Smoke and Silk

The bitter stink of wet rot was already seeping beneath the lacquered doors of the royal berth, carrying with it a faint, oily warmth that had no place aboard a burial barge. Sayano did not wait for the men to finish their useless tally of broken timbers. Her nephew lay in the dry cedar room behind her, wrapped in eighteen layers of salted ramie that cost more than an entire provincial harvest, and she had no intention of letting boneless swamp vermin gnaw through those imperial shrouds while the sentry and the embalmer wrangled over dry water skins.

She turned on her heel, her soot-stained court train hissing over the grooved cedar planks. "Bring the brazier tongs," she commanded.

Teruo stood at the companionway hatch with his bronze spear grounded between his bare feet, his shoulders rigid under a tunic stiffened with river mud. "The lower hold is already flooded with them, mourner. The keelson is gone. Kazuma heard them chewing the marrow out of the steerage dead."

"The steerage dead are common conscripts and river bargemen," Sayano said, her voice cutting through the hollow groaning of the hull. "They were born in ditch water and they may rot in it. The prince's chamber does not open to the bilge."

Kazuma emerged from the companionway ladder, wiping yellow rosin dust from his wrinkled wrists. "Lady Sayano, the drafts are rising from the ballast hold. If you break the seal on the middle deck, you will pull the swarm straight up through the ribs."

Sayano ignored him. She crossed to the ceremonial alcove beside the royal doors where the state funeral supplies sat in iron-banded chests. The Ministry of Rites had provisioned seventy pounds of dried cassia and crushed frankincense for Sukenari’s funeral journey, yet not a single clerk had thought to budget three copper obols for charcoal tongs. She gripped a cast-bronze dragon censer by its triple suspension chains, lifting the twelve-pound vessel with wrists that shook beneath her ragged silk sleeves.

With a brass scoop, she dug into the embalmer’s chest, ignoring Kazuma's sharp intake of breath. She did not take the sweet amber tears used to soothe ghosts. She took two fistfuls of raw brimstone granules and three black cakes of compressed marsh-coal, dumping them into the perforated belly of the dragon.

"That will choke the entire deck," Kazuma warned, catching her shoulder with a thumb blackened by pine tar.

Sayano struck his hand away with the heavy brass scoop. The chime of bronze on bronze rang sharp against the timbers. "Coughing men can still hold a spear, old man. A prince stripped of his flesh by swamp grubs cannot be buried with his ancestors."

She thrust the censer into the iron brazier that kept the royal deck dry, waiting until the live coals bit into the marsh-coal. A foul, greenish tendril of smoke curled from the dragon’s open jaws, spitting yellow sparks that singed the edges of her tattered hem.

The deck shuddered beneath them. A low, rhythmic chattering echoed up the companionway shaft, followed by the wet slapping of soft bodies dragging themselves across splintered cedar. The sound was not the slow grind of timber; it was the wet, ravenous scraping of multiple jointed mandibles chewing through the ceiling joists of the hold below.

Sayano seized the bronze chain in both hands and kicked the companionway hatch fully open.

A wall of thick, humid air hit her face, carrying the rank grease of crushed marsh-beetles and the sickly sweetness of the adulterated court resin. Below in the narrow transit corridor, the dark cedar walls were alive with movement. Pale, ribbed shapes the length of an oarsman's arm were writhing along the overhead beams, their translucent skins glistening under the lantern light from above. They had no eyes, only blind, questing sensory stalks that quivered toward the heat of the upper deck, and circular mouths ringed with black, horn-tipped teeth that clicked in frantic unison.

Two of the creatures dropped from a roof timber, landing with a heavy squelch on the middle deck landing five paces down. Their segmented bellies pulsed as they reared back, questing toward the hem of her gown.

Sayano did not retreat. She stepped down the first three rungs of the companionway, leaning her body out into the dark air.

With a practiced, sweeping motion drawn from the ancient court rites of cloud-weaving, she began swinging the dragon censer in a tight horizontal figure-eight. The heavy bronze vessel whined through the stagnant air. As the speed increased, the centrifugal draft forced fresh air into the lower vents of the censer, fanning the brimstone into an incandescent yellow glare.

A thick, blinding curtain of sulfuric vapor billowed from the pierced metal, sweeping down the corridor like a rolling wall of fog.

The first stalker surged forward, its blind snout gaping wide to snap at her ankle. The burning bronze belly of the censer caught the creature squarely across its questing sensory horns. A horrific sizzle echoed through the companionway as the scorching metal seared through pale flesh, releasing a burst of gray fluid that reeked of scalded fat. The beast let out a shrill, bubbling hiss and curled inward, thrashing wildly against the cedar floorboards as the dense sulfur smoke filled its breathing spiracles.

Sayano lengthened the chain by two links, using the momentum of the swing to drive the smoke downward into the draft. She knew how funeral smoke moved in confined chambers; an attendant of the imperial rites learned early that heavy mineral soot fell while heat climbed. By keeping the censer swinging at knee height, she forced the stinging sulfur fumes to carpet the floorboards while the rising heat created a thermal curtain that drove the noxious clouds directly into the lower cracks.

A dozen smaller burrowers scattered along the corridor ceiling dropped like rotten fruit, their flesh blistered by the acid smoke. They tumbled into the bilge gaps below, their chattering cries muffled by the churning vapor.

"The corridor is clear to the second bulkhead," Sayano called up through the smoke, her throat raw and burning from the fumes. Her eyes wept bitter tears, but she held the heavy chain steady, her forearms trembling with the strain. "Bring the lead sheets, Kazuma! We can tack the floorboards shut before more climb through the ribs."

For three heartbeats, only the crackle of sulfur and the wet hissing of dying scouts answered her. The heavy blanket of white-yellow smoke hung motionless in the narrow corridor, sealing the passage like a wall of solid stone. She had turned the draft against them, buying the royal tier the time it needed.

Then the timbers under her sandals dropped three inches.

A sound rolled through the hull that was neither a scrape nor a gnaw, but a massive, grinding displacement of deep silt, as though a boulder were sliding through grease. The companionway ladder creaked violently, its bronze mounting brackets bending under sudden lateral pressure.

From the dark storage hold beyond the second bulkhead, the smoke curtain tore apart.

A pale, ridged snout as wide as an imperial rice barrel wedged itself into the narrow transit passage, splintering the five-inch cedar doorframe into dry kindling. Its hide was not translucent like the scouts, but armored in thick, overlapping plates of calcified shell encrusted with black swamp shale. Thick ropes of yellow mucus dripped from three pairs of scythe-like primary mandibles, each longer than Teruo’s spearhead.

The beast did not hiss. It exhaled a deep, rhythmic vibration that resonated through the ship’s cedar ribs, vibrating the marrow in Sayano's shins. As its vast, segmented bulk poured into the companionway, it buckled the ceiling planks upward and crushed the lower half of the ladder beneath its weight, completely filling the narrow space between the bulkheads.

Sayano lowered the censer, letting the bronze dragon rest against the charred cedar of the landing. The smaller scouts were dead, their blistered hides dissolving into gray sludge among the coals. But as the sulfur smoke thinned in the crushing cold of the beast’s breath, the truth became unmistakable. The creature had not clawed upward by chance; it was anchored into the keelson, fattening upon the spiced dead beneath the floorboards, its bulk now forming a living, unyielding barricade between the upper deck and the lower hold.

She looked down at her soot-blackened hands, then back toward the ladder head where Teruo's bronze spear remained poised in the dark. The time for incense had passed; whatever remained of the imperial rites would have to be burned away with iron and oil.