The Exorcist Doctor

All of them spent their first night in Wraithpier in a much, much nicer warehouse than it had any right to be. The building the Saint’s Hands bought stood a few bridges away from the Drowned Parish—close enough that they could still hear the distant market roar whenever the wind shifted, but far enough that the air didn’t constantly taste of fish scales and canal stink.

From the outside, it looked like any other Wraithpier warehouse: tall, broad, built from dark timber reinforced by rusted iron bands, and covered by a roofline that sagged slightly. Inside, however, the place had been properly claimed. The Saint’s Hands had fenced off the surrounding platforms, posted masked guards at the perimeter bridges, and cleared the adjoining dock space so no drunk fisherman could stumble in at midnight carrying singing eels and gambling debts. The second floor inside the warehouse had been turned into individual bedrooms overlooking the open central space, while the warehouse floor itself had been converted into a giant living room with couches, tables, lamps, carpets, braziers, and enough open space for several dozen people to lounge around.

Most impressive of all, some mad Saint’s Hands bastard had somehow managed to move an entire Vile Eater into the rear of the building. They didn’t need to wear their masks inside.

If Gael had come to Wraithpier on a normal holiday, he would’ve been perfectly happy staying inside the warehouse and making himself comfortable. The air was clean, the space was large, and the thick walls looked sturdy enough to survive at least one laboratory accident. He had been thinking about getting a second workshop for his more dangerous medicinal experimentals, after all. Maeve hated it every time he blew up the workshop right under their bedroom.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t here on a normal holiday.

By morning of the next day, they’d all already split up for their separate tasks. Cara and Fergal had gone off early to coordinate with the scattered Saint’s Hands cells throughout Wraithpier. Apparently, while Gael had been busy failing to negotiate with the lunatics in hats, the Saint’s Hands had already been collecting reports, rumors, missing-person patterns, canal patrol sightings, and every suspicious explosion that hadn’t yet been blamed on drunken plumbing. Their job was to locate the Breeder the normal way, even if it wasn’t likely they’d yield any results.

Evelyn and Liorin, meanwhile, had been permitted to wander around the ward and talk to people. Gael suspected they were already picking fights with fishmongers, asking dumb questions, and spending all their salary on pointless souvenirs, but the two of them were naturals at reconnaissance the old-fashioned way. Jin and Vivi, on the other hand, had headed out to investigate reported Myrmur sightings around the deeper lakes and canals across the ward, because if they were going to be fishing up plenty of Myrmurs over the coming days and weeks, they should be doing it at a Myrmur hotspot.

And in order to fish at a Myrmur hotspot, they also needed a ship—so that left Gael and Maeve standing at the entrance to the shipwright district, a fair distance away from their warehouse.

The first thing Gael noticed was that the canals here were broader than the ones near the markets. The second thing he noticed was that the water was darker. Wraithpier’s smaller waterways had a murky blue charm to them—if one enjoyed peering into places where things might bite back—but the shipwright district possessed the kind of water that looked deep enough to hide actual leviathans. The wider canals cut through the whole district, bordered by massive docks, raised workshops, tar-black slipways, rope cranes, iron winches, and half-built vessels suspended above the water. Naturally, the buildings here were made taller and wider to boot as well, housing all sorts of construction materials needed to make a ship from scratch.

Also, there were many ships.

As Maeve looked around with quiet curiosity—her eyes moving from the workers hammering boards into the sides of fishing vessels, to the crews sealing hull seams with black pitches, to the men and women hauling cargo off transport barges with broad flat decks and covered cargo racks—he led them both into the district, glancing at the store signboards.

“... Since most of the ward’s economy comes from fishing, the next most important thing apart from fishing is moving fish before they can rot, bite someone, or explode,” he started, launching into his tour-guide mode as they pushed through the crowd. “Fresh catch needs to get from the fishermen to the buyers fast, especially if they’re going down to the other wards or up to Vharnveil. Every proper fishing business in Wraithpier owns or contracts with at least one ship as a result, because if you can’t carry your stuff to the Whispering Bridge in time, you’re just a damp man with a pile of meat and a dream.”

Maeve stepped aside as a group of dockworkers dragged a huge coil of chains past them, the links thick enough that she could probably tie down a Myrmur with them. “So these ships sail to the southern end of the ward, unload their goods there, then everything gets carried over the Whispering Bridge to the rest of Bharncair?”

“Yep.”

“So…” She squinted at a nearby dock where workers were repairing a ship with armor plates bolted along its sides. “Why do most of them look so heavy-duty, then? If they’re just for shipping, shouldn’t a normal transport barge be enough?”

“‘Cause they have to be prepared to fight the water.”

With that, Gael thumbed over the railings on the other side of the street. Maeve looked over. Beyond the docks and the workshops, the ward suddenly opened into a vast lake in the middle of the shipwright district—though calling it a ‘lake’ was probably underselling its size. It was more like a piece of the northern sea had been trapped inside Wraithpier. The water was dark, restless, and misty fog drifted over it in slow blue sheets. Several ships were out there already, some anchored in place, some circling slowly, some surrounded by smaller fishing platforms where crews were preparing rods, hooks, nets, and harpoons. Still there was more than enough open water for a hundred more ships to fill the ‘lake’ before it could even be considered crowded.

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“They fish there?” Maeve asked, also frowning at the ships.

“Well, they fish everywhere, but all the good and big stuff live in the deepwater lakes scattered throughout the ward,” he said. “The canals are fine for smaller fish that make up most of the local catches and daily market supplies, but the truly prized catches are out there, deep below the lakebeds. You can’t just stand at the canal with a little rod and expect to get anything impressive. You need a proper ship, a proper crew, proper equipment, and… I dunno if you need a permit or anything, but we’ll get one if we need it, too. I guess you also need a hand you’re willing to lose?”

A nearby shipwright floating down the canal, overhearing that, barked a laugh and shouted, “A hand’s cheap if th’fish is worth it!”

“See?” Gael said, gesturing towards him. “Local wisdom. And that’s why you need the heavy-duty armor plates and harpoons and stuff. The big fish in these deepwater lakes are… uh, pretty feisty, I hear.”

Maeve blinked, eyeing a particularly large vessel on the lake with four cranes hanging over the sides and at least two layers of thick metal plates over the hull. “You mean the ones we saw yesterday weren’t the biggest Wraithpier has to offer?”

Gael grinned. “Not a knower.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re not a knower. But you’ll know when it’s our time on the water, and to get out on the water, we’ll need a ship.” He gestured at the many stores around them. “The Saint’s Hands do have a few barges for moving goods and people around Wraithpier, but none of them are proper fishing vessels. We’re here to get a custom one built for us.”

Eventually, he spotted a signboard he’d been hoping to find. It hung over a broad three-story storefront built right along one of the deeper canals. The sign itself was a ridiculous thing, painted across three planks shaped like ship hulls and bordered with carved fish bones, iron anchors, and little brass bells, but it promised custom-built vessels for every respectable customer: travel boats, cargo barges, fishing ships, party vessels, and even floating homes weren’t out of the question.

Gael stopped in front of it and grinned. “There we go. That one.”

Maeve looked up at the sign, then at the crowded docks around the building. “It looks like a fancy shop.”

“Dearest wife, we have screw-you money now.”

“That doesn’t mean we should spend it stupidly.”

“You shouldn’t. I’m gonna.”

Maeve gave him the look again, but she followed him anyways when he strutted towards the entrance. The doors were built from dark lacquered wood reinforced with brass strips, and each handle had been shaped into the jaw of some mutated fish with too many teeth. Gael pushed through them cheerfully, expecting some orderly showroom full of polished ship models, serious professionals, and maybe even a receptionist he could emotionally damage into giving him a discount.

Instead, they walked straight into a war zone.

The interior was actually pretty cool. Ship ribs hung from the tall ceiling like the bones of sea monsters. Rudders, anchors, hooks, brass lamps, and painted figureheads covered the walls, and suspended models of different vessels drifted from the rafters on thin wires. Unfortunately, the floor was completely packed. At least a hundred were crammed into the showroom, all shouting towards the counters at the back where a row of exhausted-looking clerks tried to survive their customers. Merchants waved ledgers, fishermen slammed sketches onto desks, and transporters argued over hull weight. A wealthy-looking woman in a netted veil demanded a floating ballroom with defensive harpoons, while a short man beside her insisted his ship needed a private eel chamber for ‘religious reasons’. At least three separate fistfights were also already underway near the middle of the room, apparently over queue positions.

While they stood at the entrance, they were immediately shoved from the left by a man carrying a rolled sail, then bumped from the right by a fisherman with a hat shaped like a flounder. Maeve’s shoulders tightened as she scowled at the men.

“This is worse than Juno’s stores in the Black Bloom Bazaar,” she muttered, clutching her briefcase closer.

“Yep,” he said brightly. “But unlike the Black Bloom Bazaar, nobody here’s doing quick shopping. Commissioning a ship means giving lots of details, hearing lots of details, changing lots of details, and realizing the details cost more money, so then you have to start fighting the clerks. This queue probably hasn’t moved since last night.”

Maeve stared toward the counter. A man in a soaked coat had just been punched into a display of miniature sailboats, and two others immediately stepped over him to claim his place in line. “So? What do we do? Come back another time and wait for the queue to clear?”

But Gael was already humming to himself, having taken out two slim vials from the hexagonal repositories on his back. Both were filled with unpleasantly colored liquids—one greenish-brown, the other hard yellow—and Maeve’s eyes narrowed almost instantly as he started mixing them together.

“Gael.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. The Fishermen aren’t like the Three-Faces or the Steelborn. They don’t really police their own ward.”

“Whatever that is, it better not be—”

“Surprise attack!” he shouted, lobbing the mixture vial forward into the crowd. The glass quickly shattered on someone’s hat, and he grinned, waiting for the screaming.

He waited a little longer.

He waited a little bit longer.

… There was no screaming.

He smelled the gas wafting back over to the front of the store—a concentrated mixture of rotting cabbage, old corpse water, spoiled fish organs, and cheap embalming fluid, most he stole from Old Banks’ cemetery—but the gas wasn’t knocking anyone out. Hells, the only comment he heard about his gas was someone shouting something about baby perfume being dropped, before the usual shouting and fighting resumed over who was cutting in whose lines.

Nobody cared about his scent bomb, designed to knock out even men with the dullest of noses.

“They just tanked it, huh?” he grumbled, putting one hand on his hip and grinding his cane into the floorboards with the other. “Well, I guess Wraithpier locals aren’t called the toughest bitches in the city for nothing, but I can make an even stronger bomb.” Then he spun around, facing the door. “Let’s go back to the warehouse first. I had the Saint’s Hands ship in a ton of funny chemicals from the clinic, so once I come back with scent bomb version sixteen-point-two, we’ll show these bitches what’s—”

“Or,” Maeve said, grabbing his arm and jerking her head at the crowd, “we just do this the old-fashioned way.”

“What old-fashioned way?”

Maeve simply stared at him with mischief in her eyes, so slowly—very slowly—his grin returned to his face.

Well.

She really is a Bharnish now, huh?