Adventure Log, Session 14 The Game of Shards
General Summary
The heist had gone about as well as it could have. No one had been hurt, and they had the portrait. And no one had been caught.
The following morning, Toren Ghent, the New Square Skulls’ guild master, called Eykit, Taid, and Elitheris into his office for a discussion. The messenger that had “collected” them showed them to his office, then left, shutting the door behind him.
Toren’s office wasn’t large, nor was it opulently furnished. It was nicely appointed, however, with wood-paneled walls, a couple of bookshelves, a large wooden desk with drawers, what looked like a comfortable, high backed chair, and three simpler chairs arranged in front of the desk. Toren sat in the high back chair, behind his desk, his elbow on the desktop, his hands steepled together.
Toren Ghent, Guildmaster of the the New Square Skulls
He stood when the three entered, gestured to the three chairs, and said, “Please, sit.”
His three visitors sat, making themselves as comfortable as they could. He didn’t waste any time on morning pleasantries.
“Eykit, tell me what happened.”
Eykit recounted the events of the day and night before. How he became a bakery deliveryman in order to get a good look inside the house; how, after delivering the bread baskets, he snuck into a coat closet, staying there the whole day; and how he waited until the Baron had mysteriously left the premises before coming out of the closet.
He recounted how he made his way through the house, up the stairs, across the gallery, down the rotunda bannister rail, and into the dining room, where he took the painting. He told how he made his way out, almost getting away without raising any alarms. But alas, Larraine’s Elven tutor also happened to be a mage, who summoned a pair of terror birds to keep the thief from escaping, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
He told his guild master of Taid and Elitheris’ parts in the caper. “Taid had helped with the insertion,” he recounted, “and Elitheris helped with the extraction.” He filled in the details of both of their actions, and was generous enough to say that it really couldn’t have been done without them. Besides, he wanted them on Ghent’s good side.
During all of this, Toren asked few questions, mostly waiting for the entire story to unfold before starting in with his own inquiries. At the end of the grueling question and answer session, Toren got detailed information about his rival’s household decor, staff, layout, and basic security. Taid and Elitheris each got a bag of coins, $250 each, for their parts in the events. Toren mentioned that his informants corroborated the story, at least to a basic level, as none of them were all that close to the action.
He went on to recount what the New Square Skulls had been doing as a distraction: incursions into Flower Street Harrowers territory. These consisted mainly of highly-visible break-ins, vandalism, muggings, and “arsons”. These fake fires were actually only smoke bombs and fires lit within cauldrons, to contain the flames and prevent the fires from spreading. Ghent didn’t want any fires ravaging the city. Meanwhile, he had his people visibly accosting people in the Harrower’s territory, demonstrating that the Harrowers weren’t doing a very good job of protecting them. Toren Ghent has also spent some money on hiring town criers to spread propaganda about who was doing all of these attacks: The Order, or the Black Spades, or, in some cases, the White Hill Gang. All thieves’ guilds adjacent to the Harrowers.
It caused a lot of confusion. The Harrowers were stretched thin, spending most of their time running between crises, only to have the perpetrators move on before they could get there. Even after Baron Kraite showed up to try to control the situation, there was just too much going on to rein in the chaos. As a distraction, it worked beautifully.
And the Harrowers didn’t even know exactly who stole the portrait. They had their suspicions, of course, but they didn’t know exactly who had broken in and stolen the painting. They figured it was the Skulls, but they didn’t know who in the Skulls had pulled it off. “According to my informants,” Ghent stated, “their primary suspect is Jakkit.” Both Taid and Elitheris gave him a confused look. “He’s my second in command. In his youth, he was, like young Eykit here, part of a thieving crew. So although he doesn’t really do that any longer, he is still a suspect in the Baron’s eyes. There are a few others they think might have done it, including Merrimas Goodsong. He’s a hobbit,” Ghent added. “And good with disguises.” He turned to Eykit, “So it appears as if you aren’t on their most wanted list. Yet.”
He chuckled. “I also heard that the Baron is pissed. At his own staff, for letting this happen. Someone…or someones, more likely…blew it, and the Baron isn’t pleased. He had a pretty major failure of security, and I suspect he will be dressing down his staff for the next day or two. The fact that his ring of security was infiltrated has got to gnaw at him. I suspect he will be looking through all his stuff trying to find what else was stolen.”
Eykit looked worried. Ghent noticed, and smiled. “It’s one reason I asked you not to steal anything else. He’ll spend a lot of time combing through all of his important possessions trying to figure out what else disappeared. But he won’t find anything else, will he, Eykit?”
Eykit’s demeanor didn’t show the sudden spike of fear that ran down his spine like an icicle. He was a good actor, and kept any external showing of this fear off of his face. “No, sir, he won’t.” He gave a very convincing smile. “I really like the fact that he is going to go crazy trying to figure out what else was stolen.”
“In any case,” he continued, “job well done. Dismissed.” He was pulling out some paperwork by the time the three guests left the room.
The three companions walked out of the apartment building Toren Ghent used as his offices. Taid was talking about getting his adjusted and lightened breastplate from the enchanter. Elitheris was going with him, but Eykit had something he had to do first.
He turned to his two companions. “I’ve got to take care of something. I’ll meet you at the Port Karn Agricultural Council’s enchanter’s guild. It’s still a few days before they said they would have any information, but maybe they could tell us something about that servitor head we gave them.”
The other two looked at each other quizzically, not knowing his plans, but shrugged, and nodded. “See you in a while,” Taid said, as he and Elitheris walked eastward towards the Agricultural Council’s campus.
Eykit needed to find a fence. Just not one that he used very often. He had something to sell, and he didn’t want anyone to know that he had sold it. Heck, he didn’t want anyone to know that he had it at all! He had been told not to steal anything while in the Baron’s estate, but that didn’t work out as well as it could have. There had been too much temptation, and there was nearly no way he could have gotten out of there without stealing something. He hoped that the little bird was minor enough that the Baron wouldn’t realize it was gone. If Ghent found out, he was toast.
And he hadn’t made it out without stealing something other than the portrait. He had taken a small statuette of a bird, worked in silver. He didn’t even remember actually stealing it; it was just in his pocket all of a sudden, and if he had taken the time to go back and figure out where it had originally been, he would certainly been caught. So it was better this way: stolen, and sold quietly and discreetly. At least, that is how he rationalized it.
He knew of a fence who had a shop at the outskirts of New Square Skulls’ territory. Actually, it was located in the no-man’s-land between the territories of the Skulls and the Hammerskins. The two gangs, while nominally at peace, still had some discussions going on, punctuated by the occasional gang fight, about whose streets were whose. For Eykit’s purposes, that worked out nicely.
Lucianne ran a laundry service. She was also a fence. She wouldn’t give Eykit the best prices, but that wasn’t as important as the anonymity using her would give. It was worth the loss of money, especially since if Baron Kraite ever saw this item “on the market” it would help to point him in the direction of Eykit, and that was a large bundle of worms that Eykit had no interest in seeing come to light.
The laundry was bustling with activity, and filled with scents that Eykit couldn’t identify. Not all of them were pleasant. He picked Lucianne out while she was talking with one of her foremen. He made his way past vats of bubbling liquid and shapeless fabrics, trying to stay out of the way of the workers with large wooden paddles stirring their laundry cauldrons, then waited patiently as Lucianne finished her conversation with her employee. She saw him, nodded, and continued with her list of instructions for her foreman. A few moment later, the foreman nodded, turned, and strode off, into the mass of people and vats.
Lucianne turned to Eykit. She was Human, and tall, even taller than most Human men. The musculature of her arms showed that she hadn’t always been the boss, but had stirred vats and beat clothing herself. Her forearms looked like a baker’s forearms, thickly corded with muscle from wringing out thousands of garments.
“What do you want?” she asked bluntly.
Eykit smiled, showing only the hint of teeth. Given the rows of sharp, carnivore teeth, a Goblin smile could look very threatening, and Eykit needed her services. “I’ve got something to sell, on the down low.”
This made Lucianne perk up her attention. What had been just an annoying distraction, since customer service was not her favorite activity, became business. “Is that so? Why don’t we discuss it in my office?” She turned, beckoning for Eykit to follow, then walked quickly to her office. The much shorter Goblin had to almost run to keep up with her.
Her office was a small room, with two desks, one with a clerk sitting at it, writing columns of numbers in a ledger. “Sammel,” she said, “I need the room.”
The clerk looked up, and with only the briefest of hesitations, stood and left the room, leaving his ledger on the desk, and closing the door behind him.
Lucianne leaned against one of the many cabinets of drawers that lined one wall of the room. “What do you have?”
Eykit reached into a pouch at his waist, retrieved the bird figurine, and held it on his palm. It was the figure of a seated bird, wings folded, and made of silver. It had fine etched lines detailing the eyes, beak, and feathers. From what Eykit could tell, it was a well made piece of artwork.
The woman reached into a desk drawer, and pulled out a magnifying glass. “May I?” she asked, holding out her hand. Eykit handed the figurine over to her so she could examine it. She looked at it from all angles, analyzing the engravings, and checking to make sure it didn’t have any obvious telltale owner’s marks. “I’ll give you $80 for it.”
Eykit smiled. The haggling had begun. In the end, he walked out with $120, which wasn’t bad considering he knew he would be taking a bit of a loss. Lucianne was a shrewd haggler. She would likely get $250 for it, perhaps more, when she found a buyer for it. But at least it was out of his hands.
Meanwhile, Taid and Elitheris had walked over to the collection of buildings that made up the largest of Port Karn’s mage guilds. It was actually more than just a mage guild—the Port Karn Agricultural Council was a huge bureaucratic entity of which one small part was a mage guild. However, it was the only mage guild in town that had enchanting as a service.
Mages were rare. Only a small subset of people had the aptitude for even the simplest of magics. Only a fraction of those were discovered to be mages, and only a portion of those learned magic at all. Enchanting required more than just the minimal ability to wield magic…a lot more. And the training required was also a lot more than a lot of mages wanted to go through, so enchanter mages were rarer still. And the mage employed by the Ag Council wasn’t even from Port Karn originally. He was actually from one of the Dwarven undercities from the mountains to the northwest. Dwarves had a very magic-based culture. They had to, in order to survive so long underground. Ventilation, water supplies, food production, sewage control, even construction and excavation were all magic-based. The Dwarves couldn’t have a subterranean civilization without it.
Harald Darkstone, enchanter mage
The Dwarf in question was Harald Darkstone, a Dwarf with long blonde hair and braided beard, which he kept tucked into his belt to keep it out of the forge. Most Dwarves had pale skin, a result of their subterranean lifestyles. Harald’s was tanned, showing that he had been living in the surface world long enough to have gotten past the tendency to sunburn, rather than tan.
Harald met them in the enchanting office, a windowless room that also doubled as something of a storefront. It wasn’t large, and was bisected across the middle by a counter, a portion of which could be lifted up via hinges for access. The customer portion had a couple of chairs along the wall, but mostly those interested in enchanting an item stood at the counter, behind which was the enchanter. Behind him was a door to the crafting rooms, flanked on both sides by shelves full of wooden bins and bundles of arrows of various lengths and girths. Several other items were visible on the shelves, including knives, jewelry, and stacks of folded clothing. A sheathed sword hung from a peg on the wall, and there were several spears stored in the rafters above their heads.
Harald was between projects, having just finished enchanting the breastplate Taid had asked him to adjust and repair. The enchantment was simply to make the breastplate lighter than usual, to keep the weight down. Taid didn’t want to be slowed down. The craftsman helped Taid into the breastplate, to make sure the fit was perfect. It was, as expected, not requiring any last minute adjustments. Taid danced around in it, getting a feel for the new armor and how he moved in it. He didn’t seem hampered in any way that would affect his skill in combat.
“Seems to be adequate,” Harald said.
“It is indeed,” replied Taid. “I have a halberd I would like enchanted with Deflect. How long would that take?”
“If you like, I could do it now, but there will be a rush fee. It will cost you $200 for the base level of Deflect. I can offer this deal to you because it’s quick, and I haven’t started on my next project yet. Anything higher than the base level and we would be looking at it taking months to complete, and I have several large jobs ahead of you in the queue. But the basic level will only take me about an hour.”
“It sounds like a good deal to me. My halberd is in the weapons locker off of the lobby.” He chuckled. “For some reason, they don’t like people carrying large weapons around inside.”
Harald nodded. It was standard procedure in most public places to put primary, and often sidearms as well, in safe keeping. “I’ll have my assistant fetch it for you. Just give him a description of the weapon so he can make sure he gets the right one. Although halberds aren’t terribly common on a daily basis, unlike the ubiquitous Tondene spear.” He grinned. He’d seen a lot of Tondene spears with their hooks, lugs, and hewing spearheads.
Deflect was an enchantment that would allow the wielder of the weapon to defend more effectively by creating a field that imparted a force in a random direction on the incoming weapon. Mostly, it was used for improving armor, and, indeed, Taid’s gambeson had Deflect as part of its suite of enchantments. But it was also useful to put on shields, or weapons, because they added another layer of defense.
Taid looked around, noticing shallow bins filled with arrowheads, and the bundles of arrows and bolts. He noticed that not all of the arrows were the same length, or thickness, and that they had no arrowheads attached to them. “Do you have any enchanted bolts?”
Harald looked up from the paper he had been writing some notes on while he waited for his assistant to come back with the halberd. “What? Oh, yes. Well, sort of. We enchant the heads, then attach them to the shafts as needed. The stronger the bow, the stronger the arrows have to be. With crossbow bolts, it’s less of an issue. What do you want?”
He scrutinized Taid, figuring that he was literate. “There is a list posted on the wall, there,” he volunteered, pointing to a parchment nailed to the wall by the door. It listed several different types of enchanted arrows. Their prices, for enchanted items, were actually fairly inexpensive. Another list, next to the first, listed a few other miscellaneous enchanted items as well.
“Hey!” Taid said, “They have some necklaces with the Bless spell on them. Eykit, Elitheris, you guys should get some of these. I’ve got two, myself. A little help from the gods never hurts. Or, rather, help from magic. Although I suppose it’s the same thing.”
“Magic is simply a tool that the gods gave us,” Harald stated. “The Bless enchantment is simply magic affecting the probabilistic outcomes in the wearer’s favor. One of our best sellers, actually. The military buys them up in job lots. Usually for their officers, I presume.”
The Goblin and the Elf each got two. After all, eventually their magic would run out, and having a spare would be helpful. At some point, an event would happen that would trigger the magic to “exert” itself too much, and the magic would break. The magic’s last gasp would be able to subtly modify the probabilities of the situation, making it more favorable to the wearer.
Taid turned back to the first list, reading down the different enchantments. “Drunkenness Arrows? Anyone hit gets intoxicated?” He chuckled. “I like it. Give me five crossbow bolts with those heads. If they survive the hit, they will at least be wobbly and not thinking clearly.”
Elitheris walked over and peered at the list. She saw some things she liked: Curse arrows, Daze arrows, Sleep arrows. She checked the bundles of arrows, seeking the arrow shafts with the correct length and thickness to handle her bow. She pointed them out to Harald, who smiled and slid the barreled shafts out of the bundles.
“Two Curse, one Daze, and one Sleep, please,” Elitheris said.
Harald went to the bins of arrowheads, pulling out four broadhead tips from three different bins. He set the shafts and heads next to the bolts he had collected for Taid. Then he went about gluing on the heads. Some archers used wax to attach their arrowheads to their shafts, so that when the shaft is pulled out the head stays in the wound. Harald preferred a special glue that was both stronger than the wax but not strong enough to stay attached to the shaft when tugged out. It prevented the heads falling off on a hot day, of which there were many at the latitude at which Port Karn was situated. It was the work of ten minutes to get all of the missiles assembled. He handed them to their respective owners, saying, “The glue should harden in an hour or so. Be careful with them until then.”
Taid and Elitheris paid their money, at which point Harald’s assistant came back, holding Taid’s halberd. He took it, examining it critically. He nodded, then glanced up at Taid. “Come back in a couple of hours. It will be ready then.”
They went back to the inn, and on the way they overheard a town crier shouting, “Bardem’s Crystal Palace is in town! Go to the warehouse on Fishtail Street with the maroon bunting! Enjoy a Shardmeet! Partake of the games, the food, the drink! Shardmeet on Fishtail Street!”
And they remembered that they had a pair of Shard clusters. Those were the kinds of Shards that had magic powers, and were the end goal of the Games of Shards. People wanted magic items, and Shards were relatively common. Taid, Eykit, and Elitheris had two clusters, and 21 single Shards between them. There was a great demand for them; everybody wanted Shards, and the more the better. There were even some people who were willing to sell them, although the more someone had, the less they seemed to want to sell any.
Back at the inn, they grabbed a late lunch and some ale at the Pig’s in His Cups, then went up to their rooms to examine their Shards. They hadn’t had a chance to actually do that until that moment. They opened up the bag they kept the Shards in, and laid them out on the bed. There were 21 Shards, and a pair of two-Shard clusters.
Taid spoke up first. “I’m getting a sense of magic in the second cluster. Elitheris? What about you?” As a mage, he was attuned to the flows of mana, and thus could feel it when in the presence of a magical item. Elitheris was, too.
Elitheris looked critically at the laid out crystals. “All I get is a sense of enchantment on the second cluster, just like you. That first cluster seems dead to me.”
“Maybe neither of you are powerful enough mages?” Eykit asked.
Taid gave the Goblin a Look. “Perhaps,” he answered, admitting the point.
“From what I have heard on the street, you just think at it when holding it,” Eykit said, helpfully.
“Oh yeah?” Elitheris asked. Not having spent all that much time in “civilized” areas, she hadn’t had any contact with Shards before. “Do you ask it nicely, or can you be rude?”
It was Eykit’s turn to give a Look. “I don’t know,” he replied petulantly. “I’ve never had a Shard before. And I’ve certainly never been lucky enough to have a cluster. I only know what the street scuttlebutt has told me.”
“Well, I’m the most protected, if it explodes or something,” Taid stated, reaching for the first cluster. “Here goes nothing.” He held the first, “unenchanted” cluster, and tried to get it to work. Just in case. But he was disappointed, as nothing happened. He sort of expected that, but it was still something of a letdown.
“Okay,” he said, “That didn’t seem to do anything. Let’s see what happens with the second one.” He took a deep breath, and held the second one. “Here goes,” he said, and he willed it to work.
He faded away.
“Hey!” shouted Eykit. “Taid? Taid!” He waved his arms around where Taid used to be. “Taid! Where are you?” He and Elitheris walked around the room, trying to feel an invisible Taid. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t invisible. He was just gone.
“We gotta find him!” Eykit said, worried.
“Yeah,” agreed Elitheris. “Let’s check the building. Maybe he got transported into a neighboring room or something.”
“I’ll check this floor, you check downstairs,” Eykit said. Elitheris nodded, then bolted downstairs, eyes flicking around, alert for any Dwarves she might see.
When they had searched the inn and the attached stables and public house without any sign of Taid, they moved to neighboring buildings. On one side was a bakery, but Taid wasn’t in there baking or even buying any loaves of bread. On the other side was a chandlery, but Taid wasn’t buying any candles, either. The next buildings over were more candle shops, a restaurant specializing in Orcish dishes, a woodworker, another bakery, this one specializing in pastries and cakes, and another alehouse.
Taid wasn’t in any of them.
Because Taid was Somewhere Else.
When Taid willed the shard cluster to work, there was a sense of dizziness with a side of visual distortion. He wasn’t sure if that visual distortion was a flash of light, a color, blackness, or something even stranger. But he wasn’t in the inn any longer.
He looked around. It was foggy. And wet. He seemed to be in a shallow valley, surrounded by low hills about a dozen feet high. His boots were in mud, with a layer of water about an inch thick over it. There were grasses, and some shrubs and trees on the hills surrounding him. The air was delightfully chill, like a winter day in Port Karn. The coolness was refreshing, although the fog and general high humidity was still a little uncomfortable. But at least he wasn’t sweating in the summer heat. For now, anyway. There was no wind, and the only sounds he could hear was the whirring of insects and the sound of frogs croaking. No breeze rustled the leaves, and there didn’t seem to be any birds. Which was a little surprising; the area, marshy though it was, seemed to be the perfect place for herons and other waterfowl. No ducks, no geese, no swans. The area was strange.
Visibility was limited to about fifty feet due to the fog. It varied a little, as the fog wasn’t consistently thick. Mosquitoes were abundant, and he could see water striders flicking over the surface of the mostly-still water. He could see gnats and flies as well. He could hear no-see-ums. He slapped at the touch of some bug or another.
The water was only mostly still. He kept seeing movement in the water out of the corner of his eye. But he wasn’t sure if it was a fish, or something else.
He mentally shrugged, then headed off in an arbitrary direction. In this case, “forward”. He didn’t have a compass, as they were rather bulky things, usually mounted on ships. He had no real landmarks to navigate with, so most of his Army training wasn’t being very helpful.
As he walked, he noticed that the water got deeper. It was up to his ankles. And now he was sure he was seeing movement in the water. He did see some fish, now that he was in deeper water. Minnows, perhaps, or young fish of some other kind. Elitheris was the one who could identify fish; he only thought about how they tasted.
But there was something else in the water, besides fish. Taid couldn’t see it, but he could feel it sliding past his ankles. When he looked down, he didn’t see anything. After several attempts, he was able to see the displaced water from its movement. It was like it was invisible in the water. They didn’t seem to be threatening, but he cast the spell of Danger Sense. There didn’t seem to be any immediate danger.
He moved on, continuing his path.
The water kept getting deeper, and he was knee deep in the marshy water. The trees had slowly transitioned to mostly mangroves, their roots arching into the water. There were still no birds, or large animals. He could hear (and, in one case, actually see) frogs, and fish. And he kept feeling the “invisible” eels or whatever they were sliding past his legs and feet. He even tried to grab them, but all he was able to grab was water. He kept being attacked by mosquitoes, who never seemed to give up trying to land on him and suck his blood.
He also saw something weird. In shape, it was like some sort of sea anemone, except that it seemed to be made of water. Given that it was always at least half in the water that seemed ubiquitous, he wasn’t sure if that was even right. It was more of an impression of an anemone, with squid-like qualities that he couldn’t explain.
The fog turned into rain, first just a mist, then starting to pound the surroundings in a downpour. It started to get cold, now that his clothes were drenched.
“Enough of this crap,” he said aloud. “I’m going back.” He turned around, and headed for what he thought was the area he had come from. He trudged through the knee deep water, his saturated boots sinking a few inches into the mud at every step. A few times his feet slipped, but he kept upright, and didn’t fall into the water. Not that he would have gotten any more wet, given the rain. At least the water was getting shallower, so he figured he was at least going in the right direction towards the point from which he had arrived.
The mangroves transitioned to more “dry land” trees as the water got more shallow. The rain, however, didn’t let up, and the rushing sound of it hammering the leaves of the trees, shrubs, and grasses as well as the near stagnant water was loud enough to drown out even the croaking of the frogs. At least the rain drove away the mosquitoes that had been harassing him with their bites.
All of a sudden, he felt as if every particle of his body was being pulled in different directions. Then he felt that dizziness and experienced that visual distortion that, after a moment, resolved itself into the room at the inn.
Elitheris and Eykit were nowhere to be found. Other than their absence, the room was exactly how he left it, with the one exception being that the blanket on the bed had been hastily folded over the Shards laying on it, likely to hide them from casual eyes. In the sudden relative silence, he could hear the drops of water falling from his clothes splatting onto the wooden boards of the floor. He sighed, and started removing his soaked clothing. On a whim, he grabbed a ceramic cup off of the shelf and scraped some mud from his boots into it. He thought it might come in handy, later. Or maybe he could get it examined, to see if there was anything strange or wondrous about it. Maybe an alchemist might need it for something, once he figured out what it actually was.
The sun was in about the same position in the sky, so he knew he hadn’t been gone too long. He hung his wet things up on the hooks that ran in a row down the wall of the room. They dripped. He dried his body as best he could, then put on his other set of clothes. He went downstairs to talk with the innkeeper about laundry services.
For a nominal fee, his clothes could be laundered. He was happy to pay, knowing that his clothing and gambeson would be returned the next day. He was a little reluctant to be parted from his armor, but the layers of linen wouldn’t be as protective while saturated with water. Not to mention, they were about eight pounds heavier when they were wet. And uncomfortable to wear, besides, feeling tighter and more restrictive.
He went back upstairs to wait for Elitheris and Eykit. He didn’t have to wait long; they came back about ten minutes later.
“Where’d you go?” Eykit asked. “We looked all over for you!”
“Well, you didn’t look anywhere near where I went.” Taid said, chuckling. “Although I don’t know where that was.” He gave a description of where he had been. Neither Eykit nor Elitheris knew where he had gone. Although Elitheris did remember some old stories about other realms of existence, like the realm of fire, the realm of earth, and the other elemental realms. The Elves used the term “brane” to denote those other realms, and Elitheris guessed that maybe he had been in the Water Brane.
“There was an awful lot of land there for a Water Brane,” Taid commented, but didn’t disagree. “The water kept getting deeper, but I didn’t go too far before I turned around. And then I got returned here.”
“I want to try it!” Eykit exclaimed, taking the crystal cluster from Taid. He thought about it working, and he faded away, just as Taid had when he had used it.
After a half hour, he reappeared, with a look on his face that indicated to Taid that the planar transition, or whatever it was, felt about the same. Not quite motion sickness, but edging towards it. And he was drenched, his clothes and armor dripping with water.
Eykit’s description was similar to Taid’s, although Eykit didn’t go as far as Taid did. Except that Eykit never had any fog, only a drenching downpour of rain. From his description, it had gotten even more intense than what Taid had experienced.
Seeing that he was already wet, Taid decided to do another test of the Shard cluster. He took it back from Eykit, and touched the Goblin’s shoulder with it, willing it to work. It did. They both disappeared, since both of them were touching it.
Elitheris sighed, and shook her head. She was happy not to go to whatever that place was. She didn’t like to be soaked to bone, or stand around in mucky marshes. She’d done enough of that, and preferred something a bit more on the dry side. Let the boys play in that swamp all they like, she thought, I’m not having any part of it. Although she did realize that it might be useful as a potential bolt hole if things got rough and they needed an escape.
Taid and Eykit arrived in a shallow valley, with low hills rising to both sides, each topped with trees. Both of them realized that the spot they arrived in was subtly different from the one they had previously been to. The water was still about an inch deep, frogs still croaked, their cries almost indistinguishable from the noise of the downpour, and water skeeters still glided across the surface of the rain-dappled water.
“Odd,” Taid said.
“It looks different than it did last time,” Eykit said at the same time as Taid.
“Let’s see what’s over there,” Taid said, pointing behind him, the direct that seemed to be in the opposite direction as his previous excursion.
“Okay,” the thief said.
The rain saturated Taid’s other set of clothing within minutes. He had nothing else to change into when he got back. The sky was overcast, and it was still windless. There wasn’t even a breeze, a zephyr, or the faintest gust. The air was still, and had a “thick” quality to it that defied explanation, as if it didn’t move right.
They trudged through the muddy water, their boots threatening to get pulled off of their feet if they weren’t careful. Even in that direction, the water got deeper, and soon it was up to mid shin. Both of them could feel things moving around their legs.
Eykit grabbed at the critter flowing around his legs, and at first he thought he was successful. He could feel it squirming like an eel, but all he was able to see was a long, eel-like shape of water, which splashed through his fingers almost immediately in a rain of droplets. When they hit the water, they reformed into the snake-like thing and swam off. He tried again, missing at first, but eventually got a grip on a second one. This one, too, turned to water, sliding through his fingers and back into the swamp.
As they were trudging through the marshy muck, Eykit tripped on a submerged root or something, and he fell over into the muddy water. Now he was wet and muddy. Taid helped him back to his feet.
Shortly after this, they got recalled back to the “normal world”, with the now-familiar odd pulling sensation mixed with the visual distortions. They arrived back in the room, Elitheris waiting patiently for them. “About a half hour,” she says. “That’s how long you guys were gone.” She wrinkled her nose at the marshy smell they brought back with them. After his fall, Eykit was pretty much disguised as a marsh.
Eykit availed himself of the laundry services. Taid did his best to wring out his clothing. He didn’t have anything else to wear.
On a whim, Taid got the first Shard cluster, and tried to get it to work. Alas, he didn’t have any luck. When the other two tried it, it didn’t work for them, either.
“I guess if we want this one to do something, we will have to find a matching Shard to attach to it.”
Eykit piped up, “That Bardem guy with the crystal palace is still in town. We could go there, see what it’s all about?”
“Yeah, we should,” Taid agreed. “But first, we stop by the enchanter’s and get my halberd. It should be done by now.”
There was a sea breeze off of the water that night in the Wharf District. It’s salt tang with an underlayer of fish was strong enough to overpower the other, more human smells of the city. It was a welcome scent, considering that the Wharf District was the area where the sewer lines terminated. Normally, the area smelled like rotting vegetation, sweat, and shit. So the heavy, salty, fishy smell was a welcome relief on a hot summer night in subtropical Port Karn. The sun had just gone down, but the heat of the summer day lingered.
The streets were still full of people, horses, and wagons. They filled the streets from brick building wall to brick building wall, in clothing of all the colors of the rainbow and several more, their skin tones ranging from deep chocolate brown to a light tan, deep olive to pale light green. Every once in a while the pale skin of a Dwarf or a northerner could be seen, but they were rare. They usually turned red within a few days anyway, unless they protected themselves from the sun like the Orcs did. After sundown, many Orcs doffed their wide-brimmed hats and changed their long sleeved garments and gloves for lightweight vests or short sleeves.
The Wharf District was one of the areas that managed to pay for a mage to light the streetlights, and most of them were various shades of yellow, orange, purple, and blue, with the occasional green or red mixed in for variety. It gave the primarily commercial/industrial district a festive air, despite it not being a feast day.
As the three of them walked downhill towards the river and Fishtail Street, Taid and Eykit unconsciously kept Elitheris between them as much as possible, acting as something like a buffer for their friend. It would take a while before she became fully comfortable with the crowds of people elbow-to-elbow pushing up against her constantly.
As they passed a food cart hawking grilled sausages and fried sweet potato wedges, Eykit surreptitiously snatched a sausage from under the proprietor’s nose while he was dealing with a customer. He took a bite, chewing quickly and breathing in sharp gasps. “Hot hot hot!” he gasped out, chewing the meat that threatened to burn his mouth and tongue in more ways than one.
Taid laughed. “That cart was run by an Orc with hot peppers sewn onto his apron. Of course it’s hot!”
The Goblin blew on the stub of sausage in his hand. “By Kalshebba’s left nipple, that is one spicy sausage! And I like spicy! I think I also burned my tongue. And the roof of my mouth.” He took another bite, now that the sausage was a bit cooler, and less damaging to sensitive tissues.
“Who’s Kalshebba?” Elitheris asked.
Eykit replied around a mouthful of sausage, “Goblin goddess of food and drink. Kind of the party goddess, in a way.”
“Oh,” the Elven woman said.
“The old stories said she was destined to eat all of the other gods. Goes back to that cannibalism thing we still get hassled occasionally for.”
“Oh,” Elitheris repeated.
Eykit popped the last bit into his mouth, chewing delightedly even as his face sweated and his eyes teared. He sucked in his breath, trying to somehow reduce the spiciness in his mouth. It didn’t help. “Should have lifted a mug of ale,” he said, under his breath.
“Serves you right for stealing it,” Taid said.
“Spoilsport!” Eykit retorted. “Oh hey, there it is!”
He pointed at a large warehouse, with twisted streamers of maroon ribbons decorating it, and lit up with several spots of light in various pale colors. A mage had cast some light spells, similar to what was cast on the streetlights. A large wooden sign, painted with the words “Bardem’s Crystal Palace” on it, with depictions of Shard clusters on it in various pale colors was propped up by the door. Attached to the top of the sign was a wrought iron bracket, curved to hang over the top front of the sign. The tip was glowing with a warm, white light, brightly illuminating the sign even in the glow of the light spells on the building itself. There was a little space open in front of it, where there were fewer people, as wooden tables had been set up like seawalls, keeping the tide of people at bay, forcing them to go around. But there was still a constant stream of people going into the “Palace”.
The sounds of people shouting, laughing, and the general hubbub of a hundred conversations came out of the building. There was a bouncer at the door, keeping an eye on the people coming in. He was an imposing looking Orc, with a truncheon in a loop at his side, and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
Bouncer
There was a cover charge to get in. It wasn’t much, a mere five copper farthings. The large Orc took everyone’s money, placing it in a pouch at his waist.
Eykit smiled at him as he walked in, but the Orc either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He made sure not to pick the Orc’s pockets as he went in. Elitheris’ eyes were on the crowd of people in the room and the potential exits. She saw a loading door in the back, big enough to drive a wagon through, but it was closed. Taid was looking at the various tables around the room. They were covered in maroon tablecloths with golden edging. Bright glints on the tables were the pale crystalline forms of Shards, being used to play the Game of Shards.
The room itself was big. The shelving units that would normally have filled the room and provided space to store the contents had been either moved out, or moved over to one side of the room, leaving the majority of the space open. The roof was twenty five feet above their heads, and several brightly glowing points of light brightly illuminated the space to almost daylight levels.
Off to one side of the room, he could see a man in the same livery as the room decorations, surrounded by people. They were engaged in some kind of deal, or maybe it was just an intense conversation.
Bardem Amir
It took Eykit only 30 seconds or so to realize that three of the “patrons” weren’t patrons. They were moving differently than a patron would, and although seeming casual, they were very alert. They were guards. One stuck close to the man in the gold and maroon livery. Two others were floaters, watching the room and alert for any trouble.
The man in the gold and maroon moved off, and Eykit watched his bodyguard go with him. That man wasn’t large, and didn’t move with the grace of a trained warrior. While not clumsy by any means, he didn’t have that catlike litheness and sense of restrained strength that good warriors had. Which made him dangerous in a very different way.
Bodyguard
He nudged his companions. “Keep your eyes on that one,” he cautioned. “He’s likely a mage.” He pointed out the other two guards to them as well. “They seem more like muscle. Although the woman looks a little too eager for trouble.”
Bodyguard
“So let’s not cause any trouble while we are here,” Elitheris stated, her tone implying that Eykit would likely be the one causing any.
Eykit chuckled. “I’ll try to keep my hands to myself.” But no promises, he didn’t say aloud.
Bodyguard
In addition to the patrons, there were also waiters, wandering around the room with trays of hors d'oeuvres and drinks. In one corner was a bar and food prep station, brought in for the occasion, apparently, as it didn’t match the decor of the room, if one could consider a warehouse building as having “decor”.
The three of them were unsure where to start, or what to do. How do they enter a game? How is it even played? Was there a queue to use a table? How do you pick people to play against? They didn’t really have a clue, as none of them had ever had any Shards, or any desire, until recently, to have anything to do with them. But now that they had some….
The man in gold must have noticed them, for he came over to them. He was tall, bearded, and had the wide smile of a host on his face. “Greetings!” he said. “I am Bardem Amir, and welcome to the Palace!” He spread his hands to indicate the surroundings. “Have you played before?” he asked.
Taid spoke up. “Nope. But we wanted to see what it was all about.” The man had the demeanor of a carnival barker and the voice of someone who was used to projecting it to talk to crowds. He noticed that the bodyguard that followed Bardem around was watching them intently, assessing whether they were a threat.
“Excellent!” Bardem replied with a cheerful laugh. “Let me tell you about my little establishment, then! There are the games, of course, which you can play using your Shards. All you need to do is go to a table and let the people around it know you want to play and someone will likely challenge you to a game. Or, you can buy or sell Shards here. I’ll offer a good price for any you want to sell! Just let me know! Or you can bet on other people’s games. That’s all informal, and what odds you get will depend upon whom you are betting with. Food and drink are available, as gambling is thirsty work!”
He looked from face to face. “Any questions?” None were forthcoming. “Excellent!” he said again. He seemed to like that word…. He grinned. “Then I will be off, out of your hair, and bothering someone else!” He bowed, doffing his feathered and wide-brimmed hat. “Have a wonderful evening! May your Shards be lucky!” And he strode off, into the crowd, the slightly built bodyguard in his wake. He hadn’t been introduced, and seemed to have the ability to disappear into the background. Or perhaps it was just that Bardem’s personality eclipsed anyone else in the immediate area.
“Well then, let’s check out this Game of Shards,” Elitheris said. “So we can know how to play it. Whatever it is.”
Taid and Eykit nodded. They knew it had to do with laying Shards down so that they had a chance to connect with other Shards, but how it was done exactly wasn’t something they knew.
A game was being played at a table nearby. It was surrounded by onlookers, almost crowding around the table. Many of the onlookers were holding slips of paper, markers for the bets they had made on the game.
On the table were two rows of Shards, one from each player. One row had five Shards, the other had three. The crystals lying on the table were all about an inch or two in length, and about a quarter to half of an inch wide, and spaced about two inches apart, with about six inches between the two rows. As they watched, the second player placed a fourth Shard onto the table.
Both players waited a moment, but nothing happened. The first player placed another Shard down, making six in front of him. Again, that slight wait, as if waiting for something to happen. Again, nothing did. Some money changed hands in the audience: they had bet that by turn whatever it was that a pairing would occur. Someone had just lost that bet.
The second player removed a Shard from the board, placing it in a pouch in his lap. The first player also removed a Shard, leaving five in front of him, and three in front of the second player. The second player sighed, and placed a Shard down on the table, and again, nothing happened.
The first player placed a crystal on the table, waited, and shook his head slightly, disappointed when nothing happened…again. The second player raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “That’s all I have. Nothing I have matches up with yours.” He scooped up his Shards, stood, and walked into the crowd, likely to try to play someone else. The spectators resolved whatever bets they had made as the first player placed his Shards back into his carrying pouch.
Ten minutes later, a great deal of shouting and whooping erupted from a table on the other side of the room. All three companions turned their heads in that direction in time to see a glowing cluster rising above the table before a person leapt up to grab it, holding on as he slowly, slowly floated down to the ground. People around the table giggled as they realized that the magic that affected the cluster also affected them, and they bounced around like people in low gravity. Many of them were jumping up, only to float slowly down to the ground. Over the general noise of a large group of people shouting in childish glee, they heard “Toss me!” and a young Goblin was launched into the air by a Human who looked like a blacksmith’s apprentice. The Goblin soared up, reaching a height of about twelve feet before slowly drifting down to the floor like a leaf. He was flapping his arms as if trying to stay in the air, laughing the entire time.
After about five minutes, it ended, mostly with cries of surprise as the “floaters” came crashing down unexpectedly at the normal speed of falling objects. The range of the effect seemed to be about ten feet or so. It explained why so many of the spectators crowded so close to the tables they were watching.
They watched a few more games, never betting on them, just watching, figuring out the rules and figuring out the basic tactics of the game.
It was a very simple game. Players alternate placing Shards on the table. Or, they could use their turn to remove one of their Shards, reserving it to be played later. When one player ran out of Shards to play, the game was over. Both players took their Shards and went to play someone else, with the hope that maybe someone else might have a set of Shards that included at least one that might join with theirs. When that happened, who “won” the cluster, and all of the Shards on the table, was determined by which Shard was dominant. That was the Shard that “pulled” the joining Shard to it. Whoever owned the dominate Shard won the board; it didn’t really matter who put the joining Shard down on the board. But joinings were very rare. There were a lot of Shards out there, a whole moon’s worth apparently, and although they were all rumored to fit together like puzzle pieces, getting those pieces together from a collection spread out over all of Velyri was difficult, to say the least. But it happened, and more often than probability would seem to indicate. No one knew why, except that the Shards seemed to want to come together.
“I’d like to try it,” Elitheris said, drawn to the game. She was the one holding the bag with their twenty one singleton Shards in it. The two clusters were with Taid; they weren’t planning on taking a risk gambling with those. At least for now.
She sat in a recently vacated seat. “Shall we play?” she asked the player who had remained seated, a Human of middle age. He was bearded, and his dark skin was laced with age lines and had the leathery look of a sailor or dockworker. She imagined she could smell the salt on him, but that could have just been the location of the warehouse she was in.
He nodded, introducing himself. “I’m Larrance. Who do I have the pleasure of playing with?” He grinned, a shy, fleeting smile from someone who didn’t see Elves very often, and who seemed to be thrilled to be in the presence of one.
Elitheris wasn’t sure what to do with that, assuming she was reading him right. That was always questionable; despite being in town for a few weeks, she still wasn’t sure how city folk thought. “I’m Elitheris,” she finally responded.
People were starting to gather around the table. They were murmuring, placing bets.
He nodded, “Nice to meet you, Elitheris.” He took the token lying on the table, an oversized, coin-like disk of brass, ready to flip it to see who got to play first. One side had an image of Bardem’s grinning face, complete with his signature plumed hat. The other side had three crystal clusters, base to base, looking like a stylized flower.
Larrance won the coin toss. He placed a Shard on the table. Elitheris placed one of hers. There was a pause as both waited a moment to see if anything happened. Now that the stakes were going to affect her, the anticipation mixed with fear was real, and she could feel it like a frisson of energy in her fingertips and toes. Anticipation because of the hope of something happening, fear because she might lose her Shards.
Larrance put another Shard down, laying it next to his previous one. Elitheris did the same with one of hers. Again, the momentary pause, but nothing happened.
They kept alternating plays, mostly putting Shards down, but occasionally returning them to their “hand”. In the end, none of the played Shards joined. They both left the table disappointed, Larrance nodding to her as he left and disappeared through the crowd.
Elitheris wanted to play again. She scanned the tables. She realized she should have stayed seated at the table she was at, but the desire to play again hadn’t made itself known until she had stood up. And once she had done that, another player had taken her seat. On the other side of the room her keen eyes noticed a game ending, and she made her way over to it. As she suspected, the game was over, both players showing the now commonplace disappointment of not having any Shards joined.
She sat in the recently vacated chair. A Human woman sat down across from her. “Let’s play,” the woman said, picking up the token used for coin flips. Elitheris called “heads”, and when the coin was shown, Bardem’s smiling face greeted her. She was first.
She placed a Shard on the table. The unnamed woman did the same, and they both paused expectantly. Nothing happened. Elitheris laid another, next to the first. The woman did too, seeming like she was in a hurry. They added more Shards to the rows, in every case the woman putting hers down as soon after Elitheris’ as she could, as if impatient to get a joining. They continued playing, occasionally pulling out Shards, trying to gauge the balance between having Shards to possibly join with, versus the risk of losing all of them. The two of them seemed to hover around four to six Shards down on the table at a time. At the end, Elitheris ran out of Shards to try, and from what she could tell, none of them would match the ones the other woman had. “That’s all I’ve got,” she said, ending the game. She stood up. “Thanks for the game.”
“Yeah, whatever,” the woman replied, already getting ready to match her Shards with the next player.
“Well,” she said to Taid and Eykit, “that was a bust.”
Across the room, shouts erupted, and they heard someone shout “I gotta catch it!” They turned toward the noise, seeing a glowing cluster flying around the room like a spooked sparrow. Its rushing, whooshing noise could be heard even above the shouting of the patrons. They watched it circle around in some kind of spin, then arc right into a man’s stomach. He let out a pained “Oof!” and fell over, knocking into one of the stools at the bar, which crashed over, taking the patron seated on it with it.
The man chasing the cluster grabbed it from the fallen man’s hands, reclaiming his cluster. The man on the ground moaned, holding his belly.
“Excuse me,” a voice from behind her said. It was a deep, sonorous voice, the kind of voice an actor on stage might have. “Would you be interested in selling any of your Shards? I would pay you handsomely.”
Herbert Vesten
Elitheris turned, and saw a tall, thin man, well-dressed, with tanned skin, black hair in a pony tail, and a van dyke beard. He wore the clothes of a successful merchant, and had the hands of a manager, rather than an actual laborer. The air around him smelled fresh, not like the usual air in the building, which was a combination of sweat, salt, beer, and fish.
“Who are you,” Eykit asked.
“Well, hello,” he replied, turning his attention downward to the much shorter Eykit. “Do you have any Shards I could buy?”
“No, we’ve pooled our Shards together. She has them.” He indicated Elitheris. “But we aren’t selling.”
“That’s too bad. It’s unfortunate, but most people just don’t want to sell. Even if they could use the money more than the rocks themselves.” He smiled, showing white, even teeth. “The hope that something miraculous will happen keeps people holding on to them, I guess.”
Taid’s and Elitheris’ mage sense was going off…this man was carrying a magic item. They could feel it. When Taid looked at his hand, he noticed a ring of gold with a small sapphire on it, and in his mind’s eye, he could see it glowing softly with a pale, golden light. There was no actual glow; it was just what his perceptions saw. He noted a necklace with a similar effect.
Eykit noticed Elitheris’ and Taid’s looks, making an educated guess on what it meant. Magic. This guy had it. “Who are you?” he asked, his interest piqued.
“My name is Herbert. And you are?”
“Eykit. Do you play the Shard game?”
“Ah, no.” He laughed. “I don’t want to lose the ones I have! Which is why I prefer to buy them.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“An interrogation?” He smirked. “Fine. I’m a waiter and bartender.”
“Bullshit. You look too rich for that.”
“Oh, I don’t do that for the money. My family has money.”
“Live near here?”
Herbert raised an eyebrow. “No, I have a place in the country.” His tone of voice was starting to indicate he was realizing that he probably shouldn’t be answering so many questions.
“Ever have one of your Shards join?”
“Once. My cat talked to me for a while. It was…interesting. Apparently birds and mice occupy a great deal of their attention.”
A hard look came into his eyes as he tired of the questioning. “If you aren’t going to sell your Shards, I will go find someone else who will. Good evening.” He turned and left. The fresh smell of a spring meadow lingered for a few moments, then was swamped by the stale sweat and beer smell of the Shardmeet.
They watched him as he engaged in conversation with another person. He didn’t have any luck buying any Shards there, either.
They hung around for a little while longer, but it was late, around the middle of the night, and the Shardmeet was closing for the night. Bardem, his voice amplified somehow, announced that the Shardmeet was closing down for the night, but they could all come back tomorrow after lunch.
Elitheris, Taid, and Eykit called it a night and went back to their rooms at the inn.
The following morning, Toren Ghent, the New Square Skulls’ guild master, called Eykit, Taid, and Elitheris into his office for a discussion. The messenger that had “collected” them showed them to his office, then left, shutting the door behind him.
Toren’s office wasn’t large, nor was it opulently furnished. It was nicely appointed, however, with wood-paneled walls, a couple of bookshelves, a large wooden desk with drawers, what looked like a comfortable, high backed chair, and three simpler chairs arranged in front of the desk. Toren sat in the high back chair, behind his desk, his elbow on the desktop, his hands steepled together.
He stood when the three entered, gestured to the three chairs, and said, “Please, sit.”
His three visitors sat, making themselves as comfortable as they could. He didn’t waste any time on morning pleasantries.
“Eykit, tell me what happened.”
Eykit recounted the events of the day and night before. How he became a bakery deliveryman in order to get a good look inside the house; how, after delivering the bread baskets, he snuck into a coat closet, staying there the whole day; and how he waited until the Baron had mysteriously left the premises before coming out of the closet.
He recounted how he made his way through the house, up the stairs, across the gallery, down the rotunda bannister rail, and into the dining room, where he took the painting. He told how he made his way out, almost getting away without raising any alarms. But alas, Larraine’s Elven tutor also happened to be a mage, who summoned a pair of terror birds to keep the thief from escaping, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
He told his guild master of Taid and Elitheris’ parts in the caper. “Taid had helped with the insertion,” he recounted, “and Elitheris helped with the extraction.” He filled in the details of both of their actions, and was generous enough to say that it really couldn’t have been done without them. Besides, he wanted them on Ghent’s good side.
During all of this, Toren asked few questions, mostly waiting for the entire story to unfold before starting in with his own inquiries. At the end of the grueling question and answer session, Toren got detailed information about his rival’s household decor, staff, layout, and basic security. Taid and Elitheris each got a bag of coins, $250 each, for their parts in the events. Toren mentioned that his informants corroborated the story, at least to a basic level, as none of them were all that close to the action.
He went on to recount what the New Square Skulls had been doing as a distraction: incursions into Flower Street Harrowers territory. These consisted mainly of highly-visible break-ins, vandalism, muggings, and “arsons”. These fake fires were actually only smoke bombs and fires lit within cauldrons, to contain the flames and prevent the fires from spreading. Ghent didn’t want any fires ravaging the city. Meanwhile, he had his people visibly accosting people in the Harrower’s territory, demonstrating that the Harrowers weren’t doing a very good job of protecting them. Toren Ghent has also spent some money on hiring town criers to spread propaganda about who was doing all of these attacks: The Order, or the Black Spades, or, in some cases, the White Hill Gang. All thieves’ guilds adjacent to the Harrowers.
It caused a lot of confusion. The Harrowers were stretched thin, spending most of their time running between crises, only to have the perpetrators move on before they could get there. Even after Baron Kraite showed up to try to control the situation, there was just too much going on to rein in the chaos. As a distraction, it worked beautifully.
And the Harrowers didn’t even know exactly who stole the portrait. They had their suspicions, of course, but they didn’t know exactly who had broken in and stolen the painting. They figured it was the Skulls, but they didn’t know who in the Skulls had pulled it off. “According to my informants,” Ghent stated, “their primary suspect is Jakkit.” Both Taid and Elitheris gave him a confused look. “He’s my second in command. In his youth, he was, like young Eykit here, part of a thieving crew. So although he doesn’t really do that any longer, he is still a suspect in the Baron’s eyes. There are a few others they think might have done it, including Merrimas Goodsong. He’s a hobbit,” Ghent added. “And good with disguises.” He turned to Eykit, “So it appears as if you aren’t on their most wanted list. Yet.”
He chuckled. “I also heard that the Baron is pissed. At his own staff, for letting this happen. Someone…or someones, more likely…blew it, and the Baron isn’t pleased. He had a pretty major failure of security, and I suspect he will be dressing down his staff for the next day or two. The fact that his ring of security was infiltrated has got to gnaw at him. I suspect he will be looking through all his stuff trying to find what else was stolen.”
Eykit looked worried. Ghent noticed, and smiled. “It’s one reason I asked you not to steal anything else. He’ll spend a lot of time combing through all of his important possessions trying to figure out what else disappeared. But he won’t find anything else, will he, Eykit?”
Eykit’s demeanor didn’t show the sudden spike of fear that ran down his spine like an icicle. He was a good actor, and kept any external showing of this fear off of his face. “No, sir, he won’t.” He gave a very convincing smile. “I really like the fact that he is going to go crazy trying to figure out what else was stolen.”
“In any case,” he continued, “job well done. Dismissed.” He was pulling out some paperwork by the time the three guests left the room.
The three companions walked out of the apartment building Toren Ghent used as his offices. Taid was talking about getting his adjusted and lightened breastplate from the enchanter. Elitheris was going with him, but Eykit had something he had to do first.
He turned to his two companions. “I’ve got to take care of something. I’ll meet you at the Port Karn Agricultural Council’s enchanter’s guild. It’s still a few days before they said they would have any information, but maybe they could tell us something about that servitor head we gave them.”
The other two looked at each other quizzically, not knowing his plans, but shrugged, and nodded. “See you in a while,” Taid said, as he and Elitheris walked eastward towards the Agricultural Council’s campus.
Eykit needed to find a fence. Just not one that he used very often. He had something to sell, and he didn’t want anyone to know that he had sold it. Heck, he didn’t want anyone to know that he had it at all! He had been told not to steal anything while in the Baron’s estate, but that didn’t work out as well as it could have. There had been too much temptation, and there was nearly no way he could have gotten out of there without stealing something. He hoped that the little bird was minor enough that the Baron wouldn’t realize it was gone. If Ghent found out, he was toast.
And he hadn’t made it out without stealing something other than the portrait. He had taken a small statuette of a bird, worked in silver. He didn’t even remember actually stealing it; it was just in his pocket all of a sudden, and if he had taken the time to go back and figure out where it had originally been, he would certainly been caught. So it was better this way: stolen, and sold quietly and discreetly. At least, that is how he rationalized it.
He knew of a fence who had a shop at the outskirts of New Square Skulls’ territory. Actually, it was located in the no-man’s-land between the territories of the Skulls and the Hammerskins. The two gangs, while nominally at peace, still had some discussions going on, punctuated by the occasional gang fight, about whose streets were whose. For Eykit’s purposes, that worked out nicely.
Lucianne ran a laundry service. She was also a fence. She wouldn’t give Eykit the best prices, but that wasn’t as important as the anonymity using her would give. It was worth the loss of money, especially since if Baron Kraite ever saw this item “on the market” it would help to point him in the direction of Eykit, and that was a large bundle of worms that Eykit had no interest in seeing come to light.
The laundry was bustling with activity, and filled with scents that Eykit couldn’t identify. Not all of them were pleasant. He picked Lucianne out while she was talking with one of her foremen. He made his way past vats of bubbling liquid and shapeless fabrics, trying to stay out of the way of the workers with large wooden paddles stirring their laundry cauldrons, then waited patiently as Lucianne finished her conversation with her employee. She saw him, nodded, and continued with her list of instructions for her foreman. A few moment later, the foreman nodded, turned, and strode off, into the mass of people and vats.
Lucianne turned to Eykit. She was Human, and tall, even taller than most Human men. The musculature of her arms showed that she hadn’t always been the boss, but had stirred vats and beat clothing herself. Her forearms looked like a baker’s forearms, thickly corded with muscle from wringing out thousands of garments.
“What do you want?” she asked bluntly.
Eykit smiled, showing only the hint of teeth. Given the rows of sharp, carnivore teeth, a Goblin smile could look very threatening, and Eykit needed her services. “I’ve got something to sell, on the down low.”
This made Lucianne perk up her attention. What had been just an annoying distraction, since customer service was not her favorite activity, became business. “Is that so? Why don’t we discuss it in my office?” She turned, beckoning for Eykit to follow, then walked quickly to her office. The much shorter Goblin had to almost run to keep up with her.
Her office was a small room, with two desks, one with a clerk sitting at it, writing columns of numbers in a ledger. “Sammel,” she said, “I need the room.”
The clerk looked up, and with only the briefest of hesitations, stood and left the room, leaving his ledger on the desk, and closing the door behind him.
Lucianne leaned against one of the many cabinets of drawers that lined one wall of the room. “What do you have?”
Eykit reached into a pouch at his waist, retrieved the bird figurine, and held it on his palm. It was the figure of a seated bird, wings folded, and made of silver. It had fine etched lines detailing the eyes, beak, and feathers. From what Eykit could tell, it was a well made piece of artwork.
The woman reached into a desk drawer, and pulled out a magnifying glass. “May I?” she asked, holding out her hand. Eykit handed the figurine over to her so she could examine it. She looked at it from all angles, analyzing the engravings, and checking to make sure it didn’t have any obvious telltale owner’s marks. “I’ll give you $80 for it.”
Eykit smiled. The haggling had begun. In the end, he walked out with $120, which wasn’t bad considering he knew he would be taking a bit of a loss. Lucianne was a shrewd haggler. She would likely get $250 for it, perhaps more, when she found a buyer for it. But at least it was out of his hands.
Meanwhile, Taid and Elitheris had walked over to the collection of buildings that made up the largest of Port Karn’s mage guilds. It was actually more than just a mage guild—the Port Karn Agricultural Council was a huge bureaucratic entity of which one small part was a mage guild. However, it was the only mage guild in town that had enchanting as a service.
Mages were rare. Only a small subset of people had the aptitude for even the simplest of magics. Only a fraction of those were discovered to be mages, and only a portion of those learned magic at all. Enchanting required more than just the minimal ability to wield magic…a lot more. And the training required was also a lot more than a lot of mages wanted to go through, so enchanter mages were rarer still. And the mage employed by the Ag Council wasn’t even from Port Karn originally. He was actually from one of the Dwarven undercities from the mountains to the northwest. Dwarves had a very magic-based culture. They had to, in order to survive so long underground. Ventilation, water supplies, food production, sewage control, even construction and excavation were all magic-based. The Dwarves couldn’t have a subterranean civilization without it.
The Dwarf in question was Harald Darkstone, a Dwarf with long blonde hair and braided beard, which he kept tucked into his belt to keep it out of the forge. Most Dwarves had pale skin, a result of their subterranean lifestyles. Harald’s was tanned, showing that he had been living in the surface world long enough to have gotten past the tendency to sunburn, rather than tan.
Harald met them in the enchanting office, a windowless room that also doubled as something of a storefront. It wasn’t large, and was bisected across the middle by a counter, a portion of which could be lifted up via hinges for access. The customer portion had a couple of chairs along the wall, but mostly those interested in enchanting an item stood at the counter, behind which was the enchanter. Behind him was a door to the crafting rooms, flanked on both sides by shelves full of wooden bins and bundles of arrows of various lengths and girths. Several other items were visible on the shelves, including knives, jewelry, and stacks of folded clothing. A sheathed sword hung from a peg on the wall, and there were several spears stored in the rafters above their heads.
Harald was between projects, having just finished enchanting the breastplate Taid had asked him to adjust and repair. The enchantment was simply to make the breastplate lighter than usual, to keep the weight down. Taid didn’t want to be slowed down. The craftsman helped Taid into the breastplate, to make sure the fit was perfect. It was, as expected, not requiring any last minute adjustments. Taid danced around in it, getting a feel for the new armor and how he moved in it. He didn’t seem hampered in any way that would affect his skill in combat.
“Seems to be adequate,” Harald said.
“It is indeed,” replied Taid. “I have a halberd I would like enchanted with Deflect. How long would that take?”
“If you like, I could do it now, but there will be a rush fee. It will cost you $200 for the base level of Deflect. I can offer this deal to you because it’s quick, and I haven’t started on my next project yet. Anything higher than the base level and we would be looking at it taking months to complete, and I have several large jobs ahead of you in the queue. But the basic level will only take me about an hour.”
“It sounds like a good deal to me. My halberd is in the weapons locker off of the lobby.” He chuckled. “For some reason, they don’t like people carrying large weapons around inside.”
Harald nodded. It was standard procedure in most public places to put primary, and often sidearms as well, in safe keeping. “I’ll have my assistant fetch it for you. Just give him a description of the weapon so he can make sure he gets the right one. Although halberds aren’t terribly common on a daily basis, unlike the ubiquitous Tondene spear.” He grinned. He’d seen a lot of Tondene spears with their hooks, lugs, and hewing spearheads.
Deflect was an enchantment that would allow the wielder of the weapon to defend more effectively by creating a field that imparted a force in a random direction on the incoming weapon. Mostly, it was used for improving armor, and, indeed, Taid’s gambeson had Deflect as part of its suite of enchantments. But it was also useful to put on shields, or weapons, because they added another layer of defense.
Taid looked around, noticing shallow bins filled with arrowheads, and the bundles of arrows and bolts. He noticed that not all of the arrows were the same length, or thickness, and that they had no arrowheads attached to them. “Do you have any enchanted bolts?”
Harald looked up from the paper he had been writing some notes on while he waited for his assistant to come back with the halberd. “What? Oh, yes. Well, sort of. We enchant the heads, then attach them to the shafts as needed. The stronger the bow, the stronger the arrows have to be. With crossbow bolts, it’s less of an issue. What do you want?”
He scrutinized Taid, figuring that he was literate. “There is a list posted on the wall, there,” he volunteered, pointing to a parchment nailed to the wall by the door. It listed several different types of enchanted arrows. Their prices, for enchanted items, were actually fairly inexpensive. Another list, next to the first, listed a few other miscellaneous enchanted items as well.
“Hey!” Taid said, “They have some necklaces with the Bless spell on them. Eykit, Elitheris, you guys should get some of these. I’ve got two, myself. A little help from the gods never hurts. Or, rather, help from magic. Although I suppose it’s the same thing.”
“Magic is simply a tool that the gods gave us,” Harald stated. “The Bless enchantment is simply magic affecting the probabilistic outcomes in the wearer’s favor. One of our best sellers, actually. The military buys them up in job lots. Usually for their officers, I presume.”
The Goblin and the Elf each got two. After all, eventually their magic would run out, and having a spare would be helpful. At some point, an event would happen that would trigger the magic to “exert” itself too much, and the magic would break. The magic’s last gasp would be able to subtly modify the probabilities of the situation, making it more favorable to the wearer.
Taid turned back to the first list, reading down the different enchantments. “Drunkenness Arrows? Anyone hit gets intoxicated?” He chuckled. “I like it. Give me five crossbow bolts with those heads. If they survive the hit, they will at least be wobbly and not thinking clearly.”
Elitheris walked over and peered at the list. She saw some things she liked: Curse arrows, Daze arrows, Sleep arrows. She checked the bundles of arrows, seeking the arrow shafts with the correct length and thickness to handle her bow. She pointed them out to Harald, who smiled and slid the barreled shafts out of the bundles.
“Two Curse, one Daze, and one Sleep, please,” Elitheris said.
Harald went to the bins of arrowheads, pulling out four broadhead tips from three different bins. He set the shafts and heads next to the bolts he had collected for Taid. Then he went about gluing on the heads. Some archers used wax to attach their arrowheads to their shafts, so that when the shaft is pulled out the head stays in the wound. Harald preferred a special glue that was both stronger than the wax but not strong enough to stay attached to the shaft when tugged out. It prevented the heads falling off on a hot day, of which there were many at the latitude at which Port Karn was situated. It was the work of ten minutes to get all of the missiles assembled. He handed them to their respective owners, saying, “The glue should harden in an hour or so. Be careful with them until then.”
Taid and Elitheris paid their money, at which point Harald’s assistant came back, holding Taid’s halberd. He took it, examining it critically. He nodded, then glanced up at Taid. “Come back in a couple of hours. It will be ready then.”
They went back to the inn, and on the way they overheard a town crier shouting, “Bardem’s Crystal Palace is in town! Go to the warehouse on Fishtail Street with the maroon bunting! Enjoy a Shardmeet! Partake of the games, the food, the drink! Shardmeet on Fishtail Street!”
And they remembered that they had a pair of Shard clusters. Those were the kinds of Shards that had magic powers, and were the end goal of the Games of Shards. People wanted magic items, and Shards were relatively common. Taid, Eykit, and Elitheris had two clusters, and 21 single Shards between them. There was a great demand for them; everybody wanted Shards, and the more the better. There were even some people who were willing to sell them, although the more someone had, the less they seemed to want to sell any.
Back at the inn, they grabbed a late lunch and some ale at the Pig’s in His Cups, then went up to their rooms to examine their Shards. They hadn’t had a chance to actually do that until that moment. They opened up the bag they kept the Shards in, and laid them out on the bed. There were 21 Shards, and a pair of two-Shard clusters.
Taid spoke up first. “I’m getting a sense of magic in the second cluster. Elitheris? What about you?” As a mage, he was attuned to the flows of mana, and thus could feel it when in the presence of a magical item. Elitheris was, too.
Elitheris looked critically at the laid out crystals. “All I get is a sense of enchantment on the second cluster, just like you. That first cluster seems dead to me.”
“Maybe neither of you are powerful enough mages?” Eykit asked.
Taid gave the Goblin a Look. “Perhaps,” he answered, admitting the point.
“From what I have heard on the street, you just think at it when holding it,” Eykit said, helpfully.
“Oh yeah?” Elitheris asked. Not having spent all that much time in “civilized” areas, she hadn’t had any contact with Shards before. “Do you ask it nicely, or can you be rude?”
It was Eykit’s turn to give a Look. “I don’t know,” he replied petulantly. “I’ve never had a Shard before. And I’ve certainly never been lucky enough to have a cluster. I only know what the street scuttlebutt has told me.”
“Well, I’m the most protected, if it explodes or something,” Taid stated, reaching for the first cluster. “Here goes nothing.” He held the first, “unenchanted” cluster, and tried to get it to work. Just in case. But he was disappointed, as nothing happened. He sort of expected that, but it was still something of a letdown.
“Okay,” he said, “That didn’t seem to do anything. Let’s see what happens with the second one.” He took a deep breath, and held the second one. “Here goes,” he said, and he willed it to work.
He faded away.
“Hey!” shouted Eykit. “Taid? Taid!” He waved his arms around where Taid used to be. “Taid! Where are you?” He and Elitheris walked around the room, trying to feel an invisible Taid. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t invisible. He was just gone.
“We gotta find him!” Eykit said, worried.
“Yeah,” agreed Elitheris. “Let’s check the building. Maybe he got transported into a neighboring room or something.”
“I’ll check this floor, you check downstairs,” Eykit said. Elitheris nodded, then bolted downstairs, eyes flicking around, alert for any Dwarves she might see.
When they had searched the inn and the attached stables and public house without any sign of Taid, they moved to neighboring buildings. On one side was a bakery, but Taid wasn’t in there baking or even buying any loaves of bread. On the other side was a chandlery, but Taid wasn’t buying any candles, either. The next buildings over were more candle shops, a restaurant specializing in Orcish dishes, a woodworker, another bakery, this one specializing in pastries and cakes, and another alehouse.
Taid wasn’t in any of them.
Because Taid was Somewhere Else.
When Taid willed the shard cluster to work, there was a sense of dizziness with a side of visual distortion. He wasn’t sure if that visual distortion was a flash of light, a color, blackness, or something even stranger. But he wasn’t in the inn any longer.
Visibility was limited to about fifty feet due to the fog. It varied a little, as the fog wasn’t consistently thick. Mosquitoes were abundant, and he could see water striders flicking over the surface of the mostly-still water. He could see gnats and flies as well. He could hear no-see-ums. He slapped at the touch of some bug or another.
The water was only mostly still. He kept seeing movement in the water out of the corner of his eye. But he wasn’t sure if it was a fish, or something else.
He mentally shrugged, then headed off in an arbitrary direction. In this case, “forward”. He didn’t have a compass, as they were rather bulky things, usually mounted on ships. He had no real landmarks to navigate with, so most of his Army training wasn’t being very helpful.
As he walked, he noticed that the water got deeper. It was up to his ankles. And now he was sure he was seeing movement in the water. He did see some fish, now that he was in deeper water. Minnows, perhaps, or young fish of some other kind. Elitheris was the one who could identify fish; he only thought about how they tasted.
But there was something else in the water, besides fish. Taid couldn’t see it, but he could feel it sliding past his ankles. When he looked down, he didn’t see anything. After several attempts, he was able to see the displaced water from its movement. It was like it was invisible in the water. They didn’t seem to be threatening, but he cast the spell of Danger Sense. There didn’t seem to be any immediate danger.
He moved on, continuing his path.
The water kept getting deeper, and he was knee deep in the marshy water. The trees had slowly transitioned to mostly mangroves, their roots arching into the water. There were still no birds, or large animals. He could hear (and, in one case, actually see) frogs, and fish. And he kept feeling the “invisible” eels or whatever they were sliding past his legs and feet. He even tried to grab them, but all he was able to grab was water. He kept being attacked by mosquitoes, who never seemed to give up trying to land on him and suck his blood.
He also saw something weird. In shape, it was like some sort of sea anemone, except that it seemed to be made of water. Given that it was always at least half in the water that seemed ubiquitous, he wasn’t sure if that was even right. It was more of an impression of an anemone, with squid-like qualities that he couldn’t explain.
The fog turned into rain, first just a mist, then starting to pound the surroundings in a downpour. It started to get cold, now that his clothes were drenched.
“Enough of this crap,” he said aloud. “I’m going back.” He turned around, and headed for what he thought was the area he had come from. He trudged through the knee deep water, his saturated boots sinking a few inches into the mud at every step. A few times his feet slipped, but he kept upright, and didn’t fall into the water. Not that he would have gotten any more wet, given the rain. At least the water was getting shallower, so he figured he was at least going in the right direction towards the point from which he had arrived.
All of a sudden, he felt as if every particle of his body was being pulled in different directions. Then he felt that dizziness and experienced that visual distortion that, after a moment, resolved itself into the room at the inn.
Elitheris and Eykit were nowhere to be found. Other than their absence, the room was exactly how he left it, with the one exception being that the blanket on the bed had been hastily folded over the Shards laying on it, likely to hide them from casual eyes. In the sudden relative silence, he could hear the drops of water falling from his clothes splatting onto the wooden boards of the floor. He sighed, and started removing his soaked clothing. On a whim, he grabbed a ceramic cup off of the shelf and scraped some mud from his boots into it. He thought it might come in handy, later. Or maybe he could get it examined, to see if there was anything strange or wondrous about it. Maybe an alchemist might need it for something, once he figured out what it actually was.
The sun was in about the same position in the sky, so he knew he hadn’t been gone too long. He hung his wet things up on the hooks that ran in a row down the wall of the room. They dripped. He dried his body as best he could, then put on his other set of clothes. He went downstairs to talk with the innkeeper about laundry services.
For a nominal fee, his clothes could be laundered. He was happy to pay, knowing that his clothing and gambeson would be returned the next day. He was a little reluctant to be parted from his armor, but the layers of linen wouldn’t be as protective while saturated with water. Not to mention, they were about eight pounds heavier when they were wet. And uncomfortable to wear, besides, feeling tighter and more restrictive.
He went back upstairs to wait for Elitheris and Eykit. He didn’t have to wait long; they came back about ten minutes later.
“Where’d you go?” Eykit asked. “We looked all over for you!”
“Well, you didn’t look anywhere near where I went.” Taid said, chuckling. “Although I don’t know where that was.” He gave a description of where he had been. Neither Eykit nor Elitheris knew where he had gone. Although Elitheris did remember some old stories about other realms of existence, like the realm of fire, the realm of earth, and the other elemental realms. The Elves used the term “brane” to denote those other realms, and Elitheris guessed that maybe he had been in the Water Brane.
“There was an awful lot of land there for a Water Brane,” Taid commented, but didn’t disagree. “The water kept getting deeper, but I didn’t go too far before I turned around. And then I got returned here.”
“I want to try it!” Eykit exclaimed, taking the crystal cluster from Taid. He thought about it working, and he faded away, just as Taid had when he had used it.
Eykit’s description was similar to Taid’s, although Eykit didn’t go as far as Taid did. Except that Eykit never had any fog, only a drenching downpour of rain. From his description, it had gotten even more intense than what Taid had experienced.
Seeing that he was already wet, Taid decided to do another test of the Shard cluster. He took it back from Eykit, and touched the Goblin’s shoulder with it, willing it to work. It did. They both disappeared, since both of them were touching it.
Elitheris sighed, and shook her head. She was happy not to go to whatever that place was. She didn’t like to be soaked to bone, or stand around in mucky marshes. She’d done enough of that, and preferred something a bit more on the dry side. Let the boys play in that swamp all they like, she thought, I’m not having any part of it. Although she did realize that it might be useful as a potential bolt hole if things got rough and they needed an escape.
Taid and Eykit arrived in a shallow valley, with low hills rising to both sides, each topped with trees. Both of them realized that the spot they arrived in was subtly different from the one they had previously been to. The water was still about an inch deep, frogs still croaked, their cries almost indistinguishable from the noise of the downpour, and water skeeters still glided across the surface of the rain-dappled water.
“Odd,” Taid said.
“It looks different than it did last time,” Eykit said at the same time as Taid.
“Okay,” the thief said.
The rain saturated Taid’s other set of clothing within minutes. He had nothing else to change into when he got back. The sky was overcast, and it was still windless. There wasn’t even a breeze, a zephyr, or the faintest gust. The air was still, and had a “thick” quality to it that defied explanation, as if it didn’t move right.
They trudged through the muddy water, their boots threatening to get pulled off of their feet if they weren’t careful. Even in that direction, the water got deeper, and soon it was up to mid shin. Both of them could feel things moving around their legs.
Eykit grabbed at the critter flowing around his legs, and at first he thought he was successful. He could feel it squirming like an eel, but all he was able to see was a long, eel-like shape of water, which splashed through his fingers almost immediately in a rain of droplets. When they hit the water, they reformed into the snake-like thing and swam off. He tried again, missing at first, but eventually got a grip on a second one. This one, too, turned to water, sliding through his fingers and back into the swamp.
As they were trudging through the marshy muck, Eykit tripped on a submerged root or something, and he fell over into the muddy water. Now he was wet and muddy. Taid helped him back to his feet.
Shortly after this, they got recalled back to the “normal world”, with the now-familiar odd pulling sensation mixed with the visual distortions. They arrived back in the room, Elitheris waiting patiently for them. “About a half hour,” she says. “That’s how long you guys were gone.” She wrinkled her nose at the marshy smell they brought back with them. After his fall, Eykit was pretty much disguised as a marsh.
Eykit availed himself of the laundry services. Taid did his best to wring out his clothing. He didn’t have anything else to wear.
On a whim, Taid got the first Shard cluster, and tried to get it to work. Alas, he didn’t have any luck. When the other two tried it, it didn’t work for them, either.
“I guess if we want this one to do something, we will have to find a matching Shard to attach to it.”
Eykit piped up, “That Bardem guy with the crystal palace is still in town. We could go there, see what it’s all about?”
“Yeah, we should,” Taid agreed. “But first, we stop by the enchanter’s and get my halberd. It should be done by now.”
There was a sea breeze off of the water that night in the Wharf District. It’s salt tang with an underlayer of fish was strong enough to overpower the other, more human smells of the city. It was a welcome scent, considering that the Wharf District was the area where the sewer lines terminated. Normally, the area smelled like rotting vegetation, sweat, and shit. So the heavy, salty, fishy smell was a welcome relief on a hot summer night in subtropical Port Karn. The sun had just gone down, but the heat of the summer day lingered.
The Wharf District was one of the areas that managed to pay for a mage to light the streetlights, and most of them were various shades of yellow, orange, purple, and blue, with the occasional green or red mixed in for variety. It gave the primarily commercial/industrial district a festive air, despite it not being a feast day.
As the three of them walked downhill towards the river and Fishtail Street, Taid and Eykit unconsciously kept Elitheris between them as much as possible, acting as something like a buffer for their friend. It would take a while before she became fully comfortable with the crowds of people elbow-to-elbow pushing up against her constantly.
As they passed a food cart hawking grilled sausages and fried sweet potato wedges, Eykit surreptitiously snatched a sausage from under the proprietor’s nose while he was dealing with a customer. He took a bite, chewing quickly and breathing in sharp gasps. “Hot hot hot!” he gasped out, chewing the meat that threatened to burn his mouth and tongue in more ways than one.
Taid laughed. “That cart was run by an Orc with hot peppers sewn onto his apron. Of course it’s hot!”
The Goblin blew on the stub of sausage in his hand. “By Kalshebba’s left nipple, that is one spicy sausage! And I like spicy! I think I also burned my tongue. And the roof of my mouth.” He took another bite, now that the sausage was a bit cooler, and less damaging to sensitive tissues.
“Who’s Kalshebba?” Elitheris asked.
Eykit replied around a mouthful of sausage, “Goblin goddess of food and drink. Kind of the party goddess, in a way.”
“Oh,” the Elven woman said.
“The old stories said she was destined to eat all of the other gods. Goes back to that cannibalism thing we still get hassled occasionally for.”
“Oh,” Elitheris repeated.
Eykit popped the last bit into his mouth, chewing delightedly even as his face sweated and his eyes teared. He sucked in his breath, trying to somehow reduce the spiciness in his mouth. It didn’t help. “Should have lifted a mug of ale,” he said, under his breath.
“Serves you right for stealing it,” Taid said.
“Spoilsport!” Eykit retorted. “Oh hey, there it is!”
He pointed at a large warehouse, with twisted streamers of maroon ribbons decorating it, and lit up with several spots of light in various pale colors. A mage had cast some light spells, similar to what was cast on the streetlights. A large wooden sign, painted with the words “Bardem’s Crystal Palace” on it, with depictions of Shard clusters on it in various pale colors was propped up by the door. Attached to the top of the sign was a wrought iron bracket, curved to hang over the top front of the sign. The tip was glowing with a warm, white light, brightly illuminating the sign even in the glow of the light spells on the building itself. There was a little space open in front of it, where there were fewer people, as wooden tables had been set up like seawalls, keeping the tide of people at bay, forcing them to go around. But there was still a constant stream of people going into the “Palace”.
The sounds of people shouting, laughing, and the general hubbub of a hundred conversations came out of the building. There was a bouncer at the door, keeping an eye on the people coming in. He was an imposing looking Orc, with a truncheon in a loop at his side, and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
There was a cover charge to get in. It wasn’t much, a mere five copper farthings. The large Orc took everyone’s money, placing it in a pouch at his waist.
Eykit smiled at him as he walked in, but the Orc either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He made sure not to pick the Orc’s pockets as he went in. Elitheris’ eyes were on the crowd of people in the room and the potential exits. She saw a loading door in the back, big enough to drive a wagon through, but it was closed. Taid was looking at the various tables around the room. They were covered in maroon tablecloths with golden edging. Bright glints on the tables were the pale crystalline forms of Shards, being used to play the Game of Shards.
The room itself was big. The shelving units that would normally have filled the room and provided space to store the contents had been either moved out, or moved over to one side of the room, leaving the majority of the space open. The roof was twenty five feet above their heads, and several brightly glowing points of light brightly illuminated the space to almost daylight levels.
Off to one side of the room, he could see a man in the same livery as the room decorations, surrounded by people. They were engaged in some kind of deal, or maybe it was just an intense conversation.
It took Eykit only 30 seconds or so to realize that three of the “patrons” weren’t patrons. They were moving differently than a patron would, and although seeming casual, they were very alert. They were guards. One stuck close to the man in the gold and maroon livery. Two others were floaters, watching the room and alert for any trouble.
The man in the gold and maroon moved off, and Eykit watched his bodyguard go with him. That man wasn’t large, and didn’t move with the grace of a trained warrior. While not clumsy by any means, he didn’t have that catlike litheness and sense of restrained strength that good warriors had. Which made him dangerous in a very different way.
He nudged his companions. “Keep your eyes on that one,” he cautioned. “He’s likely a mage.” He pointed out the other two guards to them as well. “They seem more like muscle. Although the woman looks a little too eager for trouble.”
“So let’s not cause any trouble while we are here,” Elitheris stated, her tone implying that Eykit would likely be the one causing any.
Eykit chuckled. “I’ll try to keep my hands to myself.” But no promises, he didn’t say aloud.
In addition to the patrons, there were also waiters, wandering around the room with trays of hors d'oeuvres and drinks. In one corner was a bar and food prep station, brought in for the occasion, apparently, as it didn’t match the decor of the room, if one could consider a warehouse building as having “decor”.
The three of them were unsure where to start, or what to do. How do they enter a game? How is it even played? Was there a queue to use a table? How do you pick people to play against? They didn’t really have a clue, as none of them had ever had any Shards, or any desire, until recently, to have anything to do with them. But now that they had some….
The man in gold must have noticed them, for he came over to them. He was tall, bearded, and had the wide smile of a host on his face. “Greetings!” he said. “I am Bardem Amir, and welcome to the Palace!” He spread his hands to indicate the surroundings. “Have you played before?” he asked.
Taid spoke up. “Nope. But we wanted to see what it was all about.” The man had the demeanor of a carnival barker and the voice of someone who was used to projecting it to talk to crowds. He noticed that the bodyguard that followed Bardem around was watching them intently, assessing whether they were a threat.
“Excellent!” Bardem replied with a cheerful laugh. “Let me tell you about my little establishment, then! There are the games, of course, which you can play using your Shards. All you need to do is go to a table and let the people around it know you want to play and someone will likely challenge you to a game. Or, you can buy or sell Shards here. I’ll offer a good price for any you want to sell! Just let me know! Or you can bet on other people’s games. That’s all informal, and what odds you get will depend upon whom you are betting with. Food and drink are available, as gambling is thirsty work!”
He looked from face to face. “Any questions?” None were forthcoming. “Excellent!” he said again. He seemed to like that word…. He grinned. “Then I will be off, out of your hair, and bothering someone else!” He bowed, doffing his feathered and wide-brimmed hat. “Have a wonderful evening! May your Shards be lucky!” And he strode off, into the crowd, the slightly built bodyguard in his wake. He hadn’t been introduced, and seemed to have the ability to disappear into the background. Or perhaps it was just that Bardem’s personality eclipsed anyone else in the immediate area.
“Well then, let’s check out this Game of Shards,” Elitheris said. “So we can know how to play it. Whatever it is.”
Taid and Eykit nodded. They knew it had to do with laying Shards down so that they had a chance to connect with other Shards, but how it was done exactly wasn’t something they knew.
A game was being played at a table nearby. It was surrounded by onlookers, almost crowding around the table. Many of the onlookers were holding slips of paper, markers for the bets they had made on the game.
On the table were two rows of Shards, one from each player. One row had five Shards, the other had three. The crystals lying on the table were all about an inch or two in length, and about a quarter to half of an inch wide, and spaced about two inches apart, with about six inches between the two rows. As they watched, the second player placed a fourth Shard onto the table.
The second player removed a Shard from the board, placing it in a pouch in his lap. The first player also removed a Shard, leaving five in front of him, and three in front of the second player. The second player sighed, and placed a Shard down on the table, and again, nothing happened.
The first player placed a crystal on the table, waited, and shook his head slightly, disappointed when nothing happened…again. The second player raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “That’s all I have. Nothing I have matches up with yours.” He scooped up his Shards, stood, and walked into the crowd, likely to try to play someone else. The spectators resolved whatever bets they had made as the first player placed his Shards back into his carrying pouch.
Ten minutes later, a great deal of shouting and whooping erupted from a table on the other side of the room. All three companions turned their heads in that direction in time to see a glowing cluster rising above the table before a person leapt up to grab it, holding on as he slowly, slowly floated down to the ground. People around the table giggled as they realized that the magic that affected the cluster also affected them, and they bounced around like people in low gravity. Many of them were jumping up, only to float slowly down to the ground. Over the general noise of a large group of people shouting in childish glee, they heard “Toss me!” and a young Goblin was launched into the air by a Human who looked like a blacksmith’s apprentice. The Goblin soared up, reaching a height of about twelve feet before slowly drifting down to the floor like a leaf. He was flapping his arms as if trying to stay in the air, laughing the entire time.
After about five minutes, it ended, mostly with cries of surprise as the “floaters” came crashing down unexpectedly at the normal speed of falling objects. The range of the effect seemed to be about ten feet or so. It explained why so many of the spectators crowded so close to the tables they were watching.
They watched a few more games, never betting on them, just watching, figuring out the rules and figuring out the basic tactics of the game.
It was a very simple game. Players alternate placing Shards on the table. Or, they could use their turn to remove one of their Shards, reserving it to be played later. When one player ran out of Shards to play, the game was over. Both players took their Shards and went to play someone else, with the hope that maybe someone else might have a set of Shards that included at least one that might join with theirs. When that happened, who “won” the cluster, and all of the Shards on the table, was determined by which Shard was dominant. That was the Shard that “pulled” the joining Shard to it. Whoever owned the dominate Shard won the board; it didn’t really matter who put the joining Shard down on the board. But joinings were very rare. There were a lot of Shards out there, a whole moon’s worth apparently, and although they were all rumored to fit together like puzzle pieces, getting those pieces together from a collection spread out over all of Velyri was difficult, to say the least. But it happened, and more often than probability would seem to indicate. No one knew why, except that the Shards seemed to want to come together.
“I’d like to try it,” Elitheris said, drawn to the game. She was the one holding the bag with their twenty one singleton Shards in it. The two clusters were with Taid; they weren’t planning on taking a risk gambling with those. At least for now.
She sat in a recently vacated seat. “Shall we play?” she asked the player who had remained seated, a Human of middle age. He was bearded, and his dark skin was laced with age lines and had the leathery look of a sailor or dockworker. She imagined she could smell the salt on him, but that could have just been the location of the warehouse she was in.
He nodded, introducing himself. “I’m Larrance. Who do I have the pleasure of playing with?” He grinned, a shy, fleeting smile from someone who didn’t see Elves very often, and who seemed to be thrilled to be in the presence of one.
Elitheris wasn’t sure what to do with that, assuming she was reading him right. That was always questionable; despite being in town for a few weeks, she still wasn’t sure how city folk thought. “I’m Elitheris,” she finally responded.
People were starting to gather around the table. They were murmuring, placing bets.
He nodded, “Nice to meet you, Elitheris.” He took the token lying on the table, an oversized, coin-like disk of brass, ready to flip it to see who got to play first. One side had an image of Bardem’s grinning face, complete with his signature plumed hat. The other side had three crystal clusters, base to base, looking like a stylized flower.
Larrance won the coin toss. He placed a Shard on the table. Elitheris placed one of hers. There was a pause as both waited a moment to see if anything happened. Now that the stakes were going to affect her, the anticipation mixed with fear was real, and she could feel it like a frisson of energy in her fingertips and toes. Anticipation because of the hope of something happening, fear because she might lose her Shards.
Larrance put another Shard down, laying it next to his previous one. Elitheris did the same with one of hers. Again, the momentary pause, but nothing happened.
They kept alternating plays, mostly putting Shards down, but occasionally returning them to their “hand”. In the end, none of the played Shards joined. They both left the table disappointed, Larrance nodding to her as he left and disappeared through the crowd.
Elitheris wanted to play again. She scanned the tables. She realized she should have stayed seated at the table she was at, but the desire to play again hadn’t made itself known until she had stood up. And once she had done that, another player had taken her seat. On the other side of the room her keen eyes noticed a game ending, and she made her way over to it. As she suspected, the game was over, both players showing the now commonplace disappointment of not having any Shards joined.
She sat in the recently vacated chair. A Human woman sat down across from her. “Let’s play,” the woman said, picking up the token used for coin flips. Elitheris called “heads”, and when the coin was shown, Bardem’s smiling face greeted her. She was first.
She placed a Shard on the table. The unnamed woman did the same, and they both paused expectantly. Nothing happened. Elitheris laid another, next to the first. The woman did too, seeming like she was in a hurry. They added more Shards to the rows, in every case the woman putting hers down as soon after Elitheris’ as she could, as if impatient to get a joining. They continued playing, occasionally pulling out Shards, trying to gauge the balance between having Shards to possibly join with, versus the risk of losing all of them. The two of them seemed to hover around four to six Shards down on the table at a time. At the end, Elitheris ran out of Shards to try, and from what she could tell, none of them would match the ones the other woman had. “That’s all I’ve got,” she said, ending the game. She stood up. “Thanks for the game.”
“Yeah, whatever,” the woman replied, already getting ready to match her Shards with the next player.
“Well,” she said to Taid and Eykit, “that was a bust.”
Across the room, shouts erupted, and they heard someone shout “I gotta catch it!” They turned toward the noise, seeing a glowing cluster flying around the room like a spooked sparrow. Its rushing, whooshing noise could be heard even above the shouting of the patrons. They watched it circle around in some kind of spin, then arc right into a man’s stomach. He let out a pained “Oof!” and fell over, knocking into one of the stools at the bar, which crashed over, taking the patron seated on it with it.
The man chasing the cluster grabbed it from the fallen man’s hands, reclaiming his cluster. The man on the ground moaned, holding his belly.
“Excuse me,” a voice from behind her said. It was a deep, sonorous voice, the kind of voice an actor on stage might have. “Would you be interested in selling any of your Shards? I would pay you handsomely.”
Elitheris turned, and saw a tall, thin man, well-dressed, with tanned skin, black hair in a pony tail, and a van dyke beard. He wore the clothes of a successful merchant, and had the hands of a manager, rather than an actual laborer. The air around him smelled fresh, not like the usual air in the building, which was a combination of sweat, salt, beer, and fish.
“Who are you,” Eykit asked.
“Well, hello,” he replied, turning his attention downward to the much shorter Eykit. “Do you have any Shards I could buy?”
“No, we’ve pooled our Shards together. She has them.” He indicated Elitheris. “But we aren’t selling.”
“That’s too bad. It’s unfortunate, but most people just don’t want to sell. Even if they could use the money more than the rocks themselves.” He smiled, showing white, even teeth. “The hope that something miraculous will happen keeps people holding on to them, I guess.”
Taid’s and Elitheris’ mage sense was going off…this man was carrying a magic item. They could feel it. When Taid looked at his hand, he noticed a ring of gold with a small sapphire on it, and in his mind’s eye, he could see it glowing softly with a pale, golden light. There was no actual glow; it was just what his perceptions saw. He noted a necklace with a similar effect.
Eykit noticed Elitheris’ and Taid’s looks, making an educated guess on what it meant. Magic. This guy had it. “Who are you?” he asked, his interest piqued.
“My name is Herbert. And you are?”
“Eykit. Do you play the Shard game?”
“Ah, no.” He laughed. “I don’t want to lose the ones I have! Which is why I prefer to buy them.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“An interrogation?” He smirked. “Fine. I’m a waiter and bartender.”
“Bullshit. You look too rich for that.”
“Oh, I don’t do that for the money. My family has money.”
“Live near here?”
Herbert raised an eyebrow. “No, I have a place in the country.” His tone of voice was starting to indicate he was realizing that he probably shouldn’t be answering so many questions.
“Ever have one of your Shards join?”
“Once. My cat talked to me for a while. It was…interesting. Apparently birds and mice occupy a great deal of their attention.”
A hard look came into his eyes as he tired of the questioning. “If you aren’t going to sell your Shards, I will go find someone else who will. Good evening.” He turned and left. The fresh smell of a spring meadow lingered for a few moments, then was swamped by the stale sweat and beer smell of the Shardmeet.
They watched him as he engaged in conversation with another person. He didn’t have any luck buying any Shards there, either.
They hung around for a little while longer, but it was late, around the middle of the night, and the Shardmeet was closing for the night. Bardem, his voice amplified somehow, announced that the Shardmeet was closing down for the night, but they could all come back tomorrow after lunch.
Elitheris, Taid, and Eykit called it a night and went back to their rooms at the inn.
Rewards Granted
A bit of money
Some enchanted items (purchased)
2 CP
Some enchanted items (purchased)
2 CP
Missions/Quests Completed
Introduced the Game of Shards
Character(s) interacted with
Toren Ghent
Harald Darkstone
Bardem Amir
Herbert Vesten
Harald Darkstone
Bardem Amir
Herbert Vesten
Players:
Erin, Elizabeth, Steve
Report Date
29 May 2022
Primary Location
Secondary Location
Related Characters
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