The Tides of Avarice (21 page)

“I went on my own to a tavern and got drunk on grog, but my heart wasn't in it.

“All the time I was sitting there drinking, I was remembering the smug face of the chief of the coastal police, and the beady little hypocritical eyes of the judge who'd passed sentence on us, and the bloodthirsty looks on the jurors, and the braying of the townsfolk who wanted to see us all dangle. And most of anything, I remembered what my dreams and schemes had shown me doing to these scum.

“So I went into the hills and I found me a band of outlaws, and I beat them into taking me as their leader. I had to kill a few with my bare hands, but that was what was needed to get the rest to fall in line. I trained them how to use the swords and cudgels we got by murdering wayfarers on the lonely roads out there, and I bided my time until the wrath was banked back inside me, glowing white hot but fully under control.

“One night, when the moon was shy of the sky, me and my twenty cruelest cutthroats crept into the town where the courthouse was, and—”

Cap'n Rustbane stopped speaking abruptly, noticing Sylvester's presence for the first time in a very long while.

“You've put your paws over your ears,” he said. “What in the world possessed you to do that, young Sylvester? We're just getting to the best bit.”

“I don't want to hear what happens next.” The words came squeezing out of Sylvester's mouth as if they'd rather have stayed inside him.

“What?”

“Blood and guts may be all right for you, but I'm a peaceable fellow and—”

“Are you too lily-stomached for tales of mayhem?”

“Yes! That's exactly it. Think what you like of me, but—”

“But it's the gore and grue and the shrieks of the women and the spurting of blood that thrills the soul of any buccaneering boyo!”

“Then I'm not a buccaneering boyo.”

Cap'n Rustbane chuckled. It was a sound that could have made the flames of hell freeze in fear.

“But you're learning my ways.” The fox's voice was so quiet that it could barely be heard over the creaking of the ship's timbers. “D'you think you're frightened at the moment, young Sylvester?”

“Ye–yes!”

“Then imagine how frightened you'd be if it weren't just at the thought of me telling you about hacking people to death – slllloooooowwwwly, so I could savor their pain – but because I was just about to do all of these things and many, many more … to you!”

The last word was delivered no more than a finger's width from Sylvester's nose.

He thought he was going to fall off the too-high stool.

He thought he was going to faint clear away.

Billows of blackness encroached from all sides of his vision, converging in towards the center and seemed destined to blot it out entirely, but somehow he clung on to consciousness.

He stared Cap'n Rustbane straight in the eye with what he hoped was a reasonable imitation of defiance.

“I'm a peaceable person, as I've said, and I've no stomach for bloodshed or cruelty, but that doesn't mean I'm a coward. I'd ask you, sir, to remember that.”

For a moment, Sylvester knew, his life hung by a strand from a spider's web.

Then Cap'n Rustbane guffawed with laughter, slapping Sylvester on the back, which lifted him and sent him sliding across the table in a flurry of charts and pens.

“Only a hamster, and you've shown more courage to my face than any man-jack of my crew has done for a bucketful of years. I like you, young Sylvester. I knew from the first I was going to, and Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane is never, ever wrong about a thing like that.”

“Lemming,” said Sylvester.

“Whassat? Speak up!”

“Lemming.”

“Explain yourself.” The pirate's grin seemed to span the cabin wall to wall.

“I'm not a hamster,” said Sylvester with as much dignity as he could muster while lying flat on his stomach, his nose acting as an impromptu bookmark for what appeared, in the instant before impact, to be A Voyage to the Atolls of the Great Western Ocean, by Sir Perceval Montiffew. “I'm a lemming. I've told you before.”

“You have indeed,” cried Cap'n Rustbane, reaching out a paw to help him up. “And it's magnificently sorrowful I am to have made this same error yet again. Please accept my humblest apologies.”

“Apology accepted,” said Sylvester, hoping he didn't sound too prim. The fox was, after all, helping him to his feet and dusting him down.

“Good, good. Now, where was I?”

“Somewhere I'd rather you didn't go back,” said Sylvester.

“Oh, yes. Me and my band of hoodlums were—but you wanted me to skip over the good part, didn't you?”

“Yes.” Uneasily, Sylvester wondered if Viola would have given the fox the same answer.

Again, Cap'n Rustbane laughed. “You see, young Sylvester, the point of my telling you the story wasn't to impress you with the terrible things I've done during my time upon this mortal coil. That's a story too long to be told at a single sitting. What I'm trying to get through to you is the way a good pirate captain – and you don't find pirate captains any gooder than me, in a manner of speaking – makes sure of the unswerving loyalty and obedience of his crew, even their love. That'd be not too strong a word.”

“You still haven't told me how you learned about Cap'n Adamite's map,” Sylvester put in. He was sitting on the edge of the table now, his hind legs dangling beneath him.

“I haven't!” The Cap'n smote his brow histrionically. “And I was going to do that too, wasn't I? Whatever is happening to my brain? Sometimes I think I'd forget my head if it wasn't fixed on.”

“Yes, you were. Going to tell me about the map, I mean.”

“Telling you about the map's important, isn't it?” A sort of quiet reasonableness entered the fox's voice. Sylvester wasn't sure he liked the sound of it. “But then,” Cap'n Rustbane went on, “the lesson I'm in the process of teaching you is important too. Yes. I think it's the more important of the two things. Remind me about the map later.”

“Surely,” said Sylvester as if that was what he'd intended all along.

“Good. Now, my fine young friend, I was talking about fear and I was getting to the stage of telling you about what fear can do to a person, even someone who, like your good self, is no coward. Fear, true fear, isn't listening to something appalling, and oohing and ahing about how ghastly it all is. Fear is when it's about to happen to you.”

From nowhere a razor-sharp dagger had appeared in the fox's paw. Sylvester might have been better able to appreciate the legerdemain involved were it not for the fact that the paw in question was unnervingly close to his own throat.

“It's fear that enables me to rule the roost aboard the Shadeblaze,” explained Cap'n Rustbane, turning the blade over and over so that in the light from the lantern above the metal seemed almost liquid. “Some of them scurvy creatures out there are bigger than me, and there's even a few of them that are tougher than me and better in a fight, but there ain't none of them meaner than me. Ain't none of them crueller than me, or readier to cut out a tongue or an eye or a heart if I don't like its owner.”

Cap'n Rustbane let the implications of this sink in, then carried on.

“Aboard this ship, see, young lemming, I'm the judge and jury, and I've got a heart harder by far than that old mongoose back in Swivern. I know, because I saw his for myself as I held it in my paws and watched as it stopped beating. My word is law anywhere on the Shadeblaze, from the bottom of the keel to the topmost tip of the mainmast. It's law, as well, wherever my crew might chance to be on land or sea, even if they're not aboard the Shadeblaze. If anyone wants to go against my word, to break my law, why, he finds out the difficult way what it's like to raise the hackles of Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane.”

With a dexterous flick of the gray fox's paw, the dagger vanished again.

Sylvester suddenly noticed he must have stopped breathing a while back without realizing it. He filled his lungs with a panicky gasp.

“Is that understood?”

“Cer–certainly,” said Sylvester.

“The same goes for everyone. You included. That pert miss of yours too.”

Sylvester could almost hear the gears turning over in Cap'n Rustbane's mind.

“And almost certainly for that mother of hers, Three Pins. I hope.”

The dagger reappeared for a glittering split second. When it vanished again, Sylvester realized that a neat half-inch had been trimmed from his whiskers on both sides.

“Understood?” the fox repeated.

“Oh, absolutely.”

“Obey my orders and you live. Disobey, and . . .”

Cap'n Rustbane drew his finger across his throat eloquently.

Sylvester tried to give a sophisticated laugh. It came out as if someone had strangled it.

Once more, the dagger was in Rustbane's paw. “Remember how I threw this, back in Foxglove, and missed you?”

“Yes.”

“I don't often miss.”

He flipped the dagger end over end, so that he was holding it by the blade rather than the hilt, then in the same movement gave it another flip.

Sylvester felt the wind as the weapon whistled past his cheek. A tiny coolness told him that he'd lost more whiskers. Behind him, there was a thunkk as the dagger lodged in the cabin wall.

“Your life's mine to do as I like with, you understand?”

“I do.”

“Then remember it. Fear me. Your life depends upon it.”

Yet again, the fox's mood visibly shifted, as if the shadow of a cloud were lifting off a grassy field.

“But you were asking me about the map, were you not?”

“Er, yes.” Baffled by the fox's newly regained amiability, Sylvester suspected a trap somewhere. Cap'n Rustbane's constant shifts of humor made Sylvester feel as if he were walking on slippery ice. At any particular moment he was managing to keep himself upright, but always with the awareness that the very next moment might, without any advance warning, see him painfully dumped on his rear.

“Well,” said Rustbane, uncannily perpetuating the theme of Sylvester's thought, “you're sitting on it.”

The fox laughed uproariously as Sylvester, horrified, tried to look underneath himself without falling off the edge of the table.

“Not quite, dear Sylvester, not quite. But a little more to the side and you would be.”

Sylvester's gaze turned towards where Cap'n Rustbane was tapping a long, sharp claw on what looked, at first glimpse, like some old paper someone had crumpled up to throw away, then relented and tried to flatten out again. Age had turned the paper that mellow brown Sylvester knew so well from his work at the Library in Foxglove. The irregularly shaped piece of map that he'd burned had been this same yellow.

“Take a look, dear boy.”

Sylvester shuffled along so he could see the paper better. It was obvious at a glance, even though the job had been done with painstaking skill, that the sheet had been formed by gluing two roughly triangular sheets together along one edge. The result was a rectangle from which one large shape was missing. It didn't take a genius to work out what that piece of the jigsaw puzzle had been, especially since the remaining portions were covered in the same squiggles as the one Sylvester had destroyed.

On one of the pieces there were even more squiggles running diagonally across the top right-hand corner and then turning to follow, in an irregular fashion, the right-hand side of the paper for about three-quarters of the length of the sheet before disappearing off the edge. A sudden flash of insight told Sylvester this must be a section of coastline of a larger landmass.

One of the sheets of parchment was significantly filthier than the other, and than the sheet Sylvester had been given by Levantes. It looked as if someone might have been using it as a handkerchief – someone with a very bad cold. And that was the polite version of what seemed to have been done to it.

“The last time I was in jail,” breathed Rustbane into Sylvester's ear, “back in Swivern that was, you'll remember. The last time I was rotting in a prison cell there was a poor wretch of a squirrel in the cell next to mine. It was strictly forbidden for the two of us to talk, on penalty of a flogging, so o' course we did. Not the way the guards thought we'd have to, mind, which was shouting out loud enough for the other one to hear us through the thick stone walls. No. Over the years, before we'd gotten there, there'd been other prisoners in these two cells and they'd dug into the mortar between the stones with their suppertime forks and spoons and whatever else came to hand, I have no doubt, even their fingernails. By the time I was thrust unceremoniously into that cesspit, there was a tiny hole all the way through the mortar into the next cell.

“The hole was just big enough to carry a whisper.”

The gray fox stared off into the unknown distance, clearly reliving those times.

“Now,” he said, “any two amateurish jailbirds'd have done their whispering at night, when even the tiniest whisper can be heard at the other end of even the tiniest hole. But me and Hamish – that was my prisonmate's name – we were wiser jailbirds than that. Think of it: at night, when it's really quiet and nothing's moving, a whisper's likely to be heard all over the prison, see, and most partic'larly by a guard just outside in the corridor. If such a whisper had been heard, it'd have been the flesh of me and Hamish that'd have paid the price, cut to tatters by prison whips. So, what we did was we whispered during daylight hours, when everything about the prison was hustle and bustle and the screaming of the luckless whose turn it was in the torture cells beneath was at its loudest.

“I didn't tell you there was a lot of torturing going on in that prison, did I? Some of the prisons I've been in have been all right in that respect but, remember, I was in mongoose country and mongooses can be cruel creatures. Luckily, my crime hadn't been deemed worthy of the time and labors of the torturers, but Hamish was less fortunate.”