by L. W. Jacobs
“I—well, I don’t have much with me, but I suppose—”
“I’ll take that meeting, Miss Aygla,” Odril cut in, glaring at the other man. “I have quite a few books that need calculating, and it couldn’t hurt to have some done early.”
She smiled at him, while LeTwi made some sarcastic comment and the colonel goggled at the whole affair. A little competition could work wonders. “Excellent. Have them sent over, and I’ll calculate them by tomorrow evening.”
Odril’s smile was oily. “I’ll bring them myself.”
Another professional hazard—men mistaking an offer of services for something more. Fortunately, she had a supply of yura and a resonant ability no one could match, should things go wrong.
Commotion at another table caught her attention—a dark-haired serving boy was sprawled on the deck, one of the white-coated military men standing over him, wine staining his kurta. “I’ll have the price of that out of your hide, boy!”
The other men at the table chuckled, apparently enjoying the show. The “boy” was not much younger or smaller than the soldier, but he stayed where he was on the floor, clearly aware none of his options were good.
Ella stood. “Unhand him, sir.”
The soldier turned, startled, then softened on seeing her. “Ah. My apologies, madam—this is no sight for a lady. But justice must be had.”
She cocked her head. “Do you think he did it to you on purpose?”
“I wager he did, the mud-haired lout!”
“And to what advantage would that have been? Not only are you armed with military training and blade but with money and background he could never hope to achieve.”
“Why, for spite itself, if naught else,” the man rejoined, but he was deflating some as more began to watch.
“And have you previous offense with this man to cause such spite? Nay, good sir, this was accident alone. And if accident it was, there is no crime for which to demand justice.”
“And my kurta?” he demanded, gesturing to the stain spreading across the long, split-sided tunic. “Shall I pay for it out of pocket?”
Ella scoffed. “If you are too mean to cover such damages, I shall pay for them myself, sir. Have the bill sent to my room.”
The soldier stuttered, then with a stiff bow said, “That won’t be necessary.” The serving boy, sensing his opportunity, scrambled away.
Ella couldn’t keep a satisfied grin from her face as she sat back down. The Colonel nodded to her. “I’ll see no harm befalls the boy. The man was overreacting.”
“Quite right,” Gettels put in, and Odril nodding, watching her with new attention.
Ella smiled to them. Who said you couldn’t change the world with a different set of ideas?
Odril sent his books over the next morning, and she spent the day working the ledgers, taking breaks to eat or stand at the rail, watching the passage from the Ein to the narrower Genga that lead to Ayugen. It was dry work, but she found a certain satisfaction in ordering disparate accounts and logbooks into tidy forms the Councilate inspectors could audit.
The sallow bureaucrat came for his books that evening, then lingered unpleasantly in her cabin.
She gave him a smile, tonguing the yura ball in her upper lip, in case she’d need it. “Thanks again for your business. Now I really ought to do some packing before Ayugen.”
He hovered inside the door, nearly the only place to stand in the cramped cabin. “Yes. Though you—look quite settled here.”
She knew it looked odd—in contrast to most of the Swallowtail’s sparsely furnished cabins, she had a bureau, bookshelves and a writing desk all crammed between the mattress and the wall. “Well, a lady should be comfortable.”
He smiled, eyes darting glances at her body. “Yes. You know, I could easily find work for you in Ayugen. And likely pay you a lot more than you make here.”
This sort of offer was common. “That’s very kind of you, but I enjoy the freedom.”
He didn’t look pleased at the answer. “I imagine it keeps prying eyes away, too.”
Her heart clenched. “I’m—not sure what you mean.” Did he know she wasn’t licensed?
“Nothing, my darling.” His hand reached up to brush her cheek, and Ella flinched back. “But let me know if you ever change your mind.”
He moved toward the door. Finally. “Will do. Thanks again!”
She shut the door and locked it after him, then took a moment to shudder the slime from her. Odril was an unpleasant man. Then again, most bureaucrats were.
He knows, Ella.
She took Odril’s money from the bureau top. “He doesn’t know. He was probably talking about having a lie with me.”
He was thinking about having a lie with you. He was talking about why a licensed calculor would work on a riverboat instead of dry land.
She bit her lip. “Well, he’s not the first to wonder. It’s only a few days to port, anyway.”
LeTwi gave the mental equivalent of a shrug. I’d just keep your yura handy.
Ella rolled the ball of moss in her mouth, outer coating of beeswax keeping it from digesting until she chewed on it. Yura was too expensive to use except in real need. “Always do.” There were men who had gone farther than Odril, who thought that her services implied more. They’d learned their lesson.
Ella sat down on the bed. Odril would likely be her last customer of the voyage—she’d balanced books for most of the men on board, and those remaining likely had wives or House associates who would do it cheaper in port.
Still, it had been a profitable voyage. Ella took a bust of Markels from her nightstand and flipped it to reveal a cleverly hidden latch. Inside were three more balls of yura and a mess of red-gold coins. She set them on the bed in neat rows of ten: six thousand one hundred sixty moons. After paying her return fare and picking up some sundries in Ayugen, that would leave her forty-three hundred or so. Not a bad profit for a few months’ work. Two trips more, or three, and she would have enough for tuition and passage across the sea.
And a chance for real scholarship.
“Yes.” She lay back, imagining the journey across the open sea, a trip precious few managed to book with the reclusive Brineriders, and then the Thousand Spires beyond, amongst a people famed for their science and untouched by the Councilate. She’d read accounts of the Gyolla, but what would they be like? How different their systems of merit and mass labor? Would they accept her application? Most of the Council’s advisors had studied with them, though they were famously close-lipped about their experiences. Maybe it was because—
A noise at the window made her look up. She caught a glimpse of something pale on the dark walkway outside—a face?—then it was gone.
“Stains!” she cursed.
What?
“A face. I thought I saw a face at the window.” Fear clicked a moment later, and her heart started beating hard.
A bird, maybe.
Ella looked hard at the porthole. “It didn’t look like a bird.” It looked like a face watching from outside the window. From the hull of the ship?
She swept up her pile of coins and put the ball of yura back in her mouth. “I should have closed the curtains.”
She did now, and checked the lock on the door. Her little cabin suddenly felt vulnerable, her place on this ship full of men insecure, and she drew out the metal shank she kept under her pillow. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she muttered, packing the money away. She would hide the money elsewhere—in a hollow in the mattress this time. Ella tensed at every sound, jumped at every creak, but nothing more happened.
She lay back down. “Just a couple of days left, anyway. It was probably nothing.”
Maybe it was the Descending God finally returned to earth.
She laughed. “Come to peep in at me? How flattering.” She lay back on the bed and willed herself to relax. “It probably was just a bird. And if it wasn’t”—she tongued the yura in her mouth—“I guess it’s their bad luck.”
2
The devotion of the darkhairs is admirable, some of them spending so long in the mines they come out stark white. The locals have taken to calling them ghosts.
—Madam Kallenia, My Time in the South, collected in Broadsheets of the Day, Vol. XVII
Ella leaned back in her chair, ship rocking in the current, and reached for another book from her stack. Morning light caught in the leafy trees thick along the shore, and the rowing songs of the slaveship echoed from upriver. She was on the narrow rear deck, passing the morning rereading accounts of the Achuri in preparation for their arrival.
These days and nights were filled with wonder. Already known in the North for their singing ability, in their winter caves the Achuri performed impossible feats, aerial dances and guessing games and triumphs of strength, all imbued with the subtle vibration of the resonances. The locals assured me they were not under the effects of their shamanic cave-moss, though one must wonder if perhaps an extended diet of the moss has given them lasting powers, such as we experienced only for a brief time after eating the earthy substance.
Ella bit the nib of her pen, rereading the passage. It was this account in Markels, and those of others who came after to verify it, that began the rush for yura and the Councilate’s eventual expansion into the deep south. But his claims of people using resonances without yura had never been substantiated, despite rumors from returning soldiers having fought the local resistance.
Kellandrials had recounted a similar anecdote—she flipped to the page in his much-slimmer collection of broadsheets, margins dark with her notes:
We met a local woman, really a quite simple laundry woman of Brokewater, who claimed to no longer need yura to twist thoughts with her speech—a mosstongue, you’ll recall we’ve labeled them. It is of course likely fancy and attempts to win into our good graces, but as her tale is rather entertaining, dear readers, we recount it here—
Ella skimmed the page, used to Kellandrials’ verbose and self-involved style. The woman claimed to have stolen a great amount of yura, then, fearing discovery, to have eaten it all at once—and afterwards to access her resonant ability without taking anything. Now, dear readers, Kellandrials continued, burning with curiosity, we repeated the experiment, yea, even unto the thirtieth ball she estimated, at great expense to our person, but found on the morrow no greater remnants than an empty purse and a raging headache…
Ella bit her nib again, ink bitter on her tongue. It was widely known that the Councilate’s Titans, trained high in the mountains above Seinjial, were able to use their resonances without yura—though few survived the training. Could they be taking massive doses of yura, as Kellandrials’ dobby woman had? Had the Achuri lied to Markels and been using yura during his visit? Or was there another way to use the resonances without yura?
He suggests it is due to a long diet of yura, she scribbled, but that hasn’t panned out in Worldsmouth. Perhaps it is diet, but a diet of southern foods, like mavenstym.
Ella nodded. With the discovery that southern foods like mavenstym and wintermelon deepened yura experiences, Kellandrials had put forth a theory that such foods—winterfoods, he called them, as they grew in winter, when the star’s light was strong—provided the energy needed to resonate. There was precious little of it in the south, as the days never shortened as they did in the north, and the weather was too warm for such plants, rumored to grow directly out of the snow. Were they the key to using resonances without yura, as the Titans and the Achuri were rumored to do? A massive dose of yura combined with a diet of winterfoods? Titan soldiers would have plenty of access to such foods, training above the snowline of the Seinjial peaks.
Titans have been able to resonate long before yura was discovered, LeTwi cut in. That’s part of the reason the Councilate was so unstoppable.
“Yes,” she said, stopping herself from biting the pen this time. It was a bad habit to speak to her voice aloud, but she indulged it when no one was around. “But if all it took was eating plenty of winterfoods, wouldn’t all the Achuri have this power? Markels say it’s nearly all they eat in winter, alongside game.”
Maybe they all do.
Prophets. Imagine an entire people able to use their resonances at will.
Ella tipped her chair farther back, trying to grasp what that would mean for a people, for their livelihood and politics and warfare. This was the sort of thing that would make a powerful entrance essay to the Thousand Spires. Maybe she could talk to the locals in port—
She leaned too far, and with a cry toppled over backward, books flying and head banging painfully off the wooden deck.
Of course that would be the moment Captain Ralhens appeared, cold pipe clutched between his teeth. “Excuse me,” she said, cheeks heating. The inkwell had spilled, but thankfully not on her books or clothes. It was embarrassing how many such stains she’d made back here. “I—seem to have gotten lost in my thoughts.”
“Aye. ’T’wouldn’t be the first time.” There was no humor in his eyes, though. “Some men wanting to see you on top deck.”
“Some…men?” He did not sound pleased. “What’s going on?”
“Would you come with me?”
“I—” Ella gathered her things and stood up, smoothing her muslin dress. “I’m not really dressed for it. Give me a minute to change.”
He nodded and she went into her room, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. A few minutes later, he was leading her to the top deck, where a crowd of twenty or so men were gathered at the front rail, watching the passage up the Genga. Three waited for her under the covered area where they’d supped last night—Olgsby, Pruitt, and another she didn’t remember, a man who’d come to her just once on the trip.
Ella nodded to them. “Gentleman. You wanted something?”
At this Pruitt spat, but elderly Olgsby was the one who spoke. “You lied to us.” He raised a finger to point at her, voice warbling. “You deceived us.”
She summoned her most serene face. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Colonel.”
“A fake,” Pruitt said. “A common girl, masquerading as a calculor so she can catch us out here and rob of us of our money!”
Stains. They must have heard that she didn’t have a proper license. “Gentleman, I assure you—”
“You’ve already assured us, with lies!” the third man cut in. A few faces turned from the crowd at the front railing.
“Perhaps,” the captain said, “we should move this discussion somewhere more private?”
“Nothing of it,” Pruitt said, hot. “I’ll see her papers here and now, or I demand my money back, every last half-moon!”
Ella put on a smile, thinking fast. “Mr. Pruitt, I’m afraid my papers are in Worldsmouth, for safekeeping. If something were to happen during the voyage…”
“Pah,” the third one spat. “I knew you were a title-grabber the first time I met you. Trying to turn your looks into a decent name and comfortable position in one of the Houses.”
“Oh, aye, she came on to me,” Pruitt said, puffing up. “Though I had the good sense to decline at the time.”
Another snorted. “I’ll bet you declined.” Even now, the men ogled her as they spoke. Ella clenched her teeth, crushing the ball of yura in her mouth. This was likely to get ugly.
“Ellumia,” Olgsby said, looking uncomfortable at the men’s words, “are you a licensed calculor or aren’t you? You have a chance here to clear your name.”
And to repay all the money she’d made—for solid work, save her licensing? She wouldn’t even have enough to cover return passage. Fortunately, when you’d been on the run for years, lying was easy. “There’s nothing to clear, Colonel. I am a certified calculor, trained under Owengild and Feddles at the Ibex Academy for Councilium Businesswork. My work has rarely come under criticism and never led to correction or audit. Or has anyone experienced otherwise?”
It was a calculated risk—while she had never heard of her work coming up short under Council
ate inspection, she also didn’t keep as regular a tie with her customers as land-based calculors did. Still, she had plenty of repeat customers on Ralhen’s ship, and none had complained.
No one spoke up. She was beginning to smile when Pruitt swiped his arm, as though to wipe away her lies. “Doesn’t matter. You either show me some papers, or show me my coin.”
A few of the men at the rail began to drift over. This was not the kind of attention she needed. Let them once start talking to port authorities and she would be behind bars, or worse. Ella drew herself up. “Gentleman, I don’t know what to tell you. My word is good. I defer judgment to Captain Ralhens. He has known me the longest, and his word is law aboard this ship.”
Ralhens looked troubled at this and opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, someone else cut in, a newcomer. “What’s going on here?”
“Gettels!” Pruitt cried. “Just the man. Turns out this girl’s no calculor; she’s a common title-grabber. We’re trying to get our money back, and she’s refusing.”
“A title-grabber?” he cried. “I paid top coin for her!”
“As did we,” Pruitt said, grinning. “Arrest the sow if she won’t repay our coin.”
Gettels had been a lawkeeper before his time in House Galya, she recalled. He was no doubt still deputized. Ella tried to speak, to defend herself, but the crowd overrode her, and she had that sense again, that feeling of being alone on a ship full of hostile men. “Won’t pay?” “Not licensed?”
“Gentlemen!” the captain was crying, but they wouldn’t listen. Something more than words was needed here. Her yura had had time to take effect. Ella reached inside and struck her resonance.
At once, as always, the air seemed to thicken to honey. The men’s voices dropped in pitch, their motions slowed, the very breeze stilling against her cheek. This was timeslip, the brief moments her resonant ability afforded her to move at two or three times regular speed. She would not waste it.
