“Yes sir,” the bo’sun replied, gratefully. “There were no great plans otherwise, believe me.”
Oh, I do, Parry thought, darkly. And levered himself upright, cracking his neck gingerly side to side, to loosen the scar’s hold on his wind.
Ignoring Captain Rusk’s phantom gaze, he refused to be hurried in his customary toilet; gathered his hair back in a neat tail and took care to re-order his linen, wrapping his cravat doubly high, brushing his coat ‘til he was satisfied with the way it shone. At last, he pulled his boots on and strode forth, flicking the lock to behind him with a blue-green whip of sparks. For though the door would not keep his evil angel confined, it pleased him to keep it closed between them, nevertheless, as proof of their division.
You are dead, sir, if not gone; stubborn as ever, and greedy of this bond you still claim we share, for all I never wished one. Yet much as I will one day break this curse you laid on me, I will see you learn, eventually, to leave me be.
Rusk would have laughed at this last, and maybe did, since Parry couldn’t hear it outside of dream, or drunkenness—a state to which Parry had seldom been used to abandon himself, even before he knew doing so would put him once more within reach of his former slavemaster’s growling voice and wandering hands. It was a different sort of skill to speak with the dead, one Parry was glad to know he did not share, unlike Rusk’s half-sister in Porte Macoute, the sorceress known as Tante Ankolee. God alone knew that if he could have somehow banished Rusk back to her side, he would have, without delay . . . but given the man had met his well-merited end aboard-ship—under it, any road—that did not seem an option.
Bitch of Hell, Rusk had called her, then, this craft which became his grave, for he’d been a coarse man, loose of impulse and restricted in vocabulary. But Parry had put paid to that, overseeing her masthead’s re-painting himself, which now read Salina Resurrecta: a salt-borne lady, cobbled from shipwrecks. Since the curse Rusk had laid upon him in dying rendered her both home and prison to him now, he shaped her to his likes, which varied by occasion; stiff as he outwardly seemed, he could be mercurial when the fit was on him, or when the pain land’s touch now bred in him reached up through however many fathoms of ocean to curl ‘round every limb, setting his blood a-boil in its most infinitesimal vessels.
A steep price to pay for his freedom, or so it sometimes seemed—yet they had always agreed on this, Captain Rusk and he, if little else: nothing came for nothing in this world; payment was always required, usually in whatever capital seemed most expensive.
On deck, Parry found Mister Dolomance lurking by the anchor-line with head down-hung far as his lack of neck allowed for, flat black eyes kept fixed on the salt-swollen boards beneath his nailless grey feet. He looked barely human, and Parry had made him so intentionally, that his presence would disturb those around him, rather than smooth the way. The creature was a born weapon, after all, birthed to roam and kill and eat without rest; to render him otherwise would have been to betray his true nature and leave the spells which kept him above-water prone to unravel at the slightest mis-step.
Wizardry was intuitive, in the main—none had tutored Parry at his craft, not since Tante Ankolee had so briefly quizzed him before sending him on his way, with a beginner’s hex-bag and a borrowed fetish to grow it on from. The same hung at his belt even now, dangling with all sorts of fresh ammunition; the witch he glimpsed now and then in dreams, like Rusk himself, seldom telling him anything useful. And he remained alone, as he always had been.
Still, better to it, without delay. Parry drew himself full height, staring down this monstrosity he’d wrought as scornfully as possible. “They say you’ve a gift for me, sir,” he said. “Well, bring it out—I must have some recompense, to pay fee on my interrupted slumber.”
Sheer rhetoric, of course, for the crew’s benefit—Dolomance did not “speak” save for the occasional squeal and grumble, though if Parry cared to press him he could conjure a crude alignment of their thoughts, picking squeamishly through the nasty rush of hatred and hunger which resulted. Such proved unnecessary, however; instead, Dolomance flapped one four-fingered hand over the side, inviting the captain’s gaze to follow after. On the waves below, a longboat floated—debris from some wreck or another brig’s overthrow, since its sides bore the smudged marks of fire from swift passage through lit oil. Its sole occupant, wrapped to the eyes ‘gainst the sun’s depredations, raised the portion Parry took to be its head and blinked at him incuriously, offering no greeting.
“Towed it ‘ere, ‘e did, with its rope in ‘is teeth,” offered a nearby salt Parry vaguely recalled having sworn the Articles after their last prize was taken, some verminous sot claiming skill in carpentry but yet to give much proof of it. “We was just waitin’ on you to bring it closer, Cap’n . . . or not.”
Great bunch of milksops. “Do so, then.”
A haul and heave-ho commenced, and Parry stood frowning, arms crossed, as the boat drew near. The figure did not stir; he might almost believe it asleep save it sat upright, swaying slightly. When the boat’s prow struck the Salina’s, however, its passenger seemed to rouse, looking up again, sharply—its cerements fell away, disclosing a face that made all men present gasp, seeing it proved both female and of an undeniable attractiveness.
Pale skin, a red mouth, long black hair in ringlets to the waist. And blue-grey eyes almost light as Parry’s own, with their odd silver cast, yet stormier—more mutable and opaque as well, unreadable, even for him. Mercury, caught beneath a glaze of stone.
“Where am I?” this lady demanded. “It has been days . . . are you men, or dreams, only?”
“Surely, madam,” said Parry, “most dreams smell far less ill than my crew; only sniff the wind to find yourself assured of our existence.”
She shook her head. “Nay, but there was a thing that seized me, brought me here. Like a shark, if sharks had legs.”
Parry shrugged, waving Dolomance forward, and watched her start again as the shark-were grimaced down, fixed teeth a smile’s bare parody. “My servant, madam. And you?”
“I am . . . they call me Clione, sir. My father was Haelam Attesee, who doctored on the Nymph.”
“And I am Jerusalem Parry—once of Cornwall, and the Navy. Pirate now, though not entirely by choice.”
She obviously recognized the name. “A magician too, as your servant proves. And a cursed man, if other rumours be believed.”
r /> “Yes, though not so long as I stand on water. Still, ‘tis true enough we are about no good business, by merest definition—so if you’d prefer to wait for less outlaw transport, I’m sure we can accommodate your scruples . . . ”
The woman—Miss Attesee, he should call her—furled her lip out prettily, thinking the matter over: elegant in every way, with her black-winged brows and a high spot of colour on each smooth cheek, lush as any Spanish grandee’s. “Clione” was one of Poseidon’s conquests, if Parry recalled a’right, ocean-swept and transformed for his pleasure, which did seem to fit. At closer quarters, her viperous mane took on the shade of black shared by grapes grown on Veritay Island, seat of Captain’s Rusk’s familial holdings; her soft hands were two doves, and that mouth a bitten pomegranate. And though his experience in such matters was woefully narrow, he had seldom seen anyone who pulled at him so, thus far . . . aside from one, and him only intermittently.
“I’ll come up,” she said, at last, so surlily Parry might almost believe he’d forced her to it. As though there might really be some other choice to make.
A fine-made baggage, he could almost hear Rusk’s ghost observe, as hands hauled her over the rail. And aren’t ye taken wi’ her, too, my cold young gentleman . . . should I be jealous?
Of what? Parry might have snapped, had he found himself alone. But even as the words formed, he saw those eyes of hers widen, as though she’d suddenly glimpsed something—some very tall thing—just over his shoulder, where Rusk had been all too wont to loom, in life.
I will not turn, he told himself. ‘Tis some ruse. Who is the wizard here, she or I?
And before he could think better of it he’d already reached out, slipping his gaze inside her own through some maneuver he could barely parse, the better to see what she saw: a man rearing up behind Parry, blotting out the sun—Black Scots, dark-tanned and leonine, with his King Charles hair and his single eye, the other a scar-messed socket. Captain Solomon Rusk, larger than life even in the utter lack of such, regarding her with a crooked smile and growling, in a voice like self-satisfied thunder: So she can see me, eh? You as well, through her. What a to-do!
Miss Attesee put one hand up, as though about to swoon; in anticipation, Parry withdrew himself perhaps quicker than was wise, for it made her give a hopeless little cry and all-over tremble, as though he’d felt up under her skirts. The crew exchanged glances, all equal-baffled. But Solomon Rusk’s ghost threw back his half-there head and guffawed, with so little sympathy it made Parry long to kill him all over again.