Iron Jackal (27 page)

Not really
, he thought, but the edge of desperate hope in Frey’s voice revealed just how scared he really was, and Crake had to give him something.

‘It can be done,’ he said, with more assurance than he felt.

Frey brooded for a while, sucking on the bottle of rum. Crake ate the rest of his pie, glancing at him occasionally.

‘Harkins,’ he said, then tutted.

‘Cap’n, he’s alright. Nobody got hurt.’

‘He damn near died!’ Frey snapped suddenly. ‘And for what? For me!’ He held up his right hand, encased in a fingerless glove to hide the corruption in his palm. ‘All because I couldn’t keep my hands off that bloody relic.’

‘Cap’n, will you stop trying to be perfect?’ Crake cried. ‘Spit and blood, it’s like you think we’ve all forgotten how you were when we joined this crew! Might I remind you that, back then, you let someone put a gun to my head, spin the barrel and pull the trigger.
Twice!
’

‘You’re never gonna let that one go, are you?’ Frey muttered.

‘My point is, there was a time when you didn’t give half a shit about any of us, and none of us gave half a shit about each other. But those days are gone, and most of that’s your doing. I wish you’d remember that.’

Frey swigged his rum. He looked like he was taking it on board, at least.

‘Nobody expects you to be right all the time,’ said Crake. ‘Nobody but you, apparently. Stop beating yourself up.’

‘I s’pose you’ve a point,’ Frey mumbled, unconvincingly.

‘Speaking of Harkins, I note you’ve taken the destruction of the Firecrow very calmly. If he’d pulled out when you told him to, he’d have come out without a scratch.’

‘Heh,’ said Frey, and Harkins was surprised to see a smile twitch at the corner of his mouth.

‘What did you do?’ Crake asked, suspicious.

‘I backed him.’

‘You what?’

‘I stuck a bet on him to win. Pretty big one, as well. Couldn’t turn down those kinds of odds.’ He scratched at his cheek. ‘The winnings more than cover the cost of a new Firecrow.’

Crake laughed in amazement. ‘And you still told him to pull out of the race after you found Crickslint’s bomb? With all that money riding on him?’

‘S’pose I did.’

Crake slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Frey,’ he said. ‘You’re a good captain.’

Frey nodded to himself. Then he took a deep breath and sat up, as if to clear away the subject and start on another one. ‘I need a favour, Crake.’

‘Name it.’ Crake swiped the bottle and took a swig.

‘I need you to go charm a woman for me.’

The rum caught in his throat and made him cough. ‘I thought that was more your department than mine?’ he wheezed.

Frey grinned. ‘Not this lady,’ he said. ‘This one’s all yours.’

Jez’s eyes flickered open.

The trance had been confusing this time. She’d been trying to regain the dream of snow. She wanted to make sense of it. But instead she was left with a muddle of sensations, fading fast in her memory. Her mouth tasted foul, like sour milk with a sharp tang of something else underneath. Her back was hot, much hotter than the rest of her, as if she’d been lying on something warm. But she hadn’t. She’d been sitting cross-legged on her bunk.

She tutted to herself. She was never going to get the hang of these trances.

Frustrated, she picked up the book that was lying next to her and flicked through it. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t read the words. If indeed they
were
words. The clusters of tiny circles and arcs were arranged in rows, with no breaks that would suggest sentences or paragraphs. Every printed centimetre was full of symbols of identical size, like a wordsearch. It had long ago occurred to her that they might not read left to right at all, as Vardic script did. They could read diagonally, for all she knew. There was no reason to assume it followed the rules of human language, since those who wrote it were something other than human.

But still she persevered. No one was going to help her. As far as she knew, there was no one alive who could read the language of the Manes.

She’d found the book at the tail end of winter, on the savage island of Kurg, in the captain’s cabin of a crashed Mane dreadnought. In Vardia, the leaves had grown and reddened and were falling again, and she was no closer to understanding it. But what niggled at her was the feeling that she
would
understand it, if she could only remember how.

The symbols were familiar to her, though she’d never seen them until the day she found the book. It was as if she’d once known the language and somehow forgotten it. What remained was a riddle she couldn’t solve. The answer was there, waiting to reveal itself in a flash of revelation, but it refused to make itself known. She was one step away from making these symbols turn into sense, but it was a step she didn’t know how to take.

What did the Manes need the written word for, anyway? They could read each other’s thoughts. They’d discarded language and speech as hopelessly clumsy.

Yet here was a book.

She got up. There was no hope of concentrating on anything while the disgusting taste lingered in her mouth. She headed to the mess to get some coffee to wash it away.

Pinn was there, standing on the table, holding a semi-conscious cat at the end of his outstretched arm.

Jez regarded him blandly. ‘Should I ask?’

‘It’s my first experiment,’ Pinn said.

‘Your . . . experiment,’ Jez replied dubiously. She looked closer at the cat. ‘Is that a piece of
toast
strapped to his back?’

‘
Buttered
toast,’ said Pinn proudly.

Jez folded her arms. ‘Huh,’ she said.

‘I’m gonna be an inventor,’ Pinn declared.

‘You are?’

He wiggled the arm that was wrapped up in a sling. ‘Since I can’t be a pilot for a bit, I reckon it’s a good time to get started.’

‘Are we feeling threatened after Harkins’ little display of brilliant flying?’ Jez inquired sweetly.

Pinn sniffed. ‘
I
wouldn’t have trashed the aircraft in the process. Now, you wanna see this experiment or not? This cat’s heavy, y’know.’

‘Alright, I’ll bite. What are you trying to do?’

‘Well,’ said Pinn, eagerly. ‘Everyone knows that a cat always lands on its feet, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And isn’t it also true that toast always lands butter side down?’

‘Er, I think that’s more of a
saying
than a scientific fa—’

‘So if the cat has buttered toast on its back, butter side up, then it’ll land upside down. Except that’s impossible, ’cause cats always land on their feet.’

Jez could feel herself getting stupider by the second. ‘So what do you reckon will happen?’

‘I reckon they’ll sort of hang spinning in the air a couple of inches off the ground.’

‘Can you wait there just a minute?’ Jez asked. She walked round the table, collecting various jackets from where they’d been left draped over the backs of chairs. When she was done, she made a pile on the floor in front of Pinn.

‘Just in case,’ she said, and stepped back.

Pinn dropped Slag. Gravity did its job.

‘Huh,’ said Pinn, looking down at the cat, who was now buried in the pile of jackets. There was a buttery stain on Malvery’s favourite overcoat.

‘Huh,’ Jez agreed. ‘I wouldn’t want to be you when that cat comes round.’

‘Ah, I’m not scared of
him
,’ said Pinn, climbing down from the table.

A thought occurred to Jez. ‘How did you get him so docile, anyway?’

‘Stuck some rum in his milk.’

She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. Yes, that was it. That was the taste. Rum and milk. And the hot sensation on her back, as if someone had strapped an enormous piece of toast to her.

‘Huh,’ she said thoughtfully.

Frey decided not to take the tram back from the park. He needed time on his own to think, and the walk would be some rare and welcome exercise. Crake had gone to gather resources for his new experiments, and Frey was never allowed to come along on daemonist business. They were a secretive bunch, and with good reason. The Awakeners had everyone so riled up against them that they were liable to be hanged if caught practising their craft.

He found himself in a small square, all but empty except for an elderly man crossing it in the opposite direction. It was dominated by a large building with a forecourt and the symbol of the Cipher carved in stone over the archway. Frey stopped in front of it. The symbol of the Awakener’s faith, a pattern of circles and interlocking lines that the last king Andreal had drawn obsessively all over his cell in the final days of his madness. His followers believed it to be the key to decoding the language of the Allsoul. Frey thought it looked like something a madman would scrawl on a wall.

The building was boarded up and empty. Obscene graffiti, half-heartedly scrubbed out, were still visible. He couldn’t work out whether it was pro- or anti-Awakener in content; just a blare of swear words, a dumb roar of hate.

The House of Chancellors had recently passed down an edict banning the Awakeners from operating in the cities. It was part of the Archduke and Archduchess’s long campaign to defang the political threat of the Awakeners’ aggressive and profitable religion. But then had come the accusation from the Archduke that the Imperators were daemonically possessed. An accusation based on scientific evidence that Frey had delivered. And that was a provocation too far. Things were turning bloody. Out in the sticks, people were dying.

The broadsheets were full of reports from the countryside, where the Awakeners’ influence was greatest. Farming communities rioted. Peasants took up arms when tax collectors came to visit the local hermitage.

Neither the Archduke nor the Awakeners would back down. If the truth were revealed, the Awakeners would be exposed as hypocrites, having persecuted daemonists for a century. And it was just the excuse the Archduke had been waiting for to rid himself of the organisation responsible for the murder of his son Hengar.

Well, technically it had been
Frey
that had murdered his son, but technically didn’t cut it as far as Frey was concerned. Hengar’s craft had been rigged to explode; it just happened to be Frey shooting at it at the time. It was the Awakeners’ fault, pure and simple.

Should I have just let it be?

It was a question he’d been asking himself for some time. He hadn’t needed to take those damning research notes from the
Storm Dog
, while they were at the North Pole trying to rescue Trinica from Captain Grist and the Manes. He hadn’t needed to tell Crake about them, either, which pretty much committed him to act: Crake had a deep and venomous hatred of the Awakeners, and he would never let Frey sit on that kind of information.

But Frey did both those things, and then he gave the notes to Professor Kraylock at Bestwark University, who passed them on anonymously, because Frey didn’t much fancy having the Awakeners and their daemonic enforcers knowing just who had screwed them.

He did it because he wanted to make a difference. Because he wanted to make an impact, a dent in the world. He wanted to run with the big boys, instead of scrabbling about in the dirt, scavenging his way through life. But he was beginning to realise that the big decisions came with big consequences, and he wasn’t too keen to be remembered as the man who started a civil war in Vardia. Especially not with the Sammies rumoured to be tooling up for another war. They’d been suspiciously quiet ever since they called a surprise truce to end the last one.

Stop trying to be perfect
, Crake had said. But it was easier said than done. He was acutely aware that everything his crew had been through since they held up the train had been for his sake. Not for profit, not even for fun, but to pull him out of the trouble he’d got himself into. And he was pretty sure there’d be a lot more trouble to come.

His friends were risking their lives for him. That was one bastard of a burden to carry.

‘Don’t you leave me here!’

Frey’s blood went cold. He couldn’t
possibly
have just heard what he thought he’d heard. A thin, despairing shriek. Words that had been burned on his conscience for nine long years. The voice of his engineer, Rabby, as Frey sealed up the cargo ramp of the
Ketty Jay
and condemned him to be murdered by the Dakkadian soldiers outside.

Yet the words rang out clearly across the square, coming from a narrow alley at the side of the Awakener building.

He looked around quickly. The elderly man was gone. There was no sign of life in the square. The lamp-posts seemed to have dimmed, as if the gas had been turned down. He could hear the distant sounds of the city in neighbouring streets, but he suddenly felt terribly alone.

He walked slowly along the forecourt wall, towards the alley entrance, drawing a pistol as he went. He didn’t want to see what was there, but he could hardly ignore it, either. If it turned out to be nothing, at least he might convince himself that it was all his imagination.