Tales of the Ketty Jay #01 - Retribution Falls Chris Wooding

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He looked through the window, into the house. The furniture had long gone, leaving a mean, bare shell, dense with hot shadow. The sun outside was so bright that it was hard to see. It took him a few seconds to spot the man in the corner.

He was slumped, motionless, beneath a window on the other side of the house. Frey could hear flies, and smell blood.

By now his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. Enough to see that the man was dead, shot through the cheek, his jaw hanging askew and pasted onto his face with dried gore. Enough to see that he was wearing a Vardic uniform. Enough to see that he was one of theirs.

He heard a sound: sharp and hard, like someone stepping on a branch. The voices of his crew, suddenly raised in a clamour.

With a cold flood of nausea, he realised what was happening. Panic plunged in on him, and he bolted, running for the only safety he knew. Running for the Ketty Jay.

As he rounded the corner of the house, he saw Kenham lying face down next to a sundered crate. Jodd was backing away from the trenches, firing his revolver at the men that were clambering out of them. Rifle-wielding Dakkadians: two dozen or more. Small, blond-haired, faces broad and eyes narrow. They’d hidden when they heard the Ketty Jay approaching. Perhaps they’d even had time to throw the bodies of the dead Vards into the trenches. Now they were springing their ambush.

Rabby and Martley were fleeing headlong towards the Ketty Jay, as Frey was. There was fear on their faces.

One of the Dakkadians fell back into the trench with a howl as Jodd scored a hit, but their numbers were overwhelming. Three others sighted and shot him dead.

Frey barely registered Jodd’s fate. The world was a bouncing, jolting agony of moment after moment, each one bringing him a fraction closer to the gaping mouth of the Ketty Jay’s cargo ramp. His only chance was to get inside. His only chance to live.

Dakkadian rifles cracked and snapped. Their targets were Rabby and Martley. Several of the soldiers had broken into a sprint, chasing after them. A shout went up in their native tongue as someone spotted Frey, racing towards the Ketty Jay from the far side. Frey didn’t listen. He’d blocked out the rest of the world, tightened himself to a single purpose. Nothing else mattered but getting to that ramp.

Bullets chipped the turf around them. Martley stumbled and rolled hard, clutching his upper leg, screaming. Rabby hesitated, broke stride for the briefest moment, then ran on. The Dakkadians pulled Martley down as he tried to get up, then began stabbing him with the double-bladed bayonets on the end of their rifles. Martley’s shrieks turned to gurgles.

The cargo ramp drew closer. Frey felt the sinister brush of air as a bullet barely missed his throat. Rabby was running up the hill, yelling as he came. Two Dakkadians were close behind him.

Frey’s foot hit the ramp. He fled up to the top and pulled the lever to raise it. The hydraulic struts hummed into life.

Outside, he heard Rabby’s voice. ‘Lower the ramp! Cap’n! Lower the bloody ramp!’

But Frey wasn’t going to lower the ramp. Rabby was too far away. Rabby wasn’t going to make it in time. Rabby wasn’t getting anywhere near this aircraft with those soldiers hot on his heels.

‘Cap’n!’ he screamed. ‘Don’t you leave me here!’

Frey tapped in the code that would lock the ramp, preventing it from being opened from the keypad on the outside. That done, he drew his revolver and aimed it at the steadily closing gap at the end of the ramp. He backed up until he bumped against one of the supply crates that hadn’t yet been unloaded. The rectangle of burning sunlight shining through the gap thinned to a line.

‘Cap’n! ’

The line disappeared as the cargo ramp thumped closed, and Frey was alone in the quiet darkness of the cargo hold, safe in the cold metal womb of the Ketty Jay.

The Dakkadians had overrun this position. Navy intelligence had screwed up, and now his crew was dead. Those bastards! Those rotting bastards!

He turned to run, to race up the access stairs, through the passageway, into the cockpit. He was getting out of here.

He ran right into the bayonet of the Dakkadian creeping up behind him.

Pain exploded in his guts, shocking him, driving the breath from his lungs. He gaped at the soldier before him. A boy, no more than sixteen. Blond hair spilling out from beneath his cap. Blue eyes wide. He was trembling, almost as stunned as Frey.

Frey looked down at the twin blades of the Dakkadian bayonet, side by side, sticking out of his abdomen. Blood, black in the darkness, slid thinly along the blades and dripped to the floor.

The boy was scared. Hadn’t meant to stab him. When he snuck aboard the Ketty Jay, he probably thought only to capture a crewman for his fellows. He hadn’t killed anyone before. He had that look.

As if in a trance, Frey raised his revolver and aimed it point-blank at the boy’s chest. As if in a trance, the boy let him.

Frey squeezed the trigger. The bayonet was wrenched from his body as the boy fell backwards. The pain sent him to the edge of unconsciousness, but no further.

He staggered through the cargo hold. Up the metal stairs, through the passageway, into the cockpit, leaving smears and dribbles of himself as he went. He slumped into the pilot’s seat, barely aware of the sound of gunfire against the hull, and punched in the ignition code - the code that only he knew, that he’d never told anyone and never would. The aerium engines throbbed as the electromagnets pulverised refined aerium into gas, filling the ballast tanks. The soldiers and their guns fell away as the Ketty Jay lifted into the sky.

Frey would never make it back to Vardia. He was going to die. He knew that, and accepted it with a strange and awful calm.

But he wasn’t dead yet.

He hit the thrusters, and the Ketty Jay flew. North, towards the coast, towards the sea.

Twenty-Two

Sharka’s Den - Two Captains - A Strange Delivery - Recriminations

The slums of Rabban were not somewhere a casual traveller would stray. Bomb-lashed and tumbledown, they were a mass of junk-pits and rubble-fields, where naked girders slit the low sunset and the coastal wind smoothed a ceiling of iron-grey cloud over all. In the distance were new spires and domes, some of them still partially scaffolded: evidence of the reconstruction of the city. But here on the edges, there was no such reconstruction, and the population lived like rats on the debris of war.

Sharka’s Den had survived two wars and would likely survive two more. Hidden in an underground bunker, accessible only by tortuous, crumbling alleys and an equally tortuous process of recommendation, it was the best place in the city to find a game of Rake. Sharka paid no commission to any Guild, nor any tax to the Coalition. He offered a guarantee of safety and anonymity to his patrons, and promised fairness at his tables. Nobody knew exactly what else Sharka was into, to make the bigwigs so afraid of him; but they knew that if you wanted a straight game for the best stakes, you came to Sharka’s Den.

Frey knew this place well. He’d once picked up a Caybery Firecrow in a game here, on the tail end of a ridiculous winning streak that had nothing to do with skill and everything to do with luck. He’d also wiped himself out several times. As he stepped into the den, memories of triumph and despair sidled up to greet him.

Little had changed. There was the expansive floor with its many tables and barely lit bar. There were the seductive serving girls, chosen for their looks but well schooled in their art. Gas lanterns hung from the ceiling, run off a private supply (Sharka refused to go electric; his patrons wouldn’t stand for it). The myopic haze of cigarettes and cigars infused the air with a dozen kinds of burning leaf.

Frey felt a twinge of nostalgia. If he didn’t count the Ketty Jay, Sharka’s Den was the closest thing to a home he had.

Sharka came over to greet him as he descended the iron steps to the gaming floor. Whip-lean, his face deeply lined, he was dressed in an eccentric motley of colours, and his eyes were bright and slightly manic. There was never a time when Sharka wasn’t on some kind of drug, usually to counteract the one before. He was overly animated, his face stretching and contorting into grins, smiles, exaggerated poses, as if he were mouthing words to somebody deaf.

‘Got you a private room in the back,’ he said. ‘She’s in there now.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You think she was followed?’

‘No. I was hiding out there a while. I watched her go in, checked all the alleys nearby. She came alone.’

Sharka grunted and then beamed. ‘Hope you know what you’re doing.’

‘I always know what I’m doing,’ Frey lied, slapping Sharka on the shoulder.

Sharka was as much a survivor as his den was. Since the age of fifteen he’d pounded his body with every kind of narcotic Frey had ever heard of, yet somehow he’d made it to fifty-six, and there was no reason to suppose he didn’t have thirty more years left. The man’s blood must have been toxic by now, but he was tough as a scorpion. You just couldn’t kill him.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to it. You can find your way, eh? Come see me after, I’ll make sure you get an escort to wherever you need. Can’t have Dracken’s men jumping you on the way out.’

Perhaps the stress of what was to come had made him over-emotional, but Frey was deeply touched by that. Sharka was a dangerous man, but he had a heart of gold, and Frey felt suddenly unworthy of his kindness. Even if he didn’t exactly trust him, it was nice to know that someone didn’t want him dead.

‘I’m grateful for what you’ve done, Sharka,’ he said. ‘I owe you big.’

‘Ah, you don’t owe me anything,’ Sharka said. ‘I like you, Frey. You lose more than you win and you tip big when you score. You don’t piss anyone off and you don’t re-raise when you’re holding dirt and then catch a run on your last card. This place is full of cocky kids with money and old hacks playing percentages. Could do with more players like you at my joint.’

Frey smiled at that. He nodded his thanks again and then headed through the tables towards the back rooms. Sharka was a good sort, he told himself. Sharka wouldn’t sell him out for the reward on his head. Everyone knew that Sharka’s was neutral ground. He’d lose more in custom than he’d gain by the reward if there was the slightest suspicion that he’d turned in a wanted man. Half the people here were wanted by someone.

A serving girl in an appealingly low-cut dress met him at the back rooms and directed him to one of the private gaming areas. Sharka’s was all bare brick and brass - not pretty, but Rake players distrusted glitz.

He stepped in to a small, dim room. A lantern hung from the ceiling, throwing light onto the black baize of the Rake table. A pack of cards was spread out in suits across it. A well-stocked drinks cabinet rested against one wall. There were four chairs around the table.

Sitting in one of the chairs, facing the door, was Trinica Dracken.

The sight of her was a jolt. She was lounging in the chair, small and slim, dressed head to toe in black: black boots, black coat, black gloves, black waistcoat. But from the buttoned collar of her black shirt upwards, everything changed. Her skin was powdered ghost-white. Her hair - so blonde it was almost albino - was cut short, sticking up in uneven tufts as if it had been butchered with a knife. Her lips were a red deep enough to be vulgar.

But it was her eyes that shocked him most. Her lashes were almost invisible, but her irises were completely black, dilated to the size of coins. It took him a moment to realise they were contact lenses, and not the product of some daemonic possession. Worn for effect, no doubt, but certainly effective.

‘Hello, Frey,’ she said. Her voice was lower than he remembered. ‘Long time.’

‘You look terrible,’ he said as he sat.

‘So do you,’ she replied. ‘Life on the run must not agree with you.’

‘Actually, I’m getting to enjoy it. Catching my second wind, so to speak.’

She looked around the room. ‘A Rake den? You haven’t changed.’

‘You have.’

‘I had to.’

He gestured at the cards on the table between them. ‘Want to play?’

‘I’m here to parley, Frey, not play your little game.’

Frey sat back in his chair and regarded her. ‘Alright, he said. Business it is. You know, there was a time when you liked to sit and talk for hours.’

‘That was then,’ she said. ‘This is now. I’m not the person you remember.’

That was an understatement. The woman before him was one of the most notorious freebooters in Vardia. She’d engineered a mutiny to become captain of the Delirium Trigger and her reputation for utter ruthlessness had earned her the respect of the underworld. Rumour held her responsible for acts of bloody piracy and murder, as well as daring treasure snatches and near-impossible feats of navigation. She was feared by some and envied by others, a dread queen of the skies.

Hard to believe he’d almost married her.

Rabban was one of the nine primary cities of Vardia, and like the others it bore the same name as the duchy it dominated. Though it had suffered terribly in the Aerium Wars, it was still large enough to need over a dozen docks for aircraft. These docks were the first thing to be repaired after the bombing stopped six years ago. Some were little more than islands in a sea of shattered stone, but even these were busy with passenger shuttles, cargo haulers and supply vessels. Transport by air had been Vardia’s only viable option for over a century and, even in the aftermath of a disaster, there was no way to do without it.

Only a few of the docks, however, were equipped to deal with a craft the size of the Delirium Trigger.

She rested inside a vast iron hangar, alongside frigates and freighters: the heavyweights of the skies. A web of platforms, gantries and walkways surrounded it at deck-height, busy with an ant swarm of engineers, dock workers and swabbers. Everything was being checked, everything cleaned, and a complex exchange of services and trade goods was negotiated. A craft like the Delirium Trigger, with a crew of fifty, needed a lot of maintenance.

The Delirium Trigger’s purser was a Free Dakkadian named Ominda Rilk. He had the fair skin and hair typical of his race, the small frame and narrow shoulders, and the squinting eyes that still elicited much mockery in the Vardic press. Dakkadians were famed and ridiculed for their administrative abilities. Education and numeracy were much prized among their kind: it made them useful to their Samarlan masters. But Dakkadians, unlike Murthians, could own possessions, and they could earn their freedom.

It was unusual to find a Dakkadian in Vardia, where there was still much bad feeling towards them after the Aerium Wars. They were seen as pernickety coin-counters and misers by the more generous souls; the rest thought they were cunning, underhanded, murdering bastards. But still, here was Ominda Rilk. He stood among the crates and palettes waiting to be loaded onto the Delirium Trigger, examining everything and making small notes in his logbook now and again. And his squinty eyes were keen enough to spot two men transporting a very heavy-looking crate in a manner that was frankly quite surreptitious.

‘Ho there!’ he cried. The men stopped, and he walked briskly over to them. They were dock workers, dressed in battered grey overalls. One was large and big-bellied, with a whiskery white moustache; the other was short, stumpy and ugly, with oversized cheeks and a small thatch of black hair perched atop a small head. They were both flushed and sweating.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, motioning at the crate. It was nine feet tall and six wide, and they’d been rolling it along on a wheeled palette towards the loading area, where a crane picked up supplies for transport to the deck of the Delirium Trigger.

‘Don’t know,’ said Malvery, with a shrug. ‘We just deliver, don’t we?’

‘Well, who’s it from?’ snapped Rilk. ‘Where are the papers? Come on!’

Malvery drew out a battered, folded-up set of papers. Rilk shook them open and checked the delivery invoice. His eyebrows raised a fraction when he read the name of the sender. Gallian Thade.

‘We weren’t expecting this,’ he said, handing back the papers with a scowl.

Malvery gave him a blank look. ‘We just deliver,’ he said again. ‘This box goes on the Delirium Trigger.’

Rilk glared at him, and then at Pinn. There was something not right about these two, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Pinn looked back at him, mutely.

‘Does he speak?’ Rilk demanded, thumbing at Pinn.

‘Not much,’ Malvery replied. At least, he’d been told to keep his trap shut, for fear he’d say something stupid and ruin their disguise. Malvery hoped he’d implied enough threat to keep the young pilot in line. ‘You want us to load this thing on, or what?’

Rilk studied the crate for a moment. Then he snapped his fingers. ‘Open it up.’

Malvery groaned. ‘Aw, come on, don’t be a—’

‘Open it up!’ Rilk said, snapping his fingers again, in a rather annoying fashion that made Malvery want to break them and then stuff his mangled hand down his throat.

The doctor shrugged and looked at Pinn. ‘Open it up,’ he said.

Pinn produced a crowbar. The crate had been nailed shut, but they forced open a gap in the front side with relative ease, then pulled it the rest of the way with brute strength. It fell forward and clattered to the ground.

Rilk stared at the hulking, armoured shape inside the box. A monstrosity of metal and leather and chain mail, with a humped back and a circular grille set low between the shoulders. It was cold and silent.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

Malvery pondered for a moment, studying Bess. ‘I reckon it’s one of those pressure-environment-suit-thingies.’

Rilk looked it up and down, a puzzled frown on his face. ‘What does it do?’

‘Well, you wear it when you want to work on the deck, see. Like, in arctic environments, or when your craft is really, really high in the sky.’

‘It’s cold as a zombie’s tit up there, and the air’s too thin to breathe,’ Pinn added, unable to resist joining in. Malvery silenced him with a glare.

‘I see,’ said Rilk, examining Pinn. ‘And how is it a dock worker knows a thing like that?’

Pinn looked lost. ‘I just do.’

‘Lot of pilots come to the dockside bars,’ Malvery said with forced offhandedness. ‘People talk.’

‘Yes they do,’ said Rilk. He walked up to Bess, put his face to her face-grille, and peered inside. ‘Hello?’ he called. The word echoed in the hollow interior.

‘He thinks there’s somebody in there,’ Malvery grinned at Pinn, giving him a nudge. Pinn chuckled on cue. Rilk withdrew, his pale face reddening.

‘Box it up and load it on!’ he snapped, then made a quick note in his logbook and stalked away.

‘Why did you bring me here, Darian?’ asked Trinica Dracken.

‘Why did you come?’ he countered.

She smiled coldly in the light of the lantern overhead. ‘Blowing you out of the sky after all this time seemed a little . . . impersonal,’ she replied. ‘I wanted to see you. I wanted to look you in the eye.’

‘I wanted to see you too,’ said Frey. He’d scooped up the cards that were laid out on the table.

‘You’re a liar. I’m the last person you ever wanted to see again.’

Frey looked down at the cards and began to shuffle them restlessly.

‘I had people watching you,’ said Trinica. ‘Did you know that? After you left me.’

He was faintly chilled. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘The day after our wedding day, I had the Shacklemores looking for you.’

‘It wasn’t our wedding day,’ said Frey, ‘because there wasn’t a wedding.’

‘A thousand people turned up thinking otherwise,’ said Trinica. ‘Not to mention the bride. In fact, everyone seemed to think they were there for a magnificent wedding right up until the moment the judge called for the groom.’ Her expression became comically sorrowful, a sad clown face. ‘And there was the poor bride, waiting in front of all those people.’ She blew a puff of air into her hand, opening it out as she did so. ‘But the groom had gone.’

Frey was rather unnerved by her delivery. He’d expected shrill remonstrations, but she was utterly empty of emotion. She was talking as if it had happened to someone else. And those black, black eyes made her seem strangely fey and alien. A little frightening, even.

‘What do you want, Trinica?’ The words came out angrier than he intended. ‘An apology? It’s a little late for that.’

‘Oh, that’s most certainly true,’ she replied.

Frey settled back in his seat. The sight of her stirred up all the old feelings. Bad feelings. He’d loved this woman once, back when she was sweet and pretty and perfect. Loved her in a way he’d never loved anyone since. But then he’d broken her heart. In return, she’d ripped his to pieces. He could never forget what she’d done to him. He could never forgive her.

But an argument would do him no good now. He couldn’t take the risk that Trinica would storm out. The object of this meeting was to keep her here as long as possible, to let his men do their job on the Delirium Trigger.

He cleared his throat and strove to control the bitterness in his voice. ‘So,’ he said. ‘You set the Shacklemores on me.’ He began cutting the cards and reshufing them absently.

‘You were a hard man to find,’ she said. ‘It took them six months. By then . . . well, you know what had happened by then.’

Frey’s throat tightened. Rage or grief, he wasn’t sure.

‘They came back and said they’d found you. You were doing freelance work somewhere on the other side of Vardia at the time. Using what you’d learned from working as a hauler for my father’s company, I suppose. Making your own deals.’

‘It was a living,’ said Frey neutrally.

She gave him a faint, distracted smile. ‘They asked me if I wanted them to bring you back. I didn’t. Not then. I asked them instead to let you know - discreetly - how I was doing. I was sure you hadn’t troubled to enquire.’

Frey remembered that meeting well. A stranger in a bar, a shared drink. Casually mentioning that he worked for Dracken Industries. Terrible what had happened to the daughter. Just terrible.

But Trinica was wrong. He had enquired. By then, he’d already known what she’d done.

Memories overwhelmed him. Searing love and bilious hate. The stranger before him was a mockery of the young woman he’d almost married. He’d kissed those lips, those whore-red lips that now smiled at him cruelly. He’d heard the softest words pass from them to him.

Ten years. He’d thought that everything would be long ago buried by now. He’d been badly mistaken.

‘It didn’t seem fair, really,’ Trinica said, tilting her head like a bird. There was a childish look on her face that said: Poor Frey. Poor, poor Frey. ‘It didn’t seem fair that you should be able to turn your back and walk away like that. That you could leave your bride on her wedding day and never have to think about what you’d done, never take any responsibility.’

‘I wasn’t responsible!’

She leaned forward on the card table, deadly serious, those awful black eyes staring out of her white face. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you were.’

Frey dashed the cards across the table, but his fury died as soon as it had come. He sat back in his chair, his arms folded. He wanted to argue but he needed to keep things calm. Keep things together.

Don’t let this bitch get to you. Play for time.

‘You had the Shacklemores keep track of me after that?’ he asked. Trinica nodded. ‘Why the interest?’

‘I just forgot to call them off.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘It’s true. At first, I’ll admit, I wanted to see what effect my news would have on you. I wanted to see if you suffered. But then . . . well, I left home, and other things got in the way. It was only years later that I realised they’d been keeping the file open on you all that time, drawing a fee every month. My father was paying for them, you see. When you’ve that much money, it’s easy to forget about something like that.’

‘You know I joined the Navy, then?’ he said.

‘I know they conscripted you when the Second Aerium War began,’ she said. ‘And I know you were drinking too much, and you started taking all the most dangerous jobs. I know nobody wanted to fly with you because it was only a matter of time before you self-destructed.’

‘You must have enjoyed hearing all about that.’

‘I did, yes,’ she replied brightly. ‘But I didn’t find out until after you had disappeared.’

Frey didn’t say anything.

‘They tell me the position was overrun by Samarlan troops. My guess is, you landed there and they ambushed you. What happened to the rest of the crew?’

‘Dead.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Navy intelligence,’ Frey sneered. ‘Bunch of incompetent bastards. They sent us out there and the Sammies were waiting.’

Trinica laughed: the sound was sharp and brittle. ‘Same old Darian. Picked on by the world. Nothing’s ever your fault, is it?’

‘How was it my fault?’ he cried. ‘I landed in a war zone because of information they gave me.’

Trinica sighed patiently. ‘It was a war, Darian. Mistakes happen all the time. You landed in a war zone because you had been flying the most dangerous front-line missions for months. You never used to ask questions; you just took the missions and flew. It was a miracle it didn’t happen sooner.’

‘It was the best chance I had to pay off the loan on the Ketty Jay,’ he protested, but it sounded weak even to him. He couldn’t forget the desperate tone in Rabby’s voice as he closed the cargo ramp. Don’t you leave me here!

‘If you wanted to die, why didn’t you just kill yourself?’ Trinica asked. ‘Why try and take everyone else with you?’

‘I never wanted to die!’

Trinica just looked at him. After a moment she shrugged. ‘Well, evidently you didn’t want it enough, since here you are. Everyone thought you were gone. The Shacklemores closed the file. The loan company wrote off the rest of your repayments on the Ketty Jay. And off you went, a corpse to all intents and purposes. Until one day . . . one day I hear your name again, Darian. Seems you’re alive, and everyone’s looking for you. And I just had to throw my hat in the ring.’

‘You just had to, huh?’ Frey said scathingly.

Trinica’s demeanour went from casual to freezing in an instant. ‘That day you disappeared, you cheated me. I thought I’d never get to make you pay. But you’re alive, and that’s good. That’s a wonderful thing.’ She smiled, the chill smile of a predator, her black eyes glittering like a snake watching a mouse. ‘Because now I’m going to catch you, my wayward love, and I’m going to watch you hang.’

Twenty-Three

Barricades - Bess Awakes - A Lesson In Cardplay - The Monster Belowdecks - Thieves

The Ketty Jay was berthed at a small dock in the outskirts of Rabban, far from the Delirium Trigger. The dock was little more than a barely used landing pad set above a maze of shattered and leaning alleyways. Only a few other craft of similar size shared the space. They sat dark and silent, their crews nowhere to be seen. A few dock personnel wandered around, looking for something to do, their presence revealed by a cough or a slow movement in the shadows. All was quiet.

Silo and Jez worked in the white glare of the Ketty Jay’s belly lights, rolling barrels from the cargo hold and manhandling them into rows of five. There were several such rows positioned around the Ketty Jay. A haphazard kind of arrangement, an observer might think, unless they guessed what the barrels were really for.

They were building barricades.

Harkins was skirting the edge of the landing pad, scampering along in a crouch, a spyglass in his hand. He stayed out of the light of the electric lamp-posts that marked out the landing pad for flying traffic. Every so often he’d stop and scan the surrounding alleyways, then run off in a nervous fashion to another location and do it again. The dock personnel paid him no mind. As long as his captain paid the berthing fee, they were happy to tolerate eccentrics.

The night was still new when Harkins straightened, his whole body frozen in alarm. He adjusted his spyglass, shifted it this way and that, counting frantically under his breath. Then he fled back towards the Ketty Jay as if his heels were on fire.

‘Here we go,’ said Jez, as she saw him coming. Silo grunted, and levered another barrel of sand into place.

‘There’s twenty of ’em!’ Harkins reported in a quiet shriek. ‘I mean, give or take a couple, but twenty’s near enough! What are we supposed to do against twenty? Or even nearly twenty. Ten would be too many! What’s he expect us to do? I don’t like this. Not one measly rotting bit!’

Jez studied him, worried. He was even more strung out than usual. The Firecrow and Skylance were not even in the city: they’d been stashed at a rendezvous point far away. Without his craft, he was a snail out of its shell.

‘We do what the Cap’n told us to do,’ she said calmly.

‘But we didn’t know there’d be twenty! That’s almost half the crew!’

‘I suppose Dracken doesn’t want to leave anything to chance,’ said Jez. She exchanged a glance with Silo, who headed up the cargo ramp and into the Ketty Jay.

Harkins watched him go, then turned to Jez with a slightly manic sheen in his eyes. ‘Here, that’s an idea! Why don’t we just go inside, close up the cargo hold and lock it? They’d never get in then.’

‘You don’t think they’ve thought of that? They’ll have explosives. Either that, or someone who knows how to crack open and rewire a keypad.’ She motioned towards the small rectangle of buttons nested in the nearby landing strut, used to close and open the cargo ramp from the outside.

The belly lights of the Ketty Jay went out, plunging them into twilight. The barely adequate glow of the lamp-posts gave a soft, eerie cast to the near-empty dock. Silo emerged carrying an armful of guns and ammo.

Jez gave Harkins a reassuring pat on the arm. He looked ready to bolt. ‘Twenty men here means twenty less for the others to deal with,’ she said. ‘The Cap’n said Dracken would be coming for us. We’re ready for it. We just have to hold out, that’s all.’

‘Oh, just that!’ Harkins moaned with hysterical sarcasm. But then Silo grabbed his hand and slapped a pistol into his palm, and the glare the Murthian gave him was enough to shut him up.

Malvery and Pinn rejoined Crake, who was waiting at a safe remove from the Delirium Trigger with a worried frown on his brow. Together, they watched Bess being loaded on. The arm of the crane was chained to the four corners of one great palette, on which were secured dozens of crates. It lifted the palette onto the deck of the Delirium Trigger. From there, Dracken’s crew carried the crates to a winch which lowered them through an opening into the cargo hold. Dockers were not allowed aboard. Dracken was wise to the dangers of infiltration that way.

‘I don’t like this,’ Crake said to himself, for the tenth time.

‘She’ll be fine,’ said Malvery, looking at his pocket watch.

‘And if she’s not,’ said Pinn, ‘you can always build a new girlfriend.’

Malvery clipped him around the head. Pinn swore loudly.

‘She’ll be fine,’ Malvery said again.

Pinn fidgeted and adjusted his genitals inside his trousers. He was dressed in dock worker’s overalls, as were his companions, with his regular clothes beneath them. It would be necessary to change in a hurry later. Until then, exertion and multiple layers had left him sweltering. ‘When can we get on with it? My pods are dripping.’

The others ignored him. He smoked a roll-up resentfully as they observed the activity aboard. The palette, once empty, was lifted off the Delirium Trigger by the crane and returned to the elevated hangar deck, where more crates were loaded on.

‘Right-o,’ said Malvery. ‘Let’s head down there. Crake, keep your mouth shut. Nobody’s gonna believe you’re a docker with that accent. Pinn . . . just keep your mouth shut.’

Pinn made a face and spat on the ground.

‘Now, the Cap’n wants this to go like clockwork,’ Malvery said. ‘We all know there’s bugger all chance of that, so let’s just try not to get ourselves killed, and we’ll all be having a drink and a laugh about this by dawn.’

They made their way back across the busy dock, weaving between piles of chests and netting and screeching machinery. Huge cogs turned; cage-lifts rattled up and down from the lower hangar decks. Cranes swung overhead, and shouts echoed round the iron girders of the roof, where squadrons of pigeons roosted and shat. A massive freighter was easing in on the far side of the hangar, its aerium tanks keeping it weightless, nudging into place with its gas-jets.

Posing as dock workers, the three imposters were invisible in the chaos. They picked some cargo from a stack of netted crates and barrels that were being loaded onto the Delirium Trigger, and made their way towards the huge palette that was chained to the crane arm. The cargo had been piled high on the palette by now. They carried their loads on and went around to the far side of the palette, where they couldn’t be seen by the workers on the dock. There, they began unlashing a group of crates, rearranging them to make a space.

Another docker rounded the corner, carrying a heavy-looking chest. Malvery, Pinn and Crake did their best to look focused and industrious. The docker - a grizzled, burly man with salt-and-pepper hair - watched them in puzzlement for a moment, then decided that whatever they were doing wasn’t interesting enough to comment on. He put down the chest, secured it with some netting and left.

Once they’d dug out a space, they checked the coast was clear and crammed in. Then they stacked their own crates in front of it, sealing themselves inside.

Their timing was perfect. No sooner had they hushed each other to silence than a steam-whistle blew. They heard the footsteps of dock workers beyond their hiding place, evacuating the palette, and then, with a lurch, it began to lift.

Malvery had to steady the unsecured crates in front of them, for fear of being buried; but the crane moved slowly and the palette was heavy enough to be stable. Though the crates made slight and distressing shifts, nothing moved far enough to fall. Tucked in their little corner, they felt themselves transported across the gap between the hangar deck and the deck of the Delirium Trigger.

Crake found himself thinking that this must be how a mouse felt. Hiding in the dark, at the mercy of the world, frightened by every unknown sound. Spit and blood, he hated this. He didn’t have it in him to be a stowaway. He was too afraid of getting caught.

But Bess was aboard. He was committed now. He’d committed her.

Why did you do it? Why did you agree to this?

He agreed to it because he was ashamed. Because since their encounter with the man from the Shacklemore Agency, he couldn’t look Jez in the eye. Absurdly, he felt he owed her something. He felt he owed the crew. He needed to atone, to make amends for being such a despicable, vile monster. To apologise for his presence among them. To make himself worthy.

Anyway, it was too late to turn back now.

‘We’re nearly there,’ Malvery said. ‘Do it.’

Crake drew out his small brass whistle. He put it to his lips and blew. It made no sound at all.

‘That’s it?’ asked Pinn, bemused.

‘That’s it,’ said Crake.

‘So now what happens?’

‘Bess has just woken up to find that she’s in a box,’ Crake replied. ‘I wouldn’t want to be in the Delirium Trigger’s cargo hold right now.’

By the time the palette bumped down onto the deck, the howling and smashing had begun.

‘I suppose you know I’m innocent, don’t you?’ Frey asked.

Trinica was pouring two glasses of whisky from the drinks cabinet. She looked back at him: a moon-white face partially eclipsed by the black slope of her shoulder.

‘You’re not innocent, Frey. You killed those people. It doesn’t matter if you were set up or not.’

‘The Ace of Skulls was rigged to blow. Those people were going to die anyway, with or without me.’

‘Everyone is going to die, with or without you. It doesn’t mean you’re allowed to murder them.’

She was needling him and he knew it. It enraged him. She always had a way of pricking at his conscience, puncturing his excuses. She never let him get away with anything.

‘You were in on it, then?’ he asked. ‘The plot?’

She handed him his whisky and sat down again. The card table lay between them, the cards face down where they’d been thrown by Frey. Skulls, Wings, Dukes and Aces, all hidden in a jumble.

‘No. I didn’t set you up. I didn’t know you were alive until I heard you were wanted.’

‘But you know now. You know Duke Grephen is the man behind it all, and that Gallian Thade is in on it too. You know they made me the scapegoat?’

She raised an eyebrow, blonde against white. ‘My. You evidently think you’ve learned a lot. Was that your sucker punch? Should I be awed at how clever you’ve been?’

‘A little awe would be nice, yes.’

She sipped her whisky. ‘I assume you’re appealing to my better nature? Wondering how I could be part of such a terrible miscarriage of justice? How I could willingly let you take the blame for the death of Hengar when I know it was Grephen’s idea?’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘Because Grephen is paying me a lot of money. And because, frankly, I’d do it for free. You deserve it.’

‘It doesn’t concern you to be an accomplice to the murder of the Archduke’s son? Don’t you think there might be bigger implications involved?’

‘Possibly there are,’ said Trinica. ‘But that’s none of your concern, since it’ll all be over for you very soon.’

‘Come on, Trinica. Hengar’s death is only the start. You must know if Duke Grephen is planning something.’

Trinica smiled. ‘Must I?’

Frey cursed her silently. She wasn’t giving anything away. He wanted to push her for more information, but she wouldn’t play the game. Telling her that he knew about Grephen was intended to lead her up the wrong path, but he couldn’t reveal that he knew about the coup, or her mysterious hideout. That would tip his hand.

‘One question,’ he said. ‘The ferrotype. The one on the Wanted posters. How did they get that, if you didn’t give it to them?’

‘Yes, I was surprised, too,’ she said. ‘We had it taken when we were up in the mountains. Do you remember?’

Frey remembered. He remembered a time of romantic adventure, a couple newly in love. He was a lowly cargo pilot and she was the daughter of his boss, one of the heirs to Dracken Industries. He was poor and she was rich, and she loved him anyway. It was breathless, dangerous, and they were both swept giddily along, careless of consequences, armoured by their own happiness.

‘It was my father who gave it to them, I’d imagine,’ she said. ‘I suppose the Navy had no pictures of you, and they knew you had worked for Dracken Industries before that. They were probably hoping for a staff photograph.’

‘He kept that one?’

‘He kept it because I was in it. I imagine that’s how he’d like to remember me.’

The Wanted posters had only shown Frey’s face, but in the full picture, Trinica was clinging to his arm, laughing. Laughing at nothing, really. Laughing just to laugh. He remembered the ferrotype perfectly. Her hair blowing, mouth open and teeth white. A rare, perfect capture; a frozen instant of natural, unforced joy. No one would connect that young girl with the woman sitting in front of him.

In that moment, Frey felt the tragedy of that loss. How cruel it was, that things had turned out the way they did.

But Trinica saw the expression on his face, and correctly guessed its cause. She always knew his thoughts, better than anyone.

‘Look at yourself, Darian. Cursing the fate that brought you here. One day, you’re going to realise that everything that’s happened to you has been your own fault.’

‘Dogshit,’ he spat, sadness turning to venom in an instant. ‘I’ve tried my damnedest. I tried to better myself.’

‘And yet here you are, ten years later, barely scraping a living. And I am the captain of a crew of fifty, infamous and rich.’

‘I’m not like you, Trinica. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon shoved up my arse. I didn’t have a good education. Some of us don’t get the luck.’

She looked at him for a long moment. Then her black eyes dropped to the face-down cards, scattered on the table.

‘I remember when you used to talk about Rake,’ she said, idly picking up a card and flipping it over. It was the Lady of Crosses. ‘You used to say everyone thought luck was a huge factor. They said it was all about the cards you were dealt. Mostly luck and a bit of skill.’ She flipped over another: Ten of Fangs. ‘You thought they were idiots. You knew it was mostly skill and a bit of luck.’

The Ace of Skulls came next. Frey hated that card. It ruined any hand in Rake, unless it could be made part of a winning combination, which could hardly ever be done.

‘A good player might occasionally lose to a mediocre one, but in the long run, the good players made money while the bad ones went broke,’ Trinica continued.

The next card came up: the Duke of Skulls. Any Priest would give her a five-card run to the Ace of Skulls, an unbeatable combination.

She turned the final card: the Seven of Wings. The hand was busted. Her gaze flicked up from the table and met his.

‘Over time, luck is hardly a factor at all,’ she said.

Belowdecks, the Delirium Trigger was in chaos. A slow, steady pounding reverberated through the dim passageways. Metal screeched. Men shouted and ran, some towards the sound and some away from it.

‘It’s in the cargo hold!’

‘What’s in the cargo hold?’

But nobody could answer that. Those inside the hold had fled in terror when the iron-and-leather monstrosity burst out of its crate and began rampaging through the shadowy aisles. Barrels were flung this way and that. Guns fired, but to no avail. The air had filled with splinters as the intruder smashed through crates of provisions and trade goods. It was dark down there, and the looming thing terrified the crewmen.

Those on the deck above, operating the winch, had peered fearfully through the hatch into the cargo hold at the first signs of a disturbance. The light from the hangar barely penetrated to the floor of the hold. They scrambled back as they caught a glimpse of something huge lunging across their narrow field of view. It was only then that one of them thought to raise the winch.

In the confusion that ensued, nobody noticed three strangers, now dressed in the dirty motley of crewmembers, making their way belowdecks.

Those who had managed to escape from the cargo hold had slammed the bulkhead door behind them and locked it shut, trapping the monster inside. But the monster didn’t like being trapped. It was pounding on the inside of the door, hard enough to buckle eight inches of metal. Enraged bellows came from behind.

‘Get your fat stenching carcasses over here!’ the burly, dirt-streaked bosun yelled. The men he was yelling at had come to investigate the sound, and were now backing away as they saw what was happening. They reluctantly returned at his command. ‘Weapons ready, all of you! You will defend your craft!’

A rotary cannon on a tripod was being hastily erected in the passageway in front of the door. The bosun knelt down next to the crewman who was assembling the cannon. ‘When that thing comes through the door, give it everything you’ve got!’

Malvery, Crake and Pinn skirted the chaos as best they could, and for a time they were unmolested. The Delirium Trigger was only half-crewed, and almost all of them were occupied with the diversion Bess was creating. They did their best to avoid meeting anyone, and when they were seen it was usually at a distance, or by somebody who was already hurrying elsewhere. They managed to penetrate some way into the aircraft before they came up against a crewmember who got a good look at them, and recognised them as imposters.

‘Hey!’ he said, before Malvery grabbed his head and smashed his skull against the wall of the passageway. He slumped to the floor, unconscious.

‘Not big on talking your way out of things, are you?’ Crake observed, as they dragged the unfortunate crewman into a side room.

‘My way’s quicker,’ he said, adjusting his round green glasses. ‘No danger of misunderstanding.’

The side room was a galley, empty now, its stoves cold. Crake shut the door while Malvery ran some water into a tin cup. The crewman - a young, slack-jawed deckhand - began to groan and stir. Malvery threw the water in his face. His eyes opened and slowly focused on Pinn, who was standing over him, pointing a pistol at his nose.

Malvery squatted down next to the prisoner and tapped him on the head with the base of the tin cup, making him wince. ‘Captain’s cabin,’ he said. ‘Where?’

They left the deckhand bound and gagged in a cupboard of the galley. Pinn was for shooting him, but Crake wouldn’t allow it. Pinn’s argument that he was ‘just a deckhand, no one would miss him’ carried little weight.

The captain’s cabin was locked, of course, but Crake had come prepared. Given the time and the materials, it was a simple trick for him to produce a daemonic skeleton key. He slipped it into the lock and concentrated, forming a mental chord in the silence of his mind, awakening the daemon thralled to the key. His fingers became numb as it sucked the strength from him. Though small, it was hungry, and beyond the power of any but a trained daemonist to handle.

The daemon extended invisible tendrils of influence, feeling out the lock, caressing the levers and tumblers. Then the key turned sharply, and the door was open.

Malvery patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good job, mate,’ he grinned. Crake felt oddly warmed by that. Then he heard the distant pounding echoing through the Delirium Trigger, and he remembered Bess.

‘Let’s get this done,’ he said, and they went inside.

Dracken’s cabin was spotlessly clean, but the combination of brass, iron and dark wood gave it a heavy and oppressive feel. A bookshelf took up one wall, a mix of literature, biography and navigational manuals interspersed with shiny copper ornaments. Some of the titles were in Samarlan script, Crake noticed. He spotted The Singer and the Songbird and On the Domination of Our Sphere, two great works by the Samarlan masters. He found himself taken by an unexpected admiration for a pirate who would - or even could - read that kind of material.

Pinn and Malvery had gone straight to the desk on the far side of the cabin, which sat next to a sloping window of reinforced windglass. The light from the hangar spilled onto neatly arranged charts and a valuable turtleshell writing set. Crake had a sudden picture of Dracken looking thoughtfully out of that window at a sea of clouds as her craft flew high in the sky.

Pinn pawed through the charts, scattering them about and ruining Crake’s moment of reverie. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

Malvery’s eye had fallen on a long, thin chest on a shelf near the desk. It was padlocked. ‘Crake!’ he said, and the daemonist came over with his skeleton key. The lock was trickier than the one that secured the cabin door, but in the end, it couldn’t stand up to the key.

It was full of rolled-up charts. Atop them was what seemed to be a large compass. Malvery passed the compass to Crake, then began scanning through the charts with Pinn. Crake listened to the booming coming from the depths of the Delirium Trigger as he studied Malvery’s discovery.

Keep pounding, Bess, he thought. As long as I hear you, I know you’re all right.

The compass was so big that Crake could barely hold it in one hand. It was also, on closer examination, not a compass at all. It had no North-South-West-East markings, and it had four needles instead of one, all of equal length and numbered. Additionally, there were eight tiny sets of digits, set in pairs, with each digit on a rotating cylinder to allow it to count from zero to nine. These set pairs were also numbered one to four, presumably to correspond with the needles. The needles were all pointing in the same direction, no matter which way he turned it, and the numbers were all at zero.

‘I think we found ’em!’ Malvery said. He scooped up all the charts from the chest and shoved them inside his threadbare jersey, then looked at Crake. ‘Is that the device you were after?’

‘I believe it is.’

Crake had little doubt that what he held was the mysterious device Thade had mentioned. The strangeness of the compass, and the fact that it had been placed in the same chest as the charts, was enough for him.

‘We should—’ he began, but then he saw a movement in the doorway, and there was the loud report of a gun.

Malvery had seen it too: one of the crew, a black-haired, scruffy man, drawn by the sound of voices and the sight of the captain’s door left open. On seeing the intruders, the crewman hastily pulled his gun and fired. The doctor ducked aside, fast enough so that the bullet only grazed his shoulder.

Another gun fired, an instant after the first. Pinn’s. The crewman gaped, and a bright swell of blood soaked out from his chest into his shirt. He staggered back and slid down the wall of the passageway outside, disbelief in his eyes.

‘We got what we came for,’ said Malvery, his voice flat. ‘Time to go.’

The crewman lay in the passageway, gasping for air. Pinn and Malvery passed without looking at him, pausing only to steal his pistol. Crake edged by as if he was contagious, horrified and fascinated. The crewman’s eyes followed his, rolling in their sockets with an awful, empty interest.

Crake found himself pinned by that gaze. It was the look of a man unprepared, shocked to find himself at the gates of death so swiftly and unexpectedly. There was bewilderment in that look. The dying man was crushed by the knowledge that, unlike every other desperate moment in his life, there was no second chance, no way that wit or strength could pull him clear. It filled Crake with terror.

Now Crake knew why Malvery and Pinn hadn’t looked.

He was trembling as he followed his companions up the corridor. After a moment, he remembered Bess. He put the whistle to his lips, the whistle tuned to a frequency that only she could hear, and he blew. It was a note different from the one he used to wake her up and put her to sleep. This one was a signal.

Time to come back, Bess.

‘Any moment now, boys!’ the bosun yelled, as the bulkhead door screeched and lurched forward on its hinges. It was possible to see glimpses of movement through the gap at the top of the door, where the eight-inch steel had bent forward under the assault of the creature in the cargo hold. Enough to see that there was something massive behind, something as fearsome as its roaring suggested.

The crew braced themselves, aiming their revolvers and lever-action shotguns. The man operating the tripod-mounted rotary cannon flexed his trigger finger, wiped sweat from his brow and sighted. The door had given up the struggle now. Each blow could be the one that brought them face to face with the thing in the hold.

Doubt was on their faces. All their guns seemed suddenly pitiful. Only discipline kept them in place, crowded in the dim passageway.

The door buckled inwards, its upper hinge coming away completely. One more blow. One more.

But the final blow didn’t come. And still it didn’t come. And, after a time, it seemed it wasn’t going to.

The men let out their pent-up breath, unsure what this new turn of events might mean. Each had been resigned to their fate. Had they been reprieved? They didn’t dare to hope.

Some of them began to whisper. What had happened? Why had it stopped? Where had the thing in the hold gone?

From beyond the ruined door, there was only silence.

Twenty-Four

Dynamite - Jez Hears A Call - A Swift Retreat - The Cards Are On The Table

‘To your left! Harkins, to your left!’

Harkins waved his pistol in the vague direction of the enemy and fired three wild shots before cringing back into the cover of the barrels. The shadowy figure he was aiming for ran behind a parked fighter craft and disappeared from sight.

‘Nice shooting,’ Jez murmured sarcastically under her breath, then resumed scanning the dock for signs of movement. She flinched as three bullets pocked the barrels in front of her, searching her out. But the barrels were full of sand, and they were as good as a wall.

They’d put the Ketty Jay down close to a corner of the elevated landing pad, so as to give themselves only two sides to defend when Dracken’s men came for them. The barricades gave them good cover, and the largely empty dock meant that Dracken’s men had a lot of open space to deal with. But they had twenty men out there, and on Jez’s side there were only three. Two, if you didn’t count Harkins, and he wasn’t really worth counting. She checked her pocket watch and cursed.

They couldn’t hold out. Not against these odds.

Silo was crouched behind a barricade to her right, sighting along a rifle. He fired twice at something Jez couldn’t see. An answering salvo chipped the wood inches from his face.

There was one unforeseen disadvantage to their choice of position. Being close to the edge of the landing pad meant that they were near the lamp-posts that delineated it for the benefit of aerial traffic. Their attackers, on the other hand, had crossed the pad and were shooting from its centre, where it was darkest. The landing-pad staff - who would use spotlights to pick out places for craft to land - had fled when the battle began, presumably to rouse the militia.

Jez wasn’t hopeful. She doubted help would come through these broken alleys soon enough. Besides, being arrested by the militia was as sure a death sentence as Dracken’s men were. They’d be recognised as fugitives and hung.

Privately, Jez wondered if she’d survive that.

Don’t worry about that now. Deal with the things you can deal with.

‘Silo!’ she hissed. ‘The lights!’ She thumbed at the lamp-posts.

Silo got the message. He sat with his back to the barrels and shot out the nearest lamp-post. Jez took out another. In short order, they’d destroyed all the lamp-posts nearby, and the Ketty Jay sat in a darkness equal to that of their attackers.

But the distraction had let Dracken’s men sneak closer. Even in a quiet dock like this, there were hiding places. The need to fuel and restock aircraft meant there was always some kind of clutter, whether it be an idle tractor for pulling cargo, small corrugated sheds for storage, or a trailer full of empty prothane barrels waiting to be taken away.

There was movement everywhere. A shot could come from any angle. Sooner or later, something was going to get through.

Harkins was whimpering nearby. Silo told him to shut up. She looked at her pocket watch again. Rot and damnation, this was bad. They hadn’t expected twenty. Ten they could have held off. Maybe.

Something skittered across the landing pad, a bright fizz in the gloom. It took Jez only a moment to realise what it was. Dynamite.

‘Down!’ she cried, and then the stick exploded with a concussion hard enough to clap the air against her ears. The barrels murmured and rattled under the assault, but the throw had fallen short. Dracken’s men weren’t close enough to get it over the barricades. But it wouldn’t be long before they were.

She looked back at the Ketty Jay, rising above them like a mountain. The cargo ramp was open, beckoning them in. She thought about what Harkins had suggested when he first saw Dracken’s men coming. How long could they hold out inside? How much damage would a stick of dynamite do to the Ketty Jay?

Of course, Dracken’s men might have more dynamite. And a lot of sticks of dynamite could do a lot of damage.

She raised her head and looked out over the barrels, but was driven down again by a salvo of bullets, coming from all sides. Panic fluttered in her belly. They’d keep her pinned, creeping nearer and nearer until they could fling dynamite over the barricade. There were too many to hold back.

And then, almost unnoticed, she felt the change. It was becoming more natural now, a slight push through an invisible membrane: the tiniest resistance, then a parting. Sliding into elsewhere, easy as thought.

The world altered. The dark was still dark, but it didn’t obscure her vision any more. She sensed them now: eighteen men, two women. Their thoughts were a hiss, like the rushing of the waves along the coast.

Panic swelled and consumed her. She was out of control. Her senses had sharpened to an impossible degree. She smelled them out there. She heard their footsteps. And in the distance, far beyond the range of physical hearing, she heard something else. A cacophony of cries. The engines of a dreadful craft. And its crew, calling her. Calling in one wordless, discordant chorus.

Come with us. Come to the Wrack.

She recoiled from them, trying to focus her thoughts on anything other than the beckoning of that nightmarish crew. But instead of snapping out of that strange state, her mind veered away and fixed on something else. She felt herself sucked in, as she had been in Yortland watching predators stalking snow-hogs. But this time it was no animal she joined with: it was a man.

She felt his tension, the sweat of him, the thrill of the moment. Comfort and satisfaction at being on the winning side. He knew they had the advantage. Don’t slip up, though, you old dog. Plenty of graves full of the overconfident (pleased with that line, use it on the boys). Seems like they’re keeping their heads down, now. That dynamite scared ’em good.

Need to get closer. Get a good shot on ’em then. Cap’n (respect awe protectiveness admiration) would love it if you bagged one for her. Come on. Just over there.

Run for it!

Suddenly Jez was moving, rising, sighting down her rifle. She was in him and she was herself, two places at once. She knew where he was; she saw through his eyes; she felt his legs pumping as they carried him.

Her finger squeezed the trigger, and she shot him through the head at forty metres in the dark.

His thoughts stopped. All sense of him was gone. He was blanked, leaving only a hole. And Jez was thrust back into herself, her senses all her own again, curled in a foetal ball behind her barricade as she tried to understand what had just happened to her.

What am I? What am I becoming?

But she knew what she was becoming. She was becoming one of them. One of the nightmare crew. One of the creatures that lived in the wastes behind the impenetrable cloud-wall of the Wrack.

I have to run, she told herself, as a fresh volley of gunfire was unleashed. Bullets ricocheted off the side of the Ketty Jay. Another stick of dynamite fell close enough to knock over some of the barrels at the end of a barricade.

‘We can’t hold out no more!’ screeched Harkins.

No, she thought grimly. We can’t.

The deck of the Delirium Trigger was all but deserted. Most of the skeleton crew were in the guts of the aircraft, anxiously listening to the silence coming from the cargo hold. Others had gone to summon the militia. In the face of such alarm, nobody was loading cargo or swabbing the decks. When Malvery, Pinn and Crake emerged from the captain’s cabin with their plunder, there were no crew to stop them.

They raced across to the winch, now unmanned. A loaded palette was dangling over the cavernous hatch that led to the cargo hold. Pinn flustered around the controls for a few moments before finding something that he assumed would lower the winch. As it turned out, he was right. There was a loud screech and the palette began to rattle downwards.

Crake scanned the craft nervously. A crowd of dock workers had gathered around the Delirium Trigger on the hangar deck, but nobody dared cross the gangplank. They’d heard men talking about a monster aboard. Now they followed the activity of the newcomers with keen interest, assuming them to be crew.

Crake didn’t even see who shot at them. Pinn threw himself back, spitting a foul oath, as the bullet hit the winch next to his head. They scrambled out of the way, searching for their assailant, but there was no sign of one. Crake tripped and sprawled as another rifle shot sounded. Fear flooded him. He couldn’t take shelter if he didn’t know what direction the attack was coming from.

That didn’t bother Malvery overmuch. ‘Get to cover!’ he yelled, rushing towards an artillery battery, a cluster of massive cannons.

Crake scrambled after him. Another bullet hit. Out of the corner of his eye Crake saw the dock workers shouting in consternation. They were unsure who the villain was here. Some were following Crake’s plight, but others were looking at a spot above and behind him.

He looked over his shoulder. There, where the deck of the Delirium Trigger rose up towards an electroheliograph mast, he saw movement. A man, crouching, aiming.

Then Crake was behind the cannons, hunkering down next to Pinn and Malvery. ‘He’s up there!’ he panted. ‘By the mast!’

Malvery swore under his breath. ‘We need to get off this bloody aircraft, sharpish. Before them down below work out what’s going on.’

There was a sudden whine of strained metal from the winch. The chain swung sharply one way, then another, pulled from below.

Malvery edged along the barrel of the cannon and peered out for an instant, then drew back. ‘I see the bastard.’ He drew a pistol from his belt. It looked tiny in his huge hand. His usual shotgun had been too large to smuggle beneath their clothes.

‘Wait,’ said Crake. ‘Not yet.’

The chain pulled restlessly back and forth. The mechanism shrieked in protest at the weight it was carrying. The weight of the golem, clambering up the length of the chain and out of the cargo hold.

An enormous hand grabbed on to the lip of the hatch. Bess pulled herself up with a low bass groan, hauling her enormous bulk onto the deck.

‘Now!’ said Crake. Malvery swung out of hiding, aimed his pistol, and fired at the crewman hiding near the mast. The crewman, amazed by the sight of Bess, was taken by surprise. The shot missed by inches, but it startled him enough to send him scrambling out of sight.

The dock workers on the hangar deck were panicking now, beginning to flee as Bess drew herself up to her full height. They’d never seen anything like her, this humpbacked, faceless armoured giant. Those who were nearest fought to get out of the way, pushing aside the men at the back who were crowding closer to see what the fuss was about.

‘Bess!’ Crake called as they broke from hiding. The golem swung towards him with a welcoming gurgle. He hurried up to her and quickly patted her on the shoulder. The dock workers’ fear of Bess grew to encompass Crake and the others now: they were friends with the beast! ‘We’re getting out of here.’

Malvery sent another blast towards the electroheliograph tower as they ran for the gangplank. There were shouts of alarm from behind them as crewmen were roused by the gunfire. Bullets nipped at their heels. Pinn sent a few back, shooting wild.

Bess thundered down the gangplank and onto the hangar deck, the others close behind. The dock workers melted away from the Delirium Trigger like ice before a blowtorch, spreading chaos through the hangar as they fled. All activity came to a halt as crewmen on nearby freighters sensed the disturbance.

Malvery took the lead, heading towards the stairs that would take them to ground level, where they could exit the hangar. But he’d barely started in that direction when whistles sounded from below: the Ducal Militia of Rabban. Beige uniforms began to flood up the stairs that Malvery had been running for.

Too many men. Too many guns. Bess could make it through, but her more fragile, feshy companions wouldn’t.

Malvery came to a halt, pulled out his pocket watch and consulted it. He looked back at the Delirium Trigger, where the angry crew was already marshalling for pursuit. The militia had blocked their escape route. There was no way out.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Now we’ve got problems.’

Trinica Dracken looked at her pocket watch, snapped it shut and slipped it back inside the folds of her black coat.

‘You need to be somewhere, Trinica?’ Frey enquired.

She looked up at him across the card table. She seemed to be weighing a question.

‘I think we’ve beaten around the bush for long enough, Darian. You wanted to parley. Speak your piece.’

Her tone was newly impatient. Frey put two and two together.

‘Why the hurry, Trinica? You were happy to make small talk until now. You wouldn’t have been trying to buy time, would you? Delaying me here for some reason?’

He caught the flicker of anger in her eyes, and felt a small satisfaction. She’d had the best of this meeting so far: it was good to score a point on her.

‘Make your offer,’ she said. ‘Or this meeting is over.’

Might as well try, thought Frey. ‘I want you to give up the chase. Turn your back and leave us alone.’

‘What good will that do? You’ll still be wanted by the Century Knights.’

‘The Century Knights I can handle. They don’t know the underworld. I can scatter my crew, duck my head till the worst of it blows over. Maybe I’ll get out of Vardia. Sell the Ketty Jay, get a real job. But not with you on my heels. Most of them don’t even know my face except from some old ferrotype, but you do. I think you’d find me in the end. So I’m asking you to give it up.’

Trinica was waiting for the punchline. ‘Grephen is paying me a lot of money to track you down. Certainly more than you’ve ever seen in your life. What can you possibly offer me that would tempt me to give that up?’

‘I’ll keep your name out of it if I get caught.’

‘You’ll what?’ She was midway between amusement and astonishment.

‘You’re a traitor. You’re a knowing accomplice in the murder of the Archduke’s only son. The Coalition Navy never managed to pin anything on you - maybe because the witnesses have an odd habit of dying - but they know what you are and they’ll jump at the chance to see you swing from the gallows. You know Grephen is afraid of the Knights getting me before you do. He’s afraid I’ll make accusations against him.’

‘That’s the best you’ve got?’ Trinica laughed. ‘The accusations of a condemned man, without any proof to back them up?’

‘Have you thought what’s going to happen if whatever Grephen’s planning doesn’t work?’ Frey asked. ‘My accusations might not save me, but if Grephen makes a move on the Archduke then he’ll prove what I said about him is true. And that will mean everything I said about you will be true. Now maybe Grephen will win and everything will be alright for you, but if he loses, you’ll have the Navy all over you for the rest of your days. You certainly won’t be docking in a place like Rabban anytime soon.’

‘Why would you believe he’s making a move on the Archduke?’

Frey gave her a look. ‘I’m not stupid, Trinica.’

She studied him. Considering. He’d seen that expression a hundred times before at a Rake table, as players stared at their opponents and asked themselves: do they really have the cards to beat me?

Then she snorted, disgusted at herself for allowing him to threaten her.

‘This is ridiculous, and I don’t have time for it any more. It’s all over now, besides. I’ve got you.’ She drained her whisky and got to her feet. ‘You’re done.’

‘This is a parley, Trinica. Neutral ground. Sharka guarantees our safety,’ he grinned at her. ‘Can’t get me here,’ he added, rather childishly.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But I can get your craft.’

‘You don’t even know where she is.’

‘Certainly I do,’ she replied. ‘You’re berthed in the Southwest Labourer’s Quarter. Of course you registered under a false name, but I had every dock master in the city keeping an eye out for a Wickfield Ironclad-class cargo-combat hybrid. There aren’t many around with the Ketty Jay’s specifications, and I do know that craft quite well. I listened to you talk about her enough.’

Frey was unperturbed. Trinica noted his lack of reaction.

‘Obviously, you guessed I’d do something like this,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter. How many men do you have, Frey? Five? Six? Can you afford to keep that many?’ She looked around the room; he bored her now. ‘I sent twenty.’

Twenty, thought Frey, keeping his face carefully neutral, the way he’d learned to at the card table. Oh, shit.

‘What if I did the same?’ he said. ‘What if my men are on your craft, right now?’

Trinica rolled her eyes. ‘Please, Darian. You never could bluff well. You’re too much the coward: you always give in first.’

She sighed and looked down at him, as if pitying a dumb animal. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘You’re predictable. That’s why I almost caught you at the hermitage. Once Thade told me about you and his daughter I realised that was the first place you’d go. You always did think with the wrong organ.’

Frey didn’t reply. She had him there.

‘You want to know why I’m a good captain and you’re not? Because you don’t trust your people. I’ve earned my men’s respect and they’ve earned mine. But you? You can’t keep a crew, Darian. You go through navigators like whores.’

Frey kept his mouth shut. He couldn’t argue. There was nothing to say.

‘And because I know you, I know you’d never trust anyone with your aircraft,’ she continued, walking past him towards the door. ‘The Ketty Jay is your life. You’d rather die than give the ignition codes to someone who might fly off with her. That means your crew are outnumbered, outgunned, and trapped, defending an aircraft that’s nothing more than an armoured tomb.’ She cocked her head. ‘Perhaps you were thinking of some clever flanking manoeuvre. Perhaps you’re going to bring in reinforcements behind my men. Whatever you try, it makes no difference. You just don’t have the numbers.’

Frey’s shoulders slumped. Twenty men. How long could Jez, Silo and Harkins hold out against twenty men? Everything had relied on timing, but it was only now he truly realised how desperate the situation was. The plan had sounded so fine coming out of his mouth. But he was the only one not risking his life here.

Trinica saw how it hit him like a hammer. She touched his shoulder in false sympathy and leaned down to whisper in his ear, her lips brushing his lobe. ‘By now they’ll be dead, and my men will have filled the Ketty Jay with so much dynamite, the explosion will be heard in Yortland.’

She opened the door and looked back at him. ‘This will be the second time your crew died because of your hang-ups, Darian. Let’s see how far and fast you run without your aircraft.’

Then she was gone, leaving the door open behind her. Frey sat at the table, looking down at the mess of cards before him, feeling pummelled and raw and slashed to ribbons. She’d taken him apart with nothing more than words.

That woman. That bloody woman.

Twenty-Five

Flight - ‘Pick Your Targets’ - No Way Out

Crake ran hard. His lungs were burning in his chest and his head felt light, but his legs were tireless, filled with strength lent by adrenaline. Bess lumbered ahead, Malvery and Pinn hot on her heels. Bullets scored the air around them.

But they were only delaying the inevitable. There was nowhere left to go.

The hangar deck was crowded with cranes, portable fuel tanks and piled cargo. Massive cogs rose out of the floor, part of a mechanism that clamped aircraft in their berths and prevented heavy freighters from drifting. In the distance, elevated platforms for spotlights and a narrow controller’s tower rose almost to the roof of the hangar.

They used these obstacles as cover, darting past and around them, blocking the aim of the Delirium Trigger’s crew. Nobody attempted to stop them with Bess leading the way. Dock workers fled for cover, frightened by the wild gunplay of their pursuers.

The mouth of the hangar opened out to the night and the electric lights of the city. But the hangar deck was forty feet up, and there was no way down. The militia had spread out to block all the stairways. They were trapped, but still they ran, eking every last moment out of their liberty and their lives. There was nothing else left to do.

Bess slowed as they passed another pile of cargo waiting to be loaded onto a frigate. She picked up a crate and lobbed it effortlessly towards their pursuers. They scattered and scrambled away as it smashed apart in their midst. Crake and the others raced past her, and she took up position at the rear. A rifle shot bounced off her armoured back, spinning away with a high whine, as she turned to follow them.

Why did I come here? Crake thought. It was the same question he’d been asking himself all night. Why did I agree to do this? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He flayed himself with his own terror as he ran, cursing his idiocy. He could have just refused. He could have stayed out of this and left at any time. But he’d allowed himself to be roped into Frey’s plan, driven by self-loathing and his captain’s insidious charm. Back in Yortland, he’d been ready to throw it all in and leave Frey to his fate. Yet somehow, he found himself agreeing to join the Ketty Jay’s crew.

He’d made an error. He’d momentarily forgotten that time in the dingy back room of a bar, when Lawsen Macarde held a pistol to his head and told Frey to give up the ignition codes to the Ketty Jay. He’d forgotten the look on Frey’s face, those cold, uncaring eyes, like doll’s eyes. He’d allowed himself to believe - again - that Frey was his friend.

And because of that, he was going to die.

They dodged around machinery and vaulted over fuel pipes, rushing through the oily metal world of the hangar. Dark iron surrounded them; dim lights glowed; everything was covered with a thin patina of grime. They could expect no quarter here. This wasn’t a place for sympathy, but for the unforgiving industry of the new world. Crake had grown up on country estates, surrounded by trees, and had rarely ever seen the factories which had made his family rich. Now a grim fatalism swept over him. It seemed a terrible place to live a life, and a worse one to end it in.

The deck narrowed as they reached the mouth of the hangar, splitting into long walkways that led to spotlight stations and observation platforms. To their left and right, half-submerged below the elevated deck, were freighters and passenger liners, colossal in their shabby majesty. There were people lining the rail, watching their plight with interest, safely remote.

‘Up here!’ cried Malvery, and they were funnelled onto a gantry that projected out to the mouth of the hangar. It was wide enough for three abreast, but at the end there was nothing but a small observation platform. After that, there was only the fatal plunge to the ground.

It didn’t matter. They ran until the gantry ran out, and there they stopped.

The crew of the Delirium Trigger slowed, seeing their quarry was trapped. They gathered at the end of the gantry, where there was cover. Between them and the men of the Ketty Jay was a long, open stretch. They’d be easy targets there, and they still feared the golem enough to respect its power.

‘Now what?’ Pinn asked.

‘Now we surrender,’ said Malvery.

‘We what?’ cried Pinn.

The doctor’s grin spread beneath his thick white moustache. Pinn grinned back as he caught on. Crake was appalled to find that he was the only one who seemed nervous at the prospect of imminent death.

‘I don’t think they’re in the mood to take us alive, anyway,’ said Malvery. ‘Everyone, get behind Bess. She’s our cover.’

‘Hey, wait a—’ Crake began, but they’d already crowded behind the golem, using her bulk as a shield. Bess hunkered down and spread herself out as much as possible. Malvery and Pinn crouched, peering out from either side, their guns ready. Crake, still carrying Dracken’s strange compass in his hands, slid in next to them. He listened to the quiet ticks and coos coming from Bess’s chest.

‘How much ammo do we have?’ Malvery asked.

‘I got . . . um . . . twelve, thirteen bullets?’ Pinn replied.

‘I’m on about the same. Crake?’

Crake gave Pinn his revolver and a handful of bullets. ‘You take them. I wouldn’t hit anything anyway.’

‘Right-o,’ said the doctor, aiming his gun. ‘Pick your targets.’

The men of the Delirium Trigger had swelled in number now. Some held back, studying the situation, while others angrily demanded action. One or two even tried to run up the gantry, but were held back by their companions. A chancy, long-range shot spanged off Bess’s shoulder.

‘Look at ’em,’ Pinn crowed. ‘Bunch of pussies.’

Directed by the bosun, the crew commandeered crowbars from dock workers and started jimmying nearby bits of machinery. The militia had caught up now - beige uniforms milled in the crowd - but having assessed the situation they seemed happy enough to let the men of the Delirium Trigger handle it. Presumably they’d claim the credit afterwards. It was easier than risking any of their own.

‘What are they doing out there?’ Malvery murmured to himself.

Crake peered out, took one look and went back into hiding. ‘They’re making a shield.’

He was right. Moments later, ten men started to advance up the gantry, holding before them a large sheet of iron pulled from the side of a crane. They crept forward nervously but with purpose, their guns bristling out around the side of the shield.

‘Hmm,’ said Malvery.

‘What?’ said Pinn. ‘Soon as they get close enough, we send Crake’s girl out to get ’em. She’ll squash ’em into paste.’

‘Ain’t quite that easy,’ said the doctor, nodding towards the hangar deck. ‘Look.’

Pinn looked. Five men had taken position at the edge of the deck, and were lying on their bellies, aiming long-barrelled rifles at them.

‘Sharpshooters,’ said Malvery. ‘If Bess moves, we lose our cover, and they kill us.’ As if to punctuate his statement, a bullet ricocheted off Bess, inches from his face. He drew back a little way.

‘Bugger,’ said Pinn. ‘Why do we never come up with plans like that?’

‘We did,’ said Malvery. ‘That’s how we ended up here.’

The men of the Delirium Trigger crept steadily closer. The narrow angle along the gantry made it impossible to get a good shot at any of them. Malvery tried an experimental salvo with his pistol, but it only rattled their shield. They stopped for a moment, then continued.

Crake was sweating and muttering to himself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He wanted to be sick but there was nothing in his stomach: he’d been too nervous to eat before they set out on this mission.

The shield, having crossed much of the gantry, stopped. The men hunkered down behind it, becoming invisible. There was an agonising sense of calm before the inevitable storm.

‘Well,’ said Malvery to Pinn. ‘I’d say it was nice knowing you, but . . .’ He shrugged. ‘You know.’

‘Likewise, you whiskery old fart,’ Pinn smiled, mistaking genuine distaste for comradely affection. Then the men of the Delirium Trigger popped up out of hiding with their guns blazing, and all thought was lost in the chaos.

The assault was terrifying. They fired until their guns were empty, then ducked down to reload while the men behind them continued the barrage. Bess groaned and howled as she was peppered with bullets. They smacked into her at close range, blasting holes in the chain mail and leather at her joints, chipping her metal faceplate. She swatted at the air as if plagued by bees, cries of distress coming from deep inside her.

Crake had his hands over his ears, yelling over the tumult, a blunt shout of fear and rage and sorrow. The sound of leaden death was bad enough: the sound of Bess’s pain was worse.

Malvery managed to point his pistol around the side of Bess’s flank and fire off a shot or two, but it did no good. They crammed in behind the golem as best they could, but bullets were flying everywhere and they dared not break cover. Bess was being driven back by the cumulative impacts of the bullets, which punched at her armour, cutting into the softer parts of her. She stumbled backward, roaring now. The others stumbled back with her. Crake saw a spray of blood torn from Pinn’s leg: he went down, his pistols falling from his hands, clutching at his thigh.

And suddenly he knew what was behind a dying man’s eyes. He knew what the crewman on the Delirium Trigger had known, the one that Pinn had shot. He knew what it felt like to run out of time, leaving a life incomplete, and so much still to do.

There was blinding light, and the bellow of engines. And machine guns, ear-splitting machine guns smashing through the cool night air of the hangar. The men on the gantry were cut to bloodied shreds, jerking as they were pierced, thrown limply over the railings, plunging to the floor of the hangar.

Crake blinked and stared, stunned by his reprieve. But there was no mistake. Hanging in the air, scuffed and scratched and beautiful, was the Ketty Jay. And sitting at the controls was Jez.

Malvery guffawed with laughter, waving one arm above his head. Jez waved back, through the cockpit window. Pinn, rolling on the ground and shrieking, was largely forgotten.

Harkins sat in the autocannon cupola, and he opened up on the hangar deck as Jez rotated the Ketty Jay into position. The shots were pitched to scare rather than hit anyone, but they caused sufficient panic to keep the sharpshooters busy. The cargo ramp at the rear of the craft was gaping open, and Silo was standing at the top of it, holding on to a rung, beckoning them.

Jez’s control of the craft was clumsy: she backed up too hard, and swung the lip of the cargo ramp into the gantry rail with a crunch. Metal twisted and screeched, but she managed to stabilise the Ketty Jay again, and now there was an escape route, a ramp leading into the maw of the cargo hold.

Crake was standing as if in a dream, bewildered by all the noise and motion. Bess scooped him up in both arms as if he was a child, holding him close. Then she thumped forward, leaped onto the ramp, and carried him into the cargo hold.

Behind him there was scrambling, voices, men shouting things he didn’t understand. The muffled sound of autocannon fire from above; the whine of prothane thrusters on standby; the blessed safety of walls all around him.

Then the hydraulics kicked in, and the cargo ramp began to close. Malvery was shouting ‘Jez! Get us out of here!’ Pinn was wailing. The whole world swung as the craft moved. There was a wrench of metal from outside as the Ketty Jay tore off part of the gantry rail.

Acceleration.

It took some time before the fog of panic cleared and Crake’s senses returned. He realised that Bess had put him down on the floor, and was squatting next to him. He could see the glimmers of light inside her faceplate, like distant stars. Malvery was telling Pinn to shut up.

‘I’m bleeding out, Doc! I’m going cold!’

‘It’s just a flesh wound, you damn pansy. Stop whining.’

‘If I don’t make it through . . . you have to tell Lisinda . . .’

‘Oh, her. Sure. I’ll tell your sweetheart you died a hero. Come on, hobble your arse to my surgery, I’ll give you a couple of stitches. We’ll have you fixed by the time we pick up the Cap’n.’

There was movement, and the umber-skinned, narrow face of the Murthian loomed into Crake’s view.

‘You alright?’ he asked.

Crake swallowed and nodded.

Silo looked up at Bess. ‘She’s a fine thing,’ he said. Then he picked up the compass that was lying next to Crake. The compass he’d taken from Dracken’s cabin. Silo weighed it in his hand thoughtfully, then gave Crake a look of approval, stood up and walked away.

Bess was making echoing coos in her chest. Crake sat up and ran his hand along the metal plating of her arm. It was scored with burn marks and dents.

‘I’m sorry, Bess,’ he murmured. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Bess cooed again and nuzzled him, bumping the cold iron of her faceplate against his cheek.

Twenty-Six

A Well-Earned Break - Silo Lends A Hand - The Captain Is Woken - From Bad To Worse

Frey celebrated his victory in the traditional manner, and was roaring drunk by dawn.

They reclaimed the Firecrow and the Skylance from their hiding place outside Rabban, then flew for three hours, changing course several times until they were thoroughly sure that any attempts at pursuit would be hopeless. After that they began to search for a place to put down. Frey found a hillside clearing amid the vast moon-silvered landscape of the Vardenwood. There they sallied out, built a campfire, and Frey proceeded to get hammered on cheap grog.

It had been a long, long time since he felt this good.

He looked around at the laughing faces of the men who drank with him: Malvery, Pinn, even Harkins, who had loosened up and joined them after a little bullying. Jez was in her quarters, keeping to herself as usual, deciphering the charts they’d stolen from Dracken’s cabin. Crake and Silo were nearby, tending to the damage that Bess had suffered. Nobody wanted to sleep. They were all either too fired up or, in Crake’s case, too anxious. He was fretting about his precious golem.

But Frey couldn’t worry about Crake for the moment. Right now, he was basking in the satisfaction of a job well done. His plan had worked. His crew had triumphed against all the odds. Despite that cold bitch’s condescending words, her cruel pity, he’d screwed her over like a master. He imagined her face when she got back to find her crew in disarray and her precious charts missing. He imagined how she’d smoulder when she heard of the heroic last-minute rescue in the Ketty Jay. He imagined her rage when she realised how badly she’d misjudged him.

You thought you knew me, he gloated. You said I was predictable. Bet you didn’t predict that.

And the best thing was that none of his people had got hurt. Well, except for Crake’s little pet and the scratch on Pinn’s leg, but that didn’t really count. All in all, it was a brilliant operation.

If this was what success tasted like, he wanted more of it.

The bottle of grog came round to him and he swigged from it deeply. Malvery was telling some ribald story about a high-class whore he used to treat back when he was a big-city doctor. Pinn was already in stitches, long before the punchline. Harkins spluttered and grinned, showing his browned teeth. Their faces glowed warmly, flushed in the firelight and the colours of the breaking dawn. Frey felt a surge of alcohol-fuelled affection for them all. He was proud of them. He was proud of himself.

It hadn’t been an easy thing, to entrust Jez with the ignition code to the Ketty Jay. The code was set during the manufacture of the aircraft, and because it relied on various complex mechanisms it couldn’t ever be changed without lengthy and expensive engineering procedures. Jez would forever have the power to activate and fly the Ketty Jay. Even now, Frey had to fight the suspicion that Jez might be creeping towards the cockpit, intending to punch in the numbers and run off with his aircraft before anyone could stop her.

It’s done now, he thought. Live with it.

It had been absolutely necessary for the completion of his plan that someone else fly the Ketty Jay. Jez had assured him she could, having grown up flying many types of aircraft. But he’d still found himself unable to give away the code at first. Like marriage, it felt like sacrificing too much of himself to a stranger.

In the end, he’d convinced himself by making an analogy to Rake. He found that most things in life could be related to cards, if only you thought hard enough.

In Rake, it was possible to play too carefully. If you waited and waited for the perfect hand, then the obligatory minimum bets each round would gradually whittle you down. You’d run out of time and money waiting for an opportunity that never came. Sooner or later, you had to take a risk.

So he’d bet on Jez, and thankfully he’d won big. She was an odd fish, but he liked her, and he knew she was competent. He even had to admit to a slight sense of relief at the sharing of the secret code, although he wasn’t exactly sure why. It felt like he’d let out the pressure a little.

Malvery reached the punchline of his story, and they howled with laughter. Frey hadn’t been paying attention, but he laughed anyway, caught up in the swell. He passed on the bottle, and Malvery gulped from it. Later, Frey would think of other things: the task they still had ahead of them, the bitter sting that came from seeing Trinica’s face again. But for now, drinking with his men, he was happy, and that was enough.

Crake was anything but happy. Their narrow escape hadn’t invigorated him with a sense of triumph, but depressed him instead. He was acutely aware that they’d only made it out because Jez had arrived early. She’d been forced to take off sooner than planned, driven back to the Ketty Jay by far superior numbers, and had then headed directly to their pick-up point at the hangar. Once there, she’d spotted the disturbance inside and realised there was trouble. Their estimation of the length of the operation had been off: they’d allowed themselves far too much time.

In the end, they got lucky.

Rather to his surprise, Silo had emerged from the engine room to help him patch up Bess. The Murthian was a silent, solid presence around the Ketty Jay, but because he rarely offered an opinion and never socialised, Crake had unconsciously begun to ignore him, as if he was one of the servants back home. He suspected that Silo was simply curious, and saw an opportunity to get a closer look at the golem, to work out what made her tick. Whatever his motives, Crake was glad of the help and the quiet company. Between them, they pulled out bullets, stitched up leather, and soldered her wounds.

Though the damage was all superficial, Crake was wracked with guilt. He’d allowed Bess to be used as an object. What if they had dynamite? What if they had a really big cannon? Could she have stood up to that? For that matter, what would actually happen to her if she was destroyed?

Bess was a shell, inhabited by a presence. That was as much as Crake knew. A vacant suit of armour, a skin surrounding nothing. Where did the presence truly exist? What exactly was in there? Did it occupy the skin of the suit, or was it somewhere inside? Those glittering eyes in the emptiness - did they mean something?

He didn’t know. He didn’t even truly know how he’d made her. Bess was an accident and a mystery.

‘Does it hurt her?’ Silo asked suddenly, rubbing his finger across a bullet hole in her knee. His deep, molten voice was heavily inflected. Doors eet hoort hair?

‘I don’t know,’ said Crake. ‘I think so. In a way.’

The Murthian stared at him, waiting for more.

‘She was . . . upset,’ he said awkwardly. ‘When they were shooting her. So I think she feels it.’

Silo nodded to himself and returned his attention to his work. Bess was sitting quietly, not moving. She was asleep, he guessed. Or at least, he called it sleep. In these periods of catatonia, she was simply absent. There were no glittering lights inside. She was an empty suit. Where the presence had gone, or if it had really gone anywhere at all, he couldn’t have said.

The silence between them returned, but Crake felt a pressure to say something now that Silo had. It seemed momentous that the Murthian should be out here alongside him, asking him an un-prompted question. He began to feel more and more uncomfortable. The rising chorus of birds from the trees all around seemed unnaturally loud.

‘The captain seems in good cheer,’ he said at length.

Silo only grunted.

‘How do you and he know each other?’

Silo stopped and looked up at him. For a few seconds, Silo regarded him in the pale dawn light, his eyes unreadable. Then he went back to his task.

Crake gave up. Perhaps he’d been wrong. Perhaps Silo really didn’t want to talk.

‘I escaped from a factory,’ Silo told him suddenly. Arr scorrpt fram a fack-truh. He kept working as he talked. ‘Seven year back. Built aircraft there for the Samarlans. My people are slaves down there. Bet you know that, yuh?’

‘Yes,’ said Crake. He was shocked to hear such a torrential monologue from Silo.

‘The Dakkadians gave up. Stopped fighting long ago, joined their masters. But those of us from Murthia, we never give up. Five hundred year and we never give up.’ There was a fierce pride in his voice. ‘So when the time comes, some of us, we kill our overseer and we run. They come after us, yuh? So we scatter. Into the hills and the forest. And pretty soon, there’s just me. Starved and lost, but I ain’t dead and I ain’t no slave.

‘Then I see a craft coming down. Ain’t damaged, but flies like it is. Pilot look like he don’t know a thing. Makes a rough landing, and off I go. That’s my way out. And when I get there, I find the Cap’n inside. Stabbed in the guts. In a bad way.’

It took Crake a moment to catch on. ‘Wait, you mean our captain? Frey?’

‘Frey and the Ketty Jay,’ said Silo.

‘How did it happen?’

‘Didn’t ask, and he didn’t say,’ Silo replied. ‘Now, there’s plenty food and supplies there on that craft, but I can’t fly. I know craft on the inside, but I never flew one. So I take care of the Cap’n. I get him his drugs and bandages and I get him well. And in the meantime, I eat, get strong.’ He shrugged. ‘When he got better, he said he wasn’t never goin’ back to the people who sent him there. Said he was goin’ to live the life of a freebooter. That was fine by me. He flew us both out, and I been on the Ketty Jay ever since.’

‘So you saved his life?’

‘S’pose. S’pose he saved mine too. Either way, here I am, yuh? We ain’t never spoken of it since. I fix his craft, he keeps me in shelter. That’s the way it is, and I’m grateful every day I have on board the Ketty Jay. Every day, that’s one more day I ain’t a slave. Lone Murthian wouldn’t last long out here in Vardia. Your people ain’t exactly fond of us since the Aerium Wars.’

Crake looked over at the fire, where Malvery was holding Frey down and pouring grog into his mouth while the other two cheered. Every time he thought he had Frey figured out, he was bewildered anew.

‘You never said.’

‘You never asked,’ said Silo. ‘It’s a fool that speaks when there ain’t no cause to. Too many loudmouths already on this craft.’

‘On that we agree,’ said Crake.

Silo got to his feet and stretched. ‘Well, I done what I can with your lady Bess,’ he said. ‘Gonna catch some sleep.’

‘Thank you for your help,’ said Crake. Silo grunted and began to walk off.

‘Hey,’ called Crake suddenly, as a new question occurred to him. ‘Why do they call you Silo?’

‘The name mama gave me is Silopethkai Auramaktama Faillinana,’ came the reply. For the first time that Crake could remember, he saw the Murthian smile. ‘Think you can remember it?’

‘Cap’n.’

Frey was faintly conscious of someone shaking him. He wished with all his heart that they’d go away.

‘Cap’n!’

There it was again, dragging him upwards from the treacly, grog-soaked depths of sleep. Leave me alone!

‘Cap’n!’

Frey groaned as it became clear they weren’t going to give up. He was aware of a cool breeze and warm sun on his skin, the smell of grass, and the forbidding portents of a dreadful hangover. He opened his eyes, and flinched as the eager sun speared shafts of light directly into his brain. He blocked the light with his hand and turned his head to look at Jez, who was kneeling next to him.

‘What?’ he said slowly, making it a threat.

‘I’ve figured out the charts,’ she said.

He levered himself upright and groaned again, mashing his face with his palm. His mouth tasted like something had shat in it and subsequently died there. The embers of the fire were still alive, but the sun was high in a blue sky on an unseasonably warm winter’s day. Malvery snored like a tractor nearby. Pinn was sucking his thumb, his other hand twitching towards his crotch, around which all his dreams revolved.

‘Don’t you sleep?’ he said.

‘Not much,’ she admitted. ‘Sorry if it’s a bad time. You said you wanted to know straight away. You said time is—’

‘—of the essence, yes, I remember.’ He deeply regretted those words now. ‘So you know where Trinica’s hideout is?’

‘I believe so, Cap’n. The charts weren’t easy to work out. It’s not just an X-marks-the-spot kind of thing.’

‘Uh? A chart’s a chart, isn’t it?’

‘Not really. These are very close detail, marking a route through the mountains. Either we’re missing a chart or Trinica already knows the general area where the hideout is. If you don’t know where to start, you’re just looking at a bunch of mountains.’ She gave a quirky smile. ‘Lot of mountains in Vardia.’

‘But you figured it out?’

‘Matched the position of the bigger mountains with my other charts.’

‘Good work, Jez.’

‘Thank you, Cap’n.’

‘Now tell me where we’re going.’

‘You’re not gonna like it.’

‘I rarely do.’

‘I assume you’ve heard of Rook’s Boneyard?’

‘Oh, for shit’s sake,’ he sighed, and then slumped down onto his back again, his eyes closed. He’d expected bad news, just not quite that bad.

Jez patted him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll be in my quarters when you’re ready,’ she said. Then he heard her get up and walk back to the Ketty Jay.

Everybody who flew over the south end of the Hookhollows knew Rook’s Boneyard. They all knew to avoid it if they possibly could. Aircraft that went into that small, restlessly volcanic area were rarely seen again. Those that ventured into the mists spoke of seeing their companions mysteriously explode. Pilots went mad and flew into mountainsides. Survivors talked of ghosts, terrible spirits that clawed at their craft. It was a cursed place, named after the first man to brave it and survive.

Why don’t I just lie down and die here? thought Frey. It’ll save time.

Time. Time was something they didn’t have. There was no telling how long it would take Trinica to replenish her crew and familiarise the newcomers with the complexities of the Delirium Trigger. A day? A week? Frey had no idea. It really depended on whether there was anyone really vital among the men Jez had machine-gunned on the gantry.

But he knew one thing. As soon as she was up and running, Trinica would be after them with redoubled fury. Without her strange compass and her charts, she wouldn’t be able to get to the hideout, but she knew that Frey would be heading that way. She might be able to get word to her allies somehow. He wanted to be in and out before she had a chance to act.

He got to his feet and swayed as his head went light. It took a few moments for everything to stabilise again. He wasn’t, he reflected, in good shape for facing certain death anytime soon.

‘Alright,’ he told himself unconvincingly. ‘Let’s do this.’ And he stumbled off to rouse the crew.

Twenty-Seven

A Perilous Descent - The Puzzle Of The Compass - Frey Sees Ghosts

The Ketty Jay hung in the white wastes of the Hookhollows, a speck against the colossal stone slopes. There were no other craft to be seen or heard. Below them, there was only the bleak emptiness of the mist. It cloaked the lower reaches, shrouding canyons and defiles, hiding the feet of the mountains. Down there, in Rook’s Boneyard, the mist never cleared.

High above them were jagged, ice-tipped peaks. Higher still was a forbidding ceiling of drifting ash clouds, passing to the east, shedding a thin curtain of flakes as they went. A poisonous miasma, seeping from volcanic cracks and vents along the southern reaches of the mountain range. It was carried on the prevailing winds to settle onto the Blackendraft, the great ash flats, where it choked all life beneath it.

Frey sat in the pilot’s seat, staring down. Wondering whether it was worth it. Wondering whether they should just turn tail and run. Could he really get them out of this mess? This ragged collection of vagrants, pitted against some of the most powerful people in the land? In the end, did they even have a chance? What lay in that secret hideout that was so important it was worth all this?

Their victory against Trinica had buoyed him briefly, but the prospect of flying blind into Rook’s Boneyard had reawakened all the old doubts. Crake’s words rolled around in his head.

As a group, we’re rather easy to identify. Apart, they’ll probably never catch us. They’ll only get Frey.

Was it fair to risk them all, just to clear his own name? What if he sent them their separate ways, recrewed, and headed for New Vardia? He might make it there, across the seas, through the storms to the other side of the planet. Even in winter. It was possible.

Anything to avoid going down there, into the Boneyard.

Crake and Jez were with him in the cockpit. He needed Jez to navigate and he wanted Crake to help figure out the strange compass-like device, which nobody had been able to make head nor tail of yet. He’d banished the others to the mess to keep them from pestering him. Harkins and Pinn had been forced to leave their craft behind again, since it was too dangerous to travel in convoy, and they were insufferable back-seat pilots.

‘It’ll be dead reckoning once we’re down in the mist, Cap’n,’ said Jez. ‘So keep your course and speed steady and tell me if you change them.’

‘Right,’ he said, swallowing against a dry throat. He pulled his coat tighter around himself. He wasn’t sure if it was the hangover or the fear, but he couldn’t seem to get warm. He twisted round to glance at Crake, who was standing at his shoulder, holding the brass compass in both hands. ‘Is it doing anything yet?’

‘Doesn’t seem to be,’ said Crake.

‘Did you turn it on?’

Crake gave him a look. ‘If you think you know a way to “turn it on” that all of us have missed, do let me know.’

‘We don’t need your bloody sarcasm right now, Crake,’ Jez snapped, with a sharp and unfamiliar tone to her voice. Crake, rather than offering a rejoinder, subsided into bitter silence.

Frey sighed. The tension between these two wasn’t helping his nerves. It had been slowly curdling the atmosphere on the Ketty Jay ever since they returned from the ball at Scorchwood Heights.

‘Where’s all this damned mist coming from, anyway?’ he griped, to change the subject.

‘Hot air from vents to the west blowing over cold meltwater rivers running off the Eastern Plateau,’ Jez replied absently.

‘Oh.’

The conversation lapsed for a time.

‘Cap’n?’ Jez queried, when things had become sufficiently uncomfortable. ‘Are we going?’

Frey thought about sharing his idea with them. He could offer to cut them loose and go his own way. Wouldn’t that be the decent thing? Then nobody had to go down into the Boneyard. Least of all him.

But it all seemed a bit much to try and explain it now. Things had gone too far. He was resigned to it. Easier to go forward than back.

Besides, he thought, in a rare moment of careless bravado, nothing clears up a hangover like dying.

He arranged himself in his seat and released aerium gas from the ballast tanks, adding a little weight to the craft. The Ketty Jay began to sink into the mist.

The altimeter on the dashboard ticked steadily as they descended. The world dimmed and whitened beyond the windglass of the cockpit. The low hum of the electromagnets in the aerium engines was the only sound in the stillness.

‘Come to one thousand and hold steady,’ Jez instructed, hunched over her charts at her cramped desk. Her voice sounded hollow in the tomb-like atmosphere.

‘Crake?’

‘Still nothing.’

They’d puzzled over the compass for most of the day, but nobody had been able to decipher its purpose. The lack of markings to indicate North, South, East or West suggested that it wasn’t meant for navigation. The four needles, which seemed capable of swinging independently of one another, made things more confusing. And then there were the numbers. Nobody knew what they meant.

They’d established that each pair of number sets corresponded to a different arrow. The pair of number sets marked ‘1’ matched the arrow marked ‘1’. Each number was set on a rotating cylinder, like the readout of the altimeter, and presumably displayed the numbers zero to nine. The upper set of each pair had two digits, allowing a count from 00 to 99. The lower set had the same, but was preceded by a blank digit. All the numbers except this blank were set at zero.

Frey had the sense that this compass was vital to their survival in Rook’s Boneyard. They were in danger until they could work out what it did. But right now it didn’t seem to be doing anything.

Frey brought the Ketty Jay to a hover when his altimeter showed they were a klom above sea level, down among the feet of the mountains. The mist had thickened into a dense fog, and the cockpit had darkened to a chilly twilight. Frey knew better than to use headlamps, which would only dazzle them; but he turned on the Ketty Jay’s belly lights, hoping they’d provide some relief against the gloom. They did, but only a little.

‘Alright, Cap’n,’ said Jez. ‘Ahead slow, keep a heading of two-twenty, stay at this altitude.’

‘We’ll start at ten knots,’ he replied.

‘Right.’ Jez looked at her pocket watch. ‘Go.’

Frey eased the Ketty Jay forward, angling to the new heading. The sensation of flying blind, even at crawling speed, was terrifying. He suddenly found a new respect for Harkins, who had chased a Swordwing at full throttle through the mist after the destruction of the Ace of Skulls. That nervy, hangdog old beanpole was braver than he seemed.

For long minutes, they moved forward. Nobody said anything. Frey could feel a bead of sweat making its way from his hairline, across his temple. Jez called out a change of heading and altitude. Mechanically, he obeyed.

The pace was excruciating. The waiting was killing him. Something was bound to happen. He just wanted it over with.

‘I have something!’ Crake announced. Frey jumped in his seat at the sudden noise.

‘What is it?’

Crake was moving the compass around experimentally. ‘One of the needles is moving.’

Frey brought the Ketty Jay to a stop and took the compass from Crake. Jez glanced at her pocket watch again, mentally recording how far they had travelled on this new heading.

Crake was right. Though the other needles, numbered 2 to 4, were still dormant, the first needle was pointing in the direction that the Ketty Jay was heading. As Frey twisted it, the needle kept pointing in the same direction, no matter which way the compass was turned.

The number sets corresponding to the first needle had changed, too. Whereas all the others were still at zero, these had sprung into life. The topmost set read 91. The bottom set, the one preceded by a blank digit, read 30. They were not moving.

‘The top one started counting down from ninety-nine,’ said Crake. ‘The bottom one just clicked to thirty and stayed there.’

‘So what does it mean?’ Frey asked.

‘He doesn’t know what it means,’ Jez said.

‘Do you?’ Crake snapped.

Jez turned around in her chair, removed her hairband and smoothed her hair back into her customary ponytail again. ‘I’ve some idea. The topmost digits were counting down when we were moving, and now they’re not. I’d guess that they show the distance we are from whatever the arrow is pointing at.’

‘So what is the arrow pointing at?’ Crake asked, rather angry that he hadn’t worked it out first.

‘Something ninety-one metres ahead of us,’ Frey replied helpfully. ‘So now what? Can we go around it?’

‘I’d rather not deviate from the charts if we possibly can,’ said Jez. ‘They’re very precise.’

‘Alright,’ Frey replied. ‘Then we go very, very slowly, and let’s see what’s up ahead. Crake, read out the numbers.’

He settled back into his seat and pushed the Ketty Jay forward at minimum speed. Crake stood behind him, eyes flicking between the compass and the windglass of the cockpit, where there was still nothing but fog to be seen.

‘Needle’s holding steady. The other set of numbers is still at thirty. The top one is counting down . . . Eighty . . . Seventy . . . Sixty . . . No change anywhere else . . . Fifty . . . Forty . . .’

Frey’s mind was crowded with possibilities, tumbling over each other in a panic. What was it that waited there for them? The entrance to the hideout? Or something altogether deadlier?

‘Thirty . . . Twenty . . .’

He was so taut that his muscles ached, poised to throw the Ketty Jay into full reverse the instant that anything emerged from the murk.

‘Ten . . . Five . . . Zero.’

‘Zero?’ Frey asked.

‘Five . . . Ten . . . The needle has changed direction. Now it’s pointing behind us. Twenty . . . Twenty-five.’

‘Let me have a look,’ Frey said, and snatched the compass from Crake. The needle was pointing directly behind them, and the numbers were counting up towards ninety-nine again.

‘Um,’ he said. Then he handed the compass back to the daemonist. ‘Well. That’s a puzzle.’

‘Perhaps those numbers didn’t mean distance after all,’ Crake suggested churlishly, for Jez’s benefit. Jez didn’t reply. He went back to reading them off. ‘Ninety . . . Ninety-five . . . Now the numbers have reset to zero, and the first needle has joined the other three.’

‘I suppose that means we’ve gone out of range.’ Frey suggested.

‘But there wasn’t anything there!’

‘That’s fine with me.’

Jez called out a new heading, and Frey took it.

‘You might see a—’ she began, when Frey yelled in alarm as the flank of a mountain emerged from the fog. He banked away from it and it slipped by to their starboard side.

‘—mountain,’ Jez continued, ‘but there’ll be a defile running out of it.’

‘I didn’t see any defile!’ Frey complained, annoyed because he’d suffered a scare.

‘Cap’n, I’m navigating blind here. Accuracy is gonna be less than perfect. Pull back closer to the mountain flank.’

Frey reluctantly did so. The mountain loomed into view again. Jez left her station to look through the windglass.

‘There it is,’ she said.

Frey saw it too: a knife-slash in the mountain, forty metres wide, with uneven walls.

‘I don’t much like the look of that,’ he said.

‘Drop to nine hundred, take us in,’ Jez told him mercilessly.

Frey eased the Ketty Jay around and into the defile. The mountains pressed in hard, narrowing the world on either side. Shadowy walls lay close enough to be seen, even in the mist. Frey unconsciously hunched down in his seat. He concentrated on keeping a steady line.

‘More contacts,’ said Crake. ‘Two of them.’

‘Two needles moving?’

‘Yes. Both of them pointing directly ahead.’

‘Give me the numbers.’

Crake licked dry lips and read them off. ‘First needle: distance ninety and descending. The other number reads fifty-seven and holding steady. Second needle: distance . . . ninety also, now. That’s descending too. The other number reads minus forty-three. Holding steady.’

‘Minus forty-three?’ Jez asked.

‘A little minus sign just appeared where that blank digit was.’

Jez thought for a moment. ‘They’re giving us relative altitude,’ she said. ‘The first set of numbers show the distance we are from the object. The second show how far it is above or below us.’

Frey caught on. ‘So then the ones ahead of us . . . one is fifty-seven metres above us and the other is forty-three metres below?’

‘That’s why we didn’t see anything the last time,’ Jez said. ‘We passed by it. It was thirty metres above us.’

Frey felt a mixture of trepidation and relief at that. It was reassuring to believe that they’d figured out the compass and could avoid these unseen things, at least. But somehow, knowing where they were made them seem all the more threatening. It meant they were really there. Whatever they were.

‘Crake, keep reading out the distances,’ he said. Crake obliged.

‘Twenty . . . ten . . . zero . . . needle’s swung the other way . . . ten . . . twenty . . .’

Frey had him continue counting until they were out of range and the compass reset again.

‘Okay, Cap’n,’ said Jez. ‘The bottom’s going to drop out of this defile any minute. We come down to seven hundred and take a heading of two-eighty.’

Frey grunted in acknowledgement. There was enough space between the mountain walls for a much bigger craft to pass through, but the constant need to prevent the Ketty Jay from drifting was grinding away at his nerve and giving him a headache. He dearly wished he hadn’t indulged quite so heavily the night before.

Just as Jez had predicted, the defile ended suddenly. It fed into a much larger chasm, far too vast to see the other end. The fog was thinner here, stained with a sinister red light from below. Red shadows spread into the cockpit.

‘Is that lava down there?’ Frey asked.

Jez craned over from the navigator’s station and looked down. ‘That’s lava. Drop to seven hundred.’

‘Bringing us closer to the lava.’

‘I’m just following the charts, Cap’n. You want to find your own way in this mist, be my guest.’

Frey was stung by that, but he kept his mouth shut and began to descend. The fog thinned and the red glow grew in strength until they were bathed in it. The temperature rose in the cockpit, drawing sweat from their brows. They could feel the radiant heat of the lava river flowing beneath them. Pinn came up from the mess to complain that it was getting stuffy down there, but Frey barked at him to get out. For once he did as he was told.

Frey added aerium at seven hundred metres to halt their descent, and pushed onward along the length of the chasm. Visibility was better now. The mist offered hints of their surroundings. It was possible to see the gloomy immensity of the mountains around them, if only as smudged impressions. To descend a few dozen metres more would bring the lava river into detail: the rolling, sludgy torrent of black and red and yellow. The heat down there would be unimaginable.

‘Contacts,’ said Crake again. ‘Ahead and to the left a little. We - oh, wait. There’s another. Two of them. Three. Three of them.’

‘There’s three?’

‘Four,’ Crake corrected. He showed Frey the compass. The needles were in a fan, all pointing roughly ahead. Frey frowned as he looked at it, and for a moment his vision wavered out of focus. He blinked, and the feeling passed. He swore to himself that he’d never again drink excessively the night before doing anything life-threatening.

‘Any of them directly in front of us?’

‘One’s pretty close. Twenty metres below. Oh!’

‘Don’t just say “oh!” ’ Frey snapped. ‘Oh, what?’

‘One of the needles moved . . . now it’s changed back . . . now it’s gone back again.’

‘What you mean, it changed?’ Frey demanded. He wiped sweat from his brow. All this tension was making him feel sick.

‘It moved! What do you think I mean?’ Crake replied in exasperation. ‘Can you stop a moment?’

‘Well, why’s it changing? Is there something there or not?’ Frey was getting flustered now. He felt a fluttering sensation of panic come over him.

‘There’s more than four of those things out there,’ said Jez, who had got up from her station and was looking at the compass. ‘I’d guess it keeps changing the needles to show us the nearest four.’

‘There’s one thirty metres ahead!’ Crake cried.

‘But is it above us or below us?’ Frey said.

‘Forty metres above.’

‘Then why tell me?’ he shouted.

‘Because you told me to! ’ Crake shouted back. ‘Will you stop this damn craft?’

But Frey didn’t want to. He wanted to get this over with. He wanted to be past these invisible enemies and away from this place. There was a terrible feeling of wrongness stealing over him, a numbness prickling up from his toes. He felt flustered and harassed.

‘What the bloody shit is going on, Crake?’ he snarled, leaning forward to try and see what, if anything, was above them. ‘Someone talk to me! Where are they?’

‘There’s one, there’s three in front of us, one behind us now . . . umm . . . two above, thirty and twenty metres, there’s . . .’ Crake swore. ‘The numbers keep changing because you’re moving! How am I supposed to read them out fast enough?’

‘Just tell me if we’re going to hit anything, Crake! It’s pretty damn simple!’

Jez was staring in bewilderment. ‘Will you two calm down? You’re acting like a pair of—’

But then Frey recoiled from the window with a yell. ‘There’s something out there!’

‘What was it?’ Jez asked.

‘We’ve got one twenty . . . ten metres ahead . . . it’s below us though . . .’ Crake was saying.

‘It looked like . . . I don’t know, it looked like it had a face,’ Frey was babbling. His stomach griped and roiled. He could smell his own sweat, and he felt filthy. He wiped at the back of his hands to try and clean them a little, but all it did was smear more dirt into his skin. ‘The ghosts!’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s the ghosts of Rook’s Boneyard!’

‘There aren’t any ghosts, Cap’n,’ Jez said, but her face was red in the lava-light and her voice sounded strange and echoey. Her plain features seemed sly. Did she know something he didn’t? A blast of maniacal laughter came from the mess, Pinn laughing hysterically at something. It sounded like the cackle of a conspirator.

‘Of course there are ghosts!’ Frey turned his attention back to the windglass, trying to will the mist aside. ‘Everyone says.’

‘Two of them are behind us now,’ Crake droned in the background. ‘One ahead, one passing to the side.’

‘Which side?’

‘Does it matter?’

Something swept past the windglass, a stir in the mist. Frey saw the stretched shape of a human form and distorted, ghastly features. He shied back from the windglass with a gasp.

‘What is it?’

‘Didn’t you see it?’

‘I didn’t see anything!’

Frey’s vision was slipping in and out of focus, and refused to stay steady. He burped in his throat, and tasted acid and rotten eggs.

‘Cap’n . . .’ said Crake.

‘I think something’s wrong,’ Frey murmured.

‘Cap’n . . . the second set of numbers . . .’

‘What second set of—’

‘The numbers! They’re counting up from minus twenty towards zero! It’s coming at us from below!’

‘Cap’n! You’re drifting off altitude! You’re diving!’ Jez cried.

Frey saw the altimeter sliding down and grabbed the controls, pulling the Ketty Jay level.

‘It’s still coming!’ Crake shrieked.

‘Move!’ Jez cried, and Frey boosted the engines. The Ketty Jay surged forward, and a split second later there was a deafening explosion outside, slamming against the hull and throwing Crake and Jez across the cabin. The craft heeled hard, swinging to starboard, and Frey fought with the controls as they were propelled blindly into the red murk. The Ketty Jay felt sluggish and wounded. Frey caught a glimpse of the compass on the floor, its needles spinning and switching crazily.

They’re all around us!

Crake started shrieking. ‘Daemons! There are daemons at the windows!’ Frey’s vision blurred and stayed blurred. There seemed to be no strength in his limbs.

‘Cap’n! Above and to starboard!’ Jez shouted.

Frey looked, and saw a round shadow in the mist. Growing, darkening as it approached. A ghost. A great black ghost.

No. A sphere. A metal sphere studded with spikes.

A floating mine.

Jez grabbed the flight stick and wrenched the Ketty Jay to port. Frey fell bonelessly out of his seat. Crake screamed.

There was another explosion. Then blackness, and silence.

Twenty-Eight

Jez Saves The Day - Legends Come To Life - The Dock Master - Some Tactical Thinking - News From The Market

Frey came to a kind of bleary awareness some time later, to find himself crumpled on the floor of the Ketty Jay’s cockpit. His cheek was pressed to the metal, wet with drool. His head pounded as if his brain was trying to kick its way out of his skull.

He groaned and stirred. Jez was sitting in the pilot’s seat. She looked down at him.

‘You’re back,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’

He swore a few times to give her an idea. Crake was collapsed in the opposite corner, contorted uncomfortably beneath the navigator’s desk.

Frey tried to remember how he’d got in this state. He was tempted to blame it on alcohol, but he was certain that he hadn’t been drinking since last night. The last thing he remembered was flying through the fog and fretting about the numbers on the compass.

‘What just happened?’ he asked, pulling himself into a sitting position.

Jez had the compass and the charts spread out untidily on the dash. She consulted both before replying. ‘You all went crazy. Fumes from the lava river, I suppose. It would explain all the ghosts and hallucinations and paranoia.’ She tapped the compass with a fingernail. ‘Turns out this thing is to warn us where the magnetic floating mines are. Someone’s gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure this secret hideout stays secret.’

Frey fought down a swell of nausea. He felt like he’d been poisoned.

‘Apologies for taking the helm without permission, Cap’n,’ said Jez, sounding not very apologetic at all. ‘Had to avoid that mine, and you were out of action. Close thing. The Ketty Jay took a battering. Anyway, we’re nearly there now.’

‘We are?’

‘It’s actually pretty easy once you work it out,’ she said, although he wasn’t sure if she meant following the route to the hideout or flying the Ketty Jay.

He got unsteadily to his feet, feeling vaguely usurped. The sight of Jez in the pilot’s seat disturbed him. It was an unpleasant vision of the future he feared, in which Jez - now possessing the ignition code - stole away with his beloved craft when his back was turned. She looked so damned comfortable there.

Outside, everything was calm and the air had cleared to a faint haze. Though there was still a heavy fog overhead, blocking out the sky, it was possible to see to the rocky floor of the canyon beneath them. A thin river ran along the bottom, hurrying ahead of them, and a light breeze blew against the hull.

Frey rubbed his head. ‘So how come it didn’t affect you?’

She shrugged. ‘Once I saw what was happening, I held my breath. I only took a few lungfuls before we flew out of it.’

Frey narrowed his eyes. The explanation had an over-casual, rehearsed quality to it. As an experienced liar, he knew the signs. So why was his navigator lying to him?

There was a clatter from the passageway behind the cockpit, and Malvery swung round the door. ‘Allsoul’s balls, what were we drinking? ’ he complained. ‘They’re all comatose down there. Even the bloody cat’s conked out.’

‘You weren’t giving the cat rum again, were you?’ Frey asked.

‘He looked thirsty,’ Malvery said, with a sheepish smile.

‘Eyes front, everyone,’ said Jez. ‘I think we’re here.’

They crowded around her and stared through the windglass as the Ketty Jay droned out of the canyon. And there, down among the fog and the mountains of the Hookhollows, hidden in the dreadful depths of Rook’s Boneyard, they found at last what they’d been searching for.

The canyon emptied out into a colossal, gloomy sinkhole, a dozen kloms wide, where the ground dropped seventy metres to a water-logged marsh. Streams from all over the mountains, unable to find another way out, ended up here, tipping over the edge in thin waterfalls. Mineral slurry and volcanic sludge, washed down from distant vents, stained the surface of the marsh with metallic slicks of orange, green or blue. Ill-looking plants choked the water. The air smelled acidic and faintly eggy.

But here, in this festering place, was a town.

It was built from wood and rusting metal, a ramshackle sprawl that had evolved without thought to plan or purpose. Most of it was set on platforms that rose out of the water, supported by a scaffolding of girders. The rest was built on what little land the marsh had to offer: soggy banks and hummocks. Each part was linked by bridges to its neighbours, and lit by strings of electric lamps that hung haphazardly across the thoroughfares.

The buildings varied wildly in quality. Some wouldn’t have looked out of place on a country estate in the tropical south. Others had been thrown together with whatever could be found or brought from the outside. They were made of wood and stone, with slate or corrugated iron roofs. Parts of the settlement were a cluster of shanty-town huts, barely fit for habitation, whereas others were more organised and showed an architect’s touch.

Then there were the aircraft. There had to be two hundred or more, crowding around the town. Frigates floated at anchor, secured by strong chains to stop them drifting. Smaller craft ferried their crews to and from the ground. There was one enormous landing pad, occupying the biggest land mass in the marsh, but even that was nowhere near adequate to cope with the number of craft berthed here. Several large landing pads lay on the surface of the marsh. They were temporary-looking things, buoyed up by flaking aerium tanks filled from portable engines to prevent the pads from sinking.

Frey stared at the multitude. He saw freighters, barques, fighters of all description, double-hulled caravels, ironclads, monitors and corvettes. The air above the town was busy with craft taking off and setting down, a restless to and fro. A Rainbird-class hunter-killer, sleek and vicious, slipped past them to their starboard and headed into the canyon they’d just exited.

‘That’s a bit more than just a hideout,’ Malvery murmured, amazed. ‘There’s a whole bloody port down here.’

And suddenly Frey knew where he was. Nothing else matched the picture. He’d always believed this place was a myth, a wistful dream for freebooters all over Vardia. But now it was laid out before his eyes; decaying, shabby, but undoubtedly real. The legendary pirate town, hidden from the Coalition Navy and ruled by the famed pirate Orkmund.

Retribution Falls.

Frey could see no indication of where he was supposed to land, no spotlights to guide him in, so he squeezed into a vacant spot on the main pad. When he and his crew opened the cargo ramp to disembark they found someone waiting for them. He was tall and doughy around the belly and face, with one lazy eye and a gormless smile.

‘You signed in yet?’ he asked Frey.

Frey was momentarily lost for an answer. The man had just watched them set down. He considered asking how he might possibly have got to the dock master’s office and back while still in mid-air, but eventually he settled on an easier response.

‘No.’

‘You should sign in. Orkmund’s orders.’

Frey felt a thrill of excitement at the name. That settled it. This was Retribution Falls alright.

‘Where’s the dock master?’

‘You the captain?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Follow me, I’ll take you.’

Frey told the others to wait by the Ketty Jay, and then trailed after the man towards the dock master’s office. It was a grim, low-ceilinged affair, more like a large shed than an administrative building. Dirty windows were divided into small rectangular panes. The door stuck and had to be wrenched open: the frame had warped in the dank air.

Inside, the gloom was barely leavened by a single oil lantern. The dock master - a thin, old man with a pinched face - was hunched over a desk, writing with a pen. On the other side of the room was a lectern, where a huge book lay open. It was full of names and dates.

Frey waited to be noticed. The man with the lazy eye waited with him. The smell from the swamp lingered in the nostrils, faintly disgusting. Frey suspected that the locals didn’t notice it any more.

After a short time, the dock master looked up. ‘Well, sign in, then!’ he snapped, indicating the book on the lectern. ‘Olric, honestly! Why don’t you just tell him to sign in?’

Olric looked shamefaced. Frey went over to the book and picked up the pen that lay next to it. He scanned over the entries. Each line bore the name of a captain, the name of an aircraft, and the date and time of arrival and, in some cases, departure. At the bottom of each double page the dock master had signed his name and title in crabbed script.

He flicked back a few pages, idly searching for someone he knew. Maybe Trinica would be in here.

‘Busy recently, aren’t you?’ he commented. ‘You usually get this much traffic?’

‘Just sign,’ the dock master said impatiently, not looking up from his records.

Frey’s decision to confine most of the crew to the craft wasn’t popular with one man in particular.

‘You stinking bastard, Frey!’ Pinn cried. ‘You didn’t even believe Retribution Falls existed until now! I told you we should come here when we were back in Yortland, but oh, no! You thought: let’s all laugh at Pinn! Well I called it right, and I deserve to come.’

‘Shut your fat meat-hole, Pinn,’ Malvery said. ‘Cap’n’s given you an order.’

‘Oh really? Well he can stuff it up his arse with all the other orders he’s given me!’

Frey looked at Silo. ‘If he tries to leave, shoot him,’ he said, only half-joking.

‘Cap’n,’ Silo replied, priming his shotgun with a crunch.

Pinn looked around at the rest of the crew, finding no support, and then stamped back into the depths of the craft, muttering mutinously.

‘Jez, Malvery, come on,’ he said. ‘We keep a low profile, have a look around, keep our ears open. And don’t anybody call me anything but Cap’n, okay? I don’t want to hear my name spoken outside of the Ketty Jay.’

‘Right-o.’

‘Everyone got revolvers? Good. You never know.’

They headed across the landing pad towards the bridge to the town. Frey was rather pleased with himself for standing firm against Pinn’s outburst. Pinn was envisioning a night out in this pirate haven, but Frey needed to be able to effect a quick escape if necessary, without the need to go searching under bar tables for his drunken crew. Taking the whole group out would be like trying to herd cats.

He reviewed the tactics behind his choice of landing party. Separating Malvery and Pinn was the key. Pinn wouldn’t cause any trouble without the doctor’s back-up, and since Malvery was coming along, he didn’t care what happened to Pinn. Malvery was useful muscle and had a bluff charm that would play well, but the two of them together in a place like Retribution Falls would result in alcoholic carnage, sure as bird shit on statues.

Jez would also be useful. She was smart, observant, and she had eyes like a hawk. Plus she was the only sensible one among them. He didn’t count Crake. Crake dealt with daemons: nobody could say that was sensible.

But he had an ulterior motive in bringing Jez. He wanted to keep an eye on her. As grateful as he was that she’d saved their lives, he was suspicious. It puzzled him that the fumes hadn’t seemed to affect her, and her explanation was weak. He didn’t want to leave her alone on his aircraft. Not now she knew the ignition code. He wasn’t so sure he trusted her.

The others wouldn’t mind staying on the Ketty Jay. Crake, as he was never a freebooter, didn’t understand the legend and allure of Retribution Falls. He had no desire to see the place. Harkins didn’t like crowds or strangers. He’d rather be secure in his quarters, living in terror of the cat, who would wait for him to fall asleep before trying to suffocate him. And it would be too dangerous to take Silo. A Murthian would attract unwanted and hostile attention in a town like this. Besides, Silo had work to do. He needed to check over the Ketty Jay and repair any damage from the mines.

All in all, he had the whole thing figured out.

Not bad, Frey, he thought. That’s the sort of thinking a real captain does. That’s how to handle a crew.

He was in the mood for self-congratulation, despite his near-catastrophic failure to lead them through Rook’s Boneyard. The triumph of finding Retribution Falls outweighed all that. This must have been how Cruwen and Skale felt when they discovered New Vardia. He was an explorer now. Whatever happened after this, he had to admit, he felt more . . . well, more like a man than he ever had before.

In that moment when he pressed down on his guns and blew the Ace of Skulls into a flaming ruin, his life as he knew it had ended. Every day since then had been one clawed back. He’d been forced to fight every step. It was exhausting, and terrifying, and most of the time he hated it. But just sometimes, when he could snatch a rare instant of peace amid the chaos, he felt different. He felt good about himself. And it had been a long, long time since he’d felt like that.

They took the bridge from the landing pad to the nearest platform, and discovered that Retribution Falls was even more unpleasant up close, and a far cry from the legends.

The narrow streets were weathered and worn beyond their years. The marsh air ate through metal, twisted wood, and brought mould to stone. Everything flaked and peeled. Generators buzzed and reeked, providing the power for the lights that hung on wires overhead to stave off the gloom. It was cold, yet their clothes became damp and stuck to them. The smell of the marsh mingled with that of a thousand unwashed bodies.

Retribution Falls was stuffed with every kind of pirate, smuggler, fraudster and criminal that Frey could imagine. Every pub and inn was crammed to capacity. The streets were choked, the whores hollow-eyed and exhausted. Inside, the humidity and the heat of dozens of bodies made things uncomfortable. Drunken men with short tempers fought hard. Guns were drawn, and bodies fell.

There was a wildness here that he found frightening. It was a jostling, stinking pandemonium of rotted teeth and leering faces. Danger surrounded them. He found he actually missed the spectre of the militia. He liked his illegal doings to be conducted within the safety of an orderly civilisation. Total lawlessness meant survival based on strength or cunning, and Frey didn’t have too much of either.

They passed raucous bars and stepped over men lying in the thoroughfares, rum-soaked, unconscious and recently robbed. Malvery eyed up the bars as they passed, but without Pinn as his accomplice, he behaved himself and stuck close to his captain. Occasionally he’d shove someone out of their path; his size and fierce glare discouraged arguments.

‘Not quite the utopia I’d envisioned, Cap’n,’ Jez murmured.

Frey didn’t quite understand what she meant by ‘utopia’ - it sounded like one of Crake’s words - but he got the idea.

‘All those craft, all these people,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it seem like there’s far more pirates here than this place was built to hold?’

‘Certainly does,’ she said.

‘And what does that say to you?’

‘Says they’re being gathered here for something.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ he replied.

The market was a little less crowded than the streets and bars, but not by much. It sat on a platform all of its own, linked by bridges to several of its neighbours. Oil lamps hung from the awnings of rickety stalls, adding a smoky tang to the already fouled air. Their flickering light mixed uneasily with the electric bulbs hanging overhead, casting a strange glow on the heaving sea of faces that surged beneath.

Malvery pushed his way through the crowd, with Frey and Jez following in his slipstream. The stalls they passed were guarded by shotgun-wielding heavies. There were all manner of wares for sale: trinkets and knick-knacks, hardware, boots and coats, navigational charts. Dubious fried meats were offered to hungry shoppers, and someone was roasting chestnuts nearby. The noise of yelled conversation was deafening.

‘You get the impression that this has all got a little out of control?’ Jez screamed in Frey’s ear.

Frey didn’t hear what she said, so he nodded as if he agreed, and then replied, ‘I think whoever’s running this show, they’ve let things get a bit out of control!’

Jez, who also hadn’t heard him, said, ‘Definitely!’

Frey spotted a stall on the edge of the market platform, where the traffic wasn’t quite so oppressive and it was possible to see the darkening marsh in the background. One of several signs that hung from its pole-and-canvas frontage declared:

Breathe the Free Aire! Filters 8 Shillies!

He tapped Malvery on the shoulder and steered him over. The storekeeper saw them coming and perked up. He was a thin, ginger-haired man with an enormous, puckered patch of scar tissue that ran across one side of his face. It looked like he’d been mauled by a bear.

‘How did you get that?’ Frey asked conversationally, indicating the scar.

‘How did I get what?’ the storekeeper asked, genuinely puzzled.

Frey thought a moment and then let it drop. ‘These filters you’re selling. They’d protect us against the bad air in the canyons?’

The storekeeper grinned. ‘Guaranteed. Did your old ones let you down?’

‘Something like that.’

‘That’s rough, friend. Well, you can rely on these.’ He pulled one out of a crate behind him and put it on. It was a black metal oval with several breathing-slits that fitted over the mouth and nose, secured over the head by a strip of leather. ‘Wo wetter n orb wetwibooshun bawls.’

‘What?’

The shopkeeper took off the mask. ‘I said, no better in all Retribution Falls.’

‘Okay. I need seven.’

‘Eight,’ Jez corrected. When Frey and Malvery both looked at her, she said: ‘The cat.’

‘Right,’ said Frey. ‘Eight. Give me a discount.’

‘Six bits.’

‘Three.’

‘Five.’

‘Four.’

‘Four and eight shillies.’

‘Done.’

‘You won’t regret it,’ the storekeeper promised, as he began counting out filters from the crate. ‘First time in Retribution Falls?’

‘How’d you guess?’

‘Lot of newcomers recently. You just got the look.’

‘Why so many?’

The storekeeper dumped an armful of filters on the cheap wooden table that passed as a counter. ‘Same reason as you, I expect.’

‘We’re just here for the beer and scenery,’ Malvery grinned. The storekeeper laughed at that, revealing a set of teeth better kept hidden.

‘You heard about what’s going on tomorrow?’ the storekeeper asked, as Frey laid down his coins on the counter.

‘Like you noticed, we just got here,’ Frey replied.

‘You know where Orkmund’s place is?’ He indicated a distant platform. It was too dark to make out anything but a sprinkle of lights. ‘Ask anyone, you’ll find it. Be there tomorrow at midday.’

‘What’s happening?’

‘Orkmund’s got something to say. Reckon it might be time.’

Malvery did a passable job of pretending he knew what the man was talking about. ‘You think so?’

‘Well, look around,’ said the storekeeper. ‘Some of these boys are going stir crazy. Can’t keep a bunch of pirates cooped up like this. They came to fight, and if they can’t fight someone else, they’ll fight each other. I reckon he’s gonna give the word to start the attack.’

‘Let me at ’em,’ said Frey. ‘Can’t wait to show that lot.’

‘You know who we’re fighting?’ the storekeeper gasped, which wrong-footed Frey totally.

‘Er . . . what?’

‘You know where Orkmund’s sending us?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Nobody knows. That’s what we’re all waiting to find out.’

Frey backpedalled. ‘No, I meant, you know . . . the general them. Let me at them. Whoever they are.’ He trailed off lamely.

The storekeeper gave him an odd look, then snatched the coins off the counter and called out to a passer-by, trying to lure them over. Dismissed, Frey and the others moved away, distributing the filters between them.

‘Orkmund’s got himself a pirate fleet,’ Jez said. ‘That’s how Grephen’s going to do it. That’s how he’ll seize power. He’s made a deal with the king of the pirates.’

‘But there’s one last thing I don’t understand,’ Frey replied. ‘How’d Duke Grephen get Orkmund on his side?’

‘Paid him, probably,’ Malvery opined.

‘With what? Grephen doesn’t have the money to support an army. Or at least Crake doesn’t think so, and he should know.’

‘Crake could be wrong,’ Jez said. ‘Just because he has the accent doesn’t mean he has some great insight into the aristocracy. There’s a lot you don’t know about him.’

Frey frowned. He was getting heartily sick of this tension between Jez and Crake. They’d been barely able to work together when he needed them to navigate through the canyons of Rook’s Boneyard. Something needed to be done.

‘Back to the Ketty Jay,’ he said. ‘We’ve learned enough for now. Let’s see what Orkmund says tomorrow.’

‘We’re not going to have a drink?’ Malvery asked, horrified. ‘I mean, in the interests of gathering information?’

‘Not this time. Early start in the morning. I’m not having any trouble tonight.’

He started off back towards the landing pad. Malvery trudged behind. ‘I miss the old Cap’n,’ he grumbled.

Frey had almost all the information he needed. He was missing only one piece. Someone was backing Duke Grephen, providing the money to build an army of mercenaries big enough to fight the Coalition Navy and take the capital of Vardia. He needed know who. When that last piece fell into place, he’d understand the conspiracy he was tangled up in. Then, he could do something about it.

A serene and peaceful feeling settled on him as they made their way back towards the Ketty Jay. Tomorrow would bring an answer. He didn’t know how he knew, but he was certain of it.

Tomorrow. That’s when we start turning this around.

Twenty-Nine

Intervention - The Confessions Of Grayther Crake - An Experiment, And The Tragedy That Follows

Crake was shaken out of sleep by Frey’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Get up,’ Frey said. ‘What is it?’ he murmured.

‘Come on,’ insisted the captain. ‘I need you in the mess.’

Crake swung his legs off the bunk. He was still fully clothed, having gone to sleep as soon as Frey left the Ketty Jay. He’d hoped to shake off the headache he’d picked up from breathing the lava fumes. It hadn’t worked.

‘What’s so urgent, Frey? Stove making spooky noises? Daemonic activity in the stew?’

‘There’s just something we need to sort out, that’s all.’

Something in his tone told Crake that Frey wasn’t going to let this go, so he got to his feet with a sigh and shambled after his captain, out into the passageway. But instead of going down the ladder to the mess, Frey walked past it and knocked on the door of the navigator’s quarters. Jez opened up. She glanced from Frey to Crake, and was immediately suspicious.

‘Can you come to the mess?’ Frey asked, though it sounded less a request than an order.

Jez stepped out of her quarters and shut the door behind her.

They climbed down into the mess. Silo was in there, smoking a roll-up and drinking coffee. He was petting Slag, who was lying flat on the table. At the sight of Jez, the cat jumped to his feet and hissed. As soon as the way was clear, he bolted up the ladder and was gone.

Silo looked up with an expression of mild disinterest.

‘How’s the Ketty Jay?’ Frey asked.

‘She battered, but she tough. Need a workshop to make her pretty again, but nothing hurt too bad inside. I fixed her best I can.’

‘She’ll fly?’

‘She’ll fly fine.’

Frey nodded. ‘Can you give us the room?’

Silo spat in his palm and stubbed the roll-up into it. Then he got up and left. Since speaking with Silo, Crake couldn’t help seeing the Murthian’s relationship with his captain in a new light. They’d been companions so long that they barely noticed one another any more. They wore each other like old clothes.

‘Sit down,’ Frey said, motioning to the table in the centre of the mess. Jez and Crake sat opposite one another. The captain produced a bottle of rum from inside his coat and put it on the table between them.

‘She doesn’t drink,’ Crake said. He was beginning to get a dreadful idea what this was about.

‘Then you drink it,’ Frey replied. He straightened, standing over them. ‘Something’s going on between you two. Has been since you went to Scorchwood Heights. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to know, ’cause it’s no business of mine. But I need my crew to act like a crew, and I can’t have this damned bickering all the time. The only way we’re gonna survive is if we work together. If you can’t, next port we reach, one of you is getting off.’

To his surprise, Crake realised that Frey meant it. The captain looked from one of them to the other to ensure the message had sunk in.

‘Don’t come out of this room till you’ve settled it,’ he said, and then he climbed through the hatch and was gone.

There was a long and grudging silence. Crake’s cheeks burned with anger. He felt awkward and foolish, a child who had been told off by his tutor. Jez looked at him coldly.

Damn her. I don’t owe her an explanation. She’d never understand.

He hated Frey for meddling in something that didn’t concern him. The captain had no idea what he was stirring up. Couldn’t they just let it lie? Let her believe what she wanted. Better than having to think about it again. Better than having to face the memories of that night.

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Jez said.

He met her gaze resentfully.

‘What the Shacklemore said,’ she prompted. ‘You stabbed your niece. Seventeen times with a letter knife.’

He swallowed against a lump in his throat. ‘It’s true,’ he said.

‘Why?’ she whispered. There was something desperate in the way she said it. Some wide-eyed need to understand how he could do something so utterly loathsome.

Crake stared hard at the table, fighting down the shameful heat of gathering tears.

Jez sat back in her chair. ‘I can take the half-wits and the incompetents, the alcoholics and the cowards,’ she said. ‘I can take that we shot down a freighter and killed dozens of people on board. But I can’t be on this craft with a man who knifed his eight-year-old niece to death, Crake. I just can’t.’ She folded her arms and looked away, fighting back tears herself. ‘How can you be how you are and be a child-murderer underneath? How can I trust anyone now?’

‘I’m not a murderer,’ Crake said.

‘You killed that girl!’

He couldn’t bear the accusations any more. Damn her, damn her, he’d tell her the whole awful tale and let her judge him as she would. It had been seven months pent up inside him, and he’d never spoken of it in all that time. It was the injustice, the righteous indignation of the falsely accused, which finally opened the gates.

He took a shaky breath and spoke very calmly. ‘I stabbed her,’ he said. ‘Seventeen times with a letter knife. But I didn’t murder her.’ He felt the muscles of his face pulling towards a sob, and it took him a moment to control himself.

‘I didn’t murder her, because she’s still alive.’

The echo chamber sat in the centre of Crake’s sanctum, silent and threatening. It was built like a bathysphere, fashioned from riveted metal and studded with portholes. A small, round door was set into one side. Heavy cables ran from it, snaking across the floor to electrical output points and other destinations. It was half a foot thick and surrounded by a secondary network of defensive measures.

Crake still didn’t feel even close to being safe.

He paced beneath the stone arches of the old wine cellar. It was cold with the slow chill of the small hours, and his boot heels clicked as he walked. Electric lamps had been placed around the echo chamber - the only source of light. The pillars threw long, tapering shadows, splaying outward in all directions.

I have it. I have it at last. And yet I daren’t turn it on.

It had taken him months to obtain the echo chamber. Months of wheedling and begging and scraping to the hoary old bastard in the big house. Months of pointless tasks and boring assignments. And hadn’t that rot-hearted weasel enjoyed every moment of it! Didn’t he relish seeing his shiftless second son forced to run around at his beck and call! He’d strung it out and strung it out, savouring the power it gave him. Rogibald Crake, industrial tycoon, was a man who liked to be obeyed.

‘You wouldn’t have to do any of this if you had a decent job,’ he’d say. ‘You wouldn’t need my money then.’

But he did need his father’s money. And this was Rogibald’s way of punishing him for choosing not to pursue the career picked out for him. Crake had come out of university having been schooled in the arts of politics, and promptly announced that he didn’t want to be a politician. Rogibald had never forgiven him for that. He couldn’t understand why his son would take an uninspiring position in a law firm, nor why it took over three years for him to ‘work out what he wanted to do with his life’.

But what Rogibald didn’t know, what nobody knew, was that Crake had it worked out long ago. Ever since university. Ever since he discovered daemonism. After that, everything else became petty and insignificant. What did he care about the stuffy and corrupt world of politics, when he could make deals with beings that were not even of this world? That was power.

But daemonism was an expensive and time-consuming occupation. Materials were hard to come by. Books were rare and valuable. Everything had to be done in secret. It required hours of study and experimentation every night, and a sanctum took up a great deal of space. He simply couldn’t manage the demands of a serious career while pursuing his study of daemonism, and yet he couldn’t get the things he needed on the salary of a lawyer’s clerk.

So he was forced to rely on his father for patronage. He feigned a passion for invention, and declared that he was studying the sciences and needed equipment to do it. Rogibald thought he was being ridiculous, but he was rather amused by the whole affair. It pleased him to let his son have enough rope to hang himself. No doubt he was waiting for Crake to realise that he was playing a fool’s game, and to come crawling back. To have Crake admit that he was a failure, that Rogibald was right all along - that would be the sweetest prize. So he indulged his son’s ‘hobby’ and watched eagerly for his downfall.

Since Crake was unable to afford accommodation grand enough to suit his needs, his father allowed him to live in a house on the family estate which he shared with his elder brother Condred, and Condred’s wife and daughter. It was a move calculated to humiliate him. The brothers’ disdain for each other was scorching.

Condred was the favoured son, who had followed his father into the family business. He was a straight-laced, strict young man who always acceded to Father’s wishes and always took his side. He had nothing but contempt for his younger brother, whom he regarded as a layabout.

‘I’ll take him under my roof if you ask me to, Father,’ he said, in front of Crake. ‘If only to show him how a respectable family live. Perhaps I can teach him some responsibility.’

Condred’s sanctimonious charity had galled him then, but Crake took some comfort in knowing that Condred regretted the offer now. Condred had envisioned a short stay. Perhaps he thought that Crake would be quickly shamed into moving out and getting a good job. But he’d reckoned without his younger brother’s determination to pursue his quest for knowledge. Once Crake saw the empty wine cellar, he wouldn’t be moved. He could endure anything, if he could have that. It was the perfect sanctum.

More than three years had passed. Three years in which Crake spent all his free time behind the locked door of the wine cellar, underground. Every night he’d come back from work, share an awkward dinner with his disapproving brother and his snooty, dried-up bitch of a wife, then disappear downstairs. Crake would have happily avoided the dinner, but Condred insisted that he was a guest and should eat with the family. It was the proper thing to do, even if all concerned hated it.

How typical of Condred. Cutting off his nose to spite his face, all in the name of etiquette. Moron.

The only thing that made life in the house bearable, apart from his sanctum, was his niece. She was a delightful thing: bright, intelligent, friendly and somehow unstained by the sour attitude of her parents. She was fascinated by her uncle Grayther’s secret experiments, and pestered him daily to show her what new creation he was working on. She was convinced that his sanctum was a wonderland of toys and fascinating machines.

Crake found it a charming idea. He began to buy toys from a local toymaker to give to her, passing them off as his own. Her parents knew what he was doing, and sneered in private, but they didn’t say a word about it to their daughter. She idolised their layabout guest, and Crake loved her in return.

Those three years of studying, experimenting, trial and error, had brought him to this point. He’d learned the basics and applied them. He’d summoned daemons and bid them to his will. He’d thralled objects, made simple communications, even healed wounds and sickness through the Art. He corresponded often with more experienced daemonists and was well thought of by them.

All daemonism was dangerous, and Crake had been very cautious all this time. He’d gone step by tiny step, growing in confidence, never overreaching himself. He knew well the kinds of things that happened to daemonists who attempted procedures beyond their experience. But it was possible to be too cautious. At some point, it was necessary to take the plunge.

The echo chamber was the next step. Echo theory was cutting-edge daemonic science, requiring complex calculations and nerves of steel. With it, a daemonist could reach into realms never before accessed, to pluck strange new daemons from the aether. The old guard, the ancient, fuddy-duddy daemonists, wouldn’t touch it; but Crake couldn’t resist. The old ways had been mapped and explored, but this was new ground, and Crake wanted to be one of the first to the frontier.

Tonight, he was attempting a procedure he’d never tried before. He was going to bring life to the lifeless.

Tonight, he was going to create a golem.

He stopped his pacing and returned to the echo chamber, checking the connections for the twentieth time. The echo chamber was linked by soundproofed tubes to a bizarre armoured suit that he’d found in a curio shop. The shopkeeper had no idea what it was. He theorised that it might have been made for working in extreme environments, but Crake privately disagreed. It was crafted to fit a hunchbacked giant, and it wasn’t airtight. He guessed it was probably ornamental, or a sculptural showpiece made by some deranged metalworker. At any rate, Crake had to have it. It was so fascinatingly grotesque, and perfect for his purposes.

Now it stood in his sanctum, ready to accept the daemon he intended to draw into it. An empty vessel, waiting to be filled. He studied the armoured suit for a long time, until it began to unnerve him. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it was about to move.

Surrounding the echo chamber and the suit was a circle of resonator masts. These electrically powered tuning forks vibrated at different wavelengths, designed to form a cage of frequencies through which a daemon couldn’t pass. Crake checked the cables, following them across the floor of the sanctum to the electrical output he’d had wired in to the wall. Once satisfied, he turned them on one by one, adjusting the dials set into their bases. The hairs on his nape began to prickle as the air thickened with frequencies beyond his range of hearing.

‘Well,’ he said aloud. ‘I suppose I’m ready.’

Standing on the opposite side of the echo chamber to the armoured suit was a control console. It was a panel of brass dials, waist-high, set into a frame that allowed it to be moved around on rollers. Next to the controls was a desk, scattered with open books and notepads displaying procedures and mathematical formulae. Crake knew them by heart, but he scanned them again anyway. Putting off the moment when he’d have to begin.

He hadn’t been so terrified since the first time he summoned a daemon. His pulse pounded at his throat. The cellar felt freezing cold. He’d prepared, and prepared, and prepared, but no preparation would ever be enough. The cost of getting this wrong could be terrible. Death would be a mercy if an angry daemon got its hands on him.

But he couldn’t be cautious for ever. To be a rank-and-file practitioner of daemonism wasn’t enough. He wanted the power and renown of the masters.

He went to the console and activated the echo chamber. A bass hum came from the sphere. He left it for a few minutes to warm up, concentrating on his breathing. He had a feeling he might suddenly faint if he didn’t keep taking deep breaths.

It’s still not too late to back out, Grayther.

But that was just fear talking. He’d made this decision long ago. He steeled his nerve and went back to the console. Steadily, he began to turn the dials.

There was an art to catching a daemon. The trick was to match the vibrations of the equipment to the vibrations of the daemon, bringing the entity into phase with what the uneducated called the ‘real’ world. With minor daemons - little motes of power and awareness, possessing no more intelligence than a beetle - the procedure was simple enough. It was rather like fishing: you placed a sonic lure and drew them in.

But the greater daemons were another matter entirely. They had to be caught and forced into phase. A greater daemon might have six or seven primary resonances that all needed to be matched before it could be dragged unwillingly before the daemonist. And once there, the daemon needed to be contained. It was a foolish man who tried to deal with an entity like that without taking measures to protect themselves.

Crake wasn’t stupid enough to think he could handle a greater daemon yet. He was aiming lower. Something with a dog-like level of intelligence would suit him very nicely. If he could thrall an entity like that into his armoured suit, he’d have a golem dull enough to be biddable. And if it proved troublesome, he had procedures in place to drive it out and back into the aether.

But summoning daemons was dangerous in many ways. A man didn’t always know exactly what he was getting. He might fish for a minnow and find a shark on the line.

Crake had made calculations, based on the findings of other echo theorists and his own ideas. He’d identified a range of frequencies where he’d be likely to find what he wanted. Then he commenced the hunt proper.

The echo chamber began to vibrate and whine as he searched along the bandwidth. Daemonism was as much about feel and instinct as science. Crake closed his eyes and concentrated, turning the dials slowly.

There it was. That creeping sensation of being watched. He’d found something. Now he had to catch it before it slipped away.

He set up new resonances, starting high and low and then moving them closer together, feeling out the shape of the entity. He stopped when he felt the resistance of it.

The reaction was more pronounced now: a cold shiver, a slight feeling of vertigo and disorientation. He had to keep his eyes open. When he closed them, he started tipping forward.

He looked at the dials. The thing was huge, spread right across the subsonics.

Let it go, he told himself. Let it go. It’s too big.

He had it now, though. There was no way he could hold on to something like that with his standard equipment. It would simply phase into a different frequency and escape. But with the echo chamber, he could keep it pinned, pounding it with confusing signals that all interfered with one another.

He could get this one. Forget the golem, forget everything else. He just wanted to see it. Then he’d send it back. But just to see it!

Excited, riding on a fear-driven high, he worked the dials feverishly. He set up more vibrations, seeking the daemon’s primary frequencies, narrowing and narrowing the bandwidth until he matched them. The daemon was shifting wavelengths, trying to escape the cage, but he shifted with it, never letting it get away from him. The closer he came, the less space the daemon had to wriggle.

The air was throbbing. The echo chamber pulsed with invisible energies.

Spit and blood, this is working! This is actually working!

Once he had it fixed as best he could, he stepped away from the console and went to peer inside the echo chamber. Through the porthole in the door, he could see that the sphere was empty. But he wasn’t disheartened. Inside, perspectives bent out of shape, and the air warped in eye-watering contortions. Something was coming. He could hardly breathe for terror and fascination. Leaning close to the thick glass, he tried to see further inside.

A colossal, mad eye stared back at him.

He yelled, falling away from the porthole, his heart thumping hard enough to hurt. That vast eye had surged out of nowhere, surfacing into his reality, burning itself on to his consciousness. He saw it now, impossibly huge, belonging to something far bigger than the echo chamber could contain.

There was a heavy impact, and the echo chamber rocked to one side. Crake sat where he’d fallen, transfixed. Again, the sound of a giant’s fist pounding. The echo chamber dented outwards.

Oh, no. No, no.

He scrambled to his feet and ran for the console. Get rid of it, get rid of it, any way you can.

Another impact, sending a shudder through the whole sanctum. The electric lamps flickered. One tipped over, crashing to the ground. Crake lost his footing, stumbled onwards.

And then he heard her scream.

The sound froze him to the bone. It was more dreadful than anything he could imagine; more dreadful than the thing in the echo chamber. His world tipped into the primal, inescapable horror of a nightmare as he looked over at his niece, standing there in her white nightdress. She was just outside the circle of resonator poles, transfixed by the scene before her.

He’d never know how she’d got the key to the wine cellar. Perhaps she’d found an old copy in some dusty, hidden place. Had she been planning this moment ever since? Had she been unable to sleep, so keen was she to see the secret wonderland of toys where her uncle Grayther worked? Had she set her clock to wake her, hoping to sneak down in the dead of night when she thought he wouldn’t be there?

He’d never know how or why, but it didn’t matter in the end. What mattered was that she was here, and the daemon was uncontainable. The door of the echo chamber flew open, and the last thing he knew before his life changed for ever was a hurricane wind that smelled of sulphur, and a deafening, unearthly howl.

When his senses returned to him, the sanctum was dark and silent. A single electric lamp remained unsmashed. It lay on its side near the echo chamber, underlighting the looming shape of the armoured suit, which was still connected by cables to the dented metal sphere.

Crake was disorientated. It took him several seconds to understand where he was. His mind felt scratched and sore, as if rodents had been scrabbling at it from the inside, wounding his senses with small, dirty claws. The daemon had been in his head, in his thoughts. But what had it done there?

He realised he was standing. He looked down, and saw in his hand a letter knife with the insignia of his university on the hilt. The knife and the hand that held it were slick and dark with blood.

There was a clicking noise from the shadows. Red smears on the stones. He followed them with his eyes, and there he found her.

Her white nightdress was soaked in red. There were slits in her arms and throat, where the knife had plunged. They welled with rich, thick blood, spilling out in pulses. She was gaping like a fish, making clicking noises in her throat. Each breath was a shallow gasp, and her lips and chin were red. Her brown hair was matted into sodden wads.

Her eyes. Pleading. Not understanding. Dazed with incomprehensible agony. She didn’t know about death. She’d never thought it could happen. She’d trusted him, with a blind, unthinking love, and he’d turned on her with a blade.

It was the daemon’s revenge, for daring to summon it from the aether. It had been cruel enough to leave him his life and wits intact.

Crake hadn’t known that pain and despair and horror could reach the heights that they now did. The sheer intensity of it was such that he felt he should die from it. If only the darkness would come back, if only his heart would stop! But there was no mercy for him. Realisation smashed down upon him like a tidal wave, and he staggered and gagged, the knife falling from numb fingers.

She was still alive. Alive, begging him to make the pain stop, like some half-broken animal ruined under the wheels of a motorised carriage. Begging him to make it better somehow.

‘She’s a child!’ he screamed at the darkness, as if the daemon was still there to be accused. ‘She’s just a damned child!’

But when the echoes had died, there was only the wet clicking from his niece as she tried to draw breath.

What overtook him then was a grief so overwhelming that it drowned his senses. He was seized by an idea, mad and desperate, and he acted on it without thought for consequence. Nothing else was important. Nothing except undoing what had been done, in the only way he could think of.

He scooped her up in his arms. She was so light, so thin and pale, white skin streaked with trails of gore. He carried her to the echo chamber, and gently placed her inside. He pushed the door shut. Despite the abuse it had suffered, the lock engaged and it sealed itself. Then a weakness took him, and he fell to his knees, his forehead pressed against the porthole in the door, sobs wracking his body.

She was lying on her back, her head tilted, looking at him through the glass. Blood bubbled from her lips. Her gaze met his, and it was too terrible to stand. He flung himself away, and went to the control console.

There, he did what had to be done.

Jez had seen men cry before, but never like this. This was heartbreaking. Crake’s sobs were deep, wild, dredged up from a depth of pain that Jez couldn’t have imagined he held inside him. His story had become almost impossible to understand as he neared the end. He couldn’t even form a sentence through the hacking sobs that shook his whole body.

‘I didn’t know!’ he cried, his face blotched and his beard wet with tears. His nose was running, but he didn’t trouble to wipe it. He was ugly and shattered before her. It hurt to see him so. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing! Only it . . . it didn’t work like I thought. The tra . . . the tra . . . transfer wasn’t perfect. She’s different now, she’s not . . . like she was . . .’ He gasped in a breath. ‘I just wanted to save her.’

But Jez couldn’t give him pity or sympathy. She’d hardened herself too much. She saw the tragedy of him now, but if she let herself forgive him, if she gave in even a little, there would be no going back. He could perhaps be excused the crime of stabbing her, if he wasn’t in his right mind. But what he’d done next was nothing short of diabolical.

‘One thing,’ she said. Her voice was so tight that it hardly sounded like her. ‘Her name.’

‘What?’

‘All this time, you never told me your niece’s name. You’ve avoided it.’

Crake stared at her with red eyes. ‘You know her name.’

‘Say it!’ she demanded. Because she needed just this final closure, before she could walk away.

He swallowed and choked down a sob.

‘Bessandra,’ he said. ‘Bessandra was her name. But we all just called her Bess.’

Thirty

Orkmund’s Address - A Familiar Object - Frey Puts It All Together - ‘Gotcha!’

By midday, a crowd had gathered outside Orkmund’s stronghold.

In a rare moment of architectural forethought, the stronghold had been built in front of a large square which was employed for the purpose of meetings, markets and occasional executions or bouts of trial-by-combat. A wooden stage, now groaning under the weight of spectators, stood in the centre for just this purpose. Another, more temporary one had been erected just outside the stronghold, and was guarded by burly men with cutlasses. This would be Orkmund’s podium.

Frey pushed through the press of bodies, with Malvery clearing the way ahead. Pinn and Jez came behind. Pinn had been subdued by his confinement in the Ketty Jay the night before, and Frey had extracted promises of good behaviour today. He charged Malvery with enforcing them, knowing how the doctor liked to bully Pinn.

It was fun to torment the young pilot now and then, but Frey knew how much it meant to him to see Retribution Falls before they left. Just so he could say he’d been. Just so he could tell Lisinda of his adventures, on that day when he returned in triumph to sweep her into his arms. Having asserted his authority, Frey was happy to give Pinn a little slack.

The stronghold was constructed in a squared-off horseshoe shape, with two wings projecting forward around a small interior courtyard. It was dull and forbidding, with square windows and iron-banded doors. Its walls were dark stone, streaked with mould. A place built for someone who had no interest in flair or aesthetics. A fortress.

Surrounding the stronghold was a ramshackle barricade of metal spikes and crossed girders, eight feet high and surmounted by wooden watchtowers. The watchtowers were manned by rifle-wielding pirates, who scanned the crowd below them, no doubt deciding who they’d shoot first if they had the chance. In the middle of the barricade was a crude gate, a thick slab of metal on rollers that could be slid back and forth to grant access to the courtyard.

Frey and the others fought their way to a vantage point as the gate began to open and the crowd erupted in ear-pummelling cheers. The floor shook with the stamping of feet. It occurred to Frey that they were standing on a huge platform that was held up by a scaffolding of girders, and that it might not be built to take this kind of weight. It would be an ignominious end to his adventure, to sink to the bottom of a foetid marsh beneath a hundred tons of unwashed pirate flesh.

It wasn’t until Orkmund climbed the steps to his stage that Frey caught sight of him. The pirate captain Orkmund, scourge of the Coalition in the years before the Aerium Wars, who disappeared fifteen years ago and was thought by most to be dead. But he wasn’t dead: he was building Retribution Falls. A home for pirates, safe from the Navy. A place where they could conduct their business in peace - with a hefty cut for Orkmund, of course.

Though he must have been in his mid-fifties, Orkmund still cut an impressive figure. He was well over two metres high, bald-headed and thickset, with squashed features that gave him a thuggish look. Tattoos crawled over this throat, scalp and arms. He wore a simple black shirt, tight and unlaced at the throat, to emphasise an upper body and arms that were heavy with muscle. He walked up to the stage with a predator’s confidence, surveyed the cheering crowd, and raised his arms for silence. It took some time.

‘Some of you know me by sight,’ he shouted. His voice, though loud, was still faint and thin by the time it reached Frey’s ears, and he had to concentrate to hear. ‘Some don’t. For them new to Retribution Falls: welcome. I’m Neilin Orkmund.’

The cheer that erupted at that drowned out anything else for a while. When the crowd was relatively quiet again, Orkmund continued.

‘I’m proud to see so many men and women here today. Some of the finest pirates in the land. Some of you’ve known of this place for years. For others, it’d only been legend until recently. But you’ve come at my call, and I thank you for that. Together, we’ll be an unstoppable force. Together, we’ll make an army like Vardia’s never seen!’

More cheers. Pinn and Malvery cheered along with them, caught up in the moment.

‘Now I know some of you are frustrated. Champing at the bit. You wanna get into action, don’t you? You wanna break some bones and smash some skulls!’

Another deafening cheer, accompanied by clapping and jostling that threatened to turn into a riot.

Orkmund held up his hands. ‘You’ve enjoyed my hospitality. You’ve dipped your beaks in the delights of Retribution Falls. And in return, I ask you only one thing: be patient.’

The pirates near to Frey groaned and muttered. Suddenly the fervour had gone out of the crowd.

‘I know you’re disappointed. No one wants to get out there more than me,’ Orkmund hollered. ‘But this ain’t no small task we’re taking on! We ain’t here to rob a freighter or steal a few trinkets from some remote outpost. We ain’t just a crew of fifty men, or a hundred. We’re a crew of thousands! And a crew of thousands takes time to gather and co-ordinate.’

There were reluctant mumbles of concession at this.

‘The time’s coming very soon. A matter of days,’ said Orkmund. ‘But I’ve brought you here today because I’ve something to show you all.’

As he spoke, a troop of armed pirates sallied out of the stronghold, guarding two dozen men who were carrying a dozen large chests between them. They carried the chests up onto the stage as Orkmund continued.

‘I know that there are doubters out there. What are we doing here? Why are we waiting? Who are we attacking, and why’s it still a secret?’ Orkmund said, prowling back and forth on the stage. ‘Well, first ask yourself: why’d you come to Retribution Falls? Why’d you answer my call, when you didn’t even know who you was fighting? For some, it was loyalty to me. For some, it was the call to adventure. But for most of you . . . it were this!’

He threw open one of the chests, and a gasp went up from the crowd.

‘Loot! Ducats! Money!’ Orkmund cried, and the crowd cheered anew, their spirits roused. He went to the next one, and threw that open, revealing that it, too, was full of coins. ‘All this, for you! Booty! A share for every man that survives, and a right generous share it is too!’ He threw open another one. ‘Now ain’t this worth fighting for? Ain’t this worth waiting a few more days for?’

The pirates howled with glee, shaking their fists in the air, driven rabid by the sight of so much money. If not for the respect they had for Orkmund and the multiple guns trained on them, they might have tried to storm the stage right then.

But while Pinn and Malvery were yelling themselves hoarse, Frey had spotted something. He turned to Jez. ‘Can you see the stage?’

She craned to look over the shoulder of the pirate in front. ‘Not really.’

‘Come here,’ he said, and crouched down to offer her a piggy-back.

‘No, Cap’n, it’s really alright.’

‘I need your eyes, Jez. Help me out.’

Since she couldn’t think of a good reason to protest, she climbed awkwardly onto his back and he lifted her up.

‘You know, my eyesight’s not all that great, I mean it’s—’

‘The last chest on the right,’ said Frey. ‘Describe it to me.’

Jez looked. ‘It’s red.’

‘Describe it more,’ he said irritably.

She thought for moment. ‘It’s very fine,’ she said. ‘Dark red lacquer. Kind of a branch-and-leaf design on the lid. Silver clasp in the shape of a wolf’s head. Oh, wait, he’s opening it.’

Orkmund was throwing open each chest, whipping the pirates into a frenzy with the wealth paraded before them. Frey didn’t need Jez to tell him that the red-lacquered chest was full to bursting with ducats.

And that was it. The final piece fell into place.

‘Everyone!’ he said. ‘We’re leaving.’

Pinn whined in complaint. Malvery raised a threatening hand to cuff him. ‘Fine,’ Pinn sulked. ‘Let’s go.’

Frey let Jez down to the floor. ‘Seen enough, Cap’n?’ she asked.

‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

The streets were relatively quiet on their way back. Retribution Falls seemed cold and bleak without the din of drunken revelry. Frey stepped through the sludge of debris and bodily fluids from the night before, setting a quick pace. He was eager to get to the Ketty Jay. There was a purpose in his walk.

‘What’s the story, Cap’n?’ Jez asked. ‘Are we getting out of here?’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason to stay any more.’

‘I can think of lots,’ said Pinn. ‘Most of them come in pints or bottles, the rest have big wobbling tits. Come on, how about a little shore leave?’

‘I’m trying to save us all from the noose, Pinn,’ Frey replied. ‘Stay chaste for a day. Think of your sweetheart.’

‘Thinking of her just makes me want to bang a whore even worse,’ Pinn grinned, then held his hands up in submission. ‘Okay, okay. Yes, Cap’n. Back to the Ketty Jay like a good little pilot. But I still don’t get what’s going on.’

‘Alright, I’ll tell you,’ said Frey. ‘We knew that Duke Grephen was planning a coup against the Archduke. What he didn’t have was an army big enough to take on the Navy, or the money to pay for it. Orkmund’s providing the army, and now we know who’s providing the money.’

‘Do we?’ Jez asked. ‘Who?’

‘The Awakeners.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘That chest on the podium. I saw them bringing it out of the hermitage where Amalicia was being kept. I didn’t know what was in it then, but now we do. Money. And look where it ended up: here in Retribution Falls.’

‘The Awakeners are financing the pirates?’ Pinn asked. ‘Why?’

‘Because they want the Archduke out. Him and his wife.’

‘What’s his wife got to do with it?’

‘The Archduchess is the one who’s got him talking about all these new laws to limit the power of the Awakeners,’ Frey said. He was aware that he was losing Pinn already. ‘Look, the Awakeners run themselves like a business. And there’s no question they make bucket-loads of money from the superstitious. Now if someone as powerful as the Archduke starts saying that the whole idea of the Allsoul is rubbish, people are going to start listening to him. And that means the Awakeners start going the way of all the other religions they crushed a century ago.’

‘You’re remarkably well informed these days, Cap’n,’ Jez commented.

‘Been talking to Crake,’ he said.

‘You know he’s not exactly impartial, don’t you?’ she said. When she spoke of the daemonist, he noted that her tone wasn’t as obviously scornful as it had been yesterday.

‘So why are the Awakeners funding Duke Grephen?’ Pinn piped up.

Frey sighed. This would require careful explanation for Pinn to understand. ‘Because Grephen’s an Awakener. Just like Gallian Thade. If he becomes the Archduke, than the Awakeners gain power instead of losing it. In fact, they’d become pretty much unstoppable.’

Pinn frowned, pondering that for a moment as they hurried through the narrow, filthy lanes, past peeling walls and rusted steps. ‘And the Awakeners hired Dracken to catch us?’

‘No!’ Frey and Malvery cried in unison. It was Frey who continued: ‘Grephen hired her to catch us. Because he didn’t want us talking to anyone and blowing his plan before he could put it into action.’

Pinn thought some more. Frey had a feeling of dread in his stomach, anticipating the inevitable follow-up question.

‘So who hired the Century Knights?’

Malvery covered his face with a hand in despair.

‘What?’ Pinn protested. ‘It’s complicated!’

‘I swear, mate, you have the brains of half a rock.’

‘Nobody hired the Century Knights,’ Jez said. ‘They’re loyal to the Archduke. Nothing to do with Grephen. They’re after us because they think we’re the villains here.’

‘We did kill the Archduke’s son,’ Malvery pointed out.

‘Accidentally!’ Frey said. ‘And besides, we were set up. That means it doesn’t count.’

Malvery raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d like to see you try that line of argument with the Archduke,’ he said.

‘What Grephen wants,’ Frey told Pinn, before he could ask another question, ‘is that we get killed, nice and quiet, and he gets to show the bodies to everyone. Hengar’s murderers are caught, case closed. That was the idea from the start. We were supposed to die during the ambush.’

‘What he doesn’t want is the Century Knights catching us and giving us a chance to tell our side of the story,’ Jez continued. ‘He’s afraid that we know enough to make them suspicious, and that will blow his big surprise attack.’

‘Which is happening in a few days, if you believe that Orkmund feller,’ added Malvery.

Pinn gave up trying to figure out who was after who and asked, ‘So what do we do?’

‘What we do is cut a deal,’ said Frey. ‘Talk to some people. Set up a safe rendezvous. We’ll give them the charts and the compass, let them come see Retribution Falls for themselves. Once they find the army Orkmund’s put together, they’ll believe us. We’ll offer them the big fish, and in return, we demand a pardon.’

Pinn stopped dead. The others walked on a few steps before they noticed.

‘You’re selling this place out?’ he said, appalled.

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