‘What happened last time?’ I asked.
‘There wasn’t a last time,’ said Mattice, smiling fiercely.
‘They may as well find out about the screamer now,’ Prozor said, biting into her loaf. ‘Because they soon will, whatever happens.’
‘Screamer?’ I asked.
Just then there was a creak, a groan, as if the ship itself were suffering some spasm of indigestion. I tensed, as did Adrana, but only for as long as it took for us to realise that none of the others were concerned. In fact, the sound drew a murmur of celebration from them, with even Prozor lifting a tankard.
‘That didn’t take long,’ Trysil said, clenching a fist so that the muscles popped out along her arm.
‘You know the captain. When he wants to leave, we leave.’
‘Are we on sails now?’ Adrana asked.
‘Ions,’ Triglav said. ‘We’ll run the sails out when we’ve put some distance twixt us and Mazarile, but this close in there’s too much risk of puncturing them with space debris.’ He wiped a hand across his mouth. ‘Best go and earn my fee, hadn’t I? I don’t want that engine overheating before Hirtshal’s ready with the new sail.’ Then he nodded at Adrana and me. ‘Welcome aboard.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
They cleared away from the table, one after the other, until it was only Jusquerel left with Adrana and me. She kept on eating and drinking for at least a minute before saying anything. That was just her unhurried way, though, and I didn’t think there was anything in her manner meant to unsettle us.
‘You needn’t mind Prozor.’
‘She doesn’t seem to like us very much,’ Adrana said.
‘It’s not you. It’s what you are.’ Her jaw worked as she chewed. ‘Here. Have some more bread. Mattice was right: you both need feeding up.’
‘I don’t have much of an appetite,’ I said.
‘Space sickness,’ Jusquerel said. ‘If this is your first time up, it’s no wonder. We don’t run with a doctor on this ship, so if anyone fits that bill, I suppose it’s me.’ She fished into a pocket and came out with a little metal tin. She clacked it onto the magnetic table, slid it over to us like a deck of cards. ‘One a day should see you straight, but take two if you need to. My guess is you’ll be fine by the time we hit the bauble.’
I took the tin. It was pretty, with a machine-engraved pattern of interlocking birds, and I wondered if it had come from one of the earlier Occupations.
It was often difficult to tell if things were a hundred years old, or a hundred thousand.
‘Do we owe you anything?’ Adrana asked.
‘Do well by the bones,’ Jusquerel said, ‘and that’ll be payment enough for me.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘How long will it be, until we get to the bauble?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ she answered, drawling out her answer as if some mainspring or regulator in her head ran a little off synchronisation with the rest of us.
‘Can’t or won’t?’ I asked.
‘Can’t. None of us know, except Cap’n Rack and maybe Cazaray. That’s how it works. If one of us knew which bauble we were headed to and squawked that information to another crew . . . or even just blabbed about it without thinking – that could ruin us. So the Cap’n tells us to expect a voyage of at least a certain number of weeks or months, and we make sure we’ve provisions for that sort of trip. Hirtshal sets the sails, but even Hirtshal doesn’t know how far out or for how long we’re going – not until the Cap’n gives another order, and we steer or haul in.’
‘You said Cazaray,’ I replied.
‘Yes.’
‘Why would he know?’
‘The only way secrets come in and off this ship – other than sealed papers in the Cap’n’s pocket – is through the Bone Reader. There’s no way for the Bone Reader not to know anything important about a sunjammer – and if you try to hide it from them, they’ll find out anyway.’
‘So Bone Reader’s quite an important position,’ Adrana said. ‘But they also have to be someone quite young, or they can’t work with the bones.’
‘Yes,’ Jusquerel. ‘Young. Often the youngest of any of us. But gifted with the Cap’n’s secrets and the Cap’n’s ear.’ She gave a barely interested shrug. ‘You can see how that might sit badly with some people.’
‘I suppose it might,’ Adrana said.
3
We were on ship’s time from then on. It’d been night in Hadramaw when we left, but it was mid-afternoon here, and that gathering in the galley hadn’t been more than a light meal between duties. The next six hours were our own, and then we were to gather again in the evening. Rackamore said we should explore as much of the Monetta as we liked, provided we took care. Adrana and I went back to our quarters and we spent an hour sewing up our dresses so that they were less cumbersome in weightless or near-weightless conditions. ‘I don’t mind blending in,’ Adrana said, speaking with a needle between her lips. ‘But I draw the line at wearing rat-eaten clothes.’
‘I haven’t seen any rats yet,’ I said, trying to inject an optimistic note. ‘How would rats get on a ship like this anyway?’
‘How do rats get anywhere? How did rats end up in the Congregation?’
I shrugged, unwilling to follow that line of thought too far. ‘How did anyone?’
When the dresses were ready we set off again. We went from room to room, up and down levels (not that ‘up’ and ‘down’ had much meaning now), slowly building a map in our heads.
The ion engine wasn’t exactly powerful. It put out five-hundredth of a gee, and you had to work hard to notice that. For a long while it didn’t seem possible that we’d ever get anywhere. But the sly thing about it was that it was continuous, and over hours and hours, while we were busy doing other things, it was easy to forget that the ion engine was still giving out its push. When Adrana and I came across a window on the side of the ship facing Mazarile, it was jarring to see how small our world had become. We’d already travelled tens of thousands of leagues, turning Mazarile into a barely significant speck, a double-horned dot slowly losing itself against the greater mass of the Congregation.
We were heading out, into the Empty.
‘I don’t like not knowing where we’re headed,’ Adrana said, in a low whisper, as we watched our world turn tiny.
‘Bit late for misgivings now.’ I put a hand on hers, wondering why it had fallen on me to comfort her, not the other way around. ‘You wanted adventure, Adrana. Don’t be too sorry when it happens. I’m actually starting to enjoy this.’
‘You’ve gone soft for Rackamore. Or maybe Cazaray.’
‘I’m going soft for what we’ve got ahead of us. Baubles. Prizes. Quoins. We’ll come back from this richer than we ever thought possible. Even Father’ll realise we did the right thing. And we’ll have adventures, Adrana. We’ll see things no one on Mazarile ever saw.’
That was when we heard the screaming.
Adrana and I looked at each other. Neither of us had imagined it. It was muffled, but it couldn’t be coming from far away. Despite ourselves, we began to work towards the source of the noise. There were doors all along the corridor, marked for stores, equipment and so on, but we’d given them no thought until now. The final door, before the corridor bent around, had a grille cut into it, and a kind of sliding partition, large enough to shove a hand through.
The sound was coming from behind this door.
It was a woman’s whimpering, interspersed with chokes and gurgles and odd little fragments of half-language.
I tried the door. It was on hinges, like an ordinary door, and after I’d clicked the latch it pushed open easily enough.
I peered through the gap while Adrana hovered next to me.
‘What is it?’ my sister asked.
‘There’s someone in there. On a bed. Not a hammock, a proper bed.?
??
I saw a figure, lying on their back. She was fully clothed, on top of bedsheets. Straps bound her to the bed, criss-crossed over her chest, with more securing her arms and legs, and another strap doing the same for her head.
Despite these restraints, the figure was doing her best to struggle free.
Adrana pushed me aside, taking in her view of the bound sleeper. ‘What are they doing with her?’ she asked, as if I had all the answers.
I grimaced my irritation back at my sister. ‘Maybe we should ask her.’
I went through the doorway and into the room, more fearlessly than I felt. The woman couldn’t move much but she twisted her head as far as she was able and tracked me with her eyes, so wide open they were mostly white. A tongue moved across her lips. She was struggling a bit less, as if sudden curiosity had taken her mind off whatever was troubling her.
‘You’re new to them,’ she said, rasping out the words the way someone sounds when they’ve been punched in the throat. ‘New voices. I heard you scuttling around. Sisters, aren’t you?’
‘We might be,’ I said guardedly.
‘Brought you in to snoop on the bones, did they?’
‘And if they did?’ Adrana asked.
‘You want some advice, you get off this ship as soon as you can. And don’t let the bones get into you. You don’t want their whispering inside your dreams. You think you’re strong enough to keep the whispers where they belong? I thought I was strong, too.’
‘Ah,’ said a voice, startling us from the door. ‘You’ve saved me the trouble.’
‘The trouble of what?’ I asked, trying not to look all guilty and furtive.
Cazaray pushed a hand through the disorder of his blond locks. ‘There was never going to be an easy way to bring it up. You’ve probably heard that the last recruit didn’t quite work out.’
‘This is . . . what was her name?’ Adrana asked.
‘Garval.’ Cazaray came alongside us, speaking of the woman on the bed as if she were somewhere else entirely, not listening in and understanding every word. ‘She came from Prevomar – it’s a spindleworld, not a bad one, in the eighth processional. The other side of the Old Sun from us right now, but after we’ve cracked a bauble or two, stopped at Trevenza Reach . . .’
‘You’ll take her home? In that state?’ Adrana asked.
Cazaray looked diffident. ‘Given time, she may heal.’
‘May?’ I said.
‘She was never right for us, Arafura. She was caught up in something . . . some bad business with her family over a marriage. She wanted to leave Prevomar so badly that she bribed someone to make it seem she was a better talent than she was. I thought she was strong enough to take full engagement at the very first attempt . . .’ He shook his head, and if ever I was certain of anything it was that his remorse was genuine. ‘She lied to us,’ he carried on. ‘But I don’t hold that against her. We’ve all bent the truth once or twice, and she had every reason to leave Prevomar.’
‘I didn’t lie,’ Garval said. But the words came out more weakly than before, as if she had nearly used up whatever energies she’d pent up for conversation. ‘Didn’t lie.’ Some wave of exhaustion passed through her and I sensed a sort of easing, the first since we’d set eyes on her.
‘Whether she lied or not,’ Adrana said, ‘what guarantee do we have that we won’t end up the same as her?’
‘None,’ Cazaray said. ‘And that’s the sharp end of it. We’re speaking of an alien technology none of us properly understand. Just because we use it doesn’t mean we know it.’
Cazaray went to a fixture in the wall. He dampened a cloth, and dabbed it over the woman’s brow and cheeks.
He turned to us. ‘She has bad hours and good hours. If she seemed lucid then you caught her at a good time. The exposure she received was relatively short, so I’m optimistic – hopeful, at least – that her neural wiring will eventually find other pathways.’
‘Good luck to whoever was going to marry her,’ Adrana said.
‘I doubt that marriage will be uppermost in anyone’s thoughts,’ Cazaray answered, returning the cloth to the wall, and then leaving the room.
Adrana was rattled, I knew. So was I, a bit. But I wanted to make Cazaray think I was feeling bold and fearless and ready for what was ahead.
‘I’d like to see the bones.’
‘Not now,’ Cazaray replied, smiling at my enquiry. ‘It’s good that you’re keen, but we’re on ions, and that interferes with the equipment. Hirtshal’s going to run out the sails tomorrow, and we’ll travel quieter then.’ Cazaray gave a last look at Garval before closing the door. ‘The skull likes it that way.’
That evening the galley was full of smells and steam, the table crowded with cages of fruit, lidded tureens of cooked vegetables and various spiced meats, as well as tankards and metal-wired bottles, all held down with magnetism.
The lungstuff had a blu-ish haze, with the screens and displays flickering unwatched. The crew were rowdy when we arrived: Mattice finishing off the end of a story, something about another ship called the Murderess, and what had happened to her captain, a man called Rhinn, Trysil coughing because she’d been laughing too much, Cazaray trying to get a word in, Rackamore sitting back slightly like he was content just to observe, happy enough that his crew were happy. And they seemed to be, most of them. Prozor was still scowly whenever she caught either of us by the eye, Triglav still looked sad and worried, but that was just how his face was put together. There was one man we hadn’t seen before, though, and he was as serious-looking a cove as ever you’ll meet. This was Hirtshal. He was an older man with fine features, a moustache, a crescent of white hair growing thin on the scalp. When we were introduced to him, he nodded distantly, as if it wasn’t really worth his bother to remember our names, knowing we wouldn’t be sticking around.
‘Hirtshal,’ he said, before dragging his attention back to the tankard before him.
‘Hirtshal is our master of sail,’ Rackamore said, as if it was his job to fill in for the other man. ‘If there’s a person on this ship we all need to respect, this is the one. Without Prozor and Mattice we don’t open baubles; without Trysil we wouldn’t know what to take away with us. But without Hirtshal we don’t go home. Be nice to Hirtshal. Be especially nice to Hirtshal when he’s had a busy day.’
‘Were you always a master of sail?’ I asked, feeling it was expected of us to make conversation.
Hirtshal looked at me for longer than was comfortable.
‘No.’
‘You did something before?’ Adrana put in.
He took so long answering that one it was as if she’d asked him to multiply two long numbers in his head, and then find the cube root.
‘Yes.’
He drank from the tankard, sucking contemplatively on its spigot so that we were tempted to think there might be some continuation of his statement.
But that was it. His name, and a no, and a yes, and that was all we’d got from him.
‘A man of few words, our Hirtshal,’ Rackamore said, narrowing an eye at us. ‘But always honest ones. I’d rather have an honest and reliable man, if a taciturn one, than someone I can’t depend on.’
‘Cazaray says we’ll be running out the sail soon,’ I offered.
‘Yes.’ Hirtshal gave a nod.
‘And when would that be?’ Adrana asked.
He made a face, as if just squeezing out another word cost him a tremendous and painful effort, like he was passing a stone.
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Can we see it happening?’ Adrana asked.
Hirtshal thought about this for so long I was starting to think this was all a big joke on the two of us.
‘Yes.’
‘You should see the sails run out,’ Rackamore said, opening the cage to extract a fistful of fruit. ‘It’s an important mom
ent in any expedition, and it’ll give you a better idea of how the ship functions.’
‘Once we’re trimmed,’ Cazaray said, ‘I’m planning to show them the bone room.’
‘Will you bridge them up?’
Cazaray skewered meat from one of the lidded tureens. There was no cutlery, just skewers. ‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Good. Little sense in delaying the inevitable.’
After a moment Cazaray said: ‘They know about Garval.’
Rackamore cocked an eye. ‘Do they, now.’
‘I . . . might have preferred a little more time to prepare them.’
‘So might we all.’ Rackamore bit into a piece of fruit. ‘Did you tell them that she came to us under false pretences?’
‘I did, yes.’
‘That we ran the tests that we were able, and still she kept her true nature from us?’
‘They understand the fault was hers, not ours.’
‘Then that’s an end to it.’ Rackamore chewed thoughtfully. ‘Garval isn’t a secret and we’ve no reason to be ashamed of her – or for Adrana and Arafura to worry that they’ll end up the same way.’
‘May I ask something, Captain?’ I said.
He dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. ‘Most certainly.’
‘Garval seems quite ill. I know she’s from – what was the name of the place, Cazaray?’
He drew the skewer from his mouth, speaking with his lips nearly sealed. ‘Prevomar.’
‘Prevomar,’ I repeated. ‘Well, I hadn’t heard of it. But Mazarile has hospitals and hospices, and I know we can treat diseases of the mind.’
‘Maybe not this disease,’ Rackamore countered.
‘All the same, are they any better equipped on Prevomar? I just wonder why you didn’t set her off the ship while you were docked at Hadramaw. I mean, with the launch. You could have brought her down in that, couldn’t you?’
Spelled out like that, I suppose it was a bit insolent of me, questioning him that way. I knew it and so did Rackamore.
But I’d had to ask.
‘I’ll tell you why,’ he said, pausing to help himself to the vegetables. ‘Not because we’re cruel, or indifferent to her predicament. But because I must hold the reputation of this ship paramount. Our competitors watch us. They may well know that Garval was our last recruit.’