“Good, good,” Captain Roy said. “If you need anything and I’m not available, Armless is the one you should seek. A better sailor I’ve never met.”

  Without pausing, Roy continued reciting the names of the rest of Wagner’s crew. He finally reached the far end of the table, just across from Genevieve.

  “And this is of course, Mr. Wagner, the agent for the Dutch concern. What it is you’re after again, diamonds?”

  “Rubies, actually. I have an excellent lead from one of our exploration teams.”

  “Rubies, that’s an odd one for these jungles. But I don’t judge.” Roy cackled. “As long as I’m paid, that is.”

  “Indeed,” Wagner said. O’Neil could feel the man’s disdain, but the captain showed no sign that he even heard it. Knowing the old man’s hearing, he may not have.

  Wagner looked across the table. “Tell me, Miss Genevieve, what brings you and your father to the Nile. This is still quite dangerous territory to traverse.”

  Genevieve smiled as she sipped at the hot stew. O’Neil was impressed that despite her finery, she seemed all right with the simple ship’s food. He wondered where she picked up a taste for something as simple as Cookie’s sludge.

  “We are in search of a flower that grows on the banks of the lower Nile. My father has done experiments on a few samples brought up the river and carried all the way back to the United States. He found that it had immense painkilling potential and—”

  “And nothing, daughter. We wish to experiment more with the plant. Perhaps I can find more uses for it, but none that I can confirm at this time.”

  “I see,” Wagner said. “Very interesting.”

  Genevieve nodded. Wagner took a slow sip of his soup. He nearly gagged on the thick concoction. O’Neil couldn’t suppress a chuckle, even as the young woman covered her own mouth to hide a smile.

  Wagner cleared his throat. “My apologies. I must say, despite the lack of quality food, that the captain comes well recommended. I look forward to perhaps more time in your company before this voyage comes to an end.”

  “It seems we will be dining together on the regular, Mr. Wagner,” Genevieve replied.

  “Indeed,” Wagner said. “But I meant perhaps outside of a dinner situation.”

  “We will have to see, Mr. Wagner. We will have to see.”

  O’Neil smirked as he swallowed the last of his soup. He couldn’t help thinking he liked the girl already.

  Chapter Three

  “HELP!”

  The scream rang through the ship. Three nights in, Armless O’Neil rested quietly in the command cabin. He shot instantly to his feet when he heard the voice. He turned to the only other man currently on watch, a dark skinned man of around twenty. His name wasn’t easily pronounceable to either O’Neil or Captain Roy, so he was known on the ship simply as Jim.

  “Take the helm, man. That sounded like the Kid.”

  ‘The Kid’ was the name for another native of the region, a fifteen year old boy that stowed away on one of the captain’s earlier voyages, long before O’Neil ever heard of the Heart. The Kid had been on board for nearly two years now and was far more than a cabin boy to the ship’s crew.

  O’Neil slammed through the door of the ship’s cabin and out into the night sky. Only a single lamp on starboard and port lighted the deck of the Heart as it sat moored through the African night. The Nile was dangerous enough to traverse during the day; at night it was almost impossible to travel upon.

  He pulled the lamp off the hook above the door and ran towards the aft of the ship. With only days onboard, O’Neil could already navigate the Heart as well as any man could their own home. It took him only seconds to find the boy.

  The Kid rested on the deck just feet from the rear lifeboat. He looked towards the approaching lamp with apprehension. His eyes relaxed only a little as he saw O’Neil. His face was contorted in a mask of pain and rage. As O’Neil ran closer he saw why.

  The handle of a knife rose out of the Kid’s chest. The handle was wrapped in snakeskin and the hilt tipped with a mounted diamond. O’Neil knew the blade, but that wasn’t his primary concern.

  O’Neil bent over the teenage boy. He supported the Kid’s head. “Kid, what happened? Tell me what happened?”

  “Puh-puh—” The Kid coughed. Even in the dim light, O’Neil could see the blood mixed with the saliva. The blade had struck a lung. The boy wouldn’t see another night.

  “What is it, Kid? What is it?”

  “—ladium. Palladi—”

  The Kid coughed again. O’Neil met the boy’s panicked eyes. He watched as the life faded from them and the coughing stopped. Slowly, he lowered the boy’s head back to the deck.

  A short scream rose from just behind him. The young woman, Genevieve, stood beside her father and some members of the crew. O’Neil looked past them to see Captain Roy, several of the Dutchmen and more of the crew approach. It seemed the Kid’s scream woke half the boat.

  “What’s going on here?” Captain Roy yelled. He stopped short as he saw the Kid.

  Roy ran forward and dropped to his knees. He grabbed the boy by the lapel and pulled the body tightly to his chest. “Kid! Kid!”

  O’Neil rested one arm on the Captain’s shoulder. “He’s gone, Roy. He’s gone.”

  Captain Roy met O’Neil’s eyes. The captain barely held back his tears, but he slowly nodded as he lowered the body back to the deck.

  The captain’s gaze dropped down to the familiar blade sticking from the boy’s chest. He pulled it quickly free. The dark red blood appeared black in the dim light. The captain studied the hilt as fury built in his eyes.

  He waved the blade in O’Neil’s face. “You go find him! You go find that bastard and bring him to me now!”

  O’Neil only nodded. He knew no words would comfort the captain now.

  ***

  It took only minutes to find the owner of the blade. Any crew member would recognize the familiar knife instantly. Its owner regularly bragged about it and how he won it in a game of cards in Casablanca.

  Cookie loved that knife, and never liked to be parted from it. But he was also a notoriously angry drunk. He was purposefully kept away from most of the ship’s stock of liquors, but was known to imbibe his own cooking wine when he needed his fix.

  O’Neil and two men found him in his kitchen, passed out on the floor. He still wore his cooking apron. It was stained pink with blood. O’Neil rested his hand against the cloth. The blood was fresh.

  O’Neil slapped Cookie across the face. “Wake up, man!”

  “Wuh, huh?” Cookie’s eyes blinked open. They were blood red.

  “What did you do, man? What did you do?”

  “I—I just had a drink, Armless.” Each word came out slurred.

  “The Kid, why? Why did you do it?”

  “Do it? What did I do, Armless? I don’t remember nothing.”

  Cookie saw O’Neil’s eyes. He saw the intensity. The burning anger.

  “What did I do?” Cookie asked. “What did I do?”

  Chapter Four

  They buried the Kid at sea the next morning. The captain ordered Cookie’s execution, by hanging, that night.

  It all just seemed horrible to Genevieve. She knew the world wasn’t as nice as life was for her on the outskirts of New York. She saw poverty everywhere, even in her home city. But the savagery she saw here, so far from civilization, filled her with fear. At the same time, her heart swelled with an excitement she had never quite felt before. Something about the savagery, the wildness, of this world untouched by all she considered civilized…

  It scared her, but she never wanted to leave it.

  Days passed on the river. The horror of the murder at sea faded into monotony. Occasional strikes through the rapids certainly made the journey livelier, and an entire day spent inside the ship to avoid the waves of malaria-carrying insects revived the fear she felt out here in the middle of the savage wilderness.

  But by the eighteenth day of their journey, she was growing restless. She came up onto the deck one day in the early morning, just after breakfast. She found Armless O’Neil at the helm of the ship as she entered the cabin to avoid the bugs outside.

  “Can I help you, Miss Genevieve?”

  She smiled as O’Neil said her name. She hadn’t really dared approach the grizzled sailor until now. Something about being near him brought the same mixture of fear and excitement that the journey as a whole often gave her. Something about the man intrigued her endlessly.

  She reminded herself that he was nearly as old as her father, and then said, “I just wanted to see how the journey goes, Mister O’Neil. I can only spend so much time confined under the deck before it drives me insane. I need to feel the air against my skin. Otherwise I think I might lose my mind. My mother always said it was in my nature.”

  “Your mother, she was an Indian? The American kind, I mean.”

  Genevieve couldn’t hide her surprise. Few people recognized the source of her long dark hair or the slightly darker complexion of her skin.

  “Yes, she was. She died last year.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mister O’Neil.”

  “Enough with that Mister stuff, miss. Just call me O’Neil. I feel old enough without all that stuffy talk.”

  That brought a smirk to Genevieve’s face.

  After several long seconds of silence, O’Neil finally spoke. “We’ve got another two steady weeks before we reach the lake. That is if we don’t run into any major trouble. We haven’t hit the roughest patches of the water yet.”

  “It amazes me how well you know the water, O’Neil. I lived next to the ocean most of my life, but a life at sea always seemed like something strange and foreign to me.”

  “I often think that you has to be born to it. It ain’t for everyone, but for an old shark like me, it’s a good life. I reckon the captain is much the same. We both are certain to die on this water.”

  They both fell silent as they watched the boat move through the water. This time it was Genevieve that broke the silence.

  “There’s something that has been disturbing me since that night the boy died, O’Neil. The word he said. ‘Palladium’. It’s a strange word for a boy like that to use.”

  O’Neil glanced back at Jim on the other end of the cabin. “Hey, Jim. Why don’t you give Miss Genevieve and me a couple minutes? Go grab a bit of grub or something.”

  “All right, Armless. Will do.” Jim nodded as he left the room. Thankfully, the young man was too grateful for the free time during the monotonous twelve hour shift. It kept him from seeing anything strange in O’Neil’s behavior.

  O’Neil turned back to Genevieve. “You should be careful what you say around everyone on this ship, miss. Sailors have an old saying—loose lips sink ships. Be careful what you say in front of people.”

  “You think there was something more about the Kid’s death?”

  “I don’t think Cookie could have killed a bug in the state he was in that night. But the captain has always been more concerned with how things look then how they actually are. As long as the guests think they’re safe, he’s happy. That ain’t the way I work.”

  “Tell me, do you know the word? Palladium.”

  “I reckon it sounds like gibberish to me, miss.”

  “O’Neil, have you ever heard the story of Troy?”

  “That’s the one with the horse full of people or something. I heard it once or twice, I think.”

  “Indeed it is,” Genevieve said. “That is how it ended. But it’s far from how it began.

  “The Palladium was a wooden statue, an image of the goddess Pallas Athena. It sat in the city of Troy from its foundation. For hundreds of years, it was said to keep Troy safe from all attackers. No one could breach the city’s walls as long as the Palladium gave them the protection of Athena.

  “In the last days of the siege on Troy, the general Odysseus snuck into the city at night. He disguised himself as a simple beggar, but it was the captured Helen that told him the location of the Palladium. He stole the statue and escaped with it unscathed from the city’s wall.

  “Troy would fall only days later. The Palladium was stolen while the conquering fleet returned to their homes. It disappeared from Europe entirely, never to be seen or heard from again.”

  O’Neil scratched the back of his head. “That’s quite a story, Miss Genevieve. You really think this statue thing had something to do with the Kid’s death. That someone on the ship is looking for this Palladium thing?”

  “Tell me, O’Neil. Who do you think killed the young man? Be honest. I won’t judge.”

  “I think it was one of the Dutchmen. I don’t quite trust Wagner or his men. I—”

  “You don’t think they are Dutch. Like me, you think they’re German.”

  O’Neil nodded.

  “I’ve heard stories about the Germans,” Genevieve said. “They say that Hitler and his men are occultists. They’ve been rounding up every holy relic or ancient artifact they can. What they can’t buy, they steal.”

  “And now, you think they’re after this Palladium? And it’s somewhere on the trip down the Nile?”

  “The Greeks and Romans knew Egypt well. It would only take one adventurous mind to think and hide the Palladium down the world’s longest river.”

  O’Neil scratched at his rough beard. Genevieve smiled as he contemplated it. In her head the idea had sounded crazy, but the grizzled sailor seemed to actually consider it. She wasn’t sure if that made her mad or him.

  “I think we—”

  O’Neil’s words were cut off by Jim. The man charged into the room screaming.

  “Mahdi, Mahdi, Mahdi!”

  Jim ran past O’Neil and straight for the pipe horn at the back of the room. He yanked the string down and quickly sounded three long bleats.

  “What’s going on?”

  “You should get back to your cabin and lock the door, Genevieve. Jim spotted Mahdists. We’re about to be attacked.”

  Chapter Five

  O’Neil didn’t have time to get Genevieve below deck. He barely had time to retrieve his pistol from the locked box in the helm. The Mahdists leapt from the shoreline upon ropes and vines. They flew through the air towards the ship with a casual disdain for their own lives. For every four that hit the ship, one would fall into the leech and crocodile filled water.

  Jim had a machete in his hand, while O’Neil had his pistol and hook. The rest of the crew quickly flooded onto the deck, knifes and axes and cudgels in hand. Captain Roy came out last, still dressed in his bedclothes. He held the ship’s only other firearms, a Remington rifle and a Colt pistol.

  The men wasted no time waiting for the Mahdists to strike. O’Neil charged out in the lead. He shot a man off his rope before he could close in on the ship. But even as he shot, two more of the insane fighting force landed on the ship.

  While the Mahdi was fifty years dead, his men still lived in small communities on the river’s coast. They rose up decades ago to push the British out of their land, but ultimately failed. Still the survivors were still known for the hatred for the British, a term they used for any white-manned ship on these waters. They would bide their time and wait for ships to travel the line. When they found one particularly ripe for the plucking, they would attack with fury.

  O’Neil took careful aim as he shot down one Mahdist after another. But with only six bullets loaded, their numbers would outrun his bullets quickly.

  A Mahdist charged at O’Neil. The mad warrior held a scimitar high above his head, ready to cleave the one-armed sailor in two. O’Neil buried his final bullet between the Mahdist’s eyes.

  He quickly bent down over the corpse and yanked the sword free. He came to his feet just in time to cut another Mahdist from stem to stern. The warrior fell dead at his feet.

  Captain Roy unloaded both shots of the rifle, exploding two enemies’ chests before they could strike down the rest of the crew. He let the weapon fall, then pulled the pistol from his belt and fired wildly as the hash-fueled warriors flooded onto the ship.

  O’Neil cut down another man with the scimitar, and then used his hook to grab another Mahdist by the loose hood he wore. He flipped the captured Mahdist up and over him. The mad warrior crashed headfirst against the deck with a sickening crack.

  He turned back towards Captain Roy to see him be overwhelmed by the growing Mahdist force. Another Mahdist charged towards O’Neil. O’Neil parried the madman’s attack, then struck with his own blade. His eyes turned back towards the captain in time to watch Roy be cut down by the Muslim warriors.

  Genevieve screamed from inside the ship’s cabin. A Mahdist held the women over his shoulder. She struggled and struck against him, but the Mahdist showed no sign of feeling the pain. He hurled himself and Genevieve off the side of the ship. O’Neil could only watch as the Mahdist swam towards the shore.

  He was forced back into the din of the battle as more Mahdists flooded around him. The deck was awash with the Muslim warriors.

  O’Neil struck down another Mahdist with the scimitar in his hand. He caught another with his hook. He could feel the jagged end of his false limb rip through the man’s throat. He yanked the hook free and sent the Mahdist flying into two of his compatriots.

  Armless O’Neil knew that their luck was running out. The crew was filled with skilled fighters, but they were outnumbered four to one.

  The sound of rifle fire cut through the din of battle. O’Neil and the crew dropped to the deck at the sound, but the Mahdists were too enraged by their hashish addiction. They stood their ground.

  O’Neil could only watch as the bullets tore apart the mad warriors. The Mahdists fell in a hail of death and smoke and blood. It took less than a minute for the battle to come to an end.

  As the smoke cleared, O’Neil could see the source of the fire. Wagner and his men stood in a loose circle around the hatch to the guest quarters. Each man held a sparkling new rifle. O’Neil had only seen one or two before, but he knew the gun as a Mauser Karabiner. The rifle of the German army.