The Companions of Tartiël (32 page)

Taking a siesta in his room with his fingers laced behind his head on a pillow, Caineye reflected upon the amulet’s response to the room down the hall. Vinto lay alongside him on the bed, his head on the druid’s leg.

Now that he thought about it, Kaiyr’s estimate that the room itself was evil was a little off; after all, how could a
room
be evil? Surely, he had heard of rooms possessed by spirits and occasionally wreaking havoc on its inhabitants. Rather, this seemed to be more like many small, evil somethings occupying a tiny area, which would cause an inexperienced user to view them all as one larger whole. But what were those small blots of vileness? And how had they gotten aboard the ship in such numbers?

This and more Caineye was pondering when two pairs of footsteps stopped outside his door. Vinto was up and on his paws before the knock came, looking at the door and then back at his master. “Come in,” Caineye called, grunting as he rolled to the edge of the bed and into a sitting position. “It’s open.”

The door opened to reveal two short folk—halflings, Caineye recognized despite their brigandine and tabards. “Greetings, traveler,” said one of them, taking a step into the room and then moving aside so the other could join him. “Please pardon the intrusion, but we are members of the Is’thiel Trading Committee. Due to certain import restrictions, we have been tasked with ensuring that none of the Guild of Transportation’s customers are smuggling illicit goods into Is’thiel.” He bowed and then produced a parchment, which Caineye scrutinized. It seemed official enough, but being unfamiliar with Is’thiel’s seal and regulations, he had no way of knowing whether these two spoke truth. However, their polite manner and Caineye’s lack of any expensive goods in his backpack convinced the druid to let them rummage through his belongings, which they did in full view of Caineye.

“Thank you, traveler,” said the first one, the second having remained silent the whole time, “and we apologize for the inconvenience, but there have been far too many illegal goods sold on our streets lately. We hope the remainder of your voyage is pleasant.”

“Thank you, and it’s no problem,” Caineye said with a farewell wave as the two halflings let themselves out. He looked at Vinto, whose tongue lolled happily. The wolf sucked his tongue back in and closed his mouth, and the two of them shared a shrug, Caineye’s more literal than Vinto’s.

Flopping back on his bed, Caineye briefly went back to thinking about the strange room as he listened to Kaiyr going through the same process with his and Astra’s gear, who had returned exhausted from a meal in the dining hall and gone right back to sleep. The druid smiled to himself as he heard Kaiyr try to waken Astra, who groggily fended him off with a few choice words.

He couldn’t help it, but he had to suppress a pang of envy for blademaster’s company. Being a druid, Caineye had a connection to nature above and beyond that of anyone else, even of most elves. As a creature of such unadulterated nature as a nymph, Astra was something that druids wished they could be, or at least come to know, during the course of life. Those who worshipped nature idolized such beings, and the fact that Kaiyr had gotten to know such a creature so much better than Caineye had did not rest well with the druid. Then, a slight stirring in his loins warned him that perhaps more than a little of his jealousy came from another source, even though he knew that asking for something like
that
would be too much.

It was as he heard the halflings leaving Kaiyr’s room that Caineye reached for Vinto’s head and realized his wolf companion had not returned to the bed but rather was cautiously sniffing his pack, his ears flattened back against his head. Sitting up again, he looked at Vinto. “What’s the matter?”

In response, Vinto looked at his master then back at the backpack and let a low growl escape his throat. Knocking over the leather satchel, Vinto spilled some of its contents onto the floor, including a box containing a small sapphire gem Caineye had been keeping around as a source of emergency wealth. Then, nosing his way into the main partition, he widened the drawstrings’ opening and then batted at something with his paw until it, too, joined the rest of the trinkets on the floor.

“Now
that’s
odd,” Caineye remarked, leaning down to take a closer look. It was an exact replica of the box containing his emergency gem; he knew he did not have two of them. Stranger still, it had the same design and jeweler’s mark pressed into the leather case.

Vinto nosed the little box and growled, this time a little louder, and when the box jumped away and wriggled of its own accord, Caineye knew trouble was afoot. He barely had time to note a sudden outburst of commotion from Kaiyr’s room before his replica box suddenly stretched, two wings popping out of it as it transformed into a flapping, gape-mawed creature the size of a small cat. In short order, it turned on the nearest creature, Vinto, and began to attack.

Vinto sprang backward but found his retreat hindered by the wall behind him. His dodge got him out of the way of the little fiend’s snapping teeth by less than an inch, but when he went to bite back in defense, the wolf found the tiny enemy to be too quick and agile to snatch.

Caineye cursed and fumbled through his spell components before giving up and scratching off a few splinters from the edge of the bed frame, cupping them in his hands as he chanted over them. When he completed the short spell, a spar of wood as long as a footman’s spear suddenly sprang from his hands and launched itself at the winged creature. Again, the thing swooped out of the way, and the enormous splinter crashed into the door and stuck fast. The creature used the distraction of the attack to dart in at Vinto again, this time biting a chunk of fur from the wolf’s shoulder. Then Caineye gasped as he noticed his companion’s wound drip with black ichor.

“Poison?” he gasped as Vinto suddenly staggered back and shook his furred head. The creature dove in again and delivered another venomous bite to the animal. “How dare you!” the druid hissed, summoning a handful of flames with a spiteful word and throwing a gout of fire at the creature, which again dodged out of harm’s way, further frustrating Caineye as he watched the creature attack his animal companion, who now shied away from the foe, all fight gone.

Just as Caineye was reaching for the sickle he kept in his belt but had never before had to use in actual combat, the door to his room burst open to reveal Kaiyr, his dark blue robes and hair swirling about him. With the infinite grace of an elven blademaster focused on battle, he glided into the room, his glassy soulblade manifested in his right hand, and sliced the miniature fiend into two pieces. The creature’s halves dropped to the ground and shriveled into nothingness.

Pausing, the blademaster glanced around for more of the creatures. Finding none, he released his soulblade and turned to Caineye. “Are you all right, Master Caineye?” he asked, his voice deep, serious, and loud.

“I’m fine,” the druid replied hastily as he knelt by Vinto’s side. “I’m not sure about Vinto, though. Are you all right, boy?”

The wolf whimpered once but stood shakily. On wobbly legs, he walked over to Caineye’s bed and lay down next to it, too weakened to climb onto the mattress. When Caineye touched him, the wolf grunted and let out an irritated snarl.

“Will he be all right?” Kaiyr asked then, and Caineye nodded.

“If he’s being like this, he’s all right. It seems to be a muscle-weakening poison, not a deadly one. Do you have any sort of antidote on you?”

Kaiyr nodded and pulled out a small vial he had purchased some time ago. Caineye accepted it with a word of thanks and tended to Vinto’s wounds, after which the wolf looked much better, though he still lay down and closed his eyes, exhausted.

As Caineye passed the vial of magical fluid back to Kaiyr, someone in a nearby room shrieked; the scream was followed by panicked sounds of a struggle, then silence. Caineye looked at his friend. “We need to warn the other passengers! Let’s go!”

Kaiyr offered no argument and dashed outside into the hallway, where the two of them ran into Wild, who bore a few nicks from a similar encounter in his own room. “Yeah,” the halfling said before either of his other companions could say anything, “I’m on it. Saving the ship, and all that. Let’s kick some flappy-thing butt.”

*

“The three of you leave your rooms to defend the other passengers from the vicious, little enemies,” Dingo said. “Do the three of you split up and cover more ground, or stick together for protection?”

I drummed my fingers on the faux-wood computer desk provided with the dorm room as Matt disentangled his foot from one of the hairballs that tended to collect on the floor in our room, since it never got vacuumed. “Well, Kaiyr would probably be okay. I’m hitting these things on a five or higher, and the one in my room couldn’t hit me to save its life.”

“No, it couldn’t,” Dingo agreed with a chuckle. “I needed a nineteen to bite you when you used Combat Expertise.”

I grinned in response before looking to Xavier and Matt. “What do you think, guys? Xavier, you’ve still got some fire left from your last spell, but you’re not having much luck hitting them.”

He rolled his eyes and flicked his d20 in disgust. “That’s what I get for rolling a one and a two. I think I’m going to go with Wild, since he did all right with his, though not as well as Kaiyr.”

“Sounds good.”

Dingo took the cue and rubbed his hands together. “All right. The three of you scour this part of the airship, since searching the whole thing would take hours—unless you want to do that. Anyway, you manage to rescue a few passengers, but most of the rooms you enter are covered in gore, and bodies there are oozing with the same black poison you saw in Vinto’s wound, Caineye.”

“I’m going to use my amulet and see if these things are evil,” I announced. “Are they?”

The DM nodded. “They are. In fact, as you sweep your field around the hall, you discover that the room full of evil now only has a very few, tiny spots of evil, and each room has one or two small dots.”

“Damn. I’ll check that room after rescuing some of the passengers.”

“I’m going to the room, too,” Matt said, and Xavier said he would follow, as well.

“All right. You throw open the door—”

“No,” Matt interrupted, holding up a stalling hand. “Leave this to me. I’m checking for traps first.”

I bobbed my head and pointed at him. “Good idea. I step out of the way.
Thank you, Master Wild.
”

Matt acknowledged the gratitude with a nod and then rolled his d20. After adding in his Search bonus, he looked up at Dingo. “Do I find anything with a twenty-six?”

Our DM nodded. “As a matter of fact, you do. Care to disable it?” Matt did, and after getting a 28 after his bonuses, the trap, a magical rune, faded from in front of our characters.

*

Kaiyr moved to step into the now-open room, but Wild’s outstretched hand stopped him. “I wouldn’t go in there quite yet,” said the halfling, eyeing the floorboards. “See those weird patterns disguised to look like wood grain? Yeah. That one will blow your legs off if you step on it.”

“Very well. Will you be able to disarm these, as well?” asked the blademaster, retracting his foot and instead peering into the room from the doorway.

“Do you need to ask?” Wild replied with a chuckle. “I’ll have it done in a minute.”

Kaiyr nodded and fell silent. He and Caineye both looked into the room, which was filled with tiny cages, most of them open. They littered the bed, the floor, the dresser, and all the shelves on the walls. A few of them still contained their flapping, squawking prisoners, which snapped at the bars with their toothy maws as they tried to get to the companions. Wild went about carefully disabling the runes on the floor, disrupting the magical patterns with a swipe of his finger or dagger.

“All right,” he said at length, standing and sheathing his dagger. “That’s the last of ‘em. Should be safe now.”

“Should be?” Caineye grumbled, but he stepped into the room with nary a leg-shattering explosion. “What in the Nine Hells is going on on this ship?”

Wild shrugged as Kaiyr entered, silently inspecting the cages and the sparse inhabitants. “Exotic bat collection gone rogue? Beats me, Caineye. Master Kaiyr, what do you think?”

Straightening and flicking his momentarily-manifested soulblade out to strike dead one of the creatures in its cage, the blademaster shook his mane of midnight blue hair. “I cannot say, Master Wild, Master Caineye. What I
do
know is that these creatures are the source of evil that originated in this room, and they have been spread around the ship by those ‘customs officials.’ It is fortunate that I noticed when one of them slipped an extra coin into Astra’s belongings; I suspected they were up to no good, but had I not seen the act, Lady Astra or I could have been caught off-guard by that creature.”

Caineye scratched his chin, worried. “And in the state she’s in….”

Wild nodded. “It might have been deadly.”

Kaiyr’s features hardened, and he stepped back out into the hall. “We should search the rest of the airship,” he said, crossing his arms across his chest, inside the opposite sleeve. “We must put an end to this terror and find those responsible for this atrocity. For the murders they have committed, I can show them no mercy.”

“Blah, blah, show them no mercy,” repeated a sneering voice to Kaiyr’s left a short distance down the hall. Whirling around, the blademaster faced the source of the voice as Wild and Caineye darted into the hallway behind him. Kaiyr recognized the short man immediately.

“You are one of those ‘soldiers’,” he intoned, a mote of light floating about his right hand as he prepared to manifest his soulblade.

The halfling shrugged. “Guilty as charged, I suppose. I was looking for you, actually. I didn’t really expect your little friend over there to get past all our traps.”

Wild bristled. “And who are you calling little, Stubby?”

Again, the halfling gave him a noncommittal expression. “Whatever. It would have been easier if you’d tripped just one of them. It’d have saved me the trouble of having to kill you.”