Frey stepped into his quarters and slid the heavy iron door shut behind him, cutting off the voices of his crew. With a sigh, he sat on the hard bunk and dragged his hand down his face, mashing his features as if he could smear them away. He sat there for a while, thinking nothing, wallowing in the bleak depression that had settled on him.
Every time, he thought bitterly. Every damned time.
Suddenly, he surged to his feet and drew back his hand to strike the wall, but at the last instant he stopped himself. Instead he pressed forehead and fist against it, breathing deeply, hating. A hatred without target or focus, directed at nothing, the blind frustration of a man maligned by fate.
What had he done to deserve this? Where was it written that all his best efforts should come to nothing, that opportunity should flirt with him and leave him ragged, that money should rust to powder in his hands? How had he ended up living a life surrounded by the witless, the desperate, drunkards, thieves and villains? Wasn’t he better than that?
That bastard Quail! He’d done this. Somehow, he was responsible. Frey had known the job was too good to be true. The only people who ever made fifty thousand ducats out of a deal were people who already had ten times that. Just one more way the world conspired to keep the rich where they were, and keep everyone else down.
The Ace of Skulls should never have exploded. It was impossible. What happened to those people . . . Frey never meant for that. It was an accident. He couldn’t be blamed. He’d only meant to hit the aerium tanks. He had hit the aerium tanks. It was just one of those things, like a volcano erupting, or when a craft got caught in a freak hurricane. An act of the Allsoul, if you believed all that Awakener drivel.
Frey sourly reflected there might be something in the idea of an all-controlling entity. Someone was certainly out to get him, intent on thwarting his every endeavour. If there was an Allsoul, then he sure as spit didn’t like Frey very much.
He walked over to the steel washbasin and splashed water on his face. In the soap-streaked mirror he studied himself. He smiled experimentally. The lines at the edges of his eyes seemed to have deepened since last time he looked. He’d first noticed them a year ago, and had been shocked by the first signs of decline. He’d unconsciously assumed he’d always stay youthful.
Though he’d never admit it aloud, he knew he was handsome. His face had a certain something about it that pulled women towards him: a hint of slyness, a promise of danger, a darkness in his grin - something, anyway. He never was exactly sure what. It had given him an easy confidence in his youth, a self-assured air that only attracted women more strongly still.
About the only piece of luck I ever got, he thought, since he was in the mood to be peevish.
Even men could be drawn into his orbit, sucked in by a vague envy of his success with the opposite sex. Frey had never had a problem making new friends. Charm, he’d discovered, was the art of pretending you meant what you said. Whether complimenting a man, or offering feathered lies to a woman, Frey never seemed less than sincere. But he’d usually forget them the moment they were out of his sight.
Now here he was, thirty, with lines around his eyes when he smiled. He couldn’t trade on his looks for ever, and when they were gone, what was left? What would he do when his body couldn’t take the rum any more and the women didn’t want him?
He threw himself away from the sink with a snort of disgust.
Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Frey. No one likes a whiner.
Still, he had to admit, it had been a pretty bad decade and his thirties had got off to an unpromising start. Waiting for his luck to change had worn his patience thin, and trying to change it himself invariably ended in disaster.
Look on the bright side, he thought. At least you’re free.
Yes, there was that. No boss to work for, no Coalition Navy breathing down his neck. No woman tying him down. Well, not in the metaphorical sense, anyway. Some of his conquests had been more sexually adventurous than others.
But damn, this time . . . this time he really thought he had a chance. The sheer disappointment had shaken him badly.
It could have been different, though. Maybe if you’d taken a different path, ten years ago. Maybe you’d have been happy. You’d certainly have been rich.
No. No regrets. He wouldn’t waste his life on regrets.
The captain’s quarters were cramped, although they were still the biggest on the craft. He didn’t keep them particularly clean. The metal walls were coated in a faint patina of grime and the floor was filthy with bootprints. His bunk took up most of the space, beneath a string hammock of luggage which threatened to snap and bury him in the night. A desk, drawers and cabinets were affixed to the opposite wall, with catches in the drawers and doors to prevent them opening during flight. In the corner was his mirror and washbasin. Sometimes he used the washbasin as a toilet in the night, rather than climb two levels down to use the head. There were advantages to being male.
He got up and opened a drawer. Inside, atop a mess of papers and notebooks, sat a tiny bottle of clear liquid. He took it, and returned to the bunk.
Might as well, he thought, sadly.
He unscrewed the stopper, which also functioned as a pipette. He squeezed the bulb and drew in a little liquid, tipped his head back and administered one drop to each eye. Blinking, he lay back on the bed.
Drowsy relief billowed over his senses. The aches in his joints faded away, to be replaced by a warm, cloudy sensation that erased his cares and smoothed his brow. His eyes flickered shut, and he drifted on the cusp of sleep for a long while before succumbing.
He dreamed that night of a young woman, with long blonde hair and a smile so perfect it made his heart glow like burning embers. But when he woke the next morning, he remembered none of it.
Eight
Tavern Banter - Crake Visits An Old Friend - The Sanctum - An Unpleasant Surprise
Old One-Eye’s tavern was a swelter of heat and smoke, pungent with sweat and meat and beer. The gas lamps were muted by the fug that hung in the air. Stoves, lit to keep the chill of dusk away, made the room stifling. The din of conversation was such that people had to shout to be heard, raising the volume ever further. Waitresses passed between the crude wooden tables, expertly avoiding the attentions of rough-eyed men with ready hands.
Buried amid the standing crowd, Frey held court at a table littered with pewter flagons. He was just finishing a tale about his early days working for Dracken Industries as a cargo hauler. The story concerned an employee’s senile mother, who had somehow got to the controls of an unattended tractor and driven it into a pile of caged chickens. The punchline was delivered with enough panache to make Pinn spew beer from his nose, which had Malvery laughing so hard he retched. Crake observed the scene with a polite smile. Harkins looked nervously at the people standing nearby, clearly wishing he was anywhere but here. The gangly pilot had been cajoled along on this expedition by Malvery, who thought it would do him good to get out among people. Harkins hated the idea, but had agreed anyway, to avoid the slightest risk of giving offence by refusal.
Jez and Silo were absent. Jez didn’t drink alcohol, and kept herself to herself; Silo rarely left the ship.
Crake sipped at his beer as Pinn and Malvery recovered. His companions were all merrily drunk, except Harkins, who radiated discomfort despite having sunk three flagons already. Crake was still working on his first. They’d given up bullying him to keep pace once he’d convinced them he wouldn’t be swayed. He had other business tonight, and it didn’t involve getting hammered on cheap alcohol.
How easily they forgot, he thought. As if Macarde holding a gun to his head was a trifling matter not worthy of comment. As if the mass murder of dozens of innocent people was something that could be erased with a few nights of heavy drinking.
Was that their secret? Was that how they lived in this world? Like animals, thinking only of what was in front of them. Did they live in the moment, without thought for the past or concern for
the future?
Certainly that was true of Pinn. He was too dim to comprehend such intangibles as past or future. Whenever he spoke of them, it was with such a devastating lack of understanding that Crake had to leave the room.
Pinn rambled endlessly about Lisinda, a girl from his village, the sweetheart who waited for him back home. His devotion and loyalty to her were eternal. She was a goddess, a virginal idol, the woman he was to marry. After a brief romance - during which Pinn proudly declared they’d never had sex, as if through some mighty restraint on his part - she’d told him she loved him. Not long afterward, he’d left her a note and gone out into the world to make his fortune. That had been four years ago, and he’d neither seen nor contacted her since. He’d return a rich and successful man, or not at all.
Pinn saw himself as her shining knight, who would one day return and give her all the wonderful things he felt she deserved. The simple truth - which, in Crake’s opinion, was obvious to anyone with half a brain - was that the day would never come. What little money Pinn had was quickly squandered on pleasures of the flesh. He gambled, drank and whored as if it was his last day alive, and he flew the same way. Even if he somehow managed to survive long enough to luck his way into a fortune, Crake had no doubt that the bovine, dull-looking girl - whose picture Pinn enthusiastically showed to all and sundry - had long since given up on him and moved on.
In Crake’s eyes, Pinn had no honour. He’d lie with whores, then lament his manly weakness in the morning and swear fidelity to Lisinda. The following night he’d get drunk and do it again. How he could believe himself in love on the one hand and cheat on her on the other was baffling. Crake considered him a life-form ranking somewhere below a garden mole and just above a shellfish.
The others, he couldn’t so easily dismiss. Harkins was a simple man, but at least he knew it. He didn’t suffer the same staggering failure of self-awareness that Pinn did. Malvery had a brain on him when he chose to use it, and he was a good-hearted sort to boot. Jez, while not luminously cultured, was very quick and knew her stuff better than anyone on board, with the possible exception of their mysterious Murthian engineer. Even Frey was smart, though clearly lacking in education.
How, then, could these people live so day-to-day? How could they discard the past and ignore the future with such enviable ease?
Or was it simply that the past was too painful and the future too bleak to contemplate?
He finished his drink and got to his feet. This was a question for another time.
‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I have to pay someone a visit.’
His announcement was greeted by a rousing wa-hey! from the table.
‘A lady friend, eh?’ Malvery enquired with a salacious nudge that almost unbalanced him. ‘I knew you’d crack! Three months I’ve known him and he’s not so much as looked at a woman!’
Crake managed to maintain a fixed smile. ‘You must admit, the quality of lady I’ve been exposed to hasn’t been terribly inspiring.’
‘Hear that?’ jeered Pinn. ‘He thinks he’s too good for our sort! Or maybe it’s just that women aren’t to his taste,’ he finished with a smirk.
Crake wasn’t sinking to that level. ‘I’ll be back later,’ he said stiffly, and left.
‘We’ll be here!’ Frey called after him.
‘You great big ponce!’ Pinn added, to raucous howls of laughter from his companions.
Crake pushed his way out of the tavern, cheeks burning. The cold, clear air off the sea soothed him. He stood outside Old One-Eye’s, collecting himself. Even after several months on board the Ketty Jay, he wasn’t used to being mocked quite so crudely. It took him a short while before he felt calm enough to forgive the crew. Not Pinn, though. That was just one more score against him. Ponce, indeed. That moron didn’t know how to love a woman.
He buttoned up his greatcoat, pulled on a pair of gloves and began to walk.
Tarlock Cove at dusk was rather picturesque, he thought. A fraction more civilised than the dives he’d become accustomed to, anyway. With the Hookhollows rising steeply at the back of the town and the wild Poleward Sea before it, there was a dramatic vista at every corner. It was built into the mountainside and straggled around the encircling arms of the bay, connected by steep stairs and winding gravel paths. Houses were narrow, wooden and generally well kept once you got away from either of the two docks. Vessels of both air and sea made port here, as Tarlock Cove was built on fishing. The ships trawled the shoals and sold their catch to the aircraft crews for distribution.
It was, in fact, the reason they’d come here. Having been burned by their last endeavour, Frey decided to play it safe with some nice, legal work that wasn’t liable to get them all killed. He’d all but emptied the Ketty Jay’s coffers to buy a cargo of smoked bloodfish, which he planned to sell inland for a profit. Apparently, it was ‘easy work’ and ‘nothing could go wrong’, both phrases Crake had learned to mistrust of late.
He headed up railed stone stairways and along curving lanes. The houses pressed close to a waist-high barrier wall, which separated pedestrians from the sheer cliffs on the other side. Lamplighters were making their way along the cobbled streets, leaving a dotted line of hazily glowing lamp-posts in their wake. Tarlock Cove was preparing for dusk.
As Crake climbed higher, he could see the lighthouse at the mouth of the bay, and he was pleased when he noticed it brighten and begin to turn. Such things, signs of a well-run and orderly world, gave him a sense of enormous satisfaction at times.
Orderliness was one of the reasons he’d liked Tarlock Cove on his previous visits. It was overseen by the family whose name it bore, and the Tarlocks ensured their little town wasn’t left to ruin. Houses were well painted, streets swept clean, and the Ducal Militia made certain that the ragamuffin traders who passed through were kept from bothering the respectable folk higher up the mountainside.
Dominating it all from the highest point of the town was the Tarlock manse. It was unassuming in its grandeur, a wide, stout building with many windows, benevolently overlooking the bay. A classically understated design, Crake thought: the picture of aristocratic modesty. He’d visited with the Tarlocks once, and found them delightful company.
But it wasn’t the Tarlocks he planned to see tonight. He went instead down a winding, lamp-lit lane and knocked at the door of a thin, three-storey house sandwiched between other houses of a similar design.
The door was opened by a rotund man in his sixties wearing pincenez. The top of his head was bald, but stringy grey hair fell around his neck and over the collar of his brown-and-gold jacket.
He took one look at his visitor and the colour drained from his face.
‘Good evening, Plome,’ Crake said.
‘Good evening?’ Plome spluttered. He looked both ways up the alley, then seized him by the arm and pulled him over the threshold. ‘Get off the street, you fool!’ He shut the door the moment Crake was inside.
The hallway within was shadowy at this hour: the lamps hadn’t yet been lit. Gold-framed portraits and a floor-to-ceiling mirror hung on panelled walls of dark wood. As Crake began to unbutton his greatcoat, he glanced through the doorway into the sitting room. Tea and cakes for two had been laid out on a lacquered side table next to a pair of armchairs.
‘You were expecting me?’ Crake asked, bemused.
‘I was expecting someone entirely different! A judge, if you must know! What are you doing here?’ Before Crake could answer, Plome had taken him by the elbow and was hurrying him down the hall.
At the end of the hall was a staircase. Plome steered Crake around the side to a small, innocuous door. It was a cupboard under the stairs, to all appearances, but Crake knew by the prickling of his senses that appearances were deceptive here. Plome drew a tuning fork from his coat and rapped it smartly against the door frame. The fork sang a high, clear note, and Plome opened the door.
Inside was a single shelf with a lantern, and a set of wooden steps leading down. Plome
held the fork high, still ringing, and ushered Crake past. Crake felt himself brushed by the daemon that had been thralled into the doorway. A minor glamour. Anyone opening the door before subduing the daemon with the correct frequency would have seen nothing but a cluttered cupboard, probably accompanied by a strong mental suggestion that there was nothing interesting inside.
‘Watch yourself,’ said Plome. ‘I’ll go first. Third step from the bottom will paralyse you for an hour or so.’
Crake stopped and waited for Plome to shut the door, strike a match and touch it to the lantern. He led the way down the stairs, and Crake followed him. At the bottom Plome struck another match and lit the first of several gas-lamps set in sconces on the walls. A soft glow swelled to fill the room.
‘Electricity hasn’t caught on here yet, I’m afraid,’ he said apologetically, moving from lamp to lamp with the match. ‘The Tarlocks banned small generators. Too noisy and smelly, that’s the official line. But really it’s so they can build their own big generator and charge us all for the supply.’