Thora smiles at me. She has a kind face, for an iceling, ringed by stray blond curls. Like many of the northerners, she’s enormous, a full head taller than me and broader in the shoulders than most Imperial men. Among the icelings, the Butcher must count as merely oversized instead of gigantic.
“You’ve seen the rest of the ship by now. More of it than anyone else, actually, if the stories are true. The problem isn’t lack of space; it’s keeping the crabs out.” She points into the middle distance, beyond the nearest row of shacks. “See the wall?”
It takes me a moment. It’s a ramshackle thing, uniform only in its ten-foot height, made out of metal plates, pieces of crab shell, broken planks, and whatever else came to hand. At first I’d taken it for the back of another line of houses.
“That keeps the crabs out?” I ask.
“The smaller ones. The hunting packs intercept anything bigger.” She gestures at the huge square towers, arranged in a regular grid. “Originally we only defended the space between four of those, in the corner of this deck. Five years ago, the Council decided to expand the wall to nine. Someday we’ll have enough manpower to push it out again.”
“What about the Middle Deck and the Drips?”
“They’re all just corridors, so they’re easy to block off with doors and barricades. But the rooms are smaller and the ceilings are lower, so everyone would rather live up here if they can afford it.”
I smile, just a little, because it reminds me of home. The Sixteenth Ward, crammed in along the shoreline and breathing the stink of rotting fish, with the rest of the wards stacked up above it one after another, all the way up to the Imperial Ward on the breezy summit of the hill. If the Emperor could have devised a way to build the higher wards directly on top of the lower ones, no doubt it would have made things easier.
“Here we are,” Thora says. Where two streets cross, there’s a hole in the deck, and a stairway leading down. “Your pack’s quarters should be right down there; take the first left and look for a door. If you get lost, just ask around.”
“Thanks.”
She looks down at me, considering. “Zarun’s not as bad as he seems, you know.”
“Five minutes after I arrived, I watched him cut a little girl’s head off.”
Thora winces. “He can be … harsh. But he rewards loyalty with loyalty. If you prove you’re trustworthy, he’ll always back you up.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say.
“I still want to hear what happened in the Deeps,” she says. “Come find me, and I’ll buy you a drink. I suspect a lot of other people will, too.”
“I’ll take you up on that,” I say. “The story’s not as exciting as you’re probably hoping, though.” Because I’m certainly not telling them about Hagan.
“Add a few flourishes, then.” Thora smiles again. “Good luck, Deepwalker.”
The name makes my skin prickle, but I just nod cordially. Thora turns away, back toward Zarun’s quarters.
It occurs to me that, for the first time, I’m free in the “civilized” part of Soliton. No one is escorting me or dragging me anywhere or locking me in, and part of my mind urges me to run for it. Find somewhere to hide, disappear, gather information until I’m ready to make a move.
These are well-honed instincts from years on the streets, but they’re almost certainly wrong. Soliton just isn’t big enough for these kinds of tactics to be effective. The ship itself is huge, of course, but the crew here in the Stern can’t be more than a few thousand people. You can’t hide in a place like that, where everyone knows everyone else at least by reputation. It makes me feel horribly exposed, deprived of the anonymizing crowds of the city streets that I could wrap around myself like a comforting blanket.
Besides, I don’t have time to take things cautiously. And when Meroe wakes up—
As though in answer to my thoughts, a few people on the street are staring openly at me. One says something to another in a language I don’t speak, but I catch the word “Deepwalker.”
Spectacular.
I trot down the stairs, two at a time. The Middle Deck is where I was first brought to see the Butcher, I realize, a maze of metal corridors opening on to rooms of various sizes. I turn left, as instructed, and walk quickly down an empty hallway to a curtained doorway. I hesitate at the threshold; am I supposed to knock?
From inside, someone short-cuts my dilemma. “Isoka? Is that you?”
I push the curtain aside. The room is smaller than the cell we were in previously, but in much better shape, with no standing water or rotting carpets. Sleeping mats are set against one wall, a low table with cushions in the center, and a few heavy clay jars stand by the door. Other than that, it’s empty, bare metal floor and walls. I suppose Ahdron hasn’t had the time to decorate.
In the back, a doorway leads off to a smaller room, blocked by another curtain. The pack leader is nowhere in sight, but Berun is at the table and the Moron is sitting cross-legged in one corner, in much the same position he used to sit in on the little island.
“Isoka!” Berun gets up. “I heard they found you, but…”
“Yes,” I confirm wearily. “I’m still alive.”
“They told us Meroe is at Sister Cadua’s,” Berun says, anxiously. “Do you know—”
“I haven’t seen her, but I heard she’ll be all right.”
“Thank the Blessed.” He swallows. “What … what happened to your face?”
The blue marks. Rot. Time to lie.
“It’s fine,” I tell him. “I hurt myself in the fall. We found a mushroom that helped a bit, but it left these marks behind.” I offer my arm, where another line of curlicues wraps around my biceps.
“It’s … interesting,” he says. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
“Thanks.” My patience for Berun isn’t particularly strong at the moment. “Where’s Ahdron?”
“In the back. He’s taken it for his bedroom.”
I stride past Berun, and he turns to follow me, almost skipping to keep up.
“Um,” he says. “Do you know what’s going to happen to us?”
“Not yet,” I growl, and push aside the curtain.
Ahdron’s “bedroom” is just another metal space with a blanket and cushions on the floor. I suppose the sacrifices to Soliton don’t include a lot of furniture. He’s sitting with his back to the wall, a clay jug in one hand, and he grins at me as I come in.
“Isoka,” he says. “Gods be damned. Or should I call you Deepwalker now?”
“‘Isoka’ is fine,” I tell him. He looks much as he did before we left to fight the hammerhead, though his hands are wrapped in bandages. Powerburn, I assume. He really was trying to kill the thing.
“I didn’t think…” He shakes his head. “You can’t blame me for not expecting you to come back from that.”
“I wasn’t so optimistic myself, to be honest.”
I watch his eyes search my face, hesitate for a moment on the new marks, then move on. “You’re all right?”
“More or less.”
“And you want to know where we stand,” Ahdron says. He takes a pull from the clay jug. “As you can see, Pack Nine’s circumstances have improved.”
“No doubt the Butcher was grateful to you for coming home without me.”
“She would have been happy if we’d all died down there,” he says. “But since we didn’t, and since you killed the hammerhead, she’s happy to take advantage of our success. I’m not sure if she and I are entirely square”—he takes another drink, and I get a whiff of alcohol—“but we’re not on probation anymore.”
“What did you do that made her so angry, anyway?”
He shrugs. “Rutted the wrong girl. How was I supposed to know she had her eye on her?”
I had figured it was something like that. Men like Ahdron are always letting their pricks get them into trouble.
Quit stalling, Isoka.
The problem is that I can’t hate Ahdron. He acts like a bully because a bigger bully is sitting on his back, a situation with which I’m intimately familiar. He was probably earnest about helping me, even if it mostly meant helping himself. At the very least, he’s not actively trying to get me killed.
And I’m about to cut his legs out from under him. Or kill him, if it comes to that.
Oh, well.
“—I think we can keep working our way up,” he’s saying. “Now that we’re off probation, we can choose our own targets, and between you and me we should be able to make a lot of scrip quickly. That might let us bring in another—”
“Shut up and listen for a minute,” I tell him.
He pauses, eyes narrowing. “Someone wants you to leave?”
I shrug.
“The Butcher won’t stand for it.” He cocks his head. “Are you going to do it?”
“No.”
“Good choice. They may say they can protect you, but—”
“I’m not leaving. I’m taking the pack.” I fix him with a stare. “Consider this my formal challenge.”
There’s a long silence.
“You’re not serious,” Ahdron says, lifting the bottle to his lips.
“Of course I’m rotting serious.”
“Do you have any idea what the Butcher will do to you?”
“Let me worry about the Butcher,” I tell him.
“You are serious.” He sets the bottle aside and clambers to his feet. “You haven’t been here a rotting week, Deepwalker. You think you know how things work on Soliton?”