image [https://i.imgur.com/15eGPa6.jpg]
iron-sick – In the sea language, said of a ship or a boat, when her bolts or nails are so eaten with rust that they cause hollows in the planks, rendering the vessel leaky and possibly unfit to sail.
image [https://i.imgur.com/jKpPjvv.jpeg]
“SHE’S A THIRTY-TWO GUN war bitch, and a good fifth-rate, at least in her day,” said the wharfman. He looked his customer up and down. The man cut an imposing figure, a hale man with a strong, lean body and a dark raincoat. The rest of his features were passing strange, though. The tricorne hat, for one, was red and faded like an old bloodstain, and the long-beaked plague mask made him look like a man of medicine. “But she’s been sitting here for months, sir. She’s iron-sick, and nobody’s got the coin to fix what needs fixing. Though she’s built sturdy, and her timbers are arranged to deal with recoil from them magnificent Menorca guns, I shouldn’t want to test her, not on a journey to, eh, where did you say you were going?”
“Jamaica,” Oddsummers said, raising his voice a little to be heard through the mask. He looked up through the dense rain, at the remains of the HMS Edinburgh. Two green eyes peered through the tiny eyeholes of his plague mask, up at the dark clouds that had moved in across Bill Quay. The cold wind whipped his raincoat, but he hardly felt it. Many years at sea made him numb to it. “Perhaps to Nassau.”
The wharfman shook his head, and a main of grey hair nearly shook free of the toboggin pressed to his head. “No, no, no. You wouldn’t want to test her out that far, sir. That’s, what, a month-long journey at least?”
“Thirty-five days, I estimate,” Oddsummers said.
“No, no, no, that’s much too far, sir. She’s iron-sick.”
“So you’ve said.”
“And worm-eaten besides. Them red shipworms, sir, they’ve made it through the planks. The wooden sheeting on her hulls needs replacing.”
“I see.” Someone fell on the pier behind him, spilling a whole cask of wine. A dock supervisor cursed the clumsy person for all he was worth, calling him a son of a gun, which started a shoving match. Within the plague mask, thin lips smiled.
The docks were bustling, the wharfman had to occasionally step to one side of the pier to allow a sailor to board or disembark a ship. Oddsummers did not have to move. The crowds broke around him like he was a large stone in a river, hardly glancing at the tall, imposing figure. The beak of his plague mask had two holes along the nose for ventilation, and contained dried rose petals and carnations, as well as lavender, myrrh, and peppermint. It kept away the foul-smelling miasma of the masses around him, as well as the ill humours that were said to cause the Disease.
The Disease was something to fear, it had already killed thousands in London, just since the Cataclysm, and even now, on this pier, Oddsummers saw yellow-faced sailors huddled amid crates, hoping some captain desperate enough for any crew would take them on. The yellow complexion was a sign they had barely survived the Disease, and their bodies were weak and often missing pieces that had had to be amputated.
“I understand there was an engineer working these docks,” Oddsummers said. “I heard he was looking for work. Rollings was his name. Have you heard of him?”
The wharfman shrugged. “Fella missing an arm? Sure. But…well, he’s missing a bloody fucking arm,” he laughed. “So, yeh see, there’s a reason he’s not found work.”
“Find him for me, and tell him I have timbers and treenails coming from Baltic and the Colonies. The ship landed last week, and I received a letter from the wagonmasters who will be delivering them. I expect it to be no later than tomorrow. Also bolts and nails from the factory here in Newcastle. Tell him I will have a crew ready and waiting to receive his orders, two dozen skilled carpenters among them.”
The wharfman stood in the rain, mouth stupidly agape. “What, in this ship? Sir, I just told you—”
“She’s iron-sick, yes, so she needs work. We can work on her once we’re underway. Will you relay what I’ve said to Mr. Rollings or not, sir?”
“Er, that is, I can. I could. But I cannot in good conscience let you sail away in this! I only showed her to you in the ’opes you’d be one of those fellas takes old ships to the shipbreakers for me—”
“I can pay you eight thousand guilders today, if you cease all this thumb-ticking and hand me a signed deed to this vessel.”
That brought him up short. “Eight thousand!” The wharfman scratched his head. “Eight thousand? Guilders, you said? Dutch money can be hard to exchange just now—”
“That’s my offer. Take it, or let this thing sit here in the wharf and rot.”
The wharfman scratched at his scabbed lip. Looked the ship over once more.
____
Some were calling them the Five Pillars, strange cloud formations that had come in with the storm two months ago, when the Cataclysm began. The clouds had churned like a gargantuan whirlpool in the sky, then slowed and practically calcified. But not before five finger-like shapes came down from the sky, formed by the clouds themselves, reaching halfway down from the sky to the buildings of Newcastle. Each “finger” was unique, some of them longer than the others. The locals had given them names—Crooked One for the middle finger, Lightning Jack (or Jack for short) for the one that sometimes bloomed slow-moving lightning that lit up the night sky so that it was practically day all over the city.
His timepiece said it was seven in the morning, but Oddsummers always wound his clock to be a little fast, a mental trick to keep him on his toes. He made his next appointment close to New Gate. The imposing city gate was typically not open at this hour, as per the new rules, but there was an influx of charities the Church was taking in, and they had agreed to relieve some of the outlying settlements of their burden.
In came a morose mass of hobbling, yellow-faced men, women, and children, most of them with the pink and runny pustules that denoted the final stages of the Disease. Oddsummers stood to one side of the road, alongside many other plague-masked doctors, all of whom probably assumed he was of their order. Yellow-skinned women walked with vacant-eyed children clutched close to them, while orphans meandered around the grownups like little moons that had lost their orbits.
Oddsummers waited for the hundred or so doomed creatures to pass, then followed their solemn procession all the way to St. Andrew’s, where two hundred more lay in piles around the steps, their rapidly dissolving bodies forming into a general sludge that reeked of ammonia and sulfur more than the usual human decay one would expect. The afflicted lived in the tents that had been arrayed around St. Andrew’s, sometimes walking through the puddles of the previous tenants, which told them about the odds of their own survival.
Nuns and volunteers who had survived the Disease were all that were allowed to attend these doomed beings. Even the survivors remained emaciated long after the affliction had gone, their flesh was drawn and etiolated, and it clung to their bones like old leather around sticks. And each of them kept their pale yellow complexion, the truest mark of the Disease.
Oddsummers walked along with the plague doctors, insinuating himself among the dead and dying, wading through the ankle-deep remains. Bits of fingers and teeth floated in the viscous puddles, from which a tendril of unknown substance occasionally reached out to lightly touch his ankle, like a lover caressing their beloved’s cheek.
No one yet knew all the properties of the Tam, as it was called, but everyone agreed it was still alive, that the collective sludge of the dissolved remains of the Diseased somehow found communal response with the remains of others. The priests at first tried to burn the Tam—that’s what Oddsummers had heard, at least—but the explosive fire had nearly destroyed half the rookeries in Newcastle. Then they had tried to haul it away in shovels, but people claimed being too close to it for too long brought on visions of their dead relatives, and drove them to commit acts of self-harm. So, in the end, it was agreed to gather all the Diseased in one area, a place of mercy and prayer, and let them die as peacefully as possible and dissolve into the soil and flow into the trench that had been dug near St. Andrew’s.
Oddsummers spotted his target easily, for he was by far the most well-dressed patient there. The man’s blue waistcoat was embroidered with gold and silver threads, with sequins, with artificial gems. It was tattered at its horizontal hem, but almost slight enough to not be noticeable at a glance. The suit underneath was embroidered elegantly with pale, pastel tones, and with embroidered arches and rows of pillars reminiscent of Ancient Rome. But the man was barefoot, bent, with a strange, horrific arch to his back, like his spine was fighting to get free of him. An unusual, but not unheard-of, symptom of the doomed.
Soon, this man would be sludge. He would be Tam.
The other doctors fanned out. One of them spoke in low prayers as thuribles swung from chains, coils of smoke from the burning hemp creating a fog that was meant to disperse the bad humours in the air. Oddsummers broke away from the main group, and approached the man in the tattered waistcoat. A yellow-faced priest who had survived the Disease, and whose duty it was to provide last rites, stood before the well-dressed man. Oddsummers dismissed the priest with a wave of a hand. Even the priests yielded to the doctors here.
Oddsummers found a chair, slid it through the sludge, and lowered himself into the seat, across from the well-dressed man. The fellow’s grey beard had grown out in a myriad of directions, and was now falling out, piecemeal, even as Oddsummers watched. Two rheumy eyes signaled blindness was near—not a symptom of the Disease, just bad luck. “Benedict Laurier?”
The eyes looked up and around, straining to focus on the dark shape in front of them. Laurier winced, as though speaking caused him great pain. “Who’s there?” he croaked. A voice like a pebble in a tin can.
Oddsummers looked around to be sure they were alone. No eavesdroppers. Then he stood and closed the curtain to their tent, and pulled his chair closer to Laurier and sat down again. At his feet, part of the Tam puddle reached up to touch him. Doubtless, the melted flesh of the tent’s last occupant.
“Everyone here thinks I’m a doctor. But I’m not. I’m not a priest or a caregiver of any kind. I cannot offer you solace of the body or the soul, but perhaps I can ease your mind about a thing or two.”
Laurier looked like he wanted to straighten up, but the hunch on his back prevented any such acrobatics. “What…what do you mean? What is thissshhh?” A frothing pink foam fell from his mouth just then.
“Your son,” Oddsummers said, glad to have on his plague mask. “Many believe he died in Jamaica upon the Cataclysmic Day. I have reason to believe he did not. In fact, I have reason to believe he set sail for the Colonies, along with his crew of freed slaves, and has spent these months training them to become proper sailors. Proper pirates. I believe that soon now, very soon, he will unfurl a plot that he has been planning for years. He now has all the pieces he needs. And better yet, everyone thinks he’s dead, so there is no longer anyone looking for him. No one ready to stop him.”
Laurier’s blue eyes went wide, but his mouth formed a moue of distaste. “I have no son!”
Oddsummers shrugged. “That may be true. Certainly he was not of your blood, for it seems your wife cuckolded you. Fucked some man named Parsons, a stonemason working on your property for all of three months, the way I hear it.” He nodded. “But you hid that fact from most. And you raised him as your own.”
“I have no son. Nor any adopted bastard. No children at all. Leave me.”
“But you do. You have many children. And one of them is John Alfred Laurier—”
“I said leave me!”
“He left you ages ago, when you discovered him to be a poof.”
The man turned away in his seat. Painfully. Wincing and grunting the whole way. “I have no son.” He clutched his chest, blind eyes gazing out at nothing. “I have no son! I don’t know you! Now leave me!”
“You turned him out of your house after you confronted him about the rumours. I spoke to a former neighbour of yours, chap named Cocksedge. You are a respected man, Mr. Laurier, even now, even with all your many businesses suffering collapse. I spoke with Mr. Cocksedge, just this past week, and he had much to say in your defence; that your son’s deviancy was through no fault of your own, that you insisted he go to the monastery and speak to the priests about it, that you even paid handsomely to ensure they told no one. You even tried to find him once he absconded, and tried to help him before everyone found out about his thievery. Mr. Cocksedge said he didn’t know what you’d done to incur the wrath of God, and had no way to account for your string of bad luck with the trading business. The East India Company really transformed all the world, did they not? A sea change, so to speak, in the way commerce is done.”
One of Benedict Laurier’s eyes glanced in Oddsummers’s direction, trying to find him. “Whoever you are…I am in enough pain as it is. I need—” He broke off in a coughing fit, then vomited up a pink sludge. His insides were already turning to Tam. Oddsummers slid his chair back an inch or two. “I need no reminders of my son’s many transgressions, nor…nor how manifestly I underestimated the East India people—” He broke off into another coughing fit, from which blood fell freely from his lips and he did nothing to stop it.
Oddsummers reached into his coat and produced a handkerchief, and handed it to the poor fellow. “Here, you can keep it. They’re not only running out of beds, just everything else, I hear.”
Laurier reached out with an enfeebled yellow hand and took the handkerchief and dabbed his face. All around them, outside the tent, they could hear the steady moans and coughing of others. Oddsummers felt something tugging at his boots. Looking down, he saw that the Tam had grown tendrils, and was groping at him. He kicked the tendrils away, and crossed his legs. “Mr. Laurier, I can give you what you want.” Laurier turned to him. “I know you want it. A swift death. On your way here, the minders stopped you from completing the noose. Had it all ready, didn’t you, for just such an occasion? Ever since your Gloria died and you started to believe you had caught the Disease, as well. You’re almost totally blind, and I imagine you wanted to make sure the noose was good and ready so you could find it easily once you had the courage.”
Laurier’s rheumy eyes stayed on Oddsummers. “What do you want?”
“I want to solve a mystery. The one that surrounds John Laurier, but no one else has thought to look into. Perhaps because no one ever looked beyond the fact that he prefers to bed men. That scandal alone overshadows the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
Behind the mask, Oddsummers smiled good-humoredly. “You stand at death’s door, and yet still you will not let the truth out. Mr. Laurier, let’s not mince words any longer. Ten years ago, your son left the docks not too far from here, only moments after he met a man named Arthur Vhingfrith. This part I think you know, for some of your spies are the same as mine, only I can still pay them while you cannot. My spies tell me that your spies in Jamaica reported back to you, and told you all about John’s sailing off with Vhingfrith, captain of the Lively, on some venture Vhingfrith was obsessed with. A venture in Porto Bello, involving the Spanish Silver Train?”
The old man said nothing.
“Your spies back then told you they’d heard Vhingfrith was trying to recruit people to that cause. He was thinking about doing something in Porto Bello. What was it?”
The old man said nothing. He coughed more blood into his handkerchief, but never took his gaze off the plague mask’s deeply pitted eyes.
“Arthur Vhingfrith had a handful of partners in those days. One of them was named Raymond Smith. Now, you don’t know this next part, for it took place far from here, but Vhingfrith and Smith occasionally acted as spies for the Spanish. Double agents. They used letters of marque granted in Port Royal to chase Spanish ships back into the waters near Panamá. They captured a ship called the San Antonio, and took the captain as hostage, a brave man by the name of Mirandah. But, that captain was a clever man, and offered a deal to both Vhingfrith and Smith, that should they spy on the Admiralty Court in Port Royal, and report the information back to Panamá, they would receive a reward.
“They did just that. At least, those are the rumours. However, there are still other rumours that suggest Arthur Vhingfrith and Raymond Smith only entered into this venture as a means to get close to a man named Narváez. Now, here’s the interesting part. Are you listening, Mr. Laurier?”
The dying man shivered like a dog in the rain, but he was focused on Oddsummers.
“Narváez was a known spy, one of King Philip’s top men. My spies tell me he knew many passphrases for getting into and out of secret ports and inlets scattered throughout the Caribbean, which, if Vhingfrith had those passphrase, could allow the Lively to travel to certain places, without any British spies in Panamá seeing them, as long as they used Spanish ports. This was what Arthur Vhingfrith and Raymond Smith wanted most of all: access to a secret cove, through which the Spanish Silver Train passes five times a year, a fleet of treasure ships that pass untold wealth through the isthmus, dump a little into the coffers of the governors of Panamá, and—are you listening, Mr. Laurier?”
The man had broken off into more bloody coughs.
“The Silver Train takes the silver from Peru and hauls it to Spain. That was what Vhingfrith and Smith had, access to it all.” Oddsummers leaned forward. “But now, Arthur Vhingfrith is dead, his half-Negro son commands his ship the Lively as a privateer. And Raymond Smith was killed on the very night that John Laurier went missing, and his ship slid out to sea from Jamaica and began terrorizing the Colonies.” Oddsummers nodded knowingly. “I think your son had many reasons for going to Raymond Smith that night. I think you know, as well as I do, that he was always a crafty one. He learned a lot in hiding his deviancy from you all those years, and he learned even more as a cut-purse in the rookeries, and still more at the side of crafty old Arthur Vhingfrith, and, if rumours are to be believed, he learned a lot from old Blackbeard himself. He’s a schemer, that son of yours, capable of getting many sailors to do what he wants done. I hear he’s even put some of those old fencing lessons you paid for to savage use.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Benedict Laurier’s eyes shut, as if in pain.
“Your son is a murderer of many men, Mr. Laurier.”
Benedict Laurier shook his head bitterly, and spat out a gob of blood into the Tam. The pool of sludge accepted his blood like an offering, making a hissing sound as it absorbed it. “The world is done. We live in Hell now. God has abandoned us and now Hell is risen to live with us on Earth.” He coughed, wheezed, and spat. “What do you want? Say it, and then grant me eternal peace.”
Oddsummers thought about how best to say it.
“Your son went to Raymond Smith to free those slaves to re-crew his ship. There were no more men who wanted to sail aboard the Hazard, one of two cursed ships that first experienced this Cataclysm, the Long Nights. I asked around about the Ladyman. He made sure Raymond Smith was no longer protected by the Republic of Pirates before he killed the man and his family, took all his slaves, slew the redcoats that were sent after him, and then tortured Smith for those passphrases that would permit a man entry into Porto Bello’s secret ports.” He shrugged. “Some of this I know by fact, some of it I can guess at.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Laurier lamented, tears falling from his eyes.
“Oh, I know you don’t. And it doesn’t matter because I happen to know where he’ll be, and soon. The next fleet of the Spanish Silver Train is soon to head to Panamá—I have it on good authority, you see, and I know that he should be heading there very soon. Though, I won’t make it in time—I’ve yet to fully secure a ship and a working crew of my own—but I know where he’ll go after that.”
“You work…for the Spaniards?” Benedict wheezed.
“Better. The French. Their government is ascendant, while England and Spain are on the decline. I have been contracted by the French to find something. A lost treasure. That need never bother you. But what I need to know is, what did John say to you when he returned here two summers after he left?”
Benedict looked up sharply, those rheumy eyes seeming to have lost sight of the other man in the tent. “What…do you mean?” he coughed.
“Mr. Cocksedge told me. He sent one of his servants over one evening to check on your wife—your second Mrs. Laurier, who was gravely ill at the time. Cocksedge was only being neighbourly. His servant reported seeing who she thought was a woman, done up in plain white dress and bodice. Cocksedge’s servant was bringing a food basket and a letter, wishing your family well. You never saw the Negress, but she saw you, in your parlour, speaking to a man in a dress, who the Negress said ‘walked convincingly like a woman’ whenever he wanted, and ‘looked strikingly like Mr. Laurier’s son.’ John came back to you, didn’t he Mr. Laurier? Even after all those long years, and all the cruelty you showed him.”
Laurier shook his head in silence.
“The Ladyman returned to you, and I want to know what the bloody fuck he told you. Or so help me God, I’ll let you slowly fall apart, watching your jaw slough off like mulch, and fall into the Tam here at my feet! I’ll prolong it if I have to! Now, tell me!” Oddsummers stood. “Tell me, what did he come back here for?”
Benedict Laurier hesitated a moment, his vacant eyes searching the far side of the tent, as if consulting an angel sitting there. “What are you? Some kind of pirate hunter?”
“I am many things. Sort of an investigator, a hunter, but also a captain with a ship, and friends who owe me favours in every port. I have need to find your son, Mr. Laurier.”
“Will…will you kill him?”
Oddsummers nodded. “I imagine it will come to that, eventually.”
Benedict Laurier hesitated a moment longer. Then he spoke. He spoke for a long while. Moments after, Oddsummers thanked him, produced a dagger, and released him from his pain. He opened the tent flap and exited the camp, pushing aside the throngs of dying, who writhed as waterfalls of Tam came trickling down, down, down the steps of St. Andrew’s.
He looked around. When no one was watching, he produced two thin glass vials, and knelt. He uncorked the vials and scooped up some of the Tam, the bits that seemed most active with freshly-growing tendrils. Then he recorked the vials and replaced them in his inner coat pocket.
The Five Pillars were still out. The giant clouds had not changed shape. Belardino Oddsummers sent a prayer up to Holda and Venus, that they might keep him and protect him on his journey.
He headed down Avery Street. There he would find his next target.
____
Oddsummers moved down through the streets of the Avery Street rookery. Four- and five-story buildings leaned on one another like drunkards needing support from their drinking mates. Hardly an alley was wide enough for two people to walk abreast. He was looking for 118.
Two baying dogs chased a thief straight across his path, their owners, a group of watchmen, in close pursuit and blowing whistles. Oddsummers stood to one side and let thief and pursuers pass. The tumult of unbathed bodies moved without order, each of them draped in the same filthy, odor-soaked dross they’d worn the day before. Mangy stray dogs flitted from alley to wagon and back to alley. There were some puddles of Tam collecting from a wheelbarrow that had been filled with Diseased, their bodies never delivered to St. Andrew’s, for the wheelbarrow-pusher had died himself, and lay disintegrating, merging into the cobblestone street. People simultaneously ignored the scene and steered clear of his Tam puddle.
Along the riverside docks, bodies of the Diseased were piling high—the thought being that when some of them finally began to dissolve into Tam, it would just run into the river, and thence into the sea. The smell was acrid and stomach-churning, even above the herbal scents floating within his mask.
Oddsummers passed a soothsayer in the street, an old witch with yellow flesh, a Disease survivor, who had cups of Tam fixed on a table. She smeared the substance all over her hands, to the curiosity of gaping onlookers, and claimed to scry the future with it.
He shook his head and chuckled to himself. The false cults were spreading. It seemed there was no end to delusion and human ingenuity, the two could conspire to turn any tragedy into a lucrative enterprise.
When he came to 117 Avery Street, he climbed the scaffolding that had once been used by workers to repair the apartments, but were now sort of left in place for a fire escape. He passed open windows where children huddled in vacant-eyed clusters around mothers stirring hard bread in water, and where men argued with their mothers or wives, or else slept off the previous night’s stupor.
At the rooftop, he walked the long wooden planks to the neighbouring building, 118. Then he opened the trapdoor on the roof and descended a dark stairwell. He entered the third floor, and rapt once on a door as nondescript as the others. The door opened a smidge, then more, revealing the red-haired woman within. She wore a tunic that at some distant remove had been beige or white, but was now blackened by soot and sweat. “Venus keep you,” she said.
“And Diana protect you,” said Oddsummers, entering.
The witch’s apothecary looked as good as any you would find on the street. Candleflame burned the bottoms of several metal flasks, and a few elixirs bubbled lightly in small iron cauldrons. The curtains were drawn, but the windows were all cracked to let out the hideous aroma, which was so oppressive Oddsummers had to add more pleasant-smelling herbs to his mask.
“I told the magi I could only help if you could provide something for the Work.” She picked up a stick of sorghum and stirred a boiling pot. “I dunna take coin as payment.”
Oddsummers nodded. “I understand, ursula.” She was benandanti, same as he, part of the cult of shamanistic researchers that had emerged in Italy two hundred years prior, somewhere in the Friuli district if the histories were right. The Church had persecuted them for decades, believing most of their order to be dead or defunct, especially after the torture of Thiess, the Shapeshifter, a quarter of a century ago. The benandanti, translating to “good walkers,” were witches that believed themselves to be in constant battle with the dark forces of the malandanti, malevolent witches and demons. As far as they were concerned, the Cataclysm supported every claim they’d ever had about the attempts by evil creatures from the Unknowable Abyss to destroy this world.
“Then if you dunna have coin, what have you brought?” asked the ursula.
Oddsummers reached into his pocket, and pulled out a vial. “Fresh Tam, ursula, made of many comingled dead. Very fresh, too—I just came from St. Andrew’s. I believe the rumour is that this creates the Spark?”
The woman stopped stirring, rushed over, and snatched the vial and shook it and held it up to candlelight. She saw the tendrils trying to form within, and smiled a half-toothless smile.
“Will it work?”
The ursula moved wordlessly over to a copper bowl, poured in a drop of Tam, then lifted a candle and lowered it slowly until its flame licked the sludge. The flame almost seemed to reach out to the Tam, in yearning. Tendrils and flame went towards one another like lovers, and when they touched, there were three or four loud pops and several brilliant white sparks dancing. The ursula leapt back and cackled.
“Well?” said Oddsummers.
“Did you know the Catholics are gathering this stuff up by the barrel?” she said, setting the vial lovingly onto a satin cloth. “Word is, the East India Company’s got a mind of how to use it. Better’n whale oil, they say. And it doesn’t burn away upon combustion!”
Oddsummers nodded. His role for the benandanti was not as a thinker or maker, but as a seeker. They told him what to hunt, and he hunted it. Everyone had a part to play in the Work, and he played his. “There’s more. Loads more. If you can get people down to St. Andrew’s, volunteering as doctors—long as they know the risks, being that close to Tam and the Diseased.”
“You risked it,” she said. “I’m sure others will, long as they take the proper precautions.”
Oddsummers removed a glove, and rolled up the sleeve, revealing pale-yellow flesh. “I risked it because I’ve already survived it,” he said. The ursula moved a candle over his arm with wide-eyed intrigue, but Oddsummers robbed her of further research by putting his glove back on. “You have your payment now. So, where is it?”
The woman nodded slowly, thoughtfully, then moved over to an armoire and opened the bottom drawer. “What do you think’s causing it?”
He needn’t ask what she meant. “I have no thoughts on it. The Cataclysm is upon us, and yet the World has not ended. So, we are not in the End of Days. Not yet.”
“I have heard strange accusations being made,” she said, rummaging through the drawer. “The Catholics are blaming this horror on some men in the Colonies trying to harness lightning, using some sort of ‘heretical rods.’ Strange devices that conduct lightning. The Church says it may ‘interfere with the artillery of Heaven’ and ‘deprives God of using lightning as the tokens of His displeasure.’” She laughed. “I have also heard of some snake cult in Greece that is being blamed, and some strange tribal rituals in Turkey. I’ve also heard it is perhaps a confluence of these things, a break in the natural order caused by blasphemies of too much magnitude.” The ursula sighed. “And then there’s Woodes Rogers, with his fucking firmament.” She gestured west, vaguely towards the Caribbean.
“Rogers is no great philosopher,” Oddsummers said.
“But the papers he’s written, they’ve attracted no small amount of attention. Apparently, he got this notion of a ‘firmament’ from a privateer captain of some repute. Vhing-something or other.”
He nodded. “A clever man quoting a cleverer man and taking credit. Not unheard of. And his name is Vhingfrith, by the way. He’s the one coined the term. The firmament.”
The woman rummaged a moment longer, cursed to herself, before finally removing the ceramic flask. She smashed it against a table, shattering it, and then from the remains pulled out a cloth, upon which was both a rubbing and an inked series of symbols. Seventeen rows of them. “There it is,” she said, handing it over to him. “Passed on from one of our people in Paris. A good ursula herself, she’s working on applications of Spark. Says under the right conditions Tam can be made to induce vapours in the air to turn to flame! Says some Tam was accidentally spilt near a cemetery in Sweden, and that night some folk saw two men and a woman rise from their graves.”
Oddsummers looked skeptical, but the ursula probably couldn’t tell it behind the mask.
“It happened again, they say, in King Charles’s Court. They say a few holy men were present to witness the miracle. Tam was sprinkled over the bodies of a recently deceased child and it began to cry. The Swedes call such things drür, the Armenians call them zombi, and the Spanish—”
“You don’t say.” Oddsummers nodded disinterestedly and took the cloth from her. “These are the most accurate? You’re certain?”
The witch nodded. “She has never lied to me.”
____
Samuel Rollings was indeed a fair engineer. The poor man had lost his arm due to forcing the ship’s surgeon at gunpoint to cut off his Disease-afflicted arm while out at sea. Parts of his face and chest bore the pale-yellow mark of a former Diseased, but overall he seemed less etiolated than most survivors. Perhaps the amputation had worked. Rollings sat across from Oddsummers in a nameless tavern by the wharf, looking bitter.
While rain came down in sheets, they talked idly about how this would work.
“You want to use an entire crew of former Diseased?” Rollings said slowly.
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Many reasons. First of all, they’re cheap. Secondly, they will be both eager and grateful for the job—anything to get away from land, where they are often seen as somehow cursed. Third, the harbour masters will be glad to have the afflicted removed from public display, and may even help with stocking up on food and supplies to see it done. Fourth, if we run up the yellow-jack flag while at sea, people will know we’re a plague ship, and should they look at us through spyglass, they will see a crew of yellow-fleshed Diseased—and who the bloody fuck wants to board a ship covered in the Disease? No offence. That takes care of both pirates and Spanish blockades. And finally, once out to sea, our crew will likely wish to stay there, with their new family, a crew that knows what it’s like to be marked by the Disease.”
Rollings winced. “In other words, men who have no reason to return to England? Men sharing in their miseries?”
“Precisely.” Oddsummers reached across the table. “Do we have a deal?”
Rollings took a last swig of grog. Then he shook Oddsummers’s hand. “They say you’re him. You’re ‘The Villain.’ Never has a man killed more of his own countrymen than you.”
Behind the mask, Oddsummers smirked. “That’s what they say, do they?”
____
Upon the signing of the documents next morning, the HMS Edinburgh was his. Belardino Oddsummers stood before the wharfman in a small shack by the dock. He removed his plague mask, provided information that said he was Hermann Blakely, and used his false papers to lay claim to the ship. The eight thousand guilders were counted by the wharfman’s accountant, who eyed Oddsummers the whole time and whispered occasionally to the wharfman conspiratorially.
The wharfman at last came over to Oddsummers, looking sheepish and afraid, and as he handed over the deed, he said, “My accountant…he believes he’s seen a drawing of your face before. Very particular features, he says. Excuse me, sir, but are you…Belardino Oddsummers?”
“I am he,” he said, rolling up the deed and tucking it inside his coat. He pulled the mask back on. “I am The Villain. Are you afraid?”
“I…no. No, sir. But…you are wanted for treason.”
“And why do you think I did not use my true name?”
“But, sir, surely you know that as soon as you leave this wharf—”
“I was in need of a new ship. My last one was attacked and foundered not too far from here, as you might’ve heard, by an English privateer.”
“I had heard, yes.”
Oddsummers nodded. “Well, there you have it. I hope this does not weigh on your conscience too much, my friend. Trust me, all I need the Edinburgh for is to sail hard for the Caribbean. If all goes well, I shall never target an English ship.” He clapped the man on the shoulder companionably. “I wish it had not come to this.” He unsheathed his blade, gutted both the wharfman and his accountant, then reclaimed his eight thousand guilders and walked out to show his deed to the dockmaster and arranged a date for shoving off.
____
He stood in the apothecary, looking over an array of books. The shelves were stacked tight with the kinds of books he had come for: Northcote’s Marine Practice, Grant’s Complete Anatomy, Hulme’s Libellus de Natura, and last, but certainly not least, Lind’s Effectual Means on Preserving the Health of Seamen.
“Hoping to find something in there for the Tam?” a voice said.
Oddsummers looked around and found the shopkeeper limping over. “Pardon, what?”
The shopkeeper pointed to the books in his hand. “The mask, the books, I assume you are trying to help with the Disease. Hoping to find some truth in nautical health books?”
“I will be taking a voyage soon. No surgeon. I have some small skill with a saw and a square-retractor, but not much experience. I planned on taking the words of wiser physicians with me.”
“Where are you sailing to?”
“The Caribbean. And elsewhere.”
“You’ll want Abernathy’s word on physic, then,” the shopkeeper said, climbing a short ladder to remove a large, dusty tome from the top shelf. “Lots of natural medicines to be found on the islands where the Caribs live, if you make friendly with them, that is. Abernathy’s got advice on that, too. Advice on what sort of gifts the Carib tribe leaders prefer.”
Oddsummers thumbed through the book, then tossed ten shillings on the countertop and said, “Thank you.”
“Will you be needing anything else, sir? A man in need of medical books may need medical instruments. Tenaculums, trocars, ball-scoops?”
“As it happens, I do. Do you know of any shop around selling such items?”
“Not thirty steps away. Just take a left outside my door. I know the man himself. Name’s Lindsey. An honest businessman, and no doubt. And his sister is a chemist, so if you need drams of silver for your voyage, she’s the one.”
“Thank you again.”
The shopkeeper bowed slightly. “Servant, sir.”
Oddsummers took the books in a leather case and left with the tip of his hat.
____
Nine years prior to the date when Captain Belardino Oddsummers set sail upon the Edinburgh, the Act of Union was passed by Parliament, merging the kingdoms of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain, which also merged their two navies. Two major fifth-rate ships were brought over from Scotland, one renamed Glasgow, and the other renamed Edinburgh. Edinburgh was meant to be sunk as a breakwater—a permanent structure constructed in coastal areas to protect against tides, waves, currents, and storm surges. But at the last moment, a stroke of a pen by an admiral happened to re-task the Edinburgh as a cargo ship for the East India Company’s branch in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
She was used once or twice in fending off pirates, and then sent to battle Spanish patrols in the Indian Ocean, and again in the Caribbean before being sent back to England, where she was passed around from captain to captain, lost in shuffles of paperwork, forgotten over time as bigger ships became the main celebrity, and wound up back at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, slowly wasting away.
Who knew all the steps that led to her being here, now, taken by a traitor whose given name was Italian, though he himself wasn’t Italian, and whose surname had been Oldsummer, but, due to an accident at Port Registry ages ago, had him as Oddsummers? The Villain imagined Edinburgh’s story was as complex as his own, with equal parts monumental events and humdrum coincidences.
“Weigh anchor, Mr. Bainbridge,” Oddsummers said to his new first mate.
“Aye, thirr,” Bainbridge slurred. He had a permanently bent back and crooked jaw. “Shall I tell Corbin to thett a corth?”
“Yes. Tell him sou’sou’west. Tell the men all sheets free. Let’s open her up and see how she flies.”
“Aye, thirr.” Bainbridge hobbled off to shout the order.
Oddsummers leaned against the quarterdeck railing, looking at his monstrous crewmen haul rope and saul, moving on the braces to back the foretopsail. He took out the cloth the ursula had given him, upon which was Olivier Levasseur’s supposed cryptogram. A fresh copy, fully completed. He ran his fingers delicately around its edges, imagining the three hundred million pounds of treasure stacked high in some cave, or buried underneath the sands of some small, remote island.
And he wondered if he was right about the role John Laurier could play in his plan.
They left the Five Fingers behind. Oddsummers looked back at the docks, where he saw two whaling ships setting out to sea, loaded down with barrels of Tam. Rumour had it, the substance grew and expanded, without cause, without limitations. Burning it only brought fire and ruin. Burying Tam spoiled the soil. And so the whalers were paid to take barrels of the stuff out to sea and dump it.
The Catholics are collecting it as a replacement for oil, England’s leadership is tossing it away out of fear. How many more of us can die of the Disease and be fed into the ocean as Tam, or used to light a lamp? What effect will that have on Nature? The benandanti prioritized the Natural Order above all things, and whatever was happening now disturbed even a mere seeker like him. It’s more than just the unnaturalness. Passing through the firmament—it is reshaping the way we live.
Then he looked up at the dark sky. The clouds all around the Five Fingers were slowly parting, showing the rising sun. His hands touched the railing. He bent down and kissed it. “The wharfman said you are iron-sick. Said you weren’t fit to sail. But I think you can do anything, kill anyone. I think you can kill the Devil, sail us to the Caribbean, then to the Indian Ocean, to Levasseur’s treasure, and to glory. They cast you aside as breakwater. They did the same to me. Let’s show them all, you and I, eh? Let’s bend England over the rail and fuck her up the ass. Let’s you and me do that, Edinburgh.”
As though responding to the goading, the ship surged. All sheets bloomed in the wind and the cut-water cleaved dark waters, in which swam dark creatures born of the firmament.
The firmament, he thought, looking astern at the swift-rising sun. The firmament…
It had been three months since the Cataclysm reshaped the world and its geopolitics. Three months since John Laurier went missing, and left his supposed lover, Benjamin Vhingfrith, alone in Jamaica. Rumour was, England had since decided to embrace the Devil’s Son, use him to battle pirates and Spaniards in the Caribbean. But it was his relationship with Cartera, a man some called Munt, that had placed Vhingfrith, and perhaps Laurier, directly in Oddsummers’s sights. The firmament may have changed much, but it had not changed the world so much that his own priorities had shifted. French Intelligence said Munt was said to have Levasseur’s true cryptogram, and had ordered that he and his associates must not gain the momentum needed to find what the French could not. Oddsummers was tasked with making certain of that.
But Oddsummers had somewhat different plants. And like any hunter, he must know his game well. He must know it better than it knew itself. And Benedict Laurier had provided Oddsummers with a vital clue.
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the second vial that he’d taken from St. Andrew’s. He shook it. It turned many shades of pink, and even appeared to glow a moment before simmering down.