Tress turned toward the quarterdeck, where Crow stood near the helm station, taking a long pull on her canteen. She lowered it, and seemed thoughtful.
She wouldn’t dare press forward, would she? With that rainline slithering through the region?
“Helmswoman,” Crow finally said, projecting her voice so everyone could hear. “Kindly take us south a spell, along the border. It seems…imprudent to enter the Crimson at the moment.”
“As you command, Captain,” Salay said.
Crow swooped down to the main deck, then slammed herself into her cabin. Laggart hurried down the steps, nearly stumbling in his haste, then quickly covered the slip by shouting for the Dougs to get back to work. In minutes, they were sailing a leisurely course along the border. Fort excused himself to go scrub some pots, leaving Tress leaning against the ship’s rail.
Laggart stomped past Tress, then hesitated. “You,” he said. “What do you think of this now?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she replied. “I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it all.”
“I can help with that!” Dr. Ulaam’s voice called from nearby.
Laggart grunted. Then he gestured for her to follow. Curious, she joined him on the quarterdeck. Behind the helm and the captain’s roost was the aft cannon, set out on its own railed platform, like a heavily reinforced balcony sticking out the very back of the vessel.
It was a dangerous section of the ship, as it was away from the silver protections. Spores that somehow leaped the gap between sea and deck here would take longer to die. That, of course, was important for the zephyr spores used as charges.
Laggart rummaged in the gunnery barrel—an action that fortunately caused him to look down. Because if he’d seen Tress’s face, he might have noticed her sudden spike of worry. What was he doing? Was he going to confront her with one of the swapped cannonballs?
Moons…she would have made a terrible spy. How could Salay and the others possibly think she was a King’s Mask? Tress didn’t understand that it is quite possible to be so bad at something it seems implausible. In these cases, it stands to reason that such a person is in fact quite competent—because it takes true competence to feign such spectacular incompetence. It’s called the transitive property of ineptitude, and is the explanation for anything you’ve seen me do wrong ever.
In this case, Tress’s transitive ineptitude didn’t come into play, because Laggart didn’t see how nervous she was—nor did he confront her with a fake cannonball. Instead he selected an ordinary cannonball, then held it up as if admiring a beautiful painting. Or—considering the way his bald head on the end of his toothpick neck made him look—perhaps he was wondering if there was any relation.
“Now that we’re proper pirates,” he said to Tress, “I figure we ought to have someone on this ship besides me and the captain who knows how to fire a cannon. The rest of the crew are too useless around spores to be trained. Congratulations.”
She noticed that, despite his bold words, he reached very gingerly into the gunnery barrel and selected a pouch of zephyr spores—holding it pinched between two fingers. He quickly loaded it into the cannon through a latch on the top.
“Zephyr charge goes in here,” he said, snapping the metal lid closed. “Get them loaded quickly, because even here, the deck’s silver is close enough to start killing spores. Inner casing there is lined with aluminum, to block the silver’s influence.”
He pushed a wad into the cannon and rammed it into place with a rod. “This rag fills up the bore of the cannon,” he explained, “keeps the explosion from going around the ball—and puts the full force on the shot.” He slid a cannonball down the front of the cannon. It thumped into place. “Cannon can’t angle too low, otherwise we’d roll the ball out the front.”
“All right,” Tress said. “But…um, does the captain know you’re having me do this?”
“I’m cannonmaster,” he snapped. “Captain won’t care who I train. You just do as you’re told. Besides, a man needs to take care of himself. I don’t want to end up wounded, then get sunk because nobody else on this damn ship has the guts to handle zephyr.”
So. Laggart didn’t know that she was to be sold to the dragon. This struck Tress as odd, since he seemed to know the rest of the plan. But then she realized there was a good chance the captain considered him a backup sacrifice. He was one of the crewmembers who was least afraid of spores.
Laggart picked up a small wooden contraption near the railing, then tossed it overboard. It proved to be a kind of small buoy with a flag, tied by a rope to the ship. As they sailed, it trailed along far behind—like the most conscientious of stalkers.
“Take five shots a day,” Laggart told her. “The best way to get a feel for a cannon is to practice.”
He started to walk away.
“Wait!” Tress said. “You’re not going to give me any more training than that?”
“Training would be useless until you know more,” he said. “I’m busy. Figure it out and don’t bother me with stupid questions. If you sink a buoy, congratulations. There are more in the hold. Come bother me when you can do it in at most two shots, and then we’ll talk about some real training.”
“All right,” Tress said, an idea occurring to her. “But maybe I should start with something less expensive and wasteful than full cannonballs. We don’t have a flare gun on board, do we? I could try that out first.”
“What kind of a stupid question is that?” Laggart said.
It was, identifiably, the stupid kind of stupid question. Which at least is better than the redundant kind of statement.
“A flare gun is nothing like a cannon,” he said. “So just do what I told you, idiot.” He continued muttering to himself as he stalked off.
Tress folded her arms. She’d been planning to spend the evening either studying or trying to figure out how to crack Hoid’s curse. This was an unwelcome intrusion. Still, perhaps there were some advantages. If she was planning to build her own spore-based weapon to fight the captain, there were worse uses of her time than experimenting with a cannon.
It was just that Laggart, by refusing to offer any useful training, had ensured she’d waste hours figuring out the basic mechanics of aiming the cannon. Even with this brief delay at the border, she knew her time was short. Depending on where the dragon’s den was in the Crimson Sea, she had anywhere between a few hours and a few weeks to plan.
A solution occurred to her only a moment later. She pushed the cannon forward, as she’d seen Laggart do. Then she smiled, took a firing rod—which had a soaked bit of cloth on the end—and stuck it into the touch hole. A second later an explosion rocked her, knocking the cannon back along its track.
It took less than a minute for Ann’s head to pop up behind, wide-eyed and eager.
THE CHICKEN KEEPER
“You use these two winches,” Ann explained, rotating a handle—not unlike the one on a meat grinder—at the base of the cannon. “This one turns it port or starboard. This other one raises it up in the air. See, a cannonball drops as it flies. So you have to aim upward and kind of lob your shot in an arc.”