It took me a moment to understand her meaning.
Bosa had left twenty-four of her own bodies on this ship. There was the final body she had been inhabiting at the time of her death, the shell that had once belonged to Illyria Rackamore, before she was taken and turned. We had kept that body alive long enough for Bosa to give up some of her secrets—teasingly, for the most part. I do not think she told us anything against her own wishes, even at the end—but we had not rid ourselves of it, nor, initially, of the twenty-three bodies we found in glass bottles, suspended in preservative fluid. They were dead, but some attachment or vanity had kept Bosa from disposing of them.
They had proven useful to us. I will not dwell on what Fura did to those bodies, suffice to say that she could not have completed The True and Accurate Testimony without them, and she had found a similar utility in the final corpse. We had thrown the other twenty-three into space, along with the bottles that hosted them, and the empty bottles that Bosa had kept for the bodies still to come—a lineage in which I might have come to take my eventual place. But we still carried the last iteration of Bosa Sennen, and now I grasped Fura’s intention.
“We spoke of returning her to Rackamore’s family,” I said. “To his home, to her place of birth. We agreed that we owed her memory at least that much.”
“We aren’t touching Illyria Rackamore’s memory. She died somewhere in the kindness room, under Bosa’s treatment. It stopped being her body around the same time.”
I do not know if I was persuaded that this course of action was either necessary or dignified, but there were occasions when it was easier to go along with Fura and it seemed this was one of them. So while we waited for the guns to cool, my sister and I went aft to the room where we kept the one remaining bottle, and in which we had stored the severely injured and mutilated remains of Bosa Sennen, who had once been the beloved daughter of Pol Rackamore. We persuaded her grey-green corpse out of that fluid, wrinkled our noses at the pickled stench of her, and then conveyed those remains to the nearest lock.
“I’d wish you a peaceful eternity,” Fura said, taking the head between her hands and forcing the sightless face to meet her own. “If I wasn’t sure you’d come back like a ghoul. You had your moment, Bosa. You had your ship and your crew, and you left your mark. But it’s ours now. I took it, and I took you, and in a century or two no one will remember either of us. Ain’t that sweet?” She leaned in and kissed Bosa on the forehead. “Now get the hell off my ship.”
We sealed the door and charged the lock with lungstuff so that it would blow out when the outer door was opened. It was a little wasteful but we had more than enough in reserve, as well as ample lightvine to keep the lungstuff fresh.
Then we went back to the control room, and Fura told Paladin to open the lock. It gave a pop, nothing to compare with the guns, but we felt it all the same.
“Track her to out to one league,” Fura said. “Then concentrate the guns. We’ll be watching from the port galley window.”
*
Not being privy to the inner workings of my sister’s mind, I cannot say for certain what she expected from that moment. Perhaps she thought there would be jubilation among the crew; that the final, decisive extinguishing of Bosa Sennen—the complete destruction of her last mortal remains—would be the act that fully cemented Fura as our natural leader. She had, after all, been the one who ended Bosa’s reign; what better ceremony to mark her own coronation? But when the guns turned Bosa to a grey cloud, a nebula made of ash and dust, already turning black at its heart as it thinned out and dissipated, the reaction was—I believe—a degree more muted than she would have desired. There was some clapping and cheering, but it was restrained, and the faces turned from the window with an unseemly haste, as if a thing had been done—a necessary thing—but not one that any of us cared to dwell on for a moment longer, once the deed itself had been completed. We felt like leering spectators at a hanging, witnessing a sort of justice but also demeaning it by the act of onlooking. Demeaning the act, and tainting ourselves with it as well.
“Rejoice,” Fura said, lifting her arms as if to encourage applause. “This is what we’ve been waiting for, coves. This moment. We’ve scrubbed out the last stain of her. I feel better already—like there’s one less stink aboard this ship. Should’ve done it the moment we took over!”
“It was just a corpse,” I said. “If you’d come later—if you’d come too late—it would be me that you’d have had to kill.”
“No,” Fura declared, in the full hearing of the others. “You’d have been long gone, Adrana. And I’d have done whatever needed to be done.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said quietly.
I despised what had happened to Illyria Rackamore. I hated what had happened to the innocents before her, all the way back down that vile lineage. Perhaps greed had brought some of them to that state of being, but I did not doubt that some—most, perhaps—had been free of obvious blame or miscalculation. Certainly, I had done nothing that warranted my capture, besides wishing for some adventure and a modest amount of independent capital. And yet, in the months that I had been Bosa’s understudy, I had seen something of the future that awaited me, if and when I was deemed worthy of her name and the captaincy of the Nightjammer. A ship without equal, and a command without complications. A crew that either loved me or perished, because Bosa Sennen permitted no intermediate condition. A name that made the twenty thousand worlds of the Congregation shrivel into themselves.
Although I wished to crush such thoughts, I cannot deny that they had their attractions. And while that future might have been closed to me, part of it still had a hold on my imagination.
I think I was the last one to turn from the window. By then there was no trace of Bosa Sennen left at all.
Outside, at least.
*
Nervousness was like a restless bird, moving from one perch to another. It had been settled on Strambli for long enough that I thought it might have found a home, content to remain with her even though she was incapacitated. But now that Strambli was ill, Surt was the one who had started getting the jitters. She was always stopping me to ask if I’d picked up anything new on the bones, and when she wasn’t on shift she seemed to find it hard to tear her eyes away from the sweeper, just in case she was the one who spotted a blip that the rest of us missed. Surt’s business was fixing things, hooking them together, persuading alien gubbins to speak to monkey gubbins, and vice versa. She was always sucking on a broken nail or blistered finger, because she spent half her life taking things apart or forcing them back together again, and when that was the entirety of her business she was very content. But she had done all that she could inside the ship, and being outside was much less comfortable to her, and besides which it made it impossible not to think of the other ship, since most of what there was to look at out there was space and emptiness, leagues of silky darkness in which something was trying to hide itself while inching closer to us.
She caught me between shifts, clawing at my arm as I tried to squeeze past on my way from the bones.
“Did you get a sniff of anything, Adrana?”
My patience was starting to wear thin. I had told her several times that if I had something to report, the crew would be the first to know. “No, Surt,” I said, smiling through my exasperation. “Nothing this time, or the last time, or the one before that.”
“Maybe they ain’t there after all, do you think?” she asked, with a rising childlike hopefulness.
“No, I believe they’re still behind us, much as I wish it were otherwise. But this … gambit of Fura’s, that will give ’em cause to reconsider the pursuit. They’ll understand that this is all just a big misunderstanding …”
“I was thinking about that. I know what Proz says, and Fura, but would we really be doing ourselves so much harm if we just … explained ourselves? I mean, we is innocent, ain’t we? I’m not forgetting that part?”
I smiled, genuinely this time, bec
ause I shared her sense that it was growing harder and harder to remind ourselves that we had not chosen this path for ourselves. We might have set a trap for Bosa, one that she had fallen into, but we had broken no laws in that regard, nor in taking a hostile ship as prize. “No—we is … we are … innocent, and don’t let that slip your mind, not for a second. And you’re right. This is just a misunderstanding. But a knotty one, all the same, that we have to take great care in unravelling. And we will, Surt, I’m sure of it.”
“Our story ain’t too complicated,” she said. “If we just laid it out, without goin’ into all the details—the Fang and the Ghosties, and all that—they’d believe us, wouldn’t they?”
“Yes, and that’s what we’ll do, if and when the moment is right.”
She glanced aside, dropping her voice. “We could just do it now, Adrana—you and me. Get on the squawk, and …”
I cannot account for what happened to me next.
Or rather, I can account for it, very easily, but I would much rather not do so.
An image flashed into my mind, sharp and grainy in the same moment, as if I’d seen it on newsprint or a flickerbox. It was Surt, bending low to the main squawk console, the light from its dials and buttons outlining her face, which was averted slightly from the console, turned to a furtive angle so that she might detect the approach of one or more of us, and be done with her business. She had the handset raised to her mouth, and she was whispering into it, speaking into the void, arguing our case to the nearest ship with the capability of intercepting our signal. Pleading with them to abandon the pursuit and the ranging fire, because we were innocents …
I saw the image as a warning, or presentiment, of what Surt would do, or was considering doing, regardless of my cooperation in the matter. And it was intolerable to me. An anger swelled in me like nothing I’d known before, except perhaps in the full state of possession in which I had pressed a knife to Fura. But that had been months ago, when Bosa was still alive—when her psychological influence on me had been at its strongest.
I had thought myself rid of her—or nearly rid.
It was not so.
I grabbed Surt by the scruff of her neck, my movement savage enough, and fast enough, that I might very easily have snapped her spine. The action was autonomous, driven by that rising rage, and while it originated from a foreign part of me, it also flowed through and out of me just as naturally as any self-generated impulse. I pinched a ridge of skin and dug my nails into it so forcefully that Surt yelped, and that yelp, I think, was the merciful intrusion that broke the spell, puncturing Bosa’s hold on me. I released her with a gasp of shock and shame, and the horror that showed itself in Surt’s eyes must have been fully reflected in my own.
“I didn’t mean …” I said, nearly stammering. “I didn’t. I’m sorry. I just …”
I withdrew my hand and arm. I was repulsed. “It was just the ship. I thought you were going to … that you were thinking of endangering us, and …”
Surt was breathing heavily. She said nothing for a few moments, then reached up and rubbed at the back of her neck, where the skin I had pinched still showed the impression of my fingers, bloodless crescent depressions where I had dug in, nearly drawing blood.
“It’s all right, Adrana.”
“No, it isn’t. I should never have …”
“It’s all right. Because it weren’t you, not really.” She continued to regard me, as one might regard a snake that might be playing dead, and still contained a debilitating quantity of venom. “It was her, wasn’t it? We blew up her body, but that was never going to be end of her, no matter what Fura reckons. There’ll be a bit of her stuck inside you until the Old Sun swells up.”
“She’s gone,” I asserted, as much to persuade myself as Surt. “I just … lost control.”
“Maybe you did,” Surt said, lowering her hand, her breathing starting to normalise. “But then the question is, are you sure it won’t happen again? Because if that was just a glimpse of her, I’m in no hurry to have her back for good.”
*
Surt made no further mention of my behaviour, for which I was keenly grateful. I had scared her, but just as crucially I had scared myself. That spasm of rage was the equal of anything I had seen in Fura, if not more shocking by virtue of the suddenness with which it had erupted from me. I had seen something of the hold the glowy had on my sister; the way it shaped her temper. There was no denying that it frightened me and made me apprehensive about its future progression. Yet the glowy was only an accomplice in the changes that Fura had willingly brought upon herself, abetting that hardening of her character that had commenced from the moment she had to save herself on the Monetta’s Mourn. I believed that the glowy amplified her moods, and that it made their highs and lows more vertiginous, but I do not think that the glowy was itself the primary instigator of those changes. Rather, it responded to the natural patterns of her temperament; distorting and disfiguring in the process, most certainly, but never itself becoming the sole causal agent.
That was not what had happened to me, in the instant I seized Surt. My mood had been one of comradely concern, tempered only by a distant intimation that Surt might do something unwise if she permitted her own fears to swell and magnify. But in a flash that concern had transmuted to a singular, all-consuming imperative, a totality of thought and action that excluded any introspective consideration. All that mattered was the preservation of the ship; in that instant Surt had become nothing more than a faulty component that needed to be eliminated, replaced.
I thanked the worlds that she had yelped, for without that intervention I think it very plausible that I might have killed her there and then. The rage had subsided, a tide of bitter regret taking its place, but I did not doubt for an instant that the originating seed was still within me.
That much was settled; beyond dispute. The only question remaining was how effectively I could deal with the residue of Bosa that I carried. Now that I knew she was there, now that I knew her ferocity, might I have the advantage of self-awareness of my condition? If I could sense the occasions when she might rise, and steel myself against her, might I be able to keep her at bay?
I didn’t know; I could not know. It would depend, I supposed, on how thoroughly our coming circumstances put us to the test. It would depend on my strength, as well as hers.
And the degree to which Fura gave me cause to doubt our partnership.
*
I was glad to have the matter of our fictional histories to tear my thoughts away from Bosa Sennen. Prozor had crewed on more vessels than any of us, over a much longer period, and she had an inkling of the gaps where one could begin to spin a yarn, without getting too tangled up in the affairs of real lives and real ships. Without her I would have had no hope of coming up with an invented identity for our vessel and its hands.
So, when our eyes were not glued tight with tiredness, and our fingers not too raw to hold a pen, Prozor and I sat together and tried to cook up a story that would hold together at the first examination. It had to feel real and solid—but not so interesting as to invite further discussion. Like the cleansing of Strambli’s wound, there was a limit as to how deep we could go.
“If a cove asks more’n two questions straight,” Prozor said, “it means they’ve already got their suspicions. In which case more talk and lies ain’t goin’ to dig us out of that hole.”
“If anyone takes that close an interest in us,” I said, chewing on the end of the pen, “I hope we’ll be ready to make a run for the launch.”
“Keep our noses clean, not give anyone a reason to snoop around, we should be golden. Would help if I’d seen a little more of this place we’re headed to.”
“Are you certain you never went there?”
“Old Proz forgets a thing or two, especially since Bosa put a fresh dent in her skull. But not the places she’s seen. Or the coves she’s met.”
“There isn’t much in the Book of Worlds. It’s a pity we’re not
going somewhere else, because then all we’d have to do is say we’re from Wheel Strizzardy, and no one would be able to prove us wrong.”
“So we need somewhere that’s just as out-of-the-way. But not in the same processional, or one that’s easy sailin’ distance.” The dawning of an idea lifted her features. “Here. Pass me the book.”
I did, and she leafed through it with an obvious directed interest.
“What’re you thinking?”
“Indragol,” Prozor said, turning the relevant page to my eyes, so I could see how scant the entry was. “Laceworld, thirty-third processional, not so far out from the centre of things to be interestin’, but not too close to anywhere glamorous or prosperous. I went there once, so I know the shape of the place, a few of the local customs. We’ll say that’s our port of origin, the place that built and crewed this ship first of all.”
“Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Can’t we have somewhere that sounds more like Mazarile?”
“If it did, you’d say Mazarile by mistake. Indragol’s just the start of it, though. We won’t all be from that world, but enough of us to fit the story. I’ll work on that. You can give our ship a name, and decide how her ladyship wishes to be known henceforth.”
“You’re assuming she’ll be acting out the role of captain, then.”
“I’d say it’s a foregone conclusion, girlie. Unless you know otherwise.”
“If it keeps her happy, she can play at being captain.” I felt my face tighten, wishing I could share my suspicions with Prozor. She had been our saviour, as well as a friend and confidante, and it aggrieved me to keep a secret from her. But if word of Fura’s duplicity got out, there was no telling how far it would go or what the consequences would be for our fragile little crew.
I felt a rage beginning to stir inside me. I forced a torrent of placid thoughts upon myself; a succession of pleasing images, dwelling in particular on the many kindnesses Fura had done for me when we were younger.
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