Chapter 142

It was far too easy for the people of Aros to see in the dark, even on a moonless night, which this wasn’t. Thus, the goal wasn’t to avoid being seen by hiding in the darkness. It was merely that despite everyone having stats to see better in the dark and reduce their need for sleep, most people weren’t out and about at night. Fewer people on the streets meant fewer people seeing them.

Luke led them on a roundabout path through Sicanti, ducking through side streets and taking odd turns whenever he sensed people nearby. Sometimes it wasn’t possible to avoid someone seeing them, but in those instances, he did his best to keep himself between the observer and Zea. Hopefully they wouldn’t be able to make out enough detail in the dark to tell that she was a dwifkin.

They added an extra hour to the trip with all the ducking and weaving around the people were who still out and about, but both agreed it was worth it. The most important part of the plan was getting to the harbor and onto the ship unseen. If they could manage that, they could just hide out in their cabin while they waited for the ship to set sail. With [XP Mask]shielding them from casual detection, the only possible hitch was a gossiping sailor tipping someone off that the Averast had a pair of interesting passengers.

“Which ship is the one we’re riding on?” Luke asked once the harbor came into view. He knew it was one of the bigger ones, but he didn’t see the one he was looking for. The cynical part of his mind immediately jumped to the idea that it had set sail already, leaving Luke and Zea behind and stealing the deposit she’d paid.

“Uh… It’s…” Zea trailed off. “Not here?”

“Well. Shit. That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.”

“Maybe it got moved to a different dock,” Zea said. “Come on, let’s walk the length.”

“Is that something that happens often?” Luke asked. He was more than ready to admit he knew basically nothing about his world’s shipping processes, let alone how it worked on Aros.

“Eh, sometimes if there’s a lot of cargo to take on from a warehouse on the far side of the harbor, the ship might redock. Usually it’s easier to just load the freight on a wagon and move it over to wherever the ship is currently berthed. Less paperwork that way. Cheaper, too.”

Considering the average laborer was stronger than a world-record holder back on Earth, Luke supposed it wouldn’t be much of an issue if they had to carry something an extra mile. He spared a second to wonder how the average beast of burden measured up. He’d seen horses, so they were still in use on Aros, but it seemed like a decently leveled human would probably beat a horse in speed and strength.

How would a horse even level up in this world? They were herbivores, more inclined to run from trouble than stand and fight. Did they get XP from eating grass or hay somehow? Luke couldn’t recall a time he’d gotten any XP for beating up a tree, but maybe he just hadn’t killed it all the way.

“No way that’d work. Farmers would be done after a few years of harvesting crops,” he muttered.

“What?” Zea said, glancing back at him.

“Just wondering how horses level up,” he said.

“Uh… What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”

“Never mind,” Luke said.

“Focus up,” she told him. “We’re not fucking around out here. If we can’t find our ship and get aboard tonight, we’re screwed.”

They caught a lucky break and Luke spotted it ten minutes later at the north end of the harbor. “There,” he said, pointing at a dark shape riding high in the water. “That looks right.”

Zea studied it and said, “Crap. It’s been seized by the church.”

“How can you tell?”

She pointed at the water line. “See how high it’s sitting. The cargo was unloaded. It’s in the dock with the templar guards patrolling it, and there’s not a single sailor in sight over there.”

Now that she mentioned it, he did notice that every person on the dock near the Averast was armored, and that none of them were “working.” Even this late at night, dockworkers were still scrambling around at reduced numbers, but not over near the Averast. The people over there just stood in place or walked a circuit around the area.

“What are the odds it’s a coincidence?” Luke asked.

“Slim to fucking none. Someone told the church we bought passage on this ship, so they grabbed it. Probably trumped up some charge about consorting with apostates and threw at least the captain in a cell. They might have taken the whole crew in, but I think if they did, the docks would be a lot emptier right now. Ships would be fleeing before someone started looking too closely at them.”

“So we need a new ride, and we’re out fifteen gold,” Luke said.

“Looks like it,” Zea said, not taking her eyes off the ship. Her lips were thinned into a hard grimace, and she was unconsciously clutching at her money purse. Luke had his suspicions about which part she was more upset over.

“So the new mission is to find another boat that’s leaving, preferably in the next day or two, buy passage, and get the hell out of here before anyone catches up to us,” Luke said. “Yeah, that sounds easy. On the off chance that doesn’t work, maybe we should start looking into my ant genocide back up plan again.”

“Hmph. We’ll see.”

They wandered back down the docks, away from the Averast and its templar guards. “Where are we going?” Luke asked.

“I don’t know,” Zea said with a heavy sigh. “Chances are bad that we can find another ship willing to take us if they know they risk running up against the church. It’s going to be hard to even look at this point. Anyone might turn us in, and the church will be watching the docks too. Shit, there’s nowhere else to go.”

“This can’t be the only city on this entire continent that has connections across the ocean,” Luke said. “If we’re burnt here, we’ll just have to find another one.”

“If there are, I don’t know where they’re at,” Zea said. “Maybe System can tell us. But, fuck. It would be a long, long walk. If it’s any farther north, I can’t come with you. The cold is already bad enough here, and it’s not even winter yet.”

“We’ll figure it out. What do we do right now? Back out of the city?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Zea looked out across the harbor. “There has got to be a ship somewhere here that we can buy passage on. Or… Stow away? [XP Mask] would keep them from sensing us. As long as we stayed quiet, they might not realize we’re there until we’re a week out of port. At that point, we can just drop some gold into the captain’s palms and we’re good.”

“That might work, but how do we know which ships are going where we need them to go?” Luke asked. “It’s not like they’re advertising.”

“Oh, they are. Just go to any tavern right off the docks and there will be plenty of sailors more than happy to bitch and moan, often quite loudly, about how long their next trip to this or that place is going to be, how hard it is for them to go weeks or months without fresh booze and fresh whores, about what kinds of monsters they have to fight off on the trip.”

“Great. Except…”

“Yeah,” Zea said. “Except I’m too conspicuous and you have no idea what questions to ask or who to talk to. The last thing we need is to light off a signal fire that we’re back in the city. We don’t even know who we’re up against, not really. The church obviously isn’t throwing its full weight behind Lath, or he wouldn’t have needed to hire those mercenaries. Plus we have no idea where Lath himself is or what condition he’s in, or whether those mercenaries are going to stay bought after everything that’s happened.”

Luke still had the 125 AP he was holding onto for [XP Cycle]. If he needed to, he could pump some ranks into skills like [Disguise]and [Deception] to help him blend in. He’d also need to bump up [Ostari], probably all the way to rank 3 if he was going to pass as a native. It might be enough to let him walk into a tavern and make casual conversation with the sailors drinking there.

There were risks to that, of course. Zea would have to wait somewhere else. She was right that she was too conspicuous. He hadn’t seen a single dwifkin in Sicanti besides her. It was almost exclusively human, with a bare smattering of other species, but none of those were of the short variety. Every hour they spent not onboard a ship was another hour that they risked being discovered by an observer.

Deliberately seeking out people and questioning them about their ships’ destinations, just hoping to find one that was going in the right direction could also lead church agents back to them. Maybe he could just lurk near a tavern and put his high perception to work. If they got lucky, they might just overhear useful information. There was no telling how long that might take, if it worked at all, but he supposed they weren’t on a time limit anymore, not if they needed to worry about following the Averast’s schedule.

[Detection] pinged his brain and pulled him out of his musings. Somebody was watching them, and the skill directed Luke’s eyes right to him. A man stood on the deck of a ship, leaning on the railing and staring right at Zea. He noticed Luke noticing him immediately, and gave him a nod. Cautiously, Luke returned the nod.

“Guy standing on the deck of that ship over there is looking at us,” Luke said under his breath, so quietly that Zea wouldn’t have heard it standing right next to him before she’d put points into perception. “He’s not making any effort to hide it, and when I noticed him, he acknowledged it and kept on looking.”

“Shit. That’s probably a bad thing,” Zea said. Her eyes narrowed as she inspected the man and the ship she was standing on. “Why does that look so familiar?”

“They all look the same to me. What do you want to do?”

“We should probably get the hell out of here before that guy makes… a… God damn it. That’s the ship that tall bitch with the tits owns.”

“The who with the what?” Luke asked, certain he must have somehow misheard her.

“The one who wanted sixty gold for passage across the ocean. Why is she still even here? She said she was leaving days ago when I tried to negotiate with her.”

“So you’re saying that ship is going across the ocean,” Luke said. “And that for a price that’s well within our means, we could get on it right now, salvage this clusterfuck of a plan, and put Sicanti behind us.”

“No,” Zea protested. “Absolutely not. Not for sixty! That’s robbery.”

“Who gives a fuck!” Luke hissed. “Give me a month or two and I will be able to literally conjure up all the gold you could ever use.”

The man on the ship noticed they’d stopped walking why they talked. He straightened up, waved a hand near the railing to catch Luke’s attention, then made a beckoning gesture.

“Looks like he wants to talk to us,” Luke said. “You think it’s a trap?”

“Probably not,” Zea said reluctantly. “But… Fuck! So much money.”

“You’ll survive. Let’s go see what he wants. Best case, we find our ticket out of here. Worst case, you get the satisfaction of watching me do way more than sixty gold in damage to that ship when we fight our way out.”

“Well, I would like to see that. Try to knock over the mast or something if we have to fight. Those are a bitch to replace.”

“I will keep that in mind,” Luke said dutifully.

The two of them turned towards the ship and started walking.