Shell studied the map. "We should arrive in Addisport tomorrow," she said.

A friendly farmer had invited them to sleep in his barn. Shell was reading Plint's Travels by the light of the Candle of Hours, while Lillandra sat on a milking stool and Arai lounged in the hay. A couple of sleepy-eyed cows gave them lazy looks from their stalls, while a black cat, perched up on the rafters, studied them intently, its eyes shining.

"What does the book say about it?" Arai asked.

She quoted it: "A major port city in the far west of Addis, situated upon the Bay of Vandals, Addisport is the second largest city in the Kingdom of Addis after Kingsaile. A picturesque seaside city, Addisport boasts a population of perhaps a hundred thousand men and women. It is known for its pleasant climate and cosmopolitan nature; ships from Galleus, Grand Skir, and the Island Republics are known to call here regularly." Shell went on from there, reading Plint's descriptions of the city's cuisine and other assorted attractions.

Arai had known that they were getting close to another large city -- they were seeing much more traffic on the roads now -- and he had heard of Addisport; a number of fellow travelers had mentioned it in passing. "A hundred thousand people?" he mused. "That's more than the entire population of Velon."

Shell frowned at him. "Is your country really so small?"

"Let me put it this way. In the time it took us to walk from Kingsaile to Addisport, we could've crossed the entirety of Velon three or four times."

"Are there cities?"

"Just two. Harbor Town, which sits on the shore of the Bastide Sea, and the capital, Hammersvik, which is further south."

"But we have to get through the Tarnak to get there," she said, studying the map.

"Not just the Tarnak," Arai said. "Before that, we have to cross the Queendom of Elent, which is at least as big as Addis, and Arliel's Holy Empire, which is almost as big as that. Let me see that map."

She handed him the book with the fold-out map. "This is Addisport?" he asked her, pointing to the city on the eastern shore of the bay.

She nodded.

"And on the other side of the bay...Galleus?"

She nodded again. "We'll have to find a ship in Addisport to take us there."

Lillandra leaned in to study the map as well. "Couldn't we continue north, through here?" She drew a line with her fingernail, north from Addisport, through a narrow strip of land bordered by the Bay of Vandals to the south and a larger sea to the north.

Shell shook her head vigorously. "You don't want to go through there, believe me. That's the Despotate of Grand Skir. It's a nasty place, ruled by a sorcerer named Mustaf Draj. They call him the Aeromancer. Plint barely made it out of Grand Skir alive."

"So Velon isn't the only country that's had the bad luck to be taken over by a sorcerer," Arai muttered.

Lillandra shot him a dark look before returning her attention to the book. "What about Galleus? Who rules there?"

"Well, they have a king, but he's basically just a figurehead; it's the Council of Knights that really runs things. According to Plint it's a wealthy nation, very friendly to trade. They've been at war with Grand Skir for years now, but the government is stable and I don't think we'll find any trouble there."

"A sea voyage will save us some time, too," Arai said, mulling over the map. "Very well. We'll find a ship in Addisport to take us to Galleus."

"We might not be able to afford that," Lillandra warned. "We're almost out of money already, aren't we?"

"We'll find a way," Arai said, though he really had no idea how to make money in Addis, apart from hunting monsters. And monsters, fortunately or unfortunately, were not really a threat in this part of Addis -- there wasn't a lot of magia here from them to grow out of, apparently, and the authorities had little trouble handling those monsters that did appear.

"I could go back to picking pockets, I suppose," Shell mused. "I was really pretty good at it, you know, and I'm sure there's a lot of rich folks in Addisport."

"No stealing," Arai said seriously, wagging a finger at her. "Not while you're with us."

She snorted and took back her book. "You're no fun."

* * *

The next morning -- Arai slept very well, in his bed of hay -- they thanked the farmer for his hospitality and made their way down the long road which ran through his property and, ultimately, into Addisport. They first sighted the city upon cresting a hill -- all of a sudden it was there, spread out below them, a pretty port city of white buildings roofed with red tile. Beyond it lay the Bay of Vandals, which Arai understood to be a part of the Southern Ocean -- a vast, sparkling expanse, curving away to the end of the world. The sunlight dappled over the waves; it was so bright that Arai had to shade his eyes.

The bay was full of ships; Arai had never seen so many. There were cogs, brigs, barques, and more, and they came in all sizes, from small sailboats to huge, three-masted schooners. Some of the ships were especially unusual; a handful had elongated prows and triangular sails, and some were galleys, equipped with rows and rows of oars.

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Arai was intrigued. Port cities like this were almost wholly unfamiliar to him. There were a few important ports along the edge of the Southern Ocean, such as Camarro in the Holy Empire, and a great deal of trade was said to be conducted across Elent's inland sea, but the nations of the west were, for the most part, land powers rather than sea powers. Velon itself, though it abutted the Bastide Sea, had no navy at all. The biggest ships in Velon, he reflected, were fishing vessels and riverboats, and were tiny compared to the ships he saw here.

Thinking about riverboats got him thinking about his friend Odo, back in Velon. Odo had spent most of his life pulling barges up the Tuv River, and those years of toil had given him tremendous strength; Arai had never met anyone as strong as Odo. They had fought with each other the first time they had met, but the giant had quickly become one of his best friends, and had accompanied him on his quest to retrieve Silus from its hiding place beyond the Frozen Mountains. The riverman had saved his life a dozen times.

He missed Odo. He missed his jokes, his jibes, his joi de vivre. He missed Maya, too, and Vex. What had happened to his friends? Had Vex survived his battle with Lillandra's guards? Odo and Maya had been transformed into stone statues, of course, but were those statues still in the Nightfall? Had Grizz found them? Would he understand that the statues were Odo and Maya, transformed? Or would he assume they were fetishes of some kind, and have them destroyed?

The questions -- which he had been asking himself since his arrival in Addis -- were enough to drive him mad. He had no idea what might be happening in Velon. The rebellion had been on the verge of success when he had entered the Nightfall and fought Lillandra, but Lord Pierce had still had a quarter of his army left, and he was a cunning tactician; it was possible he had found a way to win.

"Something wrong?" Shell asked him, noticing that he was lost in thought.

"No," he answered. "Just thinking about Velon."

An hour later they entered the city proper. It was one of the loveliest cities Arai had ever seen, full of parks, grand buildings, and charming little seaside homes, and as in Kingsaile, the people looked prosperous. And there were a great variety of people -- the streets were full of men and women wearing strange, exotic costumes, and who looked almost as out of place in Addis as Arai and Lillandra did. Some had brown or copper skin; some were even darker than that. They passed a group of giggling girls wearing robes that appeared to have been woven out of feathers, and two large men who were fully encased, from head to toe, in gleaming silver armor.

"Knights," Shell noted. "From Galleus."

Arai had acquired his knowledge of the Addish language artificially, via Lillandra's magic, and there were some terms the magic failed to translate for him; this word "knight" was one of them. "What's a knight?" he asked Shell.

"A kind of warrior, I guess," she said. "They fight with swords and lances, and they wear that shining armor that covers them up completely. But they're not just brutes. They have a code they're supposed to follow -- to help people in trouble and fight injustice wherever they see it." She shrugged. "It's a Gallean tradition, mostly. They love knights in Galleus. Even their god is a knight."

"All that armor looks restrictive."

She shrugged again. "I wouldn't know."

Arai and Lillandra, foreigners themselves, received a handful of strange looks, and especially when people saw them with Shell -- there were fewer elves here than they had seen in the capital -- but no one stopped to question them.

Shell, for her part, wanted to go sightseeing, to tour all the amazing landmarks she had read about in Plint's Travels, but Arai insisted they visit the docks first, to find themselves a ship that might take them across the Bay of Vandals.

There were dozens of ships lined up along the city's piers; dozens more were moored further out. Arai approached a young sailor and asked him if he knew of any ships that were headed across the bay, to Galleus.

"You might try the Cockatrice," the young man said, jerking his thumb at one of the ships over his shoulder. "It's a cargo ship, but Captain Burt will take on passengers, too, if they can pay their way. He makes the run to Tax Trium every other month."

"Thank you," Arai said, and went immediately to the Cockatrice. After asking around a bit, he eventually managed to track down Captain Burt -- a big, broad-shouldered man with an extremely weathered face -- and to ask him if he would take them on as passengers.

The man squinted at them. "A man, a woman, and a little elf girl, is it? And you're wanting to go to Galleus?"

"That's right."

"Heading home?"

"You could say that."

He shrugged. "Well, I've no objections, so long as you mind your business. It's ten Addish crowns and eight silvers for a berth."

Shell's mouth fell open. "Ten gold and eight silvers just to get to Tax Trium?"

"That's the going rate, I'm afraid," he said gruffly. "It's mostly Gallean tariff, I'm sorry to say, but I have to watch my own profits, too -- I take a loss on every passenger I carry."

"It seems like a lot," Shell said.

He shrugged his big shoulders again. "Ask around. You won't find a better price in Addisport." He turned to Arai. "Well?"

"We don't have the money," Arai said reluctantly. "How long will you be in port?"

"We're leaving tomorrow morning," he said, to Arai's dismay, "but we'll be back in a month, assuming we don't run into bad weather around the Phantic Gates."

Arai nodded sadly. "Thank you for your time."

Shell tugged at his sleeve. "We should ask around. Ten gold and eight silvers is outrageous. I'm sure we'll find a better price somewhere else."

He nodded, and they went on to spend most of the rest of the afternoon haggling with merchant captains and fishermen. Unfortunately Captain Burt was right -- ten gold and eight or nine silvers seemed to be the minimum asking price. Disappointed -- and now rather hungry, for they hadn't eaten anything since the early morning -- they headed back into town and started looking around for an inn.

"I knew it would expensive," Shell said. "I didn't think it would be that expensive. Where are we going to get the money?"

"I don't know," Arai sighed. "Lillandra? Do you have any ideas?"

She seemed distracted. "What?"

"I asked you if you had any ideas on how to make money."

"No," she said. "Not really."

"What about the zemi we found at Nharlek's castle? Could we sell them?"

"I suppose we could," she said, still distracted.

Arai didn't particularly like the idea of selling off the zemi -- the Everlasting Chalice, which provided them with an endless supply of fresh water, had already proven itself extremely useful -- but if they had no other choice...

And why was Lillandra so preoccupied? He asked her if anything was wrong.

"No," she said curtly. "Just thinking."

Shrugging, he left it at that.

They found a room at an inn a few streets east of the docks, just as the sun was beginning to set over the city. They had a meal at a nearby tavern -- a rowdy place, full of drinking, swearing sailors -- and then retreated to their room for the night. As Lillandra and Shell settled down to sleep, Arai found himself looking out the window of their room, at the docks. The sailors and stevedores, he saw, were still working late into the night, and he was reminded again of Odo.

He glanced over his shoulder at Lillandra -- the Night Queen, the sorceress who had turned his friend to stone. He couldn't let it go any longer, he decided. He had to find out the truth of the matter -- and not just for Odo's sake, or for Maya's, but for his own.