12
Alt Coulumb’s docks lost none of their savor at night. In the handbook of the Palatine Perfumers’ Guild, the recipe goes like this: Mash a global civilization of some four billion human beings and another, say, half handful billion others into a fine paste. Pound that mash against a mile of coastline and let dry in the sun, then steep the resulting extract in fish oil and engine grease. Salt heavily with sweat and spray. Zest the ambition of a thousand tradesmen and -women and small-business owners, from the rug-crouched silver seller to the mustachioed and gaptoothed iconmonger and the clutch of tattooed young women who sold dreamdust at the docks for the Farwright Syndicate. Add three-quarters of this zest raw, then gently blowtorch the remainder to lend that brutal sour edge of hope betrayed, since some ships never come in even for those who wait daily by the docks ’til long past dusk. Round out the odor with a long list of prosaic cargo: saffron, sandalwood, and cinnamon, paper, steel, demon-haunted manufactured goods, long planks of magisterium and sheafs of synthetic dragonscale (inferior in all respects to the real thing, save only for the practical point that the synthetic variety need not be harvested from a dragon), bananas by the crate and oranges by the tube and soybeans by the ton, green bottle after green bottle of wine, and of course the flat nothing-scent of the airtight vessels made from the processed bones of eons-dead monsters in which alchemists stored their toxic earths and strange silvers. Garnish—lightly—with what the Palatine Perfumer’s Guild’s contributing writers describe, in a rare and generous bout of euphemism, as “effluvia.”
The handbook includes a sidebar note indicating that, like most such purely descriptive recipes, the journeyman should regard this as a test of his own nasal and artistic fortitude, as well as his extraction skills. Sales, if any, will be small.
Cat gnawed the last meat from a skewer as she climbed the gangplank from the docks to the Kel’s Bounty. “Law on deck!” the bos’n called, and she sketched a salute to the array of not-quite-savory characters that turned to her. By day the Bounty was a ship like any other, mortal-crewed with sailors from throughout the known world, with a slight bias to Archipelagese. The night crew hailed from a wider range of ports of call.
Raz appeared at the upper deck’s rail. “What kept you?”
“Meetings,” she said.
He leapt over the rail, somersaulted, and landed light-footed on the boards. His eyes were true red in the moonlight, not the burned scab color they seemed in daytime shadows. “Anything important?”
“Probably,” she said, “but it’ll keep. Glad to see you aren’t on fire anymore.”
He wiggled his fingers. Thin scars crisscrossed his palm, tracks left by sunlight. The regrown skin was even darker than the rest of him. “There’s a reason I tan. Course now I’ll have to even out, or I’ll get blotchy.”
“Some leech you are. Isn’t your guys’ thing more a sort of deathly pallor? I knew girls on the club circuit who went through my salary in white pancake makeup every month.”
“Dumb. Scenesters imitating form over function. Shoreland suckers in the Old World, the ones with castles, drew lines from skin to status—if you were pale, it meant you could afford people to do things for you in the day. The paler you are, the faster you burn, so if you’re really pale it shows you’re not scared of the peasants-with-pitchforks routine. Which is all well and good until you forget to adjust your clocks for daylight savings time, some traveler you wanted to put the moves on pulls off the window blinds at dawn, and you go up like dryer lint.”
“Daylight what?”
“It’s an Old World thing. Are you ready to sail?”
Her pocket watch was ticking. “Yes. Everyone’s aboard?”
“Hold’s packed with your creepy friends.”
“Again with the creepy.” She waved at the crew scuttling, skittering, and lurching around the Kel’s Bounty deck. “What do you call these?”
“Sailors,” he said, and turned from her and raised his hand. “Cast off!”
In the rigging, a woman with the legs and abdomen of a spider shouted, “Aye!”
They made good time out of port—the Bounty’s wind walker filled their sail with a steady breeze, and Raz took the helm. “Promise to cover for me with the pilots’ guild. I don’t want to end up on their bad side.”
“As far as the port authority is concerned, none of this is happening.”
“They don’t like to be reminded some of us have been sailing this harbor since before they were born.” He spun the wheel, called for depth, adjusted again. Sighted on something she couldn’t see with his spyglass, collapsed it, let it dangle from his neck.