A Daughter of No Nation

by A. M. Dellamonica

  Sophie handed over the pages. “It says the scribe was reverted to the innocence of childhood.”

  “That means he had an accomplice wipe his memory,” she said. “Pretty typical if you’re afraid of getting interrogated.”

  “So much for that.” Bram was going through a trunk of clothes and shoes, methodically checking the pockets of the garments and then handing them to Parrish, who felt along the seams, checking for … what? Diamonds? Cocaine?

  He came up with Highfelling’s Sylvanner sash, faded to no color at all, with all its badges.

  “He was married—we could follow that up,” Bram said.

  “Piper said his kin were dead,” Sophie replied.

  “Ha. Strike two.”

  The third crate held an assortment of satchels, inside which were carved pieces of clockwork: gears and curled wooden springs and other pieces that were, unmistakably, machinery, under a layer of oily dust. They gleamed with a strange luminescence, as if they’d been varnished in gasoline.

  “Same stuff as these hinges,” Bram said, indicating the remnants of the trunk he’d torn in half. “And swords.”

  “Stonewood,” Parrish explained. “The varnishing process makes it hard enough to use for machine parts.”

  “Parts of what?” Bram was already fitting the pieces of their find together.

  “Plans,” Sophie said. “Highfelling said, ‘Find my plans.’” She dove back into the now-empty trunks, looking for anything that might look like blueprints, coming up dry. “Parrish, take a look at the linings of his coat and whatever, will you?”

  “We’ve done so, Sophie.”

  Highfelling had no notebook, no papers of his own, no letters but the official correspondence concerning his murder.

  Think. Sophie leaned deep into the largest trunk, comparing outer height and inner depth, and pushed at the corners. The bottom shifted. False?

  She pried it up. Underneath were a leather tobacco pouch and a rolled oil painting of the Butcher’s Baste, the passage of water between Sylvanna and Haversham, a beach washed in ghostly whites and grays.

  “They do love to paint on Sylvanna,” Tonio said.

  Sophie looked at the back of the canvas and then held it up to the torchlight. Lines shone through the thin fabric.

  “Blueprints,” she said. They unrolled it over the illuminated pool. The room dimmed, but the drawings emerged.

  “Looks like an old-fashioned watch,” Verena said. “Gears and cogs.”

  “Bigger,” Bram said.

  “Some kind of automaton,” Sophie said. The plans hidden within the painting showed a faint schematic of what looked like a clockwork toy, four-limbed, low to the ground, almost a dinner plate with legs. An animal?

  She shot it twice, taking long exposures to compensate for the dimness of the lines. Her brother looked at it fixedly. After about a minute, he said, “Okay, I’ve got it.”

  “Got it what?” Verena said.

  “Memorized.” He stirred through the bits and pieces of machinery, the cogs of stonewood. “We’re missing some parts, not to mention all the cosmetic finishes, but I can put this about halfway together. Verena, give me those paddles—they’re its feet.”

  Sophie returned to her examination of their other finds.

  Why hide your smokes? She opened the pouch, which smelled of pipe tobacco. Inside were coarse-haired seedpods, dried to a nearly brown color. Some were embedded in desiccated bits of fruit, rubbery material that smelled of pear.

  “I’ve seen these before; I think they’re throttlevine seeds,” she said.

  “Cly’s vegetable nemesis,” Bram said. “Are you sure?”

  “We’ll have to germinate a couple.”

  Sophie thought of the transformed slaves in the swamp. “All those years ago, Cly had been trying to prove the Havers were sabotaging the Sylvanna lowlands. If this means they’re guilty, it’s partly Haversham’s fault, those goat-people being forced to spend their lives gnawing at the infestation.”

  I’ll remember this, she vowed.

  Fenn thought Cly might get rid of his slaves, if the throttlevine infestation was sorted. He hinted as much himself—when Sophie said slavery was a deal breaker, he had asked what would happen if he got rid of them.

  “Sold,” he said “sold.”

  It implies he really wants a relationship.

  She had no actual evidence that he’d slept with one of the slaves. And she’d been wrong about his betrothing her.

  This was a way to test some assumptions about Cly, wasn’t it? To find out how far he’d go to make things up with her? If he didn’t need the goat transforms, would he really divest the slaves at Low Bann? If she demanded that, and asked that he let Beatrice slide out of the fraud suit … how much did this case, and his daughter, really mean to him?

  As Sophie gnawed on the problem of her birth father, Bram assembled the machine pieces within the plate that was their case. He stirred a gear around in a circle and the four paddles made a lazy flapping motion, in sync.

  “That looks familiar.”

  “There are chambers here in the top plate that could hold a quantity of seedpods,” Bram said.

  “It’s a delivery system,” she said. “It’s how they’re infecting the lowlands with throttlevine. This might do it, Verena—Cly wants this case won.”

  “More than he wants Mom?”

  “Have to prove it,” Bram said. By which he meant: I’m working, shut up.

  They did, watching him fiddle with the various parts, working for so long that Parrish vanished, returning with a tray containing bowls of tasteless whitefish soup. Sophie photographed every stage. Verena fell into playing mechanic’s assistant, handing him pieces and keeping quiet.

  “It is afternoon,” Tonio said, finally, when Bram came up for air and soup. “Unless we want to spend a second night here…”

  “I’ll wrap up,” Bram said immediately.

  “Let’s see if the monks decided to do anything to punish Brother No Name,” Verena said.

  They hadn’t. He’d whistled his way through an aggrieved complaint about having done the moral thing, sermonizing about the wrong of raising the dead. Half the monks clearly agreed. And when it turned out that the stuff in the trunks had proved useful to Sophie and the others—the rest looked tempted to call “no harm, no foul.”

  One of them even castigated Brother Piper for authorizing the resurrection without sifting through the evidence first.

  “It’s not a bad point,” Sophie said.

  “We may as well pack up and leave,” Parrish said. “They’ll be arguing about this for years.”

  “Bene,” Tonio said brightly. “They could use a break in the tedium.”

  Parrish pealed laughter, a bright and joyous sound that earned him glares from the monks as it echoed off the monuments and the walls.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, meaning Nightjar, and Sophie felt happiness burst through her at the mere thought.

  CHAPTER 27

  They got down the mountain without getting eaten by specters—the insects were another story—and were aboard ship soon after. Fortunately the medic, Watts, had approved of the cat or perhaps been approved by it. He had packed up his pharmacy and moved into the doctor’s cabin while they were gone, and now he was ready and waiting to slather a sweet-smelling oil on their bites, a minty unguent that killed the itch.

  By nightfall they had put Parrish’s boyhood home, stone skulls, crows, and all, most positively in the rearview. The specter skulls seemed to watch them go. Their eye sockets and mouths were edged in bioluminescence—giving the impression of a hundred feline somethings staring after them, hungrily, as they took an easterly course under a sluggish wind.

  Bram had re-created a copy of Highfelling’s schematic from memory, then checked it meticulously against the images Sophie had taken in the waking chamber. Now he was working on building the automaton, molding pieces from clay to reconstruct the parts he didn’t have to hand.

 
The general shape and the specific locomotive heave of the automaton’s paddles made it clear soon enough that the thing was meant to pass for one of the turtles who turned up annually on the Sylvanna beaches to lay their eggs. The hollow chambers in the casing were indeed for throttlevine seeds—Sophie sprouted samples easily, preserving them as evidence.

  “Will it be enough to convince His Honor he can resolve the case?” Verena had stopped sulking, instead taking to hanging around helping every minute.

  “Knowing the delivery system should make it possible to stop the sabotage. We’ll trade that much information for a promise to get the goat transforms out of the swamp.” Sophie looked down at their makeshift turtle and frowned. “As for winning the case—this is just another circumstantial thing to add to the argument … it’s not proof. What objections would a lawyer raise if we gave him this? We have to answer them all.”

  “We need to figure out why the Sylvanners never found one on their shoreline. They’ve been pulling it off for decades.”

  “No windup toy’s going to swim eighteen nautical miles,” Bram said. “And it doesn’t appear to be magical.”

  “The plans said nothing about enchanting them. Anyway, they’re generic objects—they wouldn’t have names.”

  “So they’re releasing them in the water close to the Sylvanna shore.”

  “The passage between Sylvanna and Haversham is heavily guarded,” Parrish said. “In case of slave escapes.”

  “There are lights ashore and patrols asea,” Sophie agreed. “Plus the rocks and navigational hazards. But if it’s a patrol ship releasing the automatons … I mean, they must know how to avoid their own defenses.”

  “You studied the Baste, didn’t you?” Verena asked.

  Parrish nodded. “I meant to race its intervals, before I was expelled from Fleet.”

  “So we build a case,” Sophie said. “We have to document where they’re dropping them off, how they’re making it to shore, and what happens to them after.”

  “I have a theory about why they never found a fake turtle,” Verena said. She tapped the mix of throttlevine seeds. “Most of these are tucked into a piece of dried fruit, right? So that animals will eat them and carry them into the swamp?”

  “Right.”

  “But here’s a chamber just for seeds. The ones not wrapped in a tasty bit of fruit would stay with the original gadget, wouldn’t they?” She lifted one of the spare cogs.

  “That follows,” Sophie agreed.

  Verena tapped the cog against the wooden table, making a sharp clonk. “Stormwrack has almost no iron or refined metals. Stonewood varnish inscriptions come from Layparee. The pieces are hard, but once the glaze breaks, they fall apart pretty quick. I’ve been thinking about that trunk Bram destroyed. Throttlevine’s got those tough little roots—”

  “Genius!” Sophie said. Verena flushed with pleasure. “So the vine grows around the turtle’s remnants, the glaze gets cracked by the root system, and soon it’s just a pile of biomatter at the base of a throttlevine plant.”

  “Good in theory,” Bram said. “It still isn’t proof.”

  “Ah, but this theory we can test,” she said. “We’ve already germinated two of the pods. Now we just add bits of stonewood to the pots. We watch the plant grow—we’ve got time—and document the degradation. Verena can sign the notes every day. You’re official enough for that, right?”

  “I got the shiny badge,” she agreed.

  They were at sea for ten days before the first new throttlevine root cracked the glaze on the first gear. Sophie cut it free of the plant and added the piece to her growing supply of bagged evidence. A second sample they left, continuing to document the decay of the stonewood gear.

  It became apparent almost immediately that Verena’s sudden shift to a bright and perky be-everywhere, do-everything demeanor was a new stratagem for keeping Sophie and Parrish from further dating.

  The grown-up thing to do would be to tell Verena she was sorry she was hurting but to back the hell off. But after the long stretch of sulking, Sophie couldn’t bear another reversal, and she didn’t want more hurt feelings. Parrish apparently felt the same—he kept his distance.

  But she couldn’t leave it alone. Who could?

  Finally she slid a note under the hatch to his cabin: I don’t know what you mean by courting.

  By breakfast the next day, Bram had his model finished.

  “It descends slowly, carried by the current,” he was saying. “At a depth of about fifteen feet, water pressure compresses the midsection, here.” He pressed on his model and they heard a click. “This starts the clockwork.”

  The automaton rolled its flippers forward, inching itself across the galley table toward a bowl of deep-fried fish balls. The ferret, which had been cadging small bites from the safety of Verena’s lap, startled and then put out a paw, as if it thought it might rap the device on its carved head.

  Bram shut off the mechanism, stilling the gadget. “The automaton then begins to swim for shore. Presumably it’s part of a crowd, since they’re doing this at laying time. They’re somewhat lighter than the actual turtles, so they’d be near the top of the … what’s the collective noun, Sofe?”

  “Dule. A dule of turtles.”

  “So they ride in piggyback?”

  “I’d think if it was right in, swimming with the hundreds, it’d get knocked around and damaged.”

  “My guess is it swims above the rest, at least until they’re pretty close to the beach.”

  He reached across the table, snagged her book of notes, and doodled a bunch of turtles breaching the water. The automaton, styled with head bolts, like Frankenstein, was riding on the backs of the thousands of individuals scrabbling onto the sand.

  Sophie touched the doodle thoughtfully. Bram was one of those people who could sketch in fonts.

  “This is all conjecture,” he said. “Without an intact sample, we can’t be sure.”

  “No,” Verena said. “We’ll have to figure out the currents—where they’re being released to meet up with the dule.”

  “I can work that out,” Parrish said.

  “So you do remember the chart?”

  He nodded.

  “As for all this conjecture,” Sophie said, “what if we dress it up a little?”

  “What are you going to do,” Verena said, “build a Powerpoint presentation?”

  “Basically, yeah.” She dug out the second notebook she’d bought weeks ago. It was blank, filled with a collection of now-pressed leaves she’d collected on Sylvanna. She transferred the samples to the book of questions, freeing up the blank notebook, and told them what she had in mind. “Would you mind, Bram?”

  “Something to do while we sail east, right?” Bram said, cheerfully enough.

  “Would it hold up in court?” Verena said.

  “There are no solid standards of proof,” Sophie said.

  “Yet.”

  “Still, this doesn’t constitute evidence,” she said.

  “Yeah, but if we dress everything up right, make it glitzy, the Havers might settle the case.”

  “True.” Sophie nodded. “But I don’t want to fool around with just bluffing. We’ll dress it up because the courts don’t respect facts, but we want them to start respecting facts. More importantly, so does Cly. The point is to buy off Cly, remember? Free Beatrice, get the goat transforms out of the swamp?”

  Verena frowned. “How are you gonna do that?”

  “We. Cly was all for having me set up a Stormwrack Institute of Forensics. Here be science, hear us roar! So we write up a charter. Make it pretty enough, I bet they’d accord us just as much legitimacy as the astrologers.”

  Verena chortled.

  “Could you write the document?” Sophie said. “Do the legalese?”

  “If we figured out basic principles, I guess. Those would be about the difference between proof and … making assertions?”

  “Documented experiments, reproducible results.” S
ophie nodded. “Annela and Cly would slice through the red tape on approving us, wouldn’t they?”

  “In a second, if it benefited them.”

  “All well and good, Sofe,” Bram said. “But even with a charter, the plans, and this model … that’s not enough.”

  “Agreed,” Parrish said. “If you want absolute proof, we’ll need a clockwork turtle.”

  “I know.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Verena threw up her hands. “Where are we supposed to get that?”

  “That’s where I come in,” Sophie said. “Bram makes the presentation, you write up a forensic institute charter, and I catch an automaton in the Baste.”

  There was a silence. Then Parrish got to his feet. “We’ll need fair winds to make the turtle migration.”

  He brushed past her on his way up to the ladder that led to the sailing deck. Touching her hand briefly, he left a piece of paper tucked into her palm.

  She felt a ludicrous buzz of delight.

  Verena was contemplating the half-made turtle, which looked less like an animal and more like a serving tray for a frozen entrée, full of clock parts and surrounded by the breakfast dishes. Her face had fallen out of its wilfully perky cast and was pensive. Bram was already doing preliminary sketches.

  “Excuse me,” Sophie said, ignoring a stab of guilt as she ducked out so she could unfold her note.

  It read: I hardly know what I mean by courting myself. Issle Morta, as you may have divined, does not encourage what you call pair bonding. What do you do on Erstwhile?

  Oh yeah, Sophie thought. Dinner and a movie should be easy to pull off on a seventy-foot boat with a heartbroken teenage chaperone.

  Verena was, even now, headed up to the sailing deck to join Parrish.

  She went back to her cabin, hunting up another scrap of paper. Usually dating involves cafés and restaurants and entertainments. Long walks in the park, hand-holding. She felt a thrill, under her skin, and found herself remembering a dozen TV shows about kids at drive-ins in the fifties. Kids cuddling, making out …

  Oh, this was crazy.

  She was, nevertheless, beaming when she folded the note in the pocket of her sweater and went back up.

  The crew had raised all three sails and the jib, and the ship was running fast. Sophie got the speed from Tonio, at the helm, and converted it from Fleet units into about ten knots.