by Tom Toner
“They aren’t wanted in the city,” Bidens said, looking hurt. “It’s not my decision.”
“It will be when you’re mayor,” she countered, frustrated.
“But I don’t think I ever will be. You need a fortune to control Mostar, and ours is almost gone.”
Jatropha nodded beside them, as if he knew the location of every scrap of silk in every hidden place. “I would happily keep you on, Bidens, once we reach Nidrum and need to pass back into the Greater Second.”
Bidens coloured in the shade of the parasol, apparently speechless. Eranthis, sitting beside him, bridled; none of this had been discussed.
“It’s up to you,” Jatropha added hastily. “We can send word to your father with a decision at our next stop.”
Bidens lowered his eyes. “I’d like that very much, but it might not be allowed.”
“Well. We shall see.”
They rode in silence for some time, branches slapping the Cor-bita’s balconies as it trundled through the valley, before Bidens spoke again.
“You know,” Bidens said, picking his fingers, “I could persuade my father to let me stay on, that I’m a grown man now.”
“I’m sure you could,” Jatropha replied.
“Yes. He would listen if I had a woman, maybe.”
Eranthis turned to him, eyebrow arched, but the youth remained frowning at his hands. “Just for pretend,” he clarified. “Maybe we could write to him and say Pentas had agreed to be . . . What do you think? Would she agree to it? Just for pretend?”
Eranthis shot Jatropha a look, and beneath his glamours he smiled back at her.
“She wouldn’t have to do anything, of course,” Bidens said hurriedly, conscious of their silence. “It would just be for my father, you see. Then, when it’s time to go home, I can just say she grew bored of me.”
“She won’t like it,” Eranthis said.
Jatropha frowned. “No harm in asking her.”
“What?” she cried. “We need this boy so desperately to guide us?”
“A small deception, Eranthis, so that he can travel with us a little longer.”
She looked at the Amaranthine for some time, stealing glances out of the corner of her eye, reflecting on how many other small deceptions might have been responsible for their coming on this absurd journey.
“Osulphurous Maladine took her seat at the flaming pulpit of Ago, bowing her bald head in prayer. The journey from Stannum had taxed her delicate nerves, and as soon as the weatherplane had touched down, she went to the cloisters to beg the serpent god for her daughter’s safe return.”
Pentas’s head had started to ache again. She closed the fat ring book and looked out into the night as it travelled by, green and shimmering in the light of the moon. Jatropha had apparently visited every book emporium in Mostar, taking a particular fancy to the romance novels of one Liatris of Albina, a frail and frightfully wealthy authoress he wished to visit in Old Veronesse. Pentas and her sister had been encouraged to read them and chose a favourite so that they might have an engraved signature when they met her. The heavy novel lying in the folds of her blanket was one of the slimmest, but she could barely get five pages in before other thoughts settled and caused her to read the same passage over and over again.
The Ode of Calpus Maladine read the title, in the fashion of most old romances. She could see from the date that the book had been stamped almost fifty years ago.
Pentas read the opening paragraph again, sparing quick glances out into the darkness as the Wheelhouse clanked and clattered along the sea path. It couldn’t be far to the bloodfruit plantation of Rat Omis, their intended stop for the night.
In the year One Thousand Nine Hundred and Forty-Three, she read, the seventeen great houses on the storm-swept Isle of Maladine are in turmoil, their sovereign-in-waiting having disappeared.
She read on, trying to conjure an image of a time so long passed. 1943, as the year was written in First, twelve thousand seven hundred and four years ago. The great bright stars Cuprum and Stannum—those Jatropha called Venuse and Jupito—had been conquered, and between them the ancient Melius of the past flitted on shining wings. The heroine of the novel, Calpus Maladine, on her way to enrol in the School of Nothing, is caught in the front line of a war between the Alamaneen— the progenitors of the Cursed People—and abducted for ransom. Pentas suspected without even getting beyond the first chapter that Calpus’s wicked mother was surely responsible for her kidnap. Nobody benign would ever be named Osulphurous. She snorted and pushed the book to one side again. The lives of the book’s ancient people were short— Calpus’s evil mother was in her final years at thirty-five—and yet they appeared to accomplish much in their brief time. Pentas would be twenty-four before Wintering’s end, and what had she achieved? She’d killed all the men who had ever loved her, a bringer of death and misery, something passed from person to person like an unbreakable curse.
A tap at the door, barely louder than the groan of the place as it bounced along the pebbled road, brought her rudely from her thoughts.
“How are you finding it?” Bidens asked as he entered, gesturing to the closed book.
She shrugged, not recalling allowing him to enter. He went and sat by the sleeping child, rocking the wooden cot with one hand.
“I prefer strip serials myself,” Bidens said, a note of diffidence in his voice suggesting to Pentas that he’d been laughed at for his interests. “Onosma’s my favourite.”
Onosma. Pentas recognised it but couldn’t think why. “Is that the boy with the pet Monkman?”
He nodded. “I traded some old ones for the new editions. You can read them if you like.”
She smiled, unable to think of anything more to say. On the trunk beside her bed was Liatris’s take on the fable of Dorielziath, painstakingly translated from the Threheng over many years as if in response to the less-than-favourable critical reception of her romances. They both looked at it. The sheaf of metal pages was heavy enough to thump and kill any intruder who made it into her bedchamber aboard the Wheel-house, so Pentas had chosen to keep it handy, placed between herself and Arabis’s cot.
“I knew a boy at school named Scundy,” Bidens said. “Maybe he was named after Scundry—Dorielziath’s friend in the tale.”
“Must have been,” Pentas echoed. She looked at him properly for the first time since he’d entered, seeing how he kept to the edges of the light. “Was it hard, being sent away to school in Zurine?”
Bidens hesitated, the kinetic flame in the lantern jumping a little. It was apparently quite simple, the old magic that listened to the beat of their hearts, but Pentas had never taken the time to understand it. “I didn’t have many friends, and the few I did went off to join the King in the Woods before they finished their studies, leaving me behind. Daddo would’ve had my skin if I’d gone.”
She smiled at his childish use of the word. You could always spot the rich ones. “The King in the Woods?”
“He was hunted, this man, for proclaiming himself king, but they never found him. The boys I knew said he was kind and would employ anyone who passed his tests.”
“Where was this king?”
“You had to go north, on the great Arteries that run up towards the Ingolland Sea. When you got there, they said, someone would escort you.”
“Is he still there?”
Bidens shrugged, the flame dimming. “I don’t think so. When I went back to Mostar, I stopped hearing anything of him. It was probably all just talk—you know the way older boys can be.”
Pentas nodded.
“The rumours were so . . . odd,” he continued, apparently forgetting himself at last and warming to his subject. “They said the king would never touch anything or anyone, so as not to dirty himself with the affairs of the material world, or—” He looked up at her, the candle suddenly leaping again. “I’m sorry, I’m going on.”
“That’s all right.”
Bidens lapsed into silence for a while. “Were yo
u bullied, too?” he asked at last.
Pentas looked out into the darkness. “I suppose so.”
“I thought as much. It feels like we’ve shared some of our past, you and I.”
“Perhaps.”
Her mind was wandering, as it tended to when she knew people were trying too hard at conversation. Out in the night the waves were glowing, a twinkling luminescence churning with the moving surf. Pen-tas sat back suddenly, her own heart causing the flame to flicker this time.
“What?” Bidens asked.
“Quiet,” she whispered.
Something had sprinted past, a dark shape against the glowing waves. There was someone out there, on the beach.
They listened. Slowly Pentas fancied she could hear the patter of feet slapping on the damp sand. She doused the lantern at last, checking on the sleeping Arabis, and opened the window for a better view.
Down below, the glinting sand rolled by, the surf slopping opalescent almost to the Wheelhouse’s single track. She pushed herself up onto the ledge, leaning out to look back along the beach as it receded into darkness. Her eyes were still adjusting but she fancied she could see someone following along behind. Pentas glanced the other way, glimpsing what looked like another two figures running through the waves.
She climbed back in, heart thumping. “There are people, on the beach.”
Bidens frowned. “What . . . you mean following—?”
“Following us, yes,” she barked. Arabis stirred, grumbling.
“But why—?” Bidens began, moving to the window himself. As he did so, a small black shape darted past him and into the room, fluttering along the ceiling and chattering to itself.
“Catch it!” Pentas yelled, grabbing Arabis. The bird shrieked at her voice, flapping back onto the window frame and perching there for a moment before hopping out. They heard it cackling in the night outside.
With Arabis grumbling in her arms, Pentas made her way through the spokes of the wheel past the scullery and into the tiller cabin, noticing Jatropha had dimmed their lanterns, too. Eranthis turned to her.
“There’s something up ahead,” she said. “Some sort of barrier.” Jatropha kept silent, concentrating on the beach. Pentas realised he was slowing down the Wheelhouse.
Eranthis noticed a moment later. “What are you doing? Speed up!”
“Stay here,” Jatropha said. “Don’t get out. Douse all the lights.” He abruptly locked the tiller and the Corbita rolled to a stop in the sand. “Don’t get out,” he repeated as he climbed down from the cabin. They watched him incredulously as he made his way to the sand, Eranthis coming slowly to her senses and dimming the cabin lantern until it fizzled out. The sea and sand glowed dully against a black, starless sky.
“Come on,” Eranthis said, leaving the cabin and heading along the balcony. Pentas stared after her, almost too petrified to move, finally summoning up the courage to follow with the sleeping baby. On the balcony, she noticed the warm night wind had stilled almost to nothing, and out in the darkness there were no lights. Together they ducked into the starboard necessarium, bolting the door behind them, listening hard.
Slowly the sounds of the night became apparent through the wooden walls of the chamber and up through the single hole in the floor. Whooping cries drifted across the sands, footfalls growing closer.
The door rattled abruptly, startling them both into a gasp.
“Only me,” Bidens whispered behind the door.
Eranthis unlocked it and yanked it open. “Get in here.”
Together they sat on the floor of the cramped necessarium, Arabis soundly asleep and held to Pentas’s chest. She peered through the hole beside her, seeing only a gloomy circle of sand twenty feet below.
“Are all the lanterns out?” Eranthis whispered to Bidens.
“Every one,” he replied. A single kinetic flame would give them away.
They all started as something flapped and settled on the roof of the Wheelhouse, scrabbling over the tiles.
“Must have been following us all this way,” Eranthis said softly, silencing at a hiss from Pentas.
They listened for a while longer as the whooped yells were answered from somewhere further down the beach; more followed along behind.
Finally, Eranthis spoke up again. “What if Jatropha—” Pentas saw her look between them. “What if he wanted this to happen?”
Pentas stared at the large coloured smudge of her face without comprehension. “What—?”
“Shhh,” Bidens breathed, holding out his hand. Footfalls close by, almost beneath the hole. Some soft speech in a thick dialect, and the person was moving on, around to the front of the cabin.
“What were they saying?” Pentas asked Bidens, having barely understood.
At first, he didn’t answer. “They said . . . I don’t understand it. They were saying they can’t find the Wheelhouse.”
The sisters looked at each other in the gloom, then at Bidens.
“That’s what they said,” he muttered.
Pentas understood at last why Jatropha had climbed out. He’d created one of his blind spots—the kind he said he used to slip by people and places unnoticed—but one that obscured the Corbita entirely. Her mouth fell open in the darkness, and she resolved to indulge him in his pointless stories from now until the end of time.
The cackling and whooping were growing more distant now, veiled by the soft breath of the surf. Eranthis exhaled with a shuddering sigh. Bidens smiled at them in the darkness, getting up from his sitting position. But his knee moved awkwardly, as if still asleep, and he bumped lightly into Arabis. She woke with a gurgle, her face contorting in the shadows.
“No—”
She wailed, piercing the silence, screaming out while Pentas desperately bounced her, making all the soothing noises she knew.
“Shit, sorry—”
“Fool!” Eranthis hissed.
Arabis took a lungful of air, the silence drawing back in as they all heard the excitement coming from outside, and bawled into the tiny space.
“Give her to me,” Eranthis commanded, not bothering to lower her voice. Pentas dumped the baby in her sister’s arms and looked down at the hole.
A shadow stood beneath them, staring up.
Pentas screamed.
Before she knew it, Pentas was bumping through the darkened chambers of the Wheelhouse, a lantern brightening suddenly in the tiller cabin as someone climbed aboard. Pentas kicked over the scullery table and ran for the window, levering herself out.
She fell the twenty feet, twisting her ankle on the wet sand below, hardly noticing. Behind her, the Wheelhouse filled with light, its shadow stretching off suddenly into the surf, screams and shouts coming from its rooms. She suddenly remembered Arabis, and with a start of relief saw Bidens holding her in the tiller cabin.
She stumbled again in the water, the sand between her toes dropping and sliding away.
Pentas felt it then, looking out at the black edge of the sea.
With a roar, the tide came back in, churning cerulean with a heave of luminescence and spattering the Wheelhouse. Another surge, twice as high as the last, swept her towards the wheel, foaming and slamming up to the balcony.
Pentas clasped the railings, watching one of her attackers—his bedraggled Westerly face visible now in the light—splutter as he was pulled from the ladder to the tiller cabin and dragged back out into the waves. She knew what was doing this, that there would be no respite from it until all of these people had been swept away, and knew she must hold on as tightly as she could.
The waves boomed and slapped and gargled around the Corbita, the swell lifting it a few times in the high water and dumping it back onto the receding sand. Things shattered and banged inside. Eranthis cried out for Pentas a few times, assuring her that Arabis was safe within, and then the water dropped.
The sea gurgled, sucking at the wheel, sliding back into the darkness.
Pentas heaved her leg over the balcony rail, sliding on the
wet wood. Screams faded as the waves dragged back out to sea, disappearing into a receding froth barely touched by the lanterns. There had only been half a dozen of them, she’d seen. All taken by the sea. Jatropha’s slender white form was walking across the far sands, two dead messenger birds held in either hand.
Pentas stumbled along the balcony towards the tiller cabin, stepping through a thin scum of blood that was washing out over the planks and dripping on the sand, expecting to find one of the kidnappers injured. She slipped in the blood, throwing out a hand to catch herself on the cabin’s doorframe, and a black form materialised from the gloom. Bidens was lying there, the side of his face flat against the boards, a bright smear of blood leaching from his body. His eyes, hardened as if in a scowl, had latched on to her feet and were watching their movements intently. She steadied herself and turned away, retching, trying to lift her toes out of the blood but knowing it had mixed with all the water on the boards. When she looked back, she saw that he was moving his mouth silently. She ran for the scullery, using what last strength she had to lock the door shut behind her.
ZADAR
“Perhaps we should go back,” Eranthis said. “Back to Mostar.”
The morning sea breathed through the window. A light breeze was busily brushing a cover of loose sand across the lonely single track that stretched off along the beach. They’d left the boy back there, under blankets, and perhaps now the sand was burying him too.
She looked up at Jatropha, who was about to serve tea from the stove. “You can’t just send money,” she told him. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you that? You can’t spend your way out of problems.”
“The mayor wouldn’t appreciate our return,” Jatropha said, pouring a cup for her. “We must continue on. There will only be more of them back there.”
“We failed that poor boy,” Pentas said at her side, sipping slowly at the tea that was set in front of her. Since the attack, she hadn’t let Arabis out of her sight. Eranthis had found her in the scullery, reading the new stories of Onosma aloud to her daughter. Blood like dried paint had stuck between the boards of the balcony.