The Iron Ship (31 page)

Guis’s rage, never wholly leashed, erupted. “You know what? This was a bad idea. Fuck you Bannord. Goodnight, Hermanius.”

Hermanius lifted his glass.

“What did I say now?” said Bannord.

“You know what you said.”

From across the room, Qurion caught sight of Guis’s exit. His eyes widened at Hermanius in question. Hermanius shrugged.

Hermanius watched him make frantic apologies to the floozy he was talking to. Well, he supposed. She wasn’t actually a floozy. She looked on the face of it, quite well mannered. Probably someone’s wife. Not that that would stop Qurion. “And now, there goes our hero.” Hermanius affected a world weary expression, and gave Bannord an admonishing look.

“Screw the lot of you,” Hermanius said. “Screw the lot of you, but most of all, screw the son of a bitch who made this godsawful wine!”

He drank it anyway.

G
UIS REGAINED HIS
head when he went outside. The cold, foggy air was a slap in the face he needed.

“Perhaps master should have stayed at home like Tyn suggested?” said Tyn from his box. Guis gave it a vindictive shake.

A gaggle of drunks spilled from the tavern out on a wash of warm air, noisy and eager for more entertainment. They staggered past Guis, hallooing and guffawing. Qurion came after them.

“And why are you being such an arse then?” he said.

Guis shrugged.

“It’s getting like I can’t take you anywhere.”

“That’s the second time I’ve flounced out of a pub in one week.”

“That’s really not like you,” said Qurion with amicable sarcasm.

“You know what? It really isn’t. I’m not... Look, I’m not as angry as you think I am my friend.”

“Yes you are,” said Qurion. There was an edge of enmity to his amity.

“No I’m not! Shit, I am, I suppose...” Guis took a deep breath. “You, it’s you. You make me angry.”

Qurion’s smile vanished. The beginnings of a glower took his place. Threat and charm, that was all he had by the way of public faces. There was more to him, but he rarely put what was inside on display. Qurion’s gifts limited him. He didn’t try harder, because he did not need to. Such a shame.

“Let me explain,” Guis said. “I owe you an apology.”

“Too damn right.”

“For years, I’ve been massively jealous of you. I think you know that.”

Qurion glanced at him. “Not this again.”

“Look, every time we go anywhere, you fuck off and have your hand up some woman’s skirt before we’re two pints in. I get left there nursing my wine while you’re off. One wink and they drop their pants for you. I don’t get that. You’ve always been bigger and better looking than me. You don’t realise it.”

Qurion sighed. “No, you don’t realise it, my friend. I’ve seen you scare off women time after time with your intense artist dogshit. You’re a clever man Guis, charming. You are not much to look at, but you have them eating out of your hand half the time, then you push them into the dirt.”

Guis snorted. “You are a patronising bastard.”

“I’m right though. They’re just after a good time. Just like us. They want a quick tumble. not your bleeding heart on a platter. All you have to do is offer them that. You give them too much baggage.” Qurion stared off into the fog. A four dog carriage clattered past. Glimmer lamps were mysterious balls of light on the other side of the road, distant as the moons. Water droplets shifted and danced to a tune only they could hear. “You could have it too.” Qurion grabbed his shoulder.

Guis shrugged off his hand. “Don’t you get it? I could not have it. Not like you. I have to work hard. And this is the part you don’t get. I am jealous of you, but I do not want to be like you. I’ve sat there on my own in the pub watching you play lone wolf with other people’s girlfriends. I’ve watched you chat up my women, flirt with my sister, your cock practically in your fucking hand. And not a thought in your head for your own wife. She adores you, and you treat her appallingly. Wedding vows are
vows
, Qurion.” He looked disdainfully at Qurion’s uniform. “If you can’t keep those, what can you keep?”

Qurion was furious, but Guis wasn’t done.

“I remember when your father was fucking every doxy in the Off Parade. How much it hurt your mother, and how angry it made you. Well, look at you. The fruit never falls far from the tree, does it?”

“You call this an apology, you little shitbag?” spat Qurion. His hand was hovering near his sword hilt.

“Don’t do that, Qurion,” said Guis mildly. “I’m not as a good a swordsman as my brothers, but I’m still pretty good. There’s one kind of swordsmanship I am better at than you, and it kills.”

“And now you’re threatening me.”

“I’m getting to the apology part. You can’t help yourself. I’ve been a bad friend to you. You’ve wanted a squadron mate, all this time. Someone to ride beside you on the chase. That’s not me. I can’t be your partner in that. I don’t want what you want. So if you want to go chasing skirt, take someone else. I’m sorry I can’t be the person you think I am. Trying to be has made me conflicted, and that has made me behave poorly.”

“You’re behaving well tonight, flouncing out like a theatre diva? I suppose you forgive as well.”

“Something like that,” said Guis.

“Who’s the patronising fucker now?” Qurion bent over, thrusting his rage-reddened face into Guis’s. He prodded him in the chest. “You are a sanctimonious hypocrite. You’ve played the same game yourself enough. It’s not my fault you don’t play as well as me.”

“I choose not to.”

“Fine. Fine.” Qurion calmed, as if he were trying to rein back his anger. But then something snapped inside him. “I’ll be me, you be you. You miserable fuck. Just remember, when you’re wining and dining it up with the Hag, I got there first.”

Guis eyebrows went up.

“That’s right. At your sister’s wedding during the Revelry. I assume that makes that particular instance alright by you, being by custom and all? Yes? Oh good. Now, I was having fun. I won’t be seeing you around.” Qurion turned around and pushed his way back through the door.

“Wait!” called Guis but Qurion had already gone.

“Surely, master is the king of contrition,” said the box in Guis’s hands.

“Shut the fuck up Tyn.”

Guis stopped by a gin shop for a half pint of rough liquor on the way back. He wasn’t sure who he was most angry with. He came to the conclusion that whether it was himself or Qurion, both of them were arses. He found this hilarious for a while. Then fell into a depression where he fulminated on his own inadequacy, and on Qurion’s arrogance so much that the dangers posed by his broken mind were quite forgotten for one night. When he barged out of the gin shop and walked home, he did so without treading on the cobble cracks or scratching at the walls with his fingernails.

He lit a spirit lamp when he returned. He cast off his hat and was none too gentle with Tyn’s box when he set it down.

There were two more letters on the table by Rel’s. One was from the Hag. He drunkenly reread it, then screwed it up and tossed it onto the last embers of the fire. It flared up, and went to ash. He was angry with her for being what she was, angry with himself for not seeing past it. The persona he affected was not supposed to care about these things, but he did.

The last letter was from his mother. It had arrived yesterday, and he had avoided opening it. Now, slumped into the chair by the desk, he stared at it. The seal was in pale cream wax, elegant in design. Fine Tyn work.

He picked the letter up. He tapped it against his lips four times. The paper smelled of his mother’s perfume. He ran the paper under his fingernails sixteen times. He growled in irritation at this semi-conscious ritual, and threw it back onto the desk. Fear bloomed in him, urging him to run the paper round and round his hands again.

“Mother,” he said. It hit him then how drunk he was. He decided to read it. The seal cracked easily.

Dear Guis
, it read.
It is several months since you last paid a visit to me. I hear from your brothers that you are shortly to depart for Stoncastrum again. I would dearly like to see you. Please come at seven of the clock, Martday evening. I shall be in my garden. I will not tell your father, if that makes it any easier for you.

It was signed
your loving mother
in a series of loops. They spoke of a confidence she did not have.

He groaned and kneaded at his frown with the heel of one hand. Martday was tomorrow.

“Mother, mother, mother,” he said.

He sat there woozily for some time. He kept the fear of the Darkling at the back of his mind, behind the bars of this conundrum: To go or not to go?

He reached no decision. Ephemeral fears and vile fancies dogged his thoughts, but the Darkling did not come.

He roused himself and fell into bed as the first rays of the sun sparked hard, frosty highlights from the city rooftops.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Moorwena Kressinda

G
UIS REPLIED TO
the invitation first thing in the morning before his trepidation turned to procrastination, and thence to implicit refusal. Come the afternoon, he sent for a public dog coach of the better sort to meet him at the Parade near the Grand Illia hotel. The driver raised his eyebrows at Guis’s shabby dress. They cranked up a fraction higher when Guis told him he was bound for the Spires.

Feelings of inadequacy threatened to overwhelm him as the dog coach rattled up from the Var-side city centre into the Spires. The richest part of town was built on three ridges of soft sandstone that separated Karsa’s double shallow valleys. The whole area was riddled with caves. The cliffs of Karsa were of hard black rock, but their tops were covered in thick layers of soft clay broken through by the stone of the Spires. The lesser crags that had characterised the area in the time of King Brannon had gone elsewhere in the city, quarried and built over as the metropolis swelled. But nowhere was the soft rock more accessible than at the Spires, and nowhere did it go so deep. The very first Karsans had made their homes there, barbarian people who had dug out their dwellings before the coming of the first king.

Over time the caves had been lost in the cellars of the vast mansions raised on the Spires. But from time to time a cave might be uncovered to reveal the mundane evidence of past ages. The province of a minor branch of archaeology, these finds rarely drew attention. Bones spoons that crumbled to dust at a touch, or fragments of rough fabrics and patches of rust where iron tools might once have been laid down to rest for the final time seemed so paltry compared to the inexplicable machines of the greater eras.

There was a split among the older families as to how these finds were celebrated. Some took each artefact carefully from its resting place and displayed it as proof of long family histories. Others preferred not to dwell on these relics of the rude past. Those who rubbed shoulders with princes and other potentates took unkindly to reminders of their humble beginnings. Living in caves was the habit of animals and Wild Tyn, not cultured men.

However, as the older families had been displaced by the newer, the former opinion was growing in popularity. To an impoverished lord whose social position was under threat, the bone spoon of an unremembered ancestor took on far more importance than any number of gold ones.

Guis’s family was the newer sort of aristocracy, Gelbion Kressind buying the manse from a bankrupt baronet some thirty years back. If he had found such a cave on their property, no doubt he would have exhibited whatever was within gleefully, to show how humble the old families of Karsa City were in the beginning. His argument, often and vehemently aired, was that there was nothing special about the old money families. They had come from nothing, so why should they sneer at those newer to high rank who had come from nothing in their turn? Bone spoons, he was fond of saying, cut both ways.

The roads into the Spires split and wound round each rock like ferns uncurling in spring. The area wore its modern wealth openly. The soft stone lent itself equally to fantastical carving as it did to the construction of simple caves, and so the manses of the rich were a collection of glorious sculptures. The older were worn by the rain, but those of more recent vintage were lacquered with chemically activated resins. These gleamed as if perpetually wet. Another divider between the old and the new. Industrials, Wetrocks—Guis’s kind had many derogatory names among the older aristocracy of Karsa.

The dog coach turned off the main road, rattling under glimmer lamps wrought from silvered steel, multiple lights hanging as fruits from branches clashing in the wind. Hard granite hewn from the sea cliffs surfaced the roads, dark capillaries in the pale flesh of the spires. The coach took another turn, then another, whirling past a false castle upon whose peak crouched a roaring gorgon of stone. Guis had never liked it. Not so much for the design, which was vulgar by any standard of taste, but mostly for its function as a landmark that told him he was nearly home.

They went around a tight bend. The road climbed. All of the Var-side was below him, covered in a soupy smog. The moons shone from the tops of the cloud. The Spires were fanciful floatstone ships on a vapour sea. The image brought on a mild fit of vertigo. Guis turned to watch the rock wall blur past on the other side of the coach.

The wall gave out. Kressind Manse reared up suddenly in the dark. No fanciful carvings there. A tall house, stout as a tower, lacking even the modest decoration of the Maceriyan revivalist style. Small windows alive with yellow candleflame and blue glimmerlight, it appeared watchful rather than welcoming. Guis’s stomach lurched at the sight of it. Many of the mansions here had appurtenances that hearkened to the fortresses of the Long Dark Woe, but Kressind Manse actually looked like one. A defensive structure in the heart of the wealthiest city district. It spoke volumes as to Gelbion Kressind’s state of mind that he had chosen it as his home.

The coach entered a cut below the manse, a worn stone arch curved over the road, blocking out the house.