Post by stephena on Jun 3, 2023 15:00:05 GMT
“You look busy,” I told Derthaad as he swung open the watch house door nearly catching me a roundhouse heavy enough to mess up my hair. I liked my hair. I had it cut two years ago, and it was just getting settled in.
He still took time to hear me out as I told him a tale as old as time but new as the morning dew. This time Brother Kavel was the hero. Fate put on her finest ballgown, slunk up to him, unlocked his rib cage, stole out his heart, sliced and diced with barbed wire scissors then pan fried it in his own tears and forced it down his throat so fast the acid reflux alone would have taken out a smaller man.
A dame, of course. Natalie. Derthaad nodded sadly. "If only there was something that would get him drunk," he sighed. "We could help him forget. Although Kavel drunk... we might have to drink in the cells."
I nodded, and turned, my message done.
“You good at interrogating?” he stopped me.
I looked him up and down. Dragonborn detective. As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where it’s going out of style. A good kid. I owed him. And I was good at interrogating. I like to think it’s one of my more attractive qualities.
“Sure. I learned my craft on the streets, perfected it in the dungeons of the House, honed a few side techniques during the jungle wars in Chult and spent 18 months as the deputy head torturer for a duke. He’s dead now.”
“I meant just asking questions.” A worried looked passed across his face and he gave me a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of my back.
“Questions. They’re my favourite.”
“Then come with me.”
I needed a drink. I needed a soft bed. I needed a vacation. I needed a home in the country. What I had was a cloak, a crossbow and a sword. I followed him.
I was the first, but I wasn’t the last. It’s usually the other way round, so this felt refreshing. Beets, looking too downhearted for a girl who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money, and a character called Crow who looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.
“We’re solving a crime,” Derthaad told him.
“Is it a serious crime?” Crow’s voice was the elaborately casual voice of the guy who shows up when the last thing in your life that could go wrong has gone wrong. I liked him.
“It can be if left unchecked,” Derthaad nodded.
“With all due respect officer, you have to stop speaking in vagaries,” Crow justified my faith.
“You’re right, come with me.”
--
I’m not a girl for demi planes as a rule. They’re department-store hideouts - the most of everything and the best of nothing. But Derthaad needed a chalk board and a place to hide, and the Three Headed Dragon was ill-equipped to offer either. It was a busy night, and the smell of booze was strong enough to build a small castle on. We were meeting a dwarf who was in on the whole deal. Whatever the whole deal was. I just needed to be told where to point my crossbow. Not that I like killing. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts. But I’m good at it and you have to play to your strengths.
“We’re tracking a water genasi called Meso. A crime boss. Tried to bribe me to throw a fight,” Derthaad looked nervous and eager like a kitten who’s just shown up in a house where they don’t like kittens very much. “Dark skin – deep blue, with a white streak in his hair like a tidal wave.”
“There’s a genasi I see around sometimes,” Crow sounded reflective. “Big, very dark, shades of the abyss.”
“I think that would be one of his right-hand men,” Derthaad suggested.
I frowned. This conversation put me in mind of something but the problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.
“There’s a genasi comes by the temple sometimes,” I offered up. “White streak fits the bill. Splashes his money. Popular with the locals.”
Beets was nodding. “There’s a couple like to splash it around, spending on food and handing it to the poor folk,” she mused. “Sealed with a cresting wave.”
It was falling into place. When I was running the numbers racket for Pliers McKenzie in the Tarmalune wharfs we did a weekly drop of all the home comforts to them as needed. Bought us a thousand eyes and sealed 500 mouths. We live in an age of intellectual decay where anyone with some currency and a food parcel qualifies as a philanthropist.
“Let’s go see the dwarf,” Derthaad headed for the door. I checked my crossbow. The crossbow never settles anything. It's just a fast curtain to a bad second act. But I figured on seeing the finale and this was my insurance policy.
As we walk into the bar I noticed the eyes of one dwarf taking us all in like an orphanage nine months after the fleet has sailed. We got cosy all around him but he didn’t seem comfortable.
“Have a seat,” he croaked. “Can I get you anything? Is this a social visit?” Turns out the name was Werdil Onyxsword and he was a big cheese in hot metal. Had a forge uptown being undercut by an overambitious forge downtown. I’m hazy on detail.
“You seem stressed,” Derthaad was busy detecting. I liked watching him work. I like watching anyone work. It soothes me. Unlike having two water genasi enter the tavern behind us and cause the dwarf to panic like a line of Great Dale infantry.
“You have a choice,” I leaned forward. “You face them out there in the alley or here in front of people.”
He chose the alley. Not the sharpest dwarf in the mine.
Crow went to see he made it home and tuck him in with some cocoa. Crow was kind like that. I could see it in his eyes.
The smaller genasi headed out after Wirdle and it looked like the big drip was set to follow until I put a friendly hand on his shoulder and an unfriendly hand crossbow to the base of his skull.
“Don’t move or I'll make a hole in your head for brains to leak in.”
I could feel the shiver of magic run through me. I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of girl who goes out for a beer and wakes up in K’ul Goran with a tattoo and three engagement rings, and this magic felt a little like the fifth shot of the evening. Then I noticed Beets was up in the ceiling casting spells like she didn’t even know it.
Suddenly I’m 10ft high and 3ft wide and figuring now was the time to arm wrestle Kavel.
“Tall, aren't you?" the genasi said.
"I didn't mean to be."
His eyes rounded. He was puzzled. He was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to him.
“You’re new here, puddles, what’s the game?”
I love stupid people who lie. They throw the lie out there like tangled fishing line and spend the rest of the conversation trying to follow their way through the impossible knots they created.
“Leave me do the thinking, trickler,” I told him. “It takes equipment. Just spill.”
In the end, he gave up and took a little pride in his work. They were rinsing cash, he explained, through the fight game and the forgery game and the bad allusions game. I hate allusions.
“There’s something missing, waterboy, tell me exactly what the fuck is going on.”
“You need the chief.”
“Get him here.”
“He won’t come.”
“We have the dwarf, we have you, we have your friend, he’s going to come. It’s just a matter of when. Hurry him along or things get worse for you.”
“I am loyal.”
“Have you ever heard of the scrivener’s daughter?” I asked casually.
He shook his head.
“It’s this little ball about the size of a peppermint with a long coiled steel string attached. I put in in at either end, pull the string and blades shoot out of the ball to carve my name into the walls of whatever they find. You bleed to death very slowly. You can get healed. But we’ll be doing other stuff to you while you’re waiting for the priest. My colleague is in the ceiling with weaponry pointed right at you. We don’t want to hurt anybody, but we’re really good at it if we have to.”
This seemed to chill the mood a little and the tavern started emptying out.
Folk can get so touchy.
And then I saw Derthaad staring at me like he just found out there ain’t no tooth fairy. I figured he’d gone after Wordle but saw his goddam familiar grassing me up.
The genasi turned out to have a name. Aby. It suited him like a summer frock on a winter’s day. Derthaad took over the interrogation with Crow eyeing the sergeant curiously, but Aby was staying schtum.
“Somebody get me a cauldron, I’m going to boil this fucker,” I said eventually.
The frowns moved so fast they sent air currents through the room.
“I’m the law,” Derthaad pointed out, ripping what seemed to be a badge or symbol from Aby’s cloak that looked like a cresting wave. “This guy goes to jail, and we pay a visit to his boss in Swampside.”
---
The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don't find and the streets were dark with something more than night. We reached Swampside - a nice neighbourhood to have bad habits in – and found the chief’s place. From thirty feet away it looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away it looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.
Derthaad stuck Aby’s badge on his chest and headed for the door. Beets and Crow winged it skywards and I pulled a little trick I learned from the Seldom Seen Kid, vanishing completely. It’s easy if you practice. You have to throw yourself at the light and miss.
Derthaad’s rat-a-tat bought the little genasi from the Dragon to the door and I slipped past them while he gave waterboy the old soft soap – on the team, got the badge, happy to earn, keen to learn.
The place was empty like a house with dysentery. Whoever left must have scraped the walls with shovel on the way out just to ensure that the next person through the door knew they’d abandoned it. All I could see was crates. Some stacked high, some split open, all filled with trinkets of variable quality.
“You can unpack them,” the squirt told Derthaad. “But careful with our ones. They don’t stand much handling.”
And then he left, trailing a Sorrel Darkfire behind them. There’s many ways to solve a puzzle. Quiet reflection and thought. Study and practice. Detailed research. My way is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery and see what happens.
So I glued myself to pondlife and followed them into a room where they carried on working away at a vast ledger, hurriedly removing names, addresses and numbers and replacing them all with details I couldn’t read but I knew spelled trouble.
He stopped at the bottom of the page, unpinned his own badge and flipped it three times like tossing a coin. A tear in reality appeared and split apart like an overprotective peasant’s skull when they’re trying to save their farm from a raiding party.
I recognised this one. The white tide hair. This was Meso, the chief and the new donor to the temple’s collection.
“Well done Riptide,” Meso gargled, just as everything Riptide had done wrong started paying out. Wearing the old invisibility and moving with the training of ten years picking sailors payday pockets in Baldur’s Gate I lifted Riptide’s pin from his palm just as Derthaad hollered from the case room.
Meso poked his head, suspicions boiling out of his ears, when a crate came flying from the ceiling and crashed into his chest just as Derthaad flung a backhand spell at the portal and snapped it shut.
Meso looked at Beets and Derthaad and realisation dawned like the first rumblings of a bad oyster.
“An ambush, then?” he sighed. “This is tiresome but not unexpected. I should not have approached you at the fights. Why are you here and why are they here?”
“Meso, you are under arrest,” Derthaad pulled two pairs of handcuffs from his pack. “The charges are fraud, attempting to bribe an officer of the watch, racketeering, petty larceny, grand larceny, plain old larceny larceny and I imagine we’ll have a couple more by the time the night is through.”
“I can make it worth your while to forget this ever happened,” Meso murmured.
“Now I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand in gold most every week because I like being a detective, I like the work,” Derthaad replied. “And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there’d be no sense to it. That’s the fix I am in. I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else, don’t want to know or enjoy anything else. You can’t weight that against any sum of money. Money’s good stuff. I haven’t anything against it. It’s just not as good as the job.”
I looked at him as he said this, and remembered the warning I was once given in the House about the kind of lawman to keep an eye on if they started interfering in your business. Callimar told me one evening he stirred the darkness in a strange bone pan. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” he smiled grimly. “He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man, and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.”
As Derthaad turned the keys in the cuffs I realised at last what Callimar had meant.
He still took time to hear me out as I told him a tale as old as time but new as the morning dew. This time Brother Kavel was the hero. Fate put on her finest ballgown, slunk up to him, unlocked his rib cage, stole out his heart, sliced and diced with barbed wire scissors then pan fried it in his own tears and forced it down his throat so fast the acid reflux alone would have taken out a smaller man.
A dame, of course. Natalie. Derthaad nodded sadly. "If only there was something that would get him drunk," he sighed. "We could help him forget. Although Kavel drunk... we might have to drink in the cells."
I nodded, and turned, my message done.
“You good at interrogating?” he stopped me.
I looked him up and down. Dragonborn detective. As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where it’s going out of style. A good kid. I owed him. And I was good at interrogating. I like to think it’s one of my more attractive qualities.
“Sure. I learned my craft on the streets, perfected it in the dungeons of the House, honed a few side techniques during the jungle wars in Chult and spent 18 months as the deputy head torturer for a duke. He’s dead now.”
“I meant just asking questions.” A worried looked passed across his face and he gave me a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of my back.
“Questions. They’re my favourite.”
“Then come with me.”
I needed a drink. I needed a soft bed. I needed a vacation. I needed a home in the country. What I had was a cloak, a crossbow and a sword. I followed him.
I was the first, but I wasn’t the last. It’s usually the other way round, so this felt refreshing. Beets, looking too downhearted for a girl who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money, and a character called Crow who looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.
“We’re solving a crime,” Derthaad told him.
“Is it a serious crime?” Crow’s voice was the elaborately casual voice of the guy who shows up when the last thing in your life that could go wrong has gone wrong. I liked him.
“It can be if left unchecked,” Derthaad nodded.
“With all due respect officer, you have to stop speaking in vagaries,” Crow justified my faith.
“You’re right, come with me.”
--
I’m not a girl for demi planes as a rule. They’re department-store hideouts - the most of everything and the best of nothing. But Derthaad needed a chalk board and a place to hide, and the Three Headed Dragon was ill-equipped to offer either. It was a busy night, and the smell of booze was strong enough to build a small castle on. We were meeting a dwarf who was in on the whole deal. Whatever the whole deal was. I just needed to be told where to point my crossbow. Not that I like killing. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts. But I’m good at it and you have to play to your strengths.
“We’re tracking a water genasi called Meso. A crime boss. Tried to bribe me to throw a fight,” Derthaad looked nervous and eager like a kitten who’s just shown up in a house where they don’t like kittens very much. “Dark skin – deep blue, with a white streak in his hair like a tidal wave.”
“There’s a genasi I see around sometimes,” Crow sounded reflective. “Big, very dark, shades of the abyss.”
“I think that would be one of his right-hand men,” Derthaad suggested.
I frowned. This conversation put me in mind of something but the problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.
“There’s a genasi comes by the temple sometimes,” I offered up. “White streak fits the bill. Splashes his money. Popular with the locals.”
Beets was nodding. “There’s a couple like to splash it around, spending on food and handing it to the poor folk,” she mused. “Sealed with a cresting wave.”
It was falling into place. When I was running the numbers racket for Pliers McKenzie in the Tarmalune wharfs we did a weekly drop of all the home comforts to them as needed. Bought us a thousand eyes and sealed 500 mouths. We live in an age of intellectual decay where anyone with some currency and a food parcel qualifies as a philanthropist.
“Let’s go see the dwarf,” Derthaad headed for the door. I checked my crossbow. The crossbow never settles anything. It's just a fast curtain to a bad second act. But I figured on seeing the finale and this was my insurance policy.
As we walk into the bar I noticed the eyes of one dwarf taking us all in like an orphanage nine months after the fleet has sailed. We got cosy all around him but he didn’t seem comfortable.
“Have a seat,” he croaked. “Can I get you anything? Is this a social visit?” Turns out the name was Werdil Onyxsword and he was a big cheese in hot metal. Had a forge uptown being undercut by an overambitious forge downtown. I’m hazy on detail.
“You seem stressed,” Derthaad was busy detecting. I liked watching him work. I like watching anyone work. It soothes me. Unlike having two water genasi enter the tavern behind us and cause the dwarf to panic like a line of Great Dale infantry.
“You have a choice,” I leaned forward. “You face them out there in the alley or here in front of people.”
He chose the alley. Not the sharpest dwarf in the mine.
Crow went to see he made it home and tuck him in with some cocoa. Crow was kind like that. I could see it in his eyes.
The smaller genasi headed out after Wirdle and it looked like the big drip was set to follow until I put a friendly hand on his shoulder and an unfriendly hand crossbow to the base of his skull.
“Don’t move or I'll make a hole in your head for brains to leak in.”
I could feel the shiver of magic run through me. I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of girl who goes out for a beer and wakes up in K’ul Goran with a tattoo and three engagement rings, and this magic felt a little like the fifth shot of the evening. Then I noticed Beets was up in the ceiling casting spells like she didn’t even know it.
Suddenly I’m 10ft high and 3ft wide and figuring now was the time to arm wrestle Kavel.
“Tall, aren't you?" the genasi said.
"I didn't mean to be."
His eyes rounded. He was puzzled. He was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to him.
“You’re new here, puddles, what’s the game?”
I love stupid people who lie. They throw the lie out there like tangled fishing line and spend the rest of the conversation trying to follow their way through the impossible knots they created.
“Leave me do the thinking, trickler,” I told him. “It takes equipment. Just spill.”
In the end, he gave up and took a little pride in his work. They were rinsing cash, he explained, through the fight game and the forgery game and the bad allusions game. I hate allusions.
“There’s something missing, waterboy, tell me exactly what the fuck is going on.”
“You need the chief.”
“Get him here.”
“He won’t come.”
“We have the dwarf, we have you, we have your friend, he’s going to come. It’s just a matter of when. Hurry him along or things get worse for you.”
“I am loyal.”
“Have you ever heard of the scrivener’s daughter?” I asked casually.
He shook his head.
“It’s this little ball about the size of a peppermint with a long coiled steel string attached. I put in in at either end, pull the string and blades shoot out of the ball to carve my name into the walls of whatever they find. You bleed to death very slowly. You can get healed. But we’ll be doing other stuff to you while you’re waiting for the priest. My colleague is in the ceiling with weaponry pointed right at you. We don’t want to hurt anybody, but we’re really good at it if we have to.”
This seemed to chill the mood a little and the tavern started emptying out.
Folk can get so touchy.
And then I saw Derthaad staring at me like he just found out there ain’t no tooth fairy. I figured he’d gone after Wordle but saw his goddam familiar grassing me up.
The genasi turned out to have a name. Aby. It suited him like a summer frock on a winter’s day. Derthaad took over the interrogation with Crow eyeing the sergeant curiously, but Aby was staying schtum.
“Somebody get me a cauldron, I’m going to boil this fucker,” I said eventually.
The frowns moved so fast they sent air currents through the room.
“I’m the law,” Derthaad pointed out, ripping what seemed to be a badge or symbol from Aby’s cloak that looked like a cresting wave. “This guy goes to jail, and we pay a visit to his boss in Swampside.”
---
The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don't find and the streets were dark with something more than night. We reached Swampside - a nice neighbourhood to have bad habits in – and found the chief’s place. From thirty feet away it looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away it looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.
Derthaad stuck Aby’s badge on his chest and headed for the door. Beets and Crow winged it skywards and I pulled a little trick I learned from the Seldom Seen Kid, vanishing completely. It’s easy if you practice. You have to throw yourself at the light and miss.
Derthaad’s rat-a-tat bought the little genasi from the Dragon to the door and I slipped past them while he gave waterboy the old soft soap – on the team, got the badge, happy to earn, keen to learn.
The place was empty like a house with dysentery. Whoever left must have scraped the walls with shovel on the way out just to ensure that the next person through the door knew they’d abandoned it. All I could see was crates. Some stacked high, some split open, all filled with trinkets of variable quality.
“You can unpack them,” the squirt told Derthaad. “But careful with our ones. They don’t stand much handling.”
And then he left, trailing a Sorrel Darkfire behind them. There’s many ways to solve a puzzle. Quiet reflection and thought. Study and practice. Detailed research. My way is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery and see what happens.
So I glued myself to pondlife and followed them into a room where they carried on working away at a vast ledger, hurriedly removing names, addresses and numbers and replacing them all with details I couldn’t read but I knew spelled trouble.
He stopped at the bottom of the page, unpinned his own badge and flipped it three times like tossing a coin. A tear in reality appeared and split apart like an overprotective peasant’s skull when they’re trying to save their farm from a raiding party.
I recognised this one. The white tide hair. This was Meso, the chief and the new donor to the temple’s collection.
“Well done Riptide,” Meso gargled, just as everything Riptide had done wrong started paying out. Wearing the old invisibility and moving with the training of ten years picking sailors payday pockets in Baldur’s Gate I lifted Riptide’s pin from his palm just as Derthaad hollered from the case room.
Meso poked his head, suspicions boiling out of his ears, when a crate came flying from the ceiling and crashed into his chest just as Derthaad flung a backhand spell at the portal and snapped it shut.
Meso looked at Beets and Derthaad and realisation dawned like the first rumblings of a bad oyster.
“An ambush, then?” he sighed. “This is tiresome but not unexpected. I should not have approached you at the fights. Why are you here and why are they here?”
“Meso, you are under arrest,” Derthaad pulled two pairs of handcuffs from his pack. “The charges are fraud, attempting to bribe an officer of the watch, racketeering, petty larceny, grand larceny, plain old larceny larceny and I imagine we’ll have a couple more by the time the night is through.”
“I can make it worth your while to forget this ever happened,” Meso murmured.
“Now I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand in gold most every week because I like being a detective, I like the work,” Derthaad replied. “And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there’d be no sense to it. That’s the fix I am in. I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else, don’t want to know or enjoy anything else. You can’t weight that against any sum of money. Money’s good stuff. I haven’t anything against it. It’s just not as good as the job.”
I looked at him as he said this, and remembered the warning I was once given in the House about the kind of lawman to keep an eye on if they started interfering in your business. Callimar told me one evening he stirred the darkness in a strange bone pan. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” he smiled grimly. “He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man, and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.”
As Derthaad turned the keys in the cuffs I realised at last what Callimar had meant.
