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aithne[You may notice a certain similarity in names to the last campaign--we're using the same name lists this time around. Do not be alarmed. Any resemblance of that campaign to this one is coincidental.]
After we talked to the cops, it was definitely time for us to find somewhere to put our feet up for a bit. Argos declared his intention to go collect his wife and go to a hotel, while I, in the interest in saving money, decided to go stay with my friends John and Adele. "You can come with me, if you want," I told Electra. "They'll find someplace for you to sleep, I'm sure."
She nodded, and it was off to collect my bag from the barge and say goodbye to Elsie and then head towards where we'd be staying for the night. Elsie understood about things coming up, and at least I'd bothered to tell her, which most of the younger bargemen don't when they're done with a job. "Come back anytime, I'll find you a place," she told me with a smile.
"I'll do that," I told her. "Once this business with the cops is over with."
"At least come by for a drink or something, and tell me what you've been up to," she told me. I agreed, and then Electra and I walked toward John's house. They lived in a low-rent section of the human district, in a ramshackle house that was always on the verge of falling down.
"I met John on one of the river drives I was on, about four months ago," I told Electra when she asked me how I'd met them. "It's heavy and dangerous work, river driving. Working barges is safe, by comparison. He and I got to talking on the drive, and by the time we got back we were friends. I often stay with them for a couple of days between jobs."
"So you're sure they don't have any connection to this?"
I laughed. "Absolutely sure. They're good people."
When we arrived, John was home from a day of working the river, and Adele was finishing up with the sewing she takes in to make ends meet. "Martin! Good to see you!" John said as he opened the door. "And who's this?"
"Electra. She and I got into a spot of cop business earlier today, and I'm keeping an eye on her for a bit."
Adele, in the front room, put her sewing down. "Cop business?"
"Not what you think. We were both witnesses to something, and we got recruited to help catch the person responsible. Anyway, I was wondering if we could stay for a couple of nights. We'll go bring dinner back."
"You're always welcome, Martin, you know that. Drop your stuff here, we'll get the table ready."
I grinned, stashed my bag in a corner, and took Adele with me to the nearest small market. Most of the vendors had closed up shop for the night, except those selling hot food. We picked up the elements of dinner and walked it back.
Electra was given the couch in the front room to sleep on, and I got a spot on the kitchen floor, in front of the stove. Poi climbed out of the pouch he'd been sleeping for most of the day in and snuffled around the kitchen a bit as I settled in. He found a scrap of parchment on the floor and appeared to play with it for a while, then came back over and settled down at the top of my head, a warm little hat for me.
I scratched him, and he...sighed. I raised my head to look at him, and he tucked his nose under one pink paw and went to sleep. It was a little strange, but Poi occasionally did odd stuff. I went to sleep myself, and dreamed confusing dreams about gnomes and trolls.
We'd agreed to meet Argos about noon--he had something he was working on inventing--and decided to go have the potions we'd picked up yesterday identified. We had breakfast with John and Adele, and then headed out. Even at sunrise, the air was warm and steamy, and the weather mages who cried on the major corners said that it was going to get dangerously hot today. There was a ban on forges and fires within the city, and it seemed like just about everyone was taking the day off.
Fortunately, the university was open, just barely. The mage university has a covered courtyard where those who offer their services to the general public ply their trade. If you need a letter written, a message sent, a custom potion made, or something strange identified, that was where you generally went.
We walked in and asked our way around to the three mages who were hanging their shingle out to identify things today. We paid our gold and they conferred. And conferred. We sat down on a nearby bench. There wasn't a breath of wind stirring the muggy air, and even breathing was work.
It gets like this every summer, but not usually until August. If it was doing this in July, we likely had a very long summer ahead of us.
The verdict on the potions and the feather were that the red potion was not a potion but a living creature that would burn through various substances rapidly--an inch of wood in two minutes, stone in five, steel in ten. It was spelled so that glass would contain it, the only substance that would. The blue potion that smelled briny was a water-breathing potion, but a very concentrated one--one drop would cast water breathing on you for two and a half years or so. Impressive.
The green potion was concentrated food and water--one drop would take care of an adult's food and water needs for a day. You wouldn't get hungry or thirsty for a day after you took it.
And the feather, well. "Can't tell," the guy said as he handed it back to me. "Whatever it does, it's so bound up in binding and warding spells that nothing's leaking through. We could take off the warding, but we've got no idea if the person who does that will survive. You might want to try Remy, a necromancer in the demon quarter. She's good at demon stuff, she might be able to tell you more."
"Remy? Really?" Electra turned to me. "She's sort of my mentor. Definitely a friend."
The mage eyed Electra. "I should have known."
I didn't ask him what he meant by that, and I could hear the university's clock strike half past the hour. "We need to go meet Argos," I told her. Let's be off." We collected our things and left.
On the way to meet Argos, Electra told me about Remy. She was an older woman, a very good necromancer who, unlike most of her kind, lived in the city full-time. She kept a large house with a staff of undead servants, all of them scented like a different flower. "The butler smells like lavender, so his name is Lavender," she enthused at me.
I had to allow that undead servants would maybe be less trouble than living ones, but it was still a strange thought. We picked up Argos, who told us in detail about the project he'd finished, a device that would capture an image on a plate coated with chemicals. He'd set it up in the corner of the room with the invisible desk in it with a tripwire, hoping to get an image of anyone who came to visit it today.
Off we went to the demon section, to see Remy. We crossed the bridge into that section, which dropped us directly into the major market for that section. The smells were overwhelming, and not many vendors appeared to be out selling their wares today. We did see a lot of little spinagon demons, about three feet tall and covered in spines. They love the heat, and were out sunning themselves. The other people we saw a lot of were half-form werewolves. That wasn't a particularly promising sight. Every twenty years or so, some idealist gets all the werewolf clans fired up about species pride. Being proud of what you are is one thing, but the problem with werewolves is that the wolf in them is pretty powerful and it doesn't think like the human or humanoid in them. They start hanging out in their half form, and you get territorial fights that can escalate into all-out wars, complete with siege weaponry.
The first sign that something like that is brewing is a lot of werewolves out and about in their hybrid forms. I took note of it and resolved to go on a river drive soon. If it were going to develop into something, it would probably do so in the dog days of August.
We stopped by Electra's place for a bit, a third-floor walkup that was surprisingly large, though the building wasn't in good repair. She changed clothes and grabbed a few things. Looking around, I thought that I might get her a plant or something. Something sturdy, that she couldn't reanimate if it died.
Poi was peeking out of my pouch, looking around at the general untidiness of the place. He climbed out of the pouch and I set him down on the floor. He made a beeline for an open book that was lying on the floor, nose twitching. As I watched, he seemed to study the letters on the page, took a nibble out of the corner of it, then sat on the middle of the page and fervently washed his face. "You're being very strange," I told him. He came back over to me in his waddling way, and I picked him up. "You all right?" I asked him as I lifted him from the floor.
He didn't reply, of course, but I was a little worried. Poi was about three years old, which is a ripe old age for a rat to live to. That's the problem with keeping rats as pets, they die all too soon. I tucked him back in the pouch, and instead of curling up he put his forepaws on the edge and stuck his head out, sniffing.
Electra came out in clean clothing then, and we headed downstairs and over to Remy's. She lived in a house that looked like the architect had been reading too many of those books where the heroines arrive at a castle and have to contend with the dark master of the house. It was huge, made of stone, and there were altogether too many strange towers and spires.
The butler, Lavender by the smell of him, let us in. He looked pretty good for a dead guy, even in the heat; Remy obviously knew her business. We cooled our heels in the library for a bit, and then the lady of the house herself came in.
She was maybe ten years or so older than me, human, silver hair pulled back from her face. She was the sort of classic beauty that ages quite well. Her hair looked like it might be about hip-length when it was down, and her hands were delicate but very scarred from what was probably a number of magical experiments that had blown up in her face. She looked like any woman getting a bit older who'd taken good care of herself.
Hard to believe she was a necromancer. I don't have the kind of disapproval most people feel for necromancers, but they're also not exactly my favorite people in the world, if only because their experiments, when they go awry, go very badly wrong. Anyway, Electra introduced us and then talked to Remy a bit about what she'd found. Rey told us that the white feather's power was to turn whoever held it into the goody-two-shoes version of themselves. If the power wasn't bound, the person who held the feather would be compelled to help those less fortunate, defend the weak, and generally get themselves into large amounts of trouble for being a nosy busybody. I could see why the power had been bound.
The grey feather, the one we hadn't seen yet, would cause the one who carried with it to never age or die. We looked at each other. Here was an explanation for Joab being over four hundred years old, indeed. She told us some other stuff about angels, namely that nobody knows why they manifest and drop all of their spells at sundown, they're all pretty much painfully good, and they're endlessly attracted to places where other demons gather, especially the ones that tend towards criminal behavior. "They like to try to redeem them. We think. Anyway, yes, you can summon a specific angel if you know its true name, but good luck finding that out."
"Can you send a message to one?"
Remy nodded. "That's easier. You don't have to know their true name for that one, just what people call them. If you want, I can see if I can figure out a name of an angel who's still around. It'll take me a few days."
"That would be really helpful," Electra said.
"Oh, I just thought of something you might need. Just a second." Remy left and came back with something small on her hand. She handed us each a small silver medallion. "If Dada is running true to form, she'll be using the werewolves as her eyes and ears. Wear these; they'll ward off a werewolf attack, at least once. I wouldn't trust it more than once, though. The magic wears off of them quickly."
We thanked her, shot the breeze for a few more minutes, and then made our way out. It was midafternoon now, and the day had turned into the promised scorcher. "I have an idea," Electra said. "That water breathing potion--you think they maybe have something set up in the river?"
"We could go look. Do either of you swim?"
Turned out that I was the only one who did. Well, at least with the potion, I didn't have to worry about them drowning. We decided to get some rope and rope together--I'm a strong swimmer, I could easily haul them behind me, and because I'm a river priest, I didn't need the potion to breathe underwater. A swim sounded good, though the Fen was maybe not where I'd choose to swim, but it wouldn't be hot under the water.
I had a couple of light spells, so down we went into the murky water. We didn't find much of anything on the gnome side of the bridge, which was where we were looking, but on the other side I ran into something hard that I couldn't see. A bit of feeling around revealed that it was an invisible cage, partially visible only because of the river silt that had stuck to the bars. I found the gate and Argos opened the lock. Beyond the gate was something that we hadn't seen from the other side.
The floor of the river here was lumpy, as if the river silt had settled over what seemed to be bodies. Each of the lumps had a reed coming from one end, sticking straight up. The effect was of a strange underwater garden.
I pulled myself into the cage and waved the silt off of the lump closest to me. My throat closed. It was a girl, a blonde human girl who was no more than fourteen years old. She was wearing a skimpy swimming costume, and she had some injuries that seemed to indicate that she had not arrived here voluntarily.
Electra crouched beside her, lifting up her hand and taking off a gold ring with inset gems on her right hand. She held it out to me. In the dying light from my spell, I could see that it was engraved: "To JS, from Dad."
The next lump was an older girl, maybe eighteen, also blonde and pretty. The next was another blonde human. Sampling some random lumps, I found more young blonde human women, a blonde halfling, and in the very back a blonde elf with her hair in a style that Electra said was probably a couple of centuries old.
Beyond the elf was another gate, and Argos got through this one pretty easily. I'd stuck my hand through the bars, and found that there was air on the other side. Stepping through, we found ourselves in a rough-hewn corridor, coughing the water out of our lungs. It didn't look like anyone had been through this way recently--the floor was dry. Good enough for me.
There were some supports, and some spells on the ceiling holding it up. Not dwarf work, which worried me. I prefer tunnels that have been dug by experts, and this definitely looked like amateur work. Determining to make our explorations quick, we walked down the corridor to see what was here.
A ways down, the tunnel curved gently to the left. Sharply right, there was a short corridor that led to a door made of wood, with no apparent lock on it. Weird thing about that door--there was a stripe painted all the way around the lintel in a royal purple. There was also a hissing coming from under the door, and when I put my head down to look, I caught a whiff that made me just slightly dizzy. It didn't smell like anything, though, and I figured it was safe enough to take a look.
The door opened inwards and revealed a large room. There were curtains across one whole wall, and near the door there was a strange apparatus. Argos immediately went to the machine and started looking at it. "It's splitting water. If you have anything that makes fire, I wouldn't use it in here. Both things that make up water are flammable."
I looked at him askance. "Splitting...water? What?"
"Water's made up of two different gases," Argos said. "There's a pretty easy experiment that proves it, but it requires being able to control lightning."
"I'll take your word for it," I told him.
"The heavier gas is coming in here, and the lighter one's going somewhere else. The pipes are running...over there, looks like." He pointed at the curtain.
We pulled the curtain back to reveal a glass wall. That was more glass than I'd ever seen in one place, and certainly in one continuous sheet. I tried to imagine the size of the glass foundry that would have created it, and decided it was probably spell-made. Behind the glass was a swirling fog. Something was moving in there, but what?
There were a couple of openings into the glass--one was a large chute that was currently closed with what seemed to be a moveable glass plate, and the other was a spigot like you'd find on a beer cask, also made out of glass. Electra grabbed one of the glass flasks that were sitting on a nearby table, stuck it under the spigot, and pulled the lever.
Out came a red ooze...exactly like the one we had in a flask.
"If that's a creature, is it intelligent?" wondered Electra.
Argos shrugged and walked up to the glass. "Hello?" he said to it.
!iH The word was drawn on the glass in red. Then the word disappeared and more appeared. Hi! Sorry, forgot.
So much for the question of it being intelligent. "Are you in here by choice?" Argos asked.
No!!!!!!!
Whatever this thing was, it was certainly overusing punctuation. We determined through questioning that it had been created from a gelatinous cube, a kind of scavenger that generally lives in abandoned mines and such. Joab had created it, and he and an elf named Mahala had brought it here 425 years ago. It hadn't seen Joab or Mahala for centuries, but it had seen Sigwald a few hours ago, ranting about "that Emily Southgate girl".
It did want out, and it said that if it were out it would eat things and when it wasn't eating, it would go look at things. I tried to imagine a giant red ooze as a tourist, and thought that maybe even the demon section would have issues with that.
It could feel parts of itself that had been taken away from it. There were four in motion, but it had no idea who was carrying them. One was in the troll section, two in the demon section, one in the elven section. There were seventeen others, including the two Emily had.
One of the stationary ones was in a place over four hundred feet beneath the human district, in a spot that used to be called Southgate Street. When we asked about the blondes, the red stuff said that they were payment to a vampire named Nielsen with very specific taste in food, in exchange for hiding Joab. The cage did have that sort of larder-like feel to it, so I thought that was likely accurate. The ooze told us where Nielsen's house was, about four blocks away from Remy's.
"I've heard of him," Electra said. "One of the most powerful vampires in the city. He does a lot of business in the demon district."
Saying goodbye to the ooze and telling it we'd let it out if we could, we returned the bit we'd taken through the cute and arranged things in the room exactly as they had been when we walked in. Out and down the corridor we went, seeing what else was down here. The corridor curved around in what would be a horseshoe pattern when it was finished, and along one side of the tunnel was a dark streak, with something shining in it. I looked at one of the shining things, and frowned. "Is this what it looks like?"
Argos eyed it. "Looks like diamonds."
"Yeah, I thought so." There used to be gem mines around the city, but they were all played out some time ago. Looked like these folks had stumbled on some gem-bearing stone, probably by accident.
There was a door off the curve of the corridor that was surrounded by yet another stripe of purple paint. I eyed it. I'd thought it was a strange decorating decision made by someone who liked purple, but here it was again. I cast detect magic, and discovered that it was indeed highly magical.
It was, oddly enough, surveillance magic. When we spoke to it, it responded and told us that it could make images of those who'd passed through the door. "Show us the last person who came through," I said.
The paint peeled off the wall and assembled itself into a life-sized mannequin of a gnome. Sigwald, I assumed. "Who was the last person who was not this one to come through?"
It reconfigured itself, this time into a purple image that looked a lot like me. Joab. It turned out that the last time Sigwald had checked the paint, it had been two and a half years ago. Hoofing it back to the other door, we asked it how many images of people it cad captured in its lifetime.
It hummed, calculating. "Eight hundred ninety thousand, three hundred and seventeen individuals."
"In the last five years?"
"Eleven."
Well, at least this wasn't a high-traffic doorway any more. "Show us the last one who was neither us nor the gnome," Electra said.
"As she was when she came out." There was the prone form of the girl we'd uncovered outside, the young one. "As she was when she went in." The same girl, apparently struggling. "The same women come through every so often. He places them behind the door and when he opens it again, they are asleep."
"Can you make an image of us?" I asked. It complied. I inspected the one of me. "I need to trim the beard. I'm looking kind of scruffy," I muttered to myself.
"Do you want an image of the sentience in your pocket?" the paint asked.
"The what in my what?"
"The sentience in your pocket. I am programmed to ignore forms smaller than ten pounds, but also to pay attention to sentience."
I choked. "Wait. The rat in my pocket is a pet. He's not sentient that I've ever noticed." Poi had been curled up in my pocket, and I could feel him stir and stick his head out of the pouch.
"He is thinking thoughts that are far beyond those of an animal. He seems to have been exposed to some energy that has altered him. The death of an angel will sometimes do that to the vermin who aren't killed by it. If it was an angel's death, it will have increased his intelligence a hundredfold."
I looked down at Poi. Poi looked back. I scratched my head. "Well, show us an image, anyway."
The paint assembled itself into a giant image of Poi, roundness and all, complete with correctly-proportioned genitalia which looked rather obscene at that scale. "Put it away," I said. "Please."
We used the angel blood to become invisible and went through the other door. I'd thought it would be a bedroom, and I wasn't disappointed. It was pretty plain--a bed, a table, a cupboard for clothes, some art supplies. Under the bed were stacks of paper and parchment, though, that was very interesting indeed. They were pictures of naked and mostly naked women, all drawn in the same hand, some signed by Sigwald. "Looks like he made his own pornography," I said, holding up a picture of a blonde gnome.
He was pretty good, too. Sifting through the pile, we found pictures of the women we'd uncovered outside. The younger ones were clothed, the older ones naked. There was another picture as well, and I raised my eyebrows as I held it up. "Is this who it looks like?"
Electra squeaked a bit. "That looks like Remy! But younger."
About twenty-five or thirty years younger, to be exact. Sigwald's rendition of her, if it was her, revealed her to have been even more smoking in her youth than she was now. "Does Remy have any daughters? This isn't dated."
"One or two, I think," she said. "Might be one of them."
I eyed the picture. "Might be someone who just looks a lot like her. Nice, though." I put the drawing away, looking around. On the ceiling, there was painted a map of the city, and I frowned as I swept my eyes across it. I was pretty familiar with the troll section--my father had some business associates there, and we'd occasionally go over for dinner when I was growing up--and I'd never seen a street called Emrou Street. "Argos, look at this. That's not on the map."
The other two put down the pictures and came to look. Argos got out his map. "Look, there's a building on the ceiling that I know isn't there now," Electra said. "That's an empty lot in the demon section."
Strange, and worth checking out, both of those things. "So," I said. "What do we do now? We know where Sigwald sleeps. How do we take him out?"
Argos suggested, "The druids?"
I made a face. "I hate dealing with them. Anyone have any better ideas?"
We went back and forth with it for a while, but decided in the end that the druids had the most compelling interest in taking Sigwald down, and had the resources to do so. I sighed. "Well, let's go. We can go through the troll and demon section on the way and look at those strange spots on the map."
We came out of the tunnel, locking the cage doors behind us, and swam up and out of the river. The heated air hit us hard, drying out clothes quickly as we came up on the demon side and started walking--still invisible, mind you--through the demon section.
The place that Emily had said was an empty lot turned out to be just that. But looked at with magic sight, there was a shimmering door-shape in the middle of the lot. It looked like it was a dimension door, which meant that it could go just about anywhere--to another plane, even. We chose to let it alone and kept walking.
In the troll section, we walked down the block where Emrou Street would be. The block looked like a normal block, but it took twice as long to walk down as a normal block would. Baffled, we turned and walked to the midway point, finding ourselves facing the side of a building. Emily took a breath, set her jaw, and walked into it.
She vanished.
Not knowing what exactly she was getting into, I followed her. The sight that met my eyes was...well. Something else.
The first thing I saw was what appeared to be a slave auction. A moment or so of observation confirmed that impression. There were indeed slaves being sold here. Slavery is illegal, extremely so. There was someone with a pen that had three exhausted-looking unicorns in it, prostitutes of every stripe, people hawking things they swore were aphrodisiacs.
I grabbed Electra's arm and we both got out of there. Well, we now knew what was on Emrou street, and why it was so hard to find. Further investigation would need to wait for later, because it was getting on towards sunset and we still needed to talk to the druids.
We walked through the gates into the park-like druid quarter. There was a man in a druid cloak apparently tending a bush ahead. When we approached, he straightened and cocked an eyebrow at us. "Can I help you?"
"You have a renegade druid on the loose, named Sigwald. We know where he is."
His expression didn't change. "And what would you want for this information?"
"There's a creature where he'll be that we'd like freed, preferably where it won't hurt anything, and there's a bunch of women being held captive just outside that we'd like to be able to get out in one piece, unless you'd like to rescue them yourselves. We'd like to talk to Sigwald before you do whatever you're going to do with him. And we'd like access to the place afterwards, if you don't destroy it."
"We have no interest in the women. If you want them, you'll need to get them yourself. Stay here, I will confer." He stepped into a tree, and left us cooling our heels for about twenty minutes. We sat down in the shade of a tree and watched the sun slide towards the horizon. It was hot enough that the air felt a bit difficult to breathe, and I was starting to look forward to going back to a barge. I wasn't used to walking over the city, and especially not in this weather.
The druid walked back out of the tree. "The terms are acceptable. Return here just after sunrise tomorrow, at 6:30 precisely. For five minutes, that tree that you saw me walk through will be open to you, and it will take you to where we have him. Give me the location, and I will carry it back to my people.
I described the place to him, and he nodded then turned and walked back through the day. Looking at the rough bark of the tree he'd just disappeared into, I said, "I don't know about you guys, but I'm beat. Electra, are you coming back with me to John and Adele's, or are you going home?"
She shook her head. "I bet they know where I live. I'll come with you."
I didn't mention that we'd probably need to find somewhere else to stay tomorrow night; I try not to strain the hospitality of my friends by staying with them for too long, or too often. I had a couple more friends I could stay with if need be, but to be honest, I wasn't sure I wanted to put Emily and either of them under the same roof for too long. Both of them liked their girls young, and at the very least there would be unrestrained leering. Then I'd have to thump some heads till they stopped it. We'd work something out, though.
Argos said that he and his wife would return to the hotel they'd stayed at the night before, and we split up, agreeing to meet pre-dawn in the troll district. Electra and I walked back to John and Adele's. Both of them were home, since the bargemen had been given the day off because of the heat.
We had dinner together, a cold meal in the house's tiny courtyard as the sun went down. After dinner, John lit lamps in the courtyard, and Electra pulled out a book she'd brought with her, digging into some studying. I pulled out a shirt whose sleeve I'd torn a few days ago, and the needle and thread I keep in my bag.
Adele rolled her eyes. "Martin. Let me have that. You sew like a sailor."
"I am a sailor, in a way," I told her mildly. "It's fine, I've been mending my own things for years. You sew all day, you shouldn't have to in the evening."
"You can't sew linen like sailcloth," she said, rising to pull the shirt and thread out of my hand. "Little gods, what have you done to this shirt? Well, at least the needle's steel, and the thread's good." She sat down in her chair under the lamp above her head. Moths fluttered franticly around the lamps, and I heard the squeaks of bats overhead. Poi climbed out of his pouch and onto my lap, where he started on washing himself. "How'd you come by this tear?"
"Caught it on the edge of a crate the other day," I said. Adele was very good at what she did, and already the tear in the shirt was beginning to disappear under her practiced hands. A good seamstress has a little bit of magic in her hands, magic to persuade thread to hold and cloth to weave back together. Most people don't have the talent to be a mage, but a lot of them have knacks, like Argos and his machines, like me and being able to feel the currents in the river. John can sometimes feel when there's some variation in the river bottom where there hasn't been before.
"You need a keeper, Martin," she said as she worked on the shirt. "Or a wife. You ever going to settle down?"
I shrugged uncomfortably. "The most important thing in my life is the river. Almost always has been. Women don't like competing against something like that, I've found."
"Yeah? What about that pilot you were telling us about? She wouldn't mind."
"I think she's sleeping with the guy who owns the barge," I told her. "Besides, I don't earn enough to keep a place to live. Once I've got my own barge, maybe."
"Maybe, maybe," she said, snorting. She tossed the shirt back at me. "I'm sending John to the baths tonight with the laundry. You should go too."
"Probably a good idea, I'm feeling a bit on the rough side," I agreed. "Electra, you want to come with us?"
"I washed at home," she said. "I'm fine."
I nodded and went to help John gather the laundry together. The baths were lively tonight, the social center of the neighborhood, where you could come to have a bath, a haircut, or a shave, or to have your hair braided if you were female. There was a laundry attached to the baths where for a fee the laundresses would wash your clothing, or you could do it yourself if you were so inclined. John and I bathed while the laundresses were working on our clothes, and I trimmed myself up since I had access to a mirror here.
Then it was back to the house for some sleep. "I'll see what I can do about you talking tomorrow," I promised Poi as we settled in for the night. "At least to me."
He reached forward and tickled my forehead with his whiskers, which I thought was maybe gratitude. Poi didn't really look particularly happy, but he was at least still acting halfway normally. I couldn't imagine what he was thinking. He was a rat, and an especially lazy and greedy example of his kind. I loved him, of course, and if a rat could be said to be anyone's friend, he was surely mine. But what would a rat who was suddenly smarter than a bunch of mages put together do with all those smarts?
I supposed I'd see.
The next morning, I woke Electra a couple of hours before dawn, a development that I can tell you she was not happy about. But she got out of bed with a minimum of grumbling, and we walked out towards the druid section, meeting Argos in the troll district. The sun had just come over the horizon when we walked into the druid district, to the tree that we'd seen yesterday. The trunk was sparkling a little, and I took a breath and walked through.
We arrived in a circle of big trees. Really big trees. There was snow on the ground, and I wished I'd brought a coat. I had no idea where we were, but it was nowhere near where we'd come from.
The same druid who we'd talked to before approached us. "Sigwald is there," he said, gesturing to the center of the circle. "He is more than willing to talk. We'll let you know if he lies."
I felt Poi stir in the pouch and poke his head out, looking around. Electra and Argos followed me as we walked to the figure on the ground in front of us. Sigwald was hog-tied on the ground, mostly naked and much the worse for wear. Most of his hair had been burned off.
We started out with the important stuff--where Dada was spending her days. Turned out there were three places she was a lot--one in the demon section, through the building that wasn't there, one the house where she was entombed, and one in a cavern 450 feet beneath Southgate manor. "Any reason Southgate Manor in particular?"
"It's just where the cavern is," he said.
He told us we could find Joab in any of those three places, at Nielsen's place, or out on the planes, hunting angels. He was friends with Nielsen, and had been before Nielsen had become a vampire. When we asked about Remy, he said that she was an old lover of his, but he hadn't seen her in over twenty years. Something about how he said it suggested that it hadn't been a friendly breakup. Remy's family had been allied with Dada for centuries, but was no longer. Remy had become somewhat unreliable for them, and they feared that she was passing information about them on to someone else.
When asked what Dada wanted, he said, "The city. The mage university, especially. She doesn't have a foothold in the elven sector yet, but she does have all of the leaders of the human sector under her thumb but one. She's still looking for the Southgate daughter."
I winced, and was glad nobody was looking at me at the moment. My blood family isn't any of my business any more, I told myself. We're quit of each other. Still, it wasn't good news that my brother likely had had one of his children kidnapped. Paolo was resourceful, though, and if anyone was going to get their kid back, it was him.
Unfortunately, as Sigwald continued to talk, we found that most of those who had been kidnapped were already dead, except for those who met Nielsen's criteria. I guessed my brother wasn't going to get his kid back, after all.
When we asked about the red ooze creatures, Sigwald said that he had carried one, Dada carried one, and Joab carried one. When pressed, he admitted that Meta, the alpha of the werewolves in the demon section, also had one. That was not good news, but not unexpected.
"What about Joab?" I asked. "What's his deal?"
"Most of us are in it for the money," Sigwald told me. "Joab's different. All he wants is redemption, and it's the one thing he'll never have. He killed his own wife a few years before Dada was captured, truly accidentally mind you, but she's still dead by his hand. He carries that grey feather as a penance for what he's done."
"I know he used to worship Istishia. Who does he worship now?"
"Bane," he said.
I recognized the name; Bane is one of the gods of darkness, the Black Lord, the god that the corrupted and the hateful pray to, the god of lost souls and lost causes. "Any ideas why the hell he and I look so much alike?"
"No, but the resemblance is striking," he said, eyeing me. "Joab had one child, a daughter named Sondra. She married someone, don't know who or what happened to her, but maybe she's an ancestor. The family name's Icelorn, if you want to find out who she married."
When we asked him about the leaders, he told us that Mahala was one. When we objected, saying she was in prison, he grinned. "Only her body is in jail. She's a powerful psionicist." Then he gave us more names: Warda, the vampire that created Nielsen; Percy, the head of the university in the human district; Krist, a very strong true demon who happened to have been born here, and who held the allegiance of most of the true demons in the demon quarter; Marcel, an actor who wanders in and out of high society; Yoko, a dwarf and head of the mining guilds; Sasha, a druid who most believed to be dead, who handled getting things in and out of the black market and was the main supplier of potions and weird devices; and Ellis, a troll who used to be Dada's consort, who was now seeing Bara.
Well, that wasn't good news. We got details about locations of all of these people, asked about Nielsen's blondes (answer: his wife, who he refused to make a vampire, was blonde) and asked about how Dada's people were set up. Each person evidently knew seven others; Joab's list of contacts were different from Sigwald's, for example. He usually contacted Dada once a day through a diamond pendant. When he missed today's check-in, Dada would wait a day and try again, and then give him up for dead if he didn't answer.
We got some more information, and then ran out of questions. The druids were getting twitchy, so we finished talking to Sigwald and then stepped back as the druids closed in.
He ended up in a lot of very small pieces, sinking into the earth. Then, without a word to us, most of the druids turned and left. The one we'd spoken to before approached us. "You've involved yourself deeply in this," he said without preamble. "We want updates from you when you find things out. This will allow you to communicate with us, and spy on Dada's communications." He handed me a pendant made from a rough-cut diamond on a chain made from a silvery metal.
"And in return?" asked Argos suspiciously.
"We will heal you when you need it, and rescue you when you need that."
There didn't seem to be any good way to refuse, so I shrugged and accepted. The druid pointed out the tree we'd need to leave by, and turned and walked into another tree entirely. I heard an indignant sound from my pouch, and realized that Poi was stretched up towards my hands, trying to get a good look at the pendant.
Rats are pretty near-sighted, so I dropped the pendant into his pouch so he could look at it to his heart's content. "Well, I suppose we should be getting back," I said with a shiver. "God, I hate dealing with druids."
"I see why," Electra said. "I was just thinking about something. I was talking with Remy, the night I was late coming over the bridge. She was showing me something useful for once, not just discussing theory with me."
I looked askance at her. "Think it might have been on purpose?"
"Maybe. I don't know what to think about her at the moment."
Necromancers are bad news in general, but I didn't mention this to Electra. She was a smart girl; I figured she'd work out for herself the mistake that becoming a necromancer was, hopefully before it was too late to learn how to do something else with her life.
We went back to the city, back to the familiar heat, Poi in his pouch still inspecting the diamond pendant. I didn't know what to think about Joab, and about the rather uncomfortable parallels between his life and mine.
I hadn't killed my wife, but my young daughter had died, in a way that was arguably my fault. That death, and the depression I'd sunk into afterwards, had lost me my wife and my other two children. My living daughter would be Electra's age now, my son a year younger. I'd gone into the River Brothers after Luce had taken the children and left me, and she had remarried a year or so later. Her new husband had adopted the children, and they were none of mine, now.
I'd spent fifteen years dealing with what had happened, through hard, unpleasant work, serving the river and the Lord of the Wave. I'd run to the god; Joab had run away from him. What made the difference, there? I'd forgiven myself, finally; Inge's death had been an tragic accident, if a somewhat strange one. Why hadn't Joab been able to get there? And why did he feel the need to torture himself by staying alive?
It was kind of stupid, if you asked me. It might take fifteen years or fifty, but eventually you got over it. And if you didn't get over it, well, there was always the next life, if you believed in that. If nothing else, death brought a surcease of pain.
Of course, thinking about Inge's death brought me to wondering where Luce and the kids were now, as I did on occasion. I had no idea who she'd married, the papers I'd been given stating I was quit of any parental privilege and responsibility hadn't told me who had adopted them. Luce had always had a good head on her shoulders, and I was sure she'd picked someone who treated her as well as she deserved. Better than me, at least at the end, I was sure.
Ah, well. They weren't mine, any longer, and they were better off for me being out of their lives. Coming back into their lives would bring nothing but pain on all sides. I put them out of my mind as we started to discuss next steps, trying to figure out how to track down Dada and Joab and the rest.
In my pocket, Poi played with the diamond pendant. I didn't know if I should worry, or not...
Quotes:
"Of all the places I'd like to sleep, at the bottom of the river is not on my list."
--Argos
"So all the blondes have high Nielsen ratings?"
--Derek
"We get the people who are doing this, and we can rescue all the cute young blondes we want."
"I'm thinking of rescuing the cute blonde red thing."
"You, my friend, have a very strange sense of priorities."
--Martin, Argos
"My rat...is smarter than I am."
--Martin
"That was going to be the redhead section."
--Sigwald
After we talked to the cops, it was definitely time for us to find somewhere to put our feet up for a bit. Argos declared his intention to go collect his wife and go to a hotel, while I, in the interest in saving money, decided to go stay with my friends John and Adele. "You can come with me, if you want," I told Electra. "They'll find someplace for you to sleep, I'm sure."
She nodded, and it was off to collect my bag from the barge and say goodbye to Elsie and then head towards where we'd be staying for the night. Elsie understood about things coming up, and at least I'd bothered to tell her, which most of the younger bargemen don't when they're done with a job. "Come back anytime, I'll find you a place," she told me with a smile.
"I'll do that," I told her. "Once this business with the cops is over with."
"At least come by for a drink or something, and tell me what you've been up to," she told me. I agreed, and then Electra and I walked toward John's house. They lived in a low-rent section of the human district, in a ramshackle house that was always on the verge of falling down.
"I met John on one of the river drives I was on, about four months ago," I told Electra when she asked me how I'd met them. "It's heavy and dangerous work, river driving. Working barges is safe, by comparison. He and I got to talking on the drive, and by the time we got back we were friends. I often stay with them for a couple of days between jobs."
"So you're sure they don't have any connection to this?"
I laughed. "Absolutely sure. They're good people."
When we arrived, John was home from a day of working the river, and Adele was finishing up with the sewing she takes in to make ends meet. "Martin! Good to see you!" John said as he opened the door. "And who's this?"
"Electra. She and I got into a spot of cop business earlier today, and I'm keeping an eye on her for a bit."
Adele, in the front room, put her sewing down. "Cop business?"
"Not what you think. We were both witnesses to something, and we got recruited to help catch the person responsible. Anyway, I was wondering if we could stay for a couple of nights. We'll go bring dinner back."
"You're always welcome, Martin, you know that. Drop your stuff here, we'll get the table ready."
I grinned, stashed my bag in a corner, and took Adele with me to the nearest small market. Most of the vendors had closed up shop for the night, except those selling hot food. We picked up the elements of dinner and walked it back.
Electra was given the couch in the front room to sleep on, and I got a spot on the kitchen floor, in front of the stove. Poi climbed out of the pouch he'd been sleeping for most of the day in and snuffled around the kitchen a bit as I settled in. He found a scrap of parchment on the floor and appeared to play with it for a while, then came back over and settled down at the top of my head, a warm little hat for me.
I scratched him, and he...sighed. I raised my head to look at him, and he tucked his nose under one pink paw and went to sleep. It was a little strange, but Poi occasionally did odd stuff. I went to sleep myself, and dreamed confusing dreams about gnomes and trolls.
We'd agreed to meet Argos about noon--he had something he was working on inventing--and decided to go have the potions we'd picked up yesterday identified. We had breakfast with John and Adele, and then headed out. Even at sunrise, the air was warm and steamy, and the weather mages who cried on the major corners said that it was going to get dangerously hot today. There was a ban on forges and fires within the city, and it seemed like just about everyone was taking the day off.
Fortunately, the university was open, just barely. The mage university has a covered courtyard where those who offer their services to the general public ply their trade. If you need a letter written, a message sent, a custom potion made, or something strange identified, that was where you generally went.
We walked in and asked our way around to the three mages who were hanging their shingle out to identify things today. We paid our gold and they conferred. And conferred. We sat down on a nearby bench. There wasn't a breath of wind stirring the muggy air, and even breathing was work.
It gets like this every summer, but not usually until August. If it was doing this in July, we likely had a very long summer ahead of us.
The verdict on the potions and the feather were that the red potion was not a potion but a living creature that would burn through various substances rapidly--an inch of wood in two minutes, stone in five, steel in ten. It was spelled so that glass would contain it, the only substance that would. The blue potion that smelled briny was a water-breathing potion, but a very concentrated one--one drop would cast water breathing on you for two and a half years or so. Impressive.
The green potion was concentrated food and water--one drop would take care of an adult's food and water needs for a day. You wouldn't get hungry or thirsty for a day after you took it.
And the feather, well. "Can't tell," the guy said as he handed it back to me. "Whatever it does, it's so bound up in binding and warding spells that nothing's leaking through. We could take off the warding, but we've got no idea if the person who does that will survive. You might want to try Remy, a necromancer in the demon quarter. She's good at demon stuff, she might be able to tell you more."
"Remy? Really?" Electra turned to me. "She's sort of my mentor. Definitely a friend."
The mage eyed Electra. "I should have known."
I didn't ask him what he meant by that, and I could hear the university's clock strike half past the hour. "We need to go meet Argos," I told her. Let's be off." We collected our things and left.
On the way to meet Argos, Electra told me about Remy. She was an older woman, a very good necromancer who, unlike most of her kind, lived in the city full-time. She kept a large house with a staff of undead servants, all of them scented like a different flower. "The butler smells like lavender, so his name is Lavender," she enthused at me.
I had to allow that undead servants would maybe be less trouble than living ones, but it was still a strange thought. We picked up Argos, who told us in detail about the project he'd finished, a device that would capture an image on a plate coated with chemicals. He'd set it up in the corner of the room with the invisible desk in it with a tripwire, hoping to get an image of anyone who came to visit it today.
Off we went to the demon section, to see Remy. We crossed the bridge into that section, which dropped us directly into the major market for that section. The smells were overwhelming, and not many vendors appeared to be out selling their wares today. We did see a lot of little spinagon demons, about three feet tall and covered in spines. They love the heat, and were out sunning themselves. The other people we saw a lot of were half-form werewolves. That wasn't a particularly promising sight. Every twenty years or so, some idealist gets all the werewolf clans fired up about species pride. Being proud of what you are is one thing, but the problem with werewolves is that the wolf in them is pretty powerful and it doesn't think like the human or humanoid in them. They start hanging out in their half form, and you get territorial fights that can escalate into all-out wars, complete with siege weaponry.
The first sign that something like that is brewing is a lot of werewolves out and about in their hybrid forms. I took note of it and resolved to go on a river drive soon. If it were going to develop into something, it would probably do so in the dog days of August.
We stopped by Electra's place for a bit, a third-floor walkup that was surprisingly large, though the building wasn't in good repair. She changed clothes and grabbed a few things. Looking around, I thought that I might get her a plant or something. Something sturdy, that she couldn't reanimate if it died.
Poi was peeking out of my pouch, looking around at the general untidiness of the place. He climbed out of the pouch and I set him down on the floor. He made a beeline for an open book that was lying on the floor, nose twitching. As I watched, he seemed to study the letters on the page, took a nibble out of the corner of it, then sat on the middle of the page and fervently washed his face. "You're being very strange," I told him. He came back over to me in his waddling way, and I picked him up. "You all right?" I asked him as I lifted him from the floor.
He didn't reply, of course, but I was a little worried. Poi was about three years old, which is a ripe old age for a rat to live to. That's the problem with keeping rats as pets, they die all too soon. I tucked him back in the pouch, and instead of curling up he put his forepaws on the edge and stuck his head out, sniffing.
Electra came out in clean clothing then, and we headed downstairs and over to Remy's. She lived in a house that looked like the architect had been reading too many of those books where the heroines arrive at a castle and have to contend with the dark master of the house. It was huge, made of stone, and there were altogether too many strange towers and spires.
The butler, Lavender by the smell of him, let us in. He looked pretty good for a dead guy, even in the heat; Remy obviously knew her business. We cooled our heels in the library for a bit, and then the lady of the house herself came in.
She was maybe ten years or so older than me, human, silver hair pulled back from her face. She was the sort of classic beauty that ages quite well. Her hair looked like it might be about hip-length when it was down, and her hands were delicate but very scarred from what was probably a number of magical experiments that had blown up in her face. She looked like any woman getting a bit older who'd taken good care of herself.
Hard to believe she was a necromancer. I don't have the kind of disapproval most people feel for necromancers, but they're also not exactly my favorite people in the world, if only because their experiments, when they go awry, go very badly wrong. Anyway, Electra introduced us and then talked to Remy a bit about what she'd found. Rey told us that the white feather's power was to turn whoever held it into the goody-two-shoes version of themselves. If the power wasn't bound, the person who held the feather would be compelled to help those less fortunate, defend the weak, and generally get themselves into large amounts of trouble for being a nosy busybody. I could see why the power had been bound.
The grey feather, the one we hadn't seen yet, would cause the one who carried with it to never age or die. We looked at each other. Here was an explanation for Joab being over four hundred years old, indeed. She told us some other stuff about angels, namely that nobody knows why they manifest and drop all of their spells at sundown, they're all pretty much painfully good, and they're endlessly attracted to places where other demons gather, especially the ones that tend towards criminal behavior. "They like to try to redeem them. We think. Anyway, yes, you can summon a specific angel if you know its true name, but good luck finding that out."
"Can you send a message to one?"
Remy nodded. "That's easier. You don't have to know their true name for that one, just what people call them. If you want, I can see if I can figure out a name of an angel who's still around. It'll take me a few days."
"That would be really helpful," Electra said.
"Oh, I just thought of something you might need. Just a second." Remy left and came back with something small on her hand. She handed us each a small silver medallion. "If Dada is running true to form, she'll be using the werewolves as her eyes and ears. Wear these; they'll ward off a werewolf attack, at least once. I wouldn't trust it more than once, though. The magic wears off of them quickly."
We thanked her, shot the breeze for a few more minutes, and then made our way out. It was midafternoon now, and the day had turned into the promised scorcher. "I have an idea," Electra said. "That water breathing potion--you think they maybe have something set up in the river?"
"We could go look. Do either of you swim?"
Turned out that I was the only one who did. Well, at least with the potion, I didn't have to worry about them drowning. We decided to get some rope and rope together--I'm a strong swimmer, I could easily haul them behind me, and because I'm a river priest, I didn't need the potion to breathe underwater. A swim sounded good, though the Fen was maybe not where I'd choose to swim, but it wouldn't be hot under the water.
I had a couple of light spells, so down we went into the murky water. We didn't find much of anything on the gnome side of the bridge, which was where we were looking, but on the other side I ran into something hard that I couldn't see. A bit of feeling around revealed that it was an invisible cage, partially visible only because of the river silt that had stuck to the bars. I found the gate and Argos opened the lock. Beyond the gate was something that we hadn't seen from the other side.
The floor of the river here was lumpy, as if the river silt had settled over what seemed to be bodies. Each of the lumps had a reed coming from one end, sticking straight up. The effect was of a strange underwater garden.
I pulled myself into the cage and waved the silt off of the lump closest to me. My throat closed. It was a girl, a blonde human girl who was no more than fourteen years old. She was wearing a skimpy swimming costume, and she had some injuries that seemed to indicate that she had not arrived here voluntarily.
Electra crouched beside her, lifting up her hand and taking off a gold ring with inset gems on her right hand. She held it out to me. In the dying light from my spell, I could see that it was engraved: "To JS, from Dad."
The next lump was an older girl, maybe eighteen, also blonde and pretty. The next was another blonde human. Sampling some random lumps, I found more young blonde human women, a blonde halfling, and in the very back a blonde elf with her hair in a style that Electra said was probably a couple of centuries old.
Beyond the elf was another gate, and Argos got through this one pretty easily. I'd stuck my hand through the bars, and found that there was air on the other side. Stepping through, we found ourselves in a rough-hewn corridor, coughing the water out of our lungs. It didn't look like anyone had been through this way recently--the floor was dry. Good enough for me.
There were some supports, and some spells on the ceiling holding it up. Not dwarf work, which worried me. I prefer tunnels that have been dug by experts, and this definitely looked like amateur work. Determining to make our explorations quick, we walked down the corridor to see what was here.
A ways down, the tunnel curved gently to the left. Sharply right, there was a short corridor that led to a door made of wood, with no apparent lock on it. Weird thing about that door--there was a stripe painted all the way around the lintel in a royal purple. There was also a hissing coming from under the door, and when I put my head down to look, I caught a whiff that made me just slightly dizzy. It didn't smell like anything, though, and I figured it was safe enough to take a look.
The door opened inwards and revealed a large room. There were curtains across one whole wall, and near the door there was a strange apparatus. Argos immediately went to the machine and started looking at it. "It's splitting water. If you have anything that makes fire, I wouldn't use it in here. Both things that make up water are flammable."
I looked at him askance. "Splitting...water? What?"
"Water's made up of two different gases," Argos said. "There's a pretty easy experiment that proves it, but it requires being able to control lightning."
"I'll take your word for it," I told him.
"The heavier gas is coming in here, and the lighter one's going somewhere else. The pipes are running...over there, looks like." He pointed at the curtain.
We pulled the curtain back to reveal a glass wall. That was more glass than I'd ever seen in one place, and certainly in one continuous sheet. I tried to imagine the size of the glass foundry that would have created it, and decided it was probably spell-made. Behind the glass was a swirling fog. Something was moving in there, but what?
There were a couple of openings into the glass--one was a large chute that was currently closed with what seemed to be a moveable glass plate, and the other was a spigot like you'd find on a beer cask, also made out of glass. Electra grabbed one of the glass flasks that were sitting on a nearby table, stuck it under the spigot, and pulled the lever.
Out came a red ooze...exactly like the one we had in a flask.
"If that's a creature, is it intelligent?" wondered Electra.
Argos shrugged and walked up to the glass. "Hello?" he said to it.
!iH The word was drawn on the glass in red. Then the word disappeared and more appeared. Hi! Sorry, forgot.
So much for the question of it being intelligent. "Are you in here by choice?" Argos asked.
No!!!!!!!
Whatever this thing was, it was certainly overusing punctuation. We determined through questioning that it had been created from a gelatinous cube, a kind of scavenger that generally lives in abandoned mines and such. Joab had created it, and he and an elf named Mahala had brought it here 425 years ago. It hadn't seen Joab or Mahala for centuries, but it had seen Sigwald a few hours ago, ranting about "that Emily Southgate girl".
It did want out, and it said that if it were out it would eat things and when it wasn't eating, it would go look at things. I tried to imagine a giant red ooze as a tourist, and thought that maybe even the demon section would have issues with that.
It could feel parts of itself that had been taken away from it. There were four in motion, but it had no idea who was carrying them. One was in the troll section, two in the demon section, one in the elven section. There were seventeen others, including the two Emily had.
One of the stationary ones was in a place over four hundred feet beneath the human district, in a spot that used to be called Southgate Street. When we asked about the blondes, the red stuff said that they were payment to a vampire named Nielsen with very specific taste in food, in exchange for hiding Joab. The cage did have that sort of larder-like feel to it, so I thought that was likely accurate. The ooze told us where Nielsen's house was, about four blocks away from Remy's.
"I've heard of him," Electra said. "One of the most powerful vampires in the city. He does a lot of business in the demon district."
Saying goodbye to the ooze and telling it we'd let it out if we could, we returned the bit we'd taken through the cute and arranged things in the room exactly as they had been when we walked in. Out and down the corridor we went, seeing what else was down here. The corridor curved around in what would be a horseshoe pattern when it was finished, and along one side of the tunnel was a dark streak, with something shining in it. I looked at one of the shining things, and frowned. "Is this what it looks like?"
Argos eyed it. "Looks like diamonds."
"Yeah, I thought so." There used to be gem mines around the city, but they were all played out some time ago. Looked like these folks had stumbled on some gem-bearing stone, probably by accident.
There was a door off the curve of the corridor that was surrounded by yet another stripe of purple paint. I eyed it. I'd thought it was a strange decorating decision made by someone who liked purple, but here it was again. I cast detect magic, and discovered that it was indeed highly magical.
It was, oddly enough, surveillance magic. When we spoke to it, it responded and told us that it could make images of those who'd passed through the door. "Show us the last person who came through," I said.
The paint peeled off the wall and assembled itself into a life-sized mannequin of a gnome. Sigwald, I assumed. "Who was the last person who was not this one to come through?"
It reconfigured itself, this time into a purple image that looked a lot like me. Joab. It turned out that the last time Sigwald had checked the paint, it had been two and a half years ago. Hoofing it back to the other door, we asked it how many images of people it cad captured in its lifetime.
It hummed, calculating. "Eight hundred ninety thousand, three hundred and seventeen individuals."
"In the last five years?"
"Eleven."
Well, at least this wasn't a high-traffic doorway any more. "Show us the last one who was neither us nor the gnome," Electra said.
"As she was when she came out." There was the prone form of the girl we'd uncovered outside, the young one. "As she was when she went in." The same girl, apparently struggling. "The same women come through every so often. He places them behind the door and when he opens it again, they are asleep."
"Can you make an image of us?" I asked. It complied. I inspected the one of me. "I need to trim the beard. I'm looking kind of scruffy," I muttered to myself.
"Do you want an image of the sentience in your pocket?" the paint asked.
"The what in my what?"
"The sentience in your pocket. I am programmed to ignore forms smaller than ten pounds, but also to pay attention to sentience."
I choked. "Wait. The rat in my pocket is a pet. He's not sentient that I've ever noticed." Poi had been curled up in my pocket, and I could feel him stir and stick his head out of the pouch.
"He is thinking thoughts that are far beyond those of an animal. He seems to have been exposed to some energy that has altered him. The death of an angel will sometimes do that to the vermin who aren't killed by it. If it was an angel's death, it will have increased his intelligence a hundredfold."
I looked down at Poi. Poi looked back. I scratched my head. "Well, show us an image, anyway."
The paint assembled itself into a giant image of Poi, roundness and all, complete with correctly-proportioned genitalia which looked rather obscene at that scale. "Put it away," I said. "Please."
We used the angel blood to become invisible and went through the other door. I'd thought it would be a bedroom, and I wasn't disappointed. It was pretty plain--a bed, a table, a cupboard for clothes, some art supplies. Under the bed were stacks of paper and parchment, though, that was very interesting indeed. They were pictures of naked and mostly naked women, all drawn in the same hand, some signed by Sigwald. "Looks like he made his own pornography," I said, holding up a picture of a blonde gnome.
He was pretty good, too. Sifting through the pile, we found pictures of the women we'd uncovered outside. The younger ones were clothed, the older ones naked. There was another picture as well, and I raised my eyebrows as I held it up. "Is this who it looks like?"
Electra squeaked a bit. "That looks like Remy! But younger."
About twenty-five or thirty years younger, to be exact. Sigwald's rendition of her, if it was her, revealed her to have been even more smoking in her youth than she was now. "Does Remy have any daughters? This isn't dated."
"One or two, I think," she said. "Might be one of them."
I eyed the picture. "Might be someone who just looks a lot like her. Nice, though." I put the drawing away, looking around. On the ceiling, there was painted a map of the city, and I frowned as I swept my eyes across it. I was pretty familiar with the troll section--my father had some business associates there, and we'd occasionally go over for dinner when I was growing up--and I'd never seen a street called Emrou Street. "Argos, look at this. That's not on the map."
The other two put down the pictures and came to look. Argos got out his map. "Look, there's a building on the ceiling that I know isn't there now," Electra said. "That's an empty lot in the demon section."
Strange, and worth checking out, both of those things. "So," I said. "What do we do now? We know where Sigwald sleeps. How do we take him out?"
Argos suggested, "The druids?"
I made a face. "I hate dealing with them. Anyone have any better ideas?"
We went back and forth with it for a while, but decided in the end that the druids had the most compelling interest in taking Sigwald down, and had the resources to do so. I sighed. "Well, let's go. We can go through the troll and demon section on the way and look at those strange spots on the map."
We came out of the tunnel, locking the cage doors behind us, and swam up and out of the river. The heated air hit us hard, drying out clothes quickly as we came up on the demon side and started walking--still invisible, mind you--through the demon section.
The place that Emily had said was an empty lot turned out to be just that. But looked at with magic sight, there was a shimmering door-shape in the middle of the lot. It looked like it was a dimension door, which meant that it could go just about anywhere--to another plane, even. We chose to let it alone and kept walking.
In the troll section, we walked down the block where Emrou Street would be. The block looked like a normal block, but it took twice as long to walk down as a normal block would. Baffled, we turned and walked to the midway point, finding ourselves facing the side of a building. Emily took a breath, set her jaw, and walked into it.
She vanished.
Not knowing what exactly she was getting into, I followed her. The sight that met my eyes was...well. Something else.
The first thing I saw was what appeared to be a slave auction. A moment or so of observation confirmed that impression. There were indeed slaves being sold here. Slavery is illegal, extremely so. There was someone with a pen that had three exhausted-looking unicorns in it, prostitutes of every stripe, people hawking things they swore were aphrodisiacs.
I grabbed Electra's arm and we both got out of there. Well, we now knew what was on Emrou street, and why it was so hard to find. Further investigation would need to wait for later, because it was getting on towards sunset and we still needed to talk to the druids.
We walked through the gates into the park-like druid quarter. There was a man in a druid cloak apparently tending a bush ahead. When we approached, he straightened and cocked an eyebrow at us. "Can I help you?"
"You have a renegade druid on the loose, named Sigwald. We know where he is."
His expression didn't change. "And what would you want for this information?"
"There's a creature where he'll be that we'd like freed, preferably where it won't hurt anything, and there's a bunch of women being held captive just outside that we'd like to be able to get out in one piece, unless you'd like to rescue them yourselves. We'd like to talk to Sigwald before you do whatever you're going to do with him. And we'd like access to the place afterwards, if you don't destroy it."
"We have no interest in the women. If you want them, you'll need to get them yourself. Stay here, I will confer." He stepped into a tree, and left us cooling our heels for about twenty minutes. We sat down in the shade of a tree and watched the sun slide towards the horizon. It was hot enough that the air felt a bit difficult to breathe, and I was starting to look forward to going back to a barge. I wasn't used to walking over the city, and especially not in this weather.
The druid walked back out of the tree. "The terms are acceptable. Return here just after sunrise tomorrow, at 6:30 precisely. For five minutes, that tree that you saw me walk through will be open to you, and it will take you to where we have him. Give me the location, and I will carry it back to my people.
I described the place to him, and he nodded then turned and walked back through the day. Looking at the rough bark of the tree he'd just disappeared into, I said, "I don't know about you guys, but I'm beat. Electra, are you coming back with me to John and Adele's, or are you going home?"
She shook her head. "I bet they know where I live. I'll come with you."
I didn't mention that we'd probably need to find somewhere else to stay tomorrow night; I try not to strain the hospitality of my friends by staying with them for too long, or too often. I had a couple more friends I could stay with if need be, but to be honest, I wasn't sure I wanted to put Emily and either of them under the same roof for too long. Both of them liked their girls young, and at the very least there would be unrestrained leering. Then I'd have to thump some heads till they stopped it. We'd work something out, though.
Argos said that he and his wife would return to the hotel they'd stayed at the night before, and we split up, agreeing to meet pre-dawn in the troll district. Electra and I walked back to John and Adele's. Both of them were home, since the bargemen had been given the day off because of the heat.
We had dinner together, a cold meal in the house's tiny courtyard as the sun went down. After dinner, John lit lamps in the courtyard, and Electra pulled out a book she'd brought with her, digging into some studying. I pulled out a shirt whose sleeve I'd torn a few days ago, and the needle and thread I keep in my bag.
Adele rolled her eyes. "Martin. Let me have that. You sew like a sailor."
"I am a sailor, in a way," I told her mildly. "It's fine, I've been mending my own things for years. You sew all day, you shouldn't have to in the evening."
"You can't sew linen like sailcloth," she said, rising to pull the shirt and thread out of my hand. "Little gods, what have you done to this shirt? Well, at least the needle's steel, and the thread's good." She sat down in her chair under the lamp above her head. Moths fluttered franticly around the lamps, and I heard the squeaks of bats overhead. Poi climbed out of his pouch and onto my lap, where he started on washing himself. "How'd you come by this tear?"
"Caught it on the edge of a crate the other day," I said. Adele was very good at what she did, and already the tear in the shirt was beginning to disappear under her practiced hands. A good seamstress has a little bit of magic in her hands, magic to persuade thread to hold and cloth to weave back together. Most people don't have the talent to be a mage, but a lot of them have knacks, like Argos and his machines, like me and being able to feel the currents in the river. John can sometimes feel when there's some variation in the river bottom where there hasn't been before.
"You need a keeper, Martin," she said as she worked on the shirt. "Or a wife. You ever going to settle down?"
I shrugged uncomfortably. "The most important thing in my life is the river. Almost always has been. Women don't like competing against something like that, I've found."
"Yeah? What about that pilot you were telling us about? She wouldn't mind."
"I think she's sleeping with the guy who owns the barge," I told her. "Besides, I don't earn enough to keep a place to live. Once I've got my own barge, maybe."
"Maybe, maybe," she said, snorting. She tossed the shirt back at me. "I'm sending John to the baths tonight with the laundry. You should go too."
"Probably a good idea, I'm feeling a bit on the rough side," I agreed. "Electra, you want to come with us?"
"I washed at home," she said. "I'm fine."
I nodded and went to help John gather the laundry together. The baths were lively tonight, the social center of the neighborhood, where you could come to have a bath, a haircut, or a shave, or to have your hair braided if you were female. There was a laundry attached to the baths where for a fee the laundresses would wash your clothing, or you could do it yourself if you were so inclined. John and I bathed while the laundresses were working on our clothes, and I trimmed myself up since I had access to a mirror here.
Then it was back to the house for some sleep. "I'll see what I can do about you talking tomorrow," I promised Poi as we settled in for the night. "At least to me."
He reached forward and tickled my forehead with his whiskers, which I thought was maybe gratitude. Poi didn't really look particularly happy, but he was at least still acting halfway normally. I couldn't imagine what he was thinking. He was a rat, and an especially lazy and greedy example of his kind. I loved him, of course, and if a rat could be said to be anyone's friend, he was surely mine. But what would a rat who was suddenly smarter than a bunch of mages put together do with all those smarts?
I supposed I'd see.
The next morning, I woke Electra a couple of hours before dawn, a development that I can tell you she was not happy about. But she got out of bed with a minimum of grumbling, and we walked out towards the druid section, meeting Argos in the troll district. The sun had just come over the horizon when we walked into the druid district, to the tree that we'd seen yesterday. The trunk was sparkling a little, and I took a breath and walked through.
We arrived in a circle of big trees. Really big trees. There was snow on the ground, and I wished I'd brought a coat. I had no idea where we were, but it was nowhere near where we'd come from.
The same druid who we'd talked to before approached us. "Sigwald is there," he said, gesturing to the center of the circle. "He is more than willing to talk. We'll let you know if he lies."
I felt Poi stir in the pouch and poke his head out, looking around. Electra and Argos followed me as we walked to the figure on the ground in front of us. Sigwald was hog-tied on the ground, mostly naked and much the worse for wear. Most of his hair had been burned off.
We started out with the important stuff--where Dada was spending her days. Turned out there were three places she was a lot--one in the demon section, through the building that wasn't there, one the house where she was entombed, and one in a cavern 450 feet beneath Southgate manor. "Any reason Southgate Manor in particular?"
"It's just where the cavern is," he said.
He told us we could find Joab in any of those three places, at Nielsen's place, or out on the planes, hunting angels. He was friends with Nielsen, and had been before Nielsen had become a vampire. When we asked about Remy, he said that she was an old lover of his, but he hadn't seen her in over twenty years. Something about how he said it suggested that it hadn't been a friendly breakup. Remy's family had been allied with Dada for centuries, but was no longer. Remy had become somewhat unreliable for them, and they feared that she was passing information about them on to someone else.
When asked what Dada wanted, he said, "The city. The mage university, especially. She doesn't have a foothold in the elven sector yet, but she does have all of the leaders of the human sector under her thumb but one. She's still looking for the Southgate daughter."
I winced, and was glad nobody was looking at me at the moment. My blood family isn't any of my business any more, I told myself. We're quit of each other. Still, it wasn't good news that my brother likely had had one of his children kidnapped. Paolo was resourceful, though, and if anyone was going to get their kid back, it was him.
Unfortunately, as Sigwald continued to talk, we found that most of those who had been kidnapped were already dead, except for those who met Nielsen's criteria. I guessed my brother wasn't going to get his kid back, after all.
When we asked about the red ooze creatures, Sigwald said that he had carried one, Dada carried one, and Joab carried one. When pressed, he admitted that Meta, the alpha of the werewolves in the demon section, also had one. That was not good news, but not unexpected.
"What about Joab?" I asked. "What's his deal?"
"Most of us are in it for the money," Sigwald told me. "Joab's different. All he wants is redemption, and it's the one thing he'll never have. He killed his own wife a few years before Dada was captured, truly accidentally mind you, but she's still dead by his hand. He carries that grey feather as a penance for what he's done."
"I know he used to worship Istishia. Who does he worship now?"
"Bane," he said.
I recognized the name; Bane is one of the gods of darkness, the Black Lord, the god that the corrupted and the hateful pray to, the god of lost souls and lost causes. "Any ideas why the hell he and I look so much alike?"
"No, but the resemblance is striking," he said, eyeing me. "Joab had one child, a daughter named Sondra. She married someone, don't know who or what happened to her, but maybe she's an ancestor. The family name's Icelorn, if you want to find out who she married."
When we asked him about the leaders, he told us that Mahala was one. When we objected, saying she was in prison, he grinned. "Only her body is in jail. She's a powerful psionicist." Then he gave us more names: Warda, the vampire that created Nielsen; Percy, the head of the university in the human district; Krist, a very strong true demon who happened to have been born here, and who held the allegiance of most of the true demons in the demon quarter; Marcel, an actor who wanders in and out of high society; Yoko, a dwarf and head of the mining guilds; Sasha, a druid who most believed to be dead, who handled getting things in and out of the black market and was the main supplier of potions and weird devices; and Ellis, a troll who used to be Dada's consort, who was now seeing Bara.
Well, that wasn't good news. We got details about locations of all of these people, asked about Nielsen's blondes (answer: his wife, who he refused to make a vampire, was blonde) and asked about how Dada's people were set up. Each person evidently knew seven others; Joab's list of contacts were different from Sigwald's, for example. He usually contacted Dada once a day through a diamond pendant. When he missed today's check-in, Dada would wait a day and try again, and then give him up for dead if he didn't answer.
We got some more information, and then ran out of questions. The druids were getting twitchy, so we finished talking to Sigwald and then stepped back as the druids closed in.
He ended up in a lot of very small pieces, sinking into the earth. Then, without a word to us, most of the druids turned and left. The one we'd spoken to before approached us. "You've involved yourself deeply in this," he said without preamble. "We want updates from you when you find things out. This will allow you to communicate with us, and spy on Dada's communications." He handed me a pendant made from a rough-cut diamond on a chain made from a silvery metal.
"And in return?" asked Argos suspiciously.
"We will heal you when you need it, and rescue you when you need that."
There didn't seem to be any good way to refuse, so I shrugged and accepted. The druid pointed out the tree we'd need to leave by, and turned and walked into another tree entirely. I heard an indignant sound from my pouch, and realized that Poi was stretched up towards my hands, trying to get a good look at the pendant.
Rats are pretty near-sighted, so I dropped the pendant into his pouch so he could look at it to his heart's content. "Well, I suppose we should be getting back," I said with a shiver. "God, I hate dealing with druids."
"I see why," Electra said. "I was just thinking about something. I was talking with Remy, the night I was late coming over the bridge. She was showing me something useful for once, not just discussing theory with me."
I looked askance at her. "Think it might have been on purpose?"
"Maybe. I don't know what to think about her at the moment."
Necromancers are bad news in general, but I didn't mention this to Electra. She was a smart girl; I figured she'd work out for herself the mistake that becoming a necromancer was, hopefully before it was too late to learn how to do something else with her life.
We went back to the city, back to the familiar heat, Poi in his pouch still inspecting the diamond pendant. I didn't know what to think about Joab, and about the rather uncomfortable parallels between his life and mine.
I hadn't killed my wife, but my young daughter had died, in a way that was arguably my fault. That death, and the depression I'd sunk into afterwards, had lost me my wife and my other two children. My living daughter would be Electra's age now, my son a year younger. I'd gone into the River Brothers after Luce had taken the children and left me, and she had remarried a year or so later. Her new husband had adopted the children, and they were none of mine, now.
I'd spent fifteen years dealing with what had happened, through hard, unpleasant work, serving the river and the Lord of the Wave. I'd run to the god; Joab had run away from him. What made the difference, there? I'd forgiven myself, finally; Inge's death had been an tragic accident, if a somewhat strange one. Why hadn't Joab been able to get there? And why did he feel the need to torture himself by staying alive?
It was kind of stupid, if you asked me. It might take fifteen years or fifty, but eventually you got over it. And if you didn't get over it, well, there was always the next life, if you believed in that. If nothing else, death brought a surcease of pain.
Of course, thinking about Inge's death brought me to wondering where Luce and the kids were now, as I did on occasion. I had no idea who she'd married, the papers I'd been given stating I was quit of any parental privilege and responsibility hadn't told me who had adopted them. Luce had always had a good head on her shoulders, and I was sure she'd picked someone who treated her as well as she deserved. Better than me, at least at the end, I was sure.
Ah, well. They weren't mine, any longer, and they were better off for me being out of their lives. Coming back into their lives would bring nothing but pain on all sides. I put them out of my mind as we started to discuss next steps, trying to figure out how to track down Dada and Joab and the rest.
In my pocket, Poi played with the diamond pendant. I didn't know if I should worry, or not...
Quotes:
"Of all the places I'd like to sleep, at the bottom of the river is not on my list."
--Argos
"So all the blondes have high Nielsen ratings?"
--Derek
"We get the people who are doing this, and we can rescue all the cute young blondes we want."
"I'm thinking of rescuing the cute blonde red thing."
"You, my friend, have a very strange sense of priorities."
--Martin, Argos
"My rat...is smarter than I am."
--Martin
"That was going to be the redhead section."
--Sigwald
