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As Wintrow fumbled for an answer, he heard the now familiar cry.

‘Sail!’ He felt a shock of relief. The thunder of running feet resounded throughout the ship.

‘On deck!’ Kennit barked, and Wintrow sprang gratefully to obey.

He flung himself out the door and ran while the pirate was still reaching for his crutch.

‘There! There it is!’ Vivacia was crying as Wintrow gained the foredeck.

She scarcely needed to point. Even at this distance, the wind carried the taint of the slaver.

The ship that hove into sight was the filthiest, most dilapidated vessel that Wintrow had ever seen.

Her hull gleamed with slime where waste had slopped over her side.

She rode low in the water, obviously overloaded.

Her unevenly patched jib puckered with the wind.

A sporadic gushing of water from her indicated that her bilge pumps were being manned, probably by slaves.

Some small part of Wintrow reflected that it was probably a constant effort to keep the wallowing ship afloat.

In her wake were visible the additional V’s of serpents trailing her.

The loathsome creatures seemed to sense the panic on board, for they lifted their great maned heads and looked back at the Marietta.

There were at least a dozen of the beasts, their scaled bodies gleaming in the sun. Wintrow felt ill.

Vivacia leaned forward, her face avid. Her eagerness was so great, she almost seemed to pull the ship after her.

‘Look at them, look at them flee!’ Her crooked fingers and outstretched arms reached after the ship.

As her crew sprang to set her sails for the pursuit, the wind put its power to their backs.

‘It’s a slaver. Kennit will kill them all,’ Wintrow warned her in a low voice. ‘If you help him capture that ship, all the crew will die.’

She spared him one glance back. ‘And if I do not, how many slaves will die each day of their voyage?’ She fixed her gaze on her prey once more and her voice hardened.

‘Not all humans are worthy of life, Wintrow. At least our way preserves the most lives. If she sails on as she is, it will be a miracle if any on board survive the journey.’

Wintrow scarcely heard her. He was watching, incredulously, as the slaver began to pull away from the Marietta.

The distance between the two vessels widened.

The slaver was not blind to opportunity, nor to the new threat the Vivacia represented.

The overladen ship made for the centre of the channel.

The Marietta was too far behind her. Without the pirate ship to crowd her, the pincer technique had but one jaw. Incredibly, the slaver would escape.

Kennit set his crutch down on the foredeck, and then hauled himself up the rest of the way.

Once on the deck, he struggled to his feet and tucked his crutch under his arm.

Etta was nowhere in sight. Laboriously he made his way over to the railing to join them.

Once there, he shook his head in disappointment.

‘Those poor souls. The slaver is getting away. I’m afraid they’re doomed to their fate. ’

There would be no killing today. Wintrow felt a moment of relief.

Then Vivacia screamed. The cry was one of thwarted lust. In that instant, the ship picked up speed.

Every plank and sail suddenly aligned to their best use.

The whoops and calls of the crew grew fierce as the gap between Vivacia and the slaver began to close.

Her intentness caught Wintrow’s awareness like a butterfly snared in a spider’s web.

‘My lady!’ Kennit exclaimed in vast approval.

It was benediction and Vivacia glowed with satisfaction.

Wintrow felt it heat him. Kennit was barking commands.

Behind him, he heard the rattle of blades and the jests of men making ready to go and kill other men.

Challenges and bets were exchanged as the boarding party readied itself.

Grapples and lines were brought out on deck, while laden archers moved hastily to their places in Vivacia’s rigging.

Vivacia ignored them all. This was her pursuit, her kill.

The men on board her she heeded not at all.

Dimly Wintrow was aware of his own body.

His hands were set like claws to the bow rail and the wind of their passage lashed his hair.

Vivacia suffocated his small self in her greater energy.

As in a dream, he saw the slaver grow larger before him.

The stench of her grew stronger, and the scurrying men on her decks wore fear-stricken faces.

He heard the voices of the pirates raised in excitement as the grapples were thrown and the first volleys of arrows loosed.

The screams of those the arrows found and the muffled roar of the terrified slaves belowdecks were like the cries of distant shorebirds.

He was far more keenly aware of the Marietta suddenly gaining on them.

She threatened to steal the kill from Vivacia. The ship would not tolerate it.

Vivacia literally leaned over and grasped at the other ship as the grappling lines were pulled tight.

Her clawing fingers reached nothing but the avidity on her face terrified the crew of the slaver.

‘At them! At them!’ she cried out mindlessly, heedless of the orders Kennit was trying to give.

Her fierce blood-lust was contagious. The moment the span between the ships was leapable, the boarding party began their exodus.

‘She has done it! Our beauty has done it! Ah, Vivacia, never did I suspect you had such speed and skill!’ Kennit was worshipful in his praise.

A wave of purest adoration for Kennit flowed through Wintrow.

The ship’s emotion completely overwhelmed his own fear of what would follow now that the slaver had been captured.

The figurehead twisted about to lock eyes with Kennit.

The admiration that passed between them was the mutual recognition of predators.

‘We will hunt well together, we two,’ Vivacia observed.

‘That we shall,’ Kennit promised her.

Wintrow felt adrift. He was linked to them but they ignored him.

He was irrelevant to what they had just discovered in one another.

He could sense them connecting on a deeper, more basic level than any he had ever attained.

What, he wondered dimly, did they acknowledge in one another?

Whatever it was, he felt no answering echo in himself.

Across a body-length of water, there was another deck, where men were fighting for their lives.

Blood was flowing there, but what flowed here, between the liveship and the pirate, was something even thicker.

‘Wintrow. Wintrow!’ In a sort of daze, the boy heard his name and turned to it. Kennit’s grin was white and wide as he indicated the captured ship. ‘With me, lad!’

He found himself following Kennit across the railing and onto a foreign deck where men struggled, cursed, and screamed.

Etta suddenly flanked them, a drawn blade in her hand.

She strode with a pantherish awareness of all around her.

Her black hair shone sleek in the sunlight.

Kennit himself carried a long knife, but Wintrow was weaponless and wide-eyed in this strange world.

His mind cleared somewhat as he left Vivacia’s wizardwood behind, but the chaos he plunged into was nearly as numbing.

Kennit strode across the deck fearlessly.

Etta had placed herself on his right side, adjacent to his crutch.

They threaded their way across the filthy and stinking deck.

They passed by men intent on killing one another and circled around a man curled in a pool of blood on the deck.

An arrow had skewered him, but the fall from the rigging had done more damage.

His face was hideous as he grinned with his pain, his eyes crinkled as if in merriment while blood trickled from his ear into his scruffy beard.

Sorcor came bounding across the deck towards them.

Evidently, the Marietta had caught up swiftly once she put her mind to it.

She had grappled the slaver from the other side.

The embattled crew never had a chance. The drawn blade in Sorcor’s hand dripped while his tattooed face shone with savage satisfaction.

‘Just about done here, sir!’ he greeted Kennit affably.

‘Just a few live ones left up on the poop. Not a real fighter amongst them.’ A wild yell punctuated his comment, followed by a flurry of splashing.

‘And one less now,’ Sorcor remarked cheerily.

‘I’ve got some men opening hatch covers.

It’s a stinking hole belowdecks. I think they have got as many bodies chained up down there as they do live men.

We’re going to have to take the survivors off fast. This ship is making water like a sailor pissing beer. ’

‘Do we have room for them all, Sorcor?’

The stocky pirate waggled his eyebrows in a shrug. ‘Most likely. It’ll crowd both our ships, but when we rejoin the Crosspatch, we can transfer a lot of them to her. I’d say that about fills us up, though.’

‘Excellent.’ Kennit nodded almost absently. ‘We’ll be making for Divvytown, after we pick up the Crosspatch. Time to let out the word as to how well we’ve done.’

‘I’d say so,’ Sorcor grinned.

A blood-smudged pirate hastened up to the group. ‘Begging your pardons, Sirs, but the cook wants to yield. He’s holed up in the galley.’

‘Kill him,’ Kennit told the man in annoyance.

‘Begging your pardon, sir, but he says he knows something that would make it worth our while to let him live. Says he knows where there’s treasure.’

Kennit shook his head in wordless disgust.

‘If he knew where there was treasure, why wasn’t he going after it instead of hauling slaves in this tub?’ Etta demanded sarcastically.