But why do ye ask?"

"Just idle curiosity, Rodriguez, that's all," Krysty replied. "Nothing else. And thanks for the food."

The landlord of the Rising Flukes left the room, looking slightly puzzled.

Chapter Twenty-Two.

AFTER TWO MORE DAYS at sea, the crew-including both involuntary members-had settled down into a regular regime. Each man was part of a watch that served eight hours on duty, then eight hours off, their duties rolling on day and night. The only occasion when this would change would be in the event of one of the lookouts spotting the telltale signs of a whale, broaching in a gren-burst of frothing white spray and foam.

But so far, there had been no such sighting. Pyra Quadde kept to her cabin, occasionally pacing the quarterdeck, stick beating out a discontented tattoo on the scrubbed and holystoned planks.

Ryan was surprised how he and Donfil had been so easily accepted. The whispered talents of the Indian with the harpoon had ensured he would be welcome. A good ironsman meant more dead whales and less risk to lives. And Ryan's going unarmed into the forecastle after Kenny Hill had brought him a similar measure of respect.

The food continued to be terrible, but the weather stayed fine-bright blue skies and the cleanest air Ryan had ever breathed, free of the bitter chem taint that still lay across so much of the Deathlands, marring its old beauty.

Though some of the seamen hated being mastheaded at lookout for its boredom, Ryan loved it, and would volunteer to the first mate when it wasn't his turn to scramble aloft. Ogg gave him clues to watch for.

"The leviathan is not like any other creature, Outlander Cawdor," he said. "He has a cunning beyond our knowledge. I have read old books in what was once the liberry of the ville, telling of the whales and sharks and their ways; of a great white that frightened a town, and of its hunting; of how the whales can call to one another across a hundred miles of teeming ocean; of their mating and of their killing. I have studied them."

"And you hunt them to their deaths?"

Cyrus Ogg nodded. "Their chilling is my living. Through me and the other ships of Claggartville, the town survives. There is food, heat and light. And goods to trade. If the whales deserted these waters, then the ville would die. Sure as rad death lives in hot spots."

He told Ryan to watch for seabirds. Where they gathered there was often a whale close by. The gulls would circle about, knowing that shoals of smaller fishes would be disturbed by the monsters and driven close to the surface.

"A whale that's dived deep, down to the belly of the black canyons, will come to the surface carrying the taint of wet earth and mud. In a fog or at night thou canst taste it on the air. And thou wilt hear the cries. Deep as a cathedral bell, my granddad used to tell me. And the noise of a whale as he leaps clear is something thou never loses from the memory. Keep all this in mind, outlander, and thou wilt not come amiss on it. And call down fit to rend thy bellows if thou seest anything of the whale. That is what we are all here for, Ryan Cawdor."

AS HE CLUNG to the cold metal ring that rimmed the top of the barrel, Ryan swayed easily to and fro, going with, the b.u.t.ting motion of the ship, seeing the spreading wake that the ship trailed, and the V of foam that peeled open under her stern.

The sea was empty.

No circling, screeching gulls. No dash of spray to mark the rolling gray-green pastures. High above the deck, it was a world of stillness, with only the sighing wind for company.

The wind and a man's thoughts.

Ryan pondered on his talk the previous evening with Donfil.

The shaman had been in better spirits than almost any time since Ryan had first met him. He'd tapped the dry biscuit on the chipped table, ignoring the small curling weevils that came tumbling from it. His eyes were bright, and he leaned forward to speak quietly to Ryan.

"It is a good day, my brother. Ysun, Giver of all life, speaks to me out on these waters. I have never, even in my visions, seen such a teeming emptiness. I cannot wait to hunt my brother, the whale. To meet with him out in those small boxes of wood, and sport with the long spears... It will be such a good time. I have prayed to White Painted Woman that my heart shall not fail and that my hand shall be true in the fire of the hunting."

Ryan listened, concentrating on forcing down another spoonful of some of the most disgusting soy stew he'd ever eaten. In among the rancid lumps were gobbets of stone-cold grease. But one of the first things a child learns in the Deathlands is to eat anything and everything put in front of it.

Who knew where the next meal might come from?

Or when?

Donfil had carried on with his enthusiastic monologue about the delights of the whaler's life.

"I know that the woman's a blood-eyed gaudy s.l.u.t, but she hasn't threatened either of us. If she does, we can stand close and do what we can. If we live through to the end of this sailing, then we can chill her and all will be well."

Ryan had asked his friend what his plans might be if they did survive.

The Apache had turned his mind inward and not replied for some time. Finally he'd nodded. "Yeah. I have a debt to you, Ryan, that can never be settled. There, in the deserts, I was barely half a man. Now, here, with the wind through my hair and the taste of cold and clean in my mouth and nose... here I am a whole man... here I am a living man."

Ryan, alone at the masthead, knew in his heart that the Apache's time with them was running out. It didn't matter how the dice lay. But if they should live through it, he felt that Donfil would choose to stay in Claggartville.

But first, they had to live through.

Because of his destroyed left eye, Ryan could gain little benefit from binoculars. But the captain had rummaged in a sea chest in her cabin and emerged with a long, bra.s.sbound telescope, which she'd given to Ryan, warning him what might happen if he were to lose his grip and let it fall.

"Better you fall, cully," she'd said with something approaching a smile, a smile that sent the short hairs p.r.i.c.kling at Ryan's nape.

Now he used the telescope to scan the sea around the ship, watching for any sign of the presence of their prey. From the way the crew had been talking, he knew they were closing in on the grounds where they would normally encounter the great leviathans of the ocean.

But there was nothing.

Breathing in time with the slow pendulum swing of the mainmast, Ryan again allowed his thoughts to wander.

He thought of the large house in the blue-m.u.f.fled Shens where he'd been raised.

His running years, alone, friendless, until he fell in with the legendary Trader.

Fighting, running, loving, chilling. That had been the story of those days. Those years. Ryan remembered the evenings around camp fires, with the smell of wood smoke and meat roasting on the embers. Companions who traveled together and fought for one another. Men and women whom you could trust to stand at your back when the steel flashed.

Then Krysty Wroth had come into his life, around the same time that the Trader was readying himself to quit this world, in his own mysterious way. And then nothing had been the same.

Ryan recalled the first time he'd seen that brilliant flame-red hair, which had been around the same time he'd met up with poor, disoriented Doc Tanner. Then they'd found the first gateways and made the first of their mat-trans jumps.

Since then?

He lifted the scope to his right eye and slowly scanned the horizon, noticing a few gulls gathering and circling a mile or so ahead, off the starboard bow of the vessel. Even in his short time aboard the Salvation, Ryan had picked up enough of the correct nautical phrases to avoid trouble from either of the mates or his fellow seamen. He fumbled with the crude focusing system of the archaic instrument, trying to sharpen his view, battling against the regular rolling of the whaler to keep the image steady.

The sea looked unflurried, but there were certainly the gulls. More and more of them, mute at that distance.

Though Ryan watched carefully for three or four minutes, until his eye began to water and his vision blurred, nothing more seemed to be happening and he eventually lowered the telescope again and returned to his musings.

In the past year he and his friends had traveled thousands of miles. Many had gone, most chilled in sudden, shocking ways, their lives snuffed out in the blinking of an eye.

Ryan made a tentative attempt to count the number of people he'd called friends who'd gone to buy the farm. Names trickled past his mind like a jerky parade of stone-faced corpses. He counted to fifty without even having to pause. Another twenty faces came to him, and he had the certain knowledge that another forty or fifty acquaintances waited, gibbering, in the black wings of his memory.

There was the killing cloud in the Darks.

The Russians who had tried to invade and been driven back. The snow and the cascading flood of choking ice.

The mud and the heat when he'd first met the young killer with the hair like snow and eyes like molten rubies.

Triple-crazies, gibbering a thousand feet below a lake, surrounded by all the laboratory trivia of a new genocide.

The return down the twisted lanes of the past, to confront the old nightmares. And the trip past the ruins of- "Aloft! Anything...? Aloft, there! What dost thou see?"

"No!" Ryan called, cupping his hands to his mouth, taking the greatest care to keep the telescope safely tucked beneath his arm.

"Keep thine eyes skinned or I'll have thy backbone!" Second Mate Walsh screamed.

Ryan took up the gla.s.s, ready to look once more across the pitching acres of glittering water.

But part of his mind wandered away to Krysty Wroth, wondering if she still lived, thinking back to their many conversations on what future they desired. She hoped for safety and stability. Ryan looked for a perfection that he hadn't found yet. And might never find.

Time, to Ryan Cawdor, swinging effortlessly between heaven and the deep, cold sea, had ceased to have any meaning. He knew that when enough minutes had ticked by on the ship's chron, then someone would climb up the rigging and relieve him of the lookout's task. But until then, there was no hurry.

It was pleasant to have, for once, leisure without any responsibility. There was nothing he could do, for the time being, to extricate himself from the danger of his position. There was a rare opportunity to think about his past, and even wonder a little about his future. If there was to be one.

Ryan thought back to the many places in the Deathlands that he'd pa.s.sed through. So many of them seeming the same bleak pestholes.

One of Trader's favorite sayings came back to him at that moment. "One handful of ashes looks just like any other handful of ashes."

His eye was caught by a flurry of white spray ahead of the ship, on the starboard side. Ryan didn't need the telescope to recognize what was happening, though he'd never seen it before in his life.

"There she blows!" he shouted. "There! There she blows!"

Chapter Twenty-Three.

IT WAS MADNESS. The most terrifying, leaping, heart-stopping madness that Ryan had ever known. He was soaked to the skin within seconds, hands blistered from the heavy oars, muscles in his shoulders cracking with the effort of pulling. His hair was flattened to his skull, and he gritted his teeth as the frail boat bounded over the long Lantic rollers in pursuit of the broaching whale that he'd sighted.

How long ago?

Eternities hurtled by, like grains of sand. But his common sense told Ryan that barely twenty minutes could have elapsed. He'd been ordered down immediately from the masthead, to be replaced as look-out by one of the Oriental cooks. He was needed in the lead whaleboat, skippered by Cyrus Ogg, with its ironsman, Donfil More, crouched in the bow.

The long, narrow boat had been lowered hastily into the sea alongside the Salvation, now running under a skeleton crew, most of her men eager to row after their prey.

Pyra Quadde had raged the decks like a woman possessed of demons, lashing out with her stick at any sailor unlucky enough to run within range. Froth clung to her fleshy lips, and her eyes rolled bloodshot in their sockets.

"Now we see him, ye shiftless lazy sons of gaudy wh.o.r.es! Get to the boats and after him. Row and row, cullies. Jack in plenty for a good hunt and a clean kill. No food for a week if he slips away from ye!"

"NAUGHT BUT EARS and arms, my brave lads," said Cyrus Ogg, encouraging the five men to pull for their lives toward the patch of disturbed, misty water where the whale had last been sighted. "Pull and pull and pull again. That's the word for the silver mug of fine oil and a rich lay for us all. Pull and pull and pull yet more."

Ryan had never traveled in such a bizarre way before-with his back to where they were going, unable to see what was happening. Only Donfil in the triangular bow section and Ogg at the tiller in the stern could judge what should be done.

Walsh in the second whaleboat and a grizzled veteran named Piper Fairman in the third were only a dozen yards behind them. Ryan had heard that Captain Quadde sometimes took an iron herself if a whole school of whales was spotted. But here, with only a single beast marked down for the hunt, she was content to remain on board the Salvation and shadow the trio of small dories.

Because of the height of the long ocean waves, it was often impossible for the oarsmen to even glimpse the Salvation. Most of the time Ryan could see the three masts, and occasionally the whole white and black hull. The lookout at the top of the mainmast was still pointing dead ahead of them, to where Ryan figured he could see the birds waiting for the reappearance of the monster.

"Steady and together, my stout boys, with an in and an out, an in and an out. Any roan stops rowing, and he'll be tied to the grating and I'll flog the skin from his back. Next I'll flog the muscles and flesh away from his back. Then the gleaming ivory of his spine shall feel the kiss of the metal-tipped lash. I'll whip that man so hard his liver and lights'll be shredded and flensed and pulverized and torn so that they can be served over the side as bait for the sharks."

The world was shrinking around Ryan. Though there were few men fitter in all of the Deathlands, the endless heaving at the clumsy oar, sometimes deep in the water and sometimes kicking the empty air, was taking its toll on him. He fought for breath, feeling soreness across the tops of his thighs from the pressure and the movement against the seat.

"I'll press thine eyes in and then out of thy skull and drive a white-hot awl in and then out of thine ears and hammer hook-end nails in and then out of thy nostrils." Each repet.i.tion of "in" and "out" was accompanied by a barely audible change in the pitch of the mate's voice.

"She blows!" Donfil yelled from the bow.

Ryan wasn't able to stop himself from turning on the planking seat, seeing the most amazing sight, catching the scent of old, old earth, ripped from the belly of the Lantic.

It was as though someone had thrown up a great wall of wrinkled, blue-gray stone across their course. Rearing it, dripping and gleaming, streaked with shards of green weed, unimaginably huge.

"Turn thy face to me, outlander, and bend thy back. Or we all perish."

Cyrus Ogg nodded at him like a friendly schoolmaster, mentioning some tiny error in his tables of multiplication.

Ryan bent again to the oar, hearing a deep, sonorous roaring, which seemed as if it were vibrating the very marrow of his bones, shaking the core of his being.

"She blows, she blows!" the Apache repeated. Out of the corner of his eye, Ryan could see that his companion had taken up one of the long harpoons and was hefting it in his right hand, just as he'd done on the quayside of Claggartville, aeons ago.

But now his target was not a daub of white paint upon an old door. It was Behemoth itself, the lord over all deep waters.

"Hold oars," the first mate called, raising his voice for the first time, forced to raise it over the caldron of boiling foam and spray that seethed around them. "Now, Master Ten-from-Ten! Here be thy chance. Strike!"

Ryan was able, now they had no further need of rowing, to glance over his shoulder once more and witness the next-and most dramatic act-of the murderous play.

The towering bastion of living flesh had hardly moved. Its skin was dappled with small sh.e.l.lfish and crusted with strange cancerlike growths. Near the crest of the blunt head Ryan could see the tiny eye-not dead like that of the great shark that had attacked them on their raft. This eye twinkled with life and with curiosity. The jaws were only just ajar, the sea swilling in and out between the fronds of its teeth. They were nearly close enough to touch it.

"In with the lance, outlander!" one of the rowers yelled.

"Aye," called another, voice cracking with tension. "Before he sinks us with his f.u.c.king tail!"

"Thanks for the meeting!" Donfil cried, casting the harpoon with all of his power, driving it deep into the whale, by the great hump of muscle behind the head.

"Clear of the line, lads," Ogg ordered, keeping one hand on the tiller, using the other to fill a metal dipper with seawater.

The thin rope that was attached to the harpoon ran through a notch in the bow of the whaleboat, under the seats of the oarsmen and around the stubby wooden post, called the loggerhead, between the feet of the first mate. The line was controllable there, running back into one of the two kegs of coiled rope. Hundreds of feet in all, ready to be linked together if the whale should run and run. And in the bow, clipped to a bracket, was a small honed ax. The other task of Donfil was to cut the line if the wounded monster should suddenly decide to dive deep. The ocean thereabouts was of a depth that could lose a thousand whales.

Walsh's harpooneer also managed to strike his iron from the other side. Provoked by the stinging pain, the whale exhaled in a gust of noisome air and mist. It began to move, towing the two dories behind it. The third whaleboat hadn't managed to pull in close enough and was soon left behind.

"Ship your oars, or they'll go over the side," Ogg ordered. "Quick, Master Deadman, and hold on tight for the devil's surf ride."