The Road to Death

12

“Done!”

Kandler pivoted to goggle at Xalt, unable to believe the warforged had given in to the bandit leader’s demands so quickly.

“No,” he said to Xalt. “If anyone should give himself up for the rest, it should be me.”

Ikar snorted. “I don’t want you, justicar. I want the warforged.”

Xalt stepped forward and put his hand on Kandler’s shoulder. One of his wide fingers was missing, lost when the warforged had first stood up for Kandler and his friends. “You need to move on,” he said. “Fast. You don’t need me.”

“We don’t leave friends behind,” Sallah said over Xalt’s shoulder.

The warforged huffed in pained happiness. “To think that I might have friends.” He fixed Kandler in his ebony eyes. “I will be all right. I can make a new life here. Go.”

“Don’t press your luck,” Ikar hissed at Kandler’s ear. “The warforged wants to stay with us. You get to move on. Everybody’s happy.”

Kandler stared into Xalt’s eyes, wishing that the warforged could somehow wink at him or give him another sort of signal that everything here would be all right. Maybe the warforged didn’t dare risk it with Ikar watching like a hawk, but the justicar felt that Xalt had something in mind other than making himself into the bandits’ slave.

“All right,” he said to Ikar, never taking his eyes off Xalt. “It’s a deal.”

The warforged stared back at him like a statue. Kandler thought he saw him incline his head at him ever so slightly, but it could have just been a trick of the torches’ flickering light.

“Unless you have pressing business here in Metrol, then, I suggest we get moving,” said Ikar. “It’s not safe to be out in Metrol by night.”

“You don’t say,” Burch said.

The half-orc narrowed his eyes at the shifter. “Had you not stirred up the ghostbeasts so well, we’d have already been safe on the other side of the river. You’re fortunate we let our curiosity get the better of us. Otherwise, they’d be feasting on your souls.”

“Lucky us.”

Despite Ikar’s warnings, the streets of Metrol stretched out wide and empty all the way to the shores of the Cyre River. The bandits took the straightest route possible, sticking to the widest roads with the most space around them. They kept their new guests surrounded at all times.

Kandler wondered for a moment why Ikar hadn’t bothered to disarm the lot of them, but when he saw how many bandits there were, his consternation faded. They outnumbered him and his friends at least five to one. If they’d tried to fight their way through them, they’d have been slaughtered.

The river seemed to sneak up on Kandler. One moment, he strolled along wondering when he might see it through the mists that seemed to thicken as they worked their way to the east. The next, they turned a corner, and the mighty river lay there, rolling silently past its banks as it had for millennia.

“We’re not heading for a pier?” Kandler asked.

Ikar snorted. “If you think the ghostbeasts are bad, you should see what waits beneath the surface of the river. The beasties like to congregate around the piers where they think they might find fresh prey. We moor our boats in a new place every day.”

The half-orc pointed to a long, low ship tied up near the water’s edge. It resembled a large cutter in shape and size. Green and gold paint limned its sides, and the polished wood of the deck gleamed in the flickering torchlight. The name Salvation spanned the stern in gold-leaf letters.

As Kandler took in the handsome ship though, he noticed there was something odd about it, although it took him a moment to place just what. Then it hit him: the ship had no sails. It had no rigging and no oars, nor any other visible means of moving through the Cyre’s murky, mist-shrouded waters.

“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Ikar said proudly. “She takes us up and down the river as fast as an airship, in any kind of weather. We liberated her from the King’s Pier shortly after the Mourning.”

“It—it’s a sprayship,” said Xalt. “It’s amazing.”

Burch smacked the warforged on the shoulder with the back of his hand, then looked at the startled Xalt and jerked his head at the watercraft.

“Ah, yes,” the warforged said. “This is a magically powered craft. It works something like the—um, like an airship. Instead of harnessing a fire elemental, this craft uses a water elemental bound into the aft of the ship. At a command from the person at the tiller, the creature spins rapidly, spraying itself into the water and then spinning back up into the air to do so again.”

Xalt gestured toward a large wooden box that spilled over the ship’s stern. Arcane runes covered its surface, carved deeply into the wood and illuminated with red and gold paints. “The water shoots out of the holding box like it was cascading from a waterfall. The force pushes the ship forward at amazing speeds.”

“Well put,” Ikar said, slapping Xalt on the back hard enough to rattle the warforged’s iron carapace. “I can tell right now you’re going to be an excellent addition to my crew.”

Something grated deep down in Xalt’s chest before he spoke. “I’m sure I’ll make a large impact on your efficiency very soon.” Then, with a saluted touch to his forehead at Kandler and the others he left behind, the warforged crawled on to Salvation’s polished deck.

Sallah squeezed Kandler’s arm. “We can’t let them take him,” she whispered in his ear, low enough that he hoped Ikar, who was busy directing Salvation’s launch, couldn’t hear.

“Patience,” Kandler murmured back to her. “This hasn’t had a chance to play itself out yet.”

Many of Ikar’s scavengers scrambled after the warforged and on to Salvation. At the touch of a green-skinned orc who wore a rune-covered poncho, the ship leaped to life, water flowing slowly out of the end of the box where it spilled into the river’s surface.

“Where do we ride?” Kandler asked as he scanned the length of the ship, looking for the most strategic place to sit.

Ikar and his crew would be at their most vulnerable during the crossing, and the justicar hoped to come up with some means of exploiting that. A full-scale attack in the middle of the river seemed foolhardy, but he refused to rule it out. Once they reached the other side of the river, he feared that Ikar might change his mind about letting the four of them go. He hoped to figure a way to bring Xalt along with them, but making sure he didn’t lose any ground to the bandit leader came first.

Ikar cackled low and loud as he pointed to a small dinghy floating in the water behind Salvation. Kandler hadn’t even seen the low, dark boat in the dim light. Now that he could, it looked as if it might roll over at any second and let the river’s powerful current suck it under and away.

“Special guests like yourselves get your own private accommodations,” Ikar said. “Careful not to tip her when you climb in, and be sure to hold on tight once we get going. At speed, the nose lifts right out of the water.”

“I’ll sit on the bow,” Burch said.

Ikar laughed again. “The last time someone tried that, the whole boat got dragged straight down to the bottom. Just sit in the middle as best you can and enjoy the ride. If we see anything unusual happening back there as we cross the river, we’ll be forced to cut you loose.” As he spoke, the half-orc stared out into the swirling dead-gray mists that threatened to engulf the shore at any moment. “It’s a long, hard row across—assuming you make it.”

Within minutes, they were underway. Kandler, Burch, Sallah, and Brendis rode in the leaky dinghy, clutching the creaking sides for dear life as the thing skipped across the waves like a stone thrown by a giant. Ahead of them, towing them along, Salvation sliced through the water, Ikar the Black at the bow, barely visible through the Mournland’s border mists, more like a suggestion of himself than the actual bandit.

Kandler whispered to the others. “As soon as we get in the middle of the water, we’re cutting the tow rope.”

“Are you mad?” Brendis asked. “We’ll be trapped in the mists.”

“I’ll take my chances with them instead of Ikar,” Kandler said, fishing a pair of rickety oars out of the bottom of the boat and fixing them in place. “For all I know, he wants us to do it rather than force him to deal with us in front of his entire camp. If we show up in his headquarters, I don’t think we can expect mercy, no matter what kinds of deals we think we’ve cut.”

“What about Xalt?” Sallah said. “We can’t just leave him with them.”

“They can’t treat him worse than that warforged patrol we found him with,” Burch said. “This’ll be a step up for him.”

Sallah ignored the shifter, focusing her emerald eyes on Kandler. “You told him. You said, ‘No one gets left behind.’ Were those just words?”

Kandler growled in frustration. “We can’t do him any good if we’re dead. Unless you think you can walk along this towline like a tightrope, we can’t get to that ship until we reach the shore, and—”

“Hold it,” Burch said, holding up a hand. “Something’s wrong.”

A cry went up from Salvation, and a loud crack followed it. Peering into the mists, Kandler saw Xalt stand up next to the elemental restraining box at the ship’s stern.

“By the Flame,” Sallah said, “what is Xalt doing?”

With another crack, Xalt tore a rune-covered plank from the restraining box. The ship shuddered violently and began pitching left and right as it raced blindly through the mists. Kandler heard a pair of splashes as two of Ikar’s crew pitched off the edge of the fast ship.

A sharp voice started to bark out something in an unnatural tongue, but the boat’s pilot stopped short when Xalt slammed into him. The warforged knocked him back into the restraining box, splintering it even worse.

Ikar roared as the ship bucked up and down. “You’ll pay for this, you tin-plated traitor!” He stumbled back toward Xalt, but the deck fell out from under him, sweeping him off his feet.

“Cut the line!” Xalt shouted. “Now!”

Kandler didn’t pause to question the order. His blade came out and sliced through the taut, waterlogged towrope with a single, powerful blow.

The dinghy skittered across the surface of the river for a moment before slowly sliding to a rest. Before it sloshed to a stop, a pillar of water exploded somewhere in front of the leaky boat. Dozens of people cried out in the mist-shrouded darkness before their splash into the water cut them off.

A moment later, some of the voices restarted, renewing their earlier complaints. As Kandler listened, he could hear the current pulling the disaster’s survivors farther and farther away into the mists. Even if he’d felt inclined to save some of them, the idea of wandering around lost in the mists for hours with them would have put an end to those thoughts.

“May the Flame take those poor souls,” Sallah breathed.

“Kandler!” Ikar’s voice rang out in the darkness. It seemed to echo in the mists, making it hard to tell from which direction it came. “Kandler, you low-down, sleazy carrion crawler! You’ll pay for this! If I ever get my hands on you, you’ll pay!”

“Flame save us,” Brendis said. “What—what do we do now?”

Burch handed the young knight an oar.