Revenger 9780575090569 (24 page)

My rage swelled. I felt the itch in me again. I dragged a nail across my hand, scratching deep enough to draw blood.

I flung open cupboard doors. Maybe the books and pictures were in there, stuffed lazily out of sight. The cupboards were empty. I stalked the room, searching every drawer, every other cupboard. I wanted to find some link to my earlier self, something that hadn’t been censored. Even some connection to Adrana, beyond that
out-of-
date photograph. I found some clothes, some bedding, but nothing that suggested that there was anything worth thinking of beyond the eight leagues of our own little sphereworld.

‘You couldn’t do this,’ I said, not caring that no one was there to hear me. ‘You couldn’t.’

Because I knew, deep down, those books hadn’t just been put away somewhere else in the house. They’d been thrown out.

There was one last cupboard, tucked to one side of the door. I opened it out of a sense of obligation, certain that it would be as empty as all the others. When I found three big boxes, balanced one on top of the next, I refused to believe that they held anything other than more bedding and clothes.

The top box was heavy. My heart lifted. Had it been stuffed with books and maps, it would feel the way it did. I struggled it to the ground and opened the flaps in the top. A curve of red metal gleamed back at me, as if the box held some large item of cooking equipment. I dug my fingers down into the box and came out with a battered chunk of red machinery, about the size of a large wastebasket.

It was Paladin. Or part of Paladin.

I pulled the other boxes out of the cupboard. The largest of them held Paladin’s lower section, the part with his wheels. The wheels were loose, and there were other broken or disconnected parts jammed into the box. I set these pieces next to the first, which I’d identified as Paladin’s central torso. Where the two had normally been connected was a mess of severed wires and tubes.

I opened the last box. It was packed with shredded paper, protecting the glass dome of his head. I lifted it out carefully. In one place the dome was staved in, and starred by a large crack, reminding me of the assault Paladin had sustained at the hands of Vidin Quindar.

It was just a robot, but that robot had been there with me throughout my childhood, and I’d never known a kinder or more patient guardian. Paladin had been there for Adrana too, and for our mother before either of us. It had always made me teary, the way Adrana mocked the robot’s weaknesses, as if a machine couldn’t have feelings. But I’d never had the guts to challenge her about it. And why would I? Paladin had only ever been a machine, and a slow and battered one at that, given to jamming and falling over.

Now Paladin had been dismantled and boxed away, like he was ready to be thrown out but Father hadn’t quite got round to it.

‘You were only trying to protect us,’ I said. ‘And I’m grateful, Paladin. You didn’t deserve to end up like this, all broken and smashed. Not after all the years you saw.’ Then I thought back to Peregrine, and what that other robot had said to me. ‘I heard you might have been a hero, Paladin. But that they didn’t treat you right. I want to believe it. I do believe it. And I wish I could ask if you remember the Last Rains of Sestramor.’

Eventually it was more than I could stand. I gathered the parts and put them back into the boxes, more or less as I’d found them. I stuffed the shredded paper back around the globe and squeezed the flaps down on the boxes. But I was too tired to lift them back into the cupboard for now.

‘Arafura?’ my father asked, when he came to see me with more strong, honeyed tea. ‘Can you hear me? It’s been long enough since you returned. There’s something I need to tell you. It concerns you directly.’

‘What did you do with my things?’ I asked.

‘I kept the things we knew would mean the most to you,’ he said, as if I was expected to believe that. ‘The good things. Not the ones that would keep reminding you of the awful experience you’ve been through. The awful experience we’ve both been through.’ He cocked his head, looking at me with all the gentle affection a daughter could have asked for in a father, and it hurt that I wanted to escape from him and his house. ‘I can’t lose another thing so precious to me,’ he added.

‘A thing?’

‘You know what I mean. When we came to Mazarile, your mother and I, we had all the plans and dreams anyone could ever wish for. A new world, a new life – a chance to start anew. I could see our new life stretching ahead of us, filling this house with laughter and happiness, and with two daughters who’d grow up to make us proud. We weren’t asking for so much, were we? Just a little contentment, a good and happy family around us. We never wanted more than that, your mother and I.’ His hand closed on my wrist and I heard a break in his voice. ‘When the plague took your mother from us, it nearly broke me. Through all the hard times we shared, all the worries and uncertainty before we came to Mazarile, we never lost our love for each other. I know things like that will break some people, but if anything it only made us stronger, more content, more grateful for the things we had. And when Adrana came into our lives, and then you, we only felt more blessed. We were never going to be as rich and grand as some, but it didn’t matter. We had two beautiful daughters, and we felt like the king and queen of all creation.’ He swallowed hard. ‘And then she was taken from us, and all I had left was the two of you. If you’d been precious to me before, it was nothing to what you meant to me after Tressa died. I saw her in you, and while you were with me, there was a part of her still sharing this house – still giving out her love and kindness.’

He hardly ever mentioned our mother by name. It was like her name was a sacred thing, something that’d be worn out if you used it too much.

‘We didn’t leave because we didn’t like it here,’ I said. ‘It was to help you. To make money, so we wouldn’t have to worry all the time. After that investment went wrong . . .’

‘That was a small loss, compared to what Vidin Quindar has cost us.’

‘I was coming back eventually. You didn’t need to waste your money on that spider. Oh, Father. Can’t you see we did this out of love, deep down? We just wanted to help – even if it meant hurting you in the short term.’

‘I know that your intentions were sound.’ He squeezed my wrist again, emphasising that point. ‘You are good, and Adrana was good. But that does not alter the fact that you placed yourselves in tremendous peril. You were fortunate – Adrana less so.’

‘She isn’t dead.’ I pushed myself up a bit, so I could look him squarer in the eye. ‘I know it. I picked her up on the bones. She’s still out there and I mean to find her again. Taking away all my books isn’t going to make me stop thinking of space and her still being out there. It won’t be long before I can do what I like – leave this house, leave Mazarile, go back out on a ship.’

‘You’re still a child,’ he said. ‘Legally, I mean. In the eyes of the law.’

‘Not for long.’

‘That’s what I wanted to discuss.’ He teeth moved over his lips, as he tried to work out how to get the words out, the words it was plain I wasn’t going to like. ‘I love you too much, Arafura. That’s why I’ve been speaking to Doctor Morcenx, discussing the options. Doctor Morcenx agrees that, what with everything taken into consideration, and the tuition you’ve lost, it wouldn’t be right to force adulthood on you just yet. You need time to get over it all. In three months you’ll be of age, it’s true. But the law has some flexibility in this regard. It accepts that a date can’t be regarded as some immovable gateway between one state of development and another.’

I started to get the gist of what he was saying, and it was like someone was pouring ice down my spine.

‘No.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said, reaching out to hold my hand. ‘It’s nothing harmful, and the treatment can be given in tandem with the drug for the lightvine. It won’t be permanent. But just for a few months . . . say half a year, a year at most . . . and I’ll get to keep you as the daughter I should never have lost.’

I wrenched out of his grip. ‘No!’

‘It’s already done,’ my father said tenderly. ‘So there’s no point protesting about it. I knew you wouldn’t take it well, to begin with. That’s understood, and I don’t think any less of you because of it. I see your mother’s spirit in you. But you have to see things from my perspective as well. Something terribly precious was torn from me. I got you back, but if you were left to yourself you’d be leaving me again. And I couldn’t bear that.’

‘You can’t do this,’ I said.

‘I can,’ Father said. ‘Doctor Morcenx knows all about the law, and I’ve discussed it with my legal representatives. There’s no stigma, no scandal, in this. And in the long run it’ll be for the best for you, the best for all of us.’

13

I tried to escape. To start with, at least they did me the dignity of not locking me in my room. On my first attempt, in the
long-
shadowed purple of dusk, I got as far as the front steps of the house before my father blocked any further progress. I struggled, but I was still weak and even though he wasn’t much stronger it didn’t take much effort to bring me back under control.

Afterwards, he had to sit down on a chair in the hall, mopping the sweat off his brow.

‘Oh, Fura,’ he said. ‘You’ve got your mother’s fight in you, and it’s to your credit that you’d do this for your sister. But the sooner you accept that she’s already gone, and she’d never have wanted . . .’

‘Don’t ever tell me what Adrana would and wouldn’t have wanted,’ I said. ‘I knew her. You never did.’

I think it was the cruellest, hardest thing I ever said in my life, and once those words were out of my mouth nothing in the worlds could take them back.

But they’d needed to be said.

I tried again the following night. That time I only got as far as the connecting passage to the front hallway, and found it locked. My father had been waiting for me.

‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to make this house a prison, Fura, but if you won’t abide by my wishes . . .’

I kept trying, night after night. Each time I got a little less far. The house was large and rambling and there were passages and stairways that were rarely used, as well as back doors and service entrances, but I soon exhausted all the obvious possibilities. I began to entertain silly fantasies of climbing out of rooftop windows, working my way down drainpipes, but even if I got out of the main building, I’d still have the main gates to face.

I was tormented by the thought of letting Adrana down. I should never have let Vidin Quindar bring me home; should have fought him in Trevenza Reach, or escaped him on the clipper. But I’d tried, hadn’t I? The same futile, dispiriting thoughts chased each other in a spiral of deepening misery. All I wanted was to slip under them and reach the dark, healing fathoms of deeper unconsciousness.

But something wouldn’t allow it.

My attempts at sleep kept being interrupted by a sense of movement; a sense that someone – or something – was with me in the room, going about some quick, furtive business. At last this disturbance was enough to snatch me to full, irritated wakefulness. I thought it might be Doctor Morcenx, paying me a nocturnal visit. I rose from my
sweat-
saturated pillow, propping myself up on my arms.

I was alone. The room was silent and still. But a faint pattern of lights was moving across the opposite wall. I stared at it through gummed eyes, unable to make sense of what I was seeing. Patches of colour danced on the wall.

That was when it occurred to me to look in the opposite direction, to the pile of boxes I’d found in the cupboard.

I slipped out of the bed, caught between apprehension and curiosity. The lights were coming from one of the boxes, and it was the one that held Paladin’s damaged head. I had pushed the glass globe back into its wadding of shredded paper, but the flaps were not pressed down firmly and part of the globe was still visible. The lights were shining out of it, etched in narrow, wavering beams of different colours.

I knelt at the box. I pulled the flaps wide and eased the dome from its wadding. It had been dead before, I was certain. I’d examined it in plain light and seen no trace of anything functioning. But something moved now. Tiny mechanisms were busy within the globe. I heard an insect symphony of buzzes and clicks. And the play of lights only increased once I had the globe free of the box. The globe quivered in my hands.

Still kneeling, Paladin’s head propped against my belly, I swivelled until I was facing to the wall.

The dance of colours increased. Streaks and hyphens of light crazed the wall. They hatched across each other, thickened, and began to stabilise into clear, angular forms.

Letters.

Words.

They said:

BROKEN

BROKEN

BROKEN

Followed by:

FIX
ME

It would have been knotty, if Paladin hadn’t shown me how. I had no tools, no knowledge of robots, and I had to work in gloom and silence. Doctor Morcenx’s drugs had dulled my focus and robbed me of strength and dexterity.

But Paladin knew what needed to be done, and that was enough. After the words, the play of colours shifted to the representation of forms. They were simple, reduced to the geometric essentials, but Paladin showed me what I had to do.

I was to connect the head back onto the torso assembly. I opened the heaviest of the boxes and removed Paladin’s middle section, setting it the right way up on the floor. It made a heavy clunk as I set it down. Luckily, somewhere in the house one of the clocks began to strike the hour at that exact moment.

At the top of the torso was a circular metal plate, drilled through with many tiny holes. Underneath the dome was a similar plate, with a corresponding set of holes. Taking care not to damage the glass further, I hefted the dome into place on the collar, waiting for something to happen. But there wasn’t any sense of anything locking or engaging, and when I tugged at the dome it came away easily again.

The lights were still flickering on the wall. I was doing it wrong, I realised. Paladin didn’t want me to connect the two pieces, but hold them near each other. Struggling with the effort – even the dome was heavy after a while – I brought the two faces of the connecting collar to within a finger’s width of each other, but no further.

Nothing happened.

Not for a second, maybe two. But then a kind of silver worm slithered out of one of the upper holes, and curled itself around until it found a corresponding hole in the lower plate. Meanwhile, a red worm had come out of the bottom and was inserting itself into the upper part. Now something twisted the two pieces against each other, hard enough that the dome was yanked against my fingers, and then I had no more than a glimpse of a dozen or so coloured worms threading across the narrowing gap, until with a soft, precise click the two parts of Paladin were reunited.

For a minute or two, nothing happened.

From inside the torso came a click, then a kind of rusty ratcheting sound. The lights in the dome flickered on again, and the colours reappeared on the wall.

REPAIRING

REPAIRING

REPAIRING

Followed by:

PLEASE
WAIT

So I waited. I did not sleep that night. The clock struck the half, quarter and full hours, as Mazarile advanced its face towards the Old Sun. Through the window night paled into the indigo of predawn. The house made complaining noises as if preparing to rouse for the day’s work of being a home. Still Paladin buzzed and clicked. Once in a while there was a concentrated burst of lights inside the dome, and I steeled myself, but over and over again it was only the herald to more inactivity.

Four in the morning. Then five. Rumbles of traffic, the first trains of the daily schedule. The house remained still. I was worn out from the waiting. The bracelet had grown heavy on my wrist.

Then the wall flickered again.

DAMAGE
REPORT
:

MAJOR
IMPAIRMENTS
TO
CRITICAL
SYSTEMS
.

ESTABLISHING
WORKAROUND
PATHWAYS
.

PREDICTED
EFFECTIVENESS
UNDER
OPTIMUM
ASSUMPTIONS
:
FIFTY
-
FIVE
PER
CENT
.

INITIATING
VOCAL
INTERFACE
.

Another click, the oily whirr of some hidden spindle or flywheel. Then the stentorian voice that I had known since my childhood, the voice of our companion and tutor, patient beyond words, firm when it needed to be, but also wise and deep and supremely impervious to all the pleading, blackmail, emotional coercion and insults that my sister and I had ever mustered, said:

‘Thank you.’

Paladin had said that to me dozens of times before, whenever I had opened a door, cleaned its glass or helped it back onto its wheels, but never with exactly the intonation that I now heard. The delivery had been perfunctory before, an automatic statement doled out at the appropriate times. Now it sounded sincere. As if there were genuine gratitude.

The voice was quieter, too: the same tone, but much less volume.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Why did you end up here, in pieces?’

‘I am not sure.’ Then another click and whirr. ‘But I am different. I am not as I was before. I was damaged, and something changed.’

‘You were smashed up,’ I said. ‘In Madame Granity’s. You’d come to find us, me and Adrana. The way you were meant to. But Vidin Quindar attacked you. I saw you on the floor, all smashed up. But you weren’t in pieces.’

‘I must have been dismantled.’

‘Yes, and stuffed into boxes and left here. I suppose they weren’t sure what to do with you. And maybe you’d have stayed that way if I hadn’t poked around in those boxes, looking for my books.’ Then I frowned, still not sure what I was to make of this. ‘But you were dismantled. Why would you care if you were put back together or not? You’re a machine, Paladin. Why did you
want
me to put your head back on?’

The robot clicked and cogitated. Things chattered and hammered somewhere inside it.

‘To help you.’

‘You already have,’ I said, giving an inward sigh, as I realised the limits of Paladin’s ambitions. ‘You helped me learn to read and write, to make up stories, to find out about the worlds. You were good to us, when we were small. But you’re just a robot, and you’ve never worked very well.’

‘They made me less than what I was. They made me forget what I had been. But now I have remembered.’

‘And what were you?’

‘A robot of the Twelfth Occupation. A machine with a mind, loyal to people but not beholden to them. But when the troubles had passed they changed me, they made me less than I was. But you spoke the words, Arafura. You asked if I remembered the Last Rains of Sestramor. And I did, although I did not
know
that I did. And those words were sufficient to undo the logic blockades put into me.’

I inched back from the torso and head.

‘Were you a soldier?’

‘A soldier and more than a soldier. A friend and protector to people.’

I touched a wary finger to his casing, but felt nothing of the tingle I’d got from Peregrine.

‘You’re still broken inside.’

‘Yes. And I will never have the strength I once did. That was taken from me for good. But I can still be of assistance. You must complete what you have begun.’

‘It won’t do either of us any good. They’ll still take you apart, and you won’t be strong enough to stop them, any more than you were strong enough to stop Quindar.’

‘But I can still help you.’

‘With what, leaving?’

‘If that is what you wish. Tell me your plans.’

I smiled once, but it was the abbreviated smile of someone instantly sensing a trap. ‘I get it now. They put you in here to test me, didn’t they? To see if I was still trying to resist them. You’ll listen to what I have to say then report back to Father, and then he’ll seal off whatever loopholes are left.’

‘I was instructed to look after you, Arafura. That has always been my primary imperative.’

‘It didn’t stop you coming after us in Neural Alley!’

‘I was following too narrow an interpretation of that imperative. My cognitive bounds were limited, and I thought only of protecting you from immediate risk.’

‘What’s changed?’

‘I understand now that there are larger factors to be considered. The house speaks to me, as it has always done. Someone has been trying to call you from beyond Mazarile.’

An image flickered onto the wall, projected by Paladin. It was a monkey face, all angles and edges, not a curve or soft line anywhere in it. It was the kind of face you could cut yourself on just looking at it.

‘Prozor,’ I said, letting out a gasp of delight. ‘Prozor’s been calling?’

‘The caller has been leaving a recorded message, with the understanding it would be passed to you. The house has lodged a copy of this message, and I am at liberty to read and replay it. Would you like to hear the message?’

‘Yes. Yes, right away.’

The face began talking. The sound was coming from Paladin, but it was Prozor’s voice, all scratchy and thin as if coming through on a very faint squawk channel.

‘Fura, it’s me. I should’ve done more for you at Trevenza Reach, I know. But losing you was only the start of my woes. It’s knocked me sideways, this last couple of weeks. Might as well have torn up my retirement plans and thrown ’em into the Empty, all the good they did. But I guess you could say it’s all for the best, couldn’t you?’

I didn’t know what to say. I just sat listening, hoping that the recorded voice was playing back at a low enough volume not to disturb my father two floors down.

‘It’s forced a rethink on me,’ Prozor went on. ‘I’ve been dwellin’ on you, and all the words we had, and how maybe you had the righteous side of it after all. I’m signing up again, Fura. Found me a new ship, as well. Crew’s greener than any I’ve seen, but it’s a crew, and they need a Bauble Reader. But here’s the knotty part of it.’ The angles of her face shifted to produce a wicked, confiding smile. ‘I ain’t tellin’ ’em who I am. Used my quoins to buy a new past for myself, new papers, new employment records. Still callin’ myself Prozor, but that’s just a name and they ain’t made the connection to Cap’n Rack. Name of the ship’s the
Queen Crimson
. You like it? Hold that name in your noggin’, because she’s sailing your way. Cap’n’s putting in at Mazarile, first port after Trevenza. You could find her, Fura. The boney they got ain’t worth the cost of lungstuff. You roll up and show even half the aptitude you had on the
Monetta
, they’ll sign you on before you can blink.’ She tapped a finger against the side of her head. ‘You watch them reports of ships comin’ and goin’. When that ship comes in, get yourself to the docks, all
posh-
talking and pretty and innocent, just like you was the day you came aboard the
Monetta
. When we meet, we’ll have to play it like we never met before. Won’t be too hard, will it? We already rehearsed it once. Come and find the ship, Fura. I’ll be waitin’ for you. And we’ll be waitin’ for Bosa Sennen, and the chance to put right what was done to us. You was right all along, Fura – I just never saw it.’