Drowned Wednesday by Garth Nix Read Free Book Online Page A

‘Shiver!’ and ‘We’re doomed!’
    Sunscorch managed to drag several Denizens back and get them to take the line from the chest. But even he wasn’t able to get the crew to do anything about retrieving the boat. As it began to drift away, he jumped to the ship’s side himself, reaching back to help Arthur get hold of the netting.
    ‘Never lost salvage nor a passenger,’ he muttered. ‘No thanks to the scum of the sea I have to sail with. Mister Concort! Mister Concort! There’s a boat adrift!
    ‘Concort’s the First Mate,’ he confided to Arthur as they climbed the side. ‘Amiable, but hen-witted. Like most of this lot he was with the Moth when it was a counting house. Chief Clerk. You’d think after several thousand years at sea he’d have learned . . . but I’m misspeaking meself. Up you go!’
    Arthur was pushed up and over the rail. He fell onto the deck, unable to get his bad leg in place in time. Before he could get up himself, Sunscorch gripped him under each elbow and yanked him upright, shouting at the same time.
    ‘Ichabod! Ichabod! Take our passenger to the Captain! And get him a blanket!’
    A thin, non-tattooed Denizen neatly dressed in a blue waistcoat and an almost white shirt stepped out of the throng of panicking sailors and bowed slightly to Arthur. He was thinner than most of the other Denizens, and moved very precisely, as if he was following some mysterious dance pattern in his head.
    ‘Please step this way,’ he said, doing an about-turn that was almost a pirouette and would have looked more in keeping on a stage than on the shifting deck of a ship.
    Arthur obediently followed the Denizen, who was presumably Ichabod. Behind him, Sunscorch was yelling and slapping the backs of heads.
    ‘Port watch aloft! Prepare to make sail! Starboard watch to the guns and boarding stations!’
    ‘Very noisy, these sailors,’ said Ichabod. ‘Mind your head.’
    The Denizen ducked as he stepped through a narrow doorway. Though Arthur was considerably shorter, he had to bend his head down too. They were in a short, dark, narrow corridor with a very low ceiling.
    ‘Aren’t you a sailor?’ asked Arthur.
    ‘I’m the Captain’s Steward,’ replied Ichabod severely. ‘I was his gentleman’s gentleman when we were ashore.’
    ‘His what?’
    ‘What is sometimes called a valet,’ replied Ichabod as he opened the door at the other end, only a few yards away. The Denizen stepped through, with Arthur at his heels.
    The room beyond the door was not what Arthur expected. It was far too big to be inside the ship, for a start: a huge, whitewashed space at least eighty feet long and sixty feet wide, with a decorated plaster ceiling twenty feet above, complete with a fifty-candle chandelier of cut crystal in the middle.
    There was a mahogany desk right in the middle of the room with a green-shaded gas lantern on it, and a long row of glass-topped display cases all along one wall, each illuminated by its own gently hissing gaslight. In the far corner, there was a curtained four-poster bed with a blanket box at its foot, a standing screen painted with a nautical scene, and a large oak-panelled wardrobe with mirrored doors.
    It was also absolutely quiet and completely stable. All the noise of the crew and the sea had vanished as soon as the door was shut behind Arthur, as had the constant roll and sway of the deck.
    ‘How —’
    Ichabod knew what Arthur was asking before the boy even got the question out.
    ‘This is one of the original rooms. When the Deluge came and we had to turn the counting house into a ship, this room refused to transform to something more useful, like a gun deck. Eventually Doctor Scamandros managed to connect it to the aft passageway, but it isn’t really in the ship.’
    ‘Where is it, then?’
    ‘We’re not entirely sure. Probably not where it used to be, since the old counting house site is well submerged. The Captain thinks that this room must have been personally