Iron Jackal (31 page)

The Cap’n glanced around uncomfortably. ‘Someone’s gonna come.’

‘Will you please shut up?’ Crake asked. No one needed to tell
him
to worry about getting caught. Crake had an ingrained terror of authority born from a lifetime of strict social rules and regulations.

Frey cursed to himself and flapped around, beating off the autumn chill. The slashes along the back of his greatcoat were letting in the cold air. Silo watched him without obvious emotion.

Towering above them in the darkness were the imposing walls of the Mentenforth Institute building. Its pillared front entrance looked out onto one of the most expensive streets in Thesk, but they weren’t at the front entrance. They were round the back, in a small yard that was uncomfortably well lit. Not suitable for criminal activity at all. They were out of sight of the road, but well in sight of the buildings that overlooked the yard.

The key slipped and slid around the inside of the lock, seeking the right configuration. Crake frowned and tried again, harder. His hand was going cold. He couldn’t stop thinking about last night. About Samandra.

Come on, come on
.
Get on with it
.

‘Jez? Are you up there?’ Frey whispered, his hand to his ear where the earcuff sat. They were all wearing them. When someone spoke, the earcuffs repeated it a fraction of a second later. It was slightly disorientating, and the Cap’n had complained about it, but Crake had insisted in case they got separated.

‘I’m here, Cap’n,’ came Jez’s voice in Crake’s ear.

‘Can you see us?’

‘I can see the Mentenforth building but I . . . oh, wait, there you are. Hi!’

Frey waved up in the air. Crake glanced up briefly. The
Ketty Jay
was hanging up there in the dark somewhere, a klom above them, but all that was visible over the city lights were a few stars.

‘Be ready. We might need a quick evacuation.’

‘You told me that half a dozen times, Cap’n. What do you think I’m doing up here?’

Frey didn’t reply, but turned his attention to Crake instead. ‘What’s taking so long?’ he demanded irritably.

Crake didn’t take offence. He understood the Cap’n’s impatience. Everyone knew that time was ticking down for him, and every new delay was harder on his nerves.

They hadn’t been able to move immediately, even after they found out where the relic was. They needed to scout the location, they needed to talk to their shady underworld contacts about what was inside and, more importantly, Crake needed to sober up. They would require the use of his daemonist talents if they hoped to penetrate the Mentenforth.

They barely had a plan at all by nightfall, and Crake was still far short of his best. But the Iron Jackal wouldn’t wait.

Six nights left until the full moon. Where had the time gone?

Crake felt the key turn in his hand with a
thump
. ‘We’re in,’ he said, with no small amount of relief.

Frey pushed the door open carefully. It whined on its hinges, making Crake’s shoulders tense up. Frey looked inside, then darted through and beckoned them.

Silo went after him. Crake took a deep breath and followed. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done enough criminal things during his tenure as a crewman on the
Ketty Jay
, but he was usually doing them to other criminals, or foreigners, or Awakeners, so that was alright in his book. But breaking in to a highly respected institute of learning,
stealing
from it, went against pretty much everything he stood for. He didn’t think he could take the disgrace if he was found out. The only thing keeping him going was the fact that they’d stolen the relic in the first place, so technically it belonged to them. Sort of.

Give it up, Grayther
, he told himself.
Admit it
.
You’re not quite the noble fellow you pretend to be
.
In fact, you probably never were
.

The Mentenforth Institute. A private museum and place of study and learning, founded by members of various guilds, including the Archaeologists and the Explorers. If Samandra’s information was accurate, the relic was inside.

In retrospect, this was the most obvious place for Isley Grothsen, the head of the Archaeologists’ Guild, to bring it after Crickslint sold it to him. A Samarlan relic so ancient and valuable would presumably require some time to study and authenticate, and this place had all the necessary equipment, as well as being highly secure.

But they hadn’t had time to guess. It might have gone straight to the palace for the Archduke, or to Galmury for the professors to pore over, or to the official Archaeologists’ Guild headquarters. The transaction had been kept under wraps; none of Frey’s contacts knew anything about it. And Frey couldn’t rob
all
those places.

So Crake did what he had to do. He used the tooth on Samandra. The memory of it caused his guts to knot. He’d used the tooth on all kinds of people before without the slightest compunction, but never on someone he cared about. It made him feel dirty. Part of him blamed the Cap’n for that, but mostly he just blamed himself.

Well, if he didn’t have nobility and decency, at least he had loyalty. At least there was that. Even if it did end up thoroughly ruining what was left of his life.

The back door let on to a plain corridor. Electric lamps sat in wall recesses, running very low, providing a steady twilight. They closed the door behind them and slipped up the corridor until it ended in another, smaller door. Frey listened, then opened it, lifting it on its hinges to cut out the squeak.

Beyond was a display room, cool and full of shadows. The walls were stone, with narrow windows set high, and the floor was polished marble. Several rows of glass cases, set closely together, stood dark. At both ends, archways led into brightly lit corridors. The only light in the room was that which spilled through the arches.

They listened. Slow footsteps were faintly audible. Guards walking the corridors somewhere. Crake tried to guess where they were, but the place had an institutional hollowness to it, and sounds echoed.

‘Alright, fellers,’ Frey whispered. The earcuffs allowed them to talk at a barely audible level. ‘In and out without being seen. I don’t want anyone getting shot. Not you, and not any guards either.’

‘I thought you said guards were paid to get shot. What happened to ‘‘providing employment opportunities’’?’ Crake replied sarcastically.

‘Oh, bollocks to all that,’ he said, waving it away. ‘I just don’t want to add murder to the list of things we’ll get hung for if they catch us.’

Crake didn’t feel like adding another retort after that.

‘Relax,’ said Frey, seeing his face fall. He pulled a small bottle from inside his greatcoat, wrapped in a dirty rag, and showed it to him. ‘The doc’s given me a little something to take care of any troublemakers, nice and quiet.’

Chloroform. Crake was hardly reassured.

Frey picked a direction, and they crept along the aisles between the cases. Crake couldn’t help looking in as he passed. Usually, only guild members got to see the treasures housed in the Institute, and he wasn’t going to let the prospect of getting executed stop him taking advantage of the opportunity.

There was so much to see. The first case held a stuffed bird from parts unknown, fearsome and unsettlingly strange. There was a petrified gargant egg, bigger than his head, a remnant of a bygone time when monsters preyed on men. Next was a stretched animal-skin parchment, painted with the indecipherable characters. The accompanying plaque declared it to be Old Isilian, the forgotten tongue that had been the predecessor of all other languages on the Pandracan continent.

Further on was an old wind-map, used by suicidally brave balloonists to explore the world beyond Pandraca, before the First Age of Aviation ushered in powered flight and the wind-maps got replaced by storm charts. Next to it was a blurred ferrotype, taken from the prow of a ship in the midst of a hurricane. Amid the black-and-white spume and the rearing waves was the shadow of something huge, something coiled and spiked and unmistakably animal.

Crake moved slowly down the aisle like a mesmerised child in a sweet shop, gazing rapturously at everything. His mind was filled with the immensity of the past, of great men and women at the frontiers of new discovery. Just where he’d wanted to be, once, before he overstepped himself and his niece died because of it. But the tragedy had only stunned his ambition, not killed it. He
was
an explorer, a pioneer of unseen worlds. And by damn, he was going to distinguish himself, one way or another.

He wished there was more light. He wanted to see everything.

Someone was coming back down the aisle towards him. The Cap’n, an expression of exasperation on his face. Crake realised he’d been dawdling.

‘Will you move yourself?’ he whispered angrily. ‘This isn’t a family bloody outing!’

‘Yes, right,’ Crake murmured. ‘Sorry.’ But suddenly Silo came hurrying down the aisle, waving at them urgently. They didn’t need words to know what he meant.

Guard coming.

The three of them slipped into cover behind pedestals and display cases. The wonder and excitement of a moment ago was blasted away by the cold fear of being caught doing something wrong. Crake had never grown out of that feeling. He’d lived through multiple gunfights and commanded unworldly creatures from the aether, but trespassing was another matter entirely. He dreaded the moment that guard laid eyes on him, the shame of discovery, more than he dreaded the hanging that would probably follow.

The guard had come in through one of the archways, and was idly walking through the room, humming to himself. A lullaby: ‘Little Bright Star’. Did he have a child, then? Crake didn’t want to think about that, in case the guard ended up getting shot. He pressed himself further into hiding. He could see the Cap’n across the aisle from him, gun drawn, a serious expression on his face.

No telling which aisle the guard was going to take through the display cases. If he came too close, he couldn’t fail to notice the men crouched in the shadows.

Crake didn’t dare to peek out, in case he was spotted. The footsteps were approaching. He tried to listen, to work out which aisle the guard was coming up. He looked at Frey, who was hiding across the aisle to his right. Frey gave him a shrug and a helpless face:
search me!

Best they could do was stay still. Best they could do was—

No. Suddenly, he was sure. The guard was coming to his left. He moved, slipping around the pedestal into the aisle that lay between him and the Cap’n. By some miracle he did it without so much as a rustle. An instant later the guard passed by, inches from the spot where he’d been hiding. He went off up the aisle, a dark figure in the gloom, walking with a jaunty swing.

Crake didn’t move a muscle until the guard had left the room, through the archway at the other end, humming the lullaby as he went. He let out the breath he’d been holding.

Frey went to the opposite arch and looked out into the corridor beyond. He beckoned the other two to join him.

‘Right,’ he said quietly. ‘Here’s the plan. This place isn’t that big, but we can cover it faster if we split up. Use the earcuffs to keep in touch and—’

‘No,’ said Silo.

Frey and Crake both looked at him in surprise.

‘It’s a dumb plan, Cap’n. We don’t know the layout of this place. One of us find the thing, we gonna be tryin’ to direct the others to where we are, not knowin’ where they are neither, an’ all of us runnin’ round like headless chickens. Place is full of guards. Three times the chance o’ getting caught.’

‘Er,’ said Frey, who seemed rather taken aback by the whole thing. He wasn’t used to defiance from the quiet Murthian. ‘I suppose you’ve got a point. Let’s
not
split up, then.’

‘Right,’ said Silo, and slipped through the archway, taking the lead from Frey.

Frey and Crake exchanged a look of bewilderment. ‘Something’s got into him lately,’ said Crake. ‘He’s not been the same since Samarla.’

They followed him into the lighted corridor. Paintings of famous explorers and scientists adorned the walls. Jeddius Clard, the first man to circumnavigate the planet; Cruwen and Skale, discoverers of New Vardia; Gradmund Jagos, who found a fog-shrouded land on the far side of Atalon and named it modestly after himself.

Footsteps, shuffling sounds, distant coughs. More guards, somewhere nearby. They hurried along the corridor for a distance, before Silo paused and listened. The footsteps were getting louder. He pulled open an oak door to his left, glanced inside, and ushered them through.

Inside was another darkened room, illuminated by the city lights seeping through the windows. This time it was a study chamber, with rows of heavy desks and bookshelves lining the walls. Crake went in first. He’d barely taken a step into the chamber when he felt the floor sink by a fraction, and heard a soft
click
from beneath him.

He went cold and still, warned by instinct not to move.

‘What is it?’ Frey hissed.

‘I think I stepped on something,’ he whispered.

They listened and waited. Nothing happened.

‘Shift it!’ said Frey, nudging him. Crake stepped off the sinking tile, expecting something terrible to result; but it simply resumed its position with another click. Frey and Silo slid into the room and closed the door behind them, shutting out the light from the corridor, and the footsteps of the nearby guard.