aithne | Sleepless Streets: Lowering Property Values

The call came before breakfast, this time.

We had all gone home after Delwin's announcement; the angel had decided to help Delwin and the elf woman and her baby hide. So we'd sworn not to talk about it with each other--whisper of the secret of what the elves had once been would get us killed right quick. So we'd gone to our respective homes and slept, and now were assembled and waiting for our breakfast orders to arrive.

It was blueberry pancakes today--the blueberry harvest was starting to come in, and since blueberries are the sort of ephemeral food you get only in season, every restaurant in the halfling district was advertising blueberry specials.

Gaetana sounded worried and a bit annoyed, and we promised to meet her in the human district after breakfast. The blueberry pancakes were perfect. Iola drowned hers in maple syrup and proceeded to eat them with her hands, getting her face, hair, and hands happily sticky.

Poi climbed up to my shoulder, a small vial clenched in his mouth. He spat it out into my hand. "Present for you. Because I like you."

"What is it?"

"Undoes what the elves have done to themselves." Poi's voice was smug. "Temporarily. I suggest you find someone to test it on."

"Just one?"

"Yes, but I can make you a concentrated version that you could dump into a water supply. The elves have their own water source. Get in there, drop in the potion...poof. Drow."

I was speaking very carefully indeed. "Might want to get on that. We'll see."

He clambered down to the table and I gave him part of my pancakes, pouring on more syrup when he asked. He was definitely looking less spherical than he had, I decided. I was going to get worried about him if he dropped too much weight, though with the feather snip in his headband he wasn't going to waste away and die like many old rats did.

We finished breakfast and headed to the human district. I grew up here, and it was rather startling to see that there was something different. Very, very different. There had been a school here, one that had reasonably low or free tuition, and it had never been a particularly graceful building, squatty despite its three stories, made out of poured stone.

In the place of the school there was...a castle.

It was made out of dark stone, complete with spires, gargoyles, crenellations, and arrow-slits. There was a dark cloud gathering overhead and flashes that looked like lightning on the roof, and a moat forming at our feet. Gaetana was standing here with her hands on her hips, glaring at the castle like it had personally offended her.

"How long's it been like this?" I asked.

She turned to us, her brow drawn and dark. "The first students were due to arrive a few minutes after it changed," she told us. "There are teachers who can't be found, they're probably inside. The layout's a bit different, and it seems to be a completely different building."

Weird shit like this happens sometimes at mage schools. Not at a regular school. "So you called us in to find out why it's changed and make it stop, yes?"

"What we hired you for. Good luck. Let me know if you need anything." She flashed us a quick smile and walked away.

As she walked away, I frowned. I wondered what bug was up Gaetana's butt this time. She was acting as if something about the school turning into a castle...scared her?

I wondered briefly if Gaetana was married, if she had kids. If she did, maybe they went here. I shook my head and we got down to work, planning an expedition inside.

We put up protective spells, begged a few potions from the police, and in short order were ready to go. Iola had changed into her full wolf form. Once inside, we looked around. "Nice," Basil said, stepping ahead of us. "Someone's got bad taste in decorating."

Behind me, Electra made a crack about rats. Poi, who had come out and was sitting on my shoulder, tensed briefly and I heard Electra squawk. "What did you--ooooh! Poi!"

I glanced over my shoulder to see that Electra's hair, usually dyed black, was now the light green color of spring leaves. "Turn it back," she demanded.

"Be nice to me, then," he said tartly. She grumbled, and I heard the rat snicker.

In front of us, Basil said, "Um, guys, what's that green mist there?"

I looked up. This was a wide corridor with rooms leading off to the sides, the floor damp with unidentifiable substances and the walls blotchy with fungus. There was a mist clinging to the ceiling, which was moving away from us slowly but purposefully. "It's undead, whatever it is," I said, having put up a spell that would let me detect undead. Argos had managed somehow to lay his hands on a rat, and he tossed the protesting rodent at the cloud.

The rat passed into the mist, which contracted around it abruptly. The green of the mist blushed red, and the husk of the rat fell with a sound like crumpled parchment hitting stone. The mist seemed to perk up a bit, and started heading towards us.

"Vampiric cloud!" Electra exclaimed. "Vampire that got stuck in its mist form."

"Got it," I said, and began a prayer that I had practiced plenty but had never had a chance to use. It worked, gratifyingly enough, and the vampiric cloud fled down the corridor and away.

"Good," Electra said, then stopped and looked around. "Where did Basil go?"

"Here," he said. He stepped out of one of the side rooms, pockets building. "Lots of things in jars in there. Looks like some sort of science lab. Look there's an interesting door..."

The indicated door was marked, "Dungeon". I looked at it, then shrugged. Might as well start at the bottom and work our way up.

After some foolishness with a hallucinatory terrain spell, we managed to get down into the basement, and found people in the process of being turned into undead without the benefit of having been rendered dead first. It was an entirely unpleasant process, but it was easily fixed by dispelling the spells on the people.

The first one I hit with a dispel turned out to be a pretty female human, one of the teachers, who thanked us profusely for the rescue. She told us that just after she'd arrived at work, there had been a bright flash. She had fallen, unable to move, and after a few minutes a...thing came by to fetch her and haul her down here. It had dripped a potion in her mouth, and she'd begun the long and painful process of turning into a zombie. From her description, the creature had been a flesh golem of some sort, stitched together out of pieces and parts.

"Do you remember anything strange in the last few days?" Electra asked.

"Monday was the science fair, that's always pretty strange," the teacher said. "One of the boys had a project to do with curing vampires. One of the girls was trying to talk to the dead using this artifact she'd invented but it didn't work very well. Other than that, it was the usual run of projects--mouse breeding, model volcanoes, posters about different breeds of minotaurs and the life cycle of spinagon demons, that sort of thing."

Basil, while the teacher was talking, had been playing with some string and the drains in the room. He looked up now and rummaged in one of the pockets on his leg. "The girl--is this her crystal?" he asked, pulling out a glass globe that was slightly too large to be comfortable for him to hold.

"It is," she said, sounding surprised. "It was still in my classroom this morning."

"Can I have it?" Poi asked. I took it and held it up for him to look at. "Drop it into my pouch," he said. "I need some tools."

I did and he followed, and we asked the teacher about the girl. "She's one of the older students," she said. "Bright girl, shows a lot of promise. I think she's destined for the mage school, but her parents wanted her to spend some time with normal kids for a while. She's an adopted daughter of the Rochforths."

Piotr Rochforth was a boyhood friend of mine. I'd gotten arrested with him once. That he had a daughter in school was enough to make me feel abruptly very, very old, even though I knew that my son was probably in school somewhere, and my daughter was old enough to be done with her schooling.

There was movement at my side. Poi popped up and said, "This orb is somehow shifting this place onto some creepy plane of existence. I can't turn it off, it's being powered by something elsewhere in the building."

"Then we need to find it," I said. "Let's get the rest of these folks fixed and out of here."

We did so, and climbed the stairs to the second and then the third floor. We decided to skip the second floor on the theory that what we really wanted was to get this place shifted back to where it belonged, and the flashing on the roof indicated that something was definitely going on up there.

We walked down the hall, discovering a room full of racks and racks of potions. The potions were, thankfully, labeled. Most of them were for turning people into undead. There was also a large collection of jars with what appeared to be sheets of skin in them. They were for healing wounds. I'd seen this sort of thing before, in the healing temples. The skin was especially good for burns, if it was placed on the burns right after they were acquired.

I gathered up a few of those, and we kept going. Another room held a wand spinning in midair. Every so often, the end would flash, and a body part would appear and fall to the floor. The floor was strewn with hands, feet, legs, arms, heads, and so on.

In the next room over, a flesh golem was operating what looked a lot like a pedal-operated sewing machine. It was stitching body parts together, making another flesh golem. We slipped by and kept going. "Roof," Poi murmured.

We found the stairs up, and discovered the power source--a wand, again hovering in midair. As we watched, the glowing wand floated back to an empty space in a rack filled with other wands, and another floated up and began to glow to take its place.

I murmured the spell that allows me to see invisible, and blinked. "There's some sort of--dimensional funnel-thing here," I said. "Looks like the wands are keeping it open."

"Power source," Basil said. He reached up and snatched the wand out of midair. "Fixed!"

There was a pained roar from the floor below us. Poi, on my shoulder said, "We have about three minutes before this building is sucked back into the place it came from. I can send it back sooner, but the power's fading."

I peered over the edge of the roof. "Anyone have any rope? And what's--"

I was interrupted by the arrival on the scene of the flesh golem from downstairs. It was lumbering towards us, and Electra was grabbing wands from the racks. She used them somehow to blast a hole in the flesh golem, and Basil was offering me rope. Of course he had rope. I told Iola to change to half-form and got her and the rest off the building. Basil didn't bother with the rope, using those gauntlets of his to swing down the side of the building.

We got off, and Poi turned off the building. With a flash, the castle disappeared, and the school reappeared. From behind us, we heard groans and jeers. I assumed those were some of the students, upset that their building was back.

"I think we need to go talk to Velika Rochforth," I said. Nobody argued, and I led the way. The Rochforths are one of the lesser powers among the human nobility, such as we have, but they were rich all the same. I knew where the house was; I'd snuck in and out of it a lot as a boy. We got there and asked the butler at the door for Velika, after flashing our badges. We heard the butler say to Velika, "The police are here to talk to you. As usual."

Velika bounced down the stairs, pausing on the last flight to stare at us. "What?" she asked. "Am I in trouble?" She was fourteen or so, dressed in a little skirt and leather corset, with heavy makeup on her eyes and half her head shaved. Going through a rebellious phase, it looked like.

"Probably not," Electra said. We'd agreed to let her do the talking. "This ball. Where did you get it?"

Velika looked around, then lowered her voice. "My boyfriend," she said. "Laudomia. Yes, I know it's a stupid name, but he's cute. He's an elf, in his first year of mage training. Or he was before someone blew the elven mage tower to several hells. I'm not supposed to be seeing him, his family's mad that I exist. He borrowed some stuff from the mage tower. Then things got kind of out of hand. I thought I could use the orb to ace my science project." She looked unhappy. "Stupid thing didn't work."

"What else did he take?" Electra asked.

"Um...a zombie dog, a harp that plays itself sometimes, and a weird-ass wand. I think that's it."

Electra looked thoughtful. "Can you show me how the orb does work?"

Velika nodded and bounced down the rest of the stairs. Iola, in wolf form once more, leaned against my leg. "See?" she said as she turned the ball over in her hands. "You just shake it up some, and there you go."

A face appeared in the orb. "What do you want to know?" a disembodied voice asked.

"Where's Laudomia?" Electra asked.

"Number Eighteen Seven Gild Way, in the elven district," the voice said.

"That's where he lives," Velika added. "It's very posh. Cool hair, by the way. How'd you get it?"

"Insulted the right people," Electra said, and we bid the corseted girl farewell and went off to find a young elf.

Seven Gild Way turned out to be in the same gated complex as the elven palace. They argued about letting us in, even after we showed them our badges, and once we'd convinced them by asking if they wanted to talk to Gaetana, we found ourselves followed by elves both visible and invisible, a sort of armed guard. Were we to breathe wrong, the mistake would be corrected quickly and fatally, I suspected.

We spoke to the doorman at Number Eighteen, which, like all of the buildings on this street, turned a blank face to the street, with scarcely even any windows. The elves tend to build their houses as hollow squares centered around courtyards. It was not a particularly friendly architecture style.

The first thing I noticed about Laudomia was that he slouched. He slouched like someone who had studied the art of slouching at length, and had perfected the art of making every adult in sight want to tell him to straighten up. He might have been tall for an elf, it was hard to tell. He looked at us, looked at our badges, and visibly paled.

We were in the foyer of the house, and the butler had retreated. I held out the orb. "Velika told me you'd borrowed this from the mage tower," I started.

"I was going to return them," he said. "Really. It's just--things got kind of messy, and there's nowhere to return them to, and I'm in trouble, aren't I?"

"A bit," I said. "You need to come to the station with us, and bring everything you took."

A little while later, we were in an "interview room" with Laudomia, a zombie dog with one eyeball hanging out of its socket, a small lap harp, and a wand that was barely a handspan long and completely plain.

Laudomia knew nothing about them other than the fact that his mother Elisheva, who at the time had been the third highest ranking mage in the tower and now was the highest, had pointed out the place where they had been kept to him. Thinking to impress Velika, he'd stolen the items.

"What kind of mage points out the place where incredibly dangerous artifacts are hidden to a first year?" Electra asked, exasperated. "Even if it was her son?"

"It wanted to be stolen," a new voice said. "It's sort of a categorical imperative, really," it added.

The zombie dog...was talking. Iola growled with surprise. Looking closer at the mangy thing, it looked like it had actually been a wolf, once upon a time. One eyeball was hanging from an empty socket, connected by a red and yellow cord of nerve and vessel.

Electra stooped to ease the eye back into the socket. "What do you mean?" she asked.

The zombie snorted. "The harp. Harp of discord. People react strongly to it, usually negatively, and a few truly evil people are drawn to and calmed by it. The wand. A summoner. Any demon you can call by name, it will bring to you. The orb. A prison and a portal, all on one. Guy named Octavius lives there now. And there's me. Name's Abimelech. when I bite people, they become werewolves. And from the smell of things, yon strapping wolven right there is one of my progeny. Distant, of course." Abimelech's mouth fell open in a grin. "And what Mister Stupid Name right there isn't telling you is that his mother is the third daughter of the queen."

We looked at each other. "Right," I said. "All right, Laudomia, I think you're free to go. Though..." I pulled out the vial that Poi had given me that morning. "Ever wanted to try out looking like a drow? This is somewhat experimental, mind you, we and to see if it works on elves."

His eyes lit up, and wonder of wonders, he straightened. He was tall for an elf. "Serious? Velika would love that. She's always talking about how exotic drow are."

I tossed the vial at him. "Give it a shot."

He did, and within seconds of drinking his skin was changing hue, through brown to the night-black of the drow, his hair lightening to pure white. He smiled, and something about that smile was troubling.

What was also troubling was the way he was suddenly looking at the rest of us like we were insects, or worse than insects. We kept him in the room, waiting the five minutes for the potion to wear off. It wasn't a particularly pleasant few minutes. As elves went, Laudomia had been positively charming. As a drow, he was not charming in the least. He levitated around and spent those minutes mostly trying to insult us.

We turned him loose once he was back to normal. "So, who's Octavius?" I asked Abimelech.

Another one of those lupine grins. "He was the one who figured out how to make the...elves...look different. He got trapped in a nasty dimension afterwards. And yes, the wand can bring him through."

"I suppose until we bring him through, buildings are going to keep turning into Gothic Specials?"

"Likely." Abimelech laid down and put his nose on his paws. Iola was chasing her tail, bored. "I'd get some stuff to trap him if you need, if I were you."

We discussed it for a bit, and decided that yes, it was probably a good idea. We got set up, secured the room against prying eyes, and brought Octavius into this world.

He was very, very grateful, an older human with posture that suggested he'd been in the military for a while. All he really wanted, he told us, was to kill drow...and by drow, we understood that he meant those elves who were really drow underneath. We cautioned him to keep it chill, not go overboard, and let him loose.

We knew we'd probably have to hunt him down later, but I think we were all a little frustrated by the recent turn of events, and if felt good to let loose someone who could do something about it.

Taking advantage of our precautions, we used a combination of spells to talk to the shade of a dead elf, asking her if the elves knew that they used to be drow. The answer startled us.

At age 250 or so, the same parasites in the elven wine that made other races infertile transmitted the knowledge that the elves were drow, and how they'd gotten that way. "Why?" I asked. "Why change yourselves?"

"We lived under the ground, deep in the earth, and the earth was killing us," the shade said. "A volcano was stirring. Gases were venting into our city. The druids never helped, they claimed it was natural. We think they did it, of course. So we changed ourselves so we could live on the surface. We became sundwellers. Do not pity us, human. We did this on purpose..."

The voice of the shade faded. We all looked at each other. "I think that these items should get stored away somewhere safe," Electra said, finally.

We agreed, and packed them up to take them back to the elves. But all the time, the shade's voice was haunting me.

We did this on purpose.

Quotes:

*runs forward to look at the base of the building* "Oooh, ooh, is there a murky tarn?"
--Basil
"We're on a mission from God. Unfortunately for everyone else, it's Grrrbek."
--Basil

"But nothing says to me, 'I've turned the building gothy.'"
--Basil

"Some people have snow days, they had a zombie day."
--Basil

"Electra's expressed distaste for the squishy bits of necromancy."
--Martin

"Cool green hair, how'd you do that?"
"You know, insult the right people..."
--Velika, Electra