The Iron jackal totkj-3

by Chris Wooding

  It was the Cap’n who gave the Archduke the ammunition he needed, when they came back from the Wrack a few months ago. Malvery should have stopped him. But he just let it slide, the way he always did.

  His thoughts turned grim, and his buzz faded. He drained his cup and filled it again in the hopes of getting it back. It didn’t work.

  Suddenly uncomfortable, he stretched, slapped at a fly on his neck and looked around the cafe balcony. A lone waiter drifted about. Sammies and Vards sheltered from the fierce sun beneath the parasols, sometimes at the same table. The scene had become sinister to his eyes, the air humming with plots and the secret mutterings of spies. How much longer would this go on, this tentative peace? Were the Sammies even now eyeing up their neighbours, jealous of their abundant aerium? Would there come a time when the smuggled supply through the Free Trade Zone wasn’t enough to match their dreams of greater empires?

  Things were changing. He could feel it. And he didn’t reckon they’d change for the better.

  His mind went to his encounter at the Axelby Club. He’d been turning Hawkby’s offer over and over these past few days. A steady job in an asylum, treating the demented. And maybe after that, a surgery of his own. It had sounded wonderful at the time, but now he wasn’t so sure. The thought scared him slightly. Or, to be more accurate, the drink scared him slightly.

  He remembered what it was like before. The routine. The same places, over and over. Home, surgery, club. He feared that rhythm. Where there was a rhythm, he found places where he could fit a drink, and soon those drinks became the beats of his day. He’d become regular as clockwork in his old life: a quick drink to get him going in the morning, another before his morning consultations, one between each consultation while he was writing up his notes, one at lunch to relax him for the afternoon surgeries. He’d stay off the booze while he was operating, but he’d be gasping at the end of the day, so he’d have another to get him to the club. Then he’d start to really drink.

  On the Ketty Jay, he spent a fair amount of time bored, but he was hardly ever in the same place for more than a few days. Sure, he got drunk, but he was usually sharp enough when the crew needed him. You never knew when you were going to get into something when the Cap’n was around. That random element actually served to keep him relatively sober for most of the day, or at least to stop him getting hammered. He didn’t want to let his mates down by being a big fat comatose whale while they were off risk wee wing their necks.

  But scared or not, he was still tempted by Hawkby’s offer. He wanted to feel like he was worth something again. He wanted to feel like that young surgeon who’d earned a medal by rescuing soldiers from a battlefield.

  ‘You thought about what you’ll do if… y’know?’

  Crake put down his broadsheet. ‘If what?’

  ‘If the Cap’n don’t make it.’

  ‘Malvery!’ He was shocked.

  ‘Oh, come on. Don’t pretend it ain’t crossed your mind.’

  ‘The Cap’n is not going to die!’

  ‘Oh, aye? Got some way of stoppin’ it that we don’t know about?’

  Crake became shifty. ‘Maybe I do,’ he said.

  Malvery waited. Crake sipped his tea.

  ‘Well?’ Malvery demanded. ‘Do you or not?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Crake cried. ‘I’ve got some ideas, that’s all. It’s all theoretical!’

  ‘The Cap’n was carrying something around with him today. A metal ball with a couple of wires coming out of it. Wouldn’t say what it was. Was that one of your theoretical ideas?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does it theoretically do?’

  ‘Theoretically? It means the Iron Jackal won’t be able to find him.’

  ‘The Iron Jackal? That’s what he’s calling it?’

  ‘That’s what the sorcerer called it in the Underneath.’

  ‘Oh.’ He sat back, interested now. ‘How’s it work?’

  Crake put down his tea, eager for the distraction. The tiredness fell away from his face. ‘It’s like this,’ he said, steepling his fingers on the table. ‘This curse, if you can call it that, I think it’s actually a very advanced form of daemonism. There’d always been evidence of primitive daemonism before we applied the sciences to it, though it was hard to distinguish from superstition. The Samarlan sorcerers have docerquone it for centuries, it seems. But this! This is daemonism decades ahead of our time, and it’s thousands of years old. To bond a daemon of such intelligence and sophistication to an object, to give it such complex instructions… You know, it may be that the daemonism we know today is simply the remnants of something we knew how to do long ago, and forgot, which we’ve been painstakingly relearning ever since! And if that’s the case, it’d turn everything we know about daemonism on its head! I’d be fascinated to know where and when that relic came from.’

  Malvery chuckled at his friend’s evident excitement. ‘Blimey, it’s obvious what fires your engine.’

  Crake grinned. ‘Yes, well. One of the things they somehow did, and I’ve no idea how, is they’ve made the Cap’n into some kind of… some kind of beacon. He’s putting out a signal, and I think that’s what the Iron Jackal uses to find its target. There’s no question of him getting away. It always knows where he is.’

  ‘And you think you can block it?’

  Crake snapped his fingers. ‘Exactly. Competing frequencies interfere and cancel each other out. That device I gave the Cap’n is a modified resonator, which should – theoretically – cut out that signal.’

  ‘I’m sensing a but,’ Malvery said.

  ‘But, the problem is power. My portable batteries are so big you have to cart them around in a backpack, and even they only last a short while. Unless the Cap’n wants to stand by a plug socket the rest of his life, I can’t cut out that signal for long.’

  Malvery frowned. ‘So what use is it, then?’

  ‘With a small battery pack, he can cut it out for a few minutes. Now I don’t know how the daemon hunts, but maybe it’ll give the Cap’n a chance next time it comes for him. And what I do know is that there’s only three nights left before the full moon, and the Iron Jackal still hasn’t put in its second appearance.’ He tapped the table nervously. ‘I’ve got some other ideas too, but they’re not ready yet. I’ve been going as fast as I can.’

  Malvery could believe it. Crake looked about ten years older than he was. ‘Sounds like you’re doing a bloody good job, mate.’

  Crake gave him a half-smile to acknowledge the compliment. He looked the doctor over uncertainly, then said: ‘You know, not so long ago I was thinking about leaving the Ketty Jay.’

  ‘You were?’ Malvery was surprised to hear that Crake’s feelings had been running so close to his own.

  ‘Yes. I decided that… Well, I’d gone as far as I could go. Yes. Iuo; He fidgeted awkwardly and lowered his voice. ‘I’m a daemonist, Malvery. That’s who I am. And while I stay on the Ketty Jay I’ll never have access to the proper equipment. I’ll always be limited by that.’

  ‘You’ve got a talent and it’s going to waste,’ said Malvery, smoothing his moustache with a knuckle. ‘I get that.’

  ‘But this business with the Cap’n, it’s given me a bit of a jolt. Forced me to think on my feet. I don’t have state-of-the-art gear, so I’m having to make do with what I have. What’s happening here, it’s a unique opportunity.’

  ‘An opportunity, you say?’ Malvery’s tone indicated what he thought of Crake’s choice of words.

  ‘You know what I mean. I’m doing my damnedest to be ready in case the curse isn’t lifted when – if – we return the relic to its rightful place. But I’m not blind to the scientific value of all of this. As far as I know, no one’s ever reliably documented the methods that I’m trying out.’

  Malvery felt slightly uncomfortable about the idea of the Cap’n being anyone’s guinea-pig, but he reckoned it would be churlish to make a thing of it. After all, Crake was doing a lot more about the situat
ion than he was.

  He flexed his hand back and forth into a fist, frustrated. ‘I wish I could, I dunno, be more useful. I mean, I can help out with relics and all that, but a daemon? A daemon that you can’t bloody see and you never know when it’s coming? I get to thinkin’, what if that was me in the Cap’n’s shoes? Waitin’ for that thing to come and get me when I was alone.’ He took a drink. ‘I’d be scared to buggery.’

  ‘He is scared to… er… buggery,’ Crake replied. ‘Look, we don’t know when it’s coming next, but we know when it’s coming last. On the full moon. And he won’t be alone that time, I promise you that.’

  Malvery coughed on the liquor. ‘Let me get this straight: you’re gonna take on that thing?’

  Crake looked down at the table. ‘I’m going to try,’ he said. Then he gave a terrified little smile. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, eh? We’ll put that relic back, and all will be well.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Malvery, with genuine admiration. ‘You’re a braver man than me.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ said Crake.

  They sat back in their chairs and listened to the hubbub of the street below, sharing a companionable silence for a time.

  "You know what does scare me, though?’ Crake said suddenly. ‘The thought that I might have missed out on this.’

  ‘This?’

  He waved a hand across to indicate the cafe and the scorched, grubby city around them. ‘This. Here. Now. I was really thinking about leaving, you know. I was so fixed on the idea that I needed to do this thing, that I needed a sanctum of my own. I was going to leave my friends behind and go live in some stuffy, safe world of my own. A nice little existence with no hard choices and no nasty shocks. And there’d be no more visiting strange new places, no more saving whole cities like we did at Sakkan-’

  ‘No more dating Century Knights,’ Malvery said.

  Crake flushed and looked downcast. ‘Yes, either way there’ll be no more of that. I’m quite sure she’d shoot me if she saw me again, and I’d deserve it too.’

  Malvery chuckled. ‘Still. Samandra Bree. Even the Cap’n can’t say that.’

  ‘I can’t deny, being on the Ketty Jay does put you in the thick of it.’

  ‘That,’ said Malvery, ‘is bloody true.’

  Crake looked uncomfortable, and Malvery realised that he was more upset about Samandra Bree than he’d been letting on. He probably shouldn’t have laughed, in hindsight, but it was a bit late now.

  ‘So have you thought about it?’ Crake asked.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘What you’d do if the Cap’n was gone?’

  Malvery sipped his liquor. ‘Aye,’ he said. Down by the warehouse gate, a thickset Dakkadian was waving up at him. Malvery raised a hand in response. ‘Breaktime’s over. Let’s get to it.’

  ‘You know,’ said Crake, as they got to their feet. ‘I rather like being an honest trader. It’s quite relaxing. Makes a change from getting shot at all the time.’

  ‘Don’t get used to it,’ said Malvery, and they left.

  Fang and flurry and hot blood bursting in her mouth, the salty victory of the kill. The musty stench of the rat, her hated enemy, filled her nostrils as it struggled in her pinning grip. She marvelled at how the flesh gave way before the points of her teeth and claws. Such a soft sheath for a life, so easy to penetrate.

  It was a small rat, no contest at all. Not like the bigger ones d bietrate.

  Except once. One of the warm tall beings that clomped and stank in the wide spaces of her world, the corridors and cargo bays. The gangly, nervous one, who’d trapped her and flown her into the endless terror of the sky and then…

  She wasn’t sure. It was a smear of feelings rather than an ordered sequence of events, like all her memories. All she knew was that the gangly one was not to be trifled with.

  She devoured the rat, tearing open its belly and gobbling the innards. She was mistress of the kill. This was rightness.

  Slag ate, and Jez ate with him.

  It was hard to know where the cat ended and the person began. She was sewn into the fabric of him, her instincts muddled by his. Her body sat in the pilot’s seat of the Ketty Jay, but her mind was divided. One part was with her body, still aware, ready to lift off from the landing pad at the first sign of trouble. The other was a passenger in Slag’s brain, down in the warm vents and crawlways of the Ketty Jay.

  Slag, for his part, didn’t understand what was happening. He was aware of her, she knew, but he had no concept of the implications. Once, he’d feared her, sensing the Mane in her; but now she was a familiar presence, and he was as comfortable with her as if she were his litter-sister. She’d soaked into him, and it was like he’d known her for ever.

  She ate her fill with him and then groomed herself, finding comfort in the ritual of cleaning, the rough sc ratch of tongue on fur. Sated, she felt the need to sleep. It would be good to find a spot to curl up. She looked up and down the narrow vent. Everything was in black and white, like a ferrotype, and the vents were bright and sharp as a full moon.

  That way.

  She took off in that direction, padding down a vent towards a junction. Faint light filtered through a fan overhead; more than she needed.

  That way.

  And that was the way she went. Except suddenly she wasn’t sure whose thought it was that had directed her. It had seemed too clear to be the cat’s, too focused and decisive. But she was only a passenger here, along for the ride. Wasn’t she?

  Was it a coincidence that Slag had twice gone in the direction she picked?

  Stop.

  She came to a halt and began to idly lick her paw.

  The other paw.

  She put that paw down, and started on the other one.

  Slag didn’t seem in the least distressed by this. He thought the idea to lick the paw was his own. But it wasn’t. Jez was sure of that now.

  Stretch.

  And she did, a luxuriant lengthening of the spine.

  Well, now, she thought to herself. Isn’t this something?

  Twenty-Nine

  A Novel Use Of Technology – An Invisible Enemy – The Slaughter-yard – Dead Meat

  Frey pressed himself up against the wooden wall of the corridor, his eyes wide and his heart pounding.

  Couldn’t have been.

  He leaned out and looked round the corner. Down a short half-flight of rickety steps was a doorway to the street. Beyond was light and bright fabrics, dust and noise and chaos. A thoroughfare like a thousand others in Shasiith, hammered by the afternoon sun, hot as a kiln. And off the street were more doorways and alleys and passages: shadowy tributaries to the blinding river of humanity that ran between them.

  Couldn’t have been.

  Maybe he hadn’t seen what he thought he saw. Damn, the sun in this country was enough to give any man a touch of the strange. And no one could blame him for being jumpy.

  Last night, he’d sent a message to the Trinica on the Delirium Trigger, to ask for a rendezvous in secret. When the time came, he decided to walk instead of going by rickshaw. He needed to rehearse his apology. And after that, he needed to work out how the spit he was going to persuade her to help him. Assuming, of course, that she turned up at all.

  Wrapped up in his thoughts, nervous at the prospect of their meeting, he’d hardly been paying attention to the people around him as he walked. Hardly noticed his surroundings. It was only chance that he looked up when he did, and noticed the crumbling stone alleyway, and the Iron Jackal lurking in its shadow.

  He’d thought himself safe in the day. Night was the time for horrors. Night was when he couldn’t sleep for fear that the Iron Jackal would come when his eyes were closed, when he couldn’t even have a drop of Shine to take the edge off because he needed to be alert in case… in case…

  Couldn’t have been.

  He clutched Crake’s device in his left hand. A chrome ball, the size of a large apple. It was featureless except for a single press-stud.
Two slender wires ran from it to a battery pack that hung at his hip. The pack was heavy and clumsy and had been bashing against his leg all day, but Frey had gladly endured it. He’d take any chance he could get right now, and Crake’s invention was the only one offered to him.

  You’ll only get a minute or two out of this, Crake had said, as he was strapping the pack to Frey. Don’t waste it. Find a hiding place and hold down the stud. It won’t work if the daemon can see or hear you, but it might stop it finding you by other means.

  Agitated, he retreated from the corner, further up the corridor. Where was he, anyway? It was a dim wooden back-alley, a raised passageway that ran parallel to the street, with several doors leading off it, all closed. At one end was a rectangle of light, and a hubbub of voices and activity. He was protected from the sun here, but not from its heat, and the warm, soupy air drew sweat from his skin.

  Halfway along the corridor, he stopped. Had he seen it? It was nothing more than a glimpse, really, and given how wound up and exhausted he was, the odd hallucination here and there was nothing to be surprised at. As the seconds ticked by, he became more and more certain that it hadn’t been anything at all.

  Until he heard footsteps on the stairs.

  His heart bucked in his chest. He drew a revolver with his free hand – an unthinking response to danger – and his body tensed, ready to run or fight. But probably run.

  The panic only lasted a moment. The footsteps were too light, too fast to be made by the thing he feared. A middle-aged Dakkadian woman in dusty hemp robes came into view, carrying an armload of white sheets. She froze as she saw him, sucking in a shocked breath. Her narrow eyes widened at the sight of his revolver.

  He shoved it quickly back in his belt and held up the empty hand to show her he meant no harm. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry. My fault. Thought you were a horrible daemonic monster.’