The Dawnhounds

by Sascha Stronach

  “Mornin’ Xid,” they said. “Got a minute for a greenhorn?”

  He looked up from his gun. “Ah yes,” he said. “The newest friend in our little community of exiles. It is good to see you in the light of day. You wouldn’t happen to have brought a glass cutter aboard, would you?”

  She shook her head: nobody in Hainak used glass anymore, if they could help it. Membranes were tougher and easier to grow.

  “‘shame,” he said. “I suppose I’ll have to make do. Nobody on this ship ever has tools for glass any more, not since the Captain started to upgrade. But do be welcome. That was a good trick with the vines; I haven’t seen anybody beat Cannath on the masts in years: she’s the best climber of the ship. We all thought you were done for, like you’d challenged a camel to see who could go without water for the longest. You fit right in, you know.”

  She didn’t know how to respond to that. She’d sometimes been tolerated, but rarely considered part of the pack. The last time she’d had a friend was Kiada, and she’d learnt some hard lessons from that.

  “You too,” she said, then quietly cursed herself. Of course he fit in: he lived here.

  He laughed: a trio of quick, smoky retorts. “Well that’s good to hear,” he said. “You have to be a special sort of strange to fit in here. Stay safe, Jyn Yat-Lorn.”

  Xid went back to his tinkering. She’d later learn he’d been a slave in Ladowain, taken as a child and made to work in a factory producing guns for their armies. Between his capture and escape, he didn’t see sunlight for eight years. He wore glasses because his eyes couldn’t properly adjust to sunlight any more but he hated being indoors. He slept on a hammock on the deck, ate outside, and only went below-decks if he needed something from the carpenter’s workshop. He kept his model ships there: an armada in miniature, stuck with sealing wax to any surface that would take them. Rikaza told this to Yat, while they shared a cup of tea in the workshop, waiting for Ken-Set-Xor. Xid only shared the story when he was drunk, because it hurt too much to say otherwise, but did not mind it being told, so long as he didn’t have to hear.

  Set-Xor was talkative, bouncy. She was always scanning the room, and she moved in quick little bursts. Her story was very much like Yat’s own, except she never joined the force—she’d never gotten too big to run rooves, but eventually she got a bit too clever for her own good and ended up in the cells, where Wajet had posted a few men to conveniently leave the door unlocked, and to direct her to a certain bar on the docks. She’d had biowork done on her eyes: they were yellow slits that turned into pitch-dark orbs when she moved into shadow.

  They met Hestos and Hestas as the women were carrying a new topsail up from storage. They were identical: very tall, with piercing hazel eyes and a noble tilt to their noses and jaws. They had enjoyed dancing, but the palace on Dawgar had been burnt to the ground with the rest of the capital, and there was little need for dancers amongst the ruins. As they walked, their boots hit the timbers in perfect unison without ever communicating anything verbally, and Yat wondered whether they had their own private way of connecting their threads. She tried to read them, but saw nothing. They smiled at her as she did so, then shook their heads and moved on.

  They crossed paths with Wajet, carrying a sack under his arm. He kept his eyes low and pushed past them. Yat almost challenged him, but thought better of it. She didn’t want to have to deal with his whole over-the-top shifty copper act she knew he’d pull. She knew it was covering for something: that he acted like a crooked cop to hide the fact that he was something else. She still didn’t trust the something else of it—you didn’t get that good at looking like a scumbag without being, on some level deep within your heart, a scumbag. Nobody was that good an actor, and whatever secret work he’d been given, it was going to come back and hurt them all. He had his own agenda, or he and Sibbi had their own agenda, and either way she did not like it. She hadn’t heard their whole conversation, and the things she hadn’t heard troubled her. Wajet disappeared around a corner, heading for the heart. She sighed, and followed Rikaza to the topdeck.

  The crates weren’t meant for Macaque’s Furrow. Five of them, well-sealed with beeswax glue. Sen didn’t recognise the officers who dumped them off, but they had that army look to them. Whole squad of newcomers: he didn’t like it at all. He’d tried to get a message to the Docks Ward Station about his concerns with the new recruits, but had received no response.

  Somebody would figure out they’d misdelivered the crates within a few hours and he’d be in trouble if they found he’d tampered with them. The officers-not-officers had moved them into a storeroom out behind the house. He shooed away a monkey that had snuck in, then checked the tags. The delivery address was a storehouse in the Xineng district; the return address was the university. hazardous, do not drop in large letters, in four languages. Big police department wax seal on ‘em. Machinery, maybe? Xineng was a stalwart of the old world: a place so polluted that any living technology wilted and died overnight. It pumped out old world things: guns and explosives for export, steel, gold. He tilted one of the crates, and listened. He’d expected clanking, or for the thing to shift its centre of gravity as he tipped it. It stayed solid. He heard a gentle hiss, like rain on cobblestones.

  Powder, maybe? Sand? He lowered the crate back down. From inside, there came a gentle clinking of glass.

  If he had an afternoon, he could probably crack it open and reseal it without causing a mess. He didn’t have an afternoon: he had maybe two hours. The house was being watched. It occurred to him that this might be a trap, but if that was the case then yeah, they’d got him. He needed to know what was in those bloody crates. He’d been going insane in half-captivity, and this was something tangible that he could work with. Somebody had delivered him evidence, and damned if he wasn’t going to investigate.

  White wax, alchemically-treated. You saw it all the time, especially on ships. Waterproof, airtight, but easy to work with. Probably heat-resistant to a degree: enough that you could make it malleable, but not so much that it would break apart in warm water.

  The house had a small chapel, with a box of votive candles in the sept. They were more yellow than white, but they’d do the trick if he was careful. The place had a huge kitchen too, with more knives than any sensible chef had use for. One of them might be sharp enough to do the trick. Cut the wax, then reseal with a candle. Easy as.

  It took him about fifteen minutes of rooting around in the kitchen to find a vegetable knife whose blade would do the trick. It wasn’t perfect, but it could break the skin on his fingertip, so it would have to do. The rest of the knives hadn’t started to rust yet, but they were heading that way.

  Moving the crates at all was harder than expected: he couldn’t lift with his legs, so he had to slide one against the wall with his upper body, then let it collapse along with him. It sent a spasm up his leg, up his side, and into his neck. The crate jangled as it hit the ground and he wondered whether he’d broken something inside.

  The wax wouldn’t split cleanly beneath his blade: he had to saw at it. Chunks of whole wax broke away as he worked, and by the time he was done there was a ring of it on the floor. His hands shook while he sawed, and left a mess of hairline cracks spiderwebbing out from where the knife had bit in. Turning the crate was the hardest part: it squashed the little pieces of wax into the floorboards, and scratched the wood. His leg hurt too much for him to stand: he had to kneel while he pushed it around.

  Grunting like he was trying to pass a kidney stone, he pulled the top of the crate and peered inside. Glass tubes the size of his forearm. Maybe twenty of them, each one filled with black powder. He picked one up, and sniffed it, but he couldn’t smell anything. It looked like gunpowder, but if there was one think he’d learnt about gunpowder it’s that it stank and nothing you could do would get the smell out. Hermetic seal? Who could even make one of those out of metal? He considered shaking it, but thought bett
er: gunpowder could blow when you pushed it tight together. Had Yat told him that? Maybe his old sergeant from the war. He turned the tube over on his hands, trying to find a way to get it open. The top and bottom of the tube each had a heavy mechanical apparatus on them. The top one had a lever. He pulled it, but it was stuck and wouldn’t budge. Why glass? Not membrane, but actual blown glass. He checked the tube twice over, and he couldn’t find a single organic component.

  He was shaking from pain. As he turned the tube over in his hands, it slipped from his grasp. He’d always had quick hands, but they were moving a half-second behind his brain. He snatched at it as it fell. He’d meant to grab it around the middle, but only managed to get a few fingers around the lever at the top. It hit the bottom of its arc a centimeter above the wooden floor, and flipped back up. He fumbled for it and managed to grab it in both hands, pressed tightly to his chest. It looked like gunpowder, but somebody had done a lot of work to keep it inside the tube and he wasn’t about to ruin their day; he rather suspected it had almost ruined his day too. Thank the gods he still had his old gong fu reflexes: it hurt to use them, but they hadn’t gone anywhere.

  The tube shook in his hands. It looked different than when he’d picked it up. The powder was lighter now: flakes of salt mixed in with the pepper. As he watched, one of the pieces of white pushed itself against the glass, spread out hungrily, seeking the head of his hand. The movement had woken something up. It matched his handprint, and he could feel a frightening heat coming off it. Finding no food, it shrank back and vanished into the gunpowder.

  The stuff in the tubes was alive. He knew it with absolute certainty. There were no organic components because whatever it was would eat through those faster than they could grow back. He’d heard about shit like this, usually from drunk biowarfare officers at 4am. Why gunpowder, though? Very little actual powder went onwards with the bullet: it would be more dangerous to the shooter than the target. Unless they were sending rigged bullets to the Lion, but who would buy bullets from their enemy? It made no sense. Gingerly, he lowered the tube back into the crate and lay it down with the rest.

  The house’s ancient grandfather clock tolled out midday, and Sen swore under his breath. He’d been at it for almost ninety minutes. Cutting the wax had taken longer than expected and he’d gotten lost in it.

  He’d planned to light the candle and run it gently along the seal, but he didn’t have time for that. He took out his lighter, held it right up to the candle’s body, and held the candle over the crate seal. The drip-drip-drip took agonisingly long. The wax kept going cold before he could put the lid back on. He pressed it as flat as he dared, then held the lighter up to the side of the crate. It softened the wax, but darkened the wood. He ran the flat of his knife along the soft, warm wax to smooth it out. It looked … okay. It looked fine. If nobody was paying attention, they definitely wouldn’t notice it had been tampered with. Pushing his back against the wall and sweating bullets, Sen hoisted it back onto the pile, then went and had himself a bloody cigarette.

  When he came back in an hour and his hands had stopped shaking, the crates were gone.

  Yat saw Iacci later on deck, playing a familiar tune on his viol: the vocal line from the aria Kiada used to sing. She sat with him, closed her eyes, and let the music roll over her. She did not cry, though she could feel a tightness in her throat that let her know tears were somewhere, buried, waiting to erupt. When he finished, he turned to her.

  “I did not catch a mousy,” he said. “Did you speak to the Captain?”

  She nodded. Sibbi had been evasive but good-natured, so no change there.

  “She says she’ll think about it,” said Yat.

  “This is good,” said Iacci, “it is good that the Captain thinks on her choices. Meanwhile, we must be viglianti for the mousy. Vigiliance? Is this the word?”

  “Vigilant,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Iacci, “we must be vigilant.”

  The question burned her up, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask it. She let him take up his viol again and play another song: a sad, slow, lilting piece. When he put down his bow, she turned to him again.

  “What’s it about?” she said. She meant the first piece, but saying it out loud was too much. Iacci considered her for a moment, and screwed up his lip.

  “They are from the second act,” he said. “The girl is lost, truly lost. It is night, and she wanders the street and she is alone. She sits by the river and she weeps, and the night eats her. Is this right? Eats her? She goes into the night and it is not kind. She sings three pieces: a song for dusk, a song for midnight, a song for dawn. The world is cruel to her. This makes her strong, but it does not make the world less cruel.”

  “How does it end?” said Yat. The tightness in her throat was pressing now, making her voice crack.

  “Ah,” said Iacci. “The girl does not let the night take her. She says these words: tonight, we live. It is not much, but it carries her to the dawn. Then it ends with a kiss. It is not a good opera if it does not end in a kiss.”

  That caught her off-guard: it was such an abrupt shift in tone that it knocked her right out of her memories.

  “What if there’s nobody to kiss?” she asked.

  Iacci shrugged. “There is always somebody to kiss,” he said. “That’s how you know it’s a good opera.”

  “Isn’t that a bit simple?” said Yat, “love saves the day?”

  “Love is not simple,” said Iacci. “You take two of problems, and you put them together and you hope you don’t get five of problems. You must be open, and it is frightful to be open. I do not say this right, and I know I do not; it sounds better in Featta. It is music in my tongue, but I do not have the words and my city does not have enough mouths left to speak them for me. I love Fenazta, my city; I love Featta, my tongue; I love Violi, my art. These are the things I love, and they make me weep sometime, but I do not stop my love, because it is not the sack of rice I can throw off the dock. While I love these things, they remain.”

  “Isn’t that sad?” said Yat.

  Iacci picked up his bow.

  “Yes,” he said, with a smile, “very much so.”

  He played the third piece as the ship rolled on through the night. It opened strong, and fast, but then it went quiet, almost timid. There was an intensity beneath it, though: an electric undertow that made the quiet notes ring out like bells at dawn. Yat sat with her eyes closed, and let the music wash over her. It made the hairs on her arms stand up. When it was done, Iacci sighed and inspected the hairs on his bow.

  “This squeak is unacceptable,” he said. “I cannot escape the mousy, even when I play. I must buy more rosin. The Captain took my block and melted it down to fix this ant house, you know? She does not know how expensive it is.”

  “That was beautiful,” said Yat.

  Iacci shook his head. “It is adequate,” he said.

  “Oi Iacci, you being maudlin again?” shouted Rikaza. They clambered down from the starboard shroud, dropped onto the deck, then clapped Iacci on the waist, being unable to reach his shoulder. They bumped an elbow against Yat’s ribs, and she grimaced: she still wasn’t entirely recovered from the beating Cannath gave her.

  “Anyway,” they said. “I need this one.” They put a firm hand against Yat’s shoulder and gently walked her over to the helm. Sibbi was asleep, so Ajat was at the wheel. She had bags under her eyes, and darkness on her jaw. She frowned as they approached.

  “Yep,” said Rikaza.

  “How many?” said Ajat.

  “Six,” said Rikaza, “with the bulk of the larger ships about two days behind. The corvettes took off ahead and they’re really hauling ass.”

  “Stop,” said Yat, “just stop for a minute. What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Oh, right,” said Rikaza, “greenhorn.”

  They squeezed Yat’s shoulder, an
d Yat realised that her threads were running together with theirs, and suddenly she was inside a memory. She knew the feeling well: she could taste copper and smell kiro, as though she were stepping into a smoker’s dream. It crossed her mind that maybe she had always heard the call of magic—she just hadn’t known what she was hearing. As though whatever had been awoken in her was always there, it just hadn’t had the chance to catch fire. The world had taught her she was defective, and she’d agreed, and she’d made herself numb to her own soul. She pushed the thoughts away, and tuned in on the voices rushing through her:

  —from up in the crow’s nest, six low, dark shapes moving at speed, not even trying to conceal themselves—

  —wooden ships, biowork visible even at range—

  —the vanguard of the Hainak warfleet, coming home—

  Inside the memory, they moved together: from the crow’s nest to one of the ships, which seethed with magical power. Through the night watchmen, through the cook, up to the captain and into his memories.

  —another day maintaining the endless Ladowain blockade when the call came in—

  —“must’ve slipped the net somehow”—

  —eat eat EAT EAT EAT—

  —ringing the bells, sounding the alarms, rousing every sailor in the fleet—

  —orders coming in tinny, garbled with distance, making no sense—

  —burning hard south, nobody knowing exactly what they were walking into, but every crewman eager for blood—

  “Fleet’s coming home,” said Rikaza.

  “Y-yeah,” said Yat, “I got that.” She could still taste the last meal the captain had eaten, and still hear the manic echo of the cannon-grub’s shrieking thoughts.