Fire over Swallowhaven Read Online Free Page B

wing—the result, Trundle guessed, of having been trodden on by his master in the heat of their fight in the verminous back alleys of Rathanger, on the island of Drune.
    “Let’s give ’em a fright,” shouted Esmeralda at the tiller, her eyes shining. The Thief in the Night swooped down low over the deck of the Iron Pig, sending many a pirate diving for cover and making even Razorback and the raven duck to avoid having their heads knocked off.
    “Shut your beak, you mangy magpie!” Trundle yelled down at the raven as they swept past.
    “Blister me tripes!” bellowed Razorback. “It is them! We searched the seven hundred skies of theSundered Lands, and they were here all the time!” He let out a laugh like a goose being strangled. “Fortune favors the fiendish, ye stouthearted stinkbugs! Twenty golden sunders for the man who captures them alive!”
    This was followed moments later by a deafening volley of musket and pistol shot. The decks of the Iron Pig vanished in a fog of thick gray smoke. Trundle ducked and winced as musket balls went whistling past his ears. He heard the pop and crack of balls striking the skyboat’s hull and searing through the sails.
    But Esmeralda and Jack were a crack sailing team, and while Trundle held on, whooping and hollering with excitement, they navigated the Thief in the Night down the full length of the Iron Pig , zigzagging in and out of the windship’s masts and sending the crew leaping for their lives in all directions. They were flying so low that at one point Trundle was even able to give one pirate rat a hefty thwack around the ear with the copper tube.

    “Ye lubbers!” roared a voice through the smoke. “Ye bowlegged sons of cuttlefish! Blow ’em out of the sky! Must I do everything myself, blast yer eyes?”
    The Thief in the Night surged upward as it neared the high poop deck, its keel scraping wood as it only just cleared the rail. And in the moment before they went scudding off, Trundle saw for the first time the frightful form of the leader of all the pirates of the Sundered Lands—the terrible and tremendous Captain Grizzletusk.
    A huge and scarred hog he was, with a fearsome frowning brow and eyes as red and ferocious as blazing furnaces. His face was crisscrossed with scars, and his jaw was twisted so that his hideous tusks jutted up crookedly, like the shards of a broken bottle. His right hand was missing, and in its place Trundle saw a great five-barreled pistol sticking out from his sleeve, as though it were attached to the stump of his arm. He wore a leather belt and had two leather bandoliersstretched over his mountainous chest, and into these were thrust swords and daggers and pistols and axes and choppers and maces and clubs and cudgels, so that he looked like an entire armory on two thickset legs.
    He didn’t even flinch as the Thief in the Night grazed past his head. Trundle saw him draw a massive pistol with his good hand. He aimed at them with both arms, and a moment later, six tremendous explosions sounded as the ordinary pistol and the five-barreled one went off at the same time. Trundle felt the heat of a musket ball singe his prickles as Captain Grizzletusk vanished into a cloud of white smoke.
    “Missed, you pitiful piglet,” Esmeralda shouted back. “Missed by a mile!”
    A split second later, it seemed to Trundle that the whole world was exploding around his ears.
    “Oops!” shrieked Esmeralda as cannonballs came flying at them from all directions. In her excitement over getting clear of the Iron Pig, she had forgottenthat she was steering them right between two columns of heavily armed and murderous pirate windships.

    It seemed a great pity to Trundle, as red-hot cannonballs rocketed to and fro around him, that he wouldn’t survive to tell her exactly what he thought of her navigating skills.

“H ang on everybody!” yelled Esmeralda’s voice through the roaring of the guns and the hiss of the crisscrossing cannonballs and the