Garten was upon the step, dressed in his uniform of office.
“Can I come in then? It’s perishing out here.”
“What the hells do you want at this time in the morning?” Trassan looked up and down the street. The sky was still dark, glimmer lamps burned. The street, wide and lined with fine townhouses, had upon it only those whose work took them about in the early hours: grocers, coal merchants, collectors of the pure taking advantage of the lull in the traffic, rag and bone men and the like. “And what the hells time is it anyway?”
“Five of the clock.”
“What?”
“I thought you would probably want this.”
Garten held out an envelope. A heavy seal of purple wax with four ribbons closed the back.
Trassan blinked and took it. “The licence?”
“What else? Now can I come in? I could have gone home to bed, but I know how important this is. The least you could do is give me a mug of tea.”
Trassan cracked open the envelope and skimmed the contents. “Yes, yes, come in, come in!” He waved his brother through the door and shut it behind them. “My apologies, brother, but my maid is away on some family errand or other. Something to do with her mother, I forget.”
“You should get more.”
“I don’t like big households, makes it hard to think, all that racket,” said Trassan.
They went downstairs into the kitchen. Garten sat at the table, laying his hat and gloves upon its scrubbed surface. Trassan lit a candle and fussed about reviving the stove. He unbanked the embers, dropped kindling upon it, and had a merry blaze going in short order. He arrayed lumps of coal around it, and shut the door. He removed the covering hotplate from the top and placed a kettle of water in its place, its bottom exposed directly to the fire.
“You’ll have to wait ten minutes for the coal to catch,” Trassan said.
“You were always going to get the licence.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m sorry I could not simply give it to you. You know... Procedure.”
“Procedure. What do I need to do?” said Trassan.
“Sign the chit at the bottom of the final sheet, and the licence. Give the chit to me, keep the licence.”
“That simple?”
“Not everything in my work is complicated.”
Trassan hunted out a pen and inkpot. He made to sign quickly, but Garten caught his wrist.
“Before you do, there is something I should tell you.” Trassan paused. Garten released him. “You are getting this licence at this time in the morning because it has been hurried through. News came from Perus yesterday that the High Legate’s sickness has taken a turn for the worst. He has become erratic. It looks like he will be removed.”
“You can’t just wait for him to die?”
“That was the idea, but no. These are dangerous times. Shortly I will be away to Perus with Duke Abing, after months of waiting. The Assembly of Nations of the Hundred is already gathering. Consequently, the inquiry into this licence has been sped on. Prince Alfra is keen that you beat the Maceriyans to the Sotherwinter continent.”
“And? What does all this mean apart from the fact that I’ve been kept waiting for fucking ever by purple bloody ribbons?” He flapped the ribbons on the envelope at his brother.
“We have adhered to the conditions of our agreement with the Sunken Realm as best we can. But we are pushing it, Trass. Between you and me, I do not think that this licence will appease the king under the water.”
Trassan laid his pen down. “So, I sail away into danger, having waited on tenterhooks for the whole winter, just so the big hats up in the Three Houses can let me die with a clear conscience?”
“It’s not quite like that?”
“The fuck it’s not!”
“There is more to this than you, brother,” said Garten, his demeanour hardening. “Provoke the Sunken Realm, and we are at war. As we have followed the letter of our treaty, that will not happen.”
“But my safety is not guaranteed.”
“No. Come on, you knew this. You built your ship to cross the Drowning Sea in the face of his majesty’s objections. You would have gone, treaty or not. This way, you can do so without plunging the entire nation into danger with the king of the drowned dead.”
Trassan looked at the document. “All that, for this. I was hoping that the wait would bring me some advantage.”
“I’m sorry. That’s the way it has to be. I have worked very hard on your behalf brother, just for this.”
Trassan took up his pen. He stared at the sheet a moment before signing. He blew on the ink to dry it, then tore off the chit and handed it to his brother. Garten folded it once, and tucked it into his inside pocket. He held out his hand. Trassan took it, and they shook.
“Are we square?”
Trassan nodded. “Not worth falling out over.”
Garten flashed a quick smile. “I’ve not heard our old expression for a long time.”
“That’s because we’ve not had anything to fall out over for years.”
“I suppose not.”
Trassan’s eyes narrowed and he held his brother’s hand tightly. “We came close this time, Garten. Very close.”
THE END OF the shed had been dismantled. The Prince Alfra’s prow pointed at a tall opening ablaze with sunlight. Men waited tensely about the dockside and ship, hands at ropes and windlasses. From the wheelhouse, Captain Heffi looked onto the foredeck, his command crew ready. A brass band stood beneath the window. Bunting hung in bright swags from the five masts.
On the roof of the ship’s superstructure, Trassan gripped the rail. Behind him were Veridy, Arkadian Vand, his father, Garten, Aarin, Tyn Gelven, and many others. His attention was only for the vessel, not even Ilona, glaring at him from her father’s side, could distract him. A hundred men looked to him expectantly. Total silence in a shed where for nigh on two years there had been nothing but ceaseless industry. For the first time since the shed’s erection, wind blew within. He could hear the murmur of crowds out on the dockside; the cries of seagulls. Everything retreated, until there was only he and his ship. A fierce, overwhelming pride took him. His flesh tingled at the thought of what he was about to do.
He stood tall and raised a hand. Two hundred pairs of eyes followed him. “All clear!” he shouted.
“All clear!” came an answering voice from the deck.
“All clear!” came a third from the dockside. A bell rang frantically. Before the prow of the ship, huge windlasses were turned by teams of dockers, dragging sluice gates up toothed tracks.
With a spurt that became a swift flow, the waters of the dock flooded the drydock. By the gates the fall whipped up a scummy foam. Toward the far end the flood’s fury was spent feebly against stone walls, and it swirled with oily rainbows.
For five minutes the water poured in, the initial waterfall rush choked off as the level reached the gates and the inflow became a bubbling upon the surface. The water rose black and sinister and choked with trash. Men waited by winches to take the strain on the ropes and chains of the ship.
A tremor ran through the hull; a whisper of excitement from the people. Trassan held the rails tightly. Here was the moment of truth. A long, metallic groan sounded from the Prince Alfra as it lifted. Seamen and dockers erupted into noisy activity as they worked to keep the ship from banging into the sides.
The ship groaned and rose higher and higher. Dockmen payed out their ropes. The ship shifted slightly to the right. Dock chiefs bellowed orders, chains rattled, and the drift was arrested. Another bell rang. At the bow the gates to the wider docks opened. Shouts came back the length of the ship, one man to another.
“The gates are open!”
Heffi’s First Officer, Volozeranetz, stepped up to Trassan. “Goodfellow, I report the gates are open,” he said formally, “we may depart.”
Trassan turned around and nodded to Arkadian Vand. The engineer bent to a speaking tube at his side and spoke
into it.
“Captain Heffira-nereaz-Hellishul vovo Balisatervo Chai Tse-ban, take us out.”
Moments later, the ship shuddered. White steam leaked from its three funnels. Blue glimmerlight glowed from the top of each. With a ferocious churning, the paddlewheels either side of the ship spun, biting into the water. The ship’s horn hooted, a long and mournful sound. A loud cheer from outside answered. The brass band struck up a stirring air. Slowly, the Prince Alfra emerged from its drydock into the greater docks of Karsa City. A bright spring day greeted them. A stiff breeze kept the fumes of industry at bay, and the sun was bright and warm.
Every side of the dock was lined with people, thousands of people. They stood by the water twelve deep, hung from every window around the basin. They lined the hill above. They cheered again as the Prince Alfra’s full length emerged from its housing. The ship answered with a two-note hoot of its whistles, scaring up a screeching storm of seagulls.
The great ship filled the basin one end to the other, but Captain Heffi’s steersman had it turn smoothly, its paddlewheels churning in opposite directions until the prow pointed out on the canal; that would take them to the main Lemio-Var shipway then on to the locks. Puffing clouds of brilliant white shot with blue light, the Prince Alfra made its way slowly along the waterway. This too was lined with people. Music played everywhere, each source attempting to outdo the other. A wall of noise louder than the loudest day of the ship’s construction pushed the iron ship all the way to the Slot.
At the head of the first lock, on a specially built platform, Prince Alfra himself and the royal family looked on. The lockmaster left his offices to take the toll himself in a ceremony of ridiculous complexity. Then the first gate opened, and the ship cruised into the uppermost dock. At the top of that watery stair, Trassan felt like a king. All of Lockside Karsa was below him, houses clinging to the walls of the locks and high wharfs, a flotilla assembled below upon the muddy ocean to greet them. The iron ship was the largest vessel ever to descend the locks, and even these mighty works appeared modest in comparison.
Twenty minutes each lock took, and the crowd never stopped cheering. Only when they reached Lock Five, where Lowhouses marked the last permanently dry part of the city docks, did the noise abate a little.
The tide was in, an inundation of the middle sort. Bottomquay was covered and they did not have to descend the last three locks, but exited instead from Lock Four directly. The vessel proceeded with care past the tower marking the position of the submerged locks. Ships of wood and floatstone crowded them, some large craft in their own right, but the Prince Alfra dwarfed them all. A narrow corridor of muddy water was their way free. Once past the impediments of ship and submerged lock, steam came quicker from the funnels and the great ship surged forward, leaving its suitors behind.
The Prince Alfra performed a long loop about Slotbay. From the clifftops of Growling Point the guns of the battery popped a rippling salute. Captain Heffi came up to the top deck. Beaming as he performed complicated bows to Trassan and Arkadian Vand, he pronounced, “Goodfellows, I have the pleasure to inform you that we are now at sea. All three engines are operating at peak efficiency, Goodfellow Kressind, Goodengineer Vand.”
Trassan caught Katriona’s eye. She leaned into her husband and smiled at him broadly.
All aboard the ship cheered, drowning out the band still playing on the main deck.
Vand gripped Trassan’s elbow hard. “Well done, young man,” he said into Trassan’s ear. “Now the hard work begins. Two weeks’ sea trials, no more. You are to depart on the Twentieth of Little.”
“We should be leaving this week.” Trassan tensed at Vand’s contact. Relations between them had been difficult since the accident. Vand had dismissed the incident, but Trassan held the elder engineer responsible, and had become wary of his pride.
“Patience, Trassan. A week won’t matter. It might be better for us.”
“It’s better for Persin. We’ll lose our advantage.”
Vand grinned ferally. “He’ll never beat this ship, Trassan. Persin is not due to leave for ten days. Imagine the look on his face when you steam right past him. Two weeks, my boy. Two weeks.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Modalmen
“HO, HO! DOWN down, lay it down!” sang the workgang. “Ho, ho! Hammer swing, slam it in!” A row of hammers fell as one onto rail spikes, beating them into wooden sleepers and cinching the rails tight. A gaugeman checked the width. Already, four more lengths had been set out ahead, reading for spiking. To the sides of the track iron web weavers worked, laying out three offset rows of iron pegs joined by wires in a diamond mesh pattern. The railway was progressing along a stony ridge that ran for seven or eight miles. On one side was a dry valley, on the other a series of broken hillocks, too uneven for rails. In those places beyond the wire web nothing moved but dust. But on the ridge life held sway; a desert empty for millennia was filled with human activity.
Tuvacs and Julion walked their cart up the line. The four dogs pulling it did so with their heads down, tails and ears low. A gentle breeze blew from the south, ruffling the dogs’ fur around their harnesses and bringing the threat of returning winter.
“This lot are bored stupid,” said Julion, nodding at the dogs.
“So am I,” said Tuvacs.
Julion stopped the cart. Tuvacs went round the back, hauled off a tall tin water pail and dumped it onto the rocky ground by the railway. The track stood proud of the ridge on ballast hacked from the desert rocks and ground in a steam crusher back at camp. Only in a few places was such an extravagant amount of stone expended in levelling the ground, mostly the sleepers were laid straight onto the flattened sand, but here terrain was uneven, and required greater care. Work was slow.
“My head is killing me,” said Julion.
The gangmaster was a cheerful man of mixed Farthian and Hethikan extraction, straight-nosed and dark-skinned. He overheard them and shouted back, “Lot of glimmer in these parts, that’ll be it. Gives a mean headache, but it’ll make us all rich, once we get this stretch laid!”
“Not you,” muttered Julion. “And not I either, selling water. What by the gods does Boskovin think he’s doing?”
Tuvacs leaned against the stationary cart and put his hands under his armpits to warm them. Longdark was gone, the first week of Little well underway and the sun came a little earlier and a little stronger every morning. But it was still cold. Julion had to smash the ice on the water pitcher before doling it out. Dirty snow, grubbied by blown sand, patched the rolling landscape.
The air had a desert’s clarity, and Tuvacs could see for miles. A brilliant glare shone off a field of glassed desert to the north east, but it could be endured for a time, and Tuvacs scanned the wide horizons. He frowned, and took a step forward.
“Hey,” said Tuvacs. “Look over there.”
“What is it?” said Julion.
“Something in the sky, a dust cloud.”
“Can’t see anything.”
“It’s past that glass field.”
“Too bright to see,” said Julion dismissively.
The gangmaster joined them and looked where Tuvacs pointed for a moment. “A dust storm. They’re not unusual this time of the year. When they get up, they can be a real bitch. Not as bad as the Sisters back home, as I say. Best ignore it. It don’t belch fire.”
“I know what a dust storm is. If it’s a dust storm,” asked Tuvacs, “why is it moving against the wind?”
The gangmaster spat into the sand. “Beats me. My job is laying the rails. Yours is delivering water as per my contract with your master. Meteoromancy is beyond the pair of us.” He grinned with a set of perfect teeth. “We’ll leave the weather forecasting to the magisters.”
“Cock,” muttered Julion as he walked off. “On, Rusanina.” She yawned, exposing a long pink cavern of a mouth. A short yip had the dogs pulling again. They stopped twenty yards on. Tuvacs pulled another tall container of water from the cart, dump
ed it on the ground, broke the ice, moved on. They outpaced the track gang, then those laying the sleepers, heading on to where other work crews topped barrowfulls of pulverised rock into heaps and raked them out. Past that were red rags tied to sticks laid out by surveyors. Engineers watched critically, levelling the gravel or calling for more. Further on still, others prepared the railbed as the railway’s six guards watched the desert nervously.
All the while, Tuvacs’ eyes returned again and again to the banner of dust against the sky, the thick column at its head was moving toward them. He looked at the guards, counted them for the hundredth time. Six did not seem enough out here, not by a long measure.
NIGHT FOLLOWED DAY in the usual order, quickly at that time of year. The days had yet to equal the duration of the night.
Dark was when Tuvacs did most of his work. In his boxcar, the side down, selling liquor and the occasional finer beverage at a healthy—Boskovin’s word, he preferred ‘obscene’—mark up to the rail workers.
At morning’s second bell, as per their agreement with the rail company, he stopped serving, and closed the shutters in the face of many drunken protests. He left it twenty minutes, until after the most determined drinker had stopped hammering upon the wood, to go outside and douse the fires in their bowls and encourage the remaining men to go home in case they pass out and freeze to death. Even in summer, desert nights were cold, and they were a long way from summer.
Tuvacs was packing up the boxcar when Boskovin came to see him.
“Hello, hello my boy!” Boskovin climbed aboard. A solitary paraffin lamp lit Tuvacs’ work space. All the lights outside were off, and consequently Boskovin’s sagging patrician features were cast in a web of shadow. On a man who was more imposing, it might have been sinister. Or on a man who was less drunk. As it was, Boskovin had the appearance of a drunken pantomime devil comically trying to act sober. “Is business good?” he took a swig from a bottle in one hand, black in the low light.
The Iron Ship Page 48