Ring of Fire IV Read online

  Heads looked up when they entered the tavern and Oluf waved them over.

  “What’s happened?” Al asked.

  Oluf sighed. “A man from the tolls commission arrived with the steam boat. Apparently it’s a minesweeper, and we are now ‘surplus to requirements.’”

  “Sorry,” Al muttered.

  Oluf clapped a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Besides, we knew it was only a short-term job.” He sighed. “But the money was good while it lasted.”

  “What will you do now?” Al asked.

  Oluf shrugged. “Some of us will move on. Me? I’ll return to ferrying cargoes between Helsingør and Helsingborg.”

  “The Osprey brought a couple of the new hard hat rigs. There’s sure to be demand for trained dive crews,” Al suggested.

  Oluf shook his head. “Those things are dangerous.”

  “We looked them over and they look as good as the ones we had back in Lübeck,” Sam said.

  “Looked? Is that all? If you could say you had used them you might find someone willing to risk a painful death.” Oluf shook his head in negation. “But as you only looked, no one with any sense will risk them.”

  Al realized he’d never convince Oluf and his colleagues. Maybe if their first experience of hard hat diving hadn’t been King Christian’s failed experiment, they might have been more willing to try it. There wasn’t anything they could do, so Al and Sam left.

  * * *

  Rasmus Brahe was a lesser twig in the great Brahe family, but he had high hopes of soon securing a much more important position within the tolls commission. He’d already saved the commission eight rigsdaler by dismissing the boatmen who’d been sweeping for mines the moment he arrived in Helsingør rather than let them finish the day.

  He left the inn where he’d enjoyed a very good lunch and ambled to a lookout point so he could watch the activity on the Øresund. He easily located the Osprey puffing smoke from her single funnel as she chugged up the Øresund, but he couldn’t see the dive tender. She should be out there. Rasmus didn’t understand what was going on. The up-timers should have been out on the water using the new hard hat rigs he’d brought up from Copenhagen.

  He ran to the dock, but all anyone could tell him was the dive tender had taken on provisions, paid their bills, and left. He was forced to cool his heels until the Osprey came in to find out what had happened.

  * * *

  “What do you mean they’ve gone?” Rasmus demanded when the Osprey finally docked and he was able to talk to Louie Tillman. “They’re supposed to be salvaging the Blauwe Duif.”

  Louie needed all of his thirty-two years in the navy to keep a straight face as he commiserated with the bureaucrat. “Unfortunately, the Navy requires them elsewhere, Herr Brahe.” He smiled. “Still, they did find time to check out the new hard hat rigs you brought with you and they said they were completely happy with them.”

  Rasmus cursed under his breath. This was bad news. He had the hard hat rigs but with the Morton brothers gone he had no one to use them. He was going to have to find some new divers and handlers.

  * * *

  Rasmus looked around Helsingør first, but not even the boatmen who’d been clearing mines were interested. He’d ended up heading back to Copenhagen, but even there he’d been forced to troll through the prisons. Niels and Poul Madsen had been on death row awaiting execution when Rasmus offered them the job and, after hearing that the glitch that had killed Laurs Jeppsen had been fixed by the up-timers, the brothers had leapt at the opportunity to cheat the executioner. He’d arranged their conditional release and seen to their training before shipping them, still in chains, to Helsingør. The training had been the best he could devise, based on descriptions he’d culled from newspaper articles describing the diving operations on the River Trave.

  * * *

  The heavy helmet was slipped over Niels’ head and locked into place. He didn’t like the feeling of confinement, but he’d learned to live with it during his training. It was a small price to pay for continued life.

  He heard the pump start and the hiss-click of the non-return valve—that most important of additions to the diving suit. He held up a hand to indicate everything was working and he was ready to go down.

  The face plate was closed and locked in place. He was now totally dependent on the air-hose for air. Two men helped him stand up in the heavy suit and walked him to the landing stage—a light platform on a swing arm that would take him from the deck to the water in one easy movement. Once there he took his position and waited for his brother to join him. Moments later they were swung over the water and lowered into it.

  Niels checked that his brother was okay before manipulating his air-regulator and the exhaust-valve to reduce his buoyancy. Slowly he sank down to the Blauwe Duif.

  * * *

  Four hours later Niels was dying to go to the toilet. He was also feeling cold, and fatigued, so he was pleased to hear the clang of metal on metal that indicated topside thought it was time they came up. He passed one last cask to his brother before climbing out of the Blauwe Duif’s hold and waited for Poul to join him. Only then did he close the exhaust valve a quarter turn. This slowed the rate air escaped from his dive suit and caused it to balloon out a little, giving him positive buoyancy. He started to float gently upwards. This was in accordance with what they’d been taught back in Copenhagen. Unfortunately for them, Rasmus had failed to realize that Matt Tisdel and Miquel d’Alcaufar were able to surface without making decompression stops because they were working in less than thirty feet of water and their no-decompression time limit was effectively infinite.

  Poul surfaced soon after Niels and they were soon being swung aboard the dive tender. Moments later they were being helped to unsuit. Free of his heavy dive suit and nearly two hundred pounds lighter, Niels dashed for the heads. He returned to find his brother talking to the bureaucrat who’d arranged their pardons. They were conditional on them completing the salvage of the Blauwe Duif, but as they came with payment for their work, Niels wasn’t complaining. Money was always useful.

  “You are making very good progress,” Rasmus told Niels when he joined his brother.

  Never one to speak when he didn’t have anything to say, Niels grunted.

  That didn’t seem to deter the bureaucrat, who then asked if they were having any problems.

  “It’s very cold down there,” Poul said.

  Niels nodded. “Tomorrow we want more clothes to wear under our suits.”

  “I will see that you get some more clothes. But other than that, did you have any problems?” Rasmus asked.

  Niels shook his head. He had to give the bureaucrat credit. He had listened to all of their complaints and requests while they were being trained, and even done something about some of them. The four hour limit had been established because that was the longest either he and his brother were comfortable holding their water, so he was sure that tomorrow there would be more woolen socks, pants and tops. “Thank you,” he muttered.

  “Good, good. Well, you two have your lunch and rest a little,” Rasmus said before walking off to have his lunch.

  * * *

  They’d been back in the water a little over two hours when Niels started to feel tired, stiff, and worst of all, itchy. He put it down to the long confinement in the dive suit and the hard work he was doing, and tried to ignore it.

  Three and a half hours into the dive the itching was starting to become unbearable. It was as if he had ants crawling all over his body. He shuddered at the thought and tried to relieve the itching by rubbing against the Blauwe Duif’s timbers, but any relief was momentary. Still, he told himself, it couldn’t be long to go now.

  He heard the ring of metal on metal that was the recall. “At last,” he muttered to himself. He turned to climb out of the hold, and noticed Poul was trying to rub his back against the hull. So it wasn’t just him. He smiled at the thought, but then the itching reminded him that it was time to get back to
the surface where he could get out of his suit. He got clear of the hold and tightened the exhaust value. The dive suit started to inflate, and he put a hand on the air-regulator control valve.

  He shouldn’t have ascended at more than twenty-five feet per minute, but the sensation of insects crawling all over his body was driving him mad. Instead of opening the control valve only a little, he opened it as wide open as he could. The suit started to balloon almost immediately and he shot to the surface. On the way up his joints started to hurt. The closer to the surface the worse it got. Near the surface he started to scream.

  * * *

  Rasmus stared down at the two bodies laid out on the dive tender’s deck. He didn’t know why they had died. All he knew was that the two divers had seemed perfectly fine when they started their second dive, and there hadn’t been a problem until they returned to the surface.

  “The suits are cursed,” one of the topside crew muttered. The rest of the crew crossed themselves and stepped a little farther away from the suits that were still in the disrobing area where Niels and Poul had been pulled from them.

  Those few words rang like a death knell over Rasmus’ hopes. He’d had enough trouble finding Niels and Poul, but once this story got out—and there was no way he could stop that from happening—even condemned men wouldn’t be interested. A pardon was no good to a dead man, and with the sound of Niels’ and Poul’s screaming themselves to death still echoing in his skull, Rasmus wouldn’t blame them for preferring an easier death at the hands of the executioner.

  He couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. The dive gear had been redesigned after consultation with the Morton brothers, and they’d appeared quite happy to use them if they were made to their specifications. Niels and Poul hadn’t had any trouble during their training dives, and the divers working in the Trave River were using similar equipment with no problems.

  Rasmus could be sure of only one thing. The tolls commission was not going to be happy with his failure to salvage the cargo of the Blauwe Duif.

  * * *

  Oluf and his fellow boatmen heard about the accident, and how the divers had come to the surface screaming in pain. It only went to reinforce their belief that the dive suits were killers. If anybody had bothered to ask them though, they might have been able to supply a clue to what happened to Niels and Poul. They didn’t know much about diving, but if they’d been prompted, some of them might have mentioned that first discussion with Al and Sam Morton about nitrogen and nitrogen buildup. Instead, the new dive suits were locked away in a storeroom deep in the bowls of Kronborg Castle and the whole messy episode was quietly consigned to history.

  Prison Break

  Walter Hunt

  1

  Miolans, Savoy

  Phillippe de la Mothe-Haudencourt often found himself reflecting on his own life and upon the twists and turns he had experienced. It would have been different if the Ring of Fire had not interfered with what—once upon a time—had been a promising courtier’s career. But that was a matter of history now: at least five years’ remove, and given the rate of change that the Ring and the up-timers had brought, five years was an eternity.

  He had made his choice, attaching himself to the army of Henri Tour d’Auvergne, now Marshal Turenne, and he had accepted the responsibility for staying behind in Lyon so that when Prince Gaston and his entourage arrived, he was there to offer apologies and excuses.

  Now he was in Miolans, the Savoyard prison in the mountains, by order of King Gaston. He had been given a choice: either voluntarily permit himself to be seconded to the insipid Jean-Baptiste LeBarre, the warden of Miolans—or plan to become a resident of one of the several aptly named groups of cells that comprised it.

  It wasn’t much of a choice, but Gaston wasn’t one to offer much of a choice about much of anything.

  That being said, it was still a long way from Paris or Lyon—or Marseilles, for that matter. He could attribute the loss of his career as a courtier to the elevation of the youthful Turenne to command of an army: it was, as the up-timers said, an offer he couldn’t refuse. It had certainly dulled his courtier’s instincts, preventing him from very pragmatically jumping when it was in his best interests to do so. Instead, he patriotically took the fall for Turenne.

  And here he was. But at least, he thought, I am not an inmate. The food wasn’t terrible; LeBarre had at least a few books, and the views were magnificent.

  They were especially handsome when viewed from the lookout tower on the north side of the prison-fortress. It was one of his favorite places: far from the prison cells, far from LeBarre, and—in his poetic ex-courtier’s imagination—a place that gave at least the illusion of freedom.

  As he looked out across the vista, he heard a heavy tread on the stone steps. He turned, straightening his sleeves and giving the slightest adjustment to his belt, and presently a rumpled figure appeared at the top of the stairs. The other man looked exhausted, as if the climb had been far too much for him. He did not speak, but rather gave a weak sort of wave and stumbled to a stone bench. He leaned back, his arms splayed out.

  De la Mothe tried, and probably failed, to suppress a smile as he said, “you must be Dottore Baldaccio.”

  After a moment, the other man seemed to gather himself. He leaned forward, hands on knees, panting, then looked up.

  “You are Monsieur de la Mothe, I take it.”

  “At your service.”

  “What in the name of the Lord God, the Blessed Virgin, and all of the saints of Heaven convinced you to arrange our conversation up here? I nearly suffered a fit of apoplexy with those thrice-damned stairs.”

  “Perhaps your humors are out of balance, monsieur Dottore.”

  Baldaccio scowled at him owlishly. “My humors are just fine, monsieur, and they are not in any case subject for discussion.”

  “As you wish. To answer your question: this is a beautiful setting; it is far from the prison and prying eyes and ears. Your letter indicated that circumspection was the order of the day, and I was uncertain whether that extended to the warden. So—” He extended his hands, mock-theatrically, as if to indicate that there was no need to finish the sentence.

  “The warden? You mean that capatosta LeBarre.”

  “Yes.” The Italian word sounded like an insult; if so, it was undoubtedly apt.

  “You are quite correct, Monsieur de la Mothe,” Baldaccio said. He seemed to have recovered at least some of his breath, and his aplomb. “As my letter said, this is a matter most secret.”

  “Since it is the first I have heard from anyone of authority in some time, I am eager to hear what you would have of me.”

  “In a few days a prisoner will be transferred to Miolans. This is a very special, and very secret, prisoner. He will require special handling.”

  “Torture is not my province, Doctor.”

  “Torture? Oh, no, monsieur, you misconstrue my meaning entirely. If it was simply a matter of putting this prisoner to the question—whatever question—there are plenty of people down below who are more than adequate to the task.”

  “I completely agree.”

  “Yes. Well then. Let me be more clear. The prisoner is not to be harmed: indeed, he is to be most attentively cared for. It was thought that you were ideal for the task.”

  “I am to be…some sort of servant?”

  “Not precisely. It was intended that you be the principal…gaoler, I suppose one might say. The person charged with this prisoner’s care: his interlocutor with the outside. Because no one…” Baldaccio’s voice lowered and he waggled his finger at de la Mothe in a most ungentlemanly way. “No one is to know that he is here. Indeed, no one is to even learn his identity.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It will all be made clear to you. What you must understand now is that this is a duty of supreme importance.” Baldaccio sat up straight, giving the impression that he was of supreme importance—the dispenser of weighty tasks. “I shall be here to examine
the prisoner and certify that he is in good health—and thereafter he shall be in your care.”

  “I see.” De la Mothe did not see, but could also discern that no more was to be gotten from this buffoon. “How long am I to…take care…of this prisoner?”

  “I suppose,” Baldaccio answered, “it depends on how long he lives.”

  * * *

  Baldaccio made himself at home in Miolans for the next two days, engaging in regular banter with the warden. The two of them made quite a pair; de la Mothe, who was also present at the dinner-table, watched them as they each so obviously tried to have mirth at the other’s expense, missing that it was being done in return. It was very much like a low-quality, low-priced play that could not last a night in Paris …but it was all the entertainment that was to be had.

  On the afternoon of the third day a carriage arrived, coming eastward from the direction of Lyon. It was escorted by four hard-faced men on horseback, who cleared everyone out of the courtyard before permitting the carriage door to be opened. De la Mothe viewed the scene from an upper story; one of the guards noticed him and began to raise his musket, but the leader waved him off, pointing to de la Mothe and then to his own nose, an obvious reference to de la Mothe’s most obvious facial feature. In another circumstance it was the sort of thing that gentlemen fought duels over—but not now or here. De la Mothe congratulated himself for not having flinched when the musket was first raised, nor turning his head away from the scene.

  Finally the guards were satisfied that there were no other observers. The leader opened the carriage door and assisted someone to descend. The prisoner—for such he was: de la Mothe could hear the clink of chains as he stepped down onto the dirt—was heavily cloaked, so that no indication of his identity was visible. In quick order he was taken by two guards and hustled into one of the side-buildings, rather than the main entrance.

  Clearly this had all been planned in advance by someone who knew the prison well.