Bone silence, p.27
Bone Silence, page 27
Tindouf rubbed the back of his neck. He had the aggrieved look of one who is obliged to state an opinion he knows will be unpopular.
“I hates to say it, but it makes senses to me.”
“It’s all true,” Ruther affirmed, nodding vigorously. “There was no need to mention it until now—I never thought for a second that your sister would find it. Pardon me, but how did she find it?”
“I have no idea.”
“However she did, she’s got to be stopped. You saw what Stallis did to me. This’ll be ten times as bad.”
Fura forced her fingers into stillness. She pressed down on her arm with the other hand until the trembling abated. The neon scrollwork glowy was still burning through her skin. Her eyes itched with its prickling presence.
She tried to sound calm.
“You don’t know Adrana.”
“No, but I know that skull. I told you I didn’t remember much. But I do remember the terrors that came after. They’ve never really stopped.” He looked at them all in turn, as earnestly if this was his last chance to turn a doubtful jury. “I’m in a sort of cell or dungeon, with smooth grey walls and a smooth grey ceiling curving over me. There’s nothing in it except me, no windows or door, no way in or out except a wooden hatch in the floor. All I’ve got is a little candle. And I’m sitting on that hatch, using all my weight to try and stop something getting into the cell. Whatever it is, it keeps levering the hatch up just enough to push a limb through. It’s long and thin, black and all furred-over, like a spider’s leg. Sometimes there’s more than one of them. They keep reaching through the gap between the floor and the hatch, and it’s all that I can do to force myself to sit down harder, squeezing the gap tight, until the limbs pull back into the darkness underneath.”
Fura gave a short nervous laugh. “If that’s what you call a bad dream, you should try living with some of mine.”
“It’s real,” Ruther said, pleadingly. “Real and stronger than you realise. You think you know all about skulls. But you haven’t had that in your head week after week, month after month. And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone—including your sister.”
“She can handle it.”
“You can’t be sure of that. Do you really want to take the chance? There isn’t anyone else on the Merry Mare who knows not to use that skull. To them it’ll just be some relic Captain Werranwell kept back for himself. They won’t know.”
“We could signal her,” Prozor said quietly.
“You have to!” Ruther said.
“Midnight’s only fifty minutes away,” Fura replied. “If she means to contact me then, there’s every chance she’s already in the bone room, preparing for the exchange. If she ain’t there yet, I doubt she’ll be long about it.”
“But that’s no reason not to try!”
“Think it through, Ruther: we need to have someone suited-up and outside, with the telegraphic box, an encoded message, and some idea of the right direction in which to point it. Meanwhile, if our efforts aren’t to be wasted, someone in the sighting room of the Merry Mare will need sharp eyes that are looking exactly back at us.”
He looked at her as if there had to be some trick in her answer. “Isn’t that exactly how it’s meant to work? Isn’t that exactly how we read their signal about Mister Cazaray? I know the time is short, and we might not succeed, but is that any reason to give up?”
“I’m with the boy,” Prozor said, pushing up from the table with a determined set to her features. “The odds ain’t in our favour, if ever they were, but it’s worth tryin’. If we don’t get through to ’em before the top of midnight, then I can still keep sending until someone picks it up.”
“Better late than never,” Ruther agreed.
“You’re so keen, why don’t you go out there and send the message yourself?” Fura asked.
“He’d be keen enough,” Prozor said. “But this ain’t a boy’s job. I’ve invested a part of myself in both of you girlies, Fura, you and your sister, and I won’t see it wasted. I won’t stand by while somethin’ hurts either of you, not if I’ve a chance of stoppin’ things. Tindouf: will you help me to suit up? Paladin can spit out the pointing coordinates, while Fura jots down the very, very short message she’s goin’ to come up with.”
“I don’t mean to say what everyone else is thinking…” Ruther began.
“Then don’t,” Fura said.
“But there’s another way to reach Adrana.”
“I thought I said don’t.”
Ruther drew back, but after a breath he gathered the shreds of his courage and spoke again. “It wouldn’t need to be a long squawk, just enough…”
Fura worked her fist. She was ready to strike him for merely voicing the idea. How ready must have been plain to Prozor, who clamped a hand around her wrist and gently eased it back down.
She leaned in and whispered.
“We don’t hit our friends just ’cause they come out with uncomfortable truths, girlie. And he’s right. There’s always the squawk. If that skull’s as bad as it seems, and I ain’t seein’ any reason to doubt Ruther—and you shouldn’t, either—then maybe we should take that chance. She’d do it for you, wouldn’t she?”
Fura yanked her wrist free of Prozor’s grasp. She could feel the glowy lighting up within her like a golden proclamation, writ in fire. She could feel it in her blood, in her lungs, in her eyes and mind. A beautiful madness, a shining alloy of anger and resolve. A madness to move worlds, and to crush the small lives of those who got in her way. It did not favour the idea of signalling Adrana, because that was an action that placed its own survival in jeopardy. It was trying to turn her against the idea of saving her sister: trying to bend her against Adrana.
She denied it. It took every shred of her will, but she could—for the moment—overcome it.
But the effort left her angry, spent and drained of tolerance.
“Go and do your damned job, Prozor.”
She needed the silence of her cabin to draft the message to be sent by telegraph. That was the lie she told herself, at least. Mainly she needed the cabin to escape the guarded and accusatory looks of her crew. At least in the cabin she only had a robot to contend with.
“Has there been a development, Miss Arafura?” Paladin asked, in a tone so perfectly unobjectionable that it fanned the flames in her to a high fury. Her metal hand reached for a hefty magnetic paperweight; she had to press her other hand down on it to stop herself from ramming the paperweight into his globe.
“It’s… under control, Paladin,” she said through gritted teeth. “Everything is… entirely under control.”
“You seem agitated. Perhaps a period of rest would be in order.”
“I’ll rest when I’m…”
She silenced herself, reached for a pen and paper. She dipped the pen into the pressure-tight inkwell, nearly missing it on the first try; began to scratch out the formulation. With some shred of clarity, she reminded herself that the shorter the message, the more easily it could be repeated and therefore received without error. On the other hand, the longer the message, the more explanation she could put into it. Would Adrana accept an injunction not to use the skull, without some supplementary persuasion?
If she trusts me, Fura thought. If she trusts her own sister.
But if our stations were reversed, would I?
And—besides—is she really worth the trouble?
“No,” she declared aloud, addressing the patterns throbbing out of her skin. “You will not turn me. Not that easily.”
She started to write:
You must not use the skull. Ruther says it nearly killed him.
Her own writing was a spidery crawl, barely legible. Too verbose, in any case. It would take Prozor a minute just to send it once. She balled the paper, re-dipped the pen.
Do not use skull. Ruther says tainted…
Her hand jerked, ripping the paper. It was shaking uncontrollably now. Brine salted her lips. The glowy was itching so badly she could have clawed her own skin off and still kept going. She tried again.
Damn you to hell, Adrana Ness!
Defeated, she opened her desk drawer and took out the wallet, with its dwindling supply of vials. Her hand shook more powerfully now. Fura was down to her last twelve doses, and it had taken tremendous resolve not to cut into that supply prematurely. She had taken the last dose only two days ago; by rights she ought to wait another two days before injecting herself.
She could not wait that long.
There was no reasoning with herself; no force of will that could damp down the fire in her veins. She had to take the Mephrozine now if she was to stand any chance of thinking and functioning normally in the hours to come. She knew with an iron certainty that these hours were not going to be the easiest of her life.
There was one full vial still in its pouch, and one vial that was two-tenths full. She took out the syringe and drew the partial vial out of the wallet, pinching it in her flesh fingers. Her fingers trembled, but she had them under sufficient control. Yet, just as she nearly had it all the way out, a violent spasm started in her hand, amplifying with each jolt.
Her hand gave a sudden powerful twitch—almost a deliberate flinging action—and the wallet and its contents went tumbling away across the cabin.
Fura breathed in and out.
She turned to watch the wallet’s slow arc. She saw where it lodged herself, on a shelf of her chained library, in the narrow nook between two volumes of The Book of Worlds. The partial vial had come out completely, wedged between the wallet and the hard, wooden lip of the shelf. The full vial was still intact. She set down the syringe, wedging it under a book that was itself fixed down by a magnetic weight, and moved to the shelves.
“You will not have me so easily,” she said. “I know what I am. I know what you are, and which of us is the stronger.”
She felt the glowy laugh in her veins.
It was throbbing in rhythm with her heartbeat; even the room seemed to be shot through with a golden aura that heightened and faded on the same cycle. With her flesh hand she reached for the partial vial, closing her trembling fingers around it, clasping the glass but not crushing it. Her metal one grasped the wallet, with the full vial still tucked into place.
It clenched, with no warning.
There had been no instant where she might have sent a contradictory nerve impulse. The wallet buckled between her fingers. She heard the crunch of glass. Her hand relaxed, the wallet springing wide open again. The final vial was totally shattered, its ten doses spilling out like a pale honey, embedded with tiny, sugar-like shards. She thought of pressing her tongue to the flow, of licking the Mephrozine straight into her. She imagined the glass lacerating her tongue, scratching its way down her throat, cutting its way into her gut, and thought that it might be an acceptable price to pay.
“No,” she said softly.
She could see what had happened, and she could see the consequences, spiralling out from this moment. But she could not yet think beyond the horror of that oozing liquid. Ten more doses gone: ten more doses that might just as well have been injected into Strambli, for all the use they had served.
She still had the two remaining doses in the partial vial. It was still pinched between her flesh fingers, still intact. She stared at it with wonder and befuddlement. Between one moment and the next that single vial had become the most precious object in her universe.
She stared and stared.
“Miss Arafura?” Paladin enquired gently.
She did not turn to face him.
“What is it?”
“You have been in a state of immobility for two minutes. I thought it advisable to intervene.”
“I was… what was I doing, Paladin?”
“I am of the opinion that you were attempting to draft a message, Miss Arafura. Might I suggest that the matter was of some degree of urgency?”
She returned to her desk. The syringe was still where she had left it. She drew it out from under the book. Oddly, the compulsion was not as strong as it had been a minute or two earlier—or three, or four, if Paladin was to be believed. Her hand was still tremoring, and the fire in her veins and the itch under her skull still asserting themselves, but she thought she could contain the glowy for the time it took to finish composing the message and see it delivered.
“You did that,” she said, speaking aloud, even as she addressed the influence within her, and knowing full well it would confuse Paladin.
“Miss Arafura?”
“You made me crush the wallet. I wanted the Mephrozine; you want to take me over completely. Any path to madness is a path to you, I suppose. Well, congratulations: you won that round. But you’re not stronger than me. You’re in me, but you don’t define me. I am not you. I never will be you.”
“Is all well, Miss?”
“Let us prove a point, shall we? You’ve taken away any possibility of the Mephrozine lasting me to Trevenza Reach, even if the wind holds fair and we make it in twelve days And these last two doses… what good are they really going to do me now? Take them now, take them in two weeks, what difference will that make to either of us? Very little, I think. Except it’ll make me weaker, knowing they’re here, waiting for me. And I really don’t need weakness right now.”
She mashed her hand down on the book, crushing the partial vial. The pale secretion sogged into its papers. She did not care. It would be a reminder, if she lived long enough, of who was the stronger party.
“I did that,” Fura Ness said. “Not you. I did that.”
Her hand was steadier now. There was a steadiness in all parts of her—a calm and resolve she had not felt in some very long while. She felt as unruffled and full of purpose as a fully deflected sail. She was being pushed to one goal. She had one thing to do now; one very simple thing, and she might survive it, or she might not, but the outcome was much less important than the thing itself.
She would do what needed to be done to save Adrana.
Again.
18
Adrana had not been expecting immediate success with the new skull, but it was a surprise to her when it felt as dead and empty as a hollowed-out pebble. The skullvane had detected it, which meant that there had to be something still going on inside, but even after she had plugged in and gone through the ritual of simultaneously emptying her mind and making it invitingly open, there remained no trace of a useful carrier signal. There was a time she might have been quicker to blame herself than the instrument of communication itself, but she had enough experience with skulls to know her own capabilities, and she did not think this fault lay in herself.
Sometimes the problem lay in the neural crown, not the skull. Once a crown was adjusted to a particular reader, it did not usually need alteration if they switched from one skull to another. But that was only because the majority of skulls in general service were more alike than dissimilar, and she was not at all sure that this strange specimen fit that pattern. There were tiny sliders and dials in the crown that were stiff enough not to move with ordinary handling, but which could be altered if necessary. Adrana removed the crown and made a small but deliberate change to the settings, using touch more than sight, and then slipped the crown back on.
Still nothing. She increased the adjustments, again in a methodical way. It made no difference, but an impulse had her reaching out to test that the input socket was as firmly embedded as it looked, and as she touched the nub of corrosion-less metal something jolted across her mind. It was not the usual sensation of a carrier signal, a silence beneath silence, waiting for meaning to be impressed on it, but she had no doubt whatsoever that the flash or image had been directly related to her contact with the input probe.
It had been as quick and vivid as a lightning strike, illuminating a hitherto unseen vista. She had been granted the momentary impression of a grey, bowl-ceilinged room, and the coldness that went with it. She had been in that room for one instant; in it and sitting on the floor, waiting with nervous expectation for the arrival of someone or something.
The flash had been too brief to leave her with any emotional colouration beyond that impression of anxious waiting. And as soon as her hand came off the contact node, the skull was back to feeling dead. She tried it a second time and got the same image. Like looking at the same picture in a storybook, it conveyed no more meaning to her than the first time.
But she knew that there was something wrong with this skull. Something must have come loose under that socket: a grounding loop or one of the fine, high-impedance connections that interfaced with the twinkly itself. Just touching that contact node was enough to rectify the problem, to some degree. She could not hope to reach her sister like this, though—much less exercise the control that she would need if Stallis picked up on her presence.
She had been too hard on Vouga: pushing him to make the skull usable. He had not liked being rushed, but she had done it to him anyway—even though she would never have gone against the advice of Tindouf, or Surt, or any of the hands she had known for longer.
She disconnected, unhooked the crown and undimmed the lights. Then she pressed the intercom.
“Vouga,” she said, as soon as she had his attention. “You were right, and I was wrong. Could you come to the bone room again? The skull is nearly working, but there’s just something a little loose…”
While Tindouf helped Prozor into her suit, and prepared the lock for an emergency egress—willingly sacrificing lungstuff for the sake of a speedy exit—Paladin re-computed the pointing coordinates for the Merry Mare and had them conveyed to Ruther, who in turn had the telegraphic box primed with fresh light-imps and equipped with a copy of the encoded message Fura had drafted in her quarters. Ruther arrived at the lock with the telegraphic box just as Prozor was ready to go through.
There had been less than fifty minutes to midnight when she began formulating that message, and after the episode with the Mephrozine less than half an hour remained. Tindouf and Prozor had worked like demons, though, and there were ten minutes left by the time Prozor was through the lock and outside, stomping around to the right part of the hull to face the Congregation and the calculated position of the Merry Mare.
