The toast-and-cat theory he’d put on hold until he could get some more cats. He’d never seen Slag fall off anything and land on his feet. It was completely possible that Slag was a defective cat. He was certainly mentally defective, so it followed that he was weird in other ways, too. Wasn’t he about a thousand years old or something? Very unusual. Plus, he was violent, as evidenced by the dozens of plasters all over Pinn’s face and head. The scratches still stung.
Slag. Definitely not a good subject for his experiments.
He tried to remember how he made his batch of Professor Pinn’s Incredible Flame-Slime, but he found himself at a loss. His experiments at remixing it just ended up with goop. Besides, despite his obvious brilliance in coming up with it – even that pansy Crake was impressed! – he was having a hard time working out what it would actually be useful for.
He’d taken to carrying a small pot of it around with him, searching for some practical application for his invention. The best idea he’d had so far was to put some on the end of a cigarette to make it last longer, but smoking it made him hallucinate. He’d seen something lurking in the shadows of the cargo hold, some awful half-dog half-man half-metal thing – fractions weren’t Pinn’s strong suit. After that he decided that maybe his Flame-Slime was a bit poisonous.
He’d sat up all night in his quarters trying to come up with a new idea while Silo and the Cap’n were away, but he was short on inspiration. He’d managed a few messy scrawls, and a lot of arrows pointing to different things, but an hour later he wasn’t sure what he’d actually been trying to design. It didn’t help that both his arms were in slings now, which made it damned hard to draw anything at all. He felt like a man in a straitjacket, or a plucked turkey waiting for the oven.
He dug into his pocket with some difficulty and pulled out a folded-up ferrotype. It was one of two he had of his sweetheart Emanda. The other was in a little frame that hung off the dash of his Skylance. He vaguely remembered some other girl who used to occupy that place – Larinda? Lisandra? – but whoever that was, she was gone now.
White creases divided Emanda’s portrait into quarters. She was in her late forties, almost twice his age, and wearing a low-cut, frilly dress that revealed an expansive bosom. A broad grin was on her face, her front teeth adorably crooked. She had a thick head of curls, probably red, but they might have been brown. He wasn’t sure. Ferrotypes only came in black and white, and it had been a few months since he’d seen her.
Usually her picture made him sigh, but this time he thought he detected a judging look in her eyes. When are you going to be rich, Artis? When are you going to give me all the things I deserve?
‘I’m trying, Emanda,’ he muttered. He wiggled his wounded arms to show her. ‘It’s not my fault.’
None of the crew understood him. Everybody thought they knew about love, but none of them really did. Look at Harkins, mooning after Jez while she ignored him. Look at Frey, chasing that corpse-skinned bitch, when any fool could see she’d put a knife in his back just for giggles. Look at Crake, who thought he was so much better than Pinn, but got all flustered whenever anyone mentioned Samandra Bree. Talk about pipe dreams! She was so far out of his league that . . . that . . . Well, he couldn’t think of a decent comparison, but it was pretty damn far.
All of them were jealous of him. Because he had a woman. A woman who loved him. She’d told him so, or near enough, during that heady few days of drinking and gambling in Kingspire. That was when he decided that a penniless vagrant like him wasn’t good enough for a lady like that. Once he got rich and famous, he’d go back to her. Once he could afford to treat her right.
He wondered if she’d heard of his exploits in the Rushes yet. Pinn’s grip on reality was always a bit slippery, and in his mind, the rumour had become the literal truth. It really had been him that flew that day. He had won that race, he had landed his aircraft with no engines. Artis Pinn. What a pilot he was. She must have heard by now; it would be all over Vardia. She’d be proud. Proud that she loved a hero.
But his amazing exploits still weren’t getting him rich.
With an annoyed huff, he folded up the ferrotype, put it back in his pocket and left his quarters. It wasn’t an easy task to open the sliding metal door with both his arms restrained. He wondered why Malvery had bothered to put his burned arm in a sling, instead of simply wrapping it up. It didn’t seem to need any support. It occurred to him, as he finally got the door open, that the Doc might just have done it for a laugh.
He encountered Slag out in the corridor, who eyed him menacingly, a rat hanging from his jaws. Deciding if he was disabled enough to be worth savaging again. Pinn aimed a kick at him, but Slag just turned around and padded off with an insulting lack of fear.
Sounds from the cargo bay drew him downstairs: voices, and the whine of the ramp hydraulics. When he got there, he found that the Cap’n and Silo had returned. Grey dawn light filtered in from outside. Ashua and Crake were there too, and Jez followed Pinn in, all of them alerted by the sound of the ramp. It was unusual to see people up at dawn, but the crew of the Ketty Jay kept odd hours. Jez didn’t sleep, and Crake barely did these days: he’d been looking more and more worn out lately. He was inventing something of his own, apparently. Pinn took it as further evidence of his jealousy.
‘Good trip, Cap’n?’ Crake asked, yawning into his fist.
‘Could have been worse,’ he said. ‘Why’s everyone awake?’
‘Inventing!’ Pinn declared loudly.
Crake gave him a look. ‘I think I might have something to help with your daemon problem, Cap’n, when you’ve got a minute.’
‘Fix that daemon, and you can have my firstborn,’ said Frey.
Ashua scoffed. ‘As if you’ll ever have kids.’
‘As if I’d want one of his,’ Crake added.
Frey didn’t seem in the mood for a jolly retort. ‘Look, we have a problem. There’s a camp full of people back there that need general medical supplies and food. Food’s easy; meds, not so easy. I don’t need to tell you the clock’s running on this one.’
‘Taking time out for charity, Cap’n?’ asked Jez, puzzled.
‘It’s a trade. They get help. We get our assault force.’
Crake looked questioningly at Silo, who gave him a blank gaze in return. Crake sighed. ‘Spit and blood, you really are going to waltz in there with guns blazing, aren’t you?’
Frey ignored him and appealed to his audience. ‘Any ideas about where we find a lot of medical supplies at very short notice? Or does someone want to wake up Malvery?’
‘I’ve got it covered,’ said Ashua.
Everyone turned to look at her. ‘Sorry?’ Frey said.
‘Medical supplies. Take me to Shasiith, I’ll get you what you need.’
Frey blinked. ‘Really?’ he asked at length, as if he couldn’t believe it would be that easy.
‘Yes!’ she snapped, exasperated.
Frey became suspicious. ‘How much will it cost me?’
‘The man I know, he doesn’t need money. There’s only one thing I can think of that would persuade him to part with that amount of drugs that fast.’ She tapped her foot in agitation, took an irritable breath and looked up at the ceiling. Pinn was surprised to see that her eyes shone with moisture. ‘The price is that I get to join your crew. Permanently. Until I say otherwise.’
‘No!’ Pinn cried, horrified.
‘No!’ Jez protested.
‘No!’ Crake blurted.
‘Done,’ said Frey.
Twenty-Eight
Homecoming – Legitimate Business – Crake Sees an Opportunity – Jez & the Cat
The door was opened by a gangly Samarlan girl with hostile brown eyes. She was maybe twelve years old, maybe thirteen, with the elegant features and pitch-black skin of her race. She radiated suspicion and scorn, and a casual, predatory confidence beyond her years.
Ashua wasn’t fooled for an instant. She’d been the same way at that age. Despite the supe
rficial differences, she recognised her replacement.
((Let me guess)) she said in Samarlan. ((He found you on the street and he’s been improving you ever since. How’s your vocabulary?))
‘Exquisite,’ the girl sneered in Vardic. ‘He said you’d be coming.’
‘He was right,’ Ashua replied.
The girl looked her up and down for long enough to let Ashua know she wasn’t impressed, that Ashua wasn’t shit to her. Then she stepped back and let her in off the alley.
Maddeus had lived in many places, but they all ended up the same. The fine settees in the hall were frayed and stained. The huge mirror was smeared and bleary. Paint peeled off the walls. Tiny windows let in the dusk light through a screen of grime. Maddeus moved to each new dwelling in a flurry of fresh finery, but his very presence rotted his surroundings. In the three months since he’d moved into this latest hideaway, it had already fallen into neglect.
The girl went ahead of her up the corridor. It was dim and stifling hot. They passed beneath electric fans, which were still.
In the rooms off the corridor, she saw strangers. There were always strangers in Maddeus’ home. He surrounded himself with them: strung-out philosophers and decadent artists, stragglers and strays, people who’d wandered into his web and never made it out. The days were short to them, passing by in a muddle of stoned conversation, punctuated by hits of their drug of choice. Once, she’d thought them marvellous creatures, godlike in their refusal to submit to the realities of the world. But they all came to nothing in the end, and she despised them now.
She recognised nobody. She hadn’t visited him here, out of respect for his wishes, and it seemed he’d had a reshuffle. Out with the old, in with the new. Another handful of junkies to tickle his interest.
But there was one man Maddeus would never abandon. She spotted him in a study off the corridor, sitting at a desk and sipping mint tea. The decay that afflicted this place had been held off here, but he couldn’t keep away the fug in the air and the sickly-sweet smell of sweat and excess.
He looked up over his glasses as Ashua passed the doorway. Osbrey Fole, a taut, narrow man, grey before his time. Osbrey was Maddeus’ accountant, among other things. The man who ran his business.
She’d always liked Osbrey, and he, in his way, had liked her. They were a conspiracy of two: the only sober heads in a flock of the deluded. He gave her a curt nod, which was as much emotion as she’d expect from him, and went back to work.
At the end of the corridor was a grand set of double doors. The girl opened them and let Ashua inside.
The room beyond was warm and close. The windows were covered over with thin curtains of green and red. Pungent smoke hung in slowly coiling layers in the gloom. It was full of expensive furniture, yet it felt shabby and dispiriting, and beneath the smell of narcotic fumes there was the hospital scent of the dying.
Maddeus lay reclined on a gilded chaise longue, eyes half-lidded. Next to him was a lacquered tray table, on which lay a silver syringe, a tourniquet and a skooch pipe, among other paraphernalia. A forgotten cigarette, little more than a bent column of ash, smouldered between his fingers.
The girl made to follow Ashua inside, but Ashua blocked her way. ‘The cigarette!’ she protested.
‘I’ve got it,’ said Ashua, and shut the door in her face.
The haze in the air made her feel like she was walking through a dream. She’d forgotten the sense of unreality that pervaded the places where Maddeus lived. As if time and sense had become derailed. She’d been away long enough to get used to clarity.
Maybe that was why he’d told her she couldn’t stay with him any more. That she’d have to make her own way in Shasiith. After an adolescence spent at his side, midway between a daughter, an employee and a pet, she’d been cast out.
It had hurt her, but she’d taken to independence with a vengeance. She’d been in Shasiith long enough to know the language and the ways of the underworld, and living on her wits was something she’d been doing ever since she could remember. She cut deals, made allies and enemies, stole when she had to, cheated when she could. She wanted to show him how capable she was. How she didn’t need him. And then, the lesson learned well, he’d take her back.
She’d never seriously thought it was more than a temporary thing.
She sat down on the chaise longue next to him, took the cigarette from his fingers and crushed it into an ashtray. He stirred and his eyes opened a little more. A stupefied grin spread across his face.
‘Ashua. My darling,’ he slurred.
‘Hello, Maddeus.’
He reached weakly towards the tray table. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to . . . ?’ he said.
She stopped his hand by taking it in hers.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You never did, did you?’
His skin was dry. The bones of his hand felt hollow and brittle, like a bird’s. He looked sallow and wasted. She felt something gather in her throat, and she didn’t want to let him go.
He kept smiling that idiot smile. ‘I remember the day I met you . . .’ he said, but the sentence was crushed beneath the weight of the colossal lethargy that lay on him.
She was glad. She didn’t want to reminisce. She patted his hand. It’s alright. Whatever it is, it’s all alright.
Maddeus coughed and reached feebly for a cigarette. Without thinking, Ashua took one from his gold cigarette case, lit it for him, and put it in his mouth. She’d done it so many times while he was in this state that it was like a reflex.
He took a drag and settled back into the chaise longue with a sigh. She saw him drifting, and squeezed his hand before she lost him completely.
‘Maddeus!’ she said sharply.
He surfaced from his daze, and he looked at her as if it was the first time he’d noticed she was in the room. His face became concerned. ‘What are you doing here, my darling? Don’t you know it’s dangerous?’
She tried a frail smile, but it died on her lips. ‘I’m leaving,’ she said.
‘Hmmm,’ said Maddeus, whose attention had already gone elsewhere. She brushed his lank hair back from his face, made him focus on her again.
‘I’m leaving,’ she said, more firmly this time. ‘Leaving Shasiith for good. I’m joining the crew of the Ketty Jay. ’
He became grave. ‘Oh.’
‘That’s what you wanted for me, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, with the vague tone of someone who couldn’t remember.
‘There’s a price. I’m pretty sure you won’t mind. Medical supplies. I’ve got a list from Malvery.’
‘He’s the doctor, isn’t he?’ Maddeus smiled broadly, but his eyes shimmered with tears. She felt something surge up inside her chest, something that made her breath shudder, a feeling of such terrible enormity that it would burst her. She turned her face away from him quickly. How much of that sorrow was him, and how much was the drugs? Was there any difference any more?
‘I’ll give the list to Osbrey, shall I?’ she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.
‘That’d be best. He’ll take care of it.’ His eyes fluttered closed, and she thought for a moment that he’d fallen asleep. Then he spoke again, barely forming his words. ‘This captain, what’s he like?’
‘Mordant.’
He snorted. ‘That’s not a sentence, darling, but I’ll forgive you this once.’ He stirred and groped across the tray. His fingers brushed past the tourniquet and found the silver syringe. He sighed with pleasure. ‘Will you . . . call the girl for me?’
Her eyes prickled as she picked up the syringe and the length of rubber tubing. ‘There’s no need,’ she said softly. ‘I’m here.’
‘He’s late,’ said Crake, holding up his pocket watch.
Malvery peered over his round, green-lensed glasses at the daemonist.
‘Well, he is!’ Crake protested.
‘He’s a wholesaler. We’re buying food. This is the least dodgy thing we’ve done for months. Calm down, eh?’
/>
Malvery looked over the balcony of the café and down into the street. Below them, donkeys and rushu brayed and lowed, carts creaked, people jostled and called to one another. On the far side of the dusty river of traffic was a warehouse, its worn wooden gates thrown open. Fair-haired Dakkadians sauntered in and out of the baking gloom within.
‘Takes time to load up that much food,’ he assured Crake. He fanned himself with one beefy hand. ‘And they don’t do anything fast in this country.’
Crake put away his pocket watch, picked up a Vardic broadsheet that he’d bought from a boy on the street, and snapped it open. It was yesterday’s paper. The front page bore the headline which had put him on edge: Mentenforth Vandals still at Large. Beneath it was a ferrotype of the domed ceiling of the Mentenforth Institute vault, which Malvery had autocannoned a great big hole in.
There was no mention of them. That meant Bree and Grudge hadn’t told the Press, which meant . . . well, he wasn’t sure what that meant. But it was too hot to get concerned about things.
He sat with his feet up on a chair, sweating in the shade of a parasol. The parasol was held up by a circular wrought-iron table, upon which was a pot of spiced tea and a carafe of sweet local liquor. Malvery had been steadily working his way through the carafe for the last hour, and he had a lazy buzz on. Crake, who was drinking the tea, was altogether more jumpy. He didn’t like being back in Shasiith. He was afraid the Sammie soldiers would catch up with them.
Malvery, for his part, was reassured by the chaos and complexity of the mad sprawl that surrounded them. Hard to imagine anyone finding anyone in a place like this. They’d taken precautions, registered their craft under a false name, and Jez kept the Ketty Jay moving from dock to dock around the city. It had taken a bit of time to sort everything out – another night wasted that they could scarcely afford – but everything was on track now. He and Crake would get the food. Ashua was handling the medical stuff.
The Cap’n, for his part, had gone to see Trinica Dracken, who was in the city somewhere. With that compass of his, he could find her anywhere, and she obviously didn’t mind being found, since she still wore the ring. Whatever was going on between them, Malvery didn’t want to know; but the Cap’n said he had a plan for attacking Gagriisk, and it involved her, and that was that.