The Ocean of the Dead: Ship Kings 4 Read online

  Dow cleared his throat. ‘Boiler, you and the others go to the lower holds, see if there’s anything left there that we can salvage. Benedicta and I will go to the Great Cabin. I want to find the ship’s log.’

  Boiler nodded and led his men away forward. Dow and Benedicta moved towards the stern. Very soon they felt entirely alone, for the others were quickly lost from sight, and a carpet of dust on the decking everywhere muffled all sound. More corpses appeared, some in hammocks, some on the floor, having fallen perhaps, with arms stretched out as if in pleading. But they were beyond all help now, and Dow and Benedicta passed them by.

  They climbed, first to the Second Gun deck and then to the First, and found only similar scenes to those below, more dead, the great vessel one vast sepulchre. They emerged onto the main deck. Here the prospect was familiar to any who had travelled in the Doldrums, for tattered tents of canvas still hung from the masts to provide shade for the crew. But all was deserted. Treading carefully, wary for rotten timbers, Dow and Benedicta climbed the outer stairs to the Captain’s Walk of the stern castle. A set of gilded doors there had been wedged open, and so they passed within, lamps held high.

  A long, dust-veiled passage led away into darkness. Doorways opened from it, leading no doubt to the luxurious apartments of Nadal and his high officers, but for the present Dow and Benedicta held straight on. They came at length to a looming oak-framed threshold. Beyond it, the Great Cabin opened like an immense cavern at the end of some underground shaft, gold and glass glinting in the corners from the dim glow of the lamps.

  A great table stood there, and seated at its head in a throne-like chair was a tall, withered figure dressed in a full uniform of black and gold, a prince’s crown on its head, an admiral’s regalia on its shoulders.

  It could be only one man: Nadal.

  Dow stared in both awe and puzzlement. Five years before, in the cold wastes of the North, he had happened upon a similar scene of death, on the freezing isle where the Bent Wing had come to rest. In a forsaken hut, he and Nell had found the bodies of the last surviving officers, one of them seated at a table even as was Nadal now. But that man had been slumped forward in despair. Nadal was not slumped, he was erect in his throne, staring eternally into the distance. And his dress uniform was all but pristine. Yet why would he be wearing it at all, the hot overcoat, the stiff shirt, in the heat of the Barrier? Surely he could not have gone about like this every day. Had he put on all this finery merely to die in it?

  But even if that was true, Dow had seen enough of death to know that it would never leave a man sitting proudly upright like this. Death was always humbling, posing bodies contorted in their final spasms of pain, or slumped in the indignity of decay. Nadal, prince though he was, would not be immune. And indeed, as Dow and Benedicta came close and held their lamps above the dead lord, it could be seen that his limbs were in fact bound with rope to the arms and legs of his throne, holding him erect, and that his head too was held in place by a band across his brow. Nor had he died naturally: the sleeves of his coat were pulled back far enough to reveal the dried skin of his forearms, and great long cuts were visible there, stained with a congealed black.

  Nadal, the Lord Designate, had been fastened to the chair, and then his wrists slit.

  Murder, then? Dow did not think so. The image came clearly instead of the great prince, feeling his death approaching, arranging this scene so that his corpse would reign as commander over his dead ship, not moulder anonymously in some bed, or be cast into a watery grave.

  But who had done the cutting of the wrists? The Great Cabin seemed empty of all other remains. But no – there, slumped at the foot of the throne and half-hidden under the table was another dead figure. The shape was small, curled in on itself, bent and deformed and hideous – but a man. A scapegoat. And in one outthrust hand a knife gleamed, black along the blade.

  ‘It is he,’ said Benedicta. She was gazing at the face of the man in the throne, the dead skin taut and split across the bones beneath, the eye sockets stern in their emptiness. ‘Even in death I know him. Farewell, Nadal. How this would have grieved your father, had he lived himself. And what, I wonder, possessed you to think that this Barrier wasteland could be crossed – when even we, with engines at our call, have failed?’

  ‘Perhaps he can tell us,’ said Dow. ‘Look.’ He was nodding to the table. There before the throne was laid a sheaf of papers, and a golden inkpot gone dry, and a jewelled pen, lying flat as if just put aside from the writing. Dow lifted the papers, gently brushed the dust from them, then glanced briefly at the black passages scrawled there. ‘Here,’ he said, offering the pages to the former duchess, ‘you can read these better than I can.’

  Benedicta took the papers and peered, while Dow held his lamp for her to see.

  ‘It is a letter,’ she said at last, ‘or a final testimony. And it begins thusly. To those who will, I am told, come after. I, Nadal, write these words in the very shadow of death, at the begging of my scapegoat. Of what use they will be to those who discover this, I know not, but Thomias will not perform the final service I ask of him unless I write.’

  Dow glanced at the dead Lord Designate. It was as if the fleshless lips had spoken aloud. But Benedicta was considering the huddled figure on the ground. ‘Thomias of the Misthrown, the Tempest’s scapegoat. I knew of him: after Axay, he was reputed one of the most foresighted in the Kingdoms. Rightly so, for it seems he predicted that we would come, and find this.’

  Dow nodded to the pages. ‘Read on.’

  The once-duchess resumed. ‘For those who would seek the melancholy details in full of our voyage, I direct you to the ship’s log, to be found in my cabin. Here I will not dwell on the disasters that led us to this end: our great expedition, the attempt of the Age, a failure so utter that we did not even reach the waist of the world, let alone pass beyond it. Indeed, we have trod no ground that ships before us had not already trodden – and now Thomias and I are almost the last left alive, save for a few pitiful souls lingering still, below decks.’

  Benedicta paused a moment, frowning. ‘I don’t understand. He says that they did not even reach the equator before they died – but how can that be? For here they rest, far in the southern half of the world.’

  Dow said, ‘Years have passed since this was written. In that time, the currents that created this graveyard must have carried them clear through the inner Barrier, and brought them here to join with the others.’

  ‘Yet if so, would not the Sunken have interfered with them, as they did with us?’

  But Dow remembered something now, something Nell had said in those last awful moments upon the floating isle, regarding the hatred of the Sunken for humanity. She had said that the Sunken had indeed encountered humans before the Chloe and the New World, but that those humans had always been dead things, ghost things, corpse things. At the time Dow had considered the words to be nonsensical, but now they chimed with a growing suspicion. Maybe the Chloe was the first vessel to survive the inner Barrier after all. Maybe none of these ships here in the great graveyard had crossed the equator with living crews. Maybe they had all died in the north, victims of Miasma or algae or whatever peril, and so sailed here only as dead men, adrift, but passing slowly through the Sunken’s territory, drawn by the creeping spirals of the Doldrums waters.

  And if so, what strange objects the Sunken must have thought such vessels! So alien and hulking, carrying their loathsome cargoes of corpses. Frightening even, and yet impotent, for at least the dead were no threat. But then the Chloe and the New World had arrived, with living crews, to steal water from the Sunken’s floating islands . . . and the calamity had ensued.

  ‘Read on,’ Dow said again.

  Benedicta bent her gaze once more. ‘In any case, according to Thomias, what will matter to those who find this is not so much how we failed, but why we set out in the first place, and what it was that gave us the confidence – misplaced, as events have proved – that the Barrier could be br
eached. For the truth is not known by those we left behind. My father’s disapproval of my determination to defeat the Doldrums meant that all my preparations were made in secret.

  ‘So – here is how it came to be.

  ‘I understood from the first, of course, that lacking winds, any ship attempting the Barrier would have to rely on towing to cover most of the distance. To that end, any expedition must be well fitted out with good boats and strong crews of rowers, and ample supplies to survive the long crossing. All that I could assemble. But after all, such attempts had been made before, well resourced, and still failed. There remained one insurmountable difficulty. Every account of the Doldrums that I studied reported the same thing: that the water, growing thick with nicre, becomes heavy, and resistant to passage. In so clinging a sea, a towed ship can manage only a handful of miles a day.

  ‘At such pace, the crossing of the Barrier and then the return would take several years. That was much too long. No ship on so extended a voyage could be stocked against starvation, especially without a known shore on the other side, at which to resupply. To have any hope, my own ships would need to go faster. But how to increase our speed? The strength of my rowers we could not change, but what about the effect of the clinging sea?

  ‘I gathered a team of loyal scholars and set them to work on the problem, experimenting upon nicre-enriched waters in their laboratories. And at length they made a great discovery. They concocted a special balm, a mixture of certain distillations and minerals, which, when sprayed in a film upon a Doldrums-like sea, disrupts and disperses the nicre within in a temporary but profound fashion, enabling a ship to pass through as if the water were of the normal ocean.

  ‘In this revelation, I saw the answer to defying the Doldrums. And when I enquired of Thomias as to his forebodings on the matter, he said that he foresaw only that great good would come to the world as the result of our efforts. Thus I began to prepare in earnest for the assault upon the Barrier.

  ‘Three ships I commandeered, under guise of a less hazardous voyage to the Ice, to allay my father’s fears – but only one did we equip for cold climes. The other two we secretly loaded with tropical gear, and with a great supply too of the ingredients necessary to create the nicre-clearing balm. Then, sending the Bent Wing north to fulfil our erstwhile mission, I turned the Tempest and the Bullion south, holding fast on that course until the wind died and the sea grew flat.

  ‘The outer Doldrums reached, we launched our boats and sprayed the nicre balm in a fine curtain upon the sea. And lo, it performed just as it had in the laboratories of my scholars, so that our craft forged forward easily under power of the rowers. In those hopeful times we made at least twenty miles in every day, no matter the heat and our other discomforts.

  ‘Ah, but many are the wiles of the Barrier amid its weeds and slimes, and all too soon, calamity visited us. Refer to my log, if you will, to learn of the loss of the Bullion with all hands, I will not speak of it here. All that matters is that the Tempest pressed on despite the disaster, for I refused to be daunted, and so we came at last to a sea that was empty of all life. But here we met a new difficulty: our speed began to fall away. The balm that we sprayed ahead of us seemed to be losing its efficacy. Some quality of the sterile sea, my scholars theorised, made it different from waters in the outer Doldrums.

  ‘This was a most unexpected and unwelcome development. But still I was determined, and at last we came to waters once more where life thrived – but lo, it was life that was strange and noisome to the eye. My crew was much disturbed. Worse, amid these hateful new growths, the nicre balm had no effect at all, and we could row at only a creeping pace. It was then that I admitted reluctant defeat: we could never hope to cross the Barrier and return again in this fashion. We must retreat. I turned us about, and made for home.

  ‘Too late! For now disease assailed us, a dreadful plague, unlike any known in the north. We picked it up no doubt from the fetid waters of the inner Barrier. It began to ravage the crew severely, turning men’s skin black and rotten, and making their eyes bleed terribly. On the lower decks, there was no defence against it, and men died by the dozens every day. And that was not the only evil, for at the same time, a foul mould was discovered in our food holds, and everything it touched became poisonous, and must be thrown away.

  ‘In the space of two dreadful weeks, thus, we were laid waste. Nine of every ten men died from the plague, and yet no better fate awaited the survivors than starvation, for almost all our food went bad. Before we had come fifty miles back across the empty sea, we were marooned without rowers enough to man the boats. Here we have floated ever since, unmoving – although one of my scholars claimed before he died that we are in fact drifting slowly south again. But I think he was mad, as there are no stars here to reckon by. And of the seven hundred who set out upon this ship, no more than thirty of us linger upon it now.

  Benedicta paused again, though Dow could see there was still a final page to be read. She said, ‘I’d thought we suffered severely ourselves from disease – but it seems we’ve been blessed. We certainly did not encounter anything so deadly as this black plague of which he speaks.’

  ‘No,’ said Dow. ‘But finish his testimony.’

  She resumed. ‘Easily, thus, did the Barrier defeat us, as surely as it has beaten all others, and always will, I think. And now my own death draws near. I have been spared the plague, but starvation is an end inescapable. I choose not to meet it feeble in my bed, but here, upright, in my Great Cabin.

  ‘But still Thomias badgers me. I have not yet written what he insists I must write. It seems a trivial matter now, but he says that I must return to the subject of the nicre balm, and to its making, even though, as I have said, it is of no utility in the deep Barrier, as we have learned to our demise.

  ‘The balm is mixed of many ingredients, but Thomias demands I speak of only one; the main constituent indeed, of which we loaded numerous barrels into our holds, thinking it would be vital. In the end it has proved useless, and so, ironically, is the only thing remaining now in holds that are otherwise empty. We would have been wiser to bring more food!

  ‘But enough. My sight grows dim, and it is time. There is only one last thing to say: the main component of the balm – an ingredient obtained from our loyal colonies in the Twin Isles – is oil. Refined whale oil.

  ‘There. Make of it what you will, those who read this, if there be anyone at all. Thomias is satisfied now, and has the knife ready.

  ‘Farewell.’

  Benedicta stared at Dow. ‘Whale oil!’

  ‘Whale oil . . .’ Dow echoed, his mind suddenly blank in the face of an implication too big and too wonderful to take in all at once.

  ‘Whale oil for engines!’ the former duchess cried. ‘Whale oil for attack boats! And you kept four of them! I saw it, you beautiful boy! When we left the attack boats behind, you loaded four of them onto your Chloe! We all thought you mad, but you did it!’

  Dow was gazing in shock. ‘It was Jake’s idea, not mine . . .’

  ‘Who cares? We have them!’

  And at the same moment there came shouting from below, and the sounds of running feet, and laughter – noises utterly alien to this dead ship. Then finally Boiler’s voice, crying, ‘Dow! In the lower hold! Oil! Whale oil! A hundred barrels of it at least! We are saved!’

  *

  Of course, they were not saved even then, not truly.

  The rest of that feverish night and all the next day was spent in transferring the oil from the Tempest to the Chloe, and in unpacking the attack boats – all but forgotten, having been dismantled and stowed away a lifetime and hundreds of miles ago – and readying them for a service that no one had expected they would ever see again. The crew, weak though they were, worked with a vigour that defied their failing bodies, and by nightfall the Chloe was underway once more, under tow of four thrashing engines, and moving more swiftly than it had in months.

  But saved? No.

  As Dow had
expected, there was no food left on the Tempest, and the Chloe’s own supplies had dwindled to maybe three weeks’ worth now at the utmost, barely sustaining of life even at that. And as fast as the attack boats might now tow the ship, hundreds of miles still remained before they reached even the outer Doldrums, let alone escaped to the true windblown ocean, a thousand miles further on. Then the search for land must begin.

  And yet, from the moment he had heard Boiler’s joyful cry, Dow had known that the thing was decided; that they would not starve; that somehow the Chloe would win through and make the discovery.

  Oh, he was no prophet, even now. But he could recognise the machinations of fortune when they were revealed to him in plain sight. And in the finding of oil upon Nadal’s flagship, Dow saw exactly that: a vast scheme being laid bare; a final piece of a great puzzle, slotting neatly into place; the fulfilment of an immense design that had been set in motion long ago.

  How else could it be regarded? Fully ten years hence the Lord Designate had set forth, knowing nothing of Dow. And five years afterwards Dow had left his home, knowing nothing of the Lord Designate, by then already dead. And yet, after being delivered from the Whirlpool, then dispatched to the Unquiet Ice, and thence on through war and long journey, Dow had been brought in his final extremity to this point in the Ocean of the Dead, beyond all despair – only to find waiting for him, delivered by Nadal, and having sat in stillness all through those same years, the very thing he needed most!

  No. Fate would never have conceived a plan so intricate in its turnings, and so masterful in its scope, only to leave its agent lost and starving in the southern seas. The New World awaited them, Dow was sure.