Revenger 9780575090569 (20 page)

‘I just want to know, Prozor.’

‘Well, I’ll give a fourth theory for your
hard-
earned. It’s a ship, and it was meant to cross the Swirly, but this is it at the
end
of its voyage, not the start. It’s how one of the Occupations got started. Not ours, because Trevenza Reach was already there last time, and maybe the one before it – just different names, is all. But one of ’em, anyway, got started because a ship full of people stumbled on all these empty worlds and started fillin’ ’em up again, just like we did.’

‘Is that what you believe?’

‘No. Mostly I believe what I’m told to believe, and the rest is what I’ve figured out with my own two lamps and the grey between my ears. And Trevenza Reach ain’t all that old. Can’t be, all windows and glass like that. Nothin’ that twinkly lasts millions and millions of years, not without a bauble field around it. Truth is, it’s probably only a few Occupations old, maybe newer, and it’s damn lucky to have lasted as long as it has.’

I know a thing or two more now, enough to say that Prozor was right about the luck part. Spindleworlds aren’t common, and if ever there were more of them, most can’t have made it through to the present Occupation. Of those that did, there isn’t a pair of them that are alike. But they’ve all got the same form, which is like two cones joined together at their bases, with long, triangular windows running from the thickest part to the opposing ends. Spindleworlds don’t have swallowers in them, so they get their gravity by turning around. Because it isn’t the same at the narrow ends compared to the middle, coves can choose which bit suits them best. For the same reason it’s easier for ships to come and go from the ports at either end. That first time I saw Trevenza Reach, I couldn’t believe how small the ships looked, all swarming around like little tiny flies. They’d all hauled in their sails by then, as had we, creeping in on ions until at last a docking slot was available.

We were nearly set to leave when Jastrabarsk came to us. He sat us down opposite him in the
Courtesan
’s galley. ‘I have at least a week’s business here, maybe two, if we need more yardage than they can supply at short notice. I’ll aim to give you both fair warning before we cast away, but if you stray far from the port I can’t promise to get word to you in time.’

‘Will you be going anywhere near Mazarile?’ I asked.

‘No – we’ve a string of baubles to pop, once our yardage is settled. But you’ll find no lack of ships heading that way, or some
near-
enough place. I’m owed favours enough that I am sure I could arrange free passage for both of you.’

‘I’ll work my way,’ I said. ‘But thank you, anyway.’

‘I see you thought better of Meveraunce’s potions, Fura. I can’t fault you for that, but be prepared for some odd looks when you leave the dock.’

I shrugged. ‘Hasn’t anyone seen the glowy before?’

‘The glowy isn’t the odd thing. It’s that you don’t seem to care. The way you almost seem to welcome it, like a badge of honour.’ He produced a pair of small bags and set them on the galley table. ‘Your shares. I hope I’ve been honest.’

From the feel of my bag, there were six or seven quoins inside. Even if they were
low-
mark denominations – and I doubted that they were, for Jastrabarsk and Rackamore had held each other’s honour in equal regard – this was more money than I’d ever handled at once. I wondered about the etiquette of opening the drawstring to peer inside, but instead followed Prozor’s example and did no such thing.

‘Take care of that money. Prozor doesn’t need to be told, but Trevenza Reach isn’t well policed. Someone lifts that bag before you get to bank it with the Crawlies, you might as well have stayed at home.’

‘I’ll take care of her,’ Prozor said, stuffing the bag into an interior pocket. ‘Not that she can’t do it herself.’

‘There’s one other thing,’ Jastrabarsk said.

He fumbled a single quoin out of his pocket and onto the table. He just set it there for a few moments, not saying a word, giving us both time to clap our eyes on the piece and puzzle out its worth. It was the same size and thickness as any other, but from the dense
criss-
cross pattern of bars on its face, I knew it was one of the
highest-
value quoins I’d ever seen.

‘I thought we’d been paid,’ I said.

‘I can’t entice either of you to remain on my ship,’ he said, breaking his own silence when the quoin had made its point. ‘But I’d still like you to consider this offer. You could sail with any ship for a year, break a dozen baubles, and not earn this much money. It’s yours, for a simple price.’

‘And that’d be?’ Prozor asked.

‘Information. If one of you knows it, and speaks it first, then you can claim the quoin for yourself. If you want to split it, you can share the information.’

‘And what would this information be?’ I asked.

‘You crewed with Rackamore. You might not have been with him long, Fura, but you were his Bone Reader and he’d have been quick to let you into his confidences. As for you, Prozor, you sailed with him to many worlds and baubles. I know you know about the Fang.’

She didn’t answer him for a few seconds, and I certainly didn’t dare speak in her place.

‘The what?’

‘It’s a bauble. I know that much. But the name’s not an official one, and it doesn’t correspond to any of the baubles in our files. I also know – or so the rumour goes – that whatever Rackamore found there was enough to have him plotting to go back, when he could summon the nerve. Now, I wasn’t one to tread on a man’s toes when he was alive. The Fang was Rack’s business, not mine. But it’s different now. He won’t be going back, and if one of you doesn’t speak, the information stands every chance of dying with you.’ He picked up the quoin again, rolling it in his fingers just so we got a better look at it. ‘Ghostie stuff, that’s what I heard. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. You’d have to open it to know, wouldn’t you? But for that you’d need to know orbits, processionals, auguries – all the gen I don’t have.’

‘Then you’re out of luck,’ Prozor said quietly. ‘I don’t know anything about it. Maybe you caught a rumour, that’s all. If Rack had found a score like that, don’t you think he’d have gone back?’

‘He might have been waiting for the right time, mightn’t he?’ Jastrabarsk shifted the boulder of his head to look at me now, and slid the quoin onto the table right before me. ‘So that’s all it ever was – a rumour?’

I looked at the quoin again. I could read the
low-
bar denominations easily enough, but the higher value ones were tricky, and you need to know about bases and so on to make sense of their arrangements of bars. Not that I’d ever needed to know the value of a
hundred-
or
thousand-
bar quoin: that was for bankers and rich coves to drool over. The
criss-
crossed bars of this one floated above a diminishing, descending lattice of golden and silver threads, like I was looking into the guts of something that went further down than the table it was sitting on. No one could make anything like that now, which was why quoins were impossible to forge.

‘If it was more than a rumour,’ I said, ‘I didn’t catch it. Not in all the conversations I ever had with Rack. I’m sorry, Captain. Nothing’d make me happier than to take that beauty off your hands.’

‘It was worth a try, I suppose,’ Jastrabarsk said, palming back the quoin and returning it to his pocket. ‘But perhaps it’s for the best, all things considered. We all want a prize we can retire on, don’t we? But some things are better off left in baubles, and if anything ever qualified for that, it’s the stuff the Ghosties left behind.’ He looked a bit disappointed, but only a little bit. ‘That was by means of a bonus, I need hardly add. You both have your share of the earnings from the bauble, and if the brokers pay us more than we expect, I’ll make sure you receive your dividends. Is there anything more you feel you are owed?’

‘After you rescued us, it’s us who’s in debt,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got one thing to ask, Captain. When we’ve docked at Trevenza Reach, I need to squawk a message back home. I know it’s expensive with the commercial senders, the Reach being so far out, and I wondered if you could see your way to helping me.’

‘A transmission back to Mazarile, you mean?’

I nodded humbly. ‘I wanted to put my father’s mind at ease, sir.’

‘Then let me be the one to put
your
mind at ease,’ Jastrabarsk answered. ‘I already signalled the worlds, once we had you. It’s common protocol in the case of a rescue – so common that I didn’t think to mention it to you until now. I can’t believe that word won’t have reached your father weeks ago.’

‘That’s very good news,’ I said.

‘If you’d like to make another short transmission, you’d of course be absolutely welcome to use the squawk.’

‘On balance,’ I said, ‘I reckon you’ve already saved me the bother.’

10

With the few belongings that we had to our names, Prozor and I moved through the colour and chaos of the docks. It was weightless at the spindle, or as near as it mattered, and this only added to the confusion. There were coves everywhere – not just crews, but quartermasters, brokers, customs officers, revenue enforcers, confidence tricksters, pickpockets, drunks, harlots, prospective employees, salespeople, dock workers, vendors, musicians, even animals and robots and one or two watchful aliens. The stove smoke hazed the lungstuff and with every breath you picked up the sharp, cheap tang of perfumed incense burners. Lightvine and neon advertising struggled to push through this pastel smear, fighting for the last ragged trace of our wits.

It would have been disorientating to come here directly from Mazarile, but after weeks in the dark bellies of ships, the assault to the senses felt like a brutal, calculated siege.

‘Hold onto those quoins,’ Prozor said.

‘Where are we going?’

‘There’s a good bar a league or two down the spindle. I know you’re itchy to be on your way, but you’ll need the right connections for that and there’s a man I know can help you. You still stuck on this notion of going after her?’

‘What would you do?’

‘In your shoes? Take that bag of quoins, hop a ship back to Mazarile – which won’t cost you half of your earnings – and then spend the rest of my life never once looking at the sky. Ain’t you anxious to see your father?’

‘When I’ve got reason to see him. Which won’t be until Adrana’s with me.’

Prozor shook her head. ‘I was hopin’ it was just a phase, all that talk about crossing orbits with Fura Ness. Not that I didn’t believe you at the time, but I was countin’ on you seeing sense by now. And Jastrabarsk’s right: you can’t go around with the glowy in you like it’s something you’ve earned.’

‘Why not? I
did
earn it, didn’t I?’

If there was some kind of immigration procedure, we ghosted through it without formality. No papers were checked, no questions were asked of us, no payment was demanded. Perhaps it was Prozor, her reputation pushing ahead of us like a ram. Or me, with the glow under my skin and a look in my eyes that challenged anyone to stand in my way. Slowly we fought our way through the thinning bustle to a quieter district of the docks, and then we were out into a warren of gaudy little alleys lined with shops and boutiques that all offered one disreputable service or another. Prozor knew her way, and we threaded this maze down the gentle decline of the spindle’s interior, our weight gradually increasing as we moved further and further from the port.

Natural light pushed into Trevenza Reach through the long tapering windows, but since we were further from the Old Sun it was dimmer than Mazarile’s day. To augment the effect, a garland of lights had been strung from one end of the spindle to another, along all ten leagues of that distance. The garland was made up of dozens of hot blue sparks, but there were many gaps where they had stopped working properly. Around the inside surface, where there were not already windows, streets, houses and taller buildings festered in a clash of grids and whorls, chaos and order balanced in some uneasy civic stalemate. No city on Mazarile was more than a league across, but the spindle could have swallowed Hadramaw and Incer dozens of times over.

‘Where does one bit end and another start?’

‘They don’t,’ Prozor said. ‘It’s all just one thing. There are districts and quarters, s’posedly. But no one can agree on ’em and it’d be pointless putting up signs.’

‘Which are the oldest parts?’

‘All and none of ’em. Place is like a wound. Keeps growing over itself, getting more scarry all the time, until one day it scabs off and starts all over again. Someone sells you a map you might as well read it through the wrong side of the paper, all the good it’ll do.’

‘I hope you know where to go. And this man you know – what’s he going to tell me?’

‘The same as me, to start with – that’d you’d be better off home. Once Quell’s got it into his noggin that you’re serious, he’ll find you passage to some world that isn’t too many months away. Auzar’s favourable now, so’s Gebuly or Kathromil. Once you’ve landed, you can take stock and see how the advice you got given on Trevenza wasn’t as bad as it looked.’

‘I know my mind,’ I said firmly.

‘Now you do. But once you’ve had time to reflect on how lucky you’ve been, you won’t be in such a hurry to see Bosa again.’

It would have taken us days to fight our way through the maze of streets, but by some consent the city had preserved several wider thoroughfares running parallel to the edges of the windows. These avenues were rambling, dusty, clotted with traffic, overhung by leaning shops and houses,
criss-
crossed by electricity and telegraph lines, draped with flags and banners, and spanned by ramshackle footbridges connecting the upper levels of one building to another. There were people everywhere, wearing every kind of fashion, and even the lowliest had a proud, hard look to them. A woman was washing clothing on the front step of her house. She eyed me while her jaws chewed on something with a slow, methodical rhythm. There was judgement in her eyes, measuring me up in an instant. Prozor didn’t draw a second glance.

I was glad when we got onto one of the trams that worked their way up and down the thoroughfares, sparking under their cables. Prozor knew the numbers as if she’d been here yesterday.

‘Look at glow girl here,’ I caught a man say, as we stood pressed against the other passengers. ‘Been noshing on the vines, she has. Should’ve come to my place.’ He gave a dirty chuckle. ‘I’d have kept her handsomely fed.’

Prozor twisted her head around. ‘You got somethin’ to say to Fura, you can direct it my way as well. She saved my life.’

‘Didn’t mean nothing by it,’ the man said, rasping a hand across a face full of stubble.

As the tram rumbled on, I leaned in to her and whispered: ‘From what I remember I came pretty close to killing you. If you hadn’t come around by the time I moved you into lock, like I was planning . . .’

‘But you didn’t,’ Prozor said. ‘And you’ve got my gratitude – whether you want it or not.’

‘I’m glad we both made it,’ I said.

‘Not half as glad as I am.’

‘And I’m glad to be able to call you a friend. When we were first on the ship, I don’t think you liked us.’

‘Don’t mind admittin’ it, neither. Sits hard with us, watchin’ the captain fawn over his new favourites. But it was wrong of me, taking against you like I done.’

‘It’s over now, Prozor. We made it, and I’m grateful. We’re friends, aren’t we?’

Her tone got all stern, like she was correcting me over some
life-and-
death detail on a spacesuit or airlock.

‘No, Fura. We’re not. That word ain’t sufficient. We crewed together on a good ship, and that goes a thousand leagues deeper and further than any friendship.’

‘Thank you.’ I wondered if I ought to leave it at that, but something had been itching away at me for a while. Even though this wasn’t exactly a private place I knew I wouldn’t have many more chances to scratch it. ‘He’d have been proud of us, wouldn’t he?’

‘The Cap’n?’

‘I don’t want to think we let him down. Not after all the bad things that already happened to him.’ I paused, wondering if she was going to pick up the thread I’d very obviously left dangling. But Prozor wasn’t making things easier than they needed to be. ‘I mean about his daughter, and how he lost her. We never really went over it, did we?’

‘We could talk about this some other time, Fura.’

‘There might not be another time. We’re all that’s left of his crew, aren’t we? If the truth dies with us . . .’

‘With me, you mean.’

‘I just want to know, Prozor. I was a part of it, wasn’t I? He even started telling me about her himself. He talked as if she was dead, but Cazaray said she’d been taken, and when Bosa attacked she told Rack his daughter was still alive.’

Prozor leaned in closer to me that she only needed to whisper, and even then I could see it was causing her pain. Then again, she must have realised I had a bone between my teeth and I wasn’t going to let it go.

‘She may as well have been dead to him.’

‘But not enough that he was willing to hurt Bosa’s ship too badly. Oh, I know our
coil-
guns were cooked pretty badly. But Rack wouldn’t have taken out the
Nightjammer
, even if he’d had the chance, would he? He couldn’t put his daughter out of his mind, not while there was a chance of seeing her again. What would’ve happened to her, Proz? What would Bosa have done to Illyria?’

‘Illyria wasn’t ever cut out to read the bones – that wasn’t her aptitude. But she was good with numbers, mathematics, navigation. Took that from her mother, they say. Bosa must have seen the cut of her and knew she could be shaped to fit into the
Nightjammer
’s crew.’

‘Shaped?’

‘Turned loyal to Bosa. With drugs and psychology to begin with, and surgery if the drugs and psychology didn’t work fast enough.’ Prozor gave me a warning look. ‘I don’t mean
clever
surgery. Just drillin’ and cuttin’ out the parts of someone that make ’em difficult, if you know what I mean. Whisk a stick through someone’s grey, you can turn ’em pliant as you care.’

I had a shuddery little thought of someone spooning hot butter into porridge, then giving it a good stir.

‘You think Bosa turned Illyria, then.’

‘Turned her, or burned her. Either way, Rack wasn’t getting to see her again.’

‘Then why the crossbow?’

‘Which crossbow?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since left the
Monetta
, Proz. You mentioned it once, then never brought it up again. The crossbow I found with Rack, the one that killed him. You said it was one of ours, not Bosa’s. And the way he was left with it, his hands still on the crossbow, holding it in his own mouth . . .’

‘Where are you drivin’ with this?’

‘She didn’t kill him, did she? That wasn’t Bosa’s doing. Not directly. But whatever she said to him or showed him, it was enough for Rack to put that crossbow into his mouth and drive a bolt through his own brain.’

‘He’d just lost his crew.’

‘It was more than that. He learned something about Illyria, didn’t he? Something he couldn’t stand to live with. But he must have already known she’d either be turned or dead, and I can’t think of much worse than that.’ The tram lurched to a halt and I had to reach for a pillar to stop myself toppling. ‘Except one thing.’

‘This is our stop,’ Prozor said.

We jostled our way off the tram, me vowing to pick up the conversation as soon as I could. The stubbled man, still on the tram, saw this as his chance to have a valiant final say, muttering something about ugly women sticking together, but he’d reckoned without Prozor. Even as the tram started up again, she pounced back in and swung a punch at the man, catching him neatly on the bristled jowls. He sprawled backwards into his fellow travellers. Prozor hopped back off, dusting her hands even as the man succumbed to a barrage of fists and feet from the other passengers.

‘Hasper Quell runs this place,’ she said, leading me across the street towards the shabby, shadowed entrance of a bar that was so down at heel it couldn’t even stretch to a name. ‘He used to crew, before he got an ion burn across the eyes. Quell’s bar is safe enough for his friends, but I’d still hang on to those quoins.’

‘I will. But what about Illyria, Proz? If there’s something you know, or suspect, I’d like to know it.’

‘I need a drink,’ she said, as if that settled everything.

We went into the bar. Steps took us down into even deeper, smokier gloom. At last we reached a windowless basement, with a pink variety of lightvine crawling over the walls, winding its way around flickerbox screens tuned to various channels being broadcast across the Congregation. Tables were scattered around the floor, with patrons showing all the states of drunkenness from barely alive to almost sober. Some had their bleary pink eyes fixed on the flickerboxes; others were playing games or just staring into their drinks.

‘Sit down while I see if Hasper’s around. Pick a bright corner so you don’t glow so much.’

I found an empty table while Prozor went to the serving hatch in the wall. I settled my hands in front of me, my fingers linked. It wasn’t the gloomiest corner of the room but the glowy was still shining through, crawling under my skin like some strange alien calligraphy. I shouldn’t have been too surprised by that. The man had noticed it in the tram, and that had almost been in daylight. Here it seemed to outshine even the pink lightvine in the walls. And it itched.

I wanted to keep the marks of my ordeal. I had the resolve now. But I wondered how long it would last.

Up on the flickerbox screens – those that were not too fuzzy to make out, for the signals had to travel a long way to reach us –
serious-
looking men and women were talking about numbers and graphs. They kept showing pictures of quoins, and of banks, and every now and then the picture would cut to a Crawly, representing some bank or group of banks, or even a Clacker or a Hardshell, because they were running more and more financial services as well. Sometimes they spoke for themselves, managing our language as best they could, but most times they had a cove speaking for them.

Since leaving Mazarile I’d been dwelling on things that I’d never dwelled on before. Rackamore had put doubts and questions into my head and now they were circling and breeding, like fish in an aquarium. I kept thinking about the Crawlies, and what they were really good for. But not just them – all the aliens. And not just the aliens that were here now, doing business with the worlds, but all the aliens that had come and gone through the Congregation in the Occupations before us, and what they’d been up to as well. And I thought about the quoins and how rum it was that some people or aliens living before us had been kind enough to leave all this money littered around the worlds and baubles, just waiting to be dug up and used again.

And I had a thought that wouldn’t ever have crossed my mind on Mazarile, and that seemed strange and dangerous even now, in Trevenza Reach.