Swamped

Nothing comes to mind. As far as you can tell, you're as prepared as you're going to be.

You climb onto the other desert horse. Oof, you've never been behind the rear hump before, it's not nearly as comfortable. The grebling driver makes sure you're secure, and then starts running off.

As you leave, the crowd starts to disperse. You really got a lot of people moving, didn't you.

"It's probably simplest if you follow me," Ember says, starting to float. The drivers don't seem to acknowledge the strangeness of this in any way, but then, it's not as if Ember is trying to stay inconspicuous. Not with that outfit, anyways.

It's not a very eventful trip, which is probably just as well. The animals don't pay much attention to you - maybe they've learned to be wary of wizards, or maybe they just don't like to go near desert horses. Before long, you arrive at the transplanted swamp water.

The greblings seem a bit surprised by it. Can't say you blame them, you were shaken yourself and you already knew about the gateways.

"Guess we'd better start filling the crates," you say, climbing down. "Um, how are we going to do that? Just put them in the water?"

"Nah, there's barrels inside 'em," says your driver. He and his cohort leap onto the crates and start climbing up. "Fill the barrels, dump water from the barrels into the crates. It'll take a little while, but it won't be hard."

"I'm sure I can find a way to speed that up a bit, too," Ember says. "If there are no objections."

Well. Seems you'd better get yourself ready for a half hour or so of hard labor. Nothing new, really. You wait a bit and the greblings open up the crates, and start taking the barrels out. There's three per crate, and each crate looks like it's going to take about twenty barrels to fill up. So this could take a while.

Rider grabs two barrels immediately. You pick one up and realize, since they're grebling-sized barrels, you can probably hold two when they're empty. Maybe not when they're full of swamp water, though.

Indeed, you find that the barrels are quite heavy when full. You can only handle one, and it takes both of the greblings to carry the second. Ember, meanwhile, starts chanting and the two remaining barrels just float into the swamp and back.

"Don't suppose you could do that with all of them?" you mutter.

"I'm not quite that good yet. But at least we're running at full capacity without you straining yourself too much."

He's got a point - you need to be in fighting shape after this. And it's not that tiring to carry a single barrel. Still, you'll have to do it seven or eight times.

As you're resigning yourself to that, your eye catches sight of something in the distance. Something... shiny. And it looks like it's getting a little bigger.

Oh hells. A crossbow bolt. You might have enough time to do something about it, if you act fast. But where is it heading?