The Iron jackal totkj-3

by Chris Wooding

  She tutted to herself. She was never going to get the hang of these trances.

  Frustrated, she picked up the book that was lying next to her and flicked through it. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t read the words. If indeed they were words. The clusters of tiny circles and arcs were arranged in rows, with no breaks that would suggest sentences or paragraphs. Every printed centimetre was full of symbols of identical size, like a wordsearch. It had long ago occurred to her that they might not read left to right at all, as Vardic script did. They could read diagonally, for all she knew. There was no reason to assume it followed the rules of human language, since those who wrote it were something other than human.

  But still she persevered. No one was going to help her. As far as she knew, there was no one alive who could read the language of the Manes.

  She’d found the book at the tail end of winter, on the savage island of Kurg, in the captain’s cabin of a crashed Mane dreadnought. In Vardia, the leaves had grown and reddened and were falling again, and she was no closer to understanding it. But what niggled at her was the feeling that she would understand it, if she could only remember how.

  The symbols were familiar to her, though she’d never seen them until the day she found the book. It was as if she’d once known the language and somehow forgotten it. What remained was a riddle she couldn’t solve. The answer was there, waiting to reveal itself in a flash of revelation, but it refused to make itself known. She was one step away from making these symbols turn into sense, but it was a step she didn’t know how to take.

  What did the Manes need the written word for, anyway? They could read each other’s thoughts. They’d discarded language and speech as hopelessly clumsy.

  Yet here was a book.

  She got up. There was no hope of concentrating on anything while the disgusting taste lingered in her mouth. She headed to the mess to get some coffee to wash it away.

  Pinn was there, standing on the table, holding a semi-conscious cat at the end of his outstretched arm.

  Jez regarded him blandly. ‘Should I ask?’

  ‘It’s my first experiment,’ Pinn said.

  ‘Your… experiment,’ Jez replied dubiously. She looked closer at the cat. ‘Is that a piece of toast strapped to his back?’

  ‘ Buttered toast,’ said Pinn proudly.

  Jez folded her arms. ‘Huh,’ she said.

  ‘I’m gonna be an inventor,’ Pinn declared.

  ‘You are?’

  He wiggled the arm that was wrapped up in a sling. ‘Since I can’t be a pilot for a bit, I reckon it’s a good time to get started.’

  ‘Are we feeling threatened after Harkins’ little display of brilliant flying?’ Jez inquired sweetly.

  Pinn sniffed. ‘ I wouldn’t have trashed the aircraft in the process. Now, you wanna see this experiment or not? This cat’s heavy, y’know.’

  ‘Alright, I’ll bite. What are you trying to do?’

  ‘Well,’ said Pinn, eagerly. ‘Everyone knows that a cat always lands on its feet, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And isn’t it also true that toast always lands butter side down?’

  ‘Er, I think that’s more of a saying than a scientific fa-’

  ‘So if the cat has buttered toast on its back, butter side up, then it’ll land upside down. Except that’s impossible, ’cause cats always land on their feet.’

  Jez could feel herself getting stupider by the second. amp;lshe n. Except quo; So what do you reckon will happen?’

  ‘I reckon they’ll sort of hang spinning in the air a couple of inches off the ground.’

  ‘Can you wait there just a minute?’ Jez asked. She walked round the table, collecting various jackets from where they’d been left draped over the backs of chairs. When she was done, she made a pile on the floor in front of Pinn.

  ‘Just in case,’ she said, and stepped back.

  Pinn dropped Slag. Gravity did its job.

  ‘Huh,’ said Pinn, looking down at the cat, who was now buried in the pile of jackets. There was a buttery stain on Malvery’s favourite overcoat.

  ‘Huh,’ Jez agreed. ‘I wouldn’t want to be you when that cat comes round.’

  ‘Ah, I’m not scared of him,’ said Pinn, climbing down from the table.

  A thought occurred to Jez. ‘How did you get him so docile, anyway?’

  ‘Stuck some rum in his milk.’

  She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. Yes, that was it. That was the taste. Rum and milk. And the hot sensation on her back, as if someone had strapped an enormous piece of toast to her.

  ‘Huh,’ she said thoughtfully.

  Frey decided not to take the tram back from the park. He needed time on his own to think, and the walk would be some rare and welcome exercise. Crake had gone to gather resources for his new experiments, and Frey was never allowed to come along on daemonist business. They were a secretive bunch, and with good reason. The Awakeners had everyone so riled up against them that they were liable to be hanged if caught practising their craft.

  He found himself in a small square, all but empty except for an elderly man crossing it in the opposite direction. It was dominated by a large building with a forecourt and the symbol of the Cipher carved in stone over the archway. Frey stopped in front of it. The symbol of the Awakener’s faith, a pattern of circles and interlocking lines that the last king Andreal had drawn obsessively all over his cell in the final days of his madness. His followers believed it to be the key to decoding the language of the Allsoul. Frey thought it looked like something a madman would scrawl on a wall.

  The building was boarded up and empty. Obscene graffiti, half-heartedly scrubbed out, were still visible. He couldn’t work out whether it was pro- or anti-Awakener in content; just a blare of swear words, a dumb roar of hate.

  The House of Chancellors had recently passed down an edict doas pro- or banning the Awakeners from operating in the cities. It was part of the Archduke and Archduchess’s long campaign to defang the political threat of the Awakeners’ aggressive and profitable religion. But then had come the accusation from the Archduke that the Imperators were daemonically possessed. An accusation based on scientific evidence that Frey had delivered. And that was a provocation too far. Things were turning bloody. Out in the sticks, people were dying.

  The broadsheets were full of reports from the countryside, where the Awakeners’ influence was greatest. Farming communities rioted. Peasants took up arms when tax collectors came to visit the local hermitage.

  Neither the Archduke nor the Awakeners would back down. If the truth were revealed, the Awakeners would be exposed as hypocrites, having persecuted daemonists for a century. And it was just the excuse the Archduke had been waiting for to rid himself of the organisation responsible for the murder of his son Hengar.

  Well, technically it had been Frey that had murdered his son, but technically didn’t cut it as far as Frey was concerned. Hengar’s craft had been rigged to explode; it just happened to be Frey shooting at it at the time. It was the Awakeners’ fault, pure and simple.

  Should I have just let it be?

  It was a question he’d been asking himself for some time. He hadn’t needed to take those damning research notes from the Storm Dog , while they were at the North Pole trying to rescue Trinica from Captain Grist and the Manes. He hadn’t needed to tell Crake about them, either, which pretty much committed him to act: Crake had a deep and venomous hatred of the Awakeners, and he would never let Frey sit on that kind of information.

  But Frey did both those things, and then he gave the notes to Professor Kraylock at Bestwark University, who passed them on anonymously, because Frey didn’t much fancy having the Awakeners and their daemonic enforcers knowing just who had screwed them.

  He did it because he wanted to make a difference. Because he wanted to make an impact, a dent in the world. He wanted to run with the big boys, instead of scrabbling about in the dirt, scavenging his way through life. But
he was beginning to realise that the big decisions came with big consequences, and he wasn’t too keen to be remembered as the man who started a civil war in Vardia. Especially not with the Sammies rumoured to be tooling up for another war. They’d been suspiciously quiet ever since they called a surprise truce to end the last one.

  Stop trying to be perfect, Crake had said. But it was easier said than done. He was acutely aware that everything his crew had been through since they held up the train had been for his sake. Not for profit, not even for fun, but to pull him out of the trouble he’d got himself into. And he was pretty sure there’d be a lot more trouble to come.

  His friends were risking their lives for him. That was one bastard of a burden to carry.

  ‘Don’t you leave me here!’

  Frey’s blood went cold. He couldn’t possibly have just heard what he thought he’d heard. A thin, despairing shriek. Words that had been burned on his conscience for nine long years. The voice of his engineer, Rabby, as Frey sealed up the cargo ramp of the Ketty Jay and condemned him to be murdered by the Dakkadian soldiers outside.

  Yet the words rang out clearly across the square, coming from a narrow alley at the side of the Awakener building.

  He looked around quickly. The elderly man was gone. There was no sign of life in the square. The lamp-posts seemed to have dimmed, as if the gas had been turned down. He could hear the distant sounds of the city in neighbouring streets, but he suddenly felt terribly alone.

  He walked slowly along the forecourt wall, towards the alley entrance, drawing a pistol as he went. He didn’t want to see what was there, but he could hardly ignore it, either. If it turned out to be nothing, at least he might convince himself that it was all his imagination.

  He peered down the alley. It was dark in there, and the shadows foiled his eyes.

  Well, there was no way he was going in there to look. He wasn’t that curious.

  Then something moved. It was just on the edge of visibility, a suggestion of a shape in the blackness. He fought to make it out. Something large, round, low to the ground.

  As he stared, it unfolded long limbs and straightened, and he realised that it had been crouched, curled up, with its back to him. Now it expanded, rising to its feet, dropping one shoulder, turning towards him. And it stepped into the light from the square.

  It was seven feet tall to the shoulder, but it would have been nine if it was standing straight. Part human, part animal, part machine. Its short fur was wet and greasy, like something newly born. Its arms were thin and disproportionately long, ending in outsize hands with double-bladed bayonets in place of fingers. The knees of its legs were bent backwards, like a horse or a dog. And a dog was what its face resembled: a snarling hybrid of metal and muzzle.

  No, thought a small, clear voice inside that cut through the flapping panic in his mind. He recalled the sorcerer’s words. A jackal. Beware the Iron Jackal.

  One half of its head was metal, as were much of the limbs. Machine parts sewed into and out of muscle and skin; servos and pistons were visible in its legs. Its spine was a spiked chain running up its hunched back, and there were thin plates of black armour scattered haphazardly across its body. Something about the colour and the look of them was uncomfortably familiar, but the connection evaded him for the moment.

  One connection didn’t, though. One of its eyes was a red mechanical orb. The other stared wilherbut the codly from its black-muzzled jackal face, without an iris, only a single huge black pupil.

  That was Trinica’s eye.

  He let out an inarticulate cry of fear as he stumbled away from the alley. The Iron Jackal’s lips quivered and curled, exposing long teeth. Frey raised his revolver and fired at it: once, twice, three times. But whether it was his bad aim in the darkness or something else, the bullets hit nothing.

  Then he ran, and it came after him.

  He fled along the edge of the square, boots pounding on the cobbles. He had too much pride to call for help, but a wordless yell of alarm would serve just as well, if only there was someone to hear it. But the square was eerily deserted, and the shuttered windows that faced it were dark.

  The creature bounded out of the alleyway, running on all fours in great leaps, its bayonet fingers shrieking along the stone. Frey heard its hot animal panting, the screech and thump of each leap and landing, getting rapidly louder as it ate up the distance between them.

  It’s coming it’s coming oh shit!

  The Iron Jackal bunched and sprang. Frey darted aside, down a lane that ran off the square. A dark pile of muscle and metal and fur swept by, blades skinning the air, missing him by centimetres. Its momentum carried it past the end of the lane and out of sight.

  The lane descended in long stepped sections, lit by a few lonely lamps in wall sconces. Frey put his head down and ran hard, driven by utter terror. He had a few seconds to get ahead, and he meant to make them count.

  The sight of the thing that meant to kill him, the hard reality of it, had rocked him to his core. Until now, he’d been able to kid himself into thinking that the danger had been exaggerated. He wasn’t kidding himself any more.

  He looked over his shoulder, and saw that the beast had entered the lane and was coming after him, running on two legs now in a grotesque lope. The light seemed to slide off it, pouring away as it passed beneath the lamps. Its red eye shone in the shadow. In desperation, he fired at it as he ran, emptying his revolver to no effect.

  The lane ended in a steep set of steps, which descended to a sunken path by the side of a canal. Frey slipped on them in his haste, heels skidding, and almost ended up in the canal himself. He hit the path with a heavy jolt, but recovered his balance well enough to sprint off without losing too much speed.

  There was a high wall to his left and the canal to his right. Boats were moored in quiet rows, bumping gently against one another. Houses loomed above him, black and dank in the chill of the night. There were lights in the windows, signs of warmth and life. No one there could help him. His lungs were beginning to burn. He wasn’t in good enough shape to run this hard, but the fear of what was behind him wouldn’twouaga let him slow.

  He passed a group of men on the path, who saw him coming and moved out of the way to avoid being knocked aside. As it was, he clipped one of them with his shoulder and sent him staggering into the wall. He ran on with their indignant exclamations ringing in his ears.

  More steps, leading up off the path. He took them. The short ascent made his thighs ache. A poky street ran along the top of the canal wall. He staggered across it and into an alley, where he finally rested, heaving air into his aching chest.

  He listened, trying to focus past the blood thudding in his ears. Where was the beast? He hadn’t seen it since he’d hit the canal path. If it had been following, surely it would have encountered the same men he had?

  Perhaps it didn’t want to be seen. Or perhaps he’d lost it.

  He holstered his revolver. Bullets wouldn’t do him any good. He wasn’t a crack shot, but he was sure that he’d hit it at least once. The thing hadn’t even flinched.

  He heard a thump from overhead. He looked up, his breath catching: but all he could see between the buildings was a cloudy sky painted yellow by the city lights.

  Something moving up there. Something heavy. The scrape of metal against slate. The sound of an animal breathing.

  Frey pressed himself against the wall, eyes fixed on the rooftops. You’re invisible, he told himself. You’re not here.

  He glanced at other end of the alley. There was a street there, well lit. Late night shops were open, and he could see people. People meant safety. It couldn’t get him if there were people about, surely? A beast like that wouldn’t want to show itself out in the open.

  If he could just get to that street…

  There was a sinister growl from overhead. The Iron Jackal was craning over the edge of a rooftop, looking down on him. He felt his stomach plunge and his limbs go cold.

  He bolted.
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  He heard the rush of air as it dropped down into the alley, the impact of its landing, the snarl as it came for him. The mouth of the alley seemed a hundred metres away. He put every ounce of his strength into his legs and willed himself to make it. Every passing second, the Iron Jackal was closer, and closer, so close that it had to have caught him by now. But not yet, not yet, and then His intuition screamed at him, some millennia-old sense that warned him when a predator was about to pounce. Whether he tripped then, or whether he went down on purpose, he wasn’t sure. But he went to the ground, rolling and tumbling out of the alley onto the street, and the Iron Jackal passed over him, ced ent dolose enough to make the tail of his greatcoat flap.

  Frantic, he got his feet under him and ran up the street, gasping and howling incoherently. Shoppers froze and stared at him. The Iron Jackal picked itself up, surprised at having missed its target. Its head turned, fixed on Frey, and it came bounding after him again.

  ‘Someone bloody help me!’ Frey yelled, who’d gone beyond pride and was only thinking about survival now. But the shoppers just goggled, and hurried out of his way. He glanced over his shoulder at the terrifying daemon steaming up the street towards him. It bounded between the shoppers, and none of them took the slightest notice of it. Their eyes didn’t follow the creature; they stayed on Frey instead.

  They couldn’t see it.

  A mad thought fled across his mind: was this all in his head, then? What if he stood still and let the thing come at him? Would it prove to be harmless?

  It didn’t matter. He was far too scared to find out. As if the thing itself wasn’t bad enough, the aura of daemonic terror that it put out drove all sense from him.

  It was no safer in the open. The Iron Jackal would catch him in moments on the street. He ran for another cross-alley, past lighted windows selling chocolates and toys and clothes. Jolly things for happy people, set in pretty displays. Frey was no longer in the same world. He was alone against the beast, in the midst of an oblivious crowd.