Iron Jackal (14 page)

Frey said goodbye at the hotel door. Had it been any other woman Frey would have attempted to charm his way inside, and into her bed. Instead, he kissed her on the cheek and promised to be at the
Delirium Trigger
in an hour with the relic. Every instinct he had demanded more from the encounter, but he mastered himself and walked away, antsy with sexual frustration.

The
Delirium Trigger
was already prepping for take-off when he got to the hangar where the frigate was berthed. They arrived in a pair of rickshaws, with Malvery and Pinn guarding the relic. Ashua took up the fourth seat. She didn’t trust Frey to collect her fee for her, and wisely so.

Balomon Crund, Trinica’s bosun, took delivery of the relic and paid them. Trinica chose not to make an appearance. Frey didn’t mind. He wanted to remember her the way he’d left her.

Ashua seemed surprised that Trinica had paid them off without trying to cheat them. She’d been wired up for an argument that never came. Now that their plan had actually worked out, she became giddy. She even gave Frey a hug, which in his current state of enforced celibacy was all but unbearable.

Malvery and Pinn wanted to go out on the town, and the doctor invited Ashua along in celebration of their victory. Frey didn’t feel like it tonight, so he said he’d take the money back to the
Ketty Jay
instead. He planned to take a couple of drops of Shine and lose himself in a blissful private reverie, dreaming of the woman he hoped to win back.

That was the only thing on his mind as the
Ketty Jay
’s cargo ramp shut with a dull thump. But once the echoes had faded, he found himself faced with a hungry and threatening silence. The tune he was humming faltered and stalled. The hollow belly of the
Ketty Jay
seemed cold, despite the stifling air outside. Goose-pimples crept across his skin.

Something was very, very wrong.

Imperators.

His mind flew to the conclusion immediately. The Awakeners’ most dangerous operatives, beings that could paralyse a man with crushing, primal fear and drag out the secrets of his soul. He drew his revolver. It wouldn’t do any good, but it made him feel better.

They’ve found me.

The seconds ticked by, and nothing happened. His eyes roamed the hold. It was emptier than usual, but that still left plenty of places to hide among the junk that Frey never got round to throwing out. The battered Rattletraps, which Frey had decided to keep hold of until Silo could repair them for resale, were belted down and silent.

He felt alone. His senses told him there was nobody else on board, and while he was certain that wasn’t true, he didn’t dare raise his voice to find out.

Were
there Imperators here? Now he wasn’t sure. There was no question that the fear he felt was something unnatural, but it wasn’t anywhere near the intensity of an Imperator’s gaze, which could turn a man’s bowels to water. This was the sourceless dread of a bad drug trip, seeping into him like cold blood into a rag. The paranoia, the sense of wrongness and displacement.

Keep it together, Darian.

That was when he heard the sound.

At first he thought it was Slag. It seemed the kind of low, menacing yowl made by a cat at bay. But then the intruder hitched in a breath in a way a cat never would, and he recognised it.

There was a baby crying in the cargo hold.

‘You have
got
to be joking,’ he muttered to himself.

The crying came from behind a large pile of tarpaulin that had been stuffed in a net and tied down near the port side bulkhead. Frey crept towards it. He’d rather have gone the other way, but there was a certain dreamlike inevitability about this situation. Nothing felt quite real.

He flexed his hand nervously on the grip of his revolver. He wasn’t sure whether a crying baby merited a gun in his hand or not, but there was something unspeakably malevolent about that wail. It tugged at him with a sense of awful familiarity. He felt like he should
know
it, somehow.

He rounded the pile. Something was moving there. Something . . .

Repulsion battled with terror on his face as he saw what was hidden behind the tarpaulin.

His first impression was that it was some kind of giant maggot, a bloated, shapeless thing rolling in a puddle of fluid. It stank: a smell both sweet and rancid that ambushed Frey as it came into sight. The sheer impossibility of its being there, the horror of the thing, stunned him.

But it was no maggot. It was a sac. A grotesque, veined bag, whitish and slimy, with something bulging inside it, pushing against the skin. Something long-limbed, its joints bending unnaturally, turning inside the

womb

and Frey’s mind went treacherously to his
own
child, the baby that was never born. The baby that died inside Trinica when she tried to commit suicide as a young woman, broken by a lover’s betrayal.
His
betrayal.

The baby was still crying. It wasn’t coming from inside the sac. It was coming from everywhere.

This. Is. Not. Happening
.

The sac stretched on one side as something long and narrow was pressed against it from within. For an instant it held, then it parted in one quick tear, the lips of the split sliding greasily down the length of the object that poked out.

A bayonet. A double-bladed Dakkadian bayonet, the same kind he’d been skewered by nine years ago, on the day his crew were massacred. The same kind that had almost taken his life yesterday.

He stared as it sliced downward, slitting the stringy tissue of the sac. Sweet-smelling amniotic fluid belched from the rupture and sloshed over the floor. Frey stepped back from it, disgusted. He took his eyes off the squirming sac for an instant, to avoid the wash of liquid. When he looked back he saw that something was forcing its way through the slit in the sac, moist with new birth, and damned if it wasn’t a
muzzle
, some kind of
animal
, and—

Something bumped against Frey’s boot heel. He swung around with a cry. His arm snapped out straight, revolver in hand.

‘Don’t shoot! It’s me! It’s me!’

Me
was Crake, who had suddenly found himself with Frey’s revolver pressed against his nose. Frey blinked in bewilderment. In an instant, everything had changed. There was no crying baby. The sense of paranoia had lifted, with only his hammering heart as evidence that it had ever existed. He looked over his shoulder at the spot where the squirming thing had been. He knew before he turned that there would be nothing there.

He lowered his pistol. Crake glared at him and rubbed his nose resentfully. There was a small iron ball at Frey’s feet, resting against his boot. He shoved it away with the side of his foot.

‘Crake,’ he said. ‘I think I’m going mad.’

Crake watched as the ball rolled away, slowed, and then reversed direction to bump against Frey’s boot again.

‘What worries me, Cap’n,’ he said, ‘is that you may not be.’

‘And you’re sure you didn’t see or hear
anything?
’ Frey asked.

‘We’ve been over this. I’m quite sure,’ Crake replied. He sipped his coffee and stared off thoughtfully into the distance. In the
Ketty Jay
’s cramped mess, that wasn’t very far. It was a grim little room, comprising the fixed table where they sat, a stove and worktop, and some metal cabinets for utensils. Frey had been meaning to pretty it up for ever, but the prospect of the task always defeated him. Interior decorating was not his strong suit.

He frowned in frustration. ‘And you don’t have any idea what this . . .
signal
is?’

‘All I know is that it’s coming from you.’

It wasn’t enough. Frey had submitted himself to almost two hours of Crake’s tests, wired up to various ticking and humming machines in the sanctum while the daemonist twiddled knobs and scribbled formulae. He trusted Crake to provide him with some answers. But Crake had come up with none.

Crake scratched the back of his neck. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

‘Is it daemonic?’

‘Could be. Could be mechanical.’

‘A device on me? Something that’s transmitting?’

‘On you or
in
you.’

Frey was feeling fragile already. He didn’t need that.

‘The Imperators?’ he suggested.

‘I doubt it,’ said Crake. ‘They wouldn’t trouble themselves with giving you hallucinations. If they were after you, they’d just kill you.’

Frey found that oddly reassuring. He had special reason to be wary of the Imperators. A few months ago he’d delivered certain documents to a professor named Kraylock. Maurin Grist’s research notes, which all but proved that the Imperators were secretly daemonic half-men. Since the Awakeners had ruthlessly persecuted daemonists for over a century, Frey found it somewhat amusing that they’d been caught employing daemons themselves.

The Archduke had been less amused when he saw the notes. He issued a public demand for the Awakeners to hand over all their Imperators to establish the truth of the accusation. The Awakeners refused. Tension across the land was unpleasantly high, and getting higher. Things in Vardia were not looking good, which was half the reason Frey had ducked out to Samarla for a while.

If the Awakeners had discovered Frey’s hand in the situation, his life wouldn’t be worth crowshit. But Crake was right. This didn’t
feel
like them.

‘What’s going on?’ he lamented. There was too much about this situation that was unknown. It scared him when he didn’t know who his enemy was.

‘I might be able to find out if I could get to a decent sanctum,’ Crake said, with a complaining tone to his voice that Frey had heard a lot recently.

‘Your friend Plome has one, doesn’t he?’ Frey suggested quickly, before Crake could start on about the lack of facilities aboard the
Ketty Jay
.

‘I think I’ve abused his friendship quite enough for the time being,’ Crake replied. ‘Anyway, he won’t be at home. It’s coming up to election time, and he’s running for a seat in the House of Chancellors. He’ll be all over the duchy, pressing flesh and kissing babies.’

Frey drummed his fingers on the table. The terror he’d felt in the hold had already receded. The whole incident seemed like a nightmare, and like a nightmare it faded in the face of reality. He was beginning to wonder whether it was just a product of general bad living, or a delayed flashback from some particularly dirty narcotics he’d experimented with in his younger days. But then there was this . . .
signal
. He didn’t really understand Crake’s methods, or what frequencies and bandwidths had to do with daemonism, but his friend’s manner told him he should be concerned.

There was a clattering from overhead, and raucous voices. Pinn came clambering down the ladder from the passageway above. He missed his grip halfway down and landed heavily on his amply padded arse, making the mugs on the table jump and spill. Apparently he’d forgotten he had one arm in a sling. He looked stunned for a moment, then burst out laughing. Gales of laughter came from overhead. Malvery and Ashua. Both plenty drunk, by the sounds of it.

Frey let his head sink into his arms. He wasn’t in the mood for this now.

‘You’re back early,’ Crake commented, as Malvery and Ashua climbed unsteadily down the ladder and into the mess.

‘Spenn all my money,’ said Pinn, who had tipped over to lie on his back. ‘An’ these two won’ gimme no more.’ He thrust a cupped hand into the air. ‘Need an advance, Cap’n!’

Frey raised his head. They’d obviously been going at it hard tonight. ‘What’s she doing here?’ he said, nodding at Ashua. ‘I thought we were all done with her.’

Malvery crushed her in a huge embrace. ‘She’s alright, she is!’ he slobbered. ‘She’s . . . she’s like the daughter I never had!’ He swallowed a toxic burp. ‘Or wanted.’

Ashua tugged at his bushy white moustache. ‘It’s like having my own personal walrus!’ she beamed.

‘Somebody kill me,’ Frey murmured in despair. ‘Look, if I give Pinn some money, will you all bugger off?’

‘What’s up with him?’ Malvery inquired of Crake.

‘He just had a traumatic experience,’ Crake replied.

‘Oh, I see,’ Malvery said gravely. He disengaged himself from Ashua, crouched down next to Frey and put a hefty arm round his shoulders. Then, in a tone more suited to pets and infants, he cooed: ‘Did the Cap’n have a twaumatic expewience?’ Pinn exploded with laughter.

‘Piss off, Doc. It’s serious,’ Frey snapped, shaking himself free of Malvery’s arm.

Malvery looked put out. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Someone’s in a grump.’

‘What’s wrong with your hand?’ Ashua asked. It took Frey a moment to realise that the question was directed at him. He looked down at his hand, and his blood ran cold.

There was a black spot in the centre of his palm, an uneven circle the size of a small coin. Dark tendrils of gangrenous purple spread away from it in an ugly starburst.

All the humour drained out of the room as they stared at it.

‘Doc?’ Frey asked tremulously.

‘What’ve you done to yourself, Cap’n?’ Malvery asked. The way he said it, weak and shocked, struck dread into Frey’s heart.