‘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 messa
ges 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 . . .’
‘When the captain’s finished ironing his shirts, perhaps he’ll be able . . .’
‘Even his nibs wouldn’t turn his nose up at that . . .’
And so on. It wasn’t ever anything damning, and probably no worse than what any captain must face from their crew, and under it all was a respect and fondness. They liked him, even if he sometimes got under their skin with his high manners, educated way of speaking and the time he spent with his nose jammed into books.
Not that they were an unlearned lot. We already knew that Cazaray had come from a good background. Mattice, the Opener, had picked up his craft from books, not word of mouth. He showed me these journals – their handwritten pages a mad scribble of facts and lore relating to all the doors, locks and countermeasures one might encounter within a bauble.
‘Most of these pages aren’t in my hand,’ he said, as I flicked through the arcane contents. ‘When I was young – yes, I was young once, as miraculous as that will seem – an old Opener called Lautaro entrusted these books to me. They were all the cleverness he’d stored up over a life of opening baubles – and the books weren’t even new when Lautaro began. You see how the hand changes twice? He had ’em from an even older Opener. Going back a hundred, hundred and fifty years now. If I’m one of the best in the business – and I wouldn’t gouge the lamps out of anyone who made that claim – then it’s only because of those who went before me.’
‘Do you mind going inside those things?’ I asked.
‘Mind?’ A smile split his beard. ‘It’s what I live for, girlie. Everything else – all this chaff about sailing from one bauble to another – that’s the rubbish I put up with!’
‘Captain Rackamore says Adrana and I won’t ever go into a bauble.’
‘His imperial cleverness knows which side his bread’s buttered. Other than the sails – and maybe the skull itself – you two are about the most valuable items on this ship.’ He touched a finger to his stub of a nose. Every part of Mattice was rounded, worn down, like a very old rock that had seen aeons of time and weather. ‘You’re safe. You’ll earn your quoins fair and square, and if anyone resents you for it, you can tell them Mattice fancies a word.’
But my finger had stopped on one of Mattice’s pages. There was a drawing of a circular object with a long narrow section cutting all the way into it from the outside. Notes and details crowded the diagram. They were in the recent hand, Mattice’s.
And a name:
The Fang.
‘That’s the place,’ I said quietly. ‘Something went wrong there, didn’t it?’
‘Aye,’ Mattice said, his voice as low as my own. ‘That it did.’
5
The photon winds had taken us twenty million leagues beyond the Congregation by the time we dropped sail. I suppose the bauble ought to have been the thing that most caught my eye, but it wasn’t like that. Baubles aren’t much to look at, generally – it’s what’s inside them that puts a fever on the brow. But I’d never seen the Congregation from outside, and that was something worth a gawp or two. It was one thing to know that we were far from home; quite another to see and feel it.
If I tried to put it into nice and pretty words, all proper and ladylike, the way I was taught by Paladin, I’d say that it was a hazy circle of shimmering, scintillating light, with the Old Sun at its focus, masked and gauzed by all the intervening worlds, so that the Old Sun’s weary light was filtered by its passage through the skyshells of sphereworlds, the glassy windows of tubeworlds, the photon-shifting fields of baubles themselves, sometimes pushing that light from red to blue, sometimes from blue to red. And I’d go on to say that the cumulative effect of all those worlds floating between us and the Old Sun was to create a constant twinkling granularity, an unending dance of glints, from ruby-red to white, from white to indigo, and an almost impossibly deep purple-blue.
I wouldn’t stop there, though, because even then I wouldn’t have got you seeing it exactly the way it was. So I’d carry on and mention how the light stabbed at us, withdrew, stabbed again – each flare the moment a single world tricked the Old Sun’s light in exactly the right fashion to send it spearing into our eyes, before its orbit or angle bent the light elsewhere. You couldn’t point to a single glint and say that was a certain world, but in your head, knowing what you did, you knew each must have had its instant. Even your own little world.
It was a lovely thing, what people had made of the Congregation. We couldn’t take credit for the worlds, no. It wasn’t us who’d done the Sundering, or put all the pieces back together again. People, yes, but not us. But we could take credit for spreading back through the worlds, finding places to live again, and doing so in something close to peace and harmony for more than eighteen centuries.
And yet, moved as I was by all this – struck through by a powerful, wrenching homesickness – I couldn’t shake the words of Cap’n Rack in his library.
That all the Occupations end up being temporary, and ours wasn’t going to be any different.
‘Brabazul’s Ruin,’ he said. ‘And no, it won’t be our ruin – not if I’ve any say in it. Some of you will have heard of it – Loftling’s crew scored here pretty well, back in 1754. But they were late hauling in and they didn’t have time to go very deep before it was time to back out. Vaspery came out here again in ’81, but the bauble didn’t open. It’s held to a fairly predictable cycle since then, but in eighteen years no one’s chanced another expedition. Prozor – you can disregard the auguries in y
our book. Cazaray pulled updated numbers through the skull just before we reached Mazarile.’
‘Nice of him to say so,’ she said.
‘Nice of him to keep a commercial secret, you mean, so that we can all divide the quoins when it pays off?’ Rackamore didn’t wait for her answer. ‘If the auguries are righteous, by my reading she’ll open for us in two and a bit days, a whisker over fifty hours from now.’
It was the start of evening watch. Fifty hours would take us to just after midnight.
If you looked through the opposite window to one that was facing the Congregation, then the bauble took up the same amount of sky as all the worlds, but the difference was it was only a few leagues away. It was a sphere, about as wide as Mazarile, and it glowed all sullen and red. Pressed on that radiance, and shifting all the time, were patterns: complicated geometric forms, like carvings or embroidery. The patterns flickered from one form to the next, and now and then you caught a squint of something lurking underneath them.
‘Do we know what’s inside?’ I asked, trying to sound like a member of the crew.
‘Loftling’s account’s still the best we have,’ Mattice said. ‘It’s a rocky world, and there’s a swallower, which is why we’re in orbit. Gravity gets through the field, you see, even if nothing else does. Once it opens for us, there are doors on the surface. We have Loftling’s maps, and they’re pretty detailed. The doors, and the countermeasures, go back to the late Fifth, and we’ve enough experience of those times not to run into anything we can’t handle.’
‘The Commonwealth of the Throne of Ice,’ Jusquerel said. ‘A brutal dictatorship, by all accounts. They say the screams of their victims echoed for a hundred thousand years.’ She rubbed her hands. ‘But they left some glorious loot.’
Little needs to be said about the next fifty hours. We went through the usual watches, did our time in the bone room, cooked for the crew. Adrana and I slept as best we could. One late hour, when Garval’s screaming seemed to cut through the whole ship like a cold cruel wind, I untangled myself from my hammock and went to her room. The door was unlocked, as it had been before. Rackamore must have reckoned his crew a tolerant lot, I thought, or else it had never occurred to him that someone might wish to smother Garval for the sake of a quiet night’s sleep.