Brimstone and Lily (Legacy Stone Adventures) (53 page)

Sha’ira reached out her hand. For a second I thought she would rub my head. That would’ve made me scream. But she stroked my cheek with her knuckles instead, a gesture so unexpected from the former Shade that I gasped. “You are right, of course. We cannot save the world any way but one good person at a time. Let us begin with your mother.”

“Guess you’s the right one to carry the Stone and that’s a fact,” Romulus rumbled, his voice sounding like a distant avalanche.

Ernie threw up his little paws from his perch on the big Marshal’s shoulder. “Why not? I haven’t cheated death in a couple of days. Be good for me constitution.” He patted his round tummy. “Keep me in fightin’ trim, it will.”

We all had a little group hug. After a minute Jasper whispered, “This is all so sweet that I’m gettin’ cavities in my teeth. Can we get goin’?”

“Don’t you ever stop?” I asked out loud. Tapping my noggin for the others’ benefit, I explained, “Mr. Warm and Sensitive.” I stepped away from everybody to raise my hand. The tin cup flared into Morphageus. “Well, that works. Wasn’t sure if it would. Probably won’t on the other ship, though, huh?”

“Unlikely,” Sha’ira said. “But your magick seems a bit different than most, so…”

“Will I be able to talk to Jasper over there? That’s more important than the sword workin’.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Jasper. “Internal magick should behave just fine, even on deep water. It’s the flashy external stuff that tends to go crazy.”

That relieved me a lot. Aloud I asked, “Stone-senses and all that?”

“Unaffected. Also internal.”

Sha’ira reached into her pouch. “Ah! Speaking of the Stone.” She pulled out a length of fine golden chain with a screw-clasp. “My people in Iberion are great metalsmiths. This will be proof against ravens and almost anything else that might try to cut the Stone from your neck again.”

I smiled and took it from her strong hand. Squinting at it, I saw that it seemed to be no ordinary chain. It sparkled with rainbow colors as I moved it in the light. “This ain’t everyday gold, is it?”

“No. It’s maillon, from Scandia. Star-stone, they call it there. From a meteor. Very rare. The mermaids harvest it, still smoking from its heaven journey, and quench it in their magick pools. Almost unbreakable. We use enchanted tools to work it by moonlight. There are swords and armor made of it, but few can afford them. My family presented me this to give to my husband, should I find one, as a token of our bond.” She let out a small laugh and unscrewed the clasp. “I chose another path.”

I pulled the Stone over my head, untied the silk ribbon, and slid it free. As I turned around so she could thread the chain through and lock it around my neck, I felt as if we used the maillon for its intended purpose, after all. Though not exactly a wedding, this felt like a similar sort of ceremony.

“With this chain, I thee wed---”, snickered Jasper.

I smiled at that. Out loud I said, “For better or for worse.”

“For richer or for poorer,” said Sha’ira, smiling.

Romulus caught on. “In sickness and in health.”

“For as long as we all shall live,” I finished.

“Hopefully longer than the next ten minutes,” Jasper added.

Ernie rubbed his paws together. “Brilliant! Where’s the reception? I’m famished.”

“Over on the
Croatan
,” I told him. “A hot one, too, most like.” I jammed Morphageus into my belt and turned to the door.

Nothing more to say. We had to get going. By now Pitcairn would’ve played his part. Creeping into his cabin, which looked like the drawing room of a lord of the Sceptr’d Isle, but put together by a fancy Gaulle designer who loved lace, leather and deadly weapons (
Roberta’s doin’, I imagine
), we opened the window. All of us stood in the extreme rear of the ship. Looking left, I could just make out the stern of the
Croatan
, bobbing on the small choppy waves. It’d been lashed alongside the
Kiss
. Perfect for what we wanted to do. I brought my head back in and waved Sha’ira to take my place. She’d notched a strange-looking arrow into her bow. Longer and thicker than a normal arrow, its narrow point held an odd arrangement of springs and teeth. The fletched end held another piece of maillon maybe a quarter-inch thick, coiled into about fifty feet of the world’s most expensive rope. Romulus stood ready to tie it to a cleat outside the window. After aiming the recurved bow for a long moment, taking the rise and fall of both ships into account, the scourge of the Shades let the string slip from her fingers. The funny arrow snapped across to the
Croatan
and punched through the vertical border of its captain’s windowsill. Yanking on the line, Sha’ira activated the springs, which snapped out into a sort of grappling hook. As soon as it did so Romulus used his great strength to pull the rope taut and knot it to the cleat.

“That’ll hold us all?” I asked, one eye brow raised.

“It would hold two Mughal elephants,” Sha’ira assured me. She stowed her bow onto her back, stuck her straight-bladed boot dagger between her teeth, and began crawling upside-down toward the
Croatan
. Ernie clung to her robe. His job was to sneak in first, figuring nobody’d pay a mouse any attention, and make sure the coast was clear.

They got across and in with no trouble at all. Romulus and I held our breath for a long time as our friends made sure it was safe for us to go. Finally Ernie hopped onto the windowsill and waved.
Everybody must be up top, watchin’ Pitcairn’s show. So far, so good.
I went next, worried about slipping off and having to swim for it. My Stone-strength and sheer terror kept me from letting go. When I made it to the other side Sha’ira hauled me in as if I weighed less than one of my old rag dolls.

“Whee!” Jasper sang out. “That was fun. Let’s do it some more!”

I ignored him and waved Romulus over. In no time he’d joined us in the master’s cabin. As Sha’ira led the way, Ernie on her shoulder, I glanced around to see what sort of folks we were dealing with. This had no Rococo charm like Pitcairn and Roberta’s love nest. In fact, I wouldn’t even have called it a bedroom-office, like most captains’ quarters. No, this was a lair. The place had an animal feel to it, like some great beast, the leader of its pack, hunkered down there to savor its kill. Dark and depressing, its lighting and furniture made me feel dirty, somehow. All the bones on the floor, from unknown animals or humans, just added to that. My witched nose picked up a scent that might’ve been blood, mixed with other smells better suited to a privy.
If the rest of the ship’s like this you won’t be able to get me off it quick enough. And Ma’s here? By choice?

We planned to search the ship while Pitcairn and Roberta parleyed with the
Croatan
’s leaders on the deck of the
Kiss
. Since we expected most of the crew to be on the main deck observing the festivities, not too many of them ought to be in the bowels of the ship. If we met anybody we’d try to pretend we were supposed to be there, or overpower them. That’s why I’d been put in the middle. Sha’ira and Romulus would handle any surprises from front or rear. Ernie’s job was to scout ahead, sticking his snoot into every place where Ma might be kept. The trouble was, I didn’t know if she was disguised, a prisoner, stowing away in hiding, or just a paying passenger. After seeing the captain’s quarters, I couldn’t believe there were any pleasant accommodations to be had for the guests. If she had hid herself, the hold would be the best place to look. But the hard look of the crew didn’t give me much hope that she’d be able to hide for long. They gave the impression of having little patience for that sort of thing. Those men would search their ship for freeloaders as a matter of course. That meant she’d end up in the brig anyway, presuming she hadn’t met a worse fate. But if something bad had happened to Ma my dream would’ve said so. I felt sure of that. No matter what might’ve happened to her, this looked to be an awful big space to hunt through.

Lucky for us our friends had already thought of that. Tiny clawed feet skittered across the filthy planks behind us. Hand on sword, ready for anything, I whirled to see Gracchus and his Marines. The rats skidded to a stop and saluted.

“Wady Woberta sent us to assist you,” their leader said. “Which diwection should we go?”

Now we had over a dozen new pairs of eyes. Figuring that nobody’d give a rat a second glance in the hold, I sent Gracchus’ troops there. The rest of us continued to creep down the foul-smelling passageway that led from the master’s cabin. Our luck held. Whatever show Pitcairn presented above kept the
Croatan
’ whole crew riveted. I just hoped we didn’t run into somebody on their way to answer a call of nature. No predicting that.

“Judgin’ from the smell of this place,” Jasper said, “I’d say their calls of nature occur wherever they happen to be standin’.”

“It is pretty disgustin’, huh?” I thought back. “Like Washington City at its worst, with the garbage from a slaughterhouse thrown in.”

“Hope we find your ma before we find the galley. I don’t want to think about what they eat on this tub.”

We passed the quarters where the mates slept, and some storage lockers of various sorts. Nothing so far. My magicked ears could make out a lot of feet moving around above us, but no shouting or shooting. Roberta’d told me they’d try to spin enough malarkey to buy us a reasonable amount of time to search, but she couldn’t promise that the
Croatan
’s people wouldn’t get impatient and start a ruckus. I wanted to hurry things up and get going before that happened. But I wasn’t about to leave till I found Ma. If that took slugging it out with whoever got in my way, so be it.

Sha’ira held up a hand, making us all stop dead. With a finger to her lips she jerked her head to the right and led the way into a large low area with tables, chests, and hammocks, dim-lit with two lanterns.
Must be the berth deck, where the crew lives.
“Yeah,” Jasper snorted, “if you call this livin’.” That awful stench assaulted my nostrils even worse here, almost making me gag. What could make people live like this? All of us looked around, expecting to be jumped with so many places for somebody to hide. But the place held nothing but sailors’ stuff.

“We need to get off this ship,” Sha’ira breathed, snapping her head around to check for an ambush.

“Not till we find Ma,” I protested.

“’Tain’t a normal boat, child,” Romulus told me.

“Gee, really?” I shot back, getting testy from all the tension.

“He means that this is an Obverse vessel,” the dreamwriter said, bowstring half-pulled.

“So? More bad guys. I’m used to that.”

“You don’t understand.” She kicked at what looked like a dog’s food bowl on the deck. Looking in it, I almost lost my lunch (again). A half-eaten human heart lay in it, covered in maggots.

Something struck me as odd about an enormous pair of trousers lying across a sea chest. Stopping to take a quick look at them, I gasped, letting them fall to the grimy deck.

The pants had four legs. And a hole in the back for a tail to poke through.

“Wonder where he buys his duds. Satan’s Haberdashery?” snorted Jasper.

Sha’ira looked me in the eye. I saw fear there that she’d never shown an inkling of before. “This ship is crewed by monsters.”

I had little time to absorb that. A second later I heard my mother scream for her life.

40/ Lunch with Ma

An unladylike snort came out of Ma. “The sword’s named Jasper?”

“Hey!” he complained. “A little respect here, please?

You’re talkin’ to the Avengin’ Arm of Justice, lady.”

I came near to taking off Romulus’ ear sweeping Morphageus from my belt. Before the tip came clear my boots thumped across the planks as I rushed toward the sound. It had come from the far end of the berth deck, through a doorway that showed little light. Trusting my Stone-senses and ignoring my friends’ cries to stop, I burst through the low hatch and found myself in the galley. At least I guessed that’s what it had to be. Nothing in my twelve years had prepared me for the horrors in that cramped space. Bloody human torsos hung on meat hooks. Eyes stared out at me from a big yellow jar like so many boiled eggs. Hands and feet, alternating with potatoes and carrots on skewers, made sickening kabobs. Some luckless fellow had been wrapped up on an enormous platter, roasted like a pig. He even had an apple in his dead mouth. In a corner sat a huge black iron stove with the biggest stew pot I’d ever seen. Something foul bubbled away in it. And atop that stove Ma struggled to keep from being added to the mix.

She wore a Royal Navy uniform which hung too large on her and confined her movements against the unearthly thing that clutched her with four slimy tentacles. About seven feet tall, it stood on shaggy oversized goat’s legs. Its hairless bulging belly, sweaty and gray, made it look like it’d swallowed a beer keg. The monster’s blocky head, with no visible ears or hair, had a rhinoceros horn below three bulbous bloodshot eyes and above a drooling vertical mouth. A long forked tongue slithered out of it and across Ma’s cheek as if testing her potential flavor. To make the whole scene even more disgusting, the creature wore a tiny chef’s hat.

Seeing red, I raised my sword and charged, planning to lop off the arms that held Ma above the steaming cauldron. But the Obverse chef turned out to be a lot quicker and more aware than I’d counted on. He swept my feet out from under me with one squid-like arm while snatching a giant meat cleaver with another. I tried to make Morphageus into a shield as the blade came down. Nothing happened. My external magick wouldn’t happen on this ship. So I parried the death blow from my knees and rolled backward to avoid a third arm, which tried to crush me like a pesky fly with a tremendous slap. I fetched up against the bulkhead on one knee, breath half-knocked out of me. Now the cook from hell held a rolling pin the size of a small tree trunk in one suckered arm. Trying to watch both the cleaver and the new weapon, plus stay out of reach of that flailing third arm, I slipped on the greasy deck and went down. With what I took for a laugh, though it sounded more like wet mud splatting on a rock, the monster lunged on those goat hooves to finish me off.