Shandy brushed a stray lock of salt-stiff hair back from his forehead and squinted up at Hurwood - who smiled at him and shrugged in mock sympathy.

"That Navy captain," Shandy said, striving to keep his voice level, "was about to murder Davies - kill him without a trial. I had no choice. And your father - " He stopped for a moment in despair, then forced himself to go on, ridding himself of the words like a crew flinging cannons and casks overboard from a foundering vessel. "Your father intends to evict your soul from your body so that he can replace it with your mother's."

There was no answer from inside the cabin.

"Please get off my ship now," said Hurwood courteously.

Instead Shandy reached for the door's bolt - and a moment later found himself suspended in midair, rising up and away from the cabin door. His eyes went wide and then clamped shut, and then opened in a tense squint, and his whole body was rigid with uncontrollable vertigo.

When he had passed over the Carmichael's gunwale and hung thirty feet above the water in front of the Jenny's fire-blackened bow, he was released, and plummeted through the air for one long second before plunging into the cold water.

He thrashed his way to the surface, and wearily swam to the Jenny, and brawny arms reached out and pulled him aboard. "It's stinkin' magic, cap'n," Skank said to him when he was safely aboard and leaning against the mast and breathing deeply while a puddle of sea water spread out on the deck around his boots. "Lucky even to get away, we are."

Shandy didn't let show his surprise at being addressed as captain. After all, Davies was dead and Shandy had been his quartermaster. "Expect you're right," he muttered.

"I'm sure glad you made it, though, Jack," Venner assured him with a broad smile that didn't conceal the chill in his gray eyes.

The last couple of pirates freed the grappling hooks and leaped down into the water and were soon aboard the Jenny and demanding rum.

"Yeah, give 'em rum," Shandy said, pushing the stray hair off his forehead again and reflecting that he'd soon have to draw his hair back and add another inch or two to his tarred pigtail. "How bad's the Jenny hurt?"

"Well," said Skank judiciously, "she wasn't in great shape even before that fireball. But we ought to be able to get her back to New Providence easy enough - all tack, no jibe."

"New Providence," Shandy said. He looked up and saw the corpse of Mr. Bird climbing the Carmichael's shrouds. The body stepped into the footrope loop that hung just below the yard that supported the main course sail, and with the precision of a clockwork mechanism began unreefing the sail while cooling hands below worked the halliards. The sails filled, the sheets creaked through the blocks, and, slowly at first, the big ship moved away from the Jenny.

"New Providence," repeated the new captain of the Jenny thoughtfully.

And in the Carmichael's cabin the spell was finally lifted from Beth Hurwood's throat, and she gasped, "I believe you, John! Yes - yes, I'll come with you! Take me away from here, please!"

But by then the Jenny was a shabby scrap of discolored canvas in the middle distance of the sea's glittering blue face, and, aside from her father's, the only ears her words reached were those of the dead men crewing the Vociferous Carmichael.

BOOK THREE

"What's o'clock?"

It wants a quarter to twelve,

And to-morrow's doomsday.

- T. L. Beddoes

Chapter Nineteen

Six men climbed out of the boat when it rocked to a halt in the shallows. Stede Bonnett, peering down at them from behind a dogwood tree at the crest of the sandy hill that sheltered his campfire from the chilly onshore wind, grinned with relief when he recognized their leader - it was William Rhett, the same British Army colonel who had captured Bonnett more than a month ago, and was now clearly here to recapture him after his recent escape from the watchhouse that doubled as Charles Town's jail.

Thank God, thought Bonnett; I'm about to be locked up again - if I'm very lucky, in fact, I may be killed here today.>And finally, with Hurwood virtually vanquished, there was only one incident of Friend's life that needed to be sanctified out of plain squalid reality ... but it was the most harrowing and traumatic experience he'd ever undergone, and even just facing it, even just making himself remember it, was supremely difficult ... but now, as he hung in midair over his ship, facing his all-but-shattered enemy and watching his all-but-won prize rising up from the broken cabin beneath him, he forced himself to relive it.

He was fifteen years old, standing beside the bookcase in his cluttered, smelly bedroom ... no, in his elegant panelled bedchamber, aromatic with the jasmine breeze wafting in through the open casements and the breath of fine leather bindings ... it had always been this way, there had never been the shabby, polluted room ... and his mother opened the door and came in. Only for a moment was she a fat, gray-haired old drudge in a black bag dress - then she-was a tall, handsome woman in a patterned silk robe that was open down the front ... Seven years earlier he had discovered magic, and he had pursued it diligently since, and knew a lot now, and he wanted to share the wealth in his mind with the only person who had ever appreciated that mind ...

He went to her and kissed her ...

But it was beginning to get away from him, she was the dumpy old woman again, just come upstairs to put fresh sheets on his bed, and the room was the grubby room again and he was a startled fat boy interrupted in the midst of one of his solitary self-administrations, and he was kissing her dizzily because in his heart-pounding delirium he had misunderstood the reason for her visit ... "Oh, Mommy," he was gasping, "you and I can have the world, I know magic, I can do stuff ... "

With a huge effort of will he forced her to be the beautiful robed woman, forced the room to expand back out to its regal dimensions ... and he did it just in time, too, for he knew that his father, his mother's husband, entered the room next, and he really doubted that he could live through that scene again as it had really happened.

Well, he told himself unsteadily, I'm making reality here. In a few minutes that unbearable memory won't be what really happened.

Footsteps boomed ponderously on the stairs, ascending. Friend concentrated, and the steps diminished in volume until it might have been a child climbing the stairs. There was a lamp on the landing below, and a huge, bristling shadow darkened the open doorway and began to damage the room ... but again Friend fought it down to insignificance - now a stooped, thin shadow grew in the doorway, dim, as if the thing casting it wasn't solid.

Tags: Tim Powers Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net