Pei Jing slept aboard until the harbor reopened in the morning. Black Reef had no proper harbor wall. An old eruption had left a crescent of black rock, and red coral covered the edges. Catamarans with stained bamboo sails, pearl barges with harpoon guns, and dark corsair sloops all swung on their chains in the lagoon.
He paid two low-grade stones out of his travel purse to come ashore, leaving four hundred and eleven low-grade in all. The pier was built from old mast timber and rough pine. Green moss and crushed crab shells coated the boards.
The air smelled of dried sea cucumber, boiled shark fat, and sulfur. Pearl divers hauled baskets of urchins and gray shellfish onto sorting tables. A man with three fingers shook water out of a net. The diver beside him had scars across his chest where the coral had caught him. This was where the fine things in the mainland shops came from.
Pei Jing stopped holding his qi in. He wanted the men watching from the dock to see that he could fight. Two men on a coil of cable fell quiet and leaned back as he passed.
He listened to prices at the stalls along the ridge. Six low-grade stones for a basket of Blood-Vein Oysters. Twelve for a pound of deep-sea shark sinew. Half a stone for a sack of plain wheat flour from the north. Clean nails went by the ounce. Anything the atoll couldn’t take out of the sea…
