The Black Barnacle
Session: 2024-07-17
The three figures didn't move out of the way.
Vath had been watching them since they came into sight — two hundred feet, then one. There was something about how they were standing. Not the way travelers stand. Arms loose. Distributed across the road in a way that didn't allow for passing.
Ah.
The ambush wasn't complicated. Roadside work from people who'd done it before. He had Faerie Fire up before the first one covered half the distance.
Victor cast something. The lightning hit a tree.
Close enough.
The fight ended the way fights with bandits usually do — faster than they'd expected, messier than they'd planned for. Vath crouched over one of the downed men when it was clear they were done.
There was a scroll on him.
He unrolled it. Cain's name. A skull. At the bottom, a single letter.
C.
He'd seen that handwriting before. The letter on Sorel had the same economy. C had distributed this one to hired hands on the road — which meant C's reach was longer than Silverport's alleys, and longer than the party had assumed.
He found Cain and showed it to him without preamble. Cain looked at it for a moment.
"Warned," Vath said.
Cain nodded, and they kept moving.
Four more hours on the same coastal path. River Marin to the north, catching light through the treeline in blue flashes. The land was flat enough that Vath saw the figure from a long way out.
Enormous. A hundred feet away, maybe more. His first thought was about the silhouette — something wrong with the shoulders, with the way light caught the chest and arms. Not armor, exactly. More layered than that.
Chains.
He was covered in them. Wound and draped across his frame in layers that shouldn't have allowed movement but clearly did. Half-orc — the face and build made that plain — and something else besides, something the chains made harder to read. He stood in the middle of the road with his hands at his sides and waited.
That's Gashak.
Cain was the one who asked him. Directly, which was right.
"Are you the Black Barnacle?"
The half-orc looked at him for a moment.
Yes. He'd been a pirate on the Trackless Sea — the Black Barnacle, apparently known well enough that a Kelemvor cleric would recognize the name on sight — and then he had disappeared from that life. His purpose now: ensuring the safety of those who wish to walk away from a life of violence.
Vath turned that over. A pirate who now helped people escape exactly the kind of life he'd led. He didn't say anything. Some things announce themselves without help.
The chains made a sound when Gashak moved. Not quite metal. Something older.
One of his crew — a man called Chisel — pulled Vath aside while introductions were happening and said it plainly: Colivik Arandé was the face of the organization. Then he said what he thought of Colivik.
Vath had heard rougher language. Not much.
The group spread out while the formalities settled. Gerder Bluefin — a Goliath, carrying a stick he called Bigmouth with the quiet affection of a man who trusted it. Gallaback the dwarf, watching. Hallard Fortune, a bard, who was not watching because he was talking. Sylandrin, an elf, who seemed to be waiting for something to happen that hadn't happened yet.
At some point, one of them said Victor's full name.
Victor Davian.
Victor's expression was the expression of a man who'd been recognized and was deciding how to receive it. Gashak or one of his crew had placed him as a Reaver — a type of magic user, Vath gathered, rare enough in their part of the world to be almost theoretical. He filed the word. He didn't know what it meant yet.
It meant something to them, though.
"Landlubbers," Gashak said at one point, in a tone that wasn't quite an insult. Vath accepted the assessment and moved on.
Tilsa left with them.
She didn't make a production of it. She gave Zephyr her horse with the directness of a decision already made — somewhere on the road she'd concluded the horse should be his. Zephyr looked at the horse, then at her, then accepted. The second of Eslin's envelopes went to Gashak as instructed.
Before they parted, Gashak pressed something into Vath's hands. Carved wood — a bird, small enough to carry in a coat pocket. He explained it simply: speak to it, say that we need them, and we'll come.
Vath looked at it for a moment. Then put it in his pack.
The letters from Nathaniel came with Gashak's group — sealed with a harp, which meant they'd traveled a while to get here. Beau had been meant to deliver them, which settled something Vath had been carrying without quite knowing it. He'd been wrong about how Beau had ended. He kept his letter and didn't open it in front of anyone.
Later.
Gashak's group mentioned Harrod's Wood before they went their separate ways. They said it the way people say things when they want you to hear the warning underneath: filled with evil spirits, on the road ahead, unavoidable whether the party wanted it to be or not.
Vath looked at the tree line. Then at the road east toward Vogler.
He checked his pack and walked.
He'd spend more time in that forest than in any other stretch of ground in his life. He didn't know that yet.