Frey thought of the trip over here. ‘You trust your bosun to keep quiet to the crew?’ he asked. ‘I’d have thought he’d be the first to. . You know.’ He stabbed an imaginary knife in her back.
She laughed. ‘You always were so eloquent,’ she said. ‘No, Crund is the only one whose loyalty I can be sure of. He has no desire to lead, and he’s done more to keep the crew in line than anyone. He knows the value of secrecy in these matters. But even he has never seen me like this.’ She waved a hand at herself, the woman beneath the mask. ‘I don’t trust him that far.’
‘I think the poor idiot’s kind of in love with you,’ Frey said confidingly.
‘Ah. Then he is a poor idiot indeed,’ said Trinica, but she gave Frey a knowing look that warmed him.
Well, she’d have to pretty blind if she hadn’t figured it out by now, he thought.
‘The Awakeners, though?’ Frey asked. ‘You’re working for them? I mean, didn’t you learn your lesson the first two times?’
She laughed again. ‘I rather think it is they who haven’t learned their lesson. Duke Grephen was hanged, and Grist’s little treasure was lost for ever. I’m hardly their lucky charm. But they do pay so very well.’
‘You certainly know how to pick the wrong side.’
‘I’m confused. Aren’t we on the same side now?’
Frey found a stone and skimmed it across the lake. ‘Yeah, well. Appearances can be deceptive.’
‘You plan to fight for the Coalition, then? You think they’ll take you now?’
Frey threw up his hands. ‘I don’t want to be on any side. I didn’t even want to be part of this war!’
‘War has a way of making you part of it whether you like it or not,’ she said. She looked back out over the lake. ‘Darian, I. . shouldn’t have left you. Back in Gagriisk.’
He felt something tighten in him at her sudden change of tone. It was the voice she’d used whenever they’d talked about their relationship in the past, and it had always inspired a certain amount of terror. Events of emotional importance were something he’d never be comfortable with, because you couldn’t just shoot an emotion if it all got a bit tricky.
‘After what happened. .’ she continued hesitantly. ‘The lives of those men who died on your behalf. . That was on my head, do you understand? What I felt for you, it killed those men. And it killed me.’ She turned to him, her eyes roaming his face. ‘But I turned my back on you, when I knew you were in mortal danger. And once I’d done that, I couldn’t take it back. I didn’t even know where you went after Gagriisk and you had. . what was it, a day? Two days to live?’
Frey stayed silent, certain that if he spoke he’d spoil things somehow. Was she apologising to him? Of all the ways he’d envisaged this meeting, this had never occurred to him.
‘Then when I heard. .’ she said. ‘I heard you were in Vardia again, getting up to rot knows what, and. . Spit and blood, Darian, the relief I felt, it was. .’
She stopped, gathered herself a moment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her struggle like this.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ she said at last.
Frey was aware that his shirt was sticking to his back in the swelter of the day. The chatter of the jungle seemed suddenly loud. He picked up another stone. It was a good, flat pebble. He turned it over in his hands, examining it, and thought for a long while before he spoke.
‘It’s weird,’ he said. ‘I never blamed you for that. Or if I did, I don’t remember. When you left me, I was. .’ He felt his tongue thickening, words coming harder. It was so difficult to avoid saying the wrong thing. ‘I mean, I was kind of a mess, and I hated that you were gone, and the whole situation felt. . I don’t know, unfair. But I never blamed you for not being there to help me. I can take care of myself.’
He threw the stone out onto the water. It skipped three times before it sank.
‘Besides,’ he said. ‘The Iron Jackal? Kicked its puppy arse.’
He’d meant it light-heartedly, but it brought to mind a horrible memory. As he’d prepared to strike the final blow the daemon had taken the form of Trinica, hoping to stay his hand with pity. But it had chosen the wrong Trinica, the dread pirate with the white face and black eyes. If it had been the image of the woman before him now, he probably wouldn’t have been able to drive his cutlass into her.
She seemed grateful for his attempt to lift the mood. ‘Tell me what happened, then,’ she said. ‘After I left you.’
And so he told her about the Iron Jackal and the Azryx city lost in the Samarlan desert. She was an amazed audience. After he described the Juggernaut they’d unleashed, he had to spend several minutes convincing her that he wasn’t just spinning a yarn. She was more sober when he told her how they discovered that the Samarlans were selling Azryx technology to the Awakeners. Incredible as that was, it was nothing to what he’d already told her.
When he was done, she was thoughtful again. ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I have something to show you.’
She led him around the edge of the lake, and then headed off into the trees. Frey followed her as they made their way upslope along a narrow dirt trail. Under the leaf canopy it was stifling hot and thick with roots and creepers. Insects hummed loudly. Things that sounded uncomfortably large moved in the undergrowth.
‘It’s a relief, in a way,’ Trinica said.
‘What is?’
‘Well, for years there have been rumours that the Samarlans have struck aerium. They have huge resources to build aircraft but pitifully little aerium to keep them in the air.’
‘I gathered that, Trinica. We fought two wars about it, remember?’
She gave him a gentle smile over her shoulder. ‘Darian, you know as well as I do that you’re fully capable of fighting in a war without having the faintest idea what it’s about.’
Frey had to give her that. ‘Yeah,’ he said, and swatted a midge on his neck. ‘I suppose I don’t trouble myself with the big picture much, do I?’
‘Anyway, even with the smuggling through the Free Trade Zone, our most pessimistic estimates say that the Samarlans couldn’t keep a sizable fleet in the air for long. Not long enough to sustain a proper war, anyway. We were all worried that might change. But it’s Azryx technology they found, not aerium.’
‘And you think that’s better?’
‘It is if they don’t know how to use it.’
‘They made the whole city invisible!’ Frey protested. ‘They had some kind of interference field that made me crash the Ketty Jay!’
‘No,’ she said. ‘The Azryx did that. It was probably on when they got there.’
‘Well, they must have dealt with it somehow. A guard told us they saw Sammie aircraft flying in and out every so often.’
‘That is troubling,’ said Trinica. ‘But the fact remains: if the Samarlans don’t have aerium, they can’t mount a full-scale invasion. So instead they’re helping the Awakeners.’
‘And when the Awakeners are in power, they’ll lift the embargo and sell aerium to the Sammies again.’
‘Exactly.’ She shrugged. ‘See? A relief. At least there won’t be a Third Aerium War.’
‘Yeah, that is a relief,’ said Frey. ‘We’ll just live in a country ruled by fanatics instead.’
‘It’ll be just like having the old kings back,’ Trinica quipped. ‘Ah, here we are.’
They came out of the trees onto a narrow strip of clear land at the lip of a cliff that overlooked the southern flank of the island. Here, the ground was too stony for anything bigger than wild grasses to take root. Standing near the edge of the cliff was a triangular pillar roughly three metres high. It was covered in strange designs, and it appeared to have been fashioned from dull grey metal, now rusty and weathered with dirt and time.
‘That’s, er, unusual,’ said Frey.
He went over to look at it more closely. The designs were hard to make out, and heavily stylised, but they seemed to be depicting events of some kind. In one, three people walked through a desert towards a mountain. In another, a grieving figure held a dying man, with other dead figures in the background. Near the bottom there was a panel that showed men labouring while robed figures watched them from a tower. There was writing amid the designs which looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t Vardic or Samarlan or any other alphabet he’d seen with any frequency.