[DH] A crow of murders – 20 & 27 Nov 2018 – Taffeta
Nov 29, 2018 23:05:35 GMT
Tugark (Retired), Grimes, and 2 more like this
Post by Malri 'Taffeta' Thistletop on Nov 29, 2018 23:05:35 GMT
1495 DR, 30 Uktar
‘There, now, rest yourself there and I’ll get you a cup of tea,’ says Taffeta to her mother-in-law. ‘How was the journey?’
‘Oh, and little bumpy from Hardbuckler to the river, but once we got on the ferry it was smooth travel all the way to Elturel. And then, well, you know I never like this popping back and forth, it gives me a headache.’
‘Better a teleportation headache than a long, dangerous sea crossing.’
‘True, true.’
‘Here you are.’ Taffeta places the steaming mug on the small wooden table next to Rose’s chair. ‘Did you get to see Marel and Vindon and their girls?’
‘Yes, yes, and they all send you their love of course. And so does Marras.’
‘That’s sweet. I’m dying to hear all their news but I suppose you’d better wait until Nerry gets home – don’t want to make you repeat yourself.’
‘Well then,’ says Rose, ‘Tell me some news from here.’
Taffeta frowns for a while. The major piece of news is obvious, but she doesn’t relish the prospect of telling Rose how her son and granddaughters were kidnapped by an unhinged mage who intends to start a civil war – at least not until her husband is home. Better stick to safer topics.
‘Well,’ she says, as casually as she can, ‘we had a little bit of a mystery the other day. It was like something from one of those spooky stories you used to tell the girls!’
‘Really! Go on.’
‘I was in the Ettin one night with Daisy, talking about…’ They were talking about Daisy’s upsetting encounter with a bird that seemed to speak like her mother, and about Nowhere and Granny, and about the war. ‘... about this and that. And in burst Leocanto! He was in quite a state, said he needed help. One of his customers at the Gilded Mirror had been murdered!’
Seeing Rose’s look of alarm, Taffeta realizes this may not have been quite a safe a subject as she thought – but she’s started now, so she’d better carry on.
‘It was nobody we know – a merchant from out of town, a minotaur called Rust Hornshaver. Leocanto was absolutely frantic so we agreed to try to help. Dorian and Val were there too, and a fellow named Gorstag – I don’t think you’ve met him yet. Nice fellow, very tall. Anyway we went to have a look and there were the town guard taking away the body. Seemed he’d been stabbed twice, very clean. And the odd thing was: there was no blood.’
‘How strange!’ says Rose thoughtfully, and Taffeta relaxes a bit – for now, at least, alarm seems to have been overtaken by curiosity. ‘Could he have been killed somewhere else?’
‘It didn’t look that way. And Val smelled something odd in the air: juniper.’
‘Juniper! Had he been drinking?’
‘Oh, I think so,’ Taffeta laughs, ‘But not gin. Anyway, we talked to a few people, and Val and I had a look in the dead minotaur’s room in the Mirror. I say “had a look” – Val pretty much wrecked the place! But we found a trunk with a secret back, hiding what Val reckoned were some kind of demonic cult knick-knacks, and a couple of books. I couldn’t read them of course, and Val couldn’t be bothered to, so we took them to Dorian, who reckoned this Hornshaver may have been up to some shady dealings.’
‘But just then, up runs one of the guards and says there’s another body! Over in the marketplace. So we went to look, and it was that nice half-elven florist, Viairia. Viairia Monsellar, the guards said was her full name.’
‘Was she stabbed too?’
‘No, this was even stranger. Her body was sort of… dried up. Shrivelled. And there was a bit of blood this time – not in the body, but in a kind of trail leading away and over the wall. And again Val said there was a juniper smell, although Viairia had been selling all sorts of flowers and garlands so that wasn’t too surprising. Some of the guards had already gone off to follow the trail, so we went that way too.’
‘No blood… smell of juniper… Hmm…’ Rose is now firmly in puzzle-solving mode, and Taffeta remembers the days after she married Nerry and they lived together with his parents in Hardbuckler, and no neighbourhood cat or wheelbarrow could go missing without Rose forming a dozen theories and weighing up which local miscreant was most likely to be the culprit. ‘Well, where did the trail lead?’
‘Oddly enough,’ replies Taffeta, remembering the way Rose used to like to describe her little mysteries, ‘it went right up to the back door of the Cliffords’ house… and inside!’
‘Oh no, not Mrs Clifford the grocer!’
‘That’s the house! But don’t worry: the family were all out. They’re fine. But their house was quite a gruesome scene: three guards were dead on the floor! One was a dried-up husk like Viairia, and the other two looked like they’d been beaten up. And there were two huge wobbling masses of stuff like pork jelly. They seemed to be… eating the bodies. Or dissolving them, maybe.’
‘Arvoreen save us!’
‘It wasn’t a pretty scene. But we dealt with the jelly creatures quite easily.’
‘Were they the killers?’
‘No, they didn’t seem to be drying out the bodies they were feeding on, and they certainly couldn’t have stabbed anybody. And anyway the trail of blood kept going, out through the other side of the house and down the street.’
‘That was when Wendy turned up with a package for the Cliffords. The others all thought she must be involved somehow – it was all I could do persuade them that she was just doing her job and delivering the post! I really think Val would’ve done her an injury if I hadn’t threatened to do worse to him.’
‘Poor girl! Why would anyone do that to her, she seems so nice! Although, sometimes it’s the nice ones…’
Taffeta chuckles. ‘Well, Wendy was fine. Took it all in her stride. In fact, more than anything, she seemed very interested in the corpses… A little morbid, if you ask me, but I don’t reckon there’s any harm in it. Anyway we left her to look after the house until the Cliffords got home, and off we went again following the trail.’
‘Trouble is, the trail ran out. It seemed like whatever left it had hopped on a cart or a wagon or something. Round about that time Val got bored and took himself off to talk to Doctor Plath at the deadhouse, said he was going to ask about the minotaur. Came running back after a while shouting that he’d been attacked by a “water dragon”, then rushed off again to sound the alarm and rouse the guard. Just then we heard talk of another body – this time it was someone I didn’t know, a dwarf named Barrelbeard, a distiller. Killed and shrivelled up in an alley near his new gin distillery.’
‘Gin! Juniper again… Hmmm…’
‘Yes, juniper again. It was around this time that Daisy had to go and see to some business, and we ran into Sergeant Grimes and Demik, who came with us to look at the distillery. Seemed like it was still being built, but there were plenty of juniper berries stored there. Suddenly Dorian was swallowed up by a sort of snaking column of water that moved like it was alive. I didn’t see where it came from. After a bit of a struggle Dorian got free and Grimes managed to avoid getting caught up in it, and it ran off – well, it, er – flowed off, I suppose?’
‘Whatever it was doing, it moved fast. It was all my legs and my magic could do to catch up with it, and then it grabbed me. It felt like I was drowning inside it, but also being drained somehow – and I could see little clouds of blood coming from my nose and my ears, disappearing into the water. Next thing I know, it’s moving and trying to drag me with it! But I grabbed a window-sill and held on tight, and I guess it decided I wasn’t worth it, because it took off again. But I heard Dorian shout something in a strange language and suddenly this water creature was just hanging in mid-air, rippling but not going anywhere. We all turned on it then, and I managed to finish it off with two crossbow bolts down its… well, its throat, I suppose you could say.’
‘So that water creature was the killer? But, no… it couldn’t have stabbed the minotaur, surely?’
‘That’s what we were wondering – well, the others were; I was mostly trying to recover from whatever that thing did to me – when up comes a group of guards saying they’ve found another body, over in the Four Fair Winds. Seems a travelling bard called Elizabeth Andante had been staying there for a couple of weeks and they’d found here in her room, dried up like the others, and wearing a garland of juniper in her hair.’
‘Then it can’t have been the water monster?’
‘Well, they said this bard seemed to have been dead for a while, so we weren’t sure. We went back to the distillery to see what else we could find.’
‘Gorstag was looking into all the vats and found one he said had blood in it. Then the vat started gurgling and sort of exploded, and there was this great big demon, shaped something like a minotaur but even bigger, dripping with blood and swinging a huge axe. The last thing I needed, I can tell you! And it gave Grimes a very nasty knock – almost killed him, I reckon. But we gave as good as we got, and Gorstag finished the demon off in the end.’
‘So,’ Rose murmurs, mind working hard, ‘The demon… was in the distillery with the juniper… but the bodies were dried out like the water creature did… except the minotaur, who was stabbed… which the water thing couldn’t have done… but the demon had an axe and not a sword…’
‘We were pretty puzzled too! But we went back with Grimes to the watch-house and it turned out they’d found something interesting in the bard’s room at the Winds. In her luggage were a couple of long daggers and a detailed description of Hornshaver.’
‘An assassin!’
‘It looks that way. They reckon she’d been hired by some other merchants – Hornshaver may have been swindling them. But what she didn’t know was that he was a demon-worshipper…’
‘So he had some sort of demonic protection?’
‘Something like that. Apparently there’s a ritual that enchants your blood so that if you’re killed, it summons one of these watery things – a “slithering tracker”, they call it – and it takes revenge. Sucks the blood and water out of people and kills them.’
‘And it went after the juniper!’
‘That’s right. The assassin must’ve been wearing her garland when she killed Hornshaver. He didn’t see her coming, so the tracker didn’t know who to attack, but it smelled the juniper, and that’s why it went for the flower stall and the distillery.’
‘And the demon?’
‘They reckon the tracker probably summoned it. Demons like to have company, apparently.’
‘Well!’ exclaims Rose. ‘That certainly was a mystery! And quite a shocking story, too. Poor Viairia, and that dwarf too. Assassins and demons in Daring… I’d hoped we’d never see the like of that again.’
‘I know. But, Yondalla’s blessing, it could have been a lot worse. And the guards and everyone else worked together to sort it out.’
‘Yes, you’re right. Nowhere near as bad as...’
The xvarts. The orcs. The defeat of Daring’s army. The capture and partial destruction of the town. Blood and bodies in the streets, fire in the houses. The portal destroyed. Rose doesn’t need to mention any of those things. They both remember all too well.
‘No,’ says Taffeta, ‘Not like that. This town has seen the last of that.’
Her daughters will see no more war, she promises herself.
No matter what Nowhere or Granny may be planning.
‘There, now, rest yourself there and I’ll get you a cup of tea,’ says Taffeta to her mother-in-law. ‘How was the journey?’
‘Oh, and little bumpy from Hardbuckler to the river, but once we got on the ferry it was smooth travel all the way to Elturel. And then, well, you know I never like this popping back and forth, it gives me a headache.’
‘Better a teleportation headache than a long, dangerous sea crossing.’
‘True, true.’
‘Here you are.’ Taffeta places the steaming mug on the small wooden table next to Rose’s chair. ‘Did you get to see Marel and Vindon and their girls?’
‘Yes, yes, and they all send you their love of course. And so does Marras.’
‘That’s sweet. I’m dying to hear all their news but I suppose you’d better wait until Nerry gets home – don’t want to make you repeat yourself.’
‘Well then,’ says Rose, ‘Tell me some news from here.’
Taffeta frowns for a while. The major piece of news is obvious, but she doesn’t relish the prospect of telling Rose how her son and granddaughters were kidnapped by an unhinged mage who intends to start a civil war – at least not until her husband is home. Better stick to safer topics.
‘Well,’ she says, as casually as she can, ‘we had a little bit of a mystery the other day. It was like something from one of those spooky stories you used to tell the girls!’
‘Really! Go on.’
‘I was in the Ettin one night with Daisy, talking about…’ They were talking about Daisy’s upsetting encounter with a bird that seemed to speak like her mother, and about Nowhere and Granny, and about the war. ‘... about this and that. And in burst Leocanto! He was in quite a state, said he needed help. One of his customers at the Gilded Mirror had been murdered!’
Seeing Rose’s look of alarm, Taffeta realizes this may not have been quite a safe a subject as she thought – but she’s started now, so she’d better carry on.
‘It was nobody we know – a merchant from out of town, a minotaur called Rust Hornshaver. Leocanto was absolutely frantic so we agreed to try to help. Dorian and Val were there too, and a fellow named Gorstag – I don’t think you’ve met him yet. Nice fellow, very tall. Anyway we went to have a look and there were the town guard taking away the body. Seemed he’d been stabbed twice, very clean. And the odd thing was: there was no blood.’
‘How strange!’ says Rose thoughtfully, and Taffeta relaxes a bit – for now, at least, alarm seems to have been overtaken by curiosity. ‘Could he have been killed somewhere else?’
‘It didn’t look that way. And Val smelled something odd in the air: juniper.’
‘Juniper! Had he been drinking?’
‘Oh, I think so,’ Taffeta laughs, ‘But not gin. Anyway, we talked to a few people, and Val and I had a look in the dead minotaur’s room in the Mirror. I say “had a look” – Val pretty much wrecked the place! But we found a trunk with a secret back, hiding what Val reckoned were some kind of demonic cult knick-knacks, and a couple of books. I couldn’t read them of course, and Val couldn’t be bothered to, so we took them to Dorian, who reckoned this Hornshaver may have been up to some shady dealings.’
‘But just then, up runs one of the guards and says there’s another body! Over in the marketplace. So we went to look, and it was that nice half-elven florist, Viairia. Viairia Monsellar, the guards said was her full name.’
‘Was she stabbed too?’
‘No, this was even stranger. Her body was sort of… dried up. Shrivelled. And there was a bit of blood this time – not in the body, but in a kind of trail leading away and over the wall. And again Val said there was a juniper smell, although Viairia had been selling all sorts of flowers and garlands so that wasn’t too surprising. Some of the guards had already gone off to follow the trail, so we went that way too.’
‘No blood… smell of juniper… Hmm…’ Rose is now firmly in puzzle-solving mode, and Taffeta remembers the days after she married Nerry and they lived together with his parents in Hardbuckler, and no neighbourhood cat or wheelbarrow could go missing without Rose forming a dozen theories and weighing up which local miscreant was most likely to be the culprit. ‘Well, where did the trail lead?’
‘Oddly enough,’ replies Taffeta, remembering the way Rose used to like to describe her little mysteries, ‘it went right up to the back door of the Cliffords’ house… and inside!’
‘Oh no, not Mrs Clifford the grocer!’
‘That’s the house! But don’t worry: the family were all out. They’re fine. But their house was quite a gruesome scene: three guards were dead on the floor! One was a dried-up husk like Viairia, and the other two looked like they’d been beaten up. And there were two huge wobbling masses of stuff like pork jelly. They seemed to be… eating the bodies. Or dissolving them, maybe.’
‘Arvoreen save us!’
‘It wasn’t a pretty scene. But we dealt with the jelly creatures quite easily.’
‘Were they the killers?’
‘No, they didn’t seem to be drying out the bodies they were feeding on, and they certainly couldn’t have stabbed anybody. And anyway the trail of blood kept going, out through the other side of the house and down the street.’
‘That was when Wendy turned up with a package for the Cliffords. The others all thought she must be involved somehow – it was all I could do persuade them that she was just doing her job and delivering the post! I really think Val would’ve done her an injury if I hadn’t threatened to do worse to him.’
‘Poor girl! Why would anyone do that to her, she seems so nice! Although, sometimes it’s the nice ones…’
Taffeta chuckles. ‘Well, Wendy was fine. Took it all in her stride. In fact, more than anything, she seemed very interested in the corpses… A little morbid, if you ask me, but I don’t reckon there’s any harm in it. Anyway we left her to look after the house until the Cliffords got home, and off we went again following the trail.’
‘Trouble is, the trail ran out. It seemed like whatever left it had hopped on a cart or a wagon or something. Round about that time Val got bored and took himself off to talk to Doctor Plath at the deadhouse, said he was going to ask about the minotaur. Came running back after a while shouting that he’d been attacked by a “water dragon”, then rushed off again to sound the alarm and rouse the guard. Just then we heard talk of another body – this time it was someone I didn’t know, a dwarf named Barrelbeard, a distiller. Killed and shrivelled up in an alley near his new gin distillery.’
‘Gin! Juniper again… Hmmm…’
‘Yes, juniper again. It was around this time that Daisy had to go and see to some business, and we ran into Sergeant Grimes and Demik, who came with us to look at the distillery. Seemed like it was still being built, but there were plenty of juniper berries stored there. Suddenly Dorian was swallowed up by a sort of snaking column of water that moved like it was alive. I didn’t see where it came from. After a bit of a struggle Dorian got free and Grimes managed to avoid getting caught up in it, and it ran off – well, it, er – flowed off, I suppose?’
‘Whatever it was doing, it moved fast. It was all my legs and my magic could do to catch up with it, and then it grabbed me. It felt like I was drowning inside it, but also being drained somehow – and I could see little clouds of blood coming from my nose and my ears, disappearing into the water. Next thing I know, it’s moving and trying to drag me with it! But I grabbed a window-sill and held on tight, and I guess it decided I wasn’t worth it, because it took off again. But I heard Dorian shout something in a strange language and suddenly this water creature was just hanging in mid-air, rippling but not going anywhere. We all turned on it then, and I managed to finish it off with two crossbow bolts down its… well, its throat, I suppose you could say.’
‘So that water creature was the killer? But, no… it couldn’t have stabbed the minotaur, surely?’
‘That’s what we were wondering – well, the others were; I was mostly trying to recover from whatever that thing did to me – when up comes a group of guards saying they’ve found another body, over in the Four Fair Winds. Seems a travelling bard called Elizabeth Andante had been staying there for a couple of weeks and they’d found here in her room, dried up like the others, and wearing a garland of juniper in her hair.’
‘Then it can’t have been the water monster?’
‘Well, they said this bard seemed to have been dead for a while, so we weren’t sure. We went back to the distillery to see what else we could find.’
‘Gorstag was looking into all the vats and found one he said had blood in it. Then the vat started gurgling and sort of exploded, and there was this great big demon, shaped something like a minotaur but even bigger, dripping with blood and swinging a huge axe. The last thing I needed, I can tell you! And it gave Grimes a very nasty knock – almost killed him, I reckon. But we gave as good as we got, and Gorstag finished the demon off in the end.’
‘So,’ Rose murmurs, mind working hard, ‘The demon… was in the distillery with the juniper… but the bodies were dried out like the water creature did… except the minotaur, who was stabbed… which the water thing couldn’t have done… but the demon had an axe and not a sword…’
‘We were pretty puzzled too! But we went back with Grimes to the watch-house and it turned out they’d found something interesting in the bard’s room at the Winds. In her luggage were a couple of long daggers and a detailed description of Hornshaver.’
‘An assassin!’
‘It looks that way. They reckon she’d been hired by some other merchants – Hornshaver may have been swindling them. But what she didn’t know was that he was a demon-worshipper…’
‘So he had some sort of demonic protection?’
‘Something like that. Apparently there’s a ritual that enchants your blood so that if you’re killed, it summons one of these watery things – a “slithering tracker”, they call it – and it takes revenge. Sucks the blood and water out of people and kills them.’
‘And it went after the juniper!’
‘That’s right. The assassin must’ve been wearing her garland when she killed Hornshaver. He didn’t see her coming, so the tracker didn’t know who to attack, but it smelled the juniper, and that’s why it went for the flower stall and the distillery.’
‘And the demon?’
‘They reckon the tracker probably summoned it. Demons like to have company, apparently.’
‘Well!’ exclaims Rose. ‘That certainly was a mystery! And quite a shocking story, too. Poor Viairia, and that dwarf too. Assassins and demons in Daring… I’d hoped we’d never see the like of that again.’
‘I know. But, Yondalla’s blessing, it could have been a lot worse. And the guards and everyone else worked together to sort it out.’
‘Yes, you’re right. Nowhere near as bad as...’
The xvarts. The orcs. The defeat of Daring’s army. The capture and partial destruction of the town. Blood and bodies in the streets, fire in the houses. The portal destroyed. Rose doesn’t need to mention any of those things. They both remember all too well.
‘No,’ says Taffeta, ‘Not like that. This town has seen the last of that.’
Her daughters will see no more war, she promises herself.
No matter what Nowhere or Granny may be planning.
