The Iron jackal

Nine

The iron ball sat in the centre of the summoning circle, and didn’t move.

Crake tapped the gauges on his portable oscilloscope. His fingers moved across the array of brass dials. He checked the wires leading to the tuning poles. Everything was in order. The phantom frequency that had been plaguing him all day was nowhere to be found.

He sat at his desk and let his head sink into his hands. ‘I can’t work under these conditions,’ he complained.

Bess stirred in the corner of his makeshift sanctum. Perhaps she thought he was talking to her. When it became clear that he wasn’t, she settled back to dormancy with a creak of leather and a jingle of chainmail.

It had all begun that morning.

Crake had managed a good night’s sleep on the flight back to Shasiith – thankfully there were no encounters with the Navy to wake him. He was up early while most of the crew were still in their bunks. After rising he visited the head, where he had his first solid bowel movement in days. Encouraged by such a good start to the day, he decided to be productive. He wanted to try out a new technique he’d read about in a daemonist text he picked up before they left Vardia.

It was nothing dangerous, or even difficult. Just an improved method to identify the properties of minor daemons. It was a procedure that carried little risk, and he felt safe running it in his insecure sanctum.

But there was a problem. His oscilloscope readings, used to detect the presence of the daemons, were being skewed by a faint signal that roamed through the upper frequencies. At first he thought it was a machine fault, but all his tests showed that his equipment was working fine.

He decided it was something on the Ketty Jay. A fluctuation in the electrical systems, perhaps, or a vibrating pipe that happened to stray across his field of detection. Just one of the many annoyances that came from having to practise the Art in the back of an aircraft’s cargo hold, with only a tarpaulin curtain and some crates for privacy.

By mid-morning the signal was driving him to distraction. He asked Silo to help find the problem, but the engineer seemed distracted. His assistance was half-hearted at best, and came to nothing.

Event Vem, aoblem, butually Crake abandoned his original plan in favour of solving the issue at hand. He set up a small interference field with the tuning poles and wired a resonator to pads attached to a small iron ball, which he placed inside the summoning circle. He intended to thrall a daemon to the ball, and then set it to find the rogue frequency. If all went well, the ball would be attracted to the source of the frequency, and he could follow it. The formulae in his books helped him determine the bandwidth he needed to search to find the kind of daemon he needed. It was a simple task, child’s play really.

Simple, but not quick. His target was elusive. It took him several hours of patient searching to drag in a suitable candidate. By bombarding the daemon with sound, he befuddled it for long enough to break its connection with its place of origin. In doing so, he thralled it to the iron ball, trapping it in the world that the uneducated called reality. After that, he doused it in the troublesome signal. This daemon was a seeker, a barely sentient wisp from the aether: it would find the first thing it was set to. The signal was like a rag to a bloodhound, to give it something to track.

When all was done and he was satisfied, he turned off the interference field. It was a weak form of defence, but more than was needed when dealing with such feeble daemons. Then he waited for the ball to roll off in the appropriate direction.

And nothing happened. Because the signal his daemon was supposed to find had gone. After he’d spent all day trying to find it, it had just stopped.

He sat at his desk, his head in his hands, thoroughly depressed. He’d wasted his time. He’d wasted so much of it, these past years. It hadn’t seemed to matter when he was sunk in a bottle, grieving over the accident that had taken his niece. But Crake had once been driven in his quest for knowledge. His pursuit of the Art had been headlong and reckless. And he was getting impatient with himself.

Daemonism was what he was. How long could he sit around and do nothing about it?

He heard the hiss and whine of hydraulics as the cargo ramp opened at the far end of the hold, beyond the tarpaulin curtain and the crates. Someone going out, or someone coming back. He didn’t care. Bess seemed content enough to sleep, or whatever it was she did when she stopped moving and the lights of her eyes went out. He thought he might go and read a little in his quarters, have an early night.

There was a noise from behind him. A soft rumble. He looked over his shoulder.

Slowly and steadily, the iron ball was rolling out of the circle.

Frey hummed a little ditty as he closed the cargo ramp behind him. He was feeling immensely pleased with himself. His dinner with Trinica had been a complete success. Not only that, but on receiving the bill he discovered that she’d ordered the house wine, the cheapest on the menu. She knew he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, so she’d chosen to have mercy on his wallet. Such a small kindness may not have been remarkable in most women, but from Trinica it was epic.

After their dinner, they took a rickshaw to her hotel. She’d taken a room for the night, but she wouldn’t be staying there. It was purely to give her a place to change: to shed her fearsome outer skin after she left the Delirium Trigger, and to don it again before returning. Her crew would never know what she’d done for Frey. She was a terrible icon to them, a mistress to be adored, cold and distant as the moon. To show them the woman behind the mask would ruin her. To them, she was the mask.

Frey said goodbye at the hotel door. Had it been any other woman Frey would have attempted to charm his way inside, and into her bed. Instead, he kissed her on the cheek and promised to be at the Delirium Trigger in an hour with the relic. Every instinct he had demanded more from the encounter, but he mastered himself and walked away, antsy with sexual frustration.

The Delirium Trigger was already prepping for take-off when he got to the hangar where the frigate was berthed. They arrived in a pair of rickshaws, with Malvery and Pinn guarding the relic. Ashua took up the fourth seat. She didn’t trust Frey to collect her fee for her, and wisely so.

Balomon Crund, Trinica’s bosun, took delivery of the relic and paid them. Trinica chose not to make an appearance. Frey didn’t mind. He wanted to remember her the way he’d left her.

Ashua seemed surprised that Trinica had paid them off without trying to cheat them. She’d been wired up for an argument that never came. Now that their plan had actually worked out, she became giddy. She even gave Frey a hug, which in his current state of enforced celibacy was all but unbearable.

Malvery and Pinn wanted to go out on the town, and the doctor invited Ashua along in celebration of their victory. Frey didn’t feel like it tonight, so he said he’d take the money back to the Ketty Jay instead. He planned to take a couple of drops of Shine and lose himself in a blissful private reverie, dreaming of the woman he hoped to win back.

That was the only thing on his mind as the Ketty Jay ’s cargo ramp shut with a dull thump. But once the echoes had faded, he found himself faced with a hungry and threatening silence. The tune he was humming faltered and stalled. The hollow belly of the Ketty Jay seemed cold, despite the stifling air outside. Goose-pimples crept across his skin.

Something was very, very wrong.

Imperators.

His mind flew to the conclusion immediately. The Awakeners’ most dangerous operatives, beings that could paralyse a man with crushing, primal fear and drag out the secrets of his soul. He drew his revolver. It wouldn’t do any good, but it made him feel better.

They’ve found me.

The seconds ticked by, and nothing happened. His eyes roamed the hold. It was emptier than [empquo; ve fouusual, but that still left plenty of places to hide among the junk that Frey never got round to throwing out. The battered Rattletraps, which Frey had decided to keep hold of until Silo could repair them for resale, were belted down and silent.

He felt alone. His senses told him there was nobody else on board, and while he was certain that wasn’t true, he didn’t dare raise his voice to find out.

Were there Imperators here? Now he wasn’t sure. There was no question that the fear he felt was something unnatural, but it wasn’t anywhere near the intensity of an Imperator’s gaze, which could turn a man’s bowels to water. This was the sourceless dread of a bad drug trip, seeping into him like cold blood into a rag. The paranoia, the sense of wrongness and displacement.

Keep it together, Darian.

That was when he heard the sound.

At first he thought it was Slag. It seemed the kind of low, menacing yowl made by a cat at bay. But then the intruder hitched in a breath in a way a cat never would, and he recognised it.

There was a baby crying in the cargo hold.

‘You have got to be joking,’ he muttered to himself.

The crying came from behind a large pile of tarpaulin that had been stuffed in a net and tied down near the port side bulkhead. Frey crept towards it. He’d rather have gone the other way, but there was a certain dreamlike inevitability about this situation. Nothing felt quite real.

He flexed his hand nervously on the grip of his revolver. He wasn’t sure whether a crying baby merited a gun in his hand or not, but there was something unspeakably malevolent about that wail. It tugged at him with a sense of awful familiarity. He felt like he should know it, somehow.

He rounded the pile. Something was moving there. Something…

Repulsion battled with terror on his face as he saw what was hidden behind the tarpaulin.

His first impression was that it was some kind of giant maggot, a bloated, shapeless thing rolling in a puddle of fluid. It stank: a smell both sweet and rancid that ambushed Frey as it came into sight. The sheer impossibility of its being there, the horror of the thing, stunned him.

But it was no maggot. It was a sac. A grotesque, veined bag, whitish and slimy, with something bulging inside it, pushing against the skin. Something long-limbed, its joints bending unnaturally, turning inside the womb and Frey’s mind went treacherously to his own child, the baby that was never born. The baby that [he tify"›died inside Trinica when she tried to commit suicide as a young woman, broken by a lover’s betrayal. His betrayal.

The baby was still crying. It wasn’t coming from inside the sac. It was coming from everywhere.

This. Is. Not. Happening.

The sac stretched on one side as something long and narrow was pressed against it from within. For an instant it held, then it parted in one quick tear, the lips of the split sliding greasily down the length of the object that poked out.

A bayonet. A double-bladed Dakkadian bayonet, the same kind he’d been skewered by nine years ago, on the day his crew were massacred. The same kind that had almost taken his life yesterday.

He stared as it sliced downward, slitting the stringy tissue of the sac. Sweet-smelling amniotic fluid belched from the rupture and sloshed over the floor. Frey stepped back from it, disgusted. He took his eyes off the squirming sac for an instant, to avoid the wash of liquid. When he looked back he saw that something was forcing its way through the slit in the sac, moist with new birth, and damned if it wasn’t a muzzle, some kind of animal, and Something bumped against Frey’s boot heel. He swung around with a cry. His arm snapped out straight, revolver in hand.

‘Don’t shoot! It’s me! It’s me!’

Me was Crake, who had suddenly found himself with Frey’s revolver pressed against his nose. Frey blinked in bewilderment. In an instant, everything had changed. There was no crying baby. The sense of paranoia had lifted, with only his hammering heart as evidence that it had ever existed. He looked over his shoulder at the spot where the squirming thing had been. He knew before he turned that there would be nothing there.

He lowered his pistol. Crake glared at him and rubbed his nose resentfully. There was a small iron ball at Frey’s feet, resting against his boot. He shoved it away with the side of his foot.

‘Crake,’ he said. ‘I think I’m going mad.’

Crake watched as the ball rolled away, slowed, and then reversed direction to bump against Frey’s boot again.

‘What worries me, Cap’n,’ he said, ‘is that you may not be.’

‘And you’re sure you didn’t see or hear anything? ’ Frey asked.

‘We’ve been over this. I’m quite sure,’ Crake replied. He sipped his coffee and stared off thoughtfully into the distance. In the Ketty Jay ’s cramped mess, that wasn’t very far. It was a grim little room, comprising the fixed table where t [tabke repliedhey sat, a stove and worktop, and some metal cabinets for utensils. Frey had been meaning to pretty it up for ever, but the prospect of the task always defeated him. Interior decorating was not his strong suit.

He frowned in frustration. ‘And you don’t have any idea what this

… signal is?’

‘All I know is that it’s coming from you.’

It wasn’t enough. Frey had submitted himself to almost two hours of Crake’s tests, wired up to various ticking and humming machines in the sanctum while the daemonist twiddled knobs and scribbled formulae. He trusted Crake to provide him with some answers. But Crake had come up with none.

Crake scratched the back of his neck. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

‘Is it daemonic?’

‘Could be. Could be mechanical.’

‘A device on me? Something that’s transmitting?’

‘On you or in you.’

Frey was feeling fragile already. He didn’t need that.

‘The Imperators?’ he suggested.

‘I doubt it,’ said Crake. ‘They wouldn’t trouble themselves with giving you hallucinations. If they were after you, they’d just kill you.’

Frey found that oddly reassuring. He had special reason to be wary of the Imperators. A few months ago he’d delivered certain documents to a professor named Kraylock. Maurin Grist’s research notes, which all but proved that the Imperators were secretly daemonic half-men. Since the Awakeners had ruthlessly persecuted daemonists for over a century, Frey found it somewhat amusing that they’d been caught employing daemons themselves.

The Archduke had been less amused when he saw the notes. He issued a public demand for the Awakeners to hand over all their Imperators to establish the truth of the accusation. The Awakeners refused. Tension across the land was unpleasantly high, and getting higher. Things in Vardia were not looking good, which was half the reason Frey had ducked out to Samarla for a while.

If the Awakeners had discovered Frey’s hand in the situation, his life wouldn’t be worth crowshit. But Crake was right. This didn’t feel like them.

‘What’s going on?’ he lamented. There was too much about this situation that was unknown. It scared him when he didn’t know who his enemy was.

‘I might be able to find out i [to wasf I could get to a decent sanctum,’ Crake said, with a complaining tone to his voice that Frey had heard a lot recently.

‘Your friend Plome has one, doesn’t he?’ Frey suggested quickly, before Crake could start on about the lack of facilities aboard the Ketty Jay.

‘I think I’ve abused his friendship quite enough for the time being,’ Crake replied. ‘Anyway, he won’t be at home. It’s coming up to election time, and he’s running for a seat in the House of Chancellors. He’ll be all over the duchy, pressing flesh and kissing babies.’

Frey drummed his fingers on the table. The terror he’d felt in the hold had already receded. The whole incident seemed like a nightmare, and like a nightmare it faded in the face of reality. He was beginning to wonder whether it was just a product of general bad living, or a delayed flashback from some particularly dirty narcotics he’d experimented with in his younger days. But then there was this… signal. He didn’t really understand Crake’s methods, or what frequencies and bandwidths had to do with daemonism, but his friend’s manner told him he should be concerned.

There was a clattering from overhead, and raucous voices. Pinn came clambering down the ladder from the passageway above. He missed his grip halfway down and landed heavily on his amply padded arse, making the mugs on the table jump and spill. Apparently he’d forgotten he had one arm in a sling. He looked stunned for a moment, then burst out laughing. Gales of laughter came from overhead. Malvery and Ashua. Both plenty drunk, by the sounds of it.

Frey let his head sink into his arms. He wasn’t in the mood for this now.

‘You’re back early,’ Crake commented, as Malvery and Ashua climbed unsteadily down the ladder and into the mess.

‘Spenn all my money,’ said Pinn, who had tipped over to lie on his back. ‘An’ these two won’ gimme no more.’ He thrust a cupped hand into the air. ‘Need an advance, Cap’n!’

Frey raised his head. They’d obviously been going at it hard tonight. ‘What’s she doing here?’ he said, nodding at Ashua. ‘I thought we were all done with her.’

Malvery crushed her in a huge embrace. ‘She’s alright, she is!’ he slobbered. ‘She’s… she’s like the daughter I never had!’ He swallowed a toxic burp. ‘Or wanted.’

Ashua tugged at his bushy white moustache. ‘It’s like having my own personal walrus!’ she beamed.

‘Somebody kill me,’ Frey murmured in despair. ‘Look, if I give Pinn some money, will you all bugger off?’

‘What’s up with him?’ Malvery inquired of Crak [uiriv›e.

‘He just had a traumatic experience,’ Crake replied.

‘Oh, I see,’ Malvery said gravely. He disengaged himself from Ashua, crouched down next to Frey and put a hefty arm round his shoulders. Then, in a tone more suited to pets and infants, he cooed: ‘Did the Cap’n have a twaumatic expewience?’ Pinn exploded with laughter.

‘Piss off, Doc. It’s serious,’ Frey snapped, shaking himself free of Malvery’s arm.

Malvery looked put out. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Someone’s in a grump.’

‘What’s wrong with your hand?’ Ashua asked. It took Frey a moment to realise that the question was directed at him. He looked down at his hand, and his blood ran cold.

There was a black spot in the centre of his palm, an uneven circle the size of a small coin. Dark tendrils of gangrenous purple spread away from it in an ugly starburst.

All the humour drained out of the room as they stared at it.

‘Doc?’ Frey asked tremulously.

‘What’ve you done to yourself, Cap’n?’ Malvery asked. The way he said it, weak and shocked, struck dread into Frey’s heart.

Pinn, sensing the change in the room, got to his feet and staggered over to look. He sucked in his breath over his teeth. Frey expected him to make some dumb crack, but he didn’t, and that meant that things were really serious.

‘It was the blade,’ said Ashua. ‘You said it bit you when you picked it up.’

Yes, the blade. The sharp pain, like a pin, that caused him to drop the relic. Frey had barely thought about it. He’d just assumed it had been a tiny, sharp edge that he hadn’t seen, a flaw in the hilt that had nipped him.

‘Care to tell us all what you’re talking about?’ Crake prompted.

Ashua filled them in on the details, how Frey had opened the case they’d taken from the train and found the curious weapon inside. Frey noticed that she skipped over her part in the affair, the relentless goading which inspired him to pick it up in the first place, but he was too distressed to care.

His hand. He didn’t need the doc to tell him that he was probably going to lose it. The enormity of that thought was too much to handle.

Just a few hours ago, he’d been so happy. Why couldn’t he have just left the damned thing alone? Why didn’t he do what he was told for once?

‘You reckon it was poison?’ Pinn suggested. The sight of Frey’s hand had sobered him up fast.

‘If it was, it’s been in there too long to do anything about it,’ said Malvery. ‘If you’d come to me straight away, Cap’n…’

Frey turned to Crake. ‘You think this and the signal might be connected?’

‘It would be quite a coincidence if they weren’t.’

Frey stared at his hand again. It was so strange. It didn’t hurt or feel bad, yet the sight of it was appalling. The angry corruption beneath the skin made him feel sick.

‘I was just with Trinica. She didn’t notice,’ he protested, as if he could somehow disprove this thing and make it go away.

‘Maybe it just came on in the last few hours. Maybe she wasn’t looking,’ said Crake. ‘Does it matter?’

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered, because no one knew what to do. That was the most f rightening thing of all.

It was Ashua who shook them out of it. She strode over to Frey and pulled him up out of his seat.

‘You need help,’ she said firmly. ‘Come on.’

‘Come on where? ’ Frey asked.

‘This is my city, remember?’ she said. ‘Follow me.’