The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [123]
Then he walked off down the road, heading for the Ketty Jay. With every footstep, his good humor grew, and by the time she came into sight he was positively brimming with confidence. Smult might have tried to get one over on them, but they’d slipped the trap. And however he’d done it, he’d saved Trinica, and now she owed him. A pretty satisfactory day, all in all.
On the cargo ramp, he paused and looked back over the blasted, ramshackle settlement toward the town hall.
“Now who can’t tie their bootlaces, you scabby son of a bitch?” he muttered under his breath. And with that, he headed to the cockpit for takeoff.
AMONG THE CIVILIZED—KRAYLOCK’S REVELATIONS—FREY JOINS THE DOTS
estwark University was one of the oldest and most prestigious seats of learning in all of Vardia. It had existed for more than a thousand years. Kings and queens, dukes and earls, had studied there. Great advances in science, medicine, and avionics had been made behind its enormous sandstone walls. Its shadowy studies and echoing halls had played host to conversation and debate between the greatest philosophers, artists, and mathematicians in history. The very air was heavy with knowledge.
Frey sat at a table in the university café, rustled his broadsheet, and did his best to look educated.
The café was built into one side of a large, grassy quad. Tall, square windows looked out over a stone veranda laid with tables and chairs. It was a sunny day, and most of the tables were occupied, but Frey had snagged one near the edge, where he could watch the students going to and from their classes. They hurried along the flagged pathways between the trees and ornamental pools, chatting among themselves, their faces alight with a kind of enthusiasm that Frey hadn’t seen in years. Young men and women, brimming with dreams and possibilities. Young men and women who hadn’t yet been let out into the world, all their protection stripped from them, and left to fend for themselves.
Just you wait, Frey thought. You wouldn’t smile like that if you knew.
But for all his silent, smug warnings, he was jealous. They reminded him of when he was their age, when he thought the way they did. He’d imagined himself as a dashing freebooter or a rich and famous explorer like Cruwen or Skale, the men who discovered and mapped New Vardia. He remembered those first couple of years with Trinica, when he’d believed he was the luckiest man alive and he’d been unable to imagine any obstacle they couldn’t overcome together.
Sometimes he wished he could be that naïve again.
He sipped his coffee and made a show of studying his broadsheet, just for effect. He was acutely aware that he didn’t belong here. He couldn’t shake the suspicion that he’d only been permitted to enter by mistake and that he’d be escorted out at any moment. Even the waitress who served him the coffee had given him a frankly insulting once-over. Although she might have been eyeing him up. Frey’s instincts were all off in this place. Academia intimidated him.
There was plenty of drama in today’s broadsheet. The big news was that the Archduke had announced that his wife was pregnant. The country was in rapture, apparently. Celebrations planned in the cities and all of that.
An heir, to replace poor dead Earl Hengar. That was bad news for the Awakeners. The Archduke and his wife were staunch opponents of the organization, and even more so since Hengar’s death. The Awakeners had had a hand in that, even if they’d never been held to account for it. They might have hoped the Archduke would die childless, to pass the reins of power to a more sympathetic member of the family. But that hope was now extinguished.
The other news also concerned the Awakeners. A vote was to be taken in the House of Chancellors on a new proposition to ban Awakener activity in the cities. Just the thing that Grand Oracle Pomfrey had been complaining about, shortly before Frey robbed him at the card tables. Frey suspected it had been timed to ride the wave of public support in the wake of the Archduke’s announcement.