After a couple days in the air comes one of Mal’s familiar sleepless nights. Gunny only lets him take one of her watches, so he gets a break around dawn. In that quiet moment, he decides to take the time to tend to his leg. It’s not the only thing that deserves his attention, but it’s always at the top of his list. He’ll feel it first if he lets it get neglected. After some rummaging in his chest, he pulls out a keyring with a few very small keys on it and flips through them for the one he’s actually looking for. He props his foot up on the chest so that it’s close enough for him to find the miniature keyhole. He’s just about to unlock it when he hears Gunny’s shout from the deck above him.
“Mal! Blacksails!”
What is with all these extra blacksails about? Mal wonders, hurriedly putting away the keys. Then he scoops up his second set of pistols. When dealing with people, looking the least intimidating an elf can look is a decent strategy, but when dealing with blacksails, all he’s worried about is not dying. And potentially getting away with his ship intact.
There’s a knock on his door and someone timidly calls his name through it. “Mal? What’s going on?”
Mal sighs as he crosses the room, offering a brief but faithless prayer to save their sorry skins. He vaguely regrets letting Alice back on board — or perhaps just leaving after nightfall, despite it being common for them. And he can’t help laying some of the blame for it on Alice, since the blacksails haven’t troubled them any in months. Then again, he hasn’t been out this way in a while. Regardless, worrying about why the blacksails are here won’t stop them from being here.
Mal opens the door a bit roughly and Alice is actually a bit startled to see him standing there with two pistols strapped across his chest for easy access. She’s sure that hasn’t changed the fact that he’s also wearing one on his hip, as per usual. But somehow he looks quite a bit more intimidating like this — coat flapping and metal glinting and—
“Do you know what blacksails are?” he asks.
“Everyone knows what blacksails are,” Alice says indignantly. “I mean, who hasn’t heard the ghost stories about the mutant creatures who never sleep and who will hunt you down and never rest until they’ve killed you if you take anything that’s theirs? They’re just stories, but—”
“They aren’t stories,” Mal says, a bit too darkly, perhaps. But the words are already out and he can’t take them back. “They’re quite real. And Gunny’s spotted some one the horizon.’
“They’re not real,” Alice says. “They’re just pirates, or—”
Mal shrug. “Come up and see for yourself. But don’t come up unarmed.”
Alice isn’t, anyway. But somehow, given the amount of weaponry now attached to Mal’s person, she feels under-armed, which is a different matter entirely. “What do you want me to do?” she asks.
“Just stay out of the way. And, if I say duck, for gods’ sake, duck.”
Alice isn’t entirely sure why she’d have to agree to that, but she nods. Then she lets Mal lead the way up to the deck.
“Gunny?”
“Blacksails two points to starboard,” Gunny says. “They’re a bit of a ways off — only saw their dark sails against the horizon. But — I think they’re coming this way.”
“You haven’t taken anything of theirs, have you?” Alice asks.
“You’re the thief,” Gunny says.
“Hey! I’m not a thief! I just… use other people’s money to finance my hobbies.”
“And that’s not stealing?”
“I never said it wasn’t stealing,” Alice protests. “I’m just not a thief.”
Mal shakes his head and takes the spyglass that Gunny is offering him, holds it up to his eye, and scans the horizon for the distant ship. It takes a bit, given the distance, but as Gunny said, their eponymous black sails stand out surprisingly well in all the pastel pinks and oranges of sunrise — and it’s not that far past dawn, after all. Just far enough that something showing up that dark couldn’t possibly be natural.
“I hope you’re a thief who can fight,” Mal says. “They’re definitely coming this way.” Then, he turns towards the hold, and shouts, loud enough to deafen the women, “DEN! FIRE UP THE SECOND BURNER!”
Then he turns to Gunny. She at least was prepared for his shout, and isn’t quite as deaf as Alice. “He is awake, right?” he asks her.
“I think so. He was awake when I came up — so unless he’s fallen asleep since then—”
However, they get the answer quickly enough, in the form of a massive shudder that works it way through the ship’s pipes and then a brief whistle of escaping steam. Den, as far as can be deduced from their deck-side position, does as he’s bid and fires up the second burner. It’ll give them a bit more speed, and hopefully a bit more altitude as some of the heat is also transferred to heating the ship’s balloon.
“Come one, come on, just a bit more height and we’re above the cloud cover…”
While Gunny and Mal trade the spyglass back and forth, keeping an eye on the blacksails and also their forward motion, Alice keeps to herself, leaning against the rail of the ship. They’re going at quite a clip and the breeze up here is not quite unbearable, but it’s getting close. Still, at least she’s finally glad for the warmth of her father’s jacket. She huddles into the familiar leather and wishes she’d brought her scarf, but she’s been hopping between all the tropical islands recently and more warmth has been the last thing she’s wanted—
“Alice, I need to you be very straight with me right now.”
Alice turns, startled. She’s been lost in thought and suddenly Mal is looming over her, looking angry — but also, possibly, afraid?
“Um, what about?”
“Have you stolen anything from the blacksails?”
“No! Well… I don’t think so. I mean, how would I know that I’ve stolen anything from the bogeymen? So I don’t think so — unless the blacksails are somehow working for the Company.”
Mal sighs deeply, and the bottom drops out of Alice’s stomach.
“They… aren’t, are they? Working for the Company, I mean? I mean, yes, I’ve stolen things from the Company before, but—”
“I don’t know if they’re working for the Company,” Mal says. “But they seem very intent on following us and—”
Suddenly Mal turns to Gunny. “Gunny, what’s in the hold right now?”
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She shrugs. “Some food. Uh, bananas, I think? Not sure. It was crated already. It’s not taxed but—”
“It was crated already?” Mal asks.
“Yes, but I trust Ellery.”
“And usually I would too, but we’ve got blacksails on our tail. Keep an eye on the sails and shout when we break through the cloud layer. Alice, come with me.”
Mal hands Gunny back her spyglass and heads straight for the hold. Alice is right behind him. She’s not sure why he’s asked for her but she’s more than willing to be swept up in the excitement. She’s actually kind of grinning as they scurry down the first ladder, across the upper hold, and to the cargo hatch.
“All good, Mal?”
Alice looks over to the sound of the voice. In the doorway to the cabin is someone who cannot be described as anything but a dwarf. He’s about four feet tall with well-weathered skin and shoulders as broad as some of the largest men that Alice has ever met. She’s sure it’s impolite to be staring as she is, but she can’t help it. Elves have always been a constant part of her life — because she’s interacted with the servants of nicer households, including once upon a time her own, but they’re also far more common to end up alongside the rest of the gutter trash that haunts the streets. Those are, of course, Piers’ words, but she can’t help thinking them sometimes, especially when some of the elves she known have also been the worst people she’s known. She’s known good elves too, like Mal, but then, she’s rarely met any who are as successful at what they do as him.
And then he’s only half an elf.
“Blacksails on the horizon,” Mal tells the dwarf. “Alice, Den. Den, Alice.’
“Hello,” Alice says, a little distractedly. Den just turns around and returns to the boiler room. “Well, he seems—”
“Come on, Alice, no time to dawdle.”
She sighs. All she wanted to do was talk about how strange it is to see a dwarf, and now Mal won’t let her do that. Sometimes it can be hard biting her tongue, but her precarious position entirely depends on that ability.
In the meantime, she and Mal descend into the cargo hold. It’s incredibly dark until Mal lights a lantern and passes it to Alice. “Come help me get this crate open.”
From somewhere unseen Mal pulls out a crowbar. Alice holds the lantern high, so that she can see what he’s doing as well as he can. It doesn’t take much work for him to pry the top off the chest. Inside there’s a bit of hay for packaging. Alice isn’t sure why bananas would need to be protected like that — and then Mal brushes aside enough straw that they can both see a metal box hidden under the hay.
Mal lets out a long stream of Elven curses, most of which Alice doesn’t know. A few she does — enough to know that this is not what he wanted to find. Hell, this crate should be full of bananas, not… whatever’s in the small chest.
Mal fiddles with the chest a little. “Damn. Locked. Alice, up in the cabin, there’s a pair of—”
“Let me,” she says, grinning suddenly. She slips her picks out of the inner pocket of her jacket and hands the lantern off to Mal. Then she picks up the locked metal box, brushes as much straw off it as she can, and gets to work. The lock isn’t terribly difficult, but it’s a bit sticky, and she almost wonders if she’d be better at picking it in the dark. But there’s not nearly enough time for those kinds of shenanigans and then there’s a sudden, reassuring click! and the lid separates from the bottom by a quarter of an inch. She pries it open and finds—
“What the hell?”
“It looks like some kind of… syringe,” Mal says.
“Yeah, no shit,” Alice says. “But — what’s in them? Why’d Gunny get told they were bananas? And why’s whatever’s in them so — glittering?
As a matter of fact, it’s glittering so brightly it’s almost as if it’s they’ve brought over another lantern. There’s some kind of liquid in the syringe that looks like melted gold with flakes of something super shiny inside of it. It’s not at all clear what it could possibly be.
Other than what the blacksails are after.
“Shit,” Mal says, a heavy crease forming between his brows. “Alright, we need to…” He rubs his forehead, but it doesn’t do anything to alleviate the impending headache. He doesn’t really expect it to. What they need to do is drop this cargo right away, but if they do that then they won’t have anything to deliver, and as bad as the blacksails are, there’s not much reason to ever go back to Ellery if they can’t do this delivery.
Perhaps because Ellery doesn’t want them to come back — otherwise why would he have given them this cargo? Something he knew was tainted by—
“Alice, go tell Gunny what we’ve found. Tell her if she can get us above the cloud cover I can take over the helm, but I need to figure out what to do with this cargo. Which, I presume, is all these syringes.” He curses again, muttering something incredibly insulting, because at least it’s helping him focus on only one thing at a time, and not too many. When he’s done, Alice is still in front of him.
“What are you waiting for? Go!”
His bark startles her into heading for the stairs but it doesn’t stop her from saying, “Can’t we just drop the cargo?”
“It’s not that simple!” he shouts after her. “It’s never that simple,” he mutters to the cargo hold. The hold that’s full of the kind of contraband he never wanted to deal with — something he can’t identify, that he’s, very likely, going to get killed for.
“Well, this has been fun,” he mutters. “Time to see if we can out race them.” Mal pulls himself together and then heads back up to the deck.
----------------------------------------
The rising sun is bright as he emerges on deck. Gunny is guiding the Nameless high into the clouds, while Alice has the spyglass trained on the horizon. “Updates?” Mal barks, and this time Alice doesn’t startle. Instead, she shouts a response over her shoulder.
“No change! Come see?”
He slides up next to her and takes the spyglass when she offers it. With little trouble he spots the offending ship n the horizon. The black sails are distinctive and visible, but that’s not what intrigues him. The ship appears to be sailing parallel to them, rather than headed after them. It’s a good sign. If the blacksails are on patrol, then they’re unlikely to hunt down a speck of a ship at the edge of their range. It’s the best the Nameless can hope for, anyway.
Mal turns back to Gunny. “How long?”
“Twenty minutes!” she answers. It’s longer than he’d like, but it’s hardly long enough for the blacksails to close the distance.
“Come on, girl,” he murmurs under his breath, clutching the railing. “You can do it.”
Alice raises an eyebrow at him but he ignores it. He doesn’t know how to explain himself in a way that doesn’t sound foolish, so he doesn’t bother trying. The Nameless can hear him, and that’s the only important part anyway. He know she’s just a ship, and that magic died long ago, but he’s a sailor at heart. There’s a certain amount of superstition required to do the job, and who is he to begrudge that? When it comes to escaping from blacksails, he’ll take every advantage he can get.
The twenty minutes it takes them to break through the cloud layer are incredibly tense, but thankfully uneventful. The blacksail ship continues its trek across the horizon, getting neither closer nor further. At the speed they’re traveling, the wind is biting, but Mal makes a point to stay at the rail until they break through the cloud. Once he and Alice are showered in chilly dew, they’ve little reason to stay out in the open. With a nod to Gunny, Mal leads Alice back inside where it’s warm.
“Well, that was uneventful,” Alice says, sitting down on Mal’s bunk.
“Be thankful for that,” he says, stooping over his desk. “Now, where did I put that map… Ah, yes, there we go.” He pulls out a tool Alice has never seen before and starts making notations on the map.
“What are you doing?” she asks, leaning in to see.
“Checking our course,” Mal answers distractedly. “The air currents up here are different, they’re going to blow us off-course. I’m trying to see how much.” He spends another minute frowning at the map, makes a few more notations, and then nods thoughtfully. “Alice?”
“Mal?”
“How would you like to take an all-expense-paid trip to Tuanaki?”
She bats her eyelashes at him. “Would I ever,” she says. “I can’t imagine that’s on the way to our destination, however.”
“No, not exactly,” Mal admits. “And it means we’ll have to stop for water in Aparo if we can’t get any on Tuanaki. But it does take us away from the blacksails right now. So what do you say?”
Alice doesn’t have to think about it for very long. She grins at him. “I already said I was in,” she says. “Maybe we’ll even get to try the goldenfish.”
Mal nods enthusiastically. “I can definitely make that happen. Now, I’ve got to go loop Gunny in. You’re welcome to come, but I would highly recommend a pair of goggles if you do.”
To his surprise, she shakes her head. “I think I’ll stay inside, thanks. I’ll, uh, be in my hammock, if you need me.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Mal says quickly, getting to his feet in a bit of a rush. “It will be a few days, but I’ll make sure you know when we’re coming in to land. We should be doing that at a more reasonable speed.”
“Thank you, Mal,” she says, smiling earnestly at him. He’s already standing at the cabin door, and he pulls it open. Although she’s dying for a closer look at his map, Alice steps through the door when Mal gestures. Then, she retreats to her hammock as promised while Mal goes to talk to his first mate about their change in agenda.