The Sceptre of Samnos

The Prince Fennerel - Part 3

      The VIP staterooms were at the very rear of the ship, below the officers' cabins and currently unoccupied except for one which, the Captain said, contained a very important person on a secret mission. He warned them not to speak to him, or else it would be back to the brig with them. Then, apologising once more for the necessity to detain them, he left them there.

     The warship had six staterooms, great luxurious apartments the equal of anything carried on a Baddow clipper, so that Lirenna was granted her wish to sail the seas in style, although not quite in the way she'd expected. Each one had windows along one entire wall, giving a wonderful view of the Western Sea, although there wasn't much to see at the moment except grey water and grey sky, both roiling turbulently in the gathering wind.

     The bedrooms boasted huge four poster beds similar in design to the one they'd seen in Rhanov's room in Vantarestin, and everything else was equally luxurious. Beautifully made furniture, deep thick carpets and various fairly valuable works of art, but it struck Thomas as soulless, lacking any real warmth or sense of welcome. There was nothing to give the rooms a personal touch. There was nothing to indicate whether their last occupants had been an Admiral, a Baron or a foreign ambassador, except that he or she must have been used to a life of luxury and was presumably unwilling to allow any reduction in his or her standard of living just because they happened to be on a sea voyage. Thomas would have felt more comfortable crowded with his friends in an ordinary junior officer's cabin. Here, he hardly dared touch anything in case he marked or damaged it in some way. They were not rooms he could relax in.

     With the largest and most luxurious stateroom taken by the mysterious VIP, there were five others, meaning that the travelers could almost have had one each, with just two of them having to share, but none of them wanted to be alone in a strange place. They paired off, therefore, with Shaun and Matthew having one room, Diana and Lirenna having the next, with which it shared a connecting door, and Thomas and Jerry sharing a third. They were locked in at night, but allowed to walk around the ship by day, accompanied by a couple of guards who made sure they didn't go where they weren't supposed to. All in all it was a pleasant cruise, but Diana fretted at the delay in their quest for the Sceptre of Samnos.

     One day Silan and Rogor were given the job of guarding them as they were strolling around on deck. The young, dark haired ensign and the tall, bearded wizard soon became good friends with the travelers and chatted quite freely with them, although they avoided some subjects such as where they were going and how long they would take to get there.

     "You're a strange bunch," said Silan as they stood on the prow next to the giant catapult and watched the sea go by. "A cleric of Caroli, a follower of one of the most pacifistic Gods there is, in the company of two heavily armed fighting men armed with steel swords, one of them magical. Another human armed only with a knife. A demi shae and a nome. What were you all doing in a boat in the middle of the Western Sea?"

     Thomas tried to explain about the Emerald Oracle, but instead heard himself say "Nothing much. Just sightseeing, you know."

     "Well you really picked a funny place to do it. Nobody goes sightseeing in the Lonely Isles. Much too dangerous. You're lucky we were there to save you."

     Lirenna put an arm around him and gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek. "We know, and we're very grateful," she said. "I'm sorry if we got you into trouble."

     "Not much," he replied with a grin. "I've been in worse trouble before. Rog'll tell you."

     Rogor grinned and started to tell them a tale about when Silan had persuaded him to help smuggle a few bottles of Janta water aboard a few months before, and some of the chaos that had ensued. He turned out to be a natural storyteller and soon had the six companions almost helpless with laughter as he described, in vivid detail, the Captain's reaction as the potent spirit caused the wizard's spellcasting to misfire in bizarre and unpredictable ways in the middle of a sea battle with a Lantellan Warfish. "I thought he was going to explode!" he said, almost choking with his own laughter. "I was scrubbing the deck for a month afterwards, and it took nearly a week for the other wizards to get the mainsail back to normal again."