The Iron Ship (5 page)

“Then fuck you, and fuck your family, all you dirty Kressinds and your grasping hands! The world is changing around you; you push the mechanisms of its change as ignorant as dogs at the grain mill, thinking you control the way of change, but yoked always to a single point and forced round and round in circles. Fuck you and fuck you! As my soul chafes under the winds of limbo, I laugh, because you do not know what awaits you!”

“What awaits us?” said Aarin calmly.

Mother Moude smiled. There was a lunatic light in her eye that was not there when she had died. She beckoned. Aarin took a step closer. She bent her lips, now full and plump, now shrivelled back from grave-long teeth, to his ear.

“Lights in the sky! The bands in the Earth!”

She grabbed for him. Aarin held up his hand. The ghost collided with the iron amulet he held flat on his palm. She threw up her arms and recoiled, coming apart into streamers of shining smoke that disappeared on the wind, her shriek going with it.

Mother Moude’s chain rattled to the floor. Aarin regarded it, letting the night sounds of the wind and distant spectres moaning out on the marshes blow away the memory of Moude’s scream. He bent and picked up the chain. The cold of it burned his hand, but he did not flinch. It clinked softly as he placed it back into the chest. The bones were as they had been, neatly arrayed with the skull on top.

Pasquanty recovered himself. He had been present at many Rites of Passage, and had learned much of the art himself, but this necromancy was new to him. His legs were feeble and his bowels were watery. “She did not reveal much, Guider Kressind.”

“She never does,” said Aarin. He locked the chest carefully. “She never will. But we know more than we did.”

“This art is too much for me.”

“For me too, Pasquanty,” said Aarin softly. He placed his hands on the lid of the chest. “I would let her go if I could, you know. I cannot. It is too dangerous, her soul is tormented. But I did not bind her, and would not have done so.”

Pasquanty looked at him questioningly.

“I would not judge her, if I were you. Laws change. Customs change. Look at the world we live in now, Pasquanty, with its myriad wonders;
everything
changes. Is it right to damn someone forever for transgressing contemporary mores?”

“I... I had not thought, Guider,” said Pasquanty. He had not. Nevertheless, his distaste at the witch did not leave his open features.

“Well perhaps you should. We are the Guiders of the Dead. It is our task to think on such things. What is life if fleeting, and death but eternal?”

“Ours is an onerous task.”

Aarin gave him a sharp look. “Don’t quote the code at me. A fool lives his life by rote.
Think
.” He looked at the chest. “One day, I am sure I will try to lay her to rest. Until then—”

“She is too useful to you.” Pasquanty interrupted. He dare not do this ordinarily, but this was no ordinary night. Aarin was not so clean of sin.

Aarin’s expression, part guilt and part sorrow, told the truth of Pasquanty’s statement.

“We must stay here. It is too dangerous to go back in the dark, just the two of us. There is a bothy on the far side of the island. It is stocked with food and wine. We are not the only visitants to the isle. There will be ample to sustain us for two days, until the Great Tide is done.”

“I wish to be away. I am uneasy, I confess Guider Kressind,” said Pasquanty. “This is forbidden.”

“Is it? Then our entire order is guilty,” said Aarin flatly. “You wanted to know how certain rites are performed, and so you do. You may count yourself a criminal among criminals. We must stay.”

A
T ONE OF
the clock, three hours after the passage of the Twin over the Earth, the tide came in, dragged in the wake of the conjoined moons and second world.

The tides came in many forms. The greatest of all tides came in one unstoppable rush, but this, born of the second order of conjunction, came in two: the minor swell and the major. The minor was steady, creeping up the land inch by inch, covering it by degree, filling the creeks of the marshes and joining reeking pools into wide lagoons of cleaner water. A gentle wash coaxed in by the White Moon and the Red. The way prepared by this pelagic vanguard, the true force of the ocean was revealed.

The Great Tide came as a mountain. A tall slope of grey water two hundred feet high. Sweeping over the flats it was surprisingly silent, stealthy as the ghosts that roamed the marsh at low tide. Creek, sandbank, dune and all were engulfed by the whisper of water. The tide slopped against the isle of the dead, send a sluggish spume up the seaward side, nearly as high as the bothy in which Aarin and Pasquanty passed the night. The Black Isle was then true to its name, an island isolate in the dark sea.

The tide moved over the marsh between the Black Isle and the west cliffs, covering in seconds what took men a half hour or more to traverse on foot. Where the water met the cliffs, again it slapped with disguised force against the rock. A sheet of lacy foam rushed up to within a few hundred feet of the lowest cliff shanty, and slipped back. The lower three locks at the end of the Slot were engulfed. The floatstone ships clustered around them rose up on the sea to become level with the Bottomhouses, buoyant as corks.

For a few minutes the brown sea churned at itself, spreading patterns of white upon its surface. Marsh became ocean. The sea quieted.

Such was the power of the Great Tide.

The bothy was a conical stone construction, well hidden from the curious, not that anyone but the Guiders and their servants came to the island. There Aarin and Pasquanty spent the night in passable comfort. They were warm, at least, and fed. Pasquanty drank a good deal of wine, but he did not sleep much, and when he did his dreams were terrifying. He spent much of the night staring at the black crack of the door in the hut, waiting for the sky to turn silver, then blue.

The morning came draped in fog, chill and sharp.

Pasquanty spent the first hours of the day wandering the island while Aarin went about business of his own. He had no stomach for further instruction. If he were truthful, the events of the last night had placed a distance between he and his master. Shudders came with the memory of the witch’s shrieks.

Beside an ancient cairn of bones he stopped to watch the sea. The outpourings of ten thousand chimneys dirtied the fog clinging to the mainland, and there was little to see in what should have been a grand view. Pasquanty was drawn instead to the miniature geographies of the bone pile, described in skulls and femurs, pelvises and vertebrae. The bones were grey with age, the outer layers of many flaked away. Where they were not covered by beards of moss, the brittle lattice at the centre was clearly visible.

Pasquanty stared at this, his mind arrested by glum thoughts, his own mortality chief among them. He had only become a Guider’s deacon because his father insisted he do so, painting a glowing picture of his sure and certain advancement. The priesthood was the fate of many fourth sons, Aarin and himself included. For reasons unknown but for those described in conflicting myths, such boys possessed enough of the mage talent to Guide the dead, not enough for ought else. The Dead God’s Quarter, they were named. Pasquanty had learned to view much in life with suspicion at an early age, and predictably, the Order of Guiders was not so grand as his father promised; fusty with age, bitter with suspicion. The older masters were as terrifying as the dead. He followed Aarin around like a puppy, clinging at the one opportunity he saw for a sinecure. The warm arms of living women, the comfortable house of a Guider, a regular stipend. That was what he craved, not the empty stares of the dead.

He had never wanted to follow the path he had set his feet upon. Now he was on it, he could not get off.

To dwell on such matters was inadvisable. He made a warding sign and tore his attention away from the bones, and shuffled a half pace away.

In the late morning the mists and smokes of the far shore lifted, and Karsa City was revealed. Rank after rank of buildings stretching up and down the coast. Ships of floatstone laboured up to the Slot to gather at the feet of the Locks while the Great Tide lasted. They jockeyed for position, fighting their way, it seemed to him, to the gates. Each lock carried a toll, the lowermost were covered over. Now was the cheapest time for a captain to bring his goods to the heart of the city and thence by train on into the heart of the hilly kingdom. The larger ships anchored instead at the Bottomhouses, the wharf of the high water mark. Pasquanty fancied he could hear the cries of the stevedores. At the docks cargoes from all over the One Hundred Lands were stored, or dragged up Lockside’s wooden funiculars into the city. Their laden trucks crawled up the cliffside like ants, spilling water from their ballast tanks as they rose, empty trucks descending on parallel tracks.

However, the white of the floatstone boats reminded him too much of the bones, and he turned his attention away from this also and sent it out over the water. The marshes were as if they had never been. The debris of the city mingled with driftwood on the filthy waters. Nearer to the shore, by those districts where the outlying factories of Karsa were situated, multicoloured plumes tainted the surface. Waves kissed the stone of the Black Isle thirty feet below Pasquanty’s feet. Strange roilings disturbed the oily surface.

He found he didn’t care to look at the water either.

The deacon went away, keeping his eyes downcast so he wouldn’t see the sea. The view he found was not much better; the bones of the dead made up the isle’s summit in mosaic. The thin soil covering them he was sure was nothing but flesh all dried and gone to dust. Eyeless sockets mocked him. The mocking caws of ravens grated on his hearing.

It was a long time until nightfall.

Pasquanty awoke at the dead of night to a rumbling shush, quiet but powerful under Aarin’s snores. With relief he realised it was the tide going out, and fell into less troubled sleep.

The next day, the marsh was returned. With the water gone, the drop from the top of the Isle looked unbelievably far, as if giants had lifted them up in the dark.

There were people here and there, figures like seeds dropped on the mud, gleaning for fresh treasures dragged in by the sea or digging for the shellfish making their slow retreat from the surface. Potmen went about, retrieving their wicker cages and the treasures within. The long carcass of an emperor anguillon lay stinking in the sun. The day was the realm of men, and they laboured free of the harassment of ghosts.

On the way back Aarin paused to retrieve his darts from the boardwalk where Hollow Anika had come to them. The dunes had been rinsed away, but incredibly three of the five darts he had thrown sat upon the planks as neatly as if placed there.

Of Anika there was no sign.

Aarin weighed the darts carefully in his hand before slotting them back into their case. Pasquanty asked a few questions then, but Aarin did not answer. The darts were expensive to produce, and he was in poor humour. They passed the remainder of the return journey as silent as the twins.

At the base of the stairs they ignored gleaners’ calls for benediction, fixing their minds upon their ascent.

CHAPTER THREE

The Hag of Mogawn

D
RAYMEN WERE UNLOADING
crates from their wagons when the tide hit the Citadel of Mogawn. The swell was higher than the island’s cliffs, high enough to surge up to Mogawn’s walls. Waves broke over the edges of the island, running briefly through the scrubby woodlands around the castle. Seawater hissing aggressively around the trees as waves broke up on the floatstone and fizzed down the holes. As it appeared they would be overwhelmed, the island lurched like a cow getting to its feet. The rattle of anchor chains on their drums clattered across the courtyard as the Great Tide picked up the whole of Mogawn and placed it upon its shoulder. The draymen were unused to the motion, and staggered, then laughed at themselves for staggering. The dray dogs shifted and bayed uneasily. Their handlers went to them and reached up to scratch between their ears.

Mansanio watched from the balcony upon the west tower. His fingers tapped the balustrade in exasperation. “They should have been done hours ago,” he said. He inspected his nails with a frown. As seneschal to the countess he expected of himself a certain standard of presentation and tutted at the damage he had inflicted on his manicure, slight though it was.

Mogawn swayed gently from its floating, finding equilibrium upon the sea. Mansanio walked easily along the balcony; he had lived in the citadel for a long time. Accommodation would have to be arranged for the draymen. He had hoped they would be gone before the tide hit and had held off. There was no ducking it now, not at all. The castle was stuck with them.

“Astred, Hovernia! Find space for the draymen!” he called into the tower. “Astred!” he bellowed impatiently. A plump, middle-aged woman of obvious low birth came huffing out onto the balcony.

“I can only be in one place at a time, seneschal...”

He grimaced at her. “Don’t come any closer, you’re sweating.”

She stopped and dropped an insolent curtsy. “As you wish, Lord Seneschal. Lodgings for the draymen is it? I don’t know why you become so exercised by this, it’s all in the doings of the day.”

Back down in the courtyard the countess was striding among the crates and gesturing with a mixture of excitement and impatience. She was looking at every crate, pointing to ones that were on the flagstones. Mansanio could not hear what she was saying with those damn dogs all barking at once and the creak of the island as it settled, but she did not sound pleased. She never did. Her sharp tongue was part of his wages.

Their leader reassured her. He was better dressed than the rest, pretensions to nobility in his costume. A new money boy, wearing aristocrat’s clothes. The world was all topsy turvy. Mansanio despaired at it. Nobody knew their place any more.

The drayman took the countess over to a crate, gently opened it to show her the inside. She chewed at her nails, and nodded. She ran back up the stairs into the donjon, yelling over her shoulder loud enough for him to hear.