Our three boats cruised up to within ten yards of the prison ship, which was close enough. The stench was making me sick to the stomach and all around I saw similar faces. Someone in Midds’ crew vomited over the side and I felt that I was about to do likewise.
“You know animals, Stefan. Some river monster did this?” Peter asked me. I shrugged to indicate that there was infinite potential in the world for monsters.
“Bodies still intact,” Shon reeled off tonelessly. “Weapons. Some of them are still locked together. They killed each other. If there were monsters they just finished the work.”
“All of them?” I got out.
“All of them,” he confirmed.
“Someone’s going to have to check the boat out,” called the Warden I did not know. It was obvious that he was not volunteering. “Might be some survivors.”
“I’m taking downriver,” Midds said definitively. “Nobody’s getting me on that thing.” I knew that the only thing he would find downriver would be more of the reeds he smoked. Peter and the other Warden knew the same but they let him go and his boat cut a wide arc and sped off.
Peter looked over at his fellow Warden and said, “I’ll do the boat, if you want.” The relief on the other man’s face lit him up like a lamp. “You check upriver. Someone might have found their way along the bank.”
When we were alone, Peter took his Ropa blade out of his bag and weighed it thoughtfully. “Don’t want to rule out the monsters just yet. Let me go first.” Nobody was going to argue with him. “After that, Thelwel tries the engines and the rest of us get to piece together what the hell happened.”
The canting of the deck meant that one rail was only inches above the water line. Scavenging birds hauled their glutted bodies into the air as we approached, descending to bow the overhanging branches. Whilst I moored our boat to a rusty ring on the ship’s side, Peter hauled himself over the railing and took the sword when Shon handed it up to him. He crouched on the slanted deck, one foot against the rail, surrounded by the dead. At a gesture, Shon followed him and, as they began to make their way against the slope Thelwel and I had no choice but to take up the slack.
The first thing I saw was a knot of the dead, some five or six scavenger-ravaged corpses, all bloodied limb-bones tangled together. I did not gaze on them long enough to unravel their story but Shon looked them over with a clinical eye. He shot a shrewd glance at Peter’s back and stooped to scoop something up, and I saw it was a blade crusted with blood the colour of rust.
“You never know,” he told me.
Peter was standing in the centre of the deck by now. There was a combative set to his shoulders and the sword hung so easily in his hand that I knew he must have activated it. For a moment I expected some monster to come bounding from the water or belowdecks. There was nothing to fight, though.
Some of the dead still sported crossbow bolts projecting from skulls or between ribs. There were the notches of blades, and between the picked sockets of the skull nearest me was a chipped hole that a flintlock ball had made.
“Prisoners against sailors?” Thelwel wondered aloud, but Peter called back, “Look at the clothes,” and he was right. There were a few whose stained rags might have been prison greys, but for the most part they wore the hard-wearing garb of the crew.
I felt my queasiness wearing off from the surfeit of gore on all sides. At my feet there were two bodies intertwined like lovers, save that each clutched a hilt buried in the other’s back. As I bent over them, one eyeless visage rolled up of its own accord to grin at me. I stumbled back over the strewn dead and a crab-like thing unshelled itself from within the skull and tapped away. My queasiness returned in force and I threw the morning’s stew over the side.
Peter was approaching the entry to the hold, and gestured for us all to join him. The air from within was as laced with decay as that without, stale and stuffy to boot.
“There are no survivors,” Shon said.
Peter shrugged. “I know, but we have to check.” He led the way down the steps sword first. Thelwel produced a little hand-lamp and clicked it on, throwing a reddish glow that stretched the reaching fingers of our shadows out before us.
“Engines are straight ahead,” Peter recalled. “Holds are behind us, to fore. Left and right, crew quarters, small storage…” He stepped abruptly to one heavy metal door and kicked it open, revealing a bare metal room relieved only by a grimy porthole and a table bolted to the floor. “Remember, Stefan?”
“It’s been a while since we last played,” I said.
“That it has.”
The others looked at us as though we were mad.
“Thelwel, go check the engines out. Did they stop or were they broken, or did they just run out of something? You,” to Shon, “Go with him.”
“And we are…?” I enquired.
“The hold. You should remember that too.”
I did. Crushed in a metal cage with a mass of other prisoners; frightened, jostled, with no hope for the future and violent men all around me. Until Peter demanded a chess partner and took me from there, the first in a long line of kindnesses.
We made our way forwards less and less carefully. There were a couple of bodies in the central corridor, sailors both. The head of one was smashed almost flat. The other, one torn hand still near the chair-leg club, had a bolt in his back.
“Did they all go mad?” Peter muttered to himself. “Did they catch some brain-fever from the jungle?”
I remained silent. I was thinking about news I had heard from the city, not least Arves’ tale of the Underworld.
The hold door was ajar and Peter kicked it open. Something rushed at us instantly, nothing but a sense of movement in the gloom. The Ropa blade swept round and, if I had not already been falling backwards, it would have been the end for me. It cleft the air, the metal of the doorframe, and then its momentum dragged it on through the space that I had occupied until a moment before. Two long reptiles dashed between Peter’s legs and around me, birdlike on two feet. We heard them patter off down the corridor. Peter looked down at me contritely and helped me up.
“Are you all right?” It should have been his question, but it was mine.
“Just a bit on edge,” he said unhappily. “I thought…”
“That it was a monster after all. Something you could kill.”
He smiled slightly. “Something like that.” Then we stepped into the hold and the smile was gone.
The door of the cage was broken outwards. The prisoners had forced it in utter desperation, because the crew had obviously been shooting them through the bars. A good forty men and women were heaped like rags in the cage, and there was a scattering of dead, prisoners and crew, across the floor. I could see exactly how some had escaped the shot enough to break the door and throw themselves on their executioners, killing several with their bare hands.
Peter turned and his face was expressionless. “Check the other rooms,” he told me, and walked away.
I pushed open each door in turn, seeing a few other bodies, nothing much else. In the last I was confronted by a pistol aimed straight at me. Behind a desk sat the foul-mouthed captain I remembered. His head was tilted back and he started blankly at the ceiling of his cabin with a pistol ball in his head. Whichever mutinous crewman had killed him had also closed the door of his room, and so he was untouched by the scavengers. I judged him to be about two days dead. It was a subject in which I was becoming an unwilling expert.
Another link to my past had been severed.
There was an atrocious grinding noise from the rear of the ship and every rivet, plate and bolt of it shuddered and jumped. I reeled out of the room as the captain’s dead weight jolted from atop the desk and slid, rigid, to the floor. I saw Peter ahead of me, and I swear that we both thought some titanic monster was battering at the metal to get at the meat inside. Then the same realisation clicked in each of our minds.
“Thelwel,” Peter shouted over the din. “The engines!” and we both ran aft.
By the time we arrived the racket had stopped, and Thelwel was shaking his head at a massive block of machinery larger than the cell I shared with Lucian and Hermione.
“Damaged,” he told us. “Sabotaged. This boat isn’t going anywhere soon. How long can we spare to fix it?”
Peter frowned at him. “We’re not here to fix it. If the Marshal wants it fixed, he can send a repair crew. We’re here to see what happened.”
“I think it’s clear what’s happened,” Shon put in. There were even a couple of bodies in the engine room.
“Tell me about what they did,” Peter said patiently, and Thelwel began to give him the kind of technical details that I could not follow, and that I knew Peter could not. I lost interest soon enough and decided that what I needed most of all was fresher air.
Climbing up to the sunlight, I disturbed all the scavengers just settling down to feed again. Many of them hopped only feet away from their half-complete meals and then sidled back warily. At least they were making the best of a bad situation.
I found that the air closer to the jungle was heavy enough with the scents of life to counter those of death, and leant back on the rail at the branch-speared prow, taking advantage of the shade and wondering what on earth was going on. That was when I was grabbed.
Something hooked my shoulder from behind, and my mouth was stopped. I was whirled around to look into the heart of the jungle, into a face I had missed like a dead friend.
“Kiera!” I exclaimed, or would have done if her hand had not been over my mouth. She stared at me almost with disbelief and then clutched me in such an embrace my heart almost leapt out of me.
She released me a little awkwardly, sensing that she had perhaps crossed some line she had not intended to. “You have no idea what it’s like to see another human being!” she said.
“Trethowan…?”
“I don’t think he’s even slightly human any more, not after living with them for so long,” she said, all in a rush. “And they’re not bad, but they’re so different. I never realised how much I needed people.” She was sitting on a branch that ran along the prison ship’s rail, and there was a certain nimbleness new to her. She still wore prison greys, but cut to bare her arms and legs, and she had gained a woven bag and belt. There was a knife in that belt, scavenged from some old metal tool, and something that might have been a sling. Her delicate skin, that I had always admired, was now smeared with some greenish paste that helped blend with the greenery or maybe deterred insects. She had been working hard to fit into her new world. “You’re here with Peter and Thelwel, aren’t you?” she said. “And someone else. Where do I know him from?”
“He’s Shon. He’s a friend. He helps me write for the Governor.”
“That’s it.” She still had not wholly let go of me, hands trailing on my hands, eyes still on my eyes. “You’re here because of this. You’ve been sent to find the boat.”
“Yes, we… Were you here when it happened?”
“Some of the web-children saw it, and I’ve been nearby since, to see who came.”
I wanted to say something poetic then, about absence and fondness and so forth. The day had been too full of death and my customary eloquence was wanting. I was still muddling a suitable sentence together when she said, “Go and get Peter,” which derailed me.
“Go and bring him,” she repeated. “I want to see him, too. And I can tell you what happened here. Go.”
And of course she wanted to see Peter, and of course I went.
*
We left Thelwel tinkering with the engine, and Shon watching him because it was a valuable skill on the Island. I had not told Peter why I needed him, I just led him to lean against the rail and we stood there in silence as he grew increasingly impatient. At last I realised that Kiera was right there amongst the leaves, practically between us, one hand pressed to her mouth to stop the laughter. I think she had adapted to her new lifestyle better than she knew.
They embraced, Peter and Kiera, but it was not such a grand affair as ours had been, I was sure.
We asked her how she was coping in the wilderness, and she said she was managing. She was a creature born of the social gatherings of the Shadrapan elite, no more used to survival than the Governor, her kinsman, and yet she had prospered where I would have fallen.
“I can find food, make shelters. I know some medicine. The practical side is all taught to me. It’s when I’m not doing all these things, it starts to get to me,” she revealed. “It’s the stillness. Then I wonder what I’m doing there and who I’m trying to fool.”
Peter was brooding over something, so I gestured to the ravaged deck and asked her what the web-children had seen.
“No more than you might think. People fighting on board, then the whole ship just shuddered and ploughed into the bank. Some escaped it, but the jungle took them, one way or another. The web-children say nobody made it far.”
I wondered if they had made sure of it but said nothing. Peter made a dissatisfied noise.
“I can tell you more, though,” she added. “Just from my own reasoning. I can guess what happened. You’ve seen the hold? The prisoners?”
Our grim expressions told her that we had.
“Did you notice the balance of them, men and women?”
“It was… difficult to tell,” Peter said flatly.
“The balance was about even. That’s not the way of the Island. Normally there’s a single woman to a boat, if that. What does this suggest to you?”
“Politicals,” I recognised, “being shipped to the Island for a quiet execution, like before.”
Kiera nodded. “Only this time someone pushed too far. These prisoners had friends. Either they bought some of the crew, or the crew were their supporters already, but there was a mutiny. You can see how bloody the fighting must have been. Nobody gets that single-minded unless there’s ideology at stake. The mutineers wanted to release the prisoners so some of the loyalists got below and killed them. Fanatics on both sides.”
“And the mutineers must have thrown the engines, to stop the prisoners arriving. Or the loyalists did, to stop them returning,” Peter said incredulously. “And these were just sailors. What business did they have caring so much? What can it be like in the city?”
“Kiera, you were in politics,” I noted.
“In a way,” she admitted.
“Were your family allied to the Anteims?”
“My family? No, damn them,” she replied with surprising vehemence. “Not most of the time, anyway. Not as much as we’d have liked.”
“Jon Anteim the Elder is dead,” Peter explained. “Murdered. What does that do to the balance of power?”
She digested that, wide eyed, and I saw she must have known the old man, that his death had a particular significance for her. “Knocks it over completely. Presidents change, Lords change, the whole Authority swings from one faction to the next, but the Anteims were a constant, always pulling strings. So the old man’s dead? And his son, too, of course.” Her face closed up as she considered the implications of this. “And now the Authority is shipping its dissidents off to a quiet death in the jungles, but there’s enough opposition to cause this kind of mess.”
“And few Outriders or Angels left to keep order,” I pointed out, and gave her Underworld’s defeat in brief, and what it had cost the city.
At this point, Kiera drew back, for Thelwel and Shon were coming up from belowdecks. “I have to go,” she said.
“Kiera.” Peter leant back on the rail, nodding to Shon and Thelwel, talking out of the side of his mouth. “Have the web-children keep a watch on the Island.”
“They always do.”
“If they see the two of us put out in a boat again, you have to come here. We’ll meet you here,” he told her. She nodded slowly, and then froze and neither Thelwel nor Shon seemed to pick her out from the overhanging greenery.
Just before we re-embarked onto our own boat I cast a look back at her, but I could make out nothing but the jungle from which the birds were again descending. As I looked away I caught Thelwel’s enquiring expression. I never did find out if he saw her.
*
The journey back was not as pleasant, both because we were returning to our prison, Wardens and inmates all, and because of the heavy news we had to tell. There had been some talk of trying to keep it silent from the general populace, but Peter had pointed out that the news would spread soon enough of its own accord. The Warden I did not know proposed having all of us prisoners shot. Peter answered that he had seen enough death for one day.
Sure enough, by the time I returned to my cell, the word was already out. By that evening, even as Peter and the others made their official report to the Marshal, everyone was anxiously speculating over what would happen next. Someone on our stretch wanted to know when they would send the next boat, and Thelwel’s clear voice called, “What next boat? There is only the one boat from Shadrapar. It has always been the same one.”
I had not considered that side of things. No boat, at least until the city reclaimed it, or commissioned a new one. No boat meant no more prisoners, and nobody to take away the sacks. No boat meant we were completely cut off from the city of our birth.
*
I was awoken maybe an hour before dawn. There was a rushing and a murmuring from the end of the stretch as some new piece of news was passed from ear to ear. I was about to put my head down again and get what sleep I could (Lucian’s cough was still troubling him) when I was shocked into wakefulness by a terrible, inhuman wail like nothing I had ever heard. Everyone was quickly at their doors, clamouring to know what was going on, and above it all that horrible sound continued, something that could never have come from a human throat.
It did not. It came from Thelwel. The news had reached him and he was standing in the centre of his cell, hands pressed to his eyes, shrieking out his pain to the world from a throat that seemed not to need any fresh breath.
The word reached me at last from the men in the next cell.
Father Sulplice was dead.
He had been found at the foot of a flight of stairs with his frail old neck broken, and it might have been an accident save that there were two clear thumb marks where his killer had pressed for purchase. In ancient times they had sciences to tell a man from the marks of his thumbs, but we had long lost any such. All those marks spoke of was the fact that the old man’s death was no accident. Father Sulplice had been murdered.