Light flowed in from the open hatch. A sailor climbed down the ladder. Arriving at the floor, he put his hands on his hips and looked at Seamus. “You ain’t moved this whole time?”
“He’s kind of weirding me out,” said Prue through the bars. It had just sprung to mind; she hoped it wasn’t overplaying things.
“Don’t blame you,” said the sailor. He snapped his fingers a few times in front of Seamus’s masked face; the bandit remained unmoving. Prue could see his chest rising and falling under his robe a little more rapidly than it had when he was a soundless Caliph, but otherwise he seemed to pull off the mimic fairly well. The sailor, a thin man with a spotty mustache, walked over to Prue’s cell door and said, “Gettin’ close, Maiden. We’ll be mooring at the Crag soon. I’ve been instructed to take you to the foredecks.”
But before the seaman had a chance to remove the key from his pants pocket, a meaty thunk sounded and his eyes rolled back in his head. Like a scarecrow loosed of his wooden frame, the sailor crumpled to the ground in a pile of wool clothing and poorly washed skin. Behind him was Seamus, his hands still held in the after-position of the Bandit Backblow, something that even the most junior bandit learns within weeks of receiving the oath. Done correctly, it can put its victim into a deep and fairly pleasant sleep.
“Wow,” said Prue.
Seamus whipped off his mask and breathed a silent curse at the thing, before fishing the key from the sleeping sailor’s pocket. In a moment, he had Prue freed from her cell and they were both standing amid the crates, bales, and snoring sailor of the belowdecks hold.
“Now what?” asked Seamus, seemingly at a loss.
“Good question,” said Prue.
Just then, the whole ship jerked and shuddered. Prue ran to a porthole and, climbing atop a box, looked outside. There, in the midst of a wide, gray ocean, she saw the Crag.
The sky hung low, like a dropped ceiling oppressing a drab schoolroom, and the clouds splayed out in all directions, an unchanging ripple of gray light. The rough waters of the Pacific Ocean, equally gray, crashed wildly against the object in their midst: A giant, moss-covered rock, some dozens of stories high, was the rough pedestal for the stone structure that had, impossibly, been built on top of it. The structure resembled a castle, or a fortress, though its skyward-reaching battlements were toppled and its ramparts were in ruin, as if the thing had reached too high or defied the elements for too long; a long stone staircase wound around the side of the rock, a testament to the fact that this place had once been accessible, that it had once been a place people wished to reach. The ship pitched in the waves that drew it closer to the rock’s only visible landing spot: a wave-racked wooden jetty.
The ship pitched in the waves that drew it closer to the rock’s only visible landing spot: a wave-racked wooden jetty.
Prue turned back to report the sight to Seamus when she saw the bandit had drawn a cutlass from the sailor’s belt and was brandishing it, his eyes wild.
“Only one way out,” he said dramatically.
“Do I get one?”
Seamus frowned. A table leg, propped against the hull of the ship, would suffice. Prue gripped it and nodded. “Let’s do this,” she said.
What “this” was could be easily summed up in a short, and fairly sad, paragraph. The two of them, without much of a pregame conference, noisily climbed up the ladder, threw aside the hatch, and proudly presented themselves to the sailors, who, for their part, seemed a little surprised to see their prisoner freed and the man who they assumed to be a member of the silent Synod now sporting a raffish beard and a scimitar and howling things like: “Have at ye, scoundrels” and “This is a mutiny.” However, there were only two of them, scimitar and table leg notwithstanding, against a healthy dozen stolid seamen, and Prue and Seamus were quickly disarmed and bound against the main mast, causing only a slight ruffle in the sailors’ continued work getting the ship safely navigated into the jetty of the Crag.
“Wow,” said Seamus when it was all done and his back was pressed tightly against the solid wood of the mast. “They’re good.”
“That could’ve used a little more planning,” said Prue. At least she was enjoying some fresh sea air; it was one improvement that her current state of bondage had over her prior.
“Next time.”
“Don’t expect there’ll be a next time,” said Captain Shtiva, who had overheard their conversation. “You’ll be spending your days on the Crag. Rescue is unlikely.”
The broken fortress bobbed on the horizon; the sailors worked at their various tasks, wrangling the loping ship into the jetty. The air was full of seagull cries and ocean mist; the canvas sails whipped and cracked above Prue’s and Seamus’s heads. The sailors shouted commands and calls to one another. Before long, the ship had sidled angrily against the dock and the lines were figure-eighted around the dock’s rusty cleats. A plank was thrown over the gunwale, and Prue and Seamus were freed from their place at the mast. A sailor cohort escorted them at pistol-point over the plank and onto the dock. Captain Shtiva led the group.
Prue stayed silent. Her eyes remained fixed on the ruined battlements atop the rock. She and Seamus were led up the twisting stone staircase, made of a kind of yellowing sandstone, around the base of the rock. It followed the contours of its foundation, dipping and falling with the rock’s inconsistencies, until finally ending at a crumbled stone arch. Beyond the arch was a scene that nearly caused Prue’s knees to give out.
A weathered veranda, its flagstones littered with the remains of former convicts, stretched out before them, surrounded by walls in various states of ruin. Pieces of bone covered the ground like confetti on a parade ground.
“You can’t do this,” said Prue, in shock. “This is wrong.”
Captain Shtiva seemed to be mindful of the grim scene. “I’m sorry, Maiden,” he said. “These are my orders.”
“I spit on your orders,” said Seamus, which he did, his spittle flying over the piled remnants of some poor indivi
dual’s bottom half.
“You don’t have to follow them,” pleaded Prue. “You can follow your gut. You know this is wrong. You know this is not ‘for the revolution.’”
The captain remained silent. “Untie them,” he said.
They were led to the center of the veranda; the wind buffeted through the broken walls, chilling everyone present. The sailors held their pistols straight, their flintlocks cocked, and began to back away from the two convicted prisoners.