Her expression didn’t change at all, but somehow the temperature in the room dropped by several degrees anyway.
‘You would do well to remember where you are and who you’re talking to,’ she said, in a voice like a rusty blade.
Frey knew exactly where he was. In the captain’s cabin of the Delirium Trigger, talking to the ghost of the woman he’d loved. Where was the Trinica he’d dined with two nights ago? Where was the softness of the hand across the table, touching his?
He ran his hand through his hair in frustration, cursing the delay that had cost him the relic. Even following the compass linked to the ring on her finger, it had taken a day to fly to Thesk and another to track her down. The capital was a big place.
Trinica was gazing out of the sloping window next to her, having lost interest in him all of a sudden. She was evidently in one of those moods. The cabin’s atmosphere was oppressive, with its heavy brass fittings and dark wood bookcases full of unfamiliar titles. He spotted the book he’d given her over dinner, and felt resentful that her gratitude had been so brief.
Balomon Crund, Trinica’s bosun, stood watchfully by the door. After escorting Frey through the passageways of the aircraft, he’d remained in the room instead of leaving.
‘What’s he still doing here?’ Frey asked irritably.
‘He’s my bosun,’ said Trinica, still looking out of the window. He couldn’t imagine what was so interesting out there: the Delirium Trigger was berthed in a hangar.
Frey composed himself. Peevishness would get him nowhere. ‘Might we speak alone, Captain Dracken?’ he said with exaggerated politeness.
‘I don’t think so, Captain Frey. Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of Mr Crund. I assure you, he’s very discreet.’
Frey bit back a retort. He didn’t need games right now. He was flustered, agitated, on the edge of control. He flexed his corrupted hand, which he’d covered up with a ratty fingerless glove. He wanted to show her, to confide in her and be comforted. He was scared, damn it! But she was evidently determined to make this difficult.
He made an effort to calm himself. ‘As a favour to me, in the spirit of our recent alliance,’ he said, his voice tight with restrained fury, ‘would you tell me who bought that relic, Captain Dracken?’ He took a steadying breath and managed a passable smile. ‘Please,’ he added venomously.
She turned away from the window and studied him with her black eyes. She was like some terrible bird of prey examining a mouse. ‘I sold it to Jid Crickslint,’ she said eventually.
Frey gave a small groan and winced. Crickslint was not a name he wanted to hear.
He’d always tried to make it a policy not to rip off anyone who was liable to get their own back on him. In fact, over the years he’d got pretty good at identifying which criminals were on their way up and which were on their way out. The former, he dealt with fairly. The latter he cheated, knowing that they’d likely be dead or ruined before he came back that way again.
But no system was perfect and he’d made the odd mistake. Crickslint was one of them. He was a fence and a moneylender, and a really annoying pain in the arse to boot. Everybody in Thesk hated him, and everybody needed him. By balancing a bewildering mass of debts and favours, he’d ended up a small-scale crimelord.
Frey and his crew had done a few smuggling jobs for him, years ago. Then one day, after receiving the cargo for one of these jobs, they got a bit of news. Someone had finally done what everyone wanted to, and smashed the little weasel’s face in.
Frey had sensed an opportunity. With Crickslint’s reputation as ruined as his teeth, it was only a matter of time before his rivals overran him. Crickslint would have too much on his plate to worry about one little shipment going missing. So Frey sold the cargo himself, kept the money, and didn’t think much more about it.
But Crickslint didn’t go under. He found the man who’d embarrassed him and made a bloody example. He ruthlessly crushed the rivals who were jockeying for his spot. Soon he was back and stronger than ever. Frey didn’t know whether Crickslint had really noticed his little bit of thievery, but he’d made sure to stay out of his way just in case.
And now Crickslint possessed the only thing capable of saving Frey’s life. The world was truly an unjust place.
‘I need you to get the relic back,’ he said to Trinica.
Her laugh infuriated him. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Return the money. Straight swap. I’ll make it up to you.’
Trinica’s expression was amazed. ‘You actually mean it, don’t you? Even if I wanted to do such a thing, he’d smell desperation and double the value. Who’d pay the difference? You?’
‘Look, whatever it takes I’ll do. Name your price.’
‘There is no price. I had a job to do and I did it. Tomorrow I’m going back to Shasiith, where I have further business. If you want that relic, get it yourself.’
Her dismissive tone was the final straw. He surged across the room, slammed his hands down on her desk, looming over her. ‘This is my life, Trinica! Don’t you care?’
She gazed at him expressionlessly from her chair, not cowed in the slightest. He heard the sinister click of a revolver being cocked, and felt Crund’s pistol against the base of his skull.
‘Mr Crund, will you remove Captain Frey from my aircraft? I think he may be drunk.’
‘You’re kicking me off?’ Frey said in disbelief.
‘Since you helped me get the relic in the first place, I’ll extend you the courtesy of leaving with all your limbs intact,’ she said. ‘Say another word and I may change my mind. Now get out of my sight, before you humiliate yourself further.’ She turned away from him and looked out of the window again.
Frey opened his mouth, and then shut it again. She was right. He’d humiliated himself enough for one night.
Crund escorted him out of the cabin. Frey fumed as they walked through the Delirium Trigger’s narrow metal corridors, consumed with rage at the way he’d been treated. They climbed up a ladder onto the gun deck and into the cool air of the hangar. Crund saw him to the end of the gangway and stood there, pistol held loosely at his side, barring the way back.
Frey thought about giving him a message to convey to Trinica, something involving a particularly creative orchestra of insults, but he held his tongue. Trinica’s crew were fiercely loyal, and Crund might well shoot him in defence of his captain’s honour. Having the last laugh wouldn’t be much fun with a hole in his lung. No final rejoinder, then. He simply gathered the shreds of his pride and left.
No final rejoinder, then. He simply gathered the shreds of his pride and left.
A combat frigate like the Delirium Trigger was too large for a landing pad. It rested amid a cradle of gantries and platforms in a private hangar, its berth obtained with false papers and a hefty bribe. Trinica was still under sentence of death after her ill-advised support of Duke Grephen’s failed coup almost two years ago. It was one of the reasons she was keen to spend time out of the country. In Thesk, the capital of the Nine Duchies of Vardia and home of the Archduke, she needed to keep a low profile.
Not that Frey cared whether she lived or died at that particular moment.
He negotiated the levels down to the ground and out into the streets. It was unseasonably cold. Lamp-posts wore haloes of electric light in the faint mist of the autumn night. Windows glowed in the dark. He saw an accountant at work, a family sitting down to dinner, lovers drawing curtains to seal themselves away. Motorised carriages puttered along the roads, and militiamen in blue and grey uniforms patrolled the streets. After the chaos of Samarla, Thesk seemed a sane and orderly place.
He walked fast, with his head down. He felt the beauty in things keenly tonight, and it tormented him. The sudden lack of time had sharpened his attention.
Death was coming. The daemon was coming.
He put some distance between himself and the hangar, letting himself cool off until he could think straight again. He came to a halt
by the bank of a canal, one of many brick-lined waterways that cut through the streets of the Financial Quarter. Black water flowed past. The reflected lights of the lamp-posts were dim and stranded suns beneath the surface.
Idiot.
He’d been a fool, going to Trinica like that. Storming on to her craft and demanding her help. He’d overplayed his hand. Whatever existed between them was something private. In public, and especially in front of her crew, he had no right to expect sympathy or favour.
Had he gone to her secretly, met her away from the Delirium Trigger, then maybe he could have secured her help. But there hadn’t seemed time for all that. The spectre of his impending end raised questions that he didn’t dare think about, so he’d acted instead.
Only now did he realise how he’d jeopardised her position. He’d been too familiar, when her authority relied on staying aloof. She should have had him beaten, at the least. The fact that she hadn’t was a measure of her affection for him. But even that small mercy would have been noted by her crew, and perhaps counted as a weakness.
Well, he’d blown his chance with Trinica. She couldn’t possibly help him now. But she’d done what she could. She gave him a name.
He started walking again. Meeting Jid Crickslint was something he wasn’t looking forward to. But he’d better get on with it, regardless.
Time was running out.
The tram rattled and shook as it carried Malvery through streets he’d called home for many years. He sat hunched over, too big for the small hard seat he occupied, peering over the rims of his round green glasses at the buildings sliding by. Metal fittings jittered and jingled as they passed Dicer’s Corner, Whisperside, Glassmarket, Glee Row. The names of the tram stops had a kind of mythic poetry to his ears. Once, he’d been a part of this city, and the city had been a part of him. He read the language of a lost life, spelled out in street signs.
He disembarked at Tallowgate and watched the tram rumble away, abandoning him to the lamplit night. Hands thrust in the pockets of his coat, he headed off, breath steaming the air.
Tallowgate was a wide lane flanked by tall buildings belonging to doctors, lawyers and politicians. The houses exuded a polite sense of self-importance, with elaborate porches, wide windows and high ceilings. Malvery had lived in a house like that once. It all seemed a long time ago now.
Halfway down the lane was the Axelby Club, still there and little changed for Malvery’s seven-year absence. There was no sign above the door. From a distance, it looked like the rest of the houses on the street. It was formed of two neighbouring houses, three storeys each, that had been knocked through and combined into one. There were a dozen rooms within: parlours with settees and card tables; fire-lit libraries where a man might read in a creaking leather armchair; dining rooms serving rich red wine and rich red meat.
The sight of the club gladdened him. He’d spent a lot of time within those walls. It was important to him, somehow, that it still existed.
He stood outside and looked in. The ground floor parlours were the only rooms visible from the lane. Panes of steam-dimmed glass separated him from the men with flushed faces who argued and laughed and plotted there, brandy glasses and cigars in hand.
Though he was cold, he remembered the warmth of that place. He remembered nights spent surrounded by the bawdy merriment of the carelessly wealthy. When he was younger, he’d marvelled at their casual arrogance, even admired it. Then he became accustomed to it. Eventually he became as careless as they were.
He’d been at the Axelby Club that night. He’d drunk wine and brandy in that chair – that very same chair by the fire – and returned home long after Eldrea was asleep. Between the surgery and the club – which only allowed men through its doors – he almost never saw his wife any more. It was an arrangement that suited them both.
By then, the marriage had deteriorated to the point where he slept in his armchair rather than share her bed. But he didn’t sleep that night. He just kept drinking till the sun came up, for no reason at all. It had become a habit that he indulged more and more often. Drinking had become a pastime in itself.
Then, a knock at the door. A messenger from the surgery. A good friend of Malvery’s had been admitted with acute appendicitis. Something had to be done, fast.
Perhaps if things hadn’t become so bad between him and Eldrea, he’d have been less drunk when he operated. Perhaps, if they’d been a little more tender with one another, he’d have gone to bed instead of staying up. But these were poor excuses. He was an accident waiting to happen. An alcoholic, so sure of his own infallibility that he refused to let anyone else see to his friend. Drunk or not, he still thought himself the only man for the job.
He was wrong, and it cost a life. Henvid Clack, father of one, a geologist by trade. Henvid didn’t deserve the end he got.
‘Excuse me.’
Malvery blinked. There was a man leaning out of the doorway of the club, addressing him. He realised that he’d drifted off, his mood cooling to a dank sadness as he reminisced. He might have been gazing through the window for some time, like a hungry beggar drawn by the heat and light within. He was certainly shabby enough to pass as a beggar these days, with his stained coat and frayed jersey. Although, with a belly like his, no one was likely to describe him as hungry anytime soon.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘Lost in thought. I’ll move along.’
‘No, no, that’s quite alright,’ said the man. ‘It’s just . . . aren’t you Althazar Malvery?’
Malvery took a closer look at him. He was in his middle thirties, with a broad, handsome face framed by black curly hair and neat muttonchop whiskers. But it was his pleasant, eager manner that triggered Malvery’s memory. He’d been a younger man, and clean-shaven, when they used to drink together here.
‘Edson Hawkby!’ Malvery grinned.
‘It is you!’ Hawkby cried. He came out and shook Malvery’s hand vigorously. ‘I thought so when I saw you at the window, but it’s been such a time. It’s freezing out here. Aren’t you coming in?’
‘Ah. I ain’t really a member any more.’
‘Pah! You are tonight!’ Hawkby declared, steering him into the foyer. Inside was a uniformed doorman. ‘This fellow’s my guest, alright? Fetch him a jacket, would you?’ He looked Malvery up and down as the doorman headed off. ‘I’m afraid that outfit would raise some eyebrows in here, stuffy lot that they are.’ Then he beamed and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Althazar Malvery! Spit and blood! How are you, old fellow?’
Freshly jacketed and carrying a glass of good port, Malvery followed Hawkby to an upstairs den, where they settled themselves in front of a fire. Hawkby chattered excitedly while Malvery listened, content to soak in the atmosphere of the club. Hawkby was an eminent doctor now, the inventor of a pioneering new treatment that used magnetic fields to treat the demented. He had a small asylum of his own in the Chandletown district. Malvery was pleased to hear he was doing well: he’d always been a good, honest sort.
‘But enough of me,’ Hawkby said. ‘You’ve had quite the life of adventure, I hear!’
‘Ha! Is that what they say?’
‘We may not move in quite the same circles these days, but I know a thing or two. Surgeon on the Ketty Jay under Captain Frey. They say you’ve been behind the Wrack and gone toe-to-toe with the Manes.’
‘It was less toe-to-toe than shotgun-to-face,’ said Malvery. ‘Look, I ain’t gonna say there haven’t been high points, but being a freebooter ain’t quite as romantic as you’ve heard.’
‘Oh, now you’re being modest.’
‘Seriously. Most of the time we’re just rolling around pissed to fight off the boredom. They’re a good bunch, the best bunch, but sometimes . . .’ He accepted a refill of port from Hawkby’s bottle, and took a sip. Damn, it was good. ‘Sometimes I get to wondering what in buggery I’m doing with myself.’
Hawkby, sensing a story, nestled back into his armchair. ‘Whatever do you mean?’
Malvery looke
d into his glass, studying the way the firelight splintered and shone. Now he’d begun, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be talking about this at all. But he didn’t much want to discuss it with any of the crew, and here was someone who’d understand. Lulled by the alcohol and his surroundings, he decided to unburden himself of the thoughts that had been weighing on his mind these last few days.
‘Long time after I . . . well, you know what happened . . .’
Hawkby nodded gravely. Everyone knew what had happened to Henvid Clack.
Malvery shifted himself awkwardly in his seat, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to pick up a scalpel after that. Couldn’t do much more than tie on bandages and dish out pills. But I got past it. Our engineer, Silo, got shot pretty bad, and I pulled him through. That was nearly two years ago, I reckon.’ He adjusted his glasses and harumphed. ‘And since then I ain’t done a whole lot of anything, really.’
‘Malvery, I’m amazed! If half the stories are true, you’ve been all over the place! What I wouldn’t give for a travelling life like yours!’
‘I mean I ain’t exactly saved many lives during that time,’ said Malvery. ‘Reckon I’m well into minus figures as far as that goes.’
Hawkby regarded him thoughtfully, his forefinger resting on his chin. Malvery dug into his pocket and pulled out a small velvet presentation box. He held it out to Hawkby.
‘I remember this,’ said Hawkby. He opened it and looked at the medal inside. ‘First Aerium War, yes? You were a field surgeon then.’
‘Aye. Carried some wounded fellers out of a firefight. Didn’t think much of it at the time, but they gave me that medal, and it made my name. Brought me to the attention of a bloke named Macklebury.’
‘Yes, I recall the Mackleburys. Your patrons.’
‘General Gred Macklebury. I met him at the presentation ceremony. I s’pose he liked me. After the war, he asked if I’d be his family’s personal physician. Offered me enough money to make your hair fall out. I reckon he liked the idea of having a war hero as a doctor, or some such thing. But I didn’t want to be sittin’ on my hands when there was surgery to be done, so I cut a deal with him. If he helped me set up my own practice, I’d be at his beck and call whenever I was needed. Whenever I wasn’t – which I reckoned would be most of the time – I’d be in my surgery.’