Bad place, huh?
The worst in the empire, some say. Prisoners have been known to commit suicide upon being sentenced to life in Scorazin.
Anyone ever escaped?
Her whirlwinds twitched as a faint ripple of amusement ran through them. Not to my knowledge, but I come from a long line of innovators.
You could wait. See what we find beyond the Shelf. Could be, you don’t have to do this.
I have a sense time is very much our enemy, Mr. Torcreek. Her thoughts took on a brisk note, indicating an imminent end to the trance. There may be little opportunity to trance once I gain entry to Scorazin. If you fail to connect with me after a month, assume I’m dead and proceed at your own discretion. And put any notion of drinking heart-blood out of your head.
? ? ?
He borrowed tools from the engine room and spent over an hour hacking away at the Blue’s sternum with an axe. It had been two days since the trance with Lizanne and he felt an odd sense of pride at having resisted this impulse for so long. But the farther south they sailed, and the deeper the chill in the air, the more the Blue’s heart seemed to call to him.
He grunted and swung the axe once more. The blade sank into the fibrous gash he had made in this slab of bone. It was as thick as an oak door and almost as hard. He gave a satisfied sigh as the sternum finally cracked open, reaching in with his thick-gloved hands to pry the sundered bone apart. Through the pink-grey gore he could see the Blue’s rib-cage had compressed, the arcs of bone pressed together to conceal the prize within. Lifting a saw, he set to work, forcing down his rising gorge at the stink of the drake’s decomposing innards. It required another hour’s work before he cut a decent-sized hole in the wall of ribs, by which time the morning watch were coming on deck.
“What are you about, Mr. Torcreek?”
Clay glanced over his shoulder to see Hilemore standing near by, his blocky features rich in suspicion.
“Claiming my prize, Captain,” Clay replied, tossing some bone fragments into a bucket.
“This animal is the ship’s prize,” Hilemore informed him. “Profit derived from it will be shared among the crew.”
“I doubt they’d want any part of what I’m after.” Clay lifted a lantern and shined the light into the gap he had created, seeing something glisten as it caught the glow. Closer inspection revealed it to be at least as big as his head and secured to the rest of the Blue’s inner workings by a huge vein as thick as his forearm.
“Spare me some Black and this’d go quicker,” he told Hilemore. “Miss Ethelynne once tore a heart right out of a Red’s chest after drinking Black.”
“You’ve had all the product you’re getting, for the time being.”
“Oh well.” Clay reached for the large knife sitting amongst his array of tools. “Guess I’ll have to do it the traditional way.”
He half expected Hilemore to stop him, pull him away from the corpse and maybe even administer another beating. Instead, the captain just stood and watched as he cut the heart free and carefully extracted it from the rib-cage. “Might want to stand back a mite farther,” he told Hilemore, carrying the heart towards a steel bucket. “I’m given to believe just a drop of this stuff on un-Blessed skin can have ruinous results.”
Hilemore stared at him for a moment before taking two slow and deliberate backward steps. “Are you really intending to drink from that?” he asked.
“You intending to stop me?” Clay placed the heart in the bucket then took up the knife once more and made two deep cuts, forming a cross in the organ’s surface that immediately swelled with blood.
“I find myself curiously ambivalent on the matter,” Hilemore replied.
Clay watched as the blood dripped sluggishly from the cuts to form an inch-thick pool around the heart. It was darker and more viscous than the product Skaggerhill had harvested, and a distinct contrast to the paler, diluted substance Clay was used to. How much? he wondered, striving to recall every word Ethelynne had spoken on the subject, which he was depressed to realise amounted to no more than a few words. She had command of Lutharon because she drank the blood of his mother, he remembered. So, stands to reason he was right there when she did it. Ain’t no Blues here now.
He reached for the empty spice jar he had purloined from the galley. It was double the size of a standard product vial but still small enough to carry in his pocket. He sank it into the bucket and let it fill to the brim, then fixed the lid in place and washed the excess product away with water from his canteen.
“Finally,” Hilemore said, turning and striding towards the bridge. “A modicum of common sense.”
? ? ?
The Chokes came into view the next day. At first they appeared as a long jagged saw-blade on the southern horizon but soon resolved into a series of narrow rocky islets, each rising to a height of at least eighty feet and topped with a thick cap of ice. At Scrimshine’s urging, Hilemore had reduced speed to one-third during their approach in order to allow the tidal currents to raise the sea to the required height. “Need at least a two-moon tide to sail the Chokes,” he advised.
Clay kept a close eye on the former inmate as he worked the wheel. He knew his undimmed distrust of the man was most likely the result of Blinds-born prejudice, but it was an instinct he had learned to trust. Blinds don’t wash, he reminded himself, watching Scrimshine expertly spin the wheel to counter a sudden current.
“Gotta keep a watch on the eddies here,” he said, glancing at Hilemore. “Best tell your lookouts that, Skipper. They need to sing out if they see a big swirl ahead.”
Hilemore nodded to Steelfine, who relayed the command to the crow’s nest via the speaking-tube.
“We’re too far east,” Scrimshine went on, squinting through the wheel-house window before tapping a finger to the compass. “Gonna have to tack west for a bit.”
“We followed the heading you gave us,” Hilemore pointed out.
“Chokes’ve never been mapped for a reason, Skipper.” Scrimshine grinned and spun the wheel to starboard. “They change. Sea wears at the rock whilst the ice carves new channels and closes others. It’s almost like they’re a living thing that eats unwary ships.”
They followed the northern edge of the Chokes for another two hours. Clay quickly gained an appreciation for Hilemore’s insistence that they find a pilot before coming here. Through the gaps in the outer chain of islets he could see many more, too many to count easily, forming a close-packed maze several miles thick. He also saw how the chain of islets described a great curve, disappearing into the distance where a thin white line could be seen on the horizon.
“That’s the Shelf, huh?” he asked Hilemore, who gave a short nod, his own gaze fixed on their helmsman, who, Clay noted, now had a sheen of sweat on his cheeks despite the chill.