Sleepless Streets: The Happy Hammer

[aithne]

We were standing in the middle of a reeking crowd. Iola, in wolf form next to me, whined and then growled when one of the men sitting on the ground tried to pet her. "Sorry," I muttered to her.

We were surrounded by people who had been on a long bender, a currently-happy crowd occasioned by the fact that from the wall in front of us was coming a flow of whiskey from a pipe that usually dumped sewage into the river. It was good stuff; Argos had tried it, but whiskey isn't my drink and I was somewhat suspicious of it anyway.

The cop standing nearby was named Iphigenia, a portly dwarf who'd been showing us around and waving off the crowd with their cups and their open mouths away from the pipe opening so we could look. "Started, oh, three or four days ago, maybe a bit longer. Wouldn't be so much of a problem, but we're worried about what it might do to the river if we run out of people to drink it."

"Might be an improvement," I said, looking at the pipe. "Then again, some of the critters in the river are strange enough as it is. We don't need to get them drunk into the bargain."

"That's what we thought," Iphigenia said. There are rumors and tall tales of things that live in the river, escaped magical constructs and such. I've seen a few of those things in my time--a big lizard that looked like a dragon's ancient cousin, a giant and brilliantly colored fish that had fins like a dancer's veils and an intelligent look in its eye.

Electra was scrutinizing the earth around the pipe. The bank dropped off here to the rocky beach-like area that we were standing on now, about four feet high naturally and more with the stone wall that had been built on the bank above. "This is weird. There are a bunch of little magical things moving around in here, slowly. And all of this dirt is a little bit magical."

"That's odd, yes." Iola sniffed the flow of whiskey and lapped a bit of it up, then sneezed. "Did you see where Basil went?"

"I thought you were keeping an eye on him."

"I was." I looked around and found the kender wandering through the crowd, looking interested.

Argos was watching Iola, contemplatively. He finally spoke up. "I know I've tasted this before. There's a whiskey maker named Gemini who has a distillery somewhere in this district. I'll go see if I can get her." He took off, climbing up the metal ladder set into the bank, and vanished.

While we waited for him to come back, Electra and I did some experimentation, and found out that there were two transformation effects on the pipe and the soil surrounding it, and that there were some highly magical earthworms burrowing through the dirt. I gave one of those to Poi to work on as we pondered.

Basil came up to us. "A couple of interesting guys over there," he said. "The one with the scar on his lip is named Dyer, he was talking about the barrel he's going to use to take some of this over to the stripper row here in the dwarven district. The one talking to him with the yellow hair had this fall off his belt." He handed a gem to Electra, a ruby that glowed with its own internal light. "Shoddy workmanship, that belt. It even had a cloth sewn around it that the stitching came loose on! Look, they're leaving, I’ll go follow them."

Kender. Right.

He vanished again, just in time for Argos to show up, a female dwarf in tow. At least, I’m pretty sure she was female. "Gemini," she said, by way of introduction. "You have whiskey coming out of a sewer pipe?"

"Right there," I said, and pointed.

She pulled a cup off her belt and filled it, taking a sip. "Hunh. Tastes like what's currently in Big Bertha." At my raised eyebrow, she said, "My biggest barrel. Currently filled with an eleven-year whiskey; I was going to start transferring it out as ready to drink in another year."

"Why don't we go take a look at Big Bertha?" I said. Gemini led us back to her distillery, which happened to be near the BBW stripper club we'd been at before. The heat had intensified again, and the smell of the city hung low and close to the ground today. There was no wind, and even the chickens and the dogs were finding shade.

"This is Bertha," Gemini told us, proudly patting the side of the largest barrel I'd ever seen. It had to be a good forty feet in any direction, built into the ground. "I had this building built around her. She's a very good barrel."

"Can you tell if she's full?"

"Sure." Gemini went around, thumped on the barrel, climbed up onto it and thumped some more. "She's full as full. Strange thing, though. That's not the tap she had a few days ago." The distiller pointed. "I had a wood one; if someone replaced it, they should have told me."

We went to look at it. It was made of a steel-colored metal with an almost yellow sheen to it. "Nobody makes taps out of metal," Gemini said, puzzled. "Well, you do if you want to be ostentatious, but who's going to see it except me and my employees?"

"Can we have it to look at?" Argos asked.

"Sure, let me go get another tap to replace it with." That done, she handed us the tap, which was surprisingly light. "Anyone recognize that mark?" Electra asked, pointing at the underside of the tap.

"Klotild," Gemini said. "She's a metalsmith, does a lot of very good work. I recognize the shooting star."

I pondered the tap in Electra's hands. "Do you have any enemies or rivals, Gemini?" I asked the distiller. "Anyone interested in doing your business harm?"

"There's my sister, but that's about it. Haven't seen her in a while, she might be dead."

"What's her name?" I asked.

"Gemini. We're twins. Our parents weren't really very creative," she said, with a wry smile. "We were in the distillery business together. She and I had a disagreement. She wanted to water the whiskey. I bought her out and sent her on her way, it was...oh, about twenty-one months ago now."

"Why do you think she might be dead?"

Gemini shrugged. "She's a glowfly addict. Or was."

Glowfly is a drug, made from the bodies of a kind of demon. (They're small, winged, and about as smart as your average songbird or chicken. Some pest or another from another plane.) It makes you love everyone, and it makes you glow. It also makes you able to fly.

It has two side effects. One is that it's very addictive for most people, and it's a very expensive drug, so people get in trouble trying to be able to afford their next dose. The other is that the drug wears off without warning...sometimes when the user is in midair. Death from glowfly dust usually is the result of the sudden stop at the end of a long fall from the sky. People in the demon sector sometimes wake up to find bodies tangled in their laundry lines.

So Gemini's twin being a glowfly addict meant that she did indeed have a pretty large chance of being dead at this point. "What was her profession?" I asked. "She was a distiller, yes?"

"Bookkeeper, actually. She worshiped Istishia, but I don't know if she was a priest. River priests seem to wander in and out of the whole priesthood thing."

I would have taken offense, but it was true. Witness me, after all. Iola bonked my leg with her head, and I took the hint, thanking Gemini and escorting my fellows out.

We walked across the dwarven section to found Klotild. After asking around a bit, we found someone who could give us directions. Before we got there, Poi popped up out of the pouch he had his house in. He was waving the glowing ruby. "Hey, found what this is for. Still working on the worm."

"What?"

"Well, it works on the principle of association, using the seventh corollary..." Poi began speaking in equations again.

I waited for him to take a breath and asked, "This is interesting, Poi, but we have work to do. What does it do?"

He gave me a dirty look. "It's a touchstone for the taps. It connects all of them together, and it can be used to control them. All right?" He disappeared back into the pouch with a furious huff.

I decided to let him have some time to cool off, and we went to talk to Klotild. The forge was open-air, but it was ferociously hot, the air seeming to wring the moisture out of the air. Klotild was standing with a cup of cherry-hot metal in the forge, held with long tongs. When we got her attention, she set it aside and turned to us.

"Oh, those," she said when we showed her the tap. "Yeah, a guy had me make a dozen of them. Guy named Zale. He paid good money for it, and even supplied the mithril."

I looked at Klotild. Looked at the tap. Looked at Klotild. "This is mithril?"

Her stoot-stained face broke into a grin, revealing even teeth. "It is."

Mithril is very rare and very expensive; I was holding in my hand enough mithril to purchase...well, just about anything. A good chunk of the land in the city, to start with. And there were eleven more of these?

I handed the tap to Electra. "Zale, you said?"

"Yeah. He had a lazy left eye, it was always looking off in another direction from his other one. How he was dressed, I'd say he was from the demon section, but from the good end. You know how people look. All flash, no substance."

There was a movement from my pocket, and Poi climbed up to perch on the edge. He scrubbed at his face with one paw as I glanced down. "Yes?"

"Anyone have a seed?" Poi asked.

"I've got an apple in my pocket, just a second," Argos said. He extracted a seed from the apple, and a piece for Poi, who stuffed it in his mouth and produced the worm I’d given him from somewhere. He gave the worm a milking squeeze, and produced a bit of worm poop out the other end, Then he wrapped the seed in the dung and dropped it to the ground.

I squawked and jumped away as by my feet there erupted a furious rustle of growth, an apple tree growing decades in just seconds. What you don't know about plants is that their growing makes noise. Speeded up into seconds, it sounded like vvvvoooooommmmmm.

"Fertilizer," I said as the apple tree slowed its growth and ripe apples appeared on the branches. The leaves closest to the forge were withering from the heat. "Sorry about that, Klotild."

She was looking up into the branches, fascinated. "Not a problem. Apple wood smells nice when it burns."

We said our goodbyes and walked away, Poi clambering up to my shoulder. "Did that make you feel better?"

He snickered. "Yes."

Padding beside me in wolf form, Iola gave me and Poi a dubious glance. She couldn't understand Poi--even if she had one of our amulets, she wouldn't be wearing it in wolf form. As we walked, I could see people staring. I supposed we had to be a sight, walking around in the heat of he day, a massive black wolf at our side, a rat on my shoulder. The phoenixes had been left home for the day, Iola's in the red ooze's room.

The little boxes that Argos had made for us, the tunneling wind boxes, pinged. After a moment of total confusion when we looked around, wondering where the noise was coming from, Argos, Electra, and I pulled the boxes out of our pockets and held them to our ears. (I'm sure we all looked like crazy people.)

It was Basil, who also had one of the boxes. His voice was crackling a bit, but clearly audible. Poi leaned in, ears twitching. "Those guys led me to an old distillery. One of them's meeting with a guy named Zale. Zale's not happy about the ruby being lost. Careless of Istvan."

"Did you say Zale?" Electra asked. Basil confirmed. "Let's meet up. We have some taps to go find."

We went back to the whiskey pipe, and found a patch of shade and waited for Basil. Poi dug up the ruby for us, then sat on my knee and washed his face. "Watch this," he said to us, then messed with the ruby some. "Look."

The whiskey had changed, running clear. One of the men who'd been filling his cup drank deeply, and then spat out what he'd taken in. "Water!" he announced, disgusted. Poi chuckled, and then fiddled some more, making something called a tequila sunrise. Then elven wine. Then he worked at it a bit more and managed to make a healing potion.

"You have a small vial?" he asked me. I patted my pockets and came up with one that had held some concentrated willowbark tea yesterday. "Good. When I tell you, dip it in. I only want this to last a moment."

He scrambled down to the ground beside me and I got ready to dip the vial. He concentrated, muttering and fiddling with it. When he indicated, I dipped in the vial, and then he frantically fiddled with it again.

"What is it?" I asked.

I thought the flattened ears on his head might be a rat grimace. "Poison. One drop will kill an adult human in seconds. Now, if those taps are anywhere important..."

I got it. Someone else could do the same thing.

We needed to track down the taps. Fortunately, there were magical lines leading to the ret of the taps, and we did manage to track them all down by the time mid-afternoon rolled around. Three were in the elven section, on the main water supply outlets. Five were on other whiskey maker's barrels. Others were in the human sector, on the water supplies in the rich end of the human district. One was in the monastery of Istishia where I’d spent a decade and a half.

Obviously, this Zale was up to no good. We reconvened with Basil, filled him in, and went looking for information on Zale. One trip to the police archives later, and we knew more about Zale than we really wanted.

Zale's full name was Zale Silversmith. The Silversmiths were a jeweler family from way back, rich but not too rich. They mostly dealt in precious metals and gems. He had gone into the human mage university and had almost graduated; he'd had a fight with his transmutation teacher and left. Said teacher had died in a magical explosion not a year later.

He had been born with the lazy eye that Basil had mentioned. He'd worn a patch until he was fifteen, and refused to be healed by any priest. He also, according to the archive file, was rumored to have been the one to invent glowfly dust. He was a very rich man right now.

Basil showed us to the old distillery where he'd seen Zale. It was empty, but on searching it we came up with some interesting things--a small lead box full of glowfly dust, a map of the river and a list of all of the known priests of Istishia (I was on the list, my whereabouts listed as unknown), and another gem that was a different color than our ruby but did the same thing. I handed both the gem and the dust over to Poi, the dust so he could make an antidote.

Zale, Zale, Zale. We'd stopped part of his plan, but was there more? And where could we find the guy? Maybe the cops in the dwarven sector would know; the police file on him had mentioned a dwarven girlfriend. We wandered down there, and Iphigenia waved as we came in.

"Hey," Electra said. "You know anything about a guy named Zale Silversmith?"

"Zale. Died in 712. What was that?" Iphigenia’s eyes had gone briefly glazed.

"Zale," I said. "You know him?"

"Zale. Died in 712. What was that?"

No matter what we asked about him, or who at the station we asked, the answer was always the same. We finally traced the problem to a box of baked goods. The buns and filled donuts inside were magical. The box was from a bakery down the way called Alex's Bakery. "Alex likes the cops, gives us a discount on four dozen of her best a day," one of the cops told me.

Oh, did she now. I got some of the filling of one of the donuts for Poi. Basil had already wandered off with Iphigenia in tow, flirting like a madman. I honestly couldn't tell if he meant it, or if he was just trying to get some information out of her, or some combination of the two. Whichever it was, it was slightly disturbing to watch, and the two of them had been heading for the bakery down the street.

Once we got there, Basil bounced over to us. "Iphigenia ordered a donut, and the baker got one from behind another counter. Suspicious!" He was fair bouncing as he muttered this to us. "None of the other customers get their donuts from the special box."

"I think I need to talk with Alex," I said. Iola tagged along as I walked up to the counter. Alex pointedly ignored Iola as I leaned on the counter. "Can I have one of those?" I asked, pointing to a roll that apparently involved custard and honey.

"Two coppers," she said, and grabbed one of the rolls for me. I handed her the money, then broke the roll in half and handed one half to Iola, who had been eyeing the rolls speculatively ever since we'd come in. "Anything else?"

"Actually, yes. You sell pastries to the cop station down the street, yes?" She nodded. "They get something special, don't they?"

Alex shrugged. She was pretty as dwarves go, though her teeth were terrible. "Guy named Zale pays me good cash to make a special recipe for them, and use a filling he provides. They're pretty good, and I offer them at a discount to the cops."

I raised an eyebrow, and she flushed. "Are you aware that the filling is magic? Mind-affecting magic?" Alex went suddenly pale. "Tell you what. You stop selling anything but your normal stock to the cops, and I won't tell them what's been in the donuts you've been making them. Sound fair?"

"I had no idea. Sure. I'll keep giving them the discount for a while, too. Damn, I knew Zale was too good to be true."

Satisfied, I gave Iola the other half of the custard roll and returned to the rest. Zale was playing some sort of larger game here, and I wish I knew what it was. We talked about it and decided that our next move was to track down Zale himself and talk to him. Poi came up with an antidote and a version of glowfly dust that wasn't addictive, as well as an antidote that would also cure the addiction.

From Alex, we got an address for Zale, a warehouse in the demon district where he made most of the glowfly dust. We bullshitted our way past his guards, but Zale himself proved most uncooperative. He was amused by the fact that we'd discovered his plan, was mysterious about what else he had going on, and almost completely oblivious to Basil, who had taken a hit of the nonaddictive glowfly dust and was swooping around the room, giggling.

He did pay attention, briefly, when Basil landed in his lap. And then he paid more attention when Basil got bored and shot him in the back with a lightning wand that he'd evidently gotten off of Zale when he'd touched him.

Zale rolled his eyes, stood, straightened his shirt, and then blew dust in all of our faces.

Surprised, I inhaled.

It was exactly like being hit with a hammer. An extremely happy hammer.

I'm not sure how long it took me to get a little bit of self-control back, but when I did I found that all of us, Zale's guards included, were tumbling through the air, giggling. Iola had shifted to human form and was somersaulting. I got out the antidote that Poi had made, took a drop, and immediately realized I'd forgotten to lower myself to the ground first. Fortunately, I landed on my feet.

I managed to get everyone down to the ground and the antidote administered, and convinced Iola to shift back to wolf form. "Well, that didn't work," I muttered. "What next? Find the dwarf girl?"

It was generally agreed that Gemini was the angle we were going to need to work on Zale from, and so we went to see if we could find her. Hours of looking later, we'd zeroed in on an abandoned house in the troll district, near the invisible house that the angel prison was in. The front porch creaked alarmingly as we let ourselves in. "Gemini?" an old man said, drifting near the ceiling. Funny thing about him--he was glowing green. Most humanoids glowed yellow with glowfly powder in them. "She's the only dwarf here."

We thanked him and went to go look. Gemini was indeed there, sitting on a lumpy straw tick with her back to the wall, knees to her chest, eyes closed. I knelt next to her. "Hey, Gemini." She stirred, raised her head. I caught her chin in one hand, raising it more. She looked like a thinner version of her sister. "Stick out your tongue."

Blinking, she complied, and I dripped a little bit of antidote on her tongue. She jerked back from me, and then shook her head. "What did you just do?"

"Took away the addiction," I said. "Are you willing to talk to us about Zale?"

She nodded. "What do you want to know?"

Gemini filled in for us things we needed to know. One was that Zale's weakness was cold; other elemental energies wouldn't even touch him. Another was what the rest of his plan was; he had stolen a plant called a decade flower from the druids, that bloomed once every ten years in the worst heat of summer and put out pollen that would kill any other plant around it.

He was using the fertilizer from the worms to grow many of the flowers very quickly. They were due to bloom in three days' time, and he'd distribute them around the druid sector. The decade flowers would defoliate the druid sector and make it so nothing would grow for years there. He'd expected the druids to just get up and leave, afterward.

He believed that the druids and the elves were the real threat to the health and happiness of those in the city, along with the rich in the human sector. The taps in the dwarven district had just been a red herring. The priests of Istishia were on his list because evidently they hadn't been able to heal his lazy eye when he'd gone to them for help.

He was going to poison the river, which would have killed all those who had come there to worship (as well as a number of other people). And, finally, we found that the guy had a floating greenhouse(!) in the sky above the demon sector. Gemini offered to take us there, especially after we told her we had some nonaddictive glowfly dust.

Before we left, Electra went up to the old man who was glowing green, floating near the ceiling in the large front room of the crumbling house. "You're not human, are you?" she asked.

He rolled over, looking down at her. "No."

"Well, what are you?"

"An angel." He yawned, making the lines in his face look like valleys. "The last of them that were born here. Everyone else is gone."

"You don't look like one," she said, dubious.

Suddenly the old man was a young man, glowing like a sun god. "I'm an angel. I can look like anything I want."

I could see the speculative look on the young necromancer's face. "What name do you go by?"

"Nairn, these days."

"Well, good to meet you," she said, and grinned. There were times when I had no idea what was going on inside her head. This was one of them.

Poi asked for the lightning wand that Basil had gotten from Zale, and did some stuff to it. Then we took the glowfly dust and headed upward.

The problem with the drug is that it was distracting. I kept wanting to hug people. I don't usually want to hug people. Then I got to thinking about why I don't usually want to hug people and my thoughts started tripping over themselves and I would quit flying upwards so I could get my head untangled. It took four hits with the happy hammer before we managed to find the greenhouse in the sky, tethered to the ground with a very long and invisible rope.

We waited until the urge to declare our undying love for each other had passed (and I had convinced Iola to let go of me; she'd changed into human form) and went to look at the greenhouse. Rows and rows and rows of plants with flowers that looked like toothed...um...never mind what they looked like.

Some blasts with the wand Poi had adjusted killed all of them; the wand was now casting cold spells. "How many charges does it have?" Basil asked.

"Charges?" Poi asked. "It doesn't really work like that."

Basil was impressed. So was I, to tell the truth. We discussed the greenhouse, and decided to move it and keep it. Not sure what we're going to use a floating greenhouse for, but it might come in handy.

That taken care of, we took some more glowfly dust and floated down. I was starting to get used to the feeling a bit, but that didn't mean I wasn't affected by it. Once we were on the ground and I'd convinced Iola to change back into a wolf (she was still glowing a bit, and kept on nearly knocking me over with her tail) we asked Gemini what she wanted to do, and told her that her sister would probably be happy to see her now.

"Am I still thinner than her?" Gemini wanted to know.

"Yes," I said, wondering what that had to do with it.

"Okay, I’ll go. Bye!" She smiled at us and took off.

We wandered over to Remy's house. We figured that at this point, Zale was going to come after us, and soon. We wanted backup.

"You have any suggestions on where to wait for the guy?" I asked.

"If nowhere else, I'd say the zombie garden," she replied, thoughtful.

"The zombie garden?"

She gave me an impish look. "You know, where you plant dead bodies and zombies grow up out of the ground."

Necromancers. Right. The "zombie garden" she was referring to was the cemetery that was a block from her house.

We decided to go get some stuff and meet up at the cemetery. Electra wanted to see if she convinced the angel we'd met before to help. "Is there going to be nakedness?" he asked her when she explained the situation.

"Well, Iola here likes being naked, so maybe."

"Good." He drifted down from the ceiling. "I’ll help, if there's going to be nakedness afterwards."

A lecherous angel. Will wonders never cease. I figured that it was tough trying to keep clothes on Iola anyway, and if he wanted nakedness, she'd probably oblige. It would be up to her. We met back up in the cemetery, Remy proudly showing off her newest zombie, Magnolia. He served us tea and we sat in the gathering dusk, waiting.

Zale arrived, and while we were trying to talk to him Basil got bored and hit him with a blast from that wand. In less time than it takes to tell it, Zale was down. And dead.

Well, I hadn't really wanted to kill him, but it made talking to him easier. Some Speak With Dead spells later, and we knew that he'd been playing both sides against the middle, in the employ of both the druids and the elves. The manufacture of glowfly dust happened on Emrou Street, in the thieves' guild, and partially in the demon district.

The lazy eye had been a curse cast on him by a demon that his father had screwed over; it had seen into a dimension of hellfire and agony. He'd found a secret mithril mine deep under the dwarven sector, which was where he'd gotten the mithril to make the taps out of, but he knew nothing about any music in the sewers. He'd also seen the lights at night above the demon section, but thought they might be a code. He hadn't had anything to do with those, either.

"Well, that's that," Remy said, dusting her hands together. "Electra, do you want the body?"

"Nah," Electra said. She turned to the angel. "So. Nakedness."

The angel looked at her, amused. He was back in his older form. "I was mostly kidding about that."

She grinned. "Well, my place is pretty close by here. If you want to come over."

Nairn blinked. Then smiled. "Sure. Want me to be old, young, in between?"

"Surprise me," she said, then took his arm and marched him away, leaving the rest of us open-mouthed. Well, I suppose if you have a chance to sleep with the last angel left on this plane, you should take it.

I'm not her father, I reminded myself. Thank Istishia.

We said goodnight to Remy, and she said that she was free this coming Saturday night, if I still wanted to have dinner. And so Iola and Poi and I went home, listening to the life of the demon district all around us, people coming out and socializing now that the heat of the day had passed.

Laughter, screams, otherworldly hoots, the sound of wings as flocks of spinagons flew home to roost, wherever home was for them. A drow and a half-form werewolf sat on the stoop of an apartment block and argued good-naturedly. Groups of giggling adolescents stuttered and started by, daring each other to stay and face the unknown dangers of the demon district. I imagined one or more of them would probably end up meeting a vampire before sunrise.

A skinny kid sidled up to me with a knife, but a growl from Iola sent him running for his life. "Good enough," I said to her, to Poi, to the world in general. It had been a good day's work, despite it ending with a death.

It wasn't the river, but it was a good life anyway...



Quotes:

"Side effects may include splattering."
--Laura

"Stakeout! I'll bring the steaks!" *runs off to the butcher*
--Basil

"You missed. Good dog."
--Laura

"Well, you could come to my place..."
"Sounds good. You like them younger, older, in between?"
"surprise me."
--Electra, the angel