At Large

by Andrew Seiple

  But it is a problem for another day, Chase told herself as she grabbed control once more. She met the eyes of her curious comrades and shrugged. “What? It is the Camerlengo. I saw her once in Lafiore.”

  “What’s a Camerlengo?” Bernardo asked.

  “Someone who guards a noble’s interests,” Cagna explained. “Usually a cleric or someone with some pull in the church.”

  “Yeah, she does errands for the Baroness,” Chase said, happy that the attention was off her. She leaned back over the grate again and studied her foe.

  A tall, thin human woman, with her white-streaked brown hair done up in a bun, and a pair of spectacles perched on a hawkish nose. She was wearing traveling clothes, all black, and she had a silver pendant on. Chase squinted, and was thankful for her recently-boosted perception, as the shape of the pendant became clear to her improved eyes. A ruler? It looked like that, a flat, long rectangle with some sort of markings at regular intervals.

  The Camerlengo spoke with the five hulking men and nearly-as-hulking woman surrounding the coach. They nodded their black-hooded heads, pulled out sets of manacles, and began chanting.

  “Lockdown, No Escape!” they chorused in near unison, and then the closest one threw the door of the coach open.

  It was almost the death of him.

  A form exploded outward, swinging chain-wrapped fists, and bowling into the large Jailer. They both went down, and the remaining Jailers hurried forward, piling on, trying to subdue whoever was trying to escape.

  Chase blinked, as a sudden suspicion filled her mind. No. No, it’s impossible. Why would she bring him here?

  The pile of fat Jailers gave a sudden heave, and a large form surged out of it, sending them flying in all directions. It straightened up and glared at the outer ring of guards surrounding the coach. Glowing, battered remnants of armor showed under links of chain, and a wild black mane of hair twitched as he stared around, looking for a way out.

  Dijornos. She had brought Dijornos here! And Chase didn’t know why. Why not take him to the baronial seat? Why bring him to Arretzi?

  The guards pressed in closer, halberds leveled. Dijornos sneered and started toward them...

  ...only to trip and fall on his face.

  There was a chain around his ankle. And as Chase watched, one of the fallen Jailers got back up and tugged on the other end, which was firmly wound around the fat man’s wrist.

  Dijornos struggled to his feet... but then the other Jailers moved, and swung heavy lengths of chain, battering him, locking manacles into place all around his body. It was like watching a pack of wolves take down a bear, and it ended the only way it could.

  “Hogtie,” they told him, as chains snapped and wrapped around the prisoner.

  “Quiet you!” they snarled as he tried to shout in response, either activating his own skills or just roaring defiance. The end result didn’t matter, as Chase watched his mouth snap shut so quickly and with such violence that a tooth went flying. Or maybe that was one of the Jailers putting a boot in, it was hard to tell given how close together they were.

  Chase chose her next words very carefully. “Whoever he was, that guy never had a chance.”

  “Not really, no,” Cagna said, keeping her voice low. “Jailers are a Knight and Animator Tier Two combination. That fat counts as armor, and once they land a chain on you, it’s over.”

  The trio watched four of the Jailers haul Dijornos’ trussed up form away out of view. The remaining two stepped up to the coach, and sent chains snaking upward, to grab a smaller bundle from above. This one sagged limply as it came down... a woman in a prisoner’s hood, her clothes tattered. She seemed much less imposing than the last prisoner, but the Jailors treated her just as roughly.

  And they were wise to do so. This has to be Speranza, Chase knew. She’d be gagged or unconscious or both, of course. Her powers were far too dangerous to risk around large groups of armed men.

  “Well, that was weird,” Bernardo summed up as the Camerlengo turned her back to the proceedings and waved at someone out of view. “But if she’s transferring prisoners into the city, then they’ll be at least an hour. We’re safe to leave while this is going on, she’s somebody else’s problem.”

  It would be nice if that was true, but Chase didn’t think she’d get so lucky twice. With her fate being what it was, and the Camerlengo showing up here and now, it seemed like Hoon was letting her know that their business wasn’t done just yet.

  “Let’s go then,” Cagna decided. “Nothing more to see here.”

  Bernardo snorted. “You missed your calling in life. Normally it’s guards who say that.”

  Chase was at exactly the right angle to see how Cagna’s tail twitched, then tensed. Just for a second.

  But the dog-woman said nothing, and the three made their way down from the murder holes, down flights of stairs once more, and through mostly-empty halls.

  Finally the last door opened into daylight, and Chase blinked, letting her eyes adjust...

  ...and she was glad she did.

  For a second she just stared at the sight before her. She had thought the outskirts of Arretzi to be crowded beyond belief, full of more people than she’d ever imagined seeing in one place.

  She had been woefully naive, she saw that now. She saw it in the throngs of people that walked the streets, in the wagons that rolled by, teamsters shouting for those walking to make way. She saw it in the high, sturdy buildings that lined the cobblestones, multiple stories worth of buildings, the least of them towering over anything back home in Bothernot.

  And it wasn’t just the sight of it, there was the noise, too. Countless conversations, shouts, doors opening and shutting, music somewhere in the distance, barking from distant dogs, and gods knew what else blended together to make a cacophony quite unlike anything she had ever encountered in her fifteen years of a quiet rural life.

  “Are you coming?” Cagna’s voice registered, as if from a distance.

  Chase snapped out of it, and gave the woman a close-lipped smile, knowing somehow that she had to keep her lips shut otherwise it would be rude. “I thought you told me no questions until we’re inside the city?” Chase said and patted the woman’s arm with a friendly swipe.

  Cagna stared for a second, then she literally barked laughter. “So I did.” She took a big step and put her feet on the cobblestones just outside the door. “Well now I am. You coming?”

  “I’ve got nothing better to do,” Chase said, and followed her out.

  Bernardo said nothing, but merely shut the door behind them. The pair ventured out into the city, and Chase focused on Thomasi’s advice.

  Don’t stare.

  But oh, that was much easier said than done.

  Every street held a spectacle, every plaza had a performance. The throngs turned into crowds the further they got in, and every passerby had a story that she itched to know, but never would. There were humans and halvens and even a few dwarves throughout the crowd, and once a pair of stags loped by, carrying what might have been elves. Other, more exotic races abounded, from an owl-woman dumping washwater into the gutters from the side of an inn, to something nine feet tall and gray, with craggy skin and blue tattoos.

  And the shops!

  Every place that didn’t hold a house or a big building of some sort was crammed with stalls and storefronts and merchants hawking their wares, from freshly-baked bread to metalware, from fine pottery to worked wooden toys.

  Chase stopped at one point to watch what was obviously the work of a Tinke. A metal boat sailed and bumbled about on a blue tarp stretched out in the window of his shop, the tiny wheels below it just visible, and steam piping like mist out of a hole in the mast.

  “Come on,” Cagna’s voice was harsh, but her hand was gentle as she sat it on Chase’s shoulder. “I don’t blame you for being a bit of a country mouse, but we have a job to do.”

  Country mouse. “Is it that obvious?” Chase looked up at her.

  Cagna’s
muzzle wrinkled in what could have been a smile. “I was one myself. No shame in it. But if I’m noticing, others have too. The Don’s grace won’t protect you against the local pickpockets, other people run those groups.”

  “So where are we going, anyway?” Chase said, taking one last look through the Tinker’s shop window, and stifling a wistful sigh at a set of toy gnome soldiers.

  “The Don keeps a villa for his business in town. It’s a good base of operations. Also got some baths so you can knock the travel dust off your boots... feet, I guess,” Cagna said, glancing down at the halven’s bare extremities. “After that, you tell me. I don’t know how you do what you do. You know what you need to do, and I’ll help you, but you have to tell me what you need. And not here,” Cagna said, raising a hand as Chase started to speak. “We don’t talk about this on the street. Capisce?”

  “Capisca,” Chase agreed.

  A ten-minute walk later, and they reached the villa. A good thing too, since Chase’s halven stamina was dangerously low. She was on her second emergency roll by the time Cagna slowed up and said, “This is it.”

  It, in this case, was a large walled compound, with two stories of a fancy, white-columned house visible over the wall. It was on a street of similar structures, sharing walls with its neighbors. Cagna fiddled with the gate, which opened with a creak.

  Not knowing what to expect, Chase followed her in...

  ...and stared in amazement at the sights around her.

  A paved courtyard sat between the wall and the villa house, the stones in the ground broken in patterns to let orange trees and decorative shrubs grow with carefully-cultivated profusion.

  Across the way stood the manor house, two stories tall with a sloped roof, large enough that Chase’s entire village could live within it and have room left over for their household pets, too.

  Another building, more like a cottage, sat off to one side of the wall. An old man sat in a chair on the porch of the cottage, watching them with serenity, lifting a bottle of something quite-probably alcoholic to his lips as they entered. Across from the cottage, a small stables held a horse placidly chewing on a nearby overhanging branch, straining to get at the hard green balls of fruit just out of its reach on the already-stripped tree.

  “You’re the new one,” the old man called. “Cagna, right?”

  “One of the new ones,” Cagna confirmed. “You’re the gardener.”

  The old man nodded. “I am. The master, he’s out right now. I don’t know when he be back. He don’t tell me that.”

  “We’re not here to see him.”

  The gardener shrugged and turned back to his drink.

  “Only a few servants here,” Cagna said, as she led the way to the main door of the villa. “Four or five inside. Him outside. No guards unless there’s trouble with the other families. Goes without saying, but you shouldn’t talk business with the servants.”

  “I hadn’t planned to.”

  “Good.” Cagna held the door for her.

  The inside was just as impressive as the outside, all white painted walls and fine furnishings. But something seemed off, and as Cagna led her upstairs and past large rooms, she put her finger on it.

  There were square spots on the walls where paintings used to hang, but no longer did so. A few stands here and there held statues or sculptures, but even more stood empty. And a couple of the upstairs rooms were totally stripped of furniture, with marks in the rugs and on the tiles to show where furnishings had once been.

  Times were perhaps a bit harder on the Don lately than they had been in the past. That was potentially useful information that she filed away for later.

  Finally, Cagna dropped her off at a door. “This is a guest room. The key should be on the hook inside. It connects to a bathroom, so feel free to rest up and do whatever. I’ll be downstairs if you need me. You’re halven, so the cooks will need advance warning, I’ll wager.”

  “Thank you,” Chase said. “It would be nice to have a civilized meal schedule again. I’ve been traveling with a human so long that I’ve lost entirely too much weight.”

  Cagna’s tongue lolled out of her mouth, and her eyes twinkled. Is that amusement? Yes, yes it is, Chase realized. How do I know that?

  “I usually don’t hear THAT complaint too often,” Cagna said. “Sure, we can fatten you up. See you around, country mouse.”

  Once Cagna was gone, Chase surveyed the room, and found it to her liking. Sized for humans, yes, but there was a stepstool next to the oversized bed, and the door handles were low enough to reach if she stood on her toes. Glass windows, much nicer than those in the taverna, let in light and dust particles danced in the midday sunbeams.

  Shutting the door, Chase pulled over a chair, clambered up it, and retrieved the key from its hook. A little fiddling got the door locked. And then, before anything else, she put her pack on the ground and opened the straps. “It’s safe.”

  Renny crawled out, and stood, looking around. “That was frustrating.”

  “I’m sorry. It can’t have been comfy, cramped up in that little pack for so long.”

  “No, I didn’t mind that. Golems don’t get as uncomfy as living people seem to. We can be still for days or weeks if we need to. What I mean is I could only hear what was going on, I couldn’t see anything except when the pack was at just the right angle. And even then it was mostly just a lot of legs.”

  “Welcome to my life.” Chase sat on the floor and put her back to the wall. “We’re probably safe to talk here, so long as we don’t shout.”

  “Okay… so what was that about the Camerlengo? And Jailers?”

  Chase told him what she’d seen. At the end of it, she found she was hugging her knees to her chest.

  Renny picked up on it, too. He patted her knee. “Don’t worry. From what I saw it’s a pretty big city. So long as we stay out of her way, we’ll be done and gone in a few days.”

  “Maybe. Thomasi wants us to stall until he gets to us. But I don’t know if we can do that. Moreover, I don’t know if we should.” Chase wrinkled her nose, as she stood. “I’m going to take a bath,” she said, heading toward the other room.

  “Okay,” Renny said, padding along after her.

  He stopped when Chase did. “What?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I figured I can talk to you while you’re in the tub.”

  “Um, no. I’m going to be naked.”

  Renny shrugged. “So?”

  “This never came up? Didn’t you have two women in your adventuring party before?”

  “Yes. And?” He stopped. “Oh, are you talking about how Gadram used to bathe separately from them? And find excuses to be somewhere else when they were changing clothes?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Well that’s fine, I’m not a dwarf,” he started toward the bathroom again.

  “Nope. Look…” Chase said and felt her face flush as she started explaining.

  Finally they compromised, and dragged over a big screen so he could sit behind it and talk while she was in the tub.

  Oh, did it feel good to slip into warm water again! Chase sighed and settled into it, feeling her aches leave with the dirt. Renny’s Clean and Press skill was great for cleaning clothes, but skin was another matter.

  “So Thomasi wants us to stall?” Renny asked.

  “Oh, right. You weren’t in the room for that conversation. Yes, he’s confident he can give Don Coltello the slip, or find a way to turn this situation to our advantage. But he decided that before the Don surprised us with a time limit. Thomasi’s good, but I don’t know if he’s that good. So I’m going to fall back on my dad’s advice, here.” She felt a pang of loss, saying that. Only a week she’d been away from her family, and it felt like a lifetime, now. When she thought about it, this was the longest she’d ever been away from them.

  Her eyes stung a bit, and she closed them. You wanted adventure, Chase told herself. Hard to adventure with your parents along.
/>   Then she remembered Greta and was almost undone entirely. She felt her ears droop and fought to keep composure.

  “What did your dad say?” Renny asked from behind the screen.

  That let her push the sadness aside and focus on business. “He said one should always hope for the best, and plan for the worst. So, let’s try to hunt some werewolves. It’s a good idea, anyway. They’re killing people and if it’s the same guy as before, then he’ll have a grudge against the Don and the other crime lords. Which means they might attack us, since we’re on sort-of-friendly terms with the Don now.”

  “Do you think they’re the werewolves I smelled at the dungeon?”

  “Almost certainly. That was really near to the city, and wolves are territorial, I think.”

  “Then that’s an advantage. If I smell them again, then I’ll know. Except… except it’s going to be hard to smell anything while I’m in the pack.”

  “Yeah. We need a way around that. Can’t your illusions make you look like someone else?”

  “They can, but… well, there’s two flaws. The first is that the spell fades after time, and I have to speak to renew them. Anyone who knows the skill is going to get suspicious if they hear me casting Phantasm all the time. The second is that if I want it to move, I have to account for every little detail of the movement. It’s tricky, and I’m good, but it still ends up being a little noticeable. Especially when I try talking.”

  Another thought occurred to Chase. “It would be noticeable to werewolves, too. They’re supposed to have great senses of smell… no. No, bad idea. Which is a pity, because that first part would be easy to fix.”

  “It would?”

  “Yes. I could montage you the Grifter job, and you’d be able to silently use all your skills. It would also get you that Master of Disguise skill, too. That would probably help with all of that. Except, no, wait.” Chase slathered her arms with soap, scrubbing as she thought. “A montage would take most of a day. We don’t have that kind of time.”

  “I could get it instantly, I already unlocked that job months ago. But I don’t know if I want it.”

  “What? Why wouldn’t you? It would work beautifully with your illusions! Maybe not so much the air thing, but you chose your Elementalist job for combat anyway, right?”