The Gospel According to Verdu (a Steampunk Novel) (The Brofman Series) (5 page)

In the morning, surrounded by the evidence of his binge, he awoke. But aside from the damaged crockery, and the fragrant splatters of wine mud across the floor, all was right in Verdu’s room. He sat up and dimly thought he should be well hungover after a night of drinking on an empty stomach, but he felt fine. Better than fine, he felt the smallest glimmer of an idea forming.

He pushed himself toward the table and dragged his body into the chair. For the first time in weeks, he was hungry. He popped several pieces of pickled fish into his mouth and chewed. The tangy juices sloshed in his mouth, and he swallowed the morsels as he bit into the grayish-green bread. He tasted it, really
tasted
it. The flavor was tolerable and the texture dense and chewy. As he ate, Verdu thought hard about his various plans for escape. They all still seemed too impossible, but the thought no longer frustrated him. Something in that combination of drunkenness and self-pity had freed him.

He realized that he wanted to run from this place not for the sake of freedom itself, to leave the multitude of wretched Tugrulian subjects behind. On the contrary, he wanted to run to the resistance to be in a position to help the subjugated people in the city below, to lead the Tugrulians to a better life, and a better world. Bodily, he could not escape his cage, true, but he considered for the first time that perhaps he could still do
something.
In short order, he was sure of it.

Another bite, and the thoughts came to him in a rush. Chenda! Who knew the Pramuc better than he did? Apart from the other Companions, no one. Their story—the things that had happened to them in the desert, in the caves with Pranav Erato; the Miracle of the Sunken Garden—he knew these stories! And others needed to hear them, too.

Verdu counted his assets as he unwrapped the skewers of meat. First, he seemed to have acres of time; for days now, there had not been a single visitor from the inquisition. Secondly, he had a desire, a compulsion even, to put the story in writing. There his resources ran dry. He stopped mid chew as he realized he had no pencil. No paper.

For a moment, he sat vexed, staring at his nearly empty tray, a kabob raised halfway to his mouth. “But I
want
to write,” he said to no one. And the thought came to him, a thought that did not feel like his own, simply saying,
So, write already
.

Verdu’s hand came down onto the square of cloth on the tray, and he began to scratch the charred skewer across the tightly woven fabric. Forming the letters was slow going, but he had the fuel of desire to temper his patience as he wrote:

chapter 4

Breather

“
The torpedo shot out of the forward tube”—Captain Endicott held every eye around the table, looking to make sure no one would miss the punch line to his outrageous story—“and we shoved the bride off the back of the boat into the arms of her fiancé’s manservant!”

The men around the table howled with laughter, but Candice snorted in disgust. Truth be told, she was more annoyed with herself for getting hooked into listening to another of the captain’s tall tales than she was with the brash and bawdy humor at the expense of the not-so-virginal runaway bride. How it was that she had found herself romantically tangled with the old scoundrel, she really could not say. But, as a small hint of a smile cracked her face, she had to admit his personality could fill every corner of the room, and he did make her laugh upon occasion. Well, more than just occasionally.

It seemed that Captain Endicott liked the challenge of making Candice smile, too. The quarrels and laughter between them were as natural as the surf rubbing against the sand. They had fallen into a pleasant pattern of enjoying each other when the
Brofman
docked at Coal City, and fondly parting after a day or two of romance. Then living happily in their solitary existence for the days and weeks they were apart, always picking up where they left off and never demanding a change from the other. Now that Candice had come aboard, personally overseeing her mission of supplying seeds to the Tugrulians, the couple was trying to find common ground in this new atmosphere. Things weren’t going as well as either wished.

A series of whistles sounded through the ship, and Captain Endicott slapped his broad hand down on the galley table. “Finally!” he barked. “Boys! Get up there and make sure madam’s gardening supplies are secured in the undeclared-cargo hold.
And
be quick about it! The faster we get off this pier, the less I’m gonna owe the Terminal Station registrar.
Move!
”

The
Brofman
deckhands scattered like roaches suddenly thrust into daylight, each skittering out the galley door and into the central corridor of the airship. Candice rose to follow the deckhands up to the fresh air of the ship’s deck, but Captain Endicott grabbed her around the waist and tipped her backward into his arms. “Oh, no, my lady. You don’t need to scurry off. What point is clearing the room of the kiddies if I can’t peck the cheek of my best girl? Eh?”

The slight form of Candice Mortimer drew to its meager yet full height. Even the most inattentive of freshmen from any past or present Introduction to World Geology class could tell by the slight closing of the professor’s left eye and the near-complete disappearance of her lips that danger was imminent and cover should be taken. “Oh, so that’s how it is, Max? You’ll clear the decks for what you want, even something as inconsequential as a kiss, but when I want something that could shift the balance of humanity in the world, you can’t seem to find the time to focus on what you’re about?” Candice snarled.

Wincing, Captain Endicott held his hands up and backed away. “Is this about the melon seeds again?”

“
Mustard! You got fifty pounds of mustard seed! Melon—like your thick head—was what I wanted! Honestly, the last thing the Tugrulians need is more bitter weedy plants. They need food!” Candice began to pace back and forth in the small galley, muttering to herself about
doing something right
and
doing it yourself
. Captain Endicott contemplated how best to disappear into the corner closest to him.

After a few uncomfortable minutes, he sighed. “I’m sorry, Candice,” he said in a soft, genuine voice. “I know this is important, and I made a mistake. I think I can make it up to you when we stop at Musser Point to pick up the lovebirds. There are some warehouses there, and I’ll send the guys out to the local feed ’n’ seed to get you as much melon, pumpkin, sunflower, or whatever seeds you want me to get.” He caught Candice’s hand as she passed and held it between his thick palms, giving her his best hangdog expression. “I’m going to make this up to you.”

Candice, who had internally melted at
I’m sorry
, allowed Captain Endicott to see her scowl slip. She put her free hand up to his tanned cheek, tracing her small finger across the deep laugh lines around his eyes. “Oh, you better,” she said, tapping the side of his face in a light slap. She turned away from him and marched out the door.

Captain Endicott sat down hard on the galley bench and mopped his brow with his handkerchief. There was something about this woman that really frightened him, in an exciting kind of way. He had faced men with bombs and thieves in the night, the forces of nature and tyrannical governments. But he had never dreaded anything as much as disappointing Candice, and he couldn’t figure out exactly why he felt that way about her.

Fenimore Dulal pressed his back against the cold metal bulkhead of the RAS combat airship
Incorrigible
, feeling more miserable than he ever had in his life. At this altitude, the aluminum plates of the ship wicked away the heat from his back, leaving a cold sting and aching muscles in its place. Even though the door to his makeshift-quarters was open and he was free to move about much of the ship, he remained in his small cell; the implication of him being housed in the brig was not lost on him. At some level, he began to think that he deserved it, that he had earned the pain, the isolation, and the task he had ahead. He felt a fool to think life with Chenda, blissful as it was, could have kept him from having to pay the price for his past. To those missteps, he now had to add slinking away from his wife on their honeymoon.

In every life, bad things happen. People make mistakes they wish they could erase, accidents of birth and circumstance or even fate happen every day, and the true measure of a man is how he picks up and carries on. Fenimore felt like he had done his fair share: toeing the line, taking commands, serving his country, and making and breaking his own deals with the devils that had sway over his life. After so many years of being manipulated by his handlers in the Kite’s Republic Intelligence Service, he felt like he had finally become his own man, a man who knew his own mind and where he was headed. Chenda’s man. And in a few moments, it all fell apart. No, he realized, he
let
it fall apart, and he was back to square one.

The moment he saw Russell Sterling in the doorway of the honeymoon suite at the Musser Point Inn, Fenimore knew he was going to be roped back into the tug-of-war between Kite’s Republic and the Tugrulian Empire. He saw it coming, and sat in stupefaction as his will was drained from him by Sterling’s news that his old pal Robert had finally died, and new charges would be brought against him—manslaughter charges, possibly even murder. Sterling offered Fenimore a chance to make a new deal, a one-job trade to disappear his old crimes. Minutes to decide, or it was off to jail. . . .

Fenimore doubted he could ever be excused for what he had done. As if he could stop seeing his old friend behind his eyes every day as he went to sleep. Fenimore had been a soldier, a man who had fought and killed the enemy. Those deaths lay lightly on his soul, like drops filling a rain barrel. But Robert was no enemy. He was a man so much like himself, and there was no reason for the fight between them; there was no excuse, not even youthful exuberance. Thoughtlessness. The struggle of a moment between two friends had led to years of guilt, punishment, and manipulation for one, and motionless nothingness for the other.

Fenimore was overwhelmed by his inability to do anything to change the situation in which he found himself. As he considered that thought, being overwhelmed by nothing, he giggled.
Overwhelmed by nothing
. He rocked back and forth in his open cell, besieged by choked laughter that lurched into ragged sobs. Robert’s death, to a soldier like Fenimore, perhaps should have been just another of those drops in the bucket of violence and lives lost. But, in that moment, cold and alone in the brig, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Fenimore felt his grip on his own life, his own sanity take a sudden slip toward the abyss. In that break, it seemed a fair punishment: for killing Robert, he deserved losing Chenda. He thought at the moment when Sterling made him the offer that sneaking away would protect her, but it was not true. Fenimore was punishing himself by leaving her behind, and surely breaking her heart.

Sadly, he had not counted on how entwined he had become with her in the short span of their marriage. He had invested himself, every moment, in her love and ability. Now without her, he could not find the better parts of himself: his confidence, reason, compassion, and self-worth. Empty to the core, he kept rocking, slowly, keeping time to the soul-sucking agony that was his complete loss of faith in himself.

Content to watch the eddies of powdery dust churned by the fat bicycle tires, Chenda did not bother to turn her head to see where the newspaper boy’s cart was heading. The inn grew smaller with each turn of the pedals, the periphery of scenic dunes pushing it farther away. She saw this for what it was—what it needed to be: a moment of breaking. She was turning from the path in life she had been on, and like so many trains at Terminal Station in Coal City, a switch was thrown and the cars of her life were being shunted onto another track. For good or for ill, she was heading in a new direction and she was not sure if the destination would be to her liking. But if Fenimore was there, she would go.

How strange
, she thought over and over. Her circumstances seemed so familiar, but so different. She was heading east again, toward Tugrulia. Now it was even more frightening than it had been the last time; she knew without a doubt what she was getting into.

She bit down firmly on her lip, forcing the pain to push away her tears, but her frustration persisted. She felt like a total fraud and wondered at what she had been doing over the last several months. One of the final things that Verdu had said to her before she left Tugrulia was to work on controlling her powers. Make them dance, he said. Help people. She doubted that she had done any more than manage her gift from the gods, play with it at best. But had she helped anyone? No, and, she had to admit, she had not even tried.