The Song of the Dead

by Carrie Patel

  Then Malone noticed his balding head, reddening and beading with sweat, and the way he was gazing at Lachesse’s nails. She’d seen dogs stare at meaty bones the same way.

  Sauvage, indeed.

  “I thought that was Phelan’s job,” Malone said.

  He gave her a scowl. “Phelan is occupied.”

  “Mercy, Chernev,” Lachesse said in her silkiest voice, growling the r’s in the odd way of Geist and his crew.

  His jowls melted into a smile. “Stark welcome.” He left the pot and turned to go, ignoring Malone and her cup.

  “Could I get some dried ham and cheese?” Malone called after him, trying to keep amusement out of her voice.

  He didn’t even look back. “In the mess!” He slammed the door.

  Lachesse cleared her throat. “You were just noting that no one seems to be talking to you.” She paused long enough to let the implication sink in. “What did you expect them to say?” she asked.

  “Nothing. But I thought I’d hear them talking to each other. See them changing their routines. But it’s like it didn’t even happen.”

  “Hmm.” Lachesse sipped her caffee again, aligning her lips with the red stain she’d already made. She was almost smiling.

  “You know something?”

  Now Lachesse did smile. “I thought it was obvious. Geist’s problem is political, not personal. He’s got someone on his crew who’s trying to sabotage him, and he wants to resolve the problem with a minimum of fuss.”

  “That’s your theory?”

  “You flatter me. It’s merely an observation.”

  Malone chewed on the idea. “Sharad was low level. His shift was easy enough to cover. How does murdering him sabotage Geist?”

  “Perhaps it was about eliminating you. Or perhaps it was a distraction,” Lachesse said.

  “Murders usually work the other way around.” But it was hard to imagine what would be more conspicuous than a murder. “I haven’t seen any other signs of trouble.”

  “Then perhaps it’s happening wherever we aren’t.”

  If Lachesse weren’t so matter-of-fact, Malone would have thought the woman was mocking her. Besides, there were places enough on the ship for someone to make trouble. In storage. In the engine room.

  Behind that door Geist kept locked.

  “The bigger question is how someone would intend to sabotage the Glasauge’s mission. And why,” said Malone.

  “I expect we’ll find out soon enough.” Lachesse was staring out at the sea. “But you were the one who went to the commune. What did Geist tell you?” And how did he convince you to stay, her eyes seemed to ask.

  Malone remembered the dinner and the sense of belonging with a physical ache. “He said Arnault’s the key to some pre-Catastrophe cache. Something that his enemies could use to destroy us.”

  “That does sound dreadful.”

  “I’m not sure how much of it I believe,” Malone admitted, to herself as much as to Lachesse.

  “But when a man in a flying ship warns of death and destruction, best not to take any chances,” said the whitenail.

  Malone watched her out of the corner of her eye. “That why you came?”

  “Somebody had to represent the city’s interests, and you were certainly in no state to.” Her fingernails formed a crisscrossing lattice where she held her cup. “Besides, at my age, you learn to take all the excitement you can find.”

  Malone almost laughed. “You said Ruthers came from the Continent.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What did he call… all of it?” Malone asked. “Recoletta. The communes. The place you and I come from.” Geist had dodged that question at Meyerston.

  Lachesse pondered the matter. “I don’t recall him referring to it as anything in particular. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering,” Malone said.

  Lachesse sighed. “I do wonder what he’d make of this.”

  “The airship? Or the hunt for Arnault?”

  Lachesse turned to face Malone, both eyebrows arched in incredulity. “Skies above, woman, I was talking about the conspiracy.”

  Malone watched the whitenail’s face, waiting for some sign that she was joking. “Explain.”

  “I thought you’d understood that much. That’s why Geist doesn’t want you investigating that boy’s death. That’s why his erstwhile crew mates won’t talk to you. They’ve got something bigger to hide.”

  * * *

  The conversation with Lady Lachesse hadn’t given her ideas so much as hunches. But with a little time and work, Malone figured she could poke and prod those hunches into something more substantial.

  She made her rounds on the various decks. She paid special attention to the storage area, but she couldn’t see that anything had changed down there. She played solitaire in the mess and noted who played cards together. She kept an eye on who paired off with whom in between shifts and kept an ear out for secrets whispered amidst words of passion.

  Yet it was the sound of silence that caught her attention.

  Geist’s study – the one he always kept locked, the one from which she’d heard that peculiar purring noise – had gone quiet. Whatever equipment had kept up that warbling, musical drone was gone.

  She needed to find a way inside.

  Malone was cleaning the navigation room between shifts when she realized she was alone. She hadn’t previously had this room to herself, but Halstrom, the navigator on duty, usually took her time with her pre-shift meal and talked with the officers in the pilot house for five to ten minutes before assuming her post.

  The office was small, with one wide desk big enough to unroll various maps and charts upon, and drawers beneath for storing a variety of mysterious equipment.

  Malone glanced into the curving corridor. She saw the closed doors of Geist’s office at one end and the pilot house at the other, where a handful of crew members – Halstrom included – were chatting over cups of caffee. The unhurried melody of their conversation was just audible over the hum of the engine above.

  She had time.

  Malone checked the drawers. The topmost held equipment – pencils, protractors, a drawing compass, a navigational compass, and a dozen other enigmatic instruments of rounded, hash-marked edges and swinging arms. Nothing of use to her.

  The next held four rolled paper tubes. Maps, she was sure. Yet when Malone unfurled them on the desk, all she saw were pinprick dots against a faint grid. Star charts, presumably.

  The bottom drawer also held long rolls, and as Malone pressed them open against the desk she saw what she wanted. Maps, with the pale blue of water and the nibbled cheese contours of land.

  The first three she checked didn’t show her much. Or rather, they showed her too much from too close a range – fragments of coastline on the east, dotted with cities as varied and numerous as a farmer’s freckles, many with mouth-clogging names like “Nantes-Neugeboren,” “Salaam-de-Galicia,” and “Luse Hai’an.” She pored through them all, trying to wrap her mind around the scope of the vast land she was headed toward.

  Then, she unrolled a map that was nearly blank, the line of coast nothing more than a shape opposite the sea. What had happened to the cities? Where was this blank stretch of nothingness?

  She noticed the compass rose and realized she had the map upside down. She turned it and regarded the featureless expanse of land on the west. Malone realized that she was looking at her homeland – a broad, uncharted, and uncivilized place, little more than a border for the sea.

  And across it, in thin, capital letters was the word, “PESTELAND.” A vast list of names for the cities of the Continent, some closer together than Recoletta to its communes, and only one for the land that encompassed Recoletta, Madina, and dozens of other cities and communes.

  Malone didn’t know what the word meant, but the way it spanned the land, covering anything else that might have been there, bothered her.

  A crescendo of noise from the corridor. The conversation from t
he pilot house rising and cutting off again as someone opened the door. Malone was out of time.

  She rolled the maps up again and put them away. She was still bent over the closed drawer when Halstrom’s heavy steps sounded behind her.

  “Keska say?” the woman asked.

  For the first time, Malone was faintly grateful for the language barrier. She waved her cleaning rag about. “Cleaning. Filthy. See?” She showed Halstrom one dirt-black side.

  Halstrom squinted at her. The words she spoke were unintelligible, but her gesture – one outstretched arm pointed at the door – was clear enough.

  Lachesse was in the lounge, sipping watered-down caffee when Malone returned.

  “I don’t know how you manage so much of that stuff,” Malone said. Even diluted, the odor from the cup was strong enough to hit the back of her tongue with the memory of the stale, bitter flavor.

  “One must learn to adapt, Inspector.” Lachesse sipped her beverage daintily. “How goes your investigation?”

  “Barely,” Malone said. “Hard to investigate people you know nothing about. I thought you whitenails were buttoned up, but these people – I only understand a few of them.”

  Lachesse’s chuckle was a warm, purring sound. “It takes practice. And patience.”

  Malone paused. “What?”

  The woman looked into her cup as she swirled its contents around. “I think we’re past coyness. Patience has never been your strong suit.”

  “No, I mean – you understand them?” Even the progress Malone had made only meant she could understand a few of the slowest, clearest speakers.

  Lachesse blinked at her over the rim of her cup. “Only some of it. As best I can tell, their parlance is a mix of languages, including our own and others that share a common root. Skies above, what did you think I was doing in here all day?”

  Malone glanced at the big, wide window before Lachesse. “Exasperating me.”

  “That has been a pleasant side effect.”

  Something else occurred to Malone. “You think you’ve learned enough to translate something?” Asking Lachesse for help made her feel a little dirty, but it wasn’t like she had options.

  “I could try.”

  Malone told her about her sortie into the navigation room and about the maps she’d found there. “The Continent’s big. Bigger than I thought possible.” She paused. “Ruthers ever say anything about that to you?”

  The whitenail shrugged. “In his way.”

  “If those maps are to be believed, there are cities everywhere. My head hurt just looking at them. But then I found another – a map of the land where we came from.”

  “Oh?” Lachesse said. “And what was on it?”

  “A big, empty space with the word ‘PESTELAND’ written across it.”

  Lachesse cocked her head. “Come again?”

  “Um. ‘Peest-land’? ‘Pesty-land’?” Malone had no idea how the words were pronounced and a sneaking suspicion that Lachesse was enjoying her fumbling a little too much.

  “‘Pestiland’?” the woman finally offered, glossing over the middle syllable much like Geist and his crew did.

  “Probably. What’s it mean?”

  The whitenail hesitated, her brows drawn together in concern. “‘Place of disease.’ ‘Land of plagues.’ Something of the sort,” she said. Etched in the lines of Lachesse’s face, Malone saw the same question that rose in her own mind: what did it mean?

  She remembered, then, Geist’s strange abstention from the food at Meyerston. Valenti’s outburst. The crew’s habit of giving her a wide berth, of avoiding contact with the things she touched.

  Geist’s ready suggestion that she scrub the airship down, deck by deck, every day.

  “I do suppose you have a new lead, Inspector.”

  Suddenly, the task of getting into Geist’s office didn’t seem as impossible. “Maybe you can help,” she said to Lachesse, explaining her interest in Geist’s office.

  “How do you plan to get inside?”

  “I hadn’t gotten that far,” Malone said, feeling like she was admitting a shameful secret. “I was wondering if you had an angle.”

  Lachesse smirked. “I daresay you won’t like it.” The whitenail made it sound like a challenge.

  Malone suspected she was right, but any idea was better than none.

  “Sabotage the airship,” Lachesse said.

  She had no words for Lachesse’s proposal, but the look on her face must have been answer enough.

  The whitenail shrugged, gazing back through bored, heavy-lidded eyes. “You need Geist worried enough to make a mistake. And you need his crew distracted enough to ignore you.”

  “Sneaking into Geist’s cabin won’t matter if we’re all dead.”

  Lachesse’s face puckered into a frown. “Oh, do relax. This is a large and complex conveyance. I highly doubt that any one thing you could do will irrevocably commit us to destruction. Besides, I’m certain one of the forty people on this airship can figure out what to do.”

  It made sense, but doubt still gnawed at the corners of her mind. “That’s a lot of ‘ifs’ from someone who knows nothing about airships.”

  The old whitenail’s grin was sly. “No, but I know a thing or two about money. Enough to know you don’t invest in something like this and then give it a ‘destroy’ button. You’ll recall that I oversaw a considerable fortune in the railroad industry.” Lachesse’s modesty was as false as her rouged cheeks.

  “Sato crashed that pretty handily for you,” Malone said.

  Malone would have replayed the entire conversation just for the chagrin on Lachesse’s face. “Sato was an unexpected variable.”

  Malone nodded, pleased at hearing the whitenail make her point for her.

  Lachesse set her cup down on the table with a sigh of exasperation. “I thought we were both in agreement to do what’s necessary to see this misadventure through.”

  “I didn’t think that included suicide.”

  “Considering the circumstances under which we came to be here, perhaps you should be grateful for the opportunity.” Lachesse focused her gaze on Malone’s neck.

  Malone knew she was right, which only annoyed her further. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “Fouling complex machinery, creating general violence and mayhem?” Lachesse smiled. “I’m certain you’ll figure something out.”

  Malone knew she was right again, even as her thoughts drifted to the engine room. “Just… be ready,” she said.

  “I always am.”

  Malone made for the corridor and stopped. “One more thing. Do you know who the gintner is?”

  Lachesse paused. “You’re speaking of the crew, I assume? No. I rarely hear them address each other by title. What is a gintner?”

  Malone shrugged. “For now? Just a title.”

  * * *

  Now that Malone actually had a mind to visit the engine room, it seemed absurd to her how poorly -guarded it was. Like locking the front door only to leave the back wide open. The thought made her neck itch.

  Then again, Geist and his crew probably hadn’t bargained on anyone trying anything as reckless as what she was about to attempt.

  And with just a few days remaining before they reached the Continent, she didn’t have time to be careful.

  Malone waited for the moonrise shift, when only two engineers would be on duty. When everyone off shift – including Geist – would be lulled into a false calm by the ghost light of the moon on the water.

  The corridors were dim and quiet when Malone set about her work. Only the chime of silverware on dishes rose above the gentle buzz of snores, whispers, and moans behind cabin doors. The night belonged to her.

  That realization did nothing to still her trembling hands or dry the sheen of sweat that coated them as she made her way to the engine room.

  But if she was going to go down, perhaps it was better to have it happen by her own hand than by someone else’s.

  No one
stopped her as she climbed to the upper deck. No one seemed to notice.

  The engine room was hot and muggy, a forest of tangled metal and twisting pipes. It was a big room made small by the clutter of equipment, valves, and gauges, but under the circumstances Malone expected that would work to her advantage.

  The somnolent chuff of steam vents, the groan of pipes, and the underfoot hum of motors masked her careful movements, but the two engineers were less cautious. Malone heard their voices and felt their plodding footsteps rattle the metal grating beneath her.

  If only she could make out what they were saying.

  The voices altered their tempo, and footsteps plodded closer. Someone was coming.

  Malone glanced around. The bundles of piping and banks of equipment formed rough aisles, but what she really needed was…

  A ladder. There, in the corner, was a yellow ladder rising to the envelope. Malone scurried to it and climbed with swift, silent movements. She pulled herself into the envelope just as a man crossed into view below.

  The space Malone found herself in was long and wide, but with a low ceiling. The only light filtered in from the engine room below, visible through the slats of the metal grating beneath her. It cast stripes of light on dark, bulging surfaces overhead.

  Gas bags. Whatever held the Glasauge aloft, it was inside the balloons above her head. The realization that they were almost close enough to touch made her shiver with dread.

  The sliver of walkable space was almost as cluttered as the engine room below. Knee-high ribs of scaffolding curved along the floor every twenty feet, rising along the envelope and disappearing behind the gas bags. Cables, as faint in the darkness as spiders’ webs, were strung along the narrow space.

  At least Malone had a better – and safer – view of the engine room. It was probably fifty feet long and half as wide. Not as big as the other decks, but just as densely packed. One engineer – the one whose path had almost crossed hers – was making the rounds, checking gauges and dials. He walked with a loose, ambling gait, his hands shoved in his pockets, in a way that suggested he didn’t expect to find anything requiring his attention.