‘I want to see them with you,’ Adrana said.
‘You will, too. I’m sure of it.’
I wasn’t as sure as I sounded, but I had hope, and that was better than nothing. She was my sister, and while she’d started to be turned I had to believe that it wasn’t too late. We were together again now, and I loved her, and there were people around her who were going to unravel some of the craziness Bosa had started knotting into her. Or try, anyway. We’d do our best, and we’d try everything before we gave up on her. Adrana was strong, I told myself. Strong enough that she could sweat out Bosa’s poison, no matter how far it had got into her. I wanted her back, and I wasn’t going to give up easily. Not until she looked into my eyes, smiled, and I knew I didn’t have to worry about blades against my throat.
But I spoke the truth when I said that a little shard of Bosa wouldn’t do either of us too much harm.
Bosa was right about one thing. A cove did need a plan, and until I sorted out the clutter in my skull – what had happened to me, what I’d chosen and what had happened to me regardless, what I was prepared to accept and what I was prepared to deny –I couldn’t see my way to thinking clearly. It would take a while to make the Nightjammer ours, with or without Paladin’s help, and while we were fathoming her many and devious ways, I reckoned I had time to set down my thoughts. I’d always liked writing, and if I got my story down on paper, I’d at least be able to put my side of things.
‘I’m going to write out how it began,’ I whispered to Adrana. ‘Starting in Mazarile, the night we escaped from the museum. I’m not going to sugar it up, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t do things I wish I hadn’t. It’ll take me a while, because I can’t write very easily, but the work’ll be good for my fingers and when I’m done you can read it and we can argue about what’s right and what’s wrong. And we’ll call it something like The True and Accurate Testimony of Arafura Ness, so that it sounds right and proper, and you can always write it the way you saw it, as well, and we’ll call that The True and Accurate Testimony of Adrana Ness, and I know yours will be nicer than mine because you always had a better hand and you knew how to make words fit together like they belonged. But it won’t make one story better or worse than the other, just different.’ I leaned in and kissed her on the brow. ‘We’d need a new name for the ship,’ I added, all teasing and confidential. ‘It’s ours now and we need to start thinking of it that way. A name will help.’
‘You say you’ve the spur in you. Wrongs you want to put right. You should call it Revenger. That’s a good name for a ship, isn’t it?’
‘Not exactly a sweet name.’
‘But then it isn’t exactly a sweet ship, after what you did to take her. Well, sleep on it. Perhaps you’ll think of something better.’
I stroked her hair once more, than bid her rest for a few hours. After that, I went to what used to be Bosa’s cabin, and I looked around for paper or ink or something that would suffice. But there was nothing.
So instead I went back to the bottle room, and with Strambli’s help I got the first of the bodies out.
‘What are you going to do with it?’ Strambli asked.
I had the knife, the one Adrana had held against me, and I used it to hack away a rectangle of skin from the pickled body. It was about the size of one of the pages in the Book of Worlds, if much thicker and rougher than paper. But it would do.
‘That,’ I told Strambli.
She was shocked at first, and I think the thought crossed her mind that maybe I’d gone too far, or was on the way there. Truth to tell, I wouldn’t necessarily have disagreed. But she must have weighed her options and come to the conclusion that the safest, easiest thing was just to let me have my way.
Which only left the problem of ink. So I went back to Bosa and drew blood from her. I told Surt what I needed and after that same hesitation I’d seen in Strambli she convinced herself to come round to my way of thinking as well. Surt showed me to a chemical in the medicine supply that stopped the blood from thickening up too quickly once I’d loaded it into a pen. It flowed nice and steadily then, and didn’t clog up too fast. It wasn’t as good as ink, but it made a permanent mark, and that was all I needed.
‘I’ll take a little blood each time,’ I told Bosa. ‘Not enough to weaken you, but just enough for my purposes. And you may die before I’m done, and if so you’ll have died a good death, all things considered. If Adrana comes back to me, and I’m satisfied that she’s all right, then I’ll give you that good death myself. You won’t suffer.’
‘And if she doesn’t come back to you?’ she asked me, with a sort of distant curiosity.
‘She will,’ I said. ‘She’s my sister, and she’s stronger and better than you ever knew. But if I doubted it, I’d make paper out of you.’
Bosa nodded slowly. ‘It’s good that we’re clear.’
‘It is,’ I agreed. ‘Oh, and by the way, this ship has a new name now.’
‘What is it?’
‘My business, not yours.’
I left her then, and went back to her cabin. The cracked glass globe of Paladin’s head rested before me, still dim, but if I believed anything it was that there were thoughts going on in that glass, and sooner or later he would speak to me again, as he had spoken in Mazarile, because he was a hero of the Twelfth Occupation and I had a feeling history wasn’t quite done with him yet. Call it faith, I suppose, just as I had faith in my sister.
For now, though, I had my paper, and I had my ink. But before I could start, I stationed myself at Bosa’s window and looked out of it, beyond the Nightjammer to the purple glint and glimmer of the Thirteenth Occupation, the fifty million little worlds of the Congregation, all the named worlds and baubles, the countless more that had never been named and never would be, huddling close to the Old Sun, pressed in from outside by all the magnificent darkness and silence of the Empty, and I mused on all the people on them, all the towns and cities, all the ships sailing between those places, proud with cargo and prizes, sails bright and billowing on the photon winds, and the bones that whispered secrets between the ships, and I wondered what it would take for me to ever feel that I could lead a settled and normal life in those worlds.
I shivered. It was cold in Bosa’s ship, but not half as cold as the void beyond that glass.
Something flickered behind my reflection. A dance of lights in Paladin’s head? But by the time I’d turned he was dim again, if indeed there had been anything there.
I returned to her desk, fixed myself to the chair, spread open the gutted covers of Rackamore’s 1384 edition of the Book of Worlds, and slid one sheet of my new paper between them. Then I took up my pen in my cold tin fingers and scratched down the name of my sister, because she was where it all began.
Also by Alastair Reynolds from Gollancz:
Novels
Revelation Space
Redemption Ark
Absolution Gap
Chasm City
Century Rain
Pushing Ice
The Prefect
House of Suns
Terminal World
Blue Remembered Earth
On the Steel Breeze
Poseidon’s Wake
The Medusa Chronicles (with Stephen Baxter)
Short Story Collections:
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
Galactic North
Zima Blue
Beyond the Aquila Rift
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Gollancz
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.
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Copyright © Dendrocopos Limite
d 2016
The moral right of Alastair Reynolds to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior permission of both the copyright owner and the
above publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
ISBN (eBook) 978 0 575 09056 9
www.alastairreynolds.com
www.orionbooks.co.uk
www.gollancz.co.uk
Alastair Reynolds, Revenger 9780575090569
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