The Gospel According to Verdu (a Steampunk Novel) (The Brofman Series) (19 page)

Rainor frowned. “We try to love those who come to us, but some will not help themselves to happiness. Bhagnee was one such. Ja-nok, however, began to think that the woman he took as his wife was not Bhagnee, but another. He confessed that he was very drunk at his wedding, and that night was a blur, but he believes with all his heart that it was not Bhagnee. I think he looks for her still. That is why he keeps himself at the trading center that he created. He says that eventually, all of the world passes through Atoll Belles.”

Chenda gasped and grabbed Rainor by the arm. In her shock and haste, she pinched his skin, causing him to flinch. She pulled her hand back and apologized.

“Are you saying Ja-nok Ba-leta is the owner of Atoll Belles? He is Jason Belles?”

“Yes. That’s what he calls himself with the traders from the West. Jason Belles. Rather rough on the teeth and tongue for a Mae-Lyn name, but it suits. . . .” Rainor’s voice trailed off. The look of shock on Chenda’s face frightened him.

“Pramuc! Have I said something wrong? Are you unhappy?” His brow furrowed in confusion and worry.

“Jason Belles,” Chenda said again in awe. She blinked and smiled at Rainor.

“All is well, Rainor. Your story makes me very happy, and has answered my question, so I thank you. But, as so many answered questions do, this one leads me to more questions, ones that only I can answer, with the help of a little time. Forgive me, but I have so much to think on right now. I will tell you tomorrow, or soon after, the rest of the story of Bhagnee and Ja-nok. There is a part to their story that even Jason Belles doesn’t know.”

Verdu tried to lift his head and take a better look at the emperor’s councillor. The change in position brought on a hacking cough as his neglected insides shifted, and pain shot though his chest. He dropped his head back onto the pillow until he recovered.

“Despite the smell, you aren’t dead, I see,” Nameer said, sounding pleased with himself.
Perhaps he still has some lust for life
, he thought.

“What do you know?” Verdu asked cautiously. His instincts said he could not trust a man who worked so closely with the emperor; what Verdu wanted and what Nameer could give him were entirely too far apart. Nameer was an official with the Tugrulian government, and a powerful one at that. All Verdu wanted was to tear that government apart.

“I know enough to keep you alive and allow you to walk out of the palace, or try to at least. But what we need to discuss is whether I should.”

Verdu’s spirit sank again. “You may think me an imperial prince, but I have no way to pay your bribe. I am all that I have.”

“And what rotten shape you are in, too.” Nameer sniffed condescendingly. “I have to say, the shock of what I plan to propose may just kill you dead in the state you are in, so for now, let me say to you this: Recover your good sense and gather your wits. Becoming a martyr for your cause will not help anyone. If you think your life can mean anything with you living it, then take a bath, eat some soup, and find a spark of life. If you are to leave this palace alive, you will need more than your faith in a whole crop of gods and your precious Pramuc. I have a plan, if you are of a mind to risk it. You will need courage and strength—neither of which I see in you at the moment.”

He stood and walked toward the door; Verdu tracked him with a questioning gaze. Nameer said, “I will be back tomorrow, Your Highness. Do you think you will live until then?”

“I look forward to hearing what you have to say,” Verdu replied. “I shall endeavor to resist death.”

“Very well. Tomorrow, then.”

A moment after Nameer left, Bateem shuffled quietly into the room and softly cleared his throat to announce his presence. Verdu looked at the clerk critically and raised his head to speak—a turn that encouraged Bateem greatly.

“Bateem, would you be so kind as to arrange for me a bath, and someone to help me get in it? I would prefer someone who is unlikely to hold my under the water until I die.”

“It would be my pleasure, my lord,” he said. And he meant it. Bateem smiled as he backed away from where Verdu reclined. Whatever the councillor had said to Verdu, it seemed to have moved him in some way, backed him away from the line that separated life and death. The clerk allowed himself to feel hope pile upon hope for a moment. Then, just as the door was closing behind him, Bateem heard the words once again that had made him so loyal to the wayward prince, the words that no other royal had ever said to him and hinted that this man, Kotal Verdu, was a different sort, one who had captured his imagination, and perhaps the allegiance of many more. He said kindly, “Thank you, Bateem.”

Never before in the presence of a prince of the blood had Bateem received any measure of respect. He vowed, then and there, that he would do anything to keep it.

For Fenimore, the state between sleeping and waking had always been completely separate. He never was one for whom yawning awake and drifting to sleep were possible. When it was time to wake, he was alert, and when he finally stopped his motion when tired, he was out. Joining the crew of the
Brofman
made it doubly true. Wafer-thin mattresses and a space only slightly larger than his body meant there was no comfort or pleasure in lounging in bed. If he was not sleeping, there was no point to staying in his bunk.

Chenda, however, had helped him discover different reasons to linger abed. His marriage had tempted him to search out more comfortable and spacious horizontal resting places aboard his airship home. Helping Chenda find her uneasy rest had given him a bit of perspective. She routinely exhausted herself, and waking up seemed like an ordeal for her sometimes, as though she was clinging to sleep, trying to get a hold on more rest that she just could not grasp. He felt it was a shame that she always seemed unrested in the mornings, and he softly accused her of working too hard.

In each other’s arms, the wounds and weariness did not matter. The world did not matter and the crew did not matter and the past was forgotten and the future ignored. Awake or asleep, together was peace. Their love, the intimacy that was both passionate and steadfast, was the surest of all places in their floating and shifting world.

Now, with eyes closed and thoughts cloudy, Fenimore knew he was not fully awake or asleep. He was groggy and his mind pushed him first toward waking, and then another part of himself urged him back toward sleep, where he drifted into dreaming. In his dream, he was touching her, wrapping his arms around her paper-white midsection, stroking his hands across ribs and around her, pulling her toward him, crossing his hands over the small of her back, tracing his tongue down the line of her jaw from her ear to her chin. She moved with him, matching grasp for grasp, the passion of their intimacy warming more than the small makeshift bed in the cargo hold; it heated their very souls.

His sense of consciousness pitched again, and he lost the sensation of her. She was replaced by the smell of fungus and damp rock. Anger at being ejected from his dream struggled with the panic of not being able to open his eyes. Each beat of his heart pulsed through places in his body newly bruised and scratched. He felt a dull stiffness in parts of his body, as if he had lain too long in one position. He struggled to fully waken, to sit up, to fight whatever threatened him and complete the mission.

Within his own head, he berated his eyelids like a drill sergeant with new recruits. Reluctantly, one eye opened, and he winced at the dim light on the stone around him.
Still underground
,
he assessed, and he slid back into sleep again, much against the advice of the voices in his head screaming to him about the danger he surely was still in, reminding him of the three women dressed as Tugrulian soldiers who had overpowered him.

In the dream with Chenda, he buried his face in her stomach, trailing kisses around her belly button. She giggled as his scruff of whisker stubble tickled her, and she ran her fingers through his sandy hair. It was perfect bliss.

And then someone was staring at him: a bony fellow and very old. His limbs seemed to float independently and with no discernible rhythm. The old man placed a finger on Fenimore’s forehead for a moment and shook his head. The man made words appear directly in Fenimore’s groggy brain:
Oh, dear. This is worse than I thought.

The swift Tugrulian ship crossed the distance from Crider Island to a dock on the imperial shore in just over an hour. Candice was sure of the time—she was counting the minutes and seconds as best she could, trying not to let her racing heart distract her from her tally. She had to assume the boat landed on the Tugrulian shore. Guessing was all that her senses allowed as her head, complete with a rope gag digging into the corners of her mouth, was covered in a black cloth bag, which smelled foul, like old blood and desperation. She tried not to think of how many people had seen the inside of this hood, who they were and what could have happened to them. The blinder was there to inflict terror, and Candice could understand the theory on an intellectual level, but, emotionally, she had learned everything she needed to know about this experience and would have slit her own throat to get the vile thing off her head.

Her fear fueled her instinct—which was to panic. She was pretty sure she was alone for part of the crossing, but she could not be entirely sure. The noises of the ship—churning water, the clanking of the boiler operators, the rumble of steam through the pipes—covered the smaller noises of the room surrounding her. Unsure of whether she dared to try dislodging the bag tied around her neck, she settled for turning her head methodically from side to side, listening for any changes to the general clamor.

A hand grabbing her by one arm and hauling her upward caught her by such surprise that she tried to flail her bound arms and feet. She nearly fell over, but the beefy hand clamped tighter, and dragged her before she could totally right herself.

She started to collect her hobbled legs beneath her and was getting the pacing right to keep up with her handler when she was shoved into hard metal stairs. The raised grooves in the stairs cut into her shins and elbows. She could not understand the Tugrulian words shouted at her, but the tone was clear:
Move
!

She struggled upward, feeling her way up the steep stairs with her feet and her bound hands. A trickle of blood ran down her leg and was soaking into her sock. She knew her head had cleared the deck of the ship when the left side of her face was suddenly and gently warmed through the bag: sunlight. Her temper was just alive enough that she could think to herself,
Damn the Tugrulian heat!

The annoyed thought was snatched away and replaced with fear as the large hand grasped her again and moved her bodily from the ship to a dock. She was passed to a different set of hands, smaller and thinner than the previous ones but equally strong, and pulled along.

Candice could smell the brackish coastal water mixed with the smell of coal smoke and dead fish. The faint scent of the sun-bleached rock even filtered through the stinking bag over her head. The water lapped the pylons of the pier, and she heard seabirds and boats thumping against their moorings. As she stumbled along, the texture under her feet turned from smooth boards to sandy gravel, and the way pitched uphill. The ropes binding her feet only allowed her small steps, and she was running in miniature to keep from being dragged along.

After a few minutes of struggling to keep pace, she was panting, and her steps began to falter. She did not think she could keep up much longer when a pair of hands grabbed her shoulders firmly. Her feet left the ground and she was flung into the air. Before she could reason what was happening, she landed hard on her backside, thrown up into some kind of wagon. Blindly she rolled and scrambled around, feeling with her bound hands for any escape she could find.
If I could just see!
she thought to herself in frustration. A bony hand pressed down hard on her back just between her shoulder blades, the full force of a man’s weight behind it. Her arms gave way and she was pinned, the pressure on her slight frame bursting the air from her lungs. Fire shot through her chest as she heard a light crackle, felt the pain of a rib cracking under that iron palm.

She tried to scream, but her breath was gone. Struggle as she might, Candice could not suck in a mouthful of air. The muscles all along her back spasmed under the crushing hand. Her bound hands curled back with the convulsions, fingers trembling with her pain, suffocation, and resignation. She had been bested, both by her captors and her own body, and there was nothing she could do about it.

“And you vill stay down!” said a sharply accented voice above her as the hand disappeared from her back. He had seen her defeat and knew, for the time being, Candice was helpless and docile. Her head swam. She desperately tried to focus all her attention on pulling in a bit of air, coaxing her lungs to reset themselves and start working properly again. The relief as the first edge of breath rubbed against the searing pain of the newly cracked rib gave her reason to hope that she was not dead yet.

Somehow she summoned the strength to roll onto her side. After several searing breaths, she curled her knees up and tried to stop her sobbing. In part, she wanted to curb the tears because she didn’t want her captors to see her fragile boohooing, but more importantly, each jagged sob jerked against her ribs and made her wish she could just faint.

She was helpless and she had lost this battle with her kidnappers, but she was still alive—a mercy for which she took a moment to thank the gods. Candice decided to rest, regroup, and wait for her next opportunity.

A column of workmen with tool chests followed Nameer Xa-Ven into the bubbly pink room that held Verdu. The bath and the ministrations of the palace barber had turned the nearly dead prince into a much more presentable figure. Propped up in the frilly bed, he remained sickly around the eyes and very pale, but the change was still remarkable.

“Success,” Nameer said. “You survived the night. How fortunate.” He waved the workmen around the bed. “These men are here to help get you standing.”