War of the Maps, page 2
A simple plan, thrown over when the bandits had ambushed the train. The lucidor reckoned that agents from the department, and bounty hunters and thief-takers hunting him for the price the department had put on his head, might well be watching the ferry now, so after scanning the shore with his spyglass he cut west, riding down the slope and finding a service road that ran between fields of electrical flax and regimented stands of ironwood trees. He paused to watch a work crew fell one of the trees. Men and women standing at a respectful distance as a charge of GPX, the gravity-polarised explosive which departmental assault teams sometimes used to take down doors, flared in a brief disc of red flame around the base of the trunk. The tree shivered, but it did not fall until a team of horses harnessed to rope pulleys surged forward and its long straight trunk, topped by rags of foliage, crashed down between its neighbours.
The lucidor rode on in the thin rain, passing a farm with plastic tunnels crammed with green crops running between rows of tilted light-collecting panels, riding through a sprawl of small factories, warehouses, and abandoned lots overgrown by volunteer saplings and ox grass and tumbles of kudzu. At a roadside stall frequented by workpeople and cargo-wagon drivers he bought a paper cone of something called popcorn squid – nuggets of salty flesh fried in breadcrumbs and doused in sweet chili sauce – and ate quickly, aware of the curious glances of the other customers, who were no doubt wondering who this stranger was, with his warhorse and his foreign clothes. He licked his greasy fingers clean and rode on, past two barges moored beside conical hills of sand and gravel, past the dusty silos of a cement works and a fan of railway sidings, crossing a narrow causeway to a long spit of land on the far side of a milky lagoon, where he had spied what looked like a fishing village.
The short row of single-storey houses, built of planks painted with black tar, squatted on a ridge that overlooked the pebbly beach where boats were drawn up along the water’s edge. One boat in particular had caught his attention. It was more than twice the size of the rest, its hull moulded from some kind of plastic rather than shaped wooden planks, and there was a big square tent on the shore in front of it, open on one side, with lights shining inside and several people busy around tables and plastic tubs. As the lucidor rode up a woman stepped out and asked him what he wanted.
‘I’m looking for someone who can take me across the Horned Strait.’
‘You’ve come to the wrong place, friend. The ferry’s in the old town.’
‘I know where the ferry is. I’ll give you this horse and her saddle in exchange for a ride on that big boat of yours.’
‘We aren’t in need of a horse, and we won’t be going anywhere for a while,’ the woman said.
She was in her early forties, a tall sinewy woman dressed in a denim work shirt and leather trousers, with a bush of wiry hair and a sharp, canny gaze. A long knife sheathed in an ironwood scabbard was suspended from a baldric slung over one shoulder, and she had stopped a sensible distance from the lucidor and the warhorse.
‘What you need to do,’ she told him, ‘is turn around and ride back over the causeway and head along the coast road to the old town. Keep going west, you won’t miss it. It’s the place with the old ruin up on a hill by the river. The ferry terminal’s directly below it.’
‘What about the villagers?’ the lucidor said. ‘Might any of them take me across?’
‘I can’t speak for them, but I can tell you it isn’t likely. Fisherfolk don’t like to go too far out from shore these days.’
One of the people watching this exchange from the shelter of the tent, a young woman, stepped out into the rain and said to the lucidor, ‘The fur trimming your coat is fox, isn’t it? Desert fox. And that staff at your back is what certain lawkeepers carry in the Free State instead of pistols.’
‘I was a lawkeeper before I retired,’ the lucidor said. ‘Now I am hoping to make myself useful in the war against the invasion, which is why I am looking for the fastest way across the Strait.’
That was the cover story he had worked up before setting out, based on conversations with an acquaintance who had spent two years fighting against insurgents in Patua; his boss had supplied a fake letter of recommendation decorated with a genuine seal, and a letter of transit and identification documents made out for Saj Orym Zier, a former sheriff for the court of magistrates who otherwise exactly resembled the lucidor.
‘From what I hear, a fair number of would-be mercenaries from the Free State are on the run from all kinds of trouble,’ the first woman said. ‘Maybe that’s why this jasper wants to avoid the port and the scrutiny of the garrison.’
The young woman ignored that and said to the lucidor, ‘You are no ordinary mercenary. You are gifted. A muzzler. I am not sure what they call you where you come from, but that’s what we call your kind here.’
Her square pugnacious face was framed by long black hair parted down the middle, and like the half-dozen men and woman watching the exchange she wore a long white cotton coat. There were iron and copper rings on her fingers, and her bold gaze suggested that she was used to command.
‘We are mostly called suppressors in the Free State,’ the lucidor said, trying to hide his surprise. ‘If you know what I am, you must be gifted too. You, or one of your friends.’
‘I am a map reader,’ the woman said. ‘As are two of my assistants. We felt our gifts dimming as you approached.’
‘If I am interfering with your work, I should ride on,’ the lucidor said.
‘What do they call you, in the Free State?’
‘Saj Orym Zier.’
He had practised saying his alias, but it still felt strange in his mouth.
‘I recall how they greet guests in your country, Saj Orym Zier. My home is your home, hearth and heart. I am Orjen Starbreaker. This is my steward, Lyra Gurnek,’ the woman said, laying a hand on the tall woman’s arm, ‘and these are my assistants. We have no hearth, but we are in good heart, working hard to unravel the true nature of some of the invasion’s little monsters. And while we cannot help you make the crossing, I think I know someone who might be able to help you. Come in out of the rain and we’ll discuss it over a cup of chai. I will show you a little of what we are doing here, too. I am sure you’ll be interested, given the kind of employment you are seeking.’
Orjen Starbreaker’s rings were made of rare metals, her name was old and honourable, one of the names of those who claimed direct descent from men and women ridden by godlings in the dawn of the world, and she was a map reader, working on creatures of the invasion. She might know where Remfrey He was and what he was doing, might even have met him. And besides all that, the lucidor had ridden most of the day and was cold and weary, so he climbed down from the warhorse and tethered her to one of the stakes that anchored the tent and followed Orjen Starbreaker inside, with her steward close behind.
Long tables overflowed with the kind of organised clutter that reminded him of the city morgue’s laboratory. Microscopes, centrifuges, glass dishes and flasks and beakers, bottles of reagents, dissecting trays half-full of black wax, some with small creatures slit and splayed in them like the leavings of some unholy feast. In one corner, an electric still dripped distilled water into a plastic jerry can. The stout-walled ironwood bomb of an autoclave crouched in another. A rank of plastic tanks stood at the back, and the salt tang of seawater mixed with the prickling odour of formaldehyde and other chemicals.
A young man fetched graduated glass beakers of clear amber chai. The lucidor took a dutiful sip, tasting mint and sugar, and warmed his fingers on the beaker while Orjen told him that she and her assistants were documenting the spread of known invader species, searching for new kinds, and trying to find out how they lived and reproduced.
‘I visited the Free State once,’ she said. ‘Years ago, travelling with my father. We were taken out into the desert to watch a display of hunting with raptors, and there was a visit to a floating village in the marshes where the Great River drains away into the desert. But because my father was there on official business we spent most of our time in the capital, and most of the people I met were either government officials or security officers or lawkeepers. That’s why I recognised your staff. It’s carried by a particular type of lawkeeper, those who work for the Department for the Regulation of Applied Philosophy and Special Skills.’
‘As I said, I’m retired now,’ the lucidor said, unsettled by the young woman’s sharp gaze.
‘Lucidors. That’s what they’re called. That’s what you are.’
‘It’s what I once was.’
‘“Lucidor” means “one who seeks light”. Light being knowledge, wisdom, understanding. But you don’t seek it out because you want to understand it, do you? You don’t want to learn from it or find a use for it or discover what it tells you about the world. You want only to suppress it.’
The lucidor could have told her that the Free State was a poor country. Landlocked, mostly desert, its only cultivatable land lying along the Great River. He could have told her that although it lacked many of the resources possessed by Patua, its people shared what little they had and made sure that it was put to the best use, and thought carefully about what they needed and what they did not. The People’s House planned and policed every part of the economy, but no one went without food or shelter, and after its War of Independence the Free State had enjoyed two hundred years of peace and stability, while at this very moment a popular rebellion in the south of Patua was taking advantage of the chaos after the government had been forced to abandon the capital.
He could have told Orjen Starbreaker all that and more, but it would have been impolite, and he wanted to stay on the right side of her because of her offer to help him find a way across the Horned Strait, and because he wanted to ask her about Remfrey He. So he said, ‘It’s true that the department helps to regulate applied philosophy, and hunts down bandits who try to smuggle drugs and other contraband across the border, but that isn’t all it does. You said that you visited the marshes. I was once sent there to investigate the rumour that a necromancer was at work in its far reaches.’
That got Orjen’s attention, as he hoped it would.
She said, ‘This was someone who could raise the dead?’
‘Someone who was said to be creating monsters from parts of the dead, but turned out to be an old woman who had a glimmer of the healing touch, just enough to keep alive the birds she caught and sewed together. She couldn’t explain why she did it, but the doctors who examined her were able to prescribe a physic that helped her to overcome her compulsion. Finding people who misuse their gifts is also part of our work. As is searching out gifted children, so that they can be helped to put their talents to best use.’
‘You also serve a single-party government that controls every aspect of philosophical research, and suppresses or censors anything that conflicts with its ideology,’ Orjen said. ‘Could it have mobilised against the invasion as we have? Would it approve of the work we are doing here?’
‘That would depend on the work, of course.’
‘It’s right here, in these tanks,’ Orjen said. ‘A sampling of the creatures that are displacing and destroying ordinary life.’
She called them her little monsters, and showed them off with enthusiastic pride and no little affection. ‘Look at this!’ she said, as she led him from tank to tank. And ‘You see? You see?’ And ‘Isn’t this amazing?’
Here was a scaly worm, as long as the lucidor’s forearm, which shot out a hundred sticky venomous threads when Orjen prodded it with a stick. A creature with pairs of spines on its back patrolling the bottom of its tank on stiff prop-like legs tipped with claws, tentacles writhing around its blunt head. A small school of leaf-shaped creatures the colour of graphite, with sucker mouths filled with rasping teeth; Orjen said that they bored their way into fish and ate them from the inside out. A creature with a fat segmented body and half a dozen eyes set on short stalks around the base of a single long tentacle that ended in a snapping mouth crammed with crooked needles. A darkly translucent creature like a long flattened arrowhead that swam by flexing its body in sinuous curves, with two combs of stiff grasping poison-tipped spines around its mouth. A fist-sized creature that sculled to and fro on three pairs of paddles, its body like a streamlined helmet with two enormous eyes where the visor would be. It seemed to be the juvenile form of something much larger, Orjen said, known only from the tip of a claw-tipped tentacle embedded in the hull of a boat it had attacked; the life maps of the swimming helmet and the fragment of tentacle were identical.
Other tanks contained tangles of fast-growing red weed, or were filled with milky water from the lagoon, in which intricate lacework spires and plates and pebble-shaped structures sat like miniature cities sunk in fog. These were a kind of calcareous weed not found elsewhere, its growth apparently encouraged by the effluent discharged by the cement works. According to Orjen these weeds and every kind of little monster were the radically altered offspring of ordinary species which had been infected by microscopic pathogens called tailswallowers, because of their looped and knotted life maps.
‘The tailswallowers are the root and heart of the invasion,’ Orjen said. ‘We are a long way from understanding how they take over the life maps of their hosts, but we are beginning to understand what we need to know.’
The lucidor felt a tingling unease and said, ‘If these creatures are infected, could they infect us?’
‘Don’t worry. The tailswallowers which created these little monsters aren’t the kind which infect people, and are in any case woven into the life maps of their hosts. And that’s the most interesting and important thing about the invasion. The life maps of its tailswallowers are made of the same kind of stuff, and contain the same kind of patterns, as ordinary life maps, which means that we have a better chance of understanding and overcoming it before it spreads too far. Especially as our work is not hampered by the kind of cumbersome regulations and oversight demanded by your government.’
‘I would hope that the people of the Free State would mobilise every necessary resource if the invasion threatened to cross the border,’ the lucidor said. ‘And I know that an acquaintance of mine would very much like your work. Remfrey He. Perhaps you know the name?’
Orjen gave him a sharp look. ‘Is he someone you arrested for the so-called misuse of philosophy?’
‘He crossed into this country a little while back, and must have passed through Roos on his way to the Big Island. Had he heard of your work, I’m sure he would have paid you a visit.’
‘We have not been here long. And in a few days we will strike camp and move further west, where I hope to locate the leading edge of the invasion. Meanwhile, we have to get back to work, but first I’ll point you towards someone who might be able to help you cross to the Big Island. You see, I hadn’t forgotten about that.’
Orjen asked her steward for paper and brush, and in neat flowing characters wrote a short note – Please give all the help you can to this traveller, so that he may continue his education across the Horned Strait – and folded it and sealed it with a drip of wax melted over a ceramic burner and pressed her iron signet ring into the warm wax and handed the note to the lucidor. She waved away his thanks and told him to think about what she had shown him.
‘If you survive combat with alter women or rebels and return home safely, tell your colleagues about what we are doing here. Tell them about the power of philosophical investigations that are not policed and regulated.’
Outside in the rain, the steward, Lyra Gurnek, gave directions to the house of a trader who had supplied reagents and equipment vital to Orjen’s work. ‘She’s mostly honest, but she has connections with people who work on the shady side, and she’s keen to keep up a relationship with someone like the boss, if you know what I mean.’
‘Because your boss comes from a rich family.’
‘Rich, and old, and influential,’ Lyra said. ‘She doesn’t have to be working here. She doesn’t need to do any kind of work at all. But here she is all the same. And she just did you a big favour. Not only the letter, but also by taking the time to show you a little of our part in the war against the invasion.’
‘I am grateful for the favour. And for the demonstration of Patuan applied philosophy.’
‘She’s right to be proud of her work,’ Lyra said. ‘And she wouldn’t have taken the trouble if she didn’t think you might learn something. As for me, I reckon you have the look of a man who can’t help but find trouble wherever he goes, so I hope you repay that favour by getting across to the Big Island soon as you can. Because when you do find trouble, or when trouble finds you, I’d like it to be somewhere so far away that we never get to hear about it.’
3
Wights
The trader’s establishment was a three-storey house built of yellow clay brick and roofed with red tile, in the middle of a short row of similar houses that stood alongside a canal lock. In the shop that fronted it, with shelves of dry goods and canned and bottled produce laddering the walls and half of its counter given over to a bar, a young woman directed the lucidor to the stables at the rear, where a burly man took charge of the warhorse and the lucidor was led by the stable boy through a white-tiled kitchen to a small room off the corridor beyond. Heavy drapes were pulled across the window and the only light came from a lamp set on the table where the trader, Noojak Crow Pelee, sat, a stack of papers in front of her and a stalked instrument with a rotary dial and a wired earpiece at her left hand – a species of telephone, the first one the lucidor had seen outside a government office.
The trader was a small shrewd old woman dressed in black, propped by several cushions in her high-back chair and giving the impression that her feet did not quite touch the floor. Her wiry grey hair was parted down the middle and woven into two braids bound with black ribbon, a pipe burning clove-scented tobacco drooped in one corner of her mouth, and like the shop girl, the burly man and the stable boy, she was a wight, with pale waxy skin and a broad flat nose and eyes pinched by folds of skin under the heavy ledge of her brow. No wights lived in the Free State, but the lucidor had once worked with a wight lawkeeper from Patua while investigating a gang that had been smuggling remapped racing hounds across the border. They came from Oase, a map two hundred and fifty thousand leagues to the north, where herds of long-haired elephants and rhinoceros roamed frigid plains, stalked by sabre-toothed cats and hunted by tribes of wights who built houses from the bones of their prey. Descendants of wights stranded in Patua after the great ships that sailed the World Ocean had been decommissioned kept their bloodline pure and maintained the traditions of their homeland. Some were merchants and traders; others travelled the roads of Patua in horse-drawn caravans, selling woollen blankets and rugs woven with intricate patterns, bone knives and scrimshaw carvings, searching out seasonal farm work and meeting in fairs where horses and dogs were sold, marriages made, and wrestling matches and spear-throwing contests were held.
