“Oh, yeah,” the travelling merchant nodded enthusiastically. “Totally wiped out. Completely insane. A whole chunk of the buildings along a busy market street just tumbled down all of a sudden! Last I heard of the counting, there were over twenty people who died.”

“All of a sudden?” Toog asked and took a sip of beer, clearly enjoying playing the people person. “How do buildings just fall over?”

“I certainly don’t know, young man. But that’s what they say,” the chatty and rotund merchant confirmed.

Arne couldn’t keep a wrinkle off his forehead. Did everyone else pinpoint Toog’s gender problem free? Was it just him who was unsure? And which one of them was the most trustworthy; a man or a …whatever the possessing tentacle thing was? So, then… a firm maybe on Toog being …well, human if nothing else.

The merchant shook his head sadly. “I don’t know… what with everything that’s been going on lately, I’m just not comfortable with Arabesk, you know? It’s always the same with big cities, they just suck the morals and sense out of the people living there. I’ll sell my wares but I’m not staying. Not even a single night. That’s why I stopped here, which I usually don’t, so I can get into the city and back here in a day tomorrow. You aren’t safe in the streets. You aren’t safe in the taverns and inns. Where’s an honest merchant supposed to go, I ask you,” he shook his head.

“What’s wrong with the taverns?” Arne asked, making conversation in the hopes of getting something valuable, and thoroughly expecting the merchant to launch into a long story about cheese for dessert and indigestion and ‘really, you can’t do that to your customers’ or some similar harmless gripe before he could steer the conversation back to news about the houses collapsing so they knew where they stood.

“Oh,” the merchant said, almost subdued. “I thought every traveller had heard what happened. I imagine everyone thinks twice about staying at a tavern these days.” He gave a nervous and sad little laugh that made his belly wobble gently. “Well, ehm… apparently thirty-one people were brutally murdered. Brutally, I tell you, according to the people I heard it from who had heard it directly from an agent of the Storyteller inside the city the day before yesterday.”

“Thirty-one? Murdered how? Where in the city?” Arne asked, a sense of horror creeping up his spine.

“How did they die?” Toog asked.

“Well, I hesitate to say… it really is quite astoundingly gruesome…” the merchant confided in them, leaning over the table with obvious morbid delight.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Toog leaned closer. Arne leaned back, hiding behind his mug, hoping against hope that he was wrong. Why would he be right? It was silly. Arabesk had close to a hundred thousand people in it last time someone bothered counting and telling everyone their finding, which was about a month ago, since population survey and counting was a favourite pastime of many of the universities in the city. Murders happened. It didn’t need to have anything to do with him.

“They were skinned. Flayed. Alive! At least that’s what I heard.” The merchant shook his head. “All thirty-one people in there. And worse!” he stated, clearly a prelude to what was to come, “their bloody skins were hung on the walls, stretched out to cover all the taproom, as I heard it. The smell must have been just absolutely awful! And nobody heard a thing, that’s the strangest part. Well, that and the name of the tavern makes it a morbid coincidence.”

Don’t say The Flayed Monkey… Arne thought, almost close to prayer. “What was the name of the tavern?” he asked.

“The Flayed Monkey,” the merchant stated, almost giddy with happy horror. “Isn’t it just awful?”

Arne just nodded blankly. Maybe the thirty-one people he had on his everyday roster who used the Flayed Monkey as a gathering spot… maybe they hadn’t been in, and it was just thirty-one other people? The tavern was open for normal business and wasn’t unpopular with the locals. Why would it be his thirty-one people?

Why? Because it was the Family’s way of telling him that maybe Dia could kill their tentacle monsters, but they weren’t safe. Like the thing inside the tortured priestess had said, You think you are safe in your shadows, don’t you?

Arne was impressed at himself. He would have expected some kind of emotional response to the gaping, yawning chasm in his life that had suddenly opened up and swallowed everyone he knew and could entrust with a job that would generate continued wealth for everyone. But now there was nothing. Nobody. They were dead. Gone. Hung up to dry. Literally.

He stared blankly at the merchant and saw the man’s lips move but, oddly, no sound reached his ears.

“Excuse me,” he slowly got to his feet, surprised again at his body when his legs carried him without protest or wobble. He didn’t care where he walked, as long as it was away. Just away. Outside the tavern, he turned a corner, wove between the few houses behind the tavern along the land trade route and walked into the vast desert stretching emptily behind the small cluster of buildings.

After a while, when the houses were just small dots in the sunset horizon, Arne stopped and fell to his knees, gasping for breath when finally the loss caught up with him. He just let himself fall over and lay stunned on his back, breath hot and bitter in his throat.

He was alone. Utterly alone, with no contacts, no allies, no one to trust for the right price. No one to generate wealth and security if he manipulated them correctly, nobody to bring him actionable information, nobody to solve his problems with swift violence if he was busy elsewhere.

For the second time in his life, Arnor Grenn was completely and utterly alone.