The Shattered Land_ The Dreaming Dark - Keith Baker [46]
Eventually, Gerrion came to the harbor. He made his way onto a small sailboat, entering the cabin. The vessel was battered and worn, the hull covered with peeling black paint, and as far as Pierce could tell from the movement of shadows against the window-blind, Gerrion was its sole inhabitant.
Eventually the lamp within the cabin was extinguished. Pierce continued to watch the vessel for another hour, waiting to see if Gerrion would emerge or if a guest might arrive, but the harbor was silent and dead. A human might have found the wait to be excruciatingly dull, but such thoughts never crossed Pierce’s mind. He was absorbed by the hunt, watching every sound, every motion, every ripple of water and shifting shadow. He was hidden against a mooring pylon, and between his superior view of the piers and his inhumanly sharp senses, no one should have been able to approach without his knowledge.
But she did.
“It is strange that we should meet in this place.” Her voice cut through the night, and if Pierce had been human he would have jumped in surprise. Instead he analyzed the situation. The speaker was close but out of sight; he considered the possibility that she was invisible but came to the conclusion that she was standing on the other side of the pylon he was using for cover. At such distances his bow would be useless, and he prepared to draw his flail should the need arise, but even as he made this calculation, he was also considering the voice itself. Though feminine in pitch and inflection, it had an echoing timbre that reminded Pierce of his own voice—words formed from the rippling of a flowing stream.
It was a voice he’d heard before.
She stepped out from behind the pillar and into the light of the two moons that were full in the sky. Pierce’s instincts told him to draw his flail, but this time he restrained himself.
“Strange indeed,” he said. “I had not thought to see you again or that you possessed the skills to approach me unseen—your talents have grown since our last meeting.”
“Perhaps, or perhaps I wished to be seen.”
She wore a cloak of stained gray oilskin, and her clothes were ragged burlap. With her scarf pulled up to cover her face, she would have passed unnoticed on the street. Just another beggar. Her scarf was pulled down, and the face beneath the hood was that of a warforged soldier, coated with dark blue enamel that blended into the shadows of the night.
“What brings you to this place, brother?” she said.
For a moment, Pierce was at a loss for words. He had never forgotten their meeting on the streets of Sharn, and he felt an unfamiliar thrill at seeing her here. The stranger fascinated him on many levels. While the warforged had no true gender, her feminine voice and posture were intriguing; it was not a physical attraction in any way a human would understand it, but she raised a deep curiosity, a question of how else she might differ from him. Her skills were impressive. Reflecting on the hunt, Pierce now recalled spotting her once or twice over the evening, but he had never realized her true nature or considered the fact that she might have been watching him. Just looking at her, he could tell that she would be a deadly foe. Her hands might be empty, but they were made of steel and mithral. Studying her stance Pierce could tell that she was ready to strike if he took hostile action.
“I am here to protect my companions,” he said.
“Have you sold