Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Smuggler who doesn't mind the ritualistic bloodstains because cultists pay good
"Cap'n, are you sure about this one?"
Riocca stares at the wooden crate, their only cargo. The only cargo they need, this time, with the amount that the hooded men from the Blue Chapel are paying.
The Blue Chapel are a joke, to the locals, with the old ruined church they've chaotically half-rebuilt over twenty years, with their funny little hoods and mutters and their stupid foreigner money they ran out of because they don't know what it's worth and overpaid for everything like it was water. And for fifteen of those years they've been paying the local boys in the excise circumvention trade to move crates; always out, away from the chapel, presumably to their deep-pocketed city idiots in Girolesca.
Riocca's not an idiot. He's carefully opened some of their chicken-blood-daubed crates, over the years, to make sure of what they're up to. Rocks, mostly; the ones with fossils in. Sometimes ones with ancient carvings, the ones you find up in the dusty hills, five-pronged and writhing, or the ones that are like writing made all of triangles that nobody can read.
They've got weirder, this past year or two. Tense, sullen, arrogant. They want more boxes moved than ever before. And now this: a crate big enough to for two men to lie down in the bottom of, shoulder to shoulder, and tall enough to swallow a church altar.
It's heavy. Heavier on its own than a dozen of the knee-high cubes of their stupid rocks. And it's stained with a lot of blood; he's not sure how many chickens you'd need for that, but...they don't keep any animals but chickens up there, and he never heard of them trading for any other livestock.
"Crew don't like it, Cap'n," his first mate says apprehensively.
It's nailed shut with more nails than he'd care to count. He has noticed that every seventh nail head gleams differently. He wouldn't care to say that they're made of silver, without digging one out, and he doesn't know that he cares to do that—
"They're saying it's bad luck. Sandro says he gets a pain in his tooth when he goes near it."
Sandro drinks a lot, and talks a lot. But the box has a feeling to it, a heavy, foreboding feel...and Sandro means his gold tooth. And the Captain doesn't think he's lying.
"Maybe we tell the hooded boys that we only take the small boxes from now on," the Captain says, staring at it.
But he has a feeling in his gut, somehow, that with this one, the boys from the Blue Chapel are finished.