Chapter 126: No Flag

The ship had no name.

Aren found that out on the third morning, when he asked the water boy what she was called. The boy, a skinny twelve-year-old named Kip, looked at him as if he had asked something stupid. "The ship," he said, and went back to his bucket.

Getting up on deck took him a quarter of an hour.

His legs worked. His eyes didn’t stop. Every rope he looked at showed him how it was laid, every knot why it held, all at once and all the time, and he couldn’t turn it off. The world had become too loud to walk through. He climbed the last steps with his eyes half closed and one hand on the rail, and sat down on the first coil of rope he found.

’Ten thousand times. I asked for a gold mine and it fell on my head.’

Rook was sitting on the next coil, reading.

"You’re walking," he said. "Last night you could barely stand, so I’d call that progress. Two days to Solvane, if the wind holds."

"Who are they?" Aren asked, looking at the crew. Twelve men, and not one of them looked back.

Rook turned a page. "Thieves. Every one of them, the captain too. Her name’s Reyna Sall. They belong to a house that doesn’t have a name, and they don’t like questions about it. I’d stop asking."

The captain stood at the stern with her hands behind her back. She was a short woman of fifty in a coat that had been blue once, with hair cropped close to the skull. She had all ten fingers. Rook had mentioned the debt on the pier, and Aren had checked as soon as he could stand.

"You’ve been staring at my hands since last night, passenger," she said, without turning. "Yes, I owe him three. He never came to collect." She turned and looked him over from hood to boots. "Every lock I pick, I pick with his property. He says you make people grow. Rook brings me good people. He also brings me deadweight. I’ll decide which one you are before we make port."

"And if I’m neither?"

"Then you’re cargo."

[Reyna Sall. Rank C. Hostility: 44%.]

’And thank you, Rook. Why not paint it on the sail?’

He checked the anchors he already had.

[Rook. Hostility: 68%.]

[Anchor out of range: Vivienne Ashgrave.]

[Anchor out of range: Kaela Voss.]

Vivienne was somewhere ahead of him on this same sea, and that was already too far. An anchor out of range was a door he couldn’t knock on: no new aid recorded, no new wheel. Only what he had paid before she left could still come back, as Kaela’s had on the stern. Rook was in reach, and Rook hated him a little less every month, which was bad for business. The rule hadn’t changed since Highcrest. Hostility opened the door, and what he paid decided the wheel.

He had one slot left, and he wasn’t going to spend it on Reyna. A good anchor hated him and still had a long way to climb. Reyna Sall had already climbed. In a port full of thieves, someone better would hate him soon enough.

He spent the morning on a water cask by the rail, because it was easier than walking, and let the crew teach him things they didn’t know they were teaching.

A sailor with grey in his beard made a line fast with a quick twist and tuck. Aren had seen that knot a hundred times on the river docks at Highcrest and had never managed to tie it. He watched it once, picked up a loose end and tied it, and it was right.

Kip came along the rail with his bucket, bumped a big man with knives in his boots, said sorry, and walked on with the man’s tobacco tin up his sleeve. Aren saw all of it: the bump on the left shoulder, the hand going in on the right while the man looked left, the boy already moving away before the hand came out. He could have done it himself before Kip reached the end of the rail.

The cook showed him how to gut a fish in three cuts. By noon his nose was bleeding and he had stopped counting what he’d learned.

[Street Fighter’s Instinct: 85% → 91%.]

’I didn’t fight anyone. I sat on a barrel and watched a crew of thieves cross a deck.’

That night, when the captain’s lamp went out, he climbed to the yard. It was the long beam that held the sail, forty feet up, a hand’s width of wet wood rolling in long swings. He let go of the mast.

The Moonlit Step had come to him through Vivienne, a year ago, when her father gave her the family technique. For a year he had run rooftops with it and killed with it, and thought he knew it. He walked the yard from end to end and saw that he had known about half of it.

He kept walking until his hands started to shake on the ropes, and his body made it plain that it couldn’t keep up with his head. He climbed down before he fell down, and slept on the deck where he landed.

On the fourth day, the crew tested him. Kip set a cup of water beside him at noon and told him the rule without looking at him: before they made port, he had to lift the black-horn knife the captain wore on her back, or he was cargo.

Every thief on board had tried for that knife, so it was watched day and night. ’Everyone watches the knife. Nobody watches the bell.’

He sat on his cask and let Iron Sense open. It had always stopped at thirty paces. Today it kept going: the anchor chain at the far bow, a knife in the lookout’s basket, twelve sets of knives and where each man stood, the copper in the captain’s purse, a brass button lost at the bottom of the hold.

[Iron Sense (C → B). Range: 30 → 100 paces. All metal.]

He listened until he knew where every knife on the ship went at the change of the watch. His eyes did the rest.

Sleepless Watch opened up for him next. He could see how much sleep it had been making him pay back, and how little his body needed now.

[Sleepless Watch (C → B). One hour of sleep pays for one night.]

At dusk he took the bell.

Nobody watched the bell. It rang the watches, and the crew had stopped seeing it years ago. When the lookout turned to spit over the side, Aren lifted it off its bracket, wedged the clapper with his sleeve, tucked it under his arm, climbed the rope ladder and hung it high in the one place the lantern didn’t reach.

At the turn of the watch, it didn’t ring.

On a ship like this, a bell that didn’t ring meant trouble. In less than a minute the whole crew was on deck with their hands near their knives, around an empty bracket. The captain came out with the lantern and looked at it. Then she looked straight at Aren.

"Where is it?"

"Somewhere safe. You’ll have it back, Captain. I’d like a rule for it, though." He held his hands open at his sides. "Nobody on this ship asks me what I am. I’ll do the work you give me, and I’ll do it well, and when you’ve seen enough to decide what I’m worth, you’ll tell me. Until then, no questions."

Behind him, Rook closed his book.

One corner of the captain’s mouth moved.

"The bell, then."

He climbed into the dark, brought it down and put it in her hands. She hung it back and struck it with the flat of her palm.

"No questions," she agreed. "Until I decide."

[Reyna Sall. Hostility: 44% → 31%.]

"Eleven years I’ve known her," Rook told his book. "She never gave me that."

That night Aren went up again. He stood at the end of the yard and looked forward, at the ropes of the foremast eight paces away, and the dark beside them where the sail blocked the moon.

No light fell there, and he could still see every edge of that empty air. The step had always run on the dark around the light.

He stepped into the dark beside the ropes.

[Moonlit Step: 62% → 100%. Mastery complete.]

[Remade in core element: Void.]

[New skill: Nullstep (Lv. 1). The Host steps into any empty place he can perceive, within ten paces.]

The yard was under his foot, and then there was only air under him, and he grabbed wet rope. Behind him the yard lay bare.

He hung there over the sea and laughed without a sound.

The crescent in his core turned over, its edge working on the same dark.

[New Moon. Mastery: 60% → 71%.]

’A year to reach sixty-two. Two nights for the rest.’

He climbed back and sat against the mast. Below him, two men of the night watch were passing a pipe.

"The white ship’s two days ahead of us now," one of them muttered. "Three masts and a navy crew. She doesn’t wait for weather. Aldermere colors. They say the bride’s got a hold full of dowry chests."

"Then the Emperor’s got a new toy."

Under his shirt, on the left side of his chest, the Scar went still, as it had in the shop on Lantern Street. The Familiar that slept there didn’t go still for much.

He had kept every word the merchant gave him. A key with no teeth, the only thing that ever came out of the Pale Well whole. An Aurem princess had taken it north in her dowry a hundred years ago, and it left House Ashgrave only with a daughter who married out. They called it the Bride’s Key. It opened nothing that existed yet. And older things than the merchant kept ears in every port south of the sea, listening for its name. Say it aloud in the wrong room, and they would come to see who said it.

’Aldermere is sending the Emperor the one thing he might want to look at, and I watched her dowry chests go up the gangway. She’s the bride. The key is in one of those chests. Mira’s jar costs one key. I will take it before she says her vows.’

’And I never say its name, not to Rook, not to anyone. A man who tells the market what he wants pays double.’

At first light Kip shouted "Land!" down from the yard, and Aren went to the rail and looked south. What he saw was too large to be a harbor. It filled the horizon from east to west, white and gold in the early sun, walls and towers and docks, and above them a hill covered in roofs. That one hill was larger than Highcrest, and there were others.

"Port Myrrh," Rook said beside him. "The smallest of the great ports of Solvane."

Aren was looking at the nearest quay, where a line of men unloaded a barge. Every one of them wore a band of metal on his left shoulder. Iron, bronze, iron, iron, and far down the quay, watching them, a gleam of silver.

He put his hand to his own shoulder, where there was nothing at all.

"Keep your cloak closed," Rook told him. "Here, no band means you never awakened." He looked at the bell, then at Aren. "Nobody who watched you take that will believe it."

He turned a page.

"And they hang liars."