Revenge Of Captain Rogers

The ship that had opened fire on them came drifting through the smoke, black sails reefed, lanterns hooded. Its bow bore the pale carving of a hooked jaw. Elias knew that shape. Every captain who traded in Blackwake Bay knew it.

The Rook.

A grappling hook clanged against the rail. Then another.

“Captain,” said a voice near the foremast, “you should have taken the offer.”

Elias turned. The speaker was Harlan, his boatswain, a broad man whose hands had once hauled Elias from a burning wreck. Blood ran from a cut above Harlan’s eyebrow, though Elias could not tell whose blade had made it.

“What offer?”

Harlan’s mouth tightened. “The one you were too proud to hear.”

Men from the Rook swarmed over the rail. Their boots struck the deck in heavy rhythm. Elias fired at the first face he saw. The man spun backward, dropping into the darkness between the ships.

“Who sold us?” Elias demanded.

Harlan advanced with a cutlass lowered at his side. “You did, Captain. Every man aboard knows it.”

“I did?”

“You took the cargo meant for Governor Vale. You kept the payment. Then you blamed the crew when the governor’s hunters came.”

“That cargo was stolen from children starving in Saint Brine.”

“And now half our crew is dead.”

The accusation landed harder than the cannon blast. Elias saw the empty places among the men: Sutter, gone from the helm; Pell, who had slept beneath the forward stairs; young Niles, who had laughed whenever the sea turned rough. Their absence became a weight in the smoke.

A blade slashed toward his throat.

Elias caught Harlan’s wrist with both hands. The boatswain drove forward, using his weight to crush Elias against the wheel. The wheel’s broken spokes dug into his back.

“Listen to me,” Elias growled. “If I had sold you, the hunters would not have needed the Rook.”

Harlan hesitated.

That breath was enough. Elias drove his forehead into Harlan’s nose. Bone cracked. Harlan staggered, and Elias wrenched the cutlass free.

A pistol barked from the darkness.

Harlan jerked. His eyes widened. He fell against Elias, hot blood soaking through Elias’s shirt before sliding to the deck.

Elias shoved him aside and saw the shooter: one of the Rook’s men standing atop the rail, pistol smoking.

“Take the captain alive!” someone shouted.

That was the first truth Elias had heard all night.

He ran.

The quarterdeck had become a trap of broken timber and tangled rope. Men fought among the cannons, slipping on blood and seawater. Elias vaulted the rail onto the lower deck of a neighboring sloop. The sloop’s owner screamed and swung a belaying pin at him.

“Move,” Elias said.

“Get off my ship!”

Elias ducked the pin, seized the man’s coat, and flung him into a stack of barrels. “Then pray I do.”

Behind him, the Rook’s men poured across the gap. A bullet punched through the sloop’s mast. Elias sprinted toward the bow, but Blackwake Bay offered no clear path. Boats crowded every channel, tied three and four abreast. Lanterns swung from their prows. Sailors shouted, cursed, and shoved away from the fighting ships, only to collide with others fleeing the same storm.

He leapt onto a fishing boat, then onto a low barge loaded with salt crates. The bay bucked beneath him. Oars struck water in frantic, uneven beats.

“Captain Rogers!” called a voice from the Rook. “The ledger, Captain!”

Elias stopped.

The ledger.

He had left it in his cabin, hidden beneath the false floor where he kept the records no crewman was meant to see. It held cargo marks, payments, and names copied from letters taken in Governor Vale’s warehouse. If the betrayal had been arranged, the proof would be there.

The Rook’s men knew it.

Elias turned back toward his ship.

A burning rope fell from the rigging and landed across the deck. Fire crawled along it toward the powder room. The betraying crew had abandoned the cannons now. Some fled over the rails; others fought the Rook’s boarders in the smoke.

Elias climbed onto the nearest deck and forced his way through the crush. A sailor struck at him with an axe. Elias caught the haft, twisted, and drove the man into the mast.

“Where is my cabin?”

The sailor spat blood. “Go to hell.”

Elias struck him once and kept moving.

The cabin door had been hacked open. Papers whirled across the floor, lifting and settling in the draft from the shattered stern windows. His sea chest lay split apart. The false floor had been torn up.

The ledger was gone.

Elias stood amid the wreckage, listening to boots pound overhead.

A shadow crossed the doorway.

He raised the cutlass.

It was Harlan.

The boatswain leaned against the frame, one hand pressed to his ruined nose. Blood darkened his beard.

“You’re alive,” Elias said.

“Disappointed?”

“Who sent the Rook?”

Harlan laughed once, without humor. “You still think this is about the ship.”

“Answer me.”

Harlan’s eyes shifted toward the floor. “The broker marked the payments.”

“What broker?”

“Look for the black gull.”

Boots thundered closer.

Harlan shoved something across the floor. A brass key skittered to Elias’s feet.

“The old signal house,” Harlan said. “North pier. Before they burn it.”

“Why help me?”

“Because I never believed you sold us.”

A shot cracked through the doorway. Harlan staggered backward. Elias lunged, but Harlan seized the doorframe.

“Go!” he snarled. “Make them pay for believing the lie.”

Elias snatched up the key and plunged through the stern window.

He struck the water shoulder-first. Cold closed over him. The bay dragged at his coat, filled his boots, and muffled the shouts above. He kicked free of the wreckage and surfaced beneath a tangle of mooring lines.

The Rook loomed over him.

A lantern swung from its side, revealing faces searching the water. Elias dove again and swam beneath the hulls. Ropes scraped his back. Barnacles tore his palms. He followed the dim glow of shore lanterns until his lungs burned, then surfaced behind a rowboat.

A man in the boat saw him and lifted an oar.

“Keep quiet,” Elias whispered.

The man stared at the blood on Elias’s face and the cutlass in his hand. “You’ll pay for the boat.”

Elias climbed aboard. “If I live, I’ll pay double.”

“That sounds like a captain’s promise.”

“It is.”

The man lowered the oar, but his gaze remained fixed on the bay. “They’re hunting you.”

“They’re hunting what I carry.”

“Then carry it somewhere else.”

Elias seized the oars. “North pier.”

The rowboat slipped through the anchorage, nudging past hulls that hid him from the Rook’s lanterns. Blackwake Bay was a maze built by greed and tide. Every passage narrowed without warning. Every ship carried eyes. Elias rowed beneath overhanging yards and around drifting wreckage while cannon smoke settled in pale sheets across the water.

At the north pier, the old signal house leaned above the rocks, its windows blind and its flagpole snapped. Elias dragged the boat into shadow and climbed the slick steps.

The brass key fit a rusted lock beneath the floorboards.

Inside, the signal house smelled of wet wood and ashes. A dead lantern hung from the ceiling. Elias struck a match and found a narrow desk bolted to the wall. Its drawers had been emptied, but beneath the lowest one he saw fresh scratches.

He pried up the plank with his cutlass.

A sealed ledger lay beneath it, wrapped in oilskin and bound with black cord.

Elias cut the cord.

The pages were cramped with figures, initials, and cargo marks. Along the margins, a black gull had been drawn again and again, each bird facing the same direction. Beside one column appeared a repeated mark: a hooked crescent crossed by three short lines.

Elias knew that mark.

It belonged to Marlowe Sable’s brokers.

His thumb moved over the ink. The betrayal had not begun aboard his ship. It had been purchased here, in the dark channels of Blackwake Bay, through a hand that never touched a blade.

A sound rose outside.

Oars.

Elias closed the ledger and tucked it beneath his coat. Through the cracked window, three boats emerged from the mist. The Rook’s men had found the north pier.

He searched the room. One door led to the pier. The other opened onto a narrow ladder descending toward the rocks. He kicked it free and found a tunnel beneath the signal house, half-flooded and black.

The boats drew closer.

“Search the house!” a man shouted.

Elias dropped into the tunnel.

Water climbed to his waist. The stone walls pressed close enough to scrape his shoulders. Behind him, boots crashed through the signal house. A lantern beam stabbed down the ladder.

“There!” someone yelled.

Elias ran through the water. The ledger dragged at his coat like a stone. He reached the tunnel’s end and found an iron grate chained across the opening.

The key.

He pulled it free, thrust it into the lock, and turned.

The grate opened onto the outer rocks. Waves struck the stone with brutal force. Elias crawled through just as a bullet sparked against the tunnel wall behind him.

He threw himself into the surf.

The sea carried him beyond the pier, rolling him beneath the reach of the lanterns. When he surfaced, Blackwake Bay stretched behind him in a fever of fire and motion. His ship burned near the center of the anchorage, its mast collapsing in a shower of sparks.

Elias gripped the ledger beneath his coat and swam toward the dark line of open water.

Only when the bay’s noise faded did he crawl onto a drifting plank and tear open the oilskin again. The ledger’s pages were damp but legible. Names ran down one side. Payments ran down the other.

Then Elias saw the torn edge.

He counted the leaves twice.

One page was missing - the page bearing the name of the broker who had arranged the sale.

His hand tightened around the ledger until the cover creaked.

Behind him, Blackwake Bay burned.

Ahead, the sea opened toward Saint Brine and Marlowe Sable’s hidden network. Elias looked once at the flames, then turned his face into the wind.

“I’ll find you,” he said to the unseen broker.

The ledger gave him proof.

The missing page gave him a reason to hunt.

End of chapter one. 8 more chapters in the full book.