by Ari Marmell
This time Jourdain did blink, along with the other two guards.
“So where,” she continued before they could react any further, “would I find the Thousand Crows? Or any of Aubier's organized criminal guilds, really. I'm not picky.”
Jourdain's face began to darken.
“Only, I've already visited something like two hundred and ninety inns and taverns…”
Olgun gently corrected her with what could only be described as the emotional equivalent of eleven. Widdershins gently ignored him.
“…and even the occasional bathhouse, gods have mercy on my eyes, seeing as how they, or at least the neighborhoods you find them in, are usually the best place to uncover your more unsavory sorts. Even tried one across town, uh…Kind of grungy? Caters openly and specifically to strangers to Aubier?”
“All inns cater to foreigners and strangers—” Jourdain began, but one of the others cleared his throat.
“She means the Open Door, sir. Makes a big show of being friendly to outsiders. Wide menu, lots of servant types, welcome banners for them that reads, and overcharges for the lot.”
“Right,” the young woman confirmed. “That one. Went there, even though the people I'm looking for are local. Found nothing. Whole lot of nothing. Enough nothing to choke a…um…Well, it doesn't matter what it would choke, because enough nothing to choke anything is certainly something!”
This time, the blinking from the guards and the small assembled audience was nearly enough to generate a noticeable breeze.
“I told you before,” Jourdain snarled, “this business of a ‘sorcerer’ is rubbish. Even if it weren't, the Crows are nothing but a band of thugs. I haven't the slightest idea where to find them, and I doubt most of them know where they're going to be from one miserable night to the next. And Aubier has no organized crime. That I know of,” he added, withering just a touch beneath Widdershins's incredulous and mildly contemptuous sneer.
“Uh-huh.” She watched the three guards for a moment, quickly studied the growing crowd, then back to Jourdain. “And you wouldn't tell me if you knew?”
“That's entirely possible.”
“Jourdain, who are the other major gangs besides the Thousand Crows?”
The guard captain could barely be bothered to shrug. “I have no idea. Most of them come and go.”
“Mm-hm. So if the Crows are just another gang, the stories of a sorcerer are nonsense, and there's nothing special about them, why are they the ones that you—and everyone else, it seems—have heard of?”
“Chance,” he snapped at her, but some of the blustery certainty had washed away.
Widdershins opened her mouth to say something else—a gesture that stretched itself into a broad smile at the sudden tingle of Olgun's magics, and the clattering and cursing as someone was “encouraged” to trip headlong over the detritus in the old apartment behind her.
Did they really think I hadn't noticed when they sent the fourth guard away a few minutes ago?
Meant it was time to go, though, before someone down there decided to draw again.
“Olgun?”
An answering surge of anticipation, and then Widdershins rose to her full height on the narrow ledge, offered Jourdain a jaunty wave, and leapt. The by-now familiar surge of power and the feel of a semisolid boost in midair more than allowed her to clear the gap to the window of the next apartment over; a second such surge, and she landed smoothly and securely on a stretch of wood a cat might have had difficulty crossing. Widdershins slipped through the window, made a beeline for the door, and had blended into the streets of Aubier before Jourdain and his men had so much as reached the second floor.
“Are you insane, woman?” The jowly tavern keep leaned over the bar—seeming almost to engulf portions of it in his grimy shirt and pudding-like flesh—to breathe some truly unique fumes into Widdershins's face. Clearly the man was not averse to sampling his own wares; he could almost certainly have cleaned the countertop of grime and stains simply by exhaling on it a time or three.
“Probably,” she replied. She'd long since given up on trying to maintain the friendly smile with which she'd begun the day. All she managed now was to keep the snarl of frustrated anger from her countenance, and even with that less ambitious goal, her jaw and her back teeth ached from the effort. “But it's a simple enough question, yes?”
“You think you can just walk up to a fellow and ask something like that?” Shins found the wobbling of his fleshy face almost horrifyingly hypnotic. “You trying to get me in trouble with both sides of the law?”
“Oh, for the love of pastries…Look, I've been to about two hundred and ninety of these stupid places…”
Eleven, Olgun corrected again.
“At every single one of them, I've done everything but hang a sign around my neck. Tried all the signals and hand signs and slouches I learned to get the local thieves’ attention, but I'm not from here, so I don't know the local cant and people probably just thought I was twitching from slow poison. Even picked a few pockets here and there, almost obviously enough for even a city guardsman to notice! You have any idea how hard it is to be that careless on purpose?”
Olgun mildly suggested that the barkeep probably did not, as it no doubt came far more naturally to him.
“So yes!” Her rant now teetered on a knife's edge between exasperation and simmering rage. “I barking well am asking you! Just point me to someone in this dungheap who can tell me what I—!”
“You need to leave, lady,” the man hiding behind the jowls insisted. “Now!”
It wasn't the stares or the low mumbles of the common room's patrons, all of whom had now abandoned drink and conversation to turn her way. It wasn't even the soothing balm of Olgun's presence, which—despite his obvious efforts at calming her down—was tinged with an unmistakable anger of its own.
No, it was the barkeep's face—the quivering lip, the bulging eyes, the fearful shake of his head as he retreated from whatever it was he saw in her own twisting expression—that quenched her fury like a sudden rain.
Gods, what is wrong with me?
She spun and all but fled the tavern, holding her breath until she was through the door so that she couldn't accidentally utter a single word that might make things worse. She was blocks away—she didn't even know in which direction she'd turned—before she stopped shoving through the evening traffic and slowed herself long enough to think.
“Olgun?” Her whispers came between heaving breaths, gasps from exertion far more emotional than physical. “What's happening to me? I wanted to pull steel on that man!”
A flicker of imagery and emotion, reminiscent of the energies she felt anytime they worked in unison.
“But…it's never been like this,” she told him. “Me being sad makes you sad which makes me sad, me being reckless makes you reckless which makes me reckless, and all that. We've known that for a while now, yes? We've both been angry before, though, and it's never made me want to…to…
“Do you think Iruoch did something to us before we killed him? To me? He was magic; he could have infected us or something! Couldn't he?”
The deity's reply made it quite clear that, no, he did not attribute their shared anger to that murderous creature of the fae. What he did attribute it to, however, was a concept too complex to accurately convey in emotion and imagery. Widdershins couldn't begin to understand it.
Or maybe, she almost admitted to herself, she just didn't want to.
She was neither so distracted, however, nor so introspective, as to miss the obvious. Or even the not so obvious.
“I see them,” she assured an abruptly nervous Olgun. “Three that I've noticed. Probably at least twice that many in total, yes? Don't suppose you can tell if they're Thousand Crows or someone else?
“Well, I don't know how you'd know! Maybe they have tattoos or custom-brocaded smallclothes you might have spotted! I'm just asking! Oooh, you…Any witchcraft or sorcery, anyway?”
None, or so his a
nswering emanations suggested. None he could sense, anyway, which was, after his confusion over the spreading blight on the Delacroix property, rather less reassuring than Shins might otherwise have found it.
“Another alleyway, do you think? Or maybe…Oh, figs…Olgun, is the street clearing out because it's getting dark, or do you think the good folks of the neighborhood have some idea what's coming?
“Right. Me, neither.” A quick scouring of the street, eyes flitting like a drunken moth, until…“There. You ready? Right. Me, neither.”
A shallow grin, a slight quickening of breath, and Widdershins abruptly burst into a run, angling across the haphazardly cobbled street toward the heavy wooden structure she'd selected. The sound of pounding feet, shoving bodies, and curses rather more vicious than “figs” all conspired to inform her, in no uncertain terms, that her pursuers had abandoned any semblance of stealth.
Really hope those shutters are as flimsy as they look…. “Olgun?”
The air tingled and tickled appropriately in response; Widdershins took one more sprinting step, and dove.
Wooden slats split with a series of cracks, like a mouthful of broken teeth. Widdershins erupted from a cloud of splinters, a leather-clad brunette cannonball, untouched by the jagged bits save for a few shallow rents in her gloves. A second cloud, this one of dirt, erupted as she hit and rolled across the packed earthen floor. Surging back to her feet, she took in the entire structure at a glance before dashing quickly to the left.
As she'd suspected from outside on the street, she found herself in a smithy, recently used—judging by the aromas hanging in the air and the lingering warmth of the forge—but now closed up for the night. Cinder- and soot-choked hearth, which Shins was fairly certain should have been cleaned out before now; anvils of various sizes atop old wooden stumps; racks of tools, against the walls and free-standing both. One row of tools even hung high above the hearth, perhaps older implements rarely used but not yet deserving of disposal.
A step on the dirt, a second on the anvil, and again Shins was airborne. Twisting to the horizontal, she landed on the sloped chimney above the hearth, slipping beneath the dangling tools without disturbing a single handle. There, braced with one hand and one foot against the edge to keep herself from sliding, at least partly hidden by shadow and steel, she waited.
The first of her pursuers followed through the window a moment later, firing a flintlock blindly over the sill, presumably to ensure she wasn't waiting immediately to one side. He clambered through and moved toward the door, unbarring it for three more of his companions, while a fifth also availed himself of Widdershins's makeshift ingress. All were clearly typical bruisers and underground muscle. She'd met more than enough of their type in her years to recognize the breed.
Only five. Either she'd overestimated, or more waited outside in case she made a break for it. Better to assume the latter.
“A few seconds more…” So under her breath, nobody would have heard even had they been living in her throat at the time. “Just one more…”
The thugs began to fan out, pistols or brutal knives in hand, peering and poking into any obvious hiding spots….
Widdershins kicked, launching herself with both her free foot and the one that had been bracing her. Both fists closed on the rack of tools, toppling it from atop the forge. Propelled by her momentum, Olgun-augmented strength, and its own impressive weight, it ripped free of its flimsy bolts and plummeted into the room. The clatter of toppling tools, a veritable orchestra from hell, wasn't quite deafening enough to obscure the abortive scream and breaking bones of the ruffian on whom they landed.
He'd probably recover, but Shins wouldn't have wanted to be him for the next…ever.
Attention snared by the toppling rack, utterly unprepared for Widdershins's speed, the others might as well have been wrapped in cobweb. A handspring launched her from the heap of metal before the tools had even begun to settle. She felt her calves close around the head of the next nearest thug; a quick twist, hurling herself to the side, yanked him from his feet to bounce his head rather painfully off the closest anvil. Shins swore his eyes actually rolled in opposite directions before closing in unconsciousness.
And then there were three….
She landed in a crouch, one hand on the floor, facing back the way she'd come—and facing, too, a trio of bruisers, all of whom looked very much as though they'd expected a bunny and snagged a bear.
The first to react, a scraggly beanpole of a man, raised a broad-barrelled flintlock—a situation Widdershins and Olgun had faced so often she scarcely even had to whisper his name. Power surged, powder sparked, and the weapon discharged itself a heartbeat early, the lead ball gauging a chunk out of a stump before flattening itself in the wood.
Shins straightened upright and casually began slapping the dirt from her gloves as she asked, “Can we call this a night, yet, boys?”
Albeit at a much more wary pace than before, all three stepped toward her.
“Thought not,” she sighed.
Widdershins jammed the toe of one boot beneath a hammer that had bounced loose from the fallen rack, kicked it up into the air, snagged it with one hand, and—with yet another boost from her own personal god—hurled it across the smithy.
At which point there were three thugs collapsed and bleeding, and only two still standing.
The first lunged at her, stabbing at her gut with his fighting knife. She spun past, deflecting it with the rapier she knew her opponents hadn't even seen her draw. Steel scraped on steel and she was behind him, lunging not in his direction but at the other. Circling around, clearly having planned to get behind her, he could only gawp, caught flat-footed, as the tip of her sword punched into his side. Not deep, almost certainly not enough to kill, but more than sufficient to put him down.
Widdershins came out of her spin, ready to parry once more, and found no need. All she saw was the sole of one boot as he fled back through the door, and that only for the barest instant before he slammed it shut behind him.
“Ha!” Widdershins knelt beside the wounded man, reached out to grab a handful of shirt to wipe his blood from her rapier. “Did all right for ourselves, didn't we, Olg—?”
A ceramic decanter, roughly the size of Widdershins's head, hurtled through the window to shatter against the stone of the hearth—and from it burst a cloud of russet dust that spread rapidly through the air of the smithy.
Shins felt as though she'd just attempted to inhale the detritus coating the inside of the forge. Her throat closed up as though someone had stuck a cork in it. Only a rasped appeal to Olgun enabled her to breathe at all; she felt the swelling fade beneath a breath of his magics, not much but just enough. Her eyes stung, beginning to tear, as did the insides of her nose and mouth. Gasping, choking, hand pressed tight to her face, she stumbled toward the door…
Reaching it just in time to hear something else—something that sounded very much, but not precisely, like the first ceramic projectile—disintegrate against the wood.
A musty, rotten stench, foul enough for the thief to smell despite barely breathing at all, accompanied a gooey sheen. It seeped around the wood, through the wood, which began visibly, if only slightly, to rot.
To rot…And, as though it had absorbed the moisture of a dozen autumns at once, to swell. Widdershins didn't have to hear the creak of the door against the frame to know that she wouldn't be opening it any time soon.
“Figs…”
Or at least, that's what she thought she said. It came out as such a jagged croak, even she couldn't be certain.
No choice, then. Back to the window, no matter who or what waited outside. She was staggering by the time she made it across the smithy once more. Her arms shook and threatened to give out as she hauled herself bodily over the sill. Still, when she collapsed in a heap in the road outside, huddled, hacking, vomiting, it was a relief compared to what had come before.
“Jean says we should've shot you as you came through the wind
ow.” It took her a moment to register the voice. Deep, sneering, somehow slimy; if the sludge from the bed of a stagnant swamp were to suddenly speak, it might well sound like this. “But I wanted to see you for myself. See who's dumb enough to come looking for us but scary enough to put five men down. Right now, I have to say, I'm only seeing the first half.”
Behind her violent coughs, Widdershins almost smiled—not at anything the stranger had said, though she was always thrilled to be underestimated, but at the faint charge running through her skin, her lungs. Now that they were out of that hellish cloud, Olgun's power should enable her to recover a lot faster than these people would expect. Just keep them talking a little while…
Blinking away the tears, she achingly raised her head.
And would have sworn, initially, that she was looking at a ghost. A big, ugly, rancid-smelling ghost.
Brock?!
But no. As her vision began to clear, Widdershins realized this very much was not the Finders’ Guild enforcer who had made her life so miserable, had brutally assaulted her best friend—and whose dead body she'd seen with her own eyes a year gone by. He was, however, very much of a kind with the late and utterly unlamented Brock.
He was a brick wall mistakenly born into a man's body—so tall that Shins almost felt the need to take a break while looking up from his feet to his head, broad enough of shoulder to stand in yoke and haul a wagon under his own power.
His waist, however, was oddly slender for his size, his neck just long enough to be notably peculiar. Not a brick wall, then, she decided. The offspring of Brock and a large snake with especially poor standards.
Scattered behind him were a half dozen or so thugs and bruisers, all clearly cut from the same cloth (or perhaps burlap) as the men she'd ambushed.
“Hello,” he said, smirking down at her. “I am Ivon. This is Fingerbone.”