River of Blue Fire (56 page)

“So, again I am interrupted. It is our entire experience here, only written small. If our enemies knew, they would laugh—if they even cared enough to notice. We are so small! And me, storing up my thoughts against oblivion or an increasingly doubtful success. Each time I wonder if this will be the last time, the last entry, and these final words of mine will float on forever through information space, unheeded and unharvested.

“Builds a Fire on Air is gesturing for us to come out of the cave. Others of the Middle Air People are gathering to watch. Fear sours the air like ozone. I must go.

“
Code Delphi. End here
.”

CHAPTER 21

In the Freezer

NETFEED/NEWS: 44 Cops Nailed in Snipe Sting

(
visual: Callan, Mendez, Ojee in custody
)

VO: Forty-four California police officers were arrested in a wide-ranging sting operation. District Prosecutor Omar Hancock says the arrests prove that police are taking money from store-owners and even retailer's associations to remove street children, called “snipes,” from downtown areas
.

HANCOCK: “We have footage of these officers. We don't want this to get deep-sixed like the Texas and Ohio cases, so the footage has already been squirted all across the net. This is murder being planned—genocide you could even call it, and the murderers are the people we pay to protect us
 . . .
”

O
RLANDO and Fredericks did not have much time to consider the implications of Orlando's realization. Even as they tried to imagine what mechanism the Grail Brotherhood might have discovered that would allow them to make the network their permanent and eternal home, Chief Strike Anywhere grounded his canoe beside them on the spit of dry linoleum.

“Found bad men,” he announced. His dark face seemed even darker, as threatening as a thundercloud, but he spoke as calmly as always. “Time to get papoose.”

The tortoise, who had slept through most of the discussion between Orlando and Fredericks, was roused. After fumbling for long moments in the depth of his shell, he at last located his spectacles and pronounced himself ready to go.

Orlando was less sure. Fredericks' earlier words about risking their lives for cartoons came back to him, made even more daunting now by the idea that he might have figured out something critically important about Otherland and the Grail Brotherhood, and that it would thus be doubly unfortunate if he and Fredericks didn't live to inform Renie, !Xabbu, and the others.

Still, he thought as he clambered into the canoe behind the cartoon Indian, a bargain was a bargain. Besides, if they did not help the chief, they would have to make their way across the Kitchen on foot, an unknown distance through unknown obstacles. They had already met the dreadful salad tongs—he had no urge to discover what other bizarre things stalked the floor tiles by night.

The chief paddled them quickly across the dark waters, the steady movement almost lulling Orlando back to sleep. The tortoise, whose calm might have had something to do with being covered in armor plating,
did
fall back into a thin, whistling slumber.

The river opened wide before them, until it seemed almost an ocean: the far bank was very distant, visible only because a few fires burned there. Orlando did not realize for long moments that the great pale expanse behind the fires was not the kitchen wall, but a vast white rectangle. It stood quite close to the river's edge, but loomed higher than even the mountainous countertops.

“Ice Box,” pointed out Strike Anywhere.

“And the bad men are inside there?” Orlando asked.

“No.” The chief shook his head emphatically. “Them
there
.” He pointed with his paddle.

Hidden by darkness before, visible now only because the watch fires of the Ice Box threw them into silhouette, a forest of masts had appeared before Orlando and the others, sprouting from a shadowy bulk with a curving hull. Orlando swore quietly, surprised and alarmed. The chief backed water for a moment to slow their progress, then let the canoe drift silently. The huge vessel was mostly dark, but a few of its small windows glowed with lantern light—illumination Orlando had mistaken for reflections of the beach fires.

“It's some kind of pirate ship,” Fredericks whispered, eyes wide.

As the chief paddled them closer to the galleon, Orlando wondered at the ship's odd silhouette: the tall masts and the tight-furled sails seemed normal, as much as he could tell, but the hull seemed unusually smooth, and there was a strange, handle-shaped loop near the stern that did not correspond with any representations of pirate ships he had ever seen. It was only when they were so close they could hear the murmuring of voices from the deck above that he could make out the row of ballast barrels hanging along the hull. The nearest read “CORSAIR Brand Condensed Brown Sauce.” The smaller letters beneath implored him to “Keep your first mate and crew in fighting trim!”

The pirates' forbidding ship was a gravy boat.

As they pulled up alongside the huge vessel and lay silently against its hull, like a baby carrot or a sliver of turnip that had dropped from a serving ladle, Orlando whispered, “There must be a hundred people on board to crew a ship that big. How are the four of us supposed to. . . ?”

Chief Strike Anywhere did not seem interested in a council of war. He had already produced the out-of-nowhere rope that he had used to save them from the sink, and was making it into a lasso. When he had finished, he cast it expertly over one of the stern lanterns, pulled it taut, then began to make his way up the gravy boat's curving rear end. Orlando looked helplessly at Fredericks, duly noted the scowl, but slid his broadsword into his belt and followed the matchbox Indian anyway.

“I think someone had better stay with the canoe, don't you?” the tortoise whispered. “Good luck, lads, or break a leg—whatever it is one says when someone's going to fight with pirates.”

Orlando heard Fredericks reply with something less pleasant than “good luck,” then felt the rope go tight behind him as his friend began to climb.

Neither of them could ascend as swiftly as the cartoon Indian. By the time they had reached the stern rail and pulled themselves over, Strike Anywhere was already crouching in the shadows at the front of the poopdeck, fitting an arrow into his bow. Fredericks made another sour face, then took the bow the chief had given him from his shoulder and did the same. Orlando fingered the pitted edge of his sword and hoped that he wouldn't have to use it. His heart was beating faster than he liked. Despite the simworld's complete and total unreality, despite the dancing vegetables and singing mice, this felt a lot more dangerous than any of Thargor's Middle Country adventures . . . and probably was.

Most of the lights and all the voices were concentrated on the main deck. With the Indian in the lead, moving as silently as the best clichés suggested, they slid closer to the edge of the poop where they could sneak a look down.

“What is the range, Bosun?” someone inquired from the opposite end of the ship, in a voice of quite theatrical tone and volume.

A barefoot man in a striped shirt turned from his consultation at the main deck rail with another sailor to shout, “Two hundred, give or take the odd length, Cap'n.” Both sailors were of singularly unattractive appearance, clothes stained, teeth few, their eyes glinting with malice.

“I shall descend from the foredeck,” the oratorical voice announced. A moment later a shape in flowing black swept down from the forecastle and onto the deck just below their hiding place. The captain's footsteps had a curious syncopation; it was only when he reached the main deck that Orlando saw one of the man's legs was a wooden peg.

In fact, more than the captain's leg was artificial. His left wrist ended in an iron hook, and the other arm had an even stranger termination: as the pirate lord lifted a telescope to his eye, Orlando saw that he gripped the tube with some kind of metal clasper, an object unpleasantly reminiscent of the ravening salad tongs. But even these strange additions were less noteworthy than the captain's huge ebony mustachios, which sprouted beneath his hawklike nose, then corkscrewed down on either side of his sallow face to rest coiled, like weary vipers, on the white lace of his collar.

After having stared through the telescope for a few moments, the captain turned to his men, who stood at ragged attention around the mainmast, watching with gleeful anticipation. “We have reached the appointed hour, my sea-vermin, my filth of the foam,” he declared. “Run up the Jolly Roger and then prime the Thunderer—we shall not waste time with smaller guns.”

At his words a pair of younger corsairs, no less grimy and desperate for their youth, leaped to the rigging to raise the pirate banner. A handful of other men hurried onto the foredeck and began to roll a huge cannon back out of its gunport—a piece whose carriage wheels were as big as tables, and which looked as though it could fire an entire hippopotamus. As they cleaned the weapon, scouring the barrel with a broom twice the length of the sailor who wielded it, then poured in an entire sack of gunpowder, the pirate ship drifted ever closer to the shore. The Ice Box jutted above them like a high cliff.

The captain threw back his black cloak to reveal its blood-red lining, then stumped to the railing and lifted both his not-quite-hands to his mouth. “Ahoy the Ice Box!” he bellowed, his voice echoing and reechoing across the water. “This is Grasping John Vice, captain of the
Black Tureen
. We have come for your gold. If you open the great door, we will leave the women and children untouched, and we will kill no man who surrenders.”

The Ice Box stood silent as stone.

“We're in range, Cap'n,” the bosun called.

“Prepare the boats and the landing crews.” Grasping John hobbled a few steps closer to the great gun before striking a pose of stoic resignation. “And bring me the firing match.”

Orlando felt Chief Strike Anywhere tense beside him. One of the pirates emerged from a bolthole somewhere with a bundle in his arms, only its tiny red head protruding from the blanket. The bundle was crying, a thin, small sound that nevertheless tugged at Orlando's heartstrings.

“All hands in place, Cap'n,” the bosun shouted.

Several of the crew began to dance, arms folded, cutlasses out and gripped in their hairy fists.

“
Wicked, wicked, wicked, we
,
”

they sang, dreadfully out of tune but in a cheerful jig-time,

“
Bad we are as men can be
,

Rotten work, we'll get down to it
,

(
If it's good, we didn't do it.
)”

“
Evil, evil, evil us
,

Some are bad but we are wuss
,

Dread deeds we perform with glee
,

We aspire to infamy
!”

The captain smiled indulgently, then beckoned with his hook. The sailor with the crying bundle skittered forward and delivered it into Grasping John's clasper. The bundle's noises intensified.

“Let us see if the Thunderer can melt yon stronghold's icy reserve, eh, my salt-flecked swine?” The captain flung the blanket aside to reveal a squirming, shivering baby match, a miniature version of Strike Anywhere and his wife. He clearly intended to scrape the infant's sulphured head on the rough deck, but before he could do so, something had leapt through the space near Orlando's ear and was shivering in the black sleeve of Grasping John's coat. For a moment the entire foredeck stood frozen and silent. The pirate captain did not drop the baby boy, but he did lower him for a moment to inspect the arrow lodged in his arm.

“A mysterious someone seems to be shooting things at me from the poop,” he observed evenly. “Some of you filthy fellows hurry up there and kill him.” Then, as a dozen unshaven, scar-faced pirates rattled up the gangway, and Orlando and Fredericks scrambled to their feet in cold-stomached anticipation, Grasping John took the baby and rubbed him down the length of the massive cannon barrel, so that the small head sparked and then flared. As the infant began to cry, the captain lifted him and lit the cannon's great fuse.

Groaning in fury and pain, Strike Anywhere vaulted off the poop-deck. He landed in a group of confused pirates, scattering them like bowling pins. In a moment he had reached the pirate captain and snatched the blazing child from the man's metal hands. He plunged the baby's head into the bucket used to cool the cannon barrel, then lifted out the weeping, spluttering infant and held him close against his chest.

Orlando turned from this drama as the first of the pirates reached the poop, avidly waving his cutlass. Then, in the next five seconds, several things happened.

Thargor-reflexes slowed but not gone, Orlando dodged a cutlass-blow, stepped aside, and swung his broadsword in a flat arc; he smacked the leading pirate in the back and sent him flying off the roof, even as the tattooed buccaneer behind him fell back down the steps with one of Fredericks' arrows in his striped midsection.

Chief Strike Anywhere took his dripping, screaming child and leaped over the railing into the water. Grasping John watched with dark amusement, curling a mustachio with the end of his hook.

The fuse on the Thunderer burned down, vanishing inside the barrel for a split instant before igniting the powder with a roar like Judgment Day. The cannon vomited fire and the carriage heaved backward against its chains. The entire ship rocked, so that Orlando, Fredericks, and their pirate attackers all fell flat.