The Guardship

aware of that part of the operation, and Marlowe was not looking forward to his finding out.

The pirates were two cables off when they began their vaporing.

It started soft, one man upon the quarterdeck banging the flat of his sword against the rail in a slow and steady rhythm, then another, and a third with two bones in his hands that he beat together. Soon they were joined by someone with a drum, beating along with the steady thump thump thump thump thump, and then another with a fiddle who sawed the bow across the strings in a series of short, staccato shrieks.

When the ship had closed to a cable length one of the brigands amidships, a big man with a long black beard, began to chant in a voice like a thunderclap, “Death, death, death…”

The chant was picked up by the others, who flocked to the rails on the quarterdeck, forecastle, and waist, and clung to the shrouds and the channels, screaming, chanting, beating the sides with swords and cutlasses, steadily increasing the tempo, the whole terrible sound shot through with the bang of pistols and the high-pitched shrieking of the pirates.

Marlowe watched, transfixed, as they came on. He was carried away by that terrifying sound, the mesmerizing, steady rhythm, coming faster and faster, louder and louder, as the pirate ship ran down on them. It was the most frightening sound in the world.

He gripped his sword with a sweating palm, swallowed hard, tried to turn his eyes away, could not. The vaporing carried him off, bringing up old terrors like silt swirled up from the bottom of a deep pool.

He had heard it before, heard it from all sides, knew the great surge of brutal energy it brought to the pirate tribe, knew the resultant horror. He had learned it all, how to be victim and tormentor, had learned it from the devil himself.

It was that devil he feared. It was not rational, he knew.

That devil was just a man, and there were no other men Marlowe feared. He had bested him once. Most likely he was dead. Marlowe assured himself he had no reason to fear that man. But the vaporing brought it all back, and he could not shake it.

At last he tore his eyes from the pirates crowding their rail and looked down into the waist of his own ship. The devil was dead. He had to be. This was not him.

He hoped that his men would not panic, that Bickerstaff could hold them together. But he could see they were being swept up by the terror of the thing. The vaporing. The sound of pending death.

Chapter 20

CAPTAIN JEAN-PIERRE LeRois stood on the quarterdeck rail, sword in his right hand, his left hand on the backstay, steadying himself. And he felt steady, he felt very steady, and completely in command of himself and his ship as the Vengeance closed with this poor unfortunate who had had the temerity to fire upon them.

He was all but sober, having drunk just enough to prevent the shaking, to keep the screaming to a minimum.

And his authority, for the moment, was absolute. That was the way it worked in the sweet trade.

The crew of a ship might make decisions by vote during normal times, but when they went into battle the captain’s word was law, obeyed without question and without hesitation. Combat was not a time for democracy. As long as they were in a fight, LeRois was in command.

The vaporing was growing louder, building in intensity as they ran down on the crippled merchantman. The entire company of the Vengeance was crowded on the larboard side, screaming, pounding, firing pistols, ready to run alongside and pour onto the deck of their victim.

LeRois felt the excitement building, ready to burst out of him, the way he used to feel when he was with a woman. He opened his mouth and joined in the screaming, letting his hoarse voice mix with the layer upon layer of sound that swirled in his head.

They were going to murder these sons of whores, tear them apart. Not only had they failed to strike their flag at the sight of the Vengeance, a great effrontery, but they had fired on them as well, which was not to be tolerated.

There were women aboard. LeRois had seen them through his glass. They might provide days of amusement for his men.

“Hoist up the pavillon de pouppe, the black ensign, now!” he shouted to the men below him on the quarterdeck who were tending to the huge flag draped over the taffrail. LeRois always waited until the last second to break it out. He knew that the sudden appearance of that flag, with its leering skull and twin swords and hourglass, would wipe out any vestiges of bravery left in his victim’s crew, any hint of defiance not quashed by the vaporing.

The men on the quarterdeck hauled away, and the big flag lifted up the ensign staff and snapped out in the breeze. The death’shead seemed to laugh as the cloth twisted and buckled in the wind.

The screaming built toward a crescendo, careening around in LeRois’s head, and he opened his mouth and joined in again.

Half a cable length. There were not above a dozen men on the victim’s deck. Those working aloft had come back down and, incredibly, were firing at the Vengeance with small arms, as if they wanted to inflame the Brethren more, as if they wanted their own deaths to be as horrible as could be imagined.

Fifty yards and LeRois could feel the excitement like a hot wind sweeping across the Vengeance’s deck. The chanting had crested and broken into disorganized screaming, and the horrible sound rolled toward the victim like surf as the pirates shouted and fired and tensed for the leap across to the dead men’s ship. Halfway up the shrouds men stood on the ratlines,

swinging grappling hooks in small arcs, ready to grab the other vessel in a death grip.

Twenty yards away. LeRois squinted and ran his eyes along the quarterdeck, seeking out the merchantman’s captain, who would be his own to finish off. There was the helmsman, and the quartermaster, and…

LeRois’s scream went up and up in a pitch to a shattering wail of anguish. “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!” he screamed. He threw his sword aside and snatched up one of the pistols draped around his neck with a ribbon and fired it blindly at the victim’s quarterdeck. For there, unmistakably, was Malachias Barrett, sword in hand, pacing fore and aft, giving orders with the gestures, the stride, that LeRois knew so well.

He dropped the pistol and snatched up the next, and as he did he waited for the vision to go away, because that was what it was, he knew, a vision, just like those others that had been plaguing him more and more.

But the vision did not go away. It persisted with a tenacity that the others had not shown. LeRois felt the panic rising up in him, burning in his throat, felt the great confidence he had thus far enjoyed draining off. He screamed again and fired off his second gun, willing the specter to disappear.

The puff of smoke from the pistol obscured his view of the quarterdeck, blocking out the unholy vision, and in that instant LeRois realized that the tenor of the Vengeance’s screaming had changed, that the vaporing had turned into something else-anger and fear and defiance.

He shifted his eyes down to the victim’s waist, not fifteen yards off. The gunports were open and the great guns were running out, all at once, run out by what must have been a great many men hiding behind the bulwark.

“Merde…,” LeRois said, and then their prize seemed to explode in a blast of cannon fire. All eight guns erupted at once, blowing columns of flame across the water and filling the air with an unearthly shrieking such that not even the pirates could match.

The big guns fired straight into the densely packed pirates along the rail and the channels, men who had no cover and nowhere to run, and they tore those men to pieces. LeRois saw bodies flung back on the deck and hanging limp in the rigging and draped over the Vengeance’s unmanned cannon.

“God damn you to hell! God damn you!” LeRois screamed, frenzied. A piece of langrage had cut through his sleeve and blood was dripping out of the rent. And more blood, great quantities, was running in red lines down the side of the ship, but that only made him madder still.

“Back in place! Back in place, you sons of whores!” he shouted at his men, and the dazed, stunned pirates,