My mind plugged through the steps of understanding with mechanical slowness, my thoughts bent by the heat and by hunger. But I had not yet abandoned hope. For all I knew, Demetri and his crew were waiting, lurking in some blast pit or other on the extreme edge of the starport landing field. Or, a little voice said within me, sounding too much like Crispin, or . . . they’re all dead. That thought stilled me, chilled me in spite of the heat of that infernal planet. Like Cid Arthur, I sat a long time in the shade of that tree, watching boats wend their way up the canal opposite me. Row on for home, my lads. Row on for home.
I’m not seeing a ship by that name.
Not the starport, then. Not the starport.
Maybe they scrapped the junker.
* * *
It took the rest of the day and an exacting conversation with a city prefect to find an answer. The woman had been on the edge of arresting me for vagrancy, but my manner kept her from pulling the trigger on the stunner at her hip. Growing up, there were always stories, you see. Tales of crews gone missing in the depths of space, their empty ships scudding into ports and into systems on dying warp wakes. Men said it was pirates, the Extrasolarians preying on merchant vessels, kidnapping the crews to serve aboard their massive, black-masted ships, forcing machines into their flesh to enslave them.
I have seen those black ships, have stalked their halls. I have seen their deathless armies, machine-men hollow and unfeeling. There is truth in those tales. Still other men say it was Cielcin that preyed on the wandering ships, harvesting the crews the way you or I might net a school of fish from the sea. I suspect both are true, and more besides. I suspect that ships disappeared in the throes of poine, in interhouse warfare, the familial vendettas that typify our Empire. I suspect misfortune, mismanagement, mistakes, or perhaps an accident that caused the captain to abandon his vessel.
It does not matter what happened, and I am now too old to care. There are always empty ships and dead sailors. As the ancient sea was cruel, so too is that blacker sea, vaster by far, that fills the void between the suns like water. But I cared then, and so I found myself—ravenous and in pain—at the gate of a massive series of hangars that sat upon the very margin of the sea and the city. The orange disc of the sun rippled in the afternoon sky, distorted and shimmering in the thick air. I almost felt I could hear the steam rising off the frothing, turbid waters and from the scummy canals, green as forests, that veined the great city. And from myself.
The hangars had not been easy to find, and so rather than repeat the episode at the starport, I ignored the two guards lazing in the guardhouse by the main road and approached the high fence that cordoned off the reclamation depot, following it to where the chain terminated against the wall of an outbuilding. The fencing was cheap stuff, poor and antiquated, the sort of defense one would never have found on an old Imperial world. Unsophisticated, utterly without artifice. It wasn’t even electrified. I climbed it easily, grateful for the first time since waking on Emesh that I had no shoes as my toes helped me climb the linked bands of metal.
I proceeded along the convex arc of the shoreline, moving from the shadow of one hangar to another, peering into grimy windows and around open doors. I tried my best to walk with purpose, to appear that I belonged, which was difficult when one took my ragged appearance and palatine height into consideration. But no one stopped me, and aside from three old men standing around in the shade of a steel awning, drinking from brown bottles and laughing, wiping their hands on faded brown coveralls, I saw no one.
Each hangar held a ship, the larger ones two or even three, all lighters like the Eurynasir, space-to-surface craft. Black-hulled and white, their ceramic and adamant shells all showed signs of damage: friction burns, meteoroidal impact scars, the carbon scoring of weapon-fire. Empty ships. There are always empty ships. They whispered to me, droning of battles, of pirates, of xenobites howling out of the Dark. Of old, such sunken vessels were lost at sea, swallowed by harsh waters and destroyed by the weight of them. Space sought no such equilibrium, allowed its wrecks to remain pristine, untrammeled. There were whole corporations dedicated to the salvage of such damaged ships.
None of the ships I found in the first hangar was the Eurynasir, nor in the fifth. With evening coming on, huge flies began to emerge from their diurnal haunts and filled the air with a droning. I swatted them aside, calloused feet scraping on the burning tarmac.
Starting to panic, my stomach cramping from hunger and the need for an answer, I rounded a parked forklift just outside one of the massive buildings and nearly slammed into one of the old men I had seen earlier. He was short and nearly so broad as he was tall, all muscle and hair. His scalp was bare and the color of old bronze, his face lost in such a profusion of beard as I had never seen. Hair sprouted on his cheeks almost to his eyelids, and his arms reminded me of those of the homunculus, Saltus, reaching almost to his knees. He glared at me, alarm and outrage bubbling to the surface of that expressive, hairy face. “Who in Earth’s name are you?”
Instead of answering, I pushed my sweat-soaked hair back from my face and said, “I was on a ship. The Eurynasir. Is it here?”
The big man blinked, looked sidelong past me into the open sky above one shoulder. “What’s it to you?” He spat on the white concrete at his feet.
Trying not to lose my patience in light of the heat, my exhaustion, and my hunger, I repeated myself, more slowly and precisely this time. “I was on the ship, messer.”
At first I had thought the man old, judging by the way his face creased, the skin beneath the matted, graying beard pinched and scaled, but age among the plebeians is a tricky thing. He might have been younger than forty, and these Emeshi were all squat and muscled like bulls from the weight of that added gravity. He squinted up at me, ham fists planted on his hips.
“Skag!” another voice called. “Where’d you go?”
“Here, Bor!” the dock worker called back over his shoulder. “That fish we threw back’s come round again!” Another man rounded the corner, this one paler than the first, his skin red and peeling like the skin of the old crone in the clinic’s had been. There seemed something wrong in it, but it wasn’t sunburn. Scars? The mark of some sickness long passed?
I raised my hands, trying to appear peaceable. “Gentlemen, I don’t want trouble. I just want—” I broke off, catching sight of the silver band the second man had wrapped around his smallest finger. A silver band with a carnelian bezel. My voice tightened in my throat, coming out high and petulant. “That’s mine!”
The dock workers looked at each other, neither knowing how to respond. I gathered their victims did not often return. Maybe I was the first. In the end, they did answer, but not with words. I felt suddenly as if I were on the streets in Meidua again, facing down those thugs with their bikes. The first blow, when it came, caught me by surprise, cracking my jaw and sending me reeling. By the second blow I was ready, rolling away as the foot descended so that the man’s heel came down on concrete instead of bone. I found my feet. I was not going to die, was not going to let myself be victimized the way I had in Meidua years and weeks before. I bared my teeth, spat. The sputum came up red.
“There’s a letter,” I said, keeping open hands up between me and the two men. “Handwritten. That’s all I want.” And after a moment, I added, “And my shoes.” My eyes betrayed me, for even as I said the words, my eyes went to the signet ring—my signet ring—on the hand of the other dock worker.
On a good day, I could have taken the two men. If I had been hale, whole, uninjured, well rested, well fed. If we had been on Delos, where the very effort of standing did not beggar the muscles on my bones. If perhaps the two men hadn’t each been behemoths corded in sheets of muscle from a lifetime of hard labor in this gravity.
Perhaps.
I blocked the next blow, giving ground, stumbling a little as my callouses scuffed on the uneven earth. I was lucky; the two got in on
e another’s way, their blows wild and uncoordinated but frighteningly strong. In my weakened state, I less blocked their attacks than deflected them, knowing full well I could not stop a blow directly. Memories of a thousand sparring lessons with Felix came to mind, with Crispin. They retreated just as fast, fading as distractions must in the heat of such moments, retreating until the only memories were those of muscle and blood. A wild hook took me in the ribs, sending me staggering. Too slow, I thought, more angry than in pain. Too weak.
The man with my stolen ring on his finger hurried into the opening I’d created with my backward stumble, and even as I thought to run, the sight of it caught like embers in dry wool. I turned my stagger into a whirl, grabbing the man’s wrist, twisting so that all the weight of me fell on that pronated arm. The elbow went out with a revolting crunch, and the man’s yell turned to screaming. The sound stalled the other man, the hairy one who had first accosted me, long enough that I was able to tug the ring free. My chest worked like a bellows. There wasn’t enough air. Or there was too much air. My vision was going out at the edges, bruised with shadow.
I must have looked like an animal, standing above the man with the broken arm. I was an animal. Footsteps sounded around the corner of the far building, and through clenched teeth I said, “I just want my things back.”
“The hell’s going on?” asked a rough, feminine voice.
Not taking his eyes off me, the bearded man called out, “Bastard broke Bor’s arm!”
The others appeared then, seven of them as like the first two as one could imagine, like clay sculptures pressed from the same mold: all squat and square-shouldered, muscled identically from identical lives. The woman who’d spoken was bald but for the faintest dusting of stubble shadowing her scalp, her unpleasant face marred by an ugly wine-stain birthmark. She took in my face, and something there gave her pause, but after a moment she smiled. “Go the fuck home, boy.” She glanced at the injured man still groaning on the ground, his crooked elbow starting to purple. “Or you’ll get worse.”
The man on the ground spoke through gritted teeth. “He broke my damn arm, Gila. Call the prefects, for Earth’s sake.”
I jammed my ring onto my uninjured thumb. “You were the ones who pulled me out of my ship.” It wasn’t a question. “You don’t want the prefects here, do you?” I held the ring up for inspection, using it to make my point. I didn’t want to say anything, to call attention to what that ring meant. Doing so would have opened me to reprisal. If they called my bluff, I would have to reveal myself to the authorities, to my father. I walked a thin line, razor-sharp and with the threat of violence looming like the sword of Damocles. “I just want my things.”
The woman—Gila—spat just as the bearded man had done. “Ship’s gone. Moved up-well for refitting this morning.”
The moment’s respite had granted me some time to recover, and my breathing slowed. My hair was still plastered to my face, half covering my eyes. I tried to flip it out of the way, but it wasn’t coming free. “You’re lying.” The injured man recovered his knees, helped up by the bearded man and one of the others. “Give me my effects.”
“Your effects?” one of the dockworkers sneered. “The hell are you? The Prince of Jadd?”
I didn’t rise to the bait. “What did you do with the salvage? The crew?”
“Ship was empty when it came in-system,” Gila said. “Crew bugged out, took the shuttles and ran, left your sorry ass in the freeze.”
I licked my dry lips. “You admit it then?”
“Fuck you, boy.” She waved a hand. “Get the fuck off my worksite.”
I took a step closer, and to this day I can’t say if it was a calculated move or just blind aristocratic stupidity. “There was a letter, a handwritten letter.”
“Love note from your girlfriend, is it?” the bearded man said. “Or are you the girlfriend?” Laughter bubbled from the rest of the crowd, and somehow the sound was more threatening than a snarl. I checked my advance. Part of me, the sensible, rational core, whispered that I should run. Not to the fence, but to the open gate I had seen with the guards languishing in their air-conditioned hut. None of the dock workers had called for guards. It was possible, but it wouldn’t be easy. I was still weak. I needed water. I needed to eat. I had only bested the idiot cradling his broken arm because of my training. I’d been lucky.
Gila spoke then. “Threw everything out. Go look on a rubbish barge.” One of the men beside her moved forward, but she grabbed him by the front of his filthy jumpsuit. Her small, dark eyes darted to my ring, knowing what it signified, the danger she was in. She was smarter than the thugs from Meidua, or maybe just less brave. “Now get out.”
I knew they’d be on me the moment I turned around, for the ring if nothing else, so I backed away. I wanted to say something clever, something cutting, something to rattle them in their boots the way my father might have done. Something to freeze their blood. I had nothing. I said nothing.
At least I was fast.
I have always been fast.
CHAPTER 24
THOSE MINDLESS DAYS
THREE DAYS AND NIGHTS have passed since last I put pen to vellum. Long have I pondered how to proceed, how best to relate those days and years lost to the streets of Borosevo. They say that when he was a boy, the prince Cid Arthur was kept in a pleasure palace by his father’s faithful archon, isolated from death, disease, and poverty, for a vate had prophesied that if he should see the ugliness of the world, Cid Arthur would renounce his father’s throne and become a preacher himself. I had always wondered at this, for I had grown up in a palace myself, and I knew of poverty and sickness and had had my own brushes with death—first with my grandmother, then later when Uncle Lucian had died in his shuttle crash. I could not understand how Arthur had been so blind.
I understood it now.
Just as there is a difference between the news of a distant planet’s destruction and the bloody death of a coliseum slave, it is one thing to know there is poverty and illness and another to walk among the poor and suffering. Often I saw beggars covered in black sores and peeling skin beseeching the Chantry for deliverance not from evil, but from sickness. The Rot was rampant in the city, the gift of some alien animalcule very like a bacterium. It blackened skin and wasted flesh and hardened lymphs and lungs. The city prefects piled bodies in squares and burned them, and the smoke carried votive lanterns to a heaven that seemed deaf to all prayer. My own palatine blood defended me, but there was no defense from the horror of it.
My father’s face haunted me at night, his and the funeral masks of our forebears and the screaming of nameless prisoners in the bastille he wished to send me to. For their sake I suffered, and for my mother. I dreamed I saw her dragged to the whipping post, lashed by a blindfolded cathar in unfeeling black. When I awoke, sweating and sobbing in a cardboard pile between a clothier and a bakery, it was to thoughts of Gibson. The old man had suffered for nothing, was exiled for nothing. For there I was, rotting on the edge of the Empire and the Veil in a system looking out on the Sullen Gulf between the Arms of Centaurus and Norma.
But I forced myself to go on.
Like Cid Arthur on his quest for the Merlin Tree, I did what I had to do to survive. I ate fish raw from the canals, raided compost bins. I depended upon the kindness of street vendors—a class of men not much noted for their charity—and I learned to beg. I will not say I was good at it, but desperation eventually broke down the dregs of my palatine dignity.
I suppose I might have surrendered at any moment, submitted my blood and ring to the count’s authority and waited for my father to collect me. I was tempted—sorely tempted—those first weeks most of all. The years slipped by in squalor, and the days were long. Mad as it sounds, despite the misery and the struggle, despite the prefects and the gangs . . . I was happy. For the first time in my life I was truly free. Of my father. Of my station. Of everything.
/> It was not enough. Free I might be, but to be free and less than a serf is small consolation. Each night the stars called to me through Borosevo’s haze. They had never felt so far away. All I needed was a way offworld. I longed to find some unscrupulous merchanter who would hire a man without the necessary papers, but I couldn’t get within half a mile of the landing field. Trespassers were shot on sight.
In time, whatever lofty dreams I had faded into dreams of food. I missed wine with a passion I find difficult to describe, and fruit, and hot meals . . . and water most of all. Do you know what it is to miss water? I was made to siphon off rain barrels. All the while I brooded on my fate, on the utter destruction of my hopes and dreams. In my mind I saw Gibson’s letter afire, black smoke curling from its corners as it twisted like a dragon devouring its own tail.
I was never going to Teukros.
I was never going anywhere.
CHAPTER 25
POVERTY AND PUNISHMENT
I CROUCHED ON THE old drinking cooler I used as both treasure chest and chair in the storm drain I had called home for the past ten nights, eating half a smoked eel I had stolen from a street vendor outside the coliseum. The meat was tender, brushed with garlic and soy sauce, vaguely smoky. I had been a thief now for the better part of a week and had decided I was good at it, though my whole body ached from gravity fatigue.
It was a good spot. Dry, unless one counted the channel in the bottom of the storm drain. Enclosed, unless one counted the open mouth of the tunnel that spilled out onto a canal some twenty feet below. It was one of dozens built into the side of the White District, so called for the color of the lime-washed bulwark that separated it from Belows. The White District clustered about the base of the castle ziggurat, fifty feet or so above sea level, relic of the days when the Empire seized Emesh from the Norman United Fellowship, which had colonized it. There lived the planet’s wealthy, its patricians and offworld plutocrats, the guild factionarii and important businessmen, local celebrities and gladiators. The Chantry sanctum was there, a copper-domed structure beside the brutalist concrete mass of its attendant bastille. We beggars were not tolerated in the White District save on the day of the High Litany, which cycled through the week as Emesh’s day-and-night cycle failed to tally with the standard calendar.
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