Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

'Give us them tools,' said Swift. 'We're to relieve you, Uskins' orders. You're wanted topside, double quick.'

'Wanted by Uskins?' said Pazel with a groan.

'Not exactly,' said Saroo.

Neeps lathered boiling resin on a final seam. 'Who wants us, then?'

Saroo leaned close. 'It's Oggosk,' he said. 'Lady Oggosk. She wants to see you in her cabin. Uskins was just passing the word.'

Pazel and Neeps traded startled glances. 'Oggosk?' said Pazel. 'What can she want with us?'

The Jockeys shrugged, in a way that made it clear they would rather not know. 'Just don't keep her waiting,' Swift advised. 'One dirty look from that witch could kill a buffalo.'

Pazel and Neeps handed over their tools. But even as they turned to leave cries broke out in the next compartment.

'You give that blary thing back to me, Coxilrane!'

'Can't, sir, can't!'

'Blast you to Bodendel! It's mine!'

All down the passage boys were turning from their work. The voices drew nearer. Suddenly Firecracker Frix galloped into the compartment in a kind of terror, his long beard flapping and a notebook of some sort tucked under his arm. Behind him came Fiffengurt, barefoot and red with fury, shaking his fists above his head.

'Thief, thief!' he roared. 'I'll tear out your damned beard by the roots!'

Frix apparently believed him: he was running for his life. But as he drew even with Pazel he took a bad step. Groping for balance, his palm slapped the last spot on the wall Neeps had painted with resin. There was an audible sizzle. Frix screamed; the notebook flew from his hands, slid across the deck — and stopped at the feet of Mr Uskins, who had just entered the passage from the opposite side.

'What's all this, Second Mate?' he snapped.

'My h-hand-'

Uskins scooped up the book and examined it suspiciously.

'Now, Uskins, don't involve yourself,' shouted Fiffengurt, closing the distance.

Uskins put his back to the quartermaster. 'Mr Frix?' he demanded.

'It's his p-private journal, sir,' said Frix, still shuddering on the deck. 'Captain Rose knew about it, somehow. He sent me to take it from his quarters — it wasn't my idea, Mr Fiffengurt! See here, he gave me the master key and all! Whoopsy!'

Frix dropped the key and scrambled after it. Fiffengurt kicked his prominently displayed backside, then reached out to Uskins for the book. Uskins ignored the gesture. He had opened the journal and was flipping through the sheets of neat blue handwriting.

'There must be two hundred pages,' he said. 'You've kept yourself busy, Quartermaster.'

'It's none of your business,' said Fiffengurt. 'Hand it over.'

'"I doubt I have ever missed her more,"' Uskins read aloud with mock reverence. '"All the beauties of this world are dust without my Annabel." '

'Devil!'

Fiffengurt lunged for the journal, but Uskins kept his body between the quartermaster and his notebook. He was very nearly laughing. 'Carry on, Frix,' he said. 'I'll see that this reaches the captain.'

'But it's my blary property!' shouted Fiffengurt.

Uskins looked at him with naked malice. 'I am glad to hear you say so. First, because you will be held to account for whatever libel or mutinous matter I find in these pages.'

' You find?' said Neeps.

'And second,' Uskins continued, 'because to keep such a journal is a crime in itself.' He backed in a circle, holding off the quartermaster with one hand and waving the open book above his head with the other. 'Except for letters home, an officer's every written word is the property of the Chathrand Trading Company. Imperial law, Fiffengurt. We'll see how Captain Rose decides to punish-Ach!'

Pazel had crept around behind him and grabbed the journal. Uskins was caught off guard and stumbled over the resin-can, which oozed bubbling across the deck. But he kept his grip on the book. Furious, he slammed Pazel against the wall with his shoulder, even as Neeps and Fiffengurt grabbed at the book themselves.

'The lamp! The lamp!' cried the other boys.

Fiffengurt looked up: Uskins must have struck the oil lamp with a wild swing of the notebook. The peg on which it hung had cracked, and looked set to break at any moment. Walrus-oil lamps were sturdy but not indestructible, and fire in a passage awash with flammable resin was too grim a thought to contemplate. Fiffengurt let go of his journal and grabbed the lamp with both hands.

Uskins gave a vicious, whole-bodied tug. Pazel and Neeps held fast — and the journal ripped at the spine. Man and boys fell apart, each side gripping half the ruined book.

The first mate looked at what he held. With an approving snicker he jumped to his feet and ran off along the corridor, leaving sticky resin bootprints.

'That pig got almost everything,' said Neeps, riffling the mangled pages. 'This is the empty half of the book.'

'Are you hurt, lads?'

They assured him they weren't. Fiffengurt inspected them to be sure, moving slowly, as if in a daze. At last he turned to his beloved journal. Out of two hundred pages he was left with three.

'I'm so sorry, Mr Fiffengurt,' said Pazel.

The quartermaster stared at the crumpled sheets, as if expecting them to multiply. Slowly his jaw tightened, his teeth clenched and his hands began to shake. The tarboys shuffled backwards. Fiffengurt turned on his heel and bellowed:

'Uskins! Son of a leprous limp-teated dog-spurned side-alley whore!'

The Oggosk, Eighteenth Duchess of Tiroshi, had for reasons never well explained made her quarters in a little room inside the forecastle house, between the smithy and the chicken coops.

The cabin had been hers for a quarter century, since her first voyage with Captain Rose. When Rose was stripped of his captaincy in 929, Oggosk departed as well, but her last deed was to mark her cabin door with a strange symbol in chalk. According to tarboy legend, anyone who set foot in Oggosk's cabin from that day forward broke out in chills, boils, warts or mortifyingly confessional song, depending on who was telling the story. There was no proof of these claims. What was certain was that her little cabin had stood untouched for twelve years, until she and Rose returned in triumph to the Chathrand.

The door was painted robin's-egg blue: a strange choice for a woman nearly everyone on the ship was afraid of. Pazel had had time to reflect on this curiosity for some minutes now. Oggosk was making them wait.

'We don't have to be here,' said Neeps. 'We're not in the service; we don't have to hop when Uskins says so.'

'Don't be a fool, mate,' said Pazel. 'We may not be tarboys, but we're sure as Pitfire not Rose's guests. We'd be better off if they gave us more work to do. If Rose ever gets it into his head that we're useless, why, he'll toss us down to steerage with the rest of those poor louts, and only let us out to use the heads.'

Neeps grunted. 'I'm blary starved. When we're done here we have to make Teggatz slip us something to eat. It's our meal shift right now, you know.'

Pazel smiled. 'Your stomach's growling like a street dog.'

'I want to be strong for our fighting lesson, that's all,' said Neeps.

'There's one thing we have to do before we eat,' said Pazel, his mood darkening. 'Track down Greysan Fulbreech.' He glanced about nervously, then whispered: 'You know that the minute we're past Talturi, Thasha's coming out of hiding.'

'So?'

'Neeps, if Fulbreech has anything — well, shocking — to say about her father, I want us to know first, so we can break it to her gently.'

'Right you are,' said Neeps. Then the ship's bell began to ring, and he stamped his foot. 'That's eight bells, by damn! What in the Nine Pits can that old crone be-'

The latch clicked. The blue door swung wide, and a pungent odour met their nostrils: incense, ginger, old sweat, dead flowers. 'Come in, monkeys,' said Lady Oggosk from the shadows.