“I’m not drunk! You’re drunk, you albino monkey!” Forcing himself upright with sheer outrage, the captain’s sway gave away his lie, as did the pungent smell wafting off him. He had about a foot of height on Kelsey, and he glared down at her angrily, jabbing his clawed finger in her face.
“Umm, maybe we should do this when the captain’s feeling better,” Soraya said.
“No no, I love making deals with drunk people,” Kelsey said. Then she called out to the captain, speaking loudly and slowly. “Hey, captain! We want to charter your ship! I’ll give you a cask of wine if you agree!”
For just a moment, the captain’s ears perked up. Then he frowned. “Do you take me for a fool? Charter a ship for a cask of wine?”
“Fine,” Kelsey sneered, “Two casks.”
The captain's ears went flat with rage and he charged at Kelsey, only to stumble when she stepped to the side. He snarled and whirled around but by that time Anton was able to get between them.
“Stand down,” he grunted, grabbing a hold of the captain’s wrists.
It irked him a little, to protect Kelsey like this, but Anton was afraid that if she actually felt threatened, she’d pull out a gun.
And the captain was strong. Stronger than Anton, maybe stronger than Kelsey. He easily pulled out of Anton’s grip and gathered himself for another attack.
“Captain, no!”
“She’s a paying customer!”
The two crewmembers intervened. Despite the cramped quarters, they effortlessly wove around the captain and interposed themselves between Anton and his opponent. Between them, they managed to push the captain back into his cabin.
“Sorry, he’s normally…” Soraya trailed off, searching for the right word.
“Able to hide his bigotry?” Kelsey finished for her.
Soraya stared at Kelsey with her mouth open, trying to find the next thing to say.
“Why don’t you take a look around the ship?" she finally managed. "Rashid can show you around. I’ll get the captain… presentable, and you can talk in a bit.”
“Sure, sure,” Kelsey said. “Have fun with that.”
This was only the second ship that Anton had been on. It was bigger than the one that he had sailed here in and… that was the limit of his knowledge.
“Crew quarters holds ten,” Rashid said. “With a full crew, that leaves two cabins free for passengers.”
“Where are the rest of the crew?” Kelsey asked as they poked around one of the empty cabins. It was pretty cramped, a narrow room with bunk beds on one side and enough room to stand on the other. It was a sight more comfortable than their trip over here. Then, their quarters had been a corner of the partially filled hold, their beds a choice of sacks of flax or a hammock.
“Not much call for them, if we’re just sitting in port,” Rashid said uncomfortably. “If we get hired, we should be able to fill the slots without trouble.”
“You two are the only ones with hard-to-find skills?” Kelsey asked. “Weatherwitch and Navigator, those sound like rare Classes.”
“There’s plenty of other skills needed, for a ship like this, but they’re not hard to find,” Rashid agreed. “Let me show you the hold.”
There were actually two holds. The one they were looking at had trapdoors in the ceiling and the floor, allowing cargo to be lowered straight into the lower hold.
“How many passengers can the ship hold?” Kelsey asked, looking around.
“Four? Or do you mean if we refitted the holds for passengers?”
Kelsey nodded. “Can you hold this here?” she asked Anton. Anton did as she indicated, holding the end of the metal ribbon that she had produced against the wooden rib that held the ship's hull in place.
“Go on,” she told Rashid.
“Well, it would depend on how you fitted it out,” Rashid said, looking at Kelsey’s activities curiously.
She had moved across the hold, the ribbon stretching out behind her, seemingly infinite in length. Anton realised there were markings on the ribbon, and that she was measuring distances.
“Is that a magic item?” Aris asked, curious as well.
Kelsey grinned. “No, it’s just rolled up tightly. Rashid?”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Nobles would want the place fitted out, I doubt you’d fit four of them in here. Slavers, they pack them in, so maybe fifty, just lying about on the deck.”
“I see,” Kelsey said, continuing to measure things. “So there’s no standard fittings? You’d have to get carpenters in and build everything?”
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“Of course,” Rashid said. “If that’s what you’re after, it would take weeks just to get the designs made and the materials in.”
She continued measuring the distances between everything in the hold. Aris and Rashid watched, while Anton helped her by holding one end of the measuring tape, as she called it.
When she was finally done, she directed Anton to release his end of the tape. When he did, the ribbon whisked itself back into its container.
“Are you sure it isn’t magic?” Aris asked.
“Just a spring,” Kelsey answered, handing the box over. Aris quickly realised that she could pull the tape out about a foot or two, and then release it, allowing it to zip back into the box. She laughed delightedly.
“Let’s go measure the second hold,” she told Rashid, who was casting envious glances at Aris.
----------------------------------------
“Your boat is shit, and we probably don’t need it,” Kelsey said. They were all sitting down at the one table large enough to seat six people, in the ship’s galley. The captain had wanted to negotiate in his cabin, but there was only room for two.
Kelsey continued. “Half your rigging is missing, you have no sails, and nowhere near enough stores of food— of anything, really, except for alcohol— to feed the number of people we want to transport. And you’d need a refit to hold them all in comfort.”
The captain’s eyes bulged with rage, but Soraya restrained him with a touch on his arm.
“All the sails and the rest of the rigging are in storage,” she said. “The captain has a Trait from his bosun days, Shipshape, which keeps items stored in his hold from decaying. They’re still going to be in good shape. We can load food and water at the same time as we load passengers, there’s not much point in doing it before.”
“What sort of people are you carrying, and where?” the captain asked demandingly. “You all look far too shifty for this to be a legal cargo.”
He twisted his lips into a snarl that showed his teeth. “Illegal people can only mean slaves, and I won’t have slaves aboard my ship.”
Kelsey raised an eyebrow. “I would have thought you approved of slaves.”
“Ha!” the captain snorted. “Because I hate you monkeys? That you would think that just shows your lack of intelligence.”
“Captain…” Soraya pleaded, “Can you not insult our clients?”
“Hmmph,” was the captain's disgusted reply. “Let me tell you, ever since the Empire started bringing in you monkeys as slaves, things have been going downhill. Laziness and greed have been choking the productive courl of our nation. The foul blot on the honour of our glorious race needs to end!”
“Okay, I wasn’t expecting that,” Kelsey admitted. “But don’t you guys have humans that aren’t slaves?”
“Bah! To compare the citizens of the Empire to the barbarians that we dredge up from the northern coasts is an insult! They may be able to breed with you lot, polluting the purity of their race, but there is a wide gulf between a productive citizen and a barbarous brute like yourself.”
“You’re concerned about the purity of a different— no wait.” Kelsey shook her head. “Let’s not go down that rabbit hole. You might go for this then: we want to transport a group of ex-slaves back to the country they came from.”
“Ex-slaves? You mean stolen slaves.”
“Call it what you like,” Kelsey said. “How does that fit in with whatever passes for values in that head of yours?”
The captain paused, pondering the notion with a frown. Meanwhile, Soraya and Rashid looked at each other. “This sounds dangerous, captain,” Soraya said. “Maybe we shouldn’t…”
“Ha! A good idea from a monkey? What is the world coming to?” The captain said loudly. “Yes… why didn’t I see it before? They need to be shipped back to where they came from, to go back to squatting in their squalid little hovels… and you’re going to pay to accomplish this?”
“If we can come to an agreement, sure,” Kelsey said, bemused. She shared a glance with the dismayed crewmembers. “Are you two good with this?”
Soraya sighed. “We’re with the captain. And at least this is a job. Just how illegal is this going to be?”
“Do I look like an Elitran magistrate?” Kelsey asked. “Pretty illegal, I guess. But it’s fine. We’re not going to get caught.”
“Are you sure about that?” Rashid said. “It just takes one person to blab to the authorities and we’re all in the pit. Just how many people already know about this?”
“About this boat?” Kelsey asked, “Just the two courl you met earlier. Don’t worry, they’re not going to snitch on us. Now, let’s talk terms.”
“Uh, Kelsey,” Anton interjected, “Shouldn’t I be the one making the deal?”
“Not this time,” she said. “Since we won’t be able to go with them, we’re going to need a little extra assurance that they’ll follow through.”
“You needn't worry about that,” the captain said stiffly. “We are all courl of honour, here.”
“That’s great,” Kelsey said. “And no, I’m not worried about that at all. You see, I’ve got this little condition, or maybe you’d call it a curse…”
----------------------------------------
“That went surprisingly well,” Kelsey said as they walked off the docks. “I mean, considering how crazy he was, he seemed remarkably competent.”
“I’m still not sure about entrusting the people we rescue to him,” Aris said. “He didn’t seem like he’d treat them well.”
“He won’t go back on the terms of the deal,” Anton said. “He can’t.”
“Now we have to source ourselves some supplies as well,” Kelsey said. “I suppose we can leave that to the boys to do tomorrow.”
“It’s almost sundown,” Anton pointed out, “We should see if Zaphar is back.”
Zaphar was back, and he had maps.
“It’s an octagon, you see?” he said, pointing out the features. “Seven big cells, and one passageway out. That goes right through the guardroom.”
“And that’s the only entrance?” Kelsey asked, poring intently over the map.
“Well, there's a skylight over the central area. The glass on one of the windows is loose… now,” Zaphar said smugly. “You could pull someone up through there, but it won’t be quick. Or quiet.”
“How much noise would it make to pull someone up?” Kelsey asked.
“The window’s too short to just stand in the frame and pull them up directly,” Zaphar told her. “You’ve got to, got to stand back and pull from the side. The rope rubs against the window frame, and that makes noise.”
Kelsey hummed to herself. “I could make a pulley that sat on the frame. That would make it easier, and quieter. How many people?”
“I couldn’t get too close,” Zaphar cautioned her. “It's a big open area, and the moon lights it up a bit too much. I got a look though. There’s three in this cell, eight in this one, and nine in this one. All the others are empty.”
“Why do it that way?” Aris asked. “Why not split them evenly?”
“Probably sorting them,” Kelsey replied. “If they cleared a bunch— our bunch— out before we arrived, this might mean that they’ve had three shipments in since then. Each ship's cargo goes to a different cell until they get a chance to sort them out.”
“One crew only brought in three girls?” Anton asked. “Should we ask Kusec if that’s common?”
“Nah,” Kelsey said. “The less those two know about our operation, the happier they’ll be. We can get the details from Rashaq’s man.”
“I should get going then,” Zaphar said nervously. “If you’ll pay me, that is.”
Kelsey rolled her eyes and pulled out two gold coins. Zaphar examined them closely and bit them both before putting them away.
“So trusting,” Kelsey said. “Stay here, though. I’ll have the inn send up some food. This official that we’re meeting might have come prepared with the information we need. In which case, we’ll need to plan our next move.”