Smith hadn’t heard the shot, but he caught the brief glint of moonlight on the stone ball as it came in fast and low, straight for the glowing point of the lordling’s smoking tube. Without thinking, he dropped and yanked Lord Ermenwyr’s feet out from under him. Lord Ermenwyr fell, the ball shot past. It smashed into the nearest of the boiler domes, where it stuck. The dome crumpled along one riveted seam and began to scream shrilly, as steam jetted forth.
“Those bastards!” Lord Ermenwyr gasped. “That could have been me!”
“It was meant to be,” said Smith. “But please don’t call them names when they board us, all right? We might get out of this alive.”
“They’re not boarding us,” said Lord Ermenwyr, scrambling to his hands and knees. “I defy them!”
“Notice how we’re slowing down?” said Smith. “See the steam escaping from the boiler? It’s like, er, blood. It’s the vital fluid that makes the clockwork oarsmen row. And, since it’s leaking out—”
“Dead meat!” bellowed Crish, wrenching the ball loose. He turned and shot-putted it straight into the bows of the oncoming warship, where it did a lot of damage, to judge from the hoarse screaming that followed.
“This isn’t helping—” groaned Smith.
“I’ll show them dead meat,” said Lord Ermenwyr, in a voice that made Smith’s blood run cold. He looked up to see that the lordling had risen, and had thrown off the glamour that normally disguised him. His pallor gleamed under the moon; he seemed an edged weapon, a horrible surprise, and there was something corpselike and relentless in the stare he turned on the warship.
He leaned sidelong over the rail and reached a hand toward the water. Smith’s eyes blurred, he winced and blinked and turned his face away: for Lord Ermenwyr was warping size and distance, somehow, effortlessly dipping his hand in the moon-gleaming sea though it lay far below his arm’s reach, swirling the water idly, as though the sea were no more than a basin.
He said something that hurt Smith’s ears. He called. He persuaded. Smith found himself compelled to look back and saw a light rising under the waves. The warship was perilously close, pistol bolts were hissing across the short space of water that they had not crossed, thudding and clattering home. The lordling ignored the bolts, though he turned his head slightly as the shadow of the bow loomed black in the moonlight. Smiling, he raised his hand full of water, and the light under the waves came closer upward, and grew brighter. He spoke a Word.
Something emerged from the water and kissed the lordling’s hand, and that was all Smith registered before his brain refused to accept the geometry of what he saw. But it was bright, glowing to outshine the moon with the green phosphorescence of the depths, and it had a sweetish scent, and it made a high fizzing kind of sound that might have been speech. Smith trembled, felt a seizure beginning, and shut his eyes tightly.
But he could hear the screaming on the other ship.
He heard the wrenching and snapping of wood, too, and the full-throated and triumphant howling of Cutt, Crish, Stabb, and Strangel. He heard Willowspear’s footsteps swift on the companionway, and his pleading voice. Smith swallowed twice before he was able to mutter; “Have mercy on them, have mercy on them, o gods…”
The shouting was going on and on. There was a bubbling, a rush of air and displaced water. There was still shouting. The smell diminished, the bubbling too, but the shouting continued.
Smith opened his eyes and looked full into the moon. For a moment he glimpsed the double image of a towering shape below it that dwindled, solidified, patted its mundane form about it like a garment, and was only Lord Ermenwyr after all. Smith scrambled to his knees and peered over the railing.
The warship was still there, though falling astern and foundering. Its bowsprit with the dragon figurehead, in fact much of its forecastle, was missing. Boats were being flung over and men flung themselves too, swimming desperately to get free of the wreck and of the brightness under the water.
But the bright thing sank, and diminished, and a moment later there was no light but the moon and the now-distant lanterns of the ship, though they were going out one by one. No clattering any more, of any kind, for the first time in hours. Smith’s ears rang in the silence.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Oh, you really don’t want to know,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “They broke my toy, so I broke theirs.”
A wind came across the sea and bellied out their sails. The silence filled gradually with the long-familiar creaking of the ship under way. Lord Ermenwyr took up his smoking tube again and relit it, shielding it against the wind with both hands. Smith steadied his trembling legs, got to his feet.
“Thank you,” he said, “for not having them all killed.”
“Well, aren’t you the magnanimous soul?” said Lord Ermenwyr, regarding him askance. “I couldn’t see myself facing Mother again if I’d given them what they deserved. Her stare of reproach could take out a whole fleet of warships.”
“My lord, we must go back and rescue them,” said Willowspear.
“No!” Lord Ermenwyr bared his teeth. “What do you think I am, a nice man? It won’t do them any harm to paddle across the briny deep looking fearfully over their shoulders for a while, expecting any moment some unspeakable creature to rear up out of the primordial oozy depths and … and … Oh, bugger all, I’m getting seasick again. Help me to my cabin, Willowspear. I want my fix, and I need to lie down.”
Willowspear glowered at him.
“I’m doing this for your Mother’s sake,” he said, and helped Lord Ermenwyr to the companionway.
“Fine. Smith, you can stay up here and mind the steering-wheel thing. Boys, stand guard. Perhaps you can get Smith to teach you how to belay the anchor or some other terribly nautical business…”
His voice retreated belowdecks.
Smith staggered to the wheel and clung there, breathing deeply. Distant on the headland were the tiny yellow lights of a village. There was a fair wind; the stars were washed out by light, the night sky washed to a soft slate-blue, and the moon rode tranquil above the wide water. If anything unwholesome traveled below, it kept to its deeps and troubled the air no more.
He brought his gaze back to the deck, and met eight red lights in a line. No; they were four pairs of eyes. Cutt, Crish, Stabb, and Strangel were watching him, unblinking as towers.
“What is an anchor, Child of the Sun?” asked Strangel.
What the hell, thought Smith.
“All right,” he said. “You’re going to learn to crew this ship. Understand?”
The demons looked at one another uncertainly.
Smith woke on deck in the morning, sprawled in a coil of hawser, and—sitting up—felt every year of his life in the muscles of his lower back. Gritting his teeth, he stood and surveyed the deserted bay wherein the Kingfisher’s Nest lay anchored. It had seemed like a safe harbor by moonlight; he was gratified to see no other sail and a clear sky without cloud.
“Child of the Sun.”
He turned his head (feeling a distinct grinding in his neck) and saw the four demons standing motionless by the rail, watching him hopefully.
“Are we to pull up the anchor now?”
Smith ran his hands over his stubbly face. “Not yet,” he said. “See all these pistol bolts sticking in things? Pull ’em all out and collect ’em in a bucket. Find a wood plane and some putty and get rid of the splinters and the holes, all right? And I’ll go see if I can find a wrench so I can start taking the boiler dome apart.”
The demons looked at one another.