I hobbled away from the ‘tinker’s’ camp at a snail’s pace, vibrating with anxiety. Humble tinker my ass. They could pack themselves a mountain of pots and pans but that wouldn’t erase the reek of adventurer that clung to them.
I inspected the gifted pan again, not trusting it for a second. Nonetheless it failed to warp into a snake, explode, or any other such thing. The longer I held it the more sure I was that the worst it could do was track me.
Which was more than bad enough, but I couldn’t throw it away without arousing suspicion. I’d have to wait until I was too far to track with mundane methods before I ditched it.
It didn’t help that it was a really nice pan. Just six inches across and with a smoothly pivoting handle that could lock over the pan for better storage or rotate out to provide a firm grip. It really was the perfect gift for a traveler.
I couldn’t resist flipping it open and closed, listening to the clicks and clacks of it’s locking and unlocking.
With an effort of will I returned myself to stillness. Was I a baby, to squeal and squeak with no thought to the danger of my actions, to the horrors I could draw? I jammed the thing into one of my dimensional pouches before it could distract me any further.
I hobbled a little faster. Surely I was far enough away to drop the old man act, right?
No. Control yourself Zhen. There was no telling what perception skills that fucker might have. Not only had he possessed a far greater confidence than his foolish apprentice, but the complete confidence with which he spoke reminded me unpleasantly of the old priest that I’d stolen my powers from in the first place. I didn’t have nearly enough knowledge to compare the two with any hope of accuracy, but the comparison alone was bad enough.
Now that I was leaving I was increasingly certain that his expertise wasn’t the only cause for comparison. Just being near the man had raised my hackles in a way I couldn’t fully describe. It was something deeper than gut instinct, something in my very bones.
Or perhaps in my soul.
With my current… ailment I was walking with one eye on the real world and one on the fragile repairs that still held my soul together. Had that increased awareness extended further than I thought? I’d never put any thought into developing the sort of true soul sight that would allow me to view another’s soul, but perhaps I didn’t have too. My soul walls were cracked and crumbling, exposing my innermost self to the harshness of the outside universe. My own bleeding soul prevented just anything from getting in, but that didn’t mean changes in spiritual pressure wouldn’t have some small impact.
How powerful a soul would one need for just the emanations to have such effects?
I shivered. Maybe I was imagining things. Hopefully I was imagining things. Still, the potential of refining an ability to tell an opponents rough strength at a glance was too good to pass up. Something to look into once I’d fixed my soul.
And I would fix my soul. Failure was not an option.
I followed the road for another three days before I hit true human territory. Tangled forests gave way to rolling hills dotted with sturdy stone houses atop and the fuzzy white blobs of sheep on the slopes.
It never ceased to amaze me how thoroughly humans could dominate their environment. Before their farms sprung up here I didn’t doubt it woul have looked little different from the woods before. No goblin would dare clear cut this much valuable cover, but the humans need hide from nothing. Nothing more than a foot of solid stone and an oaken door to lock against the night and they called themselves safe.
How foolish.
But it wasn’t my task to reveal their foolishness to them. All I could do was decide whether I was better off continuing my human disguise or trying to creep through the night as I was accustomed too.
In the end the disguise won out. If that damn tinker hadn’t found me out these peasants wouldn’t and it would be faster besides. I wasn’t about to lose my soul tomorrow, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t on a time limit.
I picked up the pace from the exaggerated old man hobble I’d relied on before. While it was great for getting people to underestimate me it was also a pain to maintain that gait for extended periods, almost enough to eliminate the time savings of walking. Instead I settled on a slight limp, a nod at the same purpose without completely crippling my speed.
With the slightly mismatched legs from my aborted transformation limping came a little too easily if anything. Of course a limp wouldn’t hide me from the prying eyes of men for long. No, what would hide me was their unwillingness to look too long or too close. That Dev woman’s welcoming nature had opened my eyes, I had not gone nearly far enough.
To that end I took the time to refine my disguise in the worst possible way. Killing a few squirrels was the work of five minutes and provided me with more than enough blood to give the illusion of serious injury when strategically dabbed about my outer rags. The offal from such small animals wasn’t much, but it was more than enough to generate the sick smell of rot.
I wrinkled my nose at the reek, but I knew that I’d need at least that much just to get through the clogged nose of the average human. I’d treated all manner of sickness with my mother, so I knew enough to hit the right smell. I was going a little hard for the average infection, but not beyond what a serious case of gangrene or leprosy might have.
In other words, the perfect tool for hiding in plain sight. You couldn’t contract a disease by looking at someone, but you wouldn’t know that by how people acted.
For the next week or so I lived the life of a wandering beggar. I stumbled from one settlement to another, given a wide berth by everyone who had eyes to see or a nose to smell. Any attempt to sleep in the ‘safety’ of a village was denied, whether with words or fists. I had rocks thrown at me, weapons bared at me and was even once driven out of a village by an angry mob. It was a cold and lonely journey spent huddling in ditches and being spat on by all who passed.
In short, it was a time of unbearable luxury. The suspicious hinterlanders used words as often as they did violence, and even when they turned to violence it was of the loud, brash sort. It was a coward’s violence born from the fundamental reluctance to truly fight and kill. They wanted me gone, but from flight, not murder. They feared the blood on their hands as much as they feared me.
The blood of a fellow human at least. It was in stark contrast to the treatment of a goblin. That was a silent violence where the only goal was to kill, without thought for mercy or guilt.
Things got more difficult as I neared Seagri, with denser habitation and fewer empty ditches safe enough to sleep in. Still, I was hopeful. If the worst the city had to offer was threats and spittle than this wouldn’t be as hard as I’d thought.
For the final few miles approaching the city there was little uncultivated land left at all, forcing me to limp along the road like any other human.
Farms were packed tight on every side, rows of orderly vegetation bumping into one another, contained by hedgerows like the straining belt of a wildly obese Hob. It was more wealth in one place than I had ever seen. So much arable land, the food to support hundreds of thousands just lying on the ground. It was almost indescribable. Instincts honed by years of exile screamed at me to run, that riches like this would not go unprotected, that there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, but I beat them back. I was not the same goblin I had been. I could hide in plain sight and skulking in an open field would not aide me. Best to blend in with everyone else.
Well, not quite with everyone else. More awkwardly in between groups visibly hurrying to keep ahead of me and groups pulling back on the reins to avoid catching up with me.
Good to know my disguise was working.
It only got worse as we neared the walls. The line already bunched up more, once my reek got involved it neared comical levels. A second clump began to bunch up behind me as well, different merchants eying each other up and wondering if stealing a march on their rivals was worth catching whatever I had.
As a hesitant stalemate formed it turned out their were no takers on that particular bargain.
Smart folks.
Congestion or not, I gradually neared the city gates and my anxiety grew every step. Was this truly the right decision? Wouldn’t the humans have some means of detecting infiltrators, they wouldn’t be the terrors they were if they were so helpless surely? Two human warriors stood by the gate, leaning on their spears as if they could hardly keep awake, but even if they hardly deserved the name their danger was only highlighted by the wall looming behind them.
Nearly forty feet of plain gray stone, every inch as solid as a mountain. It was a grim reminder of the difference between our peoples. Goblins cobbled together little shacks on top of one another like a mountain of trash, meanwhile humans suborned real mountains to their will.
I took a deep breath and released my fear. It would do me no good here.
The last man ahead of me was let through and he hurried through the gate, glancing behind himself as if my stink would chase him. The guards didn’t look much happier.
“Papers?”
Time to shine. “P-pa-papers? Please sir, I have no papers.”
The guard’s wrinkled face turned into a full scowl. “Then get gone.”
He jerked his head to the side and his partner, presumably the junior, approached me. Not fast enough, the guy hesitated with both hands raised, trying to find a part of me he could seize without touching my filth.
There wasn’t one.
This wasn’t how they’d treated any of the last three men who hadn’t had papers, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected either. I’d picked the gate with the poorest looking incomers, but they were still better off than me by a fair margin. Note to self: guards don’t sympathize much with sob stories.
“P-please, could I perhaps buy some papers?” I extended my hand with a carefully calculated excess of silver.
The guards shared a glance. I was offering three times what a standard nonresident was charged. The one bribe that I’d heard a solid price for had been twice the standard fee, but that guy hadn’t reeked like me either.
The senior guard lashed out with his truncheon and smacked the silver from my hands. “Where’d a rat like you get that? If you think I’m letting some sneak thief in you’ve another thing coming.”
Wouldn’t let a thief in for so little. I translated mentally.
Physically I yelped and fell to my knees. “Please sir, its all I have. I had to flee with nothing more than I could carry, an—, and—” I intermixed my pleading with plenty of sputtering and crying. I hadn’t stolen infinite money from Garrett, so best to see if pity wouldn’t sweeten the pot before I tried upping the bribe.
“Well. As long as you came by it honestly.” The guard was already snatching up my silver by the time I’d plucked it from the ground. Didn’t even have to clean up his own mess.
The younger guard was keeping his distance, eying me like one might eye a dog with boils. Well, like I assumed a human would eye such a thing, not with hunger. “Sir, what if he brings in a plague?”
“Pfffft. Like we don’t have half a dozen of those already.”
“But sir—”
“NEXT!”
I scrambled past the guard, just another refugee eager to not get hit again. Not even a lie. I hobbled through the gate as fast as my disguise could carry me, its dark shadow passing over me and blinding me to the light on the other side.
I shied away from the sudden sun before reminding myself that human eyes were not so quick to take to the dark and I was shaded by a hood besides. I set off with a false confidence, leading with my walking stick to save me from walking straight into a wall. Surely no fool would build one within a dozen feet of the gate anyway, right?
My squinting eyes adapted to the light almost as fast as to the dark, unveiling the city to me in its full glory. It was stunning. Tenements rose up on either side, second and third stories stretching out over their foundations to form a half-tunnel over the street. The solid stone of the wall was nowhere to by found, replaced by old and splintered wood. Only the crowded square around the gate could be said to see true sunlight and the cacophony that had echoed only dimly through the tunnel was in full effect here, making me glad to have folded down my ears.
Hundreds of humans were packed in, peddlers screaming out their wares from stalls rimming the edge and hawking their goods to the travelers struggling to push through. Only waving my stick around in front of me had saved me from being bowled over in my blindness. As I squirmed through the crowd I was shocked to stumble upon some even more filthy than me. Clustered by the side of the road, kept a scant few meters away from the stalls by the glares and threats of the shopkeepers, were exactly the dregs of humanity I’d thought to disguise myself as.
This was what the humans had built?
The craftsmanship might be better, their buildings taller, but the despair and desperation were the same. Was all their power worth so little?
I took off down a narrow alley and the sun’s light all but vanished. Even the square was more shaded than you’d expect, but with each story up built wider than the last it didn’t take long for the eaves to come within inches of each other in the alleys. Only a thin crack above betrayed that we weren’t in a tunnel and I instantly felt more comfortable. Tunnels I could handle. Hells, this was even brighter than I was used to, though I couldn’t discount the possibility that its inhabitants had some manner of Skills to make up the difference.
I moved quickly, winding through the dark streets and back alleys in a pattern even I couldn’t understand, occasionally looping around or doubling back to check for followers, but it didn’t seem like I had any.
The deeper I got the more unfamiliar the city became. Only the sense of being lost was the same. While it attempted the same density of the goblin warrens it could only pale in comparison. You could cram humans all day long but they were still too big and trying to fit so many in so little space just forced the excess to spill out onto the streets, huddling in rags without shelter to their name. The tenements were built at odd angles and their wasn’t a straight corner or road to be seen, but they all followed the same build plan. Walls rose up at consistent angles and stories were of uniform height, luxurious for a goblin but cramped for anything taller.
In short, I was unimpressed. It lacked both the splendor to awe and the horror to intimidate, leaving a uniquely unsatisfying middle ground.
Was their anything novel about this place?
I turned and seized the wall, clambering up it with hardly any effort. Even the basic walls of the building were mediocre. It lacked any holes and cracks through it, but had plenty of cosmetic damage plus exposed wooden beams across the white crap they’d caked over the wickerwork. With all that exposed wood heading up was as simple as walking on even ground even with my claws hidden.
Even the overhangs weren’t enough to present a real challenge. Too small individually, even if there was one every floor, I could still hoist myself up with arm strength alone. The lack of handholds on the bottom face complicated things, but pushing off the opposite wall was a reasonable substitute. Within half a minute I was scrabbling up the slick shingles and crested the peak to look over the city.
I crouched in the shadow of a chimney to prevent my silhouette from breaking up the skyline and saw this hive of humanity with clear eyes for the first time. I pulled open my narrow slit of bandages to take it all in. Even in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined this. The tenement blocks sprawled out for miles, the narrow streets cutting them into jagged shapes like broken glass. The dock towers stretched to the sky like rows of broken teeth, the cranes of straight-cut wood atop them putting even Drakul’s grand construction to shame.
The great ships rose from the waterline like walls of oak and sail, so large I could scarcely imagine them to move. Smaller boats darted about them like the water skimmers on a stagnant pond. Above it all towered the cliffs on the far end of the bay, where the ruler of these humans must have taken his residence, and it only took one look to tell why a place of such wealth had beggars aplenty in its gutters.
The plain gray stone of the walls and piers was gone, cladding of blinding white clung to a fortress that grasped at the sky. Around it there was not a tenement to be seen. Instead rich mansions hung around the descending hills like a garland around his fortress. Palatial lawns of rich greens and gilded fountains of searing gold, even the roofs were laid of fine slate shingles that put the mossy and rotting wood beneath my feet to shame.
Humans and goblins weren’t so different I suppose. There was where the Hobs of humanity ruled their lesser kin, the Drake’s Roost of Seagri. The tenements had shocked me because I’d expected the humans to have worked wonders with all the land and wealth they stole from other races.
It appeared that the human nobility wrought their magnificence at the expense of not just other races, but at the expense of their own as well. Every hammer beating iron that I heard echoing in these slums forge nails for the construction of another palace, few if any for the maintenance of their own crumbling buildings. And I knew that every ounce of sweat, blood and tears that didn’t go to building up their wealth would go to ensuring they kept it. It was the only part of the city that had its own wall, cutting it off from the rest precisely because these humans hoarded what they had.
And if I was going to find the secrets I required anywhere, it was going to be there.
The only problem was going to be getting in. This would require some serious planning, because I could already tell the walls of the wealthy district weren’t something you could buy your way past with a fistful of silver.
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I had to raise one hand and squint just to see them, but the shadowed gates weren’t even open, let alone hosting a long line of entrants steadily creeping in. Maybe scaling the wall would be an option, but I’d have to wait for the new moon lest the reflected moonlight reveal me.
Until then I had nothing better to do than case the place out. I moved across the rooftops slowly, getting a feel for the new environment. The regular angles and short gaps of the tenements might appear to offer an easier path than the uneven rocks of my mountain home, but both this place and my own body were unfamiliar to me. The Hobgoblin metamorphosis wasn’t something you could turn off with a switch and my own attempts to abort it had amounted to little more than throwing a wrench into the gears of a machine beyond my understanding. I might have stopped the machine for now, but it still jerked forwards in fits and starts and I could no longer be sure of the result once I let it resume.
Still, even losing the hard won advantage I’d learned from the Dungeon goblins was worth far less than my life, so I was willing to accept the risk of mutation. If risk it could still be called at this stage. I was trapped in a twisted half-formed stage between Hob and goblin that had never been meant to be, so it might be fair to say that I had mutated already.
I stepped forwards and slid down the mossy shingles anyway. I needed to learn how to work with my increasingly gangly and uneven limbs one way or the other, better to do it now.
I pushed off as I neared the end, soaring across the narrow gap easily. I raised my legs till my knees practically knocked against my chin to brace for impact as I hit the next roof already halfway up. I had enough agility left to avoid an embarrassing sprawl, but I still had to scramble for purchase. Apparently I’d already gained some semblance of a Hob’s strength and the angled surface of the roof didn’t let me roll to absorb the unexpected force.
I rose and kept moving before anyone could hear and respond to my failed jump. I could only be thankful that I hadn’t broken anything. Some mixture of my Stats and half transformation gave me more than enough durability to land without so much as a bruise. The only pain I could feel was the neverending bone-deep ache of the constant growth pains.
My next jump went smoother than the first and the next smoother than that. Soon I was crossing the rooftops with no more difficulty than running errands in the warrens. I found it was more effective to jump at the last moment, the momentum of my leap enough to carry me halfway up the next roof.
I passed over the peak as a fleeting shadow, then was racing down the other side, letting gravity carry me down the moss-slick shingles as I prepared for my next jump. I only slowed as I neared the rich district, clinging to the shadows of the eastern eaves. The canyons of alleys beneath me faded into a black abyss as the setting sun stretched its fading light thinner across the world.
The streets grew broader as I neared the walls, a scant area of middle class habitation clinging to the edges of the polished walls like it could rub off on them. The tenements shrank and were replaced by clustered blocks of houses with fresh paint and carved decorations in a pale imitation of the decadent mansions above.
It took a bit longer to cross, but I appreciated the extra cover. Even as they touched each other each house insisted on having its own peaked roof, letting me run in the valleys between them, invisible from above or below.
I slowed more and more as I approached the walls, stopping to peak over each roof and around each chimney. The walls were well in sight now and moving recklessly would risk letting anyone on the walls see straight over my cover.
I had no choice but to slow to a stop. The wall was constructed well, with its overly sculpted battlements more than enough to hide peek-holes and arrow loops to boot.
They didn’t even need to man the damn things, that was the beauty of them. Just put them up there and anyone with any sense to speak of had to act like you had. To do otherwise was to roll the dice with your life.
That was just the first confirmation of my suspicions. I’d thought that whoever was in charge here would ensure better protections around their district than the city as a whole, but if anything I had underestimated them.
This wasn’t just a dozen extra guardsmen, nor was it their superior arms and armor and ability to stand upright without leaning on the wall or yawning so wide an attacking army could march in between their jaws.
No, it was the very architecture, the buildings, their placement, their decorations, their color. It was all constructed for a purpose, and most of it more than one. The courtyard before the gate stretched out for three times the distance of the one from the outer gates. It was even… was it?
I held up one hand and squinted, trying to compare it to a straight line. Yeah, the courtyard definitely sloped down away from the gates. There’d actually been a little dip before the outer gates from where the dirt had eroded towards the walls, letting any attackers run down towards the wall.
The outer edge of the inner wall was ringed with sloping stone paving, a solid two dozen feet of clear space standing in stark contrast to the shacks that leaned against the city’s outer defenses as their fourth wall. That plain white stone formed a single solid surface with the wall itself, fortifying against undermining attempts, all the way up to its top. The top itself was overdesigned as hell, with the battlements not only sticking out past the wall proper but were engraved with so many carvings that you couldn’t tell where one began and the others began.
Of course the true genius was in its combination. The overpolished stone was too bright to make out any peek holes hidden in the carvings which could then spy on anyone who so much as approached the walls. Your enemies couldn’t bypass a defense if you didn’t let them learn what it was.
But that was a challenge for later. I was still scoping out the place and only mostly sure what I needed would be behind those walls. True infiltration could wait, and waiting was exactly what I would be doing today.
I lay there on the rooftop for hours, letting loose my ears so I could finally hear like a real person and not a human. Well, almost like a real person. I still had my hood up over my ears to hide their silhouette at least, but at least they were pointed out instead of at my head.
I flicked on ear, working out the ache of long confinement and honing in on the guards at the same time. They were decidedly less talkative than the outer guards, even without much traffic to break up the monotony.
Still, their discipline was far from endless and they still shared the occasional brief, muttered conversation. Unfortunately there was a lot of overlap between what was quiet enough to hide their gossip from their boss and what was quiet enough to hide any juicy secrets from me. I mostly learned useless nonsense about Captain Denair’s illicit relationship with a baker’s daughter, but I wasn’t here for their deepest secrets any more than I was looking for blackmail material.
Their inane gossip gave me a wealth of mundane background information. Mundane background information that I could have picked up on any street corner in the city, but it came packaged with valuable context here.
The rich district was called the Heights, apparently. The slums were called the Sprawl and the midtown section the Docks. Not to be confused with the docks, which were literal docks and could be found across all three sections. Fucking humans. They got the other two names right and just had to fuck it up on the last one.
The Heights were home to something called the Ducal Council, which was the subject of many bawdy jokes and complaints, primarily related to pay and the depraved purposes for which an honest guardsman’s pay was supposedly appropriated.
Typical wingeing in other words.
It took a good three hours for the shift to change, more than enough time for the sun to dip well below the western mountains. The blinding light of the sun had retreated to a pleasantly faint orange halo above the Devlon mountains.
Its light would do the humans no good here. I dropped from the roof and crept closer to the gate, pausing to peer around the last possible corner before the cleared space. The overhanging eaves actually blocked off the view from the upper walls, leaving me exposed only to the ground level guards who were too busy gossiping with their replacements to even attempt to see me.
By the time I was in position to get a direct look at the gate itself they were already closing it. Whatever mechanisms or hinges they swung on were hidden in the stone to avoid sabotage. Lucky for me I’d never need to get an army through. Going on what I was seeing now I’d be better off getting in through somewhere else anyway.
The main gate, forty feet of oaken beams, was fully closed, but a smaller sub-gate was embedded inside for anyone who needed to get about at night. The guards closed in around the new opening, making it almost impossible to sneak past regardless of the dark.
I stuck around for ten minutes on the off chance that something interesting happened, then withdrew.
I made my way back across the city to the more familiar poverty of the sprawl. Even night failed to bring order here, with nearly as many yelling peddlers and bustling peasants as before. The only change was in the nature of their business.
It was a puzzling change, but I’d never been in a human settlement of this size before. It made some sense in a certain way, humans were diurnal after all. With the closing of the lit workday they were free to have fun in the dark.
And there wasn’t much that couldn’t be bought here. I wasn’t in the market for sex and drugs, but a few of the pitches here were more than a little tempting. Mostly the drugs, even if I was hardly planning on taking any myself, but there was one other.
“Yes, its true!” One particularly gaudy salesman proclaimed. “Relive your most cherished memories! Mad at the one that got away? Relive that one magical night forever! Want to speak with your dead wife one last time? We can do it!”
The performer waved dramatically at the run down shack behind him. “Behold, the demesne of the incredible Reginald Wishspeaker, where the impossible occurs daily!”
It had to be a scam, right? The crowd about was already dispersing, but more than a few were pushing through to the entrance.
I shook my head. I had more urgent concerns and no time to waste on bullshit. I sent back one last look to the building, mentally noting down its position. Their couldn’t be any harm in checking it out eventually…
My ears twitched underneath my hood and I dropped as flat as the roof would allow me, falling out of sight beneath the peak. That wasn’t enough to cancel out my momentum and the splintered shingles tore at my back as I skidded down the roof. Thankfully it would take more than splinters to penetrate my [Rag Armor], so all it did was slow me down enough to catch myself on the gutter rather that rip it off the roof.
I swung over the edge and dangled over the side of the eaves, holding perfectly still with only my ears moving. Damn hood. I’d torn off the damn bandages binding my ears to my skull ages ago, but I’d kept the hood up as some compromise to discretion. I didn’t need to be as strict since I was aiming to be out of sight anyway, but the sensory advantages were somewhat muted by the weight of heavy cloth.
“I swear I saw something.”
“I’m seeing plenty of things Legs, why should I care?”
My ears ached as I struggled to track the voices, not from straining to hear but from the muscles that humans are too stupid to remember they have. My ears could pivot and track even the slightest sound, but they were built for speed and precision, not moving around a bunch of useless wool cloth. I could take off the hood of course, but that would eliminate my ability to play innocent if they found me and if they were good enough to notice me at practically the same time I noticed them then I couldn’t put it past them to hear the rustling of the cloth.
“C’mon Scars, you know what the boss would say.”
The footsteps began again, this time moving towards me. This time I heard both sets, though how much of that was due to their voice tipping me off I couldn’t say. The first set was plain as day, powerful strides sounding like a drum as they darted across the rooftops. I shivered as I listened; they were clearing some alleys entirely in a single bound, not bothering with running up and down.
The second set lagged behind the first, evidently incapable of such power, but that was far from reassuring. They glided like a bird on the breeze or a mountain hare over snow, scarcely touching down before they were off again. There was something off about them, sounds echoing in ways they shouldn’t. Their footsteps lingered like a ghost and as their clunkier companion slowed even that faint sound faded entirely.
My spine chilled at that. An enemy unknown was the most dangerous of them all and finding someone capable of hiding from me so soon spoke ill for the future. If this was the standard of stealth here I was going to have to drop my arrogance over the deaf and blind humans in favor of my standard paranoia.
I glanced over the rooftops with my eyes alone, head stone still to avoid whatever friction born noise might sound out from the folds of my hood rubbing against my wrappings and each other.
I felt the vibrations as the first pair of footsteps hit my rooftop. I flexed my hands and wrist as I prepared for the inevitable.
Then they came to a stop. “This where you saw it?”
“Yeah. A shadowy figure. Fifty-fifty odds of having a Stealth Class or just being small and nimble.”
Oh, good, I knew where the sneaky one was. Right on the other side of the roof.
“Oh, so now you saw it so well you can put an exact percentage on it’s build?”
“Fifty-fifty isn’t a precise percentage you ass.” That was a little closer than before.
“What, so odd numbers are more precise now?” The first voice grew abruptly more clear midway through the sentence as his head passed the peak of the roof and fully unveiled my precarious hiding position.
“See? Nothing there Legs.”
I let out an uneasy breath as I dangled under the gutter on one hand. My core burned as I held my legs away from the wall, but it paled in comparison to the fire in my hand. I’d slipped over the edge in time with the big guy’s footsteps and sunk my claws into the underside of the eaves.
Then the bastard had the gall to stop moving, leaving me hanging from one hand with my awkward weight pulling at my claws and forming red-hot prybars in the beds of my nails.
“Fine. Whatever it is got away.”
The heavy footsteps turned back. “Assuming there was anything.”
“There was definitely something.”
“Says you.”
The footsteps faded further into the distance and I got a second handhold. Apparently I was not the only figure on these roofs.
Who were those people? The woman had keen senses and moved with a silence humans should not be capable of, while the man had leapt incredible distances with ease. Were they adventurers? But why would such people be searching over their own city—
Unless they knew there was a goblin on the loose!
No, no, I tamped down on my own paranoia and dropped down to street level. How could they know I was here? If the gates had some secret alarm surely it would have sounded as I passed?
Come to think of it, they hadn’t been looking for anyone at all had they? The man had cared more for jibes than for any search. I proceeded down the empty streets anyway. I was far enough that the gate watch would not see me and evading the eyes above was far more important than the handful of stumbling drunks who were still awake on the streets.
Like as not they’d not remember me anyway.
If they weren’t adventurers on the hunt then who were they? A terrible chill passed through me as I realized my fatal mistake.
It wasn’t just adventurers who had the soul system. That was a plain fact, but I’d just translated it into the information that was relevant to me and moved on without parsing the full implications.
Adventurers made full use of their powers obviously, but they weren’t the only ones who did. A craftsman would be aided by the same means, as would a guardsman or farmer.
Or a thief.
An honest man had no need to scorn the streets. A burglar on the other hand? Why, it could be their second home.
That made the man the only question. He lacked either the impressive stealth and keen senses of his companion, so what purpose brought him to the rooftops?
He was still traveling with the burglar, so he likely shared her profession, but he spoke to her with an irreverence unbefitting an apprentice speaking to their master.
If he was truly her equal than what had he spent his training and levels on? A complementary profession no doubt, on the same side of the law. The thug to her sneak-thief.
I resolved to avoid fighting him in the unlikely event we met again.
The important part was their illegal business. Their half-hearted investigation of me had been born of curiosity, nothing more. As such they were unlikely to give further thought to me.
Still, this was the second time I’d heard class come up when discussing human soul magic, and this time it hadn’t been from some lost academic. I was beginning to think that my strategy of listening in on lectures to children had left me with some blind spots.
I hardly regretted it, but I had some serious catching up to do before I could hope to solve the far more complicated issue of actually fixing my soul.
I needed a base and there was only one part of the city neglected thoroughly enough for a goblin to carve out a little nest and expect not to be found.
I hurried out of the Docks and back into the Sprawl, carefully avoiding skylighting myself. Even when I took to the roofs again I stalked in the shadows of their slopes, no longer peering above the peaks. No that I knew I wasn’t alone up here I needed to treat it as enemy territory.
I was wearing out by the time I spotted a good candidate.
A broken building, splintered rafters clutched around an empty shell like skeletal fingers. Even my night vision couldn’t pick out full colors from this distance, but the shape of the damage suggested some pretty serious fire damage.
I crouched on the next building over, tugging up my hood to let my ears get a good listen without fully exposing themselves. No notable activity, as expected from a species that went all but blind once the sun went down.
Even so the occasional creaking steps I could pick out from the building were notably less than what I got when I turned to other buildings. They were far beneath the cacophony I’d heard in the day, but there was more than enough activity to completely eclipse the burnt building. I could even see some of it, faint light squeezing through the gaps revealed by the cracked and crumbling plaster in places.
A promising candidate overall.
I returned to the ground and approached the building from street level. The first floor wasn’t as dilapidated as the top and had the greater nightlife to prove it. There was actual conversation of all things, and on most of the first floors for buildings around here.
The intervening floors had absorbed enough of the sound I hadn’t noticed the difference. Even my ears had limits. The conversations I picked up from the first floor seemed to be fairly casual gossip interspersed with clinking plates and chewing. The upper floors on the other hand featured more personal conversations, at least judging by their hushed tones. They were usually too quiet for even me to understand.
Better yet I still couldn’t pick out any voices from above the second floor. Why they were leaving a good enough building half full when they were packed so tight everywhere else I could only guess at, but I was more than happy to make their misfortune my fortune. All I had to do was make sure it actually was my fortune.
I scaled up the damaged building, reaching the second floor in seconds and shimmying over to a particularly damaged section. The stripped plaster laid bare the poor construction of the underlying wall, with the planks barely attached to one another and more than a few sagging out of the gap entirely. It was enough to make a goblin glad we didn’t bother with the stuff. The warrens were bad enough already, imagine how bad it could get if we could wallpaper over flaws this easily.
The gaps of the broken boards were black as pitch, even the scant moonlight enough to overshadow what little light made it inside. I angled myself to avoid line of sight to it, exploiting a more reliable sense instead. The building’s light might be easy to miss, but sound was not so easily denied. The splintered boards breathed in and out like they were but one mouth among many on the titanic beast that was the building, but a moments thought revealed that there were two sets of breaths slipping through the gap.
I moved past the human couple and resigned myself to entering from the top. Coming from below would have given me a better chance to see whatever scared the humans off from the top floors before I reached them, but it wasn’t nearly worth the risk of sneaking through a sleeping human’s room, let alone walking through the front door.
I slowed as I reached the third floor, even transferring weight from one handhold to another the work of nearly a minute. The framing beams didn’t become visibly charred until the fourth floor, and the top edge of it at that, but you could never tell how deep the rot ran from outside. More than a few warren falls had come out of nowhere, some creeping contagion eating away at critical support structures without anyone the wiser.
No one ever learned, just scavenged what was usable from the wreckage and erected new warrens atop the old. What did they care? They’d all be dead by the time it came to pay for their actions. Only weirdos like Ol’ Gobbo cared.
Probably because he was the only fucker old enough to have seen more than one.
I carefully felt up each handhold, transferring my weight with an exacting care. My various enhancements might not let me die from such a humble fall, but the noise would force me to find a different place to hide. I was far too tired to deal with that shit.
When I finally did reach the fourth floor I was even more careful, creeping through the gaping broken window as smooth as sap oozing from a shattered tree. I set one foot down and let my weight settle slowly onto the floorboards. As they creaked and gave I moved my foot around, feeling for a firm spot.
I held onto the windowsill as I found a promising spot and shifted more weight onto it. Black char crunched beneath my feet and I could feel the underlying wood flex under me. Flex, but not give.
That was good, if a bit risky. I spread my feet and lowered into a crouch. I crawled across the floor with both hands on the ground for extra support. Even with that there was no guarantee of safety, any sudden movements could concentrate force by enough to crack the floor like spring ice. I had to move at a snail’s pace to maintain any reasonable standard of safety.
Of course, I wouldn’t be here if that didn’t come with some serious benefits. Even with the uneven growth of my aborted transformation I was still far lighter than the average human, and if it was this much of a pain in the ass for me they would drop like a twenty pound stone on paper-thin ice.
The moon was high in the sky by the time I’d finished mapping out the fourth floor. Fixing the floor plans in my mind was child’s play. Neat lines and rectangles was nothing compared to the anarchy of the warrens, enough so that I could manage to memorize a good deal of the fire damage as well.
That was the most important part of the job, up with pinpointing the entrances to the floor. I wasted more than a little time hunting for the other stairs after only finding one cramped stairway jammed between a room and the outer wall. It was scarcely bigger than what you might see in the goblin warren, smaller than some. I couldn’t understand how an entire floor of this size could have been supported by such a tight passage, surely one of the residents would have built their own? Surely there was a larger stair that had simply been burnt beyond recognition?
But no, there were no holes burnt into the building large enough to hide such a thing. Regardless of my difficulty understanding the human logic I was forced to acknowledge the reality of it. Their obsession with overly ordered straight lines was apparently enough to justify such nonsense.
At least their loss was my gain, you couldn’t say that about human eccentricities often. Such a limited exit likely trapped a dozen or more humans to burn alive in the fire, but it cut hours off of my preparations.
I broke off a few scraps from the more intact bits of furniture and whittled them down into wedges. Once hammered into the lone door between me and the lower floors it was enough to provide me with some real sense of security. It was nothing that an adventurer couldn’t kick down, but I was used to living one adventurer away from death. I’d hear the adventurer coming, which was all that really mattered.
I resolved to see about setting up some proper booby traps on another day and crawled under an intact bed in a section of the building that still had a roof, wrapped myself in a charcoal stained cloak and fell asleep.