by Robert Bevan
Tony the Elf thought for a moment, then nodded.
“You need a fresh mind,” said Rhonda. “Go do your meditation thing.”
“Thanks, Rhonda,” said Tony the Elf. “I’m sorry things got so heated before. I’m glad you’re staying.” He retreated to the corner of the room where the elves hung out at night.
“Does this mean we’re not leaving?” asked Chaz.
Rhonda looked at Dave, as if she were also interested in the answer to that question.
“I guess that depends,” said Dave. “Is the bar reopening?”
Rhonda smiled. It was by no means a pretty smile, but it lightened some of the tension in the room just the same. “I think we could all use a drink right about now.”
Chapter 16
“So you want to tell everyone we’ve been shacking up for the past couple of days?”
“Of course not,” said Stacy. “I just want them to think it.”
“Subtle hints, then.” Julian thought for a moment. “Hey, Frank. No sign of Tim at the Starlight Motel for the past two nights, if you know what I mean.” He wiggled his eyebrows.
“Yeah, real subtle. Maybe I should go in alone and say you got eaten by wolves or something.”
“I’m sorry,” said Julian. “I just need some clue as to what you want me to say.”
“Say nothing. The less either of us say about what we’ve been up to, the more people will assume we’ve been sweatin’ up the sheets.”
“And why do we want them to assume that?”
“Because it shields us from any suspicion, and keeps us from having to report back on what we’ve actually been up to.”
“You mean looking for Tim.”
“Correct.”
“Which is what we’re supposed to have been up to.”
Stacy sighed. “Also correct, but –”
“I understand that our goals for finding Tim are different from theirs,” said Julian. “But wouldn’t it be safer to agree on some false information to report, rather than take for granted that they’re all going to think that we snuck away to boink for two days straight?”
“Not at all. A lie might come back to bite us in the ass later on if we get caught. Silence is just that. And Tim already planted the seeds in everyone’s heads that we’re boinking. That’s what made him go all stab happy on Mordred. But aside from that, most people would assume that when two young attractive people run off together for a couple of days, that it’s going to involve some boinking, even if the reality is that they haven’t boinked a bit.”
In truth, this is why Julian was averse to the sex story. The two nights they’d just spent together had been uncomfortable to say the least.
“Listen,” said Julian. “About that, I –” Sudden panic hit Julian in the gut. “Ravenus!”
Stacy rolled her eyes. “Oh please. You can send him out scavenging for half an hour.”
“No, that’s not what I meant!”
“Wait a minute. Are you... and the bird...”
“NO! Something’s wrong with Ravenus.”
“Oh thank God.”
Julian turned and ran in the opposite direction, away from the Whore’s Head Inn. Ravenus had flown this way after sniffing out what he'd referred to as a ‘major score’. Might Mordred have lured him into a trap with a chunk of spoiled meat? Might Julian himself be running into the same trap?
He ran past the redeveloped area into the section of the Collapsed Sewer District which still looked like its name. He slowed down to a walk and scanned the area. Wherever Ravenus was, he was still panicking.
“Slow down, Julian,” said Stacy, running to catch up to him.
“Careful. It could be a trap. This is the same feeling I had when Mordred captured Ravenus before.”
Stacy wrinkled her nose as she drew her sword. “Do you smell that?”
Julian nodded. The air was thick with the stench of death. “This isn’t normal, even for this part of the city. Come here.” He walked behind a crumbling, half-buried section of stone pipe.
Stacy followed. “What are we doing?”
“Playing what cards we’ve got,” said Julian. “I’m going to walk ahead. You hide back here. If I can get Mordred to chase me, I’ll lead him right past you so that you can Sneak Attack him. If that plan doesn’t work out and I get killed or captured, you can at least give the others what information you gather on him.”
“It’s not a great plan, is it?”
“I’m making it up on the spot.”
“Well this hiding place sucks,” said Stacy. “There’s no visibility. I’m going to hide on that pile of rubble over there.”
Julian looked at the pile of rubble, then back at Stacy. “That’s barely knee high. How are you going to hide behind that?”
“I didn’t say behind it. I said on it.” Stacy pulled a black cloak out of her bag and wrapped it around herself. It instantly lightened to the same shade of grey as the surrounding dirt. The Cloak of Elvenkind Mayor Merriweather had given her. Like a blurry gazelle, she bounded toward her indicated rubble pile and disappeared into it as her cloak took on shadows and texture.
Julian remembered that Stacy wasn’t the only one who’d received a gift from the mayor of Port Town. He dug around in his pocket until he felt a ring, which he slipped onto his finger. “Fade.”
Being invisible bolstered his courage to step into what he still had every reason to believe was a trap, but he didn’t let himself get overconfident. The game had means for detecting invisibility, and Mordred was probably powerful enough by now to have easy access to those means. Julian proceeded invisibly, but unarmed and with his hands held high.
“Ravenus?” he called out. There was no answer, but he could still feel that his familiar was terrified. He walked further out into the open. “Ravenus!”
“Fuck!” cried a voice from behind a wall, where the epicenter of the smell seemed to be located. Ravenus rocketed out over the wall and flapped frantically in Julian’s general direction. “Where are you, sir?”
With Ravenus safely in the air, Julian remained silent, not wanting to give away his position until he saw who was on the other side of the wall which Ravenus had just flown over.
As silently as he could, Julian took a careful step toward the wall, then stopped. In all the commotion, it was just now registering to him that the voice which said “Fuck!” had sounded a lot like... “Cooper?”
Slowly, cautiously, Cooper’s head rose up behind the wall until his eyes were visible. “Julian?”
“Cooper!”
Cooper turned toward him, but seemed to look straight through him. “Julian?”
“Oh yeah,” said Julian. “Hold on a sec.” He put his hand in his pocket and slipped off his ring.
“Holy shit, dude.” Cooper stood straight, revealing a fresh bleeding cut on his upper arm.
“There you are, sir,” said Ravenus, flapping down to rest on a bent iron bar sticking out the top of a garbage pile.
“What happened to your arm?” asked Julian.
“Your fucking bird happened.”
Julian looked at Ravenus. “Did you do that to Cooper’s arm?”
“He’s gone mad, sir! I mean, more so than usual. He captured me and wouldn’t let go. He was growling and drooling and spitting in my face! Truly, I thought I was done for.”
“I’m sure he was just talking and you didn’t understand him.”
“Is he talking about the growling and spitting?” asked Cooper.
“As a matter of fact, he is. I assumed... Were you actually growling and spitting in Ravenus’s face?”
Cooper laughed. “Yeah. He hates that.”
“Of course he hates it!” said Julian. “Why would you do that?”
“I needed him to start freaking out so you’d come find me.”
“My Empathic Link to my familiar is not meant to be used as a beeper!” Julian had to admit, however, gross it was, that Cooper’s idea had actually worked. “We were looking for you.
What are you doing here?”
Cooper looked rapidly from side to side. “Are you here alone? Were you followed?”
“I don’t think so,” said Julian. This didn’t seem to reassure Cooper, whose bloodshot eyes kept darting in random directions, like they were trying to stay constantly focused on all of his surroundings at once. He added, “Relax, Cooper. We’re here alone.”
Cooper’s eyes widened, locking in on something behind Julian. “The fuck you are!” He stood straight, raising a severed human arm above his head by the hand, like he’d just given someone an all-too-enthusiastic handshake.
“Jesus Christ!” said Julian. “What the –”
“Fuck you, you Predator motherfucker!” Cooper flung the arm hard at whatever he was shouting at.
“OW!” cried Stacy. “My nose!”
Julian looked back to see Stacy removing the hood of her cloak, her head becoming fully visible over her shimmering, semi-transparent body. In fairness, the Cloak of Elvenkind did have a Predator-like quality to it when she was moving. Still, that didn’t explain the arm.
Cooper called out to Stacy, “Sorry about that.”
“Sorry?” said Julian. “You just threw an arm at her!”
“You said you were here alone.”
“We!” corrected Julian. “I said we were here alone.”
“I thought you were talking about you and Ravenus.”
“Fair enough. A simple misunderstanding. But I’m less curious about why you attacked Stacy, and more curious about –”
“Who the hell’s arm is this?” asked Stacy, kicking the arm forward as she approached Julian and Cooper.
Cooper shrugged. “I don’t know. One of these guys.”
“These guys?” Julian walked around the wall, dreading what he was going to see on the other side. His fears were justified. Human bodies and severed parts were piled up against the inner corner of the crumbling wall. Julian was no forensic scientist, but most of them looked to have been axed to death.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” said Cooper.
Julian tried for a moment to imagine something he might be mistaking for a pile of dead bodies, but came up empty. “Really? Because it looks like a pile of dead bodies.”
“I suppose, in a strictly literal sense, it’s exactly what it looks like.”
Stacy rounded the corner and gasped. “Cooper! What have you been doing here?”
“I was looking for Tim and Katherine.”
Julian and Stacy glanced at each other.
Julian swallowed and nodded at the pile. “Do you have reason to believe that they are in there somewhere?”
Cooper looked at the corpses, then at Julian. “Of course not. We wouldn’t have killed them.”
There went Julian’s last hope that Cooper hadn’t just stumbled upon these corpses. “So you killed all of these people?”
“No,” said Cooper. “That’s what I was trying to tell you before. “It was Knobby.”
“Knobby?”
“Something like that. She’s particular about how you pronounce it.”
“Who the hell is Knobby?” asked Stacy.
Cooper unstrapped his axe from his back and held it out. “This is Knobby.”
Julian and Stacy took a step back.
“Okay,” said Julian. “Just take it easy and lower Knobby.”
Cooper closed his eyes like he was suddenly suffering from a migraine, then opened them again. “She asks that you stop calling her Knobby.”
“That’s what you told us to call her,” said Stacy.
His eyes closed again, Cooper nodded slowly. “N-A-B-I.”
“Oh,” said Julian. “Nabi, as in the Old Sylvan word for butterfly. Wow, how do I know that?”
Cooper opened his eyes. “She says you are correct.”
Julian sighed, unsure of where this conversation was headed. “That’s a pretty name.”
“It’s a hell of a lot better than Knobby,” Stacy agreed.
That was exactly the sort of flippant remark Julian feared might trigger an episode in his unstable friend. He grabbed Stacy firmly by the arm and smiled warmly at Cooper.
“Do you mind if I speak to Stacy in private?”
Cooper shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”
Julian led Stacy to the other side of the wall where they both crouched down.
“Your Charisma score is one point higher than mine,” whispered Julian. “But I have more ranks in the Diplomacy skill. While engaging my homicidally insane friend, how about we let me do the talking?”
“What makes you think he’s crazy?” asked Stacy.
“Are you fucking kidding me? He’s talking to a goddamn axe!”
“You talk to a bird.”
“The bird talks back. You can understand Ravenus, so don’t even compare the two. Cooper has gone full Cast Away, except Willis never sent Tom Hanks on a murder spree.”
“Wilson,” corrected Stacy.
“Whatever!”
“I believe Cooper.”
Julian rubbed his temples. “You’re a sweet girl, Stacy. But don’t be willfully naive. We have a mountain of evidence that Cooper’s psyche has cracked, and he’s dangerously unhinged right now. We have very little evidence that he has a telepathic axe.”
Stacy’s glare hardened with each word Julian spoke, but she kept her lips firmly pressed together until he was finished.
“You’re a sweet boy, Julian. But don’t be a condescending prick. If you were paying attention, you’d see that we have all the evidence we need that Cooper is telling the truth.”
“Oh? And what evidence is that?”
“Cooper can’t spell.”
Julian thought. N-A-B-I. Cooper’s not insane. At least, not necessarily. “You’re right. I’m sorry for being a condescending prick.”
Stacy smiled. “It’s okay. We’re all under some stress right now.”
They stood up and walked back around the wall to find Cooper picking his nose.
Julian cleared his throat.
Cooper looked at Julian, but continued picking his nose. “Hey.”
“So why have you and Nabi been killing all of these people?”
“Because they’re evil.”
“That’s a good reason, I guess.”
“What makes you think they’re evil?” asked Stacy. “Did they greet you with Nazi salutes or something?”
“They were wererats,” said Cooper. “Nabi said the curse of lycanthropy darkened their souls. The way she explained it, I think she means it changed their alignment.”
“And what about Tim and Katherine,” asked Julian. “You said you were looking for them here. Why are you expecting to find them here?”
“Tony the Elf and I chased them into the sewer. I thought they might come out here.”
“There are a lot of places the sewer lets out. They could have gotten out anywhere.”
Cooper shrugged. “It was the best place I could think of.” He looked at the tunnel entrance and frowned. “I’m starting to get worried.”
“We’ve got some good news for you,” said Stacy. “We have reason to believe they escaped the sewer somewhere else, and we think we know where they’re headed.”
“Sweet!” said Cooper. His piggy eyes lit up. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. This place smells like ripened assholes.”
“Ravenus!” called Julian.
Ravenus poked his head out from between a leg and an ass cheek in the corpse pile. His beak dripped with ocular fluid. “Here I am, sir.”
“Get out of there. It’s time to go.”
Ravenus squeezed his way out and tumbled down the pile. “I may have overdone it, sir. I’m not sure I can fly just yet.”
“You can perch on my staff. You’re not riding on my shoulder until you’ve had a bath.”
Chapter 17
One of the nice unrealities Katherine appreciated about the game world is that there was no such thing as insomnia. When she was ready to go to sleep, she could tur
n that shit on like a switch. No Ny-Quil or Xanax required.
It didn’t work quite the same way for staying awake, however, as she’d recently found out in the swamp. So she took the calculated risk of letting her brother further his lead while she rented a room as close to Eastgate as she could find.
The cute dwarven couple who ran the little inn she decided on stood in the doorway and looked her up and down warily until she demonstrated that she had money. When she offered five gold pieces for a room she and her wolf could spend the night in, and a hot bath, they welcomed her in like she was part of the family.
They literally sat her down at the family table for dinner. Mama Dwarf gave her a warm damp cloth to wash her face and hands with, then set an extra bowl and spoon on the table in front of her.
Katherine needed to work out the approximate dollar value of a gold piece.
“Papa lost his eye fighting off a bandit who was going to kill us all in our sleep,” volunteered the couple’s young son before shoveling a spoonful of whitish lumpy glop into his mouth.
Katherine wasn’t going to ask about her host’s eye patch, but there it was.
“Hush, Jesper,” said Papa Dwarf. “Don’t make me out to be some kind of hero in front of our guest.”
“I think it’s plenty heroic,” said Mama Dwarf, having returned to boil another kettle of water for Katherine’s bath. “You saved your family, and paved an honorable path for our son on his way to manhood.” She smiled at Katherine. “How’s your gruel, dear?”
To keep from staring at the woman’s beard, Katherine forced herself to look into her nearly empty bowl. “It’s delicious, thank you.” In truth, it tasted like warm Elmer’s glue with chunks of eraser in it. Hopefully it was at least nourishing.
“There’s plenty more where that came from. Would you like another helping?”
“Oh, no thank you,” said Katherine. “Honestly, I couldn’t eat another bite.” Not without a nearby bucket to puke in.
Katherine was also uncomfortable sitting at the table and eating while this woman, rugged as she was, hauled heavy kettles of water around to prepare her bath. Neither her husband nor her son seemed to be bothered in the least by this. Maybe it was a dwarf culture thing.
When Mama Dwarf informed her that the washtub in her room was full of piping hot water, Katherine thanked her hosts and retired to her steam-filled room, where Butterbean was eagerly waiting for her.