Half Discovered Wings (21 page)

‘
What’s that?’

Lanark pulled the rope tight through another ring, which was
halfway across the deck behind a heap of crates, and he fastened it
with a series of complicated knots. Caeles absorbed the manoeuvre
automatically, his mechanical irises focusing the images into the
backs of his eyes, and then storing the video in crystal fragments
in his semi-organic brain.

‘
The bolt-hornet’s not
got proper venom. It’s charged
with a kind of chemical electricity instead. That’s why your girl’s
got burns on her hand. That’s why her heart stopped. It’s like
getting an electric shock. What’s keeping her comatose now is the
thing’s residual toxin, preventing her from waking up. Have you
heard about stasis? What they used before the war?’

‘
Yes.’

Caeles had once been
in stasis himself, partially frozen through cryogenics and other
portions clamped into electric outlets, safeguarding his flesh for
a particularly dangerous journey in an unfriendly atmosphere. The
experience hadn’t been a memorable one – he’d been unconscious,
technically dead the whole time.

‘
Similar to that,’ Lanark said. ‘Keeps her preserved, though.
She’s alive, now that you’ve restarted her heart. But she won’t
ever wake up.’

The wind was a
harsh one, and it pulled at their clothes and whipped the rope that
now lashed the boxes to the deck.

‘
Looks like more rain,’ Lanark said solemnly, and went back to
work.

~

Darkness
enveloped the ship as it cut its steady passage through the lake.
Gabel lay in the hammock, listening to Rowan’s breathing. In the
darkness he imagined her standing, looking over him, but whenever
he strained to see across the room, all he saw was her still and
supine form, and heard the tiny sound of her breath.

Gabel had awoken to the sound of hushed voices below him; the
crew’s quarters. He couldn’t hear what was being said, only picked
up an urgency amid the whispers.

There was a
quiet knock on the door, and Timothy, the chief, entered.

‘
Speak quietly,’ he said, approaching Gabel in the dark. He
didn’t glance at Rowan. ‘There may be a problem. We’re sorting it
out. Stay quiet.’

‘
What is it?’

‘
Privateers,’ Timothy muttered, and his face contracted into a
grimace. ‘Could be trouble. They mayn’t have spotted us, but they
mostly have sound radar. Keep silent, don’t bang anything. Don’t
speak.’

‘
I understand.’

~

Gabel carefully placed Rowan over his shoulder and manoeuvred
them both through the door and out into the cold night. Wind blew
around them, whistled in their ears, the Lual a vast expanse of
oily water. He noticed there was no wake; the
Tractatus
had stopped
dead.

He shifted
Rowan to make things easier. She wasn’t heavy. She was
distressingly light, in fact, and bony beneath her clothes. He
gripped her legs as he carried her, feeling her slack arms touching
the backs of his knees with each footstep.

In the
darkness of the bridge, he laid her down on the floor, folding her
arms over her stomach to keep them out the way.

‘
What’s happening?’ he asked quietly.

The captain, Lanark, Caeles and the magus stood around
him.

‘
Privateers,’ muttered the captain. ‘They have sound radar, so
keep your voices down ‘til I say so. Don’t drop anything. In fact,
don’t pick anythin’ up. Stay still as you can, ‘cause they’ll hear
otherwise.’

‘
How long until they pass?’ asked the magus.

‘
Hours ‘til we’re out of their range.’

‘
Hours?’

‘
That’s what I said. We’re goin’ down to the crew’s quarters
now. It’s below deck, an’ they won’t see us if they get close
enough to try. We’re near enough to the graveyard now to maybe be
mistaken for a derelict.’

‘
We’re that close to the centre?’ asked Caeles. He settled down
in the darkness, standing at ease.

‘
That’s right. She’s been goin’ non-stop for three whole days
now, Mister Caeles, an’ it’s usually a seven day trip
around
the centre. I’ve
gone pretty much straight through, at your request I might add,
though we’re not in the thick of it yet.’

They moved
into the crew’s quarters that took up half of the space below the
deck. The chief came down a few minutes after everybody else,
saying that he’d been in the head. He sat down quietly with the
captain and whispered a few words, out of earshot of the
others.

Then they all
sat and waited for the privateers to pass.

Gabel placed
himself beside Rowan, smoothing her hair and laying it out neatly
for her.

Caeles slid
over. ‘How is she?’

‘
She’s the same.’

‘
I could watch her for a while.’

A moment, then Gabel said, ‘Thank you. I’m tired.’

He went to
sleep further up the cabin, near the magus.

‘
Worn out,’ said Caeles, voice nothing more than breath. He
looked down at the woman. ‘He cares too much for you.’

The hours
passed. The captain stayed awake, behind the metal shelving, filled
with tack and rubbish. The chief and his mate were probably awake
as well, but seemed asleep. Their chests moved slowly up and down
as they lay on their beds.

Caeles backed up against the wall and pulled his knees to his
chest. ‘You’re going to wake up,’ he said. ‘Then you can sing him
your song again.’

~

For many hours, Caeles sat with the wakizashi resting on his
fingers, palms up, eyes closed. It was hot in the room now, after
spending the entire night and most of the early hours trapped in
the crew’s berth with no fresh oxygen to relieve them from the
stuffiness. The air was stale, reused, and warm.

Caeles stirred. One,
then the other eye opened, and surveyed the room carefully. Nothing
had changed. The sword went carefully back into its scabbard. He
liked to hold the weapon, feel the coldness that never left it.
Though he was reminded of fire and spectres, it ironed his
nerves.

People were tired. The captain talked quietly to the chief
bosun. Lanark sat alone, eyes closed, on one of the hammocks that
hung silent and still from the wooden ceiling. Across from him,
hidden from view by a wall of cluttered bookshelves, lay the magus,
hands on chest, but eyes open and alert. In the corner, at the
opposite end near the door, lay the comatose Rowan, and sitting by
her side her self-appointed guardian, Joseph Gabel.

Caeles stood
and stretched. He then walked to the captain and sat silently next
to him, and asked his question.

‘
Is it safe yet?’

‘
Not for a while,’ the bearded man replied. ‘But there’s only
minutes to go. Please be patient a little while longer.’

Caeles had no
problem with that.

‘
Better safe than sorry,’ he said, which earned him a wise
nod.

He walked to
Rowan, whose hair was laid in braids on both sides. It was uneven
in length, strands fraying out the ends of each plait, irregularly
splayed in a dark tassel.

‘
Did you do that to her hair?’ he asked Gabel solemnly. It
reminded him too much of the way a dead woman’s hair might be done
up for an open casket.

Gabel nodded.
‘To keep it from her face.’

‘…
It looks nice.’

‘
Thanks.’

The captain
said he would go on deck and check the instruments to see if the
other ship was out of range. Caeles moved closer to the magus,
leaning against the wall and watching him. The old man seemed to be
in meditation. After more than half an hour, the magus’ lips moved.
His eyes had a different quality now, brightly animated.

‘
What’s the matter with you?’ Caeles asked.

The magus
smiled. ‘Finally: room to breathe.’

He said it
just as the captain jogged down the stairs, a grin parting his
knotted beard.

‘
All clear,’ he announced. ‘The other ship has
passed.’

He spoke at
normal volume, spreading relief.

~

Another vessel sailed the great lake that night. Its presence
had caused the crew and passengers of the
Tractatus
to go into silent hiding,
yet their concern was unfounded. The boat they thought was
inhabited by licensed pirates was empty; its only crew were
dead.

Some had jumped into the waters further toward the centre of
the lake; some had fallen; some had been pulled, and some had been
pushed. Seven new corpses now lifted the waters of the Lual. The
rest of the crew, the remaining three privateers, were also
dead.

Their bloody bodies were spread over the deck and throughout
the vessel’s innards; their own painted a gory mess over the rough
oaken canvas of the boat’s floor. Limbs and other body parts still
rolled about on the forecastle, but the majority had ended up over
the gunwales.

No waves
existed on the Lual. All there was that night was the tender wake
left behind by that carrier of corpses, the macabre ghost-ship that
would never be found.

*

Thirteen

WISHES AND
WHISPERS

Gabel was
preoccupied. As soon as the captain reported the all clear, he
lifted Rowan up over his shoulder and carried her to her berth,
resting her on the bed. After calling twice to her in a hushed
voice and receiving no reply, he went to stand by the bow.

Caeles stood
by him a few minutes later, both men silent as they looked out over
the dark surface of the lake. No land could be seen yet, only a
light mist that hung in arched twists like the strokes of an
enthusiastic painter.

They were
nearing the centre of the lake, that which the captain called the
“graveyard”. There lurked the semi-submerged carcasses of once
great ships, or the skeletal remains of some smaller boat that had
scuffed the coral reefs around the centre and broken apart.

‘
When I’m out here,’ Gabel said suddenly, surprising Caeles in
the silence, ‘I can sometimes hear what sounds like snatches of
music, coming in from out there. Not quite music … Maybe it’s a
voice. Just a few notes.’

Caeles knew what he was talking about, and as the hunter
carried on, almost to himself, Caeles remembered that song he had
heard on the shore. He had assumed it had been Rowan, but … had
there been a second tune there? The more he thought about it, the
more he recalled a dark shadow to Rowan’s melody that had left a
misty residue on his mind. But—

He could
hardly remember. Confused, he only gave a noncommittal reply, a low
grunt. They watched the mist whorl around the ship as it passed
through, leaving only the faintest of wakes.

Then Caeles
said something without even thinking about it. ‘Rowan sang for you
the night before we departed.’

He had no idea why he
blurted out such a thing. A guilty part of his mind – guilty at
being the one to have heard it, when it was meant for another –
triggered his lips and tongue into moving. Afterwards he was glad
he had spoken, but the moment he did he could barely stand the look
on Gabel’s face. It was the look of an injured man.

~

The day seemed
shorter than all the rest. As the boat proceeded in a more direct
route to the other side of the Lual, closer and closer to the
ship-wrecking reefs, Gabel became increasingly restless.

It was taking
just too long to get Rowan to a doctor, and while it was easy to
forget why they were rushing, and concentrate on fear for safety,
the full truth always hit him after enough time: Rowan was slowly
dying.

Gabel was constantly checking her pulse, memorising the beats
per minute. Slowly but surely her heart was failing in her chest.
Every day brought her two or three beats less a minute. It was, at
the moment, a steady sixty-one, but tomorrow it would be
fifty-eight, then fifty-five … By the time they reached Goya it
might not be beating often enough to keep her body
alive.

First to go
would be the toes, then the fingers, and they would freeze and drop
of as if with frostbite. Then slowly her limbs would be starved of
the blood as well, and begin to decompose, and maybe at this stage
her hair would whiten and fall out. It may become necessary to
stand her on her head to keep her brain alive.

No-one was qualified enough to say whether it was a coma or
not. Gabel thought of her as sleeping to settle his concerns, but
his self-delusion didn’t always help. Delusions needed to disguise
themselves in order to work, and Gabel was all too aware that he
was creating falsities to make things easier for
himself.

That evening the mist around the
Tractatus
once more turned to fog,
and visibility was reduced to only fifty or so metres. It was on
this day that they passed by the first of the wrecks.

The ruined ship was a large one, at least a few hundred
metres in length. Made of half-rotted wood gilded with ribs of
rusted iron, the massive vessel was nothing but a skeleton. Some of
the decking was still there, visible due to the ship’s angle. In
places huge segments of the wood had fallen into the water, giving
a cross-section of its innards. A large silver boiler that had once
helped power the thing lurched out of the water, still attached to
the walls of the ship. It swung sadly – perhaps one of its struts
had recently broken and it still moved from momentum – and creaked
as it did so.