ilverfish. He still thought they looked like rolled-up silverfish.
He swallowed dry, sour spittle. The platform was a shadow just overhead. He’d seen shapes moving round on it, before he’d come right up to it; he’d thought one was familiar, but he couldn’t be sure. Now, the world had narrowed down to the ladder in front of him, creeping upward through the dark in a glint of orange light on slick metal. He put one hand on it, then another.
The soft lanternlight licked his hands into strange shapes. It caught coppery in the curling red hair, played in the veins and the flickering bones and the soft spray of freckles. Caught gold in the wedding-band. He felt the metal beneath his fingertips, warm and clammy. It unearthed a memory he didn’t want; he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to reconcile himself.
The skies had been clear for days, but the capital was too full of lights to see all but the brightest of stars. The ships were shadow against shadow – big, bulky shapes, silhouettes that bobbed gently in the air, their moorings loose and then taut and then loose again. Even on a night like this one, Yaris was windy; the shipyard was a forest of creaking wood and leather, of rustling rigging.
You could’ve narrowed everything down to those few moments. The dry night breeze was the first cool one he’d felt in what seemed like half the time since the War of the Book. He felt it lapping at his face, gentle-like, a kinder promise of cruelties to come. He heard the jangle of a lantern, metal on metal, saw his escort’s flickering circle of light picking out the cobbles at their feet; it was a private hazy world. His head ached, nagging and insistent.
He was tired, tired in a way that’d sunk into his bones, tired like he’d never been – before. He felt sunken; he felt the sweat beading underneath his stiff collar. The sun had shown its scalding face full-on for days, had pounded its fists against the broad Uptown streets. In the wake of political season, Stainthorpe was quieter, but the squat grey cage of it heated up like an oven in the summer and dry season. During the day, he felt dazed; the evening was a whirl of color and light, of clinking champagne glasses, of gentlemen in evening dress sitting on patios, of Anatole, Anatole, Anatole, but sometimes, soft and secret, a different name.
He could hear the rush of his pulse like distant tides, and he couldn’t look up at those great shapes like tethered flying whales. If he looked up, he’d lose himself in the motion, and the ground underneath his feet would be no more solid than artevium.
They didn’t help, all those ships hanging about like ghosts. He skimmed them with his eyes, when he could; he’d expected to see scarred wood and missing hulls, but he’d only seen sleek, slim shapes.
“Nearly there, sir,” grunted the man at his side. The man’s name was Langley, and Hawke had sent him. A private carriage had taken him to a private shipyard, and Langley had met him at the gates. He was a tall, but thin for a human; he was getting on in years – though younger than Anatole, he had a head full of grey hair – and spoke in rough, quiet tones. He liked him. They’d spoken very little. Once, he’d’ve tried to strike up a conversation; he might’ve even pulled out the Tek, like a flash of colorful scarves in the pocket of a somber black waistcoat. He knew better, now.
Anatole’s thin fingers tightened around the metal. He nodded once, gritting his teeth and setting his jaw. Then, putting the dull throb in his lower back out of his head, he set his heel on the first rung. He pulled himself up, feeling the muscles in his arms – such as they were – strain to take what weight of him there was. The metal was clammy underneath his hands; he tried not to think of it.
Yesufu pez Edun was a friend of Anatole’s, he knew that much, and that didn’t commend him. He had dealings with Hawke, but so did everyone along the Vein. He was a poppies man, a Thul’amat-educated merchant-of-a-merchant-family, Crocus-turned-Bull Elephant with the plague and the unrest. That he’d invited Vauquelin – among other Viendan Reformists – to his estate in the isles, to discuss the upcoming turning of the Symvoulio, sat ill with him; that it sat ill with Hawke sat worse.
The sending had come on short notice. He’d been planning on a commercial voyage, paid for out of pocket; the King had recommended otherwise, and the King’s recommendations were not to be ignored. And so, on the evening of one of the hottest days so far in Yaris, two days before he’d’ve left of his own accord, he was climbing up to the platform of a private airship he didn’t know, to fly to the isles and lodge under the protection of Brothers he didn’t know.
If they weren’t going to off him before then. It’d occurred to him plenty of times; even now, as he tackled the last rungs of the ladder, he didn’t know whether it’d be a mercy or a shame. He’d hate to tell Ava he went like this – funny, how that was his first thought – but when Hawke snapped, even an incumbent jumped.
He was flushed by the time he pulled himself up over onto the platform. He could hear Langley behind him, carrying up his baggage. Darkness swarmed at the edges of his vision, floaters drifting like motes of dust. As he gained his bearings, he saw one other figure – just one? – on the platform with him, and then –
His eyes traveled up. It was a small craft, like the – it was a small craft, the Uccello di Hurte, but like all aircraft, it seemed impossibly large. Spare moonlight shivered across the chainmail skin of the balloon, limned the swell of the hull, shot pale highlights through the dark mahogany. The wind drifted it; the moorings went taut, then loose. A thin scrap of a shape fluttered down from the gunwale, and he swallowed another lump in his throat.
One thing at a time. His eyes skated back down the hull, down to the slim, familiar shape on the platform. A whirl of impressions hit him – too much drink; blood on his knuckles; the sting of alcohol; a bright, sharp, well-organized field, mingling with his – automatically, he set them aside. He took a step forward, bowing low. “Mrs. Ibutatu,” he said when he rose, a little breathless. It was Anatole’s thin smile he gave her, but his eyes were wide with surprise. “Good evening.”
Langley’d carried up the bags behind him, one under his arm, one slung across his back. “Ma’am,” he said, bowing politely himself.