Scar Night Page 0,14

gave a hesitant wave back. He’d never seen one of these ships so close. Its silver envelope filled half the sky; and it was getting closer, descending past him to where a dock jutted out from the temple’s sheer walls. In his lifetime, no airship had used that mooring. Not even churchships were allowed this close, and this, the Adraki, was a warship, her deck-cages packed with drums of lime-gas and incendiaries. Clearly someone important was arriving. Abruptly Dill’s nerves were on edge and his eyes itching all the more.

White as a coward’s flag, as the captain of the temple guard would have said. At least the aeronauts were too distant to see his fright. He closed his eyes and thought about Callis’s sword, his sword, but felt the white in his irises now edge towards purple. He shook his head and gripped the parapet tightly until their colour faded to a comfortable, respectable grey.

“Leaders,” cried an aeronaut, tossing down a first coil of rope. Evidently, they were not prepared to use the harpoons this close to so much ancient stonework and glass. A dockhand snatched up the rope, fed it through a pulley on the docking gantries, and ran with it over to a winch. More ropes followed, and men scrambled after them.

A call came up from the dock. “Leaders fixed. Ready to winch.”

“Bring her in.”

Ropes stretched and twanged as dockhands began to wind cables down from spools mounted on the airship deck. The warship’s engines roared again. It trembled, eased closer to the dock.

“Hey, archon,” the signalman shouted, “want a race?”

The other aeronauts laughed. “Leave the poor bugger alone,” one of them said. “Not his fault.”

“I was only asking.”

Dill lowered his head so that they couldn’t see his eyes become pink, then he followed his own wet footprints back the way he had come. The aeronauts could stuff their warship. Dill had his uniform now. And his sword, of course. He brightened a little; there was still time for some sword practice. He ran the rest of the way around the balcony, folded his wings, and ducked inside the doorway to his cell.

But halfway through he halted, and blinked. A young woman stood waiting for him by the fireplace: small, gaunt, her fair hair drawn back severely from her face and woven into a tight plait in the style popular among nobles’ daughters. But this was her only concession to fashion, for she was bereft of jewellery, and wore beaten leathers bristling with weapons. A worn hilt jutted from the scabbard on her back, blue throwing knives and silver needles ran the length of her leather-sheathed forearms, while her belt held poison pouches, a blowpipe, and three stubby bamboo tubes tarnished with age. She had taken Dill’s sword from its mount, and was examining it. The sword was too big for him, but in her tiny hands it looked absurd.

“Put that back,” Dill snapped.

Dark green eyes turned to confront him. Her face was so white she looked ill. “Your sword?” she asked. Her gaze dropped to it briefly, then bounced back up to meet his.

Dill remembered he was naked. He snatched up his nightshirt, wrapped it round his midriff, and glowered at her. “It is Callis’s sword.”

“So they say.” She studied the weapon more closely. “It’s old enough. The steel is single-layered, brittle, heavy. Blunt. The balance…” She drew the back of the blade over her sleeve and then held it between both hands. “Does not exist. The pommel was sheared off at some point, not that it makes much difference. The guard…” She snorted. “Someone replaced this. It’s gold-leafed lead. You could dent it with a spoon.” She slid the weapon back into its mount. “Shiny, though.”

Dill waited stiffly.

“Rachel Hael,” she said.

There was something familiar about her surname, but he couldn’t place it. “What do you want?”

“Nothing,” she replied quickly, flatly, as though it were a reflexive answer to that question. Then she hesitated, seemed to realize she ought to say more. “I’m your overseer.”

“What?”

“Overseer. Tutor. Personal guard.”

Rachel Hael was a foot shorter than himself, half his weight, and she couldn’t be more than three or four years older than him. She exuded all the scholarly air of someone who ate beetles.

“You’re not my overseer,” he said.

She was looking around his cell. “How many candles do you need here?”

“John Reed Burrsong is my overseer.”

“He’s been dead for seven years.”

Burrsong was dead? That explained why Dill hadn’t seen the old man around for a while. But surely there