The ocean was a choppy swell laced with lines of foam, a breathing shape over the back of which the Petrel rolled. The mastheads were beginning to glow, freezing spray cracked from taut sails, and she listed hard to starboard as she slid rather than sailed down into another trough.
A passing squall blew the surface of the waves opaque and slated rain horizontally onto the gleaming deck. Water dripped off the strips of lead nailed over Mist’s cabin door. White rain screamed down so strongly I couldn’t see through it. It pounded the waves flat.
I slid the forecastle hatchway open on its runners and peered down into the sickbay. Lightning’s figure was just visible in the gloom. The bed had been hooked to the padded leather wall and he sat propped up, a glass of brandy cradled in his big hands. He pressed his back to the wall in an attempt to relieve the pain that still immobilized him. I teetered uncertainly on the creaking threshold until he beckoned me down. “Come in. It’s so tedious lying here for weeks. I’ve either been talking to Rayne or listening to my own heartbeat in the pillow. Close the hatch, please; the chill seems to nip into my wound.”
I dangled off the ladder as the ship lurched unexpectedly, and dropped onto a spare sleeping bag by the opposite bulkhead. “I was just on deck getting some fresh air-if you can describe sea air as fresh. We keep sliding down the waves sideways, they’re like black pyramids. Mist’s furious; in the teeth of the storm we’re getting nowhere and Gio is increasing his lead. Wrenn hasn’t stopped being sick yet. Where’s the Doctor?”
“Collecting clean water from the stove. I am in good hands.”
The ship rolled and molten wax poured off the candles in the lantern. The flames jumped up high on their long wicks. Lightning blinked. He winnowed out his uninjured wing to scratch between the contour feathers, then folded it up by hand and tucked it under his voluminous surtout coat. The creamy candlelight cast his face into pallor. He was clean-shaven and, through long practice, fastidiously neat. Living on a ship for three months is like camping at the Front and Lightning knew how boredom, bad conditions and long waiting cause men’s discipline and ultimately their behavior to degenerate. The bandages under his barn-owl-yellow coat were fresh and crisp.
He said, “I worry about Cyan; I need to see her more. I only have a short opportunity to raise her and I can’t depend on Swallow to do it properly. This is such appalling timing; last century the Emperor could have done without me for a decade. Poor Cyan, she always looks delighted when I visit, though she’s different every time, she grows so fast. Jant, one day you might find that you rely on prominent features to recognize people from one decade to the next.”
He veered from Low to High Awian, an outrageously complicated language in which every noun has a case, a tense, one of three genders and one of two social classes. Most of the verbs are irregular, and the least slip in the forms of address can cause offense. I am not sure whether High Awian became so intense through its long evolution in their aristocracy or deliberately to discourage aspiring farmers, tenants and Morenzians.
“This is the longest time I have failed to practice. I’ll be in a sadly Challengeable state when we reach Tris, but it is my responsibility to catch Gio. This hurts, Jant; it certainly hurts. I can still feel the steel piercing my side-cold and inflexible. Have some brandy. I’m not drinking much, it would be disastrous for my aim, but it really is better than ours.”
“It’s the only decent drink on board,” I said. “Mist left in such a hurry that we’ve taken Gio’s leftovers for rations. My guts are shrinking; I’ve had nothing but soup and juice all week. Can I bring you any?”
“No, stay awhile and talk. I have a Messenger’s errand for you…”
“What is it?”
“It is somewhat unusual.” Lightning stared into the center of the cabin. It was easy to underestimate how debilitated he was, with those overdeveloped shoulders. I waited patiently; perhaps he was rambling. The warm round smell of wax pervaded the berth, making it rather cozy. The rain smelled green; the ship’s oakum soaked it up and stank like a wet dog. Thankfully it was difficult to envisage the breakers tearing over the main deck; above us the shredded topsail cracked and plaited. The driving waves caught red dusk like smallpox as sunset flashed under a suffocating sky, transforming the sailors’ frantic activity into a series of stills.
Lightning breathed, “It is autumn again…her birthday. I should be with Martyn. Since the Circle was founded I have never missed the date, my long-kept secret. If I could order Petrel around and sail for Awndyn, I would.”
“Count me in!”
He gave a bitter smile. “I knew that at some point I would fail Martyn. It matters not, when Gio is persuading mortals to massacre us. But although my tradition is just a whim, I find breaking it makes me uncomfortable and I fancy she will miss me.” He looked away. “I suppose you are eager to know what has been eating me up for one and a half thousand years…”
Lightning stared into space for a long while. He judged the time was right and suddenly said, “Jant, I want you to carry a message to a dead woman. If I am killed fighting the rebels, you must visit the mausoleum and speak to her about the circumstances of my end. Explain why I can no longer come to see her.”
He feigned interest in his brandy. “My cousin’s body lies in an aventurine casket near the tombs of generations of my family, in a high-ceilinged sepulchre. You will find it among the trees on the man-made island in Micawater lake, in the palace grounds. I visit her once a year; I should be there today. I always leave the door ajar so that a shaft of light falls across Martyn’s tomb. She loved the lake, you see. She used to trail her hand in the water, for the suspended mineral flecks that reflect the sunlight.
“You will see one clear track that my steps have made through the dust that lies thickly over every surface, from the entrance to the head of her vault. I sit beside the inscription that I keep free of dust. For the space of a few hours I tell her all the events of the previous year. I say that I visit as promised, because I still love her.
“I always bring balsam flowers. I store them in the underground bow room, which you have not seen. It is near the ice house, a beehive-shaped cellar, a cool, homeostatic store where the bows hang horizontally on stands. The flowers must be white because they set off her magnificent deep red hair so well. They must be balsam, as in the rhyme that no one even remembers anymore: balsam for lovers, willows for brides, briar for maidens, lilies for wives.
“When I have finished telling her the news I leave the balsam, gather up the dried remains of last year’s bouquet and row back across the lake.”
Lightning rubbed his forehead and sipped at the brandy. In his mind’s eye he stroked the glistening green stone, sitting on the plinth while maple leaves fell past the mausoleum portal and doves cooed in the baroque cote.
“Martyn and I were struck with pure and sincere love,” he said very sourly. I was startled, but I suppose nothing causes bitterness so much as a downfall from ecstasy. “I don’t know why. Maids of honor packed my mother’s entourage. There were ballrooms full of girls, all very pretty and accomplished, but not one of them was real.
“As a child Martyn was often at the palace. Then one banquet night we noticed each other and everything changed. We fell through into a panorama of hidden possibilities. We stared at each other across the laden table; nothing else existed. Without a word we rose together and left the hall. She was nineteen years old, I was twenty-nine. My conscience made me hesitate; she took my wing and led me to the antechamber, where she pushed me into the cloaks hanging on the wall and allowed me to kiss her.
“We rushed to the stables at midnight. ‘Don’t you want to escape?’ Martyn said. She was wild, she didn’t care. She charged her white hunter at hedges and ditches, taking the jumps at a mad speed and I galloped beside her.”
An unruly smirk that I had never seen before appeared on Lightning’s face. He looked almost boyish. “‘Don’t you want to escape?’ We escaped a lot after that-every opportunity we had.” He held his index fingers ten centimeters apart. “I was this far from quitting the court, marrying her and exiling ourselves. We were this far, one fistmele, from escaping properly. I wish I had had the courage; she would still be alive today. She would be here now.
“I sometimes fought Insects but my lineage shielded me. Martyn and I spent most days in a world of our own. My family never mentioned it but they knew. Oh yes, they knew. The court thrived on Mother’s blissful love for Garganey, but my love for her sister’s daughter was taboo.
“We talked for hours and rode great distances, far from the palace to converse in the forest. All those long conversations, words came so easily. At dinners we were careful to sit apart. In dances she was serene and unperturbed while I tried hard not to look.
“Martyn was a peerless rider. I remember her perfume, her sepia and sage silk, her strong limbs, pale skin, and her auburn wings that she would spread like an excitable girl. She had seen so many forests the green of them stayed in her eyes.”
I felt like a voyeur in the undergrowth next to Lightning’s cousin as she pressed herself against him and lay between the roots of an oak tree. She pulled up her tunic, her necklace’s fine links pooled in the hollow of her throat. I peered to see a young Saker kiss her neck and full breasts and repeat her name tenderly and urgently. Her red curls spread on the crisp leaves as Saker mumbled, “We mustn’t do this,” desperately down the front of her blouse.
I felt uncomfortable because I had always considered Lightning to be sexless and celibate; the thought of him shagging Martyn was strange and a bit disgusting.
His hollow voice continued: “I see her again and again. Sometimes a woman’s beauty reminds me of Martyn, but she doesn’t act the same. Anyway, even the most breathtaking beauty only approximates to Martyn’s. If I wait long enough…well…the types of characters are not endless, and with time they recur. She looked very much like Swallow, but taller, and she resembled Savory too-remember her?”
I nodded cagily. Lightning sent me to deliver his love letters to a fyrd captain called Savory, and she let me fuck her after she read them. I was single, individualistic and hedonistic, so I took it as proof of how wrong Lightning was about women. I now keep the burden of guilt to myself, because for his peace of mind and my own safety he must never know.
He continued without noticing. “Martyn was as close to perfection as it’s possible to be. A happiness so intense can’t last long; it’s always the case that the arrows we shoot up to the stars fall back on our own heads. The Insects swarmed ever closer, decimating the First Circle, and in the year six-twenty San announced the Games. Martyn watched me win through the hundred rounds in the archery tournament but she did not travel with me to the Castle, where he made us victors immortal. I whispered to her afterward how nobody in the Circle felt immortal and we hardly believed the Emperor. I established myself, organized my lodging in the Castle, and next thing I knew, San sent us to the Front. The Wall ran on the north bank of Rachis River and we struggled very hard-they stretched the Empire to breaking point. I had no sleep for a week, I fought to the last of my strength. It took years to push the vermin back into Lowespass. It was a harder struggle than that of twenty-fifteen.
“Then San gave me leave. I visited my family, and everything looked different. They were all older.”
Lightning pulled his knees up under the blanket and wrapped his arms around them. The informal gesture made him seem shockingly smaller; I suddenly saw the boy in a man I had thought too old and awesome to contain one.
“The gentry and my brothers gave sidelong glances from the periphery of the courtroom as I knelt before Teale. She raised me to my feet, pinched my cheeks and turned my head. ‘By god, it’s true,’ she said, with both pride and envy. Their bodies changed with time, mine didn’t. The world had seen nothing like Eszai before. I seemed to be a threat although I had no power to intimidate them; I couldn’t even age. The stilted politeness of the quality crowd barely covered their distrust. I was keeping their wealthy world safe from Insects but because the Circle was successful the courtiers lost the concept of danger. They took my sacrifice for granted. They drifted, I fought.
“I proposed to Martyn but she could not deny the will of our Queen. She would not leave the court and the country. Although it would have been easy, at the time we couldn’t see how. What happened to the carefree rowdy girl in those years I was away? Martyn didn’t…Now she was older I don’t think she trusted what I’d become. I think I frightened her. I wasn’t strong enough to take her from the court, and she wasn’t as strong as I thought she was…or maybe I appeared stranger to the world than I realized. In the blink of an eye she was married, raised a family of beautiful children, was an old woman; she died. She was always very changeable. I admired her ability and loved her all the more. I adored and guarded her until the end, but I never spoke to her.
“Life seems to be more about the choices you don’t make. San decreed that I could be Eszai or King of Awia, not both. The throne passed to Avernwater. I threw myself into my work again. Eventually I saw Martyn’s own line die out. The bustle and crowds had gone from the palace and I lived there on my own. Hardly anything happened for two hundred years. I had a lot of Challenges because, after all, archery is the national sport. Next time I looked up, I barely recognized the kingdom.”
Lightning realized he was staring at nothing and seemed surprised. He gave me a sharp look and said harshly, “Never mind. I had expected to outlive you, Comet, but these are not Insects we’re fighting now. Will you carry the message to Martyn?”
His confidence overwhelmed me. “I’ll do better than that. I’ll bring her balsam blooms and chat to her on your behalf this day every year for the rest of my life, and then, if I can, I’ll pass the duty on to another willing Eszai when I die.”
“God, Jant; so generous. I am indebted. Thank you very much…” He sighed; he was too exhausted to continue. The silence that followed purged the air. We both knew that we would never mention Martyn again.
I looked at us there: a young and old immortal. The lanky Rhydanne one curled up, safe in his own self-interest, had a bright pride in his eyes because he had the chance to watch over and listen to a prince aged fourteen hundred and thirty-something, talking in a tired attempt to unpick his past. You could peel away shell after shell and still never understand Lightning, because you only get a little of him with each shell. In response I told him everything about Tern’s affair, and I asked for advice. “When Tern’s in Tornado’s rooms I’m too scared to confront them, because it’s his territory, you know.”
Lightning scowled, then surprised me by saying, “But from the start she was so keen to marry you! I can have a word with her if you like. I can explain how you feel, to show my gratitude for the favor you have promised. I once told Rayne about my cousin, but no one else. You will keep the secret?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You are a good friend.” He lay down, propped on one elbow, and said, “Leave me for the night. I have to sleep.”
Next morning I waited till the rain dwindled, then ran out of my cabin along the slick bowed deck past the wheelhouse that Mist had constructed around the helm. She had also lashed a copper rod to the mainmast like a lance. Two sailors clinging to the wheel muttered, envying my sense of balance and the way I can relax into the cold.
Stormy Petrel barreled along furiously under full sail, an arrow shot toward an as yet invisible target. The knife-sharp waves scooped up water and rushed forward, all the water slipped off, then up went the peak again, farther on.
Every time the Petrel bucked up she went “whoosh,” then slammed down “splash.” This whoosh-splash wound my muscles tight; I was sure it would tear the ship to pieces. When she pitched forward the bowsprit dipped and touched the waves. I waited for it to break off. Water sprayed over the prow, rushed down the deck, sluiced off between railings and down drain holes. I thought we were going to do a headstand on the figurehead all the way to the sea floor. Next second the bowsprit pointed straight at the sky like a flagpole. It described an enormous curve as it crunched down again. The masthead drew a wide circle in the sky as Petrel rolled.
Worse, the five-meter waves pushed by the hurricane started overtaking us, and pushed Petrel forward a little in time with each tip-up. With each tip-down the bow slammed in the waves and braked the ship, so a stop-start jolting added to the vertical lift and fall.
In Mist’s cabin my entrance was met with a nod. She was busy with her charts, while her navigational instruments hurtled from one edge of the table to the other with every whoosh-splash.
“It’s been one hundred days,” I said. I wedged myself in the corner. “When will this stop? You said we should be able to see Tris by now.”
“If there was no sea-fret we could,” Mist muttered. “How’s the Archer?”
“Variable. He can walk but his wound keeps catching.”
Wrenn’s voice interrupted me: “Fret, she says! It’s not a fret, it’s a hurricane.” He lay abjectly on the bench by the stern windows. His angular Adam’s apple pointed at the ceiling. His short chestnut-colored wings folded neatly to fit under the curve of his spine, so he could lie flat on his back. His face had a greenish pallor; sweat bristled his hair and stubbly razor-cut sideburns. I noticed a tiny lip of fat over the waistband where he used to be trim. The sea crossing was taking its toll. Happily, I thought, I’m better company for Lightning now he’s injured. Lightning wouldn’t have told Wrenn his secret.
The whole room seesawed up and free-fell down. I winced at the crash. The Swordsman moaned, “After I puke I feel better until fifteen minutes later I have to puke again. My nose is full of it. The teeth ache in my gums. When we lift my stomach is left up there. I plunge with a hole in my middle-on the next rise I meet it and god knows what other internal organs.”
“Try flying,” I said merrily.
“Oh, god…”
The salt-smeared panes behind him gave onto the pockmarked water. Stormy Petrel trailed a green wake. Air bubbles deep inside the waves jiggled and struggled to rise, broke as froth.
The violet rings under Mist’s eyes were the same color as her irises; with her pale hair and fading bronze skin she looked unearthly. She pushed a wooden rule back and forth along the raised rim of the tabletop. “Patience,” she snapped. “I can’t help that we’re hindered by dirty weather, or that Pavonine missed it by days. I can’t control the seasons! I need to know what Gio is doing. I hope to predict him…Against this gale every maneuver I make is as pointless as a Circle masquerade.” Her lips cracked as she smiled. She bent over her chart again, preoccupied. “It’s simply chance. I thought I’d find him! I can’t run him down with the wind in my face no matter how much sail I fly. The Pavonine’s skipper isn’t better than me. He’s just a lucky fucker.”
Wrenn and I remained quiet. The thought that Mist was failing filled the cabin with despondency. She stretched her arm across the table and neatly caught a brass protractor as it slid past. “Can Lightning draw a bow?”
“He says so.”
“Can you fly in this weather?”
“If I can get above the clouds. Otherwise the rain-”
“Good.” She beckoned me to the chart and stroked her finger along some ruled pencil lines. “Here’s your direction from our current position and we are making just over a kilometer an hour so we’ll be at this point by the time you return. If Gio reached Capharnaum at the rate I watched him leave Awndyn, he’ll have been on Tris a fortnight. We’ll have to catch him there.” She sighed and continued almost in a daydream, “When Gio was Serein, I liked the man, I can’t pretend otherwise. We were friends for three hundred years of campaigning. He plays to his strengths so he’ll stay ashore. Aye, I recognize that Zascai extreme desperation; they drive themselves so far and so pitilessly they can’t survive. There but for San’s favor go I. Right. I admit I don’t want to deal with Gio on dry land, but I have no choice. I’ll let Lightning and Serein take their turn.
“We’re coming up on Tris in the next day or so. See? Scout around, Comet, and bring us some intelligence.”
I memorized the calculation and said to Wrenn, “Don’t worry, there’s only one day left.”
“Aye, go back to training,” Mist gibed him. “I want you as keen as a harpooner when I set you on Gio. This surf will break straight onto the rocks. I’m lucky that the Capharnai built such an imposing harbor wall for their piffling little canoes.”
The sky and sea were so overcast that the very light was gray. Cloud lowered to liquefy and make the ocean. The Petrel was always the center of a dull opaque sphere, half-filled with thrashing water. Great spirals of spitty white foam went around and around on the sea’s surface.
Waves thumped on the bow and resonated through the whole ship, playing her like a drum. She crashed down, the displaced water spurted up over the figurehead and pattered on the foredeck. Half a meter of white spray stood solid on top of the waves, where raindrops were bouncing back off. Their power smoothed the waves, filled the troughs-the sea was white as a snow field. Spume blew off the wave tops. I was inhaling it; the air was full of salt.
I shrugged my leather coat on over three layers of T-shirts, and shoved my hair down the collar. I drank a mug of hot reconstituted soup with stale biscuit broken into it. Then I set off and climbed unevenly, beating painfully against gusts that came from every direction. Behind me rain fell as a slanting gray strip from a single patch of cloud onto the heeling caravel.
Flickering lightning illuminated the clouds from within. I zigzagged up, terrified of it. I beat a path with great difficulty through the wind, already waterlogged by raindrops as big as snowflakes.
I disappeared into the cloud base and continued climbing calmly to avoid disorientation. Rain streamed down my coat and cold wisps whipped past my face.
I emerged, pulling up shreds of cloud, into a most perfect, tranquil world-with a population of one. The sky above was a uniform winter blue, a bright sun shone on complete cloud cover beneath me like a second, motionless ocean. Its wan surface was hollowed and carded into static points like a blanket of wool. The light was so brilliant it reminded me of the glare on the Darkling glaciers.
I breathed deeply in the thin air. Directly ahead cumulo-stratus lapped around the summit of Tris’s mountain, its charcoal and olive colors muted with distance. Farther away the silhouette tip of the second island in the archipelago poked through the cloud. They were like islands in the sky.
I held my wings out in a long shallow glide. On the ground I never had freedom from responsibility, from people, freedom from drugs. This was the ultimate release. Only the dull and earthbound sit in hulking carracks, the humid forest. They will never understand my world because I am the Messenger and I have all this air.
The clouds’ surface sped away under me. While Stormy Petrel and Capharnaum town labored under the storm, the setting sun cast the colors of northern lights over my private sea. Meringue cloud turned opalescent blue, pale orange and rose pink; the mountain’s shadow lengthened. I loved the uninhabited mountain. The splendor of Tris from my unique perspective filled me with elation, but I wished that I could show it to Tern. I would paint it in words for her if we were ever snug in bed together again.
I reached the mountain’s slope after nightfall. The gale concealed my wings’ noise, so I descended through the clouds to Capharnaum and circled at height trying to discern detail. It hadn’t rained on Tris; the main boulevard and its rotunda were lit but the surrounding streets were completely dark. A few people stood by the crossroads. A group of men walked toward them, carrying lanterns and some sort of polearm. The loiterers started up, slouched downhill toward the harbor and filed into a wine shop, leaving the paved street empty. From the foot of the Amarot crag, a bell pealed ten strokes, and all was silent.
I sailed over the Amarot, seeing its walls lit flame yellow. About a thousand men were bivouacking on the mosaic between the Senate House and the library. They were Gio’s rebels and they had lit a cooking fire right on Alyss’s face. The aroma of goose fat rose up to me. Real food! God, I wanted some of that meat.
Shadows ten times life-size reared and lunged on the Senate House columns as they dipped tin mugs and tarred horn cups into an enormous keg of rum and passed them around. Dirty faces reddened by the firelight jeered and laughed. Thousands of hours of effort had been poured into constructing the mosaic, and now Gio’s thugs were trashing it.
The night seemed to jump darker by degrees, making me blink; my eyes were adjusting all the time. I made out a small building perched on the cliff edge behind the Senate House. A shape as fat as Cinna waddled out of the dark entrance, buttoning his fly. I bent back my wings to descend. Yes, it was Cinna, appearing like a coagulation of all the lard in the Fourlands.
He sauntered, his hands deep in his pockets. I swung into a standing position and dropped to the ground behind him. Cinna halted in his tracks and turned around very slowly. He said, “I’m not wanking. I’m just keeping my hands warm.”
“Huh? Shut up and follow me.”
I ran, hugging close against the library wall, to the unlit colonnade that joined the library to the Senate House. I slunk inside and beckoned to Cinna. He reeled; his peacoat was spotted with rum. I grabbed his lapels and positioned him squarely behind one of the columns where he stood less chance of being seen, although he overlapped it on both sides. His red nose was darker than his shocked white expression. Drops of sweat detached from his shiny forehead and rolled down puffed-out cheeks.
I drew the ice axe from the back of my belt and whispered, “If you cry out I’ll kill you.” Cinna gave me a beseeching look, wiped his palms on his knees and pointed at the ground. I let him sit down and lean against the column. I hunkered down too, in shadow and well out of sight.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Quickly. Why is Capharnaum so dark? The streets are deserted and a bell was tolling. I saw men loitering; there was nothing threatening about Capharnaum before. What’s Gio done to them?”
Cinna’s frightened whisper was so low I scarcely heard it. “You saw that, Messenger? Yes, the patrol just called for the next watch. They’re not fyrd-the Senate appointed men to maintain the curfew and guard the houses.”
“Curfew? There’s a curfew? Why?”
“Because of an Insect that’s loose. It’s killed eighty people so far. The Senate and Gio have divided the town into sectors and they’re searching systematically, even sewers and attics, but they can’t find it. One Insect is causing more trouble than all the swarms of Lowespass. See those posters over there? They warn people to stay indoors.” He nodded toward some sheets of paper pasted on a board at the end of the library. “They carry a picture of the latest victim. But the fact that Capharnai have discovered The Joy Of Insects isn’t the only reason for the curfew. Thieves are roaming the streets. Gangs.”
“Gio’s men are desperadoes,” I agreed.
Cinna belched quietly and chuckled. “Not us. Them. The citizens.”
“But Tris had no crime six months ago.”
Across the square the rabble’s voices rose in a raucous cheer and Cinna took advantage of the noise to say, “It’s your fault!”
“Sh!”
“Mist Ata bought up all the spices, didn’t she? Now they’ve nothing to preserve food. So a lot of the Capharnai’s stores have gone rotten, it’s winter soon and some food supplies are running low. Prices are steep-The Price Of Spice is like scolopendium, Messenger. The Senate has unconditionally banned trade with the Fourlands and they’re endeavoring to ration everything except bread and fish. Well, all I know is they’re muttering because Gio’s nine hundred men have to eat and they’ve no choice but to feed us. Those drunks you saw Being Moved On have made themselves a nuisance here all day.”
“I didn’t know Capharnaum had drunks.”
“It does now. Those men were the merchants Mist paid. I know, because they hassled me for rum as we were rolling the kegs up here. I don’t know how I’m supposed to look like a pusher or a captain if I have to sleep in the outdoors…”
“Keep to the point.”
“Well, Mist gave them so many riches they don’t have to work anymore. Their money is time, and she gave them years of time so now they’re idle. I hope she profited from those peppercorns and pickles, the Entrepreneur Of Misrule, like myself.” He rubbed his plump hands together. “They’re not used to rum but they’ve found a taste for it. They drink it like wine. Because they’re armed, they’re Creating Trouble. It just goes to show that the only Truly International Language is drugs.”
I began to understand. I prompted, “They’re armed? They’ll be armed with the swords and halberds we sold them?”
Cinna nodded. “Yes, I think so. I was told that the Senate tried to buy up all the weapons from the townspeople to give to their patrols but they clearly didn’t get them all because I hear there were armed robberies-at storehouses and the market. Also, young men keep soliciting to buy swords from us. It seems they’ve become quite a status symbol. Capharnai have never seen quality steel before; it’s worth its weight in gold. And of course men have to protect themselves from the Insect.”
“Shit.”
“The Senate is discussing imposing taxes to pay the patrols.” Cinna appraised the Wheel brooch on my patched coat. “Gio is waiting for you and Serein. Gio wondered if Stormy Petrel had gone down in the storm. Of course, he reckoned without Mist’s marvelous seamanship. He was thinking about his next move. He told Senator Vendace that we would leave Capharnaum, but he doesn’t really mean to. He’s safe here; the Senate is In His Pocket.”
Cinna put a special emphasis on Gio’s name. He was obviously firmly under the fencing master’s influence. Nine hundred men following Gio, I thought. They outnumber us more than three to one. Still, that’s better odds than against the Insects. “If I have to stain my hands with blood, I must admit this rabble is less daunting than the swarms.”
Cinna gaped. “You think it’s just Gio? No, Comet. God, sometimes I believe all you have to do to be immortal is out-arrogance each other.”
“Spit it out.”
“Gio has won over the Senate and he’s prepared to lead all Capharnaum against you when you land.” He went on, “Everyone here hates you, and Gio has been planning. When Petrel sails into harbor she’ll be surrounded, you’ll be seized. There are twenty thousand people in this town.
“Vendace was wary because of the disastrous effects of your visit. But Gio’s rhetoric quite convinced him. You should’ve tried making long speeches in the Senate.” Cinna smirked. “Gio’s here for the same reasons and on the same terms as the original settlers-to leave the Empire and San. Vendace thought he had found a Kindred Spirit. Gio offered to help hunt the Insect and being desperate they welcomed him with open arms. His interpreters are at home with their old lingo. The Senate didn’t like the look of us tars as much. They’ve been discussing it for three days but they haven’t made a decision yet.”
I wished for another stint in the Senate. If Gio can sway their opinion simply by talking to them, I thought how much better I could be when it was my turn. Gio may have had two weeks to work on their hearts and minds, but I’d love a verbal battle with him.
Cinna sniggered. “They are so naïve. Myself and three colleagues could control this town in a year without drawing a sword or promising immortality-Ulp!” I pressed my ice pick to his throat. He gulped: I expected his eyes to pop in like a frog’s. I couldn’t bear the thought that he could turn Capharnaum into a slum worse than East Bank Hacilith. I hissed, “You bastard, if you ever bring drugs to Tris, if you even think of peddling here, I swear I’ll kill you. If you hide your tracks I’ll trace them, because I know every link in a larger world than you could ever comprehend. You’ll beg to be sent to the Front. You will beg for the wheel. I will have you keelhauled from bow to stern of the Petrel-”
“No!”
“You could do with losing some weight. The same goes for if you tell Gio I’ve been here.”
Cinna wiggled his shoulders, trying to pull away from the pick dimpling his neck. “Please, Comet. I’m a businessman and San’s humble servant. I shall always give a truthful account and say nothing to Gio. In the meantime I’ve arranged to stay on board Pavonine…It’s the safest place to be.”
“Coward,” I mouthed. I licked salt off my lips.
“Look at you grin. You’re enjoying this! Mad Eszai. If Petrel lands, Gio will kill you. If you turn tail and run home, you’ll starve on the journey. I wonder what San will think when his Circle breaks for Four Immortals At Once? Bet that’d give him a headache.”
I prodded him with the axe. “Where’s Gio now? Does he stay on Pavonine?”
Cinna shook his head; the blond hairs on his chin wagged. He pointed up, across the mosaic, to a concertina-shuttered lit window above the Senate House. “See the end room? Right on the corner past the last column? That’s the bedroom of the apartment that Vendace gave him. All the senators have rooms up there. It’s very plush,” he added, with a quiet admiration of Gio’s achievement. “Now tell me, Messenger, isn’t that a useful piece of information?”
“It certainly is.”
Cinna glanced at the firelight and the rebels singing drunkenly. He pressed a note into my hand. “Please let me go. I respect Mist. I’d like to help her, the little I can. It’s tough to find a way through the surf. I wrote down the details of our approach to the beacon and the position and condition of Pavonine. Please give it to her.”