The Nature of a Pirate Read online

  “But why, Cly? Why do you care?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Is it that you’re a stealth peacenik? Is it Pinna? Are you besotted with Beatrice, after all these years?”

  That got a bark of laughter.

  “Are you just kicking dirt on your father’s memory?” she continued.

  “Tormenting your elders is your brand of perversity, child.”

  “Tormenting. Really?” What am I doing? She should be happy, no matter his motives. A Cly even somewhat committed to abolition was a vastly cheerier prospect than a contented slave-owning bastard. “Why do you care?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “It shouldn’t be.”

  “Nudging Sylvanna onto a better path is the best possible outcome for a potentially appalling conflict—”

  “That’s just pragmatism.”

  “Well, yes.” Cly waved his hand in dismissal. “Kev Lidman must be stopped, Sophie.”

  “He’s locked up and pacified. He’s pretty stopped.”

  “Lidman is connected to your conspiracy. He or his allies are gaming with you.”

  It was true. But Kev seemed completely depressed half the time and scared to death the rest of it. None of which had shaken the truth from him.

  The carriage jolted sideways. Cly rapped at the sliding panel between carriage and driver, barking out orders in Sylvanner like a drill sergeant.

  No answer.

  Cly frowned, and tried the panel. It didn’t slide.

  “Use this.” Garland produced a thin knife, about nine inches long. Cly used it to pry the panel off.

  Their driver was gone.

  Garland and Cly, on either side of Sophie, opened the carriage doors without hesitating.

  They were picking up speed. One of the mares began to make a sound, a jittery, agonized whining that rose and fell. EeeEEEeeeEEE!

  The horses’ backs and flanks were ballooning, rippling in peculiar ways, as if something under the skin was trying to get out.

  “Frights,” Sophie said. “The stolen horsehair sample. Frights.”

  “We must cut the team loose,” Cly said.

  “We’ll lose the road,” Garland pointed out.

  Cly leaned far out of the carriage, looking up and down the mountain. Scanning for other threats?

  “We should jump while we’re running uphill,” Garland said. “Otherwise the horses will get up more speed. And up ahead, at that switchback…”

  EeeEEEEeeee!

  “We’ll crash,” Sophie said.

  “You first,” both men said.

  There was no time to argue. She clambered over Garland to get to the door, picked what she hoped was a soft-looking ditch, and sprang.

  It wasn’t soft. She hit a sapling and pulverized it, rolling over the tree. As pain radiated out from her shoulder and hip, she heard the clock again.

  Tick, tick, tick. For the barest of moments, she thought she could see, of all things, a view of the Tower of London. Then she staggered to her feet, before she’d even recovered her equilibrium.

  “Garland! Cly!” She limped uphill, her first steps unsteady as she broke into a drunken trot, then an actual run.

  The horses hurtled uphill, screaming.

  Sun broke over the ridge, brighter than everything, blinding her. A shadow seemed to leap from the carriage. Wishful thinking? Spots in her eyes?

  She was squinting and half-blind when the carriage tilted to one side and plunged off the road with a horrifying sound—things breaking, splintering, and inhuman shrieks.

  “Sophie?” She’d caught up to the shadow. Cly. He had a smear of dirt on his shoulder and was holding his saber in his left hand.

  “You pop those stitches again?”

  “I’m well enough,” he said. “You?”

  “Yeah, same.”

  “I should have switched carriages as soon as the replacement driver showed up.” He scooped a small dagger off the ground. “Parrish! Parrish, are you there?”

  The hair-raising screams of the horses were loud enough to drown out anything.

  “Stay back, child,” Cly said.

  She ignored him; she’d spotted Garland.

  He had jumped or fallen clear of the carriage maybe fifty feet before it went off the road. From the looks of things, he’d cracked his head on something—his face was bloodied.

  “Breathing?” Cly asked.

  “Yes,” she said, hoping it was true.

  “Wait here.” He strode past her, toward the orgy of thrashing hooves and breaking wood.

  Sophie rolled Garland carefully, feeling his skull, guessing whether anything was broken. His shirtsleeve had burst at the shoulder seams. I know his middle name; I can have him cured if I need to. He’s alive, he’s alive.…

  She didn’t even have a handkerchief to wipe his face, or a rope to hoist him up into the relative safety of the trees. If the thing tearing its way out of the horse took out Cly, they were dead.

  “Garland,” she said. “You have to wake up. Please, wake up.”

  His eyes opened.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “Am I hurt? Teeth! Can you move?”

  The shrieks culminated in a sustained equine wail of agony and then a wet ripping noise that made her wish she was deaf. Cly backed into view. The horse followed, staggering. Backlit by the morning sun, they were both silhouettes. The mare was two-headed and gouting blood. Its horse head dangled, limp, almost dragging on the ground.

  The raised head of the creature within, the one shedding the body of the horse in bloody hunks, had a familiar shape. A cat?

  Marsupial lion, Sophie decided, with tabby fur. This would account for the cat hair, the cat claws, the stolen braid of horse hair …

  Cly ran at it, bellowing, saber extended. It had just shaken a paw clear of the horse before it was impaled.

  The creature sprang upward, jerking Cly with it like a toy. The saber fell, and Cly went with it. He rolled as the cat swiped a paw at him. Its rear haunches were tangled in the corpse of the horse, like feet caught in a dropped pair of jeans, but otherwise it was free. Cly retrieved his blade and stabbed again, grunting with the effort of shoving the blade home.

  My birth father, the killing machine. The thought had bloody edges. Was this what going mad with fear felt like?

  As Cly pulled his sword free and retreated backwards, the oddity considered him, lifting a paw. A massive, flame-eyed mouser, slick with blood.

  Cly did not give it time to disentangle its back legs, instead darting in to chop at the thick wrist with the big, throat-cutting claws. The cat sprang sideways, trying to make room for an attack, and Cly followed.

  Sophie scrabbled on the ground for whatever she could grab up and throw. Her first stone went wide, but she hit the cat in its flank with a second. The fright roared, turning to face her.

  A mistake. The long stonewood blade cut an arc through the air, scything into the fright’s belly. The lion lashed out, catching Cly with the back of one big claw, and the two of them tumbled to the road.

  Cly leaped up, wobbling a bit, but ready for another attack. The creature shuddered, gouting blood. Then it was still. After an endless minute with his blade raised, Cly checked the other horses, one by one.

  Sophie spun, focusing on Garland, helping him to sit.

  “There, there,” Cly murmured. A hoarse panting sound she had barely registered earlier turned into a sigh, then petered out. A keening whinny rose and was cut short. “What a waste.”

  When she could bear to look, he was cleaning his blade.

  “You’re both all right?”

  Sophie nodded.

  “Yes,” Garland said, getting carefully to his feet. “You?”

  “Yes. That could have gotten ugly,” he observed. “It’s well we’d headed out of town. If the carriage hadn’t gone off the road and the oddity had got free of the mare faster, we’d have had much more trouble.”

  Garland nodded, as though this was a perfectly r
easonable thing to say when they were standing over the remains of a carriage and horses. Reminds me of that Sigourney Weaver movie, Sophie thought, and her eye fell on the stomach-turning remnants. Alien, that was it.

  “Birth stuff,” she said. Her voice sounded calm, too. Maybe it was chill-out hour in crazyland. “Another fright spell. I figure it used that braid of lion hair stolen from Exhibits.”

  “The same spellscribe?” Garland seemed dubious.

  “Few could muster the requisite hard-heartedness to do this,” Cly said. “And given the effort to stamp frightmaking out…” He indicated the mess behind them. “It does suggest a specialist.”

  “Because people follow certain patterns,” she said, remembering her earlier thought about Cly and Pinna. Find a woman, get her to argue his case.

  She remembered Kev, apparently offended: I’m not the frightmaker.

  The frightmaker. Someone specific; someone he knew.

  “That,” Cly agreed. “Besides, how many different spellscribes are likely to be after us right now?”

  On that happy note, they began the trudge up the switchbacks to the city. The exercise of the uphill climb, and her worry that Garland’s injured feet weren’t up to the march, were welcome distractions from the gory scene they were leaving behind. The farther they got, the more she wanted to cry.

  After an hour, a cart filled with firewood came toiling up the incline. Cly commandeered it, settling Sophie on the logs first, then Garland after her. Its owners seemed perfectly content to switch over to hiking as her birth father took up the reins.

  “We’ll be on the edge of the city in a quarter hour,” Cly said. “I’ll send a fast cab after them and they’ll barely have lost any time at all.”

  She was too tired to question whether this was true, but it turned out to be; they pulled up to a stable on the edge of the city and Cly dispatched someone to fetch their benefactors.

  He favored them with a wry grin. “Dare we risk another carriage hire?”

  “Pick the skinniest horses,” Sophie said. “Remember how fat the mare was?”

  “Indeed. A spell like that one takes time to gestate.”

  She tried to work out how long they had been at Pinna’s. “Would we have been back at the Mancellor, if not for the side trip?”

  “Unlikely,” Cly said. “With so many carriages, the main route through Hoarfrost becomes impossibly congested. People line the streets to throw grass wreaths at the betrothed.”

  “So the fright would’ve burst out into a crowd,” Sophie said. “Do you think a slaughter on National Sex Ed Day would be good for interisland tensions?”

  “Frivolous question,” Cly said, choosing a carriage with a distinctly bony-looking set of pintos.

  She flopped back into position inside—the carriage was just about identical to the one they’d wrecked—and the men crowded in with her. If you ignored the bloodstains and mud painted across their snow-white party garments, they were more or less back where they’d started.

  “This provides new avenues of investigation,” she said. “We can look into whoever arranged for the carriages to get switched.”

  “Lidman remains at the heart of this,” Cly said. “We need to discover where his accomplices are.”

  “He has to have been in touch with them, don’t you think? Since he got off Docket.”

  “The spellscribe was on Nightjar?” Garland said.

  “Something made Kev believe his allies would come and get him.”

  He nodded, conceding the point with obvious reluctance. “I’d taken on new crew since Gale died. I can’t vouch for everyone. I’ve generally been lucky—”

  “I’m sure you are an excellent judge of character,” Cly said, in that tone that left it open as to whether he meant it or was being condescending.

  “There were four whom I don’t know well.”

  “We can see what they’ve been up to since landfall,” Cly said.

  “I released them from their contracts. They might be difficult to trace.”

  “No need,” Sophie said. “Here’s our next move.…”

  After she explained, they fell silent, watching the city bustle with early morning work crews, slaves stringing banners between the trees, gauzy strips alight with tiny pinpricks that winked like stars. Lanterns depicting the various phases of the moon were erected on stakes in the public squares and the middle of intersections; kindling and small chunks of wood were piled at their bases.

  “Burning the moon,” Cly said. “It’s part of the High Winter Festival. Children attempt to stay up all night to greet the new year. It’s a significant accomplishment when one is old enough to hold out against sleep on the longest night.”

  Festival preparations. Sophie’s eyes met Garland’s. Would Cly march them to the altar on the solstice? There was no way to ask.

  Garland was smiling, and she sensed he was remembering the two of them in that little catering tent. Damn it, now she was smiling, too.

  Don’t laugh, don’t giggle, think about the killing machine over there.…

  Cly was looking over the construction work on the bonfires. Giving them a moment, or merely lost in thought?

  She owed her life to the killing machine, twice over. It was hypocritical to label him a serial killer, on no evidence, while benefiting from his skill set.

  That’s not about you, Sofe, her brother’s voice said. It’s about Stormwrack being a violent and insane place.

  She missed Bram so much it hurt.

  Five violent and insane, she thought. “I’m going to free Kev,” she announced. “Anything else—transferring him, selling him—”

  “Having him killed?” Cly suggested.

  “Is basically owning up to owning him.”

  “We’d better work out what he’s up to, then, hadn’t we?”

  They were almost back to the hotel district. “I’ll get right on that,” she said. “Can you have the driver stop at the Black Fox?”

  “I’d ask you to change first, if you don’t mind,” Cly said.

  “I know we’re a mess, but what happened to ‘Hurry up and crack the case’?”

  Cly’s lips curled. “The two of you,” he said, speaking with almost Garlandlike precision in his diction, “are wearing each other’s shirts.”

  CHAPTER 32

  She’d meant to simply dash upstairs and change to a Sylvanner sports suit, buying time both to get over her mortification and to firm up the plan. But as she plunged through the suite doors, she almost plowed right into Krispos.

  She skidded, wobbled, and, in the end, stopped herself from trampling him by enveloping him in a hug. He smelled of beeswax and something faintly grassy, like cilantro. “Didn’t I send you to Autumn?”

  “They let me take the magical path between Institutes,” he said. His black beauty-queen sash was weighted by a few new pins, presumably symbols that identified him as a foreign scholar and scribe. He was carrying a sheaf of mail and a latched wooden box.

  “What’s all this?”

  He handed over the letters. “Congratulatory messages from your father’s cousins and the woman who’s running for governor—”

  “Fralienne Erminne.”

  “Your colleagues in the Watch had directed your mail to His Honor’s estate.”

  She opened a note from Salk first.

  Sophie Hansa

  Stormwrack Forensic Institute

  Kir Hansa,

  I have read your summary translation of the Things Go Boom book, as has Convenor Gracechild. The idea of terror it describes is, of course, an ancient concept. The scale of the attacks recommended, however, and the cold-blooded preference for symbolic targets and large numbers of victims, is something I find appalling.

  It appears that secrecy surrounding the full names of incoming cadets, as practiced by the Fleet, has been lax in recent years. Everyone, we’d assumed, would have held their names close before they came to service. This is proving untrue. I have embarked on a full audit of the
bureaucracy to find exposed individuals. In the meantime, we continue to keep a close eye on anyone who might threaten Constitution.

  You have asked about alternate targets for these operatives, and note that the spellscribe who made the frights is now active in your vicinity. Do you think there is any chance he will go to Haversham? Their capital city is home to the original documents of the Fleet Compact. There is also a holy site about ninety nautical miles east of Autumn, important to a number of islands.

  If the target was Sylvanner (a notion I would normally dismiss, but given the tenor of their current election, it bears consideration), the obvious symbolic locales would be the spell vaults at any of the Spellscrip Institutes, Hoarfrost Harbor, and the great Zoo. Bear in mind, however, that Tug Island and the Golders claim Sylvanna as an ally. Your chief suspects would not want to be blamed for an incident there.

  Yours very faithfully,

  Erefin Salk

  Sophie handed the letter over so Krispos could absorb it. “What’s in this package?”

  “It’s the followbox Bramwell made.”

  She unlatched it, releasing a smell that reminded her of catacombs, and pulled out the goat’s skull, which had reshaped itself into a cube. Its teeth appeared fused, impossible to open.

  “I believe it will only unlock for its maker,” Krispos said.

  She let the bone warm in her hands. Could it have worked? If Bram had it delivered to her spelunker friend, and it got to a cave in Tennessee … how long had it been there?

  If Stormwrack truly was a future Earth, some of the answers might be inside. Despite Krispos’s comment, she tried again, straining every muscle to open it.

  Nothing. She might have been trying to crack a diamond. A blackened and smelly diamond, at that; despite its refusal to crumble, it was leaving a film of old soil on her skin.

  She rubbed it on her slacks, adding another layer to the horse blood and road dirt.

  Okay. Get out of the lady suit. Wash. Catch the terrorists before they send another giant cat after us.

  She pulled off the suit jacket, discovering a colorful bruise on her shoulder from her rapid bailout from the carriage, and showered quickly. Then she chose one of her three sets of casual Sylvanner day wear, a royal-blue jacket and slacks cut like a riding habit. As she changed, she nursed, for a moment, a dense sense of homesickness. All of her American clothes had gone down with Nightjar; she would have paid in blood for a pair of blue jeans.