‘No!’ Jez protested.
‘No!’ Crake blurted.
‘Done,’ said Frey.
Twenty-Eight
The door was opened by a gangly Samarlan girl with hostile brown eyes. She was maybe twelve years old, maybe thirteen, with the elegant features and pitch-black skin of her race. She radiated suspicion and scorn, and a casual, predatory confidence beyond her years.
Ashua wasn’t fooled for an instant. She’d been the same way at that age. Despite the superficial differences, she recognised her replacement.
((Let me guess)) she said in Samarlan. ((He found you on the street and he’s been improving you ever since. How’s your vocabulary?))
‘Exquisite,’ the girl sneered in Vardic. ‘He said you’d be coming.’
‘He was right,’ Ashua replied.
The girl looked her up and down for long enough to let Ashua know she wasn’t impressed, that Ashua wasn’t shit to her. Then she stepped back and let her in off the alley.
Maddeus had lived in many places, but they all ended up the same. The fine settees in the hall were frayed and stained. The huge mirror was smeared and bleary. Paint peeled off the walls. Tiny windows let in the dusk light through a screen of grime. Maddeus moved to each new dwelling in a flurry of fresh finery, but his very presence rotted his surroundings. In the three months since he’d moved into this latest hideaway, it had already fallen into neglect.
The girl went ahead of her up the corridor. It was dim and stifling hot. They passed beneath electric fans, which were still.
In the rooms off the corridor, she sa
She recognised nobody. She hadn’t visited him here, out of respect for his wishes, and it seemed he’d had a reshuffle. Out with the old, in with the new. Another handful of junkies to tickle his interest.
But there was one man Maddeus would never abandon. She spotted him in a study off the corridor, sitting at a desk and sipping mint tea. The decay that afflicted this place had been held off here, but he couldn’t keep away the fug in the air and the sickly-sweet smell of sweat and excess.
He looked up over his glasses as Ashua passed the doorway. Osbrey Fole, a taut, narrow man, grey before his time. Osbrey was Maddeus’ accountant, among other things. The man who ran his business.
She’d always liked Osbrey, and he, in his way, had liked her. They were a conspiracy of two: the only sober heads in a flock of the deluded. He gave her a curt nod, which was as much emotion as she’d expect from him, and went back to work.
At the end of the corridor was a grand set of double doors. The girl opened them and let Ashua inside.
The room beyond was warm and close. The windows were covered over with thin curtains of green and red. Pungent smoke hung in slowly coiling layers in the gloom. It was full of expensive furniture, yet it felt shabby and dispiriting, and beneath the smell of narcotic fumes there was the hospital scent of the dying.
Maddeus lay reclined on a gilded chaise longue, eyes half-lidded. Next to him was a lacquered tray table, on which lay a silver syringe, a tourniquet and a skooch pipe, among other paraphernalia. A forgotten cigarette, little more than a bent column of ash, smouldered between his fingers.
The girl made to follow Ashua inside, but Ashua blocked her way. ‘The cigarette!’ she protested.
‘I’ve got it,’ said Ashua, and shut the door in her face.
The haze in the air made her feel like she was walking through a dream. She’d forgotten the sense of unreality that pervaded the places where Maddeus lived. As if time and sense had become derailed. She’d been away long enough to get used to clarity.
Maybe that was why he’d told her she couldn’t stay with him any more. That she’d have to make her own way in Shasiith. After an adolescence spent at his side, midway between a daughter, an employee and a pet, she’d been cast out.
It had hurt her, but she’d taken to independence with a vengeance. She’d been in Shasiith long enough to know the language and the ways of the underworld, and living on her wits was something she’d been doing ever since she could remember. She cut deals, made allies and enemies, stole when she had to, cheated when she could. She wanted to show him how capable she was. How she didn’t need him. And then, the lesson learned well, he’d take her back.
She’d never seriously thought it was more than a temporary thing.
She sat down on the chaise longue next to him, took the cigarette from his fingers and crushed it into an ashtray. He stirred and his eyes opened a little more. A stupefied grin spread across his face.
‘Ashua. My darling,’ he slurred.
‘Hello, Maddeus.’
He reached weakly towards the tray table. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to…?’ he said.
She stopped his hand by taking it in hers.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You never did, did you?’
His skin was dry. The bones of his hand felt hollow and brittle, like a bird’s. He looked sallow and wasted. She felt something gather in her throat, and she didn’t want to let him go.
He kept smiling that idiot smile. ‘I remember the day I met you. ..’ he said, but the sentence was crushed beneath the weight of the colossal lethargy that lay on him.
She was glad. She didn’t want to reminisce. She patted his hand. It’s alright. Whatever it is, it’s all alright.
Maddeus coughed and reached feebly for a cigarette. Without thinking, Ashua took one from his gold cigarette case, lit it for him, and put it in his mouth. She’d done it so many times while he was in this state that it was like a reflex.
He took a drag and settled back into the chaise longue with a sigh. She saw him drifting, and squeezed his hand before she lost him completely.
‘Maddeus!’ she said sharply.
He surfaced from his daze, and he looked at her as if it was the first time he’d noticed she was in the room. His face became concerned. ‘What are you doing here, my darling? Don’t you know it’s dangerous?’
She tried a frail smile, but it died on her lips. ‘I’m leaving,’ she said.
‘Hmmm,’ said Maddeus, whose attention had alrentried a fraeady gone elsewhere. She brushed his lank hair back from his face, made him focus on her again.
‘I’m leaving,’ she said, more firmly this time. ‘Leaving Shasiith for good. I’m joining the crew of the Ketty Jay. ’
He became grave. ‘Oh.’
‘That’s what you wanted for me, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, with the vague tone of someone who couldn’t remember.
‘There’s a price. I’m pretty sure you won’t mind. Medical supplies. I’ve got a list from Malvery.’
‘He’s the doctor, isn’t he?’ Maddeus smiled broadly, but his eyes shimmered with tears. She felt something surge up inside her chest, something that made her breath shudder, a feeling of such terrible enormity that it would burst her. She turned her face away from him quickly. How much of that sorrow was him, and how much was the drugs? Was there any difference any more?
‘I’ll give the list to Osbrey, shall I?’ she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.
‘That’d be best. He’ll take care of it.’ His eyes fluttered closed, and she thought for a moment that he’d fallen asleep. Then he spoke again, barely forming his words. ‘This captain, what’s he like?’
‘Mordant.’
He snorted. ‘That’s not a sentence, darling, but I’ll forgive you this once.’ He stirred and groped across the tray. His fingers brushed past the tourniquet and found the silver syringe. He sighed with pleasure. ‘Will you… call the girl for me?’
Her eyes prickled as she picked up the syringe and the length of rubber tubing. ‘There’s no need,’ she said softly. ‘I’m here.’
‘He’s late,’ said Crake, holding up his pocket watch.
Malvery peered over his round, green-lensed glasses at the daemonist.
‘Well, he is!’ Crake protested.
‘He’s a wholesaler. We’re buying food. This is the least dodgy thing we’ve done for months. Calm down, eh?’