Malvery was cleaning his glasses with a corner of his coat. ‘Cap’n,’ he said. ‘Please don’t tell me we’re gonna try to rob the Archduke.’
‘Of course we bloody are,’ said Frey.
Malvery sighed heavily and put his glasses back on.
Seventeen
Archduke Monterick Arken’s palace towered over the city of Thesk, set dramatically against the cloud-scattered red dusk. It stood at the peak of a massive ridge of black rock, the plug of an extinct volcano, with sheer grassy cliffs on three sides and a gated slope to the west. Green copper domes and sloping roofs of decorative slate peered over the walls of light beige that surrounded it. Statues of great men and women looked out across the capital in all directions. The roof of an arboretorium could be seen among the towers. What couldn’t be seen were the enormous anti-aircraft gun emplacements in the front and rear courtyards.
It was a modern construction, most of it early Third Age, having been knocked down piece by piece and rebuilt after the deposition of the monarchy and the emergence of the Duke of Thesk as the head of the Coalition of Vardic Duchies. The Arkens had all been reformers, and had never let themselves be shackled by history. While other dukes shivered in glowering stone Kingdom Age buildings that were over four hundred years old, the Arkens had demolished their family seat and built a new one with piped heating.
Crake thoroughly approved.
He blew on his pie to cool it and accepted the bottle of rum from Frey. The two of them sat on some steps at the foot of a bronze statue in People’s Park, which sprawled around the base of the cliffs. A statue of Osory Crumditch looked over their shoulder: a benevolent, bespectacled old man sitting in a chair and holding a book. Crumditch’s daring fictions about love and passion among the peasantry helped wake the aristocracy to the fact that the people who toiled in their fields were human beings too. He never lived to see the serfs freed after the Mad King Andreal was overthr obvi-scattereown, but he was more than a little responsible for it.
‘You think the relic’s in there?’ Frey asked, looking up at the palace.
‘I dearly hope not,’ said Crake.
‘Could be in any one of six places I can think of,’ Frey mused.
‘Well, Crickslint’s certainly not going to tell us now, since there’s barely enough left of him to fill a jam jar.’
Frey was still looking at the palace, his own pie forgotten on the step next to him. They’d bought them from a shop down the way. The cold snap had come to an end with the rain, and tonight’s weather was more typical of autumn in these climes. A little chilly, a little damp, but not altogether unpleasant.
‘You suppose it’s true about the army of golems he has up there?’
‘Could be,’ said Crake. ‘He’s never had much of a problem with daemonists, although politically it wouldn’t make much sense to say so, what with half the country believing all that rubbish the Awakeners peddle. I wouldn’t be surprised if he used them in secret. Rumour has it some of the gear the Century Knights use is thralled.’
‘Really?’
‘Some daemonists think so.’
He munched his pie – spiced beef, hearty Vard food, for which he was absurdly grateful after Samarla – and passed the bottle back. The Cap’n was in a strange mood tonight. Crake got the sense he wanted to talk about something, but he hadn’t worked up to it yet.
While he waited, Crake watched the traffic in People’s Park. A lamplighter was making his way along the paths, leaving lamp-posts glowing behind him. A pair of young lovers walked arm in arm, wrapped up against the coming night. Three women cooed over a pram by the bandstand. A student, his arms full of books, hurried home from Galmury, the city university, which Crake had himself attended. It was only five years since he’d left, at the age of twenty-six, but it might have been a lifetime ago.
Love. Children. Even the clean, sheltered world of academia. It all seemed so distant from him. Now he was a vagrant, a drifter, moving from place to place and never settling to anything.
But was there even any point in running any more? Were the Shacklemores really still chasing him? Crake had tried to make himself hard to find by joining the crew of the Ketty Jay, but the Ketty Jay ’s crew weren’t so anonymous these days. Difficult to believe the Shacklemores couldn’t have tracked him down by now, if they’d put their minds to it.
His brother might have called off the alllieve the bounty hunters months ago. Perhaps his thirst for vengeance had faded. That, or Condred had tired of paying them. But for whatever reason, he’d not seen a Shacklemore for two years now, not since the Winter Ball at Gallian Thade’s estate on the Feldspar Isles.
So maybe he didn’t need to stay on the move, after all.
Crake dreamed of a library, a house, a sanctum. Somewhere Bess would be out of danger, and he could study the Art. All that, and perhaps a woman to share it with.
Wouldn’t that be fine? he thought. But it all seemed so far away.
‘Am I a good captain, Crake?’ Frey asked, out of nowhere.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’re the only one I ever had.’ But the look on Frey’s face made him regret his flippancy. ‘What’s bothering you really?’
‘You mean aside from the prospect of getting another visit from that daemon?’
Crake cleared his throat. ‘Yes, the daemon. I’m going to see what I can do about that,’ he said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’m working on some techniques.’
‘Techniques?’
‘Yes. You see, most… well, all daemonism is done in controlled conditions. They’re summoned and contained. But that won’t work here. The daemon is already out. So we need a different approach.’
‘Like what? Can’t you drive it out of me or something?’
‘It’s not in you. That strange signal you’re giving off, I think that’s more like the way it tracks you.’
‘So what do you plan to do?’
‘I suppose you’d call it field daemonism. I’m trying to work out ways of dealing with a daemon outside the sanctum.’
‘You think you can? You can work out a way to fight this thing?’
Not really, he thought, but the edge of desperate hope in Frey’s voice revealed just how scared he really was, and Crake had to give him something.
‘It can be done,’ he said, with more assurance than he felt.
Frey brooded for a brn b while, sucking on the bottle of rum. Crake ate the rest of his pie, glancing at him occasionally.
‘Harkins,’ he said, then tutted.
‘Cap’n, he’s alright. Nobody got hurt.’
‘He damn near died!’ Frey snapped suddenly. ‘And for what? For me!’ He held up his right hand, encased in a fingerless glove to hide the corruption in his palm. ‘All because I couldn’t keep my hands off that bloody relic.’
‘Cap’n, will you stop trying to be perfect?’ Crake cried. ‘Spit and blood, it’s like you think we’ve all forgotten how you were when we joined this crew! Might I remind you that, back then, you let someone put a gun to my head, spin the barrel and pull the trigger. Twice! ’
‘You’re never gonna let that one go, are you?’ Frey muttered.
‘My point is, there was a time when you didn’t give half a shit about any of us, and none of us gave half a shit about each other. But those days are gone, and most of that’s your doing. I wish you’d remember that.’
Frey swigged his rum. He looked like he was taking it on board, at least.
‘Nobody expects you to be right all the time,’ said Crake. ‘Nobody but you, apparently. Stop beating yourself up.’
‘I s’pose you’ve a point,’ Frey mumbled, unconvincingly.
‘Speaking of Harkins, I note you’ve taken the destruction of the Firecrow very calmly. If he’d pulled out when you told him to, he’d have come out without a scratch.’