The morning fog had teeth.
It rolled in from the open water, thick and pale, gnawing at the woodently over the boards. A wide-brimmed hat shadowed his eyes, though the fog itself seemed to shrink away from the faint gold flicker within them. He moved without hurry, hands gloved, expression unreadable—an undertaker in a world of pirates and bounties.
Two fishermen whispered as he passed.
"Mad Gentleman's out early," one muttered.
"Means someone's got a price on his head."
They were right.
Gehrman sparrow stopped at the end of the pier, where the sea clawed against the supports. A single brigantine floated there, tethered and trembling. Its flag bore no emblem; bounty hunters preferred anonymity. He stood beside a crate, opened it, and withdrew a thin ledger wrapped in oil skin.
Target: Marlow "Knife-Smile" Jenks.
Bounty: 2 million beri.
Status: Dead or alive.
He studied the name for a long moment. His face unchanged with his cold and uncaring gaze.
"Knife-Smile," he said softly, as if tasting the word. "We'll see who keeps smiling."
A whisper rippled through the air, almost like a sigh. It came from his left hand. The black glove there—the creeping hunger —shifted, its surface writhing like oil on water.
"Patience," he murmured to it. "Breakfast soon."
The glove stilled.
Gehrman stepped onto his ship: a narrow, single-masted sloop named Trick of the Light. Its deck gleamed with obsessive care. Every rope coiled perfectly, every lantern polished to mirror brightness. He released the mooring line, raised the small square sail, and the vessel slipped from the dock like a shadow freeing itself.
The sea beyond Greysail was calm, deceptively so. Gehrman guided the tiller with practiced ease, the fog thinning as the sun bled over the horizon.
He liked this hour best.
No shouting, no cannon fire, no blood yet. Just the whisper of the waves and the quiet machinery of thought.
He took a small notebook from his coat. The cover was leather, edges worn, its pages filled with precise handwriting. On the inside front he'd scrawled one sentence in darker ink:
If this is a dream, let it be a useful one.
He still wasn't sure how he'd come here—only that one night he'd gone to sleep in a cramped apartment full of books and half-cold tea, and woken on a desolate shore with the Veil coiled around his hand and a revolver resting on his chest.
He had known their names instinctively: the Creeping Hunger and Death knell.
He had known, too, that they were dangerous.
The first time he fired the gun, he'd felt something leave him—a sliver of life, traded for the pale, ringing bullet that shattered his attacker's chest. The bell sound came a heartbeat before the shot, gentle and dreadful. It never echoed; it lingered.
He'd learned quickly to ration its use.
The glove was worse. It fed on what it touched—blood, fear, fragments of souls. Sometimes it whispered. Sometimes it laughed. Yet it obeyed, mostly, and its appetite made him formidable.
In Greysail they called him mad because he spoke to it, because he predicted things he shouldn't know, because he never missed.
He thought of himself as something else entirely: a man who'd read a stories and fallen into one.
By noon the fog had burned away. The horizon revealed an island like a crooked tooth jutting from the sea—Raventon Rock, hideout of Knife-Smile Jenks and his crew of a dozen cutthroats.
Gehrman sparrow dropped the sail, letting the sloop drift behind a natural reef. He took up a brass spyglass, extended it with a click, and scanned the shore.
He found them quickly: men drinking near a shack of driftwood and tin, a longboat pulled high on the sand. Knife-Smile himself sat apart, sharpening a blade against his teeth, grin stretching too wide. His bounty poster hadn't lied.
Gehrman sparrow closed the spyglass.
He drew a long breath, steady and even, until his heartbeat slowed to the rhythm of the surf.
From inside his coat he produced a deck of black-backed cards—the same ones he used for divination. He shuffled them once, twice, and laid three on the crate beside the tiller.
The Fool. The Tower. The Hanged Man.
He studied them in silence.
"A beginning," he murmured. "A collapse. A price."
The sea breeze caught the cards and flipped them into the water. Gehrman holstered Death knell, adjusted his hat, and spoke to the glove.
"Try not to eat everything."
The glove twitched.
He reached the island just before dusk.
The pirates were drunk; the smell of cheap rum and burnt meat rolled down the beach. He walked into their midst like a ghost in black silk.
At first no one noticed. The crackle of the fire and the crash of the waves masked his steps. When they finally did, it was because the flames bent sideways, guttering as if afraid.
"Who the hell—" one began.
The toll of a bell cut him off. A soft, single chime.
Then thunder.
Death knell roared, and the man fell backward, eyes wide, a neat hole through his chest. Smoke curled lazily from the revolver's barrel.
Panic broke like surf. Knives scraped, chairs overturned. Gehrman moved through them with measured calm, every step deliberate. He fired twice more—two chimes, two bodies—then crouched behind a barrel as musket fire shredded the air.
He counted their shots. Five… six… reloads fumbled.
He stood again, flicked his wrist, and the glove uncoiled.
The black glove stretched, fingers elongating into tendrils that lashed out and seized a gunman by the throat. The man screamed once before collapsing into ash.
Another pirate swung a sword. Gehrman caught the blade in the glove's grip; metal sizzled, then dissolved.
"Mon-monster!" someone shrieked.
Gehrman tipped his hat slightly. "That depends who you ask."
He crossed the camp in seconds, precise as clockwork, until only Knife-Smile remained—backed against the shack, twin knives flashing.
"You the bounty man?" the pirate hissed, grinning even as blood spattered his face.
Gehrman's reply was calm. "You could say I collect debts."
Knife-Smile lunged. Fast—faster than Gehrman expected—but he'd seen faster. The world slowed around him, instincts sharpening to a point. He sidestepped, twisted the glove, and drove a gloved hand into the man's chest.
For a heartbeat nothing happened.
Then Knife-Smile convulsed. His grin turned glassy as the gehrman drew something unseen from him—a shimmer, a fragment of life. When gehrman withdrew, the pirate slumped, breathing shallow.
Alive," gehrman muttered. "Preferably."
He holstered Death knell, lifted the unconscious man over his shoulder, and looked up at the stars now pricking the dusk. The constellations were wrong—twisted cousins of those he remembered. He wondered again if this was hell or some god's idea of a joke.
By the time he returned to Greysail Harbor, the night was deep and windless. He delivered Knife-Smile to the marine outpost, signed the ledger without comment, and accepted a small chest of coins. The officer on duty, a young woman with salt-stiff hair, avoided his eyes.
"Another one, Mister Gehrman?"
"Another one," he said.
When she hesitated, he added gently, "I'll see myself out."
He left the outpost and walked the silent streets. The glove pulsed faintly; the revolver weighed heavy at his side. Both wanted more.He found an empty bench overlooking the harbor and sat. The moon hung above, silver and vast. Waves lapped against hulls, whispering secrets.
For a while he listened.
Then he took his notebook and wrote:
The sea has rules of its own. The wind carries whispers of impossible things—men of rubber, fish that talk, islands that float. If that's true, perhaps there's a place for a madman who listens to the dark.
He paused, then added:
"Tomorrow: new hunt. The cards will tell."
A gull cried somewhere above.
Gehrman closed the book and leaned back, hat tilted forward, eyes half-closed.
For the first time that night, he almost smiled.