‘Down!’ Frey yelled, and they scrambled for cover as more bullets came their way. They crammed themselves behind rubble shields and made hasty barricades of tipped-up blocks of road.
‘Up the street!’ Ashua called. Silo saw gun flashes there; dark figures with rifles peeped out of concealment. He aimed and loosed off a blast with his shotgun to keep their heads down for a moment.
‘I see four!’ said Ashua.
‘Five,’ Jez corrected.
One of their attackers went scampering across the street, switching cover for a better angle. Ashua leaned out and fired her pistol. There was a squawk from the darkness.
‘Four,’ Ashua said.
‘Cap’n,’ Silo said. ‘They in cover. Ain’t good. We can go back, work our way around.’
Frey thought about that for a moment. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Scout it out. Find us a path.’
Silo grunted and headed back along the street, keeping low. Once, there had been a time when he wouldn’t have raised his voice. Once, he’d been content to take orders and take no responsibility for anything. Those days were past. The Cap’n had made him his second-in-command, and he took his new position seriously. He wasn’t the man he’d been when he came on board the Ketty Jay, starving and running for his life. He had the Cap’n to thank for that. Most of the others had similar reasons to thank him.
The Coalition weren’t his people. The Awakeners weren’t his people. Even the free Murthians back home didn’t much want him any more, now that Ehri was leading them. His people were the crew of the Ketty Jay, and it was his job to keep them safe.
So keep ’em safe.
He made his way back to the corner and looked around to check the coast was clear. It wasn’t. He saw a half-dozen men coming warily up the street, no doubt drawn by the Ketty Jay’s landing. Men with rifles, closing in on their position. If the crew were caught between the two forces, they’d be cut to pieces.
Mother, he thought. Now we got a problem.
Malvery popped up from cover and let fly again with his shotgun. He didn’t have much hope of hitting anything, not with the enemy scrunched down like that. It didn’t stop him trying, though.
Silo was signalling from the corner. ‘Ashua, Pinn, Crake!’ Frey said. ‘Go help Silo. I could do without more Awakeners crawling up my arse.’
More gunfire came their way as they scampered off. Malvery listened to the zing and whine of ricochets. Wasting bullets, the lot of them. They were trapped here for the moment. He took a pot-shot anyway, for something to do. He had to let off the tension somehow.
‘What are we here for, Cap’n?’ he snarled, suddenly angry. ‘What are we really here for?’
Frey looked across at him. So did Pelaru. Neither said anything.
‘Better be bloody worth it,’ he growled.
He wasn’t even mad at the Cap’n, not really. He’d been getting these little fits of frustration more and more often lately. Malvery was usually a jolly sort, slow to anger and quick to forgive, and he didn’t like himself when he got in these moods. It was just this whole damn war. This war, and his part in it.
A new battle started up on the corner: Silo and his team scrapping it out with the Awakeners coming up behind them. Malvery kept his mind on what was ahead of him. He peeked out from hiding, saw nothing up the street but a jumble of broken shapes. The artillery fire overhead was petering out, and the night crackled with pistol shots. Most of the Coalition craft were down now, their troops storming the Awakener positions.
Something bounced near him and rolled to a halt near his feet. Something bright and fizzing. Dynamite.
‘Oooooohbollocksbollocksbollocks!’ he babbled as he scrambled towards it. He scooped it up in one meaty hand and lobbed it away. A second later there was a dull bang in his right ear and he was knocked flat. Suddenly everything was muffled, except for a high-pitched whistling that seemed to go on and on. He looked about, dazed, not quite sure where he was until Frey seized him and pulled him down.
‘Doc! Doc! You alright?’
Malvery managed a nod. Dimly, he heard somebody shooting. The Awakeners must’ve managed to sneak closer than they thought if they were within throwing range.
Beyond Frey, Pelaru was firing over a barricade at somebody up the street. Malvery frowned. Something was wrong. It took him a moment to realise what it was.
‘Where’s Jez?’ he asked, his voice sounding thick inside his skull.
Frey looked around. ‘Where is Jez?’
There was a sharp crack from somewhere nearby, and a cry. An Awakener came stumbling out from cover, holding his back. He was a Sentinel, dressed in a grey, high-collared cassock. Pelaru sighted and shot him neatly through the head.
For a whispermonger, that feller can certainly handle a gun, thought Malvery. He was coming back to himself now, the shock of the dynamite fading. Thankfully it hadn’t been too near when it went off. Or the fuse hadn’t been cut half a centimetre shorter.
There was another crack: a rifle shot. Frey looked up and Malvery followed his gaze.
‘There she is,’ said the Cap’n, with a little smile on his face.
She was crouched in the remnants of the ruined tower, sighting through a gap in the wall at the street below. How she’d got up there so fast, Malvery couldn’t say, but she had an elevated position now, which made the Awakeners’ cover all but useless. When she was on her game, Jez was a phenomenal shot. And she was on her game tonight. Another shot, and a scream from the darkness.
‘Come on,’ said Frey. ‘Let’s give her a hand.’
They opened up with their weapons, blasting away down the street. It was more to cause chaos than anything, because Jez was handling the sniper work. She took out another Sentinel. The last one was flushed out and fled. Frey shot him in the back, which was his preferred angle of approach when it came to killing someone.
‘Silo!’ Frey yelled. ‘How we doing back there?’
‘Got ’em pinned down,’ came the reply.
‘Leave ’em. We’re clear this way.’
Jez hopped out of the tower onto the lip of a wall and dropped four metres to the ground, landing like a cat. Pelaru stared at her. She stared back, her head tilted, like something feral studying a curious new find.
‘Good one, Jez,’ said Frey.
‘Yeah,’ said Malvery, mustering up a camaraderie he didn’t really feel. ‘Nice work.’ He slapped her on the shoulder, and her head snapped round. He thought for a moment she was going to attack him.
‘Thanks,’ she said, without the slightest emotion in her voice.
Malvery took his hand away, unsettled. He harrumphed and headed off after the Cap’n, eager to be away from her. He liked Jez, he really did. He just didn’t know how long he could handle having her on the crew.
Silo and the others caught them up as they reached the end of the street and found a five-way junction. One side of it had caved in, but most of the buildings were still standing. Pelaru checked his map again again scanned his surroundings intently.
‘Do you actually have any idea what we’re looking for?’ Frey asked impatiently.
Pelaru’s face cleared, and he pointed at a doorway with an ancient coat of arms still barely visible above it. ‘That,’ he said.
Seven
Pelaru led them across the junction, once they’d established that there were no troops around. Frey hurried everybody after him. He wanted to get off the street. The Awakeners that had been fighting with Silo’s team would come up on their rear if they weren’t quick.
The doorway was the entrance to a tall, narrow building which stood at the junction between two roads. Its roof had fallen in and chunks of the façade had broken off, but the structure was intact otherwise. Frey glanced at the coat of arms as he approached. It belonged to some duke or another, possibly the symbol for the Duchy of Banbarr, within whose borders Korrene lay. It didn’t look very grand, so it was likely some kind of municipal building. There were letters carved across the frontage, but the stonework was too shattered to guess at the words.