The 3 Seas

The assassin faked another low charge. Iskondra kept her sword level but bent her knee, dropping her shielding hand down. The blue protective glow firmed up in anticipation of his attack. Tauri’s tail whipped around the stout wooden leg of a tavern chair.
(more…)

Iskondra lunged forward while Tauri was momentarily distracted, her sword flashing with light. The assassin twirled to the side. The blade-bond kept moving forward towards the door, but a long tail swished out from beneath Tauri’s cloak to grab onto her leg, tripping her up. She rolled onto her side as she fell, and ended up on her back, though she lost her grip on her sword.
(more…)

“All the time you have spent trailing me, Tauri Slow-Brain, and you did not realize what I was?” Iskondra taunted, holding the sword with the point towards him.
(more…)

“You can pronounce my name properly but simple conjugation, articles, and pronouns are beyond you?” Iskondra said, holding her empty hands out in front of her.
(more…)

The same day the Horizon Chaser set out for Montport, a number of people were arriving there. Among them was a tall, thin woman with long, clever-looking fingers and scales the color of rust. She was dressed all in black. On her narrow hip, she wore a long sword with a decorated ivory hilt, sheathed in a round scabbard that was inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Taken as a whole, the scabbarded sword had more an appearance of being an ornate staff or scepter than anything else.
(more…)

Faresia was counted as one of the edge islands, as the bits of land nearest to Terminus… the great rim of the world… were known. Had the Horizon Chaser kept sailing straight out from the “back” side of the island, it would have encountered the edge just before a second day out had dawned.
(more…)

Jace had quite a lot of experience lugging big, cumbersome things around, and Sheiral was surprisingly light. That’s not to say it was easy for him to get her down below… he tried to back down the narrow, steep steps with her in his arms and ended up falling down when he was halfway to the bottom. Sheiral groaned and stirred a little, but still seemed mostly insensible.
(more…)

Katryn eyed the tiny, innocuous-looking spill of fresh water that fell from the hole in the cave’s wall. She’d always regarded it as a positive feature of her favorite remote Outer Sea hideaway, as it meant she never had to worry about going thirsty… but if Memnur really was after the gully-girl for some strange reason… well, the governor wasn’t the sort of man who let something he wanted slip out of his grasp. “Who exactly was after you… a slave trader, a couple of soldiers?”
(more…)

“That’s… that’s actually not a bad idea,” Katryn said to Loki, when she’d recovered from the shock of the two dazed and battered-looking kids who’d come sailing out of the hole in the wall and landed on the Horizon Chaser’s deck. “If they came from those caves you mentioned, we might be able to send them into town to get supplies.”
(more…)

Down through the darkness Jace and Sheiral fell, plunging into a connecting passage through which a subterranean stream flowed. The passage of water over the stone made the bottom and sides of this passageway surprisingly smooth, though not… unfortunately… particularly soft. The pair were bruised and battered as they slid through the winding stone tube with no way of stopping themselves or slowing their descent on the natural waterslide. Their momentum carried them as much as the current of the shallow stream did.
(more…)

“This tunnel isn’t getting any wider,” Sheiral said, when she and Jace had been traveling down it for quite some time. Her elbows kept banging the sides and her knees were scraped quite raw from the portions where she’d been unable to lift them.
(more…)

“Of course,” the hovering spirit of the ship said to Katryn, “if you aren’t able to finish your translation soon, staying here may cease to be an option. Or rather, your options will be to leave or soon lose the option of ever leaving. Our stores are dwindling by the day.”
(more…)