Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

“Could you not take the treatments?”

  “No … Tragen, was it? No, too far gone for the common therapies, and the stronger remedies were in woeful short supply at the time. Now, like your good captain, I must accept what I have become … what I am becoming.”

  “Has it got into your grey?” Fura asked.

  “It has, and deeply. There are external signs, but also neurological manifestations, some of them obvious to me, and some of them requiring the patient detection of a physician’s art. Occasionally, I am …” Mister Glimmery hesitated, his face clenching quite suddenly, as if with that line of thinking had come a spasm or the acute recollection of one. “Perturbed,” he continued, loosening. “But the milk baths have a soothing effect on the peripheral nerves, and there are preparations that hold the glowy’s most severe attacks at bay.”

  “Attacks?” Fura enquired.

  “The torments and agonies I mentioned.” He gave her a sympathetic look. “I see you are not yet fully acquainted with the likely progression of the ailment. I mean to cause you no distress, Captain. With luck, there is still time for you.” While he was speaking, his fingers had wandered to the lacquered box, toying with the latch that held down its lid, almost as if by a will of their own. Slowly, though, he withdrew his fingers and left the box where it was, unopened. “And speaking of matters medical, I did not wish to give the wrong impression about your colleague, the one you call …?”

  “Greben,” I said.

  “Greben, yes. Well, she is in most capable hands, I assure you. I know Doctor Eddralder very well—he has been my personal physician—and we could not hope for a kinder, more skilled practitioner. Of course the work of the infirmary weighs heavily on him, but he will never turn away a deserving case.”

  “It is very good of him to find time for Greben,” I said decorously.

  “We would have it no other way, Tragen. Our guests are few enough that we may lavish particular care on those who come. On that matter, will you not consider hauling-in a little nearer?” He directed this last enquiry at our supposed captain. “Not to be blunt about it, but our agents have questioned the condition of your sails.”

  “What concern is that of yours?” Fura asked.

  “None, except that we would be remiss if we did not help where we may. We have a great surplus of good sail and yardage in our docks, according to the merchants. It is sitting there unused, a wasted and unprofitable investment. I am informed that the merchants would be very glad to see the back of it at a favourable rate to yourselves—much better than any offer you’ll get in the lower processionals, where the market sides with the seller.”

  “Our sails are satisfactory, thank you,” Fura said. Then, scraping up some morsel of politeness, added: “But it is considerate of you to make the offer.”

  “Nonetheless, the invitation to haul-in closer still stands. Consider it, because it will make your affairs here much more tractable, and there need be no suspicion that you are standing off at such a distance for any particular reason.”

  My sister could not contain herself from glaring. “What sort of reason did you have in mind?”

  “For myself, none at all. It is …” He paused, stiffening in his chair, and a twitch dimpled the cheeks on either side of his mouth. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, forcing out the words between gritted teeth. “The affliction chooses its moments well.” With a strain of effort he twisted in his chair and called out: “Bring the remedy.”

  One of the black-gowned attendants arrived. It was a woman, carrying a small, lidded golden tray balanced on her upspread fingers. She removed the lid and offered the tray to Mister Glimmery. It contained two gold syringes.

  “Are these the last of them?”

  The woman leaned in and said: “Doctor Eddralder will bring a fresh supply tomorrow, sir, as arranged.”

  “Very well.” Mister Glimmery’s fingers moved from one syringe to the other, as if undecided which to use. “Bring Merrix, will you?”

  “Are you certain, sir? There are just these two.”

  “Bring Merrix.”

  The attendant placed the tray on the table before him, and Mister Glimmery opened the gold box with slightly fumbling fingers. He took out what struck me as a very unremarkable object. It looked like a piece of wood, perhaps the end of a broomstick, wound from end to end with string.

  “You will accept my offer of accommodation, I trust?” he asked, forcing some sort of normality into his voice, even though his continuing discomfort was obvious. “I have private rooms that are very well appointed, much cleaner and warmer than anything you will find down in the city, and very much more usefully situated with regards to the clinic. You would be able to come and go at a moment’s notice, and you would avoid any sort of disturbance or unpleasantness.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mister Glimmery,” I said, trusting that I spoke for the others. “But we have a lot of procurement to do, and I think we would find it easier if we were down in the city, close to the docks and the boutiques.”

  He tried to sound agreeable, but I had slighted his offer and the fleeting coldness of his expression made his feelings abundantly plain.

  “Suit yourselves. You won’t be very far away, no matter where you lodge.”

  The attendant came back. She had a girl with her this time, dressed in the same kind of black gown, but with a dazed, somnambulant look to her. I thought she might be thirteen or fourteen years old, although it was hard to be certain. She regarded us with a dull absence, as if we were no more than patterns on wallpaper that her eyes had seen a thousand times before. She was long boned, her eyes pale.

  “Extend your arm, Merrix,” Mister Glimmery said, not without a surprising kindness, which almost encouraged me to see him in a slightly different light. “It isn’t pleasant for either of us, but you know full well this is easiest in the long term.”

  The girl offered her sleeve, barely glancing at him. She swayed with a certain slow rhythm, and her lips moved softly as if a song were playing in her mind. Mister Glimmery’s hand dithered between the syringes before making a selection. Then, without rising, he administered one of the syringes into the girl, observed her carefully, saying nothing even as she gave a sudden convulsion and needed to be kept upright by the attendant. Mister Glimmery placed the syringe back on the tray, took the other, and injected it into his own forearm. He set it down with the first syringe, his fingers still trembling, and reached for the wooden object. Leaning back into the chair, bracing himself as if for some coming acceleration, he opened his mouth and bit onto the wooden thing.

  His own convulsion hit very hard, much more fiercely than the girl’s, his eyes rolling and his facial muscles going into spasm. He groaned through the self-imposed gag, his teeth digging into the string-bound stick. Both his hands were on the rests of his chair, and his whole upper torso twisted and thrashed.

  It was such an odd thing to see in our host, especially as he had been making genteel conversation only a few moments earlier, that I do not think any of us had a clear sense of how long the spectacle lasted. Certainly it continued for a greater span of time than was comfortable, even as the girl was taken away and a fine bubbling froth emerged from Mister Glimmery’s mouth, forcing its lavalike passage around the string-bound stick. But then an easing came upon him, and—relaxing—he removed the saliva-sodden stick and returned it to the gold box.

  “You will forgive me,” he said, using his sleeve to dab the froth from his lips and the sweat from his brow. “It seldom gives warning, and I felt I would be doing Captain Marance a disservice if she did not witness the full severity of the attack. They come at more frequent intervals lately, although never with any predictability. I trust you were not distressed?” He rubbed at the spot on his arm where he had injected himself. “I myself am now completely at ease, I assure you. The remedy may not be a cure, but it is effective in the short-term.”

  “What about the girl?” Fura asked.

  “Merrix? A deserving case
. Not a glowy infection, but a congenital neurological disorder that responds to some of the same treatments. It has been very difficult to settle on a treatment regime for Merrix, so in the absence of better data we each receive our treatments at the same time.”

  “That’s a very odd way of doing it,” I said.

  “It’s a very odd condition.”

  The attendant came back and removed the gold box, suggesting that there was little chance of a repeat performance for a few hours. Seemingly restored, Mister Glimmery pushed his giant frame up from his chair, the muscles in his arms bulging like bladders.

  “There are a number of hotels near the infirmary,” he said. “Mister S will be happy to show you to one of the more reputable establishments. In the meantime, I wish you the best of news concerning your colleague. I expect we will speak soon enough.”

  “We’d be happy to find our own lodgings—” Prozor started.

  “I insist.” He was about to take his leave from us when some faint afterthought or recollection furrowed his brow. “I meant to ask. You informed our Port Authority officials that you’d come in from the Emptyside, where you’d been working a string of baubles. I’ve no reason to doubt that story …” He paused, smiling very slightly. “But it made me wonder if you’d heard anything about trouble in the near Emptyside? About ten days ago, some altercation between a privateer and a pair of ships operating under the recent bounty?”

  “There was nothing on the squawk,” Fura said. “Nor on the bones. And I hold my crew to a hard schedule in the sighting room.”

  “Ah,” Mister Glimmery said. “We’ve had a request for assistance, you see—from the survivor of the supposed incident. They’d like to haul-in in a few days and I considered their story so unlikely I thought I’d run it by you first.”

  “I think we’d have heard,” I said.

  “Yes, that was my thought as well. How could you not know of such a thing, if it had happened?”

  Finished with us for now, he directed a significant glance at the Crawly. Taking the cue, the obedient Mister Cuttle took a final inhalation, then placed the mouthpiece back in its holder next to the apparatus, extracted his gowned and hooded form from his personal chair, leaving us to goggle—distractedly, I admit, in light of that recent intelligence—at the curious supports and voids which were necessary to accommodate a Crawly’s nether-regions.

  Then the alien and the man with the glowy left us alone, and we sat there for a few moments with only the bubbling of the apparatus to break the silence.

  Until Prozor said: “What’d he mean by ‘bounty’?”

  14

  Sneed insisted on showing us to our lodgings. We left Surt at the infirmary, where she said she would wait until there was more news about Strambli, and followed our swaggering guide through a warren of dark streets and passages, taking a generally steepening course toward the main avenue.

  Gradually there were more signs of life. Windows lit in one building, a smell of cooking from another. Shouts and laughter from a cellar door. A cove nursing a bleeding nose in a back alley, another sniffing into a bottle before tossing it aside. Mutts fighting over scraps. A robot going round and round in circles, one of his wheels jammed in a gutter, his head just a little glowing orb like a light-bulb. We climbed some more. The larger streets, running all the way around the rim, were built on the level, with ledges and terraces cut into the steepening ground. The connecting streets and alleys were all steep, eventually needing to zig-zag back on themselves. There were sheer walls with staircases going up the side of them, some rickety and some carved out of massive stone blocks and looking as if they had been that way for a thousand years, and there were buildings rising from ledges, or with their foundations jutting out into space, only a bit less precarious-looking than the infirmary.

  With Sneed in our company there had been scant chance to discuss recent developments, much less the unwelcome news about the damaged ship. We would all have been happier finding our own hotel, but as Prozor reminded me in a quiet moment, it was very likely that Mister Glimmery had his own contacts in such establishments, so our whereabouts and activities would not have remained private for very long.

  My legs were turning weary by the time we climbed up the last zig-zag and stumbled out into Shine Street, the name of the main avenue on this side of the wheel. At long last we had arrived at something like civilisation. We almost had to blink at the colour and brightness of it. The rainlit pavements were busy with people coming and going or clotting together by tram stops or outside the shops, bars, boutiques and hotels. The tall, narrow-fronted buildings were jumbled together like books in a badly organised library, with a slovenly disregard for content. There might be a hotel, then a sail-merchant’s emporium, then a coffee house, then a tattoo parlour, then a red-windowed house of ill-repute, then perhaps a Bone Merchants or a Limb Broker.

  There was a choice of possible lodgings and Sneed seemed content to allow us the final decision in this matter. Prozor selected a tall hotel with a crumbling, many-balconied facade called The Happy Return. It did not look happy to us, nor the sort of place to which one might wish to return, but Prozor had a discerning eye for such things, and she was adamant that this was the type of place most likely to do business with visiting crews, and therefore our best chance for a sort of anonymity. There was also a bar across the street, and a good selection of shops and boutiques suitable for our immediate needs.

  We dismissed Sneed, assuring him that we were quite capable of minding ourselves from this point on, and then went through the revolving door into the grand lobby. It was cold and draughty and almost completely lacking in furniture or ornamentation, save for a few dead-looking plants in pots, and a couple of sturdy chairs backed into a corner. A concierge desk stood at the back of the lobby, with elevators and stairs tucked around one side. The lone clerk was turned away from us, watching the bright rectangle of a small, grubby flickerbox perched on the left side of the desk. He could hardly have missed the clatter of our boots on the lobby tiles, but he still took no notice of us until Fura was leaning on the desk, tapping her metal fingers against the zinc surface.

  “We’d like some rooms.”

  The clerk turned off the flickerbox, then swivelled his chair to greet us. He was a small, slump-shouldered man with a very wide and flat-featured face, almost like a circular doorknob.

  “How many?”

  “Two. Two beds apiece, adjoining. Four rooms if you only do single occupancy.”

  “How many nights?”

  “As many as we need.”

  He turned around to look at the ranks of keys and mail pigeonholes behind his desk, scratching at his chin as if we were asking him for some very difficult and unprecedented thing. He had bits of paper stuck to his jaw, with tiny specks of blood in the middle of each piece, and he gave off a strong, astringent smell.

  “I can do you two rooms on the eighth floor—that’s the top. Lift only goes as far as the sixth, then you have to walk. Minimum stay is three nights. You’ll pay up-front.”

  “Is there a strong-box in the rooms?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll need a lock-up for our belongings, exclusive use of my party.”

  “That’ll cost you the same as a third room.”

  “Add it to the bill.”

  After some minor haggling—instigated by Prozor, who had a nose for what was a fair arrangement, as well as a sense of honour that forbade her from being unreasonably swindled—a deposit was agreed upon and a quantity of quoins changed hands. We took the single elevator up to the sixth floor, which chimed upon its arrival, doors grinding open, then from the sixth floor landing ascended creaking stairs to the eighth, where our rooms were halfway down a long, shabby, stain-marked landing.

  Prozor and I took one of the rooms, with Fura taking the other, having it all to herself for now. We agreed to see each other in thirty minutes.

  It was not as bad as I feared. The taps grumbled and the pipes rattled, but the
room was clean and warm enough, and there was hot and cold running water. Prozor and I stripped out of our suits and gladly rinsed off the worst of our grime. We were under proper gravity for the first time in months, not counting the bauble, and some of that dirt had been caked onto me like freckles. You never really got clean on a ship, no matter how hard you tried.

  We put on our shipboard clothes, pinching our noses at the smell still clinging to them from their time in Strambli’s chest. I was starting to think that the odour in that box had been a lot worse than could be explained by any sort of bodily process, and that Fura must have stuffed some spoiled goods in there as well.

  Prozor went to the window and looked out through the shutters on the eighth floor balcony. I picked up on her pensiveness and knew she was meaning to say something, but needed to find the words.

  “There’s somethin’ we ought to talk about,” she said eventually.

  “I didn’t like the sound of that ‘bounty’ part either.”

  “We’ll need to get to the bottom of that sooner or later. It sounds as if some coves have decided to put up some money to finish us off. But that’s not what I meant.”

  “Mister Cuttle, then?”

  “I was troubled by him, to start with, I won’t deny. He reminded me of Clinker, another Crawly I met, and I think Fura had the same thought. I don’t think he was Clinker, though there’s somethin’ fishy about him, beyond a doubt—I’d like to know what his business is with Glimmery, to start with—but that ain’t it, either.” A tram slid past, blue light flashing off its cable, picking out Prozor’s form like a shock-haired statue at midnight. “This is a rum one, Adrana. I don’t hardly know where to begin. But it’s about your sister, and what happened in the infirmary.”

  “What?”

  She stood silent before answering.

  “I wish I was sure enough to say.” The pipework rattled again. It made such a racket that I guessed that Fura was running hot water in her room. In any case it did a good job of masking our conversation. “When they winched up our stuff, those coves had that basket under control. Until Fura barged in, shoved Sneed’s men aside and …”