Five Ships
Session: 2024-09-04
The road past Harrod's Wood was fine.
Vath didn't know what he'd expected. More than this, probably. Sounds, at least. The trees were thick and the light came through at wrong angles, but nothing came out of the shadows, and the party came through the other side intact.
Maybe the spirits were occupied.
Vogler appeared quietly past that. The river gate was notable — fifteen feet of carved stone, leaping fish frozen mid-jump, scales like scattered coins — and then past that the town was just a town. Market stalls, a smell of fish, a square where children watched a man do something complicated with three balls. Not many people out.
He noted it and kept walking.
The cottage was easy enough to find. One story, stone walls, thatched roof, a door of dark oak with a brass knocker in the shape of a harp. He knew the shape from the seal on the letter he'd been carrying.
The man who answered was thin, bespectacled, and had the manner of someone who had been waiting for company for three weeks and intended to use it fully. Nasau Lanth — son of the wharfinger, as he explained before anyone asked — and within two sentences it was clear he had firm opinions on several subjects and was delighted to share them.
He led them inside. Books and something sweet, faintly strawberry — drying herbs Vath didn't recognize. The front room was cozy and well-lit, shelves lined with the kind of accumulated objects that meant someone had been a great many places and kept something from each of them. A silver rapier rested on the hearth — not decorative. Stored. Maps on an oak table, tattered at the folds.
Nasau poured port wine and stepped back.
Near the hearth, an old man was reading.
He looked up, and his face opened into a wide and genuine grin.
Nathaniel Silverblade was frail.
That was the first thing, and then the rest of it. Gaunt. Balding. Simple clothing, immaculate — the clothing of a man who had decided early that he wouldn't be caught underdressed and had never since wasted thought on it. He had ink on his fingers and a quill on the arm of his chair and the look of someone who had been expecting this visit for some time.
He was smaller than Vath remembered.
The years hadn't been unkind exactly — he was still himself, the grin was the same — but they had been thorough. He rose to meet them without difficulty and without mentioning the effort.
He's fine, Vath thought. He's fine, and it cost him to get here.
They talked.
The subject underneath all of it was Darrian.
Darrian worked in the fish trade. An important figure in Vogler; the kind of person everyone knows by name and no one has a bad word for. The salted and dried fish that left Vogler bound for Silverport and Seacrest — that whole operation ran on a specific salt, from Serenholme, under a trade arrangement that had held for years.
The salt had stopped coming.
About a month ago. No explanation, no notice, nothing in correspondence. Just a gap where supply had been.
Nathaniel spoke Darrian's name and for a moment — just a moment — something moved across his face that he didn't draw attention to. He moved past it quickly. He was good at that.
Darrian had sent his two nephews toward Serenholme to find out what had happened. To find the salt merchant who held the agreement — a man named Andris Salder. That had been a while ago now.
They hadn't come back.
The town was quiet in the way towns go quiet when they're waiting for news and the news hasn't come.
The five ships came up almost in passing.
Nathaniel mentioned them the way you mention something that's been sitting at the edge of your attention: carefully, not quite looking at you while he said it. He had sent ships — five of them — for reasons he described only as the gathering of information. Two weeks and three days. No word back.
The gathering of information.
The docks looked normal, he said. That was the thing that was bothering him. Whatever had happened, it hadn't left a visible mark.
Vath held that. Ships that don't come back and nothing to show for it. A supply line that disappears cleanly. A town with the streets half-empty on a clear afternoon.
He didn't say any of that out loud.
Nathaniel offered to pay for a night at the inn. Said it with the same warmth he'd said a hundred things to a hundred people: genuine, no weight attached to it, the kind of offer that didn't ask anything back.
Vath accepted.
Outside, the light was running late-afternoon gold across the river gate. The carved fish caught the angle well — frozen mid-jump, every scale distinct. He stood and looked at them for a moment.
He had been carrying Nathaniel's letter since Gashak's group had handed it over. Sealed with a harp. He hadn't opened it yet.
He put his hand on it now. Stood there in the late gold light.
Then took his hand away and kept walking.
Later.