Eldren awoke feeling more refreshed than he had since he had arrived in Aldimea. The combination of a warm fire, roasted meat, and a few tin cups full of hoppy ale had been like staying in a five-star resort after nights in dungeons and on the run from gray cloaks.
As the sun rose and turned the sky from deep black to light gray, he helped Baltran pack up camp while Ink foraged nearby in the woods. She returned with a collection of berries, a few sprigs of a herb that smelled sharp and oniony, and four pale-blue speckled bird eggs. She cracked the eggs onto a rock and them on the smoldering embers of the fire. Eldren watched her season them with the herb and a pinch of salt from Slad’s supply sack.
“Alright, Ink,” Eldren said, as she passed him another flat rock to use as a plate, “We’ve got the first spell shrine and we’ll need an aetherfind to locate the rest. You still think that the best way is to track down this bounty from Slad, bring them in for the reward, and then pay a master thief to steal us one?”
“Sort of,” Ink said. She pulled the crumpled paper from Slad out of her pocket. “But your plan has a lot of steps.” She flashed him a big smile and handed him the bounty paper.
Swarmelian Warrendale IV
Wanted for usery, bribery, petty theft, grand theft, the conspiracy to thieve, and public indecency (six counts).
Last known location: Dredgeport
Reward: 2000 golden scales
Eldren read the bounty warrant. He was still confused and gave Ink a puzzled look.
“Swarmy is an old— acquaintance— of mine” she explained as he handed her back the parchment. “He’s the very master thief I had in mind. With this bounty, we can blackmail him into helping us.”
“Isn’t every blasted bounty hunter in the realm gonna be lookin’ fer him?” Baltran asked, frowning and running his fingers through his beard.
“Need the golden chip unique to that bounty to claim it,” Ink said. “Part of the Iron Square’s way of maintaining lawfulness. That’s why old Slad kept it.”
“But we don’t have it either,” Baltran said, still frowning.
“Swarmy doesn’t know that, does he?” Ink said. “Dredgeport is down at the delta where the Bridewater meets the bay out into the sea. It’s a decent way away, but we should be able to make it in a week or two. Faster, if we manage to get ourselves some horses or can hitch a ride with a trade caravan.”
“How do we know Swarmy is even there?” Eldren asked. It seemed like a serious flaw in the plan. They might walk for two weeks and come up empty.
Eldren’s doubtful expression must have been noticeable.
“It’s not a bad plan,” Ardos said, poking his head out of Eldren’s backpack. “Dredgeport is a major trading city and even if this criminal isn’t there, apprentice magi travel through regularly on their shrine pilgrimages. There should be ample opportunity to find an aetherfind in the city.”
“Alright,” Eldren said. “We haven’t got any other ideas.”
“Plus, if we play our cards right, we might still be able to collect the bounty too!” Ink said gleefully.
“Eldren, if you’ve made your mind up to pursue this, grab the crystal ball,” Ardos said. “It is connected to your decisions by the registration and will update your quests accordingly.”
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So that’s how it works, Eldren thought. Good to know. He still wished he could find a better way to silence it without the sudden vibrations. He pulled out the crystal ball and held it in his palm.
New Quest:
- Travel to the city of Dredgeport (0/1)
- Locate Swarmelian (Swarmy) Warrendale IV (0/1)
* * *
The first two days of their trek to Dredgeport were uneventful. Ink led them southeast, away from Valenka’s Reach, and they avoided other villages along the way. The provisions from Slad would last another day or two and there was no sense risking a discovery by the gray cloaks from the Iron Square if they didn’t need to.
In the meantime, Eldren was beginning to enjoy traveling with Ink, Baltran, and Ardos. Hiking through the woods and crags and swapping stories made it easy to forget that they were being hunted by an organization of religious zealots and the singular focus on reaching their destination was refreshing, freeing him from the mountain of smaller, daily anxieties that plagued his life as Cam back home.
They also began to learn a lot about each other. At first, Baltran had not believed that he was from a different plane until Ardos had confirmed it — although, Eldren noted that the tortoise still didn’t provide any details as to how he had placed the spell book into Eldren’s world. They also learned that Baltran hailed from a mountain range to the southwest called the Blood Peaks and was the oldest of eight siblings—all male—who all shared the surname ‘son of Baltran’, his father.
On the afternoon of the third day, they reached a particularly rocky outcropping, through which the main road ran in a narrow pass. Until now, Ink had led them mostly off-road through the backcountry to avoid unfriendly eyes and ears. The cliffs in front of them, however, presented a problem. If they tried to climb up and over the cliffs rather, than take the road through the pass, they would lose several more days— and risk injuries that would slow them down further. Eldren still didn’t have proper footwear and didn’t fancy twisting an ankle scrambling up a boulder and root-laden cliffside. Only after she scouted behind them to ensure that a brigade of gray cloaks wouldn’t catch up to them and trap them in the pass, had Ink agreed to the shortcut.
About an hour into the pass, Ink stopped them and motioned for quiet. Baltran had been telling Eldren about the cooking his brother Naldren used to do back home.
“Something’s up there, around the next turn,” she said. “Look.” She pointed ahead of them and Eldren realized that there was a faint trail of white smoke from a fire drifting around the cliffside at the turn.
“I’ll check it out,” Ink whispered before she darted ahead, using some of the boulders along the side of the road for cover. Eldren and Baltran crouched and waited.
About fifteen minutes later, Ink returned.
“A fire going and a campsite, to be sure,” she whispered. “No signs of anyone.”
“Well, they’ve got a fire going, so they can’t be far,” Eldren said. Ink and Baltran nodded. “Anything else?” he asked.
“A small merchant cart by the looks of it, a few smaller chests lashed in the back. No animal to pull it though, which is strange.”
“So what do we do?” Ardos asked. “We’ll need to pass it.”
“Aye,” Baltran said. “We’ll lose even more time if we have ter turn back and camp tonight before climbing them bloody rocks.”
Eldren thought for a moment. There was always a chance that it was a trap. The more he thought about it, however, the more a trap seemed unlikely, given that someone would have had to travel into the pass from the opposite side of the cliffs to get here without their knowledge. He shared his thoughts and Ink nodded.
“I think we can approach it carefully,” she said. “I’ve got the crossbow and Baltran has Twister and Fang. Eldren, if you go in and act like you’re alone, we might be able to get the jump on anyone trying to trick us. And if it’s not a trap, we may have found ourselves a new set of supplies. If that’s the case, we’ll take what we can and get moving before whoever owns this campsite comes back.”
Eldren didn’t like the idea of being bait. He thought about arguing that he knew spells that could also be cast at a distance to support whoever walked into the campsite, but decided better of it when he considered that Ink and Baltran were far more practiced with their weapons than he was with casting spells in the heat of the moment. So, a few minutes later, Staff of the Novice in hand, he wandered around the corner into the campsite pretending to be a lone traveler in the pass and hoping in his head that nobody was home.
As he walked into the campsite, nothing happened. It was as Ink had described it; there was a wooden cart with no animal to pull it, loaded with trunks, and a fire was burning as if it had been built recently.
Eldren cautiously approached the cart as Ink had instructed him. If the chests contained supplies he would motion to the boulders where he knew his companions were watching him from, and they would raid the stash and leave quickly.
There were three chests on the back of the cart. One was larger than the others and unpainted while the other two were smaller and painted green and red, with intricate silver metalwork and locking mechanisms. Eldren leaned the staff against the side of the cart and went to unlatch the green trunk.
Eldren’s heart raced as a voice he didn’t recognize called out from behind him.
“Stop right there, that’s enough!”