The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [2]
Frey extricated himself gingerly from his companions, wincing as a multitude of bumps and scratches announced themselves. The lockbox had bruised his ribs in the fall, but he’d kept hold of it somehow. He looked back at the moonlit slope. It was smaller and shallower than it had seemed while they were falling down it.
Malvery got up and made a halfhearted attempt at wiping the mud off his pullover. He adjusted his round green-lensed glasses, which had miraculously stayed on his nose.
“Anyway, I’ve reconsidered my position,” he said, continuing his train of thought as if there had been no interruption. “I’ve come to believe that stealing from a bunch of defenseless orphans could be seen as a bit of a low point in our careers.”
Frey tugged at Pinn, who lay groaning on the ground. He’d been on the bottom of the heap, and his chubby face was plastered in muck. “I’m an orphan!” Frey protested as he struggled with Pinn’s weight. “Who were they collecting for, if not me?”
Malvery smoothed his bushy white mustache and followed Frey’s gaze up the slope. The forest was brightening with torchlight as the infuriated mob approached. “You should tell them that,” he said. “Might sweeten their disposition a little.”
“Pinn, will you get up?” Frey cried, dragging the pilot to his feet.
Even with the moon overhead, it was hard to see obstacles while they were running. They fended off branches that poked and lashed at their faces. They slipped and cursed and cracked their elbows against tree trunks. It had rained recently, and the ground alternately sucked at their boots or slid treacherously beneath them.
The villagers reached the top of the slope and sent a hopeful barrage of gunfire into the trees. Frey felt something slap against his long coat, near his legs. He gathered up the flapping tail and saw a bullet hole there.
Too close.
“Give up the money and we’ll let you go!” one of the villagers shouted.
Frey didn’t waste his breath on a reply. He wasn’t coming out of this without something to show for it. He needed that money. Probably a lot more than any bloody orphans did. He had a crew to look after. Seven mouths to feed, if you counted the cat. And that wasn’t even including Bess, who didn’t have a mouth. Still, she probably needed oiling or something, and oil didn’t come for free.
Anyway, he was an orphan. So that made it okay.
“Everything looks different in the dark,” Malvery said. “You sure this is the way we came?”
Frey skidded to a halt at the edge of a cliff, holding his arms out to warn the others. A river glittered ten meters below, sparkling in the moonlight.
“Er … we might have taken a wrong turn or two,” he ventured.
The precipice ran for some distance to his left and right. Before them was a steely landscape of treetops, rucked with hills and valleys, stretching to the horizon: the vast expanse of the Vardenwood. In the distance stood the Splinters, one of Vardia’s two great mountain ranges, which marched all the way north to the Yortland coast, thousands of kloms away.
Frey suddenly realized that he had no idea where, in all that woodland, he’d hidden his aircraft and the rest of his crew.
Malvery looked down at the river. “I don’t remember this being here,” he said.
“I’m pretty sure the Ketty Jay is over on the other side,” said Frey doubtfully.
“Are you really, Cap’n? Or is that a guess?”
“I’ve just got a feeling about it.”
Behind them, the cries of the mob were getting louder. They could see the bobbing lights of torches approaching through the forest.
“Any ideas?” Malvery prompted.
“Jump?” suggested Frey. “There’s no way they’d be stupid enough to follow us.”
“Yeah, we’d certainly out-stupid them with that plan.” Malvery rolled up his sleeves. “Fine. Let’s do it.”
Pinn was leaning on his knees, breathing hard. “Oh, no. Not me. Can’t swim.”
“You’d rather stay here?”