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  CONTENTS

  Frontis

  Chapter One - The Fence

  Chapter Two - Caravan

  Chapter Three - Skalds and Shadows

  Chapter Four - Seaspahn

  Chapter Five - Detect Evil

  Chapter Six - Killer

  Chapter Seven - Into Darkness

  Chapter Eight - Level One Spells

  DEADWATER

  by Red Culver

  The Wayfarers, Book 2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 Red Culver

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Franshawn Langley

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Fence

  IT WAS AMAZING how quickly three thousand gold pieces disappeared.

  I sat on the rug of my room at the Red Donkey, my pitiful collection of coins set in neat stacks before me. I thought of it as "my room," but my partner and I had recently decided to share it to save a little cash. My days of sleeping in a nice feather bed were over; the rug was my bed now.

  My partner sat on the bed, juggling daggers. Her name was Cerissa, which was apparently like Sarah or Jane for an elf woman. Her long ears poked out of her unbound red hair, and she watched the spinning daggers closely with wide purple eyes. She was dressed casually in a loose white linen shirt tucked into tight black leather breeches, her black leather armor stowed in her road-worn backpack.

  My armor was stashed away as well. In fact, we were fully packed and ready to move on whenever the innkeep of the Red Donkey realized that we had no plans to pay the week of back fees we owed. Until then, we lounged. I was dressed in my clothes from home— from Earth. I had only what I'd been wearing when I first stepped from my mom's garage onto the Silver Ways, the road that connected countless worlds such as this one.

  It had been a hell of an adventure so far, but I was feeling nostalgic. So I'd slipped on my Jethro Tull T-shirt, pulled up my torn blue jeans, buckled my Blue Öyster Cult belt buckle, and tried to pretend I wasn't in the fantasy world called Borealis.

  It had been a hell of an adventure, though. I'd gone from teenage failure to successful warrior-thief in a matter of days. Cerissa and I had stolen her mother's magical amulet out from under the nose of a powerful wizard and fenced it for three thousand gold each. The cash had bought me some nice new armor, a magic sword, and a comfortable life... for a while. It had also gained me three thousand experience points, which I'd spent to become a tougher, faster fighter.

  All according to the Rules.

  "Hey Cerissa," I said, struck by a sudden thought. She looked up, a long lock of hair falling over one eye, and caught her whirling daggers without a second glance. "Can you become a Wayfarer?"

  She cocked her head. Until recently, she'd thought Wayfarers were only a legend. It did sound ridiculous: universe-hopping adventurers who defied the laws of physics and operated under their own set of Rules. Of course, Cerissa was from a world where wizards and dragons battled on the regular, so she hadn't been too stunned when she realized I was a Wayfarer.

  After a long moment of thought, she said, "Don't know."

  "Wanna try?" I said, standing. Her eyes lit up and she leapt off the bed, her daggers forgotten. From my backpack I pulled a slender booklet, cheaply photocopied with a red cardstock cover. The only indications of the powerful magic the booklet held were a drawing of a guy with a blaster pistol and sword, and the name WAYFARER printed above him.

  Flik, you there? I thought.

  Nowhere else to go, boss, responded a voice in my head. Flik was my daemon, the conduit between my body and the Rules. He offered guidance of a sort, too, though I still wasn't sure about his cosmic allegiance. He spoke in my head, but he was bound to my totem, an object that gave my pact with the Rules a physical form. For a laugh, I'd chosen a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers, but I'd since grown quite attached to the shades.

  Can anybody become a Wayfarer? I asked. Or is it limited to humans or people from Earth or something?

  Got me, boss, said Flik.

  Seriously? I thought at him. I let you live in my brain for free and the best you can do is 'got me?'

  As far as I know, O Wise and Glorious Master, nobody's ever tried it.

  "We're going to be the first," I said, both to Flik and Cerissa.

  AMGEDPHA

  ALLAR ALLAR CNILA OLORA

  ILS TOF EOL EOL

  ILS TOF ABOAPRI

  AMGEDPHA

  Cerissa held a small golden earring in one outstretched hand as she intoned the invocation from the Wayfarer booklet. The words sounded far more musical now than they had when I'd said them in my mom's garage, as though as an elf she was born to sing and recite poetry.

  Cerissa's eyes widened in a sting of panic that I recognized as her first brush with her own daemon, which was now being bound into her earring. She calmed visibly as the incantation faded into silence, but it took her a while to move.

  "How do you feel?" I asked.

  "Shush it," she said. I could see her purple eyes flick back and forth as though reading something in the air; then they narrowed. "This ain't right."

  "What do you mean?" I felt a knot of anxiety begin in my stomach. Had something gone wrong with the invocation? Had we broken some Rule by trying to make an elf into a Wayfarer? Had I just hurt my friend?

  "These numbers," Cerissa said. "They don't match what we put on my character sheet." As part of the process, we'd written up a character sheet for Cerissa using the Character Creation rules, same as I'd originally done.

  "Better or worse?" I asked.

  "Better, I think," she said slowly. "What've you got for total XP earned?"

  I focused on nothing and called up neon letters before my eyes. I'd learned a lot more about how to use the Rules during our lazy period, and I could now see what I still thought of as my character sheet, despite paper no longer being involved.

  "Fifty-eight hundred," I said. "I got twenty-eight hundred for being human, and the rest from all the gold I've spent. How about you?"

  A smile crept over her face, one I'd long since learned to recognize as a sign of her pleasure at some piece of deviousness or criminal advantage.

  "Ten thousand, three hundred and ten," she said.

  "What?!"

  Flik, are you hearing this? I thought furiously. Cerissa had fallen into contemplation of her stats, a spaced-out look on her face.

  What? Flik sounded like I'd just interrupted him. Oh, uh, yeah. Ten thousand. That's better than you.

  No shit, I thought. Care to be useful for once and explain?

  Funny, Des was just filling me in. Apparently if you're not from Earth, you don't need a starting character sheet. Des says it's because nobody else is so helpless.

  Who in the Hell is Des? I asked. It seemed like a good opening question.

  Oh, no, she's not from Hell. Flik laughed. I'm not sure where she's from. I like her, though. She's funny.

  Yeah, but who is she? Flik had a tendency to ramble.

  Oh, she's your lady friend's new daemon.

  You can talk to her? I asked. Like, telepathically?

  Daemons can communicate directly if they're both open to it. Des and I agreed that you two would need all the help you could get. So we're going to work together.

  I sighed. Glad to hear it.

  "Okay," said Cerissa suddenly. "Think I got it. These numbers must be a translation of my real skills. Dexterity plus five, Perception plus five, Mechanics plus eight."

  "Not bad," I said. "How are you for HP?"

  "HP?" Cerissa pursed her lips for a second. "Oh, hit points. Thirteen.
Is that good?"

  "I've got fourteen," I said. "You'll need 'em. What else?"

  "Armor class ten. Attack bonus plus one. All my saving throws are plus three, except a four in Evasion."

  "Hmm." I pondered. "We'll probably want to keep you off the front lines, then. Though your AC should go up to twelve when you put your armor back on. How about your magic?"

  "Let's see." Cerissa's eyes flicked, and then her mouth fell open. "Is that— Deceiver spare me, I had no idea!"

  "What?" I asked eagerly.

  "Well." Cerissa shook her head slowly. "I always knew I could cast detect magic twice, and knock once, and that was all. Then I'd wake up in the mornin' able to do it all again. Had no idea why, though. But accordin' to this, I've got two first-level spell slots and one second-level slot. Detect magic is a first level spell..."

  "And knock is second level," I finished. "That makes sense."

  Our eyes met, and a new kind of smile appeared on her face. It was a gleeful grin, toothy and much wider than her usual sly look of pleasure.

  "Alex," she said. "This is fantastic."

  The door banged open. Thinking it was the innkeep, I dove to hide our meager pile of coins that still sat on the rug. Thus I found myself looking up backwards at a slender female masska wearing a blue peacoat and red-and-white-striped slop trousers over her patchwork fur, her tail lashing in obvious agitation. She wore a red bandana tied over her face like a bandit's mask. Gold rings and small gems glittered on her right ear.

  "Bell!" said Cerissa as I tried to straighten myself out. "How the hell are—"

  "Don't sweet-talk me, Montaigne," snapped the cat-woman named Bell. She looked down at me lying like an idiot on the rug. "And don't think your big brown eyes'll do the trick either. I'm mad as hell at the two of you."

  I finally got myself turned around and sitting normally. "What happened, Bell? I thought we were cool."

  "Mordred happened," said Bell. "Now are you portles gonna offer me a drink or what?"

  Soon Bell sat on the bed holding the last of our drink, a fiery purple liquor from the elven Home Island of Aquitana. We didn't have any glasses, so she drank straight from the bottle, an interesting trick for a cat mouth. I had failed a Knowledge skill roll to find out what a portle was, but nobody seemed interested in telling me, so I just went ahead and assumed it was something insulting.

  The drink calmed Bell's nerves a bit, and as she sipped it she told her story. In addition to an honest jeweler and talented forger— she preferred the term "artist"— Bell was a fence. After Cerissa and I had stolen the roguelock from Mordred at the Aventura Museum, Bell had been the one to buy it off us. I'd made more than my share of toasts in her honor over the last few weeks as I converted her gold into experience points and a lavish lifestyle, but it seemed the story hadn't ended when the roguelock left our hands.

  To earn her living, Bell had to resell the roguelock for more than she'd paid us. Normally this wasn't a problem. The masska had countless contacts in the criminal underworld of the city of Gate, and her legitimate jewelry business was the perfect front for transactions of the less-than-legal sort.

  "I'd expected it to be easy," Bell sighed. "Plenty of nobles in town like owning pieces of criminal history. Makes 'em feel dangerous, you know? So selling Will Swift's own roguelock should've been a cinch. The legend alone is worth twice what I gave you two, no offense. Not to mention the enchantment."

  She took a swig from the bottle and went on. "But you would have thought I was selling children or something. Every one of my usual collectors wanted nothing to do with it. James Grass wouldn't even meet with me, can you believe that? Baron Snowbeetle at least had the guts to tell me no to my face. Kinslough Slaker said I should leave town, but she wouldn't say why.

  "Didn't drown me at first, though. It's all part of the job. Collectors get that way sometimes. It's faddish, you know? Anyway, finally, finally Donovan Valentine shows some interest, so I set up a meeting. At this point I'd cut my price so deep I was practically bleeding, but oh well. I just wanted to move the damn thing."

  Bell finished the last of the liquor, looked at the empty bottle, and set it in her lap. "So we meet down by the river. There's me, alone on the shore, and Valentine shows up on a little skiff surrounded by thugs. I should've known something was up and booked it then, but what can I say? I needed the money.

  "So we make the trade. That part's easy. Valentine gives me a few bags of coin and I give him the roguelock. He and his guys set off back up the river. I'm just starting to think maybe I was worried about nothing when I get jumped." She rubbed the back of her head, where I guessed she'd been hit with something hard. "I was so caught up watching the river, I forgot to look behind me."

  Bell sighed. "Anyway, it turns out they're Mordred's new crew. Most of them are the usual riff-raff, but the leader is this lizardman who's a little too happy using his blackjack. In my opinion, at least." She rubbed her head again, and I winced a little in sympathy. I could only imagine the parts of the story she was leaving out. "I can only assume they'd been going around strongarming all the likely collectors in the city, too. I try telling 'em they're too late, that the deal is done and they're fishing in the wrong river, but they seem more interested in revenge than actually getting the roguelock back. Name of the Deceiver, Donovan Valentine probably sold me out to keep himself safe. I don't know what his contingency plans are, but I wouldn't want to be him when Mordred changes his mind...

  "Well, I had to flash my best smile, but eventually I convinced the lizardman that if he went ahead and told Mordred he'd killed me, but didn't actually do the job, he'd be welcome to all the big bags of coin that were just laying around. It did occur to him that he could just kill me for real and help himself, by the way. He's no fool. But if I were dead, I couldn't tell where all the money was hidden in my shop..." Bell shook her head and checked the liquor bottle, which was still empty.

  "So here I am. Thanks to you two, I've got no money and no customers, and if I show my face in Gate even once, Mordred will know I'm still alive. So to say you jokers owe me is, I think, an understatement."

  Her tale told, Bell became very quiet. Now that her initial agitation had worn off, it was obvious from her drooping ears and listless tail that she was more sad than angry. As far as I knew, she'd spent her entire life in Gate, running the shop she'd inherited from her father. I felt terrible at the thought that she was being run out of town on pain of death. Cerissa, who stood scowling and staring at her boots, looked about the same.

  "Okay," I said. "What are we gonna do about it?"

  CHAPTER TWO

  Caravan

  "WELL, IT AIN'T much of a plan," said Cerissa. She looked Bell up and down, then wrinkled her nose. "But it's somethin'."

  I brushed the last of the chalk off my clothes. It stuck to everything, especially my hands as I tried to get myself properly clean. But I had to admit that it was exactly that tenacious stickiness that made Bell's ridiculous disguise work.

  Thanks to a sack and a half of chalk, the masska was white from the tips of her ears to the end of her tail. Dressed in Cerissa's hastily-altered black leather armor, she looked like an ink drawing. Her own colorful clothes were carefully stowed at the bottom of Cerissa's pack, her earrings removed and pawned for some quick cash. You'd think she was a different cat... as long as you didn't touch her. Now all we had to do was get her in with a masska caravan leaving the city and she'd be free.

  "Bell, when's the next caravan heading out?" I asked.

  She twitched an irritated ear at me. "Are you serious? You think I know the comings and goings of all the masska dowts? I grew up in Gate."

  "He's new to the city," interjected Cerissa.

  Bell shook her head. "You're lucky you're cute."

  "Okay, I can find out about the caravan schedule," I said quickly. "Then we can get you in with them and out of the city."

  "Deceiver take me," said Bell, covering her face with a hand and turning away.

/>   "He's real new," said Cerissa. She turned to me with a sympathetic look. "Maybe you should let Bell and me handle this part."

  "Why?" I asked. "What did I say?"

  "Masska dowts— caravan groups— are real tight-knit," said Cerissa. "Sure, they'll trade with anyone and everyone. But the members of the dowt are all from the same bloodline. They never take on a masska they ain't related to."

  "So it's a family business?" I asked. "Can't we just pay for passage?"

  "Let me put it this way," said Cerissa. "You got weddings where you come from?"

  I nodded.

  "Imagine you stroll up to a wedding and show yourself in, start eating the feast, dance with the handmaidens, drink the brother-toast. They notice you and start to run you out, so you say 'Don't worry, I was gonna pay for the food!'" Cerissa laughed. "It's like that in a dowt. You don't just invite yourself in."

  "So what are we going to do?" I asked. I was starting to wonder why nobody had brought this up when I'd suggested my plan.

  Bell turned back to us. "We're gonna invite ourselves in."

  The whole way to the river, Bell kept her head down and her eyes locked on the ground. She was absolutely convinced that everyone we passed was one of Mordred's spies, and that her chalk disguise would be seen through in an instant. I thought she was giving too much credit to us non-masska's ability to tell the cat people apart by any means other than color.

  A few quick questions to the dockmen along the river— Cerissa handled this part, and the workers were probably happier chatting with a pretty elf than with me— got us the information we needed. A masska caravan was leaving the next morning, bound west up the river for the mountains.

  Knowledge Skill Throw: 11 + 2 = 13

  Failure!

  As the discouraging text blazed across my vision, I made a mental note to ask someone about Aventuran geography.