Tale of the Thunderbolt (14 page)

Valentine reached up to his face, and felt the old scar moving up from his chin to the level of his eye.

“I forget the rest,” Jensen said. “How did it go, Cook?”

The cook cleared his throat. “The Crying Man would bring a storm in flesh, and a storm in metal. His eyes would see to the end of a long straight path, and at this path's end would come our salvation.”

“What was your ship called, the
Thunderbolt
?” the commodore asked. “Thunderstorm? Thunder in metal?”

“Yes,” Valentine said. “But the rest is a leap. I might be able to do it, but not because of an oracle. I have certain . . . abilities . . . that the Jamaicans who tried before lacked. To do the job, I'll need the ship back, on loan for a short cruise round the island. If I can get rid of the Specter, break his hold on the island, would you return the ship and crew to take me to Haiti and back to the coast? Afterwards you could keep her. I'm sure you'd find her useful.”

“Valentine,” Jensen said. “If you can do this, I'll give you the ship and a team of men who'd sail with you across hell's lava ocean in a powderhulk, no fear.”

“That's what I'm counting on. No fear.”

 

The party broke up after midnight. It turned out Jensen was a fan of mah-jongg, and he insisted on teaching Valentine. The driver from the carriage, now formally introduced as Jason Lisi, joined them to make the fourth. After the pieces were distributed, Jensen started telling Lisi Valentine's idea to oust the Specter. Valentine had to force his brain to do double duty as he explained his plan to Lisi while learning how to match up his tiles, when to call
kung,
and when a hand was over. Valentine asked about the depths in the waters off the southern coast of the island while keeping the ancient box-top from the mah-jongg set ready to remind himself what the bamboos and characters and flowers and so on were worth. He had a feeling that convincing the commodore to commit to his plan somehow rode on his ability to play the old Chinese game — easy enough to learn but difficult to play well.

He lost.

The experience left him drained. Jensen caught him rubbing his eyes and suggested that the party break up. “I'll think it over while I sleep,” he promised Valentine. Valentine then accepted an invitation to stay in a guest bedroom.

The bedrooms all opened on the same balcony as the dining room. All had similar French doors open, inviting the soft night air. Valentine's room held the same cluttered hodgepodge of antiques — only the ticking on the mattress looked new. He found an old laminated “guest services menu” inside a nightstand drawer and relaxed, imagining the luxuries of a bygone age. Jasmine perfumed the air. What sort of assignations had transpired in the days when the Residence was just another luxurious rental property on Jamaica's sunny coast? He hung up his cumberbund and short jacket and tried to relax in bed, but his mind wouldn't let him sleep. He went out onto the balcony, barefoot on the cool concrete, and looked down at the moored hospital ship, the smaller
Thunderbolt,
and the town of Jayport.

Light still fell out the doorway from the dining room, though less than when they'd been shuffling tiles under the chandelier. Perhaps the commodore was an insomniac. Valentine walked softly to the edge of the light.

It was Carrasca, with her thick hair released from its confinement. She still had the mah-jongg tiles out, arranged in a three-tiered pile that looked like a Japanese castle. She tapped two of the tiles together as she stared at the arrangement, her lower lip thrust out in thought, a half-filled glass of wine on the table. Her wide-lapeled jacket hung on the back of her chair, and she'd partially unbuttoned her shirt. Valentine saw now that the shirt was far too big for her. Perhaps it had belonged to her father.

Valentine cleared his throat.

Carrasca glanced out the open doors. Then she jumped in her chair with a shocked gasp. Mah-jongg pieces skittered across the dinner table.

“Sorry to sneak up on you,” Valentine said. He took a step into the light.

“Mother of — You frightened me.”

Valentine noticed her arms were goose pimpled. “I'm sorry. Wrong of me to creep around my hosts' house.”

“No, not that. Your eyes.” She rattled out the words stacatto.

“My eyes?”

She shivered again. “They were — glowing.”

Perfect. You're the wolfman to her now, Ghost.
“Glowing?”

“Like an animal's at night, a cat's. Sort of orange yellow. I've never seen a man's eyes do that.”

“Maybe they caught the light just right.”

“Maybe. Maybe my imagination, too. Long day,” she said, her words returning to their usual genteel pace.

“Sorry about your stack. What were you doing?”

“You can play mah-jongg solitare, too. You take the chips out of the bag and stack them in a certain way. The trick is to not look at the ones on the lower levels as you put it together. Then you pull them off in matching pairs.”

“Didn't get enough after dinner?”

“I couldn't sleep. It relaxes me. My mind had too much to work on. This is like counting sheep.”

“I'm sorry your parents came up in the conversation.”

Some of the warmth that had been in her eyes earlier in the evening returned. “No. Oh, no, it wasn't that. You see, my grandfather talked to Captain Utari earlier. The commodore decided to let me captain the
Thunderbolt.
My first real command.”

She led him out onto the balcony, and they looked down into the bay. The
Thunderbolt
looked like a toy ship.

“You're lucky Utari didn't want her.”

She smiled. “He hates anything without a sail. Says there's no seamanship in engines.”

“But you don't feel that way.”

“You don't know sailors, David. My first real ship. My first command. I loved her even as we limped into the harbor.” The light trickling out of the dining room played across her dusky features. “I can't wait to put her to sea again. She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.”

Valentine could have said the same about the
Thunderbolt
's new commander. He would have, if there hadn't been a hint of anxiety in her eyes as she met his gaze, wary against the return of that inhuman glow.

Slave labor, carried out at a dead slow pace, tends the fields in this, one of the most backwards and ill-governed of the multitude of Kurian Principalities. Organization is nil. Construction is moribund, maintenance haphazard. Technology, with the exception of the bauxite mines (under rust-streaked signs with the word
JAMALCO
sometimes still visible) and the guns in the hands of the Specter's Chinese Quislings, has slipped back into a stage somewhere between the Neolithic implements of the Arakawa Indians and the eighteenth century. It is not unusual to see the land worked
by stone tools, before the slaves go home to rude huts lit by charcoal fires. The Jamaicans have resorted to an atavistic belief system filled with good-luck charms, incantations, and totemism to keep the Reapers from the door. Rocks or coral painted with designs in chicken blood can be seen on some doorsteps, below patterned threads of beads that sway in every window. Some families never eat after noon, in the not unreasonable belief that an empty belly makes the body less visible to the Reapers' senses. The Reapers, in the manner of wild predators, usually pick off the aged, the sick, or the few who try to flee. The Specter's cloaked avatars often lurk on the beaches and borders, taking those who try to escape over the mountains or into the cockpit country of the Northwest.

 

It took all of three days for David Valentine to cross a 1,200-yard field. In fairness, the first day hardly counted: it had been spent surveying the estate's lands. The more rugged ground sloping down toward the bay turned into fields and orchards closer to the castle. A road servicing the Kurian's home wandered westward along the coast and eastward toward a settlement centered in the ruins of a beautiful Colonial Spanish square. The immediate lands beyond the castle's pebble-colored faces were filled with tobacco fields, stretching out from the walls like a green carpet. The distinctive odor tickled his sensitive nostrils as he allowed his nose a moment's play in the air from his perch in a palm. He had surveyed farms with staple crops, fruit trees, and livestock, but this was the first tobacco field he had seen since being dropped off by Utari's fast-sailing sloop.

The first order of business was to get a feel for the rhythms of the castle's lands, filling in gaps in the knowledge of local spies.

The Specter relied on his Reapers to guard the castle and the tobacco fields at night; Valentine had made sure of that after the second day's observation. Ordinary Jamaicans avoided the acres around the castle as if the air were toxic. Women dressed in neat cotton smocks or heavy black dresses worked the Specter's personal fields and orchards as their children played amongst the crops. Valentine guessed by the quality of their clothing and shoes that they were families of his Horsed Police. They worked in a curiously lackadaisical, though not disorganized, manner. Valentine had seen many fields where the people under the Kurian thumb worked with the maniacal intensity brought on by knowing that whoever turned in fewer bushels at the end of a season would go to the Reapers.

The Reapers, with their innate ability to sense human beings by the lifesign they projected, could spot anyone approaching the castle at night across the fields. Thus had the brave Jamaican band died the night they came to kill the Specter. The men might as well have approached the castle shooting off Roman candles. At night a cluster of humans could be marked miles away by a prowling Reaper. Even a lone man would show up in the empty fields as if a spotlight were shining on him from one of the four corner towers.

But Valentine was another matter. The Lifeweaver training of six years as a Hunter had taught him to shield his lifesign through mental discipline, a practice of shutting down parts of his mind until he became intent as a prowling cat, thinking only of the furtive scratching of the rat in the drain-pipe ahead. Once in the proper mental state, it was as if a skeleton wearing his body were performing on a stage, marionetted by invisible strings from himself somewhere in a balcony above. Jamaica's tropical growth and abundant animal life generated its own form of lifesign, masked him from the prowling Reapers, and allowed him to remain at the edge of the fields in comparative safety.

He had another ability, equally useful but less explicable, even to the seemingly all-knowing Lifeweavers who had selected and trained him. Valentine could sense a nearby Reaper, mirroring its own ability to detect lifesign, though his own senses were far less precise than those of the vampiric Reapers. He once described the sensation to Alessa Duvalier as akin to “feeling where the sun is with your eyes shut.” Though to be more accurate, it felt more like a cold presence in his mind, the creepy alarm that most people experience sometime in their lives when they wake up suddenly with the fear that someone is in their bedroom. The ability was unpredictable: sometimes he could sense a Reaper moving on a wooded slope a mile away, but other times walk over one sleeping in a basement below him with only a vague feeling of unease. In the absence of any authoritative opinion, he formed a theory that his ability had to do with the mental connection between the Reaper and its Master Kurian, but like most theories, it was probably half-right at best. Anecdotal evidence suggested there were others like him. Stories filtered in from elsewhere about other Hunters with the talent, but he had never met one and compared notes.