The Iron jackal totkj-3

by Chris Wooding

  No. Strange as this place was, it was a place built for humans, by humans. He had to think of them as such.

  But where had they gone? And how had they disappeared so utterly, undiscovered until now?

  He stared across the lake, and amid the wonderment he felt a growing fear of what the night might bring.

  ‘It occurs to me we should have made a little more haste and spent a little less time messing around,’ he said. Nerves were making him irritable.

  Frey, who was standing beside him, took out his pocket watch and checked it. ‘That fat Sammie sorcerer said I had until full dark,’ he said. ‘I make it at least an hour. And Ugrik said he took the relic from right in that building.’ He clicked the pocket watch shut. ‘Plenty of time.’

  Plenty of time? Crake marvelled at how his friend could be so casual. Crake was the kind of man who turned up a quarter of an hour early for appointments, in case something unforeseen occurred on the way. He’d often bee?o; d often mystified by his crewmates’ attitude in the face of danger. It was Crake’s opinion that intelligent men should be terrified when faced with a predicament like this. Anyone who wasn’t had simply failed to understand the situation.

  But then, that would make Harkins the smartest man on the Ketty Jay, so he supposed his theory wasn’t as clever as it sounded at first.

  Be honest, Grayther. You’re scared because you don’t want to face the daemon.

  That was the truth of it. All his plans and formulae made fine theories, but he was far from ready to put them into practice. He needed more time, to test and test again. This seat-of-the-pants approach scared him witless.

  He remembered how he’d dreamed of pioneering a new kind of field daemonism, something no one else had successfully explored. How boastful and hollow that all seemed, now he came to it. The last time he’d been so arrogant, it had ended in tragedy. It had ended in Bess.

  His eyes went to the excavated zone, the bald patch in the jungle where the bones of the city had been laid bare. Bess was there, and Samandra with her. He wasn’t sure which one caused him the greater shame.

  Whatever the Cap’n said, he didn’t think Samandra would ever forgive him for what he’d done, and nor should she. But she could handle herself, at least. Bess was a different matter. He should never have let her go off with the others. He saw the sense in it – Bess would do no good here, and the Cap’n needed him – but it still left him worried and guilty. He should be there to watch out for her, but more importantly, he should be there to control her. She was always a little erratic, and without him to keep her in check, he was afraid of what she might do. He was the only one she really listened to.

  He wished they’d left her on the Ketty Ja y with Harkins and Jez. But it was too late for all that now.

  ‘Found it!’ Ugrik said. He began pulling vines aside. ‘This is the way in.’

  ‘See?’ said Frey to Crake, as they picked up their heavy packs full of equipment and made their way towards the Yort. ‘Still got an hour.’

  ‘I wonder if you’ve considered that daemons may not practise such precise timekeeping as your pocket watch?’ Crake inquired. ‘Them being pan-dimensional entities from beyond infinity, and all that?’

  Frey became worried all of a sudden. ‘But the sorcerer said-’

  ‘The sorcerer was off his face on hookroot bark,’ Crake reminded him.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right.’ He quickened his step. ‘Best get moving then, eh?’?rsquo;

  Crake felt a small, malicious pleasure at infecting the Cap’n with his sense of urgency. He followed Ugrik and Frey through the mass of vines, and into the Azryx building.

  They came in through what must have been a window. The doorway was hopelessly choked with tree roots. Crake stared around in wonderment as he climbed down into the room. Seeds and weeds had tunnelled into it here and there, and it was cracked in places, and everything was covered in dust. But despite that, it wouldn’t have been out of place in the Archduke’s palace.

  It was light in here, illuminated with a soft and restful glow that seemed to emanate from all around. The exterior had been the same skeletal off-white colour as the rest of the city, but inside, the walls and ceiling retained a blush of pink. The ceiling was scalloped like the inside of a clam shell. Everything flowed into everything else, with no joins or hard edges, and there was an organic quality to the place, as if it had been grown rather than made. Any furniture had long since decayed into nothingness, but there was a semicircular barrier just inside the front door, made of the same stuff as the walls and floor.

  Crake considered the barrier for a moment, wondering what it could be for. Then he realised. It reminded him of nothing more than a reception desk in a foyer.

  Yes! Yes, that was what it was! This place was a foyer, he decided. The thought made him dizzy. He felt a connection across ten thousand years, the reality of the people that had once lived here.

  To think I might have missed this. To think I might have barricaded myself in a sanctum, and never known this moment.

  Ugrik led the way down a corridor that went off to one side. A corridor, or perhaps a tunnel, since it had no corners and it curved as it progressed. He saw a doorway to their right, a smooth oval gap in the pinkish surface, and peered inside. Beyond was a small room with eight beds in two rows. Their frames, made of the same curious ceramic as the city, had survived the millennia. They had a strange, crablike look to them. The beds and their occupants had disappeared, but there were still the remains of ancient devices in there. They were little more than hollow boxes that stood on short poles, but whatever metal they were made of had survived the millennia with only a small amount of corrosion.

  ‘Hey!’ called Frey, from up the corridor. Crake realised he’d been lingering in the doorway. ‘Come on, Crake. It was you who wanted to hurry.’ He said it in a tone which suggested it was Frey who wanted to hurry now.

  Crake shouldered his pack and jogged to catch up. The weight of his equipment was making his back ache. Not for the first time, he cursed the lack of portability that went with his chosen profession.

  ‘Did you see those beds?’ he asked.

  ‘I saw ’em last time I was here,’ Ugrik said.

  ‘What is this place?’

  Ugrik sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Crake was amazed his nose worked at all with that great big ring in it. ‘Hospital,’ he said. ‘There’s more wards like that about, ’n’ operating theatres over the other side.’

  ‘This place was a hospital?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Crake experienced another unsettling moment. Being here, he felt strangely close to these people. T hey lived and died so long ago, yet they seem so like us.

  The corridor opened out into a larger chamber, bigger than the foyer, with two balconied galleries running along either side. Along the length of the chamber were twelve containers in three rows of four. They were white ceramic boxes inside cradles of some metal that looked like polished brass. Each was a little over two metres in length and half as wide.

  There was an eerie feel to the chamber. Time had been less kind to it than the foyer. There was rubble on the floor and grass had taken root in the corners. Dust lay thick all around. Though there was the same soft light here as elsewhere, it only seemed to emphasise the desolation and emptiness.

  And those boxes looked unsettlingly like tombs.

  Ugrik and Frey seemed to feel none of his unease, however. They headed for the far end of the room, where there was a curving stairway that seemed to have melted out of the wall, leading up to one of the galleries. Crake followed more slowly. There was something out of place here, something he couldn’t put his finger on.

  The boxes had an internal glow all their own. He studied them as he walked between them. Their walls were thin, and he could see the faintest of shadows through them. As if something was inside.

  Then he realised what had been nagging at him, and he stopped still.

  ‘Crake?’ F
rey called. ‘Can you stop dragging your arse, please?’

  Crake ignored him. He put his hands on top of one of the boxes, feeling around for a seam.

  ‘Oi! What are you fiddling with?’

  ‘There’s no dust on ’em, Cap’n.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘These boxes. There’s dust everywhere else, but not here.’

  ‘So?’

  He found what he was looking for, and hauled. ‘Well, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘Who’s been dusting them?’

  The top of the box came open. It rose up and slid to one side and tilted out of the way with a silent mechanical movement. Frey looked inside. His eyes widened.

  ‘What is it, Crake?’ Frey called, seeing the expression on his face.

  ‘Spit and blood,’ he said. ‘There are still people in these things!’

  The ceramic walls of the power station had resisted nature’s best efforts to destroy them for thousands of years. It took Ashua less than a second to do the job with a dump truck.

  Bullets pinged off the metal skin of the massive vehicle as she climbed dizzily out of the cab. Her neck and back were numb from the whiplash. Fallen rubble had crashed down onto the truck’s mangled muzzle and shattered the windscreen. She heard the others returning fire on the Sammies from the shelter of the dump box behind her.

  They were in. That was the important thing. They were in.

  The Sammies had been slow to react to the sight of a dump truck clumsily thundering through the streets. Even when it went rolling up the ramps between the platforms that led up to the power station, they hadn’t suspected the hand of foreigners. Maybe they were too confident in the belief that this place couldn’t be found. Either way, she’d made it to the second platform before anyone thought to shoot at them. But her passengers were hidden and protected, and Ashua was a hard target inside the cab, so she kept on going.

  It was only when they got to the top that she realised their predicament. There were twenty Sammies up there, maybe thirty, that they hadn’t been able to see from below. They had a machine gun, and they were forewarned.

  It seemed the guarding of the power station was a serious matter, even when they thought the city couldn’t be found. Getting out and knocking on the door wasn’t going to be an option.

  But the monster vehicle she was driving was the height of three men and weighed several dozen tonnes. Its wheels alone were three metres high: there were railed stairs on the front of it just so you could get to the cab. The cab itself was set back from the muzzle, well protected, and overhung by the dump box. And she reckoned the wall of the power station couldn’t be that thick.

  The sheer strength of the vehicle made her feel invincible. So she put her foot down, and strapped herself in.

  With their black skin, black hair and black uniforms, the Sammies looked like shadows made flesh. They certainly melted away like shadows when they saw the dump truck lumbering towards them. The machine gun punched bullets across the body of the vehicle, but the tiny?but the cab was sheltered by the enormous engine casing in the front. She yelled out a warning to the others in the back, but she wasn’t sure if they heard it over the bellow of the vehicle.

  She braked just before they hit the power station, warned by an instinct for self-preservation. Her instincts were good. The jolt of impact wasn’t violent enough to send her flying into the dash, but it was hard enough to crack the thin Azryx ceramic. Instead of ploughing hard into the building, the dump truck only shoved its muzzle through the outer wall, then coughed to a stop.

  When she got out, everyone was shouting. She blinked dust from her eyes and looked back along the flank of the vehicle. The machine gun emplacement was getting smashed to pieces by Grudge’s autocannon. Samandra Bree slipped lightly down the side of the truck, dropping onto one of the wheels and then to the ground. She swung out her shotguns and started blasting as the Sammie guards came running at them from the side.

  Ashua couldn’t help taking a moment to marvel. There was something magnetic about the sight of a Century Knight in action. This wasn’t the scrappy, hectic gunfighting she’d seen on the street, or the sterile, regimented form of the soldier. Nothing was random, and everything was fluid. Samandra was always moving, but she always knew where she was moving to. There was a lever-action shotgun in each hand. Between each shot, she spun the shotgun fast as an eyeblink, chambering a new round as she did so. Every time she pulled the trigger, Sammies at impossible range went down.

  These were the Century Knights she’d heard so much about, the heroes she’d idolised as a child. These were the men and women who let nothing stand in their way.

  ‘Get inside! We’ll take care o’ these fellers!’ Samandra called over the booming of Grudge’s autocannon. The others were already clambering over the front of the dump truck, picking their way through the rubble and down the smashed front steps into the power station. Ashua joined them.

  She found herself in a cavernous corridor. It was lit by some unknown source, but the faded hue of the walls was dark and vaguely menacing. A thin ridge followed the curve of the ceiling like a spine, and exquisitely fashioned ribs ran its length. There were small signs of decay, cracks in places and bits broken off here and there, but it still retained a louring grandeur.

  Oh, Maddeus, she thought. Gloomy and elegant. You’d have loved this place.

  Bess leaped off the muzzle of the dump truck and crashed to the ground in front of her, making her jump. Malvery slapped her on the back.

  ‘No time for daydreaming, eh?’ he said cheerily.

  ‘It’s alright for you,’ she said, rolling her neck. ‘You were in the back of the truck.’

  ‘Ah, you’re a tough little thing. You’ll live, ll livquo; he said, and then strode off to help Pinn, who was struggling his way down the front of the vehicle with only one working arm.

  She’d have thought it condescending from anyone but Malvery. But she didn’t like to be snappy when the doctor was around. In fact, his bluff, comradely manner made her feel quite good about herself. He inspired an unfamiliar emotion in her. Trust. He just seemed, well.. . decent, somehow. And Ashua couldn’t remember that last time she’d thought that about anyone. Not even Maddeus.

  A smile touched the corner of her mouth. Maybe Maddeus had the right idea after all, forcing her in with this lot. Maybe he’d been looking for someone to hand her off to for a long time, ever since he knew he was dying. She wondered how much he’d already known about the crew of the Ketty Jay when she came to him with the news that they were working together. She wondered, in fact, who had started the chain of whispers that led Frey to her in the first place.

  Maddeus wasn’t a decent man. But he looked out for her. He always had.

  She put thoughts of her erstwhile guardian from her mind, before they could threaten her. Night was the time for those thoughts, when she was alone in her nook in the hold, and the black sadness came for her. For now, she would only permit herself the hard, sharp thoughts of a survivor.

  The others were grouping up now, and together they hurried further into the building, with Bess leading the way.

  Ashua flexed her hand on the grip of her pistol and followed. This place unsettled her. She’d spent her life in the bomb-torn ruins of Rabban, and later in the close, dusty streets of Shasiith. She’d never seen anything like this, and it made her feel threatened.

  But she’d deal with it. The way she dealt with that golem, and the fact that Jez had turned into a daemon right in front of her eyes. Because that was how she lived. She took the world as she found it. She didn’t expect a thing and she didn’t give a whole lot back. What was, was, and that was pretty much all there was to it.

  The corridor bent ahead of them, and the golem disappeared. Ashua hung back, keeping her eyes peeled for soldiers. She heard shouts and gunfire, and Bess roaring, and then a wet rending sound. A Sammie screamed briefly for his mother.

  By the time Ashua came round the curve of the corridor, the screaming had stopped and the
floor was bloody. Bess was chasing a couple of guards, who were fleeing for their lives. Pinn kicked someone’s detached arm out of his path.

  They came to a junction where three corridors gathered in, their curves flowing into one another as if they were liquid frozen in place. Bess was waiting for them, the guards having escaped her. Bree and Grudge caught them up there, Samandra reloading as she came.

  ‘They’ll keep their heads down for a little while,’ said Samandra, thumbing ov?, thumbier her shoulder to indicate the way they’d come. Grudge was backing up the corridor behind her, his autocannon slung low on his hip. ‘Won’t be long in followin’ us, though. We’ll have to fight our way out like we fought our way in. And they’ll be waitin’ out there in numbers, you can bet on that.’

  ‘Bess,’ said Silo. ‘How tough you think these walls are?’

  Bess put her fist through one.

  ‘Reckon we can make our own exit when the time comes,’ said Silo.

  ‘Colden!’ Samandra called to her hulking partner. She pointed at the hole in the wall. ‘Now why can’t you do that?’

  ‘Ain’t strong enough, I guess,’ came the humourless reply.

  Samandra winked at Silo. ‘Colden. He’s a real card. Keeps me in stitches.’

  Silo showed his customary lack of reaction.

  ‘Apparently you Murthians ain’t exactly a laugh a minute yourselves,’ Samandra commented.

  ‘Ain’t much about our situation that’s funny,’ Silo replied.

  Ashua was used to Silo’s inscrutable manner by now. At first she thought he was arrogant in his silence, a haughty freed slave aping the style of the Sammie nobles. Later, she wondered if he was just dumb. But she’d noticed the quiet respect the others gave him, and she’d seen the way they all accepted his command without question. Even Crake, who was the smartest man on the crew in her opinion. So maybe there was more to Silo than he showed.

  They came across a few more Sammies as they made their way deeper into the power station. Not all were guards; some were technicians, or perhaps scholars of some kind. They let those ones go, but nobody who was armed escaped Samandra’s shotguns. She was almost casual about the way she took them out. Ashua admired her callousness. There was no room for sentiment in their world.