Revenger 9780575090569 (10 page)

‘When the captain’s finished ironing his shirts, perhaps he’ll be able . . .’

‘Even his nibs wouldn’t turn his nose up at that . . .’

And so on. It wasn’t ever anything damning, and probably no worse than what any captain must face from their crew, and under it all was a respect and fondness. They liked him, even if he sometimes got under their skin with his high manners, educated way of speaking and the time he spent with his nose jammed into books.

Not that they were an unlearned lot. We already knew that Cazaray had come from a good background. Mattice, the Opener, had picked up his craft from books, not word of mouth. He showed me these journals – their handwritten pages a mad scribble of facts and lore relating to all the doors, locks and countermeasures one might encounter within a bauble.

‘Most of these pages aren’t in my hand,’ he said, as I flicked through the arcane contents. ‘When I was young – yes, I was young once, as miraculous as that will seem – an old Opener called Lautaro entrusted these books to me. They were all the cleverness he’d stored up over a life of opening baubles – and the books weren’t even new when Lautaro began. You see how the hand changes twice? He had ’em from an even older Opener. Going back a hundred, hundred and fifty years now. If I’m one of the best in the business – and I wouldn’t gouge the lamps out of anyone who made that claim – then it’s only because of those who went before me.’

‘Do you mind going inside those things?’ I asked.

‘Mind?’ A smile split his beard. ‘It’s what I live for, girlie. Everything else – all this chaff about sailing from one bauble to another – that’s the rubbish I put up with!’

‘Captain Rackamore says Adrana and I won’t ever go into a bauble.’

‘His imperial cleverness knows which side his bread’s buttered. Other than the sails – and maybe the skull itself – you two are about the most valuable items on this ship.’ He touched a finger to his stub of a nose. Every part of Mattice was rounded, worn down, like a very old rock that had seen aeons of time and weather. ‘You’re safe. You’ll earn your quoins fair and square, and if anyone resents you for it, you can tell them Mattice fancies a word.’

But my finger had stopped on one of Mattice’s pages. There was a drawing of a circular object with a long narrow section cutting all the way into it from the outside. Notes and details crowded the diagram. They were in the recent hand, Mattice’s.

And a name:

The Fang.

‘That’s the place,’ I said quietly. ‘Something went wrong there, didn’t it?’

‘Aye,’ Mattice said, his voice as low as my own. ‘That it did.’

5

The photon winds had taken us twenty million leagues beyond the Congregation by the time we dropped sail. I suppose the bauble ought to have been the thing that most caught my eye, but it wasn’t like that. Baubles aren’t much to look at, generally – it’s what’s inside them that puts a fever on the brow. But I’d never seen the Congregation from outside, and that
was
something worth a gawp or two. It was one thing to know that we were far from home; quite another to see and feel it.

If I tried to put it into nice and pretty words, all proper and ladylike, the way I was taught by Paladin, I’d say that it was a hazy circle of shimmering, scintillating light, with the Old Sun at its focus, masked and gauzed by all the intervening worlds, so that the Old Sun’s weary light was filtered by its passage through the skyshells of sphereworlds, the glassy windows of tubeworlds, the
photon-
shifting fields of baubles themselves, sometimes pushing that light from red to blue, sometimes from blue to red. And I’d go on to say that the cumulative effect of all those worlds floating between us and the Old Sun was to create a constant twinkling granularity, an unending dance of glints, from
ruby-
red to white, from white to indigo, and an almost impossibly deep
purple-
blue.

I wouldn’t stop there, though, because even then I wouldn’t have got you seeing it exactly the way it was. So I’d carry on and mention how the light stabbed at us, withdrew, stabbed again – each flare the moment a single world tricked the Old Sun’s light in exactly the right fashion to send it spearing into our eyes, before its orbit or angle bent the light elsewhere. You couldn’t point to a single glint and say that was a certain world, but in your head, knowing what you did, you knew each must have had its instant. Even your own little world.

It was a lovely thing, what people had made of the Congregation. We couldn’t take credit for the worlds, no. It wasn’t us who’d done the Sundering, or put all the pieces back together again. People, yes, but not us. But we could take credit for spreading back through the worlds, finding places to live again, and doing so in something close to peace and harmony for more than eighteen centuries.

And yet, moved as I was by all this – struck through by a powerful, wrenching homesickness – I couldn’t shake the words of Cap’n Rack in his library.

That all the Occupations end up being temporary, and ours wasn’t going to be any different.

‘Brabazul’s Ruin,’ he said. ‘And no, it won’t be
our
ruin – not if I’ve any say in it. Some of you will have heard of it – Loftling’s crew scored here pretty well, back in 1754. But they were late hauling in and they didn’t have time to go very deep before it was time to back out. Vaspery came out here again in ’81, but the bauble didn’t open. It’s held to a fairly predictable cycle since then, but in eighteen years no one’s chanced another expedition. Prozor – you can disregard the auguries in your book. Cazaray pulled updated numbers through the skull just before we reached Mazarile.’

‘Nice of him to say so,’ she said.

‘Nice of him to keep a commercial secret, you mean, so that we can all divide the quoins when it pays off?’ Rackamore didn’t wait for her answer. ‘If the auguries are righteous, by my reading she’ll open for us in two and a bit days, a whisker over fifty hours from now.’

It was the start of evening watch. Fifty hours would take us to just after midnight.

If you looked through the opposite window to one that was facing the Congregation, then the bauble took up the same amount of sky as all the worlds, but the difference was it was only a few leagues away. It was a sphere, about as wide as Mazarile, and it glowed all sullen and red. Pressed on that radiance, and shifting all the time, were patterns: complicated geometric forms, like carvings or embroidery. The patterns flickered from one form to the next, and now and then you caught a squint of something lurking underneath them.

‘Do we know what’s inside?’ I asked, trying to sound like a member of the crew.

‘Loftling’s account’s still the best we have,’ Mattice said. ‘It’s a rocky world, and there’s a swallower, which is why we’re in orbit. Gravity gets through the field, you see, even if nothing else does. Once it opens for us, there are doors on the surface. We have Loftling’s maps, and they’re pretty detailed. The doors, and the countermeasures, go back to the late Fifth, and we’ve enough experience of those times not to run into anything we can’t handle.’

‘The Commonwealth of the Throne of Ice,’ Jusquerel said. ‘A brutal dictatorship, by all accounts. They say the screams of their victims echoed for a hundred thousand years.’ She rubbed her hands. ‘But they left some glorious loot.’

Little needs to be said about the next fifty hours. We went through the usual watches, did our time in the bone room, cooked for the crew. Adrana and I slept as best we could. One late hour, when Garval’s screaming seemed to cut through the whole ship like a cold cruel wind, I untangled myself from my hammock and went to her room. The door was unlocked, as it had been before. Rackamore must have reckoned his crew a tolerant lot, I thought, or else it had never occurred to him that someone might wish to smother Garval for the sake of a quiet night’s sleep.

I had no intention of smothering her, but I won’t pretend that my thoughts were entirely charitable. I suppose I’d been thinking of shaking her out of her phantasms, forcing her to stop acting like a mewling child.

But once I was at her side, my anger dissolved.

‘Oh, Garval,’ I said, softly as if I whispered a lullaby. ‘You can’t help this, can you?’

Within the limits imposed by her restraints, Garval thrashed and convulsed. Her head snapped from side to side, the strap that should have bound her having worked loose. Her hands were fists, the nails digging into her palms, the tendons standing out like ridges. She moaned out a torrent of agonies.

I found the cloth Cazaray had used to moisten her brow, and went to the water dispenser in the wall. I returned to Garval, stationing myself at her side, and tried to open her fingers enough to slip my hand into hers.

‘You asked if we were the new ones. I’m Fura, and my sister’s Adrana. You were right about us: we’ve come aboard to do the same thing you did – to read the skull. I know it didn’t work out well for you, but that’s not your fault. You had to find a way off your world, and you did. Adrana and I were the same.’

I dabbed the wettened cloth against her brow and lips, while she twitched and jerked as violently as when I had entered the room.

‘Well, maybe not the same,’ I went on. ‘We didn’t have it that bad. It’s just that things hadn’t gone very well for the family. Mainly, I think Adrana wanted adventure – earning quoins was just an excuse, a way to justify what she did. She tricked me, in a way, but by the time I realised what she’d done, I think I liked the idea of escaping just as much as she did.’

Whether it was my words, my presence, or just a change in the weather in her head, but Garval’s distress seemed to lessen by some small degree. I administered the cloth again. I had no fear of waking the others with my talking: if they could sleep through Garval, they could sleep through the Sundering.

‘Velgen,’ she said, just that one word.

‘Someone close to you?’ I asked, chancing that it was the name of a person rather than a world.

‘Brother,’ she answered, her voice roughened from all the moaning. ‘Good brother. Good Velgen. I should have looked after him better. You look after each other, don’t you?’

‘We do,’ I answered. But it was the sort of thing you say, whether you mean it or not.

‘Where are we?’

‘At the bauble now, orbiting it. It’s going to open soon and they’re going inside it. I don’t think it’s a dangerous place, really. They have charts and the crew seem to know what they’re doing. Rackamore seems confident . . .’

She cut across my words with a thin, knowing smile on her lips. ‘Don’t always believe what your captain says.’

‘I think he wants the best for us.’

‘The best for himself. If the rest of
’
em do all right out of it, that’s a bonus.’

I looked to the door, making certain it was shut. It was just a conversation, but all of a sudden it had a mutinous edge that made my skin prickle.

‘I don’t think he’s a bad man.’

‘Didn’t say he was. But whatever Rackamore is, a captain’s part of it, and what drives the likes of them isn’t what drives the rest of us.’

‘So what does drive him?’

She drew a laboured breath. ‘They tell you about his daughter?’

I brought the water and cloth to her bedside. ‘Not much.’

‘Good. All things considered, maybe it’s better that way.’

Gradually it became clear who was and who wasn’t going down to the bauble. A few hours before the field was supposed to drop, they all gathered in the galley, half in and half out of their spacesuits, with their helmets on the magnetic table like trophies. Cazaray – he’d been with us in the bone room until the last minute – was the least prepared, and he was being helped into his suit by Prozor and Triglav, while Hirtshal helped the others check that their connections and lungstuff seals were all secure.

The suits were familiar to me now, and we had been shown how to use them in an emergency. Every part of them was brown, or some metallic shade that contained or reflected that hue: brown fabric, brown alloy seals, brown concertina joints, brown helmet, brown glass on the little porthole of the faceplate, brown bars across the front of that faceplate. Only a few smears of colour on the helmets and shoulders identified one suit from the others.

‘They’re old,’ Rackamore said. ‘And there’s not much in them that you wouldn’t have found a thousand years ago. Old isn’t always bad, though. It’s what we can afford, which is one thing, but it’s also what we know we can trust and repair easily.’ He knuckled the white crown of his own helmet. ‘
Short-
wave squawk. That’s all that you can bank on. No in built sensors or navigation overlays. No power amplification for the rest of the suit. If you have it, you’ll soon come to depend on it and you’ll lose the strength you need to get out of a jam when the suit goes limp on you. No energy weapons or cutting gear. Nothing that relies on power works well in a bauble, and you’re better off not counting on it. Gas torches work, most of the time. Electrical pumps and supply valves for the life support, hard to avoid those, but if they seize up – and sooner or later they will – you can run on pressure alone for a few hours. Can’t rely on a heater, either.’ He had dredged up a smile. ‘There’s a reason we like to get in and out quickly. Saves on the frostbite.’

Trysil was working her fingers in the glove, easing some movement into the stiff articulation of the joints. The gloves squeaked as if they needed oiling. I remembered Rackamore exercising his fingers and understood why.

‘The bauble’s following the expected pattern,’ the captain said now. ‘Field drop should follow in . . . Proz?’

‘
Ninety-
seven minutes,’ she said.

I’d seen the gradual change in the bauble for myself. It was hard not to be captivated by it whenever I happened to pass a window facing the right way. The dance of patterns on the dark red surface had quickened, hastening towards a conclusion. More and more of the world was showing through the surface. Underneath that skin of energy was a ball of rock, not so different from Mazarile.

When they were ready there was time for a quick toast to the success of the party, handshakes and pats on backs, and then the expedition gathered their helmets and made their way to the front of the ship. The rest of us tagged behind. Rackamore, Cazaray and Mattice went inside the launch and the airlock was closed. Trysil and Jusquerel put on their helmets,
double-
checked seals and lungstuff supply, and went through another lock into the launch’s storage bay, where they worked to uncouple it from its cradle.

The mouth opened. Trysil and Jusquerel jammed levers against the hull of the launch and heaved it on its way. It backed slowly out, tail first, Rackamore using puffs of gas to control its flight. Once it was clear of the
Monetta
, Trysil and Jusquerel used
gas-
guns of their own to cross over to the launch and get aboard. It all happened in silence, like some complicated ballet that was going through a rehearsal without the orchestra.

They left. We watched the launch fall away from the
Monetta
, remaining below us as we orbited, carving out a spiral course like a watch spring. It was a silver bullet, then a silver hyphen, then it wasn’t anything more than a bright mark against the bauble’s surface.

‘Fifty minutes,’ Prozor said.

‘What happens if they hit the bauble before it opens?’ I asked Triglav, one of the five of us (besides Garval) who’d stayed back on the ship.

‘From the bauble’s point of view?’ The little man rubbed at his hairless scalp as if it needed polishing. ‘Not much. Might jinx Prozor’s calculations a little, but it won’t make a shred of difference to the auguries.’

‘And from their point of view?’

‘They say it’s painless.’

‘Do you mind Trysil going in there?’ Adrana asked. By then we’d worked out the that the two of them were together, the only couple on the ship that we knew about.

‘Oh, I’d sooner not have her out of my sight. But the truth is I know ion systems and that’s enough for this little
bone-
box. In a bauble I’d just get in everyone’s way. No, Trysil’s welcome to her line of work and provided I get her back in one piece at the end of an expedition, I’m happy enough. Do you know your history?’

‘A little,’ I said.

Triglav scratched behind one bendy ear and said: ‘When Mattice opens a door, Trysil can walk into a room full of
million-year-
old loot, give it no more than a glance, and tell instantly whether it’s worth our while. Trysil says time builds up in old things like steam in a kettle, needing to get out. Old things – properly old things – are bursting at the seams with time. And what she knows isn’t from books or museums. Talk to Trysil about the Eleventh Occupation, she’d give you a blank look. Ask her about the Council of Clouds or the Empire of the Ever Breaking Wave, then she’d hold you down and tell you a thousand stories, none of which you’ll ever find in the Hall of History.’