RavensDagger

  Chapter Twenty-Two - A Pilging

  53rd Day of Spring - Year 1758 of the Golden EraShorefarm, Yellowfield, Draya Calyrex

  The first thing to do was gather all of the serfs that were still alive into a neat row. That mostly required two of them to grab one by the armpits and ankles, then shuffle them into pce. They were still very much knocked out, but just to be safe, Lazur was tying their hands and ankles together with rope they found in the stables nearby.

  Once that was done, they continued their feast. There were over a dozen freshly dead vilgers to pilge essence from.

  "Vilgers? Or serfs?" Viridian asked as she stood up from the st. She used a small piece of... clean-enough cloth to wipe the end of her siphon clean. She didn't want dried blood staining the inside of her new body where it would be impossible to clean off.

  "What?" Carnel asked.

  "These people. Are they vilgers or serfs?" Viridian asked.

  Carnel shrugged. "Neither? They're dead."

  "Serfs," Lazur said. "If they served under a lord mayor, then they were his serfs."

  Viridian considered it, then nodded. She supposed it made some amount of sense.

  "Or they were the serfs of the dragon," Lazur said. "Which means we killed a dragon's property."

  They all paused to stare at the bodies for a moment.

  "Probably a dead dragon," Carnel said.

  Viridian chuckled darkly, then gestured to the body of the mayor. They had left him to bleed next to the heap of corpses in the middle of the pza. Walking over, she poked at his robes, then tugged harder until the outfit started to come off.

  "Why are you taking his clothes?" Carnel asked.

  "Good quality cloth, even if it's ripped," Viridian said. "I think the sash is magic too? It turned into a wing."

  "Okay," Carnel said.

  Viridian didn't want to see the man's naked form any more than Carnel did, but needs must. She shook out the robes, then used them as a sort of sack to pce the sash in. She carried it with her as they entered the rge stable next to the pza, the one they'd seen the mayor exit a few times.

  She expected the interior to be like any other stable. Dried grass and horse droppings. Instead, the first door past the stalls led to a vishly decorated room.

  There was a bed, with a plush mattress, a few chairs, and a writing desk next to a small window overlooking the town square.

  Carnel walked over to a chest next to the bed and kicked it open. She rooted inside, then shook her head. "You will be happy," she said.

  "Oh?" Viridian asked.

  "Just clothes," Carnel said.

  Viridian was, in fact, happy. The clothes were noblemen's wear, the sort of thing that Magus Maldrak wore, only... the quality of these didn't quite seem to be on the same level. Still, she pulled out several nice blouses, some ascots, a few waistcoats and long coats.

  Poking at the material of the st, she discovered that the coats were padded on the interior, like a gambeson, but far thinner.

  There was hose and some trousers as well, deeper in the chest. No weapons, however.

  "Gold," Lazur said as she pulled out a small sac from under a pillow and emptied it onto the bed. There were a half dozen gold pieces there, as well as twice as many silvery coins with draconic heads pressed into them. "We're rich. Mildly."

  "Do we... keep what we find?" Viridian asked.

  Lazur tilted her head to the side as she considered it. "I suppose so. Magus Maldrak never said."

  "We did the work," Carnel said. "And this isn't something he asked for."

  "We do work for him," Lazur said. "But... I don't think he wants this much gold."

  Viridian supposed that that was a fair point. She repced the clothes into the chest, then tried lifting it. It wasn't light, but she could manage carrying it without too much difficulty. They ransacked the room for a little longer, but other than discovering shoes under the bed, there was only one thing of real note.

  A diary, pced in the centre of the writing desk.

  Lazur carefully opened it, then leafed through its first pages. They were filled with neat, tidy handwriting. Skipping to the end showed entire pages covered in jagged, disturbed text, as if the writer's hand was shaking the entire time they wrote.

  "Magus Maldrak might want that," Viridian said.

  Lazur nodded. "He might," she agreed before closing the diary up and handing it to her. "Put it in your chest. So it doesn't get wet."

  There wasn't much else worth looting in the room. None of them needed furniture for much, and despite the strange opulence of the space, it was still just a rather clean stable.

  They left the room, Carnel helping Viridian carry the chest with all of their loot in it. They brought it straight to the pier while Lazur stayed behind to keep an eye on their sleeping captives.

  Viridian found it a little strange, to suddenly be out of sight of one of the others. So far, they'd all been together since the day they were stuffed into a storage room onboard the Gentle Tidings. This kind of separation was new, but it was very much temporary.

  As they came onto the pier, Viridian fiddled with the internal systems they used to cast magic. It was like curling a finger, only that finger was in the back of her head. A twist, and she was able to produce a ball of light.

  There was some mental control over it, but the brighter it became the shorter it sted, and moving it around required a surprising amount of focus. Lazur was clever, to be able to use this kind of thing in the middle of a battle.

  Her light fshed green, and Carnel's a bright red.

  In the distance, the Gentle Tidings took a while to respond, but one of the sailors eventually returned an affirmative with some semaphore fgs. They left the chest on the road and returned to Lazur. From there, they started to carry their prisoners back to the piers, leaving them along the wharf. Carnel broke one of the soporific bottles on the ground. Without being lit on fire, the effects were supposed to be much weaker, but that was probably fine.

  It took a dozen trips back and forth, but that was fine. The busywork kept them occupied.

  By the time they were done, the rowboat from the ship was pulling up to the longest pier, though it was doing so slowly. The boat was loaded with far more sailors than usual, and one of them was poking at the water with a long barge pole.

  "What are they doing?" Viridian asked.

  "Measuring the depth," Lazur said. "I think the Gentle Tidings is going to dock here."

  She might have been right, Viridian realized. The ship was slowly approaching at a quarter sail, and the crew onboard looked far busier than usual.

  The rowboat did eventually make it to the piers, and Viridian moved up to help as a pair of sailors jumped up and out. They turned and lent a hand to a familiar pair of faces. Magus Suffragus Nocthorn, and Artisan Artificer Preamagus Woodbone, the son of the old artificer.

  "Ah, good," Nocthorn said. "You're all here and in one piece. I'm assuming that the subjugation of the town went well?"

  "Yes," Viridian said. "The lord mayor is dead. We captured some people alive. They are there. Careful, we left soporifics around them."

  "The alchemist's concoction? Duly noted," she said. "You three look a little dirty, but otherwise in...tact... is that a knife in your head?"

  "It's stuck," Carnel said. It was hard to read her expression, but Viridian knew her well enough to pick up on the faint shift of her shoulders and the change in her tone. Carnel was deeply amused by the woman's reaction.

  Brian chuckled. "I might be able to help me with that," he said. "Oh! That's a nice piece, too. A real dragonscale bde. These fetch a fortune off the mainnd. Can you lean down, a little?"

  "Maybe take care of that off the pier?" Nocthorn said. She sounded like she had little patience for the artificer.

  "Ah, yes, of course," he said. "Shall we?"

  They all shuffled off the pier. The sailors brought the boat in deeper and tied it to a dock next to some fishing boats, then stood around rather awkwardly. Viridian noted that most were armed, though they seemed to mostly carry cudgels and long knives.

  "Are you safe here?" Viridian asked.

  Nocthorn squinted at her. "Having never partaken of draconic essence in any great quantity, most of us should be fine as long as our exposure is minimal. There are alchemical reagents--distasteful ones--that should prevent any complications from longer-term exposure. Magus Maldrak has brought several crates full of these. Still, we're going to want to use magics to clear the area before habitation becomes possible. It might be decades, or centuries, before the nd here stops causing uncontrolled draconic mutations."

  "Dangerous," Lazur said.

  "For the moment, the greater danger isn't the blighted soil, but the people living here."

  ***

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