The Black Lung Captain (23 page)

She presented her hand. He stared at it for a few moments before realising what he was supposed to do, then raised it to his lips and kissed it.

'Come inside, please,' she said.

He folowed, dazed, wrongfooted by the change in her. She was confident where before she'd been arrogant. Assured where she'd been spoiled. She'd grown to suit her new role quickly and wel.

The entrance hal was colossal, with a curving staircase of polished stone. Thin pilars drew the eye to the arched moulding on the ceiling. Valuable urns rested on pedestals with the casual precariousness only found in houses that didn't have dogs or children in them.

A manservant stood by the doors to a drawing room. He opened them and Amalicia led Frey through into a beautiful room with gold-chased paneling and a fireplace that would embarrass a duke. Settees and divans were arranged near a side table of sweetmeats and refreshments. A servant was pouring tea as they entered.

Amalicia clapped her hands. 'Leave us,' she said. 'Darian and I have a lot of catching up to do.' The servant scurried out, and the handsome manservant pushed the doors closed. As he did so, Frey caught his gaze. The manservant winced in sympathy, and then the doors clicked shut.

Frey didn't like that wince. He had a dreadful premonition of what was coming. He turned around to see Amalicia advancing on him with terrible purpose, her serene, aristocratic smile turned to an ugly snarl. 'Now wait a mi—' he began, but he was interrupted by the heel of her riding boot connecting with his jaw hard enough to send him tumbling over the back of a settee.

He was stil seeing stars as she puled him up by the colar of his shirt. Where was the pretty, cultured lady of a moment ago? Surely she couldn't be this rabid harpy, drawing back a bunched fist to drive into his eye socket?

'Where . . . were . . . you?'
she screeched, punctuating each word with a savage strike to the face. '
Where . . . were . . . you?'

'Wil you let me explain?' he spluttered. A couple of his teeth felt loose.

'No! You always do that! You explain, and I stop being mad, and I forgive you and then you leave me again! You're a liar, Darian. A damned liar!'

'I never lied to you!' he lied.

She stared at him, open-mouthed, and then kicked him between the legs. 'Don't you dare try and weasel out of this one! Don't you dare!'

He barely heard her words. They seemed to come from a great distance away, floating through a fog of perfect agony. There was a strange, sad void in his lower bely, a grey pal of aching misery, as if his guts were attending the funeral of his reproductive system.

'Why weren't you there when I got out of that hermitage, Frey?' she demanded. 'Where was my dashing buccaneer lover waiting to sweep me off my feet?

What about al those things you said?'

Frey tried to protest that she wouldn't have got out of there at al if not for him, but the only noise that emerged was a shril whimper at a pitch audible only to bats.

'Not a word! For a year!' Amalicia shrieked. 'Don't even pretend you didn't get my letters, Frey! I sent them everywhere!'

Frey held up a hand and swalowed against a hard lump in his throat that may or may not have been one of his own testicles. 'I thought . . .' he croaked. 'I thought . . .'

'Thought what? Thought I'd forgotten your promise? Thought I'd forgotten that you said you'd marry me?'

Technicaly, Frey had done no such thing, but he thought it unwise to argue the point, given his present situation. 'I thought . . . you'd reject me.'

'You thought
what?'

He caught his breath. The ache in his groin was a little less unbearable now, enough that he could manage a coherent sentence. 'I thought I wasn't good enough for you.'

'Oh, that's just rubbish!' Amalicia scoffed. 'What an excuse!'

'Look around you!' he said, swinging out an arm. 'You see? Look at what you have! You're a lady. Sure, you loved me when your father was alive. What better way to piss off Daddy than by hitching up with some lowlife freebooter, right? But the game's changed now. Daddy's gone. We dreamed of running away, but now there's nothing to run away from. What do you need me for, when you have al this?'

Amalicia looked shocked. 'It was
never
about that!'

But she was already on the back foot, and Frey kept pushing. 'Don't you think I know what would have happened next? The society bals, the dinner parties, mixing with the rich and powerful? How long would it have been before I embarrassed you? How long before you got bored of me and found someone who knew how to eat soup without slurping?'

'Darian, that's not true,' she protested, but it came out weak and unconvincing. She'd been so busy being angry and lovesick that it had probably never occurred to her until now.

'It
is
true, and you know it,' he said, getting delicately to his feet with the help of a nearby chair. He felt himself to be sure everything was stil where it was supposed to be.

Amalicia stamped huffily over to the windows, frustrated at having her righteous wrath blunted. She crossed her arms and stared out over the lawns of her estate. Regrouping. After a moment she whirled and came back. 'So you just decided it was over?' she snapped. 'You just left without a word?'

'No,' he said. 'I always meant to come back to you. But not as some filthy pirate. I wanted to come back as a man worthy of a lady like you. I wanted to come back rich and respectable. But I failed you, Amalicia. I failed.'

The Pinn Defence. Neat, deadly, and virtualy impossible to refute. Nothing cut a girl's legs out from under her like a noble justification of an apparently ignoble act. The angrier they were, the worse they felt when you sprang the trap.

Tears shimmered in his eyes, more from the pain in his pods than sorrow, but that didn't matter to Amalicia. Her anger blew out like a candle.

'You didn't think you were
worthy
of me?' she asked, and he knew by the tone of her voice that she'd forgiven him right then. It was that
I-can't-believe-how-sweet-you-are-you-delightful-thing
kind of tone that, in Frey's experience, was generaly employed in response to a thoughtful and unexpected present, or one of his rare displays of tenderness.

'I've tried to go straight, tried to make my fortune by honourable means,' he said. 'I could start a business, maybe buy some land. But . . .'

'Spit and blood, Darian. Al this time you've been thinking I wouldn't want you?'

Frey held his aching jaw. He could feel a bruise forming where her heel had caught him. 'You mean you do?' he asked, with the expression of a man who hardly dared to hope.

'Of course I do, Darian! Why do you think I was writing to you al this time?'

'After everything I've done, you stil want me?'

'Yes!' she laughed. She took his rather damaged face in her hands and gazed up into his eyes. 'Yes! I never stopped wanting you.'

'Oh, Amalicia!' he hammed. 'I've been a fool! A damned fool!'

The melodrama was lost on her. 'Darian!' she swooned, and she kissed him with such brutal passion that he feared she'd end up swalowing one of his loosened teeth.

'Come on,' she said eagerly, as soon as they'd surfaced for breath. She tugged him towards a door. 'The bedroom's this way.'

Frey clutched at his pulverised groin. 'I'm not sure I can . . .'

'Darian,' she said, with an unmistakable warning in her voice.

Frey took a steadying breath. 'Alright,' he said. 'I suppose I'l manage.'

*

It took a while to entice his traumatised equipment into action, but once he got going, he managed a passable performance. Amalicia didn't seem to mind that he was sub-par. She detonated with a scream that had Frey hurriedly clamping a hand over her mouth in case the household guards should burst in and shoot him.

Later, they lay in bed together. She was curled up against him, he on his back, looking up at the ceiling. 'What are you thinking about?' she asked him.

'Nothing,' he replied.

What he was thinking was how fine it was to lie here in an expensive bed with a beautiful young woman beside him. They could lie here al night and al day, if they wanted. And the next night, and the next. He'd never have to go back to his mouldy bunk on the
Ketty Jay,
with that threadbare hammock hanging over his head, always threatening to snap and crush him beneath an avalanche of luggage. How would it be, to live this way?

That was what he was thinking, but he said none of it.

She stirred against him and raised her head. 'Why did you come back?' she murmured.

'I came back for you.'

'Darian,' she said, the word a gentle threat. 'Why now? And don't tel me it's because you couldn't stand to be without me a moment longer.'

Frey had been about to say exactly that. He had to think a moment. Eventualy, too drugged by post-coital lethargy to come up with anything clever, he told her the truth. 'I need your help.'

She tensed in his arms.

'Wait, hear me out,' he said. 'I found a way to get rich. Realy rich. I wanted to be worthy of you, remember?'

'I remember,' she said suspiciously. Now that the first chaos of passion had settled, she was getting sceptical.

'Thing is, I can't do it without your help.'

'You need money, then,' she guessed, icing up.

Yes. Always.
'No!' he said. 'What do you take me for?'

'I don't know, Darian. I don't know what to think.' Now she was sulen and resentful. Frey was already having trouble keeping up with her moods. He remembered why he kept leaving her. A familiar irritation crept into his thoughts, but he kept it from his voice. 'I'm trying to get something. Something very valuable that the Awakeners have.'

'Ah.'

'Your father was a great friend of the Awakeners, of course. I sort of assumed you stil have connections with them, even if you don't like them much. So I wondered if—'

"What do you need?' she interrupted.

'This . . . thing. It's a metal sphere. Very valuable. They have it inside a compound up in the Splinters. Place is like a fortress. I need a way to get in, or a way to get it out.'

'A sphere,' she repeated. 'Valuable.'

'Yes.'

"I don't suppose I want to know any more than that.'

"Good policy. If it makes you feel better, it's rightfuly mine. Wel, mine and my coleagues, anyway. They stole it from us. We want to steal it back.'

'And once you have it, you'l be rich?'

'Astronomicaly so, apparently.'

'And then you'l think yourself worthy of me?'

'Absolutely.'

She roled over in bed, facing away from him. She managed to convey her sadness and disappointment through the set of her bare shoulders, though Frey couldn't work out how.

'I'l see what I can do,' she said.

They had breakfast on the south terrace in the morning, overlooking a calm lake edged by drowsily nodding trees. The sun was strong, for they'd slept in til past midday, and Amalicia was al smiles again. Frey enjoyed himself immensely. Etiquette made him awkward, but being waited on hand and foot was an experience he didn't think he'd ever get tired of.

'A man could get used to this,' he murmured, as he took his third glass of sparkling breakfast wine. Amalicia gave him a sideways glance and said nothing.

Later in the afternoon, they walked in the gardens, among the flowerbeds and the arbours. Frey wasn't much for plant life, but he was feeling quite grand today and more than a little buzzed from the wine. The presence of a beautiful woman who plainly adored him wasn't exactly unwelcome, either.

They'd been ambling around for some time when a manservant approached and whispered something in Amalicia's ear. She smiled and nodded.

'Plotting something?' Frey asked, watching the manservant retreat down the path.

'Actualy, yes,' she said. 'I've secured us invitations to a soiree in Lapin.'

'A party?' Frey exclaimed. 'What did you go and do that for?'

'Because that's where you'l find out what you want to know.'

Frey scratched the back of his neck. The thought of a society party made him uneasy. Give him a good old life-threatening gunfight anyday. At least there, if someone was wittier than you, you could just shoot them in the face.

'It's a very exclusive soiree,' said Amalicia. Frey felt his nerves tighten another notch. 'Among the guests wil be three Interpreters and a Grand Oracle.'

'Three whos and a what now?'

'High-ranking Awakeners, Darian,' she explained patiently. 'There are only four Grand Oracles in al of Vardia, and they are second in power only to the Lord High Cryptographer himself.'

'And you think they might know something about the sphere?'

'I'm sure you can get something useful out of them. You're a resourceful sort.'

'That I am,' he said. 'But do you think they'l even talk to me? I mean, look at me. They have handkerchiefs that cost more than my entire wardrobe.'

Amalicia gave him an up-and-down appraisal. 'Yes, we'l have to tidy you up a bit. But I shouldn't worry. They'l accept you as long as you're with me. And you'l find that the great and good are a lot less formal in these smal, private gatherings than they are in public. We aristocrats get up to al kinds of things when the commoners aren't looking.' She smiled to show she was joking. Sort of.

'I'm not very good with polite conversation,' said Frey. 'It's more Crake's thing.'

'Don't fret, my darling. I have a scheme in mind. You see, there's always a games room at these little affairs. And this particular Grand Oracle is very fond of Rake.'

Frey's eyes lit up. 'Rake, you say?'

'Sit him down at a table, ply him with drink, lose some hands to him. He'l be your best friend in no time.'

Frey chewed his lip. 'I could do that. I'd stil feel better if Crake came too, though. Another pair of ears in the room. He's an aristocrat; he wouldn't embarrass you.'

Amalicia tutted. 'Very wel. I'l see it's done. But he'd better behave himself, Darian, or I shal be very put out.'

'Don't use his real name on the invitation.'