A clever thought flits into your mind—you summon your deepest voice and tell them all, Captain and crew, that you are not in fact some simple sailor.
Rather: you are from the Company. The Company of Men.
A low gasp leaks from the sailors, and the Captain’s frame shrinks, the fury in his eyes snuffed.
“The Company,” he repeats, doleful. “So. Finally they have come for me.”
He looks once more to the note, but the words are gone, rain-blurred to naught. “Let us take, then, our tea,” he says, “and you and I shall speak about how exactly we’ll strive to survive the next three days.”
He turns heel and retreats into his quarters. The sailors fall mutteringly away from you. Their hard expressions have softened to curiosity—and a measure of fear. The Company of Men is the world’s shadow mercenary group, descended from the old ninjae of the Korean peninsula. Composed of orphans trained in deception and death from the days they can walk, trained in secret locations whispered across the continents like passing clouds, until finally they are hired out to the highest bidder. The strange death of the local idealist: tell-tale markings of the Company. The mill burning days after the miller refused to pay taxes: the Company. The archbishop’s suicide: the Company. All have heard of the Company. It is the creeping gooseflesh of even the hardest men.
The sailors step aside, and you pass through the wide berth and walk on down the hall. You come to a door. Above it a sign: Captain’s Quarters. You knock, wait for internal assent, then turn the handle.
If you believe doorways always lead to the places they suggest, enter here.
Or perhaps you don’t particularly care for appropriations of William Blake … ?
“Hush, forget all that. Follow me.”
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