The Iron jackal

Thirty-Nine

Frey pushed through the undergrowth. It was sweltering hot beneath the leaf canopy, but there was shade, and the trunks were dappled in the red light of the evening sun. Bats flitted, hunting insects. Unseen birds called to one another. The air was not so oven-dry among the trees, and Frey thought he smelt water.

Only an hour ago he’d been in the trackless depths of an endless desert, and this oasis hadn’t been here at all. But here he was, and it was real.

Ugrik led the way, red braids swinging, his broad back a mass of tattoos. Frey didn’t quite know what to make of him now. He might have a couple of screws loose, but if he’d been to half the places he said he had, he must be someone to be reckoned with. And after what Frey had just witnessed, he was ready to believe anything the Yort told him.

Then they emerged from the trees into a small clearing scattered with bright flowers, and Frey saw it.

It was a city.

Frey wasn’t someone to be awed by history. He didn’t share Jez and Crake’s fascination with crumbling buildings and pointless art. But even he couldn’t suppress a shiver of wonder at the occasion. A lost city! A lost Azryx city! And he might be the first Vard ever to lay eyes on it.

The oasis was situated in a huge, shallow depression, at the bottom of which was an unevenly shaped lake. The city began at its edge and radiated away up the slopes. For the most part, they were so consumed by the undergrowth that it was hard to see the shape of them, but what he could see was amazingly well preserved. The burrowing plants had toppled some towers and collapsed some walls, but if this place really was as old as Ugrik said, then it had withstood the millennia with miraculous endurance. He glimpsed buildings in snatches, visible through a thick covering of strangling creepers or crowded by ancient trees that grew up against their flanks.

It was an alien place. There was a fundamental strangeness to it. It was not made of brick and mortar. Its curves were too smooth, and it had swooping lines that were beyond the ability of the best architects in Vardia or elsewhere. Whatever material they’d used must have been incredibly strong. Spidery pillars supported structures that seemed impossibly heavy. He saw a building with a vast elliptical space in its side, like a mouth, and realised that it was probably a window once. No Vardic window had ever been built so large.

Not stone, then. Some kind of ceramic, like the material they fashioned the blades of the relic from. Something the colour of yellowed bone, peeping from the trees. Perhaps this had once been a place of bright hues, or perhaps not. Either way, the colours had gone now, and left only the skeleton of a dead city.

But alien as it was, it was built for people. He saw stairs and the remnants of boulevards. There were doorways and walkways and even a ridiculously thin bridge, now a rail for a ragged curtain of vines and moss and flowers. The lake was surrounded by a wall, built one-third of the way up the slope. He traced its outline as it sewed in and out of visibility. There were oval gateways there, but the gates were long gone.

He only had a moment to take it all in before Ugrik grabbed him and pulled him down into a crouch. ‘Don’t get yourself seen,’ he warned.

‘Seen by who?’ Frey asked, faintly alarmed. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be someone else here.

Ugrik moved to the edge of the clearing, back into the undergrowth. Frey followed. Ugrik held aside a spray of leaves, allowing a view down the near slope.

‘Sammies,’ he said.

Some way below them, a large section of the city had been exposed. Vines had been cleared, trees uprooted, soil dug away. The earth-moving machines were still at work down there, carefully quarrying out the extraordinary buildings, reclaiming them from the earth. Around them moved the Sammies, dozens of them, heading in and out of doorways, coordinating the loading of items with small cranes. Some were gathered around tables where they pored over plans, while others milled or loafed in a busy campsite that had been set up in a plaza. Many of them had guns.

With the foliage gone, Frey could see the true strangeness of the city. Low, flat buildings that were little more than boxes sat next to humped, segmented constructions that looked like a row of crouched beetles. Nearby was a colossal ball, flattened at the bottom where it touched the ground, with no apparent windows and only a doorway at its base. He saw a landing pad on the edge of the bared streets, built atop a pillar that branched out like a tree to support it.

But all that paled in comparison to the centrepiece of the excavation.

It looked as if two giant hourglasses of brass and bone had been stood next to each other. They were linked across their lower halves by a complicated building of many curves and angles, but it was the hourglasses that drew the attention. Within their frames were bizarre assemblies made up of twisted rods of metal and squat stacks of discs. Orbiting each half of the hourglass was a brass arm, like a blade, that swept around the interior edge. The upper and lower arms rotated in different directions. Occasionally a section of machinery shifted, moving to a new position as if under its own command. The whole edifice gave an impression of whirling movement contained inside a rigid structure.

There was something inside those hourglasses. A coloured gas, the consistency of cloud, full of pale colours that made Frey’s eyes hurt. Within the gas he saw a hundred storms, miniature flickers of lightning, striking in flurries.

He had no idea what it did, but one thing he did know: it was active. And the Sammies had it.

‘How long have they been here?’ he asked.

‘My guess? Since the end of the Second Aerium War.’

Frey squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t look at those hourglasses any more. ‘This is why they called the truce? We thought they’d somehow found their own aerium source or something. Maybe on Peleshar.’

amp;lsq?w Roman"uo; Reckon they found this,’ Ugrik grunted. ‘And they worked out what it was.’

‘But what good does it do them?’

Ugrik pointed down through the leaves to where a group of Sammies were using a crane to lift a massive metal device of coiled pipes and tubes on to the back of a tractor-trailer. ‘Know what that is?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Frey.

‘Nor do they,’ he said. ‘But you can bet they’re gonna find out.’

‘Salvage? That’s what they’re after?’

‘Technology,’ he said. ‘There’s things in this city like you can’t imagine. And the Sammies want it all. They want to know how to do what the Azryx did.’

Frey was only just beginning to appreciate the enormity of the situation. ‘If they manage to reverse engineer Azryx technology…’

‘They’d be well nigh invincible, I reckon,’ said Ugrik. ‘And they’ll be in your back yard before your next shit.’

‘And then in yours.’

‘Aye.’

Frey whistled quietly. ‘Anyone else know about this?’

Outside of the Sammies? You and me.’ He cackled. ‘That’s why they slung me in solitary. Didn’t want me talkin’. I don’t s’pose they reckoned anyone would come lookin’, either.’

‘I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t managed to get stuck with that damn thing,’ Frey complained, pointing at the relic that Ugrik still held in his brawny arms.

‘Funny how things work out, eh?’ said Ugrik.

‘Hilarious,’ Frey agreed, his eyes narrowing.

‘At least you got cursed by the best,’ said Ugrik, scratching at his cheek.

‘That’s a good point, actually.’ Frey brightened as he looked at his gloved hand. ‘This is an Azryx curse,’ he said with some pride.

‘There you go, then,’ Ugrik said.

Frey returned his attention to the scene below them. ‘You know what this information would be worth to the right people?’

‘You got optimistic all of a sudden,’ Ugrik observed with some surprise. ‘How about we concentrate on sorting out the mess you’re in, first? Sun’s going down.’

He was feeling optimistic. He’d found the place where the relic had come from. Everything seemed possible now. He began to believe there might be a dawn.

Ugrik waved a hand. ‘Down there, by the lakeside. That’s where I found it. We’ll have to skirt round the Sammies, but there’s patrols all over, so be careful.’

Frey couldn’t see the exact building, but he didn’t need to. It didn’t seem all that far. All they had to do was get past the Sammies and put the relic back.

Easy.

Later, they found the eye.

By then they’d made their way downslope, and were nearing the outermost limits of the city. Ugrik had taken to muttering under his breath in Yortish again. They’d both put their shirts back on, warned by the purr and whine of insects that exposed flesh would end up bitten. The foliage rustled with birds and small wildlife. Frey was wondering if there was any danger of encountering big wildlife when he suddenly pulled up short next to a cliff that rose up on their left.

‘Is that an eye?’ he asked.

‘Aye.’

‘That’s what I said. An eye.’

‘And I said aye.’

‘Yes! An eye!’

‘Aye! Aye meaning yes! Aye, it’s an eye!’

‘Oh.’

It was as big as Frey, smooth and white, staring emptily from within a mass of vines. It was set high off the ground, tilted at an angle, without brow or lid. In fact, it was hard to know how he recognised it as an eye at all. Perhaps he’d sensed the proportions of the surrounding face, which he’d mistaken for a cliff at first, masked as it was by trees and creepers. Or perhaps it was because it felt uncomfortably like it was watching him.

Now he had the eye, it was possible to estimate the rest of it. It was the same bone colour as the buildings in the city. He made out the outline of a heavy jaw, sunk into the earth. There seemed to be no nose, whether by design or by the ravages of time, and there was a muzzle of some kind. No human face, then. The head lay askance, half-buried, and it was truly colossal.

‘That,’ he said, he salsquo; is one big statue.’

Ugrik gave a noncommittal grunt. Frey tried to see if the head was attached to a body, but he was foiled by the undergrowth. ‘They had some ugly-arse gods, huh?’ he commented.

When he looked back, Ugrik was holding up a pocket watch and pointing at it impatiently.

‘Oh, right! My imminent death!’ said Frey, slapping his forehead in mock-astonishment. ‘Totally slipped my mind.’

‘I don’t plan on gettin’ caught by the Sammies a second time,’ Ugrik growled. ‘Someone needs to fly me out o’ here when we’re done. And I doubt your crew’d be all that welcomin’ if I came back without you.’

Frey looked him over. ‘You’re not half as crazy as you pretend, are you?’

‘I’m not crazy, nor pretendin’ to be,’ he said. ‘If I was crazy, I’d have told you where we were goin’ when you asked. You’d have booted me off your craft right then, curse or no curse.’

Frey had to give him that. Until a short while ago, he’d been certain the Azryx were entirely made up. ‘Come on, then,’ he said.

They left the statue behind and headed further down the slope.

‘What’s your interest in this, anyway?’ he asked, keeping his voice low. ‘Shouldn’t you have gone to tell your father about this place? Why’d you want to come back?’

‘Need the relic so they believe me,’ he said. ‘You weren’t gonna give it back to me, I reckon. So I’m helpin’ you, until you’ve got that black spot off your hand.’

‘You want the relic?’

‘Aye,’ said Ugrik. ‘Soon as we put it back, and that curse o’ yours is lifted…’ He stopped and grinned. ‘I’m gonna nick it again.’ Then suddenly his face turned grave. ‘That’s the price, by the way, Cap’n Frey. When we’re done here, I get the relic.’

Frey was taken aback. ‘You’re negotiating this now?’

‘Think you’ve got time to find where it came from before the moon’s up?’ Ugrik countered.

Frey had to respect his enterprising nature. ‘You’re welcome to it,’ he said. ‘Might be worth a fortune, but I’m damned if I’m keeping hold of that thing. It’s given me nothing but trouble.’

‹?n="justifont face="Times New Roman"›‘Shouldn’t mess with what you don’t understand,’ Ugrik advised.

‘Thanks for the advice,’ Frey said sarcastically. ‘Just in time. I almost did something stupid.’

Ugrik gave him a flat look and started walking again.

‘How did you know not to touch it, anyway?’ Frey asked, keeping pace. He swatted at a dragonfly that seemed intent on landing on his nose.

‘I didn’t,’ said Ugrik. ‘The curse is written on the blade.’

‘You can read Azryx?’

‘No. But I can read Old Isilian.’

They forged on through the foliage for a while.

‘Okay, you’re gonna have to tell me what that is,’ said Frey eventually.

‘All the languages we know – Yortish, Vardic, Samarlan and the rest – they all have their roots in one dead language from way back. Old Isilian. Couldn’t read much of what was on that relic, but there’s enough similarities so I got the gist. Don’t touch. The thing was in its case when I found it, so I never took it out.’

‘Strikes me that was probably the sensible thing to do,’ Frey said.

‘Aye, well, we can’t all be sensible, can we?’

Frey looked glumly at his hand. ‘Apparently not.’

They’d picked their way down to the edge of the city. The undergrowth was broken by glimpses of walls and doorways, and it was almost possible to make out nearby thoroughfares. They were staying well away from the excavated area that was swarming with Sammies, but Ugrik was cautious anyway, and Frey took his cue from that.

He was feeling more confident now he had a grasp on the situation. At last he knew what had happened to him, and why, and what he could do about it. All he had to do was sneak past the Sammies and put the relic back where Ugrik had found it. It sounded easy when he said it to himself. Time was short, but he’d had closer shaves. There was still a good hour till sunset, and no sign of the moon.

Ugrik held out a hand to stop him. ‘Ssh,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t making any n-’

‘ Ssh! ’

Frey shut his mouth, peeved. Ugri? peeved. k was listening attentively. Frey did, too. He heard nothing but the repetitive cry of some exotic bird.

‘I reckon someone’s followin’ us,’ said Ugrik.

Frey belatedly remembered what Crake had told him just before the crash. That someone was tracking the relic. It had gone right out of his head when the Ketty Jay went down, and Crake had been concussed and in no state to elaborate. Ugrik had been there too. Frey wondered if the Yort had forgotten, if he hadn’t been paying attention, or if he just didn’t think it mattered.

Suddenly, it came to him. He knew who’d planted that signal. He should have figured it out straight away. And if he was right, then there really wasn’t much point running at this stage.

They waited till they were passing through a particularly thick patch of foliage, and then ducked aside, hiding around the corner of a low building that had been half-consumed by soil, its walls dense with dangling tree roots. Anyone behind them would have to walk by, and they could jump out and confront them.

Frey waited, ears straining, sweat trickling from his temples. Ugrik, who was carrying a rifle from the Ketty Jay’s armoury, drummed his fingers silently on the barrel.

Nothing happened. After a time, Frey leaned over to Ugrik and whispered ‘You sure you heard-?’

‘ Ssh! ’

‘Right.’

They listened. A wild pig lumbered through the undergrowth nearby, snorting. Birds and insects rustled and peeped. Frey couldn’t imagine how Ugrik could have possibly detected anyone in amid all that noise.

Behind him, he heard the snap of a twig breaking under a boot.

He looked over his shoulder. Standing there were two uniformed Sammies, rifles trained on him.

That was mildly surprising. They weren’t who he was expecting at all.

Ugrik had noticed them too. He turned around slowly, his hands in the air. They said something in their own language.

‘Reckon they want us to-’ he began.

‘Drop the guns, yeah, I know,’ Frey said. He held up his pistol and threw it down, then tossed away the other one from his belt. Lastly he surrendered his cutlass. Ugrik laid down his rifle. The Sammies watched them carefully through narrowed eyes.

‘So I suppose these were the fellers you heard following us, then?’ Frey asked Ugrik from the corner of his mouth.

‘No,’ he grunted, pointing with his chin. ‘It was them.’

There was the unmistakable crunch of lever-action shotguns being primed, and Samandra Bree stepped out of the undergrowth behind the Sammies. Colden Grudge came with her, his autocannon ready.

‘Hello, Frey,’ said Samandra.

‘Hey, Samandra,’ he said cheerily. Now the world made sense again.

The Sammies, seeing that the Century Knights had them cold, tossed their rifles to the ground and raised their hands.

‘These friends o’ yours?’ Ugrik asked Frey.

‘Oh, we’re all best of friends,’ said Samandra. ‘Ain’t we, Frey?’

Ugrik frowned. ‘She don’t sound too sincere.’

‘You noticed that, huh?’ Frey asked, hands still in the air.

Grudge moved over to the Sammies and herded them up against the wall of the building, covering them with his fearsome cannon. Samandra never took her twin shotguns off Frey and Ugrik as she came closer.

Frey raised an eyebrow at Samandra. ‘You must’ve been pretty extraordinarily pissed, to follow me all the way here.’

‘You could say. Ever since your snake of a daemonist tried to mess with my head, you ain’t been my favourite people. But we got daemonists too, in the Century Knights. Bet you didn’t know that.’

‘Actually, pretty much everyone’s guessed by now,’ Frey told her with a shrug. ‘Sorry. By the way, I spotted you in Shasiith when you were following me around. Gotta be more subtle than that.’

‘You really shouldn’t tick me off any more than you already have, Frey,’ she warned.

‘Can’t help it,’ he said. ‘I’m just in one of those moods. So, what, you got your daemonist to tag the relic after you twigged that Crake was after it?’ Realisation dawned on him. ‘You were gonna let us escape, weren’t you?’

‘First we were gonna see if you talked. Then if you didn’t, we’d let you slip away with the relic. Just you. So you thought it was an accident.’

‘And then you’d follow me and find out who put me up to the theft.’

‘Exactly.’?actly. amp;r

‘But you shot at me,’ said Frey.

‘You shot first,’ she replied.

‘Not at you, though.’

She shrugged.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘As you can probably see, no one put me up to it.’ He put on a mock-pitiful face. ‘Although I’m hurt that you’d underestimate me like that.’

‘Well, regardless,’ she said. ‘You led us a merry damn chase all the same.’ She smiled. ‘But I got the drop on you in the end.’

There was a noisy clatter of weapons being cocked and loaded all around them. Malvery, Pinn and Crake stepped into view on the roof of the building, weapons pointed at Grudge. Silo and Ashua emerged from the trees behind Samandra, their guns trained on her back.

‘What’s up, Cap’n?’ Malvery asked. ‘Got some trouble?’

Samandra stared at Frey in amazement. ‘How do you do that?’ she asked.

Frey held up his hand with the ring on it and grinned. ‘I’ve got good people,’ he said.