“Breaker-be-damned cat,” Duval said, hopping up and down on one foot while trying to daub at the scratches on his opposite leg with one hand and hold on to the tiller with the other.

“Ha,” Thom said, “Bosun Whiskers doesn’t like your steering.”

“How’d he get on board?” asked Aeronaut Plonta, poking his dark, curly-haired head up through the hatch that opened up on the turvy side of the launch.

“How do cats get anywhere?” Thom said. “Probably sleeping under the tarps till Duval stepped on his tail.”

“Put him in a crate then,” Duval said.

“Just watch where you step,” Thom said. “He’ll come out when he calms down.”

“And then he’ll want fed,” Duval said.

“He’s already had a piece of you,” Thom said. “Suppose you could spare a toe or two.”

Jean-Claude’s belly grew cold as a horrible notion took root there. “Bosun Whiskers? That’s Keelmate Gephardt’s cat.”

“Yeah, he loved this fella. Hadn’t seen him since Gephardt disappeared.”

Jean-Claude’s soul had been hollowed out, but his mind fished up bits of understanding from the abyss. There was only one place Jean-Claude hadn’t seen Bosun Whiskers: the last page of Gephardt’s journal. The man always did everything in precisely the same order, and then he wrote it down. He’d written down his business about the aetherkeel, but not about feeding the cat, which meant he must have disappeared while performing that last chore.

What if he’d gone to feed his pet and found someone else there, a Seelenjäger stealing the skin from his cat? It was something no right-thinking Seelenjäger, steeped in the tradition of Öberholz’s Wild Hunt, would ever do, but there was one Seelenjäger other than Bitterlich who had not been brought up in those traditions, and who knew everything there was to know about Lael’s expedition to Craton Auroborea.

Hasdrubal.

Jean-Claude drew and cocked his pistol, and shuffled awkwardly back toward the stack of crates where the stowaway was hiding. If he was wrong, he would shoot an innocent cat, but if he was right, then everything that had just happened was designed to drop the keys to the Vault of Ages into Hasdrubal’s paws.

Dok sat amidships, leaning on the mast, the turvy hatch open just behind him. One good shove and he’d be safe from capture. The man could fly, after all. That would give Jean-Claude time to—

From the coil of rope beneath Dok’s feet erupted an expanding, shifting form, like smoke congealing into flesh. In the blink of an eye, there stood a thing roughly in a man’s shape but with the head and legs of a goat, covered in a thick green carapace. Its long whiplike tail lashed around Hailer Dok’s throat and squeezed off his breath.

The aeronauts froze, staring at the monstrosity. Plonta yelped and ducked back through the turvy hatch.