Fighting with fire

CHAPTER EIGHT

Lex would’ve liked to think that the poisonous octopuses were the only dangerous thing on the ship? the only thing standing between him and the captain’s medallion and glorious victory for the first round. But he knew better. Games did not tend to work that way? it would make them too boring. Gods? and the human spectators? liked a little variety. The likelihood, therefore, was that there would be several different nasties on board this ship? possibly a mixture of natural inhabitants (such as the octopuses) and things put there specially by the Gods.

When Lex heard a noise coming from behind a closed door a little later he braced himself to throw it open and discover what was behind it. It was no use trying to avoid the horrible stuff, for there were probably more traps around the captain’s medallion than there were anywhere else on the ship. The more traps they came into contact with, therefore, the closer to their ultimate goal they probably were. But before Lex could open the door, it was flung open from the other side and Jeremiah burst out.

It seemed that Jeremiah must have heard Lex and Jesse because he came flying out braced for attack, shouting and waving his sword. For a split second Lex didn’t realise it was Jeremiah and thought instead that it was something coming to get him, so he used the only weapon he had? he threw his packet of salty snacks in the nobleman’s face.

It was a surprisingly effective? if slightly ludicrous? form of attack, for Jeremiah stopped dead, clutching at his eyes with his free hand and yelling. Clearly some salt had got in there and was stinging. He was making a tremendous fuss about it, though. Anyone would think that he’d just had acid thrown in his face.

‘Sorry, old bean,’ Lex said, not really feeling sorry at all.

‘Oh my Gods, what have you done?’ Jeremiah shrieked, dropping his sword so that both hands could clutch at his eyes. ‘I can’t see! I’m blind!’

‘Well, that’s how these Games work, you know,’ Lex said cheerfully, declining to correct Jeremiah’s misimpression that he had just been attacked with something extremely harmful and possibly deadly.

‘It was only a packet of salty snacks, Jeremiah!’ Tess said scornfully from behind him. She fixed her brother with a withering look and said, ‘Stop being such a baby!’

‘Eh?’ Jeremiah lowered his hands and looked up with eyes that were a little red but, other than that, perfectly fine. ‘Oh. You ass!’ he spat venomously at Lex. ‘What are you walking around munching on snacks in the middle of the Game for? You’ll never win that way!’

‘When you’ve been playing these Games for as long as I have, Jeremiah,’ Lex replied, deliberately flippantly, ‘you become such an old hand that you can eat and play at the same time. Isn’t that right, Jesse?’ He gave the cowboy a stern, meaningful look. No point in telling Jeremiah about the Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii if he didn’t know about them already. It would spoil the surprise. And Lex certainly wasn’t going to come out and tell a competitor how to deal with a potential threat.

Jesse nodded and put a crisp into his mouth for emphasis, then remembered the Binding Bracelets and hastily handed the packet over to Lex so that he could eat a crisp, too, and they wouldn’t swap bodies.

Jeremiah shook his head and bent down to retrieve his sword. ‘Well, I think you’re a pair of asses.’

‘I think anyone who’d use the word “ass” as an insult is a stuck-up toff who has no business doing anything more dangerous than playing a game of croquet!’

To Lex’s pleased surprise, Tess sniggered at that, even if she did hastily try to turn it into a cough.

‘What happened to your leg?’ Lex asked, noticing for the first time that part of Jeremiah’s right trouser leg had been ripped away, and there was a jagged gash stretching down his calf? not deep enough to cause any damage, or a limp (more’s the pity)? but enough to draw a bit of blood.

‘Never you mind!’ Jeremiah snapped. Obviously he, too, felt that it would not do to give anything away about threats the other players hadn’t come into contact with yet. It looked to Lex like the handiwork of something with claws? a giant crab, or lobster, perhaps. Unpleasant, but hardly deadly.

‘Well, it’s been fun, but I don’t have any more time to waste standing here chatting with you,’ Lex said.

Jeremiah gave him a haughty, superior look and turned away to continue the Game as well.

And that was where the problem arose.

They were currently standing in a sort of stairwell with two doors leading on to the landing and stairs stretching away upwards and downwards (with a couple of brass octopuses on the banisters). Lex had come from one of the doors and Jeremiah had come from the other. For some reason, Lex had expected Jeremiah to walk straight past him and back the way Lex had just come but it seemed that he, like Lex, didn’t think there was much point in exploring parts of the ship that another player had already investigated. They therefore both went to go up the stairs at the same time.

‘Find your own route!’ Lex said.

‘You find your own route!’ Jeremiah snapped.

‘Look, let’s be sensible about this. Why don’t we both take the stairs but you go down and I go up?’

Whilst Jeremiah and Lex bickered, Jesse held the crisp packet out to Tess. The little girl reached out to take one but then froze suddenly and shook her head, pointing at the Binding Bracelet on her wrist. Jesse shook his own head, impatient with himself for forgetting again. But then he thought of chewing tobacco and he motioned with his hand for Tess to watch. He took a crisp out of the packet, put it in his mouth, sucked the flavour out of it, and then spat the soggy crisp out on to the floor. No body swap. A big grin spread across Tess’s face and she reached for a crisp to do the same.

‘I’m not going down!’ Jeremiah was saying vehemently. ‘There are probably more flesh-eating crabs down there!’

So that was what had taken a chunk out of Jeremiah’s leg. Lex bet those crabs were nowhere near as horrible as the Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii of Scurlyshoo, though.

‘I’m going up these stairs,’ Jeremiah declared. ‘And that’s that. I would strongly advise you not to get in my way.’

So it was to come down to a race between them, then. Lex decided his best chance would simply be to leg it up the stairs as fast as he could. Jesse could follow in his own time? he was a grown man who could take care of himself. Tess, on the other hand, was a little girl and Jeremiah would have to be even more of a jerk than Lex thought to leave her by herself on this terrible ship.

But just as his whole body was tensed ready to flee, something happened that made them all freeze. There was music coming from above. It was some sort of old sea shanty played on a harmonica. The music was out of place down there on the sunken ship? an oddly lonely sound? a sort of distant echo of the long-gone sailors who had once sailed her.

And that was when Lex first realised that, so far, they had not seen a single skeleton. Where were the crew? Even if the flesh-eating crabs had stripped the bodies bare, they surely wouldn’t have eaten the bones as well. There should be skeletons at the very least. Skeletons all over the place, in fact.

‘It must be Lorella playing some trick,’ Jeremiah said firmly as Tess drew fearfully closer to his side, clearly unnerved by the eerie music. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’

Despite this statement, it was clear from the way he looked longingly at the stairs that Jeremiah would now prefer to go down rather than up. Like an amateur, he thought it was better to avoid the obstacles rather than head straight for them. But as Lex was clearly still intending to go upstairs, Jeremiah decided that he’d better, too. They proceeded as a cautious group, for Lex now felt unable to stick to his original plan of legging it up there. Deliberately going towards danger was all very well but running towards it blindly was just plain stupid.

They got closer and closer to the melancholy music until they finally reached the little landing on the floor above and found the cause. A sailor sat there on the banisters with a harmonica in his hand, which he lowered when he saw them coming. They all stared at each other for a minute. The sailor didn’t look like a ghost. Or, at least, he didn’t look the way Lex had always imagined a ghost to look, in that he wasn’t a floating sheet with a couple of eye holes or, failing that, at least transparent. But he didn’t look quite normal either. His skin had a strange greyish look, his eyes were sunken, his hair dry.

‘What are you, sir?’ Jeremiah demanded, pointing his sword at the sailor in an over-dramatic, threatening manner. ‘Speak up! Are you a ghost?’

The sailor looked at him in cold silence for a moment before saying, ‘We’re not dead. We’re a cursed crew. We’re not allowed to die.’ His voice was dry and hoarse, like he never used it. Something about the tone sent shivers up Lex’s spine.

‘Someone on board pissed off the Gods, did they?’ he asked.

The sailor fixed his baleful gaze on him. ‘Aye,’ he whispered, before shuddering and falling silent. It seemed that whatever the crew had done to get themselves cursed in such a way was not a story this man wanted to dwell upon. Which suited Lex just fine, for he couldn’t have cared less.

‘Stand aside and let me pass!’ Jeremiah demanded.

‘No one is stopping you,’ the sailor replied coldly.

Jeremiah looked at him suspiciously for a moment before edging past him cautiously with Tess. It was as if he expected the sailor to suddenly attack him. Lex made a show of looking suitably wary and suspicious? as if he was allowing his competitor to go first to make sure it was safe. But the truth was that, unless someone was coming at him with a sword or a mace of some kind, Lex was prepared to cautiously consider them safe for the time being? and thus, potential sources of extremely valuable information.

Once they were past the sailor, Jeremiah grabbed Tess’s hand and raced up the stairs. Lex’s lip curled with contempt and he shook his head. What an amateur! The truth was that Lex had no intention of running up the stairs now. He simply wanted Jeremiah out of the way. It seemed that it had not yet occurred to him that, if the crew were all cursed rather than dead, then the captain would be moving around. He could be anywhere on the ship and running about looking for him blindly was not going to get the job done. Lex could hardly believe that Jeremiah had just gone off like that, leaving this rich source of information for Lex to tap alone. Even if this sailor didn’t know exactly where the captain was, he should at least know a little more about the potential dangers on board the ship. There was certainly nothing to lose by just asking nicely.

‘What are those rings on your hand?’ Lex asked, momentarily distracted. They looked horribly familiar and so he was fairly sure that he already knew the answer.

‘The octopuses,’ the sailor replied. ‘We were here before them so they don’t seem to mind us most of the time. But sometimes they bite. Because we’re already half dead, they can’t kill us. But they leave these scars.’ He held up his hand to display the pale, white rings. ‘And it hurts like you wouldn’t believe. Like something has got inside your body and is ripping up your insides. A bite from one of the Blue-Ringed Octopii will stop a live man’s heart in under a minute.’ He added in a sad voice, ‘But our hearts stopped long ago so they present no danger to us.’

‘I don’t suppose you know where the captain is, do you?’ Lex asked.

‘He spends most of his time up on deck.’

‘Up on deck?’ Lex repeated, his heart sinking. ‘You mean… out there?’ He pointed towards a dark porthole, the black ocean pressing against it in an unnerving manner.

‘Yes.’ The sailor nodded. ‘He wanders the deck. Most of them do.’

Well, that could certainly be a problem. For whilst the cursed crew might not need to breathe, Lex did. In the past he could have magicked himself up there but he no longer had that option? not since Lucius had burnt all his magical enchanted hats, blast him. Lex made it a habit to always carry one of the little mini-hats he used for calling cards as the Wizard in his pocket (you never know when the chance might arise to pinch something), but all they were good for was lighting pipes. They couldn’t help him breathe under water. Indeed, now that he thought about it, Kala hadn’t actually mentioned what was supposed to happen when someone finally found the captain’s medallion. She wanted it returned to her but there was no easy way for a human to reach the surface of the sea unaided and Lex could only hope that the Gods would pull them out of there the same way they’d sent them down.

But he would worry about that later? once he actually had the captain’s medallion. And that task in itself had become more complicated now that it wasn’t merely going to be a question of plucking the thing out of a dead man’s hands. If the captain was wandering about up on deck? walking and talking, as it were? then he might not want to give the medallion up. And then there could be trouble.

‘What’s the captain’s name?’ Lex asked.

‘Jed Saltworthy,’ the sailor replied.

The name was vaguely familiar but Lex couldn’t place it. ‘Decent enough bloke, is he?’ he asked, without much hope. After all, this was a cursed ship.

‘He’s the most foul, villainous man ever to roam the Seventeen Seas!’

‘Ah,’ Lex said, not surprised, but not exactly happy to hear it either. Almost as an afterthought he added, ‘What’s the name of this ship?’

The sailor gave him an odd look. ‘Don’t you know? This is the Scurlyshoo Death!’

Oh. Shit! Now it all made sense. The captain’s name and the octopus decor all fell into place as Lex recalled the story. One hundred years ago there had sailed a magnificent ship called the Golden Dawn, captained by a handsome, noble, fearless man named Jed Saltworthy. Until, one fateful day, they were attacked by a giant octopus. It rose up out of the sea, entwined its long tentacles around the ship and almost took the entire thing down to the bottom of the sea with it.

Fortunately, Captain Saltworthy managed to chop one of its tentacles off and this caused the octopus to retreat in agony, but not before it had flung the captain across the deck where he unhappily landed right on top of the broken navigation wheel, one of its jagged giant spokes going right through his leg. He survived the accident but his leg did not. They had to chop it off just above the knee.

The captain was fitted out with a peg leg and the ship was repaired. But it was also renamed. The Golden Dawn had perished in the battle with the octopus but, out of the ashes, the Scurleyshoo Death had been born, for the ship’s new mission was to kill any and all octopuses that it came across, even the harmless ones. But the captain never forgot Gloria, as he had? for some inexplicable reason? decided to name the octopus who took his leg. He would recognise her at once for the fact that he, in turn, had taken one of her tentacles. And so he sailed the seas vowing to track Gloria down and kill her if it was the last thing he ever did. But then, one day, a tornado sank the ship and the Scurleyshoo Death and its crew and captain were never heard from again.

‘Captain Saltworthy must be absolutely incensed to have his beloved ship overrun with octopuses!’ Lex said.

The sailor gave him a pitying look. ‘Far from it. This is his plan.’

‘This is his what?’

‘His plan. When the years passed and he couldn’t find Gloria, he turned to black magic. He cursed himself, us? the entire ship. We can’t die until the octopus dies.’

‘Well, how long do these things live?’ Lex asked. ‘Surely she must be dead by now?’

The sailor shook his head. ‘They can live for six hundred years or more,’ he said. ‘Little horrors. They should have gone down to the Lands Beneath with all the other monsters!’

As one of only four people ever to have gone down to the Lands Beneath, Lex knew that the myths were untrue. There were no monsters down there. Just glass men. On a giant chessboard, so to speak. All the monsters were up here. But there was no point telling the sailor that.

‘I still don’t see how having the ship overrun with octopuses can be part of the captain’s plan to kill Gloria.’

‘The Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii produce offspring once every one hundred years,’ the sailor replied. ‘The captain managed to find Gloria’s nest using his black magic. All the octopuses here are Gloria’s young. The captain maintained the air pockets in the ship so that, when the babies left the nest, they’d come straight here. Gloria is away hunting at the moment, but as soon as she comes back she’ll follow her children here, believing the ship no longer poses a threat. And that’s when the captain will strike and we’ll finally be free from this terrible curse once and for all.’

Lex gaped at him. Gloria, the most legendary octopus in the world? to the extent that some people believed her to be a myth? was coming here to this ship where her babies had been lured on board by her mortal enemy! One thing Lex knew was that wild animals didn’t tend to react very well when someone threatened their young. When Gloria showed up there was going to be a rather horrible scene and Lex was very keen not to be here when it happened. He was also slightly horrified to find out that the nasty little suckers they’d encountered so far were merely the baby version, for they were quite, quite bad enough as it was.

‘Can you point us in the direction of the deck?’ Lex asked.

The sailor gave them directions and Lex set off, up the stairs, feeling uncharacteristically bleak. The problem was that, if he had to go up on deck to get to the captain, he would not be able to talk, for he would be surrounded by water. And without his golden tongue, what was he? Just some skinny city kid with an over-inflated opinion of himself. He could have throttled Lucius in that moment for losing him his enchanted hats. If he’d still had them he could have performed some spell on himself to enable him to go up on deck and yet still be able to talk. And breathe, obviously.

The sailor had told them that the best way out on to the deck was through the bridge. Which was slightly unfortunate as Lex was fairly sure that was where Jeremiah would be heading. But once they got up there, if the conceited twit was still on the bridge, Lex was fairly confident in his own ability to trick him somehow and send Jeremiah off in the wrong direction.

It was not a simple route to reach the bridge. They had to weave in and out of other rooms, including a once-grand, stately dining room that had clearly been for the captain’s private use. The massive walnut table was screwed to the floor, as were the ornate wooden chairs down its length. They were all now covered in a coating of barnacles. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, although almost all of its crystal was broken. This room might once have been used for impressive dinner parties, with lots of food and wine and stories of sea monsters and adventures. But now it was rather a sad, forgotten sort of place, smelling of damp and decay and seaweed and dead ships.

An impressive bronze statue was fixed to the centre of the great table and Lex wasn’t surprised to see that it was an octopus. When he looked closer he saw that it was Gloria herself? he could tell from the fact that she only had seven tentacles. Despite the fact that time and the elements had faded their colours, when he looked at the omnipresent paintings on the walls, he could see that these, too, were all of Gloria.

‘The man must have had a screw loose,’ Lex remarked. ‘If he hated Gloria so much then why did he surround himself with paintings and statues of her like this? The bloody place is like some sort of shrine.’

‘One card short of a full deck, for sure,’ Jesse agreed.

Finally they made it up to the bridge? thankfully without encountering any more octopuses. There were maps and charts fastened on to the walls, all in various states of decay. Barnacles crunched beneath their feet and long slimy strings of seaweed were stinking in the corners and draped around the wheel.

But the most startling thing about the scene was the view through the large panoramic windows that looked directly out on to the deck. There was a great hustle and bustle of activity going on out there. The deck was being cleared and scrubbed, nets were being raised and cannons were being loaded? all by the hands of a phantom crew.

Jesse whistled. ‘Well, blow me, that ain’t somethin’ you see every day.’

‘No,’ Lex said, eyes narrowed intently. Perhaps he was imagining it but it really didn’t look like there was any water out there? at least not on the immediate deck. There were no bubbles streaming past the windows and portholes; the sailors’ hair hung damp about their heads rather than being moved about by the water… ‘I think the crazy captain has found some way of keeping the deck dry,’ Lex said.

‘What for?’ Jesse asked, frowning. ‘It’s not like they need to breathe, is it?’

‘No, but they’ve been trying to attract the octopuses, haven’t they? Besides, even if you don’t need air to breathe, you still need it to talk.’

It was a good point. As any kid who’s ever tried to talk underwater in the bath knows, it’s not all that easy. And sea water doesn’t tend to taste all that nice, either. Lex moved a little closer to one of the portholes and peered out. It definitely looked to him like there was air out there. There were nets full of glowing starfish, which Lex suspected had been put there for the specific purpose of lighting the deck. And by their soft light he could even see water dripping down the clothes of the crew.

Well, there was no point simply standing there staring gutlessly out of the window. There was one way to find out for sure and that was by opening the door. Either he’d get swept away like a sandcastle, or he’d be able to walk out there quite easily. He had no idea where Lorella was and, although Jeremiah didn’t appear to be here yet, he could turn up? like the proverbial bad penny? at any moment. Lex had found that the best course of action ninety-nine per cent of the time was simply to march boldly in and hope for the best, relying on luck and his own natural talent for getting himself out of whatever trouble he landed in.

So he stepped right up to the door to the deck? and opened it.