Revenger 9780575090569 (21 page)

What if it’s not even money?

Prozor came back with the drinks. But she didn’t set them down on the table. ‘Hasper’s in the back room. He says for us to join him. It’ll be quieter and you won’t have so many eyes on you.’

‘I don’t mind the eyes.’

‘I do.’

Prozor knew the way so I followed her. We went through a blank door to the right of the serving hatch, down a low, stooping corridor, then through another door into a cosy sort of room with no windows and just one flickerbox. A man was pouring himself a drink when we arrived. He was standing up with his back to us, so I didn’t get a look at his face until Prozor and I were sitting down, taking places in the comfortable padded chairs that ran around three of the walls. It wasn’t the man that caught my eye when I came through the door, though. It was the Crawly sitting in one of the chairs. Crawlies being the shape they are, sitting down the way we do isn’t really an option. But the chair had been cut or upholstered to suit the alien so that it could tuck its abdomen or tail or whatever they call it down into a hole in the back of the chair, with its legs and forelimbs jutting out in front like a dog begging for a treat. The Crawly had a gown on, or something like a gown, open at the front so the limbs could jut out, but tied under the neck, and with most of the head lost under a big drooping hood. The only part of its face I could see was a bunch of whiskery appendages that were moving all the while, twitching in and out and jerking from side to side. Crawlies could see and hear but I’d read that their mouth parts picked up a lot of information from molecules floating in the lungstuff, tasting our chemistry and knowing what kind of mood we were in almost before we did. The oddest thing, though, was what the Crawly was doing. It had a glass in one of its claws, a tall one stuffed with ice and different colours of fluid, and it was drinking through a straw, making a rude sucking and gurgling noise as if no one had taught it manners.

‘This is Mr Clinker,’ said the man who was standing up, turning around with his own drink. ‘Mr Clinker, this is Prozor and her friend from the
Monetta
. What was your name again, I’m sorry?’

‘I’m Fura,’ I said. ‘Fura Ness.’

‘Then it’s Prozor and Fura, Mr Clinker. And I’m Hasper, of course,’ he said, looking at me, ‘but I’m sure you worked that out for yourself.’

He was a big,
powerful-
looking man, dressed quite well, but in clothes that looked a size too small for his frame, so that the seams were straining and the hems didn’t quite reach where they should have done. He had black hair that was stiffened up, so that he looked like a cove being held upside down, with a shock of white at the front. His eyes were the oddest part of him, though. They were something mechanical, like two chimneys pushed into his sockets, jutting out further from his face than his nose.

‘Can you see with those?’ I asked, deciding that bluntness was the best tack.

‘See with them, Fura, and see better than my old lamps ever could. It’s Crawly medicine. They can do things we still can’t, on any of the worlds. They’ve got some odd ideas about what looks pretty, it’s true, but I’d sooner be ugly than blind.’

‘I don’t think you’re ugly,’ I said. ‘Just strange.’

‘Mr Clinker was just dropping in to check on my eyes. He put them in for me. People forget that there’s more to the Crawlies than handling money. They do all sorts of things for us, and never with any complaint. Don’t you, Mr Clinker?’

We’ve all seen Crawlies speak on flickerboxes, but unless you’ve been in the same room as one you don’t really get a proper sense of how rum it is when they make our language. They haven’t got lungs or a throat or anything like that, so the only way they can make noises is by rubbing all those whiskery bits against each other, which sounds like someone shuffling papers or scuffing their heels, but the queer part is that you begin to hear words in that rustly, scrapy chaos, and then the words start making sentences, and you’re being spoken to by a creature that wasn’t born around the Old Sun.

‘We do what we may, Hasper.’ The Crawly took another slurp from its drink. ‘It is little enough.’

‘Are you some sort of doctor?’ I asked.

‘Asking about the glowy, are you?’ Hasper Quell said.

‘No, I wasn’t. There are doctors in the worlds that can sort out the glowy, if sorting it out was what I wanted. I was thinking of something else, something that monkey medicine can’t fix – at least not the doctors on Mazarile.’

The Crawly asked, ‘What is the nature of the ailment?’

‘A problem with a heart. A man’s heart. Is that the sort of thing you know to repair?’

‘That would depend on the nature of the problem.’

I hefted the bag. ‘If I paid for you – or another Crawly doctor – to go to Mazarile and examine someone, would you do that?’

‘That would depend on the payment.’

Prozor raised a hand as I made to open the bag. But Quell waved down her objection.

‘Show Mr Clinker what you’ve got. He won’t run off with it.’

I spilled my earnings onto the little low table between the chairs. ‘Go on, then. Tell me if there’s enough there.’

The Crawly bent forward in its chair, tilting so that it could bring its forelimbs onto the table and start piecing through the quoins. Then it bent down even more so that its hood drooped forward and I could only see the tips of its mouth parts whisking in and out, kissing and tasting the quoins in a way that made me feel a bit like I wanted to lose my breakfast. It shuffled through the money, trying one bit after another.

‘Well?’ Hasper asked. ‘Put the girl out of her misery. Is there or isn’t there?’

‘This would suffice for an initial examination,’ the Crawly said, holding up the most valuable quoin of the lot. ‘Any further costs would need to be addressed once the nature of the ailment was established.’

Prozor whispered: ‘That’s half your money down the swallower before you even know they can do a thing.’

‘I was going to take it home eventually whatever happened.’

‘But you would still need to pay for your passage somewhere else, wouldn’t you?’

‘If I sign up with a crew, I’ll be earning from the outset and I won’t need to pay for passage.’

‘You won’t have much choice where you go, either.’

I still couldn’t tear my eyes off what the Crawly was doing to the quoins, how it was fondling and licking them. ‘A
down-
payment, then,’ it said. ‘If you need more time to consider the full amount.’

‘Fond of your father in Mazarile, are you?’ Hasper Quell asked me.

‘I didn’t say anything about my father.’

‘You didn’t need to.’

The Crawly put down the quoins and lifted up its hooded head to face the door we’d come in by. Everything went slow then. That’s what people always say when something like this happens, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I saw one leg coming through the door, then another, and on top of those long thin legs was a long thin body, with a black coat flapping back from it, and on top of the body was a head and face I’d hoped never to see in Trevenza Reach.

Vidin Quindar had taken off his hat as he stooped down the corridor, and now he threw it onto one of the vacant chairs and sat himself down next to the Crawly. He threw a companionable arm around Mr Clinker’s cloak, around what would have been shoulders if aliens had shoulders. ‘That your handiwork again, you sneaky devils?’ Quindar was looking up at the flickerbox, still flickering away on the wall. It was showing the same financial news as the ones in the main room. ‘Black Shatterday, that’s what they’re callin’ it,’ he said, cocking me an eye. ‘The worst bank run in decades – worse than the one what forced your mummy and daddy to leave their old world and come to shoddy old Mazarile, before you was hatched. But you’ll be all right, Miss Ness. Coves like you always floats to the top, in the end.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Prozor said to me, and I nodded because after all that had passed between us, I knew she’d never be so low as to set this up.

‘No, but Hasper did,’ Quindar said. ‘Let’s clear the lungstuff, shall we, so we all know who is and isn’t to blame? I knew you’d be showing up on Trevenza Reach one of these days. Your father put down the money to send me here, and after that all I had to do was watch out for the ships. I also knew Prozor was with you, and it didn’t take much diggin’ to find out that Quell’s place was likely to be on your itinerary. So I had a chinwag with Hasper here, put some pegs on the place, and here I am – just in the nick of time, it seems.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘To stop you wasting good money on this bag of feelers.’ He uncurled his arm from the Crawly. ‘No need, you see. We can get you home and let you hand over those quoins to your father
first-
hand, and let ’im decide what to do with it.’

Prozor looked at Quell. ‘You’ve done me some favours, Hasper, and I’ve done you some. But if I see you after this day, on this world or any other, I’ll slice you open with a yardknife.’

‘It wasn’t anything personal, Proz. And where’s the harm? No one’s been hurt, have they? I was just asked to facilitate this meeting, and here we are. Show them the legalities, Vidin, like you showed me.’

Quindar reached into his coat. ‘Easy,’ he said, smiling at Prozor. ‘It’s only papers. We all likes papers. Papers make the worlds turn, ain’t it?’ He drew out a bundle of documents, spread them flat on the table. I didn’t need to lean in to see what mattered. Near the top was the name and address of a Hadramaw legal firm that I knew my father had used in the past. Beneath that came paragraphs and paragraphs of slowly shrinking text. Quindar tapped a dirty nail against the documents. ‘Nothing fishy about any of this, so don’t go getting your collectives in a twist. It’s all above board. It just says that I, Vidin Quindar Esquire, is assigned the right to act as temporary guardian for one Arafura Ness, daughter of etcetera and etcetera, until such time as she’s safe and sound back in her own bed in Mazarile.’ He gave me a crooked,
broken-
toothed smile, as if this was all a big treat. ‘I gets to shepherd you home, is the gist of it.’

‘And if she doesn’t want to go home?’ Prozor asked.

‘What she wants and what she gets is two different things, Proz. When she came on your ship, she wasn’t of age to make her own mind up about such things. But that older sister of hers, she pulled a slippery one on her dear old dad. Adrana made herself the legal guardian, and got Arafura to agree to it.’ He touched his nose in a gesture of respect. ‘Clever cove, she was. Slippery as the best of ’em. After that, there wasn’t anything Mr Ness could do about it. That’s all void now, though. Adrana’s – and old Vidin needs to beg your forgiveness here, Fura – but Adrana’s dead and gone. She can’t be dischargin’ her familial responsibilities from beyond the grave, can she?’

‘She isn’t dead.’ I told him. ‘And why you? Was there not someone sleazier Father could have found?’

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Ooh, that stings. After I came all the way out here, and all.’

‘I’m sure the money made a difference.’

‘A man’s got to be paid, ain’t he?’ He cocked a nod at the flickerbox screens. ‘Especially in these tryin’ times. You wouldn’t have been banking with any of them concerns, Proz, would you? Might want to think about getting ahead of the lines, if you did. I hear they’re running low on reserves.’

‘You’re not taking her,’ Prozor said. ‘Not if she doesn’t want to go.’

He sighed out like a bellows. ‘Old Vidin didn’t make himself clear, I see. It ain’t yours to say, or hers. The papers is
lungstuff-
tight. She comes with me. There’s a ship all docked and ready to sail.’

‘She’s crew now. She survived Bosa Sennen. Kept herself alive – kept me alive. Whatever it says on those papers, she’s earned the right to make her own choice.’

‘Maybe going back to Mazarile is that choice,’ Quindar said. ‘I’m here to make it easier, take the worry off her mind.’

‘I’m not coming,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to. You can tell my father I’ve got work to do, and I’ll be home when I’m good and ready.’

‘She’s said her piece,’ Prozor put in.

Quindar reached for the papers, bundling them back into his coat. ‘Whether you read ’em or not doesn’t matter,’ he said, and he was making to tighten up the coat when his fist slipped out again, except this time there was nothing in it.

Or nearly nothing.

He had his fist almost closed, but not quite. A
spit-
coloured thing oozed out of his sleeve, like a big fat slug, and it settled itself into the cradle of his fist, hardening into the form of a pistol. You could still see part of the way through it, to the glistening gubbins that made it work.

‘Oh, Vidin,’ said Hasper Quell. ‘You promised me there wouldn’t be any of that nonsense. Honestly, Proz – I had his word.’

‘Now you know what it’s worth,’ Prozor snapped.

The Crawly flapped its forelimbs in agitation. ‘There will be no violence,’ it said.

‘No there won’t,’ Quidin said. ‘Not if everyone’s sensible.’

‘You’re a mercenary sort, aren’t you?’ I said, gathering up my quoins now that the alien had stopped fondling them. ‘So let’s talk money. Father paid you. Fine. How much to send you back to Mazarile?’

‘More’n you’ve got there, lovely. Besides, I’ve got a reputation to uphold. I promised your father, didn’t I? Now come with me, and it’ll seem right in the mornin’. ’

He made to grab me. I shirked back, his fist closing on lungstuff rather than my sleeve, but it was enough to have Prozor springing out of her seat, raising her own bag of quoins like it was a bludgeon. Which, thinking about it, was exactly what she had in mind. But Quindar still had the horrible
spit-
coloured pistol in his hand and he fired at Prozor. There was a pink flash, a feeling like needles being pushed into my eyes, and I wasn’t even the one he’d aimed at. Prozor slumped to the floor, donging her head on the side of the table. The Crawly rattled like a bag of dry sticks. It pulled itself out of the chair, gathered its cloak tighter, and shuffled out of the room leaving a sweet,
honey-
like smell behind. I knew they gave off that stink when they were alarmed, and that it was a way of one Crawly to signal another.