The Devil and the Dark Water

by Stuart Turton

  But every land was the same. Strength was the only currency of merit, and power was the only goal. Kindness, compassion, and empathy were trampled, exploited as weakness.

  Then he’d met Sammy.

  Here was a commoner, born with nothing, who’d upended the natural order by virtue of his cleverness. In pursuit of his goal, he’d accuse a noble as readily as a peasant. Here was somebody for whom the old rules didn’t apply. Through Sammy, Arent saw the world he aspired to, like a distant land spied through a smudged glass. Sammy was what Arent had left home to find, but their friendship would never allow him to admit it. He’d never hear the end of it.

  “This is the life I chose.” He shrugged, his tone ending the conversation.

  Sammy gave in with a sigh, then collected a pail from a peg. A long piece of rope was tied to the handle, and he cast the pail over the side of the ship into the ocean before dragging it back up, water sloshing out. The pails were normally used for washing clothes or cooling wood that was threatening to warp, but he upended it over his head, revealing pink skin behind the filth.

  Twice more he cast the pail over the side, washing his arms and legs, then stripping off his shirt to scrub his scrawny body. It was a week since he’d last eaten more than a fist’s worth of food, a fact screamed by every rib now on display in his chest.

  When he was bathed, he adjusted his sodden clothing and smoothed his breeches, even drawing his fingers through his oily, tangled hair.

  Arent watched him wordlessly. From any other man, this would seem pointless vanity, but Sammy was renowned for his beautiful comportment as much as his cleverness. He dressed, danced, and dined exactingly, his manners exquisite in all things. If that pride still burned within him, then he hadn’t given up hope.

  “How do I look?” asked Sammy, turning on the spot.

  “Like you spent the night with an ox.”

  “I didn’t want your mother to be the only one.”

  Arent laughed and gave Sammy the sleeping draught from the pouch at his hip. “This is from Sara Wessel,” he said. “It will help you sleep. Hopefully, it will make you more comfortable while I work out a way to free you.”

  “This is a wonderful gift,” said Sammy, tearing out the cork to sniff the tincture. “Please, pass along my thanks. I saw her quality on the docks, but this is… I’ve never met a woman to match her.”

  Arent agreed but said nothing for fear of giving himself away. Instead, he handed Sammy a hunk of bread he’d stolen from the galley.

  “Know who’s trying to sink us yet?” he asked.

  “That’s your job, Arent. I’ve been imprisoned in a dark room all day.” He bit into the loaf, savoring the taste. Arent had tried some at dinner. It was hard as a moneylender’s heart, but Sammy looked as though he’d never had anything better.

  “Only difference between today and most other days is that you don’t have good wine and a pipe,” countered Arent.

  Finishing the bread, Sammy linked his arm into his friend’s. “I’ll concede the compliment in the insult,” he said. “Shall we walk? My legs are stiff.”

  As they had a hundred nights before, the bear and sparrow strolled together in amiable silence. They walked across the waist, past the two yawls strapped to the deck, and up the stairs to the quarterdeck. Shadows shifted around them, piles of rope revealing themselves to be sailors curled up on deck, while lurking bodies were exposed as buckets hanging from poles.

  Step by step, Arent wasn’t sure whether he should be laughing at his own jitteriness or swinging punches into the air, just to be safe. He didn’t relax until they arrived on the quarterdeck, where the first mate was tending the sniffling young carpenter beaten by Wyck. Whatever Larme’s words, they seemed to be pouring some iron into the boy’s bones.

  Another staircase brought them to the poop deck, where the animal pens were. Hearing their footsteps on the boards, the sows began grunting and sniffling at the doors, believing they were about to be let out, while the chickens scratched at the wood.

  Arent peered over the railing. The passenger cabins were directly below, candlelight spilling out of their portholes. Only Sara and Creesjie’s were dim, their deadlights closed in case the leper should return in the night.

  “What troubles you?” asked Sammy, noticing his inspection.

  “Sara Wessel saw the leper at her porthole this evening,” replied Arent.

  “The leper from the docks? The one you put your sword through?”

  “His real name was Bosey,” explained Arent, delivering the information that Sara had uncovered about this man’s mysterious bargain with Old Tom and how his tongue had been cut out by Johannes Wyck.

  “Tormented and returning to torment, eh?” said Sammy, who was kneeling on the ground, running his fingertips across the rough planks, searching for any sign of the leper’s passing. “Do you think she imagined it?”

  “No,” replied Arent.

  “Then she didn’t, which raises a rather particular question.” Sammy paused his search. “Well, two actually.” He considered it. “Three,” he corrected himself.

  “Who’s pretending to be the dead man at her porthole?” ventured Arent.

  “That’s one.” Sammy leaped to his feet and peered intently at the dark water below. “It’s a sheer drop with no handholds, so how did he arrive there? And how did he get away once seen?”

  “Well, he didn’t come this way,” said Arent. “I was up here a minute after she screamed. He would have had to run by me to get away.”

  “Could he have hidden in the animal pens?”

  “I’d have seen him through the bars.”

  Sammy ran his hand along the railing. “He would have needed ropes to lower himself down, and he wouldn’t have had time to climb back up, then untie them.”

  “And if he’d dropped into the water, Sara would have heard a splash.”

  Sammy walked toward the mizzenmast, which rose up between the poop deck and quarterdeck, then tugged on the rigging that disappeared over the side of the ship. The ropes were attached to a thick beam that jutted out of the Saardam’s hull.

  “That beam down there is the only place he could have stood, and it’s much too far away from the porthole.” Abruptly, Sammy licked the wood, but his expression suggested it yielded no answers. “Tell me about this Old Tom.”

  “It’s some sort of devil apparently.”

  There was nobody quite like Sammy for a diminishing glare, and the one he threw at Arent could have stripped the bark off a tree.

  “I didn’t say I believed it,” protested Arent, who’d known his entire life what was waiting for him in the dark. As a boy, his father had caught him yawning during one of his sermons, then beat him so severely it was feared he might never wake again. His mother had wept for three days, until his father gathered the servants, dragged her down the staircase, and slapped her back and forth across the great hall, bellowing in righteous fury.

  Her grief represented a lack of faith, he’d said. Arent had been delivered before God to apologize for his heresy in person. If his regret was sincere, he’d be returned. Should he die, then it must surely reveal his lack of devotion. Prayer, not tears, he argued, was the only tonic now.

  Arent had been returned two days later. Devotion had nothing to do with it.

  Most people woke up from something like that with a hole in their memory. They felt like they’d been asleep, they said.

  Arent remembered everything.

  He’d traveled into the afterlife, hollering for help and hearing nothing back. He knew there was no God waiting. No devil. No saints or sinners. There were only people and the stories they told themselves. People gave the heavens a voice so they had something to ask for a better harvest, a healthy child, or a milder winter. God was hope, and mankind needed hope the way it needed warmth, food, and ale.

  But with hope ca
me disappointment.

  The downtrodden yearned for stories to explain their misfortunes, though what they really wanted was somebody to blame for their misery. It was impossible to set fire to the blight that had ruined your crops, but a blight was easily summoned by a witch, at which point any poor woman would do.

  Old Tom wasn’t a devil, thought Arent. He was an old man within kicking distance.

  “My uncle told me Old Tom devastated the Provinces thirty years ago, destroying villages and noble families,” explained Arent. “Apparently, it offers people their heart’s desire in return for terrible favors. It left a strange sign wherever it went—­an eye with a tail. That same mark was on the sail when we set off from Batavia, and it’s also on my wrist,” he said candidly.

  “Your wrist?” Sammy was taken aback. “Why would it be on your wrist?”

  “When I was a boy, I went hunting with my father,” replied Arent. “Three days later, I returned with this scar, and he didn’t return at all, and I don’t know what happened.”

  Sammy blinked at Arent in surprise. “So you got the scar around the same time this Old Tom was splashing its mark across the Provinces?”

  “I think I was the first person to carry it. Or one of them. My uncle wasn’t sure.”

  “Show me,” demanded Sammy, pulling Arent over to a lantern on the mizzenmast. “And tell me everything you know about it.”

  “I don’t know anything, except that I drew this mark on a few doors in a nearby village out of spite,” explained Arent as Sammy inspected it. “I didn’t realize the harm it would do. An old beggar called Old Tom ended up being beaten to death by some scared villagers.”

  “Old Tom?” repeated Sammy. “So this mark got free of you, then spread like a plague wearing your dead beggar’s name. Heaven’s sake, this isn’t just a demon. It’s your demon.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “The worst things often are.”

  Sammy’s small fingers probed Arent’s huge hand, but even with the extra light, there was nothing new to be learned about the scar. It was barely even visible anymore. The problematary didn’t bother to hide his disappointment.

  “You make for a very poor clue,” he chided, releasing Arent’s hand. “Who knows about the scar and the use you put it to?”

  “My grandfather and my uncle. My mother did, but she died not long after I was taken away.”

  “Broken heart?”

  “Pox.”

  “What about Sara Wessel?”

  “My uncle may have told her, but I don’t think so. She hasn’t mentioned it. Otherwise, nobody. My grandfather ordered me to keep it under my tongue. He said the past was poisoned ground and those who lingered there died. I thought he was trying to keep me from thinking about it, but my uncle told me an English witchfinder had been hunting for anybody afflicted by the mark, so they hid me away. I didn’t know that at the time though.”

  Sammy murmured appreciatively. “Your grandfather sounds like a wise man. What do you remember about the day your father disappeared?”

  “Very little. We were a few hours into the woods, tracking some boar. We didn’t speak. I was only there to carry my father’s pack. A man called to us for help.”

  “Somebody you knew?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And then?”

  “We called back and went to find him. After that…” Arent shrugged. That was his last memory of that day. For years, he’d tried to break through it, but it was like scrambling up a cliff face. “I woke up on the road, shivering wet with this scar on my wrist.”

  Sammy became watchful, his next question tentative. “Was your father’s body ever found?”

  Arent shook his head.

  “Then he could be alive?”

  “Only if the devil has a sense of humor,” grunted Arent. “My father was a predikant, and his congregation was the only thing he loved. If he’d survived, he would have come back for them. You can’t believe my father’s involved in this! You said to rule out ghosts.”

  “Ghosts are God’s problem. The living must deal with me,” declared Sammy, ideas hammering themselves together behind his eyes “But to call him a ghost, there’d have to be a body. It’s not like we haven’t seen this before, Arent. Remember the case of the empty spire, where the—­”

  “Long-­dead sister was living in the walls.” Arent shuddered. He’d been the one tasked with dragging her into the daylight. He’d spent a week washing the stink off his body.

  “What else do you know about this Old Tom?” asked Sammy, his thoughts still clearly on Arent’s father.

  “It was driven out of the Provinces by an English witchfinder named Pieter Fletcher, who was the second husband of Creesjie Jens.”

  “Your uncle’s mistress?”

  Arent nodded. “Four years ago, Old Tom found him in Amsterdam. Fletcher packed his family into a carriage and fled to Lille, but it followed and murdered him. It left its mark above his body. Creesjie Jens believes it’s raised Bosey from the dead to kill the rest of his family on the Saardam.”

  Sammy ran a hand across his face, trying to disguise the worry washing across it. “Arent, you were in Lille four years ago.”

  Arent didn’t need reminding. The shame blotted him like a wax stamp.

  It had been the first case he’d been trusted to untangle alone. Sammy had sent him to recover a jewel stolen from the Gentlemen 17. After four days of investigation, he accused a clerk named Edward Coil of the crime. They were putting the noose around his neck when Sammy arrived on the back of an exhausted horse, holding a handful of splinters that proved Arent had got it wrong. He’d been in such a hurry to accuse Coil that he’d missed them.

  Sammy had been kind, kinder than Arent had any right to expect. Time and again, he’d offered Arent another case, another chance to prove himself capable, but the mercenary knew his limitations. He’d seen them up close. That was Sammy’s gift to everybody who met him. An instant understanding of what they could never be.

  “You can’t believe I slaughtered Creesjie Jens’s husband,” protested Arent. “I didn’t even know him.”

  “I know you didn’t, you damn fool, but either somebody’s keen to make us think otherwise, or it’s a coincidence. Did Creesjie give any reason the demon might have waited so long to enact revenge?”

  “She fled. She’s been moving from country to country ever since.”

  “She moved, or she was ushered?”

  “Ushered?”

  “There are three people on this boat connected to Old Tom. Fate rarely reveals itself so nakedly.”

  “Three?”

  “You, Creesjie, and your uncle,” explained Sammy impatiently. “How did you all come to be here?”

  “I’m here because you’re here,” Arent pointed out.

  “And I’m here because the governor general ordered it so.”

  “As is Creesjie Jens. My uncle forced her to depart Batavia earlier than she was intending.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s beautiful and he enjoys her company?”

  “So am I, and I’m in a cell,” he grumbled. “What about your uncle? Why is he here?”

  “He’s sailing back to join the Gentlemen 17 and deliver the Folly.”

  “Yes, but why is he on this boat? Surely your uncle could have chosen any ship in the fleet. Why did he pick the Saardam?”

  “Captain Crauwels is the best sailor in the Company. They’ve sailed together in the past, and he trusts him.”

  Sammy blew out a long, troubled breath. “It all comes back to your uncle, doesn’t it? He’s like a damn whirlpool, and we’re all caught in the churning water.” He considered Arent. “If your uncle had ordered you to board this boat, would you have done it?”

  “Not without you.”

  “And if he’d tried to
order me to board the Saardam, I’d have asked him why he was so keen for me to be here.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “That imprisoning me was the only way to ensure you’d be on the Saardam.”

  Arent bristled. “My uncle can be brusque and even cruel, but he loves me, Sammy. He’d never do anything to put me in danger.”

  Sammy looked out at the bright lanterns of the fleet. “We’re losing sight of the dead,” he chided himself. “For all the strangeness aboard this ship, we only have one actual crime to investigate. Bosey didn’t ignite his own robes, and it wasn’t his voice that threatened the ship. Until we understand more, I’m treating his death as murder. Have you talked to his friends?”

  “I’ve tried, but it’s like trying to pry open traps.”

  “Then try harder. He must have told somebody about this bargain he struck. Somehow, you two are connected, so let’s see if he knew you. Or your family. Find out where he’s from. Perhaps he suffered in the village where Old Tom died.”

  Arent nodded, but Sammy wasn’t finished with his labors. “And it would be worth understanding what ‘Laxagarr’ means.”

  “Sara’s already tried,” responded Arent. “We think it’s Nornish, and the only person who speaks the language is the man who cut Bosey’s tongue out.”

  “That’s useful, because we need an explanation for that as well.”

  “Okay,” agreed Arent doubtfully, remembering his earlier encounter with Wyck. “What else?”

  “Rags and bandages aren’t hard to find. Convince Captain Crauwels to search the ship if you can. Otherwise, appeal to your uncle. If we’re lucky, the leper’s costume will reveal itself in the company of the man who’s been wearing it.” Sammy stared at the lanterns on the water again, frowning. “Our second avenue of investigation is simpler. If this leper is the threat, how does he mean to assail a ship this size? Did you talk to the constable in the gunpowder store?”

  “He reckons blowing the gunpowder wouldn’t do it,” said Arent. “The constable believed the quickest way to sink the Saardam was to kill the captain. By his thinking, Crauwels is the only thing keeping this crew from mutiny.”