Marcus Barkle was in a foul mood.
It was the sort of thunderous glowering funk that only caught him up when he was ashore, beset by the complications of landsmen and politics and blue-bellies.
The Blue Oriole had passed a fortnight in her drydock on Nail, caught like a dragonfly in a web.
Mr. Handy, the ship's carpenter, had discovered that the Mother storm had done more damage to their ship than first understood.
The keel had suffered a dangerous wrench, causing a half-dozen of the massive ribs to come unseated.
Worse yet, one of the small pelvic masts -- which jutted at 45 degrees from the Oriole's hull -- had popped free from the massive iron sleeve that held it fast.
"While we were dangerously preoccupied with gyrwights," wrote Captain Marsh in his log, "the vessel very nearly came apart under my boots."
Such disasters were not unheard of in the Dream.
A half dozen times in his career, the Captain had come upon a mess of timbers and wrack, subsiding by degrees into the magical fog below.
They had escaped with their lives and their own ship intact, but the temper of the crew was no less venomous for that.
While the Oriole's smiths and carpenters and joiners went about their trade, Barkle had gone about his own disreputable business.
"How many have you got, Marcus?" asked Captain Marsh, at the morning confab.
"Sounds like he's got a regular herd of brats in that brig," grumbled Falconer. "Ain't there any way to quiet them?"
Barkle ignored the First Mate and said, "We lost a dozen young ones in the storm. I've got nine in the poke so far. I can make do with ten or eleven."
"What's the trick of it?" said Sgt. Imple good-naturedly. "The streets of Piketon are swarming with orphans and starvelings. Give me a belay pin and a half hour and I'll fill the hold with snotty noses."
"Shroud-walking ain't for everyone," Barkle said simply. "They got to be small and quick and agile. Half the kids I picked won't survive out on the lines, not when the first cat's paw comes out of nowhere and gives them a playful push."
The other officers shrugged and went back to their own concerns.
From their vantage point upon the solid deck, the children who manipulated the lines and sails of a dream vessel were little more than monkeys, a necessary inconvenience.
Even those who had begun their own careers out in the far jungle of the rigging preferred not to think upon such matters.
"Anyway there's time for you to be choosy," said the Captain. "We've another two weeks of drudgery at the very least."
In truth, Marcus Barkle was being choosy.
He admitted as much to himself as he prowled through the streets of Piketon, wandering farther and farther from the port district.
In part, he strayed so far because the folk next to the harbor had got word that several ships were impressing children.
Prey was scarce where moms and dads were cautious.
But it was also a fact that Barkle had been shaken to the quick by the battle with the gyrwights.
His own view of things had taken a twist almost as sharp as the one that nearly broke the Oriole's spine.
Watching one kid after another fall away into the void, harassed and tormented by gyrwights: it was a memory that haunted his dreams.
Of course, he had no real choice in the matter. He had to recruit a new batch of kids to fill out his crew.
Yet he wanted to make some gesture, offer some protest against the foul and miserable ways of the world.
After some deliberation, Barkle had decided that he would kidnap a child of consequence.
He knew that Captain Marsh would be furious if he knew, for it was generally understood that the children of wealthy or noble persons were untouchable.
Violating this unwritten rule would mean trouble. If he was caught at it, Barkle might even lose his place.
He found that he didn't care. The poor folk of Piketon had given up plenty of kids; now the fat merchants and guildsmen would pay the blood tithe as well.
So it was that the Lord of Shrouds made his way by streetcar out into the suburbs of the city, where the ugly drabness relented a little and a few trees lined the avenues.
Tenements and shanty-towns gave way to order and ever-greater displays of wealth and power.
Nail was an ugly world, but it was profitable and here there gathered the cream and the polish.
Downtown, the ships huddled behind iron grill windows; here Barkle saw glass and crystal.
Close to the cargo docks, mothers could be seen cooking for their kids on open fires at the margin of the street.
Here there were blue-bellies on every corner making sure no one forgot their place.
Barkle had worn his finest jacket and was carrying what appeared to be a message with a hand-scrawled address, written so as to be illegible.
Twice in the first quarter-hour of prowling he was stopped by a copper and had to pretend to be a messenger.
"Please, sir, I am looking for the mansion of Lord Dudeney. Am I gone the wrong direction?"
"It's none of my care if you've gone to Purgatory," replied the blue-belly, losing interest. "Get on about your own damned business. And don't let me catch you begging for nibs."
It was bare bones until the early afternoon, when various schools and academies opened their doors and released gaggles of children into the avenue.
They were a fine, sleek lot: rosy-cheeked, stout, confident. They went along with entourages of nannies and tutors.
Barkle's mood darkened. Upon close inspection the kids he spied were all too fat or two long-of-limb for shroud-work.
"They feed their brats too well uptown," he muttered. "They would snap my spars like dry twigs."
Dusk was coming on and he had begun to contemplate giving up his scheme when he saw a smallish boy come out of a doorway.
At first, Barkle thought the child must be very young -- five or six -- but no, the lad was only slight.
What's more, the boy began to play an abent-minded game as he went, walking heel-to-toe along the narrow curb.
He practically skipped along, showing perfect balance.
Barkle had begun to move up for a closer look when the door flew open and a hard-faced man stepped out onto the street.
"Don't forget, Master Buddenbrooks!" he called. "You've a make-up lesson tomorrow at a quarter shy four bells. Practice your counter-thrust beforehand -- and don't dare be late!"
The boy pirouetted on the curb, gave a wave, then demonstrated what must have been a counter-thrust.
Without missing a beat, he twirled again and went on his way, his feet never leaving the curb.
Barkle grinned and turned away. He had seen enough to lift his spirits immensely.
"And a whole-hearted welcome to you, Master Buddenbrooks," he said. "I believe it is time you went on a little cruise."
Fourteen: A Hard-Won Prize
Monday, May 25, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Eleven: The Old Wink & Blink
Every morning just before the first smoky dawn broke over Piketon, an army of ice merchants, ragpickers, milk men and tea-wallahs fanned out through the city's slums.
The little boy called Aramis was a light sleeper. From blocks away, he would hear the distant rattle of the peddler carts and the chipping rhythm of the ice man's pick.
He slept in a tiny hovel made of old bits of cast-off corrugated iron and canvas.
There were two cots made from gunnysacks and bundles of ticking nicked from the chair-maker's shop on Cabinetry Lane.
On the other bed lay his older brother Simon, who was ill. He had worked in one of the lark shows on the Bailey Mall as a peanut seller.
But a drunk had punched the boy in the gut and then kicked him when he fell on the hard floor.
After that, Simon's belly never worked right. He could only eat soft food and he forgot things.
When Aramis went out to do his magic show, he had to tie his brother to a post set in one corner of their flop.
Aramis was a conjuror. Their dad had been one, too, and he taught Aramis everything he knew about making nibs vanish or causing feathers to turn into wisps of smoke.
The family's best trick was a floppy hat that could produce a lit candle. It didn't always work right, but when it did the crowd always clapped and gave up a few bits of small-coin.
Their father had taken a bit of his own medicine and vanished two years before. Just -- poof, gone.
Simon said it was the way of a conjuror to take himself off without even a good-bye.
Simon wouldn't have anything to do with magic and anyway he was dead clumsy. Clumsy and strong, at least until he got hurt.
Now it was Aramis's job to keep them both fed and to pay the neighborhood racketman who controlled the tenements and to buy the bottles of Figgy's Nocturnal Solution that helped Simon endure the pain.
When he heard the morning traffic in the lane, Aramis rose in the dark and began to pack his kit. He often traveled for miles through Piketon before setting up his show.
It was better to vary the crowd and to make sure none of the blue-belly cops took his measure.
He carried all of his tricks and props in a black box rigged with a pair of leather straps for his shoulders.
Tucked inside was the motley robe and conical hat that marked him out -- along with the crescent-moon tattoos over his eyes -- as a blood member of the Societe de Legerdemain.
"Are you awake, Simon?" he said.
Simon gave a low moan, stirring in his bedclothes.
"I'm off then, Simon. I won't be back til tonight. I plan to go across to Foundry Gardens, if I can slip a trolley ride."
No response.
"You be good now, Simon. I'll bring you home a good pie and some beer."
Simon began to snore and Aramis crawled out of the hovel into the dim, weary light of a Piketon morning.
Though he had long and dextrous fingers, he wasn't a stoutly-built boy. It took him a moment of dancing to get the box hoisted on his back.
Then he set off through the fast-growing crowds toward the High Street where the trains rumbled along on their iron rails, throwing blue sparks into the sky.
As he walked, Aramis felt two peculiar sensations, neither of which he could explain.
The first was a hum of peculiar optimism and happiness. He felt a little guilty whenever he realized that he quite enjoyed his life.
What had happened to Simon was pretty nasty. And it was no happy thing that their dad had run off, or been way-laid.
But Aramis liked performing as a conjurer. He was good at it and he felt a tiny thrill every time his effects went off smoothly.
If the crowd made that queer noise that meant it was baffled and delighted at the same time, he didn't hardly care if they gave up any of their nibs.
The second sensation had only come to him in the last few days and it was a rather different sort of thing:
Aramis was convinced that someone was watching him; following him, even.
As he grabbed the bar of the streetcar and pulled himself up, he glanced back over the faces in the street.
He saw nothing out of the ordinary: tradesmen, women taking their mounds of dough to the corner bakers, Dula Priests shaking their fern fronds.
There was one face that seemed a bit familiar.
A boy. Maybe ten or eleven. He was leaning against a sign post eating a chicken leg with such a stupid expression on his face that Aramis laughed.
He himself was a clever boy. His father had always said so.
"Simon is strong as an ox, but you were born with the quick eye and the quick finger."
And he was born with something else, something his father called The Old Wink and Blink.
"You've a bit of the Real Stuff in you," he said. "The True Magic. When you were a baby, your eyes kept changing colors. I had it too when I was your age, though it slipped away somehow."
It wasn't much of a power, in fact. When he tried very hard, Aramis found that he could slide himself a bit from one place to another and also through time.
He never used the trick as part of his show -- he felt that it would be cheating and besides he liked to have his secret.
But a half-dozen times he had used the Old W & B to escape a cop or a gang of bullies or the racketman's thugs.
The streetcar took him in a round-about way through the gut of Piketon.
He had to clamber down a quarter mile or so from Foundry Park, when the ticket-taker began to shout at him, but Aramis didn't mind.
He trudged the rest of the way and set up his little table (he called it his "stage") under a shabby looking linden tree. Its leaves were coated with soot and it seemed to be surrounded by scrabbly dandelions.
"At least there's no rain today," said the balloon vendor, a thick-browed Maki-maki who was setting up shop across the garden path. "People don't want balloons in the rain, do they?"
Aramis opened his own kit and soon began to perform, working his little medley of tricks, calling out, "Sorcery and wonders and delights! Sorcery and wonders and delights!"
His small, high voice could be heard across the park, except when the big lorries were rumbling past.
Just after mid-day, when the day had mustered a kind of sullen warmth, he was working his shell-trick, hiding the pea from baffled shop-girls and nannies.
"It's not possible," insisted one girl. "I know the pebble was under that shell. I saw it with my own two eyes."
"Either your eyes are playing tricks," Aramis winked, "or I am."
That won him a laugh -- and a nib or two. He looked around with satisfaction, thinking it might be time to knock off and have his own lunch, when he saw the boy again.
It was the dull-faced kid from the morning, only now he was chewing on a slice of watermelon.
Aramis went about his business, pouring water from an empty glass and causing his own hair to stick straight up and making his tongue turn blue. This last stunt delighted a group of school children.
The entire time, he was watching the boy who was watching him. The kid was very good at his ruse. He seemed a perfect idler.
For a time, Aramis half-convinced himself that it was chance that they had turned up in the same neighborhoods twice in one day.
But then the boy's act slipped for a moment. One of the balloon-seller's balloons popped with a loud bang and the kid's face changed, growing hard and deliberate. His hand strayed toward the curved knife on his belt.
It was a sailor's knife, finely made. In a flash the kid's face resumedits former, cow-like expression.
Aramis felt his heart go knock. He knew that Piketon was a dangerous, ruthless town.
There were any number of reasons that people stalked children. The slave-trade was outlawed by the Admiralty, but no one did much about it. Ships were always looking for shroud-walkers.
When his dad disappeared, no one cared. Aramis might vanish just as quick.
There was a time when the Societe Legerdemain might have looked out for one such as him, but the order had fallen on hard times, at least on this world.
He began to pack his things, acting as natural as he could.
At the last moment, when surrounded by a crowd of Prilm traders carrying their ware-banners, he bolted, hustling through he Park's gates and dodging into the traffic of the road.
Glancing back, he saw that the boy was after him. His face had once again dropped its mask and had a look of irritation and dark resolve.
Aramis spied a streetcar and swung aboard. He thought that would do the trick, but the boy made a nimble leap and caught at the tail-end of the same car.
A crowd of commuters separated them, but they eyed one-another fiercely.
At the next corner, Aramis dropped off and scampered through a vegetable market. He was quick enough except for the big box on his back.
"Hey there, kid! Watch out for the decent folk doing their business! We'll have the blue-bellies after you!"
Aramis ignored them and went up a stair into a tavern and then out the back way into an alley. In his own neighborhood he would have known where to go.
He and Simon had mapped out escape routes, hiding places, and secret rendez-vous. But in this part of Piketon he was forced to run blind.
The boy kept pace. He seemed almost to be maintaining a certain distance, watching, taking his prey's measure. Aramis felt fear rise in his throat.
What did the kid want? What would happen to Simon if he was taken? His brother would have no one.
Aramis ran for another quarter-hour, before turning a corner into a small square, built around a public fountain. Women were lined up drawing water for their soup pots.
The boy was just behind now. Unlike Aramis, who rarely got a decent meal, the other kid wasn't winded at all. He reached a hand and got a grip on the handle of Aramis's box.
"Go easy now," said the kid. "It won't be so hard on you if you don't fight it."
Aramis tugged and twisted but the boy had both hands on him now. He was unnaturally strong, stronger than Simon, almost like a little man.
The women paid them no mind. It looked like two boys tussling over a box.
Aramis scrunched up his face and began to work his magic, his true magic. But the other was boy was too quick.
"Oh, no," he said, in a business-like tone. "We'll have none of your mumbo-jumbo."
He swung a heavy bag filled with lead pellets, clapping Aramis a sharp blow on the temple.
Like a conjuror's trick, the world began to swirl and tip and then a curtain seemed to drop down over everything.
And then, just like his dad before him, Aramis the Amazing simply disappeared.
Next: Master Buddenbrooks
The little boy called Aramis was a light sleeper. From blocks away, he would hear the distant rattle of the peddler carts and the chipping rhythm of the ice man's pick.
He slept in a tiny hovel made of old bits of cast-off corrugated iron and canvas.
There were two cots made from gunnysacks and bundles of ticking nicked from the chair-maker's shop on Cabinetry Lane.
On the other bed lay his older brother Simon, who was ill. He had worked in one of the lark shows on the Bailey Mall as a peanut seller.
But a drunk had punched the boy in the gut and then kicked him when he fell on the hard floor.
After that, Simon's belly never worked right. He could only eat soft food and he forgot things.
When Aramis went out to do his magic show, he had to tie his brother to a post set in one corner of their flop.
Aramis was a conjuror. Their dad had been one, too, and he taught Aramis everything he knew about making nibs vanish or causing feathers to turn into wisps of smoke.
The family's best trick was a floppy hat that could produce a lit candle. It didn't always work right, but when it did the crowd always clapped and gave up a few bits of small-coin.
Their father had taken a bit of his own medicine and vanished two years before. Just -- poof, gone.
Simon said it was the way of a conjuror to take himself off without even a good-bye.
Simon wouldn't have anything to do with magic and anyway he was dead clumsy. Clumsy and strong, at least until he got hurt.
Now it was Aramis's job to keep them both fed and to pay the neighborhood racketman who controlled the tenements and to buy the bottles of Figgy's Nocturnal Solution that helped Simon endure the pain.
When he heard the morning traffic in the lane, Aramis rose in the dark and began to pack his kit. He often traveled for miles through Piketon before setting up his show.
It was better to vary the crowd and to make sure none of the blue-belly cops took his measure.
He carried all of his tricks and props in a black box rigged with a pair of leather straps for his shoulders.
Tucked inside was the motley robe and conical hat that marked him out -- along with the crescent-moon tattoos over his eyes -- as a blood member of the Societe de Legerdemain.
"Are you awake, Simon?" he said.
Simon gave a low moan, stirring in his bedclothes.
"I'm off then, Simon. I won't be back til tonight. I plan to go across to Foundry Gardens, if I can slip a trolley ride."
No response.
"You be good now, Simon. I'll bring you home a good pie and some beer."
Simon began to snore and Aramis crawled out of the hovel into the dim, weary light of a Piketon morning.
Though he had long and dextrous fingers, he wasn't a stoutly-built boy. It took him a moment of dancing to get the box hoisted on his back.
Then he set off through the fast-growing crowds toward the High Street where the trains rumbled along on their iron rails, throwing blue sparks into the sky.
As he walked, Aramis felt two peculiar sensations, neither of which he could explain.
The first was a hum of peculiar optimism and happiness. He felt a little guilty whenever he realized that he quite enjoyed his life.
What had happened to Simon was pretty nasty. And it was no happy thing that their dad had run off, or been way-laid.
But Aramis liked performing as a conjurer. He was good at it and he felt a tiny thrill every time his effects went off smoothly.
If the crowd made that queer noise that meant it was baffled and delighted at the same time, he didn't hardly care if they gave up any of their nibs.
The second sensation had only come to him in the last few days and it was a rather different sort of thing:
Aramis was convinced that someone was watching him; following him, even.
As he grabbed the bar of the streetcar and pulled himself up, he glanced back over the faces in the street.
He saw nothing out of the ordinary: tradesmen, women taking their mounds of dough to the corner bakers, Dula Priests shaking their fern fronds.
There was one face that seemed a bit familiar.
A boy. Maybe ten or eleven. He was leaning against a sign post eating a chicken leg with such a stupid expression on his face that Aramis laughed.
He himself was a clever boy. His father had always said so.
"Simon is strong as an ox, but you were born with the quick eye and the quick finger."
And he was born with something else, something his father called The Old Wink and Blink.
"You've a bit of the Real Stuff in you," he said. "The True Magic. When you were a baby, your eyes kept changing colors. I had it too when I was your age, though it slipped away somehow."
It wasn't much of a power, in fact. When he tried very hard, Aramis found that he could slide himself a bit from one place to another and also through time.
He never used the trick as part of his show -- he felt that it would be cheating and besides he liked to have his secret.
But a half-dozen times he had used the Old W & B to escape a cop or a gang of bullies or the racketman's thugs.
The streetcar took him in a round-about way through the gut of Piketon.
He had to clamber down a quarter mile or so from Foundry Park, when the ticket-taker began to shout at him, but Aramis didn't mind.
He trudged the rest of the way and set up his little table (he called it his "stage") under a shabby looking linden tree. Its leaves were coated with soot and it seemed to be surrounded by scrabbly dandelions.
"At least there's no rain today," said the balloon vendor, a thick-browed Maki-maki who was setting up shop across the garden path. "People don't want balloons in the rain, do they?"
Aramis opened his own kit and soon began to perform, working his little medley of tricks, calling out, "Sorcery and wonders and delights! Sorcery and wonders and delights!"
His small, high voice could be heard across the park, except when the big lorries were rumbling past.
Just after mid-day, when the day had mustered a kind of sullen warmth, he was working his shell-trick, hiding the pea from baffled shop-girls and nannies.
"It's not possible," insisted one girl. "I know the pebble was under that shell. I saw it with my own two eyes."
"Either your eyes are playing tricks," Aramis winked, "or I am."
That won him a laugh -- and a nib or two. He looked around with satisfaction, thinking it might be time to knock off and have his own lunch, when he saw the boy again.
It was the dull-faced kid from the morning, only now he was chewing on a slice of watermelon.
Aramis went about his business, pouring water from an empty glass and causing his own hair to stick straight up and making his tongue turn blue. This last stunt delighted a group of school children.
The entire time, he was watching the boy who was watching him. The kid was very good at his ruse. He seemed a perfect idler.
For a time, Aramis half-convinced himself that it was chance that they had turned up in the same neighborhoods twice in one day.
But then the boy's act slipped for a moment. One of the balloon-seller's balloons popped with a loud bang and the kid's face changed, growing hard and deliberate. His hand strayed toward the curved knife on his belt.
It was a sailor's knife, finely made. In a flash the kid's face resumedits former, cow-like expression.
Aramis felt his heart go knock. He knew that Piketon was a dangerous, ruthless town.
There were any number of reasons that people stalked children. The slave-trade was outlawed by the Admiralty, but no one did much about it. Ships were always looking for shroud-walkers.
When his dad disappeared, no one cared. Aramis might vanish just as quick.
There was a time when the Societe Legerdemain might have looked out for one such as him, but the order had fallen on hard times, at least on this world.
He began to pack his things, acting as natural as he could.
At the last moment, when surrounded by a crowd of Prilm traders carrying their ware-banners, he bolted, hustling through he Park's gates and dodging into the traffic of the road.
Glancing back, he saw that the boy was after him. His face had once again dropped its mask and had a look of irritation and dark resolve.
Aramis spied a streetcar and swung aboard. He thought that would do the trick, but the boy made a nimble leap and caught at the tail-end of the same car.
A crowd of commuters separated them, but they eyed one-another fiercely.
At the next corner, Aramis dropped off and scampered through a vegetable market. He was quick enough except for the big box on his back.
"Hey there, kid! Watch out for the decent folk doing their business! We'll have the blue-bellies after you!"
Aramis ignored them and went up a stair into a tavern and then out the back way into an alley. In his own neighborhood he would have known where to go.
He and Simon had mapped out escape routes, hiding places, and secret rendez-vous. But in this part of Piketon he was forced to run blind.
The boy kept pace. He seemed almost to be maintaining a certain distance, watching, taking his prey's measure. Aramis felt fear rise in his throat.
What did the kid want? What would happen to Simon if he was taken? His brother would have no one.
Aramis ran for another quarter-hour, before turning a corner into a small square, built around a public fountain. Women were lined up drawing water for their soup pots.
The boy was just behind now. Unlike Aramis, who rarely got a decent meal, the other kid wasn't winded at all. He reached a hand and got a grip on the handle of Aramis's box.
"Go easy now," said the kid. "It won't be so hard on you if you don't fight it."
Aramis tugged and twisted but the boy had both hands on him now. He was unnaturally strong, stronger than Simon, almost like a little man.
The women paid them no mind. It looked like two boys tussling over a box.
Aramis scrunched up his face and began to work his magic, his true magic. But the other was boy was too quick.
"Oh, no," he said, in a business-like tone. "We'll have none of your mumbo-jumbo."
He swung a heavy bag filled with lead pellets, clapping Aramis a sharp blow on the temple.
Like a conjuror's trick, the world began to swirl and tip and then a curtain seemed to drop down over everything.
And then, just like his dad before him, Aramis the Amazing simply disappeared.
Next: Master Buddenbrooks
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Ten: Aramis the Amazing
In the days that followed, Nail had little time to rethink or regret her decision to join the Blue Oriole's crew of shroud-walkers.
She was taken by Marcus Barkle through Piketon's maze of drab, cobbled streets to a warehouse in the port district. The structure was so vast that it could swallow dream-clippers whole.
The roof was made of canvas and could be rolled back as a vessel descended.
A kind of mounting structure had been erected, so that ships could be docked well above the floor, without collapsing their ventral masts.
Resting in this massive chassis was the Blue Oriole, a thirty-four gun clipper made of oak and brass and iron.
Her first glimpse was less than awe-inspiring. Nail had seen dream ships before and even studied their lines.
This ship looked hard-used and battered. The lines were a mess, hanging in clumps and knots.
Her canvas sails were spread on the ground, where groups of kids were hard at work with long needles and thread.
Up above, crews of carpenters and joiners and iron-smiths were at work, setting off a din of hammers and saws and voices.
A boy with impossibly long arms hopped down from a crate, where he'd been idling with an apple.
"This is Ballko," said Marcus Barkle. "He's Best Mate of the Shrouds. Think of him as the boss and you'll get on okay. He'll get you your stamp and then see you settled."
"My stamp?" Nail said.
"Your tattoo," said Ballko. He grinned and flexed his big bicep. There was a small blue mark there, in the form of a bird's wing.
Nail shook her head and said fiercely, "I don't want to be marked like some cow. I don't want to be owned."
The new boy screwed up his face and looked at Barkle.
"She ain't a stinking runner, is she? I got two of them already to look after and they're driving me crazy. Bawling and blubbering. I won't get a bit of peace until we're off-world."
Barkle shrugged and said, "It's the way it works, girl. We're all marked when we join the Oriole. Or any ship."
"Anyway, it's for your own good," Ballko put in. "Those bastards at the Admiralty is always after kids for their own ships, which ain't half so nice as the Oriole, I can promise you. The Impress Service has a half-dozen gangs hunting in Piketon right now. You're lucky we found you first."
"With the mark, you'll be safe," Marcus said. "It means you're already spoken for. You're one of us."
A fat, grinning man called Mr. King did the tattoo-work, splashing Nail's arm with rum and then working the needles. It stung like a hundred hornets, but she bit her lip and never made a sound.
Afterward, Ballko took her to a kind of bunkhouse. There were bars on the doors and a great, iron padlock on the door.
"I won't make bones about it," the boy said. "For the time being, you're more than half a prisoner. It gets better."
"But I volunteered," Nail said. "I agreed to come."
He grinned and winked. "Think you had a choice, do you? Think Old Barkle would let a spry monkey like you get away?"
She shrugged and said, "Anyway, I don't have anyplace else to go."
"Don't matter. Captain Marsh's orders. Too many idiots try to scram on us, before they see how good they got it. In you go now."
The room was low and dim and smelled of must and damp. She soon discovered that nearly a dozen children were locked in, some of them so terrified that they couldn't move or speak.
Others seemed delighted that they had been fed so well and taken out of their cramped, wretched families.
One cross-eyed boy -- he couldn't have been more than six or seven -- was dangling upside down from a bunk, his scrawny ribs showing.
"What are you doing?" Nail asked.
"I'm practicing," he said. "Pretty soon they'll make us walk out on them ropes. Ain't nothing under you but Dream. If you fall, you just keep on falling forever."
"Where did you hear that?"
"Everybody knows that's what happens if you fall into a dream. But I ain't going to fall. Watch this!"
He flipped himself up with surprising agility and began to walk along the edge of the bed, tongue between his teeth.
"What's your name?" Nail asked.
"I'm Little Blue Dean," he said over his shoulder. "My cat Percy is around here somewhere. They didn't want Percy to come, but Percy goes where he likes."
Nail looked around, but there was no sign of any cat.
The other children ranged in age from five or six to twelve or thirteen. The older ones were small and slight for their ages.
A group of kids had gathered around a cot, where a boy with raven-black hair was lying unconscious.
Crescent moons were tattooed above each of his eyebrows, giving his face a look of startlement. One one temple rose a swollen lump the size of a gelder-piece.
"What happened to him?" Nail said.
"Marcus Barkle clobbered him," someone said. "He's a dwarf, you know. Barkle, I mean. He ain't a kid at all."
"I overhead him talking with Ballko," said another child. "This one made a good chase of it and nearly got away. They said he was a conjuror of some kind. Said his name was Aramis. Aramis the Amazing."
Nail looked at the injured boy. He didn't look very amazing. His nose had been broken and his lip was split.
He first instinct was to take care of him, the way she had tried to care for her brothers and sisters.
But then she felt a clench of anger and bitterness. She had been abandoned. Left behind. She didn't want to look after anyone else, not now, maybe not ever again.
Aramis the Amazing would just have to take care of himself.
Next: The Old Wink and Blink
She was taken by Marcus Barkle through Piketon's maze of drab, cobbled streets to a warehouse in the port district. The structure was so vast that it could swallow dream-clippers whole.
The roof was made of canvas and could be rolled back as a vessel descended.
A kind of mounting structure had been erected, so that ships could be docked well above the floor, without collapsing their ventral masts.
Resting in this massive chassis was the Blue Oriole, a thirty-four gun clipper made of oak and brass and iron.
Her first glimpse was less than awe-inspiring. Nail had seen dream ships before and even studied their lines.
This ship looked hard-used and battered. The lines were a mess, hanging in clumps and knots.
Her canvas sails were spread on the ground, where groups of kids were hard at work with long needles and thread.
Up above, crews of carpenters and joiners and iron-smiths were at work, setting off a din of hammers and saws and voices.
A boy with impossibly long arms hopped down from a crate, where he'd been idling with an apple.
"This is Ballko," said Marcus Barkle. "He's Best Mate of the Shrouds. Think of him as the boss and you'll get on okay. He'll get you your stamp and then see you settled."
"My stamp?" Nail said.
"Your tattoo," said Ballko. He grinned and flexed his big bicep. There was a small blue mark there, in the form of a bird's wing.
Nail shook her head and said fiercely, "I don't want to be marked like some cow. I don't want to be owned."
The new boy screwed up his face and looked at Barkle.
"She ain't a stinking runner, is she? I got two of them already to look after and they're driving me crazy. Bawling and blubbering. I won't get a bit of peace until we're off-world."
Barkle shrugged and said, "It's the way it works, girl. We're all marked when we join the Oriole. Or any ship."
"Anyway, it's for your own good," Ballko put in. "Those bastards at the Admiralty is always after kids for their own ships, which ain't half so nice as the Oriole, I can promise you. The Impress Service has a half-dozen gangs hunting in Piketon right now. You're lucky we found you first."
"With the mark, you'll be safe," Marcus said. "It means you're already spoken for. You're one of us."
A fat, grinning man called Mr. King did the tattoo-work, splashing Nail's arm with rum and then working the needles. It stung like a hundred hornets, but she bit her lip and never made a sound.
Afterward, Ballko took her to a kind of bunkhouse. There were bars on the doors and a great, iron padlock on the door.
"I won't make bones about it," the boy said. "For the time being, you're more than half a prisoner. It gets better."
"But I volunteered," Nail said. "I agreed to come."
He grinned and winked. "Think you had a choice, do you? Think Old Barkle would let a spry monkey like you get away?"
She shrugged and said, "Anyway, I don't have anyplace else to go."
"Don't matter. Captain Marsh's orders. Too many idiots try to scram on us, before they see how good they got it. In you go now."
The room was low and dim and smelled of must and damp. She soon discovered that nearly a dozen children were locked in, some of them so terrified that they couldn't move or speak.
Others seemed delighted that they had been fed so well and taken out of their cramped, wretched families.
One cross-eyed boy -- he couldn't have been more than six or seven -- was dangling upside down from a bunk, his scrawny ribs showing.
"What are you doing?" Nail asked.
"I'm practicing," he said. "Pretty soon they'll make us walk out on them ropes. Ain't nothing under you but Dream. If you fall, you just keep on falling forever."
"Where did you hear that?"
"Everybody knows that's what happens if you fall into a dream. But I ain't going to fall. Watch this!"
He flipped himself up with surprising agility and began to walk along the edge of the bed, tongue between his teeth.
"What's your name?" Nail asked.
"I'm Little Blue Dean," he said over his shoulder. "My cat Percy is around here somewhere. They didn't want Percy to come, but Percy goes where he likes."
Nail looked around, but there was no sign of any cat.
The other children ranged in age from five or six to twelve or thirteen. The older ones were small and slight for their ages.
A group of kids had gathered around a cot, where a boy with raven-black hair was lying unconscious.
Crescent moons were tattooed above each of his eyebrows, giving his face a look of startlement. One one temple rose a swollen lump the size of a gelder-piece.
"What happened to him?" Nail said.
"Marcus Barkle clobbered him," someone said. "He's a dwarf, you know. Barkle, I mean. He ain't a kid at all."
"I overhead him talking with Ballko," said another child. "This one made a good chase of it and nearly got away. They said he was a conjuror of some kind. Said his name was Aramis. Aramis the Amazing."
Nail looked at the injured boy. He didn't look very amazing. His nose had been broken and his lip was split.
He first instinct was to take care of him, the way she had tried to care for her brothers and sisters.
But then she felt a clench of anger and bitterness. She had been abandoned. Left behind. She didn't want to look after anyone else, not now, maybe not ever again.
Aramis the Amazing would just have to take care of himself.
Next: The Old Wink and Blink
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Nine: Barkle's First Prize
Six days after her family disappeared into Dream, Nell stood on a stone bridge above the Eisen River.
It rushed and roared through the heart of Piketon, turning pistons and wheels, flushing away the city's filth.
Dusk draped itself over the streets. The coal-gas streetlamps looked like winking eyes.
Nell was hungry and frightened. But the thing that had driven her to clamber up onto the bridge's railing was fury.
Her face was clenched like a fist. She kept thinking of all the things that she would say to her father, if she got the chance.
"But I won't get the chance," she said, out loud. "They tricked me. They left me behind like an old suitcase."
They had forced her to accept the role assigned to her at birth: They had subtracted her and divided her until there was nothing left.
She peered up into the fug of factory smoke that cloaked Piketon. Was there really such a thing as Father Tally? Were there angels hidden in the angles of the world?
She shook her head. No. She wouldn't fool herself. She would take her final reckoning without cheating or making-believe.
"I'm Nell," she said angrily. "I never wanted to be, but that's what I am. But you're even less, Father Tally. You're just someone's excuse."
"Who is it you're talking to?"
Nell swung around, only just remembering to hang onto the bridge rail. The black, filthy water swept hungrily below her feet.
A boy, roughly her own age, stood a few paces away. He had a round, rather common face, but his eyes were queer.
They seemed to be taking her measure in a way that was more adult than child-like.
"Aren't you scared?" he said. "Standing at the edge like that? Up so high? You wouldn't stand a chance if you fell."
Nell shook her head contemptuously. "I've been in scarier places than this. I can climb just about anything. Nothing knocks me loose, unless I let go."
The boy nodded thoughtfully. "You look agile enough. And you don't look like you weigh very much."
It was an odd thing to say. As if he were sizing up a prize sheep or a bushel of corn.
"You were talking to someone," he said. "Are you crazy or something? It won't do if you're crazy."
Nell felt her blood race. A moment before she had been thinking of throwing herself into the river, letting herself be swallowed up.
But now her anger had something to focus on. "I'm not crazy," she said, in a threatening voice. "I'll punch your ears if you say that again."
"You could try," said the boy.
He took something out of his pocket. The thing was so rare and special that it took a moment for Nell to realize what it was: a ripe, perfect pear.
"Look what I pinched," he said. "Do you want half?"
Nell swallowed. Her anger was tangled up in caution and hunger.
"Why would you share?" she said. "You never saw me before. People on Nail don't give things away for free."
"No," he admitted. "There's always a price, except when you steal. And no one steals from me."
"What is it then?" Nell said. "Tell me what you want up front and be straight about it, or else leave me alone."
The boy took out a business-like knife. She saw that it was deadly sharp, curved slightly at the tip.
With a practiced turn of his wrist, he cut the pear in half and tossed her the larger piece. She couldn't help but catch it in her free hand.
It was perfect: the skin green and tinged with red, the meat grainy and white. The sweet smell nearly knocked her off the bridge.
Before she could think, she took a bite. The juice covered her chin.
The boy took a bite too. He watched her, his eyes more thoughtful than ever.
"You caught that pair without even thinking," he said. "That's no easy trick."
Nell shrugged and went on chewing.
"My name is Marcus," he said. "And I think you might just do for my crew."
She made a mocking face. "What, your crew of pickpockets and quickfingers? No, thank you. I work honest for my nibs."
He shook his head and said, "It's true I pinch things now and then, when I want them bad enough. But that's not my main job. I'm a wire walker."
"You mean you crew on a dream ship?"
He nodded. Pointing upward with the knife, he said, "You ever been up there before? Up in the Dream?"
"Sure, plenty of times. My family are pilgrims."
"Where are they now, your family? Gone off? I thought so. When I saw you climb up on the bridge rail, I thought you must be alone."
Nell wanted to say something clever and hard, but her throat tightened. She thought she might break down and cry and the thought filled her with shame.
"Here's the deal then," Marcus said. "I'm looking for kids to work the shrouds aboard a ship. She's called the Blue Oriole. A clipper. One of the fastest around. I won't lie to you. It's hard work and tricky and dangerous. But Captain Marsh is a fair man and never cruel when he doesn't have to be. Anyway, working for him is no worse than throwing yourself into a river."
The proposition was such a surprise that for a moment Nell forgot her sorrow. Kids in every port in the Dream knew about shroud-walkers and their way of hunting children.
You had to be careful or you might get shanghaied and carried away from your home and family.
"I thought your sort just kidnapped young ones," she said. "When you need fresh crew don't you just carry them off?"
The boy shrugged and said, "I do it that way when I have to. Some of the kids I take will go aboard kicking and screaming. But when I can, I look for ones like you, ones that don't have nothing better."
Nell nodded. She looked at him for a long time. She could see that there was something truly strange about him.
He wasn't like any boy she had ever seen before. He stood too still. He never fidgeted once.
She turned back to look at the rushing water. In her hand was the bead from her father's abacus. The black stone represented all her life up to that point.
It felt heavy and cold, despite the grip of her hand.
"I heard once," she said, "that shroud walkers always take a new name when they join a crew. A nickname like, a new identity."
"That's right. You leave your lubber name behind."
"I want to choose my own name."
Marcus frowned and thought it over before saying, "It's not tradition, but I guess it's fair enough. What will it be?"
"I guess you can call me Nail. That's where you found me, isn't it? It's not much different from my old name. And nails are hard, right? They're hard to pry loose."
"Nail it is then."
She nodded and said, "I'll do it then. I'll join the Blue Oriole."
The little girl turned held out her hand and let the abacus stone roll through her fingers. It dropped without a sound into the current.
Marcus Barkle watched with satisfaction, taking another bite of his pear.
Next: Aramis the Amazing
It rushed and roared through the heart of Piketon, turning pistons and wheels, flushing away the city's filth.
Dusk draped itself over the streets. The coal-gas streetlamps looked like winking eyes.
Nell was hungry and frightened. But the thing that had driven her to clamber up onto the bridge's railing was fury.
Her face was clenched like a fist. She kept thinking of all the things that she would say to her father, if she got the chance.
"But I won't get the chance," she said, out loud. "They tricked me. They left me behind like an old suitcase."
They had forced her to accept the role assigned to her at birth: They had subtracted her and divided her until there was nothing left.
She peered up into the fug of factory smoke that cloaked Piketon. Was there really such a thing as Father Tally? Were there angels hidden in the angles of the world?
She shook her head. No. She wouldn't fool herself. She would take her final reckoning without cheating or making-believe.
"I'm Nell," she said angrily. "I never wanted to be, but that's what I am. But you're even less, Father Tally. You're just someone's excuse."
"Who is it you're talking to?"
Nell swung around, only just remembering to hang onto the bridge rail. The black, filthy water swept hungrily below her feet.
A boy, roughly her own age, stood a few paces away. He had a round, rather common face, but his eyes were queer.
They seemed to be taking her measure in a way that was more adult than child-like.
"Aren't you scared?" he said. "Standing at the edge like that? Up so high? You wouldn't stand a chance if you fell."
Nell shook her head contemptuously. "I've been in scarier places than this. I can climb just about anything. Nothing knocks me loose, unless I let go."
The boy nodded thoughtfully. "You look agile enough. And you don't look like you weigh very much."
It was an odd thing to say. As if he were sizing up a prize sheep or a bushel of corn.
"You were talking to someone," he said. "Are you crazy or something? It won't do if you're crazy."
Nell felt her blood race. A moment before she had been thinking of throwing herself into the river, letting herself be swallowed up.
But now her anger had something to focus on. "I'm not crazy," she said, in a threatening voice. "I'll punch your ears if you say that again."
"You could try," said the boy.
He took something out of his pocket. The thing was so rare and special that it took a moment for Nell to realize what it was: a ripe, perfect pear.
"Look what I pinched," he said. "Do you want half?"
Nell swallowed. Her anger was tangled up in caution and hunger.
"Why would you share?" she said. "You never saw me before. People on Nail don't give things away for free."
"No," he admitted. "There's always a price, except when you steal. And no one steals from me."
"What is it then?" Nell said. "Tell me what you want up front and be straight about it, or else leave me alone."
The boy took out a business-like knife. She saw that it was deadly sharp, curved slightly at the tip.
With a practiced turn of his wrist, he cut the pear in half and tossed her the larger piece. She couldn't help but catch it in her free hand.
It was perfect: the skin green and tinged with red, the meat grainy and white. The sweet smell nearly knocked her off the bridge.
Before she could think, she took a bite. The juice covered her chin.
The boy took a bite too. He watched her, his eyes more thoughtful than ever.
"You caught that pair without even thinking," he said. "That's no easy trick."
Nell shrugged and went on chewing.
"My name is Marcus," he said. "And I think you might just do for my crew."
She made a mocking face. "What, your crew of pickpockets and quickfingers? No, thank you. I work honest for my nibs."
He shook his head and said, "It's true I pinch things now and then, when I want them bad enough. But that's not my main job. I'm a wire walker."
"You mean you crew on a dream ship?"
He nodded. Pointing upward with the knife, he said, "You ever been up there before? Up in the Dream?"
"Sure, plenty of times. My family are pilgrims."
"Where are they now, your family? Gone off? I thought so. When I saw you climb up on the bridge rail, I thought you must be alone."
Nell wanted to say something clever and hard, but her throat tightened. She thought she might break down and cry and the thought filled her with shame.
"Here's the deal then," Marcus said. "I'm looking for kids to work the shrouds aboard a ship. She's called the Blue Oriole. A clipper. One of the fastest around. I won't lie to you. It's hard work and tricky and dangerous. But Captain Marsh is a fair man and never cruel when he doesn't have to be. Anyway, working for him is no worse than throwing yourself into a river."
The proposition was such a surprise that for a moment Nell forgot her sorrow. Kids in every port in the Dream knew about shroud-walkers and their way of hunting children.
You had to be careful or you might get shanghaied and carried away from your home and family.
"I thought your sort just kidnapped young ones," she said. "When you need fresh crew don't you just carry them off?"
The boy shrugged and said, "I do it that way when I have to. Some of the kids I take will go aboard kicking and screaming. But when I can, I look for ones like you, ones that don't have nothing better."
Nell nodded. She looked at him for a long time. She could see that there was something truly strange about him.
He wasn't like any boy she had ever seen before. He stood too still. He never fidgeted once.
She turned back to look at the rushing water. In her hand was the bead from her father's abacus. The black stone represented all her life up to that point.
It felt heavy and cold, despite the grip of her hand.
"I heard once," she said, "that shroud walkers always take a new name when they join a crew. A nickname like, a new identity."
"That's right. You leave your lubber name behind."
"I want to choose my own name."
Marcus frowned and thought it over before saying, "It's not tradition, but I guess it's fair enough. What will it be?"
"I guess you can call me Nail. That's where you found me, isn't it? It's not much different from my old name. And nails are hard, right? They're hard to pry loose."
"Nail it is then."
She nodded and said, "I'll do it then. I'll join the Blue Oriole."
The little girl turned held out her hand and let the abacus stone roll through her fingers. It dropped without a sound into the current.
Marcus Barkle watched with satisfaction, taking another bite of his pear.
Next: Aramis the Amazing
Monday, May 11, 2009
Eight: Losing Nell
One of the most unsettling aspects of Dream was that it created and destroyed worlds the way men make and shatter clay pots.
Fortunately, such events were rare. And most worlds that unraveled did so gradually, over many lifetimes. There were tremors and portents.
Geomancers could predict almost to the year when a planet would come apart and be reabsorbed.
There were even certain magicks that could forestall -- at least for a time -- a world's destruction.
Port Primus, homeworld of the Admiralty, had been stitched and bound together by sorcery for nearly a century.
The creation of new worlds, by contrast, was often sudden and cataclysmic.
A dreamship would be sailing a well-charted route through the void, expecting nothing but empty vastness.
But then out of the haze would emerge a new planet, some smoking and primordially volcanic, others already teeming with life that seemed to have existed for aeons.
Nail was just such a world.
It had manifested half a century ago, a forbidding expanse of metallic rock and sulfurous lakes.
The air was scented with rust and the endless smoke of burning coalfields.
A kind of gold rush had begun, with a hundred trading concerns and guilds and conglomerates staking claims across Nail's dismal surface.
Most of these outposts remained primitive and hardscrabble.
Scar-eyed men in heavy coats worked in their holes like primitive animals, bearing ore in baskets upon their backs.
The one proper city on the planet was Piketon, a sprawling and lawless port where great ore barges rose ponderously with each boreal tide.
It was there, in those corrugated-iron slums, that Nell lost her family for good.
She was smart enough to see at once that it was a mistake for them to come to Nail.
The trade-bosses and factory owners needed engineers and accountants, but no one had any time for mystics.
"Numbers are nasty, tiresome things even when they're set to a practical use," was the general sentiment. "The idea of harkening to a sermon about them is pure daft!"
Her father was stubborn. He set up his box on busy streetcorners and begin to chant the theorems of the Blue Crescent.
But his adoration of hypotenuse and ratio only made people laugh or shrug.
There had never been food enough and now the family's meals dwindled from meager to desperate.
Null's brothers and sisters stared sullenly at their lumps of hardtack and their mugs of bluish milk.
She sometimes found them casting angry, resentful glances at her as well.
Her oldest brother, Archimedes, would hiss in Nell's ear: "You're not even supposed to be here. You must have angered Father Tally somehow, or he would have taken you off long ago."
"It's not true," she protested. "I haven't done anything."
"There must be some reason people won't listen to Dad's sermons," said the older boy. "You're an error, that's what you are. You're a fly in the ointment."
Even Nell's mother found it more and more difficult to sneak her scraps of food. The girl was often on her own.
She found herself wandering farther and farther through the lanes and alleys of Piketon.
She did odd jobs in trade for a cup of broth or a heel of bread. Occasionally someone would pay her a nib or two for emptying chamber pots and scrubbing steps.
Rust covered everything on Nail. Someone would always pay her to scrape and sand and peel.
She could climb down into pipes and narrow spaces where grown-ups couldn't go, but the work left her half-dead with exhaustion.
One day, when Nell was unfolding her little roll of blankets, her mother made a queer and surprising speech:
"I don't have much, Nell, that belongs to me alone. But I still have this shawl that was stitched by my own mum."
Nell couldn't believe her eyes. The small cloak was finely made, impossibly delicate. She touched the stitchery with her fingertips.
She could see the geometry in it, the puzzling pattern. "It's very beautiful," she said.
"I've kept it all these years. When your father sold off all the other things -- the plates, the pictures -- I hid this away."
"You were right to keep it," Nell said.
"I knew you'd understand. And now it's yours to keep. The other girls, your sisters, they wouldn't appreciate it properly."
Nell saw that her mother was crying, a thing that she almost never did anymore. Her thin, pale cheeks gleamed like wet soap in the light of the candle.
"I don't want it," Nell said, suddenly afraid. "It's too fine. I've never had anything so pretty."
But her mother wouldn't tolerate any argument. After a moment, she dried her eyes and made her face hard again.
"What's done is done," she said. "Of all the decisions I've made in my life, Nell, giving you this gift may be the one I regret the least."
Nell was a clever girl, and suspicious. This conversation made her wary.
She was careful in the weeks that followed to keep a jealous watch on her family.
She listened to her parents' conversations. She studied her father's face at night when he was chanting the remainders of Pi.
One evening, he looked up from his prayers and his stony gaze fell on Nell and he said, "I see now that you were put here to test me. You were a burden and a trial of my arrogance."
Nell waited, but her father never spoke to her again.
Two days later, she came home from delivering a package to the far side of Piketon.
An Augsburgher merchant had promised her a half-dozen nibs and a piece of rock candy if she returned within an hour's time.
It was a princely sum for such a job and Nell soon realized that she had been tricked.
Her father had paid the Augsburgher out of his last remaining coin.
"Sorry, little girl," said the barrel-chested fellow, peering at her through his monocle. "Seems your dad wanted you kept busy for a while. Tough luck and all that!"
Her mother and father and twelve brothers and sisters were gone.
She raced through the neighborhood and soon tracked down a ticket seller who had booked them passage on a dream ship bound for Titus.
"Aye, they sailed this morning aboard the Yellow Raven," the man said, with a shrug. "Said they weren't sure where they would go after Titus. Your father said he was waiting for a sign."
"I have to go after them," Nell said. "Please! There's been a mistake, I must get aboard."
She showed the man her mother's beautiful shawl. "I'll give you this. This and all the nibs I have. Please!"
The ticket seller laughed and said, "Keep your rags and your nibs, little girl. The next tide isn't for three days. The Yellow Raven will be halfway to Titus by then."
He turned away and Nell went out onto the street. It had begun to rain, so that the smell of rust filled the air.
Water red as blood choked the gutters.
She sat under the awning of a tavern, legs pulled tight against her chest, wrapped in the shawl.
Fear threatened to swallow her whole. Her family had been hard and ungenerous, but now she had no one.
In all the great emptiness of Dream, she was truly and completely alone. With the toe of her tattered boot, she drew a circle in the mud.
It was the figure for zero, for nothing, for emptiness. In the language of her father's faith, this was the symbol that matched her name.
Next: Barkle's First Prize
Fortunately, such events were rare. And most worlds that unraveled did so gradually, over many lifetimes. There were tremors and portents.
Geomancers could predict almost to the year when a planet would come apart and be reabsorbed.
There were even certain magicks that could forestall -- at least for a time -- a world's destruction.
Port Primus, homeworld of the Admiralty, had been stitched and bound together by sorcery for nearly a century.
The creation of new worlds, by contrast, was often sudden and cataclysmic.
A dreamship would be sailing a well-charted route through the void, expecting nothing but empty vastness.
But then out of the haze would emerge a new planet, some smoking and primordially volcanic, others already teeming with life that seemed to have existed for aeons.
Nail was just such a world.
It had manifested half a century ago, a forbidding expanse of metallic rock and sulfurous lakes.
The air was scented with rust and the endless smoke of burning coalfields.
A kind of gold rush had begun, with a hundred trading concerns and guilds and conglomerates staking claims across Nail's dismal surface.
Most of these outposts remained primitive and hardscrabble.
Scar-eyed men in heavy coats worked in their holes like primitive animals, bearing ore in baskets upon their backs.
The one proper city on the planet was Piketon, a sprawling and lawless port where great ore barges rose ponderously with each boreal tide.
It was there, in those corrugated-iron slums, that Nell lost her family for good.
She was smart enough to see at once that it was a mistake for them to come to Nail.
The trade-bosses and factory owners needed engineers and accountants, but no one had any time for mystics.
"Numbers are nasty, tiresome things even when they're set to a practical use," was the general sentiment. "The idea of harkening to a sermon about them is pure daft!"
Her father was stubborn. He set up his box on busy streetcorners and begin to chant the theorems of the Blue Crescent.
But his adoration of hypotenuse and ratio only made people laugh or shrug.
There had never been food enough and now the family's meals dwindled from meager to desperate.
Null's brothers and sisters stared sullenly at their lumps of hardtack and their mugs of bluish milk.
She sometimes found them casting angry, resentful glances at her as well.
Her oldest brother, Archimedes, would hiss in Nell's ear: "You're not even supposed to be here. You must have angered Father Tally somehow, or he would have taken you off long ago."
"It's not true," she protested. "I haven't done anything."
"There must be some reason people won't listen to Dad's sermons," said the older boy. "You're an error, that's what you are. You're a fly in the ointment."
Even Nell's mother found it more and more difficult to sneak her scraps of food. The girl was often on her own.
She found herself wandering farther and farther through the lanes and alleys of Piketon.
She did odd jobs in trade for a cup of broth or a heel of bread. Occasionally someone would pay her a nib or two for emptying chamber pots and scrubbing steps.
Rust covered everything on Nail. Someone would always pay her to scrape and sand and peel.
She could climb down into pipes and narrow spaces where grown-ups couldn't go, but the work left her half-dead with exhaustion.
One day, when Nell was unfolding her little roll of blankets, her mother made a queer and surprising speech:
"I don't have much, Nell, that belongs to me alone. But I still have this shawl that was stitched by my own mum."
Nell couldn't believe her eyes. The small cloak was finely made, impossibly delicate. She touched the stitchery with her fingertips.
She could see the geometry in it, the puzzling pattern. "It's very beautiful," she said.
"I've kept it all these years. When your father sold off all the other things -- the plates, the pictures -- I hid this away."
"You were right to keep it," Nell said.
"I knew you'd understand. And now it's yours to keep. The other girls, your sisters, they wouldn't appreciate it properly."
Nell saw that her mother was crying, a thing that she almost never did anymore. Her thin, pale cheeks gleamed like wet soap in the light of the candle.
"I don't want it," Nell said, suddenly afraid. "It's too fine. I've never had anything so pretty."
But her mother wouldn't tolerate any argument. After a moment, she dried her eyes and made her face hard again.
"What's done is done," she said. "Of all the decisions I've made in my life, Nell, giving you this gift may be the one I regret the least."
Nell was a clever girl, and suspicious. This conversation made her wary.
She was careful in the weeks that followed to keep a jealous watch on her family.
She listened to her parents' conversations. She studied her father's face at night when he was chanting the remainders of Pi.
One evening, he looked up from his prayers and his stony gaze fell on Nell and he said, "I see now that you were put here to test me. You were a burden and a trial of my arrogance."
Nell waited, but her father never spoke to her again.
Two days later, she came home from delivering a package to the far side of Piketon.
An Augsburgher merchant had promised her a half-dozen nibs and a piece of rock candy if she returned within an hour's time.
It was a princely sum for such a job and Nell soon realized that she had been tricked.
Her father had paid the Augsburgher out of his last remaining coin.
"Sorry, little girl," said the barrel-chested fellow, peering at her through his monocle. "Seems your dad wanted you kept busy for a while. Tough luck and all that!"
Her mother and father and twelve brothers and sisters were gone.
She raced through the neighborhood and soon tracked down a ticket seller who had booked them passage on a dream ship bound for Titus.
"Aye, they sailed this morning aboard the Yellow Raven," the man said, with a shrug. "Said they weren't sure where they would go after Titus. Your father said he was waiting for a sign."
"I have to go after them," Nell said. "Please! There's been a mistake, I must get aboard."
She showed the man her mother's beautiful shawl. "I'll give you this. This and all the nibs I have. Please!"
The ticket seller laughed and said, "Keep your rags and your nibs, little girl. The next tide isn't for three days. The Yellow Raven will be halfway to Titus by then."
He turned away and Nell went out onto the street. It had begun to rain, so that the smell of rust filled the air.
Water red as blood choked the gutters.
She sat under the awning of a tavern, legs pulled tight against her chest, wrapped in the shawl.
Fear threatened to swallow her whole. Her family had been hard and ungenerous, but now she had no one.
In all the great emptiness of Dream, she was truly and completely alone. With the toe of her tattered boot, she drew a circle in the mud.
It was the figure for zero, for nothing, for emptiness. In the language of her father's faith, this was the symbol that matched her name.
Next: Barkle's First Prize
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Seven: The Pilgrim's Daughter
Her name was Nell, which in the tongue of the Blue Crescent Theorems, meant death.
She was the thirteenth child of a mother and father who were pilgrims traveling in the endless path of Father Tally, who was also known as The Mathematician.
Because thirteen was the number of death, and one of the sacred Prime Numbers, Nell's father made an announcement on the day of her birth.
"She belongs not to us, but to the Father," he said, in his most sonorous voice. "Her fate is for Him to decide."
It wasn't an easy thing being named for death, or growing up in the knowledge that you already have one foot in the grave.
Nell was a quick child and clever and tough, which was lucky because most thirteenth children born to Father Tally's followers were taken almost at once.
Cynics said it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, for followers of the Mathematician -- a poor sect to begin with -- rarely spared much care or food on kids like Nell.
"It is an odd thing," said her father, on Nell's fourth birthday. "Perhaps the Mathematician is busy with other affairs. Or could it be that something about the child displeases Him?"
Nell's mother, a sickly, half-starved woman, would only shrug and make the fatalistic sign of the Common Denominator.
In secret, the woman loved Nell and resented her husband for giving the child to Father Tally.
She had no great interest in numbers, or the secret symmetries they were said to contain.
She had learned early on that she couldn't fill her children's bellies with the mystical truths that could be derived from the formulae contained in the Blue Crescent Theorems.
She stayed with her husband only because she had married him long ago and they had traveled far over the Known Dream.
When she cast her mind back over the path they had followed, visiting the holy sites of Father Tally's cult, she could hardly remember her home world.
The only thing she had left was this fanatic of a husband, with his braided beard and his abacus and his endless preaching.
He wasn't an evil man. He was a good enough father to their other twelve children. The idea of being left behind terrified her.
So Nell's mother labored in secret to protect her daughter, slipping the little girl food whenever she could.
Twice in Nell's brief and rather tenuous life, the woman had given her a hasty, furtive kiss on the forehead.
Whenever the family was preparing to pick up and leave for the next leg of their pilgrimage, she would warn her little girl:
"You must be careful to mingle with your brothers and sisters and avoid being noticed," the woman whispered. "Only after we're aboard ship can you let yourself be seen by your father."
Nell learned to make herself very small. She took up less space then a large cat.
Once the dreamship made sail, she would emerge like one of the fragile flowers that shows itself for a day or two in spring.
Noticing her, her father would say, "Is that one still with us? Is death still part of our pilgrimage? I never calculated such a thing, but the Mathematician alone knows the final sum."
For nine years, Nell had managed this balancing act, with the aid of her mother and one or two of her kinder siblings.
She grew up hard-faced and skinny. She was a rather bitter, sharp-tongued girl. She was, after all, viewed by those around her as a kind of Undead.
In the parlance of her father's faith, she was a Remainder.
But in the curious way of such things, Nell was also something of a genius with numbers.
She would sit in the huddle of children around her father, her face averted, listening to his sermons. Much of what he said seemed like nonsense to her.
He claimed, for example, that angels existed within Prime Numbers, because Prime Numbers were infinite and could only be divided by The One and by Themselves.
He also said that the number Pi represented the perfect Spherical Order. He would chant the numbers of Pi past the decimal point until he fell into a kind of snoring trance.
Nell saw instinctively that the Known Dream wasn't ordered into perfect spheres at all. There were sloppy elipses and jagged hedrons.
Despite her girlish prayers, she had never seen an angel, numerical or otherwise.
And yet when her father posed a mathematical question, she always knew the answer before any of her brothers and sisters.
It took all of her will power to keep her silence while the others struggled and stammered.
Sometimes, when Nell was riding a dream ship, she would sit and look at the lines of rigging, the spars and yards and masts, and she could feel the numerical tension in their design.
She could see the inner mathematical truth of the ship, with its torque and its ratios of mass to thrust.
She could see the path the ship would have to take, given the angles of its sails and the force delivered by the wind.
There were times when she even saw that others had gotten their numbers wrong.
Her father would recite one of Euclid's Elements from rote memory, transposing two figures.
Or she would see that the flawed design of a ship's mast would cause it to yaw clumsily when tacking.
"Maybe I really do belong to Father Tally," she would say. "Maybe I know these things because of him."
But she didn't really believe it.
And so when her father decided that they would travel to the world called Nail, so that he could preach the Blue Crescent Theorems to the innumerate, she perceived no plan or design.
"I suspect," Nell said to herself, "that we are all Remainders. We are all Irrational Numbers."
So she stowed herself away once again with her family and made the fateful journey to the ugly, belching world where she would first lay eyes on the Blue Oriole.
Next: Losing Nell
She was the thirteenth child of a mother and father who were pilgrims traveling in the endless path of Father Tally, who was also known as The Mathematician.
Because thirteen was the number of death, and one of the sacred Prime Numbers, Nell's father made an announcement on the day of her birth.
"She belongs not to us, but to the Father," he said, in his most sonorous voice. "Her fate is for Him to decide."
It wasn't an easy thing being named for death, or growing up in the knowledge that you already have one foot in the grave.
Nell was a quick child and clever and tough, which was lucky because most thirteenth children born to Father Tally's followers were taken almost at once.
Cynics said it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, for followers of the Mathematician -- a poor sect to begin with -- rarely spared much care or food on kids like Nell.
"It is an odd thing," said her father, on Nell's fourth birthday. "Perhaps the Mathematician is busy with other affairs. Or could it be that something about the child displeases Him?"
Nell's mother, a sickly, half-starved woman, would only shrug and make the fatalistic sign of the Common Denominator.
In secret, the woman loved Nell and resented her husband for giving the child to Father Tally.
She had no great interest in numbers, or the secret symmetries they were said to contain.
She had learned early on that she couldn't fill her children's bellies with the mystical truths that could be derived from the formulae contained in the Blue Crescent Theorems.
She stayed with her husband only because she had married him long ago and they had traveled far over the Known Dream.
When she cast her mind back over the path they had followed, visiting the holy sites of Father Tally's cult, she could hardly remember her home world.
The only thing she had left was this fanatic of a husband, with his braided beard and his abacus and his endless preaching.
He wasn't an evil man. He was a good enough father to their other twelve children. The idea of being left behind terrified her.
So Nell's mother labored in secret to protect her daughter, slipping the little girl food whenever she could.
Twice in Nell's brief and rather tenuous life, the woman had given her a hasty, furtive kiss on the forehead.
Whenever the family was preparing to pick up and leave for the next leg of their pilgrimage, she would warn her little girl:
"You must be careful to mingle with your brothers and sisters and avoid being noticed," the woman whispered. "Only after we're aboard ship can you let yourself be seen by your father."
Nell learned to make herself very small. She took up less space then a large cat.
Once the dreamship made sail, she would emerge like one of the fragile flowers that shows itself for a day or two in spring.
Noticing her, her father would say, "Is that one still with us? Is death still part of our pilgrimage? I never calculated such a thing, but the Mathematician alone knows the final sum."
For nine years, Nell had managed this balancing act, with the aid of her mother and one or two of her kinder siblings.
She grew up hard-faced and skinny. She was a rather bitter, sharp-tongued girl. She was, after all, viewed by those around her as a kind of Undead.
In the parlance of her father's faith, she was a Remainder.
But in the curious way of such things, Nell was also something of a genius with numbers.
She would sit in the huddle of children around her father, her face averted, listening to his sermons. Much of what he said seemed like nonsense to her.
He claimed, for example, that angels existed within Prime Numbers, because Prime Numbers were infinite and could only be divided by The One and by Themselves.
He also said that the number Pi represented the perfect Spherical Order. He would chant the numbers of Pi past the decimal point until he fell into a kind of snoring trance.
Nell saw instinctively that the Known Dream wasn't ordered into perfect spheres at all. There were sloppy elipses and jagged hedrons.
Despite her girlish prayers, she had never seen an angel, numerical or otherwise.
And yet when her father posed a mathematical question, she always knew the answer before any of her brothers and sisters.
It took all of her will power to keep her silence while the others struggled and stammered.
Sometimes, when Nell was riding a dream ship, she would sit and look at the lines of rigging, the spars and yards and masts, and she could feel the numerical tension in their design.
She could see the inner mathematical truth of the ship, with its torque and its ratios of mass to thrust.
She could see the path the ship would have to take, given the angles of its sails and the force delivered by the wind.
There were times when she even saw that others had gotten their numbers wrong.
Her father would recite one of Euclid's Elements from rote memory, transposing two figures.
Or she would see that the flawed design of a ship's mast would cause it to yaw clumsily when tacking.
"Maybe I really do belong to Father Tally," she would say. "Maybe I know these things because of him."
But she didn't really believe it.
And so when her father decided that they would travel to the world called Nail, so that he could preach the Blue Crescent Theorems to the innumerate, she perceived no plan or design.
"I suspect," Nell said to herself, "that we are all Remainders. We are all Irrational Numbers."
So she stowed herself away once again with her family and made the fateful journey to the ugly, belching world where she would first lay eyes on the Blue Oriole.
Next: Losing Nell
Friday, May 8, 2009
Six: Melicont
There was a saying that ships sailed the Sea of Dreams, but gelders floated on an ocean of Palymyran tea.
The Blue Oriole was moored at the harbormaster's station in high orbit above Melicont.
It was an ancient structure of stone and teak, in the style of the Seventh Restoration, with sweeping pagoda roofs and thick leaded windows.
Extending from every side of the building were wharves and gangways. A half-dozen dream ships were moored to the structure.
It seemed that a small, ramshackle village had been thrown into the sky above a dusty, weather-beaten looking world.
The Harbor Master himself was tending the massive samovar, which sat in the a corner of the audience chamber like a hulking creature.
It huffed and sighed and gave a scent of jasmine and charcoal.
Captain Marsh, First Mate Falconer, and the Cargo Steward, Mr. Stern, sat awkwardly on threadbare satin cushions.
The Harbor Master brought them each a tiny, delicate cup of steaming broth, distributing lumps of black anise sugar with a flourish.
He was an ugly, pug-faced man. When he grinned, his mouth seemed to devour his own face.
His eyes swiveled about in their sockets, in the half-blind way of Melicontian noblemen.
"It is a great privilege," the Master crooned, "a great privilege to treat directly with the great and may I go so far as to say the legendary Captain Marsh."
Captain Marsh made a gesture that was something between a nod and a shudder.
It was the habit of Melicontians to express their dissatisfaction through courteous flattery.
If the Harbor Master were satisfied that the Blue Oriole's paperwork was in order, he would never have invited her officers to tea.
"May I also express some surprise and perhaps even a hint of dismay," he continued, "that so many of our lovely and, yes, our important and vital parrots are now lying dead among the offal in the bowels of your vessel?"
The fellow blinked at them, leering idiotically.
Mr. Stern, whose idea it had been to accept the birds as cargo, cleared his throat. "The creatures were diseased before they came aboard."
"Ah." The Harbor Master nodded, as if in real delight. "And I suppose this pertinent and might I suggest even vital bit of information was recorded prominently in your cargo manifest?"
"No, I'm afraid not. We didn't realize, you see, until after we had left port."
"So you are saying that the moment of realization, of enlightenment, came after the signing of the very explicit and perfectly legitimate contract? Which is to say, after you thoroughly inspected the goods which you so kindly agreed to deliver to our humble world?"
Mr. Stern squirmed. He was a Tarisian, with a yellow oiled moustache and the tattoo of an ankh above each eye. Like allTarisians he loathed losing money.
It gave him a physical pain in his intestines.
Captain Marsh put his tea cup on the floor with a rattle and said, "Come to the point, please, Harbor Master. What will you pay us for the birds that are still alive?"
The Master wrung his hands painfully and after hemming and hawing for another minute mentioned an abysmally low price.
"You realize that with so many parrots dead, the information we can glean from the surviving creatures will be of minimal value."
"Minimal," repeated the Captain.
"I am afraid so. It is as if you had delivered to us a book with most of the pages ruined or torn out. I ask you: What good is a book with half the words missing?"
Captain Marsh nodded. He rose and went to one of the small, thick-paned windows. He stood with his legs slightly spread, hands clasped behind his back.
Beyond the window spread a view of Melicont, its gray deserts like a dirty expanse of pavement. Ochre rivers twisted and turned and seemed to vanish into the dust.
It was a wretched little world. No wonder so many of its people chose the expatriate life.
"I couldn't help noticing," said the Captain, "that a fair number of your parrots were speaking melphik. And in the cursed tongue of the Breathless."
"You must have misunderstood," cooed the Harbor Master. "Our birds are trained to speak in every manner of gibberish. To confuse and mislead our competitors."
"I know a little of the melphik speech," said Captain Marsh. "I also know that congress with their race is expressly forbidden by the Admiralty. It might interest them to see one of these birds."
The Master splayed his fingers and said, "As a great navigator and seaman, you must know the importance of gathering every possible clue about the Dream. We require information, whatever the source."
The Captain nodded. "It has also occurred to me that the information in those parrots must have come at great expense if the melphik had anything to do with it."
The Harbor Master reached a hand and took a lump of black sugar and tucked it nervously between his teeth.
"The price you quoted," said Captain Marsh, "isn't enough to pay my costs. I might as well wring their necks, the lot of them."
"We could have a feast, sir," said Falconer. "Stew the little buggers maybe, or roast them on a spit."
"And their feathers," agreed Mr. Stern, "could be sold to the haberdasheries on Wipa. They don't care if the birds are dead."
The Harbor Master sucked noisily and seemed to be counting the knuckles on his fingers. His eyes rolled like casters.
"It might possibly be," the fellow concluded, "that I was premature and yes even hasty in my earlier offer. Perhaps Mr. Stern and I might inspect the cargo one more time, collegially as it were, to determine a satisfactory compensation."
The Captain and Falconer returned to the Oriole.
The negotiation continued for several more hours but in the end, Mr. Stern felt that he had reached an equitable, though far from generous, price.
"It still sounds damned low to me," said the Captain, sitting glumly in his chambers at the stern of the ship. "We lost a baker's dozen of souls."
"And they lost half their birds," said Mr. Stern.
"Fair enough. Just get us our gelders, Mr. Stern, and let's get away from this place. And we'll have no more to do with talking parrots, is that understood?"
"Aye, sir."
When Mr. Stern went back to conclude the deal, he was accompanied by Marcus Barkle.
The Harbor Master looked at him sourly and said, "Why have you brought this child with you?"
"Barkle here is our Lord of Shrouds," said Mr. Stern. "He is in need of, ah, new recruits. To replace some of our dearly departed."
The Master placed a limber hand over his hypothetical heart and said, "Oh, no. Oh dear, my good sirs. The Melicontians don't allow their children to go before the mast under any circumstances. No, no -- we are not sailors. Only mapmakers."
"Why not, then?" said Marcus. "I thought your lot liked to travel and learn about the world."
"We are scribes, not adventurers," said the fellow. "What's more, we never serve masters other than ourselves. It wouldn't be wise. Even our young children know things, you see. Proprietary things. Secret things. It wouldn't do for a young Melicontian to find his loyalties as it were divided."
"What are we to do then? You can't sail a dreamclipper without kids."
The Harbor Master made a pantomime of thinking deeply about the problem. It was certain that he had been confronted with this question many times before.
"We are," he said at last, "only a short hop away from a rather awkward little planet called Nail. Perhaps you have heard of it?"
"I've been there before," said Barkle. He looked at Mr. Stern and nodded. "We might make that kind of haul with the crew we got, so long as the weather holds. I'm betting there's some good hunting on Nail."
Mr. Stern shrugged and said, "Perhaps we can convince the Captain to make a few repairs while we're at it. The Oriole's due for a proper landfall."
Next: The Pilgrim's Daughter
The Blue Oriole was moored at the harbormaster's station in high orbit above Melicont.
It was an ancient structure of stone and teak, in the style of the Seventh Restoration, with sweeping pagoda roofs and thick leaded windows.
Extending from every side of the building were wharves and gangways. A half-dozen dream ships were moored to the structure.
It seemed that a small, ramshackle village had been thrown into the sky above a dusty, weather-beaten looking world.
The Harbor Master himself was tending the massive samovar, which sat in the a corner of the audience chamber like a hulking creature.
It huffed and sighed and gave a scent of jasmine and charcoal.
Captain Marsh, First Mate Falconer, and the Cargo Steward, Mr. Stern, sat awkwardly on threadbare satin cushions.
The Harbor Master brought them each a tiny, delicate cup of steaming broth, distributing lumps of black anise sugar with a flourish.
He was an ugly, pug-faced man. When he grinned, his mouth seemed to devour his own face.
His eyes swiveled about in their sockets, in the half-blind way of Melicontian noblemen.
"It is a great privilege," the Master crooned, "a great privilege to treat directly with the great and may I go so far as to say the legendary Captain Marsh."
Captain Marsh made a gesture that was something between a nod and a shudder.
It was the habit of Melicontians to express their dissatisfaction through courteous flattery.
If the Harbor Master were satisfied that the Blue Oriole's paperwork was in order, he would never have invited her officers to tea.
"May I also express some surprise and perhaps even a hint of dismay," he continued, "that so many of our lovely and, yes, our important and vital parrots are now lying dead among the offal in the bowels of your vessel?"
The fellow blinked at them, leering idiotically.
Mr. Stern, whose idea it had been to accept the birds as cargo, cleared his throat. "The creatures were diseased before they came aboard."
"Ah." The Harbor Master nodded, as if in real delight. "And I suppose this pertinent and might I suggest even vital bit of information was recorded prominently in your cargo manifest?"
"No, I'm afraid not. We didn't realize, you see, until after we had left port."
"So you are saying that the moment of realization, of enlightenment, came after the signing of the very explicit and perfectly legitimate contract? Which is to say, after you thoroughly inspected the goods which you so kindly agreed to deliver to our humble world?"
Mr. Stern squirmed. He was a Tarisian, with a yellow oiled moustache and the tattoo of an ankh above each eye. Like allTarisians he loathed losing money.
It gave him a physical pain in his intestines.
Captain Marsh put his tea cup on the floor with a rattle and said, "Come to the point, please, Harbor Master. What will you pay us for the birds that are still alive?"
The Master wrung his hands painfully and after hemming and hawing for another minute mentioned an abysmally low price.
"You realize that with so many parrots dead, the information we can glean from the surviving creatures will be of minimal value."
"Minimal," repeated the Captain.
"I am afraid so. It is as if you had delivered to us a book with most of the pages ruined or torn out. I ask you: What good is a book with half the words missing?"
Captain Marsh nodded. He rose and went to one of the small, thick-paned windows. He stood with his legs slightly spread, hands clasped behind his back.
Beyond the window spread a view of Melicont, its gray deserts like a dirty expanse of pavement. Ochre rivers twisted and turned and seemed to vanish into the dust.
It was a wretched little world. No wonder so many of its people chose the expatriate life.
"I couldn't help noticing," said the Captain, "that a fair number of your parrots were speaking melphik. And in the cursed tongue of the Breathless."
"You must have misunderstood," cooed the Harbor Master. "Our birds are trained to speak in every manner of gibberish. To confuse and mislead our competitors."
"I know a little of the melphik speech," said Captain Marsh. "I also know that congress with their race is expressly forbidden by the Admiralty. It might interest them to see one of these birds."
The Master splayed his fingers and said, "As a great navigator and seaman, you must know the importance of gathering every possible clue about the Dream. We require information, whatever the source."
The Captain nodded. "It has also occurred to me that the information in those parrots must have come at great expense if the melphik had anything to do with it."
The Harbor Master reached a hand and took a lump of black sugar and tucked it nervously between his teeth.
"The price you quoted," said Captain Marsh, "isn't enough to pay my costs. I might as well wring their necks, the lot of them."
"We could have a feast, sir," said Falconer. "Stew the little buggers maybe, or roast them on a spit."
"And their feathers," agreed Mr. Stern, "could be sold to the haberdasheries on Wipa. They don't care if the birds are dead."
The Harbor Master sucked noisily and seemed to be counting the knuckles on his fingers. His eyes rolled like casters.
"It might possibly be," the fellow concluded, "that I was premature and yes even hasty in my earlier offer. Perhaps Mr. Stern and I might inspect the cargo one more time, collegially as it were, to determine a satisfactory compensation."
The Captain and Falconer returned to the Oriole.
The negotiation continued for several more hours but in the end, Mr. Stern felt that he had reached an equitable, though far from generous, price.
"It still sounds damned low to me," said the Captain, sitting glumly in his chambers at the stern of the ship. "We lost a baker's dozen of souls."
"And they lost half their birds," said Mr. Stern.
"Fair enough. Just get us our gelders, Mr. Stern, and let's get away from this place. And we'll have no more to do with talking parrots, is that understood?"
"Aye, sir."
When Mr. Stern went back to conclude the deal, he was accompanied by Marcus Barkle.
The Harbor Master looked at him sourly and said, "Why have you brought this child with you?"
"Barkle here is our Lord of Shrouds," said Mr. Stern. "He is in need of, ah, new recruits. To replace some of our dearly departed."
The Master placed a limber hand over his hypothetical heart and said, "Oh, no. Oh dear, my good sirs. The Melicontians don't allow their children to go before the mast under any circumstances. No, no -- we are not sailors. Only mapmakers."
"Why not, then?" said Marcus. "I thought your lot liked to travel and learn about the world."
"We are scribes, not adventurers," said the fellow. "What's more, we never serve masters other than ourselves. It wouldn't be wise. Even our young children know things, you see. Proprietary things. Secret things. It wouldn't do for a young Melicontian to find his loyalties as it were divided."
"What are we to do then? You can't sail a dreamclipper without kids."
The Harbor Master made a pantomime of thinking deeply about the problem. It was certain that he had been confronted with this question many times before.
"We are," he said at last, "only a short hop away from a rather awkward little planet called Nail. Perhaps you have heard of it?"
"I've been there before," said Barkle. He looked at Mr. Stern and nodded. "We might make that kind of haul with the crew we got, so long as the weather holds. I'm betting there's some good hunting on Nail."
Mr. Stern shrugged and said, "Perhaps we can convince the Captain to make a few repairs while we're at it. The Oriole's due for a proper landfall."
Next: The Pilgrim's Daughter
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