Then Sirki’s legs buckled and he fell to his knees. Suddenly he was not so gigantic. Zed stayed astride him. The Ga’s teeth were gritted, his huge shoulders thrust forward, his body trembling with the effort of delivering death to one who would not accept it. Sirki made an effort to stand. He got one foot planted and, incredibly, began to lift himself and Zed off the floor. But the pressure from Zed’s hands and the chain never faltered, and suddenly Sirki’s face took on a waxen appearance, the eyes pools of blood, and from his gasping mouth a dark and swollen tongue emerged. It quivered rapidly, like the tail of a rattlesnake.
Something crunched inside Sirki’s neck. The head hung at an angle, as Gentry’s had upon being sawed off at the dinner table. The giant’s body shivered, as if feeling the chill of the grave. Matthew saw that the hideous eyes were sightless. At last Sirki’s spirit seemed to flee the body, for the keening gasp ceased on a broken note to go along with the broken neck.
Zed let go of the chain, which was buried somewhere in there. He climbed off Sirki’s back. For a moment the giant remained on his knees, obstinant far beyond the end. Then the corpse pitched forward and the stone floor added a cruel smashing to the twisted face.
Zed crumpled to his own knees and released a shuddered moan. He was all used up.
But the stone dust was falling now in greater volume. Matthew heard a dozen cracking noises from above. Suddenly a piece of stone the size of Sirki’s dead body crashed down on the other side of the dungeon, followed by smaller bits of rubble.
“We have to get out!” Matthew shouted, and standing up he grasped hold of one of the Ga’s arms to pull him to his feet, a task he could accomplish only in his most boastful dreams.
Language barrier or not, Zed fully understood. He nodded. Something on the floor nearby caught his attention and he scooped it up before Matthew could see what it was. Then, getting up on his own power, he took Matthew by the back of his collar and pulled him into another corridor at the far right of the room. It was dark in here and Matthew could see nothing. In a few seconds Zed stopped. There was the noise of a bolt slamming back. Zed pushed forward. A heavy door opened into gray morning light. The garden lay before them, and a pathway toward the front of the castle. Now Matthew took the lead, urging Zed to follow.
Matthew fully expected Minx to be gone, but she was still waiting at the wagon and tending her wounds with the bloody cloth. “Did you enjoy your wanderings?” she snapped at him, though there was some relief in her voice. “You damned fool!” she added, and then she took stock of the Ga. “Who is this?”
“My new bodyguard,” said Matthew.
Minx used the whip to spur the team into motion. As they took off at a gallop along the road to the harbor, there came a noise like the discordant shrieking of a chorus of demons. Matthew and Zed looked back to see a shimmer of dust rising up around Castle Fell. Suddenly part of the cliff itself broke away, and the entire castle tilted toward the sea. The cobra head of one turret toppled, then a second and a third. Pieces of red slate flew like gulls. Every arched window that had not already broken shattered in an instant. With a tremendous, ungodly grinding of catastrophic forces fully half the castle tore away from its own tortured stones and pitched downward into the waves, leaving furniture hanging from rooms and splintered stairways leading to no destination but the somber sky.
“My God,” Matthew whispered.
Zed gave a rough grunt that might have been accord.
Minx Cutter had never looked back. “To Hell with all of ’em,” she said, and she lashed the team for greater speed.
Thirty-Two
MATTHEW realized that miracles did happen. The Nightflyer, as beautiful a ship as he had ever seen, was still docked. Minx drove the wagon nearly up to the gangplank. Any harbormaster either had not arrived here today or had left to see to his family.
“Damn if you people aren’t prompt,” Falco sneered from the deck, his voice as booming as any cannon and his twisted cane propped against his right shoulder. “Did you stop to eat your corncakes?”
Minx went up the plank first, followed by the Ga and then Matthew. There were a few men hauling lines and working on deck, but not nearly the crew that had brought them over. “I rounded up twenty-six men,” Falco told Matthew, as he lit his clay pipe with a small taper. “Four of those haven’t arrived, and three others decided they weren’t going to leave their wives and children after that damn tremble started. I said to bring them all along, but they couldn’t get their belongings together fast enough to suit me. They may show up yet, but so far we’ve got a crew of nineteen men on a ship that operates with forty. That means you, the Ga, and the bleeding lady will have to work.” He frowned at Minx through a pall of smoke. “What the hell did you get into? A knife fight?”
Minx just laughed as if this were the funniest thing she’d ever heard, and her laughter rang out across the ship like church bells. Then she winced and gave a very unladylike curse, because her face hurt like hell.
“I do have someone on board who can sew stitches,” said the captain. “Myself.”
“Matthew!”
He recognized that voice, all right.
Berry had emerged from the doorway that led below. She was wearing a gray cloak over the crab-stained sleeping gown. Her feet were bare and dirty. Her hair was tangled, her eyes swollen from sleepless worry. She looked a mess. She crossed the deck toward the new arrivals, and she looked hopefully and expectantly at Matthew. She started to reach for him, but something about his posture and attitude stopped the gesture.
“You can thank Miss Grigsby,” said Falco, “for our still being docked. She said you would come, no matter what. She believes in you, Mr. Corbett. More than I do, it seems, because as you can see we have two longboats tied up ready to row us out of the harbor. Lucky for you, she’s very persuasive.”
“Yes,” Matthew said. “Lucky for me.”
He smiled at her then, for he felt his heart open and the sunlight pour into it, and Berry poured herself into his arms.
He felt her heart beating, hard and fast. He crushed her to himself. Their shadows became one on the deck’s plankings. They had shared so much already, for better and for worse. Even though Berry was dirty and wretched in her current state, Matthew couldn’t help but think she was so very beautiful, and that she always to him smelled of the grass of summer, of cinnamon and the perfume of a wildflower meadow, and…
Life.
Then he caught himself, short of falling.
“Listen to me,” he said, and he saw his tone of voice make her blue eyes blaze. “You’ve caused me no end of trouble! Why you left that inn, I have no idea! And traipsing about at night? Do you know what might’ve happened to you? My God, girl! I ought to put you over my knee like the child you are and give you a good—”
A hand with fearsome strength closed upon the back of his neck, and suddenly he was looking into a pair of deepset black eyes in a solemn, bearded African face decorated with tribal scars that appeared to spell out a Z, an E and a D.
“Mr. Corbett,” Berry said frostily, “I think you should mind your manner of speech while on this voyage. And please correct your lack of respect, starting this instant.”
He might have answered, if his throat had been in working order. It seemed his new bodyguard had his own ideas about who commanded his loyalty.