In seconds, it was over. Macarde had gone. They could hear him running along the landing outside, heading downstairs, shouting for his men. Frey shoved the shotgun into his belt and picked up his cutlass.
‘Hold out your hands,’ he said to Crake. Crake did so. The cutlass flickered, and his bonds were cut. He tossed the cutlass to Crake and held out his own hands.
‘Now do me.’
Crake weighed the weapon in his hands. To his ears, it still sang faintly with the harmonic resonance he’d used to bind the daemon into the blade. He considered what it would feel like to shove it into the captain’s guts.
‘We don’t have time, Crake,’ Frey said. ‘Hate me later.’
Crake was no swordsman, but he barely had to move his wrist and the cutlass did the rest. It chopped neatly through the gap between Frey’s hands, dividing the cord in two. He threw the cutlass back to Frey, walked over to Rat’s corpse and pulled the pistol from his holster.
Frey chambered a new round into the shotgun. ‘Ready?’
Crake made a sweeping gesture of sarcastic gallantry towards the door. Be my guest.
Beyond was a balcony that overlooked a dim bar-room, musty with smoke and spilled wine. It was empty at this hour of the morning, its tables still scattered with the debris of the previous night’s revelries. Tall shutters held off the pale daylight. Macarde was yelling somewhere below, raising the alarm.
Two men were racing up the stairs as Frey and Crake emerged. Macarde’s men, wielding pistols, intent on murder. They saw Frey and Crake an instant before the foremost thug slipped on Crake’s vomit-slick, which no one had thought to clear up. He crashed heavily onto the stairs and his companion tripped over him. Frey blasted them twice with his shotgun, shattering the wooden balusters in the process. They didn’t get up again.
Frey and Crake ran for a door at the far end of the balcony as four more men appeared on the bar-room floor. They flung the door open and darted through, accompanied by a storm of gunfire.
Beyond was a corridor. The walls were painted in dull, institution-green paint, flaking with age. Several doors in chipped frames led off the corridor: rooms for guests, all of whom had wisely stayed put.
Frey led the way along the corridor, which ended in a set of tall, shuttered windows. Without breaking stride, he unloaded the remainder of the shotgun’s shells into them. Glass smashed and the shutters blew from their hinges. Frey jumped through the gap that was left, and Crake, possessed of an unstoppable, fear-driven momentum, followed him.
The drop was a short one, ending in a steeply sloping, cobbled lane between tall, ramshackle houses. Overhead, a weak sun pushed through hazy layers of cloud.
Crake hit the ground awkwardly and went to his knees. Frey pulled him up. That familiar, wicked smile had appeared on his face again. A reminder of the man Crake had thought he knew.
‘I feel a sudden urge to be moving on,’ Frey said, as he dusted Crake down. ‘Open skies, new horizons, all of that.’
Crake looked up at the window they’d jumped from. The sounds of pursuit were growing louder. ‘I have the same feeling,’ he said, and they took to their heels.
Two
‘There she is,’ said Malvery, with a grand sweep of his arm. ‘The Ketty Jay.’
Jez ran a critical eye over the craft resting on the stone landing pad before them. A modified Ironclad, originally manufactured in the Wickfield workshops, unless she missed her guess. The Ketty Jay was an ugly, bulky thing, hunched like a vulture, with a blunt nose and two fat thrusters mounted high up on her flanks. There was a stubby tail assembly, the hump of a gun emplacement and wings that swept down and back. She looked like she couldn’t decide if she was a light cargo hauler or a heavy fighter, and so she wouldn’t be much good as either. One wing had been recently repaired, there was cloud-rime on the landing struts and she needed scrubbing down.
Jez wasn’t impressed. Malvery read her reaction at a glance and grinned: a huge grin, springing into place beneath his thick white walrus-moustache.
‘Ain’t the loveliest thing you’ll ever see, but the bitch does fly. Anyway, it’s what’s in the guts that counts, and I speak from experience. I’m a doctor, you know!’
He gave an uproarious laugh, holding his sides and throwing his head back. Jez couldn’t help a smile. His guffaw was infectious.
There was something immediately likeable about Malvery. It was hard to withstand the force of his good humour, and despite his large size he seemed unthreatening. A great, solid belly pushed out from his coat, barely covered by a faded pullover that was stained with the evidence of a large and messy appetite. His hair had receded to a white circlet around his ears, leaving him bald on top, and he wore small round glasses with green lenses.
‘What happened to your last navigator?’ she asked.
‘Found out he’d been selling off spare engine parts on the side. He navigated himself out the cargo door with the Cap’n’s toe up his arse.’ Malvery roared again, then, noticing Jez’s expression, he added, ‘Don’t worry, we were still on the ground. Not that the thieving little bastard didn’t deserve dropping in a volcano.’ He scratched his cheek. ‘Tell you the truth, we’ve had bad luck with navigators. Been through seven in the past year. They’re always ripping us off or disappearing in the night or getting themselves killed or some damn thing.’
Jez whistled. ‘You’re making this job sound awfully tempting.’
Malvery clapped her on the back. ‘Ah, it ain’t so bad. We’re a decent lot. Not like the cut-throat scum you might take on with otherwise. Pull your weight and keep up, you’ll be fine. You take a share of whatever we make, after maintenance or whatnot, and the Cap’n pays fair.’ He studied the Ketty Jay fondly, balled fists resting on his hips. ‘That’s about as much as you can ask for in this day and age, eh?’
‘Pretty much,’ said Jez. ‘So what are you lot into?’
Malvery’s look was unreadable behind his glasses.
‘I mean, cargo hauling, smuggling, passenger craft, what? Ever work for the Coalition?’
‘Not bloody likely!’ Malvery said. ‘The Cap’n would sooner gulp a pint of rat piss.’ He reddened suddenly. ‘Pardon the language.’
Jez waved it away. ‘Just tell me what I’m signing up for.’
Malvery harumphed. ‘We ain’t what you’d call a very professional lot, put it that way,’ he said. ‘Cap’n sometimes doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, to tell you the truth. Mostly we do black market stuff, smuggling here and there. Passenger transport: people who want to get somewhere they shouldn’t be going, and don’t want anyone finding out. And we’ve been known to try a bit of light piracy now and again when the opportunity comes along. I mean, the haulage companies sort of expect to lose one or two cargoes a month, they budget for it, so there’s no harm done.’ He made a vague gesture in the air. ‘We sort of do anything, really, if the price is right.’
Jez deliberated for a moment. Their operation was clearly a shambles, but that suited her well enough. They didn’t seem like types who would ask many questions, and she was lucky to find work at all in Scarwater, let alone something in her field of expertise. To keep moving was the important thing. Staying still too long was dangerous.
She held out her hand. ‘Alright. Let’s see how it goes.’