Chapter I
My name is Beatrix du Loc. That is not what they called me at the College of Summoners and Diviners. The name they gave me there was for others of my kind to use, both a courtesy and a mark of my abilities. Since the late unpleasantness it is technically forbidden to me. I say technically, for I have come to see that much of what I was taught at the College was an intricate set of rules, most of them worthless. If I had not had it in me to break some of them, I would not be here now and the world we know would likely be a smoking waste on the fringes of a pit of hell. But I digress.
I was born, the elder of two daughters, into a wealthy merchant family. My sister and I were expected to marry and produce children so that the business could be passed to another generation. However, I have neither any particular beauty, nor any inclination at all to marry. This might have caused problems and perhaps tedious discussions of life in a nunnery, except that I had some talent for magic. This was deemed a very nearly respectable calling, and so I was sent to the College.
I graduated with honors and began traveling with my family's caravans to protect them from supernatural creatures who occasionally haunted remoter stretches of road or who were summoned by renegade magicians who had turned to thieving. It was, for the most part, quite spectacularly boring work, although the guards who traveled with us to protect our goods from more mundane threats taught me to use a bow and arrows and to throw a knife.
It therefore fell to my sister Isobel to marry and produce the family heir and I cannot say I blame her for refusing, though being Isobel she did it in such a way as to cause as much trouble as possible. We do not live in the middle ages. The marriage was arranged, but would not have been forced. A simple and oft-repeated 'no' would have sufficed. Isobel chose instead to run away the night before her wedding.
It truly is not her intention, but when Isobel creates trouble, I am invariably the one to clean it up. In this case, both families wanted the scandal kept quiet. My father looked around for someone who could be trusted to bring her back quietly, someone who might make her listen to reason, and his eye lit on me.
It almost makes me laugh to remember. She left a note for me saying that she was going to travel to Palleron to seek her fortune. She had less than a day's head start. I thought it would take three days at the most to find her.
Isobel is flighty, but can be clever when she chooses. She had not gone to Palleron, though she got there eventually, very much against her will. I believe she went to the seacoast and found passage out to one of the islands, but I never did find out exactly how her adventure began. Mine began well after the three days were up. I had joined up with a caravan traveling to Palleron, both for safety and because I thought I might attract less attention in a group. It was a large caravan, and there were a lot travelers accompanying the carts and wagons, most of them wanting the protection of the armed guard House Beshm had provided. Many were trying to reach the relative safety of the city. War had started in the north and people were uneasy.
It was all very quiet until we got to within a day's travel of the city. Children were whining everywhere, the drivers were bored, and the guards were swapping increasingly crude jokes. I had taken to walking near a young nun, both because she seemed the most respectable person around and because she seemed very vulnerable traveling by herself. I remember wondering which of the holy orders let its sisters wander around unprotected.
We had slowed down considerably, some obstacle in the road causing the whole stream of carts and people to back up for nearly half a mile. The guards were beginning to converge up near the head of the caravan. They told us all to stay where we were. I was getting tired of taking orders from numbskulls, so I ignored them and ran to the front. So, to my surprise, did the nun.
The cause of the holdup was an overturned cart just over the crest of a hill, and a frightened family. The guards were wary of them at first, so the nun went over to comfort them. Two other travelers had come up to see what was going on. One was a strapping, dark-haired young man in peasant clothing who had spent the entire journey making calf's eyes at all the ladies. The other was dressed all in black, with a black mask over most of his face. That was alarming enough, but he also had twin swords at his back, a red sash ornamented with a row of gold coins across his chest, and a gold earring in one ear. Anyone who combines the abilities and temperament of both a ninja and a pirate is obviously someone to avoid. I think the dark-haired young man was the only one who spoke to him. The rest of us kept our mouths shut and gave him his space.
The nun spoke with the family while the young man began wrestling the cart back onto the road. She came running back with the news that they had been terrified to silence and she thought there was something fishy going on. Just then, arrows began to fly from both sides of the road.
The nun immediately hiked up her skirts, drew two pistols from concealed holsters, and shouted "Everybody stand back! I'm a professional!" She then took up defensive cover behind the cart and began to fire, looking, despite the wimple, quite competent and dangerous.
The ninja pirate drew two swords and leapt into the fray. And when I say "leapt," I mean covered a solid forty feet in a single bound, and with a double twist in mid-air. The strapping young man raised both hands and sent a bolt of fire into the woods on the far side of the road-blast magic, strictly forbidden at the College, but very effective. I did as my father's guards had taught me-climbed a nearby tree and strung my bow.
There were two groups of bandits, one on the slope below me and one across the road. The young man's magical fire kept the second group back, and the nun picked off several who dared to show themselves. I shot where I could see movement in the woods below me. Behind me, the mother burst into tears and shouted that the bandits had her son. I jumped down from my tree and ran down the slope, but the ninja pirate was ahead of me. I really don't know how anyone can move like that. In less time than it takes to write this, he had whirled through the trees, decapitated two bandits, blocked the strikes of two more, landed next to the terrified child they were holding hostage, and dispatched them, coming up from a backward double stroke to sheathe his blades with a grin and a glitter of earring. Nobody should be able to move that fast. It's not, and I say this without irony, natural.
We returned the child to his parents and came back to the road. It was obvious that the overturned cart had been a ruse to slow us down while the bandits ambushed us. The guards congratulated us. We accepted the thanks of the family, righted their cart, and were preparing to get underway again, when we heard fresh screams from the rear of the caravan. We turned to see a huge airship lowering itself over the caravan. As we watched, ropes uncoiled and men in grey with rifles began to rappel down them. The bandits were not merely an ambush-they were meant to pin us down and make us vulnerable to an attack from above.
The feeling of having done much and accomplished little was to become all too familiar in the coming weeks. I ran for the far side of the road to take cover in the woods.
People were scattering everywhere, running into the woods, leaving carts and wagons unattended. More men in grey emerged from the airship, slithering down the ropes with the ease of so many rats. The nun and the strapping young man kept up a barrage of fire and bullets, but failed to discourage all of them. Another figure emerged from the airship, this one astonishingly dressed as a ninja with a red sash. Five long iron spikes emerged from the back of his right hand. He was shouting at the men in grey, urging them on. Then he saw the ninja pirate in our party.
It is hard to say who was more astonished. They stared at each other for a long moment, and then our ninja pirate snarled "Five Claw!" and fired a grapple gun at the airship, sailing up and swinging aboard to engage him.
I wasted a lot of arrows firing at Five Claw, which he brushed away as though they were flies. We met him more than once, and I have never so much as nicked him. Our ninja managed to gain his attention though, drawing a both swords and commencing a bewildering display of acrobatics. I might have wasted more time and more arrows, but I was distracted by an unearthly scream from the far side of the road.
I ran through the smoke and confusion, bullets flying, people shouting, carts beginning to burn, and into the woods beyond. There, in a small clearing, the dark-haired young man was facing a sort of hairless bear, which screamed again as I came up, the strange high pitched sound I had heard. I had never seen anything like it, and I have dealt with some strange creatures, but the oddest thing about it was the silver collar it wore.
It launched itself at the young man, who caught its attack and threw it away in a kind of judo throw, revealing not only uncanny strength, but also rather a lot of muscle (his shirt had come undone during the fray.) I had known he was strong, but the ability to throw several hundred pounds of creature across a clearing was far from...natural. The thing righted itself, turned, and snarled at him. I attempted to banish it away from us using the spells I had learned at the College, which didn't work. The only thing that happened was the that the collar glowed, which annoyed the bear. It screamed again and threw itself at the young man...
...who rolled out of the way and came up on four hooves in the shape of an enormous black horse. He reared up and slashed at the bear-thing with both front hooves and then with teeth. I recovered some part of my senses and tried to impose my will on the bear, but again the spell failed entirely though the collar glowed brighter. The black horse wheeled around to attack the creature's unprotected back. It swiped back at the horse with appallingly sharp claws, drawing blood. I shouted the banishment spell in desperation and this time the collar shattered entirely and the creature ran into the woods. I looked at the horse, and the horse looked at me. Shouts from the caravan behind us made us turn around and we saw a heavy smoke spreading slowly out. We each drew a breath, held it, and ran forward to try to find its source, but it was some sort of sleeping gas. In the dim fog, I saw the black horse falter and go down in front of me and then it took me under, too.
The nun woke me up. She told me that the pirates had gone, looting one cart and then taking off. Our ninja pirate was on the ground again, not badly hurt, but thoroughly annoyed. He was rounding up a couple of prisoners in grey for questioning. I staggered away and found the horse, who was still out cold. I stole a couple of hairs from its mane-an ignoble thing to do, but at the time, I neither liked nor trusted him. I went back to sit with the nun.
Her name was Zelda, and she had found a keg of beer. I don't normally indulge, but she assured me that it was a very good brew, and I felt on reflection that I had earned a drink. We discussed the attack, which appeared to have targeted one particular wagon. The airship had not been marked, and was probably stolen. We went over to investigate the wagon. There wasn't much to see. I recognized the marks on the remaining crates-a mining company that specializes in metals used for particularly intricate mechanical devises, and the driver knew where it was supposed to be delivered, but no one could tell us why it might be so important to someone. Even more puzzling was this army in grey, led by Five Claw. The ninja pirate lined up several prisoners and asked a few questions at knife point, but they knew very little. They said only that they were working for a Lord Varn and that there were other ninja pirates in his pay as well. This made our ninja pirate profoundly angry.
I asked the prisoners if they knew of any magician in Lord Varn's private army. They gave me a description of an old man, a summoner by the sound of it. This made me uneasy-not only had that bear been a powerful creature, but that collar was a strange form of control, one that I had never heard of before.
At this point the young man caused great consternation by walking back into the crowd. Apparently, the change from man to horse and horse to man does away with clothing entirely. I averted my eyes. The ninja pirate found him a pair of pants.
The captain of the guards rode up and congratulated us again. Then he asked the four of us to provide security for the rest of the journey to Palleron-in effect to make official what we had already done. He added that a position in House Beshm's forces would protect us from the rampant conscription that was going on in the city. Apparently the war in the north and the fighting among the houses had made troops hard to find and hard to keep. We agreed to protect the caravan on the way to the city and to think about his offer. It made sense to me-at the time, I still thought that Isobel had somehow managed to make it to Palleron ahead of me.
That night the four of us gathered around the fire and made introductions. The ninja pirate introduced himself as Alaric the Black. He was searching for his fleet, and the episode with Five Claw apparently troubled him. He used the word traitor frequently. The only thing he would say for certain, though, was that Five Claw was not the captain. He didn't seem to be open to further questions, so we left it at that. Zelda said she had family in the city, and that she had decided that life in the nunnery was not for her. The young man introduced himself as Diego del Fuego, and said that he used to work in a circus, doing tricks with fire. He didn't mention the part about turning into a horse.
We got underway the next morning as soon as the sun came up and traveled the rest of the way to Palleron.