Pimplebrains, astonishingly, gave Jasper a wink when he was sure his skipper wasn’t looking. “I reckon you’d better hurry up and find this ’ere treasure.”
“I will,” said Jasper coldly, “do my best. Kindly, though, keep that barbarian in check.”
Pimplebrains’s eyes widened. “Living dangerously, are we?”
“Is there any other way to live?”
The beaver gave a bark of laughter. “Touché.”
“Now, shall we stand here wasting any more time or shall we begin our search?” said Jasper.
“Begin the search,” said Rustbane.
The gray fox had managed to staunch the flow of blood from his nose. He would have a swollen bruise there for quite some while, it was obvious. It was also obvious that Rustbane knew this and was not best pleased by it. His movements seemed to be those of a machine, over-precise in their attempt to imitate casualness.
Jasper threw back his head. His whiskers twitched. He licked a claw and held it up to test the air.
“That way, I think,” he said very firmly, pointing.
✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿.
The day wore on. Sylvester was glad Viola wasn’t with them, and especially glad Mrs. Pickleberry wasn’t. As it was, Rustbane’s patience was sufficiently volatile that it wasn’t so much a question of if he might explode in a rage as when. Jasper had warned them that discovery of the treasure, even with the benefit of his Zindar senses, might not be easy or quick but even Sylvester hadn’t anticipated quite the amount of toing and froing through the forest that would be involved. The first time he fell headlong into the brambles it was agony. By the fourth or fifth time he no longer noticed the gouges and pain. He did, though, as the sun reached its zenith overhead, begin to notice with increasing acuity the fact that he was hungry.
How could it be that the nut loaf last night didn’t fill me up?
The next deduction might or might not have been powered by Zindar-enhanced mental facilities. Sylvester was never afterwards able to decide the truth.
That little swine! I’ll—
“I think we’re close!” cried Jasper.
He’d said this two or three times before, so no one got overwhelmingly excited. Nothing like a few false alarms to water down enthusiasm. Even so, the others gathered around him.
“I hope this is going to be a bit more impressive than the last time,” said Rustbane with a pained sniff.
“I do too,” said Jasper pointedly.
“Where do you want me to start digging?” said Pimplebrains.
“I said we were close. I don’t yet know how close. If you’d all just shut up your chattering for a moment I might be able to figure it out.”
Again he threw his head back.
Rasco began to squeak something, but Sylvester stood on his foot to shut him up. Doctor Nettletree still looked as if he was wondering why he’d come along on this expedition. Sylvester was glad the doctor had retained his poker. He was becoming more and more convinced Pimplebrains would do them no harm, and less and less convinced Rustbane’s intentions were equally benign.
“Oh, we are close,” said Jasper, “so very, very close I can almost taste the Zindar chest.”
For the first time in some hours, the gray fox looked as if he didn’t want to kill someone.
“Where, me hearty, where?”
Jasper took four paces forward, followed by another. He paused as if scenting for prey, then took two exaggerated paces sideways.
“Here,” he said, mainly to himself. Raising his head, he turned to look at Pimplebrains and spoke more loudly, “Here’s where you should start digging.”
He pointed to the ground directly beneath his feet.
Rustbane shouldered Jasper aside in his eagerness to get to the spot. The lemming picked himself up from the undergrowth with a rueful smile and walked over to join Sylvester and Doctor Nettletree. The three Foxglovians watched as Pimplebrains dug and Rustbane issued unnecessary and usually contradictory commands. Rasco darted around dangerously beneath the two big animals, yipping excitedly.
It took no more than a couple of minutes before Pimplebrains paused in his digging and threw the spade to one side.
“What’ve you found?” panted Rustbane.
“Don’t know yet, Skip, but there’s something tough here, something that made the spade blade spit off it.”
Rustbane turned away with a show of disappointment. “Just a rock, I’ll have no doubt.”
“Didn’t feel like no rock to me, Skip.” Pimplebrains was on his belly on the ground, attacking the exposed earth with his hooks.
“We’ve been through this before.”
“Not like this we ain’t, Skip.”
Abruptly, Pimplebrains sat up on his haunches. Both of his hooks were still invisible in the hole he dug. The muscles on his red-furred forelegs bulged as he hauled on whatever it was he’d dug those hooks into.
There was the sound a boot makes when it’s being pulled out of sticky mud, only a hundred times louder.
What Pimplebrains pulled up was a fountain of wet black earth and, firmly grasped between his hooks, a brass-strapped wooden box that seemed almost laughably small. It couldn’t have been much bigger than Sylvester’s head.
“Is that all?” said Rustbane with an expression of unspeakable contempt.
“What’re you complaining about?” said Jasper with unexpected aggressiveness. “Back on Vendros Island you were heartbroken the Zindar ship was too big for you to drag away with you. Now you’re already bitching that the real treasure of the Zindars is too small. Are you actually stupid or do you just think it’s chic to act that way?”
How big, Sylvester was thinking, does a wooden chest have to be to hold a wish, even if it’s the biggest wish in the world?
“You’re calling me stupid?” said Rustbane icily.
“If the cap fits,” replied Jasper.
Rustbane gave him a long, venomous stare, then turned away as if Jasper were something unpleasant he’d discovered on a sidewalk. “Hurry up and open the damnable thing!” he told Pimplebrains.
Pimplebrains was examining the chest, turning it over this way and that between his rusty hooks. “Could be more difficult than you think, boss.”
“What do you mean? Just hit it with that blasted shovel of yours, can’t you?”
“You’re welcome to try.”
Rustbane looked startled. He wasn’t accustomed to his crew, even close cronies like Cheesefang and Pimplebrains, addressing him with such frank dismissiveness.
“Let me have a look.”
“You’re welcome.” Pimplebrains passed him the chest, which was about the same size as Rustbane’s paw. The fox was right. It was ridiculous that something so small and seemingly flimsy could be of any value; the slats of wood from which it was made were softened by the soil in which it had lain for so many decades, if not centuries, the three brass straps wrapped around it corroded by the acid waters of the earth.
“It has a keyhole,” observed Rustbane, turning it over and over in his paws much as Pimplebrains had been doing, “but we have no key.”
The gray fox looked over sharply at Jasper. “I don’t suppose, Mr. Mystic Man, you have the first idea where the key might be?”
Jasper spread his paws. “I think you either have the key within you or you don’t.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning what you want it to mean. Meaning what you know in your heart of hearts it means.”
Sylvester suddenly heard something Madame Zahnia had told them in her treetop mansion.
What the old myths say is that the boundaries of the mortal world are marked by a wall of … a wall of something that’s called the Ninth Wave. On this side of the Ninth Wave, there’s the world we know, and not just this world, but all the stars of the firmament too. On the far side
of the Ninth Wave, though, ah, things are different there. That’s the Otherworld, that is, on the far side of the Ninth Wave. It’s where magic happens, and it’s where the soul journeys in dreams, or after it’s left behind this mortal realm.
What was it Cap’n Adamite had written in his journal?
The true location of the treasure?
Let me commit to writing no more than that it can be seen only through the fall of the Ninth Wave.
“Stop!” Sylvester shrilled.
“I do beg your pardon?” said Rustbane.
“Don’t try to open it!”
“And why in the world would you say such a thing?”
“It’ll mean your death.”
Rustbane held the chest up in front of his face, scrutinizing it as a judge might scrutinize a prizewinning melon. “Oh, surely you exaggerate.”
“Don’t be a fool!”
“In the times of his dying, the one thing that kept Josiah Adamite cheerful was the notion that eventually you’d track down the chest of the Zindars and that it’d cause your death. I, ah, found his diary.”
There was a calculating light in Rustbane’s eyes now as he gazed at Sylvester.
“So, you know about Cap’n Adamite, do you? Old Throatsplitter? And you say he left a journal? You’re a much smarter little hamster than I’d ever have credited. Not very difficult, of course but still, well, I’ve underestimated you.”
“There’s a key to the chest’s lock all right,” said Sylvester hotly, “but it’s not made of brass or iron or gold. The key the Zindars demand – demanded – of anyone seeking to open their treasure chest is something far more valuable than that.”
“It is?” There could have been no one else in the forest now but Rustbane and Sylvester, so intent were the two on each other.
Sylvester dropped his voice to a whisper.
“It’s your soul. That’s the only key you can offer that’ll open it.”
“Then I’m in no danger, am I?”
Sylvester’s jaw dropped. “Huh?”
“I’m a pirate. I have no soul.” Rustbane gave a light laugh. “There’s nothing the ghosts of the Zindars can do to harm me. Here” – he tossed the little box to Pimplebrains – “see if you can smash this open with that shovel of yours.”
Pimplebrains caught the thrown chest reluctantly, then let it fall to the ground.
“I’d rather not.”
“You forget, Pimplebrains, you have no choice in the matter. I’m your skipper and you’re my crewman. You do what I say or you—”
“Die?”
“I see you’re catching on.”
“But if the little guy’s right, and he’s been right about most things lately, anyone who forces this chest open is doomed anyway.”
“You pay attention to such superstitions?”
“Like I said before, you be the one to open it, Skip.”
“This is insubordination.”
“It’s survival.”
Rustbane rolled his eyes. “Oh, very well, if I’m surrounded by nothing but turncoats and cowards …”
“Have this back.” Pimplebrains stooped and picked up the box gingerly, then passed it to his skipper.
Now that he had it in his paws once more, Rustbane seemed much more chary of the Zindar relic.
“Such a little thing,” he mused aloud.
“We should put it back in the ground,” said Sylvester with certainty. “It’s not meant for us.”
“Because we’re not noble enough or fine enough?” challenged Rustbane.
“That’s about it,” Sylvester replied. “The person who ventures to turn the lock on that chest, they have to be certain the soul they’re using as their key is honorable, that it’ll survive the ordeal.”
“What if I could force it open without having to use a soul?”
“You’d not be able to, but if you did you’d die.”
“You’re so sure of that?”
“Yes.”
“Then you open it.”
Rustbane cast the battered, waterlogged little wooden box so that it landed on the grass at Sylvester’s feet.
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“What makes you think my soul is pure enough?”
“Call it instinct. Call it sheer sadism on my part. Call it whatever the hell you like, but if the person who opens that chest is likely to meet a ghastly fate, I’d much rather that person were you than me. I’m sure you understand.”
“I won’t do it.”
“Are you so sure of that?”
In a cascade of silver the two flintlocks were in Rustbane’s paws and they were both pointing at Sylvester. The dark tunnels of the twin muzzles looked to Sylvester like the swiftest road to his own personal doomsday.
Sylvester began to laugh.
He could have done nothing more effective to disconcert the gray fox.
“You’re staring at your own death, you shrimp of an individual, yet you think you can laugh at me? At me – Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane, Doomslayer, Deathflash, Warhammer? The scourge of every ocean passage across the broad world of Sagaria?”
“You’re so … so pathetic.”
Rustbane’s claws tightened on the triggers of the pistols.
“I’d shoot you now if that weren’t too quick a death for you.”
“My dad’s not the only one to have learned a thing or two from having lived in the Zindar ship, you know.”
Very deliberately, Sylvester put the little chest down on the grass in front of him. When he straightened up again he locked Rustbane’s gaze with his own.
The effect was as if he’d stabbed the gray fox’s eyes with needles.
Rustbane reeled away, pressing his wrist against his eyes, trying to bat away the pain.
“You can’t be doing this!”
“Watch me.”
As Rustbane watched, Sylvester advanced on him slowly, deliberately, then leaped up on the fox’s arm. He dislodged the flintlock pistol in that paw so it fell to land with a ploomph on the soft ground, then jumped across to the other arm and did the same to the other pistol. Finally, Sylvester hopped back down to the ground and returned to stand by the chest.
Rustbane stared at his empty hands, then at the two silver pistols lying at his feet. His mouth opened and closed like a goldfish’s but no words came out. Sylvester could understand why not. What Rustbane had just witnessed was an impossibility, an impossibility if you were Rustbane, that is. He had seen everything Sylvester had just done, and yet had been completely powerless to move a muscle to stop him. The same had been true for the others. Even the birds and insects had frozen in the air for those few moments while Sylvester was disarming the fox.
The most confusing thing of all was something Sylvester wasn’t going to admit to anyone right now, and only to a select few later. He didn’t know how he’d done it either. It was as if the Zindar spirit, or whatever it was inside, had suddenly decided to take over.
Now that spirit, while he could sense it was still curled up somewhere inside him, was quiescent once more.
He wondered when it’d next choose to make its presence felt.
Rustbane stooped to pick up his pistols.
As he touched the first he gave a sudden yelp and a loud oath, and leaped backward, clutching his paw as if it had been scalded.
“I think those pistols have just become neutral,” said Pimplebrains.
The big old beaver waddled forward and picked up the two guns, putting a hook through each trigger guard. Whatever it was that had stung Rustbane into retreat seemed not to affect Pimplebrains.
“Whose side are you on?” hissed Rustbane at his crewman.
Pimplebrains considered before replying. “I’ll give it to you straight, Skip. I’m like the guns. I’m neutral. I�
�m not on either side any longer. I been loyal to you for many years through thick and thin and I’d like to stay loyal to you, but I got other loyalties as well now. What the little feller – what Sylvester’s been saying makes a whole lot o’ sense. If we start meddling with Zindar stuff, we ain’t got no idea what’s likely to happen. Opening up that box could destroy the world with us in it, for all we can tell. So I’m just going to watch what happens. If you and Sylvester fight, which I reckon can’t be helped now, the high horses you both gotten up on, then I’ll not take sides. At least, I don’t think I will but I won’t stand by and watch either of you kill the other in cold blood. I owes you each that much.”
“Traitor!” thundered Rustbane.
“You could put it like that, yes.”
The gray fox’s sword was in his hand now and before anyone could move – even Sylvester, with his recently enhanced reflexes – Rustbane had vaulted forward and plunged his blade right up to the hilt in Pimplebrains’s chest.
The beaver said nothing and made no move to defend himself. He just stared at his erstwhile skipper and friend through eyes from which the life slowly ebbed, before slumping to the ground.
As Rustbane tugged his blade clear there was a fountain of the beaver’s blood.
Sylvester was too shocked to move. Ever since their experiences in the cavern on Vendros, he’d grown fond of the genial beaver.
“Murderer,” said someone quite calmly beside him.
Sylvester turned.
The speaker had been Doctor Nettletree.
Rustbane sneered. “The village sawbones has something to contribute to the conversation?”
“I can tell a murder when I see it,” said the doctor, raising his poker in defiance. It looked pitifully small by comparison with the cutlass in Rustbane’s mitt. “And that was a murder. You’ve killed someone who was a far better person than you, just because you didn’t like what he was telling you. So what’s next, you scoundrel? Kill us all so there aren’t any witnesses to your shame? Well, let’s just see you try.”
Rustbane laughed sarcastically. “Shame? Me? A pirate? Pirates don’t have shame, you backwoods ninny, and, most especially of all the pirates sailing the seas of Sagaria, Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane doesn’t ever feel shame. If I want to kill you, I’ll do exactly that but mostly I don’t – you and Jasper and Rasco, anyway. I want you to be alive so you can tell the world about my cruelty and murderousness, because the more people hear about it the more they’ll fear me, and the more people fear me, the happier I am. Got that?”
The Tides of Avarice Page 58
