Ship of Smoke and Steel

by Django Wexler

  “I still want to hear what happened in the Deeps,” she says. “Come find me, and I’ll buy you a drink. I suspect a lot of other people will, too.”

  “I’ll take you up on that,” I say. “The story’s not as exciting as you’re probably hoping, though.” Because I’m certainly not telling them about Hagan.

  “Add a few flourishes, then.” Thora smiles again. “Good luck, Deepwalker.”

  The name makes my skin prickle, but I just nod cordially. Thora turns away, back toward Zarun’s quarters.

  It occurs to me that, for the first time, I’m free in the “civilized” part of Soliton. No one is escorting me or dragging me anywhere or locking me in, and part of my mind urges me to run for it. Find somewhere to hide, disappear, gather information until I’m ready to make a move.

  These are well-honed instincts from years on the streets, but they’re almost certainly wrong. Soliton just isn’t big enough for these kinds of tactics to be effective. The ship itself is huge, of course, but the crew here in the Stern can’t be more than a few thousand people. You can’t hide in a place like that, where everyone knows everyone else at least by reputation. It makes me feel horribly exposed, deprived of the anonymizing crowds of the city streets that I could wrap around myself like a comforting blanket.

  Besides, I don’t have time to take things cautiously. And when Meroe wakes up—

  As though in answer to my thoughts, a few people on the street are staring openly at me. One says something to another in a language I don’t speak, but I catch the word “Deepwalker.”

  Spectacular.

  I trot down the stairs, two at a time. The Middle Deck is where I was first brought to see the Butcher, I realize, a maze of metal corridors opening on to rooms of various sizes. I turn left, as instructed, and walk quickly down an empty hallway to a curtained doorway. I hesitate at the threshold; am I supposed to knock?

  From inside, someone short-cuts my dilemma. “Isoka? Is that you?”

  I push the curtain aside. The room is smaller than the cell we were in previously, but in much better shape, with no standing water or rotting carpets. Sleeping mats are set against one wall, a low table with cushions in the center, and a few heavy clay jars stand by the door. Other than that, it’s empty, bare metal floor and walls. I suppose Ahdron hasn’t had the time to decorate.

  In the back, a doorway leads off to a smaller room, blocked by another curtain. The pack leader is nowhere in sight, but Berun is at the table and the Moron is sitting cross-legged in one corner, in much the same position he used to sit in on the little island.

  “Isoka!” Berun gets up. “I heard they found you, but…”

  “Yes,” I confirm wearily. “I’m still alive.”

  “They told us Meroe is at Sister Cadua’s,” Berun says, anxiously. “Do you know—”

  “I haven’t seen her, but I heard she’ll be all right.”

  “Thank the Blessed.” He swallows. “What … what happened to your face?”

  The blue marks. Rot. Time to lie.

  “It’s fine,” I tell him. “I hurt myself in the fall. We found a mushroom that helped a bit, but it left these marks behind.” I offer my arm, where another line of curlicues wraps around my biceps.

  “It’s … interesting,” he says. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

  “Thanks.” My patience for Berun isn’t particularly strong at the moment. “Where’s Ahdron?”

  “In the back. He’s taken it for his bedroom.”

  I stride past Berun, and he turns to follow me, almost skipping to keep up.

  “Um,” he says. “Do you know what’s going to happen to us?”

  “Not yet,” I growl, and push aside the curtain.

  Ahdron’s “bedroom” is just another metal space with a blanket and cushions on the floor. I suppose the sacrifices to Soliton don’t include a lot of furniture. He’s sitting with his back to the wall, a clay jug in one hand, and he grins at me as I come in.

  “Isoka,” he says. “Gods be damned. Or should I call you Deepwalker now?”

  “‘Isoka’ is fine,” I tell him. He looks much as he did before we left to fight the hammerhead, though his hands are wrapped in bandages. Powerburn, I assume. He really was trying to kill the thing.

  “I didn’t think…” He shakes his head. “You can’t blame me for not expecting you to come back from that.”

  “I wasn’t so optimistic myself, to be honest.”

  I watch his eyes search my face, hesitate for a moment on the new marks, then move on. “You’re all right?”

  “More or less.”

  “And you want to know where we stand,” Ahdron says. He takes a pull from the clay jug. “As you can see, Pack Nine’s circumstances have improved.”

  “No doubt the Butcher was grateful to you for coming home without me.”

  “She would have been happy if we’d all died down there,” he says. “But since we didn’t, and since you killed the hammerhead, she’s happy to take advantage of our success. I’m not sure if she and I are entirely square”—he takes another drink, and I get a whiff of alcohol—“but we’re not on probation anymore.”

  “What did you do that made her so angry, anyway?”

  He shrugs. “Rutted the wrong girl. How was I supposed to know she had her eye on her?”

  I had figured it was something like that. Men like Ahdron are always letting their pricks get them into trouble.

  Quit stalling, Isoka.

  The problem is that I can’t hate Ahdron. He acts like a bully because a bigger bully is sitting on his back, a situation with which I’m intimately familiar. He was probably earnest about helping me, even if it mostly meant helping himself. At the very least, he’s not actively trying to get me killed.

  And I’m about to cut his legs out from under him. Or kill him, if it comes to that.

  Oh, well.

  “—I think we can keep working our way up,” he’s saying. “Now that we’re off probation, we can choose our own targets, and between you and me we should be able to make a lot of scrip quickly. That might let us bring in another—”

  “Shut up and listen for a minute,” I tell him.

  He pauses, eyes narrowing. “Someone wants you to leave?”

  I shrug.

  “The Butcher won’t stand for it.” He cocks his head. “Are you going to do it?”

  “No.”

  “Good choice. They may say they can protect you, but—”

  “I’m not leaving. I’m taking the pack.” I fix him with a stare. “Consider this my formal challenge.”

  There’s a long silence.

  “You’re not serious,” Ahdron says, lifting the bottle to his lips.

  “Of course I’m rotting serious.”

  “Do you have any idea what the Butcher will do to you?”

  “Let me worry about the Butcher,” I tell him.

  “You are serious.” He sets the bottle aside and clambers to his feet. “You haven’t been here a rotting week, Deepwalker. You think you know how things work on Soliton?”

  He steps closer, squeezing my space, and I don’t give ground. “It’s not a matter of what I know,” I say. “It’s a matter of whether you think you can take me on.”

  “You rotting Melos types are always so rotting confident,” he sneers. “You think I’ve never killed one of you before?”

  “You’ve never fought me.” I force a smile. “Concede the point and you can stay in the pack. You’d make a good subordinate.”

  “Freeze and rot,” he says. “We had a deal.”

  “Circumstances have changed.”

  “Get out.”

  “I want an answer.”

  “As the challenged party, I have a day and a night to respond.” His lip curls. “Not that you would know the first rotting thing about it.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  “I was wrong about you,” he says. “I thought you were smart, Isoka.”

  “If it’s any consolation,”
I tell him from the doorway, “I was right about you.”

  * * *

  Ahdron is correct on one point—I don’t really know what I’m doing. I don’t know my way around Soliton yet, much less the rules of power struggles. I don’t even know how to buy food, or a place to sleep.

  But all that can wait. If this works, I’ll have time to get my legs under me. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll be dead, which means Tori goes to the whorehouse and Blessed knows what happens to Meroe. So it has to work.

  When you’re on the bottom, you have to take risks. It’s the only way up.

  I find my way to Sister Cadua’s in a series of false starts and bad directions. A tall Imperial woman meets me at the familiar curtained doorway, and now that I’m looking for it I can see her eyes flick to the marks on my face before she looks away.

  “Yes,” I say, before she can speak. “It’s me. From all the rumors.”

  “You want to see your friend?” she says.

  “Please.”

  She nods and leads me inside. We pass a number of doorways before she gestures me into a small room, where Meroe is laid out. I’m relieved to see that she already looks better than I remember, scrapes and bruises fading, breathing easily. My makeshift splint is gone, replaced with a sturdier version.

  There’s a chair beside the bed, and I sit down, suddenly feeling a weight of exhaustion. For a while I just watch Meroe breath, staring at the rich brown of her skin, the delicate little upturn of her nose.

  I remember the first night in the Deeps, pressed together for warmth. It’s warm enough, here, but I imagine climbing into bed beside her, huddling close. Just to be there when she wakes up. Just to feel …

  Blessed’s rotting balls. I don’t understand myself anymore.

  “Miss Isoka?”

  I startle. I must have fallen into a doze without realizing it. Now another woman is in the room with me. She looks Jyashtani, though her skin is almost as dark as Meroe’s. Shorter than me, broad and heavyset, she has an air of unmistakable authority.

  “Sister Cadua?” I guess.

  She nods. “It’s good to meet you.” Her Imperial is accented, but fluent, like that of most of the people I’ve met here. She nods to Meroe. “She’s doing well. Were you the one who set her leg?”

  “I hope I didn’t screw it up too badly.”

  Sister Cadua gives a small smile. “Not too badly. It should heal clean, though it will take some time.”

  “Good.” I look back at Meroe. “Do you know when she’ll wake up?”

  “Soon, I imagine. By tomorrow, unless there’s something wrong I don’t know about.”

  I nod. Sister Cadua leans close to me, examining my face with a professional eye.

  “You look exhausted.”

  “It’s been a busy day,” I admit.

  “You can go home,” she says. “I’ll send someone when she comes to.”

  “Home is … a bit tricky at the moment.”

  “Ah.” She pauses. “There’s an empty bed in the next room. And we could spare you a bowl of crab juice, I daresay.”

  “Very kind,” I say. “And the catch?”

  “I’d like to examine you.”

  I turn that over in my head for a while, but it seems only fair.

  Sister Cadua is all brisk efficiency. She hustles me into the next room, and I strip off my new clothes and stand patiently while she walks around me. She touches the marks, carefully.

  “They don’t hurt?”

  I shake my head. “Feels perfectly ordinary.”

  “And you say these came from some kind of mushroom?”

  “Yes,” I say, belatedly realizing this might not have been such a good idea. Sister Cadua seems sharp enough to poke holes in my hasty cover story. “It wasn’t like anything I’ve seen up here,” I improvise. “Probably only lives in the Deeps.”

  “Hmm.” She frowns. “Could you sketch it?”

  “Meroe would do a better job, once she wakes up.”

  She nods. “It sounds like a useful thing to add to our repertoire. I may suggest an expedition to retrieve some.”

  “I don’t know if I could find my way back to the exact spot,” I say.

  Sister Cadua waves a hand. “It will be difficult, of course. But without a Ghul talent in the crew, we need all the help we can get.”

  I yawn. “You must get some ghulwitches as sacrifices.”

  “Less frequently than you might think,” she says. “The only one I know of served in Shiara’s clade, but he was killed more than a year ago.”

  There’s more to that story, but her expression warns me not to dig into it. I’m certainly not about to tell anyone Meroe’s secret, even if it still gives me the creeps when I think about it too hard. Sister Cadua indicates that I should get dressed, and leans out into the hall to summon a bowl of crab juice.

  “It’ll be just the one night, you understand,” she says. “We need the space for the injured, most of the time.”

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “After tomorrow, I’ll have somewhere to go.”

  14

  I spend another uncomfortable night in the stupid Jyashtani-style bed, suspended several feet above the floor for no readily apparent reason. At least the crab juice, the soup of miscellaneous crab parts and mushrooms ubiquitous on Soliton, is hot and delicious.

  In the morning, I go back to Meroe’s room. She’s still asleep, and a young man in dark robes is carefully giving her water. He pauses as she moans, and shifts uneasily.

  “Her fever has come down nicely,” Sister Cadua says, when she bustles in. “She’s going to be fine, though of course the leg will take some time to heal.”

  I remember the feeling of the hammerhead’s jaws closing on my own leg, the snap of breaking bones and the hot gush of blood from shredded flesh. Now the only evidence is a ring of curling blue marks around my calf, thanks to Meroe. My stomach still lurches when I think about her power, but not as badly as it once might have.

  Sister Cadua and her assistant leave me alone with Meroe. Her features are smooth now, calm. Her eyes quiver, shifting restlessly under closed lids. I wish she’d wake up.

  There’s a knock on the wall beside the curtain doorway, and a hesitant voice. “Isoka?”

  It’s Berun, looking even more nervous than usual. I force a smile, trying to put him at his ease, but it doesn’t seem to have the intended effect. I don’t have a lot of practice not frightening people. Better to get to the point.

  “What’s going on?” I ask him.

  He’s looking past me, to Meroe. His eyes are wide. “Is she really going to be all right?”

  “Sister Cadua says she’ll be fine,” I say, irritably. The way he looks at her bothers me. “What are you doing here?”

  He looks back at me and swallows hard. “Ahdron sent me.”

  “Is he ready to talk?”

  Berun shakes his head, miserably. “He says … he accepts your challenge. He’ll be waiting in the Ring at midday.”

  I look at him blankly. “The Ring?”

  “It’s where formal challenges are fought,” Berun says. “So there can be witnesses.”

  Rot. I’d hoped Ahdron would come to his senses. “Did he tell you anything else?”

  Berun shakes his head again. “But…”

  “But what?”

  “I shouldn’t tell you this.” He glances at Meroe. “The Butcher came to our quarters last night. She and Ahdron talked for a long time.”

  Which explains a lot. No doubt the Butcher promised him her favor if he kills me. So much for Ahdron coming to his senses.

  Rot them both, then. We’ll do this the hard way.

  “Okay,” I tell Berun. “I’m going to go and get this over with.”

  “But…” He looks like he’s about to cry. “Ahdron is … strong. You should apologize. He might—”

  “Stay here with Meroe,” I say, ignoring him. “If she wakes up, tell her I’ll be back soon. Can you do that?”

  “I
’ll tell her. But what if—”

  “Tell her,” I grate, “I’ll be back.”

  Berun blinks, and nods.

  * * *

  It can’t be long until midday, so I don’t have time to waste. Fortunately, the Ring isn’t hard to find. All I have to do is follow the crowd. Apparently the news that the infamous Deepwalker will be fighting has spread rapidly, and a steady stream of crew drifts down the ragged street. Word of what I look like has spread, too, and I can hear the whispers around me, see the glances at the marks on my face. I keep my eyes fixed ahead, ignoring them.

  The Ring isn’t as elaborate as I imagined. It’s just a large, clear area of deck, roughly circular, surrounded by a chest-high barrier improvised from scrap metal. A single gate leads inside, and rising platforms around the perimeter provide somewhere for crowds to stand and watch. Opposite the gate, there’s a dais, like one of the fancy boxes at the theater, with a half-dozen chairs.

  Much of the arena is already ringed with crew. The sound of conversation dies as I walk through the gate, leaving a moment of silence. Then it returns, much louder. I look around, but I don’t see Ahdron. I must be early.

  The platform is occupied, though. I assume it’s for the officers, because I recognize Zarun’s lean, handsome face, and the massive, armored figure of the Butcher. I don’t know the others. An Imperial girl, younger than me, in a silk kizen with a wide-brimmed hat and wispy veil, sits in an elegant, correct posture. Beside her is a tall, broad-shouldered young man, with the same light brown skin and broad features as Ahdron, wearing martial leathers and an inscrutable expression.

  The final chair is occupied by a boy close to my own age, with classically Jyashtani features and wearing the loose black-and-white clothes I’ve seen on their traders in Kahnzoka. He has round spectacles that catch the light, reminding me for a moment of Kuon Naga, and holds a tall wooden cane in one hand, tapping it idly against the platform. While all eyes are on me, he seems to be watching with particular interest. I return his stare for a moment, then glance at Zarun, who raises his eyebrows knowingly. The Butcher is glaring, but I avoid her eyes. Then the tenor of the crowd noise changes, and I turn around.

  Ahdron comes in through the gate. He’s dressed in thick, dark leather, closer to armor than what he wore on our hunts, and he has a round shield strapped to his left arm and a sword at his belt. I watch him carefully as he crosses the floor of the Ring. Fighting crabs, Ahdron didn’t seem particularly well trained, but there’s a confidence in his stance now. He stops a few feet away from me, scowling.