‘Damn you, Titus… if I wanted rest I’d…’ But Balcazar had fallen asleep before he managed to complete the end of the sentence.
The home ship was an outlined speck on the taxi’s head-up display. Sometimes it seemed to Sky that the ships of the Flotilla were like the tiny islands of a small archipelago, spaced by stretches of water which nearly ensured that each island was over the horizon from its nearest neighbour. It was always night in the archipelago, too, and the fires of the islands were practically too faint to be seen except when one was close anyway. It took a leap of faith to steer away from one of those islands into the darkness, relying on the navigational systems of the taxi not to take them into oceanic waters. Mulling modes of assassination, as was his wont, Sky thought of sabotaging a taxi’s autopilot. It would have to be done just before someone he wanted to kill embarked on what they thought would be a journey to one of the other ships. It would be a simple enough matter to confuse the taxi to the point where it headed in the wrong direction entirely, sliding into blackness. Combine that with a fuel loss or life-support failure, and the possibilities were enticing indeed.
But not for him. He always accompanied Balcazar, so that particular mode was of limited value.
His mind returned to the conclave. The other Flotilla Captains had done their best not to show that they noticed Balcazar’s lapses of concentration and — at times — outright sanity, but Sky had seen the way they exchanged concerned glances across the polished mahogany gulf of the conference table, just when they imagined Sky to be looking elsewhere. It obviously troubled them immensely that one amongst their number was palpably losing his mind. Who was to say that Balcazar’s strain of madness did not lie in wait for all of them, once they reached his age? Sky, of course, did not once acknowledge that there was anything of concern in his Captain’s state of health. That would have been the gravest of disloyalties. No; what Sky had done was to maintain a poker-faced semblance of obedient solemnity in the presence of his Captain, nodding dutifully at every deranged utterance from his master, never once letting slip that he considered Balcazar as thoroughly mad as any of the other Captains feared was the case.
A loyal servant, in other words.
A reminding ping from the taxi’s console. The Santiago was looming large now, though it was still hard to see with the cabin’s interior lights on. Balcazar was snoring and drooling at the same time, a silvery stream of saliva adorning one of his epaulettes like a subtle new indication of rank.
‘Kill him,’ Clown said. ‘Go on; kill him. There’s still time.’
Clown was not really present in the taxi — Sky knew that — but he was here in some sense, his high, quavery voice seeming to come not from within Sky’s skull, but from some distance behind it.
‘I don’t want to kill him,’ Sky said, adding a silent ‘yet’ for his own benefit.
‘You know you do really. He’s in the way. He’s always been in the way. He’s a sick old man. You would really be doing him a favour by killing him now.’ Clown’s voice softened. ‘Look at him. He’s sleeping like a little baby. I expect he’s having a happy dream about his boyhood.’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘I’m Clown. Clown knows everything.’
A soft metallic voice on the console warned Sky that they were about to enter the prohibited sphere around his own ship. The taxi would shortly be seized by the automated traffic vectoring system and guided to its berth.
‘I’ve never killed anyone before,’ Sky said.
‘But you’ve often thought of it, haven’t you?’
There was no point arguing with that. Sky fantasised about killing people all the time. He thought of ways to do it to his enemies — people who had slighted him, or whom he suspected of speaking about him behind his back. Some people, it seemed to him, should be killed for no other reason than that they were weak or trustful. Aboard a ship like the Santiago, there was every opportunity to commit murder, but very little chance of doing it in a way which would avoid detection. Nonetheless Sky’s fertile imagination had brooded on this problem long enough to have thought up a dozen plausible strategies for reducing the numbers of his enemies.
But until Clown had spoken to him now, it had been enough to entertain the fantasies. Playing those gruesome little deaths over and over in his mind, slowly embroidering them, had been sufficient reward for him. Clown was right though: what was the point of drafting elaborate blueprints in painstaking detail if one at some point did not begin the business of building?
He looked at Balcazar again. So peaceful, as Clown had said.
So peaceful.
And so vulnerable.
TWENTY-THREE
It could have been worse.
I could have hit the ground without hitting the Mulch first, without first punching through two layers of festering, skeletally framed dwellings and stalls. When the car came to a stop, it was pitched nose-down in semi- darkness; faint lights and fires burned around me. I could hear raised voices, but they sounded more excited and angry than hurt, and I dared to hope that no one had been crushed by my arrival. After a few seconds I eased myself from the seat, quickly appraising my condition. I found nothing obviously broken, although everything that could have been broken was at least bruised. Then I climbed back up the length of the car, hearing the voices approach, and agitated scrabbling sounds which might have been curious children picking through the wreckage, or the noises of disturbed rats. I grabbed the weapon, checking I still had the currency I had taken from Zebra, then left the vehicle, stepping onto a precarious bamboo platform which had been neatly punctured by the car’s nose.
‘Can you hear me?’ I called, into the darkness, certain someone could. ‘I’m not your enemy. I’m not from the Canopy. These are Mendicant clothes; I’m an offworlder. I need your help very urgently. The Canopy people are trying to kill me.’
I said it in Norte. It would carry a lot more conviction than if I’d spoken Canasian, the language of the Chasm City aristocracy.
‘Put down the weapon, then, and start explaining how you came by it.’ It was a man’s voice, accented differently from the Canopy dwellers I had met. His words were imprecise, as if there was something wrong with his palette. He spoke Norte, too, but it sounded faltering, or perhaps over-precise, without the ritual elisions which come from true familiarity. He continued, ‘You arrived in a cable-car, as well. That will also require explanation.’
I could see the man now, standing on the edge of the bamboo platform. But he wasn’t a man at all.
I was looking at a pig.
He was small and pale-skinned, and he stood on his hind legs with the same awkward ease that I remembered from the other pigs. Goggles occluded his eyes, held in place by strands of leather tied around the back of his head. He wore a red poncho. In one trotter-fingered hand he held a cleaver with the kind of casual dexterity which suggested he used it professionally, and had long since ceased to be intimidated by its sharpness.
I didn’t put down the weapon; not immediately.
‘My name is Tanner Mirabel,’ I said. ‘I arrived from Sky’s Edge yesterday. I was looking for someone and wandered into the wrong part of the Mulch by mistake. I was captured by a man called Waverly and forced to take part in the Game.’
‘And you managed to escape, with a gun like that and a cable-car? Quite a trick for a newcomer, Tanner Mirabel.’ He spoke my name as if it were an oath.
‘I’m wearing Mendicant clothes,’ I said. ‘And as you’ll have noticed, my accent is that of someone from Sky’s Edge. I speak a little Canasian, if that’s easier for you.’
‘Norte is fine. We pigs aren’t as stupid as you all like to think.’ He paused. ‘Your accent got you that gun? Quite an accent, in that case.’
‘People helped me,’ I said. I was about to mention Zebra by name, then thought better of it. ‘Not everyone in
