Wake of the Bloody Angel (29 page)

“Aye, Captain,” Greaves said, and rushed off to his duties.

“Mr. Dancer!” Clift called, and the gunnery master appeared before him. “We’ll be sinking that ship with the monster beneath it. Ready your men to fire flaming bolts.”

“Aye, sir,” Dancer acknowledged.

We followed Clift down into the hold. He paused to speak to the wounded who were conscious, thanking them for their work and promising they’d be compensated for any lost extremities. Then we stopped to draw a bucket from the piss barrel. It said something that the odor of blood, death, and sweat meant the smell from the bucket didn’t bother me at all.

Clift walked into the dayroom and threw the bucket’s contents into Marteen’s covered face. He yelled, sputtered, and madly tossed his head to dislodge the clinging wet burlap.

Clift yanked off the hood. Marteen spit, looked around, and realized his situation. His brow knitted and he fell silent.

“You’re a prisoner of Captain Dylan Clift, representative of the Anti-Freebootery Guild,” the captain said. “You and your crew will be taken to Shawano for trial and hanging. Do you understand this?”

“What’s the point of the trial if you already know the verdict?” Marteen snarled. “Does that help your head rest better on your soft lace pillow?”

“You have one chance to avoid that fate,” Clift continued. “I might intercede and recommend a life sentence in the Mosinee Prison if you help out my friend here.”

“That’s some trade,” Marteen sneered. “Death either way, one fast and one slow. Why don’t you pick for me so I’ll be surprised?”

Jane, who had remained by the door, now stepped forward. “Do you know who I am, Marteen?”

“Some whore passed around by these scurvy trolls?” he said, and smacked his lips at her. “You been spreading your legs so much, you need that cane to walk with ’em closed, eh? They must like ’em tall on the
Cow.
Do you diaper them like little babies, too? I’ve known some men who paid well for that.”

“My name is Jane Argo.”

Marteen’s smile, and attitude, faded at once. Even his face turned pale beneath his tan. “Captain Argo,” he whispered. “I heard you left the sea.”

She backhanded him so hard, I worried she’d broken his neck. Her rings left cuts along his jaw. He sat there for a moment, recovering, and when he turned to us again, his teeth were coated with blood from his ruptured lips.

“As you can see, I’m back on the waves,” Jane said. “Now, Captain Clift has made you a generous offer. I’m here to sweeten it. If you answer my friend’s questions, I won’t spend ten minutes alone with you.” She returned his blown kiss.

He spit blood, but was careful not to get any of it on Jane. Then he looked at me. “Since you haven’t done or said anything, I assume you’re the friend with the questions.”

I nodded. “It’s the same one I asked you earlier. What happened to Edward Tew?”

He frowned in apparent concentration. “Tew?”

“Yes.”

Then he grinned. “Why, one and one equals two.”

His laughter rang out in the little room. When he finished, I said, “Let’s try again. What happened to Edward Tew?”

“I’d sooner hang than give up my comrades,” he hissed. To Clift, he said, “How does it feel to betray your friends and your oaths, joining up with Queen Remy against your brothers?” He looked at Jane. “And you? Are you his whore now? Queen Remy know she’s supporting a floating brothel?”

Jane smiled. If Marteen had any sense at all, he would’ve started begging for mercy right then, but he didn’t. She said, “Marteen, I’ve got a hole in my leg thanks to your little pet, and it pisses me off. Eddie and Dylan here have this thing, what’s it called? Oh, yeah. A conscience. They have one of those. I don’t.” And with that, she drew a dagger and stabbed it into Marteen’s left thigh.

His howl could’ve summoned wolves, had we been on dry land. It grew even louder when Jane pulled the dagger out, wiped it on Marteen’s shirt and put it back in her belt. I winced in sympathy; even Clift seemed a little startled. Blood surged up from the wound.

“Fuck!” Marteen said, his voice raw.

“You’ve got a lot of other things we can stab,” I pointed out. “Now, what happened to Edward Tew?”

Marteen’s eyes dripped tears of pain, but he said, “You might as well kill me. I’m not going to tell you anything, and there’s nothing you can do to make me. Keep torturing me if you think you have to, but you’ll just be breaking a sweat for nothing. I’m not afraid to sail with the White Captain off the edge of the world. Once I’m dead, I’ll be far beyond your grasp.”

I’d seen men scared of torture try to bluff their way through before, but there was something calm in Marteen when he said this that made me believe him. As a last resort, I said, “Would it help if I said please?”

Marteen looked up at me in astonishment, then began to laugh.

I nodded toward the door. It was time to regroup.

Clift put the wet burlap sack over Marteen’s laughing face and cinched it tight around his neck. Blood from his thigh wound had soaked his pants and started pooling at his feet. Clift brought a belt from his cabin and tied it tight around Marteen’s leg.

We stepped out into the hall and closed the door. I spoke softly so Marteen couldn’t overhear. “Any other ideas?”

“I haven’t even gotten warmed up on him yet,” Jane said. “Wait until that thigh starts throbbing like mine did.”

“I could threaten to hang him right here, before we even get back to Shawano,” Clift said. “We could string up a couple of his dead shipmates, make it look like we’d executed them.”

“That’s an old one, he’d never fall for that,” Jane said. “Now, some pliers to his testicles—”

“If we hurt him too much, he’ll just tell us what we want to hear,” I pointed out. “He’s our only source. If we can’t get real information out of him, we’re at a dead end. Or at least I am.”

I looked around in the shadowy corners to make sure Dorsal wasn’t lurking there. I didn’t want him to overhear anything too brutal.

“What’re you looking for?” Jane asked.

“Making sure the cabin boy’s not here.”

Clift asked, “What cabin boy?”

“Dorsal. You know. His real name’s Finn.”

In utter disbelief, Clift whispered, “You’ve seen Dorsal Finn?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Even Jane asked, “Dylan, what’s wrong?”

Clift could barely speak. “Dorsal Finn died of a fever over a year ago. I was holding his hand when he passed. We buried him at sea five hundred miles from here.”

And despite the heat of the tropical night and the stuffy warmth of the ship’s hold, a shiver went through me.

chapter TWENTY-FIVE

It
was near midnight. I lay on Jane’s bunk and stared at the wooden ceiling. The swaying lamp made shadows seem to crawl across the grain. After three days of enforced rest, Jane was far too fidgety to sleep anytime soon, so she was on deck with Clift. With Suhonen still slumbering away in my cabin, hers was the only refuge I had. And I needed it.

We’d ignored Marteen since our earlier session. He sat in the chair in the captain’s cabin, the wet bag still over his head, his injured leg still untended. A guard stood, or rather sat and slept, outside the door. I didn’t blame him; it had been a hell of a day.

Besides, there was no doubt Marteen was still there. He seemed to be running through an unending repertoire of bawdy sea songs:

They were humping on the quarterdeck

And humping on the stairs

You couldn’t see the tiller

For the pile of pubic hairs. . . .

I put the pillow over my head and tried to stuff it into my ears. How many verses did this song have?

EARLIER,
when we’d come on deck after Marteen’s first interrogation, I begged off from Clift’s questions, claiming I needed time to think. After the revelation about Dorsal Finn, that was certainly true. Clift said, low so no one else would hear, “I think if my ship is haunted, Mr. LaCrosse, I have a right to know.”

“Look, I can’t answer that. Really. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing, or I’ve gotten smacked in the head too many times. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go sit somewhere and try to think of something we missed.” When Jane started to follow me, I said sharply, “Alone. Okay?”

Neither was happy, and I couldn’t blame them, but I was too tired after the day’s battles to deal with it. I found a place by the tiller where I could see the
Bloody Angel
across the way, lit by lanterns. Shadows moved across the deck as occupying crewmen from the
Cow
passed in front of the light. There
had
to be something we’d missed.

We did have one actual, physical clue: that stack of medical crates taken from a variety of ships. Clift had planned to send them back to Blefuscola, but suddenly I wanted to check them before they left in the morning. I got Duncan to row me over, since my shoulder wasn’t up to it, and he lit the lamps in the captain’s cabin so I could see.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“The reason why these were all that they took. Think about it: They had undefended ships loaded with goods and money, and they took only the medicine chests. Why?”

“They were old and sick?”

“Old, yes. But did they fight like they were sick?”

“Well, no.” He scowled, thinking.

I opened several of the chests. All appeared completely intact. I began removing the contents of one, pausing to examine each item. There were knives and razors for surgery, irons for cauterizing wounds, pliers for pulling teeth (and, according to Jane, other things), scissors for bandages, needles and line for stitching wounds, and in carefully organized slots, various dried substances that could be combined and reconstituted into medicines.

I pulled one bottle from the box and held it to the light: poxbinder, an herb used to deaden injuries so they could be repaired. It took barely a pinch of it to be effective; slightly more than a pinch would ensure the injured party had no subsequent worries about anything. It was expensive, and could be found only along the tree line of the Galick Mountains. Its drying and preparation were a fiercely guarded secret, and only a licensed buyer could purchase it. That explained why the bottle was so small, and held so little actual poxbinder.

“I don’t suppose you know,” I mused aloud to Duncan, “how common it is to carry poxbinder in a medicine chest?”

“I’ve never been on a ship before,” he said. “And luckily, so far I’ve never needed to see the inside of a medicine chest.”

“Help me check. See how many of these have poxbinder in them.”

With Duncan’s help, it didn’t take long. They all did, some in tiny vials smaller than my pinkie. Many shared some of the other contents as well, but poxbinder was the only thing common to all of them. It might be a clue, or just as likely a coincidence. Because even if I was right, why would Marteen go to all this trouble just to collect poxbinder?

“Did you find what you wanted?” Duncan asked after I’d silently stared at the bottles for a long time.

“What? Oh, yeah. Let’s put things back like we found them.” As we returned the boxes to the stack, I asked casually, “Do you believe in ghosts, Duncan?”

“Ghosts? No. I mean, I’ve never seen one. Some people told me the ghost of my mother roamed the dunes looking for my father, just like in the play, but now I know that’s not true. Why?”

“Oh, I was just thinking about the play, too,” I lied as dismissively as I could. No sense making him think I was a lunatic.

“Do you think the captain of this ship knows anything about my father?”

“Definitely. The trick is getting him to talk. And the better trick is getting him to tell the truth.”

“Will you tell me what he says?”

“Of course. And if your father’s out there, we’ll keep looking for him.”

“And if he’s dead?”

I shrugged. “Then my job is done. I report back to my client.”

“My mother.” He said it flatly, with neither disdain nor affection.

“Yes.”

After that, he was silent. As we approached the
Red Cow,
I scanned the rail for any sign of Dorsal Finn. I wondered if I’d ever see him again.

I
must’ve dozed, because when I tried to shift my position, every joint in my body protested, especially the cut on my shoulder. When I was Duncan’s age, I never woke up achy after a fight. Marteen was still singing in the background. Then from inside the room, a familiar voice said, “Your pardon, Cap’n.”

The pillow was still over my head. I slowly pulled it away. I knew what I’d see. I also knew the cabin door was locked and there was no other way into the room.

Dorsal stood against the wall, hands behind his back, one foot twisting on the floor. He looked like any other kid caught in a lie, except
his
lie crossed the veil between life and death.