“Keelhaulin’. Psh,” Gunner said. “Keel’ this old boy? This old boy is Orholam hissown self. Orholam deserves spatial treatment.” He smiled. It wasn’t a kind smile.
Gavin saw Orholam swallow hard.
Oh, shit. Gavin’s plan, half-formed as it was, required Orholam. Alive.
Offhand, Gunner said, “Strap him to the cannon.”
His confidence vanishing, Orholam slumped, propped up only by the two sailors holding his arms, but he made no attempt at escape, resigned to his fate. Out here, at the center of the Cerulean Sea, where was there to run?
“Wh-why do this?” Gavin asked Gunner.
“Better question. Why not?” Gunner said.
The sailors draped Orholam over the cannon, hugging the barrel with both hands and feet. They stopped when they saw Gunner looking at them like they were complete morons.
“What’re you thinkin’ I wanna do? Warm his tenders with a few shots? Scald him to death through repeated firing?” Gunner demanded.
They looked back and forth at each other.
“Uh . . . over the muzzle then, Captain?” one asked. “Yessir! Right!”
Under Gunner’s baleful eye, the sailors stripped Orholam to the waist. It only took them a short time to figure out how to tie the old rower over the mouth of the big cannon: his butt supported by ropes, arms and legs lashed down the barrel, facing toward the breech, torso strapped so as to cover the opening of the muzzle itself. The cannon’s round shot was nearly as wide as the prophet’s skinny chest.
The sailors began taking lighthearted bets on whether the shot would punch a hole cleanly through him, or if it would tear the prophet in half.
Gavin suddenly felt the old lens displacement he’d felt when in the space of a single hour he’d gone from a dignified discussion over tea in the palace at Ru during the Prisms’ War to joining his men at their fires, with their jokes about hilarious murders they’d committed that morning.
In the incongruities of war, sometimes you wonder, Am I even the same person?
But these men weren’t soldiers. They’d not sacrificed their illusions and parts of their souls in order to pursue some noble ideal. He’d known that these sailors weren’t good people; they were serving the Order of the Broken Eye. But hell, even Gavin himself was sort of serving the Order now. Seeing that they were assholes made him feel a lot better that they were on this suicide mission with him.
Let ’em die.
“Why kill Orholam, Gunner?” Gavin asked, louder.
Gunner looked at him sharply.
“Captain Gunner, I mean. Sir,” Gavin said, suppressing a cringe.
But Gunner let it go, turning to Orholam instead. “My, my, my, I thrust out into the sea with all my charms, and what wonderous babes that old gruntin’ labia-clapper slides easy into my harms. Arms.”
He spat into the sea, then examined the swollen, bloodied face of his old slave: the sailors had been none too gentle when they found him hiding belowdecks.
Oddly, though, the prophet seemed to have already recovered his good spirits.
Minus the beating, the last year of not being chained to an oar had been good for Orholam. His cheeks weren’t so hollow, and now he owned the modest tunic and trousers of a Parian tradesman. Any burnous or head covering he might have been wearing earlier had been taken, though, searched for weapons. The Order were big believers in paranoia.
But there was no mistaking Gavin’s old oarmate, the man whose real name he’d never heard. In all Gavin’s time as a galley slave, this man had spoken so rarely, and so infuriatingly full of religious platitudes, that he’d been dubbed ‘Orholam.’
Orholam still had the reedy, strong arms of the oarsman he had been, and the bright eyes of the madman he doubtless still was.
“You got nothing to say, my own li’l ora’lem Or’holam?” Gunner said.
“You know Old Parian?” Gavin asked. Ora’lem Or’holam. Hidden Orholam?
“Hidden no more,” Orholam said.
“Shut up, you,” Gunner said. He addressed Gavin. “Good curses, Old Parian. My mama taught me. She loved to curse. Said it was the mark of a mature mind, cursin’ fluently. Said every man should have fifty ways o’ telling a man to bugger a viper’s nest inside a cactus, and every woman double that many. I ever tell you about my mama?”
He couldn’t have forgotten. Gavin surely never would.
Gunner regarded Orholam through bushy brows. “Orholam! You’re a prophet. Prophet-size me what I’mma say next.”
Orholam sighed. “Something about seeing as how I’m a stowaway, I can pay for my passage by giving you a prophecy for free.”
“I’ll be damned,” one of the sailors holding Orholam’s arms said.
“So wait,” Gavin said. “Does that count?”
The sailors looked confused. The captain kept his face blank.
“You asked him for one prophecy, and he gave you one. A true one, too, by the look on your face. So . . . that pays his passage, right?”
Gunner’s face looked like, while expecting brandy, he’d just quaffed bilge water.
“If you’re getting one free glimpse into the future, it’s too bad you wasted yours,” Gavin said, “but he did give you what you demanded.”
“That one didn’t take prophecy to figure out,” Orholam said, sighing. “I’m happy to oblige with another.”
The crew, at least, seemed excited for the show to go on.
“How’d you do that?” Gunner demanded.
“After Guile here and young Lord Malargos freed us all from . . . well, from you, Captain, I took an oath never to lie again. It’s been less pleasant to fulfill than even I’d guessed it would be. When men ask my vocation and I tell them I’m a prophet . . . let’s just say, I get blindfolded and hit a lot. People ask me to say which one of them hit me. If I don’t tell them, they think I can’t, and thus I’m a fraud—which often gets me a beating. If I do tell them, though, they tend to try it again to see if I simply guessed correctly once, or twice, or three times. Not a fun game for me.”
“Good news, then,” Gunner said, seeming to have regained his footing. “There’ll be no games.”
“I wasn’t implying—”
“When’d you take that oath?” Gunner asked.
“I said—”
“You shut up! You’re a liar,” Gunner said.
“I never lied to—”
“Not another word!” Gunner said. He thrust out his hand toward one of the sailors. “Linstock!”
“No, wait!” Orholam shouted. “ Please—”
Gunner punched him in the face so fast the older man didn’t even see it coming. His face snapped back so hard Gavin worried his neck was broken, and blood sprayed into the air, and then down his mouth and chin as his broken nose gushed blood.
“Prophets are hard to ken, but Gunner is not,” Gunner said.
That actually was not at all true.
“Interplat me this, prophet,” Gunner said. “What do you think I said when I meant not another word?”
Orholam opened his mouth to speak, then stopped, confused.
The sailors looked the same. One of them held out the linstock with a match cord affixed in it to the captain, but the captain didn’t even seem aware of him now.