The Tides of Avarice (22 page)

Cap'n Rustbane put his paw alongside his nose in the gesture Sylvester had come to recognize as indicating the pirate was preparing to impart some secret or item of received wisdom.

“The peelers in Swivern, you see, had got wind of the fact that Hamish knew something of great interest. He'd served for forty years as a midshipman under Cap'n Josiah Adamite, no less. Although the good Cap'n had placed a clamp of iron over the lips of his crew, fig'ratively speaking, somehow word had sneaked out that he'd discovered the location of the magical chest of the Zindars, and drawn himself a map of it. But more than that no one knew, 'cepting some of his crew, o' course. And here was poor Hamish, who'd been one of the fine seamen serving under Adamite, trapped in a Swivern jail and so under the mongoose thumb.”

“I didn't know mongooses had thumbs,” interposed Sylvester.

“Do you know how to do joined-up writing?”

“Well, er, yes, I do, as a matter of fact.”

“Then you know enough to be able to recognize a figure of speech when you see one, right?”

“Um, yes, I, um—”

“It is not of relevance to this story whether mongooses do or do not have thumbs.”

“That's true.”

“The only possible pertinence might be if you were wanting to know the details of the tortures the mongooses perpetrated upon poor Hamish.”

Sylvester scratched his head. “Would it?”

Cap'n Rustbane looked at him impatiently. “If mongooses don't have thumbs, it's hardly likely they'd have invented the thumbscrew, is it?”

“Did they invent the thumbscrew?”

“I don't know. Hamish never told me. It's likely he didn't know himself.”

“But wouldn't they have—oh.”

“That's right. Whatever the truth about mongooses, there's one fact I know for sure: squirrels don't have thumbs. Not much point waving a thumbscrew in a squirrel's face and telling him you're not afraid to use it.”

Sylvester could imagine only too well the uses to which a thumbscrew might be put on even a thumbless victim by someone dedicated to the creation of pain (there were plenty of fingers and toes you could use instead) but he decided not to contradict the Cap'n. After all, as Rustbane had just been explaining in emphatic detail, Sylvester was completely at the pirate's mercy here aboard the Shadeblaze. And Sylvester was more than sure that the pirates had a lot worse than thumbscrews they could use on whomsoever their Cap'n told them they should.

Cap'n Rustbane waved a paw dismissively. “Forget about mongoose thumbs,” he instructed.

“Right you are.”

“Although,” added the fox in a ruminative fashion, “there is one mystery about mongooses you might care to ponder in your leisure time, young Sylvester.”

“What's that?”

“Why in the heck aren't they called mongeese?”

“Because they—”

Sylvester stopped short. It was one of those infuriatingly irritating questions that you wish you'd never heard asked. Indeed, why weren't they called mongeese?

He shook his head crossly. And Cap'n Rustbane had berated him for asking irrelevant questions that got in the way of the story!

“So what did the torturers manage to extract from poor Hamish?”

Cap'n Rustbane's eyes narrowed in amusement, then became serious again.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

“Then why are you—”

“Which,” the Cap'n's voice grew louder, overriding Sylvester's, “doesn't mean to say Hamish didn't tell anyone anything. He was loyal to Cap'n Adamite as only a true, black-hearted pirate can be to his skipper, so, the more they twisted the tongs or heated the daggers white-hot, the more firmly did Hamish fasten his lips. But then after each session of agony, once what was left of him had been tossed back into his cell like a sack of unwanted rubbish, he would whisper to me through the chink between our cells all that he hadn't told the torturers. And what I learned from him, in dribs and drabs over the weeks and months before poor Hamish died, was that Cap'n Adamite had decided, for the safekeeping of the treasure whose location he had deduced, to commit the map to memory, much like you've done more recently, young Sylvester. However, knowing that bad things might happen to him and not wishing the chest of the Zindars to be lost forever should his gizzard be slit, or some such, he decided that, rather than committing the map to the flames or casting it to Davy Jones's Locker, he divided it into three parts, which he consigned to three different areas of Sagaria.”

Sylvester, engrossed, found his paw was straying to his mouth. Vexedly, he straightened his arm again and hoped Cap'n Rustbane hadn't noticed the telltale of the childish habit.

“Those three areas? Ah, yes,” said Rustbane as if Sylvester had just asked him the question. “Hamish wasn't supposed to know but he did, and he told me. For many years it was a secret I carried close to my heart, telling no one, and it seems strange that today there's no reason to keep that secret any longer – least of all from you. Two parts are here on the table, and the third one would be if it weren't for your actions yesterday. Besides, the third one will soon be here, either supplied by you voluntarily or tortured out of you.

“What Hamish told me was that old Josiah had sent the first part of the map, this bit here” – Cap'n Rustbane jabbed a claw at the top-left section – “into the heart of worg country. There's no worg alive that has the brains to read his own name, let alone a sea chart, so Cap'n Adamite knew the meaning of the map was safe from discovery there. At the same time, there's no more possessive creature than a worg, they'd die rather than give up even the most worthless trinket that's caught their fancy. So Josiah knew too, that the map was as well hidden from more intelligent eyes as it could possibly be.

“Then there was the second bit,” he said with another tap of the claw. “According to Hamish, there was something of a mystery about how it got there, but Cap'n Adamite knew it was on Booty Island. Knowledge of its exact ownership on that fair isle was not altogether possible. Of course, it being a pirate island, anyone known to be in possession of a treasure map would sure as fate be dead within the hour, if lucky enough to live that long. However, as Hamish said wisely, ‘Anything worth killing for on Booty Island will sooner or later find its way to Darkwater, and anything worth killing for in Darkwater has a habit of making a beeline for a hellhole tavern called The Moldy Claw.'

“As for the third part of the map? Ah, there rested the ultimate enigma. Where could it have gone to? Even Hamish hadn't the first glimmer of a clue. It was a secret the old blackguard, Adamite, had kept clutched tightly to his chest. Aware perhaps that, despite threats as to what he should do if they told of his disposition of the first two pieces, one or two of his rapscallion crewmen were bound to find themselves loose-tongued at the wrong moment and cough up the information to willing ears. Well then, one can imagine the old curmudgeon reasoning that, in that case no one at all, not even his most trusted cronies, would know what he had done with the final segment.

“It was a secret that even my dear friend Hamish, who'd been like a brother to the Cap'n, died without learning.”

“How did poor Hamish die?” asked Sylvester, becoming misty-eyed as he thought of the bravery of the imprisoned pirate, resisting his torturers to the last. “Did his tormentors finally put too great an imposition upon him?”

“Not precisely,” said Cap'n Rustbane. “He was still alive when the day came that I was adjudged to have served my sentence.”

“When you were released, you mean?”

“Exactamente. I was halfway to the jailhouse exit when I realized that, after my departure, there was nothing to stop my erstwhile pal, Hamish, from confiding through the chink in the wall to the next occupant of my late prison cell everything he'd been so intent on confiding to me.”

An appalling conviction spread slowly through Sylvester. “You don't mean you—”

Cap'n Rustbane spread his paws, pleading for understanding. “Well, honestly, old fellow, what in the world else could I have done? Hamish had entrusted me with a large part of the secret of what Cap'n Adamite had done with his treasure map. Far more, I was willing to bet, than I could ever have hoped to extract from the grizzled old corsair myself. The thought was intolerable that he might convey the same information to anyone else, was it not? Then there'd be two of us after the map, which, as any mathematician would tell you, would be one too many.”

“But there are two of us now who know about the map,” said Sylvester and then wished he hadn't.

“Indeed,” said Cap'n Rustbane very quietly. His voice in that moment reminded Sylvester of one of Doc Nettletree's finely honed scalpels. Sylvester wondered for an instant how Doctor Nettletree and the rest of the folk in Foxglove were getting along, then realized it was just a way of avoiding facing the reality of the peril he was in, and he switched his mind back firmly to the present.

Rustbane shrugged. “No sooner thought than done. I bribed the warder who'd been charged with releasing me and he allowed me into the cell of my dear, dear friend for just thirty seconds. Just thirty seconds? It was five times as long as I needed, though the only weapons I had with me were my bare paws and teeth. Look on it this way, I was putting him out of the reach of his daily tormentors. I was doing him a kindness really. Maybe for once Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane isn't such a blackhearted rogue as you think, eh, Sylvester?

“Anyway, within the minute I was on the street, with no one the wiser. Apart from, of course, the warder, except I'd not wasted my spare time in Hamish's cell, so the warder was strolling alongside Hamish in whatever afterlife they'd found together … Where was I again?”

“You were leaving prison,” prompted Sylvester, feeling more than a little sick.

“Ah, yes. Footloose and fancy free.” A lighthearted smile crossed the gray fox's lips, and he executed a few steps of some formal dance across the cabin's slightly unsteady floor to demonstrate how footloose he'd been.

“It didn't take long,” he continued, returning to join Sylvester at the table, “to find myself a berth on Cap'n Adamite's trusty vessel, the Shadeblaze, as it was called then and is called now. There were, after all, a few vacancies for experienced seamen, seeing as how Hamish and those of his crewmates who'd been captured with him weren't going to be coming back. I served him well for a good long time, waiting for the moment to be ripe. Then I weaned the crew away from Cap'n Adamite, or at least enough of the crew to mount a successful mutiny. Those who objected, well, let's just say that the sharks off Pountlemont Island were burping happily for quite some time. To make myself the new skipper was a challenge of little difficulty for someone as skilled in the art of manipulation as your ol' pal, Cap'n Rustbane. And the rest you know. Or, if you don't, at least you'll have guessed, an intelligent young hamster like you.”

“Lemming,” corrected Sylvester, but his heart wasn't in it.

“But the truth of it is,” said Cap'n Rustbane, his voice adopting a musing tone, “that no matter what I did to him – and I did a lot, as you can imagine – that old buzzard, Cap'n Adamite, wouldn't tell me one single teensiest hint of where he'd despatched the third section of his goddess-blasted treasure map. The third part. The important part. The bit with—”

“The bit with the big, bold ‘X' marked on it,” Sylvester completed for him.

The gray fox cocked his head to look down on Sylvester. For just a moment there was something oddly bird-like about those yellow–green eyes.

“So, you weren't kidding me, after all,” said the fox.

“Of course I wasn—”

Sylvester's voice came to an abrupt halt. Damn him! he thought. He's right about his skills of manipulation, or whatever it was he called them. He's just negotiated me, very neatly indeed, into confirming what he wanted to know.

“Care to tell me anything else about your piece of old Adamite's map?” Rustbane was saying, inspecting the claws of one paw as if the matter of the map was no more than a casual concern.

“Not right now,” responded Sylvester. “By the way, Cap'n Rustbane, just out of interest you understand, how was it your famed powers of manipulation didn't work on Cap'n Adamite?”

As Sylvester half-expected, the pirate ignored the question. “Come here and look at this, boy,” he said.

Sylvester maneuvered himself clumsily across the table to look directly down at Adamite's chart.

“See, boy,” said Rustbane, “we're here.” He touched his paw to a place near the upper corner of the map, close to the irregular line that ran down the document's right-hand side. The line Sylvester had earlier deduced represented the coast of some larger landmass.

That's not just any old landmass, he thought now. That's the landmass which happens to have Foxglove on it, Foxglove and the whole of the world I knew until yesterday. Yet Cap'n Adamite didn't even think it was worth marking Foxglove on the map.

“Where we're going to,” continued Rustbane, “is down here.”

He traced his claw down the page, at the same time moving it progressively farther from the squiggly coastline. When the claw came to a group of four medium-sized shapes and several smaller ones, all roughly oval but with, again, irregular outlines, Cap'n Rustbane began to tap it.

“They're the Caraya Islands. Take us a couple of weeks to reach 'em, I reckon. They're hotter 'n the triple-breasted goddess's underwear, they are, lying across the tropics the way they do. There are the four big ones, as you can see. The rest aren't hardly worth thinking about. The old ocean lore has it there's a million of the Carayas, some of them no bigger than a sea lion's rump, but I don't hold with that. We'll put into Hangman's Haven on the biggest of the Carayas – Blighter Island, that is. We'll pick ourselves up some supplies and maybe let the crew blow off a bit of steam, if I'm feeling of a generous cast of mind. Then” – the claw began to move again – “we keep going southwest until” – the claw ran off the surface of crumpled parchment and onto the polished wood of the desk – “we find ourselves sailing through the uncharted waters of your map, Sylvester.”