Draya found it difficult to walk as the bondmage shoved her through the street after the quick-moving Khan. Yesugen had called him Erak, but Draya couldn’t think of him as human. He was just a tool. And they wanted to turn her into the same thing. She had to trust that Jace had a plan. He had told her everything happened for a reason in her life. Did he know this would happen too? Did he really intend to trade her for three crates of fruit? She had only known him for a few days since he and Esther had rescued her from the lich. The rogue swore he was honorable and could be trusted, but right now, she didn’t know.
“Soon, everything will be better,” the Khan said. Draya sensed that she had been talking since they had left the Captain’s Nest, but her mind had been preoccupied with other things. Six guards had been waiting for them after they had left the diner, and now they trailed the three of them by a dozen feet. “It will be as it always should have been,” she continued. “Your talents have been wasted in this forsaken land. Soon, among your people and protectors, you will find your true calling and purpose.”
“How long will you keep me tied up like a dog?” Draya dared ask, lifting her bound hands toward the woman.
Yesugen laughed. “You are not tied up. I only want to let everyone else know you are under my protection now.”
“Protection?” Draya spat the word back at her.
“Would you prefer a male Khan take stewardship of you? It is a long voyage back to our homeland.”
Draya decided not to push that issue too far. Things could be worse. Of course, any journey back to Mongoria would be horrible. It didn’t matter if she was molested by a Khan, riding in a crate of bananas, or put up in a luxury cabin next to Yesugen. She would commit suicide over the side of the ship before they ever reached land if given the opportunity. Jace needed to come quickly.
The walk to the docks was brief. Haversport was a narrow collection of buildings strung out for a few miles along the coast, so no place was more than a couple of minutes from the water. Yesugen’s ship was one of the largest at the port, a three-masted vessel over 150 feet long. The last few crates were being hauled onto the boat with a massive wooden crane and pully system.
“Madam Khan,” one of the deckhands said when he saw her. “We are having trouble finding room in the hold. We have too much unsold cargo.”
She smiled at him. “Lucky for you, I found a buyer.”
“So we should unload them to the dock?”
She laughed. “Don’t go through the trouble. Just dump them overboard. Jace Thorne can pick up his payment from the sea floor. I’m certainly not going to wait around for him to show up. I want to push off in fifteen minutes. The sun is already a quarter in the sky.”
The man nodded and relayed her orders shouting to the men. Within minutes, half-filled crates of lemons, oranges, and pineapples went over the side of the ship and splashed in the shallow water. The Khan laughed with glee and turned to look down at Draya. “I only said I would unload them. He didn’t specify where.” She finished chuckling and watched as the last heavy cargo she was bringing back was loaded, and it was safe to transverse the pier without fear of injury. “Come. Your future awaits.”
Yesugen took several steps out onto the pier before she heard a grunt and turned to see Draya resisting Erak as he tried to push her down the dock. “Don’t fight this, young woman. Everything happens for a reason. You might think me cruel now, but you will soon see-”
Her voice stopped in mid-phrase as an arrow passed through her head. Draya jumped back into Erak at the sight, but the expected blood splatter didn’t accompany it. Instead, the arrow passed through the Khan like mist. Once Draya realized it was an illusion, the image vanished, and she saw the shaft sticking into the side of the ship fifty feet ahead. She looked about for the real Khan, understanding now why she had the bondmage handle all of the physical contact. Instead of finding the woman standing nearby, 11 images of her body spread along the pier, all with the same expression on her face, all looking for the hidden archer.
In the next six seconds, three more arrows exposed three other illusions, and the woman was running out of copies. “Guards!” She cried. “Find him!”
Draya looked over her shoulder and saw Psycho standing behind a pile of empty crates. He fired three more shots, and Yesugen was down to four fake images and one real one. “Erak! Do something!”
Draya saw that Psycho had about two rounds left before the guards closed on his position. “Raise your hands!” he shouted when they made eye contact.
Her body was still facing the ship, and she turned back to look down at her bound wrists. It was awkward, but she raised them in the air. As soon as her hands cleared the top of her head, an arrow zipped just over her scalp, cutting the cord. Two more shots eliminated false images, leaving only three.
The enchanted bindings still hung from her wrists, blocking her mana, but she could move her arms again. She threw off her cloak and reached under her tunic to get her staff. When it cleared her clothes, the weapon sprang to full length, and she leaped at two of the remaining illusions. Erak was casting a spell behind her, and as her long weapon passed through one image and thunked solidly into the real Khan, Erak hit his master with a burst Death Save protection.
Psycho only had one more round before the guards were on top of him and waited with a Death Shot. When Draya found Yesugen, he adjusted his aim and fired, but the bondmage’s protection beat him there, and she automatically saved against the damage. Her health dropped by over 150, but she didn’t die. The archer couldn’t keep firing as six low-level grunts barreled into him, and he had to draw his sword.
Draya backed up as the Khan screamed in pain at the arrow sticking into her side, but it was only one-third of her health, and Psycho was distracted now. After ripping the offending shaft out, she pulled two cutlasses from inside her coat, and the swashbuckling rouge prepared for battle. Draya still couldn’t expend mana, but she could absorb it, and the magical staff charged her with Dragon Strength. Yesugen’s blades whirled about her, but the young mage was up to the challenge, her weapon spinning about her and deflecting each attack. Unlike Jace, her parry ability was static, and she would never get a bad role. Only a result of 18+ from the Khan would result in a hit. Going the other way, Draya hit the Mongorian woman with half of her attacks, doing about 30 damage with each one.
Yesugen saw quickly that she was outmatched in the fight. Even as she landed her first strike, Draya struck back harder, her two-handed weapon capable of doing more damage than the light sabers. “Erak!” she cried again. “Do something.”
Scripted modules were scaled in difficulty to match the players, but this was an organic encounter in a level ten hostile zone. It didn’t anticipate having to deal with level 16 characters. The bondmage was only level 12 and not an offensive weapon. Most of his spells were defensive to protect his Khan. Her guards were the ones that were supposed to do damage, and they were currently getting slaughtered by Psycho. He had a stun spell, but it was memorized for a level 15 character and wouldn’t work on Draya. She likely would have saved anyway. He stupidly cast a fire spell instead, which did nothing.
“Idiot!” Yesugen berated him. “Stupid Celtigion. Guards!” Only two of her original six still stood against Psycho, but she called now to the ship, and a dozen other men who had been content to watch the fighting, responded to their Khan’s beckoning.
Draya saw the men cross the ship’s deck and begin to descend the gangway. She needed to end the fight soon. After another successful attack, Yesugen’s health dropped below 100, and Erak tried a new tactic. He had spells to aid the ship on a calm day, and he cast one of them now, aiming the gust of wind at Draya’s back. She saved against the attack, so she wasn’t launched into the air, but she still stumbled under the blow and dropped to one knee.
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The Khan jumped at the advantage, finding her opponent flat-footed and unable to parry for a round. She did a critical with the first weapon and reached into her swashbuckling bag of tricks to disarm Draya. Her staff fell out of her hand, hit the wooden pier, and rolled into the waist-deep water. The second strike was also a critical, and the Mongorian knocked the mage flat on her back. Yesugen didn’t need to Dodge that round, so she got her third attack bonus from using two weapons and got a double critical against the prone victim, doing 3x damage.
“Now you see your mistake,” the Khan said, relishing this moment. “You could have sailed home in luxury; now you will be bleeding and wounded, in pain the entire time.” She raised her blades for another series of attacks that would bring Draya down to almost nothing.
The spell on the bindings expired.
Fire, as if from a dragon, burst from the hands of the young woman and slammed into the wounded Khan’s chest. Yesugen flew through the air, out over the water, and was dead before she plunged beneath the surface. The weight of her clothes and gear dragged her to the bottom, where she settled on the piles of fruit her crew had dumped.
Draya scrambled to her feet and looked toward the ship’s boarding ramp to see arrows streaking through the air, hitting a man once every two seconds. They were low-level deckhands, and even though Psycho was using his Rapid Shot ability, he still had enough criticals to elevate the damage to a lethal level. After the first five men took a single arrow and fell sideways into the water, the rest returned to the ship’s safety.
Draya had other ideas.
She could only cast once per round, but she put a massive fireball through each of the three starboard-side port holes on the ship’s lower level. Even before the third left her hand, flames were burning out of control from the first. By the time the third one exploded in the small confines of the ship, fire from one of the first two had found the two unsold barrels of oil, and an explosion ripped the ship in two.
Draya was thrown back by the explosion and landed on the bondmage, just avoiding a watery landing. She scampered to her feet and spun around to regard the man, hoping that with his master dead, he might regain his autonomy. “Erak,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“No thanks to you,” he spat. “How are we to get home?”
“Home?” she asked. “That ship was your prison.”
“Foolish girl,” he said. “You don’t know what you are talking about. The Khans are our saviors. Rescuing us from a life of poverty and squalor. Our people are better fed and clothed than ever before.”
“Only because if we fail to produce enough food, we are whipped,” she argued. “That isn’t prosperity. It is slavery.”
“You know nothing,” he said and stepped forward to grab her wrist. “Come with me. I will find us another ship.”
He was much bigger than she was, but fire flared in her eyes, and her skin was hot to the touch. “Get your hands off me,” she said in a deathly tone.
“Or what?” he mocked, though he backed away. “You will kill me too? One of your kinsmen?”
“You are no kin to me,” she growled but couldn’t bring herself to cast dragon fire upon him. It would do far more than dropping him below half his health. The level 12 mage had fewer than 120 HP. She wanted to save him, but she knew she had no time. Already he was looking to the left and right, trying to find another Mongorian ship in port that could take them. She wouldn’t let him.
Instead of casting a spell, she reached her hand to the right, out over the water next to the narrow pier. Her dragon staff leaped out of the ocean and into her hand. His head spun toward her at the sound of the water. “What are you-”
She brought her weapon in from the side and cracked it over his head. Even that simple strike did over 100 damage, and he dropped to the ground in a death spiral. She stared down at his dying form, wondering what she had done. Heavy footfalls brought her out of her contemplation, and she looked up to see Jace and Quaron jogging toward her. Jace made it to the dock and took five running steps onto the pier before stopping on the other side of the motionless bondmage. His health was down to ten.
“Do you want me to save him?” he asked.
Draya didn’t answer immediately, letting his HP drop to five and then two. “Yes,” she finally said. “I think you better.”
Jace hoped the young man wasn’t chaotic, knelt beside him, and funneled enough mana through his ring to heal 25 points. The spell took, and the man resumed normal breathing. Jace stood and looked at Draya. Standing alone on the dock, she looked powerful, gripping her staff with the sea breeze blowing her red hair about and the burning ship in the background. The dragon was awakening.
“Was this your plan?” she asked. “Let me get kidnapped and get me angry enough so that I would use my powers against the Mongorians?”
“My plan was to help you remember your past so you could overcome whatever trauma you must have experienced. And I was going to kill Psycho if he let anything bad happen to you.” Jace glanced over his shoulder at the archer. The elf smiled at him and then found a shadow to disappear into. “The rest was up to you. It looks like you handled it.”
“It was a stupid plan,” she said.
{I agree,} Gracie chimed in.
“It worked,” Jace said. “You can only mock the plan when it fails.”
Draya screwed her face up in a smirk. “That’s not a rule.”
Jace took a hard line. “It is now. Are you ready to go?”
Draya looked about her, picked up her discarded cloak, and ensured she hadn’t dropped anything else. After storing the cloak in her inventory and collapsing her staff back onto her belt, she stepped over the unconscious form of the bondmage and followed Jace to the dock and then to land. Quaron was waiting for them. “That was quite a show,” the dwarf said. “We saw the fireworks from the restaurant.”
“Others will have seen it too,” Jace agreed. “We need to leave.”
The three turned to go, but Derrin Hortch stood in their way. “What happened here?” The magistrate was out of breath from having run toward the fire. He hadn’t wandered far from the docks, expecting trouble, but he hadn’t expected this.
Jace shrugged his shoulders. “I arrived a minute before you,” he said.
The trade advisor wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were focused on Draya. “Well, miss? What happened?”
Draya was Pragmatic in alignment, able to lie when necessary, but she decided to give an Honest report to respect her leader’s brilliant plan. “When we arrived, Madam Khan’s crew was throwing Jace’s compensation into the ocean. Eventually, she went in after it, and she hasn’t come back up. I don’t think she is a good swimmer. Then, the stupid bondmage thought he could cast a fire spell, but he didn’t know what he was doing. The next thing I know, the ship is on fire, and the barrels of oil exploded. A bunch of men tried to escape the ship but ended up in the water. Good thing Jace showed up when he did. The mage was dying, but he saved him.”
“What about those guards?” Derrin asked, pointing to the empty crates were six men lay dead on the ground.
Draya shrugged. “I didn’t see that happen. I was focused on the ship. My guess is that she pissed off someone very powerful, and they took out on her crew. Maybe someone new came to town recently with a complicated history and took it out on her.”
Jace stifled a grin as his companion laid it on thick, but his eyes were active as he noticed other curious dockworkers and ship captains begin to congregate in the area. Jace wanted to leave before another Mongorian made the foolish decision to try and kidnap Draya. “With Madam Yesugen Khan defaulting on her claim, and since it is void after her death, I reassert that Draeklynn Ember joined my group as a free woman. I did not steal her, and I see no one else claiming her.”
Derrin never liked the arrangement he was forced into with the Mongorians and nodded. “Then leave before your claim is challenged, and the law forces me to disagree with you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jace said. He grabbed Draya by the arm, which was still warm, and tugged her away from the growing throng. Jace said goodbye to Quaron, who was laughing at the spectacle, and hurried back up to the main city streets.
“Did the dwarf give you what you needed?” Draya asked after a minute of hasty travel. She probably should have had her cloak back on, hiding her identity from other greedy Khans, but she didn’t care anymore.
“I think so,” Jace replied. “How about you? Did you get everything you needed?”
Draya looked back toward the burning ship. “I don’t know about everything,” she said. “But, yes, I think I am much better now.”
“Just so you know,” Jace wanted to clarify. “You are more valuable than three crates of fruit. You are more valuable than three ships. I don’t think an entire fleet would be an adequate payment.”
She laughed. “An entire fleet? I like that idea.” She glanced again at the pillar of smoke rising in the air. “One ship down; 99 more to go. Promise me you will make them pay the entire price.”
“For what they did to you and your people,” Jace said, “it will be an honor. But right now, I need your help to free some other innocent people.”
Draya nodded. “I didn’t like the idea of using my powers to hurt others because that’s what my people were forced to do by those . . .” she struggled with the word, “Khans. Those . . . monsters. At first, I thought that’s what you were. But you aren’t a monster.”
They were out of town now, and Jace let his illusion drop, so he was an orc. “Are you sure?”
Draya was startled by the sudden transformation but laughed it off. “You don’t scare me anymore. Now, what Psycho did back there. That was monstrous.”
“I can hear you, Red,” a voice came from the shadows beside them.
Draya laughed. “No. The true monsters are the ones you fight. I will help you as long as I can.”
Jace smiled. Mission accomplished. “Good, then let’s get back to the stronghold. If this is what we experienced on just an information-gathering trip, I can’t imagine the time Gromphy and Esther had.”
Jace hurried to the travel node, and all three of them vanished.