“Just Lutharon,” Clay said. “The others will fly home.”
“We have room for two more aboard the Superior,” Hilemore said. The usefulness of the drakes during their battle with the Blues had evidently made a deep impression on his military mind. “And the Endeavour could carry one.”
“Just Lutharon,” Clay insisted. “We only need him.”
He went to the fore-deck to communicate the decision to Lutharon, who proved surprisingly resistant. He still roiled with excitement after the fight with the Blues, the fresh scars on his flanks seemingly doing little to deter his ardour. It’s my belief, Clay thought, laying a hand on the Black’s snout to send a flow of calming images into his mind, your kin have risked enough on our account already. Time to send them home.
Lutharon let out an aggrieved huff, twin smoke-plumes rising from his nostrils as he pulled his head away. He turned about and launched himself from the ship’s prow, climbing into the sky and wheeling about, mouth gaping as he let out a summoning call. It was soon answered by the other Blacks, all rising from the ships to join him in a swirling flock. Clay could feel some of the conflicting emotions leaking from Lutharon and sense the reluctance amongst the other Blacks. Their cries became discordant and the circling flock took on a confused, disordered appearance, some drakes colliding and snapping at each other in apparent disagreement. Eventually Lutharon let out a huge roar that drowned out all other cries and the discord abruptly ceased. They continued to circle in silence for a short while, then began to peel away, flying north to the Isles in a loose formation one by one until Lutharon was left alone in the sky.
He descended in a wide arc, skimming the sea before flaring his wings and coming to rest on the Superior’s prow. He let out a low rumble as Clay came forward to run a hand along his flank. “Sorry, big fella,” he said. “But I’m fast becoming resigned to the notion that there’s only one way to win this war, and when the time comes it’ll just be you and me.”
Hilemore ordered the blood-burner lit once they cleared the Green Cape. The Superior with her larger engine and lack of paddles soon pulled ahead of the Endeavour, though the smaller ship’s comparative lack of weight meant she was able to keep station a hundred yards off the frigate’s bow.
Clay spent much of the first three days pondering every scrap of information he had been able to glean about Catheline Dewsmine. In addition to what Akina could tell him, an appeal to the rest of the fleet for any pertinent information had yielded a number of periodicals, including some copies of Scandal Monthly so beloved by the late Mr. Tottleborn. The details of the woman’s life were so alien to his own that it was hard to find anything to empathise with, something he knew would be important if his scheme was to work. Born rich and kinda nasty with it, was his main conclusion upon reading the various accounts of Catheline’s life. Maybe that’s why the White chose her.
Eventually he was forced to conclude that the most useful aspect of the periodicals lay in the drawings and photostats depicting his subject, albeit with varying levels of accuracy. The drawings were mostly advertorials, a typical example exhorting readers to “Try Daulton’s Skin Cleansing Cream,” above a serene image of Catheline reposing on a couch, perfect profile raised towards the lips of a handsome admirer. Below the drawing was the legend “‘All women deserve to feel special.’—Catheline Dewsmine.”
“She doesn’t look insane,” Kriz commented one evening as they lay together in his bunk. He had previously shared the cabin with Lieutenant Sigoral, who now spent his nights with Loriabeth whilst Kriz spent hers with Clay. There had been no prior discussion of the arrangement, the change taking place in an unspoken atmosphere of inevitability. If Braddon had an opinion about his daughter taking up with a Corvantine Blood-blessed, he had seen fit to keep it quiet, although Clay had perceived a certain frowning disapproval whenever his uncle saw the two of them together.
“Maybe she wasn’t,” Clay replied. “Not then at least. Looks a mite different in this one, though.”
He reached for one of the news-sheets, the front page showing a photostat of Catheline stepping into a carriage outside a large mansion house in Sanorah. “Who Did She Kiss Goodnight?” asked the headline above the photostat. The story beneath related how “Famed society beauty Catheline Dewsmine appears to be keeping late hours these days. Here she is exiting the home of Senior Ironship Manager Rence Cozgrave just after midnight. According to neighbours Mrs. Cozgrave is currently visiting relatives in South Mandinor so perhaps Miss Dewsmine was just making sure Mr. Cozgrave didn’t get too lonely.” It was the expression on Catheline’s face that he found most interesting. In other photostats she was always smiling, in this her slightly blurred features stared into the camera with naked, unabashed hatred.
“I reckon whoever took this was lucky she didn’t have any product on her,” Clay said. “Anyways, whoever she was before, she’s a monster now.”
“Just like Hezkhi,” Kriz said, shifting to rest her head on his chest. “I never knew how much he must have hated Father. In the end, after all those years imprisoned in the Enclave, we all resented him, myself perhaps most of all. But I could never hate him. If I had it might have been me they called to whilst we slept. I wonder if madness isn’t all the White needs to claim us. Maybe it needs hate too.”
Hate, Clay thought, looking at the photostat again and the steady-eyed fury of the woman it depicted. Now that’s something I do know about.
CHAPTER 43
Sirus
He didn’t so much wake from unconsciousness as be dragged from it. Get up! Catheline’s voice in his head, curt and undeniable in its authority, banishing the vague images that had begun to coalesce into a dream. Despite the immediate plethora of pain that greeted his awakened body, he was still grateful she had spared him the dream, Katrya’s face having been at the forefront of it.
He sat up slowly, displacing the soil that covered him and taking in his surroundings. The soles of his boots were only a few inches away from the edge of a large crater some twenty feet across. Hovering above the crater were the four crystals, glowing bright at first but then beginning to flicker. As Sirus watched, the flicker increased whilst their glow diminished. They fell when the glow faded, landing on the partially scorched earth near by to be swiftly scooped up by a number of Spoiled.
“I hope you kept his memories,” he heard Catheline say and turned to see her standing over a corpse. Morradin hadn’t been as fortunate as Sirus. The upper half of his body lay outside the crater but what remained of the lower half lay within it, reduced to little more than a smear of ash shot through with patches of red. For a moment Sirus entertained the impossible notion that there might be some vestige of the marshal still lingering in his mind and reached out to try and find it. Of course there was only the cold silence of death. Grand Marshal Morradin, perhaps the finest military mind of his age, a singularly horrible human being and a worse Spoiled, was truly dead.
An enemy and ally both, Sirus thought amidst the welter of fear that followed. What must be done will be done by me alone.