“You don’t know?” Fat lot of good any of this was going to do me. Just more mysteries on top of the ones I already had and didn’t want. “You don’t remember?”

He was shaking his shaggy head when a crewman rapped on the cabin door, urging Riprash to come to the quarterdeck.

Walter and I were no closer to solving what had happened to him between his being stabbed by Smyler and taking a job with Gagsnatch’s Quality Slaves when Riprash shoved open the cabin door. “Trouble,” the ogre said. “Come up.” I’d scarcely ever seen him look worried, but now he really did, the great shelf of his brow frowning until his eyes were almost invisible.

Gob and I and Wart aka Vatriel aka Walter followed him up onto the deck. The shape on the horizon was so small and its lights so faint that it took me a long moment to realize it was a ship.

“What’s the ensign?” Riprash asked Gob. “Use those young eyes.”

Gob climbed up so he could lean out over the rail, then spent a half minute squinting into the foggy darkness. “Bird’s foot,” he said as he scrambled back down to the ogre’s side.

“Feared that,” said Riprash. “That’s the sign of the Commissar of Wings and Claws. It’s Niloch’s ship, The Headless Widow.”

I was frightened but didn’t want to show it. “Charming name.”

“Whole thing is Raping the Headless Widow, but that’s too long for most folks, ’cause they don’t want to talk about that ship much anyway. She runs on steam, she’s got something like twenty guns to our eight—and only two of ours work—and she’ll catch us by tomorrow or the next day, certain.”

I could see Niloch’s ship a little better now, a dark shadow hunkered low in the Stygian waters, its lanterns peering at us like eyes in the fog. I had hoped I’d burned the ugly, rattling bastard to ashes when I blew up his Gravejaw House, but hellish nobility are extremely hard to kill. And as I think I’ve mentioned, they’re also very serious about holding grudges. Apparently, the commissar had managed to get himself appointed to head up the Bobby Hunt. “Can we fight them?”

“If by fight you mean get cut to pieces, burned, and sunk, then yes, we’ll put up a fine fight. Ah, well. I always suspected I’d wind up at the bottom of the Styx someday.”

As if to underscore this cheery thought, the wind changed direction and our sails sagged. As I stared out across the dark expanse of river I could hear the hungry rumble of the Headless Widow’s engines.

thirty-seven

walking on water

HERE’S A little rule about warfare at sea: Avoid it.