The Bone Ship's Wake

by Rj Barker

  “And you,” said Karrad, “you will come gladly too? You do not act like it.” Joron stared at him. More silence. Time tipping by. Joron leaned forward.

  “I have no love for you, Karrad,” he said. “No wish to serve you or to help your cause.” He found he was hissing, his words full of very real venom. Karrad sat back a little. “But I owe all I am to the shipwife, and I have a people. Women and men I care about and I will do whatever is needed to keep them safe. I will be your weapon, knowing all the while Meas and our colony will be your hostage. So no, I do not come gladly. I come because I must, and because duty demands it of me. I make myself your slave for those I love.”

  “So, how do we proceed with this exchange, Twiner?”

  Time was ticking slowly by. Two men, gazes locked until Karrad let out a breath, a sigh.

  “I take it my black fleet patrols the waters to the east of Sankrey Island by now?” Karrad nodded.

  “An attempt to lure my ships out, but I am no fool.” Joron nodded.

  “In Hundred Isles waters there is an place called Kluff Island, not much more than a rock really.” Joron scratched the side of his head. “Take me there; we have someone ready to receive messages. They will take notice to the black fleet of what I wish. That we intend to exchange Meas for the Gullaime, and where to meet us to do it. You may choose where, but it must be out of water you control or my ships will not come.”

  “I could just send a fast ship to this island, take your messenger,” said Karrad.

  “Why risk it? You do not know the codes they will require, and you have Meas as a hostage to my good behaviour. I am not about to leave her behind.”

  Karrad watched him as he sat back. The Kept licked his lips.

  “Gueste!” he shouted. The door opened and Gueste came in, together with Cwell. “Did you hear all of that?” She nodded. “And what do you think?” Gueste walked around the desk, leaving Cwell in the doorway.

  “In his shoes, I would say anything,” she said, “for a chance at escape.” Joron stared at her – Hag, how he hated this woman. “But him,” she pointed at Joron, “all he has done was for her. He came here expecting to die, for her. For their people.” She managed to make the word “people” sound like a curse. Brought a finger to her mouth and bit on her nail. “I think he tells the truth about this island.”

  “You believe he will join us then, to save her?” said Karrad.

  “There is no real way of knowing how far he is prepared to go for her until he is tested.” Then she smiled. Leaned over and whispered something into Karrad’s ear. The Kept glanced at Joron, back to Gueste. Was he worried?

  “Very well,” said Karrad, turning back to Joron. “I will do as you ask, but in turn I have my own conditions, you will be kept under guard.” Joron nodded. “And I know song is part of the raising of these beasts. So when we bring you this gullaime, if you so much as hum without my permission I will have you killed. And then I will have your colony scorched and every woman and man in it I will use in experiments to perfect hiyl poison.” Joron nodded again. “You agree to this?” Another nod. “Good,” he turned from Joron. “Gueste,” he said, “take him away.” Joron stood and Gueste headed for the door.

  “Follow me,” she said and he did. They walked through the bothy, Gueste by his side, Cwell behind them. “I have been talking with your friend, Cwell,” she said as they wove through the building. “My, you must be regretting your treatment of her now, ey?” she laughed. “To make Mulvan Cahanny’s niece your slave and think it would never come back to haunt you.” She stopped by a door guarded by two seaguard, turned to him. “I thought you were cleverer than that, Twiner.”

  “It seemed a good idea at the time,” he said, and he was aware of Cwell behind him. Aware how Gueste’s words could be seen as true. Could he really trust Cwell? What if she simply played her own game? The opportunity to take over her uncle’s organisation must be tempting.

  “Karrad,” said Gueste, “is a clever one, but surprisingly weak sometimes, Joron Twiner.”

  “Do you mean to kill me?” said Joron, and it felt likely. He was glad his voice did not waver. That he showed no fear. She shook her head.

  “No, I see the use in you just as he does. But I meant what I said to Karrad back there. We cannot know how far you will go in service to us until you are truly tested.” She put her hand on the door handle. “And I mean to test you.” She pushed open the door and ushered him in to a small white room and there, bound and kneeling in the centre, was Mevans. “Your man here,” she pointed at him, “he took some subduing.” Mevans looked up, his face bruised with all the colours of a storm-wracked sky at sunset, purple and red and blue. He managed a smile, showing he was missing teeth from his upper and lower jaw.

  “D’keeper,” he said. “Good to see you. I’m afraid I let you down. Karrad escaped. Load of seaguard came from nowhere.”

  “It was not your fault, Mevans,” he said. “Narza betrayed us, probably left her guard conscious outside. They promised her the shipwife in exchange for us.”

  “How did that go for her?” he said.

  “They killed her.” Mevans nodded, as if this was a foregone conclusion. “Cwell turned on me also.” Mevans looked at him, glanced behind him and past Gueste to where Cwell stood, between the two seaguard.

  “Did she so,” he said, and Joron fought down a smile, for he knew from the tone of his voice that the man before him did not believe it for a second and Joron felt bad he had doubted her only a moment ago.

  “Touching as this reunion is,” said Gueste, and he turned to her, “we are here for a reason, Twiner.” She drew her blade and he felt his muscles freeze, waited for the burn of the cut. It did not come. “This man,” she gestured at Mevans, “is a criminal, sentenced to death.” Turning back to Joron, she stared into his eyes. “On the floor before him is your sword. It is precious to you, I understand, and Karrad wanted you to have it back. Now, you can pick up your blade and make some heroic attempt at escape if you wish, Twiner. I will not lie, part of me hopes you do. Or you can prove how far you will go for your shipwife, and put this man, who you have served with for years, to death.” She smiled. “For me.”

  “In cold blood?” he said, for it felt like Gueste had trapped him once more within a nightmare.

  “It’s not like you are a stranger to that, Black Pirate. I have seen the gallows lined up along the shores of the towns you raided.”

  Joron had no answer. He turned, bent down oh-so slowly and picked up the straightsword. Drew the blade, saw the engraving along it. Felt the familiar shape of the hilt in his hand. He swallowed, it felt like too much weight to carry. Took a deep breath. Looked down at Mevans, who lifted his head. Stared straight into his eyes. Joron shifted his grip on the blade. He could take Gueste, he was sure of it. Spin on the spot, take her by surprise. Then there would be the two seaguard.

  As if reading his thoughts, Mevans gave a small, almost imperceptible shake of his head, eyes flicking from Joron to somewhere behind him. Joron turned, just in time to see Cwell, her eyes locked on Mevans, move her hand away from the bone knife she carried.

  “He is my hatkeep,” said Joron. “I trust him. I need him.”

  “Why else would I choose him?” said Gueste quietly, amusement in her voice. “What use a test if it is not… testing?”

  In the back of his mind he heard Meas, and heard her mother, saying: Promise me you will do whatever it takes to get her out. But he could not do this. He could not. Not Mevans.

  Whatever it takes.

  Joron lifted the sword. Put the tip in the hollow of Mevans neck, holding the blade vertically. Held the hilt in both hands so he could thrust it down in a swift and kind killing blow through heart and lungs.

  Mevans’s breath rasping in his lungs.

  Whatever it takes.

  Joron could not do it. He could not do this thing.

  Mevans’s bruised eye opened and he looked Joron in the face. Those eyes. As friendly as always. Br
eath rasping. Mevans forcing words from his cracked and bloodied lips.

  “Only the day is undecided, D’keeper,” he said. Then gave him the smallest smile and the briefest nod of his head. “Do it.”

  Whatever it takes.

  And, with a scream that felt like it ripped out his heart, Joron forced the blade down.

  36

  The Exchange

  They took away Mevans’s body and left Joron in the room, a streak of blood across the floor that he could not take his eyes from. They did not take his sword from him and once he was alone he let it drop from his hand. There it lay in a pool of Mevans’s blood while he crouched in a corner of the room, fighting back the pain and grief that washed over him in waves.

  He felt like he was drowning.

  The door opened. Meas was pushed through, ragged and small, limping. She looked down, her feet were bare and she stood in the pool of Mevans’s blood. When she looked up at him the question was plain on her face but he could not look at her, only bowed his head and stared at the floor.

  “Mevans,” the name said so quietly it barely escaped his lips. “It was the price Gueste asked of me, to prove I would do as they say.” She looked down at the blood. Walked forward and he heard her feet lifting on stone sticky with blood. The pause as she stopped to scoop up his sword. Then she walked toward him and in the edge of his vision he saw her bloody red footprints. He felt her stand by him. Felt her hand on his shoulder, a short squeeze.

  “We leave a trail of blood wherever we go,” she said quietly. “Sometimes it is our own, more often that of others. It is what duty demands of us. Mevans knew that.” He nodded; he knew it also. Not that it made it any easier. Not that it dulled the throbbing pain within him.

  “How could he think I could ever forgive…”

  “Karrad had Gueste to do it for a reason, Joron. No doubt later he will apologise, tell you she acted on her own initiative. He was always manipulative.” He looked up at her. “People like Karrad and my mother, Joron, they are capable of terrible things because they see those they consider below them as pieces to move about in pursuit of their own agenda.”

  “I have also done terrible things,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “You do not.” He could feel it, guilt, choking him. Not just for Mevans. For so many more. For Dinyl, Coughlin, Jennil and every deckchilder who had fallen to blade or shot or simple accident. For all those whose necks he had stretched for being in nothing more than the wrong place at the wrong time. For the hundreds, maybe thousands of innocents in Bernshulme who had fallen to the keyshan’s poison.

  “I do,” she said, “of course I do. My mother told me all you did. All you wrought.”

  “Not done for duty,” he said, “not done for honour. Done from rage, done from fear and because I did not know what else to do.” He found himself looking up at her through a diamond haze of tears. “I just wanted you back, to tell me what to do.”

  “Well, I am here now,” she said, squeezed his shoulder once more.

  “You would not have done the things I did,” he said. “You would have had a plan.” She smiled then.

  “How long have you commanded my fleet, Joron? And yet you still think I always knew what I was doing?”

  “But you…”

  “Ran on hope and improvisation, Joron. On making the most of what I had at any one point.” He stood, looked at her, the eye bandage, the scars, the stooped and pained posture. When she spoke he heard the way her voice had changed, the damage done from screaming while they tortured her. He wondered what damage he could not see.

  “You are Lucky Meas,” he said, “you are the witch of Keelhulme Sounding, the greatest shipwife who ever lived.” She looked back at him, that one eye watery, and he wondered whether she was near to tears also.

  “You have never once asked, Joron Twiner, why they sent me to the black ships.” He moved over to the side, let her sit beside him for it was plain to him that standing was causing her pain. She sighed as she sat. “And I was glad of that. At the start I would never have told you, later I did not want to.” She laughed. “But you, Joron, you hold yourself to a standard too high.”

  “I killed those who did not deserve it,” he said, and the words broke from him, threatening to flood him in tears and when she replied it was his shipwife who spoke, not the woman. Harsh, not to be questioned.

  “You did what you believed was necessary. I will not say I agree with all of it. And you are right to feel guilt for many things, Joron, for a shipwife who does not wear as much guilt as they do trinkets is one who has not learned.” He wanted to interrupt, to tell her she was wrong but dared not. The steel was back in her, even if only for a moment. “And if you do not believe we all do things that we regret then know this. They sent me to the black ships, Joron,” she said, “because I ran away.”

  Silence.

  “Ran?” He did not understand. She nodded.

  “I ran. I turned my ship around and headed in the opposite direction to the enemy.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Denying it, Joron, does not make it less true.” She looked at him, but she was very far away. In another time, another place. “Three Gaunt Island two-ribbers coming back off a raid. Day as clear as you could wish for. We were fresh out of port and had ridden the Eaststorm for a week, all my gullaime fresh and unused. Day couldn’t have been better for us, the positioning neither. They couldn’t escape and I commanded the Hag’s Hunter, the most feared ship in the entire archipelago after the Arakeesian Dread. We had all the advantages.” She licked her lips. Looked away. “I think of that day a lot. I tell myself I looked at my crew, thought of the carnage to come and wanted to save them from it. I tell myself I thought that, even were our action successful, most of the stolen children aboard those Gaunt Island ships would die during it. I have thought, and I have wondered, and I have made a lot of excuses.” Then she looked back, her one eye meeting his two. “But the truth is, Joron, I was scared for myself. Of the pain that I may suffer, of death. I felt that day as if my luck had run out and the Hag sat at my steering oar. So I turned my ship, that great and powerful ship, and I ran away.”

  “Meas…” he said, and she held up a hand.

  “I do not want pity, or understanding.” She stood. “I want you to know that no one is perfect, we are all flawed. I have raided for children, killed more innocents than I can count because they lived on the wrong side of Skearith’s Spine.” She stopped, gathered herself as if she were on the rump of a ship about to take a broadside. “And I have been a coward.” She reached over, put a hand on his shoulder. “I feel shame for it, every day. But not as much shame as I feel for…” Her voice died away. She gathered herself, took a deep breath. “For what I did to you, for telling them about you.”

  “Meas…”

  “No,” she said, “do not try and give me succour. Joron, we cannot change what we have done. Do you understand? We can only try and do what is right as we go forward into the future.”

  “And what is right?” he said. She shrugged.

  “I am not sure I know. But I have had a long time to think. I see what Karrad does, what my mother did, some of what you have done. What I did.” She raised a hand, touched the bandage where they had taken her eye. “And I think on what we do to the gullaime and I know it is wrong. So, Joron Twiner, maybe rather than trying to always do right, we should concentrate on trying not to do what is wrong, for now anyway. Ey?” He nodded.

  “Ey, Shipwife,” he said.

  “Ey indeed.” She leaned back against the wall and Joron moved from his crouch to sitting by her. “I hate waiting. I wish they would hurry up and take us to our ship or do whatever it is they plan. Better to be underway and suffering what is, than worrying about what may be.”

  They waited a long time, sat in silence, waiting for someone to come and get them.

  “He would not let my mother leave?” she said eventually. Part statement, part question.

 
“No,” said Joron.

  “Did you ask?” she said.

  “No.” He knew he could have lied, told her half a truth but she was his shipwife and he would not do that. “Your mother asked me not to, said he would never let her go. Karrad told me as much himself.” Meas seemed to deflate a little. The silence hanging over them. “I am sorry, if I have let you down.”

  “No,” she said with a gentle shake of her head, “you have not. I should not have insisted on it. I realised that the moment you had left.” She shrugged. “My imprisonment here, it has left me confused at times.”

  “No,” said Joron, “she is your mother. No matter what she has done, there is always that.” He smiled. “Never a day goes by without me thinking of my father.” She stared at the floor and nodded.

  “I am jealous of what you had there, you know.”

  “Jealous that I am haunted by his death?” She shook her head.

  “No, jealous of what you had before,” she said. “Of the days you spent flying the water with him on your fisher’s boat. I have rarely heard anyone speak about a time in life that brought them such pure happiness.”

  “It was often hard,” he said.

  “Ey,” she said, “but time wears away at memory, it leaves behind what was important, and you were happy. That is what remains.” She looked at him. “I have few such times to look back on.”

  “You once told me, people like you do not have friends.” She nodded.

  “Ey,” she said, “we do not. It is a lonely life, to rule the rump of a boneship,” and she was about to say more but the door opened. Karrad entered, together with his shipwife Gueste. Both Joron and Meas stood, took two paces forward. Standing in the blood of Mevans as Karrad and Gueste stopped opposite them. For a moment Karrad stood there, looking at them, and Joron saw the shock on his face when he saw Meas, what had been done to her in his name.