The Sin in the Steel

by Ryan Van Loan

  “You’ve been counting?”

  “It’s just a figure of speech, Buc.”

  “Seems rather specific, is all I’m saying.” I tried to twist more toward him, but the shackles around my wrists were strung too tightly to the ceiling above and the ones on my ankles had just enough play to let the tips of my toes touch the floorboards. The thin bit of cloth they’d given us barely allowed for modesty and did nothing at all to keep the damp air from seeping into our skin. “I haven’t had the time or inclination to sit down and hammer out a pecking order. All my rule number ones are important.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you’re the one who gave me that belt, remember? You even said the hidden pouch would come in handy. I thought it had,” he added. “It’s not my fault they found the writ.”

  Isn’t it? “I suppose not,” I said aloud. If I was going to claim leadership of our duo in the good times, I guess that means I get that pleasure in the bad as well. Should have claimed modesty and hid it in his underclothes when we went into the baths. I hadn’t ever once thought to ask where he’d stowed it away. Too seasick. “It all goes back to that damned Cannon Ship,” I muttered.

  “What’s that?” I heard his irons grind together as he turned toward me.

  “Never mind,” I said. “How long you think we’ve been down here?”

  “Well, it wasn’t too long past breakfast when they took us, so I’m guessing it’s going on dinnertime. Chan Sha probably wants to enjoy her sport on a full stomach,” Eld said.

  “So long as one of us is comfortable.”

  “So what’s the plan?” he asked.

  “Plan?”

  “Aye, you’ve got one, right? You always have a plan.”

  “I have many plans,” I said before my silence became obvious. And I did, but none of them started with me hung by my wrists in the blinding dark hold of a pirate ship. “I thought that gaolship would be the last time we were strung up in a hold in chains, but at least this time we only have to worry about our own skins and not some snot-nosed noble’s son in the bargain.”

  “He was a pain in the arse, wasn’t he?”

  Our laughter cut off as soon as it started. Chains and pitch darkness tend to have that effect. “I’ve plans, Eld, but I can’t make the first move.”

  Eld grunted and fell silent. Even in the poorest dregs of Servenza, there was light to be found, but in the bottom of Chan Sha’s boat, it was so dark that the only color I saw was the spots dancing before my eyes. Even that didn’t seem real, because I discovered if I closed my eyes, I saw the same spots as when my lids were open. Sound was magnified, so that I could feel the beat of my heart in the back of my throat and feel my thoughts pressing against my temples, fighting to break free of my skull. I half fancied I could hear Eld’s heartbeat as well, but that had to be fancy. The sounds of the sea parting before the ship filtered through the wood, and it didn’t take much imagination to realize that there were only a few planks between us and unfathomable depths. Gods, but I hate ships. Servenzan gondolas had lured me into believing otherwise, but they were pale imitations compared to the real thing.

  “Maybe the darkness is the torture,” I said. The sounds retreated from the echoes of my voice, but the spots remained. “Leave us down here for a few days and we’ll be willing to talk, all right.”

  “I won’t talk,” Eld said. “Unless that’s part of the plan, but if it is, you better speak up now.”

  “You’ll know where to jump in,” I told him. I hadn’t the faintest idea of when that would be, but he was good on his feet so long as I didn’t push the lies too far. “You always do.”

  “Your confidence in me is inspiring,” he muttered. “But—”

  I heard a door open, and a moment later a dim red circle appeared, hovering just below eye level. The door closed with a dull thud and the light drew closer, quivering as it moved. I could hear footsteps, several pairs, almost as if the vibrations of their movement painted a picture with my ears. I didn’t even have to close my eyes to visualize them walking toward us. A little bit ago I’d been dreading the endless darkness, but now that they’d shown up I wasn’t so sure the dark was that bad after all. It’s hard for a color to make you bleed.

  “Realized the error of your ways?” I called. My voice sounded hoarse to my ears. I cleared my throat and answered my own question. “Of course you have—I told you we paid for a share and so we did, worthless as it proved to be.”

  The figures, for I could just make out rough outlines of bodies in the faint glow—or maybe one outline for all of them—said nothing, but moved closer until I could see the red scarf hung over the shielded lantern. I opened my mouth to poke them again, but there was quick movement and the world exploded in harsh light that burned my eyes and stilled my tongue. Eld cried out beside me and I felt my chains dig into my flesh as my body betrayed me, fighting to cover my eyes from the unbearable brightness.

  “It is funny how too much of something after it’s been long withheld carries beauty and pain in equal measures, isn’t it?” Chan Sha asked. “Even with your eyes closed, this must burn like a thousand suns.”

  “Maybe a few hundred,” I growled, but I couldn’t keep the tears from pouring down my face, revealing the lie. Orange blazed beyond my clenched eyelids. “Parlor tricks,” I added.

  “That’s what most of torture is.” Gem’s voice sounded from my left, close to Eld.

  “And we have to start somewhere,” Chan Sha added.

  “You’ve made a mistake…” I began.

  “Several, in fact,” she said, “but you’ve made one more than I have. You named your plantation, but that name wasn’t Kanados. I hear they pinch and squeeze and might make you disappear if you bother them enough, but they don’t renege on deals. Your writ isn’t for a plantation, either. So why don’t you tell me about that?” she asked.

  “Bugger off.”

  Something hard and wet pounded into flesh and Eld grunted.

  “Aye, keep your flinty tongue, girl,” Chan Sha said. “Gem has strange notions on hurting young girls, but grown men? Not so much. So say on.”

  “A writ is a writ,” I growled. “What if I said we couldn’t read?”

  Something whipped through the air again and Eld’s breath left him in a gasp.

  “I’d say those who can’t read don’t quote books to me over dinner,” she said. “Like to try another lie?”

  “We bought a writ off a man who said he’d bought it off the Kanados Trading Company,” I said. “He claimed he needed money and he was selling cheap. It wasn’t all that cheap, but it offered the chance we’d been looking for.”

  “You didn’t verify the transaction with the Company?”

  “What, and pay their fees?” I snorted. “That’d cost half again what the writ did. Two days later we had another flash a writ at us, a woman this time, tried to pay for her toss at the table with a writ that read like ours.”

  “Like yours?”

  “Word for fucking word. It was then we started to realize something might be amiss.”

  “I’d wondered longer than that,” Eld said, his voice tight with pain. He always knew when to make an entrance.

  “So we backtracked, ended up following a trail of these writs,” I said.

  “Right to the docks,” Eld added.

  “Aye, turns out our Company man had sold a score of these things, not worth the paper they’re written on. And then ran for the Shattered Coast.”

  “Interesting,” Chan Sha breathed. “Then why not tell me this in the first place? Why the lies?”

  “Because we’re fools either way…” I began.

  “But we’re worse fools if you know the truth,” Eld said.

  “The rest was truth,” I added. “We spent our last coin getting to Port au’ Sheen, but couldn’t find the bastard, and after a week it became clear we weren’t going to make our money back tossing dice there, so we borrowed—”

  “Stole,” Chan Sha corrected.

  “Stole
that schooner,” Eld said before I could go another round with her. “And it’s been downhill ever since.”

  “Sounds like it went downhill the day you bought the writ,” she said. “All you had to do was look at the seal placement and you’d have seen it wasn’t there.”

  “What?” My eyes snapped open of their own accord. Lights popped across my vision from the lantern, but I forced myself to focus on the woman with the braids in front of me. “What seal?”

  “The notarized seal—that’s what you pay all the money for, not the scrap of paper it’s written on. This one isn’t sealed, so it’s fucking useless.” She glanced at the oilskin parchment in her hands and snorted. “Gods, it claims you’d be a Board member. They give those seats out over their graves.”

  “I said we were fools,” I whispered. That Company bitch! She’d fucked us before we even left port—we’d been working for free this whole time and not even realized it. And now we were about to be tortured for free too. Laughter, unbidden, bubbled up to my lips.

  “That’s amusing?” the other woman asked.

  “I was worried about looking the fool and I didn’t even know what a fool looked like until now,” I said, unable to keep the laughter from my voice. “You might as well shoot us both and be done with it.”

  “I very well might,” she said, giving me a toothy smile as she rolled the writ back up into a tube.

  “We told you the truth,” Eld said. He was naked, save for a scrap of dirty cloth that hung around his hips and stopped well above his knees. A red bruise stood out on either side of his ribs. “What more do you want?”

  “What more do I want?” she repeated. She tapped the tube against her pink lips. “Very well. I want to know why a brig carrying criminals back to the Empire for execution departed Port au’ Sheen in the north, eschewed every trade route that led to Servenza, and came south instead.” She leaned forward so that the lantern illuminated her face, her cheekbones obscuring her mouth in shadow. “I want you to stop lying to my face like I’m another simpleton you can throw weighted dice at. I want,” she continued, her voice rising. “Gem!”

  Gem stepped forward and swung a sodden knotted rope, water sluicing off it as he swung it back and forth in a figure eight until it blurred into one motion and then Eld jerked and screamed through his teeth and the rope flew back to Gem’s side, blood dripping from its end. The first mate’s face was hard, his eyes inscrutable, but I saw his hand clench and unclench unevenly.

  “You.” Eld took a shuddering breath but didn’t cry out despite the livid bruises across his sides. “You didn’t break them.” He took another breath and stared straight into the other man’s eyes. “You have to swing harder if you want to do that.”

  “Gem!” Chan Sha’s smile was as wide as it had been a moment before, but I didn’t need to see her eyes clearly to know it hadn’t reached that far. “You heard the man.”

  “Wait!”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Hit him again, cunt, and you can save us all the trouble and blow our brains out here and now,” I growled. “Or you can release us and I’ll tell you everything and if we’re wrong, you can beat us to death and wear our skins and change your name to some other batshit crazy moniker, or do whatever the fuck else it takes to make your smile actually mean something.”

  “Gods.” Gem’s whisper was loud in the silence that followed.

  “You toss dice with that tongue?” Chan Sha asked.

  “Not for very long,” I said. “Usually it takes more to get me worked up.” I jerked the chains. “Though, usually, I’m not strung up like a fish for gutting.”

  “I’m not going to release you for telling poor lies,” she said. “But I’ll keep Gem from Eld while you tell me better ones. Or you could tell me the truth and then maybe I will release you.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth and you release us and give up your plans for torturing and murdering us,” I said.

  “You’re really not in a position to bargain,” Chan Sha said. “My deal is that Eld stops bleeding now, not that you won’t both bleed later.” She twisted one of the match cords in her hair. “Take it or be damned.”

  “We didn’t steal a schooner,” I said finally. My attempt to stare her down didn’t seem to be working and the bitch was right: I didn’t have anything to bargain with, save staving off the pain for a later time. Despite Eld’s blind faith in me, I didn’t really have a plan. But if there was no opportunity now, I’d just have to stall until one presented itself. Which meant the truth, or a version of it. I’m not sure I’d have given her the whole truth if she had lit a fire underneath me. There’s something in me that would rather burn than give over. So, the truth. Ish.

  “No?”

  “No. We went to the Harbormaster, as she’s the Company’s representative in that midden heap. Explained our predicament and asked for reparations.” I snorted. “That sailed as smoothly as you might expect.”

  “Worse, actually,” Eld grunted. Pain hung on the edge of his voice. “I should have listened and stolen that schooner instead.”

  “Aye, well.” I tried to shrug in my chains. “The Harbormaster accused us of forgery and bribery and threatened us with debtor’s prison.”

  “That sounds about right,” Chan Sha said. “She’s a cold one.”

  “Colder than you,” I agreed. “But she also offered an alternative. Seems the Company is boiling over because their sugar shipments keep disappearing and that heat was being directed at the Harbormaster, as she’s in the Shattered Coast and they’re back in the Empire. No one talks to the Harbormaster, though, especially pirates. So she sent us to nosing around and…” I told Chan Sha of the meeting at the tannery, changing some of the details and leaving out the Dead Gods entirely, but letting her know that some madman had broken it up and another madman of the dying sort had implicated her in the disappearances. “We gave the Harbormaster the information.”

  “And she put us on a brig and sent us south to find you,” Eld said.

  “I still don’t understand that part,” I said, letting honest confusion touch my words. Or what passed for honesty. “I’m not sure if she didn’t trust the captain or she was trying to punish us further or what. But next thing, we were on a ship heading south, straight for the route where no ship has made it through in months. Straight to you.”

  “And you did sink the ship we were on,” Eld said.

  “After you overtook us. Makes me think maybe that dying pirate wasn’t mad after all,” I finished.

  Chan Sha kept rolling the match cord between her fingers as we spoke, but there was a new tightness around her eyes. Their dark orbs shone brightly in the lamplight. “I’ve been keeping ships away from the sugar routes, it’s true. But your ship and a few others that wouldn’t take the hint aside, I’ve not been behind the disappearances.”

  “Come again?”

  “Keeping word of the truth from spreading doesn’t mean we’re the cause,” Gem said. “It’s not been Chan Sha. Nor other pirates.”

  “If not you or your brethren, then who?” I asked.

  Chan Sha dropped the match cord and shook her braids out. “A ship that flies red sails and a black flag.”

  “You said it wasn’t pirates.”

  “It’s not a pirate ship,” Chan Sha said. “It’s a ghost ship.”

  Her words hung in the air for several breaths.

  “A ghost ship?” Eld said at last, shaking his head. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “Of course not—that’s the word I’ve been preventing from spreading,” she said. “It’s crewed by the undead, so they don’t want for hunger or thirst nor feel pain. And their captain is a Dead Walker.…” She shuddered, and for the first time I saw real emotion on her face. “He sends them against every ship that touches this route. Builds his crew with the ships he captures and sends the rest to the depths. So, a ghost ship.”

  “You’ve been putting yourself between him and the rest of the wo
rld, haven’t you?” I asked. Eld cracked his neck turning to look at me, but I already knew the answer.

  “If the world finds out they’ve something to fear more than pirates, instead of ships rolling over at the first exchange of fire, they’ll start to fight.” She snorted. “Contrary to your experience, I prefer not to sink ships. It’s bad for business and draws the wrong kind of attention.”

  “The warship kind,” Gem said. “That’s the other half of it. If the nations know the Dead Gods are involved, half will send their ships to destroy them and half will send their ships to save them. And the companies will fight to clear their precious sugar routes. The sea will run black with powder and red with blood.”

  “You’re not allied with the Gods?” I asked.

  “Fuck no,” Gem spat. “If we were, we wouldn’t be running from the sight of every sail that looks too dark to be white.”

  His words sounded sincere and I’d observed more lookouts in the rigging than the Sea Dragon ran. But. That pirate with half his insides torn out had been sure Chan Sha was in league with the Dead Gods. The number of ships disappearing had made me expect to find a flotilla, not a single ship … but a ship crewed by the undead was a different story. I felt my eyes narrow, but in the light cast by the lantern, I don’t think anyone noticed. Maybe Chan Sha was allied, but her crew wasn’t.… They could be playing the game from both sides. But what was the game? Why keep everyone away from the south?

  “Why does this ghost ship only sink ships along the sugar trade routes?” Eld asked.

  “We don’t know,” Chan Sha said. “It could be they aim to keep sugar from the mainland and crash the world economy.”

  “Or maybe they plan to take advantage of that,” I said. It made a certain kind of sense. The Dead Gods had Shambles, undead, and that would make for a large enough crew to cause some damage. Damage to the trading companies that had begun to rely heavily on Ciris’s Sin Eaters. I knew I should have picked up that book on sugar production. I understood enough to know how sugar was farmed by the destitute or indentured and how it was processed, but not enough about the inner workings of it all. Still, I knew plenty about trade, supply and demand. “You could make a lot of coin betting against sugar if you knew it was going to fail.”