The Iron jackal totkj-3

by Chris Wooding

  Crake was shocked, holding the side of his face. ‘He slapped me!’ he said to Frey in indignation.

  ‘I saw,’ said Frey grimly, as the thug descended on Crake and dragged him out of the shop. The bell above the door tinkled happily as Crake was flung out on to the street.

  Crickslint had steepled his fingers again, gazing steadily at Frey, having returned to his self-appointed role as pantomime villain. ‘Now that… distraction is out of the way, perhaps we can negotiate man-to-man?’

  ‘Can’t blame a feller for trying,’ said Frey. The tooth only worked on people who were weak-willed or stupid. Crickslint was apparently neither.

  ‘I believe you were interrupted in the process of making me a ridiculous offer? You were asking me to entrust to you a valuable Samarlan relic, many thousands of years old, with a Firecrow as collateral? You do know the market’s been flooded with second-hand Firecrows since the Navy upgraded their fleet?’

  ‘Crickslint,’ said Frey. ‘It’s a classic aircraft. And you could own one, for a limited time.’

  Crickslint laughed, a high, hysterical laugh that sawed through the brain and down the spinal column. Frey had to clutch the sides of his chair to resist punching him. He was just so punchable. Although it might be pretty hard on the knuckles with those chrome teeth in place.

  ‘You could own one! Very amusing. No, I think we’ll forget about the Firecrow.’

  Frey was sort of relieved. He didn’t fancy explaining to Harkins that he’d have to do without his beloved aircraft, even though it technically belonged to Frey.

  ‘What about I do some jobs for you?’ Frey suggested. ‘For free, of course. You always need smugglers, right? I’m good at that.’

  I really hope he doesn’t remember how good I was at stealing from him, too, Frey thought. But if Crickslint did remember, he wasn’t showing it.

  Crickslint sat upright, one finger pressed against his lips in a classic pose of thought. The very artificiality of it made Frey murderous. He hated having to beg like this. He had half a mind to leave and come back with Plan B – B for ‘Bess tears everyone’s heads off’ – when Crickslint spoke again.

  ‘I have a proposal,’ he said. ‘I hear you have an exceptional pilot on your crew by the name of Artis Pinn.’

  Pinn. Pinn with his arm in a sling.

  ‘What of it?’ Frey asked carefully.

  ‘I have a way that you could do me a service. After that, I might consider loaning you the relic you need.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I know a man who owes me a lot. He’s also quite the gambler. I have an interest in seeing him lose a large amount of money. Then I’ll call in his debt and bankrupt him.’

  ‘Won’t that mean that you lose some of your money?’

  ‘Yes. But by bankrupting him I’ll be doing a far more valuable service to his rival. It’s a game of checks and balances, Captain Frey; you really don’t need to worry about it.’

  ‘So what do I have to do?’

  ‘There are races held outside the city. Single-seater craft, racing round a circuit. They’re illegal and unregulated, and a lot of money changes hands on them. The man I want is the backer for a pilot named Gidley Sleen. He places big bets on every race. I’m given to understand that Sleen is a virtual certainty to win tomorrow; the competition is feeble. Short odds will mean his backer will place an even bigger bet than usual to get a good return.’

  ‘You want me to enter Pinn in the race?’

  ‘I want you to enter him, and I want him to win. He’ll go in as an unknown. I’ll back him myself: the odds will be very favourable. When he wins, I’ll make a lot, and my target will lose a lot, I’ll call in my debt at the right moment and-’ He clicked his fingers.

  ‘Then you’ll loan me the relic?’

  ‘For two weeks. And if it’s not back in my hands by then, I will find you.’ He snapped his teeth together. ‘You don’t want that.’

  ‘Done,’ said Frey. ‘And don’t worry. Pinn’s the best damn pilot in Vardia.’

  ‘I’m gonna do what? ’ Harkins shrieked, at the same time as Pinn cried: ‘He’s gonna do what?’

  Frey pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. To Crake, who was sitting with his feet up on the table of the Ketty Jay ’s mess, the Cap’n looked tired and harassed. Good,

  ‘It’s pretty simple,’ Frey said. ‘Harkins, you’re gonna pretend to be Pinn tomorrow, and fly the race in his place.’

  ‘Him?’ Pinn cried, pointing at Harkins. ‘I’m a better pilot even with my arm in a sling!’

  Harkins muttered something unintelligible, but probably insulting.

  ‘You can’t fly properly with one arm, Pinn,’ said Frey. ‘You barely managed to land the Skylance in Thesk without crashing it.’

  But Pinn was in the midst of a tantrum and wasn’t really listening. ‘I wanna fly!’ he said. ‘This is a fringement of my human rights!’

  ‘A fringement?’ Crake said in weary disgust, rousing from his sulk.

  ‘Fringement!’ Pinn snapped. ‘Like when someone’s in your fringe!’

  Crake opened his mouth, and shut it again with a sigh. He couldn’t be bothered.

  ‘Is that even a word?’ Frey asked Malvery, who was stirring a pot of soup at the stove. Malvery shrugged without turning around. He didn’t want to get involved.

  Slag watched the conflict with half an eye, having decided to join the crew in the mess. He’d plonked himself down in a languid curve on the table and was surreptitiously lapping at a patch of spilled coffee when he thought nobody was looking.

  ‘Crickslint doesn’t know what you look like,’ Frey told Pinn. ‘As far as he knows, Artis Pinn is skinny and balding and loud noises give him a heart attack.’

  ‘Instead of someone resembling an angry potato with an attitude problem,’ Crake added.

  ‘You shut up, you milky little ponce,’ said Pinn. ‘You just got slapped by a guy with no teeth.’

  ‘Hey, he had teeth! Big shiny ones!’ Crake protested, but nobody was listening.

  ‘I am not pretending to be him!’ Harkins declared, thrusting a trembling finger at Pinn.

  ‘He is not pretending to be me!’ Pinn said.

  ‘Yes. He. Is,’ said the Cap’n. ‘Because we need that relic back.’

  ‘ You need that relic back,’ Pinn corrected.

  ‘Yes, I need it,’ said Frey, who was getting to the end of his tether. ‘And if I end up dead, what do you think happens to you lot? No more Ketty Jay. Are you all going to go and get jobs or something?’

  Pinn went pale at that. Before anyone could offer anything else, the cat suddenly sprang up, arched his back and hissed.

  ‘Here comes Jez,’ said Malvery, without taking his eyes off the soup.

  Sure enough, Jez climbed down the ladder a moment later. Slag bolted, leaping off the table and onto the counter-top, and finally up on top of a cupboard, where he sat crooning malevolently.

  ‘That cat really hates you,’ Crake observed.

  ‘He hates everyone,’ said Jez dismissively. She turned to the Cap’n. ‘Course plotted for the race site. It’ll take us two hours, more or less.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Frey. ‘Early start tomorrow, lads.’ There were general groans at the news. ‘I know, I know. But we have to get there in plenty of time. We need to tune up the Firecrow. She’ll have to be at her best if we’re gonna win this race.’

  ‘If I’m gonna win it,’ said Harkins, puffing out his chest. Thin as he was, it didn’t puff too far.

  ‘Oh? I thought you didn’t want to race?’ said Frey wryly.

  Harkins glanced at Jez and coughed. ‘Well, you know… I changed my mind! If there’s flying to be done, I’m the man to do it. Artis Pinn!’

  Pinn gave a strangled cry of rage and lunged across the mess at Harkins, who gave a less than manly squeal and hid behind Frey. Jez watched the whole thing in bewilderment.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ said Crake, getting to his feet. ‘I think I
’ll leave you all to it.’

  He slipped through the melee and climbed the ladder to the relative peace of the Ketty Jay ’s main passageway. From there, he made his way down to the hold to check on Bess.

  It was chilly and gloomy in the hold. Crake preferred that to the sweltering heat of Samarla. He was glad to be out of that country, if only because his bowel movements had finally steadied. His stomach really didn’t get on with Samarlan fare at all.

  In the middle of the hold were the Rattletraps. One of them was halfway disassembled, with Silo’s tool box resting on its hood. The man himself was nowhere to be seen. Crake was glad aboe wth="20ut that. Since they’d held up that train in the desert, Silo had been in a foul mood. Now he spent most of his time in the hold, fixing up buggies with a furious intensity, and if anyone so much as spoke to him they got an irritated glare and no reply. Crake wondered if the engineer had something on his mind, but he knew so little about him that it was hard to tell.

  In fact, it wasn’t just Silo that was acting oddly. There was a strange atmosphere on the Ketty Jay now. Everyone knew that the Cap’n was in trouble, everyone was thinking about it, but no one wanted to talk about it. So they all ran around getting on with whatever they could, or stayed away from the craft altogether.

  Nobody wanted to admit it, but the Cap’n’s life might be measured in days. And all this, this world aboard the Ketty Jay they’d created for themselves, would come to an end then. Without Frey, there was no crew. Nobody really thought they could carry on if the Cap’n was gone. They would each end up going their separate ways. It would be inevitable. They had very little in common, beyond the Ketty Jay.

  He’d reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out onto the floor of the cargo hold when he heard a soft clank from the shadows.

  His senses prickled. There was a change in the air. The chill he felt wasn’t entirely due to the temperature.

  ‘Bess?’ he said quietly, although something told him it wasn’t her. Dread trickled through him. He stared into the darkness at the edges of the hold.

  Something shifted there. Something taller than a man.

  Spit and blood. It’s here.

  He took a step backwards. He was defenceless. There was a daemon here and he was defenceless and it wasn’t even meant to be coming for him, it was meant to be Frey!

  ‘Bess!’ he called, though this time it was more like a shout.

  There was a soft growl. It moved to the edge of the light. Somehow it was still impossible to make out a shape, but he saw a claw, a huge iron claw with bayonets for fingers, and then a muzzle like a dog’s, wrinkling into a snarl.

  ‘Damn it, Bess! Where are you?’ he yelled in panic.

  She came thundering from the sanctum, emerging from behind the barrier of crates and tarpaulin at the back of the hold. A mountain of metal and chainmail and leather, boots stamping hard enough to make Silo’s tool box slide off the hood of the Rattletrap and crash to the ground.

  But by the time she’d arrived, there was only blackness where the thing had been. Crake stared at the emptiness, his heart thumping in his chest. Bess cast about in agitation, searching for whatever had alarmed Crake.

  After a moment, Crake patted her on the arm. ‘Easy, girl,’ he said. ‘It’s gone now. It’s gone.’

  Bess allowed herself to be gentled. Crake led her back to the sanctum, glancing over his shoulder at the spot where he’d seen – where he thought he saw – the daemon. Already it didn’t seem real.

  No. I saw it. Just like Frey did.

  But what had shaken him, more than the sight of the daemon itself, was the feeling of helplessness he’d experienced in that moment. He’d never faced a daemon before without his machines, without layers of sonic defences and carefully calculated formulae to hand – without preparation. But this one was loose, unconstrained by interference fields or echo chambers.

  He was a daemonist. Dealing with daemons was his whole purpose in life. But he realised that he had absolutely no way to fight the thing that had come on board the Ketty Jay.

  That, he told himself, would have to be remedied.

  Fifteen

  Pre-Flight – Use of Weapons – Silo’s Diagnosis – The Tunnel – Harkins Disobeys

  There was something wrong with the Firecrow.

  Harkins felt his already unbearable terror slide towards full-blown panic. He tried the switch again, and again, flushing air through the aerium vents. The result was the same. It just didn’t sound right.

  Was it just his nerves, playing tricks on him? No. Harkins was obsessive about his pre-flight checks. They helped to relax him. He could pass hours checking and re-checking the Firecrow from the sanctuary of his cockpit. Every system on his aircraft had been tested over and over by him personally. He knew the pitch of every squeaking hydraulic pump, the whirr of every actuator.

  He looked to his left and right. Beneath a louring grey sky, the other racers were lined up next to him. Eight pilots, including himself. They were parked on a strip of packed earth that had been cleared as a makeshift landing-pad. A hundred metres ahead of them was a cliff, and beyond it, the Rushes: the deadly maze where they would have their race.

  There was a cart in front of the aircraft that served as a podium. A man in a badly-fitting suit, who Harkins took to be an announcer of some kind, was climbing on to it.

  I can’t fly like this. Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong!

  ‘Cap’n!’ he said shriCrag wrolly. ‘I need Silo here now!’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ came the Cap’n’s voice in his ear, transmitted through the silver earcuff he wore.

  ‘There’s… I mean… Something’s wrong with the Firecrow!’ he sputtered.

  ‘You’re three minutes from take-off! I thought you checked everything already? Didn’t the officials give all the craft a last-minute inspection for-’

  ‘I did check it! It was alright then! It’s not alright now!’ Harkins said, his voice rising to a moderately loud scream.

  ‘Okay, okay. Calm down. Are you sure it’s not just your imagi-’ He stopped himself wisely before Harkins could explode. ‘Never mind. Silo’s on his way.’

  Harkins jigged and jittered in his seat. Why, why, why had he volunteered for this? Didn’t he spend his whole life avoiding situations like these? He’d almost died when he found out that the race would be held in the Rushes, instead of the nice flat plain that he’d imagined. The Rushes were a sprawling network of forested gorges carved from a dozen converging rivers which drained from the Splinters into the sea. Earthquakes and erosion had formed a system of tunnels and arches and fantastically precarious pillars, half a klom deep, with thrashing waterways at the bottom.

  He’d done it for her, of course. Jez, kind Jez, who despite being kind never seemed to notice him, no matter how heroic he tried to be. Once in a while he managed to admit the truth to himself: it was all beginning to get on his nerves a little bit. But whenever he did, he took it back immediately, not wishing to think bad thoughts about her.

  And now he was here, and there were mere minutes to go, and he was desperately hoping that whatever problem the Firecrow had developed would make it impossible to fly.

  A small crowd of spectators were gathered along the rim of the gorge ahead of them, where the finish line would be. Nearby was another makeshift landing pad for their aircraft, much bigger than the one Harkins sat on. Among others, he saw the reassuringly ugly shape of the Ketty Jay there, and a small single-seater craft which he’d seen Crickslint arrive in.

  ‘Racers!’ yelled the announcer. Harkins could only hear faintly through the cockpit hood. Everyone else had their cockpits open, but Harkins had sealed himself in the first chance he got. It felt safer that way. He frowned and tried to concentrate on the muffled words.

  ‘As we’re coming up to the start of the race, it’s time to remind you of the rules!’ he called. He was a stocky man with a shaved head and a roll of fat where his neck should have been, as if he’d been crush
ed at some point in his life and never quite sprung back into shape. ‘You’ve all been given maps detailing the network of gorgesworuo; in the race area. You’ll also see that there are four markers numbered one to four. You must pass through these gorges, in order. We’ll have observers watching you, so no cheating. As long as you do that, feel free to pick your own route. There will be two laps. Are we clear?’

  Harkins glanced down at the map fixed to his dash. He’d done his best to memorise it, but it refused to stick in his head, sliding off the surface of his mind. He was too agitated to retain any new information.

  What if I go the wrong way? What if I forget? What if I There was a loud rapping on the hood of his cockpit. He jumped violently enough to bang his skull against the headrest of his seat. Readjusting his battered leather pilot’s cap, which had fallen over his eyes, he looked for the source of the sound.

  Silo. The Murthian’s dark, narrow face gazed in at him from the other side of the windglass.

  ‘The aerium tanks!’ Harkins cried. ‘They don’t sound right when I vent air through them!’

  Silo’s face disappeared. Harkins sat back in his seat, recovering from this new shock. He feverishly hoped that Silo found whatever was wrong. He hoped it was something terminal.

  Nervously, he surveyed the other pilots. To his left was an enormously fat man in an Oddsen Blackbird, the craft gleaming silver, its back curved and its wings thin and sharp. He looked like he’d been poured into his cockpit and congealed there. To his right was a brutish-looking Yort in a black Gordinson Airbat. His hair and beard were a tangle of matted locks and braids, his face was tattooed in blue patterns, and there was a curved bone driven through the bridge of his nose. He caught Harkins’ eye and Harkins looked away quickly.

  Further down the line was the man who was supposed to be his competition. Gidley Sleen. Harkins couldn’t see him now, but he could see the nose of the Besterfield Nimbus he flew: sleek, fast, built like a dart. They all had the advantage over him in speed, but the Firecrow was a great all-rounder, and it was far more manoeuvrable than these racer models.