Chapter 85 - The Weight of Paper and Steel
The air in Massawa reeked of salt, sweat, and sorrow. Musyoka coughed as the thick humidity pressed against his chest like a burden he couldn’t throw off. It had taken days to arrive here disguised as beggars, worn sandals scraping over burning sands, their bodies cloaked in dirt and fatigue to blend into the shadows of the suffering.
But nothing had prepared Musyoka for the stench of grief in this place.
Massawa was a city carved in contrast—glittering domes in the distance for nobles and foreigners, while slaves lay hunched like broken tools near the harbor’s edge. The whip cracked more than once as they passed, and no one flinched. Not even the children.
"Monsters," Musyoka muttered under his breath.
He and the scout had moved silently until word reached them from whispers in back alleys. Naliaka and Ndengu had taken shelter in a crumbling storage house, surrounded by crates rotting with age. They looked thinner, hardened, their eyes sharp like blades dulled by constant slicing.
"Did you get our message?" Naliaka asked the moment he slipped through the back.
Musyoka, face drawn from the journey, didn’t answer. He simply reached into his tattered tunic and pulled out a roll of papers bound with cord, a sealed letter tucked alongside it.
"Your orders," he said hoarsely, "are to find passage to Nuri. Get this to King Lusweti. They’re the key to this war."
Naliaka’s fingers trembled as she undid the cord. Her eyes scanned the pages—blueprints for ships unlike any they’d seen before, sketches of rigging systems, designs for curved hulls, even basic artillery mounts. But it didn’t stop there—there were training regimens, compass designs, wave-current maps, wind analysis charts.
"Prince Khisa drew all this?" she asked in disbelief.
"He’s a prince, but he works like a man possessed," Musyoka replied. "He believes this war will be decided at sea as much as on land."