The Sapphire Cutlass

by Sharon Gosling

  Desai’s shouts stopped as suddenly as they started, leaving only the dull roar of the chant, roving closer and closer. Thaddeus spun around, listening for any sign that his friends were still nearby, but heard nothing.

  He felt something slide down his arm — fingers. Thaddeus jerked himself away, backing into the mist, but doing so bumped him into something else — something grasping, pulling at his shirt, drawing him in. He pulled away again, spinning to face his attacker, but there was nothing but the infernal gray blankness and the endless, endless chanting.

  A feeling of hopelessness washed over him as he saw ghostly faces peering out of the mist. The others were gone, he knew that — their silence was as loud as the chant that droned on and on like some kind of drug. He would be taken, too, and who only knew where — somewhere none of them would ever be found, much less where they could hope to stop whatever the Sapphire Cutlass had planned beyond this valley of terrors.

  The chanting stopped. Thaddeus knew he was out of time.

  As one, the figures lunged toward him. Cruel hands reached for him, grasping his arms, his legs, tightening around his neck.

  {Chapter 15}

  ANUKARANA

  The waves lapped at the dark shoreline. Rémy shivered in the breeze that whisked across the pale sand. Now that the sun had set — had been set, in fact, for an hour or so — the air had chilled again. In fact, it was becoming so cold that the two pirates holding her captive were in the process of building a large fire. Flames licked at the dry wood they had collected from the shore, the orange flickers growing by the second, their crackle and fizz filling the restless salt air.

  Rémy sat on the sand with her back against a rock, her hands and feet tied so that she could not move even to rub her cold arms. The fire had been constructed in the sheltered shadow of a spit of stone that jutted out from the even taller cliffs around them. It would be invisible to anyone looking toward the shore from the ocean, and indeed to anyone looking from inland, too, unless they happened to lean directly over the crumbling cliff edge and look down. It was a good spot to hide — one that her captors were obviously very familiar with, judging from the remains of old fires dotted about the shore.

  The airship stood behind them where Rémy had been forced to land it, a safe distance from the growing fire. The balloon was almost completely deflated — the ruby exhausted from its long two days of flight.

  Rémy rolled her shoulders, hating being so helpless. As she watched, the female pirate moved slowly in Rémy’s direction, her attention on the fire as she rubbed her hands together. Rémy watched her profile with interest. She didn’t think this girl was much older than she was. Her face was built of sharp and elegant angles — a proud forehead, a pointed nose pierced with a tiny diamond that glinted like a star against her skin. Her eyes were large and clear, even in the darkness. The girl’s long black hair swept back from her face in a thick, unfussy plait that fell almost to her waist. There were scars, too — almost as many as Rémy had noticed on the men — slashes that patterned her arms and neck, a testament to a hard life. The girl’s clothes were shabby and functional — a cropped green top without sleeves, baggy brown trousers bound with a belt at the waist and what looked like strips of leather at the calves, where they were pushed into scuffed tan boots that laced almost to the knee. The talwar hung in a leather scabbard from her belt, her hand hovering near its hilt as if ready to draw it at a moment’s notice.

  “How long have you been a pirate?” Rémy asked quietly.

  The girl started as if she’d forgotten Rémy was even there, looking at her for a second before setting her mouth in a line and looking away.

  “I used to be part of a circus,” Rémy went on, trying to find something that they might have in common. “My master made me steal almost as soon as I could walk. It’s not a great life, is it?”

  The girl turned and looked at her again, her eyes piercing and disdainful in the firelight. “Speak for yourself, anukarana,” she said in a low voice. “I have a very good life. I am my own master.”

  “You called me that before,” said Rémy. “Anu … Anukarana?”

  The girl stared hard at the fire, her eyes glittering in the flickering light. “Yes.”

  “What does it mean?”

  The girl was silent for a moment, her shoulders hunched against her knees. Then she looked at Rémy, her face expressionless. “In my language it means ‘imitator.’”

  “Why do you call me that?”

  She turned back to the fire. “You know.”

  “I don’t,” said Rémy. “I promise you, I don’t. Please tell me.”

  The girl didn’t look at her again, or speak another word, as if the fire was telling her secrets that she had to strain to hear.

  “I can’t explain how I found your ship,” Rémy said quietly. “I don’t think you would believe me if I told you. But I had a reason — a good one. I was looking for my brother. My twin.”

  Rémy saw the girl’s shoulders tense and knew that she’d heard what Rémy had said.

  “Is there someone aboard your ship who looks like me?” Rémy asked. “Is that why you called me an imitator? Is that why you all look at me,” she indicated Scar Face, sitting on the other side of the fire, “as if you have seen me before?”

  The girl turned to look at her again. “Who sent you?” she asked. “Your ship bears the Union Jack. Have the British paid to put a curse upon Kai’s soul? Is that why you are here, anukarana? To trick us into betraying him because they can find no other way to catch him?”

  “Kai?” Rémy asked, her heart speeding up. “Who is that? Does he — does he look like me?”

  The girl smiled, though the gesture was far from friendly. “If you truly do not know, you will find out soon enough. When he comes with the others.”

  “Do you mean your ship?” Rémy asked. “How do you know they’ll make it? They took heavy damage. What if they were destroyed?”

  The girl put back her head and laughed. “Impossible, anukarana. Kai leads a charmed life. He will survive, no matter what you or his other enemies throw at him.”

  “I’m not — I’m not his enemy,” Rémy said, frustrated, then stopped as a thought occurred to her. “He — Kai — you say he has a charmed life. Does he have a talisman? Perhaps a precious stone — an opal, maybe — that he wears around his neck?”

  The girl looked at her sharply, eyes narrowed and fingers flexed. She relaxed a little and looked back to the fire. “I am Upala,” she said softly. “I am his opal, and his talisman. I will always keep him safe.”

  Rémy was about to ask her what she meant when a mighty yell echoed against the cliff walls and reverberated around the beach. At first Rémy thought it was the wind playing tricks, but then it came again, closer this time. She twisted around, looking toward the water as Upala stood.

  The pirate’s vessel crested the waves as it rounded the cliff to enter the cove. It was battered and scarred, but it was whole — and on its deck stood every one of Upala’s shipmates, apparently unharmed.

  The ship dropped anchor and the pirates began to jump over the side, splashing into the shallows and wading through the water like a tide of their own making. They were singing and dancing, swaggering as they drew nearer, evidently pleased with themselves.

  The pirates rushed up the beach toward the fire, scattering sand into the breeze around them. All around her, they moved in flurries of color and sound. It felt unreal to Rémy as she watched everything from very far away, atop one of the cliffs that served as their shelter. Gone were the terrifying cries that had greeted the airship, replaced now by laughter and wild yells of celebration.

  For a second, the mass of bodies parted, like two tides drawing away from each other. Rémy looked through the gap and saw a pirate striding up the sand against the wind. He was thin and wiry, dressed all in black — black boots, tied up to his calve
s, black breeches, black shirt. On his head was a black tri-corn hat.

  Rémy felt her heart judder as he turned, knowing what she was about to see even before she had actually seen it. And suddenly, there he was. It was like looking in a mirror where everything is recognizable although very slightly skewed. This man, this pirate dressed in black — he looked like her. He looked like Rémy.

  He didn’t look in her direction at all. She watched him stride across the sand, weaving around his carousing shipmates with complete determination. Rémy realized that he was making for Upala. A smile burst across her face as she saw him — the first genuine one Rémy had seen her give in all the hours they had spent together that day. The two pirates walked toward each other and Rémy expected them to embrace, but instead they stopped a pace or so in front of each other, seeming suddenly awkward. Upala dipped her head, nodded, and then shrugged at something he said. Then she looked in Rémy’s direction, said something, and pointed.

  The man turned. He looked straight at Rémy with a look sharp enough to pierce stone. Her heart began to thump as he strode toward her, no trace of surprise on his scarred face. The pirate walked until he stood a hair’s breadth away, his face a mirror that Rémy could easily have pressed her nose to.

  “Well, well,” he whispered. “So here you are at last, Rémy Brunel.”

  Rémy opened her mouth, but found it impossible to get any sound past the lump that had unexpectedly formed in her throat. In any case, what was she to say? It seemed that this pirate knew her, and of course she should know him, but she did not.

  The face before her — so familiar and yet so completely unknown — studied her carefully. The pirate’s eyes narrowed slightly.

  “My name is Kai,” he said softly. “Do you not even know that, little sister?”

  {Chapter 16}

  THE REUNION

  The pirates’ celebratory mood continued long into the night. The fire burned brightly, and they danced on the sand in the light of the flames as they roasted fish freshly caught from the ocean for their supper. Rémy sat on the sand beside the pirate captain — her brother, and not only her brother, her true twin. Together they looked out at the shenanigans before them.

  Upala had left them to talk and was now dancing with one of the largest men Rémy had ever seen, even accounting for all her years of traveling with the circus. Rémy glanced at Kai and saw that her brother’s gaze was fixed on the fierce female pirate. Upala had removed her boots and was dancing barefoot with such carefree abandon that it was easy to forget just how fearsome she could look with a sword in her hand and a scowl on her face. Kai watched her with an expression that softened the hardest lines of his face, too, and seeing this Rémy looked away, a slight pang piercing her heart. Kai’s regard for Upala was obvious, and it made her think of Thaddeus. She wondered how he and the others were, and wished she were with them. The sooner she could follow their trail, the better. Which meant she shouldn’t merely be sitting here, watching this celebration.

  “You did not seem surprised to see me,” she began, leaning closer to Kai so that her voice carried over the noise of the party.

  Kai offered a slight smile, but his gaze remained fixed on the festivities. “Oh, I was surprised — to see you here, anyway.”

  “I never even knew I had a brother,” Rémy told him. “Not until a few months ago. But you knew you had a sister, all along?”

  The pirate turned to look at her at last, a dark light in his eyes. “I knew about the curse that hangs over our family. I knew what part the raja and that rat Gustave had in it and I knew, yes, I knew, that I was a twin. But life is difficult enough, Rémy, without dwelling on those things you cannot change. If you are waiting for me to apologize for not searching for you, you will wait a long time. I have had hard enough work just keeping myself alive.”

  Rémy looked away, pained. “That’s not what I meant,” she said, blinking hard as she stared at the flames. “I just do not understand why you knew when I did not.”

  Kai leaned forward to pick up a piece of driftwood at his feet and turned it in his hands. “When our parents separated, they each took one of us. Our mother took you. Our father took me.”

  “And brought you back here? To India?”

  Her twin shrugged. “He died before I was old enough to think to ask him why. Maybe he thought he could find a way to lift the curse himself. He always talked of you — you and our mother. He loved you both. They just … could not be together, all the time that the curse was in place. And he never found a way to break it.”

  “It is broken now,” Rémy told him. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Kai stopped twirling the stick, but he didn’t look up. His face took on a frown. “What do you mean?”

  “I have a friend. His name is Desai. He is from here, but he has spent many years living in London. The diamond that our parents stole from the raja all those years ago — I found it, Kai. Desai brought it back here, to lift the curse. We are both free.”

  Kai slowly lifted his head and looked out at the dancers again. The tune had changed, but the music was still just as fast. Upala weaved in and out of the other dancers, laughing as she twisted and turned, her bare feet scattering flurries of sand into the air. Kai’s eyes found her in the crowd, as Rémy suspected they always would. “The curse … is broken?” he repeated slowly.

  “Yes, thanks to Desai.”

  “He must be a great friend, indeed.”

  Rémy saw her chance and seized it. “He is. He is a great friend and a great man. At this moment he is trying to save this place from a terrible danger.”

  Her brother turned to look at her. “A danger? What danger?”

  Rémy took a deep breath. “It is called the Sapphire Cutlass. Have you heard of it?”

  Kai stared at her for a moment, then gave a bitter laugh. “Your friend has been telling you fairy stories, little sister. There are far worse dangers here than a fable like the Sapphire Cutlass. Monsters that you, in your soft little circus life, could not possibly imagine.”

  Rémy prickled at that. “Dangers such as running into a band of marauding pirates, for example?”

  Kai shook his head. “We are not the people to fear here — not for good, ordinary folk, in any case. We do what we do to help the people of this country, not to hurt them. The British take everything from these people and give nothing back. They take their land, their crops, their jewels, their sons. What can be more monstrous than that? So the people turn to the person they think can help them — the raja, who is even worse. He forces them to fight against all his enemies in an army that has no firepower, no training — no hope of winning at all.”

  Rémy thought of the villages that the airship had stopped in before the jeweled man had attacked them — how in many of them there had only been the very young and the very old and the very sick. Suddenly it seemed obvious where the able-bodied had gone, and why the crops had gone untended.

  “We take from both sides, and we do what we can to help with what we steal,” Kai went on. “So you see, little sister, we have plenty of monsters already without borrowing them from children’s stories.”

  “What if it isn’t a children’s story?” she pressed.

  Kai laughed scornfully. “A woman made of sapphire with the power to tear whole armies asunder with her bare hands? How could it be anything but?”

  Rémy shrugged. “Some people believe, yes? There is a cult, so Desai told me.”

  Kai threw the chunk of driftwood away. “So there is, he is right. A cult made of superstitious old men and women with nothing else to do with their time and nothing better to put their faith in.”

  “Desai says it is more than that. The cult has been growing, becoming more and more powerful,” she said, thinking it better to leave out, at least for the moment, her friend’s belief in the supernatural powers of the mountain and its sapphires. “He t
hinks someone is using the myth of the Sapphire Cutlass as a way to recruit more people.”

  Her brother looked at her thoughtfully. “Does he now? And what would be the good of that?”

  Rémy shrugged. “People will do anything for something they believe in, isn’t that right? Terrible things. Bad things. Desai thinks they are preparing for war.”

  “A war? Who with?”

  “He doesn’t know, but he thinks it is the raja’s mystic, Sahoj, behind it. And if that’s the case and the British find out, there will be a war for sure.”

  Kai raised his hands. “Well then, I say let them fight. If they wipe each other out, so much the better, eh?”

  Rémy put her hand on his arm, leaning closer. “Really? You would want that? You would let those people you care so much for be caught in the middle of such a war?”

  Her brother set his jaw and did not answer, staring at the fire with dark eyes.

  “I have seen things, Kai. The airship I brought here — it is nothing compared to the machines of war that I know are out there. Metal soldiers with no feeling and no heart that can march for days without food and will fight without mercy; ships that can sail beneath the water so that no one will see them coming — powered by the earth itself and by gem stones like the one that our parents stole, all those years ago. You don’t have to believe me — I can show you the ruby that makes my ship fly. I have seen things you wouldn’t believe, brother, and they have all lead us here, to this place — to the Sapphire Cutlass. Perhaps the story is just a story, but whatever is happening in the name of that story should terrify us all.”

  “And say I were to believe your words, little sister? Say I were to feel as afraid as you — what would you have me do about it?”

  “Help us. The people I traveled here with — good people, four of them — they are journeying into the valley of the Sapphire Cutlass as we speak. Come with me. You and your pirates. Come with me to find them — to help them, with whatever they find.”