Snake Bite (24 page)

A little way from where Sherlock hid, the reeds parted and a small figure slipped across the mud of the riverbank to the boat. Quickly it scurried up the rope that held the boat close to the
bank. Like Mr Arrhenius, its skin seemed to glisten in the meagre light.

The girl paused as she got to the deck. Her head moved back and forth, elevated slightly, as if she was sniffing at the air.

Mr Arrhenius walked towards her, stopping a few feet away. ‘Were you successful?’ he asked softly, his voice barely carrying through the air to where Sherlock hid. ‘Are those
interfering adolescents actually dead?’

The girl stared at him, not giving any indication that she understood his words. Or perhaps she did understand but didn’t care enough to answer.

‘What’s wrong?’ Arrhenius asked. Sherlock couldn’t see how, but somehow he had picked up on something in her manner, some uneasiness or hesitation. ‘Were they not
there? Was it the wrong boat?’

She continued to stare at him for a few moments, then looked away expressionlessly, gazing out at the darkened river.

‘You failed,’ he said, somehow picking up the truth of what had occurred. ‘Three boys, three
children
, and you failed!’ His voice grew louder and more angry.
‘And yet you dare to come back here?’ He stepped forward. Before she could move he slapped her, hard. Her head jerked around and she stumbled, falling to her knees. She stayed there, on
the deck of the boat, head lowered.

Sherlock was stunned. His experience of the girl was not huge, but so far he’d seen her as fast, strong, implacable and dangerous, yet she wasn’t even trying to defend herself. It
was as if she couldn’t use her fists against her own father.

Arrhenius looked at the girl’s hands, which were limp on the deck by her knees. ‘And what about the poison injector? Where is it? Did you drop it? Did you leave it behind where it
can be found?’

Sherlock thought he could see something glinting in the girl’s eyes, but it didn’t look like silver. It looked like tears.

‘You
lost
it, didn’t you?’

She didn’t seem to want to meet Arrhenius’s gaze. He stepped closer to her and grabbed her jaw, lifting her head up so that she was forced to look at him.

‘Pathetic,’ he hissed. ‘All the things I have done for you since your mother died, and you treat me this way. Pathetic! We are already racing against time because of your
failure. If you had killed Malcolm Mackenzie when you were supposed to, then it wouldn’t have been necessary for you to follow him to the Prefect’s Residence and steal his warning note,
and I would be at the place of the explosion already, waiting to give the signal. Because of you I now have to try to get there in this . . . this undignified fashion.’ He squeezed her jaw
hard: Sherlock could see the white indentations of his fingers in her skin. ‘You are a disappointment to me, girl. A great disappointment.’

Sherlock suddenly realized that the ground where he was crouching was moving. It reared up, opening to reveal a wet, red throat and rows of ragged teeth. Baggy, scaly flesh hung below the mouth,
swaying as the creature lunged for him, jaws gaping.

Sherlock fell backwards, shocked, as the creature that had been hiding by his side levered itself up out of the mud of the riverbank on four short legs that ended in vicious
claws.

Its eyes were small and slitted, and they stared at Sherlock without emotion, like fragments of stone. Behind the rear legs its body turned into a long, flat tail that took up fully half its
length. There were razor-edged ridges running along both sides of that tail. The thing was a reptile of some kind. Its skin was marked by deep cracks, and hung beneath it in swags and folds. Its
head was flat, like a spade. Two nostrils were set at the very front, and set high, so that it could breathe while lying in the water, Sherlock deduced. It was obviously a hunter, and one that lay
in wait, in hiding. From the tip of its snout to the end of its tail it was about the same size as Sherlock, but it seemed to be mostly muscle.

All this detail Sherlock picked up in the fragment of a second that it took the creature to use its tail to propel itself towards him. He stretched out his arms, trying to catch the thing in
mid-air. His hands grabbed at its snout and clamped its mouth shut. Half of the teeth seemed to still be outside the mouth, pointing in all directions. He could hear air hissing through its
nostrils, and he could smell its breath – rotting meat and rotting fish. Its front claws ripped at his chest, drawing blood and stinging, while its rear claws scrabbled for purchase on the
ground. Its muscular tail lashed against the mud in an attempt to push it closer to Sherlock. The razor-sharp ridges along the sides of the tail raked against the skin of his legs, ripping the
flesh and leaving lines of burning agony in their wake.

Sherlock twisted, forcing the creature around so that it was beneath him. His hands were still clamping its jaws shut, and he forced it down into the mud, manoeuvring his body so that he had one
knee on its snout, holding its jaws closed, and the other knee trapping its tail. It writhed and squirmed beneath him but he was fairly sure that he had it trapped. For a while, anyway.

He glanced down at the boat, panicked. Arrhenius and his daughter were staring up the bank. They had obviously heard something of the struggle, but not seen anything. The incredible thing was
that the creature was making almost no sound apart from the hissing of its breath through its nostrils. Any other animal would have been barking or growling or screeching or something, but this
creature, whatever it was, seemed either unable or unwilling to make any noise when it fought.

With one quick action Sherlock put all of his weight into the hardest punch he could manage, directed right at the back of the creature’s neck. It bucked beneath him once, then was still.
For one glorious moment he thought that he had killed it, but then he realized that he could still feel its sides moving as it breathed. He must have stunned it – or perhaps it was just
playing dead, waiting for him to release it.

‘Go and see what’s making that noise.’ Mr Arrhenius’s voice floated up from the boat below. ‘If it is one of those adolescents then kill him. Then I want you to go
back to their boat and retrieve that venom injector. I can’t afford to have that discovered. Then use it to kill the others. This time, do it properly.’

The girl ran for the edge of the boat. She moved like an animal – four-legged, hands and feet all making contact with the deck. She leaped, and when she hit the bank she was suddenly
running on two legs, using her hands to push reeds out of the way. She seemed desperate to prove herself to her . . . her what? Her
father
? Sherlock still couldn’t quite believe
it.

Sherlock’s gaze snapped between the approaching girl and the creature that was pinioned beneath him. He couldn’t work out what to do for the best, how to escape.

He could hear the hissing sound of the reeds parting to let the girl through. She would be on him in a moment, and even without the poison injector she would be able to rip his throat out with
the hard nails on her fingers. And she would, as well – he had seen no more mercy in her eyes than he had in the eyes of the creature he was kneeling on. But if he stopped holding the
reptilian creature down, ready to defend himself against the girl, then it would almost certainly turn on him and attack. He couldn’t hold it with one hand either, which meant that he
couldn’t get the poison injector out of his pocket.

He did the only thing he could. In the back of his mind he heard Amyus Crowe’s voice saying, ‘If life gives you lemons, Sherlock, make lemonade. Use whatever you’ve got to hand
to your advantage. Things that seem like problems might actually be solutions to other problems.’

Still holding the reptile by the snout, he slipped his other hand beneath it and grabbed its leg. He took his knee off its tail. Immediately it started to struggle. Before it could wriggle loose
from his grasp, he used every ounce of his strength to hoist it into the air. It bucked and twisted, but he held on.

The reeds parted and the girl emerged. Her teeth were bared and her black tongue was extended. Her glittering eyes fixed themselves on Sherlock and she snarled.

So he threw the reptile at her.

It tried to turn in mid-air to bite him, but he had thrown it too hard and too far for it to reach him. It hit the girl full in the face. Shocked, she fell backwards, hands grabbing at the
reptile to contain it. Sensing something warm nearby, the creature turned and tried to bite her. She grabbed at its snout with one hand and its scrabbling claws with the other. From what Sherlock
could see of her face she wasn’t scared, or even surprised. She was completely focused on defeating this new threat.

The two of them – girl and reptile – disappeared into the reeds. Sherlock could hear the continued sounds of their struggle, growing fainter and fainter as they rolled down the
riverbank towards the water. There was a splash, and then a lot of splashing. Then there was silence.

He stood up and stared down at the river. He couldn’t see the girl, or the reptile, but he could see Mr Arrhenius. The man was casting off, preparing to sail. He turned and stared up at
Sherlock.

‘You and that river alligator appear to have solved a problem for me,’ he called cheerfully. ‘She was getting to be more of a liability than an asset.’

‘What you’re trying to do is madness!’ Sherlock shouted. ‘Don’t you realize how many people will die?’

Arrhenius shrugged as the boat drifted into the river. ‘I do not care. I am being well paid for this. My employers do not care either. After all, they run mines where people die all the
time, and factories where people breathe in poisons every day that shorten their lives. As long as they make a profit, death is merely an unfortunate by-product of their business.’ He raised
his hat. ‘You have been an interesting adversary. I trust we will not meet again.’

‘I’ll stop you!’ Sherlock yelled. ‘I
will
stop you.’

‘Beware the bite of the snake, young man,’ Arrhenius warned. He placed his hat back on his head and turned to check the sail.

Wildly, Sherlock plunged down the slope to the river. If he got to Arrhenius, if he could somehow stop the man from leaving, then maybe the ship wouldn’t blow up. Arrhenius had seemed to
tell the girl that he had to get to the place where the explosion was going to happen – presumably the same place the Governor of the province was going to board the ship – and give a
signal. Mud clung to his feet and he almost fell over twice as he made his way down, but he was too late. Arrhenius’s boat was out on the river and moving fast. There was an early morning
breeze blowing from the coast, and Arrhenius’s sails were catching it and pushing him on.

He slammed his fist into his leg in frustration. So near and yet so far.

Hesitating for only a moment, he turned and climbed the bank again. When he got to the path at the top he sprinted back towards where he had left Cameron and Wu Fung-Yi. There was no sign of the
girl. If she had survived the fight with the reptile then she must have run off, looking either for her father or for shelter.

Sherlock tried to feel guilty about what he had done – fighting a girl! – but he couldn’t. There was something drastically wrong with her. She was more animal than girl, and
she was probably better off without Arrhenius. Sherlock had a feeling that she would survive no matter what the circumstances.

He wondered what her name was. It seemed such a trivial thing, but it was hard to think of her as a person without actually knowing.

It took him only a few minutes to reach the boat. He skidded down the bank and leaped for the deck. The two boys were waiting for him.

‘What happened?’ Cameron asked.

‘I’ll tell you as we go, but we’re in a race,’ Sherlock said, gasping for breath. ‘We need to cast off, raise sail and head upstream.’

‘You’re injured,’ Cameron observed, looking at the bloody scratches on Sherlock’s chest, face and legs.

‘Worry about that later. We need to move.’

As Sherlock cast off, Cameron struggled to raise the sail and Wu Fung-Yi took the rudder. Sherlock gasped out as much of the story as he could. ‘Arrhenius needs to give a signal to the
fake cook on board the
Monocacy
,’ Sherlock finished as their boat drifted out into the river and the sail caught the breeze. ‘If he’s not there the bomb doesn’t go
off.’

‘Why does he need to give a signal in the first place?’ Wu called from the rear of the boat. ‘Why not just set the explosives off?’

Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘The
Monocacy
is a big ship. We know the explosives are stored in the fake water barrels, and that means they’re probably stored near the
galley, deep inside the ship, where the Head Cook can keep an eye on them. He’ll have to light a fuse in order to set off the explosion. He won’t know, hidden inside the ship, when the
Governor steps on board. He’ll need someone off the ship to tell him when to light the fuse – which means he’ll probably be looking through a porthole, waiting for that
signal.’

‘But why can’t someone else do it?’ Cameron asked, glancing over his shoulder at Sherlock. ‘Why does it have to be Arrhenius?’

Sherlock shrugged. ‘Maybe Arrhenius doesn’t trust anyone else. Or maybe they want to restrict the number of people who are involved with the conspiracy – after all, the more
people who know then the more chance that someone will give it away, and this particular plot needs to be kept very secret for it to work.’

‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ Cameron said. ‘What was my father’s role in this? Was he one of the conspirators, or did he find out about it some
other way?’

Sherlock mused. ‘He was obviously part of it, but he also obviously had a change of heart. Maybe it was supposed to be his job to travel upstream to where the
Monocacy
is moored and
give the signal, but he changed his mind. I remember seeing him talking to Arrhenius at the dinner party at your house. Arrhenius seemed angry. Maybe that’s when he said that he wasn’t
going to take part in the conspiracy. I think he decided that he couldn’t stomach the loss of life that would result from the explosion. So Arrhenius had him killed, but then Arrhenius had to
take his place and give the signal.’