Red Seas Under Red Skies: The Gentleman Bastard Sequence, Book Two (Gentleman Bastards 2)

Those forty feet were one hell of a thing to contemplate.

Six months had passed since Locke and Jean had come to Tal Verrar; the personalities of Leocanto Kosta and Jerome de Ferra had evolved from bare sketches to comfortable second skins. Summer had been dying when they’d clattered down the road toward the city for the first time, but now the hard, dry winds of winter had given way to the turbulent breezes of early spring. It was the month of Saris, in the seventy-eighth year of Nara, the Plaguebringer, Mistress of Ubiquitous Maladies.

Jean rode in a padded chair at the stern of a hired luxury scull, a low, sleek craft crewed by six rowers. It sliced across the choppy waters of Tal Verrar’s main anchorage like an insect in haste, ducking and weaving between larger vessels in accordance with the shouted directions of a teenage girl perched in its bow.

It was a windy day, with the milky light of the sun pouring down without warmth from behind high veils of clouds. Tal Verrar’s anchorage was crowded with cargo-lighters, barges, small boats and the great ships of a dozen nations. A squadron of galleons from Emberlain and Parlay rode low in the water with the aquamarine and gold banners of the Kingdom of the Seven Marrows fluttering at their sterns. A few hundred yards away, Jean could see a brig flying the white flag of Lashain, and beyond that a galley with the banner of the Marrows over the smaller pennant of the Canton of Balinel, which was just a few hundred miles north up the coast from Tal Verrar.

Jean’s scull was rounding the southern tip of the Merchants’ Crescent, one of three sickle-shaped islands that surrounded the Castellana at the city’s centre like the encompassing petals of a flower. His destination was the Artificers’ Crescent, home of the men and women who had raised the art of clockwork mechanics from an eccentric hobby to a vibrant industry. Verrari clockwork was more delicate, more subtle, more durable - more anything, as required - than that fashioned by all but a handful of masters anywhere else in the known world.

Strangely, the more familiar Jean grew with Tal Verrar, the odder the place seemed to him. Every city built on Eldren ruins acquired its own unique character, in many cases shaped directly by the nature of those ruins. Camorri lived on islands separated by nothing more than canals, or at most the Angevine River, and their existence was shoulder-to-shoulder compared to the great wealth of space Tal Verrar had to offer. The hundred-thousand-odd souls on its seaward islands made full use of that space, dividing themselves into tribes with unusual precision.

In the west, the poor clung to spots in the Portable Quarter, where those willing to tolerate constant rearrangement of all their belongings by hard sea-weather could at least live free of rent. In the east, they crowded the Istrian District and provided labour for the tiered gardens of the Blackhands Crescent. There they grew luxury crops they could not afford, on plots of alchemically enriched soil they could never own.

Tal Verrar had only one graveyard, the ancient Midden of Souls, which took up most of the city’s eastern island, opposite the Blackhands Crescent. The Midden had six tiers, studded with memorial stones, sculptures and mausoleums like miniature mansions. The dead were as strictly sifted in death as they’d been in life, with each successive tier claiming a better class of corpse. It was a morbid mirror of the Golden Steps across the bay.

The Midden itself was almost as large as the entire city of Vel Virazzo, and it sported its own strange society - priests and priestesses of Aza Guilla, gangs of mourners-for-hire (all of whom would loudly proclaim their ceremonial specialities or particular theatrical flourishes to anyone within shouting distance), mausoleum-sculptors and, the oddest of all, the Midden Vigilants. The Vigilants were criminals convicted of grave-robbery. In place of execution, they were locked into steel masks and clanking scale armour and forced to patrol the Midden of Souls as part of a sullen constabulary. Each would be freed only when another grave-robber was captured to take his or her place. Some would have to wait years.

Tal Verrar had no hangings, no beheadings and none of the fights between convicted criminals and wild animals that were popular virtually everywhere else. In Tal Verrar, those convicted of capital crimes simply vanished, along with most of the city’s garbage, into the Midden Deep. This was an open square pit, forty feet on a side, located to the north of the Midden of Souls. Its Elderglass walls plunged into absolute darkness, giving no hint as to how far down they truly went. Popular lore held that it was bottomless, and criminals prodded off the execution planks usually went screaming and pleading. The worst rumour about the place, of course, was that those thrown down into the Deep did not die . . . but somehow continued falling. For ever.

‘Hard larboard!’ cried the girl at the bow of the scull. The rowers on Jean’s left yanked their oars out of the water and the ones on the right pulled hard, sliding the craft just out of the way of a cargo galley crammed with fairly alarmed cattle. A man at the side rail of the galley shook his fist down at the scull as it passed, perhaps ten feet beneath the level of his boots.

‘Get the shit out of your eyes, you undergrown cunt!’

‘Go back to pleasuring your cattle, you soft-dicked cur!’

‘You bitch! You cheeky bitch! Heave-to and I’ll show you who’s soft-dicked! Begging your pardon, gracious sir.’

Seated in his thronelike chair, dressed in a velvet frock coat with enough gold fripperies to sparkle even in the weak light of an overcast day, Jean looked very much a man of consequence. It was important for the man on the galley to ensure that his verbal salvoes were accurately received; while they were an accepted part of life on the harbour in Tal Verrar, the moneyed class were always treated as though they were somehow levitating above the water, entirely independent of the vessels and labourers carrying them. Jean waved nonchalantly.

‘I don’t need to get any closer to know it’s soft, lard-cock!’ The girl made a rude gesture with both hands. ‘I can see how disappointed your fucking cows are from here!’

With that, the scull was out of range of any audible reply; the galley fell away to the stern and the south-western edge of the Artificers’ Crescent grew before them.

‘For that,’ said Jean, ‘an extra silver volani for everyone here.’

As the increasingly cheerful girl and her enthusiastic team pulled him steadily toward the docks of the Artificers’ Crescent, Jean’s eyes were drawn by a tumult on the water a few hundred yards to his left. A cargo-lighter flagged with some sort of Verrari guild banner Jean didn’t recognize was surrounded by at least a dozen smaller craft. Men and women from the boats were trying to clamber aboard the cargo-lighter, while the outnumbered crew of the larger vessel attempted to fend them off with oars and a water-pump. A boat full of constables seemed to be approaching, but was still several minutes off.

‘Now, what the hell’s that?’ Jean yelled to the girl.

‘What? Where? Oh, that. That’s the Quill-Pen Rebellion, up to business as usual.’

‘Quill-Pen Rebellion?’

‘The Guild of Scribes. That cargo boat’s flying a Guild of Letter-Pressers’ flag. It must be carrying a printing press from the Artificers’ Crescent. You ever seen a press?’

‘Heard of them. For the first time just a few months ago, in fact.’

‘The scribes don’t like ’em. Think they’ll put their trade out of business. So they’ve been running ambushes when the Letter-Pressers try to get one across the bay. There must be six or seven of those new presses on the bottom by now. Plus a few bodies. It’s a big, fat, weeping mess, you ask me.’

‘I’m inclined to agree.’

‘Well, hopefully they won’t come up with anything that can replace a good team of honest rowers. Here’s your dock, sir, quite a bit ahead of schedule if I’m correct. You want us to wait around?’

‘By all means,’ said Jean. ‘Amusing help is so hard to find. I expect I won’t be but an hour.’

‘At your service, then, Master de Ferra.’