Chapter 44
West Tide gulls like mealy bread,
and East Tide gulls like marrow,
Astic gulls like little fish,
and corn behind the harrow
—Tannery kids’ kick song, Hesper
Morning in Hesper belonged to the gulls.
Raucous calls running from roof to roof, the echoes shivering off the whitewashed walls and out to sea.
Squabbling over last night’s scraps; the fish guts, the spilt food, the washes of bile and beer that tilted down the gutters and pooled in dockside puddles.
Morning belonged to the gulls, crowding the ratlines and rigging. Winkling out barnacles and mussels from the salted ropes, screaming all the while, heads thrown back, orange beaks rattling, the red shock of feathers on the crown of their heads swaying like a laughing dancer.
Fallon sidestepped the gauntlet as best he could whilst bodies swooped low over his head, thick with witless noise. He turned to Shipwright and grinned. ‘Something familiar in this, eh? Surrounded by screaming idiots, dodging an interminable rain of shit.’
She smiled stickily, clutching one of the crisp pastries the bakers of Hesper turned out in the morning to ease the ringing heads of the night before.
A whole cottage industry based on dealing with drunkards, and the grey ghosts they became come dawn.
This one bought for a slip of coin from a small dark-haired woman who moved like a bird in one of the dockside stalls.
Shipwright licks her fingers. ‘Aye, something.’
They thread their way portside, beneath the cries of the gulls and the barks of the dock workers as the first ships of morning sail into harbour.
Here, the biggest are anchored and unloaded, pulled into berths by dark-skinned men and women, limbs sanded by the sun.
The smaller boats slip into cut ways leading to the wider locks and canals which will carry them up the cliffs, beyond the seawall and out into the city proper to fill the ice-cellars with spirits, the parlours with tea and spices, the gambling dens with smoke and rumours.
They duck into one of the narrow alleys that slinks between the tall, bright walls of the warehouses. Through an unchained gate and down into the slim warren of shanty homes that cling to the high walls like barnacles hung to rope.
A short haired old woman steps nimbly out of their way, and clicks the gate closed behind them. Fallon flashes her a quick smile.
‘Where are we going, Declan?’ Shipwright asks.
He presses a finger to his moustache, lets a smile sneak out either side of it. He’s clearly enjoying himself.
They duck through a hanging curtain, the wooden beads at its hem clacking softly.
At their sides, small knots of people huddle in a close corridor, a muddle of styles and accents.
Shipwright catches a glimpse of the black, tight twists of Heron Halls hair, hands shielding smiling lips that are blunted with eastern dusk-paint.
More strangely, a man in armour she recognises as Hesper garrison, perhaps another in the grey weave of Astic, chin tucked into a set of notes being offered by someone whose coffee-coloured hands pick nervously at hair teased into Burners’ spikes.
Something wrong with the proportions of this place – they should have hit the back of the warehouse wall by now, she suspects. She gets a dim sense of what might be arch and plaster above for a moment, before they are decanted into a high, wide room, bright with light.
Across its whole expanse, stalls are stacked with the strange and the unfamiliar. Rugs are spread out where traders sift through armour, weapons, creations of terrifying simplicity and complexity and lightness.
But it’s the walls that catch her attention. On each whitewashed stretch, maps – four, five times again as tall as a man – their inked curves stretching up and out to the ceiling high above.
Fallon turns to Shipwright and smiles. ‘Welcome to the Hall of Loose Tongues.’
As he speaks, she runs her eyes over the men and women that move like water through the light of the Hall, watches the small, hushed knots of their chatter. The trade in words, in silence.
‘Spies,’ she says.
‘Information brokers,’ Fallon replies, then grins. ‘Basically, yeah.’
She elbows him affectionately, her eyes wandering over a man whistling softly to a bright-feathered bird, which repeats the tune back to him, note perfect. He holds a lock to its beak, and she watches it unclasp as the notes sound out.
Declan appears at her shoulder, the ghost of a smile lingering under his moustache. ‘Half the birds are liars,’ he mutters.
She shakes her head bemusedly. ‘So why am I here?’
‘I want you to meet someone. Before you set off for Thell.’
‘Why’s Shroud not here?’
Fallon twists his lips. ‘I asked him to look in on the wife, see if anything could be done to ease her pain.’
He twists to one side to let a gaggle of chattering men past, their fingers moving as fast as their lips. Shipwright catches just a snatch of Katkani … green fire over the halls …
Fallon’s eyes track over his shoulder. ‘Besides, this might be difficult for him.’
They skirt the left edge of the Hall. Here, separate from the welter of stalls and hawkers and back-of-the-palm whisperers, an elegant dark-skinned woman watches them pass.
Her throat is marred by a chalky scar that runs the length of her neck and the cuffs of her jacket are trimmed in gold.
Two lean black dogs with long ears curl at her feet, reaching up to take scraps of meat from her manicured fingers.
Fallon turns to look inquiringly at her as they pass.
She shakes her head in reply. ‘Too early to read the bones of the year, Lord.’
As she recedes, Shipwright sees a man approach the woman’s stall, his face still studded with the grit of the road. He waits as she bends down to one of her dogs, and whispers in its ear. Dog and man leave together, his hand resting lightly on its undulating spine.
The swirl of foreign languages pulls Shipwright deeper into the Hall. She finds her eye drawn again to the massive maps. In each one, the south-eastern corner of the continent has been carved out, or marked with sigils of warning, or simply pried from the wall to leave the bare brick beneath.
On some maps, this torn corner was in the north-west. The world did not look the same to everyone here.
As her eyes wander the curves and lines, Fallon turns her gently, his hands on her shoulders. ‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’
She nods. ‘Incomplete, though.’
He laughs. ‘From your perspective, of course. Not sure we have walls big enough for that ocean.’
‘It’s not just ocean, Declan,’ she smiles.
You’ll have to tell me about it one day.’
‘I’ll do better than that, I’ll take you.’
‘I get seasick.’
‘I’ll keep you drunk.’
‘I couldn’t leave her.’
Shipwright reaches back, grips his wrist. ‘When she wakes up.’ Determination in her tone.
She runs her eyes over the maps again, the bold strokes of paint. Mountain ranges as long as a boat. Forests as tall as a man. Almost all of it still so strange to her. A few brief points of familiarity, for better or worse. Hesper, Astic, the Burners’ Wood. Thell.
As her eyes run over the walls, Fallon pulls her towards a long, low table stretched in front of the nearest mural, covered by scrolls and maps, staked out neatly, and annotated more precisely still.
All of them drawn at different elevations: an eagle’s view, a forester’s stance, some political, marking out the big cities, the smaller towns, the legacies of older wars, the ruin of the south.
Others are more specific – here one for the currents, West Tide and East Tide swirling constantly in teasing parallels, the deep water that pulled off to the Heron Halls, and the shallowing cuts that arrowed in towards where Luss would once have been.
Here was another for herbs: killing, healing, sleeping, dreaming, marked with stunning care and precision.
The men and women behind the table move with professional grace, some old, some barely out of their teens, united only by the stain of inks on their fingers, the marks on their lips and teeth from sucked brushes.
‘Incredible,’ she breathes.
‘You’ll need a good map for heading north,’ Fallon says. ‘I doubt you can sail all the way, unless your ship’s picked up some new tricks.’
They approach the table. One of the men behind it looks up, eyes owlish from squinting.
‘Lord. Come for the latest in herds? Mountain ice? Soil life?’ His stubby fingers jab expressively.
Fallon smiles. ‘Not today. My friend here needs a map of the routes north.’
The man’s huge eyes blink slowly. ‘A map north? Yes, of course. Naval and land. But nothing further? No touches upon the azimuth, nothing cadastral or choropleth?’
Fallon shakes his head. ‘Just the routes.’
The short man blinks again, his head bobbing like a buoy at sea. ‘Not a problem, just unexpected.’ He selects one, a beautiful wash of colours, rolls it and stows it in a leather tube, before thrusting it at Fallon. ‘My lord.’
Fallon takes the tube, tugs a little as the shorter man’s hand refuses to let go.
‘Shapetender?’
The mapmaker flashes a smile, his large eyes swivelling. ‘Are you sure, Lord? Nothing hypsometric, nothing theodolite-kissed?’
Fallon pulls, firmly. ‘Just the map.’
Shapetender’s fingers relinquish it reluctantly.
‘Your digger will be by later, I expect? For the darkening charts? We have prepared a further one on the movements of the moon. Another on cart roads of the old Empire.’
Fallon looks at him levelly. ‘She will, Shape. And don’t let that brain of yours get ahead of your lips.’ He turns to Shipwright, presses the map tube against her chest. ‘Stage one, Ship. A decent map.’
As they walk away, the round-headed man’s gaze lingers on them for a moment, before another customer calls for his attention.
‘What was that about?’ Shipwright mutters.
Fallon laughs. ‘Oh, our fidgety little friend? He’s a mapmaker of the old school.’