Pinn gave a strangled cry of rage and lunged across the mess at Harkins, who gave a less than manly squeal and hid behind Frey. Jez watched the whole thing in bewilderment.
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ said Crake, getting to his feet. ‘I think I’ll leave you all to it.’
He slipped through the melee and climbed the ladder to the relative peace of the Ketty Jay ’s main passageway. From there, he made his way down to the hold to check on Bess.
It was chilly and gloomy in the hold. Crake preferred that to the sweltering heat of Samarla. He was glad to be out of that country, if only because his bowel movements had finally steadied. His stomach really didn’t get on with Samarlan fare at all.
In the middle of the hold were the Rattletraps. One of them was halfway disassembled, with Silo’s tool box resting on its hood. The man himself was nowhere to be seen. Crake was glad aboe wth="20ut that. Since they’d held up that train in the desert, Silo had been in a foul mood. Now he spent most of his time in the hold, fixing up buggies with a furious intensity, and if anyone so much as spoke to him they got an irritated glare and no reply. Crake wondered if the engineer had something on his mind, but he knew so little about him that it was hard to tell.
In fact, it wasn’t just Silo that was acting oddly. There was a strange atmosphere on the Ketty Jay now. Everyone knew that the Cap’n was in trouble, everyone was thinking about it, but no one wanted to talk about it. So they all ran around getting on with whatever they could, or stayed away from the craft altogether.
Nobody wanted to admit it, but the Cap’n’s life might be measured in days. And all this, this world aboard the Ketty Jay they’d created for themselves, would come to an end then. Without Frey, there was no crew. Nobody really thought they could carry on if the Cap’n was gone. They would each end up going their separate ways. It would be inevitable. They had very little in common, beyond the Ketty Jay.
He’d reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out onto the floor of the cargo hold when he heard a soft clank from the shadows.
His senses prickled. There was a change in the air. The chill he felt wasn’t entirely due to the temperature.
‘Bess?’ he said quietly, although something told him it wasn’t her. Dread trickled through him. He stared into the darkness at the edges of the hold.
Something shifted there. Something taller than a man.
Spit and blood. It’s here.
He took a step backwards. He was defenceless. There was a daemon here and he was defenceless and it wasn’t even meant to be coming for him, it was meant to be Frey!
‘Bess!’ he called, though this time it was more like a shout.
There was a soft growl. It moved to the edge of the light. Somehow it was still impossible to make out a shape, but he saw a claw, a huge iron claw with bayonets for fingers, and then a muzzle like a dog’s, wrinkling into a snarl.
‘Damn it, Bess! Where are you?’ he yelled in panic.
She came thundering from the sanctum, emerging from behind the barrier of crates and tarpaulin at the back of the hold. A mountain of metal and chainmail and leather, boots stamping hard enough to make Silo’s tool box slide off the hood of the Rattletrap and crash to the ground.
But by the time she’d arrived, there was only blackness where the thing had been. Crake stared at the emptiness, his heart thumping in his chest. Bess cast about in agitation, searching for whatever had alarmed Crake.
After a moment, Crake patted her on the arm. ‘Easy, girl,’ he said. ‘It’s gone now. It’s gone.’
Bess allowed herself to be gentled. Crake led her back to the sanctum, glancing over his shoulder at the spot where he’d seen – where he thought he saw – the daemon. Already it didn’t seem real.
No. I saw it. Just like Frey did.
But what had shaken him, more than the sight of the daemon itself, was the feeling of helplessness he’d experienced in that moment. He’d never faced a daemon before without his machines, without layers of sonic defences and carefully calculated formulae to hand – without preparation. But this one was loose, unconstrained by interference fields or echo chambers.
He was a daemonist. Dealing with daemons was his whole purpose in life. But he realised that he had absolutely no way to fight the thing that had come on board the Ketty Jay.
That, he told himself, would have to be remedied.
Fifteen
There was something wrong with the Firecrow.
Harkins felt his already unbearable terror slide towards full-blown panic. He tried the switch again, and again, flushing air through the aerium vents. The result was the same. It just didn’t sound right.
Was it just his nerves, playing tricks on him? No. Harkins was obsessive about his pre-flight checks. They helped to relax him. He could pass hours checking and re-checking the Firecrow from the sanctuary of his cockpit. Every system on his aircraft had been tested over and over by him personally. He knew the pitch of every squeaking hydraulic pump, the whirr of every actuator.
He looked to his left and right. Beneath a louring grey sky, the other racers were lined up next to him. Eight pilots, including himself. They were parked on a strip of packed earth that had been cleared as a makeshift landing-pad. A hundred metres ahead of them was a cliff, and beyond it, the Rushes: the deadly maze where they would have their race.
There was a cart in front of the aircraft that served as a podium. A man in a badly-fitting suit, who Harkins took to be an announcer of some kind, was climbing on to it.
I can’t fly like this. Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong!
‘Cap’n!’ he said shriCrag wrolly. ‘I need Silo here now!’
‘What’s the problem?’ came the Cap’n’s voice in his ear, transmitted through the silver earcuff he wore.
‘There’s… I mean… Something’s wrong with the Firecrow!’ he sputtered.
‘You’re three minutes from take-off! I thought you checked everything already? Didn’t the officials give all the craft a last-minute inspection for-’
‘I did check it! It was alright then! It’s not alright now!’ Harkins said, his voice rising to a moderately loud scream.
‘Okay, okay. Calm down. Are you sure it’s not just your imagi-’ He stopped himself wisely before Harkins could explode. ‘Never mind. Silo’s on his way.’
Harkins jigged and jittered in his seat. Why, why, why had he volunteered for this? Didn’t he spend his whole life avoiding situations like these? He’d almost died when he found out that the race would be held in the Rushes, instead of the nice flat plain that he’d imagined. The Rushes were a sprawling network of forested gorges carved from a dozen converging rivers which drained from the Splinters into the sea. Earthquakes and erosion had formed a system of tunnels and arches and fantastically precarious pillars, half a klom deep, with thrashing waterways at the bottom.
He’d done it for her, of course. Jez, kind Jez, who despite being kind never seemed to notice him, no matter how heroic he tried to be. Once in a while he managed to admit the truth to himself: it was all beginning to get on his nerves a little bit. But whenever he did, he took it back immediately, not wishing to think bad thoughts about her.
And now he was here, and there were mere minutes to go, and he was desperately hoping that whatever problem the Firecrow had developed would make it impossible to fly.
A small crowd of spectators were gathered along the rim of the gorge ahead of them, where the finish line would be. Nearby was another makeshift landing pad for their aircraft, much bigger than the one Harkins sat on. Among others, he saw the reassuringly ugly shape of the Ketty Jay there, and a small single-seater craft which he’d seen Crickslint arrive in.