‘The Safire is a lovely ship,’ Tusk said. ‘But she’ll never take that barque.’

  ‘I’ll trust the sea to show me a way.’

  ‘Luka?’

  ‘Yes, Jeremiah?’

  ‘Is it really three times?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Jeremiah Tusk rose to his feet. ‘Then I suppose my cross can wait a little while longer.’

  XXV

  ‘It’s just a chisel,’ Belissi whispered.

  ‘But its end is sharp,’ Sesto replied, taking the tool and hiding it under his cape. ‘It’ll make a hole in his chest as well as anything.’

  Belissi wasn’t listening. He was gazing out at the choppy waters, watching for something Sesto didn’t want to imagine.

  It was the third day of the flight. By Curcozo’s estimation, they were crossing the mid-waters of the Tilean Sea already. The days were still white and sunless, the wind still boisterous. The sea raged, heaving and galloping. Full-sheeted, the Demiurge pressed on for Luccini.

  Holding the chisel against his hip with one hand, Sesto began to walk back down the deck towards the poop, fighting the roll of the ship. He had made up his mind. He was going to kill Guido Lightfinger. The chisel would stab through the man’s breast well enough. Of course Curcozo, Alberto Long, Vinegar Bruno and Handsome Onofre would then cut him to ribbons for his action, but what of it? He’d die well, vindicated.

  Sesto could see them on the poop deck now, Guido shouting orders into the blow. He’d have to get close. Close in, like ships at close quarters. Then a single, sudden stab…

  ‘Sail! Sail!’ the lookout bellowed from above.

  The crew turned to look sternwards.

  Gods, and there she was. Coming on like a dart across the turbulent sea. The Safire, her lateen bulging fit to tear. Fast, fast, faster than the lumbering barque Demiurge.

  Luka was coming. Just as Sesto had predicted, Luka was coming to end this affair.

  Sesto’s jubilation suddenly ebbed. Guido was calling up his gunners, and there was a series of audible claps as the gun hatches lifted along the lower decks and the guns ran out. The Safire was so small, so slight, how in Manann’s name did Luka hope to turn this fight?

  Sesto clambered up onto the poop, in time to hear Guido give the order to come about.

  Guido looked over at Sesto. ‘Think he’s come to save you?’ Guido snarled. ‘Think again, my prince! He has no hope! Come about! Come about again! Turn to make him!’

  Curcozo was relaying orders. Kazuriband heaved on the wheel hard, with the help of the lee helmsman.

  ‘If my half-brother bastard wishes to make this a fight, then I’ll take it right to him!’ Guido bellowed. ‘If he has the temerity, I have the wit and the power! The Demiurge will blow him out of the sea!’

  There was a distant crump and bang. Smoke fogged the prow of the Safire. Her forward chasers had fired.

  Sesto heard the cannonballs whiz overhead, cast long. He ran back down to the mainhead and pulled Belissi upright.

  ‘We have to find some cover!’ he said.

  ‘Is she here? Is mother mine here?’

  ‘No, for the gods’ sake! No, she isn’t! But Luka is. We have to find cover!’

  The Safire fired again with its bow cannons. This time, the whistling balls punched through the mizzen yards and left acres of canvas loose and snapping in the wind.

  ‘Turn!’ Guido yelled. ‘Turn and gun them!’

  The Demiurge slowly came about, until it was side-on to the chasing sloop.

  At Guido’s orders, it fired a broadside.

  The entire ship juddered at the release. Smoke washed back over the deck in torrents. Sesto dragged Belissi down and covered his head.

  The Safire came on still. If it had been wounded, it showed no sign. It fired its long-cased bow chasers again, and this time the side rail of the poop deck exploded, killing four of the ratings nearby.

  The Demiurge fired another broadside at its attacker. After the thump and the roar, after the jolt of the deck, Sesto was able to see the Safire again as the smoke cleared.

  It was damaged. The lateen jibs had gone, exploded off the long bowsprit. Canvas, loose, ripped back across the foredecks, unmanaged and rogue. The Safire began to lag. Its foreguns flashed again. Plumes of water burst from the sea short of the Demiurge’s flanks.

  Guido’s crew cheered.

  Above the shouting, Sesto heard a call. Up in the rigging, a man was singing out, his warning drowned by the cheering.

  ‘Sail! Sail again!’ the man was yelling. ‘To starboard!’

  Sesto turned to look. A vast emerald brig was turning against them, running with the wind. As it came side on, a mile away, it fired its guns.

  A crackle of flame, a spit of soot. Then the hell arrived. The starboard side of the Demiurge was bombarded with cannon fire. The rails shattered, the hull splintered. Sheets ripped wide and men died.

  The Lightning Tree swung in closer and fired again.

  Struggling to stay upright in the heavy swell, Luka Silvaro stared ahead. In the grey light of the day, through the rain, he watched as the Demiurge and the Lightning Tree closed with each other, gun ports spitting. Jeremiah’s ship, expertly steered, had the better of the clash. Its side guns, three decks deep, belched tongues of flame. Water spouted up from the sea. Pieces of wood scattered into the air from breaking rails. The Demiurge faltered, stricken.

  Another salvo, and Guido’s ship began to limp.

  ‘Get us up close!’ Luka bawled.

  They were side-on to the Demiurge now, and the Safire’s guns were doing dreadful harm to the barque’s hull. Black smoke lifted up into the air and was carried away by the headwind.

  ‘Closer!’

  ‘We cannot!’ Silke yelled. ‘Not in this sea!’

  ‘Damn the sea! Get me in to blade-length!’

  As the Lightning Tree pounded its starboard side with chain shot, the Demiurge shuddered as the Safire came up against its port. Guido’s men tried desperately to lower booms and fenders to stave the sloop off, but the ships ground together. Despite the fierce chop, grapples were thrown across, and tie-ropes, and the ships mashed against one another.

  Luka Silvaro prepared to lead the boarding charge.

  Getting aboard a ship riding in such heavy seas was task enough, but doing so in the face of fierce resistance was quite another thing. Guido’s men stood at the port side pavis of the Demiurge with poles, billhooks and hot oil. A row of caliver men crackled drizzles of shot down from the Demiurge’s rigging, and several of Silke’s crew fell before they’d even left the Safire.

  The Demiurge was a massive brute of a ship, and close up it towered above the Safire, which was barely a third of its height. But, Luka reminded himself, it had been a massive ship last time they’d taken it too. Its very size was its weakness. It made a plenty big target.

  Silke’s own caliver men, along with archers and ratings with swivel guns, opened fire with a rippling salvo that sounded like canvas tearing. The shots sent Guido’s men in behind their pavis boards. On the Safire’s rolling deck, much lower down, Casaudor and some of the men-at-arms started heaving lit grenades up at the barque’s side. Some blasts blew out sections of the pavis, and dead or dying men tumbled down between the two mashing ships. But Casaudor had another target in mind. He lobbed his next smoking bomb up through the nearest gun-hatch, ten feet above him.

  The grenade exploded inside the barque and blew the hatch faring off. A moment later, a much greater blast tore out. The flames of the bomb had touched off the powder in the gun bay. An entire section of the massive oak hull, around the gunport, blew outwards in a blizzard of fire and splinters. With it came the huge culverin itself, propelled by the blast, its carriage burning. It flew out into the air, as if it had taken flight, and crashed down onto the Safire’s mid-deck with huge force, rolling and coming to rest, smouldering. Some of Silke’s men ran forward with pails to douse it.

  A great, gaping rent now showed in the side of the Demiurge at gun deck height.

  ‘To it. To it!’ Luka yelled, as the men-at-arms ran forward, through the clotting smoke, and hurled grapples and lines. There was no longer any need to brave the solid pavis and the defenders at the rail above. A much better access point had been created.

  The Safire’s men-at-arms, with Luka at their head, swung across the gap and clambered in through the grossly-damaged section. The air was black with smoke and soot, and the dim gun deck was littered with debris, some of it human meat. The deck gang above fired down at the crossing party, and dropped some dead with their shots, but Silke’s calivers replied, smacking their bullets into the targette boards.

  Luka was in now. The air was hot and filthy. The nearest gun-bays had been abandoned, presumably after the powder blast. Luka saw streaked puddles of blood on the deck where men, injured by shrapnel, had been dragged away.

  He made his way forward. In a few heartbeats, he encountered the first of the resistance. Gunners, most dressed in little but calico trousers and scarves, rushed the boarding gang. They had armed themselves with cut-lesses and ramming rods. Luka, and all the men-at-arms with him, were weighed down with several firearms apiece, each one primed and strung on a lanyard ribbon for ease of use. Luka raised a snaphance pistol in each hand and crackled off the shots. Two gunners collapsed and died. The men-at-arms with him fired as well, and the narrow companionway filled with acrid white smoke.

  Luka dropped the snaphances on their ribbon-cords, so they swung down at his hips, and snatched up the next two. Casaudor pushed past him, a matchlock in one hand and a boarding axe in the other. He shot one of Guido’s bastards as the man came running forward and, as the fellow fell, finished him with a back-chop of the heavy axe.

  Behind him, Luka could hear shots and cries as the next wave of boarders came in through the hole.

  He found steps, a narrow wooden flight that led up to the mid-deck. The Reiver beside him lurched backwards, blown open as the blast of a musketoon punched through him. Luka glanced up and saw the man with the musketoon on the steps, trying to reload. He fired both pistols, and brought the man’s body bumping and cracking down the step-well.

  As he stormed up the steps, Luka felt the Demiurge shake hard as another pounding from Tusk’s guns ripped into its starboard side. He heard a whickering, chopping sound from the deck above – the unmistakable, wicked sound of chain shot in the air – and winced at the terrible screams that followed. Fresh blood poured down the hatch-top at the stairhead, drooling over the edges, like run-off in a heavy sea.

  He reached the deck with the first of his men-at-arms. The place was a mess of smoke and broken wood, bodies and blood. At once they found themselves in a ferocious running battle with the Demiurge’s crew. Pistols barked, blades flashed and chimed. Luka fired the last of his loaded guns, then drew his shamshir. He hacked its edge through the throat of a man armed with a sabre, and used the butt of the spent snaphance in his left hand as a club against another.

  This was the worst phase of any sea-fight, and Luka knew it. Close quarters; the hand-to-hand. Cannon-action was a thunderous thing, and often settled any fight before it became this personal, this dirty. But when it came down to the level of face-to-face killing, it was all about brute strength, terror and the savage temper of the pirate. Whole engagements could be won or lost in a close brawl like this. If Guido’s men drove off or slaughtered the boarding party, he might yet cut free and win the day, despite the bloody beating he had taken thus far.

  It was hard to see more than a few feet in any direction, such was the thickness of the smoke. White coils, lifting from gunfire, mixed with the boiling black clouds, laden with sparks and glowing ash, that rose from the sections of the Demiurge that were on fire. The Lightning Tree’s guns had fallen silent. Tusk had spied that Luka’s men were now aboard the enemy, and did not wish to do them harm. Instead, calivers were cracking, as Tusk’s marksmen got up into the yards and began an assault. The Lightning Tree closed in. Bullets thumped into the deck, or into flesh. Men fled. Arrows and pellets from slings and bullet crossbows lashed down too. The deck was littered with dead.

  ‘For Manann, for King Death, and for the Reivers!’ Luka yelled, raising his shamshir, and his men cheered as they layed in. Turning, Luka performed a radical trepanning on the Lightfinger who tried to close with him, then pulled his wet blade free. A rapier flashed at him, and sliced him across the left arm. Gasping in pain, Luka re-presented, blocked the next strike, and found himself sparring with Alberto Long.

  ‘You picked the wrong side,’ Luka growled, and threw himself forward.

  Nearby, Casaudor and a gang of four men-at-arms reached the binnacle and engaged with a mob of Guido’s crew. Few men had the strength of arm to wield a cut-less like Casaudor, and he spattered the deck with blood as he ploughed in. Handsome Onofre, howling his master’s name, confronted the Rumour’s master mate, and tagged him across the cheek with the tip of his Arabyan nimcha. It was a deep and gruesome wound that would scar Casaudor’s face for the rest of his life.

  Casaudor hit back, striking at Handsome Onofre with his cut-less and forcing him into retreat. Onofre fought to return, raging and feral, and actually wounded one of his own men close by in his fury to gut Casaudor.

  Their blades tangled and wedged, Onofre grunting as he tried to force the advantage of his longer edge across the guard of Casaudor’s cut-less. But Casaudor knew that the only way to defeat treacherous dogs like Guido’s mob was to outdo them in treachery.

  He kicked Onofre squarely between the legs. As the man shrilled and staggered, quite folded up in agony, Casaudor swung his cut-less and cut more, smashing it side-on into Onofre’s face.

  As he fell, dead, onto the deck, Handsome Onofre no longer deserved the epithet.

  Blindly, his eardrums ringing from the awful bombardment, Sesto moved through the smoke. He’d recovered a dadao from a dead Lightfinger he’d found sprawled on the afterdeck. The sword, a heavy, two-handed cleaver from Cathay, felt awkward and unwieldy in his grip, accustomed as he was to lighter, more refined blades like the sabre or the rapier.

  But he held it tight. It was a sword, at least. Belissi’s chisel was tucked into his belt.

  He was closing on the poop-deck stairs. Quite nearby, but utterly invisible in the thick smoke-wash, he could hear a tremendous fight raging across the port side of the mid-deck. He glimpsed figures toiling and dancing in the gloom.

  The deck shook as another blast detonated deep below. A grenade? A powder keg firing? If the flames reached the mail-screened magazine deep below, there would be no deck left at all to shake, no Demiurge.

  A pikeman ran at Sesto, his face bloody from a scalp wound. Sesto side-stepped the stabbing pole, and put both arms into his sword-stroke. The dadao, heavy but razor-sharp along its single, curved edge, cut the end off the pike, and Sesto was suddenly glad he had taken it up.

  The pikeman dropped his severed pole in fear and backed away.

  For the life of him, Sesto couldn’t bring himself to hack at an unarmed man.

  ‘Run,’ he suggested.

  The pikeman did as he was told.

  Gripping the dadao in both hands, Sesto climbed the short flight of steps onto the poop deck.

  Through the streaming vapour, he caught sight of Guido, near the wheel alongside Kazuriband, fighting to turn the tiller and rip away from the Safire. The lee helmsman, decapitated by chain shot, lay dead at their feet. Curcozo was at the port rail, firing a caliver down at the Safire’s deck.

  ‘Guido!’ Sesto yelled, coming forward, hoping his entry was dramatic enough to stay the renegade in his tracks.

  It seemed to be, for Guido stared at the young man of Luccini in horrified disbelief.

  Then something interposed itself between Sesto and his target. Vinegar Bruno, gleefully banging his tambour against his thigh, rushed out at Sesto with a sabre.

  Sesto tried to ward off the attack, but the cumbersome dadao was too slow and heavy to swing it like he wanted to. He merely succeeded in blocking Bruno’s blade, catching it across the old sword’s hooked quillons. For a moment, they struggled, neither wanting to break and offer advantage. Then Sesto wrenched hard, twisting his sword around. He meant only to throw his opponent off. Almost by accident, he poked the tip of the curved blade in under the corner of Vinegar Bruno’s jaw.

  Blood, hot and bright, jetted out onto Sesto’s face. Dropping his sabre and his tambour, Vinegar Bruno backed away. He clutched at his throat, gazing at Sesto in disbelief.

  Sesto was so amazed, he actually said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Vinegar Bruno fell onto his back, a prodigious quantity of blood pooling around him, and went into his death throes. His body shook and vibrated, his feet and the heels of his hands drumming the deck more vigorously than he had ever beaten his tambour.

  Sesto gazed, frozen, at Bruno. He was utterly unprepared for Curcozo.

  The Lightfinger’s master mate threw aside his spent caliver and charged across the deck, drawing a dirk. He slammed into Sesto and crushed him against the rail. Sesto gasped and dropped his sword. Curcozo punched Sesto in the face and then drew his dagger up to spear him through the left eye.

  An expression of dismay and disappointment crossed Alberto Long’s face. He dropped his rapier with a clatter and embraced Luka Silvaro. Luka felt the man’s hot breath against his cheek.

  ‘Feel that?’ he asked.

  ‘I do,’ Alberto Long gasped.

  Luka’s shamshir was buried up to the hilt in Alberto Long’s midriff. Luka broke the embrace and wrenched the blade out. Most of Alberto Long’s entrails burst free from the newly-formed exit.