Wake of the Bloody Angel

Chapter Twenty-four

I supervised as Marteen was tied to a chair in Clift’s dayroom. The chair wasn’t nailed down, so strategic knockovers were an option. He said nothing, staring into space as if we didn’t exist.

Up close, he was downright repulsive. He had a sore-scarred nose and bald ringed patches in his hair from parasites. He smelled like a chamber pot, and I wondered if he’d deliberately wet himself. Beneath his red velvet coat, his clothes were tattered and often badly repaired. The sole of one boot revealed his toes through a split. He was older than me, probably close to fifty, but not so old as some of his crew. Still, even if we hadn’t caught him, it seemed unlikely he’d make it to sixty in this level of decrepitude.

“Guess piracy isn’t as lucrative as it was in our day,” one of his jailers taunted. Marteen did not react.

When Marteen was secured, Duncan Tew put a cloth hood over the pirate’s head. It wasn’t airtight, but it certainly wasn’t comfortable. I assigned one sailor to guard him, but made him promise to do so in absolute silence.

I retrieved a clean tunic from my cabin, where Suhonen still slept. My current shirt had grown stiff with dried blood and sweat, though thankfully most of the former was not my own. I almost made it on deck before Skurnick accosted me. Fifteen men rested in their hammocks, bandaged and stitched. Most were asleep, but a couple moaned in pain, and one whimpered for his mother. I spotted Dorsal gently touching an unconscious man’s dangling hand. He caught my eye and looked at me with too much sadness for such a young boy. I wondered how many friends he’d lost in his brief life. The doctor said, “Let me take a look at that shoulder.”

“It’s nothing.”

“I saw you fighting left-handed, so it must be something.”

“I was making it a fair fight.”

“Uh-huh. Off with your shirt.”

The difficulty of obeying that command convinced me that Skurnick might be right. He efficiently cleaned, sewed, and dressed the three-inch cut with a surprisingly light touch that did absolutely nothing to keep the needle from stinging like a bastard. When he was done, he gave me a sling to wear so I wouldn’t accidentally rip open the wound.

“How long until I can use my arm again?” I asked.

“Try moving it around in a couple of days. If it starts bleeding, then it’s too soon.”

I went on deck and found it was sunset. The Bloody Angel ’s deck was empty save for three of our men readying it for the trip to Blefuscola. Hopefully the capture of that ship, as well as the account of its defeat at our hands, would lift the self- imposed embargo cluttering the harbor.

Clift and Jane stood over a body on deck. When I got close, I saw it was Quartermaster Seaton. He was wounded in three visible places; the deep furrow bisecting his skull looked to have been the fatal blow.

“What happened?” I said.

“He got killed,” Clift said simply. “He knew the risks when he volunteered.”

“Yeah, why did he do that?”

Clift shook his head. “He was a good quartermaster, for sure. He sailed with me for ten years. I think he found the life of a pirate hunter too tedious. You saw that play he wrote about Black Edward? I believe deep down that’s the kind of end he secretly wanted, but that he could never get on this side of the law.”

“That’s a shame.”

Clift nodded. “He had a job. He did it the best he could. He chose the method of his passing.”

It struck me that such an epitaph would suit me as well. I’d have to remember to write it down and give it to Liz.

Clift draped a large piece of sailcloth over the body. He said, “Sew him up, gentlemen,” and two sailors who specialized in mending sails bent down to enclose Seaton in his burial shroud. The captain turned to me and said, “How’s our prisoner?”

“Stewing in his own juices. And I mean that literally.”

“Well, he’ll not smell any better if we wait,” Clift said. “Mr. Greaves, continue repairs and make sure we haven’t left any of our wounded on the Angel. ”

“When they’re wounded and unconscious, pirates and hunters tend to look a lot alike,” Jane explained.

“And bring me every scrap of paper from the captain’s cabin-logbooks, maps, notes, everything,” Clift added.

“Aye, Captain,” Greaves said, and rushed off to his duties.

“Mr. Dancer!” Clift called, and the gunnery master appeared before him. “We’ll be sinking that ship with the monster beneath it. Ready your men to fire flaming bolts.”

“Aye, sir,” Dancer acknowledged.

We followed Clift down into the hold. He paused to speak to the wounded who were conscious, thanking them for their work and promising they’d be compensated for any lost extremities. Then we stopped to draw a bucket from the piss barrel. It said something that the odor of blood, death, and sweat meant the smell from the bucket didn’t bother me at all.

Clift walked into the dayroom and threw the bucket’s contents into Marteen’s covered face. He yelled, sputtered, and madly tossed his head to dislodge the clinging wet burlap.

Clift yanked off the hood. Marteen spit, looked around, and realized his situation. His brow knitted and he fell silent.

“You’re a prisoner of Captain Dylan Clift, representative of the Anti-Freebootery Guild,” the captain said. “You and your crew will be taken to Shawano for trial and hanging. Do you understand this?”

“What’s the point of the trial if you already know the verdict?” Marteen snarled. “Does that help your head rest better on your soft lace pillow?”

“You have one chance to avoid that fate,” Clift continued. “I might intercede and recommend a life sentence in the Mosinee Prison if you help out my friend here.”

“That’s some trade,” Marteen sneered. “Death either way, one fast and one slow. Why don’t you pick for me so I’ll be surprised?”

Jane, who had remained by the door, now stepped forward. “Do you know who I am, Marteen?”

“Some whore passed around by these scurvy trolls?” he said, and smacked his lips at her. “You been spreading your legs so much, you need that cane to walk with ’em closed, eh? They must like ’em tall on the Cow. Do you diaper them like little babies, too? I’ve known some men who paid well for that.”

“My name is Jane Argo.”

Marteen’s smile, and attitude, faded at once. Even his face turned pale beneath his tan. “Captain Argo,” he whispered. “I heard you left the sea.”

She backhanded him so hard, I worried she’d broken his neck. Her rings left cuts along his jaw. He sat there for a moment, recovering, and when he turned to us again, his teeth were coated with blood from his ruptured lips.

“As you can see, I’m back on the waves,” Jane said. “Now, Captain Clift has made you a generous offer. I’m here to sweeten it. If you answer my friend’s questions, I won’t spend ten minutes alone with you.” She returned his blown kiss.

He spit blood, but was careful not to get any of it on Jane. Then he looked at me. “Since you haven’t done or said anything, I assume you’re the friend with the questions.”

I nodded. “It’s the same one I asked you earlier. What happened to Edward Tew?”

He frowned in apparent concentration. “Tew?”

“Yes.”

Then he grinned. “Why, one and one equals two.”

His laughter rang out in the little room. When he finished, I said, “Let’s try again. What happened to Edward Tew?”

“I’d sooner hang than give up my comrades,” he hissed. To Clift, he said, “How does it feel to betray your friends and your oaths, joining up with Queen Remy against your brothers?” He looked at Jane. “And you? Are you his whore now? Queen Remy know she’s supporting a floating brothel?”

Jane smiled. If Marteen had any sense at all, he would’ve started begging for mercy right then, but he didn’t. She said, “Marteen, I’ve got a hole in my leg thanks to your little pet, and it pisses me off. Eddie and Dylan here have this thing, what’s it called? Oh, yeah. A conscience. They have one of those. I don’t.” And with that, she drew a dagger and stabbed it into Marteen’s left thigh.

His howl could’ve summoned wolves, had we been on dry land. It grew even louder when Jane pulled the dagger out, wiped it on Marteen’s shirt and put it back in her belt. I winced in sympathy; even Clift seemed a little startled. Blood surged up from the wound.

“Fuck!” Marteen said, his voice raw.

“You’ve got a lot of other things we can stab,” I pointed out. “Now, what happened to Edward Tew?”

Marteen’s eyes dripped tears of pain, but he said, “You might as well kill me. I’m not going to tell you anything, and there’s nothing you can do to make me. Keep torturing me if you think you have to, but you’ll just be breaking a sweat for nothing. I’m not afraid to sail with the White Captain off the edge of the world. Once I’m dead, I’ll be far beyond your grasp.”

I’d seen men scared of torture try to bluff their way through before, but there was something calm in Marteen when he said this that made me believe him. As a last resort, I said, “Would it help if I said please?”

Marteen looked up at me in astonishment, then began to laugh.

I nodded toward the door. It was time to regroup.

Clift put the wet burlap sack over Marteen’s laughing face and cinched it tight around his neck. Blood from his thigh wound had soaked his pants and started pooling at his feet. Clift brought a belt from his cabin and tied it tight around Marteen’s leg.

We stepped out into the hall and closed the door. I spoke softly so Marteen couldn’t overhear. “Any other ideas?”

“I haven’t even gotten warmed up on him yet,” Jane said. “Wait until that thigh starts throbbing like mine did.”

“I could threaten to hang him right here, before we even get back to Shawano,” Clift said. “We could string up a couple of his dead shipmates, make it look like we’d executed them.”

“That’s an old one, he’d never fall for that,” Jane said. “Now, some pliers to his testicles-”

“If we hurt him too much, he’ll just tell us what we want to hear,” I pointed out. “He’s our only source. If we can’t get real information out of him, we’re at a dead end. Or at least I am.”

I looked around in the shadowy corners to make sure Dorsal wasn’t lurking there. I didn’t want him to overhear anything too brutal.

“What’re you looking for?” Jane asked.

“Making sure the cabin boy’s not here.”

Clift asked, “What cabin boy?”

“Dorsal. You know. His real name’s Finn.”

In utter disbelief, Clift whispered, “You’ve seen Dorsal Finn?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Even Jane asked, “Dylan, what’s wrong?”

Clift could barely speak. “Dorsal Finn died of a fever over a year ago. I was holding his hand when he passed. We buried him at sea five hundred miles from here.”

And despite the heat of the tropical night and the stuffy warmth of the ship’s hold, a shiver went through me.