“That piece of shit Elandriel is doing his best to make my life difficult,” I said. “There’s not a single captain in this entire fucking harbor willing to take the risk of selling a ship, no matter how much gold I offer.”
“I have an idea,” Anna-Lucielle said.
“Go on,” I said as I waved my hand for her to continue.
“We can use my Charm powers to convince them.”
“You just have to make sure Brentwurst and his minions don’t see you,” Elyse said. “Although I doubt that will be much of a problem; they wouldn’t be seen dead in the docks.”
“We could pose as clergy,” Anna-Lucielle said with a sly smile.
While the rest of my party continued listing elaborate ways to get my army onto some ships, my attention started to wander, and I picked up fragments of other conversations drifting around the smoky tavern. One sentence in particular grabbed my attention.
“Aye,” a sailor was saying in a hushed voice, “the man in the hooded cloak is bloody real, all right. He may sound like nothing but a silly, superstitious rumor to you people here in Prand, but across the sea in Yeng, they’re scared shitless of him. Where he’s seen, death follows. Young women, it seems, is the monster’s particular taste. They disappear from their homes whenever someone sees this fella around, and their bodies are found drained of blood later.”
“So he’s a vampire, then, this. . . what did you call him. . . hooded man?” his drinking buddy said.
“No,” the sailor answered. “I said he was the man in the cloaked hood. But hooded man works just fine. And he ain’t no vampire. He walks in the sun carefree, and when the bodies are found, they don’t have no teeth marks on their necks. He slits their throats with a blade of some sort, but here’s the fucked-up thing: when he kills them, the blood is all just gone.”
“Gone? Where does it go? He drinks it? Perhaps he’s a thrall for a vampire?”
“Enough with the vampires already. You got the idea in your head ever since you went with that girlie who liked to bite. Said she was a vampire, and that’s why you had to drive a stake through her heart.”
“She was a vampire.”
“Enough!” the sailor slammed his first on the table, and his friend jumped. The sailor’s expression hardened. “I don’t know what the Hooded Man does with it, but it’s like the blood just vanishes into thin air.”
“Even if he isn’t a vampire, he sounds like a right bloody terrifying monster, he does.”
“You’re telling me! And what’s more, he can fly or something. He’ll be seen on one side of Yeng one day, and then somehow appear on the other side of it the next day. Not even the dragons of legend could fly that far, that fast.”
“Dragons,” the other voice said, “isn’t that something else that’s rumored to be happening across the ocean? Forgive me for saying so, friend, but you’re sounding like you’ve been smoking some Yengish brown powder, the kind that melts your brain in your skull!”
“I’m not bonkers, you shitlicker! I didn’t say nothing about no dragons, did I? Everyone knows there’s no such bloody thing. But there are strange creatures over in Yeng, and nobody has a fucking clue what they are or where they come from. All they do know is that they come at night, and they feed on people. They’re damn huge—yeah, like dragons, you’re not going to see me avoid some word like a coward—and what I heard is they’re the pets of some crazy fucking warlock. Whatever it is, however these bloodthirsty things are connected, something dodgy is going on in Yeng; believe me, something real dodgy is going on there. I’m quitting my ship, I am, I’m not going on any more voyages to that cursed place. I’ll just get work on a fishing boat around here. Boring, but safe. No more crossing the ocean for me, no thank you!”
Now that was interesting. I knew one thing for certain about the Hooded Man, and that was that he couldn’t fly. He had gone through the portal at the Temple of Blood, and I had no doubt that the portal had enabled him to teleport across the ocean to Yeng. There had to be more of these portals there, allowing him to cross vast swathes of that huge continent in the blink of an eye. I wondered if my destruction of the portal at the Temple of Blood had caused him to be trapped in Yeng, or if other portals still existed here in Prand. If only I could find a portal myself; it certainly would be a lot easier than finding a ship.
The night ended with dozens of outlandish plans that might land us a ship, but none of them sounded like they would work.
Everyone retired to the inn’s sleeping quarters, but I decided to go for a midnight stroll to think. Shortly after I left, I noticed I was being followed. With the mood I was in, the mugger sneaking along behind me was about to get his entrails ripped out and wrapped around his windpipe.
I quickly turned a corner, then flattened myself against the wall, waiting to pounce on the fool who was tailing me. He hurried around the corner a few seconds later, and I was on him in the blink of an eye. Before he even knew what had happened, I had my left forearm crushing his throat against a wall, his right wrist pinned tight. In my right hand was
