The other passengers and crewmen who Slate made contact with onboard the Sefose were withdrawn for the majority of the trip, fearful as they were of the omnipresent threat of pirate attack. Slate and Pilotte kept to themselves, playing fetch on deck and watching the birds swoop over the dahlphins that jumped and frolicked in the choppy gray water.
On the third day out from South Airyel, true to fears, a terrible war cry broke the silence and a pirate sloop sidled up swift and fast alongside the Sefose. The crew and other passengers went into an immediate panic, running around the deck and lower levels of the ship aimlessly. A few even jumped off into the ocean. As the pirates threw lines and began to board the Sefose, Slate knew he had to act fast to protect himself.
He and Pilotte ran down the busy steps from the ship deck to their room, where they spun around in circles wondering what action to take next. Loud cries of anguish soon let Slate know that the pirates were in the hallway outside. Just after he managed to grab his sack full of Guh Hsing’s books, one of them smashed down the door. Slate spun around to face him.
“No one in here,” he barked at the pirate in a flash of inspiration.
“Wha… who’re you?” asked the pirate, with a look of dull-witted confusion.
“What do you mean? I’m a pirate,” Slate said with as much conviction as he could, “Like you!”
“You are?” the real pirate asked, scratching his scraggly beard.
“Well I wouldn’t be searching for loot if I wasn’t, would I?” Slate asked.
This question must have convinced the pirate, as he grunted something under his breath, shrugged, and left the room.
After the brute had moved on, and with a new plan for cover devised, Slate raced back up the stairs to the deck.
At the top of the stairs there was a man screaming and cowering. Slate scooped him up and threw him over his shoulder for cover as the man screamed and kicked. Despite this, Slate was able to clear the length of the ship’s deck, dodging flying bodies and fistfights.
Before he could reach the prow, three of the pirates set upon Pilotte with ropes and netting. The snarlingwulf howled and bucked and managed to throw them off, then took a large chunk out of one of their sides, before five more pirates joined in capturing the beast. They bound him tight in their ropes and threw the animal overboard onto their waiting sloop, where he landed, thankfully, on a pile of pillaged silks. Slate dropped the poor man hanging from his back onto the planks of the Sefose, and dove without abandon after Pilotte. He landed on and then climbed down one of the many boarding ropes that ran to the pirate’s sloop below, where he checked Pilotte for injury, hid his bag, and scrambled for what to do next.
When the pirates started their retreat from the Sefose, heavy with plunder and raging with adrenaline, none of them paid any attention to Slate. They fought with each other over their share of the takings after they cut loose for hours, and then still none of them noticed at dinner later that night that a stranger was onboard. Slate kept his head down and spoke quietly, and by then end of the night, when all the men were high on drink and smoke, he had managed to make conversation with enough of them that he seemed almost to belong.
The morning after Slate had inadvertently joined up with the pirates, a meeting of sorts was called to order by their captain on the deck of the sloop.
“Good work yesterday, men. It looks like we only lost a few,” the pirate captain said proudly.
“Oh yeah? Who’d we lose?” one of the pirates barked.
“We lost… who did we…” the captain stammered, fumbling as he examined a scroll of names. “Well, it doesn’t matter who,” he finally said.
“You don’t know who we lost, do you?” the contrary pirate asked again.
“I don’t have everyone’s name here, no,” admitted the captain, flustered.
“What’s my name, eh?” another pirate asked.
The captain was growing indignant. “Look," he said, "I don’t know all of your names, but that’s not why we’re here, is it?”
The crowd laughed and the captain flushed red at their insolence.
“Fine. Just fine,” he muttered. “In any case, there is a shipment of silk that we should come very near this afternoon, and it looks like we still have enough space in the hold to take that cargo, as well.”
“Why on Alm would we want more silk? Who’s going to pay for that garbage these days?” a pirate asked.
“It’s for the captain’s underwear!” cracked another.
The men roared.
“Listen, if any of you want charge of this ship, I dare you to take it,” the captain said. Slate saw him stroking a silver, club-like tool stowed in his belt.
“Oooh, captain, yes, captain,” another pirate teased.
This must have pushed the captain over the edge, as he pulled the silver thing from his belt, and held it toward the sky. He activated a mechanism on it with his fingers and then a thunderous explosion came from its tip with a burst of fire and smoke. This quieted the pirates to a stifled giggle. The captain then lowered the tip of his thunder stick at the crew, and passed it before them in a slow turn.
“If any of you really want to challenge my authority," the captain said, "I dare you to do so now.”
The men refused his eye contact as they tried to contain their laughter and shifted about.
“That’s what I thought,” the captain growled. “Expect the silk ship sometime after high noon.”
One of the crew then made a loud, wet raspberry sound that sent the rest of the men into hysterics once again. The captain slammed the door to his quarters after storming through the jamb, which caused a small sign that read “Captain’s Quarters” to fall off onto the deck.
“Well. Can you believe the nerve?” Slate asked the pirate standing next to him, feigning solidarity. The pirate scowled at him and spat in his face.
Slate remained on the deck until the preparations for the raid on the silk shipment started, at which point he was conscripted into helping ready the boarding ropes. When the sloop rode up next to the silk ship, Slate could see the terror in the faces of its crew as they stood watching their doom approach. Just as the sloop was in place and before the boarding lines were set, the captain reappeared from his quarters with the sniveling order that the pirates leave no one alive.
When the first nets were thrown from the pirate sloop to the silk transport and the villains began their attack, Slate actually thought that he might be spared having to go aboard, but he wasn’t to be so lucky. Instead, he was just short of tossed up, from his hiding space onto the silk ship, by a hulking pirate with a gleam in his eye and a hearty laugh that suggested that piracy was his simply his favorite thing in all the world.
Slate landed on the side of his right ankle when he hit the deck of the silk ship, and then slid through a pool of blood for a few feet before managing to get traction. The blood was pouring in rivers from a lifeless woman nearby, bent into a heap next to her wailing child. Slate had the thought to play dead beside her and wait for the massacre to cease, but the same pirate that had tossed him up into the fray to join the raid threw a scabbard his way, and so he reluctantly rose to his knees.
“What are you doing, don’t just stand there!” the pirate hollered.
Slate began searching the pockets of the dead woman to appease the pirate.
“Wait until they’re all dead, you idiot!” the pirate yelled, and then he lunged at Slate, pulled him with one huge arm up off the deck, and threw him forward into the confusion of bodies and blood.
One of the silk ship’s seamen came running at Slate, brandishing a knife held up over his head. Slate managed to deflect the knife with his scabbard. He dodged and then kicked the man in the stomach, sending him to the floor in pain.
“Just play dead!” Slate whispered to the man.
“What on…" the man began. Looking up, he must have seen something trustworthy in Slate’s eyes, as he did cease to flail and closed his eyes.
&
nbsp; Just as soon as Slate had stood back up, another of the pirates shoved a helpless woman into his arms.
“Slit her throat!” the pirate growled, as he sent a fountain of teeth gushing forth from the mouth of one of the other passengers.
Holding the struggling girl’s arms behind her back, Slate tried to whisper to her to calm down, but the girl was completely hysterical and continued to flail wildly in his grip.
“Kill her!” another pirate ordered, before slicing the arm of an unlucky young silk trader clean off.
“I hope this works,” Slate said under his breath. He raised his scabbard to the girl’s throat. With just the slightest amount of pressure, the knife drew a trickle of blood from the girl’s neck. When the rivulet of blood reached down to the girl’s hands, she screamed one last time and then fainted, which was exactly what Slate had hoped for.
Slate then reared around to see a crazed, reddened face flying at him, which he managed to stop rather immediately with an outstretched fist. The recipient spun around three times from the force of Slate’s blow and then fell over the side of the ship. Slate raced to the banister, where he saw that one of the silk ship’s lifeboats, full of six other lucky escapees, had already begun helping the unconscious man out of the water.
After much more fighting, which blended together in Slate’s mind into an inglorious mess of sweat and pain, the silk ship and all its crew were dispersed. Slate had managed to make it through the foray without having to kill or seriously harm anyone, and other than what were sure to be huge bruises, no one had managed to harm him too severely either, though the gory horrors he witnessed during those few awful minutes were surely going to weigh heavily on his dreams.
It was then four more days to the Passage Islands, the home of the pirates. Slate spent the time nearby Pilotte, slipping him scraps and petting him when none were watching. When the ship entered the tight confines of a shallow bay in the Passage Islands, it was apparent that the pirating business was doing rather well. There were many other ships in the little harbor, and many more pirates swarming over the whole face of the island, which was covered with buildings and new watchtowers. Slate looked at poor Pilotte, bound and broken, and wondered how they could ever hope to escape.
Chapter 11