The Providence Rider

Twenty-Seven

WHAT I want to know from you is,” Minx Cutter went on, as the sun shone down upon this happy world, “who killed my Nathan.”

Matthew was staring at the ground. He had to do so, to keep his equilibrium. He was late in answering, therefore the beautiful knife-thrower gave her own reply.

“Aria Chillany killed him, didn’t she? He disappeared one evening, on his way to meet me. I never heard from him again. Madam Chillany has a reputation for killing her ex-lovers. And yes, I knew they had been involved with each other. That was the past. He and I were looking toward the future. So…she killed him, didn’t she? For the reason that Professor Fell learned Nathan was selling diplomatic secrets to the highest bidder?”

“That,” Matthew said.

“I told him not to go there,” Minx replied. “I told him…don’t be greedy. I said…the professor will find out. It was enough that we knew about the Cymbeline and the shipment of it to Spain. That came from one of the professor’s rotten apples in the basket of Parliament, after a few drinks of wormwood in the whorehouse. Then we knew what was about to happen…and we knew we couldn’t allow it to happen.”

“Couldn’t allow it?” Matthew frowned. He was always aware of where the knife was. Currently in her right hand, at her side again. She held it with her thumb caressing the ivory handle, like an object of love. “What do you mean? You two suddenly became patriots?”

“We were always patriots. Well…maybe not so much as most, but…to sell the gunpowder to Spain? No.” She shook her head. The fire in her eyes had abated a few degrees, and now some darker sadness had crept in. She slid the knife into her waistcoat, where it had come from. “We didn’t know where the Cymbeline is stored when it reaches London from here. A warehouse somewhere on the docks. The gunpowder would be disguised as barrels of tar and nautical supplies. But when we found out that the first shipment was going to Spain, with the help of Cesar Sabroso…we had to speak out and stop it.” She stared steadily into Matthew’s eyes, and he felt the sheer force of her willpower. “No matter who I am, or what Nathan is…or was…we could not stand by and let this powder go to an enemy of our country. So…yes, we are patriotic, in our way.”

Matthew looked toward the fort and could see the thin tendril of rising smoke where the chemicals were being cooked. “What makes it so powerful? Using sugar instead of charcoal?”

“It’s white powder instead of black. It’s stronger than the normal composition, and gives off less smoke. On any battlefield or naval battle, it would give the user of it a great advantage. How did you know about the sugar?”

“It’s what I do,” he explained. And clarified, “Finding out what I’m not supposed to know.”

“All right, then. Now that you do know…what are you going to do about it?”

Matthew thought about this for a moment, as he watched the tendril drift in the breeze. And then he decided what must be done, and what he had to do.

“I’m going to get in there tonight,” he told her, “and I’m going to blow it up.”

Her expression did not change, but her voice was strained when she responded. “You,” she said, “are insane.”

“Insane to go in by the road, maybe. But through the forest? Maybe not. I think I could find something there to make a fuse or two. If I can get into the storehouse. But I’ll cross that river when I get there.” He searched her eyes and found nothing. “The professor can’t be allowed to create this gunpowder in quantity. Much may be stored already in London, ready to be shipped…but if it’s made here, here is where it must be ended.”

“Insane,” Minx repeated.

He was thinking furiously. Sweat was on his face, not necessarily from the thinking but from the morning’s sullen heat. “If I’m successful, I’ll need a way to get off the island quickly. A ship. I believe I know who might be convinced to help me with that. I have three hundred pounds that might help his decision and buy him a crew. And I need something else.”

“What are you babbling about?”

“I need a traitor. In fact, I need two traitors, to fulfill the professor’s expectations.” He ran his fingers across his mouth, his gaze directed toward the rolling sea. He had a plan…or, at least, the bare beginnings of one. Much depended upon much. “Let me ask you…if I brought you a handwriting sample say by around noon…could you forge a message by four?”

“Forge a message? What message?”

“I need what the professor expects. Proof of treason. A message, passed from one traitor to the other and hidden in a…shoe, perhaps. Or wherever I intend to plant it. A short message, and perhaps you can help me with this. Do you have any idea when the next shipment of Cymbeline is planned to leave London?”

“No. It was sheer luck our finding out about the first shipment.”

“It’ll have to be something else, then. Something revealing. But what?” He thought for a silent moment. “Who gave Nathan the first information?”

“The honorable Frederick Nash. A dissolute bastard if there ever was one. He is also on the professor’s payroll.”

“We can work with that. Drag his name into the fray. I’ll come up with something.” Matthew was thinking he had to get into Smythe’s room when the foul man went down for the mid-day meal. Questions nagged at him, though, and one he specifically had to have answered. “You say the powder is stored in a warehouse in London, but you don’t know exactly where? Why doesn’t the professor keep it all here, instead of transporting it?” As soon as he asked the question, he thought he knew the answer. “Ah,” he said before Minx could reply. “He wants it in a place where the spies from other countries can see it and report to their masters. And he fears another earthquake, doesn’t he?”

“What?” She obviously had no idea what he was talking about.

“The tremors,” Matthew explained. “There was an earthquake here when the professor was a boy. He can make the Cymbeline here in relative safety. But he fears if there’s an accident at the fort, and enough of the powder ignites…there could be another earthquake. That’s why I suspect he moves the powder off the island as soon as there’s enough to fill a ship’s hold. Which I would think would be enough to make a very impressive blast.”

“Insane,” Minx said for the third time. “You’ll never get in there to blow it up.”

“Not alone, no. But with help…possibly I will.” He levelled his gaze at her. “Yes, Madam Chillany killed Nathan. I won’t tell you how. But I will say that if Nathan Spade was standing here…he might also be thinking of blowing the place up.” He gave a quiet grunt. “The bad young man found his boundary of evil, didn’t he? The line beyond which he would not pass? So yes, Minx…your Nathan would go in there and blow the place to smithereens, just as I intend to. And he would ask for your help, just as I am asking.”

“My help? You mean with the forgery?”

“That, and however I might need you afterward. You’re very capable. I have need of your capability and your…shall we say…firmness under pressure.” He couldn’t help but give her a sly smile. “I have to ask…last night…did you…?” He shrugged and trailed off.

“Did I what?”

Her tone spoke volumes. The problem-solver was at a loss.

“Never mind,” he told her, not without some disappointment. “I have someplace to go. The house of a certain sea captain. Will you come with me?”

“I will,” she answered.

Astride their horses and with the map to Falco’s house in Matthew’s brain, they continued on their journey. Matthew and Athena were in the lead, and after a moment Minx urged Esmeralda up beside them.

“He was not all bad,” she said.

“No one is all bad.” Then he thought about Tyranthus Slaughter. “Most aren’t, at least.”

“He wanted to make amends for things he’d done in his past. He wasn’t proud of them. When he saw this chance, and he told me about it…we both knew it was right.”

“I should say,” said Matthew.

She was silent for a time, perhaps reliving poignant memories. “We were going to have a future,” she told him. “Married or not, I don’t know. We met by chance, really. At a party for Andrew Halverston, the money changer. Also on the professor’s payroll.”

“Who isn’t?” Matthew asked.

“We didn’t know we had the professor in common until later. Then…it didn’t matter.”

“It matters now,” Matthew said, turning Athena toward the road that led to Falco’s house. “More than ever.”

“You should know about being on the professor’s payroll.” Minx shot him a dark glance. “His enemy…brought to his island to work for him. How in the name of God did that happen?”

“You’ll begin to see when we get where we’re going,” he told her. “One thing I’d like to know from you…who is Brazio Valeriani and why is Fell searching for him?”

“I don’t know…but I’ve heard things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as…that the professor has strange interests and ambitions. Valeriani has something to do with those. Other than that, I have no clue.”

“Hm,” Matthew said. “I should make it my business to find out.” He kicked into Athena’s flanks to hasten her progress, for he felt that time was growing short and there was yet much to do before he, Berry, hopefully Zed and…yes, Fancy…could escape this damnable island.

Following his mental map, Matthew led them along the cart trail into the woods and to the ascertained house of white stone that stood amid a few others. They both dismounted. Matthew knocked at the door. He didn’t have long to wait before a very lovely young native woman with cream-colored skin opened the door and peered out. “Saffron?” Matthew asked. She nodded; her eyes were wide and frightened. “I’m here to—” Saffron was pushed aside, gently but firmly. The fearsome visage of the white-goateed, amber-eyed and creased ebony face of Captain Jerrell Falco took the place of his wife’s loveliness. He looked from Matthew to Minx and back again, with a slight frown of disdain. “I didn’t think you’d be damn fool enough to come in the daylight,” he rumbled, like his own earthquake. “Who is she?”

“A friend.”

“You say.”

“You can trust her.”

“Too late now, if I don’t. You sure no one followed you?”

“He’s sure,” Minx spoke up sharply, her own brass showing.

“Damn all of you for getting me into this,” Falco said. And then he opened the door and stepped back. “Come in.”

As soon as Matthew walked across the threshold, he was hit by the embrace of a red-haired adventuress from New York who, at all of nineteen tender years, had found herself in at least twenty years of trouble. Her hair was wild, her dirty face scratched by island brush, and she wore a dark blue sleeping gown that appeared to have been ripped by the claws of wildcats. Berry clung to Matthew so hard he struggled to draw a breath, and then it was she who drew back with a penetrating question: “Who is that?”

That being…

“My name is Minx Cutter. I’m a friend of Matthew’s.” The gold-hued eyes took in Berry, the room, Falco and Saffron and everything; she was as cool as a September Sabbath. “Who might you be, and why are you hiding here?”

“Berry Grigsby,” came the frosted reply. “Also a friend—a very good friend—of Matthew’s. I am here because…” She faltered, but looked to no one for help.

“Because she escaped from the Templeton Inn night before last and got herself in some difficulty,” said Falco. “She and the Ga. Where he is, I don’t know. Packs of men were nosing around here all yesterday. Searched my house, but Miss Grigsby was under the floorboards in the back room. Not very much to her liking, but necessary.”

“There are crabs under there,” she said to Matthew, her eyes wide and rimmed with the tears of revulsion. There was nothing like feeling crabs tangling in one’s hair while rough boots stomped the boards three inches above one’s face.

“She kept silent, though.” Falco had his clay pipe in hand, and now he lit it from the stub of a candle and blew out a plume of smoke. “Good thing. They were looking to hang somebody for hiding her.”

“You were where? On the road to the fort?” The question was from Minx and directed to Berry.

“I don’t know about a fort. But we were on a road not too far from here. There were skulls hanging from the trees on both—”

“Stupid girl,” Minx interrupted. “Going in there, after you saw the warning? And who else was with you?”

“Her friend. Used to be a slave,” Falco offered. From the back room a baby began to cry, and Saffron went to tend to their child. Falco blew smoke through his nostrils, his comment on the situation regarding these visitors to his home and intruders to the life of his family. “You’ve got me in some shit,” he told Matthew. “All you people. Dragging me into your business. Did you hear me ask to have my throat cut by Fell’s men? Or to have to watch my wife and child be sliced up in front of me?” The smoke rolled toward Matthew’s nose…and to his surprise and relief, he smelled it. “Answer!” the captain roared.

“I shall,” was the calm response. “I regret the inconvenience, but I am not only here to rescue Berry, but to rescue you and your family.”

“I see how much rescuing you’ve been doing, sir. Has a horse kicked you in the face lately?”

“No, but two asses did their best. Now listen to me, please. I know you’ve told me you were loyal to your employer, as long as he pays well. I understand your love for your ship. But did you know that the professor is brewing a very powerful kind of gunpowder in that fort of his? And that he plans to—”

“I don’t want to hear this. It’s not my business.”

“Your business, I believe you once said, is making the best decisions under the shadow of your sails,” said Matthew. He let that sink in for a few seconds before he went on. “You also once said you wished for a cargo concern of your own, and hoped that Fell’s money would buy it for you. Very ambitious indeed, captain. But you gave warning too, that night in your cabin, that I should take care the professor’s world doesn’t get into me, because there’s a lot of money in it. Do you recall that?”

“I do.” The smoke floated freely, changing shape as it roiled.

“I should give you the same warning, captain, because your sails are luffing in the breeze. You will need to decide in the next few minutes what your ultimate destination—and that of your wife and child—shall be.”

“What shit are you throwing?” Falco growled.

“I am throwing you a lifeline,” said Matthew, staring with great composure into the fierce amber eyes. This man, he realized, could tear his head off with little regret. Yet Matthew had the floor and he intended to keep it. “I can become your employer, if you allow it. I can pay you this night three hundred pounds in gold coins. That’s for you, your ship and a skeleton crew. I want to be taken back to New York, along with Berry, the Ga—if he can be found, because I know he’s alive—and Miss Cutter, if she wishes to go. And one other,” he continued, “who I will bring from Fell’s castle. I wish to pay you for what you do…ferrying passengers. When we reach New York, I can vow to you that I will not only secure you a place ferrying cargo, but I will work to make sure you are the master of your own business much sooner than you expected. And, Captain Falco, I can do this for you. I promise it.”

“He can do it,” said Berry. Falco smoked his pipe in stony silence.

It was the second effort, Matthew thought, that was both the more difficult and the more rewarding. He had no intention of giving up, not he who had sunken down into the depths riding a seahorse and found providence in the kiss of an Indian maiden. Oh no…not he.

“I’m going to destroy the gunpowder tonight,” Matthew said, with no expression in his voice; it was a cold fact. “Or…as the statement goes…die trying.”

“That would be likely,” Falco answered.

“A fool’s errand, yes?” Matthew’s brows lifted. “And who would expect such a fool to get in there and blow that powder to Hell, sir? So…I will have the element of surprise on my side. Now, I don’t know the layout of the land or the fort, so I will truly be in the dark. But I intend to stay in the dark until I get the job done. I’m telling you this because after that powder blows, my friends and I will very quickly need a way off this island. I am asking you, Captain Falco, to afford us that way.”

“I told him he was insane,” Minx suddenly offered. Matthew bit his lip; he was grateful for her concern but wished her to keep her opinion to herself. She stared at the floor for a moment, the tides of conflict on her face, and then she sighed heavily. “Insane or not, he has a good reason to want to do this. I’m with him.”

“Grand for you,” said Falco. “Murder for me and my family.”

“Deliverance for you and your family,” Matthew corrected. “A nice sentiment, that you wished your own cargo business. But you must know by now that no one leaves this island without the permission of Professor Fell. I would suggest that he will use you as he wishes, and at the end of his use the only item of cargo that need concern you will be yourself in a coffin. Possibly also your fine wife and child. For why would he let you leave here and start a new life? No. Impossible.” Matthew shook his head. “You’d best mind the set of your sails, Captain. They do cast a long and very dark shadow over your future.”

But for the soft crooning of Falco’s wife to the child in the bedroom, a silence settled.

Falco stood before Matthew, his brow knit and his gaze distant. He began to slowly pound the pipe’s bowl against the palm of his free hand.

Matthew waited. Nothing more needed to be said. Either the ship found its own way or ran upon the rocks. The captain was thinking; he was an intelligent man, and he was testing the currents of what might be as opposed to those that were.

“Damn,” said Falco at last; it was more the bleat of a lamb than the growl of a lion, yet it was also a lamb that refused to be slaughtered and to witness the slaughter of loved ones. He had begun his own hard voyage, which all ships must undertake.

“I will need at least a dozen men,” said the Nightflyer’s captain. “No one will question me. I know that foodstuffs and supplies are being loaded to take you back to New York in three or four days, as goes the original plan I was presented. But it will take time. And you’re saying we have only hours?”

“I’d like to leave here at first light.” Matthew decided to add: “If all goes well.”

“Hours,” said Falco, with a bitter edge. “Not nearly enough time. The harbor master will want to see my orders before he allows me to cast off. What shall I show him?”

“A letter of orders, what else?” Minx asked. “Who usually writes the orders? Sirki? Or someone else? And how is the letter delivered to you?”

“Sometimes him. Other times, other people. But it’s always on white paper, rolled with a red ribbon into a scroll, and it always bears the professor’s seal. The octopus symbol.”

“So it’s not always the same handwriting? I can take care of that,” said Minx. “I can find the paper and a ribbon, but as for the seal…” She looked to Matthew.

“I have an unbroken seal on the pouch of money I was given,” Matthew replied. “Can it be used?”

“Removed unbroken and used to reseal a letter of orders?” Minx smiled grimly. “Piece of puffet.”

“I will want,” said the captain, “to bring along other passengers. My wife’s father and mother. Her older brother and his family. He has a farm, just this side of Templeton. Without all of them, I will not go.”

It was a complication, but a necessary one. Matthew realized Falco knew the gravity of the situation. When it was clear the Nightflyer had flown early and on forged orders, someone’s head would roll. Possibly the harbor master’s, Matthew thought…and into the beak of the octopus upon whose symbol the unfortunate had relied. “Understood,” said Matthew. “I’ll leave it you to gather them together, as quietly as possible. I assure you that caution is justified here. There will be no rehearsal, and no room for error.”

“Yes,” Falco said, to the master of the room.

“I also have my work cut out for me. Minx, we should get back to the castle. I have to get into Smythe’s room for a sample of his handwriting. I’ll come up with something interesting for you to scribe.” The purpose, Matthew thought, was to skewer two pigeons with one spear and thus afford the octopus a double course of corrupted brains. He turned toward Berry and reached out for her…

…and she was there, his lucky star.

He had been so relieved to see her at first that he hadn’t known what to say. Words still seemed so small. She grasped his hand and he pulled her toward him like reeling in the most beautiful and scrappy fish in the sea. He hugged her to himself and she clung to him as if he were the most solid rock on Pendulum Island. His heart gave a few hard beats, but when he drew away and looked into her soft and frightened blue eyes he felt the irritated anger flare up once more.

“Why in the name of dear departed Christ did you and Zed leave that inn?” he demanded. “Do you know what trouble you’ve caused?”

“Zed wanted to find a boat. I wanted to help him.”

“Oh, you can converse freely with him now?”

“I can understand him. Without words.” She pulled away a greater distance. The shine of anger had surfaced from the depths of her eyes and her cheeks had reddened. “I swear, sometimes I think I can understand him better without words than you with them!”

“As your opinion pleases. We have no time for roundabouts.”

“The truest thing that’s been said!” Falco announced. “I have to go get a crew together. I suppose you’re wanting me to keep her here until morning?” The her being Berry, who looked alternately bewildered and ready to bite through iron nails.

“I do. She’s safest here.”

“That’s a poor statement, but I’ll testify to it. If those men come back again, she goes under the floor.”

Berry started to protest to Matthew but caught herself, for even she knew that her jailers this time would not be so gracious, and the crabs were more welcome company than rats in a dungeon cell somewhere.

“The Nightflyer will be ready at first light,” said Falco, his goateed chin lifted in defiance, perhaps, of Professor Fell. “If you’ve gotten me in this far, I’ll have to cast off without you if you don’t show up. My throat and the throats of my loved ones are worth more gold than you can possibly pay.”

“Agreed,” Matthew said. “At first light, then.” He glanced quickly at Berry but didn’t wish his gaze to linger upon her. She was going to be hell after this mess was cleaned up; but he was determined to give her back as much hell as he could, too.

“Good luck to you,” Falco told them when Matthew opened the door for himself and Minx. “If you’re caught tonight, please allow them to cut your guts open without squealing my name, won’t you?”

“Fair enough, sir.”

“Matthew?” Berry stepped forward. She reached out, tenderly, and touched his arm. The anger in her eyes had given way to a frightened concern. “Be careful,” she said. “I mean it. Be really careful.”

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he promised, and then he and Minx left the house. He hoped it wasn’t an empty promise, and that by first light his own head would not be the devil’s breakfast.

They reached the road and turned their horses toward Fell’s castle, and under the glaring white sun Matthew busied himself conjuring up a message to trap two traitors. Within a few minutes he was satisfied with himself. Smythe and Wilson would never know what hit them. Couldn’t happen to two more despicable characters…unless it happened to the Thacker brothers.

And now what lay ahead was truly treacherous territory. Slipping in and out of rooms unseen. The message itself: would it fool Professor Fell? And how to get to Fancy to let her know she was on the edge of her deliverance? Then tonight…the main show and a display of fireworks to end this conference of criminals.

He made a vow that he would kiss Dippen Nack if he ever got back to New York. He thought he must be truly desperate.

“What are you thinking?” Minx asked, urging Esmerelda up beside him.

“About what must be done,” he replied. “And…that I’m not so different from Nathan Spade after all, am I?”

She made a noise that might have been a cruel laugh.

“Only in your dreams,” she said, and rode on ahead.

Twenty-Eight

MATTHEW had his hand on the doorknob and was about to venture forth from Adam Wilson’s room when he heard the sound of clumping boots, slurred and boisterous curses and drunken laughter. He stayed his hand and stood transfixed, as if the Thackers might see him through the door. He judged the time to be quarter after four. The Thackers were indeed getting an early start on the evening’s festivities. He wished he could blow them to Hell along with the gunpowder, but that was not likely to happen.

He waited, hearing the noise of their passage dwindle along the corridor. Fancy would probably have been crushed between them. Either that, or she was swimming again in her world of peace and silence. In Matthew’s left hand was a small piece of parchment with ragged edges. Earlier he had slipped into Edgar Smythe’s room and gotten a piece of clean parchment and a piece with some of the Bard’s lines that Smythe had written in his bored doldrums. While he was in Smythe’s room, Matthew had heard footsteps approaching the door and then a key slide into the lock. He thought he might have aged a few years in the seconds it had taken him to get out upon the balcony, press his back against the wall and hope that Smythe did not emerge for a breath of air. Instead, Matthew had been treated to the grunting and farting noise of Smythe relieving himself in the chamberpot. Then there’d been another damnable space of time during which Matthew feared the munitions master would come out, pot in hand, to dump his mess over the railing, but this fortunately did not happen. At last the door had opened and closed once more, the key had been turned, and with sweat on his face and itching the back of his neck Matthew got out of the room, relocked it, and as had been agreed upon slipped under Minx’s door both pieces of parchment and the octopus wax stamp cut from the leather pouch with the sharp knife she’d given him to use.

Then there had been the waiting.

At nearly three-thirty the small square of parchment was pushed under his own door. There were the two lines, exactly as Matthew had directed. It looked to be Smythe’s handwriting, of course. Minx was obviously very efficient at her craft. And then there was the next step, which Matthew had chosen not to skip: he would get into Wilson’s room after four o’clock and actually plant the message in a place he might ‘discover’ it, thereby having an accurate description of Wilson’s room and belongings in case he was further questioned. A neatly-folded stocking in a drawer had served the purpose.

And now…out of this damned room with the forged evidence of communication between traitors, and let the heads roll.

He gritted his teeth, turned the knob, looked out for anyone passing by and entered the silent corridor. He was sweating under his arms and as well as on his face. He longed for a breath of New York winter, and to Hell with this infernal paradise. He slid the key into the lock, turned it and then, message gripped in hand, he took a leftward step toward his own room and therefore saw Mother Deare standing in the hallway not five paces distant, her red-gloved hands folded together in front of her, her mouth pursed with the beginning of a question.

Matthew felt his touch of winter. In fact, he was nearly frozen.

The woman approached him. When she stopped, just short of bowling him over, she peered into his face with her bulbous brown eyes.

“A game of Pall Mall is starting in the garden,” she said. “Sabroso is there already. So are Miss Cutter, Pons and his Toy. Might you wish to join them?”

“I’m…not much for games. Except chess,” Matthew managed to answer, even as he fumbled to enclose the piece of parchment in his fist.

“Oh, I think you’re very good at all manner of games, Mr. Corbett.” She held out a gloved palm. “I’m presuming you’ve found something the professor should see?”

It was clear—startlingly clear—that Mother Deare knew everything. Matthew got his brain connected to his mouth again. “I have,” he said, and handed it over.

She looked at the two lines. “Interesting.” It was spoken as if she were studying a not-particularly-interesting insect. “I’ll see he gets this. Are you joining us in the garden?”

“No. Thank you. I think…I’m going to go rest for a bit.”

“Of course. You should do so. I can have some lemon water brought to your room, if you like.”

“Actually…that would be good. Yes, thank you very much.”

“My pleasure.” She regarded the message once more. “It seems you’ve done the professor a valuable service. It won’t be forgotten, I assure you.”

“Glad to be of help,” said Matthew, who thought the words tasted indeed of the most bitter lemons.

“Well, then.” Mother Deare’s froggish face crinkled into a smile. One hand came up and patted Matthew’s cheek. “Good boy,” she said. “By all means, take your rest.” She turned away and walked toward the staircase. Matthew let her get far along the corridor before he got his legs moving. He went to his room, locked the door, sprawled across the bed and stared up at the canopy as slowly his taut nerves relaxed.

He was still in that position, though drowsing in and out of sleep, when there came a knock at his door perhaps a half-hour later. “Who is it?” he demanded, his voice as slurred as any drunken Thacker.

“Myself,” replied the lilting voice of the East Indian killer.

Matthew felt a shudder course through him. His heart began to pound. Steady, he told himself. Be calm. But easier said than done, with that giant at his door. He drew a few deep breaths to clear his head. Then he got up, thought now is the moment of reckoning and he crossed the chessboard floor to the door and opened it.

“Good afternoon,” said Sirki, who carried a tray bearing a pewter pitcher and a glass. “I was instructed to bring you lemon water.”

Matthew retreated to allow him entry. Sirki put the tray down atop the dresser and actually poured Matthew’s first glass. He offered it to Matthew, who took the glass and put his nose to it in an attempt to smell anything more powerful than lemons.

“No drugs, young sir,” said Sirki. “I promise that.”

“You take the first drink, then.” Matthew held the glass toward him.

Sirki took it without hesitation. His drink took nearly half the liquid. “Very refreshing.” He handed it back. “You’ve done a service for the professor. Why should he wish to drug you?”

“Old habits die hard,” was the reply. Matthew still didn’t trust the drink, and set it aside.

“A few questions for you.” Sirki’s mouth smiled, but the eyes were stern. “You found this message exactly where?”

“In a folded-up stocking. Second drawer of the dresser in Wilson’s room.”

“Do you have any idea whose handwriting it is?”

“I can guess,” Matthew said. He imagined what Professor Fell’s thought was upon reading the two lines Minx had forged.

We are being watched. Warn Nash.

In addition to giving Fell a pair of traitors, Matthew had given him a third in the form of Frederick Nash, the corrupt and treasonous member of Parliament.

“I presume that Professor Fell knows whose handwriting it is. I have no idea who ‘Nash’ might be, but I also presume that the professor knows.” Matthew frowned; now was the moment to voice his feigned concern. “What I can’t understand, is why the message was written down and not simply passed in speaking? It’s a simple enough message, after all. So why risk writing it down?”

“The professor has also wondered this,” said Sirki, ominously.

“Yes.” Matthew felt the sweat begin to erupt at his temples. But it was a warm day, after all. “The only conclusion I can come to—my educated guess—is that my interaction with Mr. Smythe has caused him to…shall we say…panic. Possibly Wilson intended to burn the message at a later date. Or possibly he intended to show it to this Nash person, as evidence of veracity. You know, it’s my experience that desperate men often make desperate mistakes.”

“Hm,” said Sirki. He waited for more.

“Of course,” Matthew continued warily, “there was no reason for Wilson to suspect I’d be entering his room today. But he did have common caution enough to hide the message, which speaks to me of certain guilt.”

Sirki said nothing for a while, which did not help Matthew’s nerves.

At last the giant spoke. “The professor,” he said, “has also come to these conclusions.”

Matthew nodded. He was aware how heavy his head felt on the stalk of his neck. “Can I also assume, then, that our business is done?”

“It is done, and successfully so, but there is a complication.”

“Oh?” Matthew’s stomach had twisted into a knot. “What complication?”

“Your friend Miss Grigsby cannot be found. The search continues, but some of the searchers are beginning to believe she may have stepped off a cliff in the dark and fallen to her death either on the rocks below or in the sea.”

“Oh my God!” said Matthew, with an effort.

“If she had stayed where she was placed, she would have been fine. In a few days, you’ll be leaving here aboard the Nightflyer. The searching will go on, but I fear Miss Grigsby will not be returning with you.” Sirki stared solemnly into Matthew’s eyes. “To that regard, I am instructed to tell you that another five hundred pounds will be added to your three thousand pound fee. Is that agreeable?”

“For me, yes,” Matthew answered with grim determination. “For her grandfather, I’m not so sure.”

“The professor regrets your loss. I’m sure you will convey that thought to her grandfather? As for the Ga, he is caged in the lower quarters of this castle. He will be returned to you on the morning of your departure, but not before.”

“All right.” Matthew was starting to breathe easier again. The forgery had passed its test, and Professor Fell had supplied his own story concerning the message: the frightened scribbling of one traitor to another, implicating a third. “Let me ask…what will be done with Wilson and Smythe?”

“They’ve already been taken to their own cages. They will be dealt with in a short while. Would you like to serve as a witness?”

“Me? No. I don’t care to hear their whimpering lies and denials.” Nathan Spade could not have spoken it better, Matthew thought. In truth, he feared that his heart was becoming harder by the moment. “But tell me…what will be done?”

“I will take care of them,” said Sirki. “As the professor watches, they will be chained naked to two chairs. Their tongues will be removed first.”

“Ah,” Matthew said, and then thought he might have sounded too relieved.

“One eye will be scooped from each face and crushed beneath the professor’s shoe. Next their sexual organs will be removed and placed into their mouths. Following that, their hands and feet will be sawed off. A slow and delicate operation.”

“Tiring for you, I’m sure.”

“Very much so,” Sirki agreed, without a flicker of expression. “Before they can bleed to death, their arms will be sawed off at the shoulders. Again, it’s quite an effort on my part, but the professor appreciates my vigor. If they live very much longer, their legs will be sawed off at the knees.”

“By that time,” Matthew said, “you should be ready for a long nap.”

Sirki allowed himself an evil half-smile. “My blade does most of the work, young sir. I just guide it along. But there will be much blood, which makes the grip more challenging. Where was I? Oh…at the end, they will lose their heads and everything will be put into burlap bags and carried down to Agonistes. His pet, I think you’ve seen. So Mr. Smythe and Mr. Wilson will be consigned to the sea in the form of octopus turds. Are you absolutely certain you don’t wish to witness the process?”

“Tempting,” said Matthew, “but yes, I am certain.”

“Understandable. I am empowered by Professor Fell to tell you that he feels this is a job well-done, and if he is in need of your future problem-solving abilities might he count on you?”

“You mean to find Valeriani for him?”

“The professor made no mention of that,” said the giant.

Matthew pondered the moment. He hoped to destroy the gunpowder factory and to be on his way with Berry, Zed, Minx and Fancy to the harbor within twelve hours. He doubted if the professor would feel so grateful to him when all that powder went up. “My place is in New York,” Matthew said. “I’d like to be left alone.”

Sirki seemed to be deliberating this statement. He went to the door and then paused. “You are aware,” he said, “that the professor never takes ‘no’ for an answer.”

“I’m aware. But…no.”

Sirki bowed his head slightly. “I shall pass that response along. Your payment will be delivered on the morning of your departure, along with the Ga.” He offered the faintest of smiles. “I regret not being able to kill him, but sometimes one does not always get what one wishes.” With that remark, Sirki opened the door, left the room, and closed the door at his back.

Matthew always felt relief when that huge killer departed his presence, and so he did now. He gave Sirki a few minutes to make some distance, and then he took a cautious sip of the lemon water. Yes…it just seemed to be lemons, after all. He drank the rest of the glass. But now he was in need of food, having missed the mid-day meal, and he went along the corridor and down the stairs in search of a fruitbowl or a basket of muffins and corncakes that were sometimes afforded on the dining room table.

As he was going down the steps to the dining room, he heard a muffled scream from somewhere below.

It went on for a few seconds and then stopped on a strangled note.

Matthew saw that indeed there was a basket of muffins on the table. He was reaching for one when the hollow echo of a second scream rose up seemingly from the floor. It sounded to be from a different throat than the first, but also ended brokenly.

He thought that Nathan Spade had had his revenge, and wherever Spade was he considered Matthew Corbett to be a kindred spirit.

Matthew wasn’t certain to be happy or sad about that. But it seemed that in the professor’s world one dismembered corpse in a bag begat at least one or two others, and so with the deaths of Smythe and Wilson Fate—and Fell—had been satisfied.

Another scream came up, agonized and pitiful. It died down again, and might have broken the heart of anyone who did not know the history of the screamer.

Matthew decided on the biggest muffin in the basket. He took it and, gratified to find it was studded with chocolate chunks, chewed a big bite from it and then returned to his room to wait for the fall of night. Only behind the locked door did he break out in a cold sweat and suddenly have to lose his few bites of muffin and drink of lemon water in a rush of liquid over the balcony’s railing.

Twenty-Nine

AFTER midnight, when the castle had become tomb-quiet and even the Thackers’ bellows silenced, Matthew began to stir.

He left his room with a single stubby taper, walked quietly along the corridor and used the skeleton key to open Smythe’s room. Alas, the munitions master was not sleeping in this bed, but rather in the embrace of an octopus’s digestive system. He and Adam Wilson now shared the lowest of dwellings. Matthew continued out to the balcony, where he considered the drop of over twenty feet to manicured hedges in the garden. Were there fissures in the stone wall he might get his fingertips into? He shone his light downward. Yes, there appeared to be a few worthy grips, courtesy of years of earth tremors. It was this way or no way because for certain he could not risk the stairs and the front door.

He blew out the candle and put it into his coat pocket along with the tinderbox from his room. Then he eased over the balcony, and with the supple strength of youth and damned determination he began his careful descent along the cracked wall of Fell’s castle.

The night’s banquet had been another affair of seafood, salacious behavior from the two brothers toward the diminished-looking Fancy, drunken laughter from Sabroso at jokes no one had made, Aria Chillany’s body pressing toward Matthew and her breath reeking of fish and wine thanks to his returned ability to smell, Toy feeding Augustus Pons and their whispers and giggles like two schoolgirls sharing secrets, Minx silently eating her food without a glance at anyone in particular, and Mother Deare talking about how good it would be to get started back to England in the next few days. Evidently the group would be travelling on the ship Fortuna, another of Fell’s fleet of transports. Matthew thought that being cooped up with that bunch for nearly two months would be enough to make him dance down a pirate’s plank in a fashion that would win appreciative applause from Gilliam Vincent.

Two chairs had remained vacant at the table. “Where are those fuckers?” Jack Thacker had asked, his eyes bloodshot and whitefish foaming at the corners of his mouth. “Playing with—”

“Their sausages?” Mack finished, after which he tossed back a half-glass of wine so deeply-red it was almost black. Between the brothers, Fancy stared at Matthew for a few seconds, her eyes dark-hollowed and weary, before she looked away. She was like a fine animal that had nearly been broken, Matthew thought. Much more time with the brothers, and she would be used up and withered within. Still he had yet to see her smile or even attempt such. But what was there for her to smile about? If he could only get her alone for a few seconds, to tell her what he was planning…

Mother Deare said, “Mr. Smythe and Mr. Wilson are no longer with us.”

“What?” Pons pushed Toy’s fork away. “Where are they?”

“The two gentlemen,” said Mother Deare, with a passing glance at Matthew, “have been identified as traitors to the professor.”

“Them too?” Jack’s mouth was a ghastly mess. “How many fucking traitors have there been at this party?”

“Too many,” Mother Deare replied, with a faint motherly smile. “The situation is now stable.”

“I think you should take a look at this one’s pockets.” Mack jabbed his knife in the direction of Matthew. “Turn ’im upside down and give him a fuckin’ good shake.”

“Not necessary.” Mother Deare took a dainty sip of wine, her red-gloved hand huge upon the stem. “Mr. Smythe and Mr. Wilson have served their purpose, have been found lacking in loyalty and too prideful in their own powers. They were executed this afternoon. Didn’t anyone hear them screaming?”

“I thought it was Pons gettin’ his ass jabbed,” said Jack, and Mack laughed so hard the wine burst from his nostrils.

“Crude vulgarians,” Pons replied, with as much dignity as a fat man with three chins might summon. His eyes were heavy-lidded with disdain. He turned his attention to Mother Deare. “The…removal of Mr. Smythe and Mr. Wilson…quite sudden, it seems. I am to believe that they were both important assets—”

“He said, ‘assets,’” Jack chortled, and again his brother guffawed in appreciation of the most simple-minded tavern humor.

“Important elements,” Pons went on, “to the professor’s operations. For them both to be removed…doesn’t that bode ill for future plans?”

“‘Bode ill,’ he says,” was Mack’s comment. “Buck can’t speak a man’s English.”

Matthew had reached his fill of this particular meal. “Why don’t you two shut up? You look dumber than hell. Quit proving it by speaking.”

The expressions on the faces of the Thackers froze. Mack’s chin trembled a little bit, as the rage worked on him. Jack sopped a piece of bread in fish sauce and chewed it as if tearing out Matthew’s throat with his teeth.

“To answer,” said Mother Deare. “Yes, those two men were important. You hear me say ‘were.’ But there are always other talents in the organization to take their places. You can be sure the professor has planned for that beforehand. I am empowered to be the professor’s eyes, voice and hands in London, and to adjust persons into their proper places. To promote, so to speak. And I will perform that task to the best of my ability and for the best of the organization. Thank you for asking.”

“Pleasure,” said Pons, returning his mouth to Toy’s waiting fork.

Matthew continued his crawl down the wall of Fell’s castle. His right foot slipped in its search for a crevice, he knew he was in for a tumble so he flung himself off into space and headed for the hedges. They were fortunately not laden with anything sharp or stickery, and therefore he landed amid them with the most minor of scrapes. Then it was a matter of getting himself unentangled from them, putting his feet on firm ground and heading toward the road. There was a yellow moon just past full, the night held a slight breeze, and Matthew was in his element of silence and stealth.

He was only on his way across the gardens a moment or two when he knew someone was coming toward him from the left: a dark shape though moon-painted, a lithe figure converging upon him with little or no hesitation and a confident stride.

“Are you planning on walking the distance?” Minx asked quietly when she got close enough. She was wearing a hooded cape over her clothes, and again Matthew had to wonder if she had been last night’s visitor to his room.

“I suppose that was my plan, yes.”

“You need,” she said, “a new plan. Starting with a horse. Come with me.”

“Going where?”

“Going,” she answered, “to break into the stable, saddle our two horses and go do your task of exploding some gunpowder. That is the task, correct?”

“It is.”

“Then come on, we’re wasting time.”

“Minx,” Matthew said, “you don’t have to go with me. I can do this by myself.”

“Can you?” Though he couldn’t make out her face, he knew her expression would be wry, her blonde brows upraised. “I don’t think so. Come along, and you should be grateful I’ve arrived to save your legs and possibly your neck.”

“Two necks can be stretched by a noose the same as one. In fact, I’d imagine we’d lose our heads if we’re caught.”

“I agree. That’s why we shouldn’t be caught.” Dummy, was her unspoken comment. “Stop wrangling and come along. Now.”

On the way to the stable, Matthew asked Minx how she’d gotten out of the castle unnoticed, and the reply was: “I walked out the front door and spoke kindly to the servant standing there. I’m sure he thinks I’ve gone for a solitary stroll. Being unnoticed was not my goal…getting out was. Didn’t you leave by the front door?”

“No, I chose a more scenic way.”

“Whatever it takes, I suppose. There’s the stable ahead. Keep your voice low, we don’t want to spook the horses and have them announcing us.”

Breaking into the stable was as simple as Minx inserting the business end of a blade into a lock that secured a chain across the doors. The lock was broken, the chain removed, and though the horses within grumbled and stomped their hooves none let out any tell-tale whinnies. Minx and Matthew went to work saddling their mounts of choice, Esmerelda and Athena, and within a few minutes were out of the stable and following their moon-shadows along the road.

“I’m presuming you were smart enough to bring something to light a flame,” Minx said.

“A tinderbox and candle, yes.”

“I brought the same,” she revealed. “Just in case.”

“Very kind of you.”

Minx was silent for a while, as their horses trotted the road side by side. Then she said, “Perhaps you are a bit like Nathan.”

“How so?”

“Foolish. Headstrong. A man who dares the Devil, if you want the truth. And who makes others think they can dare the Devil, too.” She cast a quick glance at him from under her hood. “I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.”

“You can always decline the dare,” Matthew told her, “and turn back.”

“Oh no, there’s no turning back. But before I set foot on that ship, I am going to kill Aria Chillany. You can count on that, my friend.”

Matthew had no doubt she would at least try. Just as he must try to get Fancy out of the grip of the Thackers, in honor of Walker In Two Worlds. It seemed both he and Minx were daring their own devils today, and what devils they were.

The moon had sunk lower by the time they reached the skull-guarded road. “Not here,” said Minx when Matthew started to rein Athena in. He followed Minx perhaps another hundred yards, and then dismounted when she did so. Minx tied Esmerelda’s reins to a low shrub and Matthew did the same with Athena’s.

“Listen well,” Minx whispered as they stood at the edge of the dense thicket that protected Fell’s powderworks. “I don’t know what’s in there. Probably there are men up on watchtowers hidden in the trees. There may be bogs and quicksand. We don’t dare show a light. The guards would be on us like blood-hungry ticks. We have to move silently and cautiously, and if one of us gets into trouble there can be no shouting for the sake of both our necks…or heads, as you say. If we are separated and one is captured, there can be no talking even if it means…you know what it would mean.”

“I do,” said Matthew. His nerves were on edge, but his resolution firm.

“All right. Let’s go.”

Two words that meant: this is the point of no return. Matthew and Minx entered the thicket together, and within sixty seconds were facing a yellow-moonlit wall of leaves and thorns the size of a man’s thumbnail, on coiled stalks that snaked out in every direction. They spent some time trying to find a way around this obstruction, and yet had to enter the portion of it that seemed the most penetrable. Even so, it was a torment on the flesh and a hazard on the clothing. Matthew felt that if his coat snagged one more time it would fall in shreds from his shoulders. His stockings were ragged and his legs streaked with blood by the time they reached more hospitable forest, which wasn’t saying much. The ground became soggy, held together by massive clumps of tree-roots. Even Minx, for all her sure-footed confidence, tripped and fell into the muck several times, and as the bog deepened Matthew’s boots were almost sucked from his feet.

They had to stop and rest, for the exertion of travelling through this sticky slop was extreme. “Ready?” Minx whispered after a few minutes, and Matthew answered that he was. On her next step Minx sank into brackish water nearly waist-deep. She continued on, and Matthew followed with one hand guarding the cotton in his tinderbox from being soaked.

The moon descended. From the trees of this ungodly, fetid swamp there croaked, trilled, shrieked and buzzed the insects of the night. As Minx and Matthew progressed, great bubbles of noxious swamp gas bloomed up beneath them like hideous flowers and made such explosive sounds they feared it would be heard by any listening ear. But no torches showed in the darkness nor were there voices, and the two determined travellers slogged onward.

“Careful,” Minx whispered, “there’s a snake in the water to your right.”

Matthew caught the movement of something over there, but it veered away. One snake seen, probably dozens lurking around their legs underwater. What use was there to think of that? Matthew looked up and could see a few stars through the thick treetops. New York seemed as far away as those. But here he was, waistdeep in muddy filth with snakes aslither around his ankles, likely tasting the blood on his shins. Delightful. What he must concentrate upon was not falling into the water, and keeping the tinderbox dry.

The ground began to rise and the water shallowed. Minx and Matthew got out of the muck onto sandy earth wild again with vegetation, and as Matthew brushed a low tree branch something made a noise like the clicking back of a pistol’s hammer and—whether exotic bird or treefrog—the thing jumped for its life into the thicket.

“Stop,” Minx whispered, and Matthew instantly obeyed.

She reached out into what appeared to be another wall of vines and thorns. She pulled some of the foliage aside and pressed her hand inward.

“Stones,” she said. “We’ve arrived.”

Matthew felt for himself. It was, indeed, the fort’s outermost wall. Looking up, nothing could be seen of how high the wall was in the overhang of trees. But all was silent save the croak and hum of frogs and night-sprites, and in the distance the note of a bird making a sound like the fall of an executioner’s axe.

Now came the problem of finding a way in, and the problem-solver was in the dark. He followed Minx to the left, her hands entering the vines to search the stones. There were no windows, barred or otherwise, and no gate to be found. At last Minx stopped, pulled on a sturdy-looking vine that snaked down along the wall, and said, “This will have to do.”

“I’ll go first,” Matthew volunteered, and Minx let him. He started up along the vine, which swayed precariously but did not give way. Matthew’s boots afforded him traction on the stones, and after a climb of some thirty feet he reached the top and hauled himself over onto a parapet. Minx followed with admirable agility, and together they took stock of where they were.

The parapet was deserted, but a single torch burned in a wooden socket on the left about fifty feet away. Beyond that another fifty feet, a second torch flamed. And on and on, around the fort’s huge perimeter. Below them stood several buildings of white stone with roofs of gray slate. Far away, toward the center of the dirt-floored enclosure, was a larger building with a chimney, where the gunpowder’s chemicals must be cooked and combined. So far there was no sign of any human occupancy though an occasional torch was set out and burning. Matthew looked for what he thought might be the powder magazine. Over on the right there was a long white building with wooden shutters closed over the windows and, telltale enough, banks of dirt built up about six feet high on both sides to act as blast walls. That would be where the powder was kept until it could be shipped out. But where might the fuses be found? Matthew reasoned there had to be fuses here, as the bombs that had destroyed the buildings in New York were fashioned here and if not directly fitted with fuses in this location, then fuses ought to be on the premises somewhere. Unless they’d been made aboard the Nightflyer, but Matthew thought the raw materials must be stored here in a safe place. The question being: exactly where? It had taken him and Minx over two hours to cross the thicket and swamp to reach the fort. They were quite simply pressed for time, as the Nightflyer would fly at first light with or without them.

Minx said, “I want you to wait here.”

“Wait here? Why?”

“In this case,” she answered, “one is better than two. I can move faster than you. Trust me when I say…you will do better to let me be your…” She frowned under her hood, searching for the words.

“Providence rider?” Matthew supplied.

“Whatever that means. You stay here. I’m going to find out where the guards are.”

“You can do that and I can’t?”

“I can do that,” she said, “without getting us both killed. Stay,” she said, and then she turned away and strode purposefully off along the parapet.

Matthew eased down on his haunches alongside the wall. This was a damnable thing to let her take such a risk, he thought; yet he had the feeling Minx Cutter was perfectly capable of getting in and out of places he could not, and it might be the ungentlemanly act to let her go alone but it was probably the most sensible.

He waited, listening to the night and watching the torches flicker in the same breeze that stirred the forest’s treetops.

He waited longer, and sat down on the stones.

After what seemed like twenty minutes he decided he could wait no more. He was keenly aware of the passing time and the lowering moon, and if Minx had been caught he was going to have to do something about that. He stood up and started along the parapet in the direction she’d gone, and in another moment he came to a stone staircase leading down. He descended to the dirt floor, passed two empty wagons, and continued on beneath a stone archway into an area not quite fully revealed by any torchlight. He moved through a territory of shadows with his back against a wall. It seemed to him his back had been against a wall now for many months. His heart was beating hard and the air felt oppressive. He could smell the bitter tang of chemicals and cooking vats. He came to a corner and paused, peered around and found the way forward clear and so he started off again. He passed under another archway and on between two stone walls leading him somewhere though he had no idea where.

And just that fast, a figure turned the corner before him, took two strides in his direction before he realized Matthew was there and then stopped.

“Who are you?” the man asked.

“I’m new here,” was all Matthew could think to say, stupidly.

“The hell you are.” A wooden whistle was lifted to the man’s mouth.

Before Matthew could kick the man either in the stomach or the groin, which he was considering, there came a solid-sounding thunk and the man shivered like a leaf in a high wind. The whistle dropped from his hand, to hang about his neck on a leather cord. The man took another step toward Matthew and then his knees crumpled. As the body toppled forward, Matthew saw the hatchet buried in the back of the man’s head.

Minx Cutter was standing behind the now-fallen guard. She put a foot on the man’s back and pulled the hatchet loose. The man thrashed on the ground as if trying to swim through the dirt, and Minx hit him again in the right temple just behind the ear.

This time he was still.

“I told you,” Minx said as she pulled the weapon free, “not to leave there, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but I was concerned about you.”

“Hm,” she said, and she put the blood-wet hatchet’s blade up under Matthew’s nose. “I entered the professor’s employ as an assassin. I killed three men before I decided the job wasn’t to my liking. Lyra Sutch trained me for that role. She was as near a mother to me as I could find after my family threw me out.” The blade dripped blood upon Matthew’s shirt. “I understand you killed Lyra, who helped me grow from a confused girl into a confident woman.”

Matthew said nothing; he could not say that at the end of Lyra Sutch’s life she was a wretched, demented sack of broken bones and axe-torn flesh.

“But,” said Minx, as she lowered the hatchet, “I’m all grown up now. And you are an impatient and foolish milksop.” Her left arm emerged from the folds of her cape. Wrapped around the wrist were several gray cotton cords. “I found a storehouse unguarded and unlocked. The hatchet came from there. Also these three fuses, from a crate. The longest should give us fifteen minutes, the shortest about six. Or they can be knotted together as one.”

“Excellent,” said Matthew, who still had the coppery smell of blood up his nostrils.

“I doubt the magazine will be so easy to get into. I’ve seen four other guards making their rounds, but they’re in no hurry and they’ve gotten lazy. There’s a barracks building where the workers must be sleeping. The professor has done us the great favor of not making his men work all night long like slaves.”

“Christian of him,” said Matthew.

“Sharpen your blade,” she said, correctly judging that Matthew’s senses were reeling due to her cold-blooded killing of the guard and her revelation of past mutual acquaintances. She knelt down and went through the dead man’s pockets, presumably searching for keys to the magazine. She came up empty, and stood up. Her gaze was both fierce and frigid. Looking upon her frightened Matthew to his core. “You should follow me,” she said, and she set off to the left without waiting for him to exit his trance.

The first step was difficult. The second a little easier. Then he was following her, and Minx continued on looking right and left but never glancing back.

They came to the magazine, the long building of white stone with the gray slate roof. A distant torch gave enough light to fall upon two locks on the door. Minx broke one with her knife’s blade, but the second resisted her. She told him, “Keep watch!” as she struggled with the more intricate mechanism. “Damn,” she said through gritted teeth, when it still defied her. “Hold this,” she commanded, and she gave him the bloody hatchet the better to concentrate on her lock-breaking.

Matthew heard the voices of two men raised in conversation. It was coming from somewhere off to the left. There was a bray of laughter; something obviously had hit one’s funny bone. Minx continued her task as Matthew turned himself in the direction of the voices. He could see no one, but the men seemed to be coming closer. Minx’s blade worked at the lock, the sharp tip digging at the stubborn innards. Hurry, he wished to say, but she knew what she was doing. The knife jabbed, the voices came closer still, and Matthew thought he might have to kill someone with this hatchet, to burden his soul further with death.

But then the men took a turn away from the magazine, for the voices began to diminish, and a moment afterward there came a metallic click and Minx whispered, “Ah. Got the bastard.” The lock fell to the ground. Minx pulled a latch and pushed the door open.

It was utterly dark within. She took the hatchet from him and said, “Light your tinderbox.”

Matthew took a moment fumbling with the thing. He got a spark in the wads of cotton and from that touched the wick of his candle. He looked to her with apprehension, wondering if the merest flame in that enclosure would set off the powder, but she motioned him in and he gathered his balls from where they’d shrivelled up into his groin and crossed the magazine’s threshold.

She closed the door behind them. “Impressive,” she said, as Matthew’s candlelight showed barrel upon barrel of—presumably—Professor Fell’s Cymbeline. Matthew counted fifteen just in the realm of the light, and beyond it were dozens more. A shipment must be imminent, he thought. The place looked to be nearly full.

He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath. He had the same feeling of dangerous pressure as he’d experienced upon the stone seahorse. If two small Cymbeline bombs could have blown that house on Nassau Street to splinters, what would dozens of barrels of the powder do?

“I’m counting sixty-two,” Minx said. “I hope you’re ready for a brilliant bang.”

He let his breath out, thinking that he’d already had one of those last night.

Minx strode toward the first barrel. She lifted her hatchet and quite readily bashed in the top of it with three blows. Matthew winced at the noise; surely that was going to bring someone running. Then Minx put her shoulder into it, overturned the barrel, and light grayish-white grains began to stream out upon the dirt. She repeated this action with a second barrel, and again the gunpowder poured out of it onto the earth. “I think,” she said, “that will be enough.” She uncoiled two of the cotton cords from her wrist and placed them in the grains of destruction, stretching them out toward the door.

“Light them,” she suggested, sweat sparkling on her cheeks.

Matthew bent down, picked up the end of one fuse and touched the candle to it. His hand was trembling, but at once the red eye opened and the fuse began to sizzle. He did the same to the second. The nitrate-saturated cord began to burn steadily toward its target. There would not be time nor opportunity to destroy the actual chemical works, but no doubt this would be a monstrous explosion and might serve to blast everything in the fort to pieces.

“Now,” said Minx, with just a trace of nerves in her voice, “we get out.”

They closed the door and latched it behind them, just for the sake of tidiness. Then Matthew was following Minx as she ran the way they’d come, seeking the stairway to the parapet. There were no guards in view, but no time for undue caution. They were both aware that very soon a little part of Hell would open on Pendulum Island.

Once up the steps, they sought the vine that had brought them here. It was like searching for a peg in a haystack. Everything from this height looked flimsy, unable to support either of them. In a few minutes they would have to learn how to fly.

“Hey!” someone shouted, from ahead. “You there!” For the want of anything else, the guard began to blow his whistle and then he came at a run toward them with a drawn sword.

His run was stopped by a knife that entered the pit of his throat, thrown from a distance of nearly twenty feet. He gagged and grasped at the knife’s handle to pull it out, but then he was staggering off the edge of the parapet like a clumsy drunk and he toppled into the darkness below.

Another voice, further away, began shouting for someone named—it sounded like—Curland. Minx leaned over the parapet, seeking a way down. Matthew looked back toward the magazine. If the guards got in there, they might yet stomp out the fuses. “I’m here!” he shouted toward the other shouter, just to confuse the issue. “This way!”

“We’ve got to go over,” Minx said, and now her voice did quaver for even her tough spirit quailed at the thought of those fuses burning down to their merry damnation. “Right here,” she told him, and motioned toward thick vines and leafy vegetation that had melded to the stones. Without hesitation she swung herself over the wall, gripped hold of whatever her fingers could find, and started down.

Matthew caught a movement to his left. A heavy-set man carrying a torch was coming up the steps. The gent looked big enough to be a match for Sirki. Minx was almost to the ground. Matthew couldn’t wait. He climbed over, grasped vines and leaves and found places to put his boot-toes into. Halfway down there was a cracking sound and Matthew felt the vines start to pull away from the stones. At the same time the man with the torch leaned over the wall and thrust the flame at him to get a better look.

“The magazine!” the man suddenly shouted over his shoulder. Matthew saw that horror had rippled across the craggy face. “My God! Check the magazine!”

Matthew reached the ground with help from the vines pulling away from the stones. Minx was already slogging into the swamp. Matthew followed her, thinking that if the guards put those fuses out all this had been for nothing. The water rose up past his knees, then over his thighs to his waist, and snakes be damned. He heard shouting from the fort, which filled him with fresh alarm. Damn it! he thought. The fuses should have burned down by now! Where was the—

His thought was never finished. It was knocked from his head by the roar of a thousand lions mixed with the shriek of five-hundred harpies and carried along by the burning breath of sixty dragons on the wing, and he was thrown insensible into the muddy drink, sinking down into the realm where the reptiles coiled and twisted safe from the evils that men did.

Thirty

A HAND gripped the back of Matthew’s coat and jerked him up from the water. He sputtered and coughed, spewing liquid from mouth and nostrils. Night had turned to day, and he had to squint against its glare. Hot winds rushed through the swamp, bending trees and tearing leaves loose in green flurries.

“Keep moving!” Minx shouted, for shouting was the only way to be heard above this symphony of the cataclysm. She, too, had taken a spill into the soup. Her face and the curls of her hair were darkened by muddy slime. She started off and pulled Matthew along as he fought to find his balance.

He looked back and saw nothing but white flashes and red centers of flame. It appeared as if the main wall of the fort had been blasted down. The Cymbeline’s thunder was deafening; Matthew’s ears rang like seventeen Sabbath bells and he could feel the continuing detonations in the pit of his stomach. He saw something on fire fly up into the air, and then it too exploded with a bone-jarring report and a flash that nearly burned the eyes blind. Another object rose up, burning, and also exploded in the ash-swirled sky. The barrels, he thought. Some were being blown out of the magazine and detonating overhead. A rain of pieces of flaming wood and chunks of scorched stone was falling around them, splashing heavily into the swamp. “Move! Move!” Minx shouted, up against his ear so he could hear her above the din.

He did not have to be told a third time.

He staggered on, as birds flew for their lives from burning branches. Minx slipped and fell and he pulled her up as she had saved him. A flaming barrel came down on the left and blew trees up from their roots and a geyser of water when it exploded. Part of the thicket over on that side was already burning, and still the barrels were coming down to blast their Cymbeline across the tortured landscape. The heated winds blew back and forth and the shockwaves knocked Matthew and Minx hither and yon as if they were made of flimsy paper. Gray smoke whipped across this battlefield. Perhaps twenty yards ahead of the struggling pair they caught sight of something hanging in the upper branches of a burning tree that might have been a human torso, black as a fistful of coal.

More explosions ravaged the night. The barrel bombs were flying, some to blast their flaming innards overhead and others to crash into the swamp and forest before they detonated. The noise was like the collision of three armies using triple-mouthed cannons, firing in confusion to the north, south, east and west. Another massive blast and belch of red fireballs rose up from the wrecked fort, and suddenly part of a burning wagon came crashing down in front of Minx and Matthew so close their eyebrows were singed.

“This way!” Minx shouted, and grasping his arm she guided him at an angle to the left. He realized she was looking for the road to get them out of this fiery morass, and he followed her gladly and yet still a bit woozy in the head.

They sloshed through the muck with flaming comets whirling overhead and the thunder of explosions making the earth shiver. Matthew looked toward the fort and saw nothing but a pall of smoke with red fires burning within. Good, he thought. If the chemical works was not totally destroyed, the next shipment of Cymbeline surely was. And there had to be enough damage in there to make rebuilding a costly and time-consuming task. Good, he thought again, and narrowly missed getting tangled in thornbranches that had a snake coiled amid the stickers.

They came out upon the road after what seemed a trek of fifteen or twenty minutes. Was the first shade of light showing to the east? It was hard to tell, for Matthew’s eyes were still dazzled. Fires growled and crackled here and there amid the thicket, burning underbrush and trees.

“Can you hear me?” Minx shouted at him, and he nodded. Her face was both stained with mud and ruddy with heat. She stared back for a few seconds at the smoke-covered fort, her eyes glittering with wild emotion between terror and exhilaration.

It was Matthew, then, who first saw the two men with torches stagger onto the road before them. One held a cutlass with a chopping blade about fourteen inches in length. Both men were bloodied by scrapes and cuts, their clothes dirty and dishevelled. Matthew’s first thought was that they had been atop a watchtower that the blast’s winds had knocked to the ground; they looked more fearful than fearsome, yet the sword meant business.

“What happened?” the man in the lead demanded. It was a foolish question, so he asked another: “What are you doing here?”

Minx regarded the men with a tight smile. “What do you think, you idiot? We blew the place to pieces.”

“What?”

“You don’t get anymore questions,” she said, as she reached into her waistcoat for the second knife that was hidden there.

The swordsman took a step forward to strike at Minx, who brought the blade out and started to throw it, but in the next instant all thoughts of edged combat were ended.

The ground shook under their feet.

It was not just a tremor. It was a side-to-side motion that made true the name of Pendulum Island. It was so severe both the two men and Matthew and Minx were knocked to their knees, and in the eerie stillness of its aftermath there was a shrill keening of wind whipping through the trees and in the distance the urgent howling of dogs.

With the second agony of the earth, a crack winnowed along the road and engulfed a shower of gravel and crushed oyster shells.

The man with the sword gave a bleat of terror. He struggled up, dropping his cutlass and torch, and ran along the road in the direction of Templeton, perhaps to see to a wife and child. The second man sat on his knees for a moment more, stunned and blinking, and then he too stood up and, following his torchlight, began to shakily walk away from Matthew and Minx as if strolling through a dreamscape. Or rather, a nightmare, for he hadn’t gotten very far where there was a ghastly low rumble of stones grinding together in the troubled guts of the island and he was whipsawed down again as the ground shifted under his boots. This time the shaking went on for perhaps six seconds, an eternity, and when it was over the man stood up again and continued determinedly walking away until his torchlight was only a faint glow.

Minx got to her feet, and so did Matthew. Her voice was choked with tension when she said, “We’ve got to—”

“Yes,” he answered, for the devil’s breakfast was being served early this day. He picked up the swordsman’s fallen torch and cutlass, thinking that both might be useful in the hours ahead.

They reached the end of the road, where the skulls had hung before the earth’s shaking had dislodged them, and they spent some time retracing their path and searching for the horses that had obviously torn loose from their moorings and were no longer there. They had no opportunity to go to Falco’s house; either the captain was already getting the Nightflyer in order, or he was not. Matthew was betting his life, and the lives of others, on Falco being true to his word. They therefore began walking toward Templeton as quickly as they could manage, and both noted the fissures—some the width of a hand—that had opened in the road. From time to time small tremors shook the earth, and it was clear to Matthew that the blast of Cymbeline had awakened the foul spirits of Pendulum’s past.

In Templeton, the town was illuminated by the blaze of torches and the street was crowded with citizens if not fully terrified then well on the way. Here and there a brave soul tried to calm the throng, but there was the sense of entrapment on an island doomed by its own history. Wagons were pulling out, loaded with family belongings, on the way to the local harbor wherever that might be. Minx motioned Matthew over to a wagon that was for the moment abandoned by its owner, and within another thirty seconds she was cracking a whip over the team’s heads and the horses were carrying herself and the providence rider away from Templeton toward the castle of Professor Fell.

The moon sat on the horizon. Early light stained the eastern sky. Minx’s whip was urgent. The castle came into view, also torch-lit. Matthew clutched his own torch and the sword, and he was thinking furiously that he might have to slash some Thacker flesh to get Fancy loose from their grip.

They pulled up in front to find the entry unguarded. The tremors obviously had sent the servants off to tend to their own families. Matthew saw fresh cracks in the white columns of the porte-cochere. Minx dropped the reins and drew her remaining knife, for she had business this morning with Aria Chillany.

Augustus Pons, Toy and Cesar Sabroso were in the candle-lit foyer, wearing their night clothes and expressions of terrified bewilderment. “What’s happening out there?” Pons asked the two arrivals as they went past to the staircase. He had seen the sword and the knife and their swamp-dirtied clothes, and he added to this question another query in the voice of a frightened child: “Is it safe?”

“No,” Minx said. “It is definitely not safe. Where is Madam Chillany?”

“Upstairs. All the way to the third floor. She and the Thackers.”

“And Fancy?” Matthew asked.

“With them. They were going to the library’s balcony for a view. Something exploded. Didn’t you hear it?”

“Yes,” Matthew said, his hearing still an issue of bells ringing. “We did hear it.”

“The whole place shook,” said Toy. His eyes were huge. “It was like the end of the world.”

“For some,” Minx said, like a grim promise. With candlelight glinting from the blade of her knife, she started up the stairs two at a time with Matthew at her heels. Matthew saw that a number of fissures had appeared in the staircase wall, and the stained-glass window depicting Temple with his bloody and haunted eyes had collapsed upon the risers as so much meaningless debris. Before they reached the top, another tremor made the castle groan like a sick old man in an uneasy sleep, and somewhere in the walls there was a pistolshot crack of stones breaking under God’s own pressure.

Matthew figured only the Thackers would be stupid enough to get to the highest balcony of Fell’s castle while an earthquake was in progress. Madam Chillany was obviously still addled in the head from the doctor’s loss of head. As Minx pushed open the pair of polished oakwood doors, Matthew found exactly what he knew must be happening: the Thackers in rumpled clothing, drinking from the bottles of wine and spirits that had been replenished on the table, and Fancy in a dark green gown standing between them, staring through the open balcony doors at the somber gray light that advanced upon the sea.

“Oh ho!” said Jack, wavering on his feet with a bottle tipped to his lips.

“Boyo,” Mack added, sitting sprawled upon one of the black leather chairs with a bottle in one hand and another on the floor beside him. Obviously neither brother turned away the opportunity to drink, even at the end of the world.

Matthew noted that the shaking of Castle Fell had dislodged a few dozen volumes from their shelves. The treasures lay underfoot. They had been trampled on by Thacker boots, for ripped pages and torn bindings were in evidence like so many wounded soldiers.

“Where is Aria Chillany?” Minx demanded.

“Was here,” said Mack.

“Ain’t now,” said Jack.

“I have to find her,” she told Matthew. “I have to finish it for him. Do you understand?”

Matthew nodded. “I can handle this. Go. But for God’s sake be—”

“I am always careful,” she interrupted. “For my own sake.” Then she turned and left the library, and he was in company with the two animals and the young woman he must set free from their grasp. “Didn’t you hear that blowup?” Jack asked. “Place shook like a whore with the crabs.” His bleary eyes aimed toward the cutlass. “What the fuck are you up to? No good?”

“Actually,” Matthew replied, “I am up to good. I am leaving this island within the hour, and I’m taking her with me.” He motioned with the torch at the Indian girl, who had turned toward him. She was expressionless, her beautiful face perfectly composed. Her raven’s-black hair moved slightly with the breeze that came through the balcony’s entrance. She was waiting, and she knew he was not leaving without her.

“Damn,” said Jack. He shook his head. His smile was bitter. “You are one piece of work, Spadey.”

“My name is not Nathan Spade. I am Matthew Corbett, and I want you to remember who bested you.”

That statement caused a shock of silence. Then, slowly, Mack stood up one of the bottles in his hand. The flesh seemed to have drawn more tightly over his facial bones and his eyes glittered. “Corbett, ya little shit…I say…you ain’t takin’ Fancy nowhere…”

“…boyo,” Jack finished, with a gritting of his teeth.

“Will you come over here, please?” Matthew asked the girl.

With that, Mack Thacker broke the bottle on the table’s edge. Gripping the back of Fancy’s neck he put the jagged edges to the side of her face. She winced, but otherwise did not move.

“Come take her,” he said. “‘Cause in another minute, she ain’t gonna be good for nobody.”

And so saying, the younger Thacker began to draw the broken glass across the beautiful girl’s cheek and the blood welled up bright and red.

Jack snorted a laugh. The girl shivered, her sad gaze on Matthew; one hand pushed weakly against Mack’s arm, but she had seemingly come to the end of her rope and was all played out.

Matthew gripped torch and cutlass and stepped forward to the fight.

Minx Cutter knew which door belonged to Madam Chillany’s room. She knocked on it, waited for the knob to turn, and then she kicked it as hard as she could kick.

The door flew open and Aria Chillany fell backward into the room, toppling over a white-upholstered chair. Minx walked in, taking note that the other woman was fully dressed in a gray gown and upon the bed was a bag she’d been packing. It appeared Madam Chillany had been about to leave the castle, possibly to find any safer place she could. By the eight tapers of the overhead chandelier cracks had appeared in the walls and chunks of plaster had fallen from the ceiling.

“What’s wrong with you?” Aria sat up, rubbing a bloodied lip bitten by a tooth. “Are you insane?” Then she caught sight of the knife.

“No, not insane. Just determined. Madam Chillany,” Minx said, “I’m going to kill you.”

“What?”

“Kill you,” Minx repeated. “For murdering my Nathan.”

There was a harsh inrush of breath.

“Yes,” came the reply to that statement. “Nathan was my lover. My love,” she clarified. “You killed him. Matthew told me so.”

“Matthew? What…”

“No more time for lies. Stand up and take this in your black heart.”

Aria Chillany came up off the floor. Her eyes were wild. With a sweeping motion she grasped the leather handle of the bag on the bed and swung it at Minx, who stepped back out of its way. Then Aria’s hand went into the bag and came out with a short but deadly blade of her own, and flinging the bag at Minx she followed it with her body and the knife flailing at the other woman’s face.

“Come on, boyo,” Mack Thacker taunted, as the broken glass sliced Fancy’s cheek. Matthew strode toward him with the sword upraised, and suddenly Jack Thacker threw his bottle at Matthew’s head and instead hit his left shoulder as Matthew dodged aside. Then Jack gave a strangled cry of rage and, his face swollen with blood, rushed across the room at Matthew.

Fancy—the pretty girl who had sat alone for so very long—came to life. She grasped Mack’s arm and sank her teeth into his hand, and he shouted in pain and grabbed a handful of her hair. The broken glass lodged against her throat. She kicked into his shin and tore loose from him, as brother Jack collided with Matthew and fought him for both the sword and the torch. A knee rose to smash into Matthew’s groin and the orange-haired head thrust forward to bust against Matthew’s skull, but Matthew avoided the blows he’d known were coming and swung Jack away from him with the strength of desperation.

“Kill him! Kill him!” Mack hollered, as the Indian girl leaped upon his back and locked an arm around his throat from behind. He flung her off and came at Matthew with the broken bottle.

But before Mack could reach him Pendulum Island, in its agonized throes, shifted once more. This time the library’s planked floor shook beneath their feet like—as Toy had said—the end of the world. There was a cracking noise like the bones of a behemoth being broken to pieces. Something deep in the guts of the castle made a hollow ringing noise like an exotic gong. The balcony windows shattered. The faces of the cherubs in the ceiling’s clouds fell away, exposing ugly gray plaster. Matthew was knocked to his knees and both brothers skittered to the floor. The torch rolled away from his fingers, setting fire to the scattered volumes.

And then the truly horrific happened, for in this quaking of tormented earth the very foundation of Fell’s castle was loosened, the seams of broken stone could not hold, and suddenly the entire library room pitched at a twenty-degree angle toward the cliff’s edge and the sea below and the books flew off the shelves like the flapping of paper bats.

Matthew, the Thacker brothers and the fallen Fancy slid along the crooked floor through the battlefield of burning books. The balcony itself began to split away from its stone bindings with the noise of small cannon fire and plummet piece by piece into the ocean. The window curtains were whirled away and downward as if into a vortex, but they snagged in the hanging balustrade. Fell’s castle had become a construction of torn parchment and forgeries, for all its strength against the earthquake. The gray morning became an open mouth ready to swallow Matthew, the Thackers and Fancy. Matthew saw the remaining stone seahorse topple down on its last ride. The library’s furniture and burning books tumbled around the sliding figures, and the problem-solver from New York reached for the bloodied Fancy as she scrabbled for a grip on the splintered planks. He caught her right arm with his left hand, but together they were going over the edge.

When the worst of the earthquake hit, Minx Cutter and Aria Chillany were locked in combat. They staggered around the room, grasping at each other’s knife hands and trying to get their own blades free. As the floor heaved and the walls cracked, their battle did not falter for death had entered the room and must be satisfied.

Madam Chillany spat into Minx’s eyes and tried to trip her but Minx was too nimble for that. They kicked at each other as the deadly blades were checked in stalemate. Then Minx drove her enemy backward against the dresser so hard the breath burst from Aria’s lungs and pain stitched her face. Aria pushed back with frantic strength and tried to wrench her knife hand free, but Minx had it gripped. With a scream of rage Madam Chillany took the risk of releasing Minx’s wrist to scratch at the gold-hued eyes and drew blood across the cheekbone. The knife came at her, a wild and unaimed blow, and grazed Aria’s shoulder.

Then the two women separated and, as Fell’s castle groaned and shrieked in its agonies, they searched for an opening the better to stab the other to death.

Matthew used the cutlass.

He got his boots turned to give himself some friction on the floor, and with the strength of the damned he chopped the sharp edge into one of the floor planks. With the other hand he held onto Fancy, stopping their slide toward the hanging ruins of the balcony and the sea below.

Then a weight grasped his ankles and nearly broke his arm from its socket as he held onto the sword’s leather grip. Matthew looked backward to see the sweating red visage of Jack Thacker as the thug crawled up over his legs. Mack had caught himself on an edge of broken plank and had hold of one of Jack’s ankles. For a moment Matthew thought his spine would break as the weight pulled on him, and he was near losing his grip on the cutlass. The sweat had burst out like a mist around his face. He was close to letting go…he feared he couldn’t take the weight an instant more, his shoulder was about to be pulled from its socket and the cutlass was starting to work free.

Fancy kicked Mack in the face with a sturdy shoe. She did it a second time and then a third and a fourth, into the nose and mouth. Mack’s features became rearranged. He spat out a mouthful of blood and a couple of broken teeth and reached with one arm for Fancy’s legs to pin them. She squirmed away from him and kicked him once more, in the throat, as he flailed at her. He made a garbled, hideous noise that sounded like Brother spoken from the depths of despair, and then he blinked heavily and wearily as he lost his grip on Jack’s legs and slid away, through the fiery pages of torn books, through the glitter of broken glass from the windows, and out upon the tilted balcony.

“Brother!” Jack screamed in response, the voice of human agony.

Mack Thacker gripped hold of one of the curtains that hung from the balustrade. He swung back and forth for a moment, as much a pendulum as Fell’s island. Then he was betrayed by the bitch called Fate, perhaps a female he had alternately wooed and scorned during the course of his dissolute life. She had the last laugh, for the curtain tore and with his fingers still locked in the fabric Mack fell toward the sea trailing a piercing cry. Upon his head followed several pieces of stone balusters, a nasty conking to be had while broken-toothed, bloody-mouthed and throat-mangled.

“Brother!” Jack called again, and Matthew saw tears burst from the dazed green eyes.

But then the elder Thacker righted his senses and refound his rage, and he began to crawl up Matthew’s back as the cutlass quivered on the edge of breaking loose.

Aria Chillany grasped a handful of Minx’s hair and flung her back against a fissured wall. This time the breath burst from Minx’s lungs, and then Aria came at her with the knife. Minx had forgotten that Aria’s usefulness to Professor Fell also involved murder, and perhaps she too had been trained in the bloody arts by Lyra Sutch. The knife flashed out and caught Minx’s waistcoat as she twisted aside, but she could feel the blade kiss her ribs. Then Minx struck out but Aria had already retreated. When the women came together again it was a blurred and confused battle of life and death, all artistry of knives forgotten and nothing in its place but the savagery of survival.

Aria’s blade rose up and slashed. A cut streaked across Minx’s forehead. She countered with a strike into Madam Chillany’s left shoulder that brought forth a shrill cry of pain. Then they were flailing and staggering, striking at each other as best they could. Aria’s teeth snapped at Minx’s left ear and then sought the flesh of her cheek. Minx hit the other woman in the jaw with her free hand and as Aria fell back she stepped forward into another swing of Madam Chillany’s blade that missed opening her throat by a half-inch.

The chill madam’s eyes flashed with murder, as blood stained her mouth. She feinted once, twice and then drove in again when Minx tried to counter the second move. Instead of retreating, Minx measured Aria’s stride and also stepped forward, bringing her knife up for the blow. They crashed together, Aria’s blade seeking an eye but instead slicing a cut across Minx’s left cheek and into the hairline, and they spun around in a mad circle for a few seconds like dancers at a bedlam ball.

Minx knew.

She felt her adversary falter. Felt her legs start to give way. And then the circle of the death dance ceased, and Aria stared at Minx with a yellowed face, her mouth opening in a gasp of shock. The sapphire eyes moved to look down upon the knife that had found her heart, and the blood that was streaming out upon the gray gown.

Minx twisted it.

Just because she could.

Aria’s knife rose up in a trembling hand, to thrust itself into the hollow of Minx’s throat.

Before it could find its target Minx reached up and grasped the wrist, and she said in a rasping voice, “You are done.”

Aria smiled thinly. She spat bloody foam into Minx’s face.

And then Madam Chillany’s eyes began to recede into their sockets, and in another few seconds she was just a dead woman who had not yet given up her soul to that which waited on the other side of the partition. Minx let her wrist go. The knife fell free to the floor. Minx placed her hand underneath Madam Chillany’s chin and pushed her backward off the cliff of life. But she left the blade in her heart for good measure.

Jack was a nimble climber. He came up over Matthew’s back and hooked an arm around the throat, at the same time clawing at Matthew’s eyes.

“You bastard,” said Fancy, and some certainty in her voice made Jack look at her. In time to see the torch she had stretched for and retrieved from the floor smash itself into his face. “Lick this,” she told him.

Sparks flew around Matthew’s head and bit his scalp. He heard some of his own hair crisp. Heard also Jack Thacker’s scream as the torch flamed his eyes out and seared his lips like pieces of grilled beef. Then Jack’s arm was off Matthew’s neck and his fingers were tending to his own blinded orbs, and with a shrug of his shoulders Matthew pushed the remaining Thacker brother off his body and away. Matthew looked back as the Irish rowdy slid down onto the sagging balcony, Jack’s face scorched red under the orange hair with the sprig of gray in it and the swollen eyes sealed shut. With a cry that might have been both pain and defiance Jack went over the edge, and as he went the rest of the balcony crumbled after him with a similar noise. As a last comment upon the life and death of Jack Thacker, Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone flung the torch toward his watery grave.

Thirty-One

HOLD on,” Matthew said. He could smell his own sweat and burned hair. He felt a hundred years old, but now was not the time to give in nor give up. He had said this because he felt, also, the hand of Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone trying to open the fingers that had seized her arm.

“Matthew,” she said quietly, tasting the name for the first time.

He tightened his grip both on her and the cutlass. Above them the ceiling of clouds and cherubs had begun to resemble a ravaged Hell rather than the repose of Heaven. Around them the burning books flamed and at any other moment Matthew might have wept for them.

“I can’t go home,” she said, quieter still.

“We can get up there.” Matthew saw places in the splintered planks that might serve as hand and foot-holds to climb up to the door. The ceiling was beginning to fall in. The clouds were heavier than they looked. Time was quickly running out, for tremors still disturbed the cracked walls and tilted floor. “Come on,” he said. “We have to go.”

“No,” she said. “That way is for you, not for me.”

He peered into her face. The blood crawled along her cheek, but she seemed neither to notice nor care; her soul had already turned away from the flesh that contained it.

“We’re both going up,” he vowed, aware that it was only a matter of seconds before either the ceiling collapsed upon them or the cutlass’s blade pulled loose.

“I came to your room,” said the girl, “to give you the only gift I could. Now I need you to give me a gift. Let me go, Matthew.”

“I won’t. No.”

“You must. I want to go dreaming now. I want to wash myself clean. Don’t you understand?”

“You’re alive!” he said.

But she shook her head, sadly still.

“No,” she answered, “I am not.”

And he did understand. He hated the understanding of it, but he did. She was part of nature, had been defiled and debased, and she wished to return to what she had been. Perhaps her feeling about death was completely contrary to his…or perhaps she just believed in a better afterlife than he. Whatever, he knew she wanted this gift…and yet…how could he open his fingers and give it to her?

“There’s a ship waiting.” He prayed to God it was still waiting, for the gray light was strengthening and the first ruddy glow had appeared to paint the waves. The sweat was on his face, his shoulders and back were cramping, and he couldn’t hold this position much longer. To emphasize the danger and lack of time, a piece of the ceiling as big as a kettle crashed down upon the tilted floor a few feet beyond the girl.

“It waits for you,” she answered, her face calm, her eyes soft and yearning for peace.

“No,” he said. “No, we’re both going.”

“Matthew…whoever you are, and whatever you are…you must know that being free means…I make my own choice.”

“The wrong choice.”

“Mine,” she said.

Her fingers began to work again, at his. Hers were strong. She stared into his face as she worked, and he resisted. Yet as his fingers were pushed away, he began not to try so very hard.

“I will find him,” she said. “I will tell him about you. He will be very glad to hear.”

“Who?” Matthew asked.

“You know,” she told him, and then Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone smiled.

And slid away.

As she went toward the edge she turned her body, and Matthew saw her go into the air as if diving into a new life, one he could not possibly understand. She went silently and beautifully, even as he cried out as if struck to the heart. Which he was.

She disappeared in a billow of dark green, like an arrow returning to a forest unknown. And perhaps her forest did lie beyond the blue silence of the deep, and in that awesome place beyond the comprehension of Matthew Corbett she would return to who she had been, proud and innocent and clean.

He did weep. Not for the burning books and the ideas of men that flew away on their wings of ash, but for the Indian girl who had just taken flight from this world to the next.

“Climb up! Hurry!”

Matthew looked up toward the door. Minx Cutter stood there, with a bloodied piece of bedsheet pressed to her forehead. Another cut on her left cheek leaked red. She wavered on her feet, her strength nearly gone. Matthew reasoned that Aria Chillany had gone to a reunion with Jonathan Gentry, which would be her small and nasty room in the diseased mansion of Hell. It appeared to him that Minx was holding herself up with willpower alone, and on that account she was a formidable figure.

“Climb up!” she repeated, urgency in her voice, as various sounds of cracking stone came from the walls and ceiling. Another large chunk fell, to Matthew’s right. White dust powdered the air. It was time to get out of here, and quickly.

The first reach was the most dangerous. He had to let go of the cutlass and grip the edge of a splintered plank. Then he started up using similar hand-and-foot holds that were precarious at best. When he got near enough to Minx she leaned down and grasped his outstretched hand, and pulled him up into the warped corridor.

“The bag of gold,” Matthew told her. She already had gone to her room to get the forged orders for the release of the Nightflyer, complete with the professor’s octopus stamp, but it was doubtful such a paper would be needed today. The staircase was still intact, though the ceiling was falling to pieces, and on the second floor Matthew took a moment to enter his room—its floor crooked and the left wall partially collapsed—and retrieve the moneybag, which he shoved into his shirt. He realized then that the room to the left of his, though it had a balcony the same as his own, was not really a room and had been empty, according to the map he’d been given. The collapsed wall revealed another staircase curving down. It had to be, he realized, the stairway to Professor Fell’s domain. Not by happenstance had Matthew been given the quarters next to it.

He entered the corridor again, where Minx waited. Without hesitation he kicked the next door in. It swung open easily, for the quake had already sprung its lock.

“What is this?” she asked.

“You should go out to the wagon,” he told her. “Keep anyone else from taking it. I’m going down this way.”

“Why? What’s down there?”

“Him,” he said, and she understood.

“I’ll wait only for a short while. Falco might have taken the ship out already.”

“If he has, he has. We’ll find another way off.”

She nodded and peered into the dark staircase. “Good fortune,” she said, and then she turned and went her own path.

Matthew couldn’t blame her. He didn’t want to go down those steps either, into that darkness, but it had to be done.

He descended. A few torches had been set into the walls, but they were all extinguished. The staircase shook beneath his feet and stone dust rained from above. The castle was dying, perhaps to join the rest of Somers Town in its underwater sleep. Fate, it seemed, had caught up with Fell’s uneasy paradise. Still Matthew descended, past the first floor and into the castle’s guts. Or bowels, as might be more proper. The staircase curved to the left, the risers cut from rough stone. He came upon two torches still burning, and he paused to take one of them from its socket. Then, his confidence made more solid by the light, he continued on his downward trek.

A gate of black iron was set at the bottom of the stairs, but it was unlocked. Matthew pushed through and winced as the hinges squealed. Another torch burned from a wall in the narrow corridor ahead, and Matthew followed its illumination. Above his head there were nearly human groans as stone shifted against stone; even here, at this depth, the castle had been mortally wounded. Deep cracks grooved the walls and floor. Matthew walked on, pace after careful pace. He came to a branch in the corridor and decided to follow the straighter route. It led him to the wooden slab of a door that hung crooked on its hinges. He pulled it open and found a spacious white-walled sitting room and a candelabra with three tapers still burning atop a writing desk. The ceiling, riddled with cracks, was painted pale blue in emulation of the island’s sky. The furniture was tasteful, expensive, and also painted white with gold trim. Matthew went through another doorway and found a bedroom with a large, canopied white bed. His attention was drawn to what hung on a number of pegs on the wall next to that bed: the tricorn hats Professor Fell had worn on his visits to Matthew’s room, a white wig the same as worn by the castle’s servants, and a battered straw hat that might have been the topper for any of the island’s farmers.

He felt time was short, but he had to open and search a chest of drawers in the bedroom. He discovered in the drawers not only the elegant suits Fell had worn as well as the opaque cowl and the flesh-colored cloth gloves, but the sea-blue uniform of a servant. Also there were regular breeches with patched knees and white shirts that appeared worn and in need of stitching. All would have fit a slender man a few inches taller than Matthew. In addition, there were the shoes: two pair polished and gentlemanly, one pair scuffed and dirt-crusted.

He began to believe that Professor Fell at times dressed as a servant to move about the house and as a regular native to move about the island. Which begged the question…was Fell a native himself? A man of color? And perhaps Templeton…his son…had been harassed and beaten to death on a London street partly because his skin was cream-colored, and darker than that of the average English boy? There was a reason, Matthew realized, why Temple’s portrait had been done in colored glass.

But the real question was…where was Professor Fell now?

The deep noise of grinding stones told Matthew he had to find a way out of here, or retrace his path to the staircase. He went through the doorway out into the corridor again, his torch held before him, and started back the way he’d come. He was not very far along when he caught sight of another torch coming toward him, and a giant figure in white robes and a white turban illuminated in the yellow light.

Sirki stopped. They faced each other at a distance of about thirty feet.

“Hello, young sir,” said the East Indian giant, and the light he held made the diamonds in his front teeth sparkle.

“Hello,” Matthew said, his voice echoing back and forth between the walls.

“We have suffered quite a mishap here. Quite an explosion, up at the far point of the island. Do you know anything about that?”

“I felt it, of course.”

“Of course. I see your stockings are very dirty. Muddy, perhaps? Did you get through that swamp all by yourself, Matthew?” Sirki waved a hand in his direction. “No, I don’t believe you did. Who helped you? It’s not only me asking. The professor would like to know. When that blast happened, his first thought was of you. And of course you were not in your room. Neither was Miss Cutter in hers. Now…why would she have helped you?”

“She likes me,” Matthew said.

“Oh. Yes. Well, then.” Sirki withdrew the sawtoothed blade from its sheath in his robes and walked forward a few steps. Matthew retreated the same number. “The professor,” said Sirki, “has left this place. He instructed me to find you, and when I went to your room I found that the stairway was revealed. You had to come down here, didn’t you? I am also instructed to tell you…that your services are no longer needed, and unfortunately Professor Fell will be unable to pay you your three thousand pounds.”

“I thought he might wind up withdrawing that offer.”

“Hm. He asked me to tell you that he will not be very much damaged by this little incident. Certainly he would not have wished this, but he has many irons in the fire.” Sirki inspected the brutal edge of his blade. “He is sorrowful for you, though. That you chose to hurt him out of your…how did he put it?…your blind stupidity. Ah, Matthew!” He advanced a few steps nearer, and again Matthew retreated. The hideous weapon gleamed with reflected torchlight. “To have come so far and be on the verge of such greatness…and then to fall back again, as dirty as the swamp.”

“The swamp,” Matthew said, “is cleaner than the professor’s soul.”

“He wishes me to cut off some part of you and bring it to him to demonstrate that you are dead,” said the giant. “What would you suggest, young sir?” To the silence that followed, Sirki smiled and said, “Let me decide.”

He strode forward, demonic in the torchlight. The sawtoothed blade was upraised, capable of horrendous injury with one swing. Matthew backed away, his heart hammering. He thrust the torch forward to keep the beast at bay.

“No use in that,” Sirki said almost gently. “I shall put that down your throat if I please.”

And Matthew knew he could. Therefore Matthew chose the better part of valor. He turned and ran for his life.

Sirki came after him, taking tremendous strides. The branch in the corridor was ahead. Matthew took the untrodden way, running as fast as he could. Sirki was right behind him, the white robes billowing like the wings of a deadly angel.

The corridor suddenly widened into a space where there sat two simple chairs with dark stains of what might have been blood upon and beneath them. Gory chains still lay about the chairs, but there were no bodies. Smythe and Wilson had already gone to the tearing beak and eight arms of Agonistes. Matthew’s light displayed three cells. He was in the dungeon under the dining hall, probably used to confine pirates and other criminals of note. In the center cell stood Zed, bald and bearded and wearing his ragged clothing. Zed had his hands gripped around the bars, and when he saw Matthew the mouth in the tribal-tattooed face gave a mangled roar of recognition.

Matthew heard Sirki coming. He saw a ring bearing three keys hanging on the wall. Sirki was almost into the chamber. Matthew dropped the torch to the floor and picked up one of the chairs. He threw it at Sirki’s legs as the giant came through the corridor, and Sirki crashed down upon the stones.

Matthew plucked the keys off the wall and ran to Zed’s cell. The first key did not fit. He looked back and saw Sirki up on his feet, lumbering toward him. The wicked blade flashed at Matthew’s head, but he had already ducked. Sparks flew up from the meeting of sawteeth and iron bars. Matthew threw the ring of keys between the bars into Zed’s cage, and then he got hold of the fallen torch and backed warily away as Sirki advanced upon him.

“This can go more easily for you,” Sirki promised. “I’ve grown to respect you. I can make your death very quick.”

“I’d rather stretch my life out a bit longer.”

“I’m sorry, but that will be im—”

Sirki was interrupted by the noise of the cell door banging open. When the giant looked in that direction to see Zed emerging from the cage Matthew stepped in and struck the torch at the side of his head, but Sirki had already recovered and deflected the torch with his own. Then he whirled to meet Zed with his blade…an instant too late, for Zed’s fist met Sirki’s mouth in a jarring smack of flesh and bone and though the knife swung viciously at Zed’s chest the Ga had darted away with admirable agility.

Sirki was caught between Matthew with his torch and Zed with his fists. He slashed first at one and then the other, and both kept their distance. Then Zed plucked up one of the lengths of chain from a chair. Sirki grinned in the flaring light. Blood was on his mouth, and he was minus a diamond as well as a front tooth.

“Ah!” he said. “I do get to kill you, after all.”

Matthew lunged at him with the torch from the right side, aiming at the knife hand. Zed swung the chain and struck Sirki a blow across the left shoulder. Sirki spun toward Matthew and rushed him in an attempt to cancel the weaker threat, but Matthew swept the torch past Sirki’s face to keep him away. Then the chain whipped out again across Sirki’s back, and now the giant in an instant of what might have been panic threw his torch at Zed and followed it with his own huge body and the deadly blade upraised.

Matthew had already seen, in the Cock’a’tail tavern in New York the October before, what Zed could do with a chain. Now Zed stood his ground and lashed the chain out; it curled around the forearm of Sirki’s knife hand, and just that fast Zed used the momentum to swing the giant crashing against the bars of the nearest cage. Sirki did not give up the knife, and grasping the chain with his free hand he hauled Zed toward himself like reeling in a hooked fish.

Zed’s feet slid along the stones. He tried to right himself but the giant’s pull was too strong. The knife waited with what seemed to be eager anticipation.

Then Matthew struck Sirki across the left side of the head with a second chain he’d picked up. The killer’s turban unravelled from the blow. Sirki’s eyes glazed for perhaps two seconds, his knife wavered and in this space of time Zed was upon him.

They grappled for the blade. It was the battle of the giants, brute against brute. Zed smashed Sirki in the face again with a heavy fist. Sirki grasped hold of Zed’s throat with his free hand, an enormous implement of murder, and squeezed hard enough to make the cords stand out. They whirled toward Matthew in their fight and hit him with their shoulders, picking him up off his feet, throwing him to the floor and leaving him breathless in the winds of violence. He was amazed to see Sirki actually lift Zed off the floor with the hand at his throat. Zed hammered at Sirki’s face and head while grasping the knife hand to keep those sawteeth from flesh. They slammed against the opposite wall so hard Matthew thought it would complete the destruction of the castle that the earthquake had begun. From above pieces of stone fell, and drifts of dust. Still the two fought on, Sirki’s fingers digging into Zed’s throat and Zed reshaping the giant’s features with the mallet of his fist.

Zed began to make a gasping, gagging sound, and Matthew saw his blows weakening. Sirki was about to defeat the Ga, an unthinkable proposition. Matthew’s torch had spun away in the collision and lay beyond the fighters. He had to decide what to do, and quickly. Though he was afraid out of his wits he took a running start and leaped upon the giant’s back, at the same time looping the chain around Sirki’s neck and squeezing as if his life depended upon it.

Sirki thrashed wildly but Matthew hung on. He was a rider of a different nature this time, and damned if he’d be thrown. The giant’s hand left Zed’s throat to reach back for Matthew’s hair, but suddenly there was a crunching noise and Zed had attacked the knife hand with ten fingers. He succeeded here where he had failed in their battle on Oyster Island, for Sirki’s knuckles sounded like walnuts being stomped under rough boots. The knife clattered to the stones, but just as quickly Sirki kicked it out of Zed’s reach. Matthew still hung on, as the wounded giant pitched and bucked. Zed hit Sirki so hard in the jaw that the man careened back and nearly broke Matthew’s spine against the wall. Then Matthew slithered off, his breath and strength gone, and through a red haze he saw Zed take his place by leaping upon Sirki’s back. The Ga grasped the chain and began to strangle the giant, the muscles in his forearms strained and quivering. Sirki fought back by slamming Zed continually against the wall with blows that Matthew thought must be near breaking bones, yet Zed would not be thrown off nor denied his moment of revenge.

The chain sunk into the flesh of Sirki’s throat. The giant’s eyes bulged and blood streamed from his nostrils. His mouth opened in a hideous gasp, and Matthew saw that the second diamond-studded tooth had been knocked out.

Still Sirki fought. Still Zed clung to his back and choked him with the chain, which had now nearly disappeared. Matthew thought with horror that in another moment Sirki’s head was going to be cleaved off by the chain. Sweat stood out in beads on the faces of both men, and then Sirki’s eyes began to bleed.

Still Sirki crashed Zed against the wall, though the fury was weaker. Still the muscles of the Ga’s arms worked. Sirki began to emit a high keening sound, an eerie gasping for departing life itself. His eyes were wide and wild and as red as the sun going down.

Then Sirki’s legs buckled and he fell to his knees. Suddenly he was not so gigantic. Zed stayed astride him. The Ga’s teeth were gritted, his huge shoulders thrust forward, his body trembling with the effort of delivering death to one who would not accept it. Sirki made an effort to stand. He got one foot planted and, incredibly, began to lift himself and Zed off the floor. But the pressure from Zed’s hands and the chain never faltered, and suddenly Sirki’s face took on a waxen appearance, the eyes pools of blood, and from his gasping mouth a dark and swollen tongue emerged. It quivered rapidly, like the tail of a rattlesnake.

Something crunched inside Sirki’s neck. The head hung at an angle, as Gentry’s had upon being sawed off at the dinner table. The giant’s body shivered, as if feeling the chill of the grave. Matthew saw that the hideous eyes were sightless. At last Sirki’s spirit seemed to flee the body, for the keening gasp ceased on a broken note to go along with the broken neck.

Zed let go of the chain, which was buried somewhere in there. He climbed off Sirki’s back. For a moment the giant remained on his knees, obstinant far beyond the end. Then the corpse pitched forward and the stone floor added a cruel smashing to the twisted face.

Zed crumpled to his own knees and released a shuddered moan. He was all used up.

But the stone dust was falling now in greater volume. Matthew heard a dozen cracking noises from above. Suddenly a piece of stone the size of Sirki’s dead body crashed down on the other side of the dungeon, followed by smaller bits of rubble.

“We have to get out!” Matthew shouted, and standing up he grasped hold of one of the Ga’s arms to pull him to his feet, a task he could accomplish only in his most boastful dreams.

Language barrier or not, Zed fully understood. He nodded. Something on the floor nearby caught his attention and he scooped it up before Matthew could see what it was. Then, getting up on his own power, he took Matthew by the back of his collar and pulled him into another corridor at the far right of the room. It was dark in here and Matthew could see nothing. In a few seconds Zed stopped. There was the noise of a bolt slamming back. Zed pushed forward. A heavy door opened into gray morning light. The garden lay before them, and a pathway toward the front of the castle. Now Matthew took the lead, urging Zed to follow.

Matthew fully expected Minx to be gone, but she was still waiting at the wagon and tending her wounds with the bloody cloth. “Did you enjoy your wanderings?” she snapped at him, though there was some relief in her voice. “You damned fool!” she added, and then she took stock of the Ga. “Who is this?”

“My new bodyguard,” said Matthew.

Minx used the whip to spur the team into motion. As they took off at a gallop along the road to the harbor, there came a noise like the discordant shrieking of a chorus of demons. Matthew and Zed looked back to see a shimmer of dust rising up around Castle Fell. Suddenly part of the cliff itself broke away, and the entire castle tilted toward the sea. The cobra head of one turret toppled, then a second and a third. Pieces of red slate flew like gulls. Every arched window that had not already broken shattered in an instant. With a tremendous, ungodly grinding of catastrophic forces fully half the castle tore away from its own tortured stones and pitched downward into the waves, leaving furniture hanging from rooms and splintered stairways leading to no destination but the somber sky.

“My God,” Matthew whispered.

Zed gave a rough grunt that might have been accord.

Minx Cutter had never looked back. “To Hell with all of ’em,” she said, and she lashed the team for greater speed.

Thirty-Two

MATTHEW realized that miracles did happen. The Nightflyer, as beautiful a ship as he had ever seen, was still docked. Minx drove the wagon nearly up to the gangplank. Any harbormaster either had not arrived here today or had left to see to his family.

“Damn if you people aren’t prompt,” Falco sneered from the deck, his voice as booming as any cannon and his twisted cane propped against his right shoulder. “Did you stop to eat your corncakes?”

Minx went up the plank first, followed by the Ga and then Matthew. There were a few men hauling lines and working on deck, but not nearly the crew that had brought them over. “I rounded up twenty-six men,” Falco told Matthew, as he lit his clay pipe with a small taper. “Four of those haven’t arrived, and three others decided they weren’t going to leave their wives and children after that damn tremble started. I said to bring them all along, but they couldn’t get their belongings together fast enough to suit me. They may show up yet, but so far we’ve got a crew of nineteen men on a ship that operates with forty. That means you, the Ga, and the bleeding lady will have to work.” He frowned at Minx through a pall of smoke. “What the hell did you get into? A knife fight?”

Minx just laughed as if this were the funniest thing she’d ever heard, and her laughter rang out across the ship like church bells. Then she winced and gave a very unladylike curse, because her face hurt like hell.

“I do have someone on board who can sew stitches,” said the captain. “Myself.”

“Matthew!”

He recognized that voice, all right.

Berry had emerged from the doorway that led below. She was wearing a gray cloak over the crab-stained sleeping gown. Her feet were bare and dirty. Her hair was tangled, her eyes swollen from sleepless worry. She looked a mess. She crossed the deck toward the new arrivals, and she looked hopefully and expectantly at Matthew. She started to reach for him, but something about his posture and attitude stopped the gesture.

“You can thank Miss Grigsby,” said Falco, “for our still being docked. She said you would come, no matter what. She believes in you, Mr. Corbett. More than I do, it seems, because as you can see we have two longboats tied up ready to row us out of the harbor. Lucky for you, she’s very persuasive.”

“Yes,” Matthew said. “Lucky for me.”

He smiled at her then, for he felt his heart open and the sunlight pour into it, and Berry poured herself into his arms.

He felt her heart beating, hard and fast. He crushed her to himself. Their shadows became one on the deck’s plankings. They had shared so much already, for better and for worse. Even though Berry was dirty and wretched in her current state, Matthew couldn’t help but think she was so very beautiful, and that she always to him smelled of the grass of summer, of cinnamon and the perfume of a wildflower meadow, and…

Life.

Then he caught himself, short of falling.

“Listen to me,” he said, and he saw his tone of voice make her blue eyes blaze. “You’ve caused me no end of trouble! Why you left that inn, I have no idea! And traipsing about at night? Do you know what might’ve happened to you? My God, girl! I ought to put you over my knee like the child you are and give you a good—”

A hand with fearsome strength closed upon the back of his neck, and suddenly he was looking into a pair of deepset black eyes in a solemn, bearded African face decorated with tribal scars that appeared to spell out a Z, an E and a D.

“Mr. Corbett,” Berry said frostily, “I think you should mind your manner of speech while on this voyage. And please correct your lack of respect, starting this instant.”

He might have answered, if his throat had been in working order. It seemed his new bodyguard had his own ideas about who commanded his loyalty.

“Quarrels must wait for the open sea,” the captain said, with a puff of smoke that drifted into Matthew’s face. “Right now we’ve got to get this ship out of here. I don’t want to think what might be coming down that road at any moment. So…my new additions to the crew…you will join the men already in those longboats. You will take orders from Mr. Spedder, my first mate. I expect you to pull hard and steady. With just the two boats, we’ll be lucky to get out of this cove in another hour.” He spoke to Zed in their common tongue. At once Zed released Matthew and was first down the gangplank.

“Ladies,” said Falco, “I mean you as well. Get to it!”

As Matthew walked between Berry and Minx on their way to the longboats tied up at the bow, he realized that before they reached New York—if, pray to God, they ever did—they were going to know every inch of the Nightflyer, have worked their fingers to the bone and have an affair of both love and hate with every sail and every mast. Their affairs of love and hate were about to begin, commencing with the longboat’s oars and the first mate’s roar of “Row! Row! Row!” amplified through a tin voice-horn.

The captain was correct in his judgement of how much time the two longboats and their crews would need to row the Nightflyer out of the cove into tide and wind. It took a little over one hour, after which Matthew thought his shoulders were near falling off and Berry would have cried if that might have done any good, but tears would not move sailing ships. They returned to the Nightflyer by means of rope ladders lowered over the side, and the longboats were cast off to drift. Matthew, Berry, Minx and Zed were instantly put to work on tasks involving the hoisting of sails and the tying down of ropes, of which there seemed to be hundreds aboard ship and all excess to be coiled neatly and out of the way.

It was going to be pure hell, Matthew realized, and no one this trip would be a passenger save perhaps Saffron, her child, two other women of middle age, an elderly woman and three more children who were aboard.

Falco aimed the Nightflyer to the northwest. The sails filled and swept them along. The sun had broken through the gray morning clouds and painted the blue sea with gilded caps. There were over a dozen other smaller boats—native craft—in the water around Pendulum Island, embarked from the local harbor that was somewhere in the vicinity of Templeton. They were circling about, their masters and passengers waiting to see if they would have an island to return to. When Matthew stood at the railing and looked back at the island he could see the haze of dust rising in the area where Castle Fell had stood, and fires still burning in the wreckage of the fort and the ravaged woods. For the most part, though, the quake seemed to have ended.

He thought of what Sirki had said, in his last moments of life. He asked me to tell you that he will not be very much damaged by this little incident.

It seemed to Matthew that that was the professor’s pride talking. Great damage had been done to the professor’s schemes and enterprises. His refuge half-destroyed, the gunpowder works likely fully destroyed, the storehouse of Cymbeline gone up, his trusted Sirki gone down, the brothers Thacker finished off, the remains of Fell’s weapons man and finances expert consumed by an octopus, and…of Aria Chillany? Matthew hadn’t asked Minx about that yet, but it was obvious who had survived that bitter confrontation.

But what of Augustus Pons, Toy, Cesar Sabroso and Mother Deare? The problem-solver had no clue. Either they had survived, or they had not. He expected they had. Especially Mother Deare, who seemed to know a great deal about survival.

And Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone. Gone dreaming in her blue silence, which hurt Matthew’s heart but made him realize he could not be the champion for everyone, and he could not make life-or-death decisions for them either.

The sun lay heavy upon him. He was tired, near exhaustion. Finding a hammock below deck and falling into a peaceful sleep would be his idea of paradise right now, but until Captain Falco said he could leave the deck here he stayed.

The Nightflyer had been out of harbor for nearly an hour, and Matthew staggering around doing whatever task he was ordered to do by the first mate, when the very same short, thickly-set bulldog of a man hollered to him over the noise of wind and spray, “You there! Deadwood! Captain wants you! Now!” He hooked a dirty thumb toward the upper deck where the helmsman steered the ship. Falco stood at the stern viewing something behind them through a spyglass.

On climbing up the set of steps to reach that exalted poop deck, Matthew saw immediately what was the captain’s object of attention. A three-masted ship, sails spread, was at their back maybe a mile or so distant.

“That’s Grayson Hardwick’s command,” said Falco, with the pipe gripped between his teeth. “Mr. Hardwick is one of the professor’s best…shall we say…providers. His sloop carries twelve guns. Mr. Landsing!” He was addressing the helmsman, a fair-haired native lad. “Course change twelve degrees port.”

“Twelve degrees port! Aye, sir!”

“They’re after us?” Matthew asked.

“You,” said Falco, “win the prize.” He turned toward the first mate, who had followed Matthew up. He said quietly, with the tone of full and calm authority. “Full sails, Mr. Spedder. Everything we’ve got and more. And when you deliver the orders, do remember that our lives may depend on three extra knots.”

Spedder hollered at the crew in a voice hard enough to shred the bark off a tree, and at once the experienced crew went to work raising whatever sails were not already catching wind.

“Shall I help?” Matthew asked.

“Stay put. I don’t want green hands tangling ropes right now.” Falco put the spyglass to his eye again. “That little bitch is coming on,” he said. “Going to be close enough for an aimed shot in a couple of hours. But my Nightflyer’s fast too, when she needs to be. We’ll just wait and see.” He turned to watch the progress of his men aloft in the shrouds, and spotting some hesitation he did not like he leaned forward on his cane and shouted, “To the task, ladies! Get that royal up!”

The morning moved on. Water was provided to the crew, and bits of limes to chew on. Falco allowed Berry to join Matthew at the poop deck’s railing, watching Hardwick’s armed ship close the gap. Every so often Falco ordered the helmsman to change course a few degrees, and he monitored the wind by watching the smoke of his pipe. The sails held full and steady, and as the Nightflyer hissed through the dark blue waves flying fish leaped before the bow.

Berry voiced the question that had been poised like a swordpoint in Matthew’s mind. “Is he on that ship?”

“I don’t know.”

“If he’s not dead…he won’t let you go that easily.”

“He’s not dead,” Matthew said. “And yes, you’re perfectly correct.” His eyes narrowed against the glare, he watched the vessel coming on with a mixture of dread and fascination. Dread that he should be the cause of the Nightflyer being blown out of the water, and fascination that of all the people in this world he alone might now be the prime object of Professor Fell’s cold and calculating wrath.

“He knows you must be here, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, yes.” Matthew was sure of it. When Sirki had not returned with some bleeding part of Matthew, the professor had to realize his giant had been vanquished. “He knows.”

Captain Falco watched the sails, his amber eyes taking in every detail. Then he turned to Matthew and Berry. “I assume you two are very tired.”

“Very,” Matthew answered.

Falco nodded. “You can sleep when you’re dead. Which I don’t intend to be, this day. Mr. Spedder!” The first mate came over. “Send a man aloft to tighten the lower right edge of the topgallant. I don’t want any luff in that sail. Then pick five men, and make sure the Ga is among them. Pass out every axe, saw and cutting tool we have. I want the cabins cleared of all heavy furniture. The beds, the dressers, the chairs and washstands…everything over the side. The doors too. Start with my cabin.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Oh…Miss Grigsby and Mr. Corbett will be joining that work detail. Go along with you, children!”

Thus began a hideous afternoon, but one with no uncertain purpose. Axes fell, saws worked and hammers knocked things to pieces small enough to be carted up to the deck and thrown over. Minx Cutter joined the workers, as did Saffron who had given her baby to the elderly woman to watch over. Saffron had tended to Minx’s wounds as best she could, washing them and wrapping a cloth bandage around the deeper of the two, the forehead cut. But Minx was sullen and silent, and Matthew made sure to stay out of her way. It appeared to him that killing a woman was not to her liking either, and possibly the spirit of Nathan Spade still did not rest easily in her memory.

Starting with the captain’s cabin, one cabin after another was cleared of its furniture. Whether they had much of an impact on the ship’s speed was hard to say, but Matthew noted in the late afternoon as he helped pitch another bedframe over that Hardwick’s craft had not gained anymore between them but was holding steady.

As the sun was sliding down and deep violet began to paint the eastern sky, the job had been finished. Everything possible had been broken apart and cast off, even the doors. The Nightflyer was now a creature of sails and hull with fewer innards. Would it be enough? Even Captain Falco seemed not to know.

But as the darkness descended, there came a flash of fire and a concussion from the direction of Hardwick’s cannons. A volley had been sent flying. Without waiting for an invitation, Matthew, Berry and Minx climbed up to the poop deck and there stood the captain at the stern railing peering again through his spyglass.

“The balls troubled fish, nothing else,” said Falco, who himself sounded weary onto collapse. It was possible only the cane was holding him up. “But they’re reloading.”

A second volley was fired. Thunder rolled across the sea. Six geysers of water shot up two hundred yards from the Nightflyer’s wake.

“Wasting their balls and powder,” was the captain’s comment. “Dark falling. They wanted to get their shot off while they could still see. We’ll have no lights on this ship tonight.” He paused, watching the other vessel, and then he said, “But I speak too quickly.”

“What is it?” Berry asked.

“Hardwick is changing course. Going to…north by northeast, it appears. Crossing our stern.” He grunted. “Giving up the chase, or pretending to. But I think Hardwick knows he can’t catch us in the dark, or find us for that matter.”

“Thank God,” said Minx.

“Thank the axes, saws and hammers. Thank your strength. Thank those sails above your heads. I think we’ve seen the last of the revenge.”

“The what?” Matthew asked.

“Temple’s Revenge. The name of Hardwick’s ship.”

“May I?” Matthew held his hand out for the spyglass, and Falco gave it to him. Through the lens, Matthew could see the dim shape of the vessel moving away to their starboard side. As he watched, he saw first one oil lamp and then another flare to life aboard Temple’s Revenge. Several lamps were lit. Matthew wondered which one spread its glow upon Professor Fell and what guise he maintained on that ship.

Indeed, the professor had called halt to the chase, probably on the advice of the ship’s master. They were heading north by northeast? To England?

I think we’ve seen the last of the revenge, Falco had said.

The ship…yes, Matthew thought. But the revenge…no.

Never, if he knew Professor Fell.

“We should run without lamps for a few hours longer,” Falco decided. “In the meantime, we have candles below in the galley. To illuminate your mutton stew, biscuits, shelled peas and cups of lemon water.”

“That at least sounds good,” said Berry, who was so tired she could hardly stand but also so famished she couldn’t sleep without eating.

“Oh, the first five nights, it is good. You will not be as coddled on this trip back as you were on the trip here. You will eat with the crew, and what the crew eats…because you are part of the crew.”

“Fair enough.” Minx lifted her chin and gave Falco a haughty stare that might have withered any other man to cinders. “Just don’t let anyone get between my food and my knife.”

“I’m sure that won’t happen, miss,” the good captain said, with the nod and slight bow of a gentleman. “After you put your knife away, you might consider letting me look at those wounds. I’m not sure a needle and catgut are needed, but scars would not be to your liking.”

Minx didn’t reply. Matthew was thinking that she bore her scars within, and any on the outside paled in comparison.

After the meal in the galley, the ship settled down for the night. Watches were set, and much to his chagrin Matthew was given an order by Mr. Spedder to report to the poop deck at eight strikes of the ship’s bell. Four o’clock in the morning, by his knowledge of that damn bell ringing on the way over. He was assigned a hammock in the cramped and—it must be said—smelly quarters amid the other men who were not on duty, the women and children being quartered elsewhere, and within a very few minutes of taking his boots off and stretching out into the netting he was gone to the world.

However weary he was, he awakened before the eight bells. He lay in the hammock, assaulted by the snoring, rumblings and fartings of the men around him. He was greatly bothered by something he could not rid from his mind.

The Lesser Key Of Solomon, the book was titled. The compendium of demons and spells to raise them. What were the odds that he would have found a second copy of that tome in Professor Fell’s library? Like the stealing of sugar, it boded ill. And it boded evil, to be perfectly honest about it. Also…another thorn in his mind…the matter of Brazio Valeriani.

I shall pay five thousand pounds to the person who locates Brazio Valeriani, the professor had said. I shall pay ten thousand pounds to the person who brings him to me. Force may be necessary. You are my eyes and my hands. Seek and ye shall find.

Ten thousand pounds. A fortune. For one man?

Why?

The professor’s words: If you found him I would pay you enough to own that little town of yours.

Again: why?

Matthew knew himself. This was going to eat at him, day and night. Yes, Professor Fell’s castle and refuge and gunpowder plant and much of his criminal Parliament might be destroyed—for today—but there was always tomorrow, and the professor was nothing if not industrious. And ambitious.

But what exactly was his ambition?

He knew his own mind. He could not let this rest, and neither could he fully rest.

The ship’s bell sounded eight. Matthew got up at once, pulled on his boots and rid himself of the palace of snores.

His instructions had been to report to the poop deck and make the rounds of the deck, every thirty minutes turning an hour-glass mounted on a gimbel next to the ship’s wheel and tending to the bell until he was relieved in four hours. A lovely proposition, for one so weary as he. Yet when he went on deck and the fresh breeze hit his face and he saw the huge sky full of stars and a silver moon still just past full shining upon the sea he thought he was so lucky to be alive in this month of March in this year of 1703. He had survived so much. He was so much stronger than before. Before when? Before yesterday.

He greeted the man on watch who awaited him for relief and also greeted the helmsman. His responsibility, Mr. Spedder had told him, was to keep accurate time by the bell: one bell in thirty minutes, two in one hour, three in ninety minutes and so on. The hour-glass’s sand was already running for the first half-hour of the morning watch, and thus Matthew began his initial round of the deck.

The Nightflyer was flying smoothly this night. The waves were kind to the girl’s hull, and kind also to a landlubber’s stomach. The sea all around was dark, not a light showing. Temple’s Revenge had gone its own way, carrying Professor Fell to his next crime against humanity.

Matthew was on his second round when he was joined by a figure wearing a gray cloak. Her red hair was still tangled and matted, and her feet were still dirty. She was still a mess, but she was a welcome sight on this silent voyage.

“May I walk with you?” Berry asked.

“Of course.”

They walked without speaking. They were comfortable in their quiet. Then Berry said, “I’m sorry I caused you trouble.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, really. I stuck my nose in where it didn’t belong. I regret putting you in the position of looking after me.”

“I managed,” he said. “I just thank God you weren’t hurt.”

She nodded. They reached the bow and started again toward the stern, as the Nightflyer spoke softly around them and the sails stretched wide before the currents of night.

“You are changed,” she told him. “Forgive me for saying this. But Matthew…you never came back when you went after that man.”

“Yes,” he had to say. “I know.”

“You can tell me. What happened, I mean. I’ll bear it for you.”

Something in her voice broke him. It happened just like that. A voice, offering to listen. Just like that. He resisted, because it was so awful. Because the Gray Kingdom still had him, and it was so very strong. Because this world was not the world he’d imagined it to be, and because he was lost in its harshness.

“Oh,” Matthew said, and it was nearly a tormented moan. He stumbled in his progress, and just like that he knew the moment had arrived to unburden himself because Berry Grigsby had offered to listen.

“Tell me,” she said. She took his hand. “I can bear it for you.”

He clasped her hand. Tightly, and more tightly still. She was holding him, it seemed, to the earth. Without her grasp, he might be swept away. He stopped, and they stood together amidships on the Nightflyer, and he looked at her in the moonlight and starshine and saw her blue eyes gleaming. When he opened his mouth he didn’t know how he would begin; he just trusted that it would all make sense.

He told her. About everything. About Tyranthus Slaughter and his crimes and horrors, about Lyra Sutch, about the sausages made from human flesh, about the hideous cellar where the bodies were hacked to pieces, about the moment when he knew he would have to kill the woman or be killed himself, about what it felt like to drive an axe into the flesh of another human being.

And, in so telling, Matthew opened up his box of pain and began to weep.

He wept not only because of that experience, but because he was changed. Because he could never go back to a place of innocence, and because this world had tainted him. Because he had not asked for this, but because this had been thrust upon him. And his weeping became crying and his crying became sobbing for the lost boy who had been Matthew Corbett, who now had to become a man whether he liked it or not. And not only any man, but a man who knew what dark things hid underneath the stones. Professor Fell was in him, and how could he get that disease out? There was only one way…to destroy the professor, and the evil that he did. Only one way…to continue the course he had been set upon.

As Matthew sobbed, Berry put her arms around him. She did not tell him to be calm or to be quiet, for she knew he needed to sob, to clear his eyes and his mind and his heart, for she knew also he had so much ahead of him.

She kissed his cheek, and held him, and when he had finished his recounting of this tale of terror and tribulation she whispered into his ear, “You did what you had to do.”

It was the truth, plainly spoken. Matthew said with an effort, “Yes. I did.”

And though it was the dark of night, a little sunlight broke through.

“Never,” she said, “doubt yourself. Yes, it was terrible. But never doubt, Matthew…that you are where you are, for a reason.”

He nodded, but he could not speak.

“As God said to Job,” Berry said. “I will demand of thee.”

“Yes,” Matthew answered, as he stared out at the unfathomable sea. “I understand.”

She kissed his cheeks and took the tears. She held his hand and walked with him a distance further, and he realized he was late in turning the hour-glass and ringing the bell. But he didn’t hurry for he felt as if he had all the time in the world, that the gray kingdom was a passing country of the soul, and that it might take a while longer…but day by day, if he concentrated on getting there, he would get closer by small steps once again to the realm of joy.

Berry left him to return to her own hammock and a few more hours of much-needed sleep. Matthew was on his way to the poop deck when a shadow moved at the mainmast. A tinderbox sparked, a flame stirred, and a clay pipe was lighted.

“Matthew,” said the captain, “do you not know that I am always aware what time it is, whether the crewman on watch rings the bell or not?”

“I’m sorry. I was—”

“Talking with your friend, yes. I wandered over that way, and heard a bit. I hope you don’t mind. After all, this is my ship.”

“I don’t mind,” Matthew said.

“Nice night for a talk, isn’t it? All those stars. All those mysteries. Yes?”

“Yes,” was Matthew’s reply.

“You’re a terrible watchman and a worse time-keeper,” said Falco. “Those errors should get you whipped.”

I’ve been whipped before, Matthew thought, but he said nothing.

“Getting me off my floor where my bed used to be.” A spout of smoke drifted up and was blown away by the breeze. “I should whip you myself.”

“It is your ship,” Matthew said.

“For certain, she is.” Falco leaned against the mainmast, a slim shadow in the dark. “As I say, I heard a bit. A little bit, but enough. I will say this, and mark it: every captain must realize, sooner or later, that to progress his ship sometimes means casting things overboard that are no longer needed. Do I make myself clear?”

“Aye, sir,” replied Matthew.

“Now you’re mocking me. But I will give you that, Matthew. I will also give you one minute to get to that bell, ring it twice for five o’clock—though you will be nearly twenty minutes late—and turn the glass. Then you will continue your rounds and you will pay attention to your duties. Clear again?”

“Clear,” was the only possible answer.

“Go,” said the captain. As Matthew started to hurry away, Falco gave out a voluminous puff of smoke and said, “And thank you for ruining my taste for sausages for the rest of my life.”

Matthew couldn’t help but smile.

It was a very good feeling.

Thirty-Three

ON the warm and sunny afternoon of the seventeenth day of April, a trumpet sounded from the crow’s-nest of the Nightflyer.

Matthew Corbett, bearded and sun-darkened, stood up from his task of swabbing the never-ending deck. He peered forward, one hand visoring his eyes.

“We’re home,” said Berry, who had come to his side from her own job of stowing away ropes into neat coils. She was wearing a blue floral-print dress from Saffron’s wardrobe. She had learned she was a natural at nautical crafts, and had become proficient at such things as reading a sextant, tying knots of twenty different kinds for different tasks, and actually keeping wind in the sails on the few times Captain Falco had allowed her to take the wheel. In fact, the captain had told her she had an easy touch with the Nightflyer, and he wished some of the men aboard could read the wind as well as she.

“Home,” she repeated, and she felt the leaping of joy within her heart but also a little sinking of sadness, for her adventure—a dirty and dispiriting spell in the brig, fearsome men with torches and swords, crabs in the dark under a wooden floor, violent earthquake and all—was almost ended. And almost ended were the days—the little more than three weeks—she had spent with Matthew, for aboard this ship he seemed to have all the time in the world and never shunned her…whereas, in the town that lay on the island before them…

Ever the same.

Matthew saw Oyster Island ahead on the port side of the ship. And beyond it, New York. The forest of masts at the Great Dock, and beyond them the buildings. The shops and homes, the taverns and the warehouses. The lives of people he cared about. His own life, renewed. He was the captain of his own ship now, and he had done as Falco directed. Over the course of this voyage he had made a great effort to throw overboard from the ship of his soul those things that caused him pain, grief and regret, and that he could not change no matter what. Revealing those personal agonies to Berry on deck, in the quiet under the moon and stars, had been a revelation to himself. How much he trusted her, and how much he also cared about her. Yet…

The shark was still in the water, out there somewhere.

The shark would not rest. It never rested. It would think, and plan, and wait…and then, sooner or later, it would stop its circling and attack. Would it come after Berry? Would it come after anyone to whom Matthew held an attachment?

He didn’t know. But he did know that Professor Fell never forgot, and so he was not done with the professor and he was certain that the professor was not done with him.

A small fleet of longboats was rowing out to meet the new arrival. The harbormaster or one of his representatives would be aboard one of them, to find out where the ship was coming from and what it was carrying. In just a little while, then, the word would begin to spread that Matthew Corbett and Berry Grigsby had returned from their nearly two months absence. Lillehorne and Lord Cornbury would want to know the whole story. And Hudson Greathouse also. Matthew decided it was time to be honest with everyone and get things out in the open. But to go so far as to allow Marmaduke to write a story for The Earwig? Matthew wasn’t so sure about that.

Minx Cutter joined Matthew and Berry at the railing. She was in good health and had scrubbed herself from a washbasin this morning. Aria Chillany’s knife would leave only a thin scar across Minx’s forehead, but it was hardly anything. She had come into her own on the voyage also, and had been quite admired by the crew when she showed them her knife-throwing abilities. Particularly when Captain Falco had volunteered to stand on deck and have Minx outline him against a bulkhead with blades. That had gone over greatly with everyone except Saffron, who didn’t intend to raise their child alone.

The three hundred pounds in gold coins had been paid to the captain and the account settled. In fact, Falco had told them that as members of the crew Matthew, Minx, Berry and Zed were entitled to a share, to be divided up when they reached New York. And so they were almost there, as the longboats came alongside to get their towropes tied up. Then there would be a short while for the rowers to guide them to a harbor berth. A rope ladder was lowered, and who should come aboard but the new assistant to the harbormaster, a man who knew ships and their cargoes and who prided himself on being watchful that no enemy of New York was trying to slip past his guard.

“Lord God! Am I lookin’ at a phantom, what’cha might say?” asked old wild-haired Hooper Gillespie, made more presentable in a new suit. He took in Berry and his eyes got wider. “Two phantoms, then? Am I dreamin’ in daylight?”

“Not dreaming,” Matthew replied. It occurred to him that the phantom of Oyster Island was standing only a few feet away. Zed had shaved for the occasion of returning to New York, and since he’d done the work of three men and on this voyage eaten the meals that three men might have consumed he was as big and formidable as ever before. “Miss Grigsby and I are glad to be home,” said Matthew.

“Where ya been, then? Everybody’s gone near crazy tryin’ to figger it out!”

“Yes.” Matthew smiled at him, and squinted in the sun. He scratched his beard, which would soon be coming off with the strokes of a new razor. “Let’s just say for now that we were in someone’s idea of paradise.”

“Huh? That don’t make a hog’s lick a’ sense! Think you’re tryin’ to rib old Hooper, is what I think! Yessir! Rib ’im!”

“Is this a typical New Yorker?” Falco asked with his pipe in his mouth, drawing nearer to Matthew.

“No,” Matthew confided. “He makes more sense than most.”

The Nightflyer, a sturdy gal, was towed into harbor. Matthew smelled the earthy aroma of springtime. The air was warm and fresh, and the hills of New Jersey and north of the town were painted in the white, violet, pink and green of new buds and new foliage. By the time the Nightflyer had been guided in, docked and tied up, Hooper Gillespie had seemingly told everyone in New York that Matthew and Berry were arrived, for a sizeable crowd had gathered and still more people were converging upon the wharf. Of course anytime a ship of large size drew in to port a throng of merrymakers, musicians and food peddlers appeared to hawk their talents and wares, but it was as clear as the weather that today the names of Corbett and Grigsby had true worth.

The gangplank was lowered. Matthew decided he would take his ease going down it, as he only had the one much-worn outfit left.

“Oh my Jesus!” shouted someone from the crowd. A familiar voice, usually directed toward Matthew in the form of irritating questions concerning the activities of a problem-solver. “Berry! My girl! Berry! Let me through, please!”

Thus the moon-faced, rotund, squat and bespectacled figure of Marmaduke Grigsby either shoved his way forward or was allowed to pass, and seeing his granddaughter navigate the gangplank broke him to tears that streamed down his cheeks and caused him to look the most miserable man on earth on perhaps the most joyous day of his life.

When Marmaduke flung himself at her in a bone-crushing embrace the energy of his delight staggered Berry and nearly took them both swimming, but for Matthew’s catching them from careening across the wharf.

“Oh dear God!” said Marmaduke, his eyes still flooding. He had to take off his spectacles to see. “Where were you? Both you and Matthew gone…no word for days and then weeks…I’m a puddle, just look at me!” He crushed Berry close again, and Matthew saw Berry’s eyes widen from the pressure. Then Marmaduke looked at Matthew and the round face with its massive red-veined nose and slab of a forehead that walnuts could be cracked upon flamed like a warlock’s rum toddy. “You!” The blue eyes nearly burst from their sockets and the heavy white eyebrows danced their jigs. “What did you drag this poor child into?”

“I didn’t exactly—”

“I should make you pay for this! I should throw you out of that abode of yours and see you in court, sir, for—”

A finger was pressed firmly against Marmy’s lips. “Hush that nonsense,” said Berry. “He didn’t drag me into anything. I went where we were taken. Neither of us wanted to go. I’ll tell you all about that later, but right now all I want to do is get home.”

“Oh, my bones are shaking.” Marmy put a hand to his forehead. He looked near passing out. “I’ve been chewed to pieces over this. Dear Lord, I’ve prayed and prayed for your return.” He fired a quick glance at Matthew. “The return of both of you, I’m saying. Granddaughter…will you help me walk?”

“I will,” she said, and took his arm.

“Please,” said Matthew before Marmaduke could be helped away in his state of disrepair, “don’t walk straight to a pen when you reach home, and begin to pepper your girl with ink and questions. Berry? Would you please allow a few days to pass before you give any information to anyone?”

“I want to sleep for a few days, is what I want,” she replied, and though Marmaduke scowled at the thought of a broadsheet to be filled with a delicious story that he was yet unable to bite into, he allowed himself to be guided through the crowd.

Others came up to greet Matthew. There was Felix Sudbury and Robert Deverick, John Five and his wife Constance, the widow Sherwyn she of the all-seeing eye and sometimes flowing fountain of a mouth, Phillip Covey, Ashton McCaggers, the Munthunk brothers, Dr. Polliver, Hiram and Patience Stokely, Israel Brandier, Tobias Winekoop, Sally Almond, Peter Conradt and…

…the owner of a black cane topped with the silver head of a lion, which now was placed underneath Matthew’s nose so as to steer his attention to the waspy wisp of a man dressed in pale yellow from breeches to tricorn, topped with a white feather plucked from the dove of peace.

“Mr. Corbett,” said Gardner Lillehorne, making it sound like the nastiest curse ever to leave a man’s lips. “Where the devil have you been?”

Matthew regarded the long, pallid face with the small black eyes that seemed to be either perpetually angry or eternally arrogant. The precisely-trimmed black goatee and mustache might have been painted on by a nerveless artist. “Yes,” he answered. “That’s where.”

“Where what?”

“Where I’ve been.”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“That’s right,” said Matthew, with a slight smile.

“My God,” Lillehorne said to his cur Dippen Nack, who stood glowering beside his master. “The man’s lost his bird.”

“I’ve been with the devil,” Matthew clarified. “And I’ll be glad to tell you about him. You and Lord Cornbury, whenever you please. Just not this afternoon. Oh.” He remembered his promise to himself, the one he’d made when he’d fully realized the enormity of his dangerous situation on Pendulum Island. He stepped forward and kissed Dippen Nack on the forehead, proving to himself that a promise made was a promise kept.

Nack in stupefied horror fell back. Nack nearly fell over a wharfboard crack.

And then through the crowd came a man who, it appeared, no longer needed a cane. He walked tall and steady, he looked strong and wolfish and ready for any battle ahead. Perhaps it was also due to the very comely—strapping, it might be said—blonde widow Donovan holding his hand and all but cleaved to his side.

“The wanderer has returned,” said Hudson Greathouse. “I believe you have some tales to tell.”

“I do. And as I have said to the High Constable, I am more than willing to tell everything to him, to Lord Cornbury, and to you. And you, first.”

“Over a bottle of wine at the Trot, I presume?”

“Two at least.”

“You are buying?”

“I am currently without funds, though tomorrow I will be paid for being part of the crew of that fine—”

He was unable to finish, because Hudson had picked him up and hugged him, and when Hudson put his strength into it the back was pressed to the test. Fortunately, Matthew’s back passed that test, and he was returned to the ground unbroken.

“Seven o’clock tonight, then,” said Hudson, who suddenly had something in his eye and was trying to get it clear with a finger. “Don’t be a minute late or I’ll hunt you down.” His eyes examined Matthew’s face. “You look older.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It’s the beard.”

“I love the beard!” said the beauteous widow. Her hands roamed Hudson’s chest and shoulders. “Something about that…makes me tingly.”

“Really?” Hudson’s brows went up. “I shall lose my razor this evening,” he decided.

Others came up and either shook Matthew’s hand or whacked him so hard on the back he thought he might yet be crippled. Hudson and his lovely departed, and so did Lillehorne and his ugly. Matthew had caught sight of Minx Cutter moving through the throng, speaking to no one, putting distance between herself and him. And also, possibly, distance between herself and the memory of Nathan Spade. He would find her later. Right now he looked around for someone in particular, a person who would be easy to spot if indeed he had left the ship.

It seemed, however, that Zed had never come down the gangplank.

Matthew went back up, to where Falco was still giving some orders to tidy the deck before any of the others might leave. “Where’s Zed?” Matthew asked.

“Forward,” Falco answered, and indeed there stood Zed at the bow, staring out across the town that had known him as a slave and then never known him as the phantom of Oyster Island.

“Isn’t he departing?”

“Oh yes, he’s departing. As soon as I find a full complement of crew, and I am able to restock my ship, we’ll be departing. That would be a week or so, I’m thinking. Until then, Zed is a guest on my ship and he prefers to remain here until we leave.”

“Until you leave? Going where?”

Falco relit his pipe with a small taper, and blew smoke into the world. “I am taking Zed home to Africa. Back to his tribe’s land, where he has asked me to take him by drawing me a very persuasive picture. And paid me, also.”

“Paid you? With what?”

Falco reached into a pocket. He opened his hand. “These. They’re very fine diamonds.”

Matthew realized what Zed had picked up from the dungeon floor as the castle was crashing down. Not a single object, but two. Sirki’s front teeth were larger in Falco’s palm than they’d appeared in the giant’s mouth, and so too were the sparkling diamonds larger.

“I’ll be damned,” Matthew had to say.

“Damned by one, at least,” Falco corrected. He returned the teeth to his pocket and clenched his own teeth around the pipe’s stem. “You’ll be foremost in his mind. Mark that.”

“I do mark it.”

“I intend to find a house and leave Saffron and Isaac here. I hope you’ll look in on them from time to time.”

Matthew nodded. He’d only learned that Isaac was the child’s name when they were several days at sea. “I don’t believe I told you, but I knew a great man named Isaac,” he said.

“Let us hope my Isaac grows up to be great. Well…I trust you will make good on your promise to held me find a position carrying cargo when I return?”

“I’ll make good.”

“I somehow knew you would say that.” Falco reached his hand out, and Matthew took it. “I also know, Matthew, that you and I are tied together by the bonds of Fate. Don’t ask me how I know this. Call it…knowing which way the wind blows.” And so saying, he blew a small white spout of Virginia’s finest that was caught by the soft April breeze and carried out over the sea.

Matthew walked forward to where Zed was standing motionless, as he must have sometimes stood watching the life of New York pass by from the rooftop of City Hall. When Zed realized Matthew was there, he instantly turned himself toward his visitor. Matthew thought that, whether at war or at peace, the Ga was a fearsome sight. But there was nothing to fear now. At least for a while, the war was over. And…perhaps…Zed’s long life of peace was soon to begin.

“You’ve saved my life more than once,” Matthew told him. “You probably can’t understand me, but I thank you for your…um…presence. I’m sure Berry won’t let you leave without speaking, and neither will McCaggers. I wish you good fortune, Zed.” Matthew thought it was peculiar, that he would never know this man’s real name. And also, in a way, terribly sad. He held out his hand.

Zed took a step forward. His mouth opened. He tried to speak. He tried very hard. He squeezed his eyes shut to try to make the stub of his tongue form a word. His face contorted. But for all his strength, he had not the power to utter a single syllable. His eyes opened. He took Matthew’s hand in a grip that tightened just to the point of breakage. Then he put a finger beside his left eye and drew that finger out along a line until it pointed at Matthew.

I’ll be watching you, he said.

And somehow Matthew was sure of that. Even at a distance from here to Africa. If anyone could cast their eye across a sea, to view a world left behind and those left in it, Zed could.

“Goodbye,” Matthew said, and when he left the Nightflyer Zed was still standing at the bow, silently regarding what he was leaving and ready perhaps to take the daring flight into his future.

Matthew was on his way home along Queen Street, thankful to have gotten through the throng and all the well-wishers, when a voice called, “Matthew! My God, there you are!”

He paused to look behind. Of course Matthew had instantly recognized the voice. Effrem Owles, tall and gangly, with his large round eyes behind his spectacles and though only at twenty years of age the premature gray streaking his brown hair. As befitted the tailor’s son, he wore a very nice tan-colored suit. But here was the rub: Matthew felt a pang of guilt as Effrem approached. Though Effrem smiled as if the entire world was his thread and needle, Matthew knew he must still be in great pain. After all, the family business had been destroyed by Professor Fell’s Cymbeline bombs. And, truth be told, Matthew felt responsible for that catastrophe because he had resisted the professor’s will.

“I heard you and Berry had arrived! I thought I’d get there to see you, but…”

“But here you are now,” said Matthew, and he clapped his friend on the shoulder. “You look fine, Effrem. How’s your father?”

“He’s very good, Matthew. But where have you been for so long? I understood you were in the hospital that night, and then you just vanished?”

“A long story. One I’ll keep for some other time. All right?”

“Of course. I won’t press you.” They began walking together, side by side and north along Queen Street. After a moment Effrem said, “I suppose you haven’t heard, then?”

“Heard what?”

“The news, Matthew! Oh, how could you have heard? Come with me, won’t you?”

“Come with you where?”

“To the shop! I want to show you!”

Effrem started striding away, and Matthew followed. They were heading toward the corner of Crown and Smith streets. A fateful corner, Matthew thought. It was where the Owles’ tailor shop had stood, before it had been blown into burning bits. The pang of guilt became stronger. Matthew faltered. He wasn’t sure he could go on.

“Keep walking, Matthew!” Effrem urged. He stopped to wait for his friend and for a haywagon to trundle past. “I know you must be tired, but I want to show you—”

“Effrem,” said Matthew. “I do remember. All right? I know what happened to your father’s shop. I’m so very sorry, and I hope you don’t hold it against me. Now…there’s no need for you to take me to the ruins. I will do whatever I can to—”

“The ruins?” Effrem’s eyes had widened. “Oh no, Matthew! Not ruins! Come on, it’s not much further! Please!” He grabbed at Matthew’s sleeve to pull him along.

They came in sight of the corner, and there Matthew stopped as if he’d run into a stone wall.

Not ruins.

A new tailor shop, built with sturdy red bricks and a coppered roof. Matthew got himself moving again, and as he neared the beautiful place he saw painted along the bottom of the glass window in front: Effrem Owles, Master Tailor. And below that, Benjamin Owles, Consulting Tailor.

“I have the shop now,” said Effrem proudly, and he did puff his chest out a little. Then he waved at someone and called, “Here he is! I found him!”

Matthew saw a slim young woman approaching. She was dressed simply and elegantly, in a dark blue gown and a hat the same. She had jet-black hair, and she was quite the lovely. She walked with a purpose, and her purpose was to reach Effrem Owles by the fastest possible route. Thus she gave Effrem a smile that shamed the April sun, and he returned that smile, and by those obvious clues it did not take a problem-solver to deduce that love bloomed eternal and between the least likely couples.

“Hello, Opal,” said Matthew.

“’lo, Matthew,” she said, but she was all eyes for her owl. “We heard you got back. Effrem went runnin’.”

“Missed him at the dock, though. Had to catch up.”

“I’d like to be caught up.” Matthew regarded the new tailor shop. “Built so strongly, and so quickly! It must have cost a pretty penny!” He had to ask the next question: “Your father had enough money to rebuild?”

“No, he didn’t,” Effrem answered. “But…that was before.”

“Before what?”

Effrem looked at Opal. “Go ahead, tell him.”

She scruffed the street with a shoe. She shrugged. “Just a thing, it was. I mean, it didn’t mean nothin’ to me. So I thought…y’know…somebody could get some good from it.”

“Will you speak sense, please?” Matthew urged.

She lifted her face and peered up at him with her very bright blue eyes. “The ring you gave me. With the red stone. Turned out it was the nicest ruby the jewel buyer ever seen.”

Matthew made the sound of a man being punched in the stomach by a baby’s fist: “Oh.”

The ring from Tyranthus Slaughter’s treasure box. Presented to Opal for her good deed in helping Matthew uncover Lyra Sutch’s plot, back in October. Matthew thought that knowing he had been responsible for such a kindness as this would have made Slaughter’s bones writhe in the grave.

“That is wonderful,” said Matthew.

“She is wonderful,” Effrem corrected. He put his arm around her shoulders, she put her arm around his waist, and suddenly Matthew felt like he needed to put his arm around a crate of wine bottles and drink to good deeds, good luck, good fortune, and the goodness of love.

Effrem excused himself from Opal for a moment while he walked with Matthew back to Queen Street. “Listen,” Effrem said quietly, though the street was certainly not crowded. “About Berry.”

“What about her?”

“I am out of her picture. Yes, I do believe she fancied me. But Matthew, I can’t be courting two ladies!”

“No, it would be unseemly,” Matthew agreed.

“Correct! So…if she asks about me, or says anything…would you be the one to tell her that I am walking the serious road with Opal?”

“The serious road?” Matthew didn’t wait for an explanation, nor did he need it. “I certainly will be the one to tell her, if she asks.”

“Thank you!” Now it was Effrem’s turn to clap Matthew on the shoulder. “My God, isn’t it splendid?”

“Isn’t what splendid?”

Effrem looked at Matthew as if he had just arrived from another world. “To be alive!” he said, with a broad and giddy grin. “She’s waiting for me, and we’re going to Deverick’s place for coffee. See you soon at the Trot?” He had already started walking in the opposite direction.

“Soon,” Matthew promised, with a smile that was neither so broad nor so giddy but quite as meaningful, and then the two friends who thought it was so very splendid to be alive continued on their separate paths.

Thirty-Four

AS they waited at the table in Sally Almond’s tavern for the person who was coming, Matthew scanned the blackboard upon which was chalked the evening’s specialities. Two fish dishes, one chicken, one beef and one pork. One of the fish dishes interested him, but he decided to drink his glass of red wine and think about it before ordering.

“To all present,” said Hudson, lifting his own glass.

He was answered by Matthew raising his glass, and by Minx Cutter raising hers. They drank, and then they listened to the strolling musician play her mandore and sing “Go No More A-Rushing” in a sultry alto voice.

There was no rushing to be done this night. It was the last week of May, which had prompted someone to request the song, its first line being “Go no more a-rushing, maids in May.” A rain shower had passed through this morning, but the earth needed its blessing. Everything was normal in New York, which meant anything could be expected at any time, from a group of Indians stalking along the Broad Way to a hog wagon breaking down and the hogs leading a merry chase along the length of Wall Street. Matthew had shaved. He had purchased a new suit from Effrem. It was cream-colored with a dark brown waistcoat. He had on new brown boots and a new, crisp white shirt. He was dressed his best in honor of the person who would be joining them, she’d said in her letter, at half past seven. According to the tavern’s clock, she would arrive in eight minutes.

“Another toast?” asked Hudson, this time with a glint of mischief in his eyes. He waited for the glasses to be raised. “To those who have tasted the grapes of crime, and found them bitter.”

Minx drank. “But sometimes,” she said as she put her glass down, “the most bitter grapes make the sweetest wine.”

“Ah ha! But yet…sweet wine can poison, the same as bitter.”

“True, but what may be sweet to me may be bitter to you.”

“Yes, and what you may drink of poison may be pleasure to me.”

“Gentleman and lady?” Matthew said. “Shut up.” They ceased their verbal joustings as if suddenly remembering he was sitting between them. Minx shifted in her chair. Her face was placid. She showed no emotion but surely she was nervous, Matthew thought. This was a momentous night for Lady Cutter. This was the night she had bought with her aid to Matthew on Pendulum Island. This was, truly, the first night of the rest of her life. The clock ticked on, and Matthew noted that Minx glanced at the progress of its hands and drank without waiting for a toast. “Very well, Mr. Corbett,” Lord Cornbury had said that morning in April, two days after Matthew had arrived home. “Begin, please.” And thus Matthew had begun, telling the green-gowned governor, the purple-suited High Constable, and the regular-clothed Chief Prosecutor everything there was to tell, from start to finish. He of course had to mention Mrs. Sutch’s sausages as background, and Prosecutor Bynes had had to excuse himself and rush from the office for it seemed he and his wife had been great partakers of that particular meat product. Matthew had told his listeners about the false Mallorys, Sirki, the bombs being set off in his name, the abduction of Berry, the voyage to Pendulum Island, the Cymbeline works…all of it.

And everything also that he knew of Professor Fell, and the fact that the professor had escaped on a vessel called Temple’s Revenge and a letter might be sent to the authorities in London to begin a search for that ship.

When he was finished Matthew asked for a glass of water, and to his credit Lillehorne went out and returned a short time later with a glass and a pitcher full of water freshly-drawn from the nearest well. Then Lillehorne had sat down in the corner seat he’d occupied and he and Lord Cornbury had stared at each other seemingly for a minute, neither one moving, as if to ask each other if they believed what they’d heard.

“Thank you, Mr. Corbett,” the ladyish Lord had said at last. He didn’t seem to want to lift his green-shaded gaze from his desk. “You may go now.”

Matthew had stood up. “You might at least send a letter requesting that Frederick Nash be investigated. Also the money changer Andrew Halverston.”

“Yes. Noted, thank you.”

“I would think this is of vital importance, gentlemen.” He used that word lightly. “There is a warehouse somewhere in London that may still be stocked with the Cymbeline. The professor may yet intend to sell that powder to a foreign army…or, it might just be sparked into an explosion that would level the buildings around it and kill many—”

“Noted,” Cornbury had interrupted. “Thank you for your presence and your time, and you are free to go.”

Matthew had looked to Lillehorne for some kind of support. The High Constable had repeated it: “Free to go.”

Berry had been waiting for him outside the governor’s mansion, beneath a shady oak, in case they had also needed her testimony. “Didn’t they believe you?” she asked as they walked toward the Broad Way. Today she was a festival of colors, a veritable walking bouquet of April flowers from her pink stockings to her darker violet gown to her red throat ribbon to her white straw hat to the puff of yellow buds that adorned it.

“I think they believed me, all right. I just think they’re overwhelmed. They don’t know what to do with the information.” He gave her a wry glance. “I don’t think they want to get themselves involved.”

Berry frowned. “But…that seems against the spirit of the town!”

“I agree. They have the facts. What they do with them now is their business.” He stepped back for a passing team of oxen pulling a lumber wagon, also bound for the Broad Way. The carriages and wagons were thick up there, in the area of Trinity Church. So much traffic, some kind of regulation was soon to be needed. Just yesterday there had been an afternoon squabble between a man hauling a wagon full of tar barrels and a street hawker pushing a variety of wigs in a cart. In the ensuing collision, it was determined that tar and wigs did not mix. And neither did tar clean up very easily from the street.

“Where are you off to?” Matthew asked her as they strolled.

“I’m with you.”

“Yes. Well…I’m on my way to see Minx Cutter. I’ve gotten her settled into a room at Anna Hilton’s boarding house. You know, over on Garden Street.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’m watching over her,” Matthew said, and instantly knew this was the wrong thing to say. “Tending to her, I mean.” Wrong again. “Making sure she stays in town.”

“Where would she go?”

“I don’t know, but I want to make certain she doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Why?”

“Someone is coming,” Matthew said, “who I think would like to meet her. In fact, it is essential that they meet.”

“Who are you talking about?”

In Sally Almond’s tavern on this May evening, the clock was two minutes away from seven-thirty. Matthew turned himself to watch the door.

“She’ll be here, don’t fret,” said Hudson. “I’m going to order another bottle. That suit everyone?”

“It suits me fine,” said Lady Cutter, with an intimation in her voice that she could drink the great one under the table ten times and again.

As they had walked along the Broad Way that morning in April, Berry had been silent for a few moments, contemplating this interest in Minx Cutter. Then had come the question that Matthew had been expecting: “Do you care for her?”

“Who?”

“You know who. Minx Cutter. Do you care for her?”

“I care about her.”

Berry had stopped suddenly, positioning herself in front of him. Her eyes were keen. Her chin was slightly uplifted. She wore her universe of freckles proudly. “You delight in playing with me, don’t you? Your word games and your…your mismeanings. I am asking you this question, Matthew. Do you care—in a romantic way—for Minx Cutter?”

He thought about this. He looked at the ground. He looked at the sky. He looked at his own hands, and polished with a sleeve the buttons on his coat. Then he looked into the face that he considered so very beautiful, and he knew the mind behind it was beautiful and so was the heart, and he said as coldly as he could on such a warm day, “Maybe I do. What of it?”

She wore a stricken expression. But only for a few seconds. If she had come to pieces in that short span of time, so she reassembled herself just as quickly.

“I see,” she said.

But Matthew knew she did not see. Matthew knew that very easily Berry’s head could have been parted from her body at the neck by Sirki’s blade, and that her beauty might have curdled in the guts of an octopus. Or that she might indeed have walked off a cliff in the dark and fallen to her death. Or been found by the searchers and wound up…what?…beaten and ravished in a cell? He couldn’t bear to think of any of those possibilities, and how close some of them might have been to coming true. So last night he had made up his mind what to do, and now—this moment—was his opportunity.

He had decided to make her hate him.

“Minx Cutter is…fascinating to me,” he said. “So different.”

“I’ll say different, too. She wears a man’s clothes.”

“She is unique,” Matthew plowed on. “A woman, not a girl.”

“Hardly a woman,” was the retort.

“All woman,” said Matthew. “And very exciting to me in that way. You know, one gets tired of the ordinary.” He thought that might be the shot that knocked her down.

But Berry was still on her feet, and still on his side. “I think you’ll find out for yourself that some ordinary people, as you say, are extraordinary. If you cared to look closely enough.”

“I live an exciting life,” said Matthew, and he nearly cringed at his own self. “Why would I want less in my romantic life?”

“Why are you so cold today? This isn’t like you!”

“It’s the new me,” he told her. And possibly there was some truth in that, for he wasn’t exactly sure he’d left all of Nathan Spade behind.

“I don’t like the new you very much, Matthew,” she said. “In fact, I don’t like the new you at all.”

“I am who I am. And who I will ever be.” He frowned, impatient at his own heartless lies. “I have to get along to see Minx now. Would you excuse me? I’d rather walk alone than be entangled in a ridiculous discussion like this.”

“Oh, would you?” She nodded. Her cheeks were very red and the freckles looked like bits of pepper. But deep in her eyes—and this wounded his soul to see—was a hurt that he thought he would rather tear his own orbs out than have to gaze upon. “All right then, Matthew. All right. I thought we were friends. I thought…we were something, I don’t know what.”

“I don’t know what either,” he answered, like the bastard of the world.

“I can’t…I don’t understand…why…”

“Oh,” he said, “stop your prattling.”

“I came to help you, if you needed me. That’s all I ever wanted, Matthew! To help you! Can’t you see that?”

“That’s the point I’m trying to make.” He drew a breath, for this next thing might be the killer. “I was wrong to have confided in you on the ship that night. It was weak, and I regret it. Because the fact is, I have never needed you. I didn’t yesterday, I don’t today and I will not tomorrow.”

And this time, he saw the little death in her eyes. It killed him, most of all.

“Fine,” Berry said. And again, as the ice closed in: “Fine. Good day to you, then.” She sounded a bit choked, and she quickly cleared her throat. Then she turned and began walking quickly away, and six strides in her departure she turned again toward him and there were tears on her face and she said in a voice near collapse, “We are done.”

It was good that she got quickly away, for Matthew got himself going in the opposite direction, not toward Garden Street at all, and he staggered like a drunk though he had only put down the water, and everything seemed blurred and terribly wrong, and his heart ached and his eyes felt as if they were bleeding. A few steps and he broke the heel off his right boot, which made him limp even more drunkenly. And also like a drunk he found himself sitting under a tree in the Trinity cemetery, surrounded by those who had already known their share of life, love and loss, and he sat there for a time wishing some ghost would whisper to him about strength and fortitude and the will to keep going and similar such bullshit but no ghost spoke and so therefore he wiped his eyes, roused himself and went on his way and he thought that somewhere in Heaven or Hell one spirit applauded him and that spirit’s name had been Nathan. Who now was long deceased, for all the good love had done him.

Before he left that village of the dead he had the overwhelming urge to call out for her, as if she could hear him. To call out and say he was sorry, that he was a liar and hadn’t meant any of it but that he was frightened for her and frightened of Professor Fell for her. So it all came down to fear. But he didn’t call out, for it would have been for nothing and anyway the dice had been thrown. We are done. Three words he would take with him when they rolled him over into his own bed in this very same village of silent sleepers.

“Yes,” said Matthew, as he watched the door of Sally Almond’s tavern at seven-twenty-nine by the clock. “By all means, another bottle.”

“You’ve been drinking a lot lately, I notice.” Greathouse poured the last of the red wine into Matthew’s glass and held up the empty soldier for the waitress. “Why is that?”

“Thirsty,” Matthew answered.

There was a small tick of metal from the clock as the minute hand moved. And just that soon, the door opened and in walked Katherine Herrald.

She was now, as she had been in October, a trim figure who drew attention and admiration. She was about fifty years old, with sharp features and penetrating blue eyes. She was straight-backed and elegant and there was nothing aged or infirm about her. Her dark gray hair, under a fashionable cocked riding-hat a rich brown hue, was streaked with pure white at the temples and at a pronounced widow’s peak. She wore a dark brown dress ornamented with leather buttons and cinched with a wide leather belt. Around her throat was a scarf nearly the same color as the Stokelys’ Indian-blood-colored pottery. She wore brown leather gloves. She came across the tavern directly to their table, as Matthew and Hudson stood up to greet her. She was their employer, her dead husband the originator of the Herrald Agency and himself murdered by Tyranthus Slaughter on orders of Professor Fell. Back in October she’d told Matthew she was going to England and then would be returning in May. So here she was, and when she’d arrived yesterday morning she’d sent a letter to them from the Dock House Inn, announcing her presence. Matthew had written back: I have someone you need to meet. Her name is Minx Cutter, and she was once an associate of Professor Fell.

“Hello, Miss Cutter,” said Mrs. Herrald, offering her hand. Minx took it. “I’m interested in hearing about you. Interested as well in hearing your story, Matthew. Your letter skimped on details. After I have a glass of wine and determine what I’d like to eat, I want to know everything.” She sat across from him, the better to read his expressions.

Matthew nodded. He was thinking that in two hours or so, after his story and Minx’s had been told, Mrs. Herrald was going to aim her eyes at the princess of blades and say, “You seem to have taken a few wrong steps in your progress through life, Miss Cutter. Yet here you are now, on a straighter path. It took great courage for you to know I was coming, and to know my history with the professor, and to sit at the table with me. I have a feeling you are never lacking for courage. I must ask: are you at all interested, Miss Cutter, in the process of discovery? For if you are—and if you are interested in continuing along your current path and possibly righting other wrongs—then…you and I should talk a little further.”

Before that, though, there was food to be ordered. Sally Almond herself came over to take their requests.

Matthew had been thinking. About predators, in particular. About the sea of life, and the creatures that roamed it. About the dangerous currents his business—now his calling—put him into. It was, really, sink or swim. He still had so much hurt in his heart for Berry. Yet he felt he had to leave her to protect her, to move forward, to prepare for his next meeting with Professor Fell. It would be upon him, likely sooner than he thought.

The next thing on his ticket, however, was to respond to the latest letter from a certain Mr. Sedgeworth Prisskitt of Charles Town who was asking for a courier to escort his daughter Pandora to the annual Sword of Damocles Ball, held in Charles Town in late June. He wondered why a father would have to pay for an escort for his daughter. Was she that ugly? He wondered also what sort of events the trip might offer, for with a name like Pandora…surely there was a box somewhere that once opened, out escaped…

…what?

It remained to be seen.

But the matter of predators was still on his mind. The matter of terrible and evil things gliding in the dark, perhaps circling him even now.

He was famished. Such thoughts would hold until after dinner and wine.

Matthew studied the blackboard for a moment and then told Sally what he would like.

She replied that it was freshly-caught, was excellent, and that forthwith she would bring him the platter of roasted shark.