Old Vu Deng didn’t make it a habit to wake early, but his hip was bothering him again, and he couldn’t sleep any longer. Storm must be coming. Head still muzzy from a night of homemade drink, scratching here and there and limping a bit, he stumbled out of his hut at the edge of the rocky peninsula to relieve himself on the burnt-out ruins of the cursed lighthouse. It was something of a village tradition back when there had been a village, one that Deng upheld faithfully as the only remaining inhabitant.

Yep, a storm was on the horizon for sure. Smelled like salty rain out there, and it was muggy as the inside of a soup pot. The first fingers of dawn were stretching up into a sky of angry-looking clouds, giving the light an odd peach-green cast.

In fact, he might be in for it a lot sooner than he’d thought. A billow of the denser clouds seemed to be moving awfully fast. This rate, they would make landfall in a thin minute.

The prospect of a storm didn’t scare Vu Deng. He liked a good noise-maker when he could get one, and storms always blew in good scavenging along his stretch of coast. The last one had washed up a miraculously unbroken bottle with a scrap of cloth inside covered in writing. Not being much of a reader, Deng had used the scrap as a handkerchief, and the bottle went directly into service holding his homebrews.

Deng was about to start back toward his hut, but that fast-moving thunderhead held his attention. His eyes weren’t what they used to be, but he thought he could see something dark standing on top.

For a moment, his mind jumped back to the old legends about warrior artists crossing thousands of miles in a day by riding on manifested clouds of Ro. But this cloud looked unwieldly and heavy, its black belly dragging the water. And the longer he watched, the more certain he was that the dark thing on top was too thin and straight to be a human.

With one hand on the crumbling wall of the cursed lighthouse ruins, Deng limped toward the rocky spit of land stretching out into the sea. As it came nearer, the belly of the cloud took shape. Wide hull, square sails, thin masts. It was a ship. Not like the sleek, colorful junks that used to pass by on their way to harbor upcoast, but bulky and dark. An eerie creature with too many teeth and bulging eyes sliced through the water as the ship plowed toward the rocks.

“They’re going to break up,” Deng said to no one in particular.

There hadn’t been a functioning beacon on this point to warn ships of the rocks just off the peninsula in nigh fifty years. Shortly after the cursed one had burned, the shipping lanes along this stretch of coast had emptied. The odd vessel passed by, but their crews had all seemed to know where the danger had been and kept well away from the shallows.

Foreigners. That was the only explanation. Deng took a few more limping steps and waved his wiry arms over his head.

“Ho, there!” he called. His lungs weren’t used to such exertion, and a coughing fit overtook him. He hacked up a wad of mucus and spat toward the lighthouse ruins, then limped out onto the point, still waving his arms. “Ho, ship! Rocks! Danger! Look out!”

He went on shouting and coughing and waving to no avail. If anything, it seemed the ship gained speed.

Deng cringed a moment before it happened, his thin shoulders rising nearly to his ears and his balding head crumpling down onto his neck like a turtle’s.

The crunch and crack of splintering wood tore through the stormy morning air. The eerie wooden monster leading from the ship’s nose disintegrated into a million pieces, and the hull shattered as it the jagged maw of underwater rocks bit into it.

“Piss on the lighthouse,” cursed Deng under his breath, his shoulders dropping. “Now they’ve done it.”

He leaned back against a flat rock and waited for the crew to start throwing out their cargo and swimming for shore.

And waited.

And waited.

None came.

The ship rocked and screeched as the waves washed it and the rocks below the waterline chewed it, but the deck remained lifeless. Deng didn’t see a single thing moving out there besides the sails snapping in the wind.

A cold shiver ran down the back of his neck.

He crossed his arms against the feeling and scowled, telling himself that whoever was aboard must not have much common sense. Any idiot could feel that a real gut-wallop of a storm was blowing in. The air was almost crackling with electricity, and the sky fair boiled with clouds. They better get shaking if they were going to salvage any of their goods.

Still nothing moved.

Could the blamed thing be empty? Maybe long since abandoned and left afloat on the seas?

The meager hair on the back of Deng’s neck stood up. He’d never seen such a make of ship, but perhaps that was due to when the ship had been made rather than where. Maybe the thing was hundreds of years old and lost to time itself, its crew dead and moldering aboard.

Now that he was looking for it, Deng thought he could see the age and disrepair. Worn and fading pitch. Ragged holes in the sails. Wormy wood. Overgrown clusters of barnacles. A general sliminess.

The wind picked up, blowing in the smell of a lightning strike out on the open ocean. At first, Deng thought some sea glass and metal bits had already washed inland from the wreck and were clinking together along the rocky shore. But when he limped over to the edge of the point and looked down, he saw nothing but kelp and the fish which lived in the crevices when the tide was in.

The sound came again, and Deng finally placed it. He hadn’t heard such a sound in the village since the night the lighthouse burnt. If he’d never heard the sound again, it would still have been far too soon.

Somewhere in that wreck, music was playing.

*

Deng wrestled with himself over rowing out for a good long while. On the one hand, no good had ever come of music in the cursed village. The night the lighthouse burned, its insane keeper had played on and on in the flames until finally his hands and lute strings had burnt away. On the other, Vu Deng was a scavenger at heart. The cargo on a ship like that might be a true treasure.

In the end, his practical side won out, just as it had when everyone else picked up and left the cursed village. The strains of ghostly music were probably just broken glass and metal. And if he didn’t row out now and gather up what he could, the storm blowing it would scatter it halfway around the world. It wasn’t every day a man had a chance to scavenge a full ship.

So he pushed his fishing skiff out onto the choppy waves and fought his way through the surf to the twisting, screeching wreck. As he tied off his little vessel to the bowsprit, Deng’s mind alternated between conjuring up chests overflowing with jewels and silver and terrifying spooks climbing out of moldering skeletons.

The wreck twisted and creaked against the rocks, shifting but not coming loose. Up close like this, the hull didn’t look as wormy and slime-ridden as it had from shore, and its sails were whole. Deng leaned in and gave the wood a sniff. No rot smell.

Truth be told, the craft looked as if it might have come off its shipyard not a month past. Wherever that shipyard might have been.

With a practiced hand, Deng manifested a climbing hook and rope, then tossed it up over the ship’s rail. He gave one last long listen for that eerie, plinking music—none to be heard—then pulled himself up the side of the slowly swaying wreck.

The wind picked up, howling through empty ratlines and snapping the sails. Deng heaved himself up on deck and stood still for a moment, feeling the motion of the ship beneath him, waiting for some sign it was about to break up the rest of the way or be dragged back out to sea. The grounded ship seemed to be safe enough for now.

Couldn’t hurt to shake a leg either way. He didn’t want to be caught out here when the real wind and waves started up.

Though the bulky foreign ship seemed vastly different from the beautiful, angular junks Deng was used to seeing, a cursory glance revealed a half-deck aft, in the same position as it would have been on a local ship. A narrow set of stairs led from the main deck up to an enormous ship’s wheel listing idly with the current. Tucked under the stairs into the half-deck was a sturdy door left half-open and swinging this way and that with the motion of the wreck.

If Deng were valuable, he thought, or a route to something valuable, then he would have stored himself in there.

As he made his way to the door, a dense gray fog flowed in, enveloping the ship like an enormous fish swallowing a worm. Immediately, the crash of the waves and scraping of the hull against the rocks faded. Cool speckles of mist patted Deng’s bald head and eyelids. He couldn’t see the shore or the horizon any longer. Even the masts and decks more than arm’s length away turned into hulking shadows.

He pursed his lips and grunted. Well, it was too late to run for his skiff. He could push off right then and row like a guai-shark was on his stern, but without sight, he could just as easily drag himself out to sea as back to shore. It hadn’t started to really howl yet. Might be fortune would smile on him and blow the fog on past, at least enough to find his way back to land.

And might be the lighthouse would rebuild itself and bring life back to the dying village.

With a snort, Deng turned back toward the door. He stumbled into a tangle of rope trailing down from the mizzen, nearly hanging himself in the mess.

Deng batted and kicked at the line, cursing whichever idiot had left such a thing dangling in the way like that. No decent captain would stand for such lax sailing. He turned a rotten eye on the shifting rope, glaring at it as he worked to free himself. He hoped the sailor who’d left it so had been strung up by his thumbs.

As if in response to his gaze, the fog overhead thinned slightly, giving him a veiled view of the beam the rope had been slung over. Dangling below the beam was a dark figure. The way it twisted and swayed gave Deng a sense of terrible weight. Bits of cloth on the figure fluttered in the gusts, but this was no flag or sheet hung high to signal other ships.

Poking from the side of the figure… Were those hands?

Deng’s skin prickled as if he’d been stung all over by a seabristle. The last of the fog blew away from the dark shape. It was a body. Legs and arms dangled limply, feet bloated and as black as boots, fingers sticking out like sausages at the end of swollen hands. Fine clothes in a strange, foreign style flapped in the wind, and long yellow hair blew back from its distended face.

Strains of that slow, plinking music drifted through the air.

“Piss on the lighthouse,” Deng whispered, his throat going dry. If he hadn’t done just that earlier, he might have let go of his water right then.

Hands shaking, eyes locked on the swollen, swinging body, Deng threw off the last coil of rope and stumbled through the door into the half-deck.

The cabin within was handsomely outfitted, fine enough for even the wealthiest lush of a captain. A wide table had been bolted to the center of the floor beneath a hanging chandelier of beeswax candles. Benches lined with velvet cushions covered one wall, and a large bunk with gilded rails had been built against the opposite one. The far end of the room was no wall at all, but a bank of windows taller than Deng that looked out onto the fog and whitecaps below.

With a groan, the ship rolled lazily, and an array of silver goblets, platters, eating utensils, rotting food, and wine bottles rolled across the wooden floor to bump against the cabinets below the bed.

The skin down the back of Deng’s neck crawled. It was as if they’d hung the captain, set the table in merry celebration, then vanished.

The door behind Deng slammed shut, and he let out a yelp.

Something screamed.

Deng’s legs went weak with fear, and he clutched at his pounding heart, afraid it was close to giving out.

The unknown creature shrieked again. With a start, Deng realized he’d heard that sound before, many, many years ago. But that couldn’t be possible, not aboard this ship of death.

Could it?

His eyes roved the cabin, wide with terror, as he searched for the source of that unholy keening.

There, between a desk tacked with maps and the end of the longest bench. A lidless cage of wooden bars woven with brightly colored silks and warmed with soft demon beast furs.

On trembling legs, Deng limped toward it, grabbing the table as he went to stabilize himself. The ship rolled again in the opposite direction, and he nearly tripped over the sliding remains of the unholy feast that had been abandoned untouched.

The shrieking kept up until Deng caught the rails in his gnarled hands and leaned his face over the crib.

The wailing infant inside fell silent when it saw him.

*

Though Deng would have given away his one good hip to be back in his little shack, he rode out the storm in the cabin of the strange death ship. Wind and rain and hail battered the huge windows, but didn’t break them. The yellow-haired infant stared at Deng. Deng stared back. Neither made a sound.

Eventually, when his aching legs would hold him up no longer, Deng sat on the bench facing the crib.

No week-old infant could survive for so long at sea alone. No captain in his right mind would bring a babe aboard a ship. And no crew would leave behind a helpless child to die, no matter how dire the circumstances. That left only one explanation.

This baby wasn’t a baby at all, but an accursed hellfiend. It had coaxed the crew into hanging the captain, then slaughtered the crew and taken up residence in this baby bed to await its next prey. Why it hadn’t changed back and attacked him yet, Deng couldn’t say.

He hauled himself back to his feet and looked down at the fiend. Wrapped around one skinny ankle was a strip of cloth covered in unfamiliar script.

Foreign. Maybe a spell to keep the hellfiend trapped in its infant form? Deng scratched at his stubbled jaw while he considered this. Yes, that explanation made sense. One of the sailors had trapped the hellfiend in this harmless form with a sealing, then the crew had bailed out for safety in dinghies.

Should’ve just thrown the thing into the sea and let it drown. Though the water might have washed away the script and set it free again.

In time, the storm battering the ship quieted to a low roar, then tapered off. Fingers of pink crept into the sky out the bank of windows, and Deng realized with mild shock that an entire night had passed. It had felt simultaneously much longer and much shorter to him.

What to do now? There was plenty here to scavenge, more than enough to get him by for a good long time. But the hellfiend… Deng didn’t want to let the creature out of his sight. Suppose the ship broke free from the rocks and sank and the hellfiend escaped? Then there would be no telling where it would go. It had seen his face, probably knew he couldn’t live far away. All alone in a village filled with empty homes, no one would hear Vu Deng’s last screams.

There was the prefect. Even before the lighthouse burned, the man was a child-eater and rumored to be as ancient as the coast itself, but he’d always protected and managed the prefecture well enough. And if he truly was as old as everyone said, he might have dealt with hellfiends before.

Deng nodded to himself. The prefect was the evil he knew.

Gingerly, Deng manifested a net from his Ro and scooped the tiny hellfiend into it. The creature kicked and batted tiny fists at him, but did no damage. The sealing on the strip of cloth must be holding strong.

Back out on deck, Deng kept his eyes down and hurried to the bowsprit where he’d tied up his skiff. When he found it still attached to the wreck, he let out a rush of breath. A bit of loose debris had fallen into the bow, and he would have to bail out the water sitting in the bottom if he wanted to make it back to shore, but that was the work of a few minutes at most.

The hellfiend infant began to scream again as Deng climbed over the ship’s rail and turned to let himself down into his vessel. The creature’s little fists seemed to be reaching for the masts. Unable to help himself, Deng glanced up at the dark shadow which swung there. For a moment, he wondered whether the yellowed-haired captain had fathered the yellow-haired child. Then Deng saw the thought for the hellfiend trickery it was—an attempt to take over his mind—and returned doggedly to his climb.

*

The sea was choppy on his return trip, and the muscles in his arms and back burned with exertion, but the wind blew in his favor. Deng managed to row his skiff to land without incident, his eyes locked on the red-faced, screaming hellfiend lying in his bow.

When he had pulled his vessel above the tide mark on the rocky shore, Deng wanted nothing more than to take down another bottle of brew and drink himself to sleep in his nice, warm hut. But he couldn’t rest while the matter of the trapped hellfiend was unsettled. Who knew if it might find a way out while he slept? That was a chance he wasn’t willing to take.

So Deng put on his walking sandals and began the journey up the overgrown road to the evil prefect.

The prefect’s castle stood at the edge of a mile-high cliff overlooking a rockier stretch of sea than even the ruined lighthouse had once guarded. Deng had never before had cause to venture there, but he’d passed it many times on the way to market when the village was still bustling with fishers and scavengers like himself. The sight of the place filled him with a creeping dread he couldn’t explain. It seemed steeped in oppressive gloom, even when the sun shone down from a cloudless sky.

Probably the lost and lingering souls of the children the prefect had eaten.

But if anyone would know what to do with a hellfiend disguised as an infant, Deng reasoned, it would be that man. And if he didn’t, perhaps the hellfiend and the evil prefect would rid the world of one another.

A stooped and wrinkled servant met Deng at the gates, bowing to him.

“May I help you, honored guest?” she asked in a tone of polite welcome.

“I come to see the prefect,” Deng said, returning her bow with a rusty version of his own. He held up the false child for her to see. “You see, I dragged this hellfiend out of a wreck on the rocks beyond the lighthouse ruins. Didn’t know what else to do with it, but I figured the prefect would.”

The withered old servant eyed the baby. “A hellfiend?”

“Don’t fear, auntie.” Deng pointed to the cloth tied round its ankle. “That’s a foreign sealing, keeping it in this harmless form.”

She nodded slowly. “Well, I will take it up to Prefect Ghing Hus for you.”

“Can’t do it,” Deng said, pulling the hellfiend back. “It’s too great a danger to put on you, auntie. I’ll carry it up myself.”

“As the honored guest wishes.”

The old scavenger followed the elderly servant up to the castle and inside the gloomy structure. He shivered as he crossed the threshold. How many children had walked into this place never to be seen alive again? Deng had been just a boy himself when the first body had washed up on the shore by the lighthouse, bloodless and clearly chewed over. The image had never left his mind.

Their steps rang off the stone floors and high ceilings, echoing through the dark halls as they wandered deeper into the castle. Here and there, sconces burned with an oily light, hardly fighting back the darkness. Not a soul met them on their way.

“This way.” The stooped servant opened a door many times taller than either of them, straining a bit as she did.

Deng stepped into the chamber first, his footfalls muffled by a worn and faded rug that had obviously once been bright and luxurious. Cushioned seats and couches were scattered about the room. Tapestries dangled along the walls to dampen drafts and hide the fortified stone walls from view.

A cleared throat pulled Deng’s attention from the furnishings. A man who looked to be no more than forty stood by the fireplace, his hands clasped behind his back.

After a moment, Deng remembered his manners and bowed.

“Esteemed prefect,” he said, holding up the hellfiend in his Ro net. “I found this in the wreckage of a foreign vessel. For now it’s bound in this form, but the thing killed or drove off the lot of the crew.”

The prefect wrinkled his nose. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

Deng faltered. “Well, kill it, I figured. You can, can’t you?”

For several heartbeats, the prefect said nothing.

Then, “More than likely. Leave it on the lounge there and step back to the doorway.”

Relief immediately replaced the tension in Deng’s old bones. He put the creature on the indicated couch and limped back to the door, happy to put some distance between himself and the fiend. It was beginning to stink a fair bit.

When Deng was standing in the doorway, the prefect crossed the room to the lounge. He leaned over the hellfiend and inspected it, then lifted one thin black brow. With two fingers, he pinched the strip of cloth and pulled it taut.

“Lysander?” the prefect read in a low voice.

“Is that the sealing they used to trap it?” Deng asked. It certainly sounded foreign to him.

“No,” the prefect said, flipping the strip over to look for more of that weird script. “I believe that’s his name.”