Revenger 9780575090569 (44 page)

‘You say you’ve the spur in you. Wrongs you want to put right. You should call it
Revenger
. That’s a good name for a ship, isn’t it?’

‘Not exactly a sweet name.’

‘But then it isn’t exactly a sweet ship, after what you did to take her. Well, sleep on it. Perhaps you’ll think of something better.’

I stroked her hair once more, than bid her rest for a few hours. After that, I went to what used to be Bosa’s cabin, and I looked around for paper or ink or something that would suffice. But there was nothing.

So instead I went back to the bottle room, and with Strambli’s help I got the first of the bodies out.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ Strambli asked.

I had the knife, the one Adrana had held against me, and I used it to hack away a rectangle of skin from the pickled body. It was about the size of one of the pages in the
Book of Worlds
, if much thicker and rougher than paper. But it would do.

‘That,’ I told Strambli.

She was shocked at first, and I think the thought crossed her mind that maybe I’d gone too far, or was on the way there. Truth to tell, I wouldn’t necessarily have disagreed. But she must have weighed her options and come to the conclusion that the safest, easiest thing was just to let me have my way.

Which only left the problem of ink. So I went back to Bosa and drew blood from her. I told Surt what I needed and after that same hesitation I’d seen in Strambli she convinced herself to come round to my way of thinking as well. Surt showed me to a chemical in the medicine supply that stopped the blood from thickening up too quickly once I’d loaded it into a pen. It flowed nice and steadily then, and didn’t clog up too fast. It wasn’t as good as ink, but it made a permanent mark, and that was all I needed.

‘I’ll take a little blood each time,’ I told Bosa. ‘Not enough to weaken you, but just enough for my purposes. And you may die before I’m done, and if so you’ll have died a good death, all things considered. If Adrana comes back to me, and I’m satisfied that she’s all right, then I’ll give you that good death myself. You won’t suffer.’

‘And if she doesn’t come back to you?’ she asked me, with a sort of distant curiosity.

‘She will,’ I said. ‘She’s my sister, and she’s stronger and better than you ever knew. But if I doubted it, I’d make paper out of you.’

Bosa nodded slowly. ‘It’s good that we’re clear.’

‘It is,’ I agreed. ‘Oh, and by the way, this ship has a new name now.’

‘What is it?’

‘My business, not yours.’

I left her then, and went back to her cabin. The cracked glass globe of Paladin’s head rested before me, still dim, but if I believed anything it was that there were thoughts going on in that glass, and sooner or later he would speak to me again, as he had spoken in Mazarile, because he was a hero of the Twelfth Occupation and I had a feeling history wasn’t quite done with him yet. Call it faith, I suppose, just as I had faith in my sister.

For now, though, I had my paper, and I had my ink. But before I could start, I stationed myself at Bosa’s window and looked out of it, beyond the
Nightjammer
to the purple glint and glimmer of the Thirteenth Occupation, the fifty million little worlds of the Congregation, all the named worlds and baubles, the countless more that had never been named and never would be, huddling close to the Old Sun, pressed in from outside by all the magnificent darkness and silence of the Empty, and I mused on all the people on them, all the towns and cities, all the ships sailing between those places, proud with cargo and prizes, sails bright and billowing on the photon winds, and the bones that whispered secrets between the ships, and I wondered what it would take for me to ever feel that I could lead a settled and normal life in those worlds.

I shivered. It was cold in Bosa’s ship, but not half as cold as the void beyond that glass.

Something flickered behind my reflection. A dance of lights in Paladin’s head? But by the time I’d turned he was dim again, if indeed there had been anything there.

I returned to her desk, fixed myself to the chair, spread open the gutted covers of Rackamore’s 1384 edition of the
Book of Worlds
, and slid one sheet of my new paper between them. Then I took up my pen in my cold tin fingers and scratched down the name of my sister, because she was where it all began.

Also by Alastair Reynolds from Gollancz:

Novels

Revelation Space

Redemption Ark

Absolution Gap

Chasm City

Century Rain

Pushing Ice

The Prefect

House of Suns

Terminal World

Blue Remembered Earth

On the Steel Breeze

Poseidon’s Wake

The Medusa Chronicles (with Stephen Baxter)

Short Story Collections:

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

Galactic North

Zima Blue

Beyond the Aquila Rift

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Gollancz

an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.

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Copyright © Dendrocopos Limited 2016

The moral right of Alastair Reynolds to be identified as

the author of this work has been asserted in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the

prior permission of both the copyright owner and the

above publisher of this book.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance

to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library.

ISBN (eBook) 978 0 575 09056 9

www.alastairreynolds.com

www.orionbooks.co.uk

www.gollancz.co.uk