"Up to the attic," Krysty whispered, waving for Lori to go ahead of her. The pair of sec men had been alone on the top floor, but there were at least three more men, generally lounging around in the taproom or kitchens.

Then someone entered the kitchen through the far door and the singing stopped.

Lori, halfway up the first flight of stairs, hesitated and looked behind her.

"Someone's-"

"Get the others. I'll deal...go on, Lori. Go, now!"

The blonde picked her way up the stairs, vanishing just as the door into the hallway opened. And Jedediah Hernando Rodriguez walked out.

He was wearing the same purple shirt as when they'd first met, jewelry c.h.i.n.king on his hands. The little pistol was in his belt with the pretty stiletto. His limpid brown eyes clicked wide as he saw Krysty standing there alone.

"What art thou...? Where's the sec men? Thou wilt find trouble if thou dost rock the boat by-"

The big .38 filled the woman's hand, the chrome gleaming in the soft light of the oil lamps lining the wall.

"How did... ? Where... ?" His face went white as linen, and for a moment Krysty thought he was going to fall over in a faint. But he recovered, leaning one hand on the closed door to steady himself. The girl began to sing again, a different, older song.

Krysty raised the gun toward the landlord's throat. If she pulled the trigger he'd be blown apart. But the chilling would bring the other sec men rushing in on them.

"A word, and you're dead. Like the two double-stiffs out there." She gestured to the yard.

"What dost thou want, mistress?" Rodriguez whispered, his mouth working like a man stricken with an ague.

"Your toy blaster and the knife." She held out her hand, taking the derringer and slipping it in a pocket of her coat, feeling the cold metal of the dagger's hilt in her left palm. She beckoned the man closer, keeping the blaster under his chin to force his head back.

"Sec men? How many and where?"

"Three in the snug. Sleeping, two of 'em. Two at the front and one by the back gate. But the roads out of the ville swarm with 'em, mistress. Best give up now and take the judgment. Or be cut down as thou runnest."

Krysty nodded. The landlord could taste the scent of excitement on her skin, like a feral musk. The scarlet hair seemed to his terrified eyes to be moving gently around her shoulders, as if it had a life of its own. But that wasn't possible. Her closeness aroused him, and he could feel the tentative beginnings of an erection nudging at his breeches.

"Art thou breaking out? I'll help thee. I can show thee paths out of the ville. Secret. n.o.body knows."

Krysty's preternaturally sharp hearing picked up the sound of steps moving cautiously down the creaking stairs from the high attic. Time was slipping by perilously fast. She took the knife and delicately placed the point an inch within Rodriguez's right nostril.

His head jerked back farther, neck sinews straining, trying to get away from the sharp steel. A tiny, frail worm of blood inched from his nose over the broad, sensuous lips.

"Please, please," he whispered. "Spare me, mistress. I had to do it. She'd have killed me."

It was time.

"So will I," Krysty said quietly.

She drove the long-bladed stiletto deep into the innkeeper's head, through the top of his nose, tearing the web of cartilage apart, the thin point sliding into the forepart of the brain. Krysty angled the knife, twisting her wrist to make the wound more devastatingly final.

The man's weight slid off his feet, almost tearing the dagger from her hand. The blade cut through the side of his nose as he fell to the floor, hands reaching up and clutching her knees. A dark patch of damp spread across his trousers as death loosed his bladder.

Blood frothed over his mouth and he struggled to speak. To her right, Krysty saw J.B. leading the others, pausing on the steps, watching the tableau of death and life.

"I never sold the ring my...mother gave me," Rodriguez mumbled. "She died thinking I had, but I never wanted. Wanted her..." He coughed and more blood came from the cavern of his throat. "Didn't want to rock... rock..."

"The boat," the girl completed, straightening and wiping the stiletto on the dead man's bright, shiny shirt.

CAPTAIN DEACON WAS in his fifties, a tall, straight-backed man with neatly trimmed white hair, framing a face of ruddy honesty and good humor. He liked smartness and insisted that his crew all wear scarlet sweaters and black pants while on board the Phoenix. Everything had gone well, with supplies loaded and the water barrels filled on time. The entire crew was aboard and all were sober. The tide was filling, and within the half hour Captain Deacon was ready to give the order to cast off the sh.o.r.e lines and set sail for the whaling grounds of the Lantic.

The outlanders came ghosting up the gangplank, like creatures from a nightmare, armed to the teeth, with blasters that totally outgunned anything he had on his ship.

It was no contest.

KRYSTY HAD EXPLAINED it very simply and very quickly, so there wouldn't be any misunderstandings between them.

"Pyra Quadde's lifted a friend of mine. Two friends. You heard?"

"I heard. One-eyed outlander and the Indian harpooneer as scored ten from ten, casting the iron. Yeah, I heard about it. And I heard about ye five."

"We're taking you and your ship, and we're going after Ryan and Donfil. And we'll get them and chill the woman. You get the ship back after you bring us safe to land here."

"If I don't?" the skipper drawled.

J.B. shook his head and came close to half smiling. "I wasn't raised to waste time on people pretending to be stupid, Captain Deacon," he said. "You know what happens. Everyone knows."

Jak spelled it out for the listening crew. "Too few us to f.u.c.k 'round. We chill captain. Next man refuses, we chill him. Keep chilling until someone says 'Yeah'.

Won't take long."

Doc stepped closer, his trusty Le Mat .36 in his gnarled fist, its scattergun barrel yawning like a war wag's exhaust. "I trust you will believe me, Captain Deacon, when I tell you that we truly wish you no harm at all. But our dear friend, Ryan, and the Apache wise man, have fallen into the hands of the wicked woman of the seven seas. We wish to rescue them and ensure that she does not live to stain the good name of womanhood for another day. If you a.s.sist us in this, then there will be no trouble and no man harmed. If you do not..." Doc shrugged his shoulders expressively.

"Can ye promise to chill the witch queen of the Lantic?"

"Yes," Krysty said.

"Sure an' certain? If I help ye and Pyra Quadde wins out, then I'm dead meat. I'll be walking around, but I'll be deader'n a sharkskin hat."

Krysty didn't dare to look back. It could only be a matter of minutes before someone found the corpses of Rodriguez and the two sec men. Then the hue and cry would begin, and it wouldn't take long for the hunt to lead to the docks.

It would be a b.l.o.o.d.y firefight.

J.B. was thinking the same. "You got ten seconds, Captain. Set sails and go after the woman now. Or I chill you. Now."

The captain sniffed, glancing at the sky. Stars peeked through the ragged curtain of cold, salt mist. "Never liked the b.i.t.c.h, anyways."

"Loose lines, Mr. Mate! Bow line and hold one stern line. Set t'gallants. Main sails when we reach the channel. Let go forward and aft on my command! Lively, now!"

So the whaling ship Phoenix moved slowly away from the quay of Claggartville, into the dark waters of the Lantic Ocean-hunting not her usual prey, but going after something far more deadly.

Krysty and the others took over the captain's quarters, making sure that they kept it secure with their blasters. But Deacon didn't seem concerned about the way they had hijacked his vessel, going about his business with a calm, unfl.u.s.tered efficiency.

And the crew took their lead from him.

The weather was kind, and Deacon knew from experience where Pyra Quadde was likely to have gone.

It wasn't many days out from port before they heard the shout from the lookout in the crow's nest, high above the deck. "Sail ho! Sail on the port beam! A ship!"

Chapter Twenty-Six.

"CANST THOU MAKE HER?" Captain Quadde shouted, standing with legs spread against the pitching of the short westerly sea.

"No, ma'am. Dark hull. Can't make her ensign at this distance."

She bellowed him down, glancing around, her eyes falling on Ryan. Her face lightened, her smile showing the hideous false teeth, which were worse than any plas-dents he'd ever seen.

"Outlander Cawdor. Thou hast more seeing in thy one good glim than these offal with their brace. Take the spygla.s.s and get aloft. Tell me what thou seest there."

Ryan slipped off his seaboots, taking the telescope with a muttered word of a.s.sent.

The ship was rolling in the swell, with an uncomfortable, chopping motion. But he knew well enough what a refusal would mean. As he had no desire to be tied naked to the mast for the woman to use for her pleasure, he climbed as nimbly as he could into the spidery rigging. He drew a deep breath of relief as he reached the relative safety of the crosstrees, swinging across to the narrow barrel of the crow's nest.

"Quickly or I'll have thee flogged for it. What ship is she? What flag does she fly, outlander? I can't hear thee!"

The shout rose almost to a scream. Ryan had heard the crew say that other captains from the region took good care to steer well wide of Pyra Quadde. One or two that didn't had been found floating belly-down among the fish guts of Claggartville harbor. So another ship coming close to them meant something out of the ordinary.

He steadied the gla.s.s on the flag that fluttered from the masthead of the approaching ship, trying to make it out, fumbling with the bra.s.s focusing screw.

"Fireblast! Can't... Ah, there it is."

From the earliest days, every ship out of New England had her own pennant, so that she could easily be recognized at a distance by any of her fellows. Even now, in the heart of the Deathlands, a hundred years after the skydark, the practice was maintained by everyone.

Even by Pyra Quadde.

Her flag cracked and snapped in the wind, only a few feet from Ryan's head.

It was a circle of crimson upon a rectangle of plain white. But as the wind tugged at the ensign it distorted the circle, elongating the bottom half, so that it sometimes resembled a b.l.o.o.d.y skull.

The oncoming vessel sported a flag of blue, with two horizontal white stripes on it. Ryan hallooed that information down to the woman on the deck, cupping his hands against the wind.

"Two slant whites on blue, thou sayest?" came the reply.

"Aye, ma'am."

"That be the Bartleby under Delano. Old Preaching Biddy hisself. Does she show any signal?"

Ryan could hardly hear the woman's words, but he leaned half out of the iron-hooped barrel and managed to catch them, "No signal. But she's heading straight for us, ma'am."

Captain Quadde beckoned him back from the masthead, sending up another member of the crew to replace him as lookout. Ryan sat on the deck and gratefully pulled on his seaboots again. Though he had a good enough head for heights, the rolling crow's nest wasn't the best place in the world to be.

The whole of the crew came out to watch the approaching vessel. Ryan recalled again that such an encounter was very rare, particularly as most of the skippers along the New England coast knew Quadde's reputation and kept plenty of sea room between themselves and the ill-starred Salvation, Slowly, tacking her way against the breeze, the Bartleby drew closer. As she did, the wind fell away to a mild zephyr, barely breathing enough air to enable the two whaling ships to maintain their forward momentum through the flattened waves.

Captain Quadde took her place at the port side of her ship. Ryan noticed that she had buckled on the Spanish Astra short-muzzle .44 and wondered whether she was antic.i.p.ating trouble.

The ships would pa.s.s port side to port side. The crew of the Bartleby was also lined up along the rail, staring in silence at the Salvation and her crew. A short, skinny man in a bottle-green tailcoat stood alone near the stem. He had a mane of white hair that made him look like pictures of Old Testament prophets that Ryan had seen in some of the many Bibles that still survived in the Deathlands. It was an odd fact that around half of the books he'd ever seen in his life had been Bibles from before the long winters. Yet he'd never read anything to confirm that the old United States had been such a profoundly religious country.

"Captain Quadde!" the man hailed, using a battered tin megaphone.

"Good day to thee, Captain Delano. What bringest thee to my waters?"

"The waters are not thine, Captain Quadde, and it be blasphemous to claim them."

"When the Almighty comes sailing and whaling across these banks with a brace of big fish hauled tight to his flanks, then I shall allow him to share of my waters, Captain."

"Thou art...!" The man controlled himself with what was an obvious effort of will. The ships were still nearly a hundred paces apart, their courses meaning they'd pa.s.s within about ten feet of each other on their parallel ways.

"Make thy speech quickly, Preaching Biddy!" Quadde shouted, beaming at the ripple of laughter from her own crew.

"If I did not..." Delano began. "I will not quarrel with thee or d.a.m.n thee, Pyra Quadde. The savior sees all, and he will judge at the ending of thy life. I seek thine aid."

The request sounded as though it had been torn from the man's soul with white-hot pincers.

"What aid, man? Wouldst thou know where the great whales sport? I slew one within the day, and he be the first of a bounteous harvest in rich lays for my lads here."

"I have hunted well. Too well," Delano replied. Now the ships were closer, the figureheads barely thirty yards apart.

"Then what...?"

"Both my brothers are lost, Captain Quadde. Dearest to my heart."

"Lost? Both?"

"Aye." The man was on the verge of tears, and Ryan could see the whiteness of

his knuckles gripping the carved rail.

"To lose one brother is unfortunate, Captain Delano. To lose both seems like foolishness." "Thou flint-heart! One was tillerman and one the harpooneer in the lead whaleboat. They had struck a ma.s.sive right whale, bonnet calked thick with barnacles. We had lost a sail from a broken halliard jammed in a block. A sudden fog came down, as it often does upon these waters..."

Now the ships were fully alongside, the crews staring curiously at one another. Ryan found it odd that all these seamen came from the same ville, yet not a word was exchanged. Captain Delano was leaning out over the rail, hands reaching imploringly toward the impa.s.sive figure of Captain Quadde.

"And thou hast seen nothing since?"