Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (19 page)

When Madlin was on higher ground and out of sight of the crew, she drew her revolver. With practiced movements so ingrained as to defy conscious thought, she slid the cylinder release, snapped the cylinder out on its hinge, and pulled the ejector pin. Eight bullets tumbled into her hand, still wet from her extended bath in the Katamic Sea. She didn’t stop
walking, keeping an eye to the uneven rock as she felt her way along with her feet. She shook the water from the bullets, then blew on them until they were mostly dry. She blew into each chamber of the cylinder and down the barrel as well, for all the good it really did. The gun needed a proper cleaning. It would be crusted with salt and whatever other filth the seawater carried until she got it home to Tinker’s Island where she had all the tools she’d need.

She wandered the island, gun in hand. If there were survivors of the
Fair Trader
lurking, she wanted to be ready for them. If she found Dan first ... well, maybe the gun would matter, maybe it wouldn’t, but she preferred the feel of it in her hand to traipsing about unarmed. She kept it aimed at the sky as she leaned on her forearm to brace herself against an outcropping as she stepped across a small chasm. The sight lines were poor, with a general upward trend to the mountainous terrain the farther inland she ventured. In her mind she tried to put some familiar shape to the landscape. It was neither a peak breaking through the waterline nor an elongated crashball of land. When Madlin reached one of the higher points, she looked around in all directions. It resembled nothing so much as a ragged cut on the face of the Katamic, puckered and scabbed over with rock, made by a knife—or best yet, a hook—that had caught and dragged along the sea, skipping as it tore, leaving the smaller islands in its wake.

From her vantage, she should have seen everything, but the irregularities in the rock could have hidden half an army—a small one, anyway. She nearly leapt from her skin when something poked her in the back. She whirled with a yelp, bringing her revolver to bear.

She aimed it at the grinning face of the most ragged, bedraggled boy she had seen outside of Korr. Dan giggled with the barrel of Madlin’s revolver inches from his forehead as he stood a step below her on the rocks. His face was reddened from sun, his eyes reddened with madness—or at least sleeplessness. The black silks he wore had been shredded. His shirt was reduced to a tattered vest, missing all of one sleeve and most of another. The pants ... Madlin kept her gaze well away from Dan’s lower half, which had little left to accord him modesty.

“Got ya,” Dan said, and started cackling. He was nonplussed by the aim of Madlin’s revolver.

Madlin put her free hand to her chest and held the gun away from Dan’s face as she calmed her quickened breathing. “There you are,” she said. “Tanner and I have been looking for you.”

“Yeah, I followed him around a while, but he’s no fun to startle. I might actually get a sword in the gut for my trouble.”

“Me and my gun were the safe ones to scare half to death?”

“Halfway there and never the whole, the trick to getting grey and old,” Dan replied. “Sorry, the rhyme doesn’t work in Kheshi. Besides, you took that gun through half the Katamic to get here; no way it would fire.”

Good to know. He thinks these work like flintlocks
. Madlin knew better. A wet flintlock, the only sort of gun Tellurak knew before her father’s “invention” of the cartridge, was worthless—or rather, the black powder it used was worthless when wet. She’d save the bullet trying it out, but stake her life that her own revolver would fire when she asked it to.

“Are you hungry? We brought what food we could,” Madlin said. “The crew’s down on the ... well, where there should be a beach.”

“I’m fine. I ate three of the pirates before I washed ashore,” Dan said. Madlin recoiled with eyes gone wide. Dan laughed. “The look on your face. Winds, I’m starving!” He hopped down the rocks, his own feet as bare as Madlin’s. She assumed he was using magic to aid his descent, since he had heretofore shown all the awkward gangliness of a youth not yet grown into his body. She took greater care in following after him.

“So what have you been doing on the island since you got here?” Madlin called ahead, hoping to keep Dan from running ahead by keeping him engaged in conversation.

Dan picked his way along the rocks, but stopped long enough to answer. “I
have
been killing pirates. There’s a pile of bodies back there a ways. Until the reinforcements arrived, I’d been playing hide-from-his-lordship with the Zaynes. They’re around here somewhere, invisible. They don’t dare confront me in the open, so I’ve been trying to hunt them down before nightfall. I’ve already lost one night’s sleep to them; I wasn’t keen to lose another.”

“You’ve been up since the battle?” Madlin asked. She thought back on all the tedium of the past day and a half aboard the
Darksmith
and tried to imagine what Dan was going through during that same time. If he was teetering closer to the brink of madness than usual, she could at least understand why.

“Them or me, and with two of them, they could afford a watch,” said Dan. He hopped down and spoke away from her. “I won’t trust my sleep to wards with that dead-eyed whoreson around. With you lot around as fodder though, I’ll get some sleep and have a bit of warning if he starts killing.”

“I feel so much better,” Madlin muttered beneath her breath as she followed, falling farther behind by the minute.

Tanner caught the sounds of Dan’s triumphant return to the crew of the
Darksmith
as they carried on the wind. The ungrateful brat had avoided him intentionally, he realized. The island simply wasn’t large enough for Dan not to have heard his shouts over all the distance he had covered. That was fine; let the boy have his fun. If nothing else it meant he was in good spirits, all things considered. After stumbling on the mutilated corpses of a number of uncouth-looking gentlemen (a couple with familiar faces from when he briefly sailed with Zayne’s ship as a twinborn “ambassador”), he hadn’t been certain of the pubescent warlock’s mood.

With congratulatory shouts fading behind him, Tanner trekked across the barren landscape in the other direction. He kept his hands well away from both pistol and sword, both for balance on the slick, smooth rock and to show that he was, if not unarmed, then at least not carrying any weapon in hand.

“If you can hear me, I want to talk,” Tanner said to the emptiness around him, keeping his voice low enough so that keen ears couldn’t possibly hear him over the din of his own well-wishers. “I’m your only chance off this island, I think. Best for everyone if you come out and we make a deal.”

There was no answer from the empty air, which was more a disappointment than a surprise. He had known the Zaynes years longer than Dan had, and had met both of them face to face, which he was all but certain Dan had not. He knew the contents of Jadon Zayne’s bag of tricks better than anyone. The boy and his father could be a pace away, and Tanner might not realize it until he smelled the rum on Denrik’s breath.

“If the boy finds you first, you won’t get anything like a deal outta him,” Tanner said. “You’ll get the better end of a deal for sure, since if I duck back there with everyone else, I’m safe as a cloistered princess and you’re still hiding from a kid warlock with all the subtle charm of an arsonist.”

Around the next jutting tooth of rock, Tanner saw a man of his early fifties, grey hair shot through with streaks of its original black and a beard of patchy stubble to match. Denrik Zayne took his ease on a flat rock shelf just high enough for his toes to reach the next ledge down. The pirate king’s uniform was a mocking homage to that of an Acardian commodore, less the Acardian crest and much of the embroidered accents. The uniform had seen better days, the whites stained yellow and smeared with black scorch marks and flecks of blood. The jacket was torn along the seam of one shoulder.

“Mr. Tanner, I am not amused,” said Zayne in a tone dry enough to parch Tanner’s soggy clothes. “Put down the sword and pistol, and we can talk.”

Tanner scratched his head a moment, then shrugged. “I’m sure Jadon could tear my Source out, armed or not. Why not?” He unbuckled both his sword belt and gun belt and laid them on the ground. Backing away from them, he found a suitable rock of his own and sat opposite the pirate.

“That
thing
of yours is a problem,” said Zayne. “He’s a rabid shark. Any of my crew that didn’t make it to the lesser islands is dead. If you help me put him out of his misery, we can deal.”

“Heads on platters always your opening bargain?” Tanner asked. “Listen, I got another world to worry about. You do too. To put my cards on the table, if it weren’t for Veydrus, I’d have just let the kid hunt you both down and be done with it. But it ain’t that simple. I let you kill Dan, he’s gonna put my twin’s skull in the bottom of his privvy if he even sniffs I was involved. I let him add you to that pile the other side of the ridge, Anzik has himself a tantrum and restarts the war. Sound about right?”

Zayne fixed him with a steady glare, chin resting on his clasped hands. “You have the general concept well in hand, I believe. You’ll just have to take care that he doesn’t suspect you.”

“Back out of that blind alley; I’m not following you in. I’ve got a way we all walk out of here alive. Well, not
walk
as such, but—”

“Mr. Tanner, you’re beginning to babble.”

“Right. Well, I’m traveling with the heiress of the Errol Company. We’ll get picked up in a few days, I imagine, when another ship comes to look for us. I’ll keep Dan from hunting you down—maybe you can even swim to one of the smaller islands to be safe—and get word to Stalyart. I can get word to him through Veydrus, and he can bring the
Merciful
down to rescue you.”

“You’ve still got the ear of that one, do you? I never understood why he kept you around.”

“Never hurts to have connections,” said Tanner.

“Indeed. But what makes you so certain a ship will be looking for you? You can’t have been due in port for days yet, a week or more if you were heading up to that frozen cesspit of the Mad Tinker.”

“Twinborn. Mad Tinker and his daughter both. She’s together with him on the other side.”

Zayne frowned. “What are they, twinborn goblins? Is that where he cooks up those contraptions of his?”

“They ain’t from Veydrus. They got some other world, filled with rot like steam ships and fancy guns. He just nicks stuff from there and makes his own. Point being, they got no skin in our brawl, but she’s got the connection to get us out of here without waiting a month.”

Zayne seethed a breath through his teeth. “What choice have I? Vengeance and likely death? Curse my luck, finally sinking my teeth into an Errol smoke-ship the day it had a demon aboard.”

“Speaking of demons,” Tanner said, brushing aside the jab at Dan’s character. “Where’s yours?”

“Close by, Mr. Tanner. Close by.”

The whole walk back to the
Darksmith
crew’s camp site, Tanner couldn’t help feeling that eyes were following him.

Chapter 15

“Only twice in my life have I given a false name. Once was to a tax man, the other to a merchant prince’s daughter. On both occasions I was spared a well-deserved reckoning by my foresight.” –Lantham Caige, in
The Scoundrel’s Lament

The darkened room was quiet, but not silent. A low hum emanated from the wall where cables grew like the hairs of a beard, combed through from the adjacent room. Each cable ran from its own little hole and drooped down to the floor before running across to the world-ripper. The only light in the room came from a few indicators on the control panel, showing coordinates in several axes and the power levels of both the viewfinder and the transport circuits. The latter was dark.

Kezudkan stood in front of the viewing frame with his hands clasped before him, leaning on the butt of his cane. At the controls was the kuduk tinker, Draksgollow, his head turned watching his patron watch the view. The image within the frame was a disused thunderail depot in the Turmon Republic, a few hours travel up the defunct Fairmorn-Tevek line. It was open to the sky in places, an older style of ventilation, simpler than pipes and chimneys for ridding the railyard of smoke, but it allowed in enough light for them to view it without having to turn the machine’s main function partway on.

“Looks fine to me,” Draksgollow said. “Plenty of space, even some old buildings intact. We could be set up in a few days.”

“No, no. Won’t do at all,” Kezudkan replied, shaking his head. He lifted his cane to point. “You see that? There goes another one.”

“Nope, didn’t see a human that time either.”

Kezudkan twisted around with a sound like a millstone grinding, and fixed Draksgollow with a critical glare. “Might want to look to those optics of yours. I’m five times your age, and I saw it plain enough. The place is infested with humans—probably rats, too.”

“Fine. Say there are humans. We can just take care of them the way we did the squatters in your mine.”

“Well and good for a bunch of savages from a primitive world, but I want something
secret
, someplace no one knows about. That isn’t compatible with exterminating native species that are liable to run off and blather to more of their own kind.”

“Then why not look at the primitive world?” Draksgollow asked, frustration slipping into his voice.

Kezudkan turned back to the viewer and shook his head. “I gave it some thought, but it takes more power going between worlds. If anything goes amiss, I’d rather be stranded locally, thank you kindly.”

Draksgollow stood, knocking his chair over and stepping aside. He waved a theatrical hand toward the controls. There was a hiss from the compressed air cylinders in his mechanical arm. “By all means then, find someplace your own muddy self.”

Kezudkan arched an eyebrow and waddled in Draksgollow’s direction. For a moment, Draksgollow’s eyes searched for some escape, realizing perhaps too late that he had angered the daruu. Neither of them were athletic, Kezudkan in his elderly third century and Draksgollow gimpy on a powerful but cumbersome steam-piston leg. The prospect of a thrashing at the old daruu’s hands wasn’t inconceivable. There was strength enough in his mechanical hand to crush the bones of a kuduk, but not a daruu. Infirm as he was, if Kezudkan caught hold of him, he’d be at the eccentric old man’s mercy. Draksgollow held his breath as the daruu approached.

When Kezudkan got to within two paces, he snatched up his cane, holding it near the tip, and leveled the handle at Draksgollow’s midsection. He held the kuduk tinker’s gaze with his own as he lowered the handle, hooked it under the edge of the chair, and righted it. He turned his back on Draksgollow as he eased himself into the tiny seat, which groaned under his bulk but held itself intact.

“Very well,” Kezudkan said as he brushed his fingers over the controls, as if reacclimating himself to the feel of the panel and dials. “Go make certain that the parts of the new machine are ready to transport and install once I find us a new home.”

“Everything
is
ready,” Draksgollow argued to the back of Kezudkan’s head. “All the parts, dollies and gantries for hauling it all, kits with every tool we’ll need—in triplicate—as well as food and basic furnishings for the new command center, on the assumption that you were going to stick us half up the arse crack of the world in some hovel.”

“Excellent suggestion,” Kezudkan quipped in reply. “I wasn’t considering Korr’s anatomy among my criteria. I shall have a look around for a proper crack, then. If you’ve got nothing better to do, how about finding out why there was a human from the savage world who knew what a kuduk was?”

“I’m no human tamer,” said Draksgollow. “I buy mine pre-broken.”

“Well, you see where my sculptor’s touch has gotten me with mine: brought up on tribunal and my home destroyed.”

“Perhaps, but I—”

“Mr. Draksgollow, I really don’t give a fornicating pair of rodents what you do with your evening, providing you leave me in peace.”

A moment later there was a wash of light from the outside corridor, followed by the hollow slam of an iron door, marking Draksgollow’s departure.

“Stones save me from the tinkers’ blight that plagues me,” Kezudkan muttered as he fiddled the dials and began his search.

Powlo had lived through worse days. They weren’t many, but he could fill a count of both hands with them. He had once spent three days trapped behind a cave-in, drinking his own piss and wondering which of his fellow miners would be the first to succumb to cannibalism—or if it would be him. He had been beaten so badly he vomited blood. There was the day that nearly broke him entirely, when his owner had sold off the mother of his children, whom he’d have called a wife if slaves were allowed to marry, a pain he wouldn’t admit to his dearest friends. Those memories all came from Korr, from his twin, Chapun. And yet he remembered every one of those events with the clarity of someone who’d been there.

By comparison, the factory lavatory where he found himself chained to a sewage return pipe was a mere inconvenience. To be certain, there was a lingering dread over the whole situation, and he was just a night removed from watching as men he’d worked beside for years were blasted full of holes, bleeding and screaming out their last moments. But nothing bad, nothing truly awful, had happened to
him
yet. He wore a newly riveted collar, but that was more an irritation than anything; he was used to the feeling. There was even enough slack for him to reach both the sink and the toilet, so apart from a rumbling belly, he wasn’t in any great distress.

The spark bulb overhead had kept him awake longer than he’d have liked the previous night. The switch for the lights was by the door, which the kuduks who’d taken him seemed keen to keep him from. Powlo’s body was unaccustomed to sleeping on smooth rock floors, but Chapun’s remembered what it was like. Eventually, with an arm at a contorted angle to ward away the light, he had managed to drift off.

He knew it was a matter of time before someone came to look in on him—and unless they had a spare lavatory, he was surprised no one had done so yet. Powlo kept himself calm and went over what he had rehearsed.

He awoke on the
Jennai
, on the half that used to be the
Cloudsmith
. The lamp in his room was on, and before he had awakened fully and puzzled out why, a voice spoke to him.

“It’s me, Chapun,” Erefan said. Chapun twisted under his blanket and saw the Mad Tinker’s twin sitting at his bedside. “I saw what happened at the mine, but not everything. Did you get away? Are you all right? I tried to mount a rescue, but when I—”

Chapun reached out and put a hand over Erefan’s, stopping short the nascent ramble before it got out of hand. “I’m alive. They took me captive.”

Erefan’s shoulders slumped in visible relief. “Captured.” Erefan nodded and his eyes unfocused. “All right, all right ... we can work with that. Somebody brew some tea and round up something to eat.”

Chapun looked out the open door of his cabin and saw a silhouetted shape slip away down the corridor. There were more people outside, he realized. A low buzz of conversation rose in the lull after Erefan’s order.

Over the course of a pre-dawn breakfast of stale pastry and lemon tea with no sugar or milk (and Erefan’s apologies for the shabby state of the rebellion’s larder), Chapun described the slaughter.

“When the world-hole opened, I thought it was you, come to check on us and brag that you’d gotten the new one working,” Chapun said. “Eziel help me, I had a smile on my face when I saw it—a
smile
. Well that didn’t last long; they came through in pairs, armed with rifles. They weren’t knockers or regular army, just blank-bearded blokes with twitchy trigger fingers. I screamed out ‘kuduks!’ but curse me for an idiot, nobody knew what I was talking about except the coal-hearted bastards shooting at us.”

“How’d you survive?” Erefan asked.

Chapun shrugged. “Dicers luck? I dunno. Prob’ly one of ‘em heard me shouting Korrish and figured I’d make a better prisoner that a corpse. I got slugged upside the head with a rifle butt, woke up chained in a loo. Smelled Korrish; figured they took me through.”

“You certain?”

Chapun nodded. “Smelled enough kuduk shit in my day,” he said with a sigh.

“I tried to force the world-ripper to work, had a little platoon rounded up for a rescue, ready to fire when I threw the switch.”

“I take it you didn’t get far with it.”

Erefan closed his eyes and hung his head. “No. We had a glimmer; it looked like it might take hold and put a hole through to the mine for us, but the dynamo cut out—didn’t have enough power to push through.”

Chapun put a hand on Erefan’s arm. “I’m alive. I’m breathing. Bolts, I’ve even got a lavatory all to myself.” His shoulders slumped and his voice grew quiet. “Better than the rest of my boys.”

Erefan stood. “Eziel grants strange mercies, eh?” He began to pace the small cabin. “We need to figure out what to do with you. Have they questioned you at all yet?”

“A bit, but they didn’t get pushy about it. I played dumb, made like I didn’t understand them. They knew I was faking. I don’t think they’re proper army though, cuz they didn’t seem like they had anyone on hand who knew what to do with a prisoner. They just left me and threatened to come back in the morning.”

“Not much of a threat, leaving you alone all night.”

“Well, they didn’t feed me. So there’s that, I suppose. They might try to starve information outta me.”

Erefan rubbed at his chin as he paced. “No. No we can’t have you starving. We’re going to need you to talk, confess even.”

“Erefan, that doesn’t sound like a good—”

“Not a true confession, of course,” said Erefan. Pieces of a plan were riveting themselves together in his head. “A careful confession, a planned one, one we can use to our advantage.”

There was a knock at the wall outside the open door. Chapun and Erefan both turned to see Vaulk poke his head in. Greuder’s twin was popular among the rebels for crafting edible food from the increasingly sparse larders, and was known for being an early riser to prepare breakfast. Even for him it was early to be awake. “Can’t help the fires of gossip spreading through the ship. I heard you have a bit of a problem with a prisoner.”

“Yeah, me,” Chapun replied.

“You have my sympathies,” Vaulk replied, letting himself in without waiting for an invitation. “But I thought you might want some assistance. This is more my area than yours, tinker.”