Stan thrust some dark beer upon him and artfully took that moment to pay Toby his day’s wages, which of course made Toby seem a piker if he did not buy the next round, which came with unaccountable speed. He was halfway through that mug and thinking better of this evening, of this huge complex city, of his fine new friend Stan, and generally of the entire copious wonderful esty itself, when he recalled how his own father had drunk heavily years before. He remembered Killeen remarking at the time that in Family Bishop, you discarded a cork once you had pulled it from a bottle, knowing with assurance that it would not be needed again.
This connection troubled him, but Stan relieved Toby’s frown by stretching his legs out and sticking a sock-clad foot up. The sock had a face sewed on it so that Stan could jiggle his toes and make the face show anger, smile, even blink. All the while Stan carried on a funny conversation with the artistic foot. But this made Toby remember a day after the Calamity, cold and bleak, when Bishops were camping overnight with some stragglers from other Families. A tall Knight boy had stuck his gray-socked foot from beneath some covers as a joke. Toby mistook it for a rat and threw his knife, skewering the foot. That had made him unpopular for some time around Family Knight.
He smiled at this and had another sip of beer. Stan’s face went pale. Toby felt a presence behind him.
Turning, he saw a tall man dressed in leather jacket and black pants, sporting a jaunty blue cap. No one but pilots could wear such a cap with its gold flashings across the bill.
“Mr.—Mr. Preston,” Stan said.
“You gentlemen out for an evening? Not too busy to discuss business?”
Mr. Preston smiled with an austere good nature, as befitted a representative of an unfettered and truly independent profession. His Aspects had laboriously taught him that lords found themselves hampered by parliaments, ministers knew the constraints of their parishioners, even school teachers in their awful power finally worked for towns.
But a silver river pilot knew no governance. A ship’s captain could give a half dozen or so orders as the induction motors readied and she backed sluggishly into the stream, but as soon as the engines engaged, the captain’s rule was overthrown. The pilot could then run the vessel exactly as he pleased, barking orders without consultation and beyond criticism by mere mortals.
Without asking, Mr. Preston yanked a chair from another of the raw hardwood tables that packed the bar, and smacked it down at the table. “I heard you come from uptime—way uptime,” he said to Toby.
“Uh, Stan told you?” Toby asked to get some time to think.
“He dropped a word, yes. Was he wrong?” Mr. Preston peered at Toby intently, his broad mouth tilted at an assessing angle beneath a bristly brown mustache.
“Nossir. Maybe he, uh, exaggerated, though.”
“Said you’d been above Rockport.”
“I caught sight of it in fog. That awful pearly kind that—”
“How far beyond?”
“Not much.”
“Cairo?”
“I . . . yeah, I gave it wide berth.”
“Describe it.”
“Big place, grander than this town.”
“You see the point? With the sand reef?”
“I didn’t see any reef.”
“Fair enough—there isn’t any reef. What’s the two-horned point like?”
“Foam whipping up in the air.”
“Where’s the foam go?”
“Shoots out of the river and arcs across to the other horn.”
“You go under the arc?”
“Nossir. I stayed in the easy water close on the other shore.”
“Smart. That arc’s been there since I was a boy and nobody’s lived who tried to shoot with the current under it.”
“I heard that too.”
“Who from?”
“Fellow upstream.”
“How far upstream?”
Nobody ever lied to a pilot, but you could shave the truth some. Toby took a sip of the dark beer that was thick enough to make a second supper—as some in the bar seemed to be doing, loudly—and said with care, “The reach above Cairo. That’s where I started.”
Mr. Preston leaned forward and jutted out his long jaw shrewdly. “There’s a big bar there, got to go by it easy. Sand, isn’t it?”
“Nossir, it’s black iron.”
Mr. Preston sat back and signaled the barkeep—who had been hovering, wringing a dirty rag—for a round. “Right. A plug of it that gushed up from some terrible event in the river bottom. Books say a geyser of molten metal—not the cool ones that flow under the river—that geyser came fuming up through the timestone itself.”
“I’ve been in other parts of the esty and I haven’t seen anything like this river. It doesn’t seem logical.”
“Not for us to know, son.”
“Please don’t call me son, sir.”
