Call For The Dead

XIII

The stair consisted of more than a hundred steps. I lost count around eighty. It was darker than the bottom side of a buried coffin.

Then light began seeping up to meet us. It was a pale, spectral light, like the glow that sometimes formed on our mastheads in spooky weather. Colgrave stopped.

I glanced back up. The servant girl stood limned in the hole through the panel. The waddling silhouette of a black bird squeezed past her legs. Another fluttered clumsily behind her, awaiting its turn.

We went on. The stair ended. An open door faced its foot. The pale light came splashing through, making Barley look like a ghost.

He went on. He was shaking all over. There was nothing in the universe more deadly than a terrified Barley.

Colgrave followed him. I followed Colgrave. Priest, Mica, and the Trolledyngjan crowded us. We spread

out to receive whatever greeting awaited us. Barley was a step or two ahead.

The creature in red reposed on a dark basaltic throne. The floor surrounding, it had been inscribed with a pentagram of live fire. The signs and sigils defining its angles and points wriggled and gleamed. The floor itself seemed darker than a midnight sky.

This was the source of light. The only source. There were torches atop the red thing's throne, but they were not alight.

The creature's eyes were closed. A gentle smile lay upon its delicate lips.

"Kill it?" I whispered to Colgrave. I bent my bow.

"Wait. Move aside a little and be ready."

Barley started forward, blade rising. Colgrave caught his sleeve.

At the same instant one of the black birds flopped past us, positioned itself in Barley's path.

"We're here," Colgrave said softly; to himself. "So what do we do now?"

He had altered again. Once more he was the mellowed Colgrave. The old Colgrave did not know the word we.

"You don't know?" I whispered.

"Bowman, I'm a man of action. Action begets action, till resolution... My goal has been to get here. I haven't thought past that. Now I must. For instance, what happens if we do kill this thing? What happens if we don't? To us, I mean. And to everyone else.

Those aren't the kinds of things Colgrave usually worries about."

I understood. Tomorrow had never mattered aboard Dragon. Life on that devil ship had been a perpetually frozen Now. Looking backward had been a glance at a foggy place where everything quickly became lost. Looking ahead had consisted of waiting for the next battle, the next victim ship, with perhaps hope for a little rape or drunkenness before we fired her and leaned back to enjoy the screams of her crew. Tomorrow had always been beyond our control, entirely in the hands of whimsical gods.

They had taken remarkable care of us for so long, till they slipped us that left-handed one with the Itaskian sorcerer....

Here we stood at a crossroads. We had to decide on a path, and both went down the back side of a hill. We could only guess which was the better.

If we could even glean a hint of what they were. The trails were virtually invisible from this side of the crest.

"Ready your arrows, Bowman," Colgrave told me. "If he needs it, put the first one between his eyes. Or down his throat. Don't give him time to caste a spell."

"What'll your signal be?"

"You make the decision. There won't be time for signals."

We locked gazes. This was a new Colgrave indeed. Technique was my private province, but the decision to shoot had never been mine.

"Think for Dragon," he said. And I realized that that was what he was trying to do, and had been for the past several days. And Colgrave was unaccustomed to thinking for or about anyone but himself.

As was I. As was I.

A tremor passed through my limbs. Colgrave saw it. His eyebrow rose questioningly.

"I'll be all right." I nocked a different arrow. The motion was old and familiar. My hands stopped trembling. "You see?"

He nodded once, jerkily, then spun to face the creature in red.

It remained unchanged. It slept, wearing that insouciant smile. "Wake him up," Colgrave ordered.

Barley started forward.

"Don't enter the pentacle!" the Old Man snapped. "Find another way."

The Trolledyngjan took an amulet from round his neck. "This be having no potency here anyway," he said. He flung it at the sleeper.

It corruscated as it flew. It trailed smoke and droplets of flame. It fell into the sorcerer's lap.

The creature jumped as if stung. Its eyes sprang open. I pulled my arrow to my ear.

Mine were the first eyes it met. It looked down the length of my shaft and slowly settled back to its throne, its hand folded over the amulet in its lap. We had dealt it a stunning surprise, but after that first reaction it hid it well. It turned its gaze from me to Colgrave.

They stared at one another. Neither spoke for several minutes. Time stretched into an eternity. Then the thing in red said, "There is no evading fate, Captain, I see what you mean to do. But you cannot redeem yourself by killing me instead of those whom I desire slain. In fact, unless I misread you, you have slain to reach me. Wherefore, then, can you expect redemption?"

His lips were parted a quarter inch, still smiling. They never moved while he spoke. And I was never sure whether I was hearing with my ears or brain.

I do not know what was on Colgrave's mind. The sorcerer's remarks did not deflate him. So I presume that he had seen the paradox already.

"Nor can you win redemption simply through performing acts. There must be sincerity." There was no inflection in his voice, but I swear he was mocking us.

I remembered an old friend who had disappeared long ago. Whaleboats had never been very sincere. Unless he had hidden it damned well.

"The damned can be no more damned than they already are," Colgrave countered. A grim rictus of a smile crossed his tortured face. "Perhaps the not-yet-damned can be spared the horror of those who are."

My eyes never left my target, but my mind ran wild and free. This was

Colgrave, the mad captain of the ghost ship? The terror of every man who put to sea? I had known him forever, it seemed, and had never sensed this in him.

We all have our mysterious deeps, I guess. I had been learning a lot about my shipmates lately.

"There is life for you in my service," the sorcerer argued. "There is no life in defying me. What I have once called up I can also banish."

"This be no life," the Trolledyngjan muttered. "We be but Oskoreien of the sea."

Priest nodded.

Barley was poised to charge. Colgrave caught his sleeve lightly. Like the faithful old dog he was, Barley relaxed.

I relaxed too, letting my bow slack to quarter pull. It was one of the most powerful ever made. Even I could not hold it at full draw long.

I stopped watching the sorcerer's eyes. There was something hypnotic about them, something aimed specially at me.

His hands caught my attention. They began moving as he argued with Colgrave, and I ignored his words for fear there would be something compelling hidden in his voice. His hands, too, were playing at treacheries.

I whipped my shaft back to my ear.

His hands dropped into his lap. He stopped talking, closed his eyes.

A wave of power inundated me. The creature was terrified of me! Of me!

It was the power I had felt as Dragon's second most famous crewman, while standing on her poop as we bore down on a victim, my arrows about to slay her helmsman and officers. It was the power that had made me the second most feared phenomenon of the western seas.

It was the absolute power of life and death.

And in that way, I soon realized, he was using me too.

I had the power, and he did fear me, but he was playing to my weakness for that power, hoping that it would betray me into his hands. In fact, he was counting on using all our weaknessess....

He was a bold, courageous, and subtle one, that creature in red. Whatever the stakes in his game, he was not reluctant to risk losing. Not one man in a million would have faced Dragon's crew for a chance at an empire, let alone have recalled us from our fog-bound grave.

He spoke again. And again he made weapons of his hands, his eyes, his voice. But he no longer directed them my way.

He chose Barley. It made a certain sense. Barley was the most wicked killer of us all. But I held the power of death, and Barley would have to get past Colgrave and Priest to take it away from me.

He whirled and charged. And the Trolledyngjan smacked the back of his head with the flat of his ax. Barley pitched forward. He lay still. Colgrave knelt beside him, his eye burning with the old hatred as he glared at the creature in red.

I nodded to the Trolledyngjan. I was pleased to see that I was not alone in my awareness of what the sorcerer was doing.

"I think you just made a mistake," Colgrave said.

"Perhaps. Perhaps I'll send you back to your waiting place. There are other means to my ends. But they're much slower...."

"You shouldn't ought to have done that," Priest said. "Barley was my friend."

What? I thought. You never had a friend in your life, Priest.

One of the black birds shrieked warningly. Colgrave reached out....

Too late. Priest's left hand blurred. A throwing knife flamed across the space between himself and the creature in red.

The sorcerer writhed aside. The blade slashed his left shoulder. His left hand rose, a finger pointing. He screamed something.

"Wizard!" I snarled.

And loosed my shaft.

It passed through his hand and smoked away into darkness. He looked down the length of my next shaft. His bloody hand dropped into his lap. Pain and rage seethed in him, but he fought for control. He wadded his robe around his hand.

My gaze flicked to Colgrave. We had a standoff here. And unless the Old Man did something, that wizard would pick us off one by one. Colgrave had to decide which way to jump.

Colgrave had to? But he had told me.... But....