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“Your daughters are a credit to you,” he said, buttering his words until they were soggy.
He was handsome, in a slightly too obvious way, like a picture of a prince in a children’s book.
It was often difficult to tell if things were a hundred years old, or a hundred thousand.
It was as if someone opened a cold window at the bottom of my skull, in a room I didn’t know about, and it let something in, and whatever it is is still whistling around in the basement of my brain.”
getting praise of out Trysil’s like trying to warm your toes by starlight.”
I must have passed those black boxes a hundred times without giving them a second glance.
“Cap’n’s philosophy is to run light, and that includes armament,”
Prozor opened another three boxes. She took out more girdles and started putting one on herself, doing up a leather strap that went around her waist and then two more that crossed diagonally over her chest. The mask was on a hinged piece, ready to swing down over her head.
I twitched one way and there was the bauble world, with part of the Monetta looming into view beneath it. I turned some more, and there was the purple-blue shimmer of the Congregation. Swinging out from the hull, exactly following my line of sight, were the muzzles of guns.
The stars were impossible little pinpricks, and the black was a cruel, cold slap against the idea of light.
My chin trembled and my heart sped, but the rest of me was like rock. Hours and hours passed like that, with the pain of being squeezed into that spot getting louder and sharper, but the fear of moving always beating it, like the two were playing a game to see which could get ahead of the other.
I was the only living being on a damaged ship, surrounded by the blood- and vomit-spattered corpses of what had once been its crew, and what I knew about the operation of sunjammers you could scratch on the tip of one finger with a fat rusty nail and still have room to spare. In other words, I’d got myself into quite a predicament.
With drugs and psychology to begin with, and surgery if the drugs and psychology didn’t work fast enough.” Prozor gave me a warning look. “I don’t mean clever surgery. Just drillin’ and cuttin’ out the parts of someone that make ’em difficult, if you know what I mean. Whisk a stick through someone’s grey, you can turn ’em pliant as you care.”
Tables were scattered around the floor, with patrons showing all the states of drunkenness from barely alive to almost sober.
It was the kind of face you could cut yourself on just looking at it.
“I’ve plenty to offer,” I said. “Intelligence. Baubles. Fortune. Quoins.” I spared him the bit about bloody retribution.
Meanwhile, blood was rocketing out of the other part of him like it was late for an appointment.
No. The Ghostie gun did something shivery to time as well as space and matter, and we were there when it happened, and if that makes a knotty confusion between what’s sane and what isn’t, you can take your complaints to the Ghosties.
Whatever she had ended up, after all the faces she had worn, was it possible it had all begun with a desire to set right what was wrong? Could kindness—by only ever taking little steps—twist itself into the worst kind of cruelty? And did the fact of that kindness excuse any part of her crimes, or just put a different shade behind them, like hanging an ugly picture on a different wall?
