Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (42 page)

That was love. The kind that made you stupid. The kind she’d never felt, nor let anyone feel for her. She envied him that, whatever misery it brought him. He had something she’d never had.

But she had something else.

The door opened downstairs, and there was a gust of wind from outside. Samandra stamped in, trailing snow and flapping at herself. ‘Cold as a corpse’s arse out there,’ she said. ‘Fires are banked up. Should be good for a couple of hours. You’re up next, Frey.’

Frey looked at his cards and said nothing.

‘Are we gonna have to do this every day?’ Malvery moaned.

‘You want the houses lookin’ occupied, don’t you?’ Bree replied. ‘No one’s gonna set down here if it don’t look like the lights are on.’ She walked over to Silo and peered over his shoulder at the gauges. ‘Anything?’

‘Nuh.’

Jez tried to shut out the daemonic hum from Kyne’s device. It was a mix of machinery and aethereal power, running off electricity provided by a generator which fed the hamlet and the mansion nearby. The device was linked to large resonator masts placed all around the rim of the valley, set to detect engine noise. They were all linked up in a manner similar to Crake’s earcuffs, but on a grander and more complex scale.

Kyne had access to some formidable technology, and by Samandra’s account he was the best daemonist in the land. But even with his help, their plan was a risky one. Capturing an Imperator would be no easy matter. It was said they could stop a man’s heart by willpower alone. Only a Mane could resist them, and then there was no question of capture; they awoke such primal hatred that neither Jez nor Pelaru would be able to stop themselves killing their targets.

Jez didn’t much concern herself with plans any more. The struggles of the crew felt distant. Only occasionally did she involve herself with their wants and needs. The rest of the time she was simply there, doing what needed to be done, waiting for the right moment. The moment of certainty. The moment when she’d turn her back on the world, and leave them for ever.

The device was too distracting. She couldn’t marshal her thoughts. She sensed the others watching her as she walked out of the room.

‘. . . why do they put up with her anyway . . .’

‘. . . gives me the chills, but it’s Jez! Don’t be so . . .’

‘. . . gonna have to do something about . . .’

She took the stairs to the top floor, where there were two small bedrooms with several unmade beds between them. Some of the crew had been sleeping in the house. They had to take shifts watching the gauges on Kyne’s machine, and it was easier to stay here than to trek back and forth to the
Ketty Jay
.

She went to the window of the back bedroom and opened it. A snowy rise, thick with bare black trees, lay before her. She clambered out and onto the sloping roof, moving swiftly and assuredly over the slippery surface. Sitting erect at the peak of the roof, waist deep in the snow, was Pelaru. She climbed up and sat next to him.

‘I had hoped for some privacy,’ he said, blinking away snow from his lashes. He was wearing a coat, but it was only to protect his fine clothes. He was Mane enough that he didn’t feel the cold.

Jez ignored the hint. She had things she needed to talk to him about.

From up here, it was possible to see the whole of the grounds. The houses and stables and garages were for the servants that worked at the mansion during the summer. A skeleton staff of guards and caretakers looked after the place during the winter months. They were now under lock and key in the basement level of the mansion where they’d be out of the way and safe. They were being cared for well enough, and it was a bloodless ambush in the end. The guards had put down their weapons once Samandra Bree got involved. Her fame preceded her.

To her left she could see the lights of the landing pad glowing in the murk, away at the end of a short road. The Century Knights’ aircraft was there, along with two smaller craft for the staff. The Tabington Wrath was a heavily armoured gunship, but it was expensive enough to be the choice of a paranoid rich man. The
Ketty Jay
and the Firecrow had been hidden elsewhere, in a clearing further down the valley, in case they were recognised.

To her right was the bridge to the mansion itself. The mansion stood on an island of rock in a shallow chasm that ran along the floor of the valley. During the summer months a meltwater river would run there, and the valley would be green. Now the valley was buried in snow, and the chasm yawned icily.

The mansion itself took up a third of the island, perched precariously on the edge of the drop. The rest was taken up by gardens – dead till spring – and a wide driveway to the bridge. Jez could barely see the mansion in the snow, only the lights of its windows. It looked dark and forbidding now, but she knew it was white and golden and fine in the sunlight.

‘Have you ever visited Thace?’ Pelaru said. ‘I miss it. I miss Arath, her high gleaming spires, her shaded colonnades, her tree-lined boulevards. I miss the music and theatre and language. But what I miss most is the
togetherness
. For almost two thousand years, we’ve been the only true republic in Atalon. Every man and woman has their say. That unites us. Being Thacian unites us. We stand in the shadow of the great slave-owning nation over the mountains to the west, and we defy them.’

‘You do more than defy them. You bombed the Samarlans’ capital and killed their God-Emperor,’ Jez pointed out. ‘Twice.’

‘Always in retaliation. Always after they tried to invade us.’ His face darkened. ‘We should have wiped the Divine Family out when we had the chance, but we wasted our time with peace settlements and politics.’

He glanced at Jez, and quickly away. It was hard for him to be near her, she knew that. The disappointment was too great. For Jez, it wasn’t so hard. She’d already accepted that what they had wasn’t what she’d thought it was. It was the love of kin. And there were many more like him, out there in the snow. Far to the North, beyond the Wrack. She heard them singing. They wanted her, and she was drawn to them.

‘You know why I came to Vardia?’ Pelaru said. ‘I did it for my homeland. A Thacian wouldn’t last five minutes in Samarla, so Vardia was the next best thing. I wanted to be a whispermonger, I wanted to know
everything
. And I dreamed that one day I might use that knowledge to protect the land I love.’ He kicked at a chunk of snow and sent it sliding down the roof. ‘What I’ve learned here . . . the Samarlans selling Azryx technology to the Awakeners . . . the Lord High Cryptographer a daemon . . . They cannot be allowed to win. My people need to know. Do you understand? My
people
!’

She did understand. ‘I suppose we all have to pick a side, sooner or later,’ she said. ‘I assume you’ve let somebody know? Sent a letter or something?’

‘I have my channels.’

‘So why are you still here?’

‘You know why,’ he said, turning away angrily.

‘Are you trying to save me?’

His jaw went tight. He sensed mockery, but she meant none.

‘I don’t need to be saved,’ she said. ‘I’ve made my choice.’

‘You’re giving up,’ he said bitterly.

‘I am what I am,’ she said. ‘Resisting it is pointless.’ She wiped wet hair from her forehead. ‘When were you planning to tell us about the relic you hid away in the
Ketty Jay
’s air vents?’ she said.

To his credit, he showed no visible reaction, though his heart jumped hard. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘How did you find it?’

The cat
, she thought. She’d found it while she was travelling with Slag, piggybacking his thoughts, sharing his simple world of savagery and instinct. But she said nothing of that. ‘You do know what it is?’

‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘Osger knew. It was his field, and that particular object was his obsession. Rumour had it that it came into the possession of the Awakeners long ago. They recognised daemonism in it, and all daemonic objects they gathered to themselves. But they didn’t know what they had. By the time anyone guessed, Korrene had been destroyed and the shrine was lost.’

‘Until your explorer found it again.’

Pelaru gazed grimly out into the snow. ‘I thought Osger was a fool to run off chasing a dream. I didn’t believe anything was there. But I let him go to his death, and I didn’t try hard enough to stop him.’ He sighed and hung his head. ‘And he was right. I recognised the relic when we searched the shrine. I was the fool.’

‘And what do you plan to do with it, now you have it?’

‘I will destroy it. Or if I can’t, I will put it somewhere that nobody will ever find it.’

Jez thought about that. Yes, perhaps that was best. Better that than have it fall into the wrong hands. And yet—

‘Hey! We got action!’

Jez’s sensitive ears picked out the cry from the living room below. The Cap’n. She exchanged an urgent glance with Pelaru, and the two of them scrambled down off the roof. They swung back in through the window with preternatural agility and hurried to the living room, where they found the others loading their weapons.

Silo looked up as they entered. ‘Engines,’ he said, thumbing at Kyne’s device. One of the gauges had jumped, the needle trembling near the halfway point. The two gauges next to it had roused slightly: they’d detected the peripheral sound.

‘Must be small,’ said Ashua. ‘Maybe just a shuttle.’

‘An Imperator, comin’ on his own, if we’re lucky,’ said Bree.

‘Our boys are gonna need more than luck,’ Malvery said.

Frey pulled his earcuff from his pocket and clipped it on. ‘Crake?’ he said. ‘Get ready. Shuttle coming in. We’re on.’

Crake, his hand on his ear where the earcuff was attached, raised his head and looked at the others. ‘They’re coming,’ he said.

Plome froze in the act of checking the resonators for the twelfth time. He gave a quick nod and stood up. The Chancellor was a squat, fat little man in his sixties. Stringy grey hair clung on around his temples, having given up the high ground. He drew out a handkerchief, mopped his brow and pate, then adjusted the pince-nez that perched on his nose.

‘Well,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Time to man the battlements, as they say.’

Morben Kyne stood at a window on the far side of the chamber, hands linked behind his back, his hooded head bowed. He looked over his shoulder at the other two. Mechanical green eyes shone in a mask of brass.

‘It’s not too late to back out of this, Plome,’ said Crake. ‘We can handle it.’

Plome gave a nervous chuckle. ‘Oh, now. You’re not getting rid of me that easily. I may not be an adventurer or a Century Knight, but I am a daemonist.’

‘Yes,’ said Crake, and laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘We’re all daemonists here.’

And it was daemonism that had brought them together and bound them in a common cause: the freebooter, the Century Knight and the politician. Plome had a seat in the House of Chancellors now; he had plenty to lose even if he got through today with his life and sanity. But the lure of the Art was strong. The opportunity to work with and learn from a man like Morben Kyne was too rare to resist. The chance to capture an Imperator, to do something never done before in daemonist lore, was a chance he couldn’t pass up. They were all explorers in forbidden lands; discovery was their drug. Plome was not a brave man, but obsession brought its own kind of bravery.

‘What we are facing here,’ he said when Crake asked him to help them, ‘is not only an assault on our liberties and our way of life, but an assault on free thought and free enquiry. I became a politician so that daemonists like us might one day be able to walk in the open without fear of being hanged. And I’m damned if I’ll climb in a hole for the Awakeners.’

He didn’t need to be here with them; it was enough to use his name as a lure. But he’d insisted on participating. Crake was faintly shamed by that. He’d always viewed Plome as rather a weak-willed sort, easily led: a good man but hardly a firebrand. Yet he was willing to nail his colours to the mast right then and there, to risk his life for his cause. Crake, in contrast, had spent months sitting on the fence. It had taken his father’s death and the destruction of his home to tip him off it.

Plome had suggested the Tarlocks’ summer house as a location for the trap. He’d visited his benefactors there before and knew it well. After that, it had been up to the Cap’n to employ his wiles on Amalicia. None of it left a particularly good taste in Crake’s mouth – he disliked endangering Plome, and he thought Amalicia had suffered enough at Frey’s hands – but hard times called for hard decisions. The fate of the Coalition might be riding on the events that played out this afternoon.

The room they occupied was a small audience chamber with panelled wood walls, overlooked by paintings of family members. The dignified atmosphere had been ruined by the daemonist’s preparations. Cables ran along the skirting boards, snaking between various devices in the corners. Clusters of batteries were piled up next to trolley racks containing oscillators, resonators and harmonisers. Damping rods and thick resonator masts stood against the walls, ready to throw out a web of frequencies. In the centre was a summoning circle with a double circle of smaller masts and spheres linked up to another resonator.

It was a cage within a cage. The instant an Imperator stepped into the room they’d hit him with a fluctuating barrage of frequencies and interference. Once the Imperator was disoriented and its power nullified, they could drive him into the circle, where he’d be thoroughly disabled by a much more focused assault.

That, at least, was the theory. But first they had to get him into the room. And then they had to keep him there long enough to interrogate him.

Crake tried not to dwell on how much could go wrong. He’d almost got Jez killed last time with his seat-of-the-pants science. Field daemonism was a dangerous game.

But it’s
my
game
, Crake thought. Even Kyne listened to him when it came to field daemonism. Nobody had ever captured a daemon outside of a sanctum before, as far as he knew. Terrified as Crake was, he took pride in that. He’d always wanted to be a pioneer. He just never imagined it would be quite so life-threatening.