The huge shadow lifted Goddard and Lane by the scruff of their greatcoats and dragged them out into the ice clearing. The toes of their boots made grooves in the snow. A third man came from behind the seracs, picked up Goddard’s and Lane’s shotguns, handed one to Golding, and kept the other for himself.
“Get out there,” said Richard Aylmore, gesturing with the barrels of the shotgun.
With a knife still held to his throat by the shadowy shape Crozier now recognized by smell as the slackard George Thompson, the captain stood and half stumbled, was half pushed, out of the serac shadows and toward the man waiting in the moonlight.
Magnus Manson dumped the bodies of Lane and Goddard in front of his master, Cornelius Hickey.
“Are they alive?” rasped Crozier. The captain’s arms were still pinned behind him by Thompson, but now that the muzzles of two shotguns were trained on him, the blade was no longer at his throat.
Hickey leaned over as if to inspect the men, and, with two smooth, easy moves, cut both their throats with a knife that had suddenly appeared in his hand.
“Not now they ain’t alive, Mr. High-and-Mighty Crozier,” said the caulker’s mate.
The blood pouring out onto the ice looked black in the moonlight.
“Is that the technique you used to slaughter John Irving?” asked Crozier, his voice shaking with fury.
“Fuck you,” said Hickey.
Crozier glared at Robert Golding. “I hope you got your thirty pieces of silver.”
Golding snickered.
“George,” said the caulker’s mate to Thompson, standing behind the captain, “Crozier carries a pistol in his right greatcoat pocket. Pull it out. Dickie, you bring the pistol back to me. If Crozier moves, kill him.”
Thompson removed the pistol while Aylmore kept his purloined shotgun aimed. Then Aylmore walked over, took the pistol and the box of cartridges Thompson had found, and backed away, shotgun raised again. He crossed the short moonlit space and handed the pistol to Hickey.
“All this natural misery,” Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. “Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?”
The caulker’s mate, Manson, Aylmore, Thompson, and Golding stared at the surgeon as if he had begun speaking Aramaic.
So did the only other living man there, Francis Crozier.
“What do you want, Hickey?” asked Crozier. “Other than more good men dead as meat for your trip?”
“I want you to shut the fuck up and then die slow and hard,” said Hickey.
Robert Golding laughed a demented boy’s laugh. The barrels of the shotgun he was holding beat a tattoo on the back of Goodsir’s neck.
“Mr. Hickey,” said Goodsir, “you do realize, do you not, that I shall never serve your purposes by dissecting my shipmates.”
Hickey showed his small teeth in the moonlight. “You will, surgeon. I guarantee you will. Or you’ll watch us cut your pieces off one at a time and then have us feed them to you.”
Goodsir said nothing.
“Tom Johnson and the others are going to find you,” Crozier said, never removing his gaze from Cornelius Hickey’s face.
The caulker’s mate laughed. “Johnson already found us, Crozier. Or rather, we found ’im.”
The caulker’s mate reached behind him and pulled a burlap bag from the snow. “What’d you always call Johnson in private, King Crozier? Your strong right arm? Here.” He tossed a naked and bloody right arm, severed just above the elbow, white bone gleaming, through the air and watched it land at Crozier’s feet.
Crozier did not look down at it. “You pathetic little smear of spittle. You are — and always have been — nothing.”
Hickey’s face contorted as if the moonlight were changing him into something non-human. His thin lips drew far back from his tiny teeth in a way that the others had seen only with scurvy victims in their last hours. His eyes showed something beyond madness, far beyond mere hatred.
“Magnus,” said Hickey, “strangle the captain. Slow.”
“Yes, Cornelius,” said Magnus Manson, and shuffled forward.
Goodsir tried to rush forward, but the boy, Golding, held him fast with one hand while holding the shotgun to his head with the other.
Crozier did not move a muscle as the giant lumbered toward him. When Manson’s shadow fell over both the captain and George Thompson holding him, Thompson himself flinched just a bit, Crozier sagged back, lunged forward, freed his left arm, and thrust his hand into the left pocket of his greatcoat.
Golding almost pulled the shotgun’s trigger, thus almost blowing Goodsir’s head off by accident, so startled was he as the captain’s coat pocket burst into flame and the muted double boom of an explosion rolled past them and echoed back from the seracs.
“Ouch,” said Magnus Manson, slowly raising his hands to his belly.
“God-damn it,” Crozier said calmly. He had inadvertently fired both barrels of a two-shot pistol.
“Magnus!” cried Hickey and rushed forward to the giant.
“I think the captain shot me, Cornelius,” said Manson. The big man sounded confused and a little bemused.
“Goodsir,” shouted Crozier amid the confusion. The captain whirled, kneed Thompson in the bollocks and broke free. “Run!”
The surgeon tried. He pulled, shoved, and almost won his freedom before the younger Golding tripped him, knocked him onto his belly, and set the full pressure of his knee on Goodsir’s back and the full force of two shotgun barrels against the back of Goodsir’s skull.
Crozier was loping for the seracs.
Hickey calmly seized a shotgun from Richard Aylmore, aimed, and fired both barrels.
The top of a serac splintered and fell at the same time that Crozier was thrown forward on his face, sliding on the ice and on a film of his own blood.
Hickey handed the shotgun back and unbuttoned Manson’s coats and waistcoasts, ripping open the big man’s shirts and filthy undershirt. “Bring the fucking surgeon over here,” he shouted at Golding.
“It don’t hurt much, Cornelius,” rumbled Magnus Manson. “Tickles, more like.”
Golding shoved, prodded, and dragged Goodsir over. The surgeon put on his glasses and inspected the twin wounds. “I’m not certain, but I don’t believe the small-caliber bullets penetrated Mr. Manson’s subcutaneous fat, much less his muscle layer. It’s little more than two minor punctures, I fear. Now may I go attend to Captain Crozier, Mr. Hickey?”
Hickey laughed.
“Cornelius!” shouted Aylmore.
Crozier, leaving a trail of blood and shredded outer clothing, had gotten to his knees and begun crawling toward the seracs and serac shadows. Now he painfully got to his feet. He staggered drunkenly toward the ice columns.
Golding giggled and raised his shotgun.
“No!” cried Hickey. He pulled Crozier’s big percussion-cap pistol from his coat pocket and took careful aim.
Twenty feet from the seracs, Crozier looked back over his shredded shoulder.
Hickey fired.
The bullet spun Crozier around and dropped him to his knees. His body sagged, but he flailed and thrust one hand down onto the ice in an attempt to rise.
Hickey took five steps forward and fired again.
Crozier was thrown backward and lay on his back with only his knees in the air.
Hickey took two more steps, aimed, and fired again. One of Crozier’s legs was knocked aside and down as the bullet tore through the knee or the muscle just below the knee. The captain made no sound.
“Cornelius, honey.” Magnus Manson’s voice had the tone of an injured child. “My stomach is starting to hurt.”
Hickey wheeled. “Goodsir, give him something for the pain.”