by Anthony Ryan
His expression darkened into a scowl as he glanced over his shoulder. “Nearly done,” he muttered.
“It was nearly done seven years ago,” Lizanne said, as unable to resist taunting him as ever.
“Change the world it will,” came the growling response. “Plasmothermic-driven carriages are the future.”
“Does the main reservoir still melt every time you activate the flow?”
“No,” came the sullen and defensive reply before he added in a softer tone, “Engine’s still too heavy. Won’t move more than a few yards before the drive-shaft seizes.”
“If only you would allow me to share your designs with my father . . .”
“Miss Lethridge!” Madame Bondersil cut in sharply. “I trust you require no reminder that Mr. Tollermine is under exclusive lifetime contract to the Ironship Trading Syndicate, as indeed are you. Whilst your esteemed father has, in the most intemperate terms, rebuffed every contractual approach made by our company.”
“Quite so, Madame.” Lizanne concealed a smile as they came to the solid oaken work-bench where Jermayah spent the bulk of his time. It was usually piled high with tools and various components but today stood empty but for a leather document case and a polished wooden box perhaps ten inches square.
“You were expecting our visit, I see,” Madame Bondersil observed.
“Knew this one was back today.” Jermayah jerked his head at Lizanne as he approached the box, resting a hand on the lid. “Guessing her mission wasn’t ’specially difficult.”
“A moment, please,” Madame said as Jermayah began to lift the lid. She turned to Lizanne, gesturing at the box. “Tell me what you see.”
Lizanne moved to the box as Jermayah stood back, her practised gaze drinking in every detail in a few seconds. It had been fashioned from redwood, one of the darker varieties, varnished and clearly old. Fine work, she decided, noting the near-invisible joins at the corners. None of Mr. Redsel’s fakery here. Her gaze narrowed a little as it traced over the lid and the intricate gold inlaid letters, an archaic flowing script in a language not spoken in any company holding.
“Corvantine,” she told Madame. “Late Third Imperium. Most likely crafted in the port of Valazin at least a century and a half ago.”
“And the letters?”
“Eutherian, the language only spoken by the elite, or the highly educated.” Lizanne took a moment to formulate a reasonable translation whereupon her gaze snapped to Madame’s, finding it met with calm resolve. Lizanne’s mind immediately returned to the sketch in her office: Madame’s most favoured pupil lost nearly two decades ago in pursuit of the impossible. “Have you brought me here to chase legends, Madame?”
Madame Bondersil gave one of her rare smiles, not just a faint flicker of amusement this time, but an expression of genuine and warm appreciation. “I brought you here,” she said, “so that we might secure the future of our company by making the greatest discovery since civilised people first stepped onto these shores. Open the box, Lizanne.”
She sighed in strained amusement as she lifted the lid and revealed what lay inside. Empty. Of course. “I must say this makes for a poor clue,” she said.
“Look closer,” Madame insisted.
Lizanne did as she was bid, peering at the unvarnished interior of the box, seeing only aged wood for the most part although she did detect some faint marks on the base, jagged circles intersected by narrow lines. “Gears?” she asked Jermayah, who nodded.
“Shadows of gears,” he said. “Someone left the lid open long enough for the sun to leave us an impression.” He undid the binds on the leather document case and extracted a drawing. It had been set down on thin paper and covered near a quarter of the work-bench when unfolded.
“Your work, I assume?” Lizanne asked, eyes tracking over the precise lines and cogs, each numbered and described in Jermayah’s neat script. The mechanics were mostly lost on her. She knew a great deal but the workings of this device were best left to the technologist’s eye. The words, however, were a different matter. “Serphia,” she murmured, reading the note next to one of the smaller cogs before moving on to its slightly larger neighbour. “Morvia.” It took a moment before she found their sister, though it was only partially complete, just twenty degrees of a circle larger still than the other two. “Nelphia.”
She moved back from the bench, frowning as she turned to Jermayah. “The three moons. How can you be sure?”
“Simple arithmetic. The diameter of this one,” he pointed to Nelphia’s cog, “is larger than this one,” he tapped Morvia, “by a factor of 1.214. Which in turn is larger than the diameter of Serphia by a factor of 1.448. An exact correlation to the values of their respective orbits.”
“An orrery,” Lizanne realised.
“Quite so,” Madame Bondersil said. “Though the Corvantines call it a solargraph. A device for precisely measuring the varied orbits of the bodies swirling about our sun, once contained within a box marked with the words ‘The Path to the White Drake.’ I assume you see the import of this?”
Lizanne gently closed the lid and traced her fingers over the letters. “I’m afraid your translation is a little too literal, Madame. The inscription is in fact a quotation from one of the classics of Corvantine literature, a partly comic tome entitled The Many Misadventures of Silona Akiv Cevokas. Cevokas is widely believed to have been inspired by a Corvantine scholar from the Third Imperium, possessed of all manner of wild notions who bankrupted himself with successive expeditions to various corners of the globe until, perhaps inevitably, he was drawn to Arradsia and the fabled, always elusive White Drake. The final chapter sees him succumbing to madness somewhere in the southern highlands, all his companions having died or abandoned him during the journey. He resolves to carve an entire mountain into his own White so it can carry him home. The final paragraph sees him happily chiselling away whilst a White creeps up behind him, though by then he’s too mad to notice.”
“And the inscription?” Madame asked.
“‘’Ware the path of the White Drake,’” Lizanne replied. “Though it’s missing the final line: ‘for madness is its only reward.’ Still a popular saying in some Corvantine circles, mostly heard when one is considering a risky business venture.”
She turned to Jermayah. “I assume you’ve attempted to recreate it?”
He shook his head. “There’s no point. Too many parts missing.”
“May I enquire where this box came from?” she asked Madame.
“Morsvale,” she replied.
The only sizable Corvantine enclave on Arradsia, Lizanne thought, her mind quickly formulating the likely purpose of her mission. “Where you will require me to go in search of the missing contents.”
“Indeed.” Madame spoke in a flat tone, free from any suggestion of flexibility. Whilst Lizanne’s contract allowed some leeway in accepting commissions from senior executives, there were those she couldn’t refuse.
“Well,” she said, “it’s preferable to the alternative. For a moment I harboured the terrible suspicion you were about to order me on some mad Interior excursion.”
“No, that aspect of the mission will be left to more appropriate hands.”
“You intend to send an expedition even though the clue promised by this box has not yet been found?”
“Time is our enemy, Lizanne. Your recent encounter aboard ship underlines the urgency very clearly.”
“And where are they to go? We have no confirmation this thing exists . . .”
“That, as you know, is not true.”
Lizanne suppressed an exasperated sigh. “She died, Madame. I know it pains you to think it, but Ethelynne Drystone perished with the Wittler Expedition.”
“They found no body . . .”
“And only the scattered bones of the others, and no trace of the White skeleton she spoke of.”
Madame paused, glancing at Jermayah. “Could you leave us a moment please, Mr. Tollermine.”
“Stop by again before you leave,” the technologist told Lizanne before disappearing into the shadowed depths of his workshop. “Got new toys for you.”
Madame waited until Jermayah’s footsteps had faded before speaking again. “You never read my full report on the Wittler Expedition, did you?”
“It remains sealed by the Board.”
“They didn’t just find a skeleton. Ethelynne recovered an egg. I saw it clearly through the trance.”
The egg of a White Drake. Undoubtedly the most valuable object in the world, should it actually exist. “The trance can be confusing,” she said. “A lesson you taught me long ago. The trance touches our dreams, our hearts. Sometimes it shows us lies we wish to be true.”
“You think I wanted her to find that thing?” Madame spoke quietly but with a heat Lizanne had rarely heard. “You think I wanted to see her like that, feel her fear, her desperation? She found an egg. The others died, killing each other thanks to some maddening infection released when their harvester powdered one of the White’s bones. But Ethelynne lived, and she took that egg with her.”
“The location of which you expect to be revealed by a Corvantine novelty fashioned more than a hundred years ago?”
“If it leads us to the nesting grounds of the White Drake, it may well lead us to Ethelynne. She was always a very curious soul and, even if the Whites all perished long ago, there is a chance she would seek their place of origin.”
A girl of nineteen, lost and alone in a continent of jungle and desert liberally seeded with wild drakes and Spoiled tribes for nigh-on thirty years. Blood-blessed or not, the odds of her survival seemed astronomical, and yet Madame would not let go her hope. “The Red Sands,” she told Lizanne. “We have contracted a company to journey there and retrieve what evidence remains of the Wittler Expedition. By the time they have done so it is my hope your investigations in Morsvale will have revealed further intelligence to aid their hunt. The box was sold at auction six months ago, purchased by one of our agents, who has not been in contact for the past seven weeks. We have to assume the Cadre knows we are in possession of it. Documents relating to its prior ownership indicate it was owned by one Burgrave Leonis Akiv Artonin, a minor aristocrat with scholarly leanings. He will be your starting point.”
“I assume it is your intention to accompany the expedition and have me relate this intelligence to you via the trance.”
“No.” Madame stood a little straighter, a small twitch of annoyance passing across her face. “That was my original intent, however the Board were swift in forbidding it. Another Blood-blessed will travel with the expedition. You will communicate your findings to them.”
“Given your well-justified concerns about the security of this enterprise it will need to be an unregistered agent, someone as yet unknown to the Cadre and therefore capable of trancing without fear of interception. Employing such a person would be a serious breach of corporate law, not to say extremely hard to find.”
“Since when is the tedium of corporate law of such concern to you, Lizanne?” Madame Bondersil gave another smile, this one much more in character due to its facility for conveying a sense of greatly superior knowledge. “And as to the difficulties of recruitment, I’m happy to report that we found a suitable candidate only last night.”
CHAPTER 5
Clay
He dreamed about the time he’d first found Derk and Joya, two scared kids huddled together amidst the stink and dross of Staker’s Alley. Clay had dropped into the alley from the roof-top, panting a little and clutching a bag of freshly stolen preserves, six full jars of pickled herring and two of plum jam. It was raining that day, as it usually did in late Vorellum. Clay liked the rain; it frustrated any pursuers and made them more likely to give up. The storekeeper had chased him for two streets, blowing hard on his whistle to draw the Protectorate, but the sharp urgent blasts tailed off when he saw Clay scale a wall and skip across the roof-tops into the Blinds. He hadn’t even needed to swallow the drop of Green in his flask.
It was the girl’s eyes that made him pause, so bright in the shadows. Not fearful either, just wide and curious. Her brother was older and smarter, hissing at her to look away. “We didn’t see you,” he promised Clay as he stepped closer. Whilst it was the girl’s eyes that drew his gaze it was the boy’s voice that made him linger. Cultured vowels free of any trace of the Blinds. The kind of voice Clay heard on his infrequent forays into Carvenport’s more salubrious districts.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he had said.
The boy tensed, shuffling forward so his sister was partly shielded, staring up with wary defiance. “And where, sir, should we be, pray tell?”
The sheer incongruity of it all drew a laugh from Clay, one which faded when he saw the hollowness of the girl’s cheeks below her too-bright eyes. “Anywhere but here,” he said, crouching to open the bag. He drew out one of the herring jars and held it out to the boy, who stopped himself snatching it immediately, wariness mingling with hope.
“We have no money,” he said.
“I believe you.” Clay pushed the jar at him and the boy took it, quickly passing it to his sister.
“You read, right?” Clay asked the boy. “Way you talk and all. Gotta know how to read.”
The boy’s head moved in a jerking nod. “I can read.”
Clay smiled. “I can’t. But I’m a fast learner.” He frowned at a sudden tinkling, looking up to see the girl tapping a pin against the glass jar. It was small and silver, one end shaped into a drake’s head, moving with an oddly familiar rhythm. Slow, steady but insistent, growing in volume until it seemed the girl was striking a hammer against a bell. He gave a shout of alarm as the jar came apart in her hand, cutting her flesh, red flashing amidst the explosion of fish and vinegar . . .
He came awake with a gasp, seeing only striped shadows and moonlight on bare stone. His mind raced through recent memory seeking answers. Speeler dying at the wharf . . . The woman, the Ironship Blood-blessed standing atop the chimney . . . Then the fall. After that nothing, just the dream and the sharp, rhythmic tapping which, he realised, still hadn’t stopped. But the sound had changed, no longer the tinkle of metal on glass, now it was metal on metal.
His eyes found the source quickly, making him growl in confusion. Moonlight streamed through a narrow slit in the wall above Clay’s bunk, the drake’s head catching it with every tap of its snout against the bars, not a pin now though. Now it was the ornate silver head of a walking cane. Clay suppressed a groan of realisation and swung his legs off the bunk, sitting up to regard the shadowy figure on the other side of the bars.
The tapping stopped and the figure moved to a stool, sitting down just beyond arm’s reach of the bars. He rested a hand on his cane, long-nailed fingers flexing, and sat in silence for some time. He hadn’t removed his broad-brimmed hat so his face was just a blank void, unseen lips forming a softly spoken question. “Do you know why you are here?”
Clay resisted the impulse to rub at his aching back. He didn’t appear to have suffered any broken bones but from the feel of it he hadn’t had a soft landing either. “Yes, Keyvine,” he replied, eyes scanning the cell for any loose object. A nail, a splinter. Anything that might serve as a weapon. His gaze found a waste bucket next to the bunk, but it was secured to the wall on a short chain. “I know why I’m here.”
“Really?” Like most people Clay had rarely heard Keyvine’s voice, just a snatched word or two over the years. It had always seemed accentless, not cultured like Derk’s, more deliberately anonymous, free of anything that might betray an origin or prior allegiance. It was also dry of any emotion, every word spoken without inflection. Now, however, Clay detected a certain amused lilt to it. “Enlighten me.”
“You’re about to tell me Cralmoor was like a son to you,” Clay sa
id, abandoning his search for a weapon as the cell was clearly too well kept. “Now he can’t talk right, thanks to me.”
“He’ll be talking soon enough. Hefty dose of Green to take care of any infecting humours and an expensive surgeon saw to that. Cralmoor is a valued employee, deserving of my largess. He is not my son. I didn’t take your transgression personally, Mr. Torcreek. I wanted you to know that. However, the nature of our business leaves no room for compromise.”
Clay ground his teeth together, knowing the question was tantamount to begging but he had to know. “Derk and Joya?”
“Ah, yes. The sibling outcasts from the managerial class. I always admired your protective attitude to them, though I’m sure the relationship had mutual benefits.”
They’re my friends. He didn’t say it. The sentiment would mean nothing to Keyvine. “Kept tabs on us, huh?”
“Should a king not know his kingdom? Have a care for all his subjects? I’ve had my kingly eye on you for quite some time. I did briefly consider taking you into my court, but it soon became apparent you had developed far too much ambition. In time you would have been the Zorrin to my Mayberus.”
Clay dimly recalled the reference, a play Derk had quoted from time to time. Mayberus had been some Corvantine emperor from long ago, betrayed by his adopted son Zorrin, an orphan from the peasant caste. A cautionary tale, Derk called it. Those who would rule should not get too close to the ruled.
“You were right,” he told Keyvine, the old jealousy flaring once more though it was soon replaced with something else, guilt and shame burning worse than envy ever had. “It was my scheme,” he said. “They didn’t want to . . .”
“But you made them. How noble. But the transgression is too great, Mr. Torcreek. You knew that, and so did they. You all knew the price should you fail to make the boat to Feros. Which brings us to my original question: do you know why you are here?”
Clay glanced around the cell and the space beyond the bars: a short corridor leading to a solid door, braced in iron. It was all too orderly and well built a place to be one of Keyvine’s dens. “This is a Protectorate cell,” he said. “Guess they got to me before you could. But you knew who to bribe to get in here.”
