Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (17 page)

“Come on, got some new friends for you to meet,” Hayfield replied. “They can do most of the talkin’.” He leaned forward and in a low tone, added, “If you can get ‘em to clamp up for two runnin’ minutes, I got a ten-bill for you.”

Koop hung his scattergun on a pair of hooks on the wall and led them into the sitting room, with windows looking out toward the thunderail tracks. Seated in three of the wicker seats scattered around the room were two women and a man, all human. The one in the sleeveless grey coveralls with her blonde hair pulled back and tied in a plume had to be Pella’s mum. If she looked nothing like her father, Pella was a cast copy of her mother with the years polished away.

The other two sat right beside one another. The first was a dark-haired man in his late twenties with a fire burning in his eyes. Rascal had seen the sort before; he was being sized up, weighed, and judged, and by someone too young to know caution. No-Boots had that look often, before he got himself hanged. His companion was dark-skinned and haired, like someone who grew up in the skies of the northern climes, dark enough even to stand out among Yellowcorn’s locals. She seemed more at ease, with the relaxed features of someone who had just been interrupted from a pleasant conversation.

Hayfield made the introductions. “Rascal, this is Gahwin, our hostess.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said the older version of Pella.

“And these are Kinmi and Syr.” Hayfield indicated first the man, then the woman. He’d have never have guessed by the names alone. Foreigners, both.

“We’ve heard a lot about you,” Kinmi said. He stood and offered Rascal his hand. He had the grip of an innkeeper, or a confidence man. It was just firm enough to not be insultingly gentle.

Rascal cast a glance over at Hayfield, who tried and failed to keep a smirk from his face. “This old leather-head tellin’ stories out of hat?”

“Don’t look at me,” Hayfield said, holding up both hands in mock defense. He nodded to Kinmi. “You go ahead and tell him.”

“We’ve heard about you for years, Rascal. We’ve been authorized to let you in on a number of confidential matters. Not the least of which—”

“We’re friends of General Rynn,” said Syr, in a charmingly melodic accent that told him he was right about her heritage; she had to have lived most of her life in Braavland.

“
General
Rynn?” Rascal asked. He reached up and stroked his scruffy little beard. “You can’t mean our little Chipmunk?”

“No, not anymore,” said Syr. “They finally convinced her to drop her human name, but yes, the same girl. She told us that the two of you used to run the gang she fought with.”

Kinmi spoke up. “Her account varied by story as to which of you was in charge.”

“Neither of us, really,” Rascal said. “I’m a priest, firstmost, so everyone in the lowest layers knew me. Just about everyone knew Hayfield though, top to bottom. Can’t hardly be helped playing fourteen years in the pro leagues, getting your flashpop in the paper monthly and your name in there after every game.”

“Who’da thunk it’d be Chipmunk climbing over bodies to get to the top,” Hayfield said.

“Bodies?” Rascal asked. “This ‘general’ thing isn’t literal, is it?”

Kinmi nodded solemnly. “The war’s started. It’s scratch and scramble for now, but so far, we’re winning.”

Rascal blinked. He must have misheard. “Winning? Winning what?”

“You were there, she said. You saw her new guns work,” Syr replied. “She’s studied the old daruu arts and is using them to arm us, to keep us mobile, to give us the advantage.”

“Eziel give us strength,” Rascal whispered. “It’s coming.”

“What’s that?” Hayfield asked, cupping a hand behind his ear.

Kinmi burst out laughing. He turned to Syr. “I always wondered if the priests even knew. I guess so.”

“Know what?” Hayfield asked, looking from Rascal to Kinmi and back again.

“There were twelve gods that watched over Korr,” Rascal said in the voice he used when acting as Pious Henlon. “When the kuduks ground our kind underfoot, we took one as our patron, to keep humanity united as best we could. Our ancestors chose Eziel, and for good reason: Eziel is the god of war.”

Hayfield looked at Rascal as if he’d caught fire. “The same Eziel that we pray to for bread in our bellies and a good lock on the door? The Eziel that collects coins for the poor and turns them into soup? The same Eziel that—”

“That kept our numbers strong for thousands of years, until his original purpose was forgotten by all but the ordained?” Rascal asked. “The Eziel that forbids us to harm our own kind, but lets me sneak off after evening prayers to put bullets in kuduk heads? The Eziel that our ancestors prayed to before battle? Yeah, that one.”

“Don’t worry, Hayfield,” Kinmi said. “Rascal’s little secret is nothing. I’m going to twist both your heads into candy knots. General Rynn authorized us to tell her old gang
everything
.”

“Lord Eziel, grant us vengeance upon our enemies. Let us share our strength as comrades and become fearsome to our foes. I am your servant, teach me to kill in your name.” –Invocation to Eziel, original phrasing

Chapter 14

“Every time some sailor waxes poetic about how big the bloody sea is, I want to punch him.” –Avrax Coalic, builder of the first transcontinental thunderail

Life aboard the drifting
Darksmith
was a series of minor annoyances. With the ship listing to starboard, everything slid. Food had to be kept in hand while eating, playing at dice was impossible, and sleeping was done in the lower corners of rooms, with bedding jammed in the crook of walls like hard, cold hammocks.

The limited number of serious injuries was one of the small blessings the crew had been afforded. Most of their casualties in the firefight with the
Fair Trader
had died quickly, if not cleanly, and most of the other injuries were minor beyond mentioning. One gunner had lost an eye, and likely his livelihood. A few others had gashes that took stitches to mend. There was little else for Jamile to do aboard after that but mother after her charges and see that infection didn’t set in.

The last thought rankled Madlin, and since rankling was one of the few activities she had available, she did a lot of it. Though she had pencil and paper aboard, drafting on the uneven floors of the
Darksmith
was a chore. Trying to use a desk would have required welding a chair to the floor first, and she had no welding equipment. And so she watched the sea, watched the rest of the crew, and watched Jamile.

If Sosha had been half as attentive to Rynn as Jamile was being to the injured crewmen, she’d still have two good feet—well, Madlin had them, but so would Rynn. Rynn never would have been tackled by a lumbering oaf if she had two working feet to dodge her aside.

Rynn. Rynn. She kept pounding the name into her own head, using it every time she thought of her twin, making an effort of it. Her father had been right, but it had taken Sosha’s reasoning to show her why.

There was something to be said for image. When her father entered a room, people stopped what they were doing and paid attention. He wasn’t a physically imposing man, but he looked the part of a Mad Tinker, always covered in grease, wearing coveralls to meet princes, peering through multi-lensed spectacles.

Madlin reached down and felt below the knee of her left leg, just to remind herself that it was there. She’d always been close with Rynn, as much as any of the twinborn she’d spoken with. Some felt the connection more keenly, others viewed the twin as more a partner than a second self. Madlin and Rynn had always been among the former. While it made sharing memories and skills more fluid, it came with drawbacks. Rynn had woken on two separate occasions since the loss of her foot only to fall heavily to the floor when she tried to put weight on a foot that she had trod upon only minutes earlier in Madlin’s body. For her part, Madlin was wary of standing with nothing to hold onto, constantly worried about losing her balance—though the nagging feeling faded as each day wore on, only to be renewed the next morning.

The injury reminded her troops of the sacrifice she’d made, which was stupid, because it was her own carelessness that had gashed up her foot, not anything the kuduks did to her. Her persistent imprisonment in the murderous collar should have been a far better symbol of her treatment under kuduk ownership. Unfortunately, it was too subtle, too familiar to most of the troops. Most of the Korrish aboard had worn a collar in one form or another. Her inability to escape hers was more a subject of pity than inspiration. The Errol Company troops that were aboard the
Jennai
couldn’t grasp the scope of the horror.

Madlin blamed Rynn for her own injury and the repeated tearing of stitches that led to her septic rot, but she blamed Sosha for not noticing soon enough to stop it. Rynn had her own plan in the works to be rid of her crutches, and Madlin—paper or no—was determined to help.

As she stared out to sea, her eyes lost their focus. Within her head, images of steel and leather evolved. Free of the confines of the workshop or even the drafting table, she snipped and stretched, bent and cut, bolted and welded pieces in her mind. She envisioned the workings, saw how they would interact, and made adjustments for defects. While she slept, Madlin would let Rynn put the refined ideas to paper. While she lazed along the railing of the drifting
Darksmith
, she daydreamed of metal feet.

“Land!”

The shout chased away the lethargy that had spread like measles among the crew. Those on deck perked up and took to the port railing, twisting about from the high vantage to better view the horizon. Those who had been sulking below decks boiled up and into the sunlight.

“About bleedin’ time,” Tanner muttered, edging his way down the deck with a hand to the nearest wall as he took a spot at the starboard railing beside Madlin. “I don’t care if it’s got jungle cats and snakes and wild boars, so long as it’s got flat ground to stand on. Gut me, what am I saying? I hope there’s some crazed hungry animals out there waitin’ to eat us. It’ll make ‘em easier to put on a spit if they ain’t runnin’ away.”

“You’re not worried about Dan at all?” Madlin asked. She studied his face as he looked along with everyone else to where the lookout with the spyglass had pointed. “Or is that it, you got your fortune, now you’re glad to be rid of him?”

“If I were you, I’d be more worried if he was alive,” Tanner said. “I saw you push him over. If blowing up a ship didn’t set his mood right, he might still be pretty sore with you.”

“You don’t sound worried.”

“Dan’s the emperor of mixed blessings,” said Tanner. He slouched against the railing and slid down until he was sitting next to Madlin. “He gets us more dark eyes turned our way than I’d like, but he takes heads when it comes time to settle up. He’s not really a friend, or a partner, or a boss. Gut me if he thinks he works for
me
. It’s more like we’re in on the same scams, and it’d piss him off if anyone botched things up on him. I think he’d kill to protect me, same as he would the empress of Kadrin, or a horse he’d taken the time to name. If it’s in his garden, he’ll be sliced belly to throat before he lets anyone so much as lean on it without his leave.”

“Just how cracked is he? Do you think he’d kill me over pushing him overboard? I didn’t think. I just sort of did it; it was an accident.”

“Want my advice?” Tanner asked. Madlin nodded vigorously. “Tell the little prick he deserved it. If that doesn’t work and it looks like he’s gonna do you cold, tell him his uncle would never kill a defenseless lady.”

“I’m not defenseless!” Madlin protested. She drew her revolver and held it up, careful not to point the barrel in Tanner’s direction.

Tanner laid a hand atop the barrel and pushed it back down in the direction of the holster. “You just keep talking like that, and he
might
kill you anyway. He’s thirteen and got all the rot that goes along with it. Tell him he can’t hurt you and sure as hangin’ he’ll try. Make him feel like a big man, he won’t lower himself to hurt a girl.”

Tanner stood once more and squinted at the horizon, shielding his eyes with a hand. “Maybe best if we do find him washed up in pieces though. Kid might’ve started a war in Veydrus with that stunt of his.”

“He better not be dead. I still plan to get him to show me proper magic.”

Tanner leaned over the rail and twisted around so his face was just a handsbreadth from Madlin’s. “Depending what we find on that little island, I might have an alternate plan.”

“What makes you so sure it’s a little island?” Madlin asked. “Could be the southern peninsula of Takalia, for all we know.”

“We ain’t drifted
that
far in a day,” Tanner replied. “And tiny, piss pot little islands are all this stretch of Katamic’s got.”

By noontime, it took no special lens or vantage to spot the grey stretch of rock that jutted from the Katamic in their path. It was the largest of several now visible from the
Darksmith’s
deck. For all appearances some ancient god had waded north from Khesh to build Takalia, and his bag of rocky shorelines had torn and spilled in the middle of the sea. The way was dotted with flotsam from the
Fair Trader
like trail signs. Whatever current was dragging them along had made better time with lighter debris than the hulking steel hull of the steamship.

Captain Toller made a few attempts to alter their course, in an effort to put some word in as to where they ran aground. The bait sail was in tatters, but by makeshift rigging the crew had managed to raise it and catch a wind; the Katamic deigned not to notice the effort, and pulled them along in spite of the tiny, ragged bit of cloth that tugged at the ship like a puppy biting at a trouser hem. An attempt at rowing lasted all of perhaps five minutes. A wooden ship the size of the
Darksmith
would take a hundred men or more at the oars. The steamship was far heavier than a wooden ship its size, giving it both more mass to push and a deeper draw to force aside in their path, plus they had no proper oars. Even a crew of landfolk would have soon realized that rifle butts and steel-sheet wreckage from the lower decks were no way to move a vessel.

Thus they waited for the Katamic to be done with them, and see where they ended up.

Madlin kept her vigil at the aft castle, starboard side. “I’ve been watching the path of the debris field in front of us,” Madlin said to Captain Toller when he happened to pass nearby. “We’ve got a good chance to miss that large island. Only the leftmost part of the swath of wreckage seems to be washing up.”

“I’ve already done all I can think of to move the ship under power—wind, steam, muscle—we’ve got nothing to do but wait,” said Toller. “And pray, I suppose.”

“You’re missing the obvious one, I think,” Madlin said.

“How’s that, now?”

“Swim.”

Toller’s face went slack and his eyes darted off in the direction of the island. “No, we can’t just leave the ship adrift. What if someone salvaged it?”

“That one should be even more obvious,” Madlin replied.

Toller shook his head. “No. We’re better off seeing where the currents take us. We should reach Takalia within a week.”

“And we’ve got two days of food. Four if we ration like misers,” said Madlin. “My father had the world-ripper running last night, nearly got it to open a hole. If his flywheel trick works out, we’ll tell him where we are and get picked up.”

“If we stay on the ship, we get those same four days, except we won’t be surrounded by whatever crew of the
Fair Trader
survived. And Cadmus had a dozen dullards with guns blast holes in his machine.”

“Just the wire webbing. That’s quick to fix.”

“Doesn’t fill
me
with confidence that he’s about to whisk us off to safety,” Toller said. He pointed to the island. “We maroon ourselves there, you’re betting our lives on your father’s tinkering. I’d rather take my chances at sea, and either land starving in Takalia or force Cadmus to pluck us from a moving target.”

“Yeah, and what about Dan?” Madlin asked.

Toller bowed his head, revealing the bit of a spreading bald spot Madlin didn’t normally have a vantage to view. “Regrettable. He gave his life to save us from those misbegotten rat-kissers.”

“And if he didn’t, he’s probably stranded there, waiting for us.”

Toller put a hand over his mouth and rubbed at his stubble. “There’s no smoke coming from the island. He seems the type to have laid into them, burning things.”