Session Two — The Storm and the Broker

The thing in the storm was not one thing.

From above the thunderheads the crew could make out shapes in the churn below, separate masses of freezing wind and shard-lit cloud moving against each other with something like intent. Not a single creature circling the ship. Several, and busy with one another, tearing at the storm and at each other for whatever passes for territory among things born out of weather and emerald dust.

Nobody aboard wanted to be noticed.

Scout shouted the obvious question across the deck. Was there any way through this without catching their attention.

“If we make it through this,” Miyake shouted back, “you guys will be worth every penny.”

What followed was not a plan so much as a shared decision to commit to something ridiculous. Yazan started it, a cleansing dance on the open deck in the middle of a squall that should have thrown him overboard, and Arkady joined him, and then the whole crew was in it, hands and voices and absolute conviction all pointed at the same idea at the same moment. The shard-dust in the air did the rest.

The Boats N Hoes went invisible. All of her, hull and gantry lines and the people standing on her deck, gone out of the world as far as anything watching could tell.

The elementals lost interest. The ship skated the roof of the storm through the night with green lightning breaking under her keel, and by morning the weather was behind them and the invisibility had bled away with the dust that fed it.

Belowdecks was a disaster.

Everything not tied down had spent the night finding a new home, and one of the four crates of exotic spice was a total loss, burst open across the deck. Three left. Chet had opinions about the state of his ship that he mostly kept to himself.

Then the hold started smelling like roast beef.

Not spice. Not cargo. Well-seasoned roast beef, rich and unmistakable and coming from a room containing no meat whatsoever. The spilled spice had pocked the floorboards where it landed and left them slick in a way that had nothing to do with moisture. The crew, being the crew, cooked with it.

The results were mixed. The spice was genuinely fortifying, the kind of meal a body remembers during a short rest. It also meant that within the hour every single person who had eaten needed to urinate with an urgency that could not be described as dignified. This was noted. It was not immediately understood as tactical intelligence.

Miyake came up after all this and ate what was offered without comment. When Yazan spoke about the shard-domes of Arabia she let him finish and then told him she knew, that she had been paid by collectors to bring old world pieces out of places like that, and that she had lost her taste for domes a long time ago. They celebrate vices, she said, and did not elaborate.

She gave them the job properly once the weather was behind them.

A man named Esteban Reyes. A broker, in Havana, hiding from Cordoban creditors who had run out of patience. Find him, take him, bring him back.

Do not kill him. He has an answer to a question that I have.

Tauon pointed out that not killing him removed most of what the crew was actually good at. Miyake's lips tightened, and that was the whole of her response.

Three days south and the city came up under them, and Scout took a sketch of the whole sprawl from twelve thousand feet before they ever set down. They put the ship in a hidden valley in the hills outside the city, tucked well out of sight of the staging grounds where Amazonian and Cordoban forces sat glaring at each other across neutral ground.

Havana on foot is gunpowder and sewage and salvage. Everything in it built twice, out of the wreckage of whatever stood there before. A city that belongs to nobody and takes money from everybody.

Arkady put on the scrap dealer. Loud coat, louder manner, a whole personality assembled specifically for the purpose of moving goods in a city where nobody asks for paperwork.

They went to Old Yara's, because that is where you go in Havana when you need to find a man who does not want finding, and also, as it turned out, when you need to unload three crates of magical spice.

Arkady worked the room and came up with four viable buyers inside a minute. Tauon was pointed toward a half-elf named Addy, a man known for taking Atlantean goods off Atlantean hands without asking where they had been.

What followed was a two-man operation of genuine craft. Tauon delivered the pitch, boisterous, flamboyant, the full performance, arms wide, entirely too much volume for the size of the table. Addy was so thoroughly captivated by the show that he never once noticed Arkady drifting in behind him and depositing a sample bag directly onto the table like a man returning something that had always been there.

Addy scoffed at the opening number, the way buyers do. They landed on three thousand gold for the three crates. He spat in his hand and offered it, and the deal was done.

Delivery to Pier Eleven. This evening.

There remained the matter of one of the other prospects, a man who had turned them down and who now had an unattended drink. Arkady is not a man who leaves an unattended drink alone. Approximately seven seconds after the spice went in, the man was sprinting for the door with the particular gait of someone who has run out of options and is now negotiating with time itself.

The crew had, by this point, discovered a weapon. They simply had not filed it as one.

Miyake had been in the bar the whole time.

Yara recognized her the moment she came through the door, which is its own kind of information about both of them.

“I heard your ship went down.”

“Yeah. All hands but me.”

Yara asked what brought her to Havana. Miyake did not answer with words. She looked across the room at a man drinking hard in a corner, badly dressed and worse rested, with two professionals sitting close enough to him to be paid for it.

Esteban Reyes looked like a man three days from the end of something.

His bodyguards clocked the party first, and then they ran, and the crew ran after them, out of the bar and into the dark between buildings where the noise of the district dropped away to nothing. Scout got out ahead of the pack and closed the distance fast.

The powder flash came from the dark ahead, and the alley turned into a killing floor.

Two Sentinels, professional and prepared, one working a rifle and roots that came up through the stones to grab at legs, the other a shotgun and something worse behind it. Scout put a guiding bolt into the first and there was very little left of him afterward. The second answered with lions, four of them, big and fast and wrong in the way summoned things always are, and then turned the metal of Scout's own body into a furnace from across the alley.

Yazan ended it. Whatever the fire dance is, he found it there in the dark, and the flametongue came around, and the second Sentinel stopped being a problem, and then the lions did too.

Then it was quiet.

Esteban Reyes was on the ground with his breath coming ragged and his eyes very wide, and Miyake stood over him with the flat of her katana against his throat, perfectly calm, the way she had been calm since the gantry.

She had not raised her voice once.

Three crates of spice still sat in the hold of a ship parked outside the city. A buyer was expecting them at Pier Eleven by evening. The crew now had a prisoner, and the most dangerous city in the world between them and both.