The Blackhope Enigma (16 page)

The main deck was bustling with sailors in loose shirts and breeches, bringing the craft safely alongside the pier. Muscular oarsmen were slumped with exhaustion on the benches that lined each side of the deck.

A sailor with an eye patch slung a rope around a post and gestured for Blaise to cross the gangplank that had been laid down for him.

As Angus’s shouts grew closer behind him, Blaise jumped onto the ship. The air smelled of sweat and fish. He was greeted by several smiling sailors, ushered down the raised gangway between the oarsmen and up onto the poop deck, where the helmsman guided the rudder. A low rumble began as men grunted and pushed the oars out like the wings of a huge bird. Within seconds the vessel shifted away from the dock.

Heart still racing, Blaise watched Angus standing motionless at the end of the pier, his face twisted with rage.

Someone tugged at his sleeve, and he turned around, startled. The one-eyed sailor, whom Blaise immediately nicknamed “Patchy,” bowed and looked expectantly at him. He seemed to be a first mate of sorts, dressed in neater breeches than the others and a tunic.

A boy peered down at Blaise from the crow’s nest atop the mainmast. Everyone else on deck had stopped work to watch the newcomer.

Who were they? What did they all want, staring at him like that? The ship pitched and he clung to the side, his stomach lurching.

Some of the men had dark hair and some had light. The same went for their skin tones and clothes. But Blaise’s stomach contracted again as he realized that their faces were all essentially the same.

They looked similar to the men in the frozen top layer of
The Mariner’s Return to Arcadia
. But those men did not move, while these men climbed and rowed and stared at him without blinking.

A voice broke the standoff.

“Welcome, Captain. Where you want to go?” asked Patchy in a singsong voice, offering him a skin full of water. “You tell me. We take you where you wish.”

“Captain? How could I be your captain? Don’t you have one already?” Blaise guzzled water and poured some over his face.

“No. We been waiting for you, Captain. Now you’re here, and this is your ship.”

“But how did you know I was coming?”

“When Captain comes here to find his ship, we come to take him where he want to go.”

Blaise noticed that many of the crew had gone back to their work. His stomach calmed a little. “But how do you know
I’m
the captain?”

“You were at shore,” said the sailor. “So you’re the captain.”

“Is this the only ship here?”

Patchy laughed. “No, other ships are already here — other captains also. But
Venus
is your ship.”

“Was Sir Innes Blackhope also a captain here?”

The sailor bowed. “Yes, yes, of many different ships, but not for long time now. Best captain, best fighter.”

“That figures,” said Blaise, and then he asked slyly, “What about Fausto Corvo? Was he here?”

This time Patchy’s face was blank.

“OK, guess not.” Blaise changed the subject. “Have you seen a boy and a girl about my age, maybe on another ship? She has brownish hair, dark pants, and her coat is green plaid. Her stepbrother is blond and has a dark jacket. They’re my friends and they’re lost.”

Patchy screwed up his face as he pondered. “No, Captain.”

“Well, I’m looking for them,” said Blaise, knowing that they were probably very far behind him now. If he tried to go back, he would have to contend with Angus again, not to mention the maze. “If you see any girl or boy, tell me.”

“I’ll tell the crew.” Patchy bowed and bellowed something across the deck in a language that could have been Italian. Heads nodded, and a few men grunted in acknowledgment.

“How do you know English?” Blaise finished the skin of water.

Patchy shrugged. “We all just know it, always.”

“Corvo thought of everything, didn’t he?” Blaise said.

“Corvo?” repeated the sailor.

“The man who made you and this ship and everything here,” said Blaise, waiting to see how Patchy would take this.

“I don’t understand, Captain.”

“So you don’t know how you got here?”

The sailor’s eyes showed no spark of interest or curiosity. “Come now, Captain. I’ll show you your cabin.”

Blaise had to hunch over as Patchy led him below the poop deck to a small cabin containing a table, chair, and bunk. He folded himself down onto the narrow bunk and stretched out his legs.

A cabin boy scurried in, bringing dried cod and more water for Blaise. He ate with ferocity, ignoring the toughness of the salty fish, and drank the whole jug of water at once. It seemed a lifetime ago that he had sat in the comfort of the palace, being waited upon by the terrified Inko.

Patchy removed a yellowed nautical chart from a trunk and smoothed it out on the table, pulling a pair of dividers out of the drawer.

Mare Incantato
was written in flowery lettering across the top, next to a painted compass rose, pointing north. Below these the chart showed a sea full of islands, islets, and rocks.

“Where do you want to go, Captain?” Patchy asked again, sweeping his hand across the chart. “To find sea snakes or unicorn fish?”

Holding up the jug for more water, Blaise said, “If it’s cool with you, I don’t want to look for sea snakes right now. I really want to find my friends, but I don’t know how.”

He got up and scrutinized the chart with Patchy, hoping it would show him some way of getting back to the palace, or at least the way out of the painting, but it showed him nothing.

Blaise touched the ivory paper, and something tugged at his brain. He dived into his messenger bag, snatching out the map he had scraped off the white wall.

He flattened it on top of the chart and cursed himself. The map wasn’t complete. In his haste he had left the top right-hand corner behind, still stuck to the wall.

The map showed islands and shoals, some with tropical vegetation and animals marked on them. The heads of fanged and spiked sea creatures popped out of the waters around the islands.

Blaise fingered the torn edge of the parchment. He had shorn off a piece of the northernmost island. Above the island were three drawings: a rectangle divided into four, with each quarter filled with smaller and smaller concentric squares; a woman holding a horn full of fruits and a wheel; and a woman with wings and a staff. Next to her was a fragment of another drawing that had been torn away.

“Do you know what they are?” Blaise asked Patchy.

The sailor shrugged. But he pointed at the island and grinned. Lifting up the map, he jabbed his finger at the nautical chart below it.

“Same same,” he announced.

Sure enough, the island was also on Patchy’s chart. It, too, was the last island at the top, but there were no drawings next to it.

“Where are we right now?”

Patchy ran his hand down the chart and pointed to an empty expanse of sea.

“We’re nowhere near that island,” Blaise said, looking again at the tiny drawings on his map. He had no idea who the two women were, but he was pretty sure about the divided rectangle.

It was just like the labyrinth in the Mariner’s Chamber.

“We go there, Captain?” The sailor measured the distance on his chart with the dividers.

Blaise furrowed his brow. Was it just a coincidence? Did he dare follow his hunch that the map had been left there for him, that his best way forward was to find the labyrinth — the way home?

“I guess so,” he said. “It’s somewhere to start, anyway.”

“Aye, sir.”

Blaise stashed the map back in his bag and followed Patchy out of his new quarters.

“Captain Doran,” said Blaise to himself, and couldn’t help but smile as he ducked his head through the low cabin doorway, emerging back on deck to survey the rows of straining oarsmen.

Angus’s shouts became curses as Blaise’s galley moved farther away.

“No one leaves me behind, least of all some idiotic boy!” he yelled. He stamped on the pier and dropped to his knees as it shifted suddenly beneath his feet, the wooden boards extending into an L shape.

When he got back on his feet, he saw a second galley ship coming across the water. Its wooden figurehead was Mercury, a young man with winged feet and a winged hat, holding a rod entwined with snakes.

Angus scrambled aboard as soon as it was tied up. A band of sailors greeted him as their captain, but he cut short their welcome.

“Captain — good,” Angus said. “Is this my reward for fighting off the monster hog and making it through the maze? I get my own transport, too?”

“Yes, yes,” said a gap-toothed sailor. “We take you where you want to go. We fight for you also!”

“Thank you, Raven, wherever you are,” muttered Angus to himself. “Very useful.”

He rushed to the stern of the ship and swung himself up onto the poop deck, from which he could see Blaise’s ship heading out into open sea.

Two sailors followed. “You give us orders, Captain. You want to fight the giant octopus? We know where to find it. Or the giant eel?”

“Fight a giant eel?” Angus frowned. “I’m not interested in sea monsters. I’m hunting a boy. He’s taken a map that should have been mine.”

The sailors nodded brightly at this.

“So here’s my first order, lads,” he bawled, pointing at the
Venus
. “Follow that ship!”

The crewmen scattered and took up their duties, shouting to the oarsmen. The ship turned and skimmed along the water’s surface while Angus hung over the side, never letting the
Venus
out of his sight. The sailors watched their new captain with the torn clothes and scratched face as he laughed and muttered to himself.

But then Blaise’s galley began to fade behind a ragged cloud of mist, and the
Mercury
slowed. Sailors called to each other in a rapid mix of tongues as they peered out to get a better view, while the ship’s pilot studied his compass and compared it to a dog-eared chart.

Angus pounded the railing with his fist. “Faster! Get moving!”

He scanned the gray shroud surrounding them. Something dark had moved in the distance — he was sure it had. But when he looked back, it had gone.

“Change course,” he commanded. “That way. They’ve gone that way!”

The helmsman glanced at the pilot, who returned a warning look.

“What’s the problem?” demanded Angus, hands on hips.

“That way’s no good, Captain,” the pilot said, frowning. “Rocks.”

Angus answered coldly, “You’ll have to be careful, then, won’t you?”

Sunni stumbled down the hill, her cries muffled by the thickening mist, calling for Blaise. He was nowhere to be seen. They reached the white wall, and Marin motioned for her to follow as he half carried Dean alongside it. When the whiteness gave way and opened to the sea, there was no sign of the pier Blaise and Angus had embarked from. Sunni collapsed onto her knees.

“Where did Blaise go? He must have come this way.”

Marin sat Dean down by her side. He took a swig from his water skin, then passed it to them.

“A ship came for the boy, and he is gone. And he was followed,” Marin said. “I saw the man for a moment only, running in the mist — the one you say you do not know.”

“We’re not liars. If we say we don’t know him, we don’t,” Sunni said. “So, now what? Do we just sit here?”

“Patience,” replied Marin. “Watch the sea.”

“You know where we are?”

“Yes.”

They sat in silence as the sunlight dazzled the water’s surface. A patch of fog drifted far out to sea.

Then Marin pointed at a ripple in the water. A pier pushed up through the surface and came to a standstill, as if it had always been there.

Marin hoisted Dean up and walked him along it, with Sunni close behind. As they reached the end, a galley with a warrior carved into the prow moved alongside them. The figurehead’s fearsome face and sword etched with dragons looked familiar.

“Mars again,” said Dean as the ship pulled in.

Marin called out something to the sailors. Two of them hauled Dean over the gangplank and sat him up on the poop deck. One of them tried to clean his leg wounds with a wet rag, but he recoiled and said, “Get off!”

Sunni huddled next to him, watching Marin tell the sailor at the helm, “There are two ships out there somewhere, captained by a man and a boy. Find them.”

The
Venus
, too, had been caught in the fog bank. When at last it drifted out, there was no sign of land in any direction, nor any birds. And there was no sign of Angus.

In his quarters, Blaise flicked his sketchbook open to a blank page and drew the hunter and his crossbow from memory, then Hugo and Angus. He spent more time on a sketch of Sunni standing on the labyrinth’s center, her eyes closed. More drawings poured out of him, filling up page after page. In the white spaces, he wrote captions and made little diagrams.

When he finally stopped and leafed back through his work, a lump rose in his throat. If he didn’t make it, at least someone might find his sketchbook and keep it. Maybe they would even find his dad and give it to him. That might help him understand what Blaise had seen and done before he died in this place.