‘I don’t need ’em,’ I said.
We cut out on ions. Soon Mazarile was small and Drozna ran out the sails. I watched it happen. They were a bit more raggedy than on the Monetta, but the photons still bounced off them and gave us thrust. The captain already had a bauble in mind, so that was where we were headed. Three weeks would bring us within launching distance, and the auguries said that the bauble would crack open handsomely just as we arrived.
One by one, as life on the ship settled into the routine of watches, grub and squint-time, I ended up having conversations with most of them. It was me cooking the grub, as I’d cooked on the Monetta, and that helped grease our exchanges even more. As I doled out servings I also doled out little clues to my past, more with some than others, enough that if they all got together and shared notes they might have come up with something halfway to the truth. It wasn’t about linking myself to Bosa Sennen, though, but giving them a reason to stop digging. Something rough had happened, and it had made me spiky, and there didn’t need to be more to it than that.
The glowy was a problem, though, and so was the arm. Sailors understood that the glowy got into people, and that wasn’t what put the doubt into them. It was the way I didn’t seem to mind, the way I gave off every impression of being a bit proud of it, like it was a tattoo that had been put on me after I did something brave. But too many people had warned me that the glowy got into your brain if you let it, and once it was there you didn’t see things clearly any more. I thought of the hard things I’d had to do to get back on a ship, and wondered if I’d done them only because I needed to, or because the glowy had made it easier to start being cruel and hard, even to myself. Thinking back to the sick girl in her bed, and then measuring her against the cove I was turning into, I knew that I’d sailed over something that couldn’t ever be uncrossed. Some big, shivery void.
That version of Fura, all sick and sorry for herself, being made sicker by Morcenx’s drugs, her father trying to burn away the memory of her older sister like she was some kind of stain, that Fura was someone I had known once and then discarded, like a friend who didn’t measure up.
This Fura was different. This Fura was harder and scowlier and knew what needed to be done. This one could turn her back on her own dying father, or watch a blinded man whimper in pain and not give one cold cuss. This one could cut her own hand off if it helped. This one didn’t care what people thought of Fura.
And even as I cursed those tin fingers, which wouldn’t yet do a tenth of what I wanted from them, I knew which Fura I liked the best.
17
There was a scratch, a tug on my curtain. Then a sharp-angled face, upside down, gloomy in the lightvine.
‘Time we had a chinwag.’
The ship grumbled around us. Someone snored a bunk or two away.
‘I don’t know if this is a good time.’
‘Won’t ever be a good time, Fura. We’ll make it quick. Could’ve knocked me halfway to Trevenza when Trusko dragged you into the galley. We were all set to leave. I’d convinced myself you weren’t going to have anything more to do with old Proz. What was the change of heart?’
‘You don’t want to know about the hand first?’
‘We’ll get to the hand.’
‘I didn’t get your message. Not for weeks. By the time I did, I was being drugged and held prisoner in my own house. I only just got out, and I left a righteous trail of chaos getting here. But I made it. Trusko doesn’t have any idea what I am. Or what you are, for that matter.’
‘No, but if you keep butterin’ on that ship slang like it’s just goin’ out of fashion, he soon will. Listen to you. Ain’t this, ain’t that, and get the gob on me, with all my worldly experience!’
‘I’m just doing my best to try to blend in.’
‘Try a bit less, in that case. All right, we may as well get to it. What happened to the hand?’
‘Did that shock you?’
‘Can’t say there’s much capable of shockin’ me lately, Fura. But you gave me a good shake when you turned up with tin fingers.’
‘I had them take my hand off in Neural Alley. Cost me sixty bar quoins, too.’ Realising that this was no kind of explanation, I went on: ‘I had a tracking device on me. Couldn’t get it off. If I hadn’t done this, I’d never have made it to the dock. Vidin Quindar was coming after me.’
‘Let me see the hand. Did it hurt much?’
I reached out to her. ‘No, it wasn’t too bad. Not that bit, anyway. But it’s been tingling and throbbing ever since. Can’t say it’s pain, but it’s not too nice either. I think that’s the connections growing across the stump. I can’t make it do much yet, but they told me I should keep trying. My main worry is someone asking too many questions about it, and me having to explain how I came by it.’
Prozor ran a nail down the green inlay. ‘It’s a pretty hand.’
‘That’s what Surt said. Then she said the hand was prettier than the rest of me.’
‘Surt’s an idiot. Most of ’em are idiots. Been crewing long enough to plumb ’em out, and there’s not much to plumb.’
‘Drozna seemed all right. Then again it was Drozna asking me too much about the arm.’
‘Drozna’s the best of a bad barrel. And I wouldn’t sweat about the arm too much. Once they see what you’re worth, where you came from won’t matter. This is the crew we needed, Fura. A weak captain suits us better than a strong one.’ She knuckled the partition between my quarters and the next. ‘Ship’s sound enough. Few dents. Can’t compare to the Monetta, but then what can?’ She paused. ‘We’re both aboard, anyway. I’ll make a big show of warming to you, but it’ll take time.’
I smiled. ‘I won’t take it personally.’
‘Now all we need is somethin’ we can call a plan. Your noggin’ still full of chaff about taking the fight to Bosa?’
‘Never been fuller.’
Prozor gave a little dry laugh. ‘When we parted in Trevenza Reach – before Quindar put me under with that gun of his – I didn’t think you had it in you. You said all the right things, and I think you thought you meant it, but I still reckoned you’d wilt away once you got another taste of Mazarile. Nice homes. Nice beds. But I was wrong, wasn’t I?’
‘I don’t blame you. There’s something else about Trevenza, too. We were talking about Illyria, and I asked you what could have been worse to Rack than knowing she’d been turned or was dead. You weren’t exactly keen to enlighten me, but I think you had the shape of it.’
Prozor gave a sigh that was more groan than sigh, like the mere idea of dragging these words out of herself caused discomfort.
‘She’d smashed me around. Put me so far under she thought I was dead. But I wasn’t. And either I dreamt somethin’, or I came back far enough to get a glimpse of her, while she was tormentin’ Rack. And I saw her face, Fura. I saw the living face of Bosa Sennen, and I knew it.’
‘Illyria,’ I said, voicing what had only been a private theory until then.
‘I didn’t know her. But I knew Rack, and it was his eyes lookin’ out of that face when she let us see it. Bosa hadn’t just turned Illyria, Fura. She’d made Illyria into herself. And that’s why Rack put that crossbow between his teeth and put a bolt through his own grey. Because he couldn’t live a second longer knowin’ what his daughter had turned into.’
Trusko had his sights on a string of baubles on independent orbits. Chance had brought them into close alignment, each no more than two weeks sail time from the next. The auguries lined up like clockwork, too. They were all due to pop one after the other. Trusko’s sunjammer could visit each in turn, winkle out the loot that was still left in them, and still make it to the next. The windows were nice and safe, and there were good maps of the insides and what was kept in them.
‘We won’t be retiring on these,’ he told the assembled crew, as we gathered in the galley,
Prozor and I making a point of sitting at opposite ends of the table. ‘But we can still make an honest return on them, if we go deep enough. No one’s been back to any of these since ’51, and the first of ’em hasn’t had a visit since 1680.’
‘That’s because they’re cleaned out,’ I heard Gathing say, in a not-quite-whisper. He was the Assessor, I knew by then – the equivalent of Trysil on the Monetta. Whether Gathing was as good as Trysil, I had no idea, but the cove certainly had a low opinion of his captain.
‘These shafts went too deep for the 1680 party,’ Trusko carried on, scratching a clean, pink nail down one of his charts. ‘Didn’t have the lungstuff or the rope. But we’ve got more than enough of both, and enough hours to get in and out. Prozor’s double-checked the auguries, too. Says we can rely on ’em.’
‘The question is,’ Gathing said, ‘can we rely on Prozor?’
I had to bite down on the instinct to defend her. Instead I just sat with a look of blank disinterest, taking no sides.
‘You want your loot,’ Prozor said, ‘you’ll need to reach that sub-chamber. I’ll read the surface properly when we haul in, but based on what I know now, you’ll have time to spare. Same goes for the other baubles, provided Drozna’s sails don’t tangle on us.’
‘My sails’ll get us where we need to be,’ the big man said.
A crew was a crew, but, even more than on the Monetta, there was a sharp line between the ones who went into the baubles and the ones who stayed behind on the ’jammer. There was hazard just in being in space – everyone agreed on that, but it was always the bauble teams who took the brunt of it. A ship was a bubbling cauldron, ready to stew up all the resentment you could eat, but somehow Rack had kept a lid on that. Cazaray and Jusquerel had both gone into the bauble when the chance was there. Quoins didn’t have anything to do with it. It was solidarity, comradeship, taking a risk for the sake of your friends.
Rack had been a good captain. Trusko wasn’t a bad man, but he couldn’t smooth over the divisions the way Rack had. It made me realise how lucky we’d been.
‘Fura, you’ll be on bone watch whenever you’re sharp enough,’ Trusko said. ‘A word, a rumour, a sniff of a rumour on any of these baubles, I want to know about it. Other ships wanting a bite of our cherries . . .’
‘And if anything else comes up?’ I asked. ‘On other baubles? You’d want to know that, wouldn’t you? Our course ain’t set in stone, is it?’
‘We could,’ Trusko said, in tones that made it plain that such a thing was the height of unlikeliness, as far as he was concerned. ‘But it would have to be exceptional intelligence, and then, of course, Prozor would need to confirm the auguries . . .’
‘No harm in speculating on it,’ Drozna said. ‘But when the Cap’s set on a plan, it takes a lot to budge him off it.’
Gathing was giving me an odd, careful look, as if he had seen something in me that everyone else had missed. I wondered if I’d gone too far with all that talk of changing course. Prozor’s expression gave nothing away. I suppose it was dicey for the both of us. We could afford a few mistakes, but not too many.
‘I didn’t mean to speak out of turn,’ I said.
‘She’s learning some manners,’ Surt said. ‘There’s hope for her yet.’
We sailed for the first bauble. It was an uneventful four-week crossing, and it barely took us beyond the limit of the outer processionals. For much of that crossing, Prozor and I kept our meetings to snatched words as we passed in a corridor, or the occasional furtive exchange when we were sure that the others were asleep or preoccupied. The bone room would have been a pretty place to talk, especially as none of the other crew were too keen to spend time in it. But if someone had chanced upon Prozor and me in there, bumping our gums like old pals, there’d have been no accounting for it. We couldn’t take that risk, so we didn’t.
Slowly, though, in a word here and a word there, we brought each other up to date on what we knew or had deduced.
Trusko was a fake. That story he’d spun me, of starting off on the bones, was one that the rest of the crew had swallowed as well. But none of it was worth a quoin. He hadn’t spent half the time in space that he wanted us to think, so Prozor reckoned, and I guessed she had spent enough time around honest coves to know the difference.
‘Way I see it,’ she whispered to me, a week into the crossing. ‘He’s got money. Or had money, least ways. Enough to buy this ship and the idea of a bit of adventure.’
‘Isn’t that more or less what Captain Rackamore did?’
‘Difference with Rack,’ Prozor said sternly, like she was telling me off, ‘was that Rack never tried to be anythin’ he wasn’t. Didn’t cover up his airs and graces and pretend he wasn’t interested in books and learnin’. Didn’t try and have us all believin’ he’d had an illustrious career from the bone room up. But I’ve sniffed around Trusko often enough to know he’s paper-thin. Queer thing is, I think he’s been telling those lies long enough he actually believes ’em. But it don’t change what he is.’
‘Why haven’t the others seen through him?’
‘Maybe they have, and maybe they don’t want to admit it to themselves. Look at it through their lamps, Fura. It’s still a ship, and it’s still employment. Maybe they didn’t have much choice. But it works for us, like I said. Trusko’s timid. He’d keep ten million leagues between him and Bosa Sennen, if he had an inkling of where she was. And he wouldn’t take this crew anywhere near actual risk, like a bauble that might actually hold some loot.’
Prozor’s line of reasoning was making my eyes water. ‘And that suits us?’
‘Oh yes. Proper it does. Because if you want to set yourself up as bait for Bosa, there’s no way you can chance lookin’ like you might actually be ready for the fight. Bosa’ll sniff you out, and she’s no fool either. The Nightjammer’s fierce, but it ain’t magic. But if you’re a weak crew, under a weak captain, on a ship that’s seen better centuries, never mind better days, you might be able to fool her that you’ve just stumbled your way into trouble. And then you’d have the better of her. For a while.’
‘Tell me about the others. I want to know who we can depend on.’
‘None of ’em, I had to put quoins on it.’ She squashed her angles into a frown. ‘Drozna’s honest enough. But he’s the sail man, and he won’t have been in the thick of it too often. Surt’s the Integrator, like you figured. Don’t know how well she’d have fared on the Monetta, but she can’t be too shabby to hold this old box of splinters together. Whether I’d trust her . . .’
‘And the rest?’
‘Well, there’s Gathing, the Assessor. Mister Snidey. Thinks highly of himself, reckons he’s a cut above the rest of us. Which he might be, but if he’s so ’andsome at Assessing, what’s he doing with a no-hoper like Trusko?’
‘What are we doing, he could ask?’
‘But he’s not, and we are.’ Having defeated me with this inarguable response, Prozor went on: ‘Who else? Strambli’s the Opener. Think she might have been good once, but something happened to her. Seen the way her hands shake, that lopsided fizzog of hers? Something went knotty in her grey.’
‘She said she had the glowy in her.’
‘If it stayed in her too long, it’d have jumped into her grey, and started playin’ merry havoc. Flushin’ it out then’s a lot harder. Leaves scars – inside and out.’ She gave me a knowing look then, as if to say that I’d be wise to heed her words about the glowy. But all that did was get me setting my jaw and hardening up my resolve. ‘All right, that’s Strambli. Tindouf, the cove with the clay pipe, he’s the master of ions. Plays the harmless idiot, and no mistake. Question is how much of that is fakery. Some coves’ll play it that way to hide that they’re smarter, but others’ll do it to make you think they must be putting it on, they can’t really be that simple-minded. And they are.’
‘He can’t be a complete idio
t, if he makes the ion engine work.’
‘No, but beyond that we ain’t seen evidence that he can tie two shoelaces together. Verdict’s out on Tindouf. That leaves two more. You and me.’
‘They’ve accepted you,’ I said.
‘Difference is I don’t have to fake much. Credit to you, though, with the way you dredged up all those ship names. Best hope no one checks up on them.’ She gave me a sideways look. ‘But you’ve changed, Fura. You even had me persuaded at times.’
‘We can’t fail at this,’ I said. ‘Whatever I’ve got to turn myself into, that’s what I’ll do.’
‘And this plan of yours . . . about how we end up as bait.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve worked it out, wrapped your noggin’ around all the knots of it?’
‘More or less.’
‘Then now might be the time to share it.’
‘I’ll give you a name, Prozor. You can work out the rest of it at your leisure. But I guarantee you won’t like it.’
‘Why don’t you let old Proz decide that for herself.’
‘All right,’ I said, sighing. ‘Setting ourselves up as bait is for later. For that we’ll need to know where Bosa is, or’s likely to be. But before that, we have to make ourselves ready for her. You said it yourself, Proz. She’s fierce, but she ain’t magic. Which just means we need to be fiercer.’
‘Plenty of folk already tried it, Fura.’
‘Maybe they did. But how many of ’em had Ghostie stuff on their side?’
Prozor’s face tightened. It was like someone did up little screws under her skin, making all the angles sharper. ‘No Ghostie stuff on this ship. If there was, we’d know it.’
‘There isn’t,’ I agreed. ‘But we know where to find some.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘We ain’t going there. Not back to that one. Not back to the Fang.’
Over the weeks of the crossing, the bone room became my private kingdom. It wasn’t a hard one to defend. No one else wanted to come anywhere near it, and if their course through the ship took them past the wheeled door to the bone room, they picked up their pace. It was all mine – I didn’t even have to share the bones with my sister, or take tuition from Cazaray.