Blackflag

The vault was underwater, which sounds like a metaphor for a problem being really complicated, but was actually just thirty feet of saltwater under the Governor’s palace. The only way in was a flooded rock tunnel that opened when the tide came up and closed when the tide went down, giving you exactly forty minutes. You also needed three keys to open the lock, and you had to turn them all at the exact same time. And there were sharks.

“They aren’t sharks,” Finch said. He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at a drawing he’d made on a stolen bar napkin. “They’re cursed barracuda. It’s a very meaningful distinction.”

I asked him what the distinction was.

“Sharks will leave you alone if you stop thrashing around,” Finch said. “Cursed barracuda don’t care. A sea witch named Sybil Thorne put them down there back in 1704 because the old Governor paid her to fix his wife’s fertility problems. The fish are magically glued to the tunnel, and they kill anything that isn’t wearing the Governor’s personal badge.”

“Do we have the badge?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then it really doesn’t matter, Finch. They’re fish and they’re going to eat us.”

“They are fish, but the taxonomy matters for the counter-curse,” he said.

I just stared at him until he stopped talking.

Here is what was inside the underwater vault: a map. It was drawn on old calfskin by a dead guy named Arnaud Vane. It was the only real map in the world that showed the route to The Iron Leviathan. A woman named Vespera had stolen my money, my crew, and my reputation, but she didn’t steal the map because she didn’t know it was sitting in a wet basement in Porto Vey. The current Governor bought it twelve years ago and just left it down there to rot.

I needed the map. Which meant I had to break into a palace that was basically a fortress built on volcanic rock, surrounded by sinking streets and angry guards.

I sat my crew down in the hold of our ship, The Rustwake. The hold smelled like bilge water and the sharp goat cheese our navigator, Marris, bought at the market because she said we needed to eat something that didn’t taste like sadness.

There were four of them. Finch with his napkins. Bramm, who was our muscle and who looked mad because he was always mad. Joss, sitting on a crate and cleaning a knife, and Marris, who was already looking at a tide chart.

I explained the tunnel, the forty minutes, and the three keys. The Governor kept one key on his belt. The Harbormaster kept the second. The third was in the bedroom of the Captain of the Guard.

“So we need all three keys in the same place, at the same time, inside a forty-minute window,” Bramm said. His arms were crossed and his muscles looked tight. “That’s basically suicide.”

“Finch is going to handle the cursed fish,” I said.

“I made a paste out of squid ink and oleander oil,” Finch said proudly. “You rub it on your skin. It messes with the magic. The fish will just swim in circles instead of biting you. Probably.”

“Probably?” I asked.

“Seventy percent chance,” Finch said.

I decided not to think about the thirty percent chance of getting eaten in the dark. “Marris, you get the Harbormaster’s key. Bramm, you take the Captain of the Guard. I’ll get the Governor’s. Joss, you stay up top and make sure we have a way out.”

Joss smiled, which was worse than if she had frowned.

The next few days were just a lot of watching people. People are predictable, especially when they think they’re important. Marris watched the Harbormaster, who went to the same brothel every single night at exactly seven o’clock. She went inside and talked to one of the working girls, who told her the Harbormaster kept the key on a thick chain around his neck and never took it off, even when his clothes were off, which is a gross thing to think about.

Since she couldn’t steal it, Marris faked a fight on the docks the next morning. She bumped hard into the Harbormaster, yelled at him, and pressed a little block of wax against his chest right where the key was resting under his shirt. It took two seconds, and she had a perfect impression of the metal.

Bramm had a harder job. The Captain of the Guard was a woman named Kaelia, and she liked to run random drills. She kept her key in a room right above the main barracks. If Bramm made a sound, thirty guys with swords would come upstairs. I told him to do it quietly. He just grunted.

I had the Governor. Governor Beldon had gout, which meant his foot swelled up and he sat in a big chair all day listening to poor people complain. I put on some itchy merchant clothes, stood in line for four hours in the hot sun, and handed him a fake legal document Marris had written up. The key was right there on his belt.

When he leaned in to read the paper, I tripped. I fell forward, knocked his water cup right into his lap, and the guards lunged at me. For about four seconds, everybody was looking at the spilled water, so I pressed my wax pad right into the key on his belt. I apologized a lot. He kicked me out. I had the mold.

High tide was at 2:14 in the morning.

At 1:30, Marris lit a fire behind the customs house to pull all the guards away from the docks. At 2:00, I stripped down, covered myself in Finch’s dead-squid paste, and slipped into the harbor. I had an iron copy of the Governor’s key in my teeth.

The tunnel was completely pitch black. I swam until I hit the twelve-foot mark, and that’s when the barracuda showed up.

There were four of them. They had flat, shiny silver eyes. I wanted to swim fast and get away, but Finch told me that cursed fish react to fear. If you act like food, you become food. So I just swam slow and steady, pretending I was supposed to be there. They swam in tight circles around me, but they didn’t bite. The seventy percent chance worked.

I broke the surface in a small, dry air pocket under the palace. The lock was right in the middle of the wall. Three keyholes, all spaced a foot apart.

I waited. The water kept rising around my boots.

At 2:26, the water rippled and Marris popped up, gasping for air. She had her key.

“The fire spread,” she panted, climbing onto the wet rocks. “I had to run through the fish market. One of the barracuda bumped into my leg.”

I asked her where Bramm was. She didn’t know.

We waited until 2:35. The water was halfway up my shins. The window was closing, and if we didn’t leave soon, the tunnel would fill up completely and we would drown in a dark hole.

“We have to go,” I said.

Marris looked at the door. “We have two keys. We can turn three locks.”

“The holes are a foot apart,” I said.

She didn’t argue. She just pulled a thick piece of twine out of her pocket and tied her key to a heavy piece of driftwood she had brought with her. She jammed the wood into the third keyhole at a weird angle.

“You take the left, I take the middle,” she said. “When I count to three, we turn our keys, and I kick the wood.”

It was a terrible idea, but I put my key in the slot anyway. She counted. We turned. She kicked the wood hard with her wet boot.

Two of the locks clicked perfectly. The third one groaned, got stuck, and then ground open with a noise that made my jaw hurt. The heavy iron door popped open.

Inside, it was basically just a big closet. The Governor had filled it with gold boxes and jewelry, because rich people always think walls are safer than banks. The map was sitting on a shelf in a leather tube. I grabbed it. Marris scooped up two big handfuls of gold coins and shoved them in her pockets. She told me it was for groceries.

We swam back out just as the tide started to pull. The current was fighting us the whole way, and my lungs were burning by the time we hit the harbor surface.

The docks were a mess of smoke and shouting guards. But sitting right at the end of the pier, dripping wet and holding his side like his ribs were broken, was Bramm. He had a bloody cut over his eye and his key in his hand.

“Captain Kaelia was in her room,” he said, spitting saltwater onto the wood.

“Did you do it quietly?” I asked.

He looked at the blood on his knuckles. “Not really.”

We got back to The Rustwake and sailed out before the sun came up. Porto Vey just faded into the fog like it wasn’t even a real place.

Down in the cabin, Finch wrapped Bramm’s ribs tightly while Bramm pretended it didn’t hurt. Marris unrolled the calfskin map on the big wooden table. Her eyes tracked the old ink lines, looking at the currents and the depths, figuring out how to keep us from hitting a reef and dying.

“This is it,” she said softly. “This goes to The Iron Leviathan.”

“It’s the first part of the trip,” I said.

She looked up at me. “You were going to leave the vault without it. When Bramm didn’t show up, you were ready to swim away.”

“The lock needed three keys,” I said.

She looked at me for a long second, like she was trying to see if I was lying, but she didn’t push it. She just looked back down at the map.

I went up to the deck. The wind was blowing cold and strong. Joss was up in the rigging, keeping an eye out for navy ships or pirates. I grabbed the big wooden wheel and turned it slightly to catch the breeze. The Rustwake groaned, leaned hard to the left, and started moving forward.

We had the map. We knew where we were going. It was a good start.