If Zymun missed with that first strike, Kip had a chance. He would have to row like mad. When he was able to see how far from shore they were, he could decide whether to risk going back and killing Zymun, or leaving him to his fate in the sea. After Zymun’s impossible escape through shark-filled waters last time, Kip planned to kill him and be sure.
If Kip was too slow, though, he’d get shot. With no idea what direction to row, and as weak as he was, he would die. If he knocked them both into the water, he would die. Zymun was the better swimmer even when Kip was healthy.
There would be only one slim chance. Kip would be ready for it. His eyes, shielded from the light under the blindfold, were naturally wide, dilated. He tried to narrow them consciously, a trick any experienced drafter could do instantly. If he was dazzled by the light, he’d miss. If—
Zymun’s weight shifted. “Orholam,” he said.
The moment was on him so suddenly, Kip almost missed it.
“A galley,” Zymun said. The blue luxin Kip was holding told him that Zymun’s voice was muted by being turned to the side, looking. “I think it’s pirates.”
Now! Blue luxin tore through Kip’s skin at his temples. With fingers of blue luxin, he flipped the blindfold off his head—and leapt.
Chapter 4
“I smell so much as a resiny fart, and I paints my deck chunky, little Guile. Red and gray and bony, you elucidate? I know luxinly smells,” Gunner said as he led him onto the deck of the Bitter Cob. “Or more like, I paint it all in brown and squashy, right, right?”
Gavin walked into the light with a lead heart.
“Right,” he said. Because he had feces for brains. Funny.
“Luxinly? Luxic? Luxinic?” Gunner asked. The man loved language the way a wife beater loves his wife.
“Luxiny, but I like your way better.”
“Bah.”
It was close to noon, choppy seas tossing the light galley more than he expected. These Angari ships were different. But what had been the most salient fact of his whole life—the light—struck him as insignificant. It was an overcast day, but with lots of light for a Prism. But this light kissed his skin like a lingering lover leaving. The hues of gray and white and black gave him despair where before the scintillant spectra had given him inconceivable power. He’d thought he’d adjusted to the loss of his colors, but it was one thing to face his loss in the darkness of a prison, another thing altogether to see that his prison was the whole world. And Gunner knew it. He had taken one look at Gavin’s eyes the night he’d captured him and he’d known.
So why is Gunner paranoid now?
Because he’s Gunner.
“On yer knobbies,” Gunner said.
Gavin got on his knees, planting them wide on the deck so the rolling motion wouldn’t knock him down. He couldn’t tell if the stretching hurt good or hurt bad, but as long as he didn’t lose his head or any other limb more important to him, any break from the oars was a good thing.
Gunner looked at him. “What happened to Gavin Guile, levering the world on the fulcrum of his wantings?”
On one level, this was the clearest thing Gunner had said to him yet, but Gavin had told Gunner he wasn’t Gavin. It was probably one of the dumber things he’d done in the last year, though there were a lot of contenders for that crown. “He died.” That ought to work, regardless of which Gavin Gunner meant.
“Tragical. How?”
The trick to working with the insane was never to profess surprise. Nor to expect it. Opacity was a dagger Gavin could wield, too. “I ran out of mercies until I had only the musket-ball mercy left. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Boom boom. Meatsack mercy. Yellow cell red, liver made dead.”
Gunner folded his arms. He looked at Gavin like he was very puzzling. “You rave.”
“I crave.”
“You knave.”
“I slave.”
“I save.”
“From waves?”
“And you gave,” Gunner said. He gestured to his big white musket, propped against a doorframe some paces away.
Gavin stopped to let Gunner win. He did want to get a better look at that odd thing, but Gunner alternately wanted to show it off and looked paranoid that someone was going to steal it. Gavin couldn’t pay too much attention to what Gunner treasured. Nor too little.
Gunner laughed, sealing his win, taking Gavin’s hesitation to be a concession of defeat. They’d played this game before. Years and years ago now. If Gavin weren’t utterly in the man’s power, and Gunner utterly insane, Gavin thought he might like him. Gunner said, “I don’t take men who’ve been in Ceres’s bosom too sincere. Them watery kisses make men crazy, and ain’t no Guile started out overmuch sane. Tell it straight as shooting. Are you Dazen Guile, back from the dead? You tell me this, and not half the tale.”
Which didn’t mean what the words meant. Gunner’s patience was shorter than his fuses. So Gavin gave it in brief: “Never died. Captured my brother at Sundered Rock, and took his place. His friends looked better than mine, so I took my brother’s clothes, and I took his place. But not a month back, I decided my imprisoned brother had gone frothing mad, and I killed him.”
It was so simple to say the words. Gavin had thought it would be impossible to tell the truth he’d worked so hard to hide for so long. But he felt nothing. He should feel something, shouldn’t he?
“The sea she sends me mysteries to invigorate,” Gunner said.
Gavin was sure, this time, that Gunner had used the wrong word on purpose. “You’re quite an invigorator. No wonder you’re Ceres’s favorite.”
Gunner spat into the water, but Gavin could tell he was pleased. “You’re Dazen? Straight bullseye?”
“I been shootin’ in the dark so long I ain’t sure what I am, now. I was Dazen, though. Straight shootin’.” Gavin wasn’t sure why he did that, dropping into patter when he spoke with others who did so. He’d always done it, though, copying accents and odd phrasing when he spent too long in any one place.
“You say this because you know Gunner worked for Dazen,” Gunner said. “You’re lying. Hoping to edge with me.”
Hoping to edge?—oh, hoping to gain an edge. “Sure. And before I killed my brother, he told me your birth name was Uluch Assan. You were so very important to him, those were his last words.”
Gunner’s eyes glittered dangerously. “Not impossible for a Prism to learn an old name.”
“Before you agreed to work for me—me Dazen—all those years ago, you told me lies about how you killed that sea demon as we sat in the slaves’ quarters drinking that foul peach liquor. And when you professed to believe that there was no such thing as superviolet luxin, we played a little game with a feather to quell your doubts.”
A worried look crossed the pirate captain’s face. “Took Gunner three shots to hit that damned dancing feather. Was an eagle feather, though, not quail.”
There was no point correcting him, so Gavin continued, “I feared I’d made you so furious that you wouldn’t work for me. I let you hit it… on the sixth shot, ya damned liar.”
Gunner went rigid. Shit. The man told lies to aggrandize himself so often, he might think that his version was the truth. Not the battle to pick, Gavin. Gunner strode away suddenly, heading to midship.
Gavin stayed where he was, on his aching knees. It was bad stretching now, he was certain of it. The two sailors who’d accompanied him looked confused as to what they were expected to do.
“Free his grabbies!” Gunner shouted. He was rummaging in a barrel.
The sailors unlocked the manacles, but kept Gavin on his knees.
Gunner grabbed something from a barrel and threw it at Gavin. He bobbled it in his bandaged, stiff hands, and it bounced on the deck. A sailor fetched it and gave it back to him. A big, wrinkled apple.
“Take him to the beakhead,” Gunner said. “Watch him close as Aborneans groats. A Guile in a corner is a sea demon in your washtub.”
Here I didn’t think you bathed. Gav
in didn’t say it, though. There was little to be gained by mocking his captor, his master, and much else to be retained. Teeth, for instance.
The sailors pulled him to his feet and pulled to him to the prow. They turned him around, forced him to his knees again. Gunner was forty paces away, at the farthest point astern. He held a gleaming white musket. Or a musket-sword? It had a single blade with twin black whorls crisscrossing up the blade, bracketing shining jewels. The blade had a small musket inset in much of the spine except for the last hand’s breadth, which was pure blade.
Gavin had a dim recollection of the thing, but it slipped away from him. Something about that night, and a clash with his father and Grinwoody and Kip. He had suffered great violence before and lost hours of time to it, and he’d certainly known men in the war who’d lost memories of injuries. But there was something about Gunner fishing him out of the waves, and then beating him with the flat of the blade? It could only be that. Gavin was still recovering from his bruises, but he didn’t have any stab wounds or he probably would be dead by now.
Still, what a terrible idea. To make a musket barrel thick enough to deal with the power of exploding powder was to make a weapon far too thick and heavy to be an effective sword. Was this some sort of odd jest?
“If you’re Dazen, you’ll remember our little demonstration,” Gunner shouted.
It was, of course, the part of Dazen and Gavin’s meeting that Gavin Guile—the real Gavin Guile—would have heard about. ‘Recalling’ the demonstration would prove nothing. But apparently Gunner didn’t realize that.
“The seas were calm that day, and you were only twenty paces back,” Gavin said.
That day, the cabin boy had wet himself, holding an apple in his trembling outstretched hand above his head. Later, Gavin had heard the story that the boy had held the apple on his head. No one explained how a boy would balance an apple on his head on a rocking boat. But it did make a better story.
Twenty paces made a good story. Forty was suicide. Gunner might be the best shot in the world. It didn’t matter. Even with an identical charge of powder, and wadding tamped down to exactly the same pressure, and a perfectly round musket ball with no flaws from its casting—even with no wind, and no lurching deck, a musket was only accurate to within a space maybe as large as Gavin’s head at forty paces. Some men liked to believe differently, but the truth was that if you hit a smaller target at that range, it was purely luck. Gavin knew how good of a shot Gunner was. He didn’t believe the man’s story of killing a sea demon, but if anyone in the world could have done such a thing through accuracy alone, it would have been Gunner.
And there’s the problem with arrogance wed with excellence and insanity—a marriage with three partners is already overfull. Reality’s intrusions were unwelcome. Gunner had spent the last twenty years convincing others that he was unable to miss; now he seemed to have convinced himself, too.
“Gunner got given a gooder gun than, than, than…” The pirate devolved into curses, angry at not coming up with an alliterative way to say ‘than he had twenty years ago.’
It wasn’t full-on rage, merely frustration, but Gavin had seen Gunner shoot a man because he was hungry. Gunner was going to go through with this.
Gavin’s stomach sank. What could he do without drafting? Maybe knock out each of the two sailors next to him—and what? Jump off the ship? There was no shore in sight. They’d simply turn around and pick him up. And trusting his body to be strong enough to take out these two sailors and jump before Gunner could shoot him was optimistic at best. He might not even be able to swim with how much abuse his body had taken recently.
He was overcome with a weariness more than physical. This? This was to be his end?
Gavin had been in too many battles to believe that there was some force that protected the men who should live. One of the greatest swordsmen in the world had been killed next to him, while out of sight of the enemy—a freak ricocheting bullet had caught his kidney. A stallion worth satrapies had stumbled on a body after the battle was done, and broke his leg. A general got dysentery because he’d shared his men’s water and meat, rather than eat at his high table. A thousand indignities, a thousand tales that ended without moral or meaning, merely mortality.
War is cause, all else is effect.
Gavin took a bite of the apple. It was sweet and tart. The best apple he’d tasted in his entire life.
Pride, you wanted some little piece of me? Here. Take the whole fucking thing. Gavin spoke in his orator’s voice: “Captain Gunner, I don’t think anyone in the world can make this shot. You think you’re this good? I don’t. I think you’re better. You make this shot, and you’ll be a legend forever. You miss it, and you’re just another pirate who talks big.” Gavin put the apple in his mouth, held it in his teeth, and turned his head to the side, giving Gunner only a profile view.
All activity on the deck stopped.
So I die with an apple in my mouth. My father would have some words about this, no doubt. And Karris will be rightly furious.
Because he’d turned, Gavin couldn’t see how Gunner responded, if he was furious or amused. Gavin couldn’t see any of the other sailors’ reactions. He only saw gray sea and gray sky. The only light granted to him was ugliness. He was only beginning to regret that he’d wasted his last words taunting a pirate when something wet splattered across his face.
He wondered if it was his teeth. There was that momentary delay, when you’re hurt badly and you’re not sure what’s happened. Was he dead? That flash perhaps the spark of his cranium exploding? He didn’t hear the musket bark, but that happened sometimes.
Cheers erupted around the deck. The apple was gone.
One of the sailors picked up a few chunks from the deck. He fit them back together. Held them up. He shouted, “Cap’n Gunner cored it perfect!”
Gunner seemed oblivious to the cheers. He set the white gun-sword across his shoulder and swaggered over to Gavin. That swagger scared Gavin more than Gunner’s normal insanity. It meant Gunner was surprised he’d made the shot, too. Orholam’s balls. “Not one man in the world could make that shot,” Gunner announced. “Cap’n Gunner made that shot!”
“Cap’n Gunner!” the crew roared.
Gunner stood over Gavin, triumphant. He twisted a bit of his ratty beard and chewed on it. “Manacles!” he barked to the sailors beside Gavin.
They slapped Gavin in chains once more, but he was barely aware of it.
Thank Orholam, if he’d gotten himself killed Karris would never have forgiven him. In fact, when he got free, this was going to be one story he wouldn’t be telling her.
Gunner laid the musket-sword across his palms. Showing it off, now, so Gavin supposed it was safe—advisable even—to show appreciation. The blade was a thing of beauty, covered with some kind of white lacquer, Gavin guessed, and adorned with gems so large they had to be semi-precious stones. Gavin was no expert at swordsmithing, but it looked like a parade piece rather than a warrior’s tool. The gems appeared to go all the way through the blade—weakening the structure—and painting the blade white with black whorls? You’d have to keep an artisan on hand to repaint it constantly. A single cutout in the blade gave a hand rest to steady the gun when firing, weakening the blade further. But Gavin saw no frizzen, no pan, no hammer, no way to balance the butt to achieve any sort of accuracy or to absorb the kick. Was this a jest? It was too thin to be a credible musket anyway.
“I don’t even load it,” Gunner said. He knew that Dazen had shared his appreciation for masterwork firearms. “It makes its own bullets, and they’re more accurate than—well, you saw. Trigger pops down here when it’s loaded.”
“How… how?” Gavin asked. It was an impossibility, of course. But he’d just had an apple shot out of his mouth at forty paces on the deck of a rolling ship. He found himself quite credulous at the moment.
Gunner grabbed the pommel, twisted, pulled it back. A small, smoky chamber was revealed. Gunner poured black powder
into it from a powder horn, pushed it back in, and then pulled the pommel back out. It unfolded to make a small buttstock. He grinned like a first-year discipulus who’d gotten away with a prank.
And there it was again, that hint that the crazy was at least half for show. Gunner had spoken without a hitch. It made sense immediately, once Gavin thought about it. Gunner was eccentric. He’d always chosen words wrong. Being thought eccentric or stupid would mean being the target of ridicule among the hard men he led, so instead he had to be absolutely crazy. Men get nervous around insanity, wonder if it’s catching, and keep their distance. Perfect for a new captain who not only wanted to continue being a captain, but wanted to become a legend.
“How accurate?” Gavin said.
“Hit a scrogger at four hundred paces. Ball don’t wobble. It’s better magic than all the magic you once called yours, Giggly Guile.” Gunner lifted the musket to his shoulder and tracked a seagull on the wing two hundred paces out. He fired, just as it swooped lower—and missed. “ ’Course, she still won’t do it all for you. Makes me respect her the more. She demands excellence, like the sea.”
Gavin hadn’t watched the shot, though. He was studying the musket. There appeared to be knobs and small dials in the space revealed by the extended stock, marked with tiny runes. That Gunner didn’t call attention to them made Gavin believe that the pirate hadn’t yet figured out what they did.
“May I?” Gavin said.
Gunner looked at him. He laughed. “Former Prism though you be, Gunner’s no fool enough to put magic in your hands.” He spat into the sea, then took a rag and began cleaning the black powder residue off the blade. “Have to hold her real careful. Dangerous as Ceres, this one.” He sank into thought, and Gavin wondered if he’d been brought onto deck simply for Gunner to show off.
Not that he minded. Any rest from the oars was rest. Of course, he’d rather not have muskets discharged in his general direction while he was resting, but beggars and choosers and all that.