Chapter 7 – Part 2

The area before the Cree docks was a noisy one. The four main piers jutting outwards into Lake Galifar, as well as the smaller, homemade planks for the local fisherman, spanned almost a quarter mile of beachfront. In that area were sailors hooting at local prostitutes, fishmongers and salesmen hawking their wares, constables blowing whistles that most everyone else ignored, supervisors yelling at laborers, gulls squawking, bootblacks and pickpockets plying their trade, and a local town official snarling at a gnome bearing copies of the Korranberg Chronicle that he was supposed to come by every Mol and Zor, blast it, and he wasn’t interested in excuses about overworked barristers!

Of the four main piers, the middle two were the longest and strongest, sitting atop regularly spaced humps of earth and stone raised by some long-ago druid with a civic bent to her nature. It was against them that the larger barges and sailing ships docked. Of course given that Cree barely had more than twelve hundred people, some two hundred of which were transient soldiers heading north to fight Aundair, these were docks that could fall in next to any port in the Five Kingdoms without being noticed as anything more than a pedestrian walkway.

Still, at the end of the southmost long pier was a ship, and in front of that ship were a group of people, and one large panther. Most of the people were attending to the loading and unloading of the ship in question, a vessel known as Smooth Sailing. Even in Cree, where sailors braved the trip across the lake rather than hug the shores, the captain was rumored to be something of a lunatic when it came to taking risks.

The woman speaking to him was a druidess, the great cat at her feet that scared the dockworkers made that clear. What wasn’t clear was what she wanted. Passage? A certain cargo?

One individual trying his best to find out was silently swimming under the docks. A shifter, he was one of the few born from an aquatic lycanthropic heritage rather than a land-based one. This made him a somewhat isolated figure. His isolation was also compounded by the fact that he was heavily addicted to certain narcotics.

And his supplier of said narcotics, a human trader of House Orien who had thinly disguised loyalty to Aundair, had given him instructions that he had better follow if he wanted to lick his precious powder ever again.

“I’ve not seen anything like that,” a voice rumbled. It was the human sailmaster with nine fingers. “I would tell you if I could, Mistress, I would.”

“I do appreciate your input,” the human woman was saying. A gull cried and drowned out the rest of her words. The shifter flicked his feet, using his inborn powers to extend vestigial fins to a useful length, catching the wood pilings sunk into the earth mounds with his hooked nails to pull himself silently through the water.

He was almost underneath them now. The nine-fingered man was talking about warforged of different designs that he had heard of, and the human druidess was asking something about half-orcs. The thudding of feet overhead picked up, drowning out their words.

The shifter swam forward just a bit more, coming close to a fist-sized gap between planks. He turned his head, squinting and trying to grasp words amidst the noise.

A great paw, claws extended, reached down and ripped half of his face off. In shock he let go of the piling and found himself swallowing water into his lungs.