The Gospel According to Verdu (a Steampunk Novel) (The Brofman Series) (10 page)

She missed Fenimore. The fluttering low in her stomach kept telling her that this separation from him was bad, really wrong. Something horrible was happening to him. She was so lost in worry that when she finally noticed that Trygan had come up behind her, it was too late.

A hand grabbed the back of her neck and another, the inside of her left thigh. One pushed as the other pulled, and Chenda was neatly flipped, head over heels, into the sparkling Kohlian Sea. Chenda reached out with one hand, scrambling to grab something, anything, from
The Poor Man’s Bounty
as it zipped by, but the slick hull gave no opportunities.

Trygan looked back from the ship and watched Chenda treading water. The expression on his face, strong and proud, left no room for doubt. He was not coming back for her. He understood fully the mutinous murder he was committing, leaving Chenda in the middle of the sea. At any given time, she was infinitely more powerful than he, but he had learned quickly that there were moments when she was vulnerable. That information he used to his advantage, to get what he wanted—his ship back. He was a shrewd man. He was a brave man.

Without a doubt, Chenda now knew why Trygan had no friends.

Ahy-Me was baffled. Each day for a week she had circled the market. She bought a few loaves of moss bread, looked at the latest creations from the dressmakers, watched Verdu’s window, and thought up a discreet way to pick up whatever he pitched out of it. The man was relentless in his writings. Each day, another segment of his account of the return of the Pramuc fell to earth from the high window of the imperial palace. The words were scratched onto whatever Verdu could find, with whatever he could get to pass for ink. The passages from the second day came on a large dried leaf, which Ahy-Me assumed had blown up to Verdu’s imprisoning window. The next day, a scroll of what Ahy-Me guessed was a big flake of plaster from the cell’s wall landed in the square. She was not sure, but the smell of the script was very similar to mushroom gravy. More unsettling was the day on which half a shirtsleeve fell to her. The words there looked to be written in his own blood.

It seemed, however, that Verdu was bound and determined to hand down this tale, one bit at a time, and if he had to open a vein to do so, he would. Ahy-Me worried more that if he thought his bones would make for a better quill, he would pull out a femur or something. She found the line between zealotry and madness to be most unclear.

Day after day she came, and night after night Ahy-Me, Pranav Erato, and several others in the resistance would faithfully hand copy the account dozens of times each. On the day after she and the others had transcribed what was sure to be the end of Verdu’s tale, she went back to the marketplace. She recited that last segment to herself as she walked through a spice seller’s stall:

To her, that sounded like the ending. Pranav Erato seemed to think it was, as he collected the two hundred hand-written copies of Verdu’s account and feverishly bound them into crude books, all but two of which he sent out by runners in all directions. He had key members of the resistance and other sympathizers in mind to receive them. Each book opened with a letter from Pranav Erato, explaining the origin of the tale, and charging each person who read the book to hand write a copy for themselves and pass along the originals so that they could share the truth with even more people.

Personally, Ahy-Me liked the story. It would bring people hope, sure, but she was rather pleased at being one of the figures in it. The telling of it made the experience seem more real to her, and she wondered at the vitality of her own life when it was reflected on the written page. It confused her just a bit that it should be so. After all, she had lived that adventure, at least in part, with Verdu and Chenda and the rest. But the way Verdu wrote his words, the turns of phrase, his point of view—it all seemed so much more important when he said it. At the time, she recalled, she’d felt like her only motive was running for her life.

But, if Verdu had truly ended his account, why she was circling the market today was a mystery to her. Pranav Erato was sure more would be coming from Verdu. Ahy-Me doubted he would put in the effort to find more materials on which to write. However, she secretly hoped that he would send a message, one with some practical information as to how she was going to help him get out of there before word made it round to the Hierarchy that he was preaching the return of the Pramuc from his cell—an offense whose punishment would be Verdu’s head on a pike.

The thought of Verdu being destroyed in that way was more than she could bear. Looking for him over the last few months, and then finally finding him, had made her realize how strongly she admired Verdu. She sighed over her feelings, a lot. It was obvious at their last meeting in Nivarta that he had eyes only for Chenda. Even knowing she could not hold a candle to the Pramuc, not in his heart anyway, did not negate Ahy-Me’s devotion to Verdu. Regardless of how he felt about her, she vowed to protect him, and love him from afar.

She circled the market again, waiting, glancing toward his window every now and again, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, perhaps even find another creatively penned message. After a few more turns past the bread stall and produce stand, Ahy-Me saw a scrap of fabric fluttering from Verdu’s cell.

Ahy-Me collected it as surreptitiously as possible, and slinked away from the market square. Deep in the shadows, she read:

Fat tears ran down Ahy-Me’s cheeks. Her heart swelled and broke in that moment. She stepped back toward the square, wanting to stand there before all of the market and shout up to his window high above, scream at him to not give up hope. To beg for him to try. Pranav Erato’s voice pulled her up short.
There’s nothing you can do
, he whispered inside her head.
Come home. If you really love him, come home
.

She resented the pranav telling her to stop. It hardly mattered that her head knew he was right. To cause a scene would be madness. It would get a lot of people killed, starting with her. The heart wants the impossible, and right away. Turning back again, following the path that led out of Kotal and into the caves of the surrounding hills, Ahy-Me walked without really thinking about where she was going, sobbing silently and saying the meanest and nastiest things possible to her mental eavesdropper just to share the pain.

Graciously, he kept his thoughts to himself for once.

chapter 9

Offset

Once she got back to the ship, it did not take long for Candice to relay what she knew, and what she suspected, to Captain Endicott. “That darn fool has been sucked back into the spy ring, and that lovesick twit has chased after him!” she said as she stomped down the gangway and onto the
Brofman
. It took a few minutes more for Captain Endicott to catch up.

“You found my wayward crewmen then?” he asked as he absently tossed bag after bag of his newly acquired seeds into an open hatch in the airship’s deck.

Exasperated, she shook her head and shoved the charred parchment at him. “No. I am telling you the opposite. Feast your eyes on this. See?”

Captain Endicott held the scrap at arm’s length and squinted at the words. After just a few seconds, he tossed the paper back at her, swore an oath disavowing the parentage of a number of the more respectable gods, and started shouting orders at the crew to pull up the lines and prepare for a quick departure.

“Ah,” Candice said drily as she followed her captain to the wheelhouse. “You’ve grasped the situation then. We’re going after her, right?”

“No,” he said, “we’re going after
him
.” Captain Endicott’s hands flew over the ship’s controls, flipping levers and sending a series of whistles and shudders through the
Brofman
’s bones. He glanced through the glass of the wheelhouse, muttering to himself, “Come on, boys, faster. There you are . . . bring in ropes. That’s it—kick it to the cleat. . . . Go!” he yelled to his ship, slamming his hand down on a bank of throttles and spinning the wheel to the left. The
Brofman
leaped forward, tossing Candice to the far side of the small space. Her back pressed against the wall, where she flailed about, squawking like a surprised goose.

“Candice?” Captain Endicott said, glancing over his shoulder. His eyes softened from determined to concerned as he saw her struggling against the force of the ship’s acceleration. “Poor girl, you need to brace yourself.” He scooped a beefy hand around her and easily pulled her off the wall. She was more than a little annoyed that he seemed to have no trouble standing solidly at the wheel, while her body always seemed to betray her in flight. For a brief moment she worried about being sick again, but returned her thoughts to the matter at hand. “Max, shouldn’t we go back and search for Chenda in town? Perhaps she headed back to Coal City to find the
Brofman
there when Fenimore left.”

“No way. That girl is running east already, possibly in the air, or maybe on a sailing ship, but she’s too full of her own abilities to have waited for us. You mark my words: she found a way to follow him, I’m betting within hours of him going. That was, what? Two days ago. We have no way to know exactly where, how, or with whom. If she went by air, she would have had to come through the airship tower we just left, and there would have been a message waiting for us when we got here. No message, so I’m wagering she’s on a boat. Now”—Captain Endicott scratched his neatly shaved chin as he thought—“day and a half, maybe two, by fast ship, say two hundred fifty to three hundred ticks per hour—mostly sure she’s heading east, maybe east-southeast, maybe an angle not so sharp—then we’re gonna be looking for her in a pretty damn big piece of ocean.

“On the other hand, Fenimore is a different story. He’s going to be on a republic transport vessel of some kind. Fast airship, likely. He’s not leavin’ a note neither, because he’s not wantin’ us to be involved. He knows the rules between us. We’ve played this game a long time. When it came to his ‘penance,’ I was just to keep my big nose out. But this all was supposed to be done, and he promised me no more of it. I took him at his word and now I’m gonna hold him to it! I can’t imagine what put him back under the KRIS’s thumb again, but it seems he’s pinched. That tells us a lot. First of all, there’s only so many places that a republic transport can stop outside the continent. Just three or four between here and a port where they can dump him near the empire—or over it. If we catch Fen, Chenda won’t be far behind; she’s not gonna stop lookin’ for him. That much is certain. We can see if luck is on our side and catch up to Fenimore before his ship gets to Tugrulia.
They
will follow protocol and dock or hover at night, which puts the advantage to us if we play it a little riskier and stop not at all. It’s long odds, but I aim to see if I can save him from himself this time. Whatever fallout comes to him from Chenda over this, well, he’s just gonna have to save himself.” Captain Endicott looked slightly frightened. “The thought of Chenda throwing a tantrum… Lives could be lost.”

Candice was more than a little amazed. She admired her captain for his swagger and bravado, but she’d never really accounted for how astute he really was. She loved Chenda like a daughter, and often displayed the instinct a mother lion had to protect her cub, so she still had the urge to chase after her. However, Captain Endicott’s words made more sense, even if there were still a number of holes in his plan.

Candice’s questions all rolled out at once. “Where are we going to look first? What do we do if we can’t find him, or find out that he’s too far ahead and has disappeared into the empire? What if—”

The captain silenced her by placing a thick finger over her lips. “Enough,” he said calmly. “Honestly, woman, you can worry a topic to death. When we get to the next obstacle we’ll fly around it, but until then, we won’t borrow trouble. In fact, we’re hardly changing the plan we had a few hours ago—to send another shipment of seeds to the Tugrulian resistance, with you supervising the mission. It’s just that we’re going to do it a whole lot faster and look for my errant first officer and his deckhand wife on the way. Relax, babe. Focus on keeping your lunch off the deck of my ship.”