Prince of Outcasts (22 page)

“Montival isn't going to let the killing of our High King go unpunished,” Russ said. “And we'll have allies.”

“Kim Il Fuckwit is certainly getting big eyes, not just raiding the Japanese and the Chinese coasts anymore,” Prince Thomas said. “We got complaints about that from the Luzon people at the Regional Security Conference. And more and more ships are going missing up in the Ceram Sea, beyond what the Suluk were always up to. The Timorese were on about it; we thought it was just their old blood-feud talking, but . . . I don't know if there's a connection but I don't like coincidences.”

His father nodded vigorously and swallowed an oyster with a squeeze of lime, looking at the Montivallans as Russ went on:

“We'd found a couple of empty barrels floating with the Feldman & Sons mark and thought we were close on their track, just between North
Sulawesi and Malaku,” Russ said. “Then we saw a little smoke. It was one of the Korean ships, burned to the waterline and breaking up. Firebolt, I'd say; the
Queen
has eighteen-pounder bow and stern chasers, and an eight-catapult broadside of nine-pounders and knows how to use it.”

The Holders both nodded, knowing what thermite could do to wood if you placed it well and the receiving ship's damage-control wasn't on their toes.

“The other one had foundered and turned turtle, but it was still floating even though the keel was awash.”

Wooden ships were extremely hard to really sink, as long as any air remained trapped in them at all. The material they were made of was inherently buoyant, after all. It took a full hold of water to pull them down.

“We took a prisoner, one of the Eaters they'd picked up in the ruins of Los Angeles, who was lying on the keel. He was the last one, and he'd gnawed most of the meat off his left forearm.”

Fifi thought for a moment before remembering the term Eater; in Australia they were usually called
zed
or
Biters
.

“He was mad . . . well, probably mad even before what happened, and dying. We gave him a little water and asked him some questions . . . they speak English, of a sort. All we could get was
teeth, teeth,
teeth
in water
. I thought he was talking about the sharks at first, there were plenty of those about.”

Chong, his second-in-command, spoke: “I was looking at the hulk, trying to see what had taken her out. There was a chunk on the starboard bow that looked as if it had been ripped loose, deck stringers snapped and pulled out from the ribs and hanging knees. Not round-shot damage, I know what that looks like. This wasn't anything I'd seen before. And we found this stuck in the wood.”

She drew a curved tooth out of a pocket; it was thick as paired thumbs at the base, and as long as her palm was broad. Fifi had no doubt at all it would fit right into the gap in the big skull's grin.

“From the look of it, that damned animal
bit
a great big chunk out of the ship. Probably tried to get aboard—”

Fifi thought about the image that put in her mind and her eyes went still for a moment. Adventure was all very well, but . . .

“They can jump half their length out of the water like someone shot them out with springs,” she said softly. “Half of thirty-six feet . . . that would be enough to get right on the deck. And five fucking tons dropping on it wouldn't help at all. Like a randy elephant trying to mate with the bows. They'd be fucked for sure.”

Pete waved a bottle of the beer. “This label's based on something that really happened, too. Those jaws can shear wood like a hydraulic saw.”

The Montivallan nodded. “Then the weight on the deck forced it down enough that the water flooded her forward, maybe her ballast shifted and then she capsized. It wasn't a very well-built ship and it had probably taken storm damage before then.”

Her Captain took up the tale. “So that was when we decided to investigate the place all the gulls were circling. The crocodile . . . saltie, you say . . . was floating belly-up, bloated with gas. We were lucky, a few hours more and it would probably have sunk for good, the sharks were at it. We weighed it when we winched it up on a boom; just under five tons.”

Boleslav laughed harshly. “The ancient stories say knights slew dragons with sword and lance. That one, even if I were a bogatyr of old like Dobrynya Nikitich, I would be glad to use a catapult. From a castle tower, hey?”

Pete closed his eyes; for a moment she was worried the dinner and the wine had sent him off to sleep again. Then he frowned in a way she recognized; he'd been watching a movie of alternatives behind his eyelids.

“The Koreans were chasing them; Moishe wouldn't have run if he thought he had a chance in a sea-fight,” he said. “So something happened to change the odds.”

“The saltie happened, to one of the Koreans at least,” Fifi added.

“Right. So Moishe whipped around fast and gave the other one a broadside, maybe it was damaged already too, and set it afire. It's what I would have done in his shoes. Then he shot the saltie and ran for it,
which he could do on a different course since they weren't bracketing him anymore. Which was why you lost him, Captain. He's a tricky bastard, and he couldn't be sure that the two after him were the only problem. Lot of places to hide, up in the Ceram.”

Captain Russ spread his hands. “We
hope
that's what happened. I would really rather not have to go home and tell the High Queen that her eldest son was eaten by a giant crocodile eight thousand miles from home.”

“While we were cruising about nearby,” Chong added.

“Giant accursed crocodile,” Captain Russ qualified.

“Accursed?” Pete asked. “You getting technical there?”

Fifi tensed. Over the years, they'd both met things that couldn't be explained by the pre-Blackout logic they'd grown up with. JB snapped his fingers, and called out over his shoulder:

“Hey, bring in those bolts, wouldja? And the bracelet.”

Two of the staff came in. One held a pair of catapult bolts, and the other a covered tray. Fifi looked at the bolts with interest and Pete put his glasses back on. Both were the sort launched by a medium-weight military or shipboard catapult; one was broken off, and had a thick hardwood shaft with a hand-forged head, a three-sided pyramidal one heat-shrunk onto the oak. The other was solid forged steel, swelling to a four-sided point and with three brass fins brazed on the base and subtly curved to spin the projectile in flight. She'd killed a Biter in Sydney with a bolt like that once. Literally blew him to pieces.

Yeah, good times.

“The steel one is Montivallan made to our Navy specifications, and we think it was what killed the beast eventually. Manufactured in Corvallis, Donaldson Foundry and Machine marks. Almost certainly from the
Tarshish Queen
; Feldman and Sons buy from them exclusively. The other's unfamiliar but we assume it's Korean.”

He licked his lips, obviously reluctant. “And this was around the crocodile's . . . arm. Forelimb. Whatever. Very close to where the Korean catapult bolt hit, it may have struck it in passing.”

The cloth was drawn aside, and instead of the macadamia and chocolate tarts they'd been promised for dessert, it held what was obviously an armband.

“Our chaplain advised us not to touch it if we could avoid it, Sir Peter,” Russ said quietly.

He crossed himself; so did Sir Boleslav, though from right to left rather than vice versa; Lieutenant-Commander Chong touched a small amulet, nephrite jade carved into a mandala. JB rolled his eyes; he was an old-fashioned atheist. But nor did he reach for the thing, Fifi noted. She had an aversion to the tub-thumping Christianity that had afflicted her childhood, but apart from that had never wasted much time worrying on such things. She had a child's faith in the Lord, and a lifelong conviction that He didn't bother meddling in the business of anyone so far beneath Him as her.

The Royal family—and the rest of the Holders—were Buddhists, which was common enough in Darwin, if not the rest of Capricornia. And Pete had always declared himself a Buddhist so lazy that he intended to pursue enlightenment when he got around to it in the next life . . . or three.

“I have to assume . . . very reluctantly . . . that the crocodile attacking the ships wasn't an accident,” the Montivallan said gravely. “I have tried to think of some normal explanation for a five-ton carnivorous reptile engaging in a fight to the death with three armed ships. I cannot. Can anyone here?”

None of them spoke, or moved to touch the armband, and she noted the servant—sorry, the staffer—wore thick leather gloves entirely inappropriate for the local climate. The band seemed composed of some ruddy metal, probably aluminum-bronze cast from salvage. On it was a broad circle of some glossy black material, and inlaid on that was a three-armed triskele, with curved writhing arms coming from a central knot. The material was almost certainly fairly high-carat gold, but she thought she wouldn't have tried to pry it out even when she'd been working salvage herself, rather than running the largest salvage company with
Warrants to the dead cities of the Australian coast. The impact of the bolt had scored right across it, for which she was obscurely glad.

“There's one good thing,” Prince Thomas said thoughtfully. Everyone looked at him, and he went on: “It attacked the
Korean
ships. Which means our enchanted saltie isn't enchanted with Kim Il.”

“A point, Your Highness,” Russ said. “We also spoke with some local small craft, those long double-hulled things with the odd sail plan. . . .”

“Prau,” Pete replied automatically. “Or proas.”

“They hadn't seen the
Tarshish Queen
, or at least couldn't describe her—I was surprised that any of them spoke English at all.”

The Capricornians all chuckled. “Lot of traffic through here,” JB said. “We're the big entrepôt now. And our ships get all over. There's ships from the rest of Oz too, come to that, and the Kiwis. From New Singapore too, and they speak English . . . well, Singlish.”

Russ nodded. “Ah, a lingua franca. They did say several ships of conventional pattern had passed through within the last few months; one of them was a three-master with a shark-mouth painted on the waterline—”

“Holy
shit
!” Fifi blurted; that was the
Silver Surfer
, Pip's ship.

“They were quite cooperative . . . well, they were looking at our broadside . . . until we showed them the crocodile's skull and the armband. Then they screamed—quite literally—something like
Pulau Bintang Hitam
!”

“And then
Pulau Satem
!” the other officer said.

“After they'd run around screeching and slapping one another for a while they hoisted their sails and made off southward as fast as they could, ignoring our hails,” Russ finished.

“Ignoring a twenty-four-pounder warning from our bow-chaser, too,” Chong added. “Just kept right on, still screaming and gibbering.”

“Pulau Bintang Hitam,”
Pete said, and rolled his eyes up in thought.

They both had a nodding acquaintance with the many varieties of Malay current in the islands.

“Island of Black Stars,” he translated.

“Pulau Satem,”
Fifi said. “That's . . .
Island of Devils,
sorta.”

“Then we headed south,” Russ said. “We'd taken storm damage back in Westria . . . California . . . we had no current charts of the area, and we were almost out of water.”

“Battle damage also,” Sir Boleslav said; he'd been punishing the beer as well as eating heroically, without noticeable effect, but a smoky look came into his eyes. “In San Francisco Bay we fought these Koreans, together with Haida devil-pirates and Eaters in league with them. At Topanga, we were ready to fight them again except for the enchanted storm. I have not taken my share of the blood due for the High King's murder. But I am young, there are years of the sword left to me yet.”

Captain Russ nodded, his expression similar for a moment: “We headed for Darwin as the nearest friendly port where we could get quick repairs, and information in our own language.”

Pete sighed. “We . . . the Darwin and East Indies Trading Company . . . do trade up that way. Some of the islands are civilized and you can do business; some are uncivilized and you can do business if you're heavily armed. Some are just . . . not visited much. A few months ago, our niece Pip . . . Lady Philippa Balwyn-Abercrombie, well, sort of an informal niece, the daughter of the co-founder of our company, Lady Julianna Balwyn-Abercrombie . . . she took a small barque up that way, the
Silver Surfer
. To try some of the places nobody else bothered—high risk, high reward.”

Fifi was sure Captain Russ and Lieutenant-Commander Chong caught the fact that much wasn't being spoken.

“She's very badly overdue. We'd be happy to give you all our commercial intelligence on the area, and any help our agents there can furnish; supplies, too . . . perhaps a supply ship to go with you.”

JB nodded. “The
Stormrider
's being refitted in the Navy dockyards, triple shifts, double time for overtime. I'll be sending some of my blokes along when she leaves. Wish I could send a ship, but we haven't any to spare right now.”

Not now that you turned up some expendable, heavily armed foreigners to do it for you, JB
, she thought.
If you fell out the window dead-drunk into a shitheap, you'd come up smelling of hibiscus with a gold brick in your teeth.

“We are sending a fast courier to Hawaii,” JB added. “With dispatches and the
Stormrider
's reports.”

The discussion went on for some time.

“God, Pete, I wish we could go ourselves!” Fifi said as they left the Palace gates and climbed into their open-bodied coach; green-and-black butterflies with six-inch wingspans were fluttering around the lanterns.