Chapter Fifty-Eight - Opportunity Comes Kicking

My second ride on an airship was nothing like the first. The Silver Boot had been a naval-looking ship with a magical means of lift and propulsion. It wasn’t meant to fly, but it did so anyway and with a lot of panache and flair.

The airship that hovered just over Green Hold and which we boarded via some dropped rope ladders was nothing like that. Its name, the Marshy Gas-Bag, was proudly emblazoned on its cloth sides and on the small nacelle at the bottom of it. The entire vessel was a huge greenish grey balloon, oblong and pointed at both ends with a few engines in boxy protrusions at its sides.

It was more of a Zeppelin than a flying boat. If it wasn’t for the bluish smoke pouring out of its four motors I could have imagined it back on Earth way back when people still flew in style instead of all cramped in the passenger seats of a jet.

I sort of wished that the experiences I had aboard the Silver Boot would repeat, with a cool captain showing me around, but we were greeted by a harried looking grenoil First Mate who showed us to our rooms then ran off to get the ship ready to depart.

So I found myself waiting in a tiny lounge, too small for the five tense occupants within, and with chairs that weren’t all that comfortable. The only saving grace were the windows looking out of the sides of the ship, seeing the world roll by beneath was always a treat, especially from inside a warm room with no wind in my face.

I sat with my knees crossed and Orange on my lap and, after some poking and prodding, got the twins to spill out the details of their adventure. Not that it was all that adventurous an adventure. Unlike Amaryllis and I, their mission had gone on without a hitch. They had been surprised by the slimes at night, but Florine was a Marsh Wizard in a marsh so he took care of them.

When I had exhausted that bit of discussion I tried prying some things out of Amaryllis, but she was busy glaring at Gabriel who, in turn, was busy nursing what I suspect was a hangover.

In the end I ended up resting my head against the cool glass of the window, fingers rubbing at Orange until the lack of sleep and yesterday’s adventure caught up with me and the world slowly, gently went dark. I was serenaded to sleep by the rocking of the airship and the distant rumble of its engines.

Something touched my shoulder and I snapped awake, the momentary confusion as to where I was fading away when I saw Amaryllis standing above me. She had Orange tucked into the crook of a wing and my backpack was slung over the opposite shoulder. “Hey, you. Good, you’re awake,” she said.

“Eh?” I asked. I twisted around to look at the landscape beyond the window only to find that it had been replaced wholesale by the bustling docks of Port Royal. Our ship was floating next to a sort of vertical pier,part of what was essentially a parking garage, but for airships. Ropes were latched to the side and grenoil in harnesses moved over to check the surface of the balloon or do other maintenanc-y things.

“Oh,” I said. “How long did I sleep for?”

“Three or so hours? Maybe a bit more. The height makes it hard to tell how the sun’s moving,” Amaryllis said.

“Right.” I got up and stretched, rubbing my neck to work out the pang that had grown in it. We were alone in the lounge area, which might have explained why Amaryllis looked so eager to get a move on. “Lead the way?”

“We can talk while we walk,” Amaryllis said.

I agreed with a nod, then followed her as she led me through the ship and onto a ramp that reached over to the port proper. There was a customs agent of sorts waiting at the bottom of the ramp, but one look at the pin on my bandoleer and the one Amaryllis wore on her belt and we were let through.

“I’m... sorry about last night,” Amaryllis said. “I lost my temper and that was inappropriate.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn't like it when she acted that angry, but I could understand where she came from. The apology was nice, though it did feel as if she was trying to put some distance between us with it.

“That kidnapping attempt was suspicious. Obviously. It wasn’t done by my family. They wouldn’t have sent cervids after me. Which means it came from elsewhere. I don’t think anyone but the guild and the bank would be able to tell where I was at the time, and only the guild knew where I would be ahead of time, which has some very disturbing implications.”

“You didn’t tell your family where you would be?” I asked. I wasn’t going to fling rocks from my glass house, I hadn’t exactly told my family that I was heading off on a grand adventure either, but I was curious about her homelife.

“That is unimportant,” Amaryllis said.

She walked through the docks as if she owned the place, her fierce scowl clearing the path before us until we were out of the docks and onto the streets proper. The Port Royal smell hit me then and I had to hold back a gag.

“Lovely,” Amaryllis drawled like someone that had just stepped in dog poop. “It’s traditional that the director of the guild be there to greet a team returning from their first mission. I intend to get to the bottom of this.”

“You mean Mister Rainnewt?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The man that worked at the guild,” I said. “Tall, human. Kind of nice?”

“No, that man’s just some sort of clerk or administrator, he’s a paper pusher,” Amaryllis said.

“He’s the one that assigned me as your partner,” I said. I didn’t want to think ill of someone, but I couldn’t help but begin to think that Mister Rainnewt was just a little suspicious now. Hopefully it was all just some horrible accident and my imagination was running wild, but it wouldn’t hurt to verify.

Trust a whole lot, but verify anyway, my dad used to say.

It was usually about the price of groceries but I think it counted here too.

I got to see a part of Port Royal that I hadn’t visited yet as Amaryllis took us up one set of stairs, then another. We crossed arches made of rattling pipes and then into an area where the homes were far larger and seemed to have been carved out of the mountain itself and then had flowers and gardens planted around them to add embellishments. There were more guards here, and yet fewer people on the streets.

I wanted to gawk around a bit like the tourist I was, but Amaryllis was setting the pace and she was relentless.

We marched onto Guild Row, coming onto the street from the opposite end than I was used to and walked down to the front of the Exploration Guild.

“Let me handle this,” Amaryllis said as we reached the doors.

I had a bad feeling all of a sudden as she raised one taloned foot and kicked the door.

Her foot bonked against the solid wood and barely rattled it.

Amaryllis’ face went an interesting shade of painful-white as she lowered her foot, but she didn’t say anything as she reached up and opened the door properly before limping in.

I expected a crowd in the lobby, but it was completely empty save for the grenoil secretary behind the counter at the far end of the room.

“Where are Gabriel and the twins?” I asked.

“That’s what I want to know,” Amaryllis said. She stomped her way across the lobby and to the desk. “Hello. Do you know where the team that just returned is?”

The secretary looked up from a stack of papers and blinked a few times. “In the lounge, I believe, with the director.”

“Good,” Amaryllis said before turning to the left and stalking off.

“Thank you, and have a nice day!” I called out to the befuddled secretary as I followed my friend.

Amaryllis seemed to know where she was going because she didn’t so much as pause until she arrived at another door. She poked this one a few times, glared at the door frame set into a stone wall, then nodded to herself.

“Oh no,” I said as she took a step back.

This time when she kicked the door open it crashed into the wall, splinters flying where the frame busted and the pretty ivory capped handle went ballistic.

Amaryllis stepped into a room that was arranged to look a little like a cross between a lounge and an inn’s main room. There were tables and chairs all over, a huge hearth on one side with the skull of what might have been a dragon over the mantle, a stuffed six-legged bear looked tall in one corner and there was a bar at the far wall.

There was a persistent smell in the air, like strong alcohol, but more refined, mixed with a thick herbal scent that I suspected came from the men sitting off in one corner enjoying cigars while staring at the spectacle that Amaryllis was starting.

Gabriel and the twins were closer to the middle of the room, talking to a Grenoil woman that was surprisingly short for a female grenoil, at least, as far as I could tell. She had a long scar running across her face from just above an eye to below her mouth, it made her lips curl up strangely to the side.

She raised the ridges above one eye as she looked to Amaryllis. “You’re paying for that door,” she said without a hint of a grenoil accent.

“Come on, Mathy, let the lass have some fun. It’s just a pinch of destruction of private property,” A big human sitting off to the side said while waving a cigar around.

“Shut it, Abraham,” the woman, presumably called Mathy barked across the room. She turned back to the pair of us and I could feel her eyeing me up and down for a moment. “So, you’ve made your entrance, Miss Albatross. What I hear from Gabriel is concerning enough, but I’d like your version of things.”

Amaryllis stood a little taller and I noticed that her feathers were starting to puff. “Our mission parameters were simple. I imagine you know what those were; we were to scout around Fort Frogger to the North-East of Deepmarsh. Our initial journey went without issue. The Fort was and is occupied by a single man who has been inhabiting the region for some time, I presume. After completing our objective we started trekking back towards Green Hold to report.”

“Haha! I can hear the stories she’s not telling you, Mathy,” the big Abraham guy said.

I didn’t speak up. I appreciated that Amaryllis wasn’t saying anything about Gunther and Throat Ripper already. I didn’t need to ruin it by opening my mouth.

“What happened before doesn’t matter,” Amaryllis said. “It’s what happened when we were crossing a bridge that’s concerning. We were waylaid by kidnappers on the road.”

The Mathy lady made a dismissive sound. “Bandits? I’ll report it to the guard and--”

“No bandits,” Amaryllis said. “Kidnappers. Six of them, with military equipment. All six were cervid using false names, unless the cervid have taken to calling their children numbers while I wasn’t paying attention.”

The room had resettled to a sort of calm after Amaryllis’ entrance, the men returning to their cigars and the few women around speaking in low murmurs. Of the dozen or so people in the room, only a couple actually seemed to care at first, but Amaryllis' declaration had all of them paying attention.

Mathy croaked. “I see. In that case, let’s talk in my office. Just you, Gabriel, and I, Miss Albatross. Abe, make sure the... other one stays here. She might be complicit in this whole thing too.”

I noticed all the suspicious looks turning my way and gulped.

***