The Iron jackal totkj-3

by Chris Wooding

  He screamed again as the ground rushed up at him, and then the whole world was motion and noise. Metal shrieked and he was thrown about like a doll shaken by a giant, slamming against his seat belt over and again. The craft skidded in a semicircle; he felt it fishtail and turn. Chunks were ripped off it and went bouncing away. Smoke filled his mouth and blackened his goggles. Sparks flew.

  Then he was slowing. Slowing. And finally, everything stopped.

  Harkins just sat there, breathing. Dazed, he looked himself over. His whole body was a mass of hurt, and yet his fingers and toes wiggled when he wanted them to, and there didn’t seem to be any blood except for a few cuts on his face. Satisfied that he wasn’t in imminent danger of dying, he slumped back into his seat, took off his goggles, and let the rain fall on his face.

  ‘I won,’ he said quietly to himself. Then, louder, a broad grin breaking out. ‘I won! I won!’

  There was a crowd running towards him. He undid his seat belt and clambered unsteadily out of the Firecrow, where he found himself surrounded by people, all of them congratulating him, patting him on the back, asking him if he was alright. He cringed and flinched, frightened by all these enthusiastic strangers. Finally a familiar face broke through. It washroaway Crake, who swept him up in a warm and surprising embrace.

  ‘Spit and blood, you idiot, we thought you were dead out there!’ he cried. ‘That was damned amazing!’

  ‘Well, you know… Can’t keep a good pilot down, I suppose.’

  He saw Jez and Pinn, pushing through the cheering spectators. A wry sort of smile on Jez’s face, and relief in her eyes. Seized by an impulse, he threw his arms around her, and hugged her to him. She laughed and hugged him back. ‘That was really something, Harkins.’

  He was actually touching her. Her small body was wrapped up in his. It was a moment he’d dreamed of for a long time, but now that it had arrived, all the bravery and recklessness he’d banked with his victory drained out of him. He blushed beetroot red and let her go, tongue thickening in his mouth. He turned away to cover his embarrassment, scratching the back of his neck, and began to examine the Firecrow. Jez, oblivious to his torment, stood next to him and did the same.

  ‘Well, you pretty much thrashed the shit out of it,’ she observed with a grin. ‘Cap’n’s gonna pop a lung.’

  The thought of that filled him with dread. Where was the Cap’n, anyway? For that matter, where was Pinn? He could have sworn he saw him a moment ago, and he wanted to rub his success in Pinn’s fat, stupid face.

  ‘That was the most brilliant piece of flying I ever saw!’ cried a loud voice. Pinn’s voice. He’d climbed up on the broken wing of the Firecrow and was addressing the crowd through the rain. ‘This feller might be the best pilot in the world!’

  The crowd cheered. Harkins could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Pinn’s purpose in life was to mock Harkins at every opportunity. To be publicly praised by him… Well, he wondered if the crash hadn’t jerked something loose in his head, and he was hallucinating.

  ‘Everyone, I want you to go out and tell all your friends what you witnessed today!’ Pinn yelled. ‘He didn’t just win the race, he landed his craft with no engines, and lived to talk about it!’

  The crowd cheered again, and Harkins was thumped on the back. He couldn’t help a smile. He felt himself swelling with pride. He really had done that, hadn’t he?

  ‘Remember his name!’ Pinn cried. ‘Three cheers for Artis Pinn!’

  The blood drained from Harkins’ face. The crowd hurrahed.

  ‘Artis Pinn!’ Another hurrah.

  ‘No!’ Harkins squeaked. ‘Wait! That’s not my name! I amp;rs my face="Timquo; m Jandrew Har-’

  ‘ Artis Pinn, hero of the skies! ’ Pinn roared, arms raised and fists shaking. Thunder boomed in the background, with uncanny timing.

  Then Harkins felt himself lifted and borne on the shoulders of the crowd, and his feeble protests were lost in the cheers as he was carried away.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ said Frey.

  Crickslint’s bodyguards spun around, saw the weapons hanging loosely in the hands of Frey, Malvery and Silo, and pulled theirs. In an instant, everyone had their guns levelled, three men on either side, fingers hovering over triggers. Rain dripped from pistols and shotgun barrels. Lightning flickered in the distance, and the sky grumbled.

  ‘Let’s not get nasty, now,’ said Frey. ‘It was your boss I was talking to.’

  Crickslint peered out from behind his bodyguards. They were standing on the makeshift landing pad, a short distance from Crickslint’s single-seater aircraft. He’d been heading for it in quite some hurry before Frey caught him up.

  ‘Captain Frey,’ he said. ‘My most hearty congratulations on your victory.’

  ‘Yeah, my pilot won, just like I said he would. Aren’t you gonna collect your winnings? After all, you put a pretty hefty bet on him, right?’ Frey’s eyes went cold. ‘Unless you didn’t.’

  The rain had plastered Crickslint’s thin blond hair to his skull. He showed his chrome teeth in a grimace. ‘No hard feelings, eh? I really didn’t think he’d win.’

  ‘Well, he did. And we had a deal, I reckon. Something about loaning me a certain relic.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Crickslint. ‘The thing about that is, I don’t have it.’

  ‘You don’t have it,’ Frey said, his voice flat.

  ‘Yes, I’d sold it by the time you turned up. Already had a buyer lined up, you see. Bad luck. Did you think I’d forget how you ran off with my shipment when I was at my lowest ebb? Maybe next time you’ll think twice about robbing Jid Crickslint.’

  Frey took a long, calming breath. If there was one thing worse than being cheated, it was being cheated by someone who referred to themselves in the third person.

  He sized up the situation. Too many guns pointed at people for his liking. Three on three: there was no way they’d all survive. ‘How about we all lower our weapons?’ he suggested. He put out his arm, and gently pushed Mantlew Roman"›lvery’s shotgun barrel down towards the ground. Silo followed suit. ‘Crickslint?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Lower your weapons, men. No one’s getting shot.’ He looked at Frey. ‘Captain Frey realises that violence is pointless in this situation, I think.’

  Frey very much wanted to do violence to Crickslint right then, even the pointless kind. Harkins’ frankly extraordinary display of flying had all been for nothing. He’d put one of his crew in mortal danger for no reason at all.

  The bodyguards warily lowered their guns, although nobody was putting them away. Still, the tension had been defused a little, and Frey was content with that.

  ‘Tell me who you sold it to,’ Frey said. ‘You owe me that much.’

  ‘Do I?’ Crickslint pondered theatrically. ‘Well, it’s no skin off my nose, I suppose. I sold it to a man called Grothsen.’

  ‘ Isley Grothsen?’ Malvery asked.

  Crickslint pointed at the doctor. ‘Your man knows of him, it seems.’

  ‘He’s the head of the Archaeologists’ Guild in Thesk,’ said Malvery. ‘The Archduke’s personal collector.’

  ‘You sold it to the Archduke?’ Frey cried.

  ‘I hope you didn’t need it too badly,’ said Crickslint. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think our business is done.’

  Frey’s mind raced. The Archduke. It was in the hands of the damned Archduke. What in spit was he going to do now?

  Protected by the barrier of bodyguards, Crickslint walked to his aircraft, climbed in and settled himself into the cockpit. Malvery held out his pocket watch to Frey, who glanced at the time and nodded.

  ‘Crickslint!’ he called.

  ‘What is it now?’ Crickslint called back.

  ‘We found the bomb you put on the Firecrow.’

  ‘Yes, I wondered why that hadn’t gone off. Insurance, in case your pilot was as good as you said. You disarmed it, then, I assume.’

  ‘No,’ said Frey. ‘Just turned the timer
back five minutes and put it on your craft.’

  Crickslint’s face fell. Frey winked. amp;lsqy wsaid Frey. uo; No hard feelings, eh?’

  Frey had to admit, he hadn’t expected quite such a big explosion. But Crickslint’s bodyguards hadn’t expected an explosion at all, so the first thing they did was whirl around to see what had happened. Frey and his men gunned them down while their backs were turned, just in case they were entertaining any thoughts of retaliation. He didn’t really hold with the idea that you should wait for a man to face you before you shot them.

  Frey considered the flaming wreckage of Crickslint’s aircraft. He wiped rain-wet hair away from his forehead. ‘Shit,’ he said.

  Malvery was cleaning his glasses with a corner of his coat. ‘Cap’n,’ he said. ‘Please don’t tell me we’re gonna try to rob the Archduke.’

  ‘Of course we bloody are,’ said Frey.

  Malvery sighed heavily and put his glasses back on.

  Seventeen

  Rum amp; Pies – Pinn’s Experiment – ‘Don’t You Leave Me Here!’ – A Chase

  Archduke Monterick Arken’s palace towered over the city of Thesk, set dramatically against the cloud-scattered red dusk. It stood at the peak of a massive ridge of black rock, the plug of an extinct volcano, with sheer grassy cliffs on three sides and a gated slope to the west. Green copper domes and sloping roofs of decorative slate peered over the walls of light beige that surrounded it. Statues of great men and women looked out across the capital in all directions. The roof of an arboretorium could be seen among the towers. What couldn’t be seen were the enormous anti-aircraft gun emplacements in the front and rear courtyards.

  It was a modern construction, most of it early Third Age, having been knocked down piece by piece and rebuilt after the deposition of the monarchy and the emergence of the Duke of Thesk as the head of the Coalition of Vardic Duchies. The Arkens had all been reformers, and had never let themselves be shackled by history. While other dukes shivered in glowering stone Kingdom Age buildings that were over four hundred years old, the Arkens had demolished their family seat and built a new one with piped heating.

  Crake thoroughly approved.

  He blew on his pie to cool it and accepted the bottle of rum from Frey. The two of them sat on some steps at the foot of a bronze statue in People’s Park, which sprawled around the base of the cliffs. A statue of Osory Crumditch looked over their shoulder: a benevolent, bespectacled old man sitting in a chair and holding a book. Crumditch’s daring fictions about love and passion among the peasantry helped wake the aristocracy to the fact that the people who toiled in their fields were human beings too. He never lived to see the serfs freed after the Mad King Andreal was overthr obvi-scattereown, but he was more than a little responsible for it.

  ‘You think the relic’s in there?’ Frey asked, looking up at the palace.

  ‘I dearly hope not,’ said Crake.

  ‘Could be in any one of six places I can think of,’ Frey mused.

  ‘Well, Crickslint’s certainly not going to tell us now, since there’s barely enough left of him to fill a jam jar.’

  Frey was still looking at the palace, his own pie forgotten on the step next to him. They’d bought them from a shop down the way. The cold snap had come to an end with the rain, and tonight’s weather was more typical of autumn in these climes. A little chilly, a little damp, but not altogether unpleasant.

  ‘You suppose it’s true about the army of golems he has up there?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Crake. ‘He’s never had much of a problem with daemonists, although politically it wouldn’t make much sense to say so, what with half the country believing all that rubbish the Awakeners peddle. I wouldn’t be surprised if he used them in secret. Rumour has it some of the gear the Century Knights use is thralled.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Some daemonists think so.’

  He munched his pie – spiced beef, hearty Vard food, for which he was absurdly grateful after Samarla – and passed the bottle back. The Cap’n was in a strange mood tonight. Crake got the sense he wanted to talk about something, but he hadn’t worked up to it yet.

  While he waited, Crake watched the traffic in People’s Park. A lamplighter was making his way along the paths, leaving lamp-posts glowing behind him. A pair of young lovers walked arm in arm, wrapped up against the coming night. Three women cooed over a pram by the bandstand. A student, his arms full of books, hurried home from Galmury, the city university, which Crake had himself attended. It was only five years since he’d left, at the age of twenty-six, but it might have been a lifetime ago.

  Love. Children. Even the clean, sheltered world of academia. It all seemed so distant from him. Now he was a vagrant, a drifter, moving from place to place and never settling to anything.

  But was there even any point in running any more? Were the Shacklemores really still chasing him? Crake had tried to make himself hard to find by joining the crew of the Ketty Jay, but the Ketty Jay ’s crew weren’t so anonymous these days. Difficult to believe the Shacklemores couldn’t have tracked him down by now, if they’d put their minds to it.

  His brother might have called off the alllieve the bounty hunters months ago. Perhaps his thirst for vengeance had faded. That, or Condred had tired of paying them. But for whatever reason, he’d not seen a Shacklemore for two years now, not since the Winter Ball at Gallian Thade’s estate on the Feldspar Isles.

  So maybe he didn’t need to stay on the move, after all.

  Crake dreamed of a library, a house, a sanctum. Somewhere Bess would be out of danger, and he could study the Art. All that, and perhaps a woman to share it with.

  Wouldn’t that be fine? he thought. But it all seemed so far away.

  ‘Am I a good captain, Crake?’ Frey asked, out of nowhere.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’re the only one I ever had.’ But the look on Frey’s face made him regret his flippancy. ‘What’s bothering you really?’

  ‘You mean aside from the prospect of getting another visit from that daemon?’

  Crake cleared his throat. ‘Yes, the daemon. I’m going to see what I can do about that,’ he said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m working on some techniques.’

  ‘Techniques?’

  ‘Yes. You see, most… well, all daemonism is done in controlled conditions. They’re summoned and contained. But that won’t work here. The daemon is already out. So we need a different approach.’

  ‘Like what? Can’t you drive it out of me or something?’

  ‘It’s not in you. That strange signal you’re giving off, I think that’s more like the way it tracks you.’

  ‘So what do you plan to do?’

  ‘I suppose you’d call it field daemonism. I’m trying to work out ways of dealing with a daemon outside the sanctum.’

  ‘You think you can? You can work out a way to fight this thing?’

  Not really, he thought, but the edge of desperate hope in Frey’s voice revealed just how scared he really was, and Crake had to give him something.

  ‘It can be done,’ he said, with more assurance than he felt.

  Frey brooded for a brn b while, sucking on the bottle of rum. Crake ate the rest of his pie, glancing at him occasionally.

  ‘Harkins,’ he said, then tutted.

  ‘Cap’n, he’s alright. Nobody got hurt.’

  ‘He damn near died!’ Frey snapped suddenly. ‘And for what? For me!’ He held up his right hand, encased in a fingerless glove to hide the corruption in his palm. ‘All because I couldn’t keep my hands off that bloody relic.’

  ‘Cap’n, will you stop trying to be perfect?’ Crake cried. ‘Spit and blood, it’s like you think we’ve all forgotten how you were when we joined this crew! Might I remind you that, back then, you let someone put a gun to my head, spin the barrel and pull the trigger. Twice! ’

  ‘You’re never gonna let that one go, are you?’ Frey muttered.

  ‘My
point is, there was a time when you didn’t give half a shit about any of us, and none of us gave half a shit about each other. But those days are gone, and most of that’s your doing. I wish you’d remember that.’

  Frey swigged his rum. He looked like he was taking it on board, at least.

  ‘Nobody expects you to be right all the time,’ said Crake. ‘Nobody but you, apparently. Stop beating yourself up.’

  ‘I s’pose you’ve a point,’ Frey mumbled, unconvincingly.

  ‘Speaking of Harkins, I note you’ve taken the destruction of the Firecrow very calmly. If he’d pulled out when you told him to, he’d have come out without a scratch.’

  ‘Heh,’ said Frey, and Harkins was surprised to see a smile twitch at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘What did you do?’ Crake asked, suspicious.

  ‘I backed him.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I stuck a bet on him to win. Pretty big one, as well. Couldn’t turn down those kinds of odds.’ He scratched at his cheek. ‘The winnings more than cover the cost of a new Firecrow.’

  Crake laughed in amazement. ‘And you still told him to pull out of the race after you found Crickslint’s bomb? With all that money riding on him?’

  ‘S’pose I did.’

  Crakew convincie slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Frey,’ he said. ‘You’re a good captain.’

  Frey nodded to himself. Then he took a deep breath and sat up, as if to clear away the subject and start on another one. ‘I need a favour, Crake.’

  ‘Name it.’ Crake swiped the bottle and took a swig.

  ‘I need you to go charm a woman for me.’

  The rum caught in his throat and made him cough. ‘I thought that was more your department than mine?’ he wheezed.

  Frey grinned. ‘Not this lady,’ he said. ‘This one’s all yours.’

  Jez’s eyes flickered open.

  The trance had been confusing this time. She’d been trying to regain the dream of snow. She wanted to make sense of it. But instead she was left with a muddle of sensations, fading fast in her memory. Her mouth tasted foul, like sour milk with a sharp tang of something else underneath. Her back was hot, much hotter than the rest of her, as if she’d been lying on something warm. But she hadn’t. She’d been sitting cross-legged on her bunk.