Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  16

  We had to insist on not being taken straight back to the hotel, but after some persuasion we were able to visit Surt, who was still keeping vigil in Doctor Eddralder’s infirmary. Or was intending to, at least. She was in one of the chairs near the reception desk, lolling face-down with her arms drooping either side of her. Prozor gave her a gentle shove, just enough to rouse her.

  “You look bushed, cove. You’ve done your stint here.”

  “What time is it?” Surt asked, peeling apart gummed-up eyes with her fingertips.

  “Three in the morning, and we’ve had a rum old night of it. First they took us to see Glimmery upstairs, then we had a run-in with a Crawly back at the hotel, and he ended up dead. Now Glimmery says there’s a crew of survivors on their way to us.”

  “Survivors of what?” Surt asked, but then some delayed process of comprehension furnished her with the answer. “Oh. I see. That ain’t good, is it?”

  “Not greatly,” I said.

  “I think the cove upstairs is trying to smoke out what we are,” Prozor said, looking around to make sure we had our conversation to ourselves. “He thinks he knows, but he ain’t certain. That’s why he mentioned that launch coming in, when he didn’t need to. Why he made a point of draggin’ us all the way to his bath, just so we could be told somethin’ we’d find out anyway in thirty hours.”

  “What’s he hoping to achieve?” I asked.

  “Hopin’ to spook us, girlie,” Prozor said. “Rattlin’ our chains just enough to get us doin’ something rash, like attemptin’ to make a dash for it, while we still can. Then he’ll know what we are.”

  “If he thinks we’re …” I dropped my voice. “If he thinks we’re anything to do with Bosa Sennen, why doesn’t he just have us rounded up right now?”

  “’Cause he can’t be sure how many of us are left on the ship. That’s the main prize, and he won’t want it slippin’ out of his grasp. Which it could easily do if he started clappin’ the rest of us in irons and so forth. He can’t even be sure if one of us is Bosa. No, he’s got to play his cards very cleverly, and tellin’ us about that launch was part of his gambit, and now he’s got his eyes on us more than ever.”

  “Literally, in the case of that eye he sent to the hotel,” I said.

  “That wasn’t him,” Prozor said bluntly.

  “He confessed!” Fura said.

  “That’s why it wasn’t him. Anyway, I watched him carefully and he wasn’t sure what Adrana was on about. But I think he’s the sort of cove who can’t stand the thought of anything going on that isn’t his responsibility, so he said it was his eye even when it weren’t.”

  “Then whose …?” Fura started.

  “Someone else with an eye, I suppose,” I put in.

  Doctor Eddralder came over. He looked very tired, the elongation of his face more pronounced, and the shading under his own pebble-pale eyes enhanced to a bruiselike purple.

  “You should get some rest, Lizzil,” he said, nodding at Surt. “You’ve been very loyal, but there’s nothing more you can do for her for the time being. Strambli needs rest, and a large portion of good luck.”

  “Her name is Greben,” I said.

  “Yes—that’s what I was told. But after the operation she returned to consciousness, albeit briefly, and not with great lucidity. She was confused, and distressed, and I attempted to reassure her that she was in safe hands and her friends were not very far away. I would have called you, Lizzil, except you were exhausted, and I felt you needed rest just as surely as your friend.” He paused, shaking water from his umbrella, which if anything seemed to sag along its spines more than it had before, as if it shared some of its owner’s fatigue. “Anyway, she denied that her name was Greben—insisted, instead, that it was Strambli. She also mentioned other names that were unfamiliar to me—Surt, Prozor, and so on. I … did not contradict her. I find in these instances that the patient is generally more content if their falsehoods are indulged. Is it a falsehood, I trust? It was a slip of my tongue to mention her preferred name …”

  “I was right about your daughter, wasn’t I?” I asked.

  If he had dismissed my assertion before, now his hesitation offered all the confirmation I sought.

  “None of us choose the paths we walk, Tragen. Or should I say … Adrana?” Then, to my sister: “You would be Arafura. She was very particular about that. Said that you had led them all into trouble, but that she loved you for it. And when I asked about Captain Marance she seemed bewildered and troubled.”

  “I knew those names wouldn’t stick,” Prozor said, which would have been a damaging confession were it not abundantly plain that Doctor Eddralder had already settled his mind about our true natures.

  “What you have discussed,” Eddralder said, “remains between us. I do not know who you are, nor why you should wish to travel under false names. I can guess well enough, though. You are either the crew who are being sought, or you think there is a chance of your being mistaken for them. Either way, you must distance yourselves from your true identities. That is no concern of mine.”

  “I am very glad to hear it,” Fura said.

  “But you should be aware of the risks, Captain … shall we continue with the pretence?”

  “Perhaps we should,” she said.

  “Very well, then—Captain Marance. I have ministered to Strambli … Greben … as well I can, but there are times when I will be called away and my staff may have to answer her questions. If she babbles in their presence, I am powerless to deflect their curiosity. Equally, I could do very little to stop word of her true name reaching Mister Glimmery. He has his suspicions, but as yet they are too uncertain to act upon. That may change when the launch arrives, and it would certainly change were he to pay heed to Greben. This places you in an extremely doubtful position. Would you like my advice?”

  “Be my guest,” Fura said.

  “Leave while you are able. Abandon Greben. You have brought her here, and she would surely have died had you not. That fever would have taken her within a day, perhaps sooner. You have done what you could for her.”

  “You can vouch for her safety, can you?” I asked.

  The bluntness of his reply surprised me. “No—not really. Nobody is safe here, as you will have likely gathered. But she will be much less safe if you are captured and interrogated, or worse, before Far-Gone claims his share of that incentive money. Need I speak for his cruelty? You may have heard him joke about how he acquired the glowy. It’s true. He did kill and eat one of his enemies, and that is how he acquired the glowy.”

  “We do not leave,” Fura said, after an interval of consideration. She was shocked, and we were all shocked, and although none of us were under the illusion that Mister Glimmery was any sort of paragon, I do not think we were quite ready to accept that he had declared his appetites so brazenly. “Not until she’s ready to be moved.”

  “You are taking a great risk.”

  “It would be just as bad if we ran now. That’s what he’s expecting—hoping. I’m not going to give him that satisfaction.”

  “In which case … I admire your fortitude, and the depth of your loyalty to your injured friend.”

  I smiled tightly, for much as I might have wished to applaud these sentiments, I knew that Fura had ulterior reasons for not seeking an early departure. Yet, because I still wished to see good in my sister, I chose to believe that the question of Strambli’s welfare was not fully absent from her thoughts.

  “You are his doctor,” I said quietly. “You are the one who treats him, injects him and so on. If he is the monster you claim him to be, why do you not find a way to end him?”

  “Because I am his doctor,” he answered, in the same soft tone. “And even if I lapsed in my … duties. Even if I could bring myself to turn my hand against him, even if I felt that some greater good would be served by that treason … there is always one complicating factor.”

  “Whatever you do to him,” I said, understandin
g, “must also be done to Merrix.”

  *

  It was closer to four in the morning by the time we got back to the hotel, and by then I was as ready for sleep as at any point in my existence. I had all sorts of doubts and qualms that ought to have kept me awake and fretting, siding with Fura in one thought and taking against her the next, but that tiredness, the accumulation of many days of worry and unrest, would not be held back any longer, and I slipped into deep, dreamless oblivion about a second after my head hit the pillow.

  I was alone. Prozor had said she would take over Surt’s vigil, and now Surt was sharing Fura’s room next door. Just before we said goodnight, Fura had agreed to squawk Paladin, alert him to the fact of the launch, and promised that she would wake me when there was any news. I told her I did not wish to sleep for more than four hours.

  In the end it was closer to six when at last she knocked on my door, and another thirty minutes before I had washed and dressed. My foot still ached from my tumble, and there was a nice swelling around the ankle, which hampered me somewhat. I opened the bedroom shutters a little warily, not quite sure that I wished to be reminded of our situation. But by some quiet miracle the world was still there, and so were we.

  It was late morning in Port Endless—well into what passed for day in this gloomy place. Perhaps one or two more sky facets had been turned on, or their brightness increased, so that the prevailing illumination was a fraction less sepulchral than the night before. The rains, too, had decreased. Parts of the sky were still emitting steam, but the former torrents were being held in moderate check. The streets below were still wet, though, and the puddles and drainage channels and sluices remained waterlogged, embedded in roads and alleys like little chips and slivers of highly reflective material. Blocky grey buildings stood out a little more distinctly than the night before, and more of the city’s geometry presented itself to me. It was still dim enough that the street lights remained on, and the few windows that had been illuminated before were still lit, but in this improved light it struck me as not so terrible a place after all. A world that might have been tolerable, or even pleasant, prior to its recent troubles. I thought of Mister Glimmery’s taste for gold, of the lavishness of his surroundings and his many fastidious attendants, and when I recalled the doctor’s words about the glowy and how it had come to be inside Glimmery, I discovered a new shade of loathing within myself. I needed no biography or newspaper clipping to envisage the course of Glimmery’s career. A strong, dangerous man who had moved from criminality to effective control of a whole world, and who now ruled by fear and blackmail. Doubtless he had been on his way to power when the last banking crisis had come, but that downturn—the same one that had cost Prozor her earnings—would only have hastened his ascent. Sneed had killed Mister Cuttle, I was sure, and since Sneed was operating under Glimmery’s instructions, I had seen first-hand the workings of a man capable of easy murder. I wished him gone, but more than that I wished us a way to slip free of his entanglements.

  A thought crossed my mind: it would be so much simpler if Strambli were to die. So very much … cleaner. I flinched, recognising it as Bosa’s way of thinking, a reminder of the abiding presence of her. The anger was one thing; this was an alteration in the pattern of my reasoning. This was what she had been trying to make me in the kindness room—a colder, sharper version of myself. I crushed it immediately, as one might mash an insect. But obliterating a thought was not the same as eradicating its point of origin; or as not having it in the first place, as well I knew.

  “The important thing,” Fura was saying as we went down in the elevator, “is to keep on just as we were yesterday. Shopping and suchlike. Let Glimmery keep his spies on us. He’ll see nothing to suggest we’re in any way perturbed.”

  “That launch will be here in less than a day. Do you still intend to be here by tomorrow morning?”

  “Fleeing will give our game away, so it’s the last thing we’ll do.”

  “Do you think they’ll let us walk out of here, when we’re ready?” Surt asked.

  “Even Glimmery can’t detain us without consequences. There’s a saying in the worlds: cross one honest crew, and you cross ’em all.”

  “Except we’re not quite an honest crew,” I said, feeling obligated to point this out. “Did you speak to Paladin?”

  “Yes, and to Tindouf as well. They’ve nothing untoward to report at their end. Paladin has a sweeper fix on that launch, which matches Glimmery’s account. It’s coming in very quickly, and there’s a sunjammer a few hundred thousand leagues astern of it which is likely to be the White Widow. Paladin says the sweeper profile is similar to the phantom that shadowed us from the Rumbler.” She gave Surt a chastened look. “I’m minded to apologise, after all this time. I should have given more credence to your observation of sail-flash.”

  “You weren’t to know what a thorn they’d turn into,” Surt said, scratching at the back of her neck.

  “I have to be circumspect with Paladin,” Fura went on. “Our squawk transmissions are vulnerable to interception, so I can only phrase my queries in innocent terms. But I hope I have made it clear that we may need all sail and ions at rather abrupt notice.”

  “You needn’t beat around that bush,” I said. “No sane captain would want to spend an hour longer in Mister Glimmery’s company than was strictly necessary.”

  When the elevator disgorged us into the lobby I was unsurprised to see a different clerk manning the desk. It was the day shift now, and in any case our flat-faced friend had looked very groggy and unwell when we returned in the small hours. We had tried to get some sense out of him regarding the cause of his unconsciousness, but he claimed to have no recollection of the circumstances leading up to Mister Cuttle’s fall. As skeptical and distrustful as I was inclining to be, I believed him. Prozor had told me that some neural weapons left the victim with a memory scrubbed of all recent events.

  “I know you’ve been told to report to Glimmery,” Fura said to the new clerk, leaning on the desk. “But that don’t preclude you reporting to me as well. Cuttle was snooping around on some business that we don’t fully understand, and I’d be surprised if he’s the last to pay us a visit. I want to know who comes and goes. Any questions, any odd types, you let me know. If I’m satisfied with the gen, there’ll be a quoin in it for you—and not some low-mark piece, neither.”

  The day clerk was a blob of a boy with a cowlick and a nervous restlessness to his eyes, always looking to one side or the other. I had an inkling he was aware of some of the trouble that had happened the previous night and wanted as little to do with it as possible.

  “I can’t promise anything, Captain Marance. And I’m not always at my desk. The hotel doesn’t run itself, you know. There’s the laundry delivery, the night kitchen …”

  “What you’re saying is, you know when to turn a blind eye,” Fura replied. “Which is a very sensible survival ploy, I don’t doubt. But I don’t like snoopers, and I especially don’t like alien snoopers. Mister … what were their names, Tragen? Gabble and Rachit, or something like that. Any Crawly interest, I want to know about it.” By way of emphasis she slipped him a ten-bar quoin. “That’s a down payment on your cooperation. Don’t make me reclaim it.”

  The lad pocketed the quoin under his waistcoat, glancing shiftily to either side as he made the item disappear. “If someone asks after you, what should I tell ’em?”

  “That they’ll need to make an appointment,” Fura said.

  *

  It was hard to set our minds to such mundane matters as the procurement of food supplies, fresh water, new lightvine cultivars, surplus yardage, spare hull material and so on, but our practical needs had not vanished simply because of our entanglements with Glimmery. Part of me was rather keen on the idea of insisting on the three of us going shopping together, partly on the grounds of safety, and partly in the interests of denying Fura the chance to go off on any clandestine errands. Yet a colder consideration suggested to me that l
etting Fura go off on her own was not such a bad thing. While we still had a chance, and supposing Strambli was well enough, I thought it would be wise to leave this world as quickly as possible. Fura would find impediments to that, though, until such time as she had located Lagganvor, or proven to her private satisfaction that he was no longer here. If I forced her to go shopping, I might keep watch on her. But I would also hamper her mission, and that might be to our greater detriment.

  So after due consideration I suggested that I take over visiting the bone emporiums, searching for a possible replacement for our failing skull, while she and Surt attended to the other matters as they saw fit. She agreed. Perhaps she sensed that there was some calculation behind my proposal, but since it was to her immediate benefit she did not quibble, and after taking coffee in the downstairs bar, I went off on my own.

  I had been truthful, at least. I meant only to visit the skull shops, and that is what I did. Fura had given me a list of the places she had already been, with some remarks about the skulls she had tested and their likely suitability, but there were a dozen other establishments within a tram stop of the hotel and I was of a mind to begin afresh. Walking into each shop, all of which were dusty, dark and forbidding to various degrees because bone sellers did not need to rely on passing custom, my thoughts flashed back to Neural Alley—leading Fura into Madame Granity’s boutique; pretending that it was my first visit when, in fact, I had already been tested and found to have the basic faculties of a Sympathetic, and believed that my sister was likely to share the same talent.