The Iron jackal

Thirty-Three

Time was running out.

Jez’s eyes were better than anyone’s, but even she couldn’t see through the dazzle of the bulldozer’s lights as it came grinding towards them. She’d managed to shoot out two of the floods, but it was a waste of time and bullets. The lights all merged into the glare, making them indistinct and hard to hit. The bulldozer would be on top of them before she could take them all out.

She couldn’t see any way to get past it, either. Guards hid behind it, using its metal body as a shield, the way their targets were using Bess. The crew would be butchered if they tried an assault. Even if Bess led the way, that vehicle was big enough to crush her under its plough, and the instant they broke cover the bastards crouching overhead would shoot them.

She could smell the fear-sweat on her companions. This wasn’t the kind of scrape they could skip out of with a daring plan and a bit of luck. They were out of options, and genuinely scared. Pinn was the only exception. He laughed at death for the same reason he laughed at complex mathematics: it was all a bit too much for his brain to handle.

She popped up and aimed a shot over Bess’s hump. No good. The mist foiled her again, and she had to duck away from a volley of return fire.

Bess was virtually impervious to small-gauge rifles like the Daks had, but she moaned in distress all the same as she was peppered with gunfire. Crake muttered soothing things to her and occasionally yelped as a bullet came too close. It was a miracle no one had been hit yet.

But the bulldozer was getting nearer, and the folds of the quarry wall would be scant protection once the enemy got an angle on them.

She racked her brains for an answer. A sharp smell filled her nostrils, derailing her train of thought. She looked over her shoulder, and saw that Pinn was crouched down, holding a tin full of some kind of transparent jelly in the hand of his wounded arm. With his free hand, he was dipping bullets into it. When he was done, he struggled to put the tin back in his pocket, and then began loading the drum of his revolver.

‘Pinn?’

‘Flame-Slime!’ he cried over the gunfire. He snapped the drum closed and spun it for effect.

‘What?’

‘Professor Pinn’s Incredible Flame-Slime! Don’t you remember?’

‘Yes, but what are you doing with it?’

‘Fire-bullets!’ he said.

‘You’re making incendiary bullets? What’s the point?’

Pinn shrugged. ‘It’s gotta be useful for something.’ Then he stood up and aimed. ‘Watch.’

‘Wait, Pinn, don’t!’

But she was too late. He fired the gun. A flaming bullet, like a tracer round, shot away into the murk.

‘Ha- ha!’ Pinn cried triumphantly, after he’d pulled himself back into hiding. ‘Told you it’d work!’

Jez pointed at his revolver. Flames were licking out of the drum, where the other bullets had caught fire. Pinn yelled and lobbed the blazing revolver away. It skittered to the edge of the rock shelf and came to a halt with its barrel facing towards them. A moment later it went off as the bullet in the firing chamber ignited, sending it skipping over the edge and away.

Pinn looked down at his bound arm, resting in its sling. Blood was seeping into the white fabric. His chubby face was grey. Lodged in the wall behind him, the bullet was still on fire.

‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘Right in the same damn place.’ Then he fainted.

‘Doc!’ Harkins cried.

‘I saw,’ said Malvery, who was busy firing off shotgun rounds. ‘Ain’uo; Ain amp;rt got time to deal with that shit-wit right now. Even if he has just invented self-cauterising bullets.’

‘You did warn him not to shoot anyone by accident,’ Ashua said to Frey. ‘You should take up prophecy.’

‘Just playing the law of averages,’ Frey replied.

‘S’pose it wasn’t victiming after all,’ Malvery commented.

Jez crammed herself back into cover. Bullets pinged and scuffed around her. The crew’s casual quips didn’t fool her; it was cheap bravado. She felt the beginnings of panic taking hold. The breather mask felt suddenly confining – a remembered response from the days when she used to breathe – and she tore it off and threw it away. Damn it, there had to be a way out. Half-Mane or not, if they shot her in the right place, she’d be dead for real.

The Manes.

She realised she could hear them.

She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. They weren’t here, not physically. Their howls were phantom echoes on the edge of her consciousness. But they were distressed. They sensed her fear and shared it. All this time they’d stayed away, respecting her wish to be left alone, but now they couldn’t help themselves. Like a mother unable to resist the cries of her child, they flocked to her, offering her their support and solidarity, lamenting their inability to help.

Why didn’t I want to be one of them? She couldn’t remember now. There was a feral simplicity to their love, the call of the pack. They were intelligent, they were people, but the daemon in them had made them primal. Like animals.

Like animals.

Her eyes flew open. Once, when she hadn’t been long on the Ketty Jay ’s crew, she’d found herself in a situation like this. Pinned down on a landing pad in Rabban, defending the craft with Silo and Harkins, surrounded by twenty of Trinica Dracken’s men. She’d heard a man’s thoughts that night, sensed where he was, and shot him through the head at forty metres in the dark. While he was running.

She could jump in and out of the cat’s head. Why not these guards? She’d tried and failed before to force herself into a human’s thoughts, but she’d had more practice now. If she could feel where they were, she could shoot them.

If she could do it. But any chance was better than no chance at all.

The chaos all around her was no obstacle. These days, she could slip into and out of a shallow trance easily, even while doing something else. But she needed to go deeper now. She’d been tentative while trying out her new abilities, afraid of what might happen. But there was no time to be careful any mcareful ore. She needed to plunge .

It was as if she was falling into a deep well, dropping like a stone towards her own core. Her head went light and then she couldn’t feel her skin any more. Suddenly, she wasn’t there, no longer in the body of Jez but limbless and loose in the void. She fought to find the path she’d learned to take when she rode inside Slag’s skull, the route her instincts had carved. She knew how to do it; she just didn’t know how it was done.

She felt herself slipping, felt a change in her mind that sent it flowering open, thrown wide to the world. And she could hear voices, a dozen voices, then ten times that, the babble of a crowd. Frantic snatches of thought invaded her head, cramming in, a bewildering muddle. She heard three languages and understood them all. She felt the screams of the dying as if they came from her own throat. She was all the people everywhere in Gagriisk, she was inside their skins: her friends, the Daks, the Murthians, all at once.

And suddenly it was too much, this overwhelming tide, but it kept on coming, relentless. Terror surged within her as she realised she was out of control, losing her grip. She fought against the pandemonium and madness but she was no longer sure who she was or if she was a she at all.

She was a Murthian, shot and killed; she was the triumphant Dak marksman. She was the Cap’n, frightened; she was the guards overhead, grim, predatory, waiting for the moment when their targets would break cover. She was a slave in the pens, watching the fighters battling in the sky, daring to wonder if long-dreamed freedom had finally come. She was She was She was lost.

Harkins, as a veteran of being afraid, could identify the fine distinctions between different states of terror in a way that non-cowards couldn’t. The stock phrases that people used to express how scared they were seemed woefully imprecise to him. He may not have had the smarts to put his wisdom into words, but he knew what he knew.

The creepy silence of the fogbound quarry had been a slow, constant kind of fear, like a child waiting for a monster to push open the wardrobe door in a darkened bedroom. The sharp alarm of the gunfight was different to that, a barrage of shocks that unmanned him and made him want to cringe and gibber. But the thought of Jez’s scorn pushed him to courage. He’d recovered himself enough to send a few wild shots in the direction of the enemy. Maybe it was his imagination, but he fancied he was getting a bit braver lately.

Fear came in many forms for Harkins. But nothing came close to this moment. The moment he heard an unearthly blood-freezing screech, from right by his ear, as he crouched behind the metal bulk of Bess. A sound that issued from the blackest hell of his subconscious. And even that came a distant second to the moment which followed, when he looked over his shoulder and saw what had made the sound. It was Jez.

Jez, and yet not Jez.

She’d changed. Not physically, but in some other way that Harkins couldn’t understand. Where there had once been a woman he adored was a creature of inexplicable horror, something that wore Jez’s shape but which radiated the cold dread of a nightmare. There was a senseless savagery in her eyes that he’d never seen before; her teeth were bared in a crooked snarl; she was coiled in the tight hunch of a hunting cat.

Her face was inches from his.

Harkins’ throat closed up. His heart stopped. His eyes bulged.

Then she leaped past him in a blur, the wind making the ears of his pilot cap flap against his head.

He stared at the empty space where she’d been. Then something unjammed inside him and he screamed, because it was impossible not to.

‘ Gaaaaaaaaaaaah! ’

Wet heat spread down his inside leg. He’d pissed himself. He didn’t care.

‘ Gaaaaahhaahhhhhh!!! ’

She was a daemon and she’d been right there in his face!

‘ Gaahhaarrrghhahahahhhh -’

He was interrupted by a brutal impact that knocked his head sideways.

‘Better?’ asked Malvery, raising a meaty hand to give him another slap.

Harkins whimpered and nodded, holding his cheek.

‘S’pose you weren’t there the last couple of times she flipped out, eh?’

Harkins shook his head, still making wounded eyes at the doctor.

‘Well, she’s sure as spit flipped out now,’ said the Cap’n, who was peeking out over Bess’s shoulder.

The screams of the guards were terrible to hear, but Harkins couldn’t help looking, if only to make sure that thing didn’t come back towards them.

The bulldozer was very close now, and he could see silhouettes in the backwash of its lights. Guards flailed about, frantic, aiming their weapons every which way. Darting among them, almost too fast to follow, was the small figure of Jez. If not for her ponytail, he wouldn’t have known it was her. She leaped and sprung and seemed to flicker, although that could have been a trick of the fog. Where she landed, the guards crumpled, or were flung away. Frey ducked as a forearm, torn off at the elbow, went wheeling past him, end over end. A Daver end. k staggered out of the gloom, tripped, and went under the bulldozer’s plough with a wail.

As Harkins watched agape, Jez jumped up on to the side of the bulldozer and was lost in the glare. There was a desperate shriek – whether from the daemon or her victim, he couldn’t tell – and a cracking sound like an ogre chewing bones. The bulldozer turned, its headlight sweeping away from them, and then tipped alarmingly as its tracks found the drop at the lip of the ledge. Metal groaned, tracks sped into empty air, and the massive machine slid over the side of the tier and crashed to the ground twenty metres below.

‘Get those bastards above us!’ Frey yelled. He backed out of cover, aiming upward at the guards crouched overhead. The others did as he did, unleashing a volley of gunfire. Harkins stayed where he was. Two bodies fell through the air and landed in broken heaps in front of him. He covered his ears and shut his eyes and yelled.

When he took his hands away, the shooting had stopped. Malvery hauled him roughly to his feet.

‘Come on, you. Ain’t no time for lying about.’

‘What about him?’ Harkins whined, pointing accusingly at the unconscious Pinn.

‘Never mind about him,’ said Malvery. ‘Go help the Cap’n.’ He knelt down and began to examine the fallen pilot.

Harkins backed away awkwardly. His wet trousers were chafing his leg. He looked around for signs of the daemon-Jez-thing, but he couldn’t hear it. All he could hear were distant explosions and gunfire from the frigates fighting in the world outside, somewhere beyond the oppressive poison haze that enshrouded them.

Not knowing what else to do, he went over to the Cap’n. Frey was standing among the scattered remains of Jez’s victims. He was looking over the edge at the wreckage of the bulldozer, dimly illuminated by its own lights.

‘Er,’ said Harkins.

The daemon shrieked from somewhere down below. Rifles fired. Frey raised his head and looked at Harkins. ‘Reckon we’ll leave her to it for a while. Let her burn off some energy.’

Harkins swallowed. ‘Right.’

‘Can someone get Bess over here?’ Malvery called. ‘Pinn’s alright, but he ain’t looking like waking up anytime soon. And I’m buggered if I’m hauling this lard-arse all the way down the quarry.’

Ehri left Griffden in charge of the battle around the slave pen gates. She instructed him to dig in tight, to clear out the surrounding areas of stray Daks, and to keep the guards on the gate pinned down. On no account were they to try and charge it. Griffden, an infantry veteran of the Second Aerium War, didn’t didn amp;rsqneed telling.

That done, Silo, Ehri and Fal slipped away from the gate, retreating to a safe distance from the machine guns. They skirted the open ground, sticking to the paths between the buildings, making their way closer to the gun. Silo led the way, and the others fell in behind him, just like old times. It felt like the natural thing to do.

There were still Daks about, who hadn’t managed to fall back to the gate before the Murthians got there. Some were hiding and trying to wait out the firefight. Others did their best to ambush the attackers when they could. Silo only saw two, who emerged from behind a building. He fired on them, along with Ehri and Fal, but they fled back the way they came. Silo crept up to the corner, listened, and eventually peeped round. The Daks were gone.

Just like Daks, he thought scornfully. Ain’t never been the types to stand and fight.

The buildings ended at the base of the rise where the anti-aircraft gun emplacement was positioned. It was surrounded by a wall of sandbags. Within were five guards. Two of them were operating the gun. The other three were crouched behind the sandbags, watching for attackers.

Silo scanned the area, careful to keep himself hidden.

We cannot get up the slope without being shot, said Fal, at his shoulder.

Ehri was huddled behind him, her rifle held upright like a staff. ~ I could hit them from here.

You may hit one, said Fal. ~ But once they know where we are, they will focus their fire on us. You will not have another chance to aim.

Silo frowned for a moment, then his brow cleared. ~ That is exactly what we must do, he said. ~ Draw their fire. There are only three of them to defend the emplacement.

I don’t understand, said Fal.

You have a pocket watch?

Neither of them did. Silo gave his to Fal. ~ Wait five minutes. Then start shooting. Stay in cover. Kill them if you can.

And you? asked Ehri. There was still suspicion in her voice. She didn’t trust him yet. She probably never would.

While they are looking at you, they will not see me, he said. He tapped the face of the watch. ~ Five minutes.

Then he was moving, heading back among the buildings, circling the rise in the land to get around the other side of the anti-aircraft emplacement. He could see the outer wall of Gagriisk ahead of him. Many of the guards in the watchtowers had abandoned their posts, having moved to different positions that allowed them to fire down on the enemy. Beyond the wall, he could see the Samarlan frigate in the distanin the dce, barely visible in the murk. It was listing heavily in the air, belching smoke and flame from its flank. As he watched, it was hit by another volley from the Delirium Trigger, and began to sink out of the sky. Dracken had demolished her opponent; now there were only the fighters left to mop up.

He was looking up when a Dak ran out from the doorway of a building just in front of him. Neither of them saw or heard the other until a split second before collision, and by then it was too late to react. They went down, tangled together, struggling instinctively even before they’d realised what had happened. The Dak rolled on top of him and punched wildly at his shoulders and head. Silo’s hands found a forearm and used it as leverage to shove the guard off him. There was an instant of scrabbling and thrashing as they fought on the ground, before Silo got the advantage. Still gripping the forearm, he brought it hard up the enemy’s back, making him yell, driving him face-down into the earth. The Dak scrabbled for his weapon with his free hand; the gun lay a metre away. Silo got onto his back and reached an arm round his throat, making a vice of the crook of his elbow. He gritted his teeth, braced himself, and with one quick jerk he broke the guard’s neck.

He rolled off and knelt in the dirt for a moment, panting. Been a while since he’d killed a man with his bare hands. It was a whole different sort of killing than shooting somebody.

No time to stop. Time was ticking. He got back to his feet, picked up his shotgun, and ran again. On his way, he heard a distant sound like a slow avalanche of metal, followed by an explosion that shook the earth and rattled the windglass seals of the buildings around him. Out in the poisoned wasteland, the frigate had crashed.

He stopped when he came up against the outer wall of the compound, and followed it till he came to the bare rise surrounding the anti-aircraft gun. Hidden by the angle of a wall, he watched the guards behind the sandbags. They’d positioned themselves to have a good view all around. He wasn’t exactly on the far side of it from Ehri and Fal – he reckoned a hundred and twenty degrees rather than a hundred and eighty – but it would have to do. The expanse of open ground seemed daunting, now that he came to it, but it was too late to back out now.

He’d lost track of the time. Hadn’t it been five minutes yet? He checked his shotgun was fully loaded. Perhaps he’d been quicker getting here than he thought. Perhaps Ehri and Fal had decided not to go ahead with it. Perhaps Ehri believed he was trying to pull some kind of trick, that his loyalty to the cause of freedom had been forever compromised by living among the foreigners.

Then there was the sharp bark of a rifle, and one of the guards in the emplacement flew back from the sandbags and fell in a heap.

More shots came. The other two guards found their source and returned fire, moving around the sandbags until they were facing away from Silo. The men operating the anti-aircraft gun seemed oblivious, focused on the Equalisers that were chasing the last of the Samarlan fighters through the yellow sky.

Silo broke cover and ran up the rise towards thse toware emplacement. A copper adrenaline tang on his tongue. If they saw him, they would shoot him, and there was nowhere to hide as he sprinted up the slope.

But they didn’t see him. It was as if the world had turned its eyes away and made him invisible. The gunners were attending to their gun; the guards were occupied with Ehri and Fal. Unobserved, he clambered over the sandbags and into the emplacement.

The first they knew of him was when he shot the first of the guards in the back at a distance of a couple of metres. He cocked his lever-action shotgun and blasted the second Dak as he turned in alarm. Hard to miss at that range. Then he went for the men on the gun.

The gunner’s assistant was still fumbling with his sidearm when Silo shot him. He went staggering back against the control assembly and slumped bonelessly to the ground, holding his guts. The gunner himself was still in the control seat. He raised his hands.

((Get out of the seat)) said Silo.

The gunner did as he was told.

((Over there.))

He stepped away from the gun, arms raised high. The barrel of Silo’s shotgun followed him. But then something in Silo’s expression, or lack of it, must have warned him what was coming, because his eyes filled with horror and his face crumpled.

((No! Please, I have children!))

Silo pulled the trigger and silenced him. He didn’t want to hear about a Dak’s children. They didn’t think children so precious when they were Murthian boys and girls, growing up bent from working in mines or with lost fingers from the cotton mills.

When he was a younger man, revenge had made him feel better. It had dampened the rage inside. Now it didn’t make him feel at all. A dead Dak was only a drop in the ocean. It didn’t change a thing.

Ehri and Fal came climbing over the sandbags and into the emplacement. Fal’s eyes were twinkling behind his goggles.

We did it! he said. – That was amazing!

" Just like old times, said Silo.

" Just like old times, Ehri agreed, her voice softer than he was used to hearing it.

A gunshot close at hand made them jump. Fal grunted. Silo pushed him out of the way, and saw one of the Daks dazedly trying to sit up, a revolver in his hand, a deep gash across his temple. Ehri hadn’t killed the one she hit, just winged him. Silo put him back down, and this time there was no mistake.

" Fal!

He didn’t want to turn around. Didn’t want to see what he knew would be there. Everything had happened so quickly, it had simply been a reaction to kill the Dak when he heard the shot. But now he put it all together. The shot, Fal’s grunt, Ehri’s cry.

Damn it, he thought to himself. Damn it all to rot and shit.

Fal was on the ground. Ehri was cradling his head with one hand, and pressing the other on his chest. Blood welled out between her fingers in pulses, spreading across Fal’s clothes.

Silo had seen enough bullet wounds in his time. The volume and colour of blood, the location of the hole, told him that this one was fatal.

"Fal! Fal! Stay with me!

Fal coughed inside his mask. His eyes were roving, confused. ~ I don’t… I Silo bent down to lay a hand on his shoulder, to offer some comfort, but Ehri screamed at him to get away. He stepped back. Fal was hers, not his. He’d left and hadn’t returned for nine years. He didn’t deserve any claim on his friend.

Fal focused on Ehri’s face, which was bent down close to his. The masks and goggles seemed cruel barriers to their final moments together.

" Mother’s coming, he said.

" No. She shook her head. ~ No.

He spluttered and gasped. ~ Maybe… maybe I’ll be reborn… outside the pens.

"You’re not going to die, Fal, she told him solemnly, through gathering tears.

" Maybe one day you’ll break me out.

Silo saw Ehri’s throat clench, and whatever words she’d meant to say were lost. She held up her hand in front of him, to show the tattoo on her palm. His eyes creased in a smile. He tried to lift his own hand to show his matching design, but he didn’t have the strength. Ehri did it for him and pressed it to her own.

It’s cold, said Fal. Then he gave a short and humourless laugh. ~ Why am I scared?

He didn’t say anything else. Silo looked away and began reloading his shotgun. He could see over the tops of the buildings to the gate of the slave pens. The battle was still going on around them, the rip and crackle of gunfire, but neither side had moved an inch. The fighters overhead still dodged and weaved, but it seemed like they were almost all Equalisers now.

When he was done reloading, Ehri was still leaning over the body of her husband. ht="0"›‹

Ehri.

Don’t, she said. – Don’t speak to me.

She raised her head and stared at him hatefully. Then she stabbed a finger at the enormous gun looming over them. ~ Get on with it! she spat.

He got into the seat, his eyes running over the controls. His brain wouldn’t make sense of it at first. Fal, dead, because of him. He’d thought he wouldn’t feel responsible for other people’s deaths any more, but he realised he was wrong. It was just people he didn’t know that he didn’t care about.

He seized the firing handles. Move forward. It was all a man could do. Keep moving forward, and forget what got wrecked in your wake.

The controls, once he applied himself, were easy enough for an engineer to figure out. He lowered the barrel. When it was horizontal, it wouldn’t go any lower, but he reckoned that the shells would dip over distance, so it would be enough for his purposes. He swung the gun around until it was facing the gate to the slave pens.

This is for you, Fal, he thought, and pressed down on the trigger.

The report of the gun pounded at his ears, a slow and steady whump-whump-whump as it spat blazing tracer shells over the rooftops. As he’d hoped, gravity sucked them down, and they hit the gates of the pen squarely, smashing them to pieces in a series of detonations. But Silo wasn’t done yet. He altered the angle, sending shells into the walls to either side of the gates, raining rubble down on the men hidden at their feet. The machine-gunners on the walls were swallowed in a cascade of brick and dust and flame. Daks fled from cover, trying to escape the destruction, and were mown down as they did so.

When Silo let off the trigger, the gate had been swallowed by a dirty, malevolent cloud, swelling outward. But as it swelled, it cleared. He heard the sound of raised voices. A charge had begun. Whether it was the slaves, or the free Murthians, or both, he couldn’t see.

But the day was won, he knew that.

He waited for a sense of triumph, and felt none. All he could think of was Fal. He got out of the gunner’s seat, and saw that Ehri was standing, her rifle in her hand, and her eyes were hard and dry.

" Are you coming? she asked.

He looked down at Fal. There was no ceremony for the dead in Murthian culture. The dead were just meat, their spirits gone back to Mother.

‘Reckon I’ll stay here a while,’ he said, and the words came out in Vardic. ‘Lost my appetite for killin’.’

Ehri looked away with a snort of bitter disdf bitterain. ‘Reckon you have,’ she said. Then she was away, over the sandbags and running down the slope towards the battle.

Silo watched her go, then knelt down next to Fal. He took off the mask and the goggles. Fal’s eyes were closed. Silo sighed.

‘Reckon I have,’ he muttered.