‘Ah,’ said Frey. ‘That makes sense now, then.’
Crake had expected more of a reaction. ‘Aren’t you angry?’
‘About what?’
‘Well, because we were making fun of you.’ He fought for a nice way to say it. ‘Because you don’t read very much.’
Frey was unable to see where the mockery was coming from. ‘But I don’t read very much,’ he said. ‘Barely at all, in fact.’
‘Oh,’ said Crake. ‘Well, I’m glad you see it that way. I just thought you should know, that’s all.’ He’d coughed and looked awkward then. ‘We should probably go get set up. We haven’t got much time.’
Since then, Crake had been working frantically to prepare for the Iron Jackal’s arrival. He’d chosen the largest chamber in the building for their stand, saying that they needed the space. He’d laid out a double circle of upright rods and small metal spheres, connected by cables to a metal box covered with dials and gauges that he called a resonator. In turn, the resonator was connected to a portable battery, and also to a smaller box which comprised only a single button.
‘This is the trigger,’ he’d said. ‘Everything in the circle will be set up to go, but I’ll need to hit this to turn it on.’
After he was done fussing with the dials, he wired up the equipment in the backpacks that Frey and Ugrik wore, and instructed them in its use. Frey was too distracted to listen to most of it, but he got the gist.
‘Yeah, yeah. You hit it with your sonic thing. We point the rods at the daemon. Hold down the buttons. Daemon is paralysed.’
‘These things eat up batteries, which is why you have to carry bigger ones,’ Crake said. ‘You’ll get thirty seconds out of them at best. Don’t waste it.’
Frey was deeply uneasy about the plan Crake had outlined. He didn’t trust this daemonism stuff at all. In fact, he wasn’t a big fan of invisible forces in general, although he supposed gravity was fairly useful, except when it made his aircraft crash. Still, this was Crake’s show now, and Frey had to trust him.
‘All this, I should add, is entirely theoretical,’ Crake explained. ‘There’s no guarantee that it will work.’
‘You just had to add a little disclaimer, didn’t you?’ Frey griped. ‘Couldn’t you just pretend you were confident? For my sake?’
‘Sorry, Cap’n. I was brought up to be honest.’
‘Well, there’s your problem,’ Frey replied. ‘And I warned you about apologising.’
‘Sorr—’ He stopped when Frey gave him a dangerous glare. ‘Yes, anyway, if all else fails, you’ve got the cutlass.’
Frey noticed how he avoided saying ‘your’ cutlass. Crake never seemed to have stopped thinking of it as his. Frey wondered if the daemonist secretly regretted trading it for his passage on the Ketty Jay all that time ago.
He drew it from his belt. ‘What good will that do?’ he asked. ‘I thought regular stuff didn’t work on daemons.’
‘That’s the point. It’s not “regular stuff”. It’s daemon-thralled, and a damn fine job I did of it, if I do say so myself. The best way to fight a daemon is with another daemon.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’
‘I didn’t want you getting any ideas about taking it on hand-to-hand.’
Frey turned the cutlass in his hand and made a few practice sweeps. Having a weapon he could see and touch, instead of all this harmonic resonance rubbish, made him feel much better.
The illumination from the chamber’s walls and floor dimmed suddenly. All three of them looked up, alerted. Was it because of Silo’s efforts in the power station? Or something else?
Frey felt a prickle of fear. The atmosphere was changing with the fading of the light. The eerie sense of decay in the room turned sinister as the darkness grew.
Crake pulled a handful of signal flares from a satchel on the ground. He struck them one by one and began tossing them in a loose ring, with the daemonist’s circle at the centre. They were surrounded by a red glow, a restless hiss and the reek of burning phosphorus.
The temperature dropped as the glow from the walls died. The desert air turned chill. They stood among the preserving tanks inside a boundary of fizzing flares. Beyond that, the darkness was now total.
They stood back to back. Frey had his cutlass ready, Crake’s metal cylinder in his off-hand. Ugrik carried a shotgun and the other cylinder. A burning flare lay at his feet, illuminating his bearded face from beneath. With the ornaments and ink-stripes on his face, he seemed every inch the murderous Yort barbarian of folk myth. Crake held a metal sphere, attached to a small belt battery, similar to the one Frey had used the last time he faced the Iron Jackal. This one, Crake assured them, would have a more dramatic effect.
In the bloody light of the signal flares, they looked like the damned.
He caught sight of the ring on his little finger, and Trinica came unbidden to his mind. I doubt we’ll meet again, he heard her say. Maybe she’d been more right than she knew. Would she cry for him when she learned of his death, he wondered?
Who was he kidding? She’d never even know. If he died here, he’d disappear without a trace, swallowed up by the desert like the Azryx city that would become his tomb.
The sheer sense of loss overwhelmed him. To have almost had her again, and lost her . . . It was too much to bear. He was truly terrified then. Not of dying, but of what his death would mean.
It would mean he’d failed her. That he’d given up, left her as a cruel ghost of herself. She was still there, beneath: the true Trinica. She could be that person again. She could be happy, she could let herself be loved, he knew it.
But not if he died tonight.
He made a promise to himself then. If he survived to see the dawn, he’d search for her again. He’d go back to Vardia, and he’d find her, and he’d do whatever it took to make amends for the things he’d done. He swore it, a fierce, determined oath. If he survived.
Damn, Darian, he thought to himself. Did that woman just become your reason to live?
He’d never have admitted it to anyone, not even from the depths of the deepest mug of grog. But here, in the bleakness of the moment, that thought gave him strength.
He swivelled, raising his cutlass. Something had moved at the far reaches of the light.
‘It’s here,’ he said.
‘I know,’ Crake said. His face was grim, eyes restlessly scanning. Ugrik was murmuring to himself.
Frey licked his lips nervously. His senses strained for a sign, the split-second warning that might mean the difference between life and death.
‘Don’t you leave me here!’ screamed Rabby from beyond the light. The last despairing wail of Frey’s doomed navigator as he was abandoned. Frey felt a cold hand brush down his back.
‘Don’t listen to it,’ Crake told him. ‘Don’t pay attention to anything it does or says.’
Easier said than done, thought Frey. He shifted his feet, feeling vulnerable. He could sense the Iron Jackal out there somewhere. He was getting used to the paranoia and dread that came with the presence of daemons, but it didn’t help much.
A trickle of sweat inched past his temple and down his stubbled cheek.
‘What’s it waitin’ for?’ Ugrik asked, but no one answered.
A low growl drifted out of the dark. A muzzled face slid into view, one half moist and glistening fur, the other dull metal. The shine of its mechanical eye was lost in the red glow of the flares, but its other eye was a black pit, and it fixed on Frey and filled him with horror.
‘Bugger this!’ said Ugrik. He raised his shotgun and fired one-handed. The blast echoed through the chamber, among the tanks of silent Azryx.
If he hit anything, they couldn’t tell. The Iron Jackal had disappeared.
‘Don’t waste your ammunition,’ said Crake. ‘You can’t hurt it with bullets.’
‘Aye?’ said Ugrik, chambering a new round. ‘Well, I reckon I’ll try anyway.’
Laughter fluttered around the chamber.
A woman’s laughter, the cold sound of Trinica at her most scornful. It was the final straw for Frey. Something snapped inside him: fear had finally driven him to rage.
‘Come on, then, if you’re coming!’ he yelled. ‘You think I’m scared of you, you ratty little mutt? Show yourself and I’ll stuff those bayonet fingers of yours up your stinking puppy arse!’
Ugrik cackled at that. Crake just looked horrified, as if making the daemon mad would somehow make things worse. But when a few seconds had ticked by, and nothing happened, he relaxed a little.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘That didn’t work.’
The Iron Jackal flew at Frey, leaping into the light, bladed claws spread wide, jaws gaping. Frey threw himself aside, but his heavy pack made him clumsy. He avoided the bayonets, but some part of the daemon slammed into the side of the pack and sent him spinning. He tumbled and crashed down onto his back, jarring his spine against the heavy equipment. The cylinder fell out of his hand and rolled away.
He tried to get up and found himself helpless, lying on the ground like an upturned turtle. The Iron Jackal was turning around for another attack, slouched and terrible in the gory glow. Panic burst in his brain. He scrabbled for the cylinder, which Crake had assured him was his best defence, and found only the cable that attached it to the equipment in his pack. He reeled it in, but even as he started he knew it was too late, because the Iron Jackal was already racing back towards him and—
The boom of Ugrik’s shotgun made him shudder. The Iron Jackal was blasted away as if swatted aside by a giant hand. It skidded along the floor, out of range of the flares, and was gone.
Frey tipped over to his side and finally managed to get to his feet. Cutlass in one hand, cylinder in the other, he looked around wildly for the next attack.
Ugrik smirked at Crake. ‘Can’t hurt it, eh?’
‘You didn’t hurt it,’ said Crake. He was fiddling anxiously with the orb in his hand.
‘Where were you?’ Frey snapped at him. ‘You were supposed to stop that thing!’
‘It doesn’t work!’ Crake said, frustrated. He thumbed the button on the orb in his hand.
‘Check the wire on the battery pack,’ Frey told him, remembering his own experience in Shasiith.
‘The wire?’ Crake looked down at the battery pack on his hip. ‘Spit and blood! You’re right! How did you know?’
‘Wild guess.’
Crake began fiddling with it. ‘Nearly there. Just hold it off for a few seconds.’
‘Hold it off?’ Frey cried, and at that moment it came again, jumping out of the darkness to land before him, hydraulic legs hissing with the impact. Frey felt his bowels turn to water as it loomed over him. It seemed to grow in the red light, swelling with each breath. Cables and mechanical tendons sewed through slick fur.
It swung a claw at him, and Frey’s cutlass reacted, darting out to parry. Sparks flew as the blade met the bayonets and turned them aside. His cutlass cushioned him from the worst of the jolt, but it was still strong enough to make him stagger.
The Iron Jackal attacked again, slashing at him with long, sinewy arms, pressing forward. Frey’s cutlass turned frantically this way and that, blocking again and again as the creature pounded at his defences. Each new blow struck more sparks, lighting up the snarling muzzle of the beast. Trinica’s black eye glowered madly at him.
He saw Ugrik off to one side, trying to get an angle on the beast, but they were locked too tightly for the explorer to dare a shot. Frey wanted to yell at him to fire anyway, because he couldn’t hold out, not against this inhuman savagery and strength. But he barely had time to draw breath.
Each time the Iron Jackal knocked his blade aside, the next parry was weaker. His arm was turning to rubber. Finally, the monster swept both hands at him together, a sheaf of bayonets, and the cutlass twisted out of his grip and went clattering to the floor.
Frey staggered, arm numbed by the impact. The daemon drew back a claw for the death-blow—
—and the air was filled with a high shriek, pitched just at the edge of Frey’s hearing but painfully intense. The Iron Jackal shrieked with it. It stepped backwards, flailing at the air, then tripped on a root that had broken through the floor. It crashed against one of the Azryx tanks, spilling its contents in a flood of liquid and a tangle of cables and withered limbs. Frey stared in amazement as the Iron Jackal found its feet and stumbled away from the tank, moving as if drunk.
‘The harmonic arc generators!’ called Crake. He was holding aloft the orb in his hand. ‘While it’s disoriented!’
It took Frey a moment to work out what he meant. In the chaos of the fight, he’d almost forgotten the cylinder in his hand, with its pinecone arrangement of rods at the end. He thrust it towards the daemon.
‘Not yet!’ Crake shouted. ‘Wait for Ugrik to get round the other side of it!’
The Yort was already going. Evidently, he’d been listening to the instructions that Frey hadn’t been paying attention to.
‘Ready?’ Crake said, once they were on opposite sides of the beast. ‘Now!’
They pressed their thumb-studs together. The pack on Frey’s back hummed into life, and the Iron Jackal froze and screeched in agony. It tried to thrash, it howled and raged, but it had been straitjacketed, trapped in an invisible cage of frequencies.
Frey felt a desperate grin come to his lips. It was working! They were hurting the bastard!
How’d you like that, you pan-dimensional piece of shit?
‘Move it over to the circle!’ Crake instructed them. The high-pitched sound from the orb faded as the battery died. ‘Quickly!’
Quickly. Frey remembered Crake’s warning. They had thirty seconds, if that.
Staying on either side of the daemon, they moved towards the circle of rods and spheres. The Iron Jackal resisted; they had to haul against its strength. Frey’s confidence wavered. Were Crake’s devices strong enough to hold it? Conscious of the need for haste, he picked up the pace, hoping to drag the creature with him on its invisible tethers.
The tension on his arm slackened suddenly. The creature lunged at him. He had only time for the briefest flash of utter terror before it was arrested again, a moment before it struck. Its back arched and twisted, and it wailed, trapped once more.
‘Idiots!’ Crake shouted at them. ‘One on each side, or it breaks the cage. Move together!’
Frey was drenched with sweat. Shocked, he did as he was told, keeping his eye on Ugrik rather than the beast. He should have listened the first time.
How many seconds left? Fifteen? Less? If the beast was released, he had no more weapons to fight it.
They sidestepped, pulling the Iron Jackal between them like two handlers wrangling a maddened bull. The daemon came with them, caught within the confines of its cage of sound. It seemed an impossibly fragile restraint for a creature like that, and yet it was working.
One step. Two. Three. Then they were at the edge of the circle. Surely that was fifteen seconds? It felt like ten minutes had passed. Crake had moved to crouch by the box with the trigger button, ready to activate the circle.
Frey frowned. Was the humming from his pack getting quieter?
‘Now!’ Crake said.
Frey and Ugrik stepped to either side of the circle in perfect sync. The Iron Jackal resisted them with all its might. Frey felt the force of it through his arm. But when he and Ugrik tugged together, it stepped clumsily forward. The instant it was inside the circle, Crake stabbed the button.
If they’d thought the Iron Jackal’s unearthly screeches had been terrible before, they were nothing compared to this. The sound was like a sandstorm, flaying the senses. The daemon writhed and thrashed as if on fire, twisting and turning in the hideous red light from the flares. Frey and Ugrik stepped back, staring, the cylinders in their hand useless now and forgotten.
It had become indistinct at the edges, hazy like smoke. But seconds passed, and no more than that occurred. It was clearly suffering, but it was still there in
the circle.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Frey demanded of Crake. ‘Kill it!’
Crake’s eyes were wide with fear as he fiddled with the dials on the machine. ‘I can’t! It’s too strong! It was supposed to be torn apart in the flux!’ The Iron Jackal howled anew at each change of the settings, but it was still holding together. ‘The battery won’t last much longer!’
The creature’s gaze fixed on Frey then, as if it knew, as if to say: I’m coming for you. As soon as this is over, I’m coming for you.
No. He wouldn’t let that thing win. He’d been to the edge too many times to give in to it now. He’d been through fear and rage, and now there was only blazing defiance.
He shucked his pack off his back and let it fall to the floor. Then he walked over to his cutlass, picked it up, and turned to face the daemon.
‘This ends here,’ he said grimly.
‘Well, end it bloody fast, then!’ Crake screamed.
He strode to the edge of the circle. The Iron Jackal saw him coming and bared its teeth. Either the circle was weakening or it had found new strength, because it was becoming solid again, mastering its pain. Frey drew back his cutlass, aiming the point between the armoured plates on its chest.
And suddenly there was no daemon in the circle any more.
The change happened as if in a dream, as if Trinica had been there all along. As if it had always been Trinica he’d been fighting. She stood in the centre of the circle, all in black, her white face red in the fading light. Darkness was gathering as the last of the flares died, but he could see that her black eyes shimmered with tears as she gazed at him with an expression of heartbreaking sorrow.
‘Darian,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’
He hesitated. His mind told him it was a daemon, but his instincts rebelled. He knew that it was just trying to buy time for the battery that powered the circle to fail, but the thought of hurting Trinica, even an effigy like this, paralysed him.
But this wasn’t her. This was the pirate queen that had taken her place. This was the mask, the shell, the cold nemesis that betrayed and shunned him.