On Stranger Tides

Cut off from the land that bore us,

Betrayed by the land we find,

Where the brightest have gone before us,

And the dullest are most behind—

Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!

'T is all we have left to prize:

One cup to the dead already—

Hurrah for the next that dies!

—Bartholomew Dowling

Chapter Nine

The evening breeze was strong and from the sea; the three ships moored offshore were nudged parallel, and the fires on the beach threw sparks away from the setting sun toward the black Florida cypress swamps. In the raised hut the pirates had built on a sandy rise just inland of the fires, Beth Hurwood peered out at the sky and the sea, and filled her lungs with the cool sea air, and prayed that the breeze would hold until dawn. She didn't want to spend a third night locked into the stifling "mosquito shelter" her father had forced the pirates to build—a canvas-walled box just big enough to lie down in.

She had never thought she would look back fondly on her two and a half years in the convent in Scotland, but now she mourned the day her father took her out of the place. The pale sisters in their robes and hoods had virtually never spoken, the rooms were stark old stone, the only food ever served was an oily gray porridge with lumps of dispirited vegetable stuff in it, and there was not a book in the place, not even a Bible—in fact, she'd never learned what Order the sisters belonged to, nor even what sort of faith; there had been no pictures, statues or crucifixes, and they might have been Moslems for all she knew—but at least they had left her alone, and she was free to stroll through the garden and feed the birds, or stand on the catwalk at the top of the wall and watch the road across the fields of heather, hoping to see strangers. Once in a while she would see someone, a farmer driving a cart, or a hunter with dogs, but though she waved to them they always hurried away—almost as if they were afraid of the place. Nevertheless she'd felt closer to those distant, hurrying figures than to the more profoundly remote sisters. Everyone in her life, after all, was a stranger to her. Her mother had died when Beth was thirteen, and that was when her father became a stranger. He quit his position at Oxford, put his daughter in the care of relatives, and then left—engaged in

"independent study," he had once said. And she was fifteen when he met Leo Friend. The swish of boots approaching through the sand made her look down, and she was relieved to see that it was at least not Friend. Blinking against the afterimage of the sun, she didn't recognize the figure until he climbed the steps and ducked in under the low thatched roof; then she almost smiled, for it wasjust old Stede Bonnett. He had arrived only yesterday in his ship the Revenge, but though he was a pirate captain, and was said to be a partner of Blackbeard's, he seemed to have been well brought up, and had none of the mocking, sardonic cheer of a man like Philip Davies, nor the cold, driven savagery of her father. Beth wondered what could have led him into piracy.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, actually doffing his hat to her. "I didn't—realize—"

"It's all right, Mr. Bonnett." She waved at the log that served as a bench. "Do sit down."

"Thank you," he said, lowering himself onto it. A long-necked bird flapped up out of the marshes and gave a squawk that made Bonnett jump. He peered after the bird suspiciously.

"You … don't seem happy, Mr. Bonnett," Beth ventured.

He looked at her then, and seemed for the first time really to see her. He licked his lips and smiled hesitantly, but a moment later his worried scowl had returned and his gaze had moved away from her.

"Happy? Hah—I defy anyone, after that spectacle at Charles Town—before Thatch demanded the ransom, they thought we meant to take the town—I turned a glass on the place—women and children running weeping through the streets—Jesus—and for what? A chest of black medicinal tobacco, and so that he could go look at the Ocracoke Inlet. And I find myself saying things, doing things … even my dreams aren't my own anymore … " The breeze shifted slightly, blowing Beth's long hair across her face, and belatedly she smelled the brandy on Bonnett's breath. An idea struck her, but out of fear of disappointment she forced down her sudden surge of hope.

She bit her lower lip. She'd have to be careful …

"Where do you come from?" she asked.

For a long time he was silent, and she wondered if he hadn't heard her, or didn't intend to answer. I've got to get away from here, she thought; I have to believe that in some normal place, far from Friend and my father, my sanity won't seem such a fragile, flawed, imperiled thing.

"Barbados," he said quietly. "I … owned … a sugarcane plantation."

"Ah. You didn't prosper at it?"

"I was doing fine," he said hoarsely. "I'm a retired Army major, I had slaves and stables, the plantation was thriving … I was a gentleman."

Beth resisted the impulse to ask him why he had turned to piracy, if all that was true. Instead she just asked him, "Would you like to go back?"

Again he looked at her. "Yes. But I can't. I'd be hanged."

"Take the King's Pardon."

"I—" He stuck a finger in his mouth and gnawed at the nail. "Thatch would never let me." Beth's heart was pounding. "We could sneak away tonight, you and I. They're all distracted by this thing they've got to do up the river." Looking up the shore to her right, she wondered why they called that expanse of marsh a river.

Bonnett smiled nervously and licked his lips again, and once more she smelled the brandy. "You and I," he began, reaching out a pudgy hand.

"Right," she said, stepping back away from him. "Escape. Tonight. When the hunsi kanzo is busy up the river."

The reference to Blackbeard sobered Bonnett, and he scowled and resumed chewing his fingernail. Not wanting to let him see the desperate hope in her eyes, Beth Hurwood looked away from him, back toward the marsh, perhaps, she thought, they call it a river because it's so nearly one. All the local moisture does tend to move westward, though as slowly in most places as brandy working its way through a fruitcake, and the shallow evening fogs certainly follow the course of it and would soon drench an exposed person almost as thoroughly as if he'd been swimming. She closed her eyes. Calling this swamp a river seemed typical of the way this dreadful New World worked—everything was still raw and unformed out here on the world's western edge, and bore only the most remote resemblances to the settled and solidified eastern hemisphere. And though now she heard Bonnett shift on the log, and quickly turned to face him, it fleetingly occurred to her that the undeveloped nature of these lands might have a lot to do with why her father had come, and why he had taken her with him.

Bonnett was leaning forward, and in the early twilight she could see the frown of tenuous determination on his pudgy old face. "I'll do it," he said almost in a whisper. "I think I must. I think going up the river tonight would be the end of me … though no doubt my body would still walk and speak and carry out Thatch's orders."

"Are there enough men aboard your ship right now to sail it?" she asked, standing up so quickly that the hut rocked on its wooden stilts.

Bonnett squinted up at her. "The Revenge? We can't take her. Do you imagine no one would see or hear us raise anchor and set the sails and move out? No, we'll provision a boat and put in it whatever we can find to improvise a mast and sail, and row away down the coast with muffled oars, and then just take our chances on the open sea. God's far more merciful than Thatch." He gasped suddenly and grabbed her wrist. "Christ! Wait a minute! Is this a trap? Did Thatch send you here—to test me? I forgot your father's his partner … "

"No," said Beth tensely. "It's not a trap. I've got to get away from here. Now let's go get that boat." Bonnett released her wrist, though he didn't look entirely convinced. "But … you've been with them for nearly a month, as I hear it. Why have you waited until now to escape? I'm sure it would have been far easier at New Providence."

She sighed. "It never would have been easy. But—" Another bird flapped past overhead, making both of them jump. Beth laughed weakly. "Well, for one thing, until we arrived here I didn't think my father actively meant me any harm, but now … well, he doesn't mean me any harm, but … the day before yesterday, when we were disembarking, I cut myself, and my father was frantic with worry that it might mortify and give me a fever. He told Leo Friend that the protective Caribbean magics," she spoke the words with distaste, "are sluggish here, and they'd have to watch me closely for any sign of illness. But his concern was … impersonal—it wasn't the concern of a father for a threatened daughter, but more like, I don't know, a captain's concern for the seaworthiness of a vessel his life depends on."

Bonnett hadn't really been listening—he patted the curls of his wig in place and licked his moustache, then stood up and walked over to where she stood—the hut swayed dangerously—and leaned beside her. Grotesquely, his face was puckered into a trembling but insinuating smile. " 'For one thing,' you said." His voice was huskier now. "Is there another?"

Beth wasn't looking at him, and she smiled sadly. "Yes; foolish, but I think so. I didn't figure it out until Tuesday, when the Navy killed him—he was aboard that boat, the Jenny, and Friend says none of them could have survived that broadside—but I don't think I really wanted to get away, without … well, you never met him. A man who was also a passenger on the Carmichael." Bonnett pursed his lips and stepped away, letting his paunch relax again. "I needn't take you, you know," he snapped.

Beth blinked in surprise and turned to look at him. "What? Of course you need to. If you don't, what's to stop me from raising the alarm before you're well away?" Abruptly she remembered that this was, despite the good manners, a pirate, and she added hastily, "At any rate, your case will certainly look better to the authorities if you've not only repented but rescued a captive of Blackbeard's as well."

"Something in that, I suppose," Bonnett muttered grudgingly. 'Very well, now, listen. We'll go, right now, by separate routes, to the shore, where one of the Revenge's boats is dragged up on the sand — you'll see me by it — and you'll get in quick and crouch low, out of sight. There's old canvas in there, hide under it. The tide's nigh again, so it shouldn't be difficult for me to wrestle the boat into the water. Then I'll row us out to the Revenge, load as much stuff into the boat as I can without raising the suspicions of that treacherous crew, and then just row away south along the coastline. Can you navigate by the stars?"

"No," said Beth. "Why, can't you?"

"Oh, surely," said Bonnett hastily. "I was just, uh, thinking of when I might be asleep. Anyway, if we just bear south we'll be in the trade lanes before too long. And then," he went on, stepping to the ladder, "if I can get far enough away from him before he learns that I've fled, maybe he won't be able to call me back."

This didn't reassure Beth, but she followed him down the ladder to the sand and walked off, away from him. She hoped to skirt around the three fires and make her way to the shore without being seen by the ever-vigilant Leo Friend.

Slowly and thoughtfully, with lines of genuine sorrow almost ennobling his pouchy face, Stede Bonnett plodded straight down the sandy slope toward the fires, his boots making sounds like slow crickets as the leather soles rasped against the saw grass.

Talking about escape with Hurwood's daughter—and then letting himself be aroused by her, even, foolishly, thinking she might respond in kind!—had brought back with far too painful a degree of clarity the life he'd been deprived of three months before. But of course even if he succeeded in escaping Blackbeard and taking the pardon, he could hardly return to Barbados and his wife. There was some consolation in that.

Perhaps in some other country, with another name, he could start over again—he was only fifty-eight, after all; with reasonable care he was a good decade short of needing to take up religion. There would still be many young women for him to focus his attention on.

For a moment a smile puckered his face, and his hands caressed an imaginary form, and he felt the old confidence, the old sureness of himself—the wife he married four years ago had taken it away from him, had made a cowed little man of what had once been a stern officer, and it wasn't until he met the girls at Ramona's that it was restored—but then, of course, he remembered how he had left the last of those girls, and he was dropped right back into the horror he'd been living in for three months. His wrinkled old hands fell back limply to his sides.

Out on the redly glittering face of the sea, looking in end-on silhouette like the upright black skeleton of some leviathan, Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge stood motionless at anchor. Bonnett instantly looked away from it, not sure Blackbeard couldn't track his thoughts back along the line of his gaze. This escape has to work, Bonnett thought as he plodded down the ever-marshier slope. Thank God the king has offered total amnesty! None of this was my fault, but no jury would ever believe that. What jurist could understand the way a hunsi kanzo can use your blood to unhinge your mind from your body? I didn't outfit the Revenge … I'm not even sure it was me that killed that last girl at Ramona's, though I'll admit it was my hand that swung the chair leg—over and over and over again, so that, though I can't remember it, my shoulder ached for days. And even if it was me, I was drugged … and who do you suppose picked that precise girl for me, with just those features, and who told her to use those words and that tone?

A terrible thought struck him, and he stopped walking, slid a yard or so and almost fell over. Why assume, as he had been doing, that Blackbeard had first noticed him at Ramona's, and had only then decided that a moneyed, landed military man would be a useful partner? What if—and despite all the trouble he was in Bonnett's face now burned with humiliation—what if Blackbeard had wanted him before, and had set the whole supposedly spontaneous thing up? What if that first girl had only been pretending to have sprained her ankle, and in fact been chosen just because she was the skinniest, so that he would be able to lift her and take her inside to her bed? She, and the other girls too, had refused to take any payment from him in his subsequent visits, insisting that his unprecedented virility was ample reward and had in fact become an indispensable remedy for all classes of malaise, vapors and depression; but what if Blackbeard had been paying them? And paying dearly, no doubt, for in addition to their plain services he was buying a considerable amount of … acting. Again he glanced out across the water at Blackbeard's lightless ship, this time with hatred. That's how it must have been, he thought; he wanted to rope me in, and he researched me to find the quickest, easiest lever with which to pry me out of my place in the ordered world. If I hadn't been married to that castrating woman, he'd have had to find some other lever … I wonder what that might have been … my pride, perhaps, he could have maneuvered me into an illegal but unavoidable-with-honor duel … or my honesty, put me in the position of having to beggar myself by repaying some dire debt undertaken by my wife.

But of course I made it easy for him. All he had to do was pay

Ramona's whores to give me back what my wife had taken from me, and then eventually to drug me and send a girl in who was a perfect duplicate, in looks and derisive manner, of my wife …

And then afterward, when my laboring heart had purged my bloodstream of the drug, and I was staring down at the dead girl's face, which no longer bore a resemblance to anyone, that evil giant strode into the room, a grin on him like a stratum of exposed granite in a mountainside, and he offered me the choice.

Some choice.

Chapter Ten

To Beth Hurwood's right lay the vast swamp that penetrated, they said, far inland—a region where land and water blurred into each other, seldom distinct, where snakes swam in the pools and fish crawled along the banks, where the very arrangement of channels and islands would, like a diabolically animate maze, change, rendering maps no more useful for navigating than sketches of clouds would be, where still air became stagnant like still water, and so miasmally thick that insects too large to do more than crawl anywhere else could fly here. Even as she glanced at that dark quarter of the landscape, far off in the marsh there appeared one of the randomly floating spheres of phosphorescence that the pirates called spirit balls; it lifted above the wispy surface of the fog and bounced slowly among the cypress branches and the dangling masses of Spanish moss, and then, just as slowly, fell back into the fog-river, and the glow became nebulous and then died out. She looked in the other direction then toward the steel-gray sea, below which the sun had sunk half an hour before in so vast and molten a blaze that the high, wispy cirrus clouds still glowed pink; and being on higher ground and undazzled by the fires, she saw the sail a moment before the pirates did. First a shout came faintly across the water from one of the three moored ships, and then one of the men down by the fires pointed and yelled, "A sail!"

The pirates all leaped up and sprinted for the boats, instinctively preferring to be on the water rather than on the land if there was to be trouble. Beth wavered uncertainly. If the sail—a single one, and disappointingly small—was a Royal Navy craft, she certainly didn't want to be aboard any ship that succeeded in fleeing them; but if she hid and stayed behind, would the Navy craft stop and send someone to check for stragglers ashore?

Someone giggled very close by, and she jumped and smothered a scream.

Leo Friend stepped out from behind a cluster of swamp maple trees. "Going for a walk, my d-d-d — Elizabeth?" His eyes, she noticed, seemed to show too much white around the irises, and a smile came and went on his face as quickly and randomly as something that should have been secured in a wind.

"Uh, yes," she said, wondering desperately how to be rid of him. "What sail is that, do you suppose?"

"It doesn't matter," Friend said. His voice was shriller than usual tonight. "Royal Navy, rival pirates — it's too late for anyone to stop us." The smile poked his pudgy lips out and then disappeared again.

"And t-t-tomorrow w-w-we'll—to-m-morrow we s-s-sail from h-h … damn it … here." He pulled a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his forehead. "In the meantime I'll walk with you."

"I'm going down toward the fires to see what's going on," she told him, knowing that since shooting Davies the fat physician had been reluctant, even with his various protective fetishes, to mingle with the pirates.

"Your buccaneer s-sweetheart's dead, Elizabeth," Friend snapped, his sparky cheer abruptly gone, "and I think it shows at least a lack of imagination to choose his suc-suc-suc-successor from out of the same stew."

Beth ignored him and began picking her way down the slope. To her alarm, she heard Friend following. How on earth, she wondered frantically, can I get away from him and keep the appointment with Bonnett?

A man out on the anchored Carmichael shouted something Beth couldn't hear, but the message was repeated by the men on the beach. "It's the bleedin' Jenny!" came a wondering shout. "The Jenny got free of that man-o'-war!"

With no clear transition point the pirates' panicky rout became a riot of celebration. Bells began ringing on the Vociferous Carmichael and Bonnett's Revenge—though not on Blackbeard's ship) — and muskets were fired into the darkening sky, and the various ships' musicians hastily snatched up their instruments and began clamoring.

Glad now that it wasn't a Royal Navy vessel, Beth Hurwood quickened her pace, while Friend, seeing that the vessel was not one that offered her a chance of escape, sulkily slacked off his own pace. Having a much shallower draft than the three ships, the Jenny was able to tack in very close to shore before dropping her anchor—the rattling of the chain lost in the general pandemonium—and a few of the men aboard her didn't wait for boats but took running dives off the bow, daringly trusting the speed and angle of their dives to carry them into water that wouldn't be over their chins in depth. A few could actually swim, and took this opportunity to show off their exotic skill by paddling around in circles, splashing and blowing like dolphins, before heading in to shore with theatrically nonchalant strokes.

One of them, though, just dove in and made his way to shore in a swift, unpretentious crawl, and he was the first to stand up in the shallows and wade in through the surge and ebb to the sand.

"Saints be praised!" cried one of the men waiting ashore. "The cook survived!"

"Whip us up one of your dinners, Shandy," called another, "before the captains start inland!" A few more sailors had made their way ashore by this time, and the ships' boats were being dragged down the sand to the surf to facilitate the more formal disembarking, and Jack Shandy was able to avoid the worst of the welcoming press. He glanced around, clearly trying to keep from ruining his night vision by looking directly into the fires, and then his dark, bearded face split in a smile when he saw the slim figure of Beth Hurwood just now striding into the central clearing. She hurried across the sand to him even as he broke into an unsteady run toward her, and when they met it seemed to her only natural to throw her arms around his neck.

"Everybody told me you were all killed—in that last broadside," she gasped.

"A lot of us were," he said. "Listen, I've been talking to Davies a lot during these last five days, and —"

"No, you listen. Stede Bonnett and I are going to steal a boat and escape tonight, and I'm sure there'll be room for you too. The Jenny's arrival will postpone it a little, I imagine, but it should at the same time provide a fine diversion. Now here's what you do—linger by the shore for a while until Bonnett can choose a boat, and then watch for me. I'll—"

"Shandy!" came a yell from the fireside crowd. "Jack! Where in hell are you?"

"Damn," said Shandy. "I'll be back." He strode away from her toward the crowd.

"Here he is!" shouted Davies. "May I present, gentlemen, my new quartermaster!" The applause that followed this announcement was sporadic, but Davies went on. "I know—you all think it's cookery and puppets he does best, and so did I, but it develops his real values are brassier; courage and deceit and a quick, steady hand with a pistol. You want to know how we got away from that man-o'-war?" The pirates loudly indicated that they wanted to know. On the outskirts of the crowd, Beth Hurwood took several slow steps backward, her face expressionless. Shandy looked back at her over his shoulder, clearly wanting to return and say something to her, but a dozen hands, and even an encouraging boot or two, were propelling him toward Davies and the flattened clearing between the fires. The lean old pirate chief grinned at him; though Davies had cursed the absence of a bocor during the past five days, he had, himself, taken the dead bocor's kit and managed to "slap Mate CareFor awake" and to some extent keep that personage's attention on the sloop, and now the wounded men were recovering unfevered and Davies' shoulder seemed to be restored.

"After I was shot off the Carmichael," said Davies loudly, "a circumstance I'll take up with certain parties presently, I was picked out of the water by the Navy boys and taken aboard their ship. I found the Jenny crippled and captured, and all her surviving lads under armed guard— except for our boy Shandy, who'd told the captain, 'Oh dear me, sir, I'm not one of these dirty pirates, I was forced to join them, and I'll be delighted to testify at their trials." Several of the Jenny's crew had attained the shore and joined the crowd, and now they hollered their delighted agreement.

"That's just what he said, Phil!"

"Innocent as a bloody sheep, that captain thought Jacky was!"

"But," Davies went on, "he tipped me a wink when no one was looking, so I waited to see what he was up to. And what Jack did was convince the captain that I should be questioned privately, down in the great cabin, and no sooner had the three of us and a couple of officers got in there and shut the door than Jack snatched a pistol and shot the captain's head clean off his body!" The applause this time was tumultuous, and Shandy was forcibly picked up and marched around the fires on the shoulders of a number of pirates. Beth took another backward step and then turned and ran toward the dark shoreline, as Davies, behind her, went on with relish to describe the way Shandy had engineered the utter destruction of the British man-of-war.

She found Bonnett standing just to the dry side of the high-water line, staring out at the darkening sea, his hands locked behind his back and the tilt of his three-cornered hat indicating that he was staring into the sky.

"Let's go, quickly," Beth panted. "I'm afraid I've confided our intentions to one who'll betray us, but perhaps if we leave instantly that won't matter. And the arrival of the Jenny can surely be used to our profit—you can pretend that the supplies you take from your ship are to replenish those of the ravaged Jenny, can't you? So for God's sake, let's go, every second—" She halted then, for Bonnett had turned around to look at her, and his face bore an uncharacteristically sardonic smile. "Ah!" he said gently. "Escape, is it? Furtive flight? That explains his extreme tension and anxiety … very conspicuous states of mind, if one has learned to smell such things." He shrugged, and gave her a smile not devoid of sympathy. "I'm sorry. Neither of the two pieces you propose removing from the board is dispensable right now." Beth gasped, then whirled and ran back in despair toward the fires, her most basic assumptions about the world shaken for the first time; for she knew beyond hope of rationalization that, though the voice had been Bonnett's and had come out of his mouth, it had been someone else speaking to her through them.

Shandy swore under his breath, for he'd lost sight of Beth, and he'd hoped to be able to give her his account of Davies' rescue before she heard the flamboyant version the Jenny's crew had come to agree on.

He was about to demand that the pirates put him down when he caught a whiff of the by now not unfamiliar smell of overheated metal. He tensed, trying to remember some of the things Davies had taught him during the past five days. He exhaled totally and hummed one of the simpler parryingtunes, and he shifted around on his unsteady perch, trying to face all corners of the compass. He found that his nose burned most uncomfortably when he was facing the farthest fire, and after a moment's peering he noticed the stocky, red-haired figure of Venner standing there. Shandy braced himself, then raised his left hand, curling the fingers into the uncomfortable position Davies had shown him, but as soon as Venner realized Shandy had noticed him he looked away, and the smell was gone instantly.

Shandy whistlingly sucked air into his heaving lungs. Well now, he thought as the pirates wearied of their sport and let him hop down to the packed sand, that's worth knowing. I guess Venner doesn't agree that I'm the best man for the quartermaster job.

The cheering and howling had abated in the clumps of the crowd nearest to the shore, and after a few seconds the stillness spread to the rest of the crowd; an inattentive pirate or two shouted, and one drunken old man worked his way to the end of a long fit of laughter, and Mr. Bird reminded everyone one more time that he was not a dog, but after that the silence on shore was absolute. And from the dark sea came the kalunk … clunk … kalunk … clunk of oars knocking in oarlocks. Shandy blinked around in uneasy puzzlement. "What's up?" he whispered to a man near him. "A boat's coming in—what's so terrible?"

The man's right hand darted to his forehead, but he hesitated and then just scratched his scalp. Shandy guessed his first impulse had been to make the sign of the cross. "It's Thatch," the man said quietly.

" … Oh." Shandy stared out at the boat that was now halfway between the shore and the lightless bulk of the Queen Anne's Revenge. There were two figures in the boat, one of whom, the bigger one, seemed at this distance to be wearing a tiara of fireflies.

More profoundly than ever, Shandy wished that Captain Wilson had not tried to kill Davies. He recalled all the stories he'd heard about this man in the approaching boat, and it occurred to him that Thatch—Blackbeard—the dreaded hunsi kanzo—was the most successful of the buccaneers who had tried to adapt to this new, western world. Blackbeard seemed as much and as inseparably a part of this world as the Gulf Stream.

Shandy glanced at Davies, who was squinting more than the fire glare called for, and though the set of his jaw made his cheeks even more lined and hollow than usual, Shandy caught a hint of how Davies must have looked as a young man—willful, and determined to conceal any misgivings once a course had been considered and decided on.

Boots grated on the sand nearby, and looking around Shandy saw old one-armed Benjamin Hurwood standing near him and staring out at the boat. Shandy thought Hurwood too was concealing what he felt, but, unlike Davies, Beth's father seemed to be tense with eagerness and impatience. Remembering some things Davies had told him about Hurwood, Shandy was pretty sure he knew why — and though he knew Hurwood was a murderer, he knew too that if he himself were ever to be in Hurwood's situation, and refrain from taking the course Hurwood was taking, it would be because of fear rather than virtue.

The boat crested an incoming breaker, and as the wave crashed to churning foam the boat rushed in until its keel jarred against the sand in the swirling shallows, and Blackbeard vaulted over the gunwale and splashed ponderously up to shore. His boatman—who, Shandy noticed with a shudder, had his jaw bound up—just sat in the boat, neither attempting to beach the thing nor to get out to deeper water before the next wave broke.

Blackbeard strode up the sand slope toward the fires, and paused for a moment where it leveled out, a big, jagged silhouette against the purple sky; his three-cornered hat seemed too tapering and long at the corners, and with the points of red light bobbing around his head he looked to Shandy like some three-horned demon newly climbed up from Hell.

Then he approached the fires, and the luminous red dots around his head were revealed to be the lit ends of match-cords woven into his shaggy mane and beard. He was a tall man, taller than Davies, and as solidly massive as a wind-etched rock outcrop.

"And here we are one year later, Mr. Hurwood," Blackbeard said. "You've brought us a fine ship, as you promised, and I've brought the herb you say we need—and here we are on Lammask in spite of your fears I'd be late." He spoke English with a slight accent, and Shandy couldn't decide whether it indicated a non-English origin or just a lack of interest and aptitude in speaking. "May we both get what we're seeking."

Behind the huge pirate Shandy saw Leo Friend, still panting from having hurried to the fires, grin furtively; and for the First time Shandy wondered if the fat young physician might have ambitions of his own in all this.

Blackbeard clumped in to the center of the cleared space, and Shandy noticed that his craggy face gleamed with sweat—perhaps because of his heavy black coat, the voluminous folds of which hung all the way down to his shins. "Phil?" said Blackbeard.

"Here, sir," said Davies, stepping forward.

"Feel recovered enough to come along?"

"Try me."

"Oh, aye, I'll do that. These are trying times." Blackbeard grinned, a rictus that exposed most of his teeth. "You were disobeying the orders."

Davies grinned back. "Unlike what you'd have done, of course."

"Hah." The giant looked around at the crowd, which was more or less separated into three groups — the three ships' crews. "Who else is—" He paused abruptly and stared at his own wide-cuffed sleeve, all expression leaving his dark face. The men nearby drew back, muttering cantrips, though Hurwood and Friend leaned forward and stared.

Shandy stared too, though not eagerly, and thought for a moment he saw the cuff twitch, and a faint puff of smoke curl out; then, very clearly, he saw a line of blood run down Blackbeard's two middle fingers and begin to drip off and fall to the sand. The pirate's long coat seemed to shiver, as though rats were running around underneath.

"Rum," the giant said in a voice both tense and quiet.

One of the men from the Carmichael's crew hurried forward with a jug, but Davies caught his collar and yanked him back. "Not just raw rum," Davies snapped. He took the jug, called for a cup, and after filling the cup he hurriedly uncorked his powder flask and shook a couple of handfuls of gunpowder into the drink. "Jack," he said. "A light, quick." Shandy sprinted to the nearest fire and snatched up a stick with a flaming end, then hurried back to Davies, who was now holding the cup out away from himself, and he touched the blazing end of the stick to the cup's rim.

Instantly it was flaming and bubbling, and Davies took it to Blackbeard. Shandy thought he saw something like a little featherless bird clinging to Blackbeard's hand, but he was distracted by the sight of the huge pirate tilting his head all the way back and then simply inverting the fiery cup over his open mouth.

For a moment it seemed that his entire head had caught fire; then as quick as it had appeared the blaze was out, leaving just the dim corona of lit match-cords, and a puff of churning, redly luminous smoke hung over his head—and as soon as Shandy noticed its resemblance to a rage-contorted face, it was gone.

"Who's going with us?" Blackbeard asked harshly.

"Me and my quartermaster here, Jack Shandy," said Davies briskly, "and Bonnett and Hurwood, of course, and probably Hurwood's apprentice, Leo Friend, he's that fat boy there … and Hurwood's daughter."

People were looking at Shandy, though Blackbeard wasn't yet, so Shandy didn't let his astonishment show—but he was angry that Davies hadn't told him Beth would be coming along into the swamp, for Davies had described to him the journey they were going to make tonight through the perilous marshes, and, evidently even more perilous, the "magical balancing point" they sought, way back in the nearly impenetrable fastnesses of primeval ooze and loathesomely adapted creatures, and he couldn't imagine bringing Beth Hurwood along.

"Your quartermaster," Blackbeard rumbled, absently crushing the cup. "What became of Hodge?"

"He was killed when we escaped from the Navy man-of-war," Davies said. "Shandy accomplished that escape."

"Caught some news of that," Blackbeard said thoughtfully. "Shandy—step forward." Shandy did, and the huge pirate-king turned his gaze on him, and Shandy felt buffeted by the sheer impact of the man's undivided attention. For a moment Blackbeard just stared down mto his eyes, and Shandy felt his face heating up, for he could almost feel the closets and cupboards of his mind being opened and their contents being appraised.

"I see there was more aboard the Vociferous Carmichael than we knew," the giant said quietly, almost with suspicion. Then, more loudly, he said, "Welcome to the world, Shandy—I can see that Davies picked the right man."

"Thank you, sir," Shandy found himself saying. "Though don't … I mean, it wasn't all quite … "

"It never is. Prove yourself tonight when we reach the Fountain … and though we travel with Baron Samedi and Maitre Carrefour, stand on your own feet." He turned away then, and Shandy, feeling as if he'd just stepped out of glaring sunlight into shade, heaved a sigh and let his constricted psyche spring back out to its normal extent.

Incoming waves had first half filled Blackbeard's boat but then nudged it up into the shallows, and several sailors had begun to unload a large box from the craft, awkwardly because of their reluctance to get near the stiffly motionless boatman. The pirate-king spat in disgust and strode away to oversee the work.

Shandy turned around and almost bumped into the imposing belly of Davies' bocor, Woefully Fat. A night for giants, Shandy thought as he tried to peer around the bulky sorceror. "Excuse me," he said before remembering that the bocor was supposed to be deaf, "have you seen Phil? Uh, Captain Davies? Oh hell, that's right, you can't hear, can you? So why am I … " The intensity of the bocor's stare made him stop jabbering. Why can't these people give these looks to somebody else, Shandy thought with a shiver, or each other?

Unlike Blackbeard, who had seemed vaguely suspicious of Shandy, Woefully Fat stared down at him with evident doubt—almost with disappointment, as though Shandy were a bottle of expensive wine that someone might have left out too long in direct sunlight.

Shandy gave the sorceror a nervously polite smile, then backed away and hurried around him. Davies, he saw now, was standing on the edge of the sand slope a few yards away, and Shandy plodded over there.

Davies saw him, grinned, and then nodded down toward Blackbeard. "A powerful man, eh?"

"God knows," Shandy agreed, not smiling. "Listen, Phil," he went on quietly, "you never told me Beth Hurwood was coming along into the swamps with us."

Davies raised his eyebrows. "Didn't I? Perhaps not—probably because it's none of your concern." Shandy thought the older man was speaking a little defensively and that alarmed him even more.

"What do they mean to do with her?"

Davies sighed and shook his head. "Frankly, Jack, I'm not certain—though I do know they're anxious to keep her from all harm. Some higher magic, I gather."

"Having to do with Hurwood's dead wife."

"Oh, certainly that," Davies agreed. "As I told you on the Jenny, the hope of getting her back is all that keeps the old boy moving."

Shandy shook his head worriedly. "But if the Caribee loas are weak here, as you told me, how on earth do they expect to keep her safe out in that swamp? And who is this Maitre Carrefour?"

"Hm? Oh, that's our old friend Mate Care-For. Thatch just pronounces it right. It means master of the crossroads. Master of different possibilities, in other words—of chance. But yes, he and Samedi and the rest of the spirit boys have grown weaker for us as we've moved so far north of the places they're anchored to. No doubt there are loas here too, but they'll be Indian ones—less than no help to us. Aye, we're pretty much on our own here. Like Thatch said, we've got to stand on our own feet. But of course after we get to this magical focus, or fountain, or whatever it is, if Hurwood can come through on his promise to show us how to use it—and not get infested, as Thatch did when he found the place — why then we'll probably be able to just fly out."

Shandy frowned angrily. "Damn it—I can't see why Blackbeard even came here in the first place. I guess he knew somehow that there was some big magic deep in this jungle, but what made him go to so much trouble to get at it? Especially since he doesn't even seem to have been handy enough at magic to keep himself out of trouble."

Davies started to speak, then chuckled and shook his head. 'You've been in the western hemisphere how long now, Jack?"

"You know how long."

"So I do. A month, call it. Well, I first saw these islands when I was sixteen, the year after the press gang grabbed me in a Bristol street and informed me I was a sailor in His Majesty's Navy. No, let me talk. You can talk after. Anyway, I was a sailor on the frigate Swan, and in May of 1692—I was eighteen by then—the Swan was in Port Royal, which was Jamaica's main seaport in those days, and we had her up on the careening ground a hundred yards west of the walls of Fort Carlyle." Davies sighed. "I guess ten years earlier Port Royal had been a real hellhole—it was Henry Morgan's home base—but when I was there it was just a nice, lively town. Well, on the second day of June, while my mates were working in the sun scraping barnacles off the Swan's hull, I was down the beach a ways reporting a shipping error at the King's warehouses, and when I had finished that I ducked in next door, at Littleton's tavern. And I'll tell you what, Jack, just as I left the place, full of beer and Littleton's excellent stew—beef and turtle, it was, as I recall—Thames Street jumped under my feet, and a sound like cannons or thunder came rolling out from the mainland. I turned back toward the tavern just in time to see the whole front wall of the place split into quarters like you'd cut a pie, and then the brick street broke up into … strips, like … and slid right down into the sea, with the whole town following right behind."

Shandy was listening avidly, having for the moment forgotten their original topic.

"I think I was under water for three minutes," Davies went on, "being battered by bricks and dirt, and just about being disjointed by the water itself, which couldn't make up its mind which way it wanted to fall. Finally I got to the surface and grabbed hold of somebody's roof beam, which was bobbing around like a toothpick on the choppiest, craziest sea you ever heard of. Eventually I was picked up by the Swan herself, which was one of the damn few vessels that hadn't been wrecked—maybe because she was already tipped over when the earthquake struck. She was crisscrossing the new patch of ocean which had, until about noon, been Port Royal, and we pulled lots of others out of that white sea—it was all bubbling and seething, you know? Like a huge pot of wild beer—but I later heard that two thousand died there."

"Jesus," said Shandy respectfully. Then, "Uh, but how does this relate to—"

"Oh, right, sorry—I'm getting carried away by my memories. Well sir, three blocks inland, on Broad Street, on that same terrible June second, an old magician from England—sort of like Hurwood, I guess—was trying out a heavy piece of resurrection magic I don't think he was very skilled at it, but he had with him that day a sixteen-year-old boy who'd grown up among the free blacks in the Jamaica mountains, a boy who, though white, had been deeply educated in vodun and had, just the year before, been consecrated to the most fearsome of the loos, the Lord of Cemeteries, Baron Samedi, whose secret drogue is low-smoldering fire. It was reincarnation magic they were playing with, trying to learn how to put old souls into new bodies, and that requires fresh human blood, and they'd grabbed some poor devil to provide it. The old English magician had tried this stuff before, and, I don't know, maybe he'd managed on his best day to bring a dead bug or two back to life, but today he had this sixteen-year-old boy yoked in double harness with himself, right?"

"Right … ?" echoed Shandy.

"Well, it turns out—neither of 'em knew it at the time, though probably a few of the old bocors knew it, and certainly the Carib Indians before that—it turns out that big-yield resurrection magic has to be done at sea. Something to do with a relationship between blood and sea water, I understand. Well, this white boy turned out to be the most powerful natural magician of his color that anybody'd ever heard of … and here he was doing resurrection magic in Port Royal— on the land." Shandy waited a moment. "Uh … yeah? So?"

"So the town of Port Royal jumped into the sea, Jack."

"Oh." Shandy looked out at the black ocean. "This … this sixteen-year-old boy—"

"—Was named Ed Thatch. He's been trying to perfect the resurrection trick ever since. And that's what brought him to this coast two years ago. You asked, remember?"

"Yes." Shandy wasn't feeling at all reassured. "Very well, so what is this focus or fountain we're going into the jungle to find?"

Davies blinked at him. "Why, I thought you knew that, Jack. It's a hole in the wall between life and death, and anyone standing around is liable to catch the spray from one side or the other. Don't you know any history? It's what Juan Ponce de Leon was looking for—he called it the Fountain of Youth."

Chapter Eleven

When it was fully dark, and Blackbeard, Davies and the rest of them had drunk off the last fortifying cups of rum and begun plodding north along the beach toward the river and the waiting boats, Benjamin Hurwood forced himself to stand up and follow them.

The daydreams that had become increasingly vivid and insistent during the last couple of years had now reached the point where they could almost be called hallucinations, but Hurwood kept his mouth clamped shut and didn't allow his eyes to follow any of the figures and objects he knew were imaginary.

It's 1718, he told himself firmly, and I'm on the shore of the I west coast of Florida, with the pirate Edward Thatch and … my daughter … what in hell is her name? Not Margaret … Elizabeth! That's it. Despite what I'm seeing half the time, I'm not at the church in Chelsea … I am not forty-three years old, the year isn't 1694 … and that is not my bride that I see there, my dear Margaret, my life, or at least my sanity … that's our daughter, the … the vehicle …

Hurwood squinted against the bright sunlight streaming in through the vestibule window as he handed the flask back to his groomsman. "Thanks, Peter," he grinned. He peeked through the crack between the two doors that were the church's side entrance, but people were still moving uncertainly down the aisles and sidling into the pews, and the minister hadn't appeared yet … though there was one frightened-looking altar boy at one of the far kneelers on the altar. "A little time yet," he told his best man. "I'll just take one more peek into the glass."

Peter smiled at the groom's nervousness as Hurwood crossed once again to the mirror he'd propped up on a nearby shelf. "The sin of vanity," Peter muttered.

"Today I believed a touch of vanity can be excused," Hurwood replied, patting his long brown locks into place. Hurwood was a studious, retiring man, but he did take pride in his hair, and, despite the fashion, never wore a wig—he always appeared in society "in his own hair," and despite his years there was no gray in it at all.

"I don't see Margaret yet," Peter remarked, pulling one of the doors open a bit and squinting toward the back of the church. "No doubt she's reconsidered."

Even the suggestion made Hurwood's stomach go cold. "God's blood, Peter, don't even speak such a thought! I'd … go mad. I—"

"A joke, merely!" Peter assured him, a hint of concern detectable behind his jovial tone. "Do relax, Ben, of course she'll come. Here, have another pull at the brandy—you're the palest bridegroom I've ever seen."

Hurwood took the proffered flask and drank deeply. "Thanks—but no more. It wouldn't do to be drunk on the altar."

"Shall I put her in the boat?" asked Peter, somehow pulling a curtain across the window so that they stood in darkness except for the light of a lamp Hurwood hadn't noticed. The air was suddenly fresher, but smelled of the sea, and marshes; fleetingly it occurred to Hurwood that they should air out these rooms more frequently—a century of incense smoke and moth-riddled draperies and dry prayer-book bindings produced some unlikely smells.

"I think you're the one that's had too much to drink," snapped Hurwood testily. He could no longer see his hair in the mirror. Pull back that damned curtain."

"This is no time for visions, Mr. Hurwood," said someone, presumably Peter. "It's time to get into the boats."

Hurwood saw to his alarm that the lamp had somehow started a fire in the side vestibule—no, three fires! "Peter!" he cried. "The church is burning!" He turned to his best man, but instead of the lean, elegant figure of Peter he saw a monstrously fat young man in grotesque clothes. "Who are you?" Hurwood asked, very frightened, for he was now certain that something had happened to his fianceé.

"Is Margaret all right?"

"She's dead, Mr. Hurwood," said the fat youth impatiently. "That's why you're here, remember?"

"Dead!" Then he must be in church for a funeral, not a wedding—but why was the casket so small, a square wooden box no more than a foot and a half long on any side? And why did it smell so earthy and bad?

Then he snapped out of it, and the memories of this last quarter of a century fell onto him like a landslide, leaving him weak and white-haired.

"Yes, dead," Leo Friend repeated. "And you're going to behave sanely for the next couple of hours even if I've got to control you myself," the fat man added desperately.

"Calm yourself, Leo," said Hurwood, managing to force a bit of detached amusement into his voice.

"Yes, by all means get … Elizabeth into the boat."

Hurwood strode confidently down the slope toward the river, where the boats were drawn up and the wooden chest from Blackbeard's boat was being pried open—though he lurched a little, because every few seconds he seemed to be walking at a ceremoniously slow pace down the church's center aisle, through alternating patches of shadow and slanting colored light as he passed the high stainedglass windows one by one. The springy, spidery-looking mangrove roots had been cutlassed away from a hundred-foot section of the river shore, and men were standing knee-deep in the black, torchlight-glittering water and catching oilskin-wrapped bundles tossed from shore and laying them in the boats. There was a flaming torch mounted in the bow of each of the three boats, and Hurwood saw that Davies and the cook were already in one of the boats, Davies holding it steady by gripping a mangrove stump that projected a foot out of the water.

" … to have and to hold, from this day forward, until death do you part?" the minister asked, smiling kindly at the earnest couple kneeling before him. Out of the corner of his eye Hurwood saw the altar boy he'd noticed earlier, still at the far kneeler and still looking scared … no, more lost than scared. "I do," said Hurwood.

"How's that again, boss?" asked the pirate who had just taken the last bundle out of the wooden chest and tossed the oilskin-wrapped packet to the men in the water.

"He says he does," snickered the man next to him.

The first pirate winked at his companion. "I thought he looked like the type that did, but I wasn't sure."

"Haw haw."

Hurwood blinked around, then smiled at them. "Most amusing. I'll be sure and bring a couple of mementos back from the Fountain for you gentlemen."

The grins fell off the men's faces. "Meant no disrespect, sir," one of them said sulkily.

"Still, I won't forget." Looking over his shoulder Hurwood saw Leo Friend making his ponderous way down the slope. "We'll go in that one," Hurwood told the cowed pirates, pointing at one of the boats. "Please bring it close, and hold it very steady, for my companion is massive." The men silently did as they were told, and out of fear of Hurwood they dragged the boat in so close to shore that he was able to step into it without getting his boots wet.

A few people threw rice in spite of Hurwood's stated preference, but he smiled as he stepped up into the carriage beside his bride, for he was far too elated to acknowledge petty annoyances. He was smiling broadly. "Thank you!" he called to the gaping pirates and Leo Friend. "We'll have you all over for dinner when we return from the continent!"

Shandy leaned out to the side, away from the boat's torch, to see Hurwood better. The old man was still grinning and waving to the shore, to the dumbfoundment of the pirates and Friend—and Beth, who was being led to her father's boat by the apparently sleep-walking Stede Bonnett. I guess she was right after all, Shandy thought, about her father being crazy.

For the last half hour the moon had been alternately hidden and exposed by clouds rushing across its face, and now a warm rain began to fall. The boats were loaded, and the passengers were all more or less settled on the thwarts—Blackbeard and his dubious rower in the first boat, Hurwood, Friend, Elizabeth and Bonnett in tne next, and Shandy and Davies in the third. Shandy was surprised to see that Woefully Fat wasn't coming along; did the giant bocor know something, perhaps, that the people in the boats didn't?

As the boats pushed away from the shore and the oarlocks began to knock and clank, and steam rose from the torch flames, all the voyagers except Beth Hurwood began humming a low-key counterpoint melody calculated to attract whatever feeble attentions of Baron Samedi and Maitre Carrefour might extend to this forsaken northern shore—but after a few minutes the humming dropped off, as if all of them found it incongruous here.

The stream was slow, and it was easy to row up it, and soon even the glow of the three fires on the shore was lost behind them in the black maze. Shandy crouched in the bow of his boat and, as the knobby towers of cypresses loomed out of the darkness, some of them looking like hooded and malformed men, some looking like stones, none of them looking like any kind of tree, he softly called directions back to Davies, who had insisted on rowing in spite of his newly healed shoulder. Things shifted wetly on the boggy ground as they passed, and there were inexplicable splashings and bubblings, but Shandy saw nothing that looked animate except the pearly oil-smears that slicked the water and seemed to form grasping hands, and warped faces mouthing unreadable words, as the boat keels razored them in half and pushed them away to either side.

Blackbeard's boat was leading the way, and in the nearly silent cathedral of the swamp Shandy thought he could hear intermittent hissing from the pirate-king's strange boatman. The only other sounds from the boats were Friend's muttered directions to Bonnett, who was laboring at their boat's oars, and an occasional soft, fatuous chuckle from Hurwood. Beth huddled in hopeless silence beside her father.

When Shandy consciously noticed the quiet susurration after about an hour of slow progress through the jungly labyrinth, he realized that he'd been aware of the sound for quite a while, but until now hadn't distinguished it from the muted splash and drip of the oars. It sounded to him like hundreds of people, not far ahead, whispering in alarm. At about the same time, he noticed the new smell, which was eclipsing the rich odors of cypress oil and decaying vegetation and black water, and as soon as he became aware of it, he realized he'd been expecting it. He exhaled sharply through his nose, then cleared his throat and spat. "Aye," muttered Davies, evidently liking it no better, "smells like a cannon that hasn't been let to cool between firings."

Hurwood too seemed to notice it, for he stopped his chortling and snapped, "The herb—put it in the torches now."

Shandy untied the oilskin bundle issued to his boat and, a handful at a time, gently tossed the damp, stringy stuff—the stuff Blackbeard had terrorized Charles Town to obtain—onto the glowing surface of the torch-head. Smoke trickled up fitfully at first, then suddenly in thick billows, and Shandy yanked his head back, huffing and spitting again, this time to get the pungent, almost ammoniac reek out of his head. Why bother, he thought, to qualify it as a ghost repellent? This stuff would chase wooden figureheads off the bows of ships.

He was tense but not actively scared—though at the same time he was wryly aware that this was like his relative coolness during the capture of the Carmichael: based on ignorance of the danger. But Blackbeard was here once, he told himself, and came out not too bad off … and of course Blackbeard just blundered in, carelessly, drawn by the Fountain's magical reverberations or whatever it was, like a moth to a candle, while we've got a guide that knows how to handle all this stuff …

His confidence waned a little, though, when he remembered that Hurwood had evidently lost his mind. And why had Blackbeard forbidden them to bring pistols?

The river narrowed, or, more accurately, broke up into dozens of narrow channels, and soon rowing became impossible, and the oars had to be used as barge poles. Blackbeard's boat took the lead, Hurwood's was next, and the boat Shandy was in was last. As the wet vines and wild orchids pressed in ever closer in the orange torchlight, Shandy began to wonder if there wasn't something out there in the marsh, not too far away, pacing them silently in the darkness—something big, though it made no sound as it moved through the moonlight-dappled tangles of bay trees and swamp Naples. He tried to force his imagination to relax, though the sound like whispering—louder now—didn't make it easy. He was kneeling on one of the thwarts, alternately heaving back with his oar against the muddy river bottom and squinting ahead through the noxious smoke to see which channels the other two boats took. Sparks from the torch at the bow had been falling back onto him ever since the boat had cast off, and he'd been absently brushing them away, but now he felt two spots of warmth at his waist, and, glancing down, didn't see any sparks.

He brushed at his shirt, and discovered that his iron belt buckle was uncomfortably hot, as was his sheathed knife. And now that he had noticed those, he was aware too of a warmth on the insteps of his feet—right where his boot buckles were.

"Uh," he began, turning to Davies, but before he could think of what to say, Hurwood called from the boat ahead.

"Iron!" the old man told them. "Apparently the old superstitions—the connection between iron and magic—it'd probably be wise to discard it, as much of it as you can—"

"Keep your weapons," came Blackbeard's bass growl. "I was here before—it doesn't get too hot to bear. And don't ditch your belt buckles if that means your pants are going to fall down." A scream from the black jungle made Shandy jump, but Davies, leaning on his own oar, laughed quietly and said, "Not a ghost—that was one of those brown-and-white birds that eat the water snails."

"Oh—right."

Shandy pulled in his oar and laid it across the bow. As gingerly as if he were splitting the shell off of a too-hot lobster, he unbuckled his belt, then drew his knife—he could feel the heat of the tang even through the leather wrapping of the grip—and, using the gunwale as a chopping block, sawed off the buckle-end of his belt. It clattered down the hull and splashed into the puddle sloshing back and forth on the floorboards. He slid the hot knife back into its sheath and picked up his oar again. Davies, who hadn't paused in his own rhythmic poling, grinned mockingly and shook his head. "Your pants better not fall down."

Shandy leaned his full weight against his oar, and wondered if the water was too shallow to float the keel clear and they were poling the boat through mud. "Yours," he gasped, "better not catch fire." The three boats inched onward through the humid jungle, hazed in the smoke from the torches. As much to relieve his watering eyes from the flame-glare as to watch for some stealthily approaching monster, Shandy kept peering off to the sides; and at first he was relieved to see that the "whispering" was issuing from flappy holes in the round pods of a white fungoid growth that was clustered more and more thickly along the spongy banks—casting about for an explanation of the phenomenon, he guessed that their roots were connected to caverns, and that temperature differences caused air to rush up and be released in this admittedly bizarre way—but as the boats were pushed farther into the marsh, where the fungus balls grew bigger, he saw that above the loose-edged, exhaling holes were bumps and indentations that looked increasingly like noses and eyes.

The sense of a huge and attentive—but silent—entity out in the darkness became more and more oppressive. Finally Shandy looked up in fear, and though he could see the moonlight-silvered interweaving of branches overhead, he knew that a thing was bending down invisibly above them, a thing that belonged here, that owned—perhaps largely consisted of—these repellently fecund swamps and pools and vines and small amphibian lives.

The others obviously felt it too. Friend scrambled heavily to his feet and then nearly extinguished his boat's torch by dumping a double fistful of the black herb onto it; the flame guttered low, but a couple of seconds later flared up again, sending a billowing cloud of the harsh smoke unfolding upward toward the branches that roofed the river.

A scream out of the sky shook blossoms from the trees and raised ripples in the water so tight and steady that for a moment the boats seemed to be sitting on a pane of extra-ridgy bull's-eye glass. The sound rang away through the jungle, and then there was just the cawing of frightened birds, and, after they subsided, just the whispering of the fungus pods.

Shandy glanced at the nearest cluster of the pods, and he saw that the fungus lumps were definitely faces now, and from the way their eyelids twitched he was unhappily sure that soon he'd be meeting the gaze of eyes when he looked at them.

Behind him Davies was swearing steadily in a weary monotone.

"Don't tell me," Shandy said in a fairly even voice, "that was one of those brown-and-white birds that eat the goddamned water snails."

Davies barked one syllable of a laugh, but didn't reply. Shandy could hear Beth weeping quietly.

"Ah, my dear Margaret," said old Benjamin Hurwood in a choked but throbbing voice, "may these tears of joy be the only sort you ever shed again! And now indulge, please, a sentimental old Oxford don. On this, our wedding day, I'd like to recite to you a sonnet I've composed." He cleared his throat. The invisible swamp-presence was still a psychic weight on the foul air, and the insteps of Shandy's feet were getting uncomfortably hot in spite of the thick leather between the boot buckles and his skin.

"Margaret!" Benjamin Hurwood began, "I require a Dante's muse … "

"We're aground," came Blackbeard's call from ahead. "Stop pushing 'em. From here, we move on foot."

Christ, thought Shandy. "Is he … kidding?" he asked, not very hopefully. Instead of answering, Davies laid his oar in the boat and climbed over the stern and lowered himself into the black water. It proved to be about hip deep.

" … Fitly to sing my joy after that day," Hurwood crooned on. Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard had taken his boat's torch out of its bracket, and he and his disquieting boatman were both already in the water and wading toward the nearest bank. Shadows shifted as they moved, and new clusters of the fungus heads became visible.

"Mr. Hurwood," Leo Friend was hissing, shaking the one-armed man. "Mr. Hurwood! Wake up, damn you!"

"When," Hurwood continued reciting, "in my life's mid-point, God let me choose … to leave the gloomy wood—"

Shandy could see Beth's shoulders shaking. Bonnett was sitting as stiffly motionless as a mannikin. Blackbeard and his boatman had climbed up onto the bank, and, ignoring the twitching, whispering white globes at their feet, were hanging on to dangling wild grapevines to keep their footing on the mud and the arching wet roots. "We need him alert," called Blackbeard to Friend. "Slap him—hard. If that doesn't do it I'll come over there and … do something to him myself." Friend smiled nervously, drew back a pudgy hand and then cracked it across Hurwood's simpering face.

Hurwood let go a yell that was almost a sob, then blinked around at the boats, once again aware of his real surroundings.

"Not much farther now," Blackbeard told him patiently, "but we leave the boats here." Hurwood peered for almost a minute at the water and the mud bank. Finally, he said, "We'll have to carry the girl."

"I'll help carry her," called Shandy.

Friend gave Shandy a venomous glare, but Hurwood didn't even look around. "No," the old man said,

"Friend and Bonnett and I can manage."

"Right," said Blackbeard. "The rest of us will be busy chopping us a passage through this jungle." Shandy sighed and put down his oar. He rocked the boat's torch free of its bracket, handed it and the packet of black herb to Davies, and then climbed out of the boat. At least his boots leaked, and the relatively cool swamp water soothed his hot feet.

Chapter Twelve

For half an hour the odd company splashed, plodded and stumbled through one claustrophobic tangle of vegetation after another; Shandy's knife-wielding arm was shaking with fatigue from chopping vines and tree branches, but he drove doggedly on, climbing up out of pools he blundered into, and forcing himself to breathe the harsh air, and always being terribly careful not to let the torch he carried in his other hand be extinguished, or burn off all its charge of the black herb. Hurwood, Bonnett and Friend lurched along behind, stopping every few yards to arrange a new way to carry their own torch, Hurwood's boxes, and Beth, and twice Shandy heard a calamitous multiple splash, followed by renewed sobbing from Beth and a burst of almost incomprehensibly shrill cursing from her father.

Shortly after the eight of them had set foot on the first mud bank, the fungus heads had begun sneezing, and a grainy powder like spores or pollen puffed out of the flappy mouths; but the thick, low-hanging torch smoke repelled the dust as if each torch were the source of a powerful wind that only the powder could feel.

"Inhaling that dust," panted Hurwood at one point when several of the things sneezed at once, "is what … gave you ghosts, Thatch."

Blackbeard laughed as he chopped a young tree aside with a swipe of his cutlass. "Clouds of ghost eggs, eh?"

Shandy, glancing back for a moment, saw Hurwood's pout of scholarly dissatisfaction. "Well, roughly," the old man said as he hunched to get his daughter's legs more comfortably arranged on his shoulders.

Shandy turned back to his task. He'd been trying all along to stay away from Blackbeard's boatman, who, blank-faced, was swinging his cutlass so metronomically that he reminded Shandy of one of the water-powered figures in the Tivoli Gardens in Italy, and as a result Shandy found himself working, more often than not, between Davies and Blackbeard.

The sense of a vast, invisible presence was intensifying again, and again Shandy could feel the thing bending down out of the sky over them, glaring with alien outrage at these eight intruders. Sticking his knife into a tree for a moment, Shandy opened the oilskin bag and dumped a handful of the black stuff onto the torch. After a moment a thick eruption of smoke billowed up and nearly blinded him as he recovered his knife; but this time when the smoke cloud disappeared into the tangled jungle canopy, the forest shook with a low roaring—a boot-shaking rumble that clearly expressed anger, and, just as clearly, emanated from no organic throat.

Blackbeard stepped back, squinting around suspiciously at the greenery that walled them in. "My first time here," he muttered to Davies and Shandy, "I talked to the natives—Creek Indians, mostly. Traded 'em medicine magic for straight talk. They mentioned a thing called Este Fasta. Said that meant 'Give Person.' Sounded like some local breed of loa. I wonder if that's who our growler was just now."

"But he didn't mess with you on your first visit," said Davies tightly.

"No," Blackbeard agreed, "but that time I didn't have the ghost repellent. He probably figured he didn't need to interfere."

Great, thought Shandy. He glanced at the torchlit web of vegetation in front of them, and was the first by a second or two to notice that the vines and branches were moving—twisting—in the still, stagnant air.

Then Blackbeard noticed it, and even as the plants assumed we crude shape of a giant hand and clawed toward them, the Pirate-king dropped his torch and lunged forward and with two strokes of his cutlass, forehand and backhand, he smashed the thing to pieces.

"Come on, devil," Blackbeard raged, a fearsome sight with his teeth and the whites of his mad eyes glittering in the glow of the smoldering match-cords woven into his mane, "wave some more bushes in my face!" Not even waiting for the foreign loa's response, he waded straight into the primeval rain forest, shouting and whirling his cutlass. "Coo yah, you quashie pattu-owl!" he bellowed, reverting almost entirely to what Shandy could now recognize as Jamaican mountain tribe patois. "It take more than one deggeh bungo duppy to scare off a tallowah hunsi kanzo!" Shandy could hardly see Blackbeard now, though he saw the vines jumping and heard the chopping of the cutlass and the clatter and splash of wrecked verdure flying in all directions. Crouched back and gripping his knife, Shandy had a moment to wonder if this maniacal raging was the only way Blackbeard allowed himself to vent fear—and then the giant pirate had burst back out of the jungle, some of his beard-trimming match-cords extinguished but his fury as awesome as before. Blackbeard snatched the oilskin bag from where it stuck out of Shandy's coat pocket, tore it open with his teeth and flung it into the mud.

"Here!" he yelled at the jungle, grabbing Shandy's torch now and slamming its flaming head straight down onto the spilled herb. "I brand you my slave!"

A steamy smoke cloud burst up, stinking of scorched black mud as well as of burning herb, and a scream of inhuman pain and wrath impacted the air from above, stripping leaves from the trees and punching Shandy right off his feet.

As he rolled in the watery muck, struggling to stand up and get air back into his lungs, Shandy dimly saw the silhouette that was Blackbeard tilt back its shaggy head and rid itself of a deafening, grating howl. It was a terrible sound, like the challenge-cry of some gargantuan reptile; Shandy felt more kinship with the wolves that, in his youth, he had occasionally heard crying from vast distances across northern ice-fields.

The trio carrying Beth had halted; Shandy was tensely crouched behind and to one side of Blackbeard, and Davies, expressionless but visibly pale in the light from Hurwood's torch, stood to the other side with his sword drawn and held readyA sudden wind blew away the echoes of Blackbeard's howl, and this time the whispering of the fungus heads was the only sound to be heard afterward—any birds in the area were silenced. Abruptly Shandy realized that the fungus heads had opened their eyes and were talking, in actual languages; the one nearest him was complaining, in French, about how cruel it was that an old woman should be neglected by her children, and one near Davies was using a Scottish dialect to deliver the sort of advice a father would give to a son about to travel to a big city. Shandy stared at it wonderingly when he heard it warn against expressing any opinion on religion or the recent regicide. Regicide? thought Shandy; did someone kill King George during this last month … or could this thing be talking about the murder of James the First a century ago?

Blackbeard slowly lowered his head, and glared at a berry-decked bay tree in front of him. A fullarmed swing of his cutlass made an aromatic ruin of the tree, and beyond it, instead of more vegetation, was darkness and a cooler breeze and a dim glow, as of a brightly lit city just over the horizon.

Blackbeard swore again and then stepped through the gap, and a moment later so did his boatman. Shandy and Davies exchanged a glance, shrugged, and followed.

The jungle was gone. In front of them a flat and plain stretched away under the unobscured moon, and a couple of hundred yards ahead was the knee-high coping wall of a circular pool that looked wider than the Roman Colosseum. Way out over the center of the pool hung a vast luminosity that might have been fire or spray, and the dimly glowing masses of it rose and fell as slowly as opals in honey. Staring at the shifting lights, Shandy realized with a chill in his belly that he had no idea how far away they were; at one moment they seemed to be colored glass butterflies glowing in the light from Hurwood's torch within easy arm's reach, but at the next moment they were some astronomical phenomenon taking place far beyond the domain of the sun and planets. The pool, too, Shandy noticed now, was optically tricky—he peered and squinted, but finally had to admit that he had not the remotest idea how tall the coping wall was. Far off to the right and left, slender bridges of some kind rose from the wall and arched high and away out of sight toward the center of the pool. The buckles on Shandy's boots were now very hot. He burned his hand drawing his knife, but managed, crouching first on one foot and then on the other, to hack the buckles off. He straightened again, trying to ignore the way his leather scabbard smoked when he put the knife back and wondering when he'd start to feel the nails that held his boot soles on. Thank God Blackbeard had forbidden pistols.

"I didn't get much farther than right here," said Blackbeard softly. He turned to Davies and grinned.

"Go ahead—walk out to the pool's edge."

Davies swallowed, then took a step forward.

"Stop!" called Hurwood from behind them. He and Friend and Bonnett had just blundered through the gap, stumbled, and then managed to put Beth down more or less gently as they fell to the dark sand. Hurwood was the first to sit up. "Apparent directions are no good here. You could walk in a straight line till you die of starvation, and never get any closer to the Fountain. It would, in all probability, seem slowly to circle you as you walked."

Blackbeard laughed. "I wasn't going to let him get so far that we couldn't get him back. But you're right, that is how it looked. I walked in toward it for two days before I admitted you can't get there from here, and then it took me three more days to walk back out to where we're standing." Hurwood stood up, brushing himself off. "Days?" he asked drily. Blackbeard looked sharply at him. "Well, no, now you mention it. The sun rose but never got much past what you'd call dawn before it decided to go down again. Dawn turned straight into dusk, with no real day between."

Hurwood nodded. "We're not really in Florida now—or not particularly, anyway, not Florida any more than we're in every other place. Have you studied Pythagoras in any depth?" Davies and Blackbeard both admitted that they had not.

"The contradictions implicit in his philosophy are not contradictions here. I don't know whether the circumstances here are the general or some special case—but here the square root of two is not an irrational number."

"Infinity— apeiron—as it exists here, would not have offended Aristotle," added Leo Friend, who, for once, seemed to have forgotten Beth Hurwood.

"Good news for Harry Stottle," said Blackbeard. "But can I get rid of my ghosts here?"

"Yes," said Hurwood. "We've just got to get you to the pool" Blackbeard waved toward the Fountain. "Lead the way."

"I shall." Hurwood hefted the bundles he'd brought along, then lowered them carefully to the sand. As Hurwood and Friend crouched to untie the bundles, Shandy sidled over to Beth. "How are you doing?" was all he could think of to say.

"Fine, thank you," she said automatically. Her eyes were unfocused and she was breathing shallowly but very fast.

"Just … hang on," Shandy whispered, angry at his own helplessness. "As soon as we get back to the beach, I swear, I'll get you out of this … "

Her knees bent and she was falling; he managed to get his arms around her before she hit the sand, and when he saw that she'd fainted, he laid her down gently on her back. Then Friend had shoved him away and was taking her pulse and lifting her eyelids to peer at her pupils. Shandy stood up and looked over at Hurwood, who was using the torch to light a lantern that had been in one of the bundles. "How can you do this to your own daughter?" Shandy asked him hoarsely. "You son of a bitch, I hope your Margaret comes back just long enough to curse you and then collapse in a pile of corruption as foul as your damned soul."

Hurwood glanced up incuriously, then returned to his work. He had got the lantern's wick lit, and now he lowered the hood over it. The hood was metal, but not featureless—random-looking slits had been cut into it, and they cast lines of light out across the dark sand.

Shandy took a step toward the old man, but Blackbeard was suddenly in front of him. "Afterward, sonny," the pirate said. "He and I are working together right now, and if you try to foul my plans you'll find yourself sitting on the ground trying to stuff your guts back into your belly." He turned to Hurwood. "You about ready?"

"Yes." Hurwood stuck the still-flaming torch upright in the sand and then stood up with the lantern. The square wooden box now hung at his belt like a fishing creel. "Is she well?" he asked Friend.

"Fine," said the fat man. "She just fainted."

"Carry her."

Hurwood raised the lantern in his single hand and stared at the patterns of light-lines it threw onto the sand. After a few seconds of study he nodded and began walking, on a course that led slightly away from the fountain.

Friend managed to stand up with Beth's limp form draped over his shoulders, though the effort darkened his face. He stumped along after Hurwood, the breath whistling in and out of him, and the rest of the group followed, with Bonnett and the odd boatman lurchingly bringing up the rear. It wasn't a steady walk. Frequently Hurwood paused to peer at the light-lines and fiercely argue mathematical niceties with Friend, and once Shandy heard Friend point out an error in one of "your Black Newton equations." Several times they led the shuffling group in sharp changes of direction, and for a long while they all just marched around and around in the outline of a square; but Shandy had noticed that, no matter what their apparent direction, the moon never shifted from its position above his left shoulder, and he shivered and wasn't tempted to offer any sarcastic comments. The torch that Hurwood had planted in the sand was as often visible ahead, or off to one side, as behind them, but every time Shandy looked at it it was farther away. The Fountain itself was so difficult to focus on that he couldn't perceive any change in its distance, but he did notice that the two bridgelike structures had moved closer together.

Then he noticed the crowds. At first he thought they were low fog banks or expanses of water, but when he stared hard at the uneven gray lines on the horizon he saw that they were made up of thousands of figures rushing silently back and forth, their arms waving overhead like a field of grass blades stirred by a night wind. "I should never have believed," said Hurwood softly, pausing in his calculations to look at the distant multitudes, "that death had undone so many." The Inferno, thought Shandy—third canto, if I'm not mistaken. And, at the moment, who cares?

The bridges were very close together now, and the sky was lightening in a direction that might have been east. Hurwood's light-lines were becoming less visible on the sand—which was, in the faint daylight, taking on a rusty hue—and Hurwood and Friend were working faster. The shapes rising and falling above the center of the pool were losing their color and becoming gray, and now looked much more like clouds of water spray than like billows of fire. With the approach of day the total silence seemed even more eerie—there were no bird or insect cries, and neither the unrestful crowds nor the Fountain made any audible sound. The air had cooled since they'd left the jungle, though his feet were warmed by the iron tacks in the soles of his boots, and it was easy to warm his hands by holding them near his smoking knife scabbard.

He had been looking back at the remote dot that was the torch, and so he bumped into Hurwood when the group halted.

There was only one bridge now, and they were right in front of it. It was about six feet wide and paved with broad, flat stones, and stone walls rose at the sides to shoulder height. Though when seen from afar the bridges had seemed to arch steeply up from the pool's edge, from where Shandy now stood it looked almost level, rising only very gradually as it narrowed away with distance and faded among the shifting clouds of the Fountain. In spite of its outlandish location, Shandy thought he'd seen the bridge before.

"After you," said Hurwood to Blackbeard.

The giant pirate, whose belt and boots, Shandy noticed, were smoking and sparking like the matchcords in his mane, stepped onto the bridge—

—and seemed to explode. Fluttering blurs of gray erupted from his mouth, nose and eyes and shot away in all directions, and his clothes leaped and shook on his huge frame like waves in a choppy sea. His hands jigged helplessly in front of him as the gray things blasted out of his sleeves, but in the midst of the ferocious detonations Blackbeard roared and managed to turn around.

"Stay there!" shouted Hurwood. "Don't step off the bridge! It's your ghosts leaving you!" The exodus was tapering off, but Blackbeard didn't stop jumping. His belt and shoes were on fire, and he grabbed the smoldering hilt of his cutlass, drew the redly glowing blade and touched it to his belt, instantly burning through the leather. He tossed the cutlass out onto the sand and with sizzling fingers snatched his belt buckle loose, drew the pieces of leather free and kicked it all after the sword. He sat down and pulled off his boots, then stood up again and grinned at Hurwood.

"Now abandon all iron," he said.

Ye who enter here, thought Shandy.

"You can step down and just wait for Leo and me right here, with the others," said Hurwood. "Your ghosts are gone, and there's still plenty of the black herb—when we recover the two other torches and get them lit too, there'll be no danger of becoming reinfected on the way out of the jungle. Our bargain is completed, and Leo and I will be back here before long to lead you all back to where this region links with the world you know."

Shandy sighed with relief, and he had started to look around for a place to sit, when he noticed that Friend had made no move to put Beth Hurwood down.

"Wh-who," Shandy stammered, "who's going over and who's staying here?"

"Leo and the girl and myself are going over," said Hurwood impatiently, putting his lantern down on the sand. He took off his belt and shoes, and then in a grotesquely unwitting parody of intimacy he knelt in front of Friend and, one-handed, disconnected the ornate belt buckle from the fat man's belt. Friend's mud-caked slippers evidently contained no iron.

"I'm going over, too," pronounced Blackbeard, not stepping down from the bridge. "I didn't fight my way in here two years ago just to pick up a peltful of ghosts." He looked past Hurwood, and a moment later Stede Bonnett and the boatman stepped forward. Bonnett began unbuckling his belt and stepping out of his shoes, but the boatman's clothes were sewn shut and he was barefoot. "They're coming too," Blackbeard said.

Davies' face had become perceptibly more lined and hollowed since leaving the fires by the seashore, but there was some kind of humor in his eyes as he took a step forward and then crouched to shed his boots.

No, Shandy thought almost calmly. It just can't be expected of me. I'm already on the sidewalk outside reality—I'm simply not going out farther, into the street. None of these people will ever come back, and I'll have to figure out Hurwood's magic lantern just to find my way back to the goddamned jungle! Why did I ever come along? Why did I ever leave England?

He found he was implicitly confident of a way out … and his face reddened when he realized that it was an axiom called up from early childhood—the conviction that if he cried hard enough and long enough, someone would take him home.

What right had these people to put him into such a humiliating situation?

He looked at Beth Hurwood, draped over Friend's shoulders. She was still unconscious, and her face, though heartbreakingly beautiful to him, was drawn and tautened by recent horrors—innocence intolerably abused. Wouldn't it be—couldn't a case be made for it being—kinder to let her die now, unconscious and not yet ruined?

While still in doubt he caught Leo Friend's eye. Friend was smiling at him with confident contempt, and he shifted his pudgy hand on Beth's thigh.

At the same moment, Hurwood began crooning reassuringly, and he got down on his hands and knees. He muttered some vague endearments and then, gently but strongly, he lowered himself flat, face down on the sand. Still murmuring, he began to flop there in a ponderous rhythm. Leo Friend blushed furiously and snatched his hand off of Beth's leg. "Mr. Hurwood!" he screeched. Hurwood, not stopping, chuckled indulgently.

"He seems to snap out of these fits before too long," said Blackbeard. "We'll wait this one out and then get moving."

Are you all crazy? wondered Shandy. Hurwood was the only chance, and a damn slim one at that, of anyone recrossing this bridge alive, and now he's madder than old Governor Sawney. There is no chance of surviving any further advance, and I don't want to take my eternal place among the silent gray legions on this unnatural horizon. Jack Shandy will wait right here, until dark, and when you doomed fools have failed to reappear I'll somehow use Hurwood's lantern to get back to the torch and the jungle and the boats and the shore. I'll no doubt regret this cowardice later, but at least I'll be able to lie in the sun and have a drink while I'm regretting it.

Shandy stepped back, away from the bridge, and sat down. He had meant to avoid meeting anyone's eyes, but as he looked around tor Hurwood's lantern, he glanced up and found Davies looking straight at him.

The lean old pirate was grinning at him, evidently pleased.

Shandy grinned back in relief, glad Davies understood … and then he realized that Davies thought he had sat down in order to take off his boots.

And suddenly he knew, unhappily, that he couldn't just sit it out. This was stupid, as stupid as his father pulling a woodworking knife on a gang of Nantes alley toughs, or Captain Chaworth rushing with an unfamiliar sword at a pistol-armed pirate chief; but somehow, perhaps like them, he had been robbed of every way out of it. He took off his boots and stood up again.

By the time Friend tore his gaze away from the ludicrously bobbing figure of Benjamin Hurwood, Shandy's boots and knife lay abandoned in the sand and Shandy was standing in front of him.

"What's the matter?" Shandy asked the fat physician. His voice quavered only slightly. "Can't get familiar with a girl unless she's asleep?"

Friend's face got even redder. "D-d-d-don't b-be ab-ab-ab—d-don't—"

"I think he's trying to say, 'Don't be absurd,' Jack," said Davies helpfully.

"Do you?" asked Shandy, his voice still a little wild. "I thought it was, 'Yeah, because that was the only time even my mother didn't gag at the sight of me.'"

Friend began squawking and stuttering in, weirdly, a little-boy voice; then blood burst from his nose and bright red drops tumbled to his silk shirt-front and soaked into the weave in blurrily cross-shaped stains. His knees started to give, and for a moment Shandy thought the physician himself was about to faint, or even die.

Then Friend straightened, took a deep breath, and, without looking at Shandy, shifted his hold on Beth and stepped up onto the bridge.

Hurwood finally rolled over and smiled at the sky for a few moments, then he twitched, glanced around, winced and got to his feet. He walked to the bridge. "Friend and I will lead," was all he said. Shandy and Davies followed him onto the bridge's paving stones, and then Bonnett and the boatman stepped from the sand onto the bridge surface.

The boatman instantly collapsed in a pile of loose clothing' Shandy looked more closely and saw that clothing was all that lay on the stones—there was no body.

Hurwood noticed the phenomenon and raised an eyebrow. "Your servant was a dead man?"

"Well … yes," said Blackbeard.

"Ah." Hurwood shrugged. "To be expected—dust to dust, you know." He turned his back on them and started forward.

Chapter Thirteen

For quite a while they walked without speaking—footsteps were the only sounds, and they were just echoless thuds. As much to distract himself as to satisfy curiosity, Shandy began mentally counting paces; and he had counted more than two thousand when the light began to dim again. He found he had no idea how long the dawn period had lasted.

They seemed now to be passing through alternating patches of light and shade, and for a moment Shandy thought he smelled incense. Hurwood began walking more slowly, and Shandy glanced at him.

They were all walking down the center aisle of a church. Hurwood was somehow dressed in a long formal coat, and his hair was brown and long and carefully curled, but the rest of the people in the procession were still dressed in the mud-caked, ragged, scorched clothes they'd worn through the jungle. Hurwood had one hand on the wooden box that was slung at his side, and his other hand swung back and forth as he walked up the aisle …

He's got his other arm back, thought Shandy with a dreamlike lack of surprise. Shandy looked ahead, toward the altar. A minister of some sort was smiling as this unsavory crowd approached, but there was an altar boy at a kneeler off to the side who stared at them with far more horror than even their devastated appearance seemed to call for. Nervously, Shandy looked behind himself …

… And saw just the bridge, and the plain far beyond it, deeply shadowed now in twilight. He turned back toward the church scene, but it was fading. Shandy caught one more whiff of incense, and then the bridge was just the bridge again.

What was that? he wondered. A look into Hurwood's mind, his memories? Did Davies and Blackbeard see it too, or was it just me because I happened to glance at him when he was projecting it?

There were smears of blood on the paving stones ahead of them, and when he reached them Shandy noticed that the drops and smudges and handprints seemed to be the tracks of two bleeding people crawling. He paused for a moment to crouch and touch one wide, splash-edged drop—the blood was still wet. For some reason this profoundly upset Shandy, though he had to admit that it was certainly a minor unpleasantness compared to most of the other recent events. There were no figures, walking or crawling, visible ahead of them, but Shandy kept glancing that way, almost fearfully. The air here had not ever been particularly fresh, but now it was stale—Shandy smelled boiled cabbage and unchanged bed-sheets. He glanced one by one at his companions; and when he looked at Friend a scene came into focus around the fat physician. The fat man was younger, a boy in fact, and though he was keeping up with Shandy and the others he was lying in a bed. Shandy followed the boy's upward gaze, and was startled to see the vague female forms in diaphanous draperies that twisted slowly overhead. There was a naively exaggerated eroticism about them, like the crude nakedlady pictures a little boy might draw on a wall … but why did they all have gray hair?

The scene dissolved in a burst of whiteness, and again the bridge was visible underfoot, the shoulderheight walls moving past on either side. Shandy's foot skidded on something that felt like a pebble — but he knew it was a tooth, and the knowledge increased his uneasiness.

Then there was deep sand underfoot, and Davies' face was lit by firelight. His face was fuller, his hair darker, and he wore the tattered remains of a Royal Navy officer's jacket. Shandy looked around, and saw that they were walking along the shore of New Providence Island; Hog Island was dimly visible across the starlit harbor to their right, and cooking fires dotted the sand slope to the left but there were fewer fires, and fewer craft in the harbor, and a couple of big pieces of storm-wrecked ships that Shandy remembered being up on the sand were nowhere to be seen. Shandy couldn't hear the conversation, but Davies was talking to Blackbeard; and though Davies was laughing and shaking his head scornfully, Shandy thought he looked upset—frightened, even. Blackbeard seemed to be making an offer, and wheedling, and Davies didn't seem to be refusing it so much as disparaging it—doubting its genuineness. Finally Blackbeard sighed, stepped back, seemed to brace himself, and gestured at the sand. Shandy smelled hot metal. Then the sand rippled and jumped, as if all the sand crabs were simultaneously struck with apoplexy, and white bones began poking up out of it and rolling and cartwheeling together into a pile; the pile heaved and shifted and shook, then steadied, and Shandy realized it was now a human skeleton in a crouching posture. As Davies stared, his half-smile a rictus of strain now, the skeleton straightened up and faced him. Blackbeard spoke, and the skeleton lowered itself and knelt on one bony knee, and it lowered its skull head. Blackbeard then made a dismissing gesture, at which the skeleton sprang apart and resumed its status as just a scattering of old bones, and Blackbeard continued his soliciting speech. Davies still didn't answer, but his air of amused skepticism was gone.

Then Shandy was once more walking on blood-spattered paving stones.

"Are we getting any closer to the goddamned place?" he asked. As he spoke, he was afraid his voice would betray his mounting fear, but the dead air here muffled his words, and he hardly heard them himself.

They kept walking. A couple of times Shandy thought he heard scuffling sounds, and gasping sobs, ahead of them on the bridge, but it was too dark for him to see clearly.

The air seemed heavy, like syrup so thick that one more grain of sugar would cause the whole works to crystallize; and, though it terrified him to do it, Shandy couldn't prevent himself from turning to look at Blackbeard … and he did look, and for a while Shandy stopped being Shandy. He was a fifteen-year-old boy known to the outlaw mountain blacks as Johnny Con, though since his misuse of some of the spells of the hungan he'd been serving, he was no longer a fit assistant for a respectable vodun priest, and had no further right—nor even inclination anymore—to call himself an adjanikon; Ed Thatch was his real name, his adult name, and in three days he'd be entitled to start using it.

Today would be the first day of his baptism to the loa that would be his guide through life, and whose goals he would henceforth share. The black marrons who had raised him since childhood had this morning escorted him down from the blue mountains to the house of Jean Petro, a legendary magician who had documentably lived here for more than a hundred years, and was said to have actually made many loas, and had to live in a house on stilts because of the way dirt turned rusty and sterile after any long proximity to him; compared to Petro, every other bocor in the Caribbean was considered a mere caplata, a street-corner turnip-conjuror.

The marrons were escaped slaves who, having originally lived in Senegal, and Dahomey, and the nations of the Congo coast, had no difficulty adapting to life in the mountain jungles of Jamaica, and the white colonists were so unnerved by this dangerous and unforgiving population that they paid the blacks a seasonal tribute in exchange for sparing the outlying farms and settlements; but even the marrons refused to venture within half a mile of Jean Petro's house, and the boy walked alone down the long path that led to the garden and the livestock pens and, finally, the house on stilts. A stream ran behind the house, and that's where the old man was—Thatch could see his bare legs, knobby and dark as blackthorn walking sticks, below the raised floor. Thatch was of course barefoot, and he made a "Be silent" gesture at the chickens poking around under the house and then padded across the dusty front yard as noiselessly as the shifting speckles of sunlight. When he had moved around the corner of the house, he could see that old Petro was walking along the stream bank, pausing here and there to lift one squat bottle after another out of the water, peer into the clouded glass, rattle his long fingernails against it, hold the dripping bottle to his ear, and then shake his head and crouch to put it back and fish up another.

Thatch watched while he kept it up, and finally the old bocor's face curdled in a smile when he listened to one bottle, and he rattled his nails on it again; and then he just stood there and took turns tapping the bottle and listening, like a dungeon-confined prisoner whose measured wall-clinking has at long last elicited, however remotely, a response.

"It's our boy, sure enough," he said in a scratchy old-man's voice. "Gede, the loa who's the … chief foreman, sort of, of the one who wants you."

Thatch realized the old man was aware of him and was talking to him. He stayed where he was, but he called, " 'Wants me'? I chose him."

The old man chuckled. "Well, anyway, that one ain't in the creek here, and we need Gede to call him. Of course even Gede's only here tokenly. This is only a part of him, in this jar, his belly button, you might say—-just enough to compel him." Petro turned around and hobbled back to the yard where Thatch stood. "The dead become more powerful as time goes by, you see, boy. What was just an unquiet ghost to your grandfather could be a full-fledged loa to your grandchildren. And I've learned to bend 'em, train 'em in certain directions like you would a vine. Farmer plant a seed in the ground and one day have a tree—I put a ghost in a bottle under running water and one day I have a loa." He grinned, revealing a few teeth in white gums, and waved the bottle back toward the stream. "I've grown near a dozen to maturity. They ain't quite the quality of the Rada loas, the ones that came with us across the ocean from Guinee, but I can grow 'em to fit what I need." The chickens in the shade under the house were recovering from Thatch's gesture, and began clucking and fluttering. Petro winked, and they shut up again. "Of course," Petro went on, "the one that wants you—or that you want, if you prefer—old Baron Samedi, he's a different sort of beast." He shook his head and his eyes narrowed in what might have been awe. "Every now and then, no more than twice or three times in my whole life, I think I've accidentally made one that was too much like … some thing or other that already existed, was already out there, and the resemblance was too close for 'em to keep on being separate. So suddenly I had a thing in a bottle that was too big to fit … even just tokenly. My damn house was nearly knocked over when Baron Samedi got too big — bottle went off like a bomb, tossed trees every which way, and the creek didn't refill for an hour. There's still a wide, deep pool there. Nothing'll grow on the bank and every Spring I've got to net dead pollywogs out of it."

Young Thatch stared indignantly at the bottle. "So what you got in your beer bottle there is just some servant of Baron Samedi's?"

"More or less. But Gede's a top-ranking loa—he's number-two man here just because the Baron is so much more. And like any other loa Gede must be invited, and then entreated, using the rites he demands, to do what we ask. Now, I've got the sheets from the bed a bad man died in, and a black robe for you, and today is Saturday, Gede's sacred day. We'll roast a chicken and a goat for him, and I've got a whole keg of clairin—rum—because Gede is lavish in his consumption of it. Today we'll —"

"I didn't come down from the mountains to deal with Baron Samedi's bungo houseboy." Jean Petro smiled broadly. "Ohhh!" He held the bottle out toward the boy. "Well, why don't you tell him that? Just hold the bottle up to the sunlight and peek in through the side until you see him … then you can explain your social standards to him."

Thatch had never dealt directly with a loa, but he tried to act sure of himself as he contemptuously took the bottle. "Very well, ghostling," he said, holding it up to the sun, "show yourself!" His tone was scornful, but his mouth had gone dry and his heart was thudding hard in his chest. At first all he could see were blurry flaws in the crudely blown glass, but then he saw movement in there, and focused on it—and for an instant he thought the bottle contained a featherless baby bird, swimming with deformed wings and legs in some cloudy fluid.

Then there was a voice in his head, jabbering shrilly in debased French. Thatch understood only some of it, enough to gather that the speaker was not only demanding chicken and rum, but protesting that it had every right to those things, and to as much candy as it wanted, too, and threatening dire punishments if any of the formalities of its invitation ceremony weren't performed with the greatest pomp and grandeur and respectfulness; and there'd better be no laughing. At the same time, Thatch got an impression of great age, and of a power that had grown vast … at such great personal expense that only a fragment of the original personality remained, like a chimney still standing in the heart of a furiously burning house. The senile petulance and the terrifying power, Thatch realized, were not contradictory qualities—each was somehow a product of the other.

Then it became aware of him. The tirade halted and he could sense the speaker looking around in some confusion. Thatch imagined a very old king, startled when he had thought he was alone, hastily arranging his robes so that they draped properly, and combing his sparse hair forward to cover his baldness.

At that point Gede evidently called Thatch's words up from memory and paid attention to them, for the voice in the boy's head was suddenly back, and it was roaring now.

"'Ghostling'?" Gede raged. "'Bungo houseboy'?" Thatch's head was punched back by something invisible, and suddenly there was blood on his nose and mouth. He reeled a couple of steps backward and tried to fling the bottle away, but it clung to his palm.

"Thatch is your name, eh?" The voice ground the inside of the boy's skull like a grating-blade being turned in a coconut.

Thatch's belly imploded visibly—blood sprayed from his nose and he sat down hard. A moment later all of his clothes burst into flame. The boy rolled, blazing, toward the stream, and though along the way he jerked with the impacts of a couple more invisible kicks, he managed to splash into the water.

"I'll tell the Baron," said the voice in his head as he floundered, still unable to get rid of the bottle, "to treat you special."

Thatch got his feet under himself and crawled up onto the bank and sat down. His hair was scorched to the scalp and his clothes looked like curtains dug out of the wreckage of a burned-down house and blood was running down his forearm from his bottle-clutching hand, but he didn't tremble as he held the thing up to the sun and grinned into its glass depths. "Do that," he whispered. "You pitiful goddamn pickled herring."

The light dimmed, and suddenly he was dry and upright and walking, and he was Jack Shandy again. The spatters of blood on the bridge's paving stones were less frequent—perhaps the injured crawlers had bandaged their wounds—but when he crouched to touch one smudged patch of wetness, he recoiled in horror. It was actually still warm. Again, louder now, he heard a wheezing gasp from ahead.

He looked up, and all at once he knew why he had thought he'd seen this bridge before. Here were the two bleeding crawlers, almost underfoot now; the white hair of one was matted with gleaming darkness, and the other figure, younger and slimmer, was trying to crawl without touching to the ground his right hand, the fingers of which were bent and blackly swollen. The lights of the city of Nantes were flickering and dim, and Shandy knew that these injured people would not be seen by some helpful wayfarer, but would have to crawl all the way back to their room, and their comfortless beds, and the ever-present marionettes.

Shandy ran ahead and then crouched in the path of his father. One of the old man's eyes was hidden by dirt-caked blood, and Shandy knew that was the eye he would lose. The old man's face was taut with effort, and breath hissed through the fresh gaps in the line of his bared teeth.

"Dad!" Shandy said urgently as his father's ruined face hitched closer. "Dad, you've inherited a lot of money! Your father has died, and left his estate to you! Get in touch with the authorities in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince!"

Old Francois Chandagnac didn't hear him. Shandy tried twice more to convey his message, then gave up and moved to the other broken crawler, the one that was twenty-one-year-old John Chandagnac.

"John," said Shandy as he crouched in front of his remembered, younger self, "listen. Don't abandon your father! Take him with you. Go to the trouble, you … you goddamned wooden choirboy!" He was choking, and tears were running down his older, bearded face as if to match the blood that streaked the younger one. "He can't do it alone, but he's not going to admit that to you! Don't leave him, he's all you've got in the world and he loves you and he's going to die alone of cold and starvation, thinking of you, while you're comfortable in England and not thinking of him … " The crawling figure was unaware of him. Shandy, already kneeling, lowered his forehead to the paving stones and sobbed harshly as the image of his younger self crawled right through him, as insubstantial as a shadow.

A hand was shaking his shoulder. He looked up. Davies' haggard face was grinning down at him, not without sympathy. "You can't collapse now, Jack," the old pirate said. He nodded past Shandy, ahead.

"We're there."

Chapter Fourteen

The bridge was gone, and belatedly Shandy wondered if any of the others had ever seen it. Or had Hurwood, for example, seen the whole thing as a walk up an impossibly long church aisle? Now they were on a muddy slope, facing down, and Shandy could feel icy moisture seeping through the knees of his trousers.

He looked around a little wildly, his earlier panic returning, for something felt very wrong, very disorienting, here—but he could see no excuse for the feeling. The mud slope curled away from them on either side, and, squinting in the dim light, he saw that the edges of it curled back in and met, some distance away; it was a slope-sided pit, and water spouted and splashed way down there at the bottom. The sky was a blanket of eerily fast-roiling clouds lit from above by, presumably, the moon. He glanced around at his seven companions to see if they shared his unease. It was hard to tell. Beth had regained consciousness—Shandy wondered when—but was just blinking dazedly, and Bonnett was as expressionless as an embalmed corpse.

"Onward," said Hurwood, and they all started down.

Though he several times slipped and slid in the mud, Shandy found himself oppressed by the idea of how solid the earth itself was. It gave him a feeling like claustrophobia, in spite of the high, churning clouds.

Then it occurred to him— seven companions? There should only have been six! He hung back and identified the laboring figures below him: there was Blackbeard, and Davies, and Bonnett, and Beth and Friend and Hurwood … and no one else. That was six. Shandy scrambled after them, and then just to reassure himself he counted the figures … and again got seven.

There was a smell, too, like stagnant water and ancient plumbing. A night for terrible smells, he reflected. The thought reminded him of something, and he worked his way over toward Davies.

"Speaking of disagreeable smells," Shandy muttered, "I thought you weren't supposed to do resurrection magic on the land."

"Miss the hot-iron smell, do you?" the pirate said quietly. "But no, Jack, they ain't doing any of that kind of magic here; they're just getting their souls … adapted … so they can do it later, somewhere at sea." The slope flattened out now, and they were able to stand up straight without being braced for a fall. "No," Davies went on, "they couldn't do one bit of it here—have you ever felt such solid ground?

Makes everywhere else feel like … just big rafts."

That was it, Shandy realized—that was what had been bothering him. This place gave one no sensation of motion. He'd never thought a place on solid land could seem to be moving, except during earthquakes; before today he'd have laughed at anyone who claimed to be able to feel the motion through space of the planet Earth. Now, though, it seemed to him that he had always been fundamentally aware of that motion, albeit as unthinkingly as the way a fish is aware of water. Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, he thought, would find this place even more disturbing than I do. They had all reached the level area except Bonnett, who was slowly bumping his way down the slope in a sitting position. "How many of us are there?" Shandy asked Davies.

"Why, uh … seven," the pirate answered.

"Count."

Davies did, then swore in alarm. "You and Bonnett and Thatch," he said quickly to himself, "and the three Old Worlders, and me. That's seven. Right, and there's nobody else. Whew, for a moment there it did look like eight, didn't it?"

Shandy shook his head unhappily. "Count again, fast, and you'll get eight. Do it slow, naming each one, and you get seven."

Davies counted again, darting a finger at each dim silhouette, once quickly and then once again slowly — and when he was done he spat out a weary obscenity. "Jack," he said, his voice tight with a disgust that Shandy thought concealed terror, "are our eyes bewitched? How can there be a stranger among us who becomes invisible only when we count carefully?"

Shandy didn't even try to answer, for he'd taken a closer look at the Fountain. He had already noticed that the water, though being flung high into the air, was oddly thick, seeming to slap more than splash when an upflung mass of it fell, and that it was the source of the dim phosphorescence as well as of the stagnant smell, but now he could see faces in the agitated liquid—hundreds of faces forming one after another as if the Fountain was a mirror spinning in the center of a crowd, and each briefly appearing face was contorted with fear and rage. Though repelled, he took a step closer—and then saw the swaying curtains of palely colored light, like a moving Aurora Borealis, that streamed away upward from the whole expanse of the Fountain and played silently across the face of the clouds far overhead, seeming to be the force that kept them churning.

Hurwood stepped up beside Shandy. The old man was breathing shallowly and quickly. "Don't anyone look around," he said. "Everybody just … keep looking wherever you are looking. The thing we need to talk to cannot appear if too much attention is paid to it." With a chill Shandy realized that the thing Hurwood sought must have been the extra figure that he and Davies had kept coming up with in their counting.

Somebody nearby whispered something, and Shandy expected Hurwood to demand silence, but then the one-armed sorceror was answering in a language Shandy had never heard, and he realized that the whisper had also been in that language, and that the whisperer was not one of their party. The alien voice spoke again, more firmly but still very softly, and it seemed to Shandy that the speaker was right at his elbow. Shandy was obeying Hurwood and staring straight ahead, but peripherally in the dimness he could see someone beside him—Davies was on his other side … was this their mysterious whisperer? Or just Bonnett? Or even Beth? Shandy was strongly tempted to peek.

The voice stopped. "Eyes front," Hurwood reminded everyone. "Close them if you'd prefer, but no one is to look around." Then he spoke again, more tensely, in the other language, and when he finished Leo Friend added a phrase that was obviously a question.

The soft, unplaceable voice answered, and spoke at some length, and Shandy wondered how long he could continue staring straight ahead. The thought of closing his eyes in so horribly motionless a place as this made his belly go cold, but even holding still was becoming unbearable. At last the voice stopped, and all at once Hurwood and Friend were moving. Shandy risked a squinting glance their way. They were hurrying toward the shore of the pool around the Fountain, and when they got there they walked right into the viscous fluid and crouched in the shallows to dip some of the stuff up in their hands and eagerly drink it. Then they waded back up onto the muddy ground, and Hurwood spoke again.

The answer that came a few seconds later was very faint, perhaps because people had shifted their gazes. The voice spoke only a few syllables.

Instantly Hurwood and Friend dug into their pockets. Hurwood produced a pocket knife, and Friend finally just yanked a pin from his powdered wig, and at the same moment each of them jabbed himself in a finger and shook blood onto the cold mud.

The blood spatters hissed where they fell, and then it looked to Shandy as if two clawlike hands had burst up out of the mud, but a moment later the things stopped moving and he realized they were plants—spindly cactus-looking things, but conspicuous in this desolate landscape. Shandy now noticed a third plant, farther down the shore, but it was withered and stiff. Then Blackbeard strode forward, and, though Hurwood reached out to stop him, in two long strides the pirate-king was ankle deep in the pool. He scooped up some of the liquid and drank it, then walked back out of it, bit his finger and shook off some blood. Again there was the hissing and the eruption of the mud, and a moment later another spiny plant had sprung up, a few yards from Hurwood's and Friend's.

The pair of sorcerors stared at him, an identical surprised and slightly alarmed expression on their faces, but then Hurwood just shrugged and muttered, "Nothing to be done." The one-armed man spoke again, and was again answered by the faint voice, though now it sounded to Shandy as if it were coming from the other side of the group, beyond Davies.

"Damn," muttered Hurwood when the voice stopped. "It doesn't know that right now." Shandy saw Friend shrug. "We can wait for a while."

"We'll wait until it knows, and has told me," said Hurwood firmly.

"Who's this it?" asked Blackbeard.

"The … personality we were questioning," said Hurwood, "though the pronoun 'who' overstates the case." He sighed, apparently at the hopelessness of trying to explain, but then his professorial reflexes seemed to take over. "Newton's laws of mechanics are entirely useful in describing the world we know—for every action there's an equal but opposite reaction, and a uniformly moving object will continue to move uniformly unless acted upon by some force—but if you get very particular about very small-scale events, if you deal with them in such specific, needlessly obsessive detail as to almost qualify you for a lunatic asylum … you find that Newton's mechanical description of reality is only mostly correct. In tiny extents of space or time there's an element of indecisiveness, postponement of definition, and you can catch truth as loose as an underdone egg. In our normal world this isn't a big factor because the … odds, I guess you'd say … are pretty consistent from place to place, and overwhelmingly strong in favor of Newton. But here they're not consistent. They're polarized here, though the overall net values are the same. There is no elasticity in this ground, no uncertainty, and so there's a lot out here in the air. What we were questioning was a … tendency toward personality; the likelihood of an awareness."

Blackbeard snorted. "What language was that, that likelihoods speak?"

"The oldest one," said Hurwood imperturbably.

"Is that," Shandy found himself asking, "why the thing is so hard to locate?"

"Yes," said Hurwood, "and don't try. It isn't any where— where is as inappropriate to this phenomenon as who. If you watch for it you're watching for a what, at some particular where and when—and on that basis you may find many things, but you won't find. He finished the sentence with a vague wave and a fading whistle.

For at least a full minute they all stood there shivering in that cold dark valley, while Hurwood patiently called some unintelligible phrase over and over again. Shandy looked around to see how Beth was enduring, but Hurwood sharply told him to keep his gaze steady.

Finally Blackbeard said, "This delay wasn't part of our bargain."

"Fine," said Hurwood. He sent his strange sentence out once again; and then he added, to Blackbeard, "Go, if you like. Good luck getting back to the jungle."

Blackbeard swore, but stayed where he was. "Your ghost-thing is looking something up for you, hey?"

"No. It will eventually manifest itself again, but it won't be the same personality as before; though at the same time it won't be a different personality either. 'Same' and 'different' are far too specific. And it won't have learned what I want to know. It will simply happen to know it this time. Or, if not this time, it will know it some time. It's like waiting for two or twelve to come up in a game of dice." More time went by, and finally one of Hurwood's patient calls was answered. Beth's father conversed with the unlocated voice for another minute or so, and then Shandy heard him plodding heavily across the mud.

"You can all look anywhere you please now," Hurwood said.

Shandy watched Hurwood, and he wasn't reassured to see the narrowed eyes and the hardened jawmuscles of the ex-Oxford don.

"Leo," Hurwood said tensely, "hold Elizabeth."

Friend was wheezingly happy to obey. Beth still seemed to be in a stunned daze, though Shandy noticed that she was breathing very rapidly now.

Hurwood reached down and untied the wooden box from his belt; he loosened the wooden lid with his teeth and shook it off. Shandy couldn't see what was inside. Then Hurwood shuffled over to Beth and held it, open end up, under her right hand.

"Cut her hand, Leo," the old man said.

Shandy started forward, but long before he could get there Friend reached down with his hairpin and, his lips wet and his eyes half-closed, drove the pin into Beth Hurwood's thumb. It brought her out of her daze. She jumped and looked down at her punctured hand, and then looked past it into the box her father was holding, into which the quick drops of her blood were falling—and she shrieked and lunged away, scrambling on all fours up the muddy slope. Shandy took off after her and caught her a few yards up, and he put his arm around her heaving shoulders and shook her gently. "It's over now, Beth," he gasped. "Your hand's cut but we're alive and I think we're headed back now. The worst is—"

"It's my mother's head!" Beth screamed. "He's got my mother's head in that box!" Shandy couldn't help looking back in horror. Hurwood was sitting down in the mud to slide the wooden lid back onto the box, an expression of almost imbecilic satisfaction lighting up his old face, while Friend just looked hungrily at Beth, his hands still raised in the position they'd been in when he was holding her—but Davies, and even Blackbeard, were staring at the one-armed man with astonishment and loathing.

Hurwood struggled to his feet. "Back," he said. "Back to the sea." He was so tensely cheerful now that he seemed to be having difficulty in speaking.

They all scrambled wearily back up the slope, and when the ground leveled out Shandy put his arm around Beth again and walked with her, though she didn't acknowledge his presence with even a glance.

The bridge was gone. Hurwood led them forward along a rutted dirt road between fields of heather under a rain-threatening sky; mountains rose in the distance, and when Shandy looked back he saw a cluster of old, almost entirely windowless stone buildings behind a wall—a monastery, perhaps, or a convent—and when he peered more closely he saw that a slim, long-haired figure was standing at the wall's top, over the closed gate.

He was unable to elicit any response from the young woman plodding lifelessly along at his side, but, still looking back, he raised his free hand in a wave, and the figure on the wall waved back at him — gratefully, he thought.

Chapter Fifteen

Hurwood and Friend led them back to the plain of dark sand, where they retrieved the still-hot boots and knives, and then the two sorcerors again used the lamp with the slotted hood to find their way back to the burning torch Hurwood had left stuck upright in the sand, and then they were back in the normal world. The black Florida jungle looked comfortingly mundane now to Shandy, and he savored the swamp smells like a man brought back to the aromatic meadows of his youth. After he had helped Davies and the empty-eyed Bonnett get all the torches lit and push the boats back into deeper water and turn them around, he took Beth's arm and led her over the marshy, shifting ground toward the boat he and Davies had occupied on the way into the swamp. "You ride with us on the way back," he said firmly.

Hurwood heard him and responded passionately, but for a couple of seconds all that came out of his mouth were random, infantile vowel sounds. He became aware of it, closed his eyes in concentration, and then began again. "She—will stay—with—me," he told Shandy.

Hurwood's insistence alarmed Shandy, for he thought he had figured out Hurwood's plan, but now it seemed there was more involved than he'd guessed. "Why?" he asked carefully. "You've no further use for her now."

"Wrong, boy," Hurwood choked. "Just—what're the words?—cocked it, here. Fire it come Yule — Christmas. Margaret stays with … I mean … her … the girl stays with me in the meantime."

"R-right," put in Friend, his protruding lower lip shiny. "W-w-we'll t-take c-c-c—" He gave up trying to speak, and merely jerked his head back toward the boat Bonnett was already sitting in. Suddenly it occurred to Shandy what Hurwood's plan might be—and as soon as he thought of it he had to know if he was right. He had no qualms about upsetting Hurwood, and Beth seemed at best minimally aware of her surroundings, so he held his hot knife up near Beth's throat, covering most of the hilt with his hand to keep Hurwood from seeing that it was the blunt side of the blade that was toward her.

The triumphant expression on Hurwood's face was instantly replaced with one of absolute horror. He fell to his knees in one of the oily pools, and then he and Friend both gobbled wordlessly at Shandy. Shandy, his fears confirmed, grinned at the gibbering pair. "Then it's settled." Walking carefully backward through the spongy bog, keeping his eyes on them and his knife near Beth's throat, he escorted her to the boat where the puzzled Davies waited.

Hurwood turned to Blackbeard and hooted imploringly.

Blackbeard had been watching this torchlit drama with narrowed eyes, and now he slowly shook his head. "Our deal is done," he said. "I won't interfere." Shandy and the nearly catatonic Beth Hurwood clambered into the boat and Davies pushed away from the mud bank. Shandy sheathed his knife.

Bonnett proved unable to do anything more complicated than row straight ahead, so it was Leo Friend whose ample fundament flexed their boat's center thwart, and whose chubby, uncallused hands gingerly took the oar handles. Hurwood was hunched on the stern thwart, facing him, his face lowered into the palm of his single hand and his shoulders rising and falling as he breathed deeply. Blackbeard poled his own boat ahead of the other two and then looked back at them, and with the torch right behind his shaggy head he reminded Shandy of a total eclipse of the sun. "I don't suppose," Blackbeard remarked, "that my boatman is going to reappear." Hurwood lifted his head and, though it took some scowling effort, he was able to reply. "No. No more than … your ghosts will. As long as we … keep the torches lit … and the herb burning, all of them … stay here."

"Then I hope I can remember the way out," said Blackbeard.

Friend blinked over his shoulder at the pirate-king in alarm. "What? But you came up the river. All you've got to do is retrace the course you took."

Davies laughed. "You did remember to leave a trail of bread crumbs, didn't you, Thatch?"

"Naw," said Blackbeard disgustedly, pulling ahead, "but if we get lost we can just ask directions at the first goddamn inn we come to."

Slowly the three boats moved forward, their orangely flickering bow-torches the only points of light in the humid blackness. The white fungus heads along the banks were silent now, except for an intermittent exhalation that flapped their lips. Shandy wondered if they were snoring. After a few minutes the channel they were following broadened out, and normal rowing became possible, and Shandy, crouched once more on the bow, sat down more comfortably, for he no longer had to be ready to lean out and push off encroaching banks and roots.

Then all at once he was aware of murderous anger, and at first he thought it was his own; he glared back at the boat behind his, but Hurwood just looked exhausted and unhappy, and Friend was whimpering softly with each torturing pull on the oars, and he realized that the rage he was aware of was a different sort from his own. His own was usually sudden and hotly choking and strongly flavored with terror, but this was soured and habitual and mean, and it emanated from a mind far too self-centered ever to entertain terror.

Blackbeard had snatched up his torch and was on his feet. "It's our friend the Este Fasta again," he called quietly. "Come back to roar at us again, and wave more bushes in our faces." The jungle presence seemed to hear him, for Shandy now detected a note of bitter humor in the psychic miasma of rage. He felt the thing think, bushes.

Shandy could feel it bending down attentively over the boats—the air was oppressive, and his lungs had to strain to draw breath.

Numbly he fumbled a handful of the herb out of the pouch and tossed it onto the torch flame, and a stinking gout of smoke boiled upward through the thickened air to impact against the vines and moss overhead.

He could feel the thing's sudden agony, but this time there was no scream and retreat. The jungle spirit was sustaining damage but was not going to back off.

The air and water—the whole jungle—began to change. "Keep … moving!" came a choked cry from Hurwood. "Get … out from under!"

"Oh, good luck," rasped Davies bitterly, nevertheless hauling desperately on the oars. The water was shaking like a jelly now, and the air was steamy and full of wet bits of vegetation that were evidently being shaken out of the trees. The structure of the boat seemed to be changing under Shandy, becoming more flexible, and when he glanced down at the floorboards he saw that they were untrimmed branches, sprouting gleaming green leaves. They were moving, growing as he watched — he could feel them heaving under his boots. There was a clump of wet waterweed on his bared forearm; when he tried to brush it off it clung by one end, and, when he grabbed the free end and pulled, he saw that he was simply pulling more of it out of a hole in his arm, and he could feel the internal tug of it all the way up to his shoulder. He let go instantly, and then saw the tiny green shoots that were poking out painfully from under his fingernails. He looked back at Davies; the back of the pirate's head was a mass of flowers, and his hat was being pushed askew by new ones opening up as Shandy watched. In Davies' shadow he could see Beth heaving in the grip of the vegetative metamorphosis, but he shuddered and looked beyond her, toward the third boat.

"Throw him … someone," howled Hurwood as green stalks began unrolling up out of his throat.

"Bonnett," croaked Friend. His fat hands were now just elbow-lumps in the tree trunks that extended from his shoulders, through the oarlocks, and out sideways into the water. "Give the thing Bonnett." Blackbeard raised a face that was a huge, unfolding orchid. The stalks of the stamen spasmed and a voice whistled, "Yes. Bonnett."

Davies' bouquet-head nodded.

Shandy felt cold water flowing between his toes and realized that his feet had become roots and had penetrated the boat's hull. He found, though, that he couldn't bring himself to nod. "No," he whispered through a throatful of twisting reeds. "Can't. Did I … throw you … to the Navy?" Davies' shoulders slumped. "Damn you," he fluted, "Jack." Shandy glanced again at the third boat. Leo Friend was a fat wet trunk with branches like spider legs projecting in all directions. A thing like a fungus-overgrown cypress stump seemed to be Stede Bonnett, and Hurwood, no longer able to speak, was now just a thick cluster of ferns that heaved furiously about as if in a high wind.

Davies labored on at the oars, but their boat was coming apart faster than the other two, and had already sunk almost to the gunwales. Shandy thought there was probably still time for Davies to stop rowing, let Hurwood's boat drift up alongside, uproot Bonnett and pitch him into the water. With such a tribute the thing might let the rest of them go … but Shandy had apparently talked Davies out of that course.

Then Davies hitched himself up, and let go of the oars.

He's going to do it, thought Shandy. It's wrong, Phil, I don't like it, but for God's sake hurry. Davies lifted one booted foot and dragged across its muddy sole the palm frond that had recently been his right hand. The left one joined it, and, while Shandy wondered what the hell the man was doing, the two floppy green hands rolled the mud into a ball.

Goddamn it, Phil, thought Shandy, what good is a mud ball?

Shandy's horribly elongated toes had found the river bottom and begun to dig in, and he felt nutrients coursing up his legs. His hands were gone, with not even a seam in the fresh trunks to differentiate what had once been him from what had once been the boat.

Davies put one hand on the twitching gunwale, and instantly the hand took root; but the flowering pirate drew back his other hand, braced himself, and then flung the ball of mud straight up. And a bomb seemed to go off. The air was compressed in a scream that deafened minds as much as ears, and sent the boats rocking violently away from one another. Then the pressure was gone and the air was suddenly very cold, and Shandy's teeth hurt when he drew a breath. He rolled over—and discovered that he could roll over, he was no longer rooted into the fabric of the boat, and the boat was a normal boat again and not a clump of writhing branches; it was even relatively dry inside. Beth was sprawled across the aft thwart—he couldn't tell if she was conscious, but at least she was breathing and had resumed her human shape. Davies was slumped over the oars, his eyes closed, laughing exhaustedly and cradling the hand he'd flung the mud ball with. The hand seemed to be burned. And somehow raindrops were pattering around them all, though the roof of the jungle was as solid as ever.

Shandy's ears were ringing, and he had to shout even to hear himself. "A ball of mud killed it?"

"Some of the mud on my boot was from the shore around the Fountain," Davies yelled back, just barely audible to Shandy, "well inside the area that's poison to all dead-but-animate things." Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again. "May I presume to suggest," yelled Shandy giddily to Davies, "that we proceed the hell out of here with all due haste."

Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. "My dear fellow consider it done."

There was a sound like dogs barking or pigs grunting around them; with his ears still ringing it took Shandy a minute to realize that it was the fungus heads making the noise. "Vegetable boys noisy tonight!" he called over their racket.

"Drunk, I expect!" returned Davies with a slightly hysterical joviality. "Damned nuisance!" Beth had pulled herself up and was sitting in the stern. She was staring ahead through half-shut eyes, and might have looked relaxed if it hadn't been for the white knuckles of her gunwale-clutching hands.

Fog began making faint halos around the torches. Some distance ahead of them Blackbeard's boat veered south, and, though Shandy directed Davies through what seemed to be the same channel, they could no longer see his boat; all the glints of reflected orange light seemed to be cast by their own boat's torch, and though they could hear Blackbeard's answering roar when they called, it was distant and they couldn't tell which direction it came from.

After he admitted to himself that they'd lost Blackbeard, Shandy looked back the way they had come. The boat with Hurwood, Friend and Bonnett in it was nowhere to be seen.

"We're on our own," he told Davies. "Do you think you can get us back to the sea?" Davies paused to stare around at the pools and channels that were identical to all the others they had passed through, partitioned by crowded trees and roots and vines that differed in no perceptible way from any other part of the swamp. "Sure," he said, and spat into the oily water. "I'll steer by the stars." Shandy looked up. The high roof of moss and branches and tangled vines was as solid as a cathedral ceiling.

For the next hour, during which Shandy called to the other boats but got no reply, and Beth didn't move a muscle, and the fog got steadily thicker, Davies rowed through the twisting channels, watching the slow current and trying to move in the same direction; he was impeded, though, by dead-end channels, still pools, and areas where the current turned back inland. Finally they found a broad channel that seemed to be flowing strongly. Shandy was glad they did, for the torch was burning more dimly all the time.

"This has got to work," Davies gasped as he rowed out into the middle of the current. Shandy noticed that he winced as he hauled on the oars, and he suddenly remembered that Davies had burned his hand throwing the mud ball at the swamp- loa. He was about to insist on a turn at the oars when one of the fungus balls on the shore spoke. "Dead end," it croaked. "Bear left. Narrower, but you get there."

To his surprise, Shandy thought he recognized the voice. "What?" he called quickly to the white, blurry-featured sphere.

It didn't reply, and Davies kept rowing down the broad channel.

"It said this is a dead end," Shandy ventured after a moment.

"In the first place," said Davies, his voice hoarse with exhaustion, "it's stuck in the mud, so I don't see how it can know. And in the second place, why should we assume it wants to give us straight advice?

We almost took root back there—this lad obviously did. Why should such a one want to give us straight advice? … Misery loves company."

Shandy frowned doubtfully at the low-flickering torch. "But these … I don't think these are what we were turning into. We were all turning into normal plants—flowers and bushes and whatnot. And we all seemed to be different from one another. These boys are all alike … "

"Back, Jack," piped up another of the puffy white things. Again Shandy thought he caught a familiar intonation.

"If anything," said Davies stubbornly, "this channel is getting wider." One of the fungus balls was dangling from a tree over the water, and as they passed it it opened a flap and said, "Bogs and quicksand ahead. Trust me, Jack."

Shandy looked at Davies. "That's … my father's voice," he said unsteadily.

"It … can't be," snarled Davies, hauling even more strongly on the oars. Shandy looked away and said, into the darkness ahead, "Left, you say, Dad?"

"Yes," whispered another of the fungi. "But behind you—then with the current, to the sea." Davies pulled two more strokes, then angrily jammed the oars down into the water. "Very well!" he said, and began working to turn the boat around. "Though I expect we'll wind up as mushroom-heads ourselves, giving wrong directions to the next lot of fools to venture in here." By the guttering torchlight they found a gap in the mudbank, and Davies reluctantly rowed into it, leaving the wide, steady course behind. The cool white light of a spirit ball or two glowed for a moment in the fog behind them.

The fog was moving downriver thickly now, filtering through the tangled branches and vines like milk dripping into clear water; soon it was solid, and their torch was a diffused, luminous orange stain on the gray-black fabric of the night—but the channel they were in was so narrow that by stretching out his arm Shandy could feel the wet shrubbery on either side.

"It is beginning to quick up a bit," Davies admitted grudgingly. Shandy nodded. The fog had made the night chilly, and when he began to shiver it occurred to him that Elizabeth was clad only in a light cotton shift. He took off his coat and draped it around her. Then the boat passed through an arch so narrow that Davies had to draw in the oars, and a moment later the craft had surged out onto the face of a broad expanse of water, and they had left enough of the fog behind in the rain forest so that, after a few dozen more downstream oar-strokes, Shandy was able to see the glow of the three shore fires ahead.

"Hah!" he exclaimed joyfully, slapping Davies on his good shoulder. "Look at that!" Davies peered around, then turned back with a grin. "And look back there," he said, nodding astern. Shandy shifted around to look back, and saw, back in the fog, the weak glows of two torches. "The others made it as well," he observed, not very pleased.

Beth was looking back too. "Is … my father in one of those boats?"

"Yes," Shandy told her, "but I won't let him hurt you." For several minutes none of them spoke, and the boat began gradually slanting in toward shore as Davies let his burned hand do less work. The pirates on the shore finally noticed the approaching boats and began shouting and blowing horns.

"Did he try to hurt me?" Beth asked.

Shandy looked back at her. "Don't you remember? He … " Belatedly, it occurred to him that there might be a better time to awaken her recent grisly memories. "Uh … he made Friend cut your hand," he finished lamely.

She glanced at her hand, then didn't speak until they had drawn in near the fires, and men were wading out to help them ashore. "I remember you holding a knife to my throat," she said distantly. Shandy bared his teeth in anguished impatience. "It was the dull side, and I never even touched you with it! That was to test him, to see if he still needed you to accomplish this magic, if some of your blood wasn't all he needed! Damn it, I'm trying to protect you! From him!" Several men had splashed up to their boat, and hands gripped the gunwales and began dragging it in toward shore.

"Magic," said Beth.

Shandy had to lean forward to hear her over the excited questions of the pirates. "Like it or not," he said to her loudly, "it's what we're involved in here."

She swung a leg over the side and jumped into the shallow water and looked back at him. The rocking bow-torch had almost expired, but it was bright enough to show the lines of strain in her face.

"What you've chosen to become involved in," she said, then turned and began wading up toward the fires.

"You know," Shandy remarked to Davies, "I'm going to get her out of this … just for the pleasure of showing her one more thing she's all wrong about."

"Are we glad to see you boys!" one of the jostling pirates exclaimed. They had dragged the boat all the way up onto the sand of the mangrove-shorn notch, and Shandy and Davies got out and stood up, stretching. The shouting began to die down.

"Glad to be out of there," Davies said.

"You must be hungry as hell," another man put in. "Or did you find something to eat in there?"

"Didn't have the leisure." Davies turned to watch the progress of the other two boats. "What time is it? Maybe Jack'd throw together some kind of pre-breakfast for us."

"I don't know, Phil, but it ain't late—no more'n an hour or two after sunset." Shandy and Davies both turned to stare at him. "But we left about an hour after sunset," Shandy said.

"And we've been gone at least several hours … "

The pirate was looking at Shandy blankly, and Davies asked, "How long were we gone upriver?"

"Why … two days," the man replied in some bewilderment. "Just about precise—dusk to dusk."

"Ah," said Davies, nodding thoughtfully.

"And ashes to ashes," put in Shandy, too tired to bother with making sense. He looked again toward the approaching boats. Idly, for in spite of his deductions all he wanted right now was an authoritative drink and a hammock and twelve hours of sleep, he wondered how he would prevent Hurwood from forcing Beth's soul out of her body so that the ghost of her mother, his wife, could move in.

Chapter Sixteen

In the morning the fog had overflowed its river boundaries and formed a damp, only dimly translucent veil over the land and sea, so chilly that the pirates huddled around the sizzling, popping fires, and it was almost midmorning, when the fog began to break up, before anyone noticed that the Vociferous Carmichael was gone; and another half hour of rowing up and down the shore in boats, and shouting and ringing bells, was wasted in confirming the ship's disappearance. Most of her crew was ashore, and the first supposition was that she had somehow come unmoored and drifted away—then Hurwood came running down the slope from the hut yelling the news that his daughter was gone and he couldn't find Leo Friend.

Shandy was standing on the beach near one of the boats when Hurwood's news was relayed. Davies and Blackbeard stood a hundred feet away, talking in low, urgent tones, but they looked up when this fresh lot of shouting began.

"Not a coincidence," pronounced Blackbeard flatly.

"The fat boy?" protested Davies. "But why?"

"Your quartermaster knows why," Blackbeard said, nodding past Davies at Shandy. "Don't you, Shandy?"

Shandy walked up to them, feeling hollow and colder than the tog. "Yes, sir," he said hoarsely. "I've seen the way he'd look at her sometimes."

"But why take my ship?" snarled Davies, whirling angrily to face the still-veiled sea.

"He had to take Beth away," said Shandy. "Her father had plans for her that were … incompatible … with the plans Friend had for her." He spoke quietly, but he was as tense as a flexed length of steel.

Blackboard, also staring out to sea, shook his massive head. "I knew he was more than just Hurwood's apprentice—that there was something he was after, all on his own. At the Fountain he finally got what he needed. I should have killed him last night, after we all got back. I think I could have." The giant pirate reached out a hand and squeezed it into a fist, and then drove it into the palm of his other hand.

The sound of the slap was lost in the sudden, jarring crack of a close thunderclap, and the flash of the sky-spanning lightning bolt sent Shandy and Davies reeling back, dazzled.

"I think I could have," Blackbeard repeated thoughtfully.

As the echoes tumbled away along the shoreline and Blackbeard lowered his hands, Shandy half wished he'd thought of dropping some of his own blood on the mud by the Fountain. The thought reminded him of the way Davies had vanquished—perhaps killed—the loa-like thing in the jungle. Surreptitiously he lifted his foot and dragged a fingernail down the groove between the sole and the side, and he rolled the resulting bit of muck into a ball and tucked it into his pocket. He didn't know whether it contained any mud actually from the marge of the Fountain, or what sort of enemy he might want to use it against even if it did, but it was clear that anyone with only guns and swords at his disposal was ludicrously ill-equipped for the kind of combat they were engaged in now.

"I've got to get my ship back," said Davies, and Shandy realized that when Davies had lost the ship he'd lost his rank, too—without the Vociferous Carmichael he was just the skipper of a notably battered but otherwise unimpressive little sloop. Davies looked desperately at Blackbeard. "Will you come along and help? He's more now than he was, and he knew some good tricks even before."

"No," said Blackbeard, his dark face impassive. "By now Woodes Rogers may have arrived in New Providence with the pardon calculated to rob me of my nation." The breeze was from the sea, and it blew back the pirate-king's lion-mane of black hair and beard, and Shandy noticed streaks of gray at the temples and chin. "I meant the Carmichael—with you as her captain—to be the flagship of my fleet … and I hope you do get her back. But it seems the age of free-for-all piracy is ending … just as the merry buccaneer days are passed … this is the age of empire." He grinned sidelong at Davies.

"Would the Brethren follow me, or take the pardon, given the choice?" Davies grinned wearily back, and waited for a wave to crash, come swirling and churning almost to their boots, and then slide back, before answering. "They'll take the pardon. To sail with Blackbeard is to leave a pledge with the hangman."

Blackbeard nodded. "But … ?"

Davies shrugged. "The problem will still be there—unless King George has the sense to get into another war. The Caribbean is full of men who know no other trade than sailing a fighting ship. Since the peace they're all out of work. Sure, they'll take the pardon—gratefully!—to write off their past crimes … but a month or two later every one of 'em will be back on the account." Blackbeard nodded, and though Shandy and Davies stepped back, he didn't even look down as the next wave boiled up past where he stood and draped a length of kelp across his ankle. Finally he spoke, slowly. "Would they follow a new captain, who had ships and money?"

"Of course—and if this captain truly had no criminal record, he could have his pick of every sailor in the New World, because they wouldn't be violating their pardons by sailing with him. But who have you got in mind? Even Shandy here has got a fair reputation."

"Do you know, Phil, why Juan Ponce de Leon called that place the Fountain of Youth?"

"No." Davies laughed shortly. "If anything, I feel a lot older since being there." Blackbeard turned to Shandy. "Any guesses, Jack?"

Shandy recalled Hurwood's antics with the head of his dead wife. "Because the place can be used to bring dead people back to life."

Blackbeard nodded. "I was sure you'd figured that out. Yes, old Hurwood plans to raise his wife's ghost from her dried head and plant it in the body of his daughter. Hard luck on the daughter, left with no body." The giant pirate laughed softly. "Hurwood came out to the New World last year—he'd heard that magic was as common as salt out here."

More shouting was going on around the fires behind them, but Blackbeard was caught up in remembering. "A pistol ball smashed his arm all to hell," he said. "We had to chop it right off and tar the stump. Never thought a man his age would survive it. But then only the next day you'd swear he'd forgot about it—all he did was watch me. The ghosts were troubling me pretty bad then, and I was having a rum-and-gunpowder two or three times a day. And even though magic has been dried up in the Old World for thousands of years, he'd tracked down its old footprints and found its bones … and studied 'em. He knew what my trouble was and had a pretty good idea of how I'd got infested by all those ghosts. He offered to cure me of 'em— exorcise 'em—if I'd show him exactly where it was that I'd picked 'em up. I said fine, let's go, but he said not so fast. We need a ghost repellent, he said, this special medicine weed the Indians grow in Carolina—I was to sail north and get some—and he had to go back to England to get a couple of things: his daughter and his wife's head, it seems. The whole reason he'd begun trying to track down living magic was to get the wife back. But before he went back to England he came to New Providence with us, and lived a few weeks with the bocors. One night he sailed off west with one of 'em, and came back next morning all worn out and crazy-looking — but excited. I knew he'd somehow managed to contact the wife. And then he left, promising as the last piece of the deal to bring back a fine ship for me."

Shandy remembered old Chaworth, and the realization that he was now one of the breed that had ruined and killed the kind old man brought a bitterness to his mouth.

"And Hurwood was right, of course," Blackbeard went on quietly. "We do use magic out here, and those of us who aren't above listening to the black bocors—especially those of us who live on the sea — know some thefty tricks. I know more, maybe, than anyone … and since our trip upriver, I've now got the power to do every one of 'em splendid." He had been facing the sea, but now he turned back to Shandy and Davies. "For years I've heard about this Fountain, and I tracked it down because of a magic I'd heard of in connection with it. A man with the right kind of power can be immortal by means of it, if he takes care to live on the sea. Blood, fresh blood, and sea water, and you don't need the head, nor a body for the soul to go into; the sorceror's blood will grow a new one in the sea, in a kind of egg, within hours of dripping into the water … "

Davies was frowning thoughtfully. "I see. So you plan to—"

"To sail north, Phil, to some place civilized, where things happen documentably and get recorded official. And I think maybe the famous Blackbeard will be trapped and killed in some sea fight, in such a way that some of his blood will fall into the ocean … and then I wouldn't be surprised if some stranger were to appear, who'll happen to know where I've hid all my lucre, and he won't have any reputation or previous history or fame to foul him up. I think he'll get a ship in some quiet way—hah!

I'll bet Stede Bonnett will help out with that—and then make his way south to New Providence Island. I think he'll want to speak to you, Phil—and I think it'd be a good thing if you'd got the Carmichael back."

Davies nodded. "Do you … want us to accept this pardon Rogers is bringing?"

"I don't see why not," Blackbeard said.

"Hear that, Jack?" Davies asked Shandy. "Back in the shop window again." Shandy opened his mouth to answer, then closed it and just shook his head.

"He's too great a sinner, Phil," Blackbeard said, amusement rumbling in his voice. Benjamin Hurwood covered the last ten yards in a sort of anxious, bounding prance, making the square wooden box tied to his belt jiggle and whirl wildly. "When do we leave"?" he screamed.

"Don't you realize how essential it is that we hurry? He may kill her, he's certainly got the power now to overcome the protections she has."

Blackbeard ignored Hurwood. "I'm going north," he said, and plodded away back toward the fires. Davies eyed the pale, trembling Hurwood speculatively. "Can you find 'em?"

"Of course I can find them—her, anyway." He slapped the wooden box irreverently. "This thing's a damn lodestone for her now, better than the pointer that led you to the Carmichael a month ago."

"We'll leave instantly," said Davies. "As soon as we get the Jenny manned. We—" He paused. "The Carmichael's crew," he said. "What's to become of them, the lads we can't carry on the Jenny?"

"Who cares?" yelled Hurwood. "Let them split up—half with Thatch, half with Bonnett. Damn my soul, what I'm going to do to that fat young worm when I find him! Prometheus never suffered as much as Leo Friend will, I promise you—"

"No," said Davies, still thoughtfully, "none of my lads sail north with Thatch … I'll load the Jenny gunwale-deep with men before I permit that … "

Hurwood had been dancing with impatience, and now the raging old man screwed his eyes shut and clenched his fist, and slowly rose up from the sand until he hovered unsupported with his boots dangling fully a yard above the ground. He opened his eyes a squint, hissed angrily and shut his eyes harder—and then was flung like a loose-jointed doll at the sea, and struck with an enormous splash out beyond where the breakers began to swell and roll in.

A number of pirates were on the beach, and several of them had paused in their various labors to gape at this performance, and now were staring wonderingly out at the falling splash spray.

"Get him," Davies rasped at the nearest cluster of them, and the men leaped to the boat, dragged it down to the water and got busy with the oars. To Shandy, Davies muttered, "You want to find the girl, right?"

"Right."

"And I want to find my ship. So let's get Hurwood aboard the Jenny before he perfects his flying and flaps away to find them without us."

The sailors had carried and shoved their wide-beamed boat out into the surf. "Don't bring him back," Davies shouted to them. "Take him on to the Jenny!"

"Aye aye, Phil," yelled back one of the laboring rowers.

Davies seized Shandy's shoulder. "Back to the camp, Jack," he said. "Send as many of the Carmichael's lads to Bonnett's crew as the Revenge can hold—the rest bring down here, and get 'em aboard the Jenny. But none of our mates sail on the Queen Anne's Revenge, understand?"

"Sure do, Phil," Shandy said. "I'll have 'em down here getting into the boats in three minutes."

"Good. Go."

Shandy had no sooner run back uphill to the crowd around the smoking charcoal piles than Woefully Fat grabbed him by the upper arm. The bocor's brown eyes glared at him out of the broad black face.

"You damn slow, boy," the man said. "I thought you'd fix things upriver. Too late now for it to be any kind of easy—now you got to kill him an' burn him ashore."

"Kill who?" blurted Shandy, forgetting the man was deaf.

"You ain't sailin' on the Queen Anne's Revenge," said Woefully Fat. Belatedly remembering the bocor's deafness, Shandy shook his head and put on an earnestly agreeing expression. He was standing on tiptoe and hoping the giant bocor wouldn't lift him any higher. "No sir!" he yelled.

"Di'n't wait five years for you so you could be a puppet o' his, and die just to provide more blood an' make his death scene look more convincin'."

"I ain't going!" said Shandy loudly, exaggerating the movement of his lips. Then he added, "What do you mean, 'five years'?"

Woefully Fat looked around—no one was paying particular attention to them, and he lowered his voice to a whisper that was somehow still a rumble. "When the white men's war ended, an' anybody could see that Thatch had learned too much."

Shandy couldn't tell if this was an answer or something Woefully Fat had been going to say anyway.

"He got away with a lot by calling himself a privateer," the bocor went on. "The English let him alone if they think he only be takin' Spanish ships. But he wa'n't interested in any distinctions between Spanish or English or Dutch, just in human lives and blood. He even kilt that old English magician he been studyin' with, an' then tried to bring him back." Woefully Fat laughed. "I help a little, that time, make a turtle eat the blood in the water. Wouldn't have worked for very long anyway, neither of 'em havin' shed blood in Erebus first, but you should have seen that turtle tryin' to write English words on the deck with its claws." He gave Shandy a sharp look. "You di'n't shed no blood there, did you?"

"Where?"

"In Erebus, as white people call the place. The place where the Fountain is, where ghosts can't be ghosts, where blood grows plants?"

"No no, not me." Shandy shook his head. "Now let go of me, will you? I've got—"

"No? Good. He have … uses for you, if'n you did. An' when the war was ended and he was still alive an' gettin' so close an' puttin' together a whole nation, it seem like, of badmen, I saw I had to call a death for him from the Old World. When the one-armed man came last year an' knew about ghosts, I was sure it was my man, 'specially since his wife died the same year I sent my summons—if the bigger loas sent him for me they'd maybe have caused her death, as long as the complications of it would drive him out here."

"That's great, really," said Shandy. He made a twisting hop and managed to pull his arm free of the bocor's huge hand. "But right now I've got to see to the crews, all right? Anybody who needs to be killed and burned is just going to have to wait." He turned and ran before Woefully Fat could grab him again.

By threats, and hints that maroonment here was a real possibility, and his own evident consternation, Shandy managed to get a little more than half of the Carmichael's crew accepted by David Herriot, Bonnett's half-bright sailing master, and hustle the remainder down to the boats and onto the water, before the boat that had picked up Hurwood had even reached the Jenny. The fog was definitely breaking up now, and when the boat Shandy was in plunged out of the last veil of mist, he smiled with affection to see the battered old Jenny rocking sturdily out there in the bright morning sunlight.

"It'll be nice to get back down south where we belong," he said to Skank, who was crouched in the bow near him.

"Oh, aye," the young pirate agreed, "it's risky tactics to get too far from the attentions of Mate CareFor and that lot."

"Yeah." Shandy hastily patted his pocket to make sure he hadn't lost the ball of mud. "Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for." In a few minutes they bumped the shot-scarred hull of the Jenny, and Shandy reached up, grabbed her gunwale and vaulted over it onto the deck. As he gave some orders about the handling of the tenuously repaired sails and lines, and oversaw the hasty loading of several casks of salt pork and beer he'd managed to commandeer from the camp, he became aware that the planks under his boots were vibrating briefly every couple of seconds, and when he made his way aft to report to Davies that they were ready to go, he saw Hurwood crouched over his grisly box on the narrow poop, and the old man's scratchy breathing exactly corresponded to the deck's vibration.

"Hope he doesn't sneeze," remarked Davies, who had also noticed the phenomenon. "All set?"

"I'd say so, Phil," Shandy answered with a tension-twitchy grin. "Far too many men, nearly no provisions, the rigging all held together with nipper twine, and the navigator a one-armed lunatic taking directions from a severed head in a box."

"Excellent," said Davies, nodding. "Good work. I knew I picked the right man for quartermaster." He looked down at Hurwood. "Which way?" Hurwood pointed south.

"Hoist anchor!" Davies shouted. "And tiller hard to starboard!" The old sloop came around to face south, and then she sped away so quickly, in spite of being jostlingly overcrowded, that Shandy knew Hurwood must be providing some sort of sorcerous propulsion to aid the tattered sails; and by noon they had ploughed their plunging, wide-waked way down past the tip of the Florida peninsula.

A half hour later things began to happen. Hurwood had been staring into the wooden box since they'd set out, but now he looked up. Shandy, who had been glancing frequently at the old man, noticed the change and walked back to the stern along the railing, balancing himself by reaching out to touch the shrouds every few steps. A few steps from the one-armed magician he paused.

"There are … others … ," the old man said.

Several of the pirates had climbed up the shrouds to escape the smell and crowding of their companions, perched themselves more or less comfortably in the loops of the ratlines, and were providing entertainment to those below by tossing an ever-lighter rum bottle back and forth among themselves without, so far, dropping it; but now one of them was staring intently to the west. "A sail!" he yelled. "Ow, damn it," he added as the bottle rebounded from his knee and fell into eager hands below. "A sail abeam to starboard and only a mile or two off!" That's got to be her, thought Shandy, whirling so quickly to look that he had to crouch and grab the rail to keep from tumbling over the side. As soon as he saw the other ship, though, he knew it wasn't the Carmichael—this ship had a forecastle structure, and an extra-high poop, and had only two huge sails each on its fore and mainmasts, and even from this distance he could see bright patterns of red and white painted along her side.

"I am not a dog!" yelled Mr. Bird, who had wound up with the rum bottle and was backing away toward the bow with it and glaring around at the rest of the pirates.

Shandy stared at the strange ship. "What is she?" he asked Davies, "and how in hell did she get so close without any of us seeing her?"

"Damned if I know how," Davies growled. "We've been keeping no formal watch, but one of those drunken bastards should have noticed before now." He squinted at the ship, which seemed to be pacing them. "It's a Spanish galleon," he said wonderingly. "I didn't know there were any still afloat — they haven't made 'em for at least half a century."

Shandy swore, then smiled tiredly at Davies. "Nothing to do with any of our concerns, obviously."

"Obviously."

"So do we just continue?"

"May as well. Even overloaded, we should be able to outrun that, especially with Hurwood lending his sorcerous push. If—"

"Drowned man!" yelled one of the men up in the shrouds. "To port, twenty yards off." Shandy looked in that direction and saw sea birds circling over a sodden, floating lump that soon disappeared in the choppy agitation of their wake.

"'Nother one ahead!" the self-appointed lookout yelled. "We may run right over him."

"One of you get a boathook out," commanded Davies, "and snag him." Another floating corpse was sighted, too far off to starboard to be visible from the deck, but the one that the lookout had seen bobbing ahead was hooked as it slipped past the bow. The sea birds squawked angrily as the floater was lifted out of the sea and dragged aboard.

"Saints preserve us!" exclaimed one of the men who lowered the sopping corpse to the deck. "It's Georgie de Burgo!"

"We're on the fat boy's track, right enough," said Davies flatly, starting forward. "De Burgo was one of the dozen men that were aboard the Carmichael when she was moored."

Davies was clearing a way through the crowd on the deck by cuffing men out of his way, and Shandy hurried along behind him before the path could close again. He was wishing he'd got a better look at the corpse he'd seen tumbling away in the wake, and he was torturing himself by trying to remember whether the cloth the thing had been wrapped in was the same color as the cotton shift Beth had been wearing when he'd seen her last.

By the time Davies and Shandy got to the bow the crowd had begun parting for them, and Shandy was able to glimpse de Burgo's corpse while he was still several steps away from it, and it was this moment of preparation that probably saved the contents of his stomach, for Georgie de Burgo's head had been all but cut free of his body by what seemed to have been one stroke of some very sharp and very heavy blade.

Shandy was staring down in queasy fascination at the thing when the lookout yelled again. "And another one to port!"

"Put him back over the side," said Davies tightly, turning back toward the stern. He and Shandy didn't speak until they had elbowed their way back to the tiller and their eerie navigator. "I think," said Davies then, "we can assume that he's killed all twelve and heaved 'em over the side. I can't imagine how, but that's not the main mystery."

"Right," said Shandy, squinting at the empty blue horizon ahead. "Who's he got crewing for him?" For a full minute neither of them spoke, then Shandy glanced to starboard at the Spanish galleon.

"Uh … Phil? Didn't you say we're faster than that Spaniard?"

"Hm? Oh, certainly, on her best day and our worst." Davies too looked to starboard—then froze, staring, for the galleon had moved well ahead of the Jenny. "God's teeth," he muttered, "that's not possible."

"No," Shandy agreed. "Neither's the fact that she's leaving no visible wake at all." Davies stared for a few more seconds, then called for a telescope. One was brought, and for a long minute he peered through it at the receding galleon. "Get the men busy," he said finally, lowering the glass. "At anything, mending line, hoisting and lowering sails, man-overboard drill, even—-just keep their attention off that Spaniard."

"Aye aye, Phil," said the mystified Shandy, hurrying forward.

He assigned so many jobs so quickly that one man who had been furtively smoking a pipe — forbidden aboard ship — managed in the confusion to ignite a puddle of Mr. Bird's rum and set half the bow ablaze; greasy hair and tarry clothes sprang into flame and a dozen suddenly burning men, hooting in alarm, went rolling and diving over the rail.

Shandy instantly ordered the helmsman to come about, and within minutes Davies' constant drilling had paid off—the fire was out, and the men in the water were all dragged back aboard before any of them had time to drown. After the excitement had died down and Shandy had had time to catch his breath and gulp some of the surviving rum, he went back to the stern. Hurwood, though he had probably protested when the Jenny came around, was staring silently into his wooden box again, and when Shandy looked ahead he saw that the Spaniard was by nowjust an irregular white fleck on the southern horizon.

"When I said to keep them busy," Davies began, "I didn't mean … "

"I know, I know." Shandy scratched at a scorched area of his beard and then leaned back against the taut shroud and looked at Davies. "So why? Just so they wouldn't notice the lack of a wake?"

"Partly that. But more important, I didn't want any of these lads to get a chance to turn a glass on her stern and read her name. She's the Nuestra Senora de Lagrimas," he said thoughtfully. "You may not have heard of her, but probably half of these men know her story. She was carrying gold from Veracruz and had the misfortune to meet an English privateer, the Charlotte Bailey. A couple of the Englishmen survived to tell about it. Terrible sea battle—lasted four hours—and both ships went to the bottom." He looked over at Shandy and grinned. "This was in 1630." Shandy blinked. "Nearly a century ago."

"Right. You know anything about raising ghosts?"

"Not really—though the way things've been going I think I'll have it down pat long before I really understand sailing."

"Well, I'm no expert at it myself, but I do know it ain't easy. Even to get a misty, half-wit casting of a dead person takes a lot of sorcerous power." He waved ahead. "And here somebody's raised the entire damned de Lagrimas—sails, timber, paint and all, and crew too, to judge by the way she's handling, solid enough to look no different from a real ship, and in bright sunlight at that."

"Leo Friend?"

"I kind of think so. But why?"

Shandy glanced at Hurwood. "I'm afraid we'll probably find out." And I hope, he thought fervently, that he's been too busy—what with murdering pirates and conjuring up ghost ships—to visit his attentions on Beth Hurwood.

Chapter Seventeen

From where she crouched in the corner of the cabin Beth Hurwood could see only disjointed segments of Leo Friend's mincing advance across the deck toward her, for he had shut the door behind himself when he came in, and the only light in the cabin was the quick, regular blue-sky-flash of a bulkhead window that kept appearing and disappearing, evidently in time to the fat man's heartbeat.

She had awakened at dawn to find herself walking down the chilly sand slope toward a boat that rocked in the shallows. When she had seen Leo Friend sitting in it and grinning at her she had tried to stop walking, but couldn't; then she tried to slant her course away from the boat, and couldn't do that either, and was not even able to slow her pace as she waded helplessly out into the icy water and clambered into the boat. She had tried to speak then, but hadn't been able to tense her vocal cords or open her mouth. The boat surged out past the breakers toward where the dim silhouette of the Vociferous Carmichael stood; the ride out to the ship had taken only a minute or so, during which time Friend never touched the loosely dragging oars and Beth never managed to move a muscle. But that had all happened several hours ago, and she had since regained at least enough control over her own actions to crawl into this corner and, when she had heard the pirates screaming and dying, to cover her ears.

Now she watched Friend warily, estimating where on his blubbery frame she could use her teeth and fingernails to best effect, and trying to tense herself against another episode of magically induced, puppetlike helplessness.

But a moment later she felt herself standing up—painfully, in an awkward, tiptoe posture that she would never have assumed voluntarily; then finally her weight came down on her heels and her arms jerked up and outward, though not for balance, for she was as unable to fall as the mast of a strongly rigged ship.

Friend raised his own arms and she realized that she'd been pulled into this position in order to embrace him. His bulging lower lip was wet and trembling and the window was flashing into and out of existence as fast as the tails side of a spinning coin, and when he stepped into her arms she felt them close around his wobbly-fleshed back, and then his mouth came down hard on hers. He stank of perfume and sweat and candy, and one of his hands was fumbling inexpertly about her torso, but Beth was for the moment able to keep her eyes and teeth clamped shut. Then his mouth slid off of hers and she heard him passionately whispering some pair of syllables over and over again. She opened her eyes … and blinked in astonishment.

The flickering window, the whole ship's cabin, was gone. The two of them were standing on a knitted rag rug in what appeared to be a shabby English bedroom; the air was close and smelled of boiled cabbage. Beth tried again to pull away from him, and, though she didn't succeed, she did get a glimpse of herself. She was suddenly fat, wearing a long shapeless black dress, and her hair was gray. And then she realized what it was that he was whispering.

"Oh, Mommy, Mommy," he gasped, panting hotly against her throat. "Oh, Mommy Mommy Mommy."

But it wasn't until she realized that he was spasmodically grinding his well-padded pelvis against her that she threw up.

Less than half a minute later Leo Friend was outside on the quarterdeck, pacing back and forth redfaced in the morning sun. The thing about mistakes, he told himself as he dabbed at the spot on his frilly blouse with a silk handkerchief, is that one must learn from them. And that incident just now in the cabin certainly should have taught me something. I simply have to wait—and just a little longer, just until I can get enough peace and quiet to cook up some of the magic I'm now capable of.

And then, he thought, looking back at the cabin door which he'd just rebolted from the outside, then we'll see who has to fight off whose attentions. He took a deep breath and then let it out, nodding decisively. He looked around the quarterdeck of what he'd made of the Carmichael, and after scrutinizing his new crew he decided they were looking a good deal less lively than they had when he'd first conjured them up, several hours ago now. They seemed even paler, and puffier, and they kept cocking their heads as if listening to something, and glancing back north with expressions that even on their dead faces were recognizable as fearful.

"What's the matter?" he snapped at one of the figures working the whipstaff tiller. "You afraid of Blackbeard? Afraid he'll come stick a cutlass into your cold guts? Or Hurwood, come after us for his d-d-d-d—goddamn offspring? I've got more power than either of them, don't you worry." The thing spoken to didn't seem to hear, and just kept turning its pearly gray head around—so far that its neck was beginning to tear—to peek back past the stern. Faintly from its useless throat came hissing that might have been whimpering.

Irritably, for his crew's evident fear had begun to infect him in spite of his confidence and the reassurance that sunny days bring, Friend climbed the companion ladders to the second poop deck — levitation was still too new and uncontrolled a skill—and looked back over the stern rail. At first he thought the pursuing ship was Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge, and his pudgy lips curled in a cruel smile—which disappeared a moment later, though, when he realized that it wasn't any ship he'd ever seen before. This one, he saw, was broader in the beam and was painted red and white around the bow … and wasn't the bow advancing awfully steadily? Didn't most ships' bows rise and fall a bit when they were making speed, and fling some spray out to the sides?

He walked to the rail that overlooked the poop and quarterdecks. At least for the moment his ship had stopped shifting its features, and there weren't any masts or decks changing their minds about whether they were there or not from moment to moment. Probably even that window in … that cabin … was either steadily there or steadily not.

"More speed!" Friend shouted to his necrotic crew. Several gray figures began creeping up the rigging. "Faster!" he shrilled.

"No wonder the damned Charlotte Bailey went down, if this is the way you handled her!" He looked back at the pursuing ship, and wondered if he was just imagining that it was already closer. He was pretty sure it was. Planting his feet firmly on the deck, he roused the new areas of his mind and pointed a sausagelike finger at the strange ship. "Go," he said tightly. Instantly a wide patch of the sea erupted in steam, curling and boiling up in a white, sharply edged cloud, and Friend giggled delightedly—but the giggling stopped a moment later when the ship came surging out of the cloud, apparently none the worse. Its sails, in fact, still shone the bright bone white of dry canvas.

"Damn," said Friend softly.

It doesn't matter who it is, he thought uneasily. I've got better things to do than deal with it. I could levitate myself and Elizabeth and just fly away … but if they pursued us rather than this ship I'd be at a disadvantage, for I'd have to keep using part of my power just to hold us up … of course I'm using a good deal of it even now, keeping these damned resurrected sailors moving …

He climbed back down to the next deck, and after shouting some more orders to the silently working gray figures, he glanced down, at the deck planks under his mud-stained but still ornate shoes. I could just rush in there and take her, he thought, the hot excitement beginning to choke him again in spite of his anxiety about the pursuing vessel. And this time I could hold her in a total sorcerous vise, so that she couldn't even blink an eye without me specifically letting her … or I could even just render her unconscious, and use magic to make her body behave in the ways I want …

He shook his head. No, that wouldn't really be any different from the activities he'd been indulging in ever since he learned, in his adolescence, how to sculpt ectoplasmic women in the air over his unrestful bed. At best all he could do right now would be to rape Beth Hurwood, and any common sailor could commit a rape. Friend wanted—needed—to commit a much more profound violation. He wanted to manipulate her very will, so that not only would she be powerless to prevent herself from coupling with him, she would live for the hope of it. And then if he happened to get her confused with his … with someone else … she'd be properly flattered.

To be able to control people as thoroughly as that, though, he would have to have control over vastly more of reality than he had ever had before—over all of it, in fact. In order fully to define the present, he would have to be able to revise the past—dictate the future—become, in effect, God. Well, he thought with a nervous smile, why not? Haven't I been getting steadily closer to that all my life?

He crossed to the port rail, leaned out and glanced back again at the mysterious pursuer. The red-andwhite painted ship had sped up since he'd last looked, and was slanting over as if to pass the Carmichael on the port side, and now he could see another sail, farther back, which the unknown vessel had been concealing. Friend hissed in alarm and squinted at it.

It's too small to be Blackbeard's ship, he thought, or Bonnett's. It must be that damned sloop, the Jenny. Hurwood will be aboard, certainly, and the Romeo sea-cook, that Shandy fellow … maybe even Davies, still angry about my having shot him. That must be what my lich crew has been looking back at for the last half hour. He glanced over at his ill-preserved helmsmen, but the focus of the dead men's attention had shifted. The lifeless figures weren't looking astern anymore, but off the port quarter instead, at the painted galleon.

"Idiots!" Friend yelled. "The danger's there!" He pointed back at the advancing sloop. His crew of dead men didn't seem to agree.

"That isn't the Carmichael!" Davies had exclaimed when the Nuestra Senora de Lagrimas slanted to the east on a closer-hauled tack and gave the Jenny a clear view of the ship they were pursuing. He kept staring at it through the telescope.

"It has to be," said Shandy.

Hurwood, who hadn't shifted from his crouch since the voyage began, looked up. "It's the ship she's on," he said, speaking just loudly enough to be heard over the splash-and-spray and the wind whistling through the harp of the rigging.

Davies shook his head doubtfully. "Poop seems too high, but I guess we'll know soon enough; both of 'em seem to be slowing down. Are we getting every knot of speed out of this?" Shandy shrugged and gestured down at Hurwood. "Ask him—but I'd say yes and a risky bit more. After that last speed-up to keep the Spaniard in sight we had to take down all sails, 'cause they were just slowing us down, and the hull strakes flex more and leak worse every time we skate over a big wave."

"Well, it shouldn't take too much longer." Whatever the ship was ahead, they were gaining on it fast, and after a minute or so Davies called "Catch!" and tossed the telescope to Shandy. "What's her name?"

Shandy peered through the telescope. "Uh … the Vochi-flerouttes Barimychael? No … no, it's the Carmichael, right enough, I see it clear now … "

"Keep the glass on her," said Davies.

" … Well," said Shandy tiredly after another few moments, "it blurs and shifts. But for a moment there it was the Charlotte Bailey." He sighed and muttered a curse he hadn't known a month ago. "So he raised the crew of the Charlotte Bailey to replace the men he murdered, but his new sorcerous strength is so great that he raised the ship's ghost too, and it's clinging to the Carmichael." Davies nodded toward the Spanish galleon. "He even raised the ship that went down with the Bailey."

"God," said Shandy. "I wonder if he knows that."

"I don't think it matters. The de Lagrimas seems to want to take up their battle right where they left off a century ago … and I don't think we want to permit that."

"No," said Shandy.

"No," agreed Hurwood, who had at last stood up and closed his noisome box. "And to answer your earlier question, no, Friend doesn't know what the Spaniard is, or he wouldn't have wasted energy trying to boil her—she's part of the same magic that's furnished him with a crew, and the only way he can be rid of her is to cancel that magic." He laughed without smiling. "The boy isn't in control of his new strength yet. He reached down to the sea floor for a crew and raised up as well everything and everybody in the vicinity. I'll wager there are fishes aswim below us now that were scattered skeletons yesterday."

"Excuse me," said Shandy quickly, "but can ghost cannon balls damage real ships? The Lagrimas seems to be lining up for a broadside."

"I don't know," grated Hurwood. The old man closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and then half the men aboard the Jenny were sent sprawling as the old sloop leaped forward across the shattering waves at a still greater speed. Shandy, braced against the transom and trying to snatch a lungful of the solid, rushing air, considered, and then giddily dismissed, warning Hurwood that the battered old vessel probably couldn't take it.

Smoke bloomed from the Spaniard's starboard flank, and a moment later Shandy rubbed his eyes incredulously, for the Carmichael had blurred, seeming simultaneously both to reel and to continue unchecked, seeming to lose spars and sails in a tangled explosion and at the same time maintain her broad spread of canvas untouched.

The drunken pirates aboard the Jenny burst out yelling at the sight of this prodigy, and several took it on themselves to try to hoist some sails while others scrambled for the helm. One man was wrenching at the sheaves of the cathead, trying to get the anchor to drop.

Davies grinned at the men who were rushing back toward the helm, and thoughtfully drew a pistol, and Shandy yelled, "There's enough ghosts in this fight without volunteers! Our only living opponent is the fat boy—do you want to let him get away with your ship?"

Shandy's words, and, even more effectively, Davies' pistol, halted the rush. The pirates wavered, covering uncertainty by redoubling their shouted oaths and demands and gestures. Davies fired his pistol into the air, and into the relative silence that followed he yelled, "The Spaniard's a ghost, I admit—but she's distracting the fat boy. He's seen us now—so do we go in and hit him while he's occupied, or wait for him to turn on us at his leisure?" Miserably, the pirates turned and fought their way back through the hammering headwind to their posts. They had only managed to raise one sail, the little square topsail, and before they could even begin to lower it again it split into a hundred fluttering ribbons, giving the plunging boat a shabbily festive appearance but doing nothing to slow it down.

Almost skipping over the waves now, the Jenny crashed into the narrowing gap between the two ships.

"All port guns fire!" Davies roared against the wind. "And then try putting the tiller over to port!" The Jenny's seven portside guns all boomed jarringly, and then after a moment of recoil the sloop heeled sharply with the canvasless jibe to starboard, and Shandy held onto the port rail and blinked against the spray from the waves that were hurtling past just inches below him; and when the port side heaved back up to something closer to its normal position he craned his neck to look back at the de Lagrimas.

She was in trouble, sure enough, her stout mainmast broken off at a ragged point about halfway up its length, and most of her rigging was serving now only to connect her to the unwieldy sea-anchor that the mast-top had become—but Shandy swore softly in awe, for the Jenny was a much smaller vessel, and her broadside had been leveled at the Spaniard's hull, not up at the masts and rigging … and it occurred to him that he was seeing the original conflict between the Nuestra Senora de Lagrimas and the Charlotte Bailey being re-enacted by the temporarily resurrected principals, who, in some deteriorated sense, still recalled the original sequence of events.

"Keep the tiller over!" commanded Davies, "and let us slow down now," he added to Hurwood.

"We'll come around across the Carmichael's bow and board her on the starboard side." The two ships had been slowing even before the de Lagrimas lost her mast, and so even overloaded and losing speed the Jenny had yards to spare when she came around, still heeling, under the Carmichael's bow. Then the Jenny's in-turning bow was scraping up splinters along the ship's hull and the sloop rocked and shuddered as it lost its momentum; Davies ordered grappling hooks flung up, and a moment later the pirates were swarming like big, ragged bugs up the ropes. Among the first of them was Shandy, who was finding it ironic that in this second capture of the Carmichael by the Jenny he should be one of the bearded wild men scrambling up the boarding lines. When he was halfway up the line, bracing his boot-soles against the hull as he wrenched himself upward, the hull suddenly jumped like a whacked drumskin and he was swung over sideways and slammed hard against it; the impact rang his head against the hull strakes and numbed his right arm, but he managed to keep his left hand clamped onto the rope. Blinking down past his dangling boots, he saw most of the men who'd been on the lines with him splash into the turbulent water between the two vessels.

"The Spaniard just hit her on the other side!" shouted Davies, leaping for one of the slack lines himself. "Now or never!"

Shandy took a deep breath—through his mouth, for his nose was dripping blood—flexed the fingers of his right hand, swung it up to grab the rope, drew his legs up and pushed himself away from the hull and wearily resumed climbing. He was the first to grip the rail and swing a leg over, but, in spite of his concern for Beth Hurwood, when he had wincingly pulled himself up he just crouched there and stared for several seconds.

The Spanish ship was a sky-blotting tangle of shattered spars and fouled rigging, but Shandy's attention was on his immediate surroundings. The ship to whose rail he was clinging was simply not the Carmichael—the waist was broader across but shorter fore and aft, there were two poop decks, one behind and even higher than the first, and the cannons were mounted right out on the top deck rather than one deck down—but what drew his unhappy attention were the sailors aboard her. They moved awkwardly, and their skin was the color of scummy cream of mushroom soup, and their eyes were the milky white that, in fish, was a sign of having been dead too long. Most of this poorly reanimated crew was rushing to the port bow, where a lot of similarly ruinous mariners were clambering across the shattered rail from the de Lagrimas. Shandy wanted very much to jump back down into the water. He had seen things like these in the most horrible of his childhood dreams, and he wasn't sure he wouldn't drop dead himself if one of these creatures were to turn its dreadfully knowing gaze full on him. I

Then he knew they were aware of him, for several of them were moving toward him at an eerie plodding-but-rapid pace, brandishing corroded but very solid-looking cutlasses. Their bare feet, shuffling across the deck, made sounds like someone rolling dead toads down a shingled roof. His voice shrill with panic, Shandy yelled the beginning phrases of the Hail Mary as he jumped to the deck, wrenched out his saber and stepped into one of the counters against multiple attack that Davies had been making him practice; he feinted as if to charge between two of his attackers, then ducked to the other side, engaging another opponent's blade in a screeching bind that sent Shandy's blade corkscrewing in to chop heavily into the pearly neck. Leaping over the tumbling, nearly beheaded figure, he saw several men shambling toward him—and, on the next deck up, he saw the bedraggled figure of Leo Friend, who was looking both furious and frightened. Friend was staring at something behind and above Shandy, and after he'd done a quick feint-and-slash-and-run and got past his immediate attackers, Shandy risked a quick glance back.

Benjamin Hurwood hung unsupported in midair a dozen feet above the ship's rail and a few yards out from it, and through the white hair that was blowing around his face he was smiling almost affectionately at Friend. "I brought you along," the old man said, and, though he spoke quietly, the clanging, thumping racket of the fighting ghost-crews was muted when he spoke, so that the words carried clearly; "I showed you the way past the impasse you had reached, showed you the place you had failed to discover by yourself." The smile grew wider, beginning to look skull-like. "Did you really think you were superior to me, that you could advance so far that I could not follow you? Hah. I'm glad you revealed your treacherous nature now—eventually you might have become powerful enough to do me harm." He closed his eyes.

Other pirates had clambered aboard now, and, after the initial astonishment, were doggedly trading sword-strokes with the cadaverous mariners, quickly catching on that the things had to be dismembered, and fairly thoroughly, to be put out of the fight. The things were quick, too, in a spasmodic, insectlike way, and several of Davies' men were bloodily down in the first few minutes. Shandy could hear someone banging behind a door below the deck Friend was on, and he guessed it was Beth who was locked in there, but he was finding it more and more difficult to make any headway across the deck. His sword arm was getting tired, and it was all he could do to parry the cutlass chops now—he was just too exhausted to lunge forward and swing his own sword in any effective riposte.

Then one of the lively corpses danced ponderously up to him and whirled a green cutlass at his head — Shandy heaved his saber up and caught the blow on his forte, but the force of it knocked the sword out of his hand. It clattered away, out of reach. The dead thing, too close to run from, drew back its arm for a killing stroke, and Shandy had no choice but to scramble inside its guard and grapple with it. Its body smelled like unfresh fish and felt like chains and jelly in a wet leather bag, and Shandy actually had to fight to keep himself from fainting at the horror of its proximity. The creature was hissing and thrashing and pounding Shandy's back with the brass guard of its cutlass, but Shandy managed to hobble to the starboard rail and roll the dead sailor over it. The gray hands clung to the lapels of Shandy's jacket, and for several seconds Shandy was bent over the rail staring down into the curdled eyes of the pendulous dead man; then one elbow, and a moment later the other, parted inside the thing's sleeves, and the body plummeted away to splash into the sea, leaving its hands and forearms locked onto Shandy's lapels.

Weaponless now, he stared around wildly for his dropped sword, but even in this panic his attention was caught by what was happening to Leo Friend. The fat young magician had risen from the poop deck up into the air, and flames were licking brightly around him, though his hair and clothing so far remained unscorched. Shandy glanced out beyond the starboard bow at Hurwood and saw flames around him too, though not as much, and he realized he was in the presence of a to-the-death duel between two supremely powerful sorcerors.

"Behind you, Jack!" came a yell from Davies, and Shandy leaped forward, the gray arms on his jacket swinging wildly, an instant before a cutlass blade whistled through the space his head had just been occupying. This put him dangerously close to another of the Charlotte Bailey's crew, who expressionlessly cocked a rubbery arm for a sword swing, but before it could deliver the blow its head sprang tumbling from its shoulders as Davies' blade clunked through its neck.

"Look around you!" Davies snapped, kicking the doubly-dead man's weapon to Shandy. "Didn't I tell you that?"

"Yeah, Phil," Shandy gasped, stooping to pick up the discouragingly heavy cutlass. None of the Charlotte Bailey's crew were right nearby, and Davies took hold of his own sword with his left hand and then flexed his free right hand; Shandy saw the pirate's eyes narrow as he did it, and he remembered that Davies had apparently burned that hand in the jungle.

"Is your hand—" he began, then yelled, "Look out yourself!" and hopped past Davies to knock away an in-thrusting blade and split the jellyfish face of the figure wielding it. "Is your hand workable?"

"It's got no choice," said Davies tightly, gripping his sword again and looking around the littered deck. "Listen, we've got to make sure Friend loses this fight; try to—" From behind Shandy came a screeching of overstressed wood, followed by loud cracking and snapping, and looking aft he saw that Friend had stretched his hand down, and though Friend was hovering a dozen yards above the deck and his pudgy hand scarcely extended down past his belt, most of the overdeck and bulkhead had been torn away from the cabin; the ripped up planks and beams hung in midair for a moment, then were dropped carelessly into the waist, and Shandy heard screams through the clattering and thudding, and he knew that some of the men from the Jenny had been under the dumped lumber.

Then Friend raised his cupped hand, and up into the sunlight from the now roofless cabin floated Beth Hurwood, struggling against something invisible that held her arms pinned to her sides.

Chapter Eighteen

Oh my God, thought Shandy in sudden panic, he's using her as a diversion; he's probably already raped her, and now he's going to set her on fire or something just to distract Hurwood. Shandy started toward her across the blood-slippery deck, and he didn't even notice that one of the dead men between himself and the unroofed cabin had focused its attention on him and was ; now crouched, holding its green cutlass low and ready.

Davies saw it, though. "Goddammit, Jack," he burst out wearily, sprinting forward to get to the necrotic sailor before Shandy did.

Venner, his shirt torn and his red hair made even redder by a long scalp wound, and his habitual ingratiating grin replaced by a snarl of desperate effort, took in the situation at a glance—and he deliberately stepped in Davies' way and drove his burly shoulder into the older man's chest. Half-winded by the impact, Davies reeled but nevertheless forced himself onward after casting back at Venner one quick glance full of anger and promise.

Shandy had had to duck around a knot of gasping, clanging combat, but now he was running straight toward the ascending figure of Beth Hurwood—and toward the patient, still-unnoticed dead mariner. Davies had no time for a deceptive attack; he ran the last few

steps to the undead sailor and simply swung his sword at the thing's neck. The blade struck deep, but with his bad hand and lack of breath Davies hadn't been able to put enough force behind the blow to cut the head entirely off, and the dead eyes rolled toward him—and before he could pull his sword free, the thing's corroded cutlass was driven horrifyingly far up into his abdomen.

Suddenly ashen, Davies hitchingly breathed a curse, then tightened his burned hand around the grip of his sword, and with a convulsive heave that was as much a violent shudder of disgust as it was an attacking move, shoved his blade across the gray neck with his last strength, sawing the head free. The two dead bodies tumbled away across the deck.

Shandy hadn't even noticed the encounter. Near Beth now, he dropped his sword and strained every muscle and tendon in a high jump for her, but his upstretched fingers brushed against an invisible resistance a foot short of her—though for a moment her downward staring eyes met his imploringly, and her lips formed words he couldn't hear.

Then he fell, rebounding painfully from the splintered cabin bulkhead to sprawl breathless on the sunhot deck and wait, completely exhausted now, for a green blade or two to nail him to the planks. But suddenly all the lich combatants were paler, translucent against the bright sky. The weight of the dead man's forearms on his chest all but disappeared.

At the same moment Shandy became aware that he was lying on the well-remembered quarterdeck of the Vociferous Carmichael, staring at armored planks he remembered having bolted in place himself — and he guessed that Friend was too busy defending himself against Hurwood to maintain the spell that had provided him with a crew.

"I could kill her," Friend said, relaxing his frown of concentration and baring bloody teeth in a smile. It was Hurwood who wavered now, and Friend pointed his free hand at the older sorceror—and a ball of fire, white-bright even in the cloudless noon, rushed through yielding rigging straight at Hurwood. The one-armed man parried it with a flailing gesture and it rebounded down into the Jenny where it was greeted with alarmed yells; but Hurwood fell a couple of feet and then caught himself jokingly, and he whimpered and reached out his hand toward his daughter, on the other side of the waist, who was slowly rising toward his adversary. There was no fire at all now flickering around Friend, who, grinning and swollen with triumph, looked like some grotesque, beribboned hot-air balloon. The young magician inhaled deeply, leaned back and stretched his arms out to either side. Then in spite of the strong breeze the air was foul with the smell of an empty iron skillet on a fire, and the ship was the squat, multi-decked Charlotte Bailey again, and the English and Spanish sailors were not only substantial again but alive-looking—ruddy cheeks, tanned arms, brightly flashing eyes — and Friend was actually glowing in the sky, brightly, like a man-shaped sun …

Leo Friend knew he was close to understanding it all now; he was on the very threshold of godhood — and without any external help, without drawing on anything but his own resources! He could see now that that was how it had to be. You did it for yourself or it didn't happen; and to overpower Benjamin Hurwood he would have to do it, and do it right now.

But to be God—which of course meant to have been God all along—he had to justify every event in his past, define every action in terms that made it consistent with godhood … there could no longer be any incidents that were too uncomfortable to remember. With superhuman rapidity he held up for mental review year after year of remembered behavior—the torturing of pets, the malice toward playmates, the poisoned candy left near schoolyards and workhouses—and he was able to face, and incorporate into divinity, every bit of it, and he could feel himself growing incalculably more powerful as he bloomed closer and closer to the perfect self-satisfaction that would bring omnipotence …

And finally, with Hurwood virtually vanquished, there was only one incident of Friend's life that needed to be sanctified out of plain squalid reality … but it was the most harrowing and traumatic experience he'd ever undergone, and even just facing it, even just making himself remember it, was supremely difficult … but now, as he hung in midair over his ship, facing his all-but-shattered enemy and watching his all-but-won prize rising up from the broken cabin beneath him, he forced himself to relive it.

He was fifteen years old, standing beside the bookcase in his cluttered, smelly bedroom … no, in his elegant panelled bedchamber, aromatic with the jasmine breeze wafting in through the open casements and the breath of fine leather bindings … it had always been this way, there had never been the shabby, polluted room … and his mother opened the door and came in. Only for a moment was she a fat, gray-haired old drudge in a black bag dress—then she-was a tall, handsome woman in a patterned silk robe that was open down the front … Seven years earlier he had discovered magic, and he had pursued it diligently since, and knew a lot now, and he wanted to share the wealth in his mind with the only person who had ever appreciated that mind …

He went to her and kissed her …

But it was beginning to get away from him, she was the dumpy old woman again, just come upstairs to put fresh sheets on his bed, and the room was the grubby room again and he was a startled fat boy interrupted in the midst of one of his solitary self-administrations, and he was kissing her dizzily because in his heart-pounding delirium he had misunderstood the reason for her visit … "Oh, Mommy," he was gasping, "you and I can have the world, I know magic, I can do stuff … " With a huge effort of will he forced her to be the beautiful robed woman, forced the room to expand back out to its regal dimensions … and he did it just in time, too, for he knew that his father, his mother's husband, entered the room next, and he really doubted that he could live through that scene again as it had really happened.

Well, he told himself unsteadily, I'm making reality here. In a few minutes that unbearable memory won't be what really happened.

Footsteps boomed ponderously on the stairs, ascending. Friend concentrated, and the steps diminished in volume until it might have been a child climbing the stairs. There was a lamp on the landing below, and a huge, bristling shadow darkened the open doorway and began to damage the room … but again Friend fought it down to insignificance—now a stooped, thin shadow grew in the doorway, dim, as if the thing casting it wasn't solid.

Now a little man like an upright rat in baggy trousers shambled into the room, obviously of no danger to anyone, in spite of its squinting and scowling. "What's—," it began in a deafening roar, but Friend concentrated again and its voice came out scratchy and petulant: "What's going on here?" The thing's breath was foul with liquor and tobacco. The father-creature now swaggered ludicrously across the tiled floor to Leo Friend, and in this version of reality the blow it leveled at him was a light, trembling slap.

The mother faced the intruder, and just her gaze made the unshaven creature recoil away from the boy. "You ignorant animal," she said softly to it, her low, musical voice echoing from the panelled walls and blending with the random tinkling of the fountains and wind chimes outside. "You thing of grime and sweat and laborer's tools. Beauty and brilliance are beyond your grubby perceptions. Go." The thing stumbled in confusion back toward the door, its stinks receding, though bits of its ill-fitting black overcoat and leather boots flaked off to mar the floor tiles.

Hurwood fell another foot; he was almost down to the level of the deck now. Sweat plastered his white hair across his forehead and he was breathing in harsh gasps. His eyes were shut—but for a moment one opened, just a slit, and there seemed to be a gleam of guile in it, of almost perfectly concealed triumph.

It jarred Friend, and for a moment his control shook; and in the remembered bedchamber the father began to get bigger and walk away slower. The room was decaying back to its original form, and Friend's mother was babbling, "What'd you hit Leo for, yer always hittin"im … " and the father started to turn around to face them.

High above the poop deck Leo Friend clenched his glowing fists and used all his willpower; and, slowly, the father was pushed down again, the paneling became at least dimly visible on the walls …

Then Hurwood stopped pretending defeat, and laughed openly, and struck.

And Friend's father, though his back was still turned to him, grew until the doorway lintel was almost too low and narrow for him, and when he turned around he had Hurwood's grinning face, and he opened his huge mouth and assailed Friend's eardrums with the sentence that Friend had tried desperately to trim out of reality: "What're ye doin' t'yer mother, ye little freak? Look, ye've got 'er sickin up on the floor!"

Moaning in abject horror, Leo Friend turned to his mother, but in the moments since he'd last looked at her she'd deteriorated, and she was now a thing like a fat, hairless dog backing away from him on all fours, its belly heaving as it regurgitated its internal organs out onto the dirty floor …

The room had not only devolved back to its original shabbiness, but was becoming even darker, the air staler. Friend tried to escape from it back to the clean sea air and the Charlotte Bailey, or even the Vociferous Carmichael, but he couldn't find a way out.

"You used it up too fast," said the terrible thing that was his father and Benjamin Hurwood and every other strong grownup who had ever despised him—and then it rushed in, as the room went totally dark, to devour him.

A thunderclap concussed the air and not only deafened Shandy, who had just climbed to his feet, but staggered him too, so that he had to grab a line of rigging to keep from falling, and when he glanced around, choking in the redoubled metallic stench, he saw that the ship had returned to being the familiar old Carmichael again and that the resurrected fighters were just dim shadows. The arms on his jacket were gone.

He glanced up. Beth Hurwood hung motionless in midair twenty feet above the poop deck, but Friend was rushing upward into the blue sky, and though he was glowing more brightly than ever now, almost too brightly to stare at, he was thrashing like a man attacked by wasps, and even over the ringing in his ears Shandy could hear him screaming. Finally, far above, there was a flash that left a red blot in front of Shandy's eyes wherever he looked, and the sky was full of fine white ash. Very gently, Beth Hurwood was lowered back into the cabin, and some of the planks that had been torn away slithered back up and clung across the ragged gaps. The ghosts of the Spanish and English sailors, nearly impossible to see now, drifted this way and that across the deck to the blood puddles around the killed members of Jenny's crew, and though the ghosts momentarily seemed to draw sustenance from the blood, some of the ash that had been Leo Friend swirled silently across the deck and seemed to poison them.

The pile of broken lumber kept shifting even after the animate planks had eeled away to provide bars for Beth's cage, and finally two bloody human figures crawled out from underneath. Shandy started to yell a pleased greeting—then noticed the broken and emptied head of one, and the completely cavedin chest of the other. After that he looked at their eyes and wasn't surprised at the emptiness in them. Nearer Shandy, the corpse of Mr. Bird sat up, got laboriously to its feet and shambled over to the blocks where the mainsail sheet was controlled; one by one the other corpses joined him there, and when they had all gathered, somehow managing to look expectant in spite of their dead faces, Shandy counted fourteen of them.

"Not Davies," he said thickly, seeing that body standing among them and realizing for the first time that his friend had been killed. "Not Davies."

Hurwood came sailing in over the rail, swerving like a big bird over the heads of Shandy and the rest of the exhausted survivors, and landed on the poop deck near the now partially boarded-over hole. He stared expressionlessly down at Shandy for several seconds, then shook his head. "Sorry," he said to him. "I don't have a big enough crew to be able to spare him. Now get off of my ship." Shandy looked toward the Jenny, whose mast and scorched sail were visible poking up above the starboard rail. The smoke that had been billowing up right after the fireball had fallen into the vessel was just wisps and curls now—evidently the men still aboard her had managed to put out the fire. The twenty or so living pirates on the Carmichael's deck, many of whom were wounded and bleeding, looked toward Shandy.

He nodded. "Back aboard the Jenny," he said, trying to keep out of his voice the choking bitterness he felt. "I'll join you in a moment."

As his men shuffled and limped across the deck to where the Jenny's grappling hooks still clung to the Carmichael's gunwales and rigging, Shandy took a deep breath and, though knowing that it would be useless and quite possibly fatal, walked purposefully across the deck toward the damaged cabin Beth was in.

Hurwood just watched him approach, a faint smile on his face.

Shandy stopped in front of the bolted door, and, feeling ridiculous as well as frightened and determined, knocked on the door. "Beth," he said clearly. "This is Jack Shandy—that is, John Chandagnac." Already the name seemed unnatural to him. "Come with me and I promise to take you directly to the nearest civilized port."

"How," came Beth's voice, surprisingly calm, through the warped door, "can I trust a man who murdered a naval officer in order to save killers from the just consequences of their acts, and later held a knife at my throat to keep me from my own father?"

Shandy brushed a stray lock of salt-stiff hair back from his forehead and squinted up at Hurwood — who smiled at him and shrugged in mock sympathy.

"That Navy captain," Shandy said, striving to keep his voice level, "was about to murder Davies—kill him without a trial. I had no choice. And your father—" He stopped for a moment in despair, then forced himself to go on, ridding himself of the words like a crew flinging cannons and casks overboard from a foundering vessel. "Your father intends to evict your soul from your body so that he can replace it with your mother's."

There was no answer from inside the cabin.

"Please get off my ship now," said Hurwood courteously.

Instead Shandy reached for the door's bolt—and a moment later found himself suspended in midair, rising up and away from the cabin door. His eyes went wide and then clamped shut, and then opened in a tense squint, and his whole body was rigid with uncontrollable vertigo. When he had passed over the Carmichael's gunwale and hung thirty feet above the water in front of the Jenny's fire-blackened bow, he was released, and plummeted through the air for one long second before plunging into the cold water.

He thrashed his way to the surface, and wearily swam to the Jenny, and brawny arms reached out and pulled him aboard. "It's stinkin' magic, cap'n," Skank said to him when he was safely aboard and leaning against the mast and breathing deeply while a puddle of sea water spread out on the deck around his boots. "Lucky even to get away, we are."

Shandy didn't let show his surprise at being addressed as captain. After all, Davies was dead and Shandy had been his quartermaster. "Expect you're right," he muttered.

"I'm sure glad you made it, though, Jack," Venner assured him with a broad smile that didn't conceal the chill in his gray eyes.

The last couple of pirates freed the grappling hooks and leaped down into the water and were soon aboard the Jenny and demanding rum.

"Yeah, give 'em rum," Shandy said, pushing the stray hair off his forehead again and reflecting that he'd soon have to draw his hair back and add another inch or two to his tarred pigtail. "How bad's the Jenny hurt?"

"Well," said Skank judiciously, "she wasn't in great shape even before that fireball. But we ought to be able to get her back to New Providence easy enough—all tack, no jibe."

"New Providence," Shandy said. He looked up and saw the corpse of Mr. Bird climbing the Carmichael's shrouds. The body stepped into the footrope loop that hung just below the yard that supported the main course sail, and with the precision of a clockwork mechanism began unreefing the sail while cooling hands below worked the halliards. The sails filled, the sheets creaked through the blocks, and, slowly at first, the big ship moved away from the Jenny.

"New Providence," repeated the new captain of the Jenny thoughtfully. And in the Carmichael's cabin the spell was finally lifted from Beth Hurwood's throat, and she gasped, "I believe you, John! Yes—yes, I'll come with you! Take me away from here, please!" But by then the Jenny was a shabby scrap of discolored canvas in the middle distance of the sea's glittering blue face, and, aside from her father's, the only ears her words reached were those of the dead men crewing the Vociferous Carmichael.