had been propping up bars and fleecing the locals in gambling dens, Jez and Crake had been taking in the sights, visiting monuments, tasting delicacies and generally soaking in the atmosphere of Samarla. Jez was a guarded and closed-off sort, but she understood beauty and wonder.

  Once he’d drunk in enough of the view, Crake headed out of the cockpit and into the passage that ran along the spine of the Ketty Jay . After a short way, a ladder ran up one side of the passage to a seat in the autocannon cupola on the Ketty Jay ’s back. He stopped to look up, saw the bottom of Malvery’s boots, and heard a glugging sound.

  ‘Settled in already, Doc?’

  Malvery’s grinning face appeared, looking down between his legs. ‘Cap’n wants me on the watch for any Sammies once we’re out of the Free Trade Zone,’ he said. He brandished a bottle of grog. ‘Reckoned I might as well bring a friend, make a night of it.’

  ‘See anything?’

  ‘Got a fine view of the Ketty Jay ’s arse end. I’d invite you up for a drink, but it’s pretty cosy in here.’

  ‘That’s alright. I’m going to see Bess.’

  ‘Give her my regards.’

  ‘Will do.’

  His quarters were half a dozen metres down the corridor, behind a sliding metal door that squealed on its rollers as he pulled it aside. The room beyond was cramped and bare, comprising a pair of small bunk-beds, a basin, a chest and a cupboard. It was as clean and tidy as he could make it, but it was still little more than a metal box to sleep in. Since he had these quarters to himself, he’d laid a board across the upper bunk and used it as a bookshelf and luggage rack. He picked a heavy, leather-bound book from the row of several dozen, tucked it under his arm, and went down into the cargo hold.

  The belly of the Ketty Jay was cavernous in comparison to the upper deck. He was making his way down the steps when he he
ard a growing roar, and felt the gentle and insistent push of the Ketty Jay ’s thrusters. He held on to a railing and listened as the lashed-down cargo creaked and shifted in the gloom.

  The Rattletraps were secured side-by-side in the centre of the hold. The name was a local Vardic word to describe a Samarlan vehicle that most foreigners found hard to pronounce. Crake thought it perfectly suitable to describe the three armoured sand-buggies that Ashua had rustled up. They were grimy contraptions that looked like they hailed from some distant as hme distnd uncivilised frontier. They had large, dusty tyres and sat on thickly coiled springs for suspension. Two of them had rotary gatling guns mounted on top of their roll-cages.

  He eyed them uncertainly. Ashua would be driving one. Jez had volunteered to drive another. There wasn’t much that Jez couldn’t drive or fly, when it came to it. Apparently, she’d had experience with similar vehicles while working for Professor Malstrom, back before she was caught by a Mane.

  Silo would be taking the third Rattletrap. No one knew what he had experience in. His past was unknown to Crake, except that he’d rescued Frey from certain death after Frey had crash-landed in Samarla many years ago. Crake had always supposed there was a story to it but, as far as he knew, no one had asked and Silo wasn’t telling.

  Crake, for his part, had always wondered where a Murthian slave learned to speak Vardic so well. He hardly ever spoke to anyone on the crew, so it seemed unlikely that he’d learned it on the Ketty Jay. Curiously, his phrasing and regional burr came from Draki, the southernmost duchy of Vardia, which bordered onto Samarla. Draki was traditionally regarded as a cultural and literal wasteland, populated by rural people from peasant stock who eked a living from the hard earth, half of it poisoned by the Blackendraft blowing in from the Hookhollow volcanoes to the west. How Silo could have learned Vardic from Draki folk was a mystery.

  Well, whatever the truth, Silo was confident he could drive a Rattletrap better than anyone else here. And if Silo said so, then it was true.