Engines and werewolves

Chapter 60

“You’re not serious,” Marvel says.

“Of course I’m serious.” I can’t keep a bit of venom out of my voice. “You think the rotting aristos care what happens to a commoner? They stick you in a room, r**e you until you get pregnant, and then take the kids away to be raised as their own. It ‘improves the noble bloodlines.’”

“Gods,” Marvel says. “No wonder you hate them.”

I shrug again, uncomfortably. It’s not that I don’t hate the aristos. It’s just that it never occurred to me that there was any other way to feel. How else is an alley rat fighting over scraps of rotten fish supposed to feel toward people who live in manicured gardens and eat hummingbird tongues? A specific reason seemed somehow superfluous.

“In ,” Marvel says, “any position is open to anyone who passes the examinations for it. It doesn’t matter who your parents are.”

I snort. “I’m sure a lot of nobles’ daughters end up as fishwives.”

“It’s not perfect,” Marvel concedes. “But we can’t afford to waste mage-born as ‘breeding stock.’” She shudders. “You’d have taken the examination and been given a high position.”

“What if I didn’t like what I was given?”

It’s Marvel’s turn to shrug. “If one of your fishermen decides he doesn’t want to be a fisherman, what does he do?”

“Sell his boat and try his hand at something else, I suppose.”

“What if he’s no good at it?”

“Then he starves, or goes begging.”

She shakes her head. “That doesn’t sound very efficient. Wouldn’t it be easier to figure out in advance what he’s best off doing?”

“So does that mean you had to take an exam to be princess?”

“No.” She goes quiet. “It’s different for royalty.”

I don’t get the chance to enquire about this, because the gray thread I’ve been following suddenly twitches, the far end rising so it slants upward. It gets more vertical as we keep moving, and ahead I can see one of the big pillars. It looks like every other one that I’ve seen, flecked with rust and crusted with shelf mushrooms, but with one important difference: a broad, flat stairway spirals around it, vanishing upward into darkness after a couple of turns.

If Grog’s gift is to be believed, it must connect to the network of stairs and bridges in the Center, which leads ultimately back to the Stern. A way out. I let out a long breath, not sure if this makes the “Victoria is going insane” theory more or less likely.

One immediate problem presents itself, though. The stairs don’t come all the way down to the level of the sand. The bottom step is about eight feet up, just high enough that I can’t touch it with my arms outstretched.

The sight of the stairs makes Marvel suck in her breath. “You knew this was here?”

“Sort of,” I mutter, staring at the inconvenient gap.

“So how do we make the stairs come down?” Marvel says eagerly. “Is there a secret switch or something?”

I give her a withering look, and her enthusiasm fades.

“Oh,” she says. “Well. We could…” She trails off.

“I’m thinking,” I growl, letting the travois fall and going over to the pillar.

The shelf mushrooms, much as they look like a stairway, aren’t strong enough to support my weight even briefly. I tear a couple away from the metal, then fling them aside. If I put my arms up and jump, I can almost reach the step, but not quite. And that doesn’t help Marvel.

I turn back to the pillar. Its face is smooth, apart from patches of rust, and I can’t get much of a hold on it. But …

“Marvel,” I say. “I’m open to ideas.”

“If you could stand on my shoulders, then you could probably pull yourself up,” she says. “But if I could stand up properly, you wouldn’t have had to drag me all this way.”

“I think I can get myself up there,” I say. “But then what?”

She looks at the poles I’ve been using to pull the travois, and her brow furrows.

“It might work,” she mutters to herself. “And what have I got to lose, other than falling onto my broken leg?”

I give her a dubious look.

* * *

Step one: get Victoria up onto the bottom stair.

I summon my Melos blade, lighting up the sand with shimmering green, and apply it to the metal, pouring in as much energy as I can muster. It takes about ten minutes of steady pressure, but when I’m finished there are two notches carved into the metal. I wedge my boot into the foothold, then reach up for the handhold, hauling myself up. From here, the first step isn’t so far away, but reaching it requires a back-wrenching maneuver, pushing away from the pillar and grabbing the edge in one motion.

Now I’m hanging from my palms, my feet dangling, and all I have to do is pull myself straight up with the rusty edge of the step cutting into my fingers. No problem.

By the time I crawl onto the step, I’m sweating freely and my biceps are trembling. I lie on my back for a moment, focused on breathing.

The canteen nearly hits me in the face, and I grab it out of the air. Marvel throws up the rest of the supplies and I set them all aside. She’s sitting just under the step, with one of the poles I used from the travois in her hands.