CHAPTER ONE
Not for the first time, Drekki Flynt was in gaol, though for this once it was just for a visit.
‘I’m relieved that you got my message, Captain Flynt,’ said the gaoler. He was an oldbeard of the lower classes, dressed in the prison variant of the copperhats uniform. An ostentatious moustache covered his mouth, still peppered with brown despite his age. ‘He’s been asking after you since he got here, three weeks ago.’
‘It was something of a surprise, I’ll say, being invited to visit a gaol,’ said Drekki. Trokwi, his mechanical drillbill, peered suspiciously from his shoulder. ‘Usually one is compelled.’
‘Are you sure he didn’t give a name?’ asked Kedren Grunnsson, ship’s runesmith and the second member of Drekki’s away party. ‘Any clue, an inkling perhaps?’
Kedren walked behind the captain down the stairs; Adrimm Adrimmsson came after him, muttering under his beard about what a pain this all was. As the gaoler was practically deaf, Kedren had to speak up to be heard.
‘Oh, dear me, no.’ The gaoler took a long, loud sniff. ‘Mad as a bag of half-starved squigs, this one. Sorry business this, but better than some I’ve seen. We often don’t know what to do with the gitzaki.[1] It’s a shame, a crying shame, to see someone of good beard and talent lost to the nuffendrinzakarni,[2] but it could happen to us all, and at least you’ve come.’ The elderly gaoler produced a voluminous handkerchief from a pouch on his belt and blew long and hard into it. The resulting honk echoed up and down the stairs for some time, because the stairs went down a very, very long way. Forever, it seemed. They were wide and steel, well wrought with aetherlamps set in the risers to show the way. Such was the artifice on display in a major sky-port, even in Mhornar, whose principal character was held to be craftiness rather than craft.
There was a touch of despair on the air, and the chill of damp. They were not far from port-bottom, and the cool indifference of Ulgu’s clouds beyond the final, outermost hulls.
‘Ooh, do forgive the pace,’ said the gaoler, who was shuffling ever so slowly. ‘It’s my knees, y’see. Not as spry as I was when I fared the airs like you. Invalided me out, because of me knees, though I wanted to stay. I envy you.’
‘It’s quite all right, father longbeard,’ said Drekki respectfully.
Although it wasn’t. The old duardin’s pace was maddening. It made Drekki’s calves ache. Despite its aethermatic boost, his armour weighed on him hard at that speed, made as it was from heavy ironstar metal. His gold-capped beard braids clicked on his chest with every torturous step. The lack of his weapons at his hips made him feel vulnerable. They’d been forced to hand those over to the guardians at the entrance, and in Mhornar, being unarmed always made a duardin uneasy. He wanted to be in and out again as quickly as could be. That simply was not happening, and Drekki suspected the sluggish pace was done for show. These minor functionaries often had an officiousness that outreached their power. The gaoler was no exception.
‘I seen many an arkanaut go gitzak in my time,’ the oldbeard droned on. ‘One too many ventures gone wrong, lose all your aether on the diamond tables. A bad voyage, a poor choice, a doomed investment. So many ways a duardin can lose his way and his mind.’ The gaoler shook his head sorrowfully. ‘A crying shame.’
‘Captain would know all about those kinds of failure,’ grumbled Adrimm from the back. ‘I believe he’s sampled them all.’ His black eyebrows beetled beneath his shock of hair. In his dark face, his eyes glinted with permanent disapproval.
‘All right, Fair-weather, all right,’ Drekki said. ‘Knock off the whining in front of the nice oldbeard.’
Kedren sucked his beard into his mouth disapprovingly. Runic beads clattered. Paler skinned than Drekki and Adrimm, in the ghostly light he looked like he’d returned from the dead. ‘Why did you bring Adrimm along?’ he said, jerking a leather-gloved thumb over his shoulder. ‘I’ve had enough of his grumbaki[3] ways.’
Drekki sighed. ‘I don’t rightly know,’ he said, wishing the gaoler would pick up the pace, and wondering if he might go that bit faster if Drekki gave him a push. ‘Some sort of masochism, I expect. His scowls are thagi[4] blows to the back.’ Drekki paused for effect. ‘The weak, poorly aimed dagger blows of a feeble, half-starved grobi!’ he boomed, filling the stairwell with his voice. ‘But blows nonetheless.’
He turned a little, the better to see Adrimm’s scowl. Drekki winked. The lines on Adrimm’s forehead became deep as agrul.[5] Trokwi gave a fluting titter. His little metal claws scratched on Drekki’s armour.
Muffled, indistinct voices cried out from below.
‘Oh now, hush hush, please, captain!’ the gaoler scolded. ‘Best not get the prisoners excited.’
‘My apologies,’ said Drekki. He almost sounded like he meant it.
‘Anyways, these gitzaki,’ said the gaoler, returning to his subject in the dogged manner of a duardin determined to make a point. ‘They end up here, I takes ’em in. They should be at the zankulidawu[6] instead, but there just isn’t the money to treat ’em all, nor the beds to keep ’em in. Way I sees it, someone’s got to look after ’em, though don’t it cost?’
‘Why you?’ said Kedren gruffly. ‘Never known a duardin of Mhornar show such altruism.’
‘Oh, we kindly types exist!’ said the gaoler. ‘Mhornar’s got a reputation, that’s fair, but what kind of duardin would we be if we let the disadvantaged suffer so? Call it my social duty.’
Kedren leaned forward to whisper to Drekki. ‘He’ll want money out of this.’
‘Naturally,’ said Drekki more loudly, sure the oldbeard was deaf enough not to hear. ‘He’s been building up to asking all the way down.’
They reached a short landing that ended in an armoured door. ‘We’ll have you to your mate soon enough,’ said the gaoler, pulling up a ring of many keys. On the other side of the door, the voices shouted loudly.
‘We’ll see if he’s any friend of ours,’ said Drekki, in case the gaoler thought he’d get some gold come what may.
‘Hmm,’ said the gaoler at his keys. ‘No.’ He moved a key around the ring with a teeth-grating squeal. He let it drop with a tiny clink. ‘Let me see.’ He picked another key and squinted. ‘Aha! Oh, no.’ A slow and steady move around the keyring followed. ‘Oh, dear me.’ He pulled out his handkerchief and gave another long and impressive parp. Then it was back to the keys. ‘Knees and eyes, knees and eyes! They always go the first, don’t they?’
‘Do you, by any chance, need a hand there?’ Kedren offered. He trapped his impatience behind his manners as skilfully as he trapped magic in metal.
‘Oh no, no, I come through this door several times a day!’ chortled the gaoler. ‘I’ll have you in in a jiffy.’ He paused, and frowned at Kedren’s garb. Kedren was clad in an arkanaut suit like the rest, but he wore his straps differently, and it was decorated with the symbols of the Dispossessed. ‘Not usual to see a runesmith up in the clouds,’ said the gaoler, as he dropped his sixth key with a clink. ‘How did you come to serve with someone like Flynt, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Ah, actually, that’s an interesting tale…’ Kedren began.
‘But it is also a long tale, and we are lacking in time.’ Drekki jammed his objection into the gap between Kedren’s inhalation of breath and exhalation of explanation. ‘Do you think we could move this along a little? I am quite busy.’
This last utterance had the shape, character and seeming of the truth, but was in fact a lie. His critics, who were many, might have said Drekki had only gone to the gaol because he had nowhere to be and nothing to do. Barak-Mhornar had proven as barren of opportunity as the most distant rocks of the Skyshoals. He was curious, though. When a message like that comes, what else are you going to do?
Word had come via a youngbeard from the Runners Guild. It was long, it was burdened with bureaucratic language, it had carried a hefty delivery fee, but the short version was…
‘Dropped right out of the sky in Chamon, they say, right into their nets,’ said the gaoler. He’d said it before a couple of times. A repetitious character and the need to fill the time while he found the right key drove him to say it again. ‘They were deep in the Skyshoals, bold lot, venturing that far towards the edge. Anyways, this fellow lands in their nets, ranting and raving he was about the Eye, and the drop, and lost Barak-Minoz. Heh! Not heard that name for a long time. We lose a lot of outposts. Name of the game, when you’re into expansion, quick and cheap.’ He spoke this as self-evident, though what this runny-nosed oldster knew about deep-air colonisation none of Drekki’s crew could say. ‘So they brought him here, to Barak-Mhornar in Ulgu, along with a hold full of fish. Didn’t know what to do with him, them fisherduardin. Said he just kept telling the same tale over and over, all the way back. So into a comfy cell with him, where he’s been this past month. Quiet, he’s been, mostly. Muttering. And then he said… Aha!’
‘Aha?’ said Adrimm, who’d heard the story as many times as the others, but was less blessed with brains. ‘That’s what he said?’
‘No, lad. He didn’t. I did. I found the right one!’ The gaoler held up a key. ‘What the gitzaki said was, “Captain Flynt! Get me Captain Flynt!” Then he went back to the raving. Poor fellow doesn’t even remember his own name. “Captain Flynt!” is the most sense we can get out of him.’ The oldbeard stuck the key into the lock and twisted. The lock clunked impressively. The door swung inward. A chilly breeze blew at them, full of shouting.
They were looking into a large block of cells. A lofty room, twenty ufzhen[7] high and fifty long, with two floors, the second open down the centre with galleries against each wall. Runs of ten cells on either side of the room and on both floors gave forty cells in total, all uniformly small. Three armed duardin in the uniform of the imkazbargi[8] walked the block, copper badges jangling on their belts and peaked caps, beards trimmed short for safety, hitting the bars with their aetherprods.
‘Quiet!’ they yelled, to no discernible effect.
‘They’re all full,’ said Kedren, raising his voice. ‘And I thought they let the criminals run Mhornar, not lock them up.’
‘Cor, look, a bunch of wispy-bearded wazzocks!’[9] a scruffy-looking aeronaut shouted from the nearest cell.
Prison-issue tankards, uniformly small, were rattled along bars. A chant set up.
‘Wazz-ocks! Wazz-ocks! Wazz-ocks!’
‘Tsk,’ said the gaoler. ‘Sorry, captain, the arrival of visitors always provokes a rumpus, I’m sure you understand. Ignore them. Your man’s down here.’ He pointed to the end of the hall.
The room was ripe, as one might expect even from so large a space when full of duardin in their grundeez[10] and grundeznaki[11] – all of them had been stripped down to their underwear. It would probably have been riper, had the floor not been made of gridded mesh that opened directly onto the sky, allowing the cold breeze in, and the prisoners’ filth out.
‘Oh, I don’t like that,’ said Kedren, looking down into the infinite grey of Ulgu’s fog.
‘Thought you’d be used to heights by now, ground pounder,’ said Adrimm.
‘Used to your flying boats maybe, but not walking on thin air.’
‘Thick steel,’ corrected Adrimm.
‘Over thin air,’ insisted Kedren.
‘Keeps down the cleaning and ventilation bills,’ the gaoler said, and sniffed deeply again. ‘Just hose the place and the prisoners down twice a week. Easy.’
‘Wazz-ocks! Wazz-ocks! Wazz-ocks!’ shouted the prisoners. There were dozens of them, four to a cell, all gleefully chanting. ‘Wazz-ocks! Wazz-ocks! Wazz-ocks!’
‘No wazzocks here,’ said Drekki, giving them a cheery wave, ‘except maybe Adrimm.’
Adrimm rolled his eyes.
‘Wazz-ocks! Wazz-ocks! Wazz-ocks!’
‘Pipe down!’ the guards shouted. They jammed their aetherprods through the cell bars and zapped a few of the inmates. This calmed them down a little, insomuch as they ceased chanting and turned instead to individual jeers. Some of these were inventively insulting.
Drekki and his crew reached the end of the row. Down that end were a handful of cells which had only one occupant apiece, none of whom seemed to be in their right mind.
‘Those are all bad,’ said the gaoler, gesturing behind him at the prisoners. ‘Whereas these here are all, alas, mad.’ He spun a finger round his temple.
One middle-aged duardin sat on a stool, stark naked, weeping endlessly. Another hopped about on his haunches, hands held high, squeakily shouting, ‘I’m a rock skipper!’ every fourth hop, in case nobody could tell what he was supposed to be. A third, and this one made them all wince, was methodically plucking out the last of his beard hairs, bulging eyes staring fixedly at some invisible, terrible sight on the far side of the wall. ‘They won’t get me! They won’t get me! Oh no,’ he muttered.
‘Poor devils,’ said Kedren, with a shake of his head. ‘This isn’t right. They should be somewhere better than this.’
‘We’re in Mhornar, remember?’ Adrimm replied. ‘Scant comfort here.’
‘Here we are,’ said the gaoler, coming to halt by the final cell. ‘This is the chap.’
A lump lay under a dirty blanket on one of the cell’s four bunkbeds.
‘Got visitors for you, nameless one!’ said the gaoler gently. ‘Wakey wakey!’
The lump stirred, the blanket slipped off. An unkempt duardin peered out at them sleepily. When he saw Drekki, his eyes widened with delight, though not as wide as Kedren’s went.
‘It can’t be!’ Kedren said.
‘Captain Flynt! Oh, Captain Flynt! Toots and whistles and all the pretty airfish, it is you!’ The duardin threw himself to the deck and began to cry in happiness, thumping the deck grille with grubby fists. ‘I’m saved, I’m saved!’
‘Do you know who he is, then?’ asked the gaoler. ‘Are you willing to take charge of him?’
‘Of course I know who he is,’ said Drekki. ‘This is Evtorr Bjarnisson. My signaller.’
‘It is him!’ said Kedren. ‘Evtorr? You’re not… dead?’
Adrimm just gaped.
‘Yes, yes! Evtorr! Evtorr!’ Evtorr shouted happily. ‘That’s my name.’ His filthy face creased with confusion. ‘I think that’s my name. Was my name? Is?’ He blinked.
‘Grand!’ The gaoler puffed up with satisfaction. ‘That’s a rare happy ending. We were doubtful we’d find you. It was very difficult to get the right fellow among the hundreds of skycaptains thronging the docks. Good for him your ship was on the registry, and there are not two Drekki Flynts.’
‘A world with two Drekki Flynts,’ said Kedren. ‘Perish the thought.’
‘Well, here I am,’ said Drekki crisply. ‘And there is only one Drekki Flynt. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of me.’
‘No,’ said the gaoler, shaking his head. ‘Can’t say that I have.’
‘You should have!’ Evtorr said enthusiastically. ‘He’s a hero, a swashbuckler, a rogue, a pilot, an endrineer, and he’s here to save me! Captain, my captain!’
‘Really? You look more like a pirate to me.’
‘I’m not a pirate!’ said Drekki.
‘Course not,’ said the gaoler, with a wink.
Drekki scowled and turned to Evtorr.
‘Your brother is going to be so pleased to see you,’ he said. ‘We’ve missed you.’
‘We didn’t miss his poems much,’ grumbled Adrimm.
‘I’m cold,’ Evtorr said abruptly, and snatched his blanket off the bed. He huddled into it. ‘So cold!’
‘Are you going to let him out, then?’ said Drekki to the gaoler. ‘Let’s get him home and warmed up.’
The gaoler scratched the back of his neck and looked down through the steel grille, as though there was something of great interest hiding in the mist below. ‘Ah yes, about that. I did say there was a funding crisis when it comes to the care of fellows such as this poor lost, now found, soul.’ He shook his head at the tragedy of it. ‘We’ve got overheads here. Food, cleaning, fresh bedding…’
‘How’s a hose count as cleaning, you cheating skybeard?’ Kedren growled.
‘Water costs,’ said the gaoler sadly. ‘Then there was the message fee.’
‘Which I paid,’ said Drekki.
The gaoler was not dissuaded.
‘And the fee for looking up who you were and finding you.’ He sucked his teeth. ‘A crying shame these folks get stuck in here. What are we to do? A charitable donation would not go amiss, to help the next poor fellow who comes along.’
‘How much?’ said Drekki. He’d brought his pouch of Mhornar thalers, because there really was no such thing as charity in Barak-Mhornar. Even so, the amount the gaoler named made them all splutter.
‘And you say I’m a pirate?’ Drekki said.
‘Thieves, the lot of you!’ said Kedren. ‘To your own kind no less. You’d fleece your mother if there was profit in it.’
‘Oh, that’s unfair. So unfair,’ said the gaoler. ‘Why, there was another lot looking for him, but he didn’t want to go with them, so I didn’t send him. A kindness, if you ask me. Surely a duardin should be rewarded a little for his kindness?’
Drekki and his fellows shared a troubled look.
‘These others, who were they?’ said Drekki suspiciously. A roster of foes trotted through his mind. He was not short of enemies who might profit from holding Evtorr captive.
‘Some company codewright,’ said the gaoler, stroking his beard. ‘She wouldn’t give her name.’ He raised his eyebrows meaningfully. ‘A bit too mysterious for my blood. We at the Guild of Correction are an honest lot, and can be good to the likes of this poor fellow,’ he said pointedly to Kedren. ‘On the other hand, if you want to cast aspersions on my moral character, you go ahead. There are people who will give me more respect and more money.’
‘So we take him now, or not at all, because you’ll sell him to the others?’ said Kedren. ‘That’s outrageous!’
The gaoler blew his nose again, and affected a sorrowful expression. ‘It’s more than fair, is what that is. What I want from you is only’ – he opened his hand and held his palm flat – ‘a small consideration.’
‘And his gear? Where is it?’
‘Ah that, yes. Upstairs with your weapons in the guard post. That’ll be extra.’ The gaoler smiled. ‘Salvage rights, you see?’
‘You’ll get half, and remain cheered by your moral rectitude. Now open that door,’ said Drekki, with menace. Trokwi trilled threateningly. The little drill of his beak rotated.
The gaoler sniggered. ‘Oh dear me, I’m holding all the cards here, you know that, don’t you? Come on now. Fair is fair, and I’ve been more than fair.’
Grumbling, Drekki reached for his money pouch. It was worryingly light on aether tokens already, and was virtually empty once he’d paid.
But what was he going to do? Evtorr was back from the dead!