The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  VERENA

  Days passed. Bram successfully inscribed the followbox, for good or ill, so that it fit into the skull of a dead ram named Mellur. They closed it up with a steak bone, a zircon, a piece of Hawaiian lava from home, and a sheet of messageply. The plan was to take it back to San Francisco, next time one of them went, and mail it to one of Sophie’s spelunker friends in Tennessee.

  “You know this probably won’t work,” said Bram.

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” she said. “If it gets us more information, hooray. If not, you learned to do another inscription. Hooray also. Speaking of which, how’ve you made out on enchanting Mom and Dad’s place against break-ins?”

  “If the legal description of the property will serve as its proper name, it should be doable,” he said. “The inscription has to be lettered on the skin of a specific type of badger, and the brush has to be topped by the fang of a guard dog. Sylvanna will have the supplies.”

  The evenings grew cooler, chilly enough to drive them below to the galley after sunset, but the afternoons were clear and mellow, with soft lemon-colored sunshine. Cook’s nets yielded butterfish, cod, herring, and snailfish, along with random marine samples for Sophie: bits of seaweed, jellies, even the occasional crab.

  They were sitting out on the quarterdeck one such afternoon, everyone relaxing after a day of print identification, self-taught magical practice, and ship maintenance. Daimon was pretending to study for his law exams. Humbrey and Selwig were murmuring over a long report they’d written for the Watch about the fingerprinting as they kept the mandated eye on Kev, whom Sophie had invited to join them.

  Kev gave every appearance of enjoying the sun. He ate his way through a bowl of leftover stew, watching the sea roll and foam, apparently without a care in the world.

  His calm troubled her. At the least, shouldn’t he feel guilty about his victims? But, whatever his feelings, having him around had been something of a benefit. The mere thought of him no longer raised her hackles or brought up the image of Cly striding toward them with empty eyes and upraised sword.

  “Maze ahead,” Beal called.

  Sophie hauled herself up for her first look at Ylle.

  They were in what would, at home, have been the North Atlantic. Garland had taken them west, skirting the storms they would apparently hit as they turned south toward Sylvanna. Bram, with his predilection for expecting natural disasters to break out everywhere, had already muttered about whether they were going to experience death by iceberg.

  This wasn’t a berg.

  Nightjar was sailing toward a mammoth formation of ice, perhaps five hundred feet tall above the surface, a stunning blue-white pyramid with a glimmering, glassine shine. It was the first of many; they cragged ahead like mountains, steaming faintly, reflecting back sunlight in blinding flashes.

  “Why am I reminded of Titanic?” Bram muttered.

  “That’s a kids’ tale,” Tonio scoffed.

  Sophie met her brother’s eyes, then opened her book of questions and made a note: TITANIC IS A KIDS’ TALE?

  As they neared, the light within the floe turned amber, the whole thing taking on the appearance of a gigantic crystal lamp.

  Excitement burned off her worries about Kev. “What gives?”

  “The floe riders come from the nation of Ylle. Their island territory is very small. Many of them, therefore, live here.” Daimon was staring, goggle-eyed, at the enormous glowing iceberg. “They are skilled ice-scribers. Their homeland grooms many lichens used in ice spells.”

  “Are they slavers?”

  “No, Kir,” said Selwig, looming over her. He spoke in a bland tone that he’d perfected—specifically, she thought—to remind her that civilized people didn’t constantly bring up the slaver/nonslaver divide.

  “Why are we sailing toward them?” Bram said. “I don’t care if it’s populated; that is a big old ship-sinking iceberg.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Garland said. “A maze pilot will take us through the field. They’ll have news and mail and information about the weather ahead of us.”

  By nightfall they could see more of the bergs, lit in a range of golds, blues, and greens, luminous pointy blocks laid across their path.

  They tied up on a floe of low-hanging ice, shaped like a buoy. The harbormaster caught the rope from the crew and tied it to an ice hook jutting from the side of the berg. As they watched, a pad of spongy moss grew in the space between the iceberg and Nightjar, creating a bumper between them and serving as a more sturdy tether.

  A ramp formed, a flat plate of ice with icicles dripping from its bottom, stretching out like a finger and thickening into a bridge. Garland left Tonio in charge and made his way across to talk to the authorities about the pilot.

  Sophie had her camera out, capturing everything she could in the waning light of sunset. An outcropping on the floe’s side formed a bathtub-size chamber of clear ice above the waterline, through which a bed of rocks and pebbles was visible. The rocks were covered by a layer of moss, maybe nine inches deep, and a pair of snow geese slumbered atop it, their long necks curving around their bodies, their beaks issuing a hint of condensed breath.

  The floe riders lived on fish and seal, not surprisingly, as well as on eggs from the seabirds and several species of fungi they were able to cultivate within caverns carved into the bigger icebergs. They kept pools of various sizes and temperatures. In some, they kept algae and plankton, and crabs kept alive on a mix of table scraps, blubber, and algae.

  It was a spare existence, with a lot of hard labor, but Sophie had seen at least one culture so impoverished that it made the floe riders seem positively wealthy. They looked as though they might be mostly self-sufficient, but Garland nevertheless asked for twenty of Sophie’s protein bars as a trade offering.

  With Nightjar under Tonio’s care, Lidman was locked up, still under the eye of Selwig. The senior officer, Humbrey, had been tasked with packing up half of the fingerprint cards, the procedures manual, and, most importantly, their victimology work on the sinkings and the possible threat to Constitution. He’d send a more detailed report ahead using the Ylle clarionhouse, then make his way back to the Fleet on the first westbound ship. He’d present their results on the bodies they’d identified so far.

  Sophie was heartily sorry to be losing him. He had a good sense of humor and worked diligently. Selwig, by contrast, was an adolescent mastiff: big, too serious, and a little clumsy. Not to mention defensive about being one of the few portside citizens aboard Nightjar.

  Watts was bringing up the rear; he was apparently looking to trade for medicinal lichens.

  It was a cold day but the seas were calm, and it was possible to hike across the floes as easily as if they were snow-covered mountain crags. The trails were sanded and there were people working everywhere. A duo of teen girls was building up beds of pebbles and moss to attract nesting birds, on a floe obviously set aside for that purpose. This floe was connected, by a springy woven bridge of vegetable fiber, to a hunk of ice so mammoth it could have gone toe to toe with an aircraft carrier.

  The bridge took them over the open sea to a carved-ice staircase that led up, up, perhaps five hundred feet, to the landing deck.

  “Welcome to Sledge,” their guide said. “Weather office, clarionhouse, and outlying post of the Fleet of Nations.”

  “This is Ylle’s rep ship?” Sophie said.

  “We keep our place in the Fleet.” Which meant yes.

  Their guide made them pause several times as they climbed upward. “Get warm, good. Get too warm, sweat. Breeze up top’ll freeze you solid if you’re wet. You know.” Sophie couldn’t tell whether the guide was just brusque or she couldn’t speak the language properly.

  “How do you survive up here when it storms?”

  The guide gave her a gap-toothed grin. “Is fine. Winds are fair.”

  “I’m just curious.”

  The guide considered this—curiosity—with that expression that suggested it
was something akin to an open wound, something Sophie should have a medic look at. Finally she said, “There is a chamber inside. We gather and sleep it out.”

  “You hibernate? For how long?”

  She shrugged. “Months, once or twice. Weeks, most often. The birds die, now and then, but otherwise it’s safe.”

  “Couldn’t this all break up?” Bram indicated the floe with a wave. “While you’re unconscious?”

  “This berg’s good five or six more seasons before she goes pocky.” Peering at Sophie’s gear, she said, “This is … Is this a light?”

  Sophie handed over her flashlight, waiting to see if the woman would figure it out. She didn’t even try, just held it until Sophie clicked the button. Then the guide pressed the bright end against the floe.

  The glow penetrated into the ice, just a few inches, but enough to reveal, within it, another colony of lichens in orderly, radial patterns, apparently stretched through the ice.

  “We tend the outer bergs,” their guide said. “Lichens create give. Harder to shatter. Ready? Let’s climb again.”

  They came out on a mammoth plain of ice, and Sophie was again reminded of an immense aircraft carrier. The port and starboard sides of Sledge were built up, scraped like the plowed edges of a road. To the fore and aft were immense sculptures. At the front was a pack of wolves, leaping into the space before the floe, like a ship’s figurehead or a dog pack pulling a sled. To the rear, a polar bear—white, glimmering, and more than sixty feet in length—gave chase. Its outstretched forepaw was the only thing connected to the floe, as though it was running after the sled and had just caught its rear.

  All two hundred and fifty flags of the Fleet of Nations were strung on a wooden pole fifty feet high, planted deep in the snow.

  Between the bear and the dogs was a village’s worth of people, some out on the exposed surface of Sledge, others occupying a permanent-looking settlement within a deep trough dug into its center, a canyon of glacier-blue ice partially roofed by sealskin and lichen netting. The temperature below had to be warmer; a dozen kids were running around on its floor, lightly dressed, under the care of a couple elders.

  Above, adults were tending cauldrons formed out of ice blocks—they looked a little like roofless igloos, lined with leather and other insulating substances. One was apparently a desalinizing operation: two teenage girls were stirring it with ornately worked paddles and were drawing out salt, which they dumped into another sealed tank.

  There were algae pools and a tub of heated water. A line of villagers visited both the potable water and the hot, filling skins and hauling them down into the trench.

  Aft, near the floe and the dog sculpture, Sophie saw a single man—so smooth of face he might have been a baby, but for his size—looking into a pool that cast dazzling light back onto him.

  Their guide was heading that way.

  His pool’s surface was remarkably black. It was contained within a tank made of bones—ribs?—that had been woven like wicker. Spellscrip notes edged its upper lip, and Sophie saw Bram taking it in, reading the words, memorizing them.

  “Weather office,” said their guide, bowing to the baby-faced man.

  Baby Face smiled at Garland. “Welcome back, Captain. Where are you bound?”

  “Sylvanna, Autumn District.”

  The man crumbled a powder into the fluid, and little winks of white light settled on the surface, forming constellations.

  “Stars,” Bram whispered.

  Sophie nodded. A puff of flour next, making clouds. Beneath them, they could suddenly see landmasses, the northwestern hemisphere of Stormwrack.

  A weather map, by any other name.

  Sprays of color, green and red, purple, gold, and white, an aurora borealis in miniature, shivered through the tank.

  “Here,” the operator said to Garland, pointing. “A vortex of cold air—it meets the warm. Keep east of that, though, and all is calm.”

  “What about the approach to Autumn?”

  “Perhaps a bit of chop. The seas will be calming as you approach. You won’t be alone out there, Kir.”

  “The cod fleet?” Garland said.

  The man sprinkled a minuscule something and the picture shifted. “They’re here,” he said. “But also Sawtooth, of the judiciary.”

  Cly’s ship. Sophie felt a stone dropping into her belly.

  “She came through?”

  He nodded. “Three days ago. His Honor took an Erinthian swindler off our hands, turned over the mail, left a nice crate of dried peaches.”

  “He’s bound for Sylvanna?”

  “Where else?”

  Garland didn’t react, instead asking, “How are things to the far south?”

  “Stormy, as always. Summer. How far south do you mean?”

  “Well into the emptiness,” Garland said.

  Emptiness. Sophie supposed that meant the refuge for the escaped slaves was somewhere in the south, off the charts.

  “I wouldn’t recommend that, Captain. Stormy down there.”

  “Always,” Garland said. He handed over the box of protein bars and a satchel of savory cakes, a sort of bread with curry that Nightjar’s cook seemed to believe was obligatory after every single meal.

  “You will stay the night, yes? The pilot will bear you out of the maze at dawn.”

  “We are grateful for your hospitality,” Garland said, which apparently meant yes.

  Their guide shook herself back to her feet. She led them into the trench, setting them up with a hot water bottle and communal sealskin blankets, bringing them each a bowl made of a skull—seal, Sophie thought—filled with a dense brown powder. Pouring boiling water into each skull, she thereby made a soup. “Seal meat, lichens, and mushrooms.”

  Sitting down to eat was apparently a signal that the visitors were socially available, because kids came to investigate them, mobbing the bunch, joining them under the blanket. Sophie felt tiny hands roaming over her, respectfully enough—they didn’t grab anything she wouldn’t want grabbed. They, at least, were curious enough to work out how the light worked.

  Perhaps Wrackers aren’t innately lacking in curiosity. The cultural taboo against it takes hold as they age.

  Their guide cast a covetous eye over the light.

  “It dies after about three hours,” Sophie told her. “Hard to recharge in the winter. I have one with a crank on Nightjar, though, that you could have.”

  “Crank…”

  “You feed it, basically.” She mimed the motion. “It’s a fair amount of work.”

  “Our nights are long and we have many hands,” the guide said. “I will take this crank light, with thanks.”

  By now the kids had snuggled in, along with a half-bear, half-human child who was only too happy to be photographed, and a husky dog.

  “So,” Bram said. “Cly’s going to Sylvanna.”

  She groaned.

  “That’s gonna make it harder for you to glide in, crack the shackle off Kev, and get out, don’t you think?” Watts said.

  She could feel awkwardness ratcheting up as they all contemplated but didn’t speak about her fake engagement. But she’d been needing this: a chance to talk to Bram and Garland about what to do, without Selwig overhearing or Daimon offering opinions. “First, I have to tell Kev about this pacification spell that’s required if I’m to release him.”

  Garland said, “Will he even agree to regaining his liberty, when you’ve shown you’re resolved to protect him?”

  “It’s his freedom.”

  He extricated one of his curls from the fist of a toddler who had taken over his lap. “He may prefer to oblige you to continue in perpetual ownership, knowing you won’t be on Sylvanna, you won’t mistreat him, and you won’t allow anyone else to do so. It might be preferable to having his capacity for violence curbed and then to be set free where all the people he’s angered can hunt and hurt him.”

  “I’m not owning him indefinitely.”

  “If he possesses info
rmation about freedom activists, and if people are after it, what then?”

  Sophie sucked on her lip. “Maybe his memory will have to go, too?”

  “What?” Bram said.

  “If he agrees, obviously.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  She nodded. “Annela shook the prospect at me like a club … Oh.”

  “What?”

  “It was her big threat for a while. Then she stopped bringing it up. And I just realized why: Beatrice told her about those damned scrolls. Told her I was too loaded for an amnesia spell.” She opened up her book of questions, found a note about Annela and the threat, and crossed it out. “One mystery down, four hundred to go.”

  “She does this,” Garland murmured to Watts.

  “Watching the woods for an unwary bird, we call it.”

  Bram was glaring at her.

  “What?” she said. “Do you think I want to amnesia Kev? What would you do, superdork?”

  He stuck his tongue out, then began to roll the problem over in his mind. She knew he’d bounce against the same walls of the trap that Cly—if it was Cly—had set for her: she lacked the hard-heartedness to let Kev go to his execution, but now she’d stuck herself with a ship-sinking, crew-killing, possible freedom fighter.

  That sense of certainty rose again: I will puzzle this one out. I’m up to this.

  “You believe your father was the one who told Kev he could ask you to take him on?” Watts asked. His incredulity was endearing. He was, in some ways, easily shocked.

  “Kev killed human smugglers. Cly kills criminals. ‘How is this any different, daughter?’ In other words, it could be a bit of an object lesson.”

  “Among other things,” Garland agreed.

  It occurred to her that the Feliachild side of the family had warned her, repeatedly, that Cly was a jerk. “Also, I think Cly’s one of the people who’s so keen to interrogate Kev.”

  It was cozy there, under the sealskin blankets. The night was wearing on, though the sky had already been dark for some time. The lamps were going out, here and there, making it even dimmer.