All this on a world a bit more than eight leagues across, and none of those cities extending more than a single league across the surface.
Now I also understood properly how the docks – one at Hadramaw and a second at its counterpart at Incer – were like a pair of horns jutting out from our world on either side, as tall again as Mazarile’s own radius, so that the distance from the swallower to the tip of either dock was more than sixteen leagues.
‘Impressed?’ Rackamore asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and it was the honest truth. It was impressive to see our entire world in one glimpse. But it also made me feel small and insignificant and a bit stupid for ever thinking Mazarile was anything special.
It wasn’t.
‘A world the size of Mazarile could manage very well with only one dock,’ Rackamore said, sounding all effortless, despite the crush from the launch’s rockets. ‘But then it would be out of balance, and that would do awkward things to your day and night cycle. So they built two, exactly opposite each other, and we can take our pick of where we land. Mostly we prefer Hadramaw – the customs officials are friendlier.’
Rackamore worked the levers on the console and I felt the pressure of the chair ease against my bones. The rumble of the rockets became a murmur, like a dinner party going on next door.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We have the speed we need to match the Monetta’s Mourn. It won’t be long now.’
Soon we were weightless, the rockets silent. Adrana and I were still strapped into our seats, but I felt the missing weight in my belly, like the endless plummeting fall of a bad dream. Rackamore said we’d be better off not undoing our buckles for now. We’d need time to adjust to weightlessness, and there’d be plenty of that later.
Mazarile had shrunk to a two-horned ball. The cities of night still glowed, but now Hadramaw was turning to the Old Sun and it was Bacramal’s turn to slide into purple twilight.
‘Here she is,’ Rackamore announced, making the rockets fire again, but this time with less ferocity.
Adrana strained to peer through her window. ‘It’s tiny!’
‘Everything looks small in space,’ Rackamore said. ‘It’s just the way of things. No lungstuff to fuzzy up the view.’
‘Lungstuff’s got nothing to do with it,’ Adrana countered. ‘That ship’s just small.’
The launch veered, bringing the orbiting Monetta to my side of the windows. Adrana hadn’t been exaggerating. It did look tiny. Worse, we’d be putting our lives in the care of that fragile-seeming thing. The thought put an extra twist in my belly.
What we were looking at was just the hull of the ship, as the sails and rigging hadn’t yet been run out. It was just a dark little husk, pointy at one end, flared at the other, lodged against the twinkly background of the Congregation like a paper cut-out in a lantern show.
Put a crossbow to my head and force me into describing it, and I’d say Rackamore’s ship was fish-shaped. The hull was longer than it was wide, and all curvy along its length, with hardly any angles in the thing at all. There were ridges and flanges all along it, just as if it had been made from planks, curved and joined neat as you could ask. But like a fish – like some bony, poisonous, bad-tempered fish – it also had all manner of fins and barbs and stingers and spines jutting out this way and that. Some of them I could guess had something to do with her rigging. And like a fish, it had a big gapey jaw at one end, and a pair of bulgy eyes near the jaw – they were big windows – and at the other end of the hull was a thing like a lady’s fan, stiffened with ribs, that couldn’t help but look like a tail.
We sidled in closer. Rackamore used the rockets like a miser, quickly tapping them on and off to cut our speed almost to zero.
‘See? She seems bigger now. As she should. Four hundred spans, prow to stern. Seventy-five spans across at the widest point. She could swallow twenty of these launches and still have room in her belly. Prow is the open mouth where we’re about to dock. Stern is the other end, where the ion exhaust fans out. She moves both ways, and up and down, and sideways if need be, but we have to agree on something – you never know when your life might depend on it. Do you like her?’
‘Still doesn’t look big to me,’ Adrana said.
It didn’t look big to me either, even up close, but now that she’d stated her mind I saw a chance to get one over on my sister.
‘It’s big enough. What were you expecting, a palace?’
Adrana glared at me.
‘She’s a good ship,’ Cazaray said. ‘Whatever you make of her now, she’ll feel like home before you know it.’
Someone on the Monetta’s Mourn must have been alerted to our arrival, for the jaw gaped wider, cranking open to reveal a red-lit mouth, a red-lit gullet, into which we slid like a fat morsel, no quicker than a walking pace, until the launch clanged against some restraint or cradle and all was still.
We stayed weightless. Rackamore and Cazaray came out of their chairs and indicated that we could unbuckle, but that we should move with caution until we were confident. ‘One kick in the wrong direction,’ the captain said, ‘and you’ll be nursing a bruise until Mournday week.’
Through my porthole, I watched the jaw close up again, squeezing out the last glimmer of the Congregation. Now all I saw were the red walls around us, ribbed with metal and strung with guts of pipes and tubes. Figures moved around outside, just beyond the launch. They wore brassy spacesuits with armoured parts and complicated hinged joints, their faces hidden under metal helmets with grilled-over faceplates.
‘We can pressurise the launch hold,’ Rackamore said. ‘But most of the time it isn’t worth the trouble. Easier to suit up.’
There was another clang, then some metal scraping and scuffing noises, conducted through the fabric of the hull, and then a squeal as the lock was opened from outside.
A small, wiry woman, not wearing a suit, popped her head into the launch.
‘Welcome back, Cap’n.’ Then a nod to the younger man. ‘Cazaray. These the recruits, is they?’
‘The Ness sisters,’ Rackamore said. ‘Treat them well, for they may turn our fortunes.’
‘We thought that about the last one.’
‘This is Adrana, this is Arafura,’ Rackamore went on. ‘And this is . . . well, why don’t you introduce yourself?’
‘Prozor,’ she said.
Her face had a hard, feral look to it. The name was one I’d already seen in the ledger. Rackamore had lost two Bauble Readers in the last ten years, but Prozor had been in that position for long enough that her name had gone all the way down the bottom half of the ledger, year by year.
‘Get them aboard, show them their quarters, make sure they’re given something to eat and drink. Oh – and Prozor?’
‘Cap’n?’
‘This is new to them. Every part of it, from weightlessness to living with vacuum only a scratch away.’
Prozor shrugged. ‘I’ll make allowance.’
‘Good. And now I need to talk to Hirtshal about the new sail we’ve just brought from Mazarile. We’ll break orbit shortly, on ions if the sails aren’t ready. I’ve a mind to put some leagues between us and Hadramaw Dock.’
‘Something up?’
Rackamore nodded, his jaw set tight. ‘Family business.’
They never told us exactly how old the ship was, or who had owned it before Rackamore, much less who’d put down the quoins to have her made. But if the long-dead coves who’d designed the Monetta’s Mourn had set out to make her insides as confusing and twisty as possible, they couldn’t have bettered the job they’d done. It was a mad maze of passages and rooms and cupboards and doors. Four hundred spans doesn’t seem like much, and maybe it isn’t when you’re speaking of a row of houses or a stroll through Mavarasp Park. But it’s surprising how many little rooms you can stuff into the fat belly of a four-hundred-span ship,
and surprising how many different ways you can come up with of linking them together, especially when there’s no up or down and no good reason not to put a door in a ceiling or a window in a floor. Passages twisted, forked, doubled back on themselves for no sound argument. Ladders and stairways threaded between decks, while bone-scraping crawlways linked compartments. There were hatches and ducts, elevators and winches. Pipes and wires went everywhere, and the ship gurgled, hissed and hummed to itself like a thing that was already half alive. Lightvine had been strung along the pipes and wires, encouraged to grow into all the inhabited spaces of the ship. Where the lightvine couldn’t be coaxed, other artificial lighting sources had been used.
‘This is where you’ll get your squint-time,’ Prozor said, when we reached what seemed to be a set of cupboards. ‘Ain’t large, but you won’t need much space when we’re under way. More beddin’ if you need it – you probably will.’
‘We sleep here?’ Adrana asked.
‘No, girlie, you play skittles here.’ Prozor opened the doors to show us what we were facing.
‘Does it get cold?’ I risked asking.
‘Truer to say it sometimes gets warm. Not afraid of a little cold, is you?’
‘I’m not,’ I said.
‘We’ll manage,’ Adrana said, casting me a glance.
The space was a compartment about the size of the smallest room either of us had ever slept in, and this was meant for two. At the back of it were two hammocks, one above the other, and a curtain that you could tug across the hammocks for privacy. Prozor showed us the hatches that held more bedding, as well as space for personal effects – not that we’d brought anything with us.
‘Sumptuous,’ I said.
‘Used to better, is you?’
‘I thought the captain told you to be nice to us,’ Adrana said.
‘You were getting the nasty side of me, you’d know it.’ But after a heavy sigh Prozor said: ‘Ain’t as bad as it looks. A cove gets used to things soon enough, and you’ll only spend as much time here as you want to. We nosh together. You’ll be the new cooks now – it’s always the Bone Reader what cooks, ’cause them being so precious and delicate they ain’t got much else to do. Other than that, you’ll be in the galley with the rest of us, singin’ songs, tellin’ stories, puttin’ on plays, readin’ fortunes, whatever passes the hours.’ She gave us a forbidding look. ‘Plenty of things scarce on a ship. Hours ain’t one of them.’
‘Are there books?’ I asked.
‘Books your thing, are they?’
‘Yes. It’s called reading.’
Prozor sniffed, wrinkling her nose. She had sharp features: sharp nose, sharp chin, sharp dark eyes under jagged brows. She had a face that would look angry no matter her mood – all vees and angles, as if she had been sketched in a hurry, with hard strokes. Her hair was as sharp-looking as the rest of her, bristling out at all angles and stiffened into spikes and barbs by some kind of glue or lacquer.
‘Talk to Cap’n Rack. He’s always pleased to show off his library. More books in there than you’ll know how to read.’
‘I doubt that,’ I said.
Prozor led us back through the ship. It might have been the way we had come, or some completely different route. It was hard to tell. She was pointing out different things all the while, grumpily unconcerned with how much we could take in at a time.
‘Near the middle now,’ she said, as we squeezed around an elbow in the passageway, still weightless. Adrana and I were moving by our fingertips and careful use of our feet, while Prozor darted forward with reckless speed, only to keep stopping and looking back at us as we caught up. She slid open a panel, ushered us through it.
‘Are you lost yet?’
I nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Good. Way we like it. Someone else comes aboard this ship, we don’t want ’em stumblin’ on the bones too easy.’
We were at a grey door, armoured like an airlock, with a wheel-shaped locking mechanism. We’d passed a dozen similar doors already. ‘Put it here for other reasons, not just to make it hard to find,’ Prozor went on. ‘Needs to be somewhere quiet, not too close to the bridge or the galley or any of that stuff. Can’t be too close to the sail-control gear or the engine room, either. This is the prime spot, and yo