Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [103]
A rotary cannon on a tripod was being hastily erected in the passageway in front of the door. The bosun knelt down next to the crewman who was assembling the cannon. “When that thing comes through the door, give it everything you’ve got!”
MALVERY, CRAKE, AND PINN skirted the chaos as best they could, and for a time they were unmolested. The Delirium Trigger was only half crewed, and almost all of them were occupied with the diversion Bess was creating. They did their best to avoid meeting anyone, and when they were seen it was usually at a distance or by somebody who was already hurrying elsewhere. They managed to penetrate some way into the aircraft before they came up against a crew member who got a good look at them and recognized them as impostors.
“Hey!” he said, before Malvery grabbed his head and smashed his skull against the wall of the passageway. He slumped to the floor, unconscious.
“Not big on talking your way out of things, are you?” Crake observed, as they dragged the unfortunate crewman into a side room.
“My way’s quicker,” he said, adjusting his round green glasses. “No danger of misunderstanding.”
The side room was a galley, empty now, its stoves cold. Crake shut the door while Malvery ran some water into a tin cup. The crewman—a young, slack-jawed deckhand—began to groan and stir. Malvery threw the water in his face. His eyes opened and slowly focused on Pinn, who was standing over him, pointing a pistol at his nose.
Malvery squatted down next to the prisoner and tapped him on the head with the base of the tin cup, making him wince. “Captain’s cabin,” he said. “Where?”
THEY LEFT THE DECKHAND bound and gagged in a cupboard of the galley. Pinn was for shooting him, but Crake wouldn’t allow it. Pinn’s argument that he was “just a deckhand, no one would miss him” carried little weight.
The captain’s cabin was locked, of course, but Crake had come prepared. Given the time and the materials, it was a simple trick for him to produce a daemonic skeleton key. He slipped it into the lock and concentrated, forming a mental chord in the silence of his mind, awakening the daemon thralled to the key. His fingers became numb as it sucked the strength from him. Though small, it was hungry and beyond the power of any but a trained daemonist to handle.
The daemon extended invisible tendrils of influence, feeling out the lock, caressing the levers and tumblers. Then the key turned sharply, and the door was open.
Malvery patted him on the shoulder and grinned. “Good job, mate.” Crake felt oddly warmed by that. Then he heard the distant pounding echoing through the Delirium Trigger, and he remembered Bess.
“Let’s get this done,” he said, and they went inside.
Dracken’s cabin was spotlessly clean, but the combination of brass, iron, and dark wood gave it a heavy and oppressive feel. A bookshelf took up one wall, a mix of literature, biography, and navigational manuals interspersed with shiny copper ornaments. Some of the titles were in Samarlan script, Crake noticed. He spotted The Singer and the Songbird and On the Domination of Our Sphere, two great works by the Samarlan masters. He found himself taken by an unexpected admiration for a pirate who would—or even could—read that kind of material.
Pinn and Malvery had gone straight to the desk on the far side of the cabin, which sat next to a sloping window of reinforced windglass. The light from the hangar spilled onto neatly arranged charts and a valuable turtle-shell writing set. Crake had a sudden picture of Dracken looking thoughtfully out that window at a sea of clouds as her craft flew high in the sky.
Pinn pawed through the charts, scattering them about and ruining Crake’s moment of reverie. “Nothing,” he said.
Malvery’s eye had fallen on a long, thin chest on a shelf near the desk. It was padlocked. “Crake!” he said, and the daemonist came over with his skeleton key. The lock was trickier than the one that secured the cabin door, but in the end, it couldn’t stand up to the key.
It was full of