Chapter 36: Daylight Strobbery
“The accused stands trial on five cases of irritated assault, one case of cheating at a carnival game, and a case of wasting pie. Priestess, how do you find the accused?”
From a throne high above him, he saw his friend lounging, eating grapes from a platter beside her. She was wearing that infuriating catlike grin which might have irked him once, but he was now just glad to see. Or was she grinning to mock him? She wasn’t that cruel, was she?
He took a deep breath and steeled his nerves. He would find out soon enough what the future would bring.
“Bring me the file cases, Jerome” she drawled lazily.
A very red-faced servant bustled up the long flight of stairs, handing off a portfolio before bustling back down. As soon as he returned, she called him up again to take the files back. He felt bad for the man.
“I will speak with the accused in private and deliver my judgement afterwards. Dismissed. Yes, you too Victor. Go away.”
The few cultists present filed out of the room, including the stone-faced guard that had escorted Dantes to the audience chamber, as they’d called it. As soon as the door shut and they were in private, she flew down the stairs into a big hug that almost knocked him over.
“I missed you, you big dumb dog.”
A little stunned, he stammered out “Missed you too, Mitts.” He’d been prepared for rejection; to be sent away or told she didn’t want his company anymore. Now with her in his arms, it all seemed so silly. His worries had been for nothing. He’d been overthinking it to an embarrassing degree. He was glad he followed her here.
He took a deep breath. She smelled nice.
“Mitts, why… how’d you…leave without saying…?” he trailed off.
“They would’ve kept destroying things if I didn’t, you know? And I left a message for you. I had to leave a letter I wrote for something else…” she pulled out of his arms, looking away before continuing. “But the meaning was obvious, right?”
“…Right.”
“Of course it was. Literally spelled out for you. Anyway, Dantes, I need your help with breaking out.”
“Breaking out?”
“Yeah, these jerks won’t let me leave. Trust me I’ve tried everything. Somehow, they even tracked me through the night in the jungle. As a cat. Well Victor did. He’s the only competent one. Since then I’m not allowed to step outside.”
He hadn’t thought anyone could find Mitty if she didn’t want to be found. This Victor man was more impressive than he’d thought the cultists could be.
“So you want me to fight this Victor guy while you escape? Leave it to me Mitts.”
She rolled her eyes, gesturing he follow her up the stairs.
“No, you fluff for brains, you can’t fight the whole cult alone, I want you to find my satchel. They took it when I arrived. It has some ingredients I need.”
At the thought of food, his stomach rumbled, suddenly remembering it still hadn’t eaten.
“Also why are you carrying a fish? Hand it over.”
Belatedly, he realised he was still carrying the Featherfish from earlier, and handed it to the grabby cat, for ahead of him lay a big platter of meat and fruits.
As he made his way to the food, Mitty made herself comfortable on the throne next to him.
“Anyhoo. I need you to break into the storeroom and get my stuff. They made me empty out my pockets and I need it for tonight. Anything else that seems interesting as well. And money, we’ll need that. And maybe a map. Then meet me back in my chambers, and we can escape in the morning. Are you even listening?”
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak through bulging cheeks crammed with food. He was pretty sure he’d make a terrible burglar though, which he relayed after a moment of chewing.
“Yes, well lucky you, I have the perfect solution. Here.”
She handed him a capped ceramic mug with a pink liquid inside.
“The storage room will be right next to your cell. Enjoy the Strobbery Milk.”
He hadn’t heard anything about a cell, but before he could complain Mitty leaned up towards him and kissed him on the cheek. Stunned, he didn’t react while she called for her guards. Was that cat custom when asking people for a favor?
“Escort this miscreant to his cell. Put him in timeout for two years. Chop chop, hurry up, daylight’s wasting. Jerome, bring more grapes.”
Two cultist guards in their standard black and gold robes led him deeper into the structure, down flights of stone stairs, in silence but for the echoing of footsteps in the cold corridors. The halls were mostly bare, though he noticed what must have once been decorative trim lining the walls, though it was mostly chiseled away. Here and there, small sections of what might’ve been grasping roots could be made out, but it was mostly roughly chiseled stone.
He admittedly hadn’t been paying attention when Mitty had laid out the plan. Something about taking maps and finding something, perhaps. He looked at the mug the guards hadn’t bothered taking from him and drank the sloshing liquid inside.
It tasted fresh, like squeezed daylight, and creamy like the smoothest silk on his tongue. Subtle, shifting, subversive. Like a clever disguise being pulled off, the nature of the drink was laid bare to him.
In front of him, the guard lazily carried his spear upon his shoulder, the other hand occupied with a lantern shining a soft red. More importantly, his gaze was drawn to the man’s belt, where a ring of keys jingled softly.
Following the leading guard down the stairs, he stumbled slightly at the bottom as the leading guard stopped suddenly, and the following guard bumped into him, pushing him forward.
“Careful there, buddy. Just cause the priestess likes ya don’t mean we got to.”
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“She likes me?”
The rear guard grunted a laugh. The front guard looked back.
“She won’t shut up about you, eh? Why you think she’s keeping you around? She had this room prepared for you, eh? Right, Lamb?”
The rear guard grunted again.
“Well, Lamb don’t say much, but even he’s got eyes, eh? Anyway, here we are. Home sweet home. For you anyhow” the guard said, opening a heavy wooden door built into the stone. Behind it, a well lit interior filled with pillows and a platter of steaks sat on a low wooden table.
“Welcome to The Cell, as we call it round here. Ah, crap, Lamb you got your keys? I musta left mine in the break room. Thanks, brother, I owe ya one, eh?”
Behind him, he heard the door lock but wasn’t concerned as he heaped a couple steaks onto a plate and started carving into them. He looked around twice to make sure no one was around before he set down the fork and knife and started tearing it directly with his teeth. The proper way of doing it. That had been the first thing Mitty insisted on: using the human food weapons to eat. Well that, and the importance of wearing clothes. She’d gotten a lot less uptight about fitting into human society once she started cooking. That was nice at least.
Having finally satisfied stomach, he looked around at ‘The Cell’. His room seemed nicely decorated, a few portraits of Mitty decorating the walls striking various heroic poses, a big circular cushion on the floor in what was likely meant to be an admittedly cozy looking bed. A window filled the room with light from above, which he pulled himself up to. It was covered in a metal grate but looked out seawards at ground level. He could see the bustle of dockworkers in the distance as ships loaded and unloaded cargo. The scent of the ocean filled the room in a way he’d missed since his arrival at Windcrown.
He let himself down and inspected the bars on the door. He tried to fit his hand through, but they were too narrow.
He scanned the room, letting his instincts pick out what he somehow knew he needed. His eyes landed on a shiny silver pillow. He ripped at it to loosen the weave, then picked out an individual thread, pulling at it, until he was left with a loose spool of silver thread. Giving it a quick test, it seemed sturdier than normal thread, biting into his hand rather than snapping.
He tasted it. Likely a steel-iron-nickel-candy alloy, strong enough to cut through the iron bars on the door no problem.
He looped the thread around the bar and started sawing it back and forth across the central bar. Before long the thread ate through the middle bar. Rather than make another cut however, he simply bent the bar up and out of the way. Iron was surprisingly soft, especially impure iron like this.
He’d gotten a look at the lock on the way in, noticing it was a basic tumbler design, not particularly intricate. With nothing to pick it with however he was stuck. Or would have been had he not lifted the keys off the guard earlier.
He quickly reached down through the gap in the bars and unlocked his cell. With a satisfied nod, he stepped out of the room, having escaped in not even ten minutes. He felt he understood a little bit why Mitty enjoyed this sort of thing now. It was quite thrilling!
He quickly found the storage room Mitts had indicated and checked the lock. Magical, and complicated. He didn’t have the spelljammer he would need to pick it. The door was made of a sturdy greenwood, so breaking through would be difficult. He eyed the hinges. Rusted iron barrel hinges. Perfect. With the proper application of strength and leverage, he could pop them right off.
Jimmying his staff under the threshold and willing it into a slightly crooked shape, he wrenched down on it violently, to which the door responded by falling out of its frame towards him. He hadn’t known he could modify the shape of the staff like that. A wave of stale air hit him as he looked in.
Inside no torches burned, only the light cast from the sconce opposite the door shedding light inside the room. A central dais stood in the center, but crates and boxes were heaped on and around it. On the walls, painted scrolls depicting a kraken emerging from the sea and swallowing the sun were displayed. His nascent senses told him they were not monetarily valuable, likely only culturally important.
No, the most valuable thing in the room was next to the dais. Mitty’s bag of stuff lay unceremoniously on the floor next to the stone pedestal, as though it had been tossed from the entrance. What did she have in here that was so valuable? Fighting the urge to rifle through it, he went to another stack of boxes, where… something important was buried. He felt his new senses begin to slip, his train of thought like soap across the skin of an idea. A… map? Yes, that was it, second to bottom box, certainly.
A shadow fell upon him as he was removing boxes, and without thinking he flung a crate towards the door, whirling to see who was casting it.
A grunt came from what he now saw to be a man he recognized. It tickled the back of his mind for a moment before coming to him. The agent from the bridge. He’d shot at Mitty before she fell.
They both froze for a moment before Dantes lunged towards the man, lashing out with his staff shortened to a club. The man blocked the hit with his bracers, though the strength of the blow knocked him slightly off balance. This allowed him to make a followup jab to the man’s chin, which was narrowly dodged by an uncannily quick recovery.
The agent launched a kick between his legs which Dantes blocked by shifting his stance sideways, causing him to abort before getting dragged off balance. The kick had just been a distraction however, and the man tapped something on his belt that pulsed a searing white light.
Covering his eyes a moment too late, annoying green sunspots covered his vision, obscuring the dimly lit room. Two successive blows struck his abdomen, but his [Toughness] was able to shrug them off.
He swept his staff in a long arc in front of him, feeling it deflected downwards to the floor and into some crates. Instinctively he jerked his head to the side, feeling something sharp cut a groove across his cheek. In a moment of inspiration, he grew a crook at the end of his staff and pulled, feeling the man’s feet pulled out from under him.
Jumping forward, he grappled the man, restraining both his arms in his grip. He was considering biting the man when a cool wave cleansed the red fog clouding his mind.
“There be better places for scuffling, youngsters. Play nice or take it somewhere else.” A familiar voice sounded from the dais.
He extricated himself from the agent slowly, and as the green spots in his vision receded, he saw the old man he’d met on the wagon ride picking his way carefully through the stacks of junk.
“Old man, what are you doing here? What did you do? Why can’t I fight this bad man who tried to hurt my friend?”
“Just a simple calming spell sonny, don’t mind this old coot. I’m just here to make certain of something. We got a troubling report from a young lass that the Order of the New Sun might have strayed from their original path.”
“Who tried to hurt your friend?” said the agent. “I was trying to save her. Little good that did.”
Dantes narrowed his eyes. The thought of punching him presented itself to him, but he found himself unable to grasp it. “You did. I know you were with those other two. Well too bad. You failed. She’s doing just fine as a priestess. Fluff you.” He threw in that last insult in an inspired moment. While violence currently eluded him, Mitty’s fourth favourite insult did not.
The agent’s eyes went wide. “Mitty’s alive? She fell. Over several miles. She landed on a stone street. Several people saw her land on the flagstones unmoving. How?”
He shrugged. “I hear cats are good with height.” That got him a puzzled look from the agent, but he ignored him.
“Priestess, you say, sonny?” The man was digging through a box of leatherbound journals, checking the first page on each before moving on.
“Sure. They showed up all of a sudden one night and started burning stuff down until she agreed to go with them. They call her priestess for some reason.”
“Mm, odd. Ah, here we are. Here, they call their deity He Who Swallows the Sun, and here, a year later, they call him He Who Deals in the Dark. These are accounts from the Master of Ceremony of the times, so they should be reliable. Hmm…”
Dantes saw the agent had moved over to another corner and was also looking through books, though more quietly, leafing through leather folios, a thoughtful look on his face And maybe a trace of something sad.
“Say sonny, do you recall if there was a window in your cell? There was? Great. I best be off now.” With that, the old man snapped the two journals shut and poofed into a cloud of smoke… no, a small fly buzzed its way out of the room, turning down the hallway towards his cell.
He felt like he’d come for something else, but his clarity for nefariousness had long since slipped away, leaving him with only the vaguest impression he’d forgotten something. Oh well, it probably wasn’t important.
He left the nerd looking through books and stuff alone in the storeroom in favor of finding a kitchen. It was about time for a snack. Now, was it a left or right to get to the staircase?