Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Maybe Bantle and his fellows was staring out the front. One if by land, two if by sea. Or do I got that backward?
The lean-to was dingy and dark and a blessed relief. Just not having the freezing rain drumming on my head was benediction enough, but the side wall and slanted roof cut the wind, too, and in the stillness Priya and my new little burrow felt almost warm by comparison. We huddled against the back wall on the hinge side of that door, where it would shade us if it opened unexpectedly. She pulled the Marshal’s coat out and I got under it with her. She weren’t shedding no appreciable warmth.
I didn’t care. She draped her arm over my shoulders and we crouched down, hugging our knees, and leaned in to the cracks between the logs to hear what we could hear.
There was some mud shoved in there in places, but overall they weren’t chinked so good and it hadn’t been reapplied recent. Little slivers of light shone out between ’em, honey warm and tantalizing. Priya and me, we tried to breathe shallow and not let our teeth chatter, because we could hear every footstep inside and sound travels in all directions. Except back up through the ceiling when your neighbor upstairs is getting up to acrobatics, if you know what I mean, but that’s just the goddamn perversity of the universe.
I’d still maybe harbored a small niggle of worry that we’d come all this way and weren’t going to find nothing except a winter watchman—especially when there was no means of transportation immediately apparent—but the first whisper of sound that filtered out with the warm air and firelight put paid to that. It didn’t do nothing to ease the twist in my guts, though, because it was Peter Bantle’s voice.
I flinched, and in flinching I noted that the icy rain had made my face stop hurting, because it started up again. Priya didn’t cringe at all. The man who can make Priya cringe ain’t been invented. And I believe the task would stretch even the Almighty’s ingenuity.
Bantle said, “If that yellow son of a bitch ain’t here in half an hour, he can whistle.”
Did that mean Nemo was an Indian after all? Or was I wrong and he was Chinese?
Another voice cut in, more educated and more accented. “For what he is paying us, he may be being as late as he wishes. I for one do not care to go back out into that rain.”
I glanced at Priya. She mouthed something in the dimness. It could have been
Scarlet.
I nodded. I guess the son of a bitch weren’t dead after all.
The third voice was familiar, too. Horatio Standish. “Why don’t I make us some coffee, gentlemen? I brought cornmeal and flour and bacon. Figure if I start up a pan of grub, that’ll bring him.”
Some things are just universal.
Like the known scientific fact that the colder and wetter you are, the better bacon smells frying. I tell you true, if a woman could die of smells, I wouldn’t be here today. There was scraping and mixing sounds, too, and sizzling. I thought even Priya was salivating, and she don’t even like bacon.
We pressed up against the log wall and convinced ourselves that some of that warmth was soaking through it. I tried not to smell bacon while I was deciding if we should kick something over and run now—the conversation weren’t too edifying—or if we should wait for Nemo to get here and try to scoop up the whole mess of ’em.
Of course, I was supposed to be waiting for the Marshal’s signal. But he sure were taking his own sweet time about whatever preparations he had in mind. And I don’t mind admitting I had an itch to hurry things along some.
I had just about decided that the sensible thing to do would be to slap irons on Bantle, Scarlet, and Standish—I felt maybe a little bad about Standish, but only a little; he did choose to associate himself with Bantle—and then for us to inhabit the cabin in our turn and lie in wait for this Nemo, when Bantle started in to talking again.
“Horaz, come over here and look at this.”
There was a rustle of paper, some footsteps. I tried to press my eye to the chink in the wall and see what was going on, but there was nothing to be seen except light and blurs. I heard Standish make a humfing sound, and then there was nothing.
“Help me move this table,” Bantle said. A great scraping followed, coupled with some muffled cursing I could not understand. In Russian, I thought, because that was Scarlet’s voice.
If they was setting up the table and chairs, then they must expect Nemo to be coming any minute. Either that or they was getting antsy with waiting.
Well, I could relate. Still no owls. And less of my heart hammering on against the inside of my ribs, despite being huddled in a corner of that shed like a mouse in a loose box, hoping not to get stomped. Still, the waiting was like to be the death of me. I wondered if maybe Marshal Reeves had made his owl call, and we’d just not heard it through the rain and our eavesdropping on Bantle and his fellows. Maybe we should start our turn as bait—
The back door of the log cottage busted open so hard it bounced off my shoulder and knocked me on my rump. A harsh glare of light followed. I scrambled away, knowing that there was no way I could avoid getting seen but hoping maybe to distract from Priya. When I looked up, Horaz Standish was framed in the door.
He had a pistol in each hand, and both of ’em was trained at me.
I rolled on my side, thinking maybe I could sprint out the open side of the shed and make for the trees and maybe our plan could still work. And if nothing else, I could lead ’em off Priya. But as I gathered my legs under me, I came face to boot with Peter Bantle, standing with the rain dripping off the groove in his hat brim, scowling down at me. He had his glove on, and it was sparking and spitting. Me, I wouldn’t have trusted that much electricity in the rain. The sizzle turned my stomach and made my insides feel liquidy and slick.
The burn on my cheek flared into fresh pain, just at the sight of it.
Bantle leveled a pistol, too, and sighed like I was the biggest exasperation he ever met. “Put the Peacemaker down,” he instructed.
I just then realized it was still in my hand.
I know I should of leveled it and shot him where he stood. But I honestly think if I had, you wouldn’t be hearing this story today. Standish and Bantle had me dead to rights, and even if I dropped Bantle, well … Horaz Standish’s forbearance was unlikely to weather my shooting his boss.
I stretched out my arm and laid the gun on the packed earth, fingertip reach away.
Bantle shook his head. “You whores really are blamed fools. Get that other one out from behind the door, please, Scarlet?”
Scarlet crossed behind Standish, more’s the pity—I would of liked him to foul Standish’s line of fire—and went around the door. He was a medium-sized fellow only, compact, but his arms were as big around as one of Priya’s thighs. And he was as strong as he looked; Priya kicked and fought as he drew her out, but she couldn’t even shake his grip on her wrist. She bit him a good one—I saw blood—and he stepped on my leg fighting her, but before too long he twisted her arm behind her back and gave her the Spanish walk out of the corner.
She never said a word. But there was more light now, and she caught my eye. The toss of her chin told me she’d kill all three of them right now, if she had the means. Though I was chattering with the cold, I agreed with her silent threat 1,006 percent.
Standish lowered his gun. “These girls are soaked to the bone. Let’s get them inside, before they freeze stiff.”
“They’d be less trouble to me under such circumstances,” Bantle said.
“I’ve got a use for at least one of ’em if you don’t,” Standish replied.
Bantle snorted. But he reached down—without holstering his pistol—and though I cringed away, he hauled me to my feet by the hair.
I woke up with a drinker’s head and the taste of vomit in my mouth, unable to feel my hands. It weren’t dark—if anything it was too damned bright, and when I tried to open my eyes I slammed ’em shut again right quick, feeling as if somebody had driven an ice pick into my brain.
I hadn’t got more than a glimpse, but I had the idea that I was in a bright, small room, maybe lit with electric arcs. I couldn’t think of anything else that would make such a dazzling light, but I also couldn’t think why anybody’d light an inside room with an arc. It was like killing ants with molten lead: significant overkill.
I moaned and tried to pull my hands down, to see if I could get some blood into them. Something rattled, and I realized they was chained up over my head.
I probably should of faked I was still out, I realized. But I had to vomit again, and I didn’t want to drown in it. It took the sort of effort I’d usually reserve for mountain climbing—if I was a mountain climber, I mean—but I managed to get my shoulder down and my knees up, and toss my chuck over the edge of the narrow metal table I was laying on without either falling off it or puking on myself any more than absolutely necessary.
They’d chloroformed me. Or maybe ether. Whatever it was, it was turning my stomach something fierce. And I still couldn’t feel my hands.
As I lay there, I came aware of a vibration coming up through the table. Like if I was on a train. But I couldn’t hear the rattle of iron wheels on iron rails or the
ratcheta ratcheta
noise of those wheels rolling over the joints. Maybe a barge?
Either way, I was mostly surprised I weren’t dead. Bantle’d proved in his own parlor that he had a taste for hurting women and that he wasn’t about to draw the line at permanent, long-term hurt.
I pressed my burned face to the cool metal and sighed. Maybe he didn’t like ’em once they was scarred up by his prior attentions. Or maybe he was just saving me for later.
That gave me a fresh well of sick. I tried to vomit again, but all I got for my trouble was hard stomach cramps and a thin, bitter streak of bile. Straining over the edge of the table made my shoulders hurt, and straining to vomit made my belly cramp, and I was feeling pretty miserable already when I realized that I didn’t know where Priya was.
That fear you get for a loved one—that’s a motivator like no other. Even though I couldn’t feel my hands or lower arms, I scooted my butt up, angled myself sideways with my legs off the table, and leaned on the chain so I could use it for purchase to pull myself sitting. The room spun, all right, but I didn’t dare fall over—and if I fell off the table I’d probably dislocate a shoulder, and then I’d really be useful for nothing.
I turned so the chain eased and my hands dropped into my lap. I looked down at ’em, daring my eyes to open. It still hurt like hell.
But the hands were there, and attached, and a funny pale color. I tried to wiggle my fingers and got nothing—not even a shimmer. As I watched, they pinked up again a bit, though. I decided that was a hopeful sign, that blood was flowing back into them. I flapped ’em like a dying fish thumping its tail. They hit my legs like lumps of warm meat. When they bounced on my chest, I realized that the Morgan dollar was still inside my shirt, tucked against the top of my bosom.
No sign of Priya anywhere. I was in a little whitewashed metal room, on a steel table. My feet dangled over a puddle of my own vomit, and those were the only things anywhere near.
The metal walls made me think I was on a ship. That would explain the hum that was still rising up the table legs to numb my bottom. And why that table was bolted to the floor.
I was musing on that when the door swung open.
I braced myself for Bantle, but it was just Horaz Standish. I was ashamed of myself for feeling a spike of relief. He stood there, framed, with a bucket in one hand and a stack of rags in the other, and he looked at me. Maybe pityingly? His face was hard to read.
“Well,” he said, after a minute. “You’ve looked better.”
He came up to me and—stepping around the puddle of upchuck on the floor—dipped a cloth in the bucket and wiped my face clean with lukewarm water. I bit my cheek not to scream when he touched the burns. He dropped the cloth on the floor, then repeated the process. He crouched down and wiped up the vomit, then washed the floor with rags.
When he was done, he washed his hands in the bucket, piled all the dirty rags back into it, and set it by the door.
I thought about kicking his head while he was down there, but somebody’d taken off my shoes, and it seemed like a lot of risk for a more or less Pyrrhic gesture. So I just watched while Standish cleaned up up after me and then came back.
“Before I unchain you,” he said, “you ought to know that there’s no escaping.”
“We’re on a boat,” I said. “Where are we going?”
He laughed. “We’re
in
a boat,” he corrected. “A submersible ship. We’re four leagues under the Sound, and all the hatches are dogged and pressure locked. You have no way out.”
“A submersible ship?”
He smiled. “Think of it as a mechanical fish.”
“It’s the
Nautilus
!” I cried. “He really
is
Captain Nemo!”
Standish looked amused. “And Peter thought you weren’t clever,” he said. “Here. Hold out your hands.”
I did, as best I could. I extended them, though they hung like dead flowers from my wrists. Standish unchained them, and I let them drop back down against my thighs. They lay against my lap like two warm, limp bladders. I tried to move them from the shoulders, and all I managed was to flop ’em against my chest and belly disgustingly.
Standish watched silently for a few moments. Then the pins and needles started and, after those, the pain.
I didn’t scream. But I did say “
aaahah!
” loud enough for anyone to hear it two rooms over. And I did rock back and forth on the table, huddling my arms up to my chest and kind of shaking them.
It hurt worse than my burned face, and the rocking back and forth wasn’t doing my splitting head any favors. Standish reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, ever so gently. “There, there, Miss Memery,” he said. “The pain will pass.”
And, more or less, given time, it did.
He touched my cheek gently—but not so gently the burned skin didn’t smart something awful. I jerked away and hissed.