CHAPTER THREE
NO SAFE HARBOR
“BY THE DEEP, FOUR FATHOMS!” the sailor in the forechains reported, hauling the lead line in to examine the waxed cup on the end of the weight. “Soft mud!”
“Paddle wheeler coming downriver!” the lookout called from the foretop.
Shae squinted through the sheets of rain and wiped the water from his eyes. A broad-bellied flatboat rounded the bend in the bayou, black smoke belching from her stacks and her wheels churning to keep steerage with the outflow of the tide. He opened his mouth to give the helmsman an order, but Hawk beat him to it.
“Starboard rudder two points. Hug the shore until she passes.”
“Aye!” The helmsman hauled Talion’s wheel to starboard until her yards clattered in the limbs of the towering cypress trees crowding the banks of the bayou.
“I hate this channel,” Hawk muttered as the paddle wheeler steamed past.
Shae could only agree. The bayou wasn’t even a river but simply a tidal inlet through the vast Marck Marsh, a serpentine ribbon of water difficult to navigate, shallow, and prone to debris in the form of hundred-foot logs or tangles of rotted stumps that could damage Talion’s paddle wheels. Barely twenty feet deep in spots, the passage up to the stilt city of Ramarck was too shallow for most seagoing ships, save smaller schooners, cutters, and tramp freighters. Talion drew only three fathoms fully laden, and she was currently only hauling coal, water, and provisions, so her keel barely delved fifteen feet. They’d visited Ramarck a few times, primarily to buy coal or oil, both found in abundance in the surrounding swamplands, or to sell ill-gotten cargo in the city’s black markets. There wasn’t much of a military presence, and the difficult tributary meant no large warships or Mercarian League vessels could frequent the port. Ramarck wasn’t safe by a far stretch, but no place was truly safe for a fugitive pirate.
“Could be worse,” Shae quipped. “The bottom could be rock and coral. We run aground here, and we can just back her off.”
“Always looking on the bright side, lad. That’s why I like you!” Rockbottom grinned at him, water cascading from his drooping bicorne hat in miniature waterfalls.
Hawk’s dirty look didn’t affect the dwarf’s mirth in the slightest.
“You like me because I make you money, Joln.” Shae peered forward as Talion rounded the last bend and the first buildings of Ramarck came into view through the curtain of rain.
“I’d like you more if you didn’t spend it as fast as we make it.” The dwarf was still upset that Shae had already spent most of their advance on the necessities of keeping Talion in trim and her crew relatively healthy.
“Four fathom and a half!” the leadsman called.
“Dead slow on the paddle wheels, Hawk. Let’s see if there’s any place we can put in.” Shae raised his spyglass as the great paddle wheels slowed to a crawl.
The city of Ramarck was like no other in Cygnar. Originally hacked out of the marsh atop a dome of high ground, it had outgrown the boundaries of solid soil and spread out into the marshy lands around the high ground. Buildings on the periphery were built upon massive pilings of iron or creosote-treated wood. Some sagged as rust or rot attacked the supports beneath them, and an entire industry had cropped up to rescue slowly subsiding structures. A network of catwalks and bridges allowed people, goods, and equipment to traverse the elevated portions of the city, the busiest of which was the waterfront—a term that seemed laughable with respect to Ramarck.
The difficulty with subsidence hadn’t impeded industry or traffic and neither had the dangers of the surrounding swamp. It seemed when there was money to be made, difficulty and danger took a back seat, and there was certainly money to be made in Ramarck. Oil, coal, and rare woods for shipbuilding and construction dominated the industries, but a healthy black market in rare skins, meats, and various swamp-based roots and herbs had cropped up as well, some medicinal and others purely recreational. Indigenous “swampie” guides made good money leading expeditions into the marsh or supplying tanneries and apothecaries with rarities.
But Shae was here for information.
The wharves jutted out into the sluggish flow of the bayou in a tangle of pilings, piers, docks, and weatherworn buildings. Flatbottom paddle wheelers dominated the traffic on the bayou, some taking their cargo upstream to transfer terminals for land-based traffic or downstream to be loaded onto waiting sea-going ships anchored in the deeper waters of the delta. Among all the belching smokestacks and sagging structures, only a few masts of sailing ships jutted skyward. Again, Shae recognized one or two but none that he’d been dodging.
“Looks like an opening just in front of that big paddle wheeler, Autumn Rose.” He lowered his spyglass and pointed. “Bring her in slow, Hawk. Grogspar, port side tie up and send word for Doc. He’s to take a detail ashore for more fresh provisions. No shore leave. We won’t be here long enough.”
“Aye, sir!” The hulking, blue-skinned trollkin bosun didn’t sound happy, which wasn’t unusual, but relayed the captain’s orders in his usual scorching tone, reinforcing them with casual blows of his massive three-fingered fists.
Hawk directed the helmsman and handled the engine room telegraph herself. With the outflowing tide against them, bringing the ship in with her nose to the current was a simple affair. Heaving lines were thrown and arm-thick hawsers were passed with no difficulties to waiting dock crews. When the gangplank thudded down onto the pier, Doc Killingsworth and a squad of eager sea dogs hurried ashore with empty sacks over their shoulders.
“I hope he doesn’t buy anything with scales,” Rockbottom groused. “Gator meat gives me gas.”
“The way Doc makes stew, we’d never know one way or the other, Joln.” Shae grinned and turned to his first mate. “Hawk, see to the ship. I’ve got to talk to a man about a shipwreck.”
“Not alone.” She glared at him from beneath her dripping bandanna but then realized she was edging upon insubordination. “Sir, you should take an escort.”
“I don’t want to spook this fellow. He’s already told others to bugger off when they asked him about Seacutter. Besides—” He patted Squall’s hilt and the butt of his hand cannon. “—nobody knows we’re here, and I like to think a warcaster is more than a match for simple thugs.”
Hawk’s scowl remained undaunted. “Respectfully, sir, a bludgeon to the back of the head will put a damper on even a warcaster’s day.”
“Then I won’t let anyone sneak up behind me with a bludgeon. I’m going alone.” He fixed her with a look that clearly said she would not change his mind.
“Very well, sir.” Shae turned to go, but he heard her well enough when she added, “I’ll have that written on your tombstone.”
He refused to acknowledge the gibe. If a warcaster couldn’t walk the streets of a city in the middle of the day without fearing for his life, he wasn’t much of a warcaster.
* * *
GHOSTMAKER PULLED HER BROAD-BRIMMED hat down low and clambered up the ladder onto the rickety pier. Baby hung securely over her shoulder in a leather scabbard to keep the rain from her more delicate working parts. The pilot of the flatbottom freight barge had accepted her gold and agreed to take her upriver without any questions.
“What is it about heavy metals, do you think, Baby?” she muttered as she eyed the busy pier. “Gold and lead solve so many problems.” Coins or bullets usually brought people around to her way of thinking one way or the other. If the first didn’t work, the second usually did.
She glanced around the bustling crowds and nodded in satisfaction. There were enough big-game hunters in Ramarck for one more figure bearing a scoped long-rifle to draw little attention, and her short stature would help her stay out of sight amongst the mostly human dockworkers. She squinted through the rain to where Talion’s distinctive raked masts jutted up from the upriver pier. They’d just secured the ship to the dock. Ghostmaker had to hurry if she meant to follow Shae to his rendezvous with this supposed informant. She would let him talk to the man, then she would have a chat with the fellow herself. Once again, that problem could undoubtedly be solved with enough gold or an ounce or two of lead, the former to grease his palm, the latter to blow holes in his knees, if need be. Once she got what she needed from him, it would once again be open season on Phinneus Shae.
True to his word, Captain Hully had little trouble sighting Talion as she rounded Southpoint. From there, Ghostmaker had acted as lookout atop the ship’s tall foremast, using Baby’s superior arcantrik scope to keep track of the pirate ship from afar. Hully knew his business, and they hung back so that only Talion’s topmasts remained in sight. Armed merchantmen weren’t rare, but there was no point in taking the risk of being identified as a Mercarian ship. Besides, Shae was notoriously paranoid and might double back to get a closer look at any ship dogging his wake.
They’d anchored Raucous among several others awaiting cargo in the bayou delta, and Ghostmaker had picked up a paddle wheel barge that had just loaded her cargo onto a waiting merchant. Now it was just a matter of tracking Shae without getting spotted.
And resisting the urge to put a bullet in his head. . . She patted Baby’s stock. Patience. . . Patience. . .
Fortunately, the hustle and bustle of the busy city made the first part easy. She spotted Shae’s distinctive warcaster armor by its stream of smoke, and she fell in step about a block behind him. He traversed half a dozen bridges and catwalks between sagging buildings, finally entering a slummy area of dilapidated tenements and flophouses, some listing badly from rotten underpinnings. The boards beneath her feet creaked alarmingly on several occasions. She paused while Shae stopped to ask directions from a passerby before resuming her stealthy shadowing. He checked over his shoulder numerous times, but she was always able to duck into cover before he turned fully.
Finally, the pirate crossed a rickety bridge to a cedar-planked building that looked like it was ready to sink into the mire at any moment, so crooked and sagging were its base timbers. The lower floor looked to be a chandlery or dry goods store of some sort, while the upper floors were accessed by a staircase drooping from the side of the building like a clinging vine. Shae checked a slip of paper from his pocket then ascended the stairs to a flat on the third floor and knocked at the door.
Instinctively, Ghostmaker looked around for a vantage point. The building she stood near reeked like low tide on a hot day, but it stood taller than the dilapidated structure Shae had gone into. She checked on Shae again just as the door opened. He stood there for a moment, but she couldn’t see past him at this angle to see who he was speaking with. She needed to get higher.
She ducked around to the building’s front and found tall doors, gaping wide, on rollers. Fishing nets hung from hoists high above while workers labored constantly with their wide needles, patching and stitching. A net loft, she thought. This might work. She slipped in and spotted stairs to a network of catwalks around the loft’s peaked ceiling, obviously meant for accessing the winches and chains used to hoist the nets. With the long practice of avoiding unwelcome questions by looking as if she knew where she was going, she quickly ascended the stair to the level of the catwalk where she looked around again. Right where she thought she would find it, a ladder led up to a trapdoor in the roof, probably for intermittent repair of leaks in the notoriously wet climate. She climbed up, popped the latch, and emerged onto the tarred roof.
Ghostmaker unslung Baby and crawled up to the peak of the roof, staying low to keep from being spotted. Across the way, through a single grimy window in the flat Shae had gone into, she spotted movement. She set her clockwork eye to Baby’s arcantrik scope and peered through the dirty glass barely fifty yards away. Shae passed the window, and her finger twitched near the rifle’s trigger.
“No, Baby. Not yet. Patience.” As soon as Shae left, she’d pay the fellow a visit, and then it would be back to business.
* * *
“BANK THE BOILERS. GO TO HAND PROPULSION.” Captain Liane Fromish peered through Intrepid’s periscope as the tangle of pilings and supports of Ramarck loomed out of the rain.
The steam engines wheezed to a stop, and her eight crewmen began cranking on the handles that propelled the tiny submarine forward in near silence. After two hours of the thrumming drone and sweltering heat of the steam plant, she welcomed the respite. Of course, with the death of the engine, the fans that brought in fresh air through the snorkel also stopped. There was nobody free to crank them by hand, so the air inside the submarine, already laden with the stench of oil, smoke, and the sweat of eleven people, began to grow even staler. There was nothing to be done about it; Liane was busy at the periscope, the pilot, Hobart, was guiding their course at her commands, and her gobber engineer, Trilby—his full name was much longer and unpronounceable— manned the power plant. They had perhaps an hour of breathable air before captain and crew were in danger of passing out. As always, discomfort, cramped quarters, and filth were part and parcel of the submarine service.
So far, the mission had gone without a hitch. They’d boarded Maelstrom, gotten underway without any difficulty, and even spotted Talion and, miles behind, Raucous, both northbound through the maze of islands of Cygnar’s eastern shore. Following the Mercarian ship at a distance proved a simple affair, and when it became obvious that the pirate was headed for Ramarck, Captain Blakely steamed into one of the many coves in the delta and quickly dropped anchor. Intrepid was deployed in a matter of minutes, her crew eager to show their captain what they could do.
Liane had little doubt of their capabilities. They had practiced in the harbor of Highgate often enough to prove their competence and courage, albeit not under battle conditions. But this wasn’t battle—this was just reconnaissance. Intrepid had steamed quietly up the bayou behind Talion with little trouble, virtually invisible in the torrential rain. They’d had one tense moment when a down-bound paddle wheeler had nearly run them down, but Fromish had heard the thrashing of the massive wheels long before she saw the ship through the periscope, and a quick evasive maneuver had evaded disaster. Now all she had to do was surface the sub under one of the piers and get ashore.
“Port rudder, two points. Half-speed.”
“Port two,” Hobart relayed, turning the wheel to the left, his eyes fixed on the compass and gauges that told him the submarine’s depth, rudder and dive plane angles, and the pressure remaining in their air reserve tanks used to change their buoyancy.
“Half-speed, Captain.” Trilby meshed the gears that reduced the propeller’s speed by half, and the crew gave a collective sigh of relief as the strain on the hand cranks eased.
Liane peered through the gloom at the towering pillars of rusted iron ahead, picking out her path and relaying course changes to Hobart, praying silently there were no submerged hazards. Given the murky waters of the bayou, the view through the tiny conning tower’s porthole showed her nothing beyond the sub’s forward deck. Intrepid’s hull was strong enough to withstand an impact at this speed, and the explosive prow “lance” wasn’t armed, so running into a submerged log wouldn’t set it off, but a collision would be embarrassing. Liane turned the periscope left and right, gauging the width between the flaking iron columns.
“Starboard one point, Hobart.”
“Starboard one.” The pilot complied, and Intrepid slid into the shadow of one of the structures.
“One-quarter speed and up ten degrees on the planes,” she ordered.
Rising from periscope depth while the boat still had forward speed didn’t require the use of the compressed air tanks to change their buoyancy. Only when diving deep or rising without propulsion did the sub need to fill or deflate the air bladders built into its hull. Using that air tended to make the crew nervous—if it ran out when they were below the depth of the snorkel, they could pull in no more. If that happened and they lost propulsion, the submarine would go nowhere but down.
“Aye, Captain!” Hobart pulled the levers that inclined the fore and aft diving planes and, the sub’s deck started to incline upward.
“Quarter speed.” Trilby reduced the thrust on the propellers.
Liane watched through the periscope as the submarine’s forward momentum slowed to a stop or at least held them stationary against the flow of the tide. As the conning tower porthole cleared the surface, she ordered, “Level planes and hold that depth. Maintain propulsion there.” As the crew responded, Liane dropped from her perch on the conning tower ladder and doffed her uniform jacket. “We’re right under one of the piers, snug as a bug in a rug. Well done.”
The crewmen on the cranks grinned at her and held their easy cadence.
“I’m going up. I’ll hook a line to her bow lift ring to keep her on station.” Liane checked the load in her repeater and tucked the pistol in her holster. Without a uniform jacket and grimy from the soot and grease of the submarine, she would pass as just another ne’er-do-well in a city full of them. She unbound her braid of dark hair and let it fall in a tangle to her shoulders. “When I’m off, keep her submerged to snorkel depth and hand crank the fans. I should be no more than an hour. Lieutenant Hobart, you’re in command.”
“Aye, Captain.” The pilot was the only other officer aboard, so command fell to him by default. Still, it was best to make things clear.
Liane climbed the ladder again, opened the hatch, and pushed hard. The heavy iron hatch lifted on its hinge, and a breath of relatively fresh air gusted through. She took in a deep breath as she poked her head up and looked around. The floor of the building overhead loomed only a few feet above the periscope, and the submarine’s deck was still a foot beneath the surface. To any curious eyes, the submarine would look like a sunken log wedged by the flow of the tide into the support pilings. She climbed up and stepped onto the deck, water sloshing up her boots and over their tops. She cringed at the cold wetness, but there was no avoiding it. She attached a cable to the heavy lift ring mounted forward and then climbed nimbly up onto one of the rusted iron cross members to loop the cable securely around it. This done, she returned to the conning tower.
“All secure, Hobart. Take her down.”
“Aye, sir!”
Even as Liane closed the conning tower hatch, the sub sank beneath her. She cinched the dogs tightly and stepped onto another support beam for the building overhead. A rusty metal ladder for boarding small boats hung down from the downriver end of the building. When she reached it and looked back, there was nothing to denote Intrepid’s position but two stout pipes—the snorkel and the periscope—protruding a foot above the water. As she watched, the periscope turned until the glass lens was pointing at her. Hobart was watching her. She grinned, waved, and climbed up onto the pier.
Instantly, she realized her one mistake.
“I should have brought a workman’s jacket.” The torrential rain soaked her hair and shirt through in a matter of moments.
There was nothing for it, but her lack of a coat made her stand out and might draw attention she didn’t want. She bent her head to the weather and started upriver along the wharves, assessing the bustling crowds. A few longshoremen gave her sidelong glances. The pistol at her hip, or perhaps her hand resting on its butt, dissuaded anything more than passing interest. She spotted Talion’s masts easily and hurried across a dilapidated span to the next pier. Through the crowds, she spotted a tall, dark-haired man in light warcaster armor crossing the way from the ship to the maze of buildings and catwalks.
Phinneus Shae.
Liane examined her quarry. The man had a cold, dangerous look that warded off unwanted attention even better than the pistol and mechanikal sword at his belt or his battle-scarred warcaster armor. He looked every inch his reputation, a hard man who would as soon cut a throat as say good day. The last thing she wanted was to draw his attention. Fortunately, the smoke trailing from the stack of the warcaster’s powered armor made following him a simple affair.
Liane ducked down a narrow way between two buildings and hurried around the back to catch him traversing the next bridge. She chose another that paralleled his path and dashed through an alley littered with refuse and rusted spare parts. By keeping out of his path and not following directly behind him, she stood a better chance of avoiding his notice, though she risked losing him if he took an unexpected turn. Twice she had to run to catch up, once even leaping a narrow gap between two buildings instead of using the distant bridge. When he stopped in front of a run-down building and consulted a note from his pocket, she knew he’d arrived at his destination. The shop on the lower floor looked like it sold ships’ supplies. When Shae knocked on the third floor flat’s door, she strolled across the way to the shop and went in.
“You look half-drowned, girl!” A thickly set woman with dark skin and gleaming white teeth looked her up and down. “You come in lookin’ for a slicker?”
“Yes.” Liane wiped the sodden tendrils of hair from her face and glanced out the shop’s filthy windows. “Mine was stolen. I just need something to keep the rain off.”
“What’s the world comin’ to when someone steals a lady’s coat?” The woman turned to a stack of bundled waxed canvas coats. “You a tiny one, so I don’t know if I got one to fit proper, but I’ll find you somethin’.”
“Thank you.” Liane kept her eyes on the window. As soon as Shae left, she’d be up those stairs in a flash, and the first phase of her mission would be accomplished.