The thing that lay upon the deck did not bleed.
It was a realization that crept into my mind with a cold, slithering dread as I approached the heap of silvered plates and scorched fabric. My men had retreated to the periphery of the mainmast, their muskets held with trembling hands, their breath coming in short, ragged gasps that clouded the air between us. Victor Frankenstein stood over the fallen figure, his boots planted firmly upon the frost-slicked timber, the brass-bound rifle still humming with a low, predatory throb that vibrated in the very soles of my feet.
"Do not touch it," Frankenstein commanded, his voice cutting through the wind like a scalpel. He did not look at me; his violet eyes were fixed upon the cooling ruin at his feet.
"It is a man," I managed to say, though the word felt hollow, a lie spoken to appease my own crumbling reason. "You have murdered a man upon my deck, sir."
"A man?" Frankenstein's laugh was a sharp, brittle sound, devoid of mirth. He reached into one of the many pouches at his waist and withdrew a pair of silver-handled shears. With a swift, practiced motion, he knelt and began to cut away the scorched remains of the intruder's tunic. "You have spent too long in the company of the living, Walton. Your definitions are provincial."
As the fabric fell away, a collective gasp rose from the crew. The creature beneath—for I cannot, in good conscience, call it a man—was a nightmare of biological and mechanical artifice. Its skin was the color of a drowned corpse, stretched tight over a frame that seemed too rigid for mere bone. But it was the seams that arrested my heart. Thick, black sutures traced the lines of its musculature, and where the violet bolt had struck its chest, the 'wound' revealed not viscera, but a complex arrangement of copper filaments and glass vials filled with a thick, pulsating mercury.
There was no heart. In its place was a brass housing, etched with the same labyrinthine symbols I had seen on Frankenstein's rifle. It ticked. Even in death—or whatever cessation of function it had reached—the rhythmic click-clack echoed the sound we had heard across the ice.
"This is a Harvester of the Third Order," Frankenstein muttered, his fingers moving with a terrifying, clinical speed as he began to dismantle the brass housing. "Efficient. Silent. Entirely devoid of the inconveniences of a soul. They are the hounds of the Synod, Walton, and where there is one, there is an infestation."
He stood abruptly, his hands stained with a pale, viscous fluid that smelled of ozone and old, stagnant water. He turned his gaze toward my crew, and for a moment, I saw a flash of something ancient and terrible in his eyes—a mixture of profound exhaustion and a god-like arrogance.
"Assembly," he barked. "Now. Every soul on this vessel, from the master to the cabin boy. Line them against the starboard rail."
"You exceed your authority, sir!" I cried, stepping forward to interpose myself between him and my men. "You are a guest upon this ship, saved from the ice by our charity. I will not have my crew treated like cattle by a madman with a galvanic toy."
Frankenstein moved faster than the eye could follow. In a blur of leather and brass, he was before me, the barrel of his rifle pressing into the soft hollow of my throat. I could feel the heat radiating from the conduits, a dry, blistering warmth that smelled of parched earth.
"Charity?" he whispered, his face inches from mine. I could see the fine, silvered lines of the scar on his cheek throbbing in time with the blue spark in his neck. "You speak of charity while the wolves are already inside the fold. I do not ask for your permission, Captain. I am preserving the only vessel that can carry me to the source of this rot. If you value the lives of these men—if you value the sanity you cling to so desperately—you will do as I say."
He lowered the weapon, but the threat remained, hanging in the air like the promise of a storm. I looked at my men. They were terrified, not of Frankenstein, but of the thing lying dead on the deck—the thing that looked like a man but ticked like a watch. I nodded, a slow, heavy movement that felt like a betrayal.
One by one, the thirty-two souls of the Archangel were gathered. They stood in a shivering line against the rail, the Arctic wind whipping their hair and biting at their exposed skin. Frankenstein walked the line with a slow, deliberate pace, his violet eyes scanning each face with an intensity that seemed to peel back the layers of their very being.
In his left hand, he held a small, glass orb filled with a swirling, translucent gas. As he passed each man, he held the orb to their throat, near the carotid artery. For most, the gas remained still, a stagnant cloud of grey.
"What do you seek?" I asked, my voice barely audible over the gale.
"The resonance of the First Fire," he replied without looking back. "The Synod does not only send hunters, Walton. They send observers. They plant seeds in the gardens of their enemies. A whisper in the ear of a sailor, a bribe to a navigator... or a surgical intrusion performed in the dark of a bunk, so subtle the victim believes it a dream."
He reached Murchison, my youngest harpooner, a lad of only nineteen with a spirit as bright as the summer sun. As Frankenstein held the orb to the boy's neck, the gas within began to churn violently. It turned a deep, bruised purple, swirling into a frantic vortex that seemed to pulse in synchronization with the blue spark in Frankenstein's own aperture.
Murchison blanched, his eyes widening in confusion. "Captain? I feel... I feel a coldness, sir. In my blood."
Frankenstein did not hesitate. He seized the boy by the jaw, forcing his head to the side. With a jagged, guttural cry of horror, I saw it—a small, silver-rimmed disc, identical to the one in Frankenstein's neck, but smaller, buried deep beneath the skin behind Murchison's ear. It was dark, dormant, but the flesh around it was puckered and black, as if the metal were rejected by the body.
"How long?" Frankenstein demanded, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous hiss.
"I... I know not what you mean!" Murchison stammered, tears pricking his eyes. "Since the London docks, sir! I had a fever... a doctor in Wapping gave me an elixir... he said it would steel me for the North!"
"A doctor in Wapping," Frankenstein repeated, a look of grim confirmation settling on his features. "With a signet ring of a charred laurel? A man with eyes that did not blink?"
The boy nodded frantically.
Frankenstein released him and stepped back, turning to me. The mask of the hunter had returned, colder and more resolute than before.
"The ship is not merely watched, Walton. It is a conduit. This 'Mark' is a tether. Through this boy, the Synod can hear the creak of your masts and the beating of your hearts. They have been steering you toward the ice since you left the Thames. You are not explorers; you are a delivery service."
He raised his shears, the silver blades glinting in the pale light.
"Hold him," Frankenstein commanded the other sailors.
"No!" I shouted. "Murchison, get back!"
But the crew was paralyzed by a new, more visceral terror. Two of the older sailors, driven by a primal instinct for survival, seized the boy's arms. Frankenstein stepped forward, the shears open.
"I am not a cruel man, Walton," Victor said, his voice momentarily softened by a fleeting, agonizing ghost of the philosopher he once was. "But I have learned that to save the limb, one must sometimes burn the forest. The boy stays, but the eye of the Synod must be blinded."
The scream that tore from Murchison's throat as the silver blades bit into the flesh behind his ear will haunt my nights until the day the worms claim me. It was not the scream of a man in pain; it was the sound of metal grinding against metal, a mechanical screech that erupted from his lungs as Frankenstein pried the silver disc from the bone.
As the device was ripped free, it let out a sharp, high-pitched whistle. Frankenstein dropped it onto the deck and crushed it beneath his boot. Immediately, the 'Harvester' near the mainmast—the dead thing of silver and mercury—began to twitch. Its clockwork heart accelerated, the click-clack becoming a frantic, blurring whir.
"Get back!" Frankenstein yelled, throwing himself over Murchison to shield the boy.
The Harvester exploded. Not with fire, but with a concussive wave of freezing mist and jagged shards of glass. The force of it threw me against the bulkhead, the air driven from my lungs.
When the mist cleared, the intruder was gone, reduced to a fine, silver dust that glittered on the deck like fallen stars. Victor Frankenstein stood up, brushing the frost from his leather coat. He looked down at the unconscious Murchison, then at the shattered remnants of the 'Mark' beneath his heel.
"They know I am here now," Frankenstein said, his gaze turning once more to the north, toward the jagged spine of the horizon where the Giant had vanished. "And they will not send another Harvester. They will send the First-Born."
He looked at me, a single, solitary tear freezing upon his cheek before it could fall.
"Prepare your muskets, Captain. The night is coming, and it brings with it a hunger that no fire can sate."