Madame Celeste Gearhart's Arc

Chapter 6 of 24

The ghost-silver held the spirits quiet for three days. On the fourth, a crow tapped Celeste's window with a scrap of red cloth in its beak. She knew the color at once. The pirate had marked her stall with red. Now the debt had come due, and she would answer or lose the stone that steadied everything. Celeste took her cane and rode the passage to the floating market. She found the pirate queen behind her stall, one boot propped on a crate, sharpening her curved sword against a whetstone. A patch covered one eye. Earrings swung as she worked. She did not look up. "You felt my call," Mei-Ling Chen said. "Good. I hate chasing debts across a river." "Name the favor," Celeste said. Mei-Ling set the sword down. "A rival captain took cargo of mine. He keeps it in a fog-bound hold across the water. My men won't go near it. They say the dead walk his deck." She smiled. "You pull the dead. So pull them off my cargo." Celeste's grip tightened on the cane. Using the totem here, far from her workbench, was the risk she feared most. One clumsy command and the spirits could tear loose. But the ghost-silver was already inside the totem. Refuse, and the pirate would take it back. "I'll need to stand close," Celeste said. "And you'll not touch me while I work." Mei-Ling led her by skiff across the black water. Mist swallowed the lanterns. The rival's deck sat low and silent, its cargo stacked under a torn tarp. Pale shapes drifted along the rail. Cold rolled off them. Celeste unstrapped the totem and set it on the boards. She spoke one soft word. The ghost-silver caught it and split it into thin threads, each thread reaching a single drifting shape. The spirits turned toward her. For a moment they strained, hungry, and her arm shook with the pull. Then the threads held. The shapes bent low and slid away from the cargo, out over the water, gone. Mei-Ling stared at the empty deck. "I've hired witches before. None cleared a hold in one breath." She hauled the tarp back and counted her crates. Then she looked at Celeste with a new, sharper eye. "That totem is worth more than any favor." "The debt is paid," Celeste said. "Paid," Mei-Ling agreed. She wrapped her fingers around the sword hilt, not to draw it, only to hold it. "But now I know what you can do. And I know men who would pay a fortune to own the woman who does it." Celeste strapped the totem to her back. She had kept the ghost-silver. Her control had held far from home, and that was proof her arc could still climb. But the pirate no longer saw a debtor. She saw a weapon worth stealing, and Celeste had shown her its full edge.