The Traitor's Spice

Five inches of mountain cedar should have blunted an iron gouge, yet the hole near the garboard strake had dissolved clean through, its edges soft as boiled melon rind. Kazuma knelt on the narrow catwalk of the lowest bilge, balancing his grease-lamp on a damp cross-beam. Below his knees, foul bilge water lapped against river ballast stones with the slow, greasy slap of drowned reeds. He needed to drive a pitch-soaked oakum plug into the breach before marsh slime fouled the stones beneath the hold, but the pale pulp around the bored rim smelled neither of rot nor of mountain sap.

He touched the rim with a calloused thumb. The pulp crumbled into yellow tallow that coated his skin like rancid lard.

Topside, the patched ward-drum beat on. The lacquered silk banner Kazuma had lashed across the bronze rim held firm, but the sound reached the bottom of the hull as a muffled, flat thrum. The vibration rattled the copper rivets in the floor timbers, shivering the small pool of gray slime that dripped from the hole.

From the copper-lined speaking tube fixed to the central rib, a dry scrape echoed down from the steering deck.

"Embalmer," Botan's voice rattled through the pipe, tinny and thin. "Our lady of the court wishes to know if her nephew has requested another blanket. The draft through your bilge hatch is fluttering her silk."

Kazuma did not look up from the bored timber. He reached into his hemp apron for his mallet. "Tell her the prince is dry. The cedar under his bier is another matter."

"Teruo shoved the mallet into my hands the moment your head cleared the hatch," Botan said through the tube. "He went to stand sentry by the middle deck grating, glaring at every creak like a debtor expecting the magistrate. Work softly, old man, or he will pin your apron to the keelson."

"Keep your stick moving against that drum," Kazuma said into the tube's flared mouth. "If the beat slows, the mud outside will wake again."

"The silk groans with every strike," Botan replied. "It will tear before the third watch, but I will play her nephew a lullaby until it does."

The tube went quiet, leaving only the dull, rhythmic pulse of the topside drum shuddering through the ship's ribcage.

Kazuma set his tallow candle into the iron lantern frame, pulling his tool roll from his belt. He laid out a square scraping chisel, an iron spoon, a three-legged bronze saucer, and a stoppered clay phial of fermented rice vinegar.

The hole was three fingers wide, bored at a clean upward slant that bypassed the thick bronze sheathing along the outer keel. A burrower had not gnawed its way through by tooth or claw. The cedar grain showed no tooth marks, no splintered fibers, no ragged tear where heartwood met force. The wood had simply melted away along the caulked seam.

Kazuma scraped a ribbon of the pale pulp into the bronze saucer. It yielded without resistance, curdling against the iron blade like sheep fat.

True shipwright's pitch was boiled pine resin, rock sulfur, and charcoal. When cured, it set hard as horn, black and bitter enough to turn away borers and water-beetles. Under heat, proper resin charred to dry cinder and released a clean, stinging smoke that cleared the nostrils like mountain frost.

Kazuma struck a spark into a pinch of dry punk and touched it to the grease-lamp wick. He held the bronze saucer over the yellow flame.

The scraped shavings did not blacken. They liquefied.

Within five breaths, the paste dissolved into a pale, translucent oil that bubbled along the saucer's rim. A heavy, greasy odor rose with the heat, coating the back of Kazuma's throat. It did not carry the sharp bite of pine or sulfur. It smelled of stagnant pool scum, dead river carp, and warm river mud.

Kazuma pulled the cork from the clay phial. With steady fingers, he let three drops of sour vinegar fall into the boiling oil, then sprinkled a pinch of coarse copper dust from his whetstone pouch across the surface.

If the mastic was sound pitch, the acid and copper would bind the oils into black, rubbery beads.

The mixture flared. The oil turned a curdled, iridescent emerald, foaming against the bronze lip while spitting tiny, sizzling droplets onto the catwalk. The vapor that billowed out was thick, sickly sweet, and heavy with the unmistakable reek of crushed marsh-gall.

The imperial dockyards had never used marsh-gall to caulk river hulls. Someone in the capital had seasoned the timber to draw the mud-stalkers straight from their beds.

Kazuma set the saucer down on the beam. The emerald scum continued to simmer in the heat, refusing to harden.

He leaned close to the hull planking, running the iron chisel along the seams that ran aft toward the rudder trunk. The outer layer of black pitch was nothing more than a cosmetic glaze, no thicker than a fingernail. Beneath that paper-thin rind lay a deep, packed vein of the same yellow gall-tallow, pressed into every oakum joint that braced the bottom of the barge.

The vessel had not been built to endure the long transit across the holy marshes. It had been turned into a floating lure, coated in bait before the first corpse was laid upon its biers.

A wet, clicking sound rose from the shadows behind him.

Kazuma turned slowly, holding the grease-lamp high.

The noise had not come from the river ballast stones beneath the catwalk. It came from the sternward partition—the rough cedar bulkhead separating the bilge crawlway from the lower storage hold. Behind that partition lay the stacked pine racks where the common dead rested: the rowers, cooks, and archers who had succumbed to swamp fever during the long retreat from the burning capital. Teruo's sister lay among them, wrapped in coarse, untreated hemp.

Kazuma stepped along the narrow beam, his straw sandals silent against the damp wood. He kept the mallet in his right hand and the iron chisel in his left.

The air grew heavier as he neared the rudder housing. A secondary draft drew through the gaps between the bulkhead planks, carrying the bitter reek of mortuary spices mixed with the thick musk of disturbed swamp water.

Near the base of the bulkhead, three feet above the floorboards, a horizontal seam had split open.

The cedar planking here was four inches thick, secured with heavy bronze pins. Yet a round, ragged aperture had been gouged through the partition, its edges wet with the same greenish slime that bubbled in his saucer.

The burrower had not lingered in the stone ballast. Drawn by the thicker concentration of bait packed into the internal joints, it had chewed through the inner wall to reach the lower hold.

Kazuma rested his shoulder against the bulkhead frame. Through the split timber, he peered into the dark chamber beyond.

The lower hold was cold and breathless. Rows of stacked wooden biers stretched into the gloom, shrouded in gray dust and cedar shavings. At the far corner, near the base of the access ladder where Teruo kept his watch above, two burial crates lay smashed on the floorboards, their cedar lids split like kindling.

In the center of the aisle, coiled over a fallen bier, was a pale, segmented shape.

The creature was longer than a grown man, its skin translucent and glistening with thick marsh slime that dripped between the floor planks. It had no eyes, no fins, and no limbs. Along its pale flank, ringed ridges of muscle contracted in rhythmic, swallowing waves. Its blunt, shovel-shaped snout was buried deep inside a torn hemp shroud, its ring of black, chitinous mandibles grinding steadily through dried sinew and spiced bone with the dry, rasping crunch of millstones.

It did not turn toward the lantern light. It fed with mechanical, ravenous hunger, drunk on the scented dust of the embalmed dead.

Behind it, along the shadowed floor toward the rudder post, two more circular holes glistened wetly in the cedar floor, their edges already melting into yellow pulp.

The other princes on the upper tier lay preserved behind bronze-latched doors. Down here, the empire's discarded soldiers were only provender.

Kazuma pulled back from the timber gap. He laid his mallet upon the damp beam and stepped back to the speaking tube on the central rib.

"Botan," he said into the copper horn.

A faint scrape of wool answered through the pipe. "Still whole down there, embalmer?"

"Do not wake the lady," Kazuma said. "Wake the spear."