Iron Jackal (43 page)

But there was one man Maddeus would never abandon. She spotted him in a study off the corridor, sitting at a desk and sipping mint tea. The decay that afflicted this place had been held off here, but he couldn’t keep away the fug in the air and the sickly-sweet smell of sweat and excess.

He looked up over his glasses as Ashua passed the doorway. Osbrey Fole, a taut, narrow man, grey before his time. Osbrey was Maddeus’ accountant, among other things. The man who ran his business.

She’d always liked Osbrey, and he, in his way, had liked her. They were a conspiracy of two: the only sober heads in a flock of the deluded. He gave her a curt nod, which was as much emotion as she’d expect from him, and went back to work.

At the end of the corridor was a grand set of double doors. The girl opened them and let Ashua inside.

The room beyond was warm and close. The windows were covered over with thin curtains of green and red. Pungent smoke hung in slowly coiling layers in the gloom. It was full of expensive furniture, yet it felt shabby and dispiriting, and beneath the smell of narcotic fumes there was the hospital scent of the dying.

Maddeus lay reclined on a gilded chaise longue, eyes half-lidded. Next to him was a lacquered tray table, on which lay a silver syringe, a tourniquet and a skooch pipe, among other paraphernalia. A forgotten cigarette, little more than a bent column of ash, smouldered between his fingers.

The girl made to follow Ashua inside, but Ashua blocked her way. ‘The cigarette!’ she protested.

‘I’ve got it,’ said Ashua, and shut the door in her face.

The haze in the air made her feel like she was walking through a dream. She’d forgotten the sense of unreality that pervaded the places where Maddeus lived. As if time and sense had become derailed. She’d been away long enough to get used to clarity.

Maybe that was why he’d told her she couldn’t stay with him any more. That she’d have to make her own way in Shasiith. After an adolescence spent at his side, midway between a daughter, an employee and a pet, she’d been cast out.

It had hurt her, but she’d taken to independence with a vengeance. She’d been in Shasiith long enough to know the language and the ways of the underworld, and living on her wits was something she’d been doing ever since she could remember. She cut deals, made allies and enemies, stole when she had to, cheated when she could. She wanted to show him how capable she was. How she didn’t need him. And then, the lesson learned well, he’d take her back.

She’d never seriously thought it was more than a temporary thing.

She sat down on the chaise longue next to him, took the cigarette from his fingers and crushed it into an ashtray. He stirred and his eyes opened a little more. A stupefied grin spread across his face.

‘Ashua. My darling,’ he slurred.

‘Hello, Maddeus.’

He reached weakly towards the tray table. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to . . . ?’ he said.

She stopped his hand by taking it in hers.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You never did, did you?’

His skin was dry. The bones of his hand felt hollow and brittle, like a bird’s. He looked sallow and wasted. She felt something gather in her throat, and she didn’t want to let him go.

He kept smiling that idiot smile. ‘I remember the day I met you . . .’ he said, but the sentence was crushed beneath the weight of the colossal lethargy that lay on him.

She was glad. She didn’t want to reminisce. She patted his hand.
It’s alright. Whatever it is, it’s all alright
.

Maddeus coughed and reached feebly for a cigarette. Without thinking, Ashua took one from his gold cigarette case, lit it for him, and put it in his mouth. She’d done it so many times while he was in this state that it was like a reflex.

He took a drag and settled back into the chaise longue with a sigh. She saw him drifting, and squeezed his hand before she lost him completely.

‘Maddeus!’ she said sharply.

He surfaced from his daze, and he looked at her as if it was the first time he’d noticed she was in the room. His face became concerned. ‘What are you
doing
here, my darling? Don’t you know it’s dangerous?’

She tried a frail smile, but it died on her lips. ‘I’m leaving,’ she said.

‘Hmmm,’ said Maddeus, whose attention had already gone elsewhere. She brushed his lank hair back from his face, made him focus on her again.

‘I’m leaving,’ she said, more firmly this time. ‘Leaving Shasiith for good. I’m joining the crew of the
Ketty Jay
. ’

He became grave. ‘Oh.’

‘That’s what you wanted for me, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, with the vague tone of someone who couldn’t remember.

‘There’s a price. I’m pretty sure you won’t mind. Medical supplies. I’ve got a list from Malvery.’

‘He’s the doctor, isn’t he?’ Maddeus smiled broadly, but his eyes shimmered with tears. She felt something surge up inside her chest, something that made her breath shudder, a feeling of such terrible enormity that it would burst her. She turned her face away from him quickly. How much of that sorrow was him, and how much was the drugs? Was there any difference any more?

‘I’ll give the list to Osbrey, shall I?’ she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.

‘That’d be best. He’ll take care of it.’ His eyes fluttered closed, and she thought for a moment that he’d fallen asleep. Then he spoke again, barely forming his words. ‘This captain, what’s he like?’

‘Mordant.’

He snorted. ‘That’s not a sentence, darling, but I’ll forgive you this once.’ He stirred and groped across the tray. His fingers brushed past the tourniquet and found the silver syringe. He sighed with pleasure. ‘Will you . . . call the girl for me?’

Her eyes prickled as she picked up the syringe and the length of rubber tubing. ‘There’s no need,’ she said softly. ‘I’m here.’

‘He’s late,’ said Crake, holding up his pocket watch.

Malvery peered over his round, green-lensed glasses at the daemonist.

‘Well, he is!’ Crake protested.

‘He’s a wholesaler. We’re buying food. This is the least dodgy thing we’ve done for months. Calm down, eh?’

Malvery looked over the balcony of the café 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 and 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. And 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 café 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 risking 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?’