The Devil's Looking-Glass - By Mark Chadbourn Page 0,61
grey, dead men clambered up what remained of the rigging to cut loose the mainsail before it dragged the mast over the side and the ship to the bottom. Jubilation flooded Will. The gamble had worked and the pirate ship had been crippled. But the triumph was short-lived. Even without its mainmast and sails, the Enemy ship swept closer.
‘They are going to ram us,’ Carpenter yelled.
‘Board us, more like,’ Will corrected as he watched the frantic activity along the other ship’s deck. The rotting crew lined the rail with grapnels and rapiers in hand. Behind them, the Unseelie Court waited to seize their moment.
‘Prepare to repel boarders,’ Bloody Jack roared, striding along the deck. His men wrenched out their own rapiers and daggers and scrambled to the rail. Will hauled himself up, drawing his blade.
‘This is more like it.’ Carpenter grinned without humour. ‘Now I can put my idle hands to good use. A hogshead of sack to the man who carves the most.’
The Corneille Noire swung close. Will braced himself for the impact. Whatever magics were at play brought the galleon firm alongside, despite the heaving swell. It was as if they were locked in congress, rising and falling with perfect rhythm.
The grapnels flew out across the black gulf, catching in the Tempest’s rigging. The pirates gripped their ropes and kicked away from the rail. Some of Courtenay’s men attempted to cut the lines, pitching a few of the swinging figures into the roiling sea. They went down without a cry, sucked under the black water in an instant.
Will blinked away the driving rain. He glimpsed the bloom of decay on the grey, dispassionate face of the once-man swinging towards him. Yet another of the Unseelie Court’s crimes against the natural order, he thought, glowering. As the pirate’s feet crossed the rail, Will lunged. Cold steel plunged through the thing’s chest, yet still it came. He withdrew his rapier and slashed down. The face peeled open from temple to chin, but still the wide eyes stared. As the pirate dropped to the deck, he swung his knife high. Will threw himself forward so that his shoulder rammed into his dead foe. The dagger whisked a hair’s breadth from his cheek as he drove on and pitched the pirate over the side.
Along the rail blew a smaller storm of steel and curses and spattering blood. Blades clashed as Courtenay’s men wrestled with their dead counterparts. One sailor barely twenty summers old went down in a gout of crimson from a slashed throat. Without pause, his staring attacker plunged his gore-stained dagger into the chest of the seaman fighting beside him.
In the confusion of the battle whirling across the storm-lashed deck, Will lost sight of his colleagues. He thrust himself into the melee. When the fighting was too close to use his rapier, he lashed out with elbows and fists and knees and feet. He glimpsed Courtenay roaring with laughter as he plunged his dagger into a grey face. A moment later the mad captain lifted the corpse over his head and pitched it into the sea.
Beyond the frenzy, Will sensed movement as fluid as the brine washing across the deck. His nerves jangled. Shadows flitted, here, there. When a lightning flash froze white faces, he realized that some of the Unseelie Court had boarded the Tempest. They kept to the gloom on the fringes so that it was impossible to tell how many there were.
Will tore himself away from the fight and made his way, stabbing and hacking as he went, to where Launceston was tipping a pirate over the side. ‘Leave the men to fight these dead things,’ he ordered. ‘The Fay are aboard, and they are our business. We must find John and Tobias now.’
He darted to the other side of the deck. In the half-light, he glimpsed shapes creeping low like wolves at night, lips pulled back from sharp teeth. As a hand flicked towards the hilt of a rapier, Will sucked in a sharp breath and leapt for a rope dangling from a grapnel in the rigging. Bracing himself, he swung both feet into the nearest Fay’s chest, propelling it over the rail.
Another attacked the instant he dropped to the boards, slashing with fast, controlled strokes. When a dying seaman stumbled back into his grim opponent, Will seized his chance, thrusting through the heart with one fluid strike.
Somewhere nearby Strangewayes yelled an anguished warning. Will wrenched around. Tobias was pointing at the door to the captain’s