Though day was nearly over, people continued to file past the body. As the sun set they melted into shadows, becoming a river of candles, glimmering down the piazza. Torches stood at the corners of the bier, sending twisting pillars of orange motes up to the waning moon.
“I’m new here; I don’t know your customs,” Bram said, in English.
Sophie repeated the phrase.
CHAPTER 12
By dawn, Bram had drawn a phrasebook and a long list of vocabulary out of Sophie and the clerk, and was working on understanding basic grammar. It was an education for Sophie, too—since she had never studied Fleet, she didn’t consciously know the rules. She just knew what sounded right. The clerk, fortunately, was happy to spell out the basics for them both.
“This word Kir you’ve been using,” Bram said at one point.
“It’s the honorific. Mister, Miss, or Missus.”
“Gender neutral?” he said.
“Seems that way,” Sophie said, and the clerk nodded.
By then she was reassembling the various flower arrangements in their suite.
Translating for Bram wasn’t quite enough to occupy her mind—she kept flashing back to Gale, dead on the floor and the sense memory of cutting off the mezmer’s arm. So, as she’d taught him Fleetspeak, she’d also pulled apart the bouquets, taking pictures of each plant, noting the ones she knew and the ones she didn’t recognize.
When that was done, she took the video camera out to the balcony, panning slowly across the courtyard, gathering grainy, ill-lit footage of Gale’s body, of Parrish and Verena standing vigil over her.
“You could go, too.” She repeated the words before she realized Bram had actually spoken to her. “Sorry, what?”
He had sent the clerk away, and was paging through twenty or so sheets of notes on Fleetspeak, watching her with a concerned expression. “You could go stand by the body too, if you wanted.”
She sat beside him, leaning in. “It’d be wrong to go play sad niece for the crowd. Gale didn’t know me.”
“Nobody who knows you would ever believe you were pretending to be sad.”
His words triggered a massive upwelling of feeling: sadness, the urge to cry yet again, and a bit of that mad feeling she’d had aboard Estrel. “She was unconscious for most of the time I knew her. It is sad, but it’s … selfishness, you know? I’m sad for me. I didn’t get to know her.”
“You think that makes you a bad person?”
She put up both hands. “Bramble, this is no time for your amateur therapist routine.”
Before Bram could answer, the Conto swept through the door, leading a small crowd. Sophie recognized the same well-dressed boy and girl who’d been with him at the bier that night. His kids, she assumed. Trailing them were a half dozen of the plainly dressed servants, laden with long, dove gray robes.
“Did you sleep, Kirs?”
She shook her head. “Time to go?”
“It’s only been a few hours,” Bram objected. “It’s dark.”
“The walk up takes an hour when one is burdened.” The servants cloaked them both, covering Sophie’s day-old clothes. The Conto glanced around the room. His eye lingered on the flower arrangements Sophie had disturbed.
You don’t miss much, do you?
The cloak was plain, soft, and heavy. The fabric felt expensive, and smelled of sourness and old dust.
“Come, this way.”
They trooped downstairs, arriving to find the soldiers shooing the working- and middle-class mourners from the courtyard. It was a quiet, orderly process that left Verena and Parrish all but alone at Gale’s head and feet. The servants had a cloak for Verena, too.
A half dozen men and women, dressed in black frock coats that matched the one worn by Parrish, stood in two rows a few meters from the bier. One, a man of perhaps twenty, handed Parrish a bicorne hat, black in color, with a long, blue-black plume. It matched his black and silver coat. A dress uniform? Parrish put it on, giving it a brisk push to compress his curls, which were so dense they looked like they’d spring it off, given half a chance. The hat was aligned fore-and-aft, not wide, not Napoleon-style. It made him a foot taller.
Parrish took a second to clasp the younger man’s arm. He bowed formally to the other five, who responded by stiffening to attention. Then, marching half-time, they encircled the bier.
“They must be from Nightjar,” Bram whispered. “Gale’s crew.”
Sophie nodded.
The sailors raised the body off the bier and the procession began to move, circling the piazza once before taking a narrow side road up between the tall black buildings. People lined the route, but there were no more offerings. The air was oppressively humid and with the sun only just rising, it was cold.
I could be knitting under this cloak and nobody would know the difference, Sophie thought. She took the opportunity to fumble out her video camera.
She had long ago taught herself the trick of shooting from the hip, of holding a camera at her side, angling it to catch the faces of passing individuals in crowds and on the street, people who might freeze up if they knew they were being photographed. It was panning for gold: nine out of every ten seconds of footage were useless, but occasionally you caught something brilliant.
She slid her camera hand out of the cloak and aimed at the crowd to her right. Filming made a decent distraction from the building fatigue and the crushing weight of sadness, the woeful and bereft faces, the soft sobs and the reverent whispers that filled the air.
There was plenty to record on the hike to the caldera. They left the city behind soon enough, and with the first glimmers of sun came a symphony of birdsong, blended warbles and whistles, half of them familiar, half not. There was almost no vegetation on these slopes: tufted grasses, a few forbs. It was entirely different from the lush path behind the palazzo, with its amphibians and ferns.
As they climbed up from sea level, the air seemed drier. A baked smell was rising, it seemed, from the soil itself.
Twenty feet away, a lizard stirred on a ledge. In the dim light, it looked like a gecko. A dead beetle on the ground tempted her; she wanted, badly, to just scoop it up, collect it. But Verena trod on it unknowingly before Sophie could give in to the socially inappropriate urge.
A familiar face among the watchers made her breath hitch.
The man caught her eye and recognition jolted between them. His lips skinned back from his teeth.
Just shoot, Sophie thought. She angled the camera, pointing right at him. He saw the movement but didn’t turn away or try to hide.
Leaving him behind, they moved on, around a rise and into the glow of molten stone, into firelight and heat. The procession gathered behind them, forming an audience on a large outcropping of porous volcanic stone.
The caldera of the volcano had a symmetrical, impossibly manmade appearance. It was almost perfectly circular, with broad skirts of igneous rock that rose fifty or so feet above the level of the lava. A notch dug into the coastal side of the mountain formed a spillway, reminiscent of the low side of a dripping candle. Super-heated stone escaped downhill from this lip, a slow-motion lava fall that terminated in a fiery pool a hundred feet below. This, in turn, flowed into the rolling hills.
A footbridge of glazed black bricks arched over the fall. The uniformed pallbearers made for it, laying the bier with Gale’s body across its rails and then, but for Parrish, clearing off.
Directly across the caldera from the bridge stood an enormous marble figure of a woman, milk-white and as tall as a three-story building. She stood on the lip of the caldera, hands out in a soothing gesture, the unmistakeable hush-hush pose of a mother calming a fussing child in its cradle. Blue letters in the magical alphabet—someone had called it spellscrip, hadn’t they?—ran from her elbows to her fingertips. The red light of the lava reflected and shifted on her stone skin.
A distant ululating shriek reached them from the harbor, a chorus of voices raised in lament, impossibly loud.
&n
bsp; Verena seized Sophie’s arm before she could turn. “Don’t look at them.”
“Why? What happens now?”
Another wail.
“You and Parrish have to give Gale to the caldera.”
“No speeches, no eulogy?” She’d persisted in thinking of the Erinthians as Italian in their sensibility; she had allowed for a full morning of religious ritual. Deep down, she’d been expecting the Pope, or someone like him, to march over the horizon with ten cardinals and a cloud of incense to make a six-hour ceremony of it.
“That shrieking sound is a Verdanii ship. It’ll be flying flags demanding we stop.”
From his place beside the bier, Parrish was looking at the two of them.
“You should do this, Verena,” Sophie whispered. “It’s your job. Me standing here is a mistake, you know that.”
“Do it, Sophie, please.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
Verena shook her slightly. “As long as the heir—you—fulfills Gale’s wishes, there’s no diplomatic incident. Otherwise, the Conto is defying Verdanii.”
Another high-pitched shriek.
“Please. Don’t leave Parrish out there holding the bag.”
You’re all about Parrish, aren’t you?
Sophie stepped out onto the bridge, facing Parrish across the body of poor Aunt Gale. She had a sudden remembrance of her, buried in that bed of rag blankets in that terrible, patched-together hut on Stele Island. Then the gritty snap—was that really just yesterday?—as the mezmer broke her neck.
Here lies Gale, slain by monsters. Somehow it seemed surreal and unutterably tiring.
“Kir Hansa,” Parrish said. “We must hurry.”
Reluctantly she grasped the handle of the bier, mirroring his motion as he raised the head of the obsidian pane, up, up. The little offerings began to drop into the fall of lava, the miniature wheat sheaves immolating in bursts of firelight. Finally, when Sophie had her arm practically levered straight up from her head, Gale’s body slid off the bier, falling soundlessly into the pyroclastic flow.
She set her teeth against what sounded like a crackle.
“Return the glass, too,” Parrish said opening his hands. She did, letting the sheet fall, end over end, into the flow.
“Now what?”
“Walk on,” he said, offering his arm. “This might be our best chance to talk before the others catch up.”
“Talk about what?” Not sleeping had made her snappish.
“I wish to suggest a course of action.”
“Let me guess,” Sophie said. “I go home, button my lip, leave the birth family alone and never think of Stormwrack again.”
“It’s too late for that.”
She waited.
“Erinth is, as you see, a remarkable place. There’s plenty here to examine: the terrain, I mean, and the wildlife. The Conto would happily provide you with guides. If you charged me and Verena with certain responsibilities, you and Bram might explore the flora and fauna of the island at your leisure.”
“Responsibilities? You mean I should turn over the investigation of Gale’s death to you.”
“Yes. We would also consult a lawyer about the estate and the Fleet courier commission.”
She was outraged. “You think I’ll get in your way.”
“Lower your voice.”
“You are so not the boss of me, Parrish.”
“If you truly came here to examine the wildlife, why not exploit the opportunity?”
“You think I’ll screw things up!”
He didn’t back down. “You don’t understand the culture here. You don’t know Gale’s history, or anything of the Fleet. Your brother doesn’t speak the language—”
“Oh, Bram? Give him a week.”
“You didn’t care for Gale,” he said, and there was more force in his voice now. “You’d just met, and she wanted nothing to do with you. Please, Kir, I’m not trying to be unkind—”
“Funny. You’re doing a stunner of a job.” She wasn’t even sure why she was so mad. “You’ve known me a day and you already think I can’t handle … You’re trying to pack me off where I can’t do any damage…”
“Yes. Step aside, study the island, feed your curiosity and let me—me and Verena, that is—”
“Will it improve Verena’s legal position if I do? Will she magically get the estate back?”
His plummy lips tightened. “No, Kir.”
“Then screw that. Unlike you, I actually have a clue or two. The guys who attacked Gale said Temperance…”
“An oath, I’m sure.”
“I know what cursing sounds like,” she said. She’d had time to think it over. “They weren’t just blowing each other off. Besides, it came up several times. Tempranza, Yacoura Tempranza. It’s why I retained it.”
They rounded a switchback along the trail, and she saw the other mourners were indeed starting to catch up.
“And your other clue?”
She pulled her arm free. “I’m not saying.”
“Excuse me?”
Ha. Made you angry. “Not until you agree to drop this idea of ditching me, and let me participate in the investigation.”
He was practically standing at attention. “That’s not up to me, Kir.”
“No? Whose call is it? The Conto doesn’t seem to care as long as the job gets done. Verena?”
He winced exquisitely. “No.”
“Wait,” she said. “You’re not saying—you’re saying me?”
“You. You’re our employer now, Sophie.” Parrish pulled in a slow, ragged breath, but when he spoke, his voice was steady. “The crew of Nightjar answers to you. We are bound to do whatever you say.”
CHAPTER 13
The procession continued downhill, along the path of the lava, which flowed with unnatural sedateness through a plain occupied by glassblowers and workers with kilns, all of whom took off their caps as they passed. Sophie caught a snatch of barely comprehensible Erinthian, naming the canal, referring to it as Fiumofoco … river of fire?
They followed it all the way to the sea, where it disappeared into the water, forming an extended curtain of rising steam that crawled out to sea, flagging the direction of the prevailing wind. They walked up the beach to the wharf, circling the eastern edge of the capital, Cindria. She estimated they’d gone about ten kilometers.
The exercise helped her unwind; she felt the fatigue less as a sharp, tense pain—jabs and edges of knives, scraping the skin—and more as an overall ache.
Formality leached out of the procession as they continued back to sea level. A few tottering children were whisked away discreetly by their parents, the families disappearing down thin alleys lined by black lava buildings. All the buildings here were made of the same porous stone, Sophie noticed, and none of them had windows looking up at the volcano. It was as if the whole of Erinth had turned its back on the looming danger on its edge.
Up and down the procession, conversations broke out. Verena and Bram caught up with her, while Parrish strode on ahead.
All too eager to get away, Sophie thought, watching him go.
“Why don’t I go alone to explain to the Mothers that Gale’s remains are gone?” Verena pointed at a tethered ship with a thoroughly bizarre shape: bulletlike, like a submarine, but with masts and sails. It seemed to have a baleen on its bow, and its sails resembled living trees—cedars, perhaps, from the look of them—clad in gossamer sail fabric.
Despite Sophie’s fatigue, her curiosity stirred. She lifted her camera, and took a few seconds to capture the craft. “Would it be better to go by yourself?”
“Yeah. You don’t want a bunch of furious Verdanii in your face, believe me.”
Sophie imagined having to justify herself to a bunch of angry grieving women, each as impressive as the mighty Annela Gracechild … or as hostile as Beatrice. The thought was just about nauseating. “Can you see about untangling the inheritance thing too, with them?”
Verena looked a bit
surprised. “I meant to try, yeah.”
“You can be open about it, you know. I don’t want it, any of Gale’s … her stuff, her life, her job. Do whatever you have to to sort out the paperwork.”
“Right, of course,” she said. “Thank you, Sophie.”
“I’ll get the wheels rolling on investigating her death, if I can,” Sophie added.
If Verena had any doubts about this, she didn’t show it. “Captain, you’ll take care of them?”
Parrish looked back and inclined his head gravely.
Oh, and the seventeen-year-old reminds us both that I need a babysitter, Sophie thought. She decided she was too tired to fight about it. There’d been a second there where she and Verena had almost been getting along.
They staggered back up to the palazzo, she and Bram, amid a dwindling crowd of courtiers. By the time they got there, they were almost leaning on each other.
“It’s almost noon,” he said. “I gotta pass out for a while.”
“Me too.” She looked at Parrish. “Nobody seems too freaked out about my camera. Why is that?”
“It’s not our way to show interest in mummer objects—mechanicals,” he said. “They’re expensive to build, unreliable, and generally less effective than magic.”
“That can’t be true,” Bram said.
Parrish shrugged. “It’s what people believe.”
People, Sophie thought. Not you. Well, Parrish had been to San Francisco; he had a better sense than most of how far technology could take a society. “Will it explode any state secrets if I show a servant a couple images?”
“Just don’t say where it’s from.” He shook his head. “If they ask, say it’s outland mummery.”
“Outland mummery,” she repeated, yawning.
They went back to the suite and she sent for the scribe. “Can you sketch? Or are you just a text guy?”
“I can make drawings, Kir.”
She flipped on her view screen, playing through the footage of the procession, and found the image she wanted, freezing it on the screen. He watched politely. As Parrish predicted, he showed no interest in the camera itself.
“See this guy?” The scribe nodded, bending close.
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