The poison was entirely Toog’s idea.
But, well, Dia had just shrugged in disinterest and Arne agreed it was worth a shot.
The first time around, it was fun. The bread baked for the Family had been doused with an emetic and everyone inside had gotten violently sick. Some spilled out on the street before spilling their bread, and even passers-by that hadn’t eaten the poison were nauseated when the vomit-fest began. Arne had found accommodation for the three of them just across the street, renting the upper floor of a house so they could observe the Family’s house in comfort without being seen and even from that vantage point, it had been a slightly nauseous, if hilarious, experience.
The second round of poisoning was to see if the barrels of fruit juice used for cooking at the Family house could be a source of wiping out their entire membership. And yes, they could. The strategy of just murdering everyone there to make sure the Family got too bad a reputation to attract new followers was definitely on the table after the test run of the runs.
But then again, when that sort of thing happened, you just ran the risk of them going underground and becoming that much harder to find again.
Arne had been turning this over in his mind back and forth while he waited for the paladins to make a move.
He had been sitting at a tavern down the street from the Family’s house in Estrin, smoking and drinking strong tarbean tea and playing boardgame after boardgame of terr with the locals three days in a row now and nothing had happened.
This morning was characteristically quiet. He was the only one sitting outside, enjoying the cool breeze that grazed the street from the harbour. The early morning rush was over, and the city settled around him with the morning’s work.
He assumed he would know if a gaggle of paladins decided to take the threat seriously and horde into the Family house. It wouldn’t happen at night either, he assumed. They would be the kind of people to be …loudly not subtle about it, right?
Arne looked up from the bland letter he was composing to The Vampire, informing her of their lack of progress in a way that would mean nothing to someone who intercepted the missive. It was nice and quiet at the Family house. Happy people milling back and forth. White robed loonies beckoning passers-by inside.
He had found a bottle of vervain perfume at the market that he intended to send with the report. Toothless old Haz at the tavern, who played a mean terr game, had ensured him the undead hated vervain, a plant also known as ironroot. Why would an old gentleman lie about something that important?
“What are we doing!”
Arne looked up at the speaker. Dia scowled and then flopped down on the bench next to him and emptied his cup.
“Toog is coming by,” she stated.
“Right. What happened to ‘let’s not be seen together’?” Arne asked, purely out of habit, knowing it wouldn’t change anything.
“Nothing happened and you keep running off, that’s what! We can't just sit around waiting for your weird ideas to begin working. We have to do something. I need to resolve this so I can be free of Chuckles for good and you are in the way with all your plans.”
Arne sighed.
She was probably right. They had to do something. But short of weaponizing the paladins of Justice or poisoning the entire Family, his creativity kept running into a wall.
“You know, it occurs to me that it isn’t really my responsibility.” Arne nodded to himself as he spoke out loud. “I agree. We have to do something. But I've been demoted to Charm, remember?”
“Sure. And you’re going to suck it up and live with it. We all got slapped with stupid titles we didn’t want.”
“Life advice from the woman who doesn’t know how money works and who can barely hold a conversation without murdering people? Lovely,” Arne commented, trying hard to keep the sudden annoyance under control.
“I also don’t know what charm means, if that thing you’re doing is it!” Dia snapped, brows drawn together as an angry storm gathered on her face.
“Could it be because I'm not charm? I never was and it’s just a damned joke in case you didn’t know.”
“Oh, I know. You think you can boss us all around. You think that’s your title. I noticed.”
“How about you start taking things I say as the suggestions they’re meant as instead of reacting to them like orders you don’t want to follow? It’s close to half-assed orgy participation to hear my suggestions like orders and then not following them. Why don’t you decide what to do?” Arne snapped.
“So if I decide something, you’ll accept it?”
“If it doesn’t put any one of us in more danger than the others, and won't for sure kill any of us, then yes, please, do decide something.”
Toog showed up quietly, sat down at the table, checked Arne’s empty cup and then wordlessly got up again and went into the tavern to order.
“So, I assume you have a suggestion since we’re having this conversation? Or are you just this sour with me because you’re embarrassed that we had that moist little moment back in Crackerville?” Arne prompted.
“We did not have a moist moment! And I do, actually, have a plan!” Dia leaned back against the wall, smiling smugly. “We have to figure out how to hurt the tentacles, so we need a bigger one we can experiment on. Not just a death crab. I'm pretty sure I know how to shift the words of the crab calling ritual to make way for a bigger one. So I say we call up a biggie, piss it off and see how the city deals with it. There's plenty of soldiers and priests and paladins and people like this here, so a rampaging tentacle would get them to react.”
“So pretty much the exact same as my plan with wiping them off on someone more qualified? I'm for that.” Arne shrugged. “So you can call a bigger one?”
Dia nodded, a line drawn between her light eyebrows. “Pretty sure. There's a place in the song that calls for definition. I change that, put some restrictions on it maybe, but then whatever is on the other side would have an open door. I know the sounds for negation, size and restriction, so it’s just a matter of scrambling them around.”
“Right…” Arne twirled his empty cup on the table and sighed. “What could possibly go wrong?”
“Well, it’s worth it to see who can actually harm it, right?”
“Sure. Only problem is the tentacles can hide in plain sight as we saw at the market, and they have smarts enough to communicate and make decisions. Like in the temple when the eye-tentacle let us run rather than follow us and risk letting the world see that the Family was harbouring a monster. It could have followed us out past the giggle-grope, but it decided not to. And maybe it even decided to clean up and get its priests back on their feet.” Arne shrugged. “Smart enemies are the worst.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Agreed.” Toog sat down again opposite to them, nodding gravely. “Do you know that feeling when people suddenly admit something that you never asked about and it's a little awkward?”
“Actually, I think I'm just about to gain that knowledge right now,” Dia said.
Toog just nodded. “I once knew this guy who was chapter two-blind.”
Arne opened his mouth to reply but closed it again. He decided to just let the madness play out.
“I don’t get it,” Dia said.
“He said he couldn’t see chapter two. And that is almost always where the fundamental concepts of the subject and the basic methodology employed by the author is laid out. So he always had to reconstruct that later on, as he read.” Toog leaned back, long slender hands resting calmly on the tabletop. “The good thing to chapter two-blindness, however, as he described it, was that he was a much more attentive reader because he didn’t take any understanding for granted.”
“I wish I wasn’t this used to confusion…” Arne just shrugged at nobody in particular. Then he felt someone looking at him and saw a tall, broad-shouldered elderly man with a neat grey moustache stride purposefully towards their table.
The man carried a sword with the ease of having done so for years and was clearly fit and alert for his age. He had short, silver hair and his dark eyes regarded them pointedly under bushy eyebrows. He wore a beautifully crafted, clearly expensive light chain mail and the green and silver tabard of the paladins of Justice.
Arne held the man’s piercing gaze as he drew a chair to their table and sat down between Toog and Dia. “I am Commander Renn of the Estrin Chapterhouse of the Order of the Paladins of Justice. The poisoning stops now!” he declared in a deep voice. “Is that clear?”
Arne didn’t bother keeping a laugh at his own reaction in check. It felt exactly like being reprimanded by his father as a small child. Not a feeling he had even been aware he remembered. “Professional interest,” he smiled. “How did you find us?”
“We have been watching you since we got around to reading your very scryable handwritten letter. Scrying is a very simple spell. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that a black-souled career criminal was ignorant of how it works,” the paladin stated calmly.
“Fortunately, that just changed. Thank you. I will do better in the future. Promise!” Arne smiled, hand on his heart, and gave a small bow. “So… are you going to actually do something about that problem that isn’t us?”
“You’ve yet to show us proof that the threat is real. The last few days have been full of you doing nothing,” Commander Renn said. “And our own investing–“
“See!” Dia interrupted loudly. “Even the paladins have noticed!”
“Hey! Poisoning people in large quantities is not doing nothing. It’s a very delicate process,” Toog interjected; half offended, half informative.
“I don’t think Justice-grandpa cares,” Arne guessed. “So how do I prove it to you?” he asked the aged paladin. “Isn’t calling your attention to ourselves, when we are clearly naturally at odds, enough proof?”
“It goes quite a long way, which is why we are having this conversation,” Commander Renn stated, ignoring Dia and Toog and scowling sternly at Arne. “But you wouldn’t be the first scoundrel to think he could have Justice solve his shady problems for him.”
“Ah. Here I was, thinking I was clever,” Arne shrugged. “So what does it take? I have no qualms short of letting you rummage through my thoughts. So what do I need to do to convince you?”
The waiter of the tavern came out with a tray with three beers, a pot of tarbean tea and a large bowl of nille, a spicy mushroom dish. The table fell silent until the man left again. Then Arne smiled broadly. “Beer?” he asked, pushing his mug slowly across the table to the paladin.
The elderly soldier just gave him a piercing look, put his hand on the mug and said a small prayer in a language Arne didn’t know, but which left an itchy sensation in his ears. Then the paladin took a good swig of beer and wiped his moustache. “I will give you one chance. A paladin of the chapterhouse will meet you here this afternoon and follow you in your endeavours to prove your claims. But be aware that you will all three be written down in the Book of Justice if it turns out you are wasting our time for selfish reasons. And don’t dawdle! If I suspect that you are, I will consider that a hostile action.”
“Excellent,” Arne stated, surprised at how relieved he felt. It was quite far from what he had hoped for but having smart ‘allies’ was better than mindless ones.
The aged paladin got to his feet. “Thank you for the beer,” he said and nodded at them before walking off in the direction he had come.
All three of them stared after him in silence for a few moments.
“That happened different than I expected,” Toog mused.
“Same.” Arne nodded.
“At least something is happening!” Dia said, evidently still existentially frustrated.
“Shit!” Arne exclaimed, when he realised something. He got up, pushed past Dia and ran after the paladin. “Wait!” he called after the man.
Commander Renn stopped and turned, left hand lightly resting with his thumb on the leather strap securing his sword in its scabbard.
Arne scoffed and held out his hands in a peace gesture. “He or she cannot be beautiful. It’s important.”
Commander Renn raised an eyebrow.
“The one you send this afternoon,” Arne explained. “If they are beautiful, they will be at greater risk of being noticed by the cult. And I’m guessing you’ll also be blaming me if your paladin ends up eaten and twinned by a death crab, right?”
“Duly noted,” Commander Renn said. “And you are quite right. I will indeed blame you as far as Justice allows if something untoward happens.”
With this promise, the paladin nodded at Arne, turned his back and walked away.
o-0-o
Arne had planned to go pickpocketing this evening to increase his funds on the assumption that the paladins would not show up today either, but since that was no longer the case, he thought about pickpocketing his way to a magic store to ask about scrying spells and how to avoid them.
Then he debated with himself whether the paladins were still watching him and, concluding that they probably were to see if his behaviour would change now that contact had been made, he decided to go sit around naked at the steam baths for a few hours instead. If they wanted to watch, they would have to live with it. He happily sat down in the steam baths next to the most obese, hairy and sweaty gentleman he could find and spent three hours having an incredibly inane conversation with the man, hoping the invaders of his privacy would enjoy the entire scene.
After the bath, Arne considered visiting a brothel which some of the men at the bar had talked about, but since there would be an orgy in his near future, he decided against it. Fun as it would be to know the paladins were watching, he wasn’t sure he really had the stamina for that kind of exercise. It annoyed him to admit this, so he pickpocketed his way back to their rented flat, hoping like a sulky toddler that the paladins noticed.
o-0-o
“Alright, before we get on with this, let me just anticipate the comments when I tell you I’m going in there with the paladin and you’re staying here,” Arne said as he took a seat at the table outside in the afternoon shadow of the tavern. “Dia will say it isn’t up to me and add something like ‘I can orgy if I want to’ and you,” he nodded at Toog, “will ask if I want to be drugged again, and I really, really do, but I’m not going to because it’s bad enough going in there, but I’m not going while I’m drug-baked and helpless. …Besides, I’ll be childminding an ugly paladin in there.”
“What’s the logic behind us not going?” Toog asked, cutting Dia’s angry reply off. “If they’ve seen me, they’ve seen you.”
“You lived there and spoke to the priests on more than one occasion. I was wearing a mask,” Arne argued.
“Hey!” Dia snapped. “Why do you think I want to orgy?”
“Come on, you’d get to see me naked. Of course you want to,” Arne shrugged, watching Dia's hands curl into fists while she stared furiously at him. “But to get back to the subject, I was also wearing a mask when we borrowed the priestess. You were not.”
“I have a lot of arguments, mostly pertaining to the priestess we borrowed who saw you and when we met Chuckles in the desert, but I don’t really want to go anyway, so if you want to hug a paladin without us watching for some kind of sex-reason, I really don’t want to interfere…” Toog pointed down the street. “Besides, I think we have company.”
Arne turned his head to look at the tall man approaching. Tall, broad-shouldered, athletic, golden curls, fair and tanned skin. He was dressed as a civilian in muted colours and not fooling anyone about his military background. And then there was his face…
Arne let out an involuntary bark of laughter, and Dia did the same. The paladin sat down at their table.
“I suppose it’s you three I have to thank for this?” he commented evenly in a pleasant voice and gestured to his face. A cracked eyebrow, a black eye, a split lip and a wound to his cheek marred what would definitely otherwise be a very handsome face.
His comment made the wound on his lip stretch and a tiny drop of blood rolled down his chin. He closed his good eye and gave a small sigh before wiping the drop off. “I’m Sir Garret of the Estrin Chapterhouse,” he said.
“Very nice to meet you, Garret,” Arne said, trying not to laugh too loudly. “That Renn fellow was pretty literal minded. You seriously want to tell me you are the ugliest paladin available?”
“At least he’s not a gnome,” Toog interjected.
“I need to know what the mission is and how you intend to approach it,” Sir Garrett said.
Next to Arne, Dia rolled her eyes and made a disgusted sound. “Nope. I’m out. You have fun with that.” She pointed at the paladin and got up to leave. “I’m off to kill a hobo.”
“…Figuratively, of course,” Arne added as Dia disappeared down the street. “Yeah, definitely a euphemism… Right,” he said quickly, “eyes on the mission. Let’s go meet the Family, Garrett.” Arne quickly got to his feet. “I’ll tell you all about what to expect. …Including how they might just recognise me and try to murder me on sight.”