Many Words

Cannon pushed the doors open. The council room had changed since his last term. He stepped into a pool of light, cast by a spotlight on the balcony, facing a table at which seven shadowy figures sat.

He glanced over at Emma, who had taken up position outside the pool of light. Her arms hung loosely at her sides. Her index finger twitched. “When we built the Brotherhood,” Cannon said, to nobody in particular, “I wouldn’t have guessed we were three years away from cheap theater tricks.”

A man’s hearty laugh answered him. The figure at the center of the table turned to his neighbor and held a hand out toward Cannon. “You see? Never at a loss for words, our old friend.”

That was Radzinsky’s voice. The man was a brute, but a sly one, who smiled in the same way a shark might, and called people ‘friend’ like a Chicago mob torpedo delivering a last warning.

“I knew you would turn up,” Radzinsky went on. “Too curious. Too proud. As always, it will be your downfall.”

“Downfall?” said Cannon, exchanging a look with Emma, or at least with Emma’s silhouette. The spotlight was playing havoc with his dark vision. “Last I checked, I was doing fine.”

“And yet here you are, trapped. Frank?”

A moment passed.

“Frank’s taking a little nap,” Cannon said.

Radzinsky tutted. “Soft.”

“I won’t kill a man just because he’s in my way, if that’s what you mean,” said Cannon.

“And yet here you are, accused of just that.”

Cannon folded his arms. “Is that so?”

“Seven Devil’s Daggers are dead, lost at sea after you destroyed their engines, stole their prize, and set a bomb aboard their zeppelin.”

“I did no such thing!” Cannon said. “Is that the garbage Thorne’s been feeding you? You don’t have a shred of evidence.”

“If you would like to defend yourself…” Radzinsky made a show of shuffling papers on the table. “You deny that you stopped Swiftsure to take Majestic for yourself?”

“Majestic was my prize to begin with!”

Before Cannon finished, Radzinsky says, “Let the record show he does not deny it. Did you destroy Swiftsure‘s engines?”

“I gave him every chance to stop.”

“Again, he does not deny the charge. And you placed a bomb aboard Swiftsure, to destroy it after you left? To complete your revenge?”

“I did not. I would—” Cannon stopped. He wouldn’t, not anymore, but a year ago? He very well might have. Word didn’t travel that fast, especially since the Long Nines had been off the grid for a few months after the debacle in Panama.


“All right,” said Cannon, “where’s the— Frank?”

“Frank?” Emma echoed, blinking. She stood just behind Cannon and to one side, in a tiled hall a dozen yards from end to end and three stories tall. Arches supported balconies on the floors above, framing a shadowy path around the periphery of the room.

Facing them, near the far wall, was a battered wooden desk. A grubby-looking man, short and stocky, half-rose as they entered.

“Nat?”

Emma’s eyebrows went up. She hadn’t known the skipper for all that long, but she did know that nobody called him that.

To her surprise, he hid his grimace well. “Emma, meet Frank Price, of the Bloody Flag last I knew. Frank, this is Emma, one of my Long Nines. It’s Captain Cannon for now. I’m here on business.”

Emma recalled that Cannon used to fly under the Bloody Flag, back when Miles Morris still ran the show. The skipper had struck out on his own after the rest of the Bloody Flaggers gave Morris the boot. “Charmed,” she said dryly, to fill the tense silence.

Price cautiously returned to his seat. “You know, N— Captain, Radzinsky’s on the council now.”

“I figured as much, with you here,” Cannon said, taking a step closer to the desk.

Emma watched Price’s eyes. He was fixated entirely on Cannon. Slowly, Emma slipped off to the side of the room.

“I have to call the enforcers on you,” Price said apologetically.

“It’s nothing personal,” Cannon said.

“It’s nothing—” Price began, then nodded jerkily. Cannon took another step forward. Price flinched.

Emma reached the wall. Moving fluidly and silently, she made for the back wall. She needn’t have bothered. A piper and a drummer couldn’t have gotten Price’s attention.

“It’s just I have orders,” Price said frantically, as Cannon drew still closer. He scrabbled around in a drawer, produced a revolver—

And Emma’s blackjack thudded against the back of his head. He slumped forward across the desk.

Cannon smiled. “I didn’t even have to ask.”

“If I’d left him any longer you’d have given him a heart attack,” Emma replied. “A hit to the head’s a kind of mercy. What made him so scared?”

“The story’s too long to tell now. Ask me later,” said Cannon. He fished in his pocket and tossed her a ball of twine. “Truss him up.”

Emma got to work, while Cannon flipped through the papers on Frank’s desk.

“Anything good?” she said.

Cannon shook his head and inspected her knots. “Good,” he said. “Well, let’s say hello.”

At the turn onto the Topside road, six black-clad figures spread out across the intersection. Two headed west, uphill; two went east, back toward the Long Tail. All four melted into the underbrush, machine pistols covering the road.

The other two found their way to a place where the road cut through a gully, then set to work with a hand auger produced from one of their satchels. One bored a row of holes into the hillside. The other slid a paper-wrapped cylinder trailing wires into each one.

They worked quickly, packing dirt into the holes to disguise them. Gathering the wires, they clambered up the hillside, then slipped away into the jungle.

The other four joined them.

“Detonator?” said the young woman, part of the returning western pair.

One of the sappers produced a small box wired to a large battery. He flipped a switch on its side and frowned. “That’s wrong.”

“What?”

He tapped a glass dome on top of the box. “There should be a green light. The radio’s broken.”

The woman shook her head, lips pressed together. “That won’t do. Do you have the backup?”

“The manual detonator? But—”

“Set it up,” said the woman. “Then get back to the airfield and tell Lecocq to get airborne. I’ll stay here and leave with the captain.”

A few of the others exchanged looks. “If you say so.”

“I do. Hop to it.”


“Do I owe you for the civics lesson?” Emma said, cutting Cannon off.

He rolled his eyes. For all her talent and sheer inventiveness when it came to a fight, she was still young. Cannon was not. Sometimes it grated on him. “You can just say, ‘I’m not interested,'” he pointed out. “Pirate society is your society now. Far be it—”

“I’m not in—”

“I worked that out, yes.” Coming to the door into the barracks, Cannon paused and looked to his left. The truck approached. “Ready?”

Emma smiled toothily. “Go in, ask questions, shoot anyone who tries to stop us leaving. My kind of job.”

Cannon gave her an approving nod, swung the doors open, and stepped through.

The truck rolled to a stop at a T-junction. A three-story stone building faced them; past the buildings to their left was a large park. Emma leaned forward, looked to her right, then looked to her left. An endless arcade, the building’s facade went on for what could have been a mile.

“They call it the Mile-Long Barracks,” Cannon said, turning left onto the main street. Sheltered beneath the ground-level arches were a few market stalls, empty at present. “It’s only about fifteen hundred feet long, though.”

“Looks like they packed it in, too,” Emma observed, pointing at the arcade with her thumb.

Cannon nodded.

“They know something about the storm we don’t?” she wondered.

Cannon shook his head. “Not unless they flew up to the edge of it in the last few hours.” The truck ground to a halt.

“Only everyone seems a lot more concerned than you are,” Emma persisted.

Swinging the truck’s door open, Cannon stepped out. Choufeng slid behind the wheel. “Turn it around,” Cannon said. “Keep it running and be ready to pick us up.” Cannon closed the door and banged on it with a fist, and the truck clunked into gear and drove off.

Emma waited for the skipper on the sidewalk. Just in front of them, the barracks jutted outward; decorative patterns adorned the gables above the third-floor windows. “The Brotherhood’s in there, then?”

“The council, at least,” said Cannon. “I spent six months on the council, back before you signed on. Whenever the whole council’s in one place, they can’t escape. There’s always something on the docket.”

“Sounds like torture.”

“The worst part is, they charge dues for the privilege.”

Emma made a face.

Cannon nodded. “We still pay dues, too. You can find a fence for anything here, and it keeps the pirating community away from our prizes.”

“So would shooting down any zep that stole from us,” Emma said.

Cannon raised an eyebrow at her. “Are you volunteering to tell the crew we’re taking on work that doesn’t pay six months out of the year?”

“When you put it that way…”

“Warm and welcoming,” Emma said.

“If we have to leave this way,” said Cannon, “it’ll be warmer than the alternative.”

Emma pondered this and couldn’t find fault with it. The plan was to leave by the Albatross. If they couldn’t, well… Emma had heard better ideas. The skipper swore up and down it would work, which meant very little to her. Iseabail said the same thing, which carried more weight, but even so, she was doubtful.

The truck jostled over a narrow-gauge railway, then came to a stop at the outskirts of the village. Cannon hopped out of the cab. Emma blinked, then jumped to the ground and met the skipper at the back of the truck. He handed her a black kit bag and wheeled a heavy trunk off the bed.

Together, they trudged into the village. Cannon wheeled the trunk through an empty doorframe into a derelict house. Emma set the bag on top of it.

They returned to the truck. Cannon reversed, then turned around and swung a left onto the road up to Topside.

Bottom Side and the Long Tail were ruins and untamed wilderness. Topside could have been dropped in directly from London or Madrid. The border was abrupt; about a quarter-mile up the road and a few hundred feet above sea level, the dirt road suddenly gave way to cobbles, and wooden buildings whose second stories jutted out over the street crowded it on either side. The truck passed a few pedestrians, fewer than usual. Once or twice, a car squeezed past, pulling far to the other side of the road as Cannon nearly scraped the mirrors off against the buildings.

There were no side streets, though the occasional alleyway too narrow for an automobile cut between the buildings. That meant a street on the far side, Emma surmised, but she couldn’t see how to drive there.

She realized she was rubbernecking like some kind of tourist, and that the skipper was grinning. She stared straight ahead and said, “Where is everybody? Isn’t this place supposed to be bustling?”

Cannon shrugged. “Battening down the hatches, probably. Nobody wants to be outside for a monsoon.”

“Battening down? Dramatic,” said Emma.

“Appropriate,” Choufeng said, looking in her direction. “Topside is like a ship at sea. No land shelters it.”

Emma blinked. “He speaks!”

“Don’t expect much more out of him today,” Cannon put in. “Here we are.”