It had taken him almost ten hours of rambling around from place to place to stumble on even this small scrap of information. All of his usual sources had dried up, and no one he had talked to could tell him anything he didn’t already know. But the men he was sitting with seemed to have a concrete idea of where at least one of those he was looking for could be found. Even so, the information was provided slowly and only after an initial exchange of coin and some ruminations about the difficulties of life in Varfleet, which led to a further exchange.

But in the end Bombax had what he wanted and was on his way out the door when the roof caved in.

He had been drinking steadily, but only small amounts, not so foolish or inattentive as to allow himself to become intoxicated. Nothing seemed unusual to him until he stood up and started for the door. Even then, for the first dozen steps, he experienced only a mild sense of imbalance, one that caused him to blink and try harder to focus his movements as he neared the door.

But he had only just taken the first step outside when all his strength simply melted away and he collapsed into a deep pool of blackness.

When he awoke, he was lashed to a wooden framework that rested against the wall of a cavernous warehouse empty of almost everything but himself. His mouth was similarly wrapped, the whole of him trussed in such a way that he could neither move nor speak. Someone, he thought right away, knew who and what he was and what it took to stop him from using magic to free himself. Unable to gesture or speak, he had no means of summoning the magic that would free him. His second thought was for the three men in the tavern who had drugged him and given him up to this fate. Although, he corrected himself quickly, he could not jump to conclusions about who had done this to him. The drink had been drugged, but someone besides the three could have done it. He had no clear way of knowing.

What he did know was that he was a captive, and that it almost certainly had to do with his being a Druid.

He glanced at his surroundings. The warehouse was old and dilapidated, and parts of it were missing or falling apart before his eyes. Whole sections of the roof were gone, and pieces of the walls high up near the joists, some thirty feet off the floor, were splintered or broken. Debris littered the floor in mounds.