The Iron Ship

by K. M. McKinley

  “And as I said, Damarteo of Hethika was a tosser. Go on then, Trassan Kressind. Are you going to ask me or not?”

  “If you are the master of truth, by your own reckoning, then surely you know what I wish to ask you?”

  Eliturion snorted. “Of course, of course.” He let out a godly belch, thunderous and pungent. “But you have to ask. There are rules, even for me.”

  “Then I shall ask. Will I be successful in my venture?”

  “And why do you ask that?”

  “You know why I ask. You are being evasive.”

  The god essayed a sly smile. “Perhaps.”

  “Will I be successful?” pressed Trassan.

  Eliturion stared at Trassan for an uncomfortably long moment. The god looked right through him and out the other side, like his head was hollow and his eyes glass windows.

  “That very much depends on your definition of success, young man.” The god sat back. “There you go, one question, one answer. You got what you wanted.”

  “I beg to differ,” said Trassan hotly.

  “Well then, you got what you asked, which is what you get if you don’t phrase your questions to a god right. If you do not have what you wanted, choose your words more carefully next time,” Eliturion smiled benevolently at his cronies as they roared with laughter. Trassan did not think it so funny.

  “Such a thing, when a god requires toadies,” he said.

  Eliturion barked out a laugh. “When did a god not require toadies? What is a worshipper if not the worst toady of all? These men at least are honest in their sycophancy. They ask nothing of me but to drink with me and hear my stories! Gods take and give little in return, and what their caprice furnishes their worshippers with is often very far from what they desired. As you, my friend, have just discovered. You are fortunate, to badger me in the pub. No entrails or priest’s fees or other humbug to be dealt with. Why do you think old Res Iapetus chased out my brothers and sisters? No man likes to bend his knee for no reward.”

  “You remained, and you still have your worshippers.”

  “Do not provoke me, Trassan Kressind.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Only if you hear it so, I am not one for threatening. If you don’t like my sooth speak to my cousin. He might prove more enlightening, if you survive the experience. All I want is a good time. Forever. I don’t like to be annoyed. It prevents me from enjoying myself.”

  Trassan gave a wide and mostly sincere smile. He bowed deeply. “And I merely jest, for it is known far and wide that of all the creatures who walk upon the shivering earth, Eliturion, last of the gods, enjoys jesting most.”

  “You know your mythology. It’s all bollocks. Still.” Eliturion sniffed and raised his giant cup. “Your health sir.”

  “And yours,” said Trassan.

  Trassan rejoined his brothers. Their drinks had arrived and Garten was tipsy.

  “Where you been then?”

  “Talking to a god!” said Trassan grandiosely.

  “We ordered you some food,” said Garten.

  “I hear you’ve some mysterious project on,” said Guis.

  “Not mysterious, but freely known!” said Trassan. “I have been engaged by Arkadian Vand in the construction of the world’s first oceanic iron ship.”

  “Ah yes, I did hear. But brother, will it not sink?” said Guis archly. “Being made of iron?”

  “Floatstone doesn’t sink,” said Garten. “And that’s made of, you know, stone.” He hiccupped. “Excuse me.”

  “Floatstone’s full of holes,” said Guis.

  “Ah, then it should sink the quicker,” said Garten.

  Guis and Garten clanged their tankard and glass together.

  Trassan shook his head. “Funny. An iron pan will not sink when placed in water, but displaces the water, allowing it to float. We are harnessing this phenomenon to create a ship of unsurpassed size and power. It is nothing new. There are several smaller vessels plying the Olb on the mainland made solely of metal. Only this is of unsurpassed scale.”

  “Unsurpassed excepting the three that sank.”

  “Details,” said Trassan. “And mine is still bigger.”

  “How are you going to power it?” said Guis, genuinely intrigued. “Glimmer engines? How’d you get enough to make it move? How do you keep it fuelled?”

  “Could just use normal steam,” pointed out Garten. “Like Tallyvan Landsman, he’s making quite the fortune on coal-fired steam, so I hear.”

  “Got to get the coal, got to carry it. How do you manage that? It’d require a whole new supply network,” pointed out Trassan.

  “True,” said Garten. “You could make one.”

  “Logistics bore me.” said Trassan. “There is a new procedure. A new type of engine, that will carry enough fuel and enough power to drive a ship the size of a town.” He leaned in close. “I designed it.”

  “How’s it work?” asked Garten.

  Trassan’s eyes flicked back and forth between his brothers, as if debating whether to reveal his secret. “Iron.” He said finally. “Iron that holds a glimmer charge.”

  Guis slapped the table “Now I know you’ve gone crazy. They’re inimical to one another.”

  “Not if the iron and the glimmer are treated and combined in precisely the right manner, not if the iron is married with silver iodide. Silver is the glimmer metal. Iron can be encouraged to hold a charge if alloyed with silver iodide under strictly controlled circumstances. Strike the alloy, upset the patterning, and it produces a steady stream of glimmer energy as the iodide decays.” Trassan became animated, sketching the process in the air with his gloved hands. “The glimmer is released slowly. As it encounters the iron, it is annihilated, generating great heat. Hot enough to make the iron cells glow red hot. If you array them in battery, introduce water... Well, I need not describe the potential of superheated steam.” He went on to do so anyway. “Imagine, the force generated by water heated not to evaporation, but to three or four times that. Even five. I believe we can reach as high as six, but it puts a terrible strain on the machinery.”

  “Seriously?” said Guis, placing his glass back on the table.

  “I can say no more. There will be an announcement soon. Vand wanted construction underway before the methods are revealed. We can’t hope to keep it secret forever, but we can keep it secret long enough to be the first to use it.”

  Guis looked at him for a long moment. “You haven’t actually got it to work properly yet, have you?”

  “Well...” said Trassan reluctantly.

  “I know you,” Guis said. “You’re playing a longshot. Does Vand know?”

  “Of course he knows!” said Trassan, his face sharp. “Look, the technique works. The hypothesis has been proven. I’ve had fifteen alchemists replicate the results, not charlatans mind, but proper magisters. There is a problem in scaling up the production, but such things only remain problems for a short while. You should see the power you get out of these devices, gentlemen! It’s going to change the world.”

  “Once you crack the problem,” said Guis speaking his gently mocking words into his wine glass. “Good luck.”

  “Does this have to do with what you want to talk to me about?” said Garten.

  Trassan became uncomfortable. “Yes, but I cannot discuss it here, I’m sure you understand.”

  He said this to Garten, but truly it was addressed to Guis. Too late, for the elder had already taken offence. Trassan would tell one brother, but not the other. From such things spring discord among siblings.

  Guis struggled to shrug it off. Trassan would have a perfectly good reason, he told himself. One that would come out once whatever deal he needed to do with Garten was done. But a nagging sense that his brother did not trust him to keep silent soured his mood, if only because he would not trust himself to keep a secret either. His good mood blackened. He retreated within himself, a snail withdrawing from insult within his shell. His grin froze, becoming something wolfish.
His eyes would not meet theirs. From this alone it was hard to tell he was offended, but his manner changed, losing its diffidence, becoming caustic. This was not an impression gained from his words or his actions, but rather something felt, like a switch in the wind, and was all too obvious to his siblings. The conversation dragged on for a while, family matters, jokes that fell flat. The others probed Guis about his doings in the Stoncastrum, but this most verbose of men bit his words hard when upset and they were reluctant to leave his mouth.

  Garten knew his brother best. He was more alive to the moods of men than machine-obsessed Trassan, and became concerned. He coaxed Guis, tried to obliquely reassure him without suggesting he had become offended, which would make matters worse. Despite his best efforts, Guis remained morose, and became angry.

  “Oh come on Guis! It’s probably something to do with the Admiralty. Am I right? I’m right.” He turned to his other brother. “You’re building a ship, right Trassan? You need something from them. You want me to help, right? You can say as much as that surely! Guis doesn’t need to know the details.”

  “I can’t say anything. I can’t, I’m sorry,” said Trassan.

  “I think I better be going,” said Guis, and stood, jarring the table. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Guis...”

  “Trassan, it’s alright, I understand. Tell me all about it when you can. I’m just being a bit of an idiot. You know what I’m like, I get things stuck in my head it...” Guis smiled tiredly but honestly. “I’m tired. I better go.”

  They exchanged warm farewells, yet cooler than their greetings.

  “Well,” said Garten as Guis pushed his way out to the door. “That was tactless. You should know better, he hates it when he thinks he’s being excluded.”

  “Nonsense! I tell him everything, and I will tell him everything about this too.” He intended to as well. To him Guis was an advisor, one of his most trusted confidantes, but one to be presented with all the facts and quizzed extensively on his opinions of them. Not with half-baked plans, with which he had little patience, nor secrets, which he struggled to keep. Guis’s mercurial nature hid a certain wisdom, but it must be utilised carefully. Trassan instinctively understood this, although would not have framed it quite that way himself. “It is not that I do not trust him, brother. It is that he does not trust himself.” He slapped Garten on the shoulder and smiled. “Come on! I’ll say sorry to the old drama queen tomorrow. He’ll turn up to see off Rel. We’ll sort it out then, it’ll be fine. We can’t go running around playing sop to his ego. It only makes him worse. Now, let’s have another drink. I feel like staying out all night.”

  Garten’s eyebrows rose.

  “You don’t?” said Trassan.

  “Well, you see, job.” Garten smiled at some private matter and swirled the dregs of his drink. “Wife. All that.”

  “Bah! When was the last time you had a holiday? You’re staying out with me, by the gods. Besides, I’ve got something to show you, I can only show you now the tide is low, and it’s best seen at first light.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Darkling

  GUIS DID NOT go straight home but went instead to the Carcaron’s Gold, a quieter place, expensive—too expensive in truth for his depleted resources. The atmosphere was altogether more private. This was a place monied lovers came, or men with business they would rather hide.

  Guis stared into his wine cup. He drained it, filled it, then drained it again. A knot sat between his shoulders, a boulder in his gut. A cruel anxiety that was not his own crushed his heart. He went over again what Trassan had said, the manner he had said it. Already his intellect had processed the exchange accurately, but his emotions were not his to command.

  A malady of the nerves afflicted Guis. He took pains to see his self-loathing reflected in others’ love for him. He took bitter satisfaction when his poor behaviour engendered the rejection he feared.

  The worst of it was that he knew it was all nonsense. Helterskelter down the passages of his mind, there was a part of him that did not suffer, a Guis as might have been. It looked upon the greater Guis in horror, and despised what it saw as weak. He had been told once that those insane who know they are insane are close to sanity. He ruefully reflected such self-knowledge did not provide a cure.

  He shook his head mechanically, four to the left, four to the right. If I do this no harm will come to those I love. If I tap the table, if I tap the table but four times, all will be well. All of it. He did it, four sets of four, digging his nails harder and harder into the wood until they parted the grain.

  The ritual did no good. Nor did the alcohol. He could not regain his mask. Forebodings of imminent disaster gripped him.

  “Careful, master,” hissed Tyn in his ear. “You are slipping. We should leave.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, ignoring the slur in his voice. “I need to find some women.”

  “To what? To look at them, frighten them, and not approach? To leer at them in drunkenness? To speak with them and challenge them to hate you? This I have seen so many times. You must go home. The Twin is large in the sky; this is a night of potency, you should not be out. Go home.”

  Tyn tugged at a knot in Guis’s hair. Undoing it would calm his emotions, but such was Guis’s state of mind he would rather suffer. He poked at Tyn, scaring the creature around the back of his neck.

  Guis rubbed the insides of his wrists four times each with the opposite wrist. All these acts he performed when no one was looking. If caught, he pretended as if he was doing nothing untoward.

  They calmed him a little for a space, ultimately the anxiety redoubled. He reached for his silver cup. A violet spark leapt from its lip, earthing itself in his forefinger with a crack.

  “Fuck!” he said, shaking his hand from the pain. Some of the other patrons looked up at him. He doffed his hat at one sardonically, deepening the man’s glower further. The man would have fled if he could see the image in Guis’s mind; unbidden, the thought of him digging his thumbs into the other man’s eye sockets and popping the organs therein. He shook the thought away, appalled. The images were the hardest to deal with. He feared them to be his deepest desires.

  “You should have let me untie the knot! Now it is too late!” whispered Tyn into his ear. “Such behaviour is dangerous. He has seen you. We must go where I can protect you. It will be difficult here.”

  “No, no.” Guis was still trying to push the thought away. What kind of a man was he, to think such things?

  “Look at the shadows. Look!”

  Guis lifted his wine-heavy head. The motion induced a spasm of nausea. He was drunker than he realised. A night like this could end in one of two ways; garrulous frivolity in one drinking pit or another—his black thoughts kept at bay for a while—or it. He squinted at the coign between floor and wall. It was often from there the Darkling came first, reaching spindly figures out and threatening to make the worst of his thoughts real.

  “Do you see?” said Tyn. “The shadows thicken. We must go!”

  He had half a bottle of wine left. Fuck them all, he thought, what did he care? “Let him come,” Guis mumbled. The bottom of the bottle bumped on the table as he dragged it to his lips. He drained it in a series of desperate gulps. Wine helped him forget his problems. He needed wine.

  Tyn yanked hard at Guis’s hair. “We are going,” it said. “Now.”

  Tyn abandoned secrecy and rode openly back to the apartment, leaning out far from Guis’s neck vigilantly. Guis slipped and cursed in the mud. Rain hammered down, wilting the brim of his hat.

  “They do not care for me,” he moaned. “My family have abandoned me. I am loathsome.”

  “Hush,” said Tyn, peering into every dark place. A footpad shrank back into the gloom when it caught sight of the creature squatting on Guis’s shoulder. But it was not peril such as this that Tyn sought. “If that were true, why were they pleased to see you?”

  “They were pleased, but it did not last. My brother
s. I embarrass them. I cannot help myself. They do not care for me. My father hates me! I do not...” Guis steadied himself against a wall, leaning his head forward and forcing Tyn to scamper onto his back. He belched messily, saliva streaming from his slack mouth, but he did not vomit. He wiped his mouth. “I do not think anyone does.”

  “Hush, hush,” said Tyn. “You are not to think bad things, you are not to dwell on them.” Tyn’s gaze darted about. There were no glimmer lamps in the alley, a stinking sidestreet deep in the Off Parade. Yellow candlelight showed around shutters or slanted through curtains. There was not nearly enough light to keep the shadows back.

  “I am a disappointment. I have neither Garten’s diligence nor Trassan’s ingenuity, Aarin’s focus or Rel’s good nature.”

  “Hush. Hush now! Go home, go home now. You will bring it upon yourself!”

  Immersed in his own self-pity, Guis would not listen. “And what of my sister! I have but a whit of that girl’s brains. That is why my father hates me. He hates me.”

  “Get on, foolish manling,” said Tyn. Its voice lost every trace of servility, deepening, becoming gruff and wild. “Get on or you will perish and I will dance upon your soulless corpse before I fly back to my freedom!”

  This roused Guis. He staggered the remaining ten yards to his building; an ancient, decrepit tenement with two lower storeys of brick and three upper storeys of warped timbers. It took him three attempts to get the key in the lock. The door’s opening took him by surprise, and he fell forward. The door slammed into the wall of the narrow shared hall with an unconscionable bang.

  “Shhh!” Guis giggled. “Shhh! People are sleeping.”

  As quietly as he could, Guis mounted the creaking stairs and climbed up to his room.

  Guis was poorer than he had been, but not yet in poverty. The room was very large, occupying all of the third floor, ten yards by eight. Outside a ragged hole split the clouds. Rain still fell, but the stars shone through. The Red Moon had gone from the sky. White moonlight streamed in through square-leaded windows, illuminating everything in cold shades of grey and midnight blue. A curtained bed took up a portion of the room. A brick fireplace occupied the centre of one of the shorter walls. A screen hid a commode. A small copper bath hung upon the wall. Four tables of varying sizes were dotted about, and several mismatched chairs. All of these were covered in piles of books and papers. Guis’s work, the varying legibility of the handwriting testifying to his mental state when he wrote each.