Daybreak (44 page)

“So these are the pirates, are they? Well, they certainly don’t look like much,” he mused, his gaze sweeping across them. “Nevertheless, I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with us. His Majesty has commanded that all outlaws be questioned, and summarily executed.”

Shamus didn’t like the sound of that. “I’ll bet it has more to do with red-hot pokers than actual questions,” he muttered out the side of his mouth.

“Or finger clamps,” Jonathan added. “Or thumb screws.”

“They won’t be taking us anywhere,” Lysander growled. He drew his sword and its strange, patch-worked blade glinted dangerously in the sunlight. “I carry the Lass of Sam Gravy — we can’t be beaten!”

The robed man looked about to reply. But Perceval’s squealing cut over the top of his words.

“I’m not an outlaw, and I won’t be treated like one! I demand to be released.” His eyes seemed about to pop as he tugged against the soldier’s grip. “Let me g — ah!”

The robed man tapped the dagger against Perceval’s chest, and the whole thing caved in with a sickening crunch — as if some great beast had gone and stomped him with its heel. Red leaked from between Perceval’s lips. The soldier didn’t even look as his body crumpled: he simply opened his hand and let the chains fall with the corpse. 

The mage, on the other hand, grinned down at it. 

“How do you like our odds now, Captain?” Jonathan said stiffly.

Lysander’s face went taut. “Not nearly as well.”

*******

“I told you it was mages!” Shamus fumed. He rattled the irons clamped around his wrist in Jonathan’s face. “Any strange happenings, anything goes amiss, and it’s always a mage’s doing.”

“You’re lucky my arms went numb an hour ago, or I’d swat you,” Jonathan retorted. While the rest of the pirates sat miserably in their chains, the fiddler hung upside down by the clamps around his ankles.

“I warned you not to fight,” Lysander muttered.

Jonathan twisted to glare at him. “Well, somebody had to put up a fight! And since you were too busy moping, I thought I’d do it. You’d better find your gall, Captain,” he added vehemently. “You saw what they did to Percy. It won’t be long before they start busting up our ribs one at a time.”

“Mages,” Shamus hissed. A sudden chill shook him to his bones.

Lysander, on the other hand, didn’t do much of anything. It wasn’t like him to let Jonathan have the last word. But he slumped against the wall and stared at the ceiling like none of that mattered anymore. There wasn’t so much as a spark in his eyes.

His stare was as worn and dull as the soles of their boots.

Granted, there wasn’t much to smile about. From what Shamus could gather, it sounded as if Midlan had marched into Harborville a couple of weeks ago. Alders must’ve given it up without much of a fight: the shops and houses were all intact, and most of the villagers stayed on as slaves. They’d hardly glanced up from their chores when the pirates tromped in — which made Shamus think they weren’t the first ship to be captured.

But oddly enough, there wasn’t a sign of
Anchorgloam
, or any of the other vessels that’d been trapped at the docks. Shamus didn’t like to think about it, but he wagered Midlan had already gotten to them. They’d be halfway to the chancellor’s island castle, if that were the case. The seas would carry the King’s army much faster than any march across land.

And they’d be out for blood.

“We’ll get there, Captain,” Shamus said, though he wasn’t certain anymore. “I know it all seems a bit grim right now, but we’ll figure a way out of here. There’s no one I’d rather be locked up with than a whole band of pirates. I wager you lads have gotten …”

He stopped when a pair of heavy footsteps rattled dust from the ceiling. A creaky trap door snapped open above them, flooding the room with light.

“All right, who’s first?”

“Do the tree rat,” a soldier growled, crouching to fix the slits of his helmet onto Jonathan. There was a bloodied rag wrapped around one of his hands, and he held it gingerly against his chest. “That whelp nearly bit my finger off.”

“And I’d do it again!” the fiddler declared. “If I were you, I’d find myself a thick pair of gloves and drop my visor.”

“No, there’s no point in questioning him. He’s a madman,” Lysander called when the soldier stormed down the ladder.

His helmet swung around. “Is that so? Then maybe I ought to pound some answers out of
you
.”

Lysander shrugged. “There’s absolutely no point in that. The King already knows everything, I’m sure — about what happened to Reginald, where Gilderick is, how the Baron’s castle got blown to bits. I’m sure he’s even figured out about Titus, by now.”

The soldier dragged Lysander to his feet by his tunic. “You know an awful lot, pirate.”

“I suppose I listen awful well.”

“Is that it?” The soldier’s voice dropped to a dangerous level. “Or did you have a hand in all this?”

Lysander grinned widely. “All of what?”

The soldier glared a moment more before he hurled Lysander to the ladder. “March. We’ll have you singing by sunrise.”

The soldier at the top of the ladder dragged Lysander by his tunic, while the man behind him drove him up with a knee. There was some laughter as the trapdoor slammed, then a meaty
thud
— followed by a gasp.

“We’ve got to do something,” Shamus said as the footsteps went out the door. 

“Right. Well, I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but I suppose we’ve got no other choice.” Jonathan twisted to lock eyes with Shamus. “You’re going to have to get my lucky lockpick.”

Shamus was more than a little surprised. He thought for certain that Midlan had taken all of Jonathan’s picks. They’d spent a good deal of the afternoon digging them out of his coat pockets and from patches on his sleeves. He’d had so many wedged beneath his boot buckles that they’d finally just tossed them off the cliffs.
 

“Most people don’t think to check your boots,” Jonathan insisted when Shamus asked. “But I’ve got one more stashed away — tucked in a place I knew they wouldn’t search.”

His grimace made Shamus leaned back. “And where is that, exactly?”

“Someplace no man would ever look.”

“Oh, for the love of seas and serpents, lad!”

Jonathan twisted around, “I need your help. It’s sewn in right between my —”

“I know where it’s sewn!” Shamus cut in. “And you can forget it. I’m not reaching in under there.”

By now, all eyes were upon them. The pirates were beginning to snicker.

“You’ve got to, mate.” Jonathan’s face was serious. “I’d do it myself, but I’ve been hanging upside down for so long that my arms are too numb to split the thread.”

“You
are
the only one who can reach him,” one of the pirates called.

Shamus glared at him.

“C’mon, mate — Lysander needs us. If it was you getting the stuffing punched out of your gut, he’d do whatever it took to spring you.”

The snickering grew into full-out laughter, at this. A few of the pirates whistled.

Meanwhile, Shamus’s face burned so hot that he could hardly think. “No, there’s no point in it! Midlan’s out there, and we haven’t got enough blades to face them. Even if we manage our way out of these chains, we’ll still be trapped.”

Jonathan sighed. “You heard the mage: they’re going to kill us all, anyways. And I don’t know about you lot, but I’d rather die with a blade in my hands than at the end of a chain.”

There was a rumble of agreement.

“So what do you say, mates? Are we going to hang around here and let our captain have all the fun, or are we going to get out and take a few of those tinheads with us?”

The pirates roared in answer. They grinned and thumped their fists against their burly chests.

Jonathan swung back to Shamus. “It’s all up to you, mate.”

“All right, fine. I’ll get your blasted pick,” he snapped. “But if you utter one word about this — and I mean it, fiddler — I’ll cast your bones into the hull of my next ship.”

“No worries, mate. Your secret is safe with me,” Jonathan said.

But the way he grinned said otherwise.

“You’re running out of time, pirate,” the mage hissed.

The floor danced before Lysander’s eyes. Wet warmth coated his lips and ran down his chin. He spat it away, watching as the blood soaked into the grain at his knees.
 

His lip had been busted at the middle. Though it stung him horribly, he forced himself to grin. “No,
you’re
the one running out of time — and options, I might add. You’ve burned me, shocked me, split me. What do you plan to do next? Skin me?”

The mage smiled. “No … we’re going to hang you. We’re going to leave your body dangling there for the next man we question — and I’m certain we’ll get through to him much quicker.”

Lysander’s grin faltered. His stomach bunched into a knot as his throat suddenly went dry. “What do you mean,
the next man
? There is no next man. I’ve already told you that all of my original crew perished in a tempest on our way back from the mountains. These men don’t know anything.”

“Do you honestly expect me to believe that?”

“Well, it was a monster of a tempest. We never saw it coming.”

“I’ve had the pleasure of torturing dozens of men in His Majesty’s name,” the mage said, eyes trailing around the darkened room. “A moment with you, and I knew you’d never utter a word about what happened to the Sovereign Five — even if you do know the truth, you aren’t giving it up.”

Lysander glared. “Why did you keep me here for so long, then?”

“To give us time to finish the gallows, of course.” The door opened, and the mage nodded to the man behind it. “Perfect. Right on schedule.”

Two sets of hands clamped around Lysander’s arms, pressing painfully against the raw burns the mage’s spells had left behind. But he hardly noticed — all of his worries turned elsewhere. “You’re wasting your breath. They’ll never talk to you!”

“Oh, one of them will,” the mage assured him as he followed with a smirk. “There’s always one.”

A muted red sky hung over Harborville — the last faint shred of a dying light. Soldiers milled about the village square, spears propped over their shoulders. They’d taken the houses for barracks and seized the shops. Makeshift camps filled the alleyways, packed to their seams with guards.

Lysander balked when they reached the heart of the square.
 

Bodies already littered the area around him. The sunken remains of men hung from stocks, several pairs of legs dangled from iron cages. A damp wind blew across it, waking the stench of rot and decay. The noise of the guards’ march startled the carrion birds from their feast. They took off in a flurry of indignant squawks but stayed circling overhead — each of their mirror-black eyes fixed eagerly upon Lysander.

He soon forgot about the reek and his stomach heaved against something else. The gallows steps became like a mountain before his eyes: they stretched and wavered at their tops, shrouded by a haze. He ground his heels into the cobblestone and shoved back against the guards. For one crazed moment, he clung to where he stood.

He knew that if his boots left the ground, they would never return — but dangle for an age inside the ruins of Harborville, his ribs a nest for carrion birds …

“This is my favorite part. I rather like to watch them struggle.”

The mage’s voice swam inside his ears, carried in by the echo of the guards’ laughter. And in that moment, Lysander came to his senses.

His heels struck the stairs hard. His legs shook slightly when he reached the gallows’ top. But by the time he turned to face the square, he’d locked them tight. Nothing would sag his shoulders or drop his chin — not even when he felt the noose scrape down his neck did he flinch. It pressed hard upon the bone above his chest until the hangman cinched it tight about his throat.

The mage slid to the front of the platform and propped his elbows on the floor before Lysander’s boots, watching in interest. “Any last words, pirate?”

Lysander kept his eyes on the red horizon, and a thought pulled a smile from his lips. “My father was hanged … and I plan to bear it with a grin, as he did.”

The hangman crammed a sack over his head, dulling the mage’s laughter. Lysander’s middle bunched tightly as he prepared himself for the fall. He sucked in panicked breaths, heaving against the moldy reek of the sack.

“On my count, hangman. Let’s see how long those legs twitch —”

Something like the shriek of a falling tree cut over the top of his words. Lysander jumped at the sound — and judging by the wave of rattling and swears, quite a few soldiers jumped as well.

“They’ve kicked in the front gate!” someone cried from behind him. He gasped and choked, his words jostled by his sprint. “They kicked it in! Knocked it off its bloody hinges!”

“What do you mean, they kicked it in?” the mage shouted back. “No one could’ve possibly kicked in that gate. It weighs more than —”

Screams filled the air where the gate had fallen. Lysander didn’t know what was happening, and he didn’t have time to wonder. This might be his only chance to escape.

He twisted against his bonds. If he could only see how they’d been tied, he might be able to squirm free. That blasted sack was in the way. He slung his head about, trying wriggle it off. But it felt as if the hangman had knotted it behind his neck.

The screams were fading fast. Lysander didn’t know what had come bursting through the gates, but he knew the soldiers of Midlan weren’t easily rattled. For the army to be shrieking the way it was, it must’ve been something horrible — and he had no intention of being around when it reached the square.

“Form ranks, hold your ground,” the mage cried. “I don’t care what sort of devilry comes around the corner — the first man who twitches will have his legs lopped off at the knee!”

Sweat poured down Lysander’s face and his head went light from the strain of trying to breathe the thickened air. Somehow, he managed to get one cord of the knot undone. He held it carefully, trying to lead it through another tangle …