On the other side of the bar, the footsteps stop. I can feel the bandit scanning the room, searching for me. I hold my breath, though I know this is a rubbish place to hide. It won’t keep me for long. There’s a wet snuffle, then the sound of him spitting. I must have gotten his nose with the door—maybe not hard enough to break it, but it had bought me some time that I now had absolutely no clue what to do with. I try to think small, dark, invisible thoughts as I pull my knees tighter against my chest.
“Come out.” There’s a swoosh, then a waterfall of breaking glass against the floor. He must have swept all the cups sitting upside down at the end of the bar off—most likely with his cutlass for greatest effect. “Where are you?” he calls in a mocking singsong. There’s another slash, and one of the lamps overhead shatters. I start to crawl along the bar, toward the opposite end nearer the exit. Why hasn’t the innkeeper woken up? Why hasn’t literally anyone in this whole goddamn place come to my aid?
“Come out now and I may not have to kill you.” There’s the clatter of a table overturned. “She never said I had to. We can come to an arrangement.”
I nearly crawl straight into the end of the bar—it’s just a wall. Nowhere to go except over and straight onto the end of his cutlass. I look around desperately, searching for something—anything—to defend myself. I don’t know how to defend myself, particularly with something I might find behind a bar, but I’m not going to wait here quietly until he finds me.
Then I see it—a machete hanging from a hook under a wine rack. I saw one of the bartenders using it that morning to halve coconuts and then pour their water into pewter pitchers for each table. I slide the leather strap off the hook as quietly as I can. It’s much heavier than I anticipated, and I need both hands to lift it.
Another table overturns, and I twist around to peer over the bar as best I can without being spotted. The man has his back to me, crouched down as he slides his cutlass under the benches lining the wall. There won’t be a better moment. I heft the machete onto the bar top, then swing myself up and over. I hoped some roguish grace might suddenly possess me, and I would leap over the bar and swing my own weapon at him in one elegant move. Instead, the bar top is much higher than anticipated and I catch my toe on one of the taps, which starts to spew warm beer across my trousers. The bar top instantly goes somehow both slick and sticky beneath me, and I end up splatted across it, the machete teetering precariously on the edge.
“Gotcha.” I hear the swoosh of the cutlass, and I lunge forward, grabbing the handle of the machete, and roll, straight off the counter. I crash onto the barroom floor, the machete flying out of my grip and sliding beneath the toppled stools. There’s a crack, and when I look up, the bandit has stuck his sword into the bar top where I had just been so hard he’s struggling to get it free. I lurch forward on my hands and knees, searching for the machete, shoving the fallen stools aside until I find it. I turn, clutching it in both hands, just as the bandit yanks his cutlass free.
We face each other. His scarf has slipped off, and his chin is dark and wet, a cracked front tooth winking out from between the greasy blood coating his lips. I am the only one out of the pair of us who has to use two hands to hold my weapon, and I suspect private fencing lessons with tipped blades and padded suiting are going to be less helpful than whatever on-the-job training this man has had with his sword.
He swings at me with a yell, and I throw up my machete, blocking the blow. When the blades strike, I feel the clang all the way through me. I swear my teeth knock together. He slashes again, lower this time, but I block that one as well, though it pushes me backward a step. I can see the strategy straightaway—he could swing all night and never tire, while I’ll likely take about three more solid hits before I lose my grip. He doesn’t have to fight me; he just has to outlast me. Be the aggressor longer than I can defend myself.
So there’s only one solution.
Before he can swipe at me again, I raise my machete and, with a primal enthusiasm I didn’t know I possessed, run toward him, screaming like a wild creature. I consider trying to actually apply any of the skills I learned in my fencing lessons, but when faced with this man and his cutlass, I can’t remember a parry from a riposte, so I just swing. He dodges, then dodges again, caught off guard by my ferocious, if inept, attack. He steps backward, right into the spreading puddle of beer, and slips, falling backward onto one of the bar stools. His scarf comes loose and flutters to the ground, revealing the blue-inked symbol of the Crown and Cleaver on his neck.
I swing at him again, but he thrusts one of the stools in front of himself like a shield. The cushioned seat must be harder than a coconut, for my blade bounces off it and I lose my balance.
A gunshot from the floor above us splits the air suddenly. The bandit and I both pause, united for a moment in wondering which of us just lost our ally. Then he swipes at me again, hacking gracelessly with all his strength. The machete flies out of my hand when his cutlass strikes it and slides across the barroom floor with a metallic scrape. I stumble backward. My foot catches the splintered remains of one of the tables, and I trip, my already throbbing ankle twisting under me.
The bandit pulls himself to his feet with a hand on the bar top and lurches toward me. I swear he’s a foot taller than he was when he opened the door to Monty’s room. I crawl backward, managing to wedge myself beneath one of the benches, but he grabs the edge of it and tosses it aside like it weighs nothing. It splinters when it strikes the bar. Before I can move, he puts a foot on my chest, pressing down hard enough that all the breath goes out of my lungs. “Nowhere else to go.”
“What do you want?” I gasp, the words barely audible.
“You know,” he says. I have a guess, but would rather not give him ideas if I’m wrong, so I shake my head. “Your spyglass,” he says. “You can give it to me now, or I can rip it from your corpse.”
“Now surely those aren’t the only choices,” someone says from behind us.
The bandit turns, foot still on my chest, and I raise my head. Monty is standing at the base of the stairs, holding an antique pistol like he almost knows how to use it. His nose is bleeding, and the bridge looks flatter than it was before, but he’s on his feet. And armed. Better than I’m doing.
The bandit raises his cutlass and bares his teeth at Monty. In return, Monty pulls back the hammer on the pistol. “Yours might be bigger, but I’ll wager mine works faster.” Even in this, the direst situation of my life and probably his as well, he still smirks.
“You won’t shoot me,” the bandit says.
“Won’t I?”
“You aren’t the type to get blood on your hands.”
“Darling, you have no idea what my type is.”
The bandit lunges at Monty, cutlass raised over his head.
And then there’s a gunshot.
It’s somehow the loudest sound I’ve ever heard, and I flinch, my hands flying up over my face. The bandit flinches too, and I think he must have been hit. Or I must have been. Someone’s been shot. I have read in books that men who are shot, fatally or otherwise, sometimes are the last to know it. But I’ve got no blood on me. The bandit has no blood on him either. We look ourselves up and down, then appraise each other, and seem to realize at the same time that neither of us is dead. Then we both look to Monty, who, in turn, looks down at his gun, puzzled. Then something seems to dawn on him.