Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (31 page)

“I do. The memory is clearing up. She probably shouldn’t get up for a while, but this is no place to rest. Her neck isn’t broken, but she’s had a concussion, and most likely whiplash. I’m going to stay here and tend to her.”

“Isn’t that a little ... awkward?” Madlin asked.

“It’s her decision,” said Erefan. “She’s better suited to it than anyone else.”

“I’m not sure I’d want to meet me,” Madlin muttered.

“Someone get a stretcher and carry Sosha to her quarters,” Jamile ordered.
Lieutenant Jamile?
Maybe doctor could be an honorary rank, strictly for medical orders.

“I can bring some of your clothes in the morning,” Madlin offered, feeling like she had nothing else to offer. A whole army at her command, and all she could think to do for an injured soldier was bring a clean dress for her nurse.

Jamile looked up, an impish smile conveying her relief that Sosha’s injuries weren’t severe. “Thank you, but I should be fine. I think her clothes ought to fit me.”

With excitement fading and the rime melting from her face and hair, exhaustion caught up with Madlin as she returned to her own room. How long had she been away? An hour? Two? She hadn’t thought to look at a clock the whole while. Pawing around the darkened room, she found the lamp and flicked it on. She tossed her coat on the floor by the coal stove, followed by hat and gloves, then changed into the thickest nightclothes in her wardrobe and threw a cloak over her shoulders.

The room was tepid, not the least unpleasant by any objective account, but Madlin wasn’t feeling objective. She was cold and wanted the cold driven from her with a ferocity that would warn it never to return. There were times for being out of doors, and an autumn night on Tinker’s Island was not one of them. She pulled open the stove door and dumped half the coal bucket inside. A mechanical sparker rested on top of the stove, with a little pull chain that was sure to get a fire going by the third pull at the worst.

Madlin wasn’t having it. She didn’t dare try to warm herself with aether, but she wasn’t afraid of a blackened lump of inert fire. The refreshing rush of aether spread through her—cold, but an altogether different sort of cold than the one that kept her shivering. One by one each lump caught fire. One would have been enough to set the whole batch burning, but she wanted heat now, not when the coals felt like giving it. Besides, the aether needed to go somewhere.

Madlin huddled herself in a chair and waited for the room to warm. That was when she noticed it—a letter by the door, where it looked to have been slipped beneath the crack. It might have been there when she left, unnoticed in the gloom and rush of her departure. She might even have kicked it aside without realizing.

Bunching the cloak tight around her, Madlin bent to scoop it up. It was a simple sheet of paper, folded this way and that such that a single wax seal could keep it closed against snooping. The impression in the wax was crude, not a seal at all. Someone had taken a quill and used the tip to press tiny letters into it, spacing them well apart to make clear that they weren’t meant to form magical runes. They spelled out her name in Korrish phonics: Ma-da-li-n.
Close enough
.

A few wiggles back and forth and the wax snapped. Madlin unfolded the paper and read:

Miss Madlin Errol,

I believe that our continued presence on Tinker’s Island is a risk we can no longer afford. All that I have said remains true. All the offers I have made still stand. I still carry the hope that you will see the warlock for what he is before he becomes your doom. Should you wish to contact me, you have the means. Find Anzik, my son’s twin in Veydrus. Look for him in the palace in Ghelk, where the Kheshi city of Mabliss lies.

Keep well,

D.Z.

Madlin read it twice, trying to decide if there was a layer beneath the one spelled plainly on the page. It occurred to her to keep it, but she shook the thought aside. Dire havoc would come, should the wrong person read that message.

Before she could second guess herself, Madlin opened the stove and fed the message to the coals.

She set the lamp on the bedside table and climbed beneath the covers. As she blew out the flame, leaving herself in cozy darkness, she had only two words to remember: Anzik and Mabliss. The rest the flames could keep.

Chapter 22

“Friends have always bored me. Enemies are the spice of life.” –Rashan Solaran

Powlo had seen steam wagons before, both through the eyes of Chapun and one that Cadmus had built on a lark. There were no proper roads for one on Tinker’s Island—little of it was level or smooth—and bumps and rattles were no friends to the delicate interlacing of machinery that ran one.

The versions Kezudkan and Draksgollow had bought with their ill-gotten gold were a different sort of animal. They still ran on steam, but runes heated the tanks. They weren’t open at the top like the front seat of every steam wagon he’d ever seen before, but had a steel canopy and glass windows as thick as the palm of his hand. They rolled on two sets of wide, flat steel belts, each the full length of the vehicle, and seemed not the least bit concerned with the grade or smoothness they traversed.

That all would have been impressive enough, but despite just a two-man crew, the little military steam wagon carried a pair of wide-barreled rotoguns on swivels. One driver, one gunner, and the rust-hearted little monsters fit through the world-holes.

Powlo was part of a crew of sixteen slaves following in the wake of the small squadron of metal beasts. He couldn’t say for certain where they were, but it was Khesh by his guess, some noble estate. Repeater gunfire sounded in the distance, down the echoing corridors to meet Powlo and his comrades as they carried plunder back through the hole to Kezudkan’s lair. It was his fourth trip, and this latest venture had him carrying off an armload of antique vases, probably getting all scratched up and less valuable by the step.

“Good, good. Excellent,” Kezudkan greeted them at the hole from the Korr side. The old daruu glanced at each slave’s take as they passed, murmuring little encouragements or comments about the strange wonders that humans of this other world coveted. When Powlo’s turn came to pass by, the daruu barred the way with his cane. “Hold there. What’s this?” A finger like a sausage carved in stone jabbed at the base of one of Powlo’s vases.

Powlo twisted around, careful not to drop anything as he looked under his own loot. “It’s blood, sir. The place is swimming in it, some rooms. I doubt there’s a rug in the place that will be worth saving.”

“We’re not here for rugs,” Draksgollow said, stomping over with his irregular gait, every other step punctuated by hisses of steam and a metallic thunk against the floor. “And I don’t give a glass hammer about flower pots.” Draksgollow slapped his mechanical hand at the vases and knocked them from Powlo’s grasp. They smashed to the ground and became worthless shards of porcelain. Each had likely been worth more than a slave’s freedom price. “Sweep that up before someone gets damaged.”

Draksgollow stomped off in pursuit of more slaves to bully, leaving Powlo alone with Kezudkan, the mess, and occasional slaves making the passage through the hole in one direction or the other.

“Don’t worry, Chapun,” Kezudkan said a conspiratorial undertone, holding the back of his hand to the side of his mouth. “We won’t have you much longer. Draksgollow doesn’t much care for you, but you’re worth more alive than dead.”

Powlo was taking off his shirt to use as a broom and stopped with it around his armpits. “You’re selling me back home?”

“Indeed. Just got the cable this morning. It’s a done deal. It’s not your freedom, but at least it will be an owner you’ve grown accustomed to.”

Powlo pulled his shirt back on. “What should I—when should—where—”

Kezudkan patted a hand in the air. “No no, just go ahead and finish that up. I won’t let you get left behind. Money is money, even if we can take whatever we want and more. It’s principle, you know. Businessmen must maintain a certain sense of themselves. Mustn’t be wasteful of coin or goods, just because we’re rich as kings.”

That evening, Powlo found himself chained in the slave car of a thunderail, heading home. Well, he was heading to the home Chapun had left, but since he had convinced everyone that he
was
Chapun, it was much the same. The accommodations were sparse, to say the least: a double-aisle ran the length of the car, with a pair of steel benches flanking each. The benches were packed with slaves sitting shoulder to shoulder, chains snaking through loops at their collars and loops behind the benches, keeping them all seated for the duration of their trip. There was no meal service in the slave car, no chamber pot to pass around. The doors wouldn’t open until the trip was ended, when some poor bastard would have to clean it out with a pump and hose before the next batch were loaded. Powlo’s seat was still damp from the last washing.

It was just a matter of time now. Maybe he finished the trip, maybe he didn’t. He’d done his job and Cadmus was going to slip him out sooner or later. He liked the tinker, trusted him even. There was just a little matter of pragmatism that told him that maybe he should wait until he was safe and cozy before giving up the location of Kezudkan’s headquarters. Sure, Cadmus might be able to tinker it out with whatever black science he used to figure out things a normal man never could dream, but he’d have an easier time rescuing Powlo than puzzling out the route on his own. Cadmus would get nothing from Powlo but the name of a train and its arrival time. Let the Mad Tinker work backward from there—searching a whole city for one workshop—if he was willing to strand Powlo.

“Seemed awful dim, to me,” Draksgollow muttered, squirting a bit of grease into one of his joints. It was just the two of them in the room, watching from the Ice Furnace lair in the arse crack of Korr. The view frame showed the workshop they had just launched their assault from, though the steam tanks were all safely ensconced in the not-so-abandoned mines with them, along with much of the loot they had stolen.

“Dim as he needed to seem,” Kezudkan replied. “You think he didn’t figure it out?”

“Dim enough not to see it for a trap. Maybe too dim to work out where he was, or care.”

“And if he was?” Kezudkan turned up his hands. “A few days’ holiday before we get back to work. We’ve earned a good one, I think. We can afford one, certainly.”

Draksgollow pushed his chair away from the table. He and Kezudkan were the only patrons of a lounge where the entertainment might not show up for days, if at all. Let the daruu while away his elder years in idle vigils. “I’ve got work to do.”

Kezudkan stared through the view frame. “Of course, of course. You’ve earned a respite, but I won’t force one on you.” He flicked a few fingers in Draksgollow’s direction.

When the kuduk tinker had departed, taking his whirrs and hisses and grating metallic twitches with him, Kezudkan settled in to relish in the silence. The stone around him was old, welcoming, tied deep to the bones of Korr and little disturbed in decades. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a small figurine, carved from white marble. It was to be part of a set of chess pieces for his grandson, but the rest of the set lay buried in the ruins of his Eversall estate. The human shape of it was bent and weary, pathetic in all ways. Once he had used it as an allegory for Erefan, to warn him to take better care of himself.

Kezudkan crushed it to powder in his fingers.