The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Of course,” the clerk said.

  She took a quick flip-through before handing it back.

  They didn’t do word-for-word transcripts here, settling instead for written summaries of trial evidence. Kev’s prosecution consisted of an account of the sinkings and an inventory of hard cargo found on Incannis, stolen things from the missing ships—amber beads, various kinds of narcotic, spell ingredients, and, from Sylvanna, “contraband medical records.” There was no mention whatsoever of smuggled slaves. The listing was followed by Cly’s statement about the fight between Incannis and his ship, Sawtooth.

  She wasn’t about to read that. She asked, “This says the cargo samples are in … Exhibits?”

  “That’s in the hold. Do you wish to see them, Kir?”

  “Is that okay?”

  “You’ve taken the Oath?”

  She nodded, wondering why anyone would take her word for it. Still, the clerk happily took her below, descending four decks to a massive locked hatch.

  “Sign in here, Kir.”

  “Okay.” A first glance reminded Sophie of movie renderings of top secret government warehouses—a vast hold filled with crates. Then it occurred to her that, big or not, this couldn’t possibly be everything. “This can’t cover all the backlogged cases.”

  “No, Kir. We store materials for cases likely to see adjudication or the dueling court within a tenmonth.”

  “Where’s the rest?”

  She started pointing at sections of shelving. “Homicide cases are held by Issle Morta, because they serve the dead. Matters of commerce go to Sparta, for they eschew profit. Paperwork for petty criminal matters is on Drake’s Shoal.”

  “They eschew pettiness?”

  It was a small joke, and it failed to gain any traction with the clerk. “The Shoal has little natural wealth. The government contract to store state records is crucial to their economy.”

  Sophie looked at the last section of shelves—the biggest. “And all your resource fights? Ownership of plants and animals? Biodiversity feuds?”

  “The natural history case archive is on Murdocco. I’ll come back, shall I?” With that, the clerk left her, closing her in and noisily throwing the latch.

  Sophie went looking for her case. At home, each of these caches would be stored in a cardboard file box. The same idea held here, but these were wicker baskets, handmade, one for each case. Each basket was covered, labeled, lashed shut, and tied to its shelf, lest the rocking of the ship dislodge crucial evidence.

  She found the basket matching Kev’s case number, examining the samples of Incannis’s plunder—beads, drug samples, and a description of a Sylvanner kid with symptoms reminiscent, at least to Sophie, of ADHD. The boy’s name had been burned from the page. The notes indicated an unproved suspicion that the file had been acquired by a name-stealing ring.

  There was nothing to either support or refute Kev’s story.

  The clerk wasn’t back yet.

  She roamed the shelves, reading labels, until one caught her eye: “Counterclaim Year 57—Marine Bats, 2 Species.”

  She opened it up, remembering the bats she’d encountered during her accidental first visit to Stormwrack. The crate held two pickled samples and two skins. Each sample had a distinctive set of tufted ears.

  She riffled through the case notes. The two islands in dispute had agreed that both species inhabited each nation’s forests … but both claimed rights to profits from spells using the animals’ larynxes.

  She looked at a bat in its jar of brine. The biodiversity shelf held perhaps two hundred such baskets, a small fraction of the total pending cases. What if most of them contained samples, items like these, all tagged with data about the animal species involved—where they were captured, habitat info?

  After the cases wrapped up, the samples might be up for grabs.

  She felt a burst of greed, as if she’d fallen into a treasure hoard. Samples, information, details on animal behavior, all of it here for the—well, not plundering, exactly.

  Who knew what she might find?

  She kept browsing.

  Snail collection, island of Erinth.

  Shrews of Zingoasis.

  Lesser chindrella, dispute between Tiladene and Ualtar.

  Peacocks, 6 species, latterly rumored unnatural.

  Fright ingredients. Pouched lion.

  “Pouched?” she said aloud. “Poached?”

  The basket wasn’t any bigger than the others.

  Pouched … marsupial?

  “I’m investigating frights,” she said, justifying herself, even though nobody was there to tell her not to rifle through other people’s case evidence. She hefted the basket down, tipping the lid.

  Painted wooden eyes glared out at her.

  “Lion-skin rug,” Sophie muttered. “Marsupial by-the-Seas lion-skin rug. OMG.”

  She pulled it out, marveling at everything—the silky, koala-dense fur, the huge forepaws with their strange, cleaverlike thumb claw. The rug only encompassed the top of the marsupial lion, so there was no chance to look at the pouch.

  Extinct at home. Alive and well here. She photographed it and clipped a hair sample, labeling it carefully.

  The rest of the basket contained a selection of samples tagged as ingredients for the frightmaking spells that, according to treaty, had been outlawed. The inventory had gaps: she found a listing for a jar of salamander eggs but not the container itself. There were twenty labeled acorns, two catkins, a lungfish, three kinds of dog, tree bark samples, braids of horse and cat hair (both half as long as the notes said they should be), sealing wax, and an unlabeled box of what looked like bits of fingernail.

  She was about to pack it all back up when she found one last sample in the bottom of the basket: a lizard, the length of her hand, with thin, iridescent glider wings.

  Sitting cross-legged in the hold atop the lion, she examined the lizard—the blue scaling on its belly, the mottled green on top. She imagined it slithering its way to some high point, wings pulled tight against its back, then dropping off, or possibly springing into the air.

  To catch what prey? Flying insects, perhaps?

  She tipped her head to take in the shelves. Box upon box of potential treasure, and a total-access card to visit.

  Strangely comforted, she took the basket out, advised the clerk that there was material missing from the collection of fright-related exhibits, and—in a last quick burst of footwork—hit the hospital ship to see if there was any chance of seeing Annela Gracechild.

  She found Beatrice, instead, sitting vigil with three separate guards. A forbidding, seven-foot Amazon type with a headdress made of pheasant feathers stood in front of the door, next to a uniformed Fleet officer and a young towheaded woman wearing what looked like black pajamas.

  “Triple guarded,” Beatrice said, indicating the trio. “One from Verdanii, one from the Convene, a third from the Watch.”

  “How’s Annela doing?” Sophie asked.

  “Still unconscious.”

  “Do they know what’s wrong?”

  “The doctors here call it salt-and-sugar tilt,” Beatrice said. She fiddled with the straps of an enormous leather purse, red in color, that looked to Sophie like a Coach knockoff.

  “Meaning what? Sugars … diabetic coma?”

  Her birth mother nodded. “I’m guessing nonketotic hyperosmolar coma. But if I say that to them, it’ll be gibberish.”

  “It’s gibberish to me, too. I don’t know anything about diabetes.”

  “They’re rehydrating her and administering sugars; she’ll probably come out of it.”

  “Was she getting insulin shots?”

  “No. Fasting wasn’t the best idea she ever had, but she’s managed it before all right.” Beatrice gnawed at her thumbnail. “If someone sabotaged her, it might have been by swapping out her pills. Very hard to prove.”

  “Bettona’s still AWOL?”

  “Yes. But she has an ironclad alibi for the other thing, rememb
er? She didn’t bring Gale’s assassins you-know-where.”

  “She has accomplices. Helpers. We found how-to books about terrorism in her cabin.”

  “Helpers who can eraglide,” Beatrice said, sourly.

  “Speaking of blood sugar, you look like you could use some food. Are you on guard here, or…”

  “’Nella’s safe enough with all this at her door.” To Sophie’s surprise, Beatrice smiled. “Come on. You’ll enjoy this.”

  She led Sophie out of what seemed to be a VIP wing and into a patient ward—a double-row of injured and sick sailors in wide flat hammocks. They were tended by nurses and orderlies of both genders.

  The hospital ward was clean. Wrackers might not understand germ theory, but they seemed to believe that cleanliness prevented contagion: the smell of ammonia was all it took to confirm that.

  Typical of Fleet, the patients were a racially mixed group. Some wore crisply ironed pajamas emblazoned with a stylized version of Constitution’s paddle wheel. The Fleet sick bay uniform, Sophie supposed. Others, presumably civilians, were in a mix of robes and smocks. One seemed to be deep in prayer. Another was embroidering. A third was browsing through a book titled Veterinary Inscription: Magical Loads and Domesticated Animals.

  A young man moved among them, followed closely by an elderly nurse.

  The man was what the Wrackers called an oddity, someone altered by magic so that his or her physical appearance was no longer entirely human. The man’s arms, from the elbow down, had the dull sheen of fish scale, and instead of terminating in fingers, his hands had the blunt, dangerous faces of eels. His female attendant—whose knuckles, wrists, and elbows all had a lumpy, arthritic look to them—was rolling a trolley. It had two levels: there was a tub of water, above, and a bowl of fish roe—bright red salmon eggs and white globes the color of cataracts—below.

  After soaking his arms in the water, the man laid his eel-head stumps on a young sailor who had an enormous leg cast. The patient had been watching intently as he approached. Her hands were clenched and her breathing was tightly controlled—signs she was struggling against significant pain?

  As the nurse’s flesh met the patient’s, there was a low crackling, and an ozone smell.…

  “Electric eels,” Sophie murmured, and Beatrice nodded.

  The sailor relaxed back against her pillows with an audible sigh of relief.

  The nurse turned, holding up both arms, as his attendant produced the bowl of roe. Eel tongues extended slowly into the bowl, and this time Sophie could see the current, little flicks of lightning traveling from nurse to eggs, leaving the roe flickering like banked coals.

  “What gives?”

  “The nurse draws the pain out of the patient and transfers it to the eggs,” Beatrice said.

  “Where it … what?”

  “Ha. Good question. It waits, basically, for the egg membranes to break. Then it makes for the nearest warm body.”

  “Literally warm? Mammalian?”

  “Yes.”

  It was the first time Sophie had seen her birth mother looking comfortable, at home with herself or her surroundings.

  Her birth mother beckoned, and nurse and attendant approached. Beatrice took a flat wooden probe and extracted two of the tiniest specks of roe. She set one on Sophie’s palm and took the other herself, between index finger and thumb. “Go ahead,” she said. “It won’t hurt much.”

  By way of demonstration, she popped her own between finger and thumb.

  Sophie followed suit. There was a shock at first, the sort of jolt one got from static on a cold winter day. Then, just for a second, aches bloomed in her femur and the back of her rib cage, quick jabs in both places.

  She looked around the room, past the woman with the broken leg, and saw a patient lying on her stomach with a huge bandage on her back, behind the heart.

  She took a sniff at her fingers: fish, nothing more.

  “Believe it or not, there’s a trade in these,” Beatrice said. “There are cultures that use them in religious ordeals, as tests of strength or, in one case, a mode of penance. Hail Mary and pop! And there’s at least one exotic dish, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” said the nurse. “There’s a chef who uses herring roe laced with pain from burns. I can’t say it’s something I’d want to taste, but…” With a shrug, the young man reached for his attendant. The movement looked both habitual and almost unconscious. Energy crackled between them.

  Those arthritic joints, Sophie thought.

  The old woman relaxed within her uniform and held up the eggs for the transfer. Then she straightened the eel man’s shirt.

  “Isn’t that terribly inconvenient?” Sophie asked.

  “I was born without hands, Kir. I could write with my feet before I was ever inscribed. Jamla and I take excellent care of each other.”

  Repurposing the disabled, as they did with the kids they’re turning into the mermaids. She hoped her discomfort with the idea didn’t show in her face. Somehow, Beatrice’s presence at her side, the consciousness of the spells she had worked on Sophie, made the whole conversation feel incredibly loaded. “This ability … You’re somehow reconfiguring the patient’s nervous system with a dose of low voltage.… But why are the eggs necessary?”

  That Don’t know, don’t care shrug. “I was trained as an auramancer, Kir. I align their auras out of the pain and move it into the roe.”

  “And are there side effects?”

  “Fewer than with maddenflur,” he said, with an expression of distaste as he referenced the opiate. “No dependence. Patients do sometimes mistake the absence of suffering for recovery.”

  “We have surgery in fifteen,” Jamla said softly.

  “Kirs, thank you for the demonstration,” Beatrice said.

  The two of them bowed and withdrew.

  “That was interesting,” Sophie said. “Thank you.”

  Beatrice led her in the other direction, out of the ward and belowdecks, past a dispensary—there were guards on the portal that led to the drugs, which seemed pleasingly sensible to Sophie—and through an ordinary-looking physio clinic equipped with weights, bars for people relearning to walk, and a swim tank.

  Here, Beatrice paused again, watching as a uniformed therapist did range-of-motion tests with a patient whose arm bore deep scars.

  The patient was unusually tall and muscled, in her fifties, and marked with a grayscale tattoo Sophie had seen on other Verdanii women around her birth mother’s age. The tattoo depicted a hawk in midflight—the line of scar tissue had just nicked one of its outstretched talons.

  The therapist finished testing the patient, then strapped her into a brace that immobilized both shoulder and upper arm before setting a dexterity puzzle beneath her dangling hand and wrist. Moving clumsily, the patient began to assemble the puzzle one-handed.

  “Is this just a tour, or is there a point?” Sophie asked.

  “You’re getting a reputation,” Beatrice said. “You look at people, you learn things about them—or know things. The jury’s out on your possibly being uncanny.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “I thought I’d waft you past a few of my people. Let them see you looking.”

  “Us.”

  “What?”

  “Let them see us looking,” Sophie said. “In a couple days I’m going to be off sailing. I don’t mind you using me as a magnet for trouble. Though, come to think of it, maybe I should.”

  Beatrice let out a snort.

  “But if you draw anyone out, it’s you they might come after.”

  “My sister’s murder is unsolved. My cousin may yet die.” The skin around Beatrice’s eyes pinkened. “Let ’em come.”

  “Then what? You have an M16 in there?” The purse was almost big enough.

  Her mother cracked the bag. Inside was an ordinary plastic sandwich bag from home, half filled with fish eggs. “Our young nurse friend wouldn’t say anything so barbaric to a stranger, but these pain roe would
drop a raging moose.”

  “Ah…”

  “Come on,” Beatrice said. “You’re right about me being hungry. And there’s a Gracechild tenner working in the cafeteria.”

  Their next stop was a strangely low-ceilinged galley with a buffet: ceviche and pickled fish, several variations of coleslaw, sliced pears in citrus juice, protein jelly, and a range of vegetable purees arranged by spice. Everything was easy to chew, pastel colored, and just above lukewarm.

  “Hospital food,” Beatrice said, helping herself to something broccoli colored, with a scent of coriander and turmeric. “See, the two worlds aren’t that different.”

  Sophie took a sampling of the ceviche and a turnip dish, thinking again of hamburgers, and chose a table that afforded her a view of the servers. “Is that the guy we’re interested in?”

  Beatrice followed her gaze to a young man in a stiffly starched cadet’s uniform. “How’d you work it out?”

  “You said he’d just joined Fleet, and he’s the newest one here. He’s making an effort not to look at us,” she said. “Skin color’s that same coppery shade as Annela’s. And Verena’s got a pair of boots with that same design.”

  “You didn’t strike me as a shoe hound.”

  “People keep stealing my boots.”

  “Rubber soles are like gold here.”

  “I’d have thought the general prejudice against—What do they call them? Atomism and mummer handicrafts?—would keep the larceny at bay.”

  “People can be hypocritical about their superstitions. One of the things I love about Americans, actually, is that they’re so often up-front about what they want.”

  American. An identity that meant nothing here. Sophie felt an odd thrum of dislocation. “Tacking back to the point … I’ve been taking notice of where and how people can vary up the Fleet uniform while still wearing a marker of nationality. So is he? Verdanii?”

  Beatrice nodded.

  “What is he … fourteen? Is he really a good candidate for a conspiracy?”

  “He doesn’t have a timepiece and he’s not a Feliachild, so he shouldn’t be able to eraglide.” Beatrice seemed to reach a decision. She opened her voluminous purse and withdrew a wooden box with a stonewood latch. “This was in Annela’s office. It contains, for lack of a better term, priestess stuff. All the physical materials used in the rituals to make eragliders of me, Gale, and Verena.”