by Geoff Rodkey
The Ripper’s head drew back in surprise—and the tension on the porch suddenly spiked. A few of the men cursed in anger at Guts as the Ripper stepped toward him, descending the porch stairs with his mouth split in a terrible grin.
“You tell me boys gon’ cheat me?”
Guts took a deep breath. His next words came out shaky. “I think . . . long as you come with . . . nobody gonna cheat nobody.”
The Ripper was standing in front of Guts now, towering over him. For a moment, it seemed like anything might happen—including Guts getting cut down with a swing of the Ripper’s machete.
Then he raised his massive fist and cuffed Guts on the side of the head, just hard enough to remind him who was boss.
“Okay, Gussie. Take me to silver.”
THE WORD SPREAD FAST. Within a couple of minutes, the size of the crowd around Guts and the Ripper had doubled, to nearly fifty men, all of them as keyed up with greed as they were with drink.
A few tried to unhitch horses from the wagons to take up the mountain. But they were sailors, not horsemen, and drunk on top of it, so all but one of them gave up in frustration before they even got the horses out of their traces. And the last one quit once he realized he didn’t have a saddle, and horses’ backs were more slippery than they looked. The others had a good laugh at that.
The Ripper looked over the crowd. Then he singled out a few. “Monkey. Don. Lew. Kurt. Big Jim. Stay here an’ watch them lambs.” He nodded at the locked doors of the meetinghouse.
The men he’d called out—I remembered Big Jim from the few hours I’d spent with the Ripper’s crew, mostly because at four feet tall, he was hard to forget—all winced and scowled, but they didn’t talk back.
Guts and I traded a look of worry. Five men left behind was better than fifty, but it was still going to be trouble.
The Ripper saw us look at each other. His eyes narrowed. Then he pointed at me.
“You stay, too,” he said. Then he turned to the one they called Monkey. “Lambs give ye trouble . . . burn ’em up.”
“Wot ’bout this one?” Monkey jerked his thumb at me.
The Ripper looked my way.
“Yew wan’ join me crew?”
I nodded.
“Yew need be tough,” he told me.
Then he turned to Monkey. “Make sure he tough.”
I was just starting to wonder what he meant by that when a fist I never saw coming slammed into the side of my head.
CHAPTER 33
Desperate Measures
“NOT BAD. YE CAN take a punch.”
I spit some blood into the dirt. It hurt to breathe. The five of them had worked me over pretty good.
“’Ave a pull. Takes the pain away.” I raised my head to see Big Jim offering me a wine bottle. He was swaying on his feet from drink. They all were.
I managed to rise to my knees. “Got any water?” I asked.
Talking hurt more than breathing. And for some reason, Big Jim got offended at the request.
“— ye!” He swung the wine bottle, aiming to break it over my head. But I managed to duck out of the way, and he lost his balance and toppled over.
The others laughed. They were lounging on the steps of the inn now, looking worn out from the effort they’d put into beating me up. Two of them were rolling tobacco into cigarettes.
Big Jim popped back up again and gave me a resentful kick in the side as he waddled back over to sit with the others.
“Trouble with this one”—I think it was Don talking—“is ’e can take it. But ’e can’t dish it out.”
“Wot ye mean?”
“Don’t ye remember? ’At’s the one we put in the ring to fight Gutsy, back on that richie ship.”
They all stared at me. Then a couple of them started nodding.
“Oh, yeh! Couldn’t finish ’im!”
Lew chortled at the memory. “Had ’im pinned on ’is belly! Holdin’ a cannonball! Just had to brain ’im! One swing! An’ he let ’im go!”
Monkey snorted in disgust. “Lost ten silver on you,” he growled at me.
“I know where you can get it back,” I said.
“That so?”
“That and more. Up the hill.” I looked down the road in the direction Guts had led Ripper and the others. They were out of sight now.
Monkey ignored me.
But I had to get these men up the mountain somehow. If I didn’t, even if Guts and the girls managed to take out all the others, this bunch would hear the explosion and figure out they’d been tricked.
Then they’d torch the meetinghouse. And after that, they’d kill me.
Unless they killed me first.
Got to get them up the mountain . . .
How?
They’d lost interest in me and turned their attention to ransacking a pile of discarded household items. I watched for a while as Monkey and Lew got into a tug-of-war over a mud-spattered silk shirt. It lasted until they accidentally ripped the shirt in half.
They’re drunk. And stupid. And greedy.
An idea started to form in my head.
It was going to be hard to pull off. And if it went wrong, I’d end up taking another beating. Or worse.
But I had to try. My heart began to race as I planned what I’d say.
Do it fast. Or you’ll be too nervous to sell it.
“You’re all Rovians, yeah?” I asked.
Monkey snorted. “Ain’t no Rovian, me. Don’t serve no king but meself.”
“I mean your blood. Your people come from Rovia? Mine do, too.”
“What of it?”
“Shut yer yap, boy,” growled Don.
“Just want to know, if I’m joinin’ the crew—do they always deal us short?”
“— ye on about?” Don was raising his fist to slug me.
I had to get the words out fast. “’Cause I know how it is with them Cartagers. I crewed with ’em before.” I started to slip into a pirate accent. “Stick together, they do. Look out for themselves. And they’s crafty! Always spinnin’ their webs against honest Rovian folk! Seen it time and again. Put two Short-Ears in a room full o’ Rovians, mark my words—them devils’ll figure out how to cheat us six ways from Sunday.”
Don looked suspicious. But he had lowered his fist.
Lew was slowly nodding. “They does talk with each other,” he said. “In them slippery voices. I seen it.”
“Bet yer lot don’t never get a fair share,” I said. “Bein’ Rovians on a ship run by Short-Ears.”
“Now, hang on,” said Don. “Ripper treats us square.”
“Don’t look like it to me,” I scoffed.
“How’s ’at?”
“Jus’ look round,” I told him. “How many Short-Ears on yer crew?”
“Ten.”
“How many the Ripper leave down here with the lambs?”
“None.”
“See? Only ones gettin’ cheated are us Rovians.”
“How we gettin’ cheated?”
“Countin’ ye short on the silver,” I said.
“—!” cursed Monkey.
Don was skeptical. “How ye know that?”
“How do you? Gonna see him count it? Less yer standin’ there when they find it, ye ain’t never gonna know.”
All five of them had their brows furrowed now, trying to puzzle it out. Monkey looked pretty sold. Don, not so much. The others were somewhere in the middle.
I sighed. “Just how it is, I guess. Join this crew, I better get used to the short end of the stick.”
I shook my head sadly, climbed the steps, and started to pick at the leftover food like I had all the time in the world to wait for the Ripper to come back.
“Hang on a bit, boyo,” Don said. “Talk this out with us.”
It took quite a bit more talking—not so much because they didn’t believe they were getting cheated but because they were scared of what the Ripper might do to them if they abandoned their posts. But in the end, greed won out over fear. Ten minutes later, I was leading all five of them on a fast march up the hill toward the temple.
We started out at such a good clip that I was worried we might catch up to the others too soon and the Ripper would order us right back down the hill again. But I was on my third trip up the mountain without much in the way of food or sleep, and by the time we’d gone a mile, my legs were shaking, my lungs were burning, my head was spinning, stabbing pains from the beating I’d just taken were shooting through me with every step I took . . . and I knew I had the opposite problem.
“Hurry up, ye —!” Don was a good twenty yards ahead, and he was getting angry. Lew was right behind him, and Big Jim was somehow managing to keep pace even though his legs were about a third as long as everyone else’s.
“—, ye —!” Monkey and Kurt were both lagging behind me, wheezing like a pair of clogged fireplace bellows. I think it was because they smoked too much.
A mile later, they’d all passed me by.
“C’mon, ye —! Show us the way!”
By then, I couldn’t even spend the energy to raise my head and see how far ahead they were. I was getting so dizzy it was all I could do to keep my feet under me.
Keep going.
“Move yer —!”
Keep going . . .
I heard Millicent’s voice in my head.
Just stay alive.
Somehow, I stayed on the trail.
“THERE IT IS!”
I was almost to the timberline. I could see the barren ridge rising up ahead of me.
Then I was out of the trees, and the grade was so steep I was practically crawling up the slope.
Monkey was lagging, too. I’d caught up to him again. Big Jim was just in front of us.
I raised my head and saw the temple steps in the distance. Off to the right, there was a cluster of men crowding the tunnel entrance. The first batch that had gone up the mountain with Guts.
I couldn’t breathe anymore. I was going to pass out.
Just stay alive.
I was on all fours, scuttling up the patchy rock, my arms and legs trembling from exhaustion. The cluster of men was thinning out as the last of the pirates filed into the tunnel. Don and Lew had almost reached them.
I saw Guts. He was coming up out of the stairwell, dodging the men going the other way.
They were trading words, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. He was gesturing to them with his hook, the short sword banging in its scabbard against his leg.
Beyond the tunnel entrance, a thin tendril of smoke was rising from the big rock where the girls were hiding.
They’d lit the torch.
Don and Lew reached the stairs and disappeared down them, past Guts.
Then it was Big Jim’s turn.
I was almost there myself, and Guts was looking past me, gesturing with his hook.
“C’mon!”
Where’s Monkey?
I’d somehow passed him. He was straggling behind me.
I stepped aside for him.
“Hurry! They’ll count it without you!”
Monkey paused at the top of the steps, gulping air.
“GET IN!” Guts screamed. “MISSIN’ IT!”
Monkey scowled, and for a moment I thought he was going to stop and scrap with Guts. But then he stumbled down the steps after his crew.
The last pirate was inside.
Kira had been watching from behind the rock. As soon as Monkey’s head disappeared from view, she came out at a dead run, torch in hand.
Guts and I began to sprint for her, trying to get as far away from the stairs as we could before the explosion came.
She was twenty yards from us when I heard the roar of a familiar voice, echoing out of the tunnel.
“OY!”
It was the Ripper.
As Kira closed the distance between us, she cocked her arm back and let the torch fly. I ducked, lost my footing, and went tumbling over.
Someone cried out in anguish. I looked up from the ground.
It was Millicent. She’d emerged from the rock and was staring past me in dismay.
I turned to see what she was looking at. Kira and Guts were just in front of me, still on their feet. Guts was pulling the short sword from its scabbard as they stared at the tunnel entrance.
The burning torch was lying atop the stairwell. Ripper Jones was halfway up the steps, his head swiveling from the torch to the bottom of the stairwell.
He must have figured out what we were trying to do, because he mounted the last few steps in one quick stride, grabbed the torch, and swept it up off the ground.
Then he straightened his back and turned in our direction.
He slowly raised the torch over his head, flaunting it like a king with a scepter.
He was laughing at us.
It didn’t work.
We’d failed.
I was heaving myself to my feet, ready to run for my life, when Guts took two steps in the Ripper’s direction and swung his good arm like he was cracking a whip.
A glint of steel flashed through the air.
Then the torch in the Ripper’s hand was falling, straight down, disappearing into the stairwell.
The Ripper jerked his head up, eyes wide and staring at the arm that had raised the torch.
It was still up over his head.
But the hand was gone, severed at the wrist by Guts’s sword.
Then the Ripper was gone, too, swallowed up by the column of fire that burst out of the tunnel as the earth shuddered from the explosion.
CHAPTER 34
The Road to Blisstown
THE FOUR OF US staggered into Blisstown just before sunset. The sky was once again turning its unearthly shades of red and orange, made all the more haunting by the smoke that lingered from the house fires on the edge of town.
It took some work with an ax to bust the chain that barred the meetinghouse door. When we finally got it open, the number of people who spilled out onto the street was a real shock—there were easily a thousand, maybe twice that number. They must have been packed in there cheek by jowl.
Then the crying and the hugging started. I’d never been hugged by a stranger before, let alone by dozens of them. It was touching, I guess, except that my arms and ribs were badly bruised from the working over the pirates had given me, so it actually hurt to get hugged.
And what I really wanted at that point wasn’t hugs, but food.
I was trying to make my way over to the piles of it the pirates had left on the porch of the Peacock Inn—which was going fast, because the townspeople hadn’t eaten since yesterday, either—when Millicent climbed up on top of the porch railing and began to address the crowd.
“I have something important to say!” she called out.
“THANK YOU!” someone yelled.
“WE LOVE YOU!” called out someone else.
Then they were all crowing, “THANK YOU!” and, “WE LOVE YOU,” and people were reaching out from all sides to pat me on the back and shoulders—which, again, was nice and all, except that it hurt—and a few feet away, I saw a woman try to plant a kiss on Guts’s cheek and nearly get a hook in the neck for her trouble, because he didn’t care for it at all. And she was blocking his path to the food.
Millicent had her hand up, waving for silence and saying something I couldn’t hear because jowly old Governor Burns, who supposedly ran Sunrise but mostly just did whatever Roger Pembroke told him to, was grabbing me around the neck—ow—and yelling, “This boy’s a hero!” right next to my ear.
No one was paying Millicent much attention at all.
Then she screamed, “SHUT UP!” at the top of her lungs, and that did the trick.
“We’re glad you’re all alive,” Millicent shouted. “But you need to hear this!”
A thousand people were silent now, their eyes on her.
“We’ve been to the silver mine,” she told them. “The men working there were slaves.”
There was a murmur of voices.
“That’s illegal!” someone cried.
“Not here!” a woman squeaked.
“Quite an accusation,” growled another.
“It’s not an accusation!” Millicent yelled back. “It’s a fact. They were in chains. Every one of them.”
I glanced at the Governor. He looked a lot less joyful than he had been a few seconds ago.
“I’m sure,” Millicent went on, “that most of you didn’t know this. But you know it now. And it’s our duty, all of us—to make sure it never happens again.”
“Never!”
“Course not!”
“It’s an outrage!”
A handful of people were yelling things like that. But just a handful.
Millicent’s face tightened. “Say never again!”
“Never again!” Fifty people shouted it. Maybe not even that many.
Millicent repeated herself, louder this time. “Never again!”
“Never again!” Half the crowd now.
“Swear it! NEVER AGAIN!”
“NEVER AGAIN!” This time, she had them all.
Millicent’s head turned from side to side, staring out at the crowd. I think she was trying to decide whether or not to believe them.
“We’re good people,” she said finally. “Let’s make sure we act like it.”
Then she looked over her shoulder, at the townspeople clustered around the food on the porch behind her.
“And for Savior’s sake, leave some food for us! We saved your lives, and we’re hungry.”
The crowd on the road parted for Guts, Kira, and me, clearing a path for us to get up the stairs to the porch. As we reached the top, I found Millicent locked in an embrace with her mother. They were both crying.
When Mrs. Pembroke saw me, she practically knocked over two townspeople in her hurry to get her arms around me. The hug hurt like anything, but this time, I didn’t mind.
