The Gospel According to Verdu (a Steampunk Novel) (The Brofman Series) (13 page)

He blinked. Unsure of where to put the storm of adrenaline and remorse for what he had been about to do, he gulped back a sob and scrambled to his feet. He ran like a coward across the path and over the curve of the hillside, gulping back alternating waves of sobs and giggles of relief. This particular battle for his soul had been averted, but he knew he was not close to ending the war raging in his own mind.

Fenimore tromped on and on through the blazing heat of the late-afternoon sun until he finally found the opening to the caves he had been looking for. He staggered over to the water trickling out of the rocks, gulping it down where it gathered in a puddle at his feet. He turned his head to encourage Chenda to drink.

Then he remembered she was not there.

He sat down on a rock and listened to the splash and gurgle of the water running down to the puddle basin. He splashed a little water on his face, washing away the tears from a countenance that his love would not recognize if she saw it. It was not the dark stain he had rubbed on his face and hair to help him pass for Tugrulian that would not have deceived her, nor would the imperial clothes. However, the look of cruelty and torment in his eyes, the despair that had sunken his cheeks, had all but consumed the face that Fenimore had always worn. He felt almost nothing but despair, an emotion that deepened with each passing moment.

He sipped more water and prayed for one of the sisters of the rebellion to find him, before the man he was, the man he wanted to be, melted away completely into the Tugrulian heat.

Nameer Xa-Ven felt like the stick the emperor and the Hierarchy were beating each other with. Politically, there was no way out of the mess he was in. As the advocate for His Imperial Highness Kotal Verdu, he had to act in his behalf until the Hierarchy and emperor came to some agreement over who had the right to the heir’s royal head.

What made it more tedious was that the condemned prince had no clue as to why there was a delay in his execution. From what Nameer gathered during his latest interview with Verdu, he was ready to die. The man honestly felt content, and he stood by the twenty-six-page fairy tale about his jaunt with the alleged Pramuc. “His life’s work,”
the fool had said. Nameer thought Verdu a sham. How could a man with as much to gain as Verdu have been so blasé about his life, or rather his death. It seemed that the longer Nameer talked with the newly found prince, the more depressed Verdu got.

Nameer also found it hard to believe that Verdu had no knowledge or even interest in how he had crept up the line of Tugrulian succession. The eldest two of the three cousins ahead of him seemed much more typical for imperial princes: hungry for power, ruthless to the point of cruelty, and devoid of mercy. They had ambition that trumped their humanity. In short, they were the perfect heirs to the Tugrulian throne.

As Nameer retreated to his study in the palace, a place that overlooked the ruins of the Dia Orella, he mulled over the kind of man Verdu was. A man of faith, yes. A dreamer as well, true. But could he be a ruler? His bloodline put him close to the top, and his temperament was unlikely to bring the empire to ruin. But he could definitely distract the rebellion. One of their own, thrust suddenly into the seat of power? There would be chaos for a while, and that was the best way for Nameer Xa-Ven to find a way out of this mess. The rebels would be flushed into the open, and once the chaos of a soft leader collapsed in on Verdu’s ears, the rebellious subjects could be pushed out for good. He might even find a promotion if he played his cards right. First councillor to the emperor was the highest a poor boy from the coast could dream of. He had no title, and could not be emperor himself, but perhaps he didn’t need to be. Perhaps he could put Verdu on the throne and then just pull the puppet’s strings.

Nameer toyed with the idea, then put it aside with a heavy sigh. Verdu did not seem strong enough to last one week as emperor. Even if Nameer could finagle a way to keep Verdu’s head on his shoulders, the rebel was not likely to play along well enough to survive the part. Mostly, he seemed a bit suicidal.

As Nameer had explained to Verdu how he had leaped up the line of succession on the day that sixty or so of his cousins, uncles, and even a few nephews died in the razing of the Dia Orella, the unwitting prince seemed to sink further and deeper into melancholy. Nameer did not know if it was the knowledge of the thousands who had died that haunted the prisoner, or the unintended gain in status caused by the death of so many of his higher-ranking kin that caused the depression. No, this Verdu was too soft to rule, and too morose to manipulate fluidly. It would be best to just let the man die a traitor, and try to keep him from tainting Nameer’s own reputation more than necessary. The sooner this mess was over, the better.

Nameer tried to push the chore of Verdu out of his mind and shuffled though a stack of new documents and letters on his desk. Among them was a strangely addressed envelope
: To the Defender of the Rediscovered Heir
.

Nameer closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
Here it comes
, he thought. He had expected needling notes from various priests and heirs entreating him bend toward one faction or the other, but this one had appeared rather more quickly than seemed possible. After all, he had just been named Verdu’s advocate, and he had hoped to have at least a day or two to work before the name-calling and browbeating began. He flicked open the letter with annoyance to read a hand he did not recognize:

Terrified, and convinced he was the butt of some terrible joke, Nameer gasped and crumpled the letter in his fist. He trembled, looking around for witnesses even as he sat alone in his office, unable to decide if he was more frightened by the horrible letter, or by the idea that it might actually be real. Did he hold a letter that was indeed from the leader of the rebels? And could that old ghost read his mind? How could Pranav Erato know what he had been thinking?

Like weeds clinging to the side of a cliff, Nameer Xa-Ven’s thoughts grasped for any solid ground available, and he bit his lip until the blood drowned his fear and desire to scream in terror.

Who’s the puppet now?
he thought.

Gutter

Candice never felt more optimistic about life than when she started a new notebook. Nolde’s First Quality Classic Writing Booklets had always been her favorite: clean and white, unruled, pages organized into a single thick folio and securely bound with stout string to heavy pressed paperboard covers, edges cut just so into sensible rounded corners. To her eyes it was a thing of beauty, both practical and touched with simple elegance. She had filled hundreds of them over the years, a new one for each project or topic of interest.

Her notebooks were not limited to her geological pursuits, not at all. She started a notebook for all sorts of things: personal book inventory, a pros-and-cons list for various breeds of pet (she always tallied it up and decided that pets just were not worth the effort in the end, and had therefore never had one), and even one on her cooking experiments. Each book was clearly labeled on the spine and front cover and printed neatly within in dark inks, and all clippings and illustrations were precisely pasted in placed and shielded with tissue-paper inserts. Candice thought she did a commendable job with each one, and was proud of her collection. It was the entirety of her intellectual life, neatly organized and labeled.

She sniffed lovingly the spine of the new blank notebook before her. The idea of a new project thrilled her very soul. She picked up her favorite and freshly filled ink pen and, in a flowing and serious hand, printed on the cover The Pros and Cons of Life with Maxwell Endicott. She slipped a small metal ruler from her canvas satchel and drew lines down the center of each of a dozen pages, writing
pros
at the top of each left column, and
cons
to the right.

She glanced at her open pocket watch on the shelf table in her tiny cabin. It was near three o’clock in the morning. Not since the war had she encountered this much trouble with sleeping. Her worries were indeed great, with Verdu gone, Fenimore roped into going back to Tugrulia, and Chenda’s whereabouts unaccounted for. These were some of her best friends, people that strangely had nothing to do with either geology or the university. It baffled her that she cared for them so. But there she was, overwhelmed with concern.

This bout of insomnia was more than just the worry about her friends. It was as if her brain refused to switch off. She found herself thinking academically about almost everything. There was suddenly so much to study; everything wanted measuring, or quantifying, or categorizing. She began to suspect, after careful observation, that her mind was truly in the soup when she began mentally recording the angles of her own fork cuts in Kingston’s meatloaf surprise at dinner one night. It frightened her more than a little, but as she had no reference books on mental illness or classical geometry aboard the
Brofman
, she could not persue those lines of self-study and laid them aside while she separated by size and counted all the seeds Captain Endicott had acquired for her. The notebook entries for those were just stunning, even if she did say so herself.

The more she worked on her pros-and-cons list for spending a greater portion of her life with the good captain, the more she felt she needed to develop a happiness equation to evaluate her friendships. Hashing this out was going to take some additional research, however. Before her mind was fully aware of it, she was opening the door to her little berth and knocking on the captain’s, just an arm’s length across the hall.

She heard him snort awake and bellow at the dark panels of wood between them. “Germer! Unless we are about to crash into the sea or we are actively being consumed by acid or fire, bugger off.”

Candice bristled at the captain’s rude language, and even more at the fact that he did not recognize her dainty knock. She stamped her tiny foot and rapped sharply on the door, this time calling, “Keep your tongue civil, Maxwell, or I’ve half a mind to leave here and go back to my room!”

The door to the captain’s room flew open, and a groggy, squinting Captain Endicott leaned against the doorjamb. “So, all I have to do to get you to go away is tell the night watch to bugger off again, and you’ll scoot? Leave me to my rest? That’s a right bargain there. I may just have to take you up on it.”

Candice crossed her arms over her chest and stared at Captain Endicott with her best schoolmarm gaze. He sniffed at her, unaffected, then rubbed one eye with the meat of his palm. “Well, since you’ve come all this way at such a late hour, come in and let’s get on with whatever it is you feel needs to be on with at this time of night. So don’t just stand there, come on with ya.” He waved Candice into the dark cabin.

She snapped the wall-sconce light on as she stomped into the room, and attempted to pace in the small space between the narrow bed and the wall. Captain Endicott grunted as he slumped onto his mattress and threw one beefy arm over his eyes, shielding himself from the light and Candice’s inevitable onslaught.

And then it came. “We have a mission, you know. We aren’t particularly successful so far, but we need to do as we said we would and deliver those seeds and many more! I know that your crew is important to you, but we have to balance our needs and our wants here. There’s got to be a formula that will help us evaluate where best to put our resources—”

“Whoa! Slow down, darling. You can’t be serious,” he said.

Candice, unaccustomed to being interrupted mid rant, blinked at him. “I’m always serious about a good formula.”

“What’s there to figure out? The boys are in real trouble, and Chenda, too. There’s no string of numbers that will convince me that my best effort to recover them is all that is required. They’re friends. That’s what friends do.”

“Friends. You treat them more like children, Max. They are all grown, and you don’t need—”

“Stop.” Captain Endicott sat up in his bed, making room for Candice to sit next to him. “I think maybe you don’t truly understand what this crew means to me. Now give your little feet a rest before you wear a hole in my floor.” He patted the rumpled blankets at his hip. Candice flopped next to him, crossing her arms over her chest impatiently and bobbing one foot over the other. He reached an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to his side, shaking her arm gently to get her to relax her death grip on herself.

“Sh,” he hissed into her hair. “Listen. I think you know this already, but sometimes we need to remind ourselves, and each other, of the truth.

“Did I ever tell you that I had two brothers? Both were younger than me, and I loved them, but they were killed in the war. I miss them, but not so much as my parents did. They’re gone, too, now. Good people, them. The kind who let their sons and daughter follow their dreams and callings, proud of what we did no matter what, which was a challenge when it came to my sister. I’ve got a good number of uncles and aunts and cousins, but I haven’t seen a one in a dozen years. I got no touchstone with them except they are kin to my folks. So, I love them, I guess, out of respect for family. But I don’t know them. They’re just the people that the gods lumped me in with.

“But Fenimore and Verdu, they found their ways to me years ago, and I do feel a bit like their father. I can’t be sure, having no kids of my own to raise, but I guess you could say I taught them everything they know, and as a crew, they are an extension of me. Passing my knowledge to them is like my progeny, the fruit of my loins, more or less. Beyond that, they became my friends. I really believe that friends
are
the family you choose. The people you bond to. It’s like love. You are not from the same stock but you choose to be part of each other, take on the other’s traditions, inflections, mannerisms, and time. . . . I don’t think I’m explaining it very well.”