THE NEW WORLD

AN ORIGINAL RED QUEEN’S WAR STORY

Mark Lawrence

Author’s Note: This is the beginning of a new Jalan and Snorri book I started writing, but it also makes a nice reasonably self-contained short(ish) story. The book may get finished one day, and it may even get published, but I have a lot of projects on the go, so it won’t be any time soon. Enjoy!

ONE

“A nun?”

“Well.” I tried my penitent face. Despite all that practice, I still wasn’t very good at it. “Nuns.”

“Nuns!” Omar threw up his hands. “You said it was just the once!”

“It was!” I fiddled with the sleeves of my cassock. “Just once. I swear it . . . Only with more than one nun.”

Omar puffed air through his lips. I doubt that I found his attempt at surprise any more convincing than he found my penitence, but I was touched that he made the effort. Barras had just raised an eyebrow. Lisa had given a slow shake of her head then dashed off after one of the triplets. Even the pope hadn’t seemed that surprised, and he only knew me by reputation.

“Aren’t nuns supposed to be, you know, celibate?” Omar knew more about the Church of Roma than I knew about the followers of Allah, but the truth was, neither of us was that bothered about our own faith, let alone someone else’s.

“They are,” I said. “Whereas the clergy aren’t. Which makes a nonsense of all this outrage I’m getting, if you ask me! Send Sister Caren and Sister Messa to the New World! Send Sister Mellony! I don’t see—”

“Three!”

“Well, there was Sister Ruth too . . .” Technically, Ruth wasn’t guilty of fornication, but only because whoever wrote the Vatican’s rules on the subject seemed to have had a very sheltered upbringing.

“Four!” Omar blinked. I excused his obsession with the numbers side of the affair on account of him being a mathmagician.

“Look, we’re getting off track here. The important thing is that they’re punishing the wrong man. I never took any vows of celibacy. Good luck recruiting enough priests to run a church if you’re going to make that a rule!”

“Actually.” Omar frowned. “I believe I read that it used to be like that a long time ago.”

“Nonsense. I think I would know a thing like that.” I waved the idea away. “Anyway, the point is that I shouldn’t be going. And, given that I am, you should be coming with me.”

“Why would I want to do a thing like that?” Omar fixed me with shrewd dark eyes.

The truth was that I didn’t have a good reason, other than a vague desire to share the misery. A pudgy five foot six in his thickest socks, Omar wasn’t ever likely to be much help in a fight. As the seventh son of the caliph of Liba, his connections came in useful from time to time, but they didn’t stretch as far as the New World. And yes, he was a mathmagician, but the magic had drained from the world, and that meant that he was really just a math . . . person. Very useful when it came to addition, subtraction, and counting nuns. Less useful on a prolonged sea voyage. “It’ll be great! A whole new world!” I reached out a hand as if the vision of it lay just before us. “A new . . . fantastic . . . um . . . point of view! Think of it! They probably have new numbers over there . . . or something.”

The fact that I had lasted three years as a cardinal before creating any major scandal was as much a surprise to me as to those who knew me. When my grandmother, the notorious Red Queen, had leaned on the pope to appoint me at the age of twenty-three to my late father’s office, I had imagined that I might manage a few weeks before they realized how utterly unsuited I was to the role.

My training for the second highest tier in the church’s hierarchy had consisted almost entirely of drinking, gambling, and whoring my way through my allowance and thoroughly enjoying the life of a minor prince, close enough to the throne of Red March to bathe in the reflected glory, sufficiently distant not to have to worry about any real responsibility.

Evidently, though, the pope was as scared of my monstrous grandmother as I was. In the end it took four nuns at once to even get me told off. I let everyone who would listen know how much I regretted my deeds.

But up until the point that the New World entered the conversation, it was all a lie. I never could resist a woman in a wimple.

Four brief months is all it took from abasing myself before Pope Gomst III in Roma to being turfed from my bed at an ungodly hour to shuffle out onto a blustery Marsails dockside. My motley entourage awaited me in front of the Hesperus. She jostled against her ropes, a beast at bay, ready to tackle an ocean. By the time I finally parted company with that ship I would be able to name every part of her with nautical eloquence. That morning, however, I barely noticed how many masts she sported, seeing instead a collection of ill-matched timbers held together with tar and optimism, ready to carry me far from everything I cared about. Well, from the few things I cared about that weren’t me, at least.

I had thrown myself on the new pope’s mercy. It turned out that in the place where one might hope for compassion for his fellow man, Pope Gomst III instead kept a cruel sense of humour. He declared that since I was so keen on exploring virgin territory, I could do it for the church on a full-time basis.

To this end, the pope assigned four Vatican church guards to escort me on my journey. He described the quartet as being for my protection, but both of us knew they were there to make sure I didn’t just take a three-year vacation on a peaceful little island in the Middle Sea. For additional company I had Bishop Hamish, who was also being pushed to the edges of the map for reasons of scandal. Monks in his case. And to keep us both holy, Monsignor Augusta, a woman who couldn’t be closer to thirty than to twenty but who had managed in that short span to acquire the icy disdain that others work on for whole lifetimes.

“A fine morning for it!” I hailed the group assembled by the dock wall. I had settled upon a plan of being relentlessly cheerful. It seemed the only way to fight back in the face of punishment.

“Cardinal.” Captain Bertron Gambini headed up my small personal guard. They stood in a huddle, the wind cracking their cloaks out before them.

“Omar!” I greeted the small Liban as he hurried across to take my hand in a dark grip. “You came.” I looked around suspiciously. “And no camels!” Behind Omar, Monsignor Augusta stared daggers at the back of his head. But while the pope had laid firm instructions about who had to accompany me and had forbid me to leave any of them behind, he had left no instructions that prevented me from adding to the list.

Though perhaps he would have if he had imagined that I would be taking a Moslem with me.

“Barras!” I waved as I approached with Omar at my side. Sturdy, dependable Barras Jon, at the gangplank overseeing the loading of his no doubt sturdy and dependable luggage. Having grown in the shadow of his father, the Grand Jon, Barras had jumped at the chance to make a name for himself by finding new trading partners for the Jon’s mercantile empire in the New World. Not even the appeal of his lovely wife and new triplets could keep him home. I’d spent an hour in the company of the three toddlers, Jalan, Japeth, and Gholloth, and I had a lot of sympathy for the man. My ears were still ringing from their yelling hours after I left. Fortunately, the next day Lisa asked that I not visit again. Apparently all three boys looked uncomfortably like me, and she didn’t want to raise suspicions. I couldn’t see the likeness myself, but I was glad of the excuse to avoid the bedlam.

I cast a jaded eye along the harbour wall. A stark, leafless forest of masts, seagulls circling raucous overhead, the stink of old fish, heaped nets, coiled ropes, salt-stained sailors, merchantmen wallowing out to sea . . . it was all depressingly familiar, the memories uniformly bad. I’d been to Hell, and whilst the world had nothing worse to offer, a long sea voyage did give you something of the flavour.

“Jalan Kendeth! By all the gods!” Snorri appeared at the ship’s rail, a huge white grin in the blackness of his beard. With stevedores crowding the gangplank, Snorri opted to vault across the chasm between ship and quay, a chasm filled with darkness, slapping waves, and the near certainty of being crushed between timber and stone. He landed as lightly as if he’d dropped ten inches rather than ten foot, and launched himself at me with such ferocity that all four church guards reached for their swords.

“Get off me, damn it! I’m a bloody cardinal!” I struggled free of his bear hug and accepted my biretta back from Omar, who had caught it as it fell. I straightened the little red hat back on my head. I’d come to the dock in full regalia. Cardinals wear red, and it’s a colour that has always suited the Kendeths. “Good to see you too, my son.”

“Son?” Snorri grinned.

“Just let me do my thing until we’re at sea.” I nodded to the hundred or so faithful lined back along the dock front, held at the warehouses by a handful of palace guards. I wasn’t entirely clear whether they had come to wish me well or to make sure I left, but either way I felt I should avoid giving them anything unflattering that might get reported along the pilgrims’ highway to his holiness.

I stepped back to take a look at Snorri. I’d forgotten quite how big he was. He’d tied the mane of his hair behind his head and wore a tunic not dissimilar to those the dockworkers had on, though cleaner and of better quality. There was, however, no hiding the fact that over six and a half foot of heavily muscled Viking was crowding the dock with us. If the runes and hammers tattooed around thick arms hadn’t given it away then the axe across his back surely had.

Monsignor Augusta’s disapproving stare drilled into me from twenty yards away. A second pagan! I smiled and waved, clapping the other hand to Snorri’s overlarge shoulder. “That’s the one to watch,” I muttered through my smile, nodding Snorri’s attention in her direction.

“Watching her would be no chore.” Snorri’s grin broadened.

“Good luck!” I shook my head. The monsignor was handsome enough, I supposed. Beautiful even, in the sort of way that a sunlit glacier might be. And just about as appealing when it came to a cuddle. Besides, Snorri would get a shock when he got closer. The woman had been horribly burned at some point. You could see the twisted scars on the side of her neck, vanishing down below her collar. And she always wore a black leather glove on the hand on that side.

Snorri and I followed the tail end of Barras’s luggage aboard. Captain Bertron and his men advanced up the gangplank hard on our heels as if to bar any retreat.

“How do you like the ship?” I asked.

“A typical Empire tub.” Snorri rubbed his chin. “Too big, too many sails, too many ropes. She’ll do though.”

The Atlantis Ocean lay between us and the Great Lands, or the New World, as people had taken to calling it of late. A handful of traders plied that ocean each year, but they were without exception Canukian merchants from the New World itself, bringing their wonders to our shores and leaving heavy with our gold. Several captains of my late great-uncle’s fleet had tried the passage themselves. Those that returned reported failure and starvation amid the storms and currents of a body of water far vaster than all of the Empire, from its feet baking in Afrique to its frozen head butting against the Bitter Ice. They claimed that the Canukians not only possessed better ships and were armed with vital maps and wind charts, but that their vessels boasted artefacts from the Mechanist age that aided their crossing.

This wasn’t to say that no ship ever made it from the Empire to the New World. Some got through, but more by luck than judgment, and none made a habit of it. All of this brought me to Snorri.

“You’ve stowed your charts somewhere safe then?”

“Charts!” He slapped me between the shoulder blades. My biretta came off and the wind ran away with it.

“Yes . . .” I wheezed painfully. “Charts.”

“Safely up here, Jal.” He tapped his forehead.

The pope would never send a missionary of the Church of Roma as a passenger on a Canukian ship. At least not a cardinal. It would hardly paint the required image in the minds of potential converts if we couldn’t even get there by our own devices. Unfortunately, that meant he was ready to gamble my life on the deck of the Hesperus, with a Red March captain making the attempt for the first time.

I recalled that in one of Snorri’s tales, he claimed that not only had the Vikings been making voyages to the New World on a regular basis, every decade or so, but that his own father had made the trip and that his family passed secret knowledge of the passage along the male heirs of their line. The women apparently got a metalworking secret and a killer recipe for goat, which at the time had seemed a much better deal to me.

“Perhaps if I appealed to the emperor . . .” Faking cheerfulness was proving difficult now that the awful reality was setting in. A dozen strides took me the width of my new home, from one rail to the other. I contemplated jumping in and swimming away. Everyone had seen me get aboard, after all . . . But swimming in a dress is far from easy, and the five gaolers the pope had saddled me with would just hunt me down. Properly, I should have had at least half a dozen clerical assistants, from scribes and priests to someone to help settle my vestments on me in the morning. Instead I got four surly men-at-arms, a disgraced bishop, and a woman whose efforts to chaperone me these last four months had been largely successful despite my very best efforts. “I said, perhaps I should . . .”

“Cast off to port!” A booming voice from the ship’s prow.

“No!”

“The tide won’t wait on us, Jal.” Snorri looked insanely happy.

I made a start for the gangplank, but two sailors were drawing it in and a line of church guards blocked my path.

And so, having been orphaned at the tender age of twenty-three and shuffled out of the line of succession into some minor clerical job, Jalan Kendeth, grandson of the Red Queen and unsung saviour of the old world, set sail into the great unknown of the new.

TWO

The good thing about being a cardinal was that I got the biggest cabin on the ship. The bad thing was that I was in a cabin. On a ship.

My introduction to the business of travel by sea had been aboard a dreadful Viking tub called the Ikea, and it hadn’t gone well. Years and experience proved to have hardened me, however. I will admit that there were times in the first week that I prayed for pirates to board ship and kill me. But by the second week I emerged, somewhat thinner and paler, to pace the decks and scowl at the world.

The sea sparkled irritatingly, and a handful of puffy white clouds scudded across a blue sky. All around me the Hesperus creaked and groaned like an old woman getting out of bed.

“You’re up!” Snorri broke from some discussion with a group of sailors, none of whom reached his shoulders.

“Hmmm.” I furrowed my brow. “No thanks to you.”

Snorri’s nursing had consisted of cheerfully hollering, “No one ever died of seasickness!” through my cabin door every other day. A boast that had been proved wrong on day eight when one of Captain Bertron’s church guards died as a result of continuous attempts to turn himself inside out. Snorri’s only concession had been to add the word hardly to his pep talk that morning. I hauled myself on deck shortly after.

Omar waved to me from the rail, where he appeared to be fishing. Barras was sparring with a church guard before the main mast, both stripped to the waist despite the gale howling off the sea.

“I can see land!” I peered into the hazy distance. “We’re there! Thank God! Praise Jesu and all the little saints!”

“Over there too.” Snorri pointed across to the opposite side. Bare brown mountains loomed just a few miles off.

“What?” The tide of my enthusiasm drew back, exposing the unwelcome rocks of common sense. It might have felt like a year, but it had only been a week.

“Afrique. A place I will visit one day.” Snorri gazed at it with a kind of hunger.

“I wouldn’t bother.” I glanced over to make sure Omar wasn’t listening. “All sand and flies and camels.”

I scowled left, then right. “Where the hell are . . . wait . . . don’t tell me.” I pointed to the distant shore.

“Kordoba!” And to the brown rocks. “Marroc!”

Snorri nodded, pretending not to be impressed. “By nightfall we will have left the Middle Sea behind and cast ourselves into the arms of Atlantis! This is where the adventure begins, Jal!”

The captain of our vessel was one Horatious Knellson, a small but terrifying man in as fine a tricorn hat as I’d ever seen. I’d met the sort before. In conversation he was precise, stern, and courteous, but five minutes in the man’s company left you in no doubt that something important had been left out when they made him.

Someone had inflicted the benefits of a classical education on the young Horatious, and he missed no opportunity to pass it on through the medium of quotation, often in Latin, a language he expected me to understand just because I was supposed to give the odd Mass in it.

“Ah, the cardinal!” he greeted me that first day. “In flagrante delicto!”

“Too kind.” I signed a benediction at him.

In truth I had discovered that I could get by behind the altar with a combination of mumbling and lines learned by rote. Mostly because nobody was listening. Snorri later explained that what I had taken for a

slightly odd compliment about the deliciousness of my fragrance had instead been an uncalled-for reference to being caught in the act with four nuns.

On fair days, which in nautical parlance meant any day when the rain fell at an angle steeper than thirty degrees, the captain would prowl the deck with a restless sort of violence, eager to find fault with his crew.

At the start of the second week of our voyage, with all signs of Empire vanished over the blue horizon, Captain Knellson caught three of his sailors drunk on rum. They’d stolen it from the ship’s casket when they should have been splicing the bilges or some such nonsense. I had expected him to have them tied to the mast and given ten lashes.

“I rarely find that I need to have a man flogged,” he told me.

Instead he set a yard of chain about each man’s ankle and had them tossed into the ocean. The last of them hit the waves with a splash and a despairing wail.

“Faber est suae quisque fortunae!” the captain declared. “Do you not agree, Cardinal?”

“Uh . . . I . . . what?” I tore my horrified gaze from the men flailing in our wake.

“Every man is the architect of his own fortune!” Captain Horatius frowned at me as if I should know what he was talking about. The man scared me more than a storm at sea, his face always calm, eyes furious.

“If those rogues can follow behind us for a mile, they’ll be allowed back on board to receive their punishment.” He nodded. “I’ll have only sober men on duty, by God! The swim will do the trick. In aqua sanitas! Do you not agree, Cardinal?”

“I, uh . . . yes?”

None of the trio made it. There were no more incidents of unlicensed drunkenness. Nobody needed to be flogged.

“A harsh man, this captain of ours,” Snorri said that night.

“He’s not my captain,” I said, lifting a goblet of Wennith red and taking a swig for the three drowned men. “I sail under the pope’s banner. That’s how it goes: cardinal, pope, God. Me, Gomst, him upstairs.”

Another swig. I’d had several barrels loaded, convincing Monsignor Augusta that they would be required for the sacrament once we reached the New World. I was beginning to think they might not last halfway.

“At sea it goes cardinal, first mate, pope, God, captain.” Snorri continued to whittle at his piece of whalebone. I’d travelled thousands of miles with the man and he’d never once shown a moment’s interest in whittling. A fortnight bouncing on the waves and he was turning out scrimshaw by the basketload, evil-looking seals mainly.

“Well . . .” I reached for some salve to my dignity. “At least I’m captain of my own cabin.”

Snorri opened his mouth, but three sharp knocks beat his words out. The door opened before I had a chance to speak and Monsignor Augusta strode in. She had a distinct advantage on me, being just the height to stand erect in the cabin. Snorri had to hunch to shoulder level, but at least he knew where he stood, so’s to speak. I had clearance between the supporting beams and would fool myself into forgetting where I was.

I lost count of how many times I banged my head, but I do remember how many times I knocked myself insensible. It was five times.

“Cardinal.”

“Augusta!” I offered her my brightest smile. She asked me at least once a day to address her by her title.

“Have you come to check on me again?”

She ignored me, peering around the cabin as if I might have concealed a nun somewhere. I wished to God I had!

“If you want to stamp out some sin, Augusta, you’d be better off surprising Bishop Hamish when he’s taking confession below decks.” A low blow, I acknowledge, but when did I ever give the impression that I wouldn’t throw my fellow man into the fire just to get the heat off me? I’d saved the damn world and what had it got me? A vomit-scented cabin on a ship bound for the ends of the earth, that’s what.

“I came to remind you that you agreed to lead Mass on deck at first light.”

“Damned if I did!” I took another swig of red, this one for the second drowned sailor. “ ‘When I get up,’ I said. I remember that distinctly.”

Augusta nodded and retreated with a “Good night, Cardinal.”

“Now that, Snorri, is how you handle the monsignor!”

Snorri made no reply, returning to his whittling with an annoying smug smile.

Monsignor Augusta got me up at first light the next day.

Being on a ship is rather like being in gaol. I can say this with authority, having spent time in both. Once you get over the terror of your situation, the bad food, the worse company, and the length of your sentence, you find that your greatest enemy is boredom. By week four I was whittling too. I discovered that I had a rare talent for turning a whale tooth into a crudely scratched whale tooth.

“So, why did you come?” I asked.

Snorri and I had perched ourselves on the poop deck, which I should point out for landlubbers is a very misleading term. Since it formed the roof of my cabin, however, I was quite glad to discover my error.

Snorri had started to whittle a lump of driftwood into an annoyingly good tree, which when you consider that it had been a tree to start with, seemed a somewhat retrograde step. “Well, you asked me to come. So I did.”

When people pause that long before replying, they’re usually working out what parts of the truth to omit.

A good liar replies swiftly. Better to pad that thinking time with words. Lying was one of the skills my time in the cardinal’s frock had improved.

I had sent word to Snorri, but hadn’t truly expected him to turn up for a voyage that wouldn’t see us returned to the Empire for two years at the very least. If ever. I’d been so delighted to have him aboard that I’d not enquired further, expecting that he would regale me with the full story soon enough. But he hadn’t.

Time to address the elephant on the poop deck.

“How are Kara and Hennan?”

“Hennan’s well. A man now.”

“A man?” It had been three years since I’d seen him, but in my mind he was very much a boy.

“He’s working the fishing boats out of Trond. Tutt would be proud. And he has a girl. I predict babies by the spring.”

“Babies!” I cut my thumb. “Shit!”

“Time and the tide. They wash over us whether we want them to or not, Jal. The boy’s a man. He has a future. And this”—he reached out to pat the axe he had laid at his feet—“has no place in it. He needs better men around him than me.”

“And Kara?” When Snorri set sail for the North with the witch and the boy, I had imagined I might be waving off a new family. Replacements for the wife and children killed in the attack that reduced the Undoreth to two warriors. Life is seldom so neat though, however we might wish it. “What’s my favourite völva up to?”

“Kara follows the magic. She can find no peace without it. Some men can find no peace without their ale.” He shrugged and glanced out at the slate-grey sea. “And some men cannot abide to be ashore too long. Magic is her ocean.”

“Magic? But it’s gone.” I had played my part in that. I was glad to see the back of it too.

Snorri waggled the hand holding his knife. “Kara said it’s like a washtub. The stopper got pulled out and the magic drained away, as water does. But imagine the washtub is a lake, and here and there you can find puddles, trapped and left to evaporate. She says there are places in the world that are like those puddles.”

“Deep places?” I shuddered, imagining the dark corridors of Kelem’s mine, flooded with old magic unwilling to depart.

“Sometimes deep, sometimes just special. She said Skilfar’s mountain held its magic for over a year, like a cloud around it.”

Another shudder. The North’s most famous witch had spent centuries burrowed into the side of a lonely volcano. I could imagine that place being loath to relinquish its power. What I couldn’t imagine was what attraction such mastery of the black arts held when the prize appeared to be life in a freezing cave miles from anywhere.

“So that’s why you left.” I sucked my thumb. The cut stung like acid. “Why are you here? Is making sure I don’t drown the whole of it?”

“My people didn’t always come back.”

“Sorry?”

“When they sailed for the New World, they didn’t always come back.”

“I thought you said they had special knowledge!” I set down the whale tooth I was spoiling. I knew the crossing was dangerous whoever made it, but this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Vikings don’t drown!”

“Some of them stayed, Jal.”

“Undoreth?” Suddenly I understood. Snorri was hoping to find some of his clan in the New World. He was the last of the Undoreth in the North, but who knew how many of his kind might be settled across the ocean.

“Undoreth.” He nodded. “I had an elder brother, you know. He sailed with my father when I was ten. Chose to stay.”

“I didn’t know that, no. Because you never told me.” It seemed unreasonable that a man so given to telling stories should have held on to secrets like this.

“Now perhaps you can tell me why you’re going.” Snorri fixed me with deep blue eyes.

“Nuns. I told you.” I didn’t have to fake the guilty voice this time.

“That’s the lever they used to get you out of your seat. It’s not what you’re going to the New World to do. And don’t bother with that conversion talk. You’d make the worst missionary ever.”

“Is that a storm coming?” I pointed over Snorri’s shoulder. I had intended to distract him, but there really was a grey wall trailing toward us, beneath the darkest cloud I’d ever seen.

“There’s always a storm coming, Jal.” Snorri kept his gaze on me. “And they’ve been battening down the hatches for the last half hour. But the thing that interests me is what the pope wants you to do for him when we get where we’re going.”

I sighed and looked down at my bloody thumb. I hadn’t really expected to be able to put Snorri off the scent.

“I’m to kill a priest.”

THREE

Storms are dull things. At least if you take away both the fear of drowning and any responsibility for keeping the ship afloat. I had fear coming out of my trousers, of course, but in retrospect storms make poor tales.

Basically it’s weather. You get shaken up and down relentlessly in a small wooden box not much larger than a coffin. Your possessions crash about inside. Waves crash about outside. The wind howls. Worrying splintering sounds reach you. Eventually the wine does its job and you awake with a sore head, to discover that the tempest has long departed and your hammock is doing its best to strangle you.

After each storm, since the pope neglected to send any servants along to do it for me, I spent much of my time carefully reconstructing the arrangement of my cabin. My luggage had been loaded well ahead of my appearance at the dockside and on the second day had to be retrieved from the darkness of the hold.

The word hold creates a false impression of order and security. Hole would be a better term. A dank hole where bilgewater sloshes unseen beneath silent crates stacked to the deck above. The cargo allowed precious little room for manoeuvre, and whilst my effects had been marked to be positioned for easy access, I saw no sign of them in the daylight pooling around the hatch. The Hesperus had been dispatched to carry me across the Atlantis, but the church had naturally filled any vacant space with trade goods, anxious to return a profit on my exile.

My spare vestments, clothes both for travelling and for entertaining, washbowl, toiletries, boots, buttons, hats, and the like, I had entrusted to the church crates, along with a few luxuries such as rugs, sweetmeats, brandy, a framed portrait of the Red Queen in case anyone forgot who was whose grandson, a decorative vase or two . . . All that I carried aboard on my person was a heavy pouch of crown gold, a box of ghosts given to me by a man who could see the future, and a crystal lens foisted upon me by a man from the distant past.

I also had the symbols of my office, of course, conferred on me by the pope himself. The holy stone, which was in practice a means for checking that a cleric followed orders, even in private, and the cardinal’s seal, which gave authority to orders of my own making.

Snorri helped me recover the rest of my belongings from the hold, along with two elderly seamen who spoke in such thick accents they might as well have been talking in another language. I oversaw the operation, to ensure that none of my treasures wandered off during transit.

“What the hell is that scratching?” I held a handkerchief to my nose in a vain attempt to ward off the rotten-seaweed-and-sewage stench of the place.

“Rats,” one of the grandfathers replied. It was the first intelligible word to pass his gums.

“Have to be bloody big rats!” I leaned closer to one of the larger crates. “Seems to be coming from in here.” It sounded like giant steel fingernails scraping against wood.

“Ayuh, bigguns.” This from the other reprobate. I assumed they were words rather than random mouth-noises.

“I saw one this big earlier.” Snorri held his hands to either side of his grin, indicating something rather smaller than a mouse.

I sniffed, then wished that I hadn’t. “A ship this big should have a cat. A good ratter.”

“Ayuh, kilt.” The man who had earlier managed “rat” slipped back into code.

“He said that something killed it,” Snorri provided, seeing my incomprehension.

I no longer cared. I spotted my crates and waved the sailors toward their duty. Half an hour later I was busy with a crowbar unpacking the furnishings of my little cardinal’s cave, which I discovered was officially called the Poop House.

The days progressed, the gulls abandoned us, the winds blew, the waves . . . waved. Miles vanished wetly beneath the Hesperus’s keel. I lost a few more lunches and found my sea legs. Snorri took to helping with the daily tasks, taking a strange delight in learning new ways to knot a bit of rope. Captain Knellson consulted him on rare occasions, though it seemed that the farther out to sea we got, the less he wanted the Viking’s opinion about our course and the more he pinned his faith upon the faded charts in his map room.

Even so, Snorri kept his own observations of sun and stars, doing complicated things with the shadow of a stick and the motion of the heavens behind the raised lattice of his fingers. And keeping some sort of tally in scratches on the mizzenmast. Omar showed a professional interest and declared the Norseman’s workings to be “surprisingly sophisticated.” I suspected he was just being kind. How hard could it be, really? After all, most of sailing across oceans is just keeping going in the right direction.

I had expected the storms. It was the food that proved to be the unexpected horror. We ran out of fresh meat within days, fruit within weeks, and before long our diet consisted of stews made from rancid fat, dried meat, and withered vegetables. Foul as that was, it didn’t take long for me to miss it once the necessary ingredients were exhausted. After that we ate an awful porridge of barley and . . . well, it was just barley. We also broached the first barrel of ship’s biscuit.

According to the man listed optimistically on the Hesperus’s roster as “cook,” a ship’s biscuit consisted of two ingredients combined in exactly the right proportions.

“Flour and water, Your Eminence.” The swarthy fellow handed me my biscuits, thereby doubling the number of ingredients in an instant through the addition of grease and salt.

“Water, you say?” I removed one of the offending articles and banged it against a timber, then tested it again with my teeth. I’ve bitten softer rocks.

“Well, the baking removes most of the water.”

“So . . . flour then?”

“Can’t argue with a man of the cloth.” He nodded obsequiously. “More than me soul’s worth.”

I tried to break off a piece. A lot of Empire sailors lose their teeth on long voyages. They’re called “gummies” in port and afforded a certain respect. Snorri maintained some wild pagan theory about diet and kept a bag of vile-tasting grapefruit seeds on his person. The obvious answer was, of course, that the gummies had lost their teeth trying to bite the sort of thing I currently held in my hand. I turned it over, seeking some sign of weakness. Instead I discovered a monster. A six-legged nightmare. And dropped the biscuit with a manly squeal.

“Good God! What is that thing?”

“Ship’s biscuit, Yer Eminence.”

“I mean the thing crawling about on it.”

The man peered as if seeing the insect for the first time. “Well, properly speaking, it’s ship’s biscuit too. When the barrel’s sealed, there ain’t nothing in it but biscuit. An these little fellers grow from smaller’n you can see to . . . quite big . . . eating nothing but biscuit. So it stands to reason that they’re biscuit too.”

“It’s a weevil.” Snorri loomed over the cook and picked the creature off the table between finger and thumb. He popped it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and grimaced. “Softer than the hardtack. And more flavour to it.”

All around us sailors laughed, the joke spreading its way up into the rigging. It hadn’t taken Snorri long to win the crew over. Some magic might have run from the world, but the sort that followed Snorri around continued to linger. Perhaps it was just the man’s openness, good humour, and willingness to pitch in where manual labour was concerned . . . but I felt there had to be more at work.

I walked off, the rolling deck nothing to me now, clutching my iron-hard disk of future weevil. Omar and Barras were chatting by the rail. Both bearded by this stage and as salt-stained as ancient mariners.

“Someone’s not happy.” Barras nodded toward the quarterdeck.

Captain Knellson’s cold stare rested squarely on Snorri’s back, his lips a thin and bitter line. He began barking orders at such a tempo they were lost on me. The men around Snorri seemed to understand them though, and not wishing to go swimming with their own yard of chain, sped off in six different directions.

“What’s got under his skin?” I wondered, trying and failing to bite off a piece of hard-baked flour.

“Well, that’s not difficult to figure.” Omar frowned. “The man commands sixty others on a wooden raft so far from land that you would need an acre of sail and a fair wind to find a beach in less than a month. What does his authority rest on out here? If someone else were wearing that hat of his when we arrived at our destination, who would be any the wiser? Fear and habit keep him where he is. That and the lack of a better alternative. Is it so hard to imagine why he distrusts your northern friend?”

“Omar!” I took a step back and stared at him. “Since when did you talk like that?” This was little, good-natured Omar, who always tagged along, always paid, always gambled and lost then gambled again. The words shrewd and insightful were extremely far down the list of those I might reach for when describing him.

“I am . . . was . . . a mathmagician, you know. When there was magic in the mix, I was bound by my vow to the Mathema not to use their teaching except in the tower’s service. Now that vow no longer binds me. It might take enchantment to make predictions as accurate as those we used to calculate, but it also required a scientific assessment of the factors. In short, the Mathema might start by teaching its students the theory of numbers, but it finishes by teaching them the practice of men.”

I let my gaze wander from one human dot in the rigging to the next, down to the bronzed bodies of the men at work on the deck. Over the weeks they had resolved from a faceless, ill-smelling herd into a disreputable and still ill-smelling crowd of individuals. Lame Tom, with his frightening harelip and no sign of a limp. Odo, who could dislocate both shoulders and weave his wiry body through the rigging like a snake. Black Dennis, named for his teeth, a man whose breath could blister skin. Hudd, a solid young man, bigger than most and burned across the face, his voice a disconcerting rasp. Scoundrels, all of them—

robbers, rapists, former pirates, men with murder in their pasts—but a crew nonetheless, used to commands and discipline. A brotherhood forged under the pressure of the certain knowledge that the ocean wanted to kill them and that any failure to work as a team would let it.

“So if you’re such a good judge of men . . .” I let the question hang.

“What am I doing following you to the ends of the earth?” Omar grinned. He still blacked his teeth as mathmagicians do.

“I was going to ask why you spent so much time with him!” I scowled past him at the sniggering Barras.

“I don’t base my friendships on numerical analysis, Jal,” Omar said, continuing to grin. “But if I did, I would still be following you. After all, what mathematician can resist a paradox?”

Whilst we passengers would move about the ship, taking constitutional strolls along the circumference of our floating prison, each of us had spots we liked to occupy at various times of the day. We established an uneasy rota of ownership, like cats that share a house. The crew would move around us, bound on their errands, largely ignored, as much a part of the background as the flapping lines, full sails, and rolling sea.

Monsignor Augusta occupied the prow for several hours around each noon. I would watch her from my own kingdom on the poop deck, my line of sight occasionally intersected by the top of Captain Knellson’s tricorn as he strode back and forth on the quarterdeck, shouting at the men.

One crew member who emerged from the faceless mass to draw my attention was the Hesperus’s thoroughly unpleasant first mate, Armarda. A huge fellow, a shade shorter than Snorri, a shade darker than Omar, a shade more vicious than the captain. He was fat where Snorri was muscular, but it never pays to underestimate the strength of a fat man. Our first mate was given to wearing a broad band of garishly coloured silk about his waist. He stank of cloves and would offer me a snarl each time our paths crossed. It had been Armarda who hammered the chains closed around the ankles of the sailors who were tossed overboard, and he stepped in to deliver other punishments when the captain passed sentence on subsequent offenders. I didn’t like the fellow one bit and took pains to avoid him, which with a big man on a small ship isn’t easy.

In addition to my new talent at scrimshaw, I took to chess to pass the time. At first I played against Omar with outsized pieces on a chalk-drawn board on the poop deck. It wasn’t so much the fact that he always, without exception, beat me that bothered me so much as the fact that he never considered any of his moves, making each one before I had time to fully draw back my hand from my last move. Later I played Barras in the mornings, huddled behind the prow where the hull continued above the decking and offered shelter from the wind. I never beat Barras either, but he would occasionally afford me the respect of umming and aahing over his next decision. I played Snorri of an evening by the light of an oil lantern, the privacy of my cabin sparing me the disgrace of being publicly defeated time and again by a barbarian. When the oil ran low, I took the box of ghosts out of my sea chest. The thing was a cube, six inches on a side with rounded corners, and looked to be made of bone, though it wasn’t. The important fact was that it glowed in the dark and provided enough light to play by.

“I should be good at this game, dammit.” I shoved the board aside. “I’m a cardinal! I push bishops around for a living. I’m the grandson of a queen. I know plenty of knights . . .”

“You should challenge the monsignor to a match,” Snorri said. “She would enjoy beating you.”

“Hah! That witch!”

“I see you mooning over her.”

“She’s the only woman on board. I’d be eyeing up my grandmother after two months at sea if she was the only game in town.” Hell, I’d even started casting longing glances at the figurehead. Hessy, the crew called her. An angel with an impressive pair of wings and a less impressive, though increasingly noteworthy, pair of clothbound breasts jutting toward the horizon. The odd fleck of paint hinted that she had once been golden, though decades of weather and woodworm had ensured that her golden years were well behind her. Lately I had recategorized her from dilapidated to mature. A sign of my increasing desperation.

That evening I taught Black Dennis the rules and played him amid the hammocks down in the squalor of the crew’s quarters. When he beat me on the third try, I made him a gift of the board and swore never to touch the game again.

I drowned my sorrows that night while the ocean made another sporting attempt to drown the rest of me, and fell into a drunken slumber swinging in my hammock.

Something woke me before I was ready to rise. I assumed it was my bladder, but apparently I had already taken care of that. I lay where I was, waiting for sleep to claim me again. The swell had fallen to a gentle rise and fall, no light showed at the various chinks through which the day would eventually poke its fingers, and there was nothing to be heard above the moan of the wind, the creaking of timbers, and the slap of waves.

*beep*

“Bugger!” I turned in the shroud of my hammock and squinted blearily toward the fixed table. A whisper of the glow from the box of ghosts still bled through the cloak I’d thrown over it. “Bugger . . .”

I’d heard that sound before. It wasn’t a natural sound. I knew of no voice that could make it, animal or human, and no instrument that could reproduce the tone. I tried to get out of the hammock and fell to the floor, one leg still tangled and held above my head at an awkward angle. “Fuckit.”

*beep*

“I’m going to throw you in the sea!” I hadn’t wanted to bring the damn box. My great-aunt had insisted.

And the queen’s sister is the kind of scary-as-hell witch who gives regular witches a bad name. They call her the Silent Sister: She doesn’t speak, but you know what she means. The magic may have run from the world, but I think the old woman kept a little back for herself somewhere.

Shaking free, I crawled to the table, my path somewhat erratic, as the wine still had a hold of me even if the hammock had finally let go. “Bloody thing!”

*beep*

I pulled the cloak aside and screwed up my eyes against the glow. It hadn’t been glowing when the Silent Sister waylaid me outside Roma House and shoved it at me with her two bony hands. At least I don’t think it had: it can be hard to tell in broad daylight. But ever since I’d unpacked it onboard, the thing had been shining like a spook-filled lantern. I took hold of it gingerly . . .

*beep*

. . . and nearly dropped it. “Bastard thing!”

The box was, to my certain knowledge, at least a thousand years old, and was a wonder of the Builders, whose creations, although seemingly magical, apparently contained no enchantments, just cleverness, and continued to run blithely on following the death of magic. Thankfully, such things were fantastically rare.

This box contained the ghosts of a million Builders, stolen through countless observations and extrapolations and trapped within it in webs of numbers. It could spit out a shade of any one of them to talk to you if you so desired. I did not so desire.

“Jalan Kendeth.” The voice issued from the box, and the lid folded in to reveal an empty white interior.

I wasn’t fooled. A moment later a man, no more than twelve inches high, floated above the open box, painted onto thin air in shades of pale. A thin man, full of nervous energy that seemed to have infected his hair. “Jalan Kendeth!” He fixed his eyes on me.

“Dr. Taproot,” I muttered. “Go away.”

“By all means, dear boy.” A smile flickered across his face, revealing crooked teeth. “But I felt duty bound to tell you about the monster.”

“What monster?” I suddenly felt much more awake.

“The one coming to kill you, of course.” He nodded toward the doorway.

Something scraped along the planking of my door. A long, slow scrape, as if giant steel fingernails were seeking purchase. And all at once I discovered that when a monster comes calling late at night, all decks are the poop deck.

FOUR

“Help!”

The single bolt holding my cabin door shut started to break free of its housings as the monster outside pushed harder.

“You would do better to deal with this yourself,” Taproot said. The white and grey image of him flickered momentarily. “It has very little remaining function. Some well-placed sword blows might render the thing inoperable.”

“Help!” I yelled louder, throwing myself toward the back of the cabin. “I don’t have a fucking sword. I’m a fucking cardinal!” I rummaged frantically in my sea chest, tossing cloaks and hatboxes over my shoulder. I held the ghost box in one hand for light, the other digging for a weapon. My fingers closed around a cold iron lump. The holy stone that the pope gave me when he officiated over my appointment ceremony. I set it aside and delved deeper.

“Some sort of—” Whatever wisdom Taproot had been about to dispense was lost in the explosion of splinters as the door shot from its frame. The bolt housing whistled over my head with lethal speed.

My hand fastened about the hilt of the big ugly knife I kept at the bottom of the chest. Even a man of God sometimes has to do a bit of stabbing. I turned, dagger in hand, my neck peppered with splinters that stood proud like a hedgehog’s spines.

“What the hell is that?”

The creature advancing on my chess table resembled the weevil from my ship’s biscuit in many regards.

Size was not one of those regards. Its black, metal-plated back stretched a good yard from its blunt, eyeless head to the array of needles or quills jutting from its rear. It seemed to float toward me on a frenzy of thin and multi-jointed legs.

“Stab it behind the frontal nodes. It’s your only chance!” Taproot shouted.

I shoved the box down the front of my trousers. I had no intention of flinging myself at a giant metal weevil. Trying to stab its vitals while it tore me open seemed like a poor deal. When it comes to vitals, I feel that the word is somewhat redundant when applied to me. All of me is vital. There are no parts that are acceptable sacrifices.

As the thing swept on under the low table, I made my move. Bent double to avoid braining myself, I leapt forward, set foot on the tabletop, and was out the doorway in a trice. Fighting is always a last resort, like admitting fault or using the L-word with a woman.

The Poop House fronted onto the quarterdeck, which lay disturbingly empty. My cries for help hadn’t gone entirely unnoticed and a number of figures were coming toward me, some just shapes in the starlight, others with swinging lanterns in hand. I didn’t miss a stride. I sprinted along the deck leaping flights of stairs in single bounds. The worst thing you can do when aid arrives is come to a halt and let them watch you die. Your job is to run right past your rescuers and leave them to deal with the danger.

The problem was that the danger was in hot pursuit and my would-be rescuers seemed unable to see it in the darkness and general confusion. The foremost of them, a sturdy fellow, Hudd maybe, even made a lunge to grapple me. I swerved clear and sprinted on, leaving an alarmed chorus of “Who?” and “What?” in my wake, very aware that I was rapidly running out of ship to run away over.

The clatter of insectoid legs drew ever closer, a sound rather like a dozen expert knitters going all out with steel needles. I plotted a path over a large coil of rope, jumping it at the last moment, and was rewarded by a crash and chilling hiss as the thing threshed its way out of the tangle.

The trick bought me a small lead. In the ghost box’s subdued glow I could see the prow rapidly approaching. After that there was nothing but the figurehead’s back and a long spar no thicker than my wrist.

I kept running, over the backs of Hessy’s wings, and when I ran out of angel . . . onto the spar. Between setting foot on the figurehead and running out of spar you pass five ropes. It is testimony to the dullness of sea travel that I could name each. The fore-topmast stay, the inner-jib stay, the outer-jib stay, the flying-jib stay, and finally the fore-royal. I caught hold of this last rope to stop from pitching into the black ocean below.

The weevil had gained Hessy’s back and, with no loss of speed, hurtled itself toward me.

“Oh you piece of shit!” I faced my enemy and readied my knife.

At the last moment, I sliced the fore-royal a yard below where I gripped it and launched myself out over the waves. Fighting really is a last resort.

The mechanical weevil reared up, flailing at my bare heels. For an awful moment it found purchase, and then in the next second I was swinging away, leaving behind me the most satisfying splash I have ever heard.

My triumph proved short-lived. It turned out that the fore-royal wasn’t just for decoration and that the yards of sail attached to the other end were heavier than I was. The swing that should have brought me back to deck turned into a rising arc that slammed me into a spiderweb of rigging ten yards in the air amid a cacophony of crashing sounds.

“Jal?” Snorri’s boom rose over the confusion of shouts and alarms down on deck.

“Cardinal?” It sounded as if the monsignor had joined him.

By craning my neck painfully, I could see a small group of them on the deck, way down below me.

Snorri, Augusta, Armarda the first mate, Captain Bertron of my church guards, and half a dozen sailors.

“What?” I shouted at them. “Get me down!”

They all stood there staring.

“Hurry, damn you! Haven’t you ever seen a man stuck in the rigging before?”

“Not a cardinal,” said one of the sailors.

I could see a glow behind me, lighting the ropes. The ghost box appeared to have slipped around to the seat of my trousers.

“And not with the sun shining out of his arse.” Snorri grinned.

It took a remarkable length of time to get me down. My own suspicion is that nobody was in too much of a hurry.

The operation involved a lot of discussion of ropes and wind, and rather little untangling of those ropes while a cardinal dangled in the gale.

Captain Knellson stamped his way onto the deck early on in the proceedings, having been roused from his cabin. I say his cabin, though in reality the Poop House was his cabin, ceded to me at the pope’s request.

Perhaps this was the reason he seemed more interested in the state of the door than in getting me down. He also showed great concern about the absence of the third mate, who should have been commanding the night watch from the quarterdeck just outside said door.

By the time I was finally reunited with the deck, my head was pounding with blood from being upside down for the last ten minutes of the exercise and my left leg wasn’t responding to any requests I made of it. I sat there, with my back to the rail, massaging my thigh and staring up at a semicircle of faces varying from furious to amused, with confusion being the most common expression. Thankfully, the ghost box had stopped glowing, and I had been able to shift it to a pocket where it made a suspiciously large bulge.

“Where in damnation is John Quinn?” It was the only chance our diminutive captain had ever had to loom over me, and he made full use of the opportunity.

“John who?” My leg had gone from useless and numb to useless and really hurting. It wasn’t an improvement.

“My third mate, dammit!”

“Why would you expect me to know where your sailors are? Surely that’s your job.” I sat back, wincing.

Captain Knellson’s boot stamped down on the planking between my outstretched legs. “Ad mores natura recurrit damnatos, fixa et mutari nescia!”

“What?” He had a small foot, but anything violent that close to a cardinal’s jewels is way too big.

“Well said, Captain.” Monsignor Augusta peered down at me with evident distaste, as though I were the giant weevil.

“He makes a fair point, Jal.” Snorri nodded and rubbed his beard.

“Your third mate is probably feeding the fish.” I hadn’t a clue what the vicious little marionette had said, and the fact that everyone else seemed to speak Latin way better than I did tinged my reply with anger. My leg had started to listen to me again and I was seized by the sudden urge to stand up and knock the captain’s fancy hat into the sea. “I would say the most important question here is how, on a ship sailing to the New World for the sole purpose of delivering a man who stands just one step away from the papal throne, how, on such a ship, does said cardinal find himself pursued the length of the vessel by a fucking metal monster?” That last part emerged as a roar as I levered myself to my feet. I was a prince before I was a cardinal and I knew all about roaring at people below my station. “It hardly swam here, so search your blasted cargo and see if your inventory includes any more steel-plate nightmares waiting to kill me . . . Captain.” I started to limp back toward my cabin, then paused to add, “As for John Quinn, the monstrosity probably killed him and pushed him into the sea.”

I had imagined that I left them all where they stood, staring after me open-mouthed, but when I picked up the largest part of my door and made to prop it across the doorway to my cabin I found Snorri stooping to enter, with Barras and Omar in his wake. And behind them a frowning Monsignor Augusta, looking unaccountably pretty in the light of the lantern she carried.

They all crowded into my small abode, despite my protests.

“Well?” Snorri said, after they had all found places to sit and then turned expectant faces on me.

“No, not really. My leg hurts like buggery, I’ve got a hell of a hangover, I’m still half drunk, and I’ve got rope-burn in places you wouldn’t believe.”

“What he means is, what have you got to say for yourself . . . Your Eminence?” Monsignor Augusta said this without a trace of a smile. She had her scarred side toward me now, and my lustful feelings shrivelled quickly.

With a sigh I worked the box of ghosts out of my pocket. It proved to be something of a prolonged struggle, as the thing really was much too big to have fitted in there in the first place.

“Did anyone see it?” Omar asked, probably to give them something to do other than stare as I wrestled with my trousers, puffing and swearing.

“I caught a glimpse,” Snorri said. “Something long, covered in metal plates like a lobster’s tail. A Builder thing. Like that.” He nodded toward the ghost box as I finally got it free.

“Taproot.” I set the box on the table and summoned the old phantom. He appeared a moment later, grinning and nodding to my guests.

Barras drew back, just a degree. He knew what to expect from my stories, but hearing and seeing are different things. Omar and Snorri had seen the box in action before. Augusta though, she startled back so badly she banged her head on the wall, and stayed pressed to it, making the sign of the cross.

Dr. Taproot bowed in her direction. “Monsignor Augusta.”

“You . . . you know me?” Rather than being put at ease, she looked even more horrified.

“I know everything, dear girl. It’s my job.”

Augusta paled further.

I tapped the table to get us back on track. “So what the hell was that thing, and why was it trying to kill me?”

“It wasn’t trying to kill you.” Taproot shook his head annoyingly.

“Well, it had a funny way of showing it. We’re missing a third mate, half my door is lodged under my skin, and I was nearly chased off the front of the boat.”

“Ship,” Snorri said.

“It wasn’t trying to kill you,” Taproot repeated. “It was too broken to have much chance of that in any case.”

“So if it wasn’t trying to kill me, what was it trying to do?”

“It was trying to destroy the box that is currently projecting me, so that the box would cease to suppress the bomb’s activation signal. Then the bomb would have exploded and killed you. And everyone else on the ship.”

“Bomb? Nobody mentioned a bomb!” I leapt to my feet.

I regained consciousness slowly, and apart from the blinding pain in my head, I felt quite peaceful, though nagged by the worry that there was something important I had forgotten.

“So . . . what is a bomb, exactly?” Barras’s voice, whispering nearby.

“Something that causes an explosion.” Omar, muttering.

“Bomb!” I sat up sharply and wished that I hadn’t. “Jesus! What happened to my head?” I clutched it in both hands.

“You banged it on a ceiling beam,” Snorri said, helping me up.

“Have you found the bomb yet?” I staggered to my sea chest, setting a hand to the monsignor’s knee for support, and sat on it.

“Taproot says if we tamper with the bomb, it might go off. Best to leave it where it is. That’s why he didn’t tell you about it,” Snorri said.

“Damn that!” I made to get up, groaned, and sat down again. “I’m not spending months sleeping above a bloody bomb!”

“Well . . .” Snorri spread his hands. “You already have done. And if we’re at sea in two more months we will all have died of starvation, so we won’t have to worry. Besides”—he nodded to the holy stone lying at my feet—“you brought your own.”

I waved Snorri’s words away and ran the hand down across my face. Technically he was right. The holy stone was some kind of small bomb. The church had a supply of them from some Builder stasis vault. They liked to use them to dissuade the clergy from curiosity. We were given strict instructions to never remove the pin that held the clasp to the stone’s iron body. Curiosity doesn’t just kill cats, it kills cardinals too.

Fortunately, I’d learned the secret before they gave me mine.

“So . . . why didn’t the machine-monster just tamper with the bomb and set it off?” Omar asked. It was a good question.

Taproot reappeared above the box. “The machine could sense the damping field that is preventing the bomb from detonating, but it was unaware of whether the bomb was ready to detonate. Certain conditions

will have been put in place. Most likely simple ones, such as the ship being out of sight of land and of other ships. The machine knew that it was important that the bomb be allowed to decide, so it couldn’t make the decision for it. They must have left the machine as a fail-safe.”

“Why didn’t you use this . . . damping field . . . to prevent the machine from coming after you?” Omar asked. I was suddenly very glad that I had convinced him to come. At times a sharp mind can come in as handy as a sharp axe.

“The box tried,” Taproot answered. “But war machines are hardened against such attacks.”

“That thing was a war machine!” I examined my ankle and found it bleeding from the cuts the weevil had left on me as it fell.

“A very specialized one, for neutralizing electronic defenses. But yes.”

“I . . . was that Latin?” I squeezed my head. Why was everyone using words I didn’t understand today?

“Fortunately, the machine was trapped under a considerable weight of cargo,” Taproot continued. “I had hoped it might remain so, but the length of the voyage gave it the opportunity to bore its way out.”

“Look.” I waved the tiny ghost quiet. “There’s only one question here of any importance.”

“How do we get the captain to head north and get us out of this circulating system before we all starve?” Snorri said.

“Who is trying to kill us all?” Barras said.

“What you’re really going to the New World to do?” Omar suggested.

“Well,” I said. I had actually been going to ask what part of the ship was farthest from the bomb and then commandeer it for my new cabin. “Those are certainly significant parts of my question, and in your own touchingly inarticulate ways, you appear to have summed it up.” I turned back to the ghost box. “Dr.

Taproot. The man with all the answers . . .”

Taproot opened his mouth, then frowned and flickered. “The box is terminating periphery functions to conserve energy. Suppressing the bomb’s ignition sequence has drained stored power reserves. Do not allow the box to get more than a few hundred yards from the bomb. I advise that you make landfall within thirty-two days.” With that he flickered out of existence and the box faded to a dull bone colour.

“Wait!” I snatched the box from the table, upended it, and shook it in the hope that Taproot might drop out. Sadly, it remained silent. “Damn . . .” I looked around the cabin. “Suggestions?”

Monsignor Augusta stood slowly and turned her dark eyes to me.

“Pray.”

FIVE

The only thing worse than sailing the Atlantis Ocean atop a floating bomb that’s due to explode any day now is doing it while hopelessly lost. And the only thing worse than that is doing the lost sailing bomb thing whilst starving to death.

I huddled in my cabin by my tiny stove while the pot suspended above it simmered gently.

“What’s cooking?” Snorri shouldered the Poop House’s poorly repaired door aside and wrinkled his nose.

“Cow.” I stirred the broth. “I’m doing what every good mariner does when all the food has run out. I’m improvising.”

“Are . . . are those boots?” Snorri leaned in, frowning.

“Before they were boots they were cow.” I stuck to my theory and poked at the sagging leather with my spoon. They were my reserve pair of house boots. I’d paid good money for them at Sharberdi’s down on Triesto Street. The height of fashion, with subtle heels and a slight curl to the pointed toe.

“They still smell like boots.” Snorri pulled back. “And besides, we haven’t run out of food. I can see three ship’s biscuits on your table from here.”

“Those things.” I paused to rub my aching jaw. “Those things are the reason that half the crew on this tub are missing three-quarters of their teeth. ‘Food’ is altogether too generous a description for them. At least my boots were once a vital part of a cow. Technically they are very close to steak. Or at least they were.” I wasn’t trying to convince Snorri so much as myself. I wasn’t planning to share, after all. He could eat his own boots. “Once all the leather’s gone, then it’s time to sit barefoot eating ship’s biscuit and drinking your own urine, and not before. It’s a wonder you don’t know this stuff already.”

“It’s not something you have to worry about when you know where you’re going.” Snorri slumped into my other chair. It creaked alarmingly. Still plenty of meat on those bones. Not that cannibalism was on the menu. That came after the biscuits were gone but before scraping the barrel for weevils.

“I know where I’m going. The New World! I was rather hoping to reach it soon.” I sat back too, leaving the pot to simmer. “I had heard tell that it was quite large and hard to miss.”

“All right, let me amend. Starvation is not a concern when you know where you’re going and how to get there. Our problem is that the wind and currents have been rolling us around the same big circle for weeks now, and our captain won’t listen to any advice on how to break free.”

“So make him listen.” I pressed both hands to my belly. People talk about hunger all the time, but it’s not a thing that tends to loom large in the lives of princes or cardinals. I’d tended to assume they were exaggerating for effect. As my belt started to require that new holes be made in order for it to keep my trews up, I started to see their point. Hunger begins as a nagging and grows rapidly to a demand. Before long it’s screaming at you so loudly that you can’t hear anything else.

“. . . when you’re not even listening to me!” Snorri banged the table.

“What?” I looked up from my hollowed stomach.

“I said, how do you think I can get the captain to listen when you’re not even listening to me?”

“You could try saying it in Latin . . . What do you want him to do, anyway?”

Snorri sighed as if this might be something he had told me before. “Every few days, a storm blows in from the northwest. Rather than turning toward it, the captain should let the Hesperus run before it—”

“Wait. I may not be much of a nautical . . . type, but even I know that the New World lies in the west.

And a northwest wind will blow us southeast. East is where we came from! I don’t want to go backward. I mean . . . I do, but right now I want to go in the direction of lunch, and we must be closer to the New World than the Empire after all this sailing, surely?”

Another, deeper sigh. “There is a current that flows east to west. Thor’s Draught. It lies south of us. Once we are in its flow, we should reach land within a week.”

“Hmmm.” I poked at my boot stew. Some carrots and potatoes would liven it up. Along with some salt, herbs, butter, and chunks of steak. “I’m so hungry!”

Snorri snorted, stood, and made for the door.

“Tell the captain again!” I called after him. “He’s a reasonable man. Well . . . a man, anyway . . .” But Snorri had gone.

I came to the ship’s rail picking pieces of boot leather from my teeth and carrying a length of string. At one end of the string a small hook sported another choice morsel of boot.

“I see you beat me to it.” Omar and Bishop Hamish were already seated upon tar barrels with their lines dangling out into the sea.

“Our Lord may have directed us to become fishers of men, but many of his disciples were originally fishers of fish. Among the apostles, Andrew was a fisherman before Christ came to him.” Bishop Hamish had boarded the Hesperus a portly man, greying his way into his fifties. I had seen little of him since. Now that his regular appetite had overwhelmed those we didn’t share and brought him above decks, away from the company of the seamen, it seemed that starvation had deflated him, leaving his flesh bagging about his bones.

Omar tugged on his line. “It seemed the obvious thing to do. But I’m starting to lose confidence. We’ve been at this all day.”

“Nonsense.” I tossed my hook out over the waves. “You’re just doing it wrong. I mean, the sea is where all the fish are kept, no?”

I stuck with it for over an hour before I started moaning in earnest. I had just begun to complain about the wind when the monsignor appeared at my side. She stood over us wrapped in a black cloak—which the wind moulded to her body, making me less inclined to find fault with it—and flexing her right hand within the black leather of its glove.

“Augusta! You’ve decided to take up fishing too?”

“I’ve come so you may tell me what your true purpose is in visiting the New World.” She fixed me with a stern stare.

I blinked, then gave her my best “not in front of the heathen” look, which involved a fair degree of rolling my eyes from side to side. “My dear monsignor, I feel we should really discuss this in the privacy of your cabin.” I made to take her elbow. I’d been at sea over a month and had yet to glimpse even a sliver of her room through a hastily shut door.

Augusta evaded my hand, stepping toward Omar. “It was your friend who first broached the subject, and I feel that he already knows more about it than anyone else on this ship.” She looked down at Omar, who rose from his barrel but still found himself overtopped. “And the bishop here will be the soul of discretion in this matter.” Her stare carried a firm promise of “or else.”

I let out a sigh of defeat. Pope Gomst had cautioned me to secrecy, but he had also chosen those of my companions that I had not. “I’m tasked to determine what happened to Abbot Brolin’s mission to the interior. If he still lives, I am to return him to the pope, and failing that, I am to return his seal.”

She tried to hide it, but my revelation stuck the monsignor hard. She staggered slightly, as if unused to the rolling deck. “Brolin?”

“Yes.”

“And if he will not return?” she asked.

“Then he has to die.” And there it was, a job title added to my list. Prince, explorer, city marshal, saviour, cardinal, passenger, papal assassin.

“Who is this Abbot Brolin exactly?” Omar asked, still holding his line and hook, watching the sea. “And how did he annoy the pope so much from so far away?”

“Abbot Brolin led an expedition into the heart of the New World about six years ago.” I glanced around to make sure no sailors had sidled within earshot. “A large one. Church guards, priests, fifty missionaries.”

The coastal regions of the New World had been civilized centuries ago by Canukians invading from the north. They maintained a network of allied city-states that engaged in the business of civilization: farming the land, mining, forging steel, and the like. They did it better than we did, which rather put the Church of Roma on the back foot when it came to converting them from their heretical version of the faith, which did away with the need for a pope and his cardinals in favour of a more informal relationship between each man and his God. So for years a succession of popes had instead been making largely unsuccessful attempts to woo the wildly uncivilized tribes of the interior from their host of pagan gods.

Abbot Brolin’s mission was larger and better funded than most, and rested on the abbot’s reputedly astonishing powers of persuasion. Indeed it was little wonder that his superiors, having seen the abbot’s charisma on display, agreed that God might well want him on the other side of the ocean. In an organization like the church, everyone below you is a threat, everyone above you an opportunity.

“Initial reports from the missionaries show that they made port at Memphis and travelled inland following the Chatternoo River. They established a community deep in the interior and began to convert the local tribes. The last message came via traders six years ago, requesting gold to build a church.

Missionaries were sent to deliver the gold the following year. No word since.”

“The pope didn’t go to all this effort for the value of a church in gold,” Omar said.

“Brolin has the seal of a papal emissary. Its authority is almost equal to that of a cardinal’s seal. It can be used to sanction church rulings, appoint priests, lend weight to letters opining on matters of doctrine . . .”

“And?”

“That seal has been appearing on a number of damaging documents that have started returning to the Empire. It seems as if Brolin may have started some sort of heretical cult among the tribes, appointing himself as a de facto pope-in-the-west. Apparently that’s a bad thing.”

“Hmmm.” Omar stared out at the grey horizon. “So, why not send a papal assassin . . . you know, a proper one? No offense.”

“They’ve sent several. Pope Gomst wouldn’t tell me how many exactly, but none of them have come back. For some reason he thinks I might do a better job.” I had argued long and eloquently against it. Some might have called it begging. But the old man had turned a deaf ear. I was to come back with the seal or not at all.

“Well, that clears up one question and poses several more,” Omar said. “At least we know why the assassins didn’t come back.”

“We do.” I nodded with what I hoped was a measure of gravitas. I was damned if I was going to ask.

“We do?” Bishop Hamish was less shy about revealing his ignorance. “Why?”

Omar, ever kind, restrained himself from rolling his eyes, though I could see that it was an effort. “They know Jalan is coming, and they’re trying to kill him. They must have known about the others too. All the assassin skills in the world aren’t going to save you if your ship sinks in the middle of the Atlantis Ocean.”

“They?”

Bless you, Bishop! I favoured him with my most cardinally smile.

“The Builders, of course. Who else could send such marvels against us.”

“Shit.” I ignored Augusta’s narrow look of disapproval. “Pope Gomst may have God in his corner, but Brolin . . . Brolin really does have friends in high places!”

The sun was setting over the yardarm, or some piece of rope-laced woodwork at least, and I had caught nothing despite hours of hard sitting.

“You should watch that young man.” Bishop Hamish nodded toward a sailor with facial burns that made Augusta’s look like mere blemishes.

“Hudd?” I quite liked the fellow, though his rasp gave everything he said a sinister edge.

“Full of questions, that one. Too friendly.”

It wasn’t like the bishop to complain about young seamen being too friendly, so I took note. “Perhaps he’s just curious?”

“I’ve seen him hanging around your door, Cardinal.”

“Hmmm.” There were plenty of reasons to hang around my door, common theft topping a long list. “I’ll keep my eye on him, thank you, Bishop.” Whether the man was after my wine, my gold, my last pair of boots, or just listening in to report to the captain, I would make sure he went away disappointed. I made a mental note to mention him to Snorri.

I’d seen Snorri moving about the deck, talking to groups of crewmen here and there, but with none of the normal hearty banter. The whole ship seemed subdued, as if waiting for something with breath bated. Quite possibly for me to get a bite on my hook. I put all that out of my mind and returned my attention to the waves.

“I was led to believe that there are men who make a living pulling meals from the sea.” I tugged my line without enthusiasm. “Just a matter of time now . . .”

“Then why aren’t any of the sailors fishing?” Omar nodded to several of the crew busy with the endless business of knots and pulleys that seemed somehow required to keep us all floating.

“Odo!” I waved one of the sailors down from the rigging. He descended with a flowing motion, seeming almost to weave through the web of lines.

“Cardinal Jal?” He dropped lightly to the deck and crossed over to us with a knowing smile.

“You look hungry enough.” Odo had been wiry to start with; now he was gristle and bone. “Why aren’t you lot fishing?”

“I . . .” Odo seemed wrong-footed by my question, as if he had been expecting a very different one.

“Caught anything?” He peered at our lines.

“No,” said Omar.

“That’s why, yer worship. The sea’s too big for fishing.”

“Start making more sense or I’ll excommunicate you.” I reached for my Bible before remembering I was using it to prop up the broken leg on my table.

Armarda, the first mate, hove into view, returning from his customary watch at the prow. He favoured Odo with a dark look, and the man started to retreat immediately. “Fishing’s good by the shore, yer worship.

Out in the deep you’ll be lucky to catch a fish in a month.” With that he scrambled up a rope and was gone.

The first mate turned his stare on the three of us left sitting at the rail, managing to mix contempt and threat into a potent brew. Armarda’s look was one I was not unfamiliar with. It was the look a gaoler offers to his prisoners. Which was fair enough, I supposed. We weren’t going to be escaping his authority anytime soon.

Bishop Hamish, disheartened by Odo’s assessment of our chances, abandoned his place at the rail and went below. I waited until he was gone then claimed his line, nudging Omar. “Doubled my odds!”

“He said you’d be lucky to get a fish in a month, Jal.” Omar shook his head.

“Well . . . now I’ll be lucky to get two!” I’d expected more enthusiasm from a gambler like Omar. “And I can tell you now, there’s not a fish out there that tastes worse than boot stew.” I ignored his puzzled expression. “Anyway, why are you fishing if it’s so hopeless?” If he left, I could be the proud owner of three lines!

“I’m not fishing,” Omar said. “I’m watching the captain and his officers so I can construct a predictive model of their movements about the ship.”

I frowned at him. He looked a lot more like he was fishing than doing that other thing he just said. I fell back on the first question I ever learned. “Why?”

“To help optimize Snorri’s mutiny, of course.”

SIX

In defiance of the skeptics, I tied a dozen lines to the rail at the Hesperus’s stern, exhausting the supply of hooks to be found. I worried that the cord would prove too thin to secure the size of ocean behemoth on which I was keen to feast, but experiment proved it to be tough stuff, requiring all my weight to snap.

With my labours complete, I retired for the night. Sleep proved hard to find even with the help of a flagon of Wennith red. I swung in my hammock imagining all the ways the Builders might kill me if their bomb failed to do the job. The Day of a Thousand Suns had been over a thousand years ago. The histories said that the ground itself burned and the oceans boiled. It seemed wholly unreasonable then that anyone survived, and even more so that they were still hanging around making my life miserable. But the Builders had copied themselves into their machines, and although they might once have been our distant forebears, all that remained of most of them now were the echoes of who they were, still ringing through those ancient engines. Data echoes, they called themselves. Ghosts in the machine. Once they were men and had shared the concerns of all men. Now they were simply intelligences caught in webs of numbers, and their ambitions were hard to fathom. Why one of their kind would seek to protect Brolin and destroy me, while others like Taproot sought to help me, I had no idea. In the dark I toyed with the crystal lens that Dr. Taproot had secretly slipped into my pocket years before. I wouldn’t have accepted it at the time, but ever since then, I’d been too afraid to throw it away.

I leaned from my hammock, felt across the table, and dropped the lens into the box of ghosts. My stomach growled just to let me know it was still angry, and I lay back, certain that morning would find me still awake.

“Jal! Jal!”

A frantic pounding at my door brought me tumbling from my hammock. “Augusta?” More in hope than anything else. It hadn’t sounded like the monsignor. I crawled blind across the cluttered floor, making for the thumping. “Jesus H. Christ! What does a cardinal have to do to get a little sleep round here?” The door bar came free and I gained my feet to find Barras and Omar each with a lantern and a worried face. I clutched the doorframe, still a little drunk. “What?”

“It’s Snorri!” Barras said.

“They’ve got him!” Omar pointed toward the main mast.

“What are you talking about?” I tried to piece the words together in a way that made sense. You don’t “get” Snorri. With an axe in hand, Snorri could kill everyone on the ship without breaking sweat.

“Come on!” Barras grabbed my arm and hauled me across the deck to the rail that overlooked the command deck.

Four men, including the second and third mate, were lugging Snorri’s limp body from below decks.

Captain Knellson preceded them, with Armarda bringing up the rear, a naked cutlass in hand. Ropes bound Snorri’s ankles and his hands were tied behind his back. They carried him face down, head almost scraping the boards.

“They came at him all together while he was sleeping,” Omar said. “Beat him senseless with clubs.”

“I don’t buy it.” I shook my head.

“Maybe they put something in his water ration,” Barras suggested.

“It’s possible.” The rail felt real in my grip, but part of me still believed I was dreaming. If the lower decks weren’t packed with the corpses of men Snorri had killed while they tried to capture him, then drugging seemed the only answer.

“Tie him to the mast,” Captain Knellson barked.

The men set to work, and with a growing audience emerging from below or descending from on high, they set to lashing the Norseman to the main mast. He raised his head before they were finished, still groggy.

Blood smeared the left side of his face and the eye on that side was swollen closed. His hair stood in spikes and glistening clumps.

“Should we cut him down?” Barras patted for where his sword should be but found nothing, having left his bed too quickly.

“Let’s see how many men the captain has first.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to save Snorri. Of course I did. It’s just that I didn’t want to be pitched into the sea and left to drown.

“With Snorri out of action, Knellson will have all of them,” Omar hissed. “They were hardly brave enough to dare mutiny with Snorri at their head. None of them will stand up for him if it means facing up to the captain and Armarda alone.”

“You have the church guards though?” Barras asked.

“All three of them. And I rather feel they’re here to guard me whether I want it or not. I don’t know how they would take it if I ordered them to fight the captain to free a heathen.” As I spoke, I spotted Captain Bertron and his two men emerge onto the deck. None of them wore armour. Even during the day they left it off. A breastplate at sea is tempting fate just that bit too far, even for the most pious of men.

“They’re not armed,” Barras said.

“Captain Knellson’s men have taken charge of all swords and crossbows to prevent them from falling into the hands of mutineers.” Monsignor Augusta appeared at my side, making me jump.

Below us on the command deck Captain Knellson rang the ship’s bell for attention and began to stride around his tightly bound prisoner. The hard beads of his eyes searched each face turned his way. “A verbis legis non est recedendum!” he declaimed.

“Christ, not this again!” I was pretty sure non meant no.

“There must be no departure from the words of the law,” Omar muttered beside me.

“I knew that,” I hissed.

The captain levelled an accusing finger at Snorri. “This pagan planned to take my ship! My ship! Against every maritime law!”

Snorri shook his head, still dazed, and tested his bonds.

“I welcomed this man aboard the Hesperus at the insistence of the church and against my better instincts, and this is how he repays my kindness? With lies and with mutiny!” Captain Knellson completed another circuit of the bigger man. “The Viking thinks he knows the way to the New World? He thinks it lies to the east!” Laughter from the officers who had helped capture Snorri. “Shortly I intend to give him the chance to follow his own advice. The pagan may swim in whatever direction he chooses, and we will see who makes land first!” More laughter from the first, second, and third mates; a hush from the crew. “He will of course have to carry the burden of his crime with him in the traditional Hesperus manner.” Knellson pointed to the ship’s smith. “Go get the chains. Two yards.”

“Jesus . . . they’re going to drown him?” I gripped the rail, white-knuckled, mind racing.

“The captain drowned three men for stealing rum, Jal,” Barras reminded me.

“A yard of chain for rum, two yards for mutiny?” Omar asked.

“It would be a mercy to load him more heavily,” Augusta said, her eyes on the mast. “He would drown immediately. Captain Knellson wants him to struggle, to fight, to despair, and then to drown.”

“Order them to let him go,” Omar said.

“On what grounds?” I asked. The hopelessness of the situation began to press on my shoulders. “He’s guilty!”

The smith reappeared with hammer and chains, panting from the run.

Captain Knellson swept the massed crew with his gaze once more, his eyes coming to rest on those of us at the poop deck rail, me in particular. “A thorough investigation will ensue come the morning, and any found to have been conspiring with the Viking will swim after him soon enough.” He waved the smith forward.

“Wait!” I called out, and Knellson’s narrow stare returned to pin me, making my blood run cold. I could be the pope himself and the bastard could still have me killed out here, and nobody would stop him.

“Cardinal?”

“I . . . uh . . .” Pleas for clemency were clearly not going to work. “The man is obviously unwell, perhaps drunk . . . Doesn’t the law demand that the guilty be sober before the sea claims them?” I had no idea if it did, but it sounded reasonable.

I saw the captain chew on his reply. In truth, I was appealing to his cruelty. With the drug out of his system, Snorri would last longer in the water, better understand his fate, and suffer more. “An hour.” Knellson waved to his second mate. “When the chain is on, douse him with seawater until he’s fit to swim.”

Snorri was looking at me now, fierce and direct but clearly aware he wasn’t going to break free from his bonds. Nobody ties a better knot than a sailor.

“And I will need to hear his confession,” I said.

“Confession?” The captain stamped. “He’s a damned pagan. He’ll be crying out to Thor as the devil drags him off to damnation!”

“Even so, he must be given his chance to throw himself on the Lord’s mercy.”

Knellson threw up his arms. “Accidit in puncto, quod non contingit in anno.”

“Uh . . .”

“He says yes,” Omar muttered at my side.

“Bless you, my son.” I made the sign of the cross at the little madman in the captain’s hat and retreated from the rail.

“What the hell are we going to do?” I reached for my door.

“I thought you had a plan!” Barras said. “Omar, didn’t he sound as if he had a plan?”

“He did.”

“Plan?” Augusta took over the opening of the door, which had been defeating me, and led us in. “There can be no plan. The heathen is guilty, and even if he were not, it isn’t the cardinal’s place to gainsay a captain on his own ship in any matter other than those of the faith.”

“Out, all of you!” I took the monsignor’s elbow and steered her around in a tight half circle to meet Barras and Omar coming in. “I need to think!”

Augusta walked away slowly, shooting me a look that mingled surprise and outrage in equal measures.

Omar and Barras followed without complaint, perhaps relieved to be free of the burden of decision.

Neither of them knew Snorri well, but they both liked him a lot.

I shouldered the door closed on them and set to thinking. I didn’t have a plan. I had just been buying time. All I had by way of weapons was a knife, and I’d little inclination to use it. Armarda was bigger than me and had a cutlass that he was clearly itching to try out. Neither my friends nor my three most likely allies had their swords. And at Captain Knellson’s command were an unknown number of armed men, certainly more than four. Added to which, although the captain himself stood several inches shy of my shoulder, I had underestimated midgets before to my own cost. I suspected that his fighting skills equalled his temper, and I had no wish to find out.

I couldn’t let them drown Snorri though. Could I? Even if he didn’t seem to have much to live for save a faint hope of reunion with a brother he’d never mentioned to me before. I supposed that to a Viking, dying at sea was all part of the package. Aegir would take Snorri down to his watery kingdom, and come Ragnarok, he could battle sea monsters alongside all the other drowned Vikings that must litter the seabed.

On the other hand, I had walked through Hell with the man. That had to count for something . . .

In the end I did what any good cardinal would do in my situation. I lifted the table leg and reached for my Bible.

SEVEN

Captain’s Log, May 12, First Year of the Second Empire.

Horatious Knellson

Prisoner Snorri ver Snagason (pagan) was given to the justice of the sea before dawn on the proven charge of mutiny. I detail events here on account of the unusual execution of the sentence.

Cardinal Jalan insisted on hearing Snagason’s last confession and offering the pagan a final chance to accept the Lord. Much as it pained me to give a mutineer a chance to escape Satan’s clutches, I could find no legitimate grounds on which to refuse the request.

After composing himself, the cardinal emerged, suitably attired in cassock, white lace rochet, and scarlet mozzetta, and went to the stern where he prepared to hear the prisoner’s litany of sins. Since the cardinal came to my ship under a cloud of scandal, and having observed that he maintained a close relationship with the prisoner, I felt it my duty to search his eminence in case he should have about his person any forgotten weapon that might come into Snagason’s possession and endanger my crew.

Despite his eminence’s strong protests that it should be Monsignor Augusta who conducted the search, I undertook the duty personally and recovered a letter opener from the lining of his mozzetta.

Thus, armed only with his Bible, Cardinal Jalan retired to the stern to contemplate while my officers concluded their efforts to refresh the prisoner to ensure he had his wits about him when offered his final chance at divine salvation.

I summoned the cardinal to the command deck, but he insisted on privacy and bade me send Snagason to him at the stern rail, free from constraints. The cardinal assured me the pagan would not try to escape if he gave his word not to. With a swell blowing in, I determined my place to be on the command deck and as a compromise had Snagason delivered to the cardinal bound hand and foot and dragging two yards of chain riveted about his ankle. I had First Mate Armarda Grande keep watch just beyond earshot with Second Mate Errol Untos, both armed with the heavy bows used to repel boarders. The two men had strict instructions to shoot the pagan at the first sign of any escape.

To begin with, Snagason seemed receptive to the cardinal’s messages of salvation, and the two kneeled facing each other in conversation, with the cardinal breaking to read passages from the Bible.

After a few minutes, however, it seemed that Snagason became angry on discovering that the cardinal had only the saving of his soul in mind rather than any more practical kind of escape. I saw the altercation myself from before the main mast. Snagason, a beast of a man, taller even than my first mate, surged to his feet, bellowing, “After all I’ve done for you!” and “You little weasel!” He lunged at the cardinal, intent on knocking him into the sea, but his eminence proved elusive, escaping with only a glancing contact. With his hands tied behind his back and his ankles bound together, Snagason was only able to throw his body at the man. Cardinal Jalan twisted aside, and in the next moment, Snagason began to topple over the rail. His eminence managed to catch the man briefly from behind, but the prisoner’s weight was too much and he slipped the cardinal’s clutches, falling into the sea.

The cardinal immediately advanced on the first mate, berating him in no uncertain terms for not shooting the brute. In his passion, the cardinal knocked my second mate to the deck with a punch that dislodged two teeth. I state here for the record though that neither officer was at fault, having received strict instructions not to grant the pagan the mercy of a quick death unless there was a significant threat to the ship.

By the time Cardinal Jalan was calmed and led away by the monsignor, the pagan was lost to the night. It saddens me that he went bound into the waves. Justice demands a slower demise for mutineers.

Progress to the west remains slow but steady, though each storm sets us back. We have water for another six weeks. With rations at a third of standard, the biscuit will last a week. Double rum ration for the crew tonight.

Captain Knellson. Sea moderate. Wind northly turning northwesterly.

EIGHT

“You let him drown!”

“I don’t know what you’re upset about, Omar. He was my friend! You’d never set eyes on the man until you turned up to board the Hesperus.”

“But you two fought together! You travelled thousands of miles together! You saved each other’s lives.

Well . . . he saved yours. You walked through the underworld together . . .”

“We did.” I nodded.

“So . . . if you let a friend like that drown . . . where do I stand? We’ve just been to a few gambling halls together, shared some meals, told a few jokes.” Omar had looked shocked when he followed me into my cabin, and a quarter hour later he still looked just as shocked.

“Omar makes a good point, Jal.” Barras, frowning and serious.

“What did you expect me to do?” I threw up my hands. “Come on! I tried to smuggle him that knife. Knellson found it. I was lucky not to get thrown over the side myself.”

“You could have . . .” Barras glanced at the cabin entrance, glimpsing around the ill-fitting door the motion I had already seen. The captain had a man out there, listening in. “I don’t know. Something!”

“Snorri’s gone. We need to move on.” I reached for my mug. “I plan to drink myself insensible. It’s what he would have wanted.”

“Not drowning was what he would have wanted,” Omar said.

“I’ll join you.” Barras produced his own mug from somewhere about his person.

I moved defensively in front of my wine casket. It was only a matter of time before the sailors started stealing in earnest from the two barrels I had in the hold, and then this would be all I had. And, not to mention all its other benefits, wine would sustain a man better than boots.

“Friends share,” Barras said. “Snorri always told me that, and I agreed with him wholeheartedly. Friends share. It’s what he would have wanted.”

With a sigh, I let Barras at the wine. If nothing else, it would be a useful moment to remind him of should he ever find out about me and his wife . . . Friends share.

“Omar?” I offered him my mug.

For a moment he looked very tempted, then he shook his head. Friends who don’t drink are the best.

We told stories about Snorri for hours, toasting his bravery and becoming at turns maudlin or unable to contain our mirth.

“And! And!” I banged the table, which promptly lurched over on its broken leg. “And!” Another swig of the good Wennith red. “Do you remember that time with the axe!” I roared with laughter.

Barras stopped chortling and looked puzzled. “They were all with the axe . . .”

“Exactly!”

And we were off again, laughing until our sides ached while Omar looked on, bemused. Friends who don’t drink are the worst.

“Omar—”

A pounding on the door cut through whatever gem I had been about to share. It grated open before I had a chance to respond.

Armarda stood blocking the light. Two wiry seamen squeezed past him and took Omar’s arms.

“Hey! Wait!” I surged to my feet, hit my head on a ceiling beam, and collapsed cursing.

“Captain wants this heathen at the mast for sentencing.” Armarda turned away. The two men dragged Omar after him.

“Wait!” Barras chased after them. “Sentencing for what?”

“Mutiny!” There was more, but I couldn’t hear it from the floor of my cabin over my moaning.

By the time I managed to get down to the command deck, Omar had been tied to the mast, a task that required considerably less rope than had been used on Snorri. Before leaving my cabin, I’d had the foresight to stuff the box of ghosts into the inner pocket of my cloak. If anyone pitched old Cardinal Jal off the ship, they would regret it, albeit very briefly, a minute or two later as I dwindled in their wake. This instant of remorse would come when the distance between the box in my pocket and the bomb in the hold became too great for the former to prevent the latter exploding.

The crew had gathered again, along with the monsignor, Bishop Hamish, and my three church guards.

“Ah, Cardinal Jalan.” Captain Knellson hailed me as I wove my way down the steps, contending with wooziness from a blow to the head, too much wine, and the heavy swell. “It appears that both the pagans you brought aboard my ship were inclined to mutiny. I’ve sent the smith to get a yard and a half of chain.

The mutineer has already agreed that he has no intention of converting to the Church of Roma, so no confession will be required.”

Omar stared at me in desperation, struggling against a cruel rope across his neck. As much as I feared being next on Knellson’s murderous list, I had to do something.

“I can’t allow this!” The captain was standing at Omar’s side, and for a mad moment I wondered if I could talk him out of the execution on the basis that Omar was one of the only men aboard who didn’t make him look short. I stepped toward them, clutching my head. “You must let him go.”

“ ‘Can’t’? ‘Must’?” Knellson imitated me. “You do realize that when you say those things to a captain on his ship, that is exactly what mutiny sounds like?” Armarda moved from the men ringing the scene to hulk at Knellson’s shoulder, cutlass in hand, blade gleaming in the afternoon sunshine.

I stopped advancing on them, straightened up, and lowered my hand. “Look, I’m not a damned mutineer.

I hardly want to give up on the church to command a ship. I just don’t want you to drown another of my friends. Omar is the seventh son of the caliph of Liba, and if you ever want to dock in an Afrique port again, you will reconsider this madness. Omar isn’t a mutineer either. Look at him! Whoever told you he was is clearly lying.”

On any reasonable man it would have worked. On many unreasonable men it would have worked too.

But something in the captain’s stony gaze told me even before I had stopped speaking that Omar was going swimming.

“It was me that told him the Liban was plotting with the Viking,” Armarda growled, taking a step toward me. “Calling me a liar, priest?”

I glanced back at Bertron and my other two guards. None of them met my gaze. “Mistaken.” I raised my empty hands as Armarda lifted his blade. “I meant that you were mistaken.”

Omar was going to drown and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Like Snorri, he was going to go over the rail into the cold enormity of the sea, and the chain would drag him down. I wasn’t even sure that he could swim, but it made no difference. He could be the best swimmer to ever live and go in unchained.

Still the waves would not release him.

The smith bustled from the ring of sailors, chain clinking in his hands.

“Mr. Untos.” Captain Knellson waved the second mate forward. “See that the pagan is put into the water as soon as his irons are affixed.

“Wait!” I fell to both knees. Behind the captain and first mate, the sailors were moving apart.

“What is it, Cardinal?” The captain stared down at me. “Tempus fugit!”

“At least let me pray for a miracle!” I pressed my palms together in prayer.

“Hah!” Armarda barked the laugh. “Pray all you—” The sharp end of an eight-foot boat hook burst out through his throat in a crimson spray.

Snorri leapt forward, his chain rattling behind him, and sent Captain Knellson sprawling to the deck with an elbow to the side of the head. The Viking grabbed the second mate’s arm and swung him with a roar, lofting him across the deck and out to sea. I grappled the third mate’s legs as, in a fit of madness, he ran past me at Snorri. I probably saved his life. Snorri kicked him in the head and scooped Armarda’s cutlass from the deck. “Anyone else?”

There was nobody else.

Within an hour, Snorri had brought the ship around and we were sailing south before a fair wind. The transition of power went smoothly enough with Armarda dead and the captain in the box, as the Hesperus’s cell was known.

The disposal of Armarda’s corpse prompted a degree of muted discussion. Nobody enduring the pangs of starvation likes to see close on three hundred pounds of meat go to waste, but in the end Snorri had him flung into the sea without ceremony.

Omar, freed from the mast rather too slowly for his liking, marched me off to my cabin, ostensibly to inspect my head wound but really to demand an explanation. Barras also joined us, at the head of a queue of quite a few others wanting to know how Snorri had returned from the ocean’s clutches.

“I’m sorry, Augusta,” I said, closing the door on the monsignor, who tried to come in on Barras’s heels.

“I’m too injured for a crowd. I need to spend some time in prayer and quiet contemplation. Perhaps if you came back around midnight I could share something with you—”

“Jalan!” Omar pulled me from the doorway. “What just happened?”

I fell back into my chair and reached for my mug, still half-full of wine. While I took a swig, Omar stayed on his feet, rubbing his neck where the rope had left it sore. “Well?”

“I saved him. Just like you said I should.” I took another swig.

“How?” Omar flashed me a dark and dangerous look that reminded me of his murderous father, a man whose traits had never before seemed to show in his seventh son.

“ ‘Come follow me, said Jesus, and I will make you fishers of men.’ ” I felt rather proud of that. A Bible quotation that I didn’t invent on the spot.

“Jalan . . .” A growl now.

“All right, all right! Christ, let me have a moment of victory, won’t you?” I drained the mug. “When I went to the stern to wait for Snorri, I cunningly hauled in all the hooks and lines I’d left for the fish. I looped them over the rail. One of them had even caught a fish!” I spread my thumb and forefinger rather generously. “This big! Had to let the bugger go.”

“I don’t understand . . .” Omar frowned.

“That’s because you’re not a genius capable of improvising lifesaving plans on the fly.” I looked around for more wine. “Anyway, when they left Snorri with me, I pulled his chain alongside me and started hooking the lines over links while I took his confession.

“And nobody saw?” Omar raised his brows.

“Did you see? It was dark!” I waved the interruption away. “Anyway, I knew one line wouldn’t hold him, but I had a dozen!”

“But that would just leave him being dragged along behind us . . . by the ankle . . . under the water, with his arms and legs tied.”

“Well, it would have if you’d done it.” I leaned back and nearly tipped my chair over. “I, however, will never let a friend down! A man of my mettle finds solutions where others—”

“Jal!” Omar stamped.

“Before I came out of my cabin, I hollowed out my Bible. I took the two small knives that I carry for emergencies and hid them inside. I told Snorri my plan while I was supposed to be listening to his confession. Later, when I was struggling with him at the rail, I put one knife in his hand and used the other to slice the ropes binding his arms. Actually, he fell before I could get them all, but I must have done a pretty good job.”

Omar at last took a seat, sitting heavily on my sea chest. “And neither of you thought to tell me this?”

“All I knew was Jal asked me to trail a rope.” Barras spread his hands.

“Knellson had ears everywhere. They were listening at my door!” I said.

Omar shook his head. “So all Snorri had to do was keep hold of the knife, then free his arms, cut his legs loose, grab the chain, haul himself up the lines, and . . . do all of this blind while being dragged along underwater. And then what? He can’t have hung onto the lines or he would have been spotted. You only kept Armarda from the rail for a few minutes . . . And how could he scale the side of the ship with one small knife?”

“All good questions.” I nodded. “He did all that stuff you said and got close enough to the hull to sink his knife. After that he had to work his way around the waterline.” Quite how he had managed that against the current of the ship’s passage and with just one knife I honestly had no idea. I suspected that it hadn’t been easy. “I asked Barras to discreetly secure a rope to the port side rail about a third of the way along the ship. Snorri just had to climb back aboard.” I peered into my mug in the hope I’d missed a few drops.

“When that happened, and whether any of the crew helped him hide, I don’t know. To be honest, the closer Knellson got to pitching you overboard, Omar, the more I began to think Snorri had messed it all up and got himself drowned despite all my help.”

Omar shook his head. “You realize how lucky you were? I mean . . . if it weren’t for those fishing lines being there already then none of this would have worked.”

I leaned back again and favoured him with a cardinal’s wisdom. “From where I’m sitting, my son, you and Snorri are the lucky ones. And you both owe me a fish.”

NINE

Under Captain Snorri, the Hesperus followed the advice that the previous incumbent had so long ignored and fled before the next storm. Our new course saw us rapidly retracing our torturous advance across the Atlantis. The crew remained in a febrile state, by turns anxious then optimistic. Mutiny is a dangerous fire to light. As soon as a body of men see that one captain may be easily overthrown, it can quickly become a habit. Starvation, of course, does not breed patience. Food remained non-existent, and in desperation I gnawed my way through several ship’s biscuits.

By day four of the new regime, however, we were sailing west once more. Snorri assured me that this time the current was with us, Thor’s Draught speeding us toward the New World. I had to take his word for it. The ocean looked much the same to me: unfriendly and far too large.

Hunger, when left untended, soon comes to dominate a man’s thoughts. I stopped daydreaming about seducing the monsignor and took instead to tormenting myself with imaginary feasts, remembered meals, the smell of bacon . . . and troubling thoughts concerning the opportunities lost when the first mate was tossed overboard to feed the fishes.

I took to standing in the prow just behind the spread of Hessy’s wings, staring for hours at the horizon in hopes that in some form or other, dinner would appear over it. The crew seemed to think I was praying for their salvation and were appreciative of my efforts. But I’d never really found praying very effective, and spent most of my time just hoping. I also eyed up Hessy’s weathered chest and wondered if woodworm were good to eat.

“Land ho!” A faint cry from the crow’s nest.

“Oh, you liar,” I muttered. I had been imagining the call for so long that I heard it taunting me from one moment to the next.

“Do you see anything?” Barras limped up beside me.

“Water,” I said. But I stared at the horizon hard enough for my eyes to sting, willing it to be true. “It’s going to be a cloud again, isn’t it?”

“Where away?” Snorri’s bellow from the command deck.

“West by southwest, Cap’n!”

Snorri began rattling out orders regarding the trimming of the sails. I guessed he must have picked up the jargon during the voyage. It sounded authentic, and the Hesperus began to turn without pitching us all into the ocean, so it appeared to have been time well spent.

“Please God, let it be real!” Omar gripped the rail beside me, leaning forward.

“Imploring the Lord for favours is my job. If you take that from me, what do I have left?” I elbowed Omar and repeated his words more loudly for the benefit of the sailors.

Tension grew. We had had some false alarms before. Once it had been a small island of driftwood and seafoam covering over an acre. But this time the addition of other cries from the rigging added credence to Jimeny Jim’s call from up in the crow’s nest, and an air of excitement settled over the Hesperus, coaxing all hands up onto the deck.

One by one, the men crowding the rails began to claim their own sightings.

“There!” Barras pointed. “Land!” And finally I spotted it too. Rather than a continent, we had found ourselves a small island. But a genuine one with trees and beaches rather than a collection of floating sticks.

“There’s got to be more, right?” I guessed the whole thing to be less than two miles across. “I mean, you don’t just get one island all alone in the middle of the ocean . . . do you?” Finding no useful answers at the prow, I went off to the command deck to harangue Snorri.

I dubbed the island Kendeth Isle in honour of my prayers steering us safely to it. It turned out that from just off its shore, a far greater body of land could be seen on the western horizon. Even so, Captain Snorri decided to weigh anchor off the main beach of Kendeth Isle in order that Captain Knellson be marooned there . . . and to allow a quick search for provisions.

Some among the crew suggested that Captain Knellson be treated to his own favourite punishment and be sent swimming for the shore, towing a suitable length of chain. Many, including myself, felt that it would be well deserved, but we lacked the appetite for actually carrying out such an execution.

“Marooning is a long and honoured maritime tradition,” I argued.

“Let’s do it.” Snorri proved easier to convince than I had anticipated given that the man had ordered him drowned.

In due course, the former captain was brought up from the box, stinking, filthy, and in shackles. Despite his diminutive stature, there was a hard core of threat in Horatious Knellson that had always made me consider him the second most dangerous man aboard the Hesperus. The dirt and chains did nothing to change my opinion, and the cold stare he steered my way made me wonder if perhaps a short trip to the seabed might not be the safest option.

The Hesperus boasted a jollyboat for transporting men between ship and shore. Snorri ordered it hoisted from its place on deck and lowered to the water. I decided to be part of the marooning party, eager to set foot on dry land after so many weeks at sea. I grabbed my heavy over-cloak from the Poop House and hurried to the rail. Most of the passengers joined me, perhaps sharing my desire for something solid and fixed underfoot. We descended via a rope ladder. Part of me hoped Knellson would slip, fall, and be lost beneath the waves.

In addition to Knellson, Snorri, and me, we packed in Monsignor Augusta, Omar, and Barras Jon, and took Captain Bertron with one of his church guards to man the oars. Compared to the Hesperus, the jollyboat rolled alarmingly in the swell, and I kept a death grip on the side, certain that we would be swamped within moments.

“Three captains on such a small vessel!” I joked to distract myself.

The others just looked at me. The sense of humour is an early casualty of famine for most people.

It took a few minutes’ rowing and a nightmarish passage through the surf before we finally grounded our keel on the sands. I leapt from the prow at the first opportunity and with wet feet announced, “I name this land Kendeth Isle and declare myself king.”

The others pushed past me before I could get into my acceptance speech. I found their lack of enthusiasm for my discovery disheartening but encouraged them to press on into the tree line to find me some lunch.

Snorri took a stake from the boat and hammered it into the ground a few yards past the point where the sand gave up. He secured Knellson to it.

“You know the punishment for marooning is—”

“Death, yes.” I came up alongside Snorri. “With you, Captain Knellson, the punishment for everything is death. It gets a bit predictable.”

“I’ll find you, Cardinal. You and your mutinous pagans. Mark my words. Justice will be done.”

Something in the little madman’s eyes reminded me of my old nemesis Count Isen. I knew that these were no idle threats, but short of murdering him, the only solution seemed to be to leave him to his delusions and to trust his predicament and the vastness of the New World to keep me safe from his vengeance.

The forest on Kendeth Isle proved comfortingly familiar. Contrary to Black Dennis’s tales aboard ship, the New World didn’t seem to boast any bizarre flesh-eating trees, violet throttler vines, or huge flowers that lured a man in with intoxicating scent only to wrap him in the folds of its disturbingly skin-like petals.

Instead, I spotted a mixture of oaks, elms, and pines.

Sadly, like the woodlands of Red March, the forests of the New World proved remarkably free of anything edible. With summer only just threatening, it was too early in the year for fruits and berries. And the wildlife on this side of the Atlantis was just as shy as it was back home. I glimpsed something that might have been a squirrel, and that was it save for a handful of birds. Even so, the contrast between the closeness and greenery of the forest and the creaking windswept deck of the Hesperus was startling after months at sea, and I wandered in a daze, my gait rolling with imagined waves. I drank in the scents and sights, almost forgetting my hunger, but not quite.

Having rooted around unsuccessfully among the trees closest to the beach, I decided to follow the others deeper in. I got about fifty yards before:

*beep*

Slowly I patted my cloak— *beep*—and found the box-shaped lump. “Hmm.”

With a shrug, I carried on into the woods.

*beep* *beep*

A faster, more urgent tempo. A cold realization ran down my spine, and I retraced my steps. The beeping slowed, then stopped. “You’re trying to remind me to stay close to the ship?”

*beep*

“Bugger.” Feeling slightly trembly after having dodged that particular arrow, I returned to the shore. It would have been somewhat embarrassing to have been exploring in the depths of the forest only to have heard a distant explosion and later to have to shamefacedly admit that I had inadvertently destroyed our transport and killed everyone left on it.

Everyone with the exception of Barras had gathered back on the beach after an hour or so. Captain Bertron’s man, Stephano, had been set to watch Knellson, and when I returned empty-handed with Omar, most of our party were already waiting. Snorri had set to removing Knellson’s fetters. The marooning tradition is that the victim be left unbound and supplied with food, a container of water, and a weapon, to which end Snorri provided two ship’s biscuits and a full leather water flask and stuck a knife in the nearest tree at a height that would require Knellson to do some work before laying hands upon it.

Snorri and the church guards started to drag the jollyboat into the water, the tide having retreated a couple of yards during our exploration.

“Captain Knellson.” I turned for a farewell. “I appoint you governor of this island. Rule it well in my name. I expect—”

“Pirates!” Knellson spat. He levelled an accusing finger my way.

“Now, now! That’s unfair,” I said. “We’re mutineers at worst. In fact, I don’t believe that as a passenger I can technically be charged with mutiny. I simply—”

“Pirates!” Knellson bellowed, staring past me.

“To the boat!” A shout from behind.

I turned and looked out across the bay. Hoving into view from around the headland was another ship! A smaller, sleeker vessel, her decks crowded, closing on the anchored Hesperus under full sail.

“Fuck me!” I said. “Pirates!”

At that point, Knellson clouted me around the back of the head with the stake he had somehow worked free of the ground, and I fell face forward onto the beach.

“Jal! Jal!”

“What?” I groaned and spat out sand. It turns out that there is no level of hungry when sand tastes good.

“Get up!”

“I am up.” This proved to be untrue. I opened my eyes and found that I was on all fours, head down, face just above an alarmingly blood-spattered area of beach.

Barras hauled me to my feet one-handed. Under the other arm he appeared to have the world’s biggest rat, albeit a blunt-nosed one with rounder ears. “Look!” He gestured behind me with his head.

“That seems as if it should be made of meat.” I leaned forward and poked his new acquisition.

Barras dropped the beast. It was about the size of a two-year-old child and looked to be twice as tasty.

He pointed out to sea. Reluctantly, I turned to follow the line of his arm.

“Ah hell . . .”

The Hesperus had raised anchor and taken flight with remarkable swiftness. She had already made it four hundred yards or more out to sea, but the pirate ship was veering to cut her off and moving at a faster rate of knots. They were obviously pirates. In addition to sneaking around the island and then sailing directly at the Hesperus with armed men crowding the decks, they helpfully flew a skull and crossbones just to drive the point home.

About a hundred yards from shore, Snorri, Augusta, Bertron, and Stephano were furiously rowing the jollyboat in pursuit, though they stood no chance of catching either vessel. But Barras wasn’t pointing at any of that. A longboat about twice the length of the Hesperus’s jollyboat was heading for the beach, the water around it churned by the oars of a dozen or more pirates.

“Oh, this is very bad!” I said.

“At least I’ve got my sword this time.” Barras drew the blade from his scabbard to make the point.

“That really wasn’t what I was talking about.” I stared at the two retreating ships, the pirate cutter rapidly closing the gap between them. “Snorri really should stop rowing about now . . .”

“How hard did Knellson hit you? How are a dozen cutthroats about to murder us on the beach not our main concern, Jal?”

I glanced toward the longboat, still fighting its way through the breakers, then reached into the capacious inner pocket of my over-cloak. In the light of day the box of ghosts seemed quite ordinary, maybe a cube cut from whalebone.

“I don’t understand.” Barras frowned at the box. The realization dawning across his face was interrupted by a white flash of light. Moments later an enormous *BOOM* slammed me back onto the beach and attempted to bury me in sand.

I sat up some while later spitting more sand from my mouth, mixed this time with splinters, sadly equally inedible. I could see no sign of either ship unless you counted the bits of smouldering wood scattered around me. The jollyboat was still in one piece, though upside down. I could see figures in the water to either side of it. The first of the pirates staggered onto the beach, dripping. Their longboat rolled in the breakers behind him. Other crewmates were struggling through the waves toward me.

Beside me a Barras-shaped sand dune gave a pitiful groan. I stood, weaving as though the beach were the Hesperus’s deck in a high storm.

Running away is a perfectly valid answer to many of life’s problems. But in some races the best thing to do is pause at the sprint line and knobble the opposition while they’re focused on their start. I drew Armarda’s cutlass from beneath my cloak and advanced into the surf. I didn’t feel exactly on top of my game, but the bedraggled pirates looked distinctly worse off. The first two barely even tried to get out of the way as I ran them through.

I don’t like killing, but I like it an awful lot more than being killed. I laid four men back into the waves before the remaining six to make it from the boat drew together and organized themselves. I retreated up the beach with the surf foaming pink behind me.

Barras had sat up and found his sword by the time I reached him.

“Get up!”

“I am up.”

“I feel we’ve already had this conversation.” I took hold of him and heaved him to his feet, then steered his vision back the way I’d come, where six angry pirates were wading to shore. One of them, waving a scimitar, appeared to be an unreasonably large woman. “See? Now we need to run and hide.”

TEN

They say that war is a mix of long periods of absolute boredom separated by moments of excruciating terror. Crossing the Atlantis Ocean is much the same. In short order I’d gone from the tedium of starving to death while being rolled from side to side to the nightmare of being hunted through a forest by angry men with swords.

Barras limped after me, still dazed and maddeningly slow. If not for the confusion of greenery, we would have been caught quite quickly. Instead we plotted a random course that seemed to take us through every patch of briar, bramble, and thornbush that Kendeth Isle possessed. Not only were we slow, but we were deafeningly noisy, crunching and snapping our way through the undergrowth at a volume that seemed impossible to miss.

Fortunately, pirates are best suited to finding their prey at sea. We arrived torn and bleeding at a tree-shrouded outcrop of rock where a natural cave offered a place to hide.

“Where’s the big rat thing?”

“Dropped on the beach.” Barras crouched beside me and wiggled his jaw as if worried it might be loose.

“Pity. I fancied a bit of that.” Even terrified and hiding, I was still starving. A nice chunk of raw whatever would have gone down very well at that moment.

We settled to wait. After a short while, a despairing scream rang out close at hand.

“So, the ship’s gone then,” Barras said. “Probably would have been better to leave the box on board.”

“To be fair, I did kill all but six of the pirates and destroy their ship too.”

“Which we needed to get to the mainland.”

“Well . . .”

“I wonder if you’re the first cardinal to murder a bishop.”

“I very much doubt it. I might be the first to kill one accidentally though.”

Our whispered conversation came to a halt as the sounds of approach reached us. A moment later, four pirates broke from the undergrowth, three scrawny but dangerous-looking men led by the enormous woman I’d seen at the beach.

“Stand and fight!” she demanded.

We stood. It seemed an odd request, since killing us on the floor would probably be easier. I held Armarda’s cutlass ready. It wasn’t a weapon I had any experience with, and I was badly out of practice with regular swords in any case. My only hope was that the pirates spent far more time tying knots and swabbing decks than they did swinging their blades.

“Where are your friends?” Barras asked.

For some reason the question drove them into a fury, and they threw themselves at us. Angry can be a poor way to fight if it makes you forget technique. I managed to turn the first man’s thrust aside and skewer him under the armpit. After that the woman was on me and my existence narrowed to a nightmare of parries as I tried to keep her from cutting me into small pieces. Her strength was alarming, and she knew how to fight. Starved, abused, and out of practice, I knew that unless Barras came to my aid, I wasn’t long for the world.

“Hah!” A tricksy feint and the woman cut me across the upper arm. “Not so easy from in front, is it?”

I probably could have come up with a witty riposte if I hadn’t been so busy not dying and also had a clue what she was talking about. She stood an inch taller than me and about a foot wider, her face red with

rage and strangely square. An unreasonable volume of dirty red curls framed blunt features on which nothing resembling mercy could be discerned.

“Hah!” I barked in return, lunging toward an opening in her attack. “Oh . . .” Somehow she knocked the cutlass from my hand.

“Now to see what your insides look like.” She didn’t seem inclined to accept surrender.

A glance to my left showed that Barras, whilst having commendably felled his two opponents, appeared to have been killed in the act and in no state to come to my defense.

“Madam! I’m a cardinal of the Church of—”

She growled and prepared to deliver the coup de grâce. I fell to my knees, not too proud to beg.

“Children! I have three young children,” I lied.

The woman paused, a puzzled expression on her face.

“Daughters! Red-haired angels!” I raised my open hands and tried to look fatherly.

Something bright appeared between the pirate’s ample breasts, and she looked down at it in vague surprise. With a crunching noise, the sword point emerged another nine inches, then withdrew.

“Snorri! Thank God!”

The woman turned, trying to swing, but collapsed. As she fell, she revealed a much shorter figure than the one I had been expecting.

“Cardinal.” Captain Knellson gave me a curt nod. “Pirates. I hate pirates.” He wiped his cutlass on the woman’s jerkin. I guessed he’d taken it from the beach, then come after the survivors.

“I hate them too!” I smiled what I hoped was an ingratiating smile. “Sinners bound for Hell, every last one of them. And you know who just sent more than a hundred of the bastards to a watery grave? Me.

That’s who.”

“The only thing worse than a pirate is a mutineer!” The madness returned to Knellson’s eyes and he levelled his blade at me.

I nodded sagely. “Mutineers are the worst. Oathbreakers. They’re betrayers and pirates! And you know who just sent nearly fifty of the bastards to a watery grave? Me. That’s who.”

Knellson drew his arm back for the thrust.

“And!” I put my hands together in prayer to remind him that I was the holiest man this side of the ocean.

“And technically, as a passenger, I can’t be guilty of mutiny.”

Knellson narrowed his eyes. “I was mistaken.”

I released the breath I had been holding.

“I was mistaken,” Knellson repeated. “There are two things worse than pirates. There’s mutineers and p—”

“Pagans?”

“Pedants.”

As Knellson lunged, Snorri’s elbow caught the side of his head. The sword point struck sparks from the rock to my left and the captain collapsed on top of the pirate he had most recently killed.

“Come on.” Snorri hauled me up, apparently oblivious to the miracle of timing he’d been part of.

“Wait. Barras.” I pointed, not feeling up to more than single words yet.

Snorri crossed to Barras’s crumpled form and rolled him over. A groan indicated Barras to be less dead than suspected. “Where are you hurt?”

“Everywhere.” But it was to the back of his head that Barras raised his hands. Apparently the rocks rising behind us had outwitted him where two pirates failed.

Snorri got us back to the beach, finding Captain Bertron and Monsignor Augusta on the way. Omar was waiting by the jollyboat, now the right way up and drawn a short distance out of the water.

“So what now?” I stooped to pick up two pieces of ship, quite possibly of the same ship, and tried to fit them together. Barras wandered off to start digging in the sand. “What now, Captain Snorri?”

“We row.” Snorri reached out to pat one of the oars.

“To the New World?”

“Yes.”

“In that?”

“Yes.”

I had been dubious when Snorri suggested rowing the jollyboat from the Hesperus to the shore of Kendeth Isle. “It has to be twenty miles . . .”

“About that.” Snorri vaulted into the boat.

“Well.” Barras stood up holding what looked like a poorly made sandy bag of sand. “At least we have lunch!” He slapped his discovery, revealing it to be his oversized rat.

“Groundhog!” Augusta declared. “There’s good eating on one of those.”

A roasted groundhog doesn’t go far toward filling the stomachs of six very hungry people, but it was certainly the most delicious meal I had had since leaving Red March.

With the meal over, we took to the waves. Snorri, Bertron, Barras, and I manned the oars, with Omar and Augusta in the stern. I had argued that near-death experiences and the wound on my arm meant Omar or Augusta should take my place, but Snorri seemed to have developed the ability to filter out my complaints to such a degree that he didn’t even hear them.

While rowing, I had nothing to look at save Omar, the ocean, and Augusta. I chose Augusta. With the sharpest edge taken off my hunger, I could appreciate the monsignor’s finer points once again. Augusta really was a striking woman. The wind had added some colour to the bold planes of her face and the salt spray puckered her small mouth into an almost kiss. The array of pins that kept her black hair in its usual severe order seemed to have gone missing after the capsize, and free of constraint, it flew thick and luxuriant around her shoulders. The ugly burn scar that led down below the collar of her vestments seemed more like an invitation to explore . . . Augusta caught me watching and met my gaze with an icy stare, her right hand bunching into a fist within its black leather glove. The other hand, uncovered, went to her hair, examining the damage.

“See if you can’t shake Taproot out of his box,” I said, nodding to indicate my inner pocket. “He won’t be so busy now.”

It was Omar rather than Augusta who came a couple of steps forward to rummage inside my cloak.

Given that I had to keep rowing, the coordination required proved beyond us and I nearly head-butted him into the sea. Eventually, though, he was able to grab the box and retreat to his place beside Augusta.

“Just open it and call for Taproot,” I said. My arms were aching now, and my back, and my arse was sore from the hard wooden bench. I could do with some distraction.

“Uh, hello?” Omar spoke nervously into the box. “Is Dr. Taproot there?”

The image of a man popped into being over the open box. It was fuzzy and hard to focus on, but it looked like Taproot. “What?”

“We were rather hoping that you could tell us that,” I called over. “What’s what, Taproot?”

“He knows,” Taproot snapped. He seemed unusually tense. Normally he liked to talk.

“Who knows? What’s going on? Why is a Builder trying to kill us?”

“Busy hiding you.” And with that Taproot grew more fuzzy and then faded completely.

“What the hell?” I shook my head. “Well, that could have gone better. Who knows? What do they know?

How?”

Omar looked at the box, then set it between himself and Augusta. “Maybe when you took the box too far from the bomb, it was able to tell whoever owned it that it was going to explode and where it was?”

“I didn’t take the box too far from the bomb. The crew took the bomb too far from the box. And if it told the Builder who had it placed in the hold that it was about to explode then that’s a good thing, right? He’ll think we’re all dead.”

“He might wonder why it took the bomb the best part of five thousand miles before it decided to explode.

At the very least he might try to find out what happened.”

I shivered despite the unwanted exercise I was enduring. “Well, it’s not as if anyone could find us in all this!”

Omar raised his hand and pointed one pudgy digit at the heavens. “They say the Builders watch us from above the sky.”

I stopped talking after that and saved my breath for rowing.

The skies had darkened, and land, whilst now in sight from sea level, still seemed impossibly distant. I had resigned myself to spending the night at sea when the call went up from Omar.

“Boat ho!”

“What?”

“I mean: Ship ho.” He paused. “That’s how you say it, isn’t it? Snorri?”

But Snorri had already set down his oar and turned to look. It was true. Cutting through the waves less than half a mile off was a ship. A tall ship hung with lights.

“More pirates?” I asked.

“Unlikely,” he said. “It’s not the kind of ship they favour. Too slow, too wide. That’s a merchantman, built to carry cargo. Besides, pirates sail dark and look for the lights of their prey. So whoever these are, they’re very confident.”

“Well, let’s hope they rescue us then!” Barras dropped his oar. “My arms are going to fall off if I have to row all the way to shore.”

“They won’t even see us, Barras.” Snorri shook his head.

“We could make a light,” Omar said, a touch of desperation in his voice.

“And how will we do that?” Captain Bertron sneered.

“Like this.” I leaned forward and picked up the box of ghosts from between Omar and Augusta. “Start glowing or I’m throwing you over the side!”

And it did.

And half an hour later we were scrambling up a rope ladder onto one of the legendary copper-bottomed Canukian ships to be greeted by the sight of our first honest denizens of the New World. The man who helped me aboard was a big, well-fed fellow who smelled of bacon and steered me toward the galley with the nicest words anyone had said to me in a very long time.

“You look hungry, eh. Let’s get you a good meal.”