Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [8]
The docks had been built on a wide ledge of land that projected out over the still black lake that filled the bottom of the barren mountain valley. It was a wild and desolate place, but then, Jez had seen many like it. Remote little ports, hidden away from the world, inaccessible by any means but the air. There were thousands of towns like Scarwater existing beneath the notice of the Navy. Through them moved honest traders and smugglers alike.
It had started as a rest stop or a postal station, no doubt. A dot on the map, sheltered from the treacherous local winds, with a ready source of water nearby. Slowly it grew, spreading and scabbing as word filtered out. Opportunists arrived, spotting a niche. Those travelers would need a bar to quench their thirst, someone thought. Those drunkards would need a doctor to see to their injuries when they fell off a wall. And they’d need someone to cook them a good breakfast when they woke up. Most major professions in the cities were harshly regulated by the Guilds, but out here a man could be a carpenter, or a baker, or a craftbuilder, and be beholden to nobody but himself.
But where there was money to be made, there were criminals. A place like Scarwater didn’t take long to rot out from the inside. Jez had been here only a week since leaving her last commission, but she’d seen enough to know how it would end up. Soon, the honest people would start to go elsewhere, driven out by the gangs, and those who were left would consume one another and move on. They’d leave a ghost town behind, like all the other ghost towns, haunted by abandoned dreams and lost possibilities.
To her left, Scarwater crawled up the stony hillside from the lake. Narrow lanes and winding stairways curved between simple rectangular buildings set in clusters wherever the land would take them. Aerial pipe networks cut across the streets in strict lines, steaming gently in the chill morning air, forming a scaffold for the jumble beneath them. Huge black mugger birds gathered on them in squads, watchful for prey.
This isn’t the place for me, she thought. But then, where was?
Ahead of them on the landing strip were two small fighter craft: a Caybery Firecrow and a converted F-class Skylance. Malvery led her to the Skylance, the closer of the two. Leaning against its flank, smoking a roll-up cigarette and looking decidedly the worse for wear, was a man Jez guessed was the pilot.
“Pinn!” Malvery bellowed. The pilot winced. “Someone you should meet.”
Pinn crushed out the cigarette as they approached and extended a hand for Jez to shake. He was short, stout, and swarthy, with a shapeless thatch of black hair and chubby cheeks that overwhelmed his eyes when he managed a nauseous smile of greeting. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, young for a pilot.
“Artis Pinn, meet Jezibeth Kyte,” said Malvery. “She’s coming on as navigator.”
“Jez,” she corrected. “Never liked Jezibeth.”
Pinn looked her up and down. “Be nice to have a woman on board,” he said, his voice deep and toneless.
“Pinn isn’t firing on all cylinders this morning, are you, boy?” Malvery said, slapping him roughly on the shoulder. Pinn went a shade grayer and held up his hand to ward off any more blows.
“I’m an inch from losing my breakfast here,” he murmured. “Lay off.” Malvery guffawed and Pinn cringed, pummeled by the doctor’s enormous mirth.
“You modified this yourself?” Jez asked, running a hand over the Skylance’s flank. The F-class was a racer, a single-seater built for speed and maneuverability. It had long, smoothly curved gull wings. The cockpit was set far back along the fuselage, to make space for the enormous turbine in its nose that fed to a thruster at the tail end. This one had been bulked