Explosive booms–artillery, magic, or both, Diamond couldn’t tell–joined the sounds of fighting coming from above deck. He grimaced and raised a defensive shield around himself, trying not to think about the way it tugged at the fatigued tension that had been building at the back of his skull over the past few days. Whether or not he had the energy to rescue the prisoners below wasn’t going to matter much if he let himself get killed before he could even start the attempt. And letting some other group of pirates sink the ship wasn’t going to end well for anyone, either.
He let his senses stretch out, trying to get a feel for how many additional minds he could sense above them, hoping for a general impression of the boarding party’s intentions. He didn’t get much of use; the frantic focus of battle dominated most everyone’s surface thoughts, and the chaos of it all made it hard for him to separate any one person from another.
The sounds of battle were just starting to come more clearly when the wood of the ship rattled under his guiding hand, a shockwave of air accompanied by the sound of a body tumbling down the stairs and landing with a thud that sounded like it was barely a few feet in front of him. Diamond drew in a sharp, startled breath and backed up several steps.
He could sense that the person who had fallen was unconscious, but that still left what was probably a spellcaster still racing down the stairs–he could hear their footsteps rapidly approaching.
Diamond quickly thought through his options, and the risks of each–but in the end, he wasn’t in any shape to play one man army, particularly without a sighted guide. He needed information; if he didn’t try to get it from this person, he’d just be trying to track someone else down next, and it was too late to escape without a confrontation here. If they were a mundane person he might have gone straight for force, but with the possibility that they were a magic user of some sort and with his own fatigue, that seemed far more of a gamble.
So Diamond backed up further as their footsteps reached the opening to the stairwell, the sound subtly changing as it came directly through the room rather than funneled down the corridor, and raised both hands in a placating gesture.
“Don’t fire! I’m harmless,” he urged. A lie, potentially, but he was certainly hoping not to have to get violent. “What’s going on?”
Amidst the heat of battle, Rhaya’s blood sang.
There was a certain amount of grim satisfaction in hearing how many times Harrigan’s crew member hit stairs before coming to a halt at the bottom, her footsteps light as she dashed after him. In her haste to get through the enclosed space she had been poised to vault over his unconscious form rather than clamber around, though upon emerging from the hallway she was forced to rethink the reckless approach.
A golden gaze landed on the other figure in the room and she dug her heels in hard against the floorboard to avoid mowing him down, the motion so jarring she nearly stumbled sideways into a support beam. With a quick pass of his appearance, obvious surprise bloomed across her features.
“How did you—”
Her words were interrupted by a sharp series of cracks from somewhere above, muffled by the layers of wood. Ah. Captain Freidrich had apparently just boarded and begun firing off gunshots. Her attention had been pulled from the figure long enough to glance upwards before darting back down to find him again and her hands, having already been raised slightly, lifted further with palms splayed and fingers outward in a cautiously submissive gesture. She was breathing heavier than she realized, but she swallowed and tried again.
“How did you get out?” Hearing her own question voiced aloud seemed to rattle something in her and her eyes slimmed, shifting her focus to briefly peer past him. Something else invaded her expression then: Unease. Just because he was by all appearances an old man should mean little by way of trustworthiness; The previous Master of Gales had been an old man aging in the hundreds and he had still been powerful enough to whoop her younger self six ways to Sunday.
How had he gotten out…? Especially if she was the first one down here, unless he wasn’t held with the captives in the first place.
“Were you one of the prisoners? Or are you a member of this ship’s crew?”
Her fingers twitched but her hands remained where they were, though the lines of her face had grown sharper; wary.
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