Arc III – Neighbors

Chapter 33 - Curios and Curios

Kridick’s disappearance left a gaping wound in the streets of Barrowdown. Kridick had been a right bastard, but the old drork had kept these alleys locked in an iron grip. With him out of the picture? Any thug with a cudgel thought they could move and demand protection from the businesses even just a few narrow streets away from the Mop. Fixers from other districts thought they could start throwing off odds for our pits. And as for odds? Well, all of them used to go through the Mop n’ Bucket. But there was suddenly a wealth of entrepreneurial spirit in Barrowdown.

In a word, chaos. But I would wrangle it, force the streets back to order as I had been over the last week. I’d bring it back under control. My control. And that attitude had some unforeseen consequences.

“Remember, Annalisa. We’re just going to talk to the guy first.”

“Actions speak louder than words,” she said, pounding her fist into her hand.

“And sometimes, so does silence. Look, we want him working. For us. Not dead or too busted up to ever come to the downs again. Someone else will just take his place.”

The excitable devilborn grumbled. Her tail thrashed, actually knocking a bundle of hides out of a tanner’s arms. He called out in anger, and then saw my robes and Annalisa’s blue skin and quickly hurried on his way. I smiled. Our reputation was spreading. Unfortunately, it had spread further than the downs.

We passed a notice board where a reasonable facsimile of me had been posted, along with a notice of bounty. I tore it down, along with Anna’s, whose perky, barbed horns they couldn’t seem to get right. I crumpled them and dropped them to the rest of the muck in the runnels. They’d started popping up after the ruckus we’d caused in Hollowdown. But that was thankfully the opposite direction from our current destination.

West of Barrowdown lay Kindledown—so named for the matchbox construction of its shanties and narrow tenements. When Dragonmaw burns, Kindledown conflagrates. That’s a ten-cunning word for goes up like a barrel of drakkyn blasting powder.

Sharing a border, it was often hard to see where one district ended and the other began. And that was the excuse the half-orc gangs of Kindledown used to start spreading influence east. I had come to redraw the map with those borders very clearly defined. I’d brought Annalisa because our reputation was really her reputation. You see, her reward was three times mine. She was the vicious plane-touched pit fighter who’d beaten a deep-sea lamia in the ring, and then tracked her down to finish the job. She was the blue streak that hit faster than you could see (when I buffed her with the dragon’s stamina) and could see attacks coming from all angles (when under the dragon’s gaze).

I didn’t mind being the power behind the power. It suited me, actually. The more people underestimated me, the easier I could catch them off guard when the cards came out. Anna, of course, took the opposite approach, as she did to most of my ideas, notions, advice, requests, demands, and expectations.

She walked next to me, openly sporting the stolen adventurer's guild badge on her vest. It had settled on rank 3, same as mine, after we’d beaten the lamia and her fixer but been smashed by Mother Mayaz. I was a little shocked that we’d come so far so quickly, having gone from a failed fortune teller with an unruly tarot deck and an unsuccessful punching bag to the rank where adventurers start delving the upper levels of the undercity. We were stronger together. I didn’t know if that was the effect of the lovers arcana, or whether it was the other way around. In typical Annalisa fashion, rather than waiting for her archetype to settle, she’d borrowed red lacquer nail paint from one of the girls at the mop and carefully painted in tiny block letters: Champion of Dragonmaw.

Subtle. At some point, the guild was going to want its badges back. They were important enough that the guild issued low level missions to retrieve them from the wilds and the undercity when adventurers went missing.

My badge had all but given up trying to assess me, and the little archetype enchantment just said sneaky enchanter. Which didn’t sound like a real archetype, but I didn’t blame the badge. Maybe I just defied categorization. Or, maybe Soul Seekers avoid the Adventurers Guild because most of them have at least half a brain.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The structures around us took on a decidedly more flammable aesthetic, so we'd gotten close to the border with Kindledown. One of the girls had come to me with information about an independent bookie here, operating out of a curio consignment and repair shop and offering odds on our fights. Called himself the broker. Probably thought he was being ironic. Really, he was being moronic.

“There,” I said, nodding to the curio shop. It was squeezed into a corner behind a dry culvert, nestled between two narrow storefronts and guarded by two narrow half-elves. I tapped the dragon’s gaze beneath my robes and examined them from a distance. Both had weapons concealed. There was also a third that I hadn’t noticed, smoking outside the pub across the street— The sign above the window of the shop claimed Shaldar’s curios and mysteries, exotic trinkets and foreign oddities.

I approached the store, and the two guards pushed off the wall to intercept. Despite their slender frames, both were appropriately scarred for the lower city. One had his head shaved in a warrior’s wedge that enhanced his hawkish features.

“Hold. I’ll have to search you. And your...” he glanced at the badge on Annalisa and stifled a smirk when he read the label. “...adventurer, will have to wait outside.”

I put my hand on my hips and donned my best posh accent. “Sir, those wanting to look under my robes, had best take me to dinner, first. A nice one.”

He didn’t budge. I sighed and made a show of removing my knife and handing it to Annalisa. I raised an eyebrow to the guard and he reluctantly nodded.

As Annalisa accepted the knife, I leaned in and murmured “Watch out for the one by the bar.” She looked uncomfortable as I leaned back, shifting furtively on the balls of her feet as though ready to fight or bolt. Typical, considering her seemingly boundless energy. But she’d been different since our encounter with Mother Mayaz and the stray demon. More… focused, I suppose. Well, if there was one thing the woman needed to work on, it was her attention span. Especially when she had a fight in just a few days time.

The inside of the curio shop didn’t disappoint, based on the collection of junk the proprietor had managed to accrue from all corners of the Bastard and beyond. I saw customers browsing porcelain from Saltforge, spices from the Strait of Kings, artwork from Azurenon, and a genuine bone-hilted dagger from the Mausoleum Plains. The last of which were very illegal, by the way, and are generally enchanted. I tapped the dragon’s gaze a little bit and was disappointed to see that this one was a fake.

However... a silk scarf glowed under a pile of dusty rags with foreign embroidery. I made my way over and drew it from the pile, examining the black mosaic pattern. Something about it drew me. I found myself wanting it for reasons unknown. I couldn’t place the design—not that I was an expert in fashion, of course. Leave that business to the highborn, the fops, and their tailors. I couldn’t tell what the enchantment did, of course. People made a living out of identifying and categorizing magical items.

But I might be able to get close if I did a reading for it. I considered the cards in my pocket. Above all else, they were a divination tool, and at its core, magic item identification was a divination field.

“Ah, you have a discerning eye, Seeker!” said a voice behind me. His steps were punctuated by the cap of a cane hitting the floorboards, and I turned to face the grey-haired proprietor. “That’s a genuine elf-silk cravat from south of the Bronze Wastes. One of a kind!”

“I’m sure there are a thousand like it,” I mentioned. I let it fall back to the stack and looked around the rest of the shop with half-lidded eyes, as though what I saw thoroughly bored me. In truth, I’d found curios fascinating ever since I was a boy, and on any other day would love nothing more to examine (and possibly pocket some of) the contents of the store. “But I intend my transactions today to be more of a... mmm transient, nature.

The proprietor feigned ignorance and glanced as his other patrons, none of whom seemed about to buy anything. “Sir, I’m not sure what you’re implying. This is a simple curios shop.”

I rolled my eyes. “A simple shop with such… protection. It seems you don’t trust me.”

“I’ve only just met you,”

I sighed, and picked up the cravat again and jingled my purse beneath my robe. The one with coins in it, mind you. “Perhaps if I were to buy something, that might make us more familiar?”

The shopkeep eyed the silk in my hand with hungry eyes. Curio shops were many things, but profitable wasn’t one of them. He probably relied on the patronage of the broker more than sales from the front of the store. “Ten cunnings.”

“Ten?” I snarled. Ten was criminal for a simple length of tattered silk that might demand two cunnings, Though, ten was also a fraction of its true worth if the enchantment proved useful. And the shopkeep clearly wasn’t aware of its true nature. “This dishrag is barely fit to wipe the ink off my blotter. I shan’t pay more than four.”

Now in his element, the proprietor tapped his cane. “I could perhaps lower my price to eight cunnings. As a special… introductory price.”

I looked at the scarf again, noticing a new stain on one of its corners. “Now I look closer, I see this craftsmanship is quite fine.” I pulled out my purse and counted out eight pieces of silver stamped with an image of the pale dragons. I didn’t really need to count it, because it emptied my purse. I dropped them into the eager hands of the curio proprietor.

“Excellent, sir. If you’ll just follow me into the back, I’ll get this wrapped for you.