The hull rolled under Thinwolf's clawing hands, as the pirate and her slave boarded. "Wait," he cried. "Please. Wait." Their indifference was palpable, a weight pressing him into the black water. He heard her say something else in that sweet voice, as the two boats began to move apart.
A grinding, ripping sound came from the bows, followed by a ripe curse from the woman. Thinwolf heard a yelp of terror. A slave dropped into the water, floated motionless. Blue light flared. Thinwolf heard a scream, then a bony crunch. He looked up, saw a feral shape bound across the widening gap between the two vessels, too swiftly to be identified.
Two more brief screams rang out, then all was quiet. Thinwolf was treading water, waiting with a sort of bemused fatalism. The hulk appeared at the pirate boat's rail. "A moment, John," it said. "I will have to throw you a line; I dare not enter the sea. I am too heavy to support myself for long."
A rope looped out and fell into Thinwolf's outstretched hands. The hulk pulled him in so rapidly that he almost lost his grip, but then he was standing on the pirate boat's deck.
The hulk steadied him with bloody metal hands. "You are all right, John?"
Thinwolf drew a deep breath. "Yes." He closed his eyes, savored the touch of the sun on his skin, the solidity of the deck beneath his feet. "Yes. Thank you." He marveled that the pleasure of survival could be so profound in one whose flesh was almost dead. But it was, it surely was.
One slave lay broken against the wheelhouse. The other hung headless from the bow pulpit, draining into the sea. Thinwolf noticed these things with an odd sense of detachment, as if he were watching a sensie tape, a fictitious adventure. "You were efficient," he said to the hulk.
"Thank you, John. Killing is a skill that I can pass on to you, when you give up your flesh. This body carries a number of intrinsic skills; did you not know?"
"No ... no, I did not."
"Oh, yes. I can kill; I can cook; I can pilot an airboat; I can perform amusing sketches and pantomines; I can recite verse in a dozen human dialects and three alien ones; I am skilled in three different schools of massage and eighteen of the most advanced sexual modes; I can identify over nineteen thousand forms of rootknot nematodes native to Jaworld; I can tat fourteen hundred traditional doily patterns...."
Thinwolf held up a hand. "Stop. I'm convinced of your qualities. Even if you could not walk and talk at the same time, I would be grateful." Thinwolf paused, continued in a low voice. "Though I'm unsure to whom I speak."
"I have no name; this is true." The hulk looked down and said no more.
"Perhaps you should have one. Choose one for yourself." Thinwolf looked across the water to his little boat, suddenly saw that it was drifting farther away by the moment. "My boat," he said.
The hulk looked up, surprise animating the noble features. "You have only to call it, John. It is imprinted with your voice, as I am."
Thinwolf called, and the boats drew together. His boat extended suction grapples, then a gangplank.
The straps that had secured the hulk were broken. The woman lay on the foredeck, her once-handsome face torn away. By the rail was a plasma weapon, half-sunk in a congealed puddle of melted decking.
"She tried to burn me, John, after I killed her brainslave. I'll clean up the mess."
"Let it wait a bit. Let's look below; perhaps we'll find treasure." Thinwolf felt no regret at the pirate's death; she had meant to drown him. He turned away, walked aft around the pirate boat's wheelhouse to the companionway.
In the hold they found odd beauty, looted from a dozen dying Cities. Against the forward bulkhead was a sculpture in patinaed bronze, depicting a group of squat, muscular humanoids wrestling with their own skins, like ugly four-limbed caterpillars, splitting open to reveal a superior form. Under the rugoses kins were hidden features, claws, the smooth edge of a wing, all washed with a greenish gold alloy. Thinwolf moved closer, reached out to the cold metal. Beneath his fingers the piece throbbed, as if with hidden struggle, and he jerked away.
There was a vast clockwork machine, in which the spokes of the wheels were attenuated alien bodies, the cogs edged with pleading hands, the levers unhuman bones. It spun at a touch, all the wheels whirling, cogs grinding, levers pumping. A grating music issued from a hundred hidden mouths. Thinwolf clutched a wheel, and it stopped.
The hulk watched, eyes somber, and offered no comment.
Thinwolf moved aft, no longer touching the objects. At the stern bulkhead, he found a great coldlight painting, in which figures moved slowly. It seemed at first to be an allegory, perhaps of an alien Hell. The torments seemed human enough: dismemberment, burning, flaying, pressing, freezing, immersion in disgusting substances; a rather ordinary range of pain and humiliation. But the creatures who walked entranced through these horrors were like two-legged deer, with great liquid eyes and expressions of saintly amusement.
"Enough," he said to the hulk.
Back on his own deck, he watched as the hulk threw the woman's body into the sea. The hulk brought a bucket to wash away the blood, bent to scrub at the stain with a deck brush. "What will you do with the other boat, John? Will you sink it?"
"What?" he asked, startled. "Why should I do that?"
"She may have allies, John. Better, perhaps, if they find nothing when they come to look for her."
Thinwolf thought about it, all that frightening beauty sinking deep into the blackness, all that bewildering meaning, stolen by pain and sweat from a dozen senile Cities, never to be seen again. He felt a pain in his heart that had nothing to do with the slow failure of that muscle. "No, let it float until someone finds it."
The hulk shrugged. "As you wish, John." When it was finished with the cleanup, it glanced at the place where it had been secured. "I will fetch new straps," it said, without visible resentment.
"Why? Oh. No, no, you're not deck cargo anymore." He felt the danger of his words as he spoke them, but he reassured himself. It was a machine; it performed its task as designed. Surely, when the time came for him to die, his desire to live would be more potent than his pity for the poor metal creature. Surely.
For the first time, the hulk smiled, though it was a small smile. "Thank you, John. You are a kind man."
Of course the hulk knew how to navigate the boat, so Thinwolf left it in the wheelhouse with instructions to call him if a City appeared. Thinwolf went below to change into dry clothing. His bunk drew him; he lay down and fell into a deep sleep, his first in days.
When he woke, the light that slanted from the porthole above his head was amber with the approaching sunset. The air was chill, and the sea was a cold, desolate gray. He dressed warmly, went on deck, to find the hulk steering tirelessly north.
"You slept well, John?"
"Yes. Yes, thank you. Anything happen, any problems?"
The hulk shook its beautiful head. "No, no problems, John. A line of thundershowers, a rainbow, a pair of nightdragons crossed our course. Nothing of any consequence."
Thinwolf looked at the hulk. It spoke calmly, but its eyes glowed; a small smile shaped its mouth — it seemed quite cheerful. "You've enjoyed your day, then?" he asked.
"Oh yes, John. For me, this is wonderful. The water shows so many different colors. I have seen seabirds, I have seen cloudcastles, and the nightdragons were lovely: crimson and gold and cerulean."
"But no Cities?"
"No, no Cities, John. Are you looking for any City in particular?"
What harm could it do to tell the hulk? "Yes. Legend says that a human City swims this world. It's my spirit quest. Do you understand?"
"What is a 'spirit quest'?"