The Automaton's Treasure

CASSANDRA ROSE CLARKE

THE AUTOMATON’S TREASURE

I sat on the deck of the
Ocean's Rose
with the only book I'd managed to shove in my trunk before I had to leave my homeland forever: an illustrated history of the Qilari swamps. It was an old book, a gift from some visiting dignitary or other who had heard about my love of the swamps. When I was a little girl, I'd been mad about them. I thought I'd outgrown the obsession, but banishment will send you wheeling back to your childhood, apparently.

I was sitting in one of the rickety wooden chairs left out for passengers, alone except for the handful of sailors scrambling in the ropes overhead. The book lay open in my lap, but I couldn't concentrate on the words. I'd read it twice on this trip already, and there was still another two months before we landed in Lisirra, the city that would serve as my prison.

A family came up on deck, shattering the peaceful, windy silence. They looked Empire, like most of the people on this ship, and they had a tottering little boy who ran up to the railing and peered over the edge, shouting about sharks. His mother joined him, saying something I couldn't make out over the wind. They were speaking the Empire tongue, which was my entire reason for eavesdropping. I'd certainly need to be fluent soon enough.

The wind picked up and turned the pages of my book, landing on a dog-eared illustration of the Qilari crocodile, mean-faced and spiky-tailed. I shut the book and settled back in my chair. The masts were silhouetted in the sun. Two sailors scurried along the tops of the sails, shouting to each other. Empire again, although a dialect I wasn't familiar with. I caught every three or four words—
ship, sight, direction. Cannons
.

Cannons? My Empire was rustier than I thought. The
Ocean's Rose
was a passenger ship, and decidedly not one for aristocrats or the wealthy. I doubted they had cannons on board.

The two sailors were joined by a third, a woman who swung in on a rope. She landed lightly on her feet, balancing herself against the top of the mast. I couldn't see her face, but she nodded her head vigorously and then swooped away again, dropping to the deck a few paces away from me and rushing off toward the captain's quarters.

The family was still standing by the railing. They'd been looking down at the sea, not up at the sky, and missed that bit of excitement.

And then an officer came on deck.

He walked over to the family first and spoke to them in a slow, hushed tone. I tilted my head toward them, trying to be inconspicuous, but I couldn't hear. The mother and father exchanged brief, worried glances; the son was still clinging to the railing. A pause. Then the mother wrapped her arm around her son's shoulders and led him away, speaking to him as she did so. I caught, “a bit of time down below—” before the officer appeared next to my chair, the chain draped around his shoulder glittering in the sun.

“Good afternoon, Lady Anaja-tu,” he said.

“That's not my name,” I snapped, more harshly than I’d intended.

He faltered. I'd confused him. “Excuse me,” he said. “My, ah, lady—”

I scowled, but I didn't correct him a second time.

“I'm afraid we'll be sailing into a storm soon. We're asking that all passengers retire belowdeck. I'll send a porter around when it's safe for you to come back up.”

“A storm?” The sky was a blank curve of blue, like the side of a flawless Saelini glass vase. “Are there even any
clouds
out?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice firm. “We have a soothsayer on board, my lady, and these storms can form without warning, this far out.”

I'd studied enough science at university to know that storms don't materialize out of an empty sky, but I didn't say anything. Perhaps magic was involved. If that was the case, then I didn't think going belowdeck would do much good, but—

I remembered the sailors shouting the word
cannon
.

“It's not a storm, is it?”

The officer gazed at me with a polite and quietly desperate expression. “I really must insist you go down below, my lady.”

I hadn't felt anything since I’d left the port at Arkuz, watching Father disappear into a point as we sailed away, and I didn't feel anything now. I stood up and tucked my book under my arm. The wind smelled of the ocean, not of rain, but I was aware of a flurry of activity in the masts overhead. Shouts of profanity and fear and protection charms.

“Fine,” I said.

I went down below. Father had arranged for a private cabin, the last gift he ever gave me. It was large enough that if I lay flat on my back my feet would touch one end and the top of my head the other, but right now it felt claustrophobic and dark despite the magic-cast lantern swinging in the corner. I pulled out my trunk and rifled through its belongings, looking for something that might work as a weapon. The closest I found was a decorative hairpin, a long silver spike topped with jeweled flowers.
She
had given it to me, a sign that she knew who I really was, a sign that she was officially in on the joke. Some joke, that got me kicked out of my homeland.

I shoved my trunk back into place, pulled down my cot, and stretched out on my back, holding the hairpin to my chest.

And waited.

The ship rocked along, as calm as always. Occasionally feet pounded overhead, and the lantern would flare and then sputter—magic working its way through the walls.

I wrapped my fingers more tightly around the hairpin, the jewels digging into my palm. I closed my eyes, whispered her name.

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

And then:

A loud, cracking
boom
.

I sat up as the boat jerked and tilted. My head slammed against the wall. Spots of light flared everywhere. The hairpin clattered to the ground, and I cried out and launched myself at the floor, feeling around for it in the murky shadows. The lantern was almost completely depleted.

Another round of cannon fire. The ship didn't move this time. My fingers closed in on the pin, and I brought it up just as the lantern failed.

Footsteps: pounding, frantic. Men screaming. Pistol shots. I sat hyperventilating in the dark, holding onto the hairpin as if it were her hand.

Cannon fire reverberated up from the floorboards. But the boat didn't jerk and shudder. We weren't hit.

The door to my cabin flew open.

I screamed, cowered back on my cot. A man stood in the doorway, a magic-cast lantern in one hand and a sword in the other.

“Oh, shut up.” He stepped inside and kicked the door closed. With his sword, he knocked down the original lantern and hung his in its place. The light was different, greenish-blue instead of white.

I shoved myself up into the corner. “Take what you want!” I shouted, kicking at my trunk. “You can have it all!” That wasn't entirely true; I'd claw his eyes out before I let him have the hairpin.

He laughed. “That ain't why we're here.” The light in the lantern brightened momentarily, and I got my first good look at him: He was tall, bony, and Jokjani, although he wore a ragged Empire jacket. He paced around the cabin as he talked, his sword out, his hand on the butt of his pistol. “Just looking to take the boat. Old one don't meet with the captain's needs.”

The cannon fire had stopped.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“What?” The pirate stopped. “Kill you? No, not unless you do something stupid. Captain don't like killing non-Confederates. That's you, sweetheart.”

I'd read enough pirate stories to know what the Confederation was. I glared at him, which just made him laugh again.

“We'll drop you off first port we come to. Starlight Rock, most like. “

“Is that in the Empire?”

The pirate looked at me for a moment and then burst into laughter. “No, girl, it ain't in the Empire. Pirates' island, and not much there but starlight and rocks. Hence the name.” He gave a little flourish as he said that last part, but my body felt like it'd been emptied out. Some abandoned pirates' island was even worse than landing in Lisirra. It was a true prison.

“You'll stay locked up in your cabin till then. Sailors got a choice of joining up or not, course. Now, if one of 'em says no—” The pirate drew a line across his throat. “Well, we drown 'em, usually, but—”

“Why are you in my room?” I didn't want to hear any more about murdering sailors.

The pirate grinned. “To keep you secure till things get settled. Ain't gonna touch you, if that's what you're worried about.”

I shuddered and drew my knees up to my chest. I didn't let go of the hairpin. The pirate tapped his sword against the side of my trunk. He looked bored.

“How long's that going to take?” I said.

“Don't go planning anything.” He looked at me. “I told you, we're gonna let you go.”

“On a
pirates' island
.”

“Better than the middle of the ocean.”

He was right, of course. I couldn't imagine them just letting us go, but it also seemed like if this pirate was to kill me, he would have done it already.

“Couple hours,” he said.

“What?”

“How long it's gonna take.” He shrugged. “Till we got the new crew sorted. And then we'll be on our way.”

He looked up at me and grinned, his face splitting into two, and the green light carved his face into shadows.

I spent the next few days locked in my cabin, just as the pirate promised. Someone brought food twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. Decent stuff: thin stews and hard little scones. I supposed they were feeding us from the ship's stores.

Different pirates would drop off the food, and I recognized most as sailors from when the ship had been a passenger liner. One of them even handed me a tin cup full of sugar-wine one evening. “Drink up, sister,” he said, lounging in the doorway, lips curled in a mocking smile. “Got another month before we get to Starlight Rock.”

Another month, and cabin fever was already crawling over my skin. They let us out once a day, in groups of three or four, to go up on deck and empty our chamber pots into the ocean. A pirate would keep his pistol trained on us the whole time, and we never got to stay out for long. But it was long enough for me to remember what the sun felt like.

Because I couldn't keep track of sunrise and sunset, I marked off meals and time spent up above in the flyleaf of my illustrated history of the swamp. Eight meals. Four times allowed on deck. Four days.

In those long stretches of time between meals and being out on deck, I lay on my cot and watched patterns of light and shadow form across the ceiling. I thought of
her
, the person I loved, the person I'd left behind, the person who'd cost me my homeland. I took all of my belongings out of my trunk and arranged them on the floor and stared at them like they were tealeaves and could tell me what the future held.

Nothing. The future held nothing.

During this fruitless exercise, I found a thin sheet of paper tucked into the bottom of the trunk. I hadn't put it there. When I unfolded it I found a list of names written in Father's neat hand.
These men can help you
, he’d written across the bottom.
Contact them when you arrive in Lisirra
.