Yancy continued to nibble at the food that was laid out for them. It was the first meal he had had for some time that was prepared by another’s hands, but of course his anonymity protected him from the threat of assassination.
As he ate, he continued to engage the guard in conversation.
The man was not of a talkative bent, but Yancy drew him out, asking him about his home, his experiences, sharing stories of places they knew in common. Soon there was something of an easy rapport between them. As he talked, Yancy imagined what it would be like when he cut the man’s throat.
Finally Yancy and the four others had eaten their fill. They pushed themselves away from the table and found places on the floor to curl up and sleep. They were as genuinely exhausted as they had been hungry and thirsty, and soon the hall was filled with the bestial sounds of their snoring.
Yancy was glad of it. The guards, he knew, would not notice that he was awake with the others so genuinely asleep. He lay there motionless, eyes closed, and listened to the little sounds of the guards moving around, talking on occasion to one another, yawning.
He remained still for an hour, but he dared wait no longer for fear that the guards would be relieved. He imagined it was somewhere around two in the morning. That was a good time. Defenses were down at that hour, watchfulness at a low ebb.
He rolled over with a groan, sat up. He saw the guard straighten, reacting to the first movement in an hour or more.
“Got to piss,” Yancy said.
The guard nodded. For a moment he was silent, and Yancy knew he was debating whether or not his charge needed accompaniment in that task. Finally he said, “Out that door there. Just piss in the bush. And come right back.”
Yancy nodded and stood. The guard did not realize that his decision had bought him at least four more minutes to live.
Yancy walked slowly, awkwardly, to the door, as if his muscles were sore and aching. But once outside and beyond the guard’s view, he picked up his pace, racing around the familiar north end of the building, down a flight of stone steps and along the dark back side of the big house. He could see nothing beyond vague shapes, the outline of the house against the stars, the blackness that was the stockade fence. But that did not matter. He was lord of the place, and he knew every inch of the grounds.
To his left, thirty feet beyond the stone wall of the house, there was a hump of dirt with a small door set in it. Yancy made a move in that direction, then stopped. He heard the crunch of shoes on gravel, a guard patrolling the perimeter.
Son of a whore, he thought. He did not have too long before the idiot in the kitchen came looking for him or raised an alarm.
Yancy waited for long maddening seconds, crouched in the blackness by the wall, as the guard came closer. He heard the man stop, pause, then head back the way he had come. Yancy waited another minute, until he could no longer hear the footfalls, then left the shadows’ protection, racing across the ground in a crouch, making for that well-hidden door set in the mound of earth.
With a dozen strides he was there, feeling along the ground until his hands fell on the heavy bar that was set across the door, preventing anyone from opening it from the inside.
He lifted the bar, put it aside, and swung the door open. Movement from the darkness within, and then Henry Nagel, hunched nearly double, emerged from the tunnel. He straightened with a stifled groan, stepped aside, and then another man followed him and another and another. More and more men-big men, bearded, with weapons hanging off them-poured out of the secret entrance and spread out on the lawn, crouching down, waiting in silence.
“How many are we?” Yancy breathed the words.
“Fifty, all told.”
Yancy nodded. They were the men from the compound, the original Terrors, his loyal core. Nagel had augmented their numbers with men from the town, pirates who were temporarily on the beach or who had made their homes on St. Mary’s. They were always ready for a good fight and eager to join in on the side most likely to win. Nagel had convinced them that it was Yancy.
“Good. Let’s go.” He turned and headed back the way he had come, and behind him the sound of fifty big, armed men following, being as quiet as they could, which was not overly quiet.
Along the dark perimeter of the building and up the stone steps. Yancy guessed he had been gone five minutes at least, enough for the guard to become concerned. He hoped the man would try to find his charge by himself, rather than raise the alarm and admit he had let Yancy leave unescorted.
He moved cautiously toward the edge of the kitchen building, slowing his pace, listening.
“Benner? Benner, you son of a bitch, where are you?” he heard the guard hiss. Trying to cover his mistake.
Yancy stepped around the corner of the kitchen and stopped, twenty feet from the guard. He could just make out the man’s dark shape. “Here!” he called softly. “Come and see this, you will not believe it!”
He slipped the ten-inch stiletto blade out of his shirt, held it easily at his side.
“Get over here, you bastard!” the guard said in a loud whisper.
“No, truly, you must see this. You will not believe it!” Yancy called out. He heard the sounds of the guard approaching, just audible as he stepped over the soft ground, heard him muttering.
The man’s dark form loomed up in front of him, and Yancy said, “Here.”
They stepped around the edge of the building and stopped in the face of the fifty pirates waiting there. The guard’s mouth fell open, and he was about to say something-to yell, perhaps-when Yancy grabbed his hair and jerked his head back and with one fluid motion cut his throat, clean through to the vertebrae.
The guard made a gasping, gurgling sound and crumpled to his knees. Yancy felt a stream of hot blood lash across his cheek, and he thought of his daily pig killing.
“There. I told you you would not believe it,” Yancy said to the dying man, then waved his men forward and led them on to the open door to the kitchen.
There he stopped them again and went in himself, calling to the one remaining guard. “I think your friend has need of your help,” he said. “He sent me back for you.”
The second guard was a cautious man, and he held Yancy at musket point and made him lead the way. But for all his caution he was not ready for Henry Nagel, waiting by the edge of the door, who grabbed him by the mouth as he walked past and jerked the gun from his hand. The guard screamed into Nagel’s callused palm, thrashed like a fish in the bottom of a boat, but he could not break Nagel’s grip, and Nagel dispatched him the way Yancy had done his partner.
The fifty crowded into the kitchen and joined their four comrades waiting there. Nagel handed Yancy his sword and shoulder belt, which he draped over his shoulder, and a brace of pistols.
Nagel stuck a bunko-what the Portuguese called a “cheroot”-between his lips and lit it with a lantern, then handed it to Yancy and lit another.
“Very well. Let us go,” Yancy said. He marched out of the kitchen, down the walk, and back into the big house. The need for subtlety was past. They had surprise, and they had sufficient numbers. The men knew what to do.
Down the hallway to the tall doors that opened into the great hall. The sentry, half asleep, jerked up at the sound, turned toward Yancy and his force of men.
“What in hell…? Who the hell…?” was as far as he got before Yancy shot him and then with his second pistol shot the other guard. There was a moment’s pause, a universal holding of breath, save for the ringing echo of the pistol shots.
And then, as Yancy stepped past the slumped, bleeding forms of the guards and into the great hall, panic exploded like a keg of power going off.
Men leaped up from the floor where they slept, arms grabbed for muskets, for swords, for breeches. They were dark ghosts in the light of the three lanterns that illuminated the hall with their weak light. Men shouted in alarm or confusion, shouted questions, shouted orders.
Yancy pulled the cheroot from his mouth, touched the glowing end to the fuse of a hand grenado, tossed it into this thrashing crowd of men. Nagel and three others did likewise.
