Revenger 9780575090569 (4 page)

‘Let me clarify my position,’ Rackamore said, leaning forward slightly – just the faintest degree, but enough to suggest an authority, even a menace, that I hadn’t picked up on until that moment. ‘I am Captain Pol Rackamore of the sunjammer
Monetta’s Mourn
. I run a tight ship, and I expect both excellence and unswerving loyalty from my crew. I do not promise them wealth. No captain can make such a promise, if the truth matters to them. But I will say this: while there is blood in my veins, marrow in my bones, and fire in my grey, you may trust your daughters with me. I have lost crew members, I have even lost a ship. But I have never lost a Bone Reader, and I do not intend to change my habits.’

‘It’s just six months,’ Adrana said.

The captain was looking at me now. ‘Assuming that the law – the Mazarile law – does allow for this assignment of guardianship, which we’ll know before we leave this dock, do you still wish to go through with this?’

I glanced at Adrana, at Father, at the bulge of the quoin in Rackamore’s pocket, then back to Father. He looked like he was about to faint, or worse. He wasn’t just grey now, he was starting to look
see-
through, like something drawn on paper and left out in the rain. I think he was still hoping to wake up and find this was all the result of too much strong drink and food.

‘I do,’ I said.

‘Her mind seems set,’ Rackamore told my father.

Father took a step back, almost like he was going to slump to the floor. One of the constables took him by the arm, and Father looked at the man with something between gratitude and resentment.

His voice was strained. ‘Where are you and your ship going, Captain?’

Rackamore gave a little grimace of regret. ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you, Mr Ness. Of course we have an idea of our itinerary. But the baubles we’ve chosen to visit are commercial secrets. There are other ships out there, other crews, and some of them would stop at nothing to jump our claims. I’m afraid it also won’t be possible for your daughters to send you much in the way of news until we complete this circuit.’

‘How long?’ Father asked, desperation clawing lines down his face.

‘A few months. I can’t be more specific than that.’ Rackamore looked pained. ‘I make no guarantees. But depending on our fortunes there is a fair chance we will stop at Trevenza Reach before we return to Mazarile. If that is the case, your daughters will have every opportunity to send a message home.’

‘Arafura,’ he said. ‘I beg you. I can’t make your sister change her mind. But don’t do this. Come back home.’

There was a future stretching out before, a safe and predictable one, familiar and comfortable as an old chair, and in that moment I nearly gave in and submitted to it. But I thought of the house, of the cupola up on the roof, of the nights I’d spent peering out into space, of the glimpsed worlds, and the fantasies and desires I’d projected onto them. I thought of the magic and the mystery of their names, from Vispero to Dargaunt to Trevenza Reach. And beyond them, to the worlds without number, the tens of thousands of places where people lived, and the sunjammers that chased the photon winds between their orbits, and all the fortune and glory that awaited their crews.

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ I said. ‘I love you. You know that. But I’ve got to go with Adrana.’

‘I won’t rest,’ Father said, and when he spoke those words it wasn’t clear who they were meant for: us or Rackamore. ‘I’m not a wealthy or influential man. But I’ll move the worlds to bring my daughters home. You can count on that.’ And he held his finger out, but his hand was shaking more than he must have wanted.

‘Wait for word from Trevenza Reach,’ I said. ‘And if that doesn’t come, you’ll hear from us when we return to Mazarile.’

And then I took Adrana’s hand and turned from him, because I couldn’t bear to keep looking.

There was a rumble as the rockets gained power, a lurch as the dock’s restraining clamps let go, and then we were free, climbing away from Mazarile.

The launch had four rows of seats, one on each side, with a gangway between them. Each seat had its own porthole. Near the front, where the hull closed into its
bullet-
shaped end, Captain Rackamore had a control seat of his own, set before an arc of rounded windows. He worked levers and sticks, while dials twitched and readouts flickered across the curve of the console before him.

If we’d experienced a loss of weight in Hadramaw Dock, it quickly built up again.

‘We’ll notch up to three gees on our way to the
Monetta’s Mourn
,’ Rackamore said, twisting around to speak to us. ‘That’s more than you’re used to, but if you’re fit and well, you shouldn’t find it uncomfortable.’ But seeing our blank expressions must have given him pause. ‘You understand what I mean by a gee?’

‘You’d better assume we don’t,’ I said.

He smiled, patiently enough. ‘Tell them, Cazaray. I need to lay in our vector.’

‘A gee is the standard unit of acceleration in the Congregation,’ Cazaray said. Adrana and I were sitting on opposed seats, Cazaray one row in front of us, just behind Rackamore. ‘It’s how it felt to stand on Earth, before the Shatterday – that’s the story, anyway. The gravity on Mazarile, in the streets of Hadramaw, wasn’t far off a gee. But that’s only because they made sure the swallower at the heart of Mazarile was a certain mass, so that you feel a natural weight on the surface. If they’d made the swallower larger – or Mazarile smaller – you’d have felt much heavier. It’s like that on many worlds, whether they have swallowers or not. The ones that spin – wheelworlds or shellworlds or whatever else – it’s often close to a gee. And that’s not because we’ve made them that way recently. They’ve been like that down through all the aeons, because it suits people. Sometimes the tenants came in and altered worlds for their own tastes, sped them up or down, added swallowers or took them away, but the majority never got changed.’

‘What sort of world are you from, Mister Cazaray?’ I asked, all proper and polite.

He grinned back at me. ‘It’s all right, Cazaray is fine. My first name is Perro, but I never liked that much – it’s a very low name. And I’m from Esperity. Have you heard of it?’

I might have remembered the name from the
Book of Worlds
, but I couldn’t swear on it.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Not many have. Esperity’s not a bad place by any means. It’s a tubeworld, a long can full of atmosphere, like a lungstuff tank, with windows to the outside to let the Old Sun in. They say the tubeworlds are some of the oldest in the Congregation, but they’re fragile, so not many have lasted until now. The historians think there was a war, a bad one, between the Second and Third Occupations. Anyway, Esperity was all right, but unless you want to become a banker or stockbroker there isn’t much to do there. I thought I might have the talent, but there’s no one like Madame Granity on Esperity. I had to go all the way to Zarathrast just to have the most basic aptitude test.’

Then he turned to face the front, because our weight was going up and it must have been a strain even for Cazaray. My seat, comfy when I’d got into it, now felt hammered together out of knives. I wasn’t in danger of blacking out, but even drawing breath was getting hard, and when I tried holding my hand above the armrest, my muscles went all quivery. I couldn’t think of speaking.

That didn’t bother me at all, though, because there was more than enough to be taking in.

The little porthole on my left wasn’t quite as big as a dinner plate, but I could already see more of Mazarile than I had at any other point in my existence. It was the same for Adrana, looking out the porthole on her right. The line of her face, the way her jaw was hanging down, told me the view was knocking her sideways.

I knew how she felt.

Mazarile had been our world, our universe, all we’d ever known. We’d read of other places in the
Book of Worlds
, caught glints of them in the night, seen pictures and moving scenes thrown onto our walls by Paladin, heard Father mutter their names as he read the financial pages, but none of it was preparation for this.

Mazarile was tiny.

We’d seen the curve of its horizon from Hadramaw Dock, but now that arc had grown into a good portion of a circle. The lights of Hadramaw were like a glowing wound under the lacy scar tissue of the skyshell. I clapped eyes on Bacramal, Kasper, Amlis – smaller cities, each under their own quilt of skyshell. The curve kept on sharpening, and the dayside started coming into view – along with the cities of Incer, Jauncery and Mavarasp. There was Tesseler, the crater that folk said had once held a city twice as large as Hadramaw. Smaller towns were strung out between these settlements, and hamlets that were built out onto the surface, without the cover of skyshell. I couldn’t have named one of them.

All this on a world a bit more than eight leagues across, and none of those cities extending more than a single league across the surface.

Now I also understood properly how the docks – one at Hadramaw and a second at its counterpart at Incer – were like a pair of horns jutting out from our world on either side, as tall again as Mazarile’s own radius, so that the distance from the swallower to the tip of either dock was more than sixteen leagues.

‘Impressed?’ Rackamore asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and it was the honest truth. It was impressive to see our entire world in one glimpse. But it also made me feel small and insignificant and a bit stupid for ever thinking Mazarile was anything special.

It wasn’t.

‘A world the size of Mazarile could manage very well with only one dock,’ Rackamore said, sounding all effortless, despite the crush from the launch’s rockets. ‘But then it would be out of balance, and that would do awkward things to your day and night cycle. So they built two, exactly opposite each other, and we can take our pick of where we land. Mostly we prefer Hadramaw – the customs officials are friendlier.’

Rackamore worked the levers on the console and I felt the pressure of the chair ease against my bones. The rumble of the rockets became a murmur, like a dinner party going on next door.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We have the speed we need to match the
Monetta’s Mourn
. It won’t be long now.’

Soon we were weightless, the rockets silent. Adrana and I were still strapped into our seats, but I felt the missing weight in my belly, like the endless plummeting fall of a bad dream. Rackamore said we’d be better off not undoing our buckles for now. We’d need time to adjust to weightlessness, and there’d be plenty of that later.

Mazarile had shrunk to a
two-
horned ball. The cities of night still glowed, but now Hadramaw was turning to the Old Sun and it was Bacramal’s turn to slide into purple twilight.

‘Here she is,’ Rackamore announced, making the rockets fire again, but this time with less ferocity.

Adrana strained to peer through her window. ‘It’s tiny!’

‘Everything looks small in space,’ Rackamore said. ‘It’s just the way of things. No lungstuff to fuzzy up the view.’

‘Lungstuff’s got nothing to do with it,’ Adrana countered. ‘That ship’s just small.’

The launch veered, bringing the orbiting
Monetta
to my side of the windows. Adrana hadn’t been exaggerating. It did look tiny. Worse, we’d be putting our lives in the care of that
fragile-
seeming thing. The thought put an extra twist in my belly.

What we were looking at was just the hull of the ship, as the sails and rigging hadn’t yet been run out. It was just a dark little husk, pointy at one end, flared at the other, lodged against the twinkly background of the Congregation like a paper
cut-
out in a lantern show.

Put a crossbow to my head and force me into describing it, and I’d say Rackamore’s ship was
fish-
shaped. The hull was longer than it was wide, and all curvy along its length, with hardly any angles in the thing at all. There were ridges and flanges all along it, just as if it had been made from planks, curved and joined neat as you could ask. But like a fish – like some bony, poisonous,
bad-
tempered fish – it also had all manner of fins and barbs and stingers and spines jutting out this way and that. Some of them I could guess had something to do with her rigging. And like a fish, it had a big gapey jaw at one end, and a pair of bulgy eyes near the jaw – they were big windows – and at the other end of the hull was a thing like a lady’s fan, stiffened with ribs, that couldn’t help but look like a tail.

We sidled in closer. Rackamore used the rockets like a miser, quickly tapping them on and off to cut our speed almost to zero.

‘See? She seems bigger now. As she should. Four hundred spans, prow to stern.
Seventy-
five spans across at the widest point. She could swallow twenty of these launches and still have room in her belly. Prow is the open mouth where we’re about to dock. Stern is the other end, where the ion exhaust fans out. She moves both ways, and up and down, and sideways if need be, but we have to agree on
something
– you never know when your life might depend on it. Do you like her?’

‘Still doesn’t look big to me,’ Adrana said.

It didn’t look big to me either, even up close, but now that she’d stated her mind I saw a chance to get one over on my sister.

‘It’s big enough. What were you expecting, a palace?’

Adrana glared at me.

‘She’s a good ship,’ Cazaray said. ‘Whatever you make of her now, she’ll feel like home before you know it.’

Someone on the
Monetta’s Mourn
must have been alerted to our arrival, for the jaw gaped wider, cranking open to reveal a
red-
lit mouth, a
red-
lit gullet, into which we slid like a fat morsel, no quicker than a walking pace, until the launch clanged against some restraint or cradle and all was still.

We stayed weightless. Rackamore and Cazaray came out of their chairs and indicated that we could unbuckle, but that we should move with caution until we were confident. ‘One kick in the wrong direction,’ the captain said, ‘and you’ll be nursing a bruise until Mournday week.’