Chương 168: 16. One-Eyed Marro 2

The wind after the night watch changed was thicker than it had been during the day. Not the kind of wind that offered any relief—this was the kind that packed itself with sea salt, tar, rotting timber, fish stink, cheap spirits, and someone's drifting perfume, then crammed all of it directly into your nose without asking permission.

Walking down the narrow alley behind Salt Dog Wharf—a passage so tight it seemed engineered specifically for people with something to hide—I began to suspect that my own lingering smell of seawater was, by local standards, practically fresh air.

"This is it?" I stopped in front of the side entrance with the broken net hanging over it and looked up. Half the repair shed's roof had caved in. The exterior walls were a patchwork of planks nailed over other planks, each repair layered over the last with the optimism of someone who had long since stopped believing in permanent solutions. Beside the door, an oil lamp burned with the guttering commitment of something that had been reconsidering its life choices for the past several hours.

Orange light leaked through the gaps in the door frame, accompanied by the rhythmic sound of metal on metal—not the chaotic crash of a fight, but the methodical sound of someone taking something apart and deciding, piece by piece, whether it was worth putting back together. Ignicia stood half a step behind me, hood pulled low, which did nothing whatsoever to diminish the ambient impression that she did not belong in any place a reasonable person would consider safe.

More precisely: she didn't belong in any place a reasonable person would consider anything.

"Knock," she said.

"You say that like you're telling me to knock on a coffin lid."

"You crawled out of an exploding ancient tomb yesterday. You're suddenly afraid of a door?"

"I'm not afraid of the door," I said, keeping my voice down.

"I'm afraid that whatever opens it will be more trouble than what was inside the tomb." She made a soft sound through her nose. The kind that meant: you're finally developing adequate situational awareness. I took a breath, raised my hand, and knocked three times. Knock. Knock. Knock. The metal sounds inside stopped. The entire repair shed went silent—the kind of silence that made the waves against the dock pilings sound like they were coming from somewhere very far away.

It lasted only a few breaths, but it carried the unmistakable quality of something large lifting its head in the dark, catching your scent, and deciding whether you were worth the effort. Then a man's voice came through the door.

"Ship repairs tomorrow. Corpse collection costs extra. Which one are you here for?"... Right. Now I understood exactly why the woman at the counter had specifically told us to ask whether he dared, not where we were going. The kind of man who opened negotiations by casually arranging your funeral was clearly not the kind who extended professional courtesies. I was still working out my response when Ignicia beat me to it, her voice as flat and unhurried as someone reading off a menu.

"If you can actually deliver people to the Dragon Kingdom's mainland, we'll let you skip the corpse collection for tonight." Silence on the other side of the door. Half a second of it. Then a low laugh came through. Not the open, easy kind. Not the theatrical villain kind either. It was the sound of a knife edge dragged lightly across the grain of wood—carrying just enough of that's interesting to be distinct from everything else. A bolt scraped back. The door pulled inward a crack.

What came through first wasn't a person—it was the concentrated smell of oil, smoke, brine, and iron rust. The light inside was brighter than outside, but only in the sense of bright enough to see clearly what kind of danger you're walking into. When I pushed the door open and stepped inside, the first thing I saw wasn't the ship. It was the man. Or more accurately: a man who, at first glance, looked like he might be a structural component of the vessel beside him.

He sat on the edge of an overturned, half-repaired wooden hull, one boot propped on a timber frame, the other leg hanging loose, turning a partially disassembled flintlock pistol in his hands with the casual attention of someone who had performed this exact maintenance routine several thousand times. An oil lamp hung at an angle above him, throwing light down across one side of his face and cutting his features into something hard and unforgiving.

The man looked somewhere around forty—though his actual age was genuinely difficult to determine, because sea salt and wind had the particular talent of aging a thirty-year-old into forty, or turning a forty-year-old into the ageless category of don't ask. He wore a short beard, neither thick nor sparse, the color of rope that had been burned at one end—black threading into gray. Over his left eye sat a leather patch, old enough to have developed its own shine, the edges worn smooth by years of use.

His right eye, by contrast, was startlingly alert—the color of deep gray stone after rain, the whites laced with red, but carrying not a trace of intoxication. That was not a drunk's eye. Not a gambler's eye. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. That was the eye of a man who let you finish lying before he decided exactly where to cut.

A diagonal scar ran from below his ear to his jaw, as though someone had once made a very serious attempt to separate his head from his neck and had only missed by half an inch. He wore a linen shirt with the collar open, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms exposed—solid, weathered, marked with rope burns, old brand scars, and something that might have been a bite wound. At his waist, no dramatic oversized blade—just a curved short knife and a hatchet sized precisely for close-quarters cranial rearrangement.

The most troubling thing was that he was sitting down, and the entire repair shed still felt like his territory. Not because he was loud. Not because he was performing authority. Quite the opposite. It was because he was too relaxed. Too relaxed, too settled, too much like a man watching two mice walk into a trap in his own home and not yet bothering to get up.

"Hm." His gaze traveled between me and Ignicia with the unhurried appraisal of someone evaluating inventory.

"Not here for ship repairs tonight. Here to beg for your lives." I really disliked his manner of speaking. Not because it was unpleasant. Because it was too accurate.

"You're One-Eyed Marro?"

"In Blackbeard Bay, only two kinds of people ask me that." He pressed a component back into the pistol with a sharp click.

"The kind who are here for the first time. And the kind who are here for the last time."

"I'd strongly prefer to be the first kind."

"Everyone does." He stood. It wasn't until he came down from the hull's edge that I realized he was taller than I'd estimated. Not exceptionally broad, but he carried the particular center of gravity that develops in men who have spent years staying upright on narrow, slick decks. He walked with a slight drag in his left foot—an old injury settled into habit—but that minor imperfection didn't diminish his danger. If anything, it made me less eager to wonder how he'd survived long enough to acquire it.

Because men who could accumulate that many scars and still move like that tended to be extraordinarily difficult to kill. He set the pistol down on a wooden table and let his gaze settle on Ignicia—holding there a beat longer than I found comfortable.

"You don't look like the kind of woman who walks into this port on her own," he said. My scalp tightened. Ignicia simply looked back at him with perfect calm.

"And you don't look like the kind of man this port hasn't managed to stab to death yet."... Wonderful. The princess standing beside me had apparently disposed of the human social convention of not provoking strangers on first meeting the same way one disposes of kitchen scraps. Marro paused. Then he laughed. More visible than the sound through the door, but still without warmth.

"I like clients who can talk," he said.

"At least they're less boring before I sell them."

"See," I said, unable to stop myself, "normal people don't generally say that directly to the clients in question."

"Normal people don't do business in Blackbeard Bay, boy." He said it too fast. Fast enough that I had nothing ready to counter with. Because the statement was, damnably, correct. The interior of the repair shed ran deeper than the outside suggested. Along the walls: coiled rope, wooden crates, tar barrels, stripped planking, and iron fittings whose purpose I couldn't identify but which were clearly excellent for bludgeoning someone to death.

In the corner, two men were sharpening something—not knives, on closer inspection, but short boarding hooks—and neither of them looked up at our conversation, as though the boss receiving two unknown visitors in the middle of the night was as unremarkable as the water is salty today. I had the distinct and growing impression that I was standing in a place where saying the wrong thing would result in waking up inside a sack at the bottom of the harbor.

What made it worse was that the fire dragon princess beside me appeared to be finding the whole environment mildly interesting. Her gaze moved across the ropes, the iron hooks, the barrels, the repair frames, and finally returned to Marro, carrying a faint analytical quality.

"You smell of sea beasts, gunpowder, alcohol, blood, and wet timber," she said.

"But not the over-laundered canvas smell of official vessels. You're clearly not someone who follows rules." Marro's single eye narrowed slightly.

"Good nose."

"She has many good qualities," I said, stepping in with what I hoped was sufficient firmness.

"But we're not here tonight to conduct a comparative olfactory study." Marro turned to me.

"Then what are you here for?" The question finally had some weight to it. Only about half the weight of a genuinely serious question, but I would take what I could get. I suppressed the urge to first ask whether any of the chairs in this establishment had been poisoned recently, and met that single exposed eye directly.

"We need to reach the Dragon Kingdom's mainland." The sounds inside the repair shed seemed to hollow out for just a moment. One of the men grinding boarding hooks in the back missed half a beat. He recovered quickly, but half a beat was enough. Marro didn't speak immediately. He reached over and picked up an oil-stained rag from the table, wiping the black residue from his hands with the unhurried attention of a man who had all the time in the world and knew it.

"Dragon Kingdom's mainland." He repeated it slowly, turning the words over like he was testing their weight between his teeth.

"You two don't lack for ambition."

"The price is negotiable," I said.

"Price is always negotiable." He lifted his head, and his gaze swept across my face with the clean efficiency of a blade.

"The question was never about price. The question is—who's chasing you?" I was silent for a moment. Not a long moment. But long enough for the smile behind his eye to deepen by one degree.

"More than one group, by the look of it," he concluded. Ignicia said, without inflection: "You only need to answer one thing. Whether you dare make the run." This time, Marro didn't answer her immediately. He took two steps forward, boot soles pressing over wood shavings and iron nails with barely a sound, and stopped at a distance precisely calibrated to make me uncomfortable—not close enough to be a threat, not far enough to be polite.

"Oh, I dare," he said. His voice was level. Almost calm. Which was exactly what made it cold.

"I've done a lot of business in my life that I probably shouldn't have. Ferrying people to the Dragon Kingdom doesn't even crack the top ten." He glanced at me, then shifted his gaze to Ignicia, the gray in his single eye flat and lightless as a reef at low tide.

"The interesting question is whether you two are worth the risk I'd be taking." I started to speak. He raised one hand and cut me off.

"Don't reach for your coin purse yet. Clients who come in at midnight smelling of seawater, blood, and gunpowder—with faces that say they just took a shortcut past the gates of hell—gold usually only covers about a third of the problem."

"What covers the other two-thirds?" The corner of his mouth pulled.

"Trouble."... I knew it.

"That said," he continued, his tone shifting like a man who had just upgraded us from can be eliminated immediately to can be negotiated with first, "I can take you. I can get you close enough to the Dragon Kingdom that you won't end up feeding fish in the outer waters." My chest loosened by half an inch. His next sentence put every single fraction of that half inch right back.

"But before that—" One-Eyed Marro tossed the oily rag onto the table, fixed us with his single eye, and raised one finger with the deliberate patience of a man who was genuinely enjoying himself.

"You're going to let me sell you first." I stared at him.... What. He watched my expression with the deep satisfaction of a craftsman who had just successfully introduced a crack into a perfectly functional brain, and then—unhurried, unrepentant—delivered the condition in full:"Before noon tomorrow. The woman plays high-value merchandise. The man plays a cargo handler.

You walk into the port auction house with me, and every soul in Blackbeard Bay gets to witness, with their own eyes—that One-Eyed Marro is putting you up for sale."