Glimmery took the biting stick from the box, looked at Eddralder and nodded once, before ramming the stick between his teeth. His jaw clamped tight with reptilian swiftness, as if driven by some entirely primal reflex.
Eddralder reached into his surgical gown and drew out a black pouch. He set it down on the table and unrolled it from one end to the other. It contained six gold syringes.
The counter-glowy drug, as we had already witnessed, was as cruel as the malady itself. But these agonies of convulsion were temporary, and within perhaps ten or twenty seconds I sensed an easing in Glimmery, a sure indication that the worst was over, at least until the next attack, and the next dose.
But even as Glimmery became more subdued, a secondary wrongness became apparent. He was calmer, and yet his eyes were widening. He still had the stick firmly between his teeth.
Eddralder had his surgical gloves on now. With one hand he pinched down Glimmery’s lower jaw, the action demanding considerable effort on his part, and with the other he extracted the stick and returned it to the box.
“No one should touch it without gloves, and even then the gloves should be disposed of very carefully.” He snapped off his own gloves with practised effortlessness, never touching the fingers with his bare skin, then dropped them into the box. He closed the lid, did up the little clasp, and returned his attention to Glimmery. “I couldn’t get poison into the syringe, not without endangering Merrix. But I was able to coat the string around your stick with a very potent toxin. It will induce a gradual paralysis, eventually extending to your heart.” He indicated the six syringes. “There is, of course, a counter-agent. One of these injections will reverse the effects of the toxin, at least to the point where you are able to make a reasonable recovery. Then you will only have the glowy to concern yourself with. For that, I am afraid, you will need to seek the services of a different physician.”
One of the gowned attendants sprung forward and held a pistol against Eddralder. One of those who was already with Merrix grabbed hold of a clump of her hair and wrenched it back, so savagely that even in the throes of her convulsions she gave a pained gasp.
But Glimmery twitched his head from side to side, his eyes still wide.
“He understands,” Eddralder said, pushing the pistol away. “His life depends on one of those syringes. Here is my promise to you, Glimmery, as your doctor—however temporary that station may now prove. You have about six hours to administer the correct dose. Any longer than that, and you will either be dead or too far-gone for the counter-agent to have any useful effect. Too far-gone, Far-Gone. How do you like that?” Eddralder was standing now. “You will allow the Ness sisters, their companions, their injured friend, and Merrix and I, free and unobstructed passage to the port. You will assist them in any way they request, and we will depart. Once we are in clear space, I will tell you which syringe to use. You are, of course, free to take your chances at any point. Perhaps you will think the odds short enough to risk a random selection. That will be your choice. I will merely leave it to your imagination as to the effect any of the other five syringes would have on you.”
Although the paralysing toxin was clearly taking its toll, Glimmery found the strength to speak, albeit only a single word.
“You …”
“I would save your energies if I were you,” Eddralder said, not without a certain physicianly kindness. “You’re going to need them. Now, in addition to my earlier stipulations, the following arrangements will be made without obstruction. I will remove a quantity of medicines from the infirmary—just enough for our immediate purposes. The Ness sisters will be given sufficient vacuum gear for the entire party, including Merrix and Strambli. There will be no trickery, and no duplicity. It is in your very best interests to ensure that we have a frictionless departure, because the sooner we are safe the sooner I can transmit the information your life depends on. Is that fully understood?”
By some heroic means Glimmery managed a nod.
“Very good,” Eddralder said. “I think we have an understanding.” Then, to Fura: “Do we still have an arrangement, Captain?”
His question must have taken Fura off her guard, but she held her composure very creditably. “Whatever … has been agreed, Doctor.”
She directed a sharp questioning glance in my direction, but it was there and gone in a blink and I do not think any other soul noticed it.
“Good,” Eddralder said. “Then let us begin. Mister Glimmery will thank us for not delaying a moment longer than necessary.”
Mister Glimmery looked at us with wide and terrified eyes. Already I fancied that his lips were turning a little bluer, as he found it more of a struggle to breathe. I should imagine that there were a number of things he wished to say to us at that point.
“One in six,” I said, nodding at the syringes. “If it were the other way around, I don’t think I’d hesitate.”
20
Glimmery’s people were reluctantly cooperative. Doctor Eddralder was permitted to stock a small portable medicine chest, which he stuffed to the limits of its capacity, while Prozor and Fura made sure that we all had the necessary vacuum gear to make the short crossing to the launch. This was more easily achieved than I had expected, although it took a few minutes for the desired elements to be brought to the infirmary. Glimmery must have kept a supply of suit parts in his palace, just in case he and his associates had an urgent need to cross vacuum. Then we were left unmolested as we completed our preparations. Glimmery’s thugs stood around us with pistols and blades, only a twitch away from using them, but Doctor Eddralder’s gambit had dropped a curtain of invincibility around us that was as impervious as any bauble field. If hate could have been bottled, though, we could have set ourselves up with a lifetime’s supply. I have rarely felt as loathed as in those final minutes.
Doctor Eddralder tried to give some comfort and reassurance to Merrix as she was put into a suit, and he was able to administer an injection that offset some of the effects of the previous dose, but she was still confused and somnambulant. There was a listless absence of focus in her eyes, as if her mind and body were greatly displaced from each other. I felt for her, and could hardly bear to imagine the torments she had been put through, but I reserved judgement as to how much of a soul remained behind that brow even as I vowed that we would do our level best for her. We could promise no comforts on Revenger, and no great prospect of continued security, but even the worst of our days would be an improvement on her life under Glimmery.
So I told myself, and in those moments I managed to believe it, too.
Then there was the matter of Strambli. She was conscious, but also confused, and there was clearly no prospect of getting her into a suit. Her wound was still heavily padded and bandaged, and she could not have walked in any case. So—after quick consultation with Eddralder—it was agreed that she would leave the same way she had arrived, in the cargo chest. I whispered a few words of comfort to her as we lowered her into the chest, leaving the lid off for the time being. I did not wish her to think she was being stashed in a coffin.
Lagganvor had Surt’s suit on, and it was too much trouble to swap them now. So Surt and Prozor made do with the parts that came down from the palace, while Fura and I scrabbled around for helmets that would fit well enough to get us to the launch. Our last demand was to be given back our own weapons, as well as some extra ones by way of insurance. Glimmery, by then, was incapable of offering a verbal response, but he still had enough residual movement to signal his angered, impotent compliance. He was in a pitiable condition, and I wondered if that six-hour estimate had been overly optimistic. But I supposed there were many stations on the way to the final state, including deeper and deeper degrees of immobility and unconsciousness, and I assumed that Eddralder had taken each of those stages into full account. Glimmery did not need to be the one who injected himself, after all.
When we were set to leave, which could not have been more than thirty minutes after Glimmery had clamped h
is teeth onto the biting stick, Fura and I went back to him. He was still in his chair, almost jammed into it, his swelling muscles locking into rigidity. His underlings were fussing around him to the limit of their abilities. Short of taking pot-luck with the six syringes, though, there was nothing they could do to lessen his discomfort.
Fura brought her face level with his own.
“All we wanted to do was heal Strambli. Granted, I had some business of my own with Lagganvor, but that never needed to be your business. And now look at you.”
Glimmery tried to speak, but all that came out of him was a hollow gurgling. Fura used the back of her glove to wipe the spittle from his lips, as sweetly as a mother tending an infant.
“Just think how much better it would have been,” she went on, “if you’d let us come and go. There’s lesson for you there, I think. You got on the wrong side of us; you over-reached yourself.” Then she paused, pushing herself up, directing a glance at me. “We won’t meet again, so let this be a parting. I am Arafura Ness. I took down Bosa Sennen, and I took her ship, but that does not mean that I have become the thing that she was. I never desired to take her name, or to adopt her ways. And I won’t. I’m going to be much too busy for that.” She smiled down at him. “Yet I must admit to a certain dark admiration for one of her traits. In the midst of her madness she was always prepared to take the necessary action. As am I, if my existence depends on it. You made a very grave error in presuming to think you could better us.”
“Goodbye, Mister Glimmery,” I said.
We wheeled Strambli to the elevator, Lagganvor and Eddralder helping Merrix, while Surt and Prozor deterred any advances against our party with vigorous jabs of their pistols and blades. The elevator took us down to the lowest level of the infirmary, from where we had a clear passage to the rope-bridge that led down to the fixed surface of Port Endless. We were never more exposed than in the long, difficult minutes it took to get Strambli to the base of that ladder. The same detachment of thugs waited at the bottom, and I wondered if we might have trouble from them. But word had clearly been sent down. They stood back, flanking our exit from the bridge, but not impeding it.
“Better pray he lasts until you’re on that ship,” said the frog-chinned one. “’Cause if he dies, I wouldn’t give any of you five seconds.”
“He will make the six hours,” Eddralder said, pausing to snap open his umbrella. “I am very rarely wrong in calculating my dosages, and I took particular pains in this instance. He can expect the necessary information as soon as Captain Ness deems us safe from any reprisal. Now, would you gentlemen be so kind as to escort us to the dock?”
“Move aside!” a voice called. “Wounded party coming through!”
They were coming up the muddy rise to the ground under the infirmary. It was a huddle of figures, some in vacuum suits and some not, some walking alone, some being assisted, and some leaning hard into trolleys bearing blanketed forms. The rain made glossy statues of their suits, curtaining off capes and hoods and the improvised protection they had rigged over the trolleys. The trolley-pushers were slipping on the greasy ground. Bringing up the rear, crouching into the steepening incline, were two hooded forms who moved with a familiar shuffling gait.
We slowed. Fura and I, who had been flanking Strambli’s trolley, advanced across the treacherous ground until we had halved the distance to Captain Restral’s group. I needed no confirmation that it was them.
“Halt where you are,” said one of the walking wounded, speaking with a commanding but broken voice, as of some capable man who had been brought to his limits. “We know who you are. You’ll surrender to us immediately.”
He was at least as tall as Eddralder, and he wore a vacuum suit up to the neck, but no helmet. He was, I should estimate, sixty-five or seventy years old, with what had once been fine, aristocratic features, but which now looked sunken-cheeked and desperate, with a high mottled forehead and a wild white sweep of dishevelled hair. He had a long-barrelled pistol aimed at us in his right hand, and his left hand was not there at all, the sleeve of his suit ending in a crudely-welded stump, a lathering of metal that was too shiny and fresh to be anything but recent work.
“Captain Restral, I presume?” Fura asked. “I heard you were injured, sir.”
“Surrender,” the man said, his pistol wavering from one of us to the other. “Which of you is Adrana Ness? Which is the other?”
“I am Adrana,” I said. “And I’m very sorry for your injury, Captain Restral. But we won’t be surrendering.” I cocked my head at the men at the base of the rope-bridge. “Tell them!”
Frog-chin cupped his hands to his mouth, bellowing above the sound of the rain. “They’re under Mister Glimmery’s protection. They’re not to be delayed on their way to port. The tall one, Doc Eddralder, spiked some poison into Glimmery and if he don’t make it to space, he won’t say how we undo the poison.”
The man listened to this, rain streaking down his face, gluing his hair to his scalp in ropy strands. He reached up with his silver-capped stump, as if he wished to wipe the rain from his eyes but had forgotten his deficit.
“Is this true, Doctor?”
“Yes, and I’ll be true to my word. But we must have passage. I am sorry for your wounded—sorry also that I will not be able to attend to them. But they will be treated to the best of the infirmary’s capabilities.”
A much younger man stepped out of the party. He was uninjured, so far as I could judge, and had been assisting the others. He was a little shorter than me, and in place of a vacuum suit he wore ordinary shipboard clothes, trousers, tunic and lace-up boots, all now muddy and rain-sodden, as if he had slipped several times between here and the port.
“Adrana Ness?” he asked, meeting my gaze. “I am Chasco. I said I would be glad to make your acquaintance, and now I am glad to be able to address you face to face. I hope you and your sister burn for what you’ve done.”
I could not say with confidence if he was younger or older than me, but I doubt very much that our ages differed by more than three years, for his face was unlined and boyish, even as I saw in it the evident strains of recent experience. I would not say that he was handsome, not by the common criteria, but there was some pleasing aspect to his features, a humility and openness that under other circumstances—any but these—might have made me think well of him, even as I chided myself for being taken in by such disarming superficiality.
“Chasco,” I said, trying to project my entire being into my voice and expression. “We did not intend this. It was a mistake—an innocent error. You must believe me.”
“I would like to,” he said, looking into my face. “You almost seem to believe it yourself.”
“I swear to you, we thought we were firing away from the White Widow. We only meant to take out your peripheral rigging. We never meant to strike the Calenture. We had no idea she was there.”
“If you had struck with grape-shot, I might accept that. But those were hull-penetrating slugs. They have only one function, which is to mutilate and murder. It was a deliberate, cold-blooded retaliation—cruelly disproportionate to the minor damage we inflicted on you.”
“I am sorry for Captain Restral,” I said nodding at the taller man. “Truly I am, and for your other wounded. But an injury like that …” I stumbled on my words, not wanting to cause more offence than had already been committed. “Accidents happen in space, Chasco, even to the best of us.”
“That is not Captain Restral,” Chasco said mildly.
“I was told he had survived.”
“He did. Shall I show you? This is Mister Trensler, our senior navigator and master of sail. He lost part of his arm, but as you say—accidents happen in space. Captain Restral is over here.”
I should not have let him lead me to the trolley, but I did. There was an awning worked up over it, a sheet of canvas supported by four upright rods, and beneath the awning was a blanketed form, covered in its entirety. I had not given it more than a glancing consi
deration until that point, but now that it was the sole object of my attention I grasped that there was not enough beneath the blanket to be the whole of a man. There was too much missing, the blanket sagging to the platform of the trolley where it ought to have followed the contours of a body. And yet there was a body there, and by the care being given to it, it could not be a corpse.
“Show her,” said a stocky, gruff-voiced man, who had a week’s growth of beard and a bandage wrapped around his scalp.
“She’s seen enough to understand,” Chasco said.
“Show her anyway.”
Chasco reached to the near end of the trolley and with immense care peeled the blanket away from the head of the form below it. Captain Restral was there, and by some terrible mercy he was unconscious. He had been burned, and what I saw was testament enough to the severity of his injuries. I was spared the worst of it, though, because a close-fitting mask covered the entire lower part of his face, from the nose down. By some quirk of preservation his eyes were undamaged, and with his eyelids closed I might almost have said that he looked restful.
“Whether you believe me or not, Chasco,” I said. “Tell him that we are not the crew he sought, and that this was an accident.”
“I will relay your statement,” Chasco said, beginning to lower the blanket back down onto Captain Restral.
He was not quite fast enough, or I was not quite fast enough in averting my gaze. Restral opened his eyes. There was a moment in which he regarded me with a soft absence of concern, as in our first waking moments. He seemed neither to recognise nor hate me. Then his eyes narrowed, as if a troubling thought had made its first foray into his consciousness. His eyes widened again, and he tried to squirm, and beneath the mask I believe that he was screaming a soundless proclamation of fury and agony.
I pulled away. The ground was treacherous under me and I slipped into the mud, my pistol spilling out of my hand. My knees and palms hit the filth and the rain shocked the back of my neck. Chasco stepped forward and placed his heel on the volition pistol, squashing it into the mud. Then he reached down and wrenched me to my feet, my hand in his, my dirt adding to his already dirtied palm.
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