Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [157]
“What do you want?” screamed the torturer, when he got his breath back.
“You can stop now,” said the newcomer.
“But he’s not confessed!”
“We’ll draft a new one and sign it for him. The Duke is back with a judge. He wants this done.”
“Can’t you give me an hour?” the torturer whined, seeing his chance at revenge slipping away.
“I’m to take charge of him immediately,” the newcomer insisted. “Get him out of that chair. He’s coming with me.”
THE SKY WAS BLUE. Clear, cloudless, and perfect. Frey squinted up at the sun and felt it warm his face. Amazing, he thought, how the north coast of the continent was gripped in ice and yet it was still pleasant here in the south. Vardia was so vast, its northern edge breached the Arctic Circle while its southern side came close to the equator. He’d always thought of winter as the grimmest season, but, like anything, he supposed, it depended on where you were standing.
The spot chosen for his execution was a walled courtyard behind the barracks, where the militia conducted their drills. There was a small raised platform with a wrought-iron lamppost in its center, flying the Duke’s flag. Ornamental arms projected out from the lamppost. They were intended for hanging pennants, but the pennants had been removed and a noose thrown over one of the arms to form a crude gallows. The end of the noose lay loosely around Frey’s neck. An executioner—a massive, sweaty ogre with a thin shirt stretched over an enormous gut—waited to pull it taut.
A small crowd was assembled before him. There were two dozen militia, a judge, the Duke, and two witnesses: Gallian Thade and Trinica Dracken. Off to one side was a wagon with bars on its sides. Inside this wheeled cage was the remainder of his crew. They were unusually subdued. The seriousness of their situation had sunk in at last. Even Pinn was getting it now. They were going to watch their captain die. Nobody felt like joking.
He’d always wondered how he’d face death. Not the quick, hectic rush of a gun battle but the slow, considered, drawn-out finale of an execution. He’d never imagined that he’d feel quite so serene. The wind stirred a lock of hair against his forehead; the sun shone on his cheeks. He felt like smiling.
The Darian Frey they were about to kill wasn’t the same Darian Frey they’d set out to frame for their crime. That man had been a failure, a man who lurched from crisis to disaster at the whim of fate. A man who had prided himself on being better than the bottom-feeding scum of the smuggling world and hadn’t desired any more than that.
But he’d surprised them. He’d turned and fought when he should have run. He’d evaded and outwitted them time and again. He’d turned a bunch of dysfunctional layabouts into something approximating a crew. Stories would be told of how they tweaked the nose of the infamous Trinica Dracken in a hangar bay in Rabban. Word would spread. Freebooters all over Vardia would hear of Darian Frey and his craft, the Ketty Jay. He’d come close to unearthing a daring conspiracy against the ruling family of the land, involving a duke of Vardia, the legendary pirate captain Orkmund, and the mighty Awakener cult.
Only a final twist of ill fortune had stopped him. Trinica had made copies of the charts he stole. Without the compass, she couldn’t make it through the magnetic mines that guarded Retribution Falls, but she could wait at the point where she knew he’d emerge.
One little slipup. But he’d led them a merry chase all the same. They might have caught him, but he still felt as if he’d won.
He looked at the faces behind the bars: Malvery, Crake, Silo, Harkins … even Pinn. He was surprised to find he was sad to be leaving them. He didn’t want it all to end now. He’d just begun to enjoy himself.
Frey had stopped listening to the list of crimes and accusations that the judge was reading out. The preliminaries were unimportant. He was thinking