Revenger 9780575090569 (42 page)

Bosa Sennen never set out to turn me into something I wasn’t, but she did, and if I ever felt like sparing her a spit of gratitude it would be for that.

Adrana didn’t recognise me at first, in the bone room’s low red light. It wasn’t the armour. I’d shrugged it off by then and just taking it off me felt like relieving myself of a dark cloak of guilt and bad intentions. No, it was what I looked like without the armour that had her befuddled. She jerked back a little, and I couldn’t blame her for that. It wasn’t just the glowy, or the tin hand, or the hard set of my face, which was starting to look stern and angry even when I didn’t mean it. It was the fury in my eyes, a little glint of madness in both of them, and the fact that I didn’t mind in the least.

We didn’t speak, not at first. We just hugged each other, hard, knowing it was real, knowing we wouldn’t be pulled apart again. I heard noises from the rest of the ship, but they might as well have been in another universe for all I cared. I’d got my sister back.

We didn’t need to say much, not at first, and we didn’t need alien skulls to flash our thoughts to each other. There had always been a language between us that didn’t need words, one that had nothing to do with dead aliens or the bony gubbins they left us. It was just that we were sisters and we knew each other better than any one else could.

It was a long time before Adrana pulled back from me enough to take me in as a whole.

‘What did they do to you?’ she asked.

And I gave the only honest answer I could. ‘
They
didn’t do anything. I did it myself. I knew what I was doing. I’m Fura Ness and I chose to become what I am.’

‘If I didn’t know you already,’ Adrana said, ‘I think you’d frighten me.’

‘Good,’ I said.

‘They say the glowy changes you.’

‘Lots of things change you. If it’s in my grey already, it can stay there. I like what I am now.’ I flexed my fingers in her hand. ‘Even these tin fingers. They’re not so bad. I can feel more through them with every day.’ I paused. ‘We’ve taken the
Nightjammer
. It’s ours now, not Bosa’s. We own this ship, and we can do what we like with it.’ I knew I was glossing over a thousand hard things we’d need to do before the ship was truly ours, but I also knew we’d find our way around every problem, one at a time, because we were a crew now.

‘Do you think it’ll get us back to Mazarile?’ Adrana asked.

‘It could,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think there’s anything there for us now.’ And I knew I had to get the truth out now, before it festered any more and started poisoning what was between us. ‘He’s gone, Adrana. Father’s gone. He died.’

‘Died?’ she asked softly.

‘He wasn’t well when we left. We knew that. After I got back, it just got worse. But you mustn’t blame yourself.’

‘Blame myself?’

I’d said the wrong words, and once I’d have taken more pains to spare her feelings, but they were out there now so the best I could do was soften them. ‘It was a strain, all the worry we put him through. He started telling himself you were dead, because it was easier than clinging to the hope that he’d see you again. I read your obituary, Adrana. Just before I left.’

‘When did he die?’

My words jammed in my throat, but I forced them out. ‘The morning I left. Paladin came with me, and . . .’

‘The morning you left. Oh, Fura. It must have been terrible.’

And she pulled her head closer to mine and I thought there was sisterly kindness in it, as if she were going to hug me so near that our tears mingled and we got the salt of them in our mouths. Tell me it wasn’t my fault either, and I wasn’t to blame myself any more than she was.

But I felt a cold edge on my throat.

‘He died, or you left him to die? Which was it, Fura?’

I tried to ease back, but whatever blade she had against my neck stayed put.

‘I’m sorry . . .’

‘You think I didn’t know? Bosa told me weeks ago. She picks up scraps, transmissions, whenever she can. Obituaries. He wasn’t much, our father, but he got his paragraph. And Bosa hoped the news would turn me nearer to her, and she was right.’

‘She didn’t turn you,’ I said, hardly speaking the words in case she cut my throat. ‘If she had, you’d have warned her about the trap.’

‘Oh, I considered it,’ Adrana said. ‘But then I thought: what’s more useful to me? Tipping off Bosa, or seeing what I can get out of her walking into it? She told me I was going to be the one, you see. Not for a while, not until I’d stopped being able to pick up the whispers, but after that, I’d be the one she favoured. That’s how it works, you see – how it’s always worked. Bosa picks the one to follow her, the one with the aptitude. It wasn’t a hard choice, Fura! I could read, and put two numbers together, and that already put me at the front of the line. But I also had her cleverness, she said, and I could be sly when I needed it, and she knew I’d soon see things the way she did.’

I had to keep her talking, so I said: ‘And how did she see things, exactly?’

‘Bosa’s not bad, Fura. That’s just how they make her seem. But it’s Bosa who’s been doing right all these years, not the rest of ’em. It was Bosa that worked out the quoins, and if the truth of that doesn’t cool your blood, nothing will. They’re souls, Fura. The souls of the dead. Only they’re not dead, exactly.’

I heard what she was saying, but the words weren’t making any sense to me. Not then, anyway.

‘So what happens now?’

‘Now? Now’s simple. You say you’ve finished off her crew? Then that’s spared me a lot of trouble, especially if you’ve brought me a new one just in time. I could keep reading the bones, but why would I need to, now you’re here? You can be my new Bone Reader. You’re as good as I ever was, I know – just a little behind me.’

‘She’s got other plans.’

I heard the voice, and then the click as she released the catch on her crossbow.

‘Prozor,’ Adrana said, in a casual sort of way, as if it wasn’t more than hours since they’d spoken.

She was halfway into the bone room, one hand on the crossbow, the other bracing against the doorway.

‘Knife off her throat, girlie.’

I felt the cold edge pull away. I drew the first proper breath since she’d put that blade on me. I was just about to say something, offering some words of explanation or excuse for what my sister had done, but Prozor must have decided things were plain enough as they stood. She flipped the crossbow around
single-
handed and crunched the stock down on Adrana’s scalp.

Adrana softened next to me, gave a sigh and started drifting out of my arms.

‘Don’t kill her,’ I said.

‘What we do or don’t do with her can wait,’ Prozor said, reaching in to pluck the knife from Adrana’s limp fingers. ‘In the meantime I thought you’d care to know that I found Garval. It didn’t take long, knowing where she was. But I found something else, too.’

I didn’t understand.

Not until she showed me.

We’d have found her sooner or later, I suppose, but she’d have been dead by then and it pleased me handsomely to have her still alive. When Bosa had been blown out of the wreck of the
Queenie
, it had been her good fortune – slim as it was – that our ship had been lined up nicely with the
Nightjammer
, so that the force of the blast set her crossing over from one to the other, without needing any tricky skill on her part. To begin with, I was sure, there’d have been a deep dread in whatever was left of her heart – the dread of falling into the endless Empty, with only the dwindling capacity of her suit to keep her alive. But then that dread would have softened to hope, and then delight, if she was capable of such a thing, that her course was perfectly true and guaranteed to take her back to the
Nightjammer
. Oh, she had a surplus of speed, it was true, and no choice about how hard or soft she was going to hit the ship’s hull, but her odds of survival had just gone up immeasurably. And since she had good expectations of getting back to the
Nightjammer
before any of us, she could alert her crew, bring the rest of her guns onto the wreck of the
Queenie
, and finish us off in a volley of spite and temper, even as she sacrificed any remaining thought of taking our bones.

But it wasn’t to be.

So nicely were our two ships lined up, you see, that once Bosa left the
Queenie
, it was only ever a matter of time before she found herself driven onto the spike sticking out of the bow of the
Nighjammer
, the same bowsprit spike that she’d made Garval’s last resting place. And she’d have had time enough to realise it, too, as her own ship got bigger and bigger in her visor.

It was even worse luck for her that she wasn’t quite dead. The spike had gone right through her, from the small of her back to her belly, but it was a narrow wound and it had sealed itself pretty thoroughly. She’d have died if we dragged her off it, so after she had dealt with Garval, Prozor found a yardknife and sawed right through the last three spans of the spike, and we brought Bosa back inside the
Nightjammer
with that thing still skewering her.

We carried her to the medical room of the
Nightjammer
, the box of horrors where Bosa did her brain surgery. I’ll say this for the place: it was clean, and she’d plundered a lovely set of drills and knives and saws and so on from the ships she fell on.

She wasn’t going to live. That was clear. But we removed most of her suit, got lungstuff into her, stopped her bleeding, sealed the wound as best we could. Not out of niceness, no. There wasn’t an atom of niceness left in any of our heads, not for her, and especially not in mine. Having your own sister put a blade to your throat, and knowing it was Bosa that turned her that way, will burn niceness out of the gentlest cove.

I laid it out for her.

‘You’re going to die, Bosa. I’ve got your ship and I’ve diced your crew into cubes. If there was one of ’em still alive I’d pluck his eyes out and feed them to you like grapes. But there isn’t. Just Adrana, and although you started turning her, you didn’t finish the job.’

It was hard for her to speak. Her eyes were gummy, her throat raw, and we had to keep putting the lungstuff back into her just to get any sense out of her gob.

But she managed this: ‘I turned her, Fura. I turned her and it’s too late to undo what I started. You can kill me, but all I’ve done is line another Bosa up to stand in my place.’

I didn’t want to hear that, not now. So I changed the tack of our chinwag and said: ‘Tell me about the quoins. What did Adrana mean, they’re the souls of the dead?’

‘Ask her yourself.’

‘I will.’

‘There was a war,’ Bosa said, after another glug of lungstuff. ‘A long time ago. Not one of ours. One of
theirs
. Aliens. It just spilled over into the Congregation, between one of our Occupations.’

Prozor, who was behind me, said: ‘Which aliens?’

‘None we know of. No name we’ve got for ’em. All they left us to remember them by is the quoins. They were slaughtered, you see. Driven to extinction. And when the end was nearly upon them, they took their own souls and squeezed them into quoins, and they’re still inside. It’s not money. It was
never
money.’ She forced her mouth into a
half-
smile. ‘Just recordings. The more bars, the more souls there are inside. Hundreds, thousands of them. And they’re not just patterns, like letters on a tomb. They’re frozen, yes. But they can live again.’

I was listening to words bubble out of a dying woman who was mad long before she’d been spiked on her own ship, and if I had one grain of sense in me I’d have ignored every one of those words.

But sense was never my strong point.

I asked: ‘What do the other aliens want with them?’

‘Nothing,’ Bosa said. ‘Not the Crawlies, or the Clackers or the Hardshells. They just want to gather them up and sell them on. They’re just the brokers. There’s someone
else
out there, some other aliens we don’t even know about. It’s them the quoins are for.’

‘The ones who were slaughtered?’ Prozor asked.

‘The ones who did the slaughtering. They want the quoins, so they can get at the souls and pull them out again.’

‘To make them live again?’

‘To put them through more torments. To keep tormenting them. To keep them in agony until the Old Sun’s just a cinder, and even then they wouldn’t stop.’ Her mouth cracked wider, eager to get something across. ‘But I could stop them, Fura. I could do a good thing. Steal the quoins before they ever got to the banks, and keep them out of circulation. There’s a world out there, a bauble, where . . .’ But she coughed, and blood came out of her mouth in a fine red spray, stinging my eyes. ‘I was trying to do a good thing, you see. A good thing. I couldn’t take on the banks, couldn’t take on the aliens . . . but I could do this one thing. If I saved even one quoin from them, that was good, wasn’t it?’

So this was where all my travels and adventures had brought me. To be next to Bosa Sennen, and have her beg me to set her conscience straight.

And I thought about it. Whatever she had ended up, after all the faces she had worn, was it possible it had all begun with a desire to set right what was wrong? Could kindness – by only ever taking little steps – twist itself into the worst kind of cruelty? And did the fact of that kindness excuse any part of her crimes, or just put a different shade behind them, like hanging an ugly picture on a different wall?

‘You said there was a bauble.’

She looked at me with something like humour. ‘I did, didn’t I. But I wouldn’t be Bosa if I gave away her secrets too easily, would I?’

‘I own your ship now. I’ll find out anything I want.’

‘I wouldn’t dwell on those quoins too hard, if I were you. You might start seeing things Bosa’s way.’ She reached for me then, quicker than I’d have credited anyone in her condition was capable of. But it wasn’t to strike me, or do me harm. She got her fingers around my jaw,
gentle-
like, and angled my face a bit closer to hers, so she could see me more easily. ‘Especially not with the glowy in you like it is. Shines bright in you, it does. I bet you already feel the fire of it, the anger it puts into your veins. The odd notions it puts into your skull.’