Iron Jackal (38 page)

~ And what if I refuse? said Akkad, when he’d finally tired of trying to outguess his opponent.

Silo had entered the camp with no answer to that, but an answer came to him now. ~ If you refuse, you won’t receive the medical supplies that I offer you in exchange.

The witch-sister raised her head sharply. Akkad glanced at her and scowled. His brow darkened as he turned back to Silo. ~ You presume to offer us
help
?

~ I offer you a trade. You appear to be in need of supplies. Food, too. I can get them for you.

Murthians kept their feelings off their faces, as a rule, although Akkad had always been too passionate to learn it well. Silo’s expression was rigid. He let nobody see that the gift he offered was something he’d just thought up, and that he had no idea how he would actually deliver it. But it wouldn’t be a difficult thing to fly back to Vardia and buy or rob what they needed. It would cost them two days, perhaps, but without that map they might lose two weeks trying to search for Gagriisk.

Murthians were good at hiding their emotions, which made them seem inscrutable to foreigners, but they were also adept at detecting them. He looked around the people assembled on the balcony. Tiny shifts in expression, unguarded instants, told him what he needed to know. His offer had caught their interest keenly. The sickness must have been worse than he imagined. Only Babbad seemed unswayed, but that was hardly surprising. He’d always been unfailingly loyal to his leader, and would never forgive Silo for what had passed.

But the only opinion that mattered now was Akkad’s. He got slowly to his feet, rising out of his chair. He looked to his wife, who was pleading him with her eyes. Then he gave his answer.

Quite a crowd had gathered on the path that led up to their leader’s hut while Silo was inside. Frey had watched them trickle up from the camp below, faces anxious, as if they thought something of great importance was going on inside. He was being guarded by two of the young Murthians who’d captured them earlier. His pistols and cutlass had been taken from him. No one spoke to him or answered his questions. All he could do was wait, and trust that Silo knew what he was doing.

The sight of the engineer being led from the hut at gunpoint was not encouraging.

A fierce-looking Murthian emerged from the hut after him, and addressed the crowd. There was general consternation at his words, and many glances thrown sideways at Frey. Then one of the scouts gave him a rough shove, and he was pushed along in Silo’s wake. He thought about calling out to his friend, but decided it would only get him a rifle butt in the kidneys.

So they were being taken somewhere. Great. He was as much in the dark as ever. Being a leader was hard enough for him, but it certainly beat being the feller who didn’t get to know shit.

It seemed like most of the camp was following as he and Silo were led along a barely visible trail through the jungle. Silo was the object of everyone’s interest: Frey was an unimportant afterthought. It pricked his pride a little, even in their current predicament.

He soon lost track of which direction they were going. For a time, there was only the maddening sound of the insects, the distant hoots and growls of things he’d rather not meet, the heat in the air and the damp clothes sticking to his body, the steady trudge of his boots on the red earth.

Then he saw a face he recognised. The Murthian woman who had greeted Silo so enthusiastically in the camp. She’d fallen into step alongside him. She was a striking woman, with the body of an athlete and broad shoulders. Her face wasn’t exactly the kind of beautiful that Frey went for, but it had a statuesque quality about it that was hard to ignore. She had the same umber skin as Silo, and thick black hair in coiled ringlets, held back from her face with a beaded band.

‘You speak Vardic?’ he asked. He remembered how she’d cowed the scouts before, and hoped he wouldn’t get hit for speaking.

She looked him up and down, her eyes cold. ‘Yuh. Name’s Ehri.’

‘Frey. Can you tell me what’s happening?’ he asked, when his escorts didn’t seem inclined to interfere.

‘We goin’ to the warrens,’ she said.

‘The warrens? Like rabbit warrens?’ Frey asked hopefully, envisioning fields and daisies.

‘What down in them warrens, it ain’t rabbits,’ she replied.

Frey cursed. ‘I bloody
knew
it wouldn’t be rabbits.’

She studied him, apparently unimpressed. ‘What’re you to Silo?’

‘I’m his capt—’ he began, then corrected. ‘His friend.’

‘You the reason he came back here?’

‘Reckon he was trying to help me out. I’m in a certain amount of trouble, see. Long story.’

‘He must think a lot o’ you, to set foot in this place again.’

‘What
is
this place?’ Frey asked. ‘What happened here?’ He motioned towards Silo, a bald, lean figure just visible through the trees and the crowd. ‘Who
is
that feller?’

‘You don’t know? Thought you were his friend?’

‘Hey!’ Frey said, offended. ‘I’m friend enough to respect his privacy.’

She considered that for a time, then turned to his escorts. ‘You idiots don’t speak a word of Vardic, do you?’ she asked. One of them sneered and said something in the fluid, musical tongue of the Murthians. She ignored him and spoke to Frey again.

‘Who was he?’ she said quietly, her eyes on the captive walking ahead of them. ‘He was a hero.’

Frey did a double take. ‘
Him?
’

‘I was still young when he turned up in camp,’ she said. ‘Right away, we knew he was dangerous. I mean, people were afraid of him. He had that madness in him. Like when someone’s so angry they can’t stand it, so they bury it under a whole pile o’ calm.’

Frey thought about that for a moment. ‘
Him?
’ he asked again.

‘I guess you don’t know him that way.’

‘You bloody guess right!’ said Frey. ‘The Silo I know wouldn’t get angry if you cut his feet off and hung ’em round his ears.’

But is that really true? Didn’t he chuck a Sammie off a roof once? Hasn’t he been stewing ever since you hijacked that train? Shouldn’t you really have paid a bit more attention?

‘So what
did
he do?’ he asked, when it became clear that Ehri wasn’t in a hurry to speak again.

‘What he did was kill Sammies and Daks,’ she said. ‘You didn’t never see nobody wanted revenge as bad as he did. For what they did to our people, what they did to his family, to him. He wanted blood off ’em, and he got it. Akkad, he was the leader back then. At first, he was worried about Silo, but he saw how the camp got inspired by him. Other people, they worried about gettin’ enough to eat, about hidin’, about all kinds o’ things. Silo, he just wanted to get even. That kind o’ single-mindedness, you gotta respect it.’

She was looking ahead as she said it, and there was something in her voice, a hint of wistful fondness. Frey thought she’d felt more than respect for Silo at one time. He might not have been the most perceptive of individuals, but he reckoned he knew enough about women. Well, all except Trinica, anyway.

‘So what then?’ he urged. He was amazed to hear of this side of Silo’s character. He wondered what other secrets he might unearth about the rest of his crew, if only he could be bothered to dig.

‘Akkad felt which way the wind was blowin’, I guess,’ said Ehri. ‘Took Silo under his wing. Eventually he got to be second in command, and by then they was great friends. Silo was always there with some new plan, some way to sabotage this or blow up that. Awful good at solvin’ problems, he was: he could overcome anythin’ if it meant he got to kill some Sammies or free some of our kin at the end of it.’

Frey put the pieces together. ‘This Akkad feller, he’s still your leader?’

‘Yuh.’

‘So I’m guessing he and Silo had a falling out?’

‘You could say. See, Akkad was always puttin’ the brakes on Silo. He saw himself as the sensible one, lookin’ out for the good of the settlement, makin’ sure we didn’t risk too much, makin’ sure most of us came home alive. And that was fine by us, don’t get me wrong. The two of them, they were some combination.’

She motioned towards the fierce-looking man Frey had seen before, whom he assumed to be Akkad. A woman and three children were walking near him, picking their way through the undergrowth.

‘Then Akkad had a son,’ she said. ‘I guess that was what did it for him. Suddenly he had something to protect, something to
really
protect, and he wouldn’t take
no
risks no more. I mean, he put the brakes on
everythin’
Silo tried.’ She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and sniffed. ‘Pretty soon it became obvious what he was about. He wanted to stop hittin’ the Sammies. Called it a pointless waste of life, that we couldn’t do no good that way. It was like a fly bitin’ a rushu, goin’ up against the Sammie Empire.’

‘And Silo didn’t like that,’ Frey guessed.

‘Lotta people didn’t. Split the camp. Some reckoned we’d do better to build a new life here in the jungle, try ’n’ make the most of what freedom we had. Some of us, it didn’t sit well that we should be hidin’ while our kin were out there bein’ worked to death. One of them was Silo.’

‘Reckon I see where this is going,’ said Frey. He squinted as a spear of sunlight found its way though the canopy and dazzled him.

‘Yuh,’ Ehri replied. ‘So did Akkad. Silo, he never wanted to kill Akkad. Just wanted to knock him off his perch. But Akkad din’t see it that way. A bunch of ’em, they tried to take over the camp, but Akkad outsmarted ’em. Some got away, but they was all caught or killed in the end. ’Cept Silo. The rest that were still alive, Akkad made an example of ’em. Took ’em to the warrens.’

‘The warrens without the rabbits?’

‘The same.’

Frey steeled himself. He had the unpleasant looming sensation that usually accompanied imminent bad news. ‘And what happens in the warrens?’ he asked, wincing.

‘What you think happens?’ She frowned at him. ‘You get eaten.’

Frey sighed wearily. ‘Bollocks.’

Twenty-Five

The Murthian Word for Irony – Mother – Dying in the Dark – Shooting Fish

T
he entrance to the warren was a circular shaft, a jagged throat of red stone in the jungle floor, some distance from the camp. There was a wooden pulley off to one side, and a worn rope dangling from it, which split at the end into a pair of stirrups. Frey was put next to Silo, and they stood together at the edge while flies sucked at their sweat. He looked down. It wasn’t so deep that he couldn’t see the bottom, only a dozen metres or so. But that was plenty deep enough.

Akkad gathered everyone around, and he gave a short speech in Murthian. Frey didn’t need a translation. He could tell by the tone that it was some self-justifying horse-arse declaration as to why he felt it necessary to lob his prisoners into a pit full of hungry whatevers. Some of the audience – mothers with sickly children, or the elderly who looked sick themselves – groaned and murmured at one point. Most of them didn’t seem too happy about what was going on. He wondered what kind of deal Silo had tried to cut with the big man, but whatever it was, it hadn’t been enough to wipe away the memory of that failed coup. The engineer was stone-faced as the judgement was rendered.

After that, they were made to put their feet into the stirrups, one foot each, and they clutched onto the rope as they were swung out over the pit and lowered down. Frey caught sight of Ehri in the crowd, standing with the smaller man he’d seen her with earlier. He had an arm round her. Her face was full of anger; his of sorrow.

Then the rock of the shaft obscured them from view. The insects became muted and everything was uncannily quiet. His world narrowed to a circle of dusk overhead. He and Silo held on to the softly creaking rope, so close they were practically hugging, and they sank through the air, which cooled quickly as they descended.

At the bottom of the shaft was an uneven chamber, with several openings at its edges that led into shadow. The light from above, weak though it was, seemed fierce and warm in contrast to the chill darkness that lurked at its edge. Frey looked around without enthusiasm.

‘How do I get into these situations?’ he moaned to no one in particular. He felt like he should be scared, but he hadn’t seen anything to be scared of yet. Vague threats of danger weren’t enough to bother him. Not when he’d seen so much of the real stuff.

He was still looking around when something dropped through the air and hit the ground next to him, making him jump. It was a hemp sack. He could see the hilt of his cutlass within, and the grip of a pistol.

‘We get our weapons?’ he asked Silo.

‘Yuh,’ said Silo, pulling open the sack. He handed Frey his pistols and cutlass, and took his shotgun and dagger. Frey checked the pistols, found they were empty, and then saw Silo counting through a handful of bullets and shells.

‘Any particular reason why they didn’t just shoot us?’

‘Gunshots make noise. They tryin’ to hide.’

Frey rolled his eyes. Silo was feeling obtuse, apparently. ‘Chop our heads off, then! You know what I mean.’

Silo handed him bullets for his pistol. ‘Ten there. I got five shells.’ He started loading them in to his shotgun. ‘Old law. Murthians ain’t s’posed to kill each other. We got enough people doin’ that already.’