Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  Then the ship gave another almighty lurch. Screams came distantly from deeper in the ship. A bare-chested scarecrow of a figure – all staring eyes white in a coal-blackened face – scrambled up a set of steps from further down.

  ‘Sir, it’s pulled off the main prop shaft!’ he panted, too terrified to notice that his boss was otherwise occupied. ‘It’s peeling us open like a bloody baked bean tin!’ Without waiting for a reply he scrambled past them and outside.

  The stoker turned back to Bobby, hesitant. Bobby had got to his knees, having recovered his breath somewhat, and he glared at the other man. ‘You know what I am,’ he said, trying to sound as menacing and mysterious as he could. ‘You know what I can do. Run, and I’ll let you live.’

  For a moment, it seemed that the stoker was going to brain him anyway, but the ship gave another shudder, this time accompanied by the tortured howl of steel plating being twisted. The stoker spat at him, dropped the shovel, and fled.

  Bobby was left alone in a room full of pipes, levers, greased brass pistons, and a bank of dials behind thick glass with their needles all trembling in the red. This was probably not a good sign. If the captain had ordered any amount of speed and, as it sounded like, the drive assembly was in the process of being shredded, Lord knew what that would be doing to the boilers.

  He began searching for something to cut his hands free, but the blade of the shovel was all he could find. He kicked it around and started sawing through the cord binding his wrists together with its dull edge. As he sawed, he became aware that the floor was now very definitely sloping. They were taking on water. Never mind the danger of getting shot or eaten – if seawater flooded the boilers, the whole ship would go sky-high. Not if, he corrected himself. When.

  He sawed faster, trying to ignore the screams and sounds of destruction from below.

  The light from the doorway was blotted out.

  ‘You bastard son of a whore,’ spat Berylin. ‘You’ve killed us all.’

  4

  The araka clung to the underside of the Spinner like a lamprey, peeling apart her hull plates with its long hunting limbs to get at the struggling morsels of terror inside. It had never felt stronger, nor more aware. As a creature of neither world, but rather the dreaming space between, its entrapment here by the witch-girl Sophie had been, ironically enough, like a nightmare. But the blood of the man Bobby, from there, had given it awareness, and the blood of the people from here had given it strength, and it devoured their souls with just as much delight as it shredded their pitifully frail bodies in the glorious singing light of I am.

  5

  She swayed in the doorway, a gun pointed at him. Not that freakish zap-gun, he noted, but this looked just as lethal. Water slopped over her boots, coming in through the door. The deck must be at sea level. Jesus, we’re going down fast, he thought. He strained until his shoulders felt like they were twisting free from their sockets, but it did no good. That sort of thing might work in the Saturday morning serials or pulp adventures like A Tender Death, he told himself, but in real life rope simply didn’t break like that.

  ‘You should have left us alone,’ he said, desperate to delay her, even by moments. ‘I warned you, back on Danae.’

  Her grin was ghastly, a bare rictus in a face drawn tight with madness. ‘Yes. You did, didn’t you? I suppose this is all my fault, really, isn’t it? Time to put that right, then.’

  She stepped into the room, wanting to be as close to him as possible when she did it, so that she could properly see that infuriating smirk leave his face when she put a bullet point-blank in his brain. When he suddenly charged at her she was more than ready, sidestepping around him easily as he crashed into the stairs where she’d been standing a moment before. She kicked him savagely in the back of one knee and was rewarded by his grunt of pain.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You only get to do that to me once. You’re quite the bruiser, Mr Jenkins, but you have no finesse.’

  He came up with the shovel in his hands. He was exhausted, dazed, and it felt like a lead weight as he waved it at her, but at least it was something. ‘Just… why?’ he said. ‘That’s all. Why?’

  ‘Why? Because you exist, that’s why. Isn’t that enough?’ She was standing with her back to the stairs which led down into the boiler room; it was full of the sound of rushing water and large objects being tossed around. She raised her pistol, and he got ready to make one last doomed lunge at her when they both noticed something like a thick belt – dark and muscular – which had suddenly appeared around her waist. She looked down at it, at first in confusion, then dawning horror, and back up at him.

  ‘Help me,’ she whispered. For a fleeting moment, he even considered trying.

  Abruptly, her clothing below where the tentacle gripped her turned red. She shrieked in agony, and with a sudden neck-snapping jerk, she was gone.

  Outside, the ship’s stern was completely submerged, and her prow pointed high in the air. It made things easier for him, since all he had to do was fall into the water and kick clumsily away as hard as he could. That was where easy stopped; he could just about keep his head above water, but without the use of his arms he couldn’t make any real progress. Stray was only several hundred yards away, but it might as well have been on the other side of the world. He thrashed, suddenly furious at the unfairness of it all – at everyone and everything that had conspired to lure him here, keep him here, and kill him here, especially this stupid fucking little piece of rope. He strained again until the tendons stood out in his neck like cables and the water closed over his head and his scream of frustration was a stream of ragged bubbles. But it didn’t make any difference. He was going to drown.

  And then, miraculously, Joe was there, scooting towards him underwater, waving and grinning around the oyster knife clamped between his teeth. There was something odd about the way he was swimming, but Bobby couldn’t spare any attention for anything beyond the fact that his hands were finally being cut free. He clawed his way to the surface, gasping, as Joe appeared next to him.

  Joe started to pull him away. ‘We have to go! It’s not safe!’

  Bobby had no breath to reply. He just nodded and obeyed.

  They made it nearly all the way to Stray when the Spinner exploded. Seawater had finally breached the ship’s boilers, and the catastrophic failure of her pressure controls resulted in a blast equivalent to several tons of high explosive, literally tearing her in two. The shock wave pounded the pair of them into the water, and they had to dive deep to avoid the hail of debris which followed.

  Burning wood and twisted metal rained down over a wide area, including Stray, the wreckage smashing large holes in the deck and even breaking pieces of it off completely. Tatters was struck by piece of the Spinner’s funnel and reduced to splintered fragments. Small fires caught in the tinder-dry thatching and destroyed much of their shelter, and whole portions of the Hub had to be simply shoved into the sea to prevent the entire raft burning. By the time Bobby and Joe hauled themselves out, Stray was a scorched and scarred ruin.

  Bobby didn’t notice much of this straight away. He was too busy lying on the warm wood with his face to the sky, enjoying the feeling of not being chased, hit, shot at, threatened or insulted – and remembering what it was like to be able to breathe. Everything hurt. Again. When footsteps approached he expected them to be followed by helping hands or even the taste of Allie’s lips. Not, as it turned out, a dog’s low snarl and the click of a rifle’s safety catch.

  He squinted up at the bald-headed silhouette against the sky. ‘Didn’t I just blow you up?’ he groaned.

  ‘Not entirely, Mr Jenkins,’ said Runce.

  Chapter 25

  Lilivet

  1

  ‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ said Vessa.

  Ennias had given her a good day’s rest to recover from the Swarm’s attack, but he’d made it plain t
hat she was going to have to make good on her claim to be able to communicate with Tourmaline, and soon. She was standing on the Cella’s foredeck, hands shoved deeply into the pockets of her coat, feeling cold under the shadow of all that concrete.

  ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ he said. ‘Never mind. I’ll just get the car. Do you have a preference about which police station you’d like me to drop you off at?’

  ‘Steady on,’ frowned Steve.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ she protested angrily, ‘but it’s just not that simple. For a start, I haven’t got the painting.’

  ‘I don’t think you need it as much as you think you do,’ said Steve. ‘You certainly didn’t need it that night when Sophie took your place.’

  ‘By the way, ta-daa,’ said Ennias, and tossed her a colour print-out of the painting.

  She looked at it unhappily for a moment, and then passed it back to him.‘It’s not the same,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t think it would be. Still, worth a try. Look, the link is in your head, right? The painting is just a switch. A trigger. Maybe it was never meant to be that, but I think if you concentrate on an image of it in your mind’s eye and try to feel what you felt those times when the link got made, you can do it without needing the actual painting itself – now that you’re conscious of what you’re doing.’

  Vessa shuddered. ‘That’s another problem. Those feelings – they’re the most horrible ones in the world.’

  ‘Yes, but they’re strong, and it’s strength that opens doors.’ He snorted. ‘Listen to me. I sound like a bleeding fortune cookie. This is what you’ve reduced me to.’

  ‘No, I mean I don’t think I can make myself feel like that. It’s like asking someone to mutilate themselves.’

  Ennias carefully tore the print-out into small pieces. ‘Then you’re no use to me,’ he said. ‘Sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the way of it, I’m afraid. You’re too dangerous to me and mine, otherwise. What with the swarm, and your feral kid there, and this Degan bloke – if what you’re saying is true – you’ve taken out three of the Hegemony’s assets in twenty-four hours. They might have been mildly curious about you before, but I bet they’re just gagging to get their hands on you now, and if you’ve got nothing to offer me which makes that danger worthwhile, well then.’ He shrugged, and tossed the scraps of paper into the canal.

  ‘Okay!’ she shouted, and then more quietly, ‘Okay. I’ll try. Just once. I’ll try.’

  ‘Try hard.’

  2

  She tried to build a picture of ‘She Shall Be Called Woman’ in her imagination piece by piece – not so much as a literal jigsaw, but more according to the feelings that each element evoked.

  …her face, head thrown back, almost featureless except for a yearning to be; her breasts, similarly blurred, little more than suggestions of form swelling outwards from a ruffled haze of chaotic colour, like a husk peeling back for something golden to burst free. White lilies bloom and multi-coloured birds flock at her right hand while clouds stir at her left, and below her is a garden stretching away into hills and a golden sunrise; Vessa thinks of how fine it would be to live in peace in a small place with a garden to tend, and then of her little window-box which she’ll probably never see again. Because there can be no peace. Not when Sophie demands. Not when everybody, even the people like Steve who care for her, demand. There is only the fraying apart at the edges when their demands become too much, like scraps of paper floating apart on water, and she gets lost in the pieces and she needs to put a frame around them all and drag them back together before they disappear and she disintegrates forever. She remembers her first ever sight of the painting – her first ever sight of anything – and how nothing after that ever seemed quite so real, just shadows of the clouds and sky and flowers and birds of another place which…

  The hradix was hooting excitedly up in the scaffolding.

  ‘It feels it,’ murmured Ennias.

  ‘Feels what?’ asked Steve.

  ‘Home.’ His eyes were shining.

  Steve looked around, but couldn’t see anything different. Except, possibly… was the shimmer of light on the canal slighly brighter than before? He thought maybe it was.

  Vessa frowned. Her eyes were closed, but she seemed to be staring intently at something. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘There’s…’

  ‘What?’ Ennias’ face was taut with concern. The hradix’s hoots became barks of alarm, and it began throwing itself back and forth in the scaffolding like a deranged chimpanzee.

  ‘There’s something… they’re fighting…’

  ‘Who’s fighting?’ asked Steve.

  ‘Bobby… there’s a woman… men with guns… and in the water…’ Her eyes snapped open in shock, but whatever they were seeing wasn’t in this world. ‘It’s in the water! It got free! Oh Jesus Christ, she let it go and it got free and it’s under the boat – don’t go down there, Bobby, it’s under the boat!’

  ‘What boat?’ Steve demanded. ‘This boat? Us, here?’

  Ennias leapt at her, thinking to break whatever link she had created, but before he could touch her, there was a violent concussion in the water astern which rocked the Cella and threw them all off-balance. When she settled and the three of them climbed to their feet to look around, they saw a dark-haired woman – half-naked, bloody, and covered in dozens of wounds – floating unconscious in a slowly widening ring of debris.

  Steve stared. ‘Who the bloody hell is that?’

  3

  It was almost more than Runce could do to stop his men from executing Bobby then and there – and if truth be told, he wasn’t a hundred percent sure that he wanted to. He let them get as far as trussing Bobby up (for the second time, he noted sourly), and marching him to the edge of the raft at gunpoint while the other Strays cursed and pleaded, before his conscience overrode the desire to avenge Berylin’s death.

  ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t,’ he growled. ‘Just one.’

  ‘You’re trapped here now, just like us,’ said Allie. ‘Except we know how to navigate out of here. Let us be, and I promise I’ll get you safely out of the Flats.’

  ‘Or I could simply shoot you all now,’ he returned. ‘Return this part of the world to normal and make my own way home by the sun and stars. That would be the simplest thing.’

  ‘Sir…’ said Bobby.

  ‘Don’t you talk to me! Your talking time is done, understand?’

  ‘…I don’t think you’ll do that.’

  Runce grabbed him and jammed the tez gun’s muzzle up under Bobby’s jaw. There was a feverish jitter in the older man’s eyes, and his throat worked like he was trying to swallow a length of steel cable. ‘A dozen men dead in the water and you just keep running that mouth of yours, don’t you?’ He could barely speak for grief. ‘My Berry dead, and it just keeps coming. What exactly do you think I’ll not do?’

  Bobby thought that right at the moment the answer to that question was: Not much.

  ‘Kill him and there’s still the rest of us,’ continued Allie defiantly. ‘Are you going to shoot two women, an old man and a child as well? Do that and you may as well not go home at all; and yes, I can see that wedding ring on your finger. What would your wife say if she could see you now? You’re supposed to be a soldier, for God’s sake.’

  Slowly Runce managed to claw back his control. He lowered the tez and had his men toss Bobby back to his companions while he stared around at the expanding debris field and wondered what in the name of Reason he was supposed to salvage from this mess.

  The job. That was what he was supposed to salvage. Get the job done. For Berylin.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said, turning back to them. ‘Let’s do this properly.’ He took his canister of sal volatile from its belt-pouch. ‘We’re going to work out who here is suborned, and who’s the dreamer – and then I’m going put them out of our misery pr
operly. We’ll start with you.’

  One of his men took a handful of Allie’s hair and forced her head back, and Runce waved the canister closely under her nose. The ammonia stench made her gag and sneeze, but other than that nothing happened. ‘That was quick,’ the crewman said, letting go of her and standing back hurriedly as if she might explode.

  ‘Quick is just fine,’ said Runce, raising the tez gun.

  ‘Idiot!’ yelled Allie. ‘I told you: I’m in a coma! It’s going to take more than a bottle of fucking smelling salts to wake me up!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Runce, looking anything but. ‘That’s not even close to being convincing.’ A high-pitch whine sounded from the capacitors in the tez gun’s pack, and he squeezed the trigger.

  ‘You are making a big mistake,’ warned Seb, taking a step forward. There were shouts and rifles raised towards him. Runce glanced at him. Bobby tensed himself, even though every muscle in his body felt like an over-wrung dishrag, knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to do anything with the momentary distraction other than get himself killed but equally sure that he was going to do it anyway. Allie saw and shook her head urgently. It was all going to go pear-shaped, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

  Then one of Runce’s men shouted ‘Sir! The boy! Look!’

  Everything stopped. Joe was on his feet, and he was glowing.

  At least, that was what it looked like at first. His skin had taken on the same nacreous, mother-of-pearl sheen as his eyes, and in the bright early morning sunlight, he shone like a burnished statue rather than a human being. Runce ignored it, continuing to focus the heat of his full scorn on Allie.

  ‘Is that meant to impress me?’ he sneered. ‘Suborning the boy?’

  ‘Mr Sarge?’ said Joe. It was, after all, the only name by which he’d heard anybody address Runce. ‘Check your machines. She’s not doing anything.’

  Runce glanced at the dials on his PV rig. All the indicator needles were flat against zero, which was impossible, given where they were and what was happening. He tapped them and shook the unit, confused. It was tempting to assume that it had been damaged by seawater or the fighting, except he knew that it had been designed to withstand much more severe conditions than either. Whatever was happening to the boy, it wasn’t as a result of any human agency – at least, nothing like he’d ever encountered. He felt like he was back in Willoughby Terrace again, aiming his tez gun at a perfectly innocent woman. A rogue swell must have lifted Stray under his feet just then; how else to explain his sudden loss of balance and backward stagger?