My thoughts fled to everything they could possibly flee to that wasn’t the death of a lover. To the sting of her knife on my throat when we first met. To the scrimshander picture she’d drawn of me in a place I could never understand. To the night I’d first begged her to fuck me. Untethered and undisciplined, I gave in to wondering who she really was, who I might have been with her, and from there to self-indulgent speculations about identity and context and winds and words that looking back I’m ashamed of myself for falling into.
I’m not a scholar. Not really. I’m not a philosopher. I’m justa cold, frightened woman screaming her insecurity to an indifferent sky. Sometimes I wonder if I could have been more, but even wondering that seems egoistic.
Sometimes I look at myself and say girl, accept it. You’re full of shit.
While I sat there dreaming my narcissist’s dreams, Q lay silent beside me until, after I don’t know how long of stewing in my own crap, I felt her fingers tense.
I looked down to see her eyes flicker open. She turned her head towards me the barest fraction and I saw her lips move, but her voice was faint and between that and the language barrier I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“Don’t speak,” I told her. And then, because it felt like the kind of thing you say, I added, “I’m here.”
Turning her head just a little, she looked into my eyes. And she said, “Quid dereliquisti me?”
I had no idea what she meant. I’d made some effort to learn some bits of her language, but since she understood Exodite perfectly well and we both mostly went in for nonverbal communication anyway, I’d kinda stalled shortly after working out the Q-words were questions. There I went letting her down again.
And when I looked so obviously blank, she said, “Left me.Forsook me. Why?”
Of all the things I wished she hadn’t asked me, that was… I mean it was one of them. Perilously close to all of them. And I was silent.
“Why?” she asked again.
I could feel my fingers going limp. My hand slipping out of hers as I pulled away out of sheer primordial shame.
With a will and a strength that I at once envied and thought it was a really bad time for, she forced herself into a sitting position. “Immemor atque unanimis false sodalibus,” she said, in a tone I’d not heard her use since Cthonius Linea. “Iam te nil miseret, dure, tui dulcis amiculi?”
I still didn’t understand her. Couldn’t even do her that courtesy.
“Iam me prodere, iam non dubitas fallere, perfide?” she went on, increasingly frustrated with me. “Nec facta impia fallacum hominum caelicolis placent.”
“I’m sorry,” I half sobbed, half whispered. “Ijust— Icouldn’t…”
I wasn’t used to Q being angry with me. But what was really devastating was that I didn’t get the chance, because I saw her anger bleed so quickly into sorrow. “Quae tu neglegis ac me miserum deseris in malis.”
I still didn’t understand. I still couldn’t face her.
I fled.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-ONEThe Rose Bud
You’ve probably cottoned on by now to the fact that this book isn’t strictly in chronological order. I tried to keep it straight at the start, but memories aren’t like watching a play and a life isn’t one story with a beginning and a middle and an end, it’s a hundred stories that cut each other off and jump between each other and end wrong and start bad and blend together like blood on the wind.
I’ve done my best. Obviously I got on the ship at the start and we’ll finally meet the Beast at the end, but everything in the middle is a jumble of things I’m desperate to remember and things I’d rather forget and forgotten hopes and old regrets and one or two bits of shit I might have just made up.
The gams, I’m about 90 percent sure, happened in the order I’m recounting them. They’re such a break from the routine of life in the sky that they stand out, and although I may have gotten one or two of the details wrong I’d more or less swear to the general picture. And hell, if you’ve a mind you can run down those ships and their manifests, speak to their captains, and ask them yourselves.
Which means I’m also fairly certain that we met the Rose Bud while Q was still in medbay, though I can’t remember if it was before or after I started work on the coffin. It wasdefinitely after Marsh fell into the head and after we’d captured Wolfram and his fellow pirates, because I remember them being involved. We were still deep in the storms, and tensions amongst the crew were running high. And so when we found the corpse, we were in a bad place to react rationally.
“It’s a sign,” said the Old Ionian voider, when he saw the beast from the prow. I’ve talked a lot about the Old Ionian, I think. So in some ways I’m kind of ashamed of the fact that I’ve forgotten his name. Hell, if I’m being totally honest, I may even be conflating two different people. “And no good will come from approaching.”
The thing he had seen was vast and white and distended. A bloated carcass that had once been a Leviathan.
Sometimes they sink. Sometimes they rise. As far as I can tell there’s no pattern to it.
Now the sight had been called, the crew were gathering forward to stare at it and speculate.
“Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,” Marsh whispered, “hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.”
