Douglas quietly finished his translation. Holmes took a deep breath.
If these men can endure the horrors they’ve been through, he thought to himself, surely my own sorrows are of little consequence.
“And what’s that?” Douglas asked, motioning to the remnants of the building at the pinnacle of the hill.
“Again,” Tomas said, “there is much that I don’t know.”
As the last shackle fell, a rousing cheer filled the air, one that took nothing into consideration—not the danger the men were in, nor the ordeal the slaves themselves had suffered.
The Merikens quickly dismantled the Gatlings, separating the barrels from the carriages so that they could be easily pulled along. And while the Harmonious Fists took the guns and the desiccated slaves back down the hill toward the boats, the Merikens, Holmes, and Douglas prepared to climb the remainder of the way to the crumbling building.
“Let me go with you!” Tomas beseeched Douglas in Portuguese, as he was too mindful of rank to join without permission.
Douglas turned and stared at him. He understood the man’s good intentions, along with his need to remain viable in his people’s eyes. Yet he was reluctant to allow it. Though still a strapping man, Tomas could barely stand. He had been so maligned that he would be more hindrance than asset.
He conferred with Holmes, who was of another opinion.
“This man is a born leader,” he declared. “To send him down with the others is to demean him further.”
“Let us hasten him to safety, then, to restore him sufficiently,” Douglas countered, “after which he’ll be of more service to them, and to his cause.”
Still Holmes insisted.
“He must be allowed his dignity, no matter how untimely it may seem.
“Permit it, Douglas,” he said.
Douglas sighed.
In spite of his every instinct to the contrary, he beckoned Tomas up the hill.
40
THE GROUP CONTINUED THEIR DILIGENT CLIMB TO THE SUMMIT. Tomas, by some miracle—or perhaps through sheer force of will—kept up with the others.
At the pinnacle was the ramshackle old structure. It seemed to have been abandoned years before. The large door swung off its hinges. Boards covered rectangular holes where windows once had been. The only thing to recommend it was that its entrance faced the expanse of the hill, while behind it lay a precipitous drop to the ocean, waves beating against the rocks below.
It would have made a good fortress, a good lookout. But it was none of those things at present.
And yet, the Gatlings were set up to protect it, Holmes mused.
A cry rose up from the beach below, as various voices called out:
“Huo yao!”
“It means ‘fire medicine,’” Douglas translated, “though I can’t imagine what they are referring to.” He and the others looked around to ensure that they were not being ambushed before making their cautious way forward.
The Merikens, weapons out, surrounded the building from all sides, while Holmes, Douglas and Tomas ventured within. Even as their eyes adjusted, with no windows and only one door to provide feeble light, the men struggled to discern anything within that could be of worth.
“Huo yao,” Douglas repeated, and he pointed at the ground just outside of the door. There was a sprinkling of something dark, as if someone had spilled a line of pepper upon the ground.
Holmes hurried over, bent down and put a speck of it on his tongue. Then he lifted his eyes up and to the right, as if tasting a complex wine.
“Equal parts sulfur and charcoal,” he mused. “French blend, from the Essonne outside Paris. Best gunpowder in the world, reasonably priced, does not absorb moisture. This is either spillage from a weapon, or…”
He stared at Douglas.
“Get the men away from here!” he commanded. “Get everyone back down the hill. Now! They have rigged this thing to blow!”
Douglas rounded up several of the Merikens, including Jessup Jones, and pushed them outside. Holmes was about to follow when he noticed that Tomas, instead of leaving with the rest, was peering intently at something in a dark corner and walking slowly toward it.
“Mera hai, jee nahin! Jee nahin, mera hai…” he said, his voice pleading.
“What is it, Tomas?” Holmes asked. “What do you see? Que ves?” he added as an afterthought, remonstrating himself that it was Spanish and not Portuguese. But Tomas did not respond and did not turn. Instead, he moved more quickly toward the crevice, repeating the same words as before. Holmes wondered if it might be a religious plea of some sort.
Then he saw a light from a match, as well as the shadow of the depraved soul who set it. It appeared to be a young slave, so starved and maligned that he looked half-mad.
Then came the sound of popping, like Chinese firecrackers all around them, growing in volume.
Then Holmes felt a trembling under his feet.
After that, a deafening explosion, and the crumbling walls of the building burst open. Holmes felt himself rising up out of that darkness like a demented jack-in-the-box.
* * *
His ears were ringing like a thousand church bells, and though the sensation of weightlessness was terrifying, he hurtled along so smoothly and so effortlessly that he wondered for a moment if he might already be dead.
He almost felt as if he could put his arms out and glide, as in a dream. At first, there were other objects moving alongside him—planks, boards, possibly even other men. Then in another moment, he was alone.
Suddenly, it was over. He was falling—no longer in slow motion, but with terrible and determined speed.
He did the only thing he knew to do.
Rather than fight it, he relaxed, tucked into himself like a snail in its shell, and protected his head.
The water, when he hit it, felt like iron.
* * *
He must have passed out ever so briefly, but when he came to, he was already plunging down toward the depths.
He looked up. The water was sealed tight above him, as if not permitting a return voyage to the land of the living. Then his watery world began to pitch and to spin.
Within seconds he no longer knew which way was north, and he could not afford to lose what little air he still held in his lungs so as to find out. Trying to remain calm, he pulled open his pants pockets and observed the direction of the bubbles. Now he knew which way the surface lay, but to no avail. Though it was only twelve feet or so, it may as well have been twenty fathoms, rather than two.
He would never make it.
He cursed the added muscle weight that was keeping him from rising more easily.
Not for the first time in this adventure, but very possibly for the last, he prepared to die.
Then he spied beside him an unnerving sight.
* * *
Whatever else had transpired in Tomas’s life—however brutal the blows and ill use he had suffered, however piteous the want of food, or the too-intimate brush with wickedness—Holmes could only pray that some portion of an earlier time had brought him joy. Because, whatever was to occur from this juncture on, one thing was certain.
Tomas’s life was done.
He had an enormous gash at his temple. His left arm had been blown clean off, and he was dropping down past Holmes, uncaring in the least.
Out of some reservoir of sentimentality, or perhaps in the assailing madness that strikes when one is faced with unexpected and unwelcome death, Holmes grabbed onto Tomas as he sank, and held him fast.
Better to perish with human company beside me than all alone, he thought fleetingly.
But not a half-second later, a terrible sense of self-preservation overtook him, and he knew what he must do. He wrapped his arms tighter about Tomas’s waist, placed his mouth on the other man’s mouth and—using the poor man as a sort of “bellows”—squeezed him around the middle and breathed in his breath.
Air filled Holmes’s lungs, and he held it fast.
I
hope that means, Holmes thought, that Tomas was still airborne when his breath ceased forever. It would have been a less painful death. He quietly thanked the big man for saving his life yet again.
The impulse to bring him along to the surface was so strong as to feel like an ache in his soul, but Holmes knew full well that he’d have neither the strength nor the oxygen to succeed. Even if he did, it would change nothing. Air, wind, sun, and even chains held no power over Tomas now.
He was free.
41
HOLMES BROKE THE SURFACE SPUTTERING AND COUGHING, choking and vomiting. As helpless as a cod with a hook in its mouth, he strained and jerked against the reality of his circumstances. At first he attempted to distance himself from his own agonized heaves with scientific observation.
They are the result of the aspiration of fluids into air passages, he thought frantically. Yet he found it nigh on impossible to remain clinically detached while expelling the contents of his stomach all the way down to the lining.
Suddenly it seemed as if a freight train was powering through his skull. His energy was spent. He bobbed like a cork in the waves, his thoughts spinning.
The slavers had baited a booby trap, and he and his men had taken the bait. There was no telling who lived, and who had died. Tomas was dead. His best friend on earth, Cyrus Douglas, most likely was dead. But what of Jessup Jones? What of Huan, Little Huan, and the other Harmonious Fists?
The odds were long. There had been enough firepower in the shack to obliterate half the hilltop. He himself had fallen from a great height, catapulted up into the air and away from the shrapnel and the debris that had felled Tomas. For all practical purposes, he should not have survived.
Which meant that his very existence—the thing that had followed him around for the past twenty-three years like an obedient dog—was no longer his at all.
His hearing seemed peculiarly sound. The initial roar had disappeared. There was nothing left but a slight ringing.
He looked up.
The rain had abated. Behind the clouds, the first brushstrokes of dusk were painting the sky. The vividness, the sheer exuberance of it, was too much.
He closed his eyes.
I should not be alive, he insisted. I should not be alive to see this when all the others—nearly everyone I care about—are more than likely dead. He felt the slack tide tugging at him, insisting he give in. A few more pulls, and he would be too far from shore to ever hope to make it back.
Even now, the carbon dioxide in my blood and tissues is most likely high enough that I would not even need to go under, he speculated. Three large gulps of water would do the trick.
After that, cerebral hypoxia.
The end.
Yet something was niggling at him, something foreign, outside his muddle-headed thoughts. Lightly at first, and then more and more insistently, like a pesky gnat.
You are alive, it said. And you ought not to be.
The words repeated until he’d had quite enough.
“You needn’t remind me!” he screamed to no one in particular. But his voice, rather than roar, came out strangled and hoarse.
For a while, no other thoughts came.
Then he heard another voice—one that was endearing and familiar, if rather snooty.
“The last thing you would want is to lose a limb, or to perish in some freakish manner…”
“Sherlock?”
Holmes said it aloud and glanced about, as if his brother might be bobbing by his side, one eyebrow lifted in scorn and perhaps a dollop of pity. This struck him as so absurd that he began to laugh until tears came to his eyes.
A moment later, he found himself bellowing to the skies.
“No! I will not permit you to do away with me, to discard me as if I were nothing!” Once again, it sounded like the call of a dead man to an impassive and indifferent universe. He had no concept as to who might be incurring his wrath, but it did occur to him that, just possibly…
He had a reason to live.
It was something tangible, something that he wanted more than anything he had ever wanted in his life. More than friendship or acclaim, more than the maternal warmth that had eluded him as a child. More than the oxygen that he was drawing in by the lungful, as if the supply might dissipate at any moment.
“Revenge.”
He said the word out loud, tasting it. It radiated through him like a fire. He yearned for it more than he had ever yearned for Georgiana… and that was the most sinister shock of all.
She seemed now like a childish fantasy, the product of stardust and naiveté. The way a small boy might dream of becoming both a scientist and a renowned cricket player. It wasn’t simply Georgiana he would have to release, but the whole silly notion of happily ever after. He, of all people, should have realized some time ago that it did not exist.
He sucked in a few more blessed, luxurious breaths—this time without guilt or recriminations. Then, as much as it pained him to do so, he slipped under the water again.
Since he was resolved to swim back to shore and take on whatever came next, he did not wish his head to become a target for some newly emboldened mercenary. Rage released in him newfound strength. He recalled the clump of native reeds, tall and hollow, perfect for his purposes. He swam back down and against the current to where he’d last seen them.
They were swaying languidly about, as if this were any ordinary day. He propelled himself back to the surface for another few breaths and then, utilizing a broken clamshell that had gotten enmeshed in the clump, he chose a reed that would suit his purposes, and began to cut.
Finally, he flipped onto his back, put one end of the reed into his mouth and the other in the air, and began stroking slowly but relentlessly toward shore.
* * *
By the time Holmes reached the breakwater, dusk was on full and glorious display. The entire island seemed as if it had been infused with it. He heard no sound, other than the occasional quizzical chirping of a bird and the ebb and flow of the tide. It was as if the events of the day had already been swallowed up and forgotten.
He dragged himself out of the water and stood on the sand for a moment, keen-eyed and alert, catching his breath. As an afterthought, he felt for the pistol he had been given, removing it from the holster strapped to his leg.
Waterlogged, of course.
If it had been very nearly useless before, as he was an inept shot, it was completely so now. Nevertheless, he shook out as much seawater as he could. Although he was keenly aware that it could no longer be pressed into service, he saw no reason to inform his enemies of that fact.
Looking down the shore, he noticed that someone had pushed the Merikens’ boats back into the sea. Whatever else transpired, he was stranded here. He moved stealthily onto the sand, looking all about, not yet relying on his reverberating ears to guide him.
* * *
At first, everything was so peaceful it seemed as if all his efforts at subterfuge were for naught.
Then, he noticed the bodies.
Some were exposed, others half-hidden. Still others were strewn along the shore like discarded petals, tangled in the brush, or broken and still bleeding upon the rocks.
He staggered, sickened by the carnage, not caring a whit whether or not he could be seen, since he was all but certain that there was no one left alive to see him. As he went from one to the other, he attempted to identify each poor soul as best he could. It wasn’t an easy task. A handful of victims had holes where their faces had been. Other bodies had already swelled and bloated, rendering them all but unrecognizable.
Two were former slaves, while two others were members of the Harmonious Fists. And every one of the nine Merikens who had joined them in the expedition was dead.
Including the young orator, Jessup Jones.
The boy lay on his back upon a rock, his body still intact. His eyes and mouth were open in an exclamation of surprise. Holmes posited that Jones had been expelled by the force of the blast and had flown
through the air, his landing brutal but quick—and that his lethal injuries were internal.
He knelt down beside him and mouthed a silent prayer for Jones and for his family. Then he pressed down on the lids and shut the boy’s eyes.
He had not yet located Douglas among the dead, at least not among the poor unfortunates who had perished on the beach, but Douglas had been with Jessup Jones. So if he had not been catapulted by the blast, as the boy had, he was most likely up in the hills, blown to pieces.
The thought was too much to bear.
He left Jones’s side and focused again on the two Harmonious Fists and two slaves. The former had been so damaged that they were all but unrecognizable. He scrutinized their hands and was grateful for his own keen memory—neither of the corpses could possibly be Huan or his boy. As for the two slaves, they had been chained to the third Gatling, and had been the most abused of the lot—so weak they could barely drop the cartridge boxes or man the crank.
“If anyone ever deserved to rest in peace,” he said quietly, “it is you.”
When he was done scanning the vicinity, he counted the possible survivors. Huan and Little Huan, along with eight more Harmonious Fists and nine former slaves. If they were still alive, where in the world could they be?
Then he noticed something that made him shake his head in wonder.
Half buried in the sand, with the water sloshing over it, was Sherlock’s walking stick. He staggered toward it, if for no other reason to be reunited with something familiar. He had just laid his hands on it and was tugging it out of the wet sand when he heard an unfamiliar voice call out behind him.
“Mycroft Holmes!”
42
WHEN HOLMES TURNED AROUND, HE SAW A ROWBOAT PULL TO shore, as another floated a short distance away. Two mercenaries—they did not look familiar, so they’d not been among the guards on the beach—leapt from it into ankle-deep water. Wielding rifles, they wrestled the thing further up the sand. Then they turned and, with bored but dutiful countenances, trained their weapons on him.
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