Roan was disgusted as well, and yet the disguise allowed him to waddle past a pair of guards in front of Rollup’s brothel. He looked exactly like the whore who had been Rollup’s lobby girl the night before and the two guards didn’t even blink.
Sitting in his cage, Rollup looked up from a stack of papers as Roan came in. Sudden anger turned the halfling’s cherubic face dark. “Tell me you were taking a break, Saewynn. If you were on your back out in the alley again, I’ll pop that belly myself.”
“I was sick,” Roan said, doing his best to affect a high lispy voice.
“Hmm, you sound it. Okay, you were smart to take it outside. No one wants to hear you puking up a half cow leg. And yes, I’m hinting you’ve been eating too much. All this eating for two crap is bull. My balls are probably bigger than that baby.”
Since Roan didn’t know what the girl would have said to that, he shrugged a little and mumbled under his breath, “Your balls are like raisons,” as he headed for the hall. He knew this would get Rollup fired up and sure enough the halfling hopped off his stool and came charging. Roan ran towards the first open door in an ugly waddle.
Another of Rollup’s whores, wearing a flimsy pink nightie, was idling on a sturdy bed that was covered with a crushed red-velvet blanket. “What the hell, Saewynn?” she demanded.
Roan ignored her. He locked the door in Rollup’s face and as the halfling cursed and dug through his keys, Roan went to the bedside where an oil lamp burned. It was the only light in the room. He blew it out and ignored the girl on the bed, who went into hysterics as if the world was coming to an end.
“Get out, Saewynn! You can’t come barging in here with your big belly hanging out. No one wants to see that. It’s gross…”
Just then Rollup got the door unlocked. He charged into the dark room only to charge into Roan’s magic dagger as the man stepped from behind the door. For a halfling, Rollup was no easy target. He was a mid-level thief in his own right, but he couldn’t stand up to a quadruple damage backstab from Roan. Twenty-five points in one shot was enough drop the halfling to the floor(XP + 450).
“Saewynn…what…what are you doing?” the prostitute in the bed asked in a voice that had been shocked to a whisper.
Roan undid the clasp of the shawl and the illusion disappeared. The girl’s eyes bugged and she pulled the red blanket up to her throat. Roan dropped to one knee and began running his hands through the dead halfling’s pockets. “If you stay in here and don’t make a sound, I won’t have to kill you. Nod your head if you understand.” The girl nodded quickly.
“Good.” Roan came away with fifty in gold, twelve keys on a ring, and a small bag of semi-precious stones: mostly garnets, pearls, and topaz. Rollup also had a magic dagger and two Potions of Invisibility.
“Where’s his office?” Roan asked.
She shook her head. “He doesn’t have one, I don’t think. But he sometimes, like disappears in that cage. Everyone thinks there a secret door. Like a trap door that only he can see because he’s a…”
“Shut up!” Roan snapped. “Stay in here and don’t say a word or I will kill you.” Looking down at the halfling, he snapped the clasp closed on the shawl, becoming Rollup. As the halfling he went back to the lobby where a man in a purple robe stood, going up and down on the balls of his feet. He had a beady-eyed parrot sitting on his shoulder that turned its head at an angle upon seeing Roan.
“Hey, Rollup. I’ll take my usual.” He held a fist out to Roan and for a moment Roan thought that he wanted a “fist-bump,” perhaps as a way as a greeting. Roan had put out his own fist when the man turned his fist over to show two gold coins.
Not knowing what else to do, Roan took them. “Um, yes, the usual. Right. Follow me.” Although the man in the robes seemed pleasant enough, Roan decided that he would have to die. He couldn’t afford to arouse suspicion. “In here,” he said, gesturing at the first door on the right.
“I don’t want Glynth,” the man said. “She’s too moody. You know that.”
“Uh, this isn’t Glynth’s room any longer. I moved her. Too many complaints. Can’t have complaints and expect to run a business, right?”
Again, Roan gestured to the door, but the man hesitated. “What’s with your voice? You sound different.” He and his bird were staring at Roan with sharp eyes. With the bird on his shoulder, Roan guessed that the man was a wizard of some sort and he didn’t want to tangle with him unless he could gain an edge.
Roan grabbed his throat. “The Killers worked me over last night. They were looking for information on whoever was running around killing people. I’ll tell you about when you’re done.” For a third time, he gestured to the door. This time the man went in.
The room was dark; the only light was coming from the lamp which was currently behind the door. Glynth was on her knees next to Rollup’s body ripping through his clothes, looking for items that might have been sewn into his seams. It was a strange sight and the man with the parrot was so thoroughly shocked that Roan was able to rip out his Doom blade and drive it into him with such strength that two bloody feet of glowing steel erupted from his chest before he even knew what was going on(XP +680).
Although he hadn’t been touched, the parrot fell off the man’s shoulder to thump onto the wooden floor. Oddly, this affected Roan more that the death of its owner. He tried not to look at the bird as he went through the man’s belongings, picking up two Potions of Healing, a Blizzard Wand, and two hundred in gold.
“You’re an assassin, aren’t you?” Glynth asked. “Rollup was just talking about them. He’d said they were behind all of this.”
“Shut up,” Roan said. “Pretend I wasn’t here.” He tossed her the bag of semi-precious stones and left, stepping over the parrot. When he got back to the front desk, there was another man waiting next to the cage. This one was in shining armor. He was big and thick; someone Roan didn’t want to mess with in this world.
“Where’s your lobby girl?” he asked.
Roan had no idea…well he had one idea. “Bopping some guy.” He let himself into the cage, shutting the door behind him and climbing up on the stool. “The price hasn’t changed,” he said, thumbing the counter on his side of the cage. The fighter dug out two gold and bobbed his head slightly, heading for the corridor.
Pocketing the gold, Roan searched around and found a slot under the counter where Rollup fed coins—it ran to a tube that went straight to the floor. He dropped from the stool and began searching for the hidden door that he was sure was there. When he found it, he cursed.
The door was a proper fit for a halfling, not a full-grown man. He tried anyway and nearly got stuck—of course it was then that he had another customer. After struggling out of the opening he jumped up on the stool. “Two gold. Let’s go!” His crankiness went unremarked; unlike most halflings, Rollup had not been a pleasant person.
When the man went up the hall, Roan took a lantern from the wall and lowered it through the opening. The gold that dropped through the tube landed in a chest; it was over half-filled. It set alight the evil embers in Roan’s breast and a lust for gold swept him. First, he took off his pack, his cloak and the shawl before he sucked in a breath, and lowered himself into the hole a second time.
Once more he got stuck, with his shoulders being just too large. He resituated himself, attempting to go in at an angle; one arm up and one down. This time when he got stuck it wasn’t that bad and he figured that one more try would do it—then the door opened and with it came a bracing chill that was too familiar.
It was the same chill he had felt behind the Sign of the Dirty Krown two nights before.
2—
Few things scared Roan in any world, but being trapped half in half out of a hole with that man heading his way was one of them.
Roan had no choice but to go down no matter how much flesh he would end up losing in the process. Exerting all the strength he could apply in his awkward stance, he forced his body down. The pain as the steel edge of
the door ripped into his arm was sharp but bearable(Damage -2HP).
“Spread out and find him,” someone ordered just as Roan made it down into the hidden room.
Quickly, he reached up and grabbed the edge of the secret door and closed it, shutting himself in a room that, like the door, had been built with a halfling in mind. The ceiling was maybe a hair over three feet from the floor, which meant Roan had to crawl around on his hands and knees.
Feeling safe, at least for the moment, he opened his Dimension Bag and began shoveling the gold inside until he had added almost three thousand coins to his total. Only then did he lift the lantern and look around. As he had expected, there was a tunnel off to his left. It had been dug by hand and was small even for a halfling. Roan had to worm his way through on his belly.
Thankfully, it didn’t go far before it branched. One tunnel led at an angle going up. “Probably to the alley behind the building.” The second went to the right for ten feet before it took a sharp turn to the left, paralleling the direction of the main tunnel. Roan guessed that this one went under the alley and up into the building across the way.
The alley was too close. “Hell, the next building is too close.” Without a real choice, he pushed on to the longer tunnel and sure enough, he popped up in the basement of an unknown building. The first thing he did when he struggled out of the tiny door was to adopt the image of Saewynn the pregnant whore.
Squaring his broad shoulders, he sashayed up to the main floor of a tavern, entering behind a wood stove that was unlit. He stood, adjusted his ridiculously short dress and started walking down a hall towards what he assumed was the front of the building. His pregnant belly lifted the front of the dress so high that he was sure he felt a wind trailing along his undercarriage.
He wanted a new look, and yet this one had worked so well that he decided to grin and bear it. When he stepped out into the bright afternoon sun he wanted to turn right around again. The streets were flooded with K Street killers and adventurers; they had Rollup’s brothel surrounded.
Roan stood out like a sore and very pregnant thumb and yet, he was ignored by the men almost completely. If he had walked out ten seconds earlier, he would have gotten away scot-free, but just as he began to push through the crowd, someone came running from the brothel.
“There’s a tunnel heading to Wee-Jim’s! Lock it down. Don’t let anyone out.”
A hand came down on Roan’s shoulder. Afraid that his muscles would be felt, Roan shrank from the touch. “How dare you touch a lady!”
“You ain’t no lady.”
Roan went stiff as he prepared to fight. It would have to be savage and quick—a couple of slashes with the Doom blade would give him enough time to retrieve the Inferno Wand. He had no idea how many charges were left in the thing, but two blasts would provide him enough cover to assume another guise.
His hand twitched towards the blade and was almost there when the man who had confronted him said, “You ain’t never been no lady, Saewynn. You see anything weird in there?”
“No, uh-uh. Sorry.”
Again, he started to leave when another of the Killers said, “Stop her. You guys heard what the Captain said. They have an Illusion Wand or something like that.”
Roan showed his hands. “I don’t have a wand, silly. And if I did would I choose to look like this? I would look like one of you. You all dress alike and carry the same kind of shields. Look around. Do you know all of these fellows?” He had no idea if he sounded like Saewynn. To his ear, he barely sounded like a woman.
What he said seemed to count for quite a bit because the identically clad K Street Killers all turned and began staring at one another, dark questioning looks on their faces. Two of them began a shoving match and as the crowd surged in to push them apart, Roan let the men flow around him and without moving, he was outside the crowd.
With all eyes on the shoving match, he knelt as if to adjust his high-heeled shoe, but really unsnapped and resnapped the clasp on the shawl, adopting the face, figure and attire of one of the Killers he had bumped into the night before. When he stood, he joined the others, moving in among them as if he belonged.
Soon the pushing ended and someone asked about Saewynn. “She’s gone! It had to be her.”
“Maybe it’s one of them,” someone said, pointing at the men that had been pushing each other a minute earlier. They were surrounded and had their shields and swords taken. One of the soldiers ran off to fetch the captain. As they did, Roan moved further and further away until he was on the other side of Rollup’s brothel, where he blended in, looking for a chance to escape.
He had made it to the edge of an alley when two men draped head to toe in black came out of the brothel. They seemed to ripple or float across the ground. With perfect clarity, he heard one say, “He’s close, summon the hell hounds.”
Hell hounds? Roan didn’t know what those were exactly but his imagination was probably very close to reality. Like normal hounds, he suspected that the hellish versions would be trackers and no amount of illusion or invisibility would help him.
What he needed was a Potion of Flying, only he didn’t have one of those. The closest he had were two Potions of the Cricket—weak jumping potions.
“Still, it’s better than nothing, especially if the hounds were like normal hounds and couldn’t fly.”
Throwing subtlety out the window, Roan headed around the corner and found himself in something that resembled a grocery store. It was dim and smelled of spoiled meat and cabbage. Heading directly to the rear of the store where the smell grew progressively worse, Roan pulled out a few silver coins and handed them to a bedraggled looking woman who obviously had orc in her more recent family tree.
“Is there a way upstairs through here?” he asked, giving her the silvers. She was afraid of him. Her muddled eyes never left his face as she pointed vaguely behind her at a curtained doorway. Roan went through it to find the source of the smell; a room where animals were butchered.
Even Roan, with his long history of standing in the middle of the most gruesome crime scenes had his mettle tested. Swarms of flies created a ceaseless hum as they landed on the rotting carcasses of what Roan hoped were pigs. There was blood on the walls, ceiling and floor. Some of it was old and congealed, layered over older blood. Some was fresh and red.
The smell of the room assaulted him, making him dizzy and causing his eyes to blur. Thankfully he saw another curtained-off doorway. He made for it, leaving gummy prints through the blood that even a poodle could follow. Beyond the curtain was a dark hallway, filled with crates and containers, some overflowing, some empty and some dribbling black fluid that came together to form a long puddle.
Roan was tempted to drink one of his Cricket potions just so he could leap over it. He didn’t. Splashing through it, he raced down the hall as behind him he heard the first of many howls. The hair-raising sound sent him sprinting even faster until he found the stairs. Up and up he went, his speed dwindling with each floor until by the eighth his chest was heaving. Below him the sound of claws scrambling on the risers drew closer and closer.
They were right behind him three floors later when he burst out onto the roof. He slammed the door behind him, but his gut told him it wouldn’t hold. With the potion in one hand he ran for the edge of the building, while at the same time trying to drink from the vial.
The magic in the potion flowed through him before he could even toss the vial away and when he leapt, he felt as though there were springs in his legs launching him across a fifteen foot chasm. When he landed, he turned, backing from the edge, watching as the door to the roof was battered into splinters.
From the stairwell came five tremendous creatures that resembled a cross between a demon and a wolf. They had red eyes, thick, black fur, and fangs three inches long.
Roan stared as he backed away and a part of his mind screamed for him to run, however the logic based part of him knew that the hounds couldn’t make the jump between the two buildings
. Seconds later he was proven wrong as the leader of the pack pelted for the edge of the building and leapt, clearing the fifteen feet with room to spare.
Chapter 29
K Street Killers Territory, Oberast
Roan turned and ran for the stairwell door as behind him the rest of the hell hounds leapt across with the same ease as the leader had. Running was useless against these creatures and jumping from building to building was even more so. His only choice was to fight them—just not five on one, eleven stories over the city.
He made it to the door before the leader could get to him. Shutting it behind him, he leapt down the first flight of stairs just as the hound hammered the door with all its weight. The door came to pieces from the blow and the hound tumbled down the stairs.
Roan could hear the mayhem, but he didn’t turn to look, he was too busy running down the hall. People poked their heads from their doors at the commotion. “Where’s a footbridge?” he cried. The first few people shut their doors in his face.
It took gold to induce the next man to answer. As Roan threw coins at him, the man pointed further down the hall to another set of stairs. “Fifth floor. Hang a left.”
Screams from down the hall let Roan know where the hounds were. A glance back showed them ripping apart a woman who had chosen the wrong time to step into the hall. Three of them were filled with a bloodlust and wouldn’t let the woman go until the leader jumped onto them and began snapping at them.
Then they were on Roan’s trail again. By then he had made it to the next set of stairs and was leaping from landing to landing. On the stairs he was actually as fast as the hounds were, but once he hit the fifth floor they caught up quickly and he only managed to get to the footbridge ahead of them.
He had no intention of cutting this bridge. It was narrow and swung from side to side, which gave him an advantage. They would have to come at him one at a time. The leader came first but instead of throwing himself on Roan’s Doom blade, it stopped just inches shy of the point.
Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2 A LITRPG Adventure Page 27