Blaggard's Moon (31 page)

But Skaelington had twice the hazards, none of the frivolity.

Armed men moved in and out of shadows with their heads down, their eyes furtively watching everything around them. They looked hard and scarred, abused and disheveled. And angry. When they spoke to one another, they whispered. Saloons were dark and quiet within, the occasional music that could be heard from the street was low and slow. Women were scarce, and were not draped around men but behaving much like them, fully armed, suspicious of all around them, careful, hard, and angry.

As the four men walked away from the docks and into the streets of Skaelington proper, a gunshot rang out. Everyone on the street turned to look, hands moving to weapons. The toes of a man's boots pointed upward, and another man went through his pockets, the haze of gray pistol smoke hanging over him. Everyone looked away, appraised one another, then went about their own business.

Damrick, Lye, and Hale grew quickly self-conscious. As rough as these Gatemen may have appeared back home, they could not match the general level of disrepute that shrouded these streets. It wasn't just the people, either. The buildings were shoddy and worn, the windows small and painted or boarded or broken, the boardwalks mangled and worn and warped. Horses were few; carriages fewer. The Gatemen looked and felt like choirboys at a dogfight. Having a well-dressed businessmen at their side did not help. They attracted stares almost every step of the way.

After a block or two, Damrick put a hand on the back of their cheerful patron's neck. “Try to look a little bit scared to be walking with us, will you?” he whispered.

“If everyone don't know who we are by morning,” Hale muttered to Lye, “I'll lower my opinion of the riffraff in this place.”

“Don't know how my own opinion could get lower,” Lye answered, a hand on each of his pistol butts.

They turned from a dark side street down a darker one. Their boots echoed through deepened shadows. Here the danger seemed to hover over them, to crowd in on them from above.

“Ah, this is it!” Still cheerful, Windall Frost rapped twice with his cane on a small, heavy oaken door fitted into a brick wall. Both door and wall were badly in need of a new coat of brown paint. The slat of a peephole slid open. Windall Frost spoke, identifying himself, and the slat slid shut. Several clicks and a jangle of chains later, and the door swung inward. They entered.

The man who closed the door behind them and locked it back up tight wore the gray robes of a priest of Nearing Vast. When he turned back toward them into the lamplight, they saw a thin man of medium height with a thin face, scarred on one side from a bad burn. His head jutted forward, and a prominent Adams apple made his neck appear to have a crook in it. His eyes seemed dim and distant, but his expression was one of great enjoyment. “So, Win, these are the hunters you've brought to the lion's lair.” He opened his arms and embraced his friend.

“I suppose so,” Frost answered. “But I hope to have your help keeping them from the lion himself.”

“Until the time is right, I assume.” The priest turned in the direction of the three men. “Carter Dent,” he said, and put out a hand. Damrick reached for it, awkwardly, and shook it.

“Damrick Fellows.”

“What, is he blind?” Lye asked bluntly.

“Yes,” the priest answered easily. “He is blind, but he can still hear quite well. I don't believe we've met.” He extended a hand toward Lye's voice.

The Gateman shook it dutifully, but quickly. “Lye Mogene,” he mumbled.

“Pleased to meet you. Do you go by Lima, or Gene?”

Lye turned red. “Lye.”

“I'm Hale Starpus,” the third Gateman offered, putting a long pause between his first and last name. He leaned forward and found Father Dent's hand.

“Good to meet you, Hale. Come into my study, and we shall talk.” But he didn't move.

“You said you'd have a guest for us…?” Windall asked.

“Yes. He's waiting. This way.” Now he walked ahead of them.

The Gatemen followed, hands on the stocks of their pistols.

They climbed a narrow stairway and entered a small sitting room.
Waiting there was a young gentleman of obvious means. He stood as the priest and his four guests entered.

For the first time on the trip, Windall Frost seemed out of sorts. “Good Lord! Wentworth Ryland. What are you doing here?”

The Gatemen drew their guns.

Wentworth threw his hands in the air. “Steady now, gentlemen. Let's be cautious with the artillery. I'm a friend.”

“You can put those away,” Father Dent assured them. “You'll want to hear his story, of course, but I think you'll find this young man will be of great service.”

“That will need to be one whale of a story,” Windall said, when the pistols were holstered again. He did not look any less suspicious. “Gentlemen,” he said to the Gatemen, “this is Wentworth Ryland, son of Runsford Ryland, heir to Ryland Shipping & Freight.”

Damrick's eyes blazed, and he kept his palm close to his pistol. “Who knows you're here?”

Wentworth showed little concern. “No one. Well, my fiancée. You must be Damrick Fellows.” He put out his hand. Damrick did not shake it. Wentworth lowered his hand, nodded at the other two men. “And you must be Hell's Gatemen.”

“There would be no Gatemen, and you would not know my name, if it weren't for your father's signature on a letter to Sharkbit Sutter, giving that pirate a license to plunder.”

“I'm sure I don't know what letter you mean. But I am not here on behalf of my father. Rather I hope to undo some of the wrongs forced upon him by Conch Imbry.”

“Forced?”

“Why don't we sit?” Father Dent suggested when the silence grew too thick. “I believe we all have much in common. Shall we explore our areas of mutual interest?”

As a result of that nighttime meeting, and through the priests' complex communication network, often called the Church, a few solid souls began to learn that the Gatemen were more than stories. Then, maintaining a level of secrecy only possible when the alternative is explosively dangerous, the interested began to organize. Regular meetings of church elders suddenly swelled from a half a dozen to two dozen men. Potluck dinners that normally drew a dozen families, mostly women and children, now drew three or four dozen men, almost all of fighting age. One by one, the
interested became the intrigued, and then the invited. These found their way to a tribunal of inquiry, and faced interrogation from unnamed men who sat in shadows and alternately prodded and provoked.

“Can ye shoot?” a voice asked from the darkness.

“I can. Was in the Forest Brigade for five years, back in Mann.” The respondent sat in a bare room with one lantern for light, its hinged barn-door cover closed in the back. The voices who questioned him sat in the darkness beyond it.

“Forest Brigade,” the voice said. “Shootin' what, bears?”

“Mostly.”

“Ever shot at a man?” a second voice asked.

“Once or twice. Criminals that live in the Deep Woods.”

“Hit any of 'em?”

“I hit what I aim at.”

“Do you have family?” asked a third voice.

Pause. “A wife and a young son.”

“And are you prepared to leave your wife a widow?”

“My parents are alive, if that's what you mean. They'll take her and the boy should anything happen to me.”

“Thirty-seven Gatemen died this year. Are you prepared to join that number?”

Silence. “Didn't know it was so many. But I honor the memory of every last man.”

“Rumors say Damrick Fellows ran scared, and that's what got his men killed at the pub in Mann.”

“I don't believe that. He took down Skeel Barris and Sharkbit Sutter. Braid Delacrew and Shipwreck Moro, too. That's no coward. And I seen how that sent a spike of fear to the hearts of Conch Imbry and his like. They're gonna send around rumors; it's how they do.”

“Four pirates and a spike of fear…is that worth leaving your boy fatherless?”

A thoughtful pause, a wrinkled chin. “My son is six years old. He's a good boy. I want him to be a good man one day. If I don't fight what I know is wrong, and give it all I got to give, what kind of man am I? What kind of man could I ask him to be?”

“He may well grow up without you around to ask him anything.”

Another pause. “If I fight against these thugs and die doing it, then at least I'll have left him a show of what's right. His mama can point him the way his daddy went, after that.”

Papers shuffled. A pen scratched on parchment.

“Here is a folded slip of paper. Do not unfold it.”

A blind priest walked from the darkness into the lamplight, and handed the paper to the man being questioned. “Don't open it,” he said. “That paper has on it your calling. A black ‘P' is your commission to pray for the Gatemen. They need those who will beg God earnestly for protection, and success. A black ‘S' is your commission to work in the service of the Gatemen, in secret financial and organizational support against all those who would stand in their way. A red ‘G' will tell you that you are to join with them on the seas, as a Gateman. All three are honorable paths, and any of the three will show your son how to do what is right. Do you understand?”

“I do understand that, yes.”

“Good. Whichever letter you have been given, know that there are many out there, whether you see them or not, who pray and serve and fight. Do not unfold this scrap of parchment until you have thought this through one more time. Put it in your pocket, and go home. Consider your choice. If you feel for any reason you are not ready to take on a life devoted to this cause, whether in the open or in secret, then burn this note. No one will know but you. Continue on with your life as though this meeting never happened. Do you understand?”

“I guess I do.”

The priest withdrew.

Now the third voice spoke from the darkness, the one that had asked about his family. “Understand this. We will never stop, never cease, until every last pirate is dead or in prison, along with every man who supports them. If you are prepared to dedicate yourself to this mission, regardless of what letter is written on that parchment, then, and only then, open it and learn your fate. Once you open that parchment, you are one of us. We expect equal devotion, whether in prayer, service, or as a Gateman on the seas. Do you understand?”

“I do. But how will I find where to go, should you want me sailing?”

“We will find you.”

After a few moments of silence, the man spoke up. “Hello?”

There was no answer.

He stood and grasped the single lamp, and turned it around, squinting into the darkness. He walked over to a black sheet hanging from a stretched string, and looked behind it. A table and three empty chairs. He was alone in the room. He let himself out the door.

On the way home, he walked with his hand in his pocket, clutching that scrap of paper. And as he walked he hoped, and then he prayed, that written on it he would find the red letter that spelled the end of Conch Imbry's hold on Skaelington, and on the Vast Sea.

“What's that supposed to be?” Conch asked, irritated. He didn't like his evening cigar interrupted by business.

Mart Mazeley looked down at the scrap of folded parchment he had handed to the Conch, then up at the two serving girls. The captain liked to hire barmaids to work aboard when he was in port, turning his private saloon into something more like a public one. But Mazeley never trusted them.

“All right,” Conch sighed. “Ladies, step outside.” They set down their drinks and sashayed out. When the door clicked, Conch turned to Mazeley, his ire up. “Make it fast.”

“It's a parchment—”

“I see it's a parchment. Someone wrote a ‘S' on it. So what?”

“That someone was Damrick Fellows.”

Conch looked at it more carefully. “How do ye know? Where'd it come from?”

“A citizen came looking for you. He wanted money. He gave me this and told me his story. He says Damrick Fellows is in Skaelington. He's been here for over a month.”

“Here? No!”

“I followed up. There are a number of these parchments floating around town.”

Conch sat up straight and peered at the paper again. “So. What's he doin'?”

“He's recruiting Gatemen.”

“He's what?”

Mazeley told the story, all he'd been told…the churches, the interrogations, the scraps of paper.

Conch fed the small paper into the flame of a nearby lamp, then dropped the burning paper into the ashtray next to his cigar. “Find him.”

“I've got men searching now. But he hasn't left many tracks.”

“Well, clean some a' the boys up and send 'em to these priests for volunteers.”