Something Like a Turtle
Session: 2024-06-26
The party was meeting at the east gate and Vath had arrived early, which meant standing and watching the others come in.
Victor came first.
His gear was a problem. Not the gear itself — the way it was packed. Something about the arrangement suggested a man who had read about travel without doing much of it. A rope had escaped his pack entirely and was trailing behind him. He caught it, stuffed it back in. Caught it coming out a different side.
Vath watched without comment.
Pedro arrived with additional ropes of his own, a wrestling belt, and a hat that seemed improved from the last version in some way that was difficult to say precisely. You could tell he was pleased with it.
Zephyr looked the same, except his hair had been dealt with. Lotion, or something like it. Vath noticed this and did not remark on it. Zephyr looked at him anyway, as if waiting.
Cain rode up on Deathbringer. The donkey was packed correctly.
Thaddeus was calling himself Victor now. Vath registered this the way he'd register a shift in wind direction. The man was Victor. He adjusted.
People change what they want to be called. It doesn't cost anything to honor that.
Cain found him before they moved out.
Not urgent. Not whispered. Just the way Cain brought things up when they needed to be discussed without becoming a thing.
A man had stopped him in an alley earlier. Priest of Kelemvor — or trying to look like one. The trappings were right, but Cain would know, and he'd said as much. The man's name was Colivik Arandé. He had thanked Cain for Deeran's death. Compensated him.
That's a name I don't know.
And then, carefully, this Colivik had mentioned Tilsa. Said dealing with her would be worth considerably more money. His masters, he implied, were the Brass Dominion.
Cain relayed it plainly and waited.
Vath looked at him for a moment. "He approached you alone."
"Yes."
"That's deliberate. They wanted to know what you'd do without the rest of us watching."
Cain's expression said he'd reached the same conclusion and hadn't liked it.
"What you did," Vath said, "was the right thing."
He filed the name away. Colivik Arandé. He didn't know what to do with it yet, but names had a way of coming back.
Tilsa arrived looking like money.
Not the market-stall, carefully-counted kind. The kind that travels with a decent horse and knows it. Hair arranged. Clothes set right. The horse was worth more than everything Vath owned and probably knew it.
Eslin's people put that together. There's a point to it.
Zephyr found the envelopes in the arrangement they'd been left. Two of them. The first was addressed my friends in a hand Vath recognized. Eslin's economy: thanks, escort, one and a half days east, a contact named Gashak. The second envelope had nothing on the outside.
Vath looked at Tilsa.
She was watching Zephyr read with the flat attention of someone who already knew the contents.
The path east ran coastal. Grassland and sparse forest on either side, the land unsure which it wanted to be. A river tracked them on the north, running from Vogler — blue and unhurried in the afternoon light.
It was good traveling.
Tilsa talked.
Not all at once. It came in pieces, the way things do when the road is long and the alternatives are silence. She talked to Pedro first. Then to Cain. By the time the light started shifting toward evening she'd told them most of it.
The Black Eel. A smuggling vessel. She'd worked it under Eofith Aeferson, who knew the Silverport routes well enough to run them half-asleep. A month back they'd been told to stay clear of Silverport. Someone further up the chain had said so, and she didn't know why.
They had a haul of alcohol and decided the risk was acceptable.
It wasn't.
Something came up out of the water. She said it like this: something that looked like a giant turtle. She said it the way she'd say rocks in the water or wrong current — a piece of information, not a wonder. The creature breathed fire. The ship had gone up fast; alcohol being what it is. A few of them had made it onto boards and floated until the Silverwatch found them. Her. Deeran. Ulf.
"I'm done with it," she said. "The smuggling."
She said it the way people say things when they mean them. Not a declaration. Just a statement about what was true.
Vath believed her. He noticed he believed her and checked himself once.
Still believed her.
She'd worked for the Brass Dominion, sort of. The word sort of was carrying weight there, but he let it stand. She wasn't lying. She might not know exactly what she'd been part of. That was possible. He'd seen it before — people downstream of decisions they hadn't made.
Pedro had been thinking about something since they left the city. Vath could tell because Pedro looked the way he looked when he was thinking — present but slightly elsewhere.
Eventually it came out. He was asking Tilsa about animals. Specifically, what kind of animal a man could wrestle in front of a crowd. Entertainment. The kind of thing people would pay to watch.
"A boar," Vath said.
Both of them looked at him.
"They're fast. Stubborn. Nobody expects you to win — that's the part that matters." He considered it. "Crowds like something that puts up an argument."
Pedro seemed to find this genuinely useful.
Zephyr played while this was happening. Not badly. Not well. Somewhere in between that still made the walk feel shorter. Vath had not known he played.
He's full of things like that.
The Sunken Treasure sat where it had been promised — half a mile from the road, arrived at dusk. The night passed without anything demanding their attention.
They were back on the road before the morning was fully decided.
Three figures ahead on the path. Not moving fast. Not moving slow. Just there, in the way that people sometimes are.
Vath put his hand near his pack and waited.