Dow’s greatest reassurance in those uneasy three days was that the colonel’s soldiers were faithfully standing watch over the prisoners. But also, he truly doubted that any actual trouble would arise while the ship remained trapped within the Banks, for unless they could make their escape, all other disputes were moot anyway. So for as long as the Snout wound amid the shadows, Nell and the others should be in no danger . . .
But then, late on the fourth afternoon since setting out, just after the ship had scraped its keel across a last sandbank, the sounders began to call regular deep water beneath the hull. First fifty feet, then sixty, then eighty – then suddenly the sea floor was plummeting away, two hundred feet deep and more. Green shallows still threatened to either side, but directly ahead the ocean was blue in the evening, and flawless. There could be no mistaking the colour or what it meant. Emmet Bone called the boats back from their patrolling, and a full spread of sails were set in a warm and strengthening breeze.
Within an hour more, by dusk, the Snout was voyaging free upon the open sea.
And yet, when Dow came back on board he found little cheer evident, even though the infamous Banks lay vanquished for the first time in their history. On the high deck, Agatha Harp, who had resumed the helm from the pilot, merely set their new course – north-east, to begin the long run up and around Great Island – then went her cabin. And on the main deck, as darkness fell, most of the crew likewise disappeared below, hunkering down grimly for the night, as they might for a coming storm.
Dow – having spent an hour ensuring the Franklin was stowed away properly – emerged to discover full night, close and heavy and starless, and a ship that was at full sail and yet all but deserted topside. The empty deck felt menacing somehow, as if everyone was gathering elsewhere to secret ends, and he hesitated as to what to do next. A part of him knew he should go down to Nell in the hold; he had not visited her since the previous night.
But after all, Colonel Oliver’s men were on guard there still, and after four almost sleepless days, Dow was bone weary; for now, even greater than his anxiety for Nell was the lure of his bed, and of closing his eyes. Anyway, he reasoned, surely nothing untoward would happen in their first few hours upon the open sea, not when there were many miles yet before the ship reached the Kingdoms. He would seize just an hour’s rest; then he would go down.
Yawning, he made for his cabin. But as he approached the stern castle he happened upon a solitary figure leaning at the rail, staring out at the night. It was Emmet Bone, a rum bottle in his hand. This last fact was so surprising – Dow had never seen the pilot drink – that he paused even in his weariness.
‘Evening, Mr Amber,’ said the pilot, with a nod and a swig from the bottle. ‘And congratulations. Your mad scheme has proven sound. Here we are, free of the dreaded Banks, and with the Heretic prisoners liberated from the inescapable prison. I thought it impossible, when we set out. I salute you.’
‘It wasn’t just me,’ said Dow. ‘It was all of us – and you in particular.’
Emmet Bone bowed. ‘But now I am done! And not before time. A pilot I am, and inured to careful sailing in treacherous waters – but this last week . . . I don’t mind telling you, Mr Amber, I have had enough of shallows, and of this ship and all its devious secrets, to last me a lifetime.’ He laughed obscurely at that and swigged again at the rum, then studied the bottle. ‘For thirty years I’ve been a sober man, did you know that? There’s no place for drunkenness, piloting ships through the Labyrinth. And if I expected I would ever see the Labyrinth again, sober I would stay.’ Pointedly, he swigged another mouthful.
Dow said nothing, only stared in grainy-eyed perplexity. What was wrong with the man?
‘I do not say you will not make it home,’ the pilot elaborated, ‘only that I won’t. I felt it as soon as the sounders called out a hundred feet of depth; even in victory, the words rang as a death knell to me, and I knew I would never see shallow water again.’ He drank bitterly, then gazed out into the blackness. ‘Ah, but my old friend will be pleased. I’m sure it’s what he hoped, when he assigned me to this damn ship.’
The War Master, Dow thought; but was wise enough to say nothing still.
It did no good. ‘Let me tell you a thing about Damien Tender!’ declared Emmet Bone, rounding to face Dow again. ‘He is a man very willing to spend the lives of his oldest friends. One by one, he has sent us to our deaths. Some see it as proof of his commitment to victory, that he will not spare even his closest comrades. I think it’s something else. I think he wants to be rid of those who knew him when he was young. It was different back then; no one of us ruled over the others. But these days he prefers to be surrounded by his admiring laundresses – and his worshipful orphans, too – who know him only as a hero. Me? I knew him when he was fallible; when he was a boy, as brave, stupid, fearful and desperate as the rest of us. He hates me for that.’
Dow shuddered. The pilot was drunk indeed. And yet, strangely, after all else that Dow had heard of the War Master, and indeed seen for himself, this description of Damien Tender somehow rang the truest . . .
Emmet Bone sighed, and frowned at the bottle in disappointment. ‘It’s no good. A foreboding is upon me, a dark cloak I cannot shake off, even with rum. I’ve heard of such things, but never thought to experience it myself. I wonder how the end will come? Not by this at least,’ he added, touching the vial about his neck. ‘The poison in here will not be for me! Ah now. Poison. Why does that word toll so in my heart?’
Dow yawned abruptly. This was too much, it was all maudlin nonsense. He remembered then that the pilot would have had just as little sleep as himself of late, and had been under more strain, steering the ship in the shallows. He must be fatigued beyond measure. Add the rum to that, and no wonder he’d let some morbid fantasy overcome him.
‘You should go to bed,’ said Dow.
Emmet Bone straightened. ‘You’re quite right. I shall go to bed and wake for no nightly noises, whatever befalls, storm or ruin, for it is no longer any concern of mine.’ He gave Dow a solemn nod. ‘Good night to you, Mr Amber. And if you want my advice, do the same: go to your own cabin, lock your door and don’t come out.’
With that he hurled the bottle out into the darkness, then reeled away through the stern castle door. Dow watched him go, lingering a moment longer himself. He glanced out at the night, and all about at the deserted ship, troubled in his heart. The thought came once more of going down to the hold . . .
Then he yawned so wide his mouth ached, and he could resist no longer. He went to his cabin, and in a last precaution – moved by the pilot’s words, perhaps – did indeed lock his door before plunging headlong onto his bed and falling immediately asleep.
*
In his dream Dow was back in the cell in the brig of the Twelfth Kingdom on the night that the capital ship was burned, huddled in the blackness, listening to the distant sounds of cannon fire and running feet and wondering what it all might mean . . .
He opened his eyes to find that waking was little different, though the sound was not cannon fire but musket fire. He listened in bleary bewilderment a moment before starting up; this was real! There was shouting and running and heavy thumps on the deck overhead, and all the while the constant rattle of musketry.
Nell! She was in danger! Dow leapt from his bed in the darkness, berating himself. Fool! He should have gone to her before. And he was at the door to unlock it, when he suddenly forced himself to stop and think. Whoever was fighting who out there, it would do no good for him to blunder into the fray without a weapon of his own.
So he turned to scrabble for matches to light the lamp, and once it was lit went rummaging through his sea chest to find his officer-issue flintlock pistol – which he then had to prime and load in feverish haste, cursing his clumsy fingers and all too aware of the sounds and shrieks of battle. Only who was it between? And why?
Armed finally, he doused his lamp and with urgent caution edged his door open. Gun smoke, pung
ent and thick, drifted in the lamplight of the passage beyond. Angry shouts sounded from the direction of the main deck, but there was no one in sight.
Dow crept out and moved forward. But just as he came to the stairway that climbed to the main deck, he heard sounds of running and a shouted command, then a shot and a cry, and a figure came tumbling down through the smoke to land contorted at his feet.
Dow stared in astonishment. It was Emmet Bone, his head twisted to one side, neck broken by the fall, a bloody hole torn in his back.
Dead.
There came more shouts from above, and shots, and the sound of something heavy falling. Dow looked up in his shock to see Agatha Harp walking slowly down the stairs, her face stained with smoke and blood, reloading her pistol even as she came. Fear and anger flared in him, and he raised his own pistol at her instinctively.
‘Dow!’ she said, seeing him there and stopping short. ‘Put that down, you fool.’
‘You shot him!’ Dow accused, glancing at the body of the pilot that lay between them.
The first officer shook her head in annoyance. ‘That wasn’t me, that was one the colonel’s men, and anyway, I think it was a mistake. I’m afraid our pilot just got caught in the crossfire.’ She had resumed loading her pistol, ramming in the shot.
‘Stop that!’ Dow commanded, aiming his pistol more firmly at her.
‘Don’t be an idiot.’
‘Stop or I’ll fire!’ Dow insisted.
Which was when there came a click by his ear, and a touch of warm steel.
‘That’s quite enough, Mr Amber,’ drawled a familiar voice, ‘unless you want your head blown off. It’s all the same to me, mind.’
Dow whirled helplessly, lowering his pistol. Jake Tooth grinned at him over the barrel of a musket. ‘You’re a prize dolt indeed, lad; taking sides when you don’t even know what the fight is.’
‘Is the high deck secure?’ Agatha Harp snapped, as if Dow wasn’t there.
The harpooner nodded, lifting the downturned gun from Dow’s hands. ‘But it was bloody. Once the captain came in on the colonel’s side, many of the crew rallied with him. But most are with us, thank the deeps, and my boys have the wheel now.’
‘The fool – after all they’ve done to him, you’d think Fletcher would be on our side. Well, I would’ve saved him if I could. Where is he now?’
‘Below. He and Oliver and those with them are making their stand on the stairs to First Lower. And you know what that means.’
‘Damn it!’ swore Agatha Harp. ‘This is all my fault. We moved too late, and they moved too soon! Come on, there might still be time . . .’
She shoved by Dow and dashed off down the passage. Still grinning, Jake lowered his musket and studied Dow a moment. Then, bizarrely, he bent to the body of the pilot, took hold of the vial hanging around Emmet Bone’s broken neck, and snapped it free. He handed it to Dow. ‘A memento, Young Admiral. May it serve you well one day!’
Dow stared at the vial in dazed abhorrence. The harpooner added, ‘Oh, and if that Ship Kings lass really matters to you, then get it through your thick skull that we’re the ones trying to save her.’ He tossed Dow’s pistol to him. ‘You’re welcome to join us. But for all the ocean’s sake, wake up to what’s happening on this ship! If not for us, you’d already be dead!’
With that the harpooner finally loped off into the smoke in pursuit of the first officer. Profoundly bewildered, Dow hesitated an instant more, gazing at the vial and the pistol. What was happening here? It sounded like mutiny – but which was the right side? It couldn’t be Jake and Agatha, surely . . . or could it?
He shook his head. There was no time to waste debating himself; they’d said that there was fighting near First Lower: that’s where Nell was! He stuffed the vial in his pocket, cocked the pistol, and set off for the hold.
No one hindered him, but as he passed down through the boat decks, he encountered to his disquiet many bodies sprawled in the passageways. Several wore army uniforms – men from the colonel’s troop – but most were common sailors of the Snout’s crew, killed fighting on one side of the affray or the other. The reek of powder grew thicker the lower he went, and the sound of musket fire louder, a persistent tattoo of shots and cries.
He caught up with Jake and Agatha finally on the gun deck, just as they came amidships. Here, a barricade of crates had been thrown up a few yards short of the main stairway that led down to the First Lower. Armed sailors were crouched on Dow’s side of this barricade, firing over the top of it, while through the smoke musket flashes could be seen from within the stairwell; return fire.
‘Report!’ Agatha Harp demanded of one of the sailors by the crates.
The man wiped a sweaty brow. ‘There can’t be many of them left, Commander, it’s just the captain and a few others holding the stairs. I think the colonel and his last men are down in the hold.’
‘The deeps take the drunken old buffoon,’ Harp cursed again. ‘There’s no time for this.’ She raised her voice. ‘Captain Fletcher! This is your first officer – the ship is ours and you fight on the wrong side! Surrender before there’s any further bloodshed.’
Through the smoke no one could be seen about the stairs now, but Captain Fletcher’s voice came back strongly from below. ‘Surrender yourself! You’re mutineers, and you’ll all hang for this when the time comes.’
‘You can’t hold out much longer, Captain. And why dishonour your name like this? You don’t want any part of what Oliver is up to, I know that much.’
A bitter laugh rose from the stairwell. ‘Oh, so you’re on my side, I suppose?’
‘More than they are, sir!’
‘No one’s on my side.’ The voice became self-pitying. With horrified wonder, Dow realised the captain was drunk even now. ‘The rest of you forced this, it wasn’t me. I just obeyed orders, and look what I got in reward: mutiny and massacre.’
Massacre. Dow stiffened behind the barricade, the word a cold blade against his heart.
Fletcher was still hectoring them lugubriously. ‘I’m the one person with no blood on his hands. I didn’t want the damn Heretics here in the first place.’ A sob. ‘If they’re all dead, don’t blame me . . .’
All dead!
Without volition, Dow was up and over the barricade, a red surge of panic and fury driving him. He had to get to Nell! From behind he heard Jake Tooth cry, ‘Come on, the rest of you! Over the top!’
Then muskets were flaring around the stairs, and shot whined in the air. Dow felt something hot tug at a loose fold of his shirt, but he charged on, pistol out-thrust. A shadow loomed out of the smoke, one of the colonel’s soldiers by the uniform, howling as he came, wielding a musket like a club. Dow fired point-blank, but the man came on, slamming Dow to the floor and then raising the club over him – only to meet the musket fire of the sailors following with Jake. The soldier’s head flew apart wetly like some nightmarishly cloven melon, and his body flopped to the deck.
Dow scrabbled up and on. Jake and the others were ahead of him now. He came to the stairwell. There he found Captain Fletcher sprawled with a burnt-edged hole in his chest, gasping his last dying breaths. But Dow only leapt over him and continued down, past more dead bodies, to the First Lower deck at last. He dashed aft through dense clouds of musket smoke and so came at last to the doorway that opened to the prisoner’s hold.
It was blocked. Grain bags had been piled heavily against it. A few yards short of the bags Jake Tooth stood frozen, having arrived before Dow. The harpooner was holding his arm, blood flowing from a wound laid open near his shoulder, but it was not the injury that had stopped him. He was staring at two figures crouched before the barricaded door, forbidding approach.
One was Colonel Oliver. The army officer was slumped against the bags, his right leg mangled beyond use by a musket ball; his face, always so red, now drained white. But his eyes burned as coldly as ever, and though a spent pistol lay discarded at his side, his bone-handled knife was bare and held ready in hi
s hand.
Beside him knelt Cassandra.
Dow stared at her in incomprehension. He couldn’t understand why she was here of all places. But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Nell lay beyond the door. So why hadn’t the harpooner already thrown Cassandra aside and gone through? Why was he just staring at her? She was unarmed – and yet somehow threat was potent in the air.
He saw it then. The laundress wasn’t defenceless after all. With her arms extended before her, she displayed a peculiar weapon. In one hand she held a metal bottle, and in the other, poised over the bottle’s mouth, she held a small white pellet, as if ready to drop it in. She was weeping, her eyes wild with regret.
‘Hold, Mr Amber,’ Colonel Oliver commanded. ‘One step closer, and I’ll order her to drop it in. Ask our harpooner if you don’t believe me.’
Dow turned wordlessly to Jake.
The harpooner’s teeth were gritted either in pain or anger. ‘It’s poison. There’s water in the bottle, and if the pellet falls in, it will produce deadly gas enough to kill us all. It’s one of the Laundresses’ favourite toys.’
Cassandra’s red eyes glinted with a mad sorrow, an animal cornered. ‘Listen to him, Dow. Come no closer, please. I don’t want to kill you.’
Jake nodded at the door to the hold. ‘They’ve set off a bottle of that same stuff and thrown it into the prisoners’ quarters. And from the lack of noise in there, I don’t think anyone is still alive.’
The statement was paralysing. Dow simply couldn’t process or believe it.
‘It was three bottles, actually,’ Colonel Oliver corrected, smiling through a veil of sweat on his face; he must have been in great pain from his leg. ‘You’re much too late, Mr Amber. She’s dead, your Ship Kings whore, and all the others. Choked and dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ wailed Cassandra, the pellet hovering at the mouth of the bottle. ‘I didn’t want any of this. I was trying to save your life, Dow. He was going to kill you. I sent you away to Banishment – but then he went after you anyway. And now they’re all here and you were going to set them free and I didn’t have a choice anymore. But I’m sorry!’
The War of the Four Isles Page 26