Storm Thief Read online

  Rail was grinning back; she could see by the creasing around his eyes.

  “Never worried for a second,” he lied.

  They made their way down through the levels, using crawlways whenever they could, sneaking along corridors when they had to. The floorplans they had memorized were sometimes wrong: parts of the building had changed since the drawings had been made. But Rail and Moa were adaptable, and they dealt with such problems as they arose. Between them, they managed to get down to the lowest level of the building, some distance underground, without being noticed at all. Sometimes they heard the inhabitants of this place chattering and groaning in their dreadful tongue. Then they backtracked and skirted around the danger zone. But though there were many dead ends and a few close shaves with the Mozgas, they eventually found the room they were looking for.

  They came to it from above, slipping through a door on to the balcony that ran around the top of the chamber. The balcony, like the chamber itself, was a work of art: a blend of metals and woods and strange plastics that swirled and swooped as if it had grown naturally rather than crafted by hand. The walls of the chamber had once been breathtaking, panelled with translucent coloured glass, arcs of black wood and sprays of gemstones. But the beauty had been ruined by time and vandals. Many of the gems were missing, and the wood was scratched. Obscenities had been splattered across the walls. Waste and dirt and rubble had gathered in the corners.

  And worst of all was the cairn in the middle. The Mozgas had built a tower of bones, the height of a man, carefully constructed from the remains of their victims, held together with some kind of gluey mortar. Bits of dried flesh still clung to the yellowing femurs and clavicles.

  Long after anyone had stopped believing in any gods at all, these creatures kept to their worship of some dark deity. This was their altar to him. In front of it was a small brass casket.

  “There it is,” Rail murmured. For the first time, he began to really believe that they were going to do this.

  He looked back at Moa, letting none of the relief he felt show on his face. It was easy to disguise his feelings with the respirator hiding his features. Sometimes he was almost glad of it. What if Moa had sensed that he was a lot less sure of himself than he pretended? What if she had known that his insides had turned to water when he thought they were about to be caught? She looked to him for her strength, and if he let her down she would crumble. So he kept up his façade of brash confidence, because she needed him to.

  He had met her, all that time ago, because he had been thinking about robbing her. She was wandering around the ghetto, gazing wide-eyed at everything. She couldn’t have looked more lost and helpless if she had been wearing a sign. It was blind luck that Rail saw her before anyone more ruthless did. He had introduced himself, she had asked for directions to someplace, he forgot exactly where. He offered to take her. He wanted to determine whether she had anything worth stealing, or whether she was just another homeless waif. At least, that was what he told himself.

  By the time they had reached the spot, Rail knew two things about her for certain: first, that she was poorer than he was and had nothing worth taking; second, that she would last approximately half a day in the ghetto before her throat got cut or something worse happened to her. Violence wasn’t Rail’s style, but there were many who would kill her first and steal from her later.

  She was devastated that the man she had come to see – her uncle, he later learned – was long gone, and the shack he had lived in burned and deserted. Against his better judgement, he offered to let her stay in his den for a night until she could make a new plan. She was wary of him, but she agreed.

  After that, she never left, and he never asked her to. He introduced her to Anya-Jacana, the thief-mistress, and they became partners. That partnership had made them among the most successful thieves in the ghetto.

  It was a living.

  They found stairs leading down from the balcony, and took them. Rail scanned the room, searching for signs of traps: spiderweb tripwires, clockwork dart-guns, springblades and the like. His own speciality was disarming and avoiding those kind of mechanisms. The Mozgas weren’t smart, but it paid to be careful.

  He saw nothing, but he told Moa to wait on the stairs in case. He walked towards the gruesome cairn of bones, treading lightly, alert for pressure plates in the floor. If he was being thorough, he would have been crawling on his hands and knees, testing as he went; but he didn’t believe the Mozgas were sophisticated enough to use those kind of tricks, and he didn’t have time anyway. He wanted to be away from here as fast as possible.

  He reached the brass casket without incident. Once there, he checked it over, looking for secret catches. Nothing.

  This is too easy, he thought. It’s not even locked.

  He opened the chest and looked inside.

  The majority of the haul was power cells, tiny cylinders that glowed yellow-green from within. Some of them were a little dim, but they would still fetch a good price. Power cells were always in demand. There were a few bundles of platinum chits and three velvet bags of assorted coins, mostly triangular and made from polished stone of various colours. Assorted other odds and ends, bits of machinery that Rail couldn’t identify, and something else.

  It caught his eye immediately. The rest was standard; the kind of currency used every day in Orokos. But this was different. He could tell at a glance that it was Functional Age technology, but beyond that it was a mystery. There were two small loops of bronze-coloured metal side-by-side, and at right angles to them was set an amber disc, about an inch in diameter. It was exquisitely made, and though Rail was no expert, he could imagine it was valuable. Very valuable.

  “Everything all right?” Moa stage-whispered across the room. She had seen the hesitation in his eyes.

  He nodded and began filling his satchel with the contents of the chest, but his mind wasn’t on what he was doing. Possibilities were racing through his head.

  This is Fade-Science. Real, genuine Fade-Science. This must be worth a fortune.

  Never before had he come across anything like this. He doubted that the Mozgas even knew what it was that they had. But the real question was this: did Anya-Jacana know they had it?

  The thief-mistress had offered them this job. She would take her pick of the treasure, as she always did, and leave a percentage to Rail and Moa. That was the way it worked. If she saw this, she would take it from them.

  But who was to say she even knew it was here? She didn’t know the contents of every safe and every chest in Orokos. Chances were that she had only heard rumours of where the Mozgas kept their money, the loot that they took from the people they kidnapped and ate. Nothing more than that. That was why she sent her thieves.

  He had emptied the casket now. All but the Fade-Science thing, which lay alone. He stared at it for a moment.

  Is it worth the risk? he asked himself.

  He snatched it up and slipped it into his pocket, then stepped away from the casket.

  He felt the pressure plate click under his heel an instant before the alarm began.

  It was a basic system, mostly clockwork, but the din of bells it made was loud enough to wake the dead. Moa shrieked in alarm at the sudden noise.

  Rail’s gaze met Moa’s across the room.

  “Time to go,” he said, and they ran.

  The tunnel echoed with the drip and spatter of rusty rainwater, spilling from the ceiling into a shallow, dirty stream. Rubble and bits of old girders had fallen here, along with spidery mechanisms that had once been parts of things from the Functional Age. The tunnel itself was a relic of that time: its walls were made of some smooth, dark metal that couldn’t be scratched, and great ribs ran along its length. But uncountable days and nights had done their work, and it had buckled and slumped at last. Nothing lasted for ever. Particularly not in Orokos.

  Silence at first, but for the
sound of the water. Then, the sharp tap of running feet. Getting louder.

  A grille high up on one side of the tunnel screeched open, and first Rail and then Moa slipped through. The grille shrieked closed behind her as they splashed into the tunnel. The boy grabbed her gloved hand, tugging her into motion, and they were running again.

  They dodged their way around the heaps of broken stone and metal, ducked past joists that jabbed down from the ceiling. After a short way, they reached a point where the tunnel branched into two. Rail slowed to a halt, looking from one to the other.

  “You know where you’re going?” Moa panted. She was out of breath, and her head was light. They might have got out of the Mozgas’ lair – through a carefully planned escape route – but their pursuers didn’t give up easily.

  “It’s this way,” he replied, his voice humming slightly as it passed through his respirator.

  “What if it’s changed?”

  “It hasn’t changed. I checked it.”

  “When?”

  “Ten days ago.”

  “Ten days?” she hissed. She pulled free from him and wiggled her fingers. “Rail, ten days ago I was right-handed.”

  “It hasn’t changed,” he said.

  There was an explosive burst of noise from behind them, the stuttering nonsense-language of their pursuers. It was horrible to hear, a muddle of language that swung from rapid to slow, high to low in one confusing garble. Then came the sound of the grille squealing slowly on its ancient hinges. Moa looked back, but there was too much rubble to see anything.

  Rail glanced at Moa with his liquid brown eyes. “Quietly,” he said, and they took the tunnel branch that he had decided was the right one. He really had no idea, though. There hadn’t been a junction here the last time he had passed this way.

  They ran as stealthily as they could, keeping close to the tunnel walls and staying out of the water, but their shoes squelched and the buckles on the satchel that Rail carried kept tapping together. The tunnel bent slowly as they hurried along it. The voices of the Mozgas echoed from the ribbed walls.

  Moa’s muscles burned, and she knew she would not last much longer. She hated herself for being a burden, but she was physically weak and always had been. She didn’t have the endurance for a sustained run.

  They came to another junction, a crossroads in the tunnel. Overhead, a vast metal fan with a single blade turned behind a discoloured grille, beating the stale air. Lean-tos and little junk shacks crowded the edges of the junction, where the water didn’t reach. They were all deserted.

  Rail gave Moa a triumphant look. “See?” he said, sounding more confident than he felt. He was relieved that he recognized the place, but he was still not sure that the route he remembered was right. Tunnels and streets had a habit of moving about in Orokos.

  Moa didn’t give him a response. There wasn’t enough breath in her anyway. She was gasping for air. Rail’s expression flickered with concern, but he snatched up her hand again and tugged her onward. A jabbering shriek reverberated after them.

  They went right, taking a tunnel that was set higher than the one which crossed it, above the level of the stream. They made it a little way further before Moa began to drag on Rail’s hand and she stumbled.

  “Rail, wait. . .” she managed.

  “We can’t wait.”

  “I can’t . . . run . . . anymore.”

  Rail cursed, searching for a solution. There was nothing here but more debris, carried down from other places when these tunnels had flooded in the past.

  “We’re nearly there,” he said, his voice becoming soothing. “You can make it.”

  He knew that she couldn’t. If Moa pushed herself further, she would collapse. She was so sickly and frail. Despite the terror of the things that chased them, he couldn’t feel angry at her. Like himself, she had grown up malnourished, and she tired easily. He saw the disappointment on her face, her shame at being the one to hold them back. Even amid everything, it made him want to comfort her.

  “Just . . . a few. . .” she said, and didn’t finish.

  Rail put his arm round her shoulder and steered her behind a pile of mouldering stone and bits of wire mesh. From there, they could see back to the junction. He sat her down and she curled up, arms wrapped around her knees, face screwed tight as she shuddered lungfuls of air in and out.

  Rail peered over the edge of the rubble, watching the junction. The cries of the creatures that stalked them seemed to come from far away now, but he knew he couldn’t trust the acoustics in this place.

  He put his hand on the satchel that he carried, reassuring himself that what he had stolen was still inside. Right now, the only thing he feared more than being caught by the Mozgas was going back to Anya-Jacana empty-handed. Then he felt in his pocket, where the strange Fade-Science artefact lay, separate from the rest of the loot.

  Are you really going to do this? he thought. Are you really going to rip off Anya-Jacana? She’ll kill you dead.

  This was all happening too fast, too much at once. It wasn’t only a matter of stealing: he was a thief, for freck’s sake, stealing was in his blood. And it wasn’t only the money that such a thing would fetch. It was the possibilities it represented. It was a chance. A chance to make things different.

  Did he dare to keep it? And could he live with himself if he gave it away?

  Something moved in the distance. Two of them. They seemed to literally appear in the centre of the junction. But Rail knew better. They had simply moved too fast to see. And yet they were sluggish now, as if they were dragging themselves through treacle. They were looking about, turning their hairless heads, deciding which way their prey might have gone. They flickered again, suddenly switching positions with no apparent movement in between. A third one joined them, running into view then decelerating into slow-motion. One of its companions had become a gibbering blur, its head shaking from side to side.

  The Mozgas wore trenchcoats of black, hung with buckles and long straps and chains, and they carried slender daggers that gleamed like icicles. Their skin was dead white and cold, limbs and bodies thin inside their coats. Their faces were elongated towards the nose, like a shark or a weasel, with a lower jaw set further back than the upper jaw, full of narrow, crooked teeth that were translucent like frosted glass. Bulbous white eyes rolled in deep sockets.

  Nobody knew exactly how these creatures had come to exist, nor how they had come to be the way they were. It was just one more mystery in a city of mysteries. In Orokos, anything was possible. Anything at all. Even something like the Mozgas, beings that were detached from time itself, never quite managing to stay in sync with the world they lived in. One moment travelling faster than thought, the next as slow as if their limbs were made of lead.

  Rail swallowed against the dryness in his mouth, and wished he had never taken this job.

  “Moa. . .” he said quietly, but she didn’t reply. She had gone dizzy and lightheaded, and had hung her head between her knees.

  The three creatures split up, as Rail had guessed they would. Two of them flitted away, and the other, still caught in the slow-motion downswing of its time-cycle, crept into the mouth of the tunnel where Moa and Rail hid.

  Sweat broke out on Rail’s brow. If they ran now, it would hear them. And with Moa as she was, they wouldn’t get far.

  Leave her behind, just leave her behind, whispered a voice in his head, the voice that had helped him survive through a hard and dangerous childhood into an even harder adolescence. Run!

  But he couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t. In the time they had known each other, she had become the most precious thing that he had, and he would never give that up. He needed her as much as she needed him.

  The Mozga was accelerating now, speeding up into normal time, walking steadily down the corridor. Hobnailed boots clanked on metal.

  Rail checked on Moa. H
er breathing had become less laboured now. Another few moments would do it; but it was a few moments they didn’t have. He searched for a weapon, more to distract himself from the voice in his head than because he really thought he had a chance of using it.

  His eye fell on a thin steel pole, about the length of his arm, sticking out from the rubble in front of him. He glanced up the tunnel. The Mozga was still some way away, treading carefully, listening. One of the tracklights overhead fizzed and went out, dimming the tunnel. Another one was flickering, making the shadows twitch fitfully. The soft suck and hiss of the respirator pack on Rail’s back seemed far too loud.

  He closed his hand around the end of the pole. He began to slide it out, and it came without resistance and made only the softest of scrapes.

  It slipped free. A few stones from the heap of debris shifted and rattled to the floor. And the Mozga appeared, right in front of Rail’s face.

  He yelled and staggered backwards, the pole in his hand. Shock froze him for a moment. The creature was inches from him, its jaws agape and its teeth wet and shining, a dagger raised to plunge into his neck. It had stopped still. Caught in time like a waxwork.

  Rail swung the pole as hard as he could into the side of its head. It was like hitting rock. The creature didn’t flinch. The weapon jolted out of his hand and sent a jab of pain up his arm to his shoulder. He took a step back, uncertain of what to do next. Then he pulled the startled Moa roughly to her feet and fled.

  They had got a few steps down the tunnel when there was a dull thud behind them, and the Mozga went flying sideways, crashed into the wall and slumped to the ground. Time had caught up with it.

  They didn’t dare to wait and see if it was out of action permanently. The tunnel bent left and they followed it. Moa stumbled more than once, but Rail was there to bear her up. And finally, after what seemed like for ever, they found their way out.

  The steps, thankfully, were where they were supposed to be. Moa had almost collapsed again by the time she reached them, but Rail would not think of stopping now, not with the cries of pursuit growing once more. He lifted her on to his back and she clung to him. She was light as a ghost, but he wasn’t strong. Only the fear of what came after them propelled him up the spiral staircase. His legs ached with the effort, but he made it to the rusted door at the top. There he put Moa down, and he pounded out the rhythm he had been taught. Three hits, pause, one hit, pause, four, pause, three.