Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (7 page)

She had more in common with the cat than the Cap’n these days. Sometimes that concerned her, sometimes it didn’t.

Ashua was asleep below her, wrapped in a sleeping bag and tucked up in her little nest, a padded nook in the bulkhead. Jez could hear the sigh of her breath, the slow beating of her heart. Elsewhere, she heard the soft chink of Bess’s chainmail parts moving in the faint breeze from the
Ketty Jay
’s air circulation system. The golem was dormant and still, an empty suit standing in Crake’s makeshift sanctum at the back of the hold, hidden by a wall of crates and a tarpaulin curtain.

There were other sounds too, sensed rather than heard. The mutter and babble of dreaming minds. The distant call of the Manes, a plaintive howl like a wolf-pack missing a member. Loudest were the thoughts of the pilots, labourers and customs officials who walked the docks outside. They came to her in a whispered susurrus, a confused mess of voices on the edge of understanding.

She could listen to them, if she wanted, though it was frustratingly hard to make sense of what she heard. It came as stitched-together patches of nonsense, windows of clarity in a shifting haze. She made it a point never to consciously spy on the crew’s thoughts, but she couldn’t help overhearing some things. She knew the Cap’n’s concerns about her. She shared them herself.

At least he thought it was only her uncanny hearing he had to worry about. If he knew the truth, he’d kick her off the
Ketty Jay
for sure.

Frey had wondered how she knew so much about that Awakener freighter in the storm. Things that couldn’t possibly be accounted for by hearing alone. The truth was, she’d been listening to the mass of thoughts from the people it carried, gleaning titbits from the muddle.

‘. . . should have told her when I . . .’

‘. . . emember to fill this up before . . .’

‘. . . is he now? What is he . . .’

‘. . . not my problem anyway, no matter what they . . .’

‘. . . feel sick. Been a month now since I’ve felt right. Should see a . . .’

She brought herself back to her body with an effort. It was perilously easy to lose herself in other people’s worries and desires. Too many minds nearby, even at night. During the day it was worse. In a crowd, it required constant concentration just to keep herself together. She felt that if she let go, she’d scatter like light, flying away in a thousand directions at once.

I’m losing it
, she told herself.
Losing myself.

Riss had warned her. The more she tested herself, the more she practised her newfound Mane abilities, the more like them she’d become. She’d accepted that. She’d chosen to change. But it was hard to let go of what she once was, what she’d always been. It was hard to let go of the world that surrounded her.

She’d drifted into an unknown sea, with no shore to navigate by and no lights to guide her. She was becoming estranged from both her companions and herself, and getting closer to nobody. It frightened her.

Then she saw Pelaru.

The thought of him focused her mind. The voices from outside faded. She saw his face, clear as if he was standing there beside her on the walkway. His olive skin, the sculpted hauteur of his features, the curve of his mouth, the straight set of his shoulders.

Beautiful.

Beautiful, in a way that startled her. Beautiful like an infant saw beauty as it stared in wonder at the sunrise. Incomprehensible, overwhelming, penetrating to the core.

What did it mean? What had she seen, when she saw the whispermonger?

Jez had always been detached, even before that day in Yortland when the Manes came. She’d yearned to connect with others but never could. She had friends and family and partners, but the deep, passionate link that she craved in her adult life had always eluded her. Aspects of human relationships that other people seemed ready to kill and die for had never seemed that important to her.

Once she’d slept with a man forty years older than her just to get the Cap’n’s neck out of a noose. Most people would have been appalled by the notion. For her, it was simply the most expedient way of getting something done. She hadn’t been defiled by the experience. She hadn’t felt much of anything about it.

Maybe there was something wrong with her. Maybe she wanted to feel more than she had a right to, more than she was capable of. That was why she’d chosen the Manes, in the end. They promised togetherness, companionship, the kind of unity that was beyond anything she’d experienced before.

But now this. Was this what the Cap’n felt when he thought of Trinica? This astonishing, stunned sense of
wanting
? Was she in love? And if that was so, was it too late to turn back from the path she’d chosen?

Was it too late to choose to be human?

Five

The Ghost City – Reunions – Morben Kyne – An Island in a Sea of Ruin – Unwelcome Allies

T
he city of Korrene lay at the feet of the Hookhollow mountains, on a stony hill that afforded a commanding view of the plains to the west. In the days before the Third Age of Aviation and mass-manufactured aircraft, it had been an important gateway for travellers and merchants making their perilous way up to Vardia’s vast Eastern Plateau.

Those days were long gone.

‘Damn,’ said Frey, peering through the windglass of the
Ketty Jay
’s cockpit. He looked across at Ashua. ‘And I thought
your
city was a piece of shit.’

Crake couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment. Rabban, where Ashua grew up, had been bombed to rubble during the Aerium Wars and still hadn’t been adequately rebuilt. But the destruction in Korrene was of another order of magnitude altogether.

The ancient city had been literally ripped apart. An enormous crooked chasm ran through the heart of it, separating the western third. Smaller cracks radiated outwards; the streets slumped into them. Broken stubs of towers jutted from the wreckage of palaces, shattered arches lay in pieces, winding lanes and terraces had folded and crumbled. The river that had run through the city was dry now, choked off by the cataclysm.

Fifty years since the final quake. The city had endured many shocks over thousands of years, but this last one had been the end of it. The survivors left and never returned. Once the scavengers had picked it over, not even the pirates wanted to stay. It became a ghost city, a bitter reminder of the savage nature of the land they lived in.

But the ghosts had been stirred up by the civil war, and the city wasn’t so empty any more.

‘Somebody tell me why they’re fighting over that heap of bricks?’ Ashua asked. She was leaning against a bulkhead, hands in one of her many pockets. Her expression, as was usual, suggested she was deeply unimpressed by everything. A black tattoo swirled around her left eye, reaching over her cheek and onto her forehead. Rabban gang fashion, from a time when the borders of that smashed city were the limit of her world.

When nobody answered her question, she looked at Pelaru, who was standing near the doorway. The cockpit was crowded, as it often was these days. Usually the Cap’n was easily annoyed by people pestering him while he was flying, but Crake got the sense that Frey didn’t like being alone with Jez. Nor did any of them, for that matter.

‘How about you?’ she asked the whispermonger. ‘Isn’t it your job to know everything?’

Pelaru gave her a faint smile. ‘And if I gave it away for free, how would I eat?’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’d eat just fine,’ said Frey, with the merest hint of sulkiness. ‘Fighters coming in.’

There was a Navy frigate to the south of the city, hanging in the early evening sky. Several small shapes had detached from it and were approaching. They were hard to make out against the mountains, but since it was a Navy frigate, it was a safe bet they were Windblades.

Frey touched his earcuff. ‘Nice and easy, Pinn. We’re all friends here, remember? Stay off the trigger.’

Crake shifted uneasily and his gaze returned to the city. He didn’t like the idea of going down there, and not only because of his lifelong aversion to getting shot. It was something deeper than that, something that had been nagging him for weeks now.

It wasn’t the idea of stealing from the Awakeners that bothered him. It was the aristocratic sense of honour that had been instilled in him by a stern and industrious father. There was a clear enemy here, a threat to the nation and his way of life. He felt he should be participating in this war rather than living off it.

Besides, it was in his own interests to see the Awakeners defeated. They’d persecuted daemonists for more than a century and poisoned the populace against them, forcing them to practise the Art in secret or risk being lynched. If the Awakeners won, the persecution would only get worse.

But if they lost, if they were driven out . . . well, what might that mean for daemonism? What great strides in science might they make if daemonists were allowed a university, a library, a place to share their views without fear? Maybe then their profession wouldn’t be so fraught with danger.

Maybe then no more daemonists would have to suffer the tragedy that he had.

‘Ready on the heliograph, Jez,’ said Frey. ‘We want to let ’em know we’re on their side.’

Jez, hunched over her desk, reached for the press-switch by which she could send coded messages. There was a signal light on the
Ketty Jay
’s humped back, bright enough to be seen on all but the brightest day. Most aircraft didn’t have the daemon-thralled earcuffs that the
Ketty Jay
’s pilots used. It gave the crew an edge that had saved their lives more than once. Crake felt a small sense of pride at that.

Frey picked up a mug of coffee from the dash and sipped at it, watching the windblades approach without much concern. ‘So what do we tell ’em, Pelaru?’

‘Tell them that I am aboard, and I have important information for their leader. He knows me.’

‘Oh yeah? Who’s in charge down there, then?’

‘Kedmund Drave.’

‘Shit! Shit! Ow!’ Frey hissed as he spilt burning coffee over his fingers. He put down the mug and flapped his hand in the air to cool it off. ‘You could have told me that before!’

‘You didn’t ask. You and he have some history, then?’

‘Few years ago, Frey emptied a shotgun into him, point blank,’ said Ashua with a wicked smile. She liked that story.

‘Suffice to say I’m not his favourite person,’ said Frey. ‘Jez, do the business.’

Jez began tapping on the press-switch, signalling to the approaching Windblades. She hadn’t looked up from her desk since Pelaru had entered. The Thacian was making such a show of ignoring her that his interest was obvious to everyone.

What’s going on between with those two? Haven’t they only just met?

Crake cleared his throat. ‘Any, er, any other Century Knights down there apart from Drave?’ he asked Pelaru, as casually as he could manage. Frey cackled knowingly, and he felt his cheeks growing hot.

‘Some, I believe. Morben Kyne. Colden Grudge. Samandra Br—’

Frey clapped his hands and twisted in his seat to grin at Crake. ‘You hear that?’

‘One word, Frey . . .’ Crake warned.

‘What?’ Frey protested innocently. ‘You should be happy. That girl’s a knockout.’

Crake hurried out of the cockpit, face burning, Ashua’s laughter in his ears. Samandra Bree. Spit and blood, just the thought of her made his heart beat faster. Samandra, who he hadn’t seen since she decked him in the Samarlan desert. Samandra: loud, vulgar, wonderful.

As he headed for his cramped quarters, he began calculating how much time he had before landing. Enough to trim his short blond beard and do what he could with his hair. Enough to pick out his best coat and apply a little scent. Enough to make sure his hands were clean and his fingernails clipped.

Samandra.

The dangers of Korrene had paled into insignificance all of a sudden. Today, he was both the happiest man alive, and the most terrified.

The Coalition’s forward base was near the eastern edge of the city, set around a cracked landing pad surrounded by a clutter of ruined buildings and broken streets. There were a dozen craft there, tough military models, Tabingtons and Besterfields. Shuttles flew back and forth from the freighter to the south. Portable anti-aircraft guns scanned the sky.

Half the pad was taken up by the camp. Tractors pulled trailers loaded with crates between the tents. Generals debated over maps. Squads of blue-uniformed men smoked and waited restlessly.

The Windblades escorted the
Ketty Jay
down. Pinn and Harkins landed their fighters alongside. They’d barely touched the ground before a half-dozen men came heading over, led by the formidable figure of Kedmund Drave.

‘Let’s get out there and meet our fans,’ said Frey, who seemed rather jolly at the prospect of an argument.

They assembled down in the cargo hold, all but Bess, whom Crake had left dormant and hidden in the back. He thought it best if she stayed asleep: she wasn’t much help in delicate negotiations.

Silo pulled the lever and the cargo ramp opened up. The stink of prothane and aerium gas slipped in from outside, along with the noise of men and machines.

‘Best smiles, everyone,’ said Frey, and they followed him down to meet the welcoming committee.

Kedmund Drave was a man with a fearful reputation. He was the Archduke’s attack dog: stern, implacable, ruthless. They said he could smell treason; they said he could look into a man’s heart and root out a lie. And when you saw him, you believed it. He had a face that looked like it had never known a smile, cheek and throat scarred, eyes grey as stone, cropped hair the same colour. He wore close-fitting crimson armour beneath a dust-stained black cloak, a two-handed sword across his back, pistols at his waist.

‘Captain Frey,’ he said. ‘Just when I thought I had trouble enough.’