Tinker's Justice (28 page)

The bailiff stood before the gathering and rapped his wrists against one another, the stone bracelets he wore sending a sharp crack for all to hear. “Order. Order. Be seated and silent. Tonight our speaker is Mr. Ganrin Draksgollow, head of the Human Replacement Project. He will enlighten us on the details of the project, his progress to date with Kupak Deep’s human problem, and his proposal for wider adoption of the Human Replacement Project’s goals and policies. Mr. Draksgollow …”

The bailiff swept an arm toward Draksgollow and bowed out of the way.

Draksgollow cleared his throat. “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Central Council, citizens of Ruttania, fellow Korrish.” There were titters and muttering from the crowd, who weren’t used to being referred to by world. “I am a tinker by trade, a smith of steel and copper, not of words.” He flipped the card with that opening line out of the way on the lectern, feeling like a fool. “You all read the papers. You’ve read about the troubles across Korr, of humans who have turned violent, and worse … turned organized. Human violence has touched every one of you. Maybe you’ve got relatives in the mining business, or know someone whose slaves up and ran off with the rebels. The rest of you have felt it too, in higher prices at the market because thunderails get boosted, or because crops rotted in the fields with no slaves for the harvest. Most of you grumble about it, wondering when someone’s going to put an end to it. Up until me, nobody has. You see, you can’t just wrestle a bunch of rebels to the ground, take their stolen guns away from them, and stick them back in the fields and mines. It don’t work that way. You try that, and you’ve got killer humans everywhere, telling stories and steaming up the blood of the docile ones. You might even get them taking a pick or a hoe to the head of one of your overseers.”

“No, that’s not the way,” Draksgollow said. He fumbled beneath the lectern for the water pitcher and poured himself a glass, never taking his eyes from the audience. It felt like an hour before he had poured his drink and taken a sip to wet his throat. He wasn’t the sort who talked for long stretches, and it took a toll. “You need a purge, same as with a fouled engine. Clean out the dirty grease and oil, put in new.” There were murmurs in the audience again, and the bailiff clacked his bracelets again, continuing until order had been restored.

Draksgollow smiled his best flashpop smile. “You wanna know how, huh? What’re we gonna do if you do what I’m saying and we get rid of the humans? Well, let me explain.” He pulled down the drop cloth, revealing a placard beneath, large enough to be seen from the back row. It was a diagram of three worlds: Korr, Veydrus, Tellurak. “You see, this ain’t the only world. I already proved that much to the Central Council before they let me up here to talk. That ain’t the point. The point is that these other worlds have got humans, humans who haven’t got all one language, who can’t possibly manage to organize on the scale our rebellious humans have. These worlds look just like ours: same rivers, same mountains … we know our way around them. On a trial basis, I’ve been rounding up humans from these worlds and putting them to work.”

Draksgollow tipped the placard and let it fall to the floor, revealing the one behind it. It showed a diagram of two humans, side by side. He had hired out for the fellow who illustrated
Meadefeld’s Medical Journal
, and the detail was spot on. Draksgollow pulled out a slender brightsteel rod with a blunted tip and pointed to the diagram on the left. “This is a Korrish human, average in every way, right according to Slave Welfare census data. This other one is a specimen taken from one of the other worlds. Three inches taller, twelve percent more muscle mass, a bit of fat on him, but that won’t last him long.” There were a few chuckles. Draksgollow felt he was getting through to them. “Already acclimated to sky work and with a good understanding of manual farming. Put this one to work in the fields, and you’ll get more work out of him and less grumbling about rebellions.”

Draksgollow flipped to the next placard. It showed graphs of projected human purge rates and human capture rates. As he began explaining the details of the plan, he was already anticipating the reveal at the end: the opening of the world-hole. The Central Council had already seen it, but they needed public support for the plan. Once the spectators got to gawk into another world—even if it was really just a spare workshop with a world-ripper in it—that would tighten the final bolt. The Ruttanians would pay. They would give him all the resources he needed to field armies, to construct world-ripper outposts. Best of all, they would put his name atop it all.

A newspaper slapped down onto Rynn’s desk. It was the Eversall Deep Herald, evening edition. The headline read: “HUMAN REPLACEMENT PROJECT GAINS COUNCIL APPROVAL.” Below was a picture of Ganrin Draksgollow and an open world-hole behind him. In the background, through the world-hole, was a world-ripper.

“Charsi, glad to see you up and about,” Rynn asked. “Kupe’s been moping around and acting like a proper gentleman lately. This ought to—”

“Look at it!” Charsi insisted, jabbing a finger at the page.

Rynn adjusted her spectacles and picked up the paper, holding it up to the light and looking close. The technician at the controls was standing and posing for his flashpop with an imbecile look on his face—a lot like Kupe’s famous flashpop, now that she considered it. Finding nothing else unusual about the picture, she began scanning the accompanying article. “Looks like they’re going to scale up their efforts. We’re going to have our hands—”

Charsi snatched the paper out of Rynn’s hands and pointed again. “Look right there. You can see the controls!”

Rynn shrugged. “It’s a newspaper flashpop. It’s too grainy to read the numbers; that was the first thing I checked. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but—”

“It’s a flashpop,” said Charsi. “There’s a negative somewhere, probably at the print room of the Herald, or at the home of the newsman who took it.”

Rynn’s eyes widened. She leapt from her chair and wrapped her arms around Charsi, careful of the bandages where her left arm ended. “This could be it, the break we’ve been looking for! Charsi, you might just win us this war.”

Charsi glanced down, toward Rynn’s legs. “After the war, any chance I could get a tinkered arm?”

“After the war I’ll make you anything you want,” Rynn replied. She grabbed the paper and rushed for the door. “I’ve got to get Kaia on this right away.”

Dunston Harwick had never traveled much. Caladris Solaran had traveled, if possible, even less. It was the way with important men that they developed a gravity all their own, with people and events drawn to them. So it amused Harwick that the Korrish airship was parked low in the skies just high enough that the waves could not reach them, with no land within sight. It was as if Cadmus Errol thought he was some great trader, who knew the world so well that he could draw maps of it by memory and know where he was by the shape of a hill or a shoreline.

“Can’t say I got to see much of Korr while I was here,” Harwick remarked as he followed Cadmus to the transport gate. “That is, unless your world flooded and no one mentioned it.”

“You know how it is,” Cadmus replied without looking back. “Anything you don’t know, they can’t get out of you.”

“You really ought to learn at least the basics of political evasions, Cadmus,” Harwick said.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Cadmus said, the first bald-faced lie he had caught the Mad Tinker in. “It’s just that I lost my twin to a daruu who got clever with a world-ripper and trapped me.”

“I had thought it too rude to ask how your twin had perished,” Harwick replied. “So I got the story out of your daughter’s friend days ago. Ghastly business, but I understand the sentiment. I was done in by an uncle of mine, and I still quite haven’t gotten over it going on six years.”

“I hear there are daruu in your world,” Cadmus replied. “Well, the one we’re sending you to, anyway.”

“Generally my people refer to them as the stone folk, but the old term still exists.”

“Any idea where I might look for one?”

Harwick saw no harm in letting the tinker spy on the stone folk’s business. It might occupy him for weeks. “Far beneath the Kadrin city of Raynesdark, they have their city. If they have others, I don’t know of them. They aren’t the most sociable of peoples, though the empire has gotten on well enough with them that we’ve traded on occasion.”

“Raynesdark?” Cadmus mused aloud. “I know where that is.”

“Has your Megrenn associate been schooling you on Veydran geography, or did my son deign to convey scholarly information?”

“Something like that,” Cadmus replied.

They reached the hold of what was once the Grangian airship
Sulfurous
, according to the brief history of the ship he’d been given. It housed one of the adjunct world-rippers used by the rebel raiding squads. Harwick’s luggage had already been piled next to the target locator, ready to carry through. A fresh-faced young soldier sat at the controls, while Cadmus kept himself between Harwick and the console, blocking the Acardian nobleman’s line of sight.

“I can’t convince you to set me down any closer, can I?” Harwick asked. The target locator showed a road some miles north of Kadris. He would either have hours of walking ahead of him, or have to debase himself before a wagon driver to allow him aboard.

“Your people sniff out the viewframe a bit too readily,” Cadmus replied. “Sorry.”

“Better safety than haste, I suppose,” Harwick replied with a sigh. “Very well, send me through.”

Cadmus gave the technician a nod and the gate opened. An attending soldier helped the now-middle-aged sorcerer haul his belongings through to Veydrus. Just before the gate closed, Harwick leaned to the side, trying to look past the Mad Tinker to catch a glimpse of the console. Cadmus leaned as well, shaking his head. The view vanished, and Harwick was left at the side of the North Road out of Kadris with his luggage at his side.

Harwick sat down on a trunk filled with clothes and waited for a likely-looking wagon to happen by. He was in too good a mood to spoil it with a long, sweaty walk.
Really Cadmus, your people spend too much time underground or bottled up in ships.
Dunston Harwick was no traveler at all, but he was a scholar of the highest caliber. The night sky was a vast map that stared down upon the land, and sailors had been using it for navigation since before the invention of the compass. To those who enjoyed astronomy, knowing the date, the time, and the location of a constellation or two was all it took. Harwick had calculated the location of the
Jennai
the night he arrived.

Chapter 22

“Judge a man not by what he has, but by what he seeks.” – Kheshi saying

The chamber was too dark, lit by just a pair of spark bulbs overhead. Madlin would have to do something about that, but it could wait. The quiet was isolating, with only the single room and no companions. Of course, only someone from the deeps of Korr could find quiet with the dynamos running constantly and the hum of paired world-rippers. This was Madlin’s refuge.

Hollowed out of Tellurak’s moon, it was a place only she and Rynn knew of. Rynn had carved it out using the
Jennai’s
auger under the guise of expanding the facility on Korr’s moon. For some time, Madlin had been pillaging supplies and parts coming out of the airship’s workshops, and had managed to shrink the design of the world-ripper to table-top size.

Bolted to the stone wall was a pair of world-rippers as wide across as her forearm, just a few inches apart from one another. Like the pair in Korr’s moon, they were set into river water, submerged halfway. But Madlin’s system was compact, contained. A short length of pipe matched the diameter exactly, set with spigots in the bottom to siphon off water and pump out waste. The top had ventilation piping and a fan.

Her real achievement had been the second pair of reduced-size world-rippers, set flat on their sides and sealed together watertight. One end was set at the bottom of the Katamic Sea, the other near the surface. In between the two she had set a turbine, and that turbine was strong enough to power the whole facility, world-rippers and all. In theory, it violated the physical law that prevented machines from perpetual motion, but Madlin knew that the world-rippers probably violated a lot of physical laws.

On the workbench in front of her lay the most recent and ambitious project she had undertaken with the world-rippers. Like the others in her secret lair, each viewframe was small enough for her to lift by herself. The unique thing about these was the lining of dragonhide. It stretched between the two frames without a seam or gap; having been flayed from one of the dragon’s digits as a single piece. It was macabre to think where it had come from, but Madlin had worked with leather before, and knew it for cowhide. Then again, she had never spoken with any of the cows whose leather she had used.

Another of Madlin’s innovations was the secondary viewframe. With the technical manual, she had been able to dissociate the viewing function from the hole-opening function, and via a selector switch, she had linked all of the moon’s world-rippers to a single control console. Flipping the selector to one of the new world-rippers in the dragonhide frame, she prepared to test a theory.

The view was set to Tellurak, the location a remote mountain in the unpopulated northern portion of what was once Tinker’s Island. Madlin supposed that mapmakers would still call it that for some time, but for her it had always been The Mad Tinker’s Island, and had lost that name when he left it behind—perhaps for good. She aligned the view until it was inches from the ice-crusted face of a granite peak, and turned the world-ripper on. A chill breeze wafted into the room through the open end of the dragonhide tube, out the inert world-ripper.

Madlin put on a coat and switched the selector to the other world-ripper of the pair. Turning the world dial, she ventured into Korr. Though she was sure she could find what she needed in Tellurak, she knew exactly where to go to find it in Korr. Industry demanded steel, and steel demanded smelting. Smelting took heat. The auxiliary view-frame whizzed through the frozen northlands and across the Sea of Kerum. There was no sign of the
Jennai
as she passed; the world was too vast for such coincidences. Eventually she found Eversall Sky, and from there it was no trick at all delving into Eversall Deep, the part of Korr Madlin knew better than any other, despite
technically
never having been there. Eversall wasn’t a major steel-working city, but Drendath Brothers’ Fine Alloys produced specialty brightsteel alloys prized in chemical plants. They had a smelter on site.

Madlin found the facility with ease, located in a remote corner of Layer Three, with its own ventilation straight to the surface. It was off hours, but the furnaces were never allowed to go cold. Night watchmen were stationed to prevent anyone getting in and causing mischief, and to alert the owners if anything should happen in the night while the furnaces were only lightly attended. Those watchmen could do nothing to stop Madlin’s intrusion, and any report of her activity would sound peculiar at best.

Stopping the view-frame over one of the furnaces, she adjusted the view until it was not quite touching the sizzling hot surface. Pulling on a pair of protective goggles over her spectacles, Madlin pulled the switch to turn on the second world-ripper. There was a muffled hiss, like an air leak inside a machine’s guts. Madlin shut off both world-rippers and pulled off her goggles.

What had gone wrong?
She had expected something more dramatic. Flipping the selector to the Acardian peaks and resetting her view-frame with the flip of a toggle—a time-saving device that matched it to the world-ripper’s settings—she inspected the mountain peak.

The ice was gone. It hadn’t been a thick layer, but Madlin could see bare rock where once there had been a crusted layer of ice at least the width of her finger. With her heart quickening, Madlin rushed over to the world-ripper to inspect the dragonhide. It was damp with condensation, but completely unaffected by the heat.

Over the course of an afternoon, Madlin performed a number of follow-up tests. The paired world-rippers, which she was thinking needed a name of their own, held up to open flame and to the heat from a magma chamber, but stretched dangerously when exposed to pressurized steam. Hours of rune carving into the tough, leathery surface made the dragonhide tough as the walls of Raynesdark, after which the device could hold the pressure from even industrial chemical storage. In northern Acardia, there was now a blackened peak that had been blasted with acetylene gas where Madlin had placed a candle. The resulting fiery explosion had done nothing to the dragonhide tube.

Satisfied with the day’s work, Madlin sat back and put her feet up on the workbench. Reaching over, she idly turned the view-frame until it looked directly at the sun. The dim lunar cavern brightened as if Madlin had pulled back the curtain of a south-facing window. There wasn’t much for refreshment in the tiny hideaway, but she had a bottle of Kheshi wine she had been meaning to try. No one was around to raise an eyebrow at her highbrow choice. Pulling out a pocket knife, Madlin jabbed the cork and wiggled it free. The wine went down smooth, and a warm, relaxed feeling filled her belly. She settled in for some quiet time alone.

A pile of books lay in a corner, stolen from the finest libraries across Korr. Most of them were ancient daruu tomes on the subject of runes—a welcome diversion into a form of magic she had some skill with—but others were chosen specifically for her current project.

Madlin selected a book published just months ago, a scientific text on solar physics, expounding on the latest theories of what goes on inside a star. Stripped to bare bolts, it said that the sun and other stars like it were the hottest things in the known universe.

Madlin was going to find out just how impervious to heat dragonhide was.

Everyone else was asleep. With a mug of strong tea, Cadmus kept the tides of slumber at bay. Finding the daruu city had proven remarkably easy with Harwick’s simple explanation of where it was located. He already had the coordinates for Raynesdark in his notes from Madlin’s goblin-led assault on the city. But far below, the tunnels changed. Gone were the rough-hewn mines of human excavation. In their place were tunnels like a Korrish art museum, with walls polished smooth and flowing with sculpted murals. The signs were written in plain Korrish, with even simple tunnel signs carved in a master’s steady hand.

Cadmus had no inkling of whether Kezudkan had found his people or not, but he suspected the crafty old daruu would have known where to look. In the absence of any clue where in the city to begin his search, Cadmus started at one end near the top and worked through the whole of it methodically. It was tedious work, the worst sort of task to toil at alone the middle of the night, fighting to stay awake. Cadmus had renewed youth in his favor, but he could have used someone to talk to while he searched.

For a moment he considered waking Jamile. Like most twinborn, she slept soundly, and she hadn’t noticed when he slipped out of bed to return to the control consoles in the main chamber. He used to sleep that way, when he had Erefan’s eyes to look through at night. Now, the great dark void behind his eyes was as much a reason to stay awake as his work. It was half a death, a preview, he imagined, of what awaited Cadmus when he died as well.

That death would come all the sooner if he couldn’t find Kezudkan and put a stop to him. That Draksgollow fellow was the one making headlines, but he was just a face to allow the daruu to remain safely anonymous. The kuduk tinker and his horrific Human Replacement Project might even be a trap. The daruu knew nothing of twinborn—or at least hadn’t before exploring the other worlds, Cadmus had to consider—but there was the rest of the Human Rebellion to consider. Even if he believed Erefan was dead, Kezudkan had to realize the rebels would want to put a stop to him. What better way to draw their attention than a scheme that promised to wipe out them and their families.

And so Cadmus stayed up long into the night, taking in the sights of a city built by Veydran daruu. As he scanned, he sketched a rough map, occasionally noting a coordinate (in code, of course) to make up for the deplorable lack of proper scale. He was able to add names to the tunnels from the helpful signs the daruu posted at each crossing. Even on a first visit, Cadmus imagined it hard for anyone to get lost if they knew the language. But none of the signs hinted at a world-ripper, or anyplace that one might erect dangerous machinery, or housing for guests from other worlds. Cadmus just kept going, yawning between sips of his tea, trips to the lavatory, and refills of his mug.

At length he stumbled across it. There was a stretch of unadorned stone wall, which was a rarity from what he had seen. He guessed that meant it was new—no one had gotten around to embellish it yet. Following it, he found a simple hemispherical chamber dedicated to a single device: Kezudkan’s world-ripper.

Cadmus had never suspected that when Erefan fell to the daruu’s trap, the search to hunt him down would lead to Veydrus. But it was clearly the daruu’s work. Kezudkan had not even made improvements to the design since delving into constructing them on his own. Drifting the view close to the console, Cadmus noticed a number of lingering old flaws that he had eliminated from the current design: improved dial layout, single-switch activation of the viewframe, fuses to protect against surges. With a smirk, he reminded himself that he had been the brains of the collaboration between daruu and human, owner and slave. Kezudkan liked to ponder and dabble, not get his hands greasy.

The room was unoccupied, with a pair of stout daruu guards posted outside. As much as Cadmus might have wanted to catch a glimpse of his nemesis, at least he now knew where to find him. With a twist of the world dial, Cadmus sent the viewframe into the swirling miasma between worlds, then shut off the machine.

He headed back to bed with a sense of contentment tinged with excitement. He would sleep better now.

“I feel like we’re breaking a law or something,” Vaulk whispered.

“Oh, you’re just being a worry-worm,” Sosha replied softly. The two of them sat side by side at the controls of the world-ripper in the rear left quadrant of the
Jennai
, near the liftwing hangar. “I’d do this myself but Mr. Harwick wrote the book in Acardian.”