“Where are what?”
“The other forty-eight shipyards that aren’t in Arast.”
“Oh. All over. Kafia, Persep, Amariyan.Sixup north in Laemuir—lots of good trees in Laemuir, nice dry weather. A couple in Arjuneh. Ephucca, Quassa sai Bendra. We just signed a contract to open one in Lapaladi.” He squinted into the dark, looking for the scrap heap. Everything outside the lamplight was just dark mounds and shadows, and in the milky moonlight nothing was significantly distinguishable from anything else. “Why do you ask?”
“You asked me how many there were as if you thought I would be interested in the answer. Sir.”
“Oh. Are you?”
“Sir,” Evemer said. And then, unexpectedly, “Yes.”
Kadou hadn’t known that Evemer had any interest in ships or shipbuilding, but then Evemer hadn’t yet owned to liking or being interested inanythingbeyond sword drills, chess, and the fine art of a perfectly nuanced stony silence. “It was just drunk rambling on my part,” he said. “Don’t mind me.”
“How does it work?”
Kadou resisted the urge to turn and stare at him. The lamplight would go right in his eyes, and then what little night vision he’d adjusted to would be shot. “Uh, shipyards?”
“Foreign ones.”
“We sign a contract—usually a twenty-or forty-year one, for a lease on land to build a shipyard on. It’s like establishing an embassy—itisan embassy in a lot of ways. We send a guildmaster and a handful of overseers and a hundred or so shipbuilders to start with, and we hire locals for felling the trees and a lot of the less-skilled labor. The guildmasters make sure all the ships meet specification before they’re launched, and then they’re brought to one of the Arasti shipyards and checked again, and if they’re properly made, the masters here give them certification of quality.” That wasn’t very interesting information, and Kadou felt a little bit like he ought to be presenting it better. The shipbuilders and all those shipyards were his, after all—at least, they were his by courtesy as the Duke of Harbors, though they were legally owned by the Arasti government. They were his responsibility, ultimately. It was his job to . . . Well, to make sure that there were people whose job it was to make sure there wereotherpeople whose jobs involved looking after the foreign shipyards, negotiating contracts, and ensuring that standards of quality were met or exceeded.
He should say something interesting. He should sayanythingthat wasn’t dreadfully boring. Ugh, and he was leaving the point of drunkenness where he was immune to anxiety. Lovely. “Did you know,” he said, thinking quickly, “that the yards in Laemuir each make four ships a week?”
“No.”
Damn. Maybe that wasn’t interesting enough. “We sell some of them, but the ones that we keep get brought right here to Kasaba to have their hulls painted in all those bright colors and patterns. For good luck.” Well, that’s what theytoldeveryone, anyway. It had to have something to do with the trick of avoiding the sea serpents, but Kadou would never breathe a word of that theory to anyone. “Can’t go to sea without luck. Is this the scrap heap?”
It did seem to be—a loose pile of odds and ends, including some yard-long sections of logs, left over from when the masts were sawn to length. Kadou picked around the edges of the pile, nudging boards and beams out of the way until Evemer made an unhappy noise. “Sir,” he said, as if he were about to beg Kadou not to drown a bag of unwanted kittens. “Sir.”
“What?”
“Your hands.”
“It’s fine.”
“Sir.Please.”
Kahyalar!Kadou mentally cursed. Why were they all like this? “It’s just bits of wood, calm down.”
“Sir.”
“Which are you going to start with? ‘But it will make your hands rough’ or ‘But you might crack a nail’?” Kadou unearthed a likely-looking log and hauled it onto its end. Too narrow, distinctly too narrow. More like a piece of a bowsprit than a mast. He tipped it to the side.
“Sir,” Evemer said, tortured.
“Funny how none of you kahyalar complain about my archery calluses. Funny how none of you get faint when I prick my fingers doing needlework. If you hate this so much, you can always put the lamp down and help, you know,” Kadou said peevishly. “Then my hands would only get half-ruined. Maybe just a chipped nail instead of a broken one.”
Evemer . . . did. He set the lantern on the cobbles and stepped in to help.
The clattering of the wood echoed very loudly through the shipyard, and when Kadou glanced up at the guildhall, he saw a few guards standing and watching them at the corner of the building. Too far away to see their faces, but they seemed calm. Sometimes one of them turned a little and said something to another. Kadou put them out of his mind.
He found another large log, primarily by stubbing his toes on it. Even before he was done cursing, Evemer was at his side, helping haul it out from under the rest.
“Hm. That’s about the right size, isn’t it?”
Evemer frowned, peering at the end of it in the dark, rubbing his fingers over some—smudge? No, it flaked off. Impossible to distinguish color or detail in the scanty moon-and starlight like this. Kadou went for the lantern and held it up so its light fell over the end of the log.
Flakes of red paint. The wood looked a bit worn.