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The captain gave the command to weigh anchors when signaled by the Daurian patrol. The metal gourds we saw were still upright; the merchant had warned us about them. Siege weapons of some kind or other, though he had been guarded about the specifics of how they worked.

For their part, the trader pulled up between two ships, lowered anchor, and was boarded from both sides.

I sighed. “Bosun Melody, we may want to call as many of our crew to the deck as possible. Better they be seen openly rather than disturbed below.”

“We’re already preparing for those barbarians to rifle through our hold. Now, they’re going to go through our sailors, as well?”

“Oh, what does he want now?” the captain called from the aftdeck.

“He wants us to muster the crew on deck.” She hollered back.

“A pox on Dauria and on their isolationist policies!” he drummed his fingers on the railing. “It’s a reasonable show of honesty. Muster the crew.”

“It’s plain UNREASONABLE, is what it is.” muttered Melody. But she gave orders for the crew to muster on deck, and most of them were visible as we sailed in for our inspection.

.....

Both sides lowered boarding ramps, and they boarded at combat speed, weapons at the ready. If we hadn’t been prepared for exactly that, a fight might have broken out.

Our captain met theirs, and...

“Ambassador, this here flat-face is speaking some kind of jibberish at me.” The captain said.

Ugh. This was going to be a long day.

I put on my toothiest smile, made certain my Truthspeaker title was active. “How might I be of service, sir?” I said in Daurian.

He spoke back to me in gibberish, then asked a gibberish question. One of the people behind him gestured to one of the boarders.

“How might I be of service, you ignorant barbarian?” he said.

To this day, I’m still not sure if that wasn’t exactly what the Daurian captain asked.

The rest was a whirlwind of opening and sifting, and allowing swords to be plunged into barrels of grain or liquid, of letting them inspect every single inch of our interior...

There was an incident where a large soldier of theirs grabbed one of our rats, bit the head off, and offered half the corpse to one of our sailors. Apparently puking is an offensive action in Dauria, and said brute wanted our sailor beheaded.

I won’t pretend that even now I understand the difference between the five honors and face. But face is how things are seen by the public, and the brute seemed to accept that our wimpy barbarian digestive tracts needed cooked meat. Somehow, shifting the blame entirely onto us was the expected and proper response.

Anyway, they looked at EVERYTHING, took nothing, ruined as little as possible while ensuring we weren’t smuggling anything, and after that day and a half, started reading off the regulations for landing on the island.

There were a LOT of those, most of them ending with “or die by being beheaded”. It made me wonder how a large nation with such a strict justice code needed an entire island for their exiles. But I had opened a System list, and recorded all the laws spoken.

“And,” he ended, “Your long boat will not depart for the fortress until after dawn tomorrow.”

The captain and I bowed our assent, and we sailed to where a small rowboat marked where we were to park unless we wanted to be set on fire and burned to the waterline.

Perhaps I should speak about that for a bit. The jailors lived in a fortress town, that in turn was surrounded by three outer walls and a trench, carved sheer downward far beneath the water line. The inmates and their descendants lived where and how they wished on the rest of the island, which we should not expect to see.

Only a dozen of us would be on land at any given time. Those in the citadel would be escorted by two guards at a time, four guards if they went shopping in the town. The list of restrictions on the town... well, I won’t get ahead of myself.

We were warned that something called the Azure River Fever had been making its rounds through the citadel. By its symptoms, it was a lot like dysentery, but that wasn’t the first thing I wanted us to have in common.

Kismet had trouble sleeping that night. She made sure Madonna had trouble staying asleep.

“Whyyyy?” I asked, as I was roughly shaken awake.

“Ask your feline female friend.” Madonna said.

I grunted, and rolled over. Madonna pulled the blankets off of me.

“Fine.” I said. “Fine, I’m awake.”

I yawned and flagged my System for a sleepless night.

Ah, the world according to Kismet! And all the wonders that we were missing, here on the boat, while they were HAPPENING JUST OVER THERE...

It was a long night, followed by a restless dawn.

Part of me expected Kismet to swim to shore, and try charming her way out of a beheading. But she behaved herself, even when the port guards went through our luggage. And the town guard. And the fortress guard. And the citadel guard.

“If one more person goes through our luggage,” Madonna said, “I’m lighting people on fire until they kill me.”

“Madonna...” I said, distracted by a familiar crack from the right side of my jaw.

“Oh, no you don’t! I haven’t learned how to walk with a book on my head for you to start shedding now!” Kismet hissed. “Let me see, let me see.”

I sighed. “Kismet, you know that fretting at it with your claws like that is only going to make it worse.”

“Third time’s a charm.” She said, tugging on the edges of the cracked skin.

“Kismet. Not. Now.” I said.

“Quit being a baby.” Madonna said.

“Ambassador, be a baby.” Gamilla said. “Be a spoiled little baby, upset by all the delays.”

I scratched my back, just below my left kidney.

Yes, even this long after having it removed and eaten, I remembered EXACTLY where in my body that was located.

“My tutor told me that patience and dignity were more important than immediate results. Or did you want us thrown off the island without ever even speaking to the admiral?”

“He’s a military man, and a warden besides. What is to be gained here?”

“Gamilla, I’ve seen you eyeing the buildings as we passed. You’ve seen the same things I have. Their cloth is of higher quality, their pottery more ornate, and their housing, at least here inside the wall, is mostly local stone. What we would trade them would be glassworks, and... I honestly don’t have a clue what else.”

“Better than I expected. But no, I meant...” she waved her hands inclusively, “Dauria is a bit bigger than the Empire, ambassador.”

“True, however... Hrm.”

She turned her head, to look at the statuary that had attracted my attention. It was a warrior, beset by goblins, but clearly winning against them. Set against the base, a bench was shaped like a fallen Uruk, clutching at his split-open face.

Gamilla’s face was pale. “How? How did we not learn this, in all of the questions we asked about this people?”

“I mean... The old man said goblins were vilified, but I figured he just meant literal goblins.”

“And when were you going to share?” she asked.

“To be fair, when have I ever known something that you did not?” I replied.

Madonna fanned herself. “He DOES have a point, dearest Gamilla. My husband is DENSELY stupid.”

“I guess so.” Gamilla said, fondling her walking stick. That stick had a lead-steel core, adding both bulk and solidity to the thing. She bragged, once, that she could shatter boulders with such a metal pole, though not without scattering the wood of the outer surface.

“Ooh, gargoyles!” Madonna said. “Actual, cursed in the daylight gargoyles. I like this culture already.”

I squinted at them. They MIGHT be real... a quick look with Mystic Vision removed all doubt.

“They don’t actually... eat... people, do they?” Kismet asked.

Madonna frowned. “Not unless you ask nicely. And then, only if the gargoyle truly feels they deserve it. Now, household pets? Best not to let them out after dark if you truly care for them.”

And then, in the heat of the afternoon, the citadel guard went through all our belongings. And I mean all of them.

A thin, but not emaciated, man spoke to us, the woman at his side rendering his words in passable Manoran. “Magistrate Rin Shong, Coinkeeper for Admiral Kwan Lun, notes that there are a lot of gifts for his master mixed in with your luggage.”

“Yes, I understand we are to present one gift per day...”

Rin Shong said some words. Was that a different language? “Admiral Kwan has asked him to inventory all of your gifts. Surely you do not object to this?”

“Of course, we object to this.” Gamilla said, as though we had rehearsed it. “What if we finish our business before twenty-one days?”

She smiled at us pleasantly. “Oh, so sorry. That will NOT become a problem.”