Malvery looked over the balcony of the cafe and down into the street. Below them, donkeys and rushu brayed and lowed, carts creaked, people jostled and called to one another. On the far side of the dusty river of traffic was a warehouse, its worn wooden gates thrown open. Fair-haired Dakkadians sauntered in andunt eyes pri out of the baking gloom within.
‘Takes time to load up that much food,’ he assured Crake. He fanned himself with one beefy hand. ‘And they don’t do anything fast in this country.’
Crake put away his pocket watch, picked up a Vardic broadsheet that he’d bought from a boy on the street, and snapped it open. It was yesterday’s paper. The front page bore the headline which had put him on edge: Mentenforth Vandals still at Large. Beneath it was a ferrotype of the domed ceiling of the Mentenforth Institute vault, which Malvery had autocannoned a great big hole in.
There was no mention of them. That meant Bree and Grudge hadn’t told the Press, which meant… well, he wasn’t sure what that meant. But it was too hot to get concerned about things.
He sat with his feet up on a chair, sweating in the shade of a parasol. The parasol was held up by a circular wrought-iron table, upon which was a pot of spiced tea and a carafe of sweet local liquor. Malvery had been steadily working his way through the carafe for the last hour, and he had a lazy buzz on. Crake, who was drinking the tea, was altogether more jumpy. He didn’t like being back in Shasiith. He was afraid the Sammie soldiers would catch up with them.
Malvery, for his part, was reassured by the chaos and complexity of the mad sprawl that surrounded them. Hard to imagine anyone finding anyone in a place like this. They’d taken precautions, registered their craft under a false name, and Jez kept the Ketty Jay moving from dock to dock around the city. It had taken a bit of time to sort everything out – another night wasted that they could scarcely afford – but everything was on track now. He and Crake would get the food. Ashua was handling the medical stuff.
The Cap’n, for his part, had gone to see Trinica Dracken, who was in the city somewhere. With that compass of his, he could find her anywhere, and she obviously didn’t mind being found, since she still wore the ring. Whatever was going on between them, Malvery didn’t want to know; but the Cap’n said he had a plan for attacking Gagriisk, and it involved her, and that was that.
‘Look at this,’ Crake said, looking up from his broadsheet. ‘There’s a town in Aulenfay that’s publicly declared they’ll fight the Archduke if he tries to outlaw the Awakeners.’
‘Bad stuff going down,’ he murmured.
‘Peasants! They must know the Archduke won’t stand for that!’
Malvery took a sip of liquor. He didn’t like discussing religion with Crake. Crake’s loathing of the Awakeners meant that he tended to rant. Malvery didn’t believe in the Allsoul – it was all too obviously made up by disappointed royalists trying to make their last king into a messiah – but he didn’t much mind if anyone else did. Problem was, the Archduke didn’t share that view. He’d been dying for a chance to get rid of them. Andd otha that meant things were going to get ugly.
They’d fought two wars to keep Vardia free, and word had it the Sammies were getting ready for a third. But instead of sticking together, they were squabbling amongst themselves. He didn’t dare think what might happen if someone didn’t back down. Vardia hadn’t seen a civil war since the Dukes deposed the monarchy. The idea of his countrymen fighting each other made him angry. It was their country, damn it! They were Vards first and everything else second. When did people forget that?
It was the Cap’n who gave the Archduke the ammunition he needed, when they came back from the Wrack a few months ago. Malvery should have stopped him. But he just let it slide, the way he always did.
His thoughts turned grim, and his buzz faded. He drained his cup and filled it again in the hopes of getting it back. It didn’t work.
Suddenly uncomfortable, he stretched, slapped at a fly on his neck and looked around the cafe balcony. A lone waiter drifted about. Sammies and Vards sheltered from the fierce sun beneath the parasols, sometimes at the same table. The scene had become sinister to his eyes, the air humming with plots and the secret mutterings of spies. How much longer would this go on, this tentative peace? Were the Sammies even now eyeing up their neighbours, jealous of their abundant aerium? Would there come a time when the smuggled supply through the Free Trade Zone wasn’t enough to match their dreams of greater empires?
Things were changing. He could feel it. And he didn’t reckon they’d change for the better.
His mind went to his encounter at the Axelby Club. He’d been turning Hawkby’s offer over and over these past few days. A steady job in an asylum, treating the demented. And maybe after that, a surgery of his own. It had sounded wonderful at the time, but now he wasn’t so sure. The thought scared him slightly. Or, to be more accurate, the drink scared him slightly.
He remembered what it was like before. The routine. The same places, over and over. Home, surgery, club. He feared that rhythm. Where there was a rhythm, he found places where he could fit a drink, and soon those drinks became the beats of his day. He’d become regular as clockwork in his old life: a quick drink to get him going in the morning, another before his morning consultations, one between each consultation while he was writing up his notes, one at lunch to relax him for the afternoon surgeries. He’d stay off the booze while he was operating, but he’d be gasping at the end of the day, so he’d have another to get him to the club. Then he’d start to really drink.
On the Ketty Jay, he spent a fair amount of time bored, but he was hardly ever in the same place for more than a few days. Sure, he got drunk, but he was usually sharp enough when the crew needed him. You never knew when you were going to get into something when the Cap’n was around. That random element actually served to keep him relatively sober for most of the day, or at least to stop him getting hammered. He didn’t want to let his mates down by being a big fat comatose whale while they were off risk wee wing their necks.
But scared or not, he was still tempted by Hawkby’s offer. He wanted to feel like he was worth something again. He wanted to feel like that young surgeon who’d earned a medal by rescuing soldiers from a battlefield.
‘You thought about what you’ll do if… y’know?’
Crake put down his broadsheet. ‘If what?’
‘If the Cap’n don’t make it.’
‘Malvery!’ He was shocked.
‘Oh, come on. Don’t pretend it ain’t crossed your mind.’
‘The Cap’n is not going to die!’
‘Oh, aye? Got some way of stoppin’ it that we don’t know about?’
Crake became shifty. ‘Maybe I do,’ he said.
Malvery waited. Crake sipped his tea.
‘Well?’ Malvery demanded. ‘Do you or not?’
‘I don’t know!’ Crake cried. ‘I’ve got some ideas, that’s all. It’s all theoretical!’
‘The Cap’n was carrying something around with him today. A metal ball with a couple of wires coming out of it. Wouldn’t say what it was. Was that one of your theoretical ideas?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does it theoretically do?’
‘Theoretically? It means the Iron Jackal won’t be able to find him.’
‘The Iron Jackal? That’s what he’s calling it?’
‘That’s what the sorcerer called it in the Underneath.’
‘Oh.’ He sat back, interested now. ‘How’s it work?’
Crake put down his tea, eager for the distraction. The tiredness fell away from his face. ‘It’s like this,’ he said, steepling his fingers on the table. ‘This curse, if you can call it that, I think it’s actually a very advanced form of daemonism. There’d always been evidence of primitive daemonism before we applied the sciences to it, though it was hard to distinguish from superstition. The Samarlan sorcerers have docerquone it for centuries, it seems. But this! This is daemonism decades ahead of our time, and it’s thousands of years old. To bond a daemon of such intelligence and sophistication to an object, to give it such complex instructions… You know, it may be that the daemonism we know today is simply the remnants of something we knew how to do long ago, and forgot, which we’ve been painstakingly relearning ever since! And if that’s the case, it’d turn everything we know about daemonism on its head! I’d be fascinated to know where and when that relic came from.’