The trade city of Pelua.
Built atop a vast lagoon where the sea met the Rene River, the city had possessed, from the very beginning, an inherent limitation: it could not survive on agriculture or production from the land alone.
And so Pelua went out to sea in order to live.
Behind the saying that all the gold coins of the continent gathered in Pelua lay another meaning: the largest and greatest number of ships on the continent dropped anchor in this harbor.
“Hey, Pier Three over there! Check the waterline on that galleon from the Southern Union! She’s eaten so much cargo she’s about to sink below the surface! Fine them for exceeding cargo capacity!”
Pietro, the chief inspector of Pelua Harbor, was raising his voice again that morning amid the sharp stink of salt and tar that stabbed at his nose.
“Chief! This is the cargo manifest for the spice merchantman from East India. Please stamp it for customs clearance.”
“Let’s see. Three hundred pounds of pepper, one hundred fifty pounds of nutmeg… Did they pay the anchorage tax and port entry tax? Good, cleared.”
Pietro pulled the quill from behind his ear and pressed the official seal of Pelua Customs firmly into the red sealing wax.
Before his eyes, hundreds—thousands—of splendid merchant ships lay at anchor, their masts stretching upward like a forest with no end in sight.
From cogs fitted with square sails to caravels that pierced through headwinds with sleek lateen sails.
They were Pelua’s magnificent maritime power, hailed as the rulers of the sea, and the beating heart that sustained this city.
“Hah, and today the tide’s out and the wind’s dead. A windless hell.”
Pietro clicked his tongue as he looked at the motionless weather vane.
Without wind, even the greatest sailing ship was nothing more than a wooden shell.
To leave the harbor, dozens of galleys rowed by slaves had to attach ropes and groan their way out, towing the ships all the way into the middle of the sea.
“The fellows setting sail today are going to bleed from galley rental fees.”
Pietro was chuckling as he turned to the next document.
“Inspector. Stamp this departure permit, if you would.”
A dark shadow fell over his head.
When Pietro lifted his gaze, a bizarre ship moored at the pier filled his entire view.
“…And what sort of monstrosity is this?”
A breath of disbelief slipped from Pietro’s mouth before he knew it.
The ship that had entered the harbor was far removed from Pelua’s grand and elegant merchantmen.
It did seem to have been remodeled from an old cargo ship that had once been the largest in the port, but the enormous masts that were the very life of a ship had all been sawed off from the base and vanished.
Instead, some black iron cylinder sat hideously in the middle of the deck, and on either side of the ship, huge waterwheels, the kind one might use to thresh grain, were attached in a ridiculous fashion.
“No sails, no seats for sailors to row, either? What is this, some floating wooden bathtub… Huh?”
Pietro rubbed his eyes at the dark blue flag hanging from the stern.
[Karnoble]
The legendary merchant company said to have made a dazzling revival after recently devouring Pelua’s textile market.
But common sense at sea was different from common sense on land.
No matter how much money they had made on land, with a crippled ship like this that had no sails, it was obvious they would sink before they could even cross the waves off the coast.
“A departure request from the Karnoble Merchant Company…”
Pietro skimmed over the cargo manifest he had been handed.
Then he let out a laugh of disbelief.
“Listen here, you! The cargo weight written here is enough for five hundred wagonloads of cotton cloth. Are you joking? If you load that insane weight onto this sail-less plank of a ship, you’ll crash straight into a reef and meet the Dragon King before—”
Pietro, who had been about to lecture him, checked the ship’s waterline—the line that marked how deep the vessel sat in the water—and shut his mouth.
Though the ship was laden with tremendous weight and sat deep in the water, the black mass of iron embedded at its center was maintaining the center of gravity with an almost grotesque perfection, allowing the ship to remain miraculously level and stable.
“…Hm. Well, it passes the cargo loading regulations. No, but how do you plan to get this enormous thing out of the harbor with no wind and without rowing? Don’t block the way for the other merchant ships. Just quietly call for a galley.”
Pietro stamped the document with a thud and handed it back, as if he could not be bothered.
At any rate, he assumed it was some lunatic boat game played by a rich young master, and that it would fail to even leave the harbor, drifting about for several days as an object of ridicule.
“It’s stamped. Depart… or don’t.”
The merchant company foreman snatched up the document and sent a rough sailor’s hand signal toward the wheelhouse.
“Permission’s been granted! Chief Manager! Open the valve!”
“Now then, go row your oars in this windless hell and— Huh?”
Just as Pietro was turning to look at the next merchant ship’s documents.
Shuuuuuk—!!
All of a sudden, an overwhelming screech of friction burst from the smokestack embedded in the center of Karnoble’s ship, loud enough to tear through the eardrums.
At the same time, black smoke and boiling white steam shot into the sky like a volcanic eruption.
“Cough! Kgh! Wh-what is it?! Is the ship on fire?! A ship with no mast is on fire! Bring water to put it out at—!”
Just as Pietro, pale with fright, was about to call the harbor guards.
Thud.
Thud-thud. Rumble-rumble-rumble!
The entire wooden deck of the harbor began to shake.
No, the ship itself, cradling that black lump of iron, was vibrating like a beast with a gigantic heartbeat.
Clank—!! Kwaaaaah—!!
And before Pietro’s two eyes, an unbelievable sight unfolded.
The ridiculous, enormous waterwheels attached to either side of the ship began to rotate with a thunderous roar.
“Wh-why is that turning on its own…?!”
The heavy wooden blades of the paddle wheels mercilessly struck the seawater off Pelua’s coast.
Sprays of water as large as houses shattered white and burst in every direction.
Bwaaaaaaaaang——!!!
A ship’s whistle, more violent and louder than the roar of any beast that had ever existed in the world, shook the entirety of Pelua Harbor.
Thousands of sailors and inspectors preparing for departure on other merchant ships leapt out onto the decks in shock and stared at that bizarre vessel.
“Insane… This is insane! It’s moving! That monster is moving!”
Pietro dropped the file he had been holding.
Bearing the dreadful load of five hundred wagonloads of cotton cloth, the enormous sailing ship with neither sails nor oars began to slowly leave the harbor.
A windless sea, without even a single breath of air.
On top of that, it was a time when a fierce flood tide was flowing in from the sea toward the harbor.
These were terrible conditions under which even Pelua’s swiftest sailing ships could barely advance only when slaves spat blood while rowing.
But Karnoble’s monster, as if it cared nothing for the laws of nature, crushed and tore through the seawater, fiercely gaining speed.
Clank! Splash! Clank! Splash!
“Th-that speed… That’s impossible! Even a hundred galleys pulling it wouldn’t reach that speed!”
Pietro’s jaw hung open as if it might fall off.
Before his eyes, Karnoble’s ship, spewing black smoke, overtook the harbor waterway where Pelua’s finest fast ships crawled like turtles, passing them like a flying arrow.
In the ship’s wake, great swells and waves rose, causing the splendid sailing ships nearby to bob like fallen leaves as sailors screamed.
“Look over there! It’s going straight through the sea!”
Barely ten minutes.
The common sense that it took half a day to get through the harbor’s complicated waterways was utterly shattered.
When Pietro came back to his senses, Karnoble’s bizarre ship had already passed the edge of the harbor and was vanishing into a black dot toward the horizon of the open sea.
All that remained was a long trail of black smoke drawn across the sea, and a vast white wake violently torn open behind it.
“…”
Silence.
The tens of thousands of people in Pelua Harbor stood as if bewitched, staring blankly out at the sea.
“What… in the world was that?”
Chief Inspector Pietro murmured as he stared blankly down at the red wax seal that had fallen to the floor.
It was the moment when the great history of Pelua’s maritime trade, built over hundreds of years upon wind and currents and the sweat of slaves,
was reduced entirely to a relic of the old era by a single burst of black smoke.
*
Our first destination was a city at the southernmost tip of the Rom Peninsula, set upon a narrow and rugged strait cutting between the mainland and a vast southern island.
Masina Harbor.
Masina was an absolute strategic point in peninsula trade, connecting the eastern and western seas of the Rom Peninsula, and the core of the Southern Union that every merchant ship wishing to pass through the strait had to go through.
If they could not pass through this narrow strait, merchant ships would have to circle all the way around the enormous island and waste months of time. Thus, all manner of rare goods and great merchants from the continent naturally gathered at Masina Harbor, creating immense wealth.
But the Masina Strait was also a graveyard infamous among sailors, equal to its golden reputation.
Mad whirlpools created by the collision of two different seas, and fickle gusts that changed direction from moment to moment.
In order to pass safely through this strait, ordinary sailing ships had no choice but to drop anchor in the harbor and wait for a favorable wind, and in the worst cases, prepare themselves for a tedious wait of nearly half a month to a full month.
“Haha… Hahahaha! This is insane! This is truly insane, Elfonso!”
On the deck, covered in acrid coal smoke, Ayla clutched the railing tightly and screamed in delight.
“We’re just tearing straight through Masina Strait’s infamous contrary currents head-on!”
In her emerald eyes, the overwhelming sensation of speed devouring the sea was reflected in full.
Far in the distance, the giant sailing ships of other merchant companies, trapped in the strait’s whirlpools and windless waters with their sails hanging limp, were being swept backward one after another like a stationary landscape painting.