The Tides of Avarice (65 page)

The most confusing thing of all was something Sylvester wasn't going to admit to anyone right now, and only to a select few later. He didn't know how he'd done it either. It was as if the Zindar spirit, or whatever it was inside, had suddenly decided to take over.

Now that spirit, while he could sense it was still curled up somewhere inside him, was quiescent once more.

He wondered when it'd next choose to make its presence felt.

Rustbane stooped to pick up his pistols.

As he touched the first he gave a sudden yelp and a loud oath, and leaped backward, clutching his paw as if it had been scalded.

“I think those pistols have just become neutral,” said Pimplebrains.

The big old beaver waddled forward and picked up the two guns, putting a hook through each trigger guard. Whatever it was that had stung Rustbane into retreat seemed not to affect Pimplebrains.

“Whose side are you on?” hissed Rustbane at his crewman.

Pimplebrains considered before replying. “I'll give it to you straight, Skip. I'm like the guns. I'm neutral. I'm not on either side any longer. I been loyal to you for many years through thick and thin and I'd like to stay loyal to you, but I got other loyalties as well now. What the little feller – what Sylvester's been saying makes a whole lot o' sense. If we start meddling with Zindar stuff, we ain't got no idea what's likely to happen. Opening up that box could destroy the world with us in it, for all we can tell. So I'm just going to watch what happens. If you and Sylvester fight, which I reckon can't be helped now, the high horses you both gotten up on, then I'll not take sides. At least, I don't think I will but I won't stand by and watch either of you kill the other in cold blood. I owes you each that much.”

“Traitor!” thundered Rustbane.

“You could put it like that, yes.”

The gray fox's sword was in his hand now and before anyone could move – even Sylvester, with his recently enhanced reflexes – Rustbane had vaulted forward and plunged his blade right up to the hilt in Pimplebrains's chest.

The beaver said nothing and made no move to defend himself. He just stared at his erstwhile skipper and friend through eyes from which the life slowly ebbed, before slumping to the ground.

As Rustbane tugged his blade clear there was a fountain of the beaver's blood.

Sylvester was too shocked to move. Ever since their experiences in the cavern on Vendros, he'd grown fond of the genial beaver.

“Murderer,” said someone quite calmly beside him.

Sylvester turned.

The speaker had been Doctor Nettletree.

Rustbane sneered. “The village sawbones has something to contribute to the conversation?”

“I can tell a murder when I see it,” said the doctor, raising his poker in defiance. It looked pitifully small by comparison with the cutlass in Rustbane's mitt. “And that was a murder. You've killed someone who was a far better person than you, just because you didn't like what he was telling you. So what's next, you scoundrel? Kill us all so there aren't any witnesses to your shame? Well, let's just see you try.”

Rustbane laughed sarcastically. “Shame? Me? A pirate? Pirates don't have shame, you backwoods ninny, and, most especially of all the pirates sailing the seas of Sagaria, Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane doesn't ever feel shame. If I want to kill you, I'll do exactly that but mostly I don't – you and Jasper and Rasco, anyway. I want you to be alive so you can tell the world about my cruelty and murderousness, because the more people hear about it the more they'll fear me, and the more people fear me, the happier I am. Got that?”

“But me?” said Sylvester.

“What about you?”

“You said you wanted to let the others live, but you didn't say that about me.”

“You and me have bad blood between us now, Sylvester, too much bad blood in the past few minutes for there to be any outcome but that one of us die at the hands of the other.”

“Excuse me,” squeaked Rasco.

“What?” snapped Rustbane, looking at the mouse as if at a lump of gristle left on the plate.

“Could you kill me too?”

“Have you lost your senses?”

“See, Rustbane, I'm on Sylvester's side. He's my buddy. So if you gonna kill him I think you gotta kill me too. Savvy?”

“It'll be easier than blowing my nose, I can assure you,” snarled the fox, making a lunge at Rasco which the mouse easily evaded.

“How do you blow your nose if you can't catch it?” cried Rasco with a laugh that belied the seriousness of the situation. Before Rustbane could pull back his sword for another slash at him he'd darted between the fox's legs and scampered up the moss-covered bole of an old sagging birch tree.

All this time, Jasper had been standing quietly, simply observing. If the slaying of Pimplebrains had had an effect on him, he'd shown nothing of it. If anything, he seemed slightly bored. There was a wry twist to his mouth as if this sort of barbarism was only to be expected if you were so foolish as to consort with pirates and suchlike lowlifes.

Now he raised his head and fixed Rustbane with a stare so terrible that, even though the fox was many times larger than Jasper, he cowered.

“So you think you're going to kill my son and leave me alive, do you?”

Rustbane tried to rally his bravado. “How do you plan to stop me?”

“There are a hundred dead cannibals on Vendros Island who thought they could mock the humble lemming when they found him, but each of them died in the shadows of the cavern behind the Larder. They got a surprise when the lemming fought back, I can tell you. For some, the end came so quick they still had the expression of surprise on their faces as they died and it's going to be the same for you, you mangy specimen of the vulpine species.”

“No, Dad,” said Sylvester thickly. “This is my business and I'll finish it.”

“Don't be a fool, son.”

“It's something I have to do, Dad. You've got to let me. I'm not a child anymore.”

“I don't want to lose you a second time, Sylvester, not after we've found each other again.”

“Same here, but this is my fight. I was the one who brought the pirate back to Foxglove. I have to deal with the consequences of my decision.”

The sword in Sylvester's paw seemed very heavy, then suddenly it seemed as light as a feather. To a Zindar, it would be.

“Stand back, Dad. You too, Doctor Nettletree and you, Rasco.” The last was directed somewhere above Rustbane's head, where the mouse had scuttled along to the tip of a birch branch and seemed to be readying himself to jump down on to the fox.

Then, directly to Rustbane, Sylvester said, doing his best to growl, “Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane, I challenge you to combat.”

To Sylvester's surprise, Rustbane bowed his head, and not in one of his usual sarcastically mocking bows but as a sign of genuine respect.

“Whatever hex you put on my flintlocks,” said the pirate, “can you take it off again?”

“It's off already. The only place it was ever on was in your mind.”

“Then let's each take a pistol.” The gray fox looked at Doctor Nettletree. “You're a medical fellow. You're accustomed to seeing death close up. Unhook them from that corpse” – he jerked his head toward the ungainly sprawled body of Pimplebrains, which Rustbane clearly now regarded as just a heap of dead meat rather than the remains of a friend – “and bring them to us.”

Sylvester was horrified at the prospect. The pistols were the right size for a fox, not for a lemming. Even using both paws he'd barely be able to lift one of them.

Then he smiled. His sword had begun feeling airily light in his paw. He knew, although he couldn't have identified the source of this knowledge, that it was going to be the same with the flintlock.

Doctor Nettletree didn't have the advantage of Zindar abilities and made heavy weather of disentangling the weapons from the dead Pimplebrains's hooks and dragging them across to a place roughly midway between Sylvester and Rustbane.

“They're both loaded, I trust?” said Sylvester. The world was, he knew, full of dead people who'd failed to be sufficiently suspicious of the gray fox.

Rustbane nodded. “I keep them that way, but you're welcome to have them checked. Doctor Nettletree, I wonder if you'd oblige us again?”

The doctor bent over and examined the two pistols in turn.

“Both fully charged,” he reported.

He backed away from the silvery weapons as if he didn't want to be near them any longer than was strictly necessary. Sylvester could sympathize with the doctor. He'd felt the same way about the pistols ever since the first time he'd seen them, a lifetime ago. For now, however, they'd lost the terror they'd always held for him.

The fox stepped forward and scooped up the guns.

Sylvester tightened his grip on the handle of his sword, expecting trickery.

The fox, reading his mind, merely chuckled and tossed one of the pistols so that it landed at Sylvester's feet.

“There's your weapon, hamst—lemming.”

“I thank you.”

Rustbane looked his own pistol over, one side and then the other, as if seeing it for the first time. “The traditional thing in these circumstances,” he said chattily to Sylvester, “is for each of us to retreat twenty paces, backs to each other, then turn and fire at a signal. But I don't think there's room here for us to go twenty paces without walking face-first into a tree trunk, so let's make it just ten, shall we?”

Sylvester inclined his head. “Ten seems perfectly sufficient to me,” he said as if he knew what he was talking about.

He threw aside his sword and then bent down to pick up the pistol Rustbane had given him. As he'd anticipated, it felt perfectly comfortable in his paw. It was something of a stretch for his claw to reach the trigger, but he coped with that by adopting a two-fisted grip, one paw on the gun's butt, the other wrapped around the trigger guard.

“How will I know you'll go the full ten paces?” he said to the pirate. “How can I be sure you won't wait until my back is turned and put a bullet through me?”

“You have my word as Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane.”

“Joking aside,” said Sylvester shortly.

Rustbane put on an expression of mock outrage, then his eyes lost their humorous glint. “Well, you have your father and your friends to watch over me. I'm sure Doctor Nettletree would biff me with his sturdy poker if I so much as hiccuped when I shouldn't.”

Sylvester was dubious. Doctor Nettletree's poker seemed a puny weapon to use against someone the size of the gray fox but there was no sense in arguing. Besides, the one whom Rustbane should be worried about wasn't Doctor Nettletree – it was Jasper, or even Rasco.

“Really, you know,” said Rustbane with an affected yawn, “it's me who should be worried about cheating.”

“How so?”

“Your father, here. If the ancient Zindar talents you've absorbed make you able to freeze time the way you did, how much can your father do, who was in the Zindar vessel for years, not just a single night?”

“Dad wouldn't cheat.”

“Even when he sees his only son about to die? It's hard to believe that someone wouldn't do everything they could, fair or foul, to save the life of their child.”

“That,” said Jasper, “is just something you're going to have to worry about, isn't it, Rustbane?”

“I suppose so. Besides, I don't think even you could move faster than a speeding bullet, and the bullet that'll be traveling toward your son's heart will be speeding as fast as I can speed it.”

“Stow the chatter,” said Sylvester, wondering momentarily where his courage was coming from. “Ten paces. Doctor Nettletree here will count them out for us. Then we turn and fire. May the best lemming win.”

Deliberately, he turned his back on Cap'n Rustbane.

This could be the end of it all, despite Rustbane's assurances, despite the other three being there. He could shoot me now and I'd be dead before there was time for anyone to do anything to stop it.

But the bullet in the spine he expected didn't come.

Instead, he heard a shuffling sound that he interpreted as Rustbane turning around likewise.

“You're okay so far, son,” said Jasper. “You still sure you want to go through with this?”

“Oh, what larks,” commented Rustbane. “I haven't fought a duel like this for, oh, months at least. It was my two hundred forty-seventh duel, and the two hundred forty-seventh that I won. What's your own record at dueling, Sylvester?”

“Like yours, it's a hundred per cent,” Sylvester replied. “Stop babbling, Rustbane. If you're too frightened to face me, say so now.”

“Me? Frightened? The possibility of being frightened isn't in the heart of a pirate, and most especially isn't in the heart of Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane. Prepare to die, Lemmington. Such a pity when we might have been friends.”

“One!” shouted Doctor Nettletree, cutting off Rustbane's flow of words.

Sylvester took a pace.

Behind him he heard Rustbane do the same.

“Two!”

Each number felt like a hammer blow to Sylvester's head. If he were wrong about the extra speed and strength the Zindar vessel had given him, each step was a step along a very short path to where the end of his life lay waiting for him.

“Three!”

Doctor Nettletree's shout seemed to be coming from a different world, a world infinitely far away. Sylvester felt as if his soul were floating through the mists that lie in the space between worlds.

“Four!”

It would be so easy, wouldn't it, for him just to let go of his existence here on Sagaria and wander in those mists forever? Oh, to be sure, Viola would weep for him a little, but she'd find someone else, someone more reliable, someone who wouldn't go traipsing off for escapades on the distant oceans.