Chapter 1
Jack Vanner stood with one hand on the salt rimed railing of the creaking ship and beheld the fiery glory of a Bermuda sunset. As the day died the ocean glowed blue and red, the lazy lapping of water striking the hull with a rythmic *slish swish* rather hypnotic.
He was, by the captain’s own estimate, halfway to Barbados. The voyage up to then had been as pleasant as such a thing could be, when one were forced to add surly sailors often drunk on swill that smelled like a swamp, tempermental squalls and a cargo of stinking steers whose lowes and thunderous kicks and restless shifts made him think they’d sink the ship.
When Jack had expressed his concern to the captain the man just laughed. “The brig’s plated in iron, lad, those hooves won’t break through. We know what we’re about.”
Vanner seriously doubted they knew what they were about. People who made a career of sailing upon the depthless, fathomless nightmare of the sea couldn’t possibly know their rears from nowhere. He wondered how many bones lay at the bottom, thanks to things like krakens and hurricanes. He bet that to those they belonged had believed they knew what they were about as well, before the wet darkness claimed them screaming.
The sail, bellied out full by the western wind, slithered and cracked in fits of occasional slack. It seemed caged in lattices of weathered ropes and cast a long, square shadow over him, one that was never still. It was tethered to a mighty mast, thick as an old tree and taller still.
Atop that was a crow’s nest, perched at a dizzying height, a wooden crown for a creaking king. He had spied it on the first day aboard and craved to be inside it ever since.
When Vanner had been young and growing up on his father’s farm he had been an avid climber. He had not feared heights of any measure, conquered the biggest trees branch by branch despite his mother’s pleas that he stop and his father’s curses (and beatings, now and then when he scared them both half to death).
The sea was calm enough, he judged, the ship rocking gently as it cut through the surf. He took off his frock coat, a lawyer’s thing spun with faded cloth of gold and burnished bangles and buckles and buttons tarnished by time, hung it from a lanyard. He slipped out of his shoes next, the soles supple pig skin that had seen too many miles. They were comfortable, but they had an annoying tendency to squeak when they got wet. Vanner liked the rain but they did not.
A nearby sailor, swarthy, sunburned and silent, watched all this without comment, puzzlement clear in his narrow blue eyes.
Vanner glanced at him. The sailor turned his head to one side and spat into the sea, pretended to turn away, though the lawyer could tell he was still being watched.
He smiled slightly. He knew what the sailor was thinking. What in the world was the fop up to? The thoughts may as well have been tattooed over the sunburns in straggling capitals.
Jack was already ten feet up the swaying rigging, the west wind cool and salty, when the sailor broke his feigned nonchalance and realized the other was climbing.
“Oy,” the man called, looking up alarmed. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing sir?”
“Climbing,” Vanner called back. He resisted the urge to wink. It would have seemed too mocking, in his opinion, too coy. He loathed theatrics, the curtain whore cavaliers who hammed up hollow drama and paraded around in costumes as if they were true heroes. Real life was pain, broken bones, a razor’s edge between the living and the dead.
He knew. He’d fallen once, despite his confidence and skill. He didn’t quit, though the coward in him always insisted he should have.
“In the Lord’s name,” the sailor said, shouting now because Jack had gained another ten feet and that high up the wind had become a howl. “Why? Aren’t you a law man? Are you fuckin’ crazy?”
“Among other things,” Vanner said softly, to himself. Twenty feet had become thirty. The climb was ridiculously easy. The ropes swayed and bucked under his weight and the force of the wind whipped at him wildly, but the lattice had been made for enduring such. It was no challenge at all, really.
Far below he heard the distant thump-clomp of the sailor’s boots as he ran off, probably to tell the captain that his prize passenger had gone mad.
Vanner didn’t care. He just kept going up. The wind got stronger still but the ropes were well woven, tightly knotted and tied well. He may as well have been scaling a ladder.
Part of him was disappointed, yet as the crow’s nest grew closer the feeling faded. Sometimes, contrary to the philosophical cliches, it was actually the destination and not the journey after all. He thought that from there he’d have a hell of a view.
As it turned out, he was right.
-
When Jack pulled himself over the salt rimed rim of the vaunted crow’s nest he realized he wasn’t alone. An old sailor leaned against its far side, his tattered, colorless coat aflap, the high collar of it turned up. The old sailor’s smile was amused yet somehow sad. He was missing more than a few teeth, and the ones that remained were the sort of gray sunlight loaned to sidewalks.
“Made it up here fast,” he remarked without emotion, tipping Vanner a nod of respect.
As the lawyer found his footing he bowed shallowly but carefully, his balance challenged by the ship’s roll and rock. Up here, at its highest point, the wood beneath his bare feet seemed alive and altogether too capricious to let his guard down...lest he be hurled to his death by a sudden shift.
The deck was over a hundred feet below and the great white sail rippled and flapped. The ocean, painted rust red by the sunset, glinted and sparkled from horizon to horizon, loaned his imagination the illusion of a world full of fresh blood.
“I didn’t realize anyone was up here,” said Vanner.
The old sailor laughed. “Someone’s always up here, young sir. Usually it’s me, or Soft John or the man they call Trent the Luckless. Takes a special sort to take this post.”
Vanner was curious. “Special?” he echoed. It was a courtroom tactic that got people to talk.
It worked. “Special, aye,” said the old sailor. “We’re the first to spot danger, but as you can see...feel...it’s dangerous enough up here. She’ll toss you, sure enough, if you’re not sharp and sprite, and then there’s the fact that we know the things no one else wants to.”
“What do you know that I don’t?” asked the law man, eyes bright.
His companion’s smile turned from friendly into something slanted and broken. He hesitated, then seemed to make up his mind. “We’re bound for Barbados, right?” he asked, ignoring the question. “They don’t tell me shit up here but I can tell we’re due west. Right?”
“Yes,” said Vanner.
“Well...” said the nameless whitebeard heavily. “Odds are good you’ll never make it. None of us will. We’re bound for Davy, the lot of us. I signaled the captain hours ago, told him I saw the signs. He doesn’t believe me, or if he does he don’t believe it’s as bad as I think it will be...”
The old man trailed off, looked out over the wild sparkle of the sea so far below, the sun shimmering and afire as it set. It was huge, a world ending red, slowly hiding its burning face. Vanner thought of the gaze of gods, of dragon eyes afire and eternally unblinking, of the glint one might find in a wolf’s as it watched a feckless sheep.
The lawyer shivered. “What makes you think we’re doomed,” he asked, surprised by the calm in his voice even though he already believed every word the other had spoken. He knew a lie and he knew the truth, had been taught the lilt of both by his trade, and he believed the old man believed the words he had spoken.
“Bah,” the old sailor said. “Two days ago the clouds had a certain shape over there, all feathery. By now it’s right in front of you, plain as the dying day.”
He pointed a withered finger north. Vanner looked there.
The sky was empty, almost to the very horizon there was nothing but the burnished glow of the heavens, the descending twilight and the ghostly sparkles of the stars just then appearing.
Yet when Vanner looked closer, very close in fact, the crows nest heaving beneath his feet now a minor distraction having grown used to such, he noticed something that might have been imagined marring the sky of molten copper.
A dark line, thin as a razor’s edge, lurked in the north. Just as he thought it was his imagination, the power of suggestion, there was a tiny flash of white, then another, then three then ten then twenty.
“A storm,” he ventured quietly, more to himself than his nameless companion.
“No,” said the old sailor sadly. “A cyclone.”
Vanner gripped the railing so tightly his knuckles went white, his hackles rising. “No one can predict the weather,” he said lamely, trying to keep the anger from his voice and failing.
“I saw the same clouds before one of those monsters destroyed my town, killed my mother and father,” the keeper of the crows nest replied flatly. “They precede them, like heralds do a big noble...or in this case a lord of Hell. Even if the captain had listened, turned around at once, it probably would have been too late. I hold no ill in my heart for him, only hope that the Lord judges us all fairly.”
There seemed to be nothing to say to this and Vanner had had his fill of the view and of the man’s company. So he said nothing as he swung down from the crows nest and back to the rigging, trying in vain to slow his racing heart.
The old sailor tipped the lawyer an unseen salute and turned away, colorless coat flapping in the wind. If Jack had looked up as he began to climb down he would have seen him staring north at a thin black line laced with bright lightning.
-
Dusk had fallen and tightened its gloomy grip by the time Vanner completed his descent, shrouding the deck in shadows. The whispers of waves calm and small lapped against the ship’s hull, the great sprawl of the Atlantic teasingly placid under the glow of a thousand white stars and a crescent moon.
He approached the captain’s cabin, bare feet making not a sound on wooden planks smooth and softened by spray. He happened to look up, spied the great wheel that steered the ship and the shadow behind it, for a moment thinking that shadow was the heavy set bosun.
It wasn’t.
A skeleton was at the helm, clutched spokes worn smooth with fleshless fingers, the empty sockets of a skull twin pools of soul eating darkness. A nearby lantern caged a melted, guttering candle with rusty X’s and clouded glass, loaned the figure a long and hollow shadow.
“This is my imagination,” he said to himself softly, in his lawyer’s voice, looking away. “That old fool and his fairy tales.”
He knocked on the captain’s door, ignored the creaking groan of the wheel as the thing that manned it made a course correction.
There was a snick as the door unlocked. Hinges stiffened by rust and salt crackled as it swung slowly and heavily open, a guillotine of light appearing, widening, broadening. Vanner pushed it open the rest of the way, mouth dry. He already knew what he was going to say. They had to batten down, turn back, at least try-
The captain’s cabin was a disaster.
Something or someone had torn through it. A wine rack was splinters and shattered glass, spatters and splashes of Port and Burgundy staining the timbers like old murder. The desk had been swept clear, as if in a rage, the maps which had once been spread across it (just yesterday, he thought, for he had seen them) were strewn like leaves in an autumn gale, some of them ripped to shreds.
Something or someone had taken a knife to the captain’s bunk, slashed the velvet blanket to ribbons. The thin mattress had been gutted of its goosedown. There were feathers everywhere, some taking to the air as a draft stole like a cold thief through the open door behind him.
Worst of all was the captain’s compass. It was open on the otherwise bare desk and set there dead center, the crystal face smeared with blood. The dial, black as a moonless night, pointed due north, wavering only slightly with the ship’s gentle sway.
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