Now Lord Ermenwyr turned to stare at Willowspear, and Smith stared too. Willowspear looked back at them with smoldering eyes.
“Why, my old childhood friend and family retainer,” said Lord Ermenwyr, “is that Resentment I see in your face at last? Yes! Let it out! Revel in the dark side of your nature! Express your rage!”
Without a word, and quicker than a striking snake, Willowspear stood up and punched him in the mouth. Lord Ermenwyr tottered backward and fell, and his bodyguards were beside him quicker than Willowspear had been, snarling like avalanches.
“You have struck our Master,” said Stabb. “You will die.”
But Lord Ermenwyr held up his hand.
“It’s all right! I did ask for it. You may pick me up, however. I have to admit I was no good at maps,” he added, as his bodyguards lifted him and dusted him off with solicitous care, “I just wasn’t interested in them.”
“Really?” said Smith, too struck by the surrealism of the moment to come up with anything better to say.
“He defaced his tutor’s atlas,” snapped Willowspear. “He crossed out the names of cities and wrote in things like Snottyville and Poopietown. I could not believe Her son would do such things.”
“Neither could Daddy,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “I thought he was going to toss me off a battlement when he saw what I’d done. He actually apologized to the man and set him free. I had got it through my nasty little head that the blue wriggly lines meant water, though. And where there’s water, you can float on it, can’t you? So how do we have a problem, Smith?” He narrowed his eyes.
“Do you know what a waterfall is?” Smith watched the purple sails.
“Of course.”
“How do you sail up one?”
Lord Ermenwyr thought about that.
“So … sailors don’t have some terribly clever way of getting around the problem?” he said at last.
“No.”
“Well, we’ll figure something out,” said Lord Ermenwyr, and turned to look at the warships. “Aren’t those things getting closer?”
“Yes!” said Willowspear, undistracted from his fury.
“Do you think they’ve seen us?”
“It’d be a little hard to miss the striped sails,” said Smith.
“All right, then; we’ll just go around their silly blockade,” Lord Ermenwyr decided. “It’ll delay us, I suppose, but it can’t be helped.”
Smith was already steering a course out to sea, but within the next quarter hour it became clear that one warship was breaking from its squadron and making a determined effort to pursue them. Lord Ermenwyr watched its progress from the aft rail. Willowspear stalked forward and prayed ostentatiously, like a gaunt figurehead.
“I think we need to go faster, Smith,” the lordling remarked after a while.
“Notice how they’ve got three times the spread of canvas we have?” said Smith, glancing over his shoulder.
“That’s bad, is it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, can’t we just do something sailorly like, er, clap on more sail?”
“Notice how they’ve got three masts, and we have one?”
“I know!” Lord Ermenwyr cried. “We’ll light the boiler and get the invisible oarsmen going!”
“That would probably be a good idea,” Smith agreed.
“Yes! Let them eat our dust! Or salt spray, or whatever.”
Smith nodded. Lord Ermenwyr fidgeted.
“Ah … do you know how to get the mechanism working?” he asked politely.
The boiler took up most of a cabin amidships, and it had been cast of iron in the shape of a squatting troll, whose gaping mouth was closed by a hinged buckler. Fortunately for everyone concerned, its designer had thoughtfully attached small brass plaques to the relevant bodily orifices, marked LIGHT BURNER HERE and FILL WITH OIL HERE and RELIEVE PRESSURE BY OPENING THIS VALVE.
“How whimsical,” Lord Ermenwyr observed. “If I ever have to transform a deadly enemy into an inanimate object, I’ll know what form to give him.” He shuddered as Smith yanked open the oil reservoir.
“Empty,” Smith grunted. “Did your ship merchant sell you any fuel?”
“Yes! Now that you mention it.” The lordling backed out of the cabin and opened the door to the cabin opposite, revealing it to be solidly stacked with small kegs. “See?”
Smith sidled through and pulled a keg down to examine it. “Well, it’s full,” he stated. “Good stuff, too; whale oil.”
“You mean it’s been rendered down from whales?” Lord Ermenwyr grimaced.
“That’s right.” Smith tapped the image stenciled in blue on the keghead, a cheery-looking leviathan.
“But, Smith—they’re intelligent. Like people.”
“No, they’re not; they’re fish,” said Smith, looking around for a funnel. “Mindless. Here we go. You hold that in place while I pour, all right?”