The Iron jackal totkj-3

by Chris Wooding

He checked the readings on the oscilloscope again. There was no question.

  Something was very wrong here.

  He frowned. The damned thing was so alien. The long, narrow blades at either end of the handle were made of some material he’d never seen before. They had a crisp, dry ceramic quality, and gave off no reflection. The way they curved in opposite directions resembled no ancient weapon he’d ever seen. Admittedly he was no authority, but he knew his way around a museum.

  Then there were the symbols, cut with exquisite precision into the handle and blades. Faintly suggestive of language, but if so it was a long way from any he recognised. And there was the question of its age. They had only Crickslint’s word that it was ancient. It might have been fashioned yesterday, judging by its lack of wear.

  But most puzzling of all was the daemonism. It simply defied his analysis. He couldn’t hope to penetrate its complexities with the equipment he had. All he’d gleaned were clues, and they would have to be enough.

  If this relic was indeed thousands of years old, then it was the find of the century. It proved that daemonism was alive and thriving long before most civilisations and religions got to their feet. It hinted at untold possibilities for today’s practitioners, if only they could overcome the prejudice fostered by the Awakeners. And as long as nobody mentioned that the Manes were created by the hubris of the early daemonists.

  But what if it wasn’t thousands of years old? He was beginning to wonder. Because he’d decoded part of the orchestra of chords that had been thralled into the relic. And what he found was a very modern technique indeed.

  There were sheets of formulae and diagrams all over the room. One side of the sanctum looked more like an engineer’s workshop, where he’d been experimenting with all the devices and parts he’d bought in Thesk. Bess was slumped in the corner of the sanctum, a blanket draped over her shoulders, stumpy legs sticking out. Her glittering eyes had disappeared; there was only darkness behind her face-grille. Her favourite storybook lay loosely in her hand.

  The sight of her caused a sudden, plunging sadness. There were new bullet-holes in her soft leather parts that would need repairing. New chips and dents in her armour. She was in a sorry state. He didn’t take care of her as well as he wished he could, and he’d been distracted of late with his mission to protect the Cap’n.

  What if he failed? What if they couldn’t get the relic back in time, and Crake’s untested methods came to nothing? Crake would survive without the Ketty Jay, but where would Bess go? He could hardly walk around with her in public: she was evidence that he was a daemonist. It struck him then that he’d been so obsessed with his own needs, and later with the Cap’n’s, that he’d barely thought about her at all since this whole affair began.

  You’re a despicable person, Grayther Crake, he told himself. No wonder you did what you did to Miss Bree.

  Grim-faced, he marched out of the sanctum, through the tarpaulin flap that led into the hold.

  It was more of a mess than usual down here, after hauling fifty Murthians to Gagriisk and Frey’s hefty landing, which knocked everything around. It was a miracle that most of the equipment in his sanctum survived a jolt like that. Only his harmoniser had broken, but luckily he could do without that for the moment.

  The Rattletraps had been retrieved after the battle. They’d only used two of the three – the ones with mounted gatlings – but those had made it back in surprisingly good condition. They may have looked like pieces of junk, but Ashua evidently knew what she was doing when she bought them.

  Reminded by that thought, he stopped at the bottom of the stairs and peered round the side, into the darkness that gathered against the bulkhead. He could hear breathing in there. Not the Iron Jackal, thankfully. The heavy breathing of sleep.

  He could just about make her out among the pipes, curled up in a nook in the bulkhead that had been padded out with tarp. She was lying on her side, swallowed by a dusty and voluminous sleeping bag. The shiver and shudder of the wind against the Ketty Jay didn’t seem to bother her at all.

  The Cap’n had made noises about shuffling people around to give her a bed – Crake had feared he was going to have to swap quarters with Jez, and lose the upper bunk he used for books and storage – but she preferred to be down here. She said she’d grown up sleeping rough, and couldn’t sleep in a bed anyway. Plus there was lots of space in the hold. It was a little odd, but nobody complained.

  He still wasn’t sure how he felt about having her on board. His initial reaction had been horror. He hadn’t wanted anyone or anything to upset the delicate balance that they’d managed to maintain all this time. But he wondered now if he’d been overly harsh. She appeared to have a brain, which was something that Crake generally approved of. Her sass was never directed at him, which was a point in her favour. In fact, she seemed to have chosen him as her co-conspirator when mocking someone else. That was a nice feeling. Malvery seemed quite taken with her, too, and he respected the doctor’s opinion in most things.

  So maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, if the Cap’n could keep his hands off her.

  The Cap’n, he thought. Yes. He had news to deliver.

  He made his way up to the cockpit. Frey was flying them low over a sea of dunes. The moon was dead ahead, only a slim black fingernail away from a perfect circle. It was a bright night. Crake tried not to think about the risks of being spotted by a Samarlan patrol. Maybe that was why they were flying so distressingly low.

  Ugrik was in the navigator’s seat, amid an untidy mass of charts. He turned in his seat as Crake entered, and cackled at him.

  ‘The mysterious Mr Crake emerges from his den!’ Ugrik declared. ‘What’ve you been up to down there, eh? Stirring up the infinite?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Crake stiffly. He found the bluntness of Yorts rather rude, and he hadn’t thought he was being especially mysterious anyway.

  ‘Something like that,’ Ugrik muttered to himself, sotto voce. ‘Aye, something very like that, I’ll bet.’

  Crake couldn’t work out what he meant by that. It sounded disconcertingly like a threat. Ugrik went back to his maps. Crake gave him a doubtful glance and then turned his attention to the Cap’n.

  Frey was staring ahead with the fixed concentration of a man determined to think about nothing. Crake had heard that Trinica had been on board. It wasn’t hard to guess who was responsible for the Cap’n’s present mood.

  ‘Any word on our destination, Cap’n?’

  Ugrik cackled again, not looking up from his charts. ‘You’ll see! You’ll see!’

  Frey thumbed at Ugrik, as if to say: there’s your answer.

  Crake cleared his throat. ‘Would you like the good news or the bad news first?’

  ‘Bad news first is traditional, isn’t it?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Gimme the good news.’

  ‘The bad news is… er, right. The good news is, I’ve made a certain amount of progress on the question of the daemon. I’ve been working on some things based on your rather brave field test of my concealment device, and I’ve developed a few techniques that might prove effective. If the worst should come to the worst, that is.’

  Frey nodded, without much enthusiasm. ‘Did I ever thank you, Crake?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘That thing, that device. Saved my life.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he thought for a moment. ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I know you’ve been working flat out on my behalf all this time. I want you to know I appreciate it.’

  It was delivered in an oddly emotionless monotone. Crake began to worry about the ry aboutCap’n’s state of mind. Perhaps he was just exhausted. They were all exhausted. It seemed like they hadn’t had a chance to catch their breath since they first found the black spot on Frey’s hand.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Bad news now,’ Frey said.

  ‘Bad news.’ Crake paused for a moment, wondering how best t
o approach this. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard of a harmonic resonance bounce?’

  Frey gave him a withering look over his shoulder. Crake decided it was not the look of a person who was likely to have heard of a harmonic resonance bounce.

  ‘Silly question, I suppose. Let me put it simply. You remember that ring I gave you a while ago, that was linked to a compass?’

  ‘This ring?’ Frey asked, raising his hand.

  Crake suddenly understood. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Cap’n, I’m very sor-’

  ‘Buy me a drink if I’m not dead by tomorrow night. You were saying?’

  Crake had been knocked off his stride. ‘Er… anyway. The way the ring and compass works is that you thrall two daemons which oscillate at the same frequency to both objects, allowing one to always find the other, rather like a magnetic pull. The earcuffs run on the same principle of matched oscillation, though they’re a sight more complex. When a daemon is thralled to something in this way, it forms a unique chord which is out of phase with the rest of the object, setting up an invisible wave which travels between the objects, which is what we call a harmonic reson-’

  ‘Layman’s terms, Crake,’ said Frey, getting ever so slightly annoyed.

  ‘Someone’s tracking the relic.’

  ‘There, now, that wasn’t so hard.’

  Crake wondered if he did have a tendency to over-explain. He ought to work on that. ‘It’s just like the ring and compass, although, I reluctantly admit, more skilful and precise. But somebody, somewhere, has a device that tells them exactly where the relic is at all times.’

  ‘And only a daemonist could do this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Know any?’

  ‘None that have been anywhere near that relic.’

  ‘Can you block it?’

  ‘Should be easy enough. But it’ll take time.’

  Frey tutted. ‘Time’s exactly what we don’t -’

  A heavy shudder ran through the Ketty Jay, violent enough to make Crake stumble.

  ‘-have…’ Frey finished, in a tone of apprehension.

  They waited, eyes roaming their surroundings as if they might see what had caused the disturbance.

  ‘Turbulence, I reckon,’ said Frey.

  The Ketty Jay shivered again. Then suddenly it was shaken hard, and Crake wheeled across the cockpit to crash into the bulkhead on the far side.

  He shook his head to clear it, only to find that the sickening slant to the cockpit was not a result of his disorientation. The Ketty Jay ’s thrusters puffed and boomed, dying and relighting again. She was listing hard to starboard, and there was a horrible ascending drone that Crake had learned to associate with plummeting aircraft. His stomach plummeted in sympathy.

  ‘Cap’n!’ he cried. ‘What’s happeni-’

  ‘Shut it! I’m busy!’ Frey barked at him. The Cap’n was struggling with the flight stick, frantically pulling levers, turning valves, kicking pedals. ‘Everything’s gone haywire!’

  Crake clambered to his feet with the help of the back of the pilot’s seat. Over Frey’s shoulder, he could see all kinds of brass dials and meters on the dash. They were flicking crazily this way and that. The steel-coloured waves of desert sand outside were tilted at a frightening angle.

  ‘One of the aerium tanks is jammed half open!’ Frey cried, thrashing at a nearby lever. They lurched forward, throwing Crake hard against the back of the chair. ‘And the damn thrusters are-’ He swore and punched a button. The thrusters boomed once more and died.

  The quiet was sudden and awful. The Ketty Jay ’s nose tipped steadily downwards. Frey wrestled with the stick to stop her rolling to starboard.

  ‘ What did you do to the thrusters? ’ Crake screamed.

  Ugrik chuckled. ‘This is just like this time in Marduk. So cold, it were, the engine froze, and we-’

  ‘You can shut your trap as well!’ Frey yelled at him. He began frantically strapping himself in with one hand, while trying to hold the course with the other. He cr other. aned round in the seat and shouted down the corridor. ‘Everyone hang on!’

  ‘Hang on to what?’ Crake howled, casting around the cockpit for something to attach himself to. In the end, he stayed clinging to the back of the chair. He felt the Ketty Jay getting heavier and heavier as she lost aerium. She glided with terrible silent grace through the moonlit night.

  ‘Do something!’ Crake flapped.

  ‘Suggestions would be good!’

  ‘Hit some buttons!’

  The Cap’n suddenly lit up. ‘Hey, I never tried that button before.’ He stabbed it with his finger.

  The silence was filled by the steady whirring of fans as the air filtration system kicked in.

  ‘Oh, that ’s where it was,’ said Frey, and then Crake felt a terrific shove from behind, he struck his head against something hard, and the world went black.

  Thirty-Seven

  Marooned – Frey Despairs – Shine – The Thing about Underdogs

  The moon hung bloated and malevolent against a dense backdrop of stars. In all directions, to the horizon and beyond, was the deep desert. Endless dunes, utterly still. Not a breath of wind stirred the silver sand. It might have been the landscape of a dead planet.

  The Ketty Jay lay at the end of a massive furrow, a scar in the pristine vista. Her nose was buried where the sand had braked her. Her tail end was tilted up into the air at a shallow angle. She’d come in on her belly, her armoured undercarriage taking the brunt of the impact, and it was only as she’d come near to a halt that her front end had ploughed into the sand. There was enough aerium still in her tanks to make her much lighter than her size suggested, and Frey had managed to take a lot of speed out of her in the seconds before they crashed. The Ketty Jay had taken a battering, but she’d held together.

  All things considered, it was a damned fine landing. Not that that made Frey feel much better about things.

  ‘Ain’t no reason for it, Cap’n,’ said Silo, who was peering into a panel underneath the dash. He had an electric torch, attached by wires to a nearby battery pack, and he was shining it around inside. ‘Can’t see none, anyways.’

  Frey crouched next to him in the semi-darkness with an oil lantern from the stores. The cockpit windglass was almost entirely covered by the tide of sand. Only a sliver of moonlight was left, and thoe Ketty Jay’s internal lights weren’t working. Not even the emergency backups.

  ‘How did this happen?’ Frey asked. ‘She just got overhauled.’

  ‘Ain’t nothing to do with the aircraft,’ said Silo, emerging. ‘Systems that ain’t even connected all went down at the same time.’

  ‘So it’s something from outside?’

  The Murthian’s face was sinister, underlit by the torch. ‘Couldn’t say, Cap’n.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You got your pocket watch? Left mine with a friend.’

  Frey brought it out. Silo shone a light on it. ‘Still working,’ said Frey.

  ‘Watch is pretty simple. Clockwork. So maybe it’s just the delicate stuff got muddled.’

  ‘Can’t you, I don’t know, reset the systems or something?’

  ‘Cap’n, there ain’t no reason why some o’ them systems ain’t working. But they ain’t. I reckon whatever did this to the Ketty Jay, it’s still doin’ it. We ain’t even gonna get the lights up till we sort that out.’

  Frey was grim. ‘Do what you can, then,’ he said, and then carried his lantern to his quarters and shut himself inside.

  He laid his lantern on top of the cabinet, after making sure it wouldn’t slide off due to the Ketty Jay’ s uncomfortable tilt. The weak light made the small, grimy room even smaller and grimier. The flame flickered in uneasy streaks on the metal walls. He washed his face in the tiny sink – the water was running, but it didn’t heat – and regarded himself in the mirror.

  He looked haggard. There were dark bags under his eyes and he hadn’t shaved recently. How long had it been since he slept properly? Seemed like for ever.

  He re
turned to the cabinet and unlocked the drawer where he kept his Shine. It was a small clear bottle with a screw-top pipette. He went over to his bunk and sat on the edge, tipping the bottle this way and that, studying the liquid inside.

  Probably enough to kill him in there, he reckoned.

  He snorted. Stop being dramatic. He’d never had the temperament for suicide. But a couple of drops of Shine seemed like a good idea right about then. Forget everything for a few hours. Dream the blissful, feathery dreams of the Shine-stoned.

  No more scrabbling about in the gutter, he’d told himself. Time to make the big moves, he’d said. After all, that was the kind of thie kind ong the hero of Sakkan ought to do. The kind of thing that was expected of him.

  And look where he’d ended up. Cursed by some rat-damned ancient blade that he couldn’t keep his hands off. Jez in a coma. Pinn shot for a second time. The Firecrow wrecked. The Ketty Jay crashed in the trackless desert a thousand kloms from anywhere. Very possibly his crew would all die of starvation if the ship didn’t get fixed, but he had a messy evisceration at the hands of the Iron Jackal to look forward to instead. He’d probably helped to kick off a civil war back in Vardia, and he was on the Century Knights’ hit-list after his little stunt at the Mentenforth Institute. On top of that, he’d ruined things with Trinica, and he didn’t know if he could ever make it right, even if he did manage to survive long enough to try.

  When you stacked it all up, he’d done a pretty shabby job of things.

  Maybe he just wasn’t cut from the right cloth. It seemed like there were people who carried the burden of the big decisions lightly. People born to a life of command: aristocrats and officers and leaders. Their choices saved lives and cost them, too. Those weren’t the kind of decisions that should be left in the hands of a shiftless orphan boy.

  His whole command was a sham. Unwittingly, he’d tricked his crew into trusting him. By pretending to be a captain, he’d somehow become one, and for a time he believed he deserved it. But he didn’t. The evidence was pretty clear on that.

  At least Trinica had the sense to turn her back on him before he destroyed her life a second time.