Arlo was sure that Placelle Lamella had continued feeding on him all night when he opened the door of his quarters the next morning and found the huge woman lying on her side in the corridor, curled up in a ball and sleeping peacefully. There had certainly been plenty for her to eat, of that he was sure. Once he’d notified the Sunseeker of his plans, he’d had the radiographer message the Lemur next and ask if Moriah could join him for dinner. They told him she had gone to land, and they would radio back when she returned. He paced and paced by the radio room, went to stare out the window and brood, inspected his quarters on the other side of the ship, paced some more, and checked for replies between each task. The girl running the set had certainly gotten tired of him by the end of the night. When he had her hail the Lemur one last time and they said Moriah had not returned and was imagined to be spending the night ashore, he gave up and left a message with his compliments and regrets before retiring to his quarters to sort through his clothes and try to distract himself from feeling rejected by a woman who hadn’t even gotten the chance to receive his offer in the first place.
He had not seen hide nor hair of the Oathkeeper throughout the entire ordeal, and figured himself to be rid of her for the time-being. And yet, it was still irritating for him to open his door with the red glow of the early-morning light in the last hours of the Blood Watch to find her as a heap in front of it.
“Get up!” he whispered harshly down at her. She stirred slightly and he tried to prod her with a toe, but he hadn’t yet donned his boots and found himself stubbed on her armor. Sucking in air, he hopped back on one foot before whispering even more harshly, “I can’t believe you slept in your armor!”
The big woman yawned and acquiesced as Arlo grabbed her by the bicep and pulled her up. She muttered something utterly indecipherable while he dragged her to the simple desk next to his bed in the cramped, plain-stated cabin he’d been given. She yawned again as he sat her in the chair and angrily set to work combing the matted rats’ nest of her strawberry blonde mess that passed for hair.
“You had your own room down the hall.” he chided.
“It feels good when you comb my hair.” was her only reply. Arlo grumbled at this but said nothing else. He just got her hair into a more-or-less even shock and then put the comb in his teeth while he used his strip of sailcloth to tie it into a ponytail for her. Then, he started using the comb on himself while he moved to the sea chest full of all the officers’ used clothes to dig out a plain cravat which he repurposed as a band for his own hair.
“Do me a favor.” he said now, slipping into his waistcoat and bolero once more, “Go across to the Master Artificer’s office and see if they have finished with my equipment. If they have not, ask if I may borrow some for this trip to Hookthorn. Whichever they give you, bring it down to me in the boathouse by seven red.”
“Alright, Arlo.” agreed the Oathkeeper with no protest whatsoever, seemingly already full of energy to hop up and go at it. Arlo watched her leave and remembered how Pluramon had suggested he think of her emotional intelligence as that of a dog. He considered, perhaps somewhat uncharitably, that she was like a dog in other ways as well while slipping into his boots. A little bit of ironic kinship washed over the young man as he crammed his customary dog treat into his mouth and stuffed a few extra into the inside pocket of his bolero before stepping out the door.
He swept through the larboard gunnery mess and managed to use his badge to embezzle a couple of hip flasks with coffee and rum on his way down to the larboard counterpart to the radiography office he’d spent so much time ducking in and out of the day before. At this hour, there was only a lonely rating reading a literary serial with his feet propped up on the table. He nodded at Arlo as he came in, but made no move to help him. Arlo nodded back to the man and pulled up a spare seat at the table. He had never used the machine before, but watched the two offices communicate back and forth enough to at least figure out how to reach the other side of the ship. He pulled the headset on and keyed the mic.
“Starboard radiography, come in, over.” he said in a low voice, so as to disturb the rating as little as possible. The set crackled to life before him and he heard a voice responding to him through a wall of static.
“This is starboard radiography. Over.”
“Any messages for Arlo Haradin-Harkon? Over.”
There was a brief pause and then a slight titter. “Good morning, sire.”
“You’re still in there, Miss Halford?” he asked, feeling immensely sorry for the girl.
“I worked a double last night, sire.” she replied, incredibly amused to be hearing his voice again. “But no worries, it were as quiet as a mouse. You were just about the only thing I had for entertainment. Sorry to say no messages for you, though, sire. Over.”
Arlo sighed. “Thanks for everything, mum. I hope you get some rest soon. Larboard radiography, out.”
He gingerly set the headset down and leaned away from the console with a sad sigh. The rating next to him turned a page and read a bit further before eventually commenting, “Shore, shipmate, I feel ya. When you’re in money it’s tits fer dinner and when you’re in pain it’s an empty bed again, am I right?”
Arlo tried to pinch his face in something like a smile at the man and chose to sip from his rum flask instead of his coffee flask before replying, “You’re very good, sir, thank you.”
“Any time, shipmate.” the fellow shot back as Arlo departed. He returned to his cabin and packed a change of clothes into his round satchel with his mess kit before wrapping the whole thing with the waxed cotton overcoat that he was absolutely certain had been sewn for a woman.
Oh well, he figured, any boatcloak in a spray was better than none at all. It wasn’t as though the water would know whether or not his chest was filled out properly. He descended to the bottom of the larboard conning tower and stepped out onto the titanic weather deck of the homeship. As he still had some time before the arranged meeting in the boathouse, he strolled along the side of the road and looked up at the stars twinkling through the fading red glow of the Blood Moon. When he reached the lift he turned and looked at the vast retreating shape of the moon itself. Like its green counterpart that had appeared in the eastern sky at the beginning of the evening, its glow colored the tops of wispy clouds. Arlo considered the sky in these last few moments of what he had considered his single night of break before getting snapped up into travel again, remembering the cigarillo the man in the gatehouse had given him back on Viola and craving an encore smoke of it now.
Not being of the habit and having not even considered it before that instant, it was easy enough to set aside the desire and just enjoy the coolness of the early morning air for a little while between sips of coffee from his flask. Once he felt satisfied, he descended the lift and made his way through the waistworks of the ship to the boathouse. He only had to ask directions twice, a better outcome compared to asking directions at every intersection as he expected. Upon arriving in the boathouse, he found it in much better order than it had been in the last time he had seen it. Only two or three buzzers were missing from the cavernous racks along the wall and all the others were stowed and wrapped in tarps at such an early hour. He found Darwin Huddlestone sat at the controls for the crane with a cigarette in his mouth and a whittling knife in his hand, and Razor Skunch posted up nearby as still as a statue with even the teal fog missing from his eyes. Arlo curiously peered into the beastman’s face and saw that inside the goggles his eyes were gently closed. The huge red man really was just sleeping all the time, it seemed. Inspection complete, Arlo dug his hands in his pockets and came to Darwin’s side offering the hip flask of rum.
“Morning to you, sire.” greeted the coxswain with a grin. He set down the little wooden figurine on the control lectern for the crane and Arlo saw that it was a somewhat crude representation of Irina Rathbone sans her coat and hat. He did not comment on this, however, and simply took a brief pull from the flask before handing it back so Arlo could do the same.
“I hope you did not have to wake early to take care of this for me.” said Arlo once he’d enjoyed his tot.
“If it was too much bother, I woulda had one of the boat monkeys do it for you, shipmate.” Darwin assured him, then resumed his work on the figurine.
“Good to know your monkeys can be trusted.” Arlo panned back, then ceased being able to contain his curiosity about the figurine. “Is that Madame Rathbone, by any chance?”
“Ooh-ooh, fancy!” mocked the other man at first, brow slightly furrowed, “But, yeah, that’s her. You met her? Been my dicin’ partner these last few weeks. Came over ‘ere on the Ravenheart.”
“Mhm?” Arlo prodded, a slight suspicion growing in his gut. “Why do you figure that to be, Mister Huddlestone?”
Darwin furrowed his brow again and replied, “Wull, which she said to me she was berthed with a bunch of stormtroopers and marines, so I figured of course she gots to be one or t’other.”
“Ah.” Arlo responded now, with a knowing smirk crossing his face. “And not the sort of person who stormtroopers or marines might be traveling in the company of, yes?”
A sound that could be called a ‘snerk’ ejaculated from some place behind Darwin’s nose as he belted skeptically, “You musta not met the same person as me if you think bawdy-mouthed Irina Rathbone with her big scar an’ her patriotic tattoo is a Marine officer. And stormtroops ain’t got an officer if they’re detached from a regiment. Only folks a detachment that small would answer to would be–”
Darwin stopped at once, interrupting himself to leap out of his chair and come to an abrupt attention with his hand forming a curve over his chest as he reported to the empty boathouse, “Tribune on Deck!”
Irina scowled at him under her peaked cap as she got near and when he recognized her his jaw immediately dropped. For her part, Irina just dug her pinkie into her ear and chastised him, “Would you keep it down, Huddlestone? For Queen’s sake, it’s earlier’n sin and my head is still pounding from that pig piss we were drinking last night. It’s only me.”
Arlo narrowed his eyes at Darwin, who seemed like the victim of a very elaborate prank. “I take it you are a fan of starboard dredgehouse dicegames, Mister Huddlestone?”
“Fan of ‘em?” laughed Irina, giving Darwin a good and hardy slap on the back as she settled in between them. “He practically runs the book for the things. Not to mention he wrangles the fiddlers for the dancing. It’s a grand ol’ way to pass the night.”
Arlo rubbed Darwin’s back where Irina had slapped it and explained, “I’m sorry, shipmate, I thought I had a little more time to warn you. Irina Rathbone is the Tribune that’s auditing the clan.”
“Why didn’t you say so, Madame Tribune?” asked Darwin with a look of shock and betrayal on his face.
“Because I didn’t want any of this rubbish,” she protested with a dismissive wave of her hand. “C’mon, Huddlestone, I know you’re alright, us Tribunes are for sniffing the nobs. Now gi’us a fag, hey? It’s early yet and I have not had my beauty rest.”
When Darwin only silently presented her with a cigarette instead of a comeback, she tutted and wagged a finger in his face with her free hand while perching the cigarette between her lips. “What? Not gonna say, ‘good thing you’re no beauty then, love’ and pinch my waist while we laugh together?”
Then, with an extremely put-upon air she turned to Arlo and reported, “See, this is why you never tell ‘em what you do for a living. I mean to say, sire, seven hours ago this man thought he might get to see my tits one day. Now he thinks it’s just the barrel of my gun.”
Arlo took this moment to note that, unlike the day before, Irina was toting said gun. She did not seem to have a bag or satchel like he did, but she did have a carbine slung over one shoulder with a prism scope mounted upon it and a boarding axe nestled into a frog on her belt. Arlo reached past her shoulder and gently tapped the tip of the barrel emerging from behind her shoulder and asked, “But in truth, Madame Rathbone, is he not correct?”
Irina seemed to consider this for a moment while cupping her chin and smoking thoughtfully before eventually exhaling a silver cloud and answering, “No, I mighta got them out one night after a few drinks in the right company. Maybe not gone much farther’n’at, but sometimes it’s fun to get ‘em out with the lads and have a laugh.”
Arlo pursed his lips at this, again being tweaked by his feeling that sex and sexuality was supposed to be discrete. Still, it had more or less dodged his actual point and so he pointed to the gun again and tried, “I would still wager that if Darwin had somehow broken a local law or violated the Imperial Constitution, you would’ve had to stop him.”
Irina made an ugly face at the suggestion. “Not unless it was somethin’ really rotten like kiddy-diddlin’, rape, or unreported asset hoarding. A Tribune’s job is to uphold the Imperial constitu-shy-on, not play nanny to every little banknote in a sock or pill in a tin under the bed.”
To prove her point, Irina turned and spat on her hand before offering it to Huddlestone for the tradesman’s handshake. After hesitating in the dim light for some time, Huddleston spat on his own and gave hers a good hard clap with a, “Oh, fine then, Irina Fat-bone. You did stick me in a fine pot of pickles, though, shell-gamin’ me like that.”
“You’re alright, Darwin,” she replied with a chuckle, “Don’t go limp on me now, shipmate.”
And so, Arlo told himself inwardly, Irina is a friend to the common people. He tried to set that fact in his memory. Though he did have to wonder how Darwin figured the little woman was a stormtrooper or a marine. Sure, she had a bawdy enough attitude, but not very many women seemed able to surpass the rigorous physical testing needed to become one of the elite soldiers of the Tribunal Committee; and those that did hardly matched Irina in stature or physique. Perhaps Darwin Huddlestone had simply needed a friend. Thinking along those lines, Arlo pointed down at the wooden figurine and sincerely told Darwin, “Whatever happened to inspire you to carve something like that, still happened Darwin.”
“Don’t you start in as well, sire,” Darwin argued now, snapping up the figurine and coming very close to tossing it out the hatch and into the water before simply stuffing it into one pocket of his uniform. “Asides, for all you know, I was gonna carve her sittin’ on a privy-pot or makin’ love to a carrot.”
“How big a carrot are we talkin’ here?” Irina asked with a cocked eyebrow.
Arlo huffed. “You’re both impossible. I’m going for a turn around the deck.”
“Alarum,” he heard Irina muttering to Darwin behind him as he strode off, “You’d think we tried to get him on the bloody carrot.”
“Oh, be easy on him, Rina, he’s ‘ad it rough.”
Arlo maintained as much dignity as he could while he walked down the long boat house. Some impulse in him drove him to gently stroke the edge of the lowermost boats on each rack he passed with his right hand. This, combined with drawing out his watch and listening to its firm, regular ticking supplanted his sense of irritation fairly quickly while he worked his way to the end of the bay and turned around on his heel. His eyes were focused on the sweep hand of his watch as he continued to pace, almost in a trance with the deck plates smooth beneath the soles of his secondhand boots. Just as he had fully settled into a peaceful rhythm, he smashed into a warm, soft wall that bounced him back onto his rump. He massaged his lower back as he looked up to find Placelle Lamella in the hatchway looking down at him with her customary expression of utter stupidity. Fortunately for his nerves, she wasn’t wearing the dopey smirk, but more just a face of mild confusion. He figured she had just been innocently standing in the doorway when he had come along and shoulder-checked himself with her.
She knelt in front of him as concern began to dawn on her face and said in a tiny voice, “I’m so sorry, Arlo. Are you hurt?”
“Don’t worry,” he assured her, “I landed on the sack I keep what’s left of my pride in. Did I happen to ding your armor?”
Placelle Lamella shook her head and gathered Arlo’s watch, which was dangling from its chain on the floor between his legs. She tucked it gingerly back into the pocket on his waistcoat and then picked up something else that fell. Lifting the cartoonish bone-shape of the dog treat to her face, she examined it at length. Then, she sniffed it. Then, she nibbled one corner of it. Next, she took a whole bite and chewed it thoughtfully.
“I thought you couldn’t eat regular food.” commented Arlo while she pulled him up onto his feet.
“It goes right through me.” said Placelle Lamella. “But it’s still fun to try stuff. These are tasty, for instance.”
“You would say that.” panned Arlo, though he pulled another one from his bolero and snapped it in two to split with her. “Anyhow, what word from the artificer?”
“Oh, I have your things here,” replied the towering woman, turning back to the hatchway. “I just stopped and set them down to slip my armor back on.”
She reached back into the passageway and returned with a narrow wooden crate. Arlo took it, but focused more on what she had said. “What do you mean, ‘slip your armor back on’?”
For some reason, every bizarre behavior the woman had made him feel distinctly on guard. She seemed harmless enough, but between her sleeping in front of his door and eating his dog treat, Arlo just couldn’t help but feel like she was always up to something.
“Master Balkan wanted to look at it.” answered the Oathkeeper easily enough, “It is a blessed holy work. The Armor of Saint Tetra was forged at a time before firearms, but it is still effective against some. The Oathkeeper who has the greaves has shown me small dings from pistol shots.”
“That’s the breastplate from the Armor of Saint Tetra?” came Arlo’s skeptical reaction, along with a feeling like bugs were crawling under his skin. He’d touched it twice like it was a simple piece of tin the day before. “They just let you walk around with things like that?”
Placelle Lamella looked down at her chest with a slight frown before looking back up at Arlo and tilting her head to one side. “I’m the only Oathkeeper from my chapel big enough to fit into it. Saint Tetra was a man with a very big middle, it seems.”
Arlo set down the narrow crate again and threw open Placelle Lamella’s robes. He put his hands on the sides of her waist and felt the leather straps and buckles on the sides, then slipped his hands around the back of it to feel the engravings of falling snowflakes he had read about in a textbook. He traced their shape up Placelle Lamella’s back, and then realized he was sort of hugging her when she put her arms around him and squeezed him close to her. With his cheek deformed against her clavicle, he asked, “Don’t you think this should be in a reliquary in some vestibule where people can see it and touch it?”
She tilted her head in the other direction now. “No. The Orderhood believes these artifacts should be used so long as they are useful. They are meant to be out in the world doing Her Works.”
Arlo sighed through his nose again and patted the Oathkeeper’s back before peeling himself off her and adding, “So should we all, I suppose. Master Balkan really stayed up all night working on my things, eh?”
While Arlo knelt to try and get into the crate, Placelle Lamella nodded and watched him with interest. “He said they actually finished a while ago. He said he could have turned out a plain sword in as little as six hours if he wanted, or just given you something from the armory, but the Clannarch wanted you to have something special.”
“That is more or less the conversation we had.” Arlo replied. His fingers were prying at the edges of the crate, but he just could not seem to find a seam. He flipped the crate over to see if the lid was on the other side and found it seemed to be identical. Next, he inspected the ends of the box while explaining, “It’s just… The sabre I had before at school was a very expensive custom-made thing like that as well, and it took me nearly three months between ordering it and receiving it.”
Instead of commenting on that, Placelle Lamella helpfully took the crate from Arlo and laid it out on the ground, then placed a heavy boot on one end and drew out her hammer. The head of it was split into a clover shape that would have been practically useless for opening the crate, but she turned it around and eased the spike on the back of its head between a narrow gap in the wood. With a single deft motion, she yanked the end off the box and then stepped back to present it to Arlo with her customary wiggle of excitement.
“Thank you.” he said politely while kneeling next to the crate again. The interior had been built up so the contents were wedged inside, but with a groping hand Arlo could find two gauze-wrapped items that were definitely a sword and a revolver. Because the boathouse was so dimly lit, Arlo drew them out carefully and carried them with Placelle Lamella tagging along behind him back over to Darwin and Irina by the hatch so he could unwrap them in the light of the rising sun washing in from the south. He was pleased to hear them chatting away about one of the girls who worked in the starboard dredge house sorting nullstone, even if he was a little put-off to hear Irina describing her as a ‘fit bird’ with a ‘sweet thick arse’. Luckily for his prudish and delicate sensibility, they both reverted to exchanging wriggling eyebrows and knowing smiles as he approached.
To do otherwise would have ruined the mood of the reveal. Arlo unwound the gauze from the gun first, and was fairly well pleased to find a leather holster with a good heavy flap inside the wrapping. He drew the handgun and held it into the light to see how it differed from any other he’d find in the armory. The answer was ‘not much’, for in many respects it was a gun from the armory. A regulation Imperial Navy Scaltney-pattern top-break revolver just like the one he’d sold to the pawnbroker in Viola town lay inside with two curious deviations: First, one plane of the octagonal barrel had been engraved with a simple figure of a running hound trailing wisps of smoke behind it all the way down to the forcing cone. Second, the normal grips which were usually checkered things of rubber or resin had been replaced with a smooth ivory gently textured in a way that reminded Arlo of wood grains or wrinkled silk. He kept the still-wrapped sword crooked under one arm while he undid his garrison belt and slipped the holster through so it would sit on the front of his right thigh. He was of very little use shooting a gun with his left hand, but even less use with a gun than a sword, so until he could devise a better solution Arlo satisfied himself with thinking it may at least scare someone off when drawn. Next, came the sword.
Arlo sensed the anticipation of the onlookers around him and admitted he felt it in himself as well while the wrapping came off. It was still warm to the touch, having come out of heat treatment not long before being packed away. The more Arlo unwound the gauze, the more things it seemed to get snagged on. Finally, it came away onto the deck in a clump. Brassy curves filled his sight line as a curved brown leather scabbard took shape before him. The hilt of his last sword had been a bulbous basket of silver lacework around a narrow hilt of gilded cord; but this new one offered much less protection.
The elements meant to protect his hand were more like protrusions on this blade. Fore and aft one long band of brass had been attached to form a swooping quillon on the back and a drooping knuckle bow on the front; with the moonburst from the back of his fake coin rising from the front of the surface, coated in brass and presented to his opponents. Athwart the blade from left to right another band of brass had been affixed that curved upwards to the left as a thumb ring and downwards to the right as a swooping spoon-like nagel to protect his hand. The hilt of the blade was fit to match the grip of the revolver, a single thin spiral of gold chain set inside a long shell of ivory that ended in the the shape of a hound’s head and snout. Arlo gasped in awe as his fingers closed around the hilt, feeling how perfectly his thumb fell into the ring and noting with strange fascination the way it felt just as comfortable to have his pointer finger over as it did under the knuckle bow.
He drew it from its scabbard and fell into a quick stance like he was on the fencing grounds at school. The tip of the satin steel blade was wider than the rest, and the whole length save for the edge had been scorched and hammer-finished. He tried it from a low guard, then a hanging guard. He hefted it around, parrying imaginary blows and drawing little circles in the air, all the while still holding the scabbard in his left hand. The balance was slightly higher than the one he’d used before, and even with how much less guard it had the whole thing was still a little heavier than he was accustomed to. Despite this, Arlo found himself feeling incredibly touched by the level of detail and forethought that had gone into this so-hasty a creation.
He had been entirely unaware of the others by now until Placelle Lamella’s voice cut through his reverie as she said, “You look really pretty with your new sword, Arlo.”
Arlo found himself blushing, feeling as silly as a boy caught fencing in the garden with a stick, but still he mouthed a quick thanks before sheathing the sword again. Not satisfied to leave it alone, however, Irina corroborated the compliment with one of her own while Arlo unfastened his belt again to slide the scabbard on.
“Seriously, princeling,” she said, “The soul-sucker is right. You cut a dashing figure like that. I almost thought for a moment I was looking at a hero rising with the sun.”
“That’s because you were!” Placelle Lamella put in now, with a gentle excitement in her tone.
Arlo turned away from them and tried to just look at the water. It was still hard to tell what level of sincerity Placelle Lamella could ever have between how stupid she seemed to act and how intelligent she supposedly was; but Irina even doing the best she could to compliment him still ended up making him feel slightly humiliated. Still, the view of the sunrise over the water was magnificent. He took it all in thoughtfully, sipping the last few dregs out of his hip flask of coffee while he counted the various ships of the Imperial flotilla in his head.
“Say,” he started after a while of this practice, “Mister Huddlestone, do you think I could see the Sunseeker from here?”
Darwin approached from one side and squinted out at the task force arranged around them. The dreadnought Ravenheart was out of sight, so destroyers and frigates were all he could really pick out aside from the odd little motor pinnace acting as a tender and zipping between a few of them. The House Haradin ships were easy to pick out from the Imperial Navy ships with the sky still so pink, their grey hulls standing out much more starkly against the shimmering peaks of the dark and choppy water. Darwin twisted his head this way and that and then said, “So that big one of ours out there is the Skyfinder of eight batteries. First heavy frigate House Haradin had built from scratch as a warship and not converted from a freighter. In her shadow you see the gunboat Cloud, of one battery. A fast little thing if I ever saw one– whenever I can see the thing… Then on the other side of the hache-em-ess Zealot you will see it coming around presently, sire.”
Darwin patted his side for his toolbelt, but found it not on him. He eyed Irina’s carbine and briefly considered asking if Arlo could make use of the optic, but decided against it. Finally, he turned to Placelle Lamella and tried to divine whether or not she might even have a spyglass. But Arlo waved him off. From this distance, the Sunseeker was plain enough to see for a landsman’s eye, and though he had spent much of his childhood on ships Arlo had never taken too deep of an interest in the finer details Darwin would want to share with him.
The RCS Sunseeker was an elegant little thing motoring around from the land and arcing towards the homeship, a tall curving stem like an axehead leading the way for a narrow wedge in a sleek pear shape. Low, fully-enclosed turrets with two long guns each were placed in front of and behind a tall conning tower that came to a needle point a full story above the wide window panes of the bridge and its surrounding balcony; and the same structure was wrapped around a tall single funnel that reached into the sky with nothing more than heat waves of transparent vapor oozing up from it. Little people were only black pips inching along the deck from this distance, but Arlo still sensed a great liveliness aboard even so early. He checked his watch again.
“Eight minutes until our supposed rendezvous and they’re still pretty far out, also need to come about one more time. And I synchronized with the chronometer here on the ship yesterday.” he said with a questioning glance at Darwin. “Are they running late, or do they move even faster than I realize?”
With a knowing smirk, Darwin replied, hands jammed into his pockets, “Actually, Arlo, I’m planning on lowering you down into a lifestone barge that’s being loaded in the dredge house now, and letting them carry you out to the Sunseeker as they’re going out there anyway to refill the stonebunker on her for your big trip.”
Even though he hated the idea, Arlo said, “Ah, I’m sure it’s quicker that way.”
Darwin patted him on the back in commiseration. “Don’t worry about getting your boots dirty, shipmate. The lifestone goes through a tumbler and gets sprayed down after it comes off the sea floor. It’s cleaner than coal and methsel put together.”
