Retribution Falls (30 page)

‘Come on, Trinica. Hengar’s death is only the start. You must know if Duke Grephen is planning something.’

Trinica smiled. ‘Must I?’

Frey cursed her silently. She wasn’t giving anything away. He wanted to push her for more information, but she wouldn’t play the game. Telling her that he knew about Grephen was intended to lead her up the wrong path, but he couldn’t reveal that he knew about the coup, or her mysterious hideout. That would tip his hand.

‘One question,’ he said. ‘The ferrotype. The one on the Wanted posters. How did they get that, if you didn’t give it to them?’

‘Yes, I was surprised, too,’ she said. ‘We had it taken when we were up in the mountains. Do you remember?’

Frey remembered. He remembered a time of romantic adventure, a couple newly in love. He was a lowly cargo pilot and she was the daughter of his boss, one of the heirs to Dracken Industries. He was poor and she was rich, and she loved him anyway. It was breathless, dangerous, and they were both swept giddily along, careless of consequences, armoured by their own happiness.

‘It was my father who gave it to them, I’d imagine,’ she said. ‘I suppose the Navy had no pictures of you, and they knew you had worked for Dracken Industries before that. They were probably hoping for a staff photograph.’

‘He kept that one?’

‘He kept it because I was in it. I imagine that’s how he’d like to remember me.’

The Wanted posters had only shown Frey’s face, but in the full picture, Trinica was clinging to his arm, laughing. Laughing at nothing, really. Laughing just to laugh. He remembered the ferrotype perfectly. Her hair blowing, mouth open and teeth white. A rare, perfect capture; a frozen instant of natural, unforced joy. No one would connect that young girl with the woman sitting in front of him.

In that moment, Frey felt the tragedy of that loss. How cruel it was, that things had turned out the way they did.

But Trinica saw the expression on his face, and correctly guessed its cause. She always knew his thoughts, better than anyone.

‘Look at yourself, Darian. Cursing the fate that brought you here. One day, you’re going to realise that everything that’s happened to you has been your own fault.’

‘Dogshit,’ he spat, sadness turning to venom in an instant. ‘I’ve tried my damnedest. I tried to better myself.’

‘And yet here you are, ten years later, barely scraping a living. And I am the captain of a crew of fifty, infamous and rich.’

‘I’m not like you, Trinica. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon shoved up my arse. I didn’t have a good education. Some of us don’t get the luck.’

She looked at him for a long moment. Then her black eyes dropped to the face-down cards, scattered on the table.

‘I remember when you used to talk about Rake,’ she said, idly picking up a card and flipping it over. It was the Lady of Crosses. ‘You used to say everyone thought luck was a huge factor. They said it was all about the cards you were dealt. Mostly luck and a bit of skill.’ She flipped over another: Ten of Fangs. ‘You thought they were idiots. You knew it was mostly skill and a bit of luck.’

The Ace of Skulls came next. Frey hated that card. It ruined any hand in Rake, unless it could be made part of a winning combination, which could hardly ever be done.

‘A good player might occasionally lose to a mediocre one, but in the long run, the good players made money while the bad ones went broke,’ Trinica continued.

The next card came up: the Duke of Skulls. Any Priest would give her a five-card run to the Ace of Skulls, an unbeatable combination.

She turned the final card: the Seven of Wings. The hand was busted. Her gaze flicked up from the table and met his.

‘Over time, luck is hardly a factor at all,’ she said.

Belowdecks, the Delirium Trigger was in chaos. A slow, steady pounding reverberated through the dim passageways. Metal screeched. Men shouted and ran, some towards the sound and some away from it.

‘It’s in the cargo hold!’

‘What’s in the cargo hold?’

But nobody could answer that. Those inside the hold had fled in terror when the iron-and-leather monstrosity burst out of its crate and began rampaging through the shadowy aisles. Barrels were flung this way and that. Guns fired, but to no avail. The air had filled with splinters as the intruder smashed through crates of provisions and trade goods. It was dark down there, and the looming thing terrified the crewmen.

Those on the deck above, operating the winch, had peered fearfully through the hatch into the cargo hold at the first signs of a disturbance. The light from the hangar barely penetrated to the floor of the hold. They scrambled back as they caught a glimpse of something huge lunging across their narrow field of view. It was only then that one of them thought to raise the winch.

In the confusion that ensued, nobody noticed three strangers, now dressed in the dirty motley of crewmembers, making their way belowdecks.

Those who had managed to escape from the cargo hold had slammed the bulkhead door behind them and locked it shut, trapping the monster inside. But the monster didn’t like being trapped. It was pounding on the inside of the door, hard enough to buckle eight inches of metal. Enraged bellows came from behind.

‘Get your fat stenching carcasses over here!’ the burly, dirt-streaked bosun yelled. The men he was yelling at had come to investigate the sound, and were now backing away as they saw what was happening. They reluctantly returned at his command. ‘Weapons ready, all of you! You will defend your craft!’

A rotary cannon on a tripod was being hastily erected in the passageway in front of the door. The bosun knelt down next to the crewman who was assembling the cannon. ‘When that thing comes through the door, give it everything you’ve got!’

Malvery, Crake and Pinn skirted the chaos as best they could, and for a time they were unmolested. The Delirium Trigger was only half-crewed, and almost all of them were occupied with the diversion Bess was creating. They did their best to avoid meeting anyone, and when they were seen it was usually at a distance, or by somebody who was already hurrying elsewhere. They managed to penetrate some way into the aircraft before they came up against a crewmember who got a good look at them, and recognised them as imposters.

‘Hey!’ he said, before Malvery grabbed his head and smashed his skull against the wall of the passageway. He slumped to the floor, unconscious.

‘Not big on talking your way out of things, are you?’ Crake observed, as they dragged the unfortunate crewman into a side room.

‘My way’s quicker,’ he said, adjusting his round green glasses. ‘No danger of misunderstanding.’

The side room was a galley, empty now, its stoves cold. Crake shut the door while Malvery ran some water into a tin cup. The crewman - a young, slack-jawed deckhand - began to groan and stir. Malvery threw the water in his face. His eyes opened and slowly focused on Pinn, who was standing over him, pointing a pistol at his nose.

Malvery squatted down next to the prisoner and tapped him on the head with the base of the tin cup, making him wince. ‘Captain’s cabin,’ he said. ‘Where?’

They left the deckhand bound and gagged in a cupboard of the galley. Pinn was for shooting him, but Crake wouldn’t allow it. Pinn’s argument that he was ‘just a deckhand, no one would miss him’ carried little weight.

The captain’s cabin was locked, of course, but Crake had come prepared. Given the time and the materials, it was a simple trick for him to produce a daemonic skeleton key. He slipped it into the lock and concentrated, forming a mental chord in the silence of his mind, awakening the daemon thralled to the key. His fingers became numb as it sucked the strength from him. Though small, it was hungry, and beyond the power of any but a trained daemonist to handle.

The daemon extended invisible tendrils of influence, feeling out the lock, caressing the levers and tumblers. Then the key turned sharply, and the door was open.

Malvery patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good job, mate,’ he grinned. Crake felt oddly warmed by that. Then he heard the distant pounding echoing through the Delirium Trigger, and he remembered Bess.

‘Let’s get this done,’ he said, and they went inside.

Dracken’s cabin was spotlessly clean, but the combination of brass, iron and dark wood gave it a heavy and oppressive feel. A bookshelf took up one wall, a mix of literature, biography and navigational manuals interspersed with shiny copper ornaments. Some of the titles were in Samarlan script, Crake noticed. He spotted The Singer and the Songbird and On the Domination of Our Sphere, two great works by the Samarlan masters. He found himself taken by an unexpected admiration for a pirate who would - or even could - read that kind of material.

Pinn and Malvery had gone straight to the desk on the far side of the cabin, which sat next to a sloping window of reinforced windglass. The light from the hangar spilled onto neatly arranged charts and a valuable turtleshell writing set. Crake had a sudden picture of Dracken looking thoughtfully out of that window at a sea of clouds as her craft flew high in the sky.

Pinn pawed through the charts, scattering them about and ruining Crake’s moment of reverie. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

Malvery’s eye had fallen on a long, thin chest on a shelf near the desk. It was padlocked. ‘Crake!’ he said, and the daemonist came over with his skeleton key. The lock was trickier than the one that secured the cabin door, but in the end, it couldn’t stand up to the key.

It was full of rolled-up charts. Atop them was what seemed to be a large compass. Malvery passed the compass to Crake, then began scanning through the charts with Pinn. Crake listened to the booming coming from the depths of the Delirium Trigger as he studied Malvery’s discovery.

Keep pounding, Bess, he thought. As long as I hear you, I know you’re all right.

The compass was so big that Crake could barely hold it in one hand. It was also, on closer examination, not a compass at all. It had no North-South-West-East markings, and it had four needles instead of one, all of equal length and numbered. Additionally, there were eight tiny sets of digits, set in pairs, with each digit on a rotating cylinder to allow it to count from zero to nine. These set pairs were also numbered one to four, presumably to correspond with the needles. The needles were all pointing in the same direction, no matter which way he turned it, and the numbers were all at zero.

‘I think we found ’em!’ Malvery said. He scooped up all the charts from the chest and shoved them inside his threadbare jersey, then looked at Crake. ‘Is that the device you were after?’

‘I believe it is.’

Crake had little doubt that what he held was the mysterious device Thade had mentioned. The strangeness of the compass, and the fact that it had been placed in the same chest as the charts, was enough for him.

‘We should—’ he began, but then he saw a movement in the doorway, and there was the loud report of a gun.

Malvery had seen it too: one of the crew, a black-haired, scruffy man, drawn by the sound of voices and the sight of the captain’s door left open. On seeing the intruders, the crewman hastily pulled his gun and fired. The doctor ducked aside, fast enough so that the bullet only grazed his shoulder.

Another gun fired, an instant after the first. Pinn’s. The crewman gaped, and a bright swell of blood soaked out from his chest into his shirt. He staggered back and slid down the wall of the passageway outside, disbelief in his eyes.

‘We got what we came for,’ said Malvery, his voice flat. ‘Time to go.’

The crewman lay in the passageway, gasping for air. Pinn and Malvery passed without looking at him, pausing only to steal his pistol. Crake edged by as if he was contagious, horrified and fascinated. The crewman’s eyes followed his, rolling in their sockets with an awful, empty interest.

Crake found himself pinned by that gaze. It was the look of a man unprepared, shocked to find himself at the gates of death so swiftly and unexpectedly. There was bewilderment in that look. The dying man was crushed by the knowledge that, unlike every other desperate moment in his life, there was no second chance, no way that wit or strength could pull him clear. It filled Crake with terror.

Now Crake knew why Malvery and Pinn hadn’t looked.

He was trembling as he followed his companions up the corridor. After a moment, he remembered Bess. He put the whistle to his lips, the whistle tuned to a frequency that only she could hear, and he blew. It was a note different from the one he used to wake her up and put her to sleep. This one was a signal.

Time to come back, Bess.

‘Any moment now, boys!’ the bosun yelled, as the bulkhead door screeched and lurched forward on its hinges. It was possible to see glimpses of movement through the gap at the top of the door, where the eight-inch steel had bent forward under the assault of the creature in the cargo hold. Enough to see that there was something massive behind, something as fearsome as its roaring suggested.

The crew braced themselves, aiming their revolvers and lever-action shotguns. The man operating the tripod-mounted rotary cannon flexed his trigger finger, wiped sweat from his brow and sighted. The door had given up the struggle now. Each blow could be the one that brought them face to face with the thing in the hold.