The Iron jackal

Twenty-Five

The entrance to the warren was a circular shaft, a jagged throat of red stone in the jungle floor, some distance from the camp. There was a wooden pulley off to one side, and a worn rope dangling from it, which split at the end into a pair of stirrups. Frey was put next to Silo, and they stood together at the edge while flies sucked at their sweat. He looked down. It wasn’t so deep that he couldn’t see the bottom, only a dozen metres or so. But that was plenty deep enough.

Akkad gathered everyone around, and he gave a short speech in Murthian. Frey didn’t need a translation. He could tell by the tone that it was some self-justifying horse-arse declaration as to why he felt it necessary to lob his prisoners into a pit full of hungry whatevers. Some of the audience – mothers with sickly children, or the elderly who looked sick themselves – groaned and murmured at one point. Most of them didn’t seem too happy about what was going on. He wondered what kind of deal Silo had tried to cut with the big man, but whatever it was, it hadn’t been enough to wipe away the memory of that failed coup. The engineer was stone-faced as the judgement was rendered.

After that, they were made to put their feet into the stirrups, one foot each, and they clutched onto the rope as they were swung out over the pit and lowered down. Frey caught sight of Ehri in the crowd, standing with the smaller man he’d seen her with earlier. He had an arm round her. Her face was full of anger; his of sorrow.

Then the rock of the shaft obscured them from view. The insects became muted and everything was uncannily quiet. His world narrowed to a circle of dusk overhead. He and Silo held on to the softly creaking rope, so close they were practically hugging, and they sank through the air, which cooled quickly as they descended.

At the bottom of the shaft was an uneven chamber, with several openings at its edges that led into shadow. The light from above, weak though it was, seemed fierce and warm in contrast to the chill darkness that lurked at its edge. Frey looked around without enthusiasm.

‘How do I get into these situations?’ he moaned to no one in particular. He felt like he should be scared, but he hadn’t seen anything to be scared of yet. Vague threats of danger weren’t enough to bother him. Not when he’d seen so much of the real stuff.

He was still looking around when something dropped through the air and hit the ground next to him, making him jump. It was a hemp sack. He could see the hilt of his cutlass within, and the grip of a pistol.

‘We get our weapons?’ he asked Silo.

‘Yuh,’ said Silo, pulling open the sack. He handed Frey his pistols and cutlass, and took his shotgun and dagger. Frey checked the pistols, found they were empty, and then saw Silo counting through a handful of bullets and shells.

‘Any particular reason why they didn’t just shoot us?’

‘Gunshots make noise. They tryin’ to hide.’

Frey rolled his eyes. Silo was feeling obtuse, apparently. ‘Chop our heads off, then! You know what I mean.’

Silo handed him bullets for his pistol. ‘Ten there. I got five shells.’ He started loading them in to his shotgun. ‘Old law. Murthians ain’t s’posed to kill each other. We got enough people doin’ that already.’

‘But they can be abandoned in a…’ Frey looked around. ‘What is this place, anyway?’

‘Ghall warren.’

‘Ghall?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t know a word for ’em in Vardic. You’ll meet ’em soon enough. They hunt the river banks at dusk, come back to the warren when the sun goes down. We got till then to get out of here.’ He chambered a round with a loud crunch and gazed steadily at Frey. ‘Best way for a Murthian to die is to die fightin’. Most in the pens don’t get that chance. Free Murthians…’ he trailed off. ‘It’s the way it is. Gotta respect your own.’

The remaining objects in the sack were a pair of flintstones and a pair of wooden torches, their ends wrapped in fabric and covered in viscous pitch.

Frey looked up at the mouth of the shaft. The rope was being winched back. ‘You put a lot of people down here?’

Frey20" align="justify"›Silo knelt and began chipping the flintstones together. ‘There was hard justice in the early days. Some people, they din’t take to the bigger picture too well after all the desperation they was used to in the pens.’ He struck a spark, and a torch ignited. ‘People stole. Hoarded food. Men fought over women, sometimes killin’ one another. We din’t have no courts out here like in Vardia, nor no time for ’em either. Needed a deterrent for the bad folk.’ He straightened. ‘Later it got used on good folk too.’

‘Your friends?’ Frey asked, as he put his cutlass and one of his pistols into his belt.

Silo’s shoulders tensed for a moment. Then he relaxed, lit the other torch and handed it to Frey. ‘Let’s get movin’.’

Silo led the way, with an urgency and purpose to his movements that Frey wasn’t used to seeing. He headed for one of the exits from the chamber, thrust his torch inside. A fissure too narrow to pass through. He tried another, and seemed to like the look of it better. Then he picked up a stone and scratched a mark on the wall.

That’s a good idea. Marking our route so we don’t go round in circles. I should’ve thought of that.

Frey followed Silo into a cramped tunnel. As the light from the shaft faded behind them, the reality of their predicament closed in on Frey, tight and hard as the rock that surrounded him. Away from the jungle heat, he suddenly felt very far from safety. Whatever was down here, Silo clearly felt it was something to be reckoned with. That was all Frey needed to know. That, and the implication that no one had ever come out of here alive.

They emerged in another chamber, kidney-shaped and more cramped than the first. The only illumination came from their torches now, and shadows jumped in the crevices. Frey began to feel claustrophobic. He couldn’t stop thinking about the tonnage of stone all around him, the sheer immovability of their surroundings. Everything around them was dead and tomblike. The scruff and scrape of their boots was an invasion of the silence.

‘Your mate Akkad’s a nasty bastard, to think up something like this,’ he muttered.

‘Weren’t him,’ said Silo. ‘Was me.’

‘You what?’

Silo looked over his shoulder. ‘My idea,’ he said. ‘Din’t have much tolerance back then for them that didn’t subscribe to the cause.’

Frey sucked his breath in over his teeth. ‘What’s the Murthian word for “irony”?’ he asked.

‘Ain’t one,’ Silo replied. ‘ ’Sides, I’m here ’cause I put myself here. Man’s just a great big sum of the choices he made on ts he="he way, and what he did with what Mother gave him. Ain’t no irony to it, or otherwise.’

‘Mother?’ Frey asked. The word jarred; it seemed excessively formal, coming from Silo. Scuffers used ‘mama’ and ‘papa.’

Silo’s dark eyes glittered in the torchlight. Then he turned away, and didn’t say anything else.

Frey watched as Silo made his way around the edge of the chamber, thrusting his torch into various gaps and fissures.

‘What are you looking for?’ he asked, when it became apparent they weren’t moving.

‘Breeze. Ain’t none.’

‘Then that way’s good as any,’ he said, pointing at the largest exit he could see.

Silo grunted, made another mark, and headed into the fissure he’d indicated. Frey followed. It was narrow enough to pass through if they hunched their shoulders. After a dozen metres it was blocked by a fall of rubble. Silo lifted his torch and said ‘Reckon we can climb up.’ So they did.

The upward shaft was even narrower than the fissure, and more uneven. Frey had to squeeze his way through gaps that were barely big enough for his hips. His cutlass scratched the rock and caught on corners as he struggled after Silo.

He was beginning to sweat again, and this time it wasn’t the heat. The smoke of the torches was thickening the air and making him cough. The sour taste of suppressed panic gathered in his mouth. He had visions of all that weight of stone coming down on him. Damn, he didn’t want to go out that way.

He needed to talk, to take his mind from the oppressive gravity of his surroundings. Silo had made it pretty clear that he wasn’t interested in talking about ‘Mother,’ but the way he said it made Frey think she was something more than a parent. He made a rare intuitive leap.

‘You a religious man, Silo?’ he asked.

‘Show me a Murthian that ain’t,’ came the reply from up ahead.

‘Mother?’

Silo stopped and looked back down the shaft they were climbing. ‘Don’t, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘You ain’t gonna understand.’

But Frey wouldn’t be deterred. He’d suddenly developed a keen interest in anything that stopped him thinking about where he was. ‘Just saying,’ he continued. ‘If you got any prayers up your sleeve, we could use ’em right now.’

‘Don’t work that way,’ said Silo, who had resumed his clumsy ascent. ‘She ain’t into interventions. She bring a man into the world, and she watch ’n’ weep at his troubles, but every one o’ her children gotta make their own way. Just like a real mama.’

‘Not like mine,’ said Frey. ‘Bitch dumped me on the doorstep of an orphanage.’

‘You reckon that’s why you spent the rest of your life tryin’ to get attention from women?’ Silo asked.

‘Probably,’ Frey admitted. ‘Couldn’t give a flying cowshit about the reasons, to tell you the truth. Shagging’s fun.’

Silo gave a deep chuckle and shook his head. ‘You some sort o’ feller, Cap’n. Don’t think I never met anyone like you.’

Frey grinned. Absurdly, in the midst of all this, he was enjoying himself, albeit in a slightly hysterical kind of way. He’d learned more about Silo in the last nine minutes than he had in the previous nine years. He felt closer to his engineer than he ever had before, and that wasn’t only because he was practically crawling up the man’s arse.

The shaft opened out halfway up the wall of a new chamber. Frey heard running water as Silo passed him back the torch and climbed down. He made his way to the edge of the opening, handed down both torches, and climbed down after.

The flames beat back the dark, and showed them part of a low-ceilinged cavern, with the far side still lost in shadow. Before them was black water, slapping and sloshing through a winding channel. That small, restless noise was loud in the silence.

‘The water’s gotta go somewhere, right?’ Frey suggested. Desperate hope ignited inside him at the idea.

‘Yuh,’ said Silo. ‘But water’s where they gather. They eat fish when they can’t get nothin’ bigger.’

‘How long you think the light’s gonna last, Silo?’ Frey asked, waving his torch about to illustrate his point.

A distant cry echoed through the cavern, a sound somewhere between a croak and a shriek. Both of them turned to look in the same direction: the way the water was flowing.

‘Still think it’s a good idea, Cap’n?’

‘I’m not dying in the dark, Silo,’ he said, and it was only as he said it that he realised how absolutely, utterly serious he was about that. ‘I’d rather meet whatever made that sound than wander till our torches go out.’

It wasn’t bravado. Hearing that shriek, an unmistakably inhuman noise, nhuheighhad made the danger he’d been ignoring seem suddenly present and real. But he still feared the lonely, empty dark more than any violent end. Dying unnoticed and unseen, lost and helpless: that was the worst thing he could imagine.

Silo gave an approving grunt. They followed the water along its course, with Silo making occasional marks, until it disappeared into a cleft in the cavern wall. Frey kept a nervous eye on the shadows at the edge of the torchlight as Silo climbed into the water. It came up to his thighs. Frey did the same, and found that the water was surprisingly warm.

They waded into the cleft. Frey was careful to ensure his pistols stayed dry as he went. His cutlass blade stuck into the water, tugging at him like a wayward rudder, but that wasn’t much of a concern. It was a daemonically thralled blade that moved of its own accord and was capable of deflecting bullets. Given all that, he assumed it was rustproof too.

‘What do you reckon happens when you die, Silo?’ he said quietly.

‘You really think this is the time, Cap’n?’

‘Well, since I’m likely to find out pretty soon, yes.’

Silo looked over his shoulder, saw that Frey meant it, and forged on through the water. ‘Me, I’ll go back to Mother ’n’ get born again,’ he said. ‘Back in the pens, most likely. But the stuff I learned this time round, it’ll all be down there, hidden off in the back o’ my mind. And I’ll be better next time.’

‘You’re not scared of dying?’

‘Nuh,’ he said. ‘Ain’t keen on losing my liberty, though. S’pose I won’t remember. But I reckon I’ll remember the sense of it, and I’ll want to have it again.’

Frey thought about that. ‘What about me?’ he asked.

‘You ain’t Murthian. You’re screwed.’

Frey rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah, that sounds about right. Members only.’

‘Ain’t too late to convert to the Awakeners,’ said Silo. Frey saw a flash of white teeth as Silo turned his head, and realised he was smiling. ‘Mebbe the Allsoul will take care o’ you.’

A joke? From Silo? Frey wondered if he’d already died. But it was such an unexpected thing that he couldn’t help smiling along.

‘Crake would kill me faster than these ghalls would,’ he said.

‘He’d have to find you first,’ Silo pointed out.

Frey looked at his hand. Once, he’d worn a silver ring. A ring that was daemonically connected to a compass, which always pointed towards it. Crake had fashioned it to keep track of his wayward captain when he disappeared on a three-day drunk. He might have used it to find Frey now, but Frey had given it to Trinica.

‘I knew that woman would be the death of me,’ he murmured, because a bit of black humour was the only way he could deal with the thought of her right now.

‘Worse things to die for,’ said Silo, and they didn’t speak any more for a while.

Trinica. If it all finished here, then it would have finished badly with her, and he couldn’t face the idea of that. Despite the ignominious way she’d kicked him off her aircraft, he’d only thought of it as a temporary setback. Something to deal with after he’d got the Iron Jackal off his case. But if that really had been their last meeting, it was a damned pathetic way to be remembered.

The cleft ended in slope of rubble, where the water splashed down over the rocks into the shadows of a long cavern beyond.

They splashed out of the cleft and made their unsteady way down the slippery rocks. Frey’s legs were soaked, and his socks squished in his boots. Once on steady ground, they tried to get an idea of the cavern they’d found themselves in. It was dank and chilly, kinked and narrow, cluttered by protrusions that bulged from all angles. The stream ran through it in a trough of its own making, carved over centuries through the relentless indifference of nature.

There were no obvious exits in sight, but the cavern extended far beyond the reach of their torches, which showed them little except for the tips of the stalactites that hung menacingly overhead.

There was another shriek from a ghall, this one much closer, loud enough to make Frey jump. He turned on his heel, holding his torch high. There, just on the edge of the light, high up on the wall: eyes ! He cried out and raised his pisto l, but suddenly he had nothing to aim at. He could have sworn he saw a glitter of light, reflected from the wet orbs of something monstrous. But when he moved closer and thrust out his torch, there was nothing there. Only an angular hole, a patch of darkness in the red rock.

‘There was something there,’ he said, breathlessly. He was frightened by how much it had frightened him.

‘Calm down, Cap’n,’ Silo rumbled. ‘Ain’t one of ’em you got to worry about. It’s when you got ten of ’em you should be scared.’

‘Well, I’m getting an early bloody run-up on it, alright?’ Frey snapped. Then something splashed in the water right by his boot heel, and he spun around and fired.

The report of his pistol was dreadful in the silence. Frey listened to the echoes bounce echwedoff up the tunnel, his nerves jangling, a wince frozen on his face. He sucked in air over his gritted teeth.

‘That was a fish, wasn’t it?’ he said.

‘Yuh,’ said Silo.

There was a quiet hissing coming from the edges of the cavern now. An unmistakably sinister sound. The ghalls, out there in the dark.

‘Stream goes that way, Cap’n,’ said Silo.

‘Right,’ he said, and they followed it.