Steel's Edge

Page 29

“Don’t step on those,” Miko said next to her. “That’s fisherman’s trap grass. It will burn your legs.”
They crossed the dunes and finally stepped onto the beach. In front of her, the ocean stretched, dark and menacing. To the left, the coast curved, forming a small peninsula, cutting off her view with trees. To the right, the distant turquoise lights of Kelena shimmered, like a mirage above the water.
“Three torches,” Richard said. “One in front, two in the back, about twenty feet apart.”
A “slaver” on her right slid off his horse, took three torches out of his saddlebag, ran forward, thrust the first torch into the sand, and lit it.
“It’s a dark night,” Jason said.
“Dark works for us,” Richard said.
The third torch flared into life. They waited.
The dog strayed back, the chain stretching, and licked her hand.
The dark silhouette of a brigantine slid from behind the peninsula.
* * *
GEORGE lay on his stomach atop a sand dune. A small black box rested on the sand in front of him. Below, the false slavers and their “captives” waited on the beach. In the distance, the brigantine dropped anchor. It was a Weird-style ship, with six segmented masts that rose in a semicircle from the deck, like the wings of a water bird about to take flight. The masts bore panes of gray-green sails. In the open sea, the sails melted against the sky, making the ship harder to see.
Mémère was dead. It had been six months since he’d last seen her. She had come up to visit for a week at Midwinter. He remembered her face as if he’d seen her yesterday. He remembered her smile. The scent of lavender that always floated around her. He knew that scent so well, that years later catching a whiff of it calmed him down.
When he was younger, Mémère was a constant presence in his life. He barely remembered his mother. She was a distant smudge in his memory. He recalled his father better, a large, funny man. When he was eight, he was invited to a friend’s house in the Broken. He was given a choice of movies to watch, and as he flipped through the cases, he saw a man in a leather jacket and a wide-brimmed hat, holding a whip. The title read Raiders of the Lost Ark. He’d read the description and realized that this strange man, Indiana Jones, did the same thing his father did. He hunted treasure.
He’d watched the movie twice in a row, which was probably why he was never invited back. But as he’d grown older, maturity had given him a new perspective. His father wasn’t Indiana Jones, no matter how much he wanted it to be true. His father had abandoned them when they needed him most, forcing Rose to take on all the responsibility of caring for them. There were days she’d come home so tired she could hardly move—once she even fell asleep in the kitchen while peeling potatoes.
But Mémère was always there. Her house served as their safe haven. No matter what trouble he would get into or how much Rose was mad at him, Mémère was always there with hugs, cookies, and old books. She was there the first time his magic showed itself. He was three years old. He’d been playing in the yard when he saw a squirrel. She had a bushy tail and fluffy red fur, and she didn’t seem afraid of him. She just sat on the trunk. He wanted to pet her, so he started moving closer and closer, one tiny step at a time. He was almost there; and then she fell off the trunk and died.
He’d picked up the fluffy body. He didn’t really understand death. He just knew that she wasn’t moving. He wanted her to move, but she wouldn’t. She just hung in his hands, limp, like an old toy. He remembered a feeling of stark terror. For a second he’d thought he would die too, just like the squirrel, then something pulled on him, hurting, and the squirrel turned and looked at him.
He’d dropped her and ran, across the yard and up the porch. He must’ve screamed because his grandmother had run out onto the porch and scooped him up. He’d buried his face in her shoulder, and she hugged him. A ghost of her voice fluttered from his memory: “It will be all right. It’s a gift, Georgie. Nothing to be afraid of. It’s a gift . . .”
George locked his teeth. Six months ago, he’d asked her again to move to the Weird. They had been sitting on the balcony drinking tea. She was leaving to return to the Edge later that day, and a feeling of dread had smothered him, heavy, like a wet blanket. In his mind, she looked exactly the same as she had been when he was little, but now every time she visited, he noticed incremental, alarming changes. Her hair was thinning. Her wrinkles cut deeper into her face. She seemed smaller somehow. It made him ill with worry.
“Please stay,” he asked.
“No, dear. I live in the Edge. That’s where I belong. This is very nice, but it’s not for me.”
He’d helped her get into the phaeton that morning. She’d kissed him good-bye.
He should’ve done more. He should’ve insisted. He should’ve compelled her to stay. If he really had begged, she would have. How could he have been so careless and stupid? Now she was dead. He didn’t even know how she died, if she had burned alive in that damn house . . . he closed his eyes tightly, stopping the tears from welling up.
He would have to tell Rose.
The brigantine was lowering two boats. The people on the beach waited patiently.
“We should be down there,” Jack said next to him.
But they weren’t. Of the two Mar brothers, Kaldar was the more malleable. His ethics had flexible boundaries, and he bent, if the wind was strong enough. But George had taken sword-fighting lessons from Richard over the past year. Richard was like a granite crag in a storm, immovable and resolute. The look in his eyes had told George he wouldn’t be getting his way. Not this time.
His Mirror assignment was over. George had failed. Jason Parris had identified him as an Adrianglian agent, and he’d already sent the dispatch to the Home Office. Erwin wouldn’t be pleased, but right now his handler’s disappointment was the least of George’s worries. He would watch Richard and Charlotte get on the ship; and then he and Jack would be forced to go home like good little children. Inside, he was screaming.
The boats pulled away from the vessel, speeding across the water, driven by magic-fueled motors. The magic residue slid off the propellers, turning their wake into a glowing trail of yellow-and-emerald radiance.
Small tongues of green lightning flared at the brigantine’s aft. They had a cloaking device, and they were priming it. Of course. The South Fleet of Adrianglia possessed three corsair-class vessels, five hunters, and an aerial-support dreadnought. Each carried pulverizer cannons as well as a host of other deadly toys. A fast and light civilian brigantine like this one couldn’t take more than one or two shots. Its best strategy lay in speed and in not being detected in the first place, which is where the cloaking device would come in handy.
A cloaking device was also hellishly expensive. The slave trade must’ve served them well. He ground his teeth again.
Jack bared his teeth, his voice a vicious whisper. “Stop grinding your teeth.”
“Shut up,” George whispered back.
“It bugs me.”
“Cover your ears, then.”
The crooked ribbons of magic lightning built. George opened the box he’d brought. Inside was a single glass bubble. He twisted it open, plucked out a glass lens edged with tiny metal cilia, and slid it into his eye. The lens’s delicate metal tendrils moved, searching, and locked onto his nerves. The pain shot straight into his brain, as if someone had hammered a wooden spike through his eye socket. The Mirror’s gadgets could do incredible things, but they always came with a price. He shook his head and looked up. The brigantine slid into clear, sharp focus, as though he were standing right next to it. He could see the carved sides and the slender lines of the ship’s rigging. If this brigantine followed the Adrianglian Maritime Code, the name would be near the bow.
Next to him, Jack growled. “Are we just going to lay here like idiots?”
“Yes, we are.”
Lightning dashed from the stern toward the bow, dancing over the vessel’s sides, illuminating the ship. That was the moment he was waiting for. He trailed the lightning with his gaze.
“This is wrong,” Jack said.
“We stay put.”
The green sparks illuminated the name, written in thick black letters on the bow, and faded into darkness. George sucked in his breath.
No. No, he must have read it wrong.
He waited for another flash.
“George, breathe,” Jack growled into his ear.
The lightning flashed, illuminating the letters once more. It still said the same thing. George went cold. There could be only two possibilities for this ship to be here now, and he couldn’t deal with either.
Again. He had to see it again.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Jack hissed.
The magic sparked off the boards, and he read the name again, for the third time, each letter like the stab of a sword into his gut.
George yanked the lens out of his eye. “We have to get down there.”
“You said we had to stay put.”
“And now I’m saying we have to get down there.”
He slithered backward off the dune and took off running toward the beach.
Jack caught up with him. They went to ground again just behind the “slaves.”
“Why?” Jack whispered, barely audible.
George paused for a second, weighing Jack’s right to know against his explosive temper. If Jack blew up, they would never get on that ship.
He deserved to know. Better do it now.
“Because that ship’s name is Intrepid Drayton.”
Jack recoiled. For a moment he thought it over, and then the right gears caught in his mind. He made the connection between their last name and the name of the ship. His eyes sparked with fire. “Did they kill Dad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is Dad selling slaves?”
“I don’t know.”
“He left us to rot in the Edge so he could sell slaves?” A snarl roiled through Jack’s voice.