V for the Flesh Owed

"A message that has to be written in blood is never quite so loud as one that is merely repeated."

They carried Malthus down at dawn.

It took four of them. Roderick could not lift, and the footman, who could, wept so that his arms shook, and so it fell to the cook's boy and the stable hand, two stolid silent youths summoned from the outbuildings, to wrap the long body in a sheet and bear it down the secret stair in the pale gray light. Thalessa went before them with a lamp. At the bottom they laid him in the chapel, beside Lady Aurelia and Ragnar Sterling, and drew the sheet up over his face.

Three bodies, in a row, on trestles of black oak. The candles guttered.

"I counted them in the night," said Roderick. He stood in the doorway with his arm in its sling and his face gray with soot and sleeplessness. "When I couldn't sleep. Four who sailed, and one who followed. Six, with the girl."

"Five, now."

"Five."

"The Duke. Miss Haze. Mr. Finch. You and I."

"And a killer among them."

"And a killer among them," said Thalessa. She did not turn. She was bending over the doctor's face, with the lens in her hand and the lamp held close, and her breath made a small cloud in the cold. "Come and look at this."

He came.

She had drawn back the sheet from the dead man's head. The face was no longer purple; it had faded in the night to a waxy, yellowish gray, and the dreadful swelling had gone down. The thin bright line of the wire still circled the throat, deep as a knife-cut. She had already removed the petal from the mouth with her forceps, and laid it on a square of white linen on the bench. She held the lens over it now.

"You have read it?" said Roderick.

"I wished you to be here."

He bent. The violet petal lay curled on the linen like a sleeping thing. And on its face, in the same hard black stroke, in the same thick lampblack ink, stood a single letter.

V.

"T, S, A, R, V," he said slowly.

"Five letters."

"Tsarv." He frowned. "It is nothing."

"No. But the pattern is not broken. One letter for the first, one for the second, two for the third, one now for the fourth. The killer has spelled five letters across four dead." Thalessa laid the lens down. "I told you the word was longer than the list. I think now it is seven. Perhaps eight."

"And the Duke is the last."

"And the Duke is next."

"What would he have?" Roderick said. "Two? Three?"

"I don't know. One, I should think. And the last, if I'm right, belongs to someone who is not on the muster roll at all." She looked at him. "That is what frightens me. Not the letters we've found. The letters we haven't."

He said nothing. His eyes had gone back to the dead man's face.

"There's something else," said Thalessa.

"What?"

"Open his collar."

Roderick hesitated. Then he put his good hand to the neck of the shirt, which she had unbuttoned but not drawn back, and turned the linen aside.

There was a paper pinned to the inside of the doctor's undershirt.

It was fastened with a long steel pin, driven right through the cloth and into the skin of the chest, and the paper had bled onto it, a small brown stain around the point. It was folded in four. She had not touched it. She wanted him to see it as she had.

"When?" said Roderick softly.

"He wore it all night. Under his waistcoat. I found it when I cut away the shirt, in the tower." She took a pair of tongs, and drew out the pin, and lifted the paper free. "Whoever wrote it did so before they killed him. It was set against his skin so that he would feel it."

She unfolded it.

It was a half-sheet of heavy yellowed paper, soft with age, stained at the corners by salt water, ruled in faint columns with a thin brown rule. The ink on it was black. The hand was square and heavy and perfectly even.

It is taking back what it is owed.

Piece by piece.

—a debt.

Roderick read it twice. Then he read it a third time, aloud, in an odd flat voice, as though he were reading a sentence passed in a court.

"Piece by piece."

"Yes."

"Meaning the flesh."

"Meaning exactly that." Thalessa's face was white. "Meaning that whoever has done this has taken the thing they were taught about the boat, and made it their text. A piece for a piece. They cut away our dead's scars as an insult to them. And the dead cut away our killer's loved one as a sort of..." She stopped, and swallowed. "A sort of tithe."

"Look at the paper."

"I am looking."

"It's ruled."

"Yes. In columns." She turned it to the light. "Thin brown ruling, forty lines to the page. See the head of the column? Lat. Long. Wind. Sea. Remarks. It was printed once. It's been faded by the damp."

"A ship's log."

"A page from one." She said it softly. "Torn out. And written over on the back."

"Which ship?"

"There is only one ship in this case, Roderick."

She turned it over. On the reverse of the sheet, ghost-pale under the new black ink, a few faint lines of a different script were still legible, in a large untidy sloping hand, such as a man might write in the dark, in a rocking boat, with a failing pencil.

Day 11. Calm. No sail. I do not

She could read no more. The rest was washed out.

She laid the paper down on the linen. For a long while she stood with her hand flat on the bench, as if to keep it from rising.

"They didn't throw it overboard," she said.

"What?"

"The log. The Captain's log. They said it was lost with the ship. They said everything was lost with the ship." She raised her eyes. "But someone has it. Someone has had it for four years, and has been tearing it up, a page at a time, and writing their threats on the backs."

"Then there is a log."

"There is a log."

"And whoever has it knows everything."

"Yes." She almost whispered. "Everything."

…

The Duke received them at ten, in the morning room, with the curtains drawn.

He was dressed. That was the first thing she noticed, and the strangest: that on this of all mornings, with three of his oldest friends lying dead in the chapel and the smell of smoke still in the house, Alastair Blackwood had put on his best black coat, his white cravat, and the heavy gold seal-ring of his rank. He sat very straight in a chair by the cold hearth with his hands upon his knees, like an old king in a portrait. Only the hands gave him away. They shook so that the ring flashed.

"Sit," he said.

They sat.

"Inspector. Scholar Ashwood. I am told that Dr Malakor is dead."

"He is, Your Grace."

"And that it was a clockwork of some kind. A trap." The Duke's lip curled. "I am told that there was a fire."

"There was."

"And that you were in it."

"We were."

"Then I must thank you, I suppose, for your... dedication." The old man's voice cracked slightly. He closed his eyes, and opened them. "I have been thinking all night. I find that I am not afraid to die. I am only afraid of how."

"Your Grace—" said Roderick.

"Be quiet, Inspector. Let me say it." He raised one trembling hand. "Four years ago I did a thing. I will not say what. It was done under such terrible conditions that I do not believe any court in the world would hold a man to account for it. But I have not slept a night since. I have not eaten a meal without tasting it." He turned his head and looked at Thalessa. "Have you ever tasted a thing, young lady, and known that you will taste it until the end of your life?"

"No, Your Grace."

"Then be glad of it."

The room was very quiet.

"The Captain," said Thalessa.

The old man flinched.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Captain Haze. He is the one you are afraid of."

"The Captain is dead."

"I know it. You have said so." She leaned forward. "You said, on the night of Mr. Sterling's death, that the Captain drowned in the wreck. Lady Aurelia told us that he was lost over the side before the boat was launched. And on the following night she told us that he saw to the food in the boat."

"She was distraught."

"She was. She also said that he never cried out. Your Grace. Who never cried out?"

"I do not know."

"Doctor Malakor knew. He tried to tell us. He was writing a letter when he was taken." She drew from her pocket the folded sheet from the doctor's writing-table and laid it on his knee. "If you wish to know the truth of what became of the Captain. What became of him, Your Grace?"

The Duke looked down at the paper. His face crumpled. For a moment she thought he was going to weep. Instead he sat quite still, with the paper trembling on his knee, and a look came into his old eyes of such naked and abject misery that she turned her head aside.

"He was the best of us," he said.

"Yes?"

"He was the best man I ever knew. He had a voice like a church. He would sit with the dying sailors in the forecastle and sing to them in the dark, and they would stop weeping. He stood between me and a mutiny once, in the Indies, with nothing in his hands." He covered his mouth. "I loved him. We all did. We are not wicked, Scholar Ashwood. We were not wicked."

"I believe you."

"Do you?"

"I believe that you were not wicked before. I wish to know what you were after."

The Duke let the paper slide from his knee to the floor. He did not seem to notice.

"There was a log," he said, very low. "He kept it. He wrote in it every day, in the boat, with a pencil stub he'd saved. We took it away from him on the fourth day. He asked us for it. He said that if he could not have food he would at least have his book." The old voice cracked and went on. "We said we would give it back. We never did. After the rescue I took it from Thorne's bag, in the collier, and I threw it into the sea."

"You threw it overboard."

"I threw it."

"Then how—"

"I don't know." He looked up at last, and his eyes were wide and red and unfocused, the eyes of a child who has seen a ghost. "I swear on my mother's grave, I saw it go. I watched it sink. And now you tell me that it has been in this house, a page at a time, for all these years."

"Did you tell anyone? Anyone at all?"

"No."

"Whose idea was the pact?"

"I will not say."

"Your Grace—"

"I will not." He rose abruptly, swaying, with one hand clutching the arm of the chair. "I have said all I can. You will forgive me, Inspector. I am going to my room. I shall lock the door. If you are wise, you will do the same."

"Your Grace," said Roderick quietly. "You are the last of them."

"I know it."

"I cannot protect you if you hide."

"No." A thin, terrible smile crossed the old man's face. "But I can protect you."

He went out. They heard his steps going slowly up the stair, a heavy tread, uneven, stopping on every landing as though to gather breath.

When the door closed above, Roderick let out a long breath and passed his hand over his face.

"He threw it overboard," he said.

"He believes he did."

"You think he's lying."

"I think he's telling the truth." Thalessa was staring at the place where the paper had fallen. "That's what frightens me. A man can be perfectly honest, and perfectly mistaken. He saw a book go over the side. It was a book. It may not have been the book."

"The Captain's log."

"Or a copy. Or a forgery." She rose, stooped, and picked up the paper from the carpet. "Someone prepared this, Inspector. Years ago. Before any of us were in this house. Someone knew that these five would throw the log away, and knew what they would throw. And kept the real thing, safe, in a place where no one would think to look."

"Where?"

"I don't know." She smoothed the sheet between her fingers. "But I think it's somewhere that smells of salt."