‘Mister Ysmay, please sit here with me,’ I said, indicating the navigational chair.
He approached, subdued, and sat.
‘Do you have family? A wife? Children?’ I asked.
He remained silent, looking at me. He had large blue eyes, too big, really, for his face. ‘A sister. My mother is an engineer.’
‘Father?’ I asked.
‘No one,’ he said. Engineers are a different stripe. Women rise to great stature if their skill and handiwork brings them high enough – they take themselves beyond men, beyond the reach of family and all the obligations the yoke of family brings. And men of lower class can rise high too, high as knights, high as men like Beleth, because their society is based on ability and native intelligence and even artistry, and not just relation. Or mere sex.
Here was a man who had hoped to rise high, who would have risen high, high enough for some security. High enough to have something that resembled a good life. And free.
And I took it all away.
‘I would have us be friends,’ I said, pulling aside the blanket that half obscured Fiscelion’s face. His pink and beautiful countenance lay bare. He gave a little smile and grasped my index finger and placed it in his mouth and gnawed. I winced. His teeth were coming in. ‘I would not have taken away all of your world. But I had to fight for my own,’ I said. ‘My son. And, sadly, our paths crossed. But now Rume is gone, and the world is changed.’ I would not offer him what-ifs: no what if we’d never come? What if you had been there in Rume? I would offer him something better. ‘You might rise high still. There will be war in Occidentalia. For silver. For land.’ I looked at Ysmay. ‘We need you. Rume is gone but not her people. And I am of Rume. We will need a man of your skills. We need you now and we need you when we arrive in the West. But what we really need is to feel that we can trust you.’
He remained silent, thinking. There was no umbrage there now. No sullenness. Just trepidation and wariness.
‘You can trust me,’ he said. And I believed him.
‘Then you may go ashore,’ I said. ‘We will remain here.’
His eyes narrowed.
‘I would not have you a prisoner. If we can trust you, you must be able to trust us. And so, you’re free to go ashore,’ I said.
‘I have no need,’ he said. ‘There are things I should see to before our journey.’
I did not press him. Truly, I would rather he stayed on board. But risks are the coin of leadership. ‘Will the Typhon weather the Occidens?’ I asked. Again. This time I might rely on his answer.
He looked sheepish. But he answered. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But she’s the finest craft I’ve ever seen. I think she will.’
Relief flooded me. To escape the hand of fate and all we had endured since Kithai, only to be drowned in a ship unfit for the open sea – I would not have my son’s fortunes end in a watery grave. ‘This is welcome news, Mister Ysmay. I am so pleased you think so.’ I stood and brought Fiscelion to where Lupina remained watching during the course of our conversation. ‘Feel free to make whatever preparations you need, we will leave on the tide,’ I said. ‘Er. When is the next high tide?’
Ysmay allowed a smile to crack his open face. ‘This evening.’
‘Wonderful. This evening,’ I said. ‘How long will it take to get to Beaticæ? We will have to run the flotilla.’
‘Two days until the Gooseneck – the Strait of Algeciræ. We can make it in one, possibly, with blood.’ I looked at him. ‘To keep Typhon satisfied and running?’ I asked.
‘He’ll run anyway,’ Ysmay answered. ‘A daemon combusts, always. It’s part of their nature. So there’s always power. But you can increase the power yield with blood.’
‘And who gives it? And how?’ I asked.
‘I give it. You, your sister, or your servant. Mister Tenebrae. Or—’ He stopped, trailed off.
‘What are you implying? Why would I do such a thing?’ A cold had come upon me. I looked upon Ysmay anew. And like that, my tolerance was gone. I was acutely aware of the weight of my sawn-off shotgun riding on my hip and thigh.
Seeing something in my eye, Ysmay held up his hands and bowed his head. ‘They love the blood of the young. And the pure. Please, Madame,’ he said, miserable. ‘Thimadæl Gyre is greedy and wants for blood—’ The ship shuddered with his words. Everything shifted, and I took a step to regain my balance. His eyes grew wild, looking all about. He’d let slip the daemon Typhon’s secret name, possibly, judging from the ship’s reaction. ‘I should not have … I am sorry, Madame! The Typhon, she’s well-built and the daemon that turns the screws loves blood. The precium. If we are desperate, a thimble full—’
‘Do not speak of that again,’ I said. I can only imagine how awful my face was then. ‘Do. Not. Or you will find my displeasure hard to bear.’
‘I am sorry,’ he said. It was abject. It was penitent.
This was a loss. I had made amends, gathered up the shards of the man and bound him to me, and then lost them and him once more.
‘We sail for Occidentalia soon. Make yourself and the ship ready,’ I said, and walked from the chamber, up on the deck to feel the wind on my face and smell land, living trees and grass and flowers, once more, before casting off.
Beaticæ was a ghost, an invisible shoreline passing by, though this was something we only knew through conversation, with Ysmay describing what he saw through the underwater seeing device. The remains of the Ruman flotilla – those that survived the destruction of the Immortal City – were disjointed and their watchmen preoccupied. They did not notice the roving eye-stalk of the Typhon or the minuscule wake it made.
We passed under a cloud-wreathed moon and hazy stars, into the waters of the Occidens, swells growing. Carnelia stopped dressing in skirts and blouses and continued to wear the clothes of the lascar. ‘They’re comfortable and make sense,’ she said, simply, ‘for working on board a ship. I’m not going to cut my hair and start scratching my crotch and spitting.’
At night I dreamed of seas of blood and fire. My father framed in the door of our family villa with both of his legs, whole once more. Fiscelion cried and sucked desperately at my breast. His teeth made ruin of my nipples. Lupina did what she could to masticate food and feed it to the boy through kisses. He was growing rapidly and his shite smelled something horrible. We set him on the cabin floors and watched him crawl about, exploring, making cooing sounds, indistinct.
‘Rume,’ he said. It was his first word.
SEVENTEEN
I Have Weighed Your Nature.
I Have Measured Every Grain Of It
MIST ROSE FROM the Breadbasket’s stream, flowing cold from the heart of the Eldvatch down through the village.
The sky was clear beyond the mists, sprayed with a multitude of stars, shining hazily onto the vaporous earth. Gynth was gone, somewhere out roaming the heights of the mountains. His natural restlessness became taut at night, stretched thin, and he prowled about, hunting, always returning red-handed and bearing meat.
In the evenings, when she came past the Pactum Wall, I supped with Lina and had long conversations about her grandmother, and mother. There was a wariness she held around me, and it hurt me that it was so impenetrable; at its heart was her knowledge of the daemon hand and some inkling of its power. She did not question me on it again, but her demeanour indicated she had not forgotten it.
‘Lina, of all of Praeverta’s group, who are the best scouts?’
‘Myself, I’ve walked from Harbour Town to the Big Empty and no eye rested on me I did not want there,’ she said, lifting her chin.
‘And of the others?’
‘Vrinthi is half-cougar. Seanchae is silent and swift and knows how to track and stay unseen,’ she said.
‘And Catch Hands?’
‘He’s a brawler, and good in a fight. He is no scout,’ she replied.
I scratched my beard. ‘How would you like a job?’
‘For the Rumans? Bah,’ she said.
> ‘For us. All here. Don’t you think our fates are joined? Even Neruda has come toward this reality,’ I said. ‘Is it just obstinacy? I already have a mule.’
Instead of irritation or anger, she laughed at this. ‘What is it you’d have us do?’
‘Go west, find rumour or evidence of the Medierans’ movements with great haste. Return here,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘When?’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said.
She stood up from the fire and stretched her back, shook out her legs. ‘I will go and tell the others.’
Lina turned to walk from the fire. I said, ‘Be careful, Granddaughter. I wouldn’t have you taken from me now that I’ve just got you back.’
‘I’m not someone to have, Granwe,’ she said, using the dvergar. ‘And you never had me in the first place.’ She turned back, her face lit by the flickering flames. ‘But I’m always careful.’ She winked at me and then disappeared beyond the ring of light.
When she was gone, I stoked the fire, changed Beleth’s dressing and gave him water and hard tack, helped him to shite and piss, then emptied his soil from the stinking wooden bucket inside the ramshackle shed we kept him in at night. The people of Grenthvar – Neruda’s lieutenants, some men, some dwarven women, some dwarven men – had promised a cell, but their time was consumed with hollowing out the mountain and trucking the ore downhill. Great hills of the black stuff stood south of the village. To the east, rising with the mountains, teams of dvergar levelled ground for rails on which to run mechanised trains, as they had at the Talavera silverlode in the shadow of Brujateton, running from the mine to Passasuego. A smelt was raised quickly of the dense, near unburnable pinewood trees in the lowlands to the south. In the day, all of the Breadbasket echoed with hammer-falls and hollers, workmen’s voices calling out, the rasp of saws and milling, ringing bells and the haws of mules and the nickering of draught horses and the bellowing of sweet aurochs pulling sledges full-loaded with fragrant, fresh-cut wood. No travertine here, but granite and limestone; the bones of the mountains. We remained behind the Pactum Wall, the furrow Neruda had carved around the village, honouring the treaty.
But at night, almost all was silent and a hush fell upon the valley. Sleep was precious – bodies worn out from labour demand rest. And there was the shadow of war upon us like the pall of wood fires that hung in the air, or the mist seeping from the ground. So little time. Sleep, if you could find it, was precious and no one would violate the silence of night, because they would not, if they managed to snatch slumber’s raiment from the night air, want their own personal silence and slumber violated.
I checked Beleth’s manacles and took off his gag so that he might have his mouth unfettered for a few hours at least. He worked his jaws and spat some blood. I had very little sympathy. There was no one around but me to talk to and his enthusiasm for dialogue had worn away; he simply looked at me in the same way he might a beast of burden or a nameless slave, his gaze passing over me as if I wasn’t even there.
Leaving him, I did not immediately return to the fire where Catch Hands sat, stirring the stew. He was a passable chef, and interesting company. It was strange for me to come back to my dvergar roots – my kin had shunned me for so long as a Ruman auxiliary that being once more in their circle was as coming home, but finding everything is the same but foreign. It’s the sinking realisation that you have changed and home has stayed fixed, as all motion is relative to the origin. But Catch Hands was unflappable and good company.
I walked the perimeter, up to the Pactum Wall, and around where we had made camp at the side of the road. In the mist, everything was indistinct and what sounds did reach my ears were muffled. I let my night vision come, and perked up my ears to the movements and sounds of everything around me.
A cough. A footfall.
I stilled.
Once, I abstained from Hellfire. But that was no more.
I pulled my six-gun and walked softly forward, angling back around, toward the fire.
She was at the door of Beleth’s shed when I placed the muzzle of the pistol in the small of her back and thumbed back the hammer. The click of metal echoed loudly in the night air.
‘And what might you be doing out at this hour, Winfried? Taking in the night air?’
She stiffened. Slowly she turned around and looked at me. ‘Mister Ilys. I was—’ She stopped. Shrugged.
‘I’m old, Win,’ I said. The situation and the pistol allowed me to be glib and over-familiar and I could give a shit if she didn’t like it. ‘Was born before your father’s father first sucked tit. We both know why you’re here. He will get what he deserves. In time. But you know better than I that he must answer questions first.’
Her gaze bored into me. She had a longknife in her belt to prick the engineer with. ‘Then let us pose the questions,’ she said.
‘You wouldn’t even know what to ask,’ I said. ‘But the engineers will.’
She shook her head and looked as if she wanted to spit out whatever foul taste flooded her mouth. She brushed past me, ignoring my pistol, and disappeared into the night’s mist.
Twenty days later, Fisk returned to the Breadbasket in front of two columns of legionnaires, maybe three thousand strong. Each man, head shorn, cheeks marked with ash, expression grim, looking pissed as all Hell. The banners of the fifth and seventh Occidentalia, a rampant wolf and a bellowing bull, were clear for all to see. There were more guns than I’d ever witnessed in one place, and something I thought I would never see – a forest of pilum on the march, each one a sapling denuded of leaves. Things had changed since the daemon hand hung from Fisk’s neck. Guns took primacy, but they had their seconds now. Two clattering, mechanical things trundled along behind the legionnaires – they appeared to be the locomotive’s mechanised baggage trains, but smaller, and wearing hellaciously large cannons as jaunty caps. Neither rode on tracks, but metal treads. They were frighteningly loud, ratcheting and clanking, billowing massive clouds of soot and steam. Behind them all, the engineers’ vardos and wagons being pulled by massive draught horses.
Fisk rode at the front with a regiment of cavalry. He wore his grey outrider gear – he’d not allowed himself to spend all his days in officer’s garb – but his legate’s eagle was pinned to his chest for all to see. It was a commonly held practice that men of high rank needed to cultivate eccentricities so that their men might love them for it, but for Fisk his outrider’s garb was pure obstinacy. There were other men of rank, tribunes and praefects, but no Marcellus.
The column stopped at the Pactum Wall and began to set up camp.
Fisk looked furious when he dismounted and approached me. Gynth watched, blinking. More than a few legionnaires reached for their Hellfire or touched gladius when they saw him.
‘Ia-damn it, Shoe,’ Fisk said, coming near. ‘The world’s gone to shit.’
I waited. Now that he was here, I could see his legate’s eagle clearly. It had grass laurels and three bars. He’d been promoted.
‘Rume,’ he said. ‘It’s gone. The same as Harbour Town.’
‘Holy shit,’ I said. It was all I could manage. ‘And Tamberlaine? Cornelius?’
‘Tamberlaine is alive, somehow,’ he said. ‘No one knows about my father-in-law. It’s possible that he was in Tamberlaine’s retinue that fled the city. There was some warning. Livia was involved, somehow.’
I whistled, taking it all in. ‘And these men?’
‘Marcellus, the whore’s son,’ Fisk said, spitting, ‘has made me region commander – possibly under Cornelius’ orders regarding his – our – silver interests. The thirteenth and sixth Occidentalia – they were lost at Harbour Town. Marcellus has taken the Cocks, Rams, Scorpions, and Eagles to Novorum, to protect interests there, leaving me with the fifth and seventh. The Bulls and Wolves. Neither at full strength. Neither willing to be folded into the other.’ He gave a tight smile. ‘Ia help the Medierans when these men take the field. Many of them are conscripts with family in Latinum. Marcellu
s is calling them our orphaned army.’
I remained quiet. When Fisk has the mood upon him, it’s best to let him talk and wait out most of the blow of the storm.
‘He took his best men. New Damnation’s abandoned. Sent the tenth to do what they could to protect the Talavera silverlode. The “working silverlode”, he said. And this is all he’s got for Dvergar.’ He looked at the Pactum Wall. ‘I see Neruda’s been hot to get the perimeter up. Have they started mining?’
‘Yes, he’s got them hauling ore. Sent rovers out for charcoal and Neruda himself has set hands to building a smelt, but he’ll need engineers for that,’ I said. I pointed to a copse of trees outside the wall, being felled. ‘There. Beyond the curve of the Pactum, there’s the mine works and smelt.’
Fisk took off his hat and wiped his brow. ‘Damn, Shoe. Neruda’s folk work fast,’ he said.
‘With good reason. There’s a hostile army west of us,’ I said. ‘Somewhere. I’ve sent out some of Praeverta’s group to scout. Lina, and a couple of others she vouched for.’
‘Your granddaughter? Was that wise?’ he said.
‘She has much of her mother’s disposition – she’s never satisfied with anything. And her knowing about the daemon hand was eating at her. I figured a job, away from the Breadbasket—’
He nodded his understanding. ‘Ahh. She seemed eminently capable. Knew I could count on you.’
‘I grow concerned, though. I sent her out when you went north to Fort Brust with Neruda’s bargain, and she hasn’t returned. I might outride some, to see if I can catch wind of her,’ I said.
‘Fine, but wait until the morrow. We have much to discuss.’ He replaced his hat and rested a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ve got a passel of engineers with me, including Black Donald, who’s the master munitioner. He’ll need to be handled with kid gloves.’
‘I sent word to Sapientia and Samantha Decius, too, that we have Beleth here. I can only hope they will come soon. He is a burden.’
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