The second mortar shell didn’t miss.
It struck ten yards to port, its blast wave tearing through the bilge strakes like an iron sledgehammer striking rotten cedar. In the cramped lower hold, the bone-shaking whump drove the breath from Ren Vale’s lungs and threw him against the salt-crusted timbers.
Above, the derrick boom screamed.
A high-pulling steel cable snapped with a pistol crack, whipping across the deckhouse roof and cleaving through the hoisting winch. With a screech of twisted bronze gears, the Iron Gall’s heavy diving bell—their sole clockwork means of dropping through the water—tore free from its davit, smashed the bulwark. Then they plunged into the sea. It vanished beneath the black swells in two seconds, swallowed by a deep pit without bottom.
Greenish bilge water swirled around Ren’s ankles. He smelled of coal dust, rotting timber, and dead barnacles.
“Well, that simplifies the balance sheet,” Vane Vale observed coldly from the companionway ladder. The Merchant brushed soot from his velvet sleeve, his ivory-headed cane tucked beneath his arm. “Our capital equipment has been liquidated without an auction. We’re now eighty-four feet of floating driftwood surrounded by three gunboats, with ninety seconds leftover on a royal surrender deadline. Our credit rating has officially achieved zero.”
