“Why? Should I not be concerned about my daughter’s welfare?”
“Do you have any idea,” says Signe, suddenly furious, “how many times someone tried to kill me and mother and Carin when we lived here? Do you know how many times we almost starved to death? Yet I did not see any sign of your concern then.”
A long pause.
“We…” Sigrud struggles for words. “We have had this conversation. We—”
“We had your conversation,” says Signe. “The conversation you wanted to have with everyone, in front of everyone. How absolutely absurd it is that you—the man who has risked his life for all kinds of murderous, horrible reasons—are suddenly asking if it’s wise for me to do the same for somewhat decent ones!”
Sigrud is torn, it seems, between frustration and shock. “I forget how young you are sometimes.”
“No,” she says. “What you forget is that you don’t really know me at all.” She checks her watch. “I need to confirm with Biswal and Nadar that they’re ready to receive you. You may stay here if you like, and see yourself out as soon as you see fit.” Then, without so much as a glance back that Mulaghesh can see, she strides away from her father through the forest of statues and out the iron door, which shuts with a clang behind her.
Sigrud gives a great, sad sigh. He stares up at the canvas roof, contemplative and melancholy. Then he says aloud, “All right, Turyin. You can come out now.”
***
Mulaghesh pokes her head up. “How long have you known I was here?”
“From the start,” says Sigrud. His scarred, battered face is still doleful. “Your boot polish…You use too much of it. I’d recognize the smell anywhere.”
“It always creeped me out, how you could catch a scent like that.” Mulaghesh stands, wipes some of the mud off of her pants, and walks over to him. “Thanks for not ratting me out, I guess.”
He shrugs. “It is no affair of mine. I assume Signe did not wish to tell you what was in these walls?”
“Yeah. I chose to come see for myself.” She pauses, feeling fiercely awkward. “I’m sorry I overheard all that.”
“Yes…My adjustment to public life”—he holds out his arms and looks at his clothing—“is not quite as easy as I’d hoped it’d be. For anyone.”
“Yeah, you look…” She holds back a cringe. “You do look different.”
“These damned things…Pah!” He rips off his fur hat and eye patch and tosses them away. When he turns back his left eye is once again the familiar hooded, empty socket. “I feel more like a human without them.”
“That was probably, like, a two-hundred-drekel hat.”
“These old specters can have it.” He looks up at the giant stone images, leaning over them like predators. “By the seas. Look at them. To imagine my country would one day spend blood and treasure to haul such things from the ocean…”
“Your girl’s got a pretty cunning idea, though,” says Mulaghesh. She walks up to Saint Zhurgut, strikes a match on the statue, and lights a cigarillo. “Blackmailing the tribes might work. And she has some damned brass in her blood, too. Hiding these things right under the nose of Fort Thinadeshi…I’d be impressed if I wasn’t so pissed.”
“She is a very cunning, clever thing. As I said, she is very good at what she does.” There’s another uncomfortable pause. He looks her over. “You seem to be doing well.”
“As do you. You must have done pretty good for yourself during the coup.”
“Ah,” says Sigrud, waving a hand. “It was hardly a coup for me. I barely struck a blow. It was like a courtly dance, so many pre-arranged steps, and I merely had to move from one to the next. Shara did all the real work, though no one knew.”
“As usual.”
“As usual, yes. What about you, have you seen any action?”
“Not a jot. They stuck me behind a desk. Then after I quit I stuck myself behind a bottle. So no new scars or limbs lost, or at least not yet. You look like you’re all in one piece, or at least what I can see above those kingly robes does.”
“Eh. Not quite.” He pulls his left lip down, revealing an utter dearth of back molars on the left side of his jaw. Mulaghesh can see extensive scar tissue around the lip, suggesting a broken jawbone.
“Holy hells. Did you try and catch a cannonball with your face?”
“A carpenter’s hammer. Makes eating soup difficult these days, and drinking even more so. Three years ago, we boarded the ship of the pirate Lindibier…do you know this man? Lindibier?”
“?’Fraid not.”
“Well.” He considers it thoughtfully. “He was a real piece of shit.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, we board, we kill, well, almost everyone, and then there’s just the cabin boy, hiding down in the aft. I walk over to him, he’s, what, fourteen? I take pity on him. I ask him, ‘You need food? Water?’ And he looks at me, and he leaps at me, and then…” He taps the side of his head. “He could swing a hammer, for a boy.” He looks away, wistful. “I strangled him and threw his body in the ocean. Let the fish turn him to shit as fast as they could. It took time for me to recover. That was when they made me a chancellor. Or my wife did. To save my life, she said.”
“Your wife?”
“Hild. Yes. She’s…” He is quiet for some time. “…like Shara. Or Signe. A very, eh, cunning person. She’s a chancellor, too. Just a more important one than me—the sort of chancellor that makes other chancellors. Which she did, to me. But I know what I’m good for. I just want to hunt meat and chase pirates. But they’ve had me behind a desk. Stuck me in a big, nice office where I never see anyone, and no one ever sees me. Though I insisted I come out when Kvarnstr?m attacked a village. Do you know him? The pirate Kvarnstr?m?”
Mulaghesh shakes her head.
“Oh. Well. He is a real piece of shit.”
“I’m sensing a theme.”
“Yes. We had been so caught up in this harbor thing, our dicks big and hard thinking of money, we had forgotten how to deal with pirates. The pirates took us, what, two years to get under control? Three? And then we forget it all, stumbling all over ourselves to do this job. Anyway, I hopped on a ship and took pursuit. We almost caught him, about sixty miles from here. But he damaged our mast with a chainshot, a cowardly way to fight.”
“I heard something about that,” she says, suspecting why Sigrud’s wife might not want someone who casually uses the phrase “dicks big and hard thinking of money” in the public eye. “So you’re actually here because your ship got damaged?”
“Partially. Some months ago Signe sent a signal to the UDS asking if she had approval to move forward with this tactic. I wanted to see what was going on, and a damaged ship is a good excuse. Besides, what are you doing here? This is a strange place for you to be, isn’t it?”
“Shara,” she says, as if that explains everything.
“Ah. Was you quitting part of her game?”
“No. That was my choice. She just dragged me back in.”