The ocean smelled of salt, wet iron, and desperate old men.
Three dozen battered wooden sloops bobbed in the wake of the two captured Star-Iron warships, fluttering white surrender pennants from their broken topmasts. The outer Star-Fall Sea was not kind to standard timber. Black-Brine currents sizzled against their hulls like weak acid, stripping away protective varnish and chewing through copper rivets.
“Please, Sovereign!” a white-bearded cultivator wailed through an amplified brass horn, keeping his distance behind the iron flagship. “The Sea-Blight mist is dissolving our keels! Let the Iron-Gull Sect sail under your formation banners, or we will sink before the reef!”
On the quarterdeck of the flagship, Deacon Vane adjusted his green silk robes and gave his wooden abacus a sharp, rhythmic shake.
“Listen to that pitch,” Vane murmured, not bothering to look back. “That is the sound of pure, unrefined margin. When a man believes his bottom is sinking, he will pay for the dry wood twice.”
Kaelen Vance leaned against the ship’s capstan in a faded gray bathrobe, his cloth slippers dangling lazily over a coil of hemp rope. He cracked a roasted melon seed between his teeth and spat the shell into the foaming churn below.
