Iron Jackal (60 page)

‘There you go, then,’ Ugrik said.

Frey returned his attention to the scene below them. ‘You know what this information would be worth to the right people?’

‘You got optimistic all of a sudden,’ Ugrik observed with some surprise. ‘How about we concentrate on sorting out the mess you’re in, first? Sun’s going down.’

He
was
feeling optimistic. He’d found the place where the relic had come from. Everything seemed possible now. He began to believe there might be a dawn.

Ugrik waved a hand. ‘Down there, by the lakeside. That’s where I found it. We’ll have to skirt round the Sammies, but there’s patrols all over, so be careful.’

Frey couldn’t see the exact building, but he didn’t need to. It didn’t seem all that far. All they had to do was get past the Sammies and put the relic back.

Easy.

Later, they found the eye.

By then they’d made their way downslope, and were nearing the outermost limits of the city. Ugrik had taken to muttering under his breath in Yortish again. They’d both put their shirts back on, warned by the purr and whine of insects that exposed flesh would end up bitten. The foliage rustled with birds and small wildlife. Frey was wondering if there was any danger of encountering
big
wildlife when he suddenly pulled up short next to a cliff that rose up on their left.

‘Is that an
eye
?’ he asked.

‘Aye.’

‘That’s what I said. An eye.’

‘And I said aye.’

‘Yes! An eye!’

‘Aye! Aye meaning yes! Aye, it’s an eye!’

‘Oh.’

It was as big as Frey, smooth and white, staring emptily from within a mass of vines. It was set high off the ground, tilted at an angle, without brow or lid. In fact, it was hard to know how he recognised it as an eye at all. Perhaps he’d sensed the proportions of the surrounding face, which he’d mistaken for a cliff at first, masked as it was by trees and creepers. Or perhaps it was because it felt uncomfortably like it was watching him.

Now he had the eye, it was possible to estimate the rest of it. It was the same bone colour as the buildings in the city. He made out the outline of a heavy jaw, sunk into the earth. There seemed to be no nose, whether by design or by the ravages of time, and there was a muzzle of some kind. No human face, then. The head lay askance, half-buried, and it was truly colossal.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is one big statue.’

Ugrik gave a noncommittal grunt. Frey tried to see if the head was attached to a body, but he was foiled by the undergrowth. ‘They had some ugly-arse gods, huh?’ he commented.

When he looked back, Ugrik was holding up a pocket watch and pointing at it impatiently.

‘Oh, right! My imminent death!’ said Frey, slapping his forehead in mock-astonishment. ‘Totally slipped my mind.’

‘I don’t plan on gettin’ caught by the Sammies a second time,’ Ugrik growled. ‘Someone needs to fly me out o’ here when we’re done. And I doubt your crew’d be all that welcomin’ if I came back without you.’

Frey looked him over. ‘You’re not half as crazy as you pretend, are you?’

‘I’m not crazy, nor pretendin’ to be,’ he said. ‘If I was crazy, I’d have told you where we were goin’ when you asked. You’d have booted me off your craft right then, curse or no curse.’

Frey had to give him that. Until a short while ago, he’d been certain the Azryx were entirely made up. ‘Come on, then,’ he said.

They left the statue behind and headed further down the slope.

‘What’s your interest in this, anyway?’ he asked, keeping his voice low. ‘Shouldn’t you have gone to tell your father about this place? Why’d you want to come back?’

‘Need the relic so they believe me,’ he said. ‘You weren’t gonna give it back to me, I reckon. So I’m helpin’ you, until you’ve got that black spot off your hand.’

‘You want the relic?’

‘Aye,’ said Ugrik. ‘Soon as we put it back, and that curse o’ yours is lifted . . .’ He stopped and grinned. ‘I’m gonna nick it again.’ Then suddenly his face turned grave. ‘That’s the price, by the way, Cap’n Frey. When we’re done here, I get the relic.’

Frey was taken aback. ‘You’re negotiating this
now
?’

‘Think you’ve got time to find where it came from before the moon’s up?’ Ugrik countered.

Frey had to respect his enterprising nature. ‘You’re welcome to it,’ he said. ‘Might be worth a fortune, but I’m damned if I’m keeping hold of that thing. It’s given me nothing but trouble.’

‘Shouldn’t mess with what you don’t understand,’ Ugrik advised.

‘Thanks for the advice,’ Frey said sarcastically. ‘Just in time. I almost did something stupid.’

Ugrik gave him a flat look and started walking again.

‘How did
you
know not to touch it, anyway?’ Frey asked, keeping pace. He swatted at a dragonfly that seemed intent on landing on his nose.

‘I didn’t,’ said Ugrik. ‘The curse is written on the blade.’

‘You can read Azryx?’

‘No. But I can read Old Isilian.’

They forged on through the foliage for a while.

‘Okay, you’re gonna have to tell me what that is,’ said Frey eventually.

‘All the languages we know – Yortish, Vardic, Samarlan and the rest – they all have their roots in one dead language from way back. Old Isilian. Couldn’t read much of what was on that relic, but there’s enough similarities so I got the gist.
Don’t touch
. The thing was in its case when I found it, so I never took it out.’

‘Strikes me that was probably the sensible thing to do,’ Frey said.

‘Aye, well, we can’t all be sensible, can we?’

Frey looked glumly at his hand. ‘Apparently not.’

They’d picked their way down to the edge of the city. The undergrowth was broken by glimpses of walls and doorways, and it was almost possible to make out nearby thoroughfares. They were staying well away from the excavated area that was swarming with Sammies, but Ugrik was cautious anyway, and Frey took his cue from that.

He was feeling more confident now he had a grasp on the situation. At last he knew what had happened to him, and why, and what he could do about it. All he had to do was sneak past the Sammies and put the relic back where Ugrik had found it. It sounded easy when he said it to himself. Time was short, but he’d had closer shaves. There was still a good hour till sunset, and no sign of the moon.

Ugrik held out a hand to stop him. ‘Ssh,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t making any n—’

‘
Ssh!
’

Frey shut his mouth, peeved. Ugrik was listening attentively. Frey did, too. He heard nothing but the repetitive cry of some exotic bird.

‘I reckon someone’s followin’ us,’ said Ugrik.

Frey belatedly remembered what Crake had told him just before the crash. That someone was tracking the relic. It had gone right out of his head when the
Ketty Jay
went down, and Crake had been concussed and in no state to elaborate. Ugrik had been there too. Frey wondered if the Yort had forgotten, if he hadn’t been paying attention, or if he just didn’t think it mattered.

Suddenly, it came to him. He knew who’d planted that signal. He should have figured it out straight away. And if he was right, then there really wasn’t much point running at this stage.

They waited till they were passing through a particularly thick patch of foliage, and then ducked aside, hiding around the corner of a low building that had been half-consumed by soil, its walls dense with dangling tree roots. Anyone behind them would have to walk by, and they could jump out and confront them.

Frey waited, ears straining, sweat trickling from his temples. Ugrik, who was carrying a rifle from the
Ketty Jay’s
armoury, drummed his fingers silently on the barrel.

Nothing happened. After a time, Frey leaned over to Ugrik and whispered ‘You sure you heard—?’

‘
Ssh!
’

‘Right.’

They listened. A wild pig lumbered through the undergrowth nearby, snorting. Birds and insects rustled and peeped. Frey couldn’t imagine how Ugrik could have possibly detected anyone in amid all that noise.

Behind him, he heard the snap of a twig breaking under a boot.

He looked over his shoulder. Standing there were two uniformed Sammies, rifles trained on him.

That was mildly surprising. They weren’t who he was expecting at all.

Ugrik had noticed them too. He turned around slowly, his hands in the air. They said something in their own language.

‘Reckon they want us to—’ he began.

‘Drop the guns, yeah, I know,’ Frey said. He held up his pistol and threw it down, then tossed away the other one from his belt. Lastly he surrendered his cutlass. Ugrik laid down his rifle. The Sammies watched them carefully through narrowed eyes.

‘So I suppose these were the fellers you heard following us, then?’ Frey asked Ugrik from the corner of his mouth.

‘No,’ he grunted, pointing with his chin. ‘It was them.’

There was the unmistakable crunch of lever-action shotguns being primed, and Samandra Bree stepped out of the undergrowth behind the Sammies. Colden Grudge came with her, his autocannon ready.

‘Hello, Frey,’ said Samandra.

‘Hey, Samandra,’ he said cheerily. Now the world made sense again.

The Sammies, seeing that the Century Knights had them cold, tossed their rifles to the ground and raised their hands.

‘These friends o’ yours?’ Ugrik asked Frey.

‘Oh, we’re all
best
of friends,’ said Samandra. ‘Ain’t we, Frey?’

Ugrik frowned. ‘She don’t sound too sincere.’

‘You noticed that, huh?’ Frey asked, hands still in the air.

Grudge moved over to the Sammies and herded them up against the wall of the building, covering them with his fearsome cannon. Samandra never took her twin shotguns off Frey and Ugrik as she came closer.

Frey raised an eyebrow at Samandra. ‘You must’ve been pretty extraordinarily pissed, to follow me all the way here.’

‘You could say. Ever since your snake of a daemonist tried to mess with my head, you ain’t been my favourite people. But we got daemonists too, in the Century Knights. Bet you didn’t know that.’

‘Actually, pretty much everyone’s guessed by now,’ Frey told her with a shrug. ‘Sorry. By the way, I spotted you in Shasiith when you were following me around. Gotta be more subtle than that.’

‘You really shouldn’t tick me off any more than you already have, Frey,’ she warned.

‘Can’t help it,’ he said. ‘I’m just in one of those moods. So, what, you got your daemonist to tag the relic after you twigged that Crake was after it?’ Realisation dawned on him. ‘You were gonna let us escape, weren’t you?’

‘First we were gonna see if you talked. Then if you didn’t, we’d let you slip away with the relic. Just you. So you thought it was an accident.’

‘And then you’d follow me and find out who put me up to the theft.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But you
shot
at me,’ said Frey.

‘You shot first,’ she replied.

‘Not at you, though.’

She shrugged.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘As you can probably see, no one put me up to it.’ He put on a mock-pitiful face. ‘Although I’m hurt that you’d underestimate me like that.’

‘Well, regardless,’ she said. ‘You led us a merry damn chase all the same.’ She smiled. ‘But I got the drop on you in the end.’

There was a noisy clatter of weapons being cocked and loaded all around them. Malvery, Pinn and Crake stepped into view on the roof of the building, weapons pointed at Grudge. Silo and Ashua emerged from the trees behind Samandra, their guns trained on her back.

‘What’s up, Cap’n?’ Malvery asked. ‘Got some trouble?’

Samandra stared at Frey in amazement. ‘How do you
do
that?’ she asked.

Frey held up his hand with the ring on it and grinned. ‘I’ve got good people,’ he said.

Forty

Adarik
–
Harkins in the Dark
–
Frey Plays Matchmaker
–
An Alliance
–
First Mate

I
t was snowing hard now. Not the blizzard conditions Jez had experienced the day she died, but a heavy, downy snow that drifted from the sky and laid a blanket over everything.

She’d gone to find her body, but it had been lost. Beyond the settlement was a clean white expanse, and no tracks to be seen. If her corpse was out there, she’d never find it. It didn’t seem very important anyway.

Rinn had disappeared at some point. Jez hadn’t noticed him leave, but that was how dreams worked, she supposed. Dreams, or trances, or whatever this was.

She made her way back through the domed Yort buildings. The drifts had built themselves high. There was no trace of what had happened here.

What
had
happened here? She was finding it hard to remember.