Tigerheart (22 page)

Paul overturned the box, allowing the water to pour out. Fiddlefix wasn’t saying anything. A grim dread began to grow in him that he had been too late to save her. Rain continued to pour down, as if the skies themselves were crying for her.

“Paul! Look out!”

Gwenny’s cry alerted him to the danger. The shadow of Captain Hack was coming right toward him, having turned its attention away from The Boy. Paul knew right then that Hack wanted to make sure Fiddlefix did not break free of her confinement. Running their previous encounter through his mind, he suddenly realized that Fiddle had never gotten near the shadow of Hack at all. Instead Mary Slash had intercepted her with a well-thrown weapon.

The Boy, seeing that Hack had broken off the battle with him, mistook it as a sign that he had Hack on the run. This resulted not in his pursuing Hack, as would have been the wise move, but instead in his doing a small dance of triumph that accomplished nothing other than showing that The Boy could dance quite adroitly. By the time he realized that Hack was running toward something rather than away from him, it was too late to intercept the shade’s course.

Hack swung the hatchet and Paul darted under it. The shadow pivoted with such speed that Paul never even saw the turn. Captain Hack’s silhouette pursued him, swinging furiously in an attempt to crack open Paul’s skull like a cantaloupe.

It was at that instant that Paul’s racing mind came up with a move that would serve as both defense and offense, provided he could pull it off.

The pirate shadow was coming at him—left, right, left, right—swinging the shadowy ax blade in a regular, rhythmic manner. Paul timed it perfectly, and brought the metal box up just as the ax was sweeping past.

Captain Hack’s blade crashed against the lock on the box, shattering it.

Paul threw open the box and tossed it to the ground as if it were suddenly scalding hot. The lid fell open and, in a small wave of water, Fiddlefix was spilled out onto the deck.

Trying to grab its opportunity, the shadow of Hack swung its hatchet directly at Fiddlefix. Paul knew he was helpless to stop it, because the shadow was still fully capable of touching whatever it wished, but anyone who endeavored to initiate contact wound up with large handfuls of nothingness.

But Fiddlefix recovered with amazing alacrity, and she darted up and out of Hack’s way as his ax hit nothing. Freed of her imprisonment, ripe for vengeance against those who had discommoded her, Fiddlefix started to glow with the force of a miniature sun. The intensity of her illumination was directly proportional to the ferocity of her temperament, and at that moment Fiddlefix was feeling temperamental enough to blind a herd of bison.

“Get him, Fiddle!” said Paul, pumping the air. Realizing what was happening, The Boy followed suit. Even Captain Slash and Princess Picca briefly halted their battle, standing frozen several feet away from each other with their weapons at the ready, to see what was transpiring.

The blinding glow of Fiddlefix approached Captain Hack, driving the shadow backward. It tried to ward her off with its hatchet, but the more brightly she glowed, the more daunted did the shadow become.

It all made perfect sense to Paul. Darkness was helpless in the face of light.

“Get it, Fiddle!” Paul said. “Break it into shards! Blind it into nothingness! Destroy it for all time!”

All of that Fiddle seemed more than happy to do. Her light escalated in brilliance, as if she were a spotlight that someone was increasing the wattage of. No longer appearing remotely as certain or confident as it had been, the shadow fell back, back. It didn’t even have the strength to strike at Fiddle. She was scolding him furiously in her native tongue as she drew closer. She darted forward, grazing the shadow, and it grabbed its arm where she had come into contact with it.

And then Paul saw The Boy, hovering overhead, watching Fiddlefix systematically demolishing their mutual opponent.

He looked resigned to the shadow’s destruction.

He looked…old. Or older.

That was when Paul realized the horrific flaw in the proceedings. If Fiddlefix succeeded in destroying the fearsome shade, as it now appeared she was going to be able to do through the sheer nature of her glow, then there was every chance she would destroy the shadow of The Boy as well. If she did that, The Boy was finished.

Without thinking, Paul darted forward, interposing himself between Fiddlefix and the shadow of Hack. “No, Fiddle!” he said, bringing her up short. “We need to—”

What Paul needed to do was never uttered, for Captain Hack chose that moment to bury his shadowy hatchet deep in Paul’s back.

The Boy cried out his name, but it was too late. Paul had allowed his guard to lapse for not more than a second, but that was all the time that a miscreant such as Captain Hack needed to do his dirty work.

Paul turned to face Hack, which was the absolute worst thing he could have done, for Hack sliced forward with the hatchet once more, cutting deep into Paul’s chest. It was a miracle that he missed Paul’s heart, but for all that it added to Paul’s survival, he might as well have cut that mighty muscle in twain. Paul staggered, blood trickling from between his lips, and Gwenny called to him, as did The Boy. He didn’t hear them. All he heard was the voice of his own conscience, berating him and telling him that he had completely botched everything. That not only was his mother going to be bereft of a daughter, but now she wasn’t going to have a son either.

Probably for the best. I bet she won’t even miss me,
thought Paul as he stumbled over his own feet and pitched forward. He struck the shadowy figure of Captain Hack headfirst and vanished into nothingness.

Gwenny’s high-pitched scream of alarm served to halt much of the remaining fighting aboard the ship. Everyone sensed that something fundamental had changed…that the challenges presented them were about to be brought to a new level far beyond the simple brutality of knife against ax and sword against spear. The Boy floated several feet away from the shadow of his late enemy and snapped angrily, “Let him go!”

There was no sign of Paul. None of him had reemerged on the other side. It was as if he had fallen through a hole in the air itself.

“Let him go, I said!” The Boy said, and threw himself directly at the shade of Captain Hack. Cold overwhelmed him for a split instant and then he reemerged on the other side, trembling. He spun to face the shadow of Hack again, knowing that any attempt to assault it would simply have the same result…a result he didn’t pretend to understand.

Captain Slash stepped near him, grinning lopsidedly. “You understand nothing, Boy. Don’t you see? Only the dead or dying may enter the twilight realm from which my brother’s shadow emanates, dwelling in a half existence between life and death. You are neither dead nor dying. So you have no hope of retrieving the lad. Not that you could have anyway; he is beyond all help or salvation.”

“No,” The Boy said fiercely. “Nothing happens in the Anyplace save that I want it to.”

“Then you must want the other lad dead,” suggested Captain Slash. “Not that I blame you. So brave and adventurous, selfless is he. He makes you look bad in comparison; certainly you must see that.”

“You lie!”

“About which part?” she said innocently.

“About all of it!”

“Boy, don’t listen to her!” Gwenny said.

“Yes, Boy, by all means, don’t!” said Captain Slash. “I’ve no doubt you’re afraid of what you’ll hear.”

Both Gwenny and Princess Picca started to speak, but he made a preemptive gesture, silencing them. “I’m afraid of nothing,” The Boy told her, wanting it to be true, knowing it wasn’t, but not caring.

“Well, then…after him you go.”

And Mary Slash stabbed forward with her sword. The Boy made no move other than to throw wide his arms and welcome the thrust as it bit deeply into him. He heard Gwenny cry out, and Princess Picca made a noise like an outraged hawk; and Fiddlefix shouted his name, his true name; and then he fell forward into the welcoming darkness of Captain Hack and heard nothing more.

Chapter 19

Anyplace and Noplace

P
aul was dangling from a very high place when he saw The Boy in the distance.

The Boy was looking around in bewilderment, probably thinking that nothing had changed since he was still standing on the deck of a pirate ship.

It took him a moment to realize the first thing that was different: It was much colder.

Much, much colder.

The ocean was frozen. Ice stretched out in all directions, and there were several large icebergs dotting the area. A steady wind was blowing, causing the sails to flap, but the ship was incapable of moving anywhere. It was completely locked into the ice.

The Boy looked up. The sky was as a second home to him, so it was natural for him to do so.

The blue of the Anyplace sky was gone. Nor was there any sign of the storm that had been hammering the ships. Instead, there was gray, nothing but gray. So much gray as to be unnatural.

Then The Boy thought to look at his own hands. They were gray as well, along with his clothes. It was as if all sense of color had been sucked out of the environment.

“Boy!” Paul shouted, his distant voice finally managing to capture The Boy’s attention. The Boy turned in the general direction he thought it was coming from.

It was from one of the icebergs. Paul was hanging off one of the projecting cliffs, very high up. But he wasn’t hanging from his fingers or any such thing. Instead he was being dangled, his arms and legs flopping about helplessly. And The Boy’s heart threatened to stop when he saw who was holding him. As I’m sure you’ve surmised by now…it was Captain Hack.

But he was no longer a mere shadow of himself. Instead there was the villain, big as life—or unlife, or whatever it was that passed for existence in this land of black and gray. His greatcoat flapped in the wind, and he was holding Paul with his good hand while keeping his hatchet poised near the lad’s throat.

“I see you down there, Boy!” he called, the wind carrying his evil voice all the way to The Boy’s ears. “Come to me! I’ve been waiting ever so long for you, Boy. Come and entertain the hatchet!”

The Boy hesitated there on the deck of the immobilized sailing vessel. He was still feeling disoriented, unsure where he was or how he had come to be there.

The Boy took several quick steps, bounded to the rail of the ship, and leaped skyward.

All the more depressing, then, when he discovered himself utterly bereft of flight. His arms pinwheeled in alarm, as he tumbled and struck the ice-covered water below. The ice was so thick that he didn’t even come close to cracking through it. He did, however, manage to bang himself up rather impressively. But he held up his scraped elbows and examined his knees and saw there was no bleeding.

Paul’s spirit plummeted when he saw that. He knew that he was lacking the power of flight, but he had hoped that The Boy, more accomplished in the art of flying, would still have the knack. He was crushed to find otherwise.

Meanwhile, The Boy, just out of curiosity, put his hand to his chest.

There was no heartbeat.

He didn’t panic about this latest development or let it bother him overmuch. Nor did he raise any of the sort of deep, philosophical questions that you or I might have conjured. Instead he simply accepted it as a reality of his new environment. Then he set off for the iceberg on foot, the thin layer of snow crunching beneath his feet.

“No hurry, Boy!” said Captain Hack, seemingly overjoyed to be able to communicate once more beyond futile gestures. “We have all the time in the world here!”

The Boy had no clue where “here” was, but that didn’t deter him from striding across the ice. He didn’t run, for the ice and snow were slippery and he was uncertain of his footing. His inelegant attempt to fly already stung him sufficiently, and he had no desire to provide further amusement for the onlooking pirate captain. Were he capable of flying, he would have been soaring around Captain Hack, hurling taunts and reveling in his superiority. Absent that, he didn’t feel much like engaging in banter. So he set his jaw and made his slow, measured way along the frozen sea.

The pirate captain, however, didn’t feel the least disinclined to palaver. “Do you sense the cold beginning to set in, Boy?” said Hack. “Oh, you don’t feel it at first. At first you have to get used to your surroundings. But it should be working its way into you by now. The cold in your muscles, your joints. If your blood were flowing, it would be slowing down about now. Figured it out yet, Boy? Know where you are?”

The Boy didn’t know, nor did he care. What he knew was that, annoyingly enough, the pirate’s words were starting to affect him. Whereas before he had felt nothing of this inhospitable place, now a bone-crushing chill was seeping through him. By the time he reached the base of the frozen mountain upon which Hack was perched with the helpless Paul, the icy wind was suffusing his being and he couldn’t remember a time when he’d ever been warm.

Paul, meanwhile, had changed his tune. Seeing The Boy’s fallen state, he had begun warning him to keep his distance, urging him not to risk himself on Paul’s behalf. Captain Hack had responded by shaking him violently and snarling, “This has almost nothing to do with you, lad. There is unfinished business between The Boy and me, and you are simply a means to an end…an end that would have been forthcoming whether you were here or not.”

The Boy climbed and continued to climb. The wind became fiercer the higher he ascended. The entire time he made his way up, he was convinced that he was not alone. Every so often he would stop and glance over his shoulder, but there was nothing there. Just the stark whiteness of the icy mountain. Light flurries of snow were swirling around him like so many tiny white insects. He brushed them away, looked again, saw nothing again. This place was playing vicious tricks upon his very consciousness.

“Just a little farther, Boy,” came the taunting voice. “What’s the matter? Slower going when you can’t just flap your arms and fly?”

The Boy wanted to have some sort of clever, biting response, but nothing came to mind. And suddenly he rounded a corner and there was Captain Hack, holding Paul over the drop.

“Put him down,” said The Boy very quietly, very firmly.

“You don’t issue dictates to me, Boy. Not here. Not in this place. I have waited too long for—”

Displaying absolutely no patience for the back-and-forth that Captain Hack so famously enjoyed, like a cat slapping around a small rodent, The Boy interrupted him and said in that same quiet, firm voice, “Put him down gently, now, and deal with me, or I’m leaving.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The Boy shrugged, turned, and started to make his way back down the icy mountain. Realizing The Boy was completely serious, Captain Hack quickly dropped Paul at his feet, clear of the drop. Paul fell roughly onto his rump and tried to stand. But The Boy turned back and said coolly, “Stay down, Paul. This is between Hack and me.”

“It always has been,” said Captain Hack with a sneer. “And how fitting that it should come down to the two of us here, of all places.”

“But where is here of all places?” Paul said. His head was swimming; he had no idea what was happening. He only knew that the wind was cutting into him like a thing alive and that if he didn’t have the tiger skin wrapped around him, he would be freezing to death…assuming death was even an option for him.

“Why don’t you tell him?” Hack said to The Boy, gesturing with a nod of his head toward Paul.

“Tell him what? What do I know of this, whatever this is?”

“Oh, you know. In your heart, you’ve always known. Come on now. Think.” Rather than villainous, Captain Hack sounded almost avuncular, as if he were pulling for The Boy to pass some particularly challenging test. “Just as you share all with the Anyplace, so too is this part of you. It’s simply a part that you’ve never wanted to admit to. It’s the part you don’t like to think about. Let it seep into you now so you can answer Paul’s question…for him and for you.”

There was something in Hack’s words that prompted The Boy to do as he said. The opening up of his mind to the Anyplace was something he had learned to do almost instinctively. This place…well, it was something else again, but that didn’t mean he was incapable of connecting with it in the same way. He did not close his eyes because he did not want to remove his gaze from Hack for even a moment, although the pirate did not especially look as if he were about to make a move against The Boy. But he turned his vision inward, letting his mind wander across the vastness of the black and gray wasteland that lay all around them.

His inner eye, the center of his imagination, showed him a realm of terrible foreboding. His mind soared above it, as he himself would have if he’d had the power of flight. It looked much like the Anyplace, but the gray and black hues permeated every aspect of it.

And there were inhabitants, yes. But they were nothing like the joyful, spirited, adventurous denizens of the Anyplace. No, these inhabitants were not living in their surroundings. They simply existed there.

And they burned. They burned with frustration or sadness or hatred. They burned for goals unaccomplished, for words left unsaid, for emotional turmoil unresolved. They seethed because they were unable to communicate with those who really mattered. They went neither forward nor back. They just…were…and were not.

“Boy?” Paul said softly. He didn’t move from the place Captain Hack had dropped him. “Boy?” Then, angrily, he turned on Hack and said, “What did you do to him!”

Credit Paul with courage. He still had his sword, and he pulled it out now to face the pirate as The Boy simply stood nearby, rocking slightly on his heels but otherwise looking as if he had completely lost touch with his surroundings (when, ironically, just the opposite was true). Captain Hack noticed the defiant gesture and simply chuckled softly. “You have determination, lad…but not much wisdom.” Hack had his cutlass out, and the hatchet that adorned his wrist was at the ready.

Paul charged him, hoping that youth and determination would win the day. Such was not the case. Their swords clashed for mere seconds, and then Hack knocked the sword out of Paul’s hand. Hack brought his sword around, looking prepared to sever Paul’s head, and suddenly The Boy’s blade intercepted his swing. Hack grinned. “So you’ve rejoined us, I see. And what, pray tell, have you managed to discern in your ponderings?”

The Boy stepped back, keeping his blade leveled. “This,” he said, his voice carefully controlled, “is the Noplace. If the Anyplace is the place between dreaming and wakefulness, the Noplace is the place between dreaming and the end of life.”

“Just so,” Hack said proudly. Again, he could have been no more pleased than if The Boy had been his own son, answering difficult questions for a grueling exam. “People in comas reside here, helpless to reply as their loving relatives sit at their bedsides and chatter to them endlessly about this, that, and the other thing. And this is also the residence of those who have passed, or are about to, but have scores to settle. Vengeance left unaccomplished. That which people call ‘ghosts’ exist here, with pale reflections of themselves occasionally seeping over into the world of man.” He gestured toward the expanse of it. “Is it not magnificent, Boy? All your life you’ve taken refuge in the Anyplace so that you would never grow older. And now you’ve taken up residence in the Noplace, where you will elude death…but on my terms this time. My terms.” And suddenly he said, “Mine!” and came straight at The Boy.

The Boy darted back, deftly keeping his blade up. He did not have the power of flight, but he still intercepted Hack’s charge with accuracy and certainty. Their swords clanged together, running up each other’s blades, bringing Hack and The Boy together with their sword guards locked, each pushing against the other.

“We end this now,” said The Boy.

“You don’t understand. It never ends.”

With that declaration, Hack shoved The Boy backward down the icy path that he had climbed to get there. The Boy tumbled foot over face, and when he managed to skid to a halt, he saw Captain Hack coming right after him, laughing loudly, and his cutlass shaking with urgency.

The Boy rolled out of the way, falling off the edge of the icy mountain. Fortunately it wasn’t far to the bottom at that point, and he landed nimbly on his feet. He was amazed to see Captain Hack leap into the air, somersault, and land squarely in front of him.

“Let me explain to you what the rest of your existence will be like,” Hack said generously.

He attacked then with eagerness and ferocity, and The Boy found himself retreating.

“Imagine a future where, since you are not truly alive, you cannot truly die,” said Hack as he thrust forward. The Boy parried desperately. Hack continued to come at him, his sword blinding. “Nor will we ever truly tire. We will spend the remainder of our twilight existence, if not eternity itself, battling fiercely without letup or respite.” He lashed out with one booted foot, catching The Boy squarely in the chest and knocking him back. The Boy, feeling leaden, fell, and then scrambled to his feet. Hack advanced, the point of his sword shaking not from fear but anticipation.