treasure || bang chan

part 3

Watching Bak Haseong in his natural habitat was a little bit fascinating. He moved with purpose, always on a mission. He had been hauling things up from below deck for a while, heaving most of it overboard. Fishing equipment and personal effects, according to him it had been slowing down the ship.

There was something wearing on my mind. It wasn't only Haseong's vague goals, or whatever reason he had for keeping me around — it was a sound. A beat, docile and muted. I'd chocked it up to the ocean, the creaking ship, but when Haseong disappeared for too long of a time, my brain started to percolate.

I leapt through a hatch in the deck, landed in the hallway below. The waves and wind outside dulled and the beat sharpened.

It was a heartbeat. The smell of a human was in the air. Someone was on the ship.

"What on earth," I murmured.

"He's squatting in the cargo hold," said a voice from behind me. I spun around. Haseong had his back to me, leaning over a wide table in a room lined with unlit lanterns.

"He? Who's he?"

"A stowaway. Unfortunate for him, hm?"

"Can't you smell him? You haven't fed yet, you should be rabid by now."

"Trust me, I'm desperate. But I figured you would be put out with me if I killed him, so I decided not to."

"You just... decided not to?" And he decided for me?

"We're a team now. Of course it would be a massive relief if you were to tell me I was wrong in my reasoning...?"

"No, you did the right thing. It's honourable." I strolled closer, satisfied. "We can take a detour to hunt. There are loads of animals in these forests."

"Mhm," he murmured briefly. His eyes were glued to the table, to the sprawling map laid over it. He'd marked a route in pencil, lines like laces stitching the landmasses together. There were five stops, each ticked with an X.

"What's all this?"

"I suppose it's time I explain." He took the pencil and scratched a dot into the blue ocean, connected it to the lines he'd already drawn. "This is where we are, roughly. We're heading down this strait to the east. We'll be stopping at each of these marks."

"What are we looking for?"

"Keys."

"Keys? For what?"

"To unlock" — he poked the last X — "this key."

"You know what, start from the beginning. Spare no detail."

"Fine. Have you ever heard of Pi Heiran?"

"I don't think so."

"He's a pirate from the early 18th century. He amassed a fortune and a cultish following, only to come down with syphilis. Before he died, he hid his treasure. The only way to find it is to claim the six keys he left along the strait. He instructed in his will that the maps be distributed to the most prominent pirates one-hundred years after his death."

"So we're on a treasure hunt."

"Not just us. The challenge has attracted some very, very keen competition. They must have quite a head-start on me now — how long was I out?"

"Five days or so."

He winced. "Blast it, we're worse off than I thought. The others have probably already found the first key, maybe even the second." He started scribbling on the map again.

"What if another pirate has a key? Does that mean the treasure is his?"

"Once a key has been claimed, it becomes a game of keep-away, as it were. Someone will kill whoever has it, and then someone else will kill them. Whoever has the first five keys will unlock the sixth — and the treasure."