Smoke for the Dead King

The dry, rattling click from the forward orlop was not gunfire, but stone grinding against bone. Illyés Gyarmati crawled through the low knee-timber hatchway with his breeches soaked in bilge grease, hunting the sound before it reached the main battery. Behind him, Midshipman Zsolnay dragged the leather surgical hamper, his boots slipping on wet ribs where the bilge ran gray with tallow.

"Keep the hemp dry," Illyés said without looking back. His ribs ached where the vinegar sailcloth in his pocket pressed hard against him. The three marrow stones carved from the demigod’s flank still radiated an unnatural winter, chilling his hands whenever he braced against the ceiling carlings. "If you drop the caustic salts into the wash, you fish them out with your teeth."

"The air is thick here, Surgeon," Zsolnay gasped. His lantern threw greasy yellow circles across the dripping planks. "It tastes like crushed chalk."

"That is because you are chewing the Founder's dreams, boy."

They tumbled into the forward cable tier. The compartment smelled of old hemp, tar, and rotting cabbage, overlaid by a cloying sweetness that set Illyés’s back teeth on edge. In the corner by the anchor bitts, three deckhands were huddled upon a mound of uncoiled hawser. None held a cutlass or a sponge. Two were on their knees, retching into the bilge, clawing at their collars. Between their parted lips, thin white ribbons of frothing lime trickled onto their chins.

Standing over them was the ship's embalmer, Borbála Cseszneky.

She wore the stiff black oilcloth cassock of the funeral order, tailored high at the throat and hemmed with tarnished silver thread. Her hands were buried inside thick gloves of lead-lined horsehide, resting on the brass chain of an unlit censer. From beneath the black cowl shielding her shaven skull, her dark eyes watched the retching sailors with the calm detachment of a dockyard tallyman.

"He who draws the breath of the founder must render the stone," she chanted, her voice flat and rhythmic above the creak of the hull. "Praise the marrow that hardens the marrow. Praise the breath that anchors the bone."

"Praise your grandmother," Illyés said, shouldering past her stiff vestments.

The embalmer did not yield; the lead weighting in her skirts made her as immovable as an iron bollard. "You desecrate an anointing, Surgeon Gyarmati. These men have inhaled the sacred breath. Their vessels are sealing. It is the holy transit."

"It is a clogged trachea," Illyés snapped. He dropped to his knees beside the eldest hand, a leathery foretopman whose face had darkened to the purple of bruised turnip. The man’s chest heaved in spastic lunges, but no air passed his teeth; only a dry, whistling hiss escaped his throat, accompanied by that dreadful clicking sound.

Illyés gripped the sailor’s jaw, forcing his mouth wide. The tongue was swollen, gray, and speckled with tiny white granules. When the man coughed, a spray of fine coral grit struck Illyés’s knuckles, sharp as glass sand. Deep in the pharynx, a pale crust had begun to knit together, a blooming lattice bridging the vocal cords.

"Hold his chin, Zsolnay," Illyés ordered, unrolling his pocket kit onto the wet hawser. "Do not let him thrash. If he jerks, the iron cuts his carotid, and we have a corpse instead of a gunner."

The midshipman threw his weight across the sailor’s shoulders, pinning him against the coil of cable. "Is it the god's rot, Surgeon?"

"Everything aboard this raft is the god's rot." Illyés drew a curved silver cannula, four inches long and hollow as a quill, alongside a small bone mallet and a horn phial of concentrated vinegar.

His thumb found the thyroid notch on the sailor's throat, sliding down into the soft hollow between the cricoid rings. The tissue was already thickening, gritty under the skin like gravel packed in lard. Setting the beveled silver point against the depression, Illyés struck the cannula’s butt with the heel of his palm.

The cartilage parted with a crisp pop.

The sailor convulsed, his heels drumming the oak floorboards as a fountain of curdled froth and blood bubbled from the silver pipe. Illyés tilted the man's neck, uncapping the horn phial with his teeth. He tipped three drops of sharp vinegar directly down the silver tube.

The acid hissed inside the wound. A puff of calcium-scented vapor rose, followed by a violent spasm. The man coughed—a great, tearing rasp—and spat a thumb-sized plug of porous white stone onto the deck. Air whistled into his chest, thin and desperate, but whole.

"Wipe his neck," Illyés told Zsolnay, cleaning his silver tube on his leather apron. "Keep the tube clear with the wire probe. If the lime scabs over the opening, turn the screw. Douse the other two with vinegar water until their gullets loosen. I am going to the chapel hold."

Cseszneky turned without a word, her heavy skirts sweeping through the bilge grease as she retreated toward the passage. Illyés snatched the iron crowbar from Zsolnay’s hamper and followed her into the narrow lower corridor.

The chapel hold was nestled beneath the main mast, a cramped chamber sealed behind heavy oak bulkheads. The air here was suffocating, thick with the oily aroma of sacred unguents and dried herbs. Behind the iron-grated vault door along the port bulkhead stood eight iron-banded casks of cured brine-tobacco, each bearing the wax seal of the Star-Pyre Order. On the altar shelf opposite, dozens of clay jars containing embalming balms sat beside gilded bone-caskets.

Cseszneky backed against the locked vault door that secured the tobacco casks, spreading her lead-lined arms to bar the way.

"You spill blood in the vestibule of the dead," she said, her voice trembling with cold rage. "You pierce the throat that the founder's breath sought to seal. You will answer to an admiralty court for every drop of grace you discharge."

Illyés planted his boots in the greasy planks. "The Admiralty is six leagues behind us, burning in the brine shoals. I took this berth for a quiet crossing—thirty days of dosing a sleeping god to earn my discharge papers and bury my saws for good. That quiet voyage drowned the moment the ladders turned to stone. If Commander Vázsonyi does not have twenty-eight hands to haul carronade tackles when the corsairs overhaul our wake, we answer to provincial cutthroats. And they do not hold courts. They slit throats from ear to ear and throw the meat to the reef crabs."

"The common flesh is expendable," Cseszneky replied. "The voyage is not. The funeral rites demand twenty hundredweight of cured brine-tobacco to combust the royal bier when we reach the core star. If the leaves are burned before the pyre is lit, his essence will not ascend. His divinity will scatter into the dark, ungathered."

"I do not want all twenty hundredweight," Illyés said, stepping toward her. "I want two casks. Five hundredweight to burn across the lower battery braziers and clear the men's throats. That leaves six casks intact for your cremation pyre."

"The holy leaf belongs to the altar," she insisted. "Not a single leaf may be defiled."

"The holy leaf is medicinal alkaline weed from the outer marshes," Illyés snapped. "Its smoke is the only agent that dissolves divine lime before it petrifies living lungs."

He raised the iron crowbar. The chisel tip came to rest two inches from the gilded reliquary strapped to her waist—a carved bone casket holding the mummified fingers of a patriarch.

"Under naval salvage law, a chief surgeon holds emergency rights of requisition over all organic stores during quarantine distress," Illyés said, his voice flat as an executioner's bell. "Give me the keys to the vault, Cseszneky. Or by the salt, I will smash that reliquary, shatter every oil jar on that shelf, and pitch your holy relics straight into the bilge."

Zsolnay reached the hatchway behind them, holding the bloody wire probe, his eyes wide in the lantern light.

The embalmer stared at the crowbar’s rusted chisel. Her jaw tightened, the cords of her neck straining beneath the black collar. Slowly, her lead-sheathed fingers reached beneath her cape and drew out an iron ring holding two square-toothed brass keys.

She tossed them at his boots. The metal clattered against the oak boards.

"Take them, butcher," Cseszneky whispered. Her gaze drifted toward the dark forward bulkheads where the ten-foot corpse lay in his leaden berth. "Burn the sacred leaf. Choke your gunners on holy smoke to buy your miserable hours. But do not deceive yourself that you are saving them."

Illyés scooped the keys from the deck, wiping the grease against his thigh. "I am keeping them breathing. That is my trade."

"He is not sleeping anymore, Gyarmati," she murmured, her voice taking on a dreadful, hollow timbre. "The rhythm of his dreaming has broken. In the berth, the starlight no longer weeps from his ribs; it pulses like a drum. He has ceased mourning his empire. He has begun to hunt."

Illyés straightened up, the keys biting cold into his calloused palm. He looked back at Zsolnay, who was staring toward the dark forward frames with a pale, frozen face.

"He can hunt who he pleases once the pyre is lit," Illyés said, tossing the keys to the midshipman. "Break the seals on two casks and get the charcoal pans burning. We have a watch to keep."