Chapter 54

I got an earful when I got back to Oak Hall from Felicity. She wasn't impressed with what I had done in the gulf and she told me so in no uncertain terms. She even insinuated that I'd been thinking with my little head and not my big when I took Elsa on the adventure after our wedding night and in the end I had to agree with her. The fact was I had acted stupidly. Worse than that I had done exactly what I had repeatedly preached that I was against. I'd turned pirate and I wasn't proud of it. It was true that the Sea Nymph had sailed from the Port of Araknis and that it had been owned by the Emir of that kingdom. It was also true that while the ship was only carrying goods as cargo when we took it, that the vessel's ultimate destination was the east coast of Africa to pick up slaves for the markets of the gulf. To Felicity it didn't matter. She even suggested that I could have just bought the damned ship if I had wanted it so badly and I had to admit that she was right. While much of the wealth that I had accumulated had been paid out for food to feed the mouths that I had been adding to Oak Hall and for paying my men and women who served me when I called on them to take up arms, there certainly had been enough left to pay for a ship.

There wasn't much I could do to change what I had done and I knew it. All I could do was promise that I would try harder next time and accept that I needed to walk the walk if I kept on spouting off about the evils of piracy. I promised I would and it did help placate my mate.

Not everyone shared Felicity's opinion. Kola and Caitlin had come from the world of hard knocks and they simply saw it as a fact of life on Game World. Elsa saw it as me getting carried away and she didn't hold it against me. Then again, Elsa had been a pirate. Of course the trio were happy with the results of my actions. They told me that my numbers were up and that the consortium was happy about things. That depressed me even more and I soon came to the conclusion that I had acted the way that I had purely to please the consortium. I definitely needed to rethink my motivation in the future.

Two days later I was sitting in the seediest bar that I had ever been in since arriving on Game World and I wondered to myself why I was there. I knew why; there were several reasons and all of them were well known to me, but still it boded ill that I was in a place where there was very little room to move about and most of the men in the place were drunk, armed, and dangerous. Thankfully I wasn't alone. I was with Dork, Goiania, and Nimue.

The bar didn't even have a name. It was up a blind alley three streets up from the waterfront. It was one of several that we'd been to since we'd arrived in Langhorne City. Langhorne City was many things. It was a place where people could do business. It was a massive warren of bars and taverns and whorehouses and drug dens. It contained hundreds of markets where a man could buy anything he wanted. It was dangerous and it was exciting and exotic. It was also the capital of the Kingdom of Temasek.

Temasek was one of the most powerful island-states on Game World. Temasek comprised the island that I knew as Singapore on my world and the neighbouring mainland. The city of Langhorne was filled with over a million inhabitants and the entire kingdom numbered over five million strong. Like the island state on my world, Temasek dominated the region. It controlled the strait that flowed by it and all the trade that sailed on it. It did so with one of the best navies available. The ships surpassed all others in the region and they were all armed with cannons.

Of the five city-states that produced gunpowder and cannons, Temasek produced the best. They'd been at it for hundreds of years and they had perfected their mix. They also protected it from outsiders. Any vessel sailing into Langhorne was scrutinised by custom officers, port authorities, and naval personnel before they were let to sail again. If even one ounce of their precious powder was discovered aboard a departing craft, the captain would be put to death, the crew would be enslaved, and the ship confiscated along with its cargo.

Most people accepted that it wasn't worth the effort to steal gunpowder from Temasek, but I wasn't most people. I'd found a use for the grenades that I'd taken from Panwan and the gunpowder and shot and I now wanted more. It was one of the reasons that we were sitting in the bar.

It wasn't the only one, as I have already stated. Another reason that we were in Langhorne City was to keep Nimue busy. My little elf was anxious to return to the Spanish Sea and to start the search for her sister. Personally I couldn't fault her for her desire but reality had to be faced. We needed a ship for the mission and it had to be manned and provisioned and made ready and that took time and it took someone seeing that it was done right.

Thankfully I got lucky as to getting a man to take care of it while I saw to it that Nimue stayed out from under everyone's feet. Tagus came and volunteered. As he told me, he was willing to put the Windrunner up on blocks for a few months and command the Sea Nymph if I wanted him. He even suggested that he could recruit most of the current crew off the Windrunner to come along with us on the adventure. As he pointed out in a very blunt manner, the men knew me and they also knew that I paid well for their services and that was a very convincing factor. Seeing that my own feelings for our new ship had waned since taking it, I had accepted Tagus' offer. By then I had lost interest in commanding the ship.

So there I was drinking rice wine and listening to shouted conversations in a dingy little bar and Tagus was hard at it back in Oak Hall and for some stupid reason I was envying him. The Sea Nymph needed to be scrubbed clean below decks and aired out and the vessel needed to be readied to serve me as my flagship in my quest to find Dindraine. Weapons needed to be mounted on her and a crew needed to be raised and trained to sail her. There were a lot of things that needed doing and only a limited time to do them in.

It wasn't the only matter that I had left behind in Oak Hall to be dealt with by someone else. The honeymoon was short with Elsa and me. The day after our trip to the Kingdom of Umayyad and the sea battles that we'd fought, Elsa was back to work running Oak Hall in my name. We spent the whole day in private talking about my plans for Oak Hall and what I wanted to see done in my absence. Paramount was the work that Peter Richards was doing for me. At the very minimum I wanted the two chameleon suits working again and if it was at all possible, I wanted him to build a jammer that would shut down the networks permanently. In addition to this I wanted an army and a navy and if possible an air force. In the list of known vehicles within five hundred miles of Oak Hall, there were three aircraft including a military transport. Who knew what might be in that airplane. As for an army and navy we had enough people and equipment for both to exist. Since my first visit to Oak Hall but three months ago, I had continually increased its population with every adventure that I had gone on. The city-state had doubled in size and while it was struggling to accommodate and feed everyone, it was doing it. In a year or two Oak Hall would be a booming place with many of its new citizens taking on new jobs that hadn't existed before. For now however, with the rains and most of the effort in Oak Hall being centred on construction, I knew that many felt bored and restless and I also knew that was a dangerous thing. Personally I felt that many would gladly take up arms just to give themselves something to do. All we needed to do was to train them.

That was a job for Talbot and Danvers and Suzy Parks and Glen Dupree. We had more ships than we could berth here in Oak Hall and we had piles of swords and pikes and shirts of chain and vests of boiled leather. Oak Hall now had six blacksmiths and if we were lucky one of them would be able to turn out muzzleloaders. All we needed was more gunpowder and we'd be okay.

Our wanderings from bar to bar had proved fruitful in some ways. Of course some of what we learned I already knew and for the most part so did the rest of my party. We knew that there were over thirty city-states in the region and all of them paid to do business in Langhorne City. We also knew that there were just as many pirate enclaves in the region which was why everyone paid to do business in Langhorne City. Mai Woo had briefed us on this before we'd told the consortium to send us there. Still it was nice to know that her intelligence was good. We learned other interesting things as well. We learned that King Mala II had ten wives and that he sat in judgement once a month in his palace to dispense justice in any case brought before him. We also learned that the best whorehouse in the island-state was run by the King's younger brother, Prince Sang. We also learned that Low District, which was where we were was a dangerous place and men were wise not to drink too much here or they would find themselves shanghaied. We also learned that while the kingdom protected their store of gunpowder with diligence, it was rumoured that a ship or two of their navy had gone missing from time to time and pirates now used the fine cannons and smokeless powder to sink passing merchant ships.

More importantly we had heard another rumour that sounded that it would open doors for me and my party. We had followed the rumour about the district in hopes of learning the truth of the matter. The rumour went that the palace was in an uproar and that guards from the inner city had ventured down into the trade district, the waterfront, and the low district in search for three young lads of fourteen years. The reason why depended on who you listened to and how drunk they were when they told their tale.

Our first chore was to get noticed. As it soon proved to us, it wasn't very hard to achieve. I led my party out of the bar and into the alley and then out into the main street. It was late in the day and darkness was already falling on the streets of the city. Personally I felt no threats directed at us. The hair on the back of my neck wasn't standing up and I was certain that it was because of our stature in comparison to that of the locals. We were all wrapped in our travelling cloaks and most of our weapons were hidden from sight as were our visages, but there was no way that Dork or I could hide the fact that we were big men. As we walked on, people actually got out of our way.

Eventually we ended up running into a patrol of guardsmen coming out of another bar some distance from the one we'd exited. The patrol was in a foul mood and they were pushing people out of their way as they made their way into the street. One of them tried to push me out of the way and the guardsman ended up on his ass.

"Hey," I bellowed with indignity, "watch where you're going."

The response to that was immediate. The patrol leader took one look at his man lying on the ground and then one look at me and my party and then he grabbed for the hilt of his sword. I didn't let him get to it.

I quickly moved towards the man and struck out at him with my hands. I had decided that killing the local soldiers was counter productive to what I was intending so I didn't go for my weapons. Instead I hit the man in such a manner that it immediately numbed his sword arm and caused him to release his grip on his blade. My second blow hit him in the centre of his chest and it sent him staggering backwards into the man standing behind him.

I didn't stop there. The patrol had consisted of the leader and six men. With one on the ground and one knocked senseless into the arms of another that left three men to be dealt with before they could defend themselves. It didn't take much of an effort. I moved right and dropped the next man with a series of quick and furious blows that left him stunned and disabled and Dork fell on the two men on the right. While he dispensed with them, using brute force to my finesse, Goiania dealt with the man who had become entangled with the patrol leader when I had struck him. That man had been knocked back against a wall and stunned for a moment. By the time he realized what was going on, Goiania was on him. She quickly demonstrated that Elves could do more than just shoot arrows. She moved just as quickly as I had and in a moment the man was on the ground and unconscious.

The fight resulted in two things. It caused anyone who'd been nearby to give us room as we regrouped and prepared ourselves for what would come next. The other thing that it did was that it drew attention to us. One of the myriad of street bums ran off the moment the fight had broken out and he had scurried in search of other guards. Those guards showed up just as we were dusting ourselves off and getting ready to move on. As always, I spotted them first.

"Well look at this," I muttered loudly in the local tongue. "It looks like we have more men who want to play."

My words brought the soldiers up short. Like the last group of soldiers there were seven men in total; a patrol leader and six guards. Their leader called them to a halt well out of reach of us and then ordered them to draw their swords. I just smiled at them for a second and then addressed them again.

"I'd think twice about doing that," I told the patrol leader. "So far no one has died tonight. If you pull your weapons and bare them at my party, we might take offence and the results could be costly for you."

"You will surrender," the patrol leader snapped back at me, "or we will cut you down where you stand."

I sighed in response to that and tried once more to make the man see the light. Before speaking I reached up and untied the ties that held my travelling cloak closed. Once I had done that, I shrugged out of my cloak and let it drop to the ground. Quickly my companions did the same. The eyes of the patrol leader and his men grew wide when they saw what we were wearing beneath them.

For this trip we had dispensed with our over tunics. The four of us were garbed in our high-tech shirts of mail, our greaves and gorgets, and our blade weapons. We looked very dangerous.

"I hear word on the streets that you are looking for three lads who have gone missing," I stated bluntly. "While my friends and I have had nothing to do with their disappearance, I could find them if it was made worth my while. Perhaps you'd like to rethink those weapons you have drawn and instead parlay with me. Better yet, you might take a message to your king and tell him of our presence."

The man blinked a couple of times in response to that little speech. By now quite a crowd had drawn about the periphery of the street and the onlookers were getting restless. The patrol leader kept flicking his gaze from me to them and I knew he was getting very nervous. I decided to help him out a bit more.

"I'm told that there is a tavern by the Port Master's building down at the waterfront that serves a good wine," I told the man in a casual manner. "I will go there while you tend to your fallen compatriots and send word back to your captain. Perhaps he would like to come and join me for a drink and a chat. What do you say man?"

The man bit his lower lip in response and hesitated. That moment of hesitation was his undoing. The riff-raff that was lining the streets took it as a sign of cowardice and they started mocking the man. The mocking grew quickly and the man's face became red with embarrassment. Frustrated he did what he shouldn't have done. He lost control.

Angrily he turned on the mob and told them to disperse or he would deal with them as well. The response was the throwing of trash and detritus at the man and his patrol. Something wet and slimy hit the man in the face. Something else hit another guardsman. It drew a cry of pain from the man and in response the men turned and attacked. They went for everyone including my people.

Only one headed towards us. As he ran the dozen or so feet that separated us, he drew up his sword as to strike one of us. I immediately stepped in the way. Again I didn't draw a weapon. Instead I grabbed the man's wrist as he started to swing downward. I stopped his strike and in turn lashed out at him with my free hand. The first blow struck him in the chest with enough force that it staggered him and knocked him backwards. The second blow struck him in the crook of his sword arm. The blow numbed his arm and he dropped his weapon. The third strike was with my elbow as I pulled my arm backwards from the second blow. This hit him in his face and broke his nose. As blood spurted from this orifice, I sidestepped the man, still holding his arm, and I twisted it behind his back. With my free hand I grabbed the back of his neck and sent him face first into a nearby doorpost. The man crumpled to the ground when I released him.

The other guards had gone for the crowd and a few proved more capable than others in their group. They slashed and killed a number of onlookers before the crowd got the idea that it was better for them to run away than to stay and fight. The patrol leader was not as lucky. Realizing he had lost control of the situation, he had turned his back on the crowds to bark orders at his men to stop. With his back turned he was unaware that someone was attacking him. A local thug knifed the man in the back, striking him a number of times before anyone could do anything to save the soldier. In the end it was Nimue who dealt with the thug. My little elf had become skilled with throwing knives over the last few months and she took the man down with one of her thigh blades.

The result was less than satisfying for the local soldiers. They had lost their officer and one other man to the mobs and they had another lying unconscious on the ground. To make matters worse, Dork and Goiania were now standing over them with their weapons drawn and the message was clear that if they moved in our direction that they would die. Dispirited, the eldest man in their number threw down his sword and surrendered. The other men quickly followed suit.