“If it was an error,” he said quietly, “then I trust that the processes of justice will treat you fairly. But I would not count on clemency. I should run, and keep running, and not look back. Is that your intention now?”
“You have us wrong,” I said, breathless after my fall. “You have me wrong, Chasco.”
Eddralder came and sheltered me beneath his umbrella. He placed his free hand on my shoulder. “We should not detain these deserving cases a moment longer, Adrana.”
“You side with them?” Chasco asked.
“My situation here was not one I wished to prolong.”
“Then pray that they don’t ask too many questions about your association with Glimmery,” Chasco said. “I know, Doctor Eddralder. We had ample time to prepare for our arrival, and that included learning all about you.”
His words troubled me, but I refused to be drawn into delaying gambits.
“We should go.”
Chasco turned to watch as our party passed the much larger one from the White Widow, but there was nothing more to be said between us. Or rather, there were a thousand protestations I might have uttered, a thousand cases for our defence, a thousand pleas for understanding, but none of them would have made the slightest difference to Chasco, nor, I think, to any member of that party. Our reputations might as well have been carved into the rock of a bauble and sealed over with a field, for all that our actions mattered. Bosa was laughing at us, I thought, mocking our audacity and foolishness in thinking we could take her ship and that no other part of her would come in the same bargain. Whatever we said or did now, it would be regarded as just another of Bosa’s stratagems, fully in keeping with her many lifetimes of subterfuge and trickery.
Then came a voice like dry twigs rustling: “Miss Arafura Ness, Miss Adrana Ness.”
It was one of the Crawlies bringing up the rear of the group. They turned to us, rain puddling on their cloaks, only a hint of quick bristling mouthparts and sensory appendages moving within the cavelike darkness of their hoods.
“Mister Scrabble, Mister Fiddle,” Fura said, for it was clear these were the same aliens who had tended the corpse of Mister Cuttle. “May we extend our sympathies on your loss, before we depart? You know that it was Mister Sneed’s doing, not ours?”
“You are absolved of the crime itself,” said the Crawly on the left. “But you were the instigators of the events which precipitated it.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “We didn’t ask Cuttle to turn against Glimmery.”
“It would not have happened without your presence,” said the other Crawly.
“I killed Sneed,” I said, picking a strand of mud-smeared hair off my face. “You know that, don’t you? I killed the man who killed your friend … associate … however you want to think of him. That makes us square.”
“Sneed was an instrument,” said the first one. “What of the man who directed him?”
Fura cocked her head. “He’s up there. You can go and see him if you wish. Don’t expect to get too much out of him right now, though.”
“Wait,” I said, with a sudden lurching intuition. “You can’t kill him, if that’s your plan. Not until we reach clear space.”
“Arafura Ness. Adrana Ness.”
“Yes?” Fura answered.
“This man with you. Lagganvor.”
Lagganvor stepped forward. He had his helmet cradled in his arm, ready to drop it over the neck ring of his suit, but for now his head was uncovered, his long hair rain-plastered to his scalp.
“Let ’em go, Mister Scrabble,” he said, directing his words at the first Crawly. “And don’t lay a feeler on Glimmery until these folk have reached their sunjammer and started making headway.”
“You have information,” said Mister Fiddle. “Knowledge obtained by Bosa Sennen.”
“Knowledge which could be highly detrimental to economic stability,” Mister Scrabble said.
“Perhaps I do,” Lagganvor said, the shoulders of his suit moving in an easy-going shrug. “I really don’t know. She didn’t tell me everything, you know. Maybe I know about some quoins, maybe I don’t.” He shot an apologetic look at Fura, which she met with a frown. “I know you’d like to silence me, coves. Shoot me down here, or however you’d do it. But you can’t. Much as it grieves you, you still have to operate within the constraints of common law and order, even in a place like this, and especially in the presence of so many honest witnesses in Captain Restral’s good people. So you’ll have to let me go, just as you have to allow Fura and Adrana to go.”
“If we might proceed …” Eddralder insisted.
“Captain Ness,” Mister Scrabble said, directing his words very pointedly at Fura. “You may depart. But you will cease your investigations into The Miser. They will only bring you trouble.”
Fura was silent, but after an interval she nodded and said: “There’s been enough trouble, Mister Scrabble. I want no further part in it.”
“Then we wish you good voyaging.”
That was the last we saw of the aliens, or Captain Restral’s party, or the infirmary. Eddralder hastened us on, and although I believed that he had calculated the toxin dose as accurately as was possible, I also believe he was anxious not to put those calculations to too stringent a test. As we were forced into a thicket of alleys, Lagganvor took out his eye and sent it scouting ahead of us, making sure there were no ill-advised ambushes. He knew those backstreets very well, leading us through with unerring confidence, as if he had plotted and memorised every possible escape route, identifying short-cuts, dead-ends and likely points of concealment. We had made several turns when he paused, held up his hand, and waited for the eye to spring back into his palm. He whispered another command and sent it on ahead of us, winging high over the dividing walls and rooftops of the alley. Once, I saw a hard blue flash and a dog went yelping away from us, its hide singed.
“Can it kill?” I asked him.
“Only if killing is warranted,” Lagganvor said, turning back. “Most of the time it serves as a passive observer or tracker. It can see under most conditions, and transmit the information across at least half a league, even when underground or in a built-up area. Simply knowing what is ahead or behind me is often enough of a boon to render force unnecessary.”
“I’m surprised Bosa let you have such a toy, if there was a chance of you turning it against her.”
“She had no reason to question my loyalty. Besides, the eye was very useful to her. You can imagine how it helped us, during bauble raids—we could send it through any little mousehole, and it never stopped working.”
I nodded, thinking of the advantage that eye should have given him when he entered Fura’s room, or how he could so easily have turned the tables on us when I shot him through the wall. Perhaps he had not been expecting the ambush, and was taken by surprise before he had a chance to deploy the eye. With Fura pressing that Ghostie knife to his throat, I could understand any willingness not to take a chance.
All the same, there was a small, quiet doubt in my mind.
21
We reached the port without difficulty, and completed the crossing to our launch. Given more time, I suppose it might have crossed Glimmery’s mind to sabotage it, or drain its fuel tanks, but he had been planning to take both us and Revenger, and any action against our launch, besides being clumsily provocative, might have caused the larger ship to slink away uncaptured. Glimmery was not to know that she was short-handed, or that Tindouf and Paladin would be hard-pushed to sail her without assistance.
Although we had one injured party, and no more fuel to splash around than when we had left the Rumbler, Fura was not sparing with the rockets. She poured them on hard, rivets and hull plates groaning under the strain and Wheel Strizzardy falling away behind us with indecent speed. For those of us accustomed to being thrown around in a metal coffin, it was testing enough. There was barely time to lash ourselves down, and we would all sport a fresh catalogue of bruises by morning. For Doctor Edd
ralder and Merrix, who were not seasoned space travellers, it was a special kind of discomfort. Even Lagganvor had been world-bound for long enough to have forgotten the questionable pleasures of rocket navigation, with bouts of hard thrust and stomach-loosening weightlessness juxtaposed like a perfect form of torture. Yet still, we were away from Glimmery, and I would have considered any sort of unpleasantness to be fair exchange for that freedom.
“Paladin,” Fura said, flicking open the ship-to-ship squawk channel. “Do you have us on the sweep?”
The robot’s deep voice came over the general speaker. “I have you, Captain Marance. Mister Tindouf has already been notified of your imminent return, and has taken this as an indication to make ready for all ions and sail. Is there anything else you wish me to tell him?”
“No, Paladin, that’s good enough for the moment. You don’t need to call me Captain Marance any longer, either. Captain Ness is all …” She paused, catching herself, and glancing around just enough to meet my eyes, before averting her own. “We’ll return to the old arrangement, Paladin—for the time being.”
“Very well, Miss Arafura.”
I loosened my buckle so that I might lean closer to the console grille. “Paladin—this is Adrana. We don’t expect to be pursued for a few hours, but I want to make sure that the White Widow doesn’t get any silly ideas about coming after the Dame … I mean Revenger, once we’re under sail.” I gave a shudder, smiling at my error. “Just a slip.”
“What else?” Fura asked.
“I have computed the possibilities, Miss Adrana,” Paladin said, “and the situation is entirely in our favour. The other vessel is far too damaged to attempt pursuit. Even if that were not the case, and she had the full benefit of her sails and ions, she would have no hope of engaging us.”
“Be sure that remains the case,” I said. “And don’t stop sweeping nearby space just in case any other foolhardy souls try for a piece of us.”
“They won’t,” Lagganvor said, strapped in just behind me. “By now everyone within a thousand leagues of Wheel Strizzardy will know about the doctor’s little ploy with those syringes.”
“I should think there are plenty who wouldn’t mind seeing Glimmery dead,” I replied.
“No shortage, certainly. But Glimmery has an organisation around him, and it won’t simply collapse the moment he dies. The head of a snake can still deliver a venomous bite, even after it has been decapitated. His enemies will be mindful of the consequences of turning against him. Besides, he has a one-in-six chance of survival, which would not seem such terrible odds if he or his people knew there was no hope of hearing from Doctor Eddralder. It was very well done, Doctor. I congratulate you.”
“I would have done it sooner, if I’d had a means of escape,” Eddralder said, with a nod in my direction. “For Merrix, if not for myself. The toxin itself was not difficult to formulate, for a man in my position.”
“It was a strange thing that man said, before we left Captain Restral’s party,” Lagganvor said.
“You mean Chasco, the Bone Reader?” I asked, contorting myself to face Lagganvor and Doctor Eddralder, who were sitting on opposite sides of the launch’s aisle. “I wouldn’t pay much heed to anything that came out of him. He was full of spite. You saw the way he made up his mind about me.”
“And yet …” Lagganvor said, but then he shook his head, smiling as if he had something very concrete on his mind, but was content to let it go for now. “You are right, Adrana. We shouldn’t read too much into baseless accusations.”
At last Fura dampened the rockets, saving what little fuel remained in our tanks for the final docking with Revenger. “Thirty minutes,” she said.
“We are safe now?” Eddralder asked.
Fura adjusted a gyroscope setting. “I wouldn’t say we’re safe until we’ve put about fifty million leagues between ourselves and this place.”
“By my estimate ninety minutes have passed since Glimmery bit into the toxin. He still has a reasonable margin of error, but I should not like to put too much faith in that. With your permission, might I squawk the infirmary?”
“Not now.”
“I must insist.”
“You’ll insist on nothing. Let him sweat a little longer, then you can send the word.”
“I admire your resolve, Captain Ness. But please do not put me in the position of breaking my own promise. I will remind you of it shortly.” Doctor Eddralder reached forward to place a consoling hand on his daughter. “It’s all right, Merrix. It will be better now. We can help these people.”
“Lagganvor,” I said, drawing breath. “You never did tell us how you managed to slip out from under Bosa’s influence. We have a little time now, so why don’t you explain how you managed what no one else could achieve.”
Fura gave me a sharp look, as if to say that by questioning some aspect of Lagganvor’s account I was doubting some fundamental part of her own judgement as well.
“There’s no mystery,” Lagganvor said, after the briefest of intervals. “I’ll gladly tell you the bones of it now. You’ll have questions, too, and I expect them. What do you really know of me, after all?”
“Not much,” I said.
“But more by the hour, I hope, until we have the basis of trust. I think it will come a lot more readily when we are on the ship. Then you will understand that my fingerprints are already all over it. I know the Nightjammer very well—better, I might warrant, than some of you. I was on it for years.”
“Then how did you escape her?” Prozor called, from one of the aft seats.
“Because I could. Bosa had always depended on occasional business with the outlying worlds, much as she’d rather have done without them. There’s only so much you can scrape from baubles and by plundering other ships. You know this already, I imagine.”
“We manage,” Surt said.
“Nonetheless, you operate under similar constraints. Bosa has—had—always depended on agents like myself to go where she could not, buying and selling according to her needs. She would rather not have relied on such arrangements, but she had no choice.”
“She bent her crew to her will,” I said. “How were you immune?”
“You’re right about the crew. Truth is, they loved her as much as they feared her. But the methods she used were never applicable to the agents she had to send out into the worlds. We had to be more independent, more free-willed, or we couldn’t do our work. It was a narrow line she had to walk. It was the same with her Sympathetics, but at least she could keep them on a close leash, inside the ship. Not so us. When she stuffed our pockets with quoins and sent us out, there was always a chance we’d turn against her.”
“She’d never have put up with that,” Prozor said.
“She had no option,” Lagganvor snapped, almost losing his temper. “It was deal with the worlds or die, and we were her only tools. She kept us in line with the minimum of conditioning, some handsome rewards, and even more handsome punishments if we let her down.”
“Rewards?” I asked.
“I was treated like a king on board that ship. My own quarters, a double share of the prize money, crew to boss around, and the close ear of the captain when she felt the need for advice. It was a good life, allowing for the fact that I was an outlaw, under the thumb of a tyrant with a very short fuse. Still, I didn’t cross her—not once. Played my part well, and never gave her cause to doubt my attachment.” He paused. “She had the use of a physician. Cowed and brow-beaten like the rest of them, but he’d made a mistake with one of his dosages, and killed the Master of Ions.” He smiled at the physician. “Not as thorough with his calculations as Doctor Eddralder, you see.”
Eddralder watched him wordlessly.
Lagganvor continued: “Bosa didn’t know. But I did. I’d seen him being sloppy with his dosages before. So we came to an arrangement, this gentleman and I. I wouldn’t inform on him to Bosa, and in return, he’d slip me a counter-agent. Just a little tincture, a drop a day, just
enough to take another edge off her conditioning. Got me back a little more of my free will, enough to see that I didn’t have any sort of future on that ship. Sooner or later I was bound to end up on the wrong side of her. Rather than wait for that, sitting on my useless fortune, I decided to jump ship.”
“At Wheel Strizzardy?” I asked, thinking of what I knew from the private journals, and that I might catch him out.
“No,” he said. “Ten worlds from here. I could never have lost her in a place like this. I chose my moment carefully, picking a time when she had to sail away urgently or risk being found, so didn’t have the opportunity to come after me directly. I waited until it was safe to move, then bought passage. Skipped from world to world, always looking over my shoulder, always knowing she was out there somewhere, and that she wouldn’t let such an indiscretion go unpunished. But it seems, at least for a while, that she had other distractions …”
“Why’d you stay here, so close to the Emptyside?” Surt asked.
“I was playing a game of stepping stones, and I hopped to a stone too far—a world from which there was no easy escape. Far fewer ships pass this way than I expected, and even fewer allow passage to the Sunwards, or anywhere near. You would think a man of means would have no difficulty in paying his way. But I was bound by the need for discretion. All this while, as the weeks turned into months, I had been greeting each day as if it might be my last, certain that Bosa had identified my whereabouts and was coming for me. Or, if not Bosa, then the agents of the banking concerns and the merchant combines, determined to hunt her down once and for all—the very men who sponsored poor Captain Restral and his companions. I watched the skies very carefully, and paid great heed to all incoming vessels … with particular interest in those of doubtful provenance, arriving from the Empty.”
“You thought your last day had come,” I said.
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