Killstreak Book One Read online

  In truth, a few of the nearby sailors had looked a little curiously at the woman already. Their stares were probably more related to the way her wet shirt clung to her chest than anything else, so Kadorax didn’t see much reason to be alarmed.

  The second warehouse was a good bit from where the Grim Sleeper was moored. In appearances, it was almost indistinguishable from the previous warehouse Brinna had infiltrated, but the guard presence was significantly higher. Humans patrolled the grounds, and there were a lot of them. A trio of guards stood watch at the front, and more were stationed at each corner, even on the end that stuck out over the water.

  “Remember that distraction we talked about?” Kadorax said.

  Syzak knew exactly what to do. In his previous life, distracting enemy mobs so the assassin could infiltrate all manner of buildings had been one of his specialties, and it was a job he enjoyed doing. It usually meant it was Kadorax’s neck on the line as opposed to his own.

  “Start getting closer,” Kadorax told the dripping wet rogue on his left. “When Syzak pulls the guards with a trap, make a run for it.”

  “Got it,” Brinna confirmed. Her eyes gleamed, and her jaw was set like a fighter about to enter the ring for a bout she knew she would easily win. The woman had a hunger to her.

  Silently—thanks to his level five talent—Syzak cast Spike Trap directly in front of the set of guards watching the warehouse door. The wooden decking vanished, and the spikes fell harmlessly into the water below, but the distraction was perfect.

  Shouts of alarm rose up from every corner of the building. The guards rushed to the front with their weapons drawn, all eyes on the street. One of them began casting a series of buffs on the other guards. Kadorax hoped the enhancements weren’t perception related, but he knew they probably were. He wished he’d had enough Fate to have taken the Fortune Teller talent and see what was going to happen next, even if it was only a few seconds in the future.

  Brinna ran on the balls of her feet, never waiting long enough to let the dock boards beneath her feet make a noise. She was halfway to the warehouse, still undetected, when a woman walking along the road at a higher elevation than the docks began to point and shout.

  “Damn Spirit score’s too low,” Kadorax grumbled. “None of us thought to check the streets above.”

  Both Kadorax and Syzak scrambled from their hiding place to the nearest staircase that would take them to the street on the next level.

  “Hey!” Kadorax yelled, cutting off the woman at the top of the staircase right as she was about to ruin the entire plan. The problem was, he hadn’t thought any further ahead than simply getting her attention.

  “What?” the woman exclaimed. She stepped back defensively, and her eyes were still following Brinna down below.

  “Run!” Kadorax finally shouted at her. He kept running as well, pushing past her and sort of gathering the woman up in his wake. The ploy worked, and the three carried on around the next bend in the street, out of view of the dock.

  Syzak pulled on Kadorax’s shoulder to slow him down. “Go get the guards!” the snake-man commanded the civilian. “Dock nineteen! Get them quick!”

  The woman kept on going, huffing and puffing up the incline and shouting for the city guards all the way.

  “Dock nineteen?” Kadorax asked when the woman was out of earshot.

  The two turned back toward Brinna, but she was out of sight. “I just made it up. Hopefully it exists, and she ends up leading the guards to the other side of the island. Either way, Brinna better be quick.”

  They ran back to the harbor level, eyes darting around the docks for any more alerted workers or passersby, and one of the warehouse guards spotted them.

  “You there!” the lead guard shouted. “Stop!”

  “Now we’re screwed,” Kadorax said under his breath.

  “Maybe buy Brinna some more time?”

  “Hide your character sheet. Don’t let them see the trap skill.”

  “Where are you going?” the guard demanded. His voice carried weight and authority bolstered by his status as a twelfth-level watchman. The man had certainly caught a few thieves and miscreants in his day.

  “We heard a bit of commotion,” Kadorax tried to explain. His Charisma score wasn’t high enough to lie outright, especially to a skilled watchman, so he had to rely on organizing the truths he spoke in a logical manner.

  Behind the watchman, Syzak’s Spike Trap faded, and the dock went back to normal.

  “And you thought what?” the guard shouted. “That you’d come down here? The two of you happen to be walking by and just think you’re going to help a professional crew? I’m not buying it.” The man turned back to the others gathered before the door. “You two, sweep the interior. Something’s not right.”

  Kadorax’s heart sank. Judging by the size of the warehouse, Brinna had about thirty seconds, maybe a minute, before the guards would find her.

  The guard brandished a heavy club in his hands. “One more time. Tell me what you’re doing.”

  “Hey, come on, man. We were just around the corner and saw some magic, that’s all. Just curious to see what was going on,” Kadorax said.

  “Not good enough,” the watchman concluded. “Apprehend these trespassers!”

  The watchman swung his club for Kadorax’s head. Syzak jumped forward to intercept the hit, taking the club squarely on his shoulder. What normally would have been enough force to send the shaman sprawling was reduced by his Hardened Scales talent to merely a glance, and Syzak landed with both arms wrapped around the watchman’s waist. Too close for the man to defend, Syzak sank his fangs into the watchman’s flesh, puncturing his armor and envenomating him with a full dose of paralyzing toxin.

  “Stay back!” Syzak yelled to the other watchmen. He held their leader’s paralyzed body in his claws, and Kadorax had a dagger at the man’s throat.

  “We didn’t come here looking for trouble,” Kadorax stated.

  One of the other watchmen held his arms out to keep the rest from charging in. “Why were you here?” he asked. The man wasn’t nearly as confident as the leader had been, and his focus was squarely on Syzak, obviously figuring him for the stronger of the pair.

  The leader started groaning as the effects of the toxin quickly left his body. At the first rank, the talent just didn’t pack much of a punch.

  “Look,” Kadorax began, fishing for a way out, “we came here to look for something, but that doesn’t matter now. We don’t want to kill this man, but we’re not going to jail, either. Make your decision.”

  Behind the watchmen—none of whom were actually looking at the actual warehouse they had been hired to guard—Brinna slipped out of a second-story window. She made eye contact with Kadorax for barely a second, shook her head, then slithered down to the dock and slipped into the water. Kadorax watched her silently swim in the direction of the Grim Sleeper.

  The leader was coming around a lot faster than Kadorax had imagined. The bastion put on his most intimidating snarl. “I’ll kill—”

  “Alright, alright!” the closest guard interrupted. He sheathed his short sword and held up his palms. “Let him go, then get out of here. You didn’t even manage to break in, and the arrest wouldn’t be worth it. We don’t have to kill each other.”

  Kadorax didn’t wait for them to change their minds. He dumped the leader over the side of the dock opposite the direction he planned to run, then took off at a full sprint with Syzak not far behind.

  The two continued on the docks, easily outpacing Brinna in the water not far to their left, until they had rounded not one but two turns in the circular harbor to put them sufficiently out of sight. The handful of workers nearby gave them a few inquisitive looks, but they all had other things occupying their time, so none of them bothered to ask any questions. Only a few piers down, the Grim Sleeper was still peacefully moored, giving Kadorax and Syzak a bit of comfort.

  Sitting down on the edge of the dock, they waited for the rogue t
o catch up.

  “That was a close one,” Syzak breathed. Above them, on the first tier beyond the harbor, they could hear a troop of soldiers marching by at a quick pace.

  “Glad we got new armor,” Kadorax replied. “You could’ve taken some serious damage. There’s no way we would have gotten through all those watchmen.”

  “And I don’t want to get thrown in jail, and I certainly don’t want a bounty on my head in Kingsgate,” the shaman added.

  Brinna found a ladder two piers away and climbed up, then set about wringing her hair dry for the second time that day.

  “Glad you know how to swim,” Kadorax said once she rejoined the group.

  Brinna grinned. “I grew up on a river. Everyone in Coldport and Assir knows how to swim.”

  The three decided to return to their ship before they brought any more attention on themselves, and Brinna needed to dry off before she got sick from the cold permeating her body. Unfortunately, she didn’t have any extra clothes onboard. There was, however, a clothesline that the long-term crew used whenever they needed to dry their own attire, so Brinna had to settle for going barefoot in ill-fitting borrowed clothes while hers hung to dry.

  “So, what was in the warehouse?” Kadorax asked. Other than the helmsman taking watch, they were alone on the top deck.

  “Found Tal’s corpse in there, but the crate of potions wasn’t with him.” Her voice became low and somber. “There was a lot of broken glass near his body. He probably just dropped the crate when he died, and they all shattered. We’ll have to get the potions somewhere else.”

  “Who would want to kill a courier for the alchemists?” Syzak wondered.

  Kadorax was trying to figure out the exact same thing. None of it really added up, but he also wasn’t privy to any of the Royal Alchemy Guild’s politics or intrigue. There could be hundreds of other groups with scores to settle, for all they knew. “Probably best to keep our necks out of it, whatever it is,” he said.

  “We need more potions for my village,” Brinna stated.

  “Do we check Oscine City on the way back? See if someone has a huge supply of Cure Minor Disease for sale?” Kadorax asked, clearly at a loss.

  “No, we just need money. If we can find a skilled priest with tons of ranks in Cure Disease, they might be able to cast it enough times per day to cure the village. How many people are sick?” Syzak asked.

  Brinna’s head slumped downward an inch in defeat. It was a subtle movement, but summed up the situation perfectly. “Assir isn’t a big village, but there were more than a hundred infected when I left. That’s probably tripled by now. We would need an army of priests to get enough cooldowns of Cure Disease to save everyone. I don’t have the thousands of gold it would cost to hire them, either. Do you?”

  For a long time, no one spoke. A gentle breeze came in from the north, bringing a bit of warmth to the air. Sailors came and went, tending to the ship or going about their own business, and the three adventurers sat in painful silence.

  “We could wait here and see if the guild will make more potions,” Kadorax finally said to break the silence. “It shouldn’t take them more than a week, right?”

  Brinna’s gaze was fixed on the distance. “That would be too late,” she said.

  “I know…”

  “At the very least I would like to eulogize my village, if Lord Percival doesn’t mind taking me back to Coldport. Maybe we could burn the town to contain the disease and keep it from reaching the other villages,” the woman continued. A few stray tears made their way down her cheeks.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Kadorax said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind dropping us off. If the plague gets beyond the villages, all of Agglor could be at risk. If he wants to preserve Oscine City as a valuable port, we’ll need to stop the sickness before it reaches their harbor.”

  In the back of Kadorax’s mind, another plan was taking root. Where there was widespread death—especially slow, painful death—other types of magic tended to congregate. Several years ago after a large forest fire had devastated a town east of Darkarrow and killed hundreds of humans and other intelligent races, a wraith had taken up residence to feed off the energy the death had left behind. Undead creatures like wraiths weren’t intelligent themselves, just beings of pure magic that drifted from wasteland to wasteland, consuming all the rot, decay, and sorrow they could find. Taking down a mature wraith was a job for a dozen adventurers with specialized gear and potions, but a newly formed wraith… Kadorax grinned as he stood to find the captain. A young wraith was a goldmine. It would be easy to kill, and the experience points would get him well on his way toward hunting the wretched jackals and the Gar’kesh.

  The Grim Sleeper sailed past Oscine City once more, its huge mast and yards creaking in the steady wind. Lord Percival had collected a rather significant bounty for the werewolf’s demise, and he had spent a small fraction of it re-outfitting the ship. The resupply also meant a couple fresh barrels of liquor and food for the crew, so everyone on board was in high spirits. Everyone except the warlock.

  The ship’s namesake prowled the stern, pacing back and forth and muttering incoherently to herself. Lord Percival explained that she became agitated whenever confronted with the possibility of facing off against an undead. Warlocks, especially ones as deeply overcome by dark magic as the Grim Sleeper, often viewed the wild, undead beasts of Agglor not as evil, but as neutral beings, and sometimes even as friends. Kadorax had no idea what went through the Grim Sleeper’s mind, if anything was truly there at all, and it unnerved him. As far as he knew, ‘agitated’ could mean one tenuous step from sinking the ship and killing them all.

  Sailing against the wind, it took the ship two days to pass Oscine City and reach the river that would take them to Coldport. The waters were choked with significantly more ice than had been present when they’d left. Careful not to damage the ship, Lord Percival took over the helm to navigate the slow and treacherous trip. During the coldest winters, the ice and snow from the Boneridge Mountains were known to drift down the river into the sea and freeze Oscine City’s harbor, and such weather had been the cause of hundreds of shipwrecks throughout the years. For enough gold, a captain could hire a talented fire mage to burn a path through the water should the need arise. The frugal captain preferred to make use of his extensive sailing talents, though he warned Kadorax of waiting too long in Coldport. If the river froze completely, he would have to beach the Grim Sleeper and wait out the winter.

  Three days after leaving Kingsgate, the Grim Sleeper alighted once again in Coldport with frost clinging to its rails and rigging. Lord Percival paid the harbormaster for his stay, and then the ragtag group of adventurers assembled at the waterline to make the journey to Assir.

  For combat, Lord Percival’s captain class did not offer much. He was proficient with his cutlass, could dodge several times in an encounter, and had a single rank in an aura he had never found a reason to use: Batten the Hatches. When activated, the aura increased the speed at which all of Lord Percival’s allies could barricade a ship for heavy weather. According to the captain, he had taken the talent merely because he enjoyed the name. Sailing mostly in waters around Oscine City and Kingsgate meant he always had a safe harbor if the storms ever got too bad, so the talent had so far gone to waste.

  The warlock, still in her ‘agitated’ mood, shuffled in tight circles several paces from the others, her cowl pulled so low she was effectively blind. Good, Kadorax thought as he observed the decrepit woman’s odd behavior. The farther she is from us, the less damage she’s likely to do.

  The villagers of Coldport gave them a wide berth as the band marched through. They passed Ayers’ old shop, now owned by one of his former apprentices, and were only stopped once before traversing the town altogether.

  One of the nobles came out from the town hall to greet them. It was early afternoon, and the sun created a horrible glare when it hit the lazy cloud of frost hanging on the wind. “You there, adventurers,” the w
oman called. She had a scroll clutched tightly in her hand.

  “Another quest?” Kadorax thought aloud with a bit of hopefulness.

  The captain being the most obvious choice for the leader of the band, the woman handed her scroll to him. “We’re in need of people like you,” she said. “You lot look like you’d know your way around a fight.” She looked the warlock up and down and shuddered.

  “Aye, what’ve you got for us?” Lord Percival responded.

  “All the details are in there,” the woman answered. “An elf who goes by the name of Santo was seen by a few villagers who came here from Assir to escape the plague. We’ve had about enough of that damned elf, so we put a bounty on his head. It isn’t much, but there’s fifty gold pieces for his death.”

  “I know Santo,” Brinna growled. “That bastard has been a thorn in my side for years. He fancies himself a necromancer. Maybe he’s behind the plague…”

  Kadorax barely even paid attention as Lord Percival accepted the quest. All of the pieces had fallen into place. He silently chastised himself for not putting it together before, or even asking the questions that would have set him down the right line of thinking. Of course an upstart necromancer had been behind the Wasting Sickness. Killing an entire village would provide Santo with all the fuel he could possibly need.

  “You didn’t think to hunt down the necromancer before going out and searching for a cure?” he asked, a bit more incredulity in his voice than he had intended.

  Brinna looked at him, clearly aghast. “When my son contracted the illness, all I wanted to do was find his cure,” she snapped. “Santo was an eccentric living on the outskirts of Assir. He paid his yearly tax—begrudgingly, but he paid. Sure, he was a nuisance, constantly pestering villagers about one thing or another, getting piss drunk and starting fights, and he did a single stint in the jail for grave robbing, but I never suspected…”

  Completely ignoring the brief altercation, Lord Percival was busy giving the noblewoman instructions. “If any of the refugees have the infection, they must be quarantined. Read everyone’s sheet. Don’t let a single person into Coldport without making sure,” he explained.