“Get up,” she snapped.
Emil did so, with a startled look.
“Take them out to the gate,” she said. “Walk them out into the jungle, and leave them there.”
“Dihana.” Emil started a plea.
“To you, I am Prime Minister. Or Miss Minister.”
Someone coughed.
Haidan stood still and looked at them. “You want know what they was doing? We find them …”
Dihana shook her head, picked her fork back up, and sipped from her glass of milk. “They are no use to me. They don’t understand the old-father’s technologies. They barely understand the history that got us here, from what the Preservationists who talk to them have said. They hide what little they know from me.” Dihana shrugged. “Therefore they are useless.”
“You got to understand.” Emil put his hands down on the table. “We were trader. Nothing big. Some of we was just young then. None of we was in charge, or in the military fighting the Tetol. We was just here, in the city, when it all happened. And we had never leave.”
“Tell Haidan what you were doing, maybe he’ll have the heart not to throw you out of the city.”
Haidan glowered at them.
“We talk to some Azteca spy here,” Emil mumbled. “Give them information for the guarantee that we ain’t go be sacrifice when they come.” He held his tied hands up to his face and scratched his nose.
“What information?” Dihana asked. That they had betrayed everyone like this did not surprise her. They had already shaken her once before, she refused to let them affect her again.
“We tell them you set up an expedition north again.”
Dihana finished her eggs. “You’re traitors.” She put down her fork with a clink. “Now you tell me how much of a traitor you are? What do you expect to get from me?”
“No, look,” Emil said. “We had talk about it a long time. We refuse to give the Azteca anything that go make the city fall. That way, if the city win, we okay and helping it. But if it fall … You see? So the first thing we had tell them were about this trip north. It probably go fail like the other one. It were no big secret. Only one trip ever make it, and that were because—”
“DeBrun captained it,” Dihana said. “He also captains this one.”
“What?” The shock in Emil’s voice was genuine. It made Dihana flinch. The other Councilmen swore.
Emil’s knees buckled, and he leaned against the table. “DeBrun alive,” he whispered. “He alive!” Then he looked up.
Now Dihana was interested. “What is this all about?”
“John deBrun were the leader of the fight against the first Teotl. When he came to Capitol City, twenty year ago, we thought we was save. Until we find out he have no memory anymore. Nothing since he wash up in Brungstun. We thought him going north would help him get he memory back, but the mission fail.” Emil looked frustrated. “Maybe this would have help him with he memory. But now he in trouble.”
Dihana stood up. “Lock them up,” she told Haidan. “Just get them out of trouble.”
Late last night Harford and Malair had gone silent. The Azteca were on the Triangle Tracks. Now this. She walked out to her balcony, looking down the street toward the harbor. She could just see Grantie’s Arch, and through that, she could see a sliver of the ocean. We’re tearing ourselves apart back here in the city, she thought, and the Azteca haven’t even gotten to within firing distance of the walls.
Good luck out there.
PART THREE
THE NORTHLANDS
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
They had sailed for just over a week already. La Revanche plunged forward, taking the northern seas wave by pounding wave. The ship lurched every few hours when a large wave smacked her from an odd angle, but the bow, again and again, ripped out the other side of a wall of dark wave, and water would race down the decks and drain off.
It was a rhythm, though John wished he could speed it up. Every week was a week that the city faced the Azteca without him.
It took two days before the most vulnerable, the mongoose-men, gained their sea legs. Another day had passed before the last of them stopped throwing up. By that time the salt in the air coated everything. The fine patina of crystals made a scraping sound whenever someone ran their hand down a rail.
By now everyone had an inkling of what long sea voyages were about. Bad weather, incredible drenching seas, and storms. Dried foods, weevily foods, and bilge rat patrol. Cockroaches, canned vegetables, and one orange a day, just in case. The ocean killed here, no longer a friend like behind the protective barrier reefs just off Brungstun.
John stood on a cabin top, the steamship pitching slowly under his feet. Oaxyctl walked up the deck and stopped next to him.
“How are you taking this?” John moved over next to him at the rail, which John walked up and down, up and down, every day. It had been a sudden decision to ask the mongoose-man to come, but John remembered the way Oaxyctl had been treated on the street. That would not be repeated on this ship. Oaxyctl had saved his life, John owed him as much as the man would accept.
“I don’t think my stomach will ever forgive me.”
John flexed his knees to stand straight in respect to the horizon and smiled. Revanche gimballed under him. “Give it another week …”
A small rogue wave broke the ocean’s rhythm, slapping the ship’s side and throwing up spray that struck them both. The water dripped from John’s waterproofed coat, but a small rivulet snuck in under his collar and trickled down his back.
“Gods.” Oaxyctl gripped the railing. “Another week.”
“You’ll get used to it.” John folded his arms. As long as one didn’t think about all the time they were using up.
“What do you to pass time?”
“Knots.”
“Knots?”
“Some men can afford books to bring with them and trade them once they’re read,” John said. “Others learn crafts. Knots are a good start. Whittling fish bones into naked women is another.”
Oaxyctl snorted. He looked at John and let go of the railing with one hand and swayed with the boat a bit, trying to imitate.
“I guess this isn’t too different than some of the long shifts in the lower mountains,” Oaxyctl said.
“At sea you are your own worst enemy.”
“That is the way it works anywhere.” Oaxyctl shuffled his feet as he lost his balance. He looked through the scuppers at the shifting landscape of water. “I’m far from home, John. Far from home.”
“Lonely?”
Oaxyctl nodded. “I feel like I have no friends, no family, no one who cares if I were to fall off the side of this boat.”
“It’s a ship,” John corrected him. “But, yes, I understand.” Out here it was like an alien land where the horizon never ended and the land constantly shifted and broke over itself.
Alien world. That impression bubbled right up through John’s subconscious. It was one of many different images and feelings that had been surfacing since the voyage started. He resented them, though. He’d been trying to hold pictures of Shanta and Jerome in his head. The weird feelings stirring in his gut scared him. He hadn’t had such distinct feelings since washing up in Brungstun and waking up with nightmares. Why now?
Every night the memories of Shanta and Jerome grew softer, shattered by the still-striking nightmares of images that had once haunted him before his family had come to him. Images of the spiked egg dripping water were John’s most prevalent dreams.
It was that, and a constant feeling of being alone with dark nothingness around him for unimaginable distances, that woke him up sweating in the night now.
“Oaxyctl, be honest with me. What will happen to my family in Brungstun?” John asked.
“Your wife, if she is lucky, will be working as a servant.” Oaxyctl lifted a hand to brush away one of his dark bangs. He blinked. Another wave slap and he lost his balance, sitting down roughly on the deck. John crouched next to him. “I do not kn
ow what they will do with your boy, as there are several … festivals to the gods that approach.”
John leaned his head back against the cabin and sat down completely. “Festivals? They sacrifice people for these, right?”
Oaxyctl didn’t reply. But the silence meant assent.
John ground his teeth. “Why?” he demanded. “Why the blood?”
“It isn’t that we, they, hate life. They adore it. They treasure it. It is the holiest gift of all.”
“So why …” In the distance, from under the decks, a faint yell.
“What would you offer your god?” Oaxyctl asked. “The mud from the bottom of a river? Or the holiest gift of all? I have seen verses that say the gift of human life is a holy deed. Is not that one of the tenets of the christians who live on this side of the mountains?”
“That is a perverse comparison.” La Revanche changed her heading, John thought. The rolling felt different. He stood up.
“Perverse?” Oaxyctl raised his voice. “No more than any other religion. What religion doesn’t have a strong connection to blood? The Vodun and christian faiths ask for blood in one way or another. You have others as well. What god do you worship? I am sure you will find some strange, if not horrific, practice there.”
“I don’t worship any gods.” John stepped forward down the deck and looked around, trying to see through the boom and sails in his way. Something was wrong. A random wave struck the side and La Revanche leaned far over. Things slid and banged around. Down through one of the hatches, sailors swore and things broke.
Oaxyctl looked around. “What’s wrong?”
An explosion ripped through the rear hatches from inside. John ran forward to the nearest hatch, conversation forgotten. He leapt down the companionway, shoving aside a mongoose-man at the bottom.
Smoke billowed forward at him. Hadley, wearing nothing but pants and carrying a pistol in his hand, grabbed John’s arm.
“I think I catch the man who done this,” Hadley reported. “A stowaway. But the explosion kill three crew.”
“We can’t steer, and we taking on water serious,” someone yelled from in the smoke.
Sabotage.
“Keep all the hatches open.” John coughed, eyes watering from smoke. “Let me see who did this.”
Two bulky fishermen in dirty coveralls pulled what looked like a mongoose-man with long dreadlocks forward. “I know you!” John grabbed the man’s chin and stared him in the eye. “At Grantie’s Arch, on the footbridge. Pepper?” John tried to recall all the impressions he had gathered that night for some sort of conclusion.
“Good afternoon.” Pepper pulled at one of the fishermen, forcing them to stagger. Hadley raised his gun in warning. Pepper looked at them. His face was black with cordite, his dreads singed. He’d been lucky to live through the blast.
He’s holding himself back, John thought. He could see it in the body language. Pepper was dangerous.
But he already knew that. He didn’t have to look for it, John had known it the second he’d first seen Pepper. It sat with certainty in John’s gut. “Get him tied up and locked away. We’ll deal with him later.” They didn’t have the time right now. They needed to fix the damage quickly, get back under way. Then they could think about that.
Pepper stared at him.
“Should kill he dead now,” one of the fishermen said.
“Don’t do anything stupid, John,” Pepper said, his voice icy.
“I’m not sure who you are, exactly,” John snapped. “So don’t call me by my first name.” To Hadley he said, “Put him in the brig, we have other things to worry about first.”
“A brig?”
Hadley and John stared at each other.
“Lock him in a room. Anywhere. You have a place like that?”
Hadley nodded. “A brig,” he repeated, rolling the word around.
It was a word that came easily to John. It mustn’t be used much in the northern parts, John thought.
“Come.” Hadley kept the gun aimed at Pepper.
John walked past them into the slowly clearing smoke. Near the rear of the hold, water rushed in, creating puddles he stepped in. Two men lay bloodied and dead on the ground, one missing a face, just a pink, shredded pulp of a skull facing the hull.
“Who can hold their breath?” John yelled back at the smoke. They would have to repair this now. A sheet of metal welded on and some struts, but first they had to pull something over the cracked hull on the outside, some watertight canvas. John hoped the explosion had not damaged Edward’s machinery for the treads they would need to travel over the northern ice.
And Pepper.
He would talk to him later, after this crisis was taken care of
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Two mongoose-men hastily cleared a sail locker to the fore of the ship, then ripped Pepper’s coat from him, throwing it aside. They yanked free any weapons and knives they found including his binoculars. Then they tied his wrists behind him with rope and pushed Pepper into the locker. They put a lock on the slatted wooden door and took up positions on either side to guard him.
Annoying.
Pepper watched through the gaps in the wooden door as men ran around. La Revanche pitched madly until John ordered a sea anchor, a large canvas parachute with spars that forced its throat open, thrown off the back of the ship. That got the ship facing downwind with the waves.
Two men with ropes tied to their waists leapt over to guide ropes and canvas to seal off the leak.
Pepper flexed until the rope around his arms popped. With his arms still behind him he dug his fingers into his forearm. He could feel skin resist, but he forced his thumbnail down until warm blood dripped onto the coils of saltcrusted rope and spare sailcloth underneath him.
He kept digging until he found a sharp edge and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. He pulled out a slender tube.
Pepper kept it, still bloodied, in his left free hand, waiting. His right boot rested against the lower lip of the door, ready to kick out outward.
The real saboteur would have to come and try to kill Pepper. The crude dart gun ripped from under his forearm would take care of any unwanted visitors. And from the brig Pepper had a good view of the entire deck.
The hours passed. It didn’t look as if La Revanche was sinking, though Pepper could hear the thrum of the pumps sucking water out over the side and the spitting of welding. The sea had calmed, and they drifted into the evening. Pepper remained alert, peering out through the slats, ready.
The figure that came up the deck wasn’t the saboteur, but John deBrun, easily recognizable due to his hook. John squatted near the edge of the sail locker. “You say you didn’t do it. What proof do you have?”
“What proof do you have that I did sabotage your ship?” Pepper said. “No one stopped to ask this.” Pepper had been hibernating in the bottom rear of the ship in a storage area, near the rudder cables, when one of the crew had snuck back to attach something near the rudder and hull.
“True.” Through the slats this close, Pepper could see only John’s eyes. “But you’re the stowaway.”
Pepper shifted, right boot on the door, dart gun in his other hand. The blood on his arm had dried and clotted. The skin by the gash quivered, repairing itself. “John, you’ve got worries. You’re worrying about me, but I’m actually the least of your many issues. You have people aboard this ship who don’t want it to reach your destination. And there’s an even bigger problem about to bite your ass.”
“And what is that?”
“There are Azteca ships out here hunting you. The bomb wasn’t supposed to go off for another couple of days, when we got closer to the Lantails.” Pepper had woken up, groggy, and surprised the first crewman. He’d killed him, but didn’t get to the second until he’d triggered the bomb. The concussion still hurt. And now Pepper’s life was even more complicated. That annoyed him even more.
“Azteca don’t have ocean-worthy ships,” John said.
&nbs
p; “They do now,” Pepper said. “The Teotl have helped.”
“And how do you know this?”
“Bars.”
“Bars?”
“Bars are your first avenues of locating information, John. You know this. With my ears, I hear all the gossip, the truth, the confessions made into rags and beer mugs: there are two deep-ocean fishing boats missing in the Lantail Islands and one sighting of a strange new-looking ship by city fishermen. They’ve petitioned for protection, but no one believes them. And then there is the matter of the Teotl I happened to catch and torture in Capitol City that told me there are three big ships out here, John, waiting for you.”
“You’re trying to get us to turn around and give up.”
“If I’d wanted that, I would have killed everyone on board during any of the first few nights at sea and burned the ship. You might not remember things, but listen to my voice and tell me I wouldn’t have.” John was quiet. “About those ships,” Pepper continued. “When they try to stop us, you should let me out. They won’t sink this ship; they’ll try to board. They want to capture you.”
“I’m not letting you out.”
“Okay. I’ve spent lots of time in confined spaces … and getting out of them. Just make sure to feed me well.”
“Where do you remember me from?” John asked. “How do you really know me?”
Pepper put a finger through the slat and wiggled it. “Your reaction to that information, without your memories to guide and back you up, would get in my way. You’d call me insane. We’ve got enough difficulty here as it is, why add to it?”
What would he say? Hi, John, you’re hundreds of years old. You once navigated between the stars, now you’re mucking about on a steam-powered toy boat on a small planet cut off from the rest of the human race.
Better to wait.
“How did you get aboard?” John crossed his arm and hook over each other. “We had guards and ships cordoning La Revanche off.”
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