30th of Nema

"Warring:

I'm in trouble up to my eyeballs. I'd laugh if I wasn't hiding in a hole like a rat, scared out of my mind. I don't have time to explain much more than this: someone has been smuggling girls through Warring Oceanic. I know because I let them.

And now I'm going to ask you to do something stupid.

First: When you see cargo coming from the East with the designation 1067-48, put an advertisement in the Garding Gazetteer. A 'Searching For' announcement. It just has to contain the words "red," and "fox." "Searching for red dinner jackets trimmed with fox, any size," for instance. The last line has to go: "to reply, please write to: 914M West Bartlebaker." 9 being the departure time, 14 the day of the month, and M the first letter of the ship name. You'll know my contact has gotten the message if that ship is raided in open water.

Second: For the love of all you hold dear, do not go to the authorities. I tried, and now Sallis is on my tail, which means that the Garding Magistrate is connected to all of this. If he even suspects that you know anything, this will go sideways.

Third: Get out of Garding. This isn't the time to be honorable and selfless. This is bigger than the girls. There's more. A lot more. I don't know how much more, or who's pulling the strings, but they're long strings.

By the time you read this, I will probably be dead. I don't have anywhere left to run, and they're closing in.

I never meant for any of this to happen. I will do my hardest to keep them looking at me and not you.

Give my love to sweet Bren... And run.

Obyrron

PS: Look in my old locker."

I stared at the words scrawled on that piece of wrinkled paper, then put it down, got up and hobbled over to NaVarre's sideboard bar, where I poured a tumbler of the golden rum he stocked. I tossed it back, then sputtered as the unfamiliar burn of hard liquor scorched down my throat and up into my nose. I choked out a "Hah!" shuddered, finished off what was left in the glass, and poured a little more. I didn't feel any braver, but I turned around and marched back to the desk anyway, telling myself I could do this. I was strong. I was courageous. I was going to read that journal.

I had come straight to NaVarre's study after leaving my room an hour ago, intent on finding out just what my father had put in that vault box. NaVarre hadn't returned yet, so I sat down in his swivel chair, set the binder on the desk, and picked up that little leather-bound seaman's journal. 

It had taken all of five seconds to figure out whose journal it was.

It took a full hour after that just to make my eyes stop welling up long enough to read the letter tucked in the flyleaf. I had yet to wrap my mind around what it said.

It was dated shortly before Len Obyrron's body was found in the canal – which helped me understand Father's reaction to the news of Len's death, but did nothing to help me plow through all the emotions roiling in my chest.

Now armed with my tumbler of rum, I plopped back down in NaVarre's overstuffed desk chair, took a breath, attempted once more to distance myself, moved the letter aside and opened the front cover of the journal.

There was a funny little blessing scrawled on the first page:

"To this new chapter in my journey: May you hold good news from beginning to end."

The first entry was about stopping at Willistair's Tomb on the way to Sant Domynne, and winding up with a stray cat on board.

Then there were several entries that had to do with nautical information: latitude and longitude notations, dates and times.

The third page had nothing but tiny cat-prints on it, which made me smile, then sniffle, then cry at the image of gruff, rough-spoken, half-wild Lendas Obyrron letting a kitten sit on his desk.

Pages four through eight contained several more of those nautical entries. This time, though, a certain cargo bin number began popping up: 1067-48.

Page after page after page of similar entries followed: nautical information, and more of those cargo bin numbers. The dates were approaching a time I remembered all too clearly. I frowned, and flipped through the journal, looking for the last entry, my heart beginning to race.

7th of Ghyrros

Looking back, I see how naïve I was. I thought I was being so sly, scraping a little extra cream off the bowl. I was a fool. A lying, cheating fool.

It's been somewhere near five years that I've been doing this. Five years of having more money than I know what to do with so long as I kept my head down, closed my eyes, and ignored what was going on right under my nose. And I did. I lied, and kept skimming the bowl from both sides.

I took my usual payment, dropped anchor twenty clicks east of Nim K, put my feet up and read the Dailies in my cabin while Sallis brought the Aramanthe alongside and offloaded that mysterious "special cargo" from the Merrienne.

I also turned around and told the Fox when I knew that "special cargo" happened to be girls. The Fox handed over the agreed upon amount, and I read the Dailies while his pirates "raided" the Merrienne somewhere in the middle of the Marral. Money in the left hand, money in the right hand, me in the middle. Sallis was usually angry about the girls, but he had the rest of the stuff, and what could I do about a pirate raid?

I'm not excusing myself. Even I know how disgusting that is, and I'm not proud of what I am. But I'm also not poor, and for a former gutter dog from Porte De Darre, that was all that mattered.

Until yesterday.

Watching Razzar die like that – in so much pain that when death finally came it was a blessed release – changed everything. He didn't deserve it. He wasn't like the rest of us. He wasn't in on the scheme. He hadn't been here long enough, and Morre and Darrunowa didn't want to split the take a fourth way, so we never told him why we stopped where we did, and he wasn't experienced enough to ask. He was just a hard-working kid who trying to help his mother put food on the table back home. Always ready with a joke or to lend a hand. Innocent. Decent.

There was nothing we could do. In the span of four days, his perfectly healthy body wasted away right in front of us. I'm not sure which was the worst part, the hemorrhaging and the vomit, or the open sores that covered his arms, his flesh decaying to the bone while he was still alive to feel it.

He touched that box. That's the only thing I can think of. There was a wicked storm on the 19th of Arrestre. Things got tossed about a bit below. One of the "special cargo" bins fell out of its nets and got banged up, and the clampdowns popped loose on one side. It wasn't even that big of a mess. Nothing was damaged. Some sort of metal box had come free of its container, but that was all. Morre helped get the thing back into the cargo bin, but Razzar was the one who actually touched it. Morre got sick too, but for him it wasn't much more than a bad case of the purge. He got better after a few days. Razzar didn't.

In all the years I spent working with Sallis, I never broke our agreement. I kept an eye out for the girls like the Fox wanted, but nothing else. That was the deal. No questions, look the other way, get paid. But that day – yesterday, the day Razzar died – I went through every last inch of that "special cargo," tearing it apart until I knew exactly what I wasn't supposed to see.

Evil. That's the only word I can put on it.

I can understand the gold. I can even understand the human cargo. But what could Sallis possibly need bluesilver powder for? And whatever was in that box Razzar picked up – the kid barely handled it. Just grabbed it by the sides and slid it back into the slot it had fallen out of. Mere seconds, that's all it took. Why would anyone need something that can turn a human being into bloody, oozing pulp just from touching it?

Darrunowa, Morre and I came up with a plan. Razzar didn't die, he jumped ship in Nim K. We didn't throw the "special cargo" overboard, it was lost with half the Warring Oceanic bins in a freak storm. And when we got back to Garding, we scattered like the cockroaches we were. Morre and Darrunowa handed in their notices and got out. I asked for a month's leave simply because I didn't want to look suspicious... but then nothing happened. For weeks, not a word. I began to think we had gotten away with it.

But I was wrong. They got Morre. The idiot had gone down to see his fillamena in Parynne. Her apartment exploded, blown sky high, with Morre and his girl inside it.

Now they're after me, and the reason makes my blood run cold: I told Inspector Erody about the girls. I figured if I could do one good thing, perhaps it would erase a little of the bad. He said he would look into it, and the next thing I knew, Sallis had a man on me. He must have thought he was invisible, but I can spot a tail miles away... and the only way he could possibly have known where I was staying was if Erody told him.

What have I done?

I closed the journal with a snap. I didn't know what to think. The Lendas Obyrron I remembered had been a kind man who stopped by the house for a game of stakes with Father on his between-run days. He laughed easily, told the most outrageous stories, brought me little gifts, flirted with Mrs. Fosspotter, all while hiding this secret behind a ready grin.

He had tried, at least. Did that erase the amount of damage he had done? He had told this Fox – undoubtedly NaVarre – about the shipments of girls. Was that enough? Did it matter?

I closed my eyes and cradled my forehead between my palms. This was bigger than Lendas. And it was certainly bigger than my feelings of betrayal. With a muttered expletive I ground my teeth and opened the journal again, diving back in. This had to be what tied the binders together. The binders held departure times and cargo manifests, but Lendas' journal held latitudes and longitudes.

~~~

I didn't look up when someone came into the study, or when footsteps slowed, then stopped on the other side of the map, a pair of big, dusty boots appearing at the northern edge of Panesia. I stuck another pin in the coast of Nimkoruguithu and crossed those coordinates off the list I had made from the journal entries.

"You're here," NaVarre whispered.

For some reason that struck me as funny. There were about a million other places I could be – dead, for one – but I was sitting cross-legged on Bloody NaVarre's soundproofed office floor, stabbing pins into a beautifully illustrated decorative map because I had proof my father hadn't been crazy after all, alive while the man who had dragged me to safety through miles of forest was teetering on the edge of death's doorstep upstairs.

I tilted my head back and gave NaVarre a broad, colorless, completely fake smile. "Your astuteness astounds, sir."

His face was haggard, his chin dark with stubble, his left eye the size and color of a ripe plum. More bruises marked his jaw. Wherever he had been, it hadn't been all pleasantness.

He stared at me for a moment, then inhaled and turned to survey the mess I was making of his study. "You've been busy."

I glanced around and shrugged a little. "I don't have anything else to do," I said, voice dull. Then I looked up at him again. "Where is the binder my father gave you?"

NaVarre's green eyes found mine. He raised an eyebrow and shook his head, as if he found something about me mystifying. But he didn't tell me to stop what I was doing or go 'rest.' He simply picked his way out of the circle of documents and walked over to the bookcase directly behind his desk. He pressed a piece of the molding on the fourth shelf up, and the whole thing slid out of the bookcase, swiveling on a hinge at one end. Then he opened a small safe set in the wall behind the bookshelf, and took out a very familiar drab green binder, this one tied with string.

"I can't believe we've gotten this far," he murmured, looking down at the thing while he locked the safe and closed the hideaway. He came back and cleared a space for himself across from me. "Alright. What's the procedure?"

For the next two hours, NaVarre helped me sort his share of the documents into the rest of it, and then we started connecting the dots with string he appropriated from Mrs. Burre's tatting bag.

A definite pattern began emerging. Cargo manifests from Warring Oceanic matched up with docking receipts in Nimkoruguithu. Tariff payment stubs provided by several of Warring Oceanic's contracted clients meshed with departing dates and times for Obyrron's freighter, the Merrienne, which in turn corresponded to shipments that were all received by the same three businesses in Nim K. A whole slew of safety slips showed cargo weights that didn't match the total on the manifests, but that were signed by the Port Authority inspectors.

NaVarre finally sat back, taking in the spider web of string crisscrossing his wall hanging. His attention kept returning to the cluster of pins off the Northern Point, where the coastline above the settlements began its broad sweep around the Gulf of Ix Peridas. "What is that?" he asked, eyes narrowed.

Without a word, I picked up the journal, opened it to that last, damning entry, and handed it to him. I didn't watch as he read it, already knowing what, exactly, he would discover when he did.

He swallowed, let out a breath, then turned the page back to read that bit about Razzar again. After a moment he put the journal down. "This changes everything."

I stared around at the evidence so many had died for. It radiated out from me in a circle, like the petals of a deadly flower. Or the rings of a target. I shivered, my imagination helpfully providing a bird's-eye view of me sitting smack in the center. With a sigh, I got up and stepped out of the mess. Then I rubbed my forehead for a moment, and steepled my hands in front of my mouth, chasing a thought til it formed a question. "What are they doing with human cargo, and weapons, and bluesilver, and boxes that kill people?"

NaVarre considered the map. "And where is it all going?" he asked, his gaze still on that knot of pins above Nim K.

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