July 25, 1722. Brewed Gambit Alchemy Shop, Kingston, Jamaica. Connecting the dots… with more dots.

Argall’s words haunted me most of the night. I felt I should’ve known what he meant, but I didn’t. At least, not quite. That nagged at me while Elara and I spent the evening poring over the torn, yellowed page. The ghost of the man’s words hovered around me the next morning while I worked. I was so preoccupied, I barely heard the bell for the front door to my shop.

“Ah. So, that’s why Elara wanted me to check on you,” Lysander said while he walked in. “Pedro, you know most people only do that to roast a chicken or a pig, don’t you? Not a sword?”

I shot him a sour look from behind my goggles, then moved a glass vial on the iron stand next to me, a little to my right. Standing up, I stretched my back, then pulled off the yellow-tinted goggles to set them aside. My sword slowly rotated like a roasting spit over a fire in my raised stone fireplace. The ghoul’s black blood on the blade glistened while the fire warmed it back to a liquid. I wrote down a few observations about it in my alchemist’s notebook.

“Well, if you know of any way to remove black blood as hard as tar from metal, I’m all ears,” I replied and arched an eyebrow at him. “Water and soap didn’t work.”

That made my friend pause a bit as he walked across my shop toward me.

“It didn’t?” Lysander squinted at the tar-like stains. “Are you sure it’s blood?”

I shrugged. “No. But, when I stabbed the thing, that ichor came out. What else would you call it?”

The navigator shook his head and winced. “It makes a certain twisted sense.”

“Speaking of theories,” I raised a finger to highlight the moment, “I’ve another theory for you.”

Lysander found a nearby wooden chair, chased Sebastian out of it, then pulled it over to the worktable to sit down. Sebastian grumbled while he flew over to another chair to resume his nap. The navigator leaned forward to squint at my sword and the black stain on it, while both rotated over the fire.

“About which? This black blood? What Argall said? That page he gave you? Or what marinade to use on a sword?” A grin tugged at his mouth as he leaned back in the chair.

“Very funny,” I replied. “I mean about the page. Also, I’ve no idea what Señor Argall meant about the ‘wood-boned man’. How is Argall doing, by the way?”

Lysander let out a heavy sigh as he leaned back in the chair.

“The city watch put him in a hospital, and the nuns are caring for him now. Pedro… he’s not all there.” He ran a hand through his dark hair. “The man barely knew I was in the room. Instead, he kept muttering off at something I couldn’t see. But at least he’s someplace safe.” Lysander watched me warily for a moment. “How you feeling after the bookshop?”

I rubbed the hand-shaped bruises at the base of my neck. The ghoul’s scream played out again in my head. A shadow of terror tickled my spine.

“I’ve been better.” I pursed my lips, then gently sighed. “Rest and medicine to dull the pain helped.” Then I shot him a dark glance. “I’m very lucky I walked away with just bruises. It was almost worse.”

Neither of us spoke. We let the silence speak for us.

“What’s your idea about the paper Argall shoved at you?” Lysander asked as he changed the subject.

I slid the old journal page out of my notebook, then handed it to Lysander. He pursed his lips while he looked over the scribbles.

“So, the torn page.” I flipped back a few pages in my alchemist’s notebook, then slid that across the workbench. “With Elara’s help, we translated a little of it. The whole thing is written in Zepheen.”

Lysander frowned, then tugged at the navigator pendant around his neck. “Zepheen? That’s a thayan language, isn’t it? Elara’s native language?”

I tapped my alchemist’s notebook with its wild assortment of translations from last night.

“Zepheen? It is, yes. But that old journal page is written in an older dialect. Old enough that Elara couldn’t read much of it.”

I tapped two drawings tucked away in either corner of the rumpled page.

“But here, and here, are what’s interesting. I think this whole thing is explaining a device. Señor Argall did mention a ‘blueprint’.”

Lysander squinted at the diagrams, then spread the page out on my workbench to smooth out the wrinkles.

“It looks like a pump mechanism.” The navigator traced a finger over the old drawings. “Like from a bilge pump.”

There was an odd movement to my right at the fireplace. I gave the gooey black blood a sideways glance, while a dark tendril of it reached down off the metal. Almost like it was reaching for the glass vial below, which wasn’t a comfort at all. I shook my head a little, then ignored the blood. With a sigh, I pulled over a chair, then flipped back a page in my notes.

“That’s roughly what Elara and I translated.” I took a deep breath, then tapped my notes again. “It is a type of pump, but not a bilge pump. Something smaller. What we’ve translated doesn’t give any hints about what it’s for. I’ve asked Skaldi and Durner to take a hard look at these designs. Maybe duplicate the parts to give us a better idea of what’s so important here. They’re off trying to build the real thing now.”

Lysander gave me a cautious look.

“Is that wise?” he asked slowly.

“Probably not,” I admitted with a small shrug. “But, my friend, we’ll have a better idea of what we’re dealing with. Not to mention, maybe even why someone wants it so badly.”

Lysander read over the translated notes, then glanced at the mysterious page from Argall. The frown on his face deepened.

“Why would Argall even have this?” He shook the wrinkled, yellowed page slightly. “This is something I expect a gearwright to have. Wasn’t Mr. Argall more about maps and odd history of Otherworld?”

I gestured to the yellowed page. “I think it came from the Codex. Almost sure of it. Look at the torn edge on the left. There’s a bit of thread binding there, just like from the Codex. The señor called it the whole book a ‘guide’ and a ‘blueprint’. This leans to that. For what?” I shrugged. “I have no idea, or how the ghoul we fought in the bookshop comes into any of this mess.”

Abruptly, the fire to my right erupted with a loud pop and a shower of sparks. I jerked back as bright embers rained down across both the stone tile floor and the worktable with my notes. The table spouted flames.

Lysander yanked both my notebook and journal page to safety, while I snatched up a jar from a nearby shelf. I tossed a scoop of water from a nearby bucket over the sparks and a few tiny flames as they tried to ignite old powder stains on the table. A blast of gray smoke vomited up toward the ceiling.

I spun toward the raised fireplace, and expected an inferno. Instead, I found a nightmare of ooze.

The black blood had warmed enough until it trailed off the metal in slow, stringy drops. Most of it collected in the glass vial like I wanted, but a few hit the fire. A burst of blue-gray smoke erupted from the flames like a volcano’s ghost with each splash. Hot sparks followed close behind, shooting up and out like a geyser.

I doused the workbench with more water, then yanked my sword off the roasting stand by the hilt before another drop fell. A nearby cloth did the trick to remove the last of the wet black blood from the blade.

Searing, burning pain exploded through my right hand the instant I wiped off the blood. The sword fell to the floor with a sharp clang, the bloody cloth dropped under the table. I caught myself on the back of a chair before I fell over. My heart hammered in my chest while my hand shuddered.

“Pedro!”

Lysander launched himself out of the chair and raced around the table. I waved him away as he dug out a box of bandages and ointment from a cabinet next to the fireplace.

“No! Stay back,” I hissed, struggling to yank off the cotton glove.

The glove hit the floor, as I shoved my right hand into a bucket of water on the other side of the fireplace. Faint smoke curled out of the glove in tiny gray columns, but I barely noticed. Lysander sure didn’t. We were focused on the bucket.

Under the water, ghostly green flames burst to life like a lost lantern from a sunken ghost ship. Those flames danced along the scars seared into my right hand. I slowly turned my hand over, staring first at the flames, then at Lysander.

“I don’t feel a thing,” I said, both amazed and shocked. To be honest, fear really wasn’t that far behind. It didn’t like being left out.

Slowly, I pulled my hand out of the bucket. The flames held on for a second in the air, then died with a soft fizzle as the water dripped off my hand.

Lysander blew out a low whistle. “Pedro, you don’t need a surgeon for that hand. You need a wavebinder. Someone who understands casting.”

I stared at my scars as if they might turn into snakes and bite me. When they didn’t, I dried my hands on a towel, then put away my sword in its scabbard by the closet.

Neither of us said a word for several long seconds. There was only the crackle of the fire in the stone fireplace.

“That was the same green, boiling fire from Captain Storm’s amulet.” I drew in a slow, deep breath. “Lysander, it was exactly the same. I just know it.”

Lysander held up ointment and bandages and nodded to my scarred hand with raised eyebrows. I shook my head. The navigator returned both to the shelf where he got them.

“So, an acid?” he asked. “Surely not a poison. They don’t catch fire, do they? Something on the amulet when you touched it?”

“No,” I replied in a low voice. “Poison’s don’t catch fire.”

I scowled at the scars that crisscrossed my hand, then snatched up my glove. A last few tendrils of smoke rose from inside like it had been cooked just slightly. There were dark scorch marks along the lining that traced out the pattern of my scars.

Memories of Captain Storm’s squirrel skull amulet leaped to mind. I showed the singed lining to Lysander.

“Those lines. My scars.” I shook my head. “I should’ve seen this. The scars on my hand follow the same pattern of the scrimshaw on Captain Storm’s skull amulet.” My frown hardened into a scowl. “My friend, this isn’t a poison or an acid. I think is a curse, and a nasty one at that. But I’m no expert.”

I tugged the glove back over my right hand to cover the scars. “This is well outside what I know of the Etherwave Arcana. We do need a wavebinder. Not just for my scars, but for that page from Señor Argall, and the black blood. We don’t know nearly enough, and that’s going to get us killed.”

Lysander walked over to collect my journal and Argall’s torn page. Not to be left out of everything, Sebastian flew over and landed on the worktable, leash in his jaws. I shook my head at him with a smile while I reached for the vial of black blood.

The moment his dark claws touched the table, he spit out the leash, then hissed at the vial. He barked maniacally, with the occasional angry growl or hiss.

“Sebastian? What…”

Lysander interrupted when he tackled me to the floor. Overhead, the black blood reached out desperately from the vial with two thick, wet tentacles. It swiped at the air where I had been only a second before Lysander tackled me. The pair of tendrils oozed back into the vial, then vanished into the liquid.

I exchanged an uneasy look with Lysander, while Sebastian continued to bark at the vial.

My friend let out a heavy sigh, then helped me to my feet. “We don’t need a wavebinder, Pedro. We need an Archbinder. One who specializes in curses, and I know just the lady.”

The vial burped, and I ran a shuddering hand through my dark, wavy hair.

Lysander patted me on the shoulder. “I think I’ll carry the vial.”