Twenty

The Mentenforth Institute – Little Bright Star – Chloroformed – Historical Artefacts

‘Hurry up, hurry up!’ Frey muttered.

Crake ignored him and concentrated on the skeleton key in the lock. The thralled daemon was singing faintly in his hand at a pitch that he could sense rather than hear. Using the tooth last night, followed by an insidious day-long hangover, had worn him down. It was harder than usual to make the key do its job.

The Cap’n glanced around uncomfortably. ‘Someone’s gonna come.’

‘Will you please shut up?’ Crake asked. No one needed to tell him to worry about getting caught. Crake had an ingrained terror of authority born from a lifetime of strict social rules and regulations.

Frey cursed to himself and flapped around, beating off the autumn chill. The slashes along the back of his greatcoat were letting in the cold air. Silo watched him without obvious emotion.

Towering above them in the darkness were the imposing walls of the Mentenforth Institute building. Its pillared front entrance looked out onto one of the most expensive streets in Thesk, but they weren’t at the front entrance. They were round the back, in a small yard that was uncomfortably well lit. Not suitable for criminal activity at all. They were out of sight of the road, but well in sight of the buildings that overlooked the yard.

The key slipped and slid around the inside of the lock, seeking the right configuration. Crake frowned and tried again, harder. His hand was going cold. He couldn’t stop thinking about last night. About Samandra.

Come on, come on. Get on with it.

‘Jez? Are you up there?’ Frey whispered, his hand to his ear where the earcuff sat. They were all wearing them. When someone spoke, the earcuffs repeated it a fraction of a second later. It was slightly disorientating, and the Cap’n had complained about it, but Crake had insisted in case they got separated.

‘I’m here, Cap’n,’ came Jez’s voice in Crake’s ear.

‘Can you see us?’

‘I can see the Mentenforth building but I . . . oh, wait, there you are. Hi!’

Frey waved up in the air. Crake glanced up briefly. The Ketty Jay was hanging up there in the dark somewhere, a klom above them, but all that was visible over the city lights were a few stars.

‘Be ready. We might need a quick evacuation.’

‘You told me that half a dozen times, Cap’n. What do you think I’m doing up here?’

Frey didn’t reply, but turned his attention to Crake instead. ‘What’s taking so long?’ he demanded irritably.

Crake didn’t take offence. He understood the Cap’n’s impatience. Everyone knew that time was ticking down for him, and every new delay was harder on his nerves.

They hadn’t been able to move immediately, even after they found out where the relic was. They needed to scout the location, they needed to talk to their shady underworld contacts about what was inside and, more importantly, Crake needed to sober up. They would require the use of his daemonist talents if they hoped to penetrate the Mentenforth.

They barely had a plan at all by nightfall, and Crake was still far short of his best. But the Iron Jackal wouldn’t wait.

Six nights left until the full moon. Where had the time gone?

Crake felt the key turn in his hand with a thump. ‘We’re in,’ he said, with no small amount of relief.

Frey pushed the door open carefully. It whined on its hinges, making Crake’s shoulders tense up. Frey looked inside, then darted through and beckoned them.

Silo went after him. Crake took a deep breath and followed. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done enough criminal things during his tenure as a crewman on the Ketty Jay, but he was usually doing them to other criminals, or foreigners, or Awakeners, so that was alright in his book. But breaking in to a highly respected institute of learning, stealing from it, went against pretty much everything he stood for. He didn’t think he could take the disgrace if he was found out. The only thing keeping him going was the fact that they’d stolen the relic in the first place, so technically it belonged to them. Sort of.

Give it up, Grayther, he told himself. Admit it. You’re not quite the noble fellow you pretend to be. In fact, you probably never were.

The Mentenforth Institute. A private museum and place of study and learning, founded by members of various guilds, including the Archaeologists and the Explorers. If Samandra’s information was accurate, the relic was inside.

In retrospect, this was the most obvious place for Isley Grothsen, the head of the Archaeologists’ Guild, to bring it after Crickslint sold it to him. A Samarlan relic so ancient and valuable would presumably require some time to study and authenticate, and this place had all the necessary equipment, as well as being highly secure.

But they hadn’t had time to guess. It might have gone straight to the palace for the Archduke, or to Galmury for the professors to pore over, or to the official Archaeologists’ Guild headquarters. The transaction had been kept under wraps; none of Frey’s contacts knew anything about it. And Frey couldn’t rob all those places.

So Crake did what he had to do. He used the tooth on Samandra. The memory of it caused his guts to knot. He’d used the tooth on all kinds of people before without the slightest compunction, but never on someone he cared about. It made him feel dirty. Part of him blamed the Cap’n for that, but mostly he just blamed himself.

Well, if he didn’t have nobility and decency, at least he had loyalty. At least there was that. Even if it did end up thoroughly ruining what was left of his life.

The back door let on to a plain corridor. Electric lamps sat in wall recesses, running very low, providing a steady twilight. They closed the door behind them and slipped up the corridor until it ended in another, smaller door. Frey listened, then opened it, lifting it on its hinges to cut out the squeak.

Beyond was a display room, cool and full of shadows. The walls were stone, with narrow windows set high, and the floor was polished marble. Several rows of glass cases, set closely together, stood dark. At both ends, archways led into brightly lit corridors. The only light in the room was that which spilled through the arches.

They listened. Slow footsteps were faintly audible. Guards walking the corridors somewhere. Crake tried to guess where they were, but the place had an institutional hollowness to it, and sounds echoed.

‘Alright, fellers,’ Frey whispered. The earcuffs allowed them to talk at a barely audible level. ‘In and out without being seen. I don’t want anyone getting shot. Not you, and not any guards either.’

‘I thought you said guards were paid to get shot. What happened to ‘‘providing employment opportunities’’?’ Crake replied sarcastically.

‘Oh, bollocks to all that,’ he said, waving it away. ‘I just don’t want to add murder to the list of things we’ll get hung for if they catch us.’

Crake didn’t feel like adding another retort after that.

‘Relax,’ said Frey, seeing his face fall. He pulled a small bottle from inside his greatcoat, wrapped in a dirty rag, and showed it to him. ‘The doc’s given me a little something to take care of any troublemakers, nice and quiet.’

Chloroform. Crake was hardly reassured.

Frey picked a direction, and they crept along the aisles between the cases. Crake couldn’t help looking in as he passed. Usually, only guild members got to see the treasures housed in the Institute, and he wasn’t going to let the prospect of getting executed stop him taking advantage of the opportunity.

There was so much to see. The first case held a stuffed bird from parts unknown, fearsome and unsettlingly strange. There was a petrified gargant egg, bigger than his head, a remnant of a bygone time when monsters preyed on men. Next was a stretched animal-skin parchment, painted with the indecipherable characters. The accompanying plaque declared it to be Old Isilian, the forgotten tongue that had been the predecessor of all other languages on the Pandracan continent.

Further on was an old wind-map, used by suicidally brave balloonists to explore the world beyond Pandraca, before the First Age of Aviation ushered in powered flight and the wind-maps got replaced by storm charts. Next to it was a blurred ferrotype, taken from the prow of a ship in the midst of a hurricane. Amid the black-and-white spume and the rearing waves was the shadow of something huge, something coiled and spiked and unmistakably animal.

Crake moved slowly down the aisle like a mesmerised child in a sweet shop, gazing rapturously at everything. His mind was filled with the immensity of the past, of great men and women at the frontiers of new discovery. Just where he’d wanted to be, once, before he overstepped himself and his niece died because of it. But the tragedy had only stunned his ambition, not killed it. He was an explorer, a pioneer of unseen worlds. And by damn, he was going to distinguish himself, one way or another.

He wished there was more light. He wanted to see everything.

Someone was coming back down the aisle towards him. The Cap’n, an expression of exasperation on his face. Crake realised he’d been dawdling.

‘Will you move yourself?’ he whispered angrily. ‘This isn’t a family bloody outing!’

‘Yes, right,’ Crake murmured. ‘Sorry.’ But suddenly Silo came hurrying down the aisle, waving at them urgently. They didn’t need words to know what he meant.

Guard coming.

The three of them slipped into cover behind pedestals and display cases. The wonder and excitement of a moment ago was blasted away by the cold fear of being caught doing something wrong. Crake had never grown out of that feeling. He’d lived through multiple gunfights and commanded unworldly creatures from the aether, but trespassing was another matter entirely. He dreaded the moment that guard laid eyes on him, the shame of discovery, more than he dreaded the hanging that would probably follow.

The guard had come in through one of the archways, and was idly walking through the room, humming to himself. A lullaby: ‘Little Bright Star’. Did he have a child, then? Crake didn’t want to think about that, in case the guard ended up getting shot. He pressed himself further into hiding. He could see the Cap’n across the aisle from him, gun drawn, a serious expression on his face.

No telling which aisle the guard was going to take through the display cases. If he came too close, he couldn’t fail to notice the men crouched in the shadows.

Crake didn’t dare to peek out, in case he was spotted. The footsteps were approaching. He tried to listen, to work out which aisle the guard was coming up. He looked at Frey, who was hiding across the aisle to his right. Frey gave him a shrug and a helpless face: search me!

Best they could do was stay still. Best they could do was—

No. Suddenly, he was sure. The guard was coming to his left. He moved, slipping around the pedestal into the aisle that lay between him and the Cap’n. By some miracle he did it without so much as a rustle. An instant later the guard passed by, inches from the spot where he’d been hiding. He went off up the aisle, a dark figure in the gloom, walking with a jaunty swing.

Crake didn’t move a muscle until the guard had left the room, through the archway at the other end, humming the lullaby as he went. He let out the breath he’d been holding.

Frey went to the opposite arch and looked out into the corridor beyond. He beckoned the other two to join him.

‘Right,’ he said quietly. ‘Here’s the plan. This place isn’t that big, but we can cover it faster if we split up. Use the earcuffs to keep in touch and—’

‘No,’ said Silo.

Frey and Crake both looked at him in surprise.

‘It’s a dumb plan, Cap’n. We don’t know the layout of this place. One of us find the thing, we gonna be tryin’ to direct the others to where we are, not knowin’ where they are neither, an’ all of us runnin’ round like headless chickens. Place is full of guards. Three times the chance o’ getting caught.’

‘Er,’ said Frey, who seemed rather taken aback by the whole thing. He wasn’t used to defiance from the quiet Murthian. ‘I suppose you’ve got a point. Let’s not split up, then.’

‘Right,’ said Silo, and slipped through the archway, taking the lead from Frey.

Frey and Crake exchanged a look of bewilderment. ‘Something’s got into him lately,’ said Crake. ‘He’s not been the same since Samarla.’

They followed him into the lighted corridor. Paintings of famous explorers and scientists adorned the walls. Jeddius Clard, the first man to circumnavigate the planet; Cruwen and Skale, discoverers of New Vardia; Gradmund Jagos, who found a fog-shrouded land on the far side of Atalon and named it modestly after himself.

Footsteps, shuffling sounds, distant coughs. More guards, somewhere nearby. They hurried along the corridor for a distance, before Silo paused and listened. The footsteps were getting louder. He pulled open an oak door to his left, glanced inside, and ushered them through.

Inside was another darkened room, illuminated by the city lights seeping through the windows. This time it was a study chamber, with rows of heavy desks and bookshelves lining the walls. Crake went in first. He’d barely taken a step into the chamber when he felt the floor sink by a fraction, and heard a soft click from beneath him.

He went cold and still, warned by instinct not to move.

‘What is it?’ Frey hissed.

‘I think I stepped on something,’ he whispered.

They listened and waited. Nothing happened.

‘Shift it!’ said Frey, nudging him. Crake stepped off the sinking tile, expecting something terrible to result; but it simply resumed its position with another click. Frey and Silo slid into the room and closed the door behind them, shutting out the light from the corridor, and the footsteps of the nearby guard.

‘Pressure plate,’ Silo murmured, kneeling down next to it. ‘Prob’ly linked to an alarm.’

‘I don’t hear an alarm,’ Crake said hopefully.

‘Guards around here. These ain’t armed, case the guards set ’em off.’ He stood up, and his eyes glittered in the gloom. ‘When you don’t see no guards, then you worry ’bout the traps.’

Crake nodded, an uncertain look on his face. There was something faintly menacing about Silo these days. An edge to him that hadn’t been there before. Crake had always rather liked the Murthian, and had never minded his tendency towards silence. But lately his quietness seemed more like dangerous brooding.

They crossed the study area to another corridor. On the far side, across the marble floor, they could see a wide, curving stairway. Silo made a quick check and they crossed to the stairs.

The stairs bent back on themselves as they climbed, ending in a small landing at the top and a carved door inlaid with swirling motifs. Overlooking the landing was a huge portrait of the Archducal Family: Archduke Monterick Arken, his wife Eloithe, and their son Hengar. Monterick tall and athletic, wearing a high-collared uniform, his hair and neatly trimmed beard a dark, rich red. Eloithe small and dark-haired, but with a fierceness in her eye that had made her beloved by some of her people and loathed by others.

And then Hengar. Earl Hengar, who’d inherited his father’s fiery hair and bright blue eyes. He was a handsome man, but he wore an enigmatic smile that made him look cruel. At least until Frey had accidentally blown him up aboard the Ace of Skulls, almost two years ago.

Crake glanced at Frey, who was looking at the painting. ‘I always thought he had brown hair,’ he whispered.

Crake frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Ferrotypes don’t come in colour, do they? Never seen a painting of him.’

Silo, who had no interest in the painting whatsoever, had quietly moved to the door at the top of the landing. It opened inwards, towards him. He peered out through the gap he’d made, then turned back to his companions and put an urgent finger to his lips.

They crept over to see what Silo had spotted. As soon as Crake peeked out, he saw the problem. The door was set halfway along another corridor. There was a shaven-headed guard sitting on a chair a half-dozen metres away, leaning up against the wall. His eyes were closed, but his hands were behind his head, and his foot was swinging lazily. There was a gun in a holster strapped to his thigh. He didn’t look asleep, just bored.

There was no way they were getting past him unseen. Crake pointed back down the stairs.

Silo cupped a hand to his ear. They heard a humming from down below, the simple stepped melody of ‘Little Bright Star’.

Crake began to feel a growing sense of alarm. They were trapped on this staircase. Maybe the humming guard would just walk on past, but maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d come up the stairs, rounding the curve until they came into sight. And then the shooting would start.

Silo was hurriedly yanking off his boots and socks. That done, he motioned at Frey, who didn’t understand him until Silo reached into the inside pocket of Frey’s coat and took out the bottle of chloroform. He pulled off the rag that it was wrapped in, wadded and soaked it, then gave the bottle back to Frey.

He’ll see you, Crake mouthed, well aware that the guard was only a few metres away through a door that was ajar.

Silo took off his earcuff and showed it to Crake meaningfully, although Crake wasn’t sure what the meaning actually was. He followed at Silo’s shoulder as the Murthian went barefoot to the doorway, aimed the earcuff, and tossed it down the corridor.

It flew silently past the guard, hit the floor on the far side of him, tapped and skittered. The guard’s eyes flew open at the sudden noise and he leaped to his feet, hand going to his holster. In doing so, he turned his back to the door. Silo broke cover, running silently on the pads of his feet. The guard heard him at the last moment, but wasn’t quick enough. Silo seized him from behind, clamping the chloroform-soaked rag hard to his mouth, using the other hand to stop him drawing his revolver. He struggled and jerked, making muffled cries, but Silo was surprisingly powerful for someone so lean. The strength leaked out of the guard in seconds, and his eyes fluttered closed, having never even seen his assailant.

Crake and Frey slipped through the door into the corridor. Frey was carrying Silo’s footwear at arm’s length, his nose wrinkled. Crake closed the door quietly behind them. Silo propped the man up in the chair, so that it looked for all the world like he was asleep.

‘You know,’ Frey whispered to Crake. ‘It occurs to me that I don’t know shit all about that feller.’

‘He is surprisingly, um, I believe the term is bad-arse, for someone who’s spent their whole life as a slave,’ Crake observed.

‘He can handle a shotgun as well, and he sure didn’t learn that from any of us.’

‘It’s all veeeeery mysterious!!!’ said Jez in a spooky voice, making them jump.

Frey and Crake exchanged a weary glance. ‘Sometimes I hate these bloody earcuffs,’ Frey said, as Jez cackled at them from the cockpit of the Ketty Jay.

Silo had retrieved his own earcuff by now. He returned to his companions and put his socks and boots back on. Then he looked at them both as if to say: Well?

‘That way,’ said Frey, pointing in a direction which Crake assumed was random.

The next door took them into a small, barrel-vaulted chamber with bronze busts in alcoves to either side. At the far end was a metal door, set deeply into the wall beneath a great stone lintel. Its surface was decorated with several sturdy guild crests in bronze and gold and copper.

‘Now that looks like the kind of door a feller might keep something behind,’ said Frey.

Silo put his palm on Frey’s chest as the Cap’n stepped forward. ‘No guards,’ he said.

Crake listened. They couldn’t hear any footsteps anywhere.

‘Right,’ said Frey, catching on. ‘Everyone, stay sharp. And watch where you’re stepping.’

‘Edge of the room,’ said Silo. ‘Any pressure pads, they’ll be in the middle.’

Crake took the engineer’s word for it. They stayed close to the wall. Crake let the others go first, and trod where they stepped. He didn’t want to be the one to bring everything down on their heads.

They reached the door without incident. Frey tried it, but it wouldn’t budge. A large keyhole sat within a flower of moulded metal. Silo tapped Frey’s arm and pointed up. Crake looked. No wonder the door was set so deep. There was a gap in the lintel overhead, and the bottom of a gate could be seen within it.

‘Ah,’ said Frey.

‘Best guess, they got triggers inside,’ said Silo. ‘Trip one, gate come down. Traps you inside ’n’ the guards come.’

‘Let’s not trip any, then,’ said Frey. ‘Mr Crake, if you please?’ He swept his arm theatrically towards the door.

‘My,’ said Crake. ‘Manners. Whatever next?’

‘My toe in your arse, if you don’t get on with it.’

‘Ah, that’s more like the Cap’n I know,’ said Crake, drawing out his skeleton key. He still didn’t feel right after last night, and breaking into the Mentenforth hadn’t helped. His fingers felt slightly numb, his grip weak and his forearm was a block of ice. There was a price to pay for using thralled daemons, even the weak, senseless ones in their earcuffs. He’d improved the earcuffs so that the effect was negligible, but the tooth and the skeleton key were hungrier entities. They fed on the user’s strength, and he needed time to recover. He vaguely wondered if he might be doing permanent damage to himself.

Well, once more won’t hurt, he said to himself, although he was pretty sure it would.

The lock was a complex one, made for a specialised key, intended to defeat thieves. Crake’s key didn’t even touch the sides, but that didn’t matter. The daemon’s invisible influence expanded to fill the space, feeling out the interior, pushing and twisting and testing until it understood the lock and defeated it. But it was a clever lock, with many parts, and Crake’s arm was trembling and numb to the shoulder by the time the key turned.

‘There,’ he said weakly. He wanted to be sick.

‘You alright?’ Frey asked him, concerned. ‘You don’t look alright.’

‘Let’s just get that relic,’ he muttered. He wanted this over with. He wanted to forget that today and yesterday ever happened. He wanted to sleep, and be miserable, and be left alone.

Silo pushed the door open. The chamber beyond was circular with a domed roof. Arranged in a semicircle were a half-dozen glass display cases on veined marble plinths. Crake’s eyes widened. The most precious treasures that the various guilds possessed, gathered in this room. But he didn’t see the relic on display.

A worm of uncertainty crawled into his gut. He glanced at Frey, and knew that he felt it too.

Spit and blood, please don’t let me be wrong about this.

Silo crouched down and examined the floor inside the doorway. ‘Wait,’ he said, then pointed to a pair of slabs and added ‘Don’t step there.’

They watched as Silo did a cursory check of the room. Crake examined the slabs so he didn’t have to think about what he’d say to the Cap’n if it turned out Samandra’s information had been inaccurate. It was actually quite easy to see the seams of the pressure pads, when you knew what to look for.

Silo returned. ‘Room looks clean,’ he said. Then he pointed at one of the display cases. ‘Relic’s in that one.’

Crake felt a wonderful moment of relief at those words. They stepped over the pressure pads and into the chamber, and went where he’d indicated. The relic case was inside, closed and lying flat on the bottom, which was why they hadn’t seen it from the doorway. Frey had told Crake about the double-bladed object inside, but at the moment it just looked like a black, featureless oblong. It wasn’t arranged for display like the other objects. It had simply been put there.

Frey’s eyes lit up as he saw it, but only for a moment. ‘There’s something not right,’ he muttered.

‘They’ve only had it a few days,’ said Crake. ‘That’s not enough time to study it, really. No point putting it on display till they know what it is.’

‘So, what, they’re just keeping it here?’

‘In the vault? Why not?’ Crake said absently. He’d already strayed to the other exhibits in the chamber. An enormous and beautiful vase from pre-republic Thace. And there . . . Spit and blood, could that suit of armour have come from the War of Three? And look! An engraving from ancient Samarla, showing men and women worshipping at the feet of the God-Emperor. There was a plaque next to it, dating it to PU 1400 or thereabouts, long before the unification of Vardia under Wilven the Successor. He did a quick calculation and marvelled. Four thousand eight hundred and fifty years old, or near enough.

Silo came up to stand beside Frey. ‘Problem, Cap’n,’ he grunted.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Frey said. ‘Pressure pads underneath the exhibits.’

‘Yuh,’ said Silo. ‘My guess is, we lift one of ’em off, that gate by the door slams down.’

Frey blew out his cheeks. ‘How in damnation are we gonna get that relic out of that case, then?’

‘Boys, I’d say that’s the least of your worries right now.’

Frey and Silo swivelled at the sound of the voice, guns flashing into their hands. But they froze when they saw who it was.

Crake didn’t need to see. He knew, and it caused a crawling nausea in his stomach. But he turned and looked anyway, because there was nothing else to do.

Standing in the doorway of the chamber, guns trained on them, were Samandra Bree and Colden Grudge.