The Black Lung Captain (22 page)

'Made it just short of lethal, the way you like it.'

He grunted in thanks and kept poking.

'How's it going?' she asked, trying to peer past him.

'Same as before,' he said. 'Can't do nothin' without the parts. She could hold up for weeks. She could give out any minute. No telin'.' He found something loose and tightened it. 'You thought about what I said?'

Jez remembered their surprising conversation in the rainforest of Kurg. 'I have. I am.'

'Talked to Crake?'

'Not yet,' she said. It seemed hard to find the right moment. 'You know he hasn't had a drink since last night?'

'He tel you that?'

'I can smel it on him.'

'Huh.'

Sensing that nothing else would be forthcoming, Jez ducked away and headed back down the ladder. The truth was, she'd been thinking a lot about Crake of late. She was becoming more and more convinced that he was the only one who could help her. Who better to deal with a daemon than a daemonist?

But it wasn't quite as simple as just walking up and asking. There had always been a distance between them. Crake seemed to resent her a little for being the one he'd confessed his crime to. Jez, for her part, had found it hard to entirely forgive him for what he'd done. Then there had been the drinking, and his gradual deterioration of late. He'd become bitter and unapproachable.

Jez was never the kind who was comfortable opening up to others. She was afraid they might one day use her vulnerabilities against her. And she was stil afraid of what would happen if she admitted the whole truth about her condition. What if Crake reacted with fear and panic? What if he felt he had to tel the Cap'n? No matter how much the crew liked her or how useful she was, having a Mane on board would make anyone nervous. She could be shunned and ejected from the
Ketty Jay
, and she couldn't face that. She couldn't go back to that life of wandering, moving from crew to crew, never putting down roots.

But she had a daemon inside her. And the longer it stayed the more power it would have over her. Sooner or later she'd be forced to take action. Even if it cost her her place on the
Ketty Jay.

She went out into the passageway. She could see Malvery through the open door of the infirmary, asleep on the surgical table, snoring. Ahead of her, Harkins was stalking down the corridor on tiptoe, a butterfly net in his hand. He flushed beetroot red as he saw her.

'Jez! Um . . . I . . . you see, I picked this up in Tarlock Cove and I . . . er . . .'

'I don't think I want to know,' said Jez.

'Right. Hm. Yes. Probably best.'

She went down to the cargo hold and outside. The
Ketty Jay
sat in a grassy mountain del, high up in the Splinters. A broken, bald peak thrust up ahead of her.

Frey and Crake were somewhere on the other side, with Grist and his bosun. Scouting out the location that Crake's daemon had identified, the place where Grist's mysterious sphere was being kept. Nearby was the
Storm Dog.
A few of Grist's crew lounged about, enjoying the bright, cool morning. Jez walked past them, towards the trees that fringed the del.

She stil had deep misgivings about this whole affair, but she was loyal to her Cap'n. He'd given her a home, and she had a way to go before she paid him back for that, even if she'd already saved his life more than once. She felt included here, and needed.

Just as she'd felt when that Mane was trying to turn her, on that snowy night in Yortland. The moment when she'd seen into their world, and felt the connections between them.

She understood why that crew on the crashed Mane craft had lain down and died. She'd only had a taste of what could have been. Having that, living with it and then giving it up would have been unthinkably terrible. A mutilation of the senses.

And yet they did it anyway. They made that choice. So maybe they're individuals, rather than slaves to a collective mind. Maybe I wouldn't lose myself
if I joined them.

Dangerous thinking. A temptation like that would be too easy to give in to. It was no easy thing to resist the cal, day after day, night after night. The need to belong had always been a part of her. And no one belonged like a Mane did.

Jez had spent her whole life looking for her place. For as long as she could remember, she'd been unable to fit in. She'd always had friends, but somehow it never seemed like the friendships she read about in books. She liked them, and they liked her, and it went no deeper. If she never saw them again, she wouldn't have shed a tear. Nobody said so, but she knew they felt the same about her.

Her childhood was spent watching her companions with secret envy. She was always the last to be involved. The cog in the gears that didn't quite mesh.

When she was a little older, she began to blame her father. Him and his obsession with trying to improve her position in life. He was a craftbuilder, an artisan, more respected than the peasantry but stil a world away from the scholars, officials and aristocrats.

Once he'd been content with his lot; but after the sickness took her mother, he changed. Suddenly, a craftbuilder's life wasn't good enough for his daughter any more. He forced her to study when she wasn't helping him in the workshop. He saved up for a tutor who'd knock the common edges off her accent. By the time Jez reached the age where she just wanted to be the same as everyone else, she was already different in a thousand little ways.

Her apologetic displays of knowledge intimidated her friends. She found herself frustrated by their lack of ambition. Her horizons had been expanded through literature, but theirs hadn't, and she couldn't understand how they could think so smal. They were stil friends, as they'd always been; but no matter how she tried, she was faintly alien to them now.

There was no help among the educated, either. They spotted her immediately, and despised her as a try-hard attempting to rise above her station. A few smal friendships blossomed, but they could only survive in isolation, and circumstances eventualy put an end to them.

She hardened herself to rejection. She embarked on adolescent romances, and found them as unsatisfying as her friendships had been. She always broke them off before her partner could.

Her father talked of university, but it was his dream and not hers. Someone like her didn't get into places like that. And even if she did, she'd never escape her birth. It would be just another round of being on the outside. So when the time came, she broke her father's heart and went off to see the world in the little A-18

he'd built for her sixteenth birthday. Out there, she'd find her place. Or if not, at least she'd be alone on her own terms.

Funny, how things turned out.

She walked out of sight of the men in the del and picked her way through the trees to a likely looking rock, where she sat down. There, she puled out a book and opened it. The writing was al circles and arcs. It stil smeled of the captain's cabin in the dreadnought.

The patterns made no sense to her, but she stared at them anyway.

'Awakeners,' said Crake. 'I hate Awakeners.'

Frey wasn't too fond of them himself. It was the Awakeners that had been behind the attempt to frame him and his crew for the murder of the Archduke's eldest son. And now, if Crake's daemon was to be believed, they were behind the theft of Grist's mysterious power source.

He shifted uncomfortably on the ridge and angled the spyglass down at the Awakener's compound. It was a colection of grand buildings, the size of a smal town, with the look of a sprawling university or an ancient library complex. A high wal surrounded it, studded with guard posts, overlooked by a clock tower that rose from the central quad. It sat on a bare island in the midst of a deep blue lake that ran the length of the valey. Next to it was a landing pad, upon which several aircraft sat dormant. Hovering at anchor over the lake was the dirty black bulk of the
Delirium Trigger
, spoiling the sense of idyl entirely.

Frey felt a surge of irritation and anger. What was Trinica doing, working for the Awakeners again? Hadn't she learned her lesson last time, after the whole debacle with Duke Grephen? She was probably already under sentence of treason because of that little affair. But she just had to get involved, didn't she? She had to get in his way. Just to spite him.

There was a bigger question here than Trinica's involvement, however. What interest did the Awakeners have in a crashed Mane aircraft? Why had they sent anyone at al?

He scanned the outer wal. Sentinels walked there, armed with rifles. They wore grey, high-colared cassocks and carried twinned daggers in their belts. On their breasts was the Cipher, the emblem of their faith, a tangled design of smal, linked circles.

Huge lamps like lighthouses had been built on every corner, no doubt powered by generators inside the compound. Approaching unseen across the lake and the barren island would be impossible, whether by day or night.

Grist lay next to him, smoking angrily. 'You see a way in?'

'There isn't a way in,' Frey said.

'There's always a way in,' Grist replied.

Frey put down the spyglass. 'Wel, I don't much fancy assaulting a heavily fortified compound with a handful of men, if that's what you're thinking. Might as wel shoot each other now, save everyone a bit of time.'

'Can't we sneak inside?' suggested Crattle, raising his head to look over his captain at Frey.

'Even if we could, which we probably can't, what happens then?' Frey asked. 'Folow the arrows to the treasure? Look how big that place is. We'd need days to search it.'

'In disguise, then?' Crattle persisted.

'You'd be caught,' said Crake, who lay on Frey's other side. 'Without even a basic knowledge of the Cryptonomicon, they'd identify you as a fraud before the end of your first conversation.'

Frey looked over at the daemonist. He certainly seemed brighter and sharper today than he had been of late. Frey had found him awake early, polishing Bess while Silo patched up rust spots on her armour and fixed broken rings in her chain mail. And Frey had to admit, Crake had stepped up when it came to do his part.

He had no idea what the daemonist had gone through to find the whereabouts of the sphere, but he was sure it hadn't been easy.

Grist took a puff on his cigar and scowled. His good cheer had been almost entirely absent since Trinica had robbed them. Without it, he was an unpleasant man to be around.

'So if we can't get in, what do we do now?'

Frey roled his shoulders, which were getting stiff from lying there. 'Now, we find out what the Awakeners are up to, why they're interested in the sphere at al, and why they went to the trouble of hiring a pirate to get it instead of doing it themselves. Once we know that, we'l have a better idea of how to get our hands on it.'

'And how d'you propose to do that?' Grist asked.

'I'm gonna do my best not to
propose
at al,' Frey said grimly.

Crake caught on. 'Amalicia Thade,' he said with a grin.

Frey had the look of a man facing a firing squad. 'Amalicia Thade.'

There was a long, grave and meaningful pause before Grist said:

'Who?'

Sixteen

Amalicia Thade -— A Warm Welcome —

Invitations — How The Rich Live

The Thade estate sprawled across the forested hils, an island of carefuly maintained paradise. Raked paths meandered round wel-tended lawns and wilow-fringed lakes, past fountains and gazebos built in pre-Revolution style. Statues of monarchs and dukes stood on plinths. A glassy arboretum was perched on a hiltop. Next to it was a hunting lodge and an observatory with the lens of a huge brass telescope poking through a slit in the dome. At the centre of the grounds, a vast manse sat foursquare and impressive, with wals of robin's-egg blue, tal windows and alabaster eaves.

Frey lounged in the back of the open-top motorised carriage, and let the sun warm his skin. This far south, springtime felt like summer. A manservant sat on the driver's bench up front, gripping the steering wheel as if it was something unfamiliar. He was dressed in a stiff uniform of white and cream, and doing his best not to sweat and ruin it.

Frey ran his knuckles over the leather of the seat and looked out at the estate as they puttered up the drive. Al of this was Amalicia's. And this place was only a fraction of her holdings. He knew the Thade family was rich, but he hadn't quite imagined the scale of it.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

What would their reunion be like, he wondered? He had to admit to a certain amount of trepidation. After al, he'd been indirectly responsible for the death of her father. But then Amalicia had been rather keen on getting him hanged anyway. She hated him for cloistering her in an Awakener hermitage. That was also Frey's fault, since he'd been the one who deflowered her, but Frey wasn't about to take the blame for her father's prudishness.

Galian Thade's death made Amalicia the head of the Thade dynasty and the inheritor of al that he saw before him and more. But stil, girls were apt to get cranky when you got their dads shot by the Century Knights. He just hoped she was in the mood to look on the bright side.

The carriage puled up in front of the house where half a dozen manservants were lined up outside the grand double doors. As he was dismounting, the doors were thrown open and Amalicia walked through.

He caught his breath as he saw her. She was more dazzling than he remembered. She must have been twenty-three by now, or thereabouts, but she seemed unaccountably mature for her age. More the elegant young lady and less the frisky, fiery girl. Her long black hair had been cut short to show off her neck. She wore riding boots, hip-hugging trousers and a silk blouse. There were hints of silver at her throat and wrist.

'Darian,' she said with a smile, as she descended the steps. Frey managed to get down from the carriage without faling. He gawked at her, dazzled.
This
was the woman he'd forgotten about, the woman he'd left behind in an Awakener hermitage without a second thought?
This
was the one whose letters he'd been ignoring? What was
wrong
with him?