Retribution Falls

Twenty-Three

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

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

They were building barricades.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malvery clipped him around the head. Pinn swore loudly.

‘She’ll be fine,’ Malvery said again.

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

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

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

Pinn made a face and spat on the ground.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, it was too late to turn back now.

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

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

‘That’s it?’ asked Pinn, bemused.

‘That’s it,’ said Crake.

‘So now what happens?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A little awe would be nice, yes.’

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

‘That’s about the size of it.’

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

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

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

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

Trinica smiled. ‘Must I?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘He kept that one?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s in the cargo hold!’

‘What’s in the cargo hold?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I believe it is.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to come back, Bess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From beyond the ruined door, there was only silence.