by Geoff Rodkey
“Why don’t it stink?” Sometimes, Percy’s facts were so outlandish they even made Adonis skeptical.
“What? The fog?”
“Yeh. Volcano smoke reeks. Like rotten eggs.”
“Why do you THINK it doesn’t stink?” Percy asked with a little snarl of disgust. Repeating questions like that was another way he bought himself extra time. “Because the ground… traps all the stink. Dig a hole sometime. Get down far enough, it’ll all come rushing out. Gag you fierce. Then you’ll see.”
BY THE TIME we rolled into Port Scratch an hour later, the morning sun had burned off the fog, it was oven-hot inside the carriage, and Percy had filled my brother and sister with dozens of new facts about science, history, and math, all of them spectacularly wrong. Not that they would bother to remember them anyway.
Port Scratch was slowly waking up as we made our way down the wide, filth-ridden main road, the carriage lurching from side to side as Stumpy snaked around the pirates who’d passed out in the street the night before. The clop of the horses’ hooves stirred a few of them, and they’d stagger to their feet, shake the rum from their heads, and double over again to vomit. There are a lot of things that Blisstown, the port city of Sunrise, has going for it over Port Scratch, but one of the first ones you notice is the lack of puke on the streets.
When we stopped at the dock, Dad made us stay in the carriage while he haggled for a boat to Sunrise. He always kept us in the carriage until the boat was hired, mostly because of Venus—there weren’t many females in Port Scratch, let alone fifteen-year-old ones who bathed, and even though my sister looked like a horse and had the personality of a lizard, I guess the pirates weren’t too choosy about who they carried off.
It took longer than usual. Ordinarily, Dad liked to head down a day early with Stumpy to settle on a boat, but this trip was so last-minute there hadn’t been time for that. So we baked inside the carriage for almost half an hour, until my good shirt was so sweat-soaked it no longer itched, while Dad rooted around on the docks, interviewing half a dozen candidates and occasionally waving his pistols when things got hot.
Eventually, he found his boat—a grimy thirty-footer with no name, a swivel gun at the fore, and a rowboat tied to the aft deck. The rowboat was critical, because pirates were banned from Sunrise, and whoever ferried us there would have to stop out of range of the shore cannons while we rowed ourselves the rest of the way in.
The two men who crewed it—one short but built like an ox, the other tall and dark-featured, with a mane of black hair that hung past his shoulders—stank of rum and man-sweat, and they both had small flames tattooed on the side of their necks. It was the mark of men who sailed with Burn Healy. Of all the captains who plundered on the Blue Sea, Healy was both the most feared and the most successful—the pirate victory over the Cartager Navy that we’d watched from Rotting Bluff during the Barker War had been all his doing, although he’d been plenty notorious even before then—and any man with a flame tattooed on his neck was guaranteed to be a cold-blooded killer.
Which was why it never made sense to me that Dad seemed to go out of his way to hire them when we needed a boat for the Sunrise run. I got up the nerve to ask him once, and he just shrugged.
“Healy men get the job done,” he said.
It was true enough—we always got there quickly, and despite their reputation, no Healy pirate had ever slit our throats. But they had a habit of renegotiating their rates once we got within sight of Blisstown, and the trip always cost Dad twice as much as he’d agreed to back in Port Scratch.
We got under way, and the two pirates somehow scared enough sail out of the stagnant Deadweather air to get us out of the harbor and into the open ocean, where we caught a breeze off Sunrise. By then, Adonis and Venus were napping in the hold, Percy was sunning himself on the foredeck like a turtle, and I was lying amidships, eyes squeezed shut and trying to look seasick because I knew from experience the others would leave me alone if they thought I might puke on them.
Secretly, though, I had half an eye open to watch Dad, who was sitting aft with the same puzzled look he’d worn for the past day. He eyed the crew for a long time, watching them tack into the wind. Then, convinced no one was watching him, he reached into an inner pocket of his coat and pulled out a folded-up piece of parchment.
He stared at it awhile, chewing on the side of his lip. At one point, he looked down the deck at Percy, eyes narrowed like he was weighing something, before he finally shook his head.
He refolded the parchment carefully and hid it back inside his coat. Then he whispered to himself, just loud enough for me to make out the words, “No way around it… Got to find a Native.”
I wondered for a while what he meant by that. I should have wondered more.
SUNRISE
Sunrise Island was breathtaking, even prettier than the name would suggest. Most of the coastline was towering cliffs that shot straight up out of the sea, but for a mile or so on either side of Blisstown, the cliffs tapered off to a stunning white sand beach that glittered like it was made of ground-up diamonds. The better part of the island was lush, green forest that sloped gradually upward until, halfway to the sky, it suddenly gave way to Mount Majestic, a jagged, massive peak made of silver.
Literally. It was actually made of silver—most of it anyway, which was why Sunrise was so rich. Even the tiniest buildings in Blisstown had carved-wood trim and expensive glass windows looking out over streets paved in stone and so clean that when I was little I was sure the horses on Sunrise never pooped.
Sunrise was even more spectacular when I compared it to Deadweather, which was a third the size and dramatically worse in every way: its gray beach littered with the rotting skeletons of wrecked ships; its tangled forest steaming with fever bugs and crawling up the sides of a dirt-black volcano so sorry looking no one had ever bothered to name it; and its lone settlement not much more than a cluster of rotting shacks that stank to high heaven.
It seemed almost ridiculously unfair, even more so when you considered that our rottenness was all Sunrise’s fault. At least, that’s what one of the field pirates once told me on a particularly stifling day. According to him, the reason Deadweather was a stinking bog while Sunrise was always just the right amount of hot and sunny with a cool breeze was because Mount Majestic blocked the ocean winds from reaching us.
I don’t know if it was true—Percy’s one book that tackled weather, Cuspid’s Natural Science, didn’t mention the Blue Sea at all—but the idea that weather was destiny, that a beautiful and pleasant island would produce beautiful and pleasant people, while an ugly swamp would breed scum like Ripper Jones or my brother Adonis, used to give me a strange kind of comfort. If my life was lousy because of the weather, what was the point of complaining? You can’t change the weather.
Of course, I’d eventually learn that the truth is much more complicated—that not everyone who lives on a pretty street is a good person, and that in even the rottenest places you might find someone you can trust with your life.
But even then, dumb as I was, I had my suspicions that Sunrise wasn’t quite as bright and pure as its name.
For one thing, there were the fortresses—two big square garrisons, bristling with cannons, that loomed over the harbor from the cliffs on either side. They were a constant reminder that Blisstown was blissful mostly because it was armed to the teeth, and even Rovian ships got fired on if they entered the harbor unannounced.
Then there was the attitude of the people in Blisstown. When we’d enter their shops, with their exotic seasonings and soft linens, the owners would smile big and offer to help Dad find whatever he wanted. But more than once, I’d catch one of them making a funny grimace at his wife when Dad’s back was turned, a what’s-that-smell? wrinkle of the nose or a can-you-believe-this-fool? roll of the eyes. Even the shopkeepers thought they were better than us.
But the biggest thing was the silver mine. It was on the western slope of Mount Majestic—the leeward si
de, the Deadweather side, the darker side. If you approached Sunrise from the east (and most people did, since the only points west were Deadweather and the distant jungles of the New Lands), you’d never see it. Even coming from the west, it was hard to tell what exactly was going on up there. Far above the cliffs and the forest, it wasn’t visible as much more than a long horizontal gash, like a dueling scar carved in the mountain’s face halfway between the timberline and summit.
But what was obvious, even from that distance, was that it was teeming with people. They crawled around it like ants, dark against the bright surface of the rock, snaking in and out of the mine in long, wriggling columns and gathered in clumps around the open fires that flickered on either end of the gash. Most of them were the same color, a deep copper red so consistent it could’ve been a uniform but almost definitely wasn’t—they were naked, or just about. And they were too dark to be Continentals, certainly not pale-skinned Rovians, or even swarthier Cartagers.
I was sure they were Natives, although I’d never seen one in person—I guess they were too sensible to have ever lived on Deadweather, and there was no sign of them anywhere among the Rovians of Blisstown. But there they were, up on that mine, year in and year out.
I figured they weren’t there because they wanted to be. And sometimes, when I watched an especially obnoxious Blisstowner swaggering up Heavenly Road in a coat studded with jewels, I’d flash back to that distant swarm of faceless people hidden behind the mountain and wonder how much of Blisstown’s riches had to do with them.
I’d be lying, though, if I said that kind of thing was always on my mind when I walked around Blisstown. Mostly, I was just in awe. Even after I’d read about all the supposedly more spectacular cities of the Continent, it was hard to imagine a finer place. And I’d wish like nothing else that I could live there instead of Deadweather.
That’s how I was feeling the day of my thirteenth birthday. I’d shrugged off the Natives even before we rounded South Point and the harbor came into view, and I was so excited to be approaching Blisstown that I’d forgotten to pretend I was seasick.
This cost me a punch to the side of the throat as Adonis came up from below. As I was doubled over coughing, I heard him call out to Dad, “Can we lunch at the Peacock?”
“Too fancy. Ye can eat street meats. Stop that racket, Egbert!”
Venus had popped up behind Adonis, fresh and perky from her nap. “Can we get jelly bread, too? Oh, please, Daddy! I’m soooo hungry.”
“We’ll see. If ye behave yerself. Business first. And don’t be underfoot while I do it.”
Just then, a muffled harrumph reached us from the distant shore. I hit the deck in time to hear the first cannonball approach—a soft murmur, rising inside of a second to a low whistle that exploded in a wet thunderclap thirty yards from the bow.
The tall, long-haired pirate wrenched the wheel to starboard, and the boom swung violently over our heads as the boat veered away from shore. A second cannonball hit the water, half again as close as the first, before the ship wheeled out of range of the shore guns.
“End of the line, boss,” he said to Dad, nodding at the rowboat.
“Ye’ll wait for us.”
“Till sundown. Then we go.”
“Could be overnight.”
My heart jumped. Venus and Adonis went wide-eyed. Even Percy, still logy from being jolted awake by the cannon fire, lifted his chin. None of us had ever spent a night on Sunrise.
“That’s extra. Twenty.”
“All in, yeh.”
“No. Extra. Forty total.”
“That weren’t the agreement.”
The pirate jerked his head toward shore. “Didn’t factor in hostilities.”
It was a lie, but completely predictable. And so was the haggling that followed, along with some pistol-waving on both sides, before Dad and the pirates agreed on a new price for their services.
They cranked down the anchor while the five of us boarded the rowboat. Then the short pirate cast us off, and I took the oars to row us ashore.
It was tough going—with Percy on board, we were awfully low in the water—and by the time we were halfway in, my left palm was blistering and my itchy shirt was soaked through with sweat for the second time that day. I didn’t mind, though. Not only was the shirt less itchy when it was soggy, but I was distracted from the pain by the ship moored at the dock ahead.
It was a five-master, monstrous in size, easily twice as big as the freighter that shipped the ugly fruit harvest up to the Fish Islands, which I’d thought was as big as ships got until I saw this one. I counted eighty portals on its starboard side, in four rows of twenty.
The top row was a gun deck, pretty standard stuff—the portals square and open under simple wooden shutters, cannon barrels dimly visible behind them. But the lower rows were something else. Each portal was fitted with its own four-pane window of actual glass, some of them open at an angle like the hand-cranked windows of the fancier homes in Blisstown. Windows that delicate on a seagoing ship seemed almost absurd, like a diamond bracelet on a donkey’s leg.
As we pulled closer, and the ship grew until it towered over us like one of the island’s cliffs, I realized every part of it was similarly rich—from the carved and painted trim on its quarterdeck, to its gleaming precious metal fittings, to the crew scurrying around its rigging in crisp uniforms of navy and white with gold piping.
It was like somebody had ripped a palace from its foundations and floated it on the water.
Even Dad was impressed. As we inched past it toward an open slip, he craned his neck to study the windows, thirty feet above us, then muttered an admiring curse.
We tied up halfway between the massive ship and the boardwalk, and as we climbed onto the dock, half a dozen soldiers and the harbormaster met us. Once they confirmed we weren’t throat slitters in disguise, the soldiers shouldered their rifles and marched in time back to the little station house at the foot of the next dock.
As he paid the harbormaster our slip fee, Dad jerked his head toward the mountain of a ship behind us.
“What the deuce is that?”
“The Earthly Pleasure. In from Rovia. Maiden voyage.”
“What’s her cargo? Royal family?”
The harbormaster shook his head. “Tourists. Haven’t you heard?”
Dad looked blank, but nodded like he understood. “Yeh. Course.”
As we trailed behind him up the dock, Venus looked to Percy.
“What’s tourists?”
Percy snorted, like the answer was obvious. “People from Tour.”
“Where’s Tour?” she asked.
“Child, please! I can’t answer questions when I’m this hungry,” said Percy.
I was pretty sure there was no country named Tour, but I didn’t have any better idea of what a tourist was than Percy. I was also just as hungry as he was, and Dad’s distant look had come back, making me worried he’d disappear on his mysterious errand without remembering to feed us. Which is exactly what happened, almost.
We followed him as he turned off the boardwalk onto Heavenly Road and suddenly ran into more people than I’d ever seen in one place in my life. In the space between the boardwalk and the Peacock Inn at the top of the hill were a few hundred richly dressed, overfed Rovians. Unlike Dad, none of them seemed to have a destination in mind—they sort of wandered about, like livestock in a field, chatting with each other and occasionally clustering in shop windows to gawk at the items for sale.
I was half aware that these people must have been passengers on the Earthly Pleasure, but at that point, they (and everything else that wasn’t food) were meaningless compared to the street meat shack, which Dad passed without so much as a look.
It was midday, and the big iron grill behind the vendor’s open counter crackled and smoked with roasting meats. To follow Dad, we had to pass through the cloud of smoky air that surrounded the shack, and when the smell hit me, my stomach wrung itself out with wanting.
The others had a similar reaction—Percy actually whimpered—but Dad was moving fast, and we didn’t dare pipe up to complain. He zigzagged through the cowlike crowd, weaving into the road where necessary, until he reached the lawyer’s office.
It was a tiny two-story building with JULIUS ARCHIBALD—LEGAL SERVICES painted on a wooden sign above the porch. Dad climbed the low stairs and rapped on the door as the rest of us waited at the edge of the street.
A little man opened the door. He was so short that he found himself staring through his spectacles right into Dad’s chest. His eyes moved up until they reached my father’s.
“Masterson. Quite early in the season for you. Did the crop fail?”
Dad shook his head. “I’ve need fer consultation. Plainspoken and private.”
“Of course. For a modest consideration.”
Dad lowered five coins one at a time into the tiny man’s hand. “There’s two fer honesty. Three fer privacy.”
The coins disappeared into the lawyer’s vest pocket. “Please. Come in.”
Dad was halfway inside when Venus saved us. “Dad! We’re starving!”
“Right.” He stepped back out and dug for a few smaller coins, which he gave to Percy. “No jelly bread. And don’t stray.”
The four of us were gone before he finished the sentence.
There were two customers ahead of us for street meat, and the minute it took them to complete their order seemed more like an hour. Percy scowled at the backs of their heads while Adonis jiggled his leg and Venus chewed her knuckle.
“I want bird. Two of them.”
“Me as well.”
“Anything’s fine for me.” Which was true. I was so hungry I could’ve gnawed the charred bits off the grill without waiting for it to cool. Besides, direct requests tended to backfire on me.
The customer in front of us had barely gotten his skewer when Percy elbowed him aside, jammed his fists onto the counter, and leaned in so hard that the vendor nearly fell backward into his grill. “Give me double mutton fancy, four redbirds on the bone, and…” Percy turned his head to look at me. I tried to seem bored, because I knew the hungrier I looked, the crueler his order would be.