by Ed McDonald
Dantry had become obsessed. He worked endless calculations based on that damn book, but I couldn’t see how numbers and lines on a page were ever going to make a woman flesh and blood again. I think that he saw it too, in the end. One day he took his impenetrable book, went out and never came back. Our relationship had grown so strained that I didn’t even notice for two days. I regretted that.
‘I should have helped him.’ I sighed. ‘Dantry was the only one trying to work out what the fuck she’d become. I wish he’d come back.’
‘So do I,’ Tnota said. He gave a wicked grin. ‘He was a man I could really have got behind.’
I grunted.
‘Yeah, I bet you could.’
4
My leg ached. Rain fell. The same people brought me their suspicions and somehow I found myself giving in to the most powerful force of coercion ever known: the continuous demands of a child. I dressed the part, looked at myself in the mirror. I looked fucking ridiculous.
I couldn’t believe that I’d agreed to attend this farce of a play.
‘It’s what all the court folk wears, that’s what the tailor said,’ Amaira said.
‘Nothing about that makes me want to wear it.’
‘I think the ruffles is nice. They hide your chin a bit,’ Amaira said.
‘What’s wrong with my chin?’
She gave me a look that said that honestly, if I didn’t already know, it wasn’t worth the telling. Kids have no tact. It’s one of the reasons I like them. The tailor had cut the clothes to a good fit but it had been a long time since I’d tried to dress up fancy, and I could have waited a few more years. Preferably until after I was dead. Lace, frills, silver buttons, gold brocade, slippers made from some kind of material so soft it was a wonder it didn’t fall to pieces on contact with the air. I’d worn this kind of garbage as a matter of course back before Adrogorsk and my disgrace, but I’d been a different kind of man back then. I had the distinct impression that these clothes were dressing up in me more than I was them, and resented me as much as I did them.
‘Fuck it. I’m changing.’
Amaira made disappointed sounds.
‘Go get yourself into that frock the major sent you. Get Valiya to help you with the laces. See if she can curl your hair too.’
Amaira scampered away singing. We conducted a lot of serious business at Blackwing, but having her around livened the place up. If we could all just remain kids forever I doubt that there’d have been a war, or an Engine or cannon and swords in the first place.
Sad to think that she was going to turn into an adult, and would probably become as unbearable as everybody else.
I changed out of the crap the tailor had sent me and into one of the new uniforms. Black breeches slashed to show the maroon lining, a close-fitting jacket with military buttons. Suitable, practical clothing for unsuitable, impractical work. I wore a long black tailcoat with it. Far better. I slung on a sword. The nobility wore weapons to the theatre not because they expected to use them but because a finely crafted weapon allowed them to show off their wealth and taste through gaudy, expensive decoration. Their weapons were more about the hilt than the length of steel attached to them. I’d allowed a smith to craft me a dress sword with fancy hand protection but I’d had him replace the feeble little duelling blade with one capable of hacking a cow’s head in two. I didn’t expect to have to defend myself against any deadly bovine assaults but you can never be too sure.
‘You look boring!’ Amaira pouted when we got into the carriage that Nenn had sent. She had a pretty pink-and-blue party frock that fell to the knee with long boots. It was a fashion that wasn’t going away and it seemed too adult for Amaira’s boyish figure, but then what did I know about children? In faraway Hyspia, they married them off at her age. Of course, if they tried that in Valengrad, we cut their dicks off.
The carriage rolled through the city to the absurd and decadent theatre that served to entertain the nobles who lived out in Willows. Rows of carriages were assembled in order of the ranks of the nobility who had arrived in them, insignias proudly displayed. Drivers were constantly reorganizing as higher-ranked nobles arrived, whilst a fraught clerk tried to work out whether a viscount had greater status than a ranker colonel. There was a new class of nobility along the Range now, and they were keener to fight than the old crowd had been. The cream who had fled in our blackest hour had encountered a spree of tragic accidents after Nall’s Engine threw the drudge back. It could have been coincidence, but after the bodies of the leader of the Red Flight mercenary company and Count Orvino had been found in the woods, together and engaged in acts of bestiality, I was certain that another of Crowfoot’s agents had turned his retribution into a game. I didn’t know which of Crowfoot’s captains was putting so much energy into entertaining themselves with that bloody work. Which was probably for the best.
Entertainers were warming the crowd up with juggling and sleight of hand, which seemed an odd choice for a play about the biggest catastrophe since Crowfoot burned the Misery into existence.
The punters had gathered in small groups. It was opening night so a single ticket was enough to bankrupt most small businesses, but anyone who could afford it was there. They loitered in hierarchical groups, with each person of status gaining a little clutch of hangers-on, like a mother duck and her ducklings. Attempting to join a group that significantly outranked you was considered a laughable error in judgment. As I looked at them all now it seemed hard to believe that I’d once played these games, had spent my hours preening and writing out lists of who I needed to speak to. I’d had ambition. So many of the young dandies in the foyer could have been me. The young women could have been Ezabeth. I avoided looking at them.
‘Can I get spun sugar?’ Amaira asked. She was practically hopping from foot to foot. I’d know no peace until I acquiesced, so I gave her some coins and she hurtled away toward a seller as if she’d been launched by a catapult.
The cream moved aside as Range Marshal Davandein moved through their ranks. At forty-five she cut an elegant figure, but she had a sculpture’s beauty, perfect lines that gave no warmth. A clever tailor had managed to cut her a dress that was both ostentatiously splendid but retained something of a military turn, and her dark hair was netted with a web of precious stones, glittering blackly. She’d not been in the post long. Marshal Wechsel had been capable, but he’d been old and the task of rebuilding our defences had taxed him. He’d passed quietly in his sleep. Davandein was related to two different princely lineages, too much cream in her blood for my liking, not enough mud. But, she was blunt and confident, and that counted for a lot when dealing with the hard-arses serving on the Range.
The main thing I liked about her was that she unquestioningly accepted the power of Nall’s Engine. I was the only mortal who knew the truth about it. A few falsified documents here and there and the Order of Aetherial Engineers was running as it always had. Everyone who’d known about the phos-supply discrepancy – that the Engine ran not on phos, but on the power of an immortal’s heart – was dead. After Nall’s Engine had obliterated our enemies, the Nameless had sealed the heart, replaced the phos tanks, and reset everything to look just like it always had. The illusion continued and nobody was any the wiser.
I caught Davandein’s eye and she beckoned me over to introduce me to someone. I cringed, being in no mood for small talk with freshly arrived cream. On her arm, a slender man pushing forty smiled at me as I approached. His hair was dark, thick, his beard short, peppered with grey that only seemed to make him more handsome. Where Davandein glowed in spectacular tailoring, his coat was plain, white wool lacking motif or embellishment, and he wore no sword on his belt, not even a dagger. I recognised him, or something about him. I’d met him before, somewhere, sometime. He gave an odd little smile, sensing my confusion.
‘Captain Galharrow,’ Davandein greeted me, pleasantly enough. ‘Allow me to int
roduce you to Governor Thierro of Valaigne. The man behind the Grandspire.’
It had been nearly twenty years and boyish youth had been replaced with gentlemanly elegance, but the moment she named him I remembered. Thierro’s smile widened a little further as he saw my new dawn of understanding.
‘I don’t imagine you ever thought to see me back here, Ryhalt,’ he said. He held out a gloved hand and we shook, and then in a rare display of affection I grasped him by the shoulder as I allowed myself to match his smile. He wore a staggering amount of cologne, an overwhelming, musky scent.
‘It’s been half a lifetime,’ I said. ‘How in the hells are you doing?’
‘You’re already acquainted, then?’ Davandein asked. She tried to mask how annoyed that made her. I’d stolen her thunder.
‘We studied together at the university,’ I said. ‘Served on the Range together too, for a time.’ I didn’t go into any further details, and Thierro didn’t offer any either. His time in the military had not ended well, and my own fall from favour had followed shortly after.
‘Ah, but we were young then, weren’t we? Fresh as spring and twice as green. It’s good to see you.’
‘You too,’ I said, and meant it. We look for the strings that lead back into our pasts and follow them as though what lies behind us is the secret to passing through the labyrinth. Those things that sleep in our wake seem simpler, to be cherished for it, because all of the confusion of our lives has been washed from them.
‘Governor Thierro is newly arrived to oversee the final stages of the Grandspire’s construction,’ Davandein said, trying to reclaim her status in the conversation. ‘Thierro holds the commanding stake in the Westland Frontier Trading Company. Were you aware of that, Captain?’
I hadn’t been, and it was a surprise. Westland was a vast trading emporium, dominating the trade routes to the colonies. Over the last ten years, they’d become rich as princes. Like me, Thierro had come from money, but we’d known luxury only as the second sons of noble houses. By contrast, Westland Trading commanded fleets of ships and bought and sold whole towns. If the Grandspire was their project, that meant that it was Thierro’s project.
That certainly explained the marshal’s cosying up to him. They made an unlikely pair, she as striking as lightning, he as drab as rain. The popinjays around us carried collapsible fans painted with miniature masterpieces, the hilts and guards of their swords worked in sparkling twists of gold and silver, embellished with the jewels that Westland’s mines pulled from the earth. For a man of Thierro’s considerable standing, he seemed to be entirely without entourage or any means to defend himself from attempts to kidnap and extort, and that was as unusual as his sober attire.
‘I’d not expected to see you back on the Range,’ I said. It was no doubt a sore point for him, but the griffin in the room needed to be pointed out. Thierro had been at Adrogorsk with me, leading a detachment of sharpshooters. A Darling had sent a killing spell, a toxic cloud of fog that had rolled over their emplacement. Thierro was one of the few to get out alive, but his lungs had been ruined and after he’d been carted back to the Range, he’d been discharged. I’d sometimes wondered which had hurt him more, the burning fumes, or seeing his men choking and dying. He’d always been a sensitive man. The military had not been the right choice for him, no matter our dreams of glory.
‘Never thought I’d see that damn sky again,’ Thierro said. ‘But fate and faith blow us in strange directions. I can’t say that I’m missing Valaigne, though. I went there for the good sea air, but it’s a grim place of dark forests and biting insects. Quieter, though.’ He glanced upward at the sky, but it remained silent.
‘We’ll have to catch up over a glass of the forty-nine,’ I said. It had been an old favourite, cheap and dreadful wine that our classmates had once swilled with great abandon. Probably worth a small fortune twenty years on, if any of it still existed.
‘Or perhaps a cup of tea,’ Thierro said through a thin smile, and I wondered whether the sea air hadn’t done his burned chest quite as much good as it was meant to. ‘In fact, I have a matter that I wish to discuss with you soon. The Range Marshal here tells me that you’re the man to speak about tracking people down. I’m told you have offices here? I’ll have my people make an appointment.’
I agreed. Davandein was keen to show him off to the cream, so Thierro and I shook hands and I headed inside, hoping to escape the mountainous pungency of his cologne, but the whole place smelled of perfume with a back-of-the-nose hit of old, spilled wine. Despite it, I was buoyed by running into Thierro. We had never been close friends, just acquaintances really, but it was good to know that at least one of the old class had done something worthwhile with his life. I’d been to too many funerals along the Range for boys who’d stood up to receive their degrees with me.
Nenn had a stall up among the gods, though not as high as the princes. Banners had been hung from the gallery boxes to proclaim their occupants’ lineage. Status, status, and more games around status. What a crock.
‘You made an effort, then,’ Nenn said, as I entered the box.
‘You’re looking pretty special too,’ I said.
Nenn hadn’t even got changed. The leather buff coat she wore was stained and colourless at the elbows and cuffs, her boots had been up and down the Misery. No courtly smallsword for her: she wore the sword I’d had made for her, a real bastard of a blade made for splitting heads. She got up and embraced me. She’d had a new nose carved, smooth black wood, glossy enough that the light danced from it, but the one thing that surprised me was the smell. Nenn usually smelled like ale and horses, but tonight she was as perfumed as any of the ladies in their finery.
‘Can’t believe you dragged me here to watch this shit,’ I said. ‘We get to see our own life stories retold by some fuckers that never dug a ditch in their lives.’
‘If I have to suffer it, you can suffer it with me,’ she grinned. ‘Meet this man. He’s all right.’ She jerked a thumb toward the only other occupant of the box who wasn’t clearly a servant or bodyguard. Soldierly, a bit older than Nenn, a bit younger than me. Handsome in a way that might have interested me in my more experimental days at the university. Neat, well-groomed, but undeniably masculine.
‘Captain Betch Davian,’ he offered me his hand. I shook it. I looked him over feeling suddenly like a father overseeing his daughter’s first dance. Stupid, but that’s how it felt.
‘State troop or free company?’ I asked.
‘City of Whitelande state,’ he said, ‘though I’ve never been there. I was born on the Range.’
‘You here during the Siege?’
‘No. I was down at Station Four.’
‘I suppose you wish you’d been here to see it.’
Betch raised an eyebrow that made me immediately like him.
‘Wouldn’t wish that on anyone in the world. I know you were involved. Nenn told me how she got to rank up.’
So it was first-name terms? Good. That meant that they were fucking, and Nenn had always needed someone to fuck her good and often.
‘Fastest climb from private to general in the history of the states. She tell you how quickly she managed to climb back down?’
Betch’s smile said she had, and he didn’t disapprove. Nenn had been de-ranked once for every time she’d managed to assault a highborn squawk. In four years, she’d dropped all the way down to major, but she was better suited to front-line work and the men didn’t care. They loved her all the more for breaking the noses of colonels and boot-shiners. The idiots mocked her for her thin blood, but after she spilled a bit of theirs to prove that it was the same, none of them had the guts to challenge her to duel. Which was good, because they’d have lost, and even though they were arseholes we still needed generals and officers.
Nenn was fussing over Amaira like she was some kind of lap cat.
‘Don’t tell me you�
��ve brought her more Misery crap?’
Amaira held up the trinket Nenn had just given her. It was a clump of what appeared to be hair. Maybe human, maybe animal. As I watched, it twisted itself into the shape of a little figure, maybe a farmer dragging a plough. It uncurled, then returned to the farmer shape. More pointless, terrible magic from the Misery.
‘Don’t put that anywhere near your mouth,’ I warned the kid, and then set about getting through enough of the house wine to make this ordeal bearable.
To my surprise, it wasn’t as terrible as I’d expected. The playwright might even have been in Valengrad during the buildup. He’d made Marshal Venzer his protagonist, and the story focused on the dilemma of whether or not to activate Nall’s Engine to defend Valengrad, or to wait to the last moment to ensure that Station Three-Six was also protected. That’s how we’d spun it. In the end Venzer had chosen to hang himself when the Engine had failed, but nobody knew that except me. I suspected that toward the end of the performance we’d see him holding the last defence of the wall and going out in a blaze of glory.
‘You notice that we don’t seem to be in this play.’ Nenn grinned. She leaned forward as a pair of young lovers were about to kiss, and yelled, ‘Come on, give it some tongue!’ The players bore Nenn’s frequent disruptions with good grace, and some of the lesser cream even emulated her crudeness, much to the chagrin of their drinking partners and the older, more settled elite. Despite Nenn’s derision, I was sure that there was a tear in her eye when one of the lovers she’d been mocking was butchered by the drudge. She covered it by adjusting the straps that held her nose in place.
‘You mind if I talk shop?’ I asked.
Nenn glanced at her beau. Betch was having to endure a stream of questions from Amaira, who was entirely uninterested in the play. He was weathering the barrage admirably, giving us a chance to talk.
