“Get to the point,” Firth urged Mingsley angrily, even as Paragon shouted, “Shut up! Close your foul mouth! And get away from my beach. Get away from me. Or come close enough to be killed by me. Yes. Come here, little man. Come to me!” He reached out blindly, swinging his arms wide, his hands open to grasp.
“Unless you have a liveship.” Mingsley revealed. “Unless you have a liveship, hulled with wizardwood, impervious to the hot white water of the river. Unless you have a liveship, who knows from the moment it is quickened the one channel up the river. That is the true source of the Bingtown monopoly on the trade. You have to have a liveship to get in the game.” He paused dramatically. “And I'm offering you the chance to get one.”
“He's lying,” Paragon shouted desperately. “Lying! There's more to it, so much more to it. And even if you owned me, I wouldn't sail for you. I'd roll and kill you all! I've done it before, you've heard the tales. And if you haven't, ask in any tavern. Ask about the
Paragon,
the
Pariah,
the death ship! Go ahead, ask, they'll tell you. They'll tell you I'll kill you!”
“He can be forced,” Mingsley said with quiet confidence. “Or removed. The hull is what is most important, a good riverman could sound us out a channel. Think what we could do with a wizardwood ship. There's some tribe up there that the Bingtown Traders traffic with. One trip would be all it would take. Firth, we could pay them double what the Old Traders pay them, and still make a profit. This is our chance to get in on a trade that's been closed to outsiders since Bingtown was founded. I've got the contacts, the owners are listening for the right cash offer. All I need is the backing. And you've got that.”
“He's lying to you,” Paragon bellowed out into the night. “He's going to get you killed. And worse! Much worse. There are worse things than dying, you Chalcedean scum. But only a Bingtown Trader would know that. Only a Bingtown Trader could tell you that.”
“I think I'm interested,” Firth said quietly. “But there are better places to discuss this.”
“No!” howled Paragon. “You don't know what he's selling you, you don't know what grief you'd be buying. You've no idea, no idea at all!” His voice broke suddenly. “I won't go with you, I won't, I won't. I don't want to, and you can't make me, you can't, I'll kill you, I'll kill you all!”
Again he flailed out wildly. If he had been able to reach the beach, he would have thrown sand, rocks, seaweed, anything. But his hands found nothing. He halted suddenly, listening. The footsteps were receding.
“. . . tell anyone?”
“Not a concern, really,” he heard Mingsley reply confidently. “You heard him. He's mad, completely insane. No one listens to him. No one even comes out here. Even if he had someone to tell, they'd never believe him. That's the beauty of this, my friend. It's so far outside of any one else's imagining. That ship has rested there for years. Years! And no one ever thought of this before . . .”
His voice dwindled, and was damped away by the muffling fog and the shush of the waves.
“NO!” Paragon shrieked out into the night. He reached back with his fists to drum and batter on his own planking. “No!” he cried again. Denial and defiance. And hopelessness. They weren't listening to him. No one ever listened to him. That had always been the problem. They'd ignore everything he told them. They'd take him out and he'd have to kill them all. Again.
“SERPENT!”
Althea's voice rang out clear and cold as the night that surrounded them. She clung with near-numbed fingers, her feet braced against the look-out's platform. Her eyes strained through the darkness to track the creature even as she heard the thundering of the crew's feet on the deck below, heard her cry passed on. Hatches were flung open as all hands hit the decks to do whatever they could do to withstand this latest attack.
“Where?”
“Three points off the starboard bow, sir! A big one.”
They were all big, she reflected bitterly as she strove to tighten her weary grip. She was cold and wet and tired, and the healing injury on her scalp still throbbed all the time. In the cold of a night like this, the throbbing became a dull agony as the chill tightened her skin. The fever had passed days ago, and Reller had snipped and tugged the stitches out when the itching had become unbearable. Reller's clumsiness and coarse jokes about her pain were infinitely preferable to the guarded tenderness she saw in Brashen's eyes whenever she chanced to be near him. Damn him. And damn him again, for here she was thinking of him when her very life depended on her focusing her mind on her task. Where had the serpent gone? One moment she had seen it, and now it was gone.
In answer to her question, the ship gave a sudden starboard lurch. Her feet slid on her ice-rimed perch, and she found her life depending on the clutch of her numbed fingers. Without even thinking, she wrapped her arm about a line and held on. On the deck below she could hear Captain Sichel cursing and demanding that the hunters do something, shoot the damned thing before it took them all to the bottom! But even as the hunters with bows drawn ran to one side of the ship, the serpent had doubled back and nudged them from the other side. It was not a sharp impact like being rammed. It was a strong upward push, like a shark nosing a dead carcass floating on the water. The ship heeled over and men scrabbled across the decks.
“Where is it?” the captain demanded furiously as Althea and the other look-outs strained their eyes into the darkness. The cold wind streamed past her, the waves heaved and she saw serpents in the curve of every swell. They dissolved into fear and imagination when she tried to focus on them.
“He's gone!” one of the other look-outs cried, and Althea prayed he was right. This had gone on too long, too many days and nights of sudden random attacks followed by anxious hours of ominous cessation. Sometimes the serpents crested and writhed alongside the ship, always just out of reach of a bowshot. Sometimes there were half a dozen, hides scintillating in the winter sun, reflecting blue and scarlet and gold and green. And sometimes, like tonight, there would be but one monstrous creature, coming to mock them by effortlessly toying with their lives. Sighting serpents was nothing new to Althea. Once, they had been so rare as to be legendary; now they infested certain areas on the Outside, and followed slave ships through the Inside Passage. She'd seen a few in her time aboard the
Vivacia,
but always at a distance and never threatening. This proximity to their savagery made them seem new creatures.
Between one breath and the next, the ship heeled over. Hard. The horizon swung and suddenly Althea's feet were flung from under her. For an instant she flapped from the spar like a flag. On the canted deck below sailors roared and flailed wildly as they slid and tumbled. She hitched her belly tight and kicked up a foot to catch a ratline. In a moment she was secure again even as the ship tilted further. The serpent had come up under the ship, and lifted it high to roll her hard to starboard. “Hang on!” someone roared, and then she heard a shrill cry cut short. “He took him!” someone shrieked, and the cry was followed by a confusion of voices, demanding of one another, “Did you see that? Who did he get? Picked him off like a ripe plum! That's what this thing is after!” The ship righted itself and through the chaos of voices, she clearly heard Brashen cursing. Then, “Sir!” His voice rang desperate in the night. “Can we not put some hunters on the stern, to keep him off our rudder? If he takes that out . . .”
“Do it!” the captain barked.
There was the clatter of running feet. Althea clung to her perch dizzily, feeling sick not with the sudden lurching of the ship but from the abruptness of death that had visited them. The serpent would be back, she was certain. He would rock the ship like a boy shaking cherries from a tree. She didn't think the beast was powerful enough to overturn the ship completely, but she was not certain. Land had never seemed so far away. Land, solid land, that could not shift beneath her, that did not conceal ravenous monsters who could erupt at any time.
She remained at her post, hating that she could not see what was happening on the deck right below her. She did not need to know, she reminded herself. What she did need to do was keep good watch and cry a warning that might save a man's life. Her eyes were weary from peering into the darkness, her hands no more than icy claws. The wind snatched the warmth from her body. But, she reminded herself, it also filled the sails and pushed the ship on. Soon, they would be out of these serpent-infested waters. Soon.
The night deepened around the ship. Clouds obscured both moon and stars. The only light in the world was that of the ship herself. Down on the deck, men worked at fabricating something. Althea moved swiftly and often, a small spider in a web of wet rigging, trying to keep some warmth in her body as she maintained her futile watch. All she could hope to see was some disturbance in the faint luminescence of the ocean's moving face.
Eventually the ship's bell rang and her replacement came to relieve her. She scampered down the now-familiar rigging, moving swiftly and gracefully despite the cold and her weariness. She hit the deck cat-lightly and stood a moment kneading her stiff hands.
On the deck, she was given a crewman's measure of rum thinned with hot water. She held it between her near-numb hands and tried to let it warm her. Her watch was over. Any other time, she would have gone to her blanket, but not tonight. Throughout the ship, cargo was being lashed down more tightly to prevent it shifting if the serpent attacked again. On the deck, the hunters were constructing something that involved a lot of salt meat and about fifty fathom of line. They were both laughing and cursing as they put it together, swearing that the serpent would be sorry it had ever seen this ship. The man who had been devoured had been one of the hunters. Althea had known him, had even worked alongside him on the Barrens, but it was hard to grasp the completeness of his death. It had happened too swiftly.
To her, the curses and threats of the hunters sounded thin and impotent, the tantrum of a child pitted against the inevitability of fate. In the darkness and the cold their anger seemed pathetic. She did not believe they could prevail. She wondered what would be worse, to drown or be eaten. Then she pushed all such thought aside, to fling herself into the work of the moment. On the deck was a hodge-podge of items jarred loose by the serpent's attack. All must be carefully re-stowed. Below decks, men worked the pumps. The ship had not sprung, but they had taken in water. There was work and plenty to spare.
The night passed as slow as the flow of black tar. From alert vigilance, all decayed to a state of frayed anxiety. When everything was made as tight as it could be, when the bait was readied and the trap set, all waited. Yet Althea doubted that anyone save the hunters hoped the serpent would return to receive their vengeance. The hunters were men whose lives centered around successful killing. For another creature to stalk and successfully devour one of their own was a sudden reversal of roles they could not accept. To the hunters, it was manifest that the serpent must return to be killed. Such was the rightful nature of the world. The sailors, however, were men who lived constantly with the knowledge that, sooner or later, the ocean would take them. The closest to winning they could come was to tell death, “Tomorrow.” The sailors working the ship strove only to put as much ocean behind them as they could. Those who had no tasks napped where they could on deck, well-tucked into nooks and crannies where a man could brace himself. Those who could not sleep haunted the rails, not trusting to the look-outs who stared from the masts above into blackness.
Althea was leaning thus, eyes straining to pierce the night, when she felt Brashen take a place beside her. Without even turning, she knew it was him. Perhaps she was that familiar with how he moved, or perhaps without realizing it, she had caught some trace of his scent on the air. “We're going to be all right,” he said reassuringly to the night.
“Of course we are,” she replied without conviction. Despite the greater danger they all faced, she was still acutely aware of her personal discomfort around Brashen. She would have given a great deal to be able to recall dispassionately all they had said and done that night. She did not know what to blame it on—the drugged beer, the blow to the head or the cindin—but she was not entirely sure she recalled things as they had happened. She could not, for the life of her, recall what had possessed her to kiss him. Maybe, she reflected bleakly, it was because she did not want to recall that those things had happened at all.
“Are you all right?” he asked in a quiet voice that freighted the words with more meaning.
“Quite well, thank you. And yourself?” she asked with impeccable courtesy.
He grinned. She could not see it, but she could hear it in his voice. “I'm fine. When we get to Candletown, all of this is going to seem like a bad dream. We'll have a drink and laugh about it.”
“Maybe,” she said neutrally.
“Althea,” he began, just as the ship gave a lurch beneath them and then began to rise. She caught frantically at the railing and clung tight. As the ship listed over, the sea seemed to rise towards her. “Get back from the rail,” Brashen snapped at her, and then flung himself aft shouting, “Feed it to him! Get it over the side, feed it to him!”
The deck under her feet kept inclining towards the vertical. Everywhere sailors shouted out their anger and terror. The ship screamed, too, a terrible creaking of wood accustomed to being supported by water and now pushed up out of it. The flexibility of the ship that made it possible for the
Reaper
to withstand the pounding of the sea told against her now. Althea could almost feel the pain of planks as fore to aft the whole structure twisted and racked. The rigging groaned and the canvas swung. She found herself crouched on the railing rather than clinging to it, gripping it with both hands. She looked up the slanting deck. Sanded smooth and clean, it offered no handholds to retreat from the edge of the ship. Below her the black sea boiled suddenly as the serpent's tail lashed the water for more purchase.