later.’
Crake was no swordsman, but he barely had to move his wrist and the cutlass did the rest. It chopped neatly through the gap between Frey’s hands, dividing the cord in two. He threw the cutlass back to Frey, walked over to Rat’s corpse and pulled the pistol from his holster.
Frey chambered a new round into the shotgun. ‘Ready?’
Crake made a sweeping gesture of sarcastic gallantry towards the door. Be my guest.
Beyond was a balcony that overlooked a dim bar-room, musty with smoke and spilled wine. It was empty at this hour of the morning, its tables still scattered with the debris of the previous night’s revelries. Tall shutters held off the pale daylight. Macarde was yelling somewhere below, raising the alarm.
Two men were racing up the stairs as Frey and Crake emerged. Macarde’s men, wielding pistols, intent on murder. They saw Frey and Crake an instant before the foremost thug slipped on Crake’s vomit-slick, which no one had thought to clear up. He crashed heavily onto the stairs and his companion tripped over him. Frey blasted them twice with his shotgun, shattering the wooden balusters in the process. They didn’t get up again.
Frey and Crake ran for a door at the far end of the balcony as four more men appeared on the bar-room floor. They flung the door open and darted through, accompanied by a storm of gunfire.
Beyond was a corridor. The walls were painted in dull, institution-green paint, flaking with age. Several doors in chipped frames led off the corridor: rooms for guests, all of whom had wisely stayed put.
Frey led the way along the corridor, which ended in a set of tall, shuttered windows. Without breaking stride, he unloaded the remainder of the shotgun’s shells into them. Glass smashed and the shutters blew from their hinges. Frey jumped through the gap that was left, and Crake, possessed of an unstoppable, fear-driven momentum, followed him.
The drop was a short one, ending in a steeply sloping, cobbled lane between tall, ramshackle houses. Overhead, a weak sun pushed through hazy layers of cloud.
Crake hit the ground awkwardly and went to his knees. Frey pulled him up. That familiar, wicked smile had appeared on his face again. A reminder of the man Crake had thought he knew.
‘I feel a sudden urge to be moving on,’ Frey said, as he dusted Crake down. ‘Open skies, new horizons, all of that.’
Crake looked up at the window they’d jumped from. The sounds of pursuit were growing louder. ‘I have the same feeling,’ he said, and they took to their heels.
Two
‘There she is,’ said Malvery, with a grand sweep of his arm. ‘The Ketty Jay.’
Jez ran a critical eye over the craft resting on the stone landing pad before them. A modified Ironclad, originally manufactured in the Wickfield workshops, unless she missed her guess. The Ketty Jay was an ugly, bulky thing, hunched like a vulture, with a blunt nose and two fat thrusters mounted high up on her flanks. There was a stubby tail assembly, the hump of a gun emplacement and wings that swept down and back. She looked like she couldn’t decide if she was a light cargo hauler or a heavy fighter, and so she wouldn’t be much good as either. One wing had been recently repaired, there was cloud-rime on the landing struts and she needed scrubbing down.
Jez wasn’t impressed. Malvery read her reaction at a glance and grinned: a huge grin, springing into place beneath his thick white walrus-moustache.
‘Ain’t the loveliest thing you’ll ever see, but the bitch does fly. Anyway, it’s what’s in the guts that counts, and I speak from experience. I’m a doctor, you know!’
He gave an uproarious laugh, holding his sides and throwing his head
