After the pirates. Obviously. After Marsh fell. For certain. Otherwise, this could have happened any time. Well, any time before the destruction of the ship and the ignominious death of the entire crew.
I was guarding the captive. The captive that mattered, I mean. There were others but since they didn’t have honey on their tongues and silver in their eyes, they were less of a concern. The officers who were still paying attention (maybe two of them? I was never sure about Flint) liked me to guard him because they thought I was too bound up in my own nonsense to fall for his. To give them their due, it was a good read.
Anyway, I was guarding the captive when Marsh slunk up to us, wearing his Leviathan-cock robe (what, you thought that part was satire?). He stood outside the cell just staring at the pirate, his hands on the bars and his eyes empty.
“Want something?” asked Wolfram. It was a disingenuous question because the man loved to talk, and I’d been denying him that for a while now.
“You have a purpose,” replied Marsh, more coherent than I’d heard him in months. “The Devouring God has need of you, and you will answer that need.”
I’d expected Wolfram to reply cynically. And in a way Isuppose he did. He bowed his head and said, “What purpose may I serve?”
It was an angle. It was obviously an angle. At least, it was obviously an angle to somebody who hadn’t nearly drowned in sperm and had their brain invaded by psychic space monsters they mistook for their god. “You may start the avalanche.”
“From inside a cell?” Definitely,definitelyan angle.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
And there he went again, rambling like, well, like his brain had been invaded by a psychic space monster he mistook for his god.
“You do realize,” I told Wolfram, “that he’s completely lost it.”
“No, madam,” replied Marsh, “I do but read madness.” And then he left, a song I didn’t recognize on his lips.
When he was safely out of earshot, I glared at the pirate. “Let me guess, you’re hoping that he and his followers will demand your release and then you and what’s left of your men will, what? Seize the ship?”
A smile flirted with Wolfram’s lips. “Now why would I have a plan like that? I’ve just had my old heart stirred by a man of true and uncommon faith.”
“And if I tell the captain?”
The smile stopped flirting and moved on to a full-on handjob in the toilets. “Well, I’m in no position to know, being as I am a prisoner who hears only what my guards let slip, but I’ve a feeling the captain might be a touch preoccupied.”
“She sees more than you know.”
“Sees too much, if I’m any judge.”
The captain was, by any reckoning, old enough and experienced enough to need no defending from me, but you might have noticed that I’m not a particularly rational woman. “You aren’t.”
“Eloquently put.”
I just glared.
“You should hear what the crew say about her, to a man who can do nothing but listen.”
He wanted me to ask what. I didn’t give him the satisfaction.
“They’re split, of course. But not in a way you’d like. Half say she’s hunting a monster that will kill us all. The other half say she’s wasting time and fuel chasing a myth. As I see it, neither bodes well for her.”
Silence was growing more difficult. Not impossible, but more difficult.
“They talk about you too, you know.”
I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. Okay, who was I kidding? “Who?”
“The crew.”
This didn’t surprise me. Everybody talked about everybody on ship. After all, in a lot of ways we were each other’s entire world. I didn’t want to know what they said. “What do they say?”
“That you think yourself a philosopher but you’re actually full of shit.”
