A Daughter of No Nation (8 page)

“Jeez,” Verena said. “What are we going to do with ourselves now that you saved us from a night of Annela looking daggers at His Honor?”

Sophie grinned. “I'd say I've earned a favor.”

“You would, would you?”

“Before dinner, we have some time to kill?”

Verena nodded.

“There must be a market or two in a city this size. Maybe even a mall?”

“You want to go
shopping
?”

“I so do,” Sophie said.

“You're going to collect more info about the Fleet.”

“What are you going to do, Verena, lock me in my cabin? Come on, you tried. Tonight at dinner, I'll tell Annela you tried. You must be exhausted with how hard you've tried. Unless you lock me up or knock me out, I am gonna see things.”

Her sister gnawed her lip.

“Besides, if you don't come, I'm still going to go, and who knows what I'll find out then?”

That got her a laugh. “Okay, you win.”

They ferried out beyond
Gatehouse
—into the suburbs, Sophie reminded herself—and into what looked, from the state of the ships, to be a wealthy section of the civilian Fleet. Verena directed their pilot to a gleaming white swan of a ship whose main deck was alive with the sights and smells of a fish and produce market. Men and women running the carts were dickering with white-dressed chef's assistants who wouldn't have looked out of place at home. Negotiating, clasping hands upon agreement, they'd hand over baskets of shellfish, cod, butterfish, sardines, and tuna. The fish were huge, fresh-looking, and healthy.

“Does anyone make sashimi or sushi here?”

“Yeah,” Verena said. “It's not served with wasabi. Otherwise, same basic idea. You don't want the food market, do you? What are we doing?”

“First, a jeweler.”

“Okay.” Verena led her belowdecks into what could very well have been a cruise ship mall, illuminated by lanternlight but otherwise about what you'd expect—a long corridor with a central promenade lined with shops.

The jeweler seemed more than happy to buy the gold and copper chains that Sophie had been wearing around her neck for months, offering her a scattering of heavy coins, each minted with the image of a ship on one side and a flag on the other.

“Your name, Kir?” he said, eyeing her blue jeans with an air of caution.

“Sophie Hansa.”

“Of?”

“Of what?”

He yanked back his hands, as if the chains or she were toxic. “I don't trade with outlanders.”

Sophie's face warmed. She glanced around, half-expecting that everyone in the market would be staring at her weird clothes, maybe even pointing and whispering. But no—almost everyone within earshot was conducting business normally, and the one woman who'd turned to see what was going on turned away hastily, probably fearing she'd be caught giving in to the cardinal-sin impulse of curiosity.

“I'll stand for her. Verena Feliachild, Verdanii.”

“Very well.” He dipped his head to Sophie in a way that seemed to mean “no offense” and handed the coins over.

Maybe it'll be Sophie of Sylvanna soon, she thought. The thought came with a thrum of guilt, a sense that she was doing wrong by her parents, back in San Francisco.

“What about these?” Sophie dug out an old wallet filled with little gems: a couple of diamonds, some semiprecious stones—turquoise, amethyst—and about six opals.

The jeweler raked through them with a look of studied indifference on his face.

“What's the point of this?” Verena said.

“Getting a bit of money of my own,” she said.

“Opals?”

“Gifts from over the years. Because of my middle name. They aren't heirlooms, Verena.”

“Two of these might be all right for magic,” the jeweler interrupted. “The rest, just for trinkets.”

“Nonsense,” Verena replied. “They're nice and symmetrical. They're great for spells.”

Sophie entrusted the haggling to her sister, drifting on to the next vendor with her handful of coins. She paused at a blown-glass goldfish bowl. Three bright yellow creatures swam within; they were only the length of her finger but had the shape and gaping lionlike mouths of the silk dragons she'd seen at Lunar New Year's celebrations in Chinatown. As she slowed, they broke the surface, letting water stream from their tiny jaws, and began to let out a whistle, the three of them pitching their notes so they formed a chord.

She found herself smiling. She extended her hand toward the bowl—

The vendor caught her just as one of the fish made a sharp-toothed snap for her fingertips.

“Bevvies, Kir? Brighten your day, bring good fortune.”

She shook her head—both to say no and to shake off the odd, soporific effect of their song. It would be amazing to have live specimens of pretty much any species, but she needed somewhere to keep them first. She crossed to what looked like a bookstore, searching through the collection of bound diaries and ribbon-bound bundles of writing paper.

“No books—these are blank?” she asked.

“Our bookseller's ma took sick,” the vendor replied. “Went back to her homeland.”

Had Verena deliberately chosen a market without a bookstall?

“May I ask you something?”

His face took on a suspicious cast. That wariness, again, of curiosity. Was it simply cultural conditioning, or was magic at work here, somehow? Courtesy or the customer service impulse won out. “Of course, Kir.”

“I got a letter recently that came with a sheet of paper that—well, I wrote on it, and someone from another ship wrote back.”

“Messageply.” He nodded.

“How does that work? I want some for my brother.”

“The pages must be prepared by a specially scribed paperworker and be of a sheet.” He pointed out a locked case with a giant, two-ply roll of what looked like toilet paper. “The sheets are then picked apart and held by the separate parties. They are two halves of the same thing, you see.”

“Sounds like quantum entanglement.”

“I don't know this term ‘quantum,' Kir.”

Bram would be fascinated. “To use something like that to contact my brother, I'd have to send him the other half of a page already in my possession?”

“There are other ways to message. Cheapest is to scribe a pair of chitterbugs hatched of one casing. You teach them a tapping code, tell one, the other picks up the rhythm.”

“Tapping code—like Morse?” She ran out a series of dots and dashes.

He nodded. “Wealthy folk prefer birds who'll talk.”

Verena and Annela would definitely notice if she took up bird ownership.

Verena had concluded the swap for the opals; Sophie selected a couple journals, a pen, and a packaged collection of items, labeled in a language she didn't speak, that caught her eye because it seemed to contain the skin of a passenger pigeon. “How much for these?”

“Five, Kir.”

She handed over a coin as if she knew what it was worth and waited. After a beat, he gave her a bunch of smaller coins.

Verena handed her an inconveniently heavy bag full of money.

“How much does this come to?”

“Think of it as about four hundred bucks, assuming you can learn to haggle.”

“I'll give it a try.”

“Where to now?”

“Tons to observe in a market, am I right?”

“You're not supposed to be observing at all,” Verena said.

“What are you going to do, put my eyes out?”

Verena's objection, she thought, seemed halfhearted. Had she surrendered to the idea of the shopping trip a bit easily? That would suggest she was hiding something specific.

She started down the mall as she mulled that over, passing a cobbler and dressmaker, then heading down a level and finding herself in front of a sign that read,
POWDERER
.”

“Powders?”

“My lips are sealed.”

“For spells,” Sophie said. “I bet this is inscription ingredients.”

The powderer's shop was filled with clay jars, all corded and sealed with wax, and each with a tidy label written in Fleetspeak: talc, mixed coral, red coral, black coral, obsidian, whalebone, specter, antelope, basker (whatever that was) human skull, human tooth, human ash male, human ash female, quartz, red granite, black granite, agate.

There were packages here, too, like the one she'd just bought with the bird corpse. “Is this—?”

“Not answering,” Verena said.

Next to the powderer's was a place that sold scales and hair, then a sanguarium.

“Sanguarium,” she repeated. “Blood vendor.”

A whole shop full of labeled blood samples. All she needed was permission to do research and someone to run DNA.

“Fine, yes,” Verena said. “Blood sellers. Sophie, what are you up to?”

“Look, I'd have to be dead to not notice things about Stormwrack, am I right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Telling me not to do science is just dumb. Not taking any hard information home until Annela gives permission, I understand that. Not sharing what I see with anyone but Bram—I can toe the line. I hate not having a camera, but I'll survive. But I'm still a tourist here.”

“It's just shopping,” Verena said, but Sophie's attention had been caught by a poster, printed on a recycled scrap of sail.

It was a crude image of a small sloop with an odd, almost dome-shaped wheel and two masts.

“That looks like the ship we sighted.”

“I asked the jeweler about it,” Verena said. “He says it was stolen from the dockyards at Tug Island.”

“Tonio thought the derelict came from Tug, too.”

“There've been a few disappearances. They figure whoever made off with the sloop is sinking ships.”

“We reported seeing it, right?”

“Parrish will,” Verena said.

A bloodcurdling shriek, from what looked to be a feather store, interrupted them.

The creature in the front display cage was large, on the scale of an albatross—an enormous seagull with a wingspan, she estimated, of over nine feet. It was white but for a band of black over its eyes and mottled patches of brown behind its shoulders. Its feet were typical gull feet: pink, webbed, stunningly huge.

“This is Corsetta's snow vulture,” Verena said.

“How do you know it's hers?”

“They're rare. There won't be two.”

The vendor had a harassed look. “She's missing the girl who charmed her,” he snapped at a would-be customer. “Won't lay.”

“It's the eggs that are important in the inscription?” Sophie asked.

Verena nodded. “It's said that only half of their young survive in the wild. Supposedly there are gifted … I dunno, call them bird whisperers, who can convince them to give up some eggs in exchange for having the rest hatched in a nice warm coop with lots of food.”

“Cooperative relationship, with the perk of a higher survival rate,” Sophie said. “What do the eggs do?”

“Snow vulture eggs enable a human to fly,” Verena said. “Not gliding, like the taxikites. They're actually winged, like angels.”

“
That
I have to see.”

“Good luck if the bird's not laying.”

“If it's pals with Corsetta, she might turn up here.”

Verena circled in place, scrutinizing the vendors, the stalls, the customers. “Yeah. They're watching for her.”

Sophie wondered if that was a good thing.

“Dammit, you've got me telling you things again,” Verena said.

“So? Your official job is to go back and forth and carry stuff to Erstwhile. If there are people who move between worlds, why can't I be one of them?”

“You want a visa now?” Verena said. “It's not me you have to convince.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I go hitching my star to Cly's family wagon, I'm going to have all kinds of chances to apply for travel visas.”

“You want to stay on Annela's good side, threatening to play the Judiciary off the Watch is not the way to go.”

“I'm not trying to pick fights with anyone, Verena. I just want a chance to see—”

“See, explore, study, record—”

“—understand!”

“And then what? Publish? And what about your parents? Are you really going to spend your life here chasing every shiny science thing you see without ever telling them?”

Sophie groaned. “I don't know.”

They paused in front of a small array of lumpy nuggets and toys for pets—Verena bought some treats for
Nightjar
's ferret, along with a small sealed pot full of crickets for its snake-head tail—and lingered over a stall of felt and fabric hats, many of them inscribed, either on brim or band, with neatly stitched or painted lettering in the magical alphabet, spellscrip.

Magic on Stormwrack was all written—you took eye of newt or other ingredients, along with someone's full name, and wrote up what the locals called an intention. It could do anything from straightening your teeth to killing you on the spot. Most people kept their middle names hidden from all but a few trusted family members or friends.

Sophie hadn't known this when she came to Stormwrack six months ago, and by the time she figured it out, the pirates had gotten hold of her name.

The sisters continued past the mages and down to a deck market that was all weapons—swords and knives, maces, cudgels and whips and bows.

“See anything you like?” Verena meant the swords, but Sophie's eye had wandered further, to a stall filled with stonewood daggers. She saw a familiar blond head within the crowd.

What are the chances? she thought. A stir of feelings, some good, some anxious, assailed her. Did she want to see him? Was it a good idea?

“Sophie?”

She turned, trying to urge Verena back to the stairway. “I'm not going to learn to use a sword, Verena. I'd be a hazard.”