The Iron jackal

Thirty-Four

It was mayhem on the quarry floor.

Visibility was down to ten metres in the fog. Everyone was shooting at shadows. Bullets whizzed randomly out of the gloom. Jez was out there somewhere, still on a rampage, her screeches like the cry of some prehistoric animal. As if one of the gargants that lived on Atalon long ago had been resurrected and set loose among them.

Frey and his crew sheltered behind a massive tracked vehicle with a drill-tipped hydraulic arm that was parked near to the quarry wall. Harkins was a total mess: every new shriek from Jez made him flail and splutter. Ashua was jigging on her haunches, a bundle of nervous energy. Crake was fussing over Bess, checking her for damage and cooing reassuring words. Pinn was groggy but alive, muttering deliriously to himself about how he won some race or another, and how he was a hero of the skies. Malvery had patched him up and declared that he’d be fine, but he wouldn’t be flying for another few weeks.

They weren’t in great shape, but they were alive, and they were close to their goal. Frey allowed himself a bit of hope.

He peered out from behind the vehicle. He could see a blurred patch of light, which he could only assume was the solitary confinement building. There were altogether too many bullets flying about in the space between him and it.

A figure came running out of the murk, across his field of vision. He raised his revolver, not sure whether it was worth taking a shot or not. The decision was taken out of his hands. A silhouette – small, ponytailed, feral – pounced into view and landed on the newcomer from behind. Frey was glad he couldn’t see what happened next.

Crouched over the remains, Jez looked left and right, searching for new victims. He ducked back into cover with a thrill of fright. A short while later, he heard screaming on the far side of the quarry, and felt safe enough to move again.

He became aware of a chorus of yells from nearby. They weren’t cries of distress. They were meant to attract attention.

‘It’s the Murthians,’ said Ashua, catching his thought. ‘The ones on the mtining shift.’

‘What are they saying?’

‘Dunno. It’s in Murthian.’ She ruffled the hair on the back of her head. ‘But I’d guess it’s along the lines of “Get us out of here”.’

‘Reckon we ought to oblige ’em,’ said Frey. ‘A few dozen people running all over would help soak up some bullets, I reckon.’

‘You’re all heart, Frey.’

‘Hey! It’s Cap’n to you now. And I’ll have you know that beneath this tough exterior I’m actually fascinatingly sensitive and complex.’

‘Yeah, I’ll just bet you are. A fascinating narcissist.’

‘Thanks. I am pretty brave, aren’t I?’

Ashua swore under her breath. ‘Forgot about your amazing skill with words. I must get you that dictionary.’

‘Will you two stop flirting and bugger off?’ Malvery said. ‘Go free those slaves, if you’re going to.’

‘We are not flirting!’ Ashua snapped.

‘Aren’t we?’ Frey asked.

‘No.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Aren’t we?’

‘No. Literally, actually no.’

Frey’s eyebrow cranked a few notches higher. ‘Aren’t w-’

‘ Is this really the time or place, Cap’n? ’ Harkins screamed, making them all jump.

‘Blimey,’ said Malvery. ‘Someone’s wound up.’

‘Reckon he’s a mite distressed at seeing Jez’s morning face,’ Frey said.

‘That was not her morning face!’ Harkins was on the edge of an apoplectic fit. ‘That was her bloody hideous awful daemon face!’

‘Relationship troubles,’ said Malvery sagely. ‘I prescribe booze.’

‘Always worked for me,’ said Frey.

‘ Pissoffthelotofyou! ’ Harkins squawked, sounding like a strangled crow.

Frey grinned. ‘I like him angry,’ he said. ‘Right then. Harkins, stay here, take a breather. Doc, you look after that idiot.’ He pointed at Pinn. ‘The rest of you, with me.’

He moved, and they followed. They skirted the wall of the quarry, staying out of the crossfire and away from trouble. Without Silo, Jez and Malvery, Frey wasn’t confident about their chances in a stand-up fight. Crake was an appalling shot, and wouldn’t be much use, but he and Bess were a pair. Ashua could handle a gun, but she needed practice judging by her performance so far.

He kept an eye out for Jez. Where was she? Should he be worried about her as much as the Daks? He couldn’t deny that she’d saved everyone’s lives a short while ago, but she still scared him. When she was out of control like this, there was no knowing what she’d do. She was probably the most competent member of his crew, but she was the biggest liability as well.

He was still thinking about it when he became aware of a low whine, getting louder and louder. He frowned. Hard to tell what it was.

Louder.

Engines. That was it.

Louder.

He looked up and saw a flaming spear come plunging through the mist. Lit by fire, he caught a glimpse of one of Trinica’s Equalisers a moment before it hit the ground. It scored a blazing trench along the valley floor and crashed into the far wall with a noise that made him shudder.

He let out a breath. ‘Trinica’s gonna kill me,’ he murmured.

He hurried on heading towards the voices, Bess clanking alongside him. Soon they found the Murthians. They were shackled in a row near the cliff face, dressed in shabby and battered clothes. Each man and boy wore an ankle shackle and an iron collar. Long chains linked them, passing through metal loops in the shackles and collars. The chains stretched between stout posts that were used as anchors.

The Murthians were holding pickaxes, and waved frantically as they saw Frey. Then they saw Bess, and they shied back in panic, and some began frantically trying to pull themselves free.

Ashua called out in Samarlan, and said something which Frey assumed was meant to calm them. It worked, at any rate. The panic subsided, but they stayed wary.

There were no guards to be seen, so Frey pointed at the metal posts that secured the slaves. ‘See about those posts, will you, Bess?’ he said. ‘Gently, though, huh? There’s people attached.’

Bess lumbered over and pulled up one of the posts, yanking a dozen slaves off their feet as she did so.

‘Bit gentler,’ Frey advised.

Crake showed her how to snap the chains that secured the slaves without hurting anyone. Once the main chains were broken, the slaves could work themselves free by passing the chains through the loops of their shackles and collars. Bess passed down the line, pulling up posts, breaking chains.

There were fifty or so, all told, coughing and cheering and shouting. Some helped their fellows free. Some ran immediately into the fog, desperate for any kind of escape. Some, enraged, hefted their pickaxes and headed off with a purpose, looking for their former captors.

The blazing streak of fire left by the crashed Equaliser was a hazy, restless glow on the valley floor. Shadows ran across it, howling. There were Daks, Murthians, and Jez somewhere in the middle of all that. Gunshots and screams became more frequent as the slaves dispersed.

‘Think there’s quite enough chaos yet, Cap’n?’ Crake asked nervously, evidently hoping there wouldn’t be any more.

‘It’ll do,’ said Frey. ‘Let’s go.’

They headed away from the quarry wall, towards the white smudge of electric light that Frey had decided was the solitary confinement building. Bullets still cut through the air, but now they were just a few silhouettes among many, and nobody targeted them.

Somebody ran out of the murk, startling them. Bess reacted fastest, lunging out, snatching them up by the arm and lifting them into the air.

‘No! Bess, no!’ Crake cried in alarm.

A Murthian slave dangled from her grip, face slack with terror.

‘Blond!’ said Crake, pointing at his own hair and his neatly cropped beard. ‘Like this! Don’t squash the other ones.’

Bess made an echoing noise deep in her chest, a sound that rose and fell and sounded distressingly like the ‘Ohhh!’ of an infant who’d just grasped a particularly tricky concept. Frey shivered. Sometimes that golem creeped him out as much as Jez did.

She let the Murthian drop. He backed away a few steps, holding his arm – which looked a bit dislocated, if Frey was honest – and then fled.

‘We’re still the good guys, right?’ Crake asked sarcastically.

‘Hey, we freed him, didn’t we?’

They reached the building wit buildinhout seeing anyone else. It was a low, bleak box of a place, with a fringe of floods around its roof that blasted out light. A generator rumbled somewhere nearby. By chance, they’d approached it on a side which had an entrance: a stout-looking metal door, firmly sealed.

‘They must really want these people solitary, to keep them all the way down here,’ said Ashua.

‘Bess, get the door, would you?’ Frey asked.

Bess made a gleeful bubbling noise and punched her fist through the door, then pulled it off its hinges.

‘She’s very direct, isn’t she?’ said Ashua to Crake.

‘She just likes smashing things,’ said Crake, with a hint of apology in his voice. ‘It doesn’t help that the Cap’n encourages her.’

‘You should see her when she’s really mad,’ said Frey eagerly.

Gunfire sounded from within the building. Bullets sparked from Bess’s armoured skin. Frey ducked as a ricochet almost parted his hair.

Bess shook the door off her arm and thundered in through the doorway with a roar. The sounds of crashing and rending followed, and agonised screams.

Ashua tilted her head, listening to the carnage. ‘I suppose this makes me the third most psychotically lethal female on the Ketty Jay, then,’ she observed.

‘Must be a humbling moment for you,’ commiserated Crake.

‘I feel practically harmless,’ she complained.

‘You’re not that harmless,’ said Frey. ‘My back teeth are still loose from when you kicked my face in.’

‘Oh yeah,’ she said, smiling. ‘The day we met.’ She sighed wistfully. ‘Good times.’

‘I think Bess is done,’ said Crake, now that the screams had stopped. He leaned in through the doorway and came back looking nauseous. ‘Yes, she’s done.’

Frey went inside. All but one of the overhead lights had been smashed. Bess hulked in the shadows, her eyes twinkling in the black depths of her face-grille, with a long chain of someone’s bloody spine hanging from her fist and a very surprised-looking face at the end of it.

Frey stepped inside, his boot squishing into something he’d rather not think about. Fog seeped through the doorway in his wake, lazily invading, fouling the clean air. There wasn’t much left of the furniture in the room, but it seom, but emed like a foyer of some kind, where paperwork might have been processed. To his right was a wooden door; to his left, a metal one. The kind for keeping prisoners behind.

Bess obligingly wrenched it open.

He followed the corridor beyond. Bess trudged along behind him, swinging the head as she walked. Crake and Ashua trailed after.

There was a row of cell doors to his right. Each door was solid metal, with a riveted porthole for viewing the cell, and a sealed slot.

‘Ugrik!’ he yelled. ‘I’m looking for Ugrik! Anyone seen him?’

There was no reply. He peered into the first cell. It was plain and bare, with a bunk, a chamberpot and little else. There was a Sammie in there, dressed in a plain hemp shirt and trousers. He was pacing the room, and as he saw Frey he ran to the porthole and began frantically saying something. His words were muted by the soundproofed door. The Sammie indicated the slot below the porthole, miming that Frey should open it. Frey didn’t bother. Then Bess leaned in behind him, and the Sammie silently screamed and retreated to the back of the cell.

He looked in on the other prisoners, and their reaction was much the same. There were Sammies and Daks in here. None of them looked particularly dangerous. Frey wondered what was so terrible about them, or what knowledge they possessed, that would merit putting them here.

Each of them reacted in the same way as the first. They’d heard the explosions outside, and thought they might be rescued. He seemed like salvation, until they saw the gore-spattered metal monster he’d brought with him. Then they were less keen to leave the protection of their cells.

In the last cell on the corridor there was a Yort.

He was sitting on his bunk, picking at his fingernails. A short man, but broad-shouldered and stocky, wearing the same prison uniform as the others. His hair was a deep red, matted and dirty. It hung in three thick braids down his back, and his long beard was braided too. There were bones and beads and little ornaments tangled in amongst it all.

Frey unbolted and opened the slot in the door. The Yort looked up. He was in his mid-forties, his face lined and weathered. There were blue stripes inked on his cheeks, above the line of his beard, and a ring through his nose like a bull.

‘Ugrik?’

He got up and stood there grinning, exposing wide-set teeth. He had odd-coloured eyes: one green and one blue. Frey wondered what he was grinning at.

‘You Ugrik?’ he said again.

‘That I am,’ Ugrik replied.

‘Remember that relic you had when the Sammies caught you?’

‘That I do.’

‘Can you take me to where you found it?’

Ugrik was still grinning. ‘Maybe I can, maybe I can’t.’

Frey wondered if he was a moron. He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘And maybe I’ll leave your bearded arse to rot in this cell. How’s that?’

Ugrik came up to the porthole, and pressed his face to the glass. He rolled his eyes to take in Frey’s companions. The sight of Bess didn’t seem to perturb him in the least.

His eyes rolled back and fixed on Frey. ‘You messed with it, didn’t you?’

Frey pulled off his glove and slapped his corrupted hand up against the glass, right against Ugrik’s face. Ugrik didn’t move back, but regarded the hand from the distance of a few centimetres. Far too close to actually see anything.

‘How long?’ Ugrik asked.

‘Tomorrow night, at full dark.’

Ugrik paced away from the porthole. Frey put his glove on again. His patience was wearing thin. Maybe they’d tortured him, or addled him with drugs. ‘Look, do you want out of here or not?’

‘Here’s the deal, stranger,’ said Ugrik, with his back turned. ‘I’ll let you break me out of here on one condition.’

‘You’ll let us break you out?’

‘Aye.’

‘What’s the condition?’

‘That you take me straight back to where that relic came from.’

Frey blinked. If he’d been prone to migraines, he’d be getting one about now. He looked to Crake, but the daemonist was equally bewildered.

‘Ugrik,’ said Frey. ‘Am I right in thinking you’re mad as a bag of otters?’

The Yort looked over his shoulder and grinned. ‘I’m not the one with the black spot on my hand,’ he replied.

Frey opened his mouth, then shut it again. He’d just roused a small army, organised air support, and fought his way through a fortified compound to get to this man. After going. After through all that, a little gratitude and cooperation wasn’t too much to ask. It was all getting on top of him a bit.

He took a long, calming breath and walked away up the corridor. ‘I really, really don’t have time for this,’ he said. He thumbed over his shoulder. ‘Bess, get the door. That feller’s coming with us.’