Chronicles of the Dragon Pirate (8 page)

“Belle-M’ere, I can’t just leave you...”

She shook me. “You can and you must. After he forced the seed down my throat and made me swallow, he told me of Draco Dominus’s plans for you, which he overheard Lord Marcus discuss with Master Gomez. This was his last chance for revenge.”

Anger blazed like a torch in my heart. “I’ll kill him, I swear it!”

“No! Tomas, listen to me: save yourself from the black wolves and remain free. Find someone who makes you happy, love her, and you will have a better revenge than killing him a dozen times.”

“Seth fled,” Mistress Margaret said, “but he cannot survive on his own for long. He will return, and when he does, my husband will make sure he hangs for what he has done. You have my word on it.” She reached beside her and handed me a dark brown leather satchel with a sling attached. “I have prepared you a travel bag. Inside it you will find clothes, your foster-mother’s oat-cakes for the journey, and her savings. You also have a curious gold coin with strange markings she said came from your real mother. Down by the dock there is a small boat waiting; I gave the ship’s mate money for your passage, as well as extra to remain there until you arrived. He will ferry you to the Dutch Flyte bound for Campeche.”

“Find Master Valencia and Rebekah,” Belle-M’ere urged. “Speak to Lord Tiberius. Draco Magistris will give you shelter.”

“I will...but, I can stay for a while. If you want.”

Mistress Margaret spoke in a firm voice. “I know not how long the boat will remain at the dock, especially since this horrid bombardment began.”

Belle-M’ere hugged me with a fierce grip before pushing me away. “Go, Tomas; fly like the wind and never look back.”

I took the travel bag from Mistress Margaret and walked toward the doorway, stopping beside the guard who’d heard the whole thing. I turned around. “I’ll light a candle for you every Sunday...at least when I can.”

Belle-M’ere smiled, perhaps for the last time. “I shall look down from paradise and see them burning.” She grimaced then, and turned to Mistress Margaret. “Help me finish the tea then pray send for the priest. I care not what anyone says: I am a good catholic, and I need to be shriven.”

“I will drag him here by his ear should he balk,” Mistress Margaret answered as she held the cup to Belle-M’ere’s lips. I said my final good-bye to her in my heart and slipped out the door.

The dock of St. Augustine stuck out into the ocean a good ship’s length or so, a small crane sitting idle in its center. The empty wooden stalls of the fish sellers, in a ragged row along the dock and the nearby shore, cast long shadows from the dragon-globes set on poles, arranged so the entire dock was illuminated. The seabirds had fled the noise and the ash coming from the fire now brightly burning to the north of us, but the waves rolling in continued their soft murmur as I crouched in the shadow of the furthest stall, the stink of rotted fish acrid in my nose.

Out to sea a short ways floated a Spanish galleon painted black with gold trim, her sails furled and her gun ports shut tight, with dragon-globes of expensive blue-colored glass hung on the masts or carried like lanterns by the men on her deck. Tied at the pier was her jolly boat, a small craft seating no more than twelve men and powered by oars, the boat black as her mother ship. Another jolly boat was tied next to it, this one of weathered wood. Four soldiers wearing snarling red wolf breastplates were standing on the dock with their muskets grounded, while their leader, wearing the silver wolf, argued with an older sailor who had half a dozen sailors, wearing white trousers and striped shirts, standing behind him. The older sailor, a large framed man with a salt and pepper beard, was practically shouting. “You’ve no right to do this; we’re here on legitimate business.”

“I know your business, smuggler,” the silver wolf soldier snarled back, “and be glad I’m in a hurry or you’d find it at a permanent end.” He pointed toward the south. “Get back in your boat and push off.”

The older sailor gave the soldier a dark look. “We’ll go, but I warn you: someday, there’ll be a reckoning.”

The silver wolf sailor merely laughed. “A reckoning? By who, scum like you that...”

Three black figures dropped out of the night sky. They hit the wood planks with a bang, and any cry of alarm I made was drowned out by the sailor’s cries as the soldiers gave a start, but then went stone still. They were Artifact golems, designed to look like women in full plate armor, their joints fully articulated but their eyes empty sockets in open faced helms. They had short wings which, I’d been told by Alfonzo, were fixed in place to give the air-golem that transported it a place to hold onto. One of the golems grabbed the silver wolf soldier by the throat while the other two held an Artifact blunderbuss in each hand, each one trained on the four soldiers. The sailors were ignored.

The silver wolf soldier didn’t struggle. “What’s the meaning of this?”

“The meaning,” the golem said without moving her articulated mouth, and I realized with a start the voice was Shadow-viper’s, “is that Captain Cholula is in a very foul mood.”

An expression of fear crossed the soldier’s face before he got control of himself. “It was a miscalculation on Elder Sebastian’s part.”

“Miscalculation? The explosive shells followed the captain halfway back to her ship. Karl was badly injured, but Red-dog’s an excellent healer and the mercenary should be on his feet in a few days. This is fortunate for you...because if he’d died, we would already be storming your ship, and you five would be running for your lives.”

One of the red wolf soldiers, a man with a large gap in his teeth, hissed, “Sir Alberto, it’s the Sea-Witch!”

I looked beyond them to where the galleon lay anchored. Close by, a black warship with sleek lines and no lights lit had snuck in behind her and sat in perfect position with the gun ports open and her cannons out. The silver wolf soldier turned his head in the golem’s grip, and swore, “Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!”

Shadow-viper sounded amused. “There will be if Sebastian doesn’t recall you soon. She wants the boy secured, and she’s willing to let Sebastian’s little...miscalculation, be forgiven, if he will turn tail and run for home.”

“Elder Sebastian’s no coward.”

“Truly? In any event, I fear right now he has little choice. As Cholula likes to say, ‘when you have them by their naughty bits, men will dance to the tune you choose’.” The older sailor gave a snort of laughter, and the golem rotated its head in a way no mortal knight could’ve done. “It would seem there’s someone with spirit here. What’s your name?”

The sailor’s humor evaporated like a tidal pool on a hot day. “It’s Mr. Bierson, mistress. I’m first mate on the merchantman, the ‘Queen Anne’s Regret’.”

Shadow-viper’s voice sounded amused. “Mistress? I’m not called that very often. Come, Mr. Bierson, let’s play a game while we’re waiting for Sebastian to decide what to do.”

Mr. Bierson’s expression became wary. “What sort of game, mistress?”

The mouth of the woman-golem clicked as it opened wide. “You’re going to stick your finger in my mouth. Then I’m going to ask you questions, and if you answer them truthfully then you keep the finger. If you don’t,” and the mouth snapped shut, “then I keep the finger.”

Mr. Bierson began to sweat as he shook his head. “Mistress, begging your pardon, but I saw blue flames inside your mouth, and I don’t want to be sticking my finger into something that’s going to burn.”

“It’s ghost-fire,” Shadow-viper said with an amused chuckle. “It can’t hurt you; it’s what we use to animate golems. But it also animates dead flesh, so if you lie to me and I take your finger, when I pull it back out of my mouth it’ll writhe like a worm for a little while. It’s funny what unnerves humans; I’ve seen brave men who’d never break, cry like babes when their dead, rotted, body parts we cut off came after them.”

Mr. Bierson stared at the golem in horror, as Sir Alberto said, “You don’t have to play her game. Dragon-ghosts will never hurt a man out of spite, only to protect her Dragon or on the Dragon’s orders. There’s no way she could’ve given this viper any instructions concerning you, so you don’t have to play.”

“He’s right,” Shadow-viper said. “But as I told him, Captain Cholula is in a very foul mood. So, when I tell her you wouldn’t play my little game, she will probably board your ship when we catch up to her, and liberate your cargo.”

Mr. Bierson’s hands balled into fists. “You’ll find us no easy meat, merchant or no.”

Shadow-viper chuckled. “Dogs pitting themselves against wolves is always amusing. But her mood is especially foul, and she’s just as likely to drop a ghost-shell on your deck and let your dead do the work for us.”

“What foul witchery are you speaking of?”

Sir Alberto answered him. “Ghost-shells are Artifact balls fired out of a mortar. They’re made of transmuted wood, so they’re light, and filled with scraps of metal and ghost-fire, with an outer layer of solid quickfire and a slightly strengthened dragon-ghost to make it all work. You activate it by speaking the dragon-ghost’s name inscribed on the ball, and when the mortar’s fired the dragon-ghost uses her strength to create an air-golem to guide the shell, which explodes when the solid quickfire inside the shell impacts something solid, like the deck of a ship. The metal pieces kill a number of men and the ghost-fire, directed by the now un-strengthened dragon-ghost, animates the dead.” He smiled at Mr. Bierson’s horrified expression. “That’s right: the dead rise up and fight the living.”

“Not very well,” one of the red wolf soldiers said. “The French used them against us at the siege of Amiens, but as long as you keep your head and don’t panic, you can either hack them apart or wait for the ghost-fire to burn itself out. And once it does, the dead stay dead.”

“The dragon-ghost animates these dead men?”

“We find animating corpses extremely distasteful,” Shadow-viper said. “But unlike an Artifact, a newly killed human only needs a push in the right direction, shall we say.”

Suddenly Mr. Bierson looked uncomfortable. “The captain recently installed a bronze mortar on the stern of the Queen Anne.”

“You’re first mate to a fool then,” Sir Alberto said. “Ghost-shells are devilishly tricky, unless you know what you’re doing. Which doesn’t stop merchants from spending good coin on them,” he added.

Shadow-viper opened the mouth of the woman-golem. “So, Mr. Bierson...care to play?”

Mr. Bierson looked back at the other sailors, who looked as close to terrified as I’d ever seen men look. “I’ll play, mistress,” he said as he turned back towards her, walking over to where the golem still had its hand around Sir Alberto’s throat. Mr. Bierson gingerly put the little finger of his left hand in the golem’s mouth.

Shadow-viper’s voice chuckled. “Smart move, Mr. Bierson. Have you seen the boy known as Tomas Rios?”

Mr. Bierson hesitated before answering. “I don’t know what the boy looks like, but no one claiming to be him has shown up on the dock looking for us. His passage aboard the Queen Anne was paid by the wife of the royal governor’s assistant.”

“Interesting...has anyone else asked for him?”

His gaze darted downward, towards the planks of the dock. “Just a native boy from the village your people shelled. He ran and hid under the dock when the galleon was sighted.”

“Remove your finger and see if the native boy is still there, and if anyone else has joined him.” Mr. Bierson took his finger out of the golem’s mouth and walked along the row of wooden shacks until he reached the one I was hiding behind. I moved to the deepest spot of shadow I could find as he passed, his boots crunching sea shells under his heels as he reached the narrow trail leading under the dock and started down.

Time seemed to crawl as I heard his footsteps walk down the path. A moment later my heart leapt in my chest as the voice of my friend Dancing Bear began cursing him in the Timucua language, and Mr. Bierson ran back up the trail. As he passed I resumed my former vantage point, in time to see him put his little finger back in the golem’s mouth. “The native boy is alone. If I may add something, which I didn’t have the opportunity to say to the gentleman you’re holding, the lady who paid Tomas Rios’s passage said his grandfather has been murdered and his mother is sick...so Tomas may still be with them.”

The golem suddenly cocked its head. Then Shadow-viper released Sir Alberto’s throat as her voice said, “Mr. Bierson, you’ve won the game. Keep your finger.” He snatched his finger from the golem’s mouth as she said to Sir Alberto, “Look to your ship, sir.”

Gazing across the water I saw a man on the high stern waving a red lantern back and forth. “That’s the recall,” Sir Alberto said to his men. The other two golems raised their weapons and the soldiers went with haste to their jolly boat, Sir Alberto stopping to speak with Shadow-viper. “When Sebastian is made the Abbott, he won’t forget what Captain Cholula did to him tonight.”

“Karl thinks the order will tear itself apart when Sebastian’s made the Abbott,” Shadow-viper replied. “Personally, I hope it does. Good hunting, Alberto.”

Sir Alberto opened his mouth, but then shut it and looked at Mr. Bierson, who’d rejoined the other sailors. “A word of advice: if your captain tries to launch a ghost-ball with blue fire playing on the outside, it means it’s cracked. Cracked ghost-balls often get sold to unsuspecting merchants by the order.”