by Keegan, Mel
“Get ’im, fer chrissakes get ’im,” he moaned at Jim, and Jim heard the threadiness of his voice. Pledge’s eyes were wide, dark, filled with shadows and with dread. He was dying, and he knew it.
“I don’t dare shoot,” Jim muttered. “I could put one square in Burke’s heart! He’ll have to do Eli Hobbs himself. What, you think he’s not big enough or strong enough?”
“Big and strong, aye,” Pledge rasped. “But Eli’s slippery as a bastard eel. Always were. Don’t … don’t trust ’im.”
Jim rammed the barrel with wadding and a lead ball, and gave Pledge a hard, sour look. “Trust him? I never trusted any of you, Master Pledge, and I still don’t. Now, shut up and let me do what I must.”
As he spoke Toby returned, arms filled with the small black cauldron, water slopping over the sides at every step. He cursed and swore under the weight of it, and Jim spared a glance for him as he tipped the whole load over the fire. The flames were out in a moment, and he slammed the cauldron down on the table right by Pledge.
“Trelane,” Pledge gasped. “Devil take yer, Trelane, if yer let Eli Hobbs take down Nathaniel.”
His voice was weakening, and if Jim was any judge Pledge’s vision would already be starting to darken. He doubted the man could see enough to know when Hobbs – slippery as any eel – rolled, feinted, fooled Burke enough to get leverage on one arm, and thrust forward as if with a bayonet.
A scream wrenched out of Burke’s throat, hoarse, sharp as much with sock as with pain. Jim never saw the wound struck, but he knew the magnitude of it from the sound of Burke’s voice. He had no doubt the knife had found the vitals, and he shot a glance at Toby. Toby’s face might have been carved from granite. No hint of expression played across his features as he watched Nathaniel Burke – his old master, old protector, old tormentor.
Fury was a curious force, Jim thought. It could imbue a man’s limbs with a power that transcended the simply human or mortal. To be sure, the strength would not last long, but while it did, many a demigod would look on with admiration.
Where Burke found the power, Jim could not know. Burke himself would not have known, but it ripped through him like divine fire. Blood was frothing on his lips and nose as he reared back, got his right hand on the hilt of the knife and tore it out of his chest, all the while keeping Eli Hobbs pinned beneath him with his weight on one elbow and both knees.
Hobbs was badly hurt already. His left arm was useless and one leg refused to move properly. Still, he flailed at Burke, even his teeth snapping as he snarled curses and tried to bite any flesh he could reach. The knife was bright with the cherry-red blood that spelled a creature’s very life. Jim had hunted often enough to know the look of such blood, and beside him Toby began to whisper in the old, dead language.
But there was still life in Nathaniel Burke, and strength enough to turn the knife in his right hand, to bat Hobbs’s hand out of the way, tuck the point of the blade right in under the jaw bone and thrust up. One hard, uncompromising shove, and it was over for Hobbs with surprising mercy. Death came to him in an instant, like a shadow racing across the hillside ahead of a storm front.
Wheezing, panting, forcing every breath into damaged lungs, Burke clambered to his feet. He stood swaying, trying to get his bearings for a long moment, outlined in the purple murk of late twilight which fell from the open door and window. With one lantern out, the taproom was dim now, and his vision must have been darkening, like Pledge’s.
“Joe?” His voice was graveling. “Joe, you still with me?”
And a mere whisper. “Still.” Pledge sat slumped in the chair, no longer moving though his eyes were open to slits, shining in the grudging light of the one lantern. Every breath inspired a moan. “It’s dark, Nathaniel.”
“Aye,” Burke wheezed. “Night’s comin’ on. She’s comin’ on fast, and she’ll be dark as the vaults in hell.” He coughed. Blood frothed in his mouth and nose, on his lips, and he spat it out. “You there, Toby, lad?”
Toby took a step forward, closer to the ring of light. “I’m here. I’ll light a couple of lanterns, Nathaniel, will I?”
But Burke’s head wagged a negative. “Forget ’em.” He peered down at his chest, dragged both hands across his face, smearing it luridly with blood, and gestured at the bin which had contained the dream and the curse of Diego Monteras’s legacy. “Pack it. All of it … keep back what you can hold in your own right hand, Toby lad. That’ll be your fair share, that and freedom. Aye, time was, you were a good lad, but you done me wrong at the end. You done me sorely wrong and if the strength was left in me, I’d flog you to tatters for it, head to foot, before I called you a free man.”
Something in his tone made the hackles prickle on Jim’s neck. He was busy with the lanterns, lighting as many as he could lay his hands on, and he glared up at Burke in their odd shadows. “Say what you mean, Captain. Neither of us ever lifted a hand against you.”
The dark, hooded eyes were more shadow than iris. Burke seemed not to look at Jim so much as clean through him, as if already he was looking into the next world. The graveyard stare made Jim shiver while Burke searched for his voice, and for words. Toby was doing as he had been bid, raking together the spilled gems, thrusting them into the bin, keeping back a few here, a few there, when size or perfection of form or color caught his eye. Burke’s eyes brooded on him as he worked.
“Toby Trelane has never killed a man, Master Fairley, and he’ll tell you, he never will. But he has it in him to be a schemin’, connivin’, underhand, murderous weasel. If the lad thinks he’ll be judged any more lightly on the day the trumpets call us back out of the ground, and from the bottom of the sea, he’s mistaken.” Again Burke coughed, and every breath seemed to flute in his throat. Blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth, unheeded, as he thrust out his hand to take the bin. Toby had forced in the stopper a moment before, and gave it to him without comment or protest. Burke tucked it under his arm and stood swaying. “Master Trelane will be judged like the rest of us mortal sinners,” he rasped. “Would he wreak death on Eli and Willie in their drunken sleep, back at Polgreen’s pox shop? He’d be too good for that, too pious. But he’ll bring the buggers here and hand ’em to me, knowin’ what’d become of ’em.” His eyes blazed accusation at Toby. “Knowin’,” he added, “what’d become of me.”
“That’s a lie,” Jim began angrily, as confused as he was furious.
“It isn’t,” Toby said with ominous quiet. He lifted his chin, looking levelly at Jim. “I told you I was bringing the four of them here, face to face, so they could settle their business once and for all, and I’d play no part in it.” His brows arched at Jim, and then at Burke. “What force stopped them behaving like decent, civilized men? What prevented them from talking it out, arguing and bickering like siblings if they had to, but thrashing it through and finding a peaceable resolution?” He turned Burke’s glare back on him. “I’ll tell you what stopped them – Nathaniel already knows, and never mind all his goddamned rhetoric.”
“They had blood in their eyes,” Jim said bitterly. “All four of them, from the moment I saw them. Murder was written on their faces, plain as the day.”
Toby nodded slowly. “That’s what they came here for – like Barney. It’s all they came here for, as if it was a game to be played, with the prize awarded to the winner. Call it, ‘last man on his feet with wounds he can be healed of.’ They got what they wanted, Jim, when they walked through your door. Nathaniel’s only aggrieved because he could never turn me into a murderer. Once, he told me he could do it, and he would –”
“I made you the promise,” Burke growled, as if he was gargling in blood at every syllable, “while I held you down over a table and gave you what you had comin’ to you, little molly-whore that you were.”
“If I was,” Toby whispered, “it’s what you made me. You could have put your mark on me to keep the others off, and then treated me with decency. Only wickedness made you take your sport on me – it was
none of my doing, Nathaniel. Don’t you dare lay blame on me.”
“Threatenin’?” Anger infused Burke with fresh energy. “You’s grown the balls to threaten me now?”
“I don’t even want to see you one minute longer,” Toby said with an icy calm. “You’ve got what you always wanted. You played the game they were all slavering to play – you’re the last on his feet, with the prize in your hand. I’m a free man, with the gems I can hold in my right fist – you offered the deal, and I’ll claim it now. There’s the door, Nathaniel. Take Monteras’s bloody legacy and walk away with it. No one’s stopping you.”
“Aye,” Burke growled, coughing, gargling, spitting, “aye, I will, and be damned to you, Trelane. If I see you again, I’s like to split you, crotch to gizzard.”
He was moving as Joe Pledge struggled up in the chair with the last of his strength. “Nathaniel, don’t leave me – fer chrissakes, don’t leave me.”
For a long moment Burke hovered, peering down at Pledge as if he was already half blind. “You’re done for, Joe,” he wheezed. “There’s more blood out of you than in. I think you’ll be in hell a day or two before me … speak well of me to the master there.”
And then he was lurching away from the spill of lantern light. Jim thought he looked closer to shadow than man as he staggered across the doorstep and away into a twilight that had dimmed to steel blue and purple. Pledge would have screamed after him, but the life had ebbed so far from him, barely a croak passed his lips.
“Nathaniel,” he panted, “Nathaniel, don’t go without me – come back, Christ blight ye! God rot you, devil take ye!”
The stream of curses continued, but Jim stopped listening. He pulled both hands over his face, aware of the sweat on his skin and the chill in his bones. “Do you know where he’s going? The man’s dead on his feet, Toby. He’s not going to make it far. Does he have friends here?”
“Friends?” Toby actually laughed, but Jim heard the edge of something very like hysteria in the sound. “The only friends he had in the world just tried to kill him … except for Joe, who took a pistol ball meant for him. And Nathaniel just walked away from him.”
“Then, where’s he going, damn him?” Jim demanded.
“I don’t know.” Toby clenched both hands into his hair as if to force his mind to think properly, before he stepped out of the ring of the light. On the threshold he stopped and turned back with a look for Jim that was a hundred years deep.
Then he was gone, and Jim found himself listening to a painful silence. He heard only the soft susurration of the outgoing tide, the labored breathing of Joe Pledge, who clung to life with a tenacity Jim had to admire, and the hammer stroke of his own heart, slowly calming as he found himself alive and with his skin whole.
Moments later, the rasped breathing stopped and when Jim turned back to the chair he saw only glazed, unfocused eyes and a mess of blood which looked slick and black in the lantern light. Pledge was as dead as Hobbs and Tuttle, who were sprawled on the floor, and propped against the wall. The tavern was so full of death, Jim felt suffocated and he dove outside, desperate for fresh air, any air.
Chapter Eighteen
He dragged the salt sea wind to the bottom of his lungs while his eyes grew accustomed to the mauve twilight. Of Toby there was already no sign, but he heard barking, sharp and persistent, and he knew that voice. “Boxer,” he muttered. “Damnit, Boxer, where are you?”
And where were Bess and Edith Clitheroe? He cast about, following the sound, and swore beneath his breath as it took him to the stable. A crack of candlelight showed under the door, and as he opened it the terrier launched himself into Jim’s arms. Jim caught him, held him tight. People who knew dogs always swore they could smell fear, death, fury. Boxer must have been able to smell it for hours now and his small body was trembling with reaction.
But before Jim could call her name, Bess shot past his legs and streaked away into the night. Either her ears or her nose told her where Toby had gone and the last Jim saw of her, she was tearing through the stableyard, headed west toward the path to Exmouth.
“Master Jim, yer alive.” The old woman was sitting on a hay bale, and wrapped in a blanket. Two fat tallow candles stood on a barrelhead beside her and her basket was at her feet, still half-full of food and drink. “I ’eard a lot I didn’t ken … pistol shots, an’ all.” She blinked owlishly at him. “Somebody’s dead?”
“They’re all dead,” Jim said bitterly, hardly recognizing his own voice.
“Master Trelane’s dead?” She was aghast.
“No … thank gods, he …” Jim swallowed hard. “We brought back two more, a charming pair of cutthroats – be grateful you never made their acquaintance! They fought, as Toby knew they would. Fighting among themselves was the only reason they came here. If Charlie Chegwidden had been alive, he’d have run a mile when he saw the bastards coming, Edith. It’s a wonder Toby and I are still alive.”
“It’s a miracle,” she agreed, looking past Jim, out into the yard. “Where is ’e, then? Master Trelane?”
“He went after Nathaniel Burke.” Jim shook his head slowly. “Burke was on his feet, but there wasn’t much life left in him. He had the prize, but he couldn’t have made it far.”
“And Master Trelane.” Edith worked her way down off the hay bale with an ouch and a wince as old hips and knees protested. “That is, ’e’s comin’ back, ain’t ’e?”
For the first time Jim acknowledged the tiny worm of doubt which had been wriggling through his gut since the moment Toby paused on the doorsill and turned back, face dark with so many shadows and secrets. The handful of gems he had chosen as the very finest still lay on the table, and dozens more had been scattered when the lantern upturned. Burke had taken everything else, though he would not stagger far, Jim thought. With a night’s head start, Toby could be twenty miles away – forty, if he bought a horse along the way; and nothing but Jim’s word would connect him with The Raven, or with the mutineer crew and his own patchwork history.
“I …” Jim hesitated, wanting to be honest. In fact, he was far from sure he would see Toby Trelane’s handsome face again. Even Bess had raced after him as if afraid she would lose him. For some time He was silent, and at last could not bring himself to speak the truth. He forced a smile and swiped up the basket. “Of course he’s coming back. He just went after Burke to make sure of him.” To know exactly what became of a dangerous enemy, and secure the treasure of Diego Monteras at the last, keep it out of the hands of some passing stranger, perhaps a yokel from a nearby farm, a fisherman stumbling home with three sheets in the wind, who would be delighted to literally fall over it on the path and claim it as his own. “Come on, Edith,” Jim encouraged, “come back to the house. Don’t go into the taproom, mind you, but I’ll get the kitchen hearth organized. You get a good fire going, and some hot food. It feels like it’ll be bloody cold tonight.”
She made a face. “It’s startin’ to stink in there, what wi’ the cellar bein’ flooded.”
“Better than spending the night in the stable, though,” he hazarded. “I’ll seal the cellar up tight till we can get some men in, get it dry.” He set Boxer down and snatched up the blankets. Edith picked up a candle in each hand. “You’ll be better in the warm, with a meal inside you,” he told her, for want of something to say to cover the sick churning of his insides.
“I will, at that,” she admitted. “What ’appened to Bess? I can’t see ’er.”
“She shot off like a cannonball, after Toby.” Jim swallowed the lump in his throat as he steered the woman across the stableyard. He kept talking out of a need to fill the silence where Toby should have been. “Just stay out of the taproom, you hear? I’ll wedge the door shut. Then I’ve got to go over and get Vicar Morley. They were the worst kind of sinners, but they’re dead and somebody has to say the right words over them. Then,” he said resignedly as they clambered up out of the persistent water, “I ought to ride over to the garrison, report this – to
John Hardesty’s good friend in person, if he’s there. Captain Dixon. If Dixon’s not there, his lieutenant will be. And since I’ll be riding past Doctor John’s door, it’d be damned rude of me not to knock and tell him what happened after he left here yesterday. And remember. Edith – let’s keep the story simple. Everything that happened, happened after Doctor John passed by, you hear? Don’t be forgetting, now! It’s an innocent tale, but it’ll stop a dozen nasty questions before they’re even asked.”
The backdoor always swelled in the rain. After the flooding it was jammed so tight, it almost seemed to be bolted shut. Jim put his shoulder against it, grunting and swearing as he forced it open. He took a candle from her, lit the three lanterns on the pantry shelf right by the door and set them up where they cast a decent light around the chaos of the kitchen.
The fire basket still stood in the middle of the room; the chairs were shoved into corners, the table thrust against the wall opposite the hearth. Mrs. Clitheroe was right, the reek of must and mildew from the cellar was already like the bilges on a neglected boat, and would only get worse. Muttering vile language, Jim wrestled the big wrought iron basket into place and kicked a chair up beside it. He pulled the table back where it belonged with a squealing of wet wood on filthy floor, and set a lantern by the chair. Edith was hovering, dismayed by the mess, and he urged her into the chair, shushed her.
“I’m just going to bring down enough kindling to get the hearth going,” he promised. “We took it all upstairs … there’s nothing to fear now.”
Nothing to fear, but still his hackles were prickling as he went through into the taproom and closed the door deliberately behind him. The three bodies seemed to mock him with grotesque shadows as he took a lantern and passed them by, and as he climbed the stairs he thought those shadows plucked at his hair, touched his clothes, with hands he could almost feel.
He cursed himself for a fool and swallowed his heart as he shoved his way into the small room, where he and Toby had set the baskets of kindling. Toby had tied it into bundles, and Jim hoisted up two at a time. He slung half a dozen over his shoulder before retrieving the lantern, and took the stairs with exaggerated caution.