by Dante King
“Aye, Lord Vance, that’s it. I think this one looks good for a start.” Rollar pointed to a large merchant ship with red sails moored nearby. “Why don’t we go talk to the captain of this ship, see what he thinks about selling?”
We walked up to the ship, where some sailors were unloading what looked like barrels of wine from the hold.
“Where’s the captain of this ship?” I asked.
“Who’s asking?” one of the sailors grunted as he glared at me with suspicion.
“Someone with a considerable amount of gold at their disposal,” I answered with a smile.
The look on the sailor’s face changed immediately, morphing into a beaming, gap-toothed smile.
“Wait right ‘ere.” He set down the barrel he was carrying. “I’ll go get ‘im.”
He returned a minute or two later with the captain of the ship, a fat fellow with a bushy gray beard and a long, blue coat. He didn’t look nearly as pleased to see me as the sailor had. Perhaps the sailor had forgotten to tell his superior that I had purses bulging with gold.
“How can I ‘elp you, sir?” the captain asked warily, looking me slowly up and down. “You ‘ave the look of a nobleman about you, dressed in finery like that. You lookin’ to purchase some of the wares I’ve imported from across the sea?”
“No,” I answered. “I need your ship. How much would you be willing to sell it for? I can pay you a very generous price.”
The captain shook his head and rubbed his chubby hands together, his eyes darting nervously from side to side, as if he suddenly feared that he was being watched. Either that or he had some men who’d attempt to steal my coin.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he mumbled, now avoiding eye contact and staring at the ground. “That would be... impossible.”
“I’ll pay you twice what this thing is worth, and that’s no exaggeration. I need your ship.”
“No, sir,” he said, still staring at the ground and seeming to grow increasingly nervous with every passing second. “Impossible, sir, impossible. I must bid you good day now, sir.”
Without another word, he turned and strode stiffly away, pausing only to whisper something to his sailors on his way back into the ship. They turned and glared in my direction and shook their heads. I walked over to the first sailor we’d spoken to, but he refused to answer any more questions and just ignored us, pretending we weren’t even there.
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked Rollar. “As soon as I mentioned buying a ship, everything changed.”
“It’s very strange, Lord Vance,” he said, “but let’s not let their odd behavior put us off. Come, let’s try that ship.” He pointed to another large merchant ship with blue and white sails, where some sailors were offloading crates.
The scenario that played out was almost identical; as soon as I mentioned buying the ship, the captain’s entire attitude changed, and it was as if he was suddenly afraid of me, like I carried the plague or leprosy. We tried a few more ships, and every single one had the same response.
“I wasn’t quite sure, but now I’m positive I smell rotting fish,” I said, exasperated. “Every sailor or captain acts like they’re looking at the Blood God himself the moment I mention buying a ship.”
“There has to be some explanation, Lord Vance,” Rollar said.
“Let’s try one more ship,” I suggested. “That one there.”
This one was only half the size of the smallest one we’d tried up to this point.
“I don’t think that will be suitable for us, Lord Vance,” Rollar said.
“That doesn’t matter. I just want to see how far down this goes. Who knows, it might be the whole damn harbor somehow conspiring not to sell boats to anyone—or just not to us.”
The ship’s captain was on deck, a scrawny, middle-aged fellow with a thick black mustache and a mop of curly black hair streaked with gray. He was reclining against the mast and swigging on a bottle of rum. Past glassy-eyed, he was my best chance at finding out why I’d been refused so many times. After all, swivelly eyes, swivelly tongue.
“Hail, good captain!” I called to him from the quay. “Can I have your ear for a moment? I’ve got gold, and lots of it, and I hope that’s enough for you to give us our share of your attention!”
The captain stood on unsteady legs, wobbled over to the edge of the ship, and looked down at me, smiling drunkenly.
“What can I ‘elp you with then, mister fancy-pants?” he asked, not in a mocking or unkind manner.
“I was wondering if you could share some information, is all,” I answered. “And I do pay quite handsomely for the right information.”
“Do you now?” he slurred. “Shoot then, my friend.”
“Why does everyone act like I’ve asked them to sacrifice their firstborn son whenever I mention buying a ship? Answer me truthfully, and I’ll pay you enough to find a hooker tonight who you can fuck without having to put a sack over her head or a blindfold over your own eyes!” I winked at him, and he laughed goodnaturedly in return.
“That sounds like a perfectly good offer to me, m’lord! Aye, the wenches in Lough Harbor are not too comely, are they? All right, I’ll tell ye. Throw me up a few gold pieces first, though, if you please.”
I tossed him three gold pieces, already enough for him to find a vaguely attractive whore later. He bit into each of the gold pieces and then nodded.
“It’s Church of Light business, m’lord,” he said. “The order has come from the bloody Seraphim ‘imself, I ‘eard. Nobody’s allowed to sell ships in any ‘arbor in the whole of Prand. If you’re caught selling a ship, not only do you lose your captain’s license permanently, but the fuckers will take off an arm, a leg, and an ear, and poke one a’ yer bloody eyes out too! You’re not going to find anyone—me included—willing to risk losing ‘alf his limbs and an eye an’ ear, no sir! Not for any amount a’ gold coin! And the Church—they’ve got spies all along the harbor front ‘ere, making sure that nobody breaks this command. That’s why nobody will talk to you, m’lord. By the Lord of Light, I’m risking a hundred lashes just by talking, I am! You’d best go now, before anyone sees us. I’m an honest bloke I am, don’t want no trouble.”
“What about passengers?” I asked. “Are ships allowed to carry passengers?”
“Only with the approval of Archmonk Brentwurst, the ol’ bastard.”
“Thanks.” I tossed the captain another gold coin before I walked over to Elyse, who was attempting to convince a sailor about the likelihood of catching venereal disease.
“As you can see, the Lord’s holy laws help prevent you from infection,” she said. “They aren’t a burden to obey, but for your own good.”
“Whatever you say,” the sailor replied with an eye-roll. “All I know is that my cock’s gettin’ wet tonight. Ven. . . ven. . . whatever the fuck I catch.”
“Sorry to interrupt your little indoctrination session,” I said to Elyse, “but the only way we can buy a ship is if we have official church papers. And we need to get them from some guy named Archmonk Brentwurst. Do you know him?”
Elyse scowled. “I do. There’s no way he’ll give you them. And if I asked on your behalf, he’d throw me out as soon as I saw him.”
“You two don’t get along?”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid you’ll need to find another way.”
“Damn. Let’s meet with the others and see what we can come up with.”
Chapter Six
Elyse, Rami-Xayon, Rollar, and I met the rest of my party at the large inn off the harbor front where we all planned to spend the night. I explained in detail the events of the day as we sat around a large table in the corner of the gloomy, smoky establishment. We had to yell to hear each other over the raucous laughter of drunken sailors, the cackling of tavern whores, and a small band playing foot-stomping shanty songs. Despite the jovial mood of the place, my party members and I wore scowls.
“That piece of shit Elandriel is doing his best to make my l
ife difficult,” I said. “There’s not a single captain in this entire fucking harbor willing to take the risk of selling a ship, no matter how much gold I offer.”
“I have an idea,” Anna-Lucielle said.
“Go on,” I said as I waved my hand for her to continue.
“We can use my Charm powers to convince them.”
“You just have to make sure Brentwurst and his minions don’t see you,” Elyse said. “Although I doubt that will be much of a problem; they wouldn’t be seen dead in the docks.”
“We could pose as clergy,” Anna-Lucielle said with a sly smile.
While the rest of my party continued listing elaborate ways to get my army onto some ships, my attention started to wander, and I picked up fragments of other conversations drifting around the smoky tavern. One sentence in particular grabbed my attention.
“Aye,” a sailor was saying in a hushed voice, “the man in the hooded cloak is bloody real, all right. He may sound like nothing but a silly, superstitious rumor to you people here in Prand, but across the sea in Yeng, they’re scared shitless of him. Where he’s seen, death follows. Young women, it seems, is the monster’s particular taste. They disappear from their homes whenever someone sees this fella around, and their bodies are found drained of blood later.”
“So he’s a vampire, then, this. . . what did you call him. . . hooded man?” his drinking buddy said.
“No,” the sailor answered. “I said he was the man in the cloaked hood. But hooded man works just fine. And he ain’t no vampire. He walks in the sun carefree, and when the bodies are found, they don’t have no teeth marks on their necks. He slits their throats with a blade of some sort, but here’s the fucked-up thing: when he kills them, the blood is all just gone.”
“Gone? Where does it go? He drinks it? Perhaps he’s a thrall for a vampire?”
“Enough with the vampires already. You got the idea in your head ever since you went with that girlie who liked to bite. Said she was a vampire, and that’s why you had to drive a stake through her heart.”
“She was a vampire.”
“Enough!” the sailor slammed his first on the table, and his friend jumped. The sailor’s expression hardened. “I don’t know what the Hooded Man does with it, but it’s like the blood just vanishes into thin air.”
“Even if he isn’t a vampire, he sounds like a right bloody terrifying monster, he does.”
“You’re telling me! And what’s more, he can fly or something. He’ll be seen on one side of Yeng one day, and then somehow appear on the other side of it the next day. Not even the dragons of legend could fly that far, that fast.”
“Dragons,” the other voice said, “isn’t that something else that’s rumored to be happening across the ocean? Forgive me for saying so, friend, but you’re sounding like you’ve been smoking some Yengish brown powder, the kind that melts your brain in your skull!”
“I’m not bonkers, you shitlicker! I didn’t say nothing about no dragons, did I? Everyone knows there’s no such bloody thing. But there are strange creatures over in Yeng, and nobody has a fucking clue what they are or where they come from. All they do know is that they come at night, and they feed on people. They’re damn huge—yeah, like dragons, you’re not going to see me avoid some word like a coward—and what I heard is they’re the pets of some crazy fucking warlock. Whatever it is, however these bloodthirsty things are connected, something dodgy is going on in Yeng; believe me, something real dodgy is going on there. I’m quitting my ship, I am, I’m not going on any more voyages to that cursed place. I’ll just get work on a fishing boat around here. Boring, but safe. No more crossing the ocean for me, no thank you!”
Now that was interesting. I knew one thing for certain about the Hooded Man, and that was that he couldn’t fly. He had gone through the portal at the Temple of Blood, and I had no doubt that the portal had enabled him to teleport across the ocean to Yeng. There had to be more of these portals there, allowing him to cross vast swathes of that huge continent in the blink of an eye. I wondered if my destruction of the portal at the Temple of Blood had caused him to be trapped in Yeng, or if other portals still existed here in Prand. If only I could find a portal myself; it certainly would be a lot easier than finding a ship.
The night ended with dozens of outlandish plans that might land us a ship, but none of them sounded like they would work.
Everyone retired to the inn’s sleeping quarters, but I decided to go for a midnight stroll to think. Shortly after I left, I noticed I was being followed. With the mood I was in, the mugger sneaking along behind me was about to get his entrails ripped out and wrapped around his windpipe.
I quickly turned a corner, then flattened myself against the wall, waiting to pounce on the fool who was tailing me. He hurried around the corner a few seconds later, and I was on him in the blink of an eye. Before he even knew what had happened, I had my left forearm crushing his throat against a wall, his right wrist pinned tight. In my right hand was Grave Oath, the dagger’s razor-sharp point hovering in the air a hair’s breadth from the man’s eyeball.
He was a rough-looking fellow, with a bushy black beard, greasy black hair that hung limply around his shoulders, and a craggy face that was covered with scars. A black eyepatch covered one eye, and he was missing three fingers on his left hand. This, along with the ornate cutlass sheathed on his hip, indicated that he was a veteran of plenty of swordfights.
“You picked the wrong target to rob, motherfucker,” I said. “Instead of a free purse of gold, you’re going to get a free disemboweling unless you can persuade me not to in the next two seconds.”
“Wait!” he spluttered, his single working eyeball focused on Grave Oath’s tip. “I’m no mugger! I’m a ship’s captain. You, you be needin’ a ship, isn’t that right?”
I eased the pressure on his throat. “That’s right. But I’ve had no pleasant experience with captains in this port town. Who are you? What tells me you won’t hand me over to the Church of Light?”
“My name is Captain Argryl,” he rasped. “And my ships are not in this ‘ere harbor. If they were, me and my whole crew would be hangin’ from the gibbets at the crossroads outside town.”
“Pirates,” I said with a smile. “I should have skipped these merchant cowards and sought you guys out right away. You are, after all, experts in smuggling contraband across the seas.”
“Aye, aye! We take any cargo, living or otherwise, and we smuggle it anywhere.”
“Most of my cargo is in the ‘otherwise’ category,” I said. “But I’m sure you’ll have no problem with that.”
I released Captain Argryl from my grip, and he spent a few moments clutching this throat and coughing. When he wiped the spittle from his cracked lips with the back of his tanned hand, his mouth curved up into a greedy grin.
“I saw you offering some very weighty lookin’ bags o’ gold to other captains,” he said. “I’ll be up-front and tell you now, friend, that my ships don’t come cheap.”
My smile widened. “My name is Vance Chauzec, Captain Argryl, and if your ships were cheap, I wouldn’t want them. Where can I find them? And how many do you have?”
“Three big ships.” He rubbed his hands together as his eye eagerly searched my body for the purses of gold. “Same size as the biggest merchant ships in this harbor, they are.”
“I’m sure we can come to an agreement that we will both find favorable,” I said. “Where do we meet you, if your ships aren’t in the harbor?”
“We’re moored in a secret cove. Five miles due north of here. Meet me there with your passengers and contraband just after the sun has set. It’s best that we do our business and set sail in darkness. Take the road heading north out of town, and when you see an abandoned farmhouse around three miles out, go straight past it, west. Stay due west through a small forest, and you’ll eventually come to some cliffs. Down below ‘em is the cove.”
“If you’re setting me up for a robbery or ambush, it’ll go very bad
ly for you, Captain.”
“It’s no setup, sir, I assure you. I wouldn’t want to cross swords wi’ the likes of you, not after the move you just pulled on me.”
“Wise choice.” I sheathed Grave Oath. “I’ll see you on the cliffs just after dusk.”
“Aye, I’ll see you then,” the greasy captain said before he slipped off into the shadows.
I headed back to the tavern to tell the others the good news, but I didn’t want to celebrate just yet. I didn’t trust Captain Argryl half as far as I could throw him, and while it seemed that his ships were the only way we’d be getting off Prand, I suspected that there would be more to it than simply handing over a bunch of gold. I was prepared to do whatever it took, though, to get my party and my army to Yeng.
We left Lough Harbor later the following afternoon, and I was glad to leave the port behind. I remained wary about this meeting with Captain Argryl and half expected it to be some sort of ambush. If it was, the captain would quickly find out he had bitten off more than he could chew.
As Argryl had said, there was an abandoned farmhouse a couple miles out of town. Past that, we made our way through a small forest as the last rays of the day’s sun faded from orange to red. By the time we reached the cliffs overlooking the small cove, the sun had just descended. Three large ships with were moored at the cove, bearing what looked like Church of Light flags.
“We’ve been fooled,” Isu said.
“No,” Elyse said. “I doubt the Church of Light would have any reason to be in this cove.”
“You be right, lassie,” a voice called out.
Captain Argryl appeared from behind a group of boulders, a dozen men behind him. The men looked just as rough and ready to fight as Argryl and to a man, they were scarred, brutish-looking fellows. All wore cutlasses and hatchets on their hips, with some carrying pistol crossbows too.