The two companions traveled along the road for several hours, moving much faster on the old dwarven road than in the rough and winding cavern tunnels. The air was cool and moved down the roadway. G felt a cool, dry breeze blowing by now and then, not unpleasant.

Far ahead, the clean, carved lines of the dark pathway road looked uniform in shape until they came upon something different. G could see a partial collapse along the road, dimly lit by the pale light of the long fluorescent strands of fungus hanging along the walls and ceiling. The splashes of light made the whole roadway look like an impressionist's painting of fairy fire and dwarven ruins.

Jowl Beard moved to the side of the road, walking near the pillars that dotted the sides as they held the rock above. G followed his lead. The column pillars had been carved from the rock and not built. Each was one solid piece of stone from top to bottom, octagon-shaped with deep carvings. Occasionally, a pattern of a dwarf in a helmet or pushing a cart had been carved into them.

Jowl Beard pointed ahead. "That is why I was sent to capture you with only a small contingent of goblins. We had been a full unit of goblin infantry coming here, and what they found in that wreck ahead is why I was ordered to continue with so few troops and scouts. We had been told to expect one human man, and the queen's consort didn't know you were an elf."

G looked ahead and saw a silver and wood shape in the rubble, as large as a wagon without wheels and easily as big as a large house. It had long silver poles sticking up from it at odd angles. "What is that? Is it a wreck? A wreck of what?"

"It's a ship. We didn't know how it came to be here, and there is no known way for a ship to be here. It hadn't been there for long," said Jowl Beard, looking behind them before returning to the distant ship.

"How does a ship sail in here? There is no water? Do you think it came from that new planar gate?" asked G, wondering if it was a magical ship.

Jowl Beard shrugged. "It's not a ship of water, elf. It is an astral ship. It plies the astral space between planes, or I think it does, anyway. The captives we took barely spoke any language we could understand. They spoke some old elf trade language the dark elf captain seemed to understand a few words of. He sent me forward while the rest of the unit went back to the city with his captives, looted goods, and the glory he expected for such a find. We need to be careful here. They will have left guards and patrols. They will bring back excavation and survey teams from the city too. An astral ship being captured here could change many things. Mirbor is considered a rugged frontier city by others. This would change much if they could divine how to bring other astral ships to trade or travel.

G looked at the carved stone walls, having no idea how a ship could sail in there. The one in the distance appeared half-buried and seemed to have failed at something. He spotted a shadow moving along the ship's rail, but it was hard to tell if it was a goblin at this distance. They had to get past the mess that blocked most of the roadway, as G had less than six days left on Tocai's quest.

"We will slip by the guards and continue along the roadway. We will leave it a few hours beyond this point," said Jowl Beard, still gazing at the half-buried ship in the distance.

G nodded, debating whether to summon Crewton, but decided against it. If they needed to be stealthy, Crewton wasn't the dog for the job. He was more of a bark-first and aggravate-everyone kind of dog. G had a vision of Crewton being all innocent with half a hamburger wrapper hanging from his jaws. He smiled. G would have to work on that. Having a dog that could sneak into places would be useful since Crewton's view of things populated his map.

"What's the plan then?" asked G.

"We sneak around to the right using these columns as cover, and we move every time the guard patrolling the top of the ship turns to walk around," said Jowl Beard.

"You can see all that from here?" asked G.

"I can see enough, and once we are closer, we will confirm his route and check if there are any more guards up there. If not, it should be relatively simple to sneak past them and continue," said Jowl Beard.

They crept forward, and in a few minutes, they were within a hundred meters of the collapsed wall and the half-buried astral ship. G could see the ship's odd shape as they neared. The ship was fifteen meters at the beam and more round than long in many ways. It had the shape of an upside-down ladybug and didn't look much like a sailing ship to him. It was made of wood and silver metal, with a few glass portholes below the rails where it stuck out of the rubble. He didn't know how many sails it should have, but then again, what he thought were sails on closer inspection almost looked like wings that stuck out on both sides and one mast at the top. The long masts were also made of the same silvery metal as the embossing on the hull, and their poles looked intact even though the cloth material attached was torn or missing. It was the oddest-looking vessel, and G wondered how it moved. Did it float or fly? What powered it?

He saw movement on the deck again. What he had taken to be rubble on the exposed part of the deck was a goblin. The creature was leaning against a stone and looking out across the broken tunnel roadway. The little green humanoid's pointy ears pointed backward at an angle, giving it an evil appearance.

G's map showed a red dot that hadn't been visible before. That was not good.

"Didn't you say the goblins can smell a trail through the dark pathways? Won't he smell us even if he doesn't see us? We smell like old salty dead fish. How do we fix that?" G asked, speaking softly.

The hobgoblin adept nodded, affirming his previous statement. After a few moments of thought, he came to a decision, "Then we will have to kill them." His tone was serious, like a business conversation gone wrong or someone who had just learned he was going to be cleaning out a bathroom in a busy subway. The hobgoblin didn't even pause after saying this. He pulled his sword and started creeping forward around the column.

Several red dots appeared on G's map as they neared the small camp with rocks piled in a barricade blocking the road. This makeshift four-foot-high wall had an open entrance with two goblins posted just inside the opening.

G had caught sight of the goblins that corresponded to the red dots except for one. He and Jowl Beard were crouched behind the last column before the barricade. G looked up, and high above, sitting on a ledge carved around the top of the octagon-shaped column was a goblin with a bow. The red dot showed on the map. If the goblin had been sitting on the other side of that column, the goblin would have seen them creeping up, but he was facing the goblin camp below and the open road area.

The other goblins had all been level three scouts, but this one with the bow was different. He was sitting there with his legs dangling over the edge, the bow in his hand, laying it across his knees, perched on a high ledge, surveying the surroundings with sharp, beady eyes that seemed to gleam with a predatory glint. He was unlike any other goblin that G had seen before. He had an air of authority, with a muscular build and a fierce expression that betrayed his high level of training and combat experience.

As G observed him, he noticed that the Goblin Archer was not like the other goblins, who seemed to be more concerned with crude pleasures and simple tasks.

Goblin Archer

Level 4

Mana 12

Level 4, and he was out of reach of everything but a mana bolt. G doubted the goblins would miss the flash of light of a mana bolt if he cast it.

G tapped Jowl Beard on the shoulder and pointed slowly upward. The goblin with the bow, even a small one, could cause havoc if they both were out in the open fighting the guards. G nodded to Jowl Beard and smiled, holding up a finger signal to wait a moment. He had an idea.

G cast his Helping Hand spell, and a glowing hand appeared next to the goblin high above. G did the movements, and a second later, the goblin was tumbling with a loud scream from the pillar ledge, falling behind the wall of rubble with a dull smacking sound. The magic hand was dismissed before the goblin hit the ground.

Jowl Beard gave him a pointy-tooth smile, then hurried forward in a crouch to the small opening in the makeshift barricade wall as the goblin guards went to look at their fallen comrade.

G could just make out the voices on the other side of the rubble.

"Why he fall?" asked the first voice in a nasally grunting language.

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"I not know," said another.

"He's not falling, he good climber," said a third voice.

Then there was chaos as Jowl Beard charged into the small knot of six goblins, his sword moving through two before they even knew they were being attacked.

What followed didn't feel much like a fight to G. Jowl Beard cut them down, and G hammered the one on the ship with a couple of mana bolts. The goblins were clearly not ready for a hobgoblin to show up and start slaying them. One of them even threw its weapons down and tried to plead with the hobgoblin, but Jowl Beard didn't slow his stride. In moments, all seven of the goblins were dead. G didn't like what they had done or how they did it. The hobgoblin's brutal efficiency and his own lack of protest when the last one was slain worried him. It was food for later thought. Right now, it was about survival. If he ever had time, he would contemplate his actions or inaction. He was fighting for survival, and he had to get to Ryan before the nutter found him and managed to finish that ritual. These evil little creatures were in the way.

G received notification icons, but he left them for later. Jowl Beard cleaned his blade, sheathed it again, then looked around the goblin camp and rolled the last one over with his booted foot. "This one was part of my group. He fled during the fight with the spiders. I might have spared him, but he knew who I was, and that would not have been good if he talked or fled again," said Jowl Beard.

G nodded, but looking at the carnage after the battle wasn't pleasant. He turned toward the half-buried ship. "What do you think of that?"

The hobgoblin turned around and looked at the ship. It appeared the goblins had moved some of the rubble away from the pile pinning down the sails of the ship and partially from the deck. "That is why I didn't have a company of warriors to capture you. The commander found this ship, captured two crew members that survived our attack on it, and ordered me to proceed with the dozen goblins you saw. The dark elf Captain Dragny and Commander Urkurkak returned to Mirbor with their captives, and they will be back for this ship with crews of diggers and borer beasts that will free it. We should not linger here," said Jowl Beard, looking around at the bodies of the goblins. "We need to hide these bodies. The commander, when he returns, will see this and send out scouts searching for us. If there are no bodies, he might think a beast killed and ate them."

G looked around at the pools of blood and the goblins. "I thought you said they can smell us? How are you going to hide all of these?"

G thought about it, took a deep breath, and realized what he needed to do. "I'll get rid of them, drag them all over to this spot."

Over the next several minutes, G picked up each goblin and willed it into his inventory. They were dead, and there was no complaint from the spatial ring. He had six dead goblin scouts and one archer in his inventory. He left the goblin's weapons where they had fallen. He would dump the bodies as soon as he found a location far from here. Hopefully, any other goblins would not smell anything but ripe dead fish.

G looked up at the ship, and there was still one corpse on the ship. He climbed onto the deck to retrieve the last goblin he had killed with his mana bolts, and G had left it for last as he wanted to look around this ship.

He could see the silvery metal embossing, with some embedded into the wood, reinforcing it. There was a fair amount of damage to the deck's railing and the rigging, but the hull from this side looked intact. He put the last corpse in his inventory and went over to the opening that led down below.

G looked down at a relatively nice set of curved stairs that descended into the belly of the hold. There was rubble strewn on the stairs below. A soft yellow glow of magic rolled along the ship's walls, providing faint light, more than enough to see below deck. Jowl Beard approached him. G glanced again at the piles of rubble on the deck and forecastle. It would take weeks to clear this out, even if they had the tools and winches needed to move those larger stones. A particular spike of stone appeared too big to move without damaging the ship as it pressed down across the helm behind them. He was also certain there were corpses under that stone because it smelled horrible near it.

"There was something peculiar here as he stared down into the opening. The softly glowing vessel's hold called to him for some reason, and he felt a mental nudge to go down there.

"We should be going. The goblins would have looted anything of value if it was down there," said Jowl Beard, breaking G out of his train of thought.

G nodded. "I want to see if there is anything left. They couldn't have taken everything," he said, thinking about the rope they had left behind at the water's edge. He was kicking himself for not putting it in his inventory.

"We must be quick about it, then. It's only a few days to the city," said the hobgoblin.

"I'll go first," said G, and he crept down the stairs into the hull.

G had once been on the USS Alabama, which had been all tight passageways and metal. This was nothing like that. It was mostly wood, with silvery fittings over the edges of the wood and sometimes between the boards of the wall of the hull. A soft ambient light filled the area, and it was warm and dry inside the ship. It was warmer than up top, and the air felt different. Cleaner, with no musty fungus smells. G kept his hand along the hull as he threaded his way down the stairs. It was twenty-one steps down to the first deck. The level was one giant open area with another set of stairs going down again farther back. The sides of the hull looked intact, even with all those stones pushing down on it outside. G had no idea how much pressure the ship was holding up under, but it didn't seem damaged at all inside, except for the apparent ransacking of every barrel, box, and storage chest. Most of the contents of the barrels were gone or eaten.

A door at one end near the back of the ship led into a cabin. It had also been ransacked. Some torn clothing was on the floor, and dried blood was everywhere. There had been a fight in here, but the contents, charts, books, and any personal belongings were all gone. The bed had been stripped of whatever mattress or pillows it once had. Whatever the captain had slept on, G was sure it wasn't the boards left on the pallet.

They moved on from the captain's quarters down below. The next level had many bunks and a few hammocks made of netting strung between the wooden pillars holding the bunks. Again, the area was looted. There were a few busted open footlockers, but most of the lockers were just gone from below the bunks.

The ship looked like it had a lot of space inside as the two circled around the lower deck. There was another stair going down, this time only ten steps. G felt the strange pull to go down the stairs. He didn't understand what it was, but it was much like his desire to save the plants back in the Arboretum. An urge to go down there. He shrugged, not seeing any dangers, and went down the stairs.

Below, he found what would be the ballast area in a normal ocean-going ship. Stones or water would fill the lower area of a sea-going ship here to keep it upright with the weight at the bottom. However, all G saw was another storage area. There were narrow passages on both sides, and these ran along the hull around a large support structure. He could touch both walls as he walked down the empty passage with his arms held out to both sides. He walked along, looking for the reason for the mental urging. He made it to the other end of the ship and found only a few scraps of cloth and a canvas material stacked high in the larger open area. It looked like the material for the sails. He didn't think he could pick it up and put it in his inventory, as the sheets were folded many times and were very heavy. G looked around, not sensing anything there, and went back toward the stairs down the other passage around the support structure, again with both arms out, touching the walls. Halfway down this side, he felt something and stopped. This was the spot calling to him. He felt a tingling in his fingers on the inside wall, and a new icon flashed on the edge of his vision. He still hadn't sorted out the messages from the fight with the goblins, which were glowing a soft yellow with orange in them. This new icon was a half circle with green and yellow colors.

He opened it:

Skill Advancement:

You have found a magical shelter. +3 to your shelter creation skill.

That's new. He reread the description for his shelter creation skill.

You have spent years wandering the woods and mountains. Your ability to find shelter when half-crocked and in need amazes the gods.

The skill itself now showed a +8.

G looked at the wall again where he had felt the tingling. It was just wooden beams that supported the upper decks with some silver metal embossments forming a solid wall. The tingling was still there. He looked closer and closed his eyes, trying to sense any magic. There was nothing at first, but as he stood there, he moved his hands around the wall of support beams, trying to feel anything odd about the wall. Was it the ship his skill was triggering on? That didn't make sense, and the message hadn't shown up until he touched the wall here. He felt around for a few more seconds, and then he felt it. It was slight, and once he touched it, a small bit of magic glowed where his fingers were placed. He opened his eyes and looked at it.

Jowl Beard spoke, "What have you found?"

"I don't know. There is magic here. It might be a doorway if I can figure out how to open it," said G, pointing at the spot on the wall.

Jowl Beard moved forward to look at it. He pushed on the wall a few times. "I see nothing."

G shrugged and kept feeling around, and then an insight occurred to him. "Tocai, do you see anything odd about this spot in the wall?"

Tocai hadn't spoken much since the waterway where they had almost died. He sounded sulky when he spoke now, "There are two spots. The one in front of you and the one you passed on the other passage opposite here."

"Two? Are you sure?" asked G.

"Yes, the other one is lower. They glow brightly for me, and I have not seen others," said Tocai.

"Tocai, if you ever see something like this again, please tell me right away," said G to his familiar. His familiar could see magic, and he was a magical entity. Whatever that meant here. He had come a long way from being a college project G used to manipulate games for his stream views.

G thought about the problem. It's a magical latch, for sure. He looked at Jowl Beard. "Can you place your hand here on this spot? I'm going around to the other side, and when I yell, you push on this location." It was worth trying. Hopefully, it didn't require some magical keys. Would his ability find someplace to shelter G couldn't get into?

Jowl Beard reached up and placed his palm on the glowing spot.

G hurried back around to the other side as he looked again at the support structure from the forward area. He noticed that although the support structure looked narrow at each end, the center section bowed out with the hull's shape. It was a trick of its design. It looked straight and thin if you didn't think too much about the outside of the ship and the hull's size and shape. Now that he looked again from the end, he could see that it was quite wide in the center. It didn't look like magic, just a very clever bit of woodworking and optics.

He found the other spot quickly with Tocai's help. It was lower than the other one, near the floor.

He reached down, placed his palm on it, and shouted, "On three, push it, One..Two..Three. " G pressed against the spot, and he heard a gentle click in the wall.

He heard Jowl Beard, "There is a doorway on this side. "

It was a clever design. Any burglar needed two people to open it or very long arms.

G hurried back to see what they had found.