Page 71 of Night's Reckoning
Ben smiled. “I’m just saying I know people.”
They approached the ship, trying to stay out of the way of the university divers. Fabia pointed to a long line of coral stretching away from the wreck. “I think that’s the mast.”
“Let’s go closer.” Ben swam alongside the line of the broken mast. While the ship lay on its side, the hull was mainly intact. It appeared as if the entire boat had simply turned over, lain down, and sunk. “Storm maybe?”
Fabia touched her microphone. “Maybe. We are quite far from established shipping channels. The dhow would have been closer to the coast. If it was blown off course because of a storm, it could have been overcome by waves.”
“Throwing the cargo overboard wouldn’t have been an option,” Ben said. “Not when you’re carrying an offering from the Fire King.”
“You’re right.” Fabia swam closer. “The top deck is completely rotted away down to the surface of the sediment. The hull is breaking apart. I can see storage jars inside.”
Ben had researched as much as he could about Arab-Chinese trade in the ninth century, as well as the history of the dhow. The cargo on the wooden sailing vessel would have been packed in widemouthed storage jars and stowed belowdecks with ballast weights and provisions for the journey. The crew would have lived in tents or small shelters on the top deck, pulling into harbor at regular intervals to exchange goods, trade, and buy new provisions.
Dhows generally didn’t stray far from the coast, so they didn’t have to carry provisions for weeks at a time. The amount of trade goods they could carry was impressive. While overland routes were limited by time and the amount a camel could carry, maritime trade was far more efficient.
Dangerous, but efficient.
Ben took everything in, noting the depth of the sediment, the condition of the jars he could see through the hull. He didn’t have a camera with him, and he wasn’t about to borrow the cameras of the university crew, but he noticed something almost immediately.
Something he didn’t want to say over the radio.
“I wonder how many men died on this ship?” Fabia asked.
Ben swam toward her. “According to Cheng, theQamar Jadidwould have had ten crew members, but there’s no way of knowing for sure. He said at least eight would have been needed to sail it.”
“Ten men who never saw land again,” Fabia said. “Ten men who died here.”
Ben floated over the wreck in silence, thinking about those men. Thinking about drifting away in a watery grave, only to have humans and immortals arrive a thousand years later to salvage the cargo you sacrificed your life trying to deliver.
In the silent water, he felt their ghosts surrounding him.
19
Ben decided that the official discovery of theQamar Jadiddeserved a party, both for historical significance and to kill some of the tension building on the ship. Cheng’s human crew needed to socialize with the university people, who needed to at least meet the vampires—even though they wouldn’t know they were vampires—so they wouldn’t become overly curious.
He planned the party for six thirty so the vampires could join the humans who weren’t on duty. Some of the crew would be at their posts on the ship and some of the university crew would be monitoring the cameras they’d set up around the wreck.
Cameras that would be shut off as soon as the vampires started working, of course.
Meanwhile, Ben and Fabia were doing their best to decorate the mess hall with limited resources.
“I can’t believe you ordered a cake to bring on the ship.”
Ben set the frozen sheet cake on a table to defrost. “I’ve learned a few things about people in my many years on earth, Fabi. And one of them is that even enemies will sit down together if there’s cake involved. If you add champagne into the mix, you get even closer to world peace.”
“And you don’t think we should save all this for the end of the project?”
“Absolutely not.” They needed warmer relations now, before the university people realized that the vampires had already confiscated some of the artifacts.
He’d noticed the blank spaces immediately. There were naturally occurring blanks in any artifact retrieval. Things moved. They broke. If they were in the ocean, they drifted away.
But then there were new, obvious blanks.
Obvious blanks where storage jars—or the remains of them—should have been. The rest of the humans might not notice, but Ben had been around vampires too long not to be suspicious.
He wasn’t happy about it, but he was trying not to overreact. Maybe Tenzin had an explanation for it. After all, it was her father’s shipment. It would all belong to Zhang in the end.
But Zhang and Cheng had agreed to let the university to document the recovery. That was the only reason he’d been able to convince Fabia to come along. If the vampires were looting, that made Ben a liar.
