"Thank you." And he gets up and knocks to be let out of her cell.

Footsteps, then, "You done in there?"

The Sergeant will let him out and lock the door again. They can head back up topside, where Ferris is standing by a door, waiting for him. He's in armor just distinguishable from the other soldiers side by side, and his affect is deadly composed compared to his previous more affable professionality, so Blai might not notice or recognize him. He'll go to Blai if Blai doesn't go to him.

"Select. Five minutes?" He gestures at the room he was guarding.

"All right."

His sternness dissolves a bit into Customer Service Voice once the door is closed. "I hope the conversation was fruitful. How much time, or do you need any other resources, to make your decision?"

"I would like some explanation of why I'm going - it needn't be complete but it does need to be true - so that no one is concerned that I've been kidnapped again, and then I need perhaps a day to put the word about and then I can accompany a party to Manus. Are you capable of discerning if my information is valuable enough here or will that need to happen there?"

"We want to buy castings of Remove Blindness, Remove Deafness and Restoration. We do have a list of people who need it and we're willing to pay up to twice your going rate. For the valuation, we don't have the relevant expertise here, I'm afraid."

"I can justify the trip for the spellcasting alone, very well."

"Shall we pick you up at the south gate on Tirenv the 5th, at noon?" That's in three days.

"That time works for me, yes."

Then Ferris will let him get his affairs in order, and three days later, be waiting at the south gate.

Blai is there, packed for a trip, including some food because he eats different proportions of everything than drakes and gnolls do and wants to be able to supplement if they guess wildly wrong what to offer him.

Not including Ferris and Blai, they're going with an escort of four. Plus two boatmen. Outside the southern gates of the city is a temporary pier put up last month, and a sleek steel-reinforced vessel is waiting for them, docked among the smattering of spearfishing boats. Ferris waves them aboard.

Onto the boat. Probably it will not be as nice as the oceangoing one but it does not matter.

It's not as nice as the oceangoing one and also they get hassled by a few waterborne nasties that the soldiers have to stab a lot of times, which adds somewhat to the turbulence of the journey, but it's doesn't seem to faze them.

The waters go far. The mountains piercing the clouds to the east and west—the High Passes, which split the north of the continent from the south—inch by. In an hour, the edge of land comes into sight, speckled by flecks of red. When they come ashore at a lakeside waystation by a road that winds down to the water, a stretch of the horizon has resolved into a field of lumpy crimson.

There's a horse-drawn carriage to pick them up. Only two of the escorts are coming with them, the other two going with the boat back to Liscor.

Blai will get into the carriage without commenting. (He didn't comment about the boat either but he did throw up once.)

...Does he want a stomach-settling potion? The carriage is worse than when they were in smooth waters but better than when they were fending off aggressive wildlife.

He doesn't usually get sick in carriages, should be fine.

Hopefully that holds even when the carriage moves at twice the speed of a Phantom Steed.

The carriage heads east through some mountainous terrain, then cut south into the plains. They stop in towns for the nights and for the horses to rest. Even the smaller towns are walled and guarded, if only nominally in some of them. There's not a village or farmstead to be seen out in the open. There's scarcely even farms, the way Blai may be used to, as open plots sprawling across the land.

Ferris points out when they pass Pallass in the distance: a blocky silhouette hundreds of feet in stature, serrated with pylons atop.

The carriage is fast but it judders sharply rather than swaying and that seems to make a difference for him. How do they feed their populations like this, are they doing heavy duty pastoralism?

They'll pass some people doing heavy-duty pastoralism. On the longer stretches between towns, he'll catch sight of a group of two of Gnolls—no Drakes—grazing goats in the hills.

Makes sense with all the meat they eat.

He is not a very talkative travel companion. Though he does check if anyone on the trip plays chess. He can make Prestidigitated pieces stick to the board well enough to play in a bouncy carriage.

Ferris is astonishingly mediocre at it. One of the soldiers is good enough to not be embarrassing, and is fascinated by the sticking pieces.

On the eighth day, they come up on Manus.

Whereas other cities built their walls like, well, city walls, Manus is built in the image of a fortress. An eight-pointed bastion fort, to be precise, sprawling across the landscape, over two hundred feet tall, drawn up to house a hundreds of thousands. It's built out of dark basalt that looks nothing like anything on this continent. But a mile behind the outer facade, another ring of walls rises higher yet: a second fortress, an inner city, carved out from the outer. Only within that guarded heart does the last, innermost citadel of Manus stand, looking over the its charge.

Past the city to the west is a blasted wasteland.

In the skies above the Walled City, flying shapes circle. Winking lights flash from the turrets of the walls. It's nearing evening when they pass into the city's shadow. They slow as they cross the drawbridge over the moat, and the gates open for them as the driver flashes identification.

"Are those birds?" Blai asks, squinting at the flying things.

"Wyvern riders," Ferris answers as the carriage rolls into the city.