"Rodriguez," warned the man by the door.

"I cannot say, lords, masters..." the man muttered. Despite his pretty clothes, he suddenly looked old, tired and drab, like a guttered wh.o.r.e. "There's many returns and a few as doesn't. But that's the way with many a vessel out of Claggartville when the large seas rise and the creatures rage from the sweltering deeps."

He saw that the bowls of chowder were finished, and he made haste to clear the table himself, not bothering to call on any of his serving girls. He bustled out, reappearing almost immediately with the main course of the supper.

He was still nervous and avoided eye contact with Ryan or any of the others as he laid out clean plates, hand-decorated with blue patterns of shark fins and whales' tails. "Finest in the house. From before the long winters came. Only for special guests. Food's coming. More ale?"

Taking their lead from Ryan's shake of the head, everyone refused more of the cool beer.

The chicken had been cooked in a way that Ryan had never seen before, in tender portions covered in bread crumbs, with baked potatoes and turnips. But when Ryan poked his knife into the side of the chicken piece, hot b.u.t.ter, laced with herbs, came spurting scaldingly out.

"Fireblast!"

Rodriguez couldn't conceal his amus.e.m.e.nt as Ryan wiped molten grease off his hands and jerkin.

"You think that's rad-fire funny?" Ryan asked, readying himself to stand and reach for the landlord's throat.

"It's just that the dish is so well named, as thou has found out. It is a very old recipe, masters, very old."

"What's it called?" Lori asked, cutting more carefully into her own portion.

"Chicken surprise, mistress." Rodriguez giggled delightedly.

Once they managed to slice the pale meat apart, the meal was delicious, the b.u.t.ter delicately flavored. A second helping was offered and accepted by everyone at the table, though Ryan began to worry whether any of them would be capable of running away from sec patrols after such a heavy supper if the need arose.

"I think we'll all go up to our room now, Rodriguez," he finally said. "Good food."

"Pay your reckoning on the morrow, won't ye? Won't ye all?"

"Yeah. Give us the check in the morning and we'll make sure it's settled," Ryan replied, pushing back his chair, carefully watching the group from the Salvation, who sat quietly at their table near the door.

Jak led the way toward the stairs. Jedediah Rodriguez, mouth working nervously, suddenly called out to Ryan, "Master?"

"What?"

"A word in thy ear." He glanced over his shoulder toward the sailors.

"What is it?"

Only the seven-foot-tall Mescalero remained in the barroom. J.B. paused with one foot on the stairs, looking back at Ryan, who waved him on.

"It's only for thee," the landlord repeated to Ryan.

"I'll go up with the others," Donfil said, ducking beneath the low beams of the room.

"No, stay. Can't be that secret that it has to be kept from the ears of a good friend,"

Ryan insisted. "What is it?"

Rodriguez seemed thrown by someone else remaining behind, Ryan saw him look again at the table of whalers, and thought he caught a slight nod from one of them.

But the light from the guttering oil lamps wasn't that strong, and he couldn't be sure.

"Over here," He beckoned Ryan and Donfil to a small round table, close to the

piano. They both sat down, looking expectantly at Rodriguez.

"Yeah?" Ryan prompted.

"It's that I've heard of threats made 'gainst thee and thy fellow outlanders." His

voice was low and confidential.

"Threats?"

"Aye. Now rocking the boat is not the way of Jedediah Hernando Rodriguez. But I cannot stand by and watch thee..."

Ryan sighed. "Will you get the trigger of the blaster and not step all around the muzzle? Who made threats?"

"Captain Quadde." The tone of his voice made it appear like a great surprise.

"I'm tired, and it's late. If that's all that... ?"

"I can-" Rodriguez had a great coughing fit, doubled over the table, face buried in his hands. Ryan heard m.u.f.fled laughter from near the door. He eased his chair around so that he could more comfortably keep an eye on the group, his hand falling by reflex to the b.u.t.t of his pistol.

But most of his concentration was occupied in planning their escape from the ville. Out the window and over the roof, cutting through the damp alleyways into the open ground to the north. Move fast and in file, parallel to the road east. Watch for the patrols of sec men, and if possible avoid them. If not... chill them. It was vital that they get away to the island where the gateway was hidden before any pursuers got close to them.

Ryan was drawn from his thoughts by something the landlord was saying.

"What? I was thinking about something else. What did you say?"

"I said I felt a chill and was going to take a schooner of fine old port. The very best, Master Cawdor. Only a dozen bottles left now from the dead days beyond recall. Thou and thy harpooneer friend will join me, I trust?"

Ryan was still locked into the details of their escape, hardly even listening to the nervous chatter of Rodriguez, But Donfil was listening.

"Not port wine, thanks. Too sweet. Too sickly. Drink for soft women. Have you nothing sharper to offer us?"

"Sharper? I have... Oh, I believe I take thy meaning. Sharper for a hand with a sharp iron. Is that not the manner of it? I have some drink made in the hills close by."

"In the hills?" Ryan asked, the thread of the conversation crossing with his own thoughts. "What of the hills?"

"A drink, Master Cawdor. Like to what is called 'whiskey' by some. Here it is made in stills in the old family ways. We call it 'usquebaugh.' It has the kick of a heart-struck whale."

Ryan was anxious to get upstairs and join the others. But the insistence of Rodriguez that they share a drink with him meant that a refusal could be more troublesome than acceptance. Knock back the usquebaugh quickly and then up and away.

"Very well."

"Something's not right," Donfil whispered, leaning across the table, covering his mouth with his hands. He watched Rodriguez mince away behind the bar, wringing his long, delicate fingers. The purple shirt seeming to glow in the half-light of the lamps.

The group of men from the Salvation was completely silent, sitting with the air of men waiting for some great event to take place before their eyes.

"What?"

"Landlord's sweating like a hog. Man's scared out of his flesh."

"Why?"

The Indian shook his head. "Can't tell. Wish Krysty was here. She'd 'see' it. I can't do that like she can."

Ryan looked at Rodriguez as the landlord came back in, carrying a metal tray with three small gla.s.ses. Two were plain, and one had a faded red flower painted on it. All three gla.s.ses were three-quarters filled with amber liquid. As he placed the tray on the table, the gla.s.ses c.h.i.n.ked and rattled.

"The usquebaugh, my masters. The water of life is what it's called. Gives a man great strength."

Donfil took one of the two gla.s.ses, and Ryan reached for the one with the flower. But Rodriguez stayed his hand. "That's my own, if thou mindest not. My lucky gla.s.s, as it were. Drink the crystal-clear spirits and part as friends."

Ryan thought that the moonshine liquor was a way off being clear as crystal. Milky as a chem cloud, more like.

"A stern wind, a short chase, a clean strike and the try-pots br.i.m.m.i.n.g," toasted the tavern keeper, downing his shot in a single gulp.

"A clean shaft and a swift pa.s.sing for my brother the deer," Donfil responded, sinking the gla.s.s in a long swallow.

"A better tomorrow," Ryan said quietly, draining the gla.s.s of spirit.

It was fiery and bitter, scorching as it scalded its way down his throat. There was also a slightly dull, unpleasant aftertaste, like the cold ashes of a dead fire.

"Another?" Rodriguez asked.

"No," Ryan replied, feeling the liquor eventually find its way into the pit of his stomach, where it lay in a sullen, curdled pool.

"Can't say I care for this water of life." Donfil pulled a face at the flavor. "Hot enough, I'll give you that. But a taste like a vulture's claws. No more for me. I'm for bed. You, Ryan?"

"Yeah."

Ryan started to rise, but he suddenly felt sick. He blinked, putting a hand to his forehead. The light from the flickering oil lamps was dimmer than earlier in the evening, and his first thought was that the clam chowder might have gone off. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the whaling hands at the far table were all standing up, drawing cudgels and belaying pins from their belts, grinning to one another.

"Ryan," Donfil warned, his voice vibrating from a long way off.

"Gently, Master Cawdor. Gently..." said Jedediah Rodriguez.

Then Ryan knew. Knew with the bitterness of cold iron. And he carried that raging knowledge with him into the careening deeps of a great blackness.

Chapter Seventeen.

While I was yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, I could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.

Moby d.i.c.k, by Herman Melville DARKNESS, PIERCED by the needle point of a slim silver dagger; noises, soft and m.u.f.fled, like the distant beating of a slack-skinned drum; movement, pitching and regular, like being in some giant's cradle; the smell, cramping and sickly, overlaid with the unmistakable stench of death and the sea.

Consciousness was slowly coming back to Ryan Cawdor.

The dreams seemed to have lasted for all of a dismal, bleak eternity. Swaying, pitching dreams that carried Ryan across gray mountain pa.s.ses where his breath smoked like fire, through featureless swamps of turgid brown water, broken only by the gnarled roots of dead trees. Occasionally a bubble of foul gas would plop to the surface, leaving a tiny circle of frozen ripples in the sc.u.m.

Ryan had fallen by the wayside, and he had watched a parade of the hopeless and d.a.m.ned file past him with scarcely a glance in his direction. There had been a tall man in black, white collared, riding a great raw-boned stallion whose head was a fiery-eyed skull.

A pair of women, both of them slender and barefoot, swayed along the center of the dreary highway through a steady fall of drizzle. Their faces were covered in masks of black muslin, and they were singing in a foreign tongue. But Ryan could recognize the word "death" repeated again and again.

A child, with golden hair and the sweetest smile, was herding along a flock of bedraggled sheep, aided by two slavering hounds. If any of the bleating creatures attempted to delay, or go to the side of the track and nibble the rank gra.s.ses, the dogs would pounce on them, rip open their bellies and claw out greasy loops of intestines, letting them dangle in the dust.

And all the time, the little boy smiled innocently and whistled a merry tune.

"Ryan. You..."

Two ragged men, sitting on a slope, were both staring at Ryan as he swayed with exhaustion. They were in the shade of a stump of a tree bearing only a handful of curling leaves. One of the men had his boots unlaced, and the other was nibbling on the end of a scrawny carrot. Eventually they looked away from him and carried on with their own waiting.

"Come on, Ryan. Wake up... Come on.... Open your eye, brother."

In his shuddering nightmare, he was running along a darkened corridor in an old castle. Rotting tapestries hid gaping holes in the walls, which were covered in a shimmering veil of iridescent beetles. Behind him Ryan could hear the murmur of voices and the pounding of boots on stone flags. The tapestries blew across the pa.s.sage in front of him, and he had to run through them, wincing as they slapped at his face.

"Ryan! By Ysun, giver of all life, wake up! If I slap you any harder my hand'll fall off the end of my arm."

Slowly and painfully, Ryan eased open his right eye.

The pain was so severe that he closed it again. Fighting against the desire to throw up, he drew in several deep, slow breaths, his head swimming. After a few moments he tried again, squinting around him.

He could see the mantis figure of Donfil crouched at his side. They were in a small room, no larger than a broom closet, with c.h.i.n.ks of light peeking through slits around a door in the ceiling.

Ryan's brain was still utterly befuddled. "Why's the door in the ceiling?" he croaked, aware that his throat was painfully dry and his voice was feeble.