CHAPTER

39

Zosia walked her dog down the quay, admiring all the damage being diligently repaired by teams of tarshirts, listening to the three-copper opera of lusty shouts and pounding pegs and sawing wood. There was scarcely a ship in Othean Bay that wasn’t in a bad way from their run-in with the leviathans of the Tothan navy, but Zosia was headed for one of the few that had escaped unscathed.

Well, almost unscathed, the replacement of the bowsprit nearly complete. They had supposedly lost it when the fearless captain had steered her vessel out from under cover of fog and sailed straight into the back of the greatest sea monster seen at the Battle of Othean, a titan that had risen from the waves to pluck sailors off the Azgarothian ships in its many wavering arms and snapping claws. Now that same captain straddled the new bowsprit, fiddling with the stays … and looking up with obvious alarm as Zosia hailed her.

“That’s what I like to see!” called Zosia as Choplicker flopped down to warm his lazy belly on the sunny quay. “A good captain always double-checks everything herself, makes sure there’s no loose ends on the yards.”

“Why, if it isn’t the pipemaker Moor Clell!” said Bang, clambering back toward the prow. “Hold on, I’ve got your piece right here. Been keeping it safe for you.”

“For me or from me, Bad Bang, and are we talking briar or a crossbow you’ve got stashed up there?”

“My but you’re one suspicious pipemaker,” said Bang, and reaching over the lip of the prow, retrieved the pipe Zosia had given up for lost so long ago. “Would you believe this beauty made it clear up to Jex Toth with me? And that I lost it in the wreck, only to have your boy Maroto come swimming out of the Haunted Sea with it clenched in his jaw? How’s that for luck?”

“All my pipes have a devil’s own,” said Zosia, pulling the cabernet-finished masterpiece she’d carved in her cell back at Diadem out from the apron of her dirndl and puffing the caldera back to life; she hadn’t wanted to alert the pirate to her arrival, being downwind on the dock. “And Maroto never was my boy. I’ll say he tried to do good. Sometimes. But that doesn’t cancel out the bad.”

“Well,” said Bang, “there’s bad and then there’s—”

“You know what I found on his body?” Zosia asked, her throat closing up all over again, Choplicker’s tail beating on the boards. “After he refused to see me on his deathbed, so I only got to say goodbye to his corpse? A letter, from him to me, confessing he was the one who set Imperials on my town. Not a lot of detail how, and certainly not a word of why, but I’ll tell you this—I thought I knew him, but reading that … reading that I knew he meant every word he wrote. Oh, and did I mention he betrayed our whole race to the monsters who just tried to sacrifice the Star? So no, he’s not my boy.”

“Well, he was mine, and whatever your trouble with him I’m not ashamed to say it,” said Bang, and if she was lying she was a better actor than the departed. “He was clumsy, though. I gave him this pipe, see, since he recognized it was one of yours and was coveting it from the first, but the poltroon broke it. I found the pieces in his pouch when I was up in that same sickroom as you, and seemed a shame to let them go up in the pyre … especially since I knew it weren’t really his. It was yours.”

“What’d you fix it with?” said Zosia, not really wanting to know but having to ask.

“Well, first I tried whale wax but when it heated up that didn’t do, so then I worked in some birch tar, and—”

“Keep it,” Zosia decided, letting go of another sliver of her long-broken heart. “I carved that for my husband, Leib Cherno. He was murdered, and it was all I had left of him in the world.”

Bang looked genuinely taken aback. “I … I never thought …”

“No, pirates never do,” said Zosia, and when Choplicker whined at her she sighed. “Most of us don’t, as a matter of habit. But we can choose to start. I’m not chopping off your arms and legs today, Bang Lin, nor putting out your eyes. Remember that the next time the Star seems dark and cruel and hopeless.”

“And you’re letting me keep the pipe,” said Bang, scratching her greasy tattooed brow with the stem carved from the antler of the first buck Zosia had shot on their mountain, when she and Leib had first come to Kypck. Let it go, old woman, let it all go.

“And I’m letting you keep the pipe,” agreed Zosia. “I lost someone who held it, but so did you. A gift for the grieving.”

“Thanks,” Bang said as Zosia turned back down the quay. “But hey, don’t you want to claim your prize before you go? I promised you a kiss if you ever caught me, and I’ll not have it said that Bad Bang don’t keep her word.”

“You said you’d kiss me anywhere I liked, if memory serves,” said Zosia. “So you can go ahead and kiss my ass.”

“Ha! Fair enough!” Bang called after her. “And where are you retiring to, then, in case I ever need to commission a new briar from the greatest carver in the Star?”

“I’ve had my fill of retirement,” said Zosia, waving her new pipe over her shoulder in farewell. “It’s time to get back to work.”

The first order of business was exorcising the ghost of drugged tubq that Boris had sullied her pipe with … and on its very first bowl, too! Even in the service of busting her out of prison the crime was almost too terrible to be forgiven, but then the last time she’d seen him he hadn’t seemed long for this world, and Zosia had too many troubles with the living to waste any more energy harboring grudges against the dead. Besides, her old superstition about the inaugural bowl somehow defining the fate of the pipe was just that, and best discarded.

This beautiful briar had been tainted from its very first flame, true, and for now the cheap aftertaste of whatever pungent all-sorts blend he’d used to cover up the poison impregnated the wood even if its soporific effects didn’t, yes … but then she’d barely begun to break the pipe in, and so long as she kept it well fed with the good stuff from here on out that badness would soon fade into nothing. This rhum-kissed twist of the best brown vergins from the far fields of Hoggawith and figgy pu’rique fermented in Saint Pease’s Parish would bless the briar with a hard black cake, and even now the lingering funk of Boris’s blend only really intruded on the tongue when she let herself notice it … so she tried not to, focusing on the sweet yet tangy tingle of the smoke, smiling to see how the sea breeze carried off her modest clouds to join their grand cousins in the sky. Every true puffer knows there’s nothing more important than making the most out of every pipe you’re privileged enough to enjoy, in savoring every sip … but every true puffer also appreciates that neither a briar nor a blend are defined by a single smoke, and while not every bowl can be the best one’s ever had, well, the one we pack tomorrow just might be …

Lunting can make a philosopher out of most anyone, but the problem with walking and smoking a pipe and letting your mind wander on a busy quay is it’s awfully easy to let your feet wander, too; Zosia almost strolled right off into Othean Bay before she caught herself. Waving away her fragrant halo and looking clear up the docks, she took in the glory that was the Winter Palace. Towering high above that Star-famous monument to human skill and hard work was the colossal Gate-ash that had sprung up in an instant, a testament that no matter how hard mortals might struggle or how high they might climb, their achievements could never hope to touch the mysterious powers pulsing just beneath their feet. Or at their heel, as the case may be.

Anyway, it was a big fucking tree.

As she dropped her eyes from the inscrutable heavens to where Indsorith sat waiting for her on a bollard in the distance, Zosia’s old knees ached anew at the prospect of all the day’s activity still ahead of them. Ever since that final battle in Jex Toth she’d been losing the youthful vigor Choplicker had granted her, the twinges and arthritis returning, but if that was another price for peace she was happy to pay it. After all the time she’d spent convincing herself that he wasn’t just some animal, here at the end of the song it turned out devils were indeed just like dogs—you couldn’t let them get away with eating whatever they wanted all the time or they’d get fat and spoiled. Looking down at the old monster she was saddled with for the First Dark only knew how many more years, she figured it was time to put him back on a diet.

It was a long way back, so Zosia did the only thing she could and picked up her pace.