More steps, leading up off the path. He took them. The short ascent made his thighs ache. A poky street ran along the top of the canal wall. He staggered across it and into an alley, where he finally rested, heaving air into his aching chest.
He listened, trying to focus past the blood thudding in his ears. Where was the beast? He hadn’t seen it since he’d hit the canal path. If it had been following, surely it would have encountered the same men he had?
Perhaps it didn’t want to be seen. Or perhaps he’d lost it.
He holstered his revolver. Bullets wouldn’t do him any good. He wasn’t a crack shot, but he was sure that he’d hit it at least once. The thing hadn’t even flinched.
He heard a thump from overhead. He looked up, his breath catching: but all he could see between the buildings was a cloudy sky painted yellow by the city lights.
Something moving up there. Something heavy. The scrape of metal against slate. The sound of an animal breathing.
Frey pressed himself against the wall, eyes fixed on the rooftops. You’re invisible, he told himself. You’re not here.
He glanced at other end of the alley. There was a street there, well lit. Late night shops were open, and he could see people. People meant safety. It couldn’t get him if there were people about, surely? A beast like that wouldn’t want to show itself out in the open.
If he could just get to that street…
There was a sinister growl from overhead. The Iron Jackal was craning over the edge of a rooftop, looking down on him. He felt his stomach plunge and his limbs go cold.
He bolted.
He heard the rush of air as it dropped down into the alley, the impact of its landing, the snarl as it came for him. The mouth of the alley seemed a hundred metres away. He put every ounce of his strength into his legs and willed himself to make it. Every passing second, the Iron Jackal was closer, and closer, so close that it had to have caught him by now. But not yet, not yet, and then His intuition screamed at him, some millennia-old sense that warned him when a predator was about to pounce. Whether he tripped then, or whether he went down on purpose, he wasn’t sure. But he went to the ground, rolling and tumbling out of the alley onto the street, and the Iron Jackal passed over him, ced ent dolose enough to make the tail of his greatcoat flap.
Frantic, he got his feet under him and ran up the street, gasping and howling incoherently. Shoppers froze and stared at him. The Iron Jackal picked itself up, surprised at having missed its target. Its head turned, fixed on Frey, and it came bounding after him again.
‘Someone bloody help me!’ Frey yelled, who’d gone beyond pride and was only thinking about survival now. But the shoppers just goggled, and hurried out of his way. He glanced over his shoulder at the terrifying daemon steaming up the street towards him. It bounded between the shoppers, and none of them took the slightest notice of it. Their eyes didn’t follow the creature; they stayed on Frey instead.
They couldn’t see it.
A mad thought fled across his mind: was this all in his head, then? What if he stood still and let the thing come at him? Would it prove to be harmless?
It didn’t matter. He was far too scared to find out. As if the thing itself wasn’t bad enough, the aura of daemonic terror that it put out drove all sense from him.
It was no safer in the open. The Iron Jackal would catch him in moments on the street. He ran for another cross-alley, past lighted windows selling chocolates and toys and clothes. Jolly things for happy people, set in pretty displays. Frey was no longer in the same world. He was alone against the beast, in the midst of an oblivious crowd.
The Iron Jackal saw where he was going and lunged to intercept, but Frey reached the alley first. The beast bounded in after him, back on all fours, charging. The alley was only short, and Frey burst out on to another street, looking behind him as he went. The creature seemed to fill the alley, mismatched eyes glaring above a fanged mouth, a nightmare vision of naked savagery.
A dazzle of light, and a clanging bell. Frey’s heart lurched in alarm as he saw something huge bearing down on him. He tripped and fell, rolling onto his side an instant before a tram rumbled past him, and all he could see was a wall of wheels a few centimetres from his nose. He scrambled back, and then suddenly hands were on him and he was being pulled to his feet. He shook them off in a panic, sliding his arms out of his greatcoat to escape, but they grabbed him again.
‘Here! Calm down!’
The authority in that voice restored a little sanity. They were militiamen, in the Archduke’s blue and grey. Four of them.
‘You alright, feller?’
‘Here, you nearly got yourself killed!’
He wasn’t listening to them. He was looking at his greatcoat, which had fallen to the floor. There were three long parallel slashes across the back of it. e ceight="0" width="20" align="justify"›The tram was slowing to a stop, its raucous bell still echoing in the night. It slid out of the way to reveal the mouth of the alley he’d come from.
There, standing in full view of the street, was the Iron Jackal. Frey threw himself back against the militiamen, but they grabbed him and restrained him.
‘No! No! It’s there! Can’t you bloody see it?’ he howled.
‘Calm down, I said! Don’t make us calm you.’
‘You ain’t gonna like it if we do,’ added another.
But the Iron Jackal made no move to attack. It simply watched him, its hunched back rising and falling. It lifted one bayonet-finger to its blunt muzzle.
Sssh.
Then it stepped back into the alley and was gone, leaving Frey to wilt into the arms of the militia as the last of his strength left him.
Eighteen
The tavern was called The Wayfarers. It was pleasant enough, nestled on the side of a hill in a quiet district of Thesk, with the palace visible in the distance through windows paned with coloured glass. The bar area was full of niches and sheltered corners, and there were parlours upstairs. It was a place for privacy, away from the raucous press of the dockside taverns. Prices were high, but not exclusive. Guards on the door ensured order within.
All in all, it was Crake’s kind of drinking hole. The decor reminded him of his university days, with its cramped feel, the dark wood-panelled walls, the low murmur of conversation and the stuffy warmth of several fires. In other circumstances, he would have taken great comfort in finding himself here, scribbling formulae on a piece of paper with a pint of black ale in a pewter mug. But he was troubled, and he couldn’t set himself at ease.
The Cap’n had woken him up in something of a state last night. Crake had listened with growing horror to the story of the attack he’d suffered. Frey showed him the slash-marks along the back of his greatcoat, desperate to prove that he wasn’t as mad as he sounded. But Crake needed no convincing. He was already gravely concerned.
Frey had been dragged off to the Militia’s district headquarters for causing a disturbance, but once he’d calmed down he managed to convince them to let him go. After that, he came to see Crake, and after that he was going to take a dose of Shine, since it was the only way he’d get any sleep that night. Crake usually disapproved of narcotics, but ind hdiv heigtonight he couldn’t blame the Cap’n.
It will come for you three more times. The third time will be on the night of the full moon. If you’re not dead already by then, that night will be your last.
That was the first. And it would only get stronger.
He had to find a way to stop it.