The cowled figures had positioned themselves in the booth on either side of the captain and his first mate. Everyone at that table had tensed, hands strained in open, explanatory gestures. The captain’s jaw had clenched tight.
Aldheim’s first mate, a man bigger than the average Bramble kind, if it were possible, filled the entire center of the booth. He seemed ready to flip the table. Dark tattoos decorated his face, lending him a predatory demeanor. His shoulders rose and fell in quick jerks. The crown of his head nearly touched the chandelier, where amber crystals dangled like dirty icicles. Whatever he was, he wasn’t human, but rather seemed a bestial hybrid of man and hellspawn.
“Enough!” Aldheim shouted. His voice, hard and quarrelsome, boomed throughout the room his once subtle accent now thick as it emphasized every hard vowel and hammered every syllable.
A flurry of motion unfolded before Klane’s eyes. A dagger flashed from beneath one of the hooded shapes’ sleeves. Glass as the first mate tore an amber shard from the chandelier. He impaled the nearest assailant—who had leaned a bit too far across the table—through the back of the neck, pinning him to the wooden table. The man spasmed and jerked his final throes until the entire table was upended. It carried everyone around them, including two more of the hooded attackers, into the center of the tavern like a blood-stained, wooden tidal wave.
“We’ve gotta get out of here!” Klane smacked Rolnar upside the shoulder.
A riotous din filled the tavern, fights breaking out amongst the drunken patrons. Klane ducked as something shattered the pyramid of steins behind him, sending glittering shards pouring off the bar-top like a glass waterfall. He threw his arms up over his head trying to ward off wayward glass leaping onto the bar as two men dressed in fishermen’s garb tumbled into his stool, smashing it to kindling. My first goal is to recover Pride from the prison he’s been ensconced within.
A tangle of paper lanterns ensnared Klane, he carried forward, frantically trying to free himself of the cording despite the best efforts of the lanterns to trap him like a fly in a web.
Rolnar had taken off after him, remarkably fast for such a large man. The Bramble sailor ducked and lunged through pockets of thrashing forms with all the grace of a drunken rhino. Klane glanced back to see the bull of a man literally plow his way past a few people, eliciting howls of pain and furious curses.
Free of the lanterns, Klane hopped a pool of amber liquid and vaulted off the bar to the dark, hardwood floor. The target room lay ahead. His fingers already moved for his set of lock picks. He withdrew a small torsion wrench and a hook pick.
The doorman had left his post, rushing in with a host of other men to tamp down the flames of aggression. Klane ducked beneath a flip-up door to a small wrap-around counter. He stepped over the clusters of trash and miscellaneous items strewn atop a decorative, crimson rug—ledger and apparent inventory manifests, piled on box safes and cabinets.
A mighty crash filled the room, the breaking of glass and metal. Aldheim’s first mate hurled a man through the seaward windows and ran roughshod over a group of cowled figures swarming him like a pack of wolves. The handles of no less than four serrated blades stuck out from his back, trails of thick, black blood streaming from the stab wounds like a lava flow.
“Goodness.” Rolnar appeared over the top of the counter, lifting the flip-up door to join Klane in the now extremely cramped space.
Klane fussed with the small keyhole in the door’s lock, jostling his hook and pick rapidly and feeling for the shift in tumblers until the resistance gave way and allowed him through. Corrosion marred the knob’s surface, glimpses of the smooth bronze beneath harkened back to a better time. Turns easily enough Klane noted.
The room was a rank storage closet lit by a single glass globe, which radiated soft light and a bit of heat onto the excess glassware, warm ales, and barrels of wine stored there.
A potent mix of fermented fruits and an oaken musk hit Klane like a wall. He reeled back at the initial scent, but with his nose buried in the crook of his arm, he pressed forward.
“Hey, you can’t be in—”
“Just grabbin’ our stuff then we’ll be goin’.” Rolnar held up a cautionary finger toward a rat of a man, who’d seemingly emerged from a dark corner behind a few of the barrels.
“Pardon me.” Klane gave him a polite nod. In his dazed state, he looked more like a shambling corpse than human. It reminded Klane of the bodies in the Clockwork Mine, as if their pungent stench had suddenly filled the room. Klane brushed the mental image away on spotting Pride, on a shelf beside a wood-handled dirk.
They probably won’t need this. Klane swiped the dirk and tucked it in his belt before reattaching Pride’s harness. He paused for a half-second. Thievery was becoming a tad too easy for him. First the casting stone, now the dirk?
His consideration broke when the man regarded Klane. “A gnome?”
“Quite right.” Klane nodded as he spun around and left, ducking between Rolnar’s legs to the doorway ahead. The Bramble man had decided to pilfer a small share of whatever mulberry-colored liquid festered within. Klane recoiled as an acrid scent met his nose. At least I’m not the only one with sticky fingers, he thought.
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The main room of the tavern had descended into further chaos. In the mix-up of scuffles someone had knocked a lantern to the ground, spreading flame and a flammable, kerosene-like substance into a giant patch that steadily swallowed the structure.
Klane searched for Captain Aldheim. He found his limp body pegged to a wall with a fine line slit across his throat. His yellow uniform, once distinguished and impeccable, now reflected a fine sheen of increasingly intense flickering light. The bright fabric had been stained dark and bloody. A frown had been carved into his face, two jagged lacerations extending down from either corner of his mouth. Two golden shills covered his eyes. He was definitely dead.
Aldheim’s first mate now on his knees, completely covered in attackers. Their arms worked like pistons as they repeatedly stabbed the brute.
One of the bartenders lay in a beaten slump beneath the counter.
Don Fuskima and his guards crept steadily back toward the rear of the bar. The tavern boss had his arms soaked in blood to his elbows but didn’t appear to be wounded. He’d obviously bashed some skulls in.
One of his guards had a broken nose. He surveyed the scene with deep, blue eyes that contrasted with the blood staining his jaw like a half-mask.
“W-what do we do?” Klane stared wide-eyed up at Rolnar.
“Cap’n’s dead, we get outta here. No point in you or I dyin’ too, I say.”
“Agree—” Klane felt himself leave the ground. A rush of cold, night air whipped through his swirls of black hair as the cobwebbed ceiling of the tavern vanished—replaced by an ultramarine sky. Rolnar’s fat knuckles dug into the back of Klane’s neck. The Bramble man had seized him by the collar, taking their escape literally into his own hands.
Plumes of smoke poured from the windows on the seaward side of the tavern, rising in thick columns above the rough, thatch roof. Klane estimated, given the spread of the fire, it would be gone within the next hour unless something was done to stop it.
Crowds thronging across the waterfront had stopped and gathered around like spectators at a show. A low, forlorn, siren-wail started from the mountaintop. A large signal-fire lighted a darkened patch of mountainside, where an airy wharf extended over the buildings below. A trio of small skyskiffs, phantoms guiding silently through the night, pressed off from the wharf toward the blaze. Large, crimson sails, with a simplistically painted white ball of flame, unfurled as they angled a gentle approach. A low, chugging murmur rose from small engines, powering propellers above a fin-like rudder sail at the rear of the craft, which allowed the crewmen to steer.
“Let me down!” Klane hollered.
Rolnar promptly dropped him. He found his footing and dashed away from the building.
They stopped in the center of a small plaza where the street forked into three separate paths. The left led along the waterfront back toward the harbor and straight ahead lay the marketplace. To their right, the street rose in a curving path into dense, mangled clusters of housing that haphazardly erected like wooden blocks piled crisscross atop one another.
“Where to?” Rolnar panted. He hunched forward, hands on his knees as his chest rapidly heaved.
A pair of cowled figures slipped out of a rear alleyway, hooking a right in a hasty ascent into the housing slums.
We can’t give them chase right now. Klane checked the other way, toward where The Reliant sat moored. “We should try the ship, at least we can let the—”
“Of course.” Rolnar took off in the direction of the harbor like a hound fixed to a scent. The crowds parted before the rushing galley cook, and Klane took advantage of the gap left in his wake, slipping through the crowds before they sealed again into a living wall.
The crackling of flames and splintering of breaking timbers mixed with the collective gasps and shouting of everyone around. The first of the three skiffs released a blanket of water unto the flames, which roared in reply.
The crowds grew steadily less dense as they progressed, now only yards from the ship. The harbor guards had taken to running about, assisting the responders. Klane froze as, through the space between a dozen or so sailors heading toward them, a menacing form skulked forth.
* * *
Before he could move or draw Pride, the menacing form was upon them. Klane recognized the harelipped sailor he’d seen with them on The Reliant not more than a half day earlier. He wasn’t here to fight them, unless a passive demeanor and lowering of his hood was some part of his plan to lull the pair into a false sense of security.
That’s highly unlikely.
“Klemens?” Rolnar asked, his voice a tone of hushed surprise.
Klemens’s eyes gleamed like steel beads. Bearing down upon Klane, he cut an intimidating figure. His disfigurement lent to the frightening form, his gray hair like steel-wool wreath around a bald scalp.
Klane reached for Pride and Klemens gave a warning glare. Instead of drawing the weapon, Klane settled for setting a hand on the hilt.
The cloak covering Klemens missed the ground by a few inches, a loose belt cinched it shut at the front. The way the cloak folded around his belt-line suggested the hilt of a small hand-weapon. Klane doubted the man had only one.
“Aye.” The man’s eyes narrowed. Behind him, small plumes of dark smoke were beginning to coil out of the large windows of the great cabin located below the poop deck. “Now, you two weren’t nothin’ to do with the captain and his dealings. You’re a rather good cook, Rolna—”
“Why, thank you.” Rolnar grinned jovially.
Klemens cleared his throat. “You’re a rather good cook, and always been kind. Y’all go the other way now.”
“I don’t understand.” Rolnar’s expression grew concerned, almost pleading. “What’d the captain do?”
“It was nothin’ personal. But he smuggled for the Ruined Saints. We couldn’t let—”
“Ruined Saints?” Rolnar interrupted once more.
Klemens sighed, glaring at the cook. He seemed to be regretting his generosity at sparing them.
“I’m curious as well,” Klane chimed in.
“The scum who run the guilds, the heads of Clockwork Mining, the oligarchs, the slave-drivers of this forsaken place.” Klemens threw a hand toward the city, as if presenting the haggard streets and the home to hundreds of thousands like a grand prize. The expression in his face belied his true feelings, though. “Now off with you all before the others—”
Klemens seized Klane by the arm, drew a knife, and thrust it toward Rolnar. The weapon was woefully inadequate when levied against the large Bramble.
“Two more,” Klemens grunted.
Klane glanced around to see a half dozen robed forms emerging from the crowds, out from alleyways, and seemingly from the shadowed eaves of the buildings themselves. He gulped and shook his head.
All I want to do is deliver a damn journal.
