They left the drug runners behind, paralyzed and gagged in the back room. Nym planned to go back for them later, when things weren’t so pressing. Analia assured him that she could handle this on her own, but she was still only second circle, despite how strong she’d gotten. He would feel much better about her fighting a cartel if he went with her.
They flew over to the docks and stopped to look around. “It’s bigger than I expected,” Analia admitted. “The building we’re looking for should be in the warehouse district over there. Or… maybe the warehouses on the other side?”
“Well, whichever one it is will have a bunch of kids in it, right? And they’ll probably be in a cell or something.”
“Maybe. It’s supposed to be a small one between two big ones, and it has doors on either side. They said it was on Shelsick Street.”
“I’m going to start scrying while you look for that,” Nym said.
He set one part of his mind to controlling his scry anchor as it swooped around, going through buildings and looking for children. There were a lot of them, to his surprise, but most of them were either outside the buildings or moving around freely. He didn’t find anyone trapped in any cages or pens anywhere he looked.
The other part of his mind focused on keeping close to Analia and watching out for danger. He didn’t know if she’d alerted the cartel to what she was doing in some way before he’d caught up to her, and he didn’t want to get sniped out of the sky by some random spell. His conduits to both the second and third layer were wide open and arcana sat in his soul well, ready to be shaped into whatever defense he needed to protect them.
“There, that’s the place,” she said, pointing down at a squat little building that seemed even smaller because it was surrounded by larger warehouses on all sides. There was a large set of double doors in the front and two separate doors on the side and back. A man was sitting in the alley behind the warehouse, close to the door, but leaned against the opposite wall and holding a jug of liquor in one hand.
He could conceivably have been guarding the door, or he might have just been a drunk. Like so many natives to Shu-Ain, he was wearing very little in the way of clothing and Nym was confident that he wasn’t carrying any weapons. That didn’t mean much if he was a mage, and as far as Nym knew, there wasn’t any way to tell just by looking.
The interior was divided up into one half a large holding area and one half smaller offices. Nowhere in any of that space was there even a single child, but one of the offices had a trap door leading down to a basement. “I think I found what you’re looking for, but there’s a problem.”
There were plenty of pens, big enough for a human child to sit in but not to move around or stand up. They were stacked on top of each other and filled an entire wall, probably forty or fifty of them. They were also empty. The whole warehouse was that way, with only five people in the entire thing.
After describing it to Analia, he said, “Maybe we’re too late and the kids have already been stashed on various ships? Or maybe we’re too early and they haven’t made the initial run in from the coast?”
“We’ll check the ships first,” Analia said. “If they’re on there, we need to rescue them before they set sail.”
They flew across the docks in a slow arc, with Nym scrying each ship as they went by. “One child here, doesn’t seem to be restrained. Two on this one, also unrestrained. Nothing. Nothing. One. Three here, sitting in a room together. Let me see… no, the room’s not locked.”
Before he could go on, Analia said, “You’re talking about this ship here? The three-master with the blue paint on the railing?”
Nym blinked and switched back to his normal sight to confirm. “Yes, that one. They’re in the room at the front. The captain’s quarters, I think? One of them is going through the desk drawers now, and the other two are tossing something that looks quite expensive back and forth. I don’t think they’re prisoners.”
“We’ll keep looking then.”
“How would you have done this without me here?” Nym asked.
“Questioned the people in the warehouse and moved forward based on that information.”
“That’s remarkably cutthroat of you.”
“They kidnapped my friend’s children,” Analia said coldly. “They don’t deserve anything better.”
Nym pointed to a small ship near the end of the dock. “That one has three adults and seven kids inside of it.”
Analia’s eyes locked onto it. “The Mistweaver. Kind of on the nose for a smuggler’s boat, isn’t it? Let’s go.”
They flew over together and landed on the deck, where they were immediately accosted by a native man wearing a pair of pants belted at the waist with a sword strapped to his hip. Nym didn’t understand a word of what he said, and there was no time to enact a translation spell. Analia calmly struck him with a force lance and blew him off the side of the ship to splash in the water.
“In the cargo hold?” she asked.
“Yes. There’s a ladder over there.”
Before they reached it, another man emerged from a cabin and looked around. “What’s this then?” he asked, his accent so thick Nym had to think for a second to understand what he was saying. He wasn’t obviously armed, but he was wearing quite a bit of gold jewelry. It was possible there was something magical in there, or that he was a mage. Just to be safe, he readied as powerful an arcana injection as possible.
“I seem to have misplaced some children on your ship,” Analia said. “I am retrieving them.”
“Nah, don’t think you are.”
Arcana flowed out of the man, but before he could do anything, Nym released his spell into him. The man cried out in pain and collapsed, his whole body spasming and his limbs twisting around. Analia just looked down at him pitilessly for a few seconds, then turned towards the ladder once she seemed sure he wasn’t getting back up.
“There’s one more adult. She’s sitting in the hold with the kids. I’m not sure if she’s a handler keeping them controlled or a victim comforting them,” Nym said.
“We’ll find out soon. This way?” Analia pointed down the hall and, with Nym’s nod, flew towards the back of the boat. She stopped at a locked grate leading down into a cargo hold and looked over at him. “Can you get this open or should I just blast it? I don’t want shrapnel hitting them down there if I can avoid it.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said. A few seconds later, the padlock clicked open and he pulled it free with telekinesis.
The cargo hold itself was dark, but that was easy enough for practically any mage to fix. A few balls of light popped up, both of them casting the spell simultaneously, and revealed a bench with seven children sitting side by side. All of them had been down in the dark long enough that the sudden light made them cry out and cover their eyes.
A casual observer might not have known they were prisoners. They weren’t chained to the floor; there were no manacles around their wrists or ankles or necks. To Nym’s eyes though, each of them was affected by magic, some sort of entanglement or holding spell that kept them firmly seated on the bench.
“What do you think you’re doing with these children?” Analia asked, her voice low, dangerous.
The woman got in front of them, placed herself between the two intruders and the living cargo she was overseeing. She rattled off something that Nym didn’t understand, and this time he got the translation spell up first. He made sure to include himself as well so that he could follow what was going on.
“Why are they being held down here?” he asked.
“Return home to island next mine. Family island wait for them.”
That was about as garbled as his previous attempts, but it got the point across. Truth seeker pinged though, and Nym shook his head. “Lie,” he said.
“Ocean tears?” Analia asked, though she said it in Byramese.
The woman shook her head vehemently, trying to deny the accusation, but truth seeker warned Nym again. He was impressed with the accuracy of the spell, considering how weak it was. But then, these were very obvious lies and none of the people they’d questioned had been good at hiding the truth. He would have known she was lying without magical assistance.
Analia swept her aside with a burst of wind and approached the children. Six of them cowered, but one in the middle, a little girl, burst out, “Nala!”
For the first time since he’d found her with those four men, a smile returned to her face. “Hi Shan. Can you tell me where your brother is?”
Nym spread the translation spell to include the girl, which worked even worse than it had on the adult. The sentence was practically incoherent, but he did get that they’d been separated back at the warehouse after they’d threatened to hurt her brother if she didn’t behave.
While they were talking, he started picking apart the spell gluing them to the bench. It came apart easily enough, especially without anyone around to keep pouring more arcana into it. The effect must have been tactile to the kids since as soon as he cut it, every single one of them jumped off the bench and started running around. Nym kept them away from the woman who’d been handling them, but otherwise let them run around the cargo hold.
“Can you teleport this many people at once?” Analia asked after a bit more conversation with the little girl.
“Nine people? Maybe? I could definitely do it in two groups. Where are they going?”
“Back to my home. Or next door, I guess. I need to get Shan back to her mother and I’m sure she’ll keep an eye on the rest of them while we go find Moda.”
“I can do Cern’s workshop. I’m more familiar with that. I’ll send you with a group of three, then follow with the other four.”
The children were quickly split up and Nym enacted the back-to-back teleports. They all landed on the roof, and he quickly flew the group down to ground level. Analia took over shepherding them and said, “I’ll be back in a bit. Will you go talk to Cern and tell him I need a batch of poison purge?”
“Oh, to get them to throw up the pellets?”
“Exactly.”
“I’m on it,” Nym told her. She waved and started herding the kids down the street while Nym went into the shop.
“About time you got back! Get in here, I need your help,” Cern yelled from the back room.
“How’d you even know it was me?” Nym asked as he walked in.
“’Bunch of people landing on my roof, who else was it going to be?”
Nym laughed and raised his hands in surrender. “You got me. Listen, Analia wants a batch of poison purge for seven kids to get a bunch of ocean tears pellets out of their stomachs.”
Cern whipped around from where he was monitoring a large flask which was just starting to bubble. “She needs what now? What in God’s name have you two been up to?”
“Well… it’s kind of complicated, but I guess some children were kidnapped by this cartel and she knew a few of them and went to get them back, and now we’ve got a whole bunch. Oh, and we’ll be going back out to find some more because we didn’t find both of the kids she was looking for.”
Cern just stared at him, slack-jawed.
They left the drug runners behind, paralyzed and gagged in the back room. Nym planned to go back for them later, when things weren’t so pressing. Analia assured him that she could handle this on her own, but she was still only second circle, despite how strong she’d gotten. He would feel much better about her fighting a cartel if he went with her.
They flew over to the docks and stopped to look around. “It’s bigger than I expected,” Analia admitted. “The building we’re looking for should be in the warehouse district over there. Or… maybe the warehouses on the other side?”
“Well, whichever one it is will have a bunch of kids in it, right? And they’ll probably be in a cell or something.”
“Maybe. It’s supposed to be a small one between two big ones, and it has doors on either side. They said it was on Shelsick Street.”
“I’m going to start scrying while you look for that,” Nym said.
He set one part of his mind to controlling his scry anchor as it swooped around, going through buildings and looking for children. There were a lot of them, to his surprise, but most of them were either outside the buildings or moving around freely. He didn’t find anyone trapped in any cages or pens anywhere he looked.
The other part of his mind focused on keeping close to Analia and watching out for danger. He didn’t know if she’d alerted the cartel to what she was doing in some way before he’d caught up to her, and he didn’t want to get sniped out of the sky by some random spell. His conduits to both the second and third layer were wide open and arcana sat in his soul well, ready to be shaped into whatever defense he needed to protect them.
“There, that’s the place,” she said, pointing down at a squat little building that seemed even smaller because it was surrounded by larger warehouses on all sides. There was a large set of double doors in the front and two separate doors on the side and back. A man was sitting in the alley behind the warehouse, close to the door, but leaned against the opposite wall and holding a jug of liquor in one hand.
He could conceivably have been guarding the door, or he might have just been a drunk. Like so many natives to Shu-Ain, he was wearing very little in the way of clothing and Nym was confident that he wasn’t carrying any weapons. That didn’t mean much if he was a mage, and as far as Nym knew, there wasn’t any way to tell just by looking.
The interior was divided up into one half a large holding area and one half smaller offices. Nowhere in any of that space was there even a single child, but one of the offices had a trap door leading down to a basement. “I think I found what you’re looking for, but there’s a problem.”
There were plenty of pens, big enough for a human child to sit in but not to move around or stand up. They were stacked on top of each other and filled an entire wall, probably forty or fifty of them. They were also empty. The whole warehouse was that way, with only five people in the entire thing.
After describing it to Analia, he said, “Maybe we’re too late and the kids have already been stashed on various ships? Or maybe we’re too early and they haven’t made the initial run in from the coast?”
“We’ll check the ships first,” Analia said. “If they’re on there, we need to rescue them before they set sail.”
They flew across the docks in a slow arc, with Nym scrying each ship as they went by. “One child here, doesn’t seem to be restrained. Two on this one, also unrestrained. Nothing. Nothing. One. Three here, sitting in a room together. Let me see… no, the room’s not locked.”
Before he could go on, Analia said, “You’re talking about this ship here? The three-master with the blue paint on the railing?”
Nym blinked and switched back to his normal sight to confirm. “Yes, that one. They’re in the room at the front. The captain’s quarters, I think? One of them is going through the desk drawers now, and the other two are tossing something that looks quite expensive back and forth. I don’t think they’re prisoners.”
“We’ll keep looking then.”
“How would you have done this without me here?” Nym asked.
“Questioned the people in the warehouse and moved forward based on that information.”
“That’s remarkably cutthroat of you.”
“They kidnapped my friend’s children,” Analia said coldly. “They don’t deserve anything better.”
Nym pointed to a small ship near the end of the dock. “That one has three adults and seven kids inside of it.”
Analia’s eyes locked onto it. “The Mistweaver. Kind of on the nose for a smuggler’s boat, isn’t it? Let’s go.”
They flew over together and landed on the deck, where they were immediately accosted by a native man wearing a pair of pants belted at the waist with a sword strapped to his hip. Nym didn’t understand a word of what he said, and there was no time to enact a translation spell. Analia calmly struck him with a force lance and blew him off the side of the ship to splash in the water.
“In the cargo hold?” she asked.
“Yes. There’s a ladder over there.”
Before they reached it, another man emerged from a cabin and looked around. “What’s this then?” he asked, his accent so thick Nym had to think for a second to understand what he was saying. He wasn’t obviously armed, but he was wearing quite a bit of gold jewelry. It was possible there was something magical in there, or that he was a mage. Just to be safe, he readied as powerful an arcana injection as possible.
“I seem to have misplaced some children on your ship,” Analia said. “I am retrieving them.”
“Nah, don’t think you are.”
Arcana flowed out of the man, but before he could do anything, Nym released his spell into him. The man cried out in pain and collapsed, his whole body spasming and his limbs twisting around. Analia just looked down at him pitilessly for a few seconds, then turned towards the ladder once she seemed sure he wasn’t getting back up.
“There’s one more adult. She’s sitting in the hold with the kids. I’m not sure if she’s a handler keeping them controlled or a victim comforting them,” Nym said.
“We’ll find out soon. This way?” Analia pointed down the hall and, with Nym’s nod, flew towards the back of the boat. She stopped at a locked grate leading down into a cargo hold and looked over at him. “Can you get this open or should I just blast it? I don’t want shrapnel hitting them down there if I can avoid it.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said. A few seconds later, the padlock clicked open and he pulled it free with telekinesis.
The cargo hold itself was dark, but that was easy enough for practically any mage to fix. A few balls of light popped up, both of them casting the spell simultaneously, and revealed a bench with seven children sitting side by side. All of them had been down in the dark long enough that the sudden light made them cry out and cover their eyes.
A casual observer might not have known they were prisoners. They weren’t chained to the floor; there were no manacles around their wrists or ankles or necks. To Nym’s eyes though, each of them was affected by magic, some sort of entanglement or holding spell that kept them firmly seated on the bench.
“What do you think you’re doing with these children?” Analia asked, her voice low, dangerous.
The woman got in front of them, placed herself between the two intruders and the living cargo she was overseeing. She rattled off something that Nym didn’t understand, and this time he got the translation spell up first. He made sure to include himself as well so that he could follow what was going on.
“Why are they being held down here?” he asked.
“Return home to island next mine. Family island wait for them.”
That was about as garbled as his previous attempts, but it got the point across. Truth seeker pinged though, and Nym shook his head. “Lie,” he said.
“Ocean tears?” Analia asked, though she said it in Byramese.
The woman shook her head vehemently, trying to deny the accusation, but truth seeker warned Nym again. He was impressed with the accuracy of the spell, considering how weak it was. But then, these were very obvious lies and none of the people they’d questioned had been good at hiding the truth. He would have known she was lying without magical assistance.
Analia swept her aside with a burst of wind and approached the children. Six of them cowered, but one in the middle, a little girl, burst out, “Nala!”
For the first time since he’d found her with those four men, a smile returned to her face. “Hi Shan. Can you tell me where your brother is?”
Nym spread the translation spell to include the girl, which worked even worse than it had on the adult. The sentence was practically incoherent, but he did get that they’d been separated back at the warehouse after they’d threatened to hurt her brother if she didn’t behave.
While they were talking, he started picking apart the spell gluing them to the bench. It came apart easily enough, especially without anyone around to keep pouring more arcana into it. The effect must have been tactile to the kids since as soon as he cut it, every single one of them jumped off the bench and started running around. Nym kept them away from the woman who’d been handling them, but otherwise let them run around the cargo hold.
“Can you teleport this many people at once?” Analia asked after a bit more conversation with the little girl.
“Nine people? Maybe? I could definitely do it in two groups. Where are they going?”
“Back to my home. Or next door, I guess. I need to get Shan back to her mother and I’m sure she’ll keep an eye on the rest of them while we go find Moda.”
“I can do Cern’s workshop. I’m more familiar with that. I’ll send you with a group of three, then follow with the other four.”
The children were quickly split up and Nym enacted the back-to-back teleports. They all landed on the roof, and he quickly flew the group down to ground level. Analia took over shepherding them and said, “I’ll be back in a bit. Will you go talk to Cern and tell him I need a batch of poison purge?”
“Oh, to get them to throw up the pellets?”
“Exactly.”
“I’m on it,” Nym told her. She waved and started herding the kids down the street while Nym went into the shop.
“About time you got back! Get in here, I need your help,” Cern yelled from the back room.
“How’d you even know it was me?” Nym asked as he walked in.
“’Bunch of people landing on my roof, who else was it going to be?”
Nym laughed and raised his hands in surrender. “You got me. Listen, Analia wants a batch of poison purge for seven kids to get a bunch of ocean tears pellets out of their stomachs.”
Cern whipped around from where he was monitoring a large flask which was just starting to bubble. “She needs what now? What in God’s name have you two been up to?”
“Well… it’s kind of complicated, but I guess some children were kidnapped by this cartel and she knew a few of them and went to get them back, and now we’ve got a whole bunch. Oh, and we’ll be going back out to find some more because we didn’t find both of the kids she was looking for.”
Cern just stared at him, slack-jawed.
