Chapter 23 - Aftermath

The raid had been as brief as possible to avoid a prolonged skirmish, and they’d brought the mage to cover their tracks. I doubt they expected me or Annalisa to throw a knife into their plans. I tugged the dirty towel off my face and looked at the damage. The public room didn’t look all that more disorderly than usual, aside from the blood. But it felt absent with the talent they’d stolen.

I helped Annalisa to her feet. She looked between the man I killed and the adventurer whose neck she’d broken. She’d gone a pale blue, almost as pale as the wane dragons. I realized that, even though she’d been training to fight and had no problem stepping into a pit with an opponent bent on her blood, she’d never intended to actually kill anyone. She stared down at the pair, and at the blood on the floor. I put my hands on her shoulders.

“Thank you, Annalisa,” I said. “I’m glad you’re my bodyguard.”

“I just…” she swallowed, and then dropped to her knees and emptied her stomach on the floor. “Oh gods.”

“Anna!” I said, lifting her chin. “Look at me.”

She managed to tear her eyes away. from the bodies, but I could see they were still filled with tears.

“You protected me. You protected them,” I said, gesturing to the girls in the corner they hadn’t managed to take. She looked at the blood-spattered women and I could see her stomach buck again. She doubled over.

I patted her on the back. For all the drunk and piss and spit in the woman, she still struck me as naive. Dragonmaw had just swallowed a huge chunk of her that would never come back.

Kridick’s fighters filed back in from the street. “Gone,” one growled. It was the dwarf, Gronn, from the pits. Most of Kridick’s gang was made up of current and former pit fighters that he’d known in the circuits. It wasn’t a big gang, but each one was a terror in close quarters. It was no wonder the raid had been so swift.

Another, a pale drakkyn, walked over to the dead men and pulled down their masks, Scowling. “I don’t recognize this one,” he said of the one I’d stabbed. The adventurer he just probed with his toe. “This one is just a rented blade,” he spat. “Adventurers. Piss on ‘em.” He glanced around, and then began to pry off the rings on the swordsman’s fingers.

“Wait,” I said. “Those are magical.”

“All the more reason to take ‘em,” he said.

I didn’t point out they were dangerous. “They’re not yours to take. Annalisa took him down.” I knew magic rings would be the furthest thing from her mind, at the moment. But there might come a time when one of those rings meant a sword dodged and one stuck through her liver.

“Well then she can come and take ‘em,” the lizard snarled. “Once she’s done sniveling in her own sick. Unless you’d care to try.”

“Leave off,” said the Gronn. “Don’t go pissing off Kridick’s new pet mage.” Despite his words, he tossed a look of pitying disgust at the plane-touched pit fighter. “The devil born just ‘ad her first taste. Wager she earned it. Go and fetch Kridick and Zar.”

“Fine,” said the lizard. He tossed the rings down, and they landed in the blood. I quickly scooped them up and held them for Annalisa. I also grabbed the chopper’s guild badge. The enchantment on it shifted, Already trying to analyze and categorize my own abilities. I already had one pinned to the inside of my robe, but I stuffed the second one in a pocket. Now we had one for Annalisa, too.

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The dwarf turned to me. “And you. Help me get these blokes to the canal before anyone else comes sniffing, yeah?” he lowered his voice. “Or before my wife finds out about this,” he intoned. Surely he couldn’t mean…

“Miss Trundi?” I asked. The dwarf grinned and waggled his bushy eyebrows at me. “That’s Madam Miss Trundi, to you, seeker. Be a good lad and get ‘is legs.”

I picked his feet up and recoiled. “Ugh, he smells like a rancid tide pool.”

“Cor, you ain’t wrong, kid,” said Gronn. He pulled down the scarf over the Mayazian’s face and I recoiled. And not just because the smell worsened.

“Ugh, what is that?” I asked. The man was human, mostly, I think. But his flesh was pale and sickly, almost scaly at the chin and neck. He had sigils carved on both cheeks so that they had scarred.

Gronn shook his head. “I don’t know, but it looks like something that belongs in the sea. So let’s help it back on its way.”

Luckily, the two men weren’t any heavier than normal humans. By the time we made it back, Kridick had gotten to the Mop n’ Bucket, Looking angrier than I’ve ever seen. He growled when he saw me. “What good’s a mage if you can’t even fend off a few bandits?” he demanded.

“Hey,” I said. “They had a mage. And more men. All we had were hangovers. Who even attacks a brothel?”

“Without anyone left alive, there’s no way to know,” snapped Kridick. Literally snapped. The living lightning of his drakkyn half was barely contained.

I had meant that ironically, but I didn’t figure pointing that out to the steaming drork would be conducive to my continued existence. It made little sense to steal girls when you could just hire them for an hour, Instead, I focused on the small amount of information I did have. “That mage worked for the Mayazian. He was at the fight last night.”

“Are you certain?”

“Definitely. Used the same spell today as he used on Annalisa during the fight. Some sort of web-puppeteer strings. More powerful without the dragons sapping it, but definitely the same.”

Kridick ran his fingers through his tangled beard. “They wouldn’t leave Harrowdown for this without orders from Mother Mayaz. There’s no way she knows what she’s got. That mage ain’t the only one pulling strings here.”

I raised an eyebrow. “What does she have, Kridick?”

He weighed telling me, rolling the story around in his mouth before deciding better. “You don’t want to know. Sufficed to say, we need to get those girls back before this sets the streets on fire.”

“You mean a war with the Mayazian?”

The half-orc shook his head. “This is bigger than the downs, boy. And right now, we got very little to go on.”

Bigger than the downs. I wonder if this involved the bookie’s mysterious upper-class benefactor, Daggertongue. I pulled my deck out and rifled through the cards. The orc’s pale cheeks reddened with anger. “Going to do a reading then, are you? Might be a bit late for that. You should’a done it an hour ago. Put them silly things away before they find themselves lodged in your throat.”

The deck felt affronted at that. They buzzed in anger at the mongrel. “Kridick, I couldn’t do a reading right now, even if I thought it could help. You need a full deck for a reading.” The boss of the Barrowdown just glared at me, uninterested in theatrics. I cut to the chase. “I was about to invoke a new card when the mage hit me. That card might currently be in the cuff of one of the girls’ dresses”

“Darcent,” said Kridick in a low, dangerous voice. “Unless the next words out of your mouth are “I can sense where the card is,” you’re going to have a very short, very painful remainder of your life.”

“I can sense where the card is,” I said, quickly. Snark will get you knifed in the middle city. “But if that mage is there, we should wait until night. He’ll be weaker, but I won’t.”

“Nightfall is a few hours off,” said Kridick. He stormed out the door. “On me, boys,” he said. Then the old pit fighter pointed at me. “That’s a few scant hours to sort this mess out before you and the devilborn start cracking skulls.”

“Us?” I demanded. Annalisa had remained mostly still and quiet—the only time I’d ever seen the woman not bouncing off the walls and running her mouth. “I’m not one to storm the castle, and she’s in no shape.”

“Figure it out,” snapped Kridick. “Link with Zarry at the Broken Axel in Hollowdown. Sun drops and you ain’t heard from him or me, you go in and you get those girls.”

He slammed the door so hard the entire building rattled.