“My department has also counted over four hundred Red corpses,” the Accounts manager added as the silence lengthened, his voice taking on a desperately hopeful tone.
“Plus who knows how many Spoiled and Green,” Arberus put in. “In terms of numbers, I’d say we’re about even. And we’ll soon have more product than we know what to do with.”
“And fewer Blood-blessed to use it.” Lizanne clasped her hands together to conceal the tremble, born as much from fatigue as worry. She found the expectation on their faces grated on her. Seven thousand dead in a single night and still they look to me.
“There is, perhaps, some crumb of comfort to be gleaned from our misfortune,” the Accounts manager said. “Though I may be considered callous for voicing it.”
“A conclusion formed before now,” Lizanne assured him. “What is it?”
“The fleet,” he said, eyes darting about the room as if worried the entire meeting might turn on him. “Our losses, tragic though they are, mean that we now have sufficient shipping to carry the entire population.”
Lizanne thought it a measure of their situation that the man’s statement was greeted by grim silence rather than an angry outburst. “How much longer?” she asked Jermayah.
“Another two days,” he said. “Once we’ve repaired the damage from last night. And I’ll need every Blood-blessed still standing. Turns out iron forges more easily under blood-fire.”
“Will they allow us another two days?” Arberus wondered. “Even with their losses, patrols report the jungle still thick with Spoiled. And we can bet the Reds aren’t spent either.”
“We can expect at least a day’s respite,” Lizanne said, keeping her gaze on Jermayah. “It all needs to be done before they come again. Take whatever measures you deem necessary, but there is no longer any other option. We will evacuate this city and sail for Feros.”
“The Blues . . .” Flaxknot began but fell silent at Lizanne’s glare.
“We will arm the ships with as many Growlers and Thumpers as we can. The Protectorate vessels will form a vanguard, fight their way through and the rest of the fleet will follow.” She rose from the desk, gesturing at the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
After they had gone she lay on her bunk, Blue vial in hand as she felt her body thrum with fatigue. Is there any point? she wondered, looking at the vial, heavy-lidded eyes watching the contents slosh back and forth. For some reason Madame Bondersil’s face swam into her thoughts, her younger face from that first meeting at the Academy, severe but also kind in her way. Was she planning it all then? Lizanne wondered. Plotting her inevitable rise year after year. All for nothing, her personal fiefdom destined for destruction within a few weeks of her ascension. Her great legacy no more than a pile of ash.
Her gaze returned to the vial, lingering on the product beading the glass. He’s dead, she thought as a parade of faces drifted through her mind. Burgrave Artonin, Madam Meeram, Kalla and Misha, poor lovelorn Sirus, Commander Stavemoor and so many others . . . Surely, by now. He must be dead.
CHAPTER 41
Clay
Clay rolled as the knife came down, hearing the blade shatter on the stone floor, then kicked out as Scriberson drew the stunted weapon back for another try. Clay’s boot caught the astronomer under the chin, sending him staggering back with blood streaming from his partly scaled mouth. Clay got to his feet, drawing the Stinger and levelling it at Scriberson’s forehead. “Where is she?” he demanded.
For a second Scriberson just stood and stared at him, blood leaking from remolded features that betrayed no emotion at all. His eyes, Clay realised, seeing the slits surrounded by yellow. The eyes of a Spoiled, or a drake. Scriberson lunged for him again, jabbing the stump of his knife blade at Clay’s neck. It was a fast move, but also clumsy and obvious. Whatever changes had been wrought in him, the astronomer had not been made into a fighter. Clay side-stepped the thrust, shifted his grip on the Stinger and slammed the butt into Scriberson’s temple, sending him to his knees. Clay put the barrel of the Stinger against his neck and drew back the hammer, speaking in a slow, deliberate tone that left no room for doubt. “Where is she, you son of a bitch?”
Scriberson turned his head to regard Clay with the same blank stare from the same slitted eyes. Scribes is not at home any more, Clay decided, stepping back from him. A slight change in the light caused him to steal a glance at the blue crystal, its pulsing rhythm now replaced by a faint shimmer. The sound of many feet shifting on stone made him turn, finding himself confronted by all the Briteshore folk. Their expressions were as blank as Scriberson’s, but instead of staring in rapt fascination at the crystal, now their identical-slitted eyes were all fixed on him.
Scriberson surged to his feet and charged at Clay, clawed hands reaching out with obvious intent. “Dammit, Scribes!” Clay dodged the charge and delivered a punch to Scriberson’s jaw, trying to dissuade him from any further assaults, but the astronomer seemed to be beyond any pain now. Shrugging off the blow he crouched to charge again. Clay brought up the Stinger, intending to put a bullet in his leg; he was no use dead, after all. His finger halted on the trigger as Scriberson came to an abrupt halt, his transformed eyes widening into a semblance of something human as he staggered, lips wet with blood and gurgling as he turned to display the throwing-knife buried in the base of his skull. He fell to the floor, gurgled some more then lay still.
Clay raised his gaze from the astronomer’s corpse, seeing her straightening from the throw near the entrance to the dome. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said and Silverpin smiled, but it was a smile he hadn’t seen on her face before. As rich in regret as it was in fondness. I ain’t supposed to be here, he realised, returning his gaze to Scriberson’s corpse, Miss Lethridge’s words from the unbidden trance coming back to him. Joya . . . The Island girl . . .
A tumult of footsteps snapped his gaze back to the Briteshore people, seeing them all charging towards him, some brandishing knives or pickaxes, others reaching out with clawed hands. He shot the closest one, the managerial type in the suit, then two more. It didn’t seem to discourage their companions and he back-pedaled on rapid feet, bringing down another two before the Stinger fired empty. Still they came on, his back connecting with the jagged spines of the crystal. He dropped the Stinger as they closed in, his hands fumbling for his vials. He managed to get the Black clear of the wallet, but it was too late, many hands reaching out to restrain him as they pressed in with crushing force. He yelled at the sting of a knife blade jabbing into his cheek, thrashing and kicking as he tried to get the vial to his lips. One sip, just one sip to throw them off . . .
Then the pressure was gone, these new-made Spoiled drawing back as one, retreating into the same crescent formation with an unconscious, near-military precision. Silverpin stood amongst them, bloodied spear in hand and a fresh-killed Spoiled at her feet. She beckoned to Clay as he staggered, untouched vial in hand. He stared at her in blank incomprehension until she repeated the gesture with an urgent flick of her hand before making for the exit. With a final wary glance at the silent figures surrounding him, and a brief look at Scriberson’s unmoving body, he trotted obediently in her wake.
—
The entrance slid closed behind him after he made his way outside. Silverpin stood with the butt of her spear resting on the chamber floor, her smile smaller, but no less regretful. Clay studied her face for a long time, wondering why there was no anger in him now, none of the heat that had gripped him as Lutharon bore him through the clouds.
“Something always made me wonder,” he said. “Just how did you manage to kill Keyvine? Him being such a very dangerous man and all. Couldn’t have been easy, even for you.”
Her smile faded and she shrugged. As ever, he found her meaning easy to interpret. You know how.
He replayed Miss Lethridge’s message, the absent words tumbling into place. Joya’s alive . . . She saw . . . The
Island girl is a Blood-blessed . . . “Thank you,” he said. “For letting Joya live.”
Another shrug, a flicker of a smile, gone in an instant. A favour to you.
He glanced back at the now-sealed dome. “Scriberson didn’t take you here. You took him.” A small, bitter laugh bubbled up from inside him, building into something shrill and harsh by the time he forced it down. “Why?”
She gave no response this time, save to lower her head, her face losing all animation. Clay took a step towards her as the anger finally arrived, fighting the impulse to grip her shoulders and shake answers from her. Instead he could only repeat “Why?” in a strained whisper.
Slowly, she raised her face, eyes meeting his, pale and beautiful in her mask of ink. And she blinked.
—
Noise. Voices. The scent of many people. The air abruptly changed from the dry heat of the chamber to the sultriness of Carvenport in early summer. He stood amongst a thick crowd of people in the broad avenue leading to Harvester’s Square, home to the breeding pens. He could see that a platform had been erected alongside a large vat at the far end of the avenue, the thick oak planking that formed its sides shuddering as the thing inside strained against its bonds. A number of adults and children were arranged in an orderly line in front of the platform, the youngsters either squirming in boredom or clutching their parents in fearful response to the noise emanating from the vat. Clay remembered it well, grunting out its pain and rage through the iron muzzle they had secured over its jaws. Hearing it then he had known it to be something terrible, something that wanted badly to kill all the people gathered to celebrate its death.
A tall man of spindly proportions stood on the platform reading aloud from a thick sheaf of papers. He was dressed in out-dated managerial garb and his voice possessed the toneless quality of those who would be better served by short speeches, but evidently he had a lot to say. Clay remembered how the crowd had begun murmuring amongst themselves as the man droned on, the murmur soon building to a babble of unrestrained conversation, though if the speech-maker took any notice of the fact that he had lost his audience, he failed to show it.
“The Corporate Age is . . .” he intoned then paused to turn a page, “. . . an age of wonders. But these wonders are not gifts; they do not spring unbidden from the ether. Instead they are the product of the Corporatist ethos . . .”
“The day of the Blood-lot,” a voice said. It was a clear, confident voice, uncoloured by an accent. Clay turned to find a young woman about his own age at his side, blonde with fine pale features. She wore a plain blue dress that complemented her colouring perfectly, matching as it did the shade of her eyes. Eyes set in a face free of tattoos. Eyes he would know anywhere.
“You can talk,” he said, which made her laugh.
“Obviously. The trance is a place of endless possibility, Clay. Here I can talk. We can finally talk.” She smiled and reached for his hand, face clouding with hurt when he snatched it away.
“I didn’t drink,” he said. “Neither did you.”
“We are in a place where such things are redundant, for me at least. Maybe for you too, in time.”
“How?”
“I truly do not know. There is so much still beyond my understanding. But I was promised wonders if I came here, and so it proved.”
“Promised by who?”
She turned as another woman made her way through the crowd. For a moment Clay thought he was seeing Silverpin’s twin but then saw the lines around the woman’s mouth and eyes. She couldn’t have been more than thirty but those lines told of youth lost to a hard life, as did the threadbare dress and shawl she wore. A little girl had hold of the woman’s hand, a little girl with blonde hair and striking blue eyes. He saw a strange cast to the woman’s face, an emptiness that echoed the blank fascination in Scriberson’s gaze. The little girl was far more animated, eyes fixed on the vat and seeming to shine with excitement.
“He promised me many things,” Silverpin said, standing aside as the pair passed by, smiling down at the little girl. “Ever since I could remember, he whispered to me. In dreams at first but then when I was awake. He called to me, and my journey to his side began here.”
She began to follow the woman and child through the crowd, passing through the assembled townsfolk as if they were mist. Clay stayed at her side, keeping close to catch every baffling word she spoke. “He said I was different. That the great gift I carried inside me had been waiting a very long time to be set free. But it needed to be fed, awoken from its slumber.”
Up ahead, he saw the woman stride past a yawning Protectorate constable without attracting his notice, then walk along the line of those awaiting the Blood-lot. “I had always found Mother very easy to control,” Silverpin went on as they followed. “Easier than any other, in fact. The blood connection, I suppose. Others have a tendency to be more difficult. And you,” she paused to favour Clay with a small grin, “were virtually impossible. It’s often the way with other Blood-blessed. No matter how many seeds I plant in their minds, they rarely take root.”
“Seeds?” Clay asked.
“I told you there was more to the trance than just shared memory. Blue is a remarkable product; your kind understands only the barest fraction of its power.”
He thought back to the Briteshore folk in the dome, staring in rapt fascination at the blue crystal as their bodies became corrupted. Had it somehow planted seeds in their minds as she had planted seeds in Braddon and the others? Perhaps it had called to them over the weeks and months they laboured in the shadow of this mountain. He remembered the pictograms they found in the manager’s office, line after line of neat script eventually becoming a frenzied mish-mash as the planted seed grew and took away the will of the man who scribbled it all down, probably without any understanding of what it meant. So they all came here to get Spoiled, he thought then frowned at another realisation. No, not all. The miner who blew his brains out on the stairs, and the Blood-blessed woman. They resisted it. Just like I resisted her, but not as much as I should have.
The woman and child were at the steps to the platform now, paused as they regarded the two Protectorate guards posted there. They seemed just as bored as their colleagues, one rolling his eyes at the other as the speaker turned yet another page and began a poorly phrased exploration of company ethics. Silverpin came to a halt and the memory froze around them, silence descending as every face and body stopped as if trapped in amber. She pointed at the little girl, still holding her mother’s hand, but turned to look at something. Clay followed her gaze and saw that her attention was returned by a boy in the line. The boy was about her own age, skin as dark as hers was pale. He held the hand of a slender woman in a recently washed dress, cunningly stitched to disguise the many repairs and alterations it had suffered over the years. He knew because he had watched her work on it every night over the preceding week, hours seated at the kitchen-table with needle-and-thread, and that was after a ten-hour shift in the wash-house. “Ain’t nobody looking down on us,” she had said. “Torcreek name means something in this city.”
Clay’s chest tightened as he looked into his mother’s face. She was smiling down at the boy holding her hand and the depth of love he saw was hard to bear. “I remembered you, Clay,” Silverpin said. “In fact I remember every detail of this day and pretty much everything since. Blue is powerful, but it holds a price. It seeps into your mind, changes it. Memory becomes inescapable, and so does guilt.”
The scene returned to life again, all the people unfreezing and the air thickening with their noise. The little girl turned away from the boy as her mother moved on from the bored guards, keeping to the edge of the platform until she came to where it ended at the vat. She bent and lifted the girl up onto the platform before climbing up after, all the time wearing the same empty mask of a face.
“You must have known it would kill her,” Clay said.
S
ilverpin gave no reply, leading him through the guards to ascend to the platform. They watched the woman and girl climb the final set of steps to the top of the scaffold overlooking the vat where they waited, still, silent and completely unnoticed.
“. . . and so,” the manager said, an air of finality creeping into his otherwise flat tones, “as a demonstration of the regard in which the Ironship Syndicate holds the people of this city, we will proceed with the harvesting.”
Grateful applause rippled through the crowd as he stepped back and all eyes turned to the vat. Silverpin led Clay to the scaffold and they climbed up to stand behind the woman and girl, staring down at the ugly spectacle below. The Black was the largest Clay had seen, a foot or more taller at the shoulder than Lutharon, and he was old. It was clear in the many scars on his hide, and the keenness of his gaze as he tried to thrash in his web of chains. Clay could see both fear and rage in those eyes. The Black understood his fate.
His wings had been hacked off and the stumps sealed with burning pitch, but still they twitched, the muscles working under the aged skin as he tried instinctively to fly clear of this threat. Harsh, guttural rasps came from the iron muzzle clamped over his jaws and Clay knew he was attempting to breathe fire at the man approaching across the floor of the vat. He would be a Master Harvester, Clay knew; only those who spent a lifetime in the pens could be trusted with the task of tapping a full-grown Black. The harvester wore a suit of thick green leather that covered him from head to foot, his face a pale smudge behind the glass visor sewn into his hood. He held a long steel spile in one hand and a hammer in the other. He would leave the drake alive, Clay knew, so the heart would pump as much product clear of his veins before exhaustion and death overtook him.