Iron Jackal (15 page)

Pinn, sensing the change in the room, got to his feet and staggered over to look. He sucked in his breath over his teeth. Frey expected him to make some dumb crack, but he didn’t, and that meant that things were really serious.

‘It was the blade,’ said Ashua. ‘You said it bit you when you picked it up.’

Yes, the blade. The sharp pain, like a pin, that caused him to drop the relic. Frey had barely thought about it. He’d just assumed it had been a tiny, sharp edge that he hadn’t seen, a flaw in the hilt that had nipped him.

‘Care to tell us all what you’re talking about?’ Crake prompted.

Ashua filled them in on the details, how Frey had opened the case they’d taken from the train and found the curious weapon inside. Frey noticed that she skipped over her part in the affair, the relentless goading which inspired him to pick it up in the first place, but he was too distressed to care.

His hand. He didn’t need the doc to tell him that he was probably going to lose it. The enormity of that thought was too much to handle.

Just a few hours ago, he’d been so happy. Why couldn’t he have just left the damned thing alone? Why didn’t he do what he was told for once?

‘You reckon it was poison?’ Pinn suggested. The sight of Frey’s hand had sobered him up fast.

‘If it was, it’s been in there too long to do anything about it,’ said Malvery. ‘If you’d come to me straight away, Cap’n . . .’

Frey turned to Crake. ‘You think this and the signal might be connected?’

‘It would be quite a coincidence if they weren’t.’

Frey stared at his hand again. It was so strange. It didn’t hurt or feel bad, yet the sight of it was appalling. The angry corruption beneath the skin made him feel sick.

‘I was just with Trinica.
She
didn’t notice,’ he protested, as if he could somehow disprove this thing and make it go away.

‘Maybe it just came on in the last few hours. Maybe she wasn’t looking,’ said Crake. ‘Does it matter?’

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered, because no one knew what to do. That was the most frightening thing of all.

It was Ashua who shook them out of it. She strode over to Frey and pulled him up out of his seat.

‘You need help,’ she said firmly. ‘Come on.’

‘Come on
where?
’ Frey asked.

‘This is
my
city, remember?’ she said. ‘Follow me.’

Ten

The Tail – Jez Attempts – Untouchables – Slinkhound – Tourists

I
t was the dead of night, which meant little in Shasiith. The place teemed like an ant colony. People swarmed over each other, talking and arguing, shopping and stealing. The air was a stew of heat and sweat and noise. Spiced bread and sizzling meat gave off a muddle of scents as vendors fed the hungry.

Like Jez, this city never slept.

Groups of men sat in the electric light of café fronts, sipping thick dark coffee and watching the chaos. Giant beasts shambled among the crowds, dragging heavy loads, their riders perched behind their heads. They were called rushu in the local tongue. Their tusks and horns had been given decorative tips in a half-hearted attempt to make them slightly less dangerous, but Jez thought they could cause terrible carnage if they had a mind to. Still, that was the way in Samarla. To foreign eyes, life here seemed disordered, frantic and cheap.

Jez had been filled in on the situation with the Cap’n, and she was deeply concerned. She’d come to feel protective towards him during her time on the
Ketty Jay
. He wasn’t very good at looking after himself at the best of times: this new, mysterious injury was only confirmation of that. But it was the state of his mind as much as his body that kept her fretting. He was just a boy in many ways. He might have been outwardly handsome and charming, but she saw through all of that, and knew him to be more sensitive and insecure than he admitted to himself.

His relationship with Trinica made her uneasy. Part of her admired him for it, the way he would plough through any and all obstacles in his pursuit of her. She’d never felt that strongly about anything, and she was jealous of his passion. He was not stubborn, or a man possessed of a great amount of willpower, but when it came to Trinica he absolutely refused to quit.

Yet Trinica had betrayed him before, and Jez saw no reason why she wouldn’t do so again. Her behaviour was no indication of her intentions; she’d proved that in the past. The last time it had hit Frey hard. The next time, he might not recover.

Oh, Cap’n. I hope you’ll be alright
.

With the exception of Silo, Bess and Harkins, the whole crew had sallied out into the streets, and they’d gone armed. It was too dangerous for Silo and Bess to leave the
Ketty Jay
, and Harkins was asleep. No one wanted to wake him up. Lately, he’d been keen to include himself in any missions, where he was usually more of a hindrance than a help. She assumed he was trying to ape the Cap’n’s recent spate of reckless bravery, though she couldn’t imagine why.

Ashua led them on foot through the city for half an hour, through streets that became progressively more narrow and ramshackle. Jez didn’t trust her, even if she found her brash and cocky front preferable to Trinica’s quiet treachery. But Ashua seemed to know where she was going and, despite being drunk, she went with some urgency.

Where they went, their mysterious tail followed them.

Jez had sensed him before she spotted him. Even among the crowds, he moved with purpose. A Dakkadian, a plain-looking young man wearing a brown embroidered robe and sandals. Jez never caught him looking at them, but she observed him from the corner of her eye when she turned her head to talk to her companions.

At first she hadn’t been sure, but he’d stuck with them all the way into the slums. A man dressed so neatly had no business among these reeking lanes with their leaning shacks and steep narrow steps. Here, the air was a fug of petrol fumes from rattling generators, which powered the lights that shone behind tattered fabric curtains. Even the poorest of people in Samarla could lay their hands on petrol: the country welled with it. It was aerium they were starved of.

The slum dwellers were a mix of Dakkadian and Samarlan, all of them wise enough to stay out of the way of the conspicuously armed group passing through. Many of the Samarlans were of the untouchable caste, their black faces mottled with white patterns to signify their low status. Many, however, were not. They were just poor. Jez had visited Samarla briefly as a navvie on other craft, but this was the first time she’d really become aware that most Samarlans didn’t live in luxury, as was popularly believed in Vardia. Crake, who had read Politics at Galmury University and knew a thing or two, had been educating her on the finer points of Samarlan society during their sightseeing excursions.

She caught up to Frey. ‘Cap’n,’ she said in a low tone.

‘The feller following us? Yeah, I know. He’s not very good.’

‘Who do you think he works for?’

‘Could be anyone.’

‘Think we should do something about him?’

Ashua, who’d overheard the conversation, leaned over. ‘Don’t bother. He won’t follow us where we’re going.’

Frey looked at Jez and shrugged. ‘What she said, I suppose.’

Jez wasn’t satisfied with that. The Cap’n’s mind was on other things, but she didn’t like the idea of not knowing. She ran through a mental list of possibilities. Awakeners? Yes, they had good reason. The Shacklemores? They didn’t usually employ Daks, but the Shacklemores were still after Crake as far as she knew. The man could even be spying for Trinica, although Jez suspected the pirate would have hired someone better.

She decided to try to find out.

The thought gave her a small thrill. She’d never attempted to read somebody’s mind before. It had always just happened, as it had on the train the day before yesterday.

Well, she had the ability. There was no denying that. She might as well learn how to use it.

And so, as they walked, she slid into a shallow trance. She could put herself into trances and bring herself out with relative ease nowadays. She no longer feared the Manes waiting for her. They didn’t howl and cry for her to join them any more. She’d been given the Invitation, she’d refused it, and they respected that choice. They still waited at the edge of her consciousness, but they never spoke to her.

With the trance came the familiar sharpening of the senses. Minute details became crisp and obvious; everything seemed
closer
somehow. Smells became distinct, so that she could separate out the different scents of her companions. She could hear the murmur of voices in distant shacks. She could never put her finger on the way that a trance made her feel, only that it made her more
here
, more present in the world.

But now that she was in the trance, she had no idea what to do next. She attempted to search with her mind, picturing the man behind them, pushing her thoughts at him. Nothing happened. She tried to remember the sensation she’d experienced when she read the man’s mind on the train, but she couldn’t duplicate it.

Eventually, she gave up. She came out of her trance, frustrated. There must be a technique to it, but she wouldn’t crack it by guessing.

Until recently, she’d been afraid of her Mane side, terrified that it would consume her if she gave in to it. But now that she’d come to terms with herself, now that she accepted she was a half-Mane, she found herself curious about it. What
could
she do, exactly? What were the limits of her abilities? And how could she possibly find out?

It was she who had chosen to refuse the Invitation. She who had turned her back on the Manes and their love. But it was she who felt abandoned now.

Ashua stopped before a door. It was entirely unremarkable, halfway down a lane that teetered with precarious two-storey shacks built from the ruined skeletons of more stable buildings.

‘One piece of advice,’ Ashua said. ‘Nobody draw weapons unless you absolutely have to. Normally they don’t mind foreigners, but they’ve been known to be jumpy.’

Frey was regarding the door without much enthusiasm. ‘What exactly is through there?’

‘The Underneath,’ said Ashua, and opened it.

Beyond the door was a labyrinth of passageways with roughly planked walls like the corridors of a mine. Electric bulbs fizzed, fed by precarious cables. It was close and stuffy, and the taller members of the crew had to duck their heads.

They passed through rooms full of tatty cots and bunk-beds. The occupants were all untouchables: mostly men, some women, and the occasional infant. They were skinny and their clothes were ragged. Sometimes they wore little more than loincloths. Their eyes were dull behind the white patterned masks that identified them, but for all that, their features had a delicate, elfin quality that made them handsome. It seemed strange to Jez to see such beautiful people in poverty, but then, the Samarlans were a beautiful race.

‘What’ve they done to their
faces
?’ Pinn asked loudly, with typical lack of tact. Malvery swatted him round the back of his head. ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘They can’t understand me.’

‘It’s a kind of acid,’ Crake said. ‘It breaks down the pigment in the skin. Like a reverse tattoo, I suppose. And they didn’t do it
themselve
s. It was done
to
them.’

The untouchables: lowest of the five Samarlan castes. Those whose ancestors had done something so terrible or dishonourable that their family name had been stricken from the records. There was no way back from that, not for the criminal or for their descendants. Newborns were marked by their own parents soon after birth, because it was death for an untouchable to be seen carrying a baby that wasn’t of the same caste. And so the stigma carried through the generations, for ever. In Samarla, if you didn’t have bloodline, you were nothing.

Jez had found much to admire about Samarla, but she still found it sickening that a culture could be so unforgiving. She had to remind herself that this was the same culture that had subjugated two different races of people and made them into slaves. Samarlan ways were not Vardic ways. She accepted that, but she didn’t have to like it.

More corridors, more rooms. They pushed through threadbare curtains and met incurious gazes. Most of the untouchables were sleeping, exhausted by the day’s activities. Few spoke, even to each other. They were a worn-out folk, ground down by hopelessness. This ‘Underneath’ that Ashua had mentioned – presumably a literal translation from Samarlan – appeared to be some kind of haven where they could lay their heads in peace.

Jez couldn’t quite work out when they were above ground and when they were below it. She would convince herself that they were deep in the bowels of the earth, and then they would descend a flight of stairs and come across a room with a window looking out over the shallow bowl of the slum. At some point they began to head sharply downwards, and the planked walls closed in around them, with rough black stone visible through the gaps. The air became dense, the temperature dropped a little, and oil lamps replaced electric lights.

Presently they came to a wide corridor lined with shabbily constructed wooden bunks on both sides, like a crowded barracks or a tomb. There were untouchables here, too, but Jez sensed something different about them. They were alert and aware, and they watched the newcomers with interest. As they passed the bunks, some of the untouchables slipped out of bed and followed them. Up ahead, slim dark figures were sliding from their bunks. There were bone knives visible among the folds of their clothes, or hanging from rope belts.