Revenger 9780575090569 (17 page)

But when I opened the store room, I saw Bosa had beaten me to it.

It wasn’t theft so much as spite. Things had been taken, I was sure – ordinary rations, alcohol, treats, luxury foodstuffs reserved for special occasions. But much else had been destroyed purely for the sake of it. Bottles had been smashed. Their weightless contents glooped around like they were playing at being
deep-
sea animals. I tried to catch and swallow what I could, but that was a harder trick than it appeared.

Bosa had also taken whole crates of our fruit, vegetables and meat, presumably because such supplies would always be useful on a ship that was obliged to keep away from the Congregation’s civilised trading centres. What remained had been pulped into a splintered mass, smeared around the walls, embedded with shards of wood and glass.

Bosa might not have counted on someone being left alive on the
Monetta
, but she’d still considered the possibility. For a couple of stupid instants I wondered why she hadn’t simply blown all our lungstuff out of the locks.

But that would have been too quick. Too clean and too easy.

Not Bosa’s way.

I kept a close watch on the sweeper. Between one hour and the next there wasn’t any sign that the distant blob had moved. But if I marked its position with one of Rackamore’s pens, then went away and came back a watch or two later, I could just about convince myself that it had sneaked a little nearer. After a day, there wasn’t any doubt. Jastrabarsk was closing in on us, presumably meaning to pick over our bones and see what was left in the bauble. But I measured the distance that the blob had moved in
twenty-
four hours and then worked out how many of those intervals it would take to reach me, and what I came up with was another five days.

I wasn’t going to make it – not with the cold leeching the energy out of me, and no water or rations.

Not unless I did something drastic.

I’d be lying if I said it never crossed my mind to cook and eat the bodies. At least, it crossed my mind that I’d be halfway to madness if I ever got to the point where that was something I’d seriously consider. Maybe I’d get there. But between now and then, there was something else I could try.

I could eat the lightvine.

There was more than enough of it snaking through the
Monetta
, certainly more than I’d ever be able to stuff into my gob in five days. And I knew it wasn’t poisonous. I’d picked that up from somewhere, some
half-
remembered tale of how you could eat the stuff without too much in the way of repercussions. That the clever coves of some earlier Occupation who’d engineered lightvine – and that was what it was, some
cooked-
up organism, tweaked from parts of other plants and animals – had made sure it wasn’t poisonous. It couldn’t be, the way people would be brushing past it, touching it, as they made their way through a ship. No, lightvine was supposed to be helpful, not hurtful. It gave off light, breathed in bad gases and gave out the ones we needed in our lungs.

And you could nosh on the stuff.

That was some third factor they’d built into it, like a final insurance clause. If your ship was in trouble, and provided you left enough lightvine to keep the lungstuff getting too groggy, you could scoff the rest and not die from it.

No one promised it was tasty, though.

I found a knife and hacked away a
finger-
sized length of it. It cut easily, and gave off some juices that I licked from my fingers. It was sweet but otherwise flavourless, like sugary water. It kept on glowing, too, even though it wasn’t connected to the rest of the organism. In my palm it was soft and cool.

I pushed the lightvine into my mouth, and bit into it.

The softness gave way to a harder, chewier core. It wasn’t quite tasteless. Peppery, to start with, then a sour afternote. I couldn’t say it was delicious, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever tasted and if you smothered butter on it you could probably charge coves for the pleasure of eating it. I kept on chewing. The pulpy core was hard work, but gradually I got the whole mass down to something I could swallow. It was going to take more than that to stop me feeling hungry. But the juices in the lightvine had taken the sting out of my thirst, and that was something.

I reckoned I could put up with it.

With me being the bookworm I am, it might seem queer that I didn’t go to the library sooner than I did. But books were a nice thing in my life, a luxury and a reminder of better times, and I didn’t want to start letting nice things back into my world until I thought there was at least a chance of making it through the next couple of days. The lightvine took the edge off my fears, though, just a bit, and maybe it was the act of feeding myself or some chemical in the lightvine itself, but all that really mattered to me was that I started thinking of ways to fill the hours, and my grey working the way it does, what jumped to mind first of all were books.

So I went to Rackamore’s library . . . and that was when I saw what she’d done to it.

I knew that books were valuable to some coves, and boring to others, but I’d never ventured beyond that thought to the idea that books might be something to be hated or destroyed. Books were like lungstuff, I’d liked to think. There were bottles of lungstuff kept for safekeeping all over a ship. There to use when you needed them, but that didn’t mean you burned them up just because you had enough to breathe somewhere else. But I suppose that was how an educated girl from Mazarile saw such things, and it didn’t mean that everyone else was obliged to have the same view.

Bosa had destroyed Rack’s library. It wasn’t an accident, or a
side-
effect of close action. This had been systematic, and it must have taken two or three of them to get the job done. They’d gone in with sharp tools – maybe the
long-
bladed yardknives that coves like Hirtshal used to cut rigging – and they’d hacked and hacked, gashing books apart at their spines, so that the pages had come out and gone fluttering all around the room, like a snowstorm with
palm-
sized flakes. But a yardknife will cut anything, even a page floating in the breeze, so they must have kept on hacking, slicing and dicing those pages until it would have taken a hundred years to stitch them back together. They’d used fire, too, so that for every white fragment there was a black or brown one, and there was still ash hovering around when I gulped a breath of it down my gullet. I was inhaling his library, or a bit of it, and somewhere in that choking taste was enough history to cram a thousand lifetimes. I coughed out some of it, but not the whole of it.

I found the covers of some of the books. With their pages stripped out, they were like the wings of dark, leathery birds that had been ripped whole off their carcasses. There was that 1384 edition of the
Book of Worlds
, not the earliest one Rack had shown me, but still strange and old and valuable. I thought of how proud he’d been, and how rarely he must have been able to show off that collection to someone who really appreciated it, and I realised he’d seen something in me that meant he trusted me with the knowledge of his library, and it was that thought beyond any other that turned my grief even sharper than it had been before.

There were probably books that hadn’t been badly damaged, or that could have been put back together without too much trouble. But going back into that library was more than I had the strength for. You might think it cold of me, but the damage that was done to those books turned my stomach more than all the wounding and murder done to the crew. It wasn’t that I didn’t think highly of people. But there are always more people, and I’d have bet quoins that some of those books were truly unique, not another of their kind anywhere under the Old Sun’s light.

Still, I steeled myself to take one memory of the library. Of all the books that had belonged to Rack, I took that one black cover from the 1384 edition. As I closed my hand around it I remembered him blowing dust off it, brushing his fingers against it so lovingly, and I hoped he wouldn’t have objected to me taking it as my own.

I’d been out of my hiding place for two days when I decided to chance using the squawk.

I worked the switches and toggles. I brought my mouth close to the speaking grill and when I made to shape a sound, what came out of me was so raw as to be almost unrecognisable.

‘Captain Jastrabarsk. This is . . .’

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.’