Madame Celeste Gearhart's Arc

Chapter 21 of 24

The dock was clean, but Celeste's peace lasted one day. At dusk a small boat bumped her pilings. She knew the shape on it before she saw the face. A round body in a brass-buckled belt. A top hat tipped over one eye. Percival Venomsworth waddled up her steps, tail dragging, and set a stoppered vial on her workbench without asking. She had sold this platypus two vials of her sap poison. Once for venom to seal her valve, once for his brass reservoir. Each trade had armed him with her own weapon. Now he came holding a third vial. She recognized the color inside. Her sap. Her poison. He had brewed it into something. "You've been busy, Madame," he said. His voice was smooth and pleased. "I feel your totem from the water now. It hums. It pulls at the dead for miles." He tapped the vial. "Powerful things should be shared. I want a cut. A share of the spirits you bind." "And if I refuse?" He smiled around his beak. "Then I visit the market barge. I tell Captain Zhou Ming and every ear on it that the witch in the tree cottage killed six of Mei-Ling's men. I have your sap to prove your hand. Refuse me, and hunters row here by morning." Celeste leaned on her cane and said nothing. He thought his vial made him safe. He thought her poison protected him. He did not understand what her poison fed. "Sit," she said. "We'll talk terms." He climbed onto her stool, delighted, and uncorked the vial to show her his work. That was the moment she needed. She set her free hand on the totem in its brass cradle. She reached past the small spirits, down to the two who owed her blood. She spoke one word inside her skull. Feed. The lantern flames went flat. Cold poured through the cottage. Baron Shadowveil rose from the totem's mouth, a purple skull wrapped in torn shadow, green eyes burning. The Baron had drunk pirate blood at her order. It hungered for more, and she had promised it dead enemies. Percival scrambled off the stool. He flung the vial. The sap splashed the spirit and did nothing. His poison was hers, and hers did not bite its own master's servant. The Baron closed over him. Celeste heard the top hat crush. When the cold lifted, the stool was empty. A wet brass buckle lay on the floor. The Baron sank back into the totem, sated and loyal, its debt paid in a mouthful. Celeste picked up the buckle. The threat was gone. But she saw the cost plainly. The Baron had held its shape longer this time, moved surer, obeyed less. Each corpse she fed it bought her strength and loosened her leash. To bind all of Everblack, she would keep feeding this mouth, and it grew stronger than she did.