Iron Jackal (45 page)

You’ll only get a minute or two out of this
, Crake had said, as he was strapping the pack to Frey.
Don’t waste it. Find a hiding place and hold down the stud. It won’t work if the daemon can see or hear you, but it might stop it finding you by other means.

Agitated, he retreated from the corner, further up the corridor. Where was he, anyway? It was a dim wooden back-alley, a raised passageway that ran parallel to the street, with several doors leading off it, all closed. At one end was a rectangle of light, and a hubbub of voices and activity. He was protected from the sun here, but not from its heat, and the warm, soupy air drew sweat from his skin.

Halfway along the corridor, he stopped.
Had
he seen it? It was nothing more than a glimpse, really, and given how wound up and exhausted he was, the odd hallucination here and there was nothing to be surprised at. As the seconds ticked by, he became more and more certain that it hadn’t been anything at all.

Until he heard footsteps on the stairs.

His heart bucked in his chest. He drew a revolver with his free hand – an unthinking response to danger – and his body tensed, ready to run or fight. But probably run.

The panic only lasted a moment. The footsteps were too light, too fast to be made by the thing he feared. A middle-aged Dakkadian woman in dusty hemp robes came into view, carrying an armload of white sheets. She froze as she saw him, sucking in a shocked breath. Her narrow eyes widened at the sight of his revolver.

He shoved it quickly back in his belt and held up the empty hand to show her he meant no harm. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry. My fault. Thought you were a horrible daemonic monster.’

She frowned at him, evidently decided he wasn’t a threat, and hissed something in Samarlan that sounded insulting. Then she hustled past him, still muttering. He slumped back against the wall, letting out a sigh of relief.

A long, rattling snarl made his blood run cold. He turned his head slowly.

It came up the steps into the gloom, a hulking, blade-fingered shape that filled the passageway. It brought the darkness with it, shrouding itself in shadow. It twisted towards him, muzzled head cocked at an angle. The red gleam of its mechanical eye shone keenly against the blackness.

Frey backed up, tripped on his heel, turned and fled.

The Dakkadian woman hadn’t yet reached the end of the passageway. She spun around as she heard him running, and shrieked in alarm, thinking he was about to attack her. He shoved past her instead, knocking her against the wall, too scared to care about chivalry. She fell over in a bundle of sheets, and he raced past her and out into the light.

The passageway came out onto a raised plank walkway running through the middle of an enclosed square. Grubby apartments were stacked up on all sides, their balconies rusted and plaster walls cracked. To either side of the walkway were dye-pits, lurid circles of purple and yellow and red. Dozens of Dakkadians worked around the pits. Men stirred the thick dye with poles; women spread dripping fabrics onto racks, their arms stained to the elbows. Prowling along the walkway were three Samarlan overseers, keeping an eye on the slaves below.

Frey looked back over his shoulder. Maybe the Iron Jackal was confined to the darkness. Maybe sunlight would protect him. That hope died as the saw the Iron Jackal come lunging up the passage on all fours. It sprang over the fallen woman and landed in a predatory crouch on the walkway. In full view of everyone. Except that nobody was looking at it. They were all looking at
him
, wondering at the crazed foreigner who had come sprinting into their midst.

The nearest Samarlan, seeing Frey approach at pace, stepped back uncertainly. Then, reaching a decision, he dropped into a low stance, ready to tackle the intruder.

‘What are you doing, you moron?’ Frey screamed at him in disbelief. ‘Get out of the way!’

But the Samarlan wasn’t getting out of the way. He lunged when Frey was close enough. Frey clubbed him round the head with the chrome ball he was holding. The Samarlan pitched limply off the side of the walkway and plunged into a pit of purple dye. Frey scampered down a short set of steps that took him to ground level, and ran off between the dye-pits while workers were still trying to fish their unconscious overseer out with their poles.

The Iron Jackal didn’t need steps. It leaped off the walkway, over the heads of the oblivious workers, and landed in Frey’s path. He skidded to a halt and then dashed off in another direction, running along the line of the vats, colours burning in the sunlight as he passed.

The workers scattered out of his way. Others clapped and jeered, enjoying themselves at a madman’s expense. None of them saw the towering hybrid of animal, machine and man that ran through the dye-pits in the madman’s wake, outpacing him easily, bearing down on him.

Frey spotted an open door at the base of the apartments that surrounded the dye-pits. He put his head down and sprinted for it. He didn’t dare look behind. The Iron Jackal was upon him, surely. In an instant he’d feel those bayonets in his back, the way he’d felt one in his guts long ago. The sickening, precise, impossible pain as blades punched through skin and muscle. Now? Now?

Now?

He threw himself through the door, spun and slammed it shut. He caught the briefest glimpse of the Iron Jackal, bearing down on him like a steam train, and then the door met the jamb. He backed away, one step, two, three, waiting for the door to shatter into splinters, the beast to crash through.

Four steps. Five.

Six.

He stopped. The door was still there.

The Iron Jackal wasn’t coming through.

Somehow, that was worse.

He was in another corridor, this one made of plastered stone. It led between half a dozen identical doors with numbers on them. Apartments, he presumed. He ran past, his armpits, thighs and back soaking with sweat now. At the end was another door: heavy, wooden and slightly rotted.

He pushed it open and found himself in a narrow lane crushed between tall buildings on either side. Other alleys crisscrossed it: a back-street maze. A thin stream of filthy waste-water trickled past his feet. Bits of litter were half-submerged in the mud, absorbed by the ground, made part of it. The air stank of too many people and something worse, some vile reek that he couldn’t place.

To his right, the lane came out onto the busy street where he’d first spotted the Iron Jackal. No point going that way: crowds didn’t deter the daemon, and they’d only hinder him. So he turned left, and went into the maze.

Off the main thoroughfares, Shasiith was a haphazard muddle of lanes and passages that curved and plunged and rose with the landscape. Makeshift steps – stones buried in red mud – had been put where they could fit. Alleys that were barely wide enough for two abreast stood between leaning buildings of three or four storeys, reducing the sunlight to a distant glow. It was possible to hear people talking and children playing, the sounds of washing-up, a dog barking; but Frey didn’t see anyone at all, and the city felt eerily deserted.

Frey ran for a minute, enough to get himself thoroughly lost, and then pulled up to catch his breath. He was at the bottom of a shaft in the middle of several buildings, an atrium to allow light in for the interior windows, which were covered with dirty shutters. Foul water dripped from an outpipe with a streak of green mould beneath it.

He judged that he’d put some distance between himself and his pursuer now. Once, he might have felt safe, but he knew the Iron Jackal would find him again, just like it had last time. He lifted up Crake’s chrome ball and put his thumb over the stud.

‘This better work, Crake,’ he said, and pressed the stud.

Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Crake had told him that its effect was invisible, but when he’d been demonstrating it to Frey, it had hummed in his hand and vibrated. It hadn’t been much, but it was enough for Frey to be able to tell it was on. Now, it was just an inert piece of metal.

Horror crumpled his guts. He turned the sphere round in his hand and saw a small dent on one side, where he’d whacked that overseer round the head.

‘Oh, right,’ he said quietly to himself.

There was a clattering growl from above.

He didn’t need to look. He bolted.

The Iron Jackal dropped into the atrium, landing with a thump and a sharp hiss of hydraulics. Frey was already plunging down an arched stone passageway, searching frantically for an escape. Tight corners and narrow spaces were the only way he’d stay ahead of the creature: it would beat him in a straight race.

At the end of the alley was a T-junction. He was approaching too fast to see which way was best, so he picked one and went for it. He sprinted into a new alley and saw a corroded metal gate standing open ahead of him, on his right. He heard the sounds of animals, and smelt the source of the stench he’d detected earlier.

None of that deterred him. There were no other exits along the length of the alley, and he could hear the Iron Jackal pounding up behind him. Whatever was beyond the gate, it wasn’t worse than getting caught. He pelted through, his lungs burning in his chest, the daemon hot on his heels.

It looked like the site of a massacre. Everywhere, red and glistening flesh, freshly stripped of its skin. Headless, limbless carcasses hanging from hooks. Piles of guts and organs spilling off tables. Moving between the carnage were men in gore-smeared aprons, wielding long knives and machetes. The hot air buzzed with flies and reeked of new death.

A slaughter-yard.

The area was fenced off into various pens. Dakkadians lined the fences, shouting orders to the butchers, who killed the beasts in front of them and began carving them up on the spot. Chickens squawked and cows lowed, instinctively distressed. A bull, secured by handlers in metal stocks, was having its throat cut as Frey came racing in. Blood splashed into buckets while the bull’s hooves skidded in the mud as it pissed and shat itself.

The sordid efficiency of the scene might have nauseated Frey in other circumstances. But he was too busy running for his life to care.

He sprinted through the yard, between the pens. A Dakkadian butcher stared at him as he passed, a freshly beheaded chicken still twitching in his hand. Customers exclaimed in surprise and made way. He glanced over his shoulder, just in time to see the Iron Jackal leaping through the gates, its teeth bared in a snarl, its mismatched eyes fixed on him.

But twisting his neck while running at full speed caused him to wobble, and his foot went out from underneath him in the churned mud. He tumbled, crashing shoulder-first into a stack of small cages full of rabbits. The cages toppled onto him, bouncing painfully off his back, and some of them broke open, freeing the animals inside.

He heard cries of alarm and anger as he scrambled desperately to his feet, driven on by fear of the daemon. The butcher in the pen emerged from behind hanging rows of rabbit skins and stormed over, a bloody knife in his grip. But Frey saw that it wasn’t only his accident that had disturbed the people in the slaughter-yard. The animals had gone berserk. Chickens threw themselves against their cages; cows thundered about, eyes rolling; geese honked and flapped. Frightened customers backed away while butchers fought to control their animals. A herd of pigs broke through a fence with sheer weight of numbers, squealing as they climbed over each other. The yard was suddenly in chaos.

I’m not crazy!
Frey thought as he ran for the far end of the pen.
The animals sense it too!

He pushed his way through people who were fighting to get out. Pigs and rabbits darted about, zigzagging past butchers trying to recapture them. Jostled and shoved, he lost sight of his pursuer. He spotted a small gate on the edge of the pens, leading into the surrounding buildings, and went for it, barging panicked Daks this way and that. When he reached the gate, he paused, scanning the yard for a sign of his adversary.

It was there, between the pens, standing upright on its hind legs. The only still figure in the chaos. Daks and animals ran this way and that around it, but none touched the invisible thing in their midst: the horror with its hunched back and spiked-chain spine, machine parts sewing in and out of its moist fur, half its muzzled face made of black metal.

It was watching him. Like it had all the time in the world. Like it knew he couldn’t get away.

It’s playing with me
, Frey though.
It’s damned well
playing
with me!

Then it came for him, bounding through the crowd.

Just inside the gate was an anteroom, with empty racks and grubby, bloodied tables pushed against the walls. The only exits Frey could see were a narrow set of stairs leading up and a heavy metal door on the far wall. He didn’t want to go up, so he took the door instead. The handle was heavy and cold to the touch as he turned it. When he hauled the door open, he saw why.

Rows of carcasses stretched away from him, swinging gently on hooks, receding into an icy fog that stirred in the breeze from the door.

The meat locker.

He turned away, thinking he could make it to the stairs instead. He was just in time to see the Iron Jackal loom through the gateway to the slaughter yard. That black eye of Trinica’s fixed on him. He let out an involuntary shriek of fright as it lunged towards him, then he slipped inside the meat locker and pulled the door shut.