When Renato stepped onto the wooden pier, he felt a firmness beneath his feet entirely unlike the ship's deck.
Although sea salt and damp had eaten away at the planks until they were nearly rotten, leaving them in far worse condition than the magically protected deck of the Magic Ship, the ground beneath Renato's feet remained perfectly still, neither rising nor shifting with the waves.
He stood in the middle of the pier and surveyed the chaos before him.
Dead fish crowded the water on both sides of White Harbor's docks. On the shore, fishermen were gutting a sea beast more than twice a man's height in length, its entrails and scales running through the gaps between the paving stones into the water and drawing swarms of flies and circling seabirds.
Blood and excrement mingled on the ground, trampled into brown sludge by countless feet. The air reeked of rotting fish and shrimp mixed with sodden timber.
Several shirtless laborers were unloading a ship that had just docked. They jogged along the gangplank with sacks on their shoulders, sweat rolling down the backs of their necks and dripping into puddles at their feet, sending tiny ripples across the water.
Renato withdrew his gaze, turned sideways to wave at De Leon, who was seeing him off beside the pier, and set out toward the streets of White Harbor.
He had politely declined Captain De Leon's invitation to stay aboard. More than ten days at sea had exhausted all the novelty Renato had felt when he first embarked.
Now, the Swordsman wanted only a room on land where the floor would not sway, a taste of the local food, and a good rest.
According to Captain De Leon, White Harbor was not a particularly large island. Most of its buildings were wooden,