But the most amazing thing was the shoal of skyships plying the air. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, but these were not the ghostly cloud pictures produced by simulacrascopes; they were tiny models made of wood, brass, cloth, and paint, all exquisitely detailed. The smallest was the size of his pinky knuckle, the largest the length of his forefinger with a sail span as big as his hand. They wheeled in vast slow schools, tacking and running, swooping and climbing around a perfect scale model of San Augustus and its harbor. The whole city was there, modeled with an obsessive attention to minutiae that was half art, half madness.
Jean-Claude walked slowly along the gallery. He caught up to and passed a tall ship just making a turn off the coast of a barrier skyland. He almost imagined he could see tiny sailors aboard, trimming the sails.
Isabelle would love this.
The thought of her stabbed him and snapped his attention back to the task at hand. He had to find out where Kantelvar’s ship had gone and then find a way to get there without giving it away to the Aragoths.
Amerigo led Felix, Jean-Claude, and half a dozen inconvenient guards through several unadorned corridors to a long room, really nothing more than a wide stretch of the hallway with rows and rows of desks on either wall and a long line of simulacrascopes down the center. The place bubbled with babble as maybe a hundred clerks exchanged a rapid patter of foreshortened Aragothic, mostly numbers and initials. Amerigo guided Jean-Claude to a long table upon which was spread a three-meter-long map of the Aragothic coast. The sky just off the continental cliff was divided up unto initialed boxes.
“These are the precincts,” Amerigo said. “Each precinct is watched over by a simulacrascope. You will note that near San Augustus, the precincts are smaller and more densely packed because that is where we have our heaviest traffic. The farther you get from a harbor into the deep sky, the bigger the space one simulacrascope can effectively track.”
“Impressive,” Jean-Claude said, but it didn’t tell him where Kantelvar had taken Isabelle. Damn it, with all this information wafting around, there had to be something he could use. “What do you use all this information for? It wouldn’t help you detect a lurking enemy because you wouldn’t have a shard of their chartstone.”
“Correct. We use it for taxes, mostly. Any ship that passes through Aragothic sky is obliged to pay a fee for the protection afforded by the Aragothic fleet.”
Of course. Only for money would people go to this much trouble.
“This is not relevant,” Felix said. “Do what you came here to do.”
We want miracles and we want them now. Jean-Claude examined the map. He doubted Kantelvar had docked his ship in the main harbor; it would be too obvious. More likely it had been stashed in a cove somewhere under the rim of the Craton Massif, away from the harbor, but not too far away. “I’ll need the lists for precincts eleven, twelve, and thirteen starting five days ago.” While he was waiting for that to happen, he asked, “And what happens if a ship just putters around in one precinct without crossing a boundary?”
“The presence of every ship in a precinct is noted at the beginning of every shift, so it would still be noted … unless—and I bring this up only because you are looking for smugglers—the ship’s navigator removed the ship’s chartstone from its matrix, say, while it was hidden in some cove. He’d only have to put it in when he wanted to feign legitimacy in order to pass through without being confronted by picket ships.”
Jean-Claude grunted, for that was likely exactly what Kantelvar had done. Otherwise, a ship clinging like a barnacle to the bottom of the city would attract attention.
A clerk arrived with a tight stack of papers that he spread on the map table before Jean-Claude. They were covered in dense writing, mostly in an obscure condensed shorthand of letters and numbers that were too busy to speak in complete words, much less sentences. The clerk said, “This first code is the identification code of the ship, the second is its time of appearance or disappearance, the third is its coordinates in space.” The clerk pointed at the first set of numbers. “This is a merchant ship. You can tell by the ‘MC’ prefix. It entered precinct ten from the harbor at five minutes after seventh bell and”—he ran his finger down the column until he found a similar entry—“left the precinct at the number eleven boundary two hours later.”
Jean-Claude stared at the number blocks in dismay, for nowhere did they seem to correlate to a list of ships’ names. “You wouldn’t happen to have a registry, would you?”
Amerigo brightened. “Of course, we have dozens of them. What ship do you need to look up?”
The last thing Jean-Claude wanted to do was spit out the name in front of Felix.
“Yes, musketeer,” Felix whispered, leaning in close. “What is the name of this ship? Tell me or I start cutting off fingers.” The edge of a razor-sharp blade creased the knuckle of Jean-Claude’s least left-hand finger.
“Se?or, no,” Amerigo said. “This is a sanctified building.”
Felix glared at Amerigo. “Then summon an artifex and tell him he’ll need to start over, unless this fat fool tells me the name of that ship right now.”
“The Fisherman’s Dream,” Jean-Claude said, recalling the name of a wharf-side inn. Fortunately, the people who named taverns had the same sort of wit as those who named boats.
“Very good,” said Amerigo, obviously relieved not to have blood on his floors.
“Or maybe it was the Wandering Goose,” Jean-Claude said. It was a small tavern on the road outside Rocher Royale. “Or maybe it was the Bosun’s Ballast.” Demoiselle Planchette would get a good cackle out of that, if ever he survived to tell her about it. “My memory gets a bit slippery when I’m in pain.”
Felix growled, “If I say you were killed trying to escape, no one will doubt me.”
“But if you do that, you’ll miss your one chance to catch your assassin. He’s not a man you want to stay loose very long, or by the time you catch up with his tail, his serpent’s head will have got round behind you.”
“Assassin?” Amerigo asked. “I thought you said you were after a smuggler.”
“The two categories are not mutually exclusive,” Jean-Claude said.
Felix wrenched Jean-Claude’s arm up even higher behind his back, sending stabs of pain through his shoulder. “Be quiet.”
Jean-Claude grimaced. “You cannot expect me to talk and be quiet simultaneously.”
“Which registry do you want?” Amerigo asked. “I’ll bring it here.”
That was a damned good question. “How are they organized?” Jean-Claude asked through gritted teeth. Finally, the guard got tired of holding Jean-Claude’s arm twisted up and relaxed enough so that his shoulder stopped screaming at him.
“Chronologically.”
“And how long has this project been going on?”
“Twenty-three years. Of course we’ve made some modifications to the accounting since then.”
Jean-Claude didn’t give a damn about accounting. The question was, for how long had Kantelvar stowed the Voto Solemne? And had he done it under that name? “Bring me the one from five years ago,” he said. That was when Kantelvar had supposedly come to San Augustus from the hinterlands.