“Can’t we go in tonight?” Aris asked. “Cheia is just in there!”

“Now, now.” Kelsey took Aris’s arm and walked her down the street. She switched languages to Zamarran. “We need to have a plan.”

“Just go in there with explosions and guns and get her out,” Aris muttered, following Kelsey’s lead with languages. “Those walls don’t look any tougher than the ones back in Rused.”

“Absolutely,” Kelsey promised. “And this time, as we leave, I’ll drop a horde of hungry undead. They’ll scour the compound clean of life and then burst out into the city, devouring all in their path.”

“Um, I don’t think that last bit…” Aris objected.

“I can see it now,” Kelsey said. “Shambling over the piles of corpses, blood running through the streets… until some Fourth Tier comes along and puts an end to all the fun.”

“What?” Aris asked.

“What’s worse is that if we’re still around at that point, he’ll find and put an end to us as well,” Kelsey said morosely. “People get so moralistic over a mountain of bodies.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Anton said sardonicly. Zaphar was just looking at them, unable to follow the conversation.

“That’s why we need a plan,” Kelsey said firmly, switching back to Elitran. “We need to know how many people we’re taking, we need a place to take them, and we need a way to get them home.”

“Is it not the same plan as before?” Zaphar asked once he was included again. “An abandoned house, and a hired ship?”

“Maybe,” Kelsey said. “I don’t have any other ideas right now, but that plan has a few problems.”

“What problems?” Anton asked.

“For one, this town is much more well-ordered than Rused was. I don’t know if we’ll be able to find a neighbourhood where we can move into an abandoned house and not attract attention. For another, we’re not on the edge of the Empire anymore. Once Captain al-Nazari got over the horizon, he was off the map. We’ll have to sail up to and past Rused before we get to that point.”

“But,” Aris protested, “It’s only two days until the auction. Do we have time to make a new plan?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kelsey assured her. “If the auction gets held, we’ll attend and make note of who buys her. It will actually be easier stealing her from her new owner.”

“Them,” Aris said, frowning. “I want to save Cheia, but I can’t abandon the rest of them.

“Sure, sure,” Kelsey agreed. “We can track them all. Now, let’s head down to the docks to see what are options are.”

They spent the rest of the day walking the docks, with Kelsey getting more and more frustrated. When they got back to the inn, she was quietly fuming.

“Not a hint of impropriety!” she exclaimed. “Not a sniff of anything untoward!”

“You said it was a well-run town,” Anton pointed out. The four of them were eating their evening meal in the shared room.

“No town is that well-run. Some of them must be smuggling things. The problem is that none of them are willing to tell a stranger that.”

At issue was that none of the ship’s captains were willing to take on passengers who didn’t have travel papers. Kelsey had hinted at more money in return for less checking, but none of them had taken the bait.

Kelsey looked at Zaphar speculatively, and he sighed. “It will take more than a few days to find and gain the trust of the criminal underworld here,” he said. “And you’ve got me scouting the compound tonight.”

Kelsey nodded her reluctant agreement. “I do have some ways that might get us in contact with them sooner but in this town, they might get me arrested.”

“No getting arrested,” Anton insisted. He didn’t want the deaths that would cause on his conscience. Kelsey stuck her tongue out at him but didn’t protest otherwise.

“We could buy a boat,” she said thoughtfully.

“How would we crew it?” Anton asked sceptically.

“I’ve lowered the water level on the Sunless Sea,” Kelsey said as if that answered him. Everyone looked at her, puzzled, but Zaphar was more confused than the rest of them.

“What is the Sunless Sea, and how do you change the water level?” he asked, but Kelsey ignored him to answer Anton’s unspoken question.

“Enough to put a boat on top of it,” she said. “And train some Skeleton Sailors.”

“Monsters crewing the boat? Monsters?” Zaphar asked. He’d absorbed the idea that Kelsey was a dungeon, but he hadn’t really accepted the reality of it.

“They’d be terrified,” Anton pointed out. “I’d be terrified. How do skeletons know how to sail?”

Kelsey waved a hand vaguely. “The magic takes care of things like that.”

“You’d still have to get out of the harbour,” Zaphar said. “The Harbourmaster, I think, will want to check your papers. He might have some objections to skeletons crewing the boat. If not the harbourmaster, then the navy might intercept. They would surely sink us on sight.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“Hmm,” Kelsey pondered. “If we had a deck-mounted machine gun we could sweep their decks…”

“I thought you didn’t want to get chased all the way to Rused,” Anton interrupted. Or risk running into another fourth Tier.”

“Point,” Kelsey admitted. “Maybe we could distract them with something. If there were a lot of people leaving, or unrest in the streets…” she trailed off in thought.

“Zaphar,” she said eventually. “Tell me about healers and priests in the Empire.”

“Those are mostly the same thing,” he replied. “There are alchemists and physicians as well but they are more expensive. From what I hear, often less effective.”

“Go on,” she said.

“Well…” Zaphar said doubtfully. “Alchemists have potions that can make you heal quicker, and antidotes to poisons. Physicians can stitch you up and set broken bones and such, but they don’t have magic.”

“They have Traits, surely?” Kelsey asked.

“Not magic ones. I think they get supernatural skill ones?”

Kelsey nodded. “What can they do about disease?” she asked.

“Not much, but I think they can stop themselves getting it,” Zaphar replied. “For disease, you want a priest… the right priest.”

“What Gods are good for healing?”

“Well, the human and courl gods, of course. Tiait and Kait”

It was the first time that Anton had heard the name of the God of Courls, and he was surprised by how similar it was to the God of Humans.

“Kait can’t cure humans, though, right?” Kelsey asked.

“They can, actually, although word got out that the trait was called Tend Prey, which didn’t make them more popular.”

Kelsey snorted but kept her focus. “Who else?”

“There’s a God of Medicine, isn’t there? I don’t steal from temples, it’s unlucky. There was one time there was a plague ship, and they sent priests of Denem in.”

“God of Trade, eh? Inutan was one of his, she was pretty versatile…”

Kelsey trailed off in thought again. Eventually, she returned her attention to the others.

“I think I’ve got the start of an idea, but it will take more than a few days to get started,” she said.

“Then, we could look at getting, what did you call it, a safe house?” Anton said. “Hide out in there until we have a boat ready.”

“Yeah,” Kelsey said slowly. “This time, we should go legitimate. Get a warehouse and kit it out, smuggle people in secretly and stay hidden for a while.”

“You probably need residency papers to buy a warehouse,” Zaphar said.

Kelsey growled. “I really wanted to avoid dealing with criminals this time around,” she said.

“Sure, sure,” Zaphar said nervously. “I should get going on that compound reconnaissance, right?”

He left hurriedly. The rest of the group talked among themselves, brainstorming ideas until Kelsey called a halt.

“Get some sleep,” she told the other two. "I’ll stay up to meet Zaphar when he comes back."

From Aris's sudden case of the giggles, Anton knew that he wouldn’t be getting sleep immediately.

“You’re not coming?” he asked. Kelsey raised an eyebrow and he felt heat come to his face.

“I mean—I’m just used to—”

Kelsey cut him off with a smile. “Treat it like a test of Unwavering, see how long you can stay in a different room from me.”

“Right.” Anton nodded. Being on the other side of a door was especially challenging for his geas because he didn’t know how far away Kelsey was. “I’ll see you in the morning then,” he said awkwardly.

Aris dragged him towards the bedroom. “This will be the first chance we get to be alone since this all started,” she giggled. Anton didn’t contradict her. He was fairly sure that Kelsey’s senses were up to listening through the door.

The door closed behind them, and Anton felt a twinge of the old fear. It didn’t control him now, so he took hold of Aris and kissed her.

“You’ll have to distract me from the geas,” he said.

“I can do that,” she eagerly replied.

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

Kelsey had breakfast ready for them when they got up. She’d drawn up a map of the compound from Zaphar’s description, and now they went over it with the others.

“Guards are all around,” Zaphar said. “Stationary posts at these six positions, patrols around the wall, and also inside the compound.”

“Inside?” Aris asked.

Zaphar nodded, tracing the routes he’d seen the guards take. “I think to catch escaping slaves,” he said, “But it works for trespassing thieves as well.”

“They didn’t catch you, though,” Kelsey pointed out.

“I’m good,” Zaphar boasted, “But they did limit me. I couldn’t spend as much time as I’d like looking through windows, and I couldn’t get into most of the buildings at all. All the windows are barred, even the higher floors. The only exceptions were the gardening shed and the stables.”

“So you don’t know what’s inside the buildings?” Anton asked.

“Some,” Zaphar said. He pointed out each building as he spoke of them. “The front entrance, it has a small showing room and a reception area for customers. This I have seen. That is only half the building though, so I suspect there are offices and a waiting area for slaves before they are brought out.”

“The main building?” Kelsey asked.

“The bottom floor is entirely open, and double-height,” Zaphar explained. “I think that is where they will hold the auction.”

“This,” he said, tapping a mid-sized building on the map, “Is where the slaves are being kept. There is a walkway that leads from this building to the second level of the main one.”

“The second level?” Aris asked, confused.

“Yes. They must prepare the slaves for auction yes? They do that upstairs and then bring them down. The third floor, I think, is living quarters for the family. This building, a barracks for the guards, and this building is quarters for the house slaves.”

Kelsey asked a few more questions as the rest of them ate. Once they had finished, she rolled the map up and made it disappear.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s see if you need papers to buy a boat.”

They did not, as it happened, need papers to buy a boat—at least the kind of boat that was available.

“It’s much smaller than the other one, isn’t it?” Aris asked hesitantly.

Assuming she was talking about the tall ship captained by al-Nazari and not Kelsey’s small bucket of insanity, Anton had to agree. The courl selling it did not.

“It’s a big ship!” he insisted. “Coastal Trader. Good hull, lots of storage. Come take a look!”

They did so, Kelsey showing more enthusiasm than the rest of them. It was, Anton had to admit, bigger than the fishing boats that frequently docked at Kirido. There was a single hold, a cavernous dark space accessed by a small hatch at the front and a large hatch in the middle. There were cabins above the deck, room enough for four, or eight if everyone shared a bunk. There was the deck.

And that was it.

Kelsey dropped down to inspect the hold. There was a small splash.

“It leaks?” Aris asked.

“All ships leak,” the courl salesman said. “It’s unavoidable.”

Kelsey poked around the hold for a bit. Anton could see her shining her torch around. Finally, she jumped up and hauled herself out of the hatch, disdaining the use of the rope ladder.

“I think we’re interested!” she said brightly. “Why don’t we talk price?”

“Of course, of course,” the courl said. If he noticed, as Anton did, that Kelsey’s boots were completely dry, he didn’t say anything.

Just before they got off the ship, Kelsey took a look out over the harbour. She frowned and paused for a longer look.

“What’s wrong?” Anton asked. She grimaced.

“Look,” she said. “Recognise that boat?”

Sailing into the harbour was a large gaudy boat that looked like it was about to capsize. Anton couldn’t swear he recognised it, but he’d only ever seen one boat that looked like that.

“That’s the Pasha’s boat, sailing in from Rused,” Kelsey told him. “If news hadn’t already arrived about our activities there, it just did.”