“And to do what?” Jane said. “It’s not like another ship could just slip up on them. These were ex- pirates.”
“Wherever the fight was, it must’ve come up in a hurry,” I said. “But it doesn’t look like it happened here.”
“The crew didn’t vanish,” Suhonen said succinctly. “They just.. left.”
We proceeded to the officers’ quarters, which were in the same condition. The captain’s door was marked with the same double X — or rather W above an M — that we’d seen on the Indigo Ray. Jane went immediately to the desk and sought out the logbook. She opened it, turned to the last completed page, and muttered, “Damn.”
I looked idly over the captain’s bunk and belongings. Sometimes not looking for something specific helped you find it, especially when you didn’t know what it was. To Jane, I said, “No clues in the log?”
“ ‘Quartering Tendecca Shoals per orders,’ ” she read. “ ‘No sign of any pirate activity or abandoned ships.’ That’s the last entry, and it was dated a week ago.”
“Does that tally up with the ship’s condition?”
“Untended for a week? Yeah.”
Suddenly I stopped, backed up, and looked at the bunk again. The hairs stood up on my neck. “Jane,” I said casually, “look at this.”
She joined me, puzzled, and then it registered. She whispered, “No fucking way.”
Suhonen came over and looked at the black yarn hair sticking out from under a pillow. Using her knife, Jane lifted the pillow to reveal button eyes, a hand-sewn dress, and the wear and tear of a favorite toy.
“Would the captain of this ship really have brought his child along?” I asked.
She shrugged. “He might.”
“On a ship that was sure to see combat?”
“These guys are tough,” Suhonen said. “Served with a Captain Lyvers once who brought his twin teenage daughters along. Apparently he hadn’t noticed that they weren’t six years old anymore, but the rest of us did.”
“I don’t follow,” I said.
“The idea that there’s something he can’t handle might not even occur to a man like the Howl ’s captain,” Suhonen said. “Sure didn’t occur to Captain Lyvers.”
Jane shook her head. “Bloody hell,” she whispered, speaking for us all. “Where are they?”
We found one thing missing-the medicine chest, just like the Ray and the Mellow Wine. We brought the charts and logbook back on board the Red Cow. Seaton was given the unenviable task of reconstructing the Vile Howl ’s previous course using her present locale, the last position noted in the log, and the weather as best he could estimate it. Meanwhile Jane, Suhonen, and I gave Clift a detailed report in his cabin. Jane did most of the talking, and covered everything succinctly.
“You’d make a good first mate,” Clift said with the hint of a smile.
“The best in any damn navy,” Jane shot back.
He chuckled, but it passed quickly. He said, “So what are we dealing with here? Mutiny?”
I shook my head. “No sign of violence. And way too many personal effects lying around. If the crew left, they did it very damn calmly, and they didn’t take their pipes, which tells me they thought they were coming back.”
“Or they were so surprised, all they had time to grab were their blades,” Suhonen added. I nodded in agreement.
“Another ship, then?” Clift mused. “But what kind? That whole ‘no sign of violence’ seems to rule out an actual pirate attack.” He paused thoughtfully. “I suppose we have no choice except to assume that whatever happened here is the same thing that happened to those other ships back at Blefuscola.”
“Seems silly not to,” I agreed.
“Very well: once we get an approximate course from Mr. Seaton, we’ll proceed to backtrack. If the wave gods are with us, we will find the solution to everyone’s mysteries at the other end.”
“Or just more mysteries,” Suhonen said. He learned fast.
Chapter Sixteen
The tug of the two mysteries-what happened to the ships, and whether Marteen was involved-kept me antsy and ill-tempered. The ship’s routine became even more maddening since I had no real part in it. The one bright spot was the ongoing sword-fighting lessons, now attended by everyone not actively on duty. The deck was almost too small for all who wanted to participate. Suhonen quickly became a second teacher, absorbing what I demonstrated and tweaking it for ship-to-ship combat. I started to learn as much as I taught.
The men were tough enough as a group, but they had no individual discipline. They counted on intimidating their opponents as much as they did outfighting them, which was a holdover from their piracy days. What I tried to show them was that when they waved their swords overhead and screamed curses, they left their entire torsos wide open to a simple thrust to the heart. If we’d been in combat against a trained force, they’d have been massacred. It took a lot of drilling to break those old habits, but they began to operate more quietly, and with more lethal efficiency, as every day passed.
The night after we sent the Vile Howl back to Blefuscola, I was on deck with Suhonen and his friends. We’d passed the rum around, and I’d gotten more talkative than usual, telling them about some of my adventures. I chalked it up to the drink, but truthfully, I was growing to really like these guys. They were men who’d voluntarily changed their lives, yet still found a way to operate largely on their own terms. I admired that.
“How’d ye meet Cap’n Jane?” one of them asked. The others eagerly repeated the question.
“We crossed paths professionally,” I said, and tried to leave it at that, but they insisted on more, so I relented. “I was handling security at a conference of lords and ministers trying to hash out a border dispute. Jane was bodyguarding one of the lords, whom somebody knifed during a formal dance. She took it personally. We did some questioning, figured out who was telling the biggest lie in a castle full of professional liars, and ended up fighting it out with the personal guard of one of the other lords. Turns out, his wife was behind it all. She was hanged, and I split my bonus with Jane. We’ve been friends ever since.”
That was the story, all right, but the truth was in the details. We’d caught two groomsmen who were in on the plot but refused to say who was behind it. After we tied them to chairs, Jane produced a snake whip and said, “I’m going to use this on you both until one of you tells me what I want to know. That means one of you will take a whipping for nothing.” It took only three lashes before one of them cracked.
Then, as the woman behind the murder tried to escape under the protection of her guards, Jane fell from a parapet and broke her leg, but still managed to hobble to the drawbridge and stop the vicious bitch from escaping. Think about that-one severely injured woman took down five professional soldiers single-handedly before I could make it down to join her. I watched her fight the fever for a week that resulted from her injury. When she came out of it, the first thing she asked was about the case. I gave her half my bonus because the family of the murdered man wasn’t going to pay her at all. I’d never doubted her toughness or her commitment to her job since.
Suddenly there was a commotion from the hatch. Jane climbed on deck, dragging a struggling figure behind her. She looked around, spotted me, and came over. “Look who I found skulking about like a bilge rat.” She tossed Duncan Tew at my feet. He sat up and wiped his bloody nose.
Damn. I’d forgotten to tell her.
“Claimed he followed us from Watchorn and signed on here when I wasn’t looking,” she continued. “And he’s been hiding ever since.”
“Uhm, actually-” I began.
Duncan roared to his feet and put all his weight and strength into a punch to Jane’s chin. It was an uppercut that would’ve broken a normal person’s jaw, and it rocked Jane back a step, but she didn’t go down. Her eyes blazed with full-on battle fury and she reached for Tew, but I stepped between them. “No, wait, settle down, both of you.”
Duncan tried to get past me, so enraged, he didn’t realize Jane was truly mad enough to kill him. Suhonen grabbed him by the hair and held him. “The man said settle down.”
