‘We’ll not overmatch them, man-for-man!’ Luka yelled at Casaudor. ‘Let’s take it to them! I want Ru’af’s heart for this infamy!’

  Sesto watched in disbelief as Luka raised a boarding action to counter the Badarra’s assault. Outflung grapnels closed the distance, dragging galley and brigantine side by side, and boarding planks and ladders slammed out through the targette wall.

  Luka led the attack. As he leapt over the boards, he fired his ducksfoot, and the five splayed barrels of the grotesque pistol roared simultaneously. Casaudor was beside him, blowing two corsairs off the plank bridge with a blast from his blunderbuss. The heavy weapon had a spring-blade under the trumpet, and Casaudor snapped it out and impaled the next corsair on it. Dying, the corsair took the blunderbuss with him as he pitched, screaming, into the sea, and Casaudor drew a cup-guard rapier instead and set in with that.

  Many of the Reivers had multiple pistols strung around them on lanyards or ribbon sashes, so they could be fired and then dropped without being lost. There was no time to reload. Surging across the gap, the men fired each weapon in turn until they were spent, and then resorted to cut-less, boarding axe and sabre.

  Corsairs, swinging on lines, were now swarming over the poop rail. Tende, hefting a long-handled stabbing axe of curious and no doubt Ebonion design, led a repulse with ten men, including Junio and Fahd. Backing away, numb with terror and wondering where on earth he could run to, Sesto heard the swishing of steel, the crack of breaking bone, the yelp of the dying. Blood ran across the decking, following the lines of the boards. The corsairs surged again, pushing more men through onto the poop, despite the loss of half a dozen picked from the swing-ropes by the fire of Vento’s marksmen above.

  Sesto found himself in a haze of smoke. He staggered around, eyes watering, and got his hand around the grip of his pistol. Junio loomed out of the smoke. The side of his head was cloven in and he looked more than ever like a goat, a sacrificial goat. He fell into Sesto’s embrace, soaking the gentleman from Luccino in hot, sour blood.

  With a horrified cry, Sesto fell back under the dead weight. A toothless, raving corsair with a bloody adze came charging out of the smoke, and Sesto fired his pistol from under the armpit of the dead storekeeper. The ball bounced off the side of the corsair’s head and pulped his ear. As he fell, yowling, two more followed him into view, lunging at Sesto.

  The first sabre slash struck Junio’s back, and Sesto was forced to use the pitiful corpse in his arms as a shield. One of the corsairs stabbed with a lance, and the iron tip came spearing out of the storekeeper’s gaping mouth towards Sesto’s face. Sesto yelled and retreated, dropping Junio face down.

  The corsairs hurled themselves after him. Sesto tried to draw his smallsword, but slipped down hard on the bloody deck.

  Ymgrawl the boucaner appeared from nowhere and interposed himself between Sesto and his attackers. The boucaner’s cut-less ripped the lancer across the eyes, and then he turned, breaking the other’s jaw with a blow from the blade’s heavy stirrup-guard. Ymgrawl grabbed hold of the dazed corsair by the hair and wrenched him head-first over the rail.

  ‘Get thee up!’ Ymgrawl yelled.

  Sesto never would have believed he’d be happy to see the wretched boucaner.

  ‘Thee maketh my job hard!’ Ymgrawl snorted, bundling Sesto down the companion ladder onto the quarterdeck.

  ‘Your job?’

  ‘Silvaro told me to shadow thee and keep thee safe from harm,’ said Ymgrawl.

  Luka hacked and slashed his way dow­­n the centre walk of the Badarra at the head of a pack of Reivers. The corsairs had thrown their full effort into the assaults, for though the rowing benches were packed with men, most were lying where they sat, helpless with fatigue. The corsairs were all thin and undernourished, and many showed signs of scurvy. The forced row to engage Luka’s ships had exhausted most of them. Luka knew he was lucky. If Ru’af’s crew hadn’t been ailing, the sheer number of them would have overrun his tubs already.

  Through the chaos and smoke, Luka saw the big, pot-bellied corsair chief up on the aft castle of the Badarra.

  ‘Ru’af! Bitch-pup!’ he yelled in Arabyan, using every curse Fahd had ever taught him. ‘Call off your dogs and I might remember my mark was black!’

  Ru’af made an obscene gesture in Luka’s direction.

  Luka turned away, hacking his dagger down on an oarsman who was running at Casaudor, and looked to sea.

  Silke, his wits about him, had got into position at last, the rowers in the tugging longboats gasping and collapsing over their oars. The Safire hadn’t run at all. It had been pulled clear to present beam-on to the Tariq.

  The first broadside almost stopped the battle dead with its thunder crack. Pieces of oar, rail and bulwark from the Tariq flew into the air and rained down. Another broadside, and the Tariq ruptured, spewing smoke and flames up into the windless blue. Its foremast collapsed, and its crew, deafened and dazed, began jumping into the sea. On the waist of the Rumour, Roque, Benuto and a dozen other blood-soaked Reivers struggled to dislodge the spike of the corvus before the Tariq dragged the brigantine onto its beam end.

  Then the bireme folded in the middle, timbers shearing and splintering, and the sea rushed in to consume her.

  The fight was out of the corsairs. Luka had to issue stern orders to stop the Reivers massacring them. Their blood was up, and the corsairs had broken the sea code. Pirates did not prey on pirates.

  Luka dragged Ru’af to the Badarra’s aft castle and spoke to him there alone for long minutes. When he returned, it was clear to all that he was disappointed by the conversation. He ordered Benuto to cut the lines holding the ships together.

  The Badarra, smoke wreathing the sea around it, drifted away astern. The Rumour and the Safire put up what sail they could to catch the meagre breeze, and slowly hauled away west.

  Luka found Sesto in the great cabin, swallowing brandy.

  ‘They attacked us because they hadn’t seen a sail in three weeks. They were famished and scurvyed and low on water. It’s as Benuto said. The seas are dry. Ru’af was in no doubt. The Butcher Ship has driven everyone from the sea with its bloody fury.’

  ‘I thought we were going to die,’ said Sesto.

  ‘We were going to die,’ snapped Luka. ‘That’s why we fought.’

  He looked at Sesto grimly. ‘Ru’af was in no doubt. Common word in the islands is that Henri of Breton is the Butcher. It is the Kymera, his great galleon that everyone fears.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Yes. But if Henri is the Butcher, he’s not the man I knew.’

  Luka took a folded parchment from his coat pocket. The sealing wax bore the imprint of the Prince of Luccini.

  ‘It’s time to tell the Reivers,’ Luka announced.

  ‘Have ears, you all!’ Luka yelled from the break-rail. All across the deck, toil ceased. The last few bodies had been pitched over the side, and repairs were now underway to crew and ship alike.

  ‘When I was took by the Luccini warships, I never thought to see light again. Nor would they have let me out, but left me to rot until they found another use for me, and freed me. An amnesty and a thousand crowns! That’s what they’ve offered me, and every man of you too!’

  That had their attention.

  Luka held up the parchment. ‘This is a letter of marque and reprisal, signed by the prince himself. Under its terms, we Reivers cease to be pirates and become privateers. Payment shall be the amnesty and the thousand crowns. My friend Sesto is here to witness our work. Take heed that unless we return him safe to Luccini, so he may report in our favour, we’ll not see a crumb.’

  All eyes turned to Sesto for a moment, and he felt very uncomfortable.

  ‘What work must we do?’ demanded Benuto.

  ‘Why, we must rid the seas of the Butcher Ship,’ said Luka Silvaro.

  VI

  It was, pronounced the robust master mate Casaudor, hot enough to boil a dog.

  They were eight days north-west of Sartosa, on the Estalian side of the Tilean Sea and, for the last three days of the passage, the weather had become their relentless foe.

  The stifling heat commenced at dawn each day, and its intensity climbed with the rising sun. The sky was utterly cloudless, and the scorching white glare of the sun drained the blue out of it like indigo dye faded out of white calico. There was barely a breath of wind enough to fill the sheets. The decks and the wood of the rails had become too hot to touch. Tende, the Ebonian helmsman, had wrapped cotton kerchiefs around his hands to prevent the spokes of the ship’s wheel from burning his flesh.

  Hot enough to boil a dog. An apt description for their misery. Listless men cowered on the Rumour’s deck in what little shadow and shade the masts and canvas availed. Cheeks, forearms and shoulders showed red raw.

  Sesto lurked in the shadow of the forecastle. The sea glittered and flashed too brightly to look at. He had been tempted to hide from the sun below decks, but it was airless down there, and there was the ever-likely chance of straying into the path of Sheerglas, the master gunner. Sheerglas scared Sesto more than any other person aboard, with his crisp-as-parchment voice and dry, earthy smell. That, and his hideously pointed teeth. As befitted a ship of the name, rumours abounded concerning Sheerglas, and Sesto didn’t like any one of them. Even in a company of brutes and murderers, Sheerglas was a very devil, and it seemed a wonder that Luka Silvaro kept him as part of the crew. But there was no gainsaying the skill of Sheerglas and his thin, pallid gun teams. He had proved that in the fight with Ru’af’s galleys.

  Because of the heat, the old cook Fahd had quit his galley and refused to work. His stoves had been put out and only salt fish and dry biscuits were available to the hungry. No one had an appetite anyway. Fahd sat against the base of the mizzen, working designs into a whale tooth with his pot-knife.

  The constant swelter had put a pressure into the air, as if the sky was fit to burst. Only a storm would ease that pressure, and when, in each late afternoon, the grumbles of thunder came to their ears from the horizon, they prayed to a man for a break in the weather. But grumbling was all the sky did.

  The nights brought no relief either. The still air remained oven-hot until after midnight, and the full moons grinned mirthlessly at the crew’s discomfort. Even the starlight seemed hot enough to tan skin.

  Sesto consoled himself with the slim fact that Luka’s Reivers had not mutinied at once on hearing what designs he had made on their collective destiny. To take coin from Luccini and turn from pirates to privateers, that was asking a lot. Luka had warned him that many Sartosans regarded such a twist of allegiance as treason, as a slur against the red flag of King Death to which they were all pledged. Sesto supposed the Reivers had accepted it because of the promise of fortune and amnesty. Above all things, even King Death himself, the Reivers worshipped gold. In the acquisition of gold, no action was too low, too dirty, too despicable: murder, deception, fraud, betrayal. Above all else, a pirate was an amoral creature, liberated from civilised codes of conduct. No shame or crime could sully his soul more than it was already.

  If expecting them to become privateers was asking a lot, the daunting task that had been set for them was asking a great deal more. The Butcher Ship was a daemon-barque, an accursed thing. He is the sea daemon himself, Benuto had said, speaking of the daemon lord of the deep that all pirates feared. Hunting the Butcher would be a task fraught with danger.

  Of course, the Tilean Sea, that haunt of pirates, had been full of dangers since the beginning of history. Plunderers, throat-cutters, boucaners and hook-handed rogues, stalking Estalian merchantmen and Tilean treasure ships, had made that stretch of blue the most dangerous waterway in the world, and made themselves legends to boot. Sacadra the Jinx, Willem Longtooth, Metto Matez and his brigands, Ezra Banehand, Bonnie Berto Redsheet… they were names and legacies Sesto had read about as a boy in the court at Luccini. In the current time alone, there was Jacque Rawhead, Jeremiah Tusk and Reyno Bloodlock, not to mention Luka Silvaro and Red Henri, naturally.

  The actions of the Butcher Ship outdid the work of even the most bloody-handed pirate, and the Rumour was charged to find it and send it to the bottom.

  Sesto’s role in the affair as insurance made him queasy to think on. He alone could vouch for the Reivers’ work and ensure their reward. So, though every man on the ship was concerned to safeguard his welfare, that also made him the most vulnerable man on board.

  With great unease, therefore, Sesto was snoozing in the midday heat when Roque shook him awake. The Estalian master-at-arms looked like a lean hunting hound, his skin wet with perspiration.

  ‘Come aft,’ he said.

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘Come see,’ Roque answered. He stood up and fanned his face with both hands. Dark half moons of sweat stained the armpits of his green silk blouse.

  Luka was waiting on the bridge with Benuto the boatswain, Casaudor and Vento, the chief rigger. Luka nodded to Sesto as he came up the poop stairs with Roque. He had affected a wide-brimmed Pavonian hat to keep the blistering sun out of his cold eyes as if he was afraid the sun’s heat might thaw them.

  ‘What is it?’ Sesto asked.

  The bo’sun, old, craggy and dressed in his shapeless black hat and frock coat as crimson as a sunset, chuckled and pointed forward. Several leagues away to the west, a little tiara of stationary white clouds hung above the horizon.

  ‘Land,’ said Luka.

  ‘Estalia? The coast?’ Sesto wondered aloud.

  Luka grinned at the mistake. ‘Not yet awhile. The islands.’

  A great chain of islands and atolls peppered the eastern seaboard of Estalia. In that dense, half-mapped archipelago lay the real pirate waters. Few pirates could afford an ocean-going ship. Forming the backbone of the piratical fraternity were the island-hoppers and the atoll-skulkers, who sallied out in longboats from their small, isolated communities to prey on those passing merchants foolish enough to water in the islands after the long crossings from the western ocean.

  If any place might be the haunt of a Butcher Ship, it was here. Long ago, the gunships and hunters of the Luccini navy had despaired of chasing pirates through the archipelago. So many coves and inlets to hide in, so many places where a flank pursuit could turn, at the spin of a coin, into a bloody ambush. Just twenty years earlier, a flotilla of Luccini warships had harried Jeremiah Tusk into the island chain, and found themselves prey to the merciless guns of a corsair welcome.

  ‘We’ll turn to the north,’ Luka said, ‘and ride the current in towards Isla d’Azure.’

  ‘Why there?’ Sesto asked.

  ‘There is a friendly town,’ said Casaudor gruffly.

  ‘One where we might water safely and hear some stories,’ Luka added.

  There was something about the cautious attitude of the seadogs that disquieted Sesto. There was something… many things, probably… they weren’t telling him.

  They entered the island chain in the later part of the day. The Safire rode in at the Rumour’s port quarter, attentive as any consort. The first few islands were scrubby knots of bare rock or spits of coral rising like nipples from blooms of sand. Larger islands, festooned with bright green trees, appeared tantalisingly ahead. Some had wide, circular reefs around them, or cusps of rock and sandbars that framed deep, turquoise lagoons. The sky was feathered with scudding clouds and the temperature dropped a few blessed degrees. Hungry seabirds dipped and mobbed in the wakes of the two ships.

  The current was taut. Luka steered the helm team with a combination of memory and an open, annotated waggoner. The waters here were rife with submerged reefs, coral brakes, sandbanks and rocks. Pepy, one of the younger, nimbler crewmen went forward and called the depth with a knot-line.

  ‘A sail!’ Sesto said suddenly.

  ‘What?’ Luka growled, looking up from his chart. Sesto’s comment won him a hard stare from Tende at the helm too.

  ‘I saw a sail,’ Sesto insisted. ‘To starboard.’

  ‘Where?’

  Sesto wished he knew. He’d glimpsed a square of flapping canvas in the skirts of the island to their right, a great mass shrouded in greenery that rose from the sea, crowned with a high cliff. He couldn’t see the sail any more.

  ‘Over there,’ Sesto said. ‘This bluff is obscuring it now. It was in there, in the basin there.’

  ‘A sail?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Taking the wind?’

  ‘Indeed yes.’

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ said Roque cattily. ‘That is Isla Verde, and its cove presents promisingly, but it is shallow and toothed with sharp coral. No ship would be in there, certainly not one at sail.’

  Sesto frowned. Maybe it had been a trick of the light, or the white flash of a passing gull.

  ‘Let’s loose a little top and come around,’ Luka said.

  Benuto gave him a curious look, and then moved to relay the command to the yardsmen. Casaudor signalled the Safire to follow them.

  ‘You believe me?’ Sesto whispered to Luka, who had come to the rail to scan with his spyglass.

  ‘No,’ said Luka, ‘but I believe we would be foolish to ignore any possibility.’

  They tracked lazily around the head of the island’s cove, until the lineman called a danger of grounding on the banks.

  ‘A sail indeed,’ Luka said, lowering his glass. He looked at Sesto and grinned. ‘Your eyes are sharp.’

  Both vessels furled their sheets and dropped anchor at the mouth of the secluded bay. Before them, in the crisp heat of the dying day, a cove fringed by rocky promontories was half exposed, hinting at a lagoon within. Behind that, the green scalp of the island rose like a mountain.

  There was no explaining the sail.

  They could see it rising proud of the cove, full-canvassed and fat with wind, like a ship running. But it was static, and deep in the lagoon, facing the inner shore of the island.