Ship of Smoke and Steel (The Wells of Sorcery #1)(17)
“Duro,” the brawler’s girl wails. “Duro!” I didn’t get a good look at her earlier, but she can’t be more than thirteen. Her kizen is soaking up blood.
“I’m sorry.” Zarun looks down at her, still smiling. “There’s always one who needs a demonstration.”
“You…” The girl looks back at him, face twisted with rage and loss.
“He was your lover?” Zarun says, cocking his head.
“He’s my brother,” she spits at him. “I’m going to kill you, you rotscum, you filthy—”
“I see,” Zarun says. “And is there anything I can do to change your mind on that subject?”
The girl’s eyes are full of fury. She thinks she’s being mocked. “I will; I swear it!”
“I believe you.”
He spins, blade hand extended, then straightens up. There’s a thump as the girl’s severed head hits the wall. Her body collapses on top of her brother’s, her blood pumping across him.
The southern girl gives a little shriek, and the others all look away from the carnage. I catch Zarun looking at me, and realize I was the only one who didn’t flinch.
“This is a good lesson,” Zarun says, in a thoughtful tone. “Here on Soliton, we mean what we say. If you tell someone you’re going to kill them, be prepared for them to take it seriously.” He lets the Melos blade fade away, and barks some foreign words into the darkness above us. Ropes fall, dark shapes swarming down them. “Bind them and take them to the Butcher!”
* * *
Our hands are tied behind our backs, and we’re led out of the pit by a hidden door, escorted by at least a dozen armed people. The crew of Soliton are a mismatched bunch, drawn from every nation I’ve ever heard of and quite a few I haven’t, men and women both, all young. Perhaps half are Imperials or Jyashtani, but there are a surprisingly large number of icelings, people from the Ice Kingdoms to the north of the Central Sea. They’re all large and broad shouldered, with blond or brown hair and pale, almost colorless eyes. It’s no wonder the first Imperial explorers thought they were ice spirits. Too uncivilized to trade in Kahnzoka, they survive on whaling and piracy.
There are four of us left: the streetwalker, the boy who stinks of piss, the southern girl, and me. My wrists chafe against the scratchy rope as we walk through an endless series of corridors, the way lit by lanterns carried by the crew. It feels more like an insect warren than a ship, every surface made of metal, streaked with rust. Here and there, something grows from the walls, irregular flat discs like shelf mushrooms, but the crew hurries us onward before I can take a closer look. They seem to know where they’re going, but by the third or fourth junction I couldn’t have found my way back to the pit for all the gold in Kahnzoka.
In spite of Zarun’s brutality, I’m perversely feeling a little better than I was in the cage. Brutality I can handle. There’s still a great deal I don’t know about this ship—if it is a ship; I can’t quite believe it—but there’s some kind of society. We’re not simply going to be devoured by monsters. I’m accustomed to dealing with people who use casual violence to make their points. Naga, the rotsucker, was probably right—working my way from gutter rat to ward boss prepared me for this.
Not that it’s going to save him, when I get back to Kahnzoka. He’s going to wish that he’d done what Zarun did, and taken me seriously.
Finally, we arrive at a door, jury-rigged out of wood scraps to fit into a metal hatchway. One of the crew knocks, and it opens from the inside. The space beyond has the feel of a barracks common room, with cushions, empty wine bottles, and dirty plates scattered everywhere. Weirdly, the cushions are made of fine fabric, battered with use but clearly very expensive. Some of the plates, chipped as they are, are gold-inlaid china, finer than anything in use at Tori’s house in the Second Ward. I can see a statue of the Blessed One, his hand raised in the traditional benediction, made from silver with flashing blue stones for eyes; it would buy a tenement building in the Sixteenth Ward, and it’s being used to weigh down scraps of paper.
The crew in the room, perhaps two dozen of them, pause what they’re doing as we’re led inside. Several games seem to be in progress, cards and dice and stranger things I can’t identify. My attention, however, is drawn to the woman getting to her feet at the far end of the room.
It would be difficult for her not to draw attention. She’s an iceling, and enormous even by iceling standards, a head and a half taller than me and at least twice as broad. The way she’s dressed makes her look even bigger, swathed in rough leather and fur, with chunks of yellowing bone sewn in. The top half of a crab’s claw, too big to have come from any crab I’d ever seen, adorns each of her shoulders. Her hair is twisted into thick, greasy dreadlocks, all tied back together, and the pale skin of her face is patchy with angry red blotches. She wears a thick, square sword at her side that looks more like an enormous meat cleaver.
This, I assume, is the Butcher.
“I thought I smelled fresh meat,” she says. Her Imperial is atrociously accented, as though she were gargling rocks. She adds something in another language, and the lounging crew laugh. The sound reminds me of the baying of hounds. “Is this all they’ve brought?”
“Zarun had to put two down,” one of the women who brought us says.