Chapter Twenty-nine

I liked the elves. The young looking elf, Tovaron Ento, was handsome in a way that wouldn’t have been possible for a human — maybe for some male models or Hollywood actors. His long, silvery-grey hair and the stereotypically long and pointy ears were just … awesome. The other guy seemed to be a bit older, but he was just as good looking, and the elf woman was basically a goddess of beauty.

I liked the elves, and so did my Tentacle Horror instinct: it was nudging me, salivating at the sight of the bronze coloured souls — they looked appetising, even more so than the teal coloured human souls. Of course I exercised restraint and waited to see what would happen. Maybe, if the elves got serious about killing my humans, I’d have a nibble. Unfortunately — or luckily, depending how I looked at it — it turned out that Tovaron Ento spoke the human language, and it didn’t seem like soul eating would be necessary after all.

Until Krissy wanted to introduce herself.

I stopped her.

As much as I liked the elves, I didn’t want them to know who we were, or more specifically, who Krissy was. From what I had managed to piece together over the past few months, I had a more or less clear picture of who Krissy was and how she had ended up with me. I had no idea what connections the elves had on the so called “mainlands”, if any, but I didn’t want to risk anyone selling her out to the people who had killed her family and would possibly want her dead, too. Krissy was mine, and I would not let anyone lay a finger on her.

When the elf asked Krissy if she was a spiritualist, I knew we needed to have a plausible reason for her to be here. I racked my brain, but unfortunately my imagination was rather limited, and the best idea I could come up with was that we belonged to some obscure organisation that hunted evil spirits. Since the elves seemed to have an ongoing evil-spirit problem, I thought it might just work — it wasn’t like they could do a quick online search to verify it, and if push came to shove, I would be happy to eat that evil spirit as proof of our claim.

Krissy took everything in stride, playing along and lying through her teeth until the elves calmed down. She was good at this. Really good. Had she been born on Earth, I was sure she’d have become an Oscar winning actress. Or a conman. She even managed to sell Akela as an integral part of our fake organisation. I was proud of her. What I wasn’t proud of was our freshly minted Bureau, but for the time being it would have to do.

***

The elves took us with them, and we arrived at our destination in the late afternoon. The place was more a hamlet than a village: I counted ten small houses — cottages, really — and a number of larger, wooden buildings around the area. I wouldn’t have minded living in a cosy, peaceful looking place like this, but there was something unsettling about the ornamental carvings on the stone walls — the patterns resembling vines, leaves and tree-branches weren’t to my taste.

The presence of a bunch of elves guarding the hamlet was not a good sign: swords, spears, bows and arrows — they were armed to the teeth.

The clothes the elves wore looked fairly modern and normal. White or blue shirts seemed to have been in fashion around here, leather vests or waistcoats, normal looking trousers and boots — nothing out of the ordinary, really. Our three elves could have been the three musketeers minus the muskets and the musketeer hats. Now that I thought about it, even the tattered, silk dress Krissy had discarded back on my island had looked more modern, an almost Victorian piece rather than medieval. It annoyed me a little that I couldn’t fit things into a single, clear-cut historical period from back home, but all in all, I liked the aesthetics.

The three elves led us past the guards of the hamlet, straight to one of the cottages. Tovaron Ento knocked on the door, and I quickly stuck one of my tenties out of my costume and through the door, focusing a part of my vision to the tip of it. An elven man was coming to open the door; he didn’t look particularly dangerous — having only a small dagger hanging on his belt — so I didn’t say anything.

The door opened, and the man was about to say something to Tovaron Ento — a greeting perhaps — when he saw Krissintha, the two masked sailors, and of course Akela. The man flinched, but Tovaron Ento put a hand on his shoulder and explained things to him in their language.

The man ushered us all in, then stepped outside and rushed away, shutting the door behind him.

Tovaron Ento motioned Krissy and the others to sit on the chairs on one side of the table in the middle of the room, but he himself and his companions remained standing, hands on their swords.

Kenta and Tommy sat down, finally taking their masks off, placing them on the table. Akela was nervous — on Misery Island there had been no such thing as “indoors”. The most confined spaces he’d ever been in were cave-like alcoves and large hollows under old trees. Being in a proper room for the first time in his life must have been a daunting experience for him, so I did my best to calm him. Krissy noticed the wolf’s plight, and she opted to settle on the floor so she could rub the mutt’s belly, letting him rest his head on her lap. Akela was getting too used to this kind of treatment in my humble opinion — and I bore most of the guilt for spoiling him so much.

We didn’t have to wait long: the man who had let us in returned, bringing another elf with him.

Now this new elf was something else. Unlike all the others I had seen so far, this one didn’t have a lot of hair. His scalp looked like it had been burned in a few spots quite some time ago, and while he had some hair, it was short and white. A couple of long scars ran from his eyes all the way down to his neck. One of his pointy ears wasn’t pointy at all: the tip was missing, looking suspiciously like it had been bitten off. He wore simple black trousers and a white shirt, had a sword at his hip, and that was it. The man was the word battle-hardened made manifest.

‘Up!’ he yelled in the human language as he entered the room.

Tovaron Ento and his two companions snapped to attention. The man who had opened the door for us left in a hurry again. Kenta and Tommy jumped up, and Akela started growling angrily as Krissy clambered to her feet.

‘Master Fe …’ Tovaron Ento began to say.

‘Shut it, boy!’ the scar-faced elf barked at him, cutting him short. Then he looked down at Akela, glaring at him for a few moments, then turned his attention back to Tovaron Ento. ‘I’ll be damned, it really is a fucking hell-hound, and for some idiotic reason you thought it was a good idea to bring it here.’

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Krissy, for some reason thought it a good idea to speak at that moment.

‘If I may introdu …’ she started to say and quickly learned that it wasn’t a good idea.

‘No-one asked you!’ the man snapped at her. ‘And you will address me as “Sir”, and only when I say you can speak. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir!’ Krissy replied in a very soldier-like manner.

Yes. That’s what it was, that’s what this elf reminded me of: a drill sergeant. I’d never been in the military, but I’d watched enough war movies in my time.

‘Now,’ drill-sergeant elf said to Krissy, his voice rough and snappy. ‘I don’t care who you are or where you came from. What I care about is whether you’re a threat to Solace or not.’

‘We’re not …’ Krissy tried her luck again.

‘Did I say you could speak?’ the elf growled at her.

‘No, sir,’ Krissy said, standing at attention, a bead of sweat rolling down her face.

The elf walked around the table, took the chair and sat down, facing all of us.

‘Now, Toven,’ he addressed Tovaron Ento, still speaking in the human tongue, probably out of consideration for us. ‘Care to tell me about this latest stupidity of yours?’

Tovaron Ento gulped, then began to tell the tale of our meeting. The elf — whom I suspected was the one and only Master Fenirig Arte he had mentioned back at the clearing — listened, nodding and humming. When the young elf gave him the sword we’d found, his face darkened, and I could see him making a gargantuan effort to hold his rage and pain in check.

Then I noticed something strange about his soul. It was a bronze coloured soul, just like those of the other elves, but … it was damaged. Not badly, but I could see a couple of … bitemarks, maybe?

Souls took the same shape as the body they belonged to — a perfect spiritual replica. But his soul had dips in it on one of his arms and on his neck, as if someone or something had scooped some of it out. I wiggled one of my tenties closer to the man, trying to take a better look at the damaged parts, and I saw something else.

His soul — like any other soul — had the node clusters a spirit or a familiar could connect itself to. It wasn’t easy to see, but I noticed that many of them had strands of Essence wires attached to it, leading from the nodes to the edge of his soul, then terminating there as if they’d been cut to prevent them from hanging out into the open. I looked at Akela. Two of his node clusters were connected to me, but the others had the loose wires I’d left there after severing the connections on my end. They weren’t doing anything, and they didn’t seem to harm or hinder Akela in the slightest, so I hadn’t removed them. This was interesting: I was one hundred percent sure that the drill-sergeant used to have a familiar at some point, but for one reason or another, he didn’t any more.

‘Krissy, listen, I don’t know if this is useful information or not, but this elf here used to be a spiritualist or watchacallit, but the familiar’s gone. Even his soul is slightly damaged.’ I explained my findings to Krissy.

Uh … maybe useful, I don’t know. This man is scaring me. Krissy complained.

‘Don’t worry too much, I think we’re safe for now.’ I said to her.

She seemed to relax a little, her rigid posture loosening, but still standing at attention like a grunt in the barracks in the presence of an officer.

‘Alright.’ Fenirig Arte said when Tovaron “Toven” Ento finished his account of events. The man turned to Krissy. ‘So … Misery Mask. We don’t like your kind around here. Not humans. Spiritualists.’

Krissy stiffened again, exhaled shakily, then said,

‘You … used to be a spiritualist yourself, sir,’

The elf snapped his head to glare at Tovaron Ento. The young man just shrugged, shaking his head.

‘Perhaps you have heard of me then?’ Fenirig Arte said, turning his head back to Krissy.

‘Uh, no sir, I haven’t,’ she said. ‘But I’m told your soul is damaged, and there are signs of a lost familiar.’

‘Who told you that?’ the man snarled the question, scowling at Krissy.

‘My familiar, sir,’ she answered.

‘You’re a fucking monk then. Which shrine are you from? Who’s your patron god?’

‘Not a monk, sir,’ Krissy said. ‘We’re from the Misery Island Bureau of Spirit Affairs. We don’t have monks … but I fulfil a … somewhat similar role.’

‘Does this Bureau of yours have a patron god?’ he asked.

‘Wensah.’ Krissy said.

‘Never heard of a Wensah.’

‘You didn’t lose out on much, sir. She’s a complete bitch,’ Krissy said, her eyes twitching.

I approved of her description of Wensah — I was the one who had told her after all. The scary, scar-faced elf burst into raspy laughter, and it took long seconds for him to calm himself.

‘Huh! Disdain for you own god? I like that,’ he said, still chuckling in a scary way. Then he looked at Akela, and asked, ‘So, you said your little hell-mutt is capable of finding evil spirits?’

‘He can sniff them out sometimes.’ Krissy said.

It was a lie but at the same time it wasn’t necessarily untrue either. Akela had a fantastic sense of smell. He couldn’t sniff out a spirit, but he could definitely sniff out animals the spirit may be attached to.

‘So. Tell me then! What is it that your Bureau and your bitch-of-a-god want?’ he asked.

Krissy took a deep breath and told the man the same story she had told Tovaron Ento, adding a few more details, such as our intent not only to find and kill the evil spirit but to investigate and possibly hinder Sivera’s spiritualist in whatever it was they were doing. Fenirig-Arte listened without interrupting Krissy, sitting cross armed, his cold, silvery blue eyes fixed on her. It reminded me of how Akela watched his prey. He wasn’t only scaring Krissy and the sailors; he was scaring me, too, and I was spirit.

Krissy finished her speech.

Fenirig Arte hummed a few times, then sighed.

‘Alright,’ he began. ‘I do not care for your organisation, but we have an evil fucking spirit on the loose so I can’t be picky. You, girl, will help us find it and kill it. Then I might allow you to board a ship and go back to the Mainlands. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir!’ Krissy said.

I felt one of my tentacles twitching, wanting to perform a salute. The man continued, looking at Krissy as if he was ready to kill her.

‘If I catch you trying to sell the idea of a shrine even to a frog in the forest, I will flay you alive. If I catch you helping Sivera’s spiritualists doing the same, I will burn the flesh off your bones. If I catch you doing anything that pisses me off even a little, I will chop you up and shove the pieces up your hell-hound’s ass. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Krissy said.

‘And you, Toven,’ the man said, turning to the young elf. ‘You and your team are in charge of these mask-wearing torture-jesters, so bring them up to speed on what’s going on. And you will make damned sure they don’t do anything stupid, because if they do, you will find yourself sitting in a cauldron of boiling horse-shit. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Tovaron Ento barked the words, snapping to attention again.

‘Good,’ Fenirig Arte said. ‘Now that we’re all friends, go and do some work!’

‘Yes, sir,’ humans and elves chorused the words.

Fenirig Arte stormed out of the building, shutting the door behind him.

‘Uhm … what was that about nice and agreeable people?’ Krissintha asked, turning to Tovaron Ento.

‘It’s true,’ the elf said, holding his hands up defensively. ‘Master Fenar is … an exception.’

The door swung open again. Everyone looked. Fenirig Arte stood half a step outside the open doorway, snarling like a wolf, glaring at Tovaron Ento.

‘Call me Fenar again and I will personally feed you to the evil spirit!’ he said, accentuating every word.

Tovaron Ento gulped, but before he could say anything in his defense, the older man slammed the door shut.

Well, he has exceptional hearing, I’ll give him that. I said to Krissy.