A Daughter of No Nation (41 page)

One of them even castigated Brother Piper for authorizing the resurrection without sifting through the evidence first.

“It's not a bad point,” Sophie said.

“We may as well pack up and leave,” Parrish said. “They'll be arguing about this for years.”

“
Bene,”
Tonio said brightly. “They could use a break in the tedium.”

Parrish pealed laughter, a bright and joyous sound that earned him glares from the monks as it echoed off the monuments and the walls.

“Let's go home,” he said, meaning
Nightjar,
and Sophie felt happiness burst through her at the mere thought.

 

CHAPTER    
27

They got down the mountain without getting eaten by specters—the insects were another story—and were aboard ship soon after. Fortunately the medic, Watts, had approved of the cat or perhaps been approved by it. He had packed up his pharmacy and moved into the doctor's cabin while they were gone, and now he was ready and waiting to slather a sweet-smelling oil on their bites, a minty unguent that killed the itch.

By nightfall they had put Parrish's boyhood home, stone skulls, crows, and all, most positively in the rearview. The specter skulls seemed to watch them go. Their eye sockets and mouths were edged in bioluminescence—giving the impression of a hundred feline somethings staring after them, hungrily, as they took an easterly course under a sluggish wind.

Bram had re-created a copy of Highfelling's schematic from memory, then checked it meticulously against the images Sophie had taken in the waking chamber. Now he was working on building the automaton, molding pieces from clay to reconstruct the parts he didn't have to hand.

The general shape and the specific locomotive heave of the automaton's paddles made it clear soon enough that the thing was meant to pass for one of the turtles who turned up annually on the Sylvanna beaches to lay their eggs. The hollow chambers in the casing were indeed for throttlevine seeds—Sophie sprouted samples easily, preserving them as evidence.

“Will it be enough to convince His Honor he can resolve the case?” Verena had stopped sulking, instead taking to hanging around helping every minute.

“Knowing the delivery system should make it possible to stop the sabotage. We'll trade that much information for a promise to get the goat transforms out of the swamp.” Sophie looked down at their makeshift turtle and frowned. “As for winning the case—this is just another circumstantial thing to add to the argument … it's not proof. What objections would a lawyer raise if we gave him this? We have to answer them all.”

“We need to figure out why the Sylvanners never found one on their shoreline. They've been pulling it off for decades.”

“No windup toy's going to swim eighteen nautical miles,” Bram said. “And it doesn't appear to be magical.”

“The plans said nothing about enchanting them. Anyway, they're generic objects—they wouldn't have names.”

“So they're releasing them in the water close to the Sylvanna shore.”

“The passage between Sylvanna and Haversham is heavily guarded,” Parrish said. “In case of slave escapes.”

“There are lights ashore and patrols asea,” Sophie agreed. “Plus the rocks and navigational hazards. But if it's a patrol ship releasing the automatons … I mean, they must know how to avoid their own defenses.”

“You studied the Baste, didn't you?” Verena asked.

Parrish nodded. “I meant to race its intervals, before I was expelled from Fleet.”

“So we build a case,” Sophie said. “We have to document where they're dropping them off, how they're making it to shore, and what happens to them after.”

“I have a theory about why they never found a fake turtle,” Verena said. She tapped the mix of throttlevine seeds. “Most of these are tucked into a piece of dried fruit, right? So that animals will eat them and carry them into the swamp?”

“Right.”

“But here's a chamber just for seeds. The ones not wrapped in a tasty bit of fruit would stay with the original gadget, wouldn't they?” She lifted one of the spare cogs.

“That follows,” Sophie agreed.

Verena tapped the cog against the wooden table, making a sharp
clonk.
“Stormwrack has almost no iron or refined metals. Stonewood varnish inscriptions come from Layparee. The pieces are hard, but once the glaze breaks, they fall apart pretty quick. I've been thinking about that trunk Bram destroyed. Throttlevine's got those tough little roots—”

“Genius!” Sophie said. Verena flushed with pleasure. “So the vine grows around the turtle's remnants, the glaze gets cracked by the root system, and soon it's just a pile of biomatter at the base of a throttlevine plant.”

“Good in theory,” Bram said. “It still isn't proof.”

“Ah, but this theory we can test,” she said. “We've already germinated two of the pods. Now we just add bits of stonewood to the pots. We watch the plant grow—we've got time—and document the degradation. Verena can sign the notes every day. You're official enough for that, right?”

“I got the shiny badge,” she agreed.

They were at sea for ten days before the first new throttlevine root cracked the glaze on the first gear. Sophie cut it free of the plant and added the piece to her growing supply of bagged evidence. A second sample they left, continuing to document the decay of the stonewood gear.

It became apparent almost immediately that Verena's sudden shift to a bright and perky be-everywhere, do-everything demeanor was a new stratagem for keeping Sophie and Parrish from further dating.

The grown-up thing to do would be to tell Verena she was sorry she was hurting but to back the hell off. But after the long stretch of sulking, Sophie couldn't bear another reversal, and she didn't want more hurt feelings. Parrish apparently felt the same—he kept his distance.

But she couldn't leave it alone. Who could?

Finally she slid a note under the hatch to his cabin:
I don't know what you mean by courting.

By breakfast the next day, Bram had his model finished.

“It descends slowly, carried by the current,” he was saying. “At a depth of about fifteen feet, water pressure compresses the midsection, here.” He pressed on his model and they heard a click. “This starts the clockwork.”

The automaton rolled its flippers forward, inching itself across the galley table toward a bowl of deep-fried fish balls. The ferret, which had been cadging small bites from the safety of Verena's lap, startled and then put out a paw, as if it thought it might rap the device on its carved head.

Bram shut off the mechanism, stilling the gadget. “The automaton then begins to swim for shore. Presumably it's part of a crowd, since they're doing this at laying time. They're somewhat lighter than the actual turtles, so they'd be near the top of the … what's the collective noun, Sofe?”

“Dule. A dule of turtles.”

“So they ride in piggyback?”

“I'd think if it was right in, swimming with the hundreds, it'd get knocked around and damaged.”

“My guess is it swims above the rest, at least until they're pretty close to the beach.”

He reached across the table, snagged her book of notes, and doodled a bunch of turtles breaching the water. The automaton, styled with head bolts, like Frankenstein, was riding on the backs of the thousands of individuals scrabbling onto the sand.

Sophie touched the doodle thoughtfully. Bram was one of those people who could sketch in fonts.

“This is all conjecture,” he said. “Without an intact sample, we can't be sure.”

“No,” Verena said. “We'll have to figure out the currents—where they're being released to meet up with the dule.”

“I can work that out,” Parrish said.

“So you do remember the chart?”

He nodded.

“As for all this conjecture,” Sophie said, “what if we dress it up a little?”

“What are you going to do,” Verena said, “build a Powerpoint presentation?”

“Basically, yeah.” She dug out the second notebook she'd bought weeks ago. It was blank, filled with a collection of now-pressed leaves she'd collected on Sylvanna. She transferred the samples to the book of questions, freeing up the blank notebook, and told them what she had in mind. “Would you mind, Bram?”

“Something to do while we sail east, right?” Bram said, cheerfully enough.

“Would it hold up in court?” Verena said.

“There are no solid standards of proof,” Sophie said.

“Yet.”

“Still, this doesn't constitute evidence,” she said.

“Yeah, but if we dress everything up right, make it glitzy, the Havers might settle the case.”

“True.” Sophie nodded. “But I don't want to fool around with just bluffing. We'll dress it up because the courts don't respect facts, but we want them to start respecting facts. More importantly, so does Cly. The point is to buy off Cly, remember? Free Beatrice, get the goat transforms out of the swamp?”

Verena frowned. “How are you gonna do that?”

“
We.
Cly was all for having me set up a Stormwrack Institute of Forensics. Here be science, hear us roar! So we write up a charter. Make it pretty enough, I bet they'd accord us just as much legitimacy as the astrologers.”

Verena chortled.

“Could you write the document?” Sophie said. “Do the legalese?”

“If we figured out basic principles, I guess. Those would be about the difference between proof and … making assertions?”

“Documented experiments, reproducible results.” Sophie nodded. “Annela and Cly would slice through the red tape on approving us, wouldn't they?”

“In a second, if it benefited them.”

“All well and good, Sofe,” Bram said. “But even with a charter, the plans, and this model … that's not enough.”

“Agreed,” Parrish said. “If you want absolute proof, we'll need a clockwork turtle.”

“I know.”

“Then what's the point?” Verena threw up her hands. “Where are we supposed to get that?”

“That's where I come in,” Sophie said. “Bram makes the presentation, you write up a forensic institute charter, and I catch an automaton in the Baste.”

There was a silence. Then Parrish got to his feet. “We'll need fair winds to make the turtle migration.”

He brushed past her on his way up to the ladder that led to the sailing deck. Touching her hand briefly, he left a piece of paper tucked into her palm.

She felt a ludicrous buzz of delight.

Verena was contemplating the half-made turtle, which looked less like an animal and more like a serving tray for a frozen entrée, full of clock parts and surrounded by the breakfast dishes. Her face had fallen out of its wilfully perky cast and was pensive. Bram was already doing preliminary sketches.

“Excuse me,” Sophie said, ignoring a stab of guilt as she ducked out so she could unfold her note.

It read:
I hardly know what I mean by courting myself. Issle Morta, as you may have divined, does not encourage what you call pair bonding. What do you do on Erstwhile?

Oh yeah, Sophie thought. Dinner and a movie should be easy to pull off on a seventy-foot boat with a heartbroken teenage chaperone.

Verena was, even now, headed up to the sailing deck to join Parrish.

She went back to her cabin, hunting up another scrap of paper.
Usually dating involves cafés and restaurants and entertainments. Long walks in the park, hand-holding.
She felt a thrill, under her skin, and found herself remembering a dozen TV shows about kids at drive-ins in the fifties. Kids cuddling, making out …

Oh, this was crazy.

She was, nevertheless, beaming when she folded the note in the pocket of her sweater and went back up.

The crew had raised all three sails and the jib, and the ship was running fast. Sophie got the speed from Tonio, at the helm, and converted it from Fleet units into about ten knots.

“What if we don't make it?”

“Wait a year?”

“Suboptimal,” she said. “No. We'll have to conduct a search on Turtle Beach, after the migration, a search for automaton parts.”

Prowling a heavily patroled, ecologically sensitive beach. Rees's ecologically sensitive beach at that. She remembered Rees trying to intervene before she embarrassed herself at the festival.

Parrish walking up, just as she was telling the assembled Sylvanners she was hugely promiscuous.

I wonder if that's why it took him so long to make his move?

Cringing inwardly, she touched the note in her pocket.

Verena and Parrish were climbing the rigging, deep in conversation.

“I gather there's a plan?” Tonio asked.

She nodded.

“
Bene.
Feels good to have wind in our sails. A little race.
Miamadre,
forgive me, these last few months have been dull. I've missed being in danger.”

“I don't know there's much danger,” she said. “Compared to last time, anyway. All we have to do is work out where they're dropping the clockwork turtles.”

“And what? Scoop one out of the water within view of the vessel that launched it?”

“Oh. Good point.”

The cat, Banana, chose that moment to climb out on deck. Watts had been giving it treats packed with fish oil and herbs, and it was filling out. There was a shine to the tabby's coat, though his ears hadn't outgrown their peculiarities. One was permanently mashed forward, the other back, giving him a pugilistic appearance. He shoved his head against Sophie's hand and began to purr like a little freight train.

“You should write to His Honor,” Tonio said.

“Should I?”

“Tell him you expect to have something worth trading. We'll reach Sylvanna days ahead of the Fleet. He could spend that time expediting your mother's release.”