The Iron jackal

Twenty-Three

The noise, the damned noise.

Frey remembered that sound. He remembered hearing it as he lay dying on the tilted floor of the Ketty Jay ’s cockpit. Through the cracked windglass, through the metal hull, he’d heard it, endless, dipping and swelling but never, ever stopping.

That day, he’d lain for hours in the punishing heat, while his life leaked slowly through the bandage around his waist. The blazing Samarlan sun was made green by the foliage pressed up against the windglass. He sweated, and breathed, and the tiredness in every muscle seemed to multiply with every breath until it felt like he was being smothered with heavy blankets. His eyes wouldn’t stay focused, and the edges of his vision had gone dark.

He’d listened to the insects. The nameless, invisible monsters, who existed in their millions but could never be seen. They sawed and creaked and chirped and whirred and chattered in a maddening cacophony.

That’s the sound of living, he thought that day. One big, confused and messy blare, nothing matching or making sense, and nothing of it meaning shit all. Just everyone trying to yell louder than everyone else. I’m better off out of it.

It was a rare philosophical moment, but he’d reckoned he was due one, since he considered himself dead meat at that point. He’d crash-landed his aircraft in the trackless mountain jungles of northern Samarla with a bayonet wound in his guts. The rest of the crew was gone, butchered by the Daks in an ambush when they set down to deliver supplies for Vard infantrymen. When he finally blacked out, he never expected to wake up again.

But Silo found him, having crawled in through the cargo ramp, which had fallen ajar during the crash. The Murthian nursed him back to health, using the medical supplies and food that had never been delivered. In return, Frey flew him out of Samarla.

Nine years since that day, give or take a few months. And now they were back. Back to the same sweltering jungle. Back to the same spot where he’d crashed, more or less. It was just inside the Free Trade Zone now, which had been set up after the last war, but its new status hadn’t changed it a bit.

Nine years, and those bloody insects still hadn’t shut up.

Frey pushed through the undergrowth, his trousers damp and his shirt sticking to his back. Silo was ahead of him, clambering up a slope, picking his way through the trees. The jungle was menacingly foreign to Frey’s eyes. The trees that grew here were not like the trees of home. Their strange forms, scaly bark and towering size made him uneasy. Almost as uneasy as the stranger he followed.

Nine years, and he’d never asked who Silo really was.

It seemed ridiculous, when he put it like that. He’d always just assumed that he was naturally incurious. He respected a man’s privacy, and it wasn’t his business what Silo’s life had been like before they met. But after nine years in each other’s company, well, there had to be more to it than simple idleness, on both their parts. Silo didn’t want to tell him. Frey didn’t want to know.

Or was it that he didn’t want to care?

And it wasn’t only Silo, either. He found himself actively switching off on the rare occasions when the less close-mouthed members of his group started talking about their past lives. Usually they were drunk at that point, so he had an excuse to forget it, but still… strange behaviour, really.

He supposed it was because their past lives didn’t involve him, and anything that didn’t involve him was by definition unimportant. Each of them existed only from the moment he met them, as far as he was concerned. Past experience suggested that they’d fade just as quickly after they were gone, although that wouldn’t make the parting hurt any the less. He didn’t feel bad about that; he thought it an honest appraisal of his character. He’d been that way since he could remember. Growing up in an orphanage meant a lot of goodbyes and a lot of new faces. Impermanence was the defining quality of Frey’s life.

But it bothered him that Silo knew how to find the place where Ugrik was being held, and he’d waited almost a half a day to tell him. And it bothered him that he still didn’t know where they were going.

Not for the first time, he wondered if he should have come at all. Silo hadn’t wanted him to, saying it was far too dangerous. But Frey had insisted. He was buggered if he’d sit back and let another member of his crew risk their lives in his stead. The least he could do was get himself killed alongside them.

In the end, Silo relented. ‘Just you,’ he said. ‘Not no one else. And you gonna regret it.’

Frey was already regretting it. The heat, the exhausting climb, the bloody noise!

And the memories. Because somewhere not far from here was an old ruined village where his last crew had died. Where he’d closed the Ketty Jay ’s cargo ramp in the face of his hapless navigator, Rabby, trapping him outside to be carved up by the enemy.

‘ Don’t you leave me here! ’

He’d heard that same cry in Thesk, when the Iron Jackal had lured him into an alleyway. A cry from the past, the sound of all his guilt and shame. He’d been trying to secure his own extinction, but he hadn’t been brave enough in the end, and he’d only ended up securing everyone else’s. They might have been a worthless bunch, that crew, but they didn’t have to die for it.

Yet the daemon that haunted him knew about that day.

There were other things it knew about him, too. When he first saw it, it had been fighting its way free of an amniotic sac, and he’d been powerfully reminded of the unborn child that had died in Trinica’s womb. The bayonets that it had as fingers were the same kind that almost took his life, that day when his crew were killed. One of its eyes was Trinica’s, or rather the eye of the pirate queen she disguised herself as: a pupil black and huge in its orbit.

And the armour plating that sewed itself in and out of its skin. He’d thought there was something familiar about it. It had come to him suddenly during the night. It was the same colour and texture as the hull of the Delirium Trigger.

It builds itself from everything you’re most afraid of. That’s what the sorcerer had said, back in the Underneath. The daemon came from him. He’d constructed it with his own fears and flaws.

Great, he thought mordantly.

Death and Trinica. Trinica and death. The two were inseparable. It frightened him that she should figure so large in the dark churn of his subconscious. Almost as large as the day Rabby died.

And all of that wrapped up in the shape of an enormous man-jackal. He’d only ever seen jackals a few times in his life, during the last war, when delivering emergency supplies to the site of a recent battle. They would be picking their way among the dead: sneaky, thieving things, feeding off the scraps of what the big boys left behind. Opportunistic skulkers with a vicious bite.

Oh, wait, thought Frey. That sounds like me.

Failure, failure, failure. He’d failed Rabby and his crew. He’d failed Trinica in spectacular style. He’d failed the child he never had. And he’d failed himself.

A sobering thing, to have a mirror held up to you like that. To have your inadequacies made flesh. He’d been fooling himself into thinking he was a hero. He’d believed his own hype. And look at him now. Desperate, sweaty, chasing the slimmest of hopes because he knew that the Iron Jackal would come for him twice more, and the next visit couldn’t be far off.

Time was short. Time to get a few things straight, then.

‘Hey!’ he called. Silo stopped and watched expressionlessly as Frey struggled up the slope towards him. When Frey had caught him up, he stood with his hands on his burning thighs, panting.

‘Reckon we’re far enough from the rest that you can speak up now,’ Frey said.

Silo just looked at him. His silence made the racket all around seem louder. Frey straightened and wiped sweaty hair from his forehead.

‘Come on, Silo,’ he said. ‘You’re a Murthian; that means you were a slave here. Crake told me one time that you used to work on aircraft in factories, which is how come you’re so good with a spanner. He also said you escaped, and that’s when you found me.’

‘That’s what I told him,’ Silo replied. ‘Might be I left some out.’

‘Uh-huh. So at what point between escaping the factory and finding me did you learn how to speak Vardic and drive a Rattletrap and handle a shotgun?’

Silo turned his head and looked away into the undergrowth, scanning the trees, as if concerned that someone might be watching and listening. ‘Didn’t want you to come with me, Cap’n,’ he said.

‘I didn’t much want to come. But we’re here now. And I’d really appreciate knowing where we’re going.’

Silo’s eyes fell on something. He walked over to a tree and ran his fingers down the bark, where the wood had been chipped. Then he squatted down and turned over a stone that lay at the base of the tree. He held it up to Frey. There were marks in an unfamiliar language scratched on the bottom.

‘There’s signs all round, if you know what to look for,’ Silo said. ‘Pointin’ the way. When I left, there was a settlement near here, hid deep in the jungle where no one gonna see it. Might be it’s gone, but I reckon not. Markers have been kept up.’ He put the stone back.

‘A settlement?’

Silo rolled his shoulders beneath his shirt, pulled out a pinch of herbs and began expertly constructing a roll-up. ‘You fought in the wars, yuh?’

‘I wouldn’t say fought,’ said Frey. ‘I was there, put it that way. Only the second time around, though. First war, I never left Vardia.’

‘Well, you prob’ly heard they had Murthians fightin’ alongside the Daks. Usually they din’t want us out of our pens. Said we was hard to control. But they needed cannon fodder and they didn’t much like wasting the Daks. Sammies need the Daks for their smarts, and they ain’t big on doin’ their own dirty work. We was expendable, so they broke us out on the front lines.’

‘They gave you weapons?’ said Frey. ‘That was a bit dumb, wasn’t it?’

Silo gave a bitter little smirk, licked the rolling paper and stuck the roll-up in his mouth. ‘They kept the women and children back. Said they’d kill one for every man who deserted or rebelled.’

‘But you did it anyway?’ Freyy? amp; the women guessed.

‘Nuh. Maybe I would’ve, given the chance. Didn’t have no women nor children of my own, and freedom’s a powerful incentive, I reckon. But I wasn’t there. They had me in the factories, buildin’ aircraft, on account of I had a talent with machines.’ He struck a match and lit up, then motioned to Frey. ‘Keep movin’, huh? Not far.’

They set off again, labouring through the foliage. The air was hot and steamy and thick, and the sunlight filtered through the canopy in hazy beams, as if they were under water.

Frey felt a certain trepidation about where he was being taken. Not just for what was waiting up ahead, but for what he would hear as Silo continued his story. He didn’t want to know anything that might change his opinion of the man. He didn’t need any moral dilemmas. If Silo hadn’t told him about his past, there was probably a good reason for it.

But it was too late to take it back now. Silo was talking, and that in itself was a rare thing.

‘They lost a lot of Murthians durin’ the wars,’ Silo said. ‘And I mean lost. Plenty o’ folk jus’ took their guns and ran when the fightin’ started. Scattered into the mountains or the deserts or whatever. Most died, I s’pose. But some didn’t, and more often than not they found a place to hole up together. More an’ more who escaped heard about ’em and joined ’em.’ He took a drag and let the smoke seep out between his lips. ‘Pretty soon we all heard about ’em, even us in the pens. Free Murthians, livin’ off the land, hid where the Sammies weren’t never gonna find ’em.’

‘So you… what, you broke out and went looking for them?’

‘Couldn’t stand bein’ kept, thinkin’ there was something better outside. Didn’t never have that hope before. So I did it, me ’n’ a couple others. Escaped from the factory. They hunted us up into the mountains, but we scattered and they din’t follow me after that. Dunno what happened to the others, but I got lucky. Weren’t far off starving when they found me.’

He went quiet for a time, but Frey was used to that, and didn’t prompt him. Eventually he spoke again.

‘You know that some o’ your folks came to Samarla to help out the Murthians after the First Aerium War?’

Frey dredged his memory. ‘Rings a bell,’ he said.

‘Young men, too much heat in their blood, needin’ a cause to fight for. They heard about the Murthian deserters. Started comin’ over in secret with weapons, intent on findin’ Murthians and trainin’ ’em how to fight back. Them that found me, they were a group like that. Bunch of Vards in there fightin’ alongside us.’

‘And that’s how you learned Vardic,’ said Frey.

Silo blew out a cloud of smoke and chuckled. ‘Had to in the early days, if you wanted to talk to ’em. Them Vard fellers were good sorts, but their Murthian… Pains a man’s ears to hear his mother tongue spoken like that.’

‘Yeah,’ said Frey. ‘Scuffers might be tough as cured shit, but they’re not the smartest, as a rule.’

Silo looked over his shoulder and frowned. ‘How’d you know they were from Draki?’

‘You talk like one of ’em,’ Frey said, shrugging.

‘Huh,’ said Silo, considering that. ‘Never noticed.’

‘So you lot were resistance fighters?’

‘S’pose you’d say we were,’ Silo spat into his hand and crushed out the dog-end in his palm. Then he dropped it in his pocket. ‘Didn’t really hold out much hope of liberatin’ our people or any such thing, but we could liberate a few. And we could make the Sammies’ lives miserable. Blowin’ up supply lines. Ambushin’ convoys. The Vard fellers taught us tactics that we din’t have, growin’ up in pens like we did.’

‘And these people, this group yo u fought with… These are the people we’re going to see?’

‘Yuh,’ said Silo. ‘They got maps. I know they know where the mine is, ’cause I remember we had a plan to hit it once. In the end it was too far to be worth it. It’s way down south, and we din’t have the fuel to burn to get us there.’

Frey felt a small ember of hope begin to glow inside him. ‘But I thought you said it was dangerous?’

‘Yuh.’

Frey was puzzled. ‘Why?’

Silo stopped and turned around. ‘When you woke up on the Ketty Jay , and I was there, I was half-starved. You remember?’

Frey nodded.

‘Been lost. Been on the run for days. Got lucky, when I saw your craft come down.’

‘I suppose so. What’s your point?’

‘Point is, Cap’n, who d’you think I was runnin’ from?’

Frey looked over his shouloveont face="der and pointed. ‘I’m guessing it was them.’