Cary had been drifting for many hours without sight of land. Even had he trusted himself to manage the canoe, the beast’s arms had smashed a hole in the hull and the vessel was useless. Using Strike’s flint, he lit the lodestone candle to get his bearing, then laid on his front dragging a paddle in the water as a sort of rudder, but either he knew too little of sailing or the raft was too heavy to turn.
On and on with still nothing around him but water. Fresh water, and he crawled to the edge now and then to drink from his cupped hand. As the sun began to sink below the horizon he lit the candle again, one tiny spark against infinity.
And all for nothing. Jaime was gone. The others dead or drowned or God knew. The monster’s horrific spawn was scattered on the current, to infest the rest of the lake. If he had any dignity, he’d walk off the edge of the raft and put an end to everything. Give up trying to undo the harm he had caused. Yet if he died, Jaime’s death went unavenged.
And then he heard an engine. Or was that the sound of his own heart as it laboured to keep beating beneath the weight of his sorrow? He got to his feet, clinging to the post. Away to the southwest a long dark shape set with lights moved beneath a plume of smoke. A steamer? Any vessel would do, and as it steadily grew closer he began to shout, waving his arms to draw someone’s eye. Any eye, but even his booming voice was lost in the sound of its churning paddlewheels.
It was near enough he could see people walking to and fro on the deck, the lights winking whenever someone passed in front of them. He’d snuffed the candle to preserve it, and now lit it again. As he shouted he passed his hand in front of the light, hoping that someone aboard saw the flickering, but the big ship didn’t slow.
His voice growing hoarse, he set the candle on the deck, pulled off his stiff coat and waved it overhead as a flag. A light on the ship began to flicker, a regular blinking as someone opening and closing the shutter of a lantern. He threw down his coat and gingerly picked up the shortened candle in its tin holder, trying to match the pattern of the flicker. Another light on the side of the ship began to drop. As it moved away from the dark mass of the barge the slim shape of a canoe resolved, paddling towards him at speed.
The grizzled man in stained buckskin at the prow of the canoe had Gordo’s wandering eyes, Cesar’s lank curtain of hair, and Patrice’s odor, but he was the dearest thing Cary had ever seen.
“Is there just the one of you?” he asked as Cary huddled on the seat behind him.
“Dunno what’s left of the others.”
“Is that so? Where’ve you come from?”
“Misery Bay. I got to get back there.”
“That’ll have to be on you, I’m sorry to say. I’ve to stick with the steamer.”
“I’ll pay you.”
He turned to look squarely at Cary. “With what?” he asked softly, his eyes briefly lighting on the fellow piloting the stern of the canoe.
“Do you know what a lodestone candle is?”
His greying brows lifted. “Why, have you got one?”
“Yours if you’ll do as I ask.”
“What about him?” he asked with a flick of his eyes to indicate the other fellow.
“Does he happen to like tobacco?”
Stars blazed across the purple sky by the time they reached the little cove. “You’re certain this is it?” Cary asked, squinting into the darkness, for not a light shone across the campsite, the water lapping softly at the unseen shore.
“Sure as sure I am,” said his guide, whose name was Denis, and whose partner had turned out to very much like tobacco. “I know this here island like no one.”
“Who’s going there?” came a shout.
Denis unshuttered the lantern and swept the light across the grounds. Patrice was splashing towards them across the shingle. The other boys huddled around the unlit fire, but there was no sign of Sandover, or of the duke’s clay-faced man. Or of Jaime, but Cary set that aside as Patrice helped him out of the canoe, then clasped him to his chest.
“Goddamn good to see you,” he choked, pounding Cary’s back.
“Might we get out of the water?” Cary wheezed.
“Why? Oh! Sure thing.”
Cary thanked his rescuers then waded onshore, the starlight just bright enough to keep him from stumbling. All five of the boys had made it through the ordeal, though they were a sorry lot, huddled in their wet clothes around the fire which Gordo was struggling to relight.
“Shame about the little fella,” he murmured as Cary knelt beside him with Strike’s smoldering tinderbox. “He was a fighter, no doubt.”
Cary only nodded. He’d kept himself from dwelling on any of his losses. He was lucky to be alive. Lucky to only be tired and frightened and not stuck on a raft in a lake the size of the sea. Lucky to have known a man like Jaime, selfless to the last.
He tried to thank Gordo, but he had no breath to speak, as if a huge weight bore down on his chest. Pain he knew, and shame, and fear and loneliness, but never such heartbreak, a sense of the world being somehow reduced for no longer containing Jaime Skye.
With the ever-burning tinderbox they woke the fire. Seated on the ground, his back against a log, Cary gnawed a little hardtack and pemmican, but the trials of the day soon caught him up. Rather than huddle alone in the tent he let sleep find him where he was.
He woke feeling as sore in body as he was in spirit. It was punishingly early, no one up but the birds and the dew, and it took him a few tries to get to his feet. He hadn’t eaten in a day, hadn’t eaten well in a month, and he stopped to hitch up his stained trousers. Never had he longed so badly for the comforts of an ordinary city, where the worst danger was another man’s ire and not drowning by lethal creatures or lunatic mage.
He reached the shore and wandered a little westward along the slabs of dimpled stone. Some quarter mile away the shoreline dipped in where the underwater crevice lay. He tried to fix the sight in his mind, for he ought to tell Dr Eckhart how to find the creature. If the thing could not be killed it could at least be avoided.
Satisfied that he could describe the scene, he was about to head back when he saw a movement in the scrub on the far side of the gap. He froze, searching among the trees, but saw nothing more. As he turned once more, a small, dear face beneath a thatch of sun-reddened hair poked out from behind a clump of birch.
“Jaime! Stay put, I’ll come get you.”
“No, you stay put,” he shouted back. He darted away through the forest, towards the heart of the island. Cary dithered, for the scrub grew thickly along this strip of shore. He was forced to retrace his steps nearly to the campsite, all the while keeping an eye for Jaime in the forest, for he could not lose him again, could not lose this chance to save them both.
Covering his head with one arm, he shoved through the thicket and gained the more open ground beneath the trees. Still no sign of Jaime, and he was going to start calling his name when he heard a sharp whistle. There between two leafless trunks at the top of a short rise was Jaime Skye, and the wretched tension in Cary’s chest dissolved into the greatest joy he’d ever known as his friend, his heart, his Jaime came pelting down the little slope and ran to him, shouting with delight, alive, alive.