Two days later, I stood by the ship’s rail as Check studied the Naniat harbor through his spyglass.
“It ain’t right, Grandeu’,” he said, sounding apologetic. “I know you wanted off at the nearest port, but this just ain’t right. It’s like … everyone’s gone.”
Check handed me the spyglass, as though I might doubt him. I took it and used it to scan the small port town, even though it was obvious even to the naked eye that something was wrong. Nobody was working on the decks of the ships in port; nobody was rowing a boat through the harbor; nobody was working on the docks or by the warehouses; nobody was moving along the streets.
The wooden-walled fortress that overlooked the harbor was silent.
*Maybe a breach?* Nje murmured in my ears. It was wrapped around me, as usual, and had once more replaced my missing right hand with a clawlike bale appendage that responded normally, if somewhat sluggishly, to my desires. I would have preferred something more human-looking, but I said nothing, preferring not to sound ungrateful. Nje had been in much better humor since we’d won our freedom.
I discerned and saw what it had detected — a faint roil across the face of the Line, like a dying ripple. Such disturbances weren’t uncommon in places where the Line had been pressured over a long period of time, such as by constant use, or where it had been torn open by a breach.
“Could they be fishing? Out of town for a festival?” I asked, aloud.
“Nah, it ain’t that kind of city,” Check replied. He took back the spyglass. “Could be the yellow jack.”
“What’s that?”
“The plague, the plague.”
I grimaced.
“Still, usually they hoist a flag,” the pirate continued.
“What do you think, Saint-Cloud?” Xavier walked to us, tapping his fingers on the butt of the pistol in his belt. “Is this still where you want to disembark?”
“Not if it’s the plague,” I said, frankly.
“The plague doesn’t work that fast, and it doesn’t usually kill everybody.”
“And someone woulda raised a flag over the fort,” Check insisted, gazing out at the abandoned harbor. “Or we’d see fires. Bodies.”
“Look.” Xavier pointed. On shore, we saw movement — a dog sniffing at a door that stood ajar. It pushed inside the building and vanished from sight.
“Well, if it’s a plague, it doesn’t kill dogs.” I looked around for Croaker and saw him among the crew pressed to the rail. The pirates all looked uneasy. “Croaker, does yellow jack kill dogs?”
“Not that I’ve heard of.” Croaker made his way over to us. “Black death, yes. Yellow jack, I don’t think so. But you’re right — we’d see signs, if there’d been a plague. Looks more like everyone just picked up and left.”
“Slavers?” Xavier asked.
“Enough to overwhelm the fort?” Check asked. “I mean, Naniat ain’t Adrahan, but they’ve still got cannon and, what, ten, twenty men?”
“Maybe it’s the white ship,” Cutter suggested. Croaker scoffed.
“That old ghost story?”
“It’s not a ghost story,” another pirate — Pike, I thought — spoke up. “I know a guy in Perdue who says he saw it!”
“Nobody sees it and comes back alive.”
“Then there couldn’t be any stories, could there?”
“I thought the white ship belonged to another pirate,” Cutter said, looking from one pirate to the next. “We were told it belonged to some new pirate king?”
Some of the pirates laughed, others shook their heads. Xavier spat over the side of the ship.
“Pirates don’t have kings,” he said, flatly. “That’s the point. No kings, no emperors.”
“Then nobody knows where it comes from?” Cutter pressed.
“It’s a ghost ship,” Pike insisted.
“Might be a Sher ship,” Xavier said, thoughtfully. “I maybe heard tell of it five, eight years ago? Just sightings, mostly.”
“So, maybe it’s a Sher ghost ship,” Pike said, their eyes crinkling with good humor. “Just sayin’, nobody’s ever seen a white ship in Perdue.”
“Foxfire, reflected moonlight, tall tales and drunken visions,” Croaker grumbled. “White ships and kraken and mermaids….”
“I keep hoping to see a mermaid,” Check said, and Pike elbowed him in the ribs. He laughed.
“Well, mermaids didn’t empty the town,” Xavier said, lips pressed together. He turned to the rest of the crew. “There’s a whole town here, looks empty and wide open for plunder. Croaker says it doesn’t look like a plague town, but right now we don’t know. Do we go ashore and see what we can find?”
The pirates immediately started talking, and I turned to Cutter as they debated the pros and cons of going ashore.
“What do you think?” I asked the young cadet. “We could leave the Steadfast, but I don’t know how we’d get home from here. We might do better to stay on the ship and see what the next port has to offer.”
“Do you know whether Captain Xavier intends to take us farther south, or back to Perdue?”
I glanced at Xavier, who was engaged in the debate..
“I don’t know, but I imagine they’ll want to go back to Perdue to sell their cargo,” I said. I decided not to tell Cutter that their cargo technically belonged to me. As far as I knew, he didn’t realize I owned the Cloud Trading Company, and it felt like an unnecessary distraction. “I don’t think everyone in Perdue is a pirate. We might be able to get passage back to Adrahan from there.”
“We don’t have any money for passage,” Cutter pointed out. I slowly nodded. For some reason, that hadn’t occurred to me, but he was right. A patriotic citizen of the empire might help a naval cadet and warrant officer return to Adrahan for free, but nobody else was likely to make the effort.
“We might find some loose change in town, depending on what happened to the residents,” I said, thoughtfully. Cutter made a face, clearly disliking the idea of looting somebody’s abandoned home. I turned back to the debate to let him think the matter through. It might not be an ideal solution, but nothing about the situation was ideal.
The debate continued for some time, but eventually greed overcame fear, and Xavier began to choose an initial scouting party.
“I’ll join you,” I said. I opened my mouth to explain why, but Xavier had already nodded agreement and moved on.
Town is maybe dangerous, Nje cautioned, but made no other objection. I was surprised, given its strong survival instincts, but perhaps it was as eager to get off the Steadfast as I was.
“Listen up,” Xavier said at last. “First crew’s me, Croaker, Check, Ozile, Saint-Cloud, Cutter, and Pike. We go ashore first, then signal if it looks safe. Nobody goes ashore until I give the all-clear. Got it?”
“Aye!” the pirates roared back, breaking into whoops and hollers.
The first order of business, Xavier decided, was to row one of the Steadfast’s boats to investigate the apparently abandoned vessels in the harbor — sloops and smaller fishing crafts, I understood from the pirates’ brief comments to each other. The sun beat down on the water and gulls cried, but there was little else to hear beyond the sound of our oars and the creaking of the ships against their anchor-ropes. Nobody hailed us.
We boarded via a ramp of bale and, seeing no bodies, began to search. Each of us had been given a sack for anything valuable we might find. I saw Xavier quickly locate the ship’s charts, unfurling them for inspection.
“That’s the coast?” I asked.
“The sugar line.” Xavier traced a line for me. “Plantations and settlements. That’s Naniat.”
My eyes fell to the lower left-hand corner of the map.
“And that’s the Razor Reef?”
“Yes.” He handed the charts to me. “Don’t trust any maps of the Reef, though. Never been successfully surveyed. Everything on the charts is lies and imagination.”
I shrugged and furled them back up, tucking them into my sack. If Cutter and I decided to disembark here, a map of the coast would be useful.
The ships in the harbor gave us little information, although there were small indications of disturbance; a small splash of dried blood here and there, some odd cuts and scrapes in the ships’ woodwork, a disarray of equipment and nets that Cutter found suspicious, although I thought that might be because he was used to the efficient orderliness of a naval ship.
STILL IN PROGRESS!