Suddenly the floor heaved. The Chathrand was tilting over: a slow, scraping list to portside, accompanied by groaning timbers, creaking screws, curses from above and below. Thasha and Felthrup scrambled into the outer stateroom.
“We’re afloat,” said Neeps, mopping beer from the floor. “Credek, they’ve got a lot of rebalancing to do.”
“Let’s go up there,” said Marila.
The three youths left the stateroom. They met Pazel on the Silver Stair, and together they climbed to the topdeck. It was very dark, but even by the dim lamplight they could see how much had changed. The inner wall of the berth had been retracted, and the locks opened wide. The river had been allowed to pour back into the great basin, and the Chathrand, as Neeps said, was at last afloat. The mooring-lines creaked, the gangways rocked on their hinges.
Suddenly Thasha stifled a cry. Two beings were sweeping toward them from amidships. They were dressed in rags, which they clutched tight against the evening wind; their hands were bone-thin and colorless. One was hooded, and the other wore an ancient Merchant Service cap. But neither figure possessed a face. It was appalling: the fronts of their heads simply blurred to nothingness. She grabbed Pazel by the arm.
“You don’t see them, do you?”
“See what, Thasha?”
She knew quite well that they were ghosts. She had seen them by daylight, these shades of the former captains of the Great Ship. But by daylight they looked human-old, strange, crazed maybe, but human. Only drugged with blane, close to death herself, had she seen them in this form. A vision she had tried for months to forget.
The two figures came right for her. Thasha stepped backward, feeling the cold in them from yards away. “Duchess!” sighed the figure in the cap.
“I’m not,” said Thasha.
“Blind fool,” hissed the hooded figure to its companion. “The hag is in the cabin with her child. You’re standing before our mistress now, so keep a civil tongue.”
Her friends were talking, their voices far away. “I’m not your mistress, either,” she said. Then, a bit more bravely: “I don’t want you near me. Go to your rest, or wherever you belong.”
“We belong in the stomach of the night,” said the hooded spirit, thrusting its non-face closer to hers. “We are the bread of the unborn, the milk they will drink in their first hours. You keep us here, Mistress-you and the Red Beast. How can you order us hence, while you hold our chains in your hand?”
“Go to him!” cried the figure in the cap. “Go to Rose and help him face his doom! Go now, girl, before it’s too late!”
The hooded figure turned on its companion, outraged that it had taken such a tone with “our mistress.” They began to bicker, a sound like driving rain. Thasha turned and fled to starboard, dragging her friends with her. Suddenly another ghost rose through a glass plank on their left and began shuffling toward her purposefully. She was not going to be able to ignore them. And perhaps she shouldn’t: Oggosk too had been trying to tell them something about Rose, when she shared that letter.
“Come with me,” said Thasha to the others, and headed straight for the captain’s door beneath the quarterdeck. But as they neared it Sergeant Haddismal emerged, frowning at some inner thought. At the sight of them he was at once suspicious. He stopped in the doorway, blocking their path.
“Where d’ye imagine you’re going?” he said. “The captain’s too busy to breathe. He don’t need to hear from four lunatics on top of everything else.”
“Haven’t you learned how insulting that is?” said Marila, with such vehemence that even her friends looked at her in surprise.
“Insulting?” said Haddismal. “You taking after the fish-eyes, now?”
“Could be worse folk to take after,” said Neeps. “Right, Marila?”
“Just be quiet,” she said.
“Sergeant,” said Thasha with rising impatience, “we were told to see the captain, right now.”
“Told, eh? By whom?”
Thasha said nothing, and Haddismal’s mouth curled in anger. “Don’t muck around with me,” he said. “You know what strange fancy’s grabbed hold of him, don’t you? You’re here to take advantage. Do you know that he’s been marked for execution, just because he bled that fishy prince a little? I suppose you want him to go back ashore and walk among them. Throw himself on their mercy. Not likely, girl.”
“What in Pitfire are you talking about?” said Thasha. “What fancy’s come over him?”
Before Haddismal could reply they heard Rose himself, bellowing from behind him. “Stand clear, you tinshirt bastard! Let me out before I choke!”
Haddismal jumped aside, and Rose barreled into the doorway. For the second time in five minutes, Thasha had to contain the urge to cry out. The others did cry out, and even Haddismal made an appalled noise in his throat.
“Aya, Captain, you should leave that behind in your chambers! Don’t let the lads see you with it, sir.”
Rose was clutching the entire carcass of a leopard. It was dry and shriveled and hard as wood, but quite real. Its glass eyes were open; a waxy tongue lay rippling between huge yellow fangs. Rose was holding it against his chest with one arm. Like the Turach, he stopped dead at the sight of Thasha and her companions. His face paled; his eyes moved from one youth to another.
“You devils,” he said. “I curse the day you came aboard.”
“Beg your pardon, sir,” said Haddismal. “I was about to send them away.”
“Not till dawn! Not till dawn!”
“I meant away from your door, sir.”
“I’ll do it,” said Rose, but his eyes were drifting, and it seemed he spoke neither to the Turach nor to the youths. “Do you hear me? I’ll do it! What more do you want?”
“Do what, for Rin’s sake?” asked Pazel. “What’s the matter with you? What’s that leopard for?”
Rose gave the leopard a convulsive squeeze. Then, noticing that Haddismal too was staring at the creature, he barked: “Get on with your preparations! You’re fifteen hours from launch, and I’m still captain while I walk this ship!”
Haddismal stalked off, perplexed and affronted. Rose was still looking past them-at the ghosts, of course. He had always been able to see them, those shades of his predecessors. They hounded him, jeered and poked. Thasha wondered how he managed to hold on to the least hint of sanity under such conditions. But had the ghosts’ torments made him crazy, or was he able to sense them because he was already mad? Either way, it chilled her to know that the only other person aboard who saw the figures was herself.
“I never requested the Chathrand,” he said. “Has the witch not told you? I was running inland when the Flikkermen tracked me down.”
Like everyone aboard Thasha had heard the rumor, though not from Lady Oggosk. But with Rose it was always better not to tip one’s hand. “Why are you telling us this, Captain?” she asked.
“Say it!”
Rose flinched. It was another ghost, just above them on the quarterdeck. Thasha recognized the figure as Captain Kurlstaf: no other commander of the Great Ship dabbed pink paint on his fingernails. Thasha and Rose both looked at Kurlstaf: his tattered dress, his ancient pearls. He pointed a long white finger-bone at Rose.
“Say it!” hissed the shade again. “Raise your sleeve and swear!”
Rose professed to despise Kurlstaf, called him pansy and tarboy-tickler, among uglier names. But Thasha knew he also put more stock in Kurlstaf’s opinions than those of any of the other spirits.
“I am responsible for the well-being of this ship,” said Rose.
“Swear, you hairy red dog!” cried Kurlstaf.
Most reluctantly, Rose tugged his right sleeve up above the wrist. They all knew he bore the wolf-scar there: a burn identical to those carried by Pazel, Neeps, Thasha, Hercol, Bolutu-and Diadrelu, though hers they had only seen after her death. Rose held his arm up like a talisman.
“I didn’t ask for this either, by the Night Gods,” he said, “but it’s burned too deep ever to heal. I’m stuck with it, stuck with you, to the last tack and beyond.” He was still looking at Kurlstaf. “If a hopeless quest is to be the fate of Nilus Rose-why not? I’ll swear. You’ll see and be amazed, for I’ll give the oath, live by it, and die by it if necessary. And it will be necessary-just look at these circus clowns. But I’ll swear. You don’t believe me, do you?”
