The Companions of Tartiël

by Jeff Wilcox

  Matt sighed. “I’m going to have to roll a Sense Motive check, Dingo. It sounds like she’s trying to fool me into doing something stupid.”

  “All right, go for it,” the DM told him, picking up his d20 to roll the appropriate, opposing Bluff check. Their dice clattered across their respective table and book.

  Matt shook his head. “No good. Eight.”

  Dingo nodded. “Well, you don’t sense anything amiss. It seems that Thelia really is just out to have a good time playing a… an acquiring game.”

  *

  “Take, for instance, that man over there,” Thelia was saying as she led Wild onto the upper deck of the Flaring Nebula. The soon-to-be thieving game victim leaned against the rail, watching the passing clouds and the landscape slowly crawl by far below in the light of the morning sun. His rune-covered, black robes marked him as a wizard, and he stood oblivious to the pair talking about him. “He probably has more money than he knows what to do with. I mean, look at that ring he’s got. That had to have cost him at least a hundred platinum. What if he were to lose it? That’s a thousand gold right in the chamber pot and out the window.”

  “It would be a terrible shame,” Wild agreed. He looked at Thelia, who responded with a sly grin. “Well,” the halfling said, clearing his throat, “maybe it would be in his best interests for someone else to look after his valuables, at least for the time being. If any of it goes over the rail, it’s history.”

  With a little bow that evoked a giggle from Thelia, Wild scampered off to approach the wizard from a different angle. The nymph faded into the shadows of the stairwell and watched Wild’s exchange with the man, a budding smile on her lips when, after the two of them shook hands, the taller human’s hand came away devoid of its burden. Wild held himself high, with his chest puffed out, and he had untucked his shirt a little to give the impression of a little more weight to his figure, possibly as some kind of traveling businessman.

  When Wild returned, he did so bearing the fruits of his labor. “You’re right,” he said, “it’s probably worth at least a thousand and a half on the market.” Turning the ring over in his hand, he admired the braided patterns in the gold and the ruby set in the jewelry like a half-opened eye.

  “That’s quite the catch,” said the deposed elven princess, “time to see if I can one-up you.”

  *

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Astra told Kaiyr, sitting up and wincing suddenly. “Ooh, wow, that really hurts. Let’s not do that anymore.” She gingerly lowered herself back down onto the bed. “Could you, ah, hand me my bag over there?”

  Silently, Kaiyr reached over and passed her the leather satchel. Astra took it and rummaged through it by touch, since she couldn’t tip it over to see inside without dumping everything onto her face. “Ah, here we go,” she said, pulling out a fine gold chain from which hung a small, crystal charm in the shape of a magnifying lens. “This is something along the lines of what you requested. As my contact who found this for me described, these sorts of things are used by clergy members of goodly faiths to aid in rooting out corruption within their ranks. I assume you have other designs?”

  Kaiyr grimaced. “The ‘ranks’ I must learn to judge number much more than those in the average religious organization, I imagine.”

  Laughing, the nymph replied, “I suppose they must, indeed, Master Kaiyr.” Then she looked stricken for a moment before lying back down. “I’m… really not feeling so well, yet. If you see Caineye and Wild, would you tell them I have a magic necklace and ring for them, respectively? I’m going to rest some more.”

  Leaning over, Kaiyr nodded as he tucked her back into the sheets on the bed, noticing as he did one of the starburst scars on her arms. He was not certain why he felt compelled to “accidentally” brush it with one finger, but he did so. Their breaths caught in their throats, and when their eyes met, their gazes locked for several long moments. Coming to his senses at last, Kaiyr let out his breath. “Sorry,” he said, uncharacteristically informal and intimate, as he drew his hand away.

  Astra, too, relaxed. “It’s all right,” she said tiredly. “I’m all right.”

  Kaiyr nodded and turned to leave the chamber, but she caught his wrist, and he stopped in his tracks, looking over his shoulder at her. “One more thing,” she said, her eyes fluttering closed. Her last words, when she spoke them, were whispered on the brink of unconsciousness and barely loud enough for the blademaster to hear: “Thank you.”

  XXV.

  Over the next three days, Kaiyr, Caineye, and Wild kept eyes on Astra to track her recovery. Her wounds had been extensive, and she spent much time bed-ridden. True to her word, she had procured some items for the human druid and halfling rogue, including an amulet that sharpened Caineye’s senses and a ring that generated a field of deflection for Wild. She had picked up some other knick-knacks for the party she had deemed useful, including more healing potions to replace those the party constantly used, despite their other healing abilities and items.

  Kaiyr spent nearly an hour with his own amulet on the first day, getting a feel for the way it transmitted auras to his senses. Upon activating it, he could catch a vague tingling sensation in his mind whenever he faced certain people on board the ship, and if he focused on those persons for a few moments, the sensation would sharpen almost into a headache. He supposed it was fitting that evil creatures should cause him physical pain to detect, and he was almost surprised at how few of them there were aboard the Flaring Nebula; there was a man in black robes whom Wild claimed to have witnessed Thelia robbing, though this man’s aura was rather weak. There were two nobles who gave him a slight twinge whenever he faced them, but what really concerned him was the room only five doors from his. There was no one individual inside that triggered the splitting headache he got from using the spell embedded in the amulet. The entire room illuminated his mind so brightly that he could not focus on it for more than a moment before his vision blurred and he was forced to his knees.

  “Are you all right?” Caineye had asked Kaiyr earlier on the third day when the two of them were roaming the halls as the blademaster grew accustomed to the amulet’s input. The elf had assured him that he was well, but when Caineye, somewhat more accustomed to such magic, tried the amulet and faced the room, the sheer sense of evil radiating from it concerned him as much as it did Kaiyr, after he recovered from the shock.

  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 t
ruth. 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.