Home From The Sea (36 page)

The parchment – the very tally over which these men had fought – caught alight in seconds while rubies, emeralds, sapphires skittered across the timbers. A handful fell and rolled away into the shadows. Others remained in the shallows of the oil lake, flames licking hungrily around them.

Heedless of the fire, Burke crashed into Hobbs with stunning force, sending the pair of them to the floor in a mess of thrashing limbs. Joe Pledge was halfway to his feet, trying to see while both his hands were clasped tight to his middle as if he were trying to hold his insides in place. Jim had no idea how badly Pledge was wounded, but he was not about to offer
succor
to the man who had threatened to torment Toby.

In fact, Pledge was shouting at Toby now, and Jim forced himself to listen, to disentangle words from sound. “Get him!” Pledge was bellowing. “Get the bastard, Trelane, afore ’e sticks that fuckin’ knife in Nathaniel!”

Get him? Jim was intent on the rolling, writhing mass of limbs and for the life of
him,
he could see no way to get between them. Instead, he gestured with his spent pistol and said to Toby, “Get the fire out while I reload this bloody thing.”

“Jim,” Toby began.

“Put the fire out!” Jim said, louder, harder. “You won’t shoot a man – fair enough. But I can, and I will, if it comes down to it!”

For an instant Toby blinked, and then from somewhere he produced a wide, genuine grin.
“Aye, sir.”
He sketched a salute and dove away toward the kitchen.

The pulses were hammering in Jim’s throat and ears as he dumped powder and shot onto the last safe corner of the table and opened both pokes. His eyes were still on Burke and Hobbs, who were struggling for the knife. A matter of scant seconds had passed since they collided, though to Jim time seemed to be passing with bizarre slowness. To his left, Joe Pledge sat slumped in the chair, fish-breathing, nursing his middle as he blinked hazily at the tangle of limbs.

“Get ’im,
fer
chrissakes get ’im,” he moaned at Jim, and Jim heard the threadiness of his voice. Pledge’s eyes were wide, dark, filled with shadows and with dread. He was dying, and he knew it.

“I don’t dare shoot,” Jim muttered. “I could put one square in Burke’s heart! He’ll have to do Eli Hobbs himself. What, you think he’s not big enough or strong enough?”

“Big and strong, aye,” Pledge rasped. “But Eli’s slippery as a bastard eel. Always were. Don’t … don’t trust ’im.”

Jim rammed the barrel with wadding and a lead ball, and gave Pledge a hard, sour look. “Trust him? I never trusted any of you, Master Pledge, and I still don’t. Now, shut up and let me do what I must.”

As he spoke Toby returned, arms filled with the small black cauldron, water slopping over the sides at every step. He cursed and swore under the weight of it, and Jim spared a glance for him as he tipped the whole load over the fire. The flames were out in a moment, and he slammed the cauldron down on the table right by Pledge.

“Trelane,” Pledge gasped. “Devil
take
yer
, Trelane, if
yer
let Eli Hobbs take down Nathaniel.”

His voice was weakening, and if Jim was any judge Pledge’s vision would already be starting to darken. He doubted the man could see enough to know when Hobbs – slippery as any eel – rolled, feinted, fooled Burke enough to get leverage on one
arm,
and thrust forward as if with a bayonet.

 
A scream wrenched out of Burke’s throat, hoarse, sharp as much with sock as with pain. Jim never saw the wound struck, but he knew the magnitude of it from the sound of Burke’s voice. He had no doubt the knife had found the vitals, and he shot a glance at Toby. Toby’s face might have been carved from granite. No hint of expression played across his features as he watched Nathaniel Burke – his old master, old protector, old tormentor.

Fury was a curious force, Jim thought. It could imbue a man’s limbs with a power that transcended the simply human or mortal. To be sure, the strength would not last long, but while it did, many a demigod would look on with admiration.

Where Burke found the power, Jim could not know. Burke himself would not have known, but it ripped through him like divine fire. Blood was frothing on his lips and nose as he reared back, got his right hand on the hilt of the knife and tore it out of his chest, all the while keeping Eli Hobbs pinned beneath him with his weight on one elbow and both knees.

Hobbs was badly hurt already. His left arm was useless and one leg refused to move properly. Still, he flailed at Burke, even his teeth snapping as he snarled curses and tried to bite any flesh he could reach. The knife was bright with the cherry-red blood that spelled a creature’s very life. Jim had hunted often enough to know the look of such
blood,
and beside him Toby began to whisper in the old, dead language.

But there was still life in Nathaniel Burke, and strength enough to turn the knife in his right hand, to bat Hobbs’s hand out of the way, tuck the point of the blade right in under the jaw bone and thrust up. One hard, uncompromising
shove,
and it was over for Hobbs with surprising mercy. Death came to him in an instant, like a shadow racing across the hillside ahead of a storm front.

Wheezing, panting, forcing every breath into damaged lungs, Burke clambered to his feet. He stood swaying, trying to get his bearings for a long moment, outlined in the purple murk of late twilight which fell from the open door and window. With one lantern out, the taproom was dim now, and his vision must have been darkening, like Pledge’s.

“Joe?” His voice was graveling.
“Joe, you still with me?”

And a mere whisper.
“Still.”
Pledge sat slumped in the chair, no longer moving though his eyes were open to slits, shining in the grudging light of the one lantern. Every breath inspired a moan. “It’s dark, Nathaniel.”

“Aye,” Burke wheezed. “Night’s
comin
’ on. She’s
comin
’ on fast, and she’ll be dark as the vaults in hell.” He coughed. Blood frothed in his mouth and nose, on his lips, and he spat it out.
“You there, Toby, lad?”

Toby took a step forward, closer to the ring of light. “I’m here. I’ll light a couple of lanterns, Nathaniel, will I?”

But Burke’s head wagged a negative. “Forget ’em.” He peered down at his chest, dragged both hands across his face, smearing it luridly with blood, and gestured at the bin which had contained the dream and the curse of Diego Monteras’s legacy. “Pack it. All of it …
keep
back what you can hold in your own right hand, Toby lad. That’ll be your fair share, that and freedom. Aye, time was, you were a good lad, but you done me wrong at the end. You done me sorely wrong and if the strength was left in me, I’d flog you to tatters for it, head to foot, before I called you a free man.”

Something in his tone made the hackles prickle on Jim’s neck. He was busy with the lanterns, lighting as many as he could lay his hands on, and he glared up at Burke in their odd shadows. “Say what you mean, Captain. Neither of us ever lifted a hand against you.”

The dark, hooded eyes were more shadow than iris. Burke seemed not to look at Jim so much as clean through him, as if already he was looking into the next world. The graveyard stare made Jim shiver while Burke searched for his voice, and for words. Toby was doing as he had been bid, raking together the spilled gems, thrusting them into the bin, keeping back a few here, a few there, when size or perfection of form or
color
caught his eye. Burke’s eyes brooded on him as he worked.

“Toby Trelane has never killed a man, Master Fairley, and he’ll tell you, he never will. But he has it in him to be a
schemin
’,
connivin
’, underhand, murderous
weasel
. If the lad thinks he’ll be judged any more lightly on the day the trumpets call us back out of the ground, and from the bottom of the sea, he’s mistaken.” Again Burke coughed, and every breath seemed to flute in his throat. Blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth, unheeded, as he thrust out his hand to take the bin. Toby had forced in the stopper a moment before, and gave it to him without comment or protest. Burke tucked it under his arm and stood swaying. “Master Trelane will be judged like the rest of us mortal sinners,” he rasped. “Would he wreak death on Eli and Willie in their drunken sleep, back at
Polgreen’s
pox shop? He’d be too good for that, too pious. But he’ll bring the buggers here and hand ’em to me,
knowin
’ what’d become of ’em.” His eyes blazed accusation at Toby. “
Knowin
’,” he added, “what’d become of
me
.”

“That’s a lie,” Jim began angrily, as confused as he was furious.

“It isn’t,” Toby said with ominous quiet. He lifted his chin, looking levelly at Jim. “I told you I was bringing the four of them here, face to face, so they could settle their business once and for all, and I’d play no part in it.” His brows arched at Jim, and then at Burke. “What force stopped them behaving like decent, civilized men? What prevented them from talking it out, arguing and bickering like siblings if they had to, but thrashing it through and finding a peaceable resolution?” He turned Burke’s glare back on him. “I’ll tell you what stopped them – Nathaniel already knows, and never mind all his goddamned rhetoric.”

“They had blood in their eyes,” Jim said bitterly.
“All four of them, from the moment I saw them.
Murder was written on their faces, plain as the day.”

Toby nodded slowly. “That’s what they came here for – like Barney. It’s
all
they came here for, as if it was a game to be played, with the prize awarded to the winner. Call it, ‘last man on his feet with wounds he can be healed of.’ They got what they wanted, Jim, when they walked through your door. Nathaniel’s only aggrieved because he could never turn me into a murderer. Once, he told me he
could
do it, and he would –”

“I made you the promise,” Burke growled, as if he was gargling in blood at every syllable, “while I held you down over a table and gave you what you had
comin
’ to you, little molly-whore that you were.”

“If I was,” Toby whispered, “it’s what you made me. You could have put your mark on me to keep the others off, and then treated me with decency. Only wickedness made you take your sport on me – it was none of my doing, Nathaniel. Don’t you dare lay blame on
me.
”

“
Threatenin
’?” Anger infused Burke with fresh energy. “
You’s
grown the balls to threaten me now?”

“I don’t even want to
see
you one minute longer,” Toby said with an icy calm. “You’ve got what you always wanted. You played the game they were all slavering to play – you’re the last on his feet, with the prize in your hand. I’m a free man, with the gems I can hold in my right fist – you offered the deal, and I’ll claim it now. There’s the door, Nathaniel. Take Monteras’s bloody legacy and walk away with it. No one’s stopping you.”

“Aye,” Burke growled, coughing, gargling, spitting, “aye, I will, and be damned to you, Trelane. If I see you again,
I’s
like to split you, crotch to gizzard.”

He was moving as Joe Pledge struggled up in the chair with the last of his strength. “Nathaniel, don’t leave me –
fer
chrissakes, don’t leave me.”

For a long moment Burke hovered, peering down at Pledge as if he was already half blind. “You’re done for, Joe,” he wheezed. “There’s more blood out of you than in. I think you’ll be in hell a day or two before me … speak well of me to the master there.”

And then he was lurching away from the spill of lantern light. Jim thought he looked closer to shadow than man as he staggered across the doorstep and away into a twilight that had dimmed to steel blue and purple. Pledge would have screamed after him, but the life had ebbed so far from him, barely a croak passed his lips.

“Nathaniel,” he panted, “Nathaniel, don’t go without me – come back, Christ blight ye! God rot you, devil take ye!”

The stream of curses continued, but Jim stopped listening. He pulled both hands over his face, aware of the sweat on his skin and the chill in his bones. “Do you know where he’s going? The man’s dead on his feet, Toby. He’s not going to make it far. Does he have friends here?”

“Friends?”
Toby actually laughed, but Jim heard the edge of something very like hysteria in the sound. “The only
friends
he had in the world just tried to kill him … except for Joe, who took a pistol ball meant for him. And Nathaniel just walked away from him.”

“Then, where’s he going, damn him?”
Jim demanded.

“I don’t know.” Toby clenched both hands into his hair as if to force his mind to think properly, before he stepped out of the ring of the light. On the threshold he stopped and turned back with a look for Jim that was a hundred years deep.

Then he was gone, and Jim found himself listening to a painful silence. He heard only the soft susurration of the outgoing tide, the
labored
breathing of Joe Pledge, who clung to life with a tenacity Jim had to admire, and the hammer stroke of his own heart, slowly calming as he found himself alive and with his skin whole.

Moments later, the rasped breathing stopped and when Jim turned back to the chair he saw only glazed, unfocused eyes and a mess of blood which looked slick and black in the lantern light. Pledge was as dead as Hobbs and Tuttle, who were sprawled on the floor, and propped against the wall. The tavern was so full of death, Jim felt suffocated and he dove outside, desperate for fresh air,
any
air.