And then it was gone. The tail flicked past them as it left, cutting the air with a whipcrack, but it had touched neither of them. There was just the empty cage, the open door, the two men in the chaos that had once been a laboratory.
Spatha’s stasis of indecision lasted a few moments longer, and then his old self returned.
‘You wanted mayhem,’ Quillon said. ‘Looks like you’re going to get it.’
‘Turn around, Doctor.’
‘Are you going to kill me?’
He didn’t have to wait for an answer. Spatha took his gun by the barrel and smashed the butt against Quillon’s skull. Pain flowered between his eyes and he slumped to the floor.
Spatha couldn’t shoot him, of course. Quillon realised this as his mind cleared and the pain shifted from agonising to merely intensely unpleasant. He had not blacked out, or if he had it had only been for an instant, not long enough to interrupt his thoughts. No, he couldn’t be shot because that would place Spatha in the laboratory, and it had to look as if Quillon was the one who had released the vorg. Knocking him unconscious made it look as if he had been injured by the vorg’s escape, as if he had been the only one down there.
He forced himself to his feet, fighting throbbing waves of dizziness and nausea. Touched a hand to the side of his head where the gun had struck him, winced at the contact, but came away with his fingers dry rather than bloody. The skin had not been broken. He took slow, calming breaths, trying to shuffle his thoughts into order. Spatha was gone and the vorg was still out there.
Perhaps it was the pain, but he experienced a sudden unexpected clarity of perception. He understood now why he had been asked to steal the blue book. It had nothing to do with the book’s contents, which even Ricasso had considered valueless to his enemies. It had, instead, everything to do with what Quillon had done subsequently. He had informed Ricasso of the matter and by doing so had entered deeper into Ricasso’s confidence. Perhaps Ricasso would have allowed Quillon access to the laboratory without that gesture, but it had undoubtedly ushered the process along. And all of that had allowed Spatha to engineer the sabotaging of Ricasso’s experiments and make it look like Quillon’s handiwork. For a moment, he could only marvel at Spatha’s chicanery, and feel bitterly repulsed at the ease with which he had been manipulated.
The snake still has venom, Ricasso had said.
The fog was lifting from his mind. Forcing himself to act calmly, he looked around the laboratory, making sure he absorbed all the details. The other vorgs were stirring, but their cages remained secure and their nutrient lines were still delivering. He had no projectile weapon, but the axe was still on the wall. He took it, and this time adrenalin turned it paper-light in his hands. He wasn’t sure what good it would do but he felt better for it.
He grabbed his bag in his other hand, left the laboratory and made doubly sure that he had locked the door on his way out. The vorg could only have gone one way, which was through the storage rooms that connected the laboratory with the rest of Purple Emperor’s multilevel gondola. As he passed through the first room he saw nothing out of place, suggesting that the creature had taken the path of least resistance. He entered the second room and heard a voice, raised and anxious. In the darkness he made out Spatha. He was standing - leaning, rather - against a wall, with a speaking tube raised to his lips. ‘One of them’s escaped. It’s in the lower levels ... broken through the wall, into the service space. Get men down here now, before it reaches the rest of the gondola. Automatic weapons, everything. Repeat, a vorg is loose!’
Quillon took in the hole that the vorg had punched through the storage room wall into the compartment beyond. The panelling was thin wood of no structural utility, the kind that even a determined fist could have punched through. The hole led not into another room, but a dusty, unlit crawlspace, threaded with pipes and tensioned control cables.
‘Not going to plan, is it?’
Spatha blinked, but that was as much surprise as he showed at Quillon’s arrival. He returned the speaking tube to the wall.
‘I should shoot you now, Doctor. It would spare both of us a great deal of trouble.’
‘Then you’d have even more explaining to do.’ Quillon surveyed the hole, wondering how far the vorg had already travelled. ‘What were you hoping for, Spatha? That it would make a bolt for daylight, and your security men could take care of it with the minimum of inconvenience? A death or two, just to make your point? Were your people already on standby, ready to pounce?’
‘Of course not. How were they to know you’d do this?’
‘Oh, good. Very good. Settling into your story already.’
‘Stay here,’ Spatha said. ‘Stay here or go back where I left you.’ He aimed the gun to emphasise his point, and Quillon backed off, raising his hands - still holding the medical bag and the axe - in surrender. Again he reminded himself that the only thing stopping Spatha shooting him now was that it would be difficult to fit into his narrative afterwards. He wasn’t supposed to be down here, after all, and would already have enough on his hands explaining how he knew about the vorg breakout so promptly. Quillon could only presume that there was no way to trace the origin of an utterance placed through the speaking tube system unless the speaker indicated their location.
And then Spatha was gone, leaving the way they had both entered, Quillon waiting two or three minutes before judging it was safe to follow him up into the public levels of the gondola. Generally when he left the laboratory he ascended into daylight, but not this time. The upper decks were gaslit, and as always there were fewer citizens walking around than during the hours of normal civic duty. But already there was more activity than was usual at this time. Spatha’s announcement had been piped through to the whole ship and people were beginning to respond. A mechanical siren - the general alarm for a shipboard emergency - wailed through the speaker grilles. Doors were opening, citizens and administrative staff stumbling out into the corridors, security officers appearing with guns and crossbows, or sprinting to the nearest armoury to equip themselves. Quillon set off for Ricasso’s quarters, but he had covered less than half the distance when he saw the man himself, along with Agraffe and Meroka.
‘What the hell’s happened?’ Ricasso asked, barking his question at Quillon.
‘Spatha,’ Quillon said. ‘He let it out. Got into the laboratory somehow and forced me to open the cage at gunpoint. If I hadn’t done it, he’d have opened it himself.’
‘The fucker,’ Meroka said, scathingly, but not without an undercurrent of admiration. ‘You all right, Cutter? Looks like you took a hit on the head.’
‘He tried to knock me out, make it look as if I’d done all this on my own. But I’m all right. Our problem is the vorg. I think Spatha was hoping it’d come up this way, make a nuisance of itself and then get shot. But it had other ideas.’
‘You saw where it went?’ Agraffe said.
‘Yes.’ Quillon looked around distractedly. ‘Where are Curtana and the others? Are they safe?’
‘Curtana’s aboard Painted Lady, getting her ready for the crossing,’ said Agraffe. Kalis and Nimcha haven’t been shipped over yet.’
‘I don’t want that thing getting anywhere near them, not after what almost happened on the ground,’ Quillon said.
‘Is it the same one?’ Ricasso asked.
‘You tell me. The left-most cage. No hindlimbs.’
‘One of my older ones, then. But no less problematic. Spatha said it broke into the service space - is that correct?’
‘Unfortunately. Do you think it’ll stay there?’
‘Where vorgs are concerned I’ve learned not to second-guess. They don’t think or reason the way we do. It may not even realise it’s in the air, aboard a ship.’
‘They’re going to crucify you for this,’ Quillon said.
‘We’ll see. First things first, and then we’ll worry about the repercussions. How’s the laboratory?’
‘A bit of a mess. I managed to get some of
the supplies over to Painted Lady beforehand, but I’m not sure how much difference they’ll make.’
‘You did what you could, Doctor, which is all anyone can expect of us. You - um - did lock up, didn’t you?’
Quillon marvelled at how anyone could absorb such potentially devastating news with barely a murmur of discontent. ‘I did,’ he said, ‘but someone else should still get down there and protect the place. Spatha a already has a way of getting in and out.’
Ricasso turned to the younger man. ‘Agraffe - can you take care of that? Find some men we can trust, and secure the laboratory and all the rooms leading to it. Be quick about it, too. Vorgs are fast, and they won’t miss a chance.’
‘I’ll take care of it,’ Agraffe said. ‘Doctor, I’ll have that axe if you have no objections.
As he handed over the axe, Quillon heard gunfire from the direction of the gondola’s stern, a hundred or more spans away. The shots were rapid, as if there was more than one shooter, but it was not automatic fire. Voices were raised, commands barked. The armed airmen who had been milling around waiting for specific orders began to move in the direction of the disturbance, weapons at the ready.
‘It might be nothing,’ Ricasso said. ‘There are enough rats living on this thing to make anyone jump at shadows. Or it might be our vorg. I think I’d best go and see for myself.’
‘Cutter and I’ll take care of the mother and kid,’ Meroka said, as if they had already discussed the matter.
‘I can do it on my own,’ Quillon said. ‘I only have to get them aboard Painted Lady.’
‘And if they need protecting, you aren’t the best man for the job. No offence, Cutter, but that’s the way it is.’
They reached Kalis and Nimcha without incident, moving against the flow of airmen and armed citizenry heading towards the front of the gondola. By the time they arrived - Quillon doubted that more than ten minutes had passed since the vorg’s breakout - Kalis was already on her feet, knocking on the door, wanting to know what was happening. He could hear her through the grille. Quillon didn’t know if Spatha’s broadcast had been piped through to her quarters, but she could not have failed to hear the commotion as half the citizenry were roused to action.
‘They’re under quarantine,’ the attending guard told Quillon, as he asked for the door to be opened. He was a young man with a shaving cut above his collar and a permanent curl to his lips.
‘Special orders from Ricasso,’ Quillon said. ‘Quarantine’s suspended. Kalis and Nimcha are to be relocated to Painted Lady before she departs.’
‘I’ll need to see paperwork on that.’
‘There’s a vorg loose,’ Meroka explained. ‘In case that escaped your attention. Ricasso’s doing his bit for Swarm, trying to kill the thing before it sucks someone’s brains out. Now, he might be able to find time in his schedule to file that paperwork you need, but I’m guessing it’s going to be a stretch, what with a monster on the loose and the ship being in a state of fucking emergency and all.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘So what’s it going to be? You going to let them out, or do I have to get, you know, truculent?’
‘We were just speaking to Ricasso,’ Quillon said, hoping to make their case more persuasive. ‘I was down in his laboratory when the vorg escaped.’
‘That was your doing, was it?’
‘It’s more complicated than it looks. But the thing is loose and these two people have already seen enough vorgs for one lifetime. They’d have been shipped over tomorrow; we’re just moving things up a few hours.’
‘You’d better not be lying, Spearpointer.’
‘If I’m lying, that’s the least of your problems. But there’s a very simple solution. Escort us to Painted Lady and surrender us to Captain Curtana. She’ll either accept that the quarantine’s over or clap all four of us in irons.’
‘Man’s talking sense,’ Meroka said. ‘Quarantine always was horse-shit, anyway.’
‘What the rumours said all along,’ the guard answered. ‘That it was nothing to do with them being dirt-rats. That it’s about the mother, or maybe the girl, and what’s under her hair.’
‘If either of them are tectomancers,’ Quillon said breezily, ‘I think we’d know by now.’
The guard opened the door. ‘Bring them out. I’ll take you over to Painted Lady. One word, one trick, and it’s over. Don’t think I won’t shoot the four of you. State of emergency, no one would quibble.’
‘What is happening?’ Kalis asked.
‘Special orders,’ Quillon said. ‘You’re being moved back to the first ship, the one we came in on.’
‘Something is wrong here,’ Kalis said. ‘Why are they shooting? Have the Skullboys come back?’
‘Not the Skulls,’ the guard said. ‘Got us a vorg on the loose.’
Kalis took in this news with equanimity, as if it was no more or less than she had been expecting. ‘Where is it?’
‘A long way from here,’ Quillon answered. ‘And we’ll be even safer aboard Painted Lady.’
‘Where will Meroka be?’ Nimcha asked.
‘I’ll be right there with you, kid. And no vorg’s coming anywhere near us.’
‘You’d best put on cold-weather clothes,’ Quillon said. ‘We’ll be spending some time outside.’
Nimcha asked, ‘Will you read the stories, Meroka?’
Meroka looked down at the picture books, spread open on the table. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘I don’t like them,’ Nimcha explained. ‘They’re stupid.’ She said this with the withering disdain only a child could adequately convey. ‘They’re about things that don’t matter. But I like it when Meroka reads them, and shows me how the words match the pictures. I like Meroka.’
‘Guess I have my uses,’ she said.
‘It makes both of you happy,’ Kalis said. ‘But my daughter is right. The stories are stupid.’
Watching the party being escorted through Purple Emperor, a casual observer would have struggled to tell whether they were being treated as prisoners or protected guests. Quillon supposed that it barely mattered now. His own liberty, if it still existed, was unlikely to last long. It would be his word against Spatha’s that he had not been responsible for the vorg’s release, and who would believe a foreigner, a man from Spearpoint with goggles over his eyes and secrets under his coat, a man with a demonstrable record of untruths? The best he could hope for now was to get Kalis and Nimcha to safety, while the authorities were preoccupied with the vorg.
There were two ways to reach Painted Lady - either by ferry craft, or by traversing the connecting walkways between airships - and both required the party to move through the gondola in the direction of the open-air loading dock where Quillon had first embarked. He willed the guard to lead them faster, but the young man seemed intent on dawdling, taking an unnecessarily circuitous route, perhaps in the hope of hearing some official confirmation of Ricasso’s order. The gunfire had abated while they were talking: he had heard no discharges at all after they had started moving.
They were very near the loading dock - no more than a corridor from it - when a pair of armed airmen appeared around a bend, weapons drawn.
‘Where are you taking them?’ the guard was asked, none too civilly, by the older of the pair.
‘Ricasso’s orders. They’re leaving the ship.’
‘Any orders Ricasso gave today are suspended with immediate effect. He’s under administrative restraint.’
‘I spoke to him about ten minutes ago,’ Quillon said, astonished. ‘He was going back to help you find the vorg.’
‘We found it. It isn’t going anywhere. No thanks to Ricasso, though.’
‘He had no part in its escape,’ said Quillon. ‘I was there when it got loose, and it wasn’t my doing either.’
‘You can explain all that to Commander Spatha. He wants you rounded up and brought to him.’ The man smiled at his companion. ‘Looks like we got here in the nick of time, doesn’t it?’
Quillon knew bet
ter than to resist: these were hotheads fired up with the possibility of an overnight change in the power structure, secure in the knowledge that if blood was shed, they would not be held accountable. The young guard was relieved of his responsibility for the party, while the two airmen walked them back into the main section of the gondola, retracing their steps part of the way before veering sternwards. It was still quiet, and some of the citizens who had been roused were beginning to drift back to their quarters and duty stations, reassured that the emergency - if not the political upheaval triggered by it - was at an end.
Presently they arrived at one of the observation rooms near the stern. The room was windowed on one side, and some of the panes had been shot out or punctured by stray rounds. A panel was missing from the back wall, where the vorg appeared to have forced its way out of the service space. An airman had his rifle aimed warily at the dark aperture, though the vorg itself had been captured and incapacitated. It lay on the carpeted floor, with Spatha and his coterie of loyalists forming a semicircle around it. Ricasso was there as well, neither at gunpoint nor under any visible restraint, but forced into cowed submission by the dissident airmen who now held power in this quarter. His face was red, his eyes wide and disbelieving, and the rumpled state of his clothes suggested that he had been handled none too gently. Spatha stood a few paces to his left, kicking a shiny-toed boot against the fallen vorg. It twitched on the floor, limbless, glossy entrails spilling from its metal chassis, mechanical eyes clicking and whirring in their housings. It been shot, and impaled through its ribs with crossbow bolts. It wasn’t dead yet.