“I do not know how much Sneed told you about our circumstances here, Tragen. Clearly I will do the best that I can for your friend. But I must ask you not to entertain unrealistic expectations.”
“Sneed told us there was a man called Mister Glimmery taking an interest in our welfare,” I said.
“Yes, I was informed that our … benefactor … has taken an interest.” There had been a strain in his voice for an instant, but I wondered if it was no more than fatigue, the doctor struggling to find his words after a long day of ministrations. “We will do what we can. As we always do.”
“We appreciate any help you can give us,” I said.
Doctor Eddralder was a very tall man, one of the tallest I had seen, and he was also long and thin in his features, like an ordinary cove walking in front of a distorting mirror. He had a faded, colourless complexion, with bruiselike shadows beneath his pebble-pale eyes. His mouth and eyes were a long way apart, as if there was too much nose between them. He had a heavy jaw, a doubtful set to his lips, and black hair combed apart in two equal waves from his scalp. He wore a pale blue surgical gown that covered every part of him from the shoulders to the tips of his shoes, and he had a way of moving around that made me think of a gaming piece being slid from one square to the next, his legs hardly moving.
“Is there anything I ought to know about the nature of the injury, Tragen?”
“What did they tell you?”
“Very little.” He was still holding up his umbrella, which had purple and white segments on it, and I noticed now that there was a steady dripping coming from the ceiling. “A wound caused by a sharp edge, in space. That covers a multitude of possibilities, from a simple accident to violent action.”
“It was a slip,” I said. “That’s all. Luckily it didn’t go all the way through. We tried to clean the wound, but it seems we didn’t do a good enough job. We only had a small surgical bay, though. If you had to operate to remove the infection, could you do that?”
“There is always a way.” He gave the umbrella a snap, partly closing it and then opening it again, so that the accumulated raindrops were flung away from its fabric. “Especially as—as appears to be the case—Mister Glimmery has made it clear the patient is to be given all available care.”
With faint intimations of unease I studied the activity taking place. Over in one corner, not quite hidden from view, some kind of operation was going on. They had tanks of gas and a kind of cabinet with bellows in it, and a patient stretched out under green blankets. A robot was bent over the patient, with its two arms vanishing into a gap in the blankets. Standing on a crate behind it was a small woman in a surgical gown and mask, and she was pushing her own two arms into a flap in the back of the robot. The robot itself must have been all but dead, except for some locomotor functions that the woman was commanding. One of the other staff, monitoring the bellows machine, caught my roving eye and I looked away sharply, feeling that that I had been caught gazing at something that was none of my business.
“We don’t expect to be treated any better than these other people, Doctor Eddralder.”
“The choice may not be yours to make, Tragen.” Then, to both of us: “Sit yourselves down. I will examine your friend and make an initial assessment. Then we may discuss a treatment plan.”
Surt and I sat as elegantly as was possible while still wearing our vacuum suits. The chairs creaked under our weight but held. I was glad when Sneed showed no intention of joining us. He was still hanging around, eyeing us in a way that made me uneasy. He was brazen about it, too, not even bothering to pretend otherwise. I’d catch him staring in our direction and he would just wipe his nose and carry on.
“I don’t care for that stumpy cove,” Surt mumbled, as she eased her right gauntlet off, finally able to stretch her fingers. “Or the smell of this place.”
“He’s got a certain way about him, I’ll admit.” I sunk down into my neck ring as far as I could, preferring a dose of my own sweat and body odour to the smells of the ward.
It was noisy as well as bad-smelling. There was a drumming of rain on the roof somewhere above us, a hiss of it racing down the outside of the building, a constant dripping of it into buckets on the floor, a drone of generators, a continuous buzzing and clicking of machines, footsteps coming and going all the while, a low murmur of doctors and staff discussing patients, the crying and moaning of the sick, and always that smell, like a yellow haze fighting its way into your sinuses.
“Do you think the lanky one’s to be trusted?” Surt asked.
“Doctor Eddralder? He seems all right, I suppose. Right now, though, I wouldn’t trust my own left arm without written references. There’s something odd about this whole set-up.”
“I know what you mean about not trusting your arm,” Surt said.
A swish of blue curtains drew my attention to the end of the room. Prozor came through, with a grim set to her face, the usual angles even more acute. Fura was just behind her, and neither of them was carrying any of our equipment.
Prozor marched on up to us while Fura veered off and headed for Doctor Eddralder, who was just wheeling Strambli’s trolley and cargo chest into a curtained area.
I made to rise from my chair.
“What happened?”
Prozor held up her hand, encouraging me to stay seated. “We lost it all, Tragen. All our helmets and breathin’ gear and anythin’ else that was in that basket. I watched it fall all the way down to that crater under us, the one full of brown water, and if you fancy swimmin’ through that on a treasure hunt, good luck to you.”
“No,” I said, astonished and dumbfounded. “We can’t have lost it all, not like that.”
“I’m tellin’ you what I saw. It was jammed and two of Snot-face’s coves were leanin’ out tryin’ to fix something in the winch. I think they almost had it loose, and then Fura … I mean, Cap’n Marance …” She glanced hastily to one side. “She shoves ’em out of the way, like she’s got the strength of two of ’em, and tries to fix it herself. Only it’s no good. The line breaks and down goes the basket, dreamy as you please, with our blessed loot in it.”
“Wait!” I called, seeing Fura starting to remonstrate with Doctor Eddralder, raising her voice and practically bowling him over, not touching him exactly, but flinging her arms out and jamming her face under his, a wild madness shining through, as if the glowy had taken a new hold.
“They told us it’d be safe!” she was shouting. “They took everything, and now look what’s happened!”
Doctor Eddralder still had his examining lamp. He stepped back from the trolley, holding up that light as if it were his only line of defence. Fura kept on advancing on him, her alloy hand opening and closing with a crazed whirr. Still in her suit from the neck down, she could have done the stick-like doctor an injury just by toppling over him.
I came behind her. “Captain!” I said, almost yelling myself, but still trying to preserve some sense of our imagined roles. “It isn’t Doctor Eddralder’s fault!”
She snapped around and for an instant all that anger was on me. She made a fist and I think she had some brief, brutal intention of using it.
“Don’t you be tellin’ me my business, Tragen.”
I dropped my voice to hiss. “We have quoins. We have more quoins than we know what to do with. We can buy it all again. Better the second time around. Greben is what matters here—not a load of old suit parts we can easily replace.”
Her nostrils flared, a tumult of rage and calculation going on behind her eyes. There was a rage in me as well, like a bottle full of fire. I fought to keep it from uncorking itself, and wondered if Fura detected my struggle as readily as I sensed the devious workings of her mind.
“It won’t go well if you keep challenging me,” she said, in little more than a whisper.
“No,” I said, in a similar tone, and with the same brooding conviction. “It most certainly won’t.”
“She’s still in you.”
“She’s in both of us,” I hissed back. “The difference is I don’t welcome her. The difference is I’m trying not to become her.”
At last something in her eased and she dropped her arms. The anger was still there, but she recognised that there was too much to be risked if we broke through our invented personas.
In a normal tone she replied: “It’ll delay us.”
“So be it. It’s just more one set of things to add to the shopping list.”
Doctor Eddralder lowered his lamp, straightening up now Fura was no longer in his face. “Are we done?” he asked mildly.
13
Fura insisted on a moment alone with Strambli before the doctor vanished into the curtained area. When she came back she dropped her voice and said: “I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t in a babbling frame of mind.”
“And if she had been?” I asked.
“It’s all right. She’s out colder than the arse-end of Trevenza Reach.” Fura tossed a bag to me, and then did the same for Surt and Prozor. “Your belongings. They’ll whiff a bit, after being in that box with her, but I’ve a feeling we’ll stop noticing after a few days.”
“And if we’re really lucky, we’ll be on our way even sooner than that,” I said.
“Well, let’s not jump to conclusions. No telling how long it’s going to take to get Strambli square, is it? If that leg turns gammy, she’ll need it off, and then we’ll have to fit her up with a tin one, and I wouldn’t want her to be in quite the rush I was. Cheer up, s—I mean, Tragen. We might have some shopping to do.”
“I thought you hated shopping.”
“Depends on the shopping.”
“We need provisions—even more than when we started out, after losing those suit parts. But I’m not in any rush to stay here longer than necessary. I don’t like it. We weren’t made to feel very welcome when we wanted to dock, and now I’m starting to feel as if we’re too welcome.”
“I’ve never been one to complain about being made too welcome,” Fura said.
I turned to Prozor. “Is there a chance they’ve worked out our true identities?”
“Ordinarily I wouldn’t say so. Even an information request ought to take days to work its way back out here. But something’s wrong, and it makes me wonder what they know, or think they know. I ain’t certain. That business with the two ships …”
“Could they have seen the attack?”
“Not unless they had scopes pointed in exactly the right direction at the right moment. It all happened too far away, even the explosion, and Paladin didn’t pick up any squawk chatter that might have given away the game, did he?”
“No one could expect us here,” I said, trying to reassure myself. “Ships come and go from places like this often enough, and it can’t be too uncommon for a captain and her Boney to be a little similar-looking. Perhaps we’re just being too jumpy.”
“We are,” Fura said, looking down at her arm. “And that’s the worst thing we could be, because we don’t want to look like coves who’ve got anything to hide.” She lowered her voice further still. “I don’t care for this place any more than the rest of you. But it’s her only chance so we see it through. Meanwhile, we’ll be as quick as we can about our other errands.” She dredged up a dark, humourless laugh. “I don’t suppose jumpin’ ships is on anyone’s immediate agenda, is it?”
Presently Doctor Eddralder came over to our row of chairs, still holding his umbrella.
“I’ve made an initial examination,” he declared in his extremely deep voice, which didn’t quite seem to match the rest of him. “We’ve given her some drugs to make her more comfortable and give her body a better chance at fighting the infection. When one of the robots is available I will conduct a thorough cleansing of the wound, chasing the infection as far as I may. I will do my utmost to save the limb, but nothing is guaranteed. An accident with a blade, you say?”
“A yardknife,” Fura said. “What we use for cutting snagged rigging, squaring-off sails and suchlike. A yardknife will go through just about anything.”
“I should like to see the edge in question. If it’s as sharp as appears from the injury, it would make a most efficacious surgical instrument.”
“It was our best yardknife,” Fura said. “Uncommonly sharp. Sadly she let go of it during the accident.”
“How unfortunate,” Doctor Eddralder said.
Mister Sneed swaggered over to our gathering. He wiped his nose on the back of his palm, then smeared the residue under his chin. “Having a little gossip with the clients, is it, doc?”
“Merely illuminating them on matters clinical, Mister Sneed.”
Sneed worked his jaw, pushing his tongue from side to side in his mouth so that it bulged from one cheek and then the other. “So long as that’s all it is. That was all it was, wasn’t it?”
“He was just telling us about Greben,” I said.
“Good. And the prognosteration is …?”
“She’ll need surgery,” Eddralder said. “If all is well, I’ll operate within the next six hours. She’ll be under my personal care while she is here—my personal care.” He was looking at Sneed, giving his words a particular threatening emphasis. “And I’ll make sure she is suitably undisturbed. You and your party may remain here if you wish, Captain Marance, but I presume you have affairs to attend to?”
“Actually, doc,” Sneed said, “they’ve been invited upstairs. A personal audience with the man himself. Mister Glimmery wants to make sure they’re getting everything they need. See, they’re getting his personal attention too.”
“I am very glad for them,” Doctor Eddralder said, giving his umbrella a sharp snap.
*
Surt insisted that she wanted to stay with Strambli, so it fell to Prozor, Fura and I to represent the crew during our audience. We were not in the least bit enthusiastic about any part of that, but equally we understood that the quality of Strambli’s care depended on the continued cooperation and sufferance of our hosts, and there was no agreeable way of getting out of the engagement.
Sneed took us up a flight of stairs onto the rain-sodden roof of the infirmary, leading us through a forest of cables that came down from the ceiling, taut as rigging, each being anchored into the roof with a great iron eyelet. He walked us to one crumbling edge, and then reached for a chain coming all the way down from the ceiling. He tugged six times, clearly a sort of code, since the tugs had distinct and deliberate intervals between them, and after a delay a metal walkway began to hinge down from above.
I had noticed the grid of pipes and cables where the sky panels had fallen away, leaking water and belching steam, but there was something else directly above the infirmary: a sort of localised plaque or growth of disreputable-looking structures built in, around and above the pipework, with more lights on than any of the buildings below. The walkway was angling down from one of these elevated structures.
Fura had left Surt in charge of our changes of clothes, and we still had our suits on below the neck. I trusted that walkway more than the rope-bridge, though, and other than the fact of my bones and muscles still aching, I had no trouble going all the way to the top, with Sneed bringing up the rear. Halfway up the rattling stairway, I paused to take in the dismal view, with all its queasy curves and bending perspectives. There was the clinic right under us, and the waterlogged hole beneath it, and stretching away beyond it the dark sprawl of Port Endless, hazed in steam and rain where it was visible at all, with many of its streets and buildings lost in gloom and only spots of fitful, flickering illumination where there was any sort of light. I spotted a few colourful signs and advertisements, and the blue flash of a tram’s electricity pole laid a street corner stark for an instant, picking out stooping, stick-figure pedestrians as if frozen in a chalk sketch.
“Move yourselves, ladies—Mister Glimmery’s got a packed schedule, you know.”
“So good of him to fit us in,” I said, certain Sneed would not hear.
At the top of the w
alkway was a doorway, and flanking it were Sneed’s two accomplices from before, or perhaps two coves who were so like the others as to be indistinguishable. We were taken into an ante-chamber and examined again, at least as thoroughly as at the infirmary, but since Fura and Surt had already been divested of their weapons once, there was nothing to be found.
Satisfied that we were no threat to our host, Mister Sneed took us along a red-carpeted corridor which opened out into a large room that was misty with sweet-smelling steam. Enormous pipes criss-crossed above our heads. The walls were gold: gold-painted, or gold-hammered panels, wherever we looked, and the floor was gold as well, made of many glazed tiles. There were no windows in the walls, but here and there the floor had been cut away to allow a view down into the city below, glazed with what I trusted was suitably resilient material. Around the perimeter of the room were gold-lacquered partition screens, and at least a dozen barefoot, black-gowned attendants stood around with towels on their arms or buckets at their feet. They had a servile look to them, female and male both, but there was also something thuggish and muscular.
The central feature of the room—and the reason for that sweet-smelling steam—was not the pipes, but rather a circular bath which took up a large part of the floor, sunk down into it so that the floor was level with the rim.
Sneed walked to the edge of the bath.
“Your guests are here, Mister Glimmery,” he said, genuflecting a little as he made his statement. “Captain Marance, and two of her associates from the Grey Lady. The other two are downstairs—one of ’em poorly, and one of ’em keeping vigil.”
Mister Glimmery was up to his neck in the bath. Hot, white liquid lapped at the rim. It smelled like hot milk, seasoned with spices. We could only see his head, and that indistinctly, because of the steam lifting off the surface. The head was hairless and he had his face turned away from us, but the impression was of some raw pink thing being slowly boiled. Three attendants were stationed around the pool, while a fourth was just bringing a fresh pail of steaming milk, pausing only to add a generous fistful of what I thought might be cinnamon or nutmeg.
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