Quick Explanation: Greetings. This is my second foray into Eberron fiction. Wanted to get off my butt and flex some writing muscles again. I should be posting daily updates until its done. Please feel free to comment if you like (or don't like -- my skin is thick) what you read here. I think the story is unique, and I'm trying to keep it in the "Dent mode" of classic pulp.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The Things We Lost
Kath Orus stood at the barge rail and eyed the thick jungle brush at the river's edge a few hundred feet away. Even at near-twilight, the Q'barran air was oppressively hot and heavy. Her pearly white skin, shot through with stripes of silver, glistened with sweat. The silver mane of hair hung limp on her neck. She heard the rustling again, and a small deer stepped lightly down a steep path to the water. Kath's skin prickled, and her wide-flat nose flared. Narrowing her yellow eyes, she pushed down the animal within her, suddenly fearful. The Beast's desire to shift and kill had been an almost uncontrollable urge, of late.
"Tiger-girl looks hungry," said the fat, hairy gnome further up the deck.
"Pike it, Verloot," Kath said, whipping her head around. "You think I can't hear you?"
Verloot attempted a bow, but he remained unsteady and slightly nauseous on the gently rolling barge and only managed to bend his neck. The gnome wore too many clothes for this climate, and they were all drenched with sweat. Thick black hair from his wig lay plastered to his forehead and cheeks. His whiskers, however, stood out like a porcupine's.
"No offense, Kath," he said. "I was only making a little joke."
"A little joke you cannot manage," said the thin warforged standing at the back of the deck. His rust-red plates looked almost black in the dusk. His green eyes glowed slightly. "They always fill your mouth and our ears."
"Ah, Book has ears, then?" Verloot changed the subject, deftly, though he walked unsteadily toward the warforged. "I always thought the 'forged captured the sound of our voices in some other arcane mechanism."
The knot of armored men slumping in the middle of the deck began to look from gnome to warforged to shifter with uncertainty. The barge captain, a scruffy, squat human, hunched over his controls, lost in his reverie with the elemental that drove the vessel’s small paddlewheel.
"Just drop it, Verloot," Kath said, finally, returning to her survey of the way ahead.
Even the steady splash of the churning barge couldn't take her mind off of the pulse in the deer's neck. Four moons, mere slivers, cut across the sprinkle of Siberys stones in the bowl of sky above her and reflected in the river ahead, a flat, dark sheet of glass.
They rounded a darkened bend and before them the sluggish Whitecliff River shattered and traced the broad, flat floodplain with a thousand yellow-brown streamlets. Above and upon this shallow, weed-choked morass sat the town of Whitecliff. The main city etched a tracery of buildings, platforms and staircases into its namesake, the pearly buttress of a plateau that began the Q’barran upcountry. Below it, on the unsteady surface of the marsh sat the shanty-town additions that had grown since the refugees, prospectors, and those who prey on them washed up after the Last War. Most of lower Whitecliff comprised tin and waddle shacks perched on ever-sinking stilts connected by graying wooden walkways.
"Lovely place," Verloot said then spat in the dead yellow water.
"It's a hole, but the perfect place for our quarry to hide," Kath said.
"Do you have contacts here, Lady?" Book asked.
"I'm afraid I don't know much about it," she said, staring at the city's strange layout and even stranger collection of citizens.
In the wavering orange light of torches, mud-spattered lizardkin drew themselves out of the water and mixed freely with hunched Cyrean refugees, hulking orcs, and the occasional over-dressed noble. What was absent disturbed her more. No city watch, or at least none in a common uniform. She surmised that they would get no help from the officials of this town.
The barge bumped into a crowded dock, and the barge captain snapped out of the mental lock he'd maintained with the elemental. Verloot met his one good eye as the captain shuffled across the deck.
"Fastest I've ever done it, I can tell ya," the man called before he'd even reached them. "Just like you asked."
"Pay the man, Book," Verloot said before turning back to the town. "And tell those no account mercenaries that we'll no longer require their services. They can find their own way back to Newthrone."
Kath watched her self-appointed master-at-arms, barely hiding her irritation.
"You know, we could use a couple of them," she said. "They could probably pick up more information in a single evening in a taphouse than we would in a week."
Verloot scoffed and spat again. "All they'd get us is another hundred pennies in debt and a case of swamp-rot.
"Where do you suggest we start then?"
"I know a few old-timers that settled up this way," the gnome said, stepping onto the dock. "I reckon I could find them."
###
"Can't say as I know too much about that," a grizzled man said, pulling his clay jug closer to his chest. "Never heard of anyone named Thiel...or any of the other names he runs under."
Verloot sat back in his chair with a sigh in the stinking dusk of the taphouse. Book shifted uncertainly, looking at the huddled shadowy forms all around them. Kath stood quickly and walked out into the heavy night air.
She leaned against the walkway rail and stared across the still water to the looming black jungle, its denizens raising a cacophony of cries. The gnome's stomping steps followed her a few moments later.
"Well, that's the last of them," he said. "What now, boss?"
"Perhaps I could consult with the Temple of the Sovereign," Book said. "I'm sure that someone there knows something of the happenings in Whitecliff."
"I still say we stay with the scum," Verloot countered, balling his fists and planting them on his hips. "Thiel's on the run and probably not supported. He's going to seek help from the dregs, and that may not reach the ears of the priests."
"Book's right," Kath said, still watching the crenellated horizon. "We've wasted enough time here."
"You're looking for Gruber Thiel, aren't you?" said a woman's voice in the steeping shadows near the bar.
Kath felt the Beast leap into her, barely able to suppress it. As the wave of savagery washed out of her, she pushed Verloot's outstretched sword down with a trembling hand, and stepped up beside Book, who stood blandly as ever.
"What do you know of him?" she asked, still shaking.
"I can tell you," the woman said, inching forward.
Her dark skin masked her features, though a wisp of mossy green hair drifted into the light on the sullen wind.
"Who are you?" Verloot said sharply.
"That's...that's not important," the woman retreated pawing at her hair. "If you have a bit of gold, I can take you to where he lives."
"And why should we trust you exactly?" the gnome spat, stepping forward and raising his sword.
Kath intervened and held up a hand.
"This is the only lead we've had, Verloot," she said quietly.
"Strangely after we spread our questions and silver all over this stinking pit, isn't it?" he growled.
"I didn't say it wasn't dangerous," she replied. "Sheath your sword, but be wary."
"I thought that was what I was doing," he said to her back.
"You'll have to take us there first, I'm afraid," Kath said to the woman. "Please come out so that we can see that you are not armed."
The woman stepped out and Kath gasped. The woman's very skin seemed to be etched from a fine grain of wood, though she moved with the supple grace of a sapling in a gentle wind. Hair like thick green moss fell to the creature’s waist.
"A bloody dryad!" Verloot said, pulling at his sword hilt. "Never trust a fey, Kath. That's what I've always said."
"I've never heard you say it." Book said.
The gnome shot him a glare, as Kath spoke.
"Where does Thiel live?" she asked.
"I'll take you," the dryad said, her eyes jumping around to each of the three in turn.
"We won't hurt you," Kath said. "We only want Thiel."
"Look," she said, visibly shaking. "I need that gold, see? I need to buy something on the way."
"Kath," Book said. "May I speak with you privately?"
"Um. Of course." She looked from the dryad to Verloot.
"Don't worry," the gnome snorted. "I'll keep an eye on her."
The warforged stepped down the walkway several paces. The stench of the swamp and the ramshackle town sitting on top of it washed back over Kath's senses.
"That creature is in the throes of massive withdrawal from addiction to some substance," Book said without prelude.
"What?" She looked back at the dryad, noticing small things now like how she hunched in her shabby linen shift. "How do you know? Maybe she's ill or..." She could think of no other explanation.
"I have tended to thousands on battlefields and in the guts of the largest cities in the Five Nations," the warforged said. "I would say either clubsnail ichor or burnroot. Most likely the latter given its prevalence in this clime."
"Burnroot?" Kath breathed. "Well, there's nothing for it now. If she knows where Thiel lives, I'll give her a whole burnroot plantation."
"Kath, I must protest. This is most cruel to use this...creature."
"I don't really care about your protests just now, Book. House Tharashk wants this guy, and I’m bringing him back,"
“Ah,” Book said. “Tharashk wants him. Nothing personal.”
“Back off,” Kath growled, stalking back to the dryad. "What is your name?"
Kath could see now some telltale signs of what Book saw. The dryad shook uncontrollably, but almost imperceptibly.
"I'll get you what you need, Picea," Kath said, turning to the gnome. "Go back into that dive and get us some burnroot. As much as you can get with this."
"Burnroot!?" Verloot said. "Are you crazy? This isn't any time to..."
"Verloot." Kath cut him off by dangling a money pouch in front of him. "Now."
The gnome snorted, snatched the money and stomped off into the bar. Kath kept an eye on the dryad. The fey had folded in on herself, crouching on the weathered boards of the walkway.
"How do you know Thiel?" Kath asked, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice.
"I've been his lover for the last few months," she said quietly.
"Did he get you...on this stuff?"
The dryad looked up sharply, her dark features darkening further. Kath let the question hang then looked away. She was tired of the job, already. Weary of finding these wastes of life clinging like lice to the underbellies of the thrashing animal that the Five Nations left in the wake of their wars. The whole of the Nations was infested with them....Cyrean refugees, manic ex-soldiers, cripples, widows, orphans.... Q'barra was thick with them too because of the empty promise of escape to a tropical paradise. She'd found the same dregs in Newthrone. She just wanted to stop and rest and get her own life back together. But, she had to find Thiel. Had to close this never ending book that started on the plains of Breland so many years ago.
"What a wonderful experience this has been," Verloot said, returning from the bar. "I get to travel the world, see all the exotic places, and deal with the most interesting of characters. Here's your plant food."
He held the loosely wrapped package out to Picea but Kath snatched it, and broke the package in half.
"Here," she said. "You get the other half when we have confirmation that Thiel is where you say he is."
The dryad grabbed the package and slid into the shadows.
"This is obscene," Book intoned, turning his glowing eyes back across the sluggish water.
"What part?" Verloot said. "The part where we have to scrape the muck off of our feet everywhere we go, or the part where we have to see a rust bucket actually cry?"
"Verloot," Kath said, as Picea returned.
The dryad's eyes were misty and dark and her movements very precise. She seemed almost lifeless...like an animated wooden carving.
"I can show you now," she said lazily.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The Things We Lost
Kath Orus stood at the barge rail and eyed the thick jungle brush at the river's edge a few hundred feet away. Even at near-twilight, the Q'barran air was oppressively hot and heavy. Her pearly white skin, shot through with stripes of silver, glistened with sweat. The silver mane of hair hung limp on her neck. She heard the rustling again, and a small deer stepped lightly down a steep path to the water. Kath's skin prickled, and her wide-flat nose flared. Narrowing her yellow eyes, she pushed down the animal within her, suddenly fearful. The Beast's desire to shift and kill had been an almost uncontrollable urge, of late.
"Tiger-girl looks hungry," said the fat, hairy gnome further up the deck.
"Pike it, Verloot," Kath said, whipping her head around. "You think I can't hear you?"
Verloot attempted a bow, but he remained unsteady and slightly nauseous on the gently rolling barge and only managed to bend his neck. The gnome wore too many clothes for this climate, and they were all drenched with sweat. Thick black hair from his wig lay plastered to his forehead and cheeks. His whiskers, however, stood out like a porcupine's.
"No offense, Kath," he said. "I was only making a little joke."
"A little joke you cannot manage," said the thin warforged standing at the back of the deck. His rust-red plates looked almost black in the dusk. His green eyes glowed slightly. "They always fill your mouth and our ears."
"Ah, Book has ears, then?" Verloot changed the subject, deftly, though he walked unsteadily toward the warforged. "I always thought the 'forged captured the sound of our voices in some other arcane mechanism."
The knot of armored men slumping in the middle of the deck began to look from gnome to warforged to shifter with uncertainty. The barge captain, a scruffy, squat human, hunched over his controls, lost in his reverie with the elemental that drove the vessel’s small paddlewheel.
"Just drop it, Verloot," Kath said, finally, returning to her survey of the way ahead.
Even the steady splash of the churning barge couldn't take her mind off of the pulse in the deer's neck. Four moons, mere slivers, cut across the sprinkle of Siberys stones in the bowl of sky above her and reflected in the river ahead, a flat, dark sheet of glass.
They rounded a darkened bend and before them the sluggish Whitecliff River shattered and traced the broad, flat floodplain with a thousand yellow-brown streamlets. Above and upon this shallow, weed-choked morass sat the town of Whitecliff. The main city etched a tracery of buildings, platforms and staircases into its namesake, the pearly buttress of a plateau that began the Q’barran upcountry. Below it, on the unsteady surface of the marsh sat the shanty-town additions that had grown since the refugees, prospectors, and those who prey on them washed up after the Last War. Most of lower Whitecliff comprised tin and waddle shacks perched on ever-sinking stilts connected by graying wooden walkways.
"Lovely place," Verloot said then spat in the dead yellow water.
"It's a hole, but the perfect place for our quarry to hide," Kath said.
"Do you have contacts here, Lady?" Book asked.
"I'm afraid I don't know much about it," she said, staring at the city's strange layout and even stranger collection of citizens.
In the wavering orange light of torches, mud-spattered lizardkin drew themselves out of the water and mixed freely with hunched Cyrean refugees, hulking orcs, and the occasional over-dressed noble. What was absent disturbed her more. No city watch, or at least none in a common uniform. She surmised that they would get no help from the officials of this town.
The barge bumped into a crowded dock, and the barge captain snapped out of the mental lock he'd maintained with the elemental. Verloot met his one good eye as the captain shuffled across the deck.
"Fastest I've ever done it, I can tell ya," the man called before he'd even reached them. "Just like you asked."
"Pay the man, Book," Verloot said before turning back to the town. "And tell those no account mercenaries that we'll no longer require their services. They can find their own way back to Newthrone."
Kath watched her self-appointed master-at-arms, barely hiding her irritation.
"You know, we could use a couple of them," she said. "They could probably pick up more information in a single evening in a taphouse than we would in a week."
Verloot scoffed and spat again. "All they'd get us is another hundred pennies in debt and a case of swamp-rot.
"Where do you suggest we start then?"
"I know a few old-timers that settled up this way," the gnome said, stepping onto the dock. "I reckon I could find them."
###
"Can't say as I know too much about that," a grizzled man said, pulling his clay jug closer to his chest. "Never heard of anyone named Thiel...or any of the other names he runs under."
Verloot sat back in his chair with a sigh in the stinking dusk of the taphouse. Book shifted uncertainly, looking at the huddled shadowy forms all around them. Kath stood quickly and walked out into the heavy night air.
She leaned against the walkway rail and stared across the still water to the looming black jungle, its denizens raising a cacophony of cries. The gnome's stomping steps followed her a few moments later.
"Well, that's the last of them," he said. "What now, boss?"
"Perhaps I could consult with the Temple of the Sovereign," Book said. "I'm sure that someone there knows something of the happenings in Whitecliff."
"I still say we stay with the scum," Verloot countered, balling his fists and planting them on his hips. "Thiel's on the run and probably not supported. He's going to seek help from the dregs, and that may not reach the ears of the priests."
"Book's right," Kath said, still watching the crenellated horizon. "We've wasted enough time here."
"You're looking for Gruber Thiel, aren't you?" said a woman's voice in the steeping shadows near the bar.
Kath felt the Beast leap into her, barely able to suppress it. As the wave of savagery washed out of her, she pushed Verloot's outstretched sword down with a trembling hand, and stepped up beside Book, who stood blandly as ever.
"What do you know of him?" she asked, still shaking.
"I can tell you," the woman said, inching forward.
Her dark skin masked her features, though a wisp of mossy green hair drifted into the light on the sullen wind.
"Who are you?" Verloot said sharply.
"That's...that's not important," the woman retreated pawing at her hair. "If you have a bit of gold, I can take you to where he lives."
"And why should we trust you exactly?" the gnome spat, stepping forward and raising his sword.
Kath intervened and held up a hand.
"This is the only lead we've had, Verloot," she said quietly.
"Strangely after we spread our questions and silver all over this stinking pit, isn't it?" he growled.
"I didn't say it wasn't dangerous," she replied. "Sheath your sword, but be wary."
"I thought that was what I was doing," he said to her back.
"You'll have to take us there first, I'm afraid," Kath said to the woman. "Please come out so that we can see that you are not armed."
The woman stepped out and Kath gasped. The woman's very skin seemed to be etched from a fine grain of wood, though she moved with the supple grace of a sapling in a gentle wind. Hair like thick green moss fell to the creature’s waist.
"A bloody dryad!" Verloot said, pulling at his sword hilt. "Never trust a fey, Kath. That's what I've always said."
"I've never heard you say it." Book said.
The gnome shot him a glare, as Kath spoke.
"Where does Thiel live?" she asked.
"I'll take you," the dryad said, her eyes jumping around to each of the three in turn.
"We won't hurt you," Kath said. "We only want Thiel."
"Look," she said, visibly shaking. "I need that gold, see? I need to buy something on the way."
"Kath," Book said. "May I speak with you privately?"
"Um. Of course." She looked from the dryad to Verloot.
"Don't worry," the gnome snorted. "I'll keep an eye on her."
The warforged stepped down the walkway several paces. The stench of the swamp and the ramshackle town sitting on top of it washed back over Kath's senses.
"That creature is in the throes of massive withdrawal from addiction to some substance," Book said without prelude.
"What?" She looked back at the dryad, noticing small things now like how she hunched in her shabby linen shift. "How do you know? Maybe she's ill or..." She could think of no other explanation.
"I have tended to thousands on battlefields and in the guts of the largest cities in the Five Nations," the warforged said. "I would say either clubsnail ichor or burnroot. Most likely the latter given its prevalence in this clime."
"Burnroot?" Kath breathed. "Well, there's nothing for it now. If she knows where Thiel lives, I'll give her a whole burnroot plantation."
"Kath, I must protest. This is most cruel to use this...creature."
"I don't really care about your protests just now, Book. House Tharashk wants this guy, and I’m bringing him back,"
“Ah,” Book said. “Tharashk wants him. Nothing personal.”
“Back off,” Kath growled, stalking back to the dryad. "What is your name?"
Kath could see now some telltale signs of what Book saw. The dryad shook uncontrollably, but almost imperceptibly.
"I'll get you what you need, Picea," Kath said, turning to the gnome. "Go back into that dive and get us some burnroot. As much as you can get with this."
"Burnroot!?" Verloot said. "Are you crazy? This isn't any time to..."
"Verloot." Kath cut him off by dangling a money pouch in front of him. "Now."
The gnome snorted, snatched the money and stomped off into the bar. Kath kept an eye on the dryad. The fey had folded in on herself, crouching on the weathered boards of the walkway.
"How do you know Thiel?" Kath asked, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice.
"I've been his lover for the last few months," she said quietly.
"Did he get you...on this stuff?"
The dryad looked up sharply, her dark features darkening further. Kath let the question hang then looked away. She was tired of the job, already. Weary of finding these wastes of life clinging like lice to the underbellies of the thrashing animal that the Five Nations left in the wake of their wars. The whole of the Nations was infested with them....Cyrean refugees, manic ex-soldiers, cripples, widows, orphans.... Q'barra was thick with them too because of the empty promise of escape to a tropical paradise. She'd found the same dregs in Newthrone. She just wanted to stop and rest and get her own life back together. But, she had to find Thiel. Had to close this never ending book that started on the plains of Breland so many years ago.
"What a wonderful experience this has been," Verloot said, returning from the bar. "I get to travel the world, see all the exotic places, and deal with the most interesting of characters. Here's your plant food."
He held the loosely wrapped package out to Picea but Kath snatched it, and broke the package in half.
"Here," she said. "You get the other half when we have confirmation that Thiel is where you say he is."
The dryad grabbed the package and slid into the shadows.
"This is obscene," Book intoned, turning his glowing eyes back across the sluggish water.
"What part?" Verloot said. "The part where we have to scrape the muck off of our feet everywhere we go, or the part where we have to see a rust bucket actually cry?"
"Verloot," Kath said, as Picea returned.
The dryad's eyes were misty and dark and her movements very precise. She seemed almost lifeless...like an animated wooden carving.
"I can show you now," she said lazily.
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