"Shiver," intoned the crew. "The ship of bone."
As they spoke, the Denizen with the lantern shuttered it right down to the merest glimmer, and everybody else looked out at the sea all around.
Sunscorch ran his tongue over his remaining teeth and kept wiping his head. His crew watched him intently, till he put away his handkerchief and clapped his hat back on.
"Listen up," he whispered. "Seeing as we're probably dead or headed for the slave-chain anyway, we might as well see what's below. Lizard? Where's Lizard?"
"Here," came a whisper from the water. "There's a chest all right, a big one, sitting pretty as you please atop a spire of rock, ten fathom down."
"The chain?"
"Screwed to the rock, not to the chest."
"Let's be having that chest, then," whispered Sunscorch. "Bones, you and Bottle back oars. Everyone else, hands on the line. You, too, Arth."
Arthur joined the others to grab hold of the rope. At Sunscorch's hoarsely whispered commands, they all hauled together.
"Heave away! Hold on! Heave cheerily! Hold on! Heave away! Hold! One more!"
At the last command, a dripping chest as long as Arthur was tall and as high as his waist scraped over the gunwale and was manhandled into the boat. As soon as it was settled, there was a mad dash to the oars. With Sunscorch whispering more commands and the rowers very gently dipping their oars, the boat moved ahead and then turned towards the lights of the Moth.
"Hope we get back to the ship in time so as we can all die together," whispered the Denizen on the oar next to Arthur. "It'd be better that way."
"What makes you so sure we're going to die?" asked Arthur. "Don't be so pessimistic."
"Feverfew never leaves any survivors," whispered another Denizen. "He slaves 'em or kills 'em. Either way they're gone for good. He's got strange powers. A Sorcerer of Nothing."
"He'll torture you first, though," added one of the women, with a grin that showed her teeth were filed to points. "You touched the buoy. You've got the Red Hand that shows you tried to steal from Feverfew."
"Quiet!" instructed Sunscorch. "Row quiet, and listen!"
Arthur cupped a hand to his ear and leaned over the side. But all he could hear was the harsh breathing of the Denizens and the soft, regular swoosh and tinkle of the oars dipping in and out of the water.
"What are we listening for?" Arthur asked after a while.
"Anything we don't want to hear," said Sunscorch, as he looked back over the stern. Without turning around, he added, "Shutter that lantern, Yeo."
"It is shuttered," replied Yeo. "One of the moons is rising. Feverfew will see us miles away."
"No point being quiet, then," said Sunscorch.
Arthur looked where the mate pointed. Sure enough, a slim blue-tinged moon was rising up on the horizon. It wasn't very big and it didn't look all that far away — a few tens of miles, not hundreds of thousands — but it was bright.
The blue moon rose quickly and rather jerkily, as if it was on a clockwork track that needed oiling. By its light Arthur could easily see the Moth, wallowing nearby. But he could also see something else, far away on the horizon. Something that glinted in the moonlight. A reflection from a telescope lens, atop a thin dark smudge that must be a mast.
Sunscorch saw it too.
"Row, you dogs!" roared the Second Mate. "Row for your miserable lives!"
Five
THEIR ARRIVAL ABOARD the Moth resembled a panicked evacuation more than an orderly boarding. The boat was abandoned as most of the Denizens clawed their way up the side ladder or the untidy mess of netting that hung along the Moth's yellow-painted hull, all of them shouting unhelpful things like "Feverfew!" and "Shiver!" and "We're doomed!"
Sunscorch managed to drag several Denizens back and get them to take the line from the chest. But even he wasn't able to get the crew to do anything about retrieving the boat. As it began to drift away, he jumped to the ship's side himself, reaching back to help Arthur get hold of the netting.
"Never lost salvage nor a passenger," he muttered. "No thanks to the scum of the sea I have to sail with. Mister Concort! Mister Concort! There's a boat adrift!
"Concort's the First Mate," he confided to Arthur as they climbed the side. "Amiable, but hen-witted. Like most of this lot he was with the Moth when it was a counting house. Chief Clerk. You'd think after several thousand years at sea he'd have learned... but I'm misspeaking meself. Up you go!"
Arthur was pushed up and over the rail. He fell onto the deck, unable to get his bad leg in place in time. Before he could get up himself, Sunscorch gripped him under each elbow and yanked him upright, shouting at the same time.
"Ichabod! Ichabod! Take our passenger to the Captain! And get him a blanket!"
A thin, non-tattooed Denizen neatly dressed in a blue waistcoat and an almost white shirt stepped out of the throng of panicking sailors and bowed slightly to Arthur. He was thinner than most of the other Denizens, and moved very precisely, as if he was following some mysterious dance pattern in his head.
"Please step this way," he said, doing an about-turn that was almost a pirouette and would have looked more in keeping on a stage than on the shifting deck of a ship.
Arthur obediently followed the Denizen, who was presumably Ichabod. Behind him, Sunscorch was yelling and slapping the backs of heads.
"Port watch aloft! Prepare to make sail! Starboard watch to the guns and boarding stations!"
"Very noisy, these sailors," said Ichabod. "Mind your head."
The Denizen ducked as he stepped through a narrow doorway. Though Arthur was considerably shorter, he had to bend his head down too. They were in a short, dark, narrow corridor with a very low ceiling.
"Aren't you a sailor?" asked Arthur.
"I'm the Captain's Steward," replied Ichabod severely. "I was his gentleman's gentleman when we were ashore."
"His what?"
"What is sometimes called a valet," replied Ichabod as he opened the door at the other end, only a few yards away. The Denizen stepped through, with Arthur at his heels.
The room beyond the door was not what Arthur expected. It was far too big to be inside the ship, for a start: a huge, whitewashed space at least eighty feet long and sixty feet wide, with a decorated plaster ceiling twenty feet above, complete with a fifty-candle chandelier of cut crystal in the middle.
There was a mahogany desk right in the middle of the room with a green-shaded gas lantern on it, and a long row of glass-topped display cases all along one wall, each illuminated by its own gently hissing gaslight. In the far corner, there was a curtained four-poster bed with a blanket box at its foot, a standing screen painted with a nautical scene, and a large oak-panelled wardrobe with mirrored doors.
It was also absolutely quiet and completely stable. All the noise of the crew and the sea had vanished as soon as the door was shut behind Arthur, as had the constant roll and sway of the deck.
"How —"
Ichabod knew what Arthur was asking before the boy even got the question out.
"This is one of the original rooms. When the Deluge came and we had to turn the counting house into a ship, this room refused to transform to something more useful, like a gun deck. Eventually Doctor Scamandros managed to connect it to the aft passageway, but it isn't really in the ship."
"Where is it, then?"
"We're not entirely sure. Probably not where it used to be, since the old counting house site is well submerged. The Captain thinks that this room must have been personally supervised by the Architect, and retained some of Her virtue. It lies within the House, that's for sure, not out in the Realms."
"You're not worried that it might get cut off from the ship?" asked Arthur as they walked over to the bed. The curtains were drawn and Arthur could hear snoring behind them. Not horrendous "I can't bear to hear it" snoring, but occasional drawn-out snorts and wheezes.