Through a garbled squawk, Prozor said: ‘Something in these places don’t take kindly to visitors. But if it comes on slow and gradual like this, it’s not usually too serious.’
‘And if it does come on fast?’
‘Be glad Bone Readers are too valuable to send into baubles.’
The others took this development in their stride, keeping a watch on the rate of decay, measuring it against Loftling’s accounts, but not allowing it to change their plans. They’d been expecting it, and like the heaviness of our steps in the shaft, treated it as an irksome but unavoidable aspect of the job.
Mattice had broken into two connected vaults that had eluded Loftling. They’d made only one trip back to the launch, so most of the treasure was still waiting to be claimed, and it lay around the vaults in great jumbled piles, all glitter and confusion, and almost none of it was anything I stood a hope of recognising. I stared in numbed wonder, bewitched by all the colours I’d ever imagined, and a few that had never crossed my mind. Shapes and textures and materials that were like nothing in my common experience, and all of it piled high in mad abandon, like the untidiest toy room of the most spoilt child in all the childhoods that had ever existed in the ten million years of the Congregation.
I looked at all the loot, then at the eight of us, and thought of how much we could carry back up the stairs. It was a cosmic joke. We could visit this room a hundred times and there’d still be too much.
But the Assessors were already pawing through the loot, sorting things into sub-piles, scornfully tossing this or that treasure aside as if it was beneath contempt.
‘Everything in these vaults has some value to someone,’ Jastrabarsk said. ‘But not necessarily to us. We take what we can easily carry, and what we can easily get a price for back in the worlds. It’s hard, knowing you can’t have it all. Harder still when the clock’s ticking. That’s why we have Assessors. They make the hard choices so I don’t have to.’
We were in the vaults for three hours, and then it was time to be on our way back up the stairs. We all had to carry our share of the burden. The suits had nets, baskets, hoppers and panniers, now bulging with plenty. I could barely move under the load, and my share was nowhere near as bulky as Jastrabarsk’s. The first twist of those ascending stairs took everything out of me. But we rested, and resumed our ascent, and slowly I found a mindless rhythm, concentrating only on the step ahead of me, and forbidding myself to think about the thousands still to come.
If our weight diminished as we gained distance from the swallower, I felt no benefit from it. In fact, the effective effort increased with our ascent, as my muscles grew ever more fatigued. But we stopped periodically, and when I had recovered some energy Jastrabarsk used the scratchy, failing squawk to ask if I wished someone to take over my burden.
‘There’ll be no loss of your share, Arafura. You’ve done well enough for a first-timer.’
‘I’m all right,’ I said, between heavy breaths.
As we got higher, though – taking longer than Jastrabarsk liked – even the Assessors began to paw through the hoppers and nets and tossed the occasional heavy item back down the staircase. We risked leaning over the edge, watching rejected trinkets hurtle into the airless depths.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to leave them on the stairs, for someone else to find?’ I asked. ‘They must have had some value, or we wouldn’t have carried them this far.’
They laughed at me.
The attrition of our suits continued apace, but it was following a predictable progression and no one seemed greatly troubled. The squawk became unusable unless we were almost helmet to helmet – and then it was easier to touch the helmets together and rely on the transmission of sound through metal and glass. Our torches faltered so that we were climbing in an ever-dwindling pool of light.
It wasn’t too bad. The less light we had, the less obvious it was that we were tiny little creatures winding our way up the inside of a vertical shaft, following the scratching line of a staircase. I kept as close to the outer wall as I could, and when I was there it was almost possible to forget that the staircase had an unprotected drop on the other side.
Finally – when it felt as if we had climbed twice as far up as we had gone down – we came to a landmark, a stretch of ten or twelve steps where the staircase had been damaged, three-quarters of it bitten away by some ancient violence, so that we had to squeeze into a single file and edge along with our backs to the wall. I’d detested that section on our descent but now I took some reassurance that we weren’t too far from the surface.
Our lights were nearly gone by then. That was when Prozor looked me hard in the faceplate, and although I was certain that my own torch had stopped working several turns of the staircase below, a yellow-green glow cast itself across Prozor’s helmet.
‘I thought you were keeping something back,’ she said, clanking her helmet against mine.
‘Keeping what back?’
But by then the others had paused as well. They were all looking at me, and one by one they reached up to dim the few helmet torches that were still operating. We stood in darkness, a little group of explorers on the last twist of a spiral staircase.
Or we would have stood in darkness, had it not been for the light spilling from my faceplate. I looked at each of them in turn, seeing their wide, awed eyes swimming behind the glass and frets of their helmets.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘She’s got the glowy,’ Jastrabarsk said.
9
Rackamore had been right that the Iron Courtesan would be on its way back to Trevenza Reach. But that was a six-week crossing, on a ship that was no larger or more comfortable than the Monetta’s Mourn, and with a crew that was even more numerous and squabblesome. It should have been a hardship, but after all that had happened around the bauble I laughed off the ordeal as if I’d been born to the life. Prozor and I were treated kindly enough, but we still mucked in as best we could, anxious that we not be accused of freeloading an easy passage back to civilisation. It was pride, I suppose – both in ourselves and in the memory of our fallen friends. When we got our last glimpse of the abandoned Monetta, stripped to her bones, the bodies of her crew bound in what was left of her sails and committed to the Empty the way they’d have wanted, we’d both made a silent pact not to let any of them down.
We both cooked, and that was welcome – they had not had a good cook for several worldfalls – but it did not end in the galley. Prozor spent time assisting Quancer, bringing his auguries up to date, and sharing little glimmers of wisdom and practical advice. If she were auditioning for the job, though, I’d have known it.
‘I’m done with this, Fura,’ she told me, late one watch as we bunked together. ‘I was gettin’ that way before Bosa took another bite of us, but that was the last straw. I’ve been spendin’ time in the bone room, sweet-talking Restromel, their boney, havin’ her contact banks and so on on my behalf; places where I’ve squirrelled me earnin’s away over the years. I’m gettin’ set to cash in.’
It was warmer on the Courtesan, maybe because there were more people on her, or just because Jastrabarsk ran it that way. When we were in our quarters Prozor only wore her underwear, a pair of shorts and a sort of vest, and both items had that grubby grey look that old clothes’ll take on no matter how hard you clean them. When she was turning from me I could see her shoulders, the top of her back and a bit of the way down it, and there was a scar under her shoulder blades like nothing I’d seen before. I couldn’t see all of it, just the edges, but what I could see made me think of a crater on a world, and the fingers of debris radiating out from the middle. The scarred-over skin had a thick, glossy look to it, and I wondered when I’d know Prozor well enough to ask her how it had happened.
Not yet, anyway.
‘I suppose you trust the Crawlies with your money,’ I said. ‘Or you’ve trusted them until now.’<
br />
‘Not exactly spoilt for choice, was I? Who else runs the banks, if it isn’t the Crawlies, or the Clackers?’
‘People say it’s because our money doesn’t interest them, so they wouldn’t ever misuse it. But when I spoke to Captain Rackamore, I had the feeling he didn’t think it was as simple as that.’
‘Nothing’s ever that simple. What did Rack say?’
‘That it was funny that the Crawlies hadn’t really shown up until just before the big crash, the one in 1566. We were doing all right, weren’t we? And then we had the crash and the Crawlies had to step in and sort out our banking institutions, throughout all the worlds. That’s what it says in the books, anyway – what we were taught. But the way Rack was going on, it was almost like he thought the Crawlies had something to do with the crash in the first place, like it suited them for it to happen to us. And now it’s not just them; the Hardshells and the Clackers also got their feelers stuck into our financial systems. I don’t understand it, Proz. Why would aliens want to handle our money, if it isn’t worth anything to them?’
‘Ours ain’t to ask, Fura. That’s what life’s taught me. Provided my share of it’s still in my accounts where I left it, why should I care what the Crawlies or the rest of ’em really want?’
‘Because someone should.’
‘That’s the glowy speaking,’ Prozor said, nodding wisely. ‘Didn’t think it’d been in you long enough to cross into your grey, but maybe you just got unlucky when you noshed on the Monetta.’
‘What’s the glowy got to do with money?’
‘The glowy does lots of things to coves, besides getting under their skin the way it has with you. It makes ’em twitchy, suspicious. Start seeing patterns that ain’t there, connections that don’t make sense. Makes coves start asking questions that don’t need answerin’.’
‘Rack never had the glowy, did he?’
‘Rack was different. Haven’t you asked Meveraunce what she can do for you? They’ve got medicines that can flush out lightvine. Pretty nasty potions, I’m told, but no worse than a good fever.’
‘I don’t need anyone’s potions. I only ate a bit of it. Meveraunce told me it’d need to be in me a lot longer to risk crossing into my brain. It’s been growing inside people for centuries, and hardly anyone’s ever died of it.’
‘No one’s ever said they like it, either.’
‘It’s not painful. A little tingly, maybe. But if you think I’m ashamed of it . . .’ I shook my head. ‘This is what I did to survive, Prozor. These are the marks that say I’m better than Bosa Sennen, because she didn’t manage to kill me.’
In the semi-darkness of our little cabin I lifted up a hand, studying the wavy, branching pattern of the lightvine glowing through my skin. It was a gentle yellow-green, throbbing and pulsing with a slow, furtive rhythm.
Those wavy lines blushed every part of my skin, from my face to my ankles. In bright light they weren’t too obvious, but in the gloom of an unlit cabin my skin had become a glowing map. I’d been studying it since we left the bauble, and I’d come to see connections forging and evaporating, forming restless patterns under my skin.
Yes, Meveraunce had treatments. They weren’t the best, she said, and they had some nasty side-effects. She reckoned the doctors on Trevenza Reach would have better medicines – but she’d been willing to let me try her potions.
I’d declined.
‘I’ll give you this, Fura. You ain’t turned out the way I was expecting.’
‘I’m not done yet.’
‘I spoke to Restromel when I was in the bone room. She’s got five or six years left on the bones, I’d guess. But she’s itchy to work on another ship, one of the combine operations working the deep processionals. Says the pay’s better, even if she knows she’ll never hit a big score. What I’m leadin’ round to is, Restromel needs to train up a new Bone Reader before Jastrabarsk’ll release her from contract. I said you were green, but you had promise.’
I blew through my lips, as if this was high praise.
‘And what did Restromel say?’
‘That you should drop by the bone room when you get a chance. See if you can get a read out of the skull. Could be your chance, Fura. Unless you’ve got plans to hop a ship home from Trevenza Reach?’
I shook my head forcefully. ‘Not in all the worlds. I’ll get word to Father, make sure he’s all right, make sure he knows I’m all right – and explain to him about Adrana, and so on, and that I won’t be home for a little while.’
‘You could do that now. Jastrabarsk ain’t got too many secrets to protect.’
‘No, but I have. There’s a man working for my father. He’s called Vidin Quindar – you might have heard of him?’
‘I know Quindar. Sooner say I didn’t, but I do. But he ain’t the sort of cove to work for the likes of your father.’
‘He does now. Whatever money Father had left – and it can’t have been much – he’s used it to keep this man looking for us, because he knows the ships and how they operate. Well, I don’t want to run into him before I’ve found another ship.’
‘What’s so shabby about this one?’
‘Everything. You can say it’s the glowy, but there’s something in me that wasn’t there before. I’m not resting until Bosa’s paid for this, Prozor. I want my sister back alive, and Garval, and Illyria too, if she’s still alive, and for that I’m going to need a crew with the guts to take her on.’ And I lowered my voice, because I was about to speak ill of our hosts, who’d been good and kind to us, and that made me feel sneaky and unappreciative, like a guest with bad manners. ‘And this isn’t it. They’re too timid. They weren’t going to take a chance on that bauble ’til you twisted their arms. They didn’t even have the nerve to try and beat the Monetta to it – they were happy to let us have first pickings! They make Rack seem like a big risk-taker.’
‘Anyone but you, Fura, I’d make ’em pay for that.’
‘But you won’t with me, because you know I’m only saying it the way it was.’
She cocked her head, giving me a sideways look.
‘You an expert, all of a sudden.’
‘I’ve earned the right, Prozor. Just as you did. I know I don’t look or speak the way the rest of you do, and I know I haven’t seen a hundredth of the things you have. But I’ve survived Bosa Sennen, and that’s more than most can say. And now I’m going to make her regret the day she ever crossed orbits with Fura Ness.’
‘I ought to laugh,’ Prozor said, after a few moments. ‘But if I did, I think I might come to regret it.’
I took up Prozor’s suggestion to go to the bone room. It wasn’t out of any desire to become part of Jastrabarsk’s crew, though. They didn’t need me and I didn’t need them.
But I wanted to get to a skull.
Nothing in the bone room was the same as on the Monetta, but nothing in it was so different that I felt like I was starting from scratch. When Restromel let me slip on one of their shiny neural bridges and plug in, the skull came through as clean, sharp, and bright as a new whistle. It was smaller than ours, but it had obviously come down the ages with a lot less damage. The signals shone through. It was like they were rising above the background almost without effort, willing themselves to be intercepted and understood. They didn’t come through in garbled bursts, either. Once I had a lock, it was solid. I was able to transcribe conversations lasting many minutes, as if they were being whispered right into my brain.
‘You’ve got the knack,’ Restromel said, reading through the notes of what I’d picked up. ‘Need some training, but there’s no doubt in my mind that you could fit in here if you wanted to study under me.’
‘That’s very considerate of you,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure I want to sign on with another crew.’
She nodded sympathetically. ‘Perfectly understandable, given what happened to you. Bu
t give it some more thought, while we’re still sailing. There’s no need to make your mind up until we reach port.’
‘Thank you, Restromel. I’ll certainly give it some more consideration.’ I looked at the bones with a timid, doubtful expression. ‘Would it be all right to spend a bit more time in here, while I’m deciding things? I’m still getting used to the idea of connecting my mind to those horrible old skulls.’
‘If you can run routine intercepts with that level of accuracy, you’re more than welcome. And don’t feel too nervous about the skulls – they’re just old bones; no more and no less.’
What Restromel didn’t know – and never guessed – was that I only wanted to spend time in that bone room for one reason. I was hoping to pick up something from Adrana, some connection, some proof that she was still alive out there somewhere, plugged into the skull on Bosa’s ship. But there wasn’t anything. I got sniffs and snatches of a hundred other ships, all the talk and babble I could ask for, but never a hint that the Nightjammer was one of those ships, or that Adrana was in a bone room.
I told myself it didn’t mean much, at least not yet, because if Bosa was as sly and furtive as her reputation made out, she’d be keeping her use of the skull to a minimum to begin with. But I couldn’t stop myself fretting about all the other things it might mean as well, such as Garval’s lie being found out, and Adrana being punished for going along with it. The trouble was, the more I dwelled on it, the more I got my head into a spin. I couldn’t allow myself to get into that state, not if I was going to be a help to my sister. So I forced the worry out of my grey for now, and vowed that I’d keep checking the bones when I had the chance, and draw no dark conclusions until there was evidence.
But no matter how many times I talked my way into the bone room, she wasn’t sending.
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