Luka nodded. He was standing in the bow, a primed pistol in his hand. He took off the Pavonian hat and tossed it down into the gunwales.
“It’s the Sacramento,” he said.
VII
The Sacramento. A notorious barque, the warship of Reyno Bloodlock. The Reyno Bloodlock, scourge of the seas.
“Reyno, Reyno, Reyno…” Luka murmured. “What has come to pass here?”
The ship looked dead. There was no sign of a living soul. On the shore, the tide had flushed up scattered debris from the wreck, and some of the twisted pieces looked like bodies.
They rowed in behind the stern. The window lights of the master cabins had been smashed in, and there was a cannon hole through the taffrail. Hundreds of gulls perched and cawed along the deck lines.
Under Luka’s instruction, they rowed in close, covered by Roque’s boat, and Luka tied them up against the mired rudder.
Holstering his pistol, he clambered, nimble as a Barbary ape, up the carved breastwork of the stern. Benuto and Tende followed their captain, and Sesto went after them. Ymgrawl tailed him dutifully.
The deck was raked at a steep angle thanks to the foundering. Beyond the shattered taffrail, the poop decking was marred by a crater, the impact of a heavy cannonball. The deckboards were splintered up, and only part of the wheel remained. And part of the helmsman too. His hands and forearms still clenched the wheel-spokes, but no other bit of him had survived the blast.
Sesto gagged at the sight of it. Tende drew his blade.
“Someone might yet live,” Luka said.
They spread out to test the validity of his claim.
Sesto crept down the poop steps and went into the upper cabin. The cannonball had spent its worst here, and the fractured decks were spotted with broken glass, shards of porcelain and the burnt, dismembered fragments of a man who had been exploded by the blast. Seabirds had found their way in and were hopping through the shadows, pecking at the scraps of cooked human meat with their long, scarlet bills.
Sesto was damned if he was going to throw up in the presence of these men. He took out his rapier and poked with the blade to scare the birds away. They rose in a flurry, banging their wings and cawing as they escaped through the window lights. What they left behind was a torso, picked half-clean and caked in burned meat.
Sesto vomited.
“Am thee arright?” Ymgrawl asked.
“Yes, I’m… yes,” Sesto said, spitting acid phlegm from his mouth.
“Tis a rude way of death,” Ymgrawl admitted, jabbing at the torso with his cutlass.
Sesto ignored him and went through the partition door into the stepway that descended to the second deck.
The second deck was half submerged. Halfway down the stairs, Sesto stepped into seawater. It filled the companionway to hip height. He sloshed down into it and waded along. The door to the master’s cabin lay open.
The desk was knocked askew, and the water was covered with floating clothes and charts, a quill and several hats. They bobbed as he sloshed into the chamber, driving ripples before him.
Raising his arms to keep his balance, Sesto waded unsteadily through the waist-deep water towards the desk. There was someone sitting behind the desk in the high-backed chair, his arms flat across the desktop, his head fallen forward.
Sesto reached the desk. The man looked asleep. He prodded him with the flat of his sword, but there was no response. Sesto reached forward and tugged at the man’s doublet front.
The man spilled away before him, arms raised stiffly. There was nothing of him except his head, arms and upper torso. Below the waterline, he was just a chewed and mangled mess of pallid flesh, broken spine and bloated guts.
Sesto cried out and staggered backwards as the corpse upturned and revealed its horror. He stumbled over something and fell down, submerged instantly in seawater.
The water roared in his ears. It was deep green and cloudy with flesh fibres stripped off the corpse.
Something white glided past him.
He erupted to the surface, choking and spluttering. Whatever was in the water with him was big, far bigger than he was. He saw a hooked fin cut the water and disappear around the desk.
Sesto began to panic.
The desk moved, barged through the water by a heavy force.
He slashed at the water around him with his blade. A long ripple furrowed the water under the cabin windows.
Sesto turned and clawed his way through the water towards the door. He felt a weight of pressure against his legs and turned in time to see a huge, blue-white shape surging towards him, just under the surface, water rolling like boiling glass back across its sleek form.
Screaming, he lunged his sword at it and drove it away. An instant later, it was back, powering all ten paces of itself towards his legs. He saw one black, glaring eye and a flash of thumb-sized, triangular teeth.
There was a loud bang and the water went red, and then began to explode into berserk foam.
“Come thee to me!” Ymgrawl shouted from the doorway, holding out a gnarled hand. In his other paw, a flintlock pistol smoked.
Sesto scrambled towards him as the blue-white shape thrashed out its death agonies behind him.
“You were lucky,” said Luka Silvaro. “This ship has become a place of death and all the eaters of the seas have gathered to feed here,” Sesto didn’t feel lucky. He was still gagging up filthy water, sprawled on the sloping deck where Ymgrawl had dragged him.
“What chance made it a place of death?” Roque wondered, and the men around them remained silent. They were all thinking the same thing.
There was a low rumble. The day was going, and ahead of the settling evening, a mauve darkness had filled the southern sky. The daily threat of a storm was levelling again, but from the look of the heavens it might actually break this time. “We must row back, captain,” Benuto said.
There was worry in the bo’sun’s voice. If the long-promised storm did indeed break this night, they would be stranded on the island for its duration. “I would not be here o’er night, so tell,” he added. Luka nodded at this council, briefly touching the gold ring in his ear and the iron of his belt buckle as luck charms. The sea breeze had got up a little, flapping the trailing lines and tattered yards of the ruined ship, and bellying the intact sails, making them crack and thump. It cooled the Reivers’ skins too, but it was not refreshing. More like a warning chill.
“Let us back to the boats,” Luka said dismally. The sight of his old rival’s ruin had affected him more than he cared to admit.
With no small measure of grateful relief, the men turned back to clamber into the longboats.
“Captain!”
They looked round. The call had come from Chinzo, one of Roque’s men-at-arms, a swarthy fellow with a sock-cap, a drooping walrus moustache and arms like a wrestler. He pointed a stubby, dirty nailed finger at the line of beach in the cove beyond the wreck of the Sacramento. Litter from the ship’s downfall lay scattered on the sand in the gentle fan of breakers. Sesto could see nothing of significance, but Luka clearly had.
“To the shore, before we return,” he ordered. Many of the men, especially Tende and Benuto, groaned.
“To the shore!” Luka insisted.
They rowed the longboats across the short stretch of shallows between the Sacramento’s sunken stern and the beach, and hauled the sturdy wooden craft up onto the sand. With the boats sitting safe and askew on their keels, the oars piled inside them, the men spread out along the hem of the surf. The breeze was stronger and colder here, blowing straight in between the promontories of the cove from the open sea. Sesto took a look at the dimming southern sky again and saw the glowering darkness as it gathered. The sky at sunset was the colour of amethyst, but there was a fulminous blackness staining through it that was not the approaching night.
The shore party wandered the breakers, studying the debris washed up there. Some pieces of wreckage were limp, drowned corpses, lifting and flopping in the waves.
Seabirds, raucous and unwilling to share their loot, flapped and circled around Luka’s searchers.
“What did he see?” Sesto asked.
“Who?” replied Luka.
“Chinzo? What did he see? We really should be getting back. It looks like a storm.”
Luka sniffed. “It is, and we should.”
“Then what?”
Luka led him up the beach to where more debris lay. A torn wine skin. An empty jar. Other nondescript junk.
“See?”
“Litter has washed ashore,” said Sesto, shrugging. “We could see that from the ship.”
Luka sighed. “Use those sharp eyes, Sesto. What is this?” He pointed to the pieces of rubbish on the sand at their feet.
“Litter.”
“And that?” Luka pointed down towards the breakers where the others stood.
“More litter, washed ashore.”
“And this?” He pointed again, apparently at nothing but the sand of the beach. Sesto stared and eventually realised that what Luka was pointing to the vague mark that separated the smooth, wet silt of the lower beach from the dimpled, drier sand that composed the dunes all the way to the threatening gloom of the tree line.
This, apart from at times of gales and storms, was the furthest point the sea came up the beach. The furthest point any piece of litter could have been washed up.
“Someone survived,” Luka said. “Someone’s here.”
VIII
The fourteen men of the shore party spread themselves out down the length of the lonely beach as the light failed, and hallooed up into the trees of the lush forest that coated the steep island above them. The thick, emerald undergrowth smoked with moisture vapour and rang with the cries of parakeets and cockatelles. Luka was bent on waiting as long as he dared in the hope that they might yet find some survivor.
Daylight became a cold, grey half-light. There was no gold or heat left in the world, it seemed to Sesto, and every hue and contrast had blanched into a bloodless place of shadows and pale whites. Beyond the promontories and the spectral hulk of the wreck, the sky was ink black and the increasingly loud rumbling in the air was now accompanied by sparking forks of lightning. The wind had picked up and driven the seabirds from the beach. The waves along the shore broke harder and more fiercely than before.
“Another quarter hour of light,” Luka told the men, “then we row. Zazara, Tall Willm… you stay with the boats and trim the lanterns. The rest of you, let’s look as deep as we dare.”
Sidearms drawn, the rest of the party edged up into the damp fringes of the island’s forest. The air was cooling here, but not as fast as out in the open, and consequently thick mists of vapour frothed out of the darkness and trailed between the tree trunks.
Sesto had been into tropical forests before, but always in daylight, when it was a vital place of heat, musk perfume, busy insects and dappled patterns of light and shade. After dark, it was a dank, smoky place of gloom, cold sweat and skeletal leaf shadows. Creeper-coiled trees loomed over him in silhouette, their lank vine loops heavy, like fat, slumbering serpents. There was a stink of cold sap and leaf mould. Unseen leaf edges cut his knuckles and thighs like hanging blades. He could see no further than the width of a deck. To his left, Chinzo and Leopaldo moved forward through the steam, to his right, off in a line, Benuto, Pepy and the scrawny rating known as Saint Bones. There was no sign of Ymgrawl the boucaner, but Sesto knew he would be close by, lurking like a phantom—or a footpad’s dagger—close to Sesto’s back.
Night insects clicked and ticked in the dripping cold. Gauzy things, some glowing like fireflies, meandered through the vapour. Black, many-legged shapes scuttled across treebark from shadow to shadow.
Luka reached a bank of earth too steep for trees, and struggled up into a small clearing that afforded him a look back over the forest he had ascended through into the cove. It was getting very dark, and lightning was cracking with mounting fury in the south. He could see the melancholy shape of the Sacramento, but not the beach, as the forest obscured it.
Roque scrambled up behind him, followed by Tende, Jager and Delgado. Luka could hear the others shouting as they came up through the trees.
The master of the Reivers looked up at the sky as the first spots of rain fell. He’d left it too long, like a fool, like a fool…
At once, the rain began to pelt down, the heavy, stinging drops of an equatorial deluge. A westerly gale, like a wall of frozen air, rushed in across Isla Verde, thrashing the forest cover like a sea in flood. Pieces of leaf and twig flew up into their faces through the slanting downpour. The rain was so heavy, he could no longer see the Sacramento, or even the cove. Down below was a tearing, swaying forest and then nothing but blackness and the curtain of rain.
And a screaming voice.
It rose above the din of the encroaching storm for a moment, piercing, and then was lost.
“Hellsteeth!” Luka cried, glancing once at the startled Roque before the pair of them began to slither and leap back down the slope. Tende and the other men followed. The slope was awash already, fluid as mucous, gushing with rivulets. Jager lost his feet and slid down on his belly. Luka slipped a few paces from the trees and tumbled, crashing into a thorny cypress and gashing his cheek and palms. Tende came down alongside him, his boots plastered with mire, rainwater glinting on his black skin like uncut diamonds. He reached out a massive hand and pulled his captain back onto his feet.
Roque scrabbled past them and descended into the forest, shouting out the names of the men still down in the dark.
Deep in the trees, Sesto darted left and right, his sword drawn. The awful scream had come from nearby, but now he could see no one and nothing except the dark leaves and the water cascading down through them. The rain clattered like drumbones across the forest canopy over his head and, all around him, the trees swayed, gasped and creaked in the typhoon wind.
“Hello!” he cried. “Hello anyone!”
He saw a man up ahead, a brief suggestion of a figure in the turmoil, and battled through towards him. By the time he reached the spot where the man had been, there was no one there.
Had there ever been?
Sesto felt a crawling fear, as if this entire isle might be cursed.
Thunder exploded overhead, and lightning strobed the chaotic forest into a brief, fierce chiaroscuro of black leaves and white air. For a second, that thunder-split second, he saw the figure again, off to his left, and resolved a haggard face in shadow, the white of grinning teeth, the black socket holes of a kaput mortem.
The bony visage of King Death.
Sesto gasped in terror, but at the next flash, the figure had gone. Sesto scrambled away through the undergrowth, hoping he was heading for the beach.
The figure rose up suddenly in front of him, and Sesto slashed out with his sword. The blade rang hard against a cutlass blade.
“Put up thy pig-stick!” Ymgrawl yelled above the storm.
“I saw—” Sesto began.
“What? What didst thee see?” the boucaner snarled, dragging Sesto on by the collar.
“I don’t know. Something. A daemon.”
Ymgrawl stopped and checked himself, touching gold, bone and iron—a ring, a necklace and a button—to ward away the evil.
“Care o’er thy tongue, for it spits ill luck!” he hissed. “Did thee scream out?”
“Scream?”
“Just that past minute or more?”
“N-no! I heard the scream and was looking for the source when I saw the… the…” Sesto swallowed hard and touched iron himself. It was difficult to make himself heard over the raging elements.
They pressed on, assaulted by the storm-driven forest. After another minute or so, Ymgrawl hollered out, and Sesto saw Benuto, Saint Bones and Pepy coming towards them, heads down.
“Who screamed?” Benuto yelled.
“Not us, bo’sun!” Ymgrawl replied.
“Where be Chinzo and Leopaldo?” Pepy shouted.
There wa
s another eye-wincing flash of lightning and an ear splitting peal of thunder. The stunning display heralded the appearance of Roque and Jager.
“What see you?” demanded the master-at-arms at the top of his voice.
“Not a hell-damned thing!” Benuto shouted back.
“There!” sang out Saint Bones who, from the top-basket of the Rumour, could spy a sail at twenty sea miles. “I saw a man!”
“Where?” snarled Roque.
“In the trees there, just there!” Saint Bones insisted. “But he is gone now…”
Together now, the drenched and shaken men moved forward, calling out. They came down the slope, across a gushing stream that had not been there on the way up, through a grove of cycads and swaying date palms, hacking back vines that swung at them from the moving trees.
In the next root cavity, swollen with water, they found Leopaldo. He lay on his back, pressed down into the wet, black earth. From his hairline to his waist, the front of him had been torn away. Some massive, clawed forest beast had done this. Some daemon from the cursed dark.
Ten paces away, Chinzo was sprawled on his side against a tree trunk. His sword lay beside him in the mud, broken in two. He was dead, but there was not a mark on him.
Roque turned the body and Sesto saw Chinzo’s face. He knew in a moment that Chinzo, brawny warrior that he was, had died of pure terror. He also knew he would never, ever forget the look on that dead face.
“Get to the boats!” Roque yelled over the constant storm.
“We cannot row in this!” Jager cried in dismay.
“Get to the damn boats anyway!” Roque retorted.
They turned to move.
The figure was behind them.
It was there and yet not there, flickering in and out of the darkness as the lightning flashed. To Sesto—to them all—it looked like a pirate mark come to life: a crude, white figure of dead bones stitched to a black cloth.
It smiled, and the smile broadened, and broadened still into a screaming skull mouth. The howl, partly the sound of a man in agony, partly the sound of an enraged animal, and partly the sound of angry, swarming insects, drowned out the storm. A rotten breath of putrefaction assailed them. The figure raised its arms as it howled, long, bony arms, impossibly long, famine thin, ending in spider fingers as sharp as sail-cloth needles.