Iron Jackal (68 page)

Step. Crank. Fire.

His last shot blew it off the side of the bridge, sending it tumbling to the floor of the trench. Already more were clambering onto the platform. Some moved towards him, but one of them went straight for the dynamite. He backed away onto the bridge. His way was clear now, but he was afraid of what that hybrid might do. If the dynamite didn’t go off, they were all dead.

The hybrid tilted its head this way and that, its multiple eye-lenses whirring, studying the satchel. As if dynamite were something it had never seen before, and it didn’t know what to make of it.

The dynamite fizzed and the fuse sparked into life. The hybrid jerked back in surprise. Silo turned tail and ran.

Behind him, the hybrid picked up the lit stick of dynamite, raised it to its face, and tipped its head quizzically.

The explosion lifted him up and threw him forward, pushing the breath from his lungs. He flew through the air and crashed down onto the bridge, skidding and sliding with uncontrollable momentum, until he fetched up in a heap at the feet of his crewmen.

His head was filled with wool. His senses were deadened, his sinuses throbbed, and there was a high, piercing whistle that seemed to emanate from inside his skull. He felt strong arms on him, and Malvery pulled him blinking to his feet. The doctor was saying something – he could tell by the movement of his great white moustache – but he couldn’t understand what. He wobbled, childlike in his confusion.

Then he was being pulled along. He stumbled to keep up. Guns were firing all around him, and huge arachnid shapes rushed past in a stampede. He watched, uncomprehending, as the horde of creatures flooded on to the bridge he’d just vacated. The things seemed to have no interest in attacking him or his companions. Instead they were rushing towards the shattered platform at the other end. There was an ascending whistle coming from that direction, as of pressure building and building.

Another explosion, bigger than the first, blasting pieces of flesh and chitin everywhere. The force of it shoved him back against Malvery. The doctor tripped, and they both went to the floor. Mangled and charred metal panels flipped through the air above them.

He was helped up a second time by other hands. By now his senses had reasserted themselves, and he could see the damage they’d wreaked. The platform was entirely gone, and half the bridge with it. All that was left was a large blackened gash at the base of the engine. Electricity sparked and sizzled within, and there was a distressing metallic whine coming from somewhere in the guts of the machine. Those hybrids that hadn’t been destroyed in the explosions swarmed over to it, blindly obsessed with its repair. As Silo had hoped, the invaders had been entirely forgotten.

‘Yeah!’ cried Pinn, fist pumping the air. ‘Let’s hear it for Professor Pinn’s Incredible Flame-Slime! Artis Pinn,
inventor
!’

The sarcastic comment Malvery was preparing was cut off by a third explosion. This one came from off to the side, where the enormous flank of one of the hourglass structures sloped into the chamber. The blast shattered a section of the containing vessel. Coloured gas began to seep through the cracks, and electricity crawled across its surface.

‘Er,’ said Pinn.

Suddenly, a fork of lightning lashed out across the chamber, blasting the shattered section apart as it went. Where it hit, an explosion threw a bloom of flame into the air.

Silo and Malvery stood next to one another, momentarily still, mesmerised by the sight of what they’d done. Samandra stuck her head in between the two of them and laid her hands on their shoulders.

‘Boys,’ she said. ‘I’m thinkin’ we might want to be elsewhere. What say?’

‘The lady’s got a point,’ Malvery said.

Samandra patted them both on the shoulders, then turned and ran like her heels were on fire.

Forty-Five

Honesty – A Reason to Live – The Iron Jackal Arrives – The Circle – A Storm of Damned Voices

‘F
rey! Pay attention!’

Frey did his best to focus on what Crake was telling him.

‘You press
here
, got it?’ said Crake, showing him the thumb-stud on the device in his hand, as if it wasn’t obvious.

‘Got it,’ he said. But he didn’t get it. He couldn’t wrap his head round the reality. Even when he’d been at his lowest ebb, he’d always secretly believed he could evade this confrontation. No matter the odds, in his heart he’d never thought it would come to this.

But full dark was almost upon them, and the Iron Jackal was coming.

Crake carried on wittering about his machines, using terms like ‘interference fields’ and ‘resonance pathways’ and so on. They stood in the chamber where they’d found those creepy tanks occupied by dead Azryx.

Tombs
, Frey thought.
Appropriate
.

Frey and Ugrik were both wearing cumbersome backpacks, each comprising a bulky battery and one of Crake’s machines, belted clumsily together. Ugrik had jammed the relic in there too, because he refused to leave it behind after all this trouble. In their hands they each held a thick, stumpy cylinder of metal tipped with a pinecone arrangement of small rods. Cables ran from the cylinders to the machines in their packs. Crake, with Silo’s help, had jerry-rigged them together using the gear in his sanctum and a few extra parts. He called them ‘harmonic arc generators’.

Frey didn’t care what they were called. They were the only weapons they had. Daemons could be drawn into the world by use of frequency and vibration, and they could be sent out of it the same way. Crake claimed that his array of devices could ‘disorient them with interference, restrain them by using resonance opposed to their base chords, or tear them apart in sonic flux,’ at which point Frey had switched off entirely.

Crake kept on casting him guilty looks. He was in torment over the misplaced bullet that had put paid to any hope of lifting the curse. He’d apologised over and over until Frey told him to can it.

‘You’re not on my crew for your accuracy with a pistol, Crake,’ he’d said. ‘You’re here ’cause you’re a daemonist. So, I dunno . . . Daemonise, or something. Or we’re all gonna get mortified.’

Even in the most abject depths of his shame, Crake had been unable to let that one pass. ‘Er,’ he said. ‘Listen, Cap’n. Mortified doesn’t mean killed.’

‘It doesn’t?’

‘No. It means embarrassed. And mordant doesn’t mean dead. It means, er, bitingly sarcastic.’

‘Huh,’ said Frey.

‘And when Ashua keeps calling you a narcissist, it doesn’t mean you’re brave. It means you’re in love with yourself.’

‘Ah,’ said Frey. ‘That makes sense now, then.’

Crake had expected more of a reaction. ‘Aren’t you angry?’

‘About what?’

‘Well, because we were making fun of you.’ He fought for a nice way to say it. ‘Because you don’t read very much.’

Frey was unable to see where the mockery was coming from. ‘But I
don’t
read very much,’ he said. ‘Barely at all, in fact.’

‘Oh,’ said Crake. ‘Well, I’m glad you see it that way. I just thought you should know, that’s all.’ He’d coughed and looked awkward then. ‘We should probably go get set up. We haven’t got much time.’

Since then, Crake had been working frantically to prepare for the Iron Jackal’s arrival. He’d chosen the largest chamber in the building for their stand, saying that they needed the space. He’d laid out a double circle of upright rods and small metal spheres, connected by cables to a metal box covered with dials and gauges that he called a resonator. In turn, the resonator was connected to a portable battery, and also to a smaller box which comprised only a single button.

‘This is the trigger,’ he’d said. ‘Everything in the circle will be set up to go, but I’ll need to hit this to turn it on.’

After he was done fussing with the dials, he wired up the equipment in the backpacks that Frey and Ugrik wore, and instructed them in its use. Frey was too distracted to listen to most of it, but he got the gist.

‘Yeah, yeah. You hit it with your sonic thing. We point the rods at the daemon. Hold down the buttons. Daemon is paralysed.’

‘These things eat up batteries, which is why you have to carry bigger ones,’ Crake said. ‘You’ll get thirty seconds out of them at best. Don’t waste it.’

Frey was deeply uneasy about the plan Crake had outlined. He didn’t trust this daemonism stuff at all. In fact, he wasn’t a big fan of invisible forces in general, although he supposed gravity was fairly useful, except when it made his aircraft crash. Still, this was Crake’s show now, and Frey had to trust him.

‘All this, I should add, is entirely theoretical,’ Crake explained. ‘There’s no guarantee that it will work.’

‘You just had to add a little disclaimer, didn’t you?’ Frey griped. ‘Couldn’t you just
pretend
you were confident? For my sake?’

‘Sorry, Cap’n. I was brought up to be honest.’

‘Well, there’s your problem,’ Frey replied. ‘And I warned you about apologising.’

‘Sorr—’ He stopped when Frey gave him a dangerous glare. ‘Yes, anyway, if all else fails, you’ve got the cutlass.’

Frey noticed how he avoided saying ‘
your
’ cutlass. Crake never seemed to have stopped thinking of it as his. Frey wondered if the daemonist secretly regretted trading it for his passage on the
Ketty Jay
all that time ago.

He drew it from his belt. ‘What good will that do?’ he asked. ‘I thought regular stuff didn’t work on daemons.’

‘That’s the point. It’s
not
“regular stuff”. It’s daemon-thralled, and a damn fine job I did of it, if I do say so myself. The best way to fight a daemon is with another daemon.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’

‘I didn’t want you getting any ideas about taking it on hand-to-hand.’

Frey turned the cutlass in his hand and made a few practice sweeps. Having a weapon he could see and touch, instead of all this harmonic resonance rubbish, made him feel much better.

The illumination from the chamber’s walls and floor dimmed suddenly. All three of them looked up, alerted. Was it because of Silo’s efforts in the power station? Or something else?

Frey felt a prickle of fear. The atmosphere was changing with the fading of the light. The eerie sense of decay in the room turned sinister as the darkness grew.

Crake pulled a handful of signal flares from a satchel on the ground. He struck them one by one and began tossing them in a loose ring, with the daemonist’s circle at the centre. They were surrounded by a red glow, a restless hiss and the reek of burning phosphorus.

The temperature dropped as the glow from the walls died. The desert air turned chill. They stood among the preserving tanks inside a boundary of fizzing flares. Beyond that, the darkness was now total.

They stood back to back. Frey had his cutlass ready, Crake’s metal cylinder in his off-hand. Ugrik carried a shotgun and the other cylinder. A burning flare lay at his feet, illuminating his bearded face from beneath. With the ornaments and ink-stripes on his face, he seemed every inch the murderous Yort barbarian of folk myth. Crake held a metal sphere, attached to a small belt battery, similar to the one Frey had used the last time he faced the Iron Jackal. This one, Crake assured them, would have a more dramatic effect.

In the bloody light of the signal flares, they looked like the damned.

He caught sight of the ring on his little finger, and Trinica came unbidden to his mind.
I doubt we’ll meet again
, he heard her say. Maybe she’d been more right than she knew. Would she cry for him when she learned of his death, he wondered?

Who was he kidding? She’d never even know. If he died here, he’d disappear without a trace, swallowed up by the desert like the Azryx city that would become his tomb.

The sheer sense of loss overwhelmed him. To have almost had her again, and lost her . . . It was too much to bear. He was truly terrified then. Not of dying, but of what his death would mean.

It would mean he’d failed her. That he’d given up, left her as a cruel ghost of herself. She was still there, beneath: the true Trinica. She could be that person again. She could be happy, she could let herself be loved, he
knew
it.

But not if he died tonight.

He made a promise to himself then. If he survived to see the dawn, he’d search for her again. He’d go back to Vardia, and he’d find her, and he’d do whatever it took to make amends for the things he’d done. He swore it, a fierce, determined oath. If he survived.

Damn, Darian
, he thought to himself.
Did that woman just become your reason to live?

He’d never have admitted it to anyone, not even from the depths of the deepest mug of grog. But here, in the bleakness of the moment, that thought gave him strength.

He swivelled, raising his cutlass. Something had moved at the far reaches of the light.

‘It’s here,’ he said.

‘I know,’ Crake said. His face was grim, eyes restlessly scanning. Ugrik was murmuring to himself.

Frey licked his lips nervously. His senses strained for a sign, the split-second warning that might mean the difference between life and death.