Someone was coming. A black beast hurtled toward them out of the deep salt blue of the sea, a shadow in the shape of a tremendous sea horse.
Ajax Oddson’s voice filled every nook and cranny of Mumkeep Reef, gurgling happily, like children do when they try to pass messages back and worth under water.
“I say! What do I see in that sea? Why, it’s two Derbymen about to obey my decree! It’s that time again!”
Far beneath the surface of the Obstreperous Ocean, purple fireworks erupted into a shower of flame, spelling out:
Everyone Loves A Duel!
CHAPTER XII
A SCHOOL OF SATURDAYS
In Which September Turns into a Bear, Saturday Swims Up the Time Stream, a Pirate Loses His Temper, and an Army of Undead Princesses Is Summoned
The shadow sea horse drew closer. Its warlike snout pierced the water. Its spine curved down like the neck of a violin. It was made for battle. It was sure and easy and vicious.
And it was not a sea horse.
When its bony black tail ran aground on a crag of Mumkeep Reef, sending a school of scarlet fish scattering in all directions, September saw right through into the soul of the sea horse, which contained a small man with a lumpy face and a glorious cravat. The sea horse’s eyes were not eyes, but two glass bubbles. Its snout was not a snout but a cruel cannon. Its tail was not a tail, but a rudder. Cutty Soames, Captain of the Coblynows, spun the wheel of a submarine made of shadows, and he looked quite beside himself with wrath.
A porthole opened up in the water just above them, growing slowly like a soap bubble until it popped—leaving a bolted ring of brass hanging in the sea. A pane of glass separated the Obstreperous Ocean from the Dueling Officiant: a grinning young lady all in blue, wearing silken indigo trousers and turquoise opera gloves and sapphire-colored boots with crisscrossed icicle laces all the way to the knee. She smirked at September and buttoned her long, beautiful sky-colored coat, trimmed in wild, woolly fur from some impossible, blueberry-colored sheep. Her long, azure hair lay over her shoulders in a serene, glossy style, topped off with a furry cobalt cap with an ice-spike like old pictures of the Kaiser. She chomped on the end of her churchwarden pipe, and blew a great pyramid of smoke into their faces, only it blew apart when it hit the porthole glass, so it did not quite pull off the devil-may-care effect the Blue Wind had hoped for.
“Girl, ho!” the Blue Wind called.
“Wind, ho!” September answered happily. She did not trust the Blue Wind any further than a rabbit trusts an owl, but she had missed her, all the same.
“HALT!” screamed Hugger-Muggery. Many more than four Pieces of Eight fired themselves out of their glass jars all over Mumkeep Reef. The water churned as its tentacled army took flight. “Yes, you! You, Cutty Soames! Cutty Crudheart! Soames, the Slime of the Sea! Captain of the Courageless Cockroaches of Snotropolis!”
The Blue Wind and Sepia Siphuncle broke into wild applause. The Blue Wind whistled through her teeth.
“Top-shelf stuff!” the cuttlefish hollered. “No one really straps a good insult on these days, it shocks the matinee crowds! Brava!”