Iron Jackal (42 page)

It took Silo a moment to switch his brain back to Vardic. ‘Tell you on the way back,’ he said.

‘We’re not going with them?’

‘Nuh,’ he said.

Frey reached out an arm and Silo helped him up. Frey frowned. ‘You alright?’

‘I’m good, Cap’n,’ he said.

Frey let it drop, and Silo was grateful for that. He wondered then if the reason he’d stayed with this man for so long was not because he had nowhere else to go, or because he feared to come home, but because deep down he believed Frey would
understand
him if his past ever came to light. Maybe Frey was the only man who could.

The day he’d found Frey dying in the crashed
Ketty Jay
, he’d also found the body of a young Dak boy in the hold, shot dead, with a rifle nearby and a bloody bayonet affixed. Since there were no other crew on board, it didn’t take a genius to work out what had happened.

They’d both failed as leaders, and they both knew it now, even if neither had ever spoken of it. Their reactions to tragedy had been different, though. Silo chose never to lead again, thinking himself unworthy to decide anything for anyone. Frey carried on being a captain, on the condition that he didn’t have to care.

But time had
made
him care. Time, and the things they’d been through since Retribution Falls. And now the weight of expectation was crushing him. Silo saw how it killed the Cap’n to be dragging them through his problems, making them atone for his mistake. It would shatter him if one of them died for his sake.

He wished he had the words to convince the Cap’n that his crew were behind him. That it didn’t matter whether it was his problem or everyone’s: they were in it together. But he didn’t think he could. He didn’t have the right to give advice about leadership. Not any more.

Nine years passive. Nine years a slave of his own making. And now here he was, full circle, a lesser man than when he started.

That didn’t sit right with him. Didn’t sit right at all.

Pinn was frustrated.

He sat on the dirty metal floor of the quarters he shared with Harkins. His little Samarlan gewgaw lay in front of him, on top of several sheets of paper covered in crude diagrams. The damned thing had broken two days after he bought it, and now the clockwork bird sat motionless in its cage, its cheeping forever quieted. But it was still a thing of beauty, a mysterious masterpiece forged by craftsmen who possessed a skill just short of sorcery. And it was most definitely not, as Malvery had repeatedly claimed, ‘just a knackered old rip-off piece of junk.’

Harkins was asleep in the lower bunk, twitching violently, as if he dreamed of being mauled by something horrible. Pinn was glad of the peace. Harkins hated him working in the room, and he’d complained about everything: about the light being on, about the noise of Pinn’s pen scratching, about Pinn’s loud and noxious farts which caused him to gag and which made his vision go dim. But this was Pinn’s inventing space, so Harkins had been forced to put up with it, until he was finally overpowered by the meaty fumes from Pinn’s arse and slipped into unconsciousness.

Pinn knew he had it in him to be a great inventor. He knew it because he reckoned himself great at everything he turned his hand to. Maybe he didn’t know how to make those fiddly little trinkets that the Sammies did, but that was okay. He was an ideas man.

It was just that he wasn’t having any ideas.

The toast-and-cat theory he’d put on hold until he could get some more cats. He’d never seen Slag fall off anything and land on his feet. It was completely possible that Slag was a defective cat. He was certainly mentally defective, so it followed that he was weird in other ways, too. Wasn’t he about a thousand years old or something? Very unusual. Plus, he was violent, as evidenced by the dozens of plasters all over Pinn’s face and head. The scratches still stung.

Slag. Definitely not a good subject for his experiments.

He tried to remember how he made his batch of Professor Pinn’s Incredible Flame-Slime, but he found himself at a loss. His experiments at remixing it just ended up with goop. Besides, despite his obvious brilliance in coming up with it – even that pansy Crake was impressed! – he was having a hard time working out what it would actually be useful for.

He’d taken to carrying a small pot of it around with him, searching for some practical application for his invention. The best idea he’d had so far was to put some on the end of a cigarette to make it last longer, but smoking it made him hallucinate. He’d seen something lurking in the shadows of the cargo hold, some awful half-dog half-man half-metal thing – fractions weren’t Pinn’s strong suit. After that he decided that maybe his Flame-Slime was a bit poisonous.

He’d sat up all night in his quarters trying to come up with a new idea while Silo and the Cap’n were away, but he was short on inspiration. He’d managed a few messy scrawls, and a lot of arrows pointing to different things, but an hour later he wasn’t sure what he’d actually been trying to design. It didn’t help that both his arms were in slings now, which made it damned hard to draw anything at all. He felt like a man in a straitjacket, or a plucked turkey waiting for the oven.

He dug into his pocket with some difficulty and pulled out a folded-up ferrotype. It was one of two he had of his sweetheart Emanda. The other was in a little frame that hung off the dash of his Skylance. He vaguely remembered some other girl who used to occupy that place – Larinda? Lisandra? – but whoever that was, she was gone now.

White creases divided Emanda’s portrait into quarters. She was in her late forties, almost twice his age, and wearing a low-cut, frilly dress that revealed an expansive bosom. A broad grin was on her face, her front teeth adorably crooked. She had a thick head of curls, probably red, but they might have been brown. He wasn’t sure. Ferrotypes only came in black and white, and it had been a few months since he’d seen her.

Usually her picture made him sigh, but this time he thought he detected a judging look in her eyes.
When are you going to be rich, Artis? When are you going to give me all the things I deserve?

‘I’m trying, Emanda,’ he muttered. He wiggled his wounded arms to show her. ‘It’s not my fault.’

None of the crew understood him. Everybody thought they knew about love, but none of them really did. Look at Harkins, mooning after Jez while she ignored him. Look at Frey, chasing that corpse-skinned bitch, when any fool could see she’d put a knife in his back just for giggles. Look at Crake, who thought he was
so
much better than Pinn, but got all flustered whenever anyone mentioned Samandra Bree. Talk about pipe dreams! She was so far out of his league that . . . that . . . Well, he couldn’t think of a decent comparison, but it was pretty damn far.

All of them were jealous of him. Because he
had
a woman. A woman who loved him. She’d told him so, or near enough, during that heady few days of drinking and gambling in Kingspire. That was when he decided that a penniless vagrant like him wasn’t good enough for a lady like that. Once he got rich and famous, he’d go back to her. Once he could afford to treat her right.

He wondered if she’d heard of his exploits in the Rushes yet. Pinn’s grip on reality was always a bit slippery, and in his mind, the rumour had become the literal truth. It really
had
been him that flew that day.
He
had won that race,
he
had landed his aircraft with no engines. Artis Pinn. What a pilot he was. She must have heard by now; it would be all over Vardia. She’d be proud. Proud that she loved a hero.

But his amazing exploits still weren’t getting him rich.

With an annoyed huff, he folded up the ferrotype, put it back in his pocket and left his quarters. It wasn’t an easy task to open the sliding metal door with both his arms restrained. He wondered why Malvery had bothered to put his burned arm in a sling, instead of simply wrapping it up. It didn’t seem to need any support. It occurred to him, as he finally got the door open, that the Doc might just have done it for a laugh.

He encountered Slag out in the corridor, who eyed him menacingly, a rat hanging from his jaws. Deciding if he was disabled enough to be worth savaging again. Pinn aimed a kick at him, but Slag just turned around and padded off with an insulting lack of fear.

Sounds from the cargo bay drew him downstairs: voices, and the whine of the ramp hydraulics. When he got there, he found that the Cap’n and Silo had returned. Grey dawn light filtered in from outside. Ashua and Crake were there too, and Jez followed Pinn in, all of them alerted by the sound of the ramp. It was unusual to see people up at dawn, but the crew of the
Ketty Jay
kept odd hours. Jez didn’t sleep, and Crake barely did these days: he’d been looking more and more worn out lately. He was inventing something of his own, apparently. Pinn took it as further evidence of his jealousy.

‘Good trip, Cap’n?’ Crake asked, yawning into his fist.

‘Could have been worse,’ he said. ‘Why’s everyone awake?’

‘Inventing!’ Pinn declared loudly.

Crake gave him a look. ‘I think I might have something to help with your daemon problem, Cap’n, when you’ve got a minute.’

‘Fix that daemon, and you can have my firstborn,’ said Frey.

Ashua scoffed. ‘As if
you’ll
ever have kids.’

‘As if I’d want one of
his
,’ Crake added.

Frey didn’t seem in the mood for a jolly retort. ‘Look, we have a problem. There’s a camp full of people back there that need general medical supplies and food. Food’s easy; meds, not so easy. I don’t need to tell you the clock’s running on this one.’

‘Taking time out for charity, Cap’n?’ asked Jez, puzzled.

‘It’s a trade. They get help. We get our assault force.’

Crake looked questioningly at Silo, who gave him a blank gaze in return. Crake sighed. ‘Spit and blood, you really
are
going to waltz in there with guns blazing, aren’t you?’

Frey ignored him and appealed to his audience. ‘Any ideas about where we find a lot of medical supplies at very short notice? Or does someone want to wake up Malvery?’

‘I’ve got it covered,’ said Ashua.

Everyone turned to look at her. ‘Sorry?’ Frey said.

‘Medical supplies. Take me to Shasiith, I’ll get you what you need.’

Frey blinked. ‘Really?’ he asked at length, as if he couldn’t believe it would be that easy.

‘Yes!’ she snapped, exasperated.

Frey became suspicious. ‘How much will it cost me?’

‘The man I know, he doesn’t need money. There’s only one thing I can think of that would persuade him to part with that amount of drugs that fast.’ She tapped her foot in agitation, took an irritable breath and looked up at the ceiling. Pinn was surprised to see that her eyes shone with moisture. ‘The price is that I get to join your crew. Permanently. Until I say otherwise.’

‘No!’ Pinn cried, horrified.

‘No!’ Jez protested.

‘No!’ Crake blurted.

‘Done,’ said Frey.

Twenty-Eight

Homecoming – Legitimate Business – Crake Sees an Opportunity – Jez & the Cat

T
he door was opened by a gangly Samarlan girl with hostile brown eyes. She was maybe twelve years old, maybe thirteen, with the elegant features and pitch-black skin of her race. She radiated suspicion and scorn, and a casual, predatory confidence beyond her years.

Ashua wasn’t fooled for an instant. She’d been the same way at that age. Despite the superficial differences, she recognised her replacement.

((Let me guess)) she said in Samarlan. ((He found you on the street and he’s been improving you ever since. How’s your vocabulary?))

‘Exquisite,’ the girl sneered in Vardic. ‘He said you’d be coming.’

‘He was right,’ Ashua replied.

The girl looked her up and down for long enough to let Ashua know she wasn’t impressed, that Ashua wasn’t shit to her. Then she stepped back and let her in off the alley.

Maddeus had lived in many places, but they all ended up the same. The fine settees in the hall were frayed and stained. The huge mirror was smeared and bleary. Paint peeled off the walls. Tiny windows let in the dusk light through a screen of grime. Maddeus moved to each new dwelling in a flurry of fresh finery, but his very presence rotted his surroundings. In the three months since he’d moved into this latest hideaway, it had already fallen into neglect.

The girl went ahead of her up the corridor. It was dim and stifling hot. They passed beneath electric fans, which were still.

In the rooms off the corridor, she saw strangers. There were always strangers in Maddeus’ home. He surrounded himself with them: strung-out philosophers and decadent artists, stragglers and strays, people who’d wandered into his web and never made it out. The days were short to them, passing by in a muddle of stoned conversation, punctuated by hits of their drug of choice. Once, she’d thought them marvellous creatures, godlike in their refusal to submit to the realities of the world. But they all came to nothing in the end, and she despised them now.

She recognised nobody. She hadn’t visited him here, out of respect for his wishes, and it seemed he’d had a reshuffle. Out with the old, in with the new. Another handful of junkies to tickle his interest.