The Iron Ship (12 page)

Garten knew his brother best. He was more alive to the moods of men than machine-obsessed Trassan, and became concerned. He coaxed Guis, tried to obliquely reassure him without suggesting he had become offended, which would make matters worse. Despite his best efforts, Guis remained morose, and became angry.

“Oh come on Guis! It’s probably something to do with the Admiralty. Am I right? I’m right.” He turned to his other brother. “You’re building a ship, right Trassan? You need something from them. You want me to help, right? You can say as much as that surely! Guis doesn’t need to know the details.”

“I can’t say anything. I can’t, I’m sorry,” said Trassan.

“I think I better be going,” said Guis, and stood, jarring the table. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Guis...”

“Trassan, it’s alright, I understand. Tell me all about it when you can. I’m just being a bit of an idiot. You know what I’m like, I get things stuck in my head it...” Guis smiled tiredly but honestly. “I’m tired. I better go.”

They exchanged warm farewells, yet cooler than their greetings.

“Well,” said Garten as Guis pushed his way out to the door. “That was tactless. You should know better, he hates it when he thinks he’s being excluded.”

“Nonsense! I tell him everything, and I will tell him everything about this too.” He intended to as well. To him Guis was an advisor, one of his most trusted confidantes, but one to be presented with all the facts and quizzed extensively on his opinions of them. Not with half-baked plans, with which he had little patience, nor secrets, which he struggled to keep. Guis’s mercurial nature hid a certain wisdom, but it must be utilised carefully. Trassan instinctively understood this, although would not have framed it quite that way himself. “It is not that I do not trust him, brother. It is that he does not trust himself.” He slapped Garten on the shoulder and smiled. “Come on! I’ll say sorry to the old drama queen tomorrow. He’ll turn up to see off Rel. We’ll sort it out then, it’ll be fine. We can’t go running around playing sop to his ego. It only makes him worse. Now, let’s have another drink. I feel like staying out all night.”

Garten’s eyebrows rose.

“You don’t?” said Trassan.

“Well, you see, job.” Garten smiled at some private matter and swirled the dregs of his drink. “Wife. All that.”

“Bah! When was the last time you had a holiday? You’re staying out with me, by the gods. Besides, I’ve got something to show you, I can only show you now the tide is low, and it’s best seen at first light.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Darkling

G
UIS DID NOT
go straight home but went instead to the Carcaron’s Gold, a quieter place, expensive—too expensive in truth for his depleted resources. The atmosphere was altogether more private. This was a place monied lovers came, or men with business they would rather hide.

Guis stared into his wine cup. He drained it, filled it, then drained it again. A knot sat between his shoulders, a boulder in his gut. A cruel anxiety that was not his own crushed his heart. He went over again what Trassan had said, the manner he had said it. Already his intellect had processed the exchange accurately, but his emotions were not his to command.

A malady of the nerves afflicted Guis. He took pains to see his self-loathing reflected in others’ love for him. He took bitter satisfaction when his poor behaviour engendered the rejection he feared.

The worst of it was that he knew it was all nonsense. Helterskelter down the passages of his mind, there was a part of him that did not suffer, a Guis as might have been. It looked upon the greater Guis in horror, and despised what it saw as weak. He had been told once that those insane who know they are insane are close to sanity. He ruefully reflected such self-knowledge did not provide a cure.

He shook his head mechanically, four to the left, four to the right.
If I do this no harm will come to those I love. If I tap the table, if I tap the table but four times, all will be well. All of it.
He did it, four sets of four, digging his nails harder and harder into the wood until they parted the grain.

The ritual did no good. Nor did the alcohol. He could not regain his mask. Forebodings of imminent disaster gripped him.

“Careful, master,” hissed Tyn in his ear. “You are slipping. We should leave.”

“Nonsense,” he said, ignoring the slur in his voice. “I need to find some women.”

“To what? To look at them, frighten them, and not approach? To leer at them in drunkenness? To speak with them and challenge them to hate you? This I have seen so many times. You must go home. The Twin is large in the sky; this is a night of potency, you should not be out. Go home.”

Tyn tugged at a knot in Guis’s hair. Undoing it would calm his emotions, but such was Guis’s state of mind he would rather suffer. He poked at Tyn, scaring the creature around the back of his neck.

Guis rubbed the insides of his wrists four times each with the opposite wrist. All these acts he performed when no one was looking. If caught, he pretended as if he was doing nothing untoward.

They calmed him a little for a space, ultimately the anxiety redoubled. He reached for his silver cup. A violet spark leapt from its lip, earthing itself in his forefinger with a crack.

“Fuck!” he said, shaking his hand from the pain. Some of the other patrons looked up at him. He doffed his hat at one sardonically, deepening the man’s glower further. The man would have fled if he could see the image in Guis’s mind; unbidden, the thought of him digging his thumbs into the other man’s eye sockets and popping the organs therein. He shook the thought away, appalled. The images were the hardest to deal with. He feared them to be his deepest desires.

“You should have let me untie the knot! Now it is too late!” whispered Tyn into his ear. “Such behaviour is dangerous. He has seen you. We must go where I can protect you. It will be difficult here.”

“No, no.” Guis was still trying to push the thought away. What kind of a man was he, to think such things?

“Look at the shadows. Look!”

Guis lifted his wine-heavy head. The motion induced a spasm of nausea. He was drunker than he realised. A night like this could end in one of two ways; garrulous frivolity in one drinking pit or another—his black thoughts kept at bay for a while—or
it
. He squinted at the coign between floor and wall. It was often from there the Darkling came first, reaching spindly figures out and threatening to make the worst of his thoughts real.

“Do you see?” said Tyn. “The shadows thicken. We must go!”

He had half a bottle of wine left. Fuck them all, he thought, what did he care? “Let him come,” Guis mumbled. The bottom of the bottle bumped on the table as he dragged it to his lips. He drained it in a series of desperate gulps. Wine helped him forget his problems. He needed wine.

Tyn yanked hard at Guis’s hair. “We are going,” it said. “Now.”

Tyn abandoned secrecy and rode openly back to the apartment, leaning out far from Guis’s neck vigilantly. Guis slipped and cursed in the mud. Rain hammered down, wilting the brim of his hat.

“They do not care for me,” he moaned. “My family have abandoned me. I am loathsome.”

“Hush,” said Tyn, peering into every dark place. A footpad shrank back into the gloom when it caught sight of the creature squatting on Guis’s shoulder. But it was not peril such as this that Tyn sought. “If that were true, why were they pleased to see you?”

“They were pleased, but it did not last. My brothers. I embarrass them. I cannot help myself. They do not care for me. My father hates me! I do not...” Guis steadied himself against a wall, leaning his head forward and forcing Tyn to scamper onto his back. He belched messily, saliva streaming from his slack mouth, but he did not vomit. He wiped his mouth. “I do not think anyone does.”

“Hush, hush,” said Tyn. “You are not to think bad things, you are not to dwell on them.” Tyn’s gaze darted about. There were no glimmer lamps in the alley, a stinking sidestreet deep in the Off Parade. Yellow candlelight showed around shutters or slanted through curtains. There was not nearly enough light to keep the shadows back.

“I am a disappointment. I have neither Garten’s diligence nor Trassan’s ingenuity, Aarin’s focus or Rel’s good nature.”

“Hush. Hush now! Go home, go home now. You will bring it upon yourself!”

Immersed in his own self-pity, Guis would not listen. “And what of my sister! I have but a whit of that girl’s brains. That is why my father hates me. He hates me.”

“Get on, foolish manling,” said Tyn. Its voice lost every trace of servility, deepening, becoming gruff and wild. “Get on or you will perish and I will dance upon your soulless corpse before I fly back to my freedom!”

This roused Guis. He staggered the remaining ten yards to his building; an ancient, decrepit tenement with two lower storeys of brick and three upper storeys of warped timbers. It took him three attempts to get the key in the lock. The door’s opening took him by surprise, and he fell forward. The door slammed into the wall of the narrow shared hall with an unconscionable bang.

“Shhh!” Guis giggled. “Shhh! People are sleeping.”

As quietly as he could, Guis mounted the creaking stairs and climbed up to his room.

Guis was poorer than he had been, but not yet in poverty. The room was very large, occupying all of the third floor, ten yards by eight. Outside a ragged hole split the clouds. Rain still fell, but the stars shone through. The Red Moon had gone from the sky. White moonlight streamed in through square-leaded windows, illuminating everything in cold shades of grey and midnight blue. A curtained bed took up a portion of the room. A brick fireplace occupied the centre of one of the shorter walls. A screen hid a commode. A small copper bath hung upon the wall. Four tables of varying sizes were dotted about, and several mismatched chairs. All of these were covered in piles of books and papers. Guis’s work, the varying legibility of the handwriting testifying to his mental state when he wrote each.

Guis sobbed, part in self-pity, part in fear. Something was stirring in the thick air of the room.

“Everyone hates me.” He tripped on a stack of books, sending them skidding across the polished floor. He flopped face down. “I hate me,” he said.

“You are not to think so! You are not to be so, you must find balance. Find your peace within, my master. They love you, they love you, do not think they do not.”

“They do not!” said Guis. A lie, his intellect said. The terrible truth, his heart rejoined.

“Be calm. Light your candles. You must do so, or I will struggle to help you.”

“I am! I am trying.”

He would have torn the little being from his shoulder there and then, if his instincts warned him against it. Without Tyn, he was defenceless against his own thoughts. He dragged himself up and went stumbling about the place, knocking his possessions into disarray. He lit big-headed matches that exploded with sulphurous ferocity, and touched them to the wicks of his candles. No tallow for Guis. He remained a goodfellow, at least for now.

One, two, four, six candles. The moonlight was replaced by naked flame’s soothing flicker.

“There!” hissed Tyn. In the corner, a patch of shadow that would not depart before the candle glow, a physical darkness.

“To the bed! To the bed! Get inside the circle!”

Around Guis’s bed was a circle of silver filings mixed with salt. Unlike the rest of the room, this part of the floor was clear of detritus. He stepped over it and sat on his bed.

The shadow drew itself up, taking on the rough shape of a man. The candlelight dimmed, its colour drained away. Sounds from outside became brittle.

Guis screwed his eyes shut.

“Do not concentrate! Do not think on it!”

“How can I not?” said Guis. His terror dissolved into bitter, drunken laughter. “Too late.”

The shadow thickened, its outline became more certain. A pair of glints in the shadowy round of its head suggested eyes.

“Think of something else, my master!”

“I cannot, I cannot!” He slammed the heels of his hands into his forehead. “I can’t stop thinking about it!”

“Stop this, my master! You must stop it.”

“I can’t, Tyn. I’m tired. Tired of this. Tired of it all. Let it come. I deserve my fate, the loveless son.”

“Then sleep, sleep.” Tyn made a pass with his hands, as if drawing down Guis’s eyelids with its finger tips.

Guis’s eyes, already heavy with wine, slid shut and he fell sideways on the bed. Tyn leaned with his collapse, expertly riding the playwright as he fell. He scampered up over Guis’s collarbone to stand upon his upper arm, not taking his eyes from the shadow.

The skin of reality rippled. Light returned, intruding now into the shadowed corner, separating the night-black skin of the thing from its refuge.

“Go Darkling, go, nothing for you here!” said Tyn softly. “Back to the shadow with you, get away from the light. Back to the cold, back to the night.”

The Darkling remained manifest, its half-formed shape indistinct but too invested in the weft of the world to be dissipated easily.

Tyn growled at it. “Begone!”

The shadow creature’s form thickened.

“Begone!” Tyn said. He held his hands wide. His eyes blazed. Smoke rose from his flesh beneath his iron collar. The scent of rich leaf mould filled the room. Tyn’s eyes flashed green.

The Darkling melted back, becoming shadow once again.

Tyn shut his eyes. When he opened them, they were bereft of power, and he stood smaller. He rubbed at his burnt neck and grimaced. “Poor Tyn,” it muttered. “Poor Tyn is trapped. Poor Tyn will never be free.” He stared at his sleeping master. Hatred etched itself into his face.

The moment passed. Tyn’s anger burned out. His expression changed to one of affection. He padded along Guis’s arm, climbed down and stood on the bed. He reached a hand out to Guis’s cheek and stroked it tenderly.

“Sleep, good master. Sleep.”

Guis rolled onto his back and let out a somnolent, wine-stinking sigh. Tyn climbed onto him again and stalked up and down until satisfied the magic was done. The rain started again, as it fussed and primped at Guis’s shoulder, tying new warding knots into his hair, crooning a song which brought to mind wild places. Raindrops tapped at the windows, driven by gusting wind, run-off spattered noisily into the street mud from a broken gutter. But the night was quiet. When its duties were done, Tyn took another look around the room, sniffing at the dark places suspiciously. It was a long time until he was satisfied. Warily, he coiled the braids into a nest in the hollow of Guis’s neck. There it slept the remainder of the night through, face twitching as it dreamt of dark forests.