The Iron Ship (57 page)

That was no good at all.

The grand irony of it that she wasn’t so clever after all. She laughed loudly, resentfully. If she were truly clever, she would have solved the issue of the spheres. Or she would not trouble herself at all with it, but play the genteel idiot, keep her wits to herself. Or was that wisdom? Was it wisdom she lacked? No, she scolded herself, it was neither! To play the fool would be a betrayal of what she was. She was cursed, clever enough to see the world as it was, too limited to do anything about it. Clever enough to know how stupid she and every other human being was.

Her thoughts went around and around her mind as relentlessly as the planets clacked overhead, problems orbiting the irresolvable issue of her face. Her father’s face. Where was the justice in the world that she had to look at the man she hated in every mirror?

Her hand rumpled a sheet of paper as it clenched.
Focus! This is not relevant. The worlds. Think! Where is the answer?
She went to the orrery’s controls upon the central column, and increased the speed. The glimmer engine within glowed blue white. This was a purely magical device, bound about with expensive spells wrought into silver by magister artisans. No intermediary steam device propelled the orbs, but the power of the glimmer applied directly. It had cost her a small fortune.

Acceleration seized the track of heaven. The orbs proceeded faster and faster. Five minutes, and one hundred revolutions of the sun were made by the Earth and its dark twin. The moons sped along their paths between the louring worlds, fugitives before them both.

Am I pretty?

Stop it. Shallow thinking. Stupid. Unimportant. This. The world, that is a problem worth thinking on, and solvable.

The Twin, the answer is there. So large an object, close enough to touch, dark enough to hide an eternity of nightmares. The fires. The tides. The Twin.

The burnished, blackened bronze of the Twin followed the track she had designed, circling the Earth like a duellist. If she had designed it poorly, she would not know if she were wrong or right, she would not know, she would only see what she thought she should see.

Not like when she looked in the mirror.

Focus
. If she were wrong, the orrery would teach her nothing. A reinforcement of preconceptions. Do not become fixated upon it. To solve a problem, look beyond it, not at it. Her face... Was that why Guis rejected her? She smiled ruefully.

Plenty more out there. Plenty more who were attracted by her reputation, by the scandal of it. Plenty who did not care, so long as she were available.

She wanted to be loved. She yearned for it as much as the idea made her laugh. To be trapped with one person for the duration of life. Another face to look at daily and grow sick of.

The Earth and the Twin were the same, opposed, drawn together and pulled apart—she was sure it was a pull now, and not a mutual repulsion as Hool, Toskin and others had it. A firmly discredited idea. Nor was it a building resistance through some theoretical cosmic medium. Why was the air thinner atop a mountain? Why did a weight fall at a constant speed no matter the thickness of the air? She had seen the feather and coin experiments at the Royal Institute last year. The vacuum tube, ingenious.

There was nothing between the worlds.

“The aether is void,” she said aloud.

There was something inherent to the celestial bodies that drew them together, the same force, one inherent to all objects, pulled them apart. Nostron was correct. If one could calculate that, she was sure she could calculate the size of the sun. She already suspected it was far more enormous than any other astronomer believed. If only the magisters could penetrate the energy enveloping the world, and leave the confines of this Earth! Perhaps then, they might be useful to her.

She looked to a huge tome balanced atop several smaller. The collected writings of Everian Andor, a mage from before the time of Iapetus. What he said bore out her own work. He had journeyed beyond, so he said. Only a mage could do that. But they lived in an era of magisters, not mages, and she had the power of neither.

All she had was her mind. That would have to do.

So, she thought. A great influence upon this world. The tides, the shakings of the earth, perhaps also the fires upon the Twin, a reciprocal influence. Did that account for the 4,000 year cycle suggested by the historical record? Surely not on its own. The Twin drew near far more frequently than that, superpositions of both moons, sun, Twin and Earth occurred every roughly every 400 years, with a drift of one year per 1,300 years. None so close as the 4,000 year conjunctions, but was it enough of a difference to cause calamity?

She watched the Twin going around and around, coming closer, drawing away, each loop bringing it nearer and nearer. There was a connection.

But there was something missing. Some other factor that she had yet to see.
Look beyond the orrery, look beyond the problem.

The one thing her father had told her that she valued.

Look beyond the problem.

She went to Andor’s book, shoved the sheafs of paper balanced on it to the floor. She opened it and flicked through the pages. Woodcuts of impossible scenes leapt out. The pages stuck. She licked her finger to turn them more easily and tasted the paper. Must and years as pronounced as any spice.

“Here,” she said to herself. The spheres whirring overhead could not hear her. She spoke for her own benefit, to remind herself of her physicality, lest she disappear into her own thoughts.

She read, finger to her lips.

“‘Upon the black were tall towers, desert and broken. Dark on dark, unknown until they were upon me and I could not escape their regard. Glassless windows gaped on prospects running with fire. A ceaseless abundance of this vomited from the Twin, as the Three Sisters do in Farthia and Ostria. I witnessed ruination wrought long since, yet felt unwelcoming eyes chase me through over liquid flame. And then I was driven on by my fear, fearing the undeniable call of Andrade to pull me back to Earth before my journey was done, and the city fell behind me.’”

Andrade, guardian of the world’s order, a tutelary spirit banished with all the rest by Res Iapetus. An allegory, or an actuality? One never knew with mages. A consequence of their power, some said a function of it, was that they were nearly all insane. At least when regarded from the confines of the objective consensual reality as experienced by others. But who was to say if the mages were insane, or if they were sane and everyone else mad?

A digression. Ruined cities on the Earth. Why not ruined cities upon the Twin and every other celestial body? Perhaps they also felt the turning wheel of history, the rise and fall and rise again.

Outside the window the brightest stars outshone the glimmer lights of her hall. Maybe something from beyond this system of heavenly baubles? There were those that maintained the stars were suns, and about them turned their own worlds, on and on into an infinity of night. Perhaps it was nothing to do with the familiar worlds at all, but an influence from further away.

In which case, she was entirely wasting her time with this very expensive toy.

Guis. She had expected better of him.

“What the fucking hell does it all matter?” She threw her arms wide and shouted her challenge to the stars outside her windows.

She was no longer sure if she spoke of astronomy or of the more pressing and equally mystifying social dance they were all forced to perform.

The spinning mechanism had no answers for her. The rattle of it suddenly irked her. She shut it off and sank into a battered armchair, placed her thumb and forefinger either side of her all too prominent nose, thinking of nothing, enjoying the pressure of her fingers on the bone.

“Goodlady?” Mansanio spoke timorously. His footsteps were timid; a mouse creeping from its hole. “Goodlady Lucinia, are you troubled?” He put a hand upon her shoulder.

She placed her own hand upon his. His was warm, hers cold. She squeezed it, smiled and looked up at him. “When have you known me not to be troubled, Mansanio?”

His face brimmed with concern. “Never, goodlady. You should not worry yourself with these questions so much. Live your life easily.”

“I do.”

He tutted. “Not like that. I mean, to go outside, take the air. Ride your coach along the shore road, find other interests to occupy your fine mind, goodlady.”

“I would find problems in all of them, Mansanio. In history, in astronomy, maths, geology.”

“I was thinking more of painting or the pressing of flowers.”

“I would find problems there too! The matter of true perspective always bothered me, for example. Or perhaps I would occupy myself with the chemical and alchemical synthesis of brighter colours, or with an exploration of the divorcing of form from essence in order to discover the true shapes hidden in all things. Flowers need classifying, sorting. What goes where, why does this grow here, and not there? How do they reproduce, what makes their faces shine? How do they draw sustenance from the ground, do they depend on the sun? What use is there in killing a plant simply to have it? I never saw the sense.” She saw his hurt and became gentler. “Mansanio, my dear Mansanio. I am so sorry. You must think me the most diabolical mistress.”

“Never, goodlady,” he said softly. “You are a wonder to me.”

“You a true friend, my rock of permanence in a life of storm-tossed uncertainty.” She squeezed his hand again and released it.

He did not remove it from her shoulder as expected. He crouched by her chair.

“Mansanio, why are you quivering so?”

“Goodlady Lucinia, the others, they do not understand you as I do. I have watched you since you were young, so graceless, so isolated, but such a mind! No one else knows you as I know you.”

He slipped his other hand around her neck. He licked his lips. His eyes were wide, moon-caught.

“Mansanio,” she said warningly, “what are you doing?”

He clutched at her, harder, his embrace turning from one of comfort to something else entirely. He pressed at the back of her neck, pulling her face towards his. She pulled back.

“Stop it!”

Mansanio was past listening. He kissed her cheek and her always furrowed forehead. He breathed hot words of affection into her ear. “I love you, I love you, I have always loved you. Do not be sad.”

The countess wrenched Mansanio’s arms from about her neck and shot to her feet. Mansanio rose slowly after her, his arms out imploringly. “Goodlady, please.”

“Get out now, Mansanio. We will discuss this in the morning.”

Mansanio reached for her again. “What is the use? I have told you how I feel. There is nothing for it but to admit how we are bound together, you and I. Be with me. It will be difficult, but you are no stranger to difficulty.”

He grabbed her and went to kiss her again. She turned her head, but he grabbed her face and planted his lips on hers. His limp moustache brushed her. She made a moan of disgust as his tongue poked into the corner of her mouth.

“Get off me this instant!” she shoved him back hard.

“My Lucinella, I cannot bear to see you hurt again...”

She slapped him as hard as she could. His head snapped around and he cowered. When he faced her again, blood trickled from his nose, and his cheek was an angry red.

“How I am hurt and by whom is entirely my own affair. How dare you! I am the Countess of Mogawn, a woman of high blood whose claim upon this castle goes back to the time of King Brannon. You are...” She glared at him with outright disgust. “You are a servant and a foreigner! How dare you think that there might be something... Get out!
Get out!
Get out now before I call Aldwyn’s boys. As young as they are they will prove more than a match for you. Get out, or I swear by the Drowned King and his sodden horde that I’ll have you put over the side of the castle to join him.”

“Goodlady, I am, I...” Mansanio grovelled. “I am so sorry, I thought—”

“Whatever you thought, Mansanio, you thought wrong. You will leave as soon as the next low tide uncovers the causeway, and you will never return to Mogawn again.”

Mansanio cringed as the countess advanced on him. With a sob, he turned and fled.

Lucinia buried her face in her hands and wept.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Preparations for Departure

“W
INTER IS COMING
to a close, the ship is almost finished and we still do not have our licence,” said Captain Heffi. He looked over a pile of papers at Trassan.

“I thought I was the pessimistic one,” said Trassan.

“They are taking an undue amount of time over it, I begin to worry.”

“We will have it.”

“You speak more from hope than conviction.”

“Either way, we need a master of arms still. Do you not want to find one of your own people?”

“Despite what some of them feel, my people make great sailors, and poor warriors. Bring one of your own, someone you can trust.”

Trassan drummed his fingers on the desk. They fell into the rhythm of the shipyard outside; the nature of the noise had changed over the last weeks. “As it happens, I have made preliminary enquiries in that direction.”

“Wise,” said Heffi.

“What? Don’t be like that, Heffi. I second-guessed you. I thought the likelihood of you suggesting a Ishmalani armsman pretty remote. You can’t have it both ways, telling me that I should find one, but only happy that I have if you have allowed me to choose!”

They were both tired and crotchety, having been at the crew manifest for several hours. Heffi grunted. Neither one way, or the other.

“If you did have a man, he would have been first choice. Do you?”

“No,” said Heffi.

“Well then.”

“Then who do you have in mind?”

Trassan picked up a piece of paper and squinted at it distractedly.

Heffi cleared his throat.

“What? Oh. I asked my brother Guis. I thought he’d suggest his friend Qurion. He’s a good soldier, cocky sod, but handy in a fight.”