Session Three — The Fondeo

The bootsteps in the alley were not a rescue party. Nobody in Havana runs toward a killing.

Miyake got Esteban up by the collar, briefly and entirely off the ground, and set him on his feet with the blade where it had been. The ship was north of the city, nestled between two hills, and everything between here and there was the Amazonian quarter. Squad and platoon encampments, roaming soldiers, campfires for a mile and a half past the edge of anything built.

They debated killing a soldier for a uniform. Arkady solved it with disguise self instead and became an Amazonian soldier on the spot. Esteban, out of breath, made his position clear before anyone asked. You just killed my bodyguards, so you need us. He tried to bolt anyway a minute later. Miyake put him back in line without effort.

Then they ran, and they ran openly, because nobody said anything about hiding.

Soldiers noticed. Most did not care. A few clocked Arkady as an officer and got curious, and by three quarters of the way through there was a cadre of mixed officers and enlisted following them up the zigzag road. Miyake was not winded. Miyake was carrying Esteban and was not winded.

Yazan's haste ran out. The lethargy dropped him mid-stride and he lost the group entirely.

Arkady stopped and let the pursuit catch him.

The officer wanted to know what the hurry was. Arkady told him they were transporting a couple of agitators up for detention, and when pressed on which detention, invented an internal security facility and declined to say more about it. The man's hand came off his saber. He stood at attention and apologized for the interruption and started waving his own people away.

Arkady asked for his name on the way out. Lieutenant Marin. He told Marin his diligence would be commended, and asked that the commendation be routed to the 32nd.

Marin scurried. Arkady kept the name.

Further up the road, Miyake reached the squad posted at the north entrance, fourteen men, rifles coming up. She did not slow down. At fifteen feet she took hold of Esteban and leapt clean over the line. The man running with her covered the same ground by opening a portal and stepping through it, which from the guards' perspective meant a thing charged at them and vanished.

Yazan, meanwhile, was cramped up in the mud being laughed at by five soldiers around a stew pot. A grizzled old one with half a beard and open wounds on his forehead asked if he belonged to the men walking past, then healed him anyway when they said he didn't. Somebody announced loudly that here was another one of them agitators, and nobody in the camp thought twice about it.

The last checkpoint had fourteen or fifteen men on it, with a few uselessly glassing the dark. An ensign objected on principle, said he didn't take orders from civilians, and claimed he had winged one of the fugitives already. A murmur went through his own men when he said it. The uniform outranked his single pip in spades. They pointed, he pointed back, and the party walked out of Havana.

Miyake had Esteban bound and gagged on the floor of an empty cabin by the time the rest of them reached the ship.

She showed weariness for the first time, and it was not physical. Something was switching off and leaving her, and her face was softening as it went. She said they could interrogate him in the morning, went into another room, and when someone looked in after her she was gone.

Chet took them back over the city at one in the morning. From above, Havana is a small lit core and then an enormous unlit sprawl, campfires scattered across the landscape for miles past the edge of the encampments. Most of the people who live there do not want to be seen. Somewhere far off, out over the water, they heard what sounded like thunder until it repeated in volleys. Chet cocked his head, checked his pocket watch, and let it go.

He asked where he was setting down. There was a pause before somebody produced Pier Eleven from memory.

Three men were waiting on the dock. The fee was five hundred gold. Arkady tried to buy time with a contact he did not have and the boss cocked a pistol, put it on him, and repeated the number. He shot Arkady before the fight properly started.

Yazan opened him up at the arm, and a potato masher came off the man's belt onto the dock with the pin still in it. He had a second one. He threw it onto the ship, said he hadn't wanted to have to do that, and the deck caught fire.

What followed happened in two places at once. Belowdecks and topside it was boots stamping at burning planking, a blanket conjured out of tinker's work and thrown over the worst of it, and Chet arriving at a run with a collapsible bucket, looking around at the damage and asking the ship what they had done to it. The hydrogas envelope was directly above all of this.

On the dock, Arkady put a rapier through the boss's chest with a hex on it. The man looked down at the blade coming out the front of him and said he had not thought it was going to go this way.

One crony threw his belt on the ground, asked twice if they were good, and ran the moment anyone nodded. The other froze under hold person and wet himself where he stood. They let him up and put him to work carrying crates.

Arkady stripped the body. A hundred and eighty gold, a pepperbox in the boot, a shaving kit with a straight razor, several forged manifests, a pouch of tobacco, and a single cigar with a glittery sheen on it. On the way out he cast a silent image of five hundred coppers stacked neatly beside the corpse.

A lot of people on the dock watched the whole thing. Not one of them asked a question or came over.

Consul Addy was waiting at Pier Eleven at half past two in the morning with his watch already out. He had been there all night and expected compensation for it. The party offered him the surviving ruffian as a gift, explaining that the man had tried to rob them and had been robbed instead, and would make a very good worker.

Addy drew an Amazonian service revolver and shot him in the head before they finished. He said he did not want their garbage labor. He wanted his spice and he wanted to leave.

He paid what he had agreed to pay. Then he handed over a cigar, Manchurian, for the trouble, and told them to get out of his hair. Through the glass they watched him sit down and light one himself. The room clouded up in a way smoke does not, and small fireworks began going off inside it.

His clerk suggested that the Amazonian navy is always looking for privateers to move cargo through the war zone, and mentioned that it might be worth staying out of Addy's way for a while.

Back at the ship, Miyake had come out of the galley looking like the night had not happened at all, having found the regenerative chamber. She and Chet were arguing topside when the rest of them walked up, Chet gesturing at the party, Miyake stone-faced and not turning to look. It ended with Chet throwing his hands in the air and saying fine.

Miyake said she wanted questions answered somewhere that was not the Havana docks. Chet returned them to the valley with an expression that suggested he knew something he was not saying.

It was past four in the morning when they went into the room. Esteban had been on the floor for three hours with nothing to do but wait for this.

Miyake did not bend down. She kicked him onto his back and scraped the gag out of his mouth with the toe of her boot. He looked up at her with nothing on his face but fear, clammy and cold with it.

You are going to tell me what I want to know, she said, or these boys are going to make sure you never tell anyone anything again. Are we clear.

He asked if he could sit up. He asked if somebody could grant him that dignity.

She stepped on his face.

He said fine, fine, fine, fine, over and over until it stopped being a word, and after that he was clay.

She asked when he had last seen the Fondeo.

His face went blank with confusion. It is a small name, the kind that goes on a skiff or a personal boat, not on anything a man would expect to be asked about at knifepoint in a locked room. He asked if it was a place. Then he asked why she wanted that thing, and she told him she did not want the boat.

She wanted its skipper.

The confusion went out of his face and what replaced it was much worse. He said he had not seen or set foot on that ship in over fifteen years. He said he could not imagine it had ever left west America. He said he wished he had a better answer.

I know that you have a better answer.

She asked the room whether anyone had a weak stomach.

He told them he was racking his brain. He told them they could not imagine the amount of drugs he had done in his life. He said fifteen years again like the number would help him.

Her boot had not moved off his face the entire time. She leaned forward and put her weight into it, and he started screaming, and it was not the sound of a man negotiating. It was pain. Whatever she wanted was in him somewhere and he could not find it, and he had gone past compliance into genuine terror for his life.

Someone suggested there were mages who could take it out of him directly. Arkady put suggestion on him to make him compliant. He did not contest it for a second. It changed nothing. He was crying by then, saying the same three sentences on a loop, that he could not remember, that he did not know.

It is in there, they told him.

It was. He simply could not reach it.

For the first time, Miyake showed anger. A white spark with green in it came off the side of her eye. She pressed down and took a knee at the same time, put her hand flat on his head, and her eyes went white with the pupils flickering underneath. Anyone who knows anything about magic knows what that is. She was going through his thoughts, and he offered no resistance at all.

I just needed him fully compliant, she said, while she was still doing it.

Thirty seconds. Then she peeled back.

I've got it. I know where we're going.

She turned on her heel and walked out. What she left on the floor had gone somewhere else and was not coming back on its own.

Chet was waiting topside and he was furious. I didn't sign up for torture. It took real work to talk him around, and what they got was not absolution. It's your boat, he said, and I will captain to the best of my ability, and gave a half salute.

They cut Esteban's bonds and he slumped to his knees. Somebody spent their last slot on lesser restoration, and the fog behind his eyes cleared enough for him to focus on them. They carried him out and set him on the dock.

You have no idea what you've gotten yourself into.

They wished him luck in his travels. He said he would need it.

Afterward, Arkady pulled Chet aside to thank him for the fire. Chet took no credit and gave none. Somebody presented him with the dead man's pepperbox and belt, still tacky with blood, and he wrapped it around his crushed velvet waistcoat and thanked them for it, visibly uncomfortable the whole time.

They put the question of Reno to Miss K over the sending stone. She answered by asking why in hell they wanted to go there, then gave them two names anyway. Domingo Cruz for fuel. Erin Faust for cargo.

They filled the tanks in the gantry district, three quarters gone crossing the straits, and went looking for Faust at seven in the morning on no sleep. The fuel clerk knew exactly who they meant and had opinions about her.

Her operation is a corrugated steel warehouse with garage doors at both ends, racks of surplus out front and a yard of used war material out back with Amazonian and Cordovan airships lined up for resupply. She wears Cordovan gray and an eye patch and used to be navy. Mid to late fifties, some elvish in the ears, hair that used to be red. She was closing deals by dismissing people mid-sentence and walking away.

She clocked the party on entry and ignored them for fifteen minutes on purpose.

When they finally got in front of her, they invoked Kailara Lore. Faust wanted to know who they were to Kailara. When they said they were her employers, she stopped and looked at them properly. She's working for you guys. Oh, honey.

Then she got to business. She had a problem that needed solving, and if Kailara had sent them, maybe they were the shape of thing that could solve it. She wanted to know how much hold space they had, and when they told her, she said that would just about do it. Profit comes from a full hold.

Sixteen sealed crates. Three in the morning, at her warehouse. Destination is the Quebec border, payment on delivery from a Kebequad client, coordinates from her clerk. The crates are sealed here and stay sealed there.

Whatever you do, don't open these fucking crates.

She told them what she knew about the Kebequad government, which is that they skin people alive and consider it a virtue. She told them the job should keep the little ones off their back for a while. The party mentioned having recently moved fifty thousand prophylactics without incident and she declined to touch that one.

Payment is seventy-five thousand gold on delivery. Her cut is twenty-five. They have three months to bring it to her.

When one of them named the split back to her with a little too much practice, her eyebrow went up and stayed up. She had spent the entire conversation in complete control of it, and she walked away from this one with questions on her face.

They slept in the valley while Scout finished repairing the deck.

Ten hours to burn before the pickup. A dockworker with strong opinions about his own boots pointed them at Macee's.

It is a tugboat. Paddle wheels, blacked-out bridge windows, a magical neon sign, and no reason to think it holds more than twenty people. Through the bridge door it opens into a full casino, not a nice one, smelling of cigar smoke and shardisite haze and expensive bourbon and vomit ground into the carpet. Two hundred people. Dice against the wall, roulette, rows of slots, and a lot of faces that had not slept in a while.

Arkady stepped out to an alley, put on Lieutenant Marin, and came back to play cards.

He took a hundred and thirty gold off the first hand with a flush and kept going, and an hour of play left him well ahead. Yazan lost early. Scout fed a single gold coin into a slot machine and rode it up through a series of increasingly good payouts to a hundred, then walked away.

Somebody opened a bar tab under Lieutenant Marin's name, let the bartender take an imprint off the insignia, and bought the entire bumper table a round of strong ale.

When Arkady eventually stepped out alone to drop the disguise, two men from the tables came out behind him. They followed him the entire way to the alley, ten yards back, close enough that there was no telling whether they had seen the change. He ducked behind a stack of crates and refuse, put a silent image of himself at the far end of the alley, and let them walk past.

They are still looking for him.