Iron Jackal (63 page)

But Malstrom hadn’t been wrong. He’d just been looking in the wrong place.

The architecture and materials put this far beyond the reach of ancient Samarlans. These people had been here long before any currently known civilisation had ever existed. These people had practised daemonism to a higher art than the best practitioners of today. The craft that he’d devoted his life to was not new, it was a rediscovery of the work of their betters. That thought made him feel dwindlingly small.

The building that Ugrik had led them to was down by the shore, beyond the encircling wall that divided the inner city from the outer. It was possible to make out the shape of the place, rather like a ball squashed from above, with four thin spikes set around it in a square. The Yort was searching through the dense mass of trees and vines that surrounded it, muttering to himself. He’d found a way in before, he said. Somewhere around here.

The buildings near the shore had an elegance and delicacy far beyond the outer buildings, which tended more towards blocks of dwellings and huge structures like the power station. Just being here made Crake’s mind race. The scholar in him was overwhelmed by a wealth of input. He’d decided that the inner city surrounding the lake was for the upper class, and the outer city was where the workers lived, and where factories and other essential buildings were constructed. He noted that the city’s only visible landing pad was in the outer city too.

But there had been gates in the wall to shut people out. Maybe the Azryx kept slaves like the Samarlans did? Maybe there was a strict divide between rich and poor? Or maybe . . . maybe it was something entirely beyond his experience.

No. Strange as this place was, it was a place built for humans, by humans. He had to think of them as such.

But where had they gone? And how had they disappeared so utterly, undiscovered until now?

He stared across the lake, and amid the wonderment he felt a growing fear of what the night might bring.

‘It occurs to me we should have made a little more haste and spent a little less time messing around,’ he said. Nerves were making him irritable.

Frey, who was standing beside him, took out his pocket watch and checked it. ‘That fat Sammie sorcerer said I had until full dark,’ he said. ‘I make it at least an hour. And Ugrik said he took the relic from right in that building.’ He clicked the pocket watch shut. ‘Plenty of time.’

Plenty of time?
Crake marvelled at how his friend could be so casual. Crake was the kind of man who turned up a quarter of an hour early for appointments, in case something unforeseen occurred on the way. He’d often been mystified by his crewmates’ attitude in the face of danger. It was Crake’s opinion that intelligent men
should
be terrified when faced with a predicament like this. Anyone who wasn’t had simply failed to understand the situation.

But then, that would make Harkins the smartest man on the
Ketty Jay
, so he supposed his theory wasn’t as clever as it sounded at first.

Be honest, Grayther. You’re scared because you don’t want to face the daemon
.

That was the truth of it. All his plans and formulae made fine theories, but he was far from ready to put them into practice. He needed more time, to test and test again. This seat-of-the-pants approach scared him witless.

He remembered how he’d dreamed of pioneering a new kind of field daemonism, something no one else had successfully explored. How boastful and hollow that all seemed, now he came to it. The last time he’d been so arrogant, it had ended in tragedy. It had ended in Bess.

His eyes went to the excavated zone, the bald patch in the jungle where the bones of the city had been laid bare. Bess was there, and Samandra with her. He wasn’t sure which one caused him the greater shame.

Whatever the Cap’n said, he didn’t think Samandra would ever forgive him for what he’d done, and nor should she. But she could handle herself, at least. Bess was a different matter. He should never have let her go off with the others. He saw the sense in it – Bess would do no good here, and the Cap’n needed him – but it still left him worried and guilty. He should be there to watch out for her, but more importantly, he should be there to
control
her. She was always a little erratic, and without him to keep her in check, he was afraid of what she might do. He was the only one she really listened to.

He wished they’d left her on the
Ketty Ja
y with Harkins and Jez. But it was too late for all that now.

‘Found it!’ Ugrik said. He began pulling vines aside. ‘This is the way in.’

‘See?’ said Frey to Crake, as they picked up their heavy packs full of equipment and made their way towards the Yort. ‘Still got an hour.’

‘I wonder if you’ve considered that daemons may not practise such precise timekeeping as your pocket watch?’ Crake inquired. ‘Them being pan-dimensional entities from beyond infinity, and all that?’

Frey became worried all of a sudden. ‘But the sorcerer said—’

‘The sorcerer was off his face on hookroot bark,’ Crake reminded him.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right.’ He quickened his step. ‘Best get moving then, eh?’

Crake felt a small, malicious pleasure at infecting the Cap’n with his sense of urgency. He followed Ugrik and Frey through the mass of vines, and into the Azryx building.

They came in through what must have been a window. The doorway was hopelessly choked with tree roots. Crake stared around in wonderment as he climbed down into the room. Seeds and weeds had tunnelled into it here and there, and it was cracked in places, and everything was covered in dust. But despite that, it wouldn’t have been out of place in the Archduke’s palace.

It was light in here, illuminated with a soft and restful glow that seemed to emanate from all around. The exterior had been the same skeletal off-white colour as the rest of the city, but inside, the walls and ceiling retained a blush of pink. The ceiling was scalloped like the inside of a clam shell. Everything flowed into everything else, with no joins or hard edges, and there was an organic quality to the place, as if it had been grown rather than made. Any furniture had long since decayed into nothingness, but there was a semicircular barrier just inside the front door, made of the same stuff as the walls and floor.

Crake considered the barrier for a moment, wondering what it could be for. Then he realised. It reminded him of nothing more than a reception desk in a foyer.

Yes! Yes, that was what it was! This place was a foyer, he decided. The thought made him dizzy. He felt a connection across ten thousand years, the reality of the people that had once lived here.

To think I might have missed this. To think I might have barricaded myself in a sanctum, and never known this moment
.

Ugrik led the way down a corridor that went off to one side. A corridor, or perhaps a tunnel, since it had no corners and it curved as it progressed. He saw a doorway to their right, a smooth oval gap in the pinkish surface, and peered inside. Beyond was a small room with eight beds in two rows. Their frames, made of the same curious ceramic as the city, had survived the millennia. They had a strange, crablike look to them. The beds and their occupants had disappeared, but there were still the remains of ancient devices in there. They were little more than hollow boxes that stood on short poles, but whatever metal they were made of had survived the millennia with only a small amount of corrosion.

‘Hey!’ called Frey, from up the corridor. Crake realised he’d been lingering in the doorway. ‘Come on, Crake. It was you who wanted to hurry.’ He said it in a tone which suggested it was Frey who wanted to hurry now.

Crake shouldered his pack and jogged to catch up. The weight of his equipment was making his back ache. Not for the first time, he cursed the lack of portability that went with his chosen profession.

‘Did you see those beds?’ he asked.

‘I saw ’em last time I was here,’ Ugrik said.

‘What is this place?’

Ugrik sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Crake was amazed his nose worked at all with that great big ring in it. ‘Hospital,’ he said. ‘There’s more wards like that about, ’n’ operating theatres over the other side.’

‘This place was a hospital?’

‘Aye.’

Crake experienced another unsettling moment. Being here, he felt strangely close to these people. T
hey lived and died so long ago, yet they seem so like us
.

The corridor opened out into a larger chamber, bigger than the foyer, with two balconied galleries running along either side. Along the length of the chamber were twelve containers in three rows of four. They were white ceramic boxes inside cradles of some metal that looked like polished brass. Each was a little over two metres in length and half as wide.

There was an eerie feel to the chamber. Time had been less kind to it than the foyer. There was rubble on the floor and grass had taken root in the corners. Dust lay thick all around. Though there was the same soft light here as elsewhere, it only seemed to emphasise the desolation and emptiness.

And those boxes looked unsettlingly like tombs.

Ugrik and Frey seemed to feel none of his unease, however. They headed for the far end of the room, where there was a curving stairway that seemed to have melted out of the wall, leading up to one of the galleries. Crake followed more slowly. There was something out of place here, something he couldn’t put his finger on.

The boxes had an internal glow all their own. He studied them as he walked between them. Their walls were thin, and he could see the faintest of shadows through them. As if something was inside.

Then he realised what had been nagging at him, and he stopped still.

‘Crake?’ Frey called. ‘Can you stop dragging your arse, please?’

Crake ignored him. He put his hands on top of one of the boxes, feeling around for a seam.

‘Oi! What are you fiddling with?’

‘There’s no dust on ’em, Cap’n.’

‘What?’

‘These boxes. There’s dust everywhere else, but not here.’

‘So?’

He found what he was looking for, and hauled. ‘Well, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘Who’s been dusting them?’

The top of the box came open. It rose up and slid to one side and tilted out of the way with a silent mechanical movement. Frey looked inside. His eyes widened.

‘What is it, Crake?’ Frey called, seeing the expression on his face.

‘Spit and blood,’ he said. ‘There are still
people
in these things!’

The ceramic walls of the power station had resisted nature’s best efforts to destroy them for thousands of years. It took Ashua less than a second to do the job with a dump truck.

Bullets pinged off the metal skin of the massive vehicle as she climbed dizzily out of the cab. Her neck and back were numb from the whiplash. Fallen rubble had crashed down onto the truck’s mangled muzzle and shattered the windscreen. She heard the others returning fire on the Sammies from the shelter of the dump box behind her.

They were in. That was the important thing. They were in.

The Sammies had been slow to react to the sight of a dump truck clumsily thundering through the streets. Even when it went rolling up the ramps between the platforms that led up to the power station, they hadn’t suspected the hand of foreigners. Maybe they were too confident in the belief that this place couldn’t be found. Either way, she’d made it to the second platform before anyone thought to shoot at them. But her passengers were hidden and protected, and Ashua was a hard target inside the cab, so she kept on going.

It was only when they got to the top that she realised their predicament. There were twenty Sammies up there, maybe thirty, that they hadn’t been able to see from below. They had a machine gun, and they were forewarned.

It seemed the guarding of the power station was a serious matter, even when they thought the city couldn’t be found. Getting out and knocking on the door wasn’t going to be an option.

But the monster vehicle she was driving was the height of three men and weighed several dozen tonnes. Its wheels alone were three metres high: there were railed stairs on the front of it just so you could get to the cab. The cab itself was set back from the muzzle, well protected, and overhung by the dump box. And she reckoned the wall of the power station couldn’t be
that
thick.

The sheer strength of the vehicle made her feel invincible. So she put her foot down, and strapped herself in.

With their black skin, black hair and black uniforms, the Sammies looked like shadows made flesh. They certainly melted away like shadows when they saw the dump truck lumbering towards them. The machine gun punched bullets across the body of the vehicle, but the tiny cab was sheltered by the enormous engine casing in the front. She yelled out a warning to the others in the back, but she wasn’t sure if they heard it over the bellow of the vehicle.

She braked just before they hit the power station, warned by an instinct for self-preservation. Her instincts were good. The jolt of impact wasn’t violent enough to send her flying into the dash, but it was hard enough to crack the thin Azryx ceramic. Instead of ploughing hard into the building, the dump truck only shoved its muzzle through the outer wall, then coughed to a stop.