“You,” they said, “are you injured?”
I answered in the negative. I could probably have lied but it would have been obvious, and Locke clearly wasn’t in the mood for my bullshit.
“Then stop following stretchers and escort this one to the brig.” They nodded at the pirate leader. He was a heavyset man, his shaved head crisscrossed with scarifications, geometric tattoos running the length of his arms. Honestly, I didn’t fancy my chances escorting him, but then I wasn’t going to be doing it alone.
Trying my damnedest to sound like I knew what I was about, I gestured at him with my pistol. “This way.”
Between me and two other crewmates whose names—all these years later—I can’t remember, we more or less managed to wrangle him down to what passed for a brig on the ship, which was basically a storage room with a barred door that on a normal voyage we’d just have put extra barrels of spermaceti in. And honestly if ithadcome to a choice between this man’s life and the storage space, there wasn’t a hunter-captain in the fleet who wouldn’t choose the sperm. I mean, that was what we were here for, wasn’t it?
Though he looked very much like a professional murderer,the pirate was at least talkative on the way to his imprisonment. He told me his name was Wolfram, and that while we’d caught him fair and square, he would be freer in his prison than we were in our berths.
When I went back to my bunk alone, I tried not to wonder how right he might be.
CHAPTER
FORTY-EIGHTPirates and Emperors
The presence in the brig of pirates—real, board-your-ship-and-take-your-cargo pirates—sent rumblings through the crew that were made a whole lot worse by the fact that the captain had chosen to take us off the regular sky-paths and into storms wilder and more turbulent than anything we’d met so far on the voyage.
“Their leader talks,” Flint was saying on one of his semiregular visits to the mess. He might have been an officer, but Flint was prone to fraternizing with the hands. “Father’s leave does he talk. I’ve had two men already come off guard duty wanting to know why we’re letting half the pay from this run go to Olympus and not demanding better lays for ourselves.”
Locke, who had gotten into the habit of joining Flint in his visits lately—something I was choosing to believe was a result of my increasingly effective charms rather than just a general desire to keep an eye on goings-on belowdecks—gave him a reproving look. “While he’s locked up, talk is all he can do.”
That didn’t reassure me, and I was, by this point, relaxed enough amongst the crew to say as much. “Talk has burned cities. It can down ships as well.”
Flint laughed. “Hark to. The scholar’s speaking.”
He’d been calling me that for months, ever since he’d foundout I was once a schoolmistress. “You don’t need to be a scholar to know words can be dangerous.”
“Then perhaps we should send you to debate him,” said Locke archly. “As a protective measure.”
“I’ll do my stint on guard, same as everybody else,” I replied. “But I doubt we’ll either of us change each other’s minds.”
My mind, if I’m honest, wouldn’t have been in much of a place for debate anyway. Since Q had been taken to medbay with injuries I lacked the expertise to assess and a prognosis I lacked the courage to ask about, I’d found a hollowness gnawing at my rib cage that I couldn’t quite explain and would have dearly loved to be rid of. As a rule, I didn’t get attached to people because time and the stars had a way of tearing you apart no matter what happened, and it was tidier all around if you just braced yourself for loss early.
Only this time, for whatever reason, it wasn’t working. I’d cried myself to sleep two nights running and my days were plagued by a sense of displacement and dread I hadn’t felt since before I went to Aphrodite. Normally when things got to me like that I’d have tried to get laid ASAP, but of the people I normally went to for a hookup, one was isolating herself in her cabin with a thinking machine and the ramblings of prophets, and the other was getting her organs sutured and her blood replaced. Both of which make you bad at sex.
Which, I suppose, meant I didn’t actually have much to complain about when Locke finally did put me on guard duty. On the night shift—insofar as night meant much on a hunter-barque—sitting on a stool carved, like so much else, from Leviathan bone, and armed with a flechette pistol, I sat opposite the pirate leader’s cell and tried to watch him without my mind wandering.
Much like staffing the array, I was bad at it. Although at least this time the job had a low floor. You’d have to be a whole lot less attentive than me to miss a grown-ass adult disappearing from a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room.
“Don’t talk much, do you?” observed Wolfram a good couple of hours into my rotation.
“Not a lot,” I replied. You might be thinking that wasn’t true—after all, I’ve been talking to you for forty-something chapters now and show no sign of shutting up. But telling stories in writing when I can stop and marshal my thoughts when I have to or write through the night when the fits seize me, when the only interruptions I have to manage are my own needs and the only comments I’ll get will come from strangers screaming into a vacuum… doing that is a whole different thing. In person I keep my mouth shut most of the time. Sometimes I feel like I’m not even there at all.
“You don’t look the sort to be on a hunter-voyage.”
That came very close to touching a nerve. “And what would you know of it?”
The smile that came to his lips then was more amused than it was cruel, but it was a close thing. “You think nobody ever crossed over from one hunt to the other? I’ve fought alongside many a beast-chaser, and you’re not one.”
“I’m becoming one.”
“Are you now?”
This was going to about six places at once, none of which I liked. I’d reinvented myself so many times, and I hate being called out on it. “For the moment. It’s the same in your line of work, surely. Nobody starts life as a pirate.”
“True enough, true enough.” It was obvious that engagement was exactly what the man wanted, and I definitely didn’t want to give it to him. Then when I didn’t say anything else, he added, “You know, I’m getting the impression you don’t like me.”
