"You wanted sailors! I never said I had sailed before!" Galt exclaimed, daring not to move her boot, even if it was restricting his ability to breathe. The rain falling onto his face wasn't helping in that regard. He felt he was in some weird mixture of strangulation and drowning and the only way to get out of it was to admit something that might get him thrown off the boat in general. Galt saw the captain's eyes widened in warning, and he held his hands up disarmingly. "Ok! Ok, I'll talk!"

"Get him up," Jess ordered, stepping off him and taking another swig of the rum. Galt felt the robust dwarf ring a burly arm around his and haul him up. 

------------- 

A cutthroat shoved him into a hard wooden chair, black hair matted to his face and his hands clapped in irons. He blinked, the rough handling and the sudden lantern light a bit jarring. The ship still creaked, but the intermittent sounds of the storm was lessened now that he was inside. The room looked to be the captain's cabin, if he had to guess. It was grander than any room he expected to see, with a hammock and treasures from across the sea hung upon the walls. A skullstaff of a witch-doctor, a golden plaque from the ziggurat primitives of the southern isles, and even a bejeweled bra from the shah's pleasure houses of the desert sands. The scarred pirate behind him left the room judging by the sounds of the door, and now the thief found himself in the cabin alone with Jess, who sat, legs up on the desk between them and crossed casually. Also planted on the desk casually was the barrel of a blackpowder musket, which Jess held lazily in her offhand as she drank more of the rum she had nabbed. Whether it was the same bottle or a second one, he couldn't tell.

"Talk," she ordered with a dangerous calm. "Who are you?"

"Love what you've done with the place," Galt remarked. She pulled the hammer back on the rifle with an audible click, which rushed his mind back to business. "My name is Galt," he said suddenly, and had he time he would have cursed himself. He always used the alias 'Jack' when not in guild business. He was really off his game. "I'm uh... OK, I'm a thief. A stowaway on that galley you ransacked. I've never met any of those people in my life and I've never sailed a day. I steal things. Money, items of a precious nature, food when I can't get anything else. I'm from the Seven Ravens, a thieves guild, and I was run out of town by the watch. I jumped on a ship, you shot at it, and I wanted to save my own skin so I asked to join." 

"And why not just tell us that?" She asked, quick on the draw. Galt gritted his teeth, thinking of being dishonest for a split second, before realizing the futility of it. "I got ahold of some information many would say is too...important to keep me alive." He saw her eyebrow raised, her interest piqued. 

"And why should I not help them out in this noble endeavor? What if there's a price on your head I might want to collect on?" 

Galt's next words were forced out of him, but he still managed to sound convincing. Which was good, considering he wasn't trying to deceive her. "You can do that, but then you'll be killing the only person in the known world who's seen the Map of Algorab."