by Sarah Remy
“Too close,” the captain called, hoarse. “Hard, forward. Hurry now. We’re nearer out than in, boys.”
Mal looked about for Liam, but couldn’t find him for the surge of men on the deck. Someone shoved a wooden pail into his hands.
“If you’re not going to stay out of the way, make yourself useful,” the sailor suggested. “Get below and bail before the next one hits. Pump’s o’erwrought. The engine drowns, we’re all dead.”
“The next one?” Mal looked at the setting sun. “The sky’s clear.”
“Another funnel sighted east,” the sailor said. “Two in a crossing innit unheard of; three’s the seas’ own rage. Never should have attempted the pass this time of year, naught but a death trap, we’ll be broke to splinters and a feast for kelp, but the Rani had to have her magus, and Baldebert’s not one to forbid her anything.” The sailor put his hands on Mal’s shoulder, turned him about, and pushed. “That way. Go. Feel the rumble? Not long now.”
Mal carried the pail with him to the middle of the deck and the main hatch. The deck tilted sharply as he staggered: returning vertigo, or the roiling sea. He crouched in ankle-deep water. When he dragged the hatch open, the flood ran like a small waterfall over the lip and into the hold.
“Oi! Shut that! We’re trying to keep the sea out, you imbecile!”
Mal slithered feet first over the lip, groping with bare toes until he found the expected ladder. His wet tunic caught on the hatch, tearing, and the bucket smacked his shoulder, but he managed to get the hatch closed again, and the fall of bilgewater slowed to a trickle. He clamored down several rungs into the hold, breathing shallowly against the stench of unwashed humanity.
“Necromancer.” The woman standing at the foot of the ladder steadied Mal as the ship rocked abruptly starboard and then back. “My apologies. I didn’t expect—”
Mal caught a quick impression of bright red hair, greased back from a high forehead, and an unfortunate crooked nose. Then he shoved the woman away, bent at the waist, and lost his breakfast to the flooded hold. As he choked and heaved, he saw his vomit was far from the worst refuse floating around his shins. The bilge was a veritable sewer of human misery.
“My lord!” Liam appeared at Mal’s elbow. The lad was soaked through and owl-eyed. He gripped a pail in both hands, and his teeth chattered with fear or chill. “What are you doing?”
“Helping,” Mal said. “Show me what to do.”
The redheaded woman scraped Mal with a doubtful gaze. She wore an iron collar about her neck, and an officer’s tunic over her trousers. A silver whistle dangled on a fine chain from her belt. “Can you stand straight?”
“Aye,” Mal replied, and made himself do so.
“Right.” She shrugged in the manner of one used to oddities upon the sea. “Go and bail the rear of the engine. Don’t distract the oars with your unnecessary pity; we’re here of our own making, let us do our job.”
Mal blinked, trying to process her wounded pride past the spinning in his head and the rocking under his feet. Water slapped against his kneecaps. The ship was settling lower into the ocean, he realized, and felt the ooze of fearful sweat on his brow.
“This way, my lord.” Liam tugged Mal further into the hold. The boy lowered his voice to an aggrieved hiss. “You shouldn’t be out. I can’t keep you safe and bail both.”
Mal didn’t bother with an answer. He was too struck with horror for coherence. The Cutlass Wind’s engine sighed and groaned and struggled even as she ship rose and fell and rocked, and the water rose. The blank, wretched faces of the men and women manning the oars seemed to Mal more repugnant than the offal floating about his legs. The engine rowed with a rhythm that had more to do with the chains collaring one oarsman to the next than real skill. If the woman at the head of the starboard rank worked her oar, so must the skinny man the next bench back.
Mal counted twenty oars on the starboard, fifteen on portside. There were more men than women; the women, at least, were allowed the modesty of thin shifts, while their male companions went entirely naked in the cloying humidity.
“My lord!” Liam hissed again. “Don’t stare. They prefer you don’t.”
Even as the boy spoke caution, one of the oars—a scarred, balding man with yellow desert eyes—turned his head and regarded Mal with hatred. Without breaking rhythm, the man spat into the bilge, showing blunt white teeth in an angry grimace.
“They’re very proud, my lord,” Liam murmured. He nudged Mal past the last of the oars. Beyond the engine the water gurgled and rolled. Mal stopped, bent double, tasting bile. Liam waited until he’d recovered, then put Mal’s bucket gently back into his shaking hands. “Bucket brigade, my lord,” the boy explained. “I need to get back. Rest here for a bit, aye? My lord.”
Mal nodded and stared into the stern. The belly of the ship was lit by a faint red light, filtering down through narrow portholes cut into the deck above. As much water as light fell across the miserable huddle of swab and sailor working desperately alongside the motionless bilge pump. The pump looked fine and new, the thick chain still untouched by rust, but the rush of water had proved too much, and most of the canvas bags meant to carry water up and out of the bilge were burst and useless. Instead swab and sailor made use of buckets and strength, scooping water and passing pails full of ocean water along the hold and up a living chain of agile men. Sailors above deck hauled the load through a hatch meant for the pump, and returned the buckets empty.
It was a woefully inefficient attempt to staunch a mortal wound. The Cutlass Wind was going down.
“Father’s like to be well entertained by this debacle, aye, brother? That or nigh dead of shame.”
Mal took a shallow breath of wet air. He turned, bucket dangling, and regarded Rowan’s laughing spirit with real relief. His older brother, looking both far happier and more substantial than Mal expected, winked back. The bilgewater ran back and forth through his calves; Mal couldn’t tell if the ghost had feet beneath the waterline.
“Nay, no ghost, not I.” Rowan shook his head sadly. “The pretty ivories on your hands and feet keep you dull as any simpleton, blind and deaf. Ra’Vadin’s ghoul could sing in your ear and you’d never notice. I’m but the voice of your gut-wrenching terror, brother.”
“Hallucination,” Mal diagnosed, sagging against the bilge wall. “That bad, am I?”
“Worse,” Rowan replied, cheerful. “Deep sea turns a magus queer, everyone knows. But the jewelry’s the real problem. Get rid o’ them bangles, Mal, and it’s possible you could save yourself and the ship as well.”
Mal stared stupidly at the ivory encircling his wrists, then at the bit of rotten apple floating near his knee. “Too late. We’re sunk.”
“Malachi!” Rowan grasped Mal’s shoulders and shook him until the vertigo in his skull smoothed to a low roar. “Pay attention. You’re not sunk yet. I didn’t die at sea so you could follow me down. Think of something! You always were the clever one.”
Mal lifted his arms above the water. His bucket whirled away, forgotten. He couldn’t see Liam. Behind him the engine still rowed, responding to each blast of the silver whistle, even as water hampered their rhythm.
“They don’t come off,” he said. “I can’t think with them on, and I can’t take them off.”
“Nay,” Rowan said, and smiled. “But Baldebert can. And I wager right about now the captain’d do near anything to save this ship.”
Baldebert was still lashed to the bowsprit, a living figurehead above the carved maid. He’d lost the dipsea, replaced the lead in his hand with a long dirk, but the blade hung loose in his fingers. Mal crawled across the deck on hands and knees, seawater running over his fingers. He was not the only coward worming across the boards; several swabs lay on their backs in the water, staring skyward. Mal heard the roar of angry wind and was afraid to look around.
The first mate ha
d lashed himself to the wheel, but had given up on holding the spoke steady. He scarce looked around when Mal pulled himself upright along the wheel prop.
“We’re free of the islands,” the mate shouted. “But we’re lost. We’ve taken on too much water, and more’n half the crew gone overboard, the engine like to drown. The funnels come one after another; there’s naught left for us but the sinking.”
Vertigo spun Mal to his knees. When the first mate fell against him, restraints pulling, he realized the reckless tilt was not in his head. The ship bucked and heaved about like a leaf in a draining cistern; the stern dragged far lower than the bow.
“Take these off!” Mal yelled. He shook his wrists at the mate. “I can help! Free me from the sorcery, and let me help!”
The other man drooped against knotted rope. Blood oozed from a cut on his brow, and was washed away by a sideways roll of seawater. He sputtered and coughed.
“They’re tuned to Baldebert,” he said when he could speak again. “He’s the only one can take them off, my lord necromancer, and I guarantee he’d rather rot at the bottom of the water than put himself at your mercy.”
“I’m not a compassionate man,” Mal replied. “Mercy’s of no consequence.”
He heaved himself over the bulwark and onto the bowsprit, wrapping arms and legs around the spar. He’d lost all sense of the horizon. The sky and the sea were the same angry green. Baldebert was the only bright spot in the world, the captain’s angry curses so vulgar they made Mal want to giggle when he should weep.
“Your bird’s come back!” Baldebert shouted. “He’s brought the bloody funnels with him, the demon!”
Mal turned his head against the spar and saw that it was not the waves Baldebert cursed, or the listing ship, but the black-feathered bird perched above on the jig.
“He’s only a bird!” Mal screamed above the wind. “You’re a madman. Come down from there before you fall in!”
“I’m knotted tight.” Baldebert turned away from Jacob and looked down across the sprit. He was wet as a fish, his grin crooked. “They’ll find my bones lashed to my ship, if they ever find us at all. You’re a single hand’s slip from the drink, my lord. One sturdy wave and you’re in.”
“Release me.” Mal demanded through chattering teeth. “Let me help.”
Baldebert’s mad smile grew thin.
“And what would you do, magus?” he challenged. “Scatter us to the devils with a snap of your fingers? I think not. I’d rather die a natural death.”
“Scatter the winds with a cant,” Mal shouted. “I’d rather not die at all.”
Baldebert shook his head even as the spar groaned and Mal dug his fingernails into wood, scrabbling for purchase.
“And can you raise my ship from the state she’s in, broken and waterlogged?”
“Aye,” said Mal simply, although he wasn’t entirely sure. “But not shackled in ivory.”
Baldebert’s fine brows rose. “Almost I believe you.”
“Cargo good as diamonds, remember?”
Baldebert stood still as the world rocked. Mal inhaled a mouthful of rain and sea, spat it out again. His lungs, already weakened by assassin’s poison, burned. He wanted to lay his head down on the spar. Instead he lifted his chin and looked across his nose at Baldebert.
“You have my word of honor,” he called. “Let me save the ship, and I’ll submit again to the shackles after.”
“Your word means nothing to me.” Baldebert’s sigh was audible even through the raging storm. “Unfortunately, you’ve reminded me I’ve given mine as well.” He used the tip of his dirk to slice free the ropes about his waist and ankles, then dropped to hands and knees and shimmied back along the bowsprit, gripping the blade in his teeth. When they lay on the spar, nose to nose, Baldebert extended one brown hand, curled his fingers.
“They’re tuned to my lineage,” he said around the dirk. “Set your hands in mine.” Mal complied without hesitation. Baldebert’s fingers were not quite long enough to curl around Mal’s slender wrists, but it was close. The captain’s flesh was chill against Mal’s own.
Baldebert stroked his thumb over ivory. At his touch the bracelets split each down the middle. Baldebert caught the pieces as they fell, four slender ivory half-moons.
“Now your feet,” the captain ordered. “Grab my belt. Don’t let go.”
Baldebert’s belt was little more than a shank of rope. Mal gripped it tightly. Baldebert twisted sideways until he hung over sea or sky, reaching into the green, the tails of his captain’s togs fluttering. Mal clenched his fists around the man’s belt and closed his eyes against vertigo. He jerked when he felt Baldebert’s fingers against his ankles, but didn’t relax his hold.
The ivory broke and fell away, taking enchantment with it. Mal’s innate magic flamed from spark to pyre, smoking away the mists in his head and the palsy in his bones. He shouted in relief and welcome, and banished the rain with one word, the howling wind with a quickly constructed cant. He lowered his voice, whispered to the sea, smoothed the waves back flat as glass.
He’d almost forgotten strength, he’d been so laid low with vertigo and sorcery. Now the magic rushed through his veins, filling his body with heat and light and the heady, heady thrill of power. He sat up on the spar, faced the gloaming horizon, and laughed, giddy.
Mal? Avani’s uncertainty in his head, along the thread that bound them, stretched thin across unkind deep sea, but not yet broken.
“Blood hells, man,” Baldebert screamed. “I said, don’t let go!”
Mal blinked and Avani was lost to him, their connection battered by distance and unfriendly fathoms, shredding. Mal chased after the bright sense of her, even as he smiled at Baldebert.
“I haven’t let go,” he said. “Shall I pull you back up, or can you manage on your own, Admiral?”
For answer Baldebert crossed his legs about the spar, swung down and around and up again, dirk gripped between his teeth, ending once more upright. He shook his head at Mal’s expression, then sheathed his blade in his belt.
“Easier without the wind and funnel,” he said, hopping lightly to his feet. “But we’re still far too low in the water, more sunk than not.” It was the captain who took Mal’s hand, and pulled him upright. “You’re flushed pink as a lad got into his mum’s pastries; fix this before joy fades sour and black.”
“Deep sea turns a magus dangerous,” Mal said, remembering.
“Just that,” Baldebert replied. “The ivory is meant to prevent it, but I’ve taken the ivory away. So. Fix this mess. Quickly.”
IT WAS EASY, too easy, and wisdom whispered for caution, but Mal was made near wild with the delightful burn of magic in his veins. He balanced on the bowsprit, Baldebert’s grip on his shoulders holding steady, and laughed down at a deck awash with refuse and struggling men, and the wandering, baffled spirits of the newly dead. The Cutlass was near one-third submerged, the stern listing just below the waterline, the bow pointed gently at the sky. The engine, Mal thought, was most certainly drowned. Worry tempered joy as he searched the deck for Liam. He saw no sign of the lad.
With a word Mal stole fistfuls of energy from the groaning dead and used it to burn away the weight of unwelcome bilge. Drowned and broken ghosts howled as their spirits snuffed away, sacrificed to Mal’s need. Once he might have pulled the strength from Siobahn, or Avani. But Siobahn was gone, banished forever, and Avani was but a twitch of worry in the back of his skull, useless.
As Mal cleared The Cutlass Wind of haunts old and new, his strength burned bright and sharp. Smoke rose in great plumes from the boards, burst from hatches and portholes. Mal heard living cries from below, shouts of pain and terror.
“Ware,” Baldebert warned. “Too quick and you’ll boil what’s left of my crew.”
Salt sparkled on the deck, left behind by dissipating vapors. The Cutlass bumped and ra
ttled, immediately lighter, and bobbed back into place atop the calm seas. Mal let his hands fall back to his side, embarrassed to discover he’d been conducting vapor and rigging and board as enthusiastically as a general over ranks. Sweat dribbled down the bridge of his nose, itching. He brushed it away irritably, and shrugged Baldebert off.
“Your ship’s seaworthy. I need to find my page,” he said.
Baldebert followed Mal down the bowsprit and onto the deck. Salt scraped beneath the soles of Mal’s feet. Jacob dropped from the jig, settled on Mal’s shoulder, claws scratching. The bird tilted his head at Baldebert, and croaked.
“Demon,” Baldebert said, dislike writ clear across his face. “You’ve decimated my ship, drowned my men. If it’s fresh water you want, take it. But leave us be.”
The captain wheeled and strode away, barking orders. Jacob flexed his toes, drawing blood. Mal winced.
“If you’ve killed Liam in your temper,” Mal warned the bird, “I’ll pluck you like a winter goose.”
LIAM WASN’T DROWNED. Most of the engine was, and more still dying, spirits pulling away from waterlogged husks. Liam fumbled to free those left alive from their iron chains while Mal and the redheaded officer dragged corpses through salt and piled them away from the bilge walls. Liam’s hand was steady on the key, his face set. Mal counted twenty-one dead. The survivors were battered and bleeding.
“Can you do nothing to repair them?” The officer held her right arm against her side. Mal thought she’d dislocated her shoulder.
“Bandage wounds and tie splints,” he said. “I’ve a light hand with a needle and catgut, and I can wield a scalpel. I know medicines. But I’m no theist priest to heal a man with book learning.”
The woman frowned.
“I don’t know ‘theist,’ ” she said. “But I’ve bandages and catgut stocked in my quarters, and some healing lore from my mam. Help me get the spared oars up on deck and into fresh air, necromancer, and it’s possible we can restore a serviceable number.”