Blaggard's Moon (56 page)

The pistol was a lump of hot iron in his hand. The sweat of his palm made it slippery, too. The thing was far too heavy to hold, much too heavy to raise up. But Delaney did it anyway. “If I don't, ye see, I'll get shot, too,” he explained to the quiet man. “And then, well, someone else'll jus' shoot ye anyway.”

Wentworth cocked his head just slightly, as though listening to
something. Then for no reason Delaney could fathom, he said, “I forgive you.”

It was a stab, a sword that flashed straight into Delaney's chest, cutting him deep. It made him want to do anything else in the world but pull that trigger.

“Time's a wastin',” Conch rumbled from behind. The voice cast a shadow of death across Delaney.

Wentworth lowered his head, and he prayed. Delaney couldn't make out the words, but saw the lips move. Delaney heard. He knew this time what it was.

The sweat of his palm, the slipperiness of the pistol butt, the weight of the weapon, the stubbornness of the trigger, the wobble of the barrel as it tried, tried so hard to move away from the matted hair on that dry, dusty scalp…these were things Delaney recalled vividly. He remembered them just that way, right before the flash and the crash and the blood and the thump of the body hitting the earth, emptied of spirit.

Now the drums began. Distant, rhythmic, but with offbeats that countered the main beats, giving them an eerie sound. Delaney listened, and a chill ran through him. They were not up close, where the rustling was. But they made that image, that flash of powder and the body slumping away from him, come to his mind over and over again, like they were calling it up inside him. Over and over. They kept doing it for a while, a long while. And then they stopped.

Delaney sighed. Wentworth had died right. Delaney could have done the same. But he'd killed instead. And now he would die wrong.

Then it hit him. He wasn't going to die wrong, not at all.

The Blaggard's Hole. The
Kwy Dendaroos
. Doorway for the Doomed. The Hants weren't wrong. Belisar the Whale wasn't wrong. This wasn't a penalty that he didn't deserve. This was exactly what he deserved. This ceremonial, ritual torture, this tearing out of his bones, this complete and utter mortal destruction in the most horrifying way imaginable…it wasn't a crying shame, inflicted on a poor soul who hadn't earned such a terrible fate. He wasn't being unfairly punished for doing a good deed for a little girl. No, he was being judged for all the evil he'd ever done and got away with. Or thought he'd got away with. Every secret, every evil thought, every ugly word.

No, this wasn't wrong, it was right. It was just.

He sat up straighter. He raised his chin. He suddenly felt, instead of
afraid or angry, almost…what was it? Grateful? No, that wasn't it. But it was something. Somehow, knowing he deserved all this, it made it…easier. No, not easier. Truer! That was it. Sort of.

He looked up at the hole in the canopy. Three bright stars were visible in the deepening blue. And then he knew what this feeling was. He felt worthy. Not worthy of being rescued. No, he felt worthy of damnation. But within that he felt, for the first time in his life, that what he'd done had meant something. It meant something so deep and so profound that God Himself had ordained this end for him. His life had been empty and evil. But it hadn't been meaningless. A man couldn't go around shooting people and stealing and robbing and turning his back on Maybelle Cuddy and the children he was supposed to have, and then just drift away into darkness and nothingness like it hadn't happened. Like it didn't matter. No, there was a God after all. A God who saw. A God who judged. A God who cared. There was a God who would clean up the world.

And that was a God Delaney would be proud to get crushed by.

“Come get me, then!” he announced, not to God, and not to the Hants, but to the mermonkeys. “I'm here! God's will be done, ye pointy-toothed little bone-munchers! Come and get me, I'm yer man!”

He meant it, too.

But they didn't come.

And after a while the drums didn't come back, and then the reeds didn't rustle. And then the feeling faded, and Delaney was left just where he'd been, sitting on his post in his pond, with a crick in his back and a backside that needed a stretch. But he didn't stretch. He left his mind to wander.

And wander it did…back to a tale where Conch Imbry tasted one last, great victory. Just before the wind shifted on him and drove him toward the shoals.

The men in the forecastle were anxious, their patience worn thin by long interludes of dying love when the great and final battle loomed. Delaney remembered that. And then Ham indulged them. He went on and on, describing every detail, shot by shot. He told how the
Shalamon
led a flotilla of ships from Mumtown, a small fleet of Cabeebs and pirates promised gold and shares, out into the rain and wind of Cabeeb Bay. He told how they surrounded those three Ryland ships, how the furnaces on the
Ayes of Destiny
, the
Lion's Pride
, and the
Blue Horizon
glowed red, how cannon boomed and hot shot flew in all directions, tracing and hissing
through the rain and the mist. The men saw it all in their minds' eyes, saw the wind kick up, felt the rain come lashing down, heard cannon and thunder, saw the gunpowder smoke plume out, and get kicked by the wind, and then dissolve into nothing in the rain and the storm.

Delaney listened, too, pulled along, engrossed. Who wouldn't be? Conch Imbry proved a brilliant, calculating admiral. He directed the small ships into the fray first, bobbing and crashing on the waves, just so he could watch and learn from their destruction. Then, having unlocked the secret of the Gatemen's success, he trained his long-range guns on the furnaces, only on the furnaces, booming from a distance while the Gatemen wore themselves ragged against a host of quick, light sloops and yachts and catamarans that would not stay still. Whenever an oven was hit square, it roared its flames and coals sky high. Then the fires of hell engulfed their own Gatemen; flying coals and white-hot shrapnel, smoke and brimstone and black grime choking and burning and maiming and killing. And the heat of those coals, now strewn across wooden decks, would hiss and steam but would not be quenched by a little rain.

Seeing the way the Gatemen used their swivel cannon, Conch ordered his powder stores moved from the main hold to the Poker Deck astern. When that was done, he singled out the
Ayes of Destiny
. He brought the
Shalamon
in close. She took a shelling from the Gatemen's four guns, and they did some damage, but not enough; those guns were quickly silenced by the
Shalamon
's big cannon. And against muskets and pistols, even when the shot was heated, the black ship's rock-hard hull held firm, deflecting glancing musket balls, burning slow even when hit square. And then there was the rain, quenching whatever small flames took root and tried to grow.

The Gatemen fought on, slipping on wet soot and blood, breathing the reek of fumes, taking fire and grapeshot until their
Destiny
was but a hissing, smoking ruin, sinking swiftly into the darkness and the cold at the bottom of the bay.

And Ham told the end of Hale Starpus, a hard man and a harder man to kill. He kept cannons booming and muskets barking until there was hardly a deck left to stand upon. And even when the ship keeled over, gasping and gurgling and creaking into the drink, he swam at his enemies with a knife clutched in his teeth, determined to sever the throat of any pirate unlucky enough to be in the water, fool enough to come within his reach. Thus he fought until a musket ball stopped him, and he slipped under the waves.

Successful at last against the Gatemen, Conch turned the same tactics on the
Lion's Pride
, and she went down as well—a simple freighter after all, her crew mere mortals. After the
Lion's Pride
it was the
Blue Horizon
. With cannon long since silenced, with furnaces in ruins, without hot shot, and with a decimated, bleeding, desperate crew, the Gatemen's ship was boarded. And it was here, when the
Shalamon
slid up from port astern and hull scraped hull, that Delaney made his reputation sure. His feet moved him up and over rails, down decks, up decks. His sword could sing and dance, and it severed many a red-plumed hat from a defeated head. Here, too, Spinner Sleeve and Mutter Cabe made good their pirate vows—Sleeve with a reckless joy that heartened his new captain. And it was on these decks that big Nil Corver, as slow of hand as he was of mind, breathed out his last, a pirate for a day.

In the end, ten ships went down. The Gatemen had sunk eight of Conch's to two of Ryland's. But those two ships took all their cargo, all Ryland's sailors, and all the Gatemen with them. The
Pride
was saved and taken prize, her bounty looted and divided back in port.

Every Gateman died. They were shown no mercy; they expected none. Wives and children, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, all would mourn the passing of good men who stood against the evil of their time, and for their trouble left the world too soon. Their memories would live on, hundreds of miles away, burnished in glory. But their remains would sink into the sea in hundreds of feet of cold blue water. They would decompose, be eaten by the sharks, or rise again and wash ashore in the grimmest of reminders for all Cabeebs in Mumtown…here's what happens to a man who crosses Carnsford Bloodstone Imbry.

Spinner Sleeve could not contain his glee. He leapt from his hammock and did a little dance. “Been a long time gettin' to the payoff!” he crowed. “But there's an end of it…them Gatemen finally got what's comin'!” Sailors laughed at him, and then swapped stories of their own. Ham's tale was done for the night. But only for the night.

“The tale of Damrick Fellows has come to an end,” he explained the very next evening. “But there is much yet to tell. For Jenta lives on, and so does the secret of Conch's gold.”

Eyes popped wide.

“She's goin' after his gold?” one asked.

“A' course she is!” a big voice fairly shouted. This was Blue Garvey,
whose comments were few, and generally brutal. “Conch killed her husband. Might as well steal and have a little somethin' to remember him by.” He laughed. No one else joined in.

“Conch waited in the port of Mumtown two more weeks,” Ham continued, “hoping something familiar might wash ashore.” He sucked his pipe, and the crackling filled the forecastle, followed by the smell of sweet tobacco smoke. “But of all the bloated bodies that ever surfaced, not a one could rightly show as either Damrick Fellows or Jenta Stillmithers. So finally he decided they were dead, and if not dead, they were dead enough. He sailed the
Shalamon
out of Mumtown to much cheering from its citizens, almost all of whom were at least somewhat richer for the dark ship's visit.”

Conch Imbry was in splendid spirits on the return trip.

“All Hallow's Dance is comin',” Conch said to Mazeley as they stood on the weather deck, soaking in the sunshine. “It may just be my favorite. Costumes, all them ghosts around and all. And me, why I'm expectin' breathless beauties to come 'round to comfort me in my time a' great sadness and loss.” He grinned. “See, I'm over her now, Mazeley. I'm a new man.”

“Delighted to hear it, sir.”

The
Shalamon
took her berth at the docks of Skaelington, and the usual crowd of well-wishers and hangers-on was there to greet them, waving, calling out, soaking up the presence of the city's most famous son. The new pirates aboard watched in fascination. The docks were gray and weathered, nothing to recommend them, but the crowd that gathered seemed quite enthusiastic.

“They think we're famous,” Mutter muttered.

“Because we are, ye dolt,” Sleeve instructed.

“Not too many women today, for some reason,” a veteran of Conch's crew interjected. “Usually more'n half of 'em are females, wantin' the Captain's attention.”

“Get a move on!” one of Conch's lieutenants now called out. The men grabbed the nearest mooring line, and though it was overmanned, still they helped play it out.

Within a few minutes Captain Conch and his man Mazeley, as was their wont, strolled down the gangway side by side. Four or five pirates, including Motley, walked with them as bodyguards.

“Ryland's dead. So he's out,” Conch was saying thoughtfully. “I'll miss
his money. But let's get that fat banker back to the poker table. I enjoyed thinnin' down his accounts, though it don't seem to have had much effect on the rest of 'im.”

Mazeley smiled.

“Conch!” one of the few female admirers called out, a bright-eyed young woman who pressed in close, pushing past Motley and the other bodyguards. “Did you catch Damrick Fellows?” she asked, eyes aglow.

The Captain grinned. “We did! We nailed the Gatemen but good!”

A small cheer went up, and others pushed in, all calling Conch's name and asking him questions.

“Okay, back up now…” Conch raised his hands, still smiling as he warded them away. Only Motley pulled his gun. The young woman tried to grab it and he fired. She fell to the ground, holding her chest. Then she lay still.

Conch turned his ire on the goon. “Motley!” He snatched the pistol away from him. “Look what you gone and—”