Fable - Ask On the Run

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Jack Thacker

Jack Thacker

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Bum. Bum. Bum. Bumm.​

The beat of the leather skin drum kept the oarsmen on The Leapin’ Lizard on rhythm and in tandem, though Jack Thacker had grown weary of it in recent weeks. He heard it in his sleep; at his meals; even on deck. The thumping echoed in Jack’s head like a permanent headache, threatening his sanity at any moment.

Between that and the hardtack and gruel he’d been eating, which had done a number on his already sore and decaying teeth…a spreading bout of dysentery on the ship, and all the bloody rainfall, the trip up the Allirian strait had been nothing short of miserable.

Jack had lost count of the days since he’d first fled Alliria. It had all happened so fast. That miserable Willem had pushed him to the brink and then some. What choice did Jack have but to kill him?

He slit the bastard’s throat in his sleep and watched him drown frantically in his own blood. Afterward he’d stolen what little value Willem had to his name; then his horse, then passageway on the first ship out of Alliria. That happened to be an exotic little trading cog called The Leapin' Lizard. Thacker bought his way on as an oarsman and had been regretting it ever since. He preferred a horse to a boat…a sword to an oar, and it showed in his efforts.

Captain Balthas called him half useless. Despite Thacker keeping to himself on the ship, the Captain seemed particularly suspicious of his origins.

“You’re not an oarsman, landlubber. So what are you doing on my ship?”

“Passage to Grayshore,” Jack had mumbled between sweaty grunts. The Captain had stopped to observe Thacker during one of his rowing shifts. Jack remembered Balthas had been thoroughly unimpressed.

“And what’s in Grayshore?” the Captain pressed.

“Me gettin’ offa this fookin’ ship.” That had been enough to end the conversation, though from then on it felt like Balthas was always watching him. Nosy bastard. Mind yer fookin’ matters, ya half-elf prick.

Jack could’ve cried when the town of Grayshore first came into view. It was another soggy day of black storm clouds and summer rain when the thatched roofs began to appear. A new life awaited Thacker on those riverbanks. Who knew what the future could bring.

Perhaps he’d stay in town a couple days. There was no way news of his misdeeds had traveled this far North yet. While murder certainly wasn’t ignored by the Allerian justice system, Willem Stroud was nobody. A sentry boss on a wall. Jack could use the little money he had left over to enjoy an inn for a few nights while he figured out his next move.

My next move, he thought as the Lizard anchored and the crew began to unload her. Thacker wished he knew what that was.

Without sparing a goodbye for the good captain, Thacker disembarked with the barebones belongings that he had; a dirty blue tunic that was getting a good wash in the rain, black armor, a tankard and a bastard sword. He trudged through the muddy town dutifully as the storm rinsed the lice from his greasy brown hair, until he came upon the town’s only inn.

Thacker didn’t even catch the place’s name. He was more worried about getting crowded out of a place at the fire. The place was jam-packed when Thacker walked in, dripping wet from his tunic to his socks.

Good, he grunted to himself. I’m joost another ugly mug in a sea uh mugs. Nobody’ll be lookin’ fer me here. The long, lanky swordsman took a seat at the end of the bench closest to the fireplace. He spied a serving wench making her rounds and a clothesline filled with roast chickens. But when Thacker jangled the silver in his coin purse, he frowned. Porridge and stale bread it is, mate he concluded grimly. Maybe I can sell my sword.

“Be a good lass and fill me tankard,” Thacker barked at the serving girl, a heavyset woman with a hefty bosom, though at first she didn’t hear him over all the din.

A sharp whistle through his yellow broken teeth later and he’d captured the wench’s attention. Thacker rudely thumped his tankard on the table. “Hot porridge and bread too.”

His hairy fist came out of his coin purse with silver in it. “And a warm bed fer a couple o’ nights.”

“Rooms all booked up, dearie. This squall’s been good fer business. Got room in the barn if yer desperate.”

“Do I look like a fookin’ donkey to ya?” Thacker grumbled. “I got a sword to spare. Get me a room, it’ll be worth it. I promise.”

“Barn or the street,” the serving girl scowled at Jack. “Got more swingin’ swords ‘round these parts than we know wot to do with.”

“Joost fill me tankard then and point me to the fookin’ pigs already,” Thacker cursed, his hair dripping down his face. He scooted himself up to the fire, trying not be irritated while he basked in its warmth.
 
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Jack Thacker
The tap-room of the Gull & Gudgeon was scarcely large enough to hold the noise inside it, let alone the patrons. Fishmongers in tar-stained boots clattered tankards while rain rattled the shutters, and the whole place smelt of brine, beer-slops, and wet wool—not unlike the harbour town of Grayshore itself.

At a scarred corner table hunched “Whistlin’” Jack Thacker—all lank jaws, wind-blown hair, and the unmistakeable bouquet of a man who had recently exchanged rowing benches for dry land.

A few paces off, half-lost in the gloaming of the hearth, rose a figure altogether less rustic. Vaezhasar—panoplied in cerulean plate chased with gold, emerald cabochons glinting like bottled witch-light—sat with a weather-worn folio spread across gauntleted knees. The sorcerer’s helm, its ram-horns sweeping upward in brazen crescents, made the rafters look positively provincial. Now and then a lazy spark crawled across his fingers as if the very air were tinder.

Presently the tome snapped shut with a noise like a coffin-lid. Vaezhasar inclined his helm by a degree—just enough to let the green eye-gems upon the brow catch the lantern-light—then addressed the serving girl in a voice that rippled with distant thunder:

“Tell me, girl — would a handful of gold convince you to prepare my friend a proper bed in that ramshackle barn of yours?”


Coins chimed as he let a few iridescent disks—whose mint no local smith could name—spill onto the tabletop. Suddenly, the tap-room’s chatter dwindled to a curious murmur; even the resident concertina surrendered a flatulent wheeze and fell silent.
 
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The serving woman muttered and grumbled to herself, in a low enough murmur to be seen not heard. She slapped Jack’s tankard on the bench table in front of him alongside a basket of hard bread, then marched over to where the conspicuous sorcerer sat–swiping his currency from his paw and swiftly biting down on one to ensure legitimacy. While she didn’t immediately recognize the strange monies, they were certainly real. Rather than second-guess herself, she curtsied at the sorcerer, and the din of the tavern resumed.

“As ye wish, Guvnuh,” she said with a pained smile of courtesy.

Jack watched the entire scenario unfold with a weary frown. He’d figured Grayshore a squalid fishing town far North enough for his existence to be forgotten. He most definitely hadn’t intended on making any friends, especially not one as queer as this one. Thacker eyed the sorcerer with the unease of a man who didn’t know whether to run or say thank you. I dun like the look o’ this one, not one bit.

But truth be told, every muscle in his body ached. He’d spent weeks at sea drinking piss-swill grog and sleeping on a tattered hammock. The physical exhaustion had taken its toll on him, and so against his better judgement Thacker let his guard down and managed a toothy smirk, raising his tankard to the sorcerer in a cheers.

“Here’s to those who wish us well,” he toasted, touching the bottom of his tankard to the bench’s table ceremoniously. “And those who don’t, to seven hells.” He took a long-awaited, much deserved gulp and savored it. Ah, real ale, he thought elatedly. Now maybe this creep’ll bugger off and let a bloke nurse a buzz in peace.

Of course Jack Thacker would have no such luck.
 
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Vaezhasar hefted his tankard in a mock–benediction. “To the stubborn persistence of your heartbeat—whoever you happen to be," he intoned, voice echoing in the helm like a sermon in a bronze cathedral.


He never troubled to raise his helm. Instead, he inclined the cup just so; from its brim, amber ale uncoiled in slender, obedient ribbons, slipping through the narrow slits of his visor like well-trained vipers.

The performance drew a collective blink from the nearest patrons, whose own tankards remained stubbornly earth-bound, beholden to gravity and lesser talents.

Presently the cup lay hollow and bereft, and Vaezhasar loosed a belch of such robust sincerity that the rafters took not

“By no means the vilest draught I’ve endured,” he allowed, giving the woodwork a judicial rap with his gauntle. “I am Vaezhasar—Vaezhasar Drakspae, for those keeping ledgers.”

With that, he reclined against the rough table’s edge, helm canted as if to survey the room through half-lidded amusement, waiting for the stranger’s reply—or, failing that, for the next round of ale to begin its slow, dignified ascent.
 
“Me friends call me Whistler;” Jack lied, taking another swig. He didn’t have any friends to speak of and nobody in Alliria had called him anything other than Thacker. But Vaezhasar didn’t have to know that.

The dirty fugitive’s dark eyes observed his benefactor coolly. The man, if there was a man underneath all that armor, was of a girth and size comparable to Jack’s, if not bigger. That alone was enough to keep Thacker on edge, nevermind the thunderous voice and fearsome helm. But Jack liked to play his cards close to the chest. If he was uneasy he wasn’t about to let this curious creature know that.

“An’ that’s a fine parlour trick mate,” Jack said, gesturing at the contents of Vaezhasar’s cup. “Ye piss it out like that too?” he asked wryly, trying to disarm his host with some distasteful gallows humor. The casual congeniality was a poor mask for Thacker’s true aura. He had the air of a man prone to flashes of impulsive violence.
 
Vaezhasar gave a dry chuckle at Jack’s jest, the sound rattling about his helm like dice in a cup. He angled his head, considering his drinking companion as one might examine a curious beetle pinned to velvet.

“Stifle the laughter, good Whistler,” he said, tapping a gauntleted knuckle against his cuirass. “This suit boasts its own waste-disposal enchantment. Should terror—or a bad batch of tavern stew—betray my lower anatomy, the offending fluids vanish into some obliging pocket of elsewhere. A marvel of modern thaumaturgy, though the fragrance is reputedly hellish on the other side.”

He let the claim linger long enough. Jack was hiding his unease well, but Vaezhasar knew better, not because he was a particularly good judge of character, but because magic tended to act a certain way around certain emotions and the aura Jack gave off in that moment practically yelled 'I'M UNCOMFORTABLE'.

“Peace, man, peace. I’m no midnight vivisector out to flense you for spare parts, nor am I shopping for fresh souls to pickle in my larder. My credentials are entirely respectable—signed, stamped, and grudgingly funded by the College of Elbion itself. The faculty, in their celestial wisdom, dispatched me to nose about Alliria’s current entanglements. Fascinating business—plots within plots, each greased by an improbable quantity of coin and sorcery.”

He set his empty tankard down with the care due an experiment in unstable alchemy, the visor slits narrowing in what passed for a cordial smile.
 
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A bowl of hot porridge suddenly rattled in front of Thacker, dropped off by the heavy-set server woman before Jack could even ask for a spoon. The would-be sailor eyed the white paste hungrily but made no motion for it–not until Vaezhasar made his peaceful intentions clear.

With the air settling, Thacker grabbed up his stale bread and dipped it voraciously into his porridge, attacking the meal like he hadn’t eaten in days while the sorcerer made his pitch.

I know this tune, Jack figured, ravaging his dinner. At this point the fire was roaring and Thacker was actually beginning to dry. Slowly he found himself more and more comfortable, albeit still highly suspicious.

“An wots any o’ that got the fook to do with me?” Jack asked, cutting through the bullshit and meeting Vaezhasar at the crux of it all; between obnoxious open mouthfuls of course. Thacker didn’t know what to make of Vaezhasar’s wit. If Jack didn’t know any better he’d say the wizard was trying to be cute. “Dun get me wrong, mate, the warm bed’s mooch appreciated, but I dun suppose ya got a set o’ teets under all o’ that armor.”

“So if ye ain’t tryna fook me and ye ain’t tryna fight me, quite frankly, I’m not quite sure wot kind o’ business we got here, eh. Maybe ye could spell it out fer me more clear like, me mother always said I was a big lunk.”
 
Vaezhasar idly rapped a taloned gauntlet against one of the sweeping horns crowning his helm, as though testing a tuning fork. “Alas, no tits for you today, my good fellow,” he intoned. “Yet, because you strike me as the sort prone to volatile outbursts, I’ll indulge in a small act of civic charity.”

He leaned in, voice dropping to the confidential hush of a conspirator in a crowded bazaar. “Word from my conveniently talkative informants is that the Merchant Council has installed a brand-new Lord Commander—bright, brash, and, for reasons known only to the gods of poor judgment, flanked by an honor guard of vampires. Yes, genuine bloodsucking chevaliers, all capes, fangs, and an appetite for inconvenient necks. He’s unleashed them upon the Reach to prune away bandits, mutinous lordlings, and any other pest that refuses to kneel on cue.”

Vaezhasar straightened, helm canting as if he considered the rafters worth addressing. “Now, as luck—or comedic timing—would have it, I require a second pair of moderately dexterous hands for an undertaking of… ah, flexible legality and questionable moral cologne. You help me navigate this little enterprise, and I’ll see to it those sanguine knights view you as something other than a portable wineskin.”

He tapped the horn once more, the metallic chime almost playful. “Consider it a two-fold blessing: profit for your purse and continued integrity for your arteries. Think it over before the next patrol of night-eyed philanthropists decides you’d pair nicely with a decanter of claret.”
 
“Integrity fer me arteries;” Thacker repeated, chuckling and shaking his ugly head. Veiled threats he thought to himself bitterly. Ye’ve gone and stepped in it now, Jack. Outside, the rain showed no sign of letting up. The tavern was standing room only, and everybody was trying to huddle as close to the fireplace as they could. If Jack had a thought to reach for his sword, it was only briefly.

This sorcerer is too powerful, Thacker assessed grimly. No, there was no sword fighting his way out of this one.

“Mayhaps we could arrange somethin,” Jack said, eyeballing a roasted chicken from across the tavern. “Questionable moral cologne is somehap I ‘appen to specialise in.” The rest of his ale dribbled down his shaggy chin as he finished his tankard and slammed it on the table. He whistled sharply for another.

“So when ye put it in those terms, wot exactly could I do fer ye, mate?”
 
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Vaezhasar let out a mellow, well-pleased chuckle that rang about inside his helm like wine poured into a silver goblet—rich, a trifle self-admiring, and laced with just enough mockery to keep the listener on edge.

“My proposition is disarmingly straightforward,” he began, voice warped into velvet echoes by the visor’s grillwork. “I require you to parade about as my hired shield. I have already retained one such bravo, but a gentleman of my stature ought, by rights, to bask beneath a double canopy of steel, eh? Besides”—he gave a languid flourish, as though brushing lint from an invisible silk sleeve—“it would never do for the local constabulary to suspect how much witch-lightning I can fling when provoked. With you and your counterpart flanking me, I shall appear an altogether unwarlike scholar, and the good burghers will sleep soundly in their ignorance. Consider this charade a singular lapse into farce, for the sake of appearances and delicate egos.”


He paused to yawn, not quite bothering to conceal it, then went on in the same conversational drawl. “Naturally, you’ll enjoy a snug measure of protection yourselves—respectable retainers, safely nestled beneath my ample cloak of privilege. Now then, friend Thacker, have you any inkling of the uproar at Alliria, when a great emerald dragon came knocking at the gates with a regiment of cadaverous footmen in tow?”
 
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The name drop was the message, the punchline, the finale. And Thacker knew that. For an instance there was a glimmer of violence in one of his baggy eyes. But the sorcerer didn’t want a conflict; he didn’t need one. Sorcerers were powerful and meddlesome and often had their schemes…and this scheme sounded straight forward enough. Still, Thacker didn’t relish the thought of being extorted.

In fact, he had a hard time containing it.

“Keep yer voice low, fool,” he hissed, leaning forward. “I read ya loud and clear mate, but ye’ll call me Whistler all the same. And if ye know me name, ye know I served in the militia. So wot of it then?”

Thacker’s eyes drifted back to the dangling roast chickens across the room. The serving girl was slicing one off for a table. Jack licked his ale wet lips.

“All these sorcerer’s riddles and I ain’t had a proper meal in weeks. O’ course I know the damned dragon, I took arms against the horde!”
 
“Lower my voice? Pshaw, good Jack—there’s scarcely a conscious ear left to offend.”

Vaezhasar’s gauntleted hand made a lazy circuit of the taproom, his tone light, almost blithe. Behind the visor his unseen grin spread like candle-flame on polished steel. Everywhere sprawled patrons of the Gull & Gudgeon: stout merchants snoring into puddles of ale, dice-sharp lads slumped like felled saplings, even the serving-wench folded over a bench, fingers still clamped round an empty tankard—every soul sunk in a slumber too neat, too sudden to be natural.

“They’ll rouse in due course,” he added, as though discussing the weather. “They generally do.”

Then, with a brisk clap—as if opening a lecture—he returned to the matter at hand. “Now, to our green acquaintance. The townsfolk dub him the Emerald Death, and with reason: an antiquated wyrm, possessed of both articulate speech and a talent for sorcery—attributes never found in callow drakes, who rank scarcely above a clever kennel-hound. When the Allirians sent him packing, our scaly friend beat a sulky retreat through Greyshore, where—rumor insists—a ballista bolt found its mark. Should that tale hold water, he must have shed something along the way: blood, a scale, perhaps a talon.”

A knowing pause, the faint grind of helm against gorget. “I need hardly tell you, Jack, that the least morsel of dragon is a lodestone for thaumaturgy. I mean to collect whatever relic lies within reach—and you, my fortuitous hireling, shall help me track it down.”

“And before you let suspicion gallop off with you, let me forestall the notion that I’ve been rummaging about in your skull. I’m no mind-reader. I merely caught wind of a certain road-agent known as ‘Whistling Jack,’ and curiosity prodded me to pitch you that little bone of a name to see whether you’d twitch. Twitch you did—quite obligingly—thus confirming my guess without the least dab of sorcery on my part.”
 
Try as he might to hide his shock, Thacker couldn’t. An entire tavern of suddenly slumbering denizens would’ve been enough to send a man with less resolve screaming out the heavy wooden front door of the Gudgeon. While Jack certainly did not do that, the alarm etched in his travel-weary face was evident. At first he didn’t know how to react.

Sorcerer’s tricks and spells, he cursed, now actively trying to avoid Vaezhasar’s helmed gaze. What choice did Jack have but to go along with it all? How in the seven hells had he even ended up in this predicament to begin with?

It was all that bastard Willem’s fault. If it wasn’t for Willem, Jack would still be getting paid in silver to sleep while standing next to some inconsequential Allirian city gate. He’d still be drinking and gambling and sleeping in the comfy confines of a castle barrack.

Out here, he was at the mercy of the wilds. A man on the run with limited options.

Prey pursued by predators.

After the initial shock had worn off…at the revelation that everyone around him had spontaneously decided to take a nap…Thacker quickly tried to recover his sensibilities.

He got up from his seat in front of the fire and begrudgingly strode over to where the roasted chickens hung…savagely tearing a quarter dark meat from one before hastily plunging his ruined teeth into said meat. Between slobbering bites and the dull drum of rain on the rooftop he addressed his would-be benefactor.

“I'll need a night's rest 'fore I'll be worth a fook,” Whistler snarled, grease riveting down his stubbled chin. “If I’m to be beholden to some wizard’s scheme, might as well get some grub and shuteye out of it. 'Sides, I rowed so damn much on that fookin' boat I can't barely feel me arms."
 
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That cider sure as shit did the trick. So had the fire. After spending days and nights in the rain on the river in her ship, and despite being born for it, warmth on her skin and a belly full of mead worked wonders. Right. She was a few drinks under the sun, not enough to be drunk per se, but let time fly into the evening and someone was going to regret playing Five Finger Fillet.

“Right then!” Nerren said as she entered the tavern away from the main entrance. It led to the privy. That piss had been much needed. Fastening her belt and adjusting the pants of her outfit, sword and axe on either hip fit for strong hands, she looked down. “Bastard gambler!” Sipping from a cup, she looked around with a frown. “I’ll have you now, longshanks!” There he was.

One of the better players of this tavern she tumbled dice with. Only he was in trouble this time and would pay with his coins or his voice for the night if not lose his life. “Ah, you drunken prick. Passed out this round, are we!?” She slapped his shoulder and grabbed it to pull him up. “Hardly. No sleeping the day away from Nerren Harclaw, mate. This game— Wait.” She blinked, turned this way, that way.

The music wasn’t playing. There was a corner for the musician but his violin was in his lap and he was quiet. Apparently, everybody was just like him—heads on tables, on the floor, in bowls, or the counter for the bartender, cold and motionless. This tavern was once very much louder only moments ago. Now it was silent as death. What the bloody heck? Except for two men.

“Um…” The only woman left standing looked at them. One had a horned helmet of crescents and looked like hell was with him. The other had a chicken and looked like he took whores to bed. “...Am I dead?”

Vaezhasar Drakspae Jack Thacker
 
Jack Thacker
Nerren Harclaw
Vaezhasar let Jack’s words whistle past him like a draught through a ruined cloister; he merely rolled his mailed shoulders in a gesture half indifferent, half amused. But at the creak of the tavern door and the newcomer’s tread, the sorcerer rose at last. Plate and rivet glimmered in the lantern-light, throwing a gargantuan shadow that all but swallowed Jack where he stood digging into the undefended roast chicken.

A guttural phrase—no syllable kin to any tongue of men—slipped from behind the ornate visor. At once the age-scarred floorboards shuddered, bulged, and parted as though they were no more than soft wax. Up from that widening fissure thrust a prodigious mouth: human in outline, yet distorted, its proportions too broad, its lips too thin, its teeth a jumbled architecture that set the nerves jangling. The thing gaped once, exhaling a chill reek of nighted places, and from its cavernous throat rose a staff—not summoned, not conjured, but extruded, as if reality itself begrudgingly surrendered it.

First came twin, backward-curving horns—charred sable shot with baleful brass. Beneath them perched a single cerulean eye-stone, cold and unblinking, set in a boss of worked gold that seemed to watch the room with scholarly contempt. The shaft followed: alternating sleeves of midnight-black metal and tarnished auric plates, every joint inscribed with sigils whose meaning was best left untranslated. The spear-end was no gentleman’s weapon; it was crafted to mutilate, to teach, to warn.

Vaezhasar clasped the staff with proprietary ease. The ungodly mouth, its task concluded, crumpled like smoke and winked from existence. He turned, helm tilting, toward the young woman who had just crossed the threshold.

“There, Jack, stands our indispensable third,” he purred, his words echo-warped within the visor. Then, inclining the horned staff in greeting, he addressed the newcomer. “Attend me, girl. We have spoken by other means, though perhaps you envisioned a sage robed in silks, not a conjurer clad in spellsteel. Pray reconcile reality with expectation—and quickly, for business presses.”
 
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Visor. Staff. Helmet. Hell with it. Nerren Harclaw had braved hellish winds at sea and faced hellbeasts on land. Others had tried to size her up in her ventures, and maybe what they saw before their stature was just some woman, but this woman was Nordenfiir.

The bear was the roar in her bones but, from the coast that was her hard home, she was born to sail the storms, to carve her tales in the sand and in the dirt with her ship, with her hands, with her sword and axe, and she had seen one too many creatures like the sorcerer before her to bat an eye to its own eye-stone.

Right. Nerren caught herself inside her own mind. So, okay, maybe she was a few drinks more into the day than a few drinks amid ale and cider and mead but who could blame her? Try sailing the days and nights she had and she felt like she deserved a break as she waited for her employer to arrive. Only it seemed like, having not laid eyes on each other until this moment, they had missed one another’s presence. Shit happens.

There he was, then, this said sage robed in silks one moment and now clad in spellsteel. He seemed like no conjurer of cheap tricks, however, but a sorcerer much and more if no more or less. If hell is real. Though the Norden reaver in his presence wasn’t going to make a show of the terrors and wonders she had since glimpsed in her adventures.

“I am here as requested,” Nerren said simply, taking a swig of her drink. The cup was suddenly empty as she paced forward. “A lady here on a job and to get paid.” The cup on a table beside her, however, was filled to the brim and its owner was too busy sleeping to notice it went missing just then.

“Same with Toothy Grin here, I imagine,” she gestured toward the only other person still standing in this tavern; words spoken in a humored tone. That meant he served some purpose for the sorcerer in their shared presence. “Just three souls braving the dangers of this world.”

She sipped her drink, licked whiskey from her lips, and stood a few paces away from both men. Her gaze shifted from the man in a blue tunic and black armor to the sorcerer and her employer. Those grey eyes did not waver. “But don’t call me girl.” There was no humor when she spoke.

Vaezhasar Drakspae Jack Thacker
 
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Oi, what ‘ave we here? A woman. Jack hadn’t had the company of a woman since before he’d fled Alliria. Those were the days, he lamented sourly. He’d lost count of how long he’d spent on the Leapin’ Lizard…what had felt like a month alongside other smelly, rough, leather-skinned men of the sea, farting and belching and snoring and sweating.

Though this lass didn’t look like she was above any of that.

Finishing his borrowed meal, Thacker licked the chicken grease off of each one of his filthy fingers while he studied the newcomer.

“Well ain’t this joost a jolly bit o’ company,” he finally snarled, wiping his ruined mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Me friends call me Whistler,” he mockingly curtsied, his patience for this encounter starting to wear thin. “I won’t call ye girl, but then I won’t know wot to call ye.”

“Now that we’re all best mates, ye’ll ‘ave to excuse me. I been drinkin’ piss swill and sleepin’ in rags fer far longer than I care to,” Thacker grumbled, his mean eyes settling on Vaezhasar. “Ye made the servin’ wench set up a bed fer me, let me rest my head in it. We can embark on yer fool’s errand on the morrow.”

He stretched his back and grimaced, coming from around the wooden counter. “Me back hurts. Me legs hurt. Me bones hurt. An’ besides, ain’t no gravediggin’ done in a monsoon. No mate, I’m too tired, too hungry, an too old to be o’ much use right now.” He cast a wistful rogue’s glance in Nerren’s direction. “Much too thirsty too,” he smiled, an ugly brigand's grin full of broken teeth.
 
Vaezhasar rolled his steel-cased shoulders with the air of a man brushing gnats from a cuirass. “Your sex is incidental, my dear,” he informed Nerren in a tone halfway between courtesy and lecture. “It is simply that you are the fledgling of our little clutch, and fledglings—be they cock or hen—require rather more watching.”

With that settled, he strode past her, cloak and plate giving off the quiet rasp of well-oiled machinery. At the threshold he paused, half-turning so the visor’s slitted gaze could corral both companions at once. “Your caution is commendable, Jack,” he said, voice echo-strange within the helm. “Flesh, alas, wears out long before ambition does; I’ve no wish to see you expire of over-exertion. Besides”—he lifted the horned staff in a negligent salute—“I must snatch a few moments’ privacy to commune with my lady wife. She will doubtless erupt like a volcano when I disclose that a comely damsel now graces our expedition.”

One gauntleted hand sketched a lazy sigil in the smoky air. Instantly the tavern doors flew wide as if tugged by invisible squires. Vaezhasar strode through, the night swallowing his cobalt-blue silhouette; the portals clapped shut behind him with the crisp finality of a judge’s gavel.
 

The clap of shutting doors pinged against Pomrick's consciousness, like a pebble dropped inside a deep well. A hurried whisper of a voice soon followed, further disturbing the waters of his placid mind.

"Pomrick. Pomrick - wake up."

Pomrick stirred. He was having the strangest dream - all darkness and void, and some terrible, monstrous presence within that darkness. Teeth. Hidden teeth and jaws, somewhere, in that universe of starless night. Somehow, he knew he was asleep, all whilst being cognisant of this fact - at the same time, he could feel his elbows on the table, and his face planted in something soft. Was this . . . what did Master Krellos call it now . . . lucid . . . dreaming?

"Pomrick, you unspeakable dolt, wake up this instant or I shall eletrocute your rear and set the hair on your legs aflame. Wake up, but keep your head down."

The whispering voice proved too insistent to ignore. With a titanic effort, Pomrick raised his neck, something dripping off of his forehead. His eyes blinked and twitched separately, each taking their own time to orient themselves, before focusing on the plate below him, full of a mangled shepherd's pie. Some of that pie still clung to his face.

The orb winked within his satchel next to him, stirring against his leg. And the people seated around his table - once a rambunctious lot of miners who had dragged him into their midst - all lay curled up like infants. Pomrick stared at them, goggle-eyed. Then his mouth dropped agape with a sudden realisation. Just moments ago, he'd been exactly like them! He could scarcely remember what had happened up until that point. But soon enough, he located other people who had awoken, or perhaps never slept at all.

Two fierce-looking folk - one a woman in leather and skins, the other a man in black armour and a dirty, blue tunic, stared at that closed set of doors, as if watching for someone beyond it. The air had considerably cooled in the tavern, a cold draft just let in like an uninvited guest.

"You deaf, boy? I told you to stay DOWN! Before they see you--oh drat--"

Finally, with his faculties more or less restored, Pomrick realised what was being communicated to him - at just about the same time as the two predators turned their heads. With little time to think, Pomrick splatted his face back down into its former pillow of pie, pretending to fall asleep again - or something. Bits of cold pie wormed into his nostrils and threatened with a twitching sneeze, but he held his breath as best he could, keeping his ears open when his eyes couldn't serve.
 
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Jack almost immediately spied the shock of red hair on the wizard’s apprentice, stirring from its haphazard pillow of Shepard’s pie.

And for a moment, the two locked eyes.

But suddenly and abruptly, a wheezy concertina started up in song, accompanied by a violin. The din of the tavern had returned; it was as if nobody had been sleeping at all. Just like that the Gudgeon had come alive again, throwing Thacker back into unease.

The lanky thug wished it was all a drunken fever dream; hell, it felt like one. The crackling of the fire, the pitter patter of the rain. The music, the chatter, the clink of glasses. I’m not in me right mind.

It was a wonder he could even find it within himself to approach his new pirate consort. But the sorcerer Vaezhasar had left with little notice, and so it was up to Whistler to get the remainder of his terms of employment from an increasingly drunken Nerren Harclaw.

They were to meet the sorcerer at the docks by daybreak, to accompany him on his business and play the role of his personal bodyguards…though Jack wondered how much guarding Nerren would actually be able to do on the morrow with as much drinking and dicing as she was doing. She drinks like a man and swears like one too, Thacker thought contemptuously. He didn’t care to find out if she was hung like one as well.

And so he sauntered out of the tavern and into the barn, though not before casting a dangerous departing glance in Pomrick’s direction. Did that muss-haired pipsqueak hear us? Thacker’s mind raced, in the throes of paranoia. Who else knows me name, he stressed, thinking back on the murder he’d committed in Alliria. That damn Willem’s cursed me beyond the grave.

Jack Thacker didn’t sleep easy that night. Vaezhasar may have put the brigand up in a featherbed, but it was still in the barn, and throughout the night the rain never let up. Whistler tossed and turned and laid awake, listening to pig snorts and horse neighs, thinking about that hideous mouth Vaezhasar had conjured.

He’d risen before sun-up and had a fast of bacon, grits and coffee before departing the Gudgeon. There was still a light trickle of rain as Thacker trudged down the dim muddy streets of Grayshore, his bastard sword clanking against his armor. When he arrived at the docks, he wasn’t surprised to see the Leapin' Lizard had already departed.

Nerren Harclaw wasn’t anywhere to be found either.

Prolly face down in a puddle o’ piss, Thacker snorted, though more in envy than anything else. Shoulda been me.

Though the sun tried to reveal itself, it was instead smothered by ominous storm clouds. Still, there was enough light to see that the Sayve river was beginning to swell with all this rain; its currents were swift and violent and brown.

Jack scanned the rocking boats for his would-be employer.
 
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The morning—or what passed for it beneath Greyshore’s sodden sky—was a dreary affair of ceaseless drizzle and ankle-deep muck. Vaezhasar came ambling down the street at an unhurried pace, as though time itself had failed to rouse his particular interest. His horned staff—an item of such baroque menace that it looked as though it had been wrested from a particularly irritable demon—was cradled loosely in the crook of one arm, its runic metal haft tapping occasionally against a shin guard.

His eyes, glinting behind the ornate slits of his helm, slid past the crooked tenements and shuttered stalls, finally settling on the river. It was bloated, brown, and bristling with foam, pressing hungrily at its banks as if it intended to swallow Greyshore in one glutinous gulp. Vaezhasar gave it a glance of vague disapproval.

“Mm. Another day or two of this and they’ll be wading to market,” he muttered to himself, the sound echoing tinnily in the confines of his helm like a dispassionate judgment from some iron-wrought oracle.

Further on, the figure of Jack resolved itself in the distance—tipping forward, bedraggled, and walking with all the cheer of a man who’d lost a fight with his own bunk. Vaezhasar raised a single gauntleted hand in lazy greeting, the gesture halfway between a benediction and a swat at an errant fly.


He came to a halt just short of the man and regarded him for a moment, the sharpened spear-tip of his staff sinking slightly into the mire with a wet shlorp.

“You look like something a tide washed up,” Vaezhasar observed with all the emotional investment of a man commenting on a weevil in his flour. His tone was not cruel—merely clinical, like a physician diagnosing mildew.

“Didn’t sleep too well, I take it?”
 
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Mud suckled up the lace of Pomrick's boot, greedily slurping down his misplaced step. His imagination almost led him to think of teeth hidden in the mud, piercing the leather, like those gargantuan jaws that still seemed to haunt his sleep-addled brain, before he quickly pulled his leg free and swung it back behind the safety of his crate.

He had followed that menacing man at a safe distance so far, eyes fixed on that sword lazily swaying from his back like some oversized dinner knife. He looked the sort to pull it free and end any unfortunate pedestrian over a trifle, with all the inevitability and routine of venturing for an eventual latrine break. His very existence seemed a horrid possibility, a monstrously tall figure that could chew him up and spit him out like any beast.

To make matters worse, he met with someone whose all-encompassing armour seemed formed from the materia of nightmares. All spikes, horns and gleaming steel, dressed in flowing robes of the finest silk and wielding a demonically grinning staff, which only added a dangerous layer of elegance to his presence.

That rendered them both nearly as terrifying as Master Krellos.

"Pomrick," that very master said, the bite of his tone carrying across even the crackle of the magic orb. "You must venture closer. I cannot hear them."

"But, Master, I'm . . . I'm as close as I can get without being seen!" Pomrick whined, clenching the edge of the crate like it was his dearest friend. "I can, um, perhaps, you know, d-distinguish their conversation from . . . from, ah, here?"

"You couldn't distinguish a seagull from a pidgeon, Pomrick, much less the conversations of a master sorcerer."

He felt fairly certain that he could, in fact, tell a seagull from a pidgeon. Elbion had plenty of pidgeons. Grayshore had plenty of seagulls, and the cry of those gulls sounded more like music to his ears compared to his master's snapping imperatives. He was tempted to inform him as much - perhaps throw the orb away and allow the wet earth to swallow it, too. But the phantasm of the thunderous glare of his master stayed his hand. If he discarded the orb, he knew he would eventually be found and brought to heel. So despite his every fibre screaming no, Pomrick licked his lips and pressed out a belaboured:

"Yes, but . . . Wh--uh, what should I . . . I mean, how can I . . ?"

"I don't rightly know, Pomrick, I'm not there! Put on a shawl and disguise yourself or find some other avenue. Be resourceful, boy, improvise! Use your critical thinking - 'tis about time you did. Analyse the situation thoroughly and then . . ."

Master Krellos' droning voice muddled into incomprehensible gibber. Pomrick's attention was stranded between a rock and a hard place: Defy his master and suffer his wrath, or follow his wish, and suffer their wrath. He remembered the glare of the tall man back in the tavern, and dreaded to imagine coming under the vivisection of that baleful gaze again. But in the end, after much deliberation and wiping his brow of sweat, he decided it to be a better course after all to be chopped up and sliced out in dices than having Master Krellos polymorph him again into a mutated weasel-rat for three weeks. At least the latter would be over with quicker than the former.

"All right, Pomrick, yes, you can do this, just, think of something, ahhh," he muttered to himself, knocking his nogging, willing some idea to penetrate his skull, before discovering an old lady not too far off on a nearby wharf. She was wearing a heavy shawl, and the first suggestion of Krellos plopped back into his mind like a wet ball. Disguise. In a rush, he went to her, pointing and gesticulating at her shawl.

"Excuse me, mistress--I mean, madame . . . my lady?"

She didn't even grant him the time of day, turning her nose up at him and walking off. Meanwhile, the voice of his master continually droned, muffled by his swinging satchel. Pomrick tore at his own hair, rising panic and stress muddling any thinking.

That's when he discovered the tattered, brown-white sail. Someone had left it there, below the wharf, a clump of discarded piles, part of it already merging with the brown river. But a cloth big enough to cover him fully, and almost dry. Perfect.

Minutes later, a shabby spectre stumbled through the street, dragging along a long snail's trail of brown canvas, turning heads and drawing eyes. But crucially, he had managed to cover his face, hair, and indeed, most of his body. Well, most of it. His boots still stuck out on occasion. This ghost staggered and tripped in its own veil a few times, earning a braying laughter from a fisherman across the road. Once nearer the pair, it moved slowly, sluggishly, attempting to pass by them like it went on this path every weekday, just happening to stop and admire the bruised sky and rickety timbers of Grayshore within earshot of the two.
 
“Wot can I say, the smell o’ wet horse shit’s tough to go to sleep to,” Thacker quipped dryly, rubbing his toothy jaw. This morning it was sore with decay. “Never ye mind about ol’ Whistler, I’d be more concerned ‘bout this river, ay mate? Looks aboot ready to spill over.”

The lanky vagabond spat a glob of green flem and hawked another one, wiping his nose on his tunic. “An’ where’s our mutual friend this morning? Don’t tell me she’s got her head in a privy,” he half-snarled half-laughed. But before the sorcerer could boom a thundering response in his wondrous helm, there was a commotion in the street.

Thacker peered through the sprinkle of rain on gray sky incredulously as a clump of sails and canvas tried to sneakily inch down the muddy street. “Now wot in the bloody fook is that,” Thacker swore, drawing Vaezhasar’s helmed gaze.
 
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“I can fly, at least,” Vaezhasar remarked with the weary air of one resigned to the unreliability of ground-bound logistics. He leaned more heavily upon his staff as he spoke, idly rotating one of the carved horns set into its crown—an old habit, akin to a chess player adjusting pieces long after the game had turned sideways. “Should the worst come to pass, we’ll have a means of leaving Greyshore without drowning like dockside rats.”

Jack’s inevitable glance behind for their missing third earned only a sour rumble from the helm. “Alterations in the cast,” the sorcerer muttered, idly tracing the curve of a horn on his black staff. He cleared his throat with the gravity of a man announcing the fall of a dynasty.

“My lady wife—may the gods preserve my library from her temper—presented me with a stark choice: dismiss young Nerren or see my grimoires reduced to cinders. I judged literary survival preferable. The girl has her passage money and half the pay besides. Henceforth our expedition sails with a crew of two.”

A shuffle of feet—furtive, deliberate—drew his eye. Pomrick, swathed in a sail-sheet that draped him like an inept phantom, was sidling past. With a lazy flick Vaezhasar swung the horned staff cross-wise, blocking the fellow’s progress as neatly as a toll-bar.

“Pray enlighten me,” he drawled, turning the visor just enough to let the stranger fall beneath its baleful gaze, “do we strike you as the dim-witted brood of some half-evolved orangutan? That—” he indicated the dangling sheet with a contemptuous tilt of the staff “—is the most lamentable attempt at concealment I’ve seen since one drunkard in Elbion tried to pass himself off as a garden statue. Look at it! Your legs are sticking out like a pair of club-footed twins under a moth-eaten quilt. Exactly whom did you expect to bamboozle, save perhaps yourself?”
 
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Pomrick stared down at his feet. Bugger all. He was right. His legs did stick out. Promptly adjusting his sheet to cover up his legs, he swayed on the spot, indecisive on his next course of action. Indeed, the sail managed to puff out with more confidence in the little bit of stray wind from the river than he did.

Just . . . Don't say anything. They will think you a dying leper or mute and leave you be.

The glare emanating from behind Vaezhasar's helmet seemed to say otherwise. It scorched through the sail and singed his quivering soul. A clank from Jack's sword, promising death, pushed him over the edge. He dug his mouth into the folds of cloth, trying to muffle his voice as much as possible and warp it where his lacking pantomime skills could not. Perhaps he could stoke their pity.

"Please, I know not what you mean--" - a cough interrupted his speech as a bit of grit lodged into his throat from the sheet - "I'm simply an old cripple . . . orphan . . . leper and . . . and I have the plague! Also I must beg for a living." Before he could reconsider whether a cripple-leper-orphan would indeed be able to move this far, a flash of inspiration came to him. "This is all I, ah, I have to wear. I cannot show my diseased skin. Oh, alas, alack, eh . . . yes."

He realised he had forgotten to muffle his voice in the end. Immediately, he sought to rectify his mistake and shifted his face, forming an outline of it in the folds of the sail, mouth gaping open and closed like a lizard baking in the sun, working to form a new string of words.

"D-don't mind me, I shall continue now to see the ph-physician . . . I may just move very slowly . . . don't mind me . . ."

It occurred to him, a little late, that they had already witnessed his clothed legs. Oh, well. Hopefully the promise of sickness would scare them. It certainly would have with him.

However, from what he could see through the fabric, the staff still barred his path, as effective as a portcullis. Pomrick swallowed, pressed his eyes closed and prayed to any god willing to listen.
 
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