Sleepless Streets: I'm A Lumberjack, And I'm OK

[aithne]

So there I was, half-naked, with a monster of a hangover and Iola in human form sleeping with her head on my chest...

Wait, back up, I swear there's a good reason.

We did get that weekend off that I mentioned before. I built a door and set one of the purple paints around it to watch it for me. Iola dragged me down to the club she used to work with, and introduced me to all of her friends. Surrounded by women in their dancing costumes, most of them wearing very little indeed, and having one plop herself into my lap and declare that any friend of Iola's was a friend of hers...well, I can't say I was having a terrible time.

Iola did growl at the one who'd dropped into my lap. "He's mine," she said, grabbing the dark-haired girl's wrist and pulling her off my lap. "Hands off."

I could swear I heard Poi laughing.

The dark-haired girl pouted and she and Iola play-fought for a little bit while I pondered how exactly I was going to bring a needed conversation up to Iola later on. Iola was hugging the dark-haired girl again soon enough, and the rest of the visit went without incident. "Why don't you head home, Iola?" I suggested. "I'm going to stop by Remy's and pick up those pendants, and I'll bring dinner home with me. All right?"

Iola looked like she wanted to argue, then nodded and turned and walked away. That girl was getting more and more possessive by the day, and I really needed to figure out how to tell her to quit it and make it stick. I didn't really want to send her to live with Electra--if nothing else, I thought that Electra wouldn't want to share her living space with Iola--but I would if I needed to.

I walked to Remy's and picked up those amulets. I asked her to make another set for us, and she agreed--I could drop the diamonds off next week. She also agreed to let me take her out to dinner in thanks for doing the spellwork on the pendants, since she was doing it more or less for free. "I'll warn you, I'm an expensive date," she said, her eyes bright. "Will it be just you and me, or are the others coming along, too?"

"Oh, I thought just you and me," I said.

"What, no Iola, even? I thought you and she--"

"We're not." I shook my head. "At least...well." I shrugged awkwardly. "She regards me as her pack leader. She'd probably bed me if I asked, but not because she wanted to. I'm staying as far away from that particular ethical problem. I have learned a few things in my time on this earth, after all."

"As long as I'm not going to have a jealous werewolf showing up on my doorstep, I'm happy." Remy smiled, and her grey eyes were alight with humor again. "I need to firm up my schedule for next week, but I'll see you in the next few days, I'm sure, and we can discuss when we're having dinner then."

I agreed, and then I left Remy and the quiet of her house behind. There was a lot I couldn't figure about Remy the necromancer, that was for sure. The quiet of her house that seemed like it had an edge of magic to it. The fact that it sounded like she'd been married--she'd mentioned her children a time or two--but she wore no wedding ring or bracelet, and it didn't appear that she had a husband in the picture. I didn't even know if she had a lover.

Well, that was part of the reason I'd asked her to dinner, to find out more about her. I stopped by a place that did an excellent lemoned pullet and picked up a couple of covered clay pots for Iola and I. "You want anything?" I asked Poi.

He had his head out of the pouch, looking around. "I like the chicken, I'll have some of that," he said, and I started at understanding him for once. I was wearing my pendant, and I'd tested it out earlier, but it was still strange. The voice that I heard was light, always seeming to be on the verge on laughter. "I smell tiropita. Some of that, too."

There was indeed a vendor selling small cheese pies, and I picked up a couple of those. "You need anything else?" I asked him as I walked home, pots carried by a string handle between the two of them and the wrapped pies in my other hand. "We can go shopping tomorrow."

"Just a few things. We can talk about it tomorrow. Hey, it's none of my business, but you're busy setting yourself up for disaster, you know."

"How so?"

He stretched his whiskers forward in amusement. "That would ruin the surprise. But trust me, you are."

I rolled my eyes, and quickened my footsteps. "Why bring it up if you're not going to tell me?"

"Because you wouldn't believe me if I told you, so I'm going to let you find out for yourself. You're the wise priest. You figure it out."

Right. Rats. I made it home and Iola was appreciative of dinner, especially of the tiropita, which I hadn't known was her favorite dessert. Poi ate and talked to the two of us, telling us all about these theories about how the universe was put together, explaining all of these formulas that he wrote on a little chalkboard, as I tried to understand what he was attempting to say to me.

The next day involved a lot of market-hopping, as I pursued a few things for Poi that turned out to be hard to get my hands on. There were a few household things to buy, as well, including the makings for another bed, supposedly for Iola.

I built the bed frame in the big room that the red ooze had once been held in, and told Iola that this was where she was going to sleep tonight. It started out well--she did in fact go to her own bed when we slept that night--but though I thought I'd be happy to finally be able to stretch out my legs again in my own bed, it turned out that I'd gotten used to her sleeping on my legs. I couldn't fall asleep. About midnight or so, I heard the door creak open. I mumbled a light spell and sat up.

Iola had a blanket wrapped around her, tangled hair falling to obscure half her face. "It's too big," she said. "The dark's too big and too echoey. Don't be mad? Please? I'm lonely."

I should have realized that that room would be too big for her to sleep in by herself. "All right," I said, giving in. "Come on. Wolf form, please." Iola changed and hopped into bed, settling down in her usual spot on my legs. She set her head down on my hip with a lupine sigh of happiness. I reminded myself to have the red ooze start in on a room for Iola, something smaller than the big room.

As I drifted off, I thought about Iola's little flashes of possessiveness, Remy's remark about jealous werewolves, Poi's crack about impending disaster. Nah. I don't think of Iola like that. She's just a kid, and a not very bright one at that. As pretty as she was, as much as every one of her movements seemed designed to make men swallow their tongues, it would be wrong for me to take advantage of her looking to me as pack leader.

She'd find a mate of her own, if she was minded towards that sort of thing. I preferred bedmates that were definitely there of their own choosing, whether it was because I paid them or because they liked me.

It was with that thought that I fell asleep, in the dark of this quiet place beneath the ground, to the accompaniment of Iola's quiet snores.

The next morning, we met the others in the halfling section for breakfast, at the Blind Goat. Electra and Argos were already there when Iola, Poi, and I showed up. Argos had spent the weekend recovering from a somewhat ill-considered wish to become as good of a sculptor as Grecko, and showed us the result of his work, some small busts of prominent elves.

We'd been eating for about a quarter hour before Basil put in an appearance. "Eggs," he croaked to the tow-headed youngster waiting tables. "A half-dozen."

"Those grapes work as advertised?" I asked.

"I can attest to that." He grinned. "So can half the halfling district."

The eggs arrived and Basil tucked into them. "So what are we doing?" he mumbled around a mouthful.

"Ax murderer, looks like," Electra said. Argos was busy putting together a contraption involving a salt cellar and a fork. "That's been on our list for a while."

"Wood trolls. Might be interesting," I added.

"Those are the ones who live just outside of town, yes?"

I nodded. "The rock trolls aren't really big on the wood trolls, for some reason."

Not big on wood trolls is a bit of a understatement. Rock trolls consider wood trolls to be unreliable, noisy, and altogether just not the thing; there are a few that live inside of town, but most live in settlements on the northern outskirts, in the forest that stretches mostly unbroken from here to the mountains. They are the troll musicians and instrument makers.

The note on the murder said that we would need to talk to a wood troll named Zada. So north we went, spending a while looking around before finally being pointed to the wood troll settlement.

The road that led there looked like it only occasionally had carts roll on it, mostly worn by feet. Once we were close, the settlement was hard to miss. Music floated on the breeze, and there were bright ribbons and fabrics decorating the trees.

The settlement was in the shape of a spoked circle, supposedly a sacred symbol. The wood trolls themselves stood about eight feet tall, and came in a rainbow of hues from ash to oak to mahogany. There was a lot more movement than we'd come to expect from a troll settlement, since the wood trolls were a lot more active than the stone. Music from pipes and from guitars came from what seemed like every corner, and you'd have thought it would clash but it didn't somehow. The buildings all had large wheels on them, as if they could be moved if need be.

We found Zada in the part of the circle that was farthest from the road. She was tall and wide, and from the moss on her shoulders and arms she was pretty old. The twigs and leaves that crowned her head were a sunset red, and she looked altogether oaky. "Ah, you finally came," she said. "Good, good, and we knew they'd send soft people. The stone trolls, ah! they don't care about us, their cousins. So you are here to help us find an ax murderer. Three victims, and all we found were pieces."

When we inquired further, we found out that the first murder, the one that had been reported, was of a troll named Marisol. Marisol had been out in the woods north of here looking for dead wood to harvest for an instrument and hadn't returned. When the trolls went looking, they found a hand and some other bits of her, but not most of her body.

The second was Rainart, who was one of the wood trolls who lived in town, a mage. He had disappeared, and there had been an altercation of some sort in his house. That had been three days after Marisol.

Three days after that, a third troll had disappeared, Marisol's boyfriend Thorburn. He had been out looking for her, and bits of him had been found about fifty feet from where her bits had been found. That was yesterday. We looked at the pieces and saw that, yes, they had been chopped with an axe of some sort, probably a very heavy greataxe.

Thankfully, it was cooler in the forest than it was in the city, and the walk to the crime scene (led by Zada's grandson Kipp, who looked like a shrub and moved like a squirrel) was a pleasant mile. The clearing her bits had been found in had a sort of shrine in it, a tree decorated with ribbons and flowers and leaves and miniature instruments. Someone had hung wooden wind chimes in the tree, and at the slightest breeze they made a melodious tinkling noise.

I asked Iola to sniff around, and she shed her clothing (not that she was wearing much; she'd refused to put on more than a very short skirt and a breastband this morning, since the day had started out hot and was getting hotter) and changed into wolf form. She sniffed around, spiraling out from the center of the clearing, a tree on the other side of it attracting her attention. She shifted into half-form and growled, "Cat. Big cat. Comes here every night, smells like, goes up this tree."

There were score marks from claws in the tree, starting from about ten feet off the ground. Curious, Basil climbed the tree--well, swung up into it is a better description. He went to almost the very top, and called down, "I think I found the murder weapon. Just a second, I'll bring it down."

He brought the axe down, the handle wrapped in cloth. It was indeed a heavy double-bladed greataxe, the head apparently made out of silver and designs worked into the blades. It was magical--and, when I checked, evil. It had teeth marks on the handle, as if it were carried in a big cat's mouth. The handle was made of maple, and felt--strange. It wasn't really magical, but it matched the color of the bits we'd seen of Marisol.

Eugh.

I asked Poi to take a look at it, and set it on a flat rock and set his pouch beside it. He came out with this strange set of tubes and racks, and I blinked and peered inside the pouch. Poi had been remodeling, it seemed. It was a lot bigger on the inside than the outside, and I could see the roof of a house, with a curl of smoke coming from the chimney.

While Poi looked the axe over, Basil climbed back up the tree and set a snare for the cougar. Poi first made a casting and a model of the cat's skull, and it turned out that this cat had to be at least nine feet long. That's enormous for our local big cats, who don't usually get much more than six feet. We cooled our heels for a bit, then Poi pronounced himself done.

He had brought out a miniature chalkboard and started writing on it, filling it with incomprehensible symbols and talking rapidly. "Can we have the stupid-person summary, please?" I asked the rat.

Poi sighed, and washed his face contemplatively for a moment. "Fine. The broad view for the dumb is that it's a lumberjack's dream. It goes through wood like butter, and has a caretaker--that cat. It has a few side effects though. First is that it needs a new handle every nine days or so, and it has to be made out of wood troll. And the person who wields it is taken over by the axe, and will have no memory of the murders."

So this wasn't just the murder weapon, it was the murderer. We wrapped it up and went to look at the place where Thorburn's bits had been found. Iola smelled a human and the cat again; their trails crossed, almost as if the cat had been chasing the human. The human had gone crashing through the undergrowth, and left behind a scrap or two of cloth--flannel. Whoever had been running was likely a lumberjack or woodsman of some sort.

Kipp, when we asked, told us that there had been a bunch of lumberjacks who'd tried to move into the woods nearby a while back, led by a guy named Adair, but told us that we'd have to ask Zada more. We thanked him and headed back into town, looking for Rainart's house.

Rainart had been the victim of whom the least had been found. It was strange--if the axe needed a new handle every nine days, I could see it going after a troll on the sixth day to give the wielder time to whittle down the torso into a handle. So why Rainart, and why only three days?

Rainart's house was a wooden one, near the edge of the troll district. The house had once had a porch, which had been mostly destroyed--axe damage, it looked like. Climbing up into the house proper, we discovered that it looked like there had been a huge fight. Lots of wood chips on the floor, most of them looking like they'd been taken out of the walls.

Iola, in half-form, sniffed around. "Lots of humans in here," she reported. "But they didn't leave by any of the doors."

She led us to where the smell of human was coming from, and under the bed was a trap door that led down into a hidey-hole in which there was--clothing?

Human clothing, all different sizes, all rough like a workman's clothes, with flannel shirts and tightly woven pants. Some of the clothing was torn, especially towards the bottom of the pile. There was, however, no blood.

Basil called, "Come look at this."

I hoisted myself out of the hole and went to look. This house had a large backyard, and it was filled with recently-planted tree saplings. Poi requested to be set down, and he went over and nibbled on one of the saplings. "Ptui!" He spat out the bark. "Blood. Human."

With as many times as he's bitten me over the years, I would think he'd recognize the taste. I set my hand down, and he scrambled up my arm to sit on my shoulder like he hasn't really done for years. He was getting a bit less spherical, I noticed. He curled one paw into the collar of my shirt.

"So where do you find lumberjacks in this town?"

"There's a bar called the Paul Bunyan in the halfling section, and a bar across the street called Babe the Blue Ox. The men tend to drink in the Bunyan, and the women in the Babe," Basil said. "I know people over there."

I supposed he would, since he had evidently been a lumberjack before deciding to become a cop. We walked over to the halfling section, and entered the Bunyan, looking for Adair.

He was tending bar in the back; evidently, he'd bought it a few years ago. "Rainart? Yeah, I knew him. He was an asshole. Someone did for him, I hear."

"Yeah," I said. "We think, at least. Have you ever heard of a magical axe that goes through wood real easy?"

Adair nodded. He was about my age, a big guy with scarred knuckles and a nose that had been broken several times. "Fallon talks about an axe like that all the time. She's probably over in the Babe."

Basil had already gone over to the Babe, along with Electra, who had gotten very quickly tired of the appraising looks and the fondling she'd gotten while walking through the crowd. Iola appreciated the looks, now back in human form (I'd had to talk her into putting her clothes back on), but she growled at the intrusive hands. We joined those two, and found Fallon. She was older, with hands that were gnarled with arthritis.

She was friendly enough, and told us that she'd had a boyfriend years ago named Rocco, a mage. He'd told her that he could make her the best lumberjack ever, and had come up with a set of three axes called El Penador di Diablo, The Pitchfork of the Devil. The silver one did what Rocco claimed it would do, let her fell trees quickly and easily. The guardian, the big cougar, started hanging around, and they called him El Diablo.

Well, things went wrong shortly after Fallon started using the axe. She started forgetting things, missing time, and the wood of the axe handle kept changing. Disturbed, she gave the axe back to him (though she kept the other two). She never saw him again.

"He had a girl on the side," she said. "Or maybe I was the girl on the side, hard to tell. Ran into her years later, and she told me that one night when they were getting busy, a big cougar came and ate him. Good thing I gave him back the axe, eh?"

"What happened to the other two axes?" Electra asked.

"I still have them, hanging over my fireplace. After using the first one, there was no way I was going to use the others."

"Can we see them?" Fallon agreed, and took us to her house, a little place nearby. The other two axes had copper and gold heads, and we took them down from the wall and had Poi look them over.

Turned out that the gold axe, instead of cutting down trees, would make them grow when they were hit with it. It had a bear familiar associated with it. The copper axe carved intricate designs in felled wood, and had a bighorn sheep familiar.

"I think," Poi said, "that the gold one will restore the memories that the silver axe takes."

"Can one be destroyed without the others being destroyed?" I asked.

Poi pondered briefly. "Probably."

Hey, I was thinking we had a solution to the problem here. At this point, Basil had gone outside and was trying to get the silver axe's handle away from the head. We helped him with that, and then Basil, having had a brilliant idea, tapped the handle with the gold axe a number of times...and from a stick of wood, Marisol's body was re-formed, and because there was some life still left in her, she came back to life.

She was overjoyed to be alive, and thanked us profusely. When we asked her what the last thing she remembered was, she said, "Adair, coming after me with a silver axe."

Interesting.

We bought the axes from Fallon, wrapped them up, and took a walk over to the Bunyan. We informed Adair that he was under arrest, and he protested that he hadn't done anything. "Then we'll turn you loose," I said.

He came along without giving us much trouble. while I was talking to Adair, out of the corner of my eye I saw Electra walking through the crowd, towards a big blonde lumberjack. She spoke to him briefly, and brought him over to us. "What am I under arrest for?" he asked me.

Arrest? I looked at Electra, who looked smug. "Ask her," I said shortly. I suppose arresting someone is a good way to get them to come with you, but I resolved to speak with Electra later about the possibility of just, you know, asking someone she thought was cute out. The blonde lumberjack's name was Goliath, it seemed.

We took Adair down to the nearest cop shop and sat Adair down in a room. At first, he denied knowing anything. Then we handed him the gold axe, and his eyes widened. "Hey, yeah, there was a silver axe. A week or so ago, I went to talk to Rainart. Well, more like burn his porch down, he'd pissed me off. Didn't know he was home at the time. He caught me and handed me this axe and...weird. I went and killed a wood troll. Two of them, actually. The first one was sort of blonde, like maple. The second one was more okay."

"Have you seen Rainart since?"

"Yeah. The second one, he was there. I saw him. Hey, look, I've got the axe handle I made out of the other one. Do you want it?"

We certainly did. After we went and fetched it and brought Thorburn back to life, we let Adair go, as there was no longer an actual murder done. Marisol and Thorburn were back, and Rainart sounded like he'd never died in the first place.

Sounded like Rainart had gotten his hands on the axe and decided to give the local lumberjacks a taste of their own medicine. He needed new axe handles, though, and he needed someone to take the fall for getting them. Once the lumberjacks-turned-trees were big enough, he was probably going to chop them down with that axe.

So maybe no murder had been done, but polymorphing people against their will and not in self-defense is illegal. We needed to find Rainart...and we thought we knew where and when he would be.

So it was back to the woods for us, to hide the axe back in the tree it had been cached in, and to hide ourselves as well. Electra told Goliath to come along with us. "I still want to know why I've been arrested!" he said, protesting. I made a helpless gesture with my hands. He did come along, but he didn't stop muttering about crazy cops.

We had a bit of a wait until sunset, when we saw the cougar--enormous beast--climb into the tree. There was a snap and an aggravated scream from above as the cat got caught in the snare. "Iola, could you listen for Rainart?" I asked her as we started to lower the cat down, keeping clear of its jaws.

Iola stood very still, then waved at us to be silent. After a moment, she took off running I followed, as did most of the rest of us. I was thinking about trying to arrest Rainart, but he attacked and didn't leave us a lot of choice other than defending himself.

In the end, Goliath hit Rainart with the copper axe and he fell apart into neat planks. The cat vanished. And that was that. Mostly.

We walked back to the wood troll settlement, which was brightly lit with magelights and definitely in a festive mood. Zada herself came to greet us, and thanks us effusively for returning Marisol and Thorburn to life. "We will feast! We're bringing in food even you can eat, and we will celebrate!"

"Well, we should be going..." I started to say.

"Nonsense! We will eat, drink, dance, play music. I insist!"

And so we ended up attending a wood troll party. There was a drink passed around, a bitterly herbal drink that was served in mixed with sugar water. After a few of those, even I was able to be persuaded to get up and dance. Zada insisted on telling us all our fortunes. "Strange things in your past," she told me seriously. "You were once one person, and are now two. Your future...cloudy. There's someone looking for you. Several someones, it appears."

I don't remember much more than that; my mind was already rather fuzzy from the drink. "I usually have a better tolerance than this," I complained to a wood troll I happened to be sitting next to. "What is this stuff?"

"The humans call it...forgetfulness? Something like that."

I gave the troll a truly alarmed look. "Absinthe?"

"That's the name, yes."

"This is going to hurt in the morning," I muttered.

At some point during the evening, Electra vanished with Goliath. (Basil had wandered up to her earlier and asked her, loudly, if she'd just arrested him because she thought he was cute. She admitted she had. Goliath almost looked flattered, and I finally told the guy he wasn't really under arrest.) I ended up singing dirty river songs and sea chanties with Basil, who had quite the repertoire of them. Iola, who'd taken a definite liking to the absinthe, kept on trying to curl up in my lap. And after that, things got sort of fuzzy.

Which leads me to waking up on a bed made of leaves, shirtless, with a mostly-naked Iola sleeping on top of me and a hangover clattering around in my head. I thought back and tried to remember how I had gotten here. Nothing came to mind, which was worrying. Did we...?

No, I still had my pants on, so probably not. Thank Istishia. I laid very, very still and tried to figure out how to get up without waking Iola.

Fortunately, she woke up about then and made a strange noise, then ran off behind some nearby bushes and was noisily sick. I felt immense sympathy for her, I wasn't feeling all that well myself. I managed to get myself upright and find the others, all of whom were looking about as good as I felt.

The rock trolls had willow-bark tea for us, and we separated for the morning to get cleaned up and let Argos attempt to explain to his poor wife why he'd been gone all night and to make a gadget for something we were thinking about dealing with that day. About noon, we met up in the halfling section. Goliath was still tagging along with Electra, strangely enough.

CUCK-KOO. CUCK-KOO. CUCK-KOO.

Yep, there it was.

CUCK-KOO. CUCK-KOO.

"Ow," I muttered. "We did have to pick today to find the cuckoo clock."

For the past few weeks, there had been a cuckoo clock sounding on the hour and half hour during the day in the halfling district. It had been getting louder over time, and now it was near-deafening. It was our job to track it down and stop it.

To make a very long story short, we finally managed to track the sound to a well, and in the well was a portal to a desert. In the desert was a temple and a phoenix the size of a roc, who appeared to have been eating people. Sacrifices, it looked like.

Turned out that the elves, every few hundred years, would bring a nearby village sacrifices during the phoenix's laying cycle. Every egg that the mother phoenix laid required the sacrifice of one humanoid for some reason. (I thought those stories were fake, just like the ones about dragons. Strange.) The phoenix eggs would be hatched and given to the elves, who would take them up above.

The chicks had a lot of interesting properties--they would bond to a humanoid, their tears were basically contact healing potions, they were very intelligent and very strong, and if you could make a cloak out of their feathers, it would make the wearer the single strongest person in the world.

The elves had picked up ninety-six chicks, and they were on their way with the last four sacrifices. The cuckoos we'd heard had been the screams of the phoenix, distorted by the portal between the two places, and had been getting louder as the portal persisted and became stronger.

We ambushed the elves when they arrived, and found out that they were indeed building a cloak of strength and bottling phoenix tears. Turns out that every ten years or so, the elves and the druids have a battle, sending their best against each other to determine which of the two groups would have to bend the knee to the other for the next decade. That battle was coming up, and the elves were preparing to cheat.

In the end, we sacrificed the elves (since they had seen us and knew that we knew about the battle) and got our own pair of phoenix chicks. Basil claimed one of them, and we gave Iola the other. Our werewolf looked utterly charmed by the baby bird, who sat on her shoulder.

We took the people the elves had brought for sacrifices (drunks, looked like, and drugged out of their wits) and went back home. I was due to report to Gaetana, and it was time for lunch and maybe a quiet lie-down somewhere cool. And maybe some more of that willowbark tea....





Quotes:

"Prostitution? I'm insulted! I had volunteers!"
--Basil

"I like you guys, you give me stuff on purpose!"
"People don't give you stuff?"
"On purpose is the surprising thing."
"We give you stuff on purpose so we don't accidentally give you stuff."
"I do have a sense of self-preservation...sort of."
--Basil, Martin

"Canadians!"
--Basil's reaction to finding a scrap of flannel

"There's a bunch of naked lumberjacks somewhere around."
--Martin

"What do we have to arrest Rainart for?"
"Lumberjacks! Abuse of lumberjacks."
"Statutory polymorph rape?"
"Okay, that's against the law, yes."
--Martin, Electra, Basil

"Martin is so stodgy."
--Basil

"It's time to get killed."
"Well, time to steal Goliath's condoms, anyway."
--Basil, Storm

"Electra, when you're done being a cop, don't become a social worker."
--Basil