The Iron jackal

Seventeen

Archduke Monterick Arken’s palace towered over the city of Thesk, set dramatically against the cloud-scattered red dusk. It stood at the peak of a massive ridge of black rock, the plug of an extinct volcano, with sheer grassy cliffs on three sides and a gated slope to the west. Green copper domes and sloping roofs of decorative slate peered over the walls of light beige that surrounded it. Statues of great men and women looked out across the capital in all directions. The roof of an arboretorium could be seen among the towers. What couldn’t be seen were the enormous anti-aircraft gun emplacements in the front and rear courtyards.

It was a modern construction, most of it early Third Age, having been knocked down piece by piece and rebuilt after the deposition of the monarchy and the emergence of the Duke of Thesk as the head of the Coalition of Vardic Duchies. The Arkens had all been reformers, and had never let themselves be shackled by history. While other dukes shivered in glowering stone Kingdom Age buildings that were over four hundred years old, the Arkens had demolished their family seat and built a new one with piped heating.

Crake thoroughly approved.

He blew on his pie to cool it and accepted the bottle of rum from Frey. The two of them sat on some steps at the foot of a bronze statue in People’s Park, which sprawled around the base of the cliffs. A statue of Osory Crumditch looked over their shoulder: a benevolent, bespectacled old man sitting in a chair and holding a book. Crumditch’s daring fictions about love and passion among the peasantry helped wake the aristocracy to the fact that the people who toiled in their fields were human beings too. He never lived to see the serfs freed after the Mad King Andreal was overthr obvi-scattereown, but he was more than a little responsible for it.

‘You think the relic’s in there?’ Frey asked, looking up at the palace.

‘I dearly hope not,’ said Crake.

‘Could be in any one of six places I can think of,’ Frey mused.

‘Well, Crickslint’s certainly not going to tell us now, since there’s barely enough left of him to fill a jam jar.’

Frey was still looking at the palace, his own pie forgotten on the step next to him. They’d bought them from a shop down the way. The cold snap had come to an end with the rain, and tonight’s weather was more typical of autumn in these climes. A little chilly, a little damp, but not altogether unpleasant.

‘You suppose it’s true about the army of golems he has up there?’

‘Could be,’ said Crake. ‘He’s never had much of a problem with daemonists, although politically it wouldn’t make much sense to say so, what with half the country believing all that rubbish the Awakeners peddle. I wouldn’t be surprised if he used them in secret. Rumour has it some of the gear the Century Knights use is thralled.’

‘Really?’

‘Some daemonists think so.’

He munched his pie – spiced beef, hearty Vard food, for which he was absurdly grateful after Samarla – and passed the bottle back. The Cap’n was in a strange mood tonight. Crake got the sense he wanted to talk about something, but he hadn’t worked up to it yet.

While he waited, Crake watched the traffic in People’s Park. A lamplighter was making his way along the paths, leaving lamp-posts glowing behind him. A pair of young lovers walked arm in arm, wrapped up against the coming night. Three women cooed over a pram by the bandstand. A student, his arms full of books, hurried home from Galmury, the city university, which Crake had himself attended. It was only five years since he’d left, at the age of twenty-six, but it might have been a lifetime ago.

Love. Children. Even the clean, sheltered world of academia. It all seemed so distant from him. Now he was a vagrant, a drifter, moving from place to place and never settling to anything.

But was there even any point in running any more? Were the Shacklemores really still chasing him? Crake had tried to make himself hard to find by joining the crew of the Ketty Jay, but the Ketty Jay ’s crew weren’t so anonymous these days. Difficult to believe the Shacklemores couldn’t have tracked him down by now, if they’d put their minds to it.

His brother might have called off the alllieve the bounty hunters months ago. Perhaps his thirst for vengeance had faded. That, or Condred had tired of paying them. But for whatever reason, he’d not seen a Shacklemore for two years now, not since the Winter Ball at Gallian Thade’s estate on the Feldspar Isles.

So maybe he didn’t need to stay on the move, after all.

Crake dreamed of a library, a house, a sanctum. Somewhere Bess would be out of danger, and he could study the Art. All that, and perhaps a woman to share it with.

Wouldn’t that be fine? he thought. But it all seemed so far away.

‘Am I a good captain, Crake?’ Frey asked, out of nowhere.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’re the only one I ever had.’ But the look on Frey’s face made him regret his flippancy. ‘What’s bothering you really?’

‘You mean aside from the prospect of getting another visit from that daemon?’

Crake cleared his throat. ‘Yes, the daemon. I’m going to see what I can do about that,’ he said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’m working on some techniques.’

‘Techniques?’

‘Yes. You see, most… well, all daemonism is done in controlled conditions. They’re summoned and contained. But that won’t work here. The daemon is already out. So we need a different approach.’

‘Like what? Can’t you drive it out of me or something?’

‘It’s not in you. That strange signal you’re giving off, I think that’s more like the way it tracks you.’

‘So what do you plan to do?’

‘I suppose you’d call it field daemonism. I’m trying to work out ways of dealing with a daemon outside the sanctum.’

‘You think you can? You can work out a way to fight this thing?’

Not really, he thought, but the edge of desperate hope in Frey’s voice revealed just how scared he really was, and Crake had to give him something.

‘It can be done,’ he said, with more assurance than he felt.

Frey brooded for a brn b while, sucking on the bottle of rum. Crake ate the rest of his pie, glancing at him occasionally.

‘Harkins,’ he said, then tutted.

‘Cap’n, he’s alright. Nobody got hurt.’

‘He damn near died!’ Frey snapped suddenly. ‘And for what? For me!’ He held up his right hand, encased in a fingerless glove to hide the corruption in his palm. ‘All because I couldn’t keep my hands off that bloody relic.’

‘Cap’n, will you stop trying to be perfect?’ Crake cried. ‘Spit and blood, it’s like you think we’ve all forgotten how you were when we joined this crew! Might I remind you that, back then, you let someone put a gun to my head, spin the barrel and pull the trigger. Twice! ’

‘You’re never gonna let that one go, are you?’ Frey muttered.

‘My point is, there was a time when you didn’t give half a shit about any of us, and none of us gave half a shit about each other. But those days are gone, and most of that’s your doing. I wish you’d remember that.’

Frey swigged his rum. He looked like he was taking it on board, at least.

‘Nobody expects you to be right all the time,’ said Crake. ‘Nobody but you, apparently. Stop beating yourself up.’

‘I s’pose you’ve a point,’ Frey mumbled, unconvincingly.

‘Speaking of Harkins, I note you’ve taken the destruction of the Firecrow very calmly. If he’d pulled out when you told him to, he’d have come out without a scratch.’

‘Heh,’ said Frey, and Harkins was surprised to see a smile twitch at the corner of his mouth.

‘What did you do?’ Crake asked, suspicious.

‘I backed him.’

‘You what?’

‘I stuck a bet on him to win. Pretty big one, as well. Couldn’t turn down those kinds of odds.’ He scratched at his cheek. ‘The winnings more than cover the cost of a new Firecrow.’

Crake laughed in amazement. ‘And you still told him to pull out of the race after you found Crickslint’s bomb? With all that money riding on him?’

‘S’pose I did.’

Crakew convincie slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Frey,’ he said. ‘You’re a good captain.’

Frey nodded to himself. Then he took a deep breath and sat up, as if to clear away the subject and start on another one. ‘I need a favour, Crake.’

‘Name it.’ Crake swiped the bottle and took a swig.

‘I need you to go charm a woman for me.’

The rum caught in his throat and made him cough. ‘I thought that was more your department than mine?’ he wheezed.

Frey grinned. ‘Not this lady,’ he said. ‘This one’s all yours.’

Jez’s eyes flickered open.

The trance had been confusing this time. She’d been trying to regain the dream of snow. She wanted to make sense of it. But instead she was left with a muddle of sensations, fading fast in her memory. Her mouth tasted foul, like sour milk with a sharp tang of something else underneath. Her back was hot, much hotter than the rest of her, as if she’d been lying on something warm. But she hadn’t. She’d been sitting cross-legged on her bunk.

She tutted to herself. She was never going to get the hang of these trances.

Frustrated, she picked up the book that was lying next to her and flicked through it. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t read the words. If indeed they were words. The clusters of tiny circles and arcs were arranged in rows, with no breaks that would suggest sentences or paragraphs. Every printed centimetre was full of symbols of identical size, like a wordsearch. It had long ago occurred to her that they might not read left to right at all, as Vardic script did. They could read diagonally, for all she knew. There was no reason to assume it followed the rules of human language, since those who wrote it were something other than human.

But still she persevered. No one was going to help her. As far as she knew, there was no one alive who could read the language of the Manes.

She’d found the book at the tail end of winter, on the savage island of Kurg, in the captain’s cabin of a crashed Mane dreadnought. In Vardia, the leaves had grown and reddened and were falling again, and she was no closer to understanding it. But what niggled at her was the feeling that she would understand it, if she could only remember how.

The symbols were familiar to her, though she’d never seen them until the day she found the book. It was as if she’d once known the language and somehow forgotten it. What remained was a riddle she couldn’t solve. The answer was there, waiting to reveal itself in a flash of revelation, but it refused to make itself known. She was one step away from making these symbols turn into sense, but it was a step she didn’t know how to take.

What did the Manes need the written word for, anyway? They could read each other’s thoughts. They’d discarded language and speech as hopelessly clumsy.

Yet here was a book.

She got up. There was no hope of concentrating on anything while the disgusting taste lingered in her mouth. She headed to the mess to get some coffee to wash it away.

Pinn was there, standing on the table, holding a semi-conscious cat at the end of his outstretched arm.

Jez regarded him blandly. ‘Should I ask?’

‘It’s my first experiment,’ Pinn said.

‘Your… experiment,’ Jez replied dubiously. She looked closer at the cat. ‘Is that a piece of toast strapped to his back?’

‘ Buttered toast,’ said Pinn proudly.

Jez folded her arms. ‘Huh,’ she said.

‘I’m gonna be an inventor,’ Pinn declared.

‘You are?’

He wiggled the arm that was wrapped up in a sling. ‘Since I can’t be a pilot for a bit, I reckon it’s a good time to get started.’

‘Are we feeling threatened after Harkins’ little display of brilliant flying?’ Jez inquired sweetly.

Pinn sniffed. ‘ I wouldn’t have trashed the aircraft in the process. Now, you wanna see this experiment or not? This cat’s heavy, y’know.’

‘Alright, I’ll bite. What are you trying to do?’

‘Well,’ said Pinn, eagerly. ‘Everyone knows that a cat always lands on its feet, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And isn’t it also true that toast always lands butter side down?’

‘Er, I think that’s more of a saying than a scientific fa-’

‘So if the cat has buttered toast on its back, butter side up, then it’ll land upside down. Except that’s impossible, ’cause cats always land on their feet.’

Jez could feel herself getting stupider by the second. amp;lshe n. Except quo; So what do you reckon will happen?’

‘I reckon they’ll sort of hang spinning in the air a couple of inches off the ground.’

‘Can you wait there just a minute?’ Jez asked. She walked round the table, collecting various jackets from where they’d been left draped over the backs of chairs. When she was done, she made a pile on the floor in front of Pinn.

‘Just in case,’ she said, and stepped back.

Pinn dropped Slag. Gravity did its job.

‘Huh,’ said Pinn, looking down at the cat, who was now buried in the pile of jackets. There was a buttery stain on Malvery’s favourite overcoat.

‘Huh,’ Jez agreed. ‘I wouldn’t want to be you when that cat comes round.’

‘Ah, I’m not scared of him,’ said Pinn, climbing down from the table.

A thought occurred to Jez. ‘How did you get him so docile, anyway?’

‘Stuck some rum in his milk.’

She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. Yes, that was it. That was the taste. Rum and milk. And the hot sensation on her back, as if someone had strapped an enormous piece of toast to her.

‘Huh,’ she said thoughtfully.

Frey decided not to take the tram back from the park. He needed time on his own to think, and the walk would be some rare and welcome exercise. Crake had gone to gather resources for his new experiments, and Frey was never allowed to come along on daemonist business. They were a secretive bunch, and with good reason. The Awakeners had everyone so riled up against them that they were liable to be hanged if caught practising their craft.

He found himself in a small square, all but empty except for an elderly man crossing it in the opposite direction. It was dominated by a large building with a forecourt and the symbol of the Cipher carved in stone over the archway. Frey stopped in front of it. The symbol of the Awakener’s faith, a pattern of circles and interlocking lines that the last king Andreal had drawn obsessively all over his cell in the final days of his madness. His followers believed it to be the key to decoding the language of the Allsoul. Frey thought it looked like something a madman would scrawl on a wall.

The building was boarded up and empty. Obscene graffiti, half-heartedly scrubbed out, were still visible. He couldn’t work out whether it was pro- or anti-Awakener in content; just a blare of swear words, a dumb roar of hate.

The House of Chancellors had recently passed down an edict doas pro- or banning the Awakeners from operating in the cities. It was part of the Archduke and Archduchess’s long campaign to defang the political threat of the Awakeners’ aggressive and profitable religion. But then had come the accusation from the Archduke that the Imperators were daemonically possessed. An accusation based on scientific evidence that Frey had delivered. And that was a provocation too far. Things were turning bloody. Out in the sticks, people were dying.

The broadsheets were full of reports from the countryside, where the Awakeners’ influence was greatest. Farming communities rioted. Peasants took up arms when tax collectors came to visit the local hermitage.

Neither the Archduke nor the Awakeners would back down. If the truth were revealed, the Awakeners would be exposed as hypocrites, having persecuted daemonists for a century. And it was just the excuse the Archduke had been waiting for to rid himself of the organisation responsible for the murder of his son Hengar.

Well, technically it had been Frey that had murdered his son, but technically didn’t cut it as far as Frey was concerned. Hengar’s craft had been rigged to explode; it just happened to be Frey shooting at it at the time. It was the Awakeners’ fault, pure and simple.

Should I have just let it be?

It was a question he’d been asking himself for some time. He hadn’t needed to take those damning research notes from the Storm Dog , while they were at the North Pole trying to rescue Trinica from Captain Grist and the Manes. He hadn’t needed to tell Crake about them, either, which pretty much committed him to act: Crake had a deep and venomous hatred of the Awakeners, and he would never let Frey sit on that kind of information.

But Frey did both those things, and then he gave the notes to Professor Kraylock at Bestwark University, who passed them on anonymously, because Frey didn’t much fancy having the Awakeners and their daemonic enforcers knowing just who had screwed them.

He did it because he wanted to make a difference. Because he wanted to make an impact, a dent in the world. He wanted to run with the big boys, instead of scrabbling about in the dirt, scavenging his way through life. But he was beginning to realise that the big decisions came with big consequences, and he wasn’t too keen to be remembered as the man who started a civil war in Vardia. Especially not with the Sammies rumoured to be tooling up for another war. They’d been suspiciously quiet ever since they called a surprise truce to end the last one.

Stop trying to be perfect, Crake had said. But it was easier said than done. He was acutely aware that everything his crew had been through since they held up the train had been for his sake. Not for profit, not even for fun, but to pull him out of the trouble he’d got himself into. And he was pretty sure there’d be a lot more trouble to come.

His friends were risking their lives for him. That was one bastard of a burden to carry.

‘Don’t you leave me here!’

Frey’s blood went cold. He couldn’t possibly have just heard what he thought he’d heard. A thin, despairing shriek. Words that had been burned on his conscience for nine long years. The voice of his engineer, Rabby, as Frey sealed up the cargo ramp of the Ketty Jay and condemned him to be murdered by the Dakkadian soldiers outside.

Yet the words rang out clearly across the square, coming from a narrow alley at the side of the Awakener building.

He looked around quickly. The elderly man was gone. There was no sign of life in the square. The lamp-posts seemed to have dimmed, as if the gas had been turned down. He could hear the distant sounds of the city in neighbouring streets, but he suddenly felt terribly alone.

He walked slowly along the forecourt wall, towards the alley entrance, drawing a pistol as he went. He didn’t want to see what was there, but he could hardly ignore it, either. If it turned out to be nothing, at least he might convince himself that it was all his imagination.

He peered down the alley. It was dark in there, and the shadows foiled his eyes.

Well, there was no way he was going in there to look. He wasn’t that curious.

Then something moved. It was just on the edge of visibility, a suggestion of a shape in the blackness. He fought to make it out. Something large, round, low to the ground.

As he stared, it unfolded long limbs and straightened, and he realised that it had been crouched, curled up, with its back to him. Now it expanded, rising to its feet, dropping one shoulder, turning towards him. And it stepped into the light from the square.

It was seven feet tall to the shoulder, but it would have been nine if it was standing straight. Part human, part animal, part machine. Its short fur was wet and greasy, like something newly born. Its arms were thin and disproportionately long, ending in outsize hands with double-bladed bayonets in place of fingers. The knees of its legs were bent backwards, like a horse or a dog. And a dog was what its face resembled: a snarling hybrid of metal and muzzle.

No, thought a small, clear voice inside that cut through the flapping panic in his mind. He recalled the sorcerer’s words. A jackal. Beware the Iron Jackal.

One half of its head was metal, as were much of the limbs. Machine parts sewed into and out of muscle and skin; servos and pistons were visible in its legs. Its spine was a spiked chain running up its hunched back, and there were thin plates of black armour scattered haphazardly across its body. Something about the colour and the look of them was uncomfortably familiar, but the connection evaded him for the moment.

One connection didn’t, though. One of its eyes was a red mechanical orb. The other stared wilherbut the codly from its black-muzzled jackal face, without an iris, only a single huge black pupil.

That was Trinica’s eye.

He let out an inarticulate cry of fear as he stumbled away from the alley. The Iron Jackal’s lips quivered and curled, exposing long teeth. Frey raised his revolver and fired at it: once, twice, three times. But whether it was his bad aim in the darkness or something else, the bullets hit nothing.

Then he ran, and it came after him.

He fled along the edge of the square, boots pounding on the cobbles. He had too much pride to call for help, but a wordless yell of alarm would serve just as well, if only there was someone to hear it. But the square was eerily deserted, and the shuttered windows that faced it were dark.

The creature bounded out of the alleyway, running on all fours in great leaps, its bayonet fingers shrieking along the stone. Frey heard its hot animal panting, the screech and thump of each leap and landing, getting rapidly louder as it ate up the distance between them.

It’s coming it’s coming oh shit!

The Iron Jackal bunched and sprang. Frey darted aside, down a lane that ran off the square. A dark pile of muscle and metal and fur swept by, blades skinning the air, missing him by centimetres. Its momentum carried it past the end of the lane and out of sight.

The lane descended in long stepped sections, lit by a few lonely lamps in wall sconces. Frey put his head down and ran hard, driven by utter terror. He had a few seconds to get ahead, and he meant to make them count.

The sight of the thing that meant to kill him, the hard reality of it, had rocked him to his core. Until now, he’d been able to kid himself into thinking that the danger had been exaggerated. He wasn’t kidding himself any more.

He looked over his shoulder, and saw that the beast had entered the lane and was coming after him, running on two legs now in a grotesque lope. The light seemed to slide off it, pouring away as it passed beneath the lamps. Its red eye shone in the shadow. In desperation, he fired at it as he ran, emptying his revolver to no effect.

The lane ended in a steep set of steps, which descended to a sunken path by the side of a canal. Frey slipped on them in his haste, heels skidding, and almost ended up in the canal himself. He hit the path with a heavy jolt, but recovered his balance well enough to sprint off without losing too much speed.

There was a high wall to his left and the canal to his right. Boats were moored in quiet rows, bumping gently against one another. Houses loomed above him, black and dank in the chill of the night. There were lights in the windows, signs of warmth and life. No one there could help him. His lungs were beginning to burn. He wasn’t in good enough shape to run this hard, but the fear of what was behind him wouldn’twouaga let him slow.

He passed a group of men on the path, who saw him coming and moved out of the way to avoid being knocked aside. As it was, he clipped one of them with his shoulder and sent him staggering into the wall. He ran on with their indignant exclamations ringing in his ears.

More steps, leading up off the path. He took them. The short ascent made his thighs ache. A poky street ran along the top of the canal wall. He staggered across it and into an alley, where he finally rested, heaving air into his aching chest.

He listened, trying to focus past the blood thudding in his ears. Where was the beast? He hadn’t seen it since he’d hit the canal path. If it had been following, surely it would have encountered the same men he had?

Perhaps it didn’t want to be seen. Or perhaps he’d lost it.

He holstered his revolver. Bullets wouldn’t do him any good. He wasn’t a crack shot, but he was sure that he’d hit it at least once. The thing hadn’t even flinched.

He heard a thump from overhead. He looked up, his breath catching: but all he could see between the buildings was a cloudy sky painted yellow by the city lights.

Something moving up there. Something heavy. The scrape of metal against slate. The sound of an animal breathing.

Frey pressed himself against the wall, eyes fixed on the rooftops. You’re invisible, he told himself. You’re not here.

He glanced at other end of the alley. There was a street there, well lit. Late night shops were open, and he could see people. People meant safety. It couldn’t get him if there were people about, surely? A beast like that wouldn’t want to show itself out in the open.

If he could just get to that street…

There was a sinister growl from overhead. The Iron Jackal was craning over the edge of a rooftop, looking down on him. He felt his stomach plunge and his limbs go cold.

He bolted.

He heard the rush of air as it dropped down into the alley, the impact of its landing, the snarl as it came for him. The mouth of the alley seemed a hundred metres away. He put every ounce of his strength into his legs and willed himself to make it. Every passing second, the Iron Jackal was closer, and closer, so close that it had to have caught him by now. But not yet, not yet, and then His intuition screamed at him, some millennia-old sense that warned him when a predator was about to pounce. Whether he tripped then, or whether he went down on purpose, he wasn’t sure. But he went to the ground, rolling and tumbling out of the alley onto the street, and the Iron Jackal passed over him, ced ent dolose enough to make the tail of his greatcoat flap.

Frantic, he got his feet under him and ran up the street, gasping and howling incoherently. Shoppers froze and stared at him. The Iron Jackal picked itself up, surprised at having missed its target. Its head turned, fixed on Frey, and it came bounding after him again.

‘Someone bloody help me!’ Frey yelled, who’d gone beyond pride and was only thinking about survival now. But the shoppers just goggled, and hurried out of his way. He glanced over his shoulder at the terrifying daemon steaming up the street towards him. It bounded between the shoppers, and none of them took the slightest notice of it. Their eyes didn’t follow the creature; they stayed on Frey instead.

They couldn’t see it.

A mad thought fled across his mind: was this all in his head, then? What if he stood still and let the thing come at him? Would it prove to be harmless?

It didn’t matter. He was far too scared to find out. As if the thing itself wasn’t bad enough, the aura of daemonic terror that it put out drove all sense from him.

It was no safer in the open. The Iron Jackal would catch him in moments on the street. He ran for another cross-alley, past lighted windows selling chocolates and toys and clothes. Jolly things for happy people, set in pretty displays. Frey was no longer in the same world. He was alone against the beast, in the midst of an oblivious crowd.

The Iron Jackal saw where he was going and lunged to intercept, but Frey reached the alley first. The beast bounded in after him, back on all fours, charging. The alley was only short, and Frey burst out on to another street, looking behind him as he went. The creature seemed to fill the alley, mismatched eyes glaring above a fanged mouth, a nightmare vision of naked savagery.

A dazzle of light, and a clanging bell. Frey’s heart lurched in alarm as he saw something huge bearing down on him. He tripped and fell, rolling onto his side an instant before a tram rumbled past him, and all he could see was a wall of wheels a few centimetres from his nose. He scrambled back, and then suddenly hands were on him and he was being pulled to his feet. He shook them off in a panic, sliding his arms out of his greatcoat to escape, but they grabbed him again.

‘Here! Calm down!’

The authority in that voice restored a little sanity. They were militiamen, in the Archduke’s blue and grey. Four of them.

‘You alright, feller?’

‘Here, you nearly got yourself killed!’

He wasn’t listening to them. He was looking at his greatcoat, which had fallen to the floor. There were three long parallel slashes across the back of it. e ceight="0" width="20" align="justify"›The tram was slowing to a stop, its raucous bell still echoing in the night. It slid out of the way to reveal the mouth of the alley he’d come from.

There, standing in full view of the street, was the Iron Jackal. Frey threw himself back against the militiamen, but they grabbed him and restrained him.

‘No! No! It’s there! Can’t you bloody see it?’ he howled.

‘Calm down, I said! Don’t make us calm you.’

‘You ain’t gonna like it if we do,’ added another.

But the Iron Jackal made no move to attack. It simply watched him, its hunched back rising and falling. It lifted one bayonet-finger to its blunt muzzle.

Sssh.

Then it stepped back into the alley and was gone, leaving Frey to wilt into the arms of the militia as the last of his strength left him.