Chapter Forty-Eight. Pirates and Emperors
CHAPTER
FORTY-EIGHT
Pirates and Emperors
The presence in the brig of pirates—real, board-your-ship-and-take-your-cargo pirates—sent rumblings through the crew that were made a whole lot worse by the fact that the captain had chosen to take us off the regular sky-paths and into storms wilder and more turbulent than anything we’d met so far on the voyage.
“Their leader talks,” Flint was saying on one of his semiregular visits to the mess.
He might have been an officer, but Flint was prone to fraternizing with the hands.
“Father’s leave does he talk. I’ve had two men already come off guard duty wanting to know why we’re letting half the pay from this run go to Olympus and not demanding better lays for ourselves. ”
Locke, who had gotten into the habit of joining Flint in his visits lately—something I was choosing to believe was a result of my increasingly effective charms rather than just a general desire to keep an eye on goings-on belowdecks—gave him a reproving look.
“While he’s locked up, talk is all he can do. ”
That didn’t reassure me, and I was, by this point, relaxed enough amongst the crew to say as much. “Talk has burned cities. It can down ships as well.”
Flint laughed. “Hark to. The scholar’s speaking.”
He’d been calling me that for months, ever since he’d found out I was once a schoolmistress. “You don’t need to be a scholar to know words can be dangerous.”
“Then perhaps we should send you to debate him,” said Locke archly. “As a protective measure.”
“I’ll do my stint on guard, same as everybody else,” I replied. “But I doubt we’ll either of us change each other’s minds.”
My mind, if I’m honest, wouldn’t have been in much of a place for debate anyway.
Since Q had been taken to medbay with injuries I lacked the expertise to assess and a prognosis I lacked the courage to ask about, I’d found a hollowness gnawing at my rib cage that I couldn’t quite explain and would have dearly loved to be rid of.
As a rule, I didn’t get attached to people because time and the stars had a way of tearing you apart no matter what happened, and it was tidier all around if you just braced yourself for loss early.
Only this time, for whatever reason, it wasn’t working.
I’d cried myself to sleep two nights running and my days were plagued by a sense of displacement and dread I hadn’t felt since before I went to Aphrodite.
Normally when things got to me like that I’d have tried to get laid ASAP, but of the people I normally went to for a hookup, one was isolating herself in her cabin with a thinking machine and the ramblings of prophets, and the other was getting her organs sutured and her blood replaced. Both of which make you bad at sex.
Which, I suppose, meant I didn’t actually have much to complain about when Locke finally did put me on guard duty.
On the night shift—insofar as night meant much on a hunter-barque—sitting on a stool carved, like so much else, from Leviathan bone, and armed with a flechette pistol, I sat opposite the pirate leader’s cell and tried to watch him without my mind wandering.
Much like staffing the array, I was bad at it. Although at least this time the job had a low floor. You’d have to be a whole lot less attentive than me to miss a grown-ass adult disappearing from a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room.
“Don’t talk much, do you?” observed Wolfram a good couple of hours into my rotation.
“Not a lot,” I replied. You might be thinking that wasn’t true—after all, I’ve been talking to you for forty-something chapters now and show no sign of shutting up.
But telling stories in writing when I can stop and marshal my thoughts when I have to or write through the night when the fits seize me, when the only interruptions I have to manage are my own needs and the only comments I’ll get will come from strangers screaming into a vacuum …
doing that is a whole different thing. In person I keep my mouth shut most of the time.
Sometimes I feel like I’m not even there at all.
“You don’t look the sort to be on a hunter-voyage.”
That came very close to touching a nerve. “And what would you know of it?”
The smile that came to his lips then was more amused than it was cruel, but it was a close thing. “You think nobody ever crossed over from one hunt to the other? I’ve fought alongside many a beast-chaser, and you’re not one.”
“I’m becoming one.”
“Are you now?”
This was going to about six places at once, none of which I liked. I’d reinvented myself so many times, and I hate being called out on it. “For the moment. It’s the same in your line of work, surely. Nobody starts life as a pirate.”
“True enough, true enough.” It was obvious that engagement was exactly what the man wanted, and I definitely didn’t want to give it to him. Then when I didn’t say anything else, he added, “You know, I’m getting the impression you don’t like me.”
“You hurt my friend,” I told him. Friend was a compromise word. Stronger than shipmate, which would have felt artificially distancing. Weaker than what I probably meant. “Or one of you did.”
“Your friend chose a dangerous trade,” he replied. “You’ve no more cause to be wroth at me than you have to begrudge the storm when it rages or the Leviathan when it strikes.”
I didn’t laugh, but somewhere below my heart I felt the irony. “There are those who would.”
“Are there now?” he echoed. And I saw a light in his eyes, the cold gleam of somebody making a bloody calculation. “When first I was captured, your captain asked me if I’d seen the Mobius Beast. Is she the one you’re thinking of?”
Fuck. I should have just stayed disengaged. “Perhaps I think she’s right.”
With the grace of an oil slick, the pirate moved across his cell and brought his face to the bars.
“I’d wager you’re the sort as thinks everything and nothing.
All tied in knots behind the eyes and always imagining this thing will be the thing and never finding it.
I’ve seen a hundred of you on the corsair-ships. And each one’s come to a short end.”
“Fine words for a prisoner.”
He shrugged with one shoulder. “I’ve no weapons, no books, no music. Talk is all there’s left to me. May as well use it.”
“Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”
“I learned long ago that nobody else would. Certainly I’ve never had someone champion me the way you’ve championed your captain.”
I didn’t rise to it.
“And new as I may be to this ship, I’ve a feeling she’ll need you. While the hunting is good, your shipmates will be happy enough to follow her in chasing a myth. When it dries up, though. When she starts having to choose between the monster and the mission. Well.”
He didn’t smile. But his eyes showed that this was very much a choice.
Still, I forced myself to be silent. I didn’t think that this man was in any danger of persuading me to free him or to turn on my captain, and we’d taken the precaution of isolating him from his crewmates, but he was upsettingly good at touching nerves and pushing buttons, and I didn’t really want him doing either.
Over the next two hours he made repeated attempts to bait me into conversation.
I resisted them all, and when I was relieved a little after midnight ship time I found myself wandering the corridors in …
a daze isn’t the right term. If anything it was the opposite.
A focus I chose not to name, because the name of it scared me.
Medbay didn’t have set visiting hours. I could have gone to Q’s bedside. But when I took steps in that direction a panic rose, and I tasted blood and gall and backed away. Now was not, I decided, the time to confront mortality. At least no more than I’d confronted it already.
So I fled. And instead of going where my every instinct had been telling me to go, I let my wanderings take me to the officers’ quarters.
Strictly, these rooms were off-limits, but in practice we all went where we wanted and nobody much cared.
Hierarchies tended to break down after a year or two in the sky.
Outside Locke’s door, I hesitated. While I was pretty sure that no other officer would have me flogged for invading their privacy like this, Locke was a stickler for the rules, even if they didn’t feel personally affronted.
Of course, the actual worst-case scenario there was that I got the skin flayed from my back, and in that exact moment I was desperate enough to feel something—to feel anything that wasn’t this disconcerting mix of naked and alone and terrified—that I’d have taken punishment over nothing.
I buzzed the intercom and heard Locke’s voice crackle out of it. “Who goes?”
I told them who went.
“And you’re here why?” It was a fair question. And a gentler one than I’d feared.
“I thought you’d want my report on the prisoner.”
The intercom went silent for a moment, then sparked back to life. “That’s a lie.”
“I was cold and out of my head and thought you might want to fuck me.”
“More honest.” Locke’s voice sounded almost amused. As far as I could tell at least—the line was bad. “But it raises questions.”
I couldn’t tell if I was giving them too much credit or too little, but I was beginning to think Locke was messing with me. A clear come in or a clear piss off I’d been prepared for. This neither here nor there was messing me around. “What sort of questions?”
“Why you came to me, for one.”
Sometimes, tactical insubordination was the way to go. “Because in my humble opinion you badly need to get laid.”
“And you think you’re the ideal solution to that problem?”
“I think something’s better than nothing and out here I’m seeing a whole lot of nothing.”
The door hissed open, and I stepped inside, still not quite certain I wasn’t making a gigantic mistake.