Deadweather and Sunrise Read Online Free Page B
Author: Geoff Rodkey
skeptical.
“What? The fog?”
“Yeh. Volcano smoke reeks. Like rotten eggs.”
“Why do you THINK it doesn’t stink?” Percy asked with a little snarl of disgust. Repeating questions like that was another way he bought himself extra time. “Because the ground… traps all the stink. Dig a hole sometime. Get down far enough, it’ll all come rushing out. Gag you fierce. Then you’ll see.”
BY THE TIME we rolled into Port Scratch an hour later, the morning sun had burned off the fog, it was oven-hot inside the carriage, and Percy had filled my brother and sister with dozens of new facts about science, history, and math, all of them spectacularly wrong. Not that they would bother to remember them anyway.
Port Scratch was slowly waking up as we made our way down the wide, filth-ridden main road, the carriage lurching from side to side as Stumpy snaked around the pirates who’d passed out in the street the night before. The clop of the horses’ hooves stirred a few of them, and they’d stagger to their feet, shake the rum from their heads, and double over again to vomit. There are a lot of things that Blisstown, the port city of Sunrise, has going for it over Port Scratch, but one of the first ones you notice is the lack of puke on the streets.
When we stopped at the dock, Dad made us stay in the carriage while he haggled for a boat to Sunrise. He always kept us in the carriage until the boat was hired, mostly because of Venus—there weren’t many females in Port Scratch, let alone fifteen-year-old ones who bathed, and even though my sister looked like a horse and had the personality of a lizard, I guess the pirates weren’t too choosy about who they carried off.
It took longer than usual. Ordinarily, Dad liked to head down a day early with Stumpy to settle on a boat, but this trip was so last-minute there hadn’t been time for that. So we baked inside the carriage for almost half an hour, until my good shirt was so sweat-soaked it no longer itched, while Dad rooted around onthe docks, interviewing half a dozen candidates and occasionally waving his pistols when things got hot.
Eventually, he found his boat—a grimy thirty-footer with no name, a swivel gun at the fore, and a rowboat tied to the aft deck. The rowboat was critical, because pirates were banned from Sunrise, and whoever ferried us there would have to stop out of range of the shore cannons while we rowed ourselves the rest of the way in.
The two men who crewed it—one short but built like an ox, the other tall and dark-featured, with a mane of black hair that hung past his shoulders—stank of rum and man-sweat, and they both had small flames tattooed on the side of their necks. It was the mark of men who sailed with Burn Healy. Of all the captains who plundered on the Blue Sea, Healy was both the most feared and the most successful—the pirate victory over the Cartager Navy that we’d watched from Rotting Bluff during the Barker War had been all his doing, although he’d been plenty notorious even before then—and any man with a flame tattooed on his neck was guaranteed to be a cold-blooded killer.
Which was why it never made sense to me that Dad seemed to go out of his way to hire them when we needed a boat for the Sunrise run. I got up the nerve to ask him once, and he just shrugged.
“Healy men get the job done,” he said.
It was true enough—we always got there quickly, and despite their reputation, no Healy pirate had ever slit our throats. But they had a habit of renegotiating their rates once we got within sight of Blisstown, and the trip always cost Dad twice as much as he’d agreed to back in Port Scratch.
We got under way, and the two pirates somehow scared enough sail out of the stagnant Deadweather air to get us out of the harbor and into the open ocean, where we caught a breeze off Sunrise. By then, Adonis and Venus were napping in the hold, Percy was sunning himself on the foredeck like a turtle, and I was lying
“What? The fog?”
“Yeh. Volcano smoke reeks. Like rotten eggs.”
“Why do you THINK it doesn’t stink?” Percy asked with a little snarl of disgust. Repeating questions like that was another way he bought himself extra time. “Because the ground… traps all the stink. Dig a hole sometime. Get down far enough, it’ll all come rushing out. Gag you fierce. Then you’ll see.”
BY THE TIME we rolled into Port Scratch an hour later, the morning sun had burned off the fog, it was oven-hot inside the carriage, and Percy had filled my brother and sister with dozens of new facts about science, history, and math, all of them spectacularly wrong. Not that they would bother to remember them anyway.
Port Scratch was slowly waking up as we made our way down the wide, filth-ridden main road, the carriage lurching from side to side as Stumpy snaked around the pirates who’d passed out in the street the night before. The clop of the horses’ hooves stirred a few of them, and they’d stagger to their feet, shake the rum from their heads, and double over again to vomit. There are a lot of things that Blisstown, the port city of Sunrise, has going for it over Port Scratch, but one of the first ones you notice is the lack of puke on the streets.
When we stopped at the dock, Dad made us stay in the carriage while he haggled for a boat to Sunrise. He always kept us in the carriage until the boat was hired, mostly because of Venus—there weren’t many females in Port Scratch, let alone fifteen-year-old ones who bathed, and even though my sister looked like a horse and had the personality of a lizard, I guess the pirates weren’t too choosy about who they carried off.
It took longer than usual. Ordinarily, Dad liked to head down a day early with Stumpy to settle on a boat, but this trip was so last-minute there hadn’t been time for that. So we baked inside the carriage for almost half an hour, until my good shirt was so sweat-soaked it no longer itched, while Dad rooted around onthe docks, interviewing half a dozen candidates and occasionally waving his pistols when things got hot.
Eventually, he found his boat—a grimy thirty-footer with no name, a swivel gun at the fore, and a rowboat tied to the aft deck. The rowboat was critical, because pirates were banned from Sunrise, and whoever ferried us there would have to stop out of range of the shore cannons while we rowed ourselves the rest of the way in.
The two men who crewed it—one short but built like an ox, the other tall and dark-featured, with a mane of black hair that hung past his shoulders—stank of rum and man-sweat, and they both had small flames tattooed on the side of their necks. It was the mark of men who sailed with Burn Healy. Of all the captains who plundered on the Blue Sea, Healy was both the most feared and the most successful—the pirate victory over the Cartager Navy that we’d watched from Rotting Bluff during the Barker War had been all his doing, although he’d been plenty notorious even before then—and any man with a flame tattooed on his neck was guaranteed to be a cold-blooded killer.
Which was why it never made sense to me that Dad seemed to go out of his way to hire them when we needed a boat for the Sunrise run. I got up the nerve to ask him once, and he just shrugged.
“Healy men get the job done,” he said.
It was true enough—we always got there quickly, and despite their reputation, no Healy pirate had ever slit our throats. But they had a habit of renegotiating their rates once we got within sight of Blisstown, and the trip always cost Dad twice as much as he’d agreed to back in Port Scratch.
We got under way, and the two pirates somehow scared enough sail out of the stagnant Deadweather air to get us out of the harbor and into the open ocean, where we caught a breeze off Sunrise. By then, Adonis and Venus were napping in the hold, Percy was sunning himself on the foredeck like a turtle, and I was lying