Chapter XV - Anywhere But Here
It was an order that didn't need to be told twice.
Inigo grabbed Granuaile's arm by the wrist and went into a sprint that
would have put Marathon to shame. Around them, surprised pirate hunters
fumbled to get their guns in position, and Brethren, seeing a chance to
catch their capturers offguard, rose to the occasion with punches and kicks,
biting or whatever else they could manage.
Granuaile and Inigo ran between guards and jumped
over the ropes tying their fellows together, dodging gunshots and and the
blades of bayonets. Granuaile began to slow down, her arm nearly slipping
from Inigo's grasp, but he gripped her wrist tighter and continued pulling
her along.
"Roberts!" she wheezed. "What about Jack?"
"Just keep running!"
They did, over bodies and between others, weaving
back and forth until they broke through the last line of bound Brethren,
to screech to a half before the exit where half a dozen gunmen stood on
guard.
"Shit."
"MOVE!" Granuaile ordered, pushing him aside. Inigo
had only enough time to see, before stumbling to his knees, a faint glow
envelop the tartan-clad Granuaile as she said, in a voice not her own,
words in a strange language Inigo had never heard. He looked up toward
the guards a moment before the fires engulfed him, a bright flash of crimson
so intense Inigo had to immediately shield his eyes, and did not remove
his hand until Granuaile was pulling him to his feet and dragging him across
an ill-strewn pile of ash. "Come on, come on!"
"What the hell was that?!" he cried, his
voice a little higher pitched than usual as they pushed past the charcoaled
remains of the curtain into the hallway beyond.
"I'm a Gael! Do you think we get on simply by pretending
to be Catholic?!"
Navigating either by instinct or simple desperation,
the two ran down the halls, taking turns at random, while behind them Kidd's
gunmen were steadily catching up.
"Come on!" Inigo said to Granuaile, as she again
began to falter in step. "Why do you tire so easily?"
"I'm not as young as I used to be, lad! And spells
like that one aren't meant to be cast on a whim. Feel lucky it didn't mean
my death!"
"It will mean your death anyway if we don't keep
running!"
They took a turn down a narrow side corridor and
after numerous twists and winds came to a dead end. Cursing, they retraced
their steps and began running down another.
"This is hopeless!" Granuaile complained, after
their tenth failed turn. "This place is a maze; we cannot succeed!"
"If we die here tonight, Jack will kill us!" Inigo
shot back. Behind them, the clamouring voices of the gunmen were growing
louder. "Do you want that?"
They tried another passage, barely large enough
to admit them, which tapered nearly to point so that the two were forced
to sidle along sideways.
"This is madness."
"No, I see light ahead..."
Inigo was right. The small sliver of a hallway that
they had entered into gave way into a large circular hall, to one side
of which was the rack of weapons. Also, unfortunately, was a cluster of
about twenty guards.
The two pirate captains stopped and stared at them.
The pirate hunters stared back.
Then, so close in time it was like a synchronized
movement, both parties started to run for the far wall. Which group reached
it first will never be known, although the combined force of so many people
colliding with the rack of weaponry was enough to send four hundred swords
and pistols cascading down on top of them. The fortunate ones were struck
by swords with sheaths. The unfortunate ones were... well... unfortunate.
Inigo and Granuaile sifted through the pile frantically
for their weapons, because unlike most pirates, they were trained in the
use of specific swords. They knocked the guardmen aside as they searched,
occasionally using the nearest cutlass to deflect a blow and sometimes
deprive the man of a few fingers. Inigo was first to come upon his weapon,
the Six-Fingered Sword, and regretted the move the instant he clasped the
handle and the warmth spread up through his body. He felt the sword jerking
him upward, veering off on another course.
"Just hold on a moment!" he hissed to it. He satisfied
a bit of its anxiousness by allowing it to cut through a couple nearby
enemies. "O'Malley?" he called.
"Nearly there!" she shouted back, unearthing her
monstrous two-hander from under a pile of rusty bayonets. She unbuckled
the sheath and pulled the enormous blade out with a flourish, and almost
immediately came under attack by the black-clothed hunters.
"Grace, we don't have time to play around!" Inigo
said urgently. The pull from his rapier was growing harder to ignore.
Granuaile, meanwhile, was fighting off four to five
enemies at a time, knocking them aside with a swing of her two-hander only
for more to come at her in a constant, unceasing barrage. It didn't take
much to see which side would prevail, as Granuaile's swings grew slower
and weaker, and the crowd of hunters surrounding her grew larger and larger,
until she was completely enveloped by them.
"GRACE!"
There was something resembling the sound of an explosion,
followed by a quake in the air, with the pirate Granuaile at is epicenter.
A perfect sphere of force, visible out of the corner of the eye as some
sort of translucent blue, expanding outward and sending the bodies caught
in its path flying, no more significant to it than dolls.
And then the field collapsed and its originator
with it, falling to her knees in complete exhaustion, only dimly aware
as the survivors now started rushing forward with their swords and guns
in hand. In some last fit for consciousness, Granuaile looked up, struggled
to climb to her feet, and being too late. With a final strangled cry, she
reached an arm out toward Inigo.
Go! the sword ordered. And Inigo could disobey
it no longer, allowing the Six-Fingered Sword to guide him down a narrow
corridor cut into the rock wall completely invisible unless one was right
by it, and down an ill-worn path, taking a last-second turn down another
passage, again and again. Inigo made no attempt to make sense of where
the sword was taking him, allowing it to do what it would.
After the experience in Denmark five years ago,
searching for the Pit of Despair, Inigo never had a reason to doubt that
his father, Domingo Montoya, would occasionally use the masterwork sword
to aid him, but it had a habit of kicking in at the strangest of moments.
"Oh Father..." Inigo said mournfully as he ran,
"I should not have left O'Malley."
They won't harm her. She is protected.
"By whom? God?"
By Jack Sparrow.
"Ah, even better."
A few minutes later he emerged into a wide area,
an intersection of sorts between four of five passageways, and as Inigo
was allowing his sword to guide him down the chosen path, he quite literally
ran into a troupe of hunters coming the other way. Stumbling back, he was
in the process of figuring out how he should go about sorting out this
mess, when something very unlikely occured. The leader of the group, taking
one look at Inigo's black clothes, saluted.
Inigo shifted the sword to his left hand and saluted
back.
"We're looking for a pair of escapees," the hunter
explained. "Have you seen them?"
A thought struck the pirate. He pointed randomly
at one of the side passages. "They went that way," he said, in the most
strained and unconvincing English accent imaginable.
"Thank you, sir!" the man said, saluting again sharply.
Inigo echoed the motion, stepping aside to let the hunters pass.
"...Strange," he muttered, after they'd disappeared
from sight. He started down the corridor his sword had selected for him.
"By all accounts, that shouldn't have worked."
"I've put them to bed, quartermaster."
"Good work."
"The poor ladies are near death's door, quartermaster,
it's incredible. They were saying the strangest things..."
"Aye?"
"Oh, just half-asleep ramblings, I wouldn't pay
it any mind..."
"What sort of things?"
"That the Blessed William and Q.A.R. turned
their guns on the Tirghráthóir, quartermaster. Apparently,
they're the only survivors. Can't make heads or tails of it, madam. I mean,
why? How?"
"What're their names again?"
"They identified theirselves as Bonney and Read,
quartermaster."
"My, my. You'd best go inform the Jackal about this."
"Aye, quartermaster."
It took five men to pin Jack down and keep him there,
lying in a pool of his own blood and sweat. He was breathing heavily, mostly
due to the pain, but that wasn't to say the struggle hadn't been something
of an endurance trial.
He recoiled as Kidd's boot connected with his stomach,
but didn't satisfy the man with anything more than a grunt. Screaming was
something he'd worked out of his system a few centuries ago.
Jack managed a laugh. "I knew it. I knew you wouldn't
kill me. You can't. You need me alive so it's a greater profit to you."
"Hardly," Kidd said, resuming his pacing between
Jack and the unconscious form of Israel Hands.
"How much am I worth? Five hundred? A thousand?"
"Ten pounds."
Jack coughed. "...Ten... pounds...?"
"I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, who
in their right mind would track a man halfway round the world for ten pounds?
Who would go through the effort and the expenses to kill you when it would
cost more to do it than what you'd get paid? But you're forgetting one
important thing, my friend."
"What's that?" Jack asked. He spat out a tooth.
"You're Captain Jack Sparrow," said Kidd, with a
hint of smugness. "No one in the empire gives a damn about you, but pirates
know better. Any one of them would give their right arm to be the one to
kill the one and only Jack Sparrow."
Jack looked up at him for a time, a bittersweet
smile quivering on his lips, and then he broke his gaze, letting his head
drop and his brow touch the cold stone floor. He laughed a mad little laugh
that became something like a sob.
"Ten pounds..."
"I imagine it is something of a disappointment,"
Kidd said empathetically.
It wasn't long before Inigo was running again. The
reasons behind it were complicated, but had a lot to do with dumb luck
running out.
"What's your next stroke of genius?!" Inigo
yelled to apparently no one as he ran through the halls, sword in front
of him.
Look, it seemed like a good idea at the time,
said the Six-Fingered Sword.
"Oh, a good idea, huh? Yes, that was absolutely
brilliant,
killing their leader!"
I'm saving you from certain death. The least
you could do is be a little grateful.
"Grateful! I'll be grateful when I get out of here!"
He spun on a shilling and headed down a corridor to his left.
I don't have to be doing this out of the
kindness of my heart, the sword said stiffly. How about getting
me some grandchildren one of these days? You're not getting any younger,
Inigo.
"Father, not now!"
Inigo and his sword emerged into an open area, so
suddenly that it took Inigo a few seconds to realize that the cold air
and dampness meant he had arrived outside the cavern. He looked around,
trying to adjust to the sudden absence of torchlight, and, noting that
the voices of his pursuers were no further behind than before, explored
the grounds a bit. He walked about twelve paces, and was about to take
a thirteenth, when he happened to look down. A long way down.
"Father?" Inigo cried, staggering back from the
edge of the cliff. "Father, I think you made a couple wrong turns somewhere!
...Father?" He shook the sword a bit, as it slowly dawned on him that the
warm tingling that had shot through his arm earlier was gone. The sounds
of shouting from the cavern told him the hunters were nearly upon him.
"Look, Father, I sort of need you here! Please! What would you say if I
were to adopt or something?"
"Quartermaster!"
"What is it, Stede?"
"Look! Up there!" The second mate pointed to the
top of the cliff over the cavern's boat entrance. The other occupants of
the Black Pearl, many of them set to the task of repairs, strained
to follow his direction. "Isn't that Captain Roberts?"
"What's he doin' up there?" Delphine wondered aloud,
squinting.
Murmuring, the pirates watched intently as their
co-captain looked back and forth, seeming at a loss at what to do.
"He looks pretty scared," Trinity observed.
The distant form of Inigo jerked to something behind
him, unseen to his crew below in the water, as something went pop-pop.
"Holy hell," said Stede. "Gunshots!"
"How in God's name..."
Anamaria, still not over her theories reached earlier
that evening, was the first to reach a conclusion. "It was a trap." She
took a huge breath and cupped her mouth with both hands. "CAPTAIN!" she
shouted. "CAPTAIN ROBERTS! YOU'VE GOT TO JUMP!"
Soon other members of the crew were following her
lead with shouts of "captain!", "over here!", "jump!" and a dozen more
like it.
It's debatable whether Inigo actually heard them
and took their advice, or just happened to trip. Either way, half a minute
later, the crew of the Black Pearl were watching the frothing circle
of water where their co-captain had splashed down, waiting for him to surface.
After a while, Delphine said, "There's no way..."
"That's ludicrous," her brother Will agreed, as
Inigo broke up through the water, thrashing wildly and making nothing even
resembling a swimming stroke. Over their heads, Inigo's assailants had
resumed their shooting, sending up sprays of water all around the co-captain.
Anamaria stepped up onto the railing and began removing
her coat. "What the hell kind of pirate captain doesn't know how to swim?"
she demanded. She was preparing to kick off into a dive when Trinity suddenly
grabbed her arm.
"Wait. I've got an idea," she said. She addressed
the crew at large. "What's the longest length of rope we got?"
"Well in excess of a hundred feet, one of 'em,"
said the third mate, a little puzzled at the question.
"Get it up on a pulley. Quick like! Now!"
Anamaria nodded slowly as realization dawned on
her around the same time the thirteen-year-old was fastening one end of
the rope to her quartermaster's waist. "I like the way you think." When
the pulley was set up, she started preparing for her jump again.
"Hold on!" Will said.
"Make it fast, Turner."
"That's the whole idea," the boy said, nodding.
He turned to the first mate. "Fezzik?"
"Yez, Will?"
"Can you do what you did for me back at Port Royal?"
"Eet'z no problem," Fezzik said confidently.
Will squinted out across the water and took a quick
estimate. "Make it about forty-five feet. Don't overshoot or you might
get her hurt."
"Wait, what?" said Anamaria, lost. She emitted something
resembling a squeak as the giant first mate picked her up, not ungently,
and drew her back behind his shoulder in his right hand. "Wait! What are
we--"
And then she was sailing through the air, tail-like
rope trailing behind her, wind whipping through her hair, weightless, fantastic,
incredible-- and then crashing into the water at tearing speeds, tumbling
and jerking, arm catching across another person's neck.
"Ready?" she heard someone, possibly Delphine,
say back at the ship. "On my count of ten..."
"Grab hold!" Anamaria said frantically, to the thrashing,
choking Inigo who may or may not have heard her, but couldn't answer the
request at any rate. At a loss of anything else to do, Anamaria untied
the rope from around her waist and fastened it to Inigo's midsection, just
as the count passed seven, failed to loop a length of rope around her wrist
at eight, lost the rope entirely at nine, and at the start of ten, was
clutched tightly around the shoulders by the man she had been trying to
save. The two were jerked through the water at high speed, sending up spray
all around them. Above them, the gunmen still fired.
The knot securing the rope to Inigo failed, and
the rope itself nearly snaked out of reach, but Inigo grabbed the end of
it at the last second with his left hand, while the right one still held
onto Anamaria. The gunshots were intensifying; more men seemed to have
come out and begun opening fire.
A bullet cut through the water and tore through
Anamaria's right side near her waist, and Inigo's left thigh, sending up
a pair of shouts and a cloud of dark blood.
The next one shot through Inigo's right forearm
and Anamaria's shoulder. Three more hit the quartermaster, but by this
time Inigo had already lost his hold, and was whisked away through the
water while Anamaria was left flailing, thrashing, and then, finally, still.
"Send me back," Inigo begged, as soon as he had landed,
soaked in blood-tainted water, on the deck of the Black Pearl. He
climbed to his feet using his remaining good hand, but made the mistake
of putting pressure on his left leg and immediately fell to his knees,
braced by his valet's arms.
"You're too wounded," Will said.
"We can still save her!"
"She's gone, captain."
"You can't know that!" Inigo shouted, ducking along
with the others under another hail of gunfire.
"She's dead, Captain Roberts! Don't you understand?
She's dead!" Will yelled in Inigo's face, tears in the corners of his eyes.
"This was all a trap. Jack and the others, they've all been killed, haven't
they?"
"I don't know," Inigo said, turning his head to
stare at nothing. His left hand clutched the Six-Fingered Sword stuck under
his belt, and felt nothing. "I... They might be... Oh dear God..."
"What happened in there, sir?"
"It-- Trap. Captain Kidd, he's a traitor. He's been
after Jack's head this whole time. He snared the entire Order, everyone
that was there. Mission's dead, Munchausen's dead... well... again. Jack,
he... He and Captain Hands stalled Kidd so Lady O'Malley and I could escape..."
The recent memories swam in Inigo's head like jumbled up alphabet soup.
"But O'Malley... I couldn't save her. I couldn't save Ana. I couldn't save
Jack. I couldn't save anyone..." And then he really broke down.
This was worse than when his father had been slain before his very eyes.
Back then he had been a helpless child, unable to do anything, but what
excuse could he give now, for this? He'd devoted his entire life to perfecting
his skill to avenge his father's death, only to let more people die. What
use was all the skill in the world if it could save no more lives than
before? What use was any of it if he kept on failing?
"You need your wounds seen to," Will said, trying
his best not to be bothered by the man's tears. "I'll get someone to fix
you some rumfustian as soon as we have a moment--"
"It doesn't matter," Inigo interrupted, his voice
raw. "The arm... Rumfustian helps heal things but it doesn't fix what's
really damaged. It doesn't make it like new. I'll never fight the same
with my right hand again..."
"You're still the most amazing swordsman in the
world, Mister Roberts."
"And a lot of good that did me tonight!"
"Miss Ashley," Will said to Trinity as she walked
past the two of them, "help me carry Captain Roberts to his quarters."
The girl nodded respectfully, bending down to wrap one drenched arm over
her shoulders while Will took the other, the three of them slowly rising
upright. "Careful on that leg, sir," he told Inigo, under a bit of strain.
The man wasn't easy to carry.
"Someone should collect Ana's body," Inigo murmured,
as he was more or less dragged along.
"It will be hard."
"I'm captain and you'll do what I tell you."
"Yessir," Will said quickly. "I'll set someone on
it right away. Let's see..." He glanced over the water at where Inigo had
lost Anamaria's body. "Er... How long does human buoyancy last after death?"
"Hnh?"
"The body's gone, Captain Roberts."
"What?"
"Just... gone."
"How can that be?"
"We need to get out of here!" Stede shouted from
near the bow. "It's looking none too hospitable at the moment!"
"We're already underway," Delphine responded, from
the helm.
"What?" Inigo demanded. "On whose orders?"
"Fezzik's, sir," she told him. "Hope you don't mind.
I mean, I think it's all in line by right, seein' as he's first mate."
"But where do we go?"
"Anywhere but here."
"But we--"
"You just take it easy for now, Cap'n Roberts."
"The name," the pirate said, leaning his head back
until he could see the sky overhead, "is Inigo Montoya."
It began to rain.
End Chapter XV