Blaggard's Moon (22 page)

Damrick nodded. “I do.”

“You going to tell me this idea?”

“It's still got a few tangles, Pa. But we'll get it sorted out before we leave.”

“You're a stubborn cuss.”

“Came by it honest. Don't worry.”

“I'm not worried. But your mother is. I'd like to give her some reason we'll come back alive.”

“Do you know anything in heaven or on earth can stop her worrying?”

“Nothing I'd ever wish on her. Besides, she prays when she worries, and that's something we'll need.”

Damrick looked at his father, then at the small cross he always wore around his neck—given by his wife on their wedding day. “Then let's let her worry.”

Once the deck guns were mounted, Damrick hiked back into town, straight to Muzzleman's Shot Tower, where he had left Lye Mogene.

“Any progress?” he asked.

Lye stood at a table in the yard behind the tower, which loomed behind him, casting a shadow across the yard. He poked through a box full of musket balls of various sizes. A brick oven blazed in the afternoon heat behind him, near the wall of the tower. What looked like four iron pokers jutted from the flames. He wore a leather apron and a heavy blacksmith's mitten on his left hand. A dozen muskets leaned against the table, and a half-a-dozen pistols lay in a line across the top of it. To his right, the grass was strewn with twice again that many weapons, as though he had test-fired them and thrown them away in disgust. A hundred feet away an archer's target leaned against a pocked stone wall. It boasted three small holes, none near the bull's-eye.

Lye looked up at Damrick in overheated frustration. “Blew up a good musket.” He kicked it with his boot toe. “Breech just shredded.” The steel bent outward in fingers at the stock end. “Lucky not to have lost an eye.”

Damrick pondered. “You tried double wadding?”

Lye put his gloved hand into a box of cotton wads, the kind used to prepare musket-ball packets. He pulled out a handful. “Double. Triple. Ever' blasted waddin' and ball and patch and barrel…” He threw them back into the box, unformed curses moving his lips. “I ain't cut out for this kinda tinkerin'.” He looked both ruddier and more tired than usual.

Damrick took a deep breath. “You think we should give it up?”

The question seemed to stun him. “Quit? Just when I'm about to get 'er all figured out?”

“Then you're making progress.”

“You just go back to your ship, sonny. I'll come get you when I've got somethin' to show.”

Damrick's eyes widened. “Then you think it may work.”

“Oh, it'll work,” Lye said. “And when it does, them pirates better turn and run.”

Damrick allowed himself half a smile. He reserved the other half for when and if he saw his idea in action.

Inside the shot tower, red drops of hot iron fell in rapid succession from two hundred feet up, cooling only slightly before they splashed with a complaining hiss into a pool of water at its base. Damrick knelt beside the pool, reached in and picked up a cool outlier. It was perfectly round, black iron shot, barely a pock in its surface. Much smoother than the molded variety, and they would shoot straighter and farther. Assuming they were matched appropriately with a good musket.

“Who's down there?” the echoing voice boomed from above. The drops of molten iron ceased.

“Damrick Fellows.”

“These are yours, then.”

“Mine?” The echo of his own words died away. “Who ordered them?”

“Your man outside!”

“What size are they?”

The drops began falling again. “Either come up and talk or go away!”

Damrick climbed the wooden stairs that spiraled up the insides of the round brick tower. From the outside, this structure could have been
mistaken for a giant tapered chimney or a castle tower, but there was no fireplace and no fortification in Nearing Vast that required anything nearly so tall. The inside was like an enormous musket barrel pointed toward the heavens. The wooden stairs winding around it were built into the brick, and reinforcement beams were few. There was no handrail, and the stairs grew narrower as they went up. The last sixty feet were an interesting climb. The stairs were no wider than a man's shoulders, and the walls actually angled in, as though pressing the climber toward the abyss. This, along with the constant dripping of white-hot metal mere inches away, turning red as it hurtled down into a hissing, panting darkness, gave the knees a mind of their own.

The top was not much better. The sudden realization of extreme height was a shock to the senses. But it was the intense heat and brutal sunlight that hammered Damrick's head. He felt like he was breathing the molten liquid that dripped from the cauldron just off the center of the round floor. Heat roiled from it visibly. The thick wooden decking under his feet was marked with grooves, concentric rings like a target, the bulls-eye being the hole through which the hot pellets dropped. The flooring was warped and charred, and it creaked as Damrick stepped carefully across it toward John Muzzleman.

The ordnance-maker hummed softly, oblivious to both heat and height. He wore no protection other than a heavy leather apron and thick, padded mittens. Short and stocky, built close to the ground like a tree stump, he was dark, with wild black hair that grew only on the back of his head, from ear to ear and nape to crown. Damrick would have assumed that the heat had singed the rest away were it not for the man's heavy, thick eyebrows. His round face looked like it was made of shiny new leather, and though he was clean-shaven, the dark stubble made it evident that he employed his razor in a losing battle with his beard.

Muzzleman looked up, nodded once, removed a glove, and extended a sweaty, stubby hand. When it met Damrick's, it squeezed like a steel vise. The tradesman immediately put his big glove back on and turned away. “I got to finish before this cools.”

That anything up here might cool anytime soon seemed unlikely to Damrick. He watched as the munitions maker opened a small valve at the side of the cauldron. This allowed a trickle of the molten iron to flow down a narrow chute, not much more than a half-inch-wide groove in a thick steel plate. When it reached the end of the flume it hit a smaller, upright iron plate that stopped the flow, which then backed up and
widened out until a puddle of hot iron formed, about the size of a large cherry. This put pressure on the iron plate until it overcame the resistance of a small counterweight, and the bottom of the plate opened suddenly, like a trap door sprung. A white droplet fell, and the little door snapped closed. The process began again, all under the watchful eye of John Muzzleman, who stood with one hand on the valve that regulated the flow. He was lost in concentration, increasing the flow gradually until the little door was ticking off drops at the rate of almost one per second.

Damrick waited, looking around him. There was no furnace here, nothing to keep the iron in the big kettle hot. It was brought up hot, then. Now he noticed the pulley suspended above them for that purpose. It hung from a tripod of iron beams that met about ten feet above their heads. A small, sturdy chain ran through the pulley and led down to a large winch positioned near the head of the stairs. But the hole in the floor was not nearly wide enough to allow up a cauldron of that size. Damrick looked again at the concentric rings in the floor, which he had until now taken to be no more than a grooved pattern. He saw hinges protruding at each ring, and he realized that the hole in the floor could be opened to almost any size, depending on which of these round doors John chose to open. With a bit of queasiness, Damrick realized he was standing inside the largest ring, meaning he was actually on top of a trap door himself. He took a small step backward, until he was convinced he was standing on a permanent floorboard.

He turned and looked over the parapet. The city stretched out for miles. To the west he could see the top of the royal palace, off in the distance. It was not substantially different than the other homes and buildings, but it was substantially larger. To the east he could see the docks, the ships lined along the prongs of the piers, their sails struck, and the ships moving in and out and around the bay, their sails catching the wind and gleaming white in the sun. And in between the docks and the palace, zigzagging streets, multicolored buildings of all different shapes and sizes, smoke rising from chimneys, horses and carriages and people with packages, in and out of shops.

“Three-fifths of an inch,” Muzzleman said without looking up.

“Pardon me?”

“The answer to your question. Three-fifths of an inch.”

It was not a standard shot size. “That's what Lye ordered?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“One thousand.”

“A thousand?” Damrick blinked. He heard the report of a musket, looked down over the edge of the parapet. Lye Mogene stood in the yard by his table. He lowered a long rifle and examined it. “He didn't seem that confident.”

Now Muzzleman looked up and grinned. “Oh, these'll do.”

“You've seen them work?”

“I made sure they worked.” He turned back to his cauldron.

But before Damrick could ask more, the faint but frantic clamor of a fire bell rose up from below. He looked over the edge again and traced it to its source, maybe two miles to the north. He could see black smoke rising. Fire in the city. He could see people and horses suddenly in action, moving quickly toward the bell, a surge of energy engulfing them. More bells clanged, closer now. Men, women, and children began pouring into the streets, many carrying buckets. Damrick had been part of this before, but from above it was extraordinary, an entire city set in motion in an instant, reacting to a danger that threatened them all. He looked back to the source of the smoke. That was a part of town with which he was very familiar. It was near Fellows Dry-Goods store. Damrick felt a moment's thankfulness that his father had closed that shop and sold off most of the goods already. His parents, though, still lived above it.

Suddenly a thrill of fear went through him. “I'll come back,” he said, his foot already on the top stair.

“I'll be here,” Muzzleman answered.

The dark of the stairs left Damrick utterly blinded. He kept both hands on the wall, and moved his feet carefully down one step at a time, cursing his eyes for their inability to adjust more quickly. His mind whirled. He had taken great precautions to protect the
Calliope
, stationing his new recruits around it day and night. But he had not done the same with his father's store, his parents' home—and now he berated himself for it. He had set himself up against pirates and their partners, without protecting his parents. If anything happened to them…

“Wait, Mr. Hambone,” Dallis Trum interrupted. “I don't get it. Ain't you going to tell what Damrick's idea is?”

“Aye,” another chimed in. “He's testin' out guns and ammunition and all-like, but even with iron shot, how's he supposin' he'll take on cannons? He's just got them piles a' pistols and rifles.”

“And them two swivel cannon,” a third added.

After a few more similar questions, the storyteller let the dust settle. “First, Mr. Trum, my name is Drumbone. Ham Drumbone. Please do not truncate it into ‘Hambone.' I heard enough of that when I was a boy.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Apology accepted. And second, do any of you men remember when the Gatemen first took to the seas?”

There was silence. “Sure,” said a voice.

“They was like ghosts,” said another.

“That's right,” Ham answered. “Pirate ships would just vanish without a trace. Some said it was magic. Some said the Firefish ate 'em. Some said it was the devil. Others said miracles of God. Some even did say it was ghosts that traveled the seas in the form of men. But I'm telling the story so you'll know that it weren't any of those.”

“Then what was it?” Dallis asked. “What was it Damrick done?”

“I'm building up to that, young sir.”

“You boys ain't figured it out already?” asked a crotchety voice. It was Sleeve. “Add it up. Iron musket balls. Problems with the waddin'. Furnaces ever' which where. Think back to that first fight Ham told, when the
Defender
attacked the
Savage Grace
. He's given ye about a thousand hints.”

There was silence. Then another said, “But it ain't fair talkin' all around it, and not just sayin' when he knows exactly.”

“Fair?” Ham asked. “What's fair got to do with it? It's a story, gents, not a contest.”

“And that's all it is,” Mutter Cabe now contributed, his baritone ominous. “Nothin' but guessin'. No one knows what happened to all them ships, and no one's left who'll tell. It's the Firefish got 'em.”

“Yer a crazy old fool, Mutter,” Sleeve countered. “Damrick Fellows got 'em. He's a smart man and was a hero fer a while, until people figured out he was no better than a murderer, a man who found out he liked killin' and went and found a way to get paid to do it. And who paid him the most, that's who he killed for. And that's why he ended up pirate, and no one sings songs to him no more.”