Roque plonked his jerez on the table and Luka immediately helped himself.

  ‘Living here in terror of the Butcher,’ Luka mumbled darkly. ‘Living here in living terror of the monster out there. They put their all into scaring it off when it next came. The last of their oil, the last of their shot. They painted their skins black and skulled, and made the noise of savages, all in the desperate hope that it would drive the evil out. But the evil was us, and we killed them anyway.’

  ‘Leave him,’ Roque whispered to Sesto. ‘In this black mood, he’s a danger even to himself.’

  But there was a noise from outside the hut that roused Luka before the pair could slip away.

  Saint Bones and Garcia Garza had appeared, dragging with them a man they had found hiding in the woods. The last survivor of the battle had died of bloodlet before he had been able to talk.

  ‘Sigmar have mercy on me!’ the man protested. He was a scruffy churchman from the Empire, his skin tanned by many years spreading the true word under a heathen southern sun.

  ‘Sigmar can save his mercy,’ Luka told him. ‘I’ll not harm you.’

  ‘You are pirates!’

  ‘Not at all. We are privateers, and we carry a letter of marque and reprisal to prove it.’

  ‘But you… you slaughtered and you–’

  ‘We were attacked, sir. By you and your fellows. We would have given quarter had we known.’

  The man bowed his head and started on a prayer to Sigmar that seemed to Sesto to run in time to the beat of the crickets.

  ‘Tell me of the Butcher Ship,’ said Luka.

  ‘It is our bane. It comes upon us at each new moon and demands all we have.’

  That story again, four times heard now.

  ‘Where does it go?’

  ‘Go?’

  ‘Go, from here?’

  ‘South, and then we see it gybing east. They say it lurks in a cove within the Labyrinth.’

  ‘Does it now? Which cove?’

  ‘Some say Angel’s Bar, others the Greenwater Sound.’

  ‘Thank you, father,’ Luka said. ‘You may go free, and tell your brethren here that none of my men will harm them. This I make as a pledge to your god, Sigmar, so he might claim my poor, barbarian soul should I break it.’

  The churchman got up, and started away.

  ‘Father? My good father! One last thing…’

  At the edge of the firelight, the man froze, fearing the very cruellest of pirate tricks.

  ‘Father… What say you are the dimensions and character of the Butcher Ship?’ asked Luka.

  The balding, bronzed Empire man turned back slowly. ‘It… it has three masts. A great barque of three hundred and fifty paces, with sixty cannon in two gun decks. Its hull and sails are red as blood. Green fire burns where it should have a figurehead. The men who crew it are not men, they are night-beasts.’

  ‘I see. Go in peace, father.’

  Gratefully, the man disappeared into the night.

  ‘The Kymera?’ Roque asked.

  ‘It fits the description. The Kymera is a great barque, two hundred and twenty paces, and it mounts forty guns. But the churchman there was no mariner. A fearful man makes monsters of the truth. Just look at Belissi.’

  Some of the Reivers gathered around laughed at this.

  ‘Mother mine!’ mocked Fanciman, querulously.

  ‘So?’ Roque asked.

  ‘Be it the Kymera or some other bastard barque, we cut our way down into the Labyrinth to war with it. One thing’s for sure, we’ll not find it in Greenwater Sound.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Sesto.

  Luka tapped the side of his nose with a long finger. ‘Old habits, old skills, Sesto. We’re hunting prey that’s threading the teeth. Greenwater Sound bottoms out at two fathoms. No barque, be it three hundred and fifty paces or two hundred and twenty, could find harbour there. Angel’s Bar, however, has no floor any man has ever managed to leadline.’

  It was dark still as they rode back out to the ships. They left the miserable bonfire at the beach end blazing into the cold tropical night.

  Before dawn, a fair wind came up, fresh and true, and the Rumour and its consort turned south and east, deeper into the archipelago.

  XV

  It seemed as if they might run out of sea. So Sesto thought on the second day out from Santa Bernadette. The islands, cased with fuming green foliage, were more densely packed here than ever before. The two ships edged their way down channel throats and narrow runs, luxuriant green jungle spilling down like emerald cliffs to either side. Bright macaws and parrots darted from island to island overhead, and the Rumour and its consort were wont to glide through passages fraught with mist. The water was bright turquoise, speaking of a bottom perilously close to the ship’s keel. This was the Labyrinth, a dense maze of islands that buffered the Estalian Littoral.

  In bays swathed by rainforest, they anchored and rested. Vento and Largo had to chase chattering monkeys off the rigging, which they had mistaken for trees. Fahd’s speciality became monkey stew. Each dawn, they had to mop the decks and rails clear of the dew left by the curling dawn fog. Blades rusted quickly in this place, and guns choked and plugged. Roque kept drill after drill running to maintain the battle readiness of Silvaro’s company.

  On the fourth day, the Rumour led the Safire down a reef channel and around a bay, beneath overhanging banks of beard-moss and draping bougainvillea, towards a fathomless cove named after angels.

  It was early and there was scant wind, so the going was slow. At the head of an inlet that Silvaro said led straight out into Angel’s Bar, they dropped anchor, and Casaudor was sent out in a longboat to spy around the inlet’s turn.

  ‘Why do we wait?’ Sesto asked.

  ‘No wind, so tell,’ replied Benuto. ‘If we force a fight, we’ll want the wind with us, to press our advantage of speed.’

  On the mid-decks below them, Roque was bringing out the armsmen now, setting pavis and targettes along the rail on the starboard side-rests. On the slopes of the hull, gun ports were being hooked open. Sesto could hear Sheerglas’s command whistle shrilling from the gun deck as he ordered up his pieces. The Rumour was rolling up its sleeves for a fight.

  Casaudor returned out of the early morning mist. He stood in the prow of the longboat, the six oars behind him slowly beating the sap-green water, and sprang up the side as soon as he was close enough to take hold of a rope.

  ‘Is it there?’ asked Silvaro.

  Casaudor nodded. ‘Like a dream in the mist. It lies at anchor, massively dark of shape and sail. A green fire smokes at its prow.’

  ‘The Butcher Ship?’

  ‘I know not, but it looks the very devil of a thing. And if it is the Butcher, then the Butcher is not the Kymera after all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Casaudor looked grim and spat out of the side of his mouth for good fortune. ‘The old churchman was not exaggerating. This monster is three hundred and fifty paces from stem to stern, and along its double gun decks nest sixty guns.’

  The ominous news spread. Many fully expected Silvaro to turn them around and quit such a confrontation, especially if this was not the prize they were after. Indeed, on the Safire, Silke began to make preparations to come about, until Silvaro signalled him otherwise.

  ‘If we get wind, we’ll go in at him,’ Silvaro told his senior men. Several muttered oaths. ‘Oh, he’s a big bastard, by Casaudor’s account, but we are two, and we are quick, and we have surprise on our side. Besides, I have to know. If this is the Butcher Ship, I have to know. And for the soul of Reyno, if no other, I have to strike.’

  Roque nodded grimly. Casaudor too assented. The bo’sun in his crimson coat seemed too concerned with the mechanics of the fight to bother over the outcome.

  Sesto sensed there was another reason behind Silvaro’s decision. The Reiver lord wanted vengeance for the blood he had been forced to spill on the beach of Santa Bernadette.

  A strong easterly rose quite suddenly an hour after Casaudor’s return, and though they were close-reached by it, Silvaro made use of it at once. According to the first mate’s report, the enemy lay with its head to the wind.

  The blow lifted the mist away from the inlet like a drawn curtain, and the tree-covered spits were revealed on either side, like barricades of jungle. Half-sheeted, the Rumour stole down the inlet’s sound, and the Safire spurred in, about forty lengths back on the starboard quarter. Both of the Rumour’s armed watches gathered at the starboard rail, pikes ready at the shield wall, and the calivermen took their places. Bottles were handed around and swigs taken.

  Unlike some rogue crews, the Reivers would not go into battle drunk and roaring, but it was custom to toast for success and fortify nerves, and drink away the curse of the sea daemon. Sesto accepted a drink from a bottle as it was passed along. His hands were shaking.

  Silvaro called for more sheet and more speed. Then he walked down from the poop and approached Sesto, who was preparing his little Arabyan wheel-lock.

  ‘When we get into it, keep your head down. I’ll not have you killed for nothing,’ Silvaro ordered.

  ‘I took a life on Santa Bernadette,’ Sesto replied bravely, despite his shaking hands. ‘For that I’ll claim at least one back here.’

  Silvaro paused and pursed his lips. Sesto’s words had clearly struck a chord. The Reiver lord nodded and tugged a long-barrelled flintlock out of his belt, handing it off, butt first, to Sesto. The damn thing was monstrously heavy.

  ‘Then take this, sir. It’ll be more use to you than that little, shiny toy.’

  Ruefully, Sesto put his little, ornate pocket pistol away and clapped a firm hold of the mighty handgun.

  Silvaro was about to offer some other remark when the man up in the topcastle suddenly hallooed. He was pointing to starboard, into the trees that rushed past on their right hand.

  Sesto looked, wondering what the matter was. Then he saw it. His heart sank. What he had first taken to be tall treetops he now saw to be the royals and skysails of a most massive ship running east with them on the other side of the spit. The sails were red. Their enemy must have taken the opportunity of the rising blow too, and was now riding his way down out of Angel’s Bar, from anchor. Due to his great size, the tops of his main masts stood up above the jungle trees. And the man in his topcastle had, without doubt, spied the Rumour and the Safire in the inlet.

  Their surprise was gone. In another five minutes, they would both run clear of the spit into the open waters of the bar and be clean on, beam to beam. Side on to a sixty-gun leviathan, the Rumour would be rent to matchwood.

  ‘Loose some sheets! Loose some there!’ Casaudor yelled, seeing the awful fate that bore down on them.

  ‘Belay that!’ Silvaro roared.

  Casaudor looked at his captain as if he was mad. ‘We must turn and run! They have us!’

  ‘No, sir!’ Silvaro snarled. ‘We will not break now! More sheet! Full sheet, you laggards! Full sheet and more besides! We will beat this unholy giant to the spithead!’

  Trembling, Sesto realised Luka Silvaro’s intention. The Rumour was a sleek, fast vessel – a ‘slighter hunting ship’, he had called it. He meant to out-race the enemy barque before the spit was done, and come around across its bows. But the barque was huge. Its plentiful sail cloth could push it ahead at a tremendous speed.

  The Rumour raised full running sail and filled its canvas fat with wind. For a moment, it paced ahead of the red topsails behind the trees. Then the red sails began to catch up again. They slid above the tops of the forest, ominously suggestive, like the fin of a great fish cutting the water, hinting at the monster hidden below. The enemy had raised the black flag, showing an hourglass that expressed the fact that time was running out for its intended victim. In response, with a curse, Silvaro hoisted his jolie rouge.

  Vento’s ratings monkeyed up and down the ratlines, extending a pack of studdingsails before the main course and main top, and a flying jib before the fore staysail. At once, the additional sheets caused the Rumour to fly and gain water at the expense of its lumbering foe.

  A length they had on it, then a length and a half. The end of the forest spit was in sight, and the deep, bottomless open water of the Bar yawned out before them.

  With less than a half minute to go before they cleared, Sesto looked back and saw with dismay that the Safire had fallen away far behind down the inlet. Silke, it seemed, had chosen to sit this one out. And that, most as like, spelt doom for the Rumour.

  As the Rumour cleared the spit into open water, it had two and a half lengths on the massive barque. They thundered out into the cove and immediately began to gybe to starboard.

  Sesto got his first look at the enemy racing up to meet them. He had imagined many things supporting the red tops seen over the trees, but this was worse than any of them. It was a colossal, dark ship, more than three times the size of the Rumour, its tight-yarded sheets red as dried blood.

  A lambent green fire burned in a metal lantern affixed to the bow. Dark shapes – daemon bodies, Sesto supposed – swarmed on the decks and up the ratlines.

  It was coming at them head-on as they turned about across its front. Their starboard side was flat-on to its racing bows. Did it mean to ram them?

  The lurch of the fast-running Rumour was great now they had come into open swell. Sesto was forced to hang on as the deck pitched and rose.

  He heard a whistle shrill and then felt the boom-shake of guns firing below him.

  A full side let out at the enemy. Sesto couldn’t hear the impacts, but he saw splashes in the sea beside the barque, and puffs of splinters and pieces of rail fly off from its bows. Its inner jib snapped and flapped away like a streamer.

  Sheerglas’s gun teams fired again, loosing chain shot this time. They had the range now, despite the rapid, cross-passing movement of the ships. All the enemy’s jibs shredded off, along with the fore starboard ratlines. Dark shapes tumbled away into the rushing sea. The royal staysails ripped aside or were torn into holes, and the top part of the foremast came down like a stricken tree.

  White smoke puffed out on either side of the hellish green lantern. The enemy had bow guns, heavy cannon by the look, and it had used them. A water spout leapt up beyond the Rumour’s bows where one shot went wide. The other tore the luff edge out of the Rumour’s biggest studdingsail and caused the loose canvas to snap and crack wildly in the blow. Severed yards whipped back and forth above the deck, despite Vento’s efforts to team them in and control them. One savagely snapping line decapitated a rigger and sent him tumbling away off the upper ratlines into the sea. His blood fell like rain on all below.

  ‘Again, Sheerglas!’ Luka yelled.

  Working like devils, sweating in the hot, dark confines of the gun decks, the master gunner’s teams succeeded in rattling off a third salvo as the Rumour came about, broad-reached, around the mighty foe.

  This did the most damage yet. Sesto winced as he saw parts of the bow quarters splinter and hole. Pieces of red wood fluttered up into the air, high above the level of the main sails.

  Then it was all commotion. Silvaro bellowed orders that Benuto bellowed louder. Tende and Saybee hauled the wheel round together and the ratings mobbed up the lines to bring the sheets to true. Roque gave a piped command that sent the armed watch over from the starboard to the port to re-establish their armoured wall there. The Rumour was turning now, its speed dropping suddenly as they went almost head to the wind. Silvaro was striving to keep the smallest possible profile towards the barque. Now they were all but bow-on as the barque presented its starboard side to them.

  The barque fired its starboard guns. It was a huge salvo and, for a moment, the hull of the ship disappeared behind an expanding cloud of firelit smoke. The broadside recoil rolled the barque heavily to its port line, and it began to loose sheets to close into battle.

  The sea to either side of the Rumour blossomed with cannon splash, and two heavy culverin balls smashed into the port bow just above the water line. The deck shook.

  Silvaro edged the Rumour around just a hint so that Sheerglas had his port guns at a tight present. They flashed and fired. Hull boards and gunport hatches blew out into the water, and smoke laced the space between the two ships. Another thundering broadside came from the devil barque. The Rumour’s foresails exploded into shreds and several men on deck were slaughtered. Sesto could smell blood again. Blood, sea salt, sea wind, powder smoke.

  The barque had dropped all speed, and was edging around, trying to out-turn the Rumour.

  ‘In close! In close!’ Silvaro ordered.

  The call seemed like suicide. As they came in shy of the barque’s starboard side, its cannons flashed once again, and the Rumour shuddered as hull wood burst and rails blew away. The foremast was in tatters. Sesto saw at least one of Vento’s riggers hanging, dismembered, from the foremast’s torn ropes.

  The order was not madness. The barque’s gunports, though plentiful, were high up on its waist and, once the sprightly Rumour got in close enough, the enemy couldn’t angle its heaviest guns low enough to target the Rumour’s hull. Still, their shots ripped through the sails. Few were more than shreds now. Sheerglas used the foremost guns to drench the enemy with grape shot. The calivermen on the rails and rigging and the men with the swivel guns began to pink at the closing foe. Cannons barked and flashed sporadically from its dark red sides. They had calivermen up too. Tortoise Schell, a cut-less in his hand as he waited for a chance to board, was killed stone dead by a caliver ball. Rodrigo Sal and Dirty Gabriel were shredded by chain shot that smashed through the pavises. Vento was impaled with splinters from the foremast along his left arm and chest, and fell twenty feet onto the deck. Largo ran aloft with his gold comb-morion in place, and spat arrows from his horse bow at anything moving at the enemy’s rail.