The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Nothing. Thanks for helping.” She kept busy with the cards and brushes until he went.

  There had been half a dozen weird things about her protorelationship with Garland, even before she’d found out she was some kind of magically jumped-up Mary Sue Supergirl. He had been told Gale would live until he found true love, for one thing. And ten minutes after the two of them had first met, Gale had been murdered.

  How could she buy into the idea of fate? Not to mention love at first sight?

  The rational argument went this way: they met, Gale died, and, in a state of grief heightened by guilt and superstition, Garland had latched on to the first new woman in his life. Obviously Sophie was the author of his fate, the fulfillment of the prophecy.

  But how could she even broach the topic without being insulting?

  Add to that the awfulness with Verena, the crush her half sister had had on Garland, practically since birth.

  They came from different worlds.

  Beatrice had … bewitched her.

  She was fake-engaged.

  She flung herself onto her narrow bunk. “Let it go,” she muttered. “Let it go, let it go, let him go.”

  She’d never had trouble walking away from a guy before.

  It’s the close quarters, she told herself. Nowhere to walk. If only I could swim to Sylvanna.

  The sword-fighting practice dummy stared at her, glass-eyed, from across the cabin. The clock ticked ponderously, seeming to tap a steady cadence against her skin. She should let it run down.

  Instead, she got up, opened it, and stilled its pendulum outright. Verena could call ahead if she wanted to eraglide in for a visit. With the clock quieted, her head cleared a little. She gathered up her notes on the sinkings in Fleet and the forbidden art of the fright—marsupial lions, salamander eggs, tree people, and all. Where was Krispos?

  If she couldn’t forget about Garland, she’d just busy herself with making connections and closing cases until her libido punched out for the night.

  CHAPTER 18

  The late watch on Northwater. Nightjar rose and fell in an easy, slow-dance rhythm, knifing through inky waves. The black sky unfurled, smothering the last orange gleaming of the sun. Their course was due south, and the days seemed longer with every day’s journey farther from the north pole. In fact, they were shortening; solstice was coming and daylight was scarce.

  The green-and-silver dance of the aurora borealis had tempted most of the crew up to the main deck hours earlier, including Sophie and Krispos, who’d been sifting through their trove of knowns about frightmaking and the sinkings in Fleet.

  The blackness of a sky entirely untouched by light pollution, velvet sprayed with glittering whorls and clusters of stars, was a stark backdrop to the flashier aurora display of undulating green and white. Sophie had sailed north once, back home, on an expedition to film narwhals in the Arctic. Even then, the remote setting had made the nighttime displays spectacular.

  This was better. Even Bram was, gratifyingly, openmouthed.

  Garland steered the ship. Watts and Sweet were high in the rigging, cozied up against each other and murmuring in unfamiliar tongues.

  The show outlasted its audience. Krispos retreated first. It was cold on deck and, Sophie had noticed, he was a delicate man, easily bruised, prone to chills, with those scarred feet and a corresponding totter to his gait.

  His departure triggered others; the daytime watch had been about ready to turn in before the aurora burst forth. As they called out their good-nights, she realized Kev and his guards had missed it entirely.

  Next time, Sophie thought, we’ll have to bring him up on deck.

  She took the amidships ladder down to the galley, brewed a pot of coffee using beans Bram had brought from home, and brought it to their cabin. Krispos was wrapped in a blanket as he nosed through one of the sets of court minutes. Bram had set up his calligraphy pens in the uncluttered corner he’d reserved for himself.

  “Fact one,” Sophie said, passing out cups. The cold air had revived her. “Someone’s using fright spells to sink ships in Fleet.”

  That much was indisputable. She took four slates and wrote the names of the ships, one atop each board.

  “The attack on Shepherd suggests an escalation,” Bram said. “Destroying a rescue vessel makes it harder to save the next target.” He dipped a brush in ink, practicing the spellscrip lettering for a spell to ward would-be thieves away from their parents’ home. It was an exercise that left him with plenty of surplus brainpower for participating in a little victimology exercise.

  “That’s not a fact,” Sophie said. “You’ve jumped to supposition.”

  “Each ship was bigger than the next,” he amended. “More crew, better location within the Fleet. The first ship was an unlicensed merchant, right? But Shepherd has official status. People were more upset by the attack.”

  “More upset” wasn’t easily quantifiable, but she wrote the ships’ sizes and crew complements on the slates. “Krispos, did you say you’d memorized all those stats on Fleet ships?”

  “It’s a standard accuracy test for memoricians.”

  “Can you make a list of official ships that are physically larger and have bigger crews than Shepherd?”

  Krispos practically purred as he unrolled a sheet of paper, pinned it to the ever-diminishing space on their bulkheads, and started writing, producing beautifully formed letters at a speed that almost rivaled that of a laser printer. “What benefit is there in attacking a higher-status vessel?”

  Bettona had had texts on terrorism in her quarters, info imported from San Francisco. Sophie picked up Things That Go Boom!, rubbed the last traces of fingerprint powder off its cover, and opened it to a marked page. She translated the original English to Fleet, for Krispos: “The ultimate goal of terrorism is to introduce people to fear, and thereby change their behavior.”

  He nodded, absorbing that, as he finished the list of ships larger than Shepherd.

  “Start at the top,” she said. “The Piracy went after Temperance once. Could they be trying to sink her outright?”

  “Frights make holes the size of a person. That wouldn’t sink a ship as big as Temperance,” Bram objected, without looking up.

  “Good point. But…!” She turned over her list of facts gleaned from the material she and Krispos had assembled about frightmaking. “Some wood frights can get bigger than their templates, giant-sized even, if they’re left to grow long enough.”

  “It takes a long time to gestate those things. The ship filths up and bleeds. If Temperance was growing a giant on her hull, the mermaids would see it.”

  She flipped Things That Go Boom! over in her hands. “If I was building up to a bigger target, I’d have foreseen an increase in security.”

  Bram nodded absently, returning to his calligraphy.

  Back to facts. Opening her phone, she poked through the e-books on profiling. “What do the targets have in common? Port of call?”

  Krispos took this as a request to jot down the names of the different island nations for the four ships in question. No commonality there. He put a little star next to the three civilian ships. “Registered at portside nations, except for Shepherd, with portside captains,” he explained.

  “So three slavers—”

  “Kev’s ship, Incannis, was sinking human traffickers,” Bram noted.

  Both rounds of sinkings had been a source of international tension. The story going around Fleet was that the portside nations were under attack by abolitionists, and that the starboard nations had decided such ships were less worthy of protection and justice than those from freeholding lands.

  “Three slave nations, but Shepherd breaks the pattern. Where were they built, Krispos?”

  A clattering of chalk: TALLON, MOSSMA, CARDESH, EHRENMORD.

  No commonality there.

  She eyed the list of potential targets. “Can you put an X in front of every ship that represents a starboard nation? We’ll call that strike one.
”

  He did it.

  What else? “Can we eliminate ships that have had magic worked on them?”

  “Most vessels bear at least one or two intentions,” Krispos said. “Shepherd turns naturally to face oncoming waves. She’s hard to swamp. All the important ships will have been inscribed.”

  “Important” sparked something. Sophie asked, “That thing you Wrackers say—‘We’re no great nation’ … Is that a subject for debate or a matter of fact? Do people agree on the great nations and the not so great?”

  “There are perhaps twenty nations in the middle whose influence is contentious,” Krispos said.

  “Okay,” Sophie said. “Give another strike to all the indisputably not great nations. Leave the middle powers on the list for now.”

  Krispos began working his way down the bottom two-thirds of the list. X, X, X.

  “What else would make something less attractive as a target? Bram?”

  “Um,” he said. “Troublemakers, unpopular countries, seacraft earmarked for replacement, and ships that should be scuttled?”

  Krispos pondered that for a second and added a half dozen marks. Two of the ships on the list had accumulated three strikes—Sophie had him cross those right out. That left forty ships with no strikes at all.

  “Redundancy,” she said. “There are three refitters, right? Taking out one repair shop or clarionhouse or food storage ship doesn’t materially threaten the Fleet. But get rid of the mermaid training center, Fleet cadet school, or the dueling court and you’ve created a big hole, both functionally and symbolically.”

  “Nice reasoning,” Bram murmured, as Krispos began X-ing. Quite a few ships got third strikes in that round. The top prospects, those with no strikes at all, dwindled to eleven.

  Now what?

  She kept at it, raising possible points of commonality and mostly finding they didn’t apply. Were the ships attacked all from northern or southern hemisphere nations? No. Three were civilian, one military. Two were owned by their captains, as Nightjar was owned by Garland. One was held by a corporation, and Shepherd by its home nation.

  She heard a hatch open on the other side of the bulkhead, where Garland’s cabin was, and the sound of his steps on the deck, barely a yard away. A creak of weight on his bunk. It was easy to imagine him taking his boots off, preparing to turn in.

  Focus, she told herself.

  Temperance, the flagship of the Fleet, was at the top of the list, high in influence, with only one strike—the one indicating that it represented a starboard nation, Tallon. Sophie was itching to declare it the obvious victim. “We know Isle of Gold wants Temperance out of the equation before war breaks out.”

  “Would it even be possible to sink it using a wood fright?” Bram said. “Temperance has a stonewood and sharkskin hull.”

  “You’re the one learning inscription; you tell us. Does the target’s hull have to be wood?”

  Bram waved an arm in a random-looking helicopter motion, roughly indicating the pile of information on frights. Krispos took this—correctly, as it happened—as a request for information. “Forest guardians do require nurse trees.”

  “This is a repurposed murder spell,” Sophie said. “Someone’s compelled to draw the image of their hand on the ship’s boards. The fright growing and then putting a hole in the ship is a side effect—as far as it knows, it’s just trying to kill the person who created it.”

  “In year eighty-two of the Cessation, a murder committed in this fashion was tied to a spellscribe on Mossma,” Krispos said. “The trial minutes say the spellscribe admitted to revising the theme of the original spell. That killing, and a massive fright outbreak on Tug Island, led to the international ban on frightmaking.”

  “Stonewood is magically treated wood, right? They make it super hard?”

  She spread the materials on frightmaking across the table, looking for information. Bram, meanwhile, stopped lettering and opened one of the magical texts he’d acquired.

  “Kev might know,” Sophie said.

  Krispos scratched his beard. “It’s the middle of the night. Shall I wake him?”

  “No need,” Bram said. “Here’s a passage about material substitutions. It says stonewood lacks the original enchantable properties of the source material. Being magically treated itself, it is neither perfectly wood nor perfectly stone and lacks the purity required to be treated as either.”

  “Stonewood is eliminated, then,” Krispos said. “And we can also put a.… was the word ‘strike’?”

  “Strike, yeah.”

  “A strike on everything that doesn’t have a wood hull.” Krispos took up his pen, clearly delighted with the process, and began X-ing.

  Sophie was relieved when the latest round of strikes earned the Verdanii ship Breadbasket its third X. The prison ship, Docket, with its carapace hull, was eliminated too. Then again, so was Temperance.

  She tapped the nearest slate. “How specific is this thing about the wood? Do we know what the hulls of these victim ships were made of?”

  Krispos switched from pen to chalk and wrote across the four slates: WHITE SPRUCE, GASPER SPRUCE, SIKKA SPRUCE, GASPER SPRUCE.

  “Spruce, spruce, and spruce. Coincidence, Bram, or significant?”

  “Um…” Now it was his turn to flip. “Best I can do for you without the original spell is give it a rating of likely significant.”

  “Okay. Add strikes to the ships that aren’t made of spruce, Krispos, if you can, just to see.”

  She began fine-combing through the notes about the sinkings, turning up a list of the things that were supposed to be in that basket of evidence about the frightmaking case. There were amphibian eggs missing, some cat hair and horsehair, plus the paperwork.

  “We need more information about the text of the frightmaking spell,” she said. “I’ll write to the head of the Spellscrip Institute in the Autumn District.”

  “Why her?”

  “She’s an expert, she was nice, and she and Cly are tight.” She left out the part where she’d embarrassed herself at a party Autumn Spell was hosting. “She can only say no, right?”

  “I think you’d better write the Watch first,” Krispos said. He had finished marking up the target list.

  Constitution, the head of the government, was the only ship with no strikes at all.

  Sophie’s flesh crawled. Practically everyone she knew within Fleet worked aboard Constitution. Annela, and Erefin Salk, of the Watch, even lived there. All the librarians and messengers who’d helped her find resources when she first stayed in Fleet, the convenors who’d been kind, the woman who ran the tea cart …

  Bram said, “Constitution is a portside ship?”

  “She’s the rep ship from Cardesh,” Krispos said. “Same country as our strapping young Watchman, Selwig.”

  “Seas,” she said. “Wait, okay, calm down. This isn’t conclusive. Krispos, can you write something explaining how we arrived at this? The process?”

  “Immediately, Kir. Do we have a way to get a message to the Fleet?”

  “Beatrice filled that messageply page I gave her. Maybe Verena can run a message to the government?”

  “If not, we may have to divert to a clarionhouse,” Krispos said.

  “Divert? In the North Atlantic?”

  “I don’t know ‘Atlantic,’ but we’re near Ylle.”

  “Before you hyperventilate yourselves into a faint,” Bram said, “remember that what I said about Temperance applies to Constitution, too. A human-sized hole isn’t a gimme to sink a big ship. Plus, there’s the mermaid patrols.”

  “Good point,” said Krispos.

  “No! Bad point!” Sophie objected. “An attack, by itself, would be plenty upsetting.”

  Bram made a raspberry noise to show what he thought of that. “The ship sinkers look ineffectual if they attack ships and fail to sink them. They want to be scary.”

  “If it’s placed just right—”

  “No. I’m not trying to be a pain,
Sofe. But if they do want to sink Constitution, they’ll need to power-up their plan. And if you go crying wolf and nothing happens, it undermines everything you’ve achieved so far.”

  He was right, as usual.

  Maybe it was a matter of giving a massive fright time to gestate? She grabbed for Things That Go Boom! again.

  “New sheet, Krispos. Things about Constitution.” She started listing everything she could think of about the government vessel: the weird, enormous, magical paddle wheel that propelled it through the Nine Seas; the three landing pads for the flying taxi service; the two elevators that connected with the ferries. Libraries, restaurants, lots of public art. Did the ship have any kind of Achilles’ heel?

  Bram asked, “Do they restrict access to the wheel? Would it have to be someone with … I dunno … a security pass?”

  “Not that I know of. Once you’re oathed up, you’re pretty much free. Free to roam.” She remembered the ceremony, Cly showing up, all the young cadets, all their relations and friends.

  Krispos started to speak, but Bram made a Shut up motion, mouthing something at him.

  She shut her eyes. “Lots of people,” she said. “The flow of people on and off Constitution is massive.”

  “Indeed. Constitution is the most frequently visited ship in the Fleet,” Krispos said, in his quoting voice.

  “Tourists, diplomats, people attending ceremonies, witnesses, people coming to watch the government hash through something related to their island. They have an art museum and a Fleet history museum aboard. People come to see the original Compact for the Cessation,” Sophie said. “They come to lodge complaints with their convenors and fill out paperwork.”

  “Meaning what?” Bram said. “You don’t need to steal a crew member’s name; you can put an inscribed person aboard?”

  “Or ten inscribed people,” Sophie said. “Or twenty.”

  Bram pursed his lips, thinking. “Yeah. That’d do it. That’d work. Write the letter.”

  CHAPTER 19

  SOPHIE,

  I PASSED YOUR CONCERN ABOUT CONSTITUTION MAYBE BEING THE TARGET FOR THE SHIP-SINKERS ON TO THE WATCH, AND TOLD THEM YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT PEOPLE BRINGING MULTIPLE FRIGHTS ABOARD. YOU’RE ORDERED TO SEND A FULL, DETAILED REPORT ASAP, PREFERABLY WITH ONE OF YOUR PEOPLE, DIRECTLY TO EREFIN SALK.