Clockwork Phoenix 4

by Mike Allen

  “Aye, for them rigs don’t have locks, just seams—the witchfinders put ’em on hot and force ’em sealed, so’s they’ll waste all their effort one one last spell to keep from dyin’; Captain Parry keeps his cravat high for a reason, t’hide the scars all ’round his neck. But Rusk broke it open, with his hands; he was a strong man, and always knew the trick of twistin’ where a thing was weakest.”

  “I ’eard this tale, too,” the second gunner chimed in. “‘Jerusha, I’ll call ye,’ he said, ‘seein’ you owe me all.’ And Parry just snapped at ’im, like they was two gents in a drawing-room: ‘Sir! I have not given you permission to use me thus, familiarly ’”

  “No, and he never did, did he? Though Solomon Rusk, bold bastard that he was, wasn’t a one t’ever pay such niceties much mind … ”

  So Parry had begun in servitude himself, of the same sort he practiced on Mister Dolomance and me—a slave turned slave-master who, just like the shark-were, had no sympathy for his own past weakness, let alone the weaknesses of others. I fought free, he might say, if questioned; do the same, if you can … and if not, stop your whining.

  (Yet for such a creature to base his power in the sea, where nothing is permanent, ever … not the shape of land, the ebb and flow of tide, or even any clear distinction between what makes one more itself than the other … )

  I think you court destruction, sir, I thought, allowing myself the very faintest beginnings of hope. And would almost have risked a smile to myself, had I not been so afraid he might be watching.

  * * *

  On those few brief occasions when we put ashore to trade, restocking with food and weaponry, the Captain always hung back, with only Mister Dolomance (who had an instinctual distrust of anything under his feet which did not move according to the ocean’s in- and out-breath) for company in his watery exile. And though other times women might come aboard, for the crew’s recreation, the Captain never indulged himself, though he might have had his pick—being not only undeniably handsomer than any other man on his ship, but having far better manners.

  Instead, the two of them would retire early, and I would peep in through the window’s crack to discover them bent together over parchment, Mister Dolomance squeak-gurgling away in Parry’s ear while his master scratched away furiously with pencil and charcoal, checking and re-checking measurements with various instrumentation. And slowly, I came to figure they must be making a map together, hopelessly impenetrable to any land-dweller’s eyes: A grand survey of the ocean’s most uncharted areas, from the bottom up.

  “He seeks for a place more land than sea, yet neither,” was the quartermaster’s theory. “Only there might this bane of his be lifted, and he find peace, if that’s indeed what he’s after.”

  “Do you doubt it?”

  “With the Captain? Where he’s concerned I doubt all things, ’til I’m told otherwise. ’Tis the best policy I’ve found, thus far.”

  I glanced away, just in time to catch my fellow captive—listening too, as always—shoot me what passed for a smirk on that mask-like parody of a human face of his, as if to say: What fools!

  Indeed, it did often seem to me the crew barely knew whereof they spoke, notwithstanding the fact they’d spent far more time under Parry’s rule than I had. And one way or another, for all my researches, exactly nothing they—or I—had discovered about him could in any way free me from my situation. I remained trapped, his possession, his slave; yet still worse, for I was not even of any great interest to him, of any particular use.

  It galled me to realize this, almost as much as it galled me to realize I cared, either way. But perhaps Captain Parry was not altogether human either—partly dragon, maybe, for his twinned love of gold and fire, his magic, his damnable arrogance; partly wolf, for his love of blood.

  Or he was just a man like any other, plundering this great sea-womb and stealing its children, using power he had no right to to bend our Mother herself to his selfish desires. Would that make things better, or worse?

  I could not fight him, either way—not I, who had declined to fight even my own kind, against whom I might have stood some chance of success. So I must find some other, more subtle, way … think myself out of this trap, like the man he’d condemned me to pretend to be, instead of the seal I so heartily wished I still was.

  So I thought, and thought again, and thought yet further. Until, at last—I found a way.

  One night, while Mister Dolomance swam his own discomforts away in the sea below’s black bosom, I threw a rope over the ship’s side and shimmied far enough down to face my fears—plunged my face into the water and took a deep, drowning breath, opening my mouth wide enough to let words leak out, trusting the water to carry them to Mister Dolomance’s ear-holes, translated thus into speech we might both understand.

  We must work together, I told him, to gain our freedoms.

  A gulp, and the reply came back, harsh even through silky fathoms: Clumsy sea-cow in man-skin, born neither of one sort nor the other, you fat-greased, fleshy thing! What could you offer that I had any need of, save for enough of your meat to fill my craw, and your too-hot blood to wash it down with?

  I had expected nothing less, nothing more. Yet I spoke on, anyhow, and he …

  … hard words aside, I could tell, even then: Mister Dolomance listened.

  There was a long silence, after. So long I feared he might be swimming closer, too intent on an easy kill to truly mull my plan over.

  But: I accept, he said, at last. Just that.

  Good, I replied. And shimmied back up, before the crew might find me gone.

  * * *

  We did not consult long, Mister Dolomance and I, in forming our plans; I knew from the start just how ill-suited by nature he was to be anything like the planning sort. Yet it is always in their desires that men make themselves most vulnerable, and though Mister Dolomance had surely never looked to, we both understood he had already gained far more insight into our captor’s yearnings than I ever would.

  So—having extracted such intelligences about the hungers which drove Captain Parry as my co-conspirator was capable of giving—it fell to me, instead, to find a way to turn their direction to our mutual benefit.

  It was not so much that the Captain trusted Mister Dolomance (for in truth, he trusted no one, thinking no one equal enough to him to merit such a gift). Yet, as had already become rapidly clear, he placed a quite foolish amount of trust in his dominance over this awful creature, whose taming-by-force formed much of his own reputation.

  “I think you are not entirely honest with me, sir,” I heard him say, one evening, over those charts of theirs. “Yet so long as you do what I require, I find I care little what details you may think to withhold.”

  A mistake, on his part. And to not consider me, at all, in his equations … this was a mistake too, though he did not know it.

  Not yet.

  The Bitch made on, leading ever-westerly, with Mister Dolomance’s grumbles our pilot’s only guide for navigation. Islands grew scarce, and stores likewise; the crew grew unhappy, yet loath to express it. While Captain Parry kept his face carefully schooled, with only the dullish glint in those sea-burnt eyes to indicate a growing undercurrent of excitement—until the night when I saw him stride into the mess unexpectedly and swig lit rum from the communal store along with the rest, all of them too disconcerted by far to refuse him a part in their drunkenness.

  Later, his back set against the fore-deck’s supplemental mast while the crew reveled down below, I watched him stare out over the topmost figurehead’s shoulders at the dark billows Mister Dolomance hid in, and mutter to himself: “Hell gape to take you, Solomon Rusk, if it didn’t that day, the way it should have—you had no stink of the true practitioner about you, trained or un-, that I could discern. How was I to know it hid in your blood, any more than you did, waiting for that very last breath to bring your death’s vow of ruin on me to fruition?”

  Here he actually paused a half-moment; I swear
I saw him listen, as to an invisible companion. Then grimace at nothing and reply, pale face suddenly touched with heat—

  “‘Nice as a divine’ … yes, you would say that. But here is truth: You took liberties with me, though I warned you not to, and this is the result. Do not think to deny it! I swore you ship-loyalty, nothing more, but you were not the sort to stint yourself and you have reaped bitter fruit from that decision since, dead man. So you may complain all you wish when drink opens my ears, but I have suffered long enough for your sins, as well as my own. I will have my place, got for me with the sea’s help, and you—you will have nothing. Now stop your mouth, before I prison your ghost in a bottle and sink you further still; from this instant forward you may watch but not touch, not ever again, and choke on the sight.”

  All at once, the humid breeze seemed to turn sharp-cold, blowing in one bitter gust from where the Captain sat to where I squatted, listening; I shivered to feel it pass by, as if touched by some strange hand. Behind us, meanwhile, the quartermaster took up with a chantey tune, fellow after fellow soon joining in as a bawling round. Quickly, I recognized in it a song usually attributed to Captain Kidd, here modified to fit a different, entirely predictable personage:

  … oh, ’Salem Parry is my name, as I sail, as I sail,

  The root of my infame, as I sail, as I sail,

  My faults I will display,

  Committed day by day—

  Damnation be my lot, as I sail…

  For every legend, good or bad, warrants a song made from his exploits. But sailors are fatalists all, drowned men kept upright sheerly by luck’s vagaries—and thus unlikely to stay long impressed by anything, or anyone, who claims to be able to cheat destiny forever.

  …So we’ll taken be at last, and then die, and then die,

  Though we have reigned awhile, we will die—

  Though we have reigned awhile,

  While fortune seemed to smile,

  We must have our due deserts, and still die…

  If Parry found the implication insulting, however, he gave no sign of it; his fine-cut face stayed closed and stony, indifferent as always. And his thoughts, now he was done discoursing with Captain Rusk’s ghost, remained his own.

  The next day, we finally reached that place Mister Dolomance had described to me—a great knot of weed flowering up from the ocean’s bottom, roots sunk two hundred feet or more, down to the darkness where blue-clear water becomes mulch-black sand. For even at its very deepest places, the sea too gives way to land, eventually.

  (And might this have been the worst part of old Captain Rusk’s curse, made all the more potent by his extremity—for if there were truly no place without land, how could the ocean ever be anything but a stop-gap, a salve between bleedings against pain that never fully died? Which, in turn, perhaps explained so much about Parry’s manner, his stiff coldness, his constant distraction; things become clearest in hindsight, always, after the fact. Long after, most often.

  (But since I am now coming near my own story’s end, as you can no doubt tell, I judge I too may well be falling into a distraction. So I will take care to try and tell the rest of it through without embellishment, from here on.)

  We nosed in slowly, seeking not to entangle ourselves, ’til the weed-forest’s thickness made it impossible and we dropped anchor as best we might, hooking it in the crook where three branches grew together at the holdfast like ivy. Parry and a small party took to the boats, following Mister Dolomance, who merely gave that creaky laugh of his when Parry vented his doubts as to where, exactly, he might be leading them. For once, I felt I could tell exactly what he was saying:

  If you believe me capable of deception, wizard, even when still so ensorcelled I keep this shape you’ve laid on me, then it is yourself you make look bad, not I.

  At this, Captain Parry merely sniffed yet once more, forbearing response—haughty as the Devil himself, if with far less reason—and waved the oarsmen to their task, bidding them into the weed’s heart ’til all of them were eventually lost from sight. The remaining crew stayed on deck, watching after with weapons ready, lest their master send up some sort of signal for aid. But since I knew exactly what they would find if they only went far enough, I slipped down below and performed a few small tasks, while no one else was looking.

  One boat came back, the quartermaster at its helm. “Captain wants ye, Ciaran-boy, and quick-smart,” he called up to me. “To ‘bear witness to his triumph’, or some-such nonsense.”

  “Coming,” I said, and was over the side a second after, not waiting on a ladder or rope; I hit the water with a splash and let the man haul me bodily aboard, all uncaring of how wet I got these ill-fitting clothes I soon expected to no longer have to wear.

  The Captain’s boat had moored, again by tethering itself to whatever was handy, right by a weed-clump so thoroughly knotted it had grown a sort of skin, fleshy-rough as any mushroom. A veritable floating island, such as crews tell tale tales of from one end of the sea to the other, never for a moment thinking to set foot upon its like in real life. And it was here that Jerusalem Parry already stood, boot-heels sunk just a bare quarter-inch into the spongey mass below; stood and swayed slightly, braced against pain, ’til he was sure no blood would come. Whereupon his bitter mouth finally stretched wide and he threw back his head to laugh, delighted as any child with the way his magic had brought him at last to that place he’d so long sought for.

  “See?” he called to me, triumphant. “I stand victorious. Though Rusk stole the land from me, yet have I conquered; the sea itself delivers whatever I demand, no matter how impossible!”

  “Mister Dolomance and myself, rather, to whom you now owe a debt of thanks.”

  Parry raised a brow. “Mister Dolomance has proved a treasured investment, undoubtedly,” he admitted with surprising grace, “so much so I may even free him for it, one day. But you’ve given me little enough during your stay with my crew, aside from sullen looks and poor labour. Or am I mistaken?”

  He thought to toy with me in his customary style, all aristocrat’s drawl and fine vocabulary—as he’d done with Rusk, perhaps, who’d seemingly found it more attractive than I. But because I knew something the Captain did not, for once, I met his insults with a similar grin.

  “As it ensues, yes,” I replied. “For instead of giving, I have in fact taken something, without your notice.”

  “Explain yourself, sir.”

  I shrugged. “Wait, and see.”

  Out where weed gave way again to ocean, the Bitch floated low, lapped at by some gentle tidal gyre; we caught yet more music off its thronged deck, playing counterpoint to light laughter, scuffle and jesting. But all this changed a moment later, when—with a flash and muffled roar, like some cracked cannon’s back-fire—its magazine, which I’d carefully set fire to before disembarking, went off, blowing her hull so far open her guts were laid bare. The mainmast went one way, the mizzenmast another, tearing wood like splintery paper; screams rose, as did smoke, and flames.

  Had he been still on board, Captain Parry’s magic might have turned the trick, but from here, there was no help for it: those careful bonds suturing wreck to wreck dissolved, leaving the ship itself to slide apart in chunks and sink, taking the bulk of his crew down as well.

  Parry’s smile became a snarl, his eyes two werewolf moons “You flotsam scum,” he called me, words ground out between his teeth like bones. “God curse the day I ever let you on my vessel.”

  “Yes, and that was entirely at your pleasure, was it not? Well, I wish you full joy of that call, just as you once wished Rusk’s ghost joy of his, when you thought no one was listening … and joy of this new home of yours, likewise, for however long your stay on it may last.”

  Caught gloating as only fools do, I was so puffed with my own cleverness that I barely registered Parry’s hand slipping inside his coat, though I knew what it was he kept there. But when he withdrew the hex-bag, brandishing it like a pistol, I at least knew to shy away; the
boat rocked sharply, salt spray slopping in over the side, prompting the quartermaster—shook from his shocked silence, and grabbing for his oars—to swear in three separate languages.

  Still: “Not so much as I wish this joy on you,” Parry told me, coldly. And upended the whole mess into the waves between us—bottle-finger, eyeball, hair-rope, fetish, tooth and all else, useless to him in his current cheated state, except as one last weapon. Since, at the very end, yet another thing more came slipping out to feed the churn … my skin.

  My skin.

  I must confess I almost went in after it, just on the off-chance, before I recalled what lurked in wait below. But then I caught sight of Mister Dolomance, still crouched in his captor’s shadow, tearing away at his own parody-of-human disguise in a paroxysm of painful delight: mouth already ripped to either earhole with new teeth sprouting up along the bottom jaw in a bloody spray, muzzle punching out triangular, while his eyes—already far too widely spaced for comfort—migrated to either side of his head, losing their minimal ability to blink entirely. Shoulders hunched and splitting down mid-line, too, as his fin’s long-buried crest at last came arching up between …

  All your bad works brought to ruin in the same instant, I thought, staring Captain Parry down, straight in his silver-penny glare. All you’ve sowed bloomed up full, sir, and ripe for reaping; well, I do hope you relish the taste of it, you sad fellow sport of unnaturalness. What little you can swallow, that is, before the end.

  Beneath the Captain’s boots, the weed-island rocked and buckled, forcing him down on one knee. I watched it crack, pull apart at its weakest points, and remembered how Mister Dolomance had described the forest that supported it, where his kin (who do not of a custom flock, or even pair, at least for longer than it takes one to get a kit on another) glided so close they risked touching in order to graze the schools that fed on those mile-high weed-fronds. It was always twilight there, a purple half-night forever blood-tinged, the water itself heavy with rotting meat; a bed of infinite appetite upon which every prospective victim knew they would, at least, die full-stomached.