Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles)

by J. S. Morin

  Rynn activated the rune structures one by one, until she could heft it as easily as a hammer.

  She took a deep breath, then another. With the leg up on the bed, she clawed her way up after it. Lying on the bed, she stripped down to her undergarments and changed into a skirt, which she hiked up around her midsection. Wondering at the oddity of putting on a boot that started just below the knee and went up to her waist, she pulled the leg on. The smooth base of her amputated leg slipped into the cradle. It fit better than she’d hoped. A bit of wiggling around lined up the mechanical knee with her real one, and she pulled the straps tight.

  The straps on the leg had no holes; she didn’t want to chance the adjustment on anything so crude as the distance between one hole and the next, so Madlin had packed an awl instead. Rynn pulled each strap as tight as she could stand it, knowing the leather would stretch and relax over time, and marked the spot. Once she had marked them all, she took the awl and put a single hole in each, then secured them.

  Rynn set her awl down on the bedding and put her hands on the edge. Slowly and carefully, she eased onto her feet. There was a hiss as the piston sucked in air that would slow her if the muscles of her leg gave way and tried to collapse beneath her. In taking her measurements, Rynn knew that her left leg was thinner than the right, probably because she never used it anymore. That was about to change.

  There was a teetering moment, a feeling like she was a circus performer, balancing on stilts that no one had taught her how to use. She held her arms out, for balance. It was the oddest sensation. Her left leg was standing in a flower pot, sunk nearly up to her hip. Her right leg compensated; muscles in her toes and the arch of her foot straining to keep her from toppling. Straightening upright was a task nearly a minute in the making, but by the time she stood tall, she felt like a person again. The leg was a proper match in height. Wiggling her hips was difficult, but she was able to judge that they were level. She tried to look down to admire the work, but her collar got in the way. She banged her chin on it—the first time she’d been careless with it in weeks. She trickled a bit of aether into it, same as she did every time she remembered it.

  There was nothing to do but try. She held her arms out for balance and lifted the leg from the floor. It handled awkwardly. The levitation runes provided a buoyancy that kept its weight from bolting her to the floor, but it still possessed the same mass. It was like walking through water.

  Thunk.

  She set her foot down and a squish of springs steadied her. She hopped forward with her good leg, but the walking in water resistance was gone, and she pitched forward, catching herself against the wall. A knurl in the bottom of the mechanical leg kept a grip on the floor, or she’d have fallen in a heap.

  “General Rynn,” a voice called through the door. A knock followed in belated politeness. “Are you all right in there?”

  “You are relieved,” she called back. “No guards outside my door.” She hesitated a moment. “And yeah, thanks. I’m fine.”

  She lost track of the time as she paced her tiny cabin. Disused muscles burned in protest, and her skin was rubbed raw. The padding meant to ease the bite of leather on her soft flesh could only do so much. Tight as she could pull the straps, things still moved and shifted. Each pass back and forth across the room, she grew a bit more familiar with her new stride. It was unlike walking of any sort she’d ever done. She limped as the mechanical foot and springs settled with each step, and the unequal weights accentuated it.

  There was a rap at the door. “General Rynn?”

  She froze in place, suddenly self-conscious of the noise she made clomping around the room. “I thought I said no guards.”

  “Bit of an odd case here,” came the reply. “You’ve got a visitor from Tinker’s Island.”

  Rynn’s mind went to fuzz. She glanced around the room, looking at the wreck of tools and hay and ... and her. “Tell him to come back later. I’m—”

  “Piss off, Madlin,” Dan’s voice echoed through the door. “I’m not one of your little soldiers.”

  “Sorry, it’s just that I’m not quite ... decent ... at the moment.”

  She heard Dan’s laughter through the door. “You got me to look into the aether at least. I half thought there was a fella in there with you. Almost had me jealous.”

  “I’m not ... it’s just ... it’s hard to explain. Can you just come back later? Please?”

  “Fine. Keep your collar for all I care.”

  Collar? Shit! Dan had real magic, of course. She’d been pestering him over a month to teach it to her so she could get it off herself. She could skip the learning process and get the result she desired. She lunged for the door.

  “Wait, no!” She held the handle for balance and kicked at the crate lid with her metal foot. “Just let me clear the door.” She couldn’t hear footsteps, but that didn’t mean Dan wasn’t slinking away soft-footed.

  Rynn wrenched the door open, bending at the waist to reach for it rather than stepping into the pull. Backwards would be practice for another day.

  Dan gave her a quizzical look when she opened the door. She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him inside. “You’re dismissed,” she told the guard who’d first knocked. The door slammed, cutting her off with Dan, alone.

  “Bloody black blazes,” Dan said, staring at the legs beneath her skirt. Stumbling worries aside, she suddenly wished she’d worn one that went below the knee. Brushing the floor, actually, would have been perfect. “I’ve known girls who’d take your hand off for putting it up her skirt. Never seen one who might do it by accident. I was wondering when I saw runes below your stump.” Dan ran fingers through his unruly hair.

  “Eyes up here,” Rynn snapped, pointing to her collar. She knew the phrase caught a guilty hook in most men’s consciences. “You said something about a collar.”

  Dan drifted his gaze lecherously up until he looked her in the eye. She knew he did it just to keep his credibility intact as an arrogant little arse. “You asked me about a thousand times how to get it off.”

  “And you told me a thousand times that you couldn’t.”

  “No, I told you that I couldn’t teach you anything to do it. I’m shit as a teacher, and you’ve got no experience except rune-tending. You’d have killed yourself trying, then Madlin would have gotten pissed at me, like it was my fault.”

  “So you can?”

  “I’ve thought of about a hundred ways.” Dan smirked. “The other nine hundred mighta killed you.”

  Rynn breathed out a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you!”

  Dan held up his hands. “Oh, don’t be so quick now. I’ve got a price.” Rynn’s eyes narrowed. “I want to see those books I’ve heard about. The ones your father built the machine from.”

  “How do you know about those?”

  “Please, there are about a dozen people on Tinker’s Island who do nothing but gossip over what they think is inside. If the Mad Tinker wanted to keep their existence a secret, he should have started in the dockside taverns and emptied a few revolvers into those loudmouths.”

  “Why do you want to see them so badly?”

  “I don’t just want to see them. I want to read them; I want to copy them. I want to open a hole to Veydrus and deliver them. No one here can read them. You’re puzzling them out like picture books and recognizing names you can sound out. And just that much got you a machine that can take people from one world to another. Imagine what else is inside.”

  “And you think that’s worth taking a collar off me? My father would never agree to that.”

  “Gut your father,” Dan said, drawing a reflexive scowl from Rynn. “You’re in charge here. Make it an order.”

  “Tinker’s Island is his.”

  Dan cocked his head. “Is it? Stuff in that book might do everyone a lot of good. If I can put it in front of someone who can translate it, I can share the secrets with you. Collar thing’s really more of a favor. You should want me taking a copy of those books, but
in case you don’t see it that way, I’ll bargain for it.”

  Madlin looked away, over at the curtains. She wished they had been open, so there was a greater distance to look off into. As it was, her gaze was trapped in the room with Dan. “I don’t see my father agreeing to it.”

  “Confront him or go behind his back. I can deal with it either way. Winds, Madlin, you lost a leg and just up and built yourself a new one. Are you going to let your old man stop you from letting me read some books?”

  She could plead incompetence later. She could find a way to help the Zaynes kill him. She could just go along and hope that what he learned was worth sharing, and that he kept his word. What she couldn’t do was let her chance to get the killer collar off her neck slip away from her.

  “Fine. I’ll find a way. Just do it.”

  Dan put a hand on her shoulder. “Easiest would be for you to lie down on the—”

  Rynn slapped his hand away as he tried to push her down to the bed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m going to lean your head out off the end of the bed and—”

  “No.” Rynn waved her hands between them. “No lying on the bed. That’s right out.”

  Dan lowered his chin to his chest and gaped at her wide-eyed. “You think I’d try to take you? No way I’m rutting anywhere near that rat-trap.” He pointed to Rynn’s mechanical leg. She felt her face grow hot. “Whatever. Just put your arm over my shoulder and bend forward as far as you can without falling.”

  Rynn complied with some reluctance. She kept her free hand pinching the neckline of her blouse closed as she reached around Dan’s shoulders. He was bony, with less muscle on him than even she possessed. He hadn’t reached the point where a man’s bulk began filling out a boy’s frame. His voice hadn’t even deepened much. It was like manhood had begun in his nethers, relocated all thought processes there, and then given up the project.

  “What are you—?”

  “Just shut up a second. You blab more than Tanner.” It was the first she’d heard mention of Tanner since the second rescue attempt had failed to locate him. Dan hadn’t seemed worried, but most of Tinker’s Island assumed he and the other lost crewman were dead.

  Rynn felt a tingling. It started somewhere deep within her and spread throughout her body. It wasn’t at all what she had expected, though she couldn’t say exactly what she had expected to happen. A pervasive tingly feeling certainly was far from it though.

  Thunk.

  As quick as the sensation came on, it disappeared.

  “Done.”

  Rynn looked down to the floor. There it sat: a simple, ugly, thick ring of iron, decorated with crudely carved runes. She felt for it at her neck, disbelieving that it was really gone, that Dan wasn’t playing some cruel trick on her. Her collar was finally off.

  “How ... but ... I ... what did you do?”

  “I took us incorporeal for a few seconds.”

  Rynn stared at him, waiting, then raised her eyebrows. “And?”

  “Incorporeal: not substantial. You know, like an illusion. Normal material passed right through us.”

  A moment’s panic swept over Rynn. She felt for her blouse, her skirt—she knew by not falling over that the mechanical leg was still there. “How come the rest of what I was wearing didn’t fall off? Not that I’m complaining, mind you!” She added hastily.

  Dan reached down and scooped up the collar, hefting it in his hand. He held it up in front of her. “Because I am very, very,” the blades inside the collar snapped out with a grating clash, “very good at what I do.”

  As Rynn watched, Dan must have powered the runes again himself. The blades shrank back inside the collar like a cat retracting its claws. As she leaned close to see if she could tell where they had gone, the teeth snapped out again, making her jump and Dan snicker.

  “What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

  Dan lobbed it to her underhand. “Nothing. It’s yours.” Rynn bobbled it, but held on. “I’ll let you get back to learning to walk on your clock-leg.” He pulled open the door.

  “Thank you!” Rynn said, belatedly remembering her manners.

  “No need to thank me. Just have Madlin ready to get me into wherever your father stores those books.” The door clanged shut behind him.

  Rynn sat for a long time after Dan left. For one thing, it felt good giving her leg the rest. But mostly she tried to sort her thoughts into the normal, neat little piles in her head. There was getting to be too much clutter; piles spilled into one another, and the pile of friends was the messiest of all.

  Sosha was the simplest dilemma. Rynn had played out her anger—unjustly, she realized—and knew that she couldn’t keep up the pretense any longer. The red, burning, frustration upon losing her leg needed somewhere to go, and she’d already caused enough damage to herself. She would need to make amends, but somehow she suspected Sosha would forgive her. Being able to stand on her own feet had upgraded her from an invalid to a drunk, which was a marked improvement that would only get better with practice.

  Her father kept slipping off of her pile of friends and allies. How anyone could at the same time be so brilliant and so obtuse baffled her. It would be just like him to give her a gift of a finely crafted peg leg, like she was some sort of story-book pirate, or a pauper war hero. At times she got the impression that he wanted her to fail just so he could wrest control back from her. It must have been Eziel’s intervention that made him see the same necessity as she had for a duplicate world-ripper aboard the Jennai. Denrik Zayne was a puzzle. He ought to have been an enemy, but he could easily have killed her and chose instead to bargain. Was Dan as dangerous as he said? Undoubtedly. Was Dan as unstable as Zayne claimed? That she was less certain of. He seemed to have a disregard for innocents that bordered on psychosis, but he had yet to cause harm to anyone who could be looked upon as an ally. If he was a monster, he was a discerning one, at least. The greater question was Zayne’s motive. Rynn knew he could have killed her in her workshop. She couldn’t have drawn her pistol before Zayne’s sword would have pierced her throat. How much of his story was true?

  The crux of his story was the reasoning for putting Dan down like a feral dog. If Zayne was to be believed, Dan was as great a threat to her as was any enemy—kuduk, daruu, or human. If Dan was the champion of a people who were equally bloodthirsty—or frankly, even one tenth so—then she would be handing over invaluable information to a deplorable empire, at least as bad as the kuduks of Korr.

  Then there was the collar. Rynn turned it over in her hands, still not quite believing that her imprisonment within its deadly grasp was over. The skin of her neck itched where she could never reach it beneath the iron, and grateful fingers scratched. As she indulged, she studied the interlocking iron teeth inside, like the maw of some snaggletooth monster, and tried to imagine what those would have felt like as they ripped through the flesh of her neck, and cracked through her spine. Not much, she decided; she would have been dead in an instant. Thanks to Dan, she no longer had to worry about finding out. Was that reason enough to entrust him with her father’s books?

  They’re my books, too. Our books. Those books belong to all of us, all the rebels. Haven’t we gotten all we’re going to get from them until someone translates them?

  Of course, Dan might learn all he could from those books, and then use that knowledge against them. To what end?

  The questions whirled in Rynn’s mind like a cyclone, blowing papers around her piles of friends and enemies faster than she could capture them and return them to their proper places. All the while the questions blew, Rynn asked more of them. Surely there was one question, one answer, one chain of logical thought that would sort everything out. There had to be some way to reconcile her father’s paranoia with Zayne’s dangled promises and veiled threats, and weigh them against Dan’s apparent madness and his brilliance with magic.

  None of that even brushed the surface of the mystery of Tanner, who was gone with
the rest of the Darksmith’s crew when the world-ripper was sent for them the next day.

  For the first time in months, Rynn was able to engage in the luxury of pacing as her worries swirled.

  Chapter 19

  “Assume that when you cannot see your enemy, they are moving with great certainty and terrifying swiftness toward your destruction.” –Xizix, demon sorcerer

  The tunnels stank of stale seawater. They were too near the surface to be free of it. A string of spark lights dangled from freestanding poles. They hooked up to a portable dynamo to keep the darkness away. Rusted iron supports stood weary guard over the tunnels running in all directions from the central hub, their pitted orange surfaces anything but reassuring to anyone venturing down those shafts. In the entire chamber, only the floor had the sheen of newness. It sat dead level and smooth as fresh poured-stone, but it was just rock that had been worked smooth by hands that knew their trade.

  Draksgollow took the place in with his eyes, digested it in his mind, and spat it out again. “You were right, this is the arse crack of the world, sure nuff.”

  Kezudkan waved away the tinker’s complaint. He clopped around on his cane, pointing as if giving a tour. “We’ll wall up the outside entrance, get rid of that fetid stink. Vent shafts looked to be in order, though I wouldn’t mind one or two of your lads giving them a once-over to be certain. This will be our main control room, where we’ll keep the machine. We’ll bring equipment through and build workshops down these corridors. There are already worker barracks, and even some nicer suites belonging to the former owners of these mines. It’s perfect.”

  “Perfect shit hole.”

  Kezudkan raise his hands to the ceiling, twenty feet above. “And it’s all ours! No one will think to look for us here. No one will bother crossing the Black Depths just to be thorough. Most importantly, Erefan won’t think to look for us here. There is no value to the place except its remoteness, no clue that this might be where we would settle. I never mentioned the Ice Furnace with any wistful longing when Erefan lived within my walls. I have no connection with the place at all. It is absent of anything I would choose for myself—uncivilized, utilitarian, and drab.”