I’d been about to utter my own name, when I thought better of it.
‘This is the Monetta. We were attacked by Bosa Sennen. She killed most of us, took our Bone Readers. But I managed to hide. It’s bad in here, but I think I can hold out until you arrive. I can see you on the sweeper and I know you’re coming nearer. If you can get here faster, please do so.’
I turned the console to receive.
I waited.
An hour passed. I worked the controls again, trying all the permutations of switches and knobs I could think of, just in case I’d misunderstood something crucial. Still all I got was static. At last I decided to risk another transmission. I opened the channel and repeated what I’d said the first time, only this time with an edge of desperation and hopelessness that I didn’t need to fake.
I worked the switches again.
The crackles continued. There was a hiss and pop, a snatch of a voice, the phantom of some much more distant transmission. Then more hissing and scratching.
Until I heard: ‘This is Jastrabarsk, sending from the Iron Courtesan. We hear you, Monetta’s Mourn. Your signal is weak, and we had trouble reading you the first time. But we’ve turned all our ears onto you now. We see no sign of your attacker on our deep sweep. State your condition. How many of you are left?’
My voice sounded as bad as the first time, but the relief almost had me choking on my own words. ‘Just me, Captain. I managed to hide. My name is . . .’ And I knew I’d need to lie for now, because it would be much too risky to use my real name while Bosa might be listening in. ‘Incer,’ I said, using the name of Mazarile’s other city. ‘The ship’s in a bad way. There isn’t much power, and it’s getting colder. She took everything. Can you get here quickly, Captain Jastrabarsk?’
I did not have to wait long for his answer.
‘You’re still faint, Monetta, but we can reach you, yes. But even with full sail and ions, we can’t be on you in less than four days . . .’
That was a day longer than I’d figured, and while it might not seem much, it was as if they’d added a year onto my sentence.
‘No . . .’ I said to myself.
‘But we will do our utmost,’ Jastrabarsk was still saying, ‘and when we’re close enough to send out a launch, we’ll do so. The delay won’t hurt us, either. It’ll give us time to make sure Bosa Sennen really has cleared the volume. What is the condition of your ship?’
‘Bad. Lots of things aren’t working. It’s cold and I don’t think there’s much power left. But I’m not really an expert.’
‘I’ll have my Integrator speak to you – see what we can make of the remaining systems.’
‘I’m worried about Bosa, Captain. Will she come back?’
‘Are you certain it was Bosa, and not just someone trading under that name? There are plenty of crews who claim to have seen her, but very few who can prove it.’
‘You want proof, Captain, I can show you the bodies, and what she did to them. I doubt you’ll need much persuasion.’ I hesitated, realising that I ought to sound less like an educated young lady from Mazarile and more like someone who’d been crewing for years. ‘Ain’t pretty, what she did, I mean,’ I went on. ‘And the way she spoke to Rackamore, it was clear that they knew each other already.’
‘I believe she exists. But it’s unusual for her to be trawling this close to the outer processionals, or to be interested in a small prize like this one. So she may be shifting tactics. That said, I doubt that she’ll return – not if she left you in a sorry state. You say she left with your Bone Readers?’
I nodded and forgot to speak for a few seconds. ‘Yes,’ I stammered out. ‘The two of them.’
‘Sisters, we heard. Fresh in from Mazarile, with quite some potential. What were you, Incer?’
‘Nothing like that, sir. Just a Scanner – a Bauble Reader. Prozor was training me up.’
‘We heard about Prozor. She was good, they said – one of the best. Is she . . .?’
‘Dead,’ I answered. ‘Yes.’
Something touched my throat. I jumped hard, despite myself, and felt a sharp edge nick my skin.
A hand reached around me, flicked off the squawk.
‘Dead, is she?’
I suppose I must have breathed but I don’t remember doing it. Just a long silence while I kept still and the blade stayed against my throat. We could have stayed like that for hours, for all I know, although I doubt it was more than seconds.
Eventually I squeezed out a word.
‘Prozor.’
‘Prozor the dead. Ain’t that nice. Ain’t that convenient.’
‘You’re alive,’ I said.
‘And whoever said I wasn’t?’
If she was going to open my neck she might as well do it now. I turned around slowly, giving her time to move the blade so that it was still pressed against my windpipe.
‘I thought she’d killed you,’ I said. ‘Like she did the others – Rackamore, Triglav, Jusquerel. I thought you’d gone the same way, except she’d bludgeoned you. I didn’t check because I didn’t have a reason to think you weren’t dead. You looked dead.’
‘Do I look dead now?’
‘Don’t look far off it.’ She had a bloodied scalp, hair tangled into it, a terribly blackened eye. I had touched her head, I remembered, and felt the soft damage under it. I hadn’t been careless, or presumed something foolish. It wasn’t my fault that her breathing was so shallow I missed it. ‘Would you mind moving that knife, Prozor? Before you kill the only other survivor on this ship?’
‘Question is, girlie, how you survived at all.’ Prozor touched her free hand to her scalp. ‘Messed me up pretty good, she did. But Bosa didn’t know about that plate I already have screwed into my skull. Knocked me out, I suppose. Can’t say I remember too much. But there ain’t a living scratch on you and that don’t sit well with me.’
‘I hid.’ I reached up slowly and drew the blade away from my throat, fighting the strength in her at first, then overwhelming her. ‘Garval helped me. Adrana helped her get loose, and . . . worlds, Prozor, I was just in the middle of signalling Jastrabarsk!’
‘In league with him, are you? Setting us up for a call from Bosa, then arranging to split the leftovers with Captain Jastrabarsk?’
‘No, nothing like that! Were you listening to what I just said? Garval showed me a hiding place, a panel in the wall. I got in there and kept quiet until Bosa was gone. It’s been two days, and now I’m chancing a message to Jastrabarsk’s ship. That’s it on the sweeper. It’s coming our way, as fast as they can make sail. That’s the end of it. Bosa has my sister. If I’d cooked up a plan, do you honestly think that’d be any part of it?’
The line of her lips tightened into something hard and judgemental.
‘You were tight, both of you.’
‘Yes. It’s called being sisters. Prozor! I wasn’t in league with anyone and right now all I care about is finding a way to get Adrana and Garval back.’
‘What did she want with the screamer?’
‘Garval said she was going to put herself up in my place, make Bosa think she already had both Bone Readers. I know, it never stood a chance of fooling Bosa for long. But if she hadn’t done it, they’d have picked the ship apart looking for me. Garval saved my life, and I owe her.’
There was one last long, appraising look from her, then she put the blade away.
‘If a word of this turns out to be anything but gospel, girlie . . .’
‘You’ve seen the bodies, Prozor. Do you think I made them up, or did those things to them?’
After a while she said: ‘They’ve got Bosa’s look about ’em. But you could’ve . . .’ She shook her head. ‘No, you ain’t got the spine for cruelty. Not like that.’
‘Thank you for that ringing endorsement.’
‘You made sure Bosa’s out o
f the scene, before you started blabbing all over the squawk?’
‘I made sure, yes. And I wasn’t blabbing. Did you hear what I said to Jastrabarsk? Nothing that would let Bosa know I’m Adrana’s sister. I made up a name, Incer. Jastrabarsk can get the full story when we’re eye to eye. He’ll understand why I had to bend a few facts, knowing she might be listening in.’
‘Maybe you should have checked with me before beggin’ for rescue. Seeing as I’m as close to captain now as I’ll ever get.’
‘You were unconscious, Prozor. So unconscious you looked dead. You know what my next plan was? I was going to move all the bodies into the airlock, one at a time, so I didn’t have to share the ship with them. Then I was going to vent all the lungstuff in the lock so they’d freeze up and stop decaying. You’d have been one of them. So instead of giving me the hard stare, you can start counting your blessings I didn’t get to it sooner. And there was no begging to Jastrabarsk. Rack told me he knew the man and they were friends. I don’t mean to die on this ship, so I did what I needed to do. Besides, Jastrabarsk was already on his way – I just asked him to get here sooner if he could.’
She chewed on that for a few moments.
‘The ship took a beating. I remember that much. Maybe we could use some outside help. Just to get us straight again, patch up our sails . . .’
‘And then we sail her, just the two of us? Rack said he ran a light crew, Prozor, and it still took seven of you. The ship’s finished. If it keeps us alive until Jastrabarsk gets here, I’ll be grateful.’
‘You sound harder than you used to. Almost like you could have been one of us.’
‘I was, wasn’t I?’
‘Maybe,’ Prozor said, and I suppose I’d have to take what I could get.
‘I never saw Bosa. But I heard it, and that was bad enough. Heard her hitting you, too. You can’t blame me for thinking you were dead.’
‘Did you move the bodies?’
‘No . . . not much.’ I didn’t want her to know I’d had to clean my own sick off them. ‘I got rid of some of the blood, that’s all. Other than that, they’re the way I found them.’
‘Then that’s how she left Rack?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, not quite reading her drift.
‘That crossbow he was clutching to himself?’
‘Yes?’
‘It was Rack’s own crossbow. Not Bosa’s.’
Prozor might have had that tin plate under her scalp, but she’d still taken a good beating. I knew she was weak, but there was no water to offer, and when I told her I could cut her some lightvine she just laughed. ‘You got to cook it, girlie. You don’t just eat it raw, not if you don’t want the glowy getting into you. You ain’t been eating’ it raw, have you?’
‘No . . . no,’ I stammered. ‘That would be silly, wouldn’t it? What’s the glowy?’
Prozor might have picked up on my hesitation, but she wasn’t pulling on all sails and her focus kept slipping away. It was like trying to have a conversation with a very old person, someone whose memory doesn’t stretch back more than a few minutes.
‘Water in the ion coolers,’ she said, during one of the interludes when she was sharper. ‘Separate system from the drinking water, and maybe not as pure, but it’ll keep us alive for now.’ And she gave me instructions on how to siphon water out of the cooling system, situated in what had been Triglav’s ion control room. There wasn’t enough heat to cook the lightvine, but Prozor said it was getting water in us that mattered more than food, and if we looked famished when Jastrabarsk rescued us they’d treat us nicer.
I had a lot of questions for her. It was finding the right moment to ask them that was the tricky part.
‘I told Jastrabarsk it was Bosa that had taken us, and he asked me if I was certain it was her. Why would he doubt?’
‘Bosa Sennen’s a name,’ Prozor said. ‘One that’s been spoken of for too long for it to be just one person.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No one lives longer than a hundred years – not in this Occupation anyway. Nothing that anyone’s ever found in a bauble’s changed that, although that ain’t stopped ’em looking. But crews were being picked off by Bosa Sennen long before I was born, and her name already went back a generation or two then. It ain’t possible.’
‘But you saw her. You know she’s real.’
‘I know there’s someone calling themselves Bosa Sennen, and using the power of that name to put the shivers into people. But that don’t mean it’s the same Bosa Sennen that was taking ships fifty years ago, or a hundred.’
‘But Rack knew her. It was Bosa that took his daughter, wasn’t it? And the same Bosa that came back this time.’
‘Ain’t been more than fifteen years between ’em, so – yes – probably that was the same person using the name. But that’s all it is – a mask for whoever’s decided to earn their keep by plunderin’ what doesn’t belong to ’em, and using crueller means than they need to to do it.’
‘So you’re saying it’s not always the same Bosa, not always the same ship?’
‘I ain’t sayin’ one thing or another. Just layin’ out the simple facts of it, which is that there ain’t a cove in the Congregation gets to live that long.’
‘That ship didn’t show up on the sweeper until it was almost on top of us. How it that possible?’
‘The Nightjammer’s sails ain’t like normal sails. Light just falls into ’em. Reason they’re black; blacker than any thing’s got any right to be.’
‘But sails need to reflect light to work, don’t they? That’s why ours stood out so strongly on the sweeper.’
‘These sails don’t. Ain’t my job to know how they work, just that they do.’
I nodded. ‘But then sails like that would be pretty handy for any crew, wouldn’t they?’
‘What’s the point you’re makin’, girlie?’
‘I think that ship must be unique, the way it operates. Lurking out here, hardly showing up on the sweep . . . how likely is it that someone just happens to have a ship like that, whenever they show up calling themselves Bosa Sennen?’
‘You got an answer, I s’pose.’
‘I think there’s only ever that one ship, and its other name is the Dame Scarlet, and if those sails are as rare as you make them seem, it must be the same ship each time, under the same Bosa Sennen. Whatever you say about people not living long enough, somehow it doesn’t apply to her. Maybe she did find something in a bauble, an elixir or something . . .’
‘Elixir,’ Prozor said. ‘Listen to you.’
‘I’m just trying to make sense of what happened.’
‘Then you’re wasting your time. There ain’t no sense to be had out of it. You crossed orbits with Bosa Sennen once. If the fates are sweet to you, you’ll go to your grave still sayin’ you only met her once.’
‘That didn’t work for Rack, did it?’
‘It was different with him, and we all knew it. When Bosa took Illyria from him, he should’ve put the both of them out of his mind for the rest of his life. But he couldn’t, and for that you can’t blame the cove. He wanted to see his daughter again, and if that meant seeing Bosa another time, he was ready to pay that price.’
‘He did,’ I said.
I wanted to ask her more about Illyria Rackamore, all the things I couldn’t have asked before, but Prozor was fading on me and I knew she needed rest.
I’d settled one thing, at least. Rack had history with Bosa and he’d got to see her again, even if it did take fifteen years.
That meant there was a chance for me, too.
Because we had history too, now. Whether Bosa knew it or not.
8
On the ninth day since the bauble’s opening, the yellow blob on our sweeper swelled until it had the flowered form of a sunjammer under full sail. The signature was di
stinct and sharp-edged, nothing like the furtive, ragged echo of Bosa’s ship. The Iron Courtesan hauled in sail and used ions to find its own orbit around the bauble, higher and more eccentric than ours. A nervous few hours passed, then a launch crossed over to the Monetta.
There were three of them in the party, and they all came aboard. Their suits were older and more battered-looking than ours, and where ours were shades of brown and brass, these were all dull pewters and blue-greys. But they clanked and huffed and smelled the same, they had the same little grilled windows for faceplates, and when Jastrabarsk removed his helmet and scuffed a hand through his hair, something in his manner reminded me of Rackamore. He was older, I reckon, wider in the face, with a heavy brow ridge and cheekbones that looked as hard and swollen as bruises. He had a scar between his lip and his chin, his teeth were metal, and his eyes were dark and fathomless – sunk so deeply that they were almost like sockets – but still there was that swagger that I recognised. His hair was grey, curly, and it had begun to recede above that high, overhanging brow.
‘You did well, Incer. You know me, of course.’ He nodded at the narrow-faced man to his right, who was squinting at a scratch on the crown of his helmet, now cradled in his hands. ‘This is Lusquer. Next to Lusquer is Meveraunce. Meveraunce is our sawbones – she’ll be taking care of you.’
Meveraunce was the tallest of them all. She had a plump face, very white hair, an upturned nose. She was already looking around.
‘Thank you,’ I began. ‘Captain . . . before we go on.’
Eyes flashed in the gloom of those sockets. ‘Yes, Incer?’
‘Are we on squawk now?’
‘Why would we be?’
‘I need to know.’
Jastrabarsk cracked a grin full of metal teeth at his colleagues. ‘Then we’re not, if it matters so much.’
‘I’m not Incer.’ Now that I was speaking the words tumbled out. ‘There’s no such person. I couldn’t tell you who I was, not when Bosa Sennen might be listening in.’
‘We had an inkling,’ Lusquer said, matching the captain’s smile. ‘Not that your name was a lie, but that something didn’t quite fit.’
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