The pain was so severe Rusk swooned, coming to again in his own vomit, his nauseate agony set to the cracking, snuffling sound of a shark-were at its repast. Spasming, he jack-knifed left and came nose-to-snout with the thing, its bloodstained mouth still unnaturally aflame, and managed, groaning: “Wh-what, wh—why—?”
Standing above, too damnable calm by far, Parry paused to order first one cuff, then the other. “The process,” he said, at last, “is called cauterization.”
Rusk spit bile. “Because ye . . . want me t’live crippled, is . . . that it?”
“Because I want you alive, yes, for now. ‘Til I say otherwise.”
“And just how long will that be, I wonder?”
“A fair question. How long can you hold your breath?”
“No ship can have two captains,” the Bitch’s former master used to claim, before Rusk overtook him. “‘Tis not natural, and the sea bears no unnaturalness.” Which was good advice, certainly, or always had been, before . . .
That man never had the ill-luck to meet with such as Jerusalem Parry, though, let alone make the supreme error of lying down with him, in both the phrase’s prime senses. And Rusk thought he might well’ve given thanks for avoiding that opportunity, had he only found himself still far enough above-waves to venture a verdict on the matter.
“Others might maroon you,” Parry had told him as the crew’s four strongest members bound Rusk’s pain-stiff carcass, all apologetic, to the Bitch of Hell’s anchor-chain. “But I am not over-merciful by nature, as you have no doubt noted, and have no interest in giving second chances. This ship is mine, from now on; your death will christen it with blood, as is only loreful.”
Oh, aye, Rusk thought, far too wearied by dolour to summon much of a struggle. Still, it would all be over soon enough, if not immediately . . .
(and there was that vaunted lack of mercy showing through, in the very proclaimed method of his demise—for keel-hauling was one of the illest deaths imaginable, a terror seldom more than threatened, combining as it did all the varied and central terrors of drowning, great bodily suffering and utter humiliation)
Soon enough, yes. Or so he had believed.
“I should thank you, I suppose,” Parry said, while they hauled him up, “for this change my durance seems to’ve wrought in me, since truly—even at my lowest, in that gaol-ship’s brig—I never looked to be so powerful as I am now. Then again, my mother’s marsh was salten, so perhaps I was always destined to find my power’s depth at sea.”
Rusk touched a too-dry tongue to bleeding lips, and eked out: “Hmm, might . . . be. So . . . will ye?”
“Give thanks, to you?” Parry cast that cold metal stare his way, one last time, lips pursing in a way Rusk would once have found intolerable for very different reasons. Then, at last: “I think not.”
But this, too, was very little surprise.
“Stay . . . ever as y’are, my Jerusha,” Rusk croaked while the weeping sailors heaved to, swinging him over the side. “I’ll . . . miss ye.”
“I cannot say the same, sir,” was Parry’s reply.
Then Rusk closed his eye, and let the water take him. Only to learn that for some unlucky few—himself very much included, it turned out—death was not always as he’d been previously given to believe, prior to shedding his mortal coil.
Now that he was no longer encumbered by the flesh, Rusk could easily see everything he’d never been privy to: lines of power leaking from Parry to Mister Dolomance and back again, a double set of chains; from his own ruined wreck of a body to the Bitch’s hull, in the brief instant Parry stooped to pluck Rusk’s still-witched eyeball out and slip it in his bag, like spoils of war, before directing “his” crew to shove their former captain’s corpse off-deck through the scuppers same as so much other rubbish. Or the curse he’d never known he was capable of placing on sweet Master Jerusha bleeding out from that same bespelled item, tainting every other hex-ingredient and entering Parry’s heart through the breast-pocket, where it soon commenced to circulate through his system like any other humour.
Seem you the same sort’a Rusk as me after all, no matter the size o’that piece ‘tween ya legs, or what-all it pull ya fiercest towards, Tante Ankolee might have said, had he ever thought to ask her. Born of bad angels on one side an’ bad men on th’other, a ten-mile-long chain o’ witches, pirates, and pirate-witches—an’ just like that Master Parry o’yours know all too well, t’him an’ your cost both, ‘tis never no fit measure ta look only at what a man already done ta foresee what him yet may do, under th’exact right circumstance. Why is’t ya think y’have such a hunger for him, anyhow, but that ya finally recognize y’own kind?
(Which maybe explains it th’other way, too, Rusk’s traitor thoughts would have chimed in, if so. Why he felt the same pull as regards to me, and just as strong, though Christ knows he’d do anything not t’admit it.)
Anything and everything, yes. As current circumstances only went to prove.
When the Bitch returned to Porte Macoute, Rusk’s ghost stood watching from her deck when Parry tried to come ashore, only to start bleeding out at every pore the second his boot-soles touched land. Saw Mister Dolomance drag him into the surf and swim back at double-time, inhumanly swift, that same passage rubbing Parry
raw ‘cross the chest and inner arms against the shark-were’s sandpaper skin, even with two separate layers of clothing between.
Later, with Parry cocooned in healing power just like that first night they’d shared together, Rusk stretched himself invisibly alongside and passed a gelid ghost-hand down his beloved murderer’s side, touching each of the wizard’s organs in turn and saving that one he liked best for last. Stroked him once more from the inside out in an entirely different way, sowing gooseflesh over his blood-smeared new-grown hide, and whispered, in Parry’s fever-bright ear:
Shield yourself from me all ye please, in whichever ways ye choose, yet I am here always, nonetheless. The Bitch is my command as much as yours, forever, Master Parry. A sad truth, and one which must drag it down eventually, bringing you along with it . . .
How it comes I know not, but know this: I will be there that day, that hour, at the very striking of your doom; we will meet again beneath the water, where I will hold you tight, as your own flesh casts you free. I will never let you go.
***
And so it did come to pass, eventually, but not for years yet. The which is another tale completely, told by one who would never know—or care to know—what you now do: how two equal-obdurate men may always be the death of each other, fast or slow, especially when magic is involved.