On examination, he discovered his left arm was swollen and discoloured and appeared to be broken, but someone had set it, securing it with a wooden splint. With an effort he tried to recall what had happened. Now his fever had broken, the disjointed images that had flashed through his mind became lucid and painfully real.

Christiaan dying in the doorway. Shadows in the darkness. The crew of the Alexandria slaughtered. His father fighting, a garrotte around his throat. The shadow warrior thrusting his sword into his father…

Jack could remember lying on the bloodied deck for what seemed an age. The shadows, thinking he was dead, had left the quarterdeck to ransack the ship. Then, as if surfacing from a deep dive, he had heard his father.

‘Jack… Jack… my son…’ he cried feebly.

Jack dragged himself out of his paralysis and crawled over to his dying father.

‘Jack… you’re alive…’ he said, a thin smile appearing on his bloodied lips. ‘The rutter… get it… home… it’ll get you home…’

Then the light faded from his father’s eyes and he exhaled his final breath.

Jack buried his head into his father’s chest, trying to stifle the sobbing. He clung on to his father as if he were a drowning sailor seizing a lifeline.

When his crying finally subsided, Jack realized he was utterly alone, stranded in a foreign land. His only hope now for getting home was the rutter.

He ran for the lower decks. The wako, occupied with loading the guns, gold and sappanwood into their own ship, failed to notice him. Below deck, Jack stepped over body after dead body until he entered his father’s cabin, where he found the now lifeless corpse of Christiaan.

The room had been ransacked, his father’s desk turned over, charts scattered everywhere. Jack flew to his father’s bunk, pulling away the bedding. He pressed on the concealed catch beneath and, to his relief, there was the rutter, safe in its oilskin.

He shoved the book inside his shirt and ran out of the cabin. He had almost reached the companionway when a hand shot out of the darkness, grabbing him by his shirt.

A blackened face loomed into sight.

It grinned maniacally, revealing a set of shark-like teeth.

‘A plague on ’em! They ain’t beaten us yet,’ whispered a wild-eyed Ginsel. ‘I’ve set fire to the magazine. BOOM!’

Ginsel’s arms exploded outwards in a gesture of destruction. He laughed briefly, then grunted, a look of surprise registering on his face. He collapsed to the deck, a large knife attached to a chain sticking out of his back.

Jack looked up to see a sinister figure emerge from the shadows. A single green eye glared at him and then at the rutter stuffed inside his shirt. The shadow jerked on the chain, whipping the knife back into his grasp. Jack spun on his heels and fled up the companionway, praying he could reach the ship’s rail in time…

Jack was flung as high as the yardarm by the massive explosion before dropping with the rest of the wreckage into the ocean…