Thin Night
Die Dünne Nacht
A Frett Ferret novella
Once a year, on a date nobody agrees on, the Drift keeps Thin Night. The lights go down to half. One inner door is left ajar, never locked. Sugar is boiled so the dead can find their way home.
On Kettle Station, where water costs more than blood and every body is worth sixty litres to the Concord, Captain Frett Ferret has business with one of the dead.
Contents
- I. Thin Night
- II. Ottoline Bask
- III. The Reclamation Office
- IV. The Wrong Casket
- V. Sugar
- VI. Accounts Receivable
- VII. The Renderer
- VIII. What She Kept
- IX. Settling Up
- X. Two Tickets
I. Thin Night
Pell is boiling sugar again.
I can smell it from here, through two bulkheads and the galley hatch, which she has left open, as the custom requires. It is a brown smell, sweet at the front and burnt at the back, and it has got into everything: the deck grating, the seat covers, the pages of this notebook, the inside of my coat. If you have ever been aboard the Rattling Lark you will know it already. People who have never met me know it. A harbourmaster on Halberd Reach once identified the Lark in the dark, with her transponder off, by sniffing the air in his own docking ring an hour after we had left it. He told the magistrate it smelt like a sweetshop on fire. The magistrate, who had eaten in some of the same places I have, knew exactly what he meant.
It is Thin Night. Out here in the Drift we keep it once a year, on a date nobody agrees on, and everybody keeps it anyway. Each station has its own reckoning. On Kettle Station it falls at the end of the cold shift in the tenth month; on Halberd Reach it falls whenever the magistrates are out of town; on the Lark it falls whenever Pell says it does, which this year is tonight. Nobody remembers where the custom came from. The old people say it comes from the old system, from the drowned days, when there were still seasons and the dead were put into the ground instead of into the water tanks. They say there was a night in the year when the cloth between the living and the dead wore thin, and the dead could find their way home if you gave them something to find it by.
I do not know what that means. I have never seen the cloth. I have seen a great many dead, and none of them has ever come home, and the ones I would have liked to see again have been the most reliable about staying away. But I keep the night all the same, the way you keep a promise somebody else made on your behalf. We dim the lights to half. We leave one inner door open, never a lock; the dead, Pell says, have had enough of locks. And we boil sugar, because the dead have no eyes but they still have appetites, and the smell of something sweet burning is the oldest lamp there is.
That, at least, is the theory. In practice it means that once a year the Lark smells even more strongly of the thing she always smells of, and Ivo complains about the filters, and Doc reads aloud from a book of Concord funeral customs to anyone who will listen, which is no one, and I sit in the navigation alcove with the lights down and find that I am thinking about Ottoline Bask.
The mind is a curious thing. I do not mean anything clever by that. I mean that it keeps things in places you did not choose, and gives them back when you did not ask. A smell, a song in a bar, the particular tick of a cooling hull, and there you are, somewhere you left years ago.
I have not thought about Ottoline Bask in months. She died eight years ago, on Kettle Station, in her laundry, at an age nobody knew and she would not have told them. I was not there. I was three systems away, taking a Concord grain barge off the hands of a crew who had been very kind about it, and the news reached me nine days late, by way of a bar, a drunk and a message that had been forwarded so many times it had picked up three other people’s debts on the way.
The message said that Ottoline Bask, laundress, of Ring Four, Kettle Station, was deceased. It said that her effects were unclaimed. And it said, in the flat green type that the Concord uses for anything it intends to take, that her remains had been sealed and assigned to the Concord Reclamation Office of Kettle Station, for processing in the ordinary way.
There was something else attached to it. The station medic, who had been paid in advance, as everybody who ever did anything for Ottoline Bask was paid in advance, had photographed a laundry ticket and sent it on with the notice. It was in her square hand, gone shaky at the end of the lines, and it said:
I am to be buried with your boots. You never came to collect them.
I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, because I have spent a good deal of my life around Mother Abacus and the habit is catching. Then I went back to the Lark and told the crew we were going to Kettle Station to collect a pair of boots. Since the boots were in a sealed Concord casket, along with the woman who had kept them for me, this came to the same thing as stealing a corpse, and the crew, who are not stupid, worked that out before I had finished the sentence.
You will want to know why. Everyone does. I have been asked it in bars and in courtrooms and once, memorably, by a Concord quartermaster with my pistol in her ear. I have three answers, and I have given all three, and all three are true, which is the trouble with answers.
The first is that Ottoline Bask had laundered a good deal more than linen in her time, and that in all the years I knew her she never once said anything that meant only one thing. A woman who has spent fifty years washing other people’s money does not die without some of it about her, and she does not send a message across three systems about a pair of children’s boots unless the boots are worth the postage. A key in a heel, I thought. A map in the soles. A number stitched into the tongue. I am a pirate. I have never pretended otherwise. A sealed box with a fortune in it, an owner who no longer needs it, and a note with my name on it is, to my way of thinking, very nearly an invitation.
The second is that Kettle Station has never had enough water, and that the Concord Reclamation Office does not render its dead for Kettle. It renders them for the Concord. Every body that goes through that office comes out as so much clean water and so many useful salts, and the water goes into a Concord tender and away down the lane to Halberd Reach, where the Concord keeps its depot, and is never seen on Kettle again. The station gives the Concord its dead, and nothing comes back. It was not always so. Before the Concord came, Kettle rendered its own dead, for Kettle, and nobody thought it strange; on a station that poor, you give back what you borrowed. The old people on Ring Four still lift a cup of water a little before they drink it, to whoever was in it before them. I did not see why Ottoline Bask should end up in a Concord depot on Halberd Reach, where nobody would say anything over her at all.
The third is that she asked me to. Once, when I was small, sitting on a folded pile of tablecloths in the steam of her laundry, she told me that when she died she wanted to be given to the dark, the old way, out of a lock and towards a star, and not poured into anybody’s tank. I have been wet my whole life, she said. I should like to be dry for a while. I do not think she ever said it again. I do not think she imagined I would remember. But the dark had raised me, after she stopped, and it seemed to me that if she wanted to go to it, I knew the way, and I knew it would have her.
So: greed, thrift and love. I have arranged them in that order because that is the order in which people stop believing me. You may choose whichever you like. I have never been able to decide, and I was there.
What I can tell you is what happened, and what happened went wrong so thoroughly, from start to finish, that you could almost mistake it for a plan.
II. Ottoline Bask
Kettle Station is five rings of rusted habitat strung on a spine, turning slowly beside a gas giant that nobody has ever bothered to name. On Kettle it is simply the giant, and nobody has ever needed to call it anything else. Ring One is the Concord annex: a customs shed, a relay office, a chapel nobody uses and the Reclamation Office, which everybody does, eventually. Rings Two and Three are docks and bars. Ring Five is where the money lives, insofar as money lives anywhere on Kettle. And Ring Four, which is the hottest and the dampest and has the lowest ceilings, is where the laundries are.
There were eleven of them when I was a child. Ottoline Bask’s was the last one before the spine, at the end of a corridor that was permanently wet underfoot and permanently warm, so that the steam from her coppers met you halfway down and walked the rest of the way with you. Her sign said BASK – LAUNDRY – ALL STAINS. It had said that for forty years, and in forty years nobody on Kettle had ever asked her to prove it.
I arrived there, she always said, in a bundle of washing. That is the whole of what I know about how I arrived anywhere. Somebody handed a sack of linen across her counter at the end of a long shift, took the ticket, and never came back to collect it, and when she opened the sack I was inside, asleep on a pile of tablecloths with a pair of boots on my feet that were already too small. She did not tell me who had brought the sack. I do not think she knew. I am fairly sure that if she had known she would have gone round and had a word with them, and I am fairly sure the word would not have been thank you.
Uncollected, she wrote on the ticket, and pinned it to the wall above the mangle, and I grew up underneath it.
She was not a kind woman, exactly. She was a fair one, which on Kettle is rarer. She was tall and bony and grey from the time I first remember her, with forearms like knotted cable from the mangle and hands that had been in hot water so long they had gone a strange smooth pink, like the inside of a shell. She smoked thin black cigarettes that she rolled from something she bought off the Gethsemane ore boats, and she let the ash fall wherever it fell, because, she said, she was in the business of getting things clean and saw no point in competing with herself.
She washed everything. Tablecloths from the Ring Five eating houses. Overalls from the docks, stiff with lubricant and worse. Bandages from the station medic, which she boiled twice and charged for three times. Uniforms from the Concord annex, which she washed with a particular care and a particular expression, the way you might handle the clothes of a man who will one day sit in judgement on you.
And she washed other things.
I did not understand, at first, why so many people came to the laundry carrying nothing at all. They would come to the counter with their hands empty and talk to her quietly for a long time, and go away, and a few days later someone else would come with a parcel and leave without one. Ship’s papers came in dirty and went out clean. Money came in at the back door and went into her books as washing: tablecloths that had never been stained, uniforms nobody had worn, a great many shirts. Every coin of it went into her ledger as washing done and paid for, and once it had paid its tax it was hers, as honest as any money on Kettle, to spend as she liked. What she liked, as a rule, was whatever the person who had brought it in had in mind, and nobody ever wrote that part down. A cargo that had been stolen from a Concord tender on the Tuesday would be, by the Friday, a cargo that a respectable firm on Halberd Reach had bought in good faith from another respectable firm, with receipts. Once, a man came in looking hunted and left looking like somebody else entirely, in a suit that had been pressed on her own press, with a name that had been pressed there too.
Everything comes clean, she told me, if you know what it’s made of.
She washed for everybody. For the smugglers on Ring Two and the honest traders on Ring Three, who were frequently the same people on different days. For the Concord clerks, discreetly. For Captain Scurvy, whom nobody else on Kettle would wash for, because of the smell and the stains and the way things he wore had of opening up again after they had been mended. She said that blood came out of anything if you were patient and the water was cold. She said lemon came out of nothing. She said he paid in advance, always, and always exactly, and never once in her hearing complained about the price, and that this made him the most frightening customer she had ever had.
I lived in that laundry until I was about eight. I learned to fold a sheet with corners you could cut yourself on. I learned to read by sorting tickets. I learned to tell, by the weight of a parcel and the way its owner did not look at it, roughly what was inside. I learned that steam hides a great many things, and that the person who controls the steam controls the room. I learned to keep my mouth shut, which nobody who has met me since will believe, but it is true, and I learned it there.
And I learned the one rule that she held above all the others, which she said to me so often that I could say it with her, in her voice, with the cigarette in the corner of the mouth:
Never deliver anything until you know who it’s for.
She meant it about parcels. She meant it, I think, about other things too. It took me a long time to understand how far she meant it, and I did not understand it fully until I was standing over her open casket in the cold hold of the Lark, eight years ago, with the lights at half and my crew pretending not to watch me.
I left when I was eight because I had to. There is no better way of putting it. A client came to the laundry who should not have come there, looking for something Ottoline had washed for somebody else, and he found me instead, alone, at the end of the shift, and what happened next is not part of this story. What is part of this story is that Ottoline came back from the drying racks at the wrong moment for him and the right one for me, with the long iron hook she used for lifting sheets out of the copper, and that afterwards she put a coat on me that belonged to neither of us and put me on an ore boat to Gethsemane with a ticket in my hand and told me not to come back to Ring Four until I was big enough to need a bigger coat.
I was barefoot. I had been in the middle of having my boots mended. She had them on her workbench, half resoled, and there was no time.
I’ll keep them for you, she said. Come and collect them.
I never did. I came back to Kettle many times over the years. I drank in the bars on Ring Two and did business on Ring Three and once robbed a moneylender on Ring Five, very politely. But I never went back down that wet warm corridor to the last laundry before the spine. I told myself it was because I was busy, or because I was wanted, or because a pirate does not go and visit the woman who brought them up as if they were a schoolchild home for the holidays. I think now it was because I did not want to stand at that counter and be handed a pair of boots that would no longer fit me, and have to hear her say so.
And then I was three systems away, taking a grain barge off a very kind crew, and she was dead, and the Concord had her.
III. The Reclamation Office
We docked on Ring Two two days before Thin Night, under the name of a salvage tug that had been scrapped some years earlier and would not mind. Doc stayed aboard to sulk. For years he has been making an atlas of the Drift by its teeth, which station’s water shows in the enamel, which rations, which rocks, so that the nameless dead can at least be told where they came from; and I had told him he could look at whatever we brought back, but not take a sample. The twins stayed aboard to clear the aft hold, which I had told them we would need cold. Pell came with me as far as the spine lift and then went to buy sugar, because she had looked at the station calendar and seen which night was coming round in two days’ time, and had gone, in her own phrase, funny about it.
“You’re bringing a dead woman aboard,” she said.
“I’m hoping to.”
“Then we’ll need a lot of sugar.”
I told her to buy what she thought was right. This was a mistake, and I record it here so that the record is complete.
Mother Abacus came with me to Ring One.
The Reclamation Office of Kettle Station is the cleanest room in the Drift. I say that as someone who grew up in a laundry. It is white, and it is cold, and it smells of nothing at all, which on Kettle is so unusual that people have been known to stop in the doorway and sniff, as though something were missing. There is a counter, a row of chairs bolted to the floor, a portrait of a Concord Assembly member nobody on Kettle has ever heard of, and a door at the back with a Concord compass rose on it and a sign that says RECLAMATION – NO ADMITTANCE, which is the only honest sign on Ring One.
Behind the counter sat Quartermaster Honoria Venn.
I had heard of her. Everyone on Kettle had. She had run the Reclamation Office for nineteen years, which on a Drift station is a geological age, and in nineteen years there had never been a complaint about her that anyone could make stick. She was small and neat and silver-haired, with a soft voice and a uniform so perfectly pressed that the creases looked structural. I knew who had pressed it. I would have known that collar anywhere. I had folded collars like it on the counter of the last laundry before the spine, with my tongue between my teeth, trying to get the points right.
“Captain Ferret,” she said, before I had opened my mouth. “How very good of you to come. Please sit down.”
I sat. Mother Abacus remained standing, with her black notebook held against her chest, because she does not sit in rooms she has not yet added up.
“I’ve come about Ottoline Bask,” I said.
“Of course you have.” Venn folded her small hands on the counter. “I was so sorry. She washed for this office for nearly forty years. She was an institution.”
“I’d like to claim her.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” She said it gently, the way a nurse tells you that the leg will have to come off. “Under the Reclamation Ordinance, the remains of any person dying on a Concord-registered station without a registered next of kin pass to the Concord, for the common good. Mrs Bask had no registered kin. Her remains were sealed under Concord seal on the day of her death and entered for processing.”
“I was her kin.”
“Were you registered?”
I was not registered. I have never been registered anywhere, except in a number of places I would rather not discuss, and none of those registers would have helped me at that counter.
“When is she to be processed?” asked Mother Abacus.
Venn looked at her for the first time, briefly, the way you look at a tool somebody has brought into the room. “On the first shift after Thin Night,” she said.
“The Concord does not keep local observances, Captain, but the men who run the renderer are Kettle men, and they will not touch it on Thin Night for any money. So it waits.” She smiled. “Thin Night is the quietest night of our year. Nobody comes to Ring One. They’re all at home with their doors open.”
She let that sit for a moment. Then, in exactly the same soft voice, she said: “Did Mrs Bask leave you any instructions, Captain? Regarding her effects?”
There are questions you are asked because the person asking wants to know the answer, and questions you are asked because they want to know whether you know it. I had been asked the second kind by magistrates, by customs men, by Captain Scurvy and once by a duke of the Seven Wells, and I know the sound of it. Venn’s voice did not change. Her hands did not move. But she was asking whether a dead laundress had told me something, and she wanted very much to know the answer, and I could not for the life of me think what a quartermaster of the Concord could want with a pair of children’s boots.
“No,” I said. “She never told me anything.”
That was true, as far as it went. Her ticket was in my coat pocket, and it had not told me anything either. Not yet.
“Then I’m so sorry,” said Venn, “that you’ve had a wasted journey.”
We went down to Ring Four afterwards. I had not meant to. My feet took me, the way feet do on a station you grew up on, and Mother Abacus came with me without asking where we were going, which is one of the reasons I keep her.
The corridor was still wet underfoot. It was not warm any more. The coppers in the last laundry before the spine had been drained, and the steam was gone, and without the steam the room was small and grey and ordinary and smelt of cold soap. The shelves were bare. The tickets were gone from their hooks. Someone had been through the place with care, and with a list, and had taken everything that might have been anything.
“Concord inventory,” said Mother Abacus, touching a strip of green seal tape that had been left on the counter. “The same day she died.”
“The same day,” I said. “That’s quick, for the Concord.”
“It’s very quick,” she said. “It’s quicker than they are.”
Above the mangle there was a pale rectangle on the wall, the size of a laundry ticket, where something had been pinned for a very long time and was not pinned any more.
I stood and looked at that for a while. Mother Abacus wrote something in her notebook, and then, which she does not often do, crossed it out.
“Is that the child?” said somebody behind us. “Is that Ottoline’s bundle?”
It was Agathe Moll, from the laundry next door, who had been old when I was small and had not, so far as I could see, got any older since; she had simply gone on drying, like a sheet. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded and looked me up and down, and told me I had grown, and that it had not improved me, and then she sat down on Ottoline’s empty counter and told me how it had been.
Ottoline had died at the mangle, at the end of a shift, with her sleeves rolled up. Agathe had found her. She had known what to do, because Ottoline had told her, a month before, and paid her for it, in advance. The boots were to go in her hands. The ticket from the wall was to go on the laces. Agathe had done both herself, and combed her hair, and put her cigarette tin in her apron pocket, because Ottoline had not mentioned the tin and Agathe had thought she would want it.
“Then the Concord came,” she said. “That same shift. Clerks with a list, the way they do it. And the Quartermaster with them.”
“Venn came down here herself?”
“In a collar Ottoline pressed for her,” said Agathe. “Nineteen years she’s run that office, and I never once saw her on Ring Four. Not for anybody. And down she comes for a laundress, before the body’s cold.” She sniffed. “Stood there while they put the seal on, too.”
I did not know what that meant. I knew only that Honoria Venn had wanted to know whether Ottoline had told me anything, and that she had come down to Ring Four, for the first time in nineteen years, to watch a laundress sealed into a box, and that the box had my boots in it.
That night, in the Lark’s galley, with Pell’s first sacks of sugar stacked against the bulkhead like sandbags, we made the plan.
Mother Abacus had the schedule. She had bought it, with the last of my money from the grain barge, from a junior clerk in the Reclamation Office who had been very surprised to discover how much his access codes were worth. The cold store was a long chamber against the outer hull of Ring One, cooled by the vacuum outside; the caskets were kept there on racks, each with a Concord seal and a number, until the renderer took them. There were fourteen caskets in the store that week. On Thin Night, during the quiet of the last shift, the store would be manned by one warden, and the warden would be, according to the junior clerk, at home with his door open.
Ottoline Bask was number nine.
“We go in at the start of the last shift,” I said. “Ignatius takes the Lark round to the hull lock outside the cold store. Pell and I go in through the office. Number nine comes out through the hull lock and into the aft hold. We’re away before anyone opens their front door.”
“And then?” said Doc.
“And then I collect my boots.”
Mother Abacus told us that the probability of a numbered Concord casket containing the wrong body was negligible, and showed us the arithmetic, and we believed her, because her arithmetic is always right.
It was. The arithmetic was not the problem.
“What a wonderful plan, Captain,” said ANNA, from the galley speaker. “And what a moving gesture, to bring her home.”
“It’s mostly about whatever’s in the boots,” I said.
“Oh, of course,” said ANNA. “How refreshingly practical.”
“And the water.”
“A truly principled stand, Captain.”
Pell said nothing. She was sitting on her sugar sacks, looking at the station calendar on her wrist, and counting the hours to Thin Night on her fingers, the way they do on Gethsemane, starting with the thumb.
IV. The Wrong Casket
On Thin Night, Kettle Station smells of burnt sugar from end to end.
I had forgotten that. You forget the things that were simply true when you were small. But as Pell and I came up the spine lift to Ring One at the start of the last shift, it was waiting for us at every landing: that brown sweet smoke, coming out of every open door in every corridor, from a thousand little pots on a thousand little stoves, so that the whole station, five rings of rust and damp and other people’s water, smelt for one night of something that had been made on purpose.
The doors were all open. That was the other thing. On Kettle you keep your door shut and locked and wedged, as a rule, because there is very little on Kettle that does not belong to somebody else first. On Thin Night every door stands ajar, a hand’s width, no more, and you walk down corridors you have walked a hundred times and see into rooms you have never seen: a family round a table with an empty chair; an old man asleep in front of a stove; a child on the floor, very carefully stirring a pot that was bigger than her head. Nobody looked up as we passed. On Thin Night you do not look at the people in the corridors. You never know who they are.
Pell walked beside me with her rifle in a laundry bag and her lips moving. I asked her what she was saying. She said she was apologising in advance.
The junior clerk’s codes opened the Reclamation Office. The front room was dark, the portrait of the unknown Assembly member a pale smudge on the wall. The door marked NO ADMITTANCE admitted us. Behind it there was a short white corridor, a smell of nothing at all, and a second door with frost on its handle.
The cold store was long and low and lit by strips of blue light along the floor. The air hurt the inside of my nose. On either side, on racks of grey Concord steel, lay the caskets: long plain boxes of grey Concord steel, each locked, sealed with a band of green Concord tape and stencilled with a number and a name. Our breath went up in front of us and did not seem to come down again.
And at the far end of the store, kneeling on the floor beside the last rack, was the warden.
He was not at home with his door open. He was an old man in a Concord-grey coat several sizes too big for him, with a small spirit stove on the floor in front of him and a small tin pot on the stove, and he was boiling sugar. The smell of it hung over the caskets like a held breath. He looked up as we came in, and his face did not do any of the things a warden’s face is supposed to do. It only looked tired, and a little embarrassed, like a man caught praying.
“Somebody has to,” he said. “For them. Nobody else is going to.”
“That’s very decent of you,” I said. “I’m sorry about what happens next.”
Pell took his hands, very gently, and tied them with a laundry cord, and sat him down on an upturned crate with his back to the wall and his pot still bubbling in front of him, where he could keep an eye on it. He did not struggle. When she had finished he looked past her, down the racks, to where I was standing beside the casket stencilled 9 – BASK, O., and he opened his mouth.
“That’s not—”
I put my finger to my lips. I am not proud of this. He was an old man boiling sugar for the dead, and he was trying to tell me something, and I did not stop to hear it. I had come a long way to steal that box, and I had its name in front of me in Concord stencil.
He closed his mouth. He looked at me for a moment longer, with something that might have been pity. Then he went back to his sugar.
There was no looking inside, not there. A Concord casket opens for the renderer and for nothing else; that is the whole point of it. You take it as it is, and you trust the stencil.
The hull lock at the end of the store was meant for the tenders, and it was big enough for a casket on a trolley and two pirates walking behind it. Ignatius had brought the Lark round to it as sweetly as a key into a lock; when the inner door opened, her own hatch was already there, a metre away across the seal, with Ivo standing in it in his shirtsleeves and his breath smoking.
“Is that her?” he said.
“That’s her.”
We wheeled number nine across. Ivo took the head end and I took the foot, and it was heavier than I had expected, and I thought, absurdly, that she had always been heavier than she looked, all that bone and cable, and that it would be like her to make the last lift difficult. We got it down the ramp and into the aft hold, where the twins had already opened the vents to the dark and frost was forming on the bulkheads in long feathers. Behind us, Pell closed the station lock and then our own, and I heard Ignatius, up front, ease the Lark off the hull of Ring One with no more noise than a door closing in another room.
We were away before anyone opened their front door. Or rather, we were away while everyone’s front door was already open, which on Thin Night amounts to the same thing.
Doc was waiting in the aft hold in his heaviest coat, with his reading glasses on his nose and his instrument case open on a crate.
“You said I could look at the teeth,” he said.
“Go on, then.”
It was not as simple as that. The lock in the lid of a Concord casket answers to the intake of a Concord renderer and to nothing else, and certainly to nothing we had aboard. Ivo got through it in the end, kneeling on the frosty deck with the hot cutter hissing and his breath smoking, and it took him the better part of an hour, and none of us left the hold. When the lock gave, he and Pell lifted the lid between them and set it against the bulkhead.
It was a man.
A man of forty or so, with a broad, weathered face, a beard that had gone on growing a little after he stopped, and an old scar through one eyebrow. I had never seen him in my life. I stood in the frost and the smell of sugar that had followed us aboard on our coats and looked at him for a long time, as if he might turn into somebody else if I waited.
Doc bent over him all the same, with his little mirror and his little light, because a man’s teeth will tell you where he grew up when nobody else will. When he straightened up he took his glasses off and polished them on his coat, which is what Doc does instead of swearing.
“Ore-boat rations,” he said. “You can see it in the enamel, the hungry years, here and here. Gethsemane Belt, I’d say. Possibly one of the inner platforms.”
Pell had come up beside me. She leaned over the casket and turned back the edge of the shroud at the neck. There was a tag there, a little card on a string, the kind the station medic ties to a wrist. She read it and her face went very still.
“Dunne,” she said. “J. Dunne. Ice docks, Ring Two.”
She did not take her hand away. She left it there, on the shroud, on the chest of a man she had never met, who had grown up hungry on the same rocks as she had.
“She moved them,” I said. My voice did not sound like mine. “Venn. She changed the stencils. She never meant Ottoline to go through the cold store at all. She put somebody else in number nine to keep the count right, and kept Ottoline somewhere she could get at her.”
“We have to take him back,” said Doc.
“We can’t take him back. By now that old man’s untied himself and gone to fetch someone, or his pot’s boiled dry and set off the alarms, and either way there’ll be wardens all over that store before the shift is out.”
There was a silence in the aft hold. Frost ticked on the bulkheads. Somewhere forward, in the galley, a pot was beginning to boil.
“Then he’s ours,” said Pell. She took her hand off the shroud at last and wiped it on her trousers, slowly, as if it had something on it that she did not want to rub off. “Tonight he’s ours. And it’s Thin Night, Frett. And we haven’t got nearly enough sugar.”
V. Sugar
I should explain about Pell and Thin Night.
On the mining platforms of the Gethsemane Belt, where she was born, they keep the night harder than anywhere else in the Drift. The platforms lose people every year: to the rock, to the cold, to the ore boats that do not come back. There is not a family on Gethsemane without an empty chair. So on Thin Night every platform boils sugar, every single cabin, all through the shift and into the next, until the corridors are blue with smoke and the scrubbers give up, and the children are allowed to stay awake as long as they like and are told that if they hear a knock on the open door they must on no account look round.
Pell left Gethsemane at fourteen in an ore pod and has never been back. But she keeps Thin Night the Gethsemane way. Most years, on the Lark, this means one pot on the galley stove, a great deal of smoke, and Pell sitting up all night beside it singing under her breath, and the rest of us leaving her to it.
That year she had a dead man from Gethsemane in the aft hold, a dead woman from Kettle still somewhere on Ring One, waiting for us to come back for her, and four sacks of sugar.
She used every pot we owned. She used the big stew pot and the little milk pan and the coffee can. She used the welding crucible from the engine room, which Ivo noticed only when it was already full and hissing. She used, finally, the copper boiler the twins kept for degreasing drive parts, a great dented thing the size of a child’s bath that took two of them to lift, and she set it on the galley’s main ring with the burner turned all the way up and poured the third sack into it and stood over it with a ladle, stirring, her face shining in the heat.
“Pell,” said Doc, from the galley hatch, with his collar over his nose. “That is enough sugar for a regiment of the dead.”
“He’s a long way from home,” said Pell, without turning round. “He needs to be able to find it. And she’s coming, isn’t she, Frett? We’re going back for her?”
“We’re going back for her.”
“Then that’s two of them.” She stirred. “Two of them, on Thin Night, on one ship. On Gethsemane you’d have the whole platform round.”
I did not argue with her. I have learned, over the years, which of Pell’s instincts to argue with, and Thin Night is not one of them. I went forward to the bridge, where Ivo was standing behind Ignatius at the console, watching the long-range plot with his arms folded.
“Traffic control’s waking up,” said Ivo. “There’s a warden cutter coming off Ring One. Not fast. Looking.”
“Looking for us?”
“Looking for somebody.” He nodded at the screen. “If we sit here we’re the only thing in the sky that isn’t a rock or a tender. We should go round the other side of the gas giant and be a rock for a while.”
“Do it.”
Ignatius put his hand on the throttle and looked at me. I nodded. And he gave the Lark everything she had, all at once, the way he always does, because Ignatius does not believe in warning people.
I do not know exactly what happened in the galley in the next few seconds. Nobody does. Pell says the boiler walked. Doc, who was in the hatch, says it did not walk so much as leave. What is certain is that a copper boiler the size of a child’s bath, full to the brim with molten sugar at a temperature I do not like to think about, slid off the galley ring under a sudden burn and went over on the deck.
Pell was fast enough. Pell is always fast enough; it is why she is the gunner. She went one way and the sugar went the other, in a long, brown, smoking tide across the galley floor, and the galley floor on the Lark is not a floor but a grating, laid over the cable runs and the air ducts and the main filter intakes, and the sugar did what anything hot and liquid does when you pour it on a grating. It went through.
It went through the grating and into the cable runs. It went into the ducts and along them, aft and down, following the draught of the scrubbers. It went into the filters and the filter housings and the space between the deck plates and the hull, and there it cooled, and there it set, brown and glassy and hard as varnish, in places that could not be reached without taking the ship apart.
The twins tried. Over the following year they took up every deck plate on the galley level and half of those on the level below. They chipped and scraped and steamed and swore, Ivo out loud and Ignatius in sign. They got out most of it. They did not get out all of it. There is sugar in the Lark still, under the floors and in the ducts and in the long dark of the air system where no one has been since she was built, and every time the scrubbers run hot it warms, very slightly, and the whole ship breathes it out.
That is why the Lark smells of sugar. Pell says it is her fault. I have always said it is Ignatius’s, for the burn. Ignatius has never said anything about it at all, but on Thin Night he always makes the first cup of tea, which on the Lark is as close as anyone comes to an apology.
We gave Jory Dunne to the dark an hour later, in the lee of the gas giant, with the galley still smoking and the ship already smelling the way she would smell for the rest of her life.
I did not know then that he had anyone. I want that on the record, before the rest. I knew his name from a card on a string, and I knew from Doc that he had been hungry as a child, and I knew from Pell’s face that he was one of hers. I did not know he had a widow on Ring Two, or that she had been to the Reclamation Office every day for weeks asking for him, or that I was about to give away the only thing of his she had left to ask for. I knew only that he was in my hold on Thin Night, that I could not give him back, and that it seemed wrong to keep him in a box among the drive spares until I had decided what he was for.
So we did it properly. Mother Abacus wrote him into the Lark’s log, in her own hand, with the date and the time and the place and the words carried aboard in error, and drew her line under it. The twins moved the casket to the aft lock. Pell stood at the inner door with a pan of what sugar she had saved, still smoking, so that he would have the smell of it to go by. Doc took off his hat.
And I said a few words. I do not remember them exactly. I said that I was sorry we had not been who he was waiting for. I said that he was a long way from Gethsemane, and that the dark out here was the same dark that was out there, so he would not be among strangers. I said I hoped somebody somewhere was boiling sugar for him, and that if they were not, we were.
Then Ivo cycled the lock, and the casket went out, and turned once, slowly, catching the light of the gas giant on its grey side, and was gone.
It was past midnight by then, and in the way the twins have, the voice had changed hands. When Ignatius put the Lark back to full burn to take us round the far side of the gas giant, it was Ignatius who was talking, and Ivo who was silent, standing at the galley whiteboard with a marker in his hand.
And as the drive came up to full, somewhere aft, deep in the spine between the coolant manifold and the gravity plate, something knocked.
Once. Then again. Steady and unhurried, three times and then a pause and then three times more, like someone at a door who has been told they are expected and does not want to seem impatient.
We all stopped where we were. Doc with his hat still in his hand. Pell with her empty pan. Mother Abacus with her pencil halfway to her teeth.
“What is that?” I said.
Ignatius listened for a long moment with his head on one side.
“It’s the ship,” he said at last. “It’s her soul. Trying to get out.”
Behind him, without a word, Ivo uncapped the marker and wrote on the whiteboard, in his small neat capitals:
OR SOMEONE TRYING TO GET IN.
Nobody rubbed it off. It was still there in the morning, and it is still there tonight, faded to a grey ghost of itself, behind the galley hatch that Pell has left open, as the custom requires.
VI. Accounts Receivable
Quartermaster Venn called us at breakfast.
She did not use the warden channel, or the station band, or anything that a traffic controller with time on their hands might listen to. She used a narrow Concord relay that I did not know the Lark could receive and that ANNA, when I asked her afterwards, said she had been receiving all along and had not thought to mention because nobody had asked. The screen in the galley lit up, and there was Venn, at her white counter, in her perfect collar, with a cup of something steaming at her elbow, looking as though she had slept well.
“Good morning, Captain Ferret,” she said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you. I wonder if you’d mind telling me where number nine is.”
The galley still smelt like the inside of a burnt cake. Ivo was on his back under the stove with a scraper. Pell was asleep at the table with her head on her arms.
“Number nine,” I said, “was not who it said it was.”
“No,” Venn agreed pleasantly. “I’m afraid that was rather the point. Where is he?”
“Gone.”
There was a very small pause.
“Gone where, Captain?”
“To the dark. Last night. We did it properly.”
I watched her face. I have watched a great many faces at the moment when they learn that a thing they were counting on is no longer available to be counted, and most of them do something: a flush, a twitch, a tightening around the mouth. Venn’s did nothing at all. It was the stillest face I have ever seen on a living person, and I have since seen some very still faces indeed.
“How very sentimental,” she said at last. “I wouldn’t have thought it of you.” She lifted her cup, and drank, and set it down. “Well. Mr Dunne was of no particular consequence. A labourer on contract to the Concord ice docks, killed in an accident on Concord premises, and therefore Concord property. His water would have gone where all the others go. You’ve robbed the Concord of perhaps sixty litres of water, and his widow of whatever she imagined she was going to get out of the appeals process, which was nothing. I shan’t lose any sleep. But you have also caused an incident in my office, Captain, on my night, with my warden tied to a crate. And incidents are logged. They go to Halberd Reach. And Halberd Reach, in its wisdom, sends auditors.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m sure you are.” She folded her hands. “So let us be practical, you and I, as Mrs Bask always was. The auditor arrives in four days, and until he has been through my cold store, nothing in it goes into the renderer. Concord rules. In the meantime I have sworn out a warrant for the theft of reclaimable mass, which is a Concord offence, and for docking under a false registry, which is another, and both are on their way to Halberd Reach with your description, which is already rather well known there. I tell you so only out of courtesy to Mrs Bask, who was always very particular about giving notice. The wardens will have your description by the end of the shift. If I were you, Captain, I should be a long way from Kettle by then.” She smiled. “Go and steal something that isn’t dead.”
The screen went dark.
Mother Abacus, who had been sitting in the corner of the galley throughout with her notebook open on her knee, did not look up.
“She came down to Ring Four herself,” she said. “She went through the back room on her own. And now she wants you off the station by the end of the shift.” She turned a page. “She found something in that laundry, Frett. Something she couldn’t carry past her own clerks. And there was only one thing leaving that room that nobody was going to open.”
“The casket.”
“The casket.”
“Then why hasn’t she taken it out again? It’s her office.”
Doc answered. He had been reading the Concord funeral book again; he could not leave it alone. “Because she can’t,” he said. “You saw what it took Ivo to get into one. A Concord casket only opens at the renderer. There’s a hood over the belt, just short of the mouth, that unlocks the lid and lifts it, so the crew can check who’s inside before the tipper takes them. Then the empty box goes back to the cold store for the next one. The rest is an embalmer’s work done backwards. The tipper lays them in the chamber, the machine puts its needles in and draws out everything wet, cleans it and stills it till it’s fit to drink, and then cooks what’s left dry. It takes all night, and once the chamber’s shut, it stays shut till the cycle’s done.”
“So she needs the renderer hall to herself,” said Mother Abacus. “Run the belt as far as the hood. Let it open the lid. Take what she put in, and stop the belt before the tipper. The renderer crew are Kettle men, and they don’t work on Thin Night. Nobody does. That was her night, Frett. Until we came.”
“Why not just render the lot?”
“Because every litre that comes out of that machine is metered,” said Doc, “and goes on the tender’s manifest. She can’t have sixty litres turn up that nobody went in for.”
“And she’ll report Ottoline stolen,” said Mother Abacus. “You took one casket. Who on Kettle will believe you didn’t take two? Once she has what she wants, she can put the rest out of a lock, and nobody will ever look for it. Nobody is looking for Ottoline Bask any more, Frett. Except us.”
“And she has four days to do it.”
I went back to Kettle that afternoon, alone, in the Lark’s little boat, with my coat collar up and my hair under a dock worker’s cap, because I wanted to know where Venn had put Ottoline, and because, I told myself, the bars on Ring Two are where you find out things on Kettle. Both of those things were true. It was also true that I wanted to find out who J. Dunne had been, and that I did not tell the crew so.
I found out quickly. On Kettle you always do. The first bar I tried had a jar on the counter with a scrawled card propped against it, FOR HESPER & THE KIDS – JORY, and a few coins in the bottom. The barman told me where she lived without my having to buy anything, which on Kettle is a sign of real feeling.
She lived in two rooms at the dock end of Ring Two, above a chandlery, with the door still open a hand’s width from the night before. I knocked anyway.
Hesper Dunne was a broad, square woman about my height, with Gethsemane in her vowels and her hair cut short with what looked like a cargo knife. Behind her, in the second room, two children were sitting very quietly on a bunk, watching a cartoon on a cracked screen with the sound turned off. There was a pot on the stove. It was cold, and there was a crust of burnt sugar in the bottom of it.
“I know who you are,” she said, before I could speak. “Tibor told me. The old warden. He came round this morning with his hands still marked from the cord.” She did not move out of the doorway. “He said a pirate with a long coat took the box marked Bask, and that it wasn’t Bask in it. He said it was Jory.”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
I have been asked a great many hard questions in my life, by a great many people who were armed. I have never been asked one harder than that, by someone who was not.
I told her. I told her all of it: the wrong stencil, the teeth, Pell’s sugar, the lee of the gas giant, the words. I told her he had gone out properly, with the smell of home to go by. I thought, I suppose, that it would be some comfort. I had not understood yet what a body is worth on Ring Two.
She listened to the end without interrupting. Then she hit me. Not hard; she was too tired to hit hard. An open hand, across the face, the way you might slap a child who has done something stupid that cannot be undone.
“Four weeks,” she said. “Four weeks I’ve been at that office. Every day. Filling in their forms. He died on their dock, so he’s their property, that’s what she says, the quartermaster, in that nice soft voice. But there’s an appeal. There’s a widows’ appeal, for contract deaths. If you win it they give you back the water. Not him. Just the water. Sixty litres, near enough.” She pointed past me, at the bunk, at the two children not looking at us. “That’s what Jory was, at the end. Sixty litres of water for those two. That was all he had left to give them. And you gave it to the dark. Because it was a nice idea. Because you had a sentimental night.”
I had no answer. I have thought about it for eight years and I still do not have one. There are things you do that are right in every way except the one that matters to the person standing in front of you.
“I’ll make it good,” I said.
“How? Are you going to go out there and fetch him?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ll make it good. Every litre. You have my word.”
She laughed. It was not a nice laugh, but it was not entirely a cruel one either.
“A pirate’s word,” she said.
“It’s the only kind I’ve got.”
She looked at me for a long time. Then she looked at the cold pot on the stove, and the crust of sugar in the bottom of it, and something in her face gave very slightly, the way ice gives before it breaks.
“You’re going back in there,” she said. “For the Bask woman. Aren’t you.”
“Yes.”
“Then you’d better know what Tibor told me. The one he wasn’t going to tell the quartermaster.” She leaned against the door frame. “The Bask box was never in the cold store. Venn had it moved the same day it came in, before the stencils were even dry, to a locker of her own behind the renderer. Concord store, she calls it. Nobody’s allowed in but her. Tibor says she goes in there at the end of every shift and stands. Just stands. Looking at it.”
“Why would he tell you that?”
“Because he’s from Gethsemane too,” said Hesper Dunne. “And because he thought you might come back. He said you looked like the sort who doesn’t turn back.”
She shut the door. Not all the way. A hand’s width. It was still Thin Night on Ring Two, for another few hours, and on Gethsemane they keep it to the end.
VII. The Renderer
We did not know which night Venn would choose. Mother Abacus worked it out by watching the lights.
The Reclamation Office’s renderer draws its power from the Ring One grid, and a machine that draws every drop out of a body and makes it fit to drink draws a great deal of it. When it warms up, every lamp on Ring One dims, very slightly, for about a quarter of an hour, and anyone who has lived on Kettle long enough knows what it means and stops talking for a moment. Mother Abacus put a sensor on the Lark’s little boat, parked the boat against the outside of Ring One with its nose to a power conduit, and sat in it for two days with her notebook, writing down the grid.
On the third night, at the start of the last shift, the lights on Ring One dimmed.
“She’s doing it tonight,” said Mother Abacus over the link. “Before the auditor. Before anyone expects her.”
“Of course she is,” I said. “How long have we got?”
“A quarter of an hour for the renderer to warm. Then the hood opens her.” A pause; the scratch of a pencil. “Go now, Frett.”
Tibor was waiting for us at the service door behind the chapel nobody uses. He had a new rope burn on each wrist and an expression of great resolve, and he did not say anything, only opened the door and pointed down the narrow corridor beyond it and then stood aside, the way he might have stood aside for a funeral. Pell touched his shoulder as she went past. I did not. I owed him an apology and I did not want to pay it in a hurry.
The renderer hall was hot. That was the first thing. After the cold store I had expected cold, but the renderer’s drying chamber runs as hot as an oven, and the hall around it was close and humming and dim, lit red by the inspection ports along the machine’s great curved flank. It filled most of the space: a long, low, rounded thing like a boiler laid on its side, with a conveyor running into its mouth, and over the conveyor, a few metres short of the mouth, the hood: a heavy steel thing on pistons that comes down on each casket as it arrives, unlocks it, and lifts the lid. Along the back wall was a line of lockers, Concord grey, and one of them, the largest, stood open.
And at the control desk beside the conveyor, with her hand on the feed and a grey steel casket waiting on the belt, stood Quartermaster Honoria Venn.
She was not in uniform. I had never thought of her as owning anything else. She was wearing a plain dark coat and soft shoes, the clothes of a woman who intends to be in a place nobody will see her. The casket had not yet reached the hood. On the desk at her elbow lay a Concord pistol, a small neat one, as neat as her collar.
She looked up, and her face did nothing at all.
“Captain Ferret,” she said. “I did tell you to be a long way from Kettle.”
“I came for my boots.”
“Did you.” She took her hand off the feed. Her eyes went past me, to the far door, and for the first time since I had known her, something moved in her face.
“Ferret,” said a voice behind me, wet and pleased. “And Miss Quint. On a weeknight.”
Captain Scurvy had come in through the far door with two of his men at his back and a lemon in his hand. He did not seem surprised to see any of us. He never did. He bit into the lemon, skin and all, and looked at the casket on the belt, and at Venn.
“Quartermaster,” he said. “I did wonder who else would come. She had a lot of customers, our Ottoline.” He came a few steps closer. “She was holding something of mine. Thirty years she washed for me, and never once let me down. The week before she died she sent word that she had something ready, and would I come and collect it. Then she died, and you went down to Ring Four for the first time in your life, and sealed her up yourself.” He turned his ruined smile on me. “You understand, Ferret. You’re here for the same reason.”
“I’m here for my boots.”
“Of course you are,” said Scurvy. “And I’m here for my laundry.”
Venn looked at the four of us. Pell had her rifle up by now, and Scurvy’s men had their hands inside their coats, and I watched her do the sum. Then she put her hand back on the feed and turned it, past the stop at the hood, all the way to the end.
The belt began to move.
“Then none of us has it,” she said.
Sixty litres that nobody had gone in for would take some explaining. She had decided, I think, that it would take less explaining than we would.
The mouth of the renderer was perhaps eight metres away, and the inspection ports along its side had gone from red to orange.
Scurvy and I went for it at the same moment.
I am not going to pretend it was a good fight. Scurvy and I fought many times over the years, and some of those fights were things of beauty, of which I am still prouder than I ought to be. This was not one of them. It was hot and close and stupid, and we were both, I think, more concerned with the box than with each other, which makes for poor technique.
I got there a step ahead of him, and he put his shoulder into me, and it was like being hit by a wet sack of stones. I caught his collar as I went, and we went over together on to the conveyor belt itself, on top of the casket, and the belt carried all three of us towards the renderer at the same unhurried pace, as though nothing in particular were happening.
Pell, behind us, had found Scurvy’s two men, or they had found her. I heard the flat crack of her rifle butt against something that was not the wall, and a man’s voice saying a word they do not say on Gethsemane in front of children.
Scurvy got his knee into my ribs. I got my elbow into his face, which opened something above his eye that had not, I think, been open for some time, and he laughed through the blood and the lemon and put his hand round my throat. It was a cold hand, colder than it had any right to be in that heat, and the fingers were very strong. Six metres. The inspection ports were yellow. Somewhere inside the machine, something began to roar, softly, the way a stove roars when you turn it up.
“This is silly,” said Scurvy, quite conversationally, with his hand round my throat. “We’re both going to lose it.”
He was right. It was the one time in our long acquaintance that I agreed with him about anything at the very moment he said it. I let go of his collar. He let go of my throat. And we both, at the same time, without a word, put our hands under the casket and heaved.
It was heavy. It had always been heavy. It came off the belt at the four-metre mark and went over the side and hit the floor of the renderer hall with a sound I can still hear, and the green tape split, though the lock held. We fell after it, and lay on the hot floor, side by side, breathing, while the empty belt ran on into the mouth of the machine and the machine, finding nothing on it, roared a little louder in disappointment and then, very slowly, began to cool.
When I got up, Venn was standing at the desk with the pistol in her hand.
She had not run. I will give her that. She stood in the red light with her neat pistol levelled at the casket on the floor, or at me, or at Scurvy, it was hard to say which, and her voice was as soft as it had been at her counter.
“Step away from the box.”
I have thought since about what I did next, and I have concluded that it was the only sensible thing available to me, which is not the same as saying it was sensible.
I took two steps, quite slowly, as though I were obeying, and then I took her pistol out of her hand, the way Ottoline once taught me to take a hot iron off a careless customer, and put the muzzle of my own just under her ear.
“You wouldn’t,” she said. Her voice did not change.
“Three nights ago I tied up an old man who was boiling sugar for the dead,” I said. “I’ve been finding out since what else I would.”
Behind me I heard Scurvy laugh, wetly, for a long time.
“Oh, well done,” he said. “Oh, Ottoline would have loved that.” He wiped the blood out of his eye with his sleeve and bent, without hurrying, to pick up his half-eaten lemon from the floor. Then he looked at his two men, one of them holding his arm and the other sitting against the wall where Pell had put him, with their pistols somewhere under the belt; and at Pell’s rifle, which was pointing at the middle of him; and at the pistol in my hand. I watched him do the same sum Venn had done, and come out with a different answer. “Two guns to none,” he said. “I can count, Ferret, whatever they say about me in the bars. Keep it for me, then. She kept it thirty years; you can manage a few weeks. I’ll come and collect.” He smiled his ruined smile. “And if you’ve found out by then who it was for, you can tell me.” He bowed to Venn, low and old-fashioned. “Quartermaster. My compliments on your coat. She did your collars beautifully, didn’t she?”
And he walked out through the far door, with his two men limping after him and Pell’s rifle following them all the way.
We did not try to kill each other that night, he and I. By our standards it was practically a picnic.
I walked Venn backwards to the tender lock, with the pistol under her ear and Pell pushing the casket behind us on a trolley she had found against the wall. Ignatius had the Lark at the lock already. He always does.
At the inner door I let her go. She stood in the red light of the cooling renderer, straightening her coat, and looked not at me but at the box.
“You don’t know what’s in it,” she said.
“No,” I said. “But I know who put it there.”
It was the first time I saw her face do anything much. A small movement at the corner of the mouth, a tightening, the face of somebody who has checked a sum twice and found it short both times. Then the lock closed between us, and Pell and I took Ottoline Bask home.
VIII. What She Kept
We opened her in the aft hold, with the vents open to the dark and frost on everything, and the lights at half, because nobody had remembered to put them back up since Thin Night and nobody wanted to be the one to do it.
The whole crew came. I had not asked them to. Ivo and Ignatius stood together by the lock, the way they stand when one of them is not sure which of them ought to speak. Mother Abacus stood at the foot of the casket with her notebook closed for once. Pell had brought a pan of sugar from the galley, a small one, and set it down on a crate, where it smoked very gently in the cold. Doc stood at the head end with his instrument case, because I had promised him a look at the teeth for his atlas.
Ivo cut through the lock with the hot cutter, as he had cut through Jory Dunne’s, and it took him as long, and nobody spoke, and then the lid lifted, and the cold came up out of the box to meet the cold in the hold, and there she was.
She was smaller than I remembered. People always are. They had laid her out in her laundry apron, the long grey one with the scorch mark at the hip where she used to lean against the copper, and Agathe Moll had put her flat black cigarette tin in the apron pocket. Her hair had been combed. Her hands, those smooth pink shell-coloured hands, were folded on her chest.
I knew her. I would have known her in the dark. But Doc bent over her all the same, with his little mirror and his little light.
“Kettle-born,” he said. “The water’s all through the enamel; you can’t mistake Ring Four for anywhere else. Old. Very old. I couldn’t tell you how old, and I’d not want to guess in front of her.” He straightened up. “Good fillings, Frett. Concord work, inner-world work. Somebody paid a great deal for that mouth, once.”
Then he did something I had never heard him do before or since. He asked if he could keep one.
I looked at him. He did not look away. He said that a tooth like that, with that much Ring Four in it and that much inner-world gold, was exactly what his atlas was missing, and that he would not ask for anything else. I said yes.
He took it very gently, a small one at the back, and wrapped it in a twist of paper and put it in his breast pocket, and stood back from the casket with his hand over the pocket.
Then I looked at her hands again. Under them, held against her as if she had been about to hand them across a counter, was a pair of children’s boots.
They were small. They had been small for me when I was eight. They had been resoled, properly, with good Gethsemane rubber, and the uppers had been cleaned and oiled and polished until the old leather shone, and new laces had been put in, and tied, and the ends of the laces had been trimmed square. And on one of the laces, on a loop of string, was a laundry ticket.
It was the ticket from the wall above the mangle. I knew it before I read it. I had grown up underneath it. It had gone yellow and soft and the pin had left a rusty hole in the top, and under the old word in her square hand, Uncollected, there was a second line, newer, in a hand that had begun to shake:
FERRET. Boots, child’s, one pair. Mended. Ready.
I did not say anything. Nobody said anything. Pell’s sugar smoked on its crate. Somewhere aft, very faintly, although the drive was cold and the Lark was sitting quite still in the lee of a nameless gas giant, I thought I heard something knock, once, and stop.
I took the boots. I took them out from under her hands, which did not want to let go and then did. I have them still. They are on the console in front of me now, as I write, beside the notebook, with the ticket still on the lace.
I am going to tell you what I did next, because I have promised myself to tell the truth in this notebook, and because nobody else who was in that hold will ever tell it for me.
I took Pell’s knife and slit the sole of the left boot.
I did it quickly, before anyone could say anything, kneeling on the frosty deck with the boot across my knee. The new rubber parted cleanly. Under it was the old sole, worn through at the heel where I used to drag my foot, and under that the leather, and under the leather nothing at all. I did the right one too. Then I sat with the two boots in my lap, their soles hanging open like little mouths, and there was no map in them, and no key, and no number stitched into the tongue. There was only good Gethsemane rubber, put on carefully by somebody whose hands had begun to shake, for a child who was never going to wear it.
Nobody said anything. After a while Pell took the boots out of my hands, and the knife, and went away to the galley, and came back an hour later with both soles glued and stitched so neatly that you can barely see the seam. She has never mentioned it since. I have never thanked her. There are some things you cannot.
You never came to collect them. It had not been a clue. It had only been true.
It was Mother Abacus who brought us back to business, because somebody had to, and because she is the only one of us who can say a thing like that in a room like that and not be hated for it.
“Frett,” she said. “The Quartermaster.”
Pell and I lifted Ottoline out, very carefully, and laid her on a folded tarpaulin on the deck. She weighed almost nothing. I had carried heavier sacks of washing for her when I was seven.
Underneath her, flat against the floor of the casket where her shoulders had been, lay a packet about the size of a ledger, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with laundry string. The oilcloth was still faintly damp. It smelt of soap.
“From the copper,” said Mother Abacus.
I untied it. Inside, in a fold of waxed paper, was a stack of stiff grey documents, each the size of a page from a book, each with a green Concord seal in one corner and a column of numbers down the side and, across the top, in the flat type the Concord uses for anything it means to keep, the words KETTLE STATION – WATER WARRANT – PAYABLE TO BEARER.
I had seen one before. Everybody on Kettle has, once, the way everybody on a poor station has once seen a jewel. A water warrant is a claim on the station’s tanks: so many hundred litres, printed on the face, to whoever walks up to the tank office and hands it over. The Concord sells them to the families who first built the rings, and to its friends, and to anybody who can afford one, and on Kettle, where water only ever gets dearer, there is no safer place to keep your savings. A single warrant will keep a household for a year. And the tank office never asks the bearer’s name. For a man whose name is on every warrant of the other kind between here and Halberd Reach, and who cannot walk up to a tank office and buy a warrant in his own name like anybody else, a warrant somebody else bought for him is worth more than anything in the Drift.
Mother Abacus counted them. She did it twice, the second time with her lips moving, and wrote the total in her notebook and looked at it, and then turned the notebook face down on her knee. She has never told me the number. I have never asked. I know only that she said, very quietly, that it was more water than Ring Four drinks in a year, and that it was not her habit to exaggerate.
There was no ticket on the packet. I looked. Ottoline ticketed everything that passed through her hands, every shirt, every parcel, every child; it was the one thing she was never careless about. If there had been a ticket on that packet when she put it in the copper, somebody had taken it off.
“Whose are they?” said Doc.
“Scurvy’s, I think,” I said.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Pell’s sugar smoked on its crate. Mother Abacus turned her notebook face up again and looked at the figure she had written there, and then at me.
“And now?” she said.
“Now they’re salvage.”
I wrapped the warrants in their oilcloth and tied the string, and put them inside my coat.
IX. Settling Up
There is a moment, at the end of every job, when the shooting is over and the thing you came for is in the hold, and you discover that the job has not ended at all. It has only changed into accounts. Who is owed. Who is owed more than they know. Who will come asking. Mother Abacus says that this is the only part of piracy that resembles honest work, and that it is the reason so few pirates live to be old: they are very good at the first part and they think the second part will see to itself.
I owed Hesper Dunne sixty litres of water. I paid her in paper: one warrant out of Scurvy’s packet, which comes to a great deal more than sixty litres and was, at the time, a great deal less than he was going to miss. Nobody aboard argued. Ignatius only pointed out that the tank office never asks who a warrant came from, which is the whole beauty of the thing.
We went back to Kettle the following night, slowly, with the transponder showing a name that was not ours, and came in under Ring Two at the end of the night shift, when the docking crews are tired and the wardens are thinking about breakfast. Tibor met us at a service lock that had not been used since before he was born. He had brought a key for it and a flask of something for himself, and he told us that the Reclamation Office had been very quiet since, and that the Quartermaster had not left her rooms, and that an inspection tender from Halberd Reach was due on the next shift.
Tibor took me up to Ring Two by a way the wardens do not use, and I knocked on Hesper Dunne’s door, which was shut now, Thin Night being over.
She opened it in her dressing gown, with the children asleep behind her, and looked at me, and did not say anything. I held out the warrant. She knew what it was. Everybody on Kettle does. She did not take it.
“Is that his?” she said at last.
I told her the truth, which was that it was not. Hers had gone out of a lock, towards the star, and there was no getting it back. This was somebody else’s, who could spare it, whether he liked it or not. I said I was sorry I had not asked her first. I said I had not known there was anyone to ask.
“No,” she said. “Nobody ever does.” She took the warrant. “He used to say he’d like that. Going out to the dark. I told him it was a waste of good water.” She turned the paper over in her fingers and read the figure on its face. “This is more than sixty litres.”
“It’s what I had change for.”
She did not slap me again. She did not thank me either, and I would not have known what to do if she had. She nodded once, the way you nod to a tradesman who has done the job he was paid for, and shut the door. All the way, this time.
Honoria Venn found me on the way out.
She was waiting at the service lock, alone, in the plain coat, with no pistol, because I still had it. Tibor saw her first and went pale and then went somewhere else. She did not look at him. She looked at me, and her face was as neat as it had been the first time, every silver hair in place, but she had not slept, and her collar, for the first time since I had known her, had gone soft at the points. There was nobody on Kettle left to press it.
“Have you got them?” she said.
I could have lied. It would have been easy. I told her yes.
She nodded, once, the way you nod when a figure comes out the way you expected, and her hand went to her collar, to the edge Ottoline had pressed for nineteen years.
“Thirty years of Captain Scurvy’s money,” she said. “It went through her books as washing and came out clean, and every time there was enough of it she walked up to the tank office and bought him another warrant, perfectly legally. Did you know that? He’d have drunk this station dry a cup at a time. The Concord would have had them in the end anyway. I only meant to see that they went somewhere tidy.”
“There was no ticket on them,” I said. “She ticketed everything.”
She did not answer at once. Then she put her hand in the pocket of her coat and took out a laundry ticket, yellow and soft, with a pin-hole in the top, and held it out to me between two fingers, the way you hand a receipt to a customer you do not expect to see again.
SCURVY, A. Warrants. Ready.
“You may as well have it,” said Venn. “I can hardly put it on my list.” I put it in my pocket, with the rest of his property.
“The auditor arrives on the next shift,” she went on. “He will find two caskets reported stolen, Mr Dunne and Mrs Bask, both by you, and a warrant out for you on Halberd Reach.”
“Not all of that is true.”
She gave me a look I have seen on a great many quartermasters, and a few magistrates, and once on Mother Abacus when I asked her how she had made the Lark’s books balance in the year we lost the grain barge. “It is all on my list,” she said. “That is what makes it true.”
“And the warrants?”
“What warrants?” said Venn. “There is nothing on my list.”
She buttoned her coat. “But I imagine Captain Scurvy keeps lists of his own.”
I gave her back her pistol. I had emptied it first, and she knew I had, and checked anyway. Then she put it in her coat and walked back up the crawlway towards Ring One, without hurrying, and that was the last time I saw Honoria Venn.
It was not the last I heard of her. The auditor came and went. Some weeks later the Concord posted a new quartermaster to Kettle Station, a young man with a soft moustache who had his collars done by a machine, and Honoria Venn was transferred to a relay station a long way down the Halberd lane, where there is nobody to process and nothing to press. Whether the auditor caught her, or she asked to go, or Halberd Reach simply felt that two caskets stolen in one night was too many for one quartermaster, I have never found out. Kettle has its own theories. Kettle always does.
We gave Ottoline Bask to the dark on the way out.
I will tell you how, because people ask, and I will tell you exactly as much as I told the auditor’s clerk on Halberd Reach the following year, when he caught up with me in a bar and wanted to know, for his records, what had become of the two caskets I was supposed to have stolen.
We stood in the aft hold with the lights at half, all six of us, and Pell boiled sugar, and Doc read something from his book of Concord funeral customs that none of us understood and all of us were grateful for. We put her in her apron and her cigarette tin, and we did not put her boots in with her, because they were mine and she had kept them for me, and we put her in the lock. Ivo opened the outer door. And the Lark turned her nose towards Kettle’s star, and Ottoline went out the old way, towards the light, the way she had told me she wanted to on a pile of folded tablecloths, a very long time ago.
That is what I told the clerk. It is true.
What I did not tell him is where the Lark was lying when Ivo opened the outer door, or which way the lock faced, or how much of Kettle’s star you can see from there through the rings. I did not tell him that the service lock under Ring Two has a twin, on the inner face, that opens on to the station’s own collection funnel, where ice from the docks is fed into the reclaimers. I did not tell him that Tibor had a key for that one too.
I am not saying she went that way. I am saying that I was there, and that I know, and that I am not going to tell you.
On Ring Four, in the laundries, where they still keep Thin Night with the lights at half and the inner door ajar, they say that Ottoline Bask came home in the water. That she went into the tanks the way Kettle’s dead used to, before the Concord came, and that it was her own choice, at the last, because she had been wet her whole life and had found she did not mind it. They say you can tell her water from anybody else’s. It gets things clean.
I have heard that story told in bars on four different stations, and every time, somebody turns to me and asks whether it is true.
Greed, thrift and love. I have arranged them in that order because that is the order in which people stop believing me.
X. Two Tickets
The Lark did not go thirsty that year. Ivo filled her tanks at Kettle’s own tank office on the way out, under a name that was not ours, with a warrant that was not ours either, and the clerk did not ask, because they never do.
Scurvy came to collect, of course. He came three times, and the second time cost Pell a scar she is still rather proud of and the Penitent most of her forward plating, and the third time was the worst of the lot. But that is another story, and a longer one, and I am not going to tell it tonight.
He never got them back. I spent them over the years, the way you spend a fortune you were not expecting: on water, mostly, and on the Lark, and in bars on Ring Two, where a pirate who pays in water warrants is very popular indeed.
It is late. The lights are at half. Pell is still boiling sugar.
She has been at it since the start of the evening shift, in the copper pan that is the last thing left of the boiler that went over that night, and the smell has come up through the galley hatch and the grating and found its way into the navigation alcove, where it was in any case already, and always will be. Doc has finished his book of funeral customs and fallen asleep in the mess with the book open on his chest. Ivo has wiped everything off the whiteboard except one line in the bottom corner. Nobody aboard will touch that. Pell says rubbing them out would be as good as opening the lock, and none of us has felt like testing her. Ignatius is at the helm, keeping her steady, on the gentlest burn he knows.
The boots are on the console in front of me. I took them out of the locker this evening, the way I do every Thin Night, and untied the ticket, and read it, and tied it on again. They are far too small for me. They always were. That was never the point.
Beside them, pinned inside the back cover of this notebook, is the other ticket. SCURVY, A. Warrants. Ready. Both in her hand, both waiting for somebody to come and collect. I collected mine in the end, a great many years too late. Scurvy never did get his laundry back.
The inner door of the aft hold is standing open. Not the lock. Never the lock. Only the inner door, the one that opens on to the cold and the dark, ajar, in case anyone wants to come home.
I do not think anyone will. I have kept this night for a good many years now, and I have seen a great many dead, and none of them has ever come back, and the ones I would have liked to see again have been the most reliable about staying away. Ottoline Bask was always very reliable.
But the drive is up, and Ignatius is at the helm, and somewhere aft, in the cold, in the dark, as I write this, something knocks.
Once.
Then again.
I am going to leave the door open a little longer.
The End