Anarchaos

XXXIII

The rest did not require individual attention. What did I have to say to General Ingor or Elman or Davus or Malik and Rose?

From the kitchens I obtained the knife with which I disposed of the crewmen on duty, beginning with the mate on watch at the wheel and ending with the two engineers on duty in the engine room. All told, seven men.

I smashed the radio equipment. There were six lifeboats and I punched holes in all of them. I damaged the engines with pliers and a hammer, then punctured the great fuel tank and led a trail of flammable objects down the flight of stairs into the pool of it at the bottom.

The ship was no longer moving through absolute blackness. Far ahead of us, and a bit to the left, there was a red glow on the horizon. As I moved about the ship, sometimes having to travel along the deck, I glanced at the horizon and from it got a feeling of urgency, as though it indicated an actual dawn coming up. It seemed to me as though I must be finished with what I had to do before that dawn.

At last everything was ready. The ship still moved forward from its own momentum, but with increased sluggishness. I dressed myself warmly in clothing taken from the dead crewmen, set the fire which would eventually lead itself to the spilled fuel and from there to the fuel tank itself, and went on down to the opening in the hull through which I’d first been brought into the ship.

There were three small motorboats down here, tied to the metal platform, and I scuttled two of them. I found the way to open the hole in the hull, started the engine of the remaining motorboat, and steered my way carefully out to the open sea.

I had taken the mate’s watch with me, and it read three-twenty a.m. when I started out in the small boat. I maintained course in the same direction the ship had taken, guiding myself by the light on the horizon far ahead and just slightly to the left, and as I went I looked back from time to time at the faintly seen ship, its yellow lights outlining it in the blackness behind me. For the longest while it seemed to sit motionless and eternal back there, an angular black silhouette in a halo of dim light surrounded by the blackness, but at precisely three-thirty by the mate’s watch I saw the first jet of flame. Blight red, shooting upward, it illuminated the ship and the bit of ocean just around it in miniature imitation of the noon light of Hell.

So long as I could still see it, the ship never exploded and it never sank. It merely burned and burned and burned, flaming away like a torch back there in the night. I moved away from it at a good speed, sitting in the stern of the small boat, huddled against the cold wind of my passage, and behind me the red beacon silently roared.

I was finished. After four years, I had done what I had come to Anarchaos to do: learn the truth about my brother’s slaying and choose an appropriate vengeance. It seemed that I had lost every battle, and then won the war.

How should I have felt? I felt cold, and empty. I no longer wanted antizone, any more than I still wanted revenge. There was nothing I wanted. Not even the oblivion of the black water rushing by below my elbow had any appeal for me.

I was heading toward Cannemuss, but only because life requires motion. So long as one breathes, it is necessary to move. In a map on the bridge of the ship I had seen where this place Cannemuss was: at the far south-easterly tip of the Sea of Morning, at the mouth of the Black River. Triss had told me it was a frontier town, a trapper’s village, a way station for supplies going out to the rim and raw materials coming back.

The last time I looked behind me, when the flaming ship had now receded completely out of sight, the mate’s watch read nearly four o’clock. From then on I looked only forward.

Five hours later I reached the coast, barren and snowbound, and two hours after that, by traveling southward along the shoreline, I came at last to Cannemuss. And on the pier at Cannemuss was standing Jenna Guild.