Revenger 9780575090569 (28 page)

‘Paladin . . . what did you do to him?’

‘I used great restraint,’ the robot informed me. ‘He still has a nervous system.’

‘You blinded him.’

‘A leniency. He was about to do worse to you.’

A commotion of uniforms and flashing epaulettes swept around the curve of Neural Alley. People scattered. The constables were blowing whistles, drawing truncheons and stun weapons. One of them slipped and went crashing through a shop window and onlookers laughed. But the rest were still coming.

‘I will deal with the constables,’ Paladin said. ‘You must make your way to the station. If you move quickly once you leave Cat Gate, I do not believe there will be any difficulties.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘We’ll meet up at the dock. You know the name of the ship.’

‘I do not think we will meet again, Arafura. Not after what is about to happen.’

‘No,’ I said disbelievingly. ‘You’ve got to come with me.’

‘You have done well this far. You will do equally well without me.’

‘Paladin—’ I said.

He turned, bouncing and swaying back in the direction of the advancing constables. I was frozen for an instant, not wanting our parting to happen like this, in this place. I watched as he began to put up a struggle, flailing his arms, flashing light at the constables. Then he buckled and went under them, and I thought that was the last I’d ever see of him.

It nearly was, and if I’d started running at that instant it would’ve been. But something came tumbling through the lungstuff, just as if it had been tossed out of that brawl to keep it from harm. I stared at it, thinking two things. The first was that I recognised it, because it was the same shattered dome I’d pulled out of a box and spoken to.

The second was that it was heading for me, like I was meant to catch it.

I put out my hands and caught his head, fumbling it to my belly just before it slipped out of my grip. He took his own head off, I thought. He took his own head off and threw it to me.

But there was nothing twinkling in the dome.

Keeping it pressed to me, I ran.

FOUR

TRUSKO

16

‘This isn’t the way it usually works,’ grumbled the captain of the
Queen Crimson
. ‘Just so we’re clear on that. No one ever comes to me direct, at the docks, demanding to be employed. We do things through intermediaries. Brokers. Agencies. The talent bazaar.’

‘I heard you could use a good boney. If that’s not the case, there are a hundred other ships that I’m sure could benefit from my abilities.’

‘You’ve a ready opinion of yourself.’

‘It’s not an opinion. I just know what I am. Anyone can work with a good skull. That’s how the combines operate. The best skulls, and mediocre readers. Mediocre because they don’t need to be any better. I heard your last Reader was fresh off a combine operation?’ I pushed on before he had a chance to confirm or deny this intelligence. ‘I’m sure you got good results, when your skull was fresh. But they get old, don’t they? The gubbins stops twinkling like it used to. Cracks open up. Signal gets fainter, if you can read it at all.’ I gave my best bored shrug. ‘Most can’t.’

‘And you think you’d be better?’

‘I’ve pulled signals out of the bones Granity keeps to feed to the cats.’

‘So you know Granity.’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘You’ve crewed. That’s plain.’ He nodded at my hand. ‘Had some damage, too, and chowed on the glowy stuff by the looks of things. But you’re from Mazarile, or I wasn’t born on Sunderday. It’s vexing that I haven’t run into you sooner. I thought I had pegs on all the talent out of Maz.’

‘Then you need more pegs. Yes, I’m from Mazarile. Does that make things knotty for you?’

‘No reason it should, other than that tongue in your head. Someone wanting to crew with me, normally they’re all please and thank you and what a nice ship you have.’

‘I don’t have time for that.’ I leaned forward, elbows on the table, knitting alloy fingers in flesh ones, and hoping the lack of movement in my false hand wasn’t too evident, because I didn’t want him asking how long I’d had it. ‘Here’s the sharp end of it, Captain. I’ve made some scowly enemies.’

‘To do with that bit of broken glass you seem so attached to?’

I’d been cradling what was left of Paladin since leaving Neural Alley.

‘Something like that. I’m getting off Mazarile one way or the other, and that’s the truth. But I ain’t going to beg my way onto a ship. Hire me or don’t. But if you take me on, you’ll have the best Bone Reader between here and Trevenza Reach.’ I settled back into my seat. ‘Question is, do you want the gen or not?’

‘Of course I want the gen.’

‘Then give me something I can put my name on.’

Captain Trusko gave me a look of long, sceptical appraisal. He was younger than Rackamore or Jastrabarsk, and there wasn’t anything of the seasoned spacefarer about him. He wasn’t a big man, but what there was of him was
soft-
looking and babyish, with two chins, a pout, and a black kiss curl glued onto his forehead. He had tried to offset his overall look with a moustache, but it only made things worse.

We were in a rented room at Hadramaw Dock, similar to the office where I had first met Rackamore and Cazaray. Trusko was busy with
last-
minute arrangements before setting sail. I’d done well to get myself before him, but I wasn’t on safe ground just yet. My decision to put on this bold, dismissive front was a dicey one.

‘We don’t cut out for a day, and the launch still has to go up and down at least twice in that time,’ Trusko said, sliding ledgers around on his desk as if he still had half an eye on those matters. ‘Given that, I’ll see what the rest of the crew make of you. It’s true I can use a Bone Reader. But not if she bristles everyone up the wrong way. It’s bad enough with the Scanner we took on at Trevenza—’

‘My experience,’ I said, ‘is that quoins will smooth over a lot of things.’

‘And you think you’d make quoins for us, do you?’

‘What we’re here for, ain’t it?’

‘You do a good job of masking that schooling you’ve had,’ Trusko said, with a thin smile. ‘But it won’t fool the rest of them. Nothing gets you off to a worse start than turning the crew against you, because they think you’re trying to pretend you’re something you’re not.’

‘I know what I am,’ I said.

‘We’ll see.’ He gathered his papers and tapped them into neat order, then held them up before him so that he could run his upper lip across the top of them, making them even neater. ‘You’ll come with me on the launch. Trial by fire. The crew shall have the last say. Best not rile them . . .’ But then he paused. ‘You never did say your name, did you?’

‘Fura,’ I said. ‘Just Fura.’

‘Very well, Just Fura. I make no promises. You look like a barefoot street waif and you’ve got spite in your eyes. You’ve been on the glowy and that never sits well with me, especially if it gets in the grey. But if you’re half the Bone Reader you think you are, maybe you have something to offer.’

‘I’ve plenty to offer,’ I said. ‘Intelligence. Baubles. Fortune. Quoins.’

I spared him the bit about bloody retribution.

Trusko’s launch took us from Hadramaw Dock to the orbit of the
Queen Crimson
. Like the
Monetta’s Mourn
, her basic form was a little like a fish, with windows for eyes,
sail-
control gear for fins and spines, ion radiators for a tail, and a mouth for the forward docking bay. We slipped into the mouth and the jaws clamped us in like a prize.

Inside, though, it was like a puzzle that had been jumbled up and reassembled in a different order. I had been on three sunjammers now – four if you counted the commercial clipper – and it was clear that they all did things in their own way. The bone room was usually somewhere near the middle, but that still left a lot of scope for how to get to it, what to have next to it, and so on. The crew’s cabins could be almost anywhere, and so could the galley, navigation room, bridge, captain’s quarters.

There was one commonality, though. The ships all sounded the same. They grumbled and moaned and sang to themselves as if they’d all been raised on the same hymnbook. And they all had the same smell. It was metal and wood and cooking and toilets and too many monkey bodies pressed into the same volume for too long. It had been unfamiliar, at first. But the shivery thing was that I had an entirely different view of that smell now.

It felt like coming home.

Trusko took me to the bone room without making any introductions along the way. ‘I’m expecting a confidential send,’ he said. ‘From a captain and a ship whose names I won’t divulge. That’ll be your first test. If you
were
thinking of bluffing, now’d be the time to come clean about it.’

‘I wasn’t bluffing.’

He spun the bone room wheel and invited me to float inside. It was a similar
set-
up to the room on the
Monetta
, with equipment hung onto the walls and the skull braced in the middle by an arrangement of
shock-
absorbing wires.

‘Grestad is our usual Reader,’ he said. ‘But Grestad is still down on Mazarile.’ He touched a finger to his forehead, just under the cowlick. ‘I started off reading the bones, back before my grey hardened up. Worked my way up the hard way. So I know the ropes, and I can get a signal out of the bones if no one else is available.’

‘So why’d you need me? Or Grestad?’

‘Grestad’s a better Reader than I was. Besides, I’ve got the ship to run. It’s the usual course of it. If a Reader doesn’t stink the place out, there’s usually a job for them somewhere else, when the bones stop playing nice. You’ve crewed as often as you say, you’d know that.’

‘I did. I just wondered why someone who could still get a signal out of the bones would waste quoins employing someone else.’ I hooked one of the items off the wall. ‘Are these what you call neural bridges? I’ve seen better than this thrown out as junk.’

‘They worked well enough for Grestad. Perhaps your tastes are a little fussy for the
Queenie
?’

I set Paladin’s head aside and slipped the bridge over my head, as best as I could, being effectively
one-
handed.

‘That tin arm of yours is a little stiff.’

‘It worked fine before my creditors decided to leave me with a parting message,’ I said, trying to make as little of it as I could. ‘Anyway, you’d be paying me to read bones, not knit. This is the skull?’

‘No, it’s tonight’s dinner.’

I stroked a hand along the skull’s ridge. It was in better nick than the one on the
Monetta
, although not necessarily newer. It was a clean
yellow-
white in colour, with no major cracks or areas of repair. I leaned in to peer through the eye holes. Constellations of coloured lights flickered back at me.

‘I’ve seen bigger. But it’s in fair fettle.’

‘It’d better be, the packet it cost us. A new set of sails took a smaller dent out of our accounts. Question is, can you find the active node? I know where Grestad hooks in.’

‘Where Grestad hooks in, and where I might choose, are two different things.’ With my good hand I worked the end of the neural bridge into one of the central nodes. All pretence dropped away now, as I fell into the receptiveness that I’d learned under Cazaray. I closed my eyes, flung wide the doors of my skull, and waited for shivery whispers to skirl through those chambers of alien bone.

Nothing came.

‘It’s not this node,’ I said softly. ‘No matter what Grestad might say.’

‘Continue.’

I shifted the connection. Nothing on the second node. But a possible hit on the third. It was a scratchy presence, an itch or a skincrawl under the roof of my brain.

I said nothing. I kept my eyes tight. But the set of my face must have shown itself to Trusko.

‘You have a signal?’

‘Let me work.’

I circled around the peripheral nodes, returning to the third as a comparison. Faint traces on three of the peripherals, but nothing as strong as that first contact.

‘You have partials on four and five. But three’s where Grestad should be hooking in. For now, anyway. That skull’s like any of the others I’ve worked with, there’s no such thing as a fixed pattern.’

‘No,’ Trusko allowed. ‘It moves, shifts around from one month to another, like there’s something restless trapped inside it. Grestad’s usually able to follow it.’

‘Usually?’ I asked, sneering out my question. ‘I was right about Grestad, wasn’t I? Combine fodder. Fine when the skull’s fresh.’

‘This one is.’

‘But I doubt Grestad’s pulling the faintest signals out of it.’

‘We don’t miss anything.’

‘You wouldn’t
know
you were missing it, would you? Wait.’ I raised a silencing finger. ‘Something’s swelling up. Might be your call, Captain Trusko.’

‘Give me a ship and a name,’ he whispered.

‘That’s easy. Too easy, you want my righteous word on it. Ship’s the
Shady Lady
, captain’s some cove by the name of Sobradin. That’s screaming through. Sobradin wants your opinion on the opening auguries for a bauble down in the . . .’

‘All right. That’s good. That’s very good.’

‘You want the rest of it, the stuff that’s whispering in under all that? Not from the
Shady Lady
. Someone a lot further out, but coming in on the same node.’ Still with my eyes closed, I added: ‘
Marquess of Shadows
, under Resparis, losing lungstuff at the Daughters of Blood and Milk . . . any vessels close to the fourth sector of the third processional make all sail to assist . . . Auskersund transmitting from the
Hollow Mistress
says to scupper and repair to all launches . . . estimated crossing time on full ions will be three days, nine hours . . .’ I tugged the bridge from my hair. ‘Do you want more?’

‘No,’ Trusko said. ‘That will be sufficient. More than sufficient. You were right about Sobradin, and I doubt there was any way for you to know that name unless you pulled it from the skull. But the rest of it? You overplayed your hand, Fura. I’d have been ready to sign you, at least as apprentice Bone Reader, but you took me for a fool. There’s no way you pulled the rest of it from that node, not when Sobradin was already sending. Maybe one in a thousand has that discrimination . . . but I’d know, wouldn’t I, if someone with that sort of talent was looking for employment?’

‘You do now.’

His expression was tight, composed. ‘No. I’m not green.’

‘Get on the squawk,’ I said. ‘If there’s a ship bleeding out down in the Sunward processionals, word’ll reach the Emptyside soon enough.’ I slipped the neural bridge back onto its hook. ‘I know what I heard, Captain. It came through
bell-
clear, too. I didn’t even have to work at it. You’ve got yourself a good skull here, whatever worth Grestad’s made of it. Now all it needs is a sharp Reader.’

‘I will get on the squawk,’ Trusko said. ‘And I will have word of something going wrong with that ship, if it even exists. You’d better pray that it does, Fura. I don’t take kindly to having my time wasted.’

‘Nor do I, Captain.’

There was a silence, which he curtailed with a contemptuous snort. ‘I’ll prove you wrong. But since my time is precious, I may as well have the pleasure of seeing the rest of the crew sound you out first. They’ll plumb you, Fura.’

‘Plumb away.’

I understood why he had his doubts. I’d have had my doubts as well. But the shivery part was that I hadn’t needed to fake a word of it. It was all real, even though I’d never heard of Resparis, his stricken ship, or the Daughters of Blood and Milk. I was getting better at reading the bones, just like Cazarary said I would.

Scarily better.

The crew had gathered in the galley. It was aft of the bone room, smaller than the one on the
Monetta
, but it served the same function. There were six of them in the room when we arrived, and five of those faces were totally new to me. I endeavoured to treat the sixth no differently.

‘Take a seat,’ Trusko said, indicating the long
double-
sided bench that spanned most of the galley. ‘But don’t get too comfortable. I think you’ll be back on that launch soon enough.’