Revenger 9780575090569 (9 page)

‘There’s no thought going on,’ I said. ‘No neural material. Cazaray said it!’

‘He lied.’ She gave a yawn and a shrug at the same time. ‘Or he doesn’t really understand it, or he doesn’t think we’d understand it. But there’s something there, and I got a little glimpse of it, just for one fierce moment. I lied as well.’

‘About the word?’

‘No. About wanting to go back and listen again. I didn’t, Fura. It was as if someone opened a cold window at the bottom of my skull, in a room I didn’t know about, and it let something in, and whatever it is is still whistling around in the basement of my brain.’

‘But you will go back,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Of course.’

I lingered at the open door to the bridge. Rackamore was in there, late in that evening watch, with his back to the door and two booted feet up on the console. All the gubbins looked thrown into place, tangled up in knots of cable and wiring, like an animal’s nest made out of shiny bits of monkey and alien scrap. There were flickerboxes, flickering with views of the ship and the scratchy signals of
long-
range broadcasts. The green globe of the sweeper sat before him, a yellow bar cycling round and round like a demented clock hand. A yellow smudge sat in the depths of the display, barely fading between cycles.

‘You wanted to see me, sir?’

‘Come in.’ His voice was low, tired. ‘Prozor showed you this room when you came aboard, didn’t she?’

‘Not really, sir. To be honest, Prozor couldn’t wait to see the back of us.’

The captain had a little metal apparatus in his hand. He worked his fingers back and forth against springs, strengthening his grip. It was a habit I had noticed among other members of the crew.

‘You shouldn’t read too much into that. Prozor’s a good sort, deep down. After what happened at the Fang . . .’ But he silenced himself quickly. ‘Never mind. A message came through on the squawk a little while ago, from Vidin Quindar.’ He gave the kind of grimace you do when you’ve bitten into something sour. ‘Quindar’s a man easily swayed by money, Fura. I deal with his sort only because the alternatives are generally worse.’

‘What about Mr Quindar, sir?’

‘He’s asked me to convey to you . . . and your sister . . . that he is now acting in the interests of your father.’

I blinked. I got the words, but not the sense of them. ‘I don’t follow, sir.’

‘Quindar has been hired by your father to expedite your return to Mazarile.’ Rackamore pushed a finger into his brow, like he was testing a bruise to see how painful it was. ‘We were entirely too hasty in accepting the legality of Adrana’s guardianship, it seems. On paper it appeared
lungstuff-
tight, but Quindar has found all sorts of qualifiers that Cazaray either missed or did not believe relevant to your case. Now it appears that they were.’

‘Hang on, sir. Father’s got no money left as it is. He can’t afford to hire anyone, let alone Quindar.’

‘Where there are ways, Fura, there are generally means. Unfortunately I now find myself on the wrong side of the law, at least as far as the matter of guardianship is concerned.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, sir.’

‘Fault is not the issue at hand. I intend no ill by your father, and I certainly never meant to tangle myself up in Mazarile family law. There’s promise in both of you – tremendous promise. But now I wonder if I’d be better divesting myself of you before I deepen my troubles.’

I swallowed. ‘Me, sir . . . or both of us?’

‘I wouldn’t separate you. Ordinarily – given that we’re under full sail, with an itinerary ahead of us – it would be quite beyond my ability to return you home.’ He nodded at the sweeper. ‘Do you see that return?’

‘That big shape, sir?’

‘No, that’s our own shadow. The sweeper projects from the hull, and it can’t see beyond our own sails. That’s a quarter of the sky lost to us, but it doesn’t really matter when most of the things we’d need to worry about would come from behind, not ahead.’ The springs squeaked under his fingers, making the muscles jump out along the line of his arm.

‘Things, sir?’

He touched a finger to the edge of the scope. ‘That distant smudge is a
long-
range echo from the
Iron Courtesan
.’

‘Is that trouble?’

‘Hardly. I know Jastrabarsk well enough, and stealing another crew’s prize isn’t the way he does business. Still, being polite, he’ll come no closer than that. But there’s an opportunity here. The
Courtesan
’s just completed a sweep of baubles, and she’ll be on her way back to Trevenza Reach much sooner than us. It’d cost us both time, but if I felt it were the right thing to do, I could arrange for a rendezvous so you could be transferred to the other vessel. From Trevenza Reach you wouldn’t have long to wait for another ship back to Mazarile, and I’d make sure you had the funds to cover the passage.’

‘But we’ve only just joined the crew. We were just starting to settle in . . .’

He looked at me with a touch of scepticism. ‘Really?’

‘Well enough, sir. I know it’s early days.’

‘It is. And as a rule they won’t start warming to you until you start cooking for them. Even Prozor generally comes round in the end, once she’s got something in her belly. We’re not monsters, as I hope you’ll have decided by now.’

‘I never thought you were monsters, sir.’

‘I hear a but.’

‘It’s true that you have to make some hard decisions now and then, isn’t it? Like with Garval, and not taking her home, even though she’s so unwell?’

‘I suppose you think me indifferent to her.’

I bit my tongue, deciding I’d already said more than I should have. ‘It’s not my position to say, sir.’

‘But I see it plainly in your face. It’s all right, Fura – you can speak your mind. Look, you have my word that we’ll get her home eventually.’

‘But she won’t be the same, will she?’

‘No, but then none of us are the same as the day we set foot on this ship. The skull drove her mad, but there’s no one it doesn’t leave some sort of mark on. Understand this, though: do well by the
Monetta
, do well by me, and you’ll never have a more loyal crew around you.’ He sighed, as if something needed to be said and he’d been bottling it in long enough. ‘May I speak candidly?’

‘Isn’t that what we’re already doing?’

He smiled at that, but it was a sad sort of smile. ‘I had a daughter once, and she was very dear to me. She sailed with me everywhere, knew every part of the ship, from sails to squawk. She was about your age when I lost her, and I’m afraid you remind me more than a little of her.’

I was careful in my choice of words, but I couldn’t think of any kind way of putting things. ‘What happened, Captain?’

Rackamore looked back to the sweeper. ‘A
stern-
chase. The only one I ever lost.’

‘She died?’

‘Yes. Yes, she did. And in you I see something of Illyria, and that makes me take more than the usual interest in your welfare.’

‘I don’t want to go back to Mazarile, Captain. Not yet. And I know Adrana’d feel the same. You shouldn’t worry about Vidin Quindar, whatever he says. I knew exactly what I was doing when I agreed to join your crew, and by the time six months are out I’ll be able to decide my own fate.’

‘Your father might disagree.’

‘He’s a good man, sir. But after Mother died he made one bad decision after another. This is just the latest of them, and now it makes me even more determined to stay and earn our prize money. You won’t signal the other ship, will you?’

There were creaking noises from the metal thing in his hand as he worked it in and out. ‘We could see how things lie after the first bauble, I suppose. If I know Jastrabarsk, he’ll mean to have the crumbs we leave behind.’ His face set as he made his decision. ‘We’ll speak no more of it. I’ll squawk Quindar and tell him that you remain under my authority. In the meantime . . . do you wish a word or two to be relayed back to your father?’

‘I thought you said there wouldn’t be any messages, sir.’

‘I am making an exception, Fura.’

I thought about it for a few seconds. I didn’t mean to be hard or callous about it. But if he knew we were alive, and not coming to any harm, that was enough.

‘Tell him nothing’s changed,’ I said.

It was the sixth day before something came through the bones again. Adrana got more than a fragment this time. She was hearing a dialogue, two parties whispering to each other, and she babbled out as much of it as she could get her tongue around.

‘. . . hauling in to Mulgracen and needing yardage. Damage to
fore-
and
mid-sun-
gallants, possibly repairable . . . advise on costs . . .’ She shook herself out of it, like someone discarding the last tatters of a nightmare. ‘Yardage. What the chaff is yardage?’

‘What the likes of Hirtshal call rigging, when they’re speaking to their own profession,’ Cazaray said. ‘And
sun-
gallants are a type of sail. Unless you picked that up since you came aboard, you could only have heard it from the skull.’ He shook his head, equal parts wonder, admiration and – I suppose – relief. ‘I never doubted you,’ he said. ‘But I wondered how long it might take. You’re weeks ahead of me!’

‘Let me try, on the same node,’ I said.

Nothing came through that day for me, or the next. But on the eighth day of our instruction, during the morning session, that cold window opened in my head as well. I didn’t get a conversation, not even one word I could sing back to Cazaray. But I’d felt something creep inside my head, something shivery and wrong that didn’t have any business being there, and it wasn’t any kind of feeling I’d ever had before in my life.

I told Cazaray. He closed his eyes, as if a prayer had been granted.

‘There’s much still to be done,’ he said. ‘But I don’t doubt that the captain’s found his new Bone Readers. You’re going to change the fortunes of this ship, both of you.’

‘Do they need changing?’ Adrana asked, hanging the bridges back up on the wall.

‘Lately they haven’t been at all bad, it’s fair to say. But they can always be bettered.’

‘There’s something I wanted to ask,’ I said, fussing my hair back into shape. ‘I heard the captain mention something about the Fang, and then he told me that he used to have a daughter, only he lost her in a
stern-
chase. Were they the same thing?’

Cazaray took a moment to answer. It was like we were asking him to speak of something against his nature and better judgement, some dark business that was better off not being mentioned.

‘No,’ he said carefully, in a low voice. ‘The Fang was one thing and the
stern-
chase another. The Fang’s a bauble. It’s where we lost Githlow . . .’

I slid a pin into my hair.

‘Githlow?’

He tightened his lips so that they creased. ‘You want the truth of it, you’ll have to wait for Prozor to share it. She’s the one who came off the worst of us.’ He let out a sigh. ‘The
stern-
chase . . . It happened before I came aboard. I never saw her.’

‘Rackamore’s daughter?’ I asked.

‘Bosa Sennen,’ he corrected me. ‘The one who took her from Rack.’ He turned from us to attend the skull. ‘And if you’re wise, you’ll never mention that name in Rackamore’s presence.’

Day by day we adjusted to the routines to the ship. We started taking over the cooking duties from Cazaray, and that helped break more of the ice with the crew. And we got better at the bones, both of us. Adrana could pull messages from the skull with more and more ease, and once or twice she was even able to tune in when Cazaray found the signal too weak. And I came on, as well. On the thirteenth day I pulled three whole words from the skull, and on the fifteenth a complete sentence. It wasn’t anything that was going to bring quoins, but it was proof that I had the aptitude as well. Satisfied that we had the basics sorted out, Cazaray started moving on to the finer aspects of Bone Reading, which included being able to send as well as receive. He had us bouncing test messages to friendly ships, and then had them verifying that the messages had come through clean. We also had to show that we could write down complex messages as they were coming in, which was harder than it sounded, sort of like rubbing your belly at the same time as patting your head.

Throughout all this it was only ever a case of sending messages between ships, never between ships and worlds. Skulls were particular, it turned out, and they didn’t work too well near swallowers or all the hustle and bustle of people and their
goings-
on. When a world needed to send something secret to another world, the message had to hop and skip its way from world to ship and ship to world, with people doing the errands at either end.

I was realising that you could spend a lifetime working with the bones and not get to the bottom of all their quirks. But a lifetime was the one thing none of us could ever count on.

Slowly word got around that we weren’t so bad. To help myself blend in a bit more, I found a very sharp knife – what they called a
yard-
knife, because it could cut through any sort of rigging – and had Adrana hack away half the length of my hair. I surprised myself when I next caught my reflection. There were angles in my face I hadn’t seen before, a sort of hardness pushing through from underneath. I hadn’t got any uglier, but I certainly hadn’t got prettier either. And I liked it. Afterwards,
grudgingly-
like, Adrana had me do the same to her hair as well. But I knew she liked how it had changed me, and wanted a part of that for herself. We also stopped insisting on wearing our dresses and boots all the time, and started trying on some of the less grubby items left for general use. Also, I may as well admit, we stopped being so particular about washing. Whatever it was we did – one of these things, or all of them, or just some slow adjustment, the crew now seemed more willing to invite us into their confidences, to share their work and its difficulties, to occasionally drop an unguarded remark about Rackamore.

‘If we can tear him away from his books . . .’