- And suddenly Shandy lurched back on the carpentry shop bench, staring at the marionette he held in his right hand. It was one of the expensive yard-high Sicilian marionettes, and he had to hold it steady until the glue that held its head on had dried, but a long splinter was sticking out from the back of the mannikin and stabbing him painfully in the palm. The thing was heavy, too. His arm was trembling with the weight and agony of the thing. But if he let it go it would be ruined.

Its brightly painted eyes were on him, and then its mouth opened. "Drop me," it said. "Open your hand and drop me."

The little wooden man was speaking with Shandy's own voice! Didn't that mean that it must be all right to do as it said? Shandy wanted to, but he remembered how proud his father had been when they'd got this one. He couldn't just drop it, no matter how much it hurt to hold it up.

"Drop me," the marionette repeated.

Well, why not, he thought as the sting of the splinter became more intense. What if it is my life I'm holding? It hurts, and none of these things lasts forever anyway.

Then he remembered something an ancient black man had said to him once in a boat on the Seine: "You got that tactic, that mud-ball trick, from Philip Davies - and you have wasted it. He gave you something else as well; it would not please me to see you waste that too."

The black man was gone, but a soft, reassuring hand gripped his shoulder, and he decided he could hold up the torturing mannikin for a while longer.

He opened his eyes, and found himself staring into Beth Hurwood's face.

Beth had been understandably slow to realize that she had drifted out of her delirium and was again wide awake - on a pier at dawn, dressed in her nightgown and surrounded by standing dead men. John Chandagnac was in front of her, holding a sword in a hand from which blood dripped energetically, facing a big bald man with a smoking fist and a terrible cut in his belly.

It had been the sharp chill in the air, and the clean smell of the sea, that finally convinced her that this strange scene was not another dream. There was tension and dire challenge in the air, and she hastily called on her memory for some of the recent speech here: Ah, Jack. Someone taught you the blood and iron trick? You've clenched your fist over a compass needle? That won't work against Baron Samedi ... Drop the sword.

Her eyes had darted to Shandy's sword hand, and she'd winced to see the blood pooling in the curve of the saber's knuckle-guard and running down his forearm ... but at the same time she'd grasped the fact that the iron needle shredding his palm was his only hope ... and that this bald man was trying to make him drop it.

Shandy's eyes were shut and the sword was wobbling in his hand - obviously he was ready to let go of it - but Beth was already moving forward. She took his shoulder firmly with one hand, and with the other she steadied the sword - by gripping the razor-edged blade tightly. Her own hot blood ran down the cold steel, followed the tang through the bell guard, and mingled with Shandy's. His eyes opened and met hers.

When the two bloods mixed the bald man was pushed back, but she knew he was only hampered, not beaten.>They kept moving south, and when he judged that it was about three in the morning they came to the sandy end of one of the jungle footpaths they'd been following, stepped out from under an awning of palm fronds, and saw that they were on the beach. Between them and the blackness that was the sea were the faintly starlit blobs of buildings; Shandy thought he recognized the Maritime Law and Records Office, but he couldn't be sure. They walked forward to the beach, and then continued moving south, staying in the shadows of buildings as much as possible and getting across streets and open squares as quickly and quietly as they could. A few lamps glowed in buildings they passed, and a couple of times they could hear drunken voices not too far distant, but nobody hailed them.

They passed several docks and clusters of beached boats ... but each time Shandy crept closer to look for a stealable boat, there was a stray lantern-gleam or whispering voice nearby; and twice on the night breeze Shandy heard the unmistakable metallic click-and-slide of a sword being loosened in its scabbard, and once he heard a dockside voice whisper a sentence in which the name "Shandy" figured emphatically. Having failed to keep him from entering, the British authorities obviously did not mean to let him get out.

More cautiously than ever, Shandy and Beth walked on southward, passing the last of the stone buildings, then tiptoeing through an area of bamboo shacks and sailcloth tents, and finally, as the stars were fading, they reached a stretch of broad marshes along which the occasional turtle pen or fisherman's shack was the high point of the landscape. The mosquitoes were much worse here, making it necessary for the two fugitives to tie bands of cloth across the lower halves of their faces to avoid inhaling the insects, but Shandy appreciated the loneliness of this stretch of beach, and, no longer having to be perfectly silent, he began taking longer strides.

Just at dawn they found a decrepit pier with a sailboat moored at the end of it, and Shandy stared for several minutes at the half-dozen ragged men huddling around a small brazier - he could see pinpoints of red light in it when the erratic breeze fanned the coals - and then he relaxed and sat back down behind the bush that concealed him and Beth from the shore below.

"Just fishermen," he whispered, mostly to himself, for Beth had drifted off into another of her somnambulistic trances. He had draped his compass-weighted velvet coat around her shoulders hours ago, and he shivered in the dawn sea breeze when he stood up and then laboriously hauled her up to stand swaying and blank-eyed beside him. "Come on," he said, leading her forward and touching his baldric to make sure the weight of all the gold scudos was still there. "We're going to buy us a boat."

He knew the two of them would be a strange spectacle with which to confront these fishermen on a chilly winter dawn - an evidently sleep-walking woman in a nightdress and velvet coat escorted from the jungle by a mud-splashed, blood-stained man in formal dress, both their faces smeared with mud - but he was confident that half a dozen of the gold coins would allay all misgivings.

By the time they had slid down the slope and begun shambling through the sand toward the pier, most of the hunched figures had turned to stare at them, though one man, wearing a weathered straw hat and wrapped in a blanket, continued to sit on the end of the pier and face the newly sun-tipped gray waves.

Shandy smiled and held six scudos forward in the palm of his gloved hand as he led Beth Hurwood out onto the echoing boards of the pier ...

Then his smile faltered and disappeared, for he had noticed the flat, filmed eyes in the gray faces, and the bound-up jaws, and the sewn-shut shirts and the bare feet.

"Oh, damn it," he whispered hopelessly, realizing that neither of them had the strength to run - it was all he could do to continue standing. With no surprise he watched the figure at the end of the pier get to its feet, shed the blanket and toss away the hat so that the dawn sun gleamed on the bald scalp. The man took the cigar out of his mouth and smiled at Shandy.

"Thank you, Jack," he rumbled. "Come, my dear." He beckoned to Beth and she stumbled forward as if pushed from behind. The velvet coat slipped off her shoulders and fell onto the weathered planks of the pier.

Almost at the same moment, Shandy's knees unlocked and he found himself abruptly sitting on the planks. "You're dead," he muttered. "I killed you ... on the stairs."

Beth took two more quick, balance-catching steps.

The bald man shook his head sadly, as if Shandy was proving to be a disappointing pupil. He puffed on the cigar and waved its glowing head at Shandy. "Come on, Jack, don't you remember the slow matches I used to braid into my hair and beard? Low-smoldering fire, that's the drogue that holds Baron Samedi's protective attention. A lit cigar works just as well. Your blade stuck me, sure enough, but the Baron, the good old Lord of the Cemeteries, repaired the damage before I had time to expire."

Beth was swaying halfway between them now, and the sun made her hair gleam like fresh-sheared copper. Shandy scrabbled at the wood and the tail of the coat, trying to find the strength to stand up again.

"But I don't hold grudges," the giant went on, "any more than Davies did, when you cut him. I'm grateful to you for escorting to me my bride - the only woman in the world who has shed blood in Erebus - and I'd like you to be my quartermaster."

Tears dripped from Shandy's squinting eyes onto the weathered planks. "I'll see you in Hell first, Blackbeard."

The giant laughed, though his eyes were now fixed on the slim, approaching figure of Beth Hurwood. "Blackbeard's dead, Jack," he said without looking away from the woman. "You must have heard. It's been absolutely verified. I need a new nickname now. Baldy, maybe." He laughed again, and his motionless dead mariners did too, whickering like sick horses through their nostrils. Shandy had been unthinkingly pulling the velvet coat toward himself, and now he felt a hard lump in it. He slid his hand into the pocket, and by touch recognized the brass-rimmed, glass-topped disk - it was the compass he'd bought. His heart began pounding, and with what he hoped was a convincingly despairing moan, he fell face down onto the pier, over the coat.

Tags: Tim Powers Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net