The Gospel According to Verdu (a Steampunk Novel) (The Brofman Series) (4 page)

“
Fair enough,” he said. “I need to write a letter to my mother anyway. It’s my birthday next week, and that always makes her sad.”

Chenda sat up and stared at Fenimore. She couldn’t imagine what expression she was wearing—a look of shame and horror, most likely. She could not decide what troubled her more: realizing she had never asked when his birthday was, or how a mother could be sad over the birth of her child.

I don’t understand
, she thought at him.

Fenimore smiled at his wife. “How strange you look! Don’t fret. Let me explain: My mother gets sad on my birthday because my brother died that day. He was born first, and was already gone—his umbilical cord had choked him—then I came right behind, screaming like a banshee. My mother’s joy over me was tainted by my brother’s death. Her pain is always there. When she looks at me, she always sees one where there should be two. I could never be enough for her.” He sighed and added quietly, “Sometimes I feel that empty space where my brother should be, too. In fact, I have felt it quite often of late. . . .”

And there it was, the hole they never talked about: Verdu. Chenda wrapped her arms around him and grabbed two handfuls of his thick hair, pressing her forehead against his.
When I see you, I see everything that means the world to me. You are everything. All I need
.

Fenimore made a half smile and patted his wife on the rump. “Of course, and you for me as well. But, I would prefer to have you go off and take care of your power surge rather than accidentally cause an earthquake in our room, so, let’s talk more when you get back from your little walk.”

Chenda nodded once and pulled on her flight pants and boots. She kept Fenimore’s shirt, tying the long shirttails in a knot over her belly and rolling the sleeves up to her wrists. As she walked to the door, she stopped to kiss Fenimore’s form, hunched over the small desk, a pen scratching away on the inn’s stationery.
I’ll just be a moment
, she thought to him, and then she was gone.

The honeymoon suite at the Musser Point Inn faced the shore and had a private path that wandered through the dunes and sea grasses to the sugar-white sands of the beach. The moonlight shaded all she could see in a perfectly matched pallet of grays, silver, and faint lavender. The shore was breezy, and the waves made a soft roar as Chenda watched the sparkles of sea spray dancing along the thick, dark line where waves met sand. A few crabs scuttled along, looking for scraps thrown up from the depths, industriously seeking out a free lunch. She decided to help out a bit, and unleashed her powers on the water just a few yards out from where she stood. Up shot a column of water, one hundred feet into the air. She commanded the water, swirling it, bubbling it, churning it for all she was worth. She looked into the water with her powers, and seeing that the bits of fish and mollusks within were thoroughly pureed, she set the whole mess down on the beach near a group of crabs and released it from her control. The seawater trickled into the dry sand almost immediately, and the bits of pulverized shell, fins, and flesh glistened on the sand.

The crabs practically did a dance for joy over their sudden jackpot, but Chenda felt a little sad. It often puzzled her that her abilities were miraculous and so powerfully destructive. She watched the crustaceans enjoy their windfall feast. It might balance the score a bit, she thought to herself, to have crab cakes for lunch.

The sky to the east began to lighten to a hazy mauve and then lilac. A few early-morning seagulls swooped in to challenge the crabs for the carrion du jour. The dawn of a new day, and everyone—everything—was still fighting over the scraps from yesterday. Again she felt that nagging truth that each time she tried to help, she just created another conflict.

Chenda turned away from the squabbling animals and strolled back up the path to her room. She was pleased to have another whole day ahead of her with Fenimore, and started to contemplate what to give him for his birthday. She climbed the last dune and noticed the door to the honeymoon suite was standing open. Her breath quickened. She had a prickling feeling that something was wrong.

Chenda started shouting for Fenimore before she crossed the threshold.

The room within was still, and there was no sign of him. His boots were gone, as was his flight coat, but his small bag remained on the floor at the head of the bed. Chenda called his name again, trying hard not to panic.

The light on the writing desk still glowed, and Chenda found two letters sealed and propped against the lamp base. The first was addressed to Jacquelyn Dulal, Fenimore’s mother, presumably. The second was on stationery very different from what was provided by the hotel, and the handwriting addressing the letter to Mrs. Chenda Frost-Dulal was not her husband’s. She took the letter in her trembling hands and tore it open.

Chenda looked at the note in her hand and let what little she had left of her power escape her. The paper caught fire. Grabbing her flight coat and boots, she dropped the flaming note into the sand as she walked out the door. Running along the boardwalk to the front of the hotel, she knew instantly several things to be true. First, she flatly refused to stay here if Fenimore was heading east. He needed her, perhaps more than he knew. Perhaps even as much as she needed him. Secondly, Fenimore was not going to the Tugrulian Empire willingly. There was no way he would leave her without so much as a personal good-bye. Something must have happened that had put Fenimore into a really compromised position, one that made him feel he must leave, silently and immediately. In her head, she knew something else was afoot, but in her heart it felt like a betrayal.

She would not stay here for him, and neither could she wait on the
Brofman
to come back and pick her up. Cooling her heels for two more days? Impossible. At the moment, she was perhaps just an hour behind Fenimore. She raged that she had not fully curbed that rotten spy herder Russell Sterling when she faced him months ago. She had meant to make it clear then that Fenimore was off-limits for the intelligence service, but once again, he had her husband. Unluckily for him, Chenda would be only one step behind.

chapter 3

The righted track

In the portico of the hotel, dawn lit the crushed shells of the drive, washing it in brilliant oranges and golds. Chenda rubbed the meat of her hand into her forehead and tried to force the next thought through her head with brute force alone.
East. I must go east, but how?
Ideas for how to execute that single notion would not come, and she was all but consumed by an aching quiver low in her abdomen. All the love stories, the trashy pulp serials that got passed around the
Brofman
and the melodramas that graced the finest theaters in Coal City, said heartbreak resided in the chest. The truth of it has always been that the pain of separation from one’s true love lives a bit farther south. The sinking, fluttering pain grows in part from fear struggling against grief. It’s knowing and not knowing something at the same time, the anticipation of an even bigger blow.

The twitching fear was testament to how much she had matured in this marriage and how sheltered she had been in the past. If she had been even one-tenth as self-aware a year ago, she would have known how unlikely her husband Edison outliving her was. At twenty-three years his junior, a long and healthy life put the odds in her favor. She had not known enough to see the truth of it when she married him; she never considered preparing herself for the ending of their time together. Since his death, Chenda had seen enough of the world to know what perilous possibilities loomed for Fenimore, and for her as well.

The ache inside her now, so similar to the clawing of the Pramuc’s power, sapped her strength. Terror. Panic. Despair. Hopelessness. The words were too weak to describe her emotions.

She looked to the sky and silently cried for help.

And, for the first time in months, she heard a strange giggle. A chorus in one voice, which in an instant turned into the ring of a bicycle bell.

Looking down again, she met the eyes of a sweet-faced teenage boy on a tricycle cart. He wore a floppy cap with a turned-up brim and a canvas satchel across his chest.

“
Pardon me, miss,” he said, scooping a bundle of newspapers from a full basket strapped behind the seat. He slouched around Chenda, then deposited his armload at the vacant doorman’s station, pulled an empty envelope from his satchel, and scribbled a few strokes on it. He tucked the envelope into the tight band that bound the papers, and he snatched up a very similar envelope from a brass clip hanging from the doorman’s desk.

Tucking the pencil into the brim of his hat, he made his way back to his bike, and checked his watch. “Um, you waitin’ for a cab? I don’t expect there will be one for quite a while. Where you headed?”

Chenda, who had not moved an inch while the paperboy worked, blinked and muttered, “East.”

“
Fancy that,” he said. “Me, too. Hop on and you can come with me to the next delivery stop, the newsstand on Blackwell Docks.”

Like stars sliding into the pinholes of night, Chenda felt the rightness of this direction. Asked and answered—the gods showed her this was the way to go. She pushed down the aching tingle and trusted in the help she was being offered. She threw herself onto the back of the trike and simply said, “Thank you,” as the boy began to pedal down the path to the east.

Verdu slouched on the cot as a serving girl brought the meal tray past the guards and placed it on the small table. A whiff of fine dust, stirred by the passing servant, curled over the edge of the table and drifted toward the floor. Verdu’s attention followed the motes settling slowly downward, as the sight was more interesting to him than what food lay on the tray. After so many weeks of confinement, his brain had numbed to his surroundings: the light and shadows looked the same each morning, each meal tasted much like the last, the birds had no new songs for him, and he could conjure no feasible plan for escape, no matter how hard he tried to find one.

The sound of the bolt sliding into place, sealing him in again, alone for another day, brought his gaze back up from the dusty floor. He made his way to the table, dragging his lame leg behind him. The tray held the usual things: a cake of moss bread, a small bowl with pickled fish and mushrooms, and a square of cream-colored cloth tied into a little bundle. Verdu looked in to see a number of charred skewers of meat—it looked to be lizard today. The usual stoppered jug of water sat in its usual place among its fellows. Verdu promised himself he would eat something later, though he had no hunger at all. In his mind he reasoned that he needed to eat, but could not find the will in his heart. He yawned, defeated by another day in his cage, and as he stretched his mouth, a small gust of wind blew through the window, coating his tongue with grit. Verdu coughed and spit, then grabbed the jug from the tray. Flicking the stopper away, he poured some cool liquid into his mouth and nearly choked again. Wine!

Well, well
, he thought, smacking his lips.
Where did this come from?
He let a bit more of the strong, sweet wine wash down his throat. It tasted good—better than good, in fact. Surprising, and surprises had been few and far between for Verdu of late. He decided very quickly that he simply did not care to look this particular gift horse in the mouth. A taste of something different, anything different, was something to celebrate, to relish. If this was some kind of trick, poison even, he was going to fall for it. There was enough wine in the jug to keep him entertained for a good while that evening, and the more he drank, the more he wanted to drink. He sipped deeply as the shadows grew long across the floor and then, in the darkness, he began to hum, and in an act of both pleasure and self-destruction, he downed the last of the wine and belched loudly.

He looked drunkenly into the empty jug and smiled. “Thank heaven for small favors,” he said as he heaved himself up and shuffled toward the bed. Halfway across the small space, he realized his balance was not up to the task. He tipped sideways onto the floor; the jug, still in his hand, smacked the hard tiles with a tinkling crack. The earthenware broke apart and pieces flew all around him. The last remaining drops from the broken jug mixed with the dust on the floor, and Verdu lay there in the middle of it all, snickering.
A good little drunk was just what I needed
, he thought. He reveled in the mess he was sprawled in. After a few minutes, his giggles faded into sobs for a time, the melody of a man feeling sorry for himself. Soon after, the wine’s sweet workings on his brain overtook his self-pity, and he began to snore.