image [https://i.imgur.com/15eGPa6.jpg]

carouser – A person known to be reckless and loud and an excessive drinker.

image [https://i.imgur.com/QmUT23y.jpg]

ON THE EVE of the attack on the Elizabeth, Capitán Del Campo consulted with Major Solucio in his villa, when it became evident the sun wasn’t going to return anytime soon. “This is what we’ve been waiting for,” Del Campo said. “A Long Night, one that gives us plenty of time to approach the Elizabeth from many angles, with many boats launched from the western beach, and then approaching around the mouth of the inlet from the north. No torches, no sounds, no calls. It will have to be well timed. According to the Frenchman, the senior African still makes his people keep strict dog-watches.”

Solucio smiled as he poured a smooth, amber-coloured Codorníu, and handed it to Del Campo. “Excellent work, Capitán. You are to be commended when this is over. In fact, I have asked the governor to offer you a station in the Chiloé Archipelago.”

Del Campo’s smile evaporated as he heard this. “A transfer, sir?”

“Absolutely. You’ve earned it.”

“I…when?”

“You act as though you don’t want the promotion!” Solucio said testily, though he tried to cover it with laughter.

“Is it? A promotion, I mean.”

“Of course it is. Do you know how many other men of your rank would give their wives to go there? There is much to do, an easy way to make a name for oneself. I thought you’d be grateful.”

“I…I am, sir. I am.” He felt sick, the drink in his hand was all but forgotten. “Thank you. But, when do I leave?”

“Before the operation with the Elizabeth is executed, I’m afraid.”

“But—sir—the Elizabeth is still a touchy matter. They have militiamen on board still. I’ve seen at least one of their red coats walking the deck daily.” Del Campo was almost despondent. “I would be sad to miss the seizure of the sloop.”

“I know. And I’m sorry to rob you of the final denouement of this story, but the timing suits. The governor has need of someone in the Archipelago who knows what they’re doing, and he was impressed when I told him how you’ve whipped your own regiment into shape. But don’t worry, the Elizabeth will be well in hand without you.” They clinked glasses. “While this Firmament Crisis may portend more evil things, this particular Long Night is fortuitous. Precisely what we’ve been waiting for, is it not?”

“It is, sir,” Del Campo stammered to say. “It is.”

This was, as it turns out, exactly what the crew of the Hazard had been waiting for, too.

____

LaCroix walked the busy cobbled streets of Porto Bello alone. If his stringy black hair and long, curled mustache did not make him stand out, his swagger surely did. He had drunk at every coffee-house, fucked every courtesan he met, and gambled the nights away more than a few times in every tavern in the stinking city. He acquainted himself of the culture, and availed himself of every vice and became a carouser of great repute, all the while learning more about this place. He learned the significance of certain flags on certain carriages, the etiquettes expected of the upper- and lower-class, and the meanings of coats of arms on guards’ tabards. This he reported back to the Ladyman whenever they had chance to meet in some hallway of the fort, or in an alleyway in the city.

LaCroix became a mainstay, even welcomed on a first-name basis in every tavern and hotel, for he was the only Frenchman in Porto Bello. At least, the only one most people were aware of. Some of the soldiers from Bateria de la Lanza would join him at night, joining in drunken revelry until the early-morning hours—even when the sun stopped coming up and some benandanti began performing their séances and prayers in the street, to invite the sun to return—he would stay out drinking and cavorting.

One of the benandanti witches was a dark-haired young woman he knew well, who had recently been taken in as an apprentice by the others. Anne Bonny barely looked like herself, even when she removed the grinning white mask. When she joined in a café in a secluded part of the city called Edlente, Anne at first pretended not to know him, then slid into a booth at the back when she was sure none of Del Campo’s Viejos were about.

“Your performances are improving,” LaCroix said, scratching his crotch. There had been an itch recently and he was concerned he’d caught something from one of the local whores. “My compliments to you, mademoiselle.”

“Why are we meeting like this?” she said, keeping her voice down and making sure her hood had been pulled over her eyes. “You’re only supposed to signal me when we are making the final move.”

“I need your help.”

“With what?”

He downed the last of his coffee, trying to sober up after an all-nighter. “Follow me.”

The fletcher’s shop LaCroix was looking for was also here in Edlente, and it was purportedly the only one in Porto Bello. Bows and arrows had practically vanished as viable weapons of war, but there were still local hunters who required a good fletcher to supply them with suitable arrows.

LaCroix approached the fletcher just as he was about to close shop. He was a middle-aged man, handsome, with callused and cracked hands that were hanging the closed sign on his door. LaCroix did not introduce himself or Anne, he merely said, “I understand you have something called a rotar-filer. You use it to file down the ends of your metal arrowheads.”

The fletcher spoke in strained English. “I no more sell tonight. Closing now.”

“I don’t want to buy any new arrows. I want to buy your waste.”

The fletcher stared at him, nonplused. “Pardon, señor?”

“The metal filings. What do you do with them when you are done?” LaCroix opened up the purse Anne had given him. Because LaCroix had spent or lost all his money whoring and gambling. Many gold doubloons rattled inside. “Because I’ve heard you have barrels. And I only need to buy one.”

“Just…just the metal shavings, señor?” He shook his head, not understanding.

“Yes. Oh, and, any bows and arrows you have lying around. Any at all, doesn’t matter the quality.”

Later that night, LaCroix and Anne rolled a barrel up a dark, empty street of Porto Bello, and loaded it onto the back of a wagon Anne had purchased with her money. They drove that wagon out of the city, into the jungle, where they met Jenkins waiting on a nameless dirt road. He and LaCroix took it from there, all the way back to Bateria de la Lanza. They were both so popular they were permitted past the north gate with only a nominal inspection of the things they had in the back. The metal shavings inside the barrel were explained away as necessary for alchemical testing. “Bonnehill” explained to them it was a passing interest of Miss Julia’s. They were admitted without another word.

When LaCroix hopped off the wagon, he handed the forged iron key to Jenkins, and said, “Get this to him.”

____

“I received your letter from Mr. Bonnehill, and sent Del Campo away, just as you asked,” said Major Solucio. “You don’t have to worry about any inappropriate advances from him again, my lady. I assure you, Capitán Del Campo left this morning.” They spoke over wine. Or, rather, he spoke, and the Ladyman listened quietly. He only whispered a small “thank you” while standing beside him at the window of the living room in his villa, overlooking the sea. Overlooking the Hazard, still anchored in the inlet.

John unclasped his cloak, the one the major had given him as a Christmas gift, and spun it off his shoulders. His coat and skirts were richly brocaded with gold threads, and puffs of white lace from beneath his cuffs partially covered his hands. His eyes raked over the beach, where hours ago he hd seen the many lanterns of Del Campo’s unit as they traveled up the beach and around the north end, heading west, away from Bateria de la Lanza.

“It was my pleasure,” said Solucio. “And the least I could do. And I don’t mind doing this kind of thing. I’ve had to make many difficult decisions in my years of ordering around pigheaded men.”

The major then launched into the many burdens of command, and John listened, still wearing his hat, always keeping a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. Together, he and Solucio watched the red moon chase the two yellow moons. Their combined light allowed them both to see the strange, swirling lumps of black creatures out at sea. A phenomenon occurring more frequently these days. Monsters of all sorts seemed to materialize during Long Nights. This particular Long Night was the most bizarre yet, the moons always excitable in the sky, sometimes changing the directions of their orbits.

John felt a hand on his lower back. He flinched ever so slightly, then relaxed, giving the major the sense that he had broken some new ground with Miss Julia. He saw Solucio smile.

Now, John thought.

“May I have some more wine?” he whispered.

“Of course,” said Solucio, and took John’s glass. Before he turned away from the window, he said, “What do you think it all means? Do the priests have it right, and these are the End of Days? Or do the benandanti have the gauge of the Universe better, and there are no real gods, only aspects of Creation, almost like spirits, that were here long before any of us, and will be here long after we’re gone? Or what about this English poet-sailor, Vhingfrith, who says it is some disturbance in the normal machinations of the Universe, and that our world is now rudderless, a ship at the whims of random currents in this firmament? Perhaps it is somehow all three. Perhaps all three are happening at once.”

He looked into Miss Julia’s beautiful blue eyes. They seemed to be smiling back at him.

“I know, I know, I sound like a tired old philosopher. Anita, my dearly departed wife, she always said that I was only born to be a soldier, nothing more, and that that ought to be enough. She also said that had I bore her a son, she would have—” That was as far as he got, before the dagger was plunged into the side of his neck, then slashed out, opening his jugular wide and sending him spinning, clutching his throat to try to contain the fountain of dark-red blood shooting out of it.

When the major’s eyes found Miss Julia standing there, the bloody blade in her hand and her handkerchief removed for the first time, he gaped in horror at a face that appeared to hold devilish features. He struggled a moment to find a door, but the Ladyman blocked him at every turn, planting a high-heeled, green-embroidered shoe against his chest and kicking him backward each time.

Solucio might have been shocked by Miss Julia’s power. But some part of him knew. He just knew he had been tricked by a devil. A changeling. A shapeshifter.

Major Solucio tried to scream. Blood came out instead of air or voice. He felt hot blood filling his lungs. He made one attempt to raise an alarm, knowing somehow this was the work of pirates. He just instantly knew, and, even as he thought it, he looked around and spotted Anita’s ghost standing by the window. Solucio mustered up his last bit of strength to perform a duty. He picked up a table and launched it across the room to smash it against a wall. It made such a clatter that surely someone ought to come.

When he fell, gargling and spasming, Major Alonso Solucio reached for an envelope-opener that had fallen to the floor, and slashed out at Miss Julia’s feet, slicing her right ankle before she leapt back. In a widening pool of his own blood, he gaped up at the ceiling, and before darkness took him, he spoke the Lord’s Prayer into his heart, and tried to imagine the gates of Heaven opening to him.

All went dark.

____

John looked down at his bleeding ankle. “God damn it—”

Then he heard the ruckus. Outside in the hallway. With his last breath, the major had caused a commotion. John went to the door and made sure that it was barred. He waited a moment as raised voices approached the door.

The calls came from his African servants, and a single soldier that stood guard just down the hall, a man named Antonio. Antonio knocked on the door and asked if everything was all right.

John licked his lips. His voice had to be perfect, but he might pass as Solucio if he sounded a bit groggy, even embarrassed. “Estoy bien,” he said. John had rehearsed both Solucio’s and Del Campo’s voices in private, should he need to impersonate their voices during tonight’s raid. But he had not imagined it would be under these circumstances. “Estoy bien…eh…nosotras nos…emocionada.” He tried to keep it simple. Sound out of breath. Like the major and Miss Julia had been fucking and something embarrassing had gone wrong. He dismissed them all, and waited to see if it had worked.

He thought he heard good-humoured chuckles from the other side of the door. And then retreating footsteps.

John looked back at the vandalized room, the corpse at the center on a frayed rug now forever stained by a still-thickening pool of blood. It was deserving of remark, he supposed, just how patriotic the man remained until the end, trying to warn anybody as to the disease that he must have surmised, at the end, now infected his fortress. How horrified he must have been to know that he had let pirates into his house—invited them in.

“Your duty to Bateria de la Lanza and to Spain was commendable, sir,” John whispered, tearing off a piece of the man’s shirt and wrapping it around his bleeding ankle. “But that duty is over. Rest now.”

He wasted no more time. He lifted one of the candles off the dining-room table and put it in the window. He waved a cloth in front of it five times, then three, then two. Then he waited. A single flash of a lantern from Hazard’s stern, easily noticeable in the night, atop waters glowing in alternating hues of red and yellow, told him his message was received.

John forced his wig back on—he’d only removed it so that the major would have less to grab onto if they got into a struggle—and made sure it was snug before he put on his bergère hat. He could wait only a few minutes for Antonio and the servants to settle down, no more. He had to be on the move.

Checking his timepiece, he saw that it was half past what ought to be one in the morning. As if time still matters at all when traveling in the firmament, he thought, lifting the bar slowly off the door and then ever so gently cracking it open.

Except for Antonio, the hallway was clear. John stepped out, covering his face with his handkerchief, and said, “The major is, ahem…very tired. Spent. He asks not to be disturbed for one half-hour.”

Antonio nodded politely, but a little knowing smile could not be missed.

John made it to the steps, passed the servants’ quarters, then through the kitchen and out the back door. Once in the back yard, he kicked off his shoes and ran, through the jungle, around the circumference of Solucio’s villa, and then crested the hill. Birds scattered before him, flew high into the sky, and plummeted once the red moon came racing overhead and confused them.

From his vantage point, John looked down into the inlet. Cuervo Cove looked perfectly calm. But he knew, somewhere in all that darkness, that many boats were being put into the water to utterly surround the Hazard and kill what was left of her crew.

From inside his blouse, underneath the stuffing he had used to simulate breasts, the Ladyman withdrew the key LaCroix had forged from the wax impression. Clutching it tight, he lowered himself into a crouch, and made for the cliffs, moving towards the fortress.

____

There were no docks around the north or south ends of the inlet, so the remaining Viejos Del Campo left behind were forced to lower their boats into a second, smaller inlet called El Cuerpo Pequeño, where a calm river flowed into the sea. Sargento Agustín Escajeda directed his men to lower the boats into the river, using the specially made wooden cranes designed by the Frenchman, who also helped the men drop the boats into the water.

Behind Escajeda was the vast Lagarto wilderness. A jungle where a tremendous amount of seawater had become trapped from a tidal wave forty-seven years before, contained in a bowl-like dip in the earth, eroding large stretches and turning it all into a miasmic, marshy landscape, filled with quicksand and rotting trees ensnared by vines. Escajeda and his people were covered in mud because they had had to pass through all that marsh to get here.

Escajeda stood on the edge of the cliff, using spyglass to look down at the Elizabeth. The waters glittered with the reflection of the crimson moon, making the Elizabeth easy to spot. The Frenchman had convinced about half of the African crew to leave the Elizabeth and come ashore to enjoy all that Porto Bello had to offer, leaving a very small fighting force aboard the sloop-of-war.

The plan was to drop the boats here, as well as on the south end of the inlet’s mouth, and converge on the Elizabeth and force the remaining crew off her. Those who surrendered would be detained, those who resisted killed, the sloop taken to some other friendly port as a prize, and this small operation would allow Spain’s navy to move just one step closer to matching England’s. Escajeda’s heart beat with excitement at the thought of seeing some fighting, and his chest swelled with pride when he thought of what this night mean. Small victories like this one could, in time, win them the war against England. It could—

“Did you hear that?” whispered Martinez. The private stood next to him in the dark, barely visible since they weren’t using torches.

“Hear what?” Escajeda replied.

Martinez raised his musket, and pointed it around at the jungle behind them. The trees made a complete wall of darkness. Birds like laughing falcons and harpy eagles made strange noises—during any Long Night, it seemed like the birds were always going mad. Escajeda shrugged. “I see nothing but—” Something punched him in the chest, preceded by only a sharp hissing. He looked down at the shaft sticking out of his chest. The second arrow hit Martinez in his throat. The volley that followed stippled his men and only half of them got out a scream before firing wildly into the dark.

An arrow struck Escajeda in his shoulder and he fell on his ass, gasping for air. He groped around in the dark for his partizan, lifted it, and pointed it at the dark.

Before his men could reload, a wall of dark men emerged from the black jungle like they were made from it. Africans! Naked but for loincloths and body paint! They came forward with large round shields and spears, looking like the drawings Escajeda had seen of African tribal warriors!

He broke the shaft of the arrow in half, stood up, and grunted out a call to fight.

For a fierce two minutes there was battle between well-regimented soldiers and stealthy ambushers who fought savagely. Shields batted away bayonets and partizans, revealing openings for the spears to pierce the Spaniards. Escajeda did not know that the spear that opened his throat belonged to Akil kaKhayi, prince of the Hadza tribe. Neither did Akil kaKhayi know that he had just killed a sergeant, who was the son of a noble family. Even after spending months out at sea, after training Bogoa and his people to fight like men of Hadza, and coordinating with Captain Laurier while pirating around the Colonies and raiding villages, Akil had never quite understood the purpose of having so many military ranks.

When he pulled his spear out of the sergeant’s throat, Akil whispered to his men, “Get the boats. Finish lowering them down to the sea. LaCroix will show you how.”

“Indeed, I will, mon ami,” laughed the Frenchman, who had known the ambush was coming and kept himself hidden inside one of the boats until the fighting was done. He showed the Africans how to work the pully system, the levers being similar to those on the bilge pump they had been learning how to use aboard the Hazard.

“Noala, signal the Hazard. Bogoa, take your men and row the boats around to the docks and form the beachhead when it is time.”

The left half of Bogoa’s face, the marred side, was concealed in shadow, but as the yellow moons now maneuvered overhead, the pits of his face shifted. He nodded once and led his twenty men to the boats. Noala lifted the shroud from her lantern and waved it from the edge of the cliff until she saw the signal from the Hazard’s crow’s nest.

“Almost there, mon ami,” the Frenchman said, smiling under yellow moonlight.

“We not there yet, LaCroix,” Akil said. “Anne Bonny and Captain waiting on us. Some of us will die.”

“Probably,” LaCroix grinned. “I wonder which ones, and do I get their shares?”

____

When Okoa saw the signal from the cliffs, he gave a soft squeeze of Isaacson’s shoulder, and Isaacson sank to his belly and slithered almost like a serpent across the quarterdeck. He had to be careful, for though it was night, the three revolving moons would make it easy for someone on a nearby boat to spot movement on Hazard’s deck.

Having spent the entire night without lights on the ship, Okoa’s eyes were now adapted enough to the dark that he could see Isaacson going about the various stations, whispering to both the English and African crew to prepare. “Steady on,” he whispered. “Steady on, all. Courage now. They’ll be along in but a moment.”

Okoa looked up. Hiding in the masts, amid the curled sheets, was Jaime. The Scotsman was in charge of directing the Africans clinging to the ratlines beside and below him.

Hazard bobbed lightly in the dark water. Okoa looked to port, towards the inlet’s mouth, knowing that lurking somewhere in all that darkness were half a dozen boats filled with Viejos, all of them confused as to why their friends had not joined them. Okoa then looked to starboard, towards the beach. Rising above it were the torches that illuminated each of Bateria de la Lanza’s five levels. He could just make out a few patrols along the walls. Looking down at the intervening black water, he could barely make out the silhouette of Dobbs’s boat, lightly paddling towards shore.

____

Once he figured he was within fifty yards of the docks, Dobbs boated his oars and laid flat on his belly, and grabbed one of the ten preloaded muskets and sighted down its barrel, aiming at one of the Viejos he spotted patrolling the pier. Captain Laurier’s long-term plan had worked, and with Del Campo’s leaving, he’d taken almost half his unit to protect him on his long journey to the Chiloé Archipelago. Del Campo had left with a dozen horses and almost as many pack mules. But, in Del Campo’s mind, and surely in Major Solucio’s, they had still had plenty of Viejos to defend a secret port and overtake a single English sloop-of-war with less than half of an unblooded African crew aboard.

Dobbs licked his finger and held it up, gauging the wind the way his father had taught him. East-to-west, at one-half value. He remained lying down, waiting for the signal.

Just then, he heard something scraping underneath the boat. Dobbs looked around. After a moment, the boat rocked, like someone was under it. He held his breath in fear at the memory of what transpired on the Rio Grande all those months ago. The things that pulled half of Bogoa’s face off. The Behemoth—

After a few moments, when nothing happened, Dobbs’s heart settled down. A little. He re-sighted down the barrel. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, still waiting for the signal.

After a few minutes, he became aware of a dozen or so boats sliding across the ink-black waters to his port side. They were coming from the north, but they were not moving towards Hazard. Dobbs smiled. Akil and Noala had done it, they had secured enough boats for the treasure.

____

Sargento Jose de Paz sat in a boat with ten other men, waiting. They had just deployed from the beach around the southern bend of the inlet and were within sight of the Elizabeth—the ship was still sitting where it had been for weeks now, right out in the open, dark but for a single lantern lit in the captain’s quarters.

What is taking Escajeda? de Paz thought. The frustration was difficult to keep in check. Unable to check his timepiece in the dark, he could only estimate the time that had elapsed since they left shore. Escajeda’s people ought to have lowered the boats into the water on the north side of the inlet. Unless that Frenchman’s crane system failed and the boats cannot be lowered. I warned Escajeda not to trust that contraption without first testing it.

But there was no use crying over it. No use at all. If Escajeda and the others didn’t show soon, de Paz resolved that he and his men would go in and finish the mission. This could be their best shot, for at any moment the sun could suddenly rise, putting an end to the Long Night. If that happened, the crew of the Elizabeth might see they were being raided. Sensing betrayal from Captain Bonnehill, they may just let fly their sheets and set sail. Of course, they likely wouldn’t get very far, not since they were within range of the fort’s cannons, especially those new twelve-pounders.

Still. Didn’t want the major’s prize ship damaged.

“We’ll give them until the red moon makes another pass overhead,” de Paz whispered to his men. He pointed to the horizon as the crimson moon dipped below the horizon. “If they aren’t here by then, all the glory will be ours.”

There were a few grins in the darkness.

____

The cache of weapons was buried beneath a holly tree at the edge of the forest that surrounded the fortress’s highest entrance, upon the very top of the cliff. The cache had been buried at some point by LaCroix, at John’s orders. John had no lantern, he operated by feel and by the shifting moonlights. By the time he had grabbed the shovel left by LaCroix, and uncovered the top layer of dirt, a pair of whistles came from different points in the night.

He whistled in return. From his right, Anne materialized wearing a man’s clothes, black boots and brown jerkin, hair tucked underneath a black headband. By her side was Roche, who moved like a lumbering hulk, a hatchet in each hand. Without saying anything, John handed Anne a pair of primed and loaded pistols, which she tucked into her belt. Then he handed her a belt with cutlass and sheath. Roche already had his axe looped in a rope around his waist.

From John’s left emerged the other whistler, Jenkins, whose face was done up in mud. When John saw him, he could not but snort and chuckle. Anne laughed, too. “What?” Jenkins said. “Didn’t want nobody to see me.”

“It shall be a moot point in a moment, my fr—” John cut himself off and swung around and aimed a pistol at movement in the dark. A whistle sounded out a moment later, and Akil emerged with fifteen of his men, all of them carrying spears and shields, weapons that, according to Akil, his people were most familiar with. “Damn it, Akil, I nearly bloody shot you!”

“Apologies, Captain. We got, eh…lost?” He tried the word out, and nodded when he decided it was correct. Okoa had been teaching him English these last few months. “There be fifteen steps up the western side, not sixteen like LaCroix say, so I thought we were at the wrong—”

“It’s quite all right, no operation goes off without a hitch,” John said, pulling on a brace of four pistols. He knew Akil had a strange relationship with numbers, he counted almost everything, even his breaths throughout the day. It made him precise in his military tactics, but if even one number was off—like the number of steps—it could throw him off. Quite the bizarre mental affliction.

John took a moment to gauge the movements of the moons, then looked at the whites of all their eyes. Some of them were no more than dark silhouettes that half melded with the trees. “All right, lads, this is it. It’s going to be bloody work, but you all knew and agreed to that months ago. This is what we trained ourselves up and down the American Coast for, making ourselves the scourge of Colonists everywhere.”

They all nodded. Some of them laughed.

“You all saw that life is no better for your people in the Colonies than anywhere else. The only way revolution begins is by funding. Funding comes from treasure. So if you want your bloody fucking freedom, and you want to keep it for all time, you’re going to have to fight. Now, these Spaniards enslave us all, just as much as the bloody English do. They are not your friends.” He looked at the Africans. “Every single soldier inside that fort has seen one of your kind slapped around, beaten, put in chains, and murdered for lack of obedience. They’ve seen it dozens of times by now and they don’t care. They don’t care! So kill them. Kill them all and let God or the fucking Behemoth sort them out.”

They did not cheer. They didn’t dare if they wanted their plot to remain secret until the very last moment. Until it was too late for anyone in Porto Bello to do anything. But some of them chuckled, or clucked and hissed in the way John had learned some African warriors did just before battle. He didn’t know the true meaning, but he knew the intent. They were ready to fight and die.

John secured his cutlass at his hip. The small, fist-sized buckler shield was gripped in his left hand. The dagger he’d killed the major with was in his right. “For the Hazard,” he said, and kissed the silver locket around his neck.

“For the Hazard,” they quietly intoned. For now, the Hazard meant everything to them. It meant freedom, it meant treasure, it meant seizing destiny.

It meant the world.

____

While Bateria de la Lanza was usually loud in the day, what with combat exercises, cannon practice, and dockworkers calling out across the beach to the crews of cargo ships that came and went, at night the five-level cliffside fort was quiet. Few ships knew of the secret entrance into Cuervo Cove, and those that did knew that entering or leaving at night was forbidden. And so, unless a signal came from one of the soldiers of the lighthouse a mile away, there was very little to do.

Especially with so many of the regulars now gone with Capitán Del Campo.

The halls were mostly dark, with the occasional torch sitting in a wall sconce to light an intersection. The corridors were made of cobblestone and wood, and they were generally very narrow. Some guards sat near the battery and played card games, the cards laid out on top of a barrel of gunpowder sitting next to the cannons.

The men took turns switching out the watches every two hours—similar to the dog-watches on a ship—but a soldier would relieve his friend if he saw the fellow was struggling to stay awake. It was relaxed. Sometimes senior officers even allowed a half-ration of rum as a reward for those who stood fast against the Long Night.

Out at sea, something swam just beneath the surface. A leviathan, creating a momentary whirlpool the size of a galleon. One of the watchmen on the fort’s fifth level spotted it by spyglass, the movement made obvious under the light of two yellow moons. Sometimes this became an attraction, like tonight, when groups of soldiers would come have a look through the spyglass to look at the phenomenon, if only to relieve the boredom. Sometimes, like tonight, the men would share their theories about what they believed the Firmament Crisis was really all about, what was causing it.

Neither pirate nor Spanish patriot saw it, but directly below them something came walking out of the water, and moved rapidly across the shadow cast by the cliff, slithering up the beach. Something large.

____

For the last two weeks, both Laurier and LaCroix had been walking these corridors to map them out. LaCroix had been useful to Del Campo, and was liked well enough by the soldiers that reveled with him in town that he often gained access to the barracks, watchtowers, and batteries. John, accompanied by Del Campo or Solucio, had been allowed to see some of the finer living quarters of the officers. Between the two of them, there wasn’t a corridor in which they could get turned around.

The main guard gate on the top of the cliff was no problem. Two soldiers, that’s all that was left. And they were both befuddled and unprepared for Miss Julia, who came running out to them, all distressed. She fell into the arms of one of the guards, who asked, “What is wrong, señorita? Who is—”

John drove the dagger under his ribs, and the man gasped, just as Akil rushed out of the shadows to skewer the second guard, who came running out to see what was the matter.

John patted one of the men down for his keys, and moved to the door. Two of the former African slaves, large men named Abi and Omari, dragged the dead guards into the woods. John opened the door and they were all staring down into stone steps, lit only by a single torch. John moved by memory (Del Campo had been very proud to show off the secret topside entrance to the fort) and they slid inside.

Down two passageways, taking a left, pasting themselves to walls to let a trio of guards go walking through the hallway up ahead, then down another set of stairs, to the fourth level. An unlucky guard was stepping out of the lavatory, about to dump his waste bucket out a window and down to the beach, when he clapped eyes on John, Anne, Jenkins, Roche, and a bundle of Africans coming his way. Roche rushed him, slashed his throat open with a swing of a hatchet, but not before he got out half a yell.

“Alphonse?” said a voice from another hallway.

John jerked a pistol from his brace, but Anne was already running to the doorway at the end of the hall, through which a white-jacketed sergeant emerged, looking around, and she clamped a hand over his mouth while she pressed his back against a wall and rammed her dagger under his ribs and twisted.

But the body fell loudly, as did the body of the man Roche killed, and the commotion seemed to attract the attention of someone down another corridor. They heard someone calling out to the other guards.

“Move!” John hissed.

They rushed down one dark corridor after the next, then down a set of narrow stairs, to the third level, following the Ladyman, for he was the only one who knew the way to the vault.

Any second now, an alarm will be raised all over the fort, all over the inlet. One of Solucio’s servants will check on him, or one of these dead guards will be found. It was impossible to know in which order any of it would happen, but he was certain it would happen. And that’s when things would start to go wrong. The question was, had they built up enough assets, momentum, and headway through preplanning to allow themselves to outrun the consequences?

Even as the Ladyman pondered it, two things happened almost simultaneously. Across the inlet, one of Major Solucio’s servants did indeed find his body, and alerted the guard, who rushed out to ring a bell to raise the alarm. And a guard named Ramone, who had the night off, returned unexpectedly on horseback because he’d forgotten his uniform, which he needed to have cleaned in town. Ramone happened to see the blood in the grass where the two guards had been murdered topside, and began running through the halls blowing a whistle.

Someone on the floor above the pirates heard it, and rang a bell. And then many bells were clamoring as one.

Oblivious to all this, John led his people through a corridor that opened into a study. To Akil, he said, “Douse those torches on the wall. Guard this door.” Akil assigned six men to do it. John, Anne, and Jenkins worked in the dark, pushing a bookshelf to one side, exposing a false panel in the walls. Anne opened the curtains to let some moonlight in, and John used his pick-lock to open the hidden door behind the panel. Once inside, he whispered to Jenkins to light his lantern, and they traversed a long, hollow, cylindrical corridor that had been bored into the wall decades ago when Bateria de la Lanza was first built. At the end of the corridor was a large iron door.

John used the forgery of Del Campo’s special key to unlock it, his gut in knots as he feared the worst—that somehow LaCroix had screwed up in making the forgery, that the smithee he’d used had done subpar work, or that John himself had pickpocketed the wrong key, even though he knew that was impossible because he—

With a sharp and satisfying click, the iron door parted slightly. It took all of John’s and Akil’s strength to pull it open. The door moaned loudly on rusted hinges.

“Jenkins, shine your light in there, for the love of God!” he hissed.

Jenkins lifted his lantern, and what they stood facing were two walls of treasure chests, each one the size of a fat pig. Some of the silver was in bags, or simply dumped in wheelbarrows. Open bags filled with coins of every type: louis d’ors, guineas, pieces of eight, doubloons, and others. There were shelves of golden statues and jade trinkets and ruby necklaces. John laughed, and stood in front of it all. There were two wooden crates filled with bejeweled tiaras and sceptres. Silk dresses of blue (the rarest colour) were neatly folded and stacked in a crate beside silk shirts embroidered with gemstones. Emeralds and diamonds were in large brown sacks, stacked in a wheelbarrow. Gold jewelry was collected in a heap on the floor, just tossed there, as if in overflow.

Anne and Akil gaped at it all.

“Sink me,” Jenkins said in awe, playing his light around. “My God, Captain.”

The silver sparkled in the lanternlight, and John spared only a single self-congratulatory smile, then said, “Akil, get a man outside, have him send Okoa the signal. And send rest of the boys up here to start loading it all. It’s now or bloody never, boyos! Yo-ho!”

“Yo-ho,” answered Anne.

“My God,” Jenkins whispered again.

John slapped him, shook him. “Time to move!”

“Yes…yes…but my God…”

____

Sargento Jose de Paz was just about ready to call out to his people to put their oars to water, and begin rowing towards the Elizabeth, when he spotted a flashing light halfway up the cliff face—on the third level of the fort, there was a lantern winking in strange fashion. And then de Paz saw something that caused him panic. Up and down the length of the sloop, there was suddenly activity. He saw it by blood-red moonlight, men climbing the ratlines and letting sheets fall. Those sheets bloomed. The sails were angled so as to harness the wind, and someone was on the quarterdeck, spinning the wheel like the devil’s whip was at him.

“Something’s going on!” de Paz said. “They’ve seen us or…” Just then, in the distance, so faint as to almost not be heard, there was a clanging of bells. It carried softly across the water. “Something’s wrong! Put your oars to work, amigos! Row! Now! Row for your loves! Row if you ever want to see—”

The hail of arrows came arching through the dark. Most of them embedded in the boats or in a man’s face or leg, but some of them struck men in the chest. Some of de Paz’s men panicked, and pulled out their pistols and muskets and began firing in blind rage at the Elizabeth. But the ship remained dark, so that no one could see their target.

Meanwhile we’re out here on the sea, with moons setting behind us, framing us in light! God, the archers can see us plainly—

And as another volley came slashing down from the stars, it suddenly occurred to de Paz that the tables had turned, that they, not the Elizabeth’s crew, were the sitting ducks. But still they fired. Enraged, de Paz drew his own pistol and fired, reloaded with some difficulty in the dark, and fired again. An arrow hit him in the arm. One of many arrows purchased by LaCroix only days before. Not many men could fire arrows in a combat situation anymore, the practice was almost extinct, but the African tribal warriors were still perfecting it. John Laurier had played to his crew’s strengths, and the advantage was that the arrows made no spark like gunpowder, so none of de Paz’s men could clock where on the ship their targets were shooting from.

They were forced to watch as the sloop-of-war maneuvered itself deeper into the inlet. Closer to the fort. Within range of its many cannons. And as he lay on his boat, trying to pull the arrow out of his arm, de Paz at least had the satisfaction of knowing the ship would be pulverized to flinders in a matter of moments.

When the sloop opened up her cannons on the fort, however, de Paz was surprised. The Elizabeth’s cannons might be able to sink a ship at sea, and even hit the beach from this distance, possibly destroy some of the docks, but those cannons would not be able to reach above the first level of the fortress. And even if a shot hit, it would not be able to do any damage.

He laughed to himself. He couldn’t wait to see them be obliterated. They are fools! Idiotic buffoons who don’t know what they’re in for!

____

Dobbs ducked his head reflexively when the Hazard’s cannons thundered as one, even though he knew the shots would go clear over his head. He watched the first of the docks explode into splinters, and the Viejo he’d been targeting dove into the water out of fear. Dobbs panned his rifle over to the next soldier, one with a lantern clipped to his hip, and who was brave enough to raise his musket towards Hazard’s dark shape.

Dobbs squeezed the trigger.

The musket boomed and the Spaniard’s head snapped back and he fell, firing his shot wildly into the air. Before he’d even stopped twitching, Dobbs set the spent musket down on his left, and lifted one of the loaded rifles on his right, re-sighting in five seconds on his next target, a white-uniformed sergeant running towards the beach to see about his friends.

____

Akil recalled his father telling him about moments like these, when just before the enemy strikes, you can see the uncertainty of the warriors on either side of you. Two animals are battling for supremacy inside the heart of every man, his father told him. A lion, and an antelope. Part of him wants to fight, the other part of him sees the sense in running. Warriors must silence their antelopes. Their leader must slay his.

Standing in the dark corridor, he watched Omari return with his lantern. “It is done. The Hazard saw my signal.”

Indeed, Akil could already hear Hazard’s cannons booming. “Get behind the others. Shield and spear up.”

Omari did as bidden, and took up the shield wall behind Akil, at the four-way junction of the hallway. They could hear raised voices echoing from all over the hallways, but did not know from which way the first attack would come. Akil lightly paced in front of the shield wall, letting his six warriors see him unafraid. Men needed to see their leader unconcerned, yet focused.

As they listened to more clattering boots, more shouts of alarm, more bells ringing, Akil’s heart called out to Ogun to grant him strength. He tapped his spear against his shield, and began humming deep, deep in his throat. The others did the same. Akil likened this to the time he had stood before the Konuri warriors that came to kill his mother, who was in childbed. He had waited until dusk, until at last the first hail of arrows came down on him, attempting to assassinate him and his sister, the as-yet-unborn princess.

From outside came the boom of many cannons as one, as Hazard fired on the beach. Their thunder was like the thunder on that day when he faced the Konuri warriors’ leader on the field, with Ogun watching from within his angry storm clouds.

Akil liked the Ladyman’s plan. He had approved of it a month ago when Laurier first started laying it out. But this part of the plan was Akil’s. Find a good junction, see which way the first wave would come from, and then, rather than hunker down and hold them off, rush at the enemy. And, at the very center of the junction where they now stood, there was a single trapdoor, which could be opened to access the floor below. LaCroix had found that on one of his many tours of the fort, and had told Akil precisely where the trapdoor was.

When Akil heard the voices coming from below, he counted them. Six different voices. He whispered, “Now.”

Omari grabbed the door handle, waiting. Mandla and Kayin took their grenadoes out of the bag. Faraji struck a match, lighting their fuses. Omari cracked the trapdoor a smidge, and Mandla and Kayin tossed their grenadoes in.

“Back away!” Akil cried.

When the Frenchman’s bombs exploded, they forced a rush of hot air up through the tunnel, lifting the trapdoor a moment. There were screams from below; no doubt the men that had been about to climb the ladder had either been torn apart or had shrapnel rip through their bodies. Akil had seen the grenadoes effect on the creature that grabbed Bogoa in the Rio Grande, and so the Spaniards had his sympathies.

“Akil!” whispered Mosi, the short, stout boy. “I hear footsteps—”

Four Spaniards appeared in the hall to their left. Akil whirled around and shouted, “Fire!”

Faraji, Mandla, and Mosi fired their muskets downrange, through the narrow hall—the fatal funnel, for it was hard to miss, since there was nowhere for any man to go, and if the round did not hit the first man it would surely hit the man bunched up behind him.

The hall filled with smoke and ear-splitting thunder as the four soldiers fell to the ground, one of them crawling away. Akil let him. He would not spare one of his warriors to go and finish him off, he needed every man covering the junction.

Akil’s musket-men were in the middle of a reload when six Spaniards appeared in the corridor behind them.

“Cover!” Akil shouted.

The men knew the drill, raising their shields an instant before ducking behind around a corner, letting the Spaniards expend their one use of their muskets.

“Now!” cried Akil, and he and his men rushed the Spaniards, who abandoned the attempt to reload their weapons and instead aimed their bayoneted rifles at the oncoming Africans. Two of them slung their halberds off their shoulders, and the narrow hallway became a melee of blades and pressing shields.

Akil was at the front, and batted away a bayonet to open the path for Omari’s spear to find the enemy’s gut. Akil received a gash across his midsection, punched his attacker with the edge of his shield, shattering the man’s nose, stunning him long enough for Abi to impale him. Then he raked the edge of his shield at all their helmeted heads, knocking two or three men off balance, causing their aim to be poor. He wielded his spear one-handed, and easily parried a halberd’s attack at his stomach, and rammed home the spearhead between a man’s teeth, to the back of his throat, and pressed forward.

Akil had long ago mastered the spear, but English steel was superior to anything he had ever wielded. In his hands, the familiar weapon moved with new and powerful purpose.

The Spaniards fought bravely, and Akil and his men pressed them until they had gone back into a wider corridor. One of the Spaniards slipped and fell, and Omari skewered him. Akil raised his shield in time to block a killing blow from a halberd—the huge axe-head of the spear-like weapon was heavy, and knocked him sideways at the impact. Akil used the haft of his spear to trip his attacker’s legs, causing him to stumble sideways into another Spaniard. Akil kicked him in his chest and rammed his spear into the man’s inner thigh, to the thumb-sized artery his father had always taught him to aim for. The Spaniard went down in a welter of blood, and their last enemy fled, bleeding from his side.

Not terrible, he thought. Not terrible for men who only learned to fight two months ago. Akil had been drilling them in the basics, showing them how to form a wall and how to use the openings he created for them. Still, if not for the shock and surprise of their attack, if not for Laurier’s plan that sent half the fort’s experienced men away, if not for the grenadoes cutting their numbers, and if not for the Hazard currently luring good soldiers away from the corridors and to their cannons, Akil knew that he and his people would be overwhelmed.

Many things had to go right for this to be possible. Many more things must still go right.

“Back to the junction!” Akil told his men. One of them, Mandla, had to be carried because a halberd’s axe-head had found his shin, and shattered it. Half of Mosi’s nose was hanging off his face but he could still move. “Come, Mandla, you can at least reload the rifles while we wait for the next group. I'm sure they'll be along soon.”

____

The wheelbarrows allowed the men to throw more treasure chests on top of the already high stacks of silver, and it took two men each to adequately steer them. John supervised it all, listening to the gunfire and shouting coming from several halls away. Anne and Jenkins led the first wave of treasure-bearers to the corridor leading to the south overlook, to the cranes that LaCroix had helped the Spaniards to erect to raise the Menorcan cannons into place. Now these cranes would help deliver their treasure to the beach, where hopefully soon Noala and her group would be forming the beachhead.

John intermittently peeked his head around corners, into living quarters, dining areas, places he knew might hold some random soldier that had been shirking duty, but might now come upon them after hearing the alarm.

He gripped his buckler in his left fist. His right fist curled around the hilt of his sword, and he tapped the gold-and-silver-chased pommel against doors, knocking before entering, trying to lure out any semi-conscious soldier who might be sleeping off the good time he’d had in Porto Bello that night.

So far, he’d found no stragglers.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

He came to the hallway where, thirty yards away, he could see Akil and his men standing at a four-way junction. One of his men appeared to be seriously injured, lying on the ground trying to reload muskets. “Akil? How goes the work?”

“It would be better if you not distract, Captain!” Akil called back.

“When you hear the big explosion, I want you to pull back to the south overlook—”

“I know the plan, Captain!”

John snorted out a laugh. And then he walked away, grinning savagely as he looked for more work to do. It suddenly occurred to him that this was the most fun he had ever had in his life. And the best, he knew, was only moments away. And, by the sound of cannonfire coming from outside, it seemed like Okoa was playing his part perfectly. Now we just have to pray the fucking Frenchman took assiduous and accurate notes from Hubert Michaels, and performed his alchemy right. If not, we’ll none of us be leaving here alive.

As it happened, LaCroix had done his work well, as Captain Laurier was about to see. Perhaps too well. But it wasn’t the Frenchman’s work that was going to supply them the most horror that night, it was the creature that came creeping up the shore, slithering through the lowermost entrance of Bateria de la Lanza, and was moving slowly, floor by floor, up the fortress steps.

____

The thing climbing up the stairs had no memory. But it could squeeze. That is what made sense to it, that is what logic it found in the pulsating need that shot through its twenty-foot length. Black and red and constantly shedding both scales and flesh, its squamous, tenebrous form pushed open doors in search of something to squeeze. Something mushy, not something cold and dead like the stones of the floor and ceiling. It had three feelers that stretched out, each feeler capable of both tasting and feeling. It had no arms or limbs, unless it wanted them, and in those times it could create them.

Its body wrapped around stone pillars, and squeezed.

And squeezed.

Until the stone cracked and the pillars exploded to dust and rubble.

It lifted a torch off the wall and coiled its great body around it and squeezed until the warmth was doused. It had no memory, but it somehow knew that it missed warmth. There had been only the cold depths of this New Sea in this strange world. It sought out the torches, the lanterns, the little candles someone had left by a desk to read by.

And it squeezed them and exulted in their warmth until it crushed them.

When the thing came upon the first two soldiers, it froze for a moment, sensing the heat of them. Its own serpentine body was cold, and porous flesh along its side vented chilled air. The soldiers froze in place, stunned. One of them fired at the thing. The other turned and ran. That’s when the thing decided to make its own arms, mimicking the squids it had seen in the New Sea. Then it formed half a dozen arms, mimicking those he saw on each of the soldiers. These faux limbs grabbed each body—each succulent, mushy, warm body—and reeled them in.

The thing did not even know what it meant to do with them. It just wanted to hold them. And squeeze.

And so it did. Until it felt something cracking inside them. Many somethings. Their mushy exterior belied the hard yet brittle structure beneath their flesh. But no matter. The warmth was still there. More warmth spilled out of them, and the thing gyrated in excitement, squeezing harder to make the warmth spill out of them in great gouts. It squeezed their heads until the two little mushy spheres in their skulls popped out, and then the thing plucked them like raisins and squeezed those until all the warmth came out.

It found their internal organs and sex organs, and squeezed those. Their warmth spilled onto the floor in pools, and their warmth sometimes shot out in wonderful little bursts, and before long the thing’s own body was drenched in their warmth.

Chilled gases jetted out of its scaly pores. The thing had never known such warmth. It dragged their bodies behind it, like a child might do with a toy it had mostly finished playing with, but might find a use for later. It slithered up another set of stairs, following the signs of warmth it detected just up ahead.

____

Akil’s faith in the captain better prove valid, thought Noala, as she and Bogoa and the rest of the men dragged the boats up out of the water and onto shore. They quickly tipped them over, and hid behind them, using them as cover. Once they were finished forming the beachhead, each warrior took their own musket and set it to one side, ready to fire. Noala gave the pistol in her belt a reassuring pat, then raised her shield, waiting for the hail of bullets that would surely—

The night was rent by another salvo from the Hazard. She was sliding in close to the destroyed docks, now firing upon the first and second levels of the fort. Spaniards were firing desperately at the dark sloop-of-war, which remained in darkness as not one lantern had been lit. A shot rang out across the water, and there was a brief flash of light. That would be the boy, Dobbs, firing from a separate boat floating in the inlet. Noala was astonished. She and the others had trained for months just to learn how to fire and reload their weapons effectually enough that they weren’t complete novices, but this young boy with one eye could fire with such precision that Spaniards simply fell dead before him. If ever a head poked out from cover, Dobbs could hit it.

“Get ready!” LaCroix cried above the echoes of cannonfire. Noala looked at him, and saw the Frenchman pointing up. Following his finger, she saw that upon the third level of the fort, the elevated platform, which dangled from a rope, was being loaded with chests, sacks, and wheelbarrows. The pirates could just barely be seen from here, working on the pullies to send the first load of treasure down.

Noala looked back at the docks. If both the Hazard and Dobbs could keep the Spaniards’ attention focused on firing into dark waters, she and her friends may not even need to fire a single shot tonight. They need only load the treasure into the boats and shove off. Things seemed to be going well enough. The Spaniards were all either dead or hiding behind cover for dear life.

Then the inlet came alive with too many ear-splitting explosions to count. Noala looked up. The Spanish batteries were fighting back. The cannons from the top two levels of the fort were now fully manned and firing, and she heard their shots ripping through the Hazard.

Noala’s fear must’ve shown on her face, because LaCroix smiled at her and said, “Don’t worry, mademoiselle, for here comes a miracle like no other! Pay attention, you may never see anything so grand ever again!”

____

Capitán Francisco Ortiz was assigned to fill Capitán Del Campo’s spot at Bateria de la Lanza until a permanent replacement could be chosen. Though, he had been told, should he prove himself every bit as reliable at Del Campo had, Ortiz could expect Major Solucio to put in a good word for him to be permanently assigned. Ortiz had been in the captain’s quarters inside the fort, writing a letter to his wife about his hopes for good news when this assignment was done, when he heard the first bells across the inlet, and then the first screams.

Rushing out of his quarters, with only his pants on, he had gathered men in each hallway he passed through and ordered them to follow him. When the first shots were fired by the sloop, and a bell went up warning of an attack on their harbour, Ortiz was outraged, but kept his calm. He assigned each of the men to their batteries.

Ortiz rushed up the stairs to the fifth level to ensure that all gunnery teams were moving to their preassigned positions. They had rehearsed this exact scenario too many times to count, and he was proud to see his men, many of whom had been roused from their sleep, already packing the wadding into each cannon. He raced up and down the line, clapping his men on the shoulder, shouting to the gunners to find their target.

One of them pointed down into the dark inlet, where the Elizabeth had moved in close enough to use her guns to hammer the beach and the first two levels of the fort. Ortiz could not fathom it, could not even guess as to why they would make such a clear and obvious tactical blunder.

But we will seize on this error, he thought, scowling down at the Elizabeth.

“Level your gun! Out tompion!” shouted Fernandez, the gun captain on duty. “Run out your gun! Now prime, prime!” Ortiz watched as lines of gunpowder were poured down the touch hole of each cannon. “Point your gun!”

Every man did as bidden, operating smoothly, with total composure despite the strange circumstances of the ambush. But Ortiz had a strange feeling. Hackles on the back of his neck told him something was wrong about all of this.

“Fire!” Fernandez shouted.

First, the fifth-level battery fired down into the bay, each cannon kicking back from recoil and rolling on its wheels before the gunnery teams pushed the heavy bastards back into place. Then, below them, the fourth-level boys fired. Twenty cannonballs soared out and over, plunging down into the dark waters of the inlet. All three moons were currently in the sky, so even though the Elizabeth had no lights on deck, Ortiz had the satisfaction of seeing some of their shots rip through sails and splinter the starboard railing. He was pretty sure he saw two men go flying into the water. Ortiz smiled and started to order the next reload himself—

Until he detected something in the air. A strange, foul odour, almost like ammonia but more rancid. It was there and gone, carried on the wind.

“Reload!” cried Fernandez.

Ortiz looked around, sniffing. His eyes fell on the three-man gunnery team twenty yards away, the men working one of the Menorcan guns. They had inserted more wadding and plunged it down the barrel.

Another salvo came from the Elizabeth. She wasn’t giving up, even after being hammered so.

Strange. Why would she—

“Prime, prime, prime!”

Ortiz sniffed the air again. Something occurred to him. Something dreadful. He took two steps towards the Menorcan team. “No, wait! Stop—”

“Fire!”

“Wait! Don’t touch the—” The blast wave that hit him was moving ten times the speed of sound, so Capitán Ortiz never knew how he died.

____

Every cannon in the world operated off the explosive cocktail of sulfur, charcoal, and sodium nitrate. The chemical reaction ignites at such force, it propels explosive air in all directions. Normally, that is. But with the cast-iron surroundings of a cannon, all that explosive air had nowhere else to go but straight down the hollowed-out bore—the barrel. In order to create such an explosion, there had to be flame. Muzzle-loading was the process of funneling gunpowder into the bore, then packing it with wadding, typically made of paper. That process was time-honoured and battle-tested.

But every gunnery team worth its salt knew the importance of cleaning the cannon bore regularly, for if there were any impurities, if the ratio of carbon to iron was not maintained, the cannon ceased to be a cannon and became something else.

From the day he left Jamaica, Captain John Laurier had sailed to the Colonies, to find Hubert Michael, an old friend and alchemist who once worked with Arthur Vhingfrith and Raymond Smith, and who Smith said had moved to the town of Stratham, in New Hampshire.

The Ladyman had long believed that there was no use putting oneself through any time-consuming effort if one couldn’t take care of two or three other time-consuming efforts simultaneously. Killing two birds with a single stone, as it were. So, while it made sense to leave the Caribbean and train his new crew in fresh waters, where the British Navy was a bit thin, he could also use the occasion to pay Hubert Michaels a visit, and introduce him to Remy LaCroix. As expected, the two tinkerers had found common ground, and, as John was able to pay Michaels for his troubles, they worked out a way to repeat the accident that happened to the Indian vessel Bombay fifteen years earlier.

John had heard the story from Arthur Vhingfrith, the tale of how the Bombay had been set upon by pirates and tried to run, and fired its superior battery at the attackers before calamity struck. Just random bad luck. A one-in-a-million chance event, where a cannon exploded and killed half the crew in an instant, and set the rest of the ship ablaze.

Together, Hubert and LaCroix worked out how it had to be done. “The inner barrel should be coated with a cocktail such as this,” he’d said, showing LaCroix the recipe containing volatile chemicals that could be turned into a paste that would be invisible once dried. “This cocktail alone will not do the trick. You will need additional ingredients to cause the combustion, to trap the necessary carbon in the bore, even after it’s been cleaned. Next, metal shavings, many of them, ought to be poured down the barrel in a thin coating. You should do this the night before you are sure they will fire the Menorcas,” he’d told LaCroix. “It is the only way to artificially create the environment that destroyed the Bombay.”

“And then what?” asked Laurier, who had left the two scientists alone in the parlour to talk while he slept in a guest bed. He’d awoken to LaCroix and Michaels still talking excitedly about how it was to be done, the candles they’d lit the night before nearly burned to the wick.

“And then,” Michaels had said, rubbing his sleepy eyes, “there will be an explosion. One unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and are likely to ever see again. At that yield, at those temperatures, anyone within, say, twenty or thirty feet of it will be annihilated. You likely will never even find their teeth. Anyone just outside the blast wave will probably still die, their eyeballs will liquefy and most, if not all their organs will rupture. Anyone left will have limbs severed, red-hot shrapnel embedded in them. And even those who survive that will have to deal with the fact that everything around them is on fire. Including their own flesh. Oh, and if it happens inside of a building of any kind, it will almost certainly cause the structural collapse of everything around it.”

____

Okoa had been on the quarterdeck when the first volley hit, and was just starting to think that they were done for when the second volley came and the wooden planks beside his only remaining leg exploded and sent a large splinter into his face. He fell over, shouting to Masters to bring her about, to aim the Hazard’s prow for the inlet’s mouth in order to at least save themselves. A shot tore through the mizzenmast, raining down more splinters on the men. One man was climbing on the ratlines when the shot came through and was torn at the waist, both his halves falling to the deck.

“Hard to port, Mr. Masters!” Okoa shouted. “Hard to port and never look back—”

Another volley smashed into them, and Reginald fell against Okoa. The cook stood and fired his pistol at the shoreline stupidly. Panicked, many followed his lead.

“Hard to port and never—”

But then Okoa’s eardrums were assailed by an explosion, and there was a lightening of the sky. A brief fireball and a wall of smoke and rock all tore away from the cliff, at the very top of the fort. A huge slab of rock came plunged down to the beach, shattering and booming like a giant’s foot stamping the shore. An enormous black plume concealed the stars and moons as the fourth and fifth level of the cliffside fortress partially collapsed. He saw a glimmer, what appeared to be a cannon or some piece of it flying out over the inlet, catching moonlights for several moments before splashing into the water.

Almost all lanterns and torches that had been lit along the walls of Bateria de la Lanza were extinguished in the great gale of hot wind, which Okoa even felt on his face. Rocks fell onto the batteries of the third level, cascading down onto the second, and smashing onto the first. He saw a man flailing in the air, vanishing into the plume of sand and dust coming up from where the rock slab impacted on the beach.

Everyone aboard the Hazard cheered. Okoa clambered to stand up, and stared from the starboard rail, looking up at a miracle. He could not stop smiling. “Belay that order of retreat, Mr. Masters,” he said, watching the rope-and-plank lift descending from the north end of the third level. Even from this distance, he could tell it was loaded with treasure, and he saw Noala and the others rushing up from the beachhead to receive it.

It was incredible, almost impossible to comprehend, but the captain’s plan might actually work. And it wasn’t until now, looking up at it all, that Okoa realized just how much doubt he’d had in his heart.

But he didn’t know about The Cold Thing That Squeezed.

____

Laurier closed his eyes as the wall of dust came down the hallway towards him. He, Anne, and Roche were lugging two bags of silver apiece over their shoulders when they felt the detonation. The explosion had been nearly deafening, and the very walls shook. He heard rumbling, felt it coming up through his feet, and for a moment he worried they’d overdone it, that the fortress wasn’t built for this kind of devastation. The wound might just be too great. The floors may very well collapse beneath us—

Hacking and coughing, he and the others stumbled forward through a corridor lit only by the lanterns hooked to their belts. Even with that light, they could scarcely see as far as the length of their arms, which they used to grope along the walls until they came to an opening. They emerged at the platform just as it was being reeled back up by the crane. John looked at Anne and Roche. The three of them were covered in dust and grinning.

“Have you ever felt more invincible?” he said.

“Not ever,” she laughed. And coughed.

“Will you ever doubt me again?”

“Not ever,” she coughed again.

“And I’ll kill whatever man that does!” Roche shouted.

They embraced in gales of laughter, while Jenkins shouted for the Africans to load up the next bundle of treasure. Laurier watched in wide-eyed awe as his plan bore fruit. There was such treasure that it overflowed, teetered on the side of the planks as they were lowered down, spilled over and rained down onto the beach. The rope groaned as it laboured to deliver the next load of treasure down to the beachhead, and then another, and then another.

It was on the sixth load that he heard gunfire. It echoed from the corridor whence he, Anne, and Roche had come.

“Come with me,” he told them.

Anne drew her pistol and followed. Roche was behind her with his axe.

They maneuvered through one cloudy corridor after another, following the sounds of more battle. Another gunshot, and then screaming, and then people shouting in an African tongue. The noise led them to a hallway outside the guard barracks, where Akil’s squad had apparently fallen back from the four-way junction they’d been holding down. Akil stood with only two of his men, Omari and Mosi. Mosi, barely out of boyhood, was on the ground, bleeding from a gash in his stomach. Six Spaniards lay dead in a heap in front of them. John saw that the African prince was sweating, panting, and bleeding from multiple cuts across his chest and arms. He looked around for Mandla and the others, but could not find them. John assumed they hadn’t made it.

“Well?” Akil panted.

John coughed and fanned the dust from his face. “You heard the explosion. It’s done. We’re loading up the rest of it now.”

“Noala?”

“She’s down on the shore, loading the treasure onto the boats. It’s time to go.”

Akil did not move. He looked ahead, to the four-way junction they had retreated from. “I won’t leave their bodies.”

“Who? Your warriors? They’re dead, Akil. There isn’t anything anyone can do for them—”

“I will not leave them.”

“Akil—”

“I say no, Captain! They fought with us. I will not let them be like Abner Crane.”

There was that name again. Laurier clenched his jaw. It seemed Abner’s ghost would not leave the crew of the Hazard be. Anne claimed to have seen him on the deck when last they were in Port Royal, and talk of the Hellmouth had been paramount since the Cataclysm had altered the entire world. But he knew Akil meant something else, for it had been Akil that ensured Abner was dead by throwing him into the water after Dobbs shot him. In these last few months, Laurier had learned that Akil did not like his captain’s philosophy on the disposability of crewmen.

John started to lay into Akil, remind them all what they’d come here for, that the treasure was in their grasp—

Then he acquiesced. These men had indeed helped him across thousands of miles of sea, had given him their full attention and support during the planning stages, and helped raid merchantmen up and down the east coast of the American Colonies. One of them had already died during a raid on an English colony in the West Indies. They had followed him into this insane plan, spilled blood, and given their lives for it. He nodded, “Very well. Anne, Roche, with me. We’ll all retrieve a body apiece. Does that suffice, Akil?”

Akil nodded rigidly. “Is good, Captain.”

“Good. Then let’s hurry, before the local militia is roused and every farmer with a pitchfork comes to skewer us.”

As they made their way down the stone corridor, a peal of bells could be heard across the bay. All around the harbour, men were indeed arming themselves and gathering in groups on horseback, rushing towards Bateria de la Lanza. It was now a race between the pirates and the locals.

____

The Cold Thing That Squeezed continued eagerly up the stairs. Such warmth as it had never felt was just up ahead! It had no ears, but it felt the explosion, felt the rush of hot air, and it yearned to climb and find the source of it, and squeeze it.

Two Spaniards with muskets fired upon it, their minds turning to mush at the mere sight of the faceless horror. They turned to run, but the Thing seized them. And squeezed. Three more soldiers rushed into the room carrying partizans. One fainted upon seeing the Thing, the other two used their partizans to try and skewer it. Its rough outer shell was still sloughing off, leaving cold wet flesh for them to wade through. They thrust between the integument, but the Thing felt no pain. It sensed their heat. It formed limbs to mimic their partizans and impaled them, then reeled them.

And squeezed.

It continued slithering up, up, up to the third level.

____

LaCroix was still laughing when the next load of treasure came down the crane. He looked up at the plume of dust, no longer expanding, but softly settling over the beach like a dark curtain. He couldn’t believe it. The efficacy of his and Hubert Michaels’s explosive cocktail had paid off more than he’d ever imagined. His time spent on land in America, while the Ladyman and the rest of the crew sailed the Hazard up and down the coast, hadn’t been for nothing. If only you could see me now, Bennett, he thought, looking up at the moons sailing overhead. What wondrous things you have missed. But perhaps you are still out there somewhere, looking down at all of this from some celestial palace. I hope you see how well you taught me the sciences.

“LaCroix!” shouted Noala. “Help us!”

He stirred. All around him the Africans were going about the business of flipping the boats upright and loading the treasure onto them, while a second team came ashore and pushed the boats out into the water and rowed them over to the Hazard.

“Of course, mademoiselle!” he exclaimed. It was all he could do to keep from dancing, but he took all that energy and darted over to one of the boats. The beachhead was no longer needed, since the damage they had caused had just about killed all the Viejos, and convinced the rest to fall back. Some of the boats had taken shots from the odd soldier on the beach, which meant some of them would leak. But Laurier had planned for that eventuality, as well, for the Hazard had sailed in close enough that the boats needn’t row out far.

And now the Hazard was firing her cannons at the beach, just enough to keep more soldiers from emerging from the fort’s first level.

LaCroix flipped another boat upright, and began running back and forth between the boats and the treasure-filled lift. He couldn’t believe it. He truly couldn’t. Bags so heavy they sometimes required two men to carry. So much silver coins and gold ingots that it felt like stepping into a dream. Surely few pirates had ever come upon such booty! And it wasn’t just coins and ingots, there were also vases, wines aged almost a hundred years, dozens of rings and necklaces, and a jewel-encrusted sceptre like LaCroix had once seen King Louis XIII holding in a painting (a forgery that Bennett had bought off a pirate named Gibbons and resold to a foolish noble in Kingston). He had stared at that painting for hours, wondering what it would be like to be a king.

LaCroix held the sceptre, and for a protracted moment he ran his fingers along the jewels. He was a king. They all were, just as the captain had said. For what were kings if not conquerors? And had the crew of the Hazard not just conquered a major Spanish fort? And what were kings without their elegant (and luxurious) signs of office? And did not Remy LaCroix now hold one such sign of office in his hands?

He does. I do.

Here was the future promised by the Republic of Pirates. Here was what Captains Edward Miller, Benjamin Hornigold, Francis Leslie, and Josiah Burgess had all promised when they laid out their Codes of Pyracy. LaCroix had never truly believed in the Code, he had merely gone along with the life Bennett taught him, like a piece of driftwood obeying the currents, siding with whichever ally helped him to survive from moment to moment.

But now he felt the Code. He felt love for his captain, for his crew, for every damned, stinking, miserable one of them.

“You going to marry that bloody thing, LaCroix?” Dobbs had come assure, having spent all his muskets, and now used his boat to load more of the treasure. The lad had gotten a tongue on him these last few months. He had grown up fast. He had had to. The cosmos was changing all around them.

LaCroix ran over to Dobbs and kissed him on the head. “This is yours! Hold it! Hold it! You’re king of Panamá now, boy! King of the Entire World! We all are! Kings and queens!” he shouted, pointing to Noala as she ran past, lugging small bags of silver. “Kings and queens!”

“Kings and queens! Kings and queens!” the men shouted. The Africans, the English, even the Scotsman who came ashore laughing. All up and down the shore, the pirates took up the call, even as they started looting the other fishing boats moored at the half-destroyed pier. Several of them volunteered themselves to start looting the dead—the soldiers had quality clothing, uniforms, armour that might come in handy another day, to say nothing of their weapons and belts of gunpowder.

LaCroix danced as the next load of treasure came down. Dobbs laughed, and they clapped one another on the backs as they got to work. There was so much celebration, and so much smoke and dust still contaminating the air, that none of them saw the line of torches half a mile away, coming down an outcropping of the beach, moving steadily towards them.

____

Okoa oversaw the offloading of the boats. He had men ready with nets to toss down, and they brought them up from the whip over the yardarm. Any Africans that had not been up to Akil’s standards as warriors were left here aboard Hazard, and now used their strength to reel in barrel after barrel, sack after sack, chest after chest. Okoa winced when he saw them drop two barrels into the water, lost forever. He berated them to calm their nerves, to move with more surety. The mixture of fear and excitement was almost overwhelming for them, and Okoa empathized because he recalled his first raid with the Ladyman, and it was nothing compared to this.

Men sang and danced as they reeled it all in.

Bags spilled across the deck. Doubloons rolling in every direction. A bejeweled tiara went rolling on the planks and was caught by Isaacson just before it went over the scuppers. “Careful now, you!” Okoa said, whacking the shoulder on of one of the Africans with his crutch. “We come all this way for treasure, do not waste a single doubloon more! Your friends died for this treasure, make sure they didn’t die so you could stay a pauper! Masters, Isaacson, show them how to do it!”

The work continued apace for half an hour, and every so often Okoa would have to whack a crewman across the head for holding treasure in his hand and gazing in disbelief at what he had. Overall, the men performed more admirably than he had expected.

While the Ladyman had been absent the ship these long weeks, Okoa’s job had become manifold. Not only did he have to maintain a constant vigil for any lantern signaling from the fort’s windows and Major Solucio’s villa, he’d also had to maintain strict dog-watches, always looking out for a surprise ambush from the Viejos, while keeping his crew about their daily tasks of maintenance.

Tonight, he’d had to direct the ship while under fire. It hadn’t lasted long, but now his hands were shaking. Despite having been the Hazard’s gun captain for over a year now, the fear had nearly taken him. It was different when he was in charge of the whole ship. Different by many orders of magnitude. He looked around at the two holes in the deck, and thanked whatever gods there were that those had not plunged straight down through to her keel.

Presently, Okoa hopped up and down the quarterdeck, raising his spyglass to survey the beach, the fort, the boats in the water. He raked slowly over the bay, where bells were still ringing. So far he had not seen any—

Oh no. Okoa saw the torches along the beach. But they weren’t moving towards the docks. Normally that would be a good thing, but when he saw them climbing up a set of hills that preceded the cliff, he knew what that meant. Jenkins had told Okoa that there was a small entrance on the side of the cliff, a natural cave that led to a locked door, beyond which was a corridor leading into the second floor of the fortress.

Okoa hopped down to the main deck, using the starboard rail for support, and grabbed hold of Babatunde, one of Raymond Smith’s former slaves. Babatunde had just come up from one of the boats hauling treasure. Okoa shook him by his collar, “Get back to the beach. Tell the captain reinforcements are coming from inland. Hurry!”

Babatunde, a smart lad who had helped Raymond Smith with some of his account-books, nodded without a word and climbed back down into a boat and he and six others began rowing hard for shore.

Okoa moved his spyglass across the beach, hoping the message reached the Ladyman in time. But then he saw something that made his blood run cold. An animal—or, no, not an animal, but some tenebrous, writhing monstrosity—moving in the darkness, almost swimming through it like an eel, moving through the gaping hole left by the exploding Menorcans on the side of the cliff. Okoa winced, uncertain of what he was seeing. But it looked like a gigantic black serpent, bleeding buckets, dragging a dozen or so human bodies in its wake.

“Sink me!” He looked up at the moons racing overhead, and thought about the story the captain had told of the Behemoth. “God in heaven…”

____

“Come on, this way!” Laurier shouted.

They all followed him. Laurier knew the layout better than they did, but the smoke and dust had settled in the air, making every corridor they traveled through a grim haze. The dead body Laurier was carrying over his shoulder once belonged to Mandla, a man that had been well liked by the rest of the crew, especially the Africans. Laurier recalled Mandla’s singing voice, and his yearning to learn the English language so that he could join in with the others when they sang chanties during a Long Night. And whenever daylight would return, Mandla could be trusted to go on deck every late evening, gazing at a westering sun like it held some inscrutable puzzle he meant to solve himself. John had even had a conversation with him once about death; Mandla believed there was no heaven, only spirits, and that spirits carried on.

It felt strange carrying Mandla. It was just now occurring to John that he had not ever carried the body of a dead friend before. Not ever. Once dead, a body was just a body to him. Say what you will about John Laurier’s life to this point, and his dogged desire to rob governments of their treasure, but he had never been above allowing himself to see another’s point of view. To accept certain of his faults. To change. And carrying Mandla now made him realize this was something he should have always done.

Such epiphanies sometimes occur to us when we least expect it. Benjamin had once told John that, once while in the latrine of an inn, he suddenly realized he hated his father as much as he loved him. It just came to me, he’d said. Like a bolt out of the blue. John had then joked that he hoped Ben didn’t have any such thoughts about him while he was taking a shit.

We shouldn’t just leave men when they die, or dump them over the rail and into the sea. Abner was right about that much. Perhaps even prayer shouldn’t be out of the—

“Are you sure this is the way, Captain?” said Akil, coughing.

“Yes, I’m sure. Just this way. There! You see?” John coughed and fanned the air. “That’s the guard barracks.” They’d had to deviate from the easiest path several minutes before, when they all heard the clatter of what sounded like booted footsteps, coming from the direction of the four-way junction. John took them down a set of stairs, crossing a common room, then a kitchen, then up another set of stairs, back to the third level.

He privately admitted to himself that he had gotten a little turned around, and done some small guesswork to get his bearings, but a good leader did not admit such ineptitude, not until they were safe, anyway.

But they had another problem; and Akil, Anne, Mosi, and Omari all knew it. Heavy footsteps. More of them. And raised voices echoing down through various hallways. There was another cadre of guards here, more Viejos that had survived and recomposed themselves after smashing defeat. One had to lend it to them, they were loyal to king and country till the very end.

John also thought he heard screaming, which he didn’t understand. An occasional shot was fired somewhere below him, but none of his people ought to be on either the second or first floor.

John pushed the mystery aside and guided them into an officer’s quarters, where they waited, listening for footsteps to pass. Then they crept back out. They were no longer running. They had to be careful now, for their numbers had dwindled—besides Anne and Roche, only Akil and two of his African fighters remained, and they were hindered by carrying their dead friends.

John guided them up a set of steps, into a smoke-filled fourth floor. They coughed and panted as they crossed a dining room, then descended another set of stairs. Someone spotted them, called after them in Spanish, probably thinking they were Viejo survivors. John ordered his people to run, and they did.

Someone blew a whistle.

More clattering footsteps. A bell rang somewhere ahead of them. John turned them into a corridor he truly didn’t recognize, and chose a room on the right, which luckily led into a semi-familiar hallway. A Spaniard happened around a corner ahead, and Anne fired a shot into his face before the soldier understood who he’d happened upon. The shot was loud in the confines, near deafening, but they still heard more footsteps coming their way.

“This way!” he ordered.

They followed him down two more corridors before it became evident they were going to have to fight their way out of this.

Ahead of them, three white-uniformed soldiers came running down the corridor. John dropped Mandla’s body and drew two pistols from his brace at once, fired, killed one man, but the second one was lucky and the round panged off his armour. Akil rushed at him and flung the dead body of Faraji at one of the Spaniards before driving his spear through the guts of the other. Roche dropped Kayin’s body, and ran screaming into the last soldier, smashing his axe against the soldier’s collarbone and sending him to his knees. The Brazilian yanked the helmet off his enemy before braining him.

A gunshot from behind! The round hit the wall beside John’s head!

Anne dropped her corpse and fired her last loaded pistol wildly into the corridor behind them.

“Take cover!” John shouted, and everyone dove into separate doorways as a hail of lead came tearing down the hallway. John heard Omari scream as a round ripped through his calf muscle, but otherwise the warrior seemed all right. John peeked around the corner, through the congealing smoke, which thankfully would obscure the vision of whatever enemies were on the other side of it. He heard the familiar scraping sounds of ramrods being shoved down barrels. “Akil! Roche! With me! Now, while they’re reloading!”

The three of them charged headlong into the fray, just as the six or seven Spaniards were pulling their ramrods from their barrels. John fired his last two pre-loaded pistols, downing two of them, then flung the pistols into the faces of the others before drawing his cutlass. Akil and Roche leapt ahead of him, the African taking left flank and the Brazilian going right. Akil’s shield batted away the bayonets like toys, and his spear felled a soldier that tried to run. Roche’s axe hacked at…everything. It was impossible to say which parts were coming off his enemies, chunks of flesh and the smell of copper filled the air.

John first parried a partizan, then a halberd, moving in close so that the length of the weapons were moot. But the men had been well trained, and with double-fisted grips they shoved their shafts against his chest, driving him backward, trying to put him at range for a thrust. One of them stepped on the hem of his skirt, tripping him, and John shin-pressed his foe to off-balance him and shoved him aside. Roche brained one of them, and Akil smashed his shield so hard against the skull of the other that his shield broke, and he flung the splinters at the remaining two, who John advanced on, parrying their partizans and ripping open the throat of one.

John was about to advance on the last one when he heard a clattering of feet. Turning, he saw that they’d been stumbled upon by an entire squad of Viejos, coming through a doorway from a mess hall not ten yards to his left.

And, leading them, wearing a metal helm, a gleaming partizan in his right hand, was Capitán Santiago Andres Del Campo.

____

Del Campo moved in slow formation with his men, the tips of their partizans pointed at the five villains, and the one dressed as a lady in front of them. For a moment his mind reeled, for look at this scene: the very dress he’d first seen Miss Julia wearing when she disembarked from the Elizabeth, the very same dress indeed! And it was even being worn by someone who almost fit her form. But the sleeves were rolled up, the white satin gloves dirtied, one of them gripping a cutlass, and the other unhooking the man’s buckler.

But it was the eyes that first told him. Blue and deep and curious, but just now darkened beneath a brow furrowed in determination. The hint of a smile. The lower half of the face, which Del Campo had rarely seen, was more man-ish now. Indeed, the masculine jaw was obvious beyond the makeup and the rouge and the faintly lipstick’d lips.

“Qué es esto?” he said. “What manner of…?” Presently, Del Campo became aware of the deception, and was all too keenly aware of the men flanking him. His men. The men that had surely seen him walking and talking with Miss Julia.

They must think me stupid. And they’re right. My God, I was blind!

“Who—are you?” he said, stepping forward.

The false woman stood before him in readied stance.

Del Campo swallowed.

A rage boiled in him. There was no more sickening ailment than betrayal, one that bore into the pit of one’s belly and became like acid eating away the stomach lining. Del Campo’s mind was flooded with disgust at both himself and the perverted monstrosity he saw in front of him. The man had no words for it. Clenching his jaw, his rage continued to seethe, and he raised his partizan and stepped closer.

From his perspective, John Laurier saw only an unblinking enemy, but he sensed the humiliating indignity. He could only imagine the mockery Capitán Del Campo would receive behind his back all his days for this, that he’d been so fooled, bedeviled by a she-man, and he knew that right then Del Campo was thinking about it himself, that his career was ruined and no one would ever take him seriously again. Wherever he went, he would be mocked for it.

There was a moment when nothing else happened. Both parties just stared at one another, various blades pointing in various directions. John coughed because of the smoke in the air. Del Campo and his people coughed, too. Were they not so focused on one another they might’ve noticed the air filled with fresh, acrid smoke, which meant something somewhere had caught flame.

While Del Campo came to grips, Laurier was dealing with his own astonishment. Del Campo and half of his Guarda del Rey ought to have been miles away by now. Yet here they were, stepping into the hallway like God’s final joke to the Ladyman, rejecting his mastery over his own destiny even as his fist tightened around it.

Then came many detonations that shook the halls. John had been wondering if that was going to happen. LaCroix had theorized the many kegs of gunpowder, kept in a locker close to the batteries, would catch fire and explode. It was a longer delay than expected, but now, amid rushing smoke in a hallway lit only by the lanterns around John’s and Anne’s belts, Del Campo shouted an inarticulate order, and the two parties rushed into a savage melee.

____

Unlucky for John Laurier, Capitán Del Campo had not yet been quite beyond the city limits when he heard the bells ringing all over Porto Bello. Delayed by a drunken wagonmaster who could not seem to fix the axle on the carriage that would be carrying the captain’s clothes across Panamá to his new station, Del Campo’s party had milled about feeding their horses, waiting for the repairs to be finished. Then they heard the many detonations of cannonfire. Then one, humongous, night-ending explosion. He’d known something was terribly wrong, there had been no scheduled test of the fort’s cannons, and so there was no reason they ought to be fired. He called for his men to saddle up and ride hard for Bateria de la Lanza, where they found a procession of local farmers and shop-owners answering the call of the bells with their shovels and pickaxes and kitchen knives. Del Camp and his people had raced past them, riding hard for the fort.

And now as the throng of fighters pushed and shoved and stabbed out into the smoky darkness, Laurier felt himself fighting against a tidal wave. The Africans rushed forward and John watched Akil in full battle glory. The Spaniards were dismayed by the African war chieftain’s speed and ferocity, backing off and trying to form a wall against him. Akil did not fight like any ordinary warrior and advanced like a tempest, invincible and unstoppable.

The hallway became all fury and blood, and those that got past Akil by accident rushed at John and the others.

Knocked backward, his blade parried by one Viejo, he scrambled while another enemy (either purposely or accidentally) shoulder-charged him and pushed him away from the safety of the Africans and their shield wall, and forced him through a doorway.

Laurier didn’t even know what sort of room he was in. It was dark, not a single candle or torch was lit, and the lantern at his hip was insufficient to penetrate the caul of smoke. His arse bumped up against a table and he heard its legs scrape against stone. Heard someone else trip and fall at his feet. Couldn’t tell if it was friend or foe.

Through the dim light, he saw a blade coming at him. He side-stepped and felt his shoulder punctured. The form of Capitán Del Campo entered the room, scything his partizan back and forth until it connected with John’s right arm. That’s all Del Campo had been looking for, a reference for where his foe was. Now he thrust and John shuffle-stepped backward and heard the partizan’s bladed tip clang off the wall.

Del Campo followed him. The lantern, though dim, still occasionally highlighted Laurier’s position. Del Campo advanced, thrusting once, twice, thrice, and John shuffle-stepped until his back was to a door. His foot found a chair leg and he grabbed the spine of the chair and flung it at his enemy, buying time to maneuver into a small doorway he sensed on his right.

Not knowing where it led, he ducked inside, narrowly avoiding the partizan’s blade.

John found himself inside a small library, one connected to an officer’s mess hall. It was partially lit by a slim window, as well as two candlesticks on a desk, illuminating a book that, presumably, someone had been reading before all hell broke loose.

This was good. This gave him the edge he needed. There was plenty of space, the sofas and chairs were at the corners of the room, with only a coffee table at the center, which he kicked aside so as not to give Del Campo more ways to keep him at range.

When Del Campo entered, he did so swinging and coughing, and Laurier seized his moment. Launching himself at Del Campo, he swiped to knock the speartip to one side and slashed at the man’s neck. But Del Campo moved, fast as an adder, and only took a cut upon his brow. He push-stepped backward, recovered, held his spear in a double-fisted grip and came at Laurier in a flurry of attacks, alternating between slashes (to deflect) and thrusts (to kill or maim).

John punched the attacks away with his buckler, confident in his footing and posture. He’d seen how Akil trained his men with spears, had joined in friendly sparring sessions once or twice, and he knew the efficacy of such a long weapon. Del Campo could keep Laurier at a distance, while keeping himself out of range of Laurier’s own weapon, and all the while corralling him into corners, cutting him off whenever he tried to maneuver. Del Campo used his forehand for guiding the shaft, and his rear hand for thrusting. The rear hand thrusted and withdrew, thrusted and withdrew, thrusted and withdrew, repeatedly.

Laurier was slower, the weight of his cutlass causing each parry to travel an inch farther than he intended, leaving wider and wider gaps for Del Campo to slip through. And every time Laurier struck, his blade bounced off metal armour.

Laurier was an experienced killer and fighter, but Del Campo was a highly-trained soldier with superior armament. It was to be a war of attrition. Who could hold out the longest? Who had the greater stamina? And who would exploit the weakness when it revealed itself?

“You fucking bastard!” Del Campo raged, and came at him with another flurry of thrusts. Laurier triangle-stepped out of the way of the first, parried the next three with his buckler, then performed a gissard, gliding his blade down the partizan’s shaft until he sliced the captain’s wrist. “Gah!” Del Campo screamed, and looked at his hand, which was clean at first, but soon the opening started gushing blood. “Gahhhhhh!” The next thrust nearly took Laurier in the neck. The next one went low, slicing the same ankle Major Solucio had done, and then Del Campo waved the blade between Laurier’s skirt, catching one of his knees and causing him to trip backwards.

Laurier fell over.

The next thrust was coming for his gut.

He punched it away with his buckler, kicked one of Del Campo’s knees to push him back, then rolled backwards and sprang up to his feet, nearly tripping over his hem before he had to again deflect Del Campo’s thrust.

The light of his lantern caught the coffee table beside him. Laurier just barely glimpsed it. Saw the opportunity. Parrying two more thrusts, he turned and leapt over the table, spun around, and kicked the table at Del Campo. The knee-high table smashed into the captain’s shins, he stumbled, and his thrust nicked Laurier’s left cheek. The Ladyman saw his moment. With his buckler, he punched the speartip down, then stepped on the shaft, pinning it to the ground, and held it in place as he brought his blade down on Del Campo’s undamaged wrist. It nearly came off.

Del Campo roared, and withdrew his hand, dangling by flesh and bits of muscle and sinew. He kicked the table out of the way, freed his spear from Laurier’s foot, and wielded his partizan one-handed, putting the end of its shaft in his armpit. Screaming, he ran forward.

John punched it away, head-butted the man as he came in, shoulder-checked him, punched his mouth with the buckler, and then thrust with all his strength. The cutlass’s blade glanced off the captain’s armour, and Del Campo kicked John in the groin and they both stumbled backwards.

The room was now filled with smoke. They could barely make one another out. Coughing, panting, nearly out of strength, they circled one another like two bears who, despite their many injuries, hadn’t had nearly enough.

John glanced to his left, at a single narrow window. While keeping his eyes on Del Campo, he swung his cutlass twice at the window, shattering the glass, desperate to let some fresh air in. Del Campo coughed like he had the flu, but he wasn’t leaving. He would either die or regain his honour, no other option existed in his mind, not even his half-severed hand would deplete his will.

Out in the hall, there was still noise of fighting.

Come on, Akil! Anne! Roche, where the fuck are you—

John broke into a coughing fit. His lungs were just about at their capacity for dust and smoke—

That was what Del Campo had been waiting for. He charged, and proved surprisingly effective with each flick of his partizan.

Desperate, John threw his all into the next maneuver. Keeping his feet planted, he angled his upper body forward and to the left, batting the speartip off center with his cutlass, then wrapped his arm around the shaft. With the partizan trapped in John’s armpit, Del Campo could not withdraw it. And with his buckler, John hammered his enemy’s face. Again and again. Until blood ran rivers down Del Campo’s face and he dropped to his knees and the partizan melted from his grip.

Del Campo fell over, his face a ruin in the red moonlight coming from the window.

The Viejo captain tried to roll over. Tried crawling away. His maimed hand reached out stupidly for something to throw at Laurier. Wheezing from effort, his lungs burning, the Ladyman stepped on Del Campo’s neck, pinning him. He raised his cutlass to deliver the coup de grâce.

Just then, John sensed something. Something in the room with him.

Then something slithered out from the darkness. It had come up through the window, reaching in, whipping past his face. It smelled of ammonia and sulfur and an overflowing latrine. It stung when it gripped his right forearm. Cold and wet.

And it squeezed.

It squeezed until his forearm snapped in half and then came off. John screamed as he watched the serpent-like shadow pull his limb out through the window, out into the Long Night. He fell to his knees, clutching his bloody stump. He was dimly aware of Del Campo still crawling along the floor, but he stood mesmerized by his mutilated arm, blood pumping from it. Then he dropped to his knees. John had the presence of mind to draw up his skirt and use it to swaddle his stump, to try and stop the bleeding.

Someone grabbed his shoulder. Yanked him to his feet. Someone slapped him. It was Anne Bonny. Roche and the Africans were with her. They yelled something at him but he barely heard them. John could somehow still feel the cold wet tentacle around his missing limb, like it was still there, like it still had hold of him.

Anne looked at the stump at first in horror, then shrugged and said, “We have to go, Captain! More are coming! They’re all coming! The halls are filled with farmers with bloody fuckin’ pitchforks! Hazard is waiting on us!” Somehow that part got through to him.

“Grab my cutlass,” he said calmly. He’d just spotted it in the dim light. He must’ve dropped it when the creature stole his arm.

Roche picked up the sword. “Got it! Let’s go, Captain! Lean on me if you need—”

He heard nothing else. The next few minutes were all a grey blur. There was a loud explosion somewhere. Someone came out of a hallway and attacked them. Mosi and Omari slew them. Omari was limping, having been shot in the leg. “Which way, Captain?” they kept yelling at him. John pointed with his one remaining hand, only vaguely familiar with these passages. It seemed to take a lifetime, but finally they found a hallway free of smoke and dust, one Anne recognized that could take them to the crane. There, Jenkins stood alone, waiting for them. He said something about how he thought they were all done for, but wouldn’t leave without knowing the Ladyman’s fate.

When Jenkins saw Laurier’s stump, his mouth went agape. They all got onto the lift and Jenkins and Mosi worked the cranks and the pulleys to lower them to the beach, then both of them jumped onto the rope and slid all the way down.

Laurier felt himself going faint. LaCroix and Dobbs were smiling when they saw him, but their smiles faded when they saw the grievous injury. They put him on the final treasure boat and Noala was in command, rowing as she shouted to the rest to row for their lives. Laurier passed out, and woke up when Anne slapped him again, and shouted, “You have to at least help me help you!”

“What?”

She was trying to get him to climb the rope ladder onto Hazard’s deck.

John hooked his left hand—My only hand now, he thought morosely—around the rope and made an effort. Akil pulled him from above while Roche and Bogoa shoved him from below.

He saw Okoa’s face. And he was crestfallen when his old friend recoiled at the sight of him.

Jenkins was a bit more encouraging, putting on an impressed smile. “I’ll say, Cap’n, you have acquitted yourself. I never dreamt a scheme like this could work so well. Well done, skipper. Well fucking done, indeed.”

“Thank you, Jenkins,” he murmured, still trembling.

They took him to the galley, where he summarily passed out again, but not before he croaked, “Mr. Okoa, draw and house the guns. Then set a course. Set a course for Nassau. Then bring me some fucking water. And rum. And Captain bloody-fucking Belmont.”

____

The Hazard was brought about and caught a jolly wind that took her swiftly through the open mouth of the bay. Some of the people on shore tried to hop aboard ships to chase her, but all the ships, as well as the docks, had been set afire by the pirates. The bells rang all night, as if to summon someone that could somehow do something, anything, about the raid that had crippled Bateria de la Lanza and cut off the heads of its leadership.

But the devastation was too complete, and there was no one left to follow the Elizabeth, none even left alive to tell of who or what had done it. What witnesses there were, could only attest to Africans and perhaps some English fighting in tight, black, smoke-filled corridors.

Already, Okoa was ordering repairs to be made, for the escutcheon to be repainted with Hazard’s true name. There might be whispers in due course of a man-ish woman who came and went from Porto Bello, who was the guest of Major Solucio and Capitán Del Campo. Some would guess rightly at who it had been. But it would be days before word of this could spread far enough for any Spanish nao to be notified and sent to give chase. In that time, the Hazard could be anywhere.

Other stories would be told about a giant serpent that moved lightning fast and snatched men up so quickly they came out of their boots, and squeezed them to death. The obliterated corridors of Bateria de la Lanza would forever be described as haunted or cursed.

Overhead, the three moons did laps across the sky. The two yellow were crescent, and the red one was full. The Cold Thing That Squeezed slithered out from the fort, having finished squeezing all the warm things it could find. Now it crept back into the water, somehow sensing the Long Night was almost over. And it couldn’t be out when the warm thing in the sky returned—the sun. Such warmth was too much, even for it.

It went back into the cold water, reluctantly, and went in search of its brothers.

____

In the four months he had been aboard the Hazard, Captain Rufus Belmont had been forced to suffer many indignities. The first was being stripped of his militiaman uniform and made to serve aboard the pirate vessel in nothing but his long johns. He was never a sailor, but Captain Laurier had seen to it that he learned how to swab decks, empty the bilge, and help Reginald with the cooking. It turned out Anne Bonny’s notion to bring him aboard paid off, though, when Belmont proved himself to be threefold as useful.

As a soldier of the King’s Militia, his experience had helped the Hazard’s crew understand the tactics and strategies of the British soldiers in the Colonies. Belmont had also, at the command of Captain Laurier, and by augmenting Akil’s own skills, helped to train much of the crew to fight. Even his uniform had been useful because, when seen from shore, it had appeared to the Viejos as though the Elizabeth had a detachment of His Majesty’s Royal Marines, whose uniforms resembled those of King’s Militia.

Belmont had only agreed to help in so many matters aboard Hazard to save his life, and because the Ladyman promised to return him to Port Royal after one year of service. The Ladyman had been surprised to see Captain Belmont adjust to life aboard a sea vessel, surpassing his fears of the crew, overcoming rampant seasickness, and even learning a bit about handing and reefing.

But of all Belmont’s attributes, the one that mattered most to Laurier just now was the militiaman’s two years spent as an apothecary’s apprentice and a dog-leech before he joined the King’s Militia, and then his three months of field medicine training.

But while Hazard had been stocked with medicines, purgatives, elixirs, and a sawbones’s tools in planning for this day, they still were not ideal for complex surgery.

Once he had the bleeding stopped, Belmont poulticed Laurier’s stump with a mixture of corn meal and honey, then wrapped it all in linen bandages. Laurier was only aware of some of what Belmont and the others were doing to him. All the room was a fog. When he came to and saw his arm terminating at a wrapped stump, Laurier said, “How bad?”

“Six other men were injured by the cannonfire,” Belmont said stoically. He lifted some of the bandages, just an inch, to check his work. “One man died. An African. Forget his name. I forget all their names. But Mr. Okoa says the damage is mostly—”

“Not the damage to the ship, you bloody…how bad is…is the wound?”

“Well, there’s no saving the hand.”

Laurier snorted. “Bedside manner. You’ve finally learned some.”

“My life has taken many serious turns of late, Captain Laurier,” Belmont said. “Suppose a man would be a fool not to start having a sense of humour about it all.”

“I thought you had it amputated.”

“What, your arm? Did you forget, someone else did that—”

“Hear this man! He can hardly keep a conversation going,” John laughed. “Your sense of humour, you idiot! I meant you’d had it amputated!”

“Ah, I see. Well, it seems you’ve proven your point. Did you see the man that did this to you?”

“It was no man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Has no one told you what did this?”

Okoa came hopping over and leaned his crutch against the wall. “We hear some monster did this to you, Captain.”

“It was one of them,” said John angrily. He looked over at his stump, and had to fight back tears. Some piece of him was gone, and he had never really thought what that would feel like. He had seen others maimed, it was not uncommon at sea, but he had never really imagined it would transpire that he had any piece removed from himself until the day the Royal Navy or some privateer dragged him up the gibbets in Port Royal and hanged him.

Suddenly, John was assaulted by memories of the Behemoth, and he swore that the memories alone caused something to stir inside of him. An eel swam in his belly, gnawing at his guts. He sucked in air through gritted teeth as a spasm of pain suddenly radiated from his stump and traveled across his body.

“Christ! What did it do to me?! What did the bloody fucking thing do to me?!”

“Easy, son,” said Belmont. “I’ve seen soldiers make full recoveries and still serve in His Majesty’s Navy in some capacity. And you’ve got men on this boat missing parts of themselves. Young Mr. Dobbs, for example, has only the one eye—”

“I don’t need reminders of who is what on my crew, Belmont, thank you! You…you…my head is fucking swimming…”

“You need to calm down. You’ve lost a tremendous amount of blood and it will take weeks to get it all back, if you even survive. Corruption may soon set in. We’ll know in a few days.”

“I can’t…I have to…” He blinked. At least, he thought he did, but when he opened his eyes he was no longer lying on a table in the galley, but in his bed in his cabin. He had no idea how much time had passed. Belmont was still there, though blurry, speaking in soft tones with Okoa and Anne. “There is a worrying imbalance of his body’s sanguine humours,” Belmont was saying. “I’m afraid without proper leeching there will be some corruption of the—”

“Anne?” Laurier croaked with leaden tongue.

Anne walked over and said something to him. He didn’t catch all of it, but she ended by giving him an approving nod and left.

Okoa shut the door and barred it. The only other person in the room was Belmont, and Okoa gave him a grim look. “Our ship…she took more damage than we thought, sir. We’re still undergoing repairs.”

“Hardly the worst thing that’s happened this week,” John chuckled.

Okoa looked at Belmont. Back at Laurier. “Captain, something else has happened.”

“What is it? Tell me.” He tried to sit up, but was too weak. The bandages around his stump were making him itch, and he saw reddened flesh all around them. “How long was I out?” He looked out the windows and saw that it was night. “It is still a Long Night? Where are we?”

“No, Captain,” said Okoa. “No Long Night. The heavens are all in order. You have been in and out with fever for two days. But…we haven’t yet determined the meaning of your corruption.”

“What do you mean? What meaning?” John scratched at his stump again.

“You don’t remember? When last time you awoke, you—eh…”

“What?”

“He doesn’t remember,” said Belmont. “I told you he wouldn’t remember.”

“Remember what? Speak sense, you goddamn creatures!” he growled at them. And suddenly he realized his mouth was dry and yet his face was wet. Wet from his own drool. He wiped the froth from around his lips and kicked the sheets away from his feet. “God’s wrath, but it’s hot! Did someone open a witch’s cunt in—eh?” He scratched again at his bandages, and looked at Okoa and Belmont, both of whom looked like they didn’t know what to say to him. “Speak!”

“Captain…”

“Okoa, by God, if you cannot just come out with it—”

“Your hand.”

“Yes, it’s gone. I haven’t forgotten that much—”

“You’ve been in and out, Captain Laurier,” said Belmont stiffly. “We’ve had a version of this same discussion several times now. My hope is that this is the last. Mind you, I have no special love for you, but God have mercy on your soul for whatever has you now.”

“Why? What has me?” He scratched his stump again. “These damned bandages!”

He started to tear them off, but just then Belmont seized John’s hand, and pulled it away from the stump. “Before you look, I need you to be prepared.”

“Why should I be prepared, Captain Belmont?” As little regard as he held for the militia, John had at least respected Belmont enough to continue to address him by his rank. That was partly the reason, he assumed, that Belmont had returned a portion of the respect, and why, just now, he wore a shadow of sympathy on his face. It was a look that worried John more than almost anything he’d encountered in all his years at sea, to see a King’s Militiaman worried for him.

John swallowed a lump in his throat. “What is it?” he whispered.

Belmont sighed, and slowly began unraveling the bandages. As he did, John felt revulsion at what he saw. With each layer removed, he wanted to run, to scream, to call someone in here with a bone saw and get to cutting. But John only stared at it, and held back his vomit.

“Leave me,” he croaked.

“Captain?” Okoa said. “I don’t think you should be left alone—”

“Okoa, leave now, before I slit your fucking throat and this king’s officer, too.”

Okoa looked stung. Then Belmont unbarred the door, and both men left, but not before Belmont said, “We already tried cutting it off. Twice. It will not stay gone. I don’t know what it wants with you, but it will not be denied.”

They left him alone in his cabin. The sighing sea was just outside his window. Milky moonlight and a single candle provided the light to see the horror.

John sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the blackened, oily monstrosity extending from the half-forearm he still had. An infection had sprung from his blackened stump. A hand of elongated, bony fingers, with wet, cracked, onxy-black leathery flesh stretched over it, and two-inch silver talons extending from each digit. Veins, which ought to have been hidden beneath human flesh, instead wrapped around black fingers and occasionally pulsed with dark purple light. Tentatively touching with his human hand, John wept when he realized his new hand felt no sensation. He hugged himself, and groaned, and the ship groaned with him, and a book fell from its shelf.

Now he will never love me, John thought. Who can love a monster?

It was not until that moment that he realized he had been entertaining the notion of finding Benjamin again, showing him what he had done to Spain, telling him the story of how they destroyed a great fortress and took more booty than almost any pirate in history, and how that might be enough to lure Ben away to someplace up north, perhaps to the Colonies. It is a cruel thing when fantasies die. They must live to give us hope. Absent hope, where do we turn to? John Laurier was contemplating that now.

He wept. And laughed. Then he stood up and walked across the cabin and lifted his cutlass, which someone had sheathed and set on his desk. He meant to either cut off the arm or open his belly. He did not know which when he picked it up.

But then something happened. The corrupted hand grabbed the hilt and suddenly John felt the hand turned to stone. That’s what it felt like. The grip was as solid as granite, yet when he waved it about, it struck imaginary opponents in the air with the speed of a coral snake. He stood there a while, mesmerized by his control of it. Some part of him had imagined that since he could not feel it, he could not use it, and yet it functioned as well as his left hand. Better.

John looked himself in the mirror. Naked, and with a demon’s elongated hand, cutlass held tight.

Then he fainted.