The Blood Debt (39 page)

‘You know.’ The flyer looked anywhere but at her. ‘He’s smart, obviously — but he’s kind of dumb, too. He doesn’t see what’s right in front of him half the time, he’s so wrapped up in his thoughts.’

That sounded familiar. ‘He’s not like us. You know about his memories, don’t you? He sees something once and it’s always in his head. The backlog swamps him if he doesn’t keep it in check.’

Chu stared up at the heavy lifter, and nodded. ‘Everyone has baggage.’

‘He has enough baggage for everyone.’

They had reached the base of one of several scaffolds leading, via various ladders and ramps, up to the gangplank.

‘Can you climb up there?’ asked Chu. ‘If not, I can arrange a freight elevator for you.’

‘No, thanks,’ she said with a tart smile. Anything rather than be considered
freight.
‘I’ll just be a little slow.’

‘Well, we’re not in any great hurry at the moment. Why don’t you go on ahead while I —?’

Chu stopped at a commotion from the hangar entrance. Voices echoed in the vast space, overlapping too much for Shilly to disentangle. A group of more than a dozen people had formed near the gate through the fence. She couldn’t make out their identities against the bright background of the day. They seemed to be arguing.

Then a group of eight broke away and marched steadily towards her location. Robed in blue, they were obviously wardens. The rest followed, shouting and waving.

‘That looks like your friend Marmion,’ said Chu, her eyes sharper than Shilly’s. ‘And Tom. There’s stationmaster Shusti — the guy who was stalling me earlier. Looks like he’s called the guards. And — oh, great.’

‘What?’ Shilly asked, more concerned by the dread in Chu’s voice than her misidentification of Marmion as a friend. ‘Who is it?’

‘Only some of that baggage we were talking about. Hold on; here they come.’

The babble of voices resolved into a full-scale argument.

‘I will
not
take no for an answer,’ Marmion was insisting. ‘My credentials are sound, and so is my credit. I act with the full authority of the Alcaide. You’ve seen the letter from Magister Considine. I can’t understand why you persist in obstructing me — except out of deliberate, unwarranted malice.’

Stationmaster Shusti was an overweight man with an elaborate coif and a sweeping, silken robe. His ample cheeks boiled red with anger. ‘This is outrageous! You cannot walk in here and expect me to ignore basic safety regulations. We have standards to conform to, and procedures to follow —’

‘Who cares about procedures? This is an emergency! Three of my people are in grave danger and I need to help them. Don’t blame me if I walk all over you on the way. Either help me or stand aside.’

Shusti spluttered. Shilly had to admire Marmion’s gall. He certainly was a dab hand at facing up to bureaucrats and functionaries, a skill no doubt learned from his years in the Haunted City.

Three guards in black and gold who had been bringing up the rear hurried forward to block the ladder Shilly and Chu were standing next to. There the rolling argument came to a temporary halt.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said one, ‘but we cannot let you pass.’

‘This again?’ Marmion opened his arms in a long-suffering gesture and rolled his eyes. ‘People might die because of your incompetence. I bet our treatment wouldn’t be so shabby if we were Stone Mages. This is outright discrimination, and I will not tolerate it!’

Chu came forward. ‘One of the people we’re going to rescue
is
a Stone Mage,’ she told the guard. ‘Do you really want the Synod breathing down our neck for not helping?’

‘A Stone Mage, huh?’ scoffed a voice from the back of the huddle. The handsome young man Shilly had seen watching her pressed forward. His uniform presented a bold red square on each shoulder. ‘He’s no more a Stone Mage than I am.’

‘Shut up, Kazzo,’ said Chu. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘No? How many Skender Van Haasteren the Tenths are there? I did some research into your little friend. He’s just a student, not a Mage. You lied about him, so who’s to say this lot isn’t lying too? Whatever you’re up to, you need to be stopped.’

There was an arrogant, malicious gleam in Kazzo’s eye. He was enjoying hurting Chu, that was for certain. Shilly instantly felt bad for baiting her.

‘We are taking this lifter,’ said Marmion to the guards, his voice low and dangerous. ‘Stand aside.’

‘No, sir. Not until I have proper authorisation.’

‘You’re outnumbered eight to three.’

‘Not for much longer, sir.’

The sound of footsteps drew Shilly’s gaze to the entrance. More guards had arrived, and it didn’t look like they were going to give Marmion what he needed.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, forcing her way past the nearest guard. He reached out to stop her and she swung her walking stick at his legs. The stout wood cracked hard against his shins. He gasped and hopped away.

She raised her stick like a sword as a second guard approached. ‘What sort of men are you, to attack a poor crippled girl?’ She indicated that Chu should start climbing. Marmion and the other wardens came around behind her. The guards drew nightsticks but didn’t wield them.

‘This is outrageous,’ spluttered Shusti. ‘How you of all people came to be involved in something like this, Chu Milang, I don’t know. Your father would be appalled.’

‘Don’t you give me that,’ the flyer said as she scurried up the metal rungs, ‘you puffed-up, self-important fool. You’re the only person here who’d try to use Dad against me.’

‘You’ll never get clear of the gantry!’

‘No? Looks to me like someone’s been sloppy with the stays. I don’t know how that could have come about. It wouldn’t have happened in Dad’s day.’

Shilly glanced up at the lifter and noted that all bar two of the ropes securing it hung loose. She glimpsed Banner’s face peering over the side of the gondola, followed shortly by the sound of an engine turning over. The propellers at the rear of the dirigible glowed brightly and began to rotate.

‘Stop them!’ yelled Shusti as the last of the wardens climbed up the ladder and Shilly prepared to follow. The three guards had moved off to another ladder, not waiting to deal with her. She only hoped for enough time to get up top before reinforcements arrived.

She climbed as fast as her gammy leg would allow. Holding onto her stick also slowed her down, so the gap between her and the last warden grew steadily greater. The pounding of feet on the ramps above vibrated through the ladder, becoming louder the higher she climbed.

She reached the first series of ramps and hurried along them. The next wave of guards was already climbing the ladder behind her. She cursed under her breath and stepped up the pace. They could, if they moved fast enough, cut ahead and catch her.

And then what? Would Marmion halt the mission on her behalf? Or would he keep going and leave her behind?

She gritted her teeth against a growing ache in her thigh and swore to save him from having to choose. She had two more ladders to climb before she reached the gangplank level. Already wardens were swarming across it to the gondola.

‘Hurry, Shilly!’

She didn’t need Chu’s shout of warning, and she didn’t waste breath replying. She reached the next ladder and heaved herself upwards. It was shorter than the last, but still looked daunting. The entire length of her leg was aflame by the time she hauled her leg over the top of the ladder.

The shouts of the guards followed her along the walkways. They were converging on her rapidly, from behind and along the second route. To her dismay, she realised that the group coming up the other ladders was going to arrive before her. Marmion would have to cast off or be boarded.

The gangplank swayed as someone ran across it from the direction of the gondola. She heard banging as she started to climb the last ladder. A nut pinged from the scaffolding before her, then bounced off metal stanchions and tumbled through space to the ground far below. The guards’ ladder wobbled precariously and their yells turned from anger to alarm.

‘Another step,’ yelled Tom, ‘and I’ll let you fall!’

The guards cursed him and began to retreat.

Shilly gratefully crawled over the top of the ladder, onto the gangplank level. Tom was instantly beside her, pocketing a large wrench and taking some of her weight with a hand under her shoulder. Shilly forced herself to concentrate on her footing and not think about the distance to the ground as she limped across the swaying gangplank. The moment they were aboard, the two remaining ties fell away.

‘Stand back!’ Chu’s voice echoed through the hangar as the guards on Shilly’s heels reached the edge of the gantry. The lifter rocked and began to rise. The sound of its engines grew to a roar. The propellers disappeared into a glowing blur. Shilly let herself be pressed into a seat, her weight suddenly seeming greater than normal. Sunlight fell across her face, momentarily blinding her.

Then they were away. With the grace of a sailing ship, the heavy lifter surged upwards, clearing the sides of the hangar’s hatch and ascending into the open sky.

Literally breathless, Shilly marvelled at the city laid out around and below her. It seemed to get darker the further inward she looked, going from a faded brown at the edges to a gleaming tower at the very centre. Beyond its walls, natural and human-made, she saw wrinkled brown land and the vast scar of the Divide to the south. Grey mountains to the northeast were wreathed in white. A strong wind blew across her face, stealing her words.

‘Well, we’re committed now.’

Tom had moved off, not waiting to be thanked for his assistance. The gondola’s passenger area was smaller than it had looked from the ground, barely wide enough for two people to stand together; long curving benches hugged its interior walls and took up valuable floor space. Chu had said it would seat twenty but half that number seemed to completely fill it. Panelling carved from a warm red wood covered the metal frame connecting the gondola to the dirigible overhead. Its sides were open to the air from waist-height upwards, apart from at the very front where curved sheets of clear glass protected the pilot. There Chu sat, frantically pulling at the controls. At the opposite end of the gondola, Banner and Tom crouched head to head, talking loudly over the throbbing of the engine. A rolling, driving vibration shook the entire frame.

‘Are you unharmed?’ Marmion stopped to check on her as he moved forward to consult with Chu. Shilly nodded, although her leg ached and her hip was on fire.

‘What happened back there?’ she asked. ‘Did you tread on someone’s toes?’

‘We bucked the system. That never goes down well with people who care about such things.’

‘Could it really be as simple as that?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe. We’ll find out when we get back, I suppose.’

Shilly was reluctant to think that far ahead. As Marmion went aft to talk to Banner, she moved forward to watch Chu. The flyer was working up a sweat at the controls, moving levers and adjusting dials at a furious rate. Shilly didn’t know what any of them did, but they looked fiendishly complex.

‘Can I help?’ she asked.

‘You can watch out for company,’ Chu told her. ‘Let me know if anyone gets too close.’

Shilly scanned the sky. Several flyers were visible, circling through the morning air over the city. ‘What will we do about them if they do?’

‘Gesture rudely. There’s not else much we
can
do in this thing. I left my slingshot at home. But it’s not as if they’re going to shoot us down or anything. The lifter is too valuable.’

‘How long until we reach the Aad?’

‘An hour or so. I’ll push it as fast as I can.’

Hearing defensiveness in Chu’s tone, Shilly stopped talking. She divided her time between keeping an eye on the sky and watching the city creep by beneath them. She tried to find the Black Galah as the city streets rolled past, but she missed it. The dirigible sailed clear over the Wall, and then there was nothing but the Divide and its strange geography below them. She saw the hair-thin line of the Fool’s Run angle away to the west and fade into the distance. Dry creek beds and sandy plains reminded her of home, but there was no sea nearby. Water hadn’t visited the canyon for years, by the look of it. It was as parched as the deepest desert.

She spotted four low brown clouds: more man’kin were on the move. Grateful she wasn’t down among them, she performed a rough mental tally of how much time had passed since Sal had called her. It had been an hour at least, and another hour would pass before they reached the Aad. From there they had to find him and Skender.

She only hoped Sal could hang on that long. It was the best she had to offer.

* * * *

The Liberators

‘Animals have minds that exist entirely in the

present, with little or no thought of tomorrow or

yesterday. Humans travel from past to future in a

dynamic tension between the two extremes.

Man’kin exist in all times at once, hence their

ability to foretell or reveal things that are not

known to us.’

MASTER WARDEN RISA ATILDE:

NOTES TOWARD A UNIFIED CURRICULUM

on’t come any closer,’ shouted Pirelius, ‘or I’ll break your friend’s neck!’

‘Skender?’ Sal froze at the entrance to the dungeon. He could feel his fragile grip on the Change slipping, which meant that either the Homunculus was close or the sink was reasserting itself. He squeezed every last drop out of the charm Master Warden Atilde had taught him, making the fog as thick as any he had ever seen. That was more important than trying to call Shilly again — and for once he didn’t care if the charm went out of control completely.

‘Skender!’

Through the dense, echoless air, he heard a strange choking noise, then a gruesome thud. The fog billowed in the lamplight, and he rushed forward, unable to stand impotently by while Skender was being hurt.

What he found was Skender sitting up on the rough floor, rubbing his throat. A familiar face hovered at his side. Sal hadn’t seen Kemp for five years but he had changed only in details. Apart from thick jet-black tattoos on his wrists and forearms, his skin was still utterly white and he still looked utterly intimidating.