The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson by Stephenson Neal

Author:Stephenson, Neal [Stephenson, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0100-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson

They had been ignored, for a time, by those who had taken the ship—which made perfect sense once Eliza understood that their intention was to take the entire vessel. But now that Météore was under way, albeit slowly, English marines had begun to pound desultorily on the door of the cabin. Hammers and prybars were mined from tool-lockers. Splinters began to fly out of the wall—rather than waste effort on the barricaded door, they were simply smashing their way through a bulkhead.

Such was the noise that Eliza might almost have overlooked the sudden arrival of the immense one-armed man in her cabin. Almost; for he entered through a window, swinging in on the end of a rope, and a chunk of glass hit her in the ear. And the maidservant must have seen him hurtling toward the glass, for she began screaming an instant before the implosion, and kept it up for a few moments after; long enough for the intruder to catch her about the waist by his one proper arm, pick her up, and throw her out of the ship. In the end, the scream was terminated only by her impact with the water. A few seconds later it resumed, sounding a bit gurgly. The large man had big pale blue eyes and seemed distracted; so much to take in, so many things to do. He looked around the cabin, making a quick count of the number of women who had not yet been thrown out (three). He turned and looked back at the ruined window. It was partly blocked by a skein of crazed glass, shredded wood, and caulking, which had complicated the defenestration of the maidservant. The man shrugged and one of his arms tripled in length. For it had been severed below the elbow and replaced with a three-part flail, segments made of some sort of dark, heavy-looking wood, bound and capped with iron, and joined one to the next by short segments of chain.

He turned toward the window, judged the distance, and went into a curious shrugging and shivering movement that propagated down the length of the flail and sent its distal segment ripping through what was left of the window-frame like chainshot launched from a cannon. That and a few kicks sufficed to make a clean rectangular aperture through which he presently hurled a screaming Nicole.

Before he could pursue this wench-flinging project any further, he was distracted by the rude irruption into the cabin of a man’s arm. The English boarders had made a hole, and one of them was reaching in to see what he might grab. At the top of his list was the brass bolt holding the cabin door closed.

The ramshackle and skeletal arm of the flail rattled across the cabin, a strangely unfolding train of dire consequences, and struck the new intruder round about the elbow with a splintery sort of noise. The arm was withdrawn, leaving a dark cavity through which the one-armed man flung a dagger that had appeared in his hand from nowhere.

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