Dow stared blankly, the laundress’s words an incoherent babble to him. She had poisoned over a hundred people? How was that possible? Who was she? Who had he even known all this time?
‘Shoot her, Dow,’ Jake uttered coldly. ‘Shoot the bitch. We have to get in there.’
Dow looked at the empty pistol in his hand. Then, mechanically, he took his satchel of powder, and a ball, and began to load it.
‘Stop that,’ Oliver warned, struggling to rise now, his knife held forward. ‘Stop it – or I swear she’ll drop the pellet in. I’ll make her.’
Dow might not have heard. The powder was in the barrel now, and then the ball.
‘Dow, please,’ begged Cassandra.
He rammed the ball down.
‘It’s on your head then,’ cried Colonel Oliver.
Dow raised the pistol, met Cassandra’s pleading eyes across the white pellet.
‘Now, fool girl,’ shrieked the army officer, knife raised to stab at her arm. ‘Do it!’
A shot cracked from the smoke behind Dow, and the colonel’s hand exploded in a bloody splash, the knife shattering into shards. Blood blossomed too from his chest, the ball continuing on. Cassandra cried out, turning her head away, only for her jaw to meet Jake Tooth’s swinging boot. The pellet flew from her fingers to land safely on dry timber, and she crumpled insensible before the door.
Agatha Harp advanced from the smoke, lowering a musket. ‘He dead?’
Jake was bent over the prone army officer. ‘No such luck. He’ll live. We’ll have to get him tied up – and the girl too.’ He turned to the barricade across the door. ‘Here, Dow, give me a hand.’
Dow snapped out of his daze at last. Nell! There might still be time! He leapt to Jake’s aid, and together they heaved the sacks clear, only to find the door padlocked. Dow took up an empty musket and battered at the lock till it broke, then wrenched the door free. It opened outwards, and bodies that had been piled against the inside tumbled forth in an unspeakable flood.
‘Beware the gas!’ Jake Tooth warned, his shirt sleeve put to his mouth.
Dow delayed only long enough to be sure that none of the corpses in the doorway were Nell, then, his arm across his face, he plunged in.
A hellish scene greeted him. He’d expected to be blinded by poisonous smoke and haze, but in fact the air was damningly clear, the gas dissipated now that its deadly work was done, and he could see with all too much clarity. Bodies. Bodies were everywhere, strewn across the floor, draped over the hammocks.
King Benito was the first he recognised. The monarch was slumped against a post, a bloody froth visible on his lips, his eyes staring emptily. And all those around him were the same, their faces grey and awful. There was King Eugene. There was Admiral Vasco.
Dead, all dead.
Dow was reeling through the corpses now, sickened with fear and horror, his eyes stinging and his throat burning from the last remnants of the poison.
Where was she?
He came across another face he knew, Baron Nikolay, dead too, his expression one of bitter disgust, as if all this only proved what he had been arguing all along, that they should never have trusted the Twin Islanders and agreed to board—
There!
Dow had come almost to the rear bulkhead, and in a corner a hand twitched! It was a man, slumped against two corpses. Dow ran to him. It was Duke Tomas, unconscious, bloody-mouthed, but with his chest labouring weakly. ‘There’s one alive here!’ Dow called behind him, then moved on. He couldn’t stay to help the duke, he must find Nell. He tore hammocks aside, stepped over another man who appeared to be breathing, giving Dow even more hope; if only she was somewhere back here too, she might be living yet...
Almost he missed her.
But in the furthest corner he spied something he recognised. It was a pile of blankets, the very blankets that Cassandra herself had delivered four days earlier, even as she was preparing to kill everyone in the hold. As she had been preparing all along, Dow marvelled in loathing. Why, with Colonel Oliver, she had chosen this hold for the prisoners especially because it was airtight . . .
There was a shape beneath the blankets! Dow hurled them aside, and Nell was there, tiny as a child. Her head was wrapped in a last blanket, a final attempt to stop the gas. Her mouth was wedged open by the material as if in a scream, but it was a silent scream, because she was dead.
Rage and grief filled him. He plucked her up – how light she was, but then he already knew that, from the one night they had spent together – and went stumbling back across the room, gasping for air himself now, nausea spinning. Shapes reared up through his tear-filled vision; one of them became Agatha Harp, the harpooner at her side. ‘Does she live?’ the first officer demanded.
Dow shook his head numbly, but Jake Tooth already had Nell’s hand in his. ‘There is warmth and colour in her yet, lad,’ he declared. ‘Get her out of these fumes and up into fresh air. Fill her lungs with breath from your own. She might not die! Go!’
Dow reeled away feverishly, out from the hold and up through the decks at a stumbling run. The stairs seemed endless; he felt drunk, his eyes blinded with poison, his throat in agony, and Nell ever heavier in his arms. But at last there was night sky above and the open air of the main deck.
He cast her down, heedless of those who gathered around him. He took huge wrenching breaths of air to fill his own lungs, and then, setting his lips to Nell’s cold mouth, he expelled his life into her; once, twice, and then again. Another wrenching breath for himself, and then again, and again.
And all the while he was remembering what his own suffocation had been like, his own drowning in the waters of the Banks, and how life had seemed to drop away from him so easily and without regret, before he had been called back by pain and light to the weariness of living. He willed Nell to make the same choice, to come back to him, to come back—
She shuddered under him. Her blue lips convulsed against his own, and in a spasm she threw him off as if it was he who was choking her in the first place. A fit of coughing took her, then she rolled to her side and vomited across the deck.
Dow, sinking to the timbers in his grateful exhaustion, could only think that he had never heard or smelled anything so sweet.
13. OF FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
Dawn found the Snout directionless, hove to upon a grey sea; a man dazed by a beating, unsure where he is or where he should be going.
In all, the night’s atrocities had led to the deaths of one hundred and seventy men and women. One hundred and four were Heretic prisoners, poisoned by Cassandra. The rest were members of the Snout’s crew who had died in the mutiny, either fighting alongside the captain and the colonel, or alongside the harpooner and the first officer. Although, of course, Agatha Harp was no longer merely a first officer.
It was Captain Harp who summoned the remaining command staff to a sunrise meeting in the Great Cabin. Dow went, and Nell went too, in defiance of doctor’s orders. She was still weak and racked with tremors from the poison, but as the senior Ship King now on board – there were fifteen survivors other than her from the ghastly hold – she refused to be excluded, and Captain Harp agreed that it was fitting she attend.
Otherwise it was a sadly reduced complement compared to the last such meeting. Captain Fletcher was no more, and three of the ship’s lieutenants had died fighting for one side or the other. Emmet Bone too was dead, killed seemingly by accident, as he was allied to neither faction. (Why the pilot had ignored his own forebodings and ventured out of his cabin during the battle, Dow would never know.) And, lastly, Cassandra and Colonel Oliver – the latter badly injured, but alive – were both locked away in the brig.
This left a roster of only two senior and two junior lieutenants, Dow included, and two commanders besides Agatha Harp: Jake Tooth – his shoulder and arm wrapped in bandages – and Johannes.
The blacksmith had played no part in the mutiny for either camp, and was unscathed – as was Nicky, Dow had been glad to hear. Ind
eed, Johannes seemed as bewildered by the whole event as was Dow; a fact he made clear even before everyone had sat down around the table. ‘Agatha, what in all the oceans happened here last night?’
The new captain had cleaned herself up somewhat since the battle, but there was still an air of blood and powder about her. She waved a weary hand to tell Johannes that he should sit, then addressed them all. ‘First things first. The Snout is ours, and for all the injured and dead, we have crew enough still to sail the ship, nor was the vessel itself harmed.’ She cocked an eye to the harpooner. ‘That is, if all the poison is cleared from the lower decks?’
Jake Tooth gave a nod. ‘Aye, Captain. We found all three of the deadly bottles and disposed of them; in one the pellet had not dissolved properly.’ He glanced at Nell. ‘Which perhaps explains how some came to survive, towards the rear of the hold.’
Nell only stared hollowly at the news. Dow could not imagine the memories that must lie behind her gaze; the choking, the screams, the bodies falling. He’d sat with her all night in sick bay, guarding over her as she wandered in and out of fevered waking, but they hadn’t talked. After the terrible intimacy of Dow breathing his life into her lungs, what was there to be said? And now, in the light of morning, and the cold fact of the death of almost all her companions, she seemed unreachable in her loss.
Johannes was shaking his head. ‘But to murder a hundred people and more! Why did they do it? And why was Twin Islander fighting Twin Islander in mutiny? I knew there were ill feelings abroad upon the ship, but what made this slaughter a necessity?’
Agatha Harp sighed. ‘I hardly know where to begin. I’m afraid that many things have been kept deliberately secret from you, Johannes – on this voyage, and before it. By both sides in this affair.’
The blacksmith bridled. ‘And why am I so untrustworthy, if I may ask?’
‘Simply, you are too good a friend to Dow Amber here. The risk was too great – for us, and even more so for Colonel Oliver and Cassandra – that you would reveal things to Dow that it was better he not know.’
‘What things?’
‘Yes,’ Dow echoed softly. ‘What things?’
The new captain sat back in her chair and spread her hands. ‘Why, the truth, of course. In particular, the truth about the War Master’s real purpose for this mission, which was never to rescue the Heretics, but rather to ensure that they were put beyond all hope of rescue: an assignment that our laundress has now lethally fulfilled.’
Dow stared in disbelief. ‘You mean this is what the War Master wanted?’
‘This. Or the Heretics locked up securely back in Black Sands. Either would have satisfied him. As long as it prevented any talk of peace.’
‘Prevented it?’
‘Oh yes. Peace is Damien Tender’s deepest fear. He does not want this war to end.’
‘But . . . I was told that you were the ones who wanted no end to the war.’
Agatha laughed. ‘By Cassandra?’
Dow fell silent in confusion.
Johannes spoke up again. ‘What’s all this talk of ending the war or not?’
The captain sobered. ‘What do you consider the aim of our struggle to be, Johannes? Is it merely to free the Twin Isles from Ship Kings rule? Or is it to replace Ship Kings rule over the world with Twin Islander rule over the world? The former is what Jake and I and many like us believe; and what the War Master might have believed once, when he was young. But not now. Now he and his Laundresses seek the latter.’
Johannes looked dubious. ‘He has said no such thing in any of his decrees.’
‘No. It’s not an admission he makes openly. Openly, the war is only ever about our freedom. Freedom is an easy thing to convince people to fight and suffer for. But to fight and suffer for the sake of dominion over others, and so that Damien Tender can be a new Sea Lord in all but name? That’s a trickier prospect.’
Jake Tooth said, ‘That’s why he fears the Heretics so much; if a new Ship Kings regime came to power and was openly willing to settle a peace and cede the Twin Isles our independence, then how could the War Master demand we fight on, dying all the while, when there would be no better reason left than his own ambition? No, preferable for him that Ferdinand and Carrasco stay in power, for they too refuse to contemplate peace, and will battle on until one side achieves total victory.’
‘Which is why,’ Agatha Harp resumed, ‘having pretended to negotiate with the Heretics and won their trust, the War Master then betrayed them and gave away the location of their meeting at sea, so they could be captured by their enemies.’
‘A mistake as turned out,’ Jake added. ‘He could have ambushed them himself and been done with it, but he liked the idea of having Carrasco and Ferdinand do his dirty work for him, of setting Ship King against Ship King. He expected that the Heretics would simply be executed, you see. He was deeply disappointed when he learned they had only been sent to Banishment.’
Dow looked to Nell – for this was insult piled upon already grave insult. But she gave no response, as if it was all beyond mattering now.
‘How can you know all this?’ Johannes protested to the captain. ‘You aren’t privy to the War Master’s court, let alone to his inner thoughts!’
‘Myself? No,’ said Agatha. ‘But there are others in our peace faction, secret members of high rank, who do move in the War Master’s circles. They know. And by their account, Damien Tender was a worried man before we arrived at Black Sands, for he knew that the Kingdoms were still restive, and that movements were afoot to liberate the Heretics. If that happened, then all his plotting would have been for nothing – but what could he do to prevent it?’
Jake grinned blackly. ‘That’s when you appeared, Dow, and offered him the solution.’
‘Me?’ said Dow – and yet he knew already, with dreadful foretaste, what the harpooner meant.
‘Of course – with your fool demand to be allowed to go to Banishment and rescue the prisoners. It was an idea so unlikely that it simply hadn’t occurred to him: snatch the Heretics from the prison isle himself, before their own subjects could! And who better to send, than someone who was known to them, someone they would trust . . .’
Dow hung his head.
‘He spared no effort,’ noted the captain. ‘Charting our course for us, donating a pilot and maps from his archive, all in earnest. But he also gave private instructions to Colonel Oliver and Cassandra, in keeping with his true purpose. The Heretics were not to be released after being rescued, but brought back to the Atoll in chains, where they’d be kept safely out of the way. Captain Fletcher, poor man, only learned of these orders once we were at sea – and was none too willing, we think; but he was browbeaten by Oliver into going along with the treachery.’
Johannes considered both Agatha and Jake in amazement. ‘And what of you two? If you knew of all this – as it seems you did – then how could you sail on such an evil errand, and say nothing?’
Agatha Harp stared severely. ‘What choice did we have? We could not stop the Snout sailing, and speaking out would only have seen us thrown off the ship. No, we met with our fellow members of the peace faction in Black Sands, and it was decided that we could only try to turn the voyage to our favour.
‘Our plan was this: Jake and I would appear to go along with the mission as loyal officers, but in secret we would go among the crew and secure their loyalty against the captain. If Banishment was indeed reached, and the Heretics rescued, we would seize control of the ship by mutiny, then proceed to deliver the prisoners to the Kingdoms after all – reversing and confounding the War Master’s intent at a stroke.’
‘And up until last night we had all but carried it off!’ said Jake, with some frustration. ‘We had the Heretics on board and most of the crew on our side and were ready to move – but then Oliver and Cassandra struck first! Oh, we were watching them; we knew that they knew we were plotting against them, and we expected that they would act sooner or later to settle it; most likely the moment we’
d cleared the Banks. But we thought they would act against us. We were ready for that; what we weren’t ready for was an attack on the prisoners, especially one so ruthless.’
Agatha Harp was apologetic. ‘We didn’t know that Oliver and Cassandra had one last secret order: if there was any risk of the prisoners being set free, then they were to be executed immediately. By Laundresses’ poison.’
‘And so we find ourselves here,’ concluded the harpooner, ‘with naught but empty hands for our troubles, and a ship full of the dead . . .’
A long silence fell over the table, the enormity almost too vast to contemplate.
‘How did you win the crew to your side?’ Johannes asked faintly at last. ‘I would not have thought them disloyal to the captain, or easily swayed to mutiny.’
‘Strangely enough,’ Agatha answered, ‘by invoking Dow’s name.’
Dow looked at her in new confusion.
‘They’ve always been in awe of you, Dow, and that awe has only deepened in light of the wonders they’ve witnessed of you first hand; the Rope Fish appearing as if to your rescue; the Golden Serpent seeming to commune with you; your crossing of the Banks on foot. So when Jake and I began to whisper to them – especially after the attack of the serpent – that you were being misled and misused by Cassandra and Oliver and the captain, their mood began to turn against these three. Our crew are honest sailors, and they don’t like the idea of being associated with deception. But more, they do not think it wise to wilfully defy the fate of the great Dow Amber.’
Dow had to shake his head. How could he have suspected none of this? Was he really so dense? But mention of the sea monster made him turn to Jake in query. ‘So when you tipped me into the whale’s mouth that day, it wasn’t on purpose?’
‘That?’ The harpooner gave a ringing laugh. ‘That was only an honest stumble. If I’d wanted you dead, boy, believe me, you’d be dead.’
The War of the Four Isles Page 27