TIME Night, continuing LOCATION Aboard the Sunset Ray
BACKGROUND:
Sharks, a stray zombie, and a long, quiet crossing later, the Agents reached the shadow beneath the Sunset Ray’s stern – Crowe with a plan to take the aft castle alone on potions of invisibility and spider climb, then drop a rope for Hawke and Raven to follow.
WHAT HAPPENED
Hunkered under the hull, Crowe spotted a rope rigged with two barrel lids suspended just above the waterline – someone’s early-warning system, or worse. He drank both potions and started up the aft castle, over the crenelations, and tied off fifty feet of silk rope before moving onto the deck itself to pick his moment against the guard. Below, Raven caught a zombie boarding the ship – possibly hauled up by a tentacle, though nobody could get a clean look at what was doing the hauling. Hawke tried to take Crowe’s abandoned skimmer for the climb; it disintegrated in his hands the moment he touched it.
Crowe doubled back onto the outer hull rather than risk the deck early, spider-climbing quietly around to the bow. As Hawke and Raven made their own ascent, Raven watched the zombie handed a box on deck, then lurch straight off the side into the water, dragged under by something with a tentacle. Whatever it was moved off fast once it had its prize. The noise covered the last few feet of their own climb.
Crowe chose his moment on the aft castle, came over the crenelations, and put the guard down with a sneak attack clean enough that he never made a sound going to the deck. Hawke and Raven, still waiting on the rope below, had no idea he’d already moved on to the bow without them.
Crowe tried to wave them up. The aft castle’s remaining guard noticed the movement first and signalled back – two stabs of a scimitar in the air. Crowe returned the gesture, keyed the walkie-talkie, and told Raven to go. With the guard’s back turned, Hawke made the crenelations and closed in; the guard clocked him at the last possible second and took a baton to the head for it. Raven followed and dropped the second guard before he had the chance to raise any alarm at all.
Lantern light glowed under the awnings ahead. A quick check of the bodies, and Raven took the ladder down to the main deck – where a mound of decapitated bodies, likely what was left of the crew, lay beside two seated Vessentaag lookouts. She crossed blood-slick decking without a sound and put a blade into one before he knew she was there. Hawke finished the second before he could react. Crowe tried the same trick on a third guard and nearly didn’t make it – spotted just in time, he took a cut before the guard could shout, and Raven closed out the last of the main deck herself while Crowe fell back into the cover of an escape boat.
Two more Vessentaag spilled out of a door near the aft castle as Hawke moved to cover it. A thunderstone took Raven full in the blast and left her deafened, but the fight itself was short – both guards went down in a hurried exchange of blows. Among the wreckage: four of the mysterious cube boxes, and a fifth, wooden, packed with something that looked disturbingly like ice.
A fast check of the fore and aft castle rooms turned up nothing further, and Hawke pressed on down to the main passenger deck. Coraman lamplight lit the corridor just enough to make out a zombie shambling toward him from the left. He moved to meet it as Crowe opened the far hatch and Raven lit a sunrod on deck as a signal to the waiting ship – then threw a second on top of the awning for good measure before dropping down into the hull herself.
The aft cabin door opened on Diplomat Anatoli, hands bound, held in the doorway by a Vessentaag guard. Behind him, an unusual figure in bulky, shimmering hide armour thumped a scythe against the ceiling, wailing a single word – Vessentaag! – over and over. The door guard flung a ball of flame that singed Hawke on the way past. Below, Raven threw a thunderstone at the bound diplomat – it deafened him along with the nearby guards, though the two Vessentaag themselves shrugged it off. A large, fiendish spider tore itself into being right in front of her; she answered it with steel before it could finish arriving. Crowe, down in the hull now, put a kemercannon shot into the shambling zombie; Hawke finished it off a moment later and found the doors beyond locked.
A second scythe materialised behind Raven and struck – and Crowe drew his rapier and cut the fiendish spider apart before it could recover.
EXTRAS.
The Sunset Ray, deck plans