William rowed away in silence, dipping along quietly but furiously toward the glow that promised some facsimile of civilization. They kept the lights out, trusting to fate not to send them to the bottom of that strangely populated sea. But apparently the shallow water was behind them. Rounding, a rock wall in almost complete darkness, they could see, dead ahead and not two hundred yards distant, a long, dim island, stretching away into nothing.
William rowed quickly back into the shadows, then sculled forward, just far enough beyond the wall of black granite to have a look ahead. Off a dock at the foot of the island were three vessels: what appeared to be Chinese junks but with four long oars dangling from either side. They rode low in the water and had a tremendously high stern with a wide rudder. On the side of each, visible even in the murky half light of the subterranean cavern, was an ornately painted goldfish, as if the three strange craft were part of a flotilla, a private navy. Two of the boats were dark and abandoned. One, right at the, tip of the dock, had a light aglow in the cabin, an oil lamp showing clearly in the window.
Fires burned on the island, throwing little domes of orange light into the vaulted darkness. Way off in the distance, far beyond the flow of the island fires, shone dozens of pinpoints of winking flame, like the eyes of night creatures in a dense forest or stars glimmering in a half clouded sky.
William wondered at first about the peculiarity of the island, its almost arctic barrenness, but quickly saw that there could be no vegetation on it, that nothing would grow in the lightless world. A scattering of billowy tents rose along a hill on the near shore. Beyond, some quarter mile farther down the rocky beach, stood a shantytown of strange buildings patched together from the wrecks of ships, complete with jutting masts and tangled rigging, and from debris hauled down, quite possibly, from the sewers. The kaleidoscopic hovels, all tilting against one another, seemed to leap and dance in the light of an immense fire burning on a hill above them. There wasn’t a person to be seen, either on the boats or on the island, and it occurred to William as he stared fascinated at the impossible scene, that for the sewer dwellers, distinctions between night and day would be perfunctory, purely practical. Perhaps whoever lived on the island — pirates, opium smugglers — were asleep. They certainly weren’t expecting him to come rowing up in a boat borrowed from William Ashbless.
To the right was nothing but more rock, more beetling cliffs rising into nothingness, the mottled stone just visible in the artificial twilight. If they rowed silently and slowly along the base of those cliffs, keeping out of rocky shallows, to a point beyond the glow of the bonfire that lit the strange shantytown, they could go ashore and slip back down the island unseen, keeping to the shadows, and search for Giles Peach. William hadn’t any doubt they’d find him there. Alt signs pointed that way: the proximity to Frosticos’ cellar, the presence of William Ashbless, the log of Captain Pince Nez that suggested Basil Peach’s familiarity with the subterranean ocean.
But there was more than that. There was something in the atmosphere, the thin mist of strange enchantment, the certainty that they rowed a boat along the edge of a dark and unfathomable mystery. Both of them could taste it on the silent air — the foggy lace veil of something impending, waiting.
Twenty minutes later the boat scrunched up onto a dark beach. They hauled it quickly up behind a hillock of stone. William wished he had his flashlight, not so much to see with as to club people insensible. They had no weapons at all beyond heaps and heaps of rock, two uselessly long oars, and William’s sharp but foolishly tiny penknife. They’d trust to stealth. Stealth and wits, those were the tickets. If Giles were there, as he surely must be, they’d bring him home alive or be taken in the attempt.
William was surprised at himself for not reacting in cowering horror at the idea of falling once again into the clutches of Hilario Frosticos. He smiled grimly at his change of heart, then thought at once of Jim falling into those same clutches. He pushed the thought out of his mind. He wouldn’t give a nickel for the future anyway if Pinion’s machine set out on its voyage with Giles at the helm.
They picked their way from rock to rock across the slowly brightening landscape until, some fifty feet from the edge of the closest of the hovels, they stopped. Nothing stirred. A thin white cloud of drifting smoke, lying in the slack air like a materializing genie, floated from a glassless window, and beyond, within the shadows of the room, the red coal of a lit pipe alternately glowed and dimmed. The idea of stumbling into every tent and hovel inquiring after Giles struck William as even more foolish than futile. If he were Frosticos, he’d keep Giles aboard ship, ready to cast loose at the first sign of trouble; although, fortunately, trouble would have to seem a distant and unlikely thing to them in such surroundings.
The log of Pince Nez, with its talk of opium smuggling, made the frozen languid smoke — still undisturbed, but joined by a second hovering ghost — suspicious. Opium couldn’t so soon have become one of Giles’ vices, though Frosticos could conceivably have begun to persuade him along those lines. More likely, the henchmen of Han Koi inhabited the shantytown, either asleep or practicing their excesses.
They’d take a chance, thought William, and make for the boats. They circled round the back of the fire, untended and burning low. The entire system of caverns had to have an opening on the ocean — perhaps beneath the honeycomb of docks and canneries that made up old Venice and were the destination of the mysterious steamer trunk, for the fire was a heap of driftwood — of the gray trunks of barkless trees; the broken, listing cabin of an old fishing boat; and the remains of weather-wrecked furniture: half an upside down table, an old stuffed chair reduced to a skeleton frame and a spiral of rusted springs. All of it, surely, couldn’t have been hauled through the sewers and pitched down the stone stairs.
The dock, no more than a collage of debris that had escaped the fires, had crumbled until it seemed to stagger and tilt into the water like a collapsing drunkard. Every third or forth board was broken and hanging, or had fallen altogether into the sea, doubtless hauled away by the water dwellers to shore up a submarine hovel. It was in the second of the three junks that they’d noticed the lamp. But in the first, William could see, burned another, low and orange. He pulled out his pocket knife, slipped his thumb lightly across the thin blade, signaled to Jim, and crept forward, ready to spring for a tethered rowboat and cut it loose at the sound of pursuit. He was as desperate as they come — not to be trifled with. Slippery as a squid, as Professor Latzarel would put it. If he was tested, he damn well wouldn’t be found wanting. Once on the water and skimming toward the stairs, he could easily outdistance the junks. He’d be halfway to safety by the time they could summon enough opium-laced thugs to man the oars. And with a bit of wit, it would be easier than that.
The first of the junks floated evenly, tied with slack line fore and aft. Close on, it was oddly and ornately carved, the bulwark wrapping round the stern in a succession of humped, gilt fish, each biting the tail of the one before it an unbroken circle around the low deck. The square sail canted obliquely across slanted bamboo, and was tattooed, again with the figure of a fish, a tri-colored koi, bent at the middle, impossibly lacy dorsal and tail fins floating over and beyond it as if buoyed up by the still waters of an aquarium.
It struck William suddenly that the sail would look startling hanging from the living room wall. Perhaps if all went well, if he were as furtive and quick as the William Hastings who’d slipped from the grasp of the mob in the sewers, he’d cut the tiling loose, roll it along its yardarm and take it along. He’d spring from the manhole on Stickley Street with the sail and Giles both. Edward’s eyes would shoot open.