Chase the Morning

Chapter Seven

Unbelieving, I looked from her to the receding wisps of mist that trailed like a wake in the air towards the empty horizon.

‘You don’t – you can’t mean –’ Dry sand clogged my mouth, choked me. I stared wildly around the quarterdeck. On the companionway below Stryge sat hunched, Fynn and the dark girl beside him, gazing up at him, their heads laid doglike upon his unclean knees; his gloved fingers, still spotted with darkening blood, idly stroked their hair. The thought of that cruel magic revolted me, but I fought down my qualms.

‘You! You stopped them just now – can’t you do it again?’

The girl who was not a girl rolled her head back languidly and gazed up at me with opaque, sated dark eyes.

‘I’m weary,’ mumbled the old man, absently continuing his caresses. ‘Spent. And now they’re too far –’

Pierce crossed the deck in three clumping strides. ‘By’re leave, Master Stephen, we don’t want ’em stopped again! Why, why’d you think we were pounding at ’em so, but to make ’em cut and run? To show we’d be too costly to polish off, and best left be! But cross ’em again, maimed as we are, and finish us they surely will! Whatever it may cost – overrun us, or just beat about and hull us with their guns!’

My wrist ached with the weight of the sword. I slid it gingerly into my belt till it hung by the blunt upper edge, and rounded on the others. ‘But Christ, there must be something we can do! We can’t just give up like that – abandon her –’

‘Refitting needn’t take so long,’ said Jyp, chewing at his lip. ‘Then we can go after the Chorazin again. Maybe the Stryge’ll still get a line on her –’

‘Yeah! If it isn’t too late! And what’s the chance of that? God man –’ I choked again, clenched my fists, trying hard not to scream at him.

‘Be easy, Stephen,’ said Mall quietly. ‘We gave of our best – a good dozen at least with their lives, and who may give more? And you played the man past all expectance. No fault of yours or ours they’d so many aboard.’

I stamped on the deck, because there wasn’t a damn thing better I could do. ‘Christ, Jyp. I said we needed a bigger ship!’

Jyp shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t have overhauled the Wolves in anything bigger, Steve. Anyhow, there wasn’t a one to be found, not armed to match them. And sure as hell not able to carry four hundred men or more – if we could’ve found them in time. Because that’s about how many Wolves we ran into!’

‘A very army, who’d have expected it?’ agreed Mall, then touched finger to lips in puzzlement. ‘So many? But how? They’d scarce have room for supplies!’

‘Aye, I did hear they were layin’ ’em in heavy while they were in port,’ put in Pierce. ‘For long voyaging, said they, and nobody cared – longer the better, said we!’

‘While they must’ve been living just day-to-day,’ mused Jyp. ‘But on the inward voyage … Hell, they must’ve been starved for days – deliberately! Starved and dry! You don’t do that – even Wolves – ‘less you need to cram in the most bodies possible. Like for slaves – or maybe …’ He whistled softly. ‘Maybe soldiers. Maybe they were an army, right enough.’

‘Soldiery?’ Mall gave a little laugh. ‘Don’t be daft, man – for what? Looting the Port? A tenfold force wouldn’t serve, not even if they’d contrived to let loose that dupiah … oh!’

Hand to mouth, she stared – at me. Jyp nodded. ‘The Port, no – but elsewhere? Wolves alone’d never be able to do it – but with that critter to captain them?’

I stared, ‘Captain them? You mean lead them? That thing had a mind?’

‘Better’n yours or mine, maybe. Sure as hell different – sure as hell. With a thing like that to do the Wolves’ thinking for ’em, scare them on – well they just might risk it, mightn’t they? Take a real cunning mind to set up that kind of a team, cunning and nasty – which is just what I’m starting to see at work!’

‘What’re you saying?’ I demanded.

‘That maybe this foraying into the Core wasn’t so wild as we thought it. Maybe that’s where they were headed all along. Part of their plan.’

‘But … what could they do there? Against police – soldiers –’

‘Who’d have to find them first. Anyone see those Wolves coming to your office, either time? Or headed away? They’ve ways. They could make all kinds of hay, striking in the right places – robbery here, murder there, maybe a full-scale attack …’

For a moment it drove Clare from my mind, the effort to imagine it, a band of terrorists who could come and go under some cloak of invisibility, strike with fearful savagery – and unleashed by that awful devouring thing from the warehouse. I shivered. The terror they could spread – and more than terror; there would be hardly any limits …

‘And that’d be only the beginning,’ said Jyp quietly. ‘A bridgehead. For a real invasion. We of the Ports, we keep an eye open most times for any little tricks like this from Outside. The Wardens keep watch, and league and guild and warehouse master their guards; there’s barriers raised, barriers you never see, yet nothing can cross without alerting them. There’s other precautions, too, things I don’t pretend to understand; Stryge could tell you more, if he wanted to. We don’t like shadows at our backs, and damn little slips past. But with a route working, they might begin to – dark things, base and bad. Worse’n your dupiah by a long long chalk. You know, this all begins to look kind of big …’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘It does. Bigger than just saving Clare, that’s what you’re trying to tell me, right? Okay, it may be. But she’s still the centre of it! This rite they’re planning for her, it’s got to be connected somehow. So it doesn’t change a damn thing for us, does it – any of this? Except to make rescuing her more important than ever. If I have to bloody well swim after them –’

‘Bravo!’ said Mall softly.

‘Didn’t say otherwise, did I?’ said Jyp quietly. ‘If all else fails. But let’s try for that refit first, huh?’

Pierce was already at the rail, speaking-trumpet to mouth, directing a volley of orders at the crew. ‘Up, puppies! What, d’you think – it’s make-and-mend day? So you’ll all sit around on your arses louse-picking, will you? What kind of order d’you call this? I’ve seen better on a Brazil bumboat! These decks’ll be the better for a swilling and a swabbing and a lick o’holystone, and us none the worse for it either, I’m thinking …’ They took the barracking with weary good humour, perhaps because Pierce was croaking as exhaustedly as anyone. I had to swallow my bitter disappointment, and accept it; there really was nothing else to be done, and everyone was quietly getting on with it. Raging wouldn’t get me anywhere.

‘Well,’ I sighed, turning back to Jyp. ‘Just show me how I can help, then, and I’ll do it –’ The long sword swung between my legs and tripped me flat on the deck with a crash, ruining my gesture but luckily not much else.

‘If you’d cleave to that thing, best you learn the right use of it,’ Mall admonished me severely as she hoisted me to my feet. ‘Else you run the risk of most grievous hurt!’

‘… and practically useless on dates, huh?’ grinned Jyp, then, more critically ‘Looks well on him, though. We could teach him a trick or two, eh, Mall?’

She twitched the sword from my belt and slashed the air with graceful savagery. ‘Not Wolf work, this. A fine balance, but heavy – Bavarian, maybe, by the turn of the ornament. Not easy to handle – you wielded it better than I guessed.’

‘Just like playing squash,’ I grinned. ‘Good for the wrists.’ She raised an eyebrow, and Jyp chortled.

‘He means kind of a tennis game – not what you were thinking, lady. Okay, we’ll teach you, Steve – and heaven help your poor hide. Meantime, though, let’s us buckle to on these spars. Maybe we can salvage something …’

We did, eventually; but not much, and by then the sweat had sloughed most of the powder-burn off our faces. The day grew hotter, and men took turns to collapse in the scuppers and let the deck-pumps play over them. I lay gasping among them as the stream moved on, blinking up at the sky and feeling the thin crust of salt dry almost at once on my skin; I licked it hungrily from my lips. Where were we? It felt more tropical than anything, the air warm and the sun fierce. Overhead, on the jury-rig coupled to the mainmast stump, the single sail flapped loosely as they ran it up, giving us moments of welcome shade. After five hours solid slog in the stinking heat below it was sheer paradise; I wasn’t up to the technicalities of re-rigging, but patching shotholes with planks and mallets, that I could manage. Now, though, I didn’t feel able to drive a nail through tissue-paper; getting back on deck had taken my last reserves, and I was glad enough to just elbow myself up again and wait for the next glorious blast of water. Instead a shadow settled over me, almost as welcome, and lingered.

‘Well, hi,’ came Jyp’s voice. ‘Still rarin’ t’go, are we?’

‘Bugger off,’ I croaked, blinking up at him, a silhouette edged with glowing brass. He shifted, and the sunlight clashed like a giant cymbal. I sank back with a groan. ‘No stay, I need the shade. My head’s ready to fall off and roll down the scuppers. Any more hammering and it probably will.’

‘You’ll never miss it,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But we’re close to done now. We’ll be able to tack now without shipping too much water, thanks to you guys. And the new rig takes the weight of the sail just jim-dandy.’

I took the hand he stretched out and he hauled me effortlessly to my feet. He must have been working as hard as everyone else, he looked just as hot and haggard and bristly, but it didn’t seem to diminish his energy in the least. His lean face was aglow as he grinned up at the primitive lash-up made with the broken foremast. How old was he, I wondered; how long ago did he come into the world, and where? There was something about him, something the same as Mall, though less strong – an aura of energy, inexhaustible strength. They seemed completely tireless, almost inhumanly so – except that they positively radiated humanity, whether in good nature and kindness, almost overwhelmingly so to me, or in the startling ferocity they let loose on their enemies. Inhuman was no way to think of them; superhuman would be nearer the mark.

Was it their age alone, or was that just incidental to another quality, another force that drove them to live so long and so intensely? Now that I came to think of it, there was something the same about Pierce, in a more stolid way, and about other faces in the crew. But in them it was not as strong or as complete, and sometimes it did look inhuman; the limping Master Gunner, Hands, seemed to crackle and glitter with malicious destructive energy, as if he burned not food but gunpowder in his guts. As if he embodied the living spirit of his guns, with no purpose except to destroy, and no care as to what.

Suddenly I felt the lack deeply, even of a one-sided passion like that; nothing of the sort burned in me. I felt rusty and ashen and empty, like the long-neglected fireplace I’d uncovered in redecorating my flat. The need to help Clare raised a glow, maybe – no, more than that. One last fierce flame in the embers; but its lonely blaze only highlighted the empty hearth. The rest was cold.

Jyp clouted me amiably on the shoulder. ‘Hey, cheer up!’ he said, propelling me through the incredible clutter towards the quarterdeck. ‘Thought you’d like to see – we’re going to bring her head around now, let the sail catch the wind a little and if the rig holds – why, we’re cookin’ with gas!’

‘Hands! All hands!’ came the hollow roar from the bridge trumpet. ‘Man the braces! Mr Mate! We’ll have that sea-anchor in! Carry on when you’re ready, Sailing Master!’

As the mate and his party hauled in the float that had kept our nose into the wind, Jyp bounded up onto the companionway. ‘Aye aye, cap’n! Ready, helm? Bring her round then – handsomely, now – a point, a point – sheets –’ His eyes fixed on the new rig, he gave his orders in a tense monotone, hardly a shout; but the deck fell so quiet his voice carried clearly. The crude-looking square-sail began to quiver, the yard creaked; I held my breath. The canvas thrashed once, twice, then swelled taut with a satisfying thump. The mast took the strain, creaked and quivered against its stays in the play of vast tensions, like invisible fingers – and held. The deck lost its lolling motion and rose smoothly as the ship strained sluggishly forward. A great sigh went up as everyone remembered to breathe again, as if we were trying to fill the sail ourselves.

‘Steady as she goes! That’s well done, my chicks!’ The squawk of the trumpet didn’t quite conceal the relief in Pierce’s voice. ‘Very well done! A spot of refreshment’s in order, I’ll warrant! Not quite noon yet, but we’ll consider it so!’ A hoarse cheer echoed his order. ‘Up spirits, Mr Mate, and a double tot for all! Then hands to eat, by watches!’

Not quite noon? There stood the sun, all right, just off the zenith – though that might mean nothing, in this crazy world. It felt more like day’s end to me, after five hours in that hellhole – but then I’d started not long after dawn. Currents were building up in the crowd on deck, and I found myself drawn into one, headed for the foot of the new mainmast where two large barrels had been set up. Before I knew it I was gulping down a pannikin full of a potent mix; I’d never much liked rum, but even cut with water that grog was the best thing I’d ever tasted. Life flowed back into me with a rush, and I found myself grinning back at the other crewmen, and probably looking just as inane. I seemed to be getting along with them as well as with the officers, or maybe better, and that pleased me absurdly. Right from my college days I’d been always a chief, never an Indian, and there was a good side to being the greenhorn again. Not that there was much social distinction aboard; here came Jyp, wiping his lips from the same pannikin, and if the sailors cleared a path for him it was good-humouredly and with real respect.

‘Chow time, port watch!’ he shouted, and as half the hands went clattering and tumbling below he led me up to the quarterdeck for ours. He peered unenthusiastically under the covers of the elegant silver dishes Pierce’s steward had laid out on a folding table. ‘Just ships’ ordinary, I guess – beans, salt pork, German sausage, biscuit – and all cold, dammit. The galley stove went out in the last exchange.’

‘It takes five hours to relight?’

‘Out with a twenty-five pound shot, I meant – right out through the side.’

‘Umm. You know, this is just the weather one prefers a cold luncheon, don’t you think?’

‘By the most amazing coincidence’ … grinned Jyp. ‘Still, there’s rum to wash it down.’

Rum there was, in enormous tumblers, but I only managed one. Jyp swore I slid nose-down into my plate of beans, but he was exaggerating as usual; no way could I ever have flaked out before I’d finished the last one.

It was falling on me. I knew it, I could see it and I couldn’t even move, a meteor streaking down the sky, glowing larger by the minute, closer, clearer, greener till it blotted out the sky, roaring down on me in flame – a vast clutching hand. The fingers closed like falling pillars and a vast explosion tore me atom from atom and scattered me to the winds. Then, just as suddenly, I was awake, staring up at the sky, stained the deep indigo of a tropical twilight. I was glad of that; my eyes didn’t feel up to much else. The brighter stars gleamed like needles. Another blast shook me, and set the stars dancing in my head; I rolled over, found that was just as uncomfortable, and sat up with a groan. Now I was awake I knew that sound, and I fumbled confusedly for my sword.

‘Slept your fill, Master Stephen?’ inquired a familiar voice, mildly sardonic, from the direction of the helm. ‘Have no fear, they’re but signal guns.’

‘Of course,’ I mumbled, or something of the sort, fighting to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth. ‘Nice uv yuh t’let m’sleep. Nice soft deck …’

A boot tapped musically against wood. ‘Your cabin’s yet unrepaired, or we’d have stowed you there. There’s water in the butt here, should you wish it.’

I downed a pannikin practically in one gulp, and felt a lot better. ‘Could I have another? Is there enough?’

‘To soak your head in, an it’ll not fall off!’ grinned Mall. I followed her advice, as far as my face anyhow; the water was tepid and brackish, but incredibly refreshing all the same. ‘Take all you will, there’s no lack. See, we’re in sight of land.’

‘Uh?’ I jerked my head up, spluttering and streaming. ‘What? Where?’ But I saw it even as she pointed, a dark streak between the sea and a strangely luminous skyline.

‘We’ve run up a signal for aid. That’s what purpose the guns serve, to call attention to it – and a’looks as though we’ve snared our hare!’

I wiped my streaming eyes and peered out; something was there, something like a glowing coal across the low swell, and growing slowly larger. The hands were lining the sides, laughing and pointing. I shivered, though the night was warm; it looked uncomfortably close to my dream. But when it rolled a little closer, and Pierce hailed it, I laughed myself. It was a little steamship, craziest-looking thing I’d ever seen with its immense crowned smokestack, tethered by stays just like a mast, and huge uncovered paddlewheels at either side of the little wheel-house that was all its superstructure. When it tooted its whistle and hove-to alongside I’d have expected Mickey Mouse to look out. Instead a vision of white whiskers and brass buttons appeared with a megaphone, rubbing his hands, and greeted Pierce with the cheerful sympathy of a man about to profit from his neighbour’s problem. They began a spirited negotiation, only about half intelligible – which was probably just as well, given the half I could make out; terms like ‘raggedy-ass lime-juice freebooter’ and ‘pinch-penny tea-kettle sailor’ were flying back and forth quite freely. Unless I was much mistaken, each challenged the other to a duel at one point. But all at once they came to a friendly accord, and the steamboat began chugging laboriously around, paddles churning in opposite directions. Pierce and Jyp came striding aft, sounding very cheerful.

‘A stroke of high fortune, by Jove!’ the captain rumbled. ‘A steam tug for our tow, and at a most reasonable rate.’

‘That’s so,’ agreed Jyp placidly. ‘Last one, I recall you solemnly vowed if he didn’t come down two bits a mile you’d rape his wife and burn his house down. And shoot his dog. Okay, Mall, I’ll relieve you now; this river’s an old friend of mine. There’s sandbars and mudbanks aplenty right up the river, and I know all their first names.’

‘And whom they wedded, I’ve no doubt. The wheel’s to yourself, pilot! I’ve a mind to rest me awhile.’ With a friendly wave she trotted lightly down to the maindeck. Seeing the spring in her stride as she threaded her way through the growing snarl-up there, you wouldn’t have thought she needed any rest at all. The mate was struggling to organize the reefing of the makeshift mainsail; without proper rigging this was a murderously difficult job, and even these hardened sailors were so tired they were tripping over and tangling lines everywhere you looked. Pierce glared and seized his speaking trumpet. ‘Deck, there! Belay, all! One fall at a time! Haul by turns, you pox ’spital outsweepings!’ They stared up stupidly, and he began to thump time on the rail, ‘Haul, one! Then haul two!’

A clear musical note picked up the rhythm of his shout and wove it into a mocking little rise-and-fall tune. Laughter rippled, and one of the women sang along with the line.

The men picked up the song, hoarse as corncrakes but with reviving energy. Order seemed to flow across the deck, and they threw their weight on the falls in time to the repeated lines.

Miracle of miracles, the snarl-up was beginning to clear, and men could shin up the makeshift mast and out on the yard – gingerly, since there wasn’t any footrope.

I glanced round for the source of the music, and was astonished to see Mall appear at the door of her cabin, a violin at her shoulder, swaying with each bold sweep of her bow. Out into the tangle she stepped, skipping over snags and kicking stray ends of rope aside without missing a note, and perched herself nimbly upon the rail. As they finished hauling she shifted almost imperceptibly to another tune, a strange sad reflective melody with an oddly Elizabethan sound – or not so oddly, when you thought about it. It was incredibly calm and beautiful.

‘Great little fiddler, isn’t she?’ said Jyp softly.

‘The best – not that I’m any expert. Doesn’t she ever sleep?’

‘Not often. I’ve seen her, once or twice. Never for long.’

‘Do you?’

Jyp chuckled softly. ‘Now and again.’

The tug hooted impatiently, and a cloud of smutty soot from its stack blew across the deck, inspiring Pierce to further inspired cursing; a line was flung from its stern to our bows, and there made fast. The little tug tooted again and turned clumsily away, paddles stirring the dark water to a froth. The line took the strain, hummed taut, the Defiance wallowed horribly under us a moment and then surged forward in a new rhythm, bobbing and bucking across the waves. I turned to Jyp. ‘You called this a river? With only that streak of land in sight? Looks more like the sea, still.’

‘Sure is, in a sense.’ He spoke a little absently, his eyes fixed on the water ahead. ‘But it’s a big river, this, strong current carrying a mighty load of silt and flowing right out against the sea to dump it. Delta here sticks out a long way, and the current’s building the banks all the time. We’re steering down the main drag already; can’t see it, but it’s there – hallo!’ A soft, almost subliminal judder seemed to pass through the ship. ‘Baby’s grown a mite. Ah, well, it scrapes the copper clean. Man can’t be too careful round here.’

And I realized with a sudden thrill that even while we’d talked the waves around us had been growing slower, heavier, flatter, as if the water itself was turning somehow thicker; a shadow seemed to be spreading beneath. At last they began to break over the hidden solidity and their voices changed to the resigned hiss of surf – too near, all too near to come from that far-off streak of land. Slowly, almost shyly, hummocked silhouettes rose on either side in the starlight, and before long I saw them topped with scrubby grass and clumps of bushes. The ship’s motion was changing, growing steadier, the thudding pulse of the surf already behind us and dying away. It was as if, in the blackness beyond the light of our lanterns, the land had reached out to meet us.

So it went on, hours into the night. Clouds hid the moon, and the starlight showed us only the barest outlines of the bank; our lanterns couldn’t reach. Ahead of us blazed the open door of the tug’s firebox, an angry guiding star in the blackness with the insistent, relentless chuffing of its engine. I did my best to doze, lying or sitting leaning against the transom, but without the combined effects of rum and exhaustion the discomfort of the deck kept on waking me every hour or so. Once something sang uncomfortably in my ear, and I sat up sharply and stared around. The banks had changed a little, not necessarily for the better. There were trees there now, oddly stunted and growing in swampland, to judge by what drifted out to us on the warm breeze – the smells, and the incessant chorus of chirps, croaks and whistles. And the mosquitoes; I slapped and swore, but they didn’t seem to bother Jyp.

‘They go off watch a little later,’ he said, poised easily at the wheel. I was about to say something about them getting their tot of blood first, when a sound between a boom and a coughing roar echoed out across the night, followed by a heavy splash. ‘Gator,’ remarked Jyp. ‘Havin’ bad dreams, maybe.’

‘My heart bleeds.’ I sank my head in my arms to save my eyelids from the mosquitoes and drifted back in and out of my own unhappy musings. I’d meant to ask where we were going, but I was almost too weary to care. Two or three times more I remember waking in dim unease, but not what woke me. The last time was clearer. Drums thudded in my head, there was the smell of lightning on the air, and on a wall shadows glided back and forth …

Quite abruptly, as if somebody had shaken me, I was awake, sitting up, tense and breathing hard. Nothing had changed, that I could see; yet something had. The air was cooler, for one thing, and the smells were different. The moon was out now, though very low in the sky, and stretching long shadows across the deck. But Jyp stood at the helm still, unperturbed. He nodded as I hauled myself stiffly up, yawned, stretched till my muscles cracked, and wished I hadn’t eaten all those beans. I wasn’t feeling conversational, so I leaned on the rail and gazed out over the river. It looked as wide and as dark as ever, but the banks were changing. The odd trees were still there – some kind of cypress, I thought, seeing them more clearly – but mingled with other kinds as the banks rose higher. And in among them I thought I saw little sparkles now and again, far-off lights. I blamed them on my eyes at first, till the sound of singing drifted out through the darkness – voices in harmony, women’s mostly. It sounded like some kind of blues, slow and mournful as the turbid river.

I was about to mention it to Jyp and ask him where we were supposed to be going when another shape materialized out of the shadows in the river beside us, a tall three-masted bulk even bigger than the Chorazin, lolling heavily at anchor in the channel. Its immense bowsprit seemed to scorn our shattered rig as we slunk by. Beyond it other much smaller boats were moored, and others, little better than canoes, drawn up on the muddy bank. Then came trees again, but more and more cleared gaps were appearing; there were buildings here, almost to the water’s edge, and more voices, raucous this time. I looked over to the other bank, but it was sunk in unbroken darkness. Out in the river, though, the moonlight glinted sullenly on another big ship at anchor, a lean long shark-shape riding strangely low in the water. Its flat decks were capped with dark rounded humps, their long snouts shrouded in draped tarpaulins; a broad stubby smokestack rose up between them, only a little higher. Unmistakably it was a warship, and with turreted cannon that had to be far more modern than our muzzle-loaders. Beyond it the trees vanished, and a phalanx of big ugly buildings fringed the sky, spiked here and there with tall thin factory chimneys. A broad jetty lanced out into the river and back along the banks into the night till only its faint lights marked it, and the shadowy foliage of mastheads ranged alongside, much the same as I’d seen over the Danube Street rooftops. But among them, standing out like the broad pillared trunks of a southern rain forest, were pair after pair of smokestacks. Crowned with fantastical rondels, stellar points, even Corinthian capitals, they capped the high-sided hulls beneath as if they were the factories’ floating spawn. As we drew nearer I saw the huge cylinders, stepped and flanged, at their sterns. I leaned on the rail and held my head.

Jyp made an enquiring noise. ‘It’s this clash of times,’ I groaned. ‘It’s making me giddy. Do times always get jumbled together like this?’

Jyp shook his head. ‘No jumble. Square-riggers, sternwheelers, tin-plate monitors even – round about the 1850s, 1860s, you’d find ’em all moored along here together.’

I nodded, considering Jyp carefully. ‘Remember that, do you? From when you were young?’

‘Me?’ He smiled. ‘Hell, no! I’m not that old. They’d all gone by the time I was born, ’cept maybe a few sternwheelers. Never saw one, anyhow, nor any kind of ship where I was raised; not a drop of sea. The grain, with its waves, mile on mile, they said that was like the ocean; what’d they know? They’d never seen it any more’n I had. Till I ran away to the coast; then I saw, and I’ve never left it since. Even though I got me my master’s tickets just in time for the war, and the U-boats.’

I was startled the other way now; Jyp hardly seemed modern enough to have sailed against U-boats. Tunisian corsairs, yes; U-boats, no. It made his ageless look oddly more outrageous than Mall’s. ‘Sounds rough. What were you on? The North Atlantic run? The Murmansk Convoys?’

‘Yes, to both. But I was born back before the turn of the century, in Kansas. I was maybe sixteen when I ran off; it was World War One I was talking about.’ He jerked his head. ‘I stuck around, that’s all. In the shadows, just like those ships out there. Just like everything we’re seeing – those songs from the old slave barracoons, the little fishing villages, the whole damn river under us. All part of what formed this place, its character, its image. Its shadow. It’s not gone, not yet. Outside the Core it lingers on, clinging round this place. Felt maybe but never seen, though you lived a whole life long here – not ‘less one day you happened to turn the right corner.’

‘Which place –’ I tried to ask. But the screech of the tug’s whistle drowned me out, and the sudden explosion of activity around us on the deck. Jyp yelled out orders and spun the wheel; Pierce came trumpeting up from below, and turned out both watches. We had come to an empty berth along the crowded dock, and the Defiance had to be worked in. Which left me about the only useless person on board – except perhaps the eerie little trio huddled in that foc’sle cabin, and they hardly counted as human. I thought of taking to my half-collapsed cubbyhole, but there was no clear way off the quarterdeck. Lines were being hauled in dripping from the tug and others flung to shadowy figures along the quay. I was doing my best to dodge between them when Mall’s best steam-whistle tones nearly got me hanged in a stray loop. ‘Hoi, beauteous Ganymede! Sliding off like a shovelboard shilling? We’ll warp her in – come lend the weight of your arm! Hands to the capstan!’

I couldn’t quite remember who the hell Ganymede was and I wasn’t sure I wanted to; but at least it was something I could do. We heaved the long bars from their racks, thrust them through the slots and bent our backs to them.

Mall kicked back the pawl and hopped neatly out of our way, onto the capstan’s scarred top. ‘Heave, my sweet roarers! Heave, my ruddy rufflers! Heave your ways to the booze-ken! Bend your backs to the wapping-shop! What, sweat so o’er a feather? Man-milliners all, the best of you! Scarce fit to poke a shag-ruff!’ She unslung the violin from her shoulder and scraped a swinging tune that was obviously a local favourite.

As the shantymen – and women – worked their way down some national characteristics I’d never have suspected, the crippled Defiance was drawn in alongside the wharf. I bent my back with the rest, but once the fenders boomed against the side, the ropes were made fast and the gangplanks crashed into place, that was the end of my usefulness. The flurry of activity redoubled; everyone was either shouting orders or obeying them, or both. Nobody actually told me to get lost; but somehow I couldn’t seem to find a spot of the deck where somebody didn’t have a really good urgent reason for apologetically but firmly elbowing me out of the way.

I couldn’t resent it, either. I knew I was lucky the crew were still so intent on the chase, after the bloody rebuff we’d suffered – whether it was revenge, or general hatred for Wolves, or the money I’d offered that drove them. It occurred to me then that these half-immortals must have a strange attitude to money. They could never be sure they had enough. They’d know it was almost inevitable they’d run out of it, sooner or later – and equally, that there was no point in lingering too long in one place to earn a lot, because that would shorten their lives, drag them back towards the Core or whatever they called it. No wonder they were so keen on trade! And so eager to earn large amounts quickly, even in ways as dangerous as this.

But I hadn’t any of those drives. There was nothing I could do, and I was stiff, sticky, dirty and depressed. If I wanted some privacy and peace of mind I’d either to retreat to what was left of my cabin, or escape down the gangplank to the wharfside. I chose the latter, but my foot had no sooner touched terra firma than the mate and a party of seamen came clattering after me, barged me – very apologetically – aside, scrambled up on a long flatbed wagon drawn by a team of four immense horses, and trundled off into the shadows of the wharfside buildings. These were nothing like the grim walls of stone and brick I’d left behind. Just as decrepit, though – clapboard mostly, painted in what the lanterns told me were faded pastel colours, plastered with illegible shreds of posters. The windows were mostly boarded or broken, and grass grew around their stone steps. I was just about to sit down on one when a party of sailors came struggling ashore with huge sausages of canvas, evidently what sails had been salvaged, and began to spread them out across the cobbles, right to the foot of my step. Where they elbowed me – very apologetically, of course – aside. Never mind peace of mind; I wasn’t even getting to rest the other end.

Leaving the sailmakers to whistle and swear over the shot-damage, I wandered away down the wharf and peered around the first corner I came to. It was a street, like any other dockside street I’d seen, but less well lit. God alone knew what the two lamps visible were burning; it wasn’t gas or electricity – with that dim little flame it could be anything from colza oil to blubber. It told me nothing at all about where we were, or what kind of town it was; I was wondering if I dared look a little further when I noticed the figure standing hunched and abject under one of the lamps. Indistinct in the warm hazy air, and yet oddly familiar; somebody I’d seen before, somebody I recognized by their stance alone – and there couldn’t be many of those.

I took a step forward. It gave a great start, as if it had seen me, and ran a few steps out into the road, towards me. Then it hesitated, half turned as if called away, and stood irresolute in the middle of the dim road. I hesitated too, not sure who or what I was seeing; but I was still within earshot of the dock. One good shout would bring folk running; and the bare sword that tapped my calf at every step was a strange primitive comfort. Also, as I came nearer I could see that whoever it was wasn’t very big; not a Wolf. A woman, more likely, from the flowing outline of the clothes; and the impression of familiarity was getting very strong. Maybe I was just following some dockside tart – though after Katjka I’d be slow to take even one of them for granted. This one was shorter than her, though; more of a height with …

With Clare? I shook off the thought. A couple of steps more and I’d see more clearly – but then the figure gave another great start. It looked wildly down a narrow side-street to the right, then threw up its hands and waved me frantically back. I stopped, clutched at my sword and saw the figure whip this way and that like an animal caged within high walls. Then it whirled as if despairing and bolted towards the mouth of the side street. I called out. It glanced around, caught its foot on the curb and sprawled headlong – not exactly suspicious or threatening. I ran towards it as it picked itself painfully up, and for an instant I caught a glimpse of swinging hair, long hair. I couldn’t see the colour – but it was the length of Clare’s, at least. But with another panicky gesture whoever it was limped off into the shadowy street, and as I reached the corner I heard hobbling steps slapping away along the pavement.

Not being a total idiot, I didn’t rush in after it. Carefully I drew my sword, and stopped to let my eyes adjust. They did, and there was nobody lurking, nowhere for them to lurk against high concrete walls featureless as a jail. The road was uneven, puddled with glinting water, the long pavements were clear of everything except garbage – quite a lot of that – and those painful steps went on, with just a hint of gasping breath. I ran, leaping the puddles, skirting the softly-blowing shreds of paper and plastic, and in the gleam of a brighter lamp at streets’ end I glimpsed the figure again – slim, slight, limping desperately along with arms akimbo and hair flying. Not Clare; she was less delicate, more solidly built. But still that unnerving hint of the familiar, infuriating me, undermining all my cautious instincts with the desperate need to see. Where was the sun? We’d been all night on the river; surely it must be rising soon?

Left around corners limped my shadow-hare, left, left and right again. I darted after it, swinging round the lamp-posts like a child for speed. Then a new street opened onto a sudden brightness I found blinding; all I could make out at first were the rows of white lights that seemed to hang unsupported like stars in the hazy air, and among them, above a mass of glittering reflections, tall shafts of shimmering movement. My dazzled eyes rebelled at those dancing, glassy columns; the sound alone told me it was a fountain. Beyond it, beneath a shadowy row of arches, its reflections danced – and across them that shadow flickered, slipping from arch to arch. It was some kind of piazza, lined with shop windows dark and empty now; what shops I didn’t stay to see. My running footfalls rang echoes from the roof. We were in a city square, the hare and I, brightly lit by the white globes gleaming down from elegant wrought-iron lamp-holders on the high stone walls, from ornately fluted standards ringing the railings of the garden at its heart. And down its pathways, clipped and civic, the dark figure glided, beneath the hooves of a rearing statue and beyond, towards a white wall that towered over the far side of the square, higher than all the rest. Three sharp towers loomed out of the night, the middle one tallest – no, those were crosses on top. Three spires. It was some kind of church, or cathedral more likely; but odd, outlandish with its stacked columns and narrow-arched windows, and in the midst of them all a clock. Like places I’d seen in Spain or Italy, the kind they called romanesque – and come to think of it, the rest of the square had the same sort of look. We might have been somewhere in Spain – only not quite. So where the hell was I? Correction – plain where. They wouldn’t have cathedrals in hell.

Flagpoles stood stark and empty. Signs were too far for me to read without turning aside. And there in the gloom by the great barred door lurked my quarry, hesitant, fleeting, poised as if to dart inside – why? To seek sanctuary – from me?

I slowed down, walked evenly, lightly towards it, closer and closer. Till I might have lunged forward and grabbed it. But I stopped, hesitant; and the moment it saw that the figure gestured again, desperately, and backed away towards the shadowy mouth of the narrow street behind. I’d come close enough to catch a gleam of dark eyes, a flash of a parchment-colored cheek, no other detail. Who had I known with any such coloring? Except …

The figure whirled about and ducked around the corner. I sprang after it; and found it there, standing, its back to me, as if gazing at the sky. A sky filling with light now, so that the surrounding rooftops stood out in sharp silhouette – but the light was white, and it didn’t drown the stars. My hair bristled. The sun rising when the moon should have, that was bad enough. But the moon in place of the sun – a new night, in place of a dawn and an end of deep shadows – That was far worse. I took two short steps forward, caught the figure by the shoulder, and felt a loose light cloak, almost a shawl, fall from the head. It turned sharply.

‘I’m sorry.’ I stammered idiotically, like anyone who’s accosted the wrong person, blinking hastily around for the real shadow. The face beneath the long hair was a man’s, lined and bony and sickly sallow, the livid lips set thin and hard. ‘I thought –’

Then the eyes met mine. The malevolent glitter in them lanced into me, diamond-hard, chilling – the triumphant eyes of the knave-card. And I had seen that face before! Where? A fleeting glimpse – a red car, madly driven … The thin lips split in a soundless crow of laughter, mocking, horrible. Instinctively I flung my sword up between us, as if to ward off a blow; but the shadow man only skipped back and fled. I bolted after him, furious now, fury fed on fear. This time there was no dodging, and no limp; the street was straight and he ran, fast, one block and across a road against lights, then another, with me never more than a sword’s length from his heels. Until, in the middle of the third block – he was not there. I skidded stumbling to a halt, stared wildly around, slashed at the air, at nothing. Then I gagged at a brief whiff of a horrible smell, like vomit. And that was it; I was alone.

Had he meant to lose me, whoever he was? He could damn well think again. I’d been ready for that. I’d kept track of every turn. I knew just which way we’d come, and where the river must be from here. Wherever here was …

I slid the sword back into my belt, and glanced around. High old walls, some of them stone, small barred windows – it looked strangely familiar somehow. Yes; these were warehouses, mostly Victorian by the look of them and pretty decrepit. But here and there ornate signs stretched out across walls cleaner than the rest, window frames newly painted; there was even a flash of pink neon. Another disco? Just the same sort of area, trendy chic creeping like a naked hermit crab into the shells of old solid commerce. But where? The neon sign spelt out Praliné’s – French-sounding, which meant precisely nothing; cafés in Moscow have French names. Anyhow, this didn’t smell like France – or Moscow either, somehow; there was a big-city sourness in the warm humid air, an unholy blend of traffic fumes and junk-food frying and aromatic plants that was wholly new to me. These were backstreets, with nobody about to ask. But just ahead there was more light, and the distant hum of traffic. I was curious; I went to look.

The street I emerged into was startling. No more warehouses; it was wide and well-lit and lined with houses, terraces of tall dignified houses in reddish brick. They had that elusive European look about them again, especially along their upper frontage, where a kind of continuous gallery ran, forming deep balconies under the common roof. Houseplants and large bushes grew there in tubs, bays and mimosas and others I didn’t know at all, exotic, elegant, airily graceful, trailing their foliage down over the ornate ironwork railings. But these houses had been restored, too; most of them were shopfronts, now, or cafés – some open. I strolled towards the nearest, and the warm night air rose up and hit me with the rich aromas of coffee and frying onions and hot pastry, and the blare of taped jazz. And suddenly I was so hungry I could have wept.

Hungry for more than food, too; it was a glimpse of civilization, of sanity – or at least of the kind of madness I knew. But would they take my kind of money here? I felt in my pockets. In an inner pocket were a few small coins, very heavy – gold pieces, of some kind I hadn’t seen, decorated with peculiar writing and elephants; they must be Jyp’s. All my ordinary money was in the pockets of my own clothes, on shipboard; and I began to feel very uneasy. I ought to be getting back. But I couldn’t resist peering in the window, seeing what kind of people were there. They were my own kind, exactly my own kind; they could have come from any country in the world, just about – mostly young, mostly Caucasian, but a good few blacks and Orientals too, a cheerful cosmopolitan crowd shouting so loudly over the jazz that I couldn’t make out the language. There was a menu, but the window was so steamed over I couldn’t make it out. And the café’s sign read Au Barataria. Which was where, exactly?

A young couple came out, and feeling a complete idiot I stepped up to them. The girl’s face, flushed and pretty, twisted; the boy’s darkened and he pulled her sharply aside. I shrugged, and let them pass; nice manners they had here. I strolled down the road. Here was a bookshop window still lit, and all the titles in English, by God! Only one gaggle of bestsellers looks pretty much like another to me. What I buy is Time and The Economist; so that didn’t tell me too much either. Next came a men’s boutique full of black leather and called, if you’ll believe it, Goebbels. That only went to prove that really bad taste is universal. And after that, a video shop, with just two or three cases on view; the titles were English, all right, but a little specialized – Pretty Peaches, Pussy Talk, Body Shop. Well, yes. Where the hell was this, the Costa Brava? The food smelt too appetizing for that.

Here came somebody else to ask, a hefty black man; but before I so much as opened my mouth I almost got a fist in it. The last day or so hadn’t exactly taught me to turn the other cheek, but I restrained myself; starting trouble now might be just the wrong thing. A more respectable citizen, middle-aged and fat, was hurrying down the far pavement; I strode over to intercept him, but before I got beyond the ‘Excuse me, sir –’ he thrust something into my hands and scuttled off at a rate he wasn’t built for. I gaped after him, then down at my hand. A few silvery coins; I picked up the two largest, and saw the eagle on each, soft-edged with wear. Quarters; twenty-five cents; hot damn, I was in America.

I stood there giggling helplessly to myself. In a night and a day – most of the latter spent drifting – I’d managed to cross the Atlantic. If I ever got the hang of how, I could play hob with the export business, that was for sure.

Or … how long had it actually taken me? Things had been happening with time. And suddenly childhood fairy tales came back to me, about the king who’d returned from under the hill – and this, after all, was the land of Rip van Winkle …

Suddenly I wasn’t giggling any more. For all the warmth of the night I felt pinched and cold like a returning ghost, a pathetic shadow in the twilight peering in at the warmth of life it had been shut out from for so long. Now I had to know when I was, as well as where. I glanced hungrily at a café, and stifled the thought; fifty cents wouldn’t buy the water in my coffee, if this was anything like New York. A squat blue bin across the street was a newspaper vending machine; that would help! I hurried back across the street – and stopped dead in the middle. Now I knew why people were shying away from me.

Just the way I’d shied away from lurches, drunks and dropouts. There I was, reflected in a dress-shop window, a grotesque ghost hovering over the stilted dummies inside. A gaping thug, wild-haired, soot-smeared, unshaven, dressed in skin-tight leather that bared arms seamed with small burns and scars, a gaudy braid band like gang colours around my forehead, and a four-foot sword dangling along my leg – God knows, I would’ve run away. Maybe Jyp was right and the sword, at least, they wouldn’t notice; but what was true for him might not be for me. I was too much a part of all this.

Then a truck came roaring down on me without even trying to brake, and I leaped for the sidewalk like an electrified frog. I flipped the driver a gesture, then remembered and stuck up the single finger they understood over here. Not that I altogether blamed him, though, any more than the touchy black character. I looked barking mad and dangerous as hell. I hurried to the machine, thumbed my coins and thrust them in. Just enough – I yanked out the paper and stared. The New Orleans States – Item, published the fourth –

The day after I’d left. New Orleans. A day and a night – right. That was all there was to it. I felt my legs begin to tremble under me. It was true, then … I let the paper fall, turned and ran back the way I’d come, away from lights and cafés and Creole cooking odours and iron balconies, ran like hell for the river and the wharf.

Back to the square I raced, sure of every turn, and came out just by the cathedral, crossed the gardens at full tilt – astonishing some late-night strollers – and ducked panting into the street I’d left. From there it was easy, round every turn just as I’d remembered it, and my memory didn’t so much as falter once. It was easier on foot, this kind of thing, when you could take your time spotting landmarks, when you didn’t have to make snap decisions where to turn. Not that I didn’t give one great sigh of relief, though, when I finally turned into the road where that lying apparition had first hooked me, and saw the broad river gleaming like dull copper under the hazy moon. The Mississippi, no less. Well, I’d something to ask Le Stryge about, at any rate.

From there on in I strolled quietly, getting my breath back. I couldn’t hear any noise of hammering; maybe they’d stopped work for the night. I couldn’t blame them; two in a row was a bit much for anyone. I turned the corner to the wharf; and then I came to a dead halt and clutched at the side of the building, as if the running had suddenly seized my legs and turned them to water under me.

It wasn’t the same building. It was no clapboard shack; there were none, not up or down the broad concrete wharves that stretched out along the river on either side. It was a modern wall of corrugated aluminium, just like all the others I could see, up and down. Beside some there were ships, all right – big cargo carriers with never a mast or smokestack between them, flanked by modern container cranes or grain or mineral hoppers whose banks of floodlights carved out little wedges in the night. Of the Defiance, of all or anything that had brought me here, there was no sign at all.

I could have gone rampaging up and down those wharves, looking; I didn’t. I knew too damn well what had happened. I’d feared it from the moment I saw that paper, that date – though maybe it was already too late by then. Maybe it had been since that moon rose. My assumptions, my Core-bred basic instincts, had tangled with the reality that had brought me here. I’d pushed on too deep, gone back into the Core, seen too much of it that didn’t want to let go its grip. As, no doubt, the Knave meant to happen. And some deeper part of me, despairing of fulfilling the purpose that had driven me so far, so fast, had retreated into what it knew best and shut out the rest. In a foreign country, without papers, passport, money or even a good explanation why I was here, it had stranded me, left me high and dry on a desolate shore. From the Defiance, from Mall and Jyp, from all hope of help, it had cut me off.

There’d been no dawn. Maybe there never would be, any more. There was nothing before me but streets, a cityful of corners to turn, hoping that around one, or the next … hoping against hope. How long would that take? Empty and sick, I gripped the warehouse wall, staring up at the blank little windows high above, eyes as blind as mine to what I most needed to see. It was behind them somewhere, beneath all this modern overlay, the past sheathed in sheet steel – or coffined?

‘Hey!’ roared a hoarse angry voice. ‘Hey you! Whatcha doin’ there? C’mon, beat it!’ I almost drew on him, but remembered in time that in these parts even nightwatchmen would carry a gun; better not call attention to the sword, anyhow. A wavering flashlight tracked me like a spotlight as I stalked away, around the first corner that opened and into the shadows of unlit alleys. Darkness closed on me like a vast fist, and the shadows flooded into my head. Lost, alone, I stumbled blindly through stinking puddles, deeper and deeper into night.

At first I still tried to remember where I was going, turning this way and that, seeking another way back through the darkened ways to the river and the docks. But soon enough my tired mind lost track, and soon after that I forgot the very direction of the docks; but I kept walking, because there was nowhere to stop. Now and again I struggled to think. What did any marooned tourist do? Go see the British consul – with a convenient case of amnesia? I’d be flown home, then. With a lot of explaining to do; about here, about gold, about … what had happened to Clare. I’d be lucky to stay out of Broadmoor. And with her on my conscience, maybe I wouldn’t want to …

After a while I found myself wandering out of the unlit maze into wider streets again, with lights and lit windows; but which streets and where I no longer cared. Some were like the elegant old brick houses I’d seen; others were garishly new, lined with blazing shop windows and neon signs – but all empty, all bare, all dead. I barged into – I didn’t know what; lamp standards, trash cans, street litter. I heard voices, angry voices, didn’t know where they came from. Perhaps there were people on those sidewalks, then; but if there were, I wasn’t seeing them. Only the cars moved, hissing past, featureless, driverless blurs of light and noise. Sometimes, suddenly, they’d come at me with howling horns, from all directions it seemed, and I’d have to dodge and weave my way through, and stagger off before they could come around again.

My sight dimmed. My sense of isolation got worse. The noise, the colours around me, everything my senses told me, seemed to make less and less sense, to add up to nothing, no coherent picture. I felt I had to keep moving at all costs, so this horrible inchoate world couldn’t close in around me and cut me off forever. But I was very tired now, and under my feet from time to time the ground would lurch suddenly and make me stumble. From overhead came a sound I knew, the whine of a circling jet; but I saw only a pattern of beating lights gliding over emptiness, and hid my eyes. Shadow and quiet drew me, and somehow, after hours, maybe, I found myself drifting along lesser ways, suburban streets lined with houses, more homely, less hostile. Yet the lit windows glared down balefully at me, and the cars still hissed by.

Until, with electrifying suddenness, one of them screeched in behind me, right to the sidewalk’s edge. I swung about in sudden fright, and grabbed at my sword – then froze, half-crouching, as a blue-white light flicked across my eyes. I saw nobody, but I heard the voices, hard and harsh.

‘That’s him! We got him!’

‘Station? Contact at – yah, goin’ after him now!’

‘Watch it, watch it – he’s a big one – keep it friendly – hey, feller!’

I started and jumped back as doors slammed hollowly.

‘Jesus, what’s that? Machete?’ I looked down. Instinctively I’d half-drawn the sword, and it spat back the blue light like icy fire.

‘Hallo? Suspect is armed, repeat armed –’

‘Hey feller! We jes’ wanna word, nobody’s goin’get hurt! So you put that stickah ‘way now, hear?’

I backed off, kept on backing. My head was horribly clear all of a sudden. There was no way I’d get to the docks from a police cell – or a madhouse. I could see the policeman now, a burly middleaged black man with fierce grizzled whiskers; he was trying to sound reassuring, but his fat hand hovered near the unclipped flap of his holster. The other one would be covering him from the car, no doubt. I looked around desperately, and again it was darkness and shade that caught my eye; across the road a gap opened between the houses, its sagging wire fence overhung by spreading trees. I edged back some more, then relaxed a little, bowed my head, heard the fat man’s sigh of relief – and swept the sword right out of its scabbard in a hissing arc. I wasn’t as well in control of it as I thought; it must have nearly parted those whiskers. He leaped backward with a startled yell, tripped over a hydrant and sprawled on his back. That opened my way for a flying leap, right over him, onto the bonnet of the squad car and out into the road, luckily empty. I reached the grass strip in a couple of bounds, narrowly stopped myself running out into the path of a highly decorated van, then ran anyway because a bullet had just gone whistling past. The van screeched around in a tyrestripping arc, horn blaring, onto the grass between me and the squad car. I reached the fence, vaulted over it and landed ankle-deep in litter-strewn grass before I realized that – in a manner of speaking – I wasn’t alone.

If I’d known more about the city I might have been less surprised at landing in a graveyard – and at the aspect of it, vast stretches of huge and imposing tombs, vandalized, neglected and overgrown. Right now they didn’t worry me in the least. This ruined city of the dead looked like the safest place to hide I could imagine. I went belting off among the graves like someone desperate to get back to his own. Some way behind me I heard the sound of somebody else trying to vault the fence, and failing dismally. My conscience shrivelled again; I’d nothing at all against those cops. I didn’t like doing this one bit – but no way were they going to stop me now.

I wove and dodged among the ranks of the dead, ducking from path to path, turning and turning till I lost track of time and direction. Now and again I slipped in among half-fallen models of Greek and Roman temples, gasping for breath in the heavy air, to listen for pursuit till I was sure there wasn’t any. Nothing stirred, not even a breath of wind. I didn’t blame them for giving up; you could have played hide-and-seek all night in that place, and the weed-grown gravel paths didn’t show tracks. Come to think of it, I wasn’t too sure which way I’d come myself. I looked around. Tombs, tombs, tombs as far as I could see, a skyline of crosses and wreaths and sculpted angels and other less probable things. Nothing stirred, not even a breath of wind in this leaden air; no sign that there was a city of the living anywhere out there. It gave the cemetery a timeless, suspended feeling. I must be right in the heart of the place. At least it was pretty much flat. I set out, heading what I guessed was away from the way I’d come in. Nothing to do but walk till I hit a wall –

I shivered suddenly, though the night was warm. The chill that shot through me was so acute it was like an electric shock. I’d brushed against something, not grass, not stone –

I almost laughed. It was just a little scarecrow, no higher than my waist, a battered old hat and weather-bleached tailcoat hung on crossed poles, bulked out by the weeds that had grown up beneath it. Almost laughed; but the chill had caught my breath too strongly, and my heart was thudding wildly. I looked wildly around, but there was nothing else, nothing except a warm wind stirring the trees; nothing different about this particular little knot of tombs. Broken down, broken into, sprayed with graffitti like the rest; unusual, though, these whorls and spirals and scratchy circles. As if they’d been put on with luminous paint, or attacked by some kind of decay. I’d seen something like them somewhere before, but not so clear. Here, in the deepest darkness, a faint green phosphoresence seemed to hang around them – not so faint, either. Once your eyes got used to it you could practically see by it …

A faint scraping scrabble startled me. I whirled around with visions of some vengeful and trigger – happy cop creeping up on me; but this was too small for that. Beneath one defaced stone the rich grass was twitching; some little animal I’d disturbed, then. What did they have here? Possums, garter snakes … I bent down to look.

Then I sprang back with a shriek that must have split the air across the cemetery. The scrawled mandala – shape on the stone blazed out fire – bright, and against it waved the hand that had thrust out of the earth, right at my face. The earth heaved under me, almost tipping me onto it, but I kept my balance, staggering, and turned to run. The gravel swelled and hummocked in front of me as if some huge worm – thing tunnelled beneath, throwing me back. I fell; the sword in one hand, I flung out the other to catch myself and dug my fingers into the gravel to steady me – then snatched them away, barely in time. Beneath the pebbles something shut with a click, like a fish snapping after a fly. The ground convulsed again. Bushes wavered wildly and fell, first one headstone then another tipped over with a flat crump, others shuddered and crumbled. The simpering head of a marble angel toppled, bounced and rolled almost to my feet. All around me the soil was lifting, fingers clawing, an arm thrusting upward like a plant growing in a stop – motion film …

And behind me there was a nasty little tittering sound.

I spun around. The little scarecrow had grown as well, until it towered over me, a huge thin figure barring my passage – and lifting one of those empty sleeves. Weeds rustled within it, weeds with long downreaching roots, weeds grown fat on rich food. A single finger, skinny and gnarled – twig or bone? – crooked at my face. The ancient hat tilted slightly, and a sound rustled at my ears, hissing and tickling like a close-up whisper – only in both ears at once. A voice. Like dead leaves one minute, the next liquid, gargling, horrible.

It was almost worse to realize it made sense. It was some kind of bastard French or pidgin dialect, like none I’d ever heard, thickly accented; but I could understand. Telling me to bow down and worship –

Whose kingdom? Homage to who? I couldn’t move. Sheer panic, like a gust from an open window, whipped up my thoughts and scattered them every which way. With a sudden squeaky rustle the finger jabbed out, right into the centre of my forehead. It struck the sweatband. Something like a high-voltage spark or a soundless explosion went off, a glare of light behind my eyes instead of in front.

‘Like hell!’ I bayed. Too scared to think. I slashed out. It was with luck and instinct and not much else that I used my swordhand. It was like cutting a hedge. The derby flew up, an end of stick went whipping away and the ragged tailcoat collapsed in a boneless flurry of arms. Thick stalks whipped free, oozing stinking sap; pollen sprayed into my face like ancient gravedust and set me sneezing. Something – briarstems, maybe – clawed at my ankles. I yelled again, leaped free of them and bolted for my life – or maybe something more. Right now that cop with his gun would have been the sweetest sight I could imagine – or, failing that, some real light. There almost seemed to be some, there ahead of me; a warm hazy glow, high above the shadows of the grave, infinitely warm and secure-looking. I hared off that way, fast as I could. Whatever it was, right then I wanted it, badly. I was sacred it would just slip away and leave me to the darkness rustling at my heels.

It didn’t slip away. It shone steady, and grew till the trees stood out against it, a broad beacon of normality – street lights, maybe. All I could hear was my blood and breath, labouring both; steel bands squeezed at my chest and head. But the tombstones were thinning, opening out; there was a wall here, and beyond it more fence, less dilapidated than the rest. Without breaking stride I sprang up onto one of the stones ranged against the wall, from that to the wall and clutched at the wires. Fortunately they weren’t electrified or barbed, and with my last burning breath I swung myself up, over, crashed down among rough weeds some twelve feet below and ran, ran until I tripped over something hard and fell sobbing to my knees at the margins of the light.

Then I cowered down, shrank back, as the ground quivered. With a rushing, hissing rumble and clack and a lonely, hooting cry something vast went flicking across my sight, an endless phalanx of speeding shadows, blotting out the light, the world.

When the thunder passed and the light was clear again, some fragment of my wits came slinking back. I looked up, gasping, and began to pick myself up, rather shamefaced. Pure luck that freight train hadn’t come up this track instead of the other; next time it might. I’d blundered into some kind of marshalling yard, well lit but no safe place to wander. Miles better than that damn cemetery, though. Part of my mind was threshing furiously, fighting to rationalize what I’d just seen, to explain it away – an earth tremor, overheated imagination, anything. I ignored it. I was just too glad to be out of it. Then I froze; I heard a voice, not close, not far, clear and vehement in the still night.

‘I tell you, you go fuck around in that theah boneyard all you like, but you doan’ get me –’ There, a few hundreds yards away down the track by the fence, sat a squad car with its lights flashing. And I realized the sickening inevitability of it, that they wouldn’t have given up at all, just called up other cars to cover the likely exits. And this one, of all the luck, was mine; I knew that voice, and I sympathized. Staying on all fours, I began to inch forward.

‘Scared? Just you lissen a’me one damn minute, peckerhead – Hey!’

I knew what that meant; I was off even before the doors slammed, the lights swung around towards me, the siren came on. I heard the tyres crunch across the gravel, and it was time to bolt again before I’d even got my breath.

I couldn’t run much longer, but nothing would get me back into that graveyard. Somewhere in the yard another train was coming. I limped across the tracks, into the shadow of some standing freight cars; I thought of getting into one, if only to grab a few minutes’ rest, but they were very securely chained up, and the shadow seemed like no shelter at all. I ducked over the coupling and through, landed right in the path of the oncoming train and found a new turn of speed; behind me I heard gravel spray as the squad car swerved aside. Across more tracks I ran, between stolid lines of silent cars, until suddenly I was at another fence – and not more than a hundred yards up, an open gate. Wouldn’t the cops head for it? I took the chance, there weren’t any others. I made it, and suddenly I was free of all fences, running like a madman through an empty street; but behind me the siren was getting louder. And was that another ahead, around the corner of this tall building? I could turn this way – or that. Towards the sound – or away. That was no siren. I made my choice, and turned the corner.

I could have laughed, if my aching lungs had let me. The street was wide, glistening in the night-haze as if from recent rains; tall buildings, featureless in the night, loomed over it like chasm walls. In one narrow side doorway an old man stood, the only living soul in all that great gorge of a place, a black man in a shabby overcoat, playing a mournful trumpet; and that was the sound. I ran down towards him, and saw the heavy dark glasses he wore, the placard in front of him, the tin cup. He stopped playing suddenly, lowered his trumpet, and I swerved wide so as not to frighten him, wishing I could call out to him. But he called out to me instead.

‘Son! Hey, sonny! Which way de fi-ah?’

Almost instinctively I came to a halt; it was a startling voice, deep and commanding, to come from that stooped old frame. He had an odd sing-song accent, too, not at all American. I gasped, tried to answer and couldn’t; he didn’t wait for one. ‘You run ’way from de man? De poleece? Uh-huh, that’s what I hear, those ’larums.’ The wrinkled old face creased up in a wide grin, over chipped teeth. ‘We fix dat. You just hunkah down behin’ me heah, boy – in de doorway, okay? Oh-kay! You all snug now?’ And without waiting for another answer he lifted his trumpet and began to play again. I knew the tune – ‘Saint James Infirmary’, mournful as hell and too horribly appropriate. I squatted down in the doorway, shivering and wheezing, struggling to get my breath back. I peering up at the old man’s back, shabby and bent but surprisingly broad, and the square of sky framed in the door arch above.

My mind filled in the words, and I wished it wouldn’t. One of the old original blues, so old you could trace its roots back to ancient folksongs –

A siren wailed discords along the high walls, then cut them short in a screech of brakes; blue light pulsed through the door arch. ‘Hey, pops!’ yelled a voice, not the same one now. ‘You see a big guy come runnin’ this way? White boy, wavin’ a machete or sumpn’ – a real crazy –’

‘Son,’ chuckled the old trumpet player. ‘It’s maybe twenny yeahs gone since I saw anythin’ wuth a good goddam! Or I wouldn’t be standin’ roun’ on dis heah chilly stoop, believe me-ee!’

‘Oh,’ said the cop, sounding slightly abashed. ‘Right, yah. Uh, you hear anyone, then? A couple of minutes back?’

The old man shrugged. ‘Someone runnin’, five minutes back. ‘Long Decatur Street way, maybe. I wuz playin’ mah horn –’

‘Okay, pops!’ A coin jingled into the cup. ‘Better get out of the wet, hear? Somebody might take a shine to your cup, this hour o’ the morning!’ The siren came on again, and the light slid away from the doorway; I sagged with relief. The old man took up where he’d left off, till the siren had died away completely, then rounded out the tune with a cheeky little flourish and began to shake the spit out of his trumpet.

‘Nice ’nuff boys – but dey’re not makin’em any bright-ah!’ He turned and grinned at me, and I had the odd feeling he could see me very well. But he fumbled about just the same for the card at his feet, and I picked it up and handed it to him. It carried an incredibly ancient-looking religious print, showing a ‘Black Heaven’ like something out of Green Pastures, and beneath it in crude lettering The Opener of the Ways. He tucked it carefully away in the doorway, and sat carefully down beside me.

‘Look,’ I began, ‘you got me out of one hell of a hole – I haven’t done anything, but – damn, I just don’t know how to thank you –’ Then I realized I did. I fumbled in my pocket for Jyp’s coins; I could pay him back later. I pressed two into the old man’s palm, and he nodded and grinned again. ‘Now mind,’ I warned him. ‘Those are gold. You can’t spend it straight away, but you can sell it – it’s not stolen or anything. Take them to a proper coin-shop if you can, not just a bank or a jeweller or a pawnbroker. Should be worth more than the weight of the gold alone.’

The old man listened gravely. ‘Thank you, my good frien’. Dat’s Christian kindness. Like this Saint James dey name de hospital fo’, huh? Saint-Jacques, dey call him in de real ol’ days – or Santiago …’

I chuckled. ‘That’s right, the Spanish founded the place, didn’t they? You know your history.’

The old man laughed, pleased. ‘Me? I jes’ seen a lot, dat’s all. And doan’ forget. So many mem’ries, mah old cold back bends under de load!’

‘Well, you could warm it up a bit now – get yourself a new coat, for a start.’

‘I hadn’t meant it to sound patronizing, but it came out that way. The old man wagged his head amiably. ‘Son, I thank you for the good advice! But I’ve learned some better. I give you it freely – when yo’ very balls is freezin’, rum’s the only juice!’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I promised solemnly. ‘Thanks again. But I’d better be off. The cops might come back, and I’ve got to get to the riverfront – to the docks – er, you couldn’t give me directions from here?’

He cackled, and heaved himself up before I could lift a hand to help. ‘The docks, uh?’ Again the glasses flashed at me with a peculiarly penetrating air. ‘Dat’s easily done, son. Easy.’ He nodded casually down the street. ‘A good Christian tune soon set you on yoah way!’

And before I could say a word, he clapped the battered trumpet to his lips and launched into a tune I recognized. ‘Gospel Ship’ – a revivalist song, hardly jazz at all, but he made it swing. The trumpet wasn’t mournful any more but sharp, a blade of blue notes slicing through the blackness. Its bright bell winked suddenly with reddish light, and mirrored, distorted, a web of black threads. Startled, I looked over my shoulder and saw the wedge of sky between the chasm walls turning paler, flooding with red in a tidal wave of dawn. And against that rising glow, like a winter treeline, a spiky tracery of masts stood silhouetted. Down the gloomy length of the street shone a single faint streak of gold, and danced in fire upon the bobbing trumpet.

I gaped a moment in wonder and fear, and then, forgetting everything, I began to run along that bright path. All around those gloomy walls the tune echoed, beat upon those blind windows –

The Last Trump should sound like that, maybe.

I bounded along that silent stream of dawn light like a child splashing through puddles. Then I remembered I hadn’t said goodbye to the old man, if man he was, and turned to wave. But his back was turned to me already, shuffling along towards Decatur or wherever, still playing, his card tucked tightly under his arm. I waved, anyway; I guessed he had more ways than one to see. And then from the docks I heard the shrill whistle of a steam-tug, and my heart missed a beat. Amid the forest of masts something was stirring, sliding past them, out into the stream; tall masts, not smokestacks. I ran like mad for the river.

No way could I have reached it in time, but I ran anyway. They might still be in hailing range – or I might get another boat to follow them …

I found my feet slipping on dawn-slick cobbles as I reached the wharf, steadied myself on the wall at the corner and felt the paint on the warped clapboard crackle and peel under my hand. The Core had lost its hold, and I was back. But I felt no exaltation, only amazement. For the shape that slid away down the gold-tracked waters, like a shadow of night slinking off before the dawn, had three tall masts, not two, and its high transom loomed level with the capitals of the smokestacks. I gaped up and down the dock, guessed at my way and began to run again.

The guess was right. It was no more than twenty minutes later I bounded up the springy gangplank and collapsed wheezing onto the deck, newly smooth and smelling richly of tar and linseed and sappy wood. From the quarterdeck came a stampede, Jyp and the others practically tumbling down the companionway, with old Stryge wavering excitedly after them. A man and a woman of the deck watch more or less scooped me up and sat me on the hold grating, but I had hardly enough breath to speak.

‘They – here –’

‘Aye, aye, ’tis known!’ said Mall soothingly. ‘Spare your words till the wind’s back i’ your sail. You’re not hurt otherwise? A mercy, better far than we’d feared.’

‘That’s so, shipmate,’ remarked Jyp, shaking his head with laconic relief. ‘Glad to have you back live and whole, never more so. Moment we missed you we sic’d old Stryge on your tail – and when he ups and says you’ve been drawn off by a sending, lured back into the Core – and into a trap – well … He said he’d sent out a call on your behalf, and that was the best he could do.’ He spat over the rail at the dockside. ‘Hell, we maybe should’ve guessed there might be trouble. One of the old slave trade centres, here – it’s still lousy with obeah, voodoo, you name it; part of the legacy. But why should some local bocor beat the drums for us? That’s what I don’t get. We haven’t trodden on anyone’s toes here – hell, how’d they even get to hear about us?’

‘From the Chorazin!’ I wheezed.

‘What?’

‘That’s what I was trying to tell you,’ I croaked. ‘It’s been docked here, too, all the time – about a mile downriver on the far bank – I saw it pulling out, not long back –’

Pierce seized my shoulder. ‘You’re sure, lad – I mean, Master?’

‘Yes, I’m sure – damn it, I was sent to see it –’

‘Masthead!’ bellowed Pierce.

The Stryge thrust his granite face unpleasantly close to mine. ‘Sent? By whom? How?’

‘A – an old black man, a busker – a street musician, you know –’

‘Deck! A smoking teakettle with a soot-black merchantman a’tow! A good league downriver!’

‘All hands!’ roared Pierce. ‘Mr Mate! Ashore with you and roust out that old tarrarag of a tugmaster! All bands! We must have hit her worse than we thought, she pulled in for repairs – and saw us come by – hah! How’s that for defiance, my fine buckoes?’

Stryge’s eye glittered frighteningly. ‘What old man? Who answered? Who came?’

‘A – an old busker, like I said – played the trumpet – he had a – a card, called himself the – Opener of the Ways, that was it –’

Stryge jerked back, Jyp whistled and choked on it, and Mall ran her hands through her hair. ‘Faith, a pretty company to be keeping!’

‘Look, he was kind, whoever he was! He hid me from the cops – he showed me the way back, the Chorazin –he saved my hide! My mind, too, maybe – after that thing in the cemetery I thought I was going off my trolley! Maybe he was the answer to that call of yours –’

‘What thing?’ demanded the Stryge, but in nothing like his normal snarl. I thought I saw a flicker of real feeling cross the stonily malevolent mask; something I might have welcomed, if it hadn’t looked like fear. So I told him, and watched his face crumple. Jyp went ashen, and Mall, to my astonishment, sank to her haunches beside me and hugged me bruisingly hard.

‘The Baron!’ said Stryge with a high shaky cackle. ‘And Legba! The imbecile boy escapes the Baron, meets Legba and calls him a blind old man! As if he’d come to my call, hah!’

‘But who’s to say he didn’t?’ rebuked Jyp softly. ‘This – it’s taking a shape I feared. More at stake than just a raid into the Core – or a girl getting shanghaied – much, much more. There’s strong forces at play here, if the Invisibles are taking a hand.’

‘More than a hand!’ said Mall shrilly. ‘D’you not see? It’s sides they take – and when ever did they do thus? With Stephen here caught in the middle!’

Jyp clenched his fists. ‘And good or bad, they’re ill meddlers with men! Hoy, Mister Mate – what of the tug?’

‘None to be had!’ cried the breathless mate, scorning the plank and swinging himself aboard by the new mainstays. ‘There was three fired up – but two spiked overnight, a’ purpose! A mercy their boilers didn’t blow to blazes! And the last the Wolves took, with pistol’s point as fee! We’ll needs wait hours!’

Pierce threw down his hat and stamped upon it. ‘By Beelzebub’s burning balls! And miss the dawn? Never! Hands to the braces! We’ll after them under sail alone! We caught the bastards before and by hell’s thunders we’ll do it again, if it’s up Satan’s arsegut they flee us! Topmen aloft! Leap to it, rum – rotted whoreson bitch-spawn you be –’

The mate’s leathery face rumpled uneasily. ‘But cap’n – how’ll we know their course to follow? We’ve no way –’

‘Ah, but we have!’ said Mall grimly. ‘The Stryge may check it if he wills, but I doubt his divination will fare better. A contention’s in hand among the Invisibles, t’would seem. So where else would the Chorazin be bound in such case, but to the island that’s their home?’

Jyp smacked hand into palm. ‘That’s it! Well, skipper – for Hispaniola?’

‘Aye, set your course,’ muttered Pierce, the rage drained from him. ‘Hispaniola! Hayti! There’s a lee shore for the soul, a shoal of shadow all a-slather with blood and black arts. But if it must be, it must. Quartermaster, to the helm! And pray God that we are in time!’