At that point Gede evidently called Thatch's words up from memory and paid attention to them, for the voice in the boy's head was suddenly back, and it was roaring now.
"'Ghostling'?" Gede raged. "'Bungo houseboy'?"
Thatch's head was punched back by something invisible, and suddenly there was blood on his nose and mouth. He reeled a couple of steps backward and tried to fling the bottle away, but it clung to his palm.
"Thatch is your name, eh?" The voice ground the inside of the boy's skull like a grating-blade being turned in a coconut.
Thatch's belly imploded visibly - blood sprayed from his nose and he sat down hard. A moment later all of his clothes burst into flame. The boy rolled, blazing, toward the stream, and though along the way he jerked with the impacts of a couple more invisible kicks, he managed to splash into the water. "I'll tell the Baron," said the voice in his head as he floundered, still unable to get rid of the bottle, "to treat you special."
Thatch got his feet under himself and crawled up onto the bank and sat down. His hair was scorched to the scalp and his clothes looked like curtains dug out of the wreckage of a burned-down house and blood was running down his forearm from his bottle-clutching hand, but he didn't tremble as he held the thing up to the sun and grinned into its glass depths. "Do that," he whispered. "You pitiful goddamn pickled herring."
The light dimmed, and suddenly he was dry and upright and walking, and he was Jack Shandy again. The spatters of blood on the bridge's paving stones were less frequent - perhaps the injured crawlers had bandaged their wounds - but when he crouched to touch one smudged patch of wetness, he recoiled in horror. It was actually still warm. Again, louder now, he heard a wheezing gasp from ahead.
He looked up, and all at once he knew why he had thought he'd seen this bridge before. Here were the two bleeding crawlers, almost underfoot now; the white hair of one was matted with gleaming darkness, and the other figure, younger and slimmer, was trying to crawl without touching to the ground his right hand, the fingers of which were bent and blackly swollen. The lights of the city of Nantes were flickering and dim, and Shandy knew that these injured people would not be seen by some helpful wayfarer, but would have to crawl all the way back to their room, and their comfortless beds, and the ever-present marionettes.
Shandy ran ahead and then crouched in the path of his father. One of the old man's eyes was hidden by dirt-caked blood, and Shandy knew that was the eye he would lose. The old man's face was taut with effort, and breath hissed through the fresh gaps in the line of his bared teeth.
"Dad!" Shandy said urgently as his father's ruined face hitched closer. "Dad, you've inherited a lot of money! Your father has died, and left his estate to you! Get in touch with the authorities in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince!"
Old Francois Chandagnac didn't hear him. Shandy tried twice more to convey his message, then gave up and moved to the other broken crawler, the one that was twenty-one-year-old John Chandagnac.
"John," said Shandy as he crouched in front of his remembered, younger self, "listen. Don't abandon your father! Take him with you. Go to the trouble, you ... you goddamned wooden choirboy!" He was choking, and tears were running down his older, bearded face as if to match the blood that streaked the younger one. "He can't do it alone, but he's not going to admit that to you! Don't leave him, he's all you've got in the world and he loves you and he's going to die alone of cold and starvation, thinking of you, while you're comfortable in England and not thinking of him ... "
The crawling figure was unaware of him. Shandy, already kneeling, lowered his forehead to the paving stones and sobbed harshly as the image of his younger self crawled right through him, as insubstantial as a shadow.
A hand was shaking his shoulder. He looked up. Davies' haggard face was grinning down at him, not without sympathy. "You can't collapse now, Jack," the old pirate said. He nodded past Shandy, ahead. "We're there."
Chapter Fourteen
The bridge was gone, and belatedly Shandy wondered if any of the others had ever seen it. Or had Hurwood, for example, seen the whole thing as a walk up an impossibly long church aisle? Now they were on a muddy slope, facing down, and Shandy could feel icy moisture seeping through the knees of his trousers.
He looked around a little wildly, his earlier panic returning, for something felt very wrong, very disorienting, here - but he could see no excuse for the feeling. The mud slope curled away from them on either side, and, squinting in the dim light, he saw that the edges of it curled back in and met, some distance away; it was a slope-sided pit, and water spouted and splashed way down there at the bottom. The sky was a blanket of eerily fast-roiling clouds lit from above by, presumably, the moon. He glanced around at his seven companions to see if they shared his unease. It was hard to tell. Beth had regained consciousness - Shandy wondered when - but was just blinking dazedly, and Bonnett was as expressionless as an embalmed corpse.
"Onward," said Hurwood, and they all started down.
Though he several times slipped and slid in the mud, Shandy found himself oppressed by the idea of how solid the earth itself was. It gave him a feeling like claustrophobia, in spite of the high, churning clouds.
Then it occurred to him - seven companions? There should only have been six! He hung back and identified the laboring figures below him: there was Blackbeard, and Davies, and Bonnett, and Beth and Friend and Hurwood ... and no one else. That was six. Shandy scrambled after them, and then just to reassure himself he counted the figures ... and again got seven.
There was a smell, too, like stagnant water and ancient plumbing. A night for terrible smells, he reflected. The thought reminded him of something, and he worked his way over toward Davies. "Speaking of disagreeable smells," Shandy muttered, "I thought you weren't supposed to do resurrection magic on the land."
"Miss the hot-iron smell, do you?" the pirate said quietly. "But no, Jack, they ain't doing any of that kind of magic here; they're just getting their souls ... adapted ... so they can do it later, somewhere at sea." The slope flattened out now, and they were able to stand up straight without being braced for a fall. "No," Davies went on, "they couldn't do one bit of it here - have you ever felt such solid ground? Makes everywhere else feel like ... just big rafts."
That was it, Shandy realized - that was what had been bothering him. This place gave one no sensation of motion. He'd never thought a place on solid land could seem to be moving, except during earthquakes; before today he'd have laughed at anyone who claimed to be able to feel the motion through space of the planet Earth. Now, though, it seemed to him that he had always been fundamentally aware of that motion, albeit as unthinkingly as the way a fish is aware of water.
Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, he thought, would find this place even more disturbing than I do.
They had all reached the level area except Bonnett, who was slowly bumping his way down the slope in a sitting position. "How many of us are there?" Shandy asked Davies.
"Why, uh ... seven," the pirate answered.
"Count."
Davies did, then swore in alarm. "You and Bonnett and Thatch," he said quickly to himself, "and the three Old Worlders, and me. That's seven. Right, and there's nobody else. Whew, for a moment there it did look like eight, didn't it?"
Shandy shook his head unhappily. "Count again, fast, and you'll get eight. Do it slow, naming each one, and you get seven."
Davies counted again, darting a finger at each dim silhouette, once quickly and then once again slowly - and when he was done he spat out a weary obscenity. "Jack," he said, his voice tight with a disgust that Shandy thought concealed terror, "are our eyes bewitched? How can there be a stranger among us who becomes invisible only when we count carefully?"