17

Log a Log Kennebec's river galleon, which happened to also be called Kennebec, docked on a bank in the River Moss, dropped anchor, and tied its sails. The sun had set.

Fentress stood on the deck with her paws bound behind her back with rope, alongside Sully and Bristol, similarly bound. The waterfront rippled in the moonlight, a snaky white line weaving out of a lacquered surface. Stillness and chill pervaded the air. The sky was starless.

One by one, Kennebec's crew dragged the slavebeasts from belowdecks, each bound as well. They were as invisible in the open air as they were in the hull, stinted creatures, huddling together as well they could.

Kennebec paced the deck, his face emblazoned by a lantern. He took quick count of the slaves. "That's all. Are they ready?"

A shrew beside him nodded. Kennebec cleared his throat and handed the lantern to a lackey. "It's time for a delivery," he said. "Any volunteers?"

Silence. Kennebec laughed. Fentress didn't get it.

"That's fine, I've somebeast in mind for today's delivery already. 'Tis a special occasion. I've collected all the little lost Redwallers, and I'll be ready to pick them up and serve them back to Lady Alagadda soon. Which, of course, will be an excellent bargaining chip in our future, longterm relationship as mutual beneficiaries of her conquest. Considering my none-too-insignificant paw in the matter. But this boon of mine will prove my continued loyalty and thus solidify permanent prospects into the future.

"And thus, as I shall offer up the denizens of Redwall as tribute to a new ally, I shall commemorate the momentous event with a tribute to an old ally."

Old ally? What did that mean? Kennebec was going around backstabbing all the creatures of Mossflower on somebeast's order other than Alagadda? Fentress didn't know if she could handle any more villains crammed into this potboiler. She hoped he was simply using a figure of speech, his highfalutin dialogue was primed for one. But nobeast other than Kennebec seemed amused as he pranced across the deck, spilling semi-comprehensible sentence after semi-comprehensible sentence. In fact, the slavebeasts had tuned his words out entirely, retreating to a dim glaze behind their irises.

"And to honor such an old ally, what better sacrifice should there be but an old enemy?" said Kennebec. "Indeed, the oldest one I have left living. 'Twill be a commemoration of a new age, a new era. Thus, after such a long, long time of keeping our dear friend Luce Penobscot, daughter of my predecessor Log a Log Penobscot, as my cherished guest upon this fine vessel, I'm afraid 'tis time to part ways."

He paused for effect and the void was instantly filled by Luce flinging herself onto the deck in what Fentress first thought was a fit of sobbing until she realized it was actually a fit of fury. Luce pounded her tiny fists against the wood, nearly shrieking at Kennebec:

"For this? You kept me all this time for THIS? That's it? Nothing more? You'll throw me to that fat snake same as you threw literally everybeast else looked at you funny? I expected a little more CREATIVITY than that from you, Kennebec! I expect nothing else from you but creativity, and now you've lost even that?"

Kennebec grinned. "On the contrary, milady," he said with a bow, "I do believe this is the most creative way to punish you of all."

Luce hurled herself at him, wobbling on her paws and moving at an angle that wouldn't have collided with him even if she had not been restrained immediately by a pair of burly shrews who looked indistinguishable from the two Bristol had taken out belowdecks.

Fentress turned to Sully and whispered, "What do you think he's talking about?"

"I dunno what," said Sully, "'Cept he plans to kill her. I ain't plannin' on lettin' that happen, you?"

"No," said Fentress. She made sure nobeast was listening and leaned closer. "I still have the knife I picked off that guard. It's hidden in my habit. I'll give you a signal when it's time."

Sully nodded. "Should we try an' get Bristol to help? An' the others?"

The hare in question stood by in stolid silence, breathing heavily. "I think Bristol'll help when the time comes," said Fentress. "The others I'm not sure. Wait—quiet."

A group of Guosim, the previous guard Trego among them, herded them and the other slaves to one side of the ship. A few of the younger ones had started to wail, and Luce's furious shouts could still be heard although she had been taken who knew where. As an otter, Fentress was a head taller than every other beast on the ship, but in the massive glut of creatures seething and writhing across the deck in a thousand infinitesimal motions, spotting her was impossible. She could, however, make out Kennebec's floppy red hat.

"Down the ladder, down ye go," said Kennebec. "Down ye go, down ye go."

One by one the shrews and the slaves descended the rope ladder to the riverbank, with a few intrepid crewbeasts leaping from the side and landing in the sand with a plop. Fentress, Sully, and Bristol were among the last to descend, pushed by Trego and a few others. Trego's face was wan with care and anxiety; at one point he whispered something to Fentress that might have been "sorry."

Descending the ladder was difficult with her paws bound, and posed the question of how she would draw the knife when she needed. She had tried to wiggle her wrists against the rope and slowly loosen it, but sailors—and Guosim in particular—were spectacular at knot-tying. It would take hours of constant kneading to even begin to extricate herself, and by that time her wrists would be worn raw.

On the bank, the shrews ushered them through a small copse of uneven terrain, through which many of the slaves tripped and slipped and were stricken or yelled at by the guards. This was the first time Fentress had the chance to observe Kennebec's underlings in any detail. She noticed that while some of them bullied the slaves with whips and rods, others, mostly stinted, nervous-looking ones like Trego, would allow a stumble to go uncriticized, and a rare few, after looking around to see if anybeast was watching, even held out a paw to help the fallen creature back up.

The copse opened onto a black, inky lagoon. The lagoon was almost perfectly round, surrounded by a ring of trees, and on its unguent surface danced the moon like an empty disk of oblivion, a hole in the earth itself. Kennebec strode to the fore of the cavalcade and called those at his back to halt.

"Salutations, O Great Lord of this realm," he said.

The lagoon peered back.

Kennebec did not repeat himself, but he did not move from his spot at the rim of the lagoon, frozen in a perpetual half-bow, his hat doffed. The other shrews did not speak. The only sounds came from Luce, who had not stopped struggling against her captors, and a few miscellaneous squeaks from the littler slaves.

Fentress leaned close to Sully. "How well can you move your paws?"

"Not well. Why?"

"The dagger in my habit. I need you to take it and try to cut my binds. If we work together maybe we can manage it."

"I dunno," said Sully. "I can hardly even budge my fingers. I'll just drop it, an' then where'll we be?"

She was right. Fentress racked her brains for another solution.

Kennebec had not moved after a minute but the surface of the lagoon began to change. The change was almost imperceptible at first. The image of the moon reflected on the lagoon contorted, twisted, became elliptical, and then not a regular shape at all, undulating, like gelatin.

The water in the center of the lagoon bulged. The tensile grip of the liquid held for a moment before bursting and parting ways as something massive, shimmering, and black rose into the air. Fentress forgot about her bind for a moment as she stood transfixed in awe of the thing emerging out of the abyss. It only continued to rise, unfolding as a long, slender and yet immense coil, with piercing yellow eyes set into an angular, fanged face.

It was a serpent.

"Ugh," said Sully, apparently unfazed, "Just what we need, more reptiles."

"It… this… this is Kennebec's ally?" said Fentress. "How did he… how did he befriend such a creature?"

"By sacrificin' young maidens, o'course," said Sully. "If I 'twere a snake, I'd not mind my next meal bein' served up t'me on a silver platter."

Before Fentress could rebut, the serpent unhinged its jaw and spoke.

"I wasssss… ssssslumbering…"

Kennebec shifted to another ridiculous pose of ingratiation. Was a creature's body even supposed to bow so low? "Indeed, O Exalted One. But I happen to know this is your preferred time to take meal, and I have brought a choice morsel as a token of gratitude for your continued approval of my wardenship over your lands during your restful seasons—"

And he launched into a speech, which the serpent seemed to actually listen to. Fentress found that even more ridiculous than Kennebec's audacity at speaking so much in the presence of something so terrifying. The foppish knave must have had at least some smidgen of the old Guosim gusto that so imbued their culture; he would not have had so many followers had he not.

She glanced askance and noticed Bristol on the ground. Nudging Sully, she moved to help the hare stand back up until she realized that she had not fallen, but had rather curled into a peculiar position. Her paws, which were bound behind her back, she slipped underneath her legs and footpaws, contorting herself somewhat painfully but with limber motions until her paws were in front of her. She then held the binding to her mouth and began to gnaw.

Fentress glanced around, but almost all of the slaves and shrew guards were watching the serpent.

"Bristol," Fentress whispered. "Bristol. How long until you can chew through your binds?"

"Gmph gnaw glomph," said Bristol. She did not look up, a determined glint in her eye.

The serpent spoke again, its mellifluous voice cutting across the clearing. "Enough… I'll hear no more of ssssssuch aimlesssssss prattle… Deliver me ssssusssstenance as you have done ssssso oft before… And as sssuch is our agreement…"

"Of course, of course, of course," said Kennebec, motioning at his lackeys. "Bring the sacrifice at once."

A bustle arose in the crowd. Luce continued shouting and snarling, undeterred by the presence of the serpent.

Bristol had made progress on her binds. Strands of twine were stuck in her whiskers. Fentress moved between her and the shrew guards to prevent them from seeing the hare, as she seemed to have no mind for surreptitiousness.

One of the shrews saw her anyway. "'Ey, stop that, yew ain't s'posed t'be doin' that!" He started moving toward Bristol.

Fentress lashed out and cracked him on the forehead with the hard part of her skull. The shrew clapped his paws to his dome and recoiled into the shrew behind him, howling. Fentress herself squinted her eyes and grimaced in pain.

The shrew guards began to cotton to what was going on and a larger and larger crowd, albeit mostly slaves, watched them. Actually, they were watching Fentress, completely ignoring Bristol as she gnawed deeper and deeper into her bindings. Fentress winced again, seeing double, her skull aching.

"We gotta move, Fen," said Sully.

"Never, never!" screamed Luce from afar. A secondary commotion had started nearer to the front of the crowd, and many of the creatures gathered around were unsure whether Luce or Fentress were more worthy of observation, causing a few to oscillate their heads wildly like living corkscrews.

Another guard seized Fentress's arm. "Yew'll pay fer that, yew will!" he snarled, brandishing a switch.

Sully shouted and plowed into the guard, tackling him.

Immediately a third guard came for Fentress. Her vision coalesced just enough that she could see it was Trego, the cowardly shrew who had been the slaves's guard when she first awoke on Kennebec's ship. Even now Trego moved with reluctance, casting unsure glances to his side to see if any of his more able companions might deal with the issue first, but the majority of the guards were running to the front of the crowd. Luce's shouts grew more feral.

"Trego," hissed Fentress, and the name itself was enough to stop him in his tracks. "Trego, cut my binds. You're no scoundrel—you can't believe in what Kennebec has doing here. Don't you remember your fealty to the previous Log a Log?"

Trego stared at her, dumbfounded.

"Luce is the daughter of the old Log a Log, isn't she? And you'll allow this murderous usurper to give her to this serpent? Cut my binds, Trego, cut them!"

"I can't…" Trego shook his head vehemently.

Fentress leaned in, placing her face a whisker's-breadth away from his; he was too petrified to recoil. "You can. And you will, or else you'll lose any shred of redemption your pitiful form has managed to retain all this time. Cut the binds!"

Trego clasped his paws to his ears and whined. "Okay, okay, I'll do it! I'll do it!"

Fentress turned and held her wrists to him. He started to cut, clumsily, slipping and nicking her skin more than once, but not enough to draw blood. Each time his paw trembled a little too much, he uttered a plaintive and warbling apology only to slip again moments later.

When he had gotten the rope down to the last few threads Fentress saved him some trouble and pulled the binds apart herself, her arms not yet stiff from bondage. Trego immediately left her mind; he might have turned tail and fled the scene for all she knew. Her first thought was for Sully. The squirrel had disappeared in the ruckus, lost in a wash of heads and bodies. Fentress resisted the urge to look for her; Sully could handle herself. Bristol too had disappeared, everything was chaos, creatures were running back and forth frantically. Fentress started to run, too.

She ran toward the lagoon, trying to place Luce's shouting out of the cacophony of voices but hearing nothing. She could make out what sounded like Kennebec orating. She drew the dagger she had stashed in her habit and held it, ready to stab.

Pushing past a pair of startled slaves she broke out of the mass of bodies onto the bank of the lagoon.

A tableau of creatures awaited her. First and foremost, making up the center of the panoply, was the serpent, black and placid in the lagoon, watching with its yellow eyes but making no motion to strike or else enter the fracas. Arranged on either side of it were seven or eight others. The most obvious was Kennebec, in his red attire, lying half-propped on one shoulder, his other arm clutched to his chest. His head had tilted back in a dramatic display of suffering. Opposite him was Luce, restrained by two shrew guards, lunging at Kennebec in ardent furor, although a third shrew was raising a whip to beat her. On the ground in the sand was a small dagger not unlike the one Fentress held in her paw, coated in a sheen of blood. The remaining figures on the tableau were also guards, arranged around Kennebec and offering assistance.

Luce must have taken the dagger from the other shrew that Bristol had slain, and managed to strike at Kennebec. Kennebec cried:

"Defend me, friends, I am but hurt!"

Fentress rushed at him with the dagger. One of his aides saw her coming and lashed out at her with a light, wooden spear, which she turned to avoid, her paws skidding in the smooth sand.

"I am… disssspleassssed with your sssstewardsssship…" said the serpent.

"O Mirthful Lord," said Kennebec, "'Tis in the nature of beasts to rebel 'gainst the paw which delivers unto them obedience. But I shall snuff out this pestilence—"

Fentress and the guard who had taken up a fight with her (the others preoccupied either with Luce or Kennebec) began to circle a makeshift arena in the sand. Fentress had never fought anybeast before. Not to mention all she had was a dagger and the spindly, wily-looking shrew in front of her had a spear. Fentress couldn't know for sure if that was a bad matchup, but something gave her a pretty strong idea. (Plus if she did manage to take down this first opponent, there were several more waiting for her in the immediate vicinity.)

She watched the flitting spear-point, waiting for the slightest movement. If she lunged, she'd be impaled, but if she could—the spear shot forward. She swung to the left as the shaft bored past her, the shrew behind it making an exaggerated grunt as he gored thin air. She went at his exposed form with the dagger but he shot out a paw and grappled with her wrist. He apparently dropped the spear because his other paw hooked her in the jaw. Her brain rattled but she tangoed with him in the sand, his weight leaning against her, forcing her down, blood spilling from her teeth. She hit the ground and the bulk of shrew landed on top of her. A mouthful of acrid fur filled her sagging jaw. Not knowing what exactly she was biting, she clenched her fangs, enough to draw blood herself. The shrew reared back screaming, holding his wounded neck from which blood sprayed in a hideous plume. Rage consumed his eyes and he fell upon her, but as he fell she thrust the dagger up and stabbed him in the stomach.

The dead weight toppled onto her, pinning her to the ground. One of Luce's captors, the one flogging her with the switch, realized what was amiss and ran to aid his companion.

"Yew slew 'im," the shrew cried in disbelief. "Me good mate Rabun, an' yew slew 'im!" He raised the switch to strike her as she tried unsuccessfully to wriggle from underneath good mate Rabun's lifeless corpse. She braced herself for the blow.

It did not come. Instead, Bristol Isabella Rensselaer-LaBette leapt from the fracas and lashed at the shrew with an already-bloodied cutlass she must have plucked from some other unfortunate soul's cold paw. The switch-bearing shrew gaped down at his suddenly-open gut before dropping to the ground.

"BLOOD N' VINEGAR N' EULALIA N' ALL THAT ROT," screeched Bristol as she set upon the two shrews accosting Luce.

Fentress didn't bother to watch the action. She dug into the sand with her paws and forced herself from under the corpse of the creature she had slain. In the days since she had fled Redwall she had wondered what she would feel if and when the time came that she must kill. Perhaps those thoughts had steeled her or perhaps the need to survive had overridden all sentimentalism, because her only thought toward the shrew she had slain (she even knew his name, Rabun) was that she sure wished he'd had the courtesy to fall someplace else in his dying moments. Fortunately, the ground beneath her was pliable and she was svelte enough to weasel her way from underneath the corpulent bulk.

By the time she had extricated herself, Luce's two guards lay slain on the sand and Luce herself stumbled over the ground blindly, groping her way around.

Bristol had moved for Kennebec and was currently engaged with his three remaining guards. They faced her cautiously, two brandishing spears and the third a rapier, forming a close-knit wall between Bristol and Kennebec. Bristol had slowed in her fury, if only to observe the formation, studying it for weaknesses. She may have been reckless, but not ill-trained.

Fentress seized the second dagger—the one with which Luce had stabbed Kennebec—and formed up alongside Bristol.

"I'm with you," she said to the hare. "I'm by your side!"

Bristol did not even glance at her, did not even notice her. Her eyes misted with a crimson tinge. Fentress took a slight step aside, wary of the hare's demeanor, wondering if perhaps she should allow Bristol to handle things on her own. But she couldn't leave a friend, especially outnumbered as she was—and Guosim shrews weren't known for being slouches in a brawl. Baring both daggers, she set herself to her purpose.

Before she could do anything, however, the slow, mellifluous voice of the serpent rang out above the din of battle.

"Ssssssstop thisssssss affront to my ssssssenssssessss!"

Fentress addressed the serpent. "Who even are you?"

"I am lord of thisssss realm, worthlesssss creature… You shall addressssss me as ssssuch…"

"I've never even heard of you!" Fentress said. "Some lord, if nobeast even knows your name!"

In a dim part of her mind she figured riling up the serpent might be a bad idea. But another part of her mind thought: the more chaos thrown into the situation, the more madness, the better. This entire time she had been strung along a carefully-constructed series of events, led by an array of well-planning and devious villains. Kennebec expected a fight, expected a rebellion. That was why he refused to even bind his subjects when they were on his ship, why he had earlier attempted to taunt her to a duel. Because he had planned. His crew had stopped them the second they tried to escape; no doubt he had some concealed weapon to strike her down with had she indeed lunged at him as he expected. And she would not put it past him to have more tricks, more schemes. Besides, this haughty serpent, who had come seemingly out of nowhere and yet presided over the events like a deity, had made her only angrier.

"My name," said the serpent. "My name isss one whissspered throughout my realm with fear and ressspect… All know it and tremble…"

"Nope!" said Fentress. "Never even heard of ya. Guess your warden here hasn't been doing his job right after all?" She indicated Kennebec, whose eyes widened, aghast. "Seems to me a good warden would make sure your name was known above all, but you see, the only name I've been hearing lately is Kennebec, Kennebec, Kennebec."

The serpent's narrow eyes actually seemed to widen for a moment with utter indignation. "Thissss… Thissss cannot be!"

"Oh, verily," said Kennebec. "It is not at all as this lowly slave girl speaks. She lies willfully and insolently as a pitiful strategic maneuver. Your name is most well known of all, O Lord."

The head of the massive serpent pointed from Kennebec to Fentress, and back to Kennebec, before resting finally on Fentress. "Thissss inssssolence… It mussssst then be… punisssshed…"

Without any indication, the serpent lunged at Fentress, baring its ivory fangs.