The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Corsetta kept getting out of there, didn’t she?” Bram and Garland had followed them below, creating a crush in the narrow corridor.

  It was true. On their last voyage together they’d picked up a scam artist, a teenage girl who’d had something of a gift for escapes.

  “I believe Corsetta may have been inscribed … slippery, they call it,” Garland said. “It’s a common intention on certain nations where there’s a large class of people in service. The intention can be laid on adolescents who work as cleaners or tutors in the homes of powerful people. Living in a stranger’s home creates vulnerabilities…”

  “Slipperiness keeps the lord of the manor from meddling with the help?” Bram said.

  Garland nodded. “By making them hard to trap.”

  “Lidman will be secure enough,” Humbrey said. He’d been watching the two men closely—reading their lips, Sophie realized.

  “I’ll be spending time with him,” Bram said. “Learning about inscription. Is that okay?”

  “Everything to do with Lidman is up to your sister,” Garland said. “We’ll be under way within an hour.”

  With that he turned, moving forward toward the galley, and away.

  “Give him time,” Bram murmured, before Sophie could follow.

  * * *

  Sophie returned to their cabin. Bram had made copies—without her name on them—of the texts of the seven Beatrice inscriptions. As they eased out to the edge of Fleet, turning into the wind, she brooded over that last one.

  Beatrice meant to bond me with my adopted family. To keep me away. But it didn’t work; she doesn’t know what the spell does.

  Bram had circled one of the letters within that scroll, noting it with a question mark.

  She was, momentarily, so weary that her eyes crossed. The past few days had been a whirl. Meeting Beatrice at the hospital, exploring the exhibits archive, all the paperwork …

  It would slow down now.

  She made herself sit, closed her eyes, started to breathe on a four count. Inhale, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four. In time, her mind stilled. Everything would start coming together now. Sailing meant long days with nowhere to go; it was like a retreat of sorts. The Watch and the courts couldn’t throw new things at her from here. The bandwidth for communications in and out would narrow. She’d start knocking some questions off the list in her book.

  She kept up the count—in, out, in—until she was calm. Then she lay in her bunk, letting the sea rock her into a catnap.

  When she resurfaced, she started by sorting her papers and notes: pieces of messageply, the letter from Brawn. One by one, she pinned them to the bulkhead.

  “Of course,” Bram said, when he appeared. “If we’re going to play at being cops, we might as well have a crime board.”

  “Never call it playing,” she told him. “This is real-time, grown-up work, Bram. No more ivory tower.”

  “Aye, aye, Boss.”

  They don’t say “Aye, aye” here, she thought, but he handed her a pin, along with the list of things that had gone missing from that basket of fright spell ingredients.

  As the masts of the Fleet shrank into the distance, the two of them settled into a rhythm, gathering, sorting, and displaying their artifacts and clues, working in a way that reminded her of fall nights spent doing homework at the kitchen table. It was a feeling at once companionable and tinged with the faintest hint of homesickness.

  CHAPTER 17

  Traveling within the Fleet was less like sailing than being in an especially tricky-to-navigate city. After Nightjar broke away, setting sail westward in what would be at least a three-week journey, the ocean stretched once more in every direction. There was nowhere to go, nobody to call, nobody to see. A powerful sense of isolation set in.

  The ship was small. Garland was remote. Tonio had taken a quiet dislike to Daimon—on the grounds, Sophie suspected, that Bram found her fake fiancé cute.

  As for Bram, he gave every appearance of being supremely pleased to be asea again. When he wasn’t busy chatting Daimon up—on the pretext of practicing his Fleet, usually—he was trying to learn more about inscription from Krispos, from the books Verena had left, and from Kev himself.

  Sweet’s time was taken up with ship repairs and being ridiculously in the throes of newfound love with Watts. As for Daimon, Humbrey, and Selwig, they were strangers.

  On the third day out, a note appeared on the sheet of messageply whose other half Sophie had left with Beatrice.

  ANNELA IS STABLE. THERE WAS SOME BRAIN DAMAGE, WHICH WE’VE HAD CURED. IT WAS A HEAVY INTENTION, BUT SHE NO LONGER NEEDS TO PRESERVE HER MAGICAL LOAD FOR A MORE EXALTED CAREER.

  In other words, she had officially failed in her quest to become Allmother.

  SHE SAYS BETTONA AND A GIRL WERE SPEAKING ANGLAY AND SEARCHING HER OFFICES AS SHE FIRST FELL INTO THE HYPEROSMOLAR COMA. THE GIRL REFERRED TO BETTONA AS “SIR,” A COUPLE TIMES. AN ERSTWHILE MILITARY CONNECTION?

  MOVING ON TO GOVERNMENT GOSSIP, THE SLAVE NATIONS HAVE BEEN TRYING TO GET THE CONVENOR OF SYLVANNA TO REBUKE CLYDON PUBLICLY FOR TAKING ANNELA TO HAVERSHAM ABOARD SAWTOOTH DURING THE DIPLOMATIC INCIDENT EARLIER THIS YEAR. IT’S PART OF A BIGGER BROUHAHA OVER THE SYLVANNER ELECTION—THERE ARE SOME HOTLY CONTESTED RACES BETWEEN ISOLATIONIST AND PRO-FLEET FACTIONS, AND SOME ABOLITIONIST PAL OF CLYDON’S IS RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR.

  VERDANII AND SYLVANNA HAVE ALWAYS HAD MUCH IN COMMON DESPITE THEIR DIFFERENCES OVER SLAVERY. IF PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO CHIP AWAY AT THAT ALLIANCE WHILE VERDANII IS PERCEIVED TO BE VULNERABLE, IT SEEMS LIKELY THAT THERE’S HOPE IN SOME QUARTERS THAT A FLEETWIDE WAR CAN BE TRIGGERED SOONER RATHER THAN LATER.

  The note ended abruptly, as Beatrice filled the last of the magical page.

  Working from the books she’d loaded into her phone, Sophie reinvented a wheel, working up basic how-to-procedures for the beginnings of a fingerprint process.

  The Fleet had begun taking prints from new cadets about fifteen years ago—as fallout from some kind of lawsuit, naturally. The cards were in with the rest of the personnel records, which were filed according to an arcane system based on country of origin and term of service. They sometimes used the prints when a body turned up in the ocean without its tags or its face. It only really worked when they had a good guess as to who the body was.

  What Sophie had done was to request all the prints of people who’d gone AWOL or otherwise missing from Fleet in the past five years, along with a thousand randomly chosen from the archive, and all of the unidentified corpse prints.

  Identification was first a matter of classifying the prints—basically, indexing them in a way that made it possible to look them up again. Two guys named Azizul Haque and Edward Henry had come up with one such system in the nineteenth century, for use in British India. The technology proliferated as police around the world taught themselves to do it, using written manuals. Now Sophie was doing the same, figuring out how to turn ten finger impressions into a code: once you determined the dominant pattern on each finger, you gave it an A if it mostly had arches, a W if it was whorls, and an L if it had loops. This gave you something that looked like AWALLWLALL, which let you order your print cards into one of thirty-two piles.

  The next order of classification was finer grained, but it got you into the right drawer before you started looking for what fingerprint techs called “points of similarity.”

  The idea was that she, Humbrey, and Selwig would examine and file all the print cards, without knowing which ones belonged to the missing sailors. Then they’d do searches on the corpse prints. If the matches they produced did indeed come from people who’d vanished—and if all three of them came up with similar results—the Watch would concede that the classification system worked and would expand the scope of the project.

  It was a big task, suited to long days. Luckily, both men were good at pattern recognition. Humbrey was especially keen—he relished the prospect of carving out a new direction for his career, now that his hearing was
shot. Selwig was younger, a burly giant of a soldier who looked like he’d be happier loading hay bales, working as a club bouncer, or playing football. He was less interested in desk work and his disposition leaned toward surliness, but he learned well enough … as long as he was praised almost constantly.

  Since their duties included guarding Kev, Sophie moved the entire dactyloscopy operation right to Kev’s cabin. “You have options,” she told him. “Sit on the fringes, help Bram learn inscription, or help out with the fingerprint stuff.”

  Rather than lie around being bored to death, Kev settled into drinking endless cups of sweetened tea while answering Bram’s magic-related questions.

  When she found herself wanting a break from the group, Sophie would leave them with the pile of prints and practice the next step: record keeping, comparisons, and lifting latent prints.

  Printing a subject was easy enough. A sponge laced with locally made dyes made a perfectly respectable ink pad. Capturing latent prints was another matter. It was harder, but also more fun.

  At home, a lot of fingerprint powders were made of synthetic materials or graphite. Here, Sophie would need to rely on powder recipes from the nineteenth century. Over the first week, with slow and meticulous work, she experimented with powder mixes and dusted much of the ship for latent prints, exploring ways to lift them off wood, silver, ceramics, and the Erinthian obsidian that served as window glass.

  The hardest thing, technologically, proved to be transferring powdered latent prints to cards for use as permanent records. Stormwrack had no plastic, and thus no clear lifting tape to deploy. Bram took a day off from studying inscription and got Daimon to help him with applying a thin layer of glue to cards, lifting the prints, and then shellacking the resulting image to fix it to the page.

  As they nailed down each stage of the process, Sophie wrote out a procedures manual in Fleet, translating existing English documents and adapting them to Stormwrack’s technology and resource base.

  This was where Krispos came in. As Sophie made translations of the procedures manuals she was using as sources, she wrote them out in Fleet and then had him memorize the texts.

  She was putting her cabin back to rights one afternoon, after a serious print-gathering binge, when Garland passed by.

  “Garland,” she said. “Can I speak to you?”

  He stepped inside, taking in the dust patches and the fingerprint cards drying in the weak winter sunlight. “More practice for the Watch cadets?”

  “For me, too,” she said, handing him a pair of dried, shellacked cards.

  “What’s this?”

  “One’s Verena. I don’t know which. The other, probably…”

  “Would be Gale.” His features softened a little as he compared them.

  She attempted a change of subject. “So—Kev.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “The law says he can’t just be freed,” she said.

  “Given his crimes, that’s unsurprising.”

  “But if he’s harmless, it’s allowed.”

  “A pacification spell? He would have to give you his full name.”

  “Mensalohm told me that, once we get to Sylvanna, they strip a slave’s previous identity. I have to rename him.”

  Garland frowned. “You’ve told him this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Once the pacification spell’s done, he’s defenseless?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you can free him. Will you?”

  “I want to. But something’s wrong with this picture. The pirates want him. Cly, too, maybe. But he doesn’t seem especially scared.”

  “No. Which is strange. Even if you free him, his enemies could presumably chase him down.”

  “Exactly.” He always knows just where I’m going with these things. “So does he think we can protect him indefinitely?”

  “He’d have to be quite the optimist.” Garland considered it. “There’s no bottom to these depths.”

  “Kev claims the thing the Golders want from him is the location where the slaves went. The ones he supposedly freed.”

  “They’re more likely to want his coconspirators.”

  “Cly killed everyone aboard Incannis.”

  “Their sponsors, then.”

  “Sponsors?”

  He fiddled with one of the print brushes as he explained. A good proportion of the bonded had light intentions laid on them at birth, spells to make them tractable or obedient. Even if those intentions hadn’t been laid, or got destroyed, a slave who ran had to know that his or her owner could lay another inscription on them after the fact.

  “There is a tiny window of opportunity,” Garland said. “A person’s name must be changed before they’re found to be missing. Otherwise, their owner can kill them from afar or compel them to return.”

  Sophie swallowed. Her own name was in the wild; the only way to change it would be to do so legally, in the United States, or perhaps now in Sylvanna, where she was—on paper, anyway—a citizen.

  “You mean some free nation is making escapees citizens, and then renaming them,” she said.

  “If Kev knows who, and how, it would give him significant political value.”

  “If we get him to tell us who his contacts are, maybe we can warn them—”

  “Sophie, as a Sylvanner yourself, and a sworn official of the Fleet, it’s better that you don’t know.”

  Suspicion bloomed. That made it sound like Garland knew something. “Fair enough. But if there was a hidden slave colony on one island or another, couldn’t Kev go there after he’s pacified? To be safe from the Isle of Gold types and their happy torture fun?”

  He considered it, dipping the edge of the brush in the club moss dust and lightly buffing the corner of Verena’s clock. A print—Sophie’s own thumb—started to take shape. His hands were as nicely proportioned as the rest of him, and they moved with increasing assurance as he familiarized himself with the brush. “It might be,” he said at last, “that there’s a place where he’d be welcomed.”

  “You know where the people he rescued ended up.” She couldn’t help beaming at him. “You’re totally in with the abolitionists.”

  “I can no more allow to having an idea of an escapee’s whereabouts than you can admit to a lack of commitment to your present romantic relationship,” he said, in the extra-prissy voice.

  She tried not to be stung. She had brought a fiancé, however fake, aboard. If their positions were reversed, she’d be hurt.

  “Fine, let’s change the subject.” She indicated the cards with Aunt Gale’s and Verena’s prints on them. “I’ve compared both of these cards with that print the police in San Francisco bagged from my parents’ house.”

  “You thought Verena ransacked your room? I could have told you—”

  “She isn’t here, is she? She’s on Verdanii. Intelligence types there could totally have ordered her to go see if she could find Gale’s pocket watch.”

  “I know things were awkward between you, because of—” He barely paused. “Because of me. But you can’t believe Verena would violate your privacy.”

  “I’m supposed to be the proof squad, not the take-people-at-their-word patrol,” she said.

  “Ah, yes. Indisputable facts. No trust without proof. Did you suspect her of transporting John Coine, as well?”

  “Of course she didn’t help kill Gale!”

  “But you’d like to prove that, too?”

  The only enclosed space on Nightjar that was bigger than this cabin was the galley, and yet it seemed too close, suddenly. She fought an urge to pace, which would have brought her, in one step, right up to his nose. “Brawn told me John Coine went to a Tenderloin diner, Sunny Side Jim. And a gun store. We’ll assemble pictures of all the Feliachild suspects, me and her included, and find someone to show them to the restaurant staff and gun store folks.”

  “Someone?”

  “Would your Anglay be up to it?”

  “Possibly.” His tone
was still guarded.

  “Seas, Garland! I’m not trying to lock up the family. I have to eliminate Beatrice and Verena as suspects.”

  “Your sister would never have helped John Coine and his cronies kill Gale. If you think—”

  “I don’t think that! Not even a little.”

  That got a genuine smile from him. “And Bettona Feliachild?”

  “Her? She’s in this somehow, up to her knobby neck.”

  “Beatrice believes she trained someone to eraglide.”

  “Yeah. We have to figure out who … and whether they are indeed genetically related to the Verdanii nobility. If not, Annela and the gang at the Watch can move on to being unhappy about foreign eragliders instead of suspecting Feliachilds of treason.”

  “I suppose that might be an improvement.” He handed the fingerprint brush back.

  When he turned to leave, she said, “Don’t go.”

  His brows rose in question.

  Don’t start babbling, don’t start babbling. “Let me print you.”

  “Why?”

  “To eliminate you from the mix here.” She pulled out a fresh page, wrote Captain G. Parrish of Issle Morta on it, and the date. “Give me your hand.”

  With the barest of pauses, he did. His skin was warm.

  She rolled his left thumb over the sponge, laid it on the table, and then rolled it on the card. “What does that look like to you?”

  “Truth,” he said.

  What did you do with that? She kept going. “Index, middle, fourth, pinky. Now your left.”

  He consented with a faint smile.

  Thawing, she thought. I’m just a little irresistible, then.

  Hard on the heels of that thought came the memory of the scrolls Beatrice had given her. Charm. He was just succumbing to the magic.

  “Sophie?”

  She finished printing him and tried to sound cheerful. “All done!”

  “Whatever’s wrong?”