CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The days were short in that part of the airs. It was mid-afternoon by the time they were all ready. Bokko sailed away overhead, Trokwi describing lazy circles around him. Drekki watched them go through the lenses of his helm, which he’d put back on in case of toxic mists. With a holler of farewell, Otherek’s group began their trek to the tanks. Drekki waved them off, then fixed his eyes on the central superstructure, the place where the systems keeping the immense sky-ports aloft were centrally controlled.
‘This way!’ Drekki shouted, and set off at a brisk pace. The tilting of the sky-port gave a slope to the streets that made them feel odd, but they were not insurmountably steep. He chose a road leading towards the skarenoffrigrin running down the centre, of which there was only the one, Minoz being a small port. He set off whistling, as if he were a duardin of solid means taking in the morning air.
Adrimm and Kedren were a little more circumspect. Adrimm’s good spirits had predictably evaporated as soon as they’d come in to land. Good moods never lasted long with Fair-weather, but there was a particularly sad and oppressive air to the place, so he couldn’t be entirely blamed. He walked slowly along the street, aether-rifle at the ready, and kept checking his cutter was running free in its scabbard. Kedren was equally alert, his blunderbuss cradled ready to fire, the hammer pulled back. Before they left, he’d crammed it with rune-stamped pellets that were proof against the dead.
Drekki didn’t share their tension. He looked through broken windows with curiosity where Adrimm peered with dread. He optimistically liked to think that the populace had escaped somehow, somewhere. It was a hope reinforced when they got to the first junction. A few bits of debris and dropped possessions littered the streets. There were tufts of grass growing where a thin soil had developed in the cracks. In a few more decades, he supposed, the place might look like a metalith. It was cold. The sheen of ice glinted on all surfaces out of direct sunlight, and there were spectacular layerings of frost in the deepest shadows. But there were no bodies.
‘They left in a hurry,’ he said, toeing an abandoned satchel full of sodden papers.
‘There’s a lot of krozdonk,’[53] said Kedren, who wrinkled his nose at guano-streaked walls. ‘But I see no birds or airfish still.’
‘Look,’ said Adrimm, nodding to empty cradles atop a low building. ‘Lifeboat station atop that bazaar there.’
‘Yes,’ said Drekki. ‘Wait here, I’m going to give that a look over.’
‘Captain…’ said Adrimm. For once, he wasn’t moaning, but had a wary, guarded air entirely appropriate to the situation. That’s why Drekki kept him around. When he got his act together, Adrimm was good in a corner.
‘Tish! I’ll be fine,’ said Drekki. ‘I want to see how they left. We could learn a lot about what happened to the people here. This isn’t all about gold. Only mostly.’ He walked around the building. There was a set of public stairs in an alley at the back to allow access to the lifeboats.
He took the stairs two at a time. Easy for him, with his longer-than-average legs. At the top, the signs of a disorderly yet successful evacuation were repeated. There were more abandoned possessions: personal stuff like broken suitcases, and discarded bits of prospecting equipment. He stopped and knelt to pick up a child’s doll, a soft knitted kvinn with long braids. It was sodden, faded and smelled of decaying wool. He turned it over. Bright colours were still visible along the seams. Besides exposure to the elements, it showed no damage. He looked around carefully. There were no bodies, no scattered skeletons of corpses picked apart by the Skyshoals’ beasts.
‘I’d say they all got away,’ he said to himself. He looked at the doll again. A sad sight, but not too unhopeful. ‘Lost in the panic.’ He put the doll back.
The lifeboats told the same story. There were six cradles, standard rig, comprising four hooked brackets about three duardin high, sized to hold a twenty-duardin lifeboat off the deck and ready for evacuation. Boarding steps terminated in empty air by each cradle. There should be enough lifeboats for the whole population, according to the Code. Despite the possessions scattered around, they looked to have launched normally, and in good order. The arms leaned back as they should once the boats’ small endrins were active to let the boats fare clear, and only one of the covers that protected the lifeboats had been left lying on the ground.
‘So they had time to gather them up,’ said Drekki. The tarpaulins doubled as shelters from the elements once the boats were launched. The one left behind had plenty of hooks and eyelets to facilitate being rigged as a tent.
Drekki poked about a bit. There were no signs of fighting. No sign of later damage either, as one might expect from marauders or looters. There was only decay. Close by one of the sets of boarding steps he found a broken strongbox that had been dropped from a height, and spilled enough aether-gold tokens to supply a ship of the Aelsling’s size for a month.
‘That it’s been dropped is a bad enough sign,’ said Drekki. ‘Worse that no one stopped to gather it up. Hmm.’ He stroked the moustaches of his ancestor mask. Someone, surely, would have tried to snatch up such riches, even in the middle of an evacuation? The tokens lay undisturbed, not raked by hurried fingers, but left in a neat spill where they had fallen. He stared out across the city. Other empty lifeboat points dotted the port, and he couldn’t see any downed or fouled boats. Bokko was visible far off, his stout figure dangling from his endrin rig, the dot of Trokwi flying ahead.
Drekki looked to the central command tower. Hysh was dipping towards it. Perhaps he did not have so much daylight as he had thought.
He made time to collect the aether anyway.
‘Waste not, want not,’ he said.
‘Find anything?’ Kedren asked gruffly, when Drekki came back. The runesmith was ill at ease, but Drekki had spent time, effort and blood exploring ruined karaks for the sake of the runesmith, so Kedren held his misgivings behind his beard.
‘The inhabitants left quickly, in something of a panic, which suggests they didn’t have much time,’ said Drekki, hefting the box. ‘They left a goodly sum of solidified aether here. But they launched the boats in good order, so they must at least have had an idea of what was going on and enough time to act on it. I think they might all have got off the port, at least. Though what happened after, who knows? The endrinriggers stayed back. Maybe they thought they could fix the problem. Perhaps the evacuation was only a precaution.’
‘No bodies. No signs of fighting,’ said Adrimm, peering through another window. ‘The bird crap?’
‘Scavengers, coming in after the duardin had gone.’
‘Where are they now?’ asked Adrimm.
‘Nothing left to eat,’ said Kedren doubtfully.
‘Yeah, right, it’s not like a big old place like this would normally be teeming with birds and airfish, is it?’ said Drekki sarcastically. ‘There should be animals everywhere. This is just eerie.’
‘I don’t know about the lack of birdlife, but as for the port I’d say the rumours are true,’ said Kedren. ‘It does look like sabotage.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps not. Let’s get on to the control tower,’ said Drekki. ‘We should find answers there.’
The rest of the port proved to be the same: scattered belongings on the streets, no damage beyond that caused by the explosion. Where Drekki’s party was, away from the disaster zone, the mess was restricted to broken glass. The windows had shattered, but that was more or less it. They passed a large inn, five storeys tall, with a big bar on the ground floor. Beer tankards stood as they had been left. Plates were scattered everywhere, along with more of the ubiquitous guano.
‘Left in a hurry, picked clean after. Same story as elsewhere,’ said Kedren. He tipped a mug towards himself and peered inside. Dried-up beer left a tarry substance that smelled a little of creosote.
‘Looks that way,’ said Drekki. ‘But it begs a big question.’
‘Which is?’ asked Adrimm.
‘Kedren was right. I’d like to know who has kept the endrins topped up for the last three decades.’
They approached the control tower gate. Ordinarily, the booths either side would have been occupied by elite Grundcorps guards. The gates were open, and powered down. No aetherlamps glowed inside.
‘Come on,’ said Drekki.
They went up a wide set of spiral stairs. In the total silence of the Dead Air, the noise the duardin made seemed very loud; the clank of boots and rustle of flight suits, even the hum of the aetherworks strapped to their backs. Doors opened up onto dark offices. A smell of dankness pervaded. There were no people, living or dead. Four turns round, and they left daylight behind. Drekki snapped on a torch, its harsh blue light filling the stairs side to side.
A few more turns brought them back into the softer glow of the afternoon. They had arrived into the middle of the control tower’s operations centre. Banks of machines curved around the circular room. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave views across the whole city. These had all burst inwards, and the arkanauts’ footsteps were each marked by a loud crunch. Again, there were no bodies, and no damage besides the broken glass. Drekki checked over a few of the consoles, much more complicated and involved versions of the helm on the Aelsling. They were all powered off, the needles on the gauges resting against their pins, the aether tubes empty.
‘Anything?’
Drekki threw a lever. It was loose, unresponsive. No resistance to the action.
‘Nothing,’ he said. He snapped a couple of switches back and forth and looked up at dead aetherlamps. ‘Nothing works.’
‘Except the endrins,’ said Kedren.
‘Except the endrins.’ Drekki looked around. ‘No one’s operating them from up here though.’
‘I’m sweating like a grot at a trommraad,’ Adrimm moaned. He looked at the air gauge set into his wrist. ‘Stuff this, I need to breathe some free air.’
He unlocked his helmet, pulling it off his head with a big sigh of relief. The smell of grundizonk[54] wafted up out of his neck hole.
‘Oof!’ he said. ‘It’s funti hot here, to say we’re up in the bottom Fifth Air.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ said Drekki thoughtfully. ‘Curious. The air all right?’
‘A bit dank, but breathable,’ said Adrimm.
Drekki wandered on to the high bank of instruments which would have been watched over by an Admiralty portmaster. A small walkway with two steps either end followed the curve of the control bank, giving the portmaster a vantage point to view his underlings while they worked.
‘The most recent logs should be there,’ said Drekki, pointing at the centre of the portmaster’s walk.
He went to a built-in writing table. There were five cubby-holes next to it, each of which should have held a book with around a week’s worth of logs. But the chains that once held the books in place were dangling free. Drekki lifted one up. The ends were sharp. ‘Someone snipped these with cutters.’
He walked back through the room to the stairs.
‘Where are you going, captain?’ Adrimm asked.
‘Down to the records room, where they keep the old logs. Adrimm, you stay up here. Keep a lookout.’
‘Aye aye, captain,’ said Adrimm.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Kedren. ‘I’ve never been in the control room for one of these foolish flying baraks of yours,’ he added, when they went down the stairs.
‘Finding it interesting?’
‘No. I just enjoy my sense of tradition being outraged. Vindicates my low opinion of skybeards,’ he said.
‘I can always leave you at the next city that has a community of Dispossessed duardin, you know.’
‘What, and miss all this fun? No chance.’
Drekki put on his torch again. They went into the first door below the command centre, then through an office full of empty desks neatly arrayed and hastily abandoned. Damp drifts of papers lay everywhere, spotted with mould.
There was a sudden noise. Drekki and Kedren spun around, relaxing when Drekki’s aetherbeam illuminated a broken drillbill, stuck in a single behaviour routine, dipping its beak in and out of a tankard left at the corner of a desk.
‘Chuffin eck!’[55] said Kedren.
Drekki chuckled nervously. ‘First sign of life.’
They headed deeper into the office.
‘Here we go, records room,’ said Drekki, playing his lamp over runes stamped above a door.
They went into a long room full of shelves on rails. Drekki walked along them, checking the dates cast neatly onto brass plaques at the end of each one. He reached the latest, and handed his lamp over to Kedren.
‘Hold this,’ he said, and began spinning the wheel on the outside of the shelf. The wheel turned a long screw, which engaged with truckles on the shelf bottom, moving it along the rails and opening up a space for a duardin to enter.
Drekki stepped between the archives, found the latest box of records, pulled it out and blew the dust off it. He peered at the labels.
‘Endrineering logs. This is dated three weeks before Minoz was reported missing,’ he said. He looked further up the shelf. ‘It’s the last. No more after this.’
‘Maybe they took the others with them.’
‘Maybe somebody burned them,’ said Drekki. He flicked through. The pages were arranged as three sets of neat columns: one in red describing the operation of the city’s machines, aether consumption, efficiencies and the like, one in green plotting their course, and one in blue with a host of complex meteorological data. Remarks by the master pilot were added here and there in neatly ruled boxes, and at the end of each day was a space for reports on deficiencies in the city’s faring performance.
‘What’s it say?’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary, that’s what. Position, performance, the weather.’
‘Nothing on aether? That might help – if there was an accident, there could be a clue in that.’
‘You know more about our ways than you let on, runesmith, but no. Information on industrial performance and other aspects of the port’s life is held by the relevant guilds. We’ll have to go to their offices to check those out. It might be worth doing it right now, this port is not big, and the guild offices are probably close–’
Just then there was an enormous clatter, followed by an excited shrieking.
‘Grungni’s beard,’ said Kedren. ‘That mechanical toy of yours is going to give me heart failure.’
‘It’s not Trokwi,’ said Drekki uneasily, pulling his gun. ‘Drillbills don’t shriek like that.’
They hurried out of the archive. Adrimm was shouting.
‘Get back here! Get back here!’
Drekki and Kedren ran out onto the stairs, guns ready. Adrimm nearly crashed into them. His arms wheeled and he continued down the stairs.
Gleeful whoops echoed up from the lower floors.
‘What in the names of the Eight Realms is going on?’ Drekki shouted.
‘It’s a monkey!’ Adrimm shouted back up at them. ‘And it’s got me helmet!’
‘Grungni blast him,’ said Drekki. ‘We’d better get after him, it’d be just like him to get into trouble.’
Drekki and Kedren broke into a run. They bounced off the walls like balls in an owzat[56] alley, they were running so fast to catch up with Adrimm. They rushed out onto the street, now golden in Hysh’s last rays. Adrimm stood in the middle of the road in a state of annoyed confusion.
‘Lost it.’ He swore long and fluidly.
‘There!’ Kedren shouted, simultaneously letting out a blast from his blunderbuss. Ensorcelled pellets shrieked off a metal shopfront, blasting out the few panes of whole glass left in the window. Drekki caught sight of a large, orange ape, its long face puckered with joy. A tail twitched over its head. It sported a large, soft felt hat. Adrimm’s helmet was tucked under its arm.
Adrimm raced after it.
‘Adrimm! Stop!’
‘I want me helmet back!’ wailed Adrimm. He pelted round the corner, skidding on broken glass. Kedren and Drekki followed.
‘Bloody fool!’ Kedren panted.
They came back onto the main boulevard to see the monkey hightailing into a large building, knuckling along on its free hand, back legs kicking shattered glass everywhere, shrieking with delight at the mischief it was making.
Adrimm pulled ahead.
‘Get back here, you orange villain!’ Adrimm shouted, and put on an impressive turn of speed towards the building. He hurtled through the door, and vanished inside.
‘Wait!’ Kedren shouted. ‘It could be a trap!’
‘What kind of monkey sets a trap?’ huffed Drekki as they raced across the street, and into the door Adrimm had taken.
They skidded to a halt in a tailor’s. Two of the walls were occupied by cubby-holes full of mouldering cloth. A workbench with scissors and other trade tools occupied the back. There were fancy clothes strewn about, and wooden mannequins of duardin on plinths wearing tattered garments, but it was a fleeting impression. There were far more pressing matters to think of, because Adrimm had his hands up, and the monkey was dancing about, chattering wildly, smacking the floor with its hands in triumph.
‘That kind of monkey sets traps,’ said Kedren. He held up his hands too.
‘Don’t shoot!’ said Drekki. ‘We’re friends.’
In the middle of the room, toting a volley gun, was a duardin in endrineer’s armour. He had his helm off, showing a tanned face and a huge black beard bristling with outrage. One of his eyes was milky blind, a scar cutting all the way down from his hairline to his lip. And he wasn’t alone. One beefy arm was wrapped firmly around the neck of a certain Uzki Frenek, who struggled ineffectually in his iron grip.
‘Barak-Mhornar bastards,’ he spat. ‘I knew you’d come back one day to finish the job.’