Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  I was just starting back down the corridor when something caught my eye at the far end, near the top landing. It was hard to make out, since there was only a single light at the top of the stairs, but I was certain I saw a shadowy form creeping down to the seventh floor.

  I had about a second to choose whether I knocked on our door to summon Prozor, or just went after the shadowy figure on my own. I decided on the latter. It was just a shadow, but some suspicious corner of my mind was alert for a furtive, rather than legitimate, movement and it was telling me that this cove was trying to sneak down those stairs without being seen. I hurried to the end of the hallway, then out onto the landing, where the stairs came up through a square lightwell that went all the way back down to the lobby. I peered down, leaning cautiously over the bannister.

  “You!” I called, catching a glimpse of the descending figure as it rounded one corner of the staircase. There was a cloak, and a hood, and the form moved with a shuffling locomotion that spoke of only one possibility. “Mister Cuttle!”

  The descending form paused, its hood twitching my way, and for an instant some twiglike sensor or appendage projected from the hood. Then the Crawly redoubled his descent, one of his forelimbs skimming against the bannister. I set off after him, skipping down two stairs at a time, even as my bones protested.

  “Cuttle!” I called again. “Whatever Glimmery sent you for, you have no business snooping on us!”

  I caught another glimpse of the alien as he skirted a corner, sensing that he was moving with a new urgency. I redoubled my own descent, and I had taken a gamble on skipping three steps when my ankle gave way and I went tumbling onto the seventh floor landing. I lay there for an instant, quite winded by the impact, my cheek and jaw pressed into hairy, threadbare carpet that might as well have been sandpaper for all the cushioning it offered. Then I gathered myself up, winced as I placed weight on my foot, and hobbled on. My ankle ached, but since nothing had snapped or torn, I thought it a minor sprain not any lasting injury.

  I did not intend to hurt Mister Cuttle—Bosa’s anger was not roused by this intruder, strangely—but had I not discarded the jacket I might have been tempted to sting him with the volition pistol, provided I could have found the lowest setting. Cursing myself for throwing the jacket and pistol onto the bed, I continued my pursuit, thinking that at the very least I could grab the alien and pin him against a wall. Why did I not wish the equivalent of his neck under my fingers? Because he had not lied to me, I supposed, and his actions—puzzling though they were—were more a mystery to be solved, than a clear and direct threat to the security of our ship and crew. Bosa’s anger, I was starting to sense, was not an indiscriminate thing. It had purpose and capabilities of curious restraint.

  That, or I was learning to wield it, as one would a weapon.

  I was halfway down the flight of stairs between the seventh and sixth floors when I heard the chime of the elevator. “Cuttle!” I shouted, knowing I would lose him if he made it into the elevator ahead of me. “You can’t get away!”

  Which was, of course, rather contrary to the truth, but I hoped the confident certainty of my declaration might give him pause for some tiny but decisive interval.

  I heard the grind of the elevator doors, a shuffle of footsteps, and a moment or two later the sound of the doors closing again. Then the whine of the elevator’s motor as the car began to descend back down to the lobby level.

  “No!” I called out, despite the self-evident futility of it.

  There was only the one elevator and if I waited for the car to return, Mister Cuttle would be out of the hotel and into the night long before I made it to street level. But I could not hobble down the stairs fast enough to catch him.

  Still wincing, I made it to the sixth floor landing and hammered the elevator button, as if by some magic I might short-circuit the mechanism and freeze the car between floors. That was when I heard a patter of light, rapid footsteps on one of the floors above mine, and I looked back up the stairwell to the eighth floor landing, where Prozor had just appeared, leaning recklessly far over the bannister.

  “It was Cuttle,” I said breathlessly. “Him or one just like him. Sneaking down from our floor. He’s on his way down to the lobby.”

  But Prozor looked past me and down and said: “He ain’t on his way down, girlie. He’s already there.”

  Her meaning eluded me since the elevator was still in motion, and I knew Mister Cuttle could not possibly have made it down six sets of winding stairs in the time since I had last glimpsed him. I followed the direction of her stare in any case, and then understood only too well.

  I was still six floors above the lobby, so it formed a small square of black and white tiles, like a pattern at the end of a rectangular kaleidoscope. A dark form lay smeared across a portion of those tiles. I knew instantly what it was, of course, but to begin with I resisted the recognition, not wishing to accept the fact of it, as if by the act of that acceptance I might concretise something which had not yet slipped into full and definite certitude. There was a hood, a gown, a spray of broken limbs and appendages, like a sack of twigs that had ripped open, and a dark green stickiness encroaching further and further into the regularity of the tiles.

  Prozor was coming down the stairs from the eighth floor landing and I wanted her by my side very badly. My feelings toward Mister Cuttle had been neutral in the company of Mister Glimmery, although I had strived to be cordial. When I had detected his presence here, my sentiments had shifted to a hard suspicion, and yet even then I had wished to corner and interrogate him, not see him broken and ruptured six floors under me.

  I realised then that I was being observed.

  There was a watcher, precisely level with me. It was in the space between me and the opposite side of the stairwell, floating in mid-air. It was an eye, or more properly an eyeball, very accurate in its size and details, from the white of its globe to the fine veins on that globe, to the pupil and iris regarding me with an immense, unblinking intensity. I stared at it and the eye stared back, and although I was the more shocked party—how could it be otherwise?—the eye could not help but appear startled, simply because it was an eyeball, absent of eyelids, absent the context of a face, and incapable of evoking any expression but a sort of continuous fearful astonishment.

  Prozor was just rounding the last set of stairs, onto the landing. I turned to her to declare that there was an eye watching me and demand her immediate confirmation of it, but I was paralysed into speechlessness and all I could do was make a stupid guttural clicking sound.

  “What is it, Adrana?”

  Perhaps she sensed that there was more to my stupefaction than the mere fact of Mister Cuttle’s demise. I turned back, just in time to see the eyeball drop away, much faster than if it had been simply obeying the pull of gravity, or the centripetal illusion that passed for gravity in Wheel Strizzardy. And then it was gone.

  Prozor joined me at the bannister.

  “He might have stumbled, I suppose.”

  “There was something looking at me. A few seconds ago.” I swallowed before I finished what I had to say. “An eye. Just hovering out there.”

  I expected her to question or refute my observation, but all it seemed to do was put a new severity in her face, as if all our troubles had only been a rehearsal until this point.

  “We’d better go and see Mister Cuttle. Have you got a strong stomach for this sort of thing?”

  “I’m learning.”

  It would have taken me as long to make my way down the six remaining flights as it did to wait for the elevator again, but Prozor wanted to get to the lobby sooner than that so she rushed ahead and was kneeling next to the broken Crawly when I came out.

  “I can’t be sure he’s the same one,” she said, lifting back his hood very delicately, so that more of his face was visible. “But I’d stake quoins on it if I were pushed. Cuttle must have been sent here as soon as Sneed reported back to Glimmery about our hotel.”

&n
bsp; It was a very bad thing to have happened. Unlike a monkey, Mister Cuttle was hard on the outside and mostly soft within. The fall had crushed and shattered the outermost parts of him, so that a stew or soup of brackish green had been free to spill and ooze out onto the floor. It was still oozing, and Prozor had to shuffle back in her kneeling position as the vile tide threatened to lap against her shoes. One of Mister Cuttle’s longer appendages, a sort of forearm, had come off completely, and the single hooked digit on the end of that limb was still twitching, tapping against the floor.

  I was struck by two powerful, conflicting emotions. One was the sense of awe that came from being in the presence of a profoundly alien individual, whose life process were entirely distinct from our own. The second was a wrenching sense of empathy, a conviction that no creature deserved a death like this.

  “You were careless,” I said, noting where Prozor had planted a footprint in the middle of the green spillage.

  “It weren’t me,” she answered, standing up, and exhibiting a clean pair of soles.

  We were just around the corner from the concierge desk and it struck me as rather odd that no notice had been taken of recent developments. I moved around into sight of the desk, with its still-glowing flickerbox and the keys and mail pigeonholes behind it. The round-featured clerk was still there, but slumped face-down on a newspaper.

  I went to him and lifted his head slightly. There was drool blotting the newspaper, and some faint animation stirred in the slits of his eyes.

  “Out like a light,” I said to Prozor. “Knocked out by something.”

  A cold draught kissed the back of my neck. I turned around. It was the revolving door, wafting some of the night’s damp into the lobby. Fura was coming through.

  “I thought we agreed to meet at the bar?”

  “We did,” I said, with a terse disregard for her feelings. “Then we ran into the small matter of a dead Crawly.”

  “What?”

  “Mister Cuttle came down from Glimmery’s palace. We think it’s him, anyway. He was sneaking around upstairs when I surprised him. Then … this.” I nodded over to the corpse, which she would have noticed for herself soon enough, since it was in plain sight.

  She stared, the glowy brightening around her eyes and nose as if it were freshly daubed warpaint.

  “What in chaff did you to do him?”

  “She didn’t do anythin’,” Prozor said. “The cove fell, or was pushed, but it weren’t anything Adrana did. Someone else was here, too. Knocked out the knob-faced cove on the front desk, too. Did you see anyone comin’ out, as you were approachin’?”

  “No.”

  Fura joined us at the fallen Crawly. By now two or three other guests had been drawn from their rooms and were looking down from the next landing over the lobby, but it only took a sharp look from Fura to convince them that this was not their problem.

  She examined Cuttle with what I believed was the same comingling of revulsion and pity I had felt. There was a toughness about my sister, and an increasing estrangement, but she was not so far removed from her former self as to be devoid of the kinder sensibilities.

  “This is a very bad business,” she said, in a tone of low, slow reverence. “I like to pick my enemies in my own good time. I wanted to know what they were about, but that doesn’t mean I was in any rush to get on the bad side of the Crawlies.”

  “If he was here on Glimmery’s business,” I said, “then who killed him?”

  “That footprint might be a clue,” Prozor said.

  “The elevator sounded as Mister Cuttle was coming down. I thought it was him, calling it up from the lobby, but now I wonder if it was someone else coming up.” I glanced at Prozor, then back to Fura. “Something else, too, and I’m not sure how it fits. Just after Mister Cuttle fell, there was an eye.”

  “An eye,” Fura echoed.

  “Just floating there, looking at me. And then it went. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like that. Have you?”

  “No … nothing like that.”

  It was either a lie, or a scarcely credible error of recollection. But we must both have seen the entry in Bosa’s private journal where she spoke of giving Lagganvor the gift of an eye, and wishing for it back. I had never heard of an eye such as this, one that could float around on its own, but it seemed unlikely that the two eyes were unrelated.

  My anger swelled, my palms turning slick with sweat and anticipation. Confront her now, I thought, and be done with it. All the lies, all the evasion, out in the open—and let Prozor be the arbitrator. But a shrewder part of me encouraged the anger to dampen down again, and to my quiet satisfaction it obeyed.

  I wished to see how her scheme was going to adapt.

  Fura retraced her steps from the revolving door. Then she knelt down and prodded a patch of stickiness on a white tile. “Whoever stepped in him is long gone. We can guess it was the same person that tipped him off the stairs, if that’s how it happened.” And then, with a firmer emphasis: “I didn’t see anyone. I crossed over between two trams, and came straight in. I was minding where I stepped, not who was coming and going from this flea-pit.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “It’s not as if you’d have anything to cover up, is there?”

  Fura eyed me, but an answer she might have been considering was snatched from her lips by the renewed movement of the revolving door. We all turned, doubtless forming a host of individual theories as to the likely identity of the incoming party. I doubt if any among us imagined that the door was about to divulge two Crawlies, though. They came through via separate partitions, shuffling in their hunch-shouldered fashion, hoods low over the mysteries of their faces.

  “Remain,” said a Crawly’s rustling voice, like a parcel of sticks being rubbed together.

  “We didn’t do this,” I said.

  “Remain. Do not attempt evasion.”

  Something metallic glinted out of a fold in the first Crawly’s hood, clutched in a birdlike talon. The second produced a similar item. I did not need to recognise a weapon to know a weapon, and I raised my hands in slow, unthreatening fashion.

  “Why did you kill Mister Cuttle?”

  “We did not kill him,” I answered, trying to sound firm but rather undermining my efforts with the nervous quaver in my voice. “He came here for some reason, probably on the authority of Mister Glimmery. I was trying to speak to him when he ended up down here.”

  “You are party to a crime against our kind. There will be very serious repercussions.”

  “She didn’t do it,” Prozor said, sighing slightly. “Look at the mess someone left after they stepped in your friend. Someone came here, tripped Cuttle over the bannister, and scarpered fast. You can look at our shoes if you like. You’ll see that the sole patterns don’t match.”

  “The man at the desk is out cold,” I said. “Maybe he saw something before they put him under.”

  “Move away from Mister Cuttle.”

  “Gladly,” Fura mouthed. We stepped aside, backing against the wall with the chairs and the potted plants. The two aliens moved to either side of their fallen associate.

  “A third party was here,” said the second Crawly, bending over the remains of Cuttle, but keeping the hem of its cloak clear of his broken parts and the dark green margin of his inner ichor. “It is likely that the third party was the culpable agent.”

  “But these are not absolved.”

  “No, they are not absolved. But the unconscious one may prove a material witness.”

  They were speaking our language until that point, a queer sort of courtesy, but then they broke into a much more rapid exchange of rustling and snapping sounds, like a bonfire just getting started. It was futile to try and guess which Crawly was speaking and which listening, and if they had been monkeys it would have been a case of each talking rudely over the other, but their faculties of language and comprehension were as different from our own as speech is from the quacking of ducks.

  Something rum ha
ppened then, and it disturbs me even now. The Crawlies began flicking something over the corpse of Mister Cuttle, scattering tiny saltlike grains from somewhere within their gowns. I was touched by it, initially, thinking we were witnessing some tender rite or observance of the dead. Perhaps we were. I have heard it said that birds will scatter flowers on their own deceased, and I am sure there are stranger ceremonies among the many sentient species. But this was like nothing in my narrow experience.

  Mister Cuttle began to give off smoke. It started in two or three places then took a more fervent hold, and within ten or fifteen seconds that smoke was coming out of every part of his corpse, even the pieces that I would testify had never been touched by the saltlike grains. It consumed him totally, and yet there was no smell, no sound, nor any sense of the smoke lingering in the higher spaces of the lobby. It seemed, instead, to disperse into invisibility once it had lifted free of his corpse, and when the smoking was done there was nothing left of the corpse, not even an ashen outline. The black and white floor tiles were exactly as grubby as they had before, neither more nor less, and if there had been a remnant trace of Mister Cuttle’s former existence I do not think it lay within the reach of our forensic science, nor that of any Occupation.

  The first Crawly directed the darkness of its hood in my direction.

  “What is your involvement with Mister Cuttle?”

  “I …” I stammered, finding it hard to think—let alone speak—given what I had just seen. “I only met him today. We all only met him today. He was with Mister Glimmery, up in his gold palace above the infirmary.”

  The second Crawly said: “What is your involvement with Mister Glimmery?”

  “Nothing we chose,” Fura said, snarling out her answer. “We docked. One of our friends is sick, and she needed treatment at the hospital. Glimmery … chaff it, why am I the one being asked? What’s your involvement, exactly, coves?”

  “Our interest is mercantile.”