Iron Jackal (22 page)

‘Done,’ said Frey. ‘And don’t worry. Pinn’s the best damn pilot in Vardia.’

‘I’m gonna do
what?
’ Harkins shrieked, at the same time as Pinn cried: ‘He’s gonna do
what
?’

Frey pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. To Crake, who was sitting with his feet up on the table of the
Ketty Jay
’s mess, the Cap’n looked tired and harassed.
Good
, he thought pettily. He was still sore at Frey for getting him slapped. His cheek hadn’t stopped stinging yet.

‘It’s pretty simple,’ Frey said. ‘Harkins, you’re gonna pretend to be Pinn tomorrow, and fly the race in his place.’

‘Him?’ Pinn cried, pointing at Harkins. ‘I’m a better pilot even with my arm in a sling!’

Harkins muttered something unintelligible, but probably insulting.

‘You can’t fly properly with one arm, Pinn,’ said Frey. ‘You barely managed to land the Skylance in Thesk without crashing it.’

But Pinn was in the midst of a tantrum and wasn’t really listening. ‘I wanna fly!’ he said. ‘This is a fringement of my human rights!’

‘A
fringement
?’ Crake said in weary disgust, rousing from his sulk.

‘Fringement!’ Pinn snapped. ‘Like when someone’s in your fringe!’

Crake opened his mouth, and shut it again with a sigh. He couldn’t be bothered.

‘Is that even a word?’ Frey asked Malvery, who was stirring a pot of soup at the stove. Malvery shrugged without turning around. He didn’t want to get involved.

Slag watched the conflict with half an eye, having decided to join the crew in the mess. He’d plonked himself down in a languid curve on the table and was surreptitiously lapping at a patch of spilled coffee when he thought nobody was looking.

‘Crickslint doesn’t know what you look like,’ Frey told Pinn. ‘As far as he knows, Artis Pinn is skinny and balding and loud noises give him a heart attack.’

‘Instead of someone resembling an angry potato with an attitude problem,’ Crake added.

‘You shut up, you milky little ponce,’ said Pinn. ‘You just got slapped by a guy with no teeth.’

‘Hey, he
had
teeth! Big shiny ones!’ Crake protested, but nobody was listening.

‘I am
not
pretending to be him!’ Harkins declared, thrusting a trembling finger at Pinn.

‘He is
not
pretending to be me!’ Pinn said.

‘Yes. He. Is,’ said the Cap’n. ‘Because we need that relic back.’

‘
You
need that relic back,’ Pinn corrected.

‘Yes,
I
need it,’ said Frey, who was getting to the end of his tether. ‘And if I end up dead, what do you think happens to you lot? No more
Ketty Jay
. Are you all going to go and get jobs or something?’

Pinn went pale at that. Before anyone could offer anything else, the cat suddenly sprang up, arched his back and hissed.

‘Here comes Jez,’ said Malvery, without taking his eyes off the soup.

Sure enough, Jez climbed down the ladder a moment later. Slag bolted, leaping off the table and onto the counter-top, and finally up on top of a cupboard, where he sat crooning malevolently.

‘That cat really hates you,’ Crake observed.

‘He hates everyone,’ said Jez dismissively. She turned to the Cap’n. ‘Course plotted for the race site. It’ll take us two hours, more or less.’

‘Fine,’ said Frey. ‘Early start tomorrow, lads.’ There were general groans at the news. ‘I know, I know. But we have to get there in plenty of time. We need to tune up the Firecrow. She’ll have to be at her best if we’re gonna win this race.’

‘If
I’m
gonna win it,’ said Harkins, puffing out his chest. Thin as he was, it didn’t puff too far.

‘Oh? I thought you didn’t
want
to race?’ said Frey wryly.

Harkins glanced at Jez and coughed. ‘Well, you know . . . I changed my mind! If there’s flying to be done, I’m the man to do it. Artis Pinn!’

Pinn gave a strangled cry of rage and lunged across the mess at Harkins, who gave a less than manly squeal and hid behind Frey. Jez watched the whole thing in bewilderment.

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ said Crake, getting to his feet. ‘I think I’ll leave you all to it.’

He slipped through the melee and climbed the ladder to the relative peace of the
Ketty Jay
’s main passageway. From there, he made his way down to the hold to check on Bess.

It was chilly and gloomy in the hold. Crake preferred that to the sweltering heat of Samarla. He was glad to be out of that country, if only because his bowel movements had finally steadied. His stomach really didn’t get on with Samarlan fare at all.

In the middle of the hold were the Rattletraps. One of them was halfway disassembled, with Silo’s tool box resting on its hood. The man himself was nowhere to be seen. Crake was glad about that. Since they’d held up that train in the desert, Silo had been in a foul mood. Now he spent most of his time in the hold, fixing up buggies with a furious intensity, and if anyone so much as spoke to him they got an irritated glare and no reply. Crake wondered if the engineer had something on his mind, but he knew so little about him that it was hard to tell.

In fact, it wasn’t just Silo that was acting oddly. There was a strange atmosphere on the
Ketty Jay
now. Everyone knew that the Cap’n was in trouble, everyone was thinking about it, but no one wanted to talk about it. So they all ran around getting on with whatever they could, or stayed away from the craft altogether.

Nobody wanted to admit it, but the Cap’n’s life might be measured in days. And all this, this world aboard the
Ketty Jay
they’d created for themselves, would come to an end then. Without Frey, there was no crew. Nobody really thought they could carry on if the Cap’n was gone. They would each end up going their separate ways. It would be inevitable. They had very little in common, beyond the
Ketty Jay
.

He’d reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out onto the floor of the cargo hold when he heard a soft
clank
from the shadows.

His senses prickled. There was a change in the air. The chill he felt wasn’t entirely due to the temperature.

‘Bess?’ he said quietly, although something told him it wasn’t her. Dread trickled through him. He stared into the darkness at the edges of the hold.

Something shifted there. Something taller than a man.

Spit and blood. It’s here.

He took a step backwards. He was defenceless. There was a daemon here and he was defenceless and it wasn’t even meant to be coming for
him
, it was meant to be
Frey
!

‘Bess!’ he called, though this time it was more like a shout.

There was a soft growl. It moved to the edge of the light. Somehow it was still impossible to make out a shape, but he saw a claw, a huge iron claw with bayonets for fingers, and then a muzzle like a dog’s, wrinkling into a snarl.

‘Damn it, Bess! Where are you?’ he yelled in panic.

She came thundering from the sanctum, emerging from behind the barrier of crates and tarpaulin at the back of the hold. A mountain of metal and chainmail and leather, boots stamping hard enough to make Silo’s tool box slide off the hood of the Rattletrap and crash to the ground.

But by the time she’d arrived, there was only blackness where the thing had been. Crake stared at the emptiness, his heart thumping in his chest. Bess cast about in agitation, searching for whatever had alarmed Crake.

After a moment, Crake patted her on the arm. ‘Easy, girl,’ he said. ‘It’s gone now. It’s gone.’

Bess allowed herself to be gentled. Crake led her back to the sanctum, glancing over his shoulder at the spot where he’d seen – where he
thought
he saw – the daemon. Already it didn’t seem real.

No. I saw it. Just like Frey did.

But what had shaken him, more than the sight of the daemon itself, was the feeling of helplessness he’d experienced in that moment. He’d never faced a daemon before without his machines, without layers of sonic defences and carefully calculated formulae to hand – without
preparation
. But this one was loose, unconstrained by interference fields or echo chambers.

He was a daemonist. Dealing with daemons was his whole purpose in life. But he realised that he had absolutely no way to fight the thing that had come on board the
Ketty Jay
.

That, he told himself, would have to be remedied.

Fifteen

Pre-Flight – Use of Weapons – Silo’s Diagnosis – The Tunnel – Harkins Disobeys

T
here was something wrong with the Firecrow.

Harkins felt his already unbearable terror slide towards full-blown panic. He tried the switch again, and again, flushing air through the aerium vents. The result was the same. It just didn’t sound right.

Was it just his nerves, playing tricks on him? No. Harkins was obsessive about his pre-flight checks. They helped to relax him. He could pass hours checking and re-checking the Firecrow from the sanctuary of his cockpit. Every system on his aircraft had been tested over and over by him personally. He knew the pitch of every squeaking hydraulic pump, the whirr of every actuator.

He looked to his left and right. Beneath a louring grey sky, the other racers were lined up next to him. Eight pilots, including himself. They were parked on a strip of packed earth that had been cleared as a makeshift landing-pad. A hundred metres ahead of them was a cliff, and beyond it, the Rushes: the deadly maze where they would have their race.

There was a cart in front of the aircraft that served as a podium. A man in a badly-fitting suit, who Harkins took to be an announcer of some kind, was climbing on to it.

I can’t fly like this. Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong!

‘Cap’n!’ he said shrilly. ‘I need Silo here now!’

‘What’s the problem?’ came the Cap’n’s voice in his ear, transmitted through the silver earcuff he wore.

‘There’s . . . I mean . . . Something’s wrong with the Firecrow!’ he sputtered.

‘You’re three minutes from take-off! I thought you checked everything already? Didn’t the officials give all the craft a last-minute inspection for—’

‘I did check it! It was alright
then
! It’s not alright
now
!’ Harkins said, his voice rising to a moderately loud scream.

‘Okay, okay. Calm down. Are you sure it’s not just your imagi—’ He stopped himself wisely before Harkins could explode. ‘Never mind. Silo’s on his way.’

Harkins jigged and jittered in his seat. Why, why, why had he volunteered for this? Didn’t he spend his whole life avoiding situations like these? He’d almost died when he found out that the race would be held in the Rushes, instead of the nice flat plain that he’d imagined. The Rushes were a sprawling network of forested gorges carved from a dozen converging rivers which drained from the Splinters into the sea. Earthquakes and erosion had formed a system of tunnels and arches and fantastically precarious pillars, half a klom deep, with thrashing waterways at the bottom.

He’d done it for her, of course. Jez, kind Jez, who despite being kind
never seemed to notice him
, no matter how heroic he tried to be. Once in a while he managed to admit the truth to himself: it was all beginning to get on his nerves a little bit. But whenever he did, he took it back immediately, not wishing to think bad thoughts about her.

And now he was here, and there were mere minutes to go, and he was desperately hoping that whatever problem the Firecrow had developed would make it impossible to fly.

A small crowd of spectators were gathered along the rim of the gorge ahead of them, where the finish line would be. Nearby was another makeshift landing pad for their aircraft, much bigger than the one Harkins sat on. Among others, he saw the reassuringly ugly shape of the
Ketty Jay
there, and a small single-seater craft which he’d seen Crickslint arrive in.

‘Racers!’ yelled the announcer. Harkins could only hear faintly through the cockpit hood. Everyone else had their cockpits open, but Harkins had sealed himself in the first chance he got. It felt safer that way. He frowned and tried to concentrate on the muffled words.

‘As we’re coming up to the start of the race, it’s time to remind you of the rules!’ he called. He was a stocky man with a shaved head and a roll of fat where his neck should have been, as if he’d been crushed at some point in his life and never quite sprung back into shape. ‘You’ve all been given maps detailing the network of gorges in the race area. You’ll also see that there are four markers numbered one to four. You must pass through these gorges,
in order
. We’ll have observers watching you, so no cheating. As long as you do that, feel free to pick your own route. There will be
two
laps. Are we clear?’

Harkins glanced down at the map fixed to his dash. He’d done his best to memorise it, but it refused to stick in his head, sliding off the surface of his mind. He was too agitated to retain any new information.