Wake of the Bloody Angel (9 page)

I was aware of Hawk’s horrible deeds, his fearsome reputation, and the fact that if he really applied himself, he could probably kill me before I saw it coming. Yet it was hard not to smile. He had an easygoing air that implied his prison stay was little more than a weekend inconvenience.
Don’t forget what he is, LaCrosse,
I told myself,
or what he’s capable of.

“Up to that point, it could have been the story of a thousand pirates, including myself,” Hawk continued. “But now comes the miraculous part. King Clovis of Witigan built a new castle far from his old one, and the quickest way to move his treasure to it was by sea. Only the good king outsmarted himself. He put together an intimidating fleet, all right: a dozen Witiganian warships guarded the single massive vessel on which everyone assumed he’d put his treasure. But in reality, he put it on a plain merchant ship leaving three days later, which is what Black Edward unknowingly captured as his first victim. Imagine his surprise when he saw the biggest single treasure in recorded history lying before him.”

“I bet he smiled.”

“I’d have pissed myself. So Edward immediately headed back for his woman. But a storm came up and sank his ship within sight of his destination. All hands lost, save one to tell the tale. As luck would have it, there’s a huge trench there, far too deep for any diver, and there lies Black Edward’s treasure, intact but untouchable. They say.”

“In my experience, ‘they’ aren’t always that reliable. Convenient there was one survivor. Who was he?”

“The quartermaster. A thoroughly unscrupulous worm of a man.”

“You knew him?”

“He tried to sign aboard the
Poison,
but he was more trouble than he was worth. He told me that the tale of Black Edward’s demise was a lie, that in fact the treasure was hidden on an island and the whole sinking of the
Bloody Angel
was a ruse.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“I wouldn’t believe him if he said the sun rose in the east.”

“So you never checked his story.”

“No.”

“What was his name?”

He smiled. “You’re the kind of man I could drink with, Mr. LaCrosse. If they let me have drinks here, that is. You assume that since I’m sitting up here desperate for company, that I might break my oath to the Brotherhood of the Surf. Grand Article Number Four: ‘No brother will ever betray another to the forces of law and order.’ ”

“No, I don’t think you’re desperate. And I’d never ask for information without offering to pay.”

Now he laughed. “Mr. LaCrosse, look around. Even if you were planning to share Black Edward’s lost treasure, it would do me no good. So what can you possibly have to trade that I could use?”

Before I could reply, Hawk looked up sharply. He said, “Wait a moment. You didn’t know that the
Bloody Angel
’s quartermaster crossed my path, did you? No, you didn’t. So why did you come to me, Mr. LaCrosse? Not just because I’m old enough that I might remember.” I could almost hear the gears in his brain clicking as he puzzled it through. “You came to see me because . . .” His smile grew broad. “Jane. You’re here with Jane.”

He stood, a liquid motion that seemed almost inhumanly swift. I jumped. He came toward me, and despite the net and bars between us, I said, “Like I said, Hawk, I’m scared of you. Stay right there or I’ll leave.”

He stopped and held up his hands. “Of course. So is Jane down below? Hiding beneath the fog?”

“Jane doesn’t do much hiding. She’s working for me on this, so I wanted to do the asking.”

“And now you want the name. But there’s still the question about why I would do that. Money doesn’t do me much good here.” He scratched at his beard. “So what can you possibly have to trade to make me betray a fellow brother of the surf?”

I reached into my pocket, careful to make no sudden moves; I didn’t want to startle Hawk, or send myself into another uncontrolled spin. I removed the thing I had claimed below, just before I handed over my boot knife.

He made no move to take it, but his eye never left it. “Is that—?”

“It is.”

He extended his hand.

I pulled mine back. “First the name.”

He was silent for a long moment. I felt the first stirrings of wind, and the crow below me cawed as if to welcome it. “All right. His name was Marteen, I believe. Wendell Marteen. The last I heard of him, he tried to captain a ship of his own off the Fussell Islands, but he was considered bad luck for surviving the
Bloody Angel
’s sinking.”

The initials, at least, matched those of the sole survivor mentioned in the official Watchorn records. “Bad luck for surviving?”

“Sailors are a superstitious lot, and their superstitions don’t always make sense. I assumed that was why he made up the tale that the
Bloody Angel
had been deliberately scuttled. Time, I think, has given the lie to that story. After all, if Black Edward were still alive, could he truly sit on a treasure of that magnitude for twenty years?”

“Where can I find Marteen?”

He shrugged. “I’m not in the loop, as they say. No doubt many things have changed since my incarceration. For all I know, he rots in one of the cells below us. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? If that’s not the case, I would look in the Southern Ocean, where the pirates are common. He never struck me as the type to explore new horizons.”

“All right. Thanks.” Then I held out the treasure that had made him cooperate: a lock of Jane Argo’s hair.

The net caught his fingers as he slowly reached through the bars. He took the curl from my outstretched hand. He stepped back, carefully maneuvered the lock through the netting, and held it close to his good eye. “Well, I’ll be damned. Thank you, Mr. LaCrosse.”

“My pleasure. And actually, I do have one more question.”

He continued to gaze at the lock of hair. “And it is—?”

“They say you killed a guard for no reason. Is that true?”

He broke his attention away from the curl. “What? No, not at all. I had a reason.”

“What was it?”

“He talked about my mother.” Then he smiled.

I had to fight surprisingly hard not to as well. “Any message for Jane?”

He looked at me with that one crystal-clear eye, and for an instant I glimpsed the ice-cold consciousness behind it. I was really glad I didn’t have to face him across swords. I wondered how Jane had managed to do it.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Tell her . . . ‘Someday.’ ”

“ ‘Someday.’ A threat?”

“A date.”

I nodded, and yanked the rope twice. Hawk said, “Fair wind and following seas to you,” and turned away from the window before I lowered out of sight.

DESCENDING
through the mist was like leaving some alien place where evil gods lived and returning to the normal world. I stepped out of the basket and leaned against the wall. My heart felt like it was searching for a space between my ribs big enough to jump through.

Jane said, “So did he tell us—?”

Without looking, I held up my hand. I wasn’t up to the challenge of Jane’s jocularity.

“Sorry,” she said. “When you’re ready.”

At last my brain stopped swimming, and the clammy feeling faded. I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, then faced everyone. The guards who’d been on basket-lifting detail didn’t meet my eyes. The warden’s expression was unreadable, but Jane gave me a surprisingly sympathetic smile. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No,” I said, “just a monster.”

“So did he help you?”

“Yeah. We have a name. Wendell Marteen. Hawk says he was Edward Tew’s quartermaster, and survived the sinking of the
Bloody Angel,
” I said. “If he’s still around—”

“He is,” the warden said.

“Don’t tell me he’s here,” I said.

“No, but it’s funny you should mention that. He just returned to the active list about a year ago.”

“Queen Remy has a list of wanted pirates,” Jane explained. “They consider it a badge of honor to be on it. Probably not the effect Remy had in mind.”

“Probably not.” I turned to the warden. “You said he’s ‘just returned’?”

“Yes. Nobody had heard a peep out of him for over a decade, and now suddenly he’s back. Took at least three cargo ships in the Southern Ocean off Fussell.”

The watery feeling finally left my legs, and I could breathe normally. “Then I guess we’ll have to go find him, right?”

“You’re the boss, boss,” Jane said.

We thanked the warden, and I retrieved my sword and boot knife. We untied our horses outside the prison gate and remounted them. The sun and breeze had eliminated the mist, and I could see the white window bars at the top of Rody Hawk’s tower. I wondered if he was watching. Just the possibility made the hairs on my neck rise again.

As we rode I said, “I want a drink. I don’t care what kind. Just as long as there’s a lot of it.”

“Wow, I’ve never seen you like this,” Jane said. “Was it really that bad?”

I desperately wanted to ask her how she’d managed to catch him, let alone take him alive. I suspected, though, that I didn’t really want to hear the answer. The way he’d taken the lock of her hair told me a lot of vague things I didn’t want made into specifics. “Nah,” I said with forced levity. “It was mainly the height.”

“I’m a little pissed at you giving him a lock of my hair without asking me. I suppose you traded that for information?”

“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

“Uh-huh.” She looked off into the distance. “Did he have any message for me?”

I recalled his single word for her. I imagined how, if such a word was aimed at me, it would ride in the back of my head for the rest of my life, until it either came true or I died. I said, “No.”

“That smug bastard,” Jane muttered. “After all we went through together. So what now, boss?”

“I think there’s no avoiding it this time,” I said. “It’s time to raise sail. You go over the mountains to Mosinee and round us up a ship. I’m going to Neceda to give Angelina a progress report. I’ll be back in a week.”

“You going to stop and see that redhead of yours?”

“If she’s there. She might be off working.”

Jane grinned. “And you trust her to do that?”

“She ain’t Miles,” I said as I turned my horse and rode away. I didn’t look back to see if she was smiling or not, but as I reached the road, I heard her high laugh on the wind.

chapter SEVEN

I
made good time back to Neceda and got there a week later, in the late afternoon.

The tavern was crowded. Both Angelina and Callie worked the floor. Occasionally Angie had hired other girls, but none of them lasted very long; she was not, as you can imagine, an easy woman to work for. She demanded almost superhuman stamina and had no patience with mistakes. Callie succeeded, I always thought, because she never took Angie seriously.

I stood in the door until my eyes adjusted and waited for Angelina to notice me. When she did, she nearly dropped the tray of empty tankards she carried. She quickly regrouped and said, “You’re back already?” as if my appearance were worth no more than a raised eyebrow.

“It’s an update, not a final report. I need to talk to you alone.”

She waved at the full tables. “I’m busy right now.” “Then
take a break,
” I said through my teeth. Normally, I

wouldn’t have been so brusque, but I’d had the whole ride back to stew over the fact that she neglected to mention her son, and who knew what else. I was, to put it mildly, peeved.

She saw it, too. “Okay,” she said, and stepped over to catch Callie as she headed out with a fresh round of drinks. The younger waitress listened to Angie, then glared at me.

Upstairs, I closed both doors and gestured for Angelina to have a seat. As she did, I opened the windows to let in some fresh air. I said, “Looks like you need to get Callie some more help.”

“She’s the only girl in this town who comes in to work, not to snag a new boyfriend.”

“What about Minnow Shavers?”

“Are you kidding? She’ll be out of town as soon as her father looks away long enough. She can’t stand Neceda.”

I paused, took a deep breath, and tried to remain calm. Starting off with a rant seemed counterproductive. “Just so we’re clear on definitions, Angie, leaving out something really important counts as lying. So you lied to me.”

“About what?”

“Your son.”

Her expression didn’t change, and she said nothing.

“I met him,” I added.

She had to lick her lips before speaking. “And . . . how is he?”

“Grown up. And a little bitter,” I added wryly.

She continued to look steadily at me. “I didn’t realize he’d still be around Watchorn, or I would’ve mentioned him. I wonder who finally took him in when I left?”