Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy-Seven - Moral Fiber

We gathered up all the clues we could find, as well as the contents of the baron’s safe, and spread them out on the dining room table.

It wasn’t much, really. A few dozen papers, some forms, and a neat stack of gold coins, bank notes, and little ingots with numbers and seals stamped onto them.

“So... we’re not going to steal the money,” I said.

“Why not?” Calamity asked.

“Because stealing is wrong,” I explained. He didn’t seem entirely convinced, but I felt like Caprica and Amaryllis, at least, were on my side. Willowbud too. Awen seemed a bit ambivalent about it, and Tharval was just as willing to pocket the gold as Calamity was.

“Setting aside the gold for the moment,” Amaryllis said. “We need to consider the other things on the table here.” She stabbed a talon at one of the pages. “This is the order for weaponry that Awen found, and I for one think it’s rather concerning.”

Tharval tugged the page out from under Amaryllis’ grip and squinted at it. “Hrm, I know this group. Bunch of money-grubbers with no artistic sense, but they know how to hire good folk and pay them what they’re worth. This is an order for four hundred automatic repeating crossbows. That’s enough to outfit an army.”

“Or two battalions of an army,” Caprica said. “But those are the kinds of weapons you want to keep out of the hands of angry civilians. They’re easy to learn how to operate and are difficult to fight against. A strong enough soldier will brush off a bolt and someone like a Paladin wouldn’t be easy to hit in the first place, but still...”

“I wouldn’t dismiss these things so easily, missy,” Tharval said. “These aren’t little sylph bolt throwers. These are proper dwarven bows. They’ll punch through rock and fly faster than a lightning bolt.”

I hoped he was exaggerating a lot there.

“Four hundred of those is concerning,” Awen muttered.

We all nodded.

“I dunno. If it was to equip hunters or the like it wouldn’t be that big a deal. It’s mostly concerning because of who’s getting them,” Calamity said. “Anything we can do about that contract?”

Tharval squinted at it, then grinned. “Well, says here he’ll be needing to pay in instalments, and they’re not cheap. So if we take that there gold, he won’t be able to afford a single one, let alone four hundred.”

“So what you’re saying is that it’s the morally correct thing to do to take his gold,” Calamity said while nodding to himself.

“We’re not taking the gold. Stealing is wrong,” I repeated.

“As wrong as breaking and entering, subduing that guard back on the couch and... well, we stole from his pantry already,” Calamity pointed out.

I pouted. He was a little bit right, but I didn’t want to push things. Doing one bad thing didn’t give someone the right to do another, no matter how much someone might dance around the logic. “We’re not taking it, please,” I said.

Tharval and Calamity rolled their eyes, proving that they were pretty alike in at least one way. “Alright, what else do we have?” Amaryllis changed the subject. She tapped a small pile of pages. “These are the docking forms for Vonowl’s ship. It’s in a private, exterior dock now, which might explain why we never spotted it within the tower.”

“Private docks are fairly common, though they’re far more expensive than the tower docks. They’re the only option for larger ships and certain well-to-do persons like to keep their ships away from the common airship,” Willowbud said.

“And some hobbyists rent out private spots to park their ships in,” Tharval added. “So that they can tinker with them in peace. It’s a common enough practice. There’s airship-racing and endurance runs and a number of sports that require a ship, usually a small one that can operate with a minimal crew or solo.”

So like people who had boats on Earth. There were some people who had lots of money and who bought a yacht and then some people who just kept a little boat as a sort of very expensive hobby.

Not the kind of hobby my family was into, or that we could afford. Our budget was more suited to gardening and long walks.

“That doesn’t seem like very useful information, although maybe we can impound the vehicle before he makes another escape,” Caprica said.

“That’s a good idea,” Amaryllis said. “But there’s more. See, he has two more ships that he’s paying the docking fees for. Their names are... a series of letters and numbers. They’re barges. I think Pyrowalkian?”

“Terrible ships,” Tharval grumped. “No artistry, mass-produced chaff that’s as likely to fly as it is to fall apart around your ears. Cheap though.”

Amaryllis huffed a ‘we’re better than that’ kind of huff. “Maybe the good baron is running out of funds. Or he just doesn’t care. In either case, he has two more ships he might use to escape with.”

“Give me their names, please,” Willowbud said as he tugged out a little notebook from a pouch around the waist of his armour. “I have enough sway, I think, to have the vehicles interdicted before they can leave. Or at least have them be part of a surprise inspection before takeoff.”

“Ah, I know a person or two that handles that kind of thing,” Tharval said. His smile was downright predatory. “We can make sure that the inspection is quite thorough. They’ll find something that’s not up to one of those damnable codes.”

“You don’t like safety regulations?” Awen asked.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“I like them when they stop others from being morons. I don’t like them when they get in the way of my genius,” Tharval said.

I suppressed a giggle.

“So, what do we do now? Are there any other hints we can work with?” I asked instead. Some of the papers hadn’t been touched.

“Well, these are letters back to the Harpy Mountains. Some of them are correspondence that might hold a few secrets, I haven’t had time to read them all. The rest are letters to family. His mom is worried about him.” Amaryllis rolled her eyes, but I thought it was rather sweet.

Even bad guys could have nice moms.

“Maybe we ought to write her ourselves,” Calamity said with a grin. “Tell her what her boy’s been up to. I mean, sure, we’re gonna try to get him arrested and all, but there’s nothing like a disappointed parent to put your mood down. Trust me, I’m an expert at that.”

“At disappointing your parents or feeling down?” Amaryllis asked.

Calamity paused, then shrugged. “Both?”

“As interesting as that idea is,” Caprica said. “It seems a little too infantile for my tastes. Perhaps we can come up with a plan to actually deal with Vonowl before we start think about adding insult to injury?”

“Ah, he’s going to come back here, right?” Awen asked. “This is his room.”

“Unless someone warns him,” Amaryllis pointed out. “He’s shown that he’s willing to run before, so we can assume that he might try to run again.”

I nodded. “In that case, we’ll go and confront him.”

“And where would we go for that, exactly?” Amaryllis asked. “I can think of several places he might be, and that’s not including the possibility that he’s in transit or that he has friends in the Storm Tower who can shelter him.”

“I don’t know, I didn’t spend too much time with him, but he doesn’t seem like the type of person to have a lot of real friends,” I said.

“Wow, that’s... painful coming from you,” Amaryllis said.

I felt my cheeks warming up a little. That had been kind of a mean thing to say, hadn’t it? Maybe I was turning into a mean kind of person? Were my friends bad influences?

No, that couldn’t be it.

“A-anyway,” I said. “Maybe we could split up, go to all the most likely places to find him?”

“And then what, have only one or two of us there to confront him?” Caprica asked. “I don’t doubt the combat prowess of anyone here, but the baron will likely have guards and he might be in a place that’s public where starting a fight could lead to some trouble with the locals that would be best handled as a group.”

I reached up and tugged on my droopier ear as I thought, but before I could come up with anything, Calamity had an idea.

“Let’s just stop that weapon shipment,” he said. “Even if we don’t get the baron we’ll have to stop it in any case, and we can tell the folk selling those crossbows to fetch the baron for us. Two birds with one arrow.”

My friends and I glanced at each other, and when no one had a better idea, we decided to give it a go.

We filed out of the hotel--after putting the money back, I checked. We made sure the guard on the sofa was okay. He had come to a while ago, and Calamity untied one of his arms and gave him the leftovers of what he’d made in the kitchen as a snack so he wouldn’t go hungry while untying himself.

We happened to encounter the reception dwarf on the way down. “He wasn’t there,” I said with a shrug.

“I... yes, I’m aware,” the dwarf said. “I heard some commotions above?”

“Nothing much, we didn’t break anything, I don’t think.” I smiled to reassure him. “Don’t worry! If there’s any trouble, you can direct it to the Exploration Guild.”

“Ah, yes, of course,” he said before squeezing himself out of the way.

We continued on down the stairs for a bit, and Amaryllis piped up almost as soon as we were out of the receptionist’s hearing range. “Wow, Broccoli, that was almost devious.”

“Huh?”

“Shoving all the blame onto the guild like that,” she said. “I was worried when you started talking that you’d just admit to ruining Vonowl’s rooms.”

“But we didn’t ruin them,” I said.

“I left a mess in the kitchen,” Calamity said.

“I cut up the mattress to see if there was anything hidden in it,” Caprica said. “What, I read about it in a novel.”

“Ah, we kind of... broke the wall around the safe,” Awen admitted.

“And the safe too!” Tharval added.

I pressed my hands over my face. “I’m a liar. A liar and a manipulator.”

Amaryllis patted me on the back. “It’s okay, as long as you’re not lying to or manipulating me.”

“I wouldn’t!” I said. “Not on purpose, anyway.”

We left the hotel without any of my friends commenting on my realisation that I was slowly turning into a terrible person. Fortunately, we soon started to talk, and I was able to put that out of my mind for the moment. Maybe I was just being a bit silly and overdramatic. A bit of breaking and entering and theft wasn’t that big a deal, was it?

With Thrarval and Willowbud leading our group, we descended another staircase, boarded a trolley filled with so many people that some were hanging off the side, and continued on deeper into the Storm Tower on a circuitous route towards the weapons company.

When we arrived at our destination, we paused and took in the front of the shop.

It was a grand thing, with a massive ballista on a platform to one side and several oversized swords and spears behind glass on the other.

Above, in hard iron letters, was the name Thorade’s Munitions.

***