The Aeronaut's Windlass (38 page)

“Bridget doesn’t know about the grim captain’s visitors,” Folly said, her eyes darting around. “But they’re looking at us right now.”

Bridget blinked. “Captain Grimm’s visitor? Do you mean that commodore?”

“The one with the very large hat,” Rowl added helpfully.

“She doesn’t understand,” Folly said to the jar. “These came before that, when the master treated the grim captain, on the day before they met.”

“I’m a bit confused,” Bridget said politely. “Master Ferus treated Captain Grimm before meeting him?”

Folly whispered to her jar, “If she keeps repeating everything I say, this is going to take much more time.” She glanced around them and slowly exhaled. “There. I think . . . I think yes, there. We’re alone now.”

“Folly, I need you to help me understand,” Bridget said. “Are you talking about Aurorans?”

Folly blinked several times and then said, her tone thoughtful, “She brings up an excellent point. Possibly. I feel awful, and I think I’ll sit down.”

The etherealist’s apprentice sat down on the ground as if entirely exhausted, her knees curled up to her chest, her eyes sunken. She leaned her head back against the spirestone wall.

“Miss Folly,” Bridget said, “are you quite all right?”

Folly patted her jar as a mother might a restless child and said, “It’s all right. Bridget doesn’t know how hard it is to hear things. Tell her that we’re just tired and we need a moment.”

“I see,” Bridget said. She tilted her head, studying the other girl thoughtfully. She’d regarded Folly as someone who must have fallen into some kind of premature dotage, but . . . her answers were canny enough, if phrased quite oddly. Folly had said that she would have told Bridget something if she could, though by the simple act of saying as much, she had accomplished it.

“I noticed,” Bridget said, “that Master Ferus seems to have difficulties with doorknobs.”

“She doesn’t know that the master is far too brilliant for such things,” Folly said, nodding.

“And you,” Bridget continued thoughtfully, “seem to have difficulty speaking directly to others.”

“Oh, she uses her eyes and what’s behind them as well,” Folly said to her jar with a weary little smile. “That’s two in one week. Perhaps I should write down the date.”

“Remarkable,” Bridget said. “Miss, I am very sorry if I said anything to offend you or if I haven’t paid attention when you meant me to hear something. I didn’t understand.”

Rowl leaned down to peer at Folly. “She seemed no more ridiculous to me than most humans.”

At that, Folly looked up and beamed a smile at Rowl. “Oh. He doesn’t know that that’s the kindest thing anyone’s said about me since the master called me a gnatcatcher.”

“And now we’re back to being very odd,” Bridget said. “But I shall try to make allowances for it, since we’re to be working together.”

Bridget felt Rowl’s paw tap her cheek, and she turned her head in that direction.

The side lane where they’d stopped was dimly lit, even by the standards of Habble Landing. It reminded her of the tunnel where the footpads had lurked. For a second she didn’t see whatever Rowl had warned her about—but then there was a flicker of light, and she saw a pair of green-gold eyes staring at them from the shadows, and around them was a grey-furred shape. A cat.

Bridget made a basket of her arms and Rowl leapt down to them, and then to the ground. The ginger cat ambled calmly down the alley toward the other feline. Then he sat down a few feet away from the other cat, ignored him entirely, and began to fastidiously groom his paws.

The stranger cat emerged from the gloom and sat down a bit closer to Rowl. Then he, too, promptly ignored the other cat and began grooming.

“Oh,” Folly asked her jar. “Do you think Bridget knows if that is . . . cat diplomacy?”

“They’ve never explained it to me, but it’s more of a power struggle, I think,” Bridget replied. “I’m fairly sure it’s about establishing which of them is the least impressed by the other.”

“I wonder what is being established.”

“A more capable cat is never impressed by a less capable cat.”

“Oh,” Folly said. “I see what she’s saying now. They’re seeing which of them is the proudest.”

Bridget sighed and nodded. “Or at least which has the biggest ego.”

“By ignoring each other,” Folly said.

“Yes.”

Folly frowned down at her jar. “I don’t know all about cats, like Bridget, but it seems to me that this could be a prolonged contest.”

“It often is.”

“I wonder what we should do to hurry things along,” Folly said to her jar.

“Hurry two cats?” Bridget asked, smiling at Rowl. “No. The cats didn’t come to our habble looking for our help, Miss Folly. This is their custom, their way. We shall wait.”

*   *   *

“W
e shall wait for three hours, apparently.” Folly yawned to her jar of crystals.

“One learns patience, working in a vattery,” Bridget said. “It doesn’t matter how much one wants a batch to be done. It won’t happen any faster. It’s the same with cats.”

Folly leaned down to her jar and whispered, “I don’t think cats grow in vats, but we shouldn’t say so aloud, for that might hurt her feelings and be unkind.”

“You know what I meant,” Bridget said, “though that was very amusing.”

The other girl smiled downward, clearly pleased. “So few people understand my jokes. Usually they just give me very strange looks.”

“I’m the girl who associates with cats,” Bridget said. “Please believe that I know precisely the look you mean.” Bridget checked on Rowl again, but the two cats remained locked in their war of mutual indifference. “I’ve been thinking about what the Spirearch said earlier. About the nature of Master Ferus’s mission.”

“She means ‘secret mission,’” Folly said to her jar.

“Did he tell you what he was up to?”

Folly traced a fingertip along the outside of her jar. It might have been Bridget’s imagination, but the tiny crystals inside seemed to give off the faintest glow of light where Folly’s fingertip touched the glass. “Bridget doesn’t understand the master very well,” she said. “He guards knowledge like a banker guards coins.”

“So you don’t know exactly what he’s looking for, either.”

Folly smiled faintly without looking up. “He gave me a few pennies. They’re quite frightful.”

Bridget frowned. “But surely it isn’t difficult to deduce that he means to locate the Auroran infiltrators and foil their plans.”

“Bridget’s logic seems sound,” Folly said. “I was thinking almost the same thing.”

Bridget nodded. “We’re seeking the help of Albion cats to thwart the Aurorans. But they’ve been so successful at keeping their movements concealed that we still have no idea exactly where they are. That seems a remarkable accomplishment, to descend through the vents of half the habbles of a Spire without being observed by a cat somewhere. They must be doing something to make sure they go unseen. Do you think it possible that the Aurorans are also using cats as scouts, Folly?”

The etherealist’s apprentice ducked her head a little at the mention of her name. The pitch of her voice dropped to a bare, low whisper. “Not cats. Not cats.”

“Not cats,” Bridget said. “It’s something else, then. Something that frightens you.”

“It’s a terrifying penny,” Folly said to her little jar. “I’m slightly mad, but not a fool. If Bridget knew, she’d be as afraid as I am.”

Bridget felt a chill run neatly up her spine and leaned toward Folly, speaking more quietly. “You mean . . . something from . . .” Her mouth felt quite dry and she swallowed. “From the surface?”

It wasn’t unheard-of for the creatures of the surface to gain access to a Spire. In fact, the smaller beasts did so regularly. A Spire contained literally hundreds of miles of ventilation tunnels and ducts, water channels, cisterns, sewage channels, and compost chambers. Metal grates were regularly installed where they could be, but constant contact with the outer atmosphere degraded their cladding and eventually left them vulnerable to iron rot.

Cats did far more to protect the residents of any Spire than humans realized, by hunting and killing such intruders. Granted, the lovely little bullies would have done so in any case, and not simply for food, but because they loved the hunt. Most folk tended to assume that cats preyed solely upon rodents and the like, which was certainly true, but in fact by working cooperatively, a tribe of cats could stalk and bring down prey considerably larger than themselves.

Sometimes, however, something too large and too dangerous for cats to handle managed to enter a Spire’s tunnels. That was why every habble employed verminocitors, men and women who hunted such predators professionally, who maintained and repaired the defensive grates, and who tracked and killed nightmarish interlopers before the beasts could begin hunting the people of a Spire.

But those were wild creatures. If, somehow, the Aurorans had managed to train something from the
surface
to fight with their military . . . There were many stories and books and dramas written around the concept of some misguided soul attempting to tame the creatures of the surface, to train them to do their will. Such fictional figures universally met an identical fate: agony and death at the hands of their would-be pets—generally after a great loss of life.

Wild beasts could not
be
tamed. They could not
be
controlled. That was, after all, what made them
wild
.

“They don’t belong here and they want to destroy us,” Folly said to her jar, her eyes sick, but her tone matter-of-fact. “All of us. They don’t care what Spire we call home.”

“Well,” Bridget said. “If the Aurorans truly are playing with that fire, it’s only a matter of time before it burns them.”

“I once had a dream of the world,” Folly said. She gave Bridget’s face a quick, flicking glance before looking down again. “And it all burned.”

Bridget felt a shiver gather at the nape of her neck, and she said nothing. She looked away, back toward Rowl, waiting.

Chapter 30

Spire Albion, Habble Landing, the Black Horse Inn

B
enedict fetched their drinks when the bartender waved at them, and Master Ferus seized his rather large mug of beer with obvious enthusiasm and began tilting it back at once.

“Goodness,” Gwen said, shaking her head. “I’m quite certain that a gentleman does not simply
attack
a drink so.”

Ferus lowered the mug and wiped foam from his upper lip, beaming. “No, indeed, he does not. Fortunately I am absent any of the qualities that make a gentleman, and thus need not bother with the gentlemanly approach.” He waved his empty mug at the bartender and said, “Another, Sir Benedict!”

Benedict, who had just sat, gave the old man a rather lopsided smile and then rose again, without complaint, to make another trek across the room and back. He came back with one enormous mug in each hand, and set them both down before Ferus.

The old etherealist beamed and said, “A man who plans ahead. Foresight, always foresight, it’s the first trait of any formidable person at all.”

“I just hoped to be able to sample mine before I had to get up again,” Benedict said, and sipped demonstratively at his own drink. “How is your tea, coz?”

“Perfectly tepid,” Gwendolyn answered, but she added a dollop of honey to it in any case, stirred it, and sipped. Even scarcely warm tea was tea, thank goodness, and something that felt very normal amidst all the strange events of the past few days. “Master Ferus . . . my word.”

Ferus lowered the second emptied mug, coughed out a quiet, rather unobtrusive little belch, and smiled at her. “Yes, child?”

“I take it that you are not obliterating your good sense for no reason whatsoever.”

He narrowed his eyes at her and gave Benedict a shrewdly conspiratorial glance. “Doesn’t miss much, does she?”

“Despite what everyone tends to think, no,” Benedict agreed in a polite tone. “I think she rather enjoys letting everyone believe she’s too self-absorbed to notice anything that’s happening around her.”

“It’s either that or let them think I’m some vapid twit. Like Mother,” Gwen said. “I simply can’t bring myself to stoop that low.”