Calcutta — The Cycle of Dissolution

The Becalming

The journey from Vienna to Trieste gave the party precious time to prepare for the long voyage ahead. Georgiana buried herself in the pages of the Cultes Des Ghoules, pouring weeks of uncomfortable study into mastering its dark contents. By the time the carriage rolled into Trieste, she had successfully learned the secrets of the Enchant Knife, though casting it for the first time would be an entirely separate and daunting undertaking. She immediately turned her focus to the next incantation she wished to master, the unsettling Shrivelling, beginning the long parallel process of absorbing its mysteries alongside the rest of the tome.

On the morning of August 20th, 1814, the party arrived at the docks of Trieste in the pre-dawn darkness and boarded their vessel bound for Egypt. They were introduced to the ship’s leadership: the steady Captain Zanier, the hulking and volatile First Mate Marko Vukovic, the superstitious Boatswain Petar Boskovic, and the cook Stavros, a man fiercely proud of his deeply questionable culinary creations. The crew was a colorful mix of Dalmatians, Greeks, Triestines, and Ragusans, and as the lines were cast off and the sails caught the morning breeze, the ship pulled out into a glittering, glass-clear Mediterranean sea. Nathaniel Holt wasted no time fitting in, joining Petar’s dawn rigging inspection and spotting things the boatswain had missed.

The first evening at sea introduced the party to Stavros’s infamous “good stew,” a gray, gelatinous concoction featuring unidentifiable chewy bits, a lone carrot floating on the surface, and what appeared to be a tentacle. Freddy and Georgiana took one look — and one horrifying sniff — and retreated to their own supplies of beef jerky. Freddy attempted to persuade Stavros to use the party’s fresh provisions, but the cook became fiercely defensive, insisting his grandmother’s recipe was beyond reproach and shooing him away with a wooden spoon. The evening wound down with Nathaniel Holt quietly fleecing the crew at Crown and Anchor, while Freddy joined a card game of Briscola with Tommaso, the captain’s nephew, playing against the silent and unsettling sailors Ivo and Frano. When Tommaso could not cover his gambling debts and Frano drew a knife, Freddy stepped in to settle the debt himself, earning Tommaso’s effusive and lasting gratitude.

The second day brought a breakthrough in the matter of the stew. Freddy had noticed that while Stavros waved men away from his pot with a spoon, he was considerably more welcoming toward the women aboard. Emma and Georgiana visited the galley, where they found Stavros humming a short, cyclical, strangely hypnotic tune that caused Emma’s eyes to go glassy and her head to bob along with the rhythm before Georgiana snapped her out of it. Stavros, leering and delighted by the female company, agreed to take the night off and let them cook, throwing open his supply chest to reveal a collection of fly-blown, half-rotted vegetables, gray-green meat, and tomatoes covered in white spots. Katherine joined them in the galley while Freddy attempted to dispose of Stavros’s rancid ingredients by hurling them overboard, triggering a frantic scramble as the cook tried desperately to save his grandmother’s legacy while the party kicked rotting meat and squidging lettuce over the side. The rotten meat left a glistening trail across the deck before sliding off the edge, and the first mate Marko eventually intervened, cuffing Stavros and ordering the crew to swab the deck clean. That night, dinner was a triumph — salt-rubbed pork, fresh vegetables, and a proper sauce — earning the party the warm gratitude of Captain Zanier and the entire crew. By the third day, Stavros had grudgingly accepted the party’s superior supplies and began using them without further protest.

On the second night, the crew gathered around the storyteller Nikos, who recounted the tale of Yannis, a sailor whose incessant whistling had called something up from beneath the keel — something that whistled back the same tune, note for note. Yannis never whistled again after that, eventually abandoning the sea entirely to keep bees as far from the water as a Greek could get. The following night, Nikos told a darker story still: a grain carrier becalmed near Rhodes where knocking and a green glow from beneath the water preceded the disappearance of the captain and several crew members, with the surviving sailors refusing to speak of it ever again. Petar clutched his carved wooden icon of St. Elmo throughout both tellings, his knuckles white around the little saint. Georgiana and Emma quietly reflected on their own knowledge of such legends, recognizing that every seafaring culture in the world carried some version of this same terrible story.

On the fourth day, Emma’s promenade along the deck proved to be a navigational hazard of the first order. Sailors ran into each other, let go of ropes, and generally forgot their duties entirely while watching her walk by, sending at least one man flying across the deck when his abandoned line snapped taut. Captain Zanier politely but firmly asked Emma to stop walking around the ship, and she charmed him into letting her try her hand at the ship’s wheel up on the forecastle instead. The experiment ended badly when Emma accidentally snapped the wheel off its spoke, leaving the captain holding it together while she was sent below to find Ivo the carpenter. She found Ivo in the cargo hold being directed by the anxious scholar Mr. Endicott, who was insisting the carpenter build ventilation baffles around a large, heavily guarded crate. Ivo was pulled away to fix the wheel, leaving Endicott sputtering about decaying effects and ruined scholarship, and Marko, already simmering with frustration, punched a passing cabin boy named Luka rather than the passenger he clearly wanted to strike.

That same evening, Freddy slipped below decks and caught Endicott handling a mysterious rectangular object in the dim light of the swinging lantern — something roughly the size of a book, which Endicott hurriedly shoved back into the crate and locked away. Over wine at dinner, Freddy’s considerable charm loosened the scholar’s tongue enough to extract a confession: Endicott had illegally secured ancient Greek funerary stones from a sea cave shrine above Saria in the Dodecanese, bypassing all the necessary legal permissions in the name of scholarship. He was heading to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, he admitted, hoping to find someone who could decipher the unknown script carved into the tablets. Freddy quietly shared this information with the rest of the party.

In the middle of the sixth night, the party was awoken by the sound of scuffed footsteps as Endicott crept through their quarters toward the cargo hold. Adrien and Freddy followed him silently into the hold, catching him in the act of opening his crate. The rest of the party was roused, and by the light of a swinging lantern, they examined the contents: limestone tablets broken at the corners, carved with strange aquatic figures that resembled fish or octopuses but were somehow neither, alongside an indecipherable script that matched no known ancient language. Bronze plaques in the crate bore bilingual text, one language appearing to be Greek funerary inscriptions. Emma and Georgiana’s scholarly knowledge confirmed what Endicott had been reluctant to admit — the artifacts had been smuggled illegally out of Ottoman territory, and his desperate journey to Bengal was the act of a man who believed he had found something as significant as the Rosetta Stone. Endicott grew defensive and locked everything away again, retreating to his cabin.

As the days passed, the crew’s unease about Endicott grew into something darker. Sailors Spiros and Ivo reported that they had crept to the hatch one night and heard Endicott alone in the hold, reading from a tablet in Greek and then answering himself in a completely different voice — a call and a response in a tongue neither man had ever heard, as if two people were having a conversation in the dark. Drago began loudly demanding that the crate be thrown overboard, and the muttering spread through the crew like a slow fire. Petar did his best to keep order, but even he seemed rattled, his hand never far from his little wooden saint.

Katherine spent nine days carefully measuring, cutting, shaping, and fitting hidden compartments into the party’s luggage trunks, camouflaging the joins so skillfully that the modifications were nearly invisible. The ship navigated the Strait of Otranto with Nathaniel Holt lending his Royal Navy experience to help guide the vessel through the stiff contrary winds and hard currents of the narrows. Young Luka, the sixteen-year-old cabin boy, attached himself to Emma with wide-eyed fascination, begging her to tell him about England and its green hills, and before long Thomas had been drawn into the conversation as well, recounting military adventures to the enraptured boy. Thomas confided to Freddy that he had barely slept a wink since the voyage began, for reasons that had nothing to do with the sea.

On the eleventh day, the wind gusted twice and then stopped entirely, as if a door had been closed. The sails fell completely slack, hanging like dead men, and the sea flattened to a black mirror without a ripple or a current. The only sound that remained was Stavros in the galley, humming his repetitive, cyclical tune — now muttering words beneath his breath about the mother, the martyr, the murder. As night fell, a slow green phosphorescence began to glow from beneath the water’s surface, casting the ship in an eerie, otherworldly light. The crew grew surly and frightened, and even Nikos’s storytelling that night felt less like entertainment and more like a warning, as he spoke of the dead lying cold and patient beneath a calm sea, waiting for someone to call them by name.

The knocking began that night — slow, rhythmic, and patient, echoing up through the hull from below the waterline. It was not coming from one spot but from many, moving around the ship as if something — or many somethings — were searching the hull from outside. Drago and Marko led a group of sailors to seize Endicott, blaming him and his crate for the disaster, and the crew nearly threw him overboard before Captain Zanier fired a pistol into the air and Petar stepped up beside him to restore a fragile order. Freddy, Adrien, and Thomas went below to investigate, confirming that the sounds came from outside the hull entirely, not from the crate. The party spent the rest of the night huddled in their quarters with weapons drawn, taking turns on watch.

The twelfth day brought no wind and no relief. Ivo reported to the captain that the hull timbers were vibrating in a way that felt deeply wrong, though he could find no physical damage. The party persuaded Captain Zanier to move Endicott’s crate into a rowboat to be towed behind the ship, hoping to calm the crew and test whether the cargo was somehow connected to their predicament. Endicott wailed protests from behind his locked cabin door but refused to come out, and the crew dragged the crate up from the hold and lowered it into the rowboat with grim satisfaction, though the dead calm left it bobbing uselessly against the stern. Stavros served a simple meal of bread and cheese, no longer bothering to cook, and his humming had grown into something that sounded unmistakably like a funeral prayer. That evening, the knocking and scratching returned from all around the hull at once, and when Freddy looked over the side into the glowing green water, he saw them — dozens of pale, bloated faces with open eyes staring up from the depths, hair floating away in the stillness, patient and waiting. A low moaning rose through the ship’s timbers, and as it grew louder and resolved into words, Emma felt the blood drain from her face. The chant rising from beneath the sea was the same tune Stavros had been humming since the very first day they had set sail.