In a way, Ash didn’t mind further confinement in this black pit he had crawled into. Within his own depths he felt as if he deserved to be there, that he would gladly suffer an eternity of this desolation if it meant bringing Nico back from to the living. Beneath the oiled cloak, he could feel the small clay vial of ashes lying cold and dead against his chest.
CHAPTER TEN
A Matter of Diplomacy
‘The Holy Matriarch requests a moment of your time,’ cooed Guan, standing there with his twin sister, both watching him with their hooded, arrogant eyes.
Ché gripped the open cabin door a little harder as they all swayed with the violent motions of the ship. All around them, the flagship groaned and complained against the buffeting of the heavy seas. The sister was studying him closely, and he stared back at her, her face as sharp and lean as her brother’s, her thin lips slightly parted on one side.
He held his forefinger up. One moment.
Ché closed the Scripture of Lies in his hand, making sure they saw it first, then replaced it on his neatly made cot in plain sight. He stepped out into the passageway and followed them.
He was glad of a chance to stretch his legs, despite his usual sense of foreboding whenever he was summoned by the Matriarch. He hadn’t ventured out much these several days past, the weather being too poor for dallying out in the open. Today was the worst so far. The ship pitched so steeply from side to side they had to walk with their hands along the walls of the passageway to keep their balance.
One by one they stepped up onto the main deck and bent into the blasts of wind. A gust sent the sister stumbling sideways, tottering with outstretched hands before her brother tugged her by the sleeve back to his side. A wave crashed against the hull and threw a froth of water hissing over the decking, knocking over a few sailors so they went sliding amongst it in their rainslicks.
The three priests wiped their faces dry, and in a line made for the steps that zigzagged up the flank of the quarterdeck, where they started to haul themselves up.
‘A little choppy today!’ the sister, Swan, called back at him.
Guan looked back too, his expression cool.
The man hadn’t spoken with Ché for some days now. Perhaps Guan had finally taken his hint about wanting to be left alone.
Still, there was a look in his eyes; something wounded in them. Not the reaction he would have expected if these twins really were Regulators in disguise. Perhaps he was simply being paranoid after all.
This is why I am without friendships, he thought.
At the door of General Romano’s cabin they passed a pair of Acolytes stationed as guards, sheltering as best they could beneath the tiny porch. Within, even over the din of the gale and the waves, the raised voice of Romano could be heard cutting through the laughter of his people. Like many, the young general had been revelling in drink and narcotics since the bad weather had confined them all to their quarters.
On the topmost floor, at the door to Sasheen’s private cabins, the three of them stood within the porch as the honour-guards searched them for weapons. The sister was last, and as she was carefully patted down Ché noticed how her brother watched the process with a frown. She ignored his scrutiny, though, looked at Ché instead with her features softened by a delicate smile.
Pretty, he thought, and glanced down at her body without subtlety, her wet robe clinging to it.
‘Clear,’ said the Acolyte as he finished, and his partner knocked on the door.
Heelas, Sasheen’s personal caretaker, beckoned them into the salon, where priests of the entourage lounged in a subdued silence. Heelas led the three of them across to the door of Sasheen’s private cabin and rapped a knuckle on it gently, then opened it and passed through without waiting for a response.
The moment Ché entered the room he could feel it, the anger in the air. Sasheen sat on her great chair at the rear of the spacious cabin. She was wrapped in a fur coat over plain robes. Her chest was rising and falling quickly. Ché noticed a broken wineglass at the foot of the wall, and drops of red wine amongst the shattered glass, running one way then the other as the floor pitched