Packer was close enough to hear Scat’s words. “What now, Captain?” John Hand asked.
Scat didn’t answer. He was mesmerized, joyously so, by what he saw. He saw, glittering beneath the waves, a million gold coins. It would take an entire fleet to sail back here, overcome the Achawuk, and bring home these trophies. He only wished he had that armada right now. If he had the Camadan and the Marchessa, he would turn for some of them, even now.
He looked at Packer. Then he looked quickly back to sea. The boy would be trouble, most likely. He would want a steep cut of those coins. Scat saw men’s hearts through the veil of his own, and what he saw now in Packer was a pretender to Scat’s new riches. The boy had stolen his glory…what else might he take? Packer was a young prizefighter who had landed a lucky punch and then expected the same honors given to the storied champion. Scat had dealt with such men before. Scat had been such a man before. He could worry about it later. Right now, he beheld all he had been seeking. He had found the end of the rainbow. His pot of gold. Nothing was going to darken it, or threaten it, not at this moment.
Packer watched Scat. The look the Captain gave him was not one he would have expected. It was brief, and then it was gone, but in it was no trace of gratitude, or congratulations, or forgiveness, or respect. Not even comradeship. It was the look of a greedy man shielding his prize. It was a warning.
Packer turned back to the sea. What he saw beneath the waves was quite different than what Scat saw. Here were the fires of hell, flames licking up from the pit. These beasts had lured his father to his death, and had lured Packer here, causing the deaths of half the crew in the process. Could such a power ever be harnessed to serve the simple fishermen of Nearing Vast? And if so, at what cost? It seemed little more than a fool’s quest now, sure to bring more death and destruction before it could be accomplished. If it could be accomplished at all.
“Now there’s a challenge,” John Hand said quietly. The Captain of the Camadan saw a different kind of fire. He was watching his carefully laid plans go up in smoke. The designs of the Camadan and the Marchessa were not based on sailing into the midst of a feeding frenzy. He would need to rethink the entire venture. To deal with these volumes of product would take enormous numbers of men and ships.
“Captain,” Delaney said with surprising urgency, and even fear. All those who heard him looked at him. His eyes were wide, seeing a fire the others didn’t, not the Captain, not John Hand, not Andrew Haas, not Packer Throme. He saw a procession of torches below the waves that promised yet another battle. He said now in a hoarse whisper: “They’re gaining on us.”
All eyes looked back to sea. Off in the distance, Achawuk lights could now be seen on the surface of the water, and the golden glow beneath the waves was vanishing at its farthest points. It moved like a lava flow toward the ship.
The Firefish were once again following the blood scent, and their trail was made up of bodies buried at sea.
Panna awoke with a cry from another bad dream, sweating and panting. She sat up and looked around her in the darkness. Laughter came from the next room, a woman’s laugh, piercing and shrill; not Tallanna’s. Panna peered through the dim light and saw someone, a woman in a dress, standing near the doorway. “Who’s there?” she asked, her own voice sounding thin, faraway and frightened. There was no answer. Panna reached over to the lamp, keeping the bed covers tight around her, and turned up the flame.
By the door hung a lady’s spring dress, with petticoats and a bustle. Panna breathed easier. Tallanna had brought it for her. Panna sat back against the headboard. No one else was in the room. Beside her was the dining tray, the remains of her dinner of fish, cheeses, and fruits. She touched her shoulder and pulled up the strap of her nightgown. She could still feel the silkiness of the honeysuckle bath.
It had been a horrible dream. In it, Tallanna was the woman of the nightmare, and in this new dream she had killed Packer once again, and again he didn’t fight back. She had then come for Panna, who ran, but couldn’t escape.
Panna listened to the laughter from next door, and the music down below. She was in a strange place, where women were used as property. She had been brought here by a woman she didn’t know, a dangerous woman who frightened her, but who nonetheless would determine her destiny. Packer, the one in the dream, came back to her. His eyes had been black, and blank, and he had showed no emotion, as though he had already been dead before Tallanna killed him. What did that mean?
“Packer,” she said softly, trying hard to bring back memories of his face as it really was. “Packer Throme.” She couldn’t. As much as she tried, the only images she could conjure were blurred or disfigured, and they quickly melted into the empty-eyed Packer of the dream.
“Oh, God,” she said aloud, turning over. And now the image of her father came to her, the big, gentle smile and the dancing eyes, as he listened to her sing to him. It was comforting, warm; the love he offered was a father’s love, lean on understanding but rich with emotion; unending, unwavering, protecting.
What would he think now if he knew where she was? It wouldn’t matter to him, she knew, as long as she was safe. He would love her, even though he would never be able to comprehend what she had done, what she was doing.
And then she realized what he must truly be thinking, what he must be facing. She had run away into grave dangers, become an outlaw, and he had no idea where she was, whether she was well or ill, alive or dead. And now a new image entered her mind: the great, comforting bear of a man turned fearful, timid, broken. She saw Will Seline the way he had been after her mother had died. Crumpled, crippled by the pain.
What had she done? She had left him, left her home, left the village to follow Packer, and had cut herself off from every form of protection and comfort she knew in the world. She had indeed stepped outside God’s appointed protection; away from family, friends, society. All for Packer, for a swordsman she hardly knew, a boy who went to join up with pirates, and whose face she couldn’t even recall.
The laughter in the next room sounded ugly, the music hollow. What could she do now? Run away again? And where would she go? To jail, no doubt. They might forgive her in Hangman’s Cliffs, but to the City of Mann she was just another criminal, just another woman with a dark secret hiding in an inn with other criminals, others with dark secrets, doing things unlawful, outside the bounds of society, of family, of friends.
There is nothing for you to decide.
How could Panna awaken from this dream? How was reality any better than the nightmare? She buried her head in the pillow and wept. The brute force of the world, the blank ugliness of it, the evil it carried with it in every sultry look, in every smug wink, was more than she could bear. Outlaws everywhere, dark purposes lurking behind every expression of every face of every person. How could she make it stop? What could she do to make things right, to wake up to a day that was not grim and lost and dark?
CHAPTER 16
The Ghost
“We need more canvas,” Scat said aloud, without lowering his telescope from the waters receding behind them.
John Hand was the recipient of the command. He paused for half of a second, looking at his superior. Scat still looked like the aftermath of war; dried blood and sweat had left his clothes and hair caked and matted. He had wiped his face, or tried to, but it was streaked and drawn and pale. And he was clearly unwilling to take back command of the quarterdeck.
Hand looked to the stars to assure himself of their heading, which was now southeast, then turned to face the wind, which was still from the south. Sailing at a right angle to it, two points abaft the beam, with studding sails unfurled, would give them maximum speed. “East, then?” East was the fastest way out of the Achawuk territory.
“Maximum speed, Captain,” Scat snapped out.
There was no time for debate. The yellow lava was growing closer every second.
Hand left Scat at the afterdeck rail and returned to the quarterdeck. “Aye, aye.”
He turned to the first mate and pointed to each sail as he gave explicit orders. “Strike the sprits’l. Reef the main four points, the mizzen three. I want the fores’l full, the foretopgallant full—blast it, let all the others stand full. Trim her as she goes; I want hull speed!”
Jonas Deal was wide-eyed at the aggressiveness, not to mention the danger, of the set.
“We know the Chase can fight,” Hand explained, clapping Deal on the shoulder. “Now we’ll find out if she can fly.”
“Aye, Cap’n. That we will. All hands!” Jonas went to work, relaying the orders.
The crew couldn’t respond as quickly as they would have liked. There was confusion in the melding of the survivors from two watches. But Haas and Deal stood side by side on the quarterdeck, conferring briefly, barking orders as to which man should be where, who should do what, then conferring again. Inside of three minutes the orders were carried out, the canvas snapped full, the great cat leaped, and the chase was on.
“That maintopgallant is laboring hard,” Andrew Haas warned Captain Hand, looking up at the moonlit sail. The wind had freshened now, up to thirty-five knots. The Chase was heeled just as dramatically as she had been during the Achawuk battle, but was moving now at a clip of better than twenty knots. The chains on the port side, just eighteen inches below the rail, were under water. Sea spray splashed onto the deck, soaking everything, washing clean what was left of the blood. Too much rudder to port under these conditions, and she would be laid on her beams, in imminent danger of capsizing. Too much rudder to starboard and she could broach, bringing her full broadside to the wind and waves, again in danger of capsizing. Even an ill-timed gust of wind could be disastrous. But the set of the sails was the Captain’s charge, and Haas wasn’t bold enough to break etiquette to question the overall danger of it. At least not yet.
“She’s holding full,” Hand said evenly, eyeing the canvas.
The Firefish kept coming, and they were gaining on the Chase despite her top speed. Scat saw the yellow flashes under the black water, lighting the night sky as they grew in intensity where the Achawuk had been tossed from the ship’s decks. He couldn’t take his eyes from the sight, his greatest fear and his strongest desire commingled there in a vision both wonderful and terrible. So he stood silently, watching the jagged dorsal fins in the moonlight, cutting the water white behind them as the pursuers closed in on the burial site of the Chase’s own dead. An occasional flash marked their location even more clearly, as an unfortunate dolphin, barracuda, or shark strayed into their path.
“They’ll slow some in a moment,” Hand said to Scat, walking up to him at the afterdeck rail. “When they reach our dead.”
“You’re sure of that?” Scat asked flatly.
When the yellow flashes came they were in tight succession, one after another like a string of fireworks on a common fuse. Thirty-nine lightning strikes in the darkness, barely discernible one from another, and the churning waters remained in pursuit, still gaining.
John Hand just shook his head. “Incredible.”
“So what does a whole pack of Firefish do when they attack, Professor Hand?” Scat asked, not moving.
Hand let out a laugh. “They take us down. That ought to slow them some, don’t you think?”
The Captain was not amused. He peered through his telescope. “We don’t know what they’ll do. Nobody knows what a pack will do.” Alone, an attacking Firefish would always take the easy bait, the carcass with the lure thrown from a longboat. He looked closely at John Hand. They’d had close calls, survived some damage, but in all their battles, all their experience, they had yet to see the great Fish destroy a tall ship. “But they’ll take us down if they want to, no doubt about that.”
From below, in the dark, silhouetted against the shimmering white disk of the moon, the hull of the Trophy Chase looked like a bleeding, listing, silent animal. This prey was longer and wider than any Firefish, and extremely fast. It did not have the churning strokes of a land beast, or the paddling motions typical of an air beast in water. This was a sea creature.
In the lead, closest to the Chase, a massive Firefish sliced through the cold waters. This one was half the age but half again the size of the beast that had confronted Talon. A chunk of scaled flesh had been ripped from it just above the tail, and its right eye was gone. Great slashing scars like four strokes of a knife above and below the empty eye socket testified to the fury of the battle that had left it half blind. This was the lead Firefish, the alpha of the pack. Its decisions would be the pack’s decisions.
The sleek prey it sought, despite its size, had shown no desire to fight. It simply ran. But it ran fast. Its appearance from below, with the one long, angled fin, suggested a shark. The one-eyed beast had seen this before, in prey not nearly this size, not remotely this fast. This prey moved without the oscillating, swiveling motion of a shark, or of any fish, for that matter. In the darkness of the beast’s mind, it knew it sought a dangerous prey. Its speed spoke of sleek and supple flesh, but the rigid body spoke its opposite, a protective shell.
But the blood! The tasty morsels it left in its wake! The size and gracefulness of it, silent and focused, running, smooth, without effort! A great pain grew within the beast, an ache it did not understand and that it could not differentiate from physical sensation. It was a hunger, a lust, which grew stronger as it pursued. This prey was a prize. And the one-eyed beast would not be satisfied until this prize swelled and warmed its belly.
“We need Stedman Due,” Hand said. “We need the lures.”
Scat dropped the scope and looked at John Hand with a scowl. “There’s two dozen Firefish back there if there’s one. We’ve got one longboat and four dozen lures, and no bait.”
“You’d rather do nothing?”
Scat took a deep breath. It wasn’t in him to wait and watch. This was the Trophy Chase threatened. He would take almost any risk to save her. “We could try the cannon. We might get lucky.”
“Scat—we know what a five-inch ball will do to those beasts.” It would do precisely nothing. Round shot, canister, grapeshot, scrap-shot, shell, all bouncing harmlessly off Firefish scales, was a scene often repeated and well documented in the early encounters, a scene that had led in great part to the development of the lures in the first place. “If we can kill one with a lure, maybe it’ll distract the rest. Maybe we can even scare them.”
Scat doubted it. But to see one die would be some comfort. “Well, Stedman and Gregor survived the Achawuk battle,” Scat said with a sudden, cruel grin. “They have their role to play.”
“We all have our duty,” Hand agreed solemnly.
Scat pondered. The huntsmen knew how to set a lure lashed to a side of beef, and throw it into the path of an approaching Firefish. With the help of Lund Lander, they had reduced the exercise as near as possible to simple mathematics. But they had no beef. The Camadan carried the sides of beef, and the cattle, used by the huntsmen in the longboats. How would they entice a Firefish to take a brass box?
“And what for bait?” Hand asked in a whisper.
“Use the Achawuk.” Scat did not like the sound of the words as he said them, superstitious as he was about death.
“Already overboard.”
Scat swallowed, still focused on the Firefish. “Then use…” his voice dropped off…“one of our men fallen in battle.” Scat was trying to sound casual about it, though John Hand heard the tremor.
“Already overboard,” John Hand said. And he and Scat looked one another in the eye.
“Blamed efficient of you, Captain.”
Hand stared hard at Scat. “Maybe you’ll get lucky, and one of your crew nursing wounds down in sick bay will die in the next few minutes.”
Scat stared back. The idea of crewmen in sick bay was new to him. With Talon as healer, very few men seemed to get sick enough to quit working. He snorted. “We have no surgeon. Maybe one’s dead already.”
A man on a large gray horse entered the dark streets of Hang
man’s Cliffs at a full gallop. The horse foamed with sweat, throwing clumps of mud behind her as she ran. The man’s dark cape billowed behind him. Pulling up short at the pub, under the sign of the Firefish, the man bounded from the horse, the steel scabbard of his rapier flashing in the lamplight. He was a small man, but strong and lithe. He took the crimson beret from his head as he went through the doorway.
Less than five minutes later, he was back on his horse, again at a full gallop, not back in the direction from which he had come, but past Mrs. Molander’s wash, up the hillside toward the ramshackle docks of Inbenigh.
Lund ascended from the hold carrying a brass box in each hand. He was followed by a crewman similarly laden. Leaving the sailor on deck, Lund climbed the short rope ladder down to the longboat and quickly, carefully, placed his two lures inside it.
Scat watched in grim silence. None of the wounded in sick bay had cooperated. The huntsmen would go alone, without bait. This was a far cry from picking a doomed sailor off the yardarm with a pistol. This was ordering two men to jump with all the other men watching. Scat wasn’t worried about losing them; he’d signed enough death warrants to have been long past losing sleep over the passing of another sailor or two.
And he wasn’t worried about himself. Captains could outlive reputations; his own was testament to that. What he worried about was his ship. Ships had souls, and their reputations rarely changed. Once a ship had earned a bad name, she carried it with her to the end. Ships could be cursed, and dead sailors could curse them.
Long before the Macomb succumbed to the Achawuk, she had carried a dark shadow. That same ship endured an outbreak of smallpox at sea during one voyage, and two murders on her decks during another. Every sailor in the Royal Navy, every pirate, and every tall-ship sea dog, knew the Macomb. She had a reputation for killing her own. The Achawuk had played out their appointed role, and had surprised no one but the Macomb’s crew. Perhaps not even them.
The Trophy Chase Saga Page 27
