“Uh-h. No. I’d rather stay with the men.”
“I’ll sling a hammock for you? You’d be off the floor.” Another set of eyes and ears in the cabin wouldn’t hurt. Might even deter Tatiana.
Joss licked his lips. Screwed his foot around on the floor. “Um. Maybe. I guess. Thank you.”
The nails were long. Samos jingled them in his palm, made a decision. “I’ve been up all night so I’m taking a nap now. I’ll be nailing the door shut.”
Joss opted to go on a search for a spare hammock while he slept. With the nails in the door, the rat tucked underneath the bed, and a saucer of water and a stale stump of bread he’d found placed on the floor, Samos sighed and rolled into bed. Sleep came swiftly.
He woke to the rhythmic creak of the ship’s timbers, the crash of waves, and the sway of the trink light above him. Someone banged on the door. A small warm weight scampered across his stomach and onto the floor.
“Samos?”
Joss was at the door.
He found the hammer and yanked out all nine nails to the squeal of protesting timber. Easy. He’d left an inch of each nail sticking out.
When he opened the door Joss was doing his jig from foot to foot. “Miss Tatiana wants to see you.”
Miss? The title seemed incongruous, like calling a bloodsucking bat, sweetie pie or something. “She does?” He peered along the bare timber walkway between his cabin and the railing. “Where?” Above, the sky glowered, crowded with dark clouds. A distant storm grumbled.
“At the stern.”
This was her ship and he couldn’t avoid her if she wanted to see him. Not forever. But that didn’t mean he had to make it easy.
On the forecastle, just forward of an anchor chain, was a flat area around two gheist multi-guns. Fan-shaped, four barrels apiece, the guns were possibly meant to repel a swarm of boarders, or sweep the ship’s deck clear of combatants in one deadly blast. With no battle imminent the only crewman nearby was occupied with scouring the deck timber with a holystone to keep the timbers healthy and salt-free.
He’d been neglecting his true purpose lately. Samos knelt on a dry patch of deck, bowed his head for a while, composing his mind until the words were clear.
He said them out loud. It seemed to mean more that way. “Pela. Each day, from now on, I’m going to send these words to you. You may not hear them, but somehow I believe that you will feel them. I’ve done a bad thing and I intend to correct that. You are my true love and I can think of no better thing than to strive for the rest of my life to deserve you. I will never forget you, or our child that you carry.”
He stared at the jade pendant tied to the middle of his left palm. No longer merely a piece of jewelry, it had become a potent symbol of their love and in some esoteric way, it helped him to block the waves of lust that rolled out from Tatiana.
Footsteps came, light, precise ones, the tap of those so well-remembered boots.
He turned his head.
Even from six or seven yards away, the arch of her body as she leaned back against the rail, her breasts outlined by cloth, the shift of buttock and thigh as she crossed her ankles – it was enough to make the memories of the day before surge to the surface. Raw, sensual, commanding. He froze. Dragged in a few ragged breaths. A mistake. There was that enticing, come-take-me-to-bed scent again.
“Stay there!” Shakily, he put his hand out – the left one – not that he’d done that deliberately.
A swell of coolness spread from the pendant through hand, wrist, and arm to the rest of him. Thoughts cleared. He could control this. He chuckled and climbed to his feet, felt the bones in his backbone click as he stretched and shifted the bulk of his muscles.
“I have your measure, Tatiana.”
“Do you?” she said, voice smooth as whipped cream. Then the enticing arrangement of her body was spoiled as she whipped out a handkerchief and coughed into her hand. The racking, moist coughs doubled her over for at least a minute.
Samos folded his arms. He was not going to budge. Whatever afflicted her was not his doing. Yet he couldn’t help wondering. What she’d told him so far, didn’t fit together in some way.
At last she stopped coughing and straightened.
“Tell me. Why am I here? You could have left me in port to be dragged away and executed, interrogated, imprisoned. This is not the doing of the Imperator, is it? Am I just a convenient bed mate?”
There were new dark shadows around her eyes and her skin seemed pale and fragile.
“You know, Mr. Samos Goodkin, you’re the only one who has ever resisted me.” She coughed again. “How?” An eyebrow twitched in query. “Is it that?” She gestured at his hand.
He closed his fist though it was too late for hiding. What with the strapping and the gleam of the jade, you’d have to be blind to miss it. He should have worn a glove.
“You’re interrupting me. I was meditating.”
“Oh?” That drew a laugh and she very obviously admired his muscles, her gaze running over him from head to groin. “I hadn’t thought you the type to meditate.”
A throb of pleasure caught at him and he shifted to rearrange his pants. He cleared his throat, feeling as if he was sixteen again. “If that’s all you came to tell me, please go. I’ve more meditating to do.”
“No. I find I crave your conversation.” With some of her earlier verve and despite the roll and yaw of the ship, she hopped up onto the rail and perched there with her legs tucked round the rail’s timber spokes.
He frowned. “The price of conversation is for you to tell me what’s going on. Joss says you’ve still got a heart problem, and that you need something to fix yourself. Am I your cure? If so, why not use one of your scum-sucking miserable crew?” He nearly snarled the words. Bulldung. Where was his steadiness, his calm? The sailor scrubbing the deck jerked at the insult but kept on working.
“Curious. Now how did Joss discover that? Lommer.” She spoke to the man. “Find something else to do.”
The man nodded and left, carrying a sloshing bucket.
“You want to know more? Let me enlighten you with my story then. The best part starts four years ago.
“I was an Imperial Investigator back then too. Good at it, loyal, one of the best in fact. Then the Imperator sent me on a special mission away in the icy south. Kondike territory. I retrieved a certain object. We had to tussle with some persistent Bheulakks to get it. At the end, they limped away in their airship and we had the object, but they’d destroyed our ship and we had to make it back across the ice.” She flipped her hand as if dismissing the importance of her words. “Cold, blizzards, starvation. Only two of us made it and I nearly died. My heart got damaged. The Imperator promised he would find a way to give me back my life.”
She paused, gray eyes staring out across the deck and beyond to the sea and sky. A hand strayed to rest flat over her chest. “One trinketologist devised a trinketton, a new and intricate one, that could replace my heart. So. It was done...” Her voice perked up, unnaturally cheerful, “And here I am!”
Still she withheld something. The construction of a trinketton, the assembly of the pieces, metal and organic, and the infusion of the animus – all this had taken place on a workbench of some sort. How had the heart been placed inside her? Some gruesome surgery? And there was another, more vital, problem he could think of.
He tapped his finger on the deck, punctuating his words. “And? What happens when the trinketologist dies, and your new heart fails?”
“He has, already.”
Whoah. She should be dead.
The facts aligned: a trinketton heart that functioned after its creator had passed on, the obsession with sex, that sirenlike beckoning to men, and her inexplicable state of being thoroughly alive when she should be dead.
Sex tied it all together. Yes.
“Is that what this is about? Does...does sex, somehow refuel your heart? I suppose it’s not the worst ever deal.” He laughed bitterly. “But not me. Find another
.”
“You refuse?”
So he was correct.
He braced himself, sure that she would sashay up and press herself against him or something equally provocative. “I am in love. You may not be able to understand that.” He snorted. “But it’s true. I won’t betray Pela again. Find another!”
She closed her eyes. “Ah, but it chooses, not me.” It might have been his imagination but he heard both regret and sadness in her voice. Stretching her legs toward the decking, she slid off the railing. “You love her? Love. How strange that it has such power.” Then she turned and walked away.
He watched her go. There was a slowness to her movements he’d not seen before. He shook his head. She’d find someone. Though her other sexual partners might not have been Immolators, there was nothing that special about him.
To submit to that craving for sex again? The very idea made him feel ill. It was unnatural and ugly, and he dreaded the way it had overwhelmed him. Besides, he saw again the pile of discarded clothing in the hold. Perhaps, in time, it could kill. Perhaps, that was the one fact she hadn’t divulged.
C H A P T E R E I G H T E E N
Each evening thereafter, he knelt at the bow and reaffirmed his vow to Pela. He tried his best to remember the scent of her black hair, the heavy softness when he ran it through his fingers, the thrill when she’d placed his hand on her stomach and whispered in his ear that they were to have a child. Sometimes the memory made him rise to his feet with added bounce in his muscles, while on other nights, inexplicably, the sense of loss weighed him down and he rose as slowly as a man wrought of stone.
The ship, as far as he could tell, had shifted to a heading to the north, running on a course that must be almost parallel to the Burgla’le coast. Why? Did Tatiana have some knowledge to which only she was privy?
Any sane person would expect the Sung ship to head mostly west, in the direction of their homeland. North was the fragmented crescent of the islands of the Indofreska, or the Million Isles, as they were sometimes called. Some said the people of Indofreska were of the same lineage as the Bloodmen, for after all the coast of the Bloodmen’s Clandom was not that far to the east and the waters separating them might once have been as shallow as those between the Indofreska islands. There were physical similarities too – the same broad, brown-hued faces, the same smaller stature, though the Bloodmen excelled at dwelling in trees and the Indofreskans at living off the sea.
The strangest thing to Samos was that no one seemed to mind that neither this ship nor the Sungese ship, as deep-drafted as each was, could navigate the shallow waters of Indofreska with their ever-shifting channels. It was a place for fishing vessels and canoes and nimble outriggers.
One evening Tatiana came out again and watched his meditation.
By then the rat, named Ermatruse after an aunt, had become as well-tamed as a pet dog, and rode happily on his shoulder, her little whiskered nose questing after the odors carried on the wind.
Tatiana said nothing, waiting until a sailor placed a chair for her before slumping into it and studying Samos. He felt the weight of her gaze and didn’t turn, but couldn’t stop himself from gathering data – his Immolator senses reaching out of their own accord. As if she had inhaled some of the ocean, he heard wet wheezes and gurgles when she breathed, and he smelled the tang of brandy and the ripe musk of her body. She wanted him, yet did nothing. Illness, or not, she burned with a wild sultry power. As always, his body responded, an erection stirring.
He gnawed the inside of his cheek. She possessed a key that might force him to surrender – Pela. Her most powerful weapon. Why she hadn’t used this to force his co-operation? What would he do? Best if he left the ship as soon as the Sungese were found. Assuming they were going the right way. Assuming that was enough to win the Imperator’s pardon.
His mind wandered along a startling path. The bat trinketton, of course, if there was a safe channel for this ship to follow through the Million Isles, the trinketton would show it. Which meant, with an eighty percent surety, plus or minus five percent, that Tatiana had known where she was going way back in Carstelan.
She had an informant who’d told her where the Sungese had gone. It had to be an informant and someone very close to Kengshee or his superiors.
Which meant she might also have known exactly what he, Samos, had done on the day of the clinic massacre. That would be why she was so sure of his loyalty. To have a destination in the Indofreska isles the Sungese must be on a ship as swift and sure as the fishing boats of the natives.
This time he did turn, still kneeling, and he stared back at her. She raised her usual eyebrow at him as if daring him to say something. What he’d always aimed at might be so close.
But there were so many facts that intermeshed with other facts, so many possible outcomes that even he wasn’t certain.
He clicked his teeth together. Hells, he had to ask. “Where are we going?”
She regarded him with red-rimmed eyes, smiling thinly. “Why is this woman so important to you?”
He half-opened his mouth then shook his head. “What? After all this, you still don’t believe I love her?”
She held the smile.
“I love her because I do. Love isn’t definable. Or explainable. Especially not to a cold bitch like you.”
She blinked at that then slowly, shakily, stood and walked away, leaving him to puzzle out what she’d hoped to achieve, and damned if he had figured it out even ten minutes later.
“Fuck,” he muttered, stroking Ermatruse’s fur, feeling her whiskers brush his earlobe, “that woman’s even crazier than I first thought.”
Yet she’d still not threatened him with any action against Pela. If she got desperate enough, would she order Teo and her crew to attack him in some way? Arrh! He clamped his hands to his head. This was driving him crazy.
On the one hand, beyond the damper the jade pendant put on his emotions, he wanted to grab her, throw her over his shoulder and drag her into bed, while on the other hand, he felt like tossing her overboard to the sharks.
If the crew did attack him, he might not win against them all, but he could kill or maim many of them. Could. Not that he wanted to. There’d been enough killing. Could was the crucial word, for killing them would mean he’d once again lost all chance of fulfilling his vow. He lost if she used the leverage of Pela, or if she ordered her crew against him. What in all the demons in hell, stayed her hand when she looked to be on the brink of dying?
And what was he doing? Stupid things. Was he right? A dying woman, the Imperator’s favorite if he paid heed to gossip, and he meant to leave her to die.
Was...he...right?
Later that night, the first of the Indofreskan isles hove into view – if ‘hoving’ was the correct word. He watched from the bow as a string of lights from a fishing village picked out the timbers of a jetty and the few boats tied up to it. Captain Sadorey shouted orders. The crew scrambled to man anchors, lead lines, and the bat trinketton. The Freespear slowed, her passage marked by the faintest of bubbling whispers as she slipped through the sea.
“Six fathoms on the bow!” called the man minding the trinketton.
“Four to starboard!”
“Deepest channel two points to port!”
Tatiana arrived on the main deck, hands behind her back, at ease yet alert. Samos eyed her, sure he was safe in the shadowy niche he’d found.
“Samos,” Joss called from below the ladder that led up to his spot on the forecastle. “Are you up there?”
Like a bloodhound that’d found a trail, Tatiana jerked, her nose lifting, her eyes seeking and finding Samos in the darkness. Her lips curled in a smile.
Samos sighed and felt that familiar thrum tingle through him. Even shielded as he was, her allure stirred his blood. “Up here, Joss.”
The boy had brought Ermitruse, the rat. She was as comfortable on the boy’s shoulder as on his.
“Traitor,” muttered Samos, tickling Ermitruse under th
e chin. She rubbed her chin on his knuckles and squeaked at him. “What’s with the rat friendship, Joss?”
“Um.” He ducked his head. “She seemed lonely, and, and once I gave her some ham, she hopped up here and wouldn’t leave.”
“Ham? You’re feeding her better than I get fed.” Though there’d been no farther attempts to taint his food, the rat still got first taste of all meals, and invariably the food was dead cold before he was game to eat it himself.
“We’re on our way, boy, sit up here with me.” It was a warm night and with the ship moving so slowly they might have been floating in a pond, being rocked only by the wind. “Say, where did you get the ham? I could do with some.”
Joss settled, cross-legged, on the oiled deck. “From the cook. Tatiana said her pet rat liked it an’ she told me to ask him for some. She used to have a rat once.”
“Tatiana did?” Samos was dismayed to find his voice as high-pitched as Ermitruse’s squeak. He screwed up his face. “Tatiana, are you sure?”
“Yes. She also said to tell you that your lady, Pela, has had a visitor, a priest. And, um, I think Miss Tatiana said something about knowing where a Mister Thom Drager was? Does that sound right?”
“Oh. My. Gods.” That Pela was in any way connected to Tatiana made him uneasy, as if he was sitting on a box of snakes that might escape any time. But, Drager was still alive. Samos shook his head. A crazy man, but he had tried in the end, to help. If they tracked him down, he’d end up dead anyway. Executed.
“Say, Samos do you know how to fish? ’Cause I’d like to try it. Can you believe we’ve had no fish for supper in all these days? I can get some line from Cork.”
“Sure. Sure. How come all the crew like you so much?
Joss screwed up his face, shrugged. “I do things for them, like tell them what’s wrong with them...When they sprain things, hurt themselves. Stuff.”
“Ah huh. Stuff.” Bio-energeer ‘stuff’ from the sound of it. “You’re a good kid, Joss.” If he had the chance, somehow, to get Joss training, he’d do it. Somebody should.
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