Beasts of the Walking City (17 page)

She shakes her head, and he doesn’t seem surprised. 

He takes off his hat, and made a quick, awkward bow. “I’m Rehdr.”

“Kjat,” she says. “Kjati.”

“Right this way, Miss Kjati.” He holds a small boat close to the dock and lets her climb in—the bow is carved and painted in the shape of a seaswan and she tucks herself into it, as the back of the boat is filled up with a heavy crate. She finds herself staring at the boy’s back as he sets to the oars, which is just as well.

He says something to her as he pulls them away from the dock, but she can’t hear it. He turns, and speaks over his shoulder. “I said, did you hear that great roar awhile back? Sergeant told me they found some magical beast from Tilhtinora. Got loose and killed a marine or something before they took it down. I hope we get a look at it. They might skin it and bring it out on one of the decks, if we’re lucky.”

Kjat doesn’t reply, and after a minute Rehdr turns back to his rowing. The lights of the docks fade away behind them, and they move for a time across the low waves with nothing but the sound of the oars and the surf breaking off against the rocky shore, and the flickering light of the boy’s lantern to keep them company. 

Kjat unbuckles the leather belt that runs from her waist over her opposite shoulder, the one that holds her mage’s scabbard, and silently drops it into the water when she doesn’t think Rehdr will notice. It sinks rapidly. 

After a little while, the lights of the great ship grow brighter behind her, and when she turns to look at it they are nearly upon it, and she gasps at how large it is.

Is it a ship, or a city? 

It was truly immense, larger than any ship she’d ever seen in the Tamaranth lagoons, and that’s only what she can see of it. 

It towers over them, blocking out the world. 

The bow sweeps up in a great swan’s neck similar to the Rehdr’s dinghy, but it’s a swan of terrible proportions—larger than the close-in walls of the upper Warrens, or the huge seawall at Tamaranth. The sides of the ship are carved into long, graceful feathers, and each of them is unique and gilded with precious metals and larger than a skyscraper. 

Its expansive beak glitters in the moonslight. Its great malevolent eyes are lit up with magefire.

Of course, it had to be a bird, she thinks, and sighs. There was no escaping them. The Akarii and their birds—couldn’t it have been any other family? The Ciordoi loved their goats. Why couldn’t it have been a goat ship?

“Yeah, beautiful, isn’t she?” Rehdr says back over his shoulder. And it is in its way—beautiful and awful at the same time. Rehdr ships the oars, and they drift for a few minutes down the length of it, and Kjat wonders how far it stretches on for. 

It’s bigger than a city.

“Haloooo,” Rehdr calls up, when they come to a hatch halfway up the hull. “It’s Rehdr the Bountiful back from the great beyond.”

“Cut the shit,” says a boy’s voice from above. “And give me one good reason why I should let you back in here. You don’t do a speck of work.”

Rehdr winks at Kjat. “I’ve brought us a maiden fair,” he says. “Rescued from the fire by my own two hands.”

A head appears at the hatch, and looked down at them. “You’re full of
paak
,” he says. And then he notices Kjat. “He didn’t really rescue you, did he?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

The boy’s eyebrows lift, and he mutters something Kjat can’t make out. He goes back inside, and lowers down a rope ladder that Rehdr says she should climb. When she’s in the hold the boy there extends a kind of winch out of the hatch to raise the boat up. He works a large metal crank that winds a cable through several pulleys and gears, and the boat rises up to the level of the hatch with Rehdr still in it. They swing it inside, and together the two of them strain and shove the boat in line with a number of others just like it.

“I’m Croah,” says the other boy, bowing. “And you are?”

“Back off, lover boy,” says Rehdr. “We’re to see the Chief Steward straight away. Keep an eye on this one, Miss Kjati. To say he’s got a reputation would be an understatement.”

Croah winks at her. He’s about Rehdr’s age, with thick eyebrows, fat sideburns, and greased hair that stands straight up from his head a good six inches. Kjat rolls her eyes, and then turns and follows Rehdr through a maze of low, dark passageways, until they somehow emerge into a large, bright scullery.

The room is a flurry of activity. Along one long wall are a set of deep metal sinks, and people—both human and some Stona, Kjat notes—are bent over them, scrubbing an endless stream of pans and large black kettlepots that stream in through another door and stack up in a pile on the far end. Dishes are lined up in racks and then run through dishwashers that belch out steam. Down another side stretch washbasins, where a similar group tackles a stream of laundry that piles in from another direction. For all of the Akarii skill with technology and aether, it doesn’t look like they’re using any of it here. This could have been any scullery from the last several centuries. 

The air is hot and damp, and Kjat feels herself break into a sweat.  

Rehdr steers her toward the center of the room, where a tall, stout woman stands clapping her hands, and calling out instructions with a red face. The woman wipes a hand across her forehead, and tucked a stray piece of  chestnut hair behind one ear as they approach. “Well, Rehdr, it certainly took you long enough. Where’s everyone else you were going to bring us?”

Rehdr looks a little sheepish. “Yes, mim. I brought you Miss Kjati here, Chief Steward. Everyone else was either in boats trying to get out before we got them, or rounded up already.”

“Kjati, is it? Hmmm.” Chief Steward Eeg turns and studies Kjat closely. Kjat tries to seem a little nervous, like a servant girl might be at being called out, but she’s not doing a good job of it. She gives up and just meets Eeg’s eyes directly and nods. “And what kept you from being penned up with everyone else in the Port?” Eeg asks.

“I don’t know, mim. I guess they just missed me.” Kjat tells her story again about the silverware.

Eeg frowns, and then nods. “All right, then. We can really use the help. I just hope you can swab up a ship better than you swab up yourself.” Her tone is not unkind. “Pay’s a Karandelh penny a week when we leave a port, not when we land mind you and there’s no sense in asking for it sooner. And room and board.” 

Eeg looks around her. “Ava? Ava!” A girl dumping a load of soiled wraps into the heaping mound waiting to be washed turns, and Eeg gestures her over. “Ava, you have space in your bunk, don’t you? Take Kjat back and show her where to put her things, and then get the girl a bath. You hungry, Kjat?” Kjat nods. The meal on the docks is feeling like a long time ago. “Get her some food from Cook Targluck, Ara, and tell him I said to, so he doesn’t give you too much grief. And then take her with you in the morning to work the drone pit on two-feather deck.”

Ava nods and smiles at Kjat. She’s a few years younger, about Kjat’s height, pale skinned and willowy, with small, pixie-like features and long hair the color of straw, knotted in back and held up under the pale blue scullery bonnet. A small pink birthmark shaped like a quarter-moon hangs at the corner of her right eye. She exchanges a bashful look with Rehdr, and blushes slightly, and Rehdr’s cheeks also turn a quiet shade of pink. Kjat sees that none of this is lost on the Chief Steward.

“Get going, girls,” says Eeg. “There’s not much time before lockdown, and I want you in your bunks well before that.  Rehdr, you brought back some supplies, I hope?  Make sure you get them unloaded this time."

“Come with me,” Ava says, her eyes watching Rehdr until he's back out the doorway they came in through. “I won’t let Targluck give you any of his fish paste.” She grimaces to illustrate the point.

“Thank you, mim,” Kjat says to Eeg, in a tone she hoped was something like gratitude.

Chief Steward Eeg nods, distractedly. “Thank me by doing a whole lot of work, dear, and not getting yourself into trouble, eh?”

Kjat follows Ava out into the maze of rough, dark hallways again. Halls seem to branch of in every direction. “The halls here in downbelow are marked with slashes at the corners,” Ava says, pointing to simple carved marks at the intersection of two halls. “It’s a little confusing until you get the hang of it?” Ava says. “But it doesn’t take too long. Just remember that the even-numbered ones run across the ship from side to side, and the odd ones mostly run front to back. Bow to stern, I guess I should say. Do you read?”

Kjat nods. “Good,” Ava says. “Most of the halls up above have names? Like city streets? So that’ll help you get around, if you ever have to go up there.” Some of the corridors they go through have sharply sloped sides—Kjat guesses those press up against the external hull.

Ava shows her the bunk room, which is long and narrow and filled up with simple girls’ beds that stand three bunks high. “You can have this middle bunk over me, if you’d like. Ceri sleeps up top, but she’s hardly ever here. Do you have any things?” Kjat shakes her head. “It’s all right. A lot of girls don’t when they first come on.” A few girls are already there, some asleep. The ones that aren’t study Kjat curiously.

The bunk room stands in a dormitory of similar rooms, with one long corridor capped by a large metal door at the end. Ava tells her that there are several more dormitories around the ship like it, separate ones for Stona, Talovian, and Human, and separate ones for each gender. “The human boys are off on the other side of the ship,” Ava whispers to her, conspiratorially. “At slash seventeen and slash eighty-eight.” She tilts her head and looks at Kjat, and then looks away, deciding not to say whatever it was that she was thinking. “If you need to go up to upperdecks for something, the closest hatch is at slash five, slash-eighty two. But there’s a guard there, so make sure you have a token from Eeg.”

At the far end of the hall is the wardrobe, where Ava gets her a clean set of Akarii wraps, some underclothes and a nightshift. Next door are the toilets and the shared bathing room, which holds a long, open pool lined with simple white tile. Hot, steaming water streams in from one end of the room, and leaves through an opening at the far side. Kjat stares enviously at it for a minute—when was the last time she’d had a bath? But she’s starving, and the dirt won’t kill her for another hour.

So Ava takes her to one of the servant’s kitchens, where after turning down a chunk of bread smeared with grey fish paste from a muttering Talovian wearing a dirty chef’s hat, Kjat gets a bowl of steaming fish stew in a thick bowl made from a loaf of bread that’s surprisingly good. It takes her all of a minute to devour it.

“You’re kind of quiet, Kjat,” Ava says, smiling at her. “But you sure can eat.”

Ava is so good natured, so young, that Kjat can’t help but smile back. The expression feels strange on her face after so long.

“So did Rehdr really rescue you from the fire?”

“Well,” Kjat says, starting in on a second helping. “He did save me from being stuck in that Port. I’m not sure what I would have done. I’m pretty grateful.”

A look of concern crosses Ava’s face.

“But not
too
grateful, if you know what I mean. He’s not exactly my type.”

Ava looks relieved, and nodded. Kjat hides a grin. Ava reaches across the table and points to one of the glyphs on her hand. “What’s that?”

“The name of a demon.”

Ava’s eyes grow wide, and she pushes backwards on her bench.

“Just kidding,” Kjat lies. “I used to be in the Dancer’s Guild, in Tamaranth.”

“Really?” Ava’s eyes stay wide. “Do they mark you like that?”

Kjat nods. “For every dance you learn, you get one. You should have seen some of the other dancers. They were covered all over, even more than me.” She’s amazed at how quickly some of these things came off her tongue.

“I’ve never been to Tamaranth. My parents are from outside of Karandelh—we own a little farm out there.”

“Do you want to go back there some day?”

“After I’ve seen some things? Sure, maybe. It’s pretty boring there.”

“A warship is a funny way to see the world.”

Ava frowns. “That’s what my friends said, too? Back home? But you don’t really see the war down here, do you? Eeg’s not going to let us go out any place that’s dangerous, and the ship stops in lots of places to get food and supplies. It’s not like we have a lot of money and I could just hop on a podship. Besides. We’ve got the best navy in the world, and I just know Nadrune is the best Fleet-Commander. Who’s going to threaten an Akarii flag ship?”

“Who indeed,” Kjat says.

• • •

After a third bowl, Ava leads her back to the bath, and makes sure Kjat knows which bunk room is hers. “Third door on the right, remember. And it’s only an hour or so to lockdown, so don’t be too long.” She turns to go.

“What’s lockdown?” Kjat asks.

Ava turns back. “Oh. Unless you’re working nights and have a token? Everyone is supposed to be in their rooms, and the doors at the end of the girls’ corridors are shut and locked for the night. It supposed to keep us safe from the birds, but Ceri says that’s mostly just a story to keep us from messing around.”

“Birds? The Stona?”

Ava shakes her head. “First Family men, and some of the royal cousins. Upperdecks servants, sometimes? They come downbelow for…”

“For sport,” Kjat says, frowning.

Ava bites her lower lip and nods. “We call them ‘birds’ because they wear a lot of feathers. And they’re just like birds? You’ll see. If they catch you out, they’re supposed to get to do what they want. Some of the girls think it will get them somewhere? If they’re ‘caught’? You know, like they’ll get some guy to fall in love with them and get married and get to go live in a tower in Tilhtinon and make bird babies.”

“What do you think?”

Ava turns to the hall, and then turns back. “I’ve seen them sometimes, the couple of times I’ve gone to upperdecks. They’re
so
strange, Kjat. It’s hard to imagine what kind of guy is underneath all of that.”

Kjat nods. There are too many avians to keep track of. If she gets off this ship alive, and can find a way to deal with the featherwolves and the blackjackals, she will get herself a room down deep in the Warrens, where birds and Akarii don’t go, deep enough that the Disciples won’t find her again.