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

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Frey was confused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you’re going to tell the Coalition Navy where Retribution Falls is?’

‘You think you could shout it a bit louder, Pinn?’ Malvery cried. ‘I don’t think they heard you in Yortland.’

Pinn looked around furtively, suddenly remembering where he was. Thankfully, the alley they were standing in was deserted, and nobody seemed to have heard. He scuttled up closer to Frey and jabbed him in the chest with a finger.

‘This place is a legend! This place was built with the sweat and tears of a generation of pirates. It’s been the hope of every freebooter since the Aerium Wars that they could one day find Retribution Falls and live out the rest of their days in pirate wonderland. It’s a yoo -, a yoo—’

‘Utopia,’ Jez said. ‘Pinn, it’s a dump.’

Pinn was aghast. ‘It’s Retribution Falls!’

Jez studied her surroundings critically. The sagging roofs, the cracked walls and mildewed corners, the broken bottles and bloodstains. She sniffed, taking in the rank stench of the marsh.

‘You know what pirates are really good at, Pinn?’ she said. ‘Being pirates. And that’s all. In fact, if you asked me what would happen if you took a thousand pirates and asked them to build a town, I’d say it would look pretty much like this. This place was better as a legend. The real thing doesn’t work.’

‘Let me put it this way, Pinn,’ said Frey. ‘Do you want to get hanged, or don’t you?’

Pinn examined the question for a trick. ‘No?’ he ventured.

‘It’s either you or this place. Orkmund’s working for Duke Grephen, remember? And Grephen wants all of us dead. You too, Pinn.’

Pinn opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, and then gave up trying to argue. ‘Lisinda would never get over it if anything happened to me,’ he said.

‘Think how proud she’ll be when she learns you single-handedly triumphed over an army of pirates,’ Malvery beamed.

‘I suppose I could dress it up a little,’ Pinn mused. ‘Alright, spit on this place. Let’s get out of here and stab some backs!’

‘That’s the spirit!’ Frey said cheerily.

Back at the Ketty Jay, Frey issued instructions for take-off and made sure Slag was trapped in the mess so some unlucky volunteer - Pinn - could force a mouth filter on him during the journey back. Silo was showing Frey some superficial damage to the underwings when Olric, the dock master’s assistant, wandered up to them.

‘Leaving, are you?’

‘Just got an errand to run,’ said Frey. ‘Orkmund says it’ll be a few days yet, so . . .’ he shrugged.

‘You gotta sign out.’

‘I was just about to. Be over there in a minute.’

Olric ambled away again. Frey asked Silo to fetch Crake from inside, and the daemonist came down the cargo ramp shortly after.

‘You needed me?’

‘You and Jez sort things out last night?’ he asked.

Crake didn’t meet his eye. ‘As best we could.’

Frey wasn’t encouraged. ‘Can you come with me to the dock master’s office? I need to sign out before we fly.’

Crake gave him a puzzled look. ‘Two-man job, is it?’

‘Actually, yes. I need you to distract the dock master. I mean really distract him. You think you can do the thing with the tooth?’

‘I can try,’ said Crake. ‘Did he strike you as particularly smart or quick-witted?’

‘Not really.’

‘Good. The less intelligent they are, the better the tooth works. It’s the smart ones that cause all the problems.’

‘Don’t they always?’ Frey commiserated, as he led the daemonist across the landing pad.

‘What are you up to, anyway?’ Crake asked.

‘Taking out a little insurance,’ replied Frey, with a wicked little smile.

The journey out was less traumatic than the journey there. Now they had filters to protect against the strange fumes from the lava river, and they knew the trick of the compass and the mines, things were not so daunting. The only drama came from Pinn, who had a miserable time trying to subdue the cat, until Malvery hit on the idea of getting him drunk first. A quarter-bottle of rum later, and Slag was placid enough to take the mouth filter, after which they headed to Malvery’s surgery to apply antiseptic to Pinn’s scratched-up arms and hands.

There had been talk of ignoring the charts and flying straight up and out of there, instead of the laborious backtracking through the canyons, but they soon discovered that there was a reason why nobody did that. The area above Retribution Falls was heavily mined, and Jez theorised that these ones could be more magnetic than the ones they’d encountered, meaning that they’d home in on the Ketty Jay from a greater distance. Frey decided not to push their luck. They’d follow the charts.

Frey had Jez and Crake up in the cockpit again, one to navigate and one to read from the compass while he flew. The atmosphere between them had changed. Instead of sniping, Jez tried not to talk to Crake at all, beyond what was necessary to co-ordinate their efforts. Crake also seemed very quiet. Something was different between them, for sure, but Frey had the sense that it wasn’t entirely resolved yet.

Well, at least there had been progress. They weren’t fighting any more. It was a start.

Frey was light-hearted as he piloted them through the fog. He was beginning to feel that things were really pulling together for them now. The changes had been slow and subtle, but ever since they’d left Yortland he’d felt more and more like the captain of a crew, rather than a man lumbered with a chaotic rabble. Instead of letting them do whatever they felt like, he’d begun to give them orders, and he’d been surprised how well they responded once he showed a bit of authority. They might gripe and complain, but they got on with it.

The raid on Quail’s place had been a complete success. Jez and Crake’s infiltration of the Winter Ball had yielded important information. And the theft of the compass and charts from the Delirium Trigger was their crowning glory so far. A month ago, he couldn’t have imagined pulling off anything so audacious. In fact, a month ago he couldn’t have imagined himself giving anybody orders. He’d have said: What right do I have to tell someone else what to do? He didn’t think enough of himself to take command of his own life, let alone someone else’s.

But it wasn’t about rights, it was about responsibilities. Whether as passengers or crew, the people on board the Ketty Jay endured the same dangers as he did. If he couldn’t make them work together, they all suffered. His craft was the most important thing in the world to him, yet he’d never given a damn about its contents until now. It had always been just him and the Ketty Jay, the iron mistress to whom he was forever faithful. She gave him his freedom, and he loved her for it.

But a craft was nothing without a crew to run it and pilots to defend it. A craft was made up of people. The Ketty Jay was staffed with drunkards and drifters, all of them running from something, whether it be memories or enemies or the drudgery of a land-bound life; but since Yortland, they’d all been running in the same direction. United by that common purpose, they’d begun to turn into something resembling a crew. And Frey had begun to turn into someone resembling a captain.

Damn it, he was getting to like these people. And the thought of that frightened him a little. Because if his crew got hanged, it would be on his account. His fault. He’d got them all into this, by taking Quail’s too-good-to-be-true offer of fifty thousand ducats. He’d made that desperate gamble, closed his eyes and hoped for a winning card; but he’d drawn the Ace of Skulls instead.

Jez, Crake, Malvery, Silo . . . even Harkins and Pinn. They weren’t just badly paid employees any more. Their lives had come to rest on his decisions. He didn’t know if he could bear the weight of that. But he did know that he had no choice about it.

‘No mines nearby,’ Crake reported.

‘I think we’re through, Cap’n,’ Jez said, slumping back in her seat. ‘You can start your ascent any time now.’

‘Well,’ Frey said. ‘That was Rook’s Boneyard. I hope you all enjoyed your tour.’

They managed weak smiles at that. He cut the thrusters and fed aerium gas into the ballast tanks, allowing the Ketty Jay to rise steadily. The fog thinned, and the mountainsides faded from view.

‘Never thought I’d miss daylight quite so badly,’ Frey said. ‘It better be sunny up there.’

There was no danger of sun, this deep in the Hookhollows, with the clouds and drifting ash high in the sky overhead. But the mist oppressed him. He wanted to be able to see again.

The Ketty Jay rose out of the white haze, and the sky exploded all around them. The concussion threw the Ketty Jay sideways and sent the crew flying from their seats onto the floor. Frey scrambled back into his seat, half-blinded by the flash of light, thinking only of escape.

Get out of here, get out of here, get—

But the blast had spun the Ketty Jay around, and now he could see their assailant through the windglass of the cockpit. Her black prow loomed before them, a massive battery of guns trained on his small craft.

The Delirium Trigger.

Frey slumped forward onto the dashboard. The first shot had been a warning. Her outflyers had surrounded them, waiting for the slightest hint that they were going to run. But Frey wasn’t going to run. It was hopeless. They’d be blown to pieces before he had time to fire up the thrusters.

Not like this. I was so damn close.

The Delirium Trigger’s electroheliograph mast was blinking. Jez, who had staggered to her feet and was standing behind the pilot’s chair, narrowed her eyes as she watched it.

‘What’s it say?’ Frey asked.

‘ “Gotcha!” ’ Jez replied.

Frey groaned. ‘Bollocks.’

Thirty-One

One Is Missing - Frey Is Put To The Question - Goodnight, Bess

I new I should have got out when I had the chance, Crake thought, as the men of the Delirium Trigger flooded up the Ketty Jay’s cargo ramp. Six of them covered the prisoners while the others dispersed through the hold, checking corners, moving with military precision. Wary eyes flickered over Bess, who was standing quietly to one side.

‘You tell that thing, if it moves, you all get shot,’ snarled one of the gunmen.

‘She won’t,’ said Crake, the words coming out small. ‘I put her to sleep.’

He’d been forced to. He couldn’t trust that Bess would behave when their lives were under threat.

The gunman jabbed Crake with the muzzle of his revolver. Bess didn’t react. ‘She’d better not. Or you’re first to go.’

The crew of the Ketty Jay stood at the top of the ramp, offering no resistance. All except Jez, anyway. Where Jez was, only the captain knew. Crake had seen her speaking urgently with Frey as they were being escorted out of the mountains. Later, after they were instructed to land in the vast wastes of the Blackendraft, she was gone. When Malvery enquired as to her whereabouts, Frey said: ‘She’s got a plan.’

‘Oh,’ said Malvery. ‘What kind of plan?’

‘The kind that won’t work.’

Malvery harumphed. ‘No harm in trying, I suppose.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

They were patted down. None of them were carrying weapons, but Crake’s heart sank a little further when a crewman pulled his skeleton key from the inside pocket of his greatcoat and held it up in front of his face.

‘What’s this for?’ the crewman demanded.

‘My house,’ Crake lied. The crewman snorted and tossed it away. It skidded across the floor of the cargo hold and into a dark corner. With it went any hope that Crake had of escaping from the Delirium Trigger’s brig and saving their hides.

Once the invaders were satisfied they’d been stripped of anything dangerous, Frey and his crew were herded down the ramp at gunpoint. Crake was sweating and his stomach roiled. The future was closing in on him rapidly, arrowing him towards the gallows. He couldn’t see a way out of this one. They were surrounded by overwhelming firepower and completely at Dracken’s mercy. There would be no miraculous rescue this time.

Pinn whistled as he walked down the ramp, totally oblivious to the seriousness of their situation. Even now, he believed in his own heroic myth enough to trust that a hair-raising escape was just around the corner. Crake hated him for that happy ignorance.

Outside, the world was as bleak as their prospects. The ash flats to the east of the Hookhollows were desolate and grim, featureless in every direction. Even the nearby mountains were invisible beneath the rim of the great plateau. From horizon to horizon was a dreary grey expanse, a dead land choked beneath the blanket of dust and flakes that drifted from the west. A chill wind stirred powdery rills from the ground and harried them into the distance. The sky overhead was the colour of slate. The disc of the sun was faint enough to stare at without discomfort.

Looming in the sky to their left was the Delirium Trigger, its massive keel imposingly close, as if it might plunge down and crush them at any moment. Closer by was the small passenger shuttle used to ferry crew from the craft to the ground and back again. The Delirium Trigger was too huge to land anywhere except in specially designed docks.

Their captors halted them at the bottom of the ramp. Standing before them, a short distance away, was a slight figure, dressed head to toe in black. Crake recognised her from Frey’s description: the shockingly white skin, the short, albino-blonde hair torn into clumps, that black, fearsome gaze. She regarded them icily as one of her men walked over to her and whispered something in her ear, then she gave him a short command and he hurried back into the bowels of the Ketty Jay. After that, she walked up to Frey. Mutual loathing simmered in their eyes.

‘The ignition code, please,’ she said.

‘You know that’s not gonna happen,’ he said. ‘You’ve got us. What do you want my aircraft for?’

‘Sentimental value. The code?’

‘She’s not worth anything compared to the reward you’ll get bringing us in. Leave her here.’

‘She’s worth everything to you. Besides, the press will want some ferrotypes of the craft that shot down the Ace of Skulls. Perhaps I’ll present it to the Archduke as a gift. It may encourage him to overlook certain rumours about my activities elsewhere in the future.’

‘This is pointless. You won’t—’

Dracken pulled a revolver in one quick move and pressed the muzzle against his chest, silencing him. ‘It wasn’t a request. Give me the code.’

Frey was shaken; Crake could see it. But he bared his teeth into something approximating a grin and said: ‘Shoot me if you like. You’ll just save the hangman a job.’

Dracken and Frey stared at each other: a test of wills. Dracken’s finger twitched on the trigger. She was sorely tempted. Then she took the gun away and stepped back.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You get to live. Duke Grephen will want a signed confession out of you. Besides, there’s someone else who may be more willing to talk. I understand there was a woman flying the Ketty Jay that night when you stole my charts. I don’t see her here. Where is she, Frey? Won’t she know the codes?’

Frey didn’t reply. Dracken spotted one of her men coming out of the Ketty Jay and heading over to her. ‘Let’s find out,’ she said. She addressed the crewman, a whiskery, heavyset fellow with a steel ear to replace one that had been cut off. ‘Anyone else inside?’

‘One,’ he said. ‘In the infirmary. She’s dead, though I ain’t sure what of.’

Trinica looked at Frey for an instant. ‘You’re sure she’s dead?’

‘Yes, Cap’n. She don’t have a pulse, and she ain’t breathing. I listened at her chest, and her heart ain’t beating. I seen a lot of dead men and women, and she’s dead.’

‘She hit her head,’ said Frey. ‘When you shelled us.’ He indicated Malvery. ‘The doc tried to help her, but he couldn’t do much. All the damage was inside.’

Malvery caught on, and nodded gravely. ‘Terrible thing. Fine young woman,’ he murmured.

Crake felt a chill go through him. He was remembering that night on the Feldspar Islands when they’d gone to Gallian Thade’s ball at Scorchwood Heights. The night when Jez had really fallen and hit her head. Fredger Cordwain, the man from the Shacklemore Agency, had taken her pulse then, too. He’d also been convinced she was dead. At the time, Crake had assumed he was mistaken in the heat of the moment, but now he wondered.

How had she managed to fool them both?

‘You want us to get rid of her?’ the crewman asked Dracken.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Leave her where she is. We’ll need the body to show the Duke. How are they getting on with the golem?’

‘Coming out now, Cap’n,’ he replied, gesturing at the half-dozen men who were manhandling the inert form of Bess down the ramp.

‘What are you doing with her?’ Crake blurted in distress, before good sense could intervene.

Dracken’s black eyes fixed on to him. Crake had a sudden and dreadful feeling that he’d done something very foolish in drawing her attention. ‘That thing is yours, is it?’ she asked. ‘You’re the daemonist? ’

Crake swallowed and tasted ash in the back of his throat. Dracken sauntered over towards him, raking her gaze along the line of prisoners as she went.

‘Very clever, what you did in Rabban,’ she murmured. ‘And surprising, too. I’d have expected a daemonist to abandon their golem and make a new one, but you actually rescued it from my cargo hold.’ She studied him with an intensity that made him squirm. ‘That’s very interesting.’

Crake kept his mouth shut. He had the impression that anything he said would only damn him further.

‘Still, interesting as it is, I’m not stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice,’ she said. ‘And I’m not having that thing wake up on the journey back. So your golem is staying here.’

Crake felt weakness flood through him. The horror of it almost made him stagger. He looked around wildly, taking in the endless, trackless expanse of grey that surrounded them. There were no signs of life anywhere. No civilisation. Nothing but the tiny smudges of aircraft heading for the coast, hopelessly distant.

To abandon her here would be to lose her for ever.

‘I’ve an idea,’ said Dracken, addressing Frey. ‘It seems the only other person who knows the ignition code is dead, and I’d rather not kill you until after you’ve given us a confession. But a daemonist . . . well, he could be problematic. They have all kinds of . . . arts. Probably easier to get rid of him now.’

Crake saw what was coming. She lifted her gun and pointed it at his forehead in what was becoming a depressingly familiar state of affairs.

‘Unless you’ve something to tell me, Frey?’ she prompted.

Frey’s face had gone stony. Crake had seen that impassive expression before, when Lawsen Macarde put him in a similar situation. Except this time, there was little doubt that Trinica’s gun was fully loaded.

A strange calm came over him. Let it end, then.

‘You have until three,’ said Trinica. ‘One.’

He was tired. Tired of struggling against the grief and shame. Tired of living under the weight of one arrogant mistake, to think that he might summon one of the monsters of the aether and come away unscathed. Tired of trying to understand that awful twist of fortune that had led his niece to his sanctum on that particular night, instead of any other.

Leave her here, amid the ash and dust. If he didn’t wake her up, no one ever would. Let her sleep, and perhaps she’d dream of better things.

‘Two.’

He closed his eyes, and to his faint surprise, dislodged a tear. He felt it trickle down the side of his face, over the hump of his cheekbone, to be lost in his beard.

He’d worked so hard to be great. It had ended in ignominy, disgrace and failure. What was a world worth, that treated its inhabitants so?

‘Thr—’ Trinica began.

‘Stop!’ Frey snapped.

Crake’s eyes stayed closed. Hovering on the razor-blade edge between existence and oblivion, he dared not tip the balance with the slightest movement.

‘Seven sixty-seven, double one, double eight,’ he heard his captain say.

There was a long pause. His body shook with each thump of his heart. He didn’t even hope. He didn’t even know if he wanted to be left in the world of the living.

But the choice wasn’t his to make. He felt the chill metal of the revolver muzzle leave his forehead. His eyes fluttered open. Dracken had stepped back, and was regarding him like a child who has just spared an insect. Then she turned to Frey and raised an eyebrow. Frey looked away angrily.

Crake felt detached from himself, clothed in a dreamlike numbness. He watched as Dracken’s crew carried Bess away from the Ketty Jay. Then, with obvious glee, they stood her on her feet. A hunched metal statue, a monument to their victory. He heard Dracken order the man with the steel ear to assign two men to fly the Ketty Jay behind them. Frey wouldn’t meet anyone’s eye: he’d been broken by Dracken, and was burning with a hate and fury such as Crake had never seen him show.

But it all seemed far away and inconsequential. He was still alive, somehow, although he wasn’t sure he’d fully returned from the brink yet.

Someone patted his shoulder. Malvery. They were being urged towards the nearby passenger shuttle. From there they’d be taken to the Delirium Trigger’s brig. Crake sent a mental message to his feet to get them moving. Dazed, he stumbled along with the group, his boots scuffing up little grey clouds. They were herded up some steps and into the belly of the shuttle, where they sat, surrounded by armed guards.

Crake looked out through the shuttle door at the lonely figure of Bess. The crewmen had deserted her now, and were attending to other tasks. The shuttle was powering up its engines, sending veils of dust to coat her.

Let her sleep, he thought. Goodnight, Bess.

Then the door slammed closed, and she was lost from his sight.

Thirty-Two

An Audience With Dracken - Bringing Up The Past - The Ugly Truth Of It All

‘Out, you.’

Frey looked up, and saw a thickset, bald man with a bushy black beard on the other side of the bars. ‘You mean me?’

‘You’re the cap’n, ain’t ya?’

He glanced around at his crew, trying to decide whether there was any advantage in protesting. All six of them had been put in the same cell on the Delirium Trigger’s brig. There were five cells in all, each capable of holding ten men. The walls were metal, and the lights were weak. The smell of oil was in the air, and the sound of clanking machinery and distant engines echoed in the hollow spaces.

Silo met his eyes with a customarily inscrutable gaze. Malvery just shrugged.

‘I’m the captain,’ Frey said at length.

‘Cap’n Dracken wants to see you,’ the bald man informed him.

The gaoler unlocked the door and pushed it open, waving a shotgun to deter any attempts at a breakout. Frey walked through, and the door clanged shut behind him.

‘Hey,’ said Malvery. ‘While you’ve got her ear, ask if we can get some rum down here, eh?’

Pinn laughed explosively. Crake didn’t stir from where he sat in a corner, drowned in his own misery. Harkins had fallen asleep, tired out by being afraid of everything. Silo was silent.

And Jez? What was Jez doing right now? Frey had turned it over and over in his mind, but he still couldn’t work out how she could fake her own death convincingly enough to fool Trinica’s man. She’d refused to reveal how she was going to do it when she first told him of her plan. She just said: ‘Trust me.’

Still, he was beginning to wonder if she actually had died.

The bald man took him by the arm and pressed a pistol into his side, then walked him out of the brig and through the passageways of the Delirium Trigger. They passed other crewmembers on the way. Some sneered triumphantly at Frey; others gave him looks of abject hatred. Their humiliation at Rabban - not to mention the deaths of a dozen or so crewmen - hadn’t been forgotten.

When they reached the door to the captain’s cabin, the bald man brought him to a halt. Frey expected him to knock, but he didn’t. He appeared to be deliberating some question with himself.

‘Are we going in?’ Frey prompted.

‘Listen,’ replied the crewman, turning on Frey with a threatening look in his eyes. ‘You be careful what you say in there. The Cap’n . . . she’s in one of her moods.’

Frey arched an eyebrow. ‘Thanks for the concern,’ he said, sarcastically. ‘What’s she going to do, kill me?’

‘It ain’t you I’m concerned about,’ came the reply, and then he knocked on the door and Trinica called for them to enter.

Trinica’s cabin was well ordered and clean, but the dark wood of the bookcases and the brass fittings of the dim electric lamps gave it a close, gloomy feel. Trinica was sitting behind her desk at the far end of the room, on which a large logbook lay open next to a carefully arranged writing set and the brass compass-like device they’d used to navigate the minefields of Retribution Falls. She was looking out of the sloping window. Beyond, night had fallen.

She didn’t acknowledge Frey as he was brought in. The bald man stood him in the centre of the room. After a moment, without turning from the window, she said:

‘Thank you, Harmund. You can go.’

‘Cap’n,’ said the big man, and left.

Frey stood uncertainly in the centre of the room for a moment, but still she didn’t speak to him. He decided he’d be damned if he’d feel awkward in front of her. He walked over to a reading-chair by one of the bookcases and sat down in it. He could wait as long as she could.

His eyes fell to the compass on the desk. The sight of it inspired a momentary surge of bitterness. That would have been his proof. That device and the charts that came with it would have won him his freedom. He’d been so close.

He fought down the feeling. No doubt Trinica had put it there to inspire just such a reaction. Railing against the injustice of his circumstances would do him no good now. Besides, for the first time he could remember it felt just a little childish.

‘You’re going to hang, you know,’ she said at last. She was still staring out of the window.

‘I’m aware of that, Trinica,’ Frey replied scornfully.

She glanced at him then. There was reproach in her eyes. Hurt, even. He found himself regretting his tone.

‘I thought we should talk,’ she said. ‘Before it’s over.’

Frey was puzzled by her manner. This wasn’t the acerbic, commanding woman he’d met back in Sharka’s den; nor did he recognise her behaviour from the years he’d loved her. Her voice was soft, the words sighing out without force. She seemed deeply tired, steeped in melancholy.

Still suspicious of a trick, he resolved not to play into her hands. He’d give her no sympathy. He’d be hard and bitter.

‘Talk, then,’ he said.

There was a pause. She seemed to be seeking a way to begin.

‘It’s been ten years,’ she said. ‘A lot’s happened in that time. But a lot of things stayed . . . unresolved.’

‘What does it matter?’ Frey replied. ‘The past is the past. It’s gone.’

‘It’s not gone,’ she said. ‘It never goes.’ She turned away from the window and faced him across her desk. ‘I wish I had your talent, Darian. I wish I could walk away from something or someone, and it would be as if they never existed. To lock a piece of my life away in a trunk, never to be opened.’

‘It’s a gift,’ he replied. He wasn’t about to explain himself to her.

‘Why did you leave me?’ she asked.

The question took him by surprise. There was a pleading edge to it. He hadn’t expected anything like this when he was led into the room. She was vulnerable, strengthless, unable to defend herself. He found himself becoming disgusted with her. Where was the woman he’d loved, or even the woman he’d hated? This desperation was pitiable.

Why had he left her? The memories seemed distant now: it was hard to summon up the feelings he’d felt then. They’d been tinted by ten years of scorn. Yet he did remember some things. Thoughts rather than emotions. The internal dialogues he had with himself during the long hours alone, flying haulage for her father’s company.

In the early months, he’d believed they’d be together for ever. He told himself he’d found a woman for the rest of his life. He couldn’t conceive of meeting someone more wonderful than she was, and he wasn’t tempted to try.

But it was one thing to daydream such notions and quite another to be faced with putting them into practice. When she began to talk of engagement, with a straightforwardness that he’d previously found charming, he began to idolise her a little less. His patience became short. No longer could he endlessly indulge her flights of fancy. His smile became fixed as she played her girlish games with him. Her jokes all seemed to go on too long. He found himself wishing she’d just be sensible.

At nineteen, he was still young. He didn’t make the connection between his sudden moodiness and irritability and the impending threat of marriage. He told himself he wanted to marry her. It would be stupid not to, after all. Hadn’t he decided she was the one for him?

But the more he snapped at her, the more demanding she became. Tired of waiting - or perhaps afraid to wait too long - she asked him to marry her. He agreed, and secretly resented her for a long time afterwards. How could she put him in that position? To choose between marrying her, which he didn’t want, or destroying her, which he wanted even less? He had no option but to agree at the time and hope to find a way out of it later.

And yet Trinica seemed blissfully unaware of any of this. Though his bad moods were ever more frequent, they didn’t seem to trouble her any more. She was assured that he was hers, and he seethed that she would celebrate her victory so prematurely.

By the time the date of the wedding was announced, Frey’s thoughts were mainly of escape. He slept little and badly. Her father’s obvious disapproval encouraged him to think that the wedding was a bad idea. A barely educated boy of low means, raised in an orphanage, Frey wasn’t a good match for the highly intelligent and beautiful daughter of an eminent aristocrat. Those social barriers, that had seemed laughable in the first flush of love, suddenly rose high in Frey’s mind.

He wanted to be a pilot for the Coalition Navy, steering vast frigates to the north to do battle with the Manes, or south to crush the Sammies. He wanted to be among the first to land on New Vardia or Jagos after the Great Storm Belt calmed. He wanted to fly free across the boundless skies.

When he looked at Trinica, and she smiled her perfect smile, he saw the death of his dreams.

That was when she fell pregnant. The wedding was hastily brought forward, and her father’s opposition to it transformed into whole-hearted support of their enterprise, backed up by veiled threats if Frey should waver. Frey began to suffer panic attacks in the night.

He remembered the sensation of a vice around his ribs, squeezing a little harder with every day that brought him closer to the wedding. He never seemed to have quite enough breath in his body. The laughter of his friends as they congratulated him became a distressing cacophony, like an enraged brace of ducks. He felt harried and harassed wherever he went. The smallest request was enough to send him into a fluster.

He remembered wondering what it would be like to feel like that for ever.

By this point he was absolutely certain he didn’t want to marry her. But it didn’t mean he didn’t want to be with her. Even with all the irritation and buried anger, he still adored this woman. She was his first love, and the one who had teased him from his rather cold, uninspiring childhood into a wild world where emotions could be overpowering and deeply irrational. He just wanted things to go back to the way they were before she began to talk about marriage.

But he was terrified of making the wrong choice. What if she was the one for him? Would he be condemning himself to a life of misery? Would he ever meet anyone like her again?

He was paralysed, trapped, dragged reluctantly into the future like a ship’s anchor scoring its way along the sea bed. In the end, there was only one way out he could face, and that was not to face it at all. He couldn’t make even that decision until the very last minute. He was hoping desperately for some vaguely defined intervention that would spare him from hurting her.

None came, so he ran. He took the Ketty Jay, in which was everything he had in the world, and he left her. He left her carrying his child, standing in front of a thousand witnesses, waiting for a groom who would never come.

After that, it only got worse.

‘Darian?’ Trinica prompted. Frey realised he’d slipped into reverie and fallen silent. ‘I asked you a question.’

Frey was taken by a sudden surge of anger. What right did she have to make him explain himself? After what she’d done? His love for her had been the most precious thing in his life, and she’d ruined it with her insecurities, her need to tie him down. She’d made him cowardly. In his heart he knew that, but he could never say it. So instead, he attacked her, sensing her weakness.

‘You really think I’m interested in a little catch-up to make you feel better?’ he sneered. ‘You think I care if you understand what happened or not? Here’s a deal: you let me go and I’ll have a nice long chat with you about all the terrible things I did and what an awful person I am. But in case it escaped your notice, I’m going to be hanged, and it’s you that’s taking me to the gallows. So piss on your questions, Trinica. You can go on wondering what went wrong until you rot.’

Trinica’s expression was surprised and wounded. She’d not expected such cruelty. Frey found himself thinking that the white-skinned bitch who had taken the place of his beloved might actually cry. He’d expected anger, but instead she looked like a little girl who had been unjustly smacked for something they didn’t do. A profound sadness had settled on her.

‘How can you hate me like this?’ she asked. Her voice was husky and low. ‘How can you take the moral high ground, after what you did to me?’

‘Broken hearts mend, Trinica,’ Frey spat. ‘You murdered our child.’

Her eyes narrowed at the blow, but any promise of tears had passed. She turned her face away from him and looked out of the window again. ‘You abandoned us,’ she replied, grave-cold. ‘It’s easy to be aggrieved now. But you abandoned us. If our child had lived, you’d never have known it existed.’

‘That’s a lie. I came back for you, Trinica. For both of you.’

He saw her stiffen, and cursed himself. He shouldn’t have admitted that, shouldn’t have let the words free from his mouth. It weakened him. He’d waited years to throw his hatred in her face, to confront her with what she’d done, but it had always gone so much better during the rehearsals in his head. He wanted her to wreck herself on his glacial indifference to her suffering. He wanted to exact revenge. But his own rage was foiling him.

She was waiting for him to go on. He had no choice now. The gate had been opened.

‘I went from place to place for a month. Thinking things through. A bit of time away from you with all your bloody demands and your damn father.’ He cut himself off. Already he sounded surly and immature. He took a breath and continued, trying not to let his anger overwhelm him. ‘And I decided I’d made a mistake.’ He thought about trying to explain further, but he couldn’t. ‘So I came back. I went to see a friend in town, to get some advice, I suppose. That was when I heard. How you’d taken all those pills, how you’d tried to kill yourself. And how the baby . . . the baby hadn’t . . .’

He put his fist to his mouth, ashamed of the way his throat closed up and his words jammed painfully in the bottleneck. When the moment had passed, he relaxed and sat back in his seat. He’d said enough. There was no satisfaction in this. He couldn’t even hurt her without hurting himself.

‘I was a stupid girl,’ said Trinica quietly. ‘Stupid enough to believe the world began and ended with you. I thought I could never be happy again.’

Frey had sat forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees and his fingers tangled in his fringe. His voice was brittle. ‘I ran out on you, Trinica. But I never gave up on myself. And I never tried to take our child with me.’

‘Oh, you gave up on yourself, Darian,’ she replied. ‘You were just a little more indirect. You spent three years drinking yourself to death and putting yourself in harm’s way. In the end, you took your whole crew with you.’

Frey couldn’t muster the energy to argue. The weary, conversational tone in which she delivered her accusation robbed him of the will to defend himself. Besides, she was right. Of course she was right.

‘We’re both cowards,’ he murmured. ‘We deserved each other.’

‘Maybe,’ said Trinica. ‘Maybe neither of us deserved what we got.’

All the fire had gone out of Frey. A black, sucking tar-pit of misery threatened to engulf him. He’d imagined this confrontation a thousand ways, but they all ended with him demolishing Trinica, forcing her to face the horror of what she’d done to him. Now he realised there was nothing he could say to her that she hadn’t already thought of, nothing he could punish her with that she hadn’t already used to punish herself more effectively than he ever could.

The truth was, his position was so fragile that it fell apart when exposed to the reality of an opposing view. While he nurtured his grievances privately, he could be appalled at how she’d mistreated him. But it didn’t hold up to argument. He couldn’t pretend to be the only one wronged. They’d ruined each other.

Damn it, he hadn’t wanted to talk. And now here they were, talking. She always had a way of doing that to him.

‘How’d you get this way, Trinica?’ he said. He raised his head and gestured at her across the gloomy study. ‘The hair, the skin . . .’ He hesitated. ‘You used to be beautiful.’

‘I’m done with beautiful,’ she replied. There was a long pause, during which neither of them spoke. Then Trinica stirred in her seat and faced him.

‘You weren’t the only one who turned away from me after I tried to kill myself,’ she said. ‘My parents were disgraced. Bad enough they had a daughter who was going to give birth outside of marriage; now she’d killed their grandchild. They could barely look at me. My father wanted to send me to a sanatorium.

‘In the end, I stole some money and took an aircraft. I didn’t know where I was going, but I had to get away. I suppose I thought I could be a pilot.

‘I was caught by a pirate two weeks later. They must have seen me in port and followed my craft out. They forced me down and boarded me, then took my craft to add to their little fleet. I thought they’d kill me, but they didn’t. They just kept me.’

Frey couldn’t help a twinge of pain. That dainty, elegant young woman he’d left behind hadn’t been equipped to survive in the brutal, ugly world of smugglers and freebooters. She’d been sheltered all her life. He knew what happened to people like that.

‘I wasn’t much more than an animal to them,’ she went on. Her tone was dead, without inflection. ‘A pet to use as they pleased. That’s what beautiful does for you.

‘It took me almost two years to work up the courage to put a dagger in the captain’s neck. After that, I stopped being a victim. I signed on as a pilot for another crew, learned navigation on the side. I wanted to make myself indispensable. I didn’t want to be dependent on anybody again.’

She turned her attention to the window, evading him.

‘I’ll not bore you with the details, Darian. Let’s just say I learned what it takes for a woman to survive among cut-throats.’

The omissions spoke more than any description ever could. Frey didn’t need to be told about the rapes and the beatings. Physically weak, she’d have needed to use her sexuality to play men off against each other, to ensnare a strong companion for protection. A rich girl who’d never known hardship, she’d been forced into whoredom to survive.

But all that time, she’d been strengthening herself, becoming the woman he saw before him. She could have gone home at any point, back to the safety of her family. They’d have taken her back, of that he was sure. But she never did. She cut out every soft part of herself, so she could live among the scum.

He didn’t pity her. He couldn’t. He only mourned the loss of the young woman he’d known ten years ago. This mockery of his lover was his own doing. He had fashioned her, and she damned him by her existence.

‘By the time I got to the Delirium Trigger, I’d made my way in the underworld. I had a reputation, and they respected me. I knew the crew was troubled and I knew the captain was a syphilitic drunk. It took me a year, building trust, winning them round. I knew he was planning an assault on an outpost near Anduss, I knew it would be a disaster, and I waited. Afterwards, I led the survivors against him. We threw him overboard from two kloms up.’

She gazed across at him. Her black eyes seemed darker in the faint light of the electric lamps.

‘And then you turned yourself into a ghoul,’ he finished.

‘You know how men are,’ she said. ‘They don’t like to mix desire and respect. They see a beautiful woman in command and they belittle her. It makes them feel better about themselves.’ She looked away, her face falling into shadow. ‘Besides, being pretty never brought me anything but pain.’

‘It kept you alive,’ he pointed out.

‘That wasn’t living,’ she returned.

He had no answer to that.

‘So that’s the story,’ she said. ‘That’s what it takes to be a captain. Patience. Ruthlessness. Sacrifice. You’re too selfish to make that crew respect you, Darian. You surprised me once, but it won’t happen again.’

There was a knock at the door. A spasm of irritation crossed her face. ‘I gave orders that I wasn’t to be disturbed!’ she snapped.

‘It’s urgent, Cap’n!’ came a voice from the other side. ‘The Ketty Jay has gone!’

‘What?’ she cried, surging to her feet. She tore open the door to the cabin. A crewman was outside, obscured from Frey’s view by the door.

‘She were following us with her lights on,’ came the breathless report. ‘All of a sudden, the lights go out. By the time we got a spotlight over there, she were nowhere to be seen. She could’ve gone anywhere in the dark. She’s disappeared, Cap’n. Nobody knows where.’

Trinica’s head swivelled and she fixed Frey with a glare of utter malice.

Frey grinned. ‘Surprise!’

Thirty-Three

Deliberations - Back In The Blizzard - The Manes - A Feat Of Navigation

Jez, in the pilot’s seat of the Ketty Jay, flew on into the night. The craft was dark, inside and out. The light of the moon edged her face in brittle silver. It fell also onto the two bodies on the cockpit floor, and glittered in their blood. Dracken’s men. The iron pipe that had stoved in their heads lay between them.

Jez’s jaw was set hard. Navigation charts were spread on the dashboard next to her. She stared through the windglass at the world below, eyes fixed. The Ketty Jay slid through the darkness, high above the clouded mountains, a speck in the vast sky.

She could see the lights of other craft, visible at great distance. A flotilla of fighters surrounded a long, rectangular freighter. A prickle of shining dots signified a Navy corvette, cruising the horizon. And in between, there were the invisible vessels, like the Ketty Jay, that had reason to stay hidden and wanted to move unobserved. Stealthy shadows in the moonlight. A pilot wouldn’t see them unless they were very close, but Jez saw them all.

Even hours later, she was still trembling with the aftershocks of murder. Had there been a gun to hand she might have used it to threaten the men, then tied them up and kept them prisoner. But they had the guns, and she only had a length of pipe. She crept into the cockpit and brained the navigator before he even knew she was there. The pilot turned in his seat in time to receive the second blow across his forehead.

She’d told herself that she was only going to knock them out; but as with Fredger Cordwain, the Shacklemore man, it only took one blow to kill them. She was far stronger than her small frame suggested. Just another aspect of the change, along with her penetrating vision, her ability to heal bullet wounds in hours and the frightening hallucinations.

And the voices. The dissonant voices, the crew of that terrible craft, which loomed out of the endless fog of the Wrack. She could hear them now, their faint cries blowing on the wind that rushed past the hull of the Ketty Jay. Calling her. Calling her home.

Why not? Why not just go to them? Turn this crate to the north and get it all over with.

She was tired of this life. The last three years had been spent discarding one crew and joining up with another, never putting down roots. She kept her distance from the men and women she worked with because she knew, sooner or later, they’d find her out. It had been the same with the crew of the Ketty Jay. Eventually, she always had to run. Now that moment had come again.

Why stay in a world where you’re not wanted?

Every day, it got a little harder to resist the call of the Wrack. Every day eroded her willpower a little more. Was it only stubbornness that made her stay among people who would kill her if they knew what she was? Was it simply fear that prevented her from going to the north, where they lamented her absence, where she’d belong? Like the distant howl of a wolf pack, their cries stirred her, and she ached to go to them.

What’s stopping you, Jez? What’s stopping you?

What, indeed? Where else could she go from here? Did she imagine she could effect some kind of daring rescue in the Ketty Jay? No, that would be suicide. She wasn’t even very good at flying her. It would take a long time to get used to the many quirks of a craft as patched together as this. And even if she did somehow save Frey and the others, what then? How would she explain how she’d convinced Dracken’s crewman that she was dead?

It was just like all the times before, with all the other crews. The small things were adding up: her fantastically sharp eyesight; the way she never seemed to need sleep or food; how animals reacted around her; the uncanny healing after she got shot in Scarwater; the way she’d been unaffected by the fumes in Rook’s Boneyard.

And now there was this new ability to convincingly imitate a corpse. The first time, only Crake had seen it, and he hadn’t said a word. It could have been passed off as the Shacklemore man’s mistake. But twice?

Now the suspicious glances would begin. She’d start to hear that wary, mistrustful tone in their voices. Even on the Ketty Jay, where you didn’t ask about a person’s past, questions would be raised. They could accept a daemonist, but could they accept her? How long before Malvery insisted on giving her a check-up to solve the mystery? How long before they found her out?

The reason Fredger Cordwain thought she had no pulse was because she had no pulse.

The reason Dracken’s man thought she was dead was because she was.

It had happened three years ago.

The first Jez knew of the attack was when she heard the explosion. It was a dull, muffled roar that shook the ground and spilled the soup she was eating, scalding her fingers. A second explosion sent her scurrying to grab her thick fur-and-hide coat. She pulled up the hood, affixed the mask and goggles, and headed out of the warmth of the inn, up the stairs and into the blizzard.

She emerged onto the main thoroughfare of the tiny, remote town in Yortland that had been her home for a month. The dwellings to either side were low domes, built mostly underground, barely visible. The light from the small windows and the smoke from their chimneys pushed through the whirling snow.

There were others already outside: some were Yort locals, others were the Vard scientists who used this town as a base while they worked on the excavation nearby. All eyes were on the bright bloom of fire rising from the far side of the town. From the landing pad.

Her immediate thought was that a terrible accident had occurred, some tragic rupture in the fuel lines. Even before she wondered how many might have died, her stomach sank at the thought of being stranded in this place. The aircraft were their only link to the rest of the world. Here, on the northern tip of Yortland, civilisation was scattered and hard to find. There was no other settlement for a hundred kloms in any direction.

She felt a gloved hand on her upper arm and turned. She knew it was Riss, the expedition’s pilot, even though his face was hidden behind a fur-lined hood, mask and goggles. Nobody else touched her arm like that.

‘Are you alright?’ he shouted over the whistling wind. His voice was muffled.

‘Of course I’m alright. The explosion was over there.’

But then someone pointed to a dark shape approaching through the grey chaos in the sky, and the cries of alarm began. Jez felt the strength drain out of her as it took on form, huge and ragged and black. The drone of its engines was drowned out by the piercing, unearthly howling coming from its decks. It was a mass of dirty iron, oil and smoke, all spikes and rivets and shredded black pennants. A dreadnought, come from the Wrack, across the Poleward Sea to the shores of Yortland.

The destruction of the aircraft on the landing pad had been no accident. The attackers wanted to be sure nobody got away.

The Manes were here, searching for fresh victims.

Ropes snaked down as the dreadnought loomed closer, its massive hull swelling as it descended until its keel was only a few metres above the rooftops. By the time the Manes came slipping and sliding to the ground, people were already scattering in terror. They’d all heard the stories. The appearance of the dreadnought, the sheer force of its presence, panicked them like goats.

Jez panicked with them, fleeing up the thoroughfare, thinking only of escape. It was Riss who grabbed her arm, more forcefully this time, and tugged her into a doorway. He hurried her down some steps and into a circular underground room full of crates of scientific equipment and boxes of food and clothing. It was cold down here, but not as bad as outside. The sound of their boots echoed from the grey stone walls.

As soon as she was released, she bolted into a corner and huddled there, hugging herself and whimpering. She’d always prided herself on being a level-headed sort, but the sight of the dreadnought was too much for her. The craft exuded terror, an animal sense of wrongness that appealed to the most basic instincts. Whatever the Manes were, her intuition shrieked at their mere presence.

Riss was faring better. He was obviously scared out of his wits, but he was moving with a purpose. He’d grabbed two packs and was shoving dried food and blankets into them.

‘We can’t stay here,’ he said, in response to her unspoken question. ‘They’ll go through the whole town. It’s what they do.’

‘We . . . I’m not . . . I’m not going out there!’ Jez said through juddering lips. She could hear screams and sporadic gunfire from outside.

He pulled the packs tight, hurried over and shoved one towards her. She could see his eyes through the glass of the goggles. He was staring at her hard.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘When the Manes hit a town, they don’t leave people to tell the tale. The ones who aren’t taken are killed. You understand? We can’t avoid them by hiding down here.’

‘Where can we go?’

‘The excavation. The ice caves. We can survive there for a night. If we get out of town, we can wait till they’re gone.’

Jez calmed a little as his words sank in. Professor Malstrom, their employer, was obsessed with the search for a lost race he’d dubbed the Azryx, whom he believed had once possessed great and mysterious technology. Based on slender evidence and some cryptic writings, he’d divined that they died out suddenly, many thousands of years ago, and their civilisation had been swallowed by the ice. He’d persuaded the university to fund him on various digs over the past year, hoping to uncover relics of that ancient people. So far, he’d not found a thing. But the excavation would provide them with the shelter they needed, and the Manes might not look there.

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, we can hide out in the caves!’

She clutched at the sanity he offered, soothed by the strength and certainty in his voice. Riss had held a candle for her ever since they’d started working together, as pilot and navigator for Professor Malstrom’s expeditionary team. She liked him as a friend, but had never been able to summon up any feelings deeper than that.

He’d always been protective of her. It was a trait she found annoying: she interpreted it as possessiveness. But now she was ashamed to realise she wanted a protector. She’d crumbled in the face of the horror bearing down on them, and he hadn’t. She clung to him gratefully as he lifted her up and helped her put on her pack.

The thoroughfare was eerily deserted when they emerged. The dreadnought had gone, and the blizzard was closing in, cutting visibility down to fifteen metres. The chill began to seep into them immediately, even through their protective clothing. From somewhere in the skirling mêlée of snowflakes came distant yells and the report of shotguns. Piercing, inhuman howls floated after them.

They stayed close to the buildings. Jez hung on to Riss as he led her towards the edge of town, where a crude trail led up the mountain to the glacier. The excavation site was up there.

They’d not gone far when there was the roar of an engine, and a blaze of light up ahead. Gunfire erupted, startlingly close. Riss pulled Jez into the gap between two domed Yort dwellings, and they hid behind a grit-bin as a snow-tractor came racing up the thoroughfare. The boxy metal vehicles were usually employed to haul supplies and personnel back and forth from the glacier, but someone was trying to escape on one. The Manes had other ideas: there were four of them swarming all over it, trying to drag the doors open or punch their way in through the glass. Jez glimpsed them in the backwash of the headlamps as they passed - ghoulish, feral approximations of men and women - and then the speeding snow-tractor fishtailed on the icy ground. It slewed sideways for an instant before its tracks bit and flung it into the wall of a building.

The Manes abandoned the snow-tractor as several Yorts, wielding shotguns, came backing up the thoroughfare, firing into the blizzard, where more shadowy figures were darting on the edges of visibility. Manes prowled on all fours along rooftops or slunk close to the ground. They flitted and flickered, moving in fast jerks. They jumped from one spot to another without seeming to pass through the distance between.

Jez cringed as she saw the Manes spread out to encircle their victims. She wanted to run, to break from hiding and flee, but Riss held her tight.

The Yorts wore furs and masks. The Manes wore ragged clothes more suited to a mild spring day in Vardia. The cold, which would kill an unprotected human in minutes, meant nothing to them.

She turned away and burrowed into Riss’s arms as the Manes sprang inward as one. She’d closed her eyes to the sight, but she couldn’t shut out the screams of men and the exultant howls of the Manes. Mercifully, it was over in seconds.

Once done, there was silence. It was a short while before Riss stirred and looked out. The sounds of conflict still drifted out of the blizzard, but the Manes had moved elsewhere.

‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

Jez obeyed, reluctant to leave the relative safety of the grit-bin. His footsteps crunched across the thoroughfare, fading away. For a time, all she heard were faint gunshots and barked commands, carried on the breeze. Then his footsteps came crunching back. She looked out and saw him carrying a cutlass in one hand. There were several dead men scattered across the thoroughfare, their blood stark against the snow. At least three were missing. Not dead, but taken. Stolen by the Manes to crew their terrible craft.

Riss hunkered down in front of her. ‘The man in the snow-tractor is dead,’ he said. He held up the cutlass. ‘I got this.’

‘What about a gun? Don’t we need a gun?’

He wiggled his fingers inside his thick glove. Unlike the Yort suits, the scientists’ gear was built without much consideration for mobility; warmth was their primary concern. The gloves were too clumsy to fit the forefinger inside a trigger-guard, but without them his skin would freeze to the metal.

They headed away from the thoroughfare, through the gaps between the close-set dwellings. The snow had collected in drifts here, and they forged on with some difficulty, but at least the buildings hid them from view. Jez followed in Riss’s wake, allowing him to carve a path for her. Her breath was loud in her ears, trapped inside her mask. Her fur-lined hood obscured her peripheral vision, forcing her to turn to look behind her every few steps. She was afraid something was sneaking up on them, following their trail through the snow.

Something was sneaking up on them; but the attack, when it came, was from above.

Jez barely saw it. It was a blur of movement in the confusing whirl of the blizzard. Riss reacted with a cry before he was flung aside to crash into the side of a building. Standing in his place, right in front of her, was a Mane. It was the first and last time she ever got a good look at one, and it rooted her to the spot with fear.

The stories said they’d once been human, and they were recognisably so in form and face. But they’d been changed into something else, something that wore human shape uncomfortably, as a skin to contain whatever hid beneath.

The creature before her was scrawny, wearing a tattered shirt and trousers and no shoes at all. Limp black hair was smeared across a pale, wrinkled brow. Its features were twisted out of true. Lips curled to reveal sharp, crooked teeth. It glared at her with eyes that were the yellow and red of bloody pus. Its fingernails were long, dirty and cracked, and it stood low to the ground in a predator’s crouch.

It wasn’t what she saw, but what she sensed that paralysed her: the intuitive knowledge that she was in the presence of something not of this world, something that broke all laws and ruined all the certainties of a thousand generations of knowledge. Her body felt that, and rebelled.

Then it pounced, and bore her into a snowdrift.

She remembered little of what followed. It didn’t seem to make sense when she recalled it later. The Mane had her pinned by the shoulders, and stared into her eyes. Her gaze was locked, as if she were a mouse hypnotised by a snake. She could smell the stench of it, a dead scent like damp leaf mould. Her breathing dropped to a shallow pant.

She felt crushed by the weight of the creature’s will, oppressed by the force in its gaze. By the time she realised something was being done to her, it was too late to resist it. She struggled to oppose the invader with her thoughts, but she couldn’t concentrate. She was losing herself.

She became aware of a change all around her. The blizzard faded, turning ghostly and powerless. The world was darker and sharper all at once. She could see details where there hadn’t been details before: the fine jigsaw of creases in the skin of the Mane’s face; the shocking complexity of its feathery irises.

There was a whispering in the air, a constant hiss of half-spoken words. Movement all around her. She recognised the movement of the Manes, prowling around the town. She could feel them. She shared their motion. And as she sank deeper and deeper into the trance, she felt the warmth of that connection. A sense of belonging, like nothing she’d experienced before, enfolded her. It was beautiful and toxic and sugary and appalling all at once.

She’d almost surrendered herself to it when she was ripped back into reality.

It took a moment for her senses to cope with the change. She was being pulled to her feet by a faceless man in a hooded fur-and-hide coat. Her initial reaction was to pull away, but he held her firmly and said something to her. When she didn’t respond, he said it again, and this time the words got through.

‘—re you alright? Jez? Jez?’

She nodded quickly, because she wanted him to shut up. He was frightening her with his urgent enquiries. The Mane was thrashing and squealing on the ground. A cutlass was buried in the base of its neck, up to the collarbone, half-severing its head. There was little blood, just a clean wound, exposing bone.

But it still wasn’t finished. Moving with jerky, spastic movements, it got its feet under it and tried to stand. Riss swore and kicked it in the face, knocking it flat. He wrenched the cutlass free and beheaded it with a second stroke.

Riss turned away from the corpse of the Mane and looked up at her. He held out his hand: come with me.

Something snapped inside her. The accumulated horror and shock of the attack broke through. She lost her mind and fled.

She ran, through the passageways between the houses, out into the blizzard. The winds pushed and battered her. Snow stuck to her goggles. She could hear Riss calling her name but she ignored him. At some point she realised that she could no longer see any houses, just endless, unmarked snow. She kept running, driven by the terror of what lay behind.

Only when exhaustion drove her to her knees did she stop. She was thoroughly lost, and all traces of her passing were being erased by the fury of the snow. She dared not go back, and she couldn’t go forward. The cold, that she’d barely noticed during her flight, had set in deep. She began to shiver violently. A tiredness overtook her, every bit as insidious and unstoppable as the power of the Manes.

She curled up into a foetal position, and there, buried in the snow, she died.

Every day since, Jez had wondered what might have happened if things had gone another way. If Riss hadn’t saved her. If she’d succumbed to the Mane.

Would it have been so bad, in the end? In that brief moment, when she touched upon the world of the Manes, she’d felt something wonderful. An integration, a togetherness above and beyond anything her human life had given her.

She’d never borne children, never been in love. She’d always dreamed of having friends she could call soulmates, but somehow it never happened. She just didn’t care about them enough, and they didn’t care about her in return. She’d always considered herself rather detached, all in all.

So when she felt the call of the Manes, the primal invitation of the wolf-pack lamenting the absence of their kin, she found it harder and harder to think of reasons to resist.

Yes, they killed; but so had she, now. Yes, they were fearsome; but a fearsome exterior was no indication as to what was beneath. You only had to know the secret of Bess to understand that.

Would the process have been half so frightening if she’d been invited instead of press-ganged? Might she have gone willingly, if only to know what lay beyond that impenetrable wall of fog to the north? Were there incredible lands hidden behind the Wrack, glittering ice palaces at the poles, as the more lurid pulp novels suggested? Was it a wild place, like Kurg with its population of subhuman monsters? Or was there a strange and advanced civilisation there, like Peleshar, the distant and hostile land far to the south-west?

Whatever had been done to her by the Mane that day was incomplete, interrupted by a cutlass to the neck. She was neither fully human nor fully Mane, but somewhere in between. And yet the Manes welcomed her still, beckoned her endlessly, while the humans would destroy her if they knew that she walked their lands without a beating heart.

She never found out what happened to Riss. The morning after she died, she woke up and dug her way out of the snow that had entombed her in the night. The sun shone high in a crystal-blue sky, glittering on distant mounds of white: the roofs of the town. She’d run quite a way in her panic, but it had been in entirely the wrong direction if she’d hoped to reach the safety of the ice caves up on the glacier.

The corpses lay beneath the snow now. Whether Riss was among them, or if he’d been taken, the result was the same. He was gone.

Numb, she searched for survivors and found none. She stood in front of the snow-covered wreck of the aircraft she’d navigated for a year, and felt nothing. Then she found a snow-tractor and began to dig it out.

It took her several days to find another settlement, following charts she’d salvaged. Since she felt perfectly healthy she didn’t question how she’d survived at first. She assumed her snowy tomb had kept her warm. It was only when she was far out in the wilderness that she noticed her heart had stopped. That was when she began to be afraid.

By the time she reached the settlement, she had a story, and a plan.

Keep moving. Keep your secret. Survive, as much as you can be said to live at all.

But it had been a long and lonely three years since that day.

She passed over the southern part of the Hookhollows, their glowing magma vents making bright scribbles in the dark. The Eastern Plateau rose up before her, and she took the Ketty Jay down through the black, filthy clouds. Her engines were robust enough to take a little ash. Once she’d broken through, she brought the Ketty Jay to a few dozen metres above ground level, and skimmed over the Blackendraft flats. She glanced at the navigational charts she was following. Charts that had been meticulously kept by Dracken’s navigator since they’d commandeered the Ketty Jay.

Trust me, she’d said to Frey, when he demanded to know how she was going to fool Dracken’s men into thinking she was dead. The kind of trust he’d shown when he gave her the ignition code to his precious aircraft, the one thing he could be said to love. Even though he was afraid she might steal it and fly off for ever, he’d trusted her.

And he trusted her to come back and save him. She wouldn’t let him down.

She was under no illusion that she was risking her own life, and she knew that even if she succeeded, she’d probably be despised. They couldn’t be her friends. She’d never belong to that crew. If they learned how she was slowly, steadily becoming a Mane, they’d be forced to destroy her. She couldn’t blame them for that.

Yet she’d try anyway. Perhaps afterwards she’d go to the north, to the Manes; but first, she’d try.

It made no sense. But sometimes, humans did things that made no sense.

There was one last thing to do before she set off. Though she’d been lying in the infirmary with all the appearance of a corpse, she’d been wide awake. And she’d heard Dracken’s men talk. Not all the crew of the Ketty Jay had been taken on board the Delirium Trigger.

She slowed the Ketty Jay to a hover and consulted the charts again. She wanted to get this right first time. It was a small challenge to herself. She adjusted the craft’s heading, pushed her on half a klom, then stopped again. When she was satisfied, she engaged the belly lights. The ashen, dusty waste below her was flooded in dazzling light. She smiled.

Damn it, Jez. You’re good.

There, right where they’d left her, was Bess.

Thirty-Four

Malvery’s Story - Something Worse Than Cramp - Frey Goes To The Gallows

Mortengrace, ancestral home of Duke Grephen of Lapin, stood out white among the trees like an unearthed bone. It was set amid the folds and pleats of heavily forested coastal hills in the western arm of the Vardenwood, overlooking the sparkling blue waters of the Ordic Abyssal to the south. High walls surrounded it, enclosing a landing pad for aircraft, expansive gardens and the grand manse where the Duke and his family resided. Among the half-dozen outbuildings were an engineer’s workshop, a barracks for the resident militia and a gaol. The latter was rarely used in these more peaceable times, but it had found employment over the last two days, since Trinica Dracken had delivered six of the most wanted men in Vardia.

Crake sat in his cell, with Malvery and Silo, and he waited. It was all that was left to do now. He waited for the noose.

The cell was small and clean, with stone walls plastered off-white. There were hard benches to sleep on and a barred window, high up, that let in the salty tang of the sea. The temperature was mild on the south coast of Lapin, even in midwinter. A heavy wooden door, banded with iron, prevented their escape. There was a flap at the bottom, through which plates of food were occasionally pushed, and a slot their gaoler used to look in on them.

He was a chatty sort, keen to keep them updated on the details of their imminent demise. Through him, they’d learned that Duke Grephen was at an important conference, and was on his way back just as soon as he could get away and find a judge. ‘To execute the sentence nice and legal,’ the gaoler grinned, drawing out the word ‘execute’ just in case they missed how clever he was being by using it. ‘But don’t you worry. There ain’t no hurry, ’cause not a soul knows you’re here. Nobody’s coming to your rescue.’

There were two guards, in addition to the gaoler, though the prisoners rarely heard them speak. They were there to keep an eye on things. ‘Just in case you try any foolery,’ the gaoler said, with a pointed look at Crake. They’d evidently been warned that there was a daemonist among the prisoners. Crake’s golden tooth would be useless: he couldn’t deal with three men. His skeleton key was lying somewhere in the Ketty Jay’s cargo hold, equally useless.

No way out.

He’d been swallowed by an immense sense of emptiness. It had come upon him in the moment they’d lifted off from the Blackendraft, to be taken on board the Delirium Trigger. The news that the Ketty Jay had disappeared did little to alleviate it. Bess was gone.

His thoughts went to the small whistle, hidden in his quarters aboard the Ketty Jay. Only that whistle, blown by the daemonist who had thralled it, had the power to wake her from oblivion. He’d never get to blow that whistle now. Perhaps that was best.

He should never have tried to save her. In attempting to atone for one crime, he’d committed one far greater. And now she’d be left, neither dead nor alive, for an eternity.

Did she sleep? Was she aware? Was she trapped in a metal shell in the endless waste of the ash flats, unable to move or scream? How much was left of the beautiful child he’d ruined? It was so hard to tell. She was more like a faithful dog than a little girl now, muddled and jumbled by his clumsy transfer, prone to fits of rage, insecurity and animal violence.

He should have let her die, but he couldn’t live with the guilt of it. So he’d made her a monster. And, in doing so, made himself one.

A distant howl made Crake, Silo and Malvery look up as one. The voice was Frey’s, coming from the torture room, just beyond the cell he shared with Pinn and Harkins.

‘They’ve started up again,’ said Malvery. ‘Poor bastard.’

Crake stirred himself. ‘Why’s he bothering to hold out? What does it matter if he signs a confession or not? We’re all going to be just as dead with or without it.’

Malvery grinned beneath his white walrus-like moustache. ‘Maybe he just enjoys being an awkward bugger.’

Silo actually smiled at that. Crake didn’t take up the humour. He felt Malvery put a huge arm round his shoulder.

‘Cheer up, eh? You’ve had a face like a soggy arse since Dracken caught us.’

Crake gave him an amazed look. ‘You know, all my life I’ve been under the illusion that the fear of death was a common, almost universal part of being human. But recently I’ve come to think I’m the only one on this crew who is actually worried about it in the slightest.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I bet the other cell is half-full of Harkins’ shit by now, he’s so scared,’ Malvery said with a wink. ‘Then again, he’s afraid of just about everything. The only reason he’s still a pilot is because he’s more afraid of not being a pilot than he is of getting shot down.’

‘But . . . I mean, don’t you have regrets? Thwarted hopes? Anything like that?’ Crake was exasperated. He’d never been able to understand how the vagabonds of the Ketty Jay lived such day-today lives, never seeming to care about the future or the past.

‘Regrets? Sure. I’ve got regrets like you wouldn’t believe, mate,’ said Malvery. ‘Told you I was a doc back in Thesk, didn’t I? Well, I was good at it, and I got rich. Got a little flush with success, got a little fond of the bottle too.

‘One day a messenger from the surgery turned up at my house. There was a friend of mine, been brought in gravely ill. His appendix, was what it was. It was early in the morning, and I hadn’t gone to bed from the night before. Been drinking the whole time.’

Crake noted that the light-hearted tone was draining out of Malvery’s voice. He realised suddenly that he was in the midst of something serious. But Malvery kept going, forcing himself to sound casual.

‘Well, I knew I was drunk but I also knew it was my friend and I believed I was the best damn surgeon for the job, drunk or sober. I’d got so used to being good that I thought I couldn’t do no wrong. Wouldn’t trust it to anyone else. Some junior doc tried to stop me but I just shrugged him off. Wish he’d tried harder now.’

Malvery stopped suddenly. He heaved a great sigh, as if expelling something from deep in his lungs. When he spoke again it was with a deep resignation in his tone. What had been done had been done, and could never be undone.

‘It should have been easy, but I got careless. Slipped with the scalpel, went right through an artery. He bled out right in front of me, on the table, while I was trying to fix him up.’

Even obsessed with his own misery, Crake felt some sympathy for the big man. He knew exactly how he felt. Perhaps that was why they’d instinctively liked each other when they first met. Each sensed in the other a tragic victim of their own arrogance.

Malvery cleared his throat. ‘I lost it all after that,’ he said. ‘Lost my licence. Lost my wife. Spent my money. Didn’t care. And I drank. I drank and drank and drank, and the money got less and less, and one day I didn’t have nothing left. I think that was about when the Cap’n found me.’

‘Frey?’

Malvery pushed back the round, green-lensed spectacles on his broad nose. ‘Right. We met in some port, I forget which. He bought me some drinks. Said he could use a doctor. I said I wasn’t much of a doctor, and he said that was okay, ’cause he wasn’t gonna pay me much anyway.’ He guffawed suddenly. ‘Ain’t that just like him?’

Crake cracked a smile. ‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

‘I ain’t never picked up a scalpel since that day when I killed my friend. I don’t think I could. I keep those instruments polished in the infirmary, but I’ll never use ’em. I’m good for patching you up and a bit of stitching, but I’d never trust myself to open you up. Not any more. You wanna know the truth, I’m half a doctor. But that’s okay. ’Cause I found a home on the Ketty Jay, and I’ve got the Cap’n to thank for it.’ He paused as Frey screamed from down the corridor. A spasm of anger crossed his face, but was gone again in an instant. ‘He’s a good man, whatever faults he’s got. Been a good friend to me.’

Crake remembered how Trinica had put a gun to his head, and how Frey had given up the codes to his beloved aircraft rather than see the daemonist shot.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘To me, too.’

Crake knotted his fingers behind his head and leaned back against the wall of the cell. Silo, Harkins, and now Malvery: Frey certainly had a thing for picking up refugees. Granted, they were all useful to him in some way, but all owed a debt of gratitude and loyalty to their captain that Crake hadn’t detected until recently. Perhaps Frey’s intentions had been entirely mercenary - it could be that he just liked cheap crew - but at least half his men viewed him as a saviour of sorts. Maybe Frey didn’t need them, but they certainly needed him. Without their captain, Silo would end up lynched or sent back to slavery in Samarla, Harkins would be forced to face a life without wings, and Malvery would be a destitute alcoholic once again.

And what of the rest of them? He himself had found a place to hide while he stayed ahead of the Shacklemores. Pinn had found a place that would tolerate him, where he could forever avoid the reality of his sweetheart in his doomed search for riches and fame. And Jez? Well, maybe Jez just wanted to be in a place where nobody asked any questions.

Like it or not, Frey gave them all something they needed. He gave them the Ketty Jay.

‘We’re all running from something,’ Crake said wryly. Malvery’s words, spoken weeks ago, before they’d shot down the Ace of Skulls and all this had begun. Malvery bellowed with laughter, recognising the quote.

Crake looked up at the ceiling of the cell. ‘I deserve to be here,’ he said.

Malvery shrugged. ‘Then so do I.’

‘Ain’t no deserving, or otherwise,’ Silo said, his bass voice rolling out from deep in his chest. ‘There’s what is, and what ain’t, and there’s what you do about it. Regret’s just a way to make you feel okay that you’re not makin’ amends. A man can waste a life with regrets.’

‘Wise words,’ said Malvery, tipping the Murthian a salute. ‘Wise words.’

Distantly, Frey screamed again.

Frey had been shot twice in his life, beaten up multiple times by members of both sexes, bitten by dogs and impaled through the gut by a Dakkadian bayonet, but until today he’d always been of the opinion that the worst pain in the world was cramp.

There was nothing quite so dreadful to Frey as waking up in the middle of the night with that tell-tale sense of tightness running like a blade down the length of his calf. It usually happened after a night on the rum or when he’d taken too many drops of Shine, but on the cramped bunk in his quarters he often lay awkwardly and cut off the circulation to one leg or the other, even when dead sober.

The worst moments were those few seconds before the agony hit. There was always time enough to try and twist out of it in such a way that the pain wouldn’t come. It never worked. The inevitable seizure that followed would leave him whooping breathlessly, writhing around in his bunk and clutching his leg. It invariably ended with him knocking multiple items of luggage from the hammock overhead, which crashed down onto him in a tumble of cases and dirty clothes.

Finally, after the chaos of bewildering, undeserved pain, would come a relief so sweet that it was almost worth going through the preceding trauma to get there. He’d lie half-buried in the luggage, gasping and thanking whoever was listening that he was still alive.

Frey had learned long ago that the violent clenching of the muscles in his lower leg could send him wild with agony. Today, his torturer had introduced him to the joys of electrocution. Instead of just his leg seizing up, now it happened to his entire body at once.

If he survived this, Frey decided, he’d have to rethink his definition of pain.

Blinding, shocking torment; his back arching involuntarily; muscles tensed so hard they could break bone; teeth gritted and jaw pulled back in a grimace.

And then the pain was gone. The joy was enough to make him want to break down and weep. He slumped forward in the chair as much as his restraints would allow, sweat dripping off his brow, chest heaving.

‘Do you want to be hurt? Is that it?’ the torturer asked.

Frey raised his head with some difficulty. The torturer was looking at him earnestly, wide grey eyes sympathetic and understanding. He was a handsome fellow, square-jawed and neat, wearing a carefully pressed light blue uniform in the ducal colours of Lapin.

‘You should have a go at this,’ Frey said, forcing out a fierce grin. ‘Gives you quite a kick.’

The guard standing by the door - a burly man in an identical uniform to the torturer - smiled at that for a moment, before realising he wasn’t supposed to. The torturer tutted and shook his head. He moved over to the machine that stood next to Frey’s chair. It was a forbidding metal contraption, the size of a cabinet, with a face of dials and semicircular gauges.

‘Obviously it’s not kicking hard enough,’ the torturer said, turning one of the dials a few notches.

Frey braced himself. It did no good.

The pain seemed like it would never end, until it did. The room swam back into focus. He’d always pictured torture chambers as dank and dungeon-like, but this place was clean and clinical. More like a doctor’s surgery than a cell. The electric lights were bright and stark. There were all kinds of instruments in trays and cabinets, next to racks of bottles and drugs. Only the metal door, with a viewing-slot set into it, gave away the true nature of this place.

The confession sat on a small table in front of him. A pen waited next to it. The torturer had obligingly read it out to him yesterday, before they began. It was pretty much as he’d expected: I, Frey, admit every damn thing. I conspired with my crew to kill the Archduke’s son because we’re greedy and bad, and then we all laughed about it afterwards. It was all my idea and certainly nobody else’s, especially not Duke Grephen’s or Gallian Thade’s, who are both spotless and loyal subjects of our revered leader, and whose very faeces smell of roses and almond, et cetera, et cetera.

The torturer picked up the pen and held it out to him. ‘End it, Darian. Why struggle? You know there’s no way out of here. Why must you make the last few hours of your life so miserable?’

Frey blinked sweat out of his eyes and stared dully at the pen. Why didn’t he just sign it? It was only a formality. As soon as Grephen arrived with a judge, they’d be tried and hanged anyway, though not necessarily in that order.

But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t sign that paper because he didn’t want to make it easy on them. Because he’d fight for every moment he had left, eke out every inch of existence there was to be had.

Confessing was giving up. He wasn’t resisting in the hope of achieving anything; he was resisting just to resist. It didn’t matter how futile it was. He was bitter that he’d got so close, that he’d almost managed to get his crew out of the mess he’d got them into. It enraged him.

So he relished the small victories that were left. However she did it, Jez had got away, and taken the Ketty Jay with her. The fact that Grephen wasn’t hurrying back immediately to dispose of his prisoners suggested that Trinica Dracken had neglected to mention that she’d lost the Ketty Jay en route. Unwittingly, Dracken had bought them some time.

He’d embarrassed her twice now. He took solace in that. He hadn’t failed to notice that Trinica kept her compass and charts close to her at all times now. She’d been carrying them as they were shuttled from the deck of the Delirium Trigger to the landing pad at Mortengrace. She was nervous that they might be stolen again, and didn’t want to leave them in her cabin.

Small victories. But victories, nevertheless.

He didn’t hold out hope of Jez coming back. Not only would it be stupid, she had no real reason to. They were just a crew, like many she’d taken up with before. Though efficient at her job, she’d always seemed stand-offish, keeping to her cabin most of the time. He didn’t imagine she held any particular affection for them, and he had no reason to expect loyalty. After all, she’d barely joined before he turned her into an outlaw.

But the Ketty Jay survived, and with a new captain at the helm. That was alright with Frey. If he couldn’t have her, he was glad that someone could, and he’d always liked his diminutive navigator. He’d always wonder how Jez did it, though he took consolation in the fact that he wouldn’t have to wonder long.

I suppose Slag made it too, he thought. I wonder how he’s going to get on with his new captain.

‘Sign!’ the torturer urged, pressing the pen into his hand.

Frey took it. ‘Give me the paper,’ he said.

The torturer’s eyes lit up eagerly. He moved the table closer, so Frey could write on it. The leather cuffs he wore were attached to straps that gave him a few inches of slack. The torturer presumably thought a man couldn’t spasm efficiently without a little room to writhe.

‘Bit closer. I can’t reach,’ said Frey. The torturer did as he was asked. ‘Can you hold the paper steady? This isn’t easy with one hand.’

The torturer smiled encouragingly as he steadied the paper for Frey to sign. He stopped smiling when Frey stabbed the pen into the soft meaty part between his thumb and forefinger.

A third man in uniform burst in through the door, and stood bewildered at the sight that faced him. The torturer was wheeling around the room, shrieking, holding his impaled hand, which still had a pen sticking out of it. The guard by the door was in paroxysms of laughter. Frey had crumpled the confession into a ball and was trying to get it into his mouth to eat it, but couldn’t quite reach. He paused guiltily as the newcomer stared at him, then let it drop from his hand.

‘What do you want?’ screamed the torturer, when he got his breath back.

‘You can stop now,’ said the newcomer.

‘But he’s not confessed!’

‘We’ll draft a new one and sign it for him. The Duke is back with a judge. He wants this done.’

‘Can’t you give me an hour?’ the torturer whined, seeing his chance at revenge slipping away.

‘I’m to take charge of him immediately,’ the newcomer insisted. ‘Get him out of that chair. He’s coming with me.’

The sky was blue. Clear, cloudless and perfect. Frey squinted up at the sun and felt it warm his face. Amazing, he thought, how the north coast of the continent was gripped in ice and yet it was still pleasant here in the south. Vardia was so vast, its northern edge breached the Arctic Circle while its southern side came close to the equator. He’d always thought of winter as the grimmest season; but like anything, he supposed, it depended on where you were standing.

The spot chosen for his execution was a walled courtyard behind the barracks, where the militia conducted their drills. There was a small raised platform in the centre where a general might stand to oversee proceedings. A wrought iron lamp-post projected from its centre, flying the Duke’s flag. Ornamental arms projected out from the lamp-post. They were intended for hanging pennants, but the pennants had been removed and a noose thrown over one of the arms to form a crude gallows. The end of the noose lay loosely around Frey’s neck. An executioner - a massive, sweaty ogre with a thin shirt stretched over an enormous gut - waited to pull it taut.

A small crowd was assembled before him. There were two dozen militia, a judge, the Duke, and two witnesses: Gallian Thade and Trinica Dracken. Off to one side was a wagon with bars on its sides. Inside this wheeled cage were the remainder of his crew. They were unusually subdued. The seriousness of their situation had sunk in at last. Even Pinn was getting it now. They were going to watch their captain die. Nobody felt like joking.

He’d always wondered how he’d face death. Not the quick, hectic rush of a gun-battle but the slow, considered, drawn-out finale of an execution. He’d never imagined that he’d feel quite so serene. The wind stirred a lock of hair against his forehead; the sun shone on his cheeks. He felt like smiling.

The Darian Frey they were about to kill wasn’t the same Darian Frey they’d set out to frame for their crime. That man had been a failure, a man who lurched from crisis to disaster at the whim of fate. A man who had prided himself on being better than the bottom-feeding scum of the smuggling world, and hadn’t desired any more than that.

But he’d surprised them. He’d turned and fought when he should have run. He’d evaded and outwitted them time and again. He’d turned a bunch of dysfunctional layabouts into something approximating a crew. Stories would be told of how they tweaked the nose of the infamous Trinica Dracken in a hangar bay in Rabban. Word would spread. Freebooters all over Vardia would hear of Darian Frey, and his craft, the Ketty Jay. He’d come close to unearthing a daring conspiracy against the ruling family of the land, involving a Duke of Vardia, the legendary pirate captain Orkmund, and the mighty Awakener cult.

Only a final twist of ill fortune had stopped him. Trinica had made copies of the charts he stole. Without the compass she couldn’t make it through the magnetic mines that guarded Retribution Falls, but she could wait at the point where she knew he’d emerge.

One little slip-up. But he’d led them a merry chase all the same. They might have caught him, but he still felt like he’d won.

He looked at the faces behind the bars: Malvery, Crake, Silo, Harkins . . . even Pinn. He was surprised to find he was sad to be leaving them. He didn’t want it all to end now. He’d just begun to enjoy himself.

Frey had stopped listening to the list of crimes and accusations that the judge was reading out. The preliminaries were unimportant. He was thinking only of what was to come. Death was inevitable. He accepted that, and was calm. His hands were tied securely before him, and there were two dozen guards with rifles waiting to fill him with bullets if he should try to escape.

But he still had one trick left to play. The world would remember him, alright. Maybe they’d never know the truth, but they’d know his name.

The judge, an ancient, short-sighted relic who was more than half dust, finished his rambling and looked up, adjusting his spectacles.

‘Sentence of death has been passed,’ he droned. ‘Tradition grants the prisoner the opportunity to make a last request. Does the prisoner have such a request?’

‘I do,’ said Frey. ‘To be honest, I consider it a bit of an insult that the Duke couldn’t even provide a decent gallows to hang me by. I request an alternative method of execution.’

Duke Grephen’s sallow face coloured angrily. Trinica watched the prisoner curiously with her black eyes.

‘I’d like to be beheaded with my own cutlass,’ Frey said.

The judge looked at the Duke. Grephen swiped a strand of lank blond hair from his forehead and huffed.

‘I can see no objection,’ creaked the judge warily, in case the Duke had any objection.

‘Fetch his cutlass!’ Grephen cried. One of the guards hastened away to obey.

Frey stared at the Duke coolly. Even in his uniform, he looked like a spoiled boy. His deeply set eyes glittered with childish spite. He was a cold and humourless man, Frey surmised that much. He’d murdered dozens on board the Ace of Skulls, just to kill the Archduke’s son in such a way that it could be pinned on someone else. Frey didn’t believe it bothered him one bit. If there was any warmth in him, it was reserved for the Allsoul.

Next to him stood Gallian Thade. Sharp-faced, beak-nosed, with a pointed black beard. He was all angles and edges, where the Duke was soft and pudgy. Thade watched him with an air of smugness. He’d waited a long time to see the man who had deflowered his daughter receive his punishment.

And then there was Trinica. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her ghost-white face revealed nothing. Would she be pleased to see him die? Would she finally be able to close the chapter of her life that had begun with him? Or was she even now remembering fonder moments from their past, wondering if she’d done the right thing in bringing him here?

Grephen had destroyed the Ace of Skulls; Thade had picked Frey to frame for it; Trinica had caught him.

He had reason to kill them all. But he’d only have time to do one of them. And he’d already chosen his target.

The guard returned from the barracks with his cutlass. Grephen took it and inspected it before passing it to the executioner. The executioner ran his thumb admiringly down the blade, then hissed through his teeth as he slashed the tip open.

‘Could you get this thing off me?’ Frey asked, jiggling his shoulders to indicate the noose. The executioner thrust the cutlass into his belt and removed the noose with one hand, sucking his bleeding thumb with the other.

‘Kneel down, mate,’ he said. Frey went to his knees on the wooden platform at the foot of the lamp-post. He shifted his wrists inside their knots of rope and rolled his neck.

He looked over at the cage, where his crew were imprisoned. Once he was dead, they’d follow him. Pinn seemed bewildered. Crake’s gaze was heavy with tragedy. Silo was inscrutable, Harkins was cringing in a corner and looking away. Malvery gave him a rueful smile and a thumbs-up. Frey nodded in silent thanks for his support.

‘Sentence of execution by beheading,’ said the judge, ‘to be carried out in the sight of these eminent witnesses.’

The executioner drew the cutlass and took aim, touching the blade to the back of Frey’s neck. ‘Don’t worry, eh?’ he said. ‘One swipe and it’ll be done.’

Frey took a breath. One swipe. He saw the blade descending in his mind’s eye. He saw himself dropping one shoulder, rolling, holding up his hands as the daemon-thralled sword slashed neatly through his bonds. He saw the blade jump from the hands of the executioner and into Frey’s grasp. He saw the surprise on Grephen’s face as Frey flung it from the podium. He saw it slide point first into the Duke’s fat heart.

The sword always knew his will. He might go down in a hail of bullets, but the author of his misery would go down with him. And all of Vardia would know how Duke Grephen died at the hands of an insignificant little freebooter, who had outwitted him at the last.

‘Kill him,’ said Grephen to the executioner.

The executioner raised the cutlass. Frey closed his eyes.

Ready . . .

The blade quivered, and he fancied he heard the harmonic singing of the daemon within.

Ready . . .

And then a loud voice cried: ‘STOP!’

Thirty-Five

The Suspicions Of Kedmund Drave - Frey Says His Piece - The Sticky Matter Of Proof - Death In The Courtyard

The voice that had halted the execution belonged to Kedmund Drave, the most feared of the Century Knights, who Frey had last seen lying on a landing pad in Tarlock Cove after he emptied a shotgun into Drave’s chest. His moulded crimson armour showed no signs of the encounter as he swept across the courtyard towards Duke Grephen, his thick black cape swaying around him.

To either side were Samandra Bree and Colden Grudge. Frey recognised them from their ferrotypes. Samandra was wearing the outfit she was famous for: battered coat and boots, loose hide trousers, a tricorn hat perched on her head. Grudge, in contrast, looked like something half-ape. Shaggy-haired and bristle-faced, he was a hulking mass of dirty armour barely contained inside the folds of a hooded cloak. His autocannon clanked against his back. It was a gun bigger than most men could even carry, let alone fire.

‘What exactly is going on here?’ Drave demanded, striding up to the Duke. They could scarcely have been more different: the soft, spoiled aristocrat in his neatly pressed uniform and the iron-hard figure of the Knight, his silver-grey hair shorn close to his scalp and his cheek and neck horribly scarred.

Grephen collected himself, overcame the physical intimidation and attempted to assert his Ducal authority. ‘These men are pirates,’ he said. ‘They have been condemned to death. I wasn’t aware there was any law forbidding a Duke to deal with pirates inside his own duchy. As you can see, I have a judge here to ensure everything is legal.’

Drave stared at the old judge, who began to look nervous.

‘I see,’ he said slowly. ‘I imagine the trial has been thorough and fair.’

Grephen bristled. ‘Remember who you’re talking to, sir. You may have the Archduke’s authority but even the Archduke knows to respect his Dukes.’

‘I’m not in the business of respect,’ Drave snarled. He turned to the judge. ‘There has been a trial, I assume?’

The judge looked shiftily at Grephen and swallowed. ‘I was brought here to oversee the executions. The Duke assured me that their guilt was not in question.’

‘You’ve obtained confessions, then?’ Drave asked Grephen.

Frey grinned. There wouldn’t have been time to make up and sign another confession after he’d ruined the last one.

‘They were caught red-handed in an act of piracy,’ Grephen declared, flushing angrily. ‘There was no need for a confession, or a trial. I exercised my ducal authority, as is my right. Besides, they admitted it.’

‘Did we, bollocks!’ Malvery yelled from the cage. ‘He’s lying!’

‘You shut up!’ growled Colden Grudge, pointing a meaty finger at the doctor.

‘We’re innocent!’ Pinn cried, joining in happily. For a while his faith in a last-second intervention had wavered; but now here it was, and all was right with the world again.

Drave turned his gaze to Trinica. ‘Trinica Dracken. You caught these men?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know what crimes they are wanted for?’

‘I do.’

‘And you were hired to catch them by the Duke?’

‘I was.’

‘Then he must know what crimes they are wanted for.’

Trinica looked at Grephen, her black eyes emotionless. ‘I’d assume so,’ she said.

Drave turned on Grephen. ‘Given that, Duke Grephen, why did you see fit to execute these prisoners yourself instead of delivering them to the Archduke for public trial? After all, it wasn’t your son they killed.’

Grephen had begun to sweat, his limp hair becoming lank. He looked to Gallian Thade, but Thade couldn’t help.

‘I can answer that,’ called Frey. He was still kneeling on the platform, with the executioner standing next to him, Frey’s cutlass held loosely in his hand.

‘You be quiet, criminal!’ Grephen snapped.

Drave’s eyes narrowed as he looked for the first time at the man who had almost killed him a few weeks earlier. Frey wondered if the malice in that glare would be the death of him, or if Drave would give him the chance he needed. For a long instant, Drave said nothing; then he held up a hand.

‘Let him speak. I’d like to hear what he has to say.’

Frey looked around the courtyard. All eyes were on him now. The guards in their light blue uniforms glanced at each other nervously. Grephen looked nauseous with fear. They’d thought this would be a simple execution: now they realised there was much more to it.

‘Can I get to my feet?’ Frey asked. ‘My knees are getting kind of sore like this.’

Drave motioned for him to get up. The executioner backed away a step. ‘Make it quick,’ he said. ‘And make it good. I will get to the bottom of this, but I’ll not lie to you, Darian Frey: I’d like to see you dead as much as anyone.’

Frey got up. He was still possessed of that strange sense of calm that had settled on him with the surety of death. It was as if his body couldn’t quite believe there might be a reprieve for him.

‘I’ll keep it simple, then,’ he said. ‘Duke Grephen plans to overthrow the Archduke. He’s being bankrolled by the Awakeners; they want to see the Archduke deposed because of the political measures he and his wife are introducing to limit their power. They know Grephen is devout, and that he’ll act favourably towards them once he seizes power.’

‘These are lies!’ Grephen shouted, but Frey went on anyway.

‘The Awakeners don’t have an army, and Grephen doesn’t command enough troops to challenge the Coalition Navy, so between them they’ve raised a force of pirates and freebooters, paid for with Awakener gold. This army is at the hidden port of Retribution Falls, waiting for the signal to move on Thesk and unseat the Archduke. As far as I know, that signal is coming any day now.’

‘And what does any of this have to do with the destruction of the Ace of Skulls and the death of Hengar?’ Drave asked.

‘Hengar’s death was a preliminary. They wanted to be sure there was nobody left for dissenters to rally round. He was the only surviving member of the Arken family who could inherit the title after the Archduke is gone. His secret affair with a Samarlan gave them an opportunity to get him out of the way and make it look like an accident. And Hengar was the popular one; by killing him and then leaking the information about the affair, they made the Archduke’s family look dishonest and immoral. All the better for after the coup, when they could claim it was a revolution to depose a corrupt regime, just like the Dukes when they overthrew the monarchy.’

‘This is pure fantasy!’ Grephen shrieked. ‘I will not stand here and listen to this slander from a pirate and murderer.’

‘I can prove it,’ said Frey. ‘I’ve been to Retribution Falls, and I’ve seen the army that’s waiting there. I know how to find it.’ He stared hard into the eyes of Kedmund Drave. ‘I can take you there.’

Drave stared back at him. ‘In exchange for a pardon, no doubt.’

‘A pardon?’ cried the Duke, but was ignored.

‘For me and my crew,’ Frey said. ‘The Ace of Skulls was rigged with explosives. Any engineer would tell you it’s nigh on impossible to blow up a craft that size with the guns I have on my craft. We were set up to take the fall for it, so nobody would suspect that it was part of a bigger plot. They hoped we’d be killed before we ever worked out what was going on, so we wouldn’t be able to tell anyone.’ He raised his bound hands and pointed across the courtyard. ‘The set-up was Gallian Thade’s doing. He’s in on it too.’

Thade said nothing, but his gaze was murderous.

‘You’re going to take his word for what kind of guns he has on his craft?’ Grephen spluttered.

‘I know what kind of guns he has on his craft,’ Drave said. ‘We have it in our possession.’

Frey’s heart leaped. That could mean only one thing: Jez. Somehow, she’d found the Century Knights and told them what was going on. A flicker of real hope ignited in him.

‘He’s playing for time!’ Grephen accused. ‘He’s leading you on a wild goose chase. You’re not really thinking of letting him lead you all over Vardia in search of some mythical pirate port?’

Drave looked at Frey. ‘Is that what you’re doing? Playing for time?’ ‘If you’ll permit me . . .’ said Frey. He reached down into his trousers and began groping around at his crotch. Several guards covered him with guns. Samandra Bree raised an eyebrow.

After a moment, he pulled out a tightly folded piece of paper and proffered it across the podium. Drave looked at it, then nodded at Samandra.

‘Me?’ she cried in protest. She rolled her eyes. ‘Fine!’ she groaned.

She took the paper delicately from Frey’s hand, touching it as little as possible. ‘That’s been down there for days, right?’

‘Ever since Dracken captured us,’ Frey said, with a wink. ‘Lucky they didn’t search us too closely.’

Samandra wrinkled her pretty nose. ‘Ugh.’

She handed the paper to Drave, who unfolded it, apparently unconcerned by the moistness and the smell.

‘It’s a page from the dock master’s book at Retribution Falls. You can see his name and title signed down there in the bottom corner,’ Frey told him.

‘I see it,’ said Drave. He turned the paper over. ‘I don’t see the Ketty Jay on here, though.’

‘We weren’t calling ourselves the Ketty Jay at the time. It would have been a bit stupid with half of Vardia trying to catch or kill us.’

‘How convenient!’ Grephen crowed.

‘I’m not showing it to you to prove I was there. The fact that you hold it in your hand is proof enough that I was there,’ Frey replied. ‘The name you should be looking at is the Moment of Silence. If you look up her records you’ll find she’s a craft registered to the Awakeners. The signature will also match the captain’s. She was the craft shuttling Awakener gold to Retribution Falls to finance the army.’

Grephen was becoming short of breath. ‘That . . . that piece of paper doesn’t prove anything! A forged piece of rubbish!’

There were many tales told about Kedmund Drave. Like all the Century Knights, he had his own kind of legend. One of the less unpleasant stories claimed that he could tell if a man was lying just by looking into his eyes. He looked now: a penetrating gaze, boring into the Duke.

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