Blue Sea Burning (29 page)

Millicent led us around the far end, to a spot about a hundred yards across the rock-studded hillside from the temple. Just past one of the larger rocks was an opening in the ground, flush with the earth so it was impossible to see until you were almost on top of it. Inside it, a set of worn, rubble-strewn steps led down to an underground tunnel just tall enough for a man to walk through.

We followed Millicent down the steps and into the tunnel. It was pitch black, but we'd brought half a dozen torches and a box of matches with us from the mine's storehouses, so we used those to light our way.

After a hundred yards or so—far enough to put us directly under the temple ruins—the tunnel widened into a deep, empty chamber. In the middle of the twenty-foot-high ceiling, an air shaft let in just enough sunlight to see.

Millicent had been right—as long as we could get the pirates inside that chamber and seal off the mouth of the tunnel with the explosive, it was perfect.

Kira peered up at the airshaft, her face lit by the beam of sunlight that streamed down from it.

“What did they use this for?” she asked.

“It must have been to fool people,” said Millicent.

“What do you mean?”

“That shaft you're looking at is right behind the temple altar. Which they probably used for the Marriage of the Sun—when Ka took the Dawn Princess and her dowry away with him? Right?”

“Right.”

“Well, if you had a princess, and some treasure, and you wanted them to rise up in the sky and disappear . . . but you couldn't
actually
make them do that, because it's impossible—”

“It's not impossible,” said Kira, scowling. “Ka exists—”

“I'm not saying he doesn't. But for the sake of argument, suppose he doesn't
actually
take the princess and the treasure away with him. And you still want people to think he does. Wouldn't it be helpful if you had a hole behind the altar you could just drop them into?”

Kira glared at Millicent, and I figured I needed to stop the argument before it got going.

“Come on,” I said. “We need to figure out how to blow the tunnel entrance.”

POSITIONING THE KEGS
was simple—if we stacked them in the recesses just inside the tunnel entrance on either side, no one coming in would notice as long as they weren't looking too closely.

The trouble came when we tried to figure out how to set them off. We needed to be well away from the tunnel, not just so we wouldn't blow ourselves up, but so the pirates wouldn't see us and get suspicious. But the fuses we'd found with the powder burned so slowly that if we tried to light them from any distance that gave us cover, the pirates would've left the chamber and gotten halfway back to Blisstown before the charge ignited.

“Lay a trail of powder,” said Guts. “Up the steps and across the slope to them big rocks, where we'll be hidin'.”

He pulled a short sword from a scabbard fixed to his belt. He'd taken it from one of the pirates back at the silver mine, and although we'd all gotten on him about robbing the dead, he'd claimed it wasn't robbery at all.

“That there's Lank,” he'd snorted. “
Porsamora
stole this off me a year ago. Takin' it back is all.”

Now he used his newly recovered sword as a crowbar, sticking it under the lid of one of the kegs to pry it open.

Millicent stopped him. “Wait—powder won't work. You can't get it up the steps.”

We quickly realized what she meant. Every step meant a break in the line of powder, so the fire would just fizzle out at the top of the steps.

“We'll have to light it from the bottom,” said Kira.

“How are we going to do that? Anybody standing down there will get incinerated.”

No one spoke for a moment. My stomach started to churn.

This is never going to work.

“We'll throw a torch,” said Millicent. “Into the stairwell.”

“You think that'll work?”

“Yes! It'll
have
to.” She looked around. About fifty yards from the tunnel entrance were the rocks Guts had mentioned—half a dozen of them, more than big enough to hide behind.

Millicent pointed to the rocks. “We'll wait behind those. Leave plenty of powder on the floor around the tunnel entrance. Once the pirates are inside the chamber, we'll light one of the torches and throw it down the stairwell from a distance.”

My stomach was twisting itself into knots.

It's never going to work.

“Right, then,” said Guts, putting his sword back in its scabbard. “You two get that powder set to blow. Me an' Egg'll go fetch the pirates.”

His voice caught a little on the last sentence. And when I looked at him, there was a worry on his face like I'd never seen before.

In all the time I'd known him, I'd never seen Guts scared of anything. Until now.

It's never going to work.

He was already at the top of the tunnel steps, ready to head down the mountain to Blisstown.

“Comin'?”

I followed him up the steps. My legs felt like lead.

“Wait!” Kira pushed past me, ran to Guts, and wrapped her arms around him.

I turned away—it was a private moment, and I didn't want to ruin it by gawking at them—and when I did, I found myself face-to-face with Millicent, her deep brown eyes staring into mine.

She didn't say a word.

She didn't say she was sorry about Cyril, that she regretted the whole thing, that it was me she really loved and she knew that now, and that if we somehow managed to get through this, she'd never doubt it again.

She didn't have to. The look in her eyes said all of that.

Then I kissed her—or maybe she kissed me, I'm not sure which—and when it was over, she cupped my face in her hands and gave me one last, long look with those eyes that I could have stared into forever.

“Just stay alive,” she said.

“You too.”

Then I turned and followed Guts down the mountain.

Ripper's Town

IT'S NEVER GOING TO WORK.

It'll work. It
has
to work.

It won't. We'll never get all the pirates inside that chamber.

Don't think like that. Stay positive.

This is insane.

“Donkey's followin' us.”

“What?” I looked over my shoulder. Smack was trotting down the ridge in our direction. It was a little annoying to find out he was capable of moving that fast when he felt like it.

“He's not a donkey,” I said. “He's a mule.”

“Wot's the difference?”

I thought about it. “I don't know. They're bigger, I think.”

“He ain't big.”

“Bigger than a donkey.”

“— your —! He's a donkey.”

“— yours! He's a mule!”

We went back and forth like that for a while. It was stupid, but I didn't mind. As long as we were arguing, I couldn't focus on how insane the whole plan was.

It's never going to—

“That's a
pudda
donkey!”

“He's a mule! Look at his ears!”

“Wot's ears got to do with it?”

“HEE-AW!”
Smack had joined the argument.

“See?” Guts twitched. “Donkey noise, that is.”

“Why's he following us, anyway?”

“Thinks we got food.”

“I
wish
we had food.”

“Ever eat donkey?”

“He's a
mule
!”

“— YER
PUDDA
MULE! I ate horse once.”

“That's disgusting!”

“It ain't! Same as cow.”

“No, it isn't.”

“Is!”

Guts must have been as eager for the distraction as I was, because the horse meat/cow meat fight went on even longer than donkey/mule did. And when it was finished, we somehow got into an argument about whether cows had feet or hooves. That led right into one about whether it was okay to eat animals that had feet. On the heels of that came a bitter dispute over the reason why snakes don't have feet.

Then there were a couple of
really
stupid arguments, the subjects of which I'd forgotten almost before they were over.

We were less than a mile above the harbor, spitting curses at each other over whether dolphins were fish or something else, when we saw thick black smoke billowing up over Blisstown.

We're too late. They're burning the hostages.

“Run!”

We sped down the footpath so fast that by the time we reached the outskirts of town, the only things that hurt more than my knees were my lungs. There was a thick haze in the air, and the first half dozen houses we saw were on fire.

Smack had quit following us by then. Donkey or not, he had more sense than we did.

We walked through the dirty haze toward the middle of town, the smoke giving us coughing fits and my cheeks prickling from the heat of the burning buildings, until we came upon two men crouched over something in the middle of the road.

They were Ripper pirates. One of them was using a hand ax to hack at the lock on a small, steel-banded chest. What looked like a crumpled pile of clothes was lying a few feet away by the side of the road, but I didn't peer too closely at it, because I was pretty sure it wasn't just clothes.

We were coughing so loudly the pirates heard us even before we came into view through the haze. One of them rose to his feet as we approached, a pistol in his hand and a drunken snarl on his lips.

“On yer—
Gutsy
?” He lowered the pistol, gaping at Guts.

“Oy!” The second man was looking up from the chest in disbelief. “Where ye come from, dog?”

“Been chained up in that mine by these —
pudda
rich folk,” Guts said. “Need to talk to the Ripper.”

During the walk from the mine to the temple ruins, we'd worked out exactly what Guts was going to say to the pirates and when. But he was holding his new short sword in his good hand, just in case.

“Well, ain't you sumpin'?” the one with the pistol said, grinning. “Where's all them boys went up to the mine?”

“Dead,” said Guts.

Both men stopped smiling. “Dead how?”

“Come with, ye'll find out when the Ripper does.”

“S'posin' ye tell us first?”

Guts twitched. “What fer? Ripper make you cap'n?”

“Watch it, crip—” The one with the pistol started to raise it.

“Lemmy,” said the other one, with a note of warning in his voice.

Lemmy looked back at his mate. Then he scowled and lowered his gun.

The one crouched over the chest stuck his hand ax in his belt and stood up, hoisting the chest over his shoulder.

“C'mon.”

Only the houses on the outskirts of town had been put to the torch. The rest were still standing, although the streets we passed were a mess, with clothes and furniture strewn all over.

The townspeople who hadn't resisted, which was most of them, looked to be locked up in the big meetinghouse at the end of Heavenly Road. Next door to the meetinghouse was the Peacock Inn, where the pirates had set up their headquarters.

The road in front of the inn was piled with the remains of an island-wide sacking: dozens of busted-open chests, wardrobes, trunks, and cabinet drawers, along with hundreds of once-valuable objects discarded in the dirt—tableware, broken clocks, rolled-up carpets, soiled velvet curtains, and the busted remains of a few hundred wine bottles.

The carriages and wagons that had hauled in the plunder lay abandoned all along Heavenly Road, clogging the street halfway to the pier. Most of the horses still stood in their traces, heads drooping and motionless, like they sensed there'd be trouble if they made a fuss.

A few dozen men were lounging around the Peacock's wide front porch, grazing on piles of food and quaffing wine straight from the bottles. They'd been at it a while—most of them looked ready to burst from one end or another. As we approached, a few caught sight of Guts and began to hoot.

“Looky there!”

“Eees Gussie!”

“Back from the dead, eh, Gutsy? Play us a song!”

“Gimme a spot o' that ham, I might,” Guts snarled.

The man he was speaking to lurched to his feet and hurled a giant, meaty shank over the porch railing at Guts—who, with the sword still in his good hand, didn't have a prayer of catching it. Fortunately, I was next to him, unarmed and hungry enough that I managed to lunge sideways in front of Guts, trapping the ham against my chest even as it knocked me into the dirt.

The pirates roared with laughter. But Guts and I hadn't eaten much over the past day, and we tore into that ham without wasting any time worrying about how pitiful it looked. Which just made the pirates laugh harder.

“I seen yew een Pella!” a Cartager pirate called out to Guts. “Why you leave?”

“
Pudda
 — richie turned me slave,” Guts growled back through a mouthful of ham.

I was choking down my fourth bite when I heard the heavy creak of the Peacock's front door, followed by the sudden roar of a deep, angry voice.

“OY!”

All the laughter and talking stopped in a hurry. It took a terrible kind of power to silence thirty wine-drunk pirates at a snap, and I didn't have to look up to know that the heavy footfalls crossing the porch toward us were coming from Ripper Jones.

He was a beast of a man, everything about him oversized except his tiny Cartager ears. There was a machete in his hand and a sour look in his eyes.

“What's this 'bout my men bein' dead?” His Cartager accent was so thick that the words sounded more like “wa'si 'bou me meb'yeh dea'?”

“Natives done 'em rough,” said Guts.

“Wha' Natives?”

“Ones slavin' in the mine.”

“'Ow you know?”

“I was with 'em. Richies pinched me an' him”—Guts twitched his head in my direction—“when they knocked off Pella. Took us here, stuck us in the mine with them slaves. They locked us all up when they went down the hill to fight yers. But they was sloppy. Some o' the Natives worked 'emselves loose. Freed the rest. They was fixin' to make fer the cove and sail off when yer men come up the road.”

“Buncha savages? Best
my
men?
Pudda blun!
” As he glared at Guts, the teeth that showed through the Ripper's snarl were filed to sharp points. If he'd stared at me like that, I think I might have passed out.

“Got good news fer you, tho',” said Guts.

“Wha's that?”

“I know where them richies hid their silver.”

A ripple of low voices rose up around us.

“Do ye now? Up inna mine?”

“Nah.” Guts twitched as he shook his head. “Them richies put it someplace secret.”

“Pudda blun,”
scoffed the Ripper.

“True,” insisted Guts. “Take ye there.”

“Fer wha'? You tryin' deal me?”

“Don't ask much. Spot on yer crew is all. Fer me an' him.” He nodded at me again. “Short numbers, ye can use us.”

“Ye had yer spot. Ye done run off.”

“Won't run twice.”

“Why so?”

Guts lowered his head. “Thought I'd see better days. Wound up in
pudda
chains.”

The Ripper scratched his chin through his beard as he stared at Guts.

“Where this silver?”

“Up the mountain. High up. Take ye there.”

Ripper looked around at his men. “Mink . . . Barney . . . five more. Get a wagon. Be quick. Wanna leave here by night.”

The men he'd called out started toward the porch stairs as the Ripper turned to head back inside the inn. My heart was hammering in my chest.

It's not going to work.

“Wait,” said Guts.

The Ripper looked back with a scowl. “Wha'?”

“Wagon can't make it. Tough climb. Just a footpath. And there's lots of silver needs carryin'.”

“'Ow much?”

“'Nuff that you oughta see it first.” Guts's eyes darted from the Ripper to the men who were scattered across the porch. “Be sure it all gets back to ye.”

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.