The Iron jackal

Twenty-Eight

The door was opened by a gangly Samarlan girl with hostile brown eyes. She was maybe twelve years old, maybe thirteen, with the elegant features and pitch-black skin of her race. She radiated suspicion and scorn, and a casual, predatory confidence beyond her years.

Ashua wasn’t fooled for an instant. She’d been the same way at that age. Despite the superficial differences, she recognised her replacement.

((Let me guess)) she said in Samarlan. ((He found you on the street and he’s been improving you ever since. How’s your vocabulary?))

‘Exquisite,’ the girl sneered in Vardic. ‘He said you’d be coming.’

‘He was right,’ Ashua replied.

The girl looked her up and down for long enough to let Ashua know she wasn’t impressed, that Ashua wasn’t shit to her. Then she stepped back and let her in off the alley.

Maddeus had lived in many places, but they all ended up the same. The fine settees in the hall were frayed and stained. The huge mirror was smeared and bleary. Paint peeled off the walls. Tiny windows let in the dusk light through a screen of grime. Maddeus moved to each new dwelling in a flurry of fresh finery, but his very presence rotted his surroundings. In the three months since he’d moved into this latest hideaway, it had already fallen into neglect.

The girl went ahead of her up the corridor. It was dim and stifling hot. They passed beneath electric fans, which were still.

In the rooms off the corridor, she sa

She recognised nobody. She hadn’t visited him here, out of respect for his wishes, and it seemed he’d had a reshuffle. Out with the old, in with the new. Another handful of junkies to tickle his interest.

But there was one man Maddeus would never abandon. She spotted him in a study off the corridor, sitting at a desk and sipping mint tea. The decay that afflicted this place had been held off here, but he couldn’t keep away the fug in the air and the sickly-sweet smell of sweat and excess.

He looked up over his glasses as Ashua passed the doorway. Osbrey Fole, a taut, narrow man, grey before his time. Osbrey was Maddeus’ accountant, among other things. The man who ran his business.

She’d always liked Osbrey, and he, in his way, had liked her. They were a conspiracy of two: the only sober heads in a flock of the deluded. He gave her a curt nod, which was as much emotion as she’d expect from him, and went back to work.

At the end of the corridor was a grand set of double doors. The girl opened them and let Ashua inside.

The room beyond was warm and close. The windows were covered over with thin curtains of green and red. Pungent smoke hung in slowly coiling layers in the gloom. It was full of expensive furniture, yet it felt shabby and dispiriting, and beneath the smell of narcotic fumes there was the hospital scent of the dying.

Maddeus lay reclined on a gilded chaise longue, eyes half-lidded. Next to him was a lacquered tray table, on which lay a silver syringe, a tourniquet and a skooch pipe, among other paraphernalia. A forgotten cigarette, little more than a bent column of ash, smouldered between his fingers.

The girl made to follow Ashua inside, but Ashua blocked her way. ‘The cigarette!’ she protested.

‘I’ve got it,’ said Ashua, and shut the door in her face.

The haze in the air made her feel like she was walking through a dream. She’d forgotten the sense of unreality that pervaded the places where Maddeus lived. As if time and sense had become derailed. She’d been away long enough to get used to clarity.

Maybe that was why he’d told her she couldn’t stay with him any more. That she’d have to make her own way in Shasiith. After an adolescence spent at his side, midway between a daughter, an employee and a pet, she’d been cast out.

It had hurt her, but she’d taken to independence with a vengeance. She’d been in Shasiith long enough to know the language and the ways of the underworld, and living on her wits was something she’d been doing ever since she could remember. She cut deals, made allies and enemies, stole when she had to, cheated when she could. She wanted to show him how capable she was. How she didn’t need him. And then, the lesson learned well, he’d take her back.

She’d never seriously thought it was more than a temporary thing.

She sat down on the chaise longue next to him, took the cigarette from his fingers and crushed it into an ashtray. He stirred and his eyes opened a little more. A stupefied grin spread across his face.

‘Ashua. My darling,’ he slurred.

‘Hello, Maddeus.’

He reached weakly towards the tray table. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to…?’ he said.

She stopped his hand by taking it in hers.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You never did, did you?’

His skin was dry. The bones of his hand felt hollow and brittle, like a bird’s. He looked sallow and wasted. She felt something gather in her throat, and she didn’t want to let him go.

He kept smiling that idiot smile. ‘I remember the day I met you. ..’ he said, but the sentence was crushed beneath the weight of the colossal lethargy that lay on him.

She was glad. She didn’t want to reminisce. She patted his hand. It’s alright. Whatever it is, it’s all alright.

Maddeus coughed and reached feebly for a cigarette. Without thinking, Ashua took one from his gold cigarette case, lit it for him, and put it in his mouth. She’d done it so many times while he was in this state that it was like a reflex.

He took a drag and settled back into the chaise longue with a sigh. She saw him drifting, and squeezed his hand before she lost him completely.

‘Maddeus!’ she said sharply.

He surfaced from his daze, and he looked at her as if it was the first time he’d noticed she was in the room. His face became concerned. ‘What are you doing here, my darling? Don’t you know it’s dangerous?’

She tried a frail smile, but it died on her lips. ‘I’m leaving,’ she said.

‘Hmmm,’ said Maddeus, whose attention had alrentried a fraeady gone elsewhere. She brushed his lank hair back from his face, made him focus on her again.

‘I’m leaving,’ she said, more firmly this time. ‘Leaving Shasiith for good. I’m joining the crew of the Ketty Jay. ’

He became grave. ‘Oh.’

‘That’s what you wanted for me, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, with the vague tone of someone who couldn’t remember.

‘There’s a price. I’m pretty sure you won’t mind. Medical supplies. I’ve got a list from Malvery.’

‘He’s the doctor, isn’t he?’ Maddeus smiled broadly, but his eyes shimmered with tears. She felt something surge up inside her chest, something that made her breath shudder, a feeling of such terrible enormity that it would burst her. She turned her face away from him quickly. How much of that sorrow was him, and how much was the drugs? Was there any difference any more?

‘I’ll give the list to Osbrey, shall I?’ she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.

‘That’d be best. He’ll take care of it.’ His eyes fluttered closed, and she thought for a moment that he’d fallen asleep. Then he spoke again, barely forming his words. ‘This captain, what’s he like?’

‘Mordant.’

He snorted. ‘That’s not a sentence, darling, but I’ll forgive you this once.’ He stirred and groped across the tray. His fingers brushed past the tourniquet and found the silver syringe. He sighed with pleasure. ‘Will you… call the girl for me?’

Her eyes prickled as she picked up the syringe and the length of rubber tubing. ‘There’s no need,’ she said softly. ‘I’m here.’

‘He’s late,’ said Crake, holding up his pocket watch.

Malvery peered over his round, green-lensed glasses at the daemonist.

‘Well, he is!’ Crake protested.

‘He’s a wholesaler. We’re buying food. This is the least dodgy thing we’ve done for months. Calm down, eh?’

Malvery looked over the balcony of the cafe and down into the street. Below them, donkeys and rushu brayed and lowed, carts creaked, people jostled and called to one another. On the far side of the dusty river of traffic was a warehouse, its worn wooden gates thrown open. Fair-haired Dakkadians sauntered in andunt eyes pri out of the baking gloom within.

‘Takes time to load up that much food,’ he assured Crake. He fanned himself with one beefy hand. ‘And they don’t do anything fast in this country.’

Crake put away his pocket watch, picked up a Vardic broadsheet that he’d bought from a boy on the street, and snapped it open. It was yesterday’s paper. The front page bore the headline which had put him on edge: Mentenforth Vandals still at Large. Beneath it was a ferrotype of the domed ceiling of the Mentenforth Institute vault, which Malvery had autocannoned a great big hole in.

There was no mention of them. That meant Bree and Grudge hadn’t told the Press, which meant… well, he wasn’t sure what that meant. But it was too hot to get concerned about things.

He sat with his feet up on a chair, sweating in the shade of a parasol. The parasol was held up by a circular wrought-iron table, upon which was a pot of spiced tea and a carafe of sweet local liquor. Malvery had been steadily working his way through the carafe for the last hour, and he had a lazy buzz on. Crake, who was drinking the tea, was altogether more jumpy. He didn’t like being back in Shasiith. He was afraid the Sammie soldiers would catch up with them.

Malvery, for his part, was reassured by the chaos and complexity of the mad sprawl that surrounded them. Hard to imagine anyone finding anyone in a place like this. They’d taken precautions, registered their craft under a false name, and Jez kept the Ketty Jay moving from dock to dock around the city. It had taken a bit of time to sort everything out – another night wasted that they could scarcely afford – but everything was on track now. He and Crake would get the food. Ashua was handling the medical stuff.

The Cap’n, for his part, had gone to see Trinica Dracken, who was in the city somewhere. With that compass of his, he could find her anywhere, and she obviously didn’t mind being found, since she still wore the ring. Whatever was going on between them, Malvery didn’t want to know; but the Cap’n said he had a plan for attacking Gagriisk, and it involved her, and that was that.

‘Look at this,’ Crake said, looking up from his broadsheet. ‘There’s a town in Aulenfay that’s publicly declared they’ll fight the Archduke if he tries to outlaw the Awakeners.’

‘Bad stuff going down,’ he murmured.

‘Peasants! They must know the Archduke won’t stand for that!’

Malvery took a sip of liquor. He didn’t like discussing religion with Crake. Crake’s loathing of the Awakeners meant that he tended to rant. Malvery didn’t believe in the Allsoul – it was all too obviously made up by disappointed royalists trying to make their last king into a messiah – but he didn’t much mind if anyone else did. Problem was, the Archduke didn’t share that view. He’d been dying for a chance to get rid of them. Andd otha that meant things were going to get ugly.

They’d fought two wars to keep Vardia free, and word had it the Sammies were getting ready for a third. But instead of sticking together, they were squabbling amongst themselves. He didn’t dare think what might happen if someone didn’t back down. Vardia hadn’t seen a civil war since the Dukes deposed the monarchy. The idea of his countrymen fighting each other made him angry. It was their country, damn it! They were Vards first and everything else second. When did people forget that?

It was the Cap’n who gave the Archduke the ammunition he needed, when they came back from the Wrack a few months ago. Malvery should have stopped him. But he just let it slide, the way he always did.

His thoughts turned grim, and his buzz faded. He drained his cup and filled it again in the hopes of getting it back. It didn’t work.

Suddenly uncomfortable, he stretched, slapped at a fly on his neck and looked around the cafe balcony. A lone waiter drifted about. Sammies and Vards sheltered from the fierce sun beneath the parasols, sometimes at the same table. The scene had become sinister to his eyes, the air humming with plots and the secret mutterings of spies. How much longer would this go on, this tentative peace? Were the Sammies even now eyeing up their neighbours, jealous of their abundant aerium? Would there come a time when the smuggled supply through the Free Trade Zone wasn’t enough to match their dreams of greater empires?

Things were changing. He could feel it. And he didn’t reckon they’d change for the better.

His mind went to his encounter at the Axelby Club. He’d been turning Hawkby’s offer over and over these past few days. A steady job in an asylum, treating the demented. And maybe after that, a surgery of his own. It had sounded wonderful at the time, but now he wasn’t so sure. The thought scared him slightly. Or, to be more accurate, the drink scared him slightly.

He remembered what it was like before. The routine. The same places, over and over. Home, surgery, club. He feared that rhythm. Where there was a rhythm, he found places where he could fit a drink, and soon those drinks became the beats of his day. He’d become regular as clockwork in his old life: a quick drink to get him going in the morning, another before his morning consultations, one between each consultation while he was writing up his notes, one at lunch to relax him for the afternoon surgeries. He’d stay off the booze while he was operating, but he’d be gasping at the end of the day, so he’d have another to get him to the club. Then he’d start to really drink.

On the Ketty Jay, he spent a fair amount of time bored, but he was hardly ever in the same place for more than a few days. Sure, he got drunk, but he was usually sharp enough when the crew needed him. You never knew when you were going to get into something when the Cap’n was around. That random element actually served to keep him relatively sober for most of the day, or at least to stop him getting hammered. He didn’t want to let his mates down by being a big fat comatose whale while they were off risk wee wing their necks.

But scared or not, he was still tempted by Hawkby’s offer. He wanted to feel like he was worth something again. He wanted to feel like that young surgeon who’d earned a medal by rescuing soldiers from a battlefield.

‘You thought about what you’ll do if… y’know?’

Crake put down his broadsheet. ‘If what?’

‘If the Cap’n don’t make it.’

‘Malvery!’ He was shocked.

‘Oh, come on. Don’t pretend it ain’t crossed your mind.’

‘The Cap’n is not going to die!’

‘Oh, aye? Got some way of stoppin’ it that we don’t know about?’

Crake became shifty. ‘Maybe I do,’ he said.

Malvery waited. Crake sipped his tea.

‘Well?’ Malvery demanded. ‘Do you or not?’

‘I don’t know!’ Crake cried. ‘I’ve got some ideas, that’s all. It’s all theoretical!’

‘The Cap’n was carrying something around with him today. A metal ball with a couple of wires coming out of it. Wouldn’t say what it was. Was that one of your theoretical ideas?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does it theoretically do?’

‘Theoretically? It means the Iron Jackal won’t be able to find him.’

‘The Iron Jackal? That’s what he’s calling it?’

‘That’s what the sorcerer called it in the Underneath.’

‘Oh.’ He sat back, interested now. ‘How’s it work?’

Crake put down his tea, eager for the distraction. The tiredness fell away from his face. ‘It’s like this,’ he said, steepling his fingers on the table. ‘This curse, if you can call it that, I think it’s actually a very advanced form of daemonism. There’d always been evidence of primitive daemonism before we applied the sciences to it, though it was hard to distinguish from superstition. The Samarlan sorcerers have docerquone it for centuries, it seems. But this! This is daemonism decades ahead of our time, and it’s thousands of years old. To bond a daemon of such intelligence and sophistication to an object, to give it such complex instructions… You know, it may be that the daemonism we know today is simply the remnants of something we knew how to do long ago, and forgot, which we’ve been painstakingly relearning ever since! And if that’s the case, it’d turn everything we know about daemonism on its head! I’d be fascinated to know where and when that relic came from.’

Malvery chuckled at his friend’s evident excitement. ‘Blimey, it’s obvious what fires your engine.’

Crake grinned. ‘Yes, well. One of the things they somehow did, and I’ve no idea how, is they’ve made the Cap’n into some kind of… some kind of beacon. He’s putting out a signal, and I think that’s what the Iron Jackal uses to find its target. There’s no question of him getting away. It always knows where he is.’

‘And you think you can block it?’

Crake snapped his fingers. ‘Exactly. Competing frequencies interfere and cancel each other out. That device I gave the Cap’n is a modified resonator, which should – theoretically – cut out that signal.’

‘I’m sensing a but,’ Malvery said.

‘But, the problem is power. My portable batteries are so big you have to cart them around in a backpack, and even they only last a short while. Unless the Cap’n wants to stand by a plug socket the rest of his life, I can’t cut out that signal for long.’

Malvery frowned. ‘So what use is it, then?’

‘With a small battery pack, he can cut it out for a few minutes. Now I don’t know how the daemon hunts, but maybe it’ll give the Cap’n a chance next time it comes for him. And what I do know is that there’s only three nights left before the full moon, and the Iron Jackal still hasn’t put in its second appearance.’ He tapped the table nervously. ‘I’ve got some other ideas too, but they’re not ready yet. I’ve been going as fast as I can.’

Malvery could believe it. Crake looked about ten years older than he was. ‘Sounds like you’re doing a bloody good job, mate.’

Crake gave him a half-smile to acknowledge the compliment. He looked the doctor over uncertainly, then said: ‘You know, not so long ago I was thinking about leaving the Ketty Jay.’

‘You were?’ Malvery was surprised to hear that Crake’s feelings had been running so close to his own.

‘Yes. I decided that… Well, I’d gone as far as I could go. Yes. Iuo; He fidgeted awkwardly and lowered his voice. ‘I’m a daemonist, Malvery. That’s who I am. And while I stay on the Ketty Jay I’ll never have access to the proper equipment. I’ll always be limited by that.’

‘You’ve got a talent and it’s going to waste,’ said Malvery, smoothing his moustache with a knuckle. ‘I get that.’

‘But this business with the Cap’n, it’s given me a bit of a jolt. Forced me to think on my feet. I don’t have state-of-the-art gear, so I’m having to make do with what I have. What’s happening here, it’s a unique opportunity.’

‘An opportunity, you say?’ Malvery’s tone indicated what he thought of Crake’s choice of words.

‘You know what I mean. I’m doing my damnedest to be ready in case the curse isn’t lifted when – if – we return the relic to its rightful place. But I’m not blind to the scientific value of all of this. As far as I know, no one’s ever reliably documented the methods that I’m trying out.’

Malvery felt slightly uncomfortable about the idea of the Cap’n being anyone’s guinea-pig, but he reckoned it would be churlish to make a thing of it. After all, Crake was doing a lot more about the situation than he was.

He flexed his hand back and forth into a fist, frustrated. ‘I wish I could, I dunno, be more useful. I mean, I can help out with relics and all that, but a daemon? A daemon that you can’t bloody see and you never know when it’s coming? I get to thinkin’, what if that was me in the Cap’n’s shoes? Waitin’ for that thing to come and get me when I was alone.’ He took a drink. ‘I’d be scared to buggery.’

‘He is scared to… er… buggery,’ Crake replied. ‘Look, we don’t know when it’s coming next, but we know when it’s coming last. On the full moon. And he won’t be alone that time, I promise you that.’

Malvery coughed on the liquor. ‘Let me get this straight: you’re gonna take on that thing?’

Crake looked down at the table. ‘I’m going to try,’ he said. Then he gave a terrified little smile. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, eh? We’ll put that relic back, and all will be well.’

‘Blimey,’ said Malvery, with genuine admiration. ‘You’re a braver man than me.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Crake.

They sat back in their chairs and listened to the hubbub of the street below, sharing a companionable silence for a time.

"You know what does scare me, though?’ Crake said suddenly. ‘The thought that I might have missed out on this.’

‘This?’

He waved a hand across to indicate the cafe and the scorched, grubby city around them. ‘This. Here. Now. I was really thinking about leaving, you know. I was so fixed on the idea that I needed to do this thing, that I needed a sanctum of my own. I was going to leave my friends behind and go live in some stuffy, safe world of my own. A nice little existence with no hard choices and no nasty shocks. And there’d be no more visiting strange new places, no more saving whole cities like we did at Sakkan-’

‘No more dating Century Knights,’ Malvery said.

Crake flushed and looked downcast. ‘Yes, either way there’ll be no more of that. I’m quite sure she’d shoot me if she saw me again, and I’d deserve it too.’

Malvery chuckled. ‘Still. Samandra Bree. Even the Cap’n can’t say that.’

‘I can’t deny, being on the Ketty Jay does put you in the thick of it.’

‘That,’ said Malvery, ‘is bloody true.’

Crake looked uncomfortable, and Malvery realised that he was more upset about Samandra Bree than he’d been letting on. He probably shouldn’t have laughed, in hindsight, but it was a bit late now.

‘So have you thought about it?’ Crake asked.

‘About what?’

‘What you’d do if the Cap’n was gone?’

Malvery sipped his liquor. ‘Aye,’ he said. Down by the warehouse gate, a thickset Dakkadian was waving up at him. Malvery raised a hand in response. ‘Breaktime’s over. Let’s get to it.’

‘You know,’ said Crake, as they got to their feet. ‘I rather like being an honest trader. It’s quite relaxing. Makes a change from getting shot at all the time.’

‘Don’t get used to it,’ said Malvery, and they left.

Fang and flurry and hot blood bursting in her mouth, the salty victory of the kill. The musty stench of the rat, her hated enemy, filled her nostrils as it struggled in her pinning grip. She marvelled at how the flesh gave way before the points of her teeth and claws. Such a soft sheath for a life, so easy to penetrate.

It was a small rat, no contest at all. Not like the bigger ones d bietrate.

Except once. One of the warm tall beings that clomped and stank in the wide spaces of her world, the corridors and cargo bays. The gangly, nervous one, who’d trapped her and flown her into the endless terror of the sky and then…

She wasn’t sure. It was a smear of feelings rather than an ordered sequence of events, like all her memories. All she knew was that the gangly one was not to be trifled with.

She devoured the rat, tearing open its belly and gobbling the innards. She was mistress of the kill. This was rightness.

Slag ate, and Jez ate with him.

It was hard to know where the cat ended and the person began. She was sewn into the fabric of him, her instincts muddled by his. Her body sat in the pilot’s seat of the Ketty Jay, but her mind was divided. One part was with her body, still aware, ready to lift off from the landing pad at the first sign of trouble. The other was a passenger in Slag’s brain, down in the warm vents and crawlways of the Ketty Jay.

Slag, for his part, didn’t understand what was happening. He was aware of her, she knew, but he had no concept of the implications. Once, he’d feared her, sensing the Mane in her; but now she was a familiar presence, and he was as comfortable with her as if she were his litter-sister. She’d soaked into him, and it was like he’d known her for ever.

She ate her fill with him and then groomed herself, finding comfort in the ritual of cleaning, the rough sc ratch of tongue on fur. Sated, she felt the need to sleep. It would be good to find a spot to curl up. She looked up and down the narrow vent. Everything was in black and white, like a ferrotype, and the vents were bright and sharp as a full moon.

That way.

She took off in that direction, padding down a vent towards a junction. Faint light filtered through a fan overhead; more than she needed.

That way.

And that was the way she went. Except suddenly she wasn’t sure whose thought it was that had directed her. It had seemed too clear to be the cat’s, too focused and decisive. But she was only a passenger here, along for the ride. Wasn’t she?

Was it a coincidence that Slag had twice gone in the direction she picked?

Stop.

She came to a halt and began to idly lick her paw.

The other paw.

She put that paw down, and started on the other one.

Slag didn’t seem in the least distressed by this. He thought the idea to lick the paw was his own. But it wasn’t. Jez was sure of that now.

Stretch.

And she did, a luxuriant lengthening of the spine.

Well, now, she thought to herself. Isn’t this something?