In Freeport, they started calling it the ghost.
Nobody could say afterward who had used the word first. It might have been one of the Black Tern's crew, telling the story in the harbor taverns after the ship finally limped home, three weeks late, with her engine patched together from spare parts and her captain wrapped in sailcloth in the hold. It was a good story, and they told it often. A stranger coming in out of the sunset in a boat with a white rag on its mast. A soup that smelled like paradise. Sixty-three men and women waking up on the mess deck with their heads splitting and their spoons still in their hands, and the prisoners gone, and Esme Corvin dead in her cabin without a mark on her except the one that had killed her.
And the stranger's arm. Everyone who had seen it described it the same way. Black lines, fine as cracks in ice, from the fingertips to just below the shoulder.
It was a good story. It got better every time.
* * *
Commodore Silas Brannock heard it in the great hall of the Congress of Captains, sitting at the long table under the flags, with his hands folded in front of him.
He was a tall, heavy-shouldered man of about sixty, with a close-cropped gray beard and a quiet, deliberate way of speaking that made other people lower their voices to hear him. He had been an officer of the Republic once, a long time ago, before a thing happened on a burning island that he never talked about. Now he commanded the southern squadron of the Free Fleet, and Tobias Wren had been one of his captains, and one of his friends.
He listened to the Black Tern's mate tell the story, all of it, from the white rag to the empty hold. When the man had finished, Brannock sat for a while without speaking.
"The Cormorant," he said at last. "He told Corvin she blew her boilers. Off an island to the southeast."
"Yes, sir."
"Which island?"
The mate shifted uneasily. "That's the thing, sir. Nobody knows. Wren's log was gone. The stranger had it, and he took it with him. But the captain said he told her he'd come from the southeast, in a boat small enough for one man to sail."
Brannock nodded slowly. He unfolded his hands and laid them flat on the table.
"Then we'll look," he said.
* * *
They looked.
The Congress sent two ships that season, and Brannock sent two more of his own. They quartered the empty seas to the southeast of Scald Rock, back and forth, week after week, in a long, slow, patient search.
Two of them found nothing at all. There was nothing out there, their captains said. Only deep water, and long swells, and fog that came down out of a clear sky without warning and lay on the sea for days.
The third came back with a story.
They had found an island, the captain said, on the edge of a fog bank. It was small, with a cliff at one end and a white beach below it, and a rusting gunboat at anchor outside the reef. They had come close enough to read the name on her bow before the fog closed in. Cormorant. They had sent a boat in toward the beach, with a lieutenant and six men. And the fog had thickened, and they had heard shouting across the water, and then nothing.
The boat never came back. When the fog lifted two days later, the island was gone, and so was the Cormorant, and the sea where they had been was deep and blue and empty.
The fourth ship never came back at all.
* * *
Jason found the wreck one morning after a storm.
It was lying on the reef off the north shore, where the coral ran out into the sea in a long, jagged spine: a small, three-masted schooner, broken open along its whole length, with the waves still slamming into it and pouring out through its ribs. The storm had blown all night from the north, harder than any he had seen in years, and at some point in the black hours, blind and helpless, the schooner had struck.
There were no survivors. He walked the shore for two days and found fourteen of them, washed up in the rocks and the weed. He buried them at the edge of the forest, beside the others, in a second row.
He found the other boat, too, a week later: a ship's boat, stove in and upside down, wedged in the rocks below the cliff on the east side of the island, with no one in it at all. He didn't know where it had come from. He didn't know when. He didn't remember any fog, and he had not seen any ship.
He stood there, looking at it.
Then he went back to the cave, and stood in front of the old charcoal map on the wall, and studied it.
* * *
He had always known they would come.
He had known it on the beach, the night after he came home, sitting by the fire with the admiral's coat gone and Alexander's still hanging at the back of the cave. He had killed twelve men here, and walked aboard the Black Tern and killed her captain, and taken the Free Fleet's most valuable prisoners out from under their noses. There was no world, not this one and not his own, in which people let that go.
And he couldn't leave. He knew that now, more clearly than he had ever known anything.
Pass away peacefully in your sleep, alone, on a deserted island.
Not at the end of a rope in a square in Freeport. Not with a bullet in his back on his own beach. Not burned out of his cave. Peacefully, in his sleep. That was the mission. It had always been the mission, from the very first morning on the raft. And for thirty years he had thought of it as something that would happen to him, like weather.
It wasn't. It was something he was going to have to fight for.
So he started preparing.
* * *
The Cormorant's armory was in a locked room below her bridge. He broke the lock with a crowbar from the engine room on his first trip out, and stood in the doorway, looking at what was inside.
There were rifles, twenty of them, long and heavy, with brass-bound stocks and bolts that slid back with a smooth, oiled click. There were pistols, a dozen, the same kind Hollis had drawn in the cave. There was a crate of hand grenades, black iron eggs packed in straw, which he looked at and then carefully closed again. And there was ammunition, more than he could have used in ten lifetimes, in heavy wooden boxes stamped with the free captains' gull.
He took it all ashore, a few boxes at a time, in the boat. It took him a week.
Then he tried to learn to shoot, and discovered that he couldn't.
He could hold a rifle steady. He had strong, patient hands, and he could lie still for an hour in the long grass without moving a muscle. He could line up the sights. But when he fired at a gourd set on a rock a hundred paces away, the shot went high, or low, or wide, and he couldn't tell which. And he couldn't tell why.
It took him a month to understand it.
It was the eye. With only one, he could see where a thing was, but not how far away it was. The world had been flat for thirty years, and he had learned to live in it: to reach for things carefully, to judge distance by size and shadow and habit. But a rifle bullet dropped as it flew, and how much it dropped depended on exactly how far it had to go, and he had no way of knowing.
So he did what he had always done. He treated it as a problem.
He paced out the distances. From every place on the island where he might ever want to shoot from, to every place he might ever want to shoot at, he walked the ground and counted his steps, and wrote the number down. He set up marks: a white stone on the beach at exactly two hundred paces from the post on the clifftop, a notch cut in a tree at three hundred from the mouth of the cave, a pile of shells at the edge of the lagoon. He memorized them. Then he sat at his firing posts for days, and shot at each mark again and again, and learned exactly how high to aim for each one, and scratched it all onto the stock of the rifle in tiny, careful lines.
He stopped trying to judge distance by eye. He didn't need to. He knew the island. Every rock, every tree, every gully. Now he knew how far away each of them was from every other.
By the end of the first year, he could hit a gourd at three hundred paces nine times in ten, from any post on the island, without ever having to think about how far away it was.
* * *
He built the rest over the next four years.
He thought about it the way he had once thought about the cistern, and the boat, with charcoal drawings on the wall of the cave that he rubbed out and redrew a hundred times.
He built firing posts. There were six of them, scattered across the island in places where the rock rose high: on the clifftop, above the grotto, on the ridge above the plain, at the northern end of the forest. Each one looked out over a stretch of ground that anyone coming ashore would have to cross. Each one had a clear field of fire, and a hidden way out behind it, and a cache of water and ammunition buried in a sealed gourd under a flat stone.
He built traps. He had been building traps for thirty years, for birds and fish, and it turned out that the principles were not so different for men. He dug pits along the forest paths and lined them with sharpened stakes and covered them with woven mats and leaves, so cleverly that he nearly walked into one himself after a rainy season. He rigged deadfalls on the steep paths, great logs held back by a single trigger line. He stretched thin wires from the Cormorant's engine room across the trails at ankle height, running back through hidden loops to strings of empty tins that rattled at his posts, so that he would know, from anywhere on the island, where someone was walking.
And he made paths. Paths that only he knew. He cut them through the thickest parts of the forest, and along ledges of the cliff that looked impossible from below, and down into the sea cave on the north shore that could only be reached at the lowest tide. He linked the hollow tree on the edge of the plain to the crack in the cliff above the grotto, where the air came out warm from the mausoleum beneath. He could cross the whole island now, from end to end, without once setting foot on open ground.
He drew all of it on the map on the wall of the cave. When he was done, he looked at it, and then took a wet rag and wiped the new parts away, until only the old map remained. He didn't need it written down. He knew it the way he knew the knots.
* * *
Once, in the third year, he took the Cormorant apart.
He had been looking at her for a long time, riding at anchor outside the reef, rusting a little more every season. She was a flag, he realized. A mark on the sea that said here. Anyone who saw her would know exactly where to come.
So over one long dry season he stripped her. He took everything he could use: sheets of steel from her bulkheads, wire and cable, tools, lamps, oil, coal, canvas, a whole ship's worth of nails and bolts. And then, on a still day at the end of the season, he went down into her engine room with a crowbar and opened her seacocks, the way Glorianna had described them to him one night in the boat, and climbed back up and rowed away.
He sat on the beach and watched her go. She settled slowly, stern first, with a long, groaning sigh of escaping air. Her funnel went under last, and the water closed over it, and a few bubbles came up, and then the sea outside the reef was empty again.
He felt, watching it, strangely sad.
* * *
He was fifty-five years old, or near it, when the ship came.
He heard it before he saw it, one gray morning in the rainy season: a faint, steady throbbing on the wind, like a heartbeat under the sound of the sea. He went up to the clifftop post, and lay down flat behind the rocks with the rifle beside him, and looked out.
It was a warship, a real one this time, long and dark and well kept, with two funnels and a turret at the bow. It flew the black flag. It came in slowly, carefully, sounding the depth as it went, and anchored well outside the reef. Its guns turned slowly toward the island and stopped.
Jason watched through the rifle's small brass telescope as a boat came down from its side, and began to pull toward the beach.
There were nine men in it. Eight of them were sailors, armed with rifles, sitting very straight and looking at the cliff. The ninth sat in the stern.
He was tall and heavy-shouldered, with a close-cropped gray beard, and he wore a long dark coat with no decorations on it at all. He sat very still, with his hands resting on his knees. And he was not looking at the cliff, the way the others were. He was looking at the edge of the forest above the beach, where two long rows of sticks stood in the grass.
The boat ran up onto the sand. The eight sailors jumped out, and spread out across the beach with their rifles ready, and knelt.
The man in the dark coat stepped out last, and stood at the edge of the water, and looked up at the island.
Then he began to walk, slowly, up the beach toward the graves.