Dawn brought the smell of stale ale and wet iron to the Drowned Anchor Tavern. Captain Hong Tao sat in a corner booth with a cracked cup of sour wine.
He was thirty-eight, with twenty years of salt and sun on his face. A sea-scorpion had torn a purple furrow along his left jaw seven years ago. Across from him sat his second, Meng Tie, with blood showing through the bandages on his right arm.
Two pieces of a flying broadsword lay between them. Three feet of second-grade cold iron had snapped at the middle. The edge looked like a ruined saw. The runes were burned black.
“The Middle Rim shop wants twelve mid-grade stones for another blade,” Meng Tie said. “Or fourteen hundred low-grade. On credit it’s fifteen percent a month. Come autumn the guild will own our boat, our armor, and our bones.”
Hong drank the wine in one swallow. “My cousin signed one of those contracts. He’s hauling sulfur through the vents now, blind in both eyes.”
“Then what do we use? We have four hours to get off the dock before the noon launch deadline. The warden gives us until dusk to bring the kill back. Miss that and Warden Sun takes our berth and impounds the Iron Whale.”
