Neither the Archduke nor the Awakeners would back down. If the truth were revealed, the Awakeners would be exposed as hypocrites, having persecuted daemonists for a century. And it was just the excuse the Archduke had been waiting for to rid himself of the organisation responsible for the murder of his son Hengar.
Well, technically it had been Frey that had murdered his son, but technically didn’t cut it as far as Frey was concerned. Hengar’s craft had been rigged to explode; it just happened to be Frey shooting at it at the time. It was the Awakeners’ fault, pure and simple.
Should I have just let it be?
It was a question he’d been asking himself for some time. He hadn’t needed to take those damning research notes from the Storm Dog , while they were at the North Pole trying to rescue Trinica from Captain Grist and the Manes. He hadn’t needed to tell Crake about them, either, which pretty much committed him to act: Crake had a deep and venomous hatred of the Awakeners, and he would never let Frey sit on that kind of information.
But Frey did both those things, and then he gave the notes to Professor Kraylock at Bestwark University, who passed them on anonymously, because Frey didn’t much fancy having the Awakeners and their daemonic enforcers knowing just who had screwed them.
He did it because he wanted to make a difference. Because he wanted to make an impact, a dent in the world. He wanted to run with the big boys, instead of scrabbling about in the dirt, scavenging his way through life. But he was beginning to realise that the big decisions came with big consequences, and he wasn’t too keen to be remembered as the man who started a civil war in Vardia. Especially not with the Sammies rumoured to be tooling up for another war. They’d been suspiciously quiet ever since they called a surprise truce to end the last one.
Stop trying to be perfect, Crake had said. But it was easier said than done. He was acutely aware that everything his crew had been through since they held up the train had been for his sake. Not for profit, not even for fun, but to pull him out of the trouble he’d got himself into. And he was pretty sure there’d be a lot more trouble to come.
His friends were risking their lives for him. That was one bastard of a burden to carry.
‘Don’t you leave me here!’
Frey’s blood went cold. He couldn’t possibly have just heard what he thought he’d heard. A thin, despairing shriek. Words that had been burned on his conscience for nine long years. The voice of his engineer, Rabby, as Frey sealed up the cargo ramp of the Ketty Jay and condemned him to be murdered by the Dakkadian soldiers outside.
Yet the words rang out clearly across the square, coming from a narrow alley at the side of the Awakener building.
He looked around quickly. The elderly man was gone. There was no sign of life in the square. The lamp-posts seemed to have dimmed, as if the gas had been turned down. He could hear the distant sounds of the city in neighbouring streets, but he suddenly felt terribly alone.
He walked slowly along the forecourt wall, towards the alley entrance, drawing a pistol as he went. He didn’t want to see what was there, but he could hardly ignore it, either. If it turned out to be nothing, at least he might convince himself that it was all his imagination.
He peered down the alley. It was dark in there, and the shadows foiled his eyes.
Well, there was no way he was going in there to look. He wasn’t that curious.
Then something moved. It was just on the edge of visibility, a suggestion of a shape in the blackness. He fought to make it out. Something large, round, low to the ground.
As he stared, it unfolded long limbs and straightened, and he realised that it had been crouched, curled up, with its back to him. Now it expanded, rising to its feet, dropping one shoulder, turning towards him. And it stepped into the light from the square.
It was seven feet tall to the shoulder, but it would have been nine if it was standing straight. Part human, part animal, part machine. Its short fur was wet and greasy, like something newly born. Its arms were thin and disproportionately long, ending in outsize hands with double-bladed bayonets in place of fingers. The knees of its legs were bent backwards, like a horse or a dog. And a dog was what its face resembled: a snarling hybrid of metal and muzzle.
No, thought a small, clear voice inside that cut through the flapping panic in his mind. He recalled the sorcerer’s words. A jackal. Beware the Iron Jackal.
One half of its head was metal, as were much of the limbs. Machine parts sewed into and out of muscle and skin; servos and pistons were visible in its legs. Its spine was a spiked chain running up its hunched back, and there were thin plates of black armour scattered haphazardly across its body. Something about the colour and the look of them was uncomfortably familiar, but the connection evaded him for the moment.
One connection didn’t, though. One of its eyes was a red mechanical orb. The other stared wilherbut the codly from its black-muzzled jackal face, without an iris, only a single huge black pupil.
That was Trinica’s eye.
He let out an inarticulate cry of fear as he stumbled away from the alley. The Iron Jackal’s lips quivered and curled, exposing long teeth. Frey raised his revolver and fired at it: once, twice, three times. But whether it was his bad aim in the darkness or something else, the bullets hit nothing.
Then he ran, and it came after him.
He fled along the edge of the square, boots pounding on the cobbles. He had too much pride to call for help, but a wordless yell of alarm would serve just as well, if only there was someone to hear it. But the square was eerily deserted, and the shuttered windows that faced it were dark.
The creature bounded out of the alleyway, running on all fours in great leaps, its bayonet fingers shrieking along the stone. Frey heard its hot animal panting, the screech and thump of each leap and landing, getting rapidly louder as it ate up the distance between them.
It’s coming it’s coming oh shit!
The Iron Jackal bunched and sprang. Frey darted aside, down a lane that ran off the square. A dark pile of muscle and metal and fur swept by, blades skinning the air, missing him by centimetres. Its momentum carried it past the end of the lane and out of sight.
The lane descended in long stepped sections, lit by a few lonely lamps in wall sconces. Frey put his head down and ran hard, driven by utter terror. He had a few seconds to get ahead, and he meant to make them count.
The sight of the thing that meant to kill him, the hard reality of it, had rocked him to his core. Until now, he’d been able to kid himself into thinking that the danger had been exaggerated. He wasn’t kidding himself any more.
He looked over his shoulder, and saw that the beast had entered the lane and was coming after him, running on two legs now in a grotesque lope. The light seemed to slide off it, pouring away as it passed beneath the lamps. Its red eye shone in the shadow. In desperation, he fired at it as he ran, emptying his revolver to no effect.
The lane ended in a steep set of steps, which descended to a sunken path by the side of a canal. Frey slipped on them in his haste, heels skidding, and almost ended up in the canal himself. He hit the path with a heavy jolt, but recovered his balance well enough to sprint off without losing too much speed.
There was a high wall to his left and the canal to his right. Boats were moored in quiet rows, bumping gently against one another. Houses loomed above him, black and dank in the chill of the night. There were lights in the windows, signs of warmth and life. No one there could help him. His lungs were beginning to burn. He wasn’t in good enough shape to run this hard, but the fear of what was behind him wouldn’twouaga let him slow.
He passed a group of men on the path, who saw him coming and moved out of the way to avoid being knocked aside. As it was, he clipped one of them with his shoulder and sent him staggering into the wall. He ran on with their indignant exclamations ringing in his ears.