“What you doing?”
The words came in a hard whisper from behind her. Bellis spun, her hands gripping her shift. Tanner had sat up and was staring at her from within his dark alcove.
She moved a little, and he stood. She saw the odd encumbrances of tentacles spill from his midriff. He faced her, his stance tense and suspicious. He looked as if he was about to attack her. And yet he whispered, and something in that reassured her.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. He stood in the entranceway to hear her, and his face was as hard and untrusting as she had ever seen it. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” she whispered. “I just . . . I had to . . .” And her inventiveness fled her: she did not know what she would say she had had to do. Her words dried up.
“What are you doing?” he said. Slow and angry and curious, he spoke to her in Ragamoll.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, and shook her head. “I felt . . .” She held her breath and looked at him again, her eyes steady.
“Can’t open that bolt,” he said.
He was looking at the package in her hands, and with an effort, Bellis did not try to hide it or move her fingers nervously, but kept it in plain view as if it was nothing important.
“What is it, call of nature? Was that what it was? You’ll have to use the pot, lady. You can’t be shamed of things like that here. You saw what happened to William.”
She straightened then and nodded, keeping her face immobile, and walked back to where her bed lay. “Sleep better, won’t you,” said Tanner Sack behind her, and settled himself slowly. At the curtain between the rooms, Bellis turned briefly to look at him. He sat up, obviously waiting and listening, and setting her teeth she pulled the curtain to.
For a few moments there was silence. Then Tanner heard the sound of a tiny little spray, a few grudging drops, and he grinned humorlessly into his sheet. A few feet from him, separated by the curtain, Bellis stood up from the chamberpot, her face set and furious.
Through her humiliated anger, she grasped at something. Began to shape a hope, an idea.
The next day was the Armadans’ last full day on the island.
The scientists put together their reams of paper and their sketches, talking and laughing like children. Even the taciturn Tintinnabulum and his companions seemed buoyed up. All around Bellis schedules and plans were taking shape, and it seemed like the avanc was caught in all but fact.
The Lover flitted into the discussions and out again, a heavy smile on her, her new cut red and shining. Only Uther Doul was impassive—Uther Doul and Bellis herself. Their eyes met, across the room. Motionless, the only still points in the bustling hall, they shared a moment of some superior feeling akin to scorn.
All day, the anophelii came and went, their sedate, monkish manner shaken. They were very sorry to see the newcomers go, realizing they were soon to be bereft of the sudden influx of theories and impressions that they had brought.
Bellis watched Krüach Aum and saw how like a child the old anophelius was. He watched his new companions packing what bags and clothes and books they had brought, and he tried to copy them, though he had nothing. He left the hall and returned a little while later with a bundle of rags and edges of scrap paper that he collected and tied together at the top in a crude imitation of a traveling sack. It made Bellis shiver to watch.
Deep in her own bag, Bellis could feel Silas’ package: the letters, the necklace, the box, the wax, the ring. Tonight, she told herself, and felt panic. Tonight, come what may.
For the rest of the short day she tracked the sun’s passage. In the late afternoon, when the light had become thick and slow and every shape bled shadows, dread overtook her. Because she realized that there was no way she could cross past the swamps and the territories of the murderous mosquito-women.
Bellis looked up in alarm as the door was thrown open.
Captain Sengka stepped forward into the room, flanked by two of his crew.
The three cactacae stood at the entrance, their arms crossed. They were big men, even for their race. Their vegetable muscles bunched around their sashes and loincloths. Light gleamed on their jewelry and on their weapons.
Sengka pointed his massive finger at Krüach Aum. “This anophelius,” he announced, “is going nowhere.”
No one moved. After several still seconds, the Lover stepped forward.
Sengka spoke before she could. “What did you think, Captain?” he said, disgusted. “Captain? Is that what I should fucking call you, woman? What did you think? I’ve turned a blind sun-fucked eye on your presence here, which I did not have to do. I’ve put up with your communication with the natives, which is a breach of security risking a new fucking Malarial Age . . .” The Lover shook her head impatiently at this hyperbole, but Sengka continued. “I’ve waited patiently for you to get the fuck off this island, and what? You think you can smuggle one of these creatures off-land without my knowledge? You think I’d let you go?
“Your vessels will be searched,” he said decisively. “Any contraband lifted from Machinery Beach, any anophelii books or treatises, any heliotypes of the island will be confiscated.” He indicated Aum again and shook his head incredulously. “Have you read history, woman? You want to take an anophelius out?”
Krüach Aum watched the altercation with wide eyes.
“Captain Sengka,” said the Lover. Bellis had never seen her more alive with presence, more magnificent. “No one would ever criticize your concern for safety, or your commitment to your commission. But you know as well as I that the male anophelius is a harmless herbivore. We have no intention of bringing out any but this one.”
“I will not have it!” Sengka shouted. “Sunshit, this system is absolute, and it’s absolute because we can learn the lessons of history. No anophelii are to leave this island. That is a condition of their being allowed to live. There are no exceptions.”
“I’m tiring of this, Captain.” Bellis could not but admire the Lover’s calm, cold and hard as iron. “Krüach Aum is leaving with us. We have no wish to antagonize Dreer Samher, but we are taking this anophelius.” She turned her back on him and began to walk away.
“My men on Machinery Beach,” he said, and she paused, then turned back to him. He drew a huge pistol and held it loose, dangling down. The Armadans were quite still. “Trained cactacae fighters,” Sengka said. “Defy me and you will not leave this island alive.” So slowly that the motion did not seem threatening, he raised his gun and pointed it at the Lover. “This anophelius . . . Aum, you said . . . he is coming with me.”
The guards all around the room were poised on the edge of motion. Their hands fluttered over their swords and bows and pistols. Scabmettlers in cracked armor and huge cactacae, their eyes moved quickly from Sengka to the Lover and back again.
The Lover did not look at any of them. Instead, Bellis saw her catch the eye of Uther Doul.
Doul walked forward, placing himself between the Lover and the gun.
“Captain Sengka,” he said in that beautiful voice. He stood still, the pistol now trained on his head, looking up at the cactus-man, more than a foot taller and vastly more massive than he. He stared into the barrel of the gun as he spoke, as if it were Sengka’s eye. “It falls to me to bid you good-bye.”
The captain looked down and seemed momentarily uncertain. He drew back his free hand then, his biceps knotting enormously under his skin, his meaty fist tensed and ready to swing, bristling with thorns. He was moving slowly, obviously hoping not to hit Doul, but to intimidate him into submission.
Doul reached out with both his hands, as if supplicating. He paused, and there was a sudden snapping motion of such speed that Bellis—who had expected it, who had known that something of the sort would happen—could not possibly follow it. Sengka was reeling back, shocked, holding his throat where Doul had jabbed him with stiff fingers (not hard but like a warning, finding a space between those vicious spines and taking the breath from him). Doul held the gun now, still pointing toward h
is own skull, trapped between his flat palms like something granted him in prayer. He kept his eyes on Sengka and whispered to him, words that Bellis could not hear.
(Bellis’ heart is slamming. Doul’s actions shatter her. Whether an attack is brutal or muted, the motion itself, its preternatural speed and perfection, makes it seem like an assault on the order of things, as if time and gravity can no more withstand Uther Doul than flesh.)
The two cactacae standing behind Sengka stepped forward, sluggish and outraged. They reached to their belts, drawing weapons, and the gun held in Doul’s frozen applause flickered and faced them, and flickered again and was clenched in his outstretched right hand, pointed directly first at one and then (instantaneously) the other sailor.
(There is no movement. The three cactacae are appalled at this velocity and control that border on thaumaturgy.)
Doul shifted again, the gun leaving his fingers and spinning out of reach. His white sword was in his hand. There were two reports, and Sengka’s crew members yelled in pain, in quick succession, their hands snapping away from their weapons, now clutched in front of them, wrists split.
The sword’s tip was at Sengka’s throat now, and the cactus-man stared at Doul with fear and hatred.
“I hit your men with the flat of my blade, Captain,” said Doul. “Don’t make me show you the edge.”
Sengka and his men backed away, retreating out of his range, through the door and into the last of the daylight. Doul waited by the entrance, his sword extended into the open air.
All around the room a sound was building, a rhythmic muttering, a triumphant, awed bark. Bellis remembered it. She had heard it before.
“Doul!” the men and women of Armada chanted. “Doul! Doul! Doul!”
As they had at the glad’ circus, as if he were a deity, as if he could grant them wishes, as if they were chanting in church. Their adorations were not loud, but they were fervent and grimly joyous, and ceaseless, and in perfect time. They enraged Sengka, who heard in them a taunt.
He glared back at Doul, framed in the doorway.
“Look at you,” he shouted furiously. “You coward, you pig-man, you fucking cheat! What demon did you let fuck you in return for those skills, pig-man? You won’t leave this fucking place.”
He was silent then, suddenly, his voice collapsing, as Uther Doul stepped out of the room, into what the cactacae had thought of as the safety of the open air. The Armadans gasped, but most of them kept chanting.
Bellis was at the door immediately, ready to slam it against any she-anophelii. She saw Doul stalking without hesitation toward Nurjhitt Sengka, his blade held poised. She could hear him speaking.
“I know you’re angry, Captain,” he said softly. “Control yourself, though. There’s no danger in Aum coming with us, and you know that. It’ll be his last contact with this island. You came to forbid it because you felt your authority leaching from you. That was a miscalculation, but so far only two of your men have seen this.”
The three cactacae were ranged a little way around him, their eyes meeting and parting again, wondering if they could rush him. Bellis was shoved aside suddenly as Hedrigall and several other Armadan cactacae and scabmettlers came to stand outside. They did not approach the stand-off.
“You will not stop us leaving, Captain,” Doul went on. “You don’t want to risk war with Armada. And besides, you know as well as I that it’s not my crew or even my boss you want to punish, it’s me. And that . . . ,” he finished softly, “will not happen.”
Bellis heard the sound, then: the high drone of anophelii women approaching. She gasped, and heard others gasp, too. Sengka and his men began to look up shiftily, as if trying to avoid being seen.
Uther Doul’s eyes did not move from Captain Sengka’s face. A scudding shape cut across the sky, and Bellis pinched her mouth closed. The chant of “Doul!” had dwindled, but it continued almost subliminally. No one yelled out to him that he was in danger. They all knew that if they had heard the anophelii, he certainly had.
As the sound of their wings approached, Doul moved closer to the captain, suddenly, till he was staring very close into Sengka’s eyes.
“Do we understand each other, Captain?” he said, and Sengka bellowed and tried to grab Doul and crush him in a thorned bear hug. But Doul’s hands flickered in Sengka’s face then swung down to block his arm, and then Doul was standing a few feet back, and the cactus-man was doubled up and cursing as sap dripped from his smashed nose. Sengka’s crewmen watched with a kind of appalled indecision.
Doul turned his back to them then, and raised his sword to meet the first of the mosquito-women who came for him. Bellis stopped breathing. The she-anophelius was suddenly visible, plummeting through screaming air, a starved shape. The jag erupted from her mouth. She skirted over the earth, irregular and very fast, her arms outstretched, slavering and starving.
For long moments she was the only thing that moved.
Uther Doul was still, waiting for her, his sword held vertically on his right. And then suddenly, when the anophelius was so close that Bellis thought she could smell her, so that her proboscis seemed to be touching Doul’s flesh, his arm was suddenly stretched across his body, the sword still vertical and immobile but on the other side of him, and the mosquito-woman’s head and left forearm were tumbling free and bloody across the dry earth as her body crashed to the ground beyond him. Thick, sluggish gore streaked Doul’s blade, and the corpse and the dust.
Doul had moved again, and was turning, leaping up, reaching with his hands as if he were plucking a fruit, spitting the second she-anophelius (which Bellis had not even seen) as she flew over his head, and then twisting, pulling her out of the air on the end of his blade and flicking her to the ground, where she lay screaming and drooling and still trying to reach him.
He dispatched her quickly, to Bellis’ appalled relief.
And then the sky was quiet, and Doul had turned again to Sengka and was wiping his blade.
“This is the last you’ll hear of me, or any of us, Captain Sengka,” he assured the cactus-man, who stared at him with more fear than hatred now, and whose eyes took in the bloody corpses of those two mosquito-women, each stronger than a man. “Go now. This can end here.”
Then again the hateful sound of the she-anophelii, and Bellis almost cried out at the thought of more carnage. The humming grew closer, and Sengka’s eyes grew wide. He stood for a moment longer, looking quickly around him for the ravenous she-anophelii, a part of him still hoping that they might kill Doul, but knowing that they would not.
Doul did not move, no matter that the sound grew closer.
“Sunshit!” Sengka shouted, and turned away, defeated, waving his hands to bring his men with him. They walked quickly away.
Bellis knew that they wanted to get away before any more of the she-anophelii attacked and were killed. Not because they cared for the terrible woman-things, but because the sight of Doul’s mastery was appalling to them.
Uther Doul waited until the three cactus-people had disappeared. Only then did he turn, calmly, resheathing his sword, and walk back to the room.
The sound of wings was very close by that time, but mercifully, they were a little too slow, and they did not reach him. Bellis heard the screaming wings dissipate as the mosquito-women scattered.
Doul reentered the room, and the shout of his name went up again, proud and insistent like a battle cry. And he acknowledged it this time, bowed his head and raised his arms to the height of his shoulders, his palms outstretched. He stood immobile, lowering his eyes, as if adrift on the sound.
And it was night again, the last night, and Bellis was in her room, on her bed of dusty straw, Silas’ package in her hands.
Tanner Sack did not sleep. He was too wired from the excitement of the day, the fights. He was caught up in astonishment at what he now knew, what he had learned from Krüach Aum. Only tiny fragments of a much larger theory, but his new knowledge, the scale of the commission expected of him, w
as dizzying. Too dizzying to let him sleep.
And, besides, he was waiting for something.
It came between one and two in the morning. The curtain to the women’s room was drawn back, very gently, and Bellis Coldwine crept across the room.
Tanner twisted his mouth in a hard smile. He had no idea what it was that she had been doing the previous night, but it was obvious that pissing had not been on her mind. He gave a half smile, half wince as he thought of his little cruelty, forcing her into such a performance. He had felt somewhat guilty afterward, though the thought of the prim, tight Miss Coldwine squeezing out a few drops for his benefit had kept him grinning all the next day.
He had known then that her business, whatever it was, was unfinished, and that she would come back.
Tanner watched her. She did not know he was awake. He could see her standing by the door in her white underdress, peering through the window. She was holding something. It would be that leather packet she had tried not to draw his attention to the previous night.
He felt curiosity about her actions, and a spark of cruelty, some redirected revenge for his mistreatment on the Terpsichoria settling on Bellis. Those feelings had stopped him from informing Doul or the Lover of her actions.
Bellis stood and looked, then hunkered down and rummaged silently in her package, and stood and looked again and bent and stood and so on. Her hand hovered ineffectually around the bolt.
Tanner Sack stood and walked soundlessly toward her; she was too engrossed with her indecision to notice him. He stood a few feet behind her, watching her, irritated and amused by her irresolution, until he had had enough and he spoke.
“Got to go again, have you?” he whispered sardonically, and Bellis spun around to face him, and he saw with shock and shame that she was crying.
His mean little smile disappeared instantly.
Tears were pouring from Bellis Coldwine’s eyes, but she did not utter a sob. She was breathing hard, and each deep breath shook and threatened to break, but she was quite silent. Her expression was fierce and controlled, her eyes intense and bloodshot. She looked like something cornered.