“I’m sorry,” said the little man. “I didn’t mean to yell. You just pulled, and it stuck.”
“Give us that ring,” snarled Natasha, “before I cut your Goddess-damned finger off.” She drew a dagger at her waist to make good on the threat.
“Sorry, sorry,” said the man.
Fengel flushed with anger. “What is the meaning of this?”
Natasha, the pirates, and the passengers all looked back at him. Geoffrey Lords had the decency to look abashed.
Fengel strode over and snatched the sack from his cook. “I asked, what you think you’re doing, Mr. Lords?”
Geoffrey winced. He opened his mouth to reply, but Natasha spoke up first. “We are looting and pillaging, Fengel.” She glared at him, voice tight with frustration. “That should be obvious, even to you.”
“That doesn’t mean we need to start cutting off fingers! The people are being cooperative.”
Natasha stared at him a long moment. “Good Goddess above! We are pirates, Fengel. Have you forgotten that? We’re here to take their things!”
“Um,” said the man in the suit. “I think I can get the ring off.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t keep a certain level of decorum! We have a reputation to maintain.”
“Yes,” cried Natasha. “As pirates! As plunderers! Raiders of the sea!”
“Natasha’s Reavers, mayhap, but Fengel’s Men have always been gentlemen.”
“But they’re not just Fengel’s Men anymore, now, are they?”
“And they’re not your Reavers either!”
“Really, it’s coming off now,” said the passenger. “It’s just that I’ve gained some weight lately.”
Fengel glared at the man. “Shut up.” He paused and took a deep breath before looking back to Natasha. “Though you are incapable of seeing it, there’s a perfectly logical reason behind this. Gentlemanly conduct results in more cooperative participants.”
“Who cares about participation?” yelled Natasha. “If they don’t participate, we just cut their heads off and take their things anyway!”
“Which guarantees that those who catch wind of that fact will fight us all that more in the future!” cried Fengel.
“Good! Then I’ll know I’m alive!”
“No! It just gets more of your people killed!”
“Not if you kill everyone else first! That makes sure you’ve got their attention.”
“Which isn’t needed if they’re cooperating in the first place!”
“People tend to need reminders,” she said sweetly. “Let me show you.”
Natasha drew a flintlock pistol with her free hand. She casually aimed it at Captain Mortimer. The man ducked aside with a yelp, and the first mate threw himself likewise aside, cursing. The gun went off with a crack like thunder, a thick plume of stinking sulfurous smoke erupting from it.
The shot was off target. It smacked into the ship’s bell with a loud and echoing call before spinning off in a wild ricochet. The ball hit the iron capstan in the middle of the deck, deflected upward, and impacted the mast just inches away from where Lina Stone stood. The young woman yelped and flinched away from the shower of splinters, losing her grip on the rigging at hand.
Her pet scryn screeched in surprise and flailed its weight about. Lina yelled at it and the creature became even more upset, coiling up to push away from her as it threw itself into the air. The added motion threw Lina even more off balance as she windmilled desperately.
It did not help.
Fengel watched as she toppled from her perch. Lina reacted quickly, though, whipping out a long dagger from her belt and stabbing into the sail beside her. It tore, but slowly enough that it looked for a moment as if she would ride it all the way down to the deck safely. Then she hit the cross-stitching joining one section of sail to another. The dagger was yanked from her grip, and Lina fell, landing hard with a thud from fifteen feet up.
Fengel wheeled on his wife. “You utter madwoman! Someone might have been killed!”
Natasha looked embarrassed. “That was the point.”
“But not one of our crew! It’s a good thing that you’re such an awful shot.”
“I can hit the mark when it counts!”
“No, you can’t. You never notice a damned thing either, until its too late! Just like that storm you got us caught in the other week. I told you to watch for it before I went below!”
“It was a sudden squall,” hissed Natasha. “And you’re one to talk. You’re so obsessed with cleaning your coat that you missed the call on this ship three times over.”
“Proper grooming is an important part of comportment,” Fengel replied with dignity. “As if you don’t spend an hour perfecting that ‘disheveled-yet-attractive-pirate-princess appearance’ each time we come back to port.” He paused, turning to one of the male passengers, looking for an ally. “Women, right?”
The man nodded gravely. “Quite right, sir. I swear, every time I try to take my wife out to the opera, she wastes half the night ‘prettying up.’“
The old dowager with the fancy hat raised an eyebrow. “That, sir, is a crass and unworthy generalization.” She looked to Natasha. “Are you going to let that stand? How often does your husband here avoid his duties to slip off with his mates?”
“Ha!” barked Natasha. “You’d think him, Henry and Lucian were all joined at the hip. Mixed crew, my arse! Just the other night I found the three of them playing cards in an empty hardtack crate.”
Fengel flushed as he realized that everyone on deck was now a part of their argument, and that it was probably his fault. Whatever. We’re done here for now.
He pivoted on his heel and took a step back toward the hold, where their loot awaited. He paused at the lip, unable to resist. “If someone wasn’t so unbearably afraid of being her father,” he called back, “then maybe I would spend more time on deck.”
There was a pause, and then a surprised shriek of anger. Fengel half turned, eager to catch the look of rage etched across Natasha’s face. His smug amusement changed to alarm as she grabbed the oil lantern from the nearest Wiley twin and threw it straight at him. Fengel ducked, barely, and the thing sailed overhead in a beautiful parabolic arc.
Right into the cargo hold.
Chapter Two
Lina picked up another rug. It split as she did so, separating down a charred section she hadn’t seen at first. She made a small sound of disgust and threw the pieces into a pile with the others.
“This one’s ruined,” she said aloud.
Her voice echoed in the almost-empty hold of the Dawnhawk. It bounced from the bulkhead walls, with their portholes peering out into night. It carried from the distant forward bulkhead all the way down to the stair at the stern, past the single lantern dangling overhead, through the insufficient illumination it cast on the burned and broken crates from the earlier raid on the Minnow. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and wet ash.
“Only in comparison to your beauty,” said Allen.
For the Goddess’s sake. Lina didn’t want to have to deal with Allen right now. Her whole right side ached and there were still splinters in her neck from Natasha’s ricochet. Also, Runt was still upset with the earlier incident and refused to leave her shoulder. He’d been overeating of late, too.
She glanced over at Ryan Gae, the only other person in the room, who smiled in quiet amusement. “I am flattered,” she replied, “that I hold up well to a cheap foreign rug charred into stinking ash.” She glared at Ryan. “But I wasn’t asking for the comparison. Tally that one down as ruined.”
Her two friends couldn’t have been more different if they’d tried. Allen was short and frail where Ryan was tall and stout. Allen wore the heavy goggles and leather coat of a Mechanist, while Ryan dressed in the loose shirt and trousers of a lifelong pirate. While Ryan laughed at the world, Allen always seemed to have something in his hands to hide behind. And Allen, unlike Ryan, was nursing a massive crush on Lina.
Ever since their first meeting several months ago, the young Mechanist had followed her around like a lovesick puppy. She’d thought that the supervision of the older Mechanist they had on board would rein him in a bit, or keep him too busy to bother her. She thought wrong. He wasn’t troublesome like other men could be, the ones she’d been forced to cater to for so many years. Just bumbling and annoyingly persistent. She wasn’t in the mood for either anymore, and maybe not ever again.
Allen retreated behind his copy-board. Lina hauled another rug from the scorched crate before them. It was large and heavy, and unleashed a cloud of ash when she pulled it free. The particulates caught her in the face, stinging her eyes. Lina cursed and let the whole thing fall to the deck. When she blinked her eyes clean again, she saw that the rich red fabric was blackened and burnt.
“Ruined too,” said Ryan.
“And the others beneath it?” asked Lina, voice raw.
Ryan peered into the crate. “Total loss,” he said sadly. “We’re not making a single bent sovereign from this load.”
That was going to be a sore spot with the crew. Today’s attack was the fourth failed raid with the integrated crew since their return from the Yulan Interior. The treasure from the H.M.S. Albatross had already dwindled, most of it going toward clearing Fengel’s debt with the Sindicato. There hadn’t been any real plunder since, and it was making everyone touchy.
Lina kicked the wooden side of the crate. She whirled away, swearing in frustration. “This is the fourth damned one!” she cried, wheeling back on her friends. “How are we going to take the Breachtown Counting House if we can’t even steal a pile of cheap carpets?”
“Now, lass,” said Ryan, hands up in a calming gesture. “It might not be all that bad. There might be a few we can salvage.” He glanced dubiously at the remaining pile of crates.
“No. No. They’re all trash, and this has been a complete waste of effort.” She stepped up to her friend. “I almost died today, Ryan, and it wasn’t a stupid accident or some enemy blade. The captain’s witch of a wife almost shot me. Shot. Me.”
“She didn’t mean to,” said Ryan weakly.
“Because I didn’t catch her attention,” snarled Lina. “Rastalak is still laid up, and last I saw, Henry Smalls wasn’t doing too well either. Even Nate Wiley got caught in the fire, and he’s one of her original crew! Today was a catastrophe, and tomorrow is only going to be worse.” She closed her eyes and took a breath. Runt squirmed on her shoulders, upset by the tone of her voice. Ryan didn’t say anything this time. Allen remained silent as well.
“Look,” she continued. “Keep going through this mess if you want. I’m going up above before the stink makes me puke. I’ll find the first mate and let him know.” Lina turned on her heel and marched to the stair. Ascending it, she climbed through the narrow hatch at its top to the higher decks of the Dawnhawk.
She rose into a small alcove, set off to one side in a dim, narrow hall. Down the far end to her left, she knew, would be the engine room and lair of the Mechanist, a member of that peculiar secret society of machine-smiths. Lina shook her head and glanced down the hall the other way, toward the rest of the ship, where the crew bunked on the quarterdecks and another stairwell led up to the stern hatch of the deck, past the captain’s cabin.
Lina had scarcely reached that stairwell when she heard the noise. Shouting, angry and strident. It echoed down to her and into the quarterdeck, only a little muffled. The captains were yelling at each other. Again.
She sighed. Forward hatch, then.
What she thought of Natasha hadn’t changed at all. There was a time, though, not too long ago, when her opinion of Fengel had been quite different. Lina had been eager for his attention then, a swarm of butterflies taking flight in her stomach whenever she received it. He’d seemed dashing and handsome, and though she recognized the crush for what it was, she had been powerless to ignore it.
That had changed quickly enough. Though she was still fond of Fengel, he was just as mad, in his own way, as the angry bag of cats that he called his wife. He was just her captain now, nothing more. I am done with that kind of thing. Romance, relationships, any of that; I’m just done with it.
Lina strode past the stairwell and into the quarterdeck, going for the mess hall door at its far end. As she moved through, exhausted pirates with bloodshot eyes stared up at her from their hammocks. A few of her crewmates, old and new, tried to muffle the noise of the argument above; blond Tricia had a balled-up shirt over her head, and Geoffrey Lords stuffed pistol-shot wadding into his ears. None of them slept. Fengel and Natasha had probably been going at it for a while now.
Lina moved through the inner passages of the Dawnhawk, the captain’s tirade fading to blissful quiet. Lina felt more comfortable here, less aggravated. She found the forward stair and climbed up through its hatch to the outside world above.
Cool night air washed over her. It smelled of salt and the sea, clean and welcome after the ashy stench of the hold. Above her floated the gas-bag envelope, a ridged canvas ovoid that held the airship aloft in the sky. Heavy chains and cables connected the deck to the gasbag, along with ratlines and rigging on the port and starboard rails. Secured oil lanterns and ambient moonlight shed soft illumination over the deck of the vessel.
The wind changed, bringing with it a myriad of irritated shouts. Runt tensed at the noise and Lina looked to the deck. The sound came from the evening watch crew, split into two distinct, arguing groups. Lina watched the nearest pair as they squabbled over a bucket and mop. Charlie Green was one of Natasha’s Reavers originally, and Elly Minel had served with Fengel for years now. Past them near the port-side railing, two more pirates hung suspended from the gasbag as they checked the hawsers connecting it to the airship. Fat Thomlin and grizzled Jeremiah Frey had belonged to different captains originally as well, and they looked over each connection twice before shouting its status over each other down to where a third person waited below. But most of the noise came from a large crowd down near the helm.
Lina’s irritation returned full force. It’s not enough that Fengel and Natasha squabble like a pair of children, they’ve got us fighting too. Lina shook her head. Enough. She had to get away from this, somewhere quiet, peaceful. But that was the trouble with a ship; there were only so many places one could go.
Her eyes caught on the rigging that stretched up to the gas bag and beyond. That’ll do. Lina adjusted Runt and moved over to the gunwales. She clambered atop the exhaust pipe onto the rigging. Her bruised limbs protested, but Lina ignored the pain. She climbed, yet as she did the voices from the squabbling near the helm rose up to her.
“Loaded, you overgrown cow!”
Lina glanced back down to see Reaver Jane, Natasha’s current right-hand woman, in a heated argument with Sarah Lome, Fengel’s huge red-headed gunnery mistress. The two were positioned on either side of an equipment locker, just up from the helm. Members of both sides of the crew surrounded the pair, watching intently. The locker was open and its contents had been pulled out: muskets, cutlasses and maintenance equipment for each.
“Keeping them loaded is insane!” roared Sarah Lome.
“They’re going to be uncocked,” replied Reaver Jane. “So what’s the problem?” The piratess was of average height and weight, with dark hair cut shoulder length. Lina disliked her. The woman was shrewd and dangerous.
“Standing orders from the captain are to keep all weapons unloaded and unarmed, to prevent any misfires, wet powder, and so forth. As gunnery mistress, it’s my responsibility to see that order carried out,” said Sarah Lome.
“And my captain wants us to be ready should we need these guns. Which won’t do a damned bit of good if they aren’t loaded. Why do we even need a gunnery mistress when we don’t have any Goddess-forsaken cannons?”
“Your captain is a drunken whore who hasn’t the first idea how to run a proper ship!”
“And yours is a fop who can’t give a hard order to save his life!”
/> The argument escalated, the crew now shouting encouragement. Even the aetherite navigators, Konrad and Maxim, called out from their shared station.
So much pointless, wasteful bickering. Lina shook her head and continued her climb. When the argument below was occluded by the curve of the gasbag, she paused to rest. With her good hand and leg mooring her to the rigging, Lina looked out onto the world.
Night enclosed the airship in a single sheet of velvet that stretched across the sky. The brilliant coin of the moon and the pinprick light of the stars starkly illuminated the Dawnhawk, high above the twisting chop of the Atalian Sea. For a moment nothing seemed to exist but the sea, the airship, and the cold light of the sky. Then the faint shouting from the deck below rose up to her.
It’s like we’re the only ones in the world, and yet we still can’t stop fighting. All of Lina’s anger drained, leaving only frustration and melancholy. What am I going to do? I can’t leave. This is my home. If only there were some simple way to fix things, to restore order, to get people working together....Lina shook her head and continued her climb.
She reached the pinnacle of the gas bag, where the rigging swept up and over the top before falling back down the other side. Her first time up here had been a terrifying experience. Now it was simply precarious, if no less daunting. At the very apex was a thin wooden deck, running the length of the airship and sewn into the canvas, allowing slightly less risky movement. Halfway down the length of the ’bag was a shallow wooden cupola. Lina spied the tops of four heads poking up over its edge.
Curious, she moved over. The inhabitants resolved into Henry Smalls, first mate Lucian Thorne, Gabley the lookout, and a white ape. All four were playing cards.
On Discord Isle (The Dawnhawk Trilogy) Page 2
