Bloody Rose

by Nicholas Eames

  “Maybe I fit.”

  “It doesn’t—”

  “Please,” Tam said, wishing to hell that hadn’t sounded so desperate. “Don’t you want something real? Something that lasts longer than just one night? You say you’ve used people, but those people have used you, too. And you deserve better than that, Cura, whether you think so or not.” The summoner remained silent, and so Tam went on. “Let me try, at least. And maybe let yourself actually care about someone instead of just giving yourself away to whoever—”

  Cura drew her knife.

  “Shit. I’m sorry. Please don’t stab me.”

  “I’m not going to stab you, Tam.” She unbuckled the blade’s black leather sheath and slid the knife back into it. “This is Kiss,” she said, offering it to the bard. “I didn’t name it. It was a gift from my uncle Yomi. I want you to have it.”

  When Tam only glared at the knife, Cura set it down on the bed between them. After another uncomfortable silence she stood and went to the door.

  “See you ’round, Tam,” she said, and then left.

  For several long minutes Tam stared at the weapon the summoner had left behind. Its blade was straight, its handle carved into the likeness of a raven. The lute in her lap lay silent. The song could wait; she didn’t feel like making music just now.

  I gave her my heart, Tam thought, miserably, and she gave me a knife.

  The captain strolled into the galley that evening while the band was pitting itself against a half-cask of Tarindian rum. A search of the Spindrift’s cupboards had revealed a great deal of smashed glassware and one wooden cup, so they were sharing it around.

  “Doshi?” asked Freecloud, glancing up from stuffing his pipe.

  “Yessir?”

  “Who’s flying the ship?”

  “No one,” he answered. “No need to worry, however. I’ve checked our altitude, corrected our course, battened the hatches—”

  “What hatches?” asked Cura. “Where are there hatches?”

  “The point being,” Doshi went on saying, “we are not going to crash. The Warden is up there, and Hawkshaw is nothing if not vigilant. If anything goes amiss I’m sure he’ll let us know. We’re clear of the mountains, not quite into the Brumal Wastes. The only thing we’re likely to hit is a few clouds.”

  “How long will it take us to reach Mirrormere?” asked Rose.

  “Two days, weather permitting,” said Doshi. He claimed a seat at one end of the galley’s trestle table, sidling up next to Cura, who in turn scooted closer to Tam, who tried to pretend she didn’t notice the summoner’s sudden proximity.

  “Could we be attacked on the way?” asked Freecloud.

  “We could,” Doshi granted, “though it ain’t likely. If it’s ugly and it’s got wings, it’s probably out west with Brontide’s Horde. Besides, the Spindrift may not be the fastest bird in the sky, but she’s got a few tricks up her sleeve.”

  “Tricks?” Brune looked dubious. “Like what? Falling to pieces in a storm?”

  “There’s two dozen barrel bombs stowed in her belly,” said Doshi breezily, as if he hadn’t just admitted they were in a flying boat loaded with explosives. “And I keep a chest in my room stocked with enough alchemical grenades to set half the Heartwyld on fire. Also, I’ve got a few bolt-throwers stashed here and there.”

  “In the hatches, no doubt,” said Cura.

  Doshi favoured her with a shit-eating grin.

  “Sounds like you’re ready for trouble,” said Roderick, who was eating a handful of snow he’d scooped from the icebox. “What are you? A pirate or something?”

  Tam half-expected one of her bandmates to reprimand the satyr for being impolite, but they all looked pretty damn eager to hear the captain’s answer.

  “I was,” he said, adjusting his goggles. “That’s how I came to possess this fine vessel for the first time.”

  “The first time?” Brune passed Doshi the wooden cup. Since the shaman was sitting closest to the cask, he was in charge of refilling it each time someone finished it off.

  “My crew and I found her beached on the Barbantine coast,” said the captain. “We were plying the shallows, collecting the Salt Queen’s toll from whoever crossed our path—”

  “You were robbing them,” Freecloud clarified.

  “All tolls are robbery. Whether a king takes his share or a dashing young swab holds a blade to your throat, your purse is lighter all the same. But yes, we were robbing them. And one morning we spotted the Spindrift laid up on some rocks. Her hull was rotted through. Her sail was in shreds. At first, we mistook her for just another wreck—until we saw the rings.”

  “You mean the tidal engines?” Tam asked.

  Doshi swallowed the last of his rum and returned the cup to Brune. “Right. The crew agreed to strip them and sell them off in Aldea. They’re pure duramantium, remember. We’d have been rich as southern princes, every one of us. Could have done anything with that kind of money. Except the one thing I wanted to do.”

  Brune passed the cup off to Cura. “And what’s that?”

  “Fly,” he said, looking through the cracked glass of a porthole window. “There was a storm that night. I was on watch when a bolt struck the water near the wreck and set one of those engines whirling. Next thing I knew I’d stolen a dory and rowed to shore. I filled the other engine up with salt water and rigged the orbs so I could take her up. By morning I’d fixed the steering, if you could call it that. I headed for Askatar, flying backward the whole time, and only able to turn right. I couldn’t afford to repair her, and figured my old crew would come looking for us anyway, so I sold her off to some fat Narmeeri merchant for so much gold I had to buy three kolaks just to carry it all.”

  Tam raised a hand. “What are kolaks?”

  “Like a scaly camel with no humps,” said Cura, handing back the cup.

  “What’s a camel?” asked Tam.

  “Like a furry kolak but with humps,” Rose said, though she didn’t take her eyes off Doshi. “So you took the money after all?”

  The captain shook his head. “I meant to. I really did. Except I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d given up more than I’d gained. I had more coins than a dragon could count, but …” His fingers toyed idly with the sash at his waist. “When you grow up as I did, without two coppers to rub together, being rich means being free. Free to go where you want, to eat what you want, to be whoever it is you’d like to be. But where I wanted to go, who I wanted to be”—he made an encompassing gesture—“is right here. I’d tasted true freedom, and I was hungry for more.”

  It was Tam’s turn at the cup. Tarindian rum was a luxury she’d never experienced before this evening. She thought it would taste like the oversweet swill Roderick and Cura drank most of the time, but it didn’t. The stuff was appallingly smooth, with notes of vanilla and honey, coupled with a subtle woodiness inherited from the inside of its cask.

  Okay, she thought for the second time in as many days, I’ve been hanging around mercenaries for too long.

  “The merchant fixed her up—or made her airworthy, anyway—and turned the Spindrift into a pleasure barge, his own flying harem. He called her something different, mind you—The Gilded Palace, or some rubbish name like that. He filled it up with lots of booze, plenty of women, too few guards, and took to the skies.”

  Tam finished her cup—her fourth, in fact, or maybe her fifth?—and handed it back to Brune.

  “Let me guess,” said Freecloud amiably. “You stowed away?”

  The captain stroked one of his moustaches. “Not quite. In fact, I bribed his guards, dressed up like a woman, and paraded aboard with the rest of his girls. Once we were airborne I staged a mutiny. We trussed him up and set him down in some bunghole village downriver, then spent the next few months sailing all over Grandual. We split the merchant’s fortune among us, and I dropped the girls off wherever their hearts desired.”

  Brune downed his measure of rum in a single gulp, then tapped the cask again and passe
d the cup to Rose. “Sounds lovely,” said the shaman.

  “It was.” Doshi’s smile turned wistful. “One of the girls and I fell in love. Anny, sweet Anny. I’d have jumped overboard if she asked me to. Well, probably. She had eyes like black pearls, hair like Satrian silk, and could cuss like a sailor with a stubbed toe. The third time I stole this ship was from her, but that’s a tale for another sky.”

  Freecloud swirled the cup Brune gave him, gazing at it rather than drinking. “So you fly for the Widow now?”

  “I fly for the Widow for now,” the captain amended. “I’ve managed to piss off quite a few powerful people down south. The Widow pays well, asks no questions, and I ask none in return. It’s a marriage of convenience—not that anyone with more wits than a lobotomized gremlin would marry that ice-hearted shrew.”

  Cura smirked. “Turned you down, did she?”

  “Numerous times.” Doshi wore a smirk of his own. “The woman’s bloody rich, you know. Anyhow, it’s lucky I ran into Hawkshaw when I did. He was in North Court at the time. I mistook him for a bounty hunter, because … Well, you’ve seen the fucker: grim as a grey sky, ain’t he? Turns out he was down there to recruit a band for some super-secret gig.”

  “The Simurg,” said Rose.

  “The Raincrows,” said Freecloud, finally downing his rum.

  “Indeed and indeed!” Doshi pushed his goggles farther up and rubbed at the red mark they’d left on his forehead. “The Warden offered me work, and if you’re looking to lie low you can’t do much better than Diremarch these days. Also, the Widow has made me a very wealthy man. Once the Dragoneater is slain, I’m free to go where I please.”

  “And where will that be?” asked Roderick. Like Brune, he finished his allotment of rum all at once.

  “I’m thinking Castia.”

  Freecloud’s ears shot up. “You would risk flying over the Heartwyld?”

  Doshi shrugged. “Why not? Oh, I hear the storms are the stuff of nightmares, and the sky above the forest is home to all kinds of fiends, but the Brumal Wastes ain’t exactly smooth sailing either, and what’s a journey without a little danger?”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Cura. It was Doshi’s turn at the cup, but the Inkwitch stole it from under his nose. She and the captain shared a smile, and Tam felt a sensation she barely recognized—something very much like a raven-handled knife twisting in her guts.

  Jealousy? The voice in her head tsked disapprovingly. Maiden’s Mercy, girl. Get a grip …

  “Besides,” Doshi said, “I hear Castia’s new emperor is some sort of paragon. The arena was torn down, slavery abolished. He’s even granting citizenship to monsters so long as they promise to behave themselves.”

  “Dogs and cats living together!” Roderick threw up his hands. “What’s the world coming to?”

  The captain smiled, stood, and smoothed the wrinkles from the lap of his yellow robe. “Anyhow, should Castia fail to amuse … I suppose I’ll just keep on sailing west.”

  “There’s nothing west of Castia,” Cura pointed out.

  “There’s something west of everywhere, my dear,” Doshi countered.

  Rose leaned over the table. “So you’ve seen the Dragoneater?” she asked. “You were there when the Raincrows took it on?”

  The captain scraped his teeth over his bottom lip. “I was there, yes. I watched the Raincrows take their shot. The Simurg is not like other monsters—and I’ve seen plenty, believe me. This thing is …” He cringed at some horror only he could see. “Would you like to know how long the Raincrows lasted against the Dragoneater?”

  The muscles in Rose’s jaw flexed. “How long?”

  “Seventeen seconds.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The Final Verse

  They sailed through the night. Tam went to sleep drunk and woke up hungover, grey light punching through the porthole window like a spear. The moment she opened her eyes she heard Daon Doshi’s voice in her head.

  Seventeen seconds.

  She stayed in bed until her head ceased pounding, one hand on the raven knife she’d stowed beneath her pillow. Finally she roused herself, and when her feet hit the floorboards a mild current kicked up her legs.

  Fuck this fucking shitbox skyship.

  She lowered her feet again and waited until the tingling sensation went away, then got up and dressed.

  Roderick was still asleep—Tam could hear the booker snoring through the walls. She found Brune and Cura in the kitchen sharing a cup of tea in the Spindrift’s single intact mug. The Inkwitch had started a new book—A Ghoul on the Side—and was still wearing a bandage over the tattoo she’d given herself two nights prior. She favoured Tam with a tight smile, but said nothing.

  Topside, the air was brisk, but the skyship’s high prow cut the worst of the wind. It was snowing, still; flakes whipped by, fleeting as half-remembered dreams, fizzling as they struck the sails above.

  Rose and Freecloud sat amidst the scatter of Rose’s red-and-black armour. The druin was speaking, gesturing grandly with his hands, while Rose examined the pieces of her armour one by one, knocking out dents with an iron mallet. She hadn’t repaired it since she and the band had taken on the tribe of orcs back in Highpool, and Tam figured she’d be at it for hours. Every so often Rose would pick up a pauldron or a battered greave and yelp as it shocked her, then glare either at Doshi or the crackling sails above.

  It was, remarkably, like any other morning she’d spent with Fable—except, of course, that they were thousands of feet in the air. You’d have never guessed they were a day away from a date with the Dragoneater.

  Hawkshaw was sitting exactly where she’d seen him last, hunched in his black straw cape against the base of the headless woman.

  Tam joined Doshi on the rear deck, and the captain commented on various landmarks as they passed overhead.

  “See that glacier? The dragon Neulkolln is asleep inside—gods help the north if that thing ever melts. Look!” he said a short while later. “The Spires of Balmanak! They called it the Silver City. Every tower boasted windows of mirrored glass, and at sunrise the whole place would light up like it was made of crystal.”

  “Also it was built on a silver mine,” said Freecloud, who’d left Rose alone to curse at her armour.

  “What happened to it?” Tam asked. The so-called Spires of Balmanak were sheathed in ice, jutting like icicles from colossal white drifts.

  Doshi grimaced. “The Simurg happened to it.”

  Eventually Brune and Roderick wandered up as well, and the four of them marvelled as they soared over the snowcapped tombstones of a giant graveyard. Doshi brought the Spindrift low, so they could read the weathered slabs as the skyship swooped between them.

  “Kathos Ironfoot,” Brune recited. “Never killed a merc that didn’t need killing.”

  “Here lies Bert,” said Tam. “We put him here because he died.”

  Freecloud grinned as he pointed out his favourite. “I’d rather be dead than cold.”

  Roderick, clutching his hat against the grasping wind, rattled off another. “One satchel of dried yeast. Two and half satchels of wholemeal flour. Two cups—fuck me,” he swore, “this is a recipe for walnut bread!”

  Around noon Doshi’s mood began to sour. Tam followed his gaze and saw dark clouds piled on the horizon. “The Stormwall,” he announced, lowering his goggles and tightening the sash at his waist. “You’ll want to get below. Things are about to get interesting.”

  Interesting, according to Daon Doshi, meant hailstones the size of kettles drumming against the Spindrift’s hull. It meant winds that screamed like a tone-deaf banshee while the ship rattled, rocked, and shuddered unnervingly. Interesting meant plummeting a thousand feet in a matter of seconds with the band nailed to the galley roof, screaming—or, in Roderick’s case, laughing hysterically.

  Once they’d broken through the storm, things grew calm again. One by one the band trickled topside and gathered at the rail. According to Doshi, the lan
d over which they flew had once been an inland sea. There were ancient boats and the bones of leviathans locked in the ice, and the captain pointed out the frosted domes of Carthia. “Once a thriving island city-state,” he remarked sadly. “All gone now. Nothing good lasts forever, they say.”

  “Nothing bad, either,” said Freecloud, which drew a wry smile from Daon Doshi.

  When the sun went down the band shared a quiet meal, during which Cura’s foot brushed Tam’s beneath the table.

  The Inkwitch muttered, “Sorry.”

  Tam spared her a polite smile. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Later, when Cura had trouble sawing the fat off a pork shank Brune had cooked up, Tam cleared her throat. “I’ve got a knife in my room if you need a sharper one.”

  “No, thank you,” said Cura.

  Their bandmates looked between them, bewildered.

  Rose tried using the scrying orb to reach her father after dinner, but the sphere only crackled with static grey.

  They retired to their rooms early. The cots were bolted to the floor, so Tam was relieved to find Hiraeth in sound condition underneath. She lit the shortest candle she could find and sat on her bed with the lute in her lap. The music to the final verse of Brune’s song, which had proved elusive these past few days, tumbled suddenly into her head. She felt like an angler who’d come to the river’s edge and found her quarry already flopping on the bank.

  Tam played the song in its entirety for the first time. At the end, she let one note slide against another in a long, mournful howl, and imagined her mother might’ve liked to have heard it.