“Kill the boy,” the half-blood muttered, the tension all but vanished from his voice. “You’re right. Who cares if its true if it gets us free. And I’m through being a coward. If this is our only chance. It’s what Cain and Jez would’ve wanted.”
“Father too,” said Adam, “and I’m sorry, for earlier. I should’ve told you. What you’ve heard about what happened to me. It’s all—”
Adnihilo’s hand shot through the twilight and snared the breast of the pastor’s son’s shirt. “It doesn’t matter,” he uttered, his free hand grabbing the heart of his own dirty roughspuns. “We’re brothers from now on. Even if everyone else is gone, even if there isn’t a home to go back to, we don’t have to go through this alone.”
“God save us, then. Does that mean you’ll come with me? To face the captain?”
“Just tell me when.”
“I’m not sure. All I know is that we’re waiting on a signal. I assumed someone would come find me when—”
From above, the warning bell’s clang rang loud and drown out the brothers of Babylon. It came in frantic bursts, and between they heard the watchman in the crow’s nest cursing a storm. Gooseflesh spread over the pastor’s son’s neck. He knew that in seconds the hatch would surge and the deck would turn into a whirlpool of the smuggler’s men. By then, their revenge would arrive too late. The path to the cabin would be made impassible, and they would likely be caught and hanged.
He had no time, no choice but to say that this was the signal they were waiting for, that the mutiny had begun, and that someone had started without them. So they rushed, out from among the barrels toward the rear of the ship where the aftcastle stood utterly unguarded. The crew roared behind them, and the din of iron cutlasses against wood and canvas and flesh sent Adnihilo sprinting for the door—unlocked—as Adam drew his sword, and they stole inside.
The captain’s cabin remained much how the Messah had left it: alight with candles burned low on their sticks and with an air and odor vaguely of blossoms. The squat table and stools were still present as well, only now a flagon sat where Ba’al’s box lay before. It was empty, knocked askew next to a couple pewter goblets passed which sat the Devil himself—slumped on his cot with his boots off, his sword drawn; and drunk enough that the jaundice had gone from his ragged face. Even his ruddy nose had taken a shade of gray. And he was swaying, holding on to Magdalynn standing next to him while she filled his tankard from a bottle marked God’s Fingers Vineyard. She gasped at the brothers’ sudden entry and spilled piss-yellow wine onto the crotch of Venicci’s trousers.
The smuggler leapt up with a start, slurring drivel , spittle dribbling into his beard, none of which concerned Adam or Adnihilo, as though they weren’t even there—as if the greatest threat within the cabin rested in a gaunt little girl rather than the desperate hands of one vengeful Messah. And so, oblivious to his assailant’s approach, Venicci lurched belligerently for Magdalynn who, throwing her hands in the air and reeling port-wise, dropped and shattered her bottle of God’s Fingers wine. The smuggler, lurching forward, stomped hard on the fragments. He screamed and lost his sword, then he stumbled heel over heel to a squat, cushioned stool where he squealed more for his bleeding foot.
Adam stood still as stone. This was supposed to be a night of righteous justice, nothing like this carnival show. He expected resistance, confrontation, and malicious tricks, hostage-taking or lies or begging, but the pastor’s son got not of that. The hellish winds were vanished from his sails, leaving him unwilling even to advance. Adnihilo, however, seized their advantage. He vaulted the table and landed behind Venicci still wailing over the glass in his foot. He bound the smuggler with wiry arms, then the witch’s son shouted something, and Magdalynn began shouting too. Adam lifted the point of his sword. It was what he was there to do, yet no part of his being showed sign of obedience—his forearms felt flimsy as grass, his shoulders stiff as mountain ridges, his legs fixed as the roots of a tree, and his head light and lifted like a star in the distance. It was all he could do to line up his thrust and push. He didn’t look, but he could feel the steel slip in where he’d aimed at the smuggler’s heart. His stomach turned, so he swallowed hard and extracted the sword and heard the thump of the body on the floor.
Murder.
Adam looked to Magdalynn and saw her face was as twisted as his—to his relief—she was staring not at him but at the body, and her fear turned to tears as she turned from the corpse to cry into the folds of the pastor’s son’s shirt. Adnihilo, though, was just the opposite. His eyes held fast to the Messah; his smiling cheeks stretched wide; his chest swelled and sank with wanton excitement. Then, just as he seemed to be calming down, the half-blood’s head snapped at the sight of the smuggler’s sword on the floor. Greedily, he collected the weapon: a sabre blade, broad and short, on a pearl-pummeled hilt with bars of smoked steel that wrapped his hand like the legs of a spider. He pillaged the scabbard as well—a silver-capped sheath of matte black leather—took it belt and all without regard for the departed. He’d haven taken the smugglers vest too if it weren’t drenched in blood, Adam thought.
The pastor’s son shivered at that and at the cold blood coursing through his veins. His body felt foreign to him now, stiff and distant as a life-sized puppet, and he felt the same about his friend. Now what? It was strange. Minutes had passed since
