The Tides of Avarice

The first thing you notice is the smell. It hangs like an almost visible miasma in the sluggish air of Darkwater – or, at least it does here, in the meanest, rottenest and generally most lethal part of Darkwater, the only town on Booty Island and, in its turn, the meanest, rottenest and generally most lethal part of the Toxic Archipelago. Darkwater is probably the only town in the whole wide world of Sagaria where murder isn't a criminal offense: in the local terminology it's called “justifiable homicide.” The men here will slit your throat for free and send a selection of your bodily organs to your loved ones for no more than the cost of the postage stamp.

The women are worse.

And as for the kids? Don't even ask.

The smell that hangs around the tavern called The Moldy Claw, here in the dankest, dismalest, most corpse-littered part of Darkwater, is made up of varying parts of stale ale, rigor mortis, unwashed undergarments, rotting teeth, dead fish, deader rats, salty dogs, stagnant pools of various excretions and, not least, the outhouse behind The Moldy Claw, a structure of awesome venerability and the source of a stench so profound that, on those rare occasions when sunlight manages to penetrate the oily clouds above Darkwater, the outhouse's very brickwork seems to shimmer yellowly. No one in a generation has dared – not even the cutthroats who frequent The Moldy Claw, who've been known to face down sea monsters and sorcerers – make use of the outhouse of their own volition. Or, if they have, none have returned to tell the tale. Skullface Jack Moriarty, the cruelest pirate who ever sailed the seas of Sagaria, used to have his worst enemies thrown in through its age-smirched doorway, and some say that, on those cold nights when the stars seem to be made of crystal, you can still hear their screams.

Tonight, for once, no one had smashed the streetlight that stands on the corner outside The Moldy Claw. Through a layer of dead insects trapped inside the glass, it cast its pale illumination over a plain of broken barrels and bottles, making them appear to smolder with a sickly yellow glow – a glow the same color as the smell, in fact.

Inside the tavern, if you'd been foolhardy enough to go there, the noise would have hit you like a punch on the nose – that is, if the real punch on the nose hadn't reached you first. Most of the clientele who could still stand up were gathered in the far corner eagerly cheering on either Thick-Skulled Skully or Stoneface Muldoon, who were displaying all the tactical intricacies and strategic subtleties possible within a head-banging contest. Spectators and contestants alike were pouring rum down their throats at frequent intervals and by the flagonful, almost as if it were water – although it wasn't, in fact, quite as brown as the local water. Some had profitable looting to celebrate. Others were merely drowning their sorrows. All had reached the state where you couldn't tell the difference.

At this time of night, only the lowliest and foulest of pirates roamed the streets. Anyone else who had any common sense, or at least a trace of survival instinct, stayed well clear of the harbor area or, preferably, the entire town.

Best of all was to avoid Booty Island altogether.

No one in their right mind would stand in the dock area, just on the edge of the nervous pool of light The Moldy Claw's streetlamp cast, trying to tempt the rare passerby with bits of assorted booty, and yet two individuals were doing exactly this. They weren't exactly planning to sell the stuff, you understand. They just wanted to lure people with trinkets of silver and precious stones, then slit their throats, take all their money, grab their rings and other jewelry, and throw their corpses into the deep, dark, obliterating waters of the harbor. Then they'd offer the newly acquired gewgaws to the next person, and so on. It was what folk with a firmer grip on the technicalities of commerce might have called stock rotation.

The taller of the two was dressed in a long coat whose high collar reached all the way up to the greasy bandanna wrapped around what was presumably a forehead. All you could see of him was the occasional flash of an earring, or the glint of jingling jewelry as he proffered it to any late-arriving cutthroat who was headed for the tavern. The other peddler, slightly shorter, preferred a shorter coat so that people could better see the cutlass hanging at his side and the dirk stuck in his belt. It wasn't hard to guess that he, though the smaller, was the Muscle to his companion's Brains.

“Brains” being a strictly relative term, of course.

“Heard that he's back on the island, eh?” said Brains.

“Aye, that he is,” replied Muscle, batting his arms together as if to keep out the chill of the night, even though the air of Darkwater was always too laden with fermenting chemicals to cool down much.

“Arrived this morning, so I heard. Came here on the lookout for something. Something or someone. The good news is he ain't killed no one yet. They say he has to kill a man every day or he can't digest his supper right.”

“The day ain't over yet,” observed Brains. “Not quite.”

“So?”

“So that means it's bad news he ain't killed nobody yet.”

“Why's that?”

“He's only got about twenty minutes left. Gotta be killing someone real soon.”

Muscle grunted in gloomy acquiescence.

There was silence between them for a few moments, a silence broken only by the din of revelry and screaming from within The Moldy Claw.

Then Muscle added, “You heard what happened to Longnose Dobby?”

“No. Not old Dobby? What'd he do?”

“He was in one o' they taverns on Blighter Island,” said Muscle, clearly ready to settle into a long narrative. “The Voodooer, it was, or maybe The Zombie Parrot. Dobby was just sitting there minding his own business, tossing back a few noggins of the dark stuff, when along he comes and asks him if he'd like a game o' shrunkhead pool.”

“No!”

Shrunkhead pool was a game rather like billiards except that, instead of using billiard balls, you played with those little wizened shrunken heads people brought back from their holidays in exotic lands. It was, accordingly, a game of considerably greater skill than ordinary pool or billiards, in that the heads rarely traveled in a straight line, tending to be bounced off their trajectory by things like their ears.

“Shrunkhead pool it was,” Muscle confirmed. “Worst of it all was that Dobby didn't know who he was. Thought it was just the tavern drunk.”

“One of the tavern drunks,” Brains corrected.

“That too,” agreed Muscle.

“So Dobby didn't know to let him win?”

“Beat him three games in a row. They bet twenty doubloons a game, and you can buy a lot with sixty doubloons. Dobby thought he was going to get hisself a nice little house in the country, settle down and start breeding himself a few grandchildren.”

A frown slowly twisted Brains's face. “Wouldn't he have to have some children first?”

“Why?”

“Before he had grandchildren, I mean. It's the orthodox way of going about it.”

Muscle considered this, then dismissed it with a shrug of his shoulders. “Doesn't matter nohow, anyway.”

Brains shuddered. “He didn't get his sixty doubloons?”

“Not just that.”

Brains shuddered again. “So Dobby'll not be having any children, I s'pose. Who bought the postage stamp?”

“Not that!” snapped Muscle. “It's just that … just that … well, Longnose Dobby's had to get hisself a new nickname, is all.”

“Well, shiver me timbers.”

“And,” said Muscle, “that was one of his good days. If he had been in a bad temper, now …”

He let the word peter away into a fog of nightmarish images.

There was another silence, this one longer than the first. Through the open window of The Moldy Claw came the distinctive soggy crrrrrack of a skull splitting.

“You heard tell about the enchantment?”

Muscle snorted. “Enchantment my, ah, foot. Reckon he's just as vuln'able as all the rest of us.”

Brains looked doubtful. “‘Blade cannot cut him,'” he recited, “‘nor rope hang him. Bullet cannot hole him, nor water drown him.'”

“Where'd you hear that?”

“Everybody knows it. You can hear it sung in any tavern, aboard any ship.”

“I ain't never heard it.”

“You just has.”

“Oh.”

“And it's true,” said Brains, rubbing in his advantage. “Two times has he been sent to the gallows, and two times he's walked away again.”

“Pull the other one. It's wooden.”

“'S a fact. Twice over he's been invited to dance with ol' Jack Ketch, and each time the rope's broke and he's managed to escape. Four times he's been stabbed in the gizzard, and just laughed it off. And no one knows how often he's had to walk the plank …”

This time the two men shuddered in unison.

“It's said,” whispered Brains, “that the Devil hisself walks close behind him, guarding his back.”

“Nah.”

“'S what they say.”

Even though both Brains and Muscle were cutthroats of many years' standing, and had seen and done things that would give most ordinary people nightmares for the rest of their lives, mention of the Devil was, to them, something infinitely more bloodcurdling. It was as if further words were frozen solid in their throats.

Muscle resumed batting his arms together.

Brains looked out into the darkness of the street in hope of spying a potential customer. There wasn't one, of course. As we've already said, nobody in their right minds would be out this late in this part of town unless they were going to The Moldy Claw, and everybody who was going to The Moldy Claw tonight was either in there already or by now too drunk to reach it.

Still, there was this feeling someone else might be around.

After a while, Brains forgot about it.

“Here,” he said more quietly, quickly looking up and down the street and then beckoning Muscle to come closer. “Here, I got something to show you.”

Once the eyepatched man was beside him, Brains took another precautionary glance in all directions before pulling from a hidden pocket of his coat a roughly triangular, much-creased sheet of paper. He straightened out the wrinkles and then held the paper up so that it better caught the feeble light.

“See?”

Muscle stared at the paper. “That's writing,” he said, squinting. “I think.”

“It's a treasure map,” said Brains smugly. “Leastwise, it's part of a treasure map. And it's me ticket to a lifetime of luxury and wealth. I kin shake the mud of Darkwater off of me heels, settle meself somewhere in the country with a few bevies of buxom babes, maybe open meself a nice little pub …”

“Nah,” said Muscle. “You? The scourge o' the Sev—” He cut the sentence short, realizing, although he did not know the word, that he'd been about to plunge headlong into the quicksand of hyperbole. “Or at least a lake or two, anyway,” he compromised hurriedly.

“Just like Dobby's dream,” said Brains, nodding. “Only, for me, it's gonna come true.”

“There ain't no buried treasures left,” said Muscle. “They've all been unburied. How much d'you pay for that thing, anyway? You been had, I tell you.”

“No,” said Brains, looking quite obnoxiously confident. “This map's a genuine 'un, and so's the treasure it'll lead to. See here? See the signature at the bottom?”

Muscle peered closer. “Blimey!”

“Yes. It's him.”

“But the legend says—”

“The legends all say he took it with him when he went to Davy Jones's Locker,” said Brains, completing the sentence, “but he obviously didn't. He was a cunning one, he was, was Cap'n Adamite. But so am I. All I needa do is find the other two parts of this here map and Cap'n Adamite's treasure will be mine. And that's where you come into the pitcha, my fine friend.”

“Me?”

“None other. I could do with help hunting down the other pieces of the map, and, like they always says, three eyes is better than one. How 'bout it? Cap'n Adamite's treasure – leastwise, the treasure of the Zindars, the map to find wot he discovered – is big enough for both o' us. Fifty-fifty, we could split it.”

Muscle narrowed his eye, considering.

“Whassat?” he said suddenly, jerking his head toward the harborside.

“What's what?”

“That sound. Din't you hear it?”

“No.”

“There 'tis again.”

“'S just the seaweed slapping 'gainst the mooring poles.”

“No,” said Muscle. “'S a different sound.”

He began to creep in the direction of the water, and Brains, the torn portion of map drooping between his fingers, followed him willy-nilly. Soon they were both standing on the very edge of the rotting dock, the tips of their toes seeming to be peeking down into the lifeless black water.