‘That’s horrible.’
‘That,’ Peregrine said, ‘is civilisation. Not all who were rewarded deserved to be; not all who should have been were.’
I felt as if my world – my worlds – had shifted a bit, just as if the Old Sun had turned over in its long, lazy sleep. ‘Did you live through it all, sir? All the years since the Twelfth?’
‘No, even my repair systems would not have endured six hundred and sixty thousand years of interstitial time. I was trapped in a bauble. Time flows normally in such a place, no matter what you may have heard. I put myself into a state of extreme hibernation and waited for some new Occupation to arise and find me, as I knew it would.’
‘Do you ever think about it, sir? How we keep starting up over and over again, only it never lasts?’
‘All the time, Fura Ness – in my situation it is difficult not to.’ The robot paused, and I had the sense that it was anxious to be off on some other engagement but didn’t care to come across as too rude. ‘Will you be seeing this Paladin soon?’
‘He’s all broken, sir. He got smashed up in Neural Alley, trying to help the family.’
‘I am sorry to hear that. You must pass on my regards, if you get the chance. Tell him that Peregrine sends his best wishes, and asks if he remembers the Last Rains of Sestramor.’
‘Is that a world, sir?’
‘It used to be,’ he said, with a tone that was as close to sadness as I ever heard coming out of something that wasn’t alive. ‘Well, this has been very pleasant. Is there something you’d like me to do with that bracelet, Fura Ness?’
I thought of the things he might do, from breaking it to jamming it, and at that moment I couldn’t see how any of them would make things easier for me when we got to Mazarile. Sometimes it was better to accept one nuisance thing than open a whole can of others.
But there was something.
‘You know this ship pretty well, don’t you? I know it’s a commercial clipper, but there’ll be a bone room on it somewhere, I’m sure. I don’t mean to get you into hot water, but you must be good at opening doors and things. Would you be able to help me get into the bone room while no one’s around?’
‘That would be completely against the ship’s rules,’ Peregrine said sternly. Then, before I could get too crestfallen. ‘It would also be a very useful way for me to check that certain of my operative faculties were still as sharp as they used to be.’
‘That’s very kind of you, sir. And I promise I won’t be doing anything I shouldn’t.’
I’d been right about the ship having a bone room, but that wasn’t too much to my credit. A commercial ship like the clipper might not be up to the same bauble games as the Monetta or the Courtesan but there’d no reason not to have a skull on board, and chances were it’d be a good one, the best that combine money could buy.
I wasn’t wrong about that, either.
The bone room was in a part of the ship where ordinary passengers weren’t meant to go, but it was only a short way down a private corridor off one of the main promenades. There was a message saying only crew were supposed to go beyond that point, but after I’d spent a day or two lurking nearby, I knew it wouldn’t be any trouble to sneak through. Hardly any one came and went and it was pretty clear that the bone room wasn’t in use most of the time. Since they weren’t interested in snooping on commercial secrets, the main use for the bone room would be sending emergency messages if the clipper ran into trouble. Once a day, as far as I could tell, they had someone go inside for an hour, just to make sure the skull was working properly.
I gave it another day just to make sure. Then I met Peregrine near the private corridor and after double-checking that the way was clear, we went to the bone room. The door had a wheel on it, just like the one in the Monetta. I tried it once, and it was as stiff as if it had been welded in place. But I knew that robots could speak to locks and doors, and I wasn’t surprised when Peregrine made the door click, the wheel whirred in my hand, and I was in.
‘The door will lock itself when you leave,’ Peregrine said. ‘But if I were you I wouldn’t spend too long in there.’
‘I’m not intending to. But if I needed to come back tomorrow, or the day after . . .’
‘You won’t need me. I made a small adjustment to the door’s settings – nothing that will get either of us into trouble. It will think your bracelet is a passkey.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, in gratitude and wonder.
‘It was a small thing. But it would probably be best for both of us to keep our distance from now on.’
‘You’ve been very kind.’
I watched him go, then finished spinning the wheel so I could let myself into the bone room. I sealed myself in, then took stock. Just as it had been with the Courtesan, there wasn’t anything here that exactly matched the set-up on the Monetta. But I was starting to feel I’d know my way around any bone room in the Congregation, and there wasn’t anything here that fazed me. A nice clean skull, all neat and white, and neural bridges that felt expensive and delicate at the same time, like pricey jewellery. I dimmed the lights, plugged in, and chased the whispers.
There was a lot of chatter. Ships were whispering to ships, worlds to worlds via ships. A lot of people were changing plans and schedules. It was more than a week since Black Shatterday but the after-effects of the crash were still being felt. Now it was a quick scramble to make some kind of profit, any profit, and crews were taking on bigger risks than they’d have countenanced a month ago. Debts and favours were being called in across the Congregation. Grudges and scores settled. It was a bad, nervous time.
But Adrana wasn’t sending.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t out there. Bosa wouldn’t have cause to communicate with other ships, not as a routine, but she’d have every reason to listen. So if I wanted to make contact with Adrana, I would have to do the sending, at least to start with.
I’d always been told what to say, and now there wasn’t any captain giving me lists and instructions. But I thought about Adrana and the sort of thing she wouldn’t be able to ignore, and then it was plain to me what I needed to put out.
I put the words together in my noggin, and squeezed them into the bony box of the skull.
‘This is Monetta’s Mourn, under Rackamore. Answer if you read.’
I went back the next day, and the one after that, and then a whole week of days, always making sure Quindar was busy and no one was going to spot me going in and out of the bone room. As best as I could, I tried to spread the times around, so that I had the best chance of overlapping with Adrana. Once, when Quindar was snoring so loudly I feared he’d shake the ship apart, I stole out of my room and spent thirty minutes with the bones. And still she wasn’t there.
But the day after, she was.
The chatter after Black Shatterday was starting to die down, and maybe that helped me pick out one voice above all the others.
‘Fura. It’s you. I know it’s you.’
There was no voice to that, not even words, but there was the exact intent of the words, and the meaning that they’d have formed if they’d been there. Adrana had said it was like the impression left over in silence after the sounds have been taken away, a kind of memory.
And I knew it was her. There wasn’t any process of consideration, of doubt, of waiting for more evidence. I knew better than anything in my life that it was my sister whispering to me through the skull.
It was Adrana and she was alive.
‘Yes,’ I sent back. ‘I’m here.’
I didn’t mean to sound cold, but the skull sucked the warmth out of every word that went in or out of it. It was like communicating through little black letters when you couldn’t use punctuation or capitals or any kind of emphasis. Like making words out of alphabet blocks.
But there was joy in me and I knew there was joy in Adrana, however col
d and far away she felt to me.
But also worry.
‘Where are you?’ she asked, except it wasn’t really a question, not after the skull had thinned it out to a husk of pure information. ‘I thought you were dead, like the others. Garval said that you hid, but after they took Garval . . .’
‘I made it,’ I said. ‘A ship rescued me, took me back to Trevenza Reach, and now I’m on another one to Mazarile. I’m going to come and find you.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t. I got myself into this mess, and I’ll get out of it. I’ve dragged you into enough trouble already.’
‘You didn’t drag me into anything.’
‘Don’t do it, Fura. You’ve no idea of her cruelty. Whatever you think you know of her, it’s only a tiny part of what she’s capable of. I’ve seen it, believe me. And I know what she is now. I know what it means to be Bosa Sennen.’
‘I don’t care. I made a promise to myself.’
‘Please, Fura.’
I couldn’t take any more of her pleading. I disconnected from the skull and tugged the bridge from my head. It felt unreal, to have had this contact with her, to have broken it of my own accord. But I knew if I took any more of it she’d start putting sense into my head, and that wasn’t what I wanted. We both knew the other was alive, at least, and if there was any joy to be taken from the moment, that was where I took it from. Better to know she was still breathing, than dead.
Besides, there’d be other times. We were still nowhere near Mazarile. Provided I kept my cool, and the dice rolled in my favour a few times, I’d be able to talk to her again.
The door creaked and I flinched around. Suddenly I was back on the Monetta when Garval came to rescue me, and I realised then that I hadn’t asked after her when I had the chance, and then I thought about what Adrana had said, about seeing the real cruelty Bosa had in her. I hoped Garval hadn’t been the focus of that nastiness.
The door creaked again. Some cove was trying to get in.
There wasn’t any point delaying the inevitable. They’d get through the door sooner or later, and I’d look just as bad when they did as I did now. I put the bridge back where it belonged and opened the door from the inside. I could have bet quoins on whose face I’d see and I wasn’t wrong. Quindar, with that ghouly grin, like a man who just found a lost quoin in his pocket. Behind him, looking more puzzled than cross, was a couple of the ship’s crew, including the cove I recognised as the usual Bone Reader.
‘Winkle ’er out,’ Quindar said.
12
That was the end of my liberty on the clipper. While it was against rules to keep me locked up in my room, that was only applicable to ladies and gentlemen who hadn’t broken the common regulations of shipboard behaviour. Tampering with the bones was an extra heinous crime because the bones might be the one thing that got the ship out of a sticky situation. There wasn’t any use arguing that I’d probably treated the bones more gingerly than the regular Reader ever did, or that if they ever did run into trouble, they’d get a damned sight more use out of me than they would out of him.
Anyway, after that I was tied to Quindar like a balloon on a string. The only saving grace was that he wasn’t any happier with my company than I was with his, so whenever there was an opportunity he’d lock me into my cabin with a library book, thinking in his stupid way that leaving someone alone with only a book was a very clever and cruel punishment.
Now and then, as I was dragged to and from meals, I got a glance through a porthole. For weeks and weeks we hardly moved at all. Then came a day when the Congregation was visibly larger than the day before, and then it was as if we fell into it with a sort of indecent haste. What had been an indistinct purple-white shimmer resolved into a dance of worlds, fifty million tiny bodies, and at length one of them grew more distinct than the rest, becoming a little barbed sphere, and I knew that it was Mazarile. I was glad to see my home, of course, but sad too because I’d always counted on Adrana being with me when we returned.
‘Gather your things, girlie,’ Vidin Quindar said, as we closed in for Hadramaw. ‘Time to meet your daddy and start being a good daughter again. Proper weight on your shoulders now, you being the only one left.’
‘She’s still alive,’ I hissed. ‘And if you say another word against that, I’ll . . .’
‘You’ll what?’ he asked, cracking an interested grin.
‘I saw someone burn from the inside when a harpoon went through them,’ I told him. ‘Saw someone blown up the same way. I saw what a crossbow does to you, fired close enough. You think I don’t have the imagination to come up with something for you?’
‘Old Vidin’s just doin’ his job, girlie – ain’t no need to make it personal.’
‘It’s been personal from the moment you hurt Prozor.’
The ship was too large to dock at Hadramaw, so launches came to ferry the cargo and passengers down to the port. ‘No funny games now,’ Quindar warned, as if I might try something at the last moment.
But I had no intention of running. I’d reached an acceptance of my fate. My father could do what he liked, but in three months I’d be a legal adult, with all the same rights and responsibilities as Adrana. Now, three months was a terribly long time to leave Adrana at the mercy of Bosa Sennen, but finding her again was always going to take time, and a little delay wouldn’t necessarily hurt. It would give me time to cover my tracks a bit; to make sure I really had a plan that could hold lungstuff. I was going to have to be sly and resourceful, and sometimes you had to let people think they’d won when in fact they hadn’t.
Our launch brought us to one of the docking ledges at the Hadramaw complex. Quindar’s paperwork was subjected to more scrutiny. He had a smirky, smug answer for every question, though, and before long we were through and in the elevator that hurried us down to the surface of Mazarile. Gravity increased as we neared the ground. My bones and muscles started grumbling about it.
It was night and the port wasn’t too busy. Quindar took me to a private room, all wood-panelled walls with no windows, and there was my father, along with two representatives from the legal firm that had organised my return.
‘Excellent work, Vidin,’ said one of the representatives. ‘Mr Ness expresses his gratitude.’
‘Course he does,’ Quindar said, tipping off his hat to expose his bald cranium. ‘And it’s been old Vidin’s pleasure to bring about this most harmonious reunion.’
I turned back to look at my father. He looked smaller and frailer than I remembered, and that was a proper shock. The representatives were standing on either side of him, like bookends, as if they thought he might crumple at any moment.
For a good and long moment I think he had his doubts that I was the right girl. I’d grown skinny and tough in space, and changed my hair, and that was before we got to the glowy. That would change the look of anyone.
More than that, though. I knew there was a hardness in my eyes as if someone had jammed steel into them.
Father stepped over and kissed me on the cheek, took my hand in his, tracing my fingers with his own. ‘Everything’s going to be better now, Fura. Your ordeal’s over. It’s all behind you. And you’re more precious to me now than you’ve ever been.’
‘I’m so glad to be back,’ I said. ‘It was terrible, what happened out there. I mean, it was terrible the things that happened to us. I’m never going back. I never want to see space again, or a ship, or anything that reminds me of that dreadful time.’
This statement drew a cough from one of the representatives. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, in a high quavering voice, ‘now might not be an inopportune moment to mention the veil of discretion . . .’
‘This whole affair,’ the other representative said, in a deeper, more authoritative tone, ‘has been a terrible strain on the good name of your father. It was no fault of yours, Arafura. You were misled. You were not responsible for
your own actions.’
‘I surely wasn’t,’ I agreed.
‘But now that’s what’s happened . . . has happened,’ said the first, still in that high voice, ‘now that’s eventuated, so to speak . . . there doesn’t need to be any further blemish on the name . . . the good name . . .’
‘What my colleague means,’ the second said, ‘is that, through the good offices of our friends in journalistic and reporting circles . . . a certain benign obscurity may now be permitted to cloud these recent unpleasantnesses. There need be no public knowledge of your involvement with Captain Rackamore . . . still less of the regrettable incident that befell his ship.’
‘And no mention at all,’ the first put in, ‘of . . . any other individuals, who may have profited from that incident. You and your sister developed a rare . . .’ He paused, wringing his hands while he searched for the right word. ‘Malady, you see.’
‘A malady,’ I repeated.
‘An illness, a serious ailment,’ the second one said. ‘Which required a long interval of seclusion. Bed rest, regular visits from the physician, complete isolation. It was a protracted illness, a congenital weakening of the heart, and it was a great sadness that your sister eventually succumbed.’
‘Oh,’ I said quietly, nodding, as if I was impressed by this masterful piece of lie-mongering, and quite ready to swallow it as the truth.
‘She’s butterin’ you up,’ Vidin Quindar said. ‘I know the girlie, and she’s layin’ it on thick. Space is exactly where she wants to be. You’ve got a lick of sense, you’ll put a lock on her door and chain her to a bed for the next three months.’
‘How can you say that?’ I asked, gasping at the effrontery. ‘After all I’ve been through. You’re making me feel quite dizzy, Mr Quindar. I think I’m going to faint.’