“This isn’t our stop.”
“I need a drink. And not in the New City. That cursed place hurts my eyes. I can’t sleep properly up there. Too many eyes.” He vanishes into the throng on the platform. A few other passengers consider getting into Baston’s carriage, but take one look at him and pick another seat. He closes the door, lets the jolting of the train lull his tired bones.
Alone, he opens his hand and stares at the pebble. It glimmers with a faint light that seems to grow brighter as the train crosses the border and into the New City.
So what if the alchemists have their candles? The thieves have their own light, now.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Eshdana unshackle Cari and take her on board the gunboat. At the sight of the armed guards, Ren lets his stick fall into the water. There’s nothing they can do against armed guards – and that’s not even considering the sorceress.
One of the guards on the gunboat is Dol Martaine. He pulls Cari down to sit next to him as the boat turns around, engine alternately growling and idling as they try to find the best course through the hazardous ruins.
“Help them,” she whispers.
“Got their brat at home, don’t I? That’s all I can do for Adro.”
“You sold me out to the Ghierdana,” she spits at Martaine.
“If I’d sold you out,” Martaine whispers, “you think I’d still be here? Instead, I’m wiping up after the wretch.” He shakes his head. “I should have done it. I wish I had done it. I’d off this cursed island and halfway to Paravos. But no use crying over it now, yes?”
“Are you taking me to Artolo?”
“No. The Dentist.” He hands her a grey shift to wear. The coarse cloth is spotted with someone else’s blood. As Cari pulls the garment over her head, she turns around, looking for something she can steal. A knife or some other weapon. Anything to give her an edge – but Martaine knows her too well. He grabs her, drags her back down to the bench next to him, and keeps a close eye on her. The sorceress, too, watches her like a silent idol.
There’s a ship in the distance, beyond the ruins of the city. An alchemy-powered freighter, her funnels trailing pale blue smoke as she steams north around the coast. Cari stares at her, trying to judge her size. The horizon’s as fucked up as the sea, but Cari guesses it must be huge.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“Moonchild,” answers Martaine. “The Dentist brought it. Big beast of a ship, eh? Armed, too. She’s to bring the yliaster to Guerdon.” He shakes his head. “Maybe I’d be on her if it weren’t for you.”
Cari half rises for a better view of the distant vessel, but Martaine hauls her down. “Sit still and shut up for once in your bloody life,” he hisses, and there’s terror in his eyes. “I won’t end up like Hawse.”
She sits still. She shuts up. She pulls the grey shift around herself, like her touch is tainted.
The refinery reminds Cari of the Alchemists’ Quarter in Guerdon, but only a little. In the district, the pipes were polished mirror-bright and ornamented with astrological sigils. The factories were palaces of industry, temples to transmutation. The Ghierdana refinery, though, looks like a distillery for making rot-gut booze. All ramshackle, dripping with grease and oil, barely holding together, and built from whatever salvage they could find in the ruined city.
There are a few sections, though, that look new-made. The innermost components – reaction vessels, industrial athanors – are clearly imported from beyond Ilbarin, incongruous as a hat on a Bythos. Guerdon-made, she guesses, although they look somehow off to her. Fanciful, brass and steel decorated with serpents and flowers. Admittedly, her expertise on alchemical factories is limited to one burglary and two near-apocalypses.
Below, she can see the loading docks where they bring in the sacks of yliaster; on the right, a queue of carts, laden with casks bound for Ushket’s docks, then Moonchild. And then far-off Guerdon.
And above it all, perched on the roof of the refinery, is the dragon.
Martaine and other guards drag her, kicking and biting, through the refinery. She knows it’s a waste of energy, but she gets a really satisfying elbow into the ribs of one of the guards. If she managed a bite, too, it would have been a better meal than she’s had in days, but they don’t give her the opportunity.
They wrestle her across the main floor, past rows of troughs filled with yliaster, being washed by miserable workers who don’t dare look up. Past the huge main athanor, an alchemical furnace. They bring her to a narrow metal staircase that leads to a gantry. There’s a room up here overlooking the main factory floor, and they shove her through the door.
It’s a laboratory – there’s a mask and robe of woven silver hanging from a hook, rows of bottles and jars, aetheric instruments, things in tanks. Windows so he can monitor the athanors. Another window, looking out over the ruins and the sea and the muddy shore. The room’s all cold and clinical, all scrubbed clean. A room for dissections.
The alchemist’s there. The Dentist. Vorz. Cari’s seen him before, sort of – through Spar, in the last days before she fled Guerdon. A black crow of a man, stalking through her streets in the New City. Another alchemist, grubbing in the dirt for poison.
The guards troop out, but the armoured sorceress remains. “I’ll paralyse her,” she says, raising a gloved hand limned in purple light.
Vorz clicks his tongue in irritation. “An active incantation would affect my instruments. Restrain her only if necessary.”
Cari nods meekly. Lets her shoulders drop, her hands go limp. No point in fighting a sorcerer.
From a shelf, he takes down an object she recognises – it’s a gilded skull. Once Professor Ongent used a skull like that one to determine her connection to the Black Iron Gods. She recalls the horror of that early contact with the deities, how it drove her into a frenzy of terror. She’d ended up breaking Ongent’s nose with a headbutt.
“First, I shall ascertain what thaumic anchors remain,” murmurs Vorz. He’s talking to the sorceress, not Cari. He hasn’t even looked at her – she’s a specimen to him, an experiment. His voice is a solemn whisper. “At this distance, I doubt there’s active congruency to any Guerdonese powers, but there may be spiritual pollution from the local aether. I may require you to conduct an exorcism.”
He bends over to put the skull in Cari’s hands, just like Ongent did.
Cari skips the frenzy of terror, and just head-butts the Dentist straight off. His nose breaks with a very satisfying crunch. She flings the skull at the sorceress – purple light flares, but it catches the skull, not her. More bone shatters. Cari springs across the room, grabbing jars of alchemical shit and smashing them down, throwing them at the sorceress – fuck, please, would SOMETHING just explode! – then running. There’s a door across the room. She darts to it, grabbing a scalpel as she flees, broken glass bloodying her feet.
Out of the door on to the gantry. Refinery floor below her. Above her, the whole building shakes with a furious animal roar. Oh yeah, there’s a dragon on the roof.
Suddenly, there’s no ceiling above her, as a massive claw rips a hunk of it away. A furious dragon’s eye peers through the hole, boggling at her insolence, so she adds injury to insult by flinging the scalpel straight into it. She runs down the metal gantry, charging headlong. No fucking idea where she’s going, but at least it’s not waiting around to die.
She hears shouts from the factory below. Eshdana guards below spot her, start stomping up the metal stairs towards her, so she jumps from the gantry, grabbing on to the metal bars that support the tin roof. She swings across, bar to bar, until she reaches the outer housing of the main athanor, the big bell-shaped tank in the middle of the room. It’s hot to the touch, like climbing on a stove, but after a morning diving in the chilly depths it’s almost pleasant. Easily the best part of a doomed attempt to escape from a gang of crazed dragon-pirates and their alchemical freak show. She sways, deliriously, from the top of the machine. She doesn’t have a plan, but ma
ybe something will happen. And, if not, then at least, for a brief moment, she’s free. She laughs wildly.
Roars from outside. Surely the dragon won’t smash up his own refinery. The workers and guards mill around beneath her, but none of them can climb up here. None of them dare shoot at her, either, for fear of damaging their precious machinery. Cari laughs again as they come to the same realisation and lower their weapons.
A door below bursts open, and Artolo rushes in, red-faced and furious, carrying a long-barrelled rifle. He raises the weapon, and she can tell that the risk to the yliaster isn’t going to dissuade him. Shit. She climbs higher, trying to keep the athanor between her and that gun.
Artolo roars in frustration and races to the side, trying to get a clean shot. She dodges back the other way, trying to guess his intention. She wishes that she had Spar’s sight to back her up, instead of having to peer through the tangle of struts and pipes that sprout from the upper section of the furnace.
He fires. The section of pipe she was clinging to explodes in a burst of fire and shrapnel. Cari leaps awkwardly at the last second and manages to catch on to a dangling loop of chain, but there’s nowhere else to go, and she’s left hanging thirty feet above the ground, ears ringing from the blast. The world sways and spins around her.
Artolo takes aim.
“ENOUGH!” roars the dragon. “Artolo, put the rifle down. Now!”
Artolo’s face contorts in fury, but he drops the gun.
“You, Thay, enough of this folly. There is no escape. There are only degrees of suffering. Yield.”
All Cari can do is hang there. The only defiance she can muster is spitting in the dragon’s face, and he’s too far away for the little gobbet of phlegm to get anywhere near him. It splashes in a yliaster trough, far below.
“Your courage is noted,” continues the dragon, squeezing in through the loading dock. Its folded wings scrape against the sides of the massive door. Workers scurry out of the way, and the liquid in the yliaster troughs jumps and ripples with every thunderous footfall. Gods, the thing is gigantic. It fixes its fiery eyes on Cari, and she’s frozen – not by magic, but by sheer animal terror, a little mouse facing off against a lion. She tries to clamber around the athanor again, get the furnace between her and that thing, but, fast as a striking serpent, the dragon’s head darts forward. The jaws close around Cari, and she lets go of the chain in shock. She shrieks as it whips her around. The dragon holds her in his mouth without biting down – he could devour her in an instant, the slightest pressure from those mighty jaws would crush her, drive those huge teeth through her, she can feel them digging into her, and for a terrifying instant she thinks that he’s going to eat her – and then spits her out, dropping her on to the hard ground.
He leans down, his hot drool dripping on her skin. Flames lick the air when he speaks. “Your cousin Eladora Duttin came to my lair. She offered me tribute. A share of Guerdon’s wealth. A territory on the mainland. The fate of two empires, at my command. She bargained with gods to reach me. Praised my magnificence. She bowed before me and begged for my aid. She understood her place.” The dragon stares down at her, eyes blazing.
“You will, too.”
They dress Cari’s wounds before returning her to the prison camp. The dragon’s teeth have torn a dozen ugly cuts in her thighs, her side, her shoulders. None too deep, but they all have to be washed out with stinging antiseptic. While the Eshdana healer treats her, she glances up, spots Vorz sitting on a walkway above the factory floor, another doctor fussing over the alchemist’s bandaged nose.
“Worth it,” she mutters.
She expected them to punish her. To beat her. Feed her to the dragon. Instead, they feed her. It’s better than camp food – she guesses it’s Eshdana rations. There’s even something pinkish that might conceivably have once been introduced to meat, and she wolfs it down. It doesn’t even cost her any chits. Somehow, it’s more sinister to have her special status underlined. They want something from her.
Back in the camp, the guards thrust Cari through the gate and close it behind her. Other guards watch her from the gantries as she makes her way through the ruins to the house she shares with Ren and Adro. The other prisoners watch her, too, but she can feel a barrier between her and them. She’s tainted, made toxic by her mysterious association with the Ghierdana. It’s like having the Stone Plague back in Guerdon.
Adro’s lying on the floor. They’re always exhausted after diving, falling asleep where they drop, so she thinks nothing of it until she sees Ren’s face.
“Oh fuck. What happened?”
“He got sick after they took you. Something in the water struck him. Maybe poisoned him.” Ren presses a rag to Adro’s brow. His big body shakes with the effort of breathing. His skin’s clammy, his hands limp, sprawled across his heaving chest like jellyfish. The wound’s small, but the flesh around it is swollen and raw. Little droplets of liquid pus ooze from it and run down Adro’s flanks.
“You’re hurt, too,” says Ren, seeing Cari’s bandages.
“It’s nothing.” She kneels down on the other side of Adro, takes his other hand in hers. “We’ve got to find him a healer.”
“I tried,” says Ren quietly, in his matter-of-fact way. “They won’t come. We need to be here for him.”
Cari sits. Waits. Holds her friend’s hand, as shudders run through him. She doesn’t know what to do. Her instincts tell her to run. She hates to stay and watch, to sit and wait for the inevitable.
Don’t stay in Aunt Silva’s house, waiting for the nightmares to come. Leave. Run away in the night.
Don’t sit and quarrel with Captain Hawse day after day. Leave. Run away in the night.
And Spar – Spar was dying from the moment she met him. And she nearly did flee, when he needed her most. When he was in a prison – a prison like this one – and Heinreil poisoned him, Cari fled down to Guerdon’s harbour, went looking for a ship to carry her away. It was the fucking Black Iron Gods that convinced her to turn around, to stay.
How shit a person is she, to need moral guidance from tyrannical carrion gods?
Is Khebesh another way to avoid hanging around, waiting for a friend to die? She told herself that Khebesh was a destination, not an excuse, but it got her out of Guerdon. Should she have stayed, born witness as Spar slowly faded into nothingness? Maybe it’s all her fault – she used so much of him during the invasion…
Adro groans, and it floods her stomach with sick guilt. She’s supposed to be here for Adro, and instead she’s thinking about Spar. Focus on one sick friend at a time.
She searches for something to say. “Your little girl – Dol Martaine has her. She’s safe. I mean, Martaine’s a fucker and I’ll kill him if he touches her – no, we’ll kill him – but she’s staying with him.”
“Hear that? Ama is safe. You don’t need to worry,” echoes Ren, talking to Adro. He even manages a thin smile. “We’ll find her again, like before. You brought us out of this camp, remember? You saved us.”
Adro groans, but doesn’t say anything that might be intelligible speech. He coughs, blood-flecked spittle bursting from his lips. His eyes open, but they don’t focus on anything. Ren dribbles a little water into his mouth.
“He’s not going to make it,” whispers Cari, and Ren’s eyes flash with anger.
“He’s strong. You know how strong he is. He’ll bury us all – won’t you, Adro?”
The sun vanishes behind the Rock of Ilbarin. The stars come out. They’ve changed again, Cari notes distantly. The Godswar fucks up the heavens, rewrites the celestial sphere. The tide comes up the slope, waves breaking against the ruins of the city. It’s beautiful in the darkness – the yliaster deposits make the whole sea shimmer like liquid moonlight. She describes it to Adro. Talks about old times, telling the same old stories Adro recounted at that last dinner on the Rose. She doesn’t tell the tales as well as Adro, but she tries. She even adds a new one to the rotation – remember that time we nearly escaped Ilbar
in on a boat made of worms? Wasn’t that crazy? Wasn’t that a lark?
When she can no longer talk, Ren takes over. He reminds Adro of their shared history, how Adro got him out of the camp. Talks about the fragile little life they built in Ushket. He speaks with a courtier’s eloquence, and a diplomat’s evasion: he never mentions that Adro was ash-marked, a prison guard for the Ghierdana. Ren never mentions his own job in Ushket directly either, but Cari guesses it was something to do with the Ghierdana, too. Either you serve the dragon, or you die. There is no escape. Only degrees of suffering. Ren describes a little island of tranquillity, a fiercely defended bubble of normality in a dying land. He talks about teaching Ama to read, about friends they can stay with in Paravos when they finally leave Ilbarin, about his idea to keep roaming Bythos out of a little vegetable garden at the back of their home.
Her own dragon-inflicted wounds begin to ache. Her shoulders, especially, as she hunches over Adro’s body. At some point in the night he begins to shiver, his whole body shaking convulsively. They pile their thin blankets on top of him after the heat leeches from the air.
Sometime close to dawn, Ren comes around to sit next to Cari.
“I want to tell you something,” he says, not looking at her. “Adro asked me to remain silent, but I owe you honesty. That night, when Adro visited Captain Hawse and dined with you – he told me where he was going, and who he was going to see. I told the Ghierdana that you were at the wreck of the Rose. That’s how they found you.”
“I- I thought it was Martaine—”
“No. It was I. They were offering passage off Ilbarin.” Ren adjusts Adro’s blanket. “Adro didn’t know. He was furious when I told him. And I don’t suppose it’s worth anything, but I am sorry. I don’t bear any malice towards you. There’s no space for such things, now.” A thin smile. “It’s always easier to deal with abstracts, isn’t it? In the prefect’s court, one of my duties was overseeing the paperwork regarding executions. We always had to excise all the names – it was always Prisoner Number such-and-such.”
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