World-Ripper War (Mad Tinker Chronicles Book 3) (11 page)

Madlin’s philosophical musings were interrupted by a clatter from across the room. Cadmus had dropped a wrench as he pulled himself from beneath the control console. “Things going amiss over there?”

Cadmus said nothing, but pulled a switch and the first bulb around the world-ripper’s frame lit. “Hah!” his voice echoed across the room. He pulled the others in succession and when the final bulb lit, his world-ripper sprang to life, showing a view out over the sea. “What are the coordinates over there?”

With the controls operating on relative location, the settings for the two would be nearly identical for what they had planned. Madlin read off the numbers from her machine, and Cadmus turned the settings on his to match. The view was from the same remote valley in the Savage Lands as far from Madlin’s view as his machine was from hers. Cadmus adjusted his side until the two views were back to back.

“You ready over there?” he asked.

“Nothing left but to try it.”

Madlin threw the switch, and her machine opened a hole to Tellurak. Water from the stream gushed through as if a dam had burst. In a strange sense, one had. The canal carried the water across the room, under a metal bridge that connected one half of the room to the other, covering the ends of pipes that jutted into the canal to pump fresh water out and wastewater in. It sped toward Cadmus’s side where he awaited its arrival with a hand ready on the switch for the other machine.

The water level in Cadmus’s view had drastically lowered. Madlin’s machine was starving the stream just an inch upriver from where his looked. When the water was about to crash into the frame of his world-ripper, Cadmus activated it, opening a world-hole for the water to exit through. The water poured back into the stream bed on Cadmus’s end.

Madlin let out a whoop, and Cadmus cackled and clapped his hands together. “Smell that fresh air,” said Madlin.

“We need to install some rocks, to make it babble like a proper stream,” said Cadmus with a critical eye on the flow.

Their elation was short lived. Once the water filled the canal, it kept rising. In the span of seconds, it was spilling over into the banks of the canal and heading for spark equipment. Prudence had made them keep the wiring off the floor when trying to harness a tiny river for themselves, but a flood was an alarming prospect when trapped in a small space with enough spark to turn them both to cinders.

“What in Eziel’s name...?” Madlin shouted.

Cadmus was already back at the controls for his machine. “It’s the gravity. Water pressure is higher on both sides than it is in here. We need to raise the world-holes.”

Madlin rushed to her own controls as Telluraki water washed over the soles of her boots. “Blast it, you’re right. I worked out the setup without taking the gravity change into account. Who knew the moon would be like this?”

“Cap it,” Cadmus said. “Worry about it after we stop this flood.” Cadmus brought his side completely out of the water, turning his end into a drain pipe. The water level in the canal began to drop.

When Madlin was able to adjust the controls on her end, she brought the hole halfway out of the water, and the flow into the canal lessened and stabilized.

“Sorry.”

Cadmus looked down into the canal. None of the pipes were underwater, meaning no pumped water until something was done about the civic engineering of their new headquarters. “Well, you’re the one who’s going to mop it up.”

Madlin looked out her end of the setup, then across to the hole on Cadmus’s side of the room. “I can only imagine what this must look like to the animals out there.”

“I imagine they see two idiot humans, trying to flood the moon of another world with their stream water.”

“Yeah, I’ll get working on a solution to the gravity problem.”

Rynn felt foolish. She fidgeted in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position. Her tinker’s legs were the best thing she’d built since her injury; they’d changed her life. But there were still deficiencies to the design and sitting was one of them. For reasons she could not quite explain to herself, she had washed and changed in preparation for dinner. Nothing she wore was fancy or even particularly ladylike—she owned nothing but coveralls and loose-fitting, comfortable garments—but she was scrubbed clean to the freckles and her clothes smelled of laundry soap.

For Dan?
The question nagged at her. She tried to justify it to herself as a visit of state. Dan was as good as an ambassador to Veydrus. He was influential, powerful, and she was planning to ask for his help.
He’s all that ... but ... DAN?
He was also spoiled, vicious, and violent. Her boys liked the idea of putting holes in a few kuduks here and there, but there was never the
glee
in their eyes that she had seen in his at the prospect of a force invading Tinker’s Island. There was never the wanton bloodletting as Dan had shown at the card room in Buou.

There was a knock at the door. In a panic, Rynn mussed her hair—which she had just finished brushing—lest Dan get the wrong idea. “Come in.”

“Thought I’d come half an hour late,” Dan said as he poked his head in, “but I figured I’d kicked enough dirt on your boots for one day.” He slipped inside and closed the door behind him. They were alone.

“Thanks,” said Rynn. “You’re one of the few left around here who ever does. You’re better at it than the gang I ran with.”

“Well, there’s always a line you can’t go over,” Dan said as he sauntered to the table. “Back someone into a corner, even the scrawniest cat will fight back. Me? I just don’t worry about that line.”

“But you just said—”

“I said you’d had enough, not that I was worried about pushing you too far. Nice spread, I must say. Your bandits pop off to a royal cupboard for all this sparkling finery?”

“This?” Rynn asked, waving a hand over the table set for two. The plates were polished obsidian, chased with gold. Forks, knives, and spoons all shone in immaculate brightsteel—which did look a little like silver at a casual glance, now that Rynn thought about it. “These vacu-dirges were classy rides before we filled them with sweaty human soldiers. This junk all came from first class. Kitchen staff went a little off the tracks when I told them I needed a table set for two in ... my ... quarters.” Rynn swallowed. She had gone off the tracks a bit herself.

Dan smirked and slid into the chair across from her. “You don’t say. Well, you’re looking a lot better. Wouldn’t hardly know you broke your nose a week ago.”

Rynn fumbled her hands under the table and gave a nervous laugh. “Well, I can’t grow fingers back, but I’m not exactly made of glass.”

Dan flexed the fingers of his left hand. “Yeah, the skin color took a while to get right, but you’d think I grew up with these. Perks of being a mighty sorcerer, am I right?”

“Wouldn’t know. You keep refusing to teach me.”

“Well, I’d teach Madlin if I was going to teach either of you. She’s got a better Source for it. But you need a real teacher, someone who can get you the guidance you need. Not some lucky, gifted warlock who can barely explain what he’s doing.”

Rynn stopped fidgeting. “You’d really do that? Help me find a teacher?”

Dan shrugged. “I’ve got all kinds of political power in Veydrus. I could get you instruction at the Imperial Academy. They’d plunk you in with the eight-year-olds, and you wouldn’t know the language, but they could teach you real magic in a few years.”

“Pass.”

The food arrived just then. Though they were still rebels and soldiers, a number of the
Jennai’s
crew were full time kitchen staff, from cooks to servers. She was glad that the two who carried in their meal were relative strangers to her. Given a calm moment’s thought, Rynn could have put names to both of them, but her thoughts were anything but calm. She was glad that Greuder hadn’t delivered the food personally, or she might have turned red as the tomato soup that was their first course.

As soon as the door shut behind the servers, Dan spoke. “So, what was it you needed to see me about?”

Rynn took a mouthful of piping hot soup—burning the inside of her mouth—to try to compose her approach. “Blasted stuff is boiling!”

“Yeah, I’ve heard you can blow on it to fix that,” Dan remarked dryly.

Rynn huffed and took a sip of ale to ease the burning. “Well, the
Jennai
is completely reliant on runes for levitation.”

“You’re better off, believe me.”

“Oh, I agree. But I’ve been thinking ... how do we land? I was hoping you knew a reverse rune for levitation. One that makes gravity, maybe?”

“Gravity? The bloody blades is that?”

“You know, the force that keeps us all from drifting off into the sky? Makes the world go round the sun?” She almost added that the moon does the same, but the less talk of moons, the better.

“Why would we need a force to hold us down?”

“Eziel, damn your backward little magic world! Any two objects attract one another; the larger and heavier the object, the more they attract.”

Dan shook his head. “Nope, that can’t be true. I find I am much better attracted to small women than large ones.”

“It’s ... is ...” Rynn put a hand to her forehead. “Never mind. Just ask your grandfather—you mentioned once that he was clever—or your teachers at that academy. Someone in your witchcraft world must have puzzled out celestial mathematics, and if they’re half as lazy as you, they immediately found a way to do it with magic.”

There was a moment’s pause where Dan furrowed his brow with his head cocked to one side. “I am getting the impression you think Korrish are smarter than Veydrans.”

“I imagine we’ve damned well had to be. We’ve had to work for everything.”

“Envy is ugly, isn’t it?”

They ate in silence after that. Rynn could think of no recovery from the cliff she’d had thrown the conversation off. It amazed her that Dan could keep his silence for that length of time.
Did I actually hurt his feelings?
It seemed implausible. Dan had never shown signs of having complicated feelings before. The boy was little more than a machine that sorted people for future rutting, killing, or exploiting. Bruising his ego would be like stomping on a shadow.

“Thanks for the dinner. Better food than the rest of your crew gets, that’s for sure.” Dan stood and wiped his mouth on a cloth.

“Dan, just try. Please?” Rynn asked. “If you can find a way to use runes to create gravity, I’ll take the world-ripper off duty for as long as it takes to find Tanner and get you to him.”

“Blackmail, huh? I was wondering if you even
remembered
I wanted off this boat.”

“No, it’s not blackmail, it’s ...” Rynn searched for a word.

“About time you grew the stones to play bare knuckle—figuratively, anyway. I’ll see what I can do.”

Chapter 10

“Having a gun pointed at you teaches you to value your own life. Pointing one at someone else tells you who you are.” –Pious Henlon (a.k.a. “Rascal”)

Kupe had never held a gun before. As a boy, he had imagined toting one of the knockers’ scatterguns, but in his imagination it had never been as heavy as the real thing in his hands. It was no scattergun—those rarely hurt kuduks, from what he had been told—but rather a rifle. Where Davlin’s people had gotten a hold of it, who could say? The rifle bore the mark of the Glandrek Company, which Kupe had never heard of. Guns were a subject where he was just beginning to learn what he didn’t know.

All around him, similar wonder and discovery was taking place among the humans of Cuminol. They were the ones who had backed up their brave words after Davlin’s sermon and shown up for duty. One of the acolytes had a crate filled with various implements of war and was doling them out like loaves to beggars. That was the sort of thing that the priests
used
to do, before they started talking about the old ways.

Kupe was assigned to a squad with nine other would-be rebels. Davlin made the assignments himself, and he broke Kupe and Charsi into separate squads. Kupe wasn’t sure whether it was intentional. No one else was asking questions about who they were teamed with, and he wasn’t about to be the troublemaker. At least Mull was with him as squad leader.

There were no uniforms, no badges, nothing knocker-like about the whole operation aside from being armed. Each of them covered their faces with whatever they could manage—scarves, handkerchiefs, hoods, goggles, or even just thick-smeared grease and soot. The squads filtered out into the maintenance tunnels, places Kupe barely knew existed, always taking them for granted. Regular tunnels—the sort with trolleys and shops and houses—those Kupe knew back and forth. As a news hauler, that was the oil that kept his business moving. People, places, happenings, he bought and sold those. The newspapers didn’t make a lot of money from the humans; most didn’t read, and a single newspaper could get passed among a circle of friends, then spread by word of mouth as gossip. It made Kupe enough money to get by, and it kept him known. It hadn’t gotten him into too many sewers, water treatment ducts, or spark routing junctions. It was a part of his education that he was about to fill in, it seemed.

Mull had ordered a tunnel-rat ahead to act as scout, a boy named Murfy. He was small for his age, skinny, and with twitchy eyes that never looked long in one direction. Kupe had seen him around, but didn’t know much about him. Murfy wasn’t a reader, wasn’t a gossip, and wasn’t a girl—the three sorts of people Kupe paid the most attention to. Tunnel rats were thieves and scrounges. Not many humans minded because they spent more time on the kuduk layers than bothering fellow humans. It was simple practicality though; you don’t steal from the poor because there’s no coin in it. Besides, the kuduks had the monopoly on wringing coin and labor from the humans.

“What’s the smell in here?” one of the other squad members asked. Kupe didn’t know her name.

“Everything,” Murfy answered. “C’mon.” He waved for them to follow. Oil lamps lit the passage, fed by an aging and rusted tangle of pipes that reminded Kupe of a bowl of noodles.

“Where we headed?” Kupe asked. He didn’t want his to be the first question, but since that valve had already been opened …

“You don’t need to know,” Mull snapped. “Just keep up and don’t get lost.”

Kupe gritted his teeth. He’d snookered Mull into this rebel business, and now the old coalman wouldn’t so much as tell him where they were going. How was Kupe supposed to rebel if he didn’t know where he was going?

The sub-tunnels wove endlessly through the stone of Cuminol Deep. There were inclines and dips; sometimes they climbed ladders. Kupe had tried to keep a mental map of their journey in his head but had hopelessly tangled it. It didn’t even seem possible that Cuminol was big enough to account for how long they’d traveled.

“Keep up. No stragglers,” Mull called behind him in a whisper that echoed down the tunnel. The comment wasn’t meant for Kupe, who had been managing to match Murfy’s pace, but for a pair of slaggard desk-sitters who had joined the rebels. Mull’s whisper was comically loud to reach them at the back of the pack over the sounds of their footsteps and the gear they carried. If any kuduks were in the sub-tunnels with them, there would be no element of surprise.

“Ain’t too far left,” Murfy said.

The tunnels rumbled. The tunnels had rumbled to some degree all throughout the squad’s journey, but this was different. No boiler, factory or trolley could cause the rhythmic thrumming in the stone around them the way the thunderail could. They were approaching the depot, and a thunderail was arriving.

“What?” Kupe asked. “We knocking off a thunderail?”

Mull pulled a pocketclock from his jacket and squinted at it in the feeble lamp light. “Yeah. And we’re a minute behind. Pick it up!”

Murfy set off at a more vigorous pace, Mull close behind. The rest of the squad hurried to keep up. It sounded like a riot in the tunnels. How could anyone miss such a racket going on just a few paces below the railyard? A shriek of tortured metal cut the air and jabbed into Kupe’s ears, making him wince—the thunderail’s brakes. Even deadened by the rock above, it was an impressive sound.

“Third car from the end,” Mull said as they stopped at a ladder leading up. “Grab what you can run with and get back down here. We’ve got four minutes. Shoot what you got to, and no more. This is a heist, not a war.”

Not a war
, Kupe echoed in his thoughts.
I wonder if Davlin knows that.

Kupe was in the middle of the pack as they crowded up the ladder. The climb was awkward with a rifle in his hands. There was a strap to sling it over a shoulder, but Kupe didn’t trust a strip of sturdy cloth with clip-hook ends to keep his only weapon with him. He had never been properly armed before, and he had a premonition that he would need it before the heist was over.

When Kupe emerged from the maintenance tunnel, the railyard was already in turmoil. It seemed that the rebels had already been spotted, and the freighters and laborers were running for cover and screaming for others to do likewise. Kupe had run like that before when knockers came shaking down human-run establishments looking for criminals. Guilty or not, when the knockers came, sensible humans scattered. Now the kuduks were on the other side of the guns; some humans were as well, but they were in no real danger, not that they knew that. Kupe knew it, though. Those kuduk-serving shavers might be cowardly collaborators, but they were blameless in the greater war. Davlin had made sure to pound that into the rebels’ heads in his sermons. Kupe tried his best to ignore them and look for signs of knockers as he ran for the thunderail.

The third car from the end was a freight car, nothing special standing out from the others in a long line of similar cars. Up front were the passenger cars, pristine and shining. The squad could pocket some heavy coin there, Kupe knew, shaking down the passengers. The gambler in him wanted to break off from the squad, let them carry off whatever was in the freight car while he went and made himself a half a year’s wages in minutes. He felt the weight of the rifle in his hands. Davlin had entrusted it to him as he had entrusted weapons to so many other rebels. It had been for a reason, and it wasn’t to make one human rich—even the sort of rich that lasted for half a year.

A shot rang out. It came from the front of the thunderail. Kupe and several of his fellows whirled, rifles to the ready, to see who was shooting at them. Nobody. It was another squad of rebels, taking on a knot of club-wielding knockers near the engine.

Of course. Davlin knows the front is where the coin is. He didn’t forget. He assigned another squad.
Kupe’s momentary lapse into greed was washed away. The rebellion wasn’t going to waste a prime opportunity to part the traveling kuduks from their ill-earned coin.

“Move! Move!” Mull shouted. There was no place for stealth in the operation, not anymore. Kupe ran for the third to last car, finding that he had fallen to the back of the pack.

The next crack of gunfire was louder, closer. One of the rebels at the front of the charge collapsed. Another rifle report, and another rebel fell to the ground. The gunfire was coming from their destination, the third car from the end of the thunderail.

A momentary panic fell over those nearest the fallen fighters. They stared down at the bodies, ignoring the weapons in their hands. Two more were cut down by the next wave of fire. Kupe’s eyes widened and the edges of his vision grew fuzzy. All he saw were the two kuduk soldiers—not plain old head-knockers, but large-as-life army troops—stationed on the front and rear platforms of the car. They wore plate iron vests and helmets like inverted bowls. Their rifles looked similar to the one in Kupe’s hands. The soldiers seemed to know quite well how to use theirs. Kupe raised his own to fire back, and heard the
pling
of his shot ricocheting off the iron vest of the soldier he had shot.

“Rush them!” Mull shouted, his voice carrying over the commonplace din that settled in between shots. The railyard was a battlefield, with at least one end of the thunderail fighting back for all they were worth. Kupe had no thought to spare for the front end of the thunderail. He saw that the soldier he had fired at was swinging a rifle in Kupe’s direction.

Kupe was never a tunnel rat. His eyes didn’t dart around on their own. He wasn’t the skittish sort. Bravado was his preferred image, with an easy swagger and an insouciant smile. That was how he liked people to see him. That image was so much trash and broken glass when someone pointed a rifle in Kupe’s direction. He dove to the ground, scrabbling on hands and knees to put something solid between him and the kuduk he had shot. He heard a shot ring out and winced, expecting to feel a stabbing pain, but there was nothing of the sort. Sparing a glance back, he saw that the rebels had followed Mull’s order and rushed to overwhelm the soldiers while they still had the numbers for that sort of tactic. Kupe scrambled to his feet to join in, pleased to find that he had kept hold of his rifle the whole time. It seemed that there might be some hope for him as a soldier yet.

By the time Kupe got to the car, both soldiers were dead. Dragged to the ground. Shot at zero range. He tried not to look down but had to in order not to trip over the corpse. The ruined face, the red beard, they were images that would come back to him in nightmares, he just knew. He swallowed back his lunch as it tried to escape. Kupe pulled down his handkerchief and took a deep breath, free from the stifling cloth.

Inside the car, Mull was acting as freightmaster. Rebels shouldered past one another, rifles slung over shoulders and arms filled with boxes and crates. There should only have been six of their squad left, by Kupe’s count, but more than that number were already inside. Another squad had joined them for the plundering.

Mull caught Kupe’s eye and pointed to a stack in front of him. “Kupe, take that crate there. If you can manage it, take two.”

Kupe nodded. “Yessir!” It felt respectable taking orders from a human boss for once. He slung his rifle over a shoulder and hefted the crate. It was only the size of a bundle of newspapers but weighed like stone. “What’s in here? Bricks?” Kupe felt stupid when he looked more closely and saw that the crate was labeled. In plain, stenciled letters, it read: MUNITIONS 0375IN, ROTO RATED.

“Shut up and haul it out of here. Knockers’ll be here any minute.”

Kupe nodded though no one was paying him any special attention. He grunted and shifted the ammunition crate into a better grip in his arms, then squeezed back through the crowd and out. On the front platform of the car, Kupe glanced down to check his footing. The dead soldier had been dragged out of the way, a smeared red trail marking his passage. When he looked up, thankful not to have been forced to look into the corpse’s face again, a flash blinded him momentarily, accompanied by a popping sound that he would know anywhere.

Newspaper flashpop!
The realization echoed in his head. When he hawked papers, Kupe bragged that the
Cuminol Chronicle
got to crime scenes faster than the knockers. It was no idle boast, and it was being proven again at Kupe’s expense.
I’m naked!
It was an exaggeration brought on by panic, but Kupe’s face was exposed when the flash bulb popped. He wanted to reach down and pull his handkerchief up; it was just around his neck. But there was the matter of a crate filled with munitions, occupying both his hands.

There was no hiding. With all the rebels’ attention focused on plunder and the potential for knocker reinforcements to arrive, putting down his crate to take a shot at a news reporter seemed ludicrous. Kupe at least looked to see who had gotten him, to see who had exposed him as a rebel. He knew everyone at the paper, kuduk and human alike, even the cranky old daruu who owned the newspaper. If he could catch them before they published, he might be able to find a way to convince them not to run a flashpop that showed his face. It was a longshot, but Kupe was known. Being outed as a rebel was doubly bad for someone like him. He wouldn’t be an anonymous human face in the newspaper, his name would spring to mind. He’d have to go into hiding. He’d be ruined.

The camera fell away from the reporter’s face, a thin plume of smoke rising from the flash bulb. It was Charsi.
What is she doing here? Was this her assignment?
Kupe had no time to ponder. He and the rest of the squad ran for the sub-tunnels.