In the first part of the morning of the next day, Sesto heard voices arguing in Silvaro’s cabin. There was no doubting the voices belonged to Silvaro himself and to Roque, the master-at-arms. Sesto didn’t dare approach. He sat down with his back to the base of the mainmast and waited. Ymgrawl sat down beside him. Long-limbed and scrawny, Ymgrawl just folded himself up into a sitting position. He took out a tanner’s knife with a hooked tip and began cutting away at a yellow-dry whale’s tooth.
“They’re arguing,” said Sesto at length.
“Aye.”
“Do they often argue?”
“Thou knowst as good as I. No two better friends on the seas.”
“Then what?”
Ymgrawl fixed Sesto with his narrow, flinty stare. “The Butcher Ship. Roque can’st credit this to be the truth. Too easy, saith he.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Butcher. Tis a monster. Like a force of creation. Roque saith it would not threaten for supplies. It would as like raid and burn and take its will.”
“Then what is it we hunt?”
Ymgrawl shrugged.
The freeport of Santa Bernadette was said to be the last living place in the island chain, though Ymgrawl boasted he knew of others. It was at least the last place of any real size. They came upon it in the heat of the afternoon. Across a bay, twinkling with bright, reflected sunlight, lay the inner curve of a dense, green island. Between sea and jungle lay a stripe of whitewashed buildings.
The bay was too shallow even for the Safire, so they cast out anchors at the mouth, and three armed boats were prepared and lowered.
It was a long, sticky row to the shore. Sesto travelled in the lead boat with Luka, hearing the bare-chested ratings around him grunt and pant as they heaved to the stroke call. Sesto watched Luka prime and cock a pair of wheel-lock pistols and a short-muzzled caliver, and began to wish he’d brought a deal more than his rapier. Maybe his little Arabyan gun would have been a good idea.
They beached and dragged the longboats up onto the gritty sand. At Roque’s gesture, men drew swords and pistols, and scurried forth up the head of the beach towards the stucco shacks and limed buildings that drowsed under the hem of date and palm.
“There’s none here on it,” reported Fanciman, one of the armsmen, returning to Roque.
The master-at-arms had crouched down, touching a dark patch on the sand. He sniffed his fingers. “Wet with lamp oil,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Sesto asked.
“Ware those huts!” Roque shouted, rising. The men up the beach, about to burst into some of the dwellings, paused.
Sesto hurried after Luka and Roque as they crossed to the nearest building. It was an old blockhouse, built of timber and mudbrick, its white plaster crumbling.
Luka pushed open the door with the snout of his caliver. The wood-planked door, gnawed away at the edges by the ministry of sand and sea, creaked in a little way and stopped. Luka was about to nudge it again, when Roque raised a hand.
The Estalian crouched low to the side of the doorway and made the others stand back as he prodded the door the rest of the way in with his sabre’s long blade.
The gunpowder boom scared birds out of the trees and its echo rolled up and down the warm air of the beach.
Inside the hut, a blunderbuss had been set to a chair and its trigger tied with fishing twine to the door bolt.
“A trap,” said Roque, examining the makeshift weapon.
“A trap for what?” mused Silvaro.
Outside, a thin rattle of gunfire sounded.
They ran out of the hut. Bullet-balls and short-haft arrows were pelting down the beach from both the north and south ends, coming out of the trees. Already, three of Luka’s landing party had fallen, wounded. There was a heavier boom from some field piece, and a geyser of sand vomited up from the ground not ten paces from where Luka and Sesto stood.
“To arms! To arms!” Roque shouted.
Sesto heard a soft, clicking rush. Flames licked along the beach edge in a line, growing into a furiously burning wall. The oil Roque had scented was a fire-trap dug into the ground. Someone had carefully—desperately, Sesto thought—prepared this welcome.
Another cannonball whizzed overhead and cracked wide the gables of the blockhouse they had entered.
“Manann’s mercy! I’ve had my fill of this greeting,” Luka growled. “Into cover!”
One of his men, obeying blindly, ran into a hut and was blown in two by the fowling piece strung to its door. Three more ran ill of a covered pit between two huts. The stretched, sand-covered canvas snapped away beneath their weight and plunged them into a staked darkness. Their howls were almost unbearable.
From the cover of the trees, men charged them. Dozens of men, carrying spears, hatchets and machetes. Their skins were black, and white skull marks had been daubed on their faces, aping the look of King Death himself. They howled and ululated, and beat on drums and copper kettles. Sesto thought them quite frightening. They had the pirate landers pinned on a narrow stretch of beach between the huts and the crackling wall of fire.
“Damn this…” roared Luka. He raised his caliver and fired at the first savage who came running at him. The blast walloped the man over onto his back. Luka cast the caliver aside, and drew his pistols, greeting the next two assailants with similar fates.
Roque, his voice brooking no disobedience, brought the Reiver party into a knot, forming two walls that faced each head of attack. A salvo of locks crackled and puffed white smoke, and skull-faced men dropped hard onto the sand.
Then blades came out and it came down to steel.
Luka, the largest man on the beach, was raging with temper now. He drew his curved shamshir and a stabbing dagger and hurled himself at the line of charging foemen.
“With him! With him!” Roque shouted.
Sesto drew his rapier, trembling with fear, and dashed out after Luka.
He met a man coming at him with a woodaxe, little more than a hatchet, and stuck him clumsily through the throat. Then he felt rather bad about it. For all his howling and warpaint the man had seemed more scared than he was.
Luka and four of his most thuggish retainers—Fanciman, Tall Willm, Saint Bones and Saybee—led the brunt charge into the straggled southern line of attackers, and gave fearful account. Luka ripped a man open with his shamshir, then impaled another on his dagger. He kicked at a third, then slashed at him once his sword was free. Tall Willm gutted a man with his sabre. Saybee, the massive lee helmsman, swung a double-toothed axe forged in the Norse lands and felled two men like trees. Strung around with various flint- and wheel-lock pistols on ribbon loops, Fanciman seemed never to need to reload. Saint Bones, his devilish rapier dancing, sang Sigmarite hymns as he slew.
To the north hand, Roque did the lion’s share of the bloodletting, flanked by Tortoise Schell and Pietro the Hoof, two of his favoured armsmen.
And that was enough.
The attackers broke off and scattered, fleeing up the beach to both compass points. Their ululating had become howls of fear. They left weapons, drums and kettles on the sand behind them, along with twenty-four dead or dying men, six of which Luka alone had dealt with.
The Reivers themselves had lost three, with four more wounded. One of the wounded was a man dragged, bloody and wailing, out of the stake-trap. Some of the stakes came with him, stuck through his legs. The hot afternoon stank of blood and sweat. Flies buzzed around them, suddenly swarming from the damp, leech-haunted forest beyond the huts, drawn by the reek of fresh blood.
“One lives yet,” Roque announced as some of his men dragged a bleeding, shivering savage to face Luka.
The man was thrown to the ground at Luka’s feet. He didn’t dare look up. A pistol ball had shredded his right ear and blood was pouring out of the mangled flesh onto the sand, where the drops quivered proud like rubies before slowly seeping in. Sesto could see that where the man’s dark skin had been smudged away, his flesh was as pale as an
y mainland Tilean’s.
Luka shook his head and knelt down to face the man, who whimpered and tried to turn away. “You thought we were the Butcher Ship, didn’t you?” Luka sighed.
XIV
The sun sank fast, as it does in the tropics, and a cool ocean snap blew in across them, spurring the last dregs of smoke off and away from the glowing, glassy embers of the oil trap. A thin crescent moon came out, sharp as a claw extending, and stars lit their tiny lamps. In the dark foliage of the island forest, nocturnal insects began to thrill and peep and knock.
Sombre and half-hearted, kerchiefs tied around their mouths, the landing crew dragged the bodies of their enemy into a stack at the northern tip of the beach. No formal words were made, but some of the men came, one by one—Saint Bones, Fanciman, Pietro the Hoof, Roque—and muttered things to the dead, casting coins or rings or other trinkets into the heap.
Wards of protection, no doubt. The Reivers were cut-throats, but this action had a sour taste.
Once the moon had cleared the tossing silhouettes of the island’s trees, Luka took a flaming torch from Saybee and threw it on the heap.
The flames burned bright white with heat, yellow with fat.
Sesto walked as far away from the pyre as he could get.
Down by the south end of Santa Bernadette’s beach, he discovered Roque, alone, drinking from a flask of jerez.
“A bad business,” Roque said, aware of Sesto in the night shadow behind him. He held out the flask.
Sesto took a sip. The sweet, heavy-fortified wine tasted like silk.
“Mistaken identity,” the Estalian mariner went on, looking out into the sea, watching the waves roll up in gentle curls along a sandy waterline made glassy by the moonlight. Little red crabs scuttled and jumped on the mirror of sand, their calliper claws leaving marks that lasted just a heartbeat before the next sudsy curl smoothed them over.
Roque took the proffered bottle back. “This Butcher. He makes butchers of us all,” Roque suddenly knelt and twisted the flask down upright in the dry sand to stop it upsetting. He leaned forward and washed his hands in the breakwater. It was too dark to tell if there was any blood on them, too dark to see if any was scrubbing off. Sesto was sure the act was essentially ritual. Or at least the contrition of a man’s unhappy soul.
Roque had not been right since the dreadful night on Isla Verde. Only Sesto and Sheerglas knew that the fiend Gorge had rejected Roque for having spoiled blood. They had not spoken about it.
To his dying day, Sesto would believe there was nothing more terrible to witness than a self-avowed killer trying to make amends for his own sins.
“I heard you argue,” said Sesto nervously.
“Then your ears are as big as the fool-boy Gello’s!” Roque snapped.
“Forget I spoke, sir,” Sesto said, and turned away.
“Sesto!” Roque called. He got up, recovered his flask, and hurried to the young man’s side.
“What?”
“Forgive me, sir. I forget myself in a gentleman’s company. It has been a long time since—”
“Since what? Since you were at court, Senor Santiago Delia Fortuna?”
“Yes. That is perhaps what I meant.”
“So you are that man? That famous discoverer?”
“Sesto, Sesto… That man is long dead, years dead. That man is also here. Make of that riddle what you will.”
“What happened to you?”
“I have sworn not to tell it. I… Let me just say, I travelled wide, made my name and fortune, and then pushed my luck against the fates of the fickle oceans too far. In Lustria, in that abominable land. Such things I saw… The scaled ones… they—”
He took a deep swig.
“Five years I was lost. Five years I will not speak of. It was as a low oar-slave on an Arabyan corsair galley that Luka found me. Found me, saw my worth… the man who stands before you on this beach tonight was born again, whole, at that moment. All that he had been before was melted away and lost.”
Sesto pursed his lips. “You argued with Luka today.”
Roque nodded. “We stalk the wrong prey. There is a tyrant ship out in the waters of the islets, but not a butcher. And today we—”
He fell silent.
“I killed a man today,” Sesto said.
“Three myself, and none deserved it. If you killed, Sesto, you know this pain. The Butcher’s taint makes even the best of us brute killers.”
The notion surprised Sesto somewhat. That curious pirate code again, no doubt. The notion that there were degrees to which one could be a killer.
The balefire burned on at the far corner of the beach. Nearer to the huts and shanties, driftwood bonfires had been built and lit. Their crackling heat and parched smoke billowed around the huts and drove off the night flies and mosquitoes.
Luka had a bellyful of wine in his skin, and sat morosely at a plain timber table in the main hut. “Dead for a peso octo, all of them,” he muttered as Roque and Sesto came in. “Dead by our hand for trying to stay alive.”
Roque plonked his jerez on the table and Luka immediately helped himself.
“Living here in terror of the Butcher,” Luka mumbled darkly. “Living here in living terror of the monster out there. They put their all into scaring it off when it next came. The last of their oil, the last of their shot. They painted their skins black and skulled, and made the noise of savages, all in the desperate hope that it would drive the evil out. But the evil was us, and we killed them anyway.”
“Leave him,” Roque whispered to Sesto. “In this black mood, he’s a danger even to himself.”
But there was a noise from outside the hut that roused Luka before the pair could slip away.
Saint Bones and Garcia Garza had appeared, dragging with them a man they had found hiding in the woods. The last survivor of the battle had died of bloodlet before he had been able to talk.
“Sigmar have mercy on me!” the man protested. He was a scruffy churchman from the Empire, his skin tanned by many years spreading the true word under a heathen southern sun.
“Sigmar can save his mercy,” Luka told him. “I’ll not harm you.”
“You are pirates!”
“Not at all. We are privateers, and we carry a letter of marque and reprisal to prove it.”
“But you… you slaughtered and you—”
“We were attacked, sir. By you and your fellows. We would have given quarter had we known.”
The man bowed his head and started on a prayer to Sigmar that seemed to Sesto to run in time to the beat of the crickets.
“Tell me of the Butcher Ship,” said Luka.
“It is our bane. It comes upon us at each new moon and demands all we have.”
That story again, four times heard now.
“Where does it go?”
“Go?”
“Go, from here?”
“South, and then we see it gybing east. They say it lurks in a cove within the Labyrinth.”
“Does it now? Which cove?”
“Some say Angel’s Bar, others the Greenwater Sound.”
“Thank you, father,” Luka said. “You may go free, and tell your brethren here that none of my men will harm them. This I make as a pledge to your god, Sigmar, so he might claim my poor, barbarian soul should I break it.”
The churchman got up, and started away.
“Father? My good father! One last thing…”
At the edge of the firelight, the man froze, fearing the very cruellest of pirate tricks.
“Father… What say you are the dimensions and character of the Butcher Ship?” asked Luka.
The balding, bronzed Empire man turned back slowly. “It… it has three masts. A great barque of three hundred and fifty paces, with sixty cannon in two gun decks. Its hull and sails are red as blood. Green fire burns where it should have a figurehead. The men who crew it are not men, they are night-beasts.”
“I see. Go in peace, father.”
Gratefully,
the man disappeared into the night.
“The Kymera?” Roque asked.
“It fits the description. The Kymera is a great barque, two hundred and twenty paces, and it mounts forty guns. But the churchman there was no mariner. A fearful man makes monsters of the truth. Just look at Belissi.”
Some of the Reivers gathered around laughed at this.
“Mother mine!” mocked Fanciman, querulously.
“So?” Roque asked.
“Be it the Kymera or some other bastard barque, we cut our way down into the Labyrinth to war with it. One thing’s for sure, we’ll not find it in Greenwater Sound.”
“Why not?” asked Sesto.
Luka tapped the side of his nose with a long finger. “Old habits, old skills, Sesto. We’re hunting prey that’s threading the teeth. Greenwater Sound bottoms out at two fathoms. No barque, be it three hundred and fifty paces or two hundred and twenty, could find harbour there. Angel’s Bar, however, has no floor any man has ever managed to leadline.”
It was dark still as they rode back out to the ships. They left the miserable bonfire at the beach end blazing into the cold tropical night.
Before dawn, a fair wind came up, fresh and true, and the Rumour and its consort turned south and east, deeper into the archipelago.
XV
It seemed as if they might run out of sea. So Sesto thought on the second day out from Santa Bernadette. The islands, cased with fuming green foliage, were more densely packed here than ever before. The two ships edged their way down channel throats and narrow runs, luxuriant green jungle spilling down like emerald cliffs to either side. Bright macaws and parrots darted from island to island overhead, and the Rumour and its consort were wont to glide through passages fraught with mist. The water was bright turquoise, speaking of a bottom perilously close to the ship’s keel. This was the Labyrinth, a dense maze of islands that buffered the Estalian Littoral.