The Iron Ship (29 page)

“He told me to report to him, yes. Where’s Veremond? He said he would wait?”

“Oh, he is a very busy man. I take you. Come on! Come on!” Zhinsky frantically beckoned. “The major’s office this way.” He led Rel out into the main thoroughfare and set off at a terrific pace.

“Hey Zhinsky.”

“Yes, oh wise scion of the Kressinds?”

“I appreciate it’s just your way, and I like a good banter as much as the next man, but Estabanado seems quite the stickler for the rules. Perhaps while we are in the fort you should call me ‘sir’?”

“First he wants captain, and now he wants ‘sir’?” Zhinsky roared with laughter. “Sir?”

“Something funny, Zhinsky?” The military air of the fort had reawoken the soldier in Rel.

“Oh little merchant boy, I thought you and I were friends! After all Zhinsky has done for you.” He put on a sad face. “Ah! Here! This is Major Mazurek’s office.” He held up a finger to his lips and winked. “Shhh! Mazurek is very lazy. He is probably sleeping. Let’s give him a surprise!” he said, and reached for the door handle with his other hand.

“Shouldn’t you knock?”

But Zhinsky had barged into the office. He took off his hat and threw it onto a pile of papers occupying a sideboard. Miraculously, it did not fall over. The whole office was in a similar state, a clutter of paperwork and objects covered with a fine layer of dust.

“Pah!” said Zhinsky, coughing and flapping his hand in front of his face. “This place so dirty. That Major Mazurek, eh? You must be thinking he is a dirty fellow.”

Zhinsky went through a pile of papers, a frown on his face. It lit up when he found a bottle under them. “Aha! I know where the good stuff is.” He plonked himself down behind the major’s desk. As nonchalantly as could be, he kicked a stack of papers onto the floor and set his dirty boots onto the wood. He stretched back, uncorked the bottle with his teeth, spat the cork out and took three big gulps of the major’s liquor.

Rel looked about himself in consternation. “What are you doing, man? He could be here any minute!”

Zhinsky took the bottle away from his lips and smacked them appreciatively. “Why the bother? I thought little merchant boy like the party? That is what his papers say.”

“You read my papers?”

“Of course! Why shouldn’t I?” He drank again, and shuddered with delight. “Now that is good. Do you want some?”

“He’ll have us up on charges!”

Zhinsky peered around the room as if there might be someone lurking under the furniture. “Who?”

“The major! His paperwork, his whisky.”

“This not whisky? Whisky? We not in Karsa, merchant’s boy. This is little water.”

“Does it matter what it is? It’s his! You drank it!”

Zhinsky sighed, took his feet off the desk and put the bottle down with a clunk.

“I never have liked paperwork,” he said.

“But...” said Rel. Then, “Oh. I see.”

A grin split Zhinsky’s weather-beaten features, wider than the canyon of the Olb. He laughed and laughed and laughed, so hard he had to hold his belly with both hands. Then, suddenly, he stopped, and his mien became deadly serious. “I am Major Zhalak Zhinsky Doroetsev Mazurek. First two my names, next to last my mother’s, Mazurka is where I am from.” He shrugged. “Simple. I learn you Khusiachki. It be good for you.”

Rel gaped. Zhinsky smirked.

“Good joke, yes? Come! Do not be looking like the grounded fish! I enjoy joking. Is good for morale.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“How do I get to know you if I do and you are bowing and scraping and sir this and sir that? This way is much better. I was in Mohacs-Gravo, you there. Good idea of mine.” He ran his eyes over a pile of paper that he had not kicked off his desk. He sighed at it. “Now Captain Kressind. You were saying something about me calling you all the time ‘captain’ and ‘sir’?”

“Sorry,” said Rel, snapping to attention. “Sir.”

“As you are seeing, I have much work to be doing. Go find Veremond. He finish showing you about. I see you later, say four of the clock?”

“Yes sir,” said Rel.

“That is all arranged then! You are, as we say when we do this properly, dismissed captain.”

Rel backed out of the room, feeling shaky. As the latch clicked down he could hear Zhinsky sniggering to himself inside.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Captain Heffi

C
APTAIN
H
EFFIRA-NEREAZ-
H
ELLISHUL VOVO
Balisatervo Chai Tse-ban stepped out of a hansom cab and onto the Bottomquay. He was a large man, and the cab rocked on its wheels as he relieved it of his weight. Some of his kind hid their religion, but not the captain. His ample girth was accentuated by a wide and extravagantly ruffled golden cummerbund. He wore his hair shaved but for one, long lock that cascaded from the right hand side of his head, arranged by ritual prescription upon the shoulder of his embroidered jacket. From the tips of his square-toed shoes to the oiled ends of his side-knot, he was obviously and proudly Ishmalan. The cabbie caught the coin he tossed and examined it with a surly eye. The cabbie eyed the three gold rings in the captain’s nose, the hoops in his ears and the jewels on his fingers.

“Thank you,” said the captain. He said it pleasantly, but with finality that made it clear there was no more money forthcoming.

The cabbie tugged the peak of his cap, although his expression belied this respect. He flicked his whip at his dogs. They had taken the opportunity to lie down as dogs will, and stood with wide, red gapes, rumbling their displeasure.

The cab drove away, the noise of the iron rims of its wheels silenced by the thick layer of muck on the cobbles. The captain breathed deeply of the air. The sharp tang of salt, the reek of the Lemio and Var as they ran down their spillways either side of the locks. There was rubbish on the wind, and shit, and spices from far lands. And fish. Always there was fish.

“It is good to be back at the Locksides,” he said loudly and sincerely.

The wharfs of Bottomquay were accessible only during the least of the Lesser Tides, and therefore attracted the lowest tolls. There was a minor rise on, and smaller floatstone vessels crowded the grubby docks, crews frantically unloading before the water turned. Fine, silty mud was thick underfoot; from this a good part of Lockside’s unique aroma issued. A hundred feet above were the higher docks, positioned at the mean of the tides. A little above that, beyond the reach of all but the highest of tides, the first buildings began; the Lowhouses. Bottomquay was inundated far too often to build on, and the steep cobbled roads leading up to the Lowhouses were thick with men and women, taking wares up to the stores and funiculars clinging to the cliffs above.

The locks themselves dominated everything, one of the great engineering feats of the age. The Slot, they were called. That name had once belonged to the cleft into which the locks were built, but most now did not remember the Lemio-Var waterfalls, or the Tyn that had dwelled underneath. Already one hundred years old, the locks were still unmatched in their size and boldness, and caused the most jaded seadog to stop and stare. There were twelve of them, one for every hour of the day, they liked to say. The upper seven were cut directly into the rock, deeper the higher one went, stepping up directly into the city along the original path of the conjoined Lemio and Var, now forever divided. The angle of the cliff was less severe there than elsewhere in Karsa, but still precipitous, and so the lower locks were built far out into the marsh on footings of giant boulders, carved and fitted without mortar. Giant coffers of pitch-blackened timbers rose from these, the trees that made them brought all the way from the forests of Shefir overseas. Gates of the same six-foot thick wood fronted each locks. The bottommost lock was a black line ahead of Heffi. The tarred timbers of the higher locks went up and up. Big floatstones sat in two of them, their masts poking over the top of the walls, high over the buildings. Waiting for the gates to open and draw them one level closer to the heart of the city, they were the toys of a giant left upon the stairway of titans.

How Captain Heffi loved the sight of them. The locks meant home, and he never failed to be cheered by them. He patted his belly happily, and headed off into the crowds of stevedores, sailors, dockworkers and those who earned their trade serving them. He’d not got halfway to the Anguillon and Anchor before he was stopped by an agent seeking a Ishmalan captain. Three more times it happened before he made the door. All but one were Ishmalan like him, and all knew him personally. They called his name with enthusiasm.

“I’m not interested,” he told them one after the other, after the customary handshakes, backpatting and small talk. “I have employment. I am contracted for the foreseeable future. A grand venture, no less.”

He would tell them no more, and when they asked for further detail, he smiled and walked on.

Presently, he reached the rusty grille that let into the private steps of the Anguillon and Anchor. Often covered by the tide, they were a quick way to the inn two hundred feet above when it was out. A long, dank climb up, and he emerged directly into the pub’s yard.

I
T WAS TO
see an agent such as those that had hailed him that the captain had come. Their meeting had been arranged a week in advance, because both were busy men. Orerzensonam rose from the booth he was waiting in, and the two greeted each other like the old friends they were.

“Heffi! Heffi, Heffi, Heffi. Old heart!” The agent slapped the captain affectionately on the shoulders as the larger man engulfed him in a hug.

“Orry. Good to see you,” he said. “I’m glad you could make the time for me.”

“I can always make the time for you, Heffi. Always. The best captain on the seas!”

“Now you are flattering me, my friend.”

“Nonsense, nonsense! You know me, eh? I speak only the truth.”

“Ha! The biggest lie of all.”

“How is the world treating you? Has the One sent anything fine your way?”

Orry was of the same sect of the Ishmalan as his friend, less ostentatious perhaps, but they did not hide what they were. They ritually touched their foreheads at the mention of their god.

“He has, he has,” said Heffi. “I came the long way round, had to go down the Lockside, up the water steps. I needed to remind myself what I came from, because life is very good.”

“So I see.”

Heffi slapped his gut and the two laughed.

“It is good to see you.”

“It has been too long. Is the food here the same?”

“Dreadful as always. The fish stew will kill you.”

“Fine. Then let’s drink.”

They ordered a jug of dark sailor’s porter each, and some food anyway. “Just bread!” insisted Heffi darkly. For a time they talked of this and that, exchanging news of their intertwined families, whose members were scattered across the known world.

After the first pint, they turned to business, slipping into the secret tongue of their kind. A rich creole of Low Maceriyan and Croshash, spiced with words used in no other living language.

“Is it true? The
Prince Alfra
, the iron ship! Is he as magnificent as they say?”

“It’s common knowledge,” said Heffi. “So it is true.”

“Common knowledge! That the ship exists,
that
is common knowledge. What the ship is like? That is not.” Orry looked at him expectantly.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Draught, beam, displacement?” ventured Orry. “To go to the Sotherwinter it must be–”

“Nothing.”

“Masts?”

“No. Nothing at all. I can tell you nothing, Orry”

“Come on, there are thousands of workers at work, old heart.”

“And you know nothing, because they’re all under the threat of Tyn glamour, made large and worrying by the efforts of one Magister Tullian Ardovani. They come in, they work, they go home, and for the life of them they cannot speak of what they have done. Arkadian Vand is not a fool.”

Orry raised his eyebrows at the name. “Ardovani? The sea witch! I see. But you’re...” He waved his finger around.

“Talking? Privilege of being captain.”

Orry laughed. “You’ll tell me spies are struck blind.”

“I could tell you that.”

“I see.” Orry let his inquiry drop and grew businesslike. “Alright then. How many are you after?” He retrieved reading glasses from a pouch in his pocket and pinched them onto his nose, then dragged a ledger from a knapsack on the bench, licked his finger, and opened it up. He looked at Heffi expectantly.

“It’s not just the normal complement I need,” said Heffi.

“Oh? Do you mean quality or quantity by that, old heart?”

“Orry! I mean both!” said Heffi. “Quantity
and
quality. We’re after any you can find who are familiar with the operation of glimmer engines. I need rod shifters, mechanics, tenders... The lot.”

“Fine, fine.”

“And sailors. A lot of sailors. Especially those with experience of the deep south. There will be ice.”

“Right, right, old heart. How many?”

Heffi took several gulps of his beer. He set it down hard on the table and wiped the suds from his beard.

“Two hundred ordinary seamen,” he said. “Give or take.”

Orry looked at him incredulously. “You’re serious? You are serious!”

They laughed, Orry rather more cautiously than Heffi.

“Can you do it?” asked Heffi.

“What kind of ship is this?”

“Like none you’ve ever seen before. Can you do it?”

Orry looked down at the rows of columns in his ledger. He shrugged.

“No. Well. Yes, yes. Yes I can do it. It’ll be difficult but... How many of the People do you need?”

“As many as possible. It’s a difficult voyage. Now,” he said. “Can you get me Tolpoleznaen? He’s the best steersman by sea or river.”

“Afraid not. He’s on a lucrative contract up past the Little Islands way. He’s due out in three days, won’t be back for a year and a half.”

“Double his fee,” said Heffi.

“He’ll not break contract for that.”

Heffi shrugged. “Triple it then. I will have him.”