CASE 327
The Kraken at the End of the World
The Kraken at the End of the World
Monologue 1
Monologue 2
Monologue 3
Monologue 4
Monologue 5
Monologue 6
Monologue 7
Monologue 8
Monologue 9
Monologue 10
Monologue 11
Monologue 12
Monologue 13
Monologue 14
Monologue 15
Monologue 16
Monologue 17
Monologue 18
Monologue 19
Monologue 20
Monologue 21
Monologue 22
Monologue 23
Monologue 24
Monologue 25
Atramentum. Second city of the UPZ, first and last stop for your typical goon trying to get in or out of the Shadow Plane. Its shiny big brother Candentia gets all the political importance and the white and gold colour scheme so everyone knows they don't tolerate dirt. I don't know if anyone's dumb enough to believe them, but either way, Atramentum's colours mostly range from shadow-grey to shadow-black, what with all the leakage from across the plane border, and it practically advertises its dirt on the radio.
According to a real fancy napkin scribbling from City Hall, the official city motto of Atramentum is "The City Where Dreams Are Made Of". I have a question or two about the grammar, but for once I actually agree with those grimy mugs over in Central Plaza: my dreams really are made of about all the same secret herbs and spices as the city is: dark alleys, shadows full of killers, and boardrooms full of worse killers. There ain't a lot of justice to be found on those mean, rain-slicked streets. But someone's gotta try. And if that someone has to be me, then at least I can use it to pay my rent.
My name's Chiaroscuro Gray. You can tell because it says so on my stationary, although it is admittedly written in grey on grey, and I did admittedly write it on there myself. I'm a private detective and a public nuisance, and I'm about to be in a whole heap of trouble, which is how I know it's Monday.
It's getting close to midnight - the sky already faded from one of the light greys to one of the dark greys - when the blurred tyres of a Natterlynd Model 18 skid their way through the particular rain-slicked mean streets of Downtown Atramentum towards the office formerly of Grayjoy Private Investigators, now occupied solely by one singular bum battling his internal demons and his external hangover, and one Gnomish angel in the material form of a remarkably long-suffering secretary. By any smarter man's yardstick I oughta've called it a night on both the office and the whiskey about an hour ago, but the wisecase who built my apartment never linked it to the stairwell and right now I'm in no mood to try to navigate the fire escape, so for now I'm hiding from the world under a wide-brimmed fedora and behind a crummy old ironwood desk.
The buzzer on my desk goes off, and my whiskey-cushioned melancholy is interrupted by the only voice that's allowed to, because reminding me to look up from my desk every once in a while is one of the things I pay her for.
"There's a lady here to see you, Mr Gray," reports Sal Friday, through the microphone that sits on her desk in the next room, right in front of the sign that says "secretary" in case the clients think I just happen to have an unclaimed desk. "She's a real classy broad, too. You should straighten your tie."
Sal may be twelve feet of sass in a four foot dame, but in this cutthroat city she's the one person I'd trust enough to hand a razor to, so I sit up in my chair, try to ignore my headache, and straighten my tie.
And then, sure enough, in walks a dame with 'trouble' written on every scale. Now, I'm a man of the world. I've seen a dame or two in my time. This is the kind of dame I feel I can always bear to see more of, but know I'll always regret doing so. She's got a set of legs that won't quit and a solid spine that ain't hiring. I've got nothing against Vishkanya in general - they're just one more set of misfits trying to make their ill-advised fortune in a city that doesn't look after them, and in my experience the really cold-blooded reptiles around here are more likely to have respectable jobs and mammalian physiognomy - but something about this one gives me the sense she's got a forked tongue in more ways than one. All the same, there's a jewel around her neck that could pay my rent for the rest of my life, and not just because I keep getting shot at and the doc says most of my internal organs look like an oil refinery. And then... there's the face.
Some folk say the gods only used so many faces when they made the planes, which sounds just like them, the bums. I've had more than one crook try to spin in a courthouse that whatever dirty deed I put a finger on him for was actually done by some convenient double that happened to have his exact face and also his exact taste in cabbage. But, as sure as I know my own bleary-eyed mug in the mirror, I swear I knew this dame's face - every curve and every angle, the exact spit of my own old partner, only in serpent-green instead of flame-red. And not dead for fifteen years.
"I'm in need of a detective, Mr Gray," says the dame, fixing me with a serpent's hypnotic stare from eyes I once spent eternities gazing into on a different woman's face. "They say you're the very best at finding people no-one wants to find".
That sounds like a naked attempt at flattery, but it also sounds like a job offer, and I'm not prude enough to turn down a job offer just because it's naked. I light up a cigarette, and offer her the match while it's still casting it's shadowy glow across my dingy grey office. The dame gently touches the flame with the tip of a long white cigarette held in a longer black cigarette holder, and turns her head to gaze out the window while she waits for me to answer.
"I can be for the right price," I tell her. "Who is it you're looking for, and when did they give you the slip?"
The street lamp outside paints a series of bright lines across the dame's face as she stands in profile by the window blinds. "My patron," she says. "Some time last night or this morning, while I was... indisposed with a gentleman caller."
I lean back in my chair. "What kinda patron we talking here? I've seen you in the periodicals, lady. Persephone Natterlynd. Daughter of the late Jupiter. I don't follow celebrity gossip too closely at my age, but I know you ain't an actress and I'm guessing your old man gave you enough of a head start in life that you don't need a sponsor."
Persephone Natterlynd, daughter of the late Jupiter, takes a drag on her fancy gasper like someone who doesn't feel a hurry to answer every little question a detective drops into her in-tray. "Call me Sephy, detective. Near everybody who's anybody does. I'm afraid my missing patron is a little more serious than a mere theatregoer or a sponsor from one of Gatz's soirée circle. I'm a witch, detective - or I was when I went to sleep last night. My patron is the Kraken that Ends the World. And it's gone missing."
I give her a long, hard look before I drop my cigarette into the ashtray and pull my hat brim over my eyes. "Sorry, Ms Natterlynd. You got the wrong guy. Speak to the police. I don't play with magic shit."
The dame gives me a look that coulda cracked open a wallnut. "Mr Gray, you know as well as I do that the police in this town help no-one but themselves and City Hall, and there isn't a man in City Hall that wouldn't love to bury a story like this under six feet of concrete with a knife in its back. It's an election year, detective. Mayor Pipswitch won't risk anything that might alarm the public - and a missing Apocalypse Kraken WILL alarm the public."
When I say nothing, she softens her voice, but keeps that serpent's gaze pinned right to me like a tie pin I can't afford. She hasn't blinked an eye once since she stepped in here. "I'm sure you know, detective, that my father amassed quite a fortune in his time on this plane. Automobiles, you know. As his sole living heir, the entirety of the Natterlynd empire now legally belongs to me. Whatever you need me to pay you, I can pay you more."
Maybe it's the feeling of my landlady's shadow looming over my shoulder. Maybe it's the chill from that one crack in the window pane I can't afford to fix. Maybe I'm still a lot drunker than I think I am. Or maybe it's just that, even though they're on a whole different person with a slipperier expression, I just never could learn how to say no to those eyes.
Whatever the reason for my latest stupidity, I find myself reaching across my desk for the matte black telephone, give Ms Natterlynd my worst scowl, and say the line my gut already knows is only gonna make this week a lot worse for me:
"Maybe you're in luck, lady. Maybe I know a guy."
According to a real fancy napkin scribbling from City Hall, the official city motto of Atramentum is "The City Where Dreams Are Made Of". I have a question or two about the grammar, but for once I actually agree with those grimy mugs over in Central Plaza: my dreams really are made of about all the same secret herbs and spices as the city is: dark alleys, shadows full of killers, and boardrooms full of worse killers. There ain't a lot of justice to be found on those mean, rain-slicked streets. But someone's gotta try. And if that someone has to be me, then at least I can use it to pay my rent.
My name's Chiaroscuro Gray. You can tell because it says so on my stationary, although it is admittedly written in grey on grey, and I did admittedly write it on there myself. I'm a private detective and a public nuisance, and I'm about to be in a whole heap of trouble, which is how I know it's Monday.
It's getting close to midnight - the sky already faded from one of the light greys to one of the dark greys - when the blurred tyres of a Natterlynd Model 18 skid their way through the particular rain-slicked mean streets of Downtown Atramentum towards the office formerly of Grayjoy Private Investigators, now occupied solely by one singular bum battling his internal demons and his external hangover, and one Gnomish angel in the material form of a remarkably long-suffering secretary. By any smarter man's yardstick I oughta've called it a night on both the office and the whiskey about an hour ago, but the wisecase who built my apartment never linked it to the stairwell and right now I'm in no mood to try to navigate the fire escape, so for now I'm hiding from the world under a wide-brimmed fedora and behind a crummy old ironwood desk.
The buzzer on my desk goes off, and my whiskey-cushioned melancholy is interrupted by the only voice that's allowed to, because reminding me to look up from my desk every once in a while is one of the things I pay her for.
"There's a lady here to see you, Mr Gray," reports Sal Friday, through the microphone that sits on her desk in the next room, right in front of the sign that says "secretary" in case the clients think I just happen to have an unclaimed desk. "She's a real classy broad, too. You should straighten your tie."
Sal may be twelve feet of sass in a four foot dame, but in this cutthroat city she's the one person I'd trust enough to hand a razor to, so I sit up in my chair, try to ignore my headache, and straighten my tie.
And then, sure enough, in walks a dame with 'trouble' written on every scale. Now, I'm a man of the world. I've seen a dame or two in my time. This is the kind of dame I feel I can always bear to see more of, but know I'll always regret doing so. She's got a set of legs that won't quit and a solid spine that ain't hiring. I've got nothing against Vishkanya in general - they're just one more set of misfits trying to make their ill-advised fortune in a city that doesn't look after them, and in my experience the really cold-blooded reptiles around here are more likely to have respectable jobs and mammalian physiognomy - but something about this one gives me the sense she's got a forked tongue in more ways than one. All the same, there's a jewel around her neck that could pay my rent for the rest of my life, and not just because I keep getting shot at and the doc says most of my internal organs look like an oil refinery. And then... there's the face.
Some folk say the gods only used so many faces when they made the planes, which sounds just like them, the bums. I've had more than one crook try to spin in a courthouse that whatever dirty deed I put a finger on him for was actually done by some convenient double that happened to have his exact face and also his exact taste in cabbage. But, as sure as I know my own bleary-eyed mug in the mirror, I swear I knew this dame's face - every curve and every angle, the exact spit of my own old partner, only in serpent-green instead of flame-red. And not dead for fifteen years.
"I'm in need of a detective, Mr Gray," says the dame, fixing me with a serpent's hypnotic stare from eyes I once spent eternities gazing into on a different woman's face. "They say you're the very best at finding people no-one wants to find".
That sounds like a naked attempt at flattery, but it also sounds like a job offer, and I'm not prude enough to turn down a job offer just because it's naked. I light up a cigarette, and offer her the match while it's still casting it's shadowy glow across my dingy grey office. The dame gently touches the flame with the tip of a long white cigarette held in a longer black cigarette holder, and turns her head to gaze out the window while she waits for me to answer.
"I can be for the right price," I tell her. "Who is it you're looking for, and when did they give you the slip?"
The street lamp outside paints a series of bright lines across the dame's face as she stands in profile by the window blinds. "My patron," she says. "Some time last night or this morning, while I was... indisposed with a gentleman caller."
I lean back in my chair. "What kinda patron we talking here? I've seen you in the periodicals, lady. Persephone Natterlynd. Daughter of the late Jupiter. I don't follow celebrity gossip too closely at my age, but I know you ain't an actress and I'm guessing your old man gave you enough of a head start in life that you don't need a sponsor."
Persephone Natterlynd, daughter of the late Jupiter, takes a drag on her fancy gasper like someone who doesn't feel a hurry to answer every little question a detective drops into her in-tray. "Call me Sephy, detective. Near everybody who's anybody does. I'm afraid my missing patron is a little more serious than a mere theatregoer or a sponsor from one of Gatz's soirée circle. I'm a witch, detective - or I was when I went to sleep last night. My patron is the Kraken that Ends the World. And it's gone missing."
I give her a long, hard look before I drop my cigarette into the ashtray and pull my hat brim over my eyes. "Sorry, Ms Natterlynd. You got the wrong guy. Speak to the police. I don't play with magic shit."
The dame gives me a look that coulda cracked open a wallnut. "Mr Gray, you know as well as I do that the police in this town help no-one but themselves and City Hall, and there isn't a man in City Hall that wouldn't love to bury a story like this under six feet of concrete with a knife in its back. It's an election year, detective. Mayor Pipswitch won't risk anything that might alarm the public - and a missing Apocalypse Kraken WILL alarm the public."
When I say nothing, she softens her voice, but keeps that serpent's gaze pinned right to me like a tie pin I can't afford. She hasn't blinked an eye once since she stepped in here. "I'm sure you know, detective, that my father amassed quite a fortune in his time on this plane. Automobiles, you know. As his sole living heir, the entirety of the Natterlynd empire now legally belongs to me. Whatever you need me to pay you, I can pay you more."
Maybe it's the feeling of my landlady's shadow looming over my shoulder. Maybe it's the chill from that one crack in the window pane I can't afford to fix. Maybe I'm still a lot drunker than I think I am. Or maybe it's just that, even though they're on a whole different person with a slipperier expression, I just never could learn how to say no to those eyes.
Whatever the reason for my latest stupidity, I find myself reaching across my desk for the matte black telephone, give Ms Natterlynd my worst scowl, and say the line my gut already knows is only gonna make this week a lot worse for me:
"Maybe you're in luck, lady. Maybe I know a guy."
Monologue 2
I've been on this case for maybe an hour, and it's already growing enough tentacles to fill in for a conspicuously absent doom kraken.
I left my home sweet alleyway in the backseat of a very efficient and comfortable automobile, the front two being occupied by an enigmatic heiress with the face of an angel and the road safety consciousness of a demon, and a fiendish looking foot-tall squid named Mephistopheles, whom Sephie Natterlynd tells me is a vital part of the unbreakable pact with her magic patron that just got itself broken. The intent was to pick up my go-to expert on magical hokum and maybe sneak a little look at the supposed location of the missing kraken while I was at it. Instead, I somehow found myself heading back the way we came before we even arrived, with me now sharing the backseat with the kid, a very disagreeable tiefling occultist and a seven foot orc workie that just got the green kicked out of him by the improbable intervention of a person larger than he is.
It takes all of us except the squid to help poor Jimmy the Nose limp upstairs and settle him down on the sofa in my reception room. Sal goes to work at once, putting in a call to whatever poor mug's on night duty at the local Halfway House of Our Lady of Liberty to let Padre Ashleighford Sundae know that one of his flock needs some urgent ministrations for spiritual healing. I pour two large scotches for myself and the wounded, and offer to find a few more glasses for the room.
"Frankly, Charlie, I find you the city's best walking advert for prohibition - but under the circumstances I'll try out your way just this once".
Ms Natterlynd gives a nod - "please" - and then turns her attention to the new arrivals. "I don't believe we've had the pleasure of an introduction. Sephie Natterlynd. Detective Gray is helping me find a missing associate."
"Muriel Caine. Curator of the museum that some frightful hoodlum just shot up, for which I am assuming Detective Gray holds some responsibility."
"Oh, I certainly hope not. And you must be the famous Axel Webb"
...
Sal puts the phone down. "Padre Ashleigh's on his way. Are you all right, Axel? Is anyone else hurt?
...
I open the desk drawer above the one I keep my best scotch in, and take out a reliable old spool of monochrome twine and some thumbtacks. "Alright, kid. Let's get a start on this case before anyone else gets bounced off a car door. Whaddve ya got for me, kid?"
I left my home sweet alleyway in the backseat of a very efficient and comfortable automobile, the front two being occupied by an enigmatic heiress with the face of an angel and the road safety consciousness of a demon, and a fiendish looking foot-tall squid named Mephistopheles, whom Sephie Natterlynd tells me is a vital part of the unbreakable pact with her magic patron that just got itself broken. The intent was to pick up my go-to expert on magical hokum and maybe sneak a little look at the supposed location of the missing kraken while I was at it. Instead, I somehow found myself heading back the way we came before we even arrived, with me now sharing the backseat with the kid, a very disagreeable tiefling occultist and a seven foot orc workie that just got the green kicked out of him by the improbable intervention of a person larger than he is.
It takes all of us except the squid to help poor Jimmy the Nose limp upstairs and settle him down on the sofa in my reception room. Sal goes to work at once, putting in a call to whatever poor mug's on night duty at the local Halfway House of Our Lady of Liberty to let Padre Ashleighford Sundae know that one of his flock needs some urgent ministrations for spiritual healing. I pour two large scotches for myself and the wounded, and offer to find a few more glasses for the room.
"Frankly, Charlie, I find you the city's best walking advert for prohibition - but under the circumstances I'll try out your way just this once".
Ms Natterlynd gives a nod - "please" - and then turns her attention to the new arrivals. "I don't believe we've had the pleasure of an introduction. Sephie Natterlynd. Detective Gray is helping me find a missing associate."
"Muriel Caine. Curator of the museum that some frightful hoodlum just shot up, for which I am assuming Detective Gray holds some responsibility."
"Oh, I certainly hope not. And you must be the famous Axel Webb"
...
Sal puts the phone down. "Padre Ashleigh's on his way. Are you all right, Axel? Is anyone else hurt?
...
I open the desk drawer above the one I keep my best scotch in, and take out a reliable old spool of monochrome twine and some thumbtacks. "Alright, kid. Let's get a start on this case before anyone else gets bounced off a car door. Whaddve ya got for me, kid?"
Monologue 3
There's very little of Atramentum that was ever going to win any awards in any beauty contests, but the area around the Downtown outroad is pretty close to being as grim as it gets. This is a place that isn't built for living or working; it's built for passing through by people who are either trying to get into the city, out of some terribly misplaced dream or terribly unpaid debt, or else desperately trying to get out. The people who end up here on any kinda long-term basis are those who got trapped, unable to get any further in and unable to get any further out. The humanoid scum on the drain filter of life. I always figured I'd end up here myself sooner or later. Better than even odds one of the alleys behind one of these grim dilapidated dive bars and motels and burlesque clubs is destined to be my final resting place, and I just don't know it.
The Schlintz Motel is a square grey edifice with blacked out windows, a dozen yards away from the main road, pebble-dashed in grime and labelled by a wooden sign over the door that's somehow seen even more better days than the one at the roadside that points the way. Frankly I don't blame Ms Natterlynd for being hesitant to pull into the parking lot, rolling to a reluctant stop just beyond the mouth of it at a speed lower than I'd have thought her wagon was capable of.
Every minute or so, the headlamps of some other automobile light us up in a wave of shadow-dimmed white as they pass by on the outroad, each one no doubt driven by someone whose reasons for being in this part of town at this hour of the night are just as glamorous as ours.
If we're not too late, Jaykrake ought to still be holed up in this crummy joint, maybe even along with whatever mystery palookah gifted him a matchbook with instructions to come here if he ever needed a free ride out of town. If so, maybe we can really get our answers about what he was doing sneaking a bunch of whackadoodle cultists into a godsforsaken cursed museum basement, how those cultists ended up in a fight to the death with City Hall, and what happened to Ms Natterlynd's world-ending kraken friend in the process.
Obviously that's not how neatly anything ever turns out for a Charlie of my kinda luck, but it a little self-delusion never hurt anybody.
I got a neat pattern of dark blood and bruises giving my name a new appropriateness across my busted nose, and a rising swelling on my arm where my fancy dwarven-forged trenchcoat wasn't able to black quite enough of a bullet's momentum to stop it putting a dent in my skeleton. My heiress client has a series of little green-red scores across the scales all down her bare arm where a stream of gunfire didn't quite miss her. It doesn't seem to have hampered her steering reflexes any, but maybe it's given her second thought about standing around near someone that gets shot at as often as I do.
"Detective, I'm sure you understand that every moment I spend here is a moment that threatens to bring the paparazzi down upon your so carefully conducted investigation. Perhaps it's best if Mephisto and I take our leave for the night, and you can let me know your findings at a less salacious time and place."
The thought of having to take a cab back into town haunts me like I'm a fuckin' Cold Hand hideout, but for some reason in the face of this dame I acquiesce and let her hand over a glossy card with her personals.
"Good luck, boys."
The Natterlynd automobile screams out into the road, barely avoiding getting T-boned by a passing freight truck, and its enlightening headlamps are slowly rubbed out by endless drizzling layers of blurring grey rain. I watch my own blood get washed down my arm and across the glossy surface of Sephie's business card, finally dripping from the corner to join a dim rainbow cocktail of motor oil, mud and gods only know what else in the puddles of the parking lot's cracked surface. I fix my hat against the rain and hand the card to the kid so I can better focus on the rest of my surroundings.
"All right, kid. Let's see if my example has had any educational merit whatsoever. What do you make of this whole set-up so far?"
The Schlintz Motel is a square grey edifice with blacked out windows, a dozen yards away from the main road, pebble-dashed in grime and labelled by a wooden sign over the door that's somehow seen even more better days than the one at the roadside that points the way. Frankly I don't blame Ms Natterlynd for being hesitant to pull into the parking lot, rolling to a reluctant stop just beyond the mouth of it at a speed lower than I'd have thought her wagon was capable of.
Every minute or so, the headlamps of some other automobile light us up in a wave of shadow-dimmed white as they pass by on the outroad, each one no doubt driven by someone whose reasons for being in this part of town at this hour of the night are just as glamorous as ours.
If we're not too late, Jaykrake ought to still be holed up in this crummy joint, maybe even along with whatever mystery palookah gifted him a matchbook with instructions to come here if he ever needed a free ride out of town. If so, maybe we can really get our answers about what he was doing sneaking a bunch of whackadoodle cultists into a godsforsaken cursed museum basement, how those cultists ended up in a fight to the death with City Hall, and what happened to Ms Natterlynd's world-ending kraken friend in the process.
Obviously that's not how neatly anything ever turns out for a Charlie of my kinda luck, but it a little self-delusion never hurt anybody.
I got a neat pattern of dark blood and bruises giving my name a new appropriateness across my busted nose, and a rising swelling on my arm where my fancy dwarven-forged trenchcoat wasn't able to black quite enough of a bullet's momentum to stop it putting a dent in my skeleton. My heiress client has a series of little green-red scores across the scales all down her bare arm where a stream of gunfire didn't quite miss her. It doesn't seem to have hampered her steering reflexes any, but maybe it's given her second thought about standing around near someone that gets shot at as often as I do.
"Detective, I'm sure you understand that every moment I spend here is a moment that threatens to bring the paparazzi down upon your so carefully conducted investigation. Perhaps it's best if Mephisto and I take our leave for the night, and you can let me know your findings at a less salacious time and place."
The thought of having to take a cab back into town haunts me like I'm a fuckin' Cold Hand hideout, but for some reason in the face of this dame I acquiesce and let her hand over a glossy card with her personals.
"Good luck, boys."
The Natterlynd automobile screams out into the road, barely avoiding getting T-boned by a passing freight truck, and its enlightening headlamps are slowly rubbed out by endless drizzling layers of blurring grey rain. I watch my own blood get washed down my arm and across the glossy surface of Sephie's business card, finally dripping from the corner to join a dim rainbow cocktail of motor oil, mud and gods only know what else in the puddles of the parking lot's cracked surface. I fix my hat against the rain and hand the card to the kid so I can better focus on the rest of my surroundings.
"All right, kid. Let's see if my example has had any educational merit whatsoever. What do you make of this whole set-up so far?"
Monologue 4
It's less than 24 hours since I made a characteristically stupid decision for a woman of uncertain motive, and already this case is growing tentacles like the Kraken we still aren't much closer to finding. A missing kid, a huge goon with a gun at large, four dead workies in octopus masks, two dead bureaucrats and now a dead pencilneck from the local museum of spooks, and a spook of a whole different kind with a Candentia tiepin and a penchant for cleaning up crimescenes. Most of my body aches from being peppered with bullets and then forcibly separated from all its water like a kipper being dried for storage. I'm just lucky most of my water already got swapped out for scotch long ago, otherwise I might be dead, and my go-to occult-expert kid with me. I'm up to my ears in rituals and curses and artefacts, and my ears are pretty far up compared to most people's. To top it all off, it looks like I'm gonna have to tell that tetchy museum broad her museum got burned.
I need answers. I need a solid lead. I need about twelve hours of sleep and a medical check-up.
What I have is a burned diary, a handful of blue hair, a plaster cast of a piece of Eldritch contraband, a supernaturally heavy chunk of slimy cursed rock, a Dockworker's Union card, a precocious kid with an array of deeply suspicious powers, a reinforced trenchcoat and a gun.
I guess that'll have to do.
I need answers. I need a solid lead. I need about twelve hours of sleep and a medical check-up.
What I have is a burned diary, a handful of blue hair, a plaster cast of a piece of Eldritch contraband, a supernaturally heavy chunk of slimy cursed rock, a Dockworker's Union card, a precocious kid with an array of deeply suspicious powers, a reinforced trenchcoat and a gun.
I guess that'll have to do.
Monologue 5
It was foolish enough of me to start this case looking for a missing doom monster in the shadows of Atramentum on the comedown from a vicious hangover. Now, here I am also looking for a missing little girl right in the lion's den of one of the city's most professional crook rackets, on what little shuteye I could grab while recovering from getting dried like a salami by an evil book. But what else can you do? Little girl's not gonna rescue herself - I hope. Now that I've fully commited to this it'd make me look like a real lemon if she did.
On the real narrow plus-side, if you have to gamble your life somewhere, the city has no end to the list of options that'd be worse places than the nicer part of Little Shireside.
When the UPC was founded back in the War of the Concord, long before even my beat-up old jalopy of a skeleton was anywhere to be found, it took them a little while to bring the Halflings on board. Didn't seem like much of a military asset, you'll be shocked to hear, to sign up a bunch of knee-high ginks with the average fat-to-muscle ratio of a racoon and a cultural history that spent almost no time on defence or engineering and a whole lot of time on cookery, winemaking and the performing arts.
Then peacetime came, and suddenly food, booze and music had a real obvious appeal. Didn't take long after that to write the Halflings into the Concord, but by then all the good house-plots had been taken up by tall men's lilypads with very inconsiderately placed doorhandles. When the first old Shireside families moved from the green and pleasant shorehills of Evendim Lake to the Big Dark Apple, they were moving into steep awkward slopes and wet bogsoil; the part of the city outskirts nobody with sense and berries wanted to build on. A century or two of restaurant and music hall profits to lay a brick with and now they've got a whole bustling little mini-city of their own spread out in quaint little tileroof houses and gaslamps and jazz clubs all stacked around steep winding roads, the marshy old sloughwater drained into what we now call the Shireside Lake, and they now call the Little Evendim.
The Evendim switchback is visible rising over that selfsame shiny skate of pond water as Ms Natterlynd's motor peels a finely cut banana onto the South Bridge over to Little Shireside from the Eastern Dockside and the obstructing scenery of high-roofed warehouses and skyscrapers gives way to a world of very different architectural sensibilities more friendly towards long-distance views but far less friendly towards the nosebones of a beanpole like me. Knowing there's a pair of unusually literally bloodsucking tycoons searching the city for the same little girl we're after, it seemed prudent not to take one of the more direct and well-observed thoroughfares across the main waterway they call the Jot that breaks the city in two - especially since most of those woulda meant crossing Silkroad, where my pintsized partner is more likely to be recognised than just-about anywhere else.
At the top of the switchback, it's homely candles painting lambent gold smears on the inkglass of the lake far below, looms the Evendim Club, our ill-advised destination, showing off its classy awnings and marble pillars as if there isn't a blood soaked den of robber barons just beyond. When prohibition came for all the city's licker, the Shireside families that happened to still own boozemakers back in the old country found themselves real neatly positioned to take over the whole of Little Shireside and the whole city's rumrunning industry, so long as they weren't afraid to get their hands dirty en route. And there ain't many hands in the city as dirty by now as Don Pinto Cappoferro, the Godfather of Little Shireside.
"You're really going into the viper's nest with this one, detective," Sephy says as she finally slows to something approaching a sensible speed for the narrow winding streets of Little Shireside - no sense in attracting unwanted attention from a traffic cop right on the doorstep of the mob. "I hope you have a plan."
"You know, sometimes I forget," I tell her, gazing up the switchback at the viper's nest in question. "Kid, do we have a plan?"
On the real narrow plus-side, if you have to gamble your life somewhere, the city has no end to the list of options that'd be worse places than the nicer part of Little Shireside.
When the UPC was founded back in the War of the Concord, long before even my beat-up old jalopy of a skeleton was anywhere to be found, it took them a little while to bring the Halflings on board. Didn't seem like much of a military asset, you'll be shocked to hear, to sign up a bunch of knee-high ginks with the average fat-to-muscle ratio of a racoon and a cultural history that spent almost no time on defence or engineering and a whole lot of time on cookery, winemaking and the performing arts.
Then peacetime came, and suddenly food, booze and music had a real obvious appeal. Didn't take long after that to write the Halflings into the Concord, but by then all the good house-plots had been taken up by tall men's lilypads with very inconsiderately placed doorhandles. When the first old Shireside families moved from the green and pleasant shorehills of Evendim Lake to the Big Dark Apple, they were moving into steep awkward slopes and wet bogsoil; the part of the city outskirts nobody with sense and berries wanted to build on. A century or two of restaurant and music hall profits to lay a brick with and now they've got a whole bustling little mini-city of their own spread out in quaint little tileroof houses and gaslamps and jazz clubs all stacked around steep winding roads, the marshy old sloughwater drained into what we now call the Shireside Lake, and they now call the Little Evendim.
The Evendim switchback is visible rising over that selfsame shiny skate of pond water as Ms Natterlynd's motor peels a finely cut banana onto the South Bridge over to Little Shireside from the Eastern Dockside and the obstructing scenery of high-roofed warehouses and skyscrapers gives way to a world of very different architectural sensibilities more friendly towards long-distance views but far less friendly towards the nosebones of a beanpole like me. Knowing there's a pair of unusually literally bloodsucking tycoons searching the city for the same little girl we're after, it seemed prudent not to take one of the more direct and well-observed thoroughfares across the main waterway they call the Jot that breaks the city in two - especially since most of those woulda meant crossing Silkroad, where my pintsized partner is more likely to be recognised than just-about anywhere else.
At the top of the switchback, it's homely candles painting lambent gold smears on the inkglass of the lake far below, looms the Evendim Club, our ill-advised destination, showing off its classy awnings and marble pillars as if there isn't a blood soaked den of robber barons just beyond. When prohibition came for all the city's licker, the Shireside families that happened to still own boozemakers back in the old country found themselves real neatly positioned to take over the whole of Little Shireside and the whole city's rumrunning industry, so long as they weren't afraid to get their hands dirty en route. And there ain't many hands in the city as dirty by now as Don Pinto Cappoferro, the Godfather of Little Shireside.
"You're really going into the viper's nest with this one, detective," Sephy says as she finally slows to something approaching a sensible speed for the narrow winding streets of Little Shireside - no sense in attracting unwanted attention from a traffic cop right on the doorstep of the mob. "I hope you have a plan."
"You know, sometimes I forget," I tell her, gazing up the switchback at the viper's nest in question. "Kid, do we have a plan?"
Monologue 6
I've been in some scrapes in my time, and this one wasn't anywhere near the worst, although admittedly that isn't any guarantee of it not being the last. To be honest, by the usual measure of my fortune, I guess this actually counts as a point for me. Sure, we caught the cold steel gaze of the Godfather of Little Shireside himself, the biggest name in smallest suits and the only high-pillow hood crazy enough to apparently bring some kinda four-colour live tiger into his own gin mill. Sure, we got in a tangle with the same big cheese's chiv-happy second banana while the kid was dressed up as his squeeze, and now I got a little more of what passes for daylight in this city let in where daylight isn't meant to be let in. But by some happy break we walked outta both of those with our blood still pumping, which is better than a lot of other putzes have gotten outta Cappoferro and Tallboy. And now here we are with the very thing we came in here for: one plucky newsie kid, still alive and only slightly worse for wear thanks to some Halfling pug with a chronic case of no bedside manner.
Only thing we gotta figure out now is how to get out from behind the eight-ball here, cooped up as we are in an unfamiliar basement with no eyes on a window and Gods-only-know how many triggermen between here and the dame's fancy getaway crate.
It ain't a troublesome task to get the little miss out of her bonds with a little application of six years' experience crossing swords for nickles. Seems she doesn't know who she is or where she came from, but she knows how to walk and how to hide, which right now is a more highly demanded skillset.
"We're gonna get you outta here or die tryin', champ," I tell her. "And I'm doing my best to make it not the second one."
Outside this two-dime interrogation slammer there's a storeroom fulla booze, a probable secret door that I ain't got nearly enough time to jimmy open with the current number of hoods on my ass, and the not-quite-distant-enough rumblings of a lumbering occult contraption with a built-in link to the Big Little Man upstairs, and a half pint prize fighter who's already proven himself more than willing to hit a girl. Sephie puts her magic slippers and sneaky ol' snake gams to work, creeping through the kid's magic camouflage to lock up the door between us and the alerted goons, buying us a little more time before the chop squad arrives. I do my best to stay quiet as I roll a licker barrel or two in front of what I hope to Lady Liberty really is a door. I'd like to get a quiet way out of here if we can, but if beggars can't be choosers then there's more than one way to open a door, if you happen to have a large enough quantity of high-proof bug-juice, a matchbook and a place to hide.
Something soft slips in behind me, and a sharp but gentle tongue flicks the air by my ear.
"I hope you're as resourceful as they say, detective," whispers the dame, in a hiss that makes it hard not to feel where her lips made contact a few minutes ago. "I'm paying you to find my patron, not to get us both killed in a mob shootout."
"Watch this space, lady," I tell her. "I might be about to make a whole lot out of these resources in a minute."
I spare a glance to check what the kid's doing - the old kid, not the new younger model. "You got any good ideas left, Wunderkind? Or have we reached the point where I gotta start trying bad ones?"
Only thing we gotta figure out now is how to get out from behind the eight-ball here, cooped up as we are in an unfamiliar basement with no eyes on a window and Gods-only-know how many triggermen between here and the dame's fancy getaway crate.
It ain't a troublesome task to get the little miss out of her bonds with a little application of six years' experience crossing swords for nickles. Seems she doesn't know who she is or where she came from, but she knows how to walk and how to hide, which right now is a more highly demanded skillset.
"We're gonna get you outta here or die tryin', champ," I tell her. "And I'm doing my best to make it not the second one."
Outside this two-dime interrogation slammer there's a storeroom fulla booze, a probable secret door that I ain't got nearly enough time to jimmy open with the current number of hoods on my ass, and the not-quite-distant-enough rumblings of a lumbering occult contraption with a built-in link to the Big Little Man upstairs, and a half pint prize fighter who's already proven himself more than willing to hit a girl. Sephie puts her magic slippers and sneaky ol' snake gams to work, creeping through the kid's magic camouflage to lock up the door between us and the alerted goons, buying us a little more time before the chop squad arrives. I do my best to stay quiet as I roll a licker barrel or two in front of what I hope to Lady Liberty really is a door. I'd like to get a quiet way out of here if we can, but if beggars can't be choosers then there's more than one way to open a door, if you happen to have a large enough quantity of high-proof bug-juice, a matchbook and a place to hide.
Something soft slips in behind me, and a sharp but gentle tongue flicks the air by my ear.
"I hope you're as resourceful as they say, detective," whispers the dame, in a hiss that makes it hard not to feel where her lips made contact a few minutes ago. "I'm paying you to find my patron, not to get us both killed in a mob shootout."
"Watch this space, lady," I tell her. "I might be about to make a whole lot out of these resources in a minute."
I spare a glance to check what the kid's doing - the old kid, not the new younger model. "You got any good ideas left, Wunderkind? Or have we reached the point where I gotta start trying bad ones?"
Monologue 7
Sock for sock, this is about exactly how you don't want a case to go. Our only surviving witness to the squid's disappearance can barely remember her own name, let alone anything I can use. And the process of getting the sprout out of trouble has left us slap in the middle between the tiger-souled Godfather of Little Shireside and a 2000 lb chop-happy termite in a 90 dollar suit. At the present moment, very literally in the middle, and possibly fatally, as both sides seem determined to turn my client's fancy getaway crate into an iron scrap sandwich with everything. If Sephie's own piloting doesn't somehow get us away or more likely kill us first.
The Trox has squeezed two of its oversized hands out the window of it's Dillinger to fire a Tommy chopper straight at our ride. That's something to file away in case we somehow make it back to the office in a single-digit number of pieces: whatever this goon's here for, it looks like he doesn't need anyone alive.
The Trox has squeezed two of its oversized hands out the window of it's Dillinger to fire a Tommy chopper straight at our ride. That's something to file away in case we somehow make it back to the office in a single-digit number of pieces: whatever this goon's here for, it looks like he doesn't need anyone alive.
Monologue 8
The rain drives down around the Natterlynd, soaking into the fancy seatrags through broken windows and bulletholes in the metal.
If this was my car, it'd be a write-off. There are autoshops in the city that can heal up a getaway crate all the way back to factory sparkle with a little mild violation of the laws of physics, but even if I wasn't broke, every one of those that I know of is run by Brightpetal and Gneiss these days, and right now I'm twitchy enough with just cops, Shireside and the Trox out looking for us, without inviting those two parasites to take a bite.
Of course, Sephie - Ms Natterlynd - almost certainly has an at-home autoshop of her own she can use. That's the advantage of having your own name on the car, I guess.
In the back, the kid is taking the little lady through all manner of guided occult hoo-ha in the hopes of scraping up some of the memories her outing with our mutual dear departed knocked out of her ears. I'd wager a nickel he's trying to keep her mind off the freshly dug hole in her arm and the blossoming pair of matching shiners as much as he's hoping to get a convenient shiny solution to our kraken pinch. The gal spits out another tooth in-between turns gazing at the kid's swinging ticker. The kid himself looks about as put together as you'd expect for a Charlie that just walked out of a car crash into another car crash.
In the driver's seat, the forktongued dame's strange sweet face is all cut up and bleeding bronze-coloured syrup, broken glass in her hair, pet squid wrapped affectionately around her leg through a tear in her gladrags. You can tell she ain't a fighter, not like Joy was, but I gotta admit, she sure is still driving, even soaked like a sailor and beat up like the same sailor after a barside disagreement.
In less illustrious company, I'd admit I wasn't feeling 100% myself. I could do with a night off or six, and a round of liquid painkillers, only I ain't got the time with half the buttonmen in the city on my ass for the mysterious little lady in the backseat, so I settle for a gasper, which I manage to light on the third attempt in the rain that's driving almost as hard as our chauffeuse.
"Would you mind, detective?" asks Sephie, with a voice that sounds like it's just gone three rounds with Billy-goat Oxbridge the Downtown troll boxer. "I'd use my own, but I think your magic boy has my holder back there, and I need both hands to keep this wheel straight with all the new dents in it."
Obligingly, I slide a cigarette between her waiting lips and cup my hands around her face to light it up.
"You saved my life back there, Detective," she says, after her first drag, like she's reading off stock prices.
"I reckon we'd probably ALL be somewhere in the lake by now if it weren't for your tricks, pal," I tell her. "Call it square on that score."
She wraps her tongue around the gasper to flick the ash out the broken window into the ink-black street. I see her unblinking eyes study the pintsize new addition to our little mystery posse, shaking the dust off her cap in the backseat. "Quite a little family you're building up for yourself here, Detective. I don't know that I 'd have pegged you for the type."
I gotta give a snort of laughter for that, even in spite of everything. "Maybe I coulda been, once. Atramentum had other plans for me. It always does."
"What do you think it's planning now?" she asks, fixing that hypnotic snake-stare back on me.
"I try not to," I parry. "If anyone's gonna try and predict the future around here, that feels like the kid's job. What's your dance card look like from here, Axel? You wanna take this to the office or should we drop you straight at Gallachan's?"
If this was my car, it'd be a write-off. There are autoshops in the city that can heal up a getaway crate all the way back to factory sparkle with a little mild violation of the laws of physics, but even if I wasn't broke, every one of those that I know of is run by Brightpetal and Gneiss these days, and right now I'm twitchy enough with just cops, Shireside and the Trox out looking for us, without inviting those two parasites to take a bite.
Of course, Sephie - Ms Natterlynd - almost certainly has an at-home autoshop of her own she can use. That's the advantage of having your own name on the car, I guess.
In the back, the kid is taking the little lady through all manner of guided occult hoo-ha in the hopes of scraping up some of the memories her outing with our mutual dear departed knocked out of her ears. I'd wager a nickel he's trying to keep her mind off the freshly dug hole in her arm and the blossoming pair of matching shiners as much as he's hoping to get a convenient shiny solution to our kraken pinch. The gal spits out another tooth in-between turns gazing at the kid's swinging ticker. The kid himself looks about as put together as you'd expect for a Charlie that just walked out of a car crash into another car crash.
In the driver's seat, the forktongued dame's strange sweet face is all cut up and bleeding bronze-coloured syrup, broken glass in her hair, pet squid wrapped affectionately around her leg through a tear in her gladrags. You can tell she ain't a fighter, not like Joy was, but I gotta admit, she sure is still driving, even soaked like a sailor and beat up like the same sailor after a barside disagreement.
In less illustrious company, I'd admit I wasn't feeling 100% myself. I could do with a night off or six, and a round of liquid painkillers, only I ain't got the time with half the buttonmen in the city on my ass for the mysterious little lady in the backseat, so I settle for a gasper, which I manage to light on the third attempt in the rain that's driving almost as hard as our chauffeuse.
"Would you mind, detective?" asks Sephie, with a voice that sounds like it's just gone three rounds with Billy-goat Oxbridge the Downtown troll boxer. "I'd use my own, but I think your magic boy has my holder back there, and I need both hands to keep this wheel straight with all the new dents in it."
Obligingly, I slide a cigarette between her waiting lips and cup my hands around her face to light it up.
"You saved my life back there, Detective," she says, after her first drag, like she's reading off stock prices.
"I reckon we'd probably ALL be somewhere in the lake by now if it weren't for your tricks, pal," I tell her. "Call it square on that score."
She wraps her tongue around the gasper to flick the ash out the broken window into the ink-black street. I see her unblinking eyes study the pintsize new addition to our little mystery posse, shaking the dust off her cap in the backseat. "Quite a little family you're building up for yourself here, Detective. I don't know that I 'd have pegged you for the type."
I gotta give a snort of laughter for that, even in spite of everything. "Maybe I coulda been, once. Atramentum had other plans for me. It always does."
"What do you think it's planning now?" she asks, fixing that hypnotic snake-stare back on me.
"I try not to," I parry. "If anyone's gonna try and predict the future around here, that feels like the kid's job. What's your dance card look like from here, Axel? You wanna take this to the office or should we drop you straight at Gallachan's?"
Monologue 9
As is usually how it goes in my own sordid history, I'd made a nice little packet of mixed mistakes over the last couple of days - many of them noble, most of them stupid - and now I had to face the consequences.
Less usually, the majority of the mistakes so far this week didn't particularly involve alcohol - although Sephie and I did share a bottle of scotch last night while we patched ourselves up after putting the kid to bed, which may have exerted an influence or two between the lines.
Sephie, certainly, was the first mistake I made in this mess, and might turn out to be one of the biggest. I guess you don't get to be a dame in charge of a million-dollar racket like Natterlynd without knowing what you want and how to take it. Now the snake's got me in her coils, and I got no choice but to see this through to wherever she takes me.
Big Mistake Number Two is actually a very little mistake by height or volume, although maybe not - the kid tells me - by concentration of occult juju, and certainly not by asking price. Three or four different parties seem to be interested in buying up little miss Lonesome, and more than one of them has already set their opening bid at thirty pounds of lead direct to the torso, all in change.
A less street-bitten gumshoe might already have found himself forced to choose between the newshawker and his own working ticker by now. Fortunately, I've been around the block a few times to have a hidey-hole already stashed away for an even-rainier-than-usual day, which if Lady Luck stays interested ought to at least buy us a couple of nights to come up with some miraculous breakthrough.
Atramentum's a tough city, and I work a tough beat. I make enemies a lot more often than I make friends, which is only partly down to my winning personality. Sometimes a gink's gotta have a place he can lie low in when the chop squad's out looking to measure him for a complimentary wooden overcoat, and it just so happened that I live in an apartment building that was designed in stages by whomever hadn't run out of money yet, which means the staircase doesn't connect to my apartment but it also means there's a pokey little pad's worth of empty space behind one wall of my office where some of the staircase infrastructure ought to be. So one month while my landlady was out of town and I was temporarily flush with cabbage from a successful case that I was looking to plant somewhere before it went rotten, Sal and I got a little creative with our interior design.
It ain't much of a party venue - no windows, barely room for one skinny occupant, and every time I go in I hit my head on the doorway - but it's invisible from the outside and lined with enough lead in the walls to keep out most divinations anyone in this city's gonna know.
Given the current occupant's previous abode was the rotten hull of a haunted sail ship, it's even odds I might've gotten away with charging rent if I was just a smidge less self-destructively noble.
As of this morning there's no body in the city save me, Sephie, Sal and little miss Lonesome herself who know about the saferoom, and only me and Sal know the way inside. I'd like to keep it that way as much as possible, but the Webb kid's already in this Kraken malarkey up to his pointy ears, and with the amount of occult shit piling up I'm gonna need his big fancy brain to get me outta this jam with all my body's water still on the inside.
With a little fancy fingers, the heel comes off my shoe and slots into a tiny keyhole hidden behind a natty photograph of some batty workies up behind my desk. I don't bother hiding the code from the kid, not do I bother telling him. He's hung around me long enough by now, and probably seen me at my drunkest. He already knows.
The hidden door swings open and I step through into the fresh new parallelogram of light spread across the grey carpet, with the kid hovering at my elbow. Little miss Lonesome's thoughtfully kept the lamps off in here, possibly to keep down my electricity bill, but more likely because she's still sleeping off the kind of injuries a kid's not really supposed to survive before they're old enough to drink.
"You in here, Little Miss? Thekra?"
The advantage of decorating my rooms in all shades of grey is they look the exact same to darkvision as they do in the light, so it doesn't take my eyes any time to adjust. Otherwise, I might not have reacted in time to the... thing that lurched and stumbled its way outta the bed towards us.
Thekra's in here, all right - or something wearing her body like a bad suit is. I happen to have enough years of experience as a detective to immediately pick up on the clues that something isn't right compared to how she was last evening. Her limbs flail clumsily as she moves, like she can't quite remember how to use them. Her mouth's permanently open in a dry raspy gargle that doesn't match any sound I've ever heard before. It's impossible to tell through darkvision whether the stuff leaking out of her tear ducts and fingernails is blood or ink, but whatever it is it's probably not supposed to be leaking. And, most subtly, when I put her to bed last night, the girl didn't have tentacles.
Less usually, the majority of the mistakes so far this week didn't particularly involve alcohol - although Sephie and I did share a bottle of scotch last night while we patched ourselves up after putting the kid to bed, which may have exerted an influence or two between the lines.
Sephie, certainly, was the first mistake I made in this mess, and might turn out to be one of the biggest. I guess you don't get to be a dame in charge of a million-dollar racket like Natterlynd without knowing what you want and how to take it. Now the snake's got me in her coils, and I got no choice but to see this through to wherever she takes me.
Big Mistake Number Two is actually a very little mistake by height or volume, although maybe not - the kid tells me - by concentration of occult juju, and certainly not by asking price. Three or four different parties seem to be interested in buying up little miss Lonesome, and more than one of them has already set their opening bid at thirty pounds of lead direct to the torso, all in change.
A less street-bitten gumshoe might already have found himself forced to choose between the newshawker and his own working ticker by now. Fortunately, I've been around the block a few times to have a hidey-hole already stashed away for an even-rainier-than-usual day, which if Lady Luck stays interested ought to at least buy us a couple of nights to come up with some miraculous breakthrough.
Atramentum's a tough city, and I work a tough beat. I make enemies a lot more often than I make friends, which is only partly down to my winning personality. Sometimes a gink's gotta have a place he can lie low in when the chop squad's out looking to measure him for a complimentary wooden overcoat, and it just so happened that I live in an apartment building that was designed in stages by whomever hadn't run out of money yet, which means the staircase doesn't connect to my apartment but it also means there's a pokey little pad's worth of empty space behind one wall of my office where some of the staircase infrastructure ought to be. So one month while my landlady was out of town and I was temporarily flush with cabbage from a successful case that I was looking to plant somewhere before it went rotten, Sal and I got a little creative with our interior design.
It ain't much of a party venue - no windows, barely room for one skinny occupant, and every time I go in I hit my head on the doorway - but it's invisible from the outside and lined with enough lead in the walls to keep out most divinations anyone in this city's gonna know.
Given the current occupant's previous abode was the rotten hull of a haunted sail ship, it's even odds I might've gotten away with charging rent if I was just a smidge less self-destructively noble.
As of this morning there's no body in the city save me, Sephie, Sal and little miss Lonesome herself who know about the saferoom, and only me and Sal know the way inside. I'd like to keep it that way as much as possible, but the Webb kid's already in this Kraken malarkey up to his pointy ears, and with the amount of occult shit piling up I'm gonna need his big fancy brain to get me outta this jam with all my body's water still on the inside.
With a little fancy fingers, the heel comes off my shoe and slots into a tiny keyhole hidden behind a natty photograph of some batty workies up behind my desk. I don't bother hiding the code from the kid, not do I bother telling him. He's hung around me long enough by now, and probably seen me at my drunkest. He already knows.
The hidden door swings open and I step through into the fresh new parallelogram of light spread across the grey carpet, with the kid hovering at my elbow. Little miss Lonesome's thoughtfully kept the lamps off in here, possibly to keep down my electricity bill, but more likely because she's still sleeping off the kind of injuries a kid's not really supposed to survive before they're old enough to drink.
"You in here, Little Miss? Thekra?"
The advantage of decorating my rooms in all shades of grey is they look the exact same to darkvision as they do in the light, so it doesn't take my eyes any time to adjust. Otherwise, I might not have reacted in time to the... thing that lurched and stumbled its way outta the bed towards us.
Thekra's in here, all right - or something wearing her body like a bad suit is. I happen to have enough years of experience as a detective to immediately pick up on the clues that something isn't right compared to how she was last evening. Her limbs flail clumsily as she moves, like she can't quite remember how to use them. Her mouth's permanently open in a dry raspy gargle that doesn't match any sound I've ever heard before. It's impossible to tell through darkvision whether the stuff leaking out of her tear ducts and fingernails is blood or ink, but whatever it is it's probably not supposed to be leaking. And, most subtly, when I put her to bed last night, the girl didn't have tentacles.
Monologue 10
Morning in Atramentum comes with a weak grey light you don't get anywhere else. When the pale-slate sky's full of dark-slate rainclouds, like it is this morning and almost every morning, the grey light refracts through a hundred grey raindrops so the air seems to flicker like a filmreel, and the wet sidewalks sparkle like they're paved with tarnished silver and powdered with zinc.
It's a real sight to behold and a real pain in my ass to walk through. But I got a coat and a hat and an increasingly tight jam I need all the help I can get to pull out of.
We stick to the covered arcades and awnings as much as we can, and the tight alleyways between tall buildings where the rain has to make it through a whole coffee filter of ariels and vent pipes and fire escapes before it reaches ground level. Conveniently, these are also the places the cops don't patrol so much, because it's a real devil to get into a four-foot alleyway when you're four foot six across the shoulders. I'd feel pretty safe about that if the flatfoots were the only gang of lunks after us right now. Unfortunately halflings and tooth fairies are a lot more equipped to keep up with an unwary gumshoe through the winding ways of Downtown Atramentum, and the Man only knows what kinda tracking a vampire is capable of.
...
Number 8 Korat Alley is the offices for some down-market shipping logistics company. Number 10 is an apartment building even crummier than mine. Number 9 across the street is the saddest-looking bodega I've ever walked past, with one of the meanest looking Catfolk that's ever stared suspiciously at me through a window. Folks in this narrow band where Downtown meets Dockside tend to be a pretty rough and rowdy bunch - lotta sailors and itinerants. Surprising amount of Catfolk seem to end up around here - maybe they're drawn to the water by the fish but kept from getting closer by the water. Right now, of course, the bulk of the workies around this part of town are on the picket lines with Wall-Eye Wally and his boys, so as long as we don't go creeping any closer to the Dockside, we ain't likely to get too badly outnumbered all of a sudden.
The narrow back-alley between numbers 8 and 10 is a dead end, with a cluster of overflowing trash cans and a single staircase down to a door with no handle and one of those prison-style peephole shutters at what I'd guess is about eye-height for someone the approximate size of, say, the bodega cat across the street. All my private dick instincts say it's an excellent place to get jumped. I turn around to check the mouth of the alley again, and when I turn back, Nine-Lives is behind me.
"Took you long enough, Nines. I sure hope this isn't a real elaborate way to get us somewhere you can rob us. Jokes on you if it is: we're both broke."
Nine-Lives flashes a fang as she slips between us in the cramped alleyway without touching the sides. "If I wanted to rob you, Gray, I'da done it before I left the bar, and you wouldn't a known. I need you to try an be serious for once in your tragic farce of a career, gumshoe. I'm letting you in on something you ain't gonna get outta me again, and you ain't ever gonna get in without me. Were ya followed?"
"Gee, Nine-Lives, I forgot to ask. Kid, were we followed?"
...
Nine-Lives bats out a little rhythm on the door with paws soft enough it doesn't seem to make a sound over the rain, but the eyehole shutter opens to the narrow green eyes of a ginger tomcat who hisses for a password in Catfolk. Nine-Lives mewls a password back, and the Tomcat's eyes soften a touch just before they vanish behind the shutter.
"I caught the last part of that. It means 'these boys are with me'."
"Nearly. 'Row' is boys. 'Rau' is bozos."
A real heavyweight mouser opens the door into a pokey coat-check room that might as well have 'speakeasy' written on the lintel. Pink wallpaper with a gold cat motif visible under all the scrapes and scuffs. Peeling gold paint on the wainscotting. Sounds of a wild piano-and-bass number from the room beyond. It ain't a lot - it's barely a little - but someone put a lot of love into it the way only a cat-herd of down-and-outs with nothing else to love can.
Nine-Lives leaves her coat and hat with the alley-cat on the door.
"Miss Softpaw." "Thanks, Socks."
The detective chooses to keep his.
...
Through the door, crammed into the space available so the patrons are practically knee-to-knee, is a shabby but high-effort pink and gold burlesque house. Most of the patrons Catfolk of one stripe or another, about half of them sailors or dockworkers at least, all of them the sorts of people that'd get thrown out of any classy establishment, and given some funny looks even at Monty's. Dames walking around in their underthings with a shooter tucked through a garter in case anyone tries something they ain't paid for. FELLAS in a dame's underthings with a shooter tucked through their garter. Short-haired longhairs and long-haired shorthairs smoking cigars in pinstripes or cheap tuxes regardless of gender. Half of the fellas in here are getting pretty frisky with other fellas, and more than a few of the dames are batting eyes at other dames. At the focal end of the establishment there's a stage where a pair of real cool cats are playing the piano and bass for a group of burlesque dancers. The pianist and the bassist look like at some point they've either swapped clothes or swapped body shapes. The dancers are certainly all dressed and made up to look like ladies, but at this point no-one in the Obol would bet on it. In the front row, visible over the heads of every other patron, the massive shark-man from of Lefty Blahaj, enforcer for the Dockworker's Union, is happily dancing along in his seat. His dancing is very bad.
"Welcome to the Kittykat Club," says Nine-Lives drily. "Try not to get roped into something too far outside your comfort zone".
Behind the bar is a balding scrawny oddball of a tuxedo cat wearing a balding scrawny oddball of a tuxedo who fixes Nine Lives with a bug-eyed smile as she approaches.
"The usual, Tux. Get these two bozos and I a private table. And tell Miss Kitty to bring down the screamer."
"Absolutely, Miss Nine-Lives!" says the barman. "Any drinks for the new boys?"
...
"I'm on duty and the kid's flat broke," says the detective. The barman mixes up a glass of milk with some kinda sharp-smelling licker for Nine Lives, and a platter of fried things on sticks that I'm pretty certain are rodents. He waggles his claws at a blonde cheetah-spotted cigarette girl in a dangerously short pink figure-hugging dress with an ear slit cut into her floral pillbox hat. "Cheet my lovely, find these characters a private table and keep a little eye on them until Miss Kitty gets down."
The cigarette girl unlocks a side door off the main music hall and leads the trio to a comparatively quiet gaming table - faded pink felt with peeling gold edging. She puts her cigarette tray down on the table and selects one of her own products to light up, sitting at the table and crossing her legs in a way that, with the dress she's wearing, establishes for the company that she managed to find a set of panties in a matching shade of pink. The cigarette books her tray offers are all blank.
Nine-Lives drapes herself gracefully over a seat opposite and takes a bite out of a deep-fried mouse. The cigarette girl nudges Axel playfully with her tail.
"You boys got names? They call me Cheet!"
...
"My name's too long to be worth remembering," says Gray. "Is 'Cheet' because of the spots or because I shouldn't play you at cards?"
"Both of those are just coincidences!" she says. "It's cos it's always the married johns that seem to take me upstairs."
...
"While that's also true, it's also a coincidence," sighs Nine-Lives. "They call her 'Cheet' because she's never once missed with a throwing knife. And Tux sent her to watch you in case you try anything."
Cheet pouts a little. "It's no fun if you just tell them the secrets upfront, Teazer!" She points a cigarette at Axel. "But you can still get a prize if you guess where I'm hiding them!" She shows off her bare arms as if demonstrating that there are no throwing knives hidden up the sleeves her skimpy outfit doesn't have.
...
A burst of music from the hall signals that someone else has opened the door into their private gaming room. "Someone else", in this case, is a hugely rotund greying cat lady with a limp and a cane, wearing what probably started as a version of the same outfit Cheet has before it spent a few decades greying from cigarette smoke and getting an extra panel or two sewn in to keep up with the bulk of the body wearing it - the end result looking a little bit like a galleon under ragged sail. The dame looks like she coulda been a brothel madam in the old west - and she's old enough that you could almost believe she was.
"Sorry about the delay; I ain't as as spry as I once was. Cheet, angel, why don't we stand over here at a respectable distance while our friends have their discussion."
It's a real sight to behold and a real pain in my ass to walk through. But I got a coat and a hat and an increasingly tight jam I need all the help I can get to pull out of.
We stick to the covered arcades and awnings as much as we can, and the tight alleyways between tall buildings where the rain has to make it through a whole coffee filter of ariels and vent pipes and fire escapes before it reaches ground level. Conveniently, these are also the places the cops don't patrol so much, because it's a real devil to get into a four-foot alleyway when you're four foot six across the shoulders. I'd feel pretty safe about that if the flatfoots were the only gang of lunks after us right now. Unfortunately halflings and tooth fairies are a lot more equipped to keep up with an unwary gumshoe through the winding ways of Downtown Atramentum, and the Man only knows what kinda tracking a vampire is capable of.
...
Number 8 Korat Alley is the offices for some down-market shipping logistics company. Number 10 is an apartment building even crummier than mine. Number 9 across the street is the saddest-looking bodega I've ever walked past, with one of the meanest looking Catfolk that's ever stared suspiciously at me through a window. Folks in this narrow band where Downtown meets Dockside tend to be a pretty rough and rowdy bunch - lotta sailors and itinerants. Surprising amount of Catfolk seem to end up around here - maybe they're drawn to the water by the fish but kept from getting closer by the water. Right now, of course, the bulk of the workies around this part of town are on the picket lines with Wall-Eye Wally and his boys, so as long as we don't go creeping any closer to the Dockside, we ain't likely to get too badly outnumbered all of a sudden.
The narrow back-alley between numbers 8 and 10 is a dead end, with a cluster of overflowing trash cans and a single staircase down to a door with no handle and one of those prison-style peephole shutters at what I'd guess is about eye-height for someone the approximate size of, say, the bodega cat across the street. All my private dick instincts say it's an excellent place to get jumped. I turn around to check the mouth of the alley again, and when I turn back, Nine-Lives is behind me.
"Took you long enough, Nines. I sure hope this isn't a real elaborate way to get us somewhere you can rob us. Jokes on you if it is: we're both broke."
Nine-Lives flashes a fang as she slips between us in the cramped alleyway without touching the sides. "If I wanted to rob you, Gray, I'da done it before I left the bar, and you wouldn't a known. I need you to try an be serious for once in your tragic farce of a career, gumshoe. I'm letting you in on something you ain't gonna get outta me again, and you ain't ever gonna get in without me. Were ya followed?"
"Gee, Nine-Lives, I forgot to ask. Kid, were we followed?"
...
Nine-Lives bats out a little rhythm on the door with paws soft enough it doesn't seem to make a sound over the rain, but the eyehole shutter opens to the narrow green eyes of a ginger tomcat who hisses for a password in Catfolk. Nine-Lives mewls a password back, and the Tomcat's eyes soften a touch just before they vanish behind the shutter.
"I caught the last part of that. It means 'these boys are with me'."
"Nearly. 'Row' is boys. 'Rau' is bozos."
A real heavyweight mouser opens the door into a pokey coat-check room that might as well have 'speakeasy' written on the lintel. Pink wallpaper with a gold cat motif visible under all the scrapes and scuffs. Peeling gold paint on the wainscotting. Sounds of a wild piano-and-bass number from the room beyond. It ain't a lot - it's barely a little - but someone put a lot of love into it the way only a cat-herd of down-and-outs with nothing else to love can.
Nine-Lives leaves her coat and hat with the alley-cat on the door.
"Miss Softpaw." "Thanks, Socks."
The detective chooses to keep his.
...
Through the door, crammed into the space available so the patrons are practically knee-to-knee, is a shabby but high-effort pink and gold burlesque house. Most of the patrons Catfolk of one stripe or another, about half of them sailors or dockworkers at least, all of them the sorts of people that'd get thrown out of any classy establishment, and given some funny looks even at Monty's. Dames walking around in their underthings with a shooter tucked through a garter in case anyone tries something they ain't paid for. FELLAS in a dame's underthings with a shooter tucked through their garter. Short-haired longhairs and long-haired shorthairs smoking cigars in pinstripes or cheap tuxes regardless of gender. Half of the fellas in here are getting pretty frisky with other fellas, and more than a few of the dames are batting eyes at other dames. At the focal end of the establishment there's a stage where a pair of real cool cats are playing the piano and bass for a group of burlesque dancers. The pianist and the bassist look like at some point they've either swapped clothes or swapped body shapes. The dancers are certainly all dressed and made up to look like ladies, but at this point no-one in the Obol would bet on it. In the front row, visible over the heads of every other patron, the massive shark-man from of Lefty Blahaj, enforcer for the Dockworker's Union, is happily dancing along in his seat. His dancing is very bad.
"Welcome to the Kittykat Club," says Nine-Lives drily. "Try not to get roped into something too far outside your comfort zone".
Behind the bar is a balding scrawny oddball of a tuxedo cat wearing a balding scrawny oddball of a tuxedo who fixes Nine Lives with a bug-eyed smile as she approaches.
"The usual, Tux. Get these two bozos and I a private table. And tell Miss Kitty to bring down the screamer."
"Absolutely, Miss Nine-Lives!" says the barman. "Any drinks for the new boys?"
...
"I'm on duty and the kid's flat broke," says the detective. The barman mixes up a glass of milk with some kinda sharp-smelling licker for Nine Lives, and a platter of fried things on sticks that I'm pretty certain are rodents. He waggles his claws at a blonde cheetah-spotted cigarette girl in a dangerously short pink figure-hugging dress with an ear slit cut into her floral pillbox hat. "Cheet my lovely, find these characters a private table and keep a little eye on them until Miss Kitty gets down."
The cigarette girl unlocks a side door off the main music hall and leads the trio to a comparatively quiet gaming table - faded pink felt with peeling gold edging. She puts her cigarette tray down on the table and selects one of her own products to light up, sitting at the table and crossing her legs in a way that, with the dress she's wearing, establishes for the company that she managed to find a set of panties in a matching shade of pink. The cigarette books her tray offers are all blank.
Nine-Lives drapes herself gracefully over a seat opposite and takes a bite out of a deep-fried mouse. The cigarette girl nudges Axel playfully with her tail.
"You boys got names? They call me Cheet!"
...
"My name's too long to be worth remembering," says Gray. "Is 'Cheet' because of the spots or because I shouldn't play you at cards?"
"Both of those are just coincidences!" she says. "It's cos it's always the married johns that seem to take me upstairs."
...
"While that's also true, it's also a coincidence," sighs Nine-Lives. "They call her 'Cheet' because she's never once missed with a throwing knife. And Tux sent her to watch you in case you try anything."
Cheet pouts a little. "It's no fun if you just tell them the secrets upfront, Teazer!" She points a cigarette at Axel. "But you can still get a prize if you guess where I'm hiding them!" She shows off her bare arms as if demonstrating that there are no throwing knives hidden up the sleeves her skimpy outfit doesn't have.
...
A burst of music from the hall signals that someone else has opened the door into their private gaming room. "Someone else", in this case, is a hugely rotund greying cat lady with a limp and a cane, wearing what probably started as a version of the same outfit Cheet has before it spent a few decades greying from cigarette smoke and getting an extra panel or two sewn in to keep up with the bulk of the body wearing it - the end result looking a little bit like a galleon under ragged sail. The dame looks like she coulda been a brothel madam in the old west - and she's old enough that you could almost believe she was.
"Sorry about the delay; I ain't as as spry as I once was. Cheet, angel, why don't we stand over here at a respectable distance while our friends have their discussion."
Monologue 11
Fun fact about Dockside Atramentum is that is that this place used to be the mouth of what they called Inkwater Slough: an impassible brackish swampland where the river met the tides met the planar leakage from the Shadow Realm, and whatever garbage washed up from whichever direction got built up and festered with nowhere to go.
The Concordat drove out all the native scrags and merrows in a terrible and bloody military campaign back in the days before they let those folks into the Concord and pretended we were all equal in the eyes of the Senate, and they drained enough of the swamp to build this city and monetise river and tides and planar leakage for the good old Almighty Dollar, but it seems when a place has spent all of its existence being a gutter for the rotten things of the past to stick and fester in, it doesn't give up the habit easy.
Heck, we got the remnants of the family that led the depopulation of the Slough themselves still stuck around and festering over on the north side of the Shades, and as for this dock where the Slough's own rotten-toothed mouth was... Well. Right now I'm looking at the abandoned timbers of a boat whose purpose someone tried to cover up fortysomething years ago, with the world-ending god they pretended not to be digging for right behind me in the body that used to belong to a girl that someone abandoned near this spot by either incredible coincidence or extremely convoluted intention. This place is the crack between planes where stuff gets stuck when no-one wants it, and more often than not it's my job to make sure all the bad pennies between these proverbial sofa cushions get turned back up.
As for the little lady, she seems to be calmed down a lot from her usual bundle of nerves by the disinterested rumbling of the nearby ocean: something older and bigger and darker than even this old city. She takes a deep breath of salty, oily, fish-scented Dockside air and looks around.
"Yeah, I remember the boat," she says. "But I think I remember it... from the inside." She hesitates, like she's listening to a broadcast that isn't playing for the rest of us. "There's... Something else, too. Pulling. Like a tide. Over there."
She points out across the docks. Dockside curves out a little at both ends, so you can see the opposite extremes across the harbour if you happen to have darkvision and the fog's taking a smoke break. One direction, away from where the little girl's pointing, has the big copper Statue of Lady Liberty, gifted to the city by the Halfling Shires when the Senate let them join the Concord. The other direction's all cranes and old warehouses and ancient huts, the kind of place they probably find a body in the harbour every other week.
"Sounds like a tide with lousy taste. Has that always been there?"
The girl shakes her head. "There's always been one here" she says, nodding towards the boat. "And... There." She points again, straight outta the harbour, towards the distant horizon line of black waves against grey clouds. "This one's just today," she says, pointing back towards the nasty part of the harbour. "But it's stronger."
"Well, ain't that a real sockdollager. Axel, Kid. You got any insights on this, or do I just have to somehow make decisions based on tides in a child's head?"
The Concordat drove out all the native scrags and merrows in a terrible and bloody military campaign back in the days before they let those folks into the Concord and pretended we were all equal in the eyes of the Senate, and they drained enough of the swamp to build this city and monetise river and tides and planar leakage for the good old Almighty Dollar, but it seems when a place has spent all of its existence being a gutter for the rotten things of the past to stick and fester in, it doesn't give up the habit easy.
Heck, we got the remnants of the family that led the depopulation of the Slough themselves still stuck around and festering over on the north side of the Shades, and as for this dock where the Slough's own rotten-toothed mouth was... Well. Right now I'm looking at the abandoned timbers of a boat whose purpose someone tried to cover up fortysomething years ago, with the world-ending god they pretended not to be digging for right behind me in the body that used to belong to a girl that someone abandoned near this spot by either incredible coincidence or extremely convoluted intention. This place is the crack between planes where stuff gets stuck when no-one wants it, and more often than not it's my job to make sure all the bad pennies between these proverbial sofa cushions get turned back up.
As for the little lady, she seems to be calmed down a lot from her usual bundle of nerves by the disinterested rumbling of the nearby ocean: something older and bigger and darker than even this old city. She takes a deep breath of salty, oily, fish-scented Dockside air and looks around.
"Yeah, I remember the boat," she says. "But I think I remember it... from the inside." She hesitates, like she's listening to a broadcast that isn't playing for the rest of us. "There's... Something else, too. Pulling. Like a tide. Over there."
She points out across the docks. Dockside curves out a little at both ends, so you can see the opposite extremes across the harbour if you happen to have darkvision and the fog's taking a smoke break. One direction, away from where the little girl's pointing, has the big copper Statue of Lady Liberty, gifted to the city by the Halfling Shires when the Senate let them join the Concord. The other direction's all cranes and old warehouses and ancient huts, the kind of place they probably find a body in the harbour every other week.
"Sounds like a tide with lousy taste. Has that always been there?"
The girl shakes her head. "There's always been one here" she says, nodding towards the boat. "And... There." She points again, straight outta the harbour, towards the distant horizon line of black waves against grey clouds. "This one's just today," she says, pointing back towards the nasty part of the harbour. "But it's stronger."
"Well, ain't that a real sockdollager. Axel, Kid. You got any insights on this, or do I just have to somehow make decisions based on tides in a child's head?"
Monologue 12
An expected occupational hazard of my position is that I find myself in a lot of places I wouldn't want to be in. Crime dens, mob hideouts, dark alleys with a palooka at each end, and occasionally a political dinner.
We might just have found a new topper for the leaderboard here with a cursed and rotting ghost ship haunted by unpleasantly handsy sailor spooks, zombie slime monsters from the sea and the violent memories of an eldritch god.
It's precisely the sort of situation one would ordinarily suggest could only be ideal to share with three quarters of the surviving workforce of the city's foremost museum of occult bullshit, and yet one would, it turned out, be real wrong about that. Our salt-bearded dwarf friend has apparently been provoking whatever eldritch psychic hooha is in here in order to lure in the ancient apocalypse horror he has unfinished business with, but which also happens to be inconveniently a small girl under my immediate watch AND the missing patron I've been hired to secure by a very rich and very persuasive dame. Mr The Nose is trying to split he difference between hefting his giant skull-cracker in preparation to end a fight and remaining a comfortingly gentle presence so as not to set off the pipsqueak, which is a tricky enough needle for anyone to thread and our Jimmy here is no tailor. The small child - slash - ancient horror in question just lost an internal struggle against her inner octopus in the heat of an especially tense moment, and now she has a tentacle throwing miniature storms of electrical destruction around, which so far has only taken the dwarf out of the equation but somehow I don't think she's gonna stop at just the one without a serious adjustment in the ambience, and meanwhile my trusty occult expert is too busy getting engulfed by ghost tentacles from an unhelpfully placed ghost iceberg to explain what in the Nine Hells is going on.
One of those workdays.
We might just have found a new topper for the leaderboard here with a cursed and rotting ghost ship haunted by unpleasantly handsy sailor spooks, zombie slime monsters from the sea and the violent memories of an eldritch god.
It's precisely the sort of situation one would ordinarily suggest could only be ideal to share with three quarters of the surviving workforce of the city's foremost museum of occult bullshit, and yet one would, it turned out, be real wrong about that. Our salt-bearded dwarf friend has apparently been provoking whatever eldritch psychic hooha is in here in order to lure in the ancient apocalypse horror he has unfinished business with, but which also happens to be inconveniently a small girl under my immediate watch AND the missing patron I've been hired to secure by a very rich and very persuasive dame. Mr The Nose is trying to split he difference between hefting his giant skull-cracker in preparation to end a fight and remaining a comfortingly gentle presence so as not to set off the pipsqueak, which is a tricky enough needle for anyone to thread and our Jimmy here is no tailor. The small child - slash - ancient horror in question just lost an internal struggle against her inner octopus in the heat of an especially tense moment, and now she has a tentacle throwing miniature storms of electrical destruction around, which so far has only taken the dwarf out of the equation but somehow I don't think she's gonna stop at just the one without a serious adjustment in the ambience, and meanwhile my trusty occult expert is too busy getting engulfed by ghost tentacles from an unhelpfully placed ghost iceberg to explain what in the Nine Hells is going on.
One of those workdays.
Monologue 13
I tell the kid - the Webb kid, the one I had first and who only has a lot of knowledge of occult horrors in his head instead of an entire occult horror itself - to meet me tomorrow at Monty's. The office - and my apartment with it - are almost certainly under close watch from Bloodhunter and his flatfoot goons. Well be safe enough at the speakeasy while we figure out what we're doing about Miss Caine and the kobold Operative, Tam Taldrum's secret border crossing, and Ladies only know what else needs figuring out before we put this case to bed.
The sky's starting to shift back from dark-grey to black by the time we get within flapping distance of Elmer Gallachan's charming abode, where the kid has a convenient complementary skylight entryway to his bedroom that can bypass the sightlines of the undercover squad wagon conspicuously parked across the street. Clearing the flats off our backs is yet another impossible task to add to the list. We haven't even started figuring what to do with little Lonesome that doesn't end the godsdamn world, although it seems every goon show in the city has their own opinion on the matter by now; most of them remarkably violent.
Once the kid's safe inside - or whatever passes for safe around here right now - I head back to Monty's, where I placed a couple of calls earlier on while the kid was trying his luck at the interrogation game with Angel and Nine-Lives. One to Sal, to let her know to lock up and make sure the flats see her leave, but move everything about the current case into the saferoom first. If Bloodhunter wants to poke around my office while no-one's there, which I'd be willing to bet he does if I were a gambling man, I'd rather set the stage for him on my own terms.
The second call I placed to the only other place I can think of to lay low right now that the flats wouldn't dare touch. As soon as the cops give up on watching my office I can put Thekra back in the saferoom and, provided she doesn't lose any more teeth, she'll be as safe as she's gonna get until someone tells us how to stop her from going all danger squid every time she gets spooked. In the meantime, I need a friend in a high enough place to hide us both, and I only have one friend of any notable altitude these days.
You can tell she's being discreet, because for the first time she's sent a chauffeur rather than drive us herself - a huge Vanaran silverback with some very eye-raising facial scars, presumably on retainer from her dear old man who I recall used to hire ex-cons as muscle for when he needed to make a big show in a union negotiation. It's definitely her wagon, though, and I doubt she'd let anyone get their hands on it without her consent if she were still upright and breathing, so I take the chance on the big lug behind the steering wheel. He drives us in silence through the darkening streets until the bulk of the city, with all its highrises and alleyways, falls away behind the swanky garden estates of Uptown. I can feel the whitewashed mansions judging me from behind their hedgerows and treelines, for daring to come here in a cheap second-hand suit and an armoured trenchcoat that hasn't been dry-cleaned in a couple of weeks. The little lady's even more out of place than me, of course - probably never seen a green space this big or a building this clean in all her life - either of them - but it turns out she's already out for the count by the time I look to check on her. She's had a long day of shapeshifting and getting shot at, I guess.
The Natterlynd estate has its own private automobile test track, a garage nearly as large as the house itself, even the topiary is mostly modelled after Natterlynd automobiles. A pair of peacocks are wandering the green in between it all, just so you know the folks that live here have a spot of old-world class beyond just the car fortune. There's a statue of Jupiter Natterlynd himself out front, raised up on a pedestal, gesturing at the grounds and the garage and the roads beyond. If you seek a monument, look around you - here or anywhere with highways. The 20th Century is Natterlynd's world, and we're all just living in it. Only Natterlynd made the classic rookie mistake of dying with only a daughter to inherit the kingdom, which in a man's world can be a death sentence even to a business empire like Jupiter here's.
The big lug at the wheel scoops up the sleeping newsgirl with one arm and opens the door for me with the other - first to get me out of the car, and then into the entry hall of the building, all without saying a word.
"Strong silent type, huh? I respect it. Means you don't run outta conversation topics too soon."
There's a big metal man in the entry hall, with servant's livery stretched over his nuts and bolts. Gasoline powered, by the look of the exhausts on his back, but I'd bet probably with a hint of golem magic in him of the kind that gets less swanky doors kicked in by the prohibitionists these days. Class and cabbage open a lot of doors the rest of us don't get keys to, and it turns out they can keep the right doors shut, too.
The dame comes outta some kinda drawing room to meet us, quellizaire in hand, wearing a nightgown that probably costs more than my whole suit.
"Put the little girl in the Blue Suite, Ajax," she instructs. "Have Carbury keep an eye on the door. That'll be all. Please, detective, hang up your coat and hat. Can I offer you a nightcap?"
I spend a couple of hours in a half-lit room, in front of the fire, sharing a bottle of 1812 Oldlaw with Sephie Natterlynd while I go over the facts of the case.
Some unknown number of decades ago, someone, most likely our unaging bloodsucker friends at Brightpetal and Gneiss, constructed and dispatched a craft called the Nemo on a mission to locate and capture the Kraken That Ends the World, where it lay snoozing on the bottom of some Grindylowe-filled ocean trench. They succeeded in waking it up, but not bringing it back, getting frozen in an iceberg and sending a last distress signal back to whoever was listening in. Half a century ago, B&G hire Captain Mendelsohn, either officially through a deal with the Candentia Merchant Navy or directly by more off-the-books means, to head to the Nemo's last known co-ordinates and dig up the Kraken. Mendelsohn arrives to find a tribe of occultist Finfolk determined to keep anyone away from the Kraken and a gang of grindylowe determined to free it, witnesses a series of murders and commits a few of his own getting the prize home. B&G let Arkham Caine take the frozen Kraken into his museum, but when prohibition hits and they get a deal in place with city hall, it's B&G who get the security contract to keep an eye on the big squid while it's frozen in Caine's basement. Saltbeard Coalridge, one of a tiny handful of survivors of Mendelsohn's crew, develops enough of an obsession with the Kraken to get a job at the museum guarding the thing. City Hall conducts a ritual every year to keep the ice frozen and the Kraken subdued. A little over a decade ago, some Finfolk out in the deep black sea spawn a mostly-human baby, whether as a genetic fluke or an occult phenomenon, and SOMETHING convinces them to leave the little airbreather ashore in Atramentum specifically, where B&G put a tracker on her and leave her to grow up on the mean streets until a few days ago, when B&G make a deal with City Hall to alter their Kraken security ritual and send a goon in with little Lonesome the human Finfolk, seemingly to turn her into the Kraken's new body. Arcanum Inspector Melvin Brown gets the heebie-jeebies about the new ritual and blabs to the Shireside Mob. Meanwhile, museum archivist Whipoorwhil Jaycrake is secretly a part of a Dockside Kraken Cult led by some mysterious Prophet, who are getting equipment from a fishy-looking fellow under the supervision of the Velstrac, who may also have provided a set of Kraken idols to the Shireside. Jaycrake sets his cultist buddies up to disrupt the security ritual, presumably to free the Kraken. Melvin, under Shireside instruction, brings in Tam Taldrum and a magic-eating tiger to disrupt the ritual a whole different way so she can trap the Kraken in an idol and deliver it back to the Shireside don. Neither gang knows about the other, and B&G don't know about either, until they all step on each other's feet and the ritual turns into a firefight. The Kraken gets all blended up with Lonesome, and she gets out of the museum only to be picked up by the Shiresides. Jaycrake flees as soon as he sees the carnage, tries to meet up at a sleazy motel with someone who offered to help him out in a pinch - most likely the kobold Operative that then killed him and set it up to look like an accident. Someone sent Tony the Trox to destroy the evidence at the museum, shoot up the houses of both Jaycrake and Saltbeard, and then intercept us while we rescued the little lady from the Shireside Mob. In all the excitement there she lost a tooth, which attracted the attention of the Tooth Mob, who found out the hard way what she is, and could potentially have sold that information to anyone by now. Certainly someone gave the Powder Street Mob a reason to come after us. Meanwhile, this kobold Operative has taken charge of the police cordon around the museum, and is using Miss Caine's dedication to her institution to help him prevent further occult incursions, but it's up in the air what he plans to do once the museum is stable and Muriel isn't needed any more. We don't know for sure who he's working for, but we know he has a Candentia insignia and he gets his suits from Silken Webb, whose CEO has SOME kind of business deal with B&G that they value enough to make his estranged son a job offer. There's one other notable official from Candentia in town right now, that being Senator Benny Goodrake, who dropped in to shore up Mayor Pipswitch's reelection campaign so the pair of them together can realise some vision for the city's future that may or may not involve the looming breakdown of peace with the Shadow Plane now that Otsvald Berenger is pressing his fascist boots down on the shadow city right across the border from us, and may or may not be their desperate way of saving their own skin from an economic catastrophe that Wall-Eye Wally believes is coming. Somewhere in all of this, a Kyton who might be Miss Caine's grandmother is leaving cryptic hints by doll for the museum staff to find a guy named Warheit Schmerz, and what's left of the Kraken Cult is trying to summon their god to them and possibly succeeding enough that little Lonesome's been getting increasingly tentacley a lot of late. And now Ice Chips fuckin' Evan is interested enough to send us - or more specifically Axel - a bribe and a party invite. Oh yeah, and a lot of real dark old texts say if the wrong set of circumstances take place around the Kraken - whatever those might be - it might just trigger a whirlpool in the abyss between plains big enough to drown the world, and with Atramentum being situated right on the planar border it's a fair bet we'll all be the first to go when that happens, so no big pressure.
There's a whole lot of pieces on the board, which I appreciate, but it feels like I'm still missing a few important corners. Seems like a fair bet that B&G want the Kraken inside Thekra and Thekra under their control so they can weaponise her - maybe even cut her apart to do it. You'd be a fool to come up with a plan to take apart a person and rebuild them into a weapon without getting at least one Kyton involved, but who they might have struck a deal with for that and how remains a mystery, and we're gonna have to be smart if we want to poke around in B&G's affairs and still keep all our blood where it's meant to be. We know Cappoferro wants the Kraken in a form he can contain, but not what he plans to do with it. Taldrum definitely knows more than she's saying about that, but she's unlikely to spill anything more until we secure her the safe passage into the shadow plane she's after. We have even less idea what Powder Street want with her, and even less again about Evan and the Cold Hand. All the evidence suggests the cultists are looking to release the Kraken and trigger the apocalypse, but no word on why - Jaycrake didn't seem like the type to want to burn down the world, and at least one of the others was invested enough in the future to keep his union membership up to date. Axel had a psychic visit from a fairy mob boss who told him Big Al Dente of the Tooth Mob could shed light on that one, but that's only if we can get an audience with him. There's a lot we don't know about the Op, including who he's working for, why, and on what orders. We still don't know what Lukas Webb's involvement in any of this is, whether he's a player or a pawn or just an opportunistic wise guy. And we have no idea whose side Mariam Von Juntz is on, or why it's so important to her that somebody track down this Schmerz fella. And we still don't know why B&G picked Lonesome for their scheme, or why they waited until now to try it. Somewhere in all this, there's also a missing journalist who Lonesome's friends tipped off about Brightpetal picking her up for his scheme, and we don't know a lot of anything about her.
And then, there's the issue of evidence. We now have Mendelssohn's confession in writing to his part in the conspiracy, and a telegram that proves he was taking orders from someone named 'Gneiss', but it'll take a lot more than that to force the DA's hand when it comes to standing up to two of the city's richest businessmen, and that's assuming the DA isn't himself in on the whole thing from the start, given how cosy City Hall and B&G are together. If the DA refuses to prosecute, the only powers that could override him would be the Mayor or, if the Mayor is implicated too, the UPC senate - which, in Atramentum, is represented by Benny Goodrake. We'd need a pretty smart case or a real devious argument to convince any of those guys to put B&G safely inside the big house.
My head's swimming by the time I'm done laying it all out for myself, and only about half of that is from the scotch.
"It sounds like you've got a lot on your plate, detective," says the dame. I guess at some point I started thinking aloud. "Is there any way I can be of assistance?"
There's not a lot of humor in my chuckle. "Depends, Sephie. Do you know how to safely decouple an eldritch god from its mortal body or get the cops to leave me alone?"
"I can certainly do my best at both, detective," she says, so seriously that for a moment it almost sobers me up. "For the eldritch god, let me run some ideas past your colleague with the occult expertise and see what might present itself. For the police, give me a day or so and I'll see what I can leverage out of Mr Greenleaf."
The scotch bottle is empty, and the fire is burned down most of the way to embers. "How did you ever get an in with DA Greenleaf?" I ask her.
In the flickering darkness, Sephie Natterlynd smiles, emberlight glittering off her hooded eyes and smooth-polished scales. She sets her half-empty glass on the mantlepiece and runs her fingers through her hair. With a single serpentine movement, she slips straight out of her nightgown, which piles on the rich carpet behind her with a gentle whisper. "Why don't you let me show you, detective?"
Over on the other side of town, what does Axel do after departing from Gray?
The sky's starting to shift back from dark-grey to black by the time we get within flapping distance of Elmer Gallachan's charming abode, where the kid has a convenient complementary skylight entryway to his bedroom that can bypass the sightlines of the undercover squad wagon conspicuously parked across the street. Clearing the flats off our backs is yet another impossible task to add to the list. We haven't even started figuring what to do with little Lonesome that doesn't end the godsdamn world, although it seems every goon show in the city has their own opinion on the matter by now; most of them remarkably violent.
Once the kid's safe inside - or whatever passes for safe around here right now - I head back to Monty's, where I placed a couple of calls earlier on while the kid was trying his luck at the interrogation game with Angel and Nine-Lives. One to Sal, to let her know to lock up and make sure the flats see her leave, but move everything about the current case into the saferoom first. If Bloodhunter wants to poke around my office while no-one's there, which I'd be willing to bet he does if I were a gambling man, I'd rather set the stage for him on my own terms.
The second call I placed to the only other place I can think of to lay low right now that the flats wouldn't dare touch. As soon as the cops give up on watching my office I can put Thekra back in the saferoom and, provided she doesn't lose any more teeth, she'll be as safe as she's gonna get until someone tells us how to stop her from going all danger squid every time she gets spooked. In the meantime, I need a friend in a high enough place to hide us both, and I only have one friend of any notable altitude these days.
You can tell she's being discreet, because for the first time she's sent a chauffeur rather than drive us herself - a huge Vanaran silverback with some very eye-raising facial scars, presumably on retainer from her dear old man who I recall used to hire ex-cons as muscle for when he needed to make a big show in a union negotiation. It's definitely her wagon, though, and I doubt she'd let anyone get their hands on it without her consent if she were still upright and breathing, so I take the chance on the big lug behind the steering wheel. He drives us in silence through the darkening streets until the bulk of the city, with all its highrises and alleyways, falls away behind the swanky garden estates of Uptown. I can feel the whitewashed mansions judging me from behind their hedgerows and treelines, for daring to come here in a cheap second-hand suit and an armoured trenchcoat that hasn't been dry-cleaned in a couple of weeks. The little lady's even more out of place than me, of course - probably never seen a green space this big or a building this clean in all her life - either of them - but it turns out she's already out for the count by the time I look to check on her. She's had a long day of shapeshifting and getting shot at, I guess.
The Natterlynd estate has its own private automobile test track, a garage nearly as large as the house itself, even the topiary is mostly modelled after Natterlynd automobiles. A pair of peacocks are wandering the green in between it all, just so you know the folks that live here have a spot of old-world class beyond just the car fortune. There's a statue of Jupiter Natterlynd himself out front, raised up on a pedestal, gesturing at the grounds and the garage and the roads beyond. If you seek a monument, look around you - here or anywhere with highways. The 20th Century is Natterlynd's world, and we're all just living in it. Only Natterlynd made the classic rookie mistake of dying with only a daughter to inherit the kingdom, which in a man's world can be a death sentence even to a business empire like Jupiter here's.
The big lug at the wheel scoops up the sleeping newsgirl with one arm and opens the door for me with the other - first to get me out of the car, and then into the entry hall of the building, all without saying a word.
"Strong silent type, huh? I respect it. Means you don't run outta conversation topics too soon."
There's a big metal man in the entry hall, with servant's livery stretched over his nuts and bolts. Gasoline powered, by the look of the exhausts on his back, but I'd bet probably with a hint of golem magic in him of the kind that gets less swanky doors kicked in by the prohibitionists these days. Class and cabbage open a lot of doors the rest of us don't get keys to, and it turns out they can keep the right doors shut, too.
The dame comes outta some kinda drawing room to meet us, quellizaire in hand, wearing a nightgown that probably costs more than my whole suit.
"Put the little girl in the Blue Suite, Ajax," she instructs. "Have Carbury keep an eye on the door. That'll be all. Please, detective, hang up your coat and hat. Can I offer you a nightcap?"
I spend a couple of hours in a half-lit room, in front of the fire, sharing a bottle of 1812 Oldlaw with Sephie Natterlynd while I go over the facts of the case.
Some unknown number of decades ago, someone, most likely our unaging bloodsucker friends at Brightpetal and Gneiss, constructed and dispatched a craft called the Nemo on a mission to locate and capture the Kraken That Ends the World, where it lay snoozing on the bottom of some Grindylowe-filled ocean trench. They succeeded in waking it up, but not bringing it back, getting frozen in an iceberg and sending a last distress signal back to whoever was listening in. Half a century ago, B&G hire Captain Mendelsohn, either officially through a deal with the Candentia Merchant Navy or directly by more off-the-books means, to head to the Nemo's last known co-ordinates and dig up the Kraken. Mendelsohn arrives to find a tribe of occultist Finfolk determined to keep anyone away from the Kraken and a gang of grindylowe determined to free it, witnesses a series of murders and commits a few of his own getting the prize home. B&G let Arkham Caine take the frozen Kraken into his museum, but when prohibition hits and they get a deal in place with city hall, it's B&G who get the security contract to keep an eye on the big squid while it's frozen in Caine's basement. Saltbeard Coalridge, one of a tiny handful of survivors of Mendelsohn's crew, develops enough of an obsession with the Kraken to get a job at the museum guarding the thing. City Hall conducts a ritual every year to keep the ice frozen and the Kraken subdued. A little over a decade ago, some Finfolk out in the deep black sea spawn a mostly-human baby, whether as a genetic fluke or an occult phenomenon, and SOMETHING convinces them to leave the little airbreather ashore in Atramentum specifically, where B&G put a tracker on her and leave her to grow up on the mean streets until a few days ago, when B&G make a deal with City Hall to alter their Kraken security ritual and send a goon in with little Lonesome the human Finfolk, seemingly to turn her into the Kraken's new body. Arcanum Inspector Melvin Brown gets the heebie-jeebies about the new ritual and blabs to the Shireside Mob. Meanwhile, museum archivist Whipoorwhil Jaycrake is secretly a part of a Dockside Kraken Cult led by some mysterious Prophet, who are getting equipment from a fishy-looking fellow under the supervision of the Velstrac, who may also have provided a set of Kraken idols to the Shireside. Jaycrake sets his cultist buddies up to disrupt the security ritual, presumably to free the Kraken. Melvin, under Shireside instruction, brings in Tam Taldrum and a magic-eating tiger to disrupt the ritual a whole different way so she can trap the Kraken in an idol and deliver it back to the Shireside don. Neither gang knows about the other, and B&G don't know about either, until they all step on each other's feet and the ritual turns into a firefight. The Kraken gets all blended up with Lonesome, and she gets out of the museum only to be picked up by the Shiresides. Jaycrake flees as soon as he sees the carnage, tries to meet up at a sleazy motel with someone who offered to help him out in a pinch - most likely the kobold Operative that then killed him and set it up to look like an accident. Someone sent Tony the Trox to destroy the evidence at the museum, shoot up the houses of both Jaycrake and Saltbeard, and then intercept us while we rescued the little lady from the Shireside Mob. In all the excitement there she lost a tooth, which attracted the attention of the Tooth Mob, who found out the hard way what she is, and could potentially have sold that information to anyone by now. Certainly someone gave the Powder Street Mob a reason to come after us. Meanwhile, this kobold Operative has taken charge of the police cordon around the museum, and is using Miss Caine's dedication to her institution to help him prevent further occult incursions, but it's up in the air what he plans to do once the museum is stable and Muriel isn't needed any more. We don't know for sure who he's working for, but we know he has a Candentia insignia and he gets his suits from Silken Webb, whose CEO has SOME kind of business deal with B&G that they value enough to make his estranged son a job offer. There's one other notable official from Candentia in town right now, that being Senator Benny Goodrake, who dropped in to shore up Mayor Pipswitch's reelection campaign so the pair of them together can realise some vision for the city's future that may or may not involve the looming breakdown of peace with the Shadow Plane now that Otsvald Berenger is pressing his fascist boots down on the shadow city right across the border from us, and may or may not be their desperate way of saving their own skin from an economic catastrophe that Wall-Eye Wally believes is coming. Somewhere in all of this, a Kyton who might be Miss Caine's grandmother is leaving cryptic hints by doll for the museum staff to find a guy named Warheit Schmerz, and what's left of the Kraken Cult is trying to summon their god to them and possibly succeeding enough that little Lonesome's been getting increasingly tentacley a lot of late. And now Ice Chips fuckin' Evan is interested enough to send us - or more specifically Axel - a bribe and a party invite. Oh yeah, and a lot of real dark old texts say if the wrong set of circumstances take place around the Kraken - whatever those might be - it might just trigger a whirlpool in the abyss between plains big enough to drown the world, and with Atramentum being situated right on the planar border it's a fair bet we'll all be the first to go when that happens, so no big pressure.
There's a whole lot of pieces on the board, which I appreciate, but it feels like I'm still missing a few important corners. Seems like a fair bet that B&G want the Kraken inside Thekra and Thekra under their control so they can weaponise her - maybe even cut her apart to do it. You'd be a fool to come up with a plan to take apart a person and rebuild them into a weapon without getting at least one Kyton involved, but who they might have struck a deal with for that and how remains a mystery, and we're gonna have to be smart if we want to poke around in B&G's affairs and still keep all our blood where it's meant to be. We know Cappoferro wants the Kraken in a form he can contain, but not what he plans to do with it. Taldrum definitely knows more than she's saying about that, but she's unlikely to spill anything more until we secure her the safe passage into the shadow plane she's after. We have even less idea what Powder Street want with her, and even less again about Evan and the Cold Hand. All the evidence suggests the cultists are looking to release the Kraken and trigger the apocalypse, but no word on why - Jaycrake didn't seem like the type to want to burn down the world, and at least one of the others was invested enough in the future to keep his union membership up to date. Axel had a psychic visit from a fairy mob boss who told him Big Al Dente of the Tooth Mob could shed light on that one, but that's only if we can get an audience with him. There's a lot we don't know about the Op, including who he's working for, why, and on what orders. We still don't know what Lukas Webb's involvement in any of this is, whether he's a player or a pawn or just an opportunistic wise guy. And we have no idea whose side Mariam Von Juntz is on, or why it's so important to her that somebody track down this Schmerz fella. And we still don't know why B&G picked Lonesome for their scheme, or why they waited until now to try it. Somewhere in all this, there's also a missing journalist who Lonesome's friends tipped off about Brightpetal picking her up for his scheme, and we don't know a lot of anything about her.
And then, there's the issue of evidence. We now have Mendelssohn's confession in writing to his part in the conspiracy, and a telegram that proves he was taking orders from someone named 'Gneiss', but it'll take a lot more than that to force the DA's hand when it comes to standing up to two of the city's richest businessmen, and that's assuming the DA isn't himself in on the whole thing from the start, given how cosy City Hall and B&G are together. If the DA refuses to prosecute, the only powers that could override him would be the Mayor or, if the Mayor is implicated too, the UPC senate - which, in Atramentum, is represented by Benny Goodrake. We'd need a pretty smart case or a real devious argument to convince any of those guys to put B&G safely inside the big house.
My head's swimming by the time I'm done laying it all out for myself, and only about half of that is from the scotch.
"It sounds like you've got a lot on your plate, detective," says the dame. I guess at some point I started thinking aloud. "Is there any way I can be of assistance?"
There's not a lot of humor in my chuckle. "Depends, Sephie. Do you know how to safely decouple an eldritch god from its mortal body or get the cops to leave me alone?"
"I can certainly do my best at both, detective," she says, so seriously that for a moment it almost sobers me up. "For the eldritch god, let me run some ideas past your colleague with the occult expertise and see what might present itself. For the police, give me a day or so and I'll see what I can leverage out of Mr Greenleaf."
The scotch bottle is empty, and the fire is burned down most of the way to embers. "How did you ever get an in with DA Greenleaf?" I ask her.
In the flickering darkness, Sephie Natterlynd smiles, emberlight glittering off her hooded eyes and smooth-polished scales. She sets her half-empty glass on the mantlepiece and runs her fingers through her hair. With a single serpentine movement, she slips straight out of her nightgown, which piles on the rich carpet behind her with a gentle whisper. "Why don't you let me show you, detective?"
Over on the other side of town, what does Axel do after departing from Gray?
Monologue 14
I don't go to Sal's often. Doc says I shouldn't bend that far for too long at a time. I'd do a whole dice full o' numbers on my spine
But truth is, there's more about it than that.
For one thing, most of her folks don't approve of the kind of mud I drag in. Her mother thinks I'm a waster, which is fair, and her eldest sister thinks I'm a bad penny, which is inarguable. One of her younger sisters thinks I'm just dangerous enough to be interesting, which may be even worse, and all the kids in the house aren't used to seeing anyone over five feet or under four colours, which scares 'em.
For a second thing, the gal deserves a place of her own - or, not her own on this case, but surrounded exclusively by her own people - where everything she has to look through working for me doesn't get to intrude. Someone the city hasn't broken yet is damn near a miracle, and I ain't gonna spit in the eye of Lady Luck if I can help it; I know how much I need that eye of hers around to tip me a wink now and again.
Today, though, we had a little girl who needed hidden from damn near every palooka in the city, and I was hoping even Lady Luck would agree it was worth risking a crick in the neck and a spit in the eye to bring Atramentum's Most Innocent and Wanted to the only dame I ever trusted that I wasn't stupid enough to be in love with.
Sitting pretty in the compact and affordable side of Midtown like a frilly-haired girl waiting to be picked up from a big, dreary schoolhouse, the Friday family home does its best to hold onto a Gnomish spirit in the grey and the gloom of Atramentum, blue paint and pink sash windows and bright green roof tiles all shadowed and faded by the dim tendrils seeping through from the shadow plane. The picket gate comes up to about my knee, and is painted a real fetching shade of yellow. The garden beyond is a single narrow path that even I have a hard time sticking to, cutting a thin and winding slice between a hugger-mugger allotment jigsaw of herbs and veg half of which I've never seen or heard of before and probably never will again.
As soon as the tiny gate clicks open, a single tuft of green in the middle of a whole gang of leafy shrubs twists and shifts, and Sal's mom emerges, wrapped in gardening overalls, trailing a tape measure from where she's no doubt been measuring this year's marigolds. The old lady looks me up and further up, and spits out a disappointed 'tsk' as she sticks a brightly coloured slug to her shoulder to free up a hand for removing her beekeeper's mask.
"Is you. Finally show your face again. Come to waste my daughter's time with more of your problems and paperwork."
"I'm afraid so, Mrs Friday. Is Sal in? This here's my associate Axel Webb, and the little girl goes by either Lonesome or Thekra depending on who you ask. Axel, this here is Mitzi Friday."
"Mxyzptlk." She shakes dirt off a gloves hand and holds it out. "Are you also responsible for keeping my daughter locked in an office comparing gun residues and answering telephones?"
...
We're miraculously saved from further delays by the red-painted front door opening up at the other end of the path. A skinny crone waves a real dangerous-looking chef knife in the air and yells exuberantly in Gnomish - shrunken even for a Gnome, but reaching about Axel's height through grey-pink hair alone. Mitzi yammers back in the same language and then scowls at me as her mother-in-law realises they have company.
"Mitzi! Mr Detective is here and you are keeping him out in the cold and the rain like he is rutabaga! He is not rutabaga! There is a new child here also! And a tall and handsome boy! Hello tall and handsome boy! You are not rutabaga also yes?"
...
"Must come inside! Mitzi not be rude, she think you rutabaga! If you rutabaga I would cut you! Up for soup, yes? No, come in! Salamanca is in one of the workshops, I call her and you wait in sitting room. I bring soup - but not rutabaga! Salamanca!"
Noona Friday doesn't actually vacate the doorway while she shouts up the stairwell, but she's skinny and shrivelled enough, and I'm enough of a beanpole, to slip by her anyway. - though I have to bend halfway to double to miss the rafters, and even the kid's practically dusting the ceiling cobwebs with that watchmaker's bonnet of his. A gaggle of tiny anklebiters playing in the hallway shrink away and scatter once my looming gangly shadow falls across them. The marginally tallest two I'm pretty sure are the youngest of Sal's personal nunnery of sisters; the others I'm less up to scratch on, which means they're probably nieces, most likely of Jude, the eldest. Just my luck to make a rare in-person appearance on Sal's side of town the same day the whole family chooses to gather.
Inevitably, Sal's little sister Jac comes out to snoop at the commotion, bright as a button in her school uniform, ready for a regular day of imitating innocence like every other gal her age. Early 40s is about the start of adulthood for a Gnome, which is a dangerous age to be for multiple years at a time. She gasps and clasps her hands to her neat little pinafore.
"It's Mr Chiaroscuro!" She gabbles her excitement in Gnomish to her relatives on the sitting room and gives me a real sweet smile. Fortunately I don't have to cross wits with her today, because she catches sight of who I brought with me and immediately focuses on awkward young Axel Webb, a nervous boy closer enough to her in both height and age to make an even better target.
"And he's brought a new friend!" She bats her purple lashes at her chosen new victim. "What's your name, mister? I'm Jacarta!"
...
"We're looking for a friend of the kid here's, that Sal took in. Probably can't miss her. Probably left horn marks in your ceilings? More than likely got on with Mitzi and Jude real well due to a shared interest in cutting me down to size, if you'll pardon the expression in present company?"
"Si, si" - hard to tell if Noona realises she still has the blade in her hand as she waves me off in the narrow corridor. "But you are just miss her, she go out again to her museum, very dedicated to obsession, surely her Noona is very proud. Sit! Wait!"
Ordinarily I'd like to say we're in a hurry and need to amscray after Caine, but I worry granny Friday would take it as a challenge, and we do need to explain things to Sal, so I jerk my head at the kid to play along.
In the sitting room, a dozen or so Gnomish ladies are gathered all round a pretty pokey little room, in a scatterbrained arrangement of chairs and worktables evidencing a wide range of eclectic interests. There's a radio off on the corner, and a shrine-like arrangement of candles on the mantle around a faded mugshot of a mustachio'd gnome in a sailor suit.
Manitoba Friday came to Atramentum as a gunnery engineer for the UPC navy, and the lone man in a huge family of dames. In a piece of classic Atramentum lousy kismet, he died in a boat explosion on the UPCS Ambition in 1901. Stayed behind to tinker with the engine and bought most of the men time to get their lifeboats out of the blast radius, according to some of the sailors that got out. Naturally, the navy provided his mother, wife, numerous daughters and multiple unmarried sisters with a flag and a hero's funeral, but decided they couldn't quite stretch to supporting a whole family of their size out of the widows and orphans budget, so most of the elder Friday girls had to get whatever jobs were open to enterprising your dames in the 19 oughts. Sal has relatives all over the city, in offices and launderettes and shops and diners, a few at the telephone exchange, even one or two at City Hall. And, of course, more than a few in the Rhombodazzlers. Lady Luck pays out a better paycheck than you can get as a cigarette girl or a stenog, just so long as you don't push her the wrong way.
Fortunately, Gnomes always tend to make diligent workers, and the family makes a decent living out of their chosen fields. Noona used to be a kitchen lady before she retired, and her recipes, while unpredictable, could certainly never be called bland. Mitzi works in gardening and can get tropical sunflowers to pollinate under Atramentum's anemic skies, if you're the kind of eccentric willing to pay to make that happen. And of course, Sal can match blood spatter and gunpowder residue and bullet casings faster and more reliably than most of the Met clubhouse can, and the notes she keeps are real meticulous, if worded in an unexpectedly penny-dreadful sort of a voice.
It's hard not to feel awkward at the best of times when you're built to a scale a few hands higher than anyone or anything in your surroundings, made only moreso by Jude scowling from the centre of her gaggle of spooked anklebiters and Jac finding constant excuses to stand herself right next to Axel, and the enthusiastic chopping sounds from Noona in the kitchen.
Our mysterious little newsgirl seems pretty at home, though - I guess for her, this is about the first time everything's been the RIGHT size, and she even gets to see some of ',em from above. So that bodes well at least: we don't have to worry about her running out on us if we leave her here - only some wrong number on one or other side of the law tracking her here. We really need Bloodhunter's eyes off the office long enough to get Lonesome back in her saferoom before Lady Luck decides even her dedicated disciples in this house deserve a turn for the worse. But that's in Sephie's hands now - and, while I'm loathe to be optimistic while I'm racking up dangerous problems faster than I can solve them, if I had to pick someone I thought could charm the DA, Sephie's be my second choice after some kinda golem made of money. She's a real charming woman.
For the sake of my good health, such that it is, I figure I should focus on the problems I can at least try to tackle myself. I do my best to pull the kid away from earshot of his new admirer.
"It's gonna be a lot trickier to catch up with your employer if she's already on the other side of a police cordon. You think you can get us into the museum without showing our faces to the flat club?"
...
Finally, we are mercifully saved from a death by a thousand awkward stares by the arrival of Sal, straight as ever, carrying a scroll case, a small stack of files, and what I assume from the colourful scrapbook cover is her personal journal.
"I'm glad you dropped by, Mr Grey. I mighta found a couple a things you oughtta see. You too, Axel, sweetie."
She pulls over a corkboard one of her sisters was mapping some obsession on and flips it around to lay out her files.
"My cousin Jozy works at the patent office, so since we were looking into B&G I thought I'd see what she could borrow for me. Looks like they have a lot of patents on file that they haven't put in their product catalogue yet. Some of them even got words redacted out of the copy the patent office keep. I ain't a detective, but I oughtta thought that meant they had something to hide, so I took a look. First thing I found was this one. B&G have patents on file going all the way back to 17 hundred whatever. Those days they were mostly in weapons and warships, which you know happen to be personal specialty areas of mine. Made a lot of friends in the navy, even before my ol' man's day. But their first big invention to stay off the market and off the books was this one. Take a look."
...
"'After this Project Nemo, they seem to cool it on the secret projects for a little while, until right around your boss lady's museum gets the Kraken and they offer up their security sensors to be installed in the Kraken room. After that, they start working on a whole lotta munitions advancements that haven't all hit production yet. We gots trigger mechanisms and explosive concoctions and all kinda clever little gizmos and automated mini-rituals and alchemical methods that add up to tapping into some kind of destructive energy source and getting it to do its thing, either on a timer or at some particular trigger condition. Plenty of applications for most of this stuff in conventional guns and bombs if you wanted to take 'em down that route, but if I had to guess I'd say they've been holding so much of it back because they're waiting for a missing piece. If I had access to the stuff they've been patenting, and I wanted to build a weapon and wasn't a good and responsible girl, the only thing limiting the size of kaboom I could make would be the initial energy source at the centre of it all. It's like they got all sorts of ways of making a bigger and better gun here, but they're still lacking bigger and better gunpowder. If they crack that, by the time they put it all together and roll out their big finale it could be enough to level a city block or a city."
"Or enough to change the course of a war, in one direction or another. If you happened to believe a war was in the works."
"And one more thing. The most recent patent they filed? Was barely a week ago. It's so fulla redactions it's practically just a buncha black pages, but Jozi managed to slip out the few bits that ain't, if you wanna take a look."
But truth is, there's more about it than that.
For one thing, most of her folks don't approve of the kind of mud I drag in. Her mother thinks I'm a waster, which is fair, and her eldest sister thinks I'm a bad penny, which is inarguable. One of her younger sisters thinks I'm just dangerous enough to be interesting, which may be even worse, and all the kids in the house aren't used to seeing anyone over five feet or under four colours, which scares 'em.
For a second thing, the gal deserves a place of her own - or, not her own on this case, but surrounded exclusively by her own people - where everything she has to look through working for me doesn't get to intrude. Someone the city hasn't broken yet is damn near a miracle, and I ain't gonna spit in the eye of Lady Luck if I can help it; I know how much I need that eye of hers around to tip me a wink now and again.
Today, though, we had a little girl who needed hidden from damn near every palooka in the city, and I was hoping even Lady Luck would agree it was worth risking a crick in the neck and a spit in the eye to bring Atramentum's Most Innocent and Wanted to the only dame I ever trusted that I wasn't stupid enough to be in love with.
Sitting pretty in the compact and affordable side of Midtown like a frilly-haired girl waiting to be picked up from a big, dreary schoolhouse, the Friday family home does its best to hold onto a Gnomish spirit in the grey and the gloom of Atramentum, blue paint and pink sash windows and bright green roof tiles all shadowed and faded by the dim tendrils seeping through from the shadow plane. The picket gate comes up to about my knee, and is painted a real fetching shade of yellow. The garden beyond is a single narrow path that even I have a hard time sticking to, cutting a thin and winding slice between a hugger-mugger allotment jigsaw of herbs and veg half of which I've never seen or heard of before and probably never will again.
As soon as the tiny gate clicks open, a single tuft of green in the middle of a whole gang of leafy shrubs twists and shifts, and Sal's mom emerges, wrapped in gardening overalls, trailing a tape measure from where she's no doubt been measuring this year's marigolds. The old lady looks me up and further up, and spits out a disappointed 'tsk' as she sticks a brightly coloured slug to her shoulder to free up a hand for removing her beekeeper's mask.
"Is you. Finally show your face again. Come to waste my daughter's time with more of your problems and paperwork."
"I'm afraid so, Mrs Friday. Is Sal in? This here's my associate Axel Webb, and the little girl goes by either Lonesome or Thekra depending on who you ask. Axel, this here is Mitzi Friday."
"Mxyzptlk." She shakes dirt off a gloves hand and holds it out. "Are you also responsible for keeping my daughter locked in an office comparing gun residues and answering telephones?"
...
We're miraculously saved from further delays by the red-painted front door opening up at the other end of the path. A skinny crone waves a real dangerous-looking chef knife in the air and yells exuberantly in Gnomish - shrunken even for a Gnome, but reaching about Axel's height through grey-pink hair alone. Mitzi yammers back in the same language and then scowls at me as her mother-in-law realises they have company.
"Mitzi! Mr Detective is here and you are keeping him out in the cold and the rain like he is rutabaga! He is not rutabaga! There is a new child here also! And a tall and handsome boy! Hello tall and handsome boy! You are not rutabaga also yes?"
...
"Must come inside! Mitzi not be rude, she think you rutabaga! If you rutabaga I would cut you! Up for soup, yes? No, come in! Salamanca is in one of the workshops, I call her and you wait in sitting room. I bring soup - but not rutabaga! Salamanca!"
Noona Friday doesn't actually vacate the doorway while she shouts up the stairwell, but she's skinny and shrivelled enough, and I'm enough of a beanpole, to slip by her anyway. - though I have to bend halfway to double to miss the rafters, and even the kid's practically dusting the ceiling cobwebs with that watchmaker's bonnet of his. A gaggle of tiny anklebiters playing in the hallway shrink away and scatter once my looming gangly shadow falls across them. The marginally tallest two I'm pretty sure are the youngest of Sal's personal nunnery of sisters; the others I'm less up to scratch on, which means they're probably nieces, most likely of Jude, the eldest. Just my luck to make a rare in-person appearance on Sal's side of town the same day the whole family chooses to gather.
Inevitably, Sal's little sister Jac comes out to snoop at the commotion, bright as a button in her school uniform, ready for a regular day of imitating innocence like every other gal her age. Early 40s is about the start of adulthood for a Gnome, which is a dangerous age to be for multiple years at a time. She gasps and clasps her hands to her neat little pinafore.
"It's Mr Chiaroscuro!" She gabbles her excitement in Gnomish to her relatives on the sitting room and gives me a real sweet smile. Fortunately I don't have to cross wits with her today, because she catches sight of who I brought with me and immediately focuses on awkward young Axel Webb, a nervous boy closer enough to her in both height and age to make an even better target.
"And he's brought a new friend!" She bats her purple lashes at her chosen new victim. "What's your name, mister? I'm Jacarta!"
...
"We're looking for a friend of the kid here's, that Sal took in. Probably can't miss her. Probably left horn marks in your ceilings? More than likely got on with Mitzi and Jude real well due to a shared interest in cutting me down to size, if you'll pardon the expression in present company?"
"Si, si" - hard to tell if Noona realises she still has the blade in her hand as she waves me off in the narrow corridor. "But you are just miss her, she go out again to her museum, very dedicated to obsession, surely her Noona is very proud. Sit! Wait!"
Ordinarily I'd like to say we're in a hurry and need to amscray after Caine, but I worry granny Friday would take it as a challenge, and we do need to explain things to Sal, so I jerk my head at the kid to play along.
In the sitting room, a dozen or so Gnomish ladies are gathered all round a pretty pokey little room, in a scatterbrained arrangement of chairs and worktables evidencing a wide range of eclectic interests. There's a radio off on the corner, and a shrine-like arrangement of candles on the mantle around a faded mugshot of a mustachio'd gnome in a sailor suit.
Manitoba Friday came to Atramentum as a gunnery engineer for the UPC navy, and the lone man in a huge family of dames. In a piece of classic Atramentum lousy kismet, he died in a boat explosion on the UPCS Ambition in 1901. Stayed behind to tinker with the engine and bought most of the men time to get their lifeboats out of the blast radius, according to some of the sailors that got out. Naturally, the navy provided his mother, wife, numerous daughters and multiple unmarried sisters with a flag and a hero's funeral, but decided they couldn't quite stretch to supporting a whole family of their size out of the widows and orphans budget, so most of the elder Friday girls had to get whatever jobs were open to enterprising your dames in the 19 oughts. Sal has relatives all over the city, in offices and launderettes and shops and diners, a few at the telephone exchange, even one or two at City Hall. And, of course, more than a few in the Rhombodazzlers. Lady Luck pays out a better paycheck than you can get as a cigarette girl or a stenog, just so long as you don't push her the wrong way.
Fortunately, Gnomes always tend to make diligent workers, and the family makes a decent living out of their chosen fields. Noona used to be a kitchen lady before she retired, and her recipes, while unpredictable, could certainly never be called bland. Mitzi works in gardening and can get tropical sunflowers to pollinate under Atramentum's anemic skies, if you're the kind of eccentric willing to pay to make that happen. And of course, Sal can match blood spatter and gunpowder residue and bullet casings faster and more reliably than most of the Met clubhouse can, and the notes she keeps are real meticulous, if worded in an unexpectedly penny-dreadful sort of a voice.
It's hard not to feel awkward at the best of times when you're built to a scale a few hands higher than anyone or anything in your surroundings, made only moreso by Jude scowling from the centre of her gaggle of spooked anklebiters and Jac finding constant excuses to stand herself right next to Axel, and the enthusiastic chopping sounds from Noona in the kitchen.
Our mysterious little newsgirl seems pretty at home, though - I guess for her, this is about the first time everything's been the RIGHT size, and she even gets to see some of ',em from above. So that bodes well at least: we don't have to worry about her running out on us if we leave her here - only some wrong number on one or other side of the law tracking her here. We really need Bloodhunter's eyes off the office long enough to get Lonesome back in her saferoom before Lady Luck decides even her dedicated disciples in this house deserve a turn for the worse. But that's in Sephie's hands now - and, while I'm loathe to be optimistic while I'm racking up dangerous problems faster than I can solve them, if I had to pick someone I thought could charm the DA, Sephie's be my second choice after some kinda golem made of money. She's a real charming woman.
For the sake of my good health, such that it is, I figure I should focus on the problems I can at least try to tackle myself. I do my best to pull the kid away from earshot of his new admirer.
"It's gonna be a lot trickier to catch up with your employer if she's already on the other side of a police cordon. You think you can get us into the museum without showing our faces to the flat club?"
...
Finally, we are mercifully saved from a death by a thousand awkward stares by the arrival of Sal, straight as ever, carrying a scroll case, a small stack of files, and what I assume from the colourful scrapbook cover is her personal journal.
"I'm glad you dropped by, Mr Grey. I mighta found a couple a things you oughtta see. You too, Axel, sweetie."
She pulls over a corkboard one of her sisters was mapping some obsession on and flips it around to lay out her files.
"My cousin Jozy works at the patent office, so since we were looking into B&G I thought I'd see what she could borrow for me. Looks like they have a lot of patents on file that they haven't put in their product catalogue yet. Some of them even got words redacted out of the copy the patent office keep. I ain't a detective, but I oughtta thought that meant they had something to hide, so I took a look. First thing I found was this one. B&G have patents on file going all the way back to 17 hundred whatever. Those days they were mostly in weapons and warships, which you know happen to be personal specialty areas of mine. Made a lot of friends in the navy, even before my ol' man's day. But their first big invention to stay off the market and off the books was this one. Take a look."
...
"'After this Project Nemo, they seem to cool it on the secret projects for a little while, until right around your boss lady's museum gets the Kraken and they offer up their security sensors to be installed in the Kraken room. After that, they start working on a whole lotta munitions advancements that haven't all hit production yet. We gots trigger mechanisms and explosive concoctions and all kinda clever little gizmos and automated mini-rituals and alchemical methods that add up to tapping into some kind of destructive energy source and getting it to do its thing, either on a timer or at some particular trigger condition. Plenty of applications for most of this stuff in conventional guns and bombs if you wanted to take 'em down that route, but if I had to guess I'd say they've been holding so much of it back because they're waiting for a missing piece. If I had access to the stuff they've been patenting, and I wanted to build a weapon and wasn't a good and responsible girl, the only thing limiting the size of kaboom I could make would be the initial energy source at the centre of it all. It's like they got all sorts of ways of making a bigger and better gun here, but they're still lacking bigger and better gunpowder. If they crack that, by the time they put it all together and roll out their big finale it could be enough to level a city block or a city."
"Or enough to change the course of a war, in one direction or another. If you happened to believe a war was in the works."
"And one more thing. The most recent patent they filed? Was barely a week ago. It's so fulla redactions it's practically just a buncha black pages, but Jozi managed to slip out the few bits that ain't, if you wanna take a look."
Monologue 15
Niceties are thin on the ground in these greyed-out mean old streets.
Cling to them if you can get 'em. They run out faster than you'd think.
Some folks can afford to stay stocked in niceties for a long time as a perk of their job. The Natterlynd board certainly can. Gatz's cronies, and probably most of the Inkblot Gazette by extension. City Hall could if only they wanted to. Mr Wall-Eye's fighting to keep a hold of that right for his dockyard workies, so far as they ever had it, which I respect but I don't know that it's a horse I'd back at the Dullahan.
Say what you want about Muriel Caine - Ladies know I have - but she was doing what she could to keep the niceties in place for her workers too, until men with the kind of jobs that never have niceties came in and ruined it for her.
Some lines of work don't come with niceties. You can beg, borrow and steal however many you can find along the way, but sooner or later you have to cover the shortfall with a gun. Or else the shortfall covers you.
I'd rather it hadn't happened in front of the kid. But it happens. I've had to do it before and I'll have to do it again.
Men like the Op never get niceties. It's against their contract. They exist to steal the niceties of others and make the mean streets meaner.
The Concordat swears up and down in all of Candentia's shining golden halls that there are no men like the Op; not anymore; not since the Concord.
I don't know if they believe that out in the Shining City. Here in the dim streets of the City Where Dreams Are Made Of, believing everything the Concordat says about itself is just one more nicety most of us can't afford.
They don't have families any more, guys like him, or backgrounds, or names - but you can guess the story, give or take a few dimes. Some kobold tribe down in the Underside gets dollar signs in their eyes and moves to the surface, settles in Candentia where the dragons tend to be, running the coffers and choosing the laws. Maybe it takes a generation or two of thankless work before one of them proves his loyalty enough to catch some senator's eye, and some Charlie in a black suit takes him into a black room and tells him the spiel - the Shining City on a Hill sits on a bedrock of dirt and grime and other people's blood, and it needs a young man like you, son, to do the dirty work underground of polishing that bedrock so the city can keep shining. Every off-the-books button job a brick in the wall of the Concordat's defences. Every bullet in a troublemaker's skull a blow for democracy and apple pie.
They probably don't tell him right then and there that there's only one way that kinda line of work ever gets to end, but I reckon by the time the Op showed up on Jaycrake's doorstep he'd probably figured it out and made his peace.
Maybe it's served him well wherever he's gone to now.
Or maybe the only place he is now is twenty feet down and five feet out on the sidewalk behind the Arkham Caine Museum. Maybe he sold the only soul he ever had a long time ago, to a man without a name on the board of a group without a title, and all me and my Detective Special did was balance the books on a cheque that was already cashed.
Wouldn't that be nice.
I look at the kid. Ruffled, but remarkably unharmed thanks to all those tricks he keeps up his sleeves.
"Alright, kid. That's the bit I'm good at. Afraid we gotta lean on you for clearing up the remains and lifting whatever hoodoo shit got cast on the building before the flats notice or Tall Dark and Fiery out there finishes putting himself back together. You gotta keep it together until we get away from here, alright?"
Cling to them if you can get 'em. They run out faster than you'd think.
Some folks can afford to stay stocked in niceties for a long time as a perk of their job. The Natterlynd board certainly can. Gatz's cronies, and probably most of the Inkblot Gazette by extension. City Hall could if only they wanted to. Mr Wall-Eye's fighting to keep a hold of that right for his dockyard workies, so far as they ever had it, which I respect but I don't know that it's a horse I'd back at the Dullahan.
Say what you want about Muriel Caine - Ladies know I have - but she was doing what she could to keep the niceties in place for her workers too, until men with the kind of jobs that never have niceties came in and ruined it for her.
Some lines of work don't come with niceties. You can beg, borrow and steal however many you can find along the way, but sooner or later you have to cover the shortfall with a gun. Or else the shortfall covers you.
I'd rather it hadn't happened in front of the kid. But it happens. I've had to do it before and I'll have to do it again.
Men like the Op never get niceties. It's against their contract. They exist to steal the niceties of others and make the mean streets meaner.
The Concordat swears up and down in all of Candentia's shining golden halls that there are no men like the Op; not anymore; not since the Concord.
I don't know if they believe that out in the Shining City. Here in the dim streets of the City Where Dreams Are Made Of, believing everything the Concordat says about itself is just one more nicety most of us can't afford.
They don't have families any more, guys like him, or backgrounds, or names - but you can guess the story, give or take a few dimes. Some kobold tribe down in the Underside gets dollar signs in their eyes and moves to the surface, settles in Candentia where the dragons tend to be, running the coffers and choosing the laws. Maybe it takes a generation or two of thankless work before one of them proves his loyalty enough to catch some senator's eye, and some Charlie in a black suit takes him into a black room and tells him the spiel - the Shining City on a Hill sits on a bedrock of dirt and grime and other people's blood, and it needs a young man like you, son, to do the dirty work underground of polishing that bedrock so the city can keep shining. Every off-the-books button job a brick in the wall of the Concordat's defences. Every bullet in a troublemaker's skull a blow for democracy and apple pie.
They probably don't tell him right then and there that there's only one way that kinda line of work ever gets to end, but I reckon by the time the Op showed up on Jaycrake's doorstep he'd probably figured it out and made his peace.
Maybe it's served him well wherever he's gone to now.
Or maybe the only place he is now is twenty feet down and five feet out on the sidewalk behind the Arkham Caine Museum. Maybe he sold the only soul he ever had a long time ago, to a man without a name on the board of a group without a title, and all me and my Detective Special did was balance the books on a cheque that was already cashed.
Wouldn't that be nice.
I look at the kid. Ruffled, but remarkably unharmed thanks to all those tricks he keeps up his sleeves.
"Alright, kid. That's the bit I'm good at. Afraid we gotta lean on you for clearing up the remains and lifting whatever hoodoo shit got cast on the building before the flats notice or Tall Dark and Fiery out there finishes putting himself back together. You gotta keep it together until we get away from here, alright?"
Monologue 16
It's a beautiful day to be threatened, and Jaycrake used to live in a beautiful neighbourhood. I leave the kid to perch in one of a row of roadside trees, keeping a beady little pigeon eye on our carefully arranged crime scene until Bloodhunter sees what he needs to see, and I take a brisk afternoon stroll to the nearest trolley stop - just me and the friendly white glow of old streetlights reflected in broad wet sidewalk, and my shiny new tiepin that speaks with the voice of my local senate representative.
It doesn't really suit me. Doesn't go with the gray.
"Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Senator, but if I were you I might cut my losses on this one. You've lost your triggerman, implicated yourself in all manner of conduct unbecoming a dragon of your station, and it's pretty clear your buddies Poliander and Breckon have been playing you for a sucker and it's only a matter of time before they drain you like they drain everything else they touch. I'm not much of a gambler myself, Benny, but it looks like Lady Luck might not be with you on this one. No shame in leaving the table and keeping your shirt. I've seen the kinds of shirts you wear, Senator."
Goodrake chuckles, the way only a real big cheese can chuckle: real rich and real jovial, with the pizzaz of a multi-century career politician and the chutzpah of a 15-foot dragon with more moolah than Abadar.
"I've made it about three times your age without ever needing to rely on a lady, my boy, and I don't think it would suit to start now."
I make it to the leafy Midtown trolley stop without being assassinated and hop on the first trolley I see that isn't on a Dockside line. Guess I'm taking Goodrake through Central Plaza to the Shades, where he can fit in with all the other Ghouls.
"If you'll pardon my saying so," says the Senator, "You don't have the voice of the other young fella's father. I might even say you don't seem to be trying as hard as you were at the Kobold. But you do have the gunsmoke of a fighter in you, and obviously a nose for trouble. I can only surmise you must be the Fetching friend. The Private Eye. I'm afraid I don't quite recall your name."
I move to the back runner of the trolley and lean over the bar to keep the conversation as quiet as possible. A young elf couple and a family of dwarves give me funny looks from very different heights as I push past, but they're too polite to say anything round here. Just my luck, it turns out Cornelius Wagstaff's busybody wife is also taking a ride into town on the same line. I keep my voice below the rumble of the trolley as best I can.
"Nice trick, Benny. You oughtta perform on the Boulevard with that. Here, let me have a go:
"I don't think the rest of the Senate has your back on what you're doing here, do they, Benny? You had that one shortstack spook with the tiepin handling all your busywork from the Museum to Silken Webb to the Schlintz Motel, and not even a personal bodyguard otherwise. Had to deputise the mayor's office and the Metropolitan to get the manpower to shut up the Museum in the first place. And the tub that Brightpetal and Gneiss commissioned to recover their investment fifty-odd years ago left from our harbour, rather than Icepoint or anywhere else closer to the bergs. Oh, I'm sure your white-suit cronies in the Shining City all agreed to look the other way while you shoot your shot, but they don't want their name on it, do they?
And I'll bet City Hall don't know the half of it either, otherwise you wouldn'ta needed your spook snooping around a pair of factory magnates they were already buddies with and a museum they were already inspecting. Nah, Pipswitch is a natural born patsy; that's why Cappoferro keeps him around.
This is a personal project, isn't it, Benny? Anything goes wrong, anything gets out, and you're the schmuck the rest of the Senate'll hang out to dry like a mackerel they intend to smoke.
You got a pretty good gig going right now, dontcha Benny? Seems a hell of a stake to be playing political Parcheesi with. And for what?"
I thought he might take the bait. Sweet ladies, I wish he'd take the bait. But this kipper's too slick for that.
"Why don't you tell me, Detective?" says the Senator, and fit me for an overcoat if I can't hear that winning smile all the way from here. "It's your story to tell, and quite a tale you've spun I may say."
"Yeah, well, maybe we'll see who else thinks so, how's that for a party plan? Let's see: We'll start with the strike, shall we, Senator? Dollars to nickels that's how you got the mayor's Hancock on this whole Palooza, huh? Fixing his little workie problem in time for the election.
"I heard you talking a big game on the radio about putting everyone to work in a new line of manufacturing. Shiny new factories as far as the eye can see. You were a lot more of a tightwad on the details of what we're gonna be manufacturing, but it doesn't take an A-clads detective to put the pieces together on that.
"A big ol' war - that's the plan, isn't it Senator? Fill the hole in the economy with demand for tanks and bullets and, who knows, maybe thin the herd a little of striking-age ginks while you're at it, am I right?
"But you've been in politics a long time, haven't you, Benny? You knew the rest of the Senate was never gonna vote for another war - not against a big nasty lot like the Kytonian Ecclesiarchy - unless they were sure it was a war they could win.
"That's where B and G come into it, isn't it, Benny? They promised you they could make you a secret weapon that could blow a hole in someone else's plane bigger than anything the Ecclesiarchy can do. IF you gave them a little hand greasing the wheels of their R&D. A little navy expedition here, a little cover-up there. And, presumably, a hell of a paycheck for the finished product.
"That's the real sticky point for a man like you, isn't it Benny? You don't wanna pay through the snout top-dollar to a pair of expert bloodsuckers like B&G if you can help it. So you go looking for a little leverage on them: send your spook to tail them a little, maybe he can get a little blackmail, or maybe he can find out how their secret weapon works so the Senate can make its own and you can cut them out of the deal entirely. When they started sniffing around the same Museum where the city stashed the Squid God of Destruction they pulled out of the wreckage of their own wrecked sub half a century ago, the Kobold figured out that had to be the key, but he didn't know how. He DID know that Whippoorwill Jaycrake's obvious obsession with the Kraken made him exactly the right person to notice if someone else tampered with it, and that any kind of Kraken expert sticking his beak into your scheme would more than likely figure the truth before you were good and ready, so he made Jaycrake would go to him before anyone else, and then he made sure he never got to go to anyone else at all. For good measure you told him to put the button on Jaycrake's boss too, just as soon as she wasn't useful.
"So that explains the Mayor, B&G and the Kobold, but you know, Benny, I'm still a little stuck on you. Why do you want a war so badly, Senator? Why have you been prepping for one since 1832? The economy boost is a good enough reason for a short-sighted gink like the mayor, and B&G don't care what happens as long as you pay them enough, but it's a lot of cost to you for a pretty short-term thing. I gather dragons tend to live a thousand years or more, don't they, Senator? No way you'd risk your own career for a market bump that ain't likely to last my lifetime. Please, enlighten me. Lend me some of that famous Gold Dragon wisdom."
Goodrake sighs like my laundress when she sees another bloodstain.
"Anyone with an eye for politics can see that the war with the Ecclesiarchy is coming whether we like it or not. The shadows across the plane continue to grow and darken. It's an easy call to make sure that, when the war comes, the Concordat is equipped to win."
"Yeah, I bet than line goes down like a double shot of Oldlaw in the Senate, but I ain't so sure it cuts any mustard. I don't pretend to be a mathematician but... I'm about in my 40s myself, Senator, and when I was a kid in the Shadow City there were still about half a dozen coulda-been Demogogues out for control of the Ecclesiarchy, and the Velatrac were moving a lot of apples and a lot of lead trying to secure Berenger the clout to make his plane-wide purity empire possible. Seemed like a bit of a premature time to be handing over your Merchant Navy boys to some cockamamie horror expedition. If there's a war coming, I dunno that I buy that it's been coming since you started this. And besides, if all you were doing really was preparing the country to be able to defend itself, why all the secrecy? Why sneak around striking deals without the formal backing of the Senate?
"I'd wager you wanna make sure the war happens and you don't wanna risk scaring off the Kytons before they give you the casus belli you need. What's more, Senator, I'd wager you wanna set off as many of those weapons you commissioned as you can get away with - otherwise B&G wouldn't be scrambling so hard to make sure they get the means to produce an indefinite supply. A localised apocalypse the size of a city isn't a very solid way to defend against an invasion, Mr Goodrake, but it's a pretty neat way to take a landmark off the map. If you only had them making one or two of the dinguses, I'd think maybe you were just wrangling to knock over the seat of government while the Demogogue was on duty, but a steady supply? That looks to me like you're just waiting for the excuse to knock over the whole country, Senator. Turn all the cities into sinkholes and all the Charlies, dames and anklebiters into smoke."
THAT rattles him. Finally. I get a whole second or two of silence out of the old drake before he slithers out that golden tongue of his again.
"You have a lot of very incendiary ideas there, Detective. But it seems to me you've failed to answer your own question. Now, why on earth would any sitting Senator WANT a war so destructive?"
"Well, Senator, I wish I could say I thought it was something fancy, but I don't. I noticed earlier in our little pow-wow hear you made a big deal about never having relied on a "lady". Ya coulda said "god", and it woulda made a better point, but you didn't. Maybe you're just real patriarchal, Mack, I don't know, but maybe again you ARE a religious man, just not for one of the ladies. Doesn't take a genius to guess your loyalties at that point, Benny. The scales coulda just been me profiling, but the watch and the tie-pin are a dead giveaway, not to mention I've noticed you've never missed a movie premier for that Dolores Gilt starlet every time you're in town. Myself, I'm more of a Valentine Charlie, but that's because I ain't a Dollarite, am I right? You're a card-carrying student of the Almighty Dollar, aintcha, Benny? And maybe that gave you a little economic insight us more short-lived creatures took longer to clock to.
"I reckon maybe you saw the same thing Wall-Eye Wally did, maybe even before he did. The Almighty Dollar can't keep cashing his checks. Our whole country's been running up a tab we don't have the green to pay off. Now the party's over, and we're all just waiting for the hoity-toits to notice.
"And you couldn't have that. You're doing better outa the rich times than most. But where are you gonna find the berries to keep the whole country in the green so you can keep skimming your percentages off the top?"
I light up a gasper and watch my reflection in the smooth black puddles passing under the trolley.
"The Shadow Plane's got a whole mineral wealth ecosystem of its own. They got magic there we can't replicate yet. Neon crystals and shadow glass skyscrapers... And you happen to be Senator of the city right on the border. You topple the Ecclesiarchy, and knock over every major city-state in the Shadow Plane along the way, and there's nothing to stop you looting the whole Plane just like the Concordat already did with the native marsh-dwellers that used to live where Atramentum is now - only bigger, and shinier. This AIN'T a war, Senator, is it? It's a SHAKEDOWN. This isn't politics; it's a gang racket, and you're just the Kingpin looking to get paid protection money."
I blow a cloud of smoke into the wake of the trolley and listen to the thoughtful quiet on the other end of the line. When the Senator speaks again, his voice is just a little lower, and just a little rumblier, like he's not putting so much juice into pretending not to be a magic lizard the size of a gas station temporarily wearing a person-sized face.
"Those are some mighty find stories you've told there, Detective," he rumbles "with some quite hurtful allegations. But that's all they are. Allegations. Stories. I've heard a lot of guesswork and not a lot of provable fact. You really think there's an outlet in the UPC that'd publish such a baseless hit-piece on a sitting Senator? You'd be asking then to lose their reputation and their career if you did.
"But I can tell you're a tenacious fella - stubborn, some might say. Never one to let a little common sense get in the way of a good crusade, hmm? So let me offer you a friendly deal, Detective. You give up your crusade now, and settle the Webb boy down with you, and I'll make sure you get your names cleared, your boy gets his Museum back, and I'll pay off whatever outstanding offer you had to investigate this 'case', hmm? In fact, you give me whatever you have on Mr Brightpetal and Mr Gneiss and I'll double whatever your current client is paying. I'll pay your way out of this shady cesspit of a town, hmm? You can go wherever you want. Do whatever you want. Drink yourself to death in whichever gutter best takes your fancy, anywhere in the world.
"You make the wrong choice, and I will have no choice but to sue you for slander. I can bury you, bury your occultist friend, bury that Museum, and bury any damn fool you find unsensed enough to try to publish your story."
"Is that the way you buried Jaycrake?" I ask him.
"Your choice, Mr Gray," he says.
I guess he figured out my name after all.
"I'll have to get back to you on that," I say. "I'm going into a tunnel."
I take off the tipin and drop it off the back of the trolley onto the tracks, and hop off at the next stop. Time to catch up with the kid.
...
Back at Jaycrake's, Axel's got about ten minutes to wait before the squad cars pull up.
...
Lieutenant Dirk Bloodhunter gets outta the car, unholsters his pea-shooter and steps into the house.
A few minutes afterwards he steps back out and orders one of his underlings to get back in the car and radio in to the chief and the coroner. "We're gonna be here a while."
It doesn't really suit me. Doesn't go with the gray.
"Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Senator, but if I were you I might cut my losses on this one. You've lost your triggerman, implicated yourself in all manner of conduct unbecoming a dragon of your station, and it's pretty clear your buddies Poliander and Breckon have been playing you for a sucker and it's only a matter of time before they drain you like they drain everything else they touch. I'm not much of a gambler myself, Benny, but it looks like Lady Luck might not be with you on this one. No shame in leaving the table and keeping your shirt. I've seen the kinds of shirts you wear, Senator."
Goodrake chuckles, the way only a real big cheese can chuckle: real rich and real jovial, with the pizzaz of a multi-century career politician and the chutzpah of a 15-foot dragon with more moolah than Abadar.
"I've made it about three times your age without ever needing to rely on a lady, my boy, and I don't think it would suit to start now."
I make it to the leafy Midtown trolley stop without being assassinated and hop on the first trolley I see that isn't on a Dockside line. Guess I'm taking Goodrake through Central Plaza to the Shades, where he can fit in with all the other Ghouls.
"If you'll pardon my saying so," says the Senator, "You don't have the voice of the other young fella's father. I might even say you don't seem to be trying as hard as you were at the Kobold. But you do have the gunsmoke of a fighter in you, and obviously a nose for trouble. I can only surmise you must be the Fetching friend. The Private Eye. I'm afraid I don't quite recall your name."
I move to the back runner of the trolley and lean over the bar to keep the conversation as quiet as possible. A young elf couple and a family of dwarves give me funny looks from very different heights as I push past, but they're too polite to say anything round here. Just my luck, it turns out Cornelius Wagstaff's busybody wife is also taking a ride into town on the same line. I keep my voice below the rumble of the trolley as best I can.
"Nice trick, Benny. You oughtta perform on the Boulevard with that. Here, let me have a go:
"I don't think the rest of the Senate has your back on what you're doing here, do they, Benny? You had that one shortstack spook with the tiepin handling all your busywork from the Museum to Silken Webb to the Schlintz Motel, and not even a personal bodyguard otherwise. Had to deputise the mayor's office and the Metropolitan to get the manpower to shut up the Museum in the first place. And the tub that Brightpetal and Gneiss commissioned to recover their investment fifty-odd years ago left from our harbour, rather than Icepoint or anywhere else closer to the bergs. Oh, I'm sure your white-suit cronies in the Shining City all agreed to look the other way while you shoot your shot, but they don't want their name on it, do they?
And I'll bet City Hall don't know the half of it either, otherwise you wouldn'ta needed your spook snooping around a pair of factory magnates they were already buddies with and a museum they were already inspecting. Nah, Pipswitch is a natural born patsy; that's why Cappoferro keeps him around.
This is a personal project, isn't it, Benny? Anything goes wrong, anything gets out, and you're the schmuck the rest of the Senate'll hang out to dry like a mackerel they intend to smoke.
You got a pretty good gig going right now, dontcha Benny? Seems a hell of a stake to be playing political Parcheesi with. And for what?"
I thought he might take the bait. Sweet ladies, I wish he'd take the bait. But this kipper's too slick for that.
"Why don't you tell me, Detective?" says the Senator, and fit me for an overcoat if I can't hear that winning smile all the way from here. "It's your story to tell, and quite a tale you've spun I may say."
"Yeah, well, maybe we'll see who else thinks so, how's that for a party plan? Let's see: We'll start with the strike, shall we, Senator? Dollars to nickels that's how you got the mayor's Hancock on this whole Palooza, huh? Fixing his little workie problem in time for the election.
"I heard you talking a big game on the radio about putting everyone to work in a new line of manufacturing. Shiny new factories as far as the eye can see. You were a lot more of a tightwad on the details of what we're gonna be manufacturing, but it doesn't take an A-clads detective to put the pieces together on that.
"A big ol' war - that's the plan, isn't it Senator? Fill the hole in the economy with demand for tanks and bullets and, who knows, maybe thin the herd a little of striking-age ginks while you're at it, am I right?
"But you've been in politics a long time, haven't you, Benny? You knew the rest of the Senate was never gonna vote for another war - not against a big nasty lot like the Kytonian Ecclesiarchy - unless they were sure it was a war they could win.
"That's where B and G come into it, isn't it, Benny? They promised you they could make you a secret weapon that could blow a hole in someone else's plane bigger than anything the Ecclesiarchy can do. IF you gave them a little hand greasing the wheels of their R&D. A little navy expedition here, a little cover-up there. And, presumably, a hell of a paycheck for the finished product.
"That's the real sticky point for a man like you, isn't it Benny? You don't wanna pay through the snout top-dollar to a pair of expert bloodsuckers like B&G if you can help it. So you go looking for a little leverage on them: send your spook to tail them a little, maybe he can get a little blackmail, or maybe he can find out how their secret weapon works so the Senate can make its own and you can cut them out of the deal entirely. When they started sniffing around the same Museum where the city stashed the Squid God of Destruction they pulled out of the wreckage of their own wrecked sub half a century ago, the Kobold figured out that had to be the key, but he didn't know how. He DID know that Whippoorwill Jaycrake's obvious obsession with the Kraken made him exactly the right person to notice if someone else tampered with it, and that any kind of Kraken expert sticking his beak into your scheme would more than likely figure the truth before you were good and ready, so he made Jaycrake would go to him before anyone else, and then he made sure he never got to go to anyone else at all. For good measure you told him to put the button on Jaycrake's boss too, just as soon as she wasn't useful.
"So that explains the Mayor, B&G and the Kobold, but you know, Benny, I'm still a little stuck on you. Why do you want a war so badly, Senator? Why have you been prepping for one since 1832? The economy boost is a good enough reason for a short-sighted gink like the mayor, and B&G don't care what happens as long as you pay them enough, but it's a lot of cost to you for a pretty short-term thing. I gather dragons tend to live a thousand years or more, don't they, Senator? No way you'd risk your own career for a market bump that ain't likely to last my lifetime. Please, enlighten me. Lend me some of that famous Gold Dragon wisdom."
Goodrake sighs like my laundress when she sees another bloodstain.
"Anyone with an eye for politics can see that the war with the Ecclesiarchy is coming whether we like it or not. The shadows across the plane continue to grow and darken. It's an easy call to make sure that, when the war comes, the Concordat is equipped to win."
"Yeah, I bet than line goes down like a double shot of Oldlaw in the Senate, but I ain't so sure it cuts any mustard. I don't pretend to be a mathematician but... I'm about in my 40s myself, Senator, and when I was a kid in the Shadow City there were still about half a dozen coulda-been Demogogues out for control of the Ecclesiarchy, and the Velatrac were moving a lot of apples and a lot of lead trying to secure Berenger the clout to make his plane-wide purity empire possible. Seemed like a bit of a premature time to be handing over your Merchant Navy boys to some cockamamie horror expedition. If there's a war coming, I dunno that I buy that it's been coming since you started this. And besides, if all you were doing really was preparing the country to be able to defend itself, why all the secrecy? Why sneak around striking deals without the formal backing of the Senate?
"I'd wager you wanna make sure the war happens and you don't wanna risk scaring off the Kytons before they give you the casus belli you need. What's more, Senator, I'd wager you wanna set off as many of those weapons you commissioned as you can get away with - otherwise B&G wouldn't be scrambling so hard to make sure they get the means to produce an indefinite supply. A localised apocalypse the size of a city isn't a very solid way to defend against an invasion, Mr Goodrake, but it's a pretty neat way to take a landmark off the map. If you only had them making one or two of the dinguses, I'd think maybe you were just wrangling to knock over the seat of government while the Demogogue was on duty, but a steady supply? That looks to me like you're just waiting for the excuse to knock over the whole country, Senator. Turn all the cities into sinkholes and all the Charlies, dames and anklebiters into smoke."
THAT rattles him. Finally. I get a whole second or two of silence out of the old drake before he slithers out that golden tongue of his again.
"You have a lot of very incendiary ideas there, Detective. But it seems to me you've failed to answer your own question. Now, why on earth would any sitting Senator WANT a war so destructive?"
"Well, Senator, I wish I could say I thought it was something fancy, but I don't. I noticed earlier in our little pow-wow hear you made a big deal about never having relied on a "lady". Ya coulda said "god", and it woulda made a better point, but you didn't. Maybe you're just real patriarchal, Mack, I don't know, but maybe again you ARE a religious man, just not for one of the ladies. Doesn't take a genius to guess your loyalties at that point, Benny. The scales coulda just been me profiling, but the watch and the tie-pin are a dead giveaway, not to mention I've noticed you've never missed a movie premier for that Dolores Gilt starlet every time you're in town. Myself, I'm more of a Valentine Charlie, but that's because I ain't a Dollarite, am I right? You're a card-carrying student of the Almighty Dollar, aintcha, Benny? And maybe that gave you a little economic insight us more short-lived creatures took longer to clock to.
"I reckon maybe you saw the same thing Wall-Eye Wally did, maybe even before he did. The Almighty Dollar can't keep cashing his checks. Our whole country's been running up a tab we don't have the green to pay off. Now the party's over, and we're all just waiting for the hoity-toits to notice.
"And you couldn't have that. You're doing better outa the rich times than most. But where are you gonna find the berries to keep the whole country in the green so you can keep skimming your percentages off the top?"
I light up a gasper and watch my reflection in the smooth black puddles passing under the trolley.
"The Shadow Plane's got a whole mineral wealth ecosystem of its own. They got magic there we can't replicate yet. Neon crystals and shadow glass skyscrapers... And you happen to be Senator of the city right on the border. You topple the Ecclesiarchy, and knock over every major city-state in the Shadow Plane along the way, and there's nothing to stop you looting the whole Plane just like the Concordat already did with the native marsh-dwellers that used to live where Atramentum is now - only bigger, and shinier. This AIN'T a war, Senator, is it? It's a SHAKEDOWN. This isn't politics; it's a gang racket, and you're just the Kingpin looking to get paid protection money."
I blow a cloud of smoke into the wake of the trolley and listen to the thoughtful quiet on the other end of the line. When the Senator speaks again, his voice is just a little lower, and just a little rumblier, like he's not putting so much juice into pretending not to be a magic lizard the size of a gas station temporarily wearing a person-sized face.
"Those are some mighty find stories you've told there, Detective," he rumbles "with some quite hurtful allegations. But that's all they are. Allegations. Stories. I've heard a lot of guesswork and not a lot of provable fact. You really think there's an outlet in the UPC that'd publish such a baseless hit-piece on a sitting Senator? You'd be asking then to lose their reputation and their career if you did.
"But I can tell you're a tenacious fella - stubborn, some might say. Never one to let a little common sense get in the way of a good crusade, hmm? So let me offer you a friendly deal, Detective. You give up your crusade now, and settle the Webb boy down with you, and I'll make sure you get your names cleared, your boy gets his Museum back, and I'll pay off whatever outstanding offer you had to investigate this 'case', hmm? In fact, you give me whatever you have on Mr Brightpetal and Mr Gneiss and I'll double whatever your current client is paying. I'll pay your way out of this shady cesspit of a town, hmm? You can go wherever you want. Do whatever you want. Drink yourself to death in whichever gutter best takes your fancy, anywhere in the world.
"You make the wrong choice, and I will have no choice but to sue you for slander. I can bury you, bury your occultist friend, bury that Museum, and bury any damn fool you find unsensed enough to try to publish your story."
"Is that the way you buried Jaycrake?" I ask him.
"Your choice, Mr Gray," he says.
I guess he figured out my name after all.
"I'll have to get back to you on that," I say. "I'm going into a tunnel."
I take off the tipin and drop it off the back of the trolley onto the tracks, and hop off at the next stop. Time to catch up with the kid.
...
Back at Jaycrake's, Axel's got about ten minutes to wait before the squad cars pull up.
...
Lieutenant Dirk Bloodhunter gets outta the car, unholsters his pea-shooter and steps into the house.
A few minutes afterwards he steps back out and orders one of his underlings to get back in the car and radio in to the chief and the coroner. "We're gonna be here a while."
Monologue 17
Not for the first time, the kid's occult hoodoo pulls us both out of a situation where I'm about to get shot - although this time, to be fair, it wasn't even a real palooka; just a workie with a factory to guard.
He still got me pretty good back there, though.
The slug he put in me isn't a deeply pressing concern on its own. Seems to have missed everything I need to keep upright. Nothing a little bandages and bourbon doesn't fix for however long it takes me to get to a doctor. Considering I just got back from trading threats with a real McCoy dragon on the UPC senate who wants to buy a fleet of apocalypse bombs to shake down a whole Plane, a little extra lead in my diet wouldn't be a top ten concern right now.
Unfortunately, he put something else in there that's clearly a little harder to stick on the back burner. I don't wanna profile a whole species, but Drow are known for their poisons. Underside mushrooms and spider venoms, gods only know what else he mighta got me with.
My skin's looking somehow even paler than usual right now, and I can feels the cold sweats starting up. The wounds I got back there are bleeding a lot more than they oughta and take a lot more effort and a lot more bug juice to stopper up. Feels like I'm made outta tissue paper.
No time to rest and recover, though. There's no telling how long we have before Goodrake, Bloodhunter or ladies only know who else catches up with us again, and our best chance of wrangling a way out of that is plugging up the holes in this case we still haven't filled before whatever big confrontation happens.
I get to my feet, and the world flips around unhelpfully for a while. The rooftop underneath me swims a little, but not enough to stop me walking. Up ahead, Joy looks worried. I close my eyes, count to three, and when I open them again, there's no Joy. Just Axel.
Kid looks worried. I probably look like Hell, and he knows what Hell looks like better than most.
It's been a minute since I saw Joy like that. Unless you count seeing her face in Sephie Natterlynd. But I guess I'm under a lot of stress. And some kinda Drow venom. And I haven't been drinking like I usually do these past few days.
But I ain't got time to lose focus right now. The past has its own problems and I got enough to worry about in the present. My old partner isn't here. But the kid is - the kid who got me out of that factory with just a mild case of poison instead of a serious case of dead, and snatched up a few clues while he was at it.
I take another swig of the licker, deep enough to banish a ghost or two.
"Nice work, kid," I tell him. "Why don't you talk me through what you found while we head to the docks?"
He still got me pretty good back there, though.
The slug he put in me isn't a deeply pressing concern on its own. Seems to have missed everything I need to keep upright. Nothing a little bandages and bourbon doesn't fix for however long it takes me to get to a doctor. Considering I just got back from trading threats with a real McCoy dragon on the UPC senate who wants to buy a fleet of apocalypse bombs to shake down a whole Plane, a little extra lead in my diet wouldn't be a top ten concern right now.
Unfortunately, he put something else in there that's clearly a little harder to stick on the back burner. I don't wanna profile a whole species, but Drow are known for their poisons. Underside mushrooms and spider venoms, gods only know what else he mighta got me with.
My skin's looking somehow even paler than usual right now, and I can feels the cold sweats starting up. The wounds I got back there are bleeding a lot more than they oughta and take a lot more effort and a lot more bug juice to stopper up. Feels like I'm made outta tissue paper.
No time to rest and recover, though. There's no telling how long we have before Goodrake, Bloodhunter or ladies only know who else catches up with us again, and our best chance of wrangling a way out of that is plugging up the holes in this case we still haven't filled before whatever big confrontation happens.
I get to my feet, and the world flips around unhelpfully for a while. The rooftop underneath me swims a little, but not enough to stop me walking. Up ahead, Joy looks worried. I close my eyes, count to three, and when I open them again, there's no Joy. Just Axel.
Kid looks worried. I probably look like Hell, and he knows what Hell looks like better than most.
It's been a minute since I saw Joy like that. Unless you count seeing her face in Sephie Natterlynd. But I guess I'm under a lot of stress. And some kinda Drow venom. And I haven't been drinking like I usually do these past few days.
But I ain't got time to lose focus right now. The past has its own problems and I got enough to worry about in the present. My old partner isn't here. But the kid is - the kid who got me out of that factory with just a mild case of poison instead of a serious case of dead, and snatched up a few clues while he was at it.
I take another swig of the licker, deep enough to banish a ghost or two.
"Nice work, kid," I tell him. "Why don't you talk me through what you found while we head to the docks?"
Monologue 18
It's been a hot second since I got in a real fistfight in a dockside warehouse. I'm almost nostalgic.
No time for sightseeing, though. Two of those goons got away, and ya wouldn't need to be a rhombodazzler to bet they'll be high-tailing it straight to the Harbourmaster that might well be the only other member of their little cult left. If we want to catch up with the goons OR get the drop on ol' Gilman while there's still a chance he ain't gonna be forewarned, we gotta set off now.
On the other side, we got three cultists out cold here along with Saltbeard, a mysterious manhole and a whole warehouse to comb for clues that might well be tampered with by the time we get back if we choose to leave now.
On top of that, the clock's ticking on my last hour or two of normal functionality before the Drow poison kicks in again, and I'd like to be some place with licker before I have to deal with that again.
Jimmy and the kid have taken a few knocks - or, by the looks of it, whatever extraplanar hoodoo that tall fella with the trident hit them with, it's opened back up a handful of knocks they'd gotten some time in the past.
Blood spattered all over the wet rusty floor of this forgotten ramshackle cargohut - green from Jimmy, purplish from the kid, a little monochrome grey from me, and a lot of red that I figure is mostly from Saltbeard. From what we got on my rapier and Jimmy's big old sledgehammer, it looks like the tiny little cultist bled sorta blue-green, the big one that got away kinda brown, and the medium-sized one I just cold-cocked had some thick pale ochre looking kind. Those Brightpetal and Gneiss bastards can probably smell this place a mile off. No blood from the tall fella, though. When he played with that little statue of his, it dried him up like beef jerky, and his wounds are mostly just leaking dust. Been there, pal. My condolences.
"That was some wild tricks with the chains and the rafters, kid. Nice job taking our suspect off his feet. This looks like more your kinda crime scene than mine. What's the play - hang around to check this out and risk Gilman clocking we're onto him, or beat feet and leave this place to whichever palooka either wakes up or stumbles in?"
No time for sightseeing, though. Two of those goons got away, and ya wouldn't need to be a rhombodazzler to bet they'll be high-tailing it straight to the Harbourmaster that might well be the only other member of their little cult left. If we want to catch up with the goons OR get the drop on ol' Gilman while there's still a chance he ain't gonna be forewarned, we gotta set off now.
On the other side, we got three cultists out cold here along with Saltbeard, a mysterious manhole and a whole warehouse to comb for clues that might well be tampered with by the time we get back if we choose to leave now.
On top of that, the clock's ticking on my last hour or two of normal functionality before the Drow poison kicks in again, and I'd like to be some place with licker before I have to deal with that again.
Jimmy and the kid have taken a few knocks - or, by the looks of it, whatever extraplanar hoodoo that tall fella with the trident hit them with, it's opened back up a handful of knocks they'd gotten some time in the past.
Blood spattered all over the wet rusty floor of this forgotten ramshackle cargohut - green from Jimmy, purplish from the kid, a little monochrome grey from me, and a lot of red that I figure is mostly from Saltbeard. From what we got on my rapier and Jimmy's big old sledgehammer, it looks like the tiny little cultist bled sorta blue-green, the big one that got away kinda brown, and the medium-sized one I just cold-cocked had some thick pale ochre looking kind. Those Brightpetal and Gneiss bastards can probably smell this place a mile off. No blood from the tall fella, though. When he played with that little statue of his, it dried him up like beef jerky, and his wounds are mostly just leaking dust. Been there, pal. My condolences.
"That was some wild tricks with the chains and the rafters, kid. Nice job taking our suspect off his feet. This looks like more your kinda crime scene than mine. What's the play - hang around to check this out and risk Gilman clocking we're onto him, or beat feet and leave this place to whichever palooka either wakes up or stumbles in?"
Monologue 19
There's a lot of things can make a man do what he isn't trying to do and doesn't want to. Drink. Drugs. Pain. A beautiful dame.
It was different with Danny the Gun, though. Real different.
I ain't a stranger to guns, and I ain't an enemy to them, in specific circumstances. They lack the artistry and self-expression that comes with swordplay, not to mention looking less pretty on a big screen, but my ol' Detective Special has gotten me out of a lot more jams than I've got the toast for. You can trust a gun, so long as the only thing you trust is for is violence. It's an ugly hunk of iron built only to make the world a sadder place, but sometimes some real wrong number decided the world'd be a sadder place with you still in it, and an ugly hunk of iron turns out to be a preferable sweetheart than even the prettiest tombstone.
When I hold my trusty old Detective Special, it comes with the weight of knowing one quick twitch can save a gink's life, but only at the expense of another. But when I held Danny the Gun...
Well, let's say the fella knew what he was put on the Material Plane to do, and knew it real well. Clearer than anyone else I've ever met. I had everything it is to be a gun, right there in the palm of my hand - the bloodslick founding-stones of the whole country - the whole Concordat - propped up on the history of iron and lead, and the whirling, heady orgy of everything that could be built up and torn down from here on out if only enough lead tore through enough meat-cuts. The untouchable power of hot hard metal over soft little bodies. Every possible rush of loin-stirring, head-heating power that uncaged, unchained violence has to offer. Nature red in tooth and claw. Nurture black in smoke and ash.
And I'm standing there, this iced-up shooter in my hand, and all this hot red purpose poured into my head. All around me are soft little people, mine to chew up and spit out like cheap tobacco.
And I see Joy, dead on the ground in front of me, three little holes in the back of her little tan coat, painted dark red, flames gone to embers in her hair. And I sure as all the hells can't bring her back, but the gun tells me I can balance the books, make everyone else the same way she is so she doesn't have to eat the indignity of being alone on the ground while black-hearted goons like Kray and Cappoferro and Goodrake and Brightpetal and Gneiss get to keep on strolling around. All I gotta do is get these saps out of the way and then go fetch Thekra, put a few peepholes in her to let the Kraken out and watch the world burn, as if a big enough flame might relight Joy's hair again.
Thank the Ladies the first sap in my way was Axel Webb.
Anyone else and I mighta pulled the trigger.
I was more than happy to put a few bullets of my own into Danny as soon as that newsdame ghost managed to pry him away from my traitorous flippers. Didn't stop until he was in pieces on the salt-wet warehouse floor, too crumpled up for anyone but a world-class ironmonger to put back into assembly.
I'm shivering at the thought of it as I prop our local unconscious cult-leader on the only convenient chair I could find in this disused warehouse, wrapped up in enough rope to hang a hydra for high treason. Though, now I think about it, maybe the shivering is just the poison starting to come back on me. My hands are looking a little clammy, now I come to think about it.
When I look back at our would-be interrogatee, I can see Joy over his shoulder, sat on the edge of a crate. She's still got the holes in her, but she's smiling. She looks proud of me.
I got enough to deal with what with the real ghost who needs me to piece together all the facts of her career-defining big scoop, without distracting myself hallucinating ghosts that aren't here. I focus my lying peepers on the kid that saved my life by being one Charlie the world's most charming pea-shooter couldn't make me shoot.
"We probably got a few minutes to grill this lizard patty before Kray comes back with reinforcements and things get messy. Jimmy didn't hit him too hard so I figure a quick saltwater shower oughta turn his lights back on for a bit. Go ahead and do the honours whenever you're ready, kid."
It was different with Danny the Gun, though. Real different.
I ain't a stranger to guns, and I ain't an enemy to them, in specific circumstances. They lack the artistry and self-expression that comes with swordplay, not to mention looking less pretty on a big screen, but my ol' Detective Special has gotten me out of a lot more jams than I've got the toast for. You can trust a gun, so long as the only thing you trust is for is violence. It's an ugly hunk of iron built only to make the world a sadder place, but sometimes some real wrong number decided the world'd be a sadder place with you still in it, and an ugly hunk of iron turns out to be a preferable sweetheart than even the prettiest tombstone.
When I hold my trusty old Detective Special, it comes with the weight of knowing one quick twitch can save a gink's life, but only at the expense of another. But when I held Danny the Gun...
Well, let's say the fella knew what he was put on the Material Plane to do, and knew it real well. Clearer than anyone else I've ever met. I had everything it is to be a gun, right there in the palm of my hand - the bloodslick founding-stones of the whole country - the whole Concordat - propped up on the history of iron and lead, and the whirling, heady orgy of everything that could be built up and torn down from here on out if only enough lead tore through enough meat-cuts. The untouchable power of hot hard metal over soft little bodies. Every possible rush of loin-stirring, head-heating power that uncaged, unchained violence has to offer. Nature red in tooth and claw. Nurture black in smoke and ash.
And I'm standing there, this iced-up shooter in my hand, and all this hot red purpose poured into my head. All around me are soft little people, mine to chew up and spit out like cheap tobacco.
And I see Joy, dead on the ground in front of me, three little holes in the back of her little tan coat, painted dark red, flames gone to embers in her hair. And I sure as all the hells can't bring her back, but the gun tells me I can balance the books, make everyone else the same way she is so she doesn't have to eat the indignity of being alone on the ground while black-hearted goons like Kray and Cappoferro and Goodrake and Brightpetal and Gneiss get to keep on strolling around. All I gotta do is get these saps out of the way and then go fetch Thekra, put a few peepholes in her to let the Kraken out and watch the world burn, as if a big enough flame might relight Joy's hair again.
Thank the Ladies the first sap in my way was Axel Webb.
Anyone else and I mighta pulled the trigger.
I was more than happy to put a few bullets of my own into Danny as soon as that newsdame ghost managed to pry him away from my traitorous flippers. Didn't stop until he was in pieces on the salt-wet warehouse floor, too crumpled up for anyone but a world-class ironmonger to put back into assembly.
I'm shivering at the thought of it as I prop our local unconscious cult-leader on the only convenient chair I could find in this disused warehouse, wrapped up in enough rope to hang a hydra for high treason. Though, now I think about it, maybe the shivering is just the poison starting to come back on me. My hands are looking a little clammy, now I come to think about it.
When I look back at our would-be interrogatee, I can see Joy over his shoulder, sat on the edge of a crate. She's still got the holes in her, but she's smiling. She looks proud of me.
I got enough to deal with what with the real ghost who needs me to piece together all the facts of her career-defining big scoop, without distracting myself hallucinating ghosts that aren't here. I focus my lying peepers on the kid that saved my life by being one Charlie the world's most charming pea-shooter couldn't make me shoot.
"We probably got a few minutes to grill this lizard patty before Kray comes back with reinforcements and things get messy. Jimmy didn't hit him too hard so I figure a quick saltwater shower oughta turn his lights back on for a bit. Go ahead and do the honours whenever you're ready, kid."
Monologue 20
A gumshoe's a pretty versatile species, like a cockroach, or a rat. Most of us who don't get outta the game while the pie's still hot eventually end up either crossed out by someone we ticked off or buried under a trolley by our own boxes, but until that day comes it's in our nature to last a lot longer than anyone wants in whichever environment people least want us to be in.
Even so, some places you expect cockroaches in more than others. The natural habitat of the gumshoe is dingy, damp, dilapidated and doesn't offer much more room than it takes to draw a gun. You expect a case to ask you to snoop around in back-allies and motels and warehouses as a matter of tradition; fancy townhouses and celebrity galas are a different kettle of fish-worshippers.
If I hadn't already been so far outside of my comfort zone from all the occult bullshit, today woulda been weighing on me. But this wasn't the first time this week Sephie Natterlynd's wishes had pulled me outta my depth, and you'd be a grade-A sucker to think it'd be the last. More likely than not, by the time we close this case I'll be more outta my depth than the Kraken we're all fighting over.
One thing's become clear, as the kid and I blouse it offa Longinqua avenue and lose sight of the Webb Luxury Townhouse between the fancy alley's well-to-do shrubbery: Lucas Webb fancies himself a spider at the centre of the cobweb, roping in other dangerous palookas and weaving them to his own ends, but Brightpetal and Gneiss ain't flies - they're bats, and that's a whole size league above a spider. His floozy girl spyday was actually their thrall, and I wouldn't doubt if whatever angle he thought he was pulling in passing on messages to the Purified was also some trick they already undercut before he started it.
Maybe Webb thought he was selling his table-buddies out to the Velstrac so the Ecclesiarchy wouldn't get caught off-guard by the bomb they're building. Doesn't seem like a lucky bet to assume it's coincidence that the same man sending messages to the Purified has a photo of the Ecclesiarch of Purity among his treasured possessions. If so, Brightpetal and Gneiss musta known from the remarkably proportioned Miss Sheer, which means they gotta have something up their own bloodstained sleeves to make sure they come out on top. But just maybe, if they don't get their Kraken, that puts a hole in their playbook big enough to scare even a couple of Vampires.
I gotta hope so, because it seems like all the big meetings of every highfalutin palooka involved in this racket are due tomorrow, and our own cockamamie plan tonight to separate the Kraken and its newsie roommate may be our last chance to topple that house of cards before it reaches whatever it's building towards.
I got a lot on my mind right now, but even so, it occurs to me the kid probably has a lot with an extra scoop on top on his. I give him a look down as I clamp a gasper between my teeth for the nerves.
"You okay, kid? Saw a lot of grimy stuff in there about your old man. Mine was no oil painting himself, but he wasn't in bed with the kytons OR the hired help. You need a break?"
[...]
"Alright kid. Here's the grand shiny plan we got cobbled together tonight. Obediah Slough is most likely bringing his Kraken-slaying trident to Gatz-in-spats's big autumn gala, and Gatz himself is more than likely trading a case or two of real green cabbage for it. Ms Natterlynd's there on invitation, and I can hitch a ride on the basis of handing in a report to Mrs Gatz about the Charlie Stoneacre case. You don't have an invite to Gatz's, but for existentially troubling reasons you do have one to a craps-house shindig on the other side of the river with Ice Chips godsdamn Evan, and a sweet enough history with the aforementioned Stoneacre girl that she might let you hop between parties with her. You get what you can outta Evan - I want to know what that cold-boned bastard has on any of this, whether he's involved or not - and Sephie and I can keep a bead on Slough and Gatz until you arrive. Now remember, Slough's not the only dangerous gink at the function. Cappoferro's slated to be there, and he probably figures we owe him for a girl, a club and a cat. There's also this Grau fella that Carravaggio says is a Velstrac goon. Best to steer clear of both if we can. Once there's three of us there, that's enough to outflank both Slough and Gatz at once, find an opportunity to swap the trident for Mr Marsch's decoy and make off with the real one back to the office, where your heebie-jeebie employer might just be able to use it to pry apart Lonesome from the squid-god of the apocalypse. Sephie gets her patron back, Lonesome gets to go free, Miss Plighye writes a hitpiece on the blackhats and maybe by next month everything's back to normal right on time for a whole new decade of different troubles to come my way. Anything you want to add?"
[...]
"Well, kid. All silk so far, and not your old man's kind this time. One thing we do gotta get square is finding some proper gladrags for the pair of us that'll let us blend in at an uptown ball. I don't think any of my usual snippers'll have the goods, but I can figure Sephie's bound to know a fella. After that - well, I got a gut hunch one way or another this is our last free day before this whole dirty trolley goes one way or the other. There anything else you want to cross off before the big night?"
Even so, some places you expect cockroaches in more than others. The natural habitat of the gumshoe is dingy, damp, dilapidated and doesn't offer much more room than it takes to draw a gun. You expect a case to ask you to snoop around in back-allies and motels and warehouses as a matter of tradition; fancy townhouses and celebrity galas are a different kettle of fish-worshippers.
If I hadn't already been so far outside of my comfort zone from all the occult bullshit, today woulda been weighing on me. But this wasn't the first time this week Sephie Natterlynd's wishes had pulled me outta my depth, and you'd be a grade-A sucker to think it'd be the last. More likely than not, by the time we close this case I'll be more outta my depth than the Kraken we're all fighting over.
One thing's become clear, as the kid and I blouse it offa Longinqua avenue and lose sight of the Webb Luxury Townhouse between the fancy alley's well-to-do shrubbery: Lucas Webb fancies himself a spider at the centre of the cobweb, roping in other dangerous palookas and weaving them to his own ends, but Brightpetal and Gneiss ain't flies - they're bats, and that's a whole size league above a spider. His floozy girl spyday was actually their thrall, and I wouldn't doubt if whatever angle he thought he was pulling in passing on messages to the Purified was also some trick they already undercut before he started it.
Maybe Webb thought he was selling his table-buddies out to the Velstrac so the Ecclesiarchy wouldn't get caught off-guard by the bomb they're building. Doesn't seem like a lucky bet to assume it's coincidence that the same man sending messages to the Purified has a photo of the Ecclesiarch of Purity among his treasured possessions. If so, Brightpetal and Gneiss musta known from the remarkably proportioned Miss Sheer, which means they gotta have something up their own bloodstained sleeves to make sure they come out on top. But just maybe, if they don't get their Kraken, that puts a hole in their playbook big enough to scare even a couple of Vampires.
I gotta hope so, because it seems like all the big meetings of every highfalutin palooka involved in this racket are due tomorrow, and our own cockamamie plan tonight to separate the Kraken and its newsie roommate may be our last chance to topple that house of cards before it reaches whatever it's building towards.
I got a lot on my mind right now, but even so, it occurs to me the kid probably has a lot with an extra scoop on top on his. I give him a look down as I clamp a gasper between my teeth for the nerves.
"You okay, kid? Saw a lot of grimy stuff in there about your old man. Mine was no oil painting himself, but he wasn't in bed with the kytons OR the hired help. You need a break?"
[...]
"Alright kid. Here's the grand shiny plan we got cobbled together tonight. Obediah Slough is most likely bringing his Kraken-slaying trident to Gatz-in-spats's big autumn gala, and Gatz himself is more than likely trading a case or two of real green cabbage for it. Ms Natterlynd's there on invitation, and I can hitch a ride on the basis of handing in a report to Mrs Gatz about the Charlie Stoneacre case. You don't have an invite to Gatz's, but for existentially troubling reasons you do have one to a craps-house shindig on the other side of the river with Ice Chips godsdamn Evan, and a sweet enough history with the aforementioned Stoneacre girl that she might let you hop between parties with her. You get what you can outta Evan - I want to know what that cold-boned bastard has on any of this, whether he's involved or not - and Sephie and I can keep a bead on Slough and Gatz until you arrive. Now remember, Slough's not the only dangerous gink at the function. Cappoferro's slated to be there, and he probably figures we owe him for a girl, a club and a cat. There's also this Grau fella that Carravaggio says is a Velstrac goon. Best to steer clear of both if we can. Once there's three of us there, that's enough to outflank both Slough and Gatz at once, find an opportunity to swap the trident for Mr Marsch's decoy and make off with the real one back to the office, where your heebie-jeebie employer might just be able to use it to pry apart Lonesome from the squid-god of the apocalypse. Sephie gets her patron back, Lonesome gets to go free, Miss Plighye writes a hitpiece on the blackhats and maybe by next month everything's back to normal right on time for a whole new decade of different troubles to come my way. Anything you want to add?"
[...]
"Well, kid. All silk so far, and not your old man's kind this time. One thing we do gotta get square is finding some proper gladrags for the pair of us that'll let us blend in at an uptown ball. I don't think any of my usual snippers'll have the goods, but I can figure Sephie's bound to know a fella. After that - well, I got a gut hunch one way or another this is our last free day before this whole dirty trolley goes one way or the other. There anything else you want to cross off before the big night?"
Monologue 21
The Gatz Mansion is four stories stacked like a house of cards on a big broad sloping hill between the Jot and the main road through Uptown, like a parade king on top of his parade float, or a dragon on its hoard. The house and the grounds in front of it are nice and symmetrical, every window and sculpture and rosebush and cypress tree placed just so and matched to its partner by Ingrid's meticulous design philosophy, though I doubt the persnickety old broad did any of the yardwork herself. Gatz in Spats has a small army of black-liveried yes-men to run the house and garden for him while he and his wife busy themselves being rich.
I've met the lovely couple once or twice before, mostly when Ingrid hired me to scoop out the deal with little Charlie Stone, and they always put up an amiable front that was at least as obviously artificial as their house and garden. I've nothing against the Gatzes personally, they seem like swell folks if you're into new money pageantry - but they're the richest folks in Atramentum, and nobody gets rich in Atramentum without bloodying a few noses and burying a few bodies.
Like any self-respecting gang hideout, Gatz's gang of movers and shakers have a set of doormen at each entrance to keep out the riff-raff, which ordinarily doesn't bode well for me being professionally about as riff as raffs come, but fortunately tonight I came with a ticket that Ingrid Gatz was nice enough to punch for me years ago.
A 700 pound ogre in a 500 pound suit leans himself double so his uncharacteristically well-groomed mug can fill up the whole side window of Sephie's runabout.
"I'm on the list, big boy," says Sephie, breathing cigarette smoke into the goon's big ol' beady eyes. "Natterlynd. Detective Gray is here to see Mrs Gatz about a case, and the other car behind is carrying a lot for Howard's auction. Tell your boss."
Ms Natterlynd manages to rein in her reckless driving enough to avoid leaving smoketrails in the gravel as she drives us up one of the identical mirrored car-paths that flank Gatz's multi-tiered sculpted garden. Party's already in full swing, candlelit tables laid out on each shelf of grassland and the cream of Atramentum's richest crop drinking and dancing in between them hard enough to blot out any uninvited thoughts about tyrants consolidating power just over the border or economic collapse on their own doorstep. Gatz-in-spats's usual cronies: the last gasp of the Gilded Age, desperately trying to ignore the gilt flaking off and the guilt piling up.
Every corner of the garden's watched by one of Howard's boys, poised to refill the giggle-juice any time some swank's wine glass goes empty. Bunch of varnished applecrates strewn around where fox-faced showgirls are performing to the toots and squeaks of seasoned jazz musicians, each girl wrapped in a skirt of tails that may or may not be bona-fide. Howard and Ingrid themselves are probably the distant blots just-about visible surveying the domain from the front landing of the main house, dwarfed by the ancient stack of masonry they're presumably spending a pretty penny to heat and light tonight. Of course, those two can't even see in the dark the way a gink who grew up on the Shadow Plane does, so I dunno how much of proceedings the view from up there even gives them. Maybe they're only standing up there for the fun of it.
I might not ordinarily be at home in a penguin suit, but there's a handful of birds on this particular ice floe I know by sight. A lot of them are gathered around the swanky pool Gatz keeps out on his lawn to give his parties a water hazard.
Slough's Mrs is in there, in an all-black bathing suit that matches her giant hat and the sunglasses stuck over her eyes. Atramentum has never once gotten sunlight at this house, so I figure she prefers to keep her face obscured. Could always be she's still mourning her first husband, but that'd make the bathing suit an odd choice.
Draped fashionably along the poolside next to her is Carlotta Webb, Lukas's own pet black widow. She's so wrapped in silks it'd be hard to tell it was even her from this distance in the flickering candlelight, except that the flickers keep glittering off the web of threads sewed through her skin in some spidery patterns the kid tells me are significant from an occult point of view. Hard to imagine sometimes how a kid like Webb comes outta the parents he came outta. I inherited both of my parents' flaws: I drink too much AND I piss off all the wrong people.
Clustered around the same pool as Carlotta and Ermengarde are a practical who's who of bigwigs I'd rather not see today. Police Chief Casey Blonx and his wife sit humourlessly at a table with the Wagstaffs, the wife of whom is trying to look like she belongs here while clearly raw that her husband is too old and decorated to care. To balance it out, though, there's also a real swanky looking crocodile of a lizardman in a boater who Sephie tells me is THE Mr Mire of Merrow, Goldvein and Mire. I'd go ask for an autograph if only he wasn't hanging at the same watering hole as so many dire hyenas.
Further up the city's longest driveway we pass a table where Inkblot Gazette editor J.P. Grindstone is alternating between hushed conversation with a rich and shady looking dwarf and dictating a story to his gnoll lackey Hunter Jackson. Sephie tells me the dwarf is Mr Goldvein, which just leaves Merrow to complete the trilogy - and I'm assuming he's inside because there ain't a lot of places out here for an ogre to hide.
Bouncing between sites of interest all over the layout like a real industrious bumblebee, disrupting huddles and pulling up the volume wherever anything starts to get quiet, is little Charlie Stone, snatching up champagne glasses and spilling them over rosebushes by dancing too energetically to whichever jazz band she's nearest at the time. No sign of Axel with her, but give the kid time. He's the slow and methodical type. Makes him an odd match for Charlie that way, but I can see why the kid likes her. She's a real sweet biscuit, if you can handle the flavour. Lady Valentine knows I've liked worse choices when I was his eyes.
What I don't see is any sign of Obediah Slough or his magical fish fork. It ain't surprising. Slough never seemed like the party type, from what I heard - he might have needed to come here to save his fortune, but he's almost certainly holed himself up in the quietest part of the house he can find.
The Gatzes are there to greet us in person when Sephie's getaway crate finds itself a spot to stop - right next to a curiously out-of-place halfling bakery van and an unpleasantly familiar Lincoln Concordant. Gatz in Spats takes Sephie by the hand and kisses her gloved wrist with the kind of nonchalance a guy needs to study for decades to master.
"Enchanted as always, Sephie, old sport! You're just in time to tell me where I'm going wrong with my collection of automobiles here; it really feels like I'm missing something to tie them all together! And who's this lucky fellow you're canoodling with? Detective Gray, isn't it? Enchanted, old sport, truly enchanted! Perikins tells me you're here to make good on a check my wife wrote you - how delightfully of the moment, good fella!" He shakes my hand and leans in close. "And you've brought a new lot for the auction, eh, Detective? Helluva move there, sport, I see why the old trouble and strife hired you." He straightens up and leans on a cane, eyebrows raised like a vaudeville comedian. The trouble and strife in question clears her throat.
"Mr Gray. I was beginning to worry you had given up on our agreement - but I see your reputation for closing your investigations remains intact."
"That's what I do, lady. It's the reason people like you still hire me. Ms Natterlynd - perhaps you can watch Mr Gatz's people transporting the auction lot to see it doesn't get mishandled, and we can meet up again after I've had a quiet word with Mrs Gatz here."
Gatz had an elevator installed in his house as part of his ever-unsatisfied dabbling with whatever new line of modernity catches his short attention span. I've walked more stairs than even this stack of masonry has plenty of times, but Ingrid takes pity on me today since I look like I'm made mostly outta knees. A pretty little goblin elevator girl with died-red hair takes Ingrid and I up to the private family rooms on the top floor, where we can talk without competing with the sounds of music and merriment. Ingrid opens up a drawing room and shoos out a jumpy maid - part humanoid, part deer, no doubt hired for her natural advantages in keeping away from the bosses. The drawing room has a fireplace already lit, a couple of cases of peerages and wealthy women's periodicals, a sewing chair for Ingrid and a comfy little stool for me, and a basin carved into the wall in the shape of a skull with tentacles, full of a mixture of what smells to be saltwater and blood. Doesn't take Axel Webb to figure Oz Marsch isn't the only party who tried contacting the Kraken after it went missing, only I'm betting Ingrid never got any results. She has a pretty little ring on like a tentacle wrapped around her finger, which she swizzles around with the other hand as talks.
"What is she then, Detective. However does she make it here every time?"
"She's a witch, Mrs Gatz. Patronised by the kingpin of a fairy racket called the Seelie Court that lays claim to every territory in the city that happens to have a party going on at the time. By the terms of Miss Stoneacre's deal with the Seelie don, she exists in all of them, and only in all of them. Accesses them all out of some sort of fairland inbetween-place called the Green Room. The good news is, the fair folk don't want anything with you other than keeping the party going and livening it up. Other people's joy is a currency this Green Room establishment can cash, with Charlie's help. The bad news is, if there's a way to get rid of her, I don't know it and you couldn't pay me enough to find it. This Seelie Court racket's no small-fry; their don's practically a demigoddess from what I hear. I don't imagine there's a lot of fish big enough to swim with that particular shark -" I'm feeling punchy, so I risk a pointed glance at the occult washbasin in her wall - "and I gather your favourite big fish isn't answering your telegrams lately."
Ingrid Gatz scowls, and covers her ring with her hand. She makes a real careful show of looking away thoughtfully.
"You say this... Fairy creature is... Interested in making deals out of my events?"
She's her husband's wife alright.
"I wouldn't try it, mack. Your hootenannies no doubt give someone like Charlie plenty of opportunity to stir up the kind of dough her patron can make bread outta, but you yourself are probably a bit too straight-laced to keep the favour of the Lady of the Green Room. If you wanted my advice, I'd tell you to stay out of the Seelie Court's way and make the most of the free advertising. Stoneacre's a pretty girl with a big personality; there's probably more than a few at this shindig of yours who came here mostly for her."
Ingrid sniffs. "Thank you, Detective," she changes the subject. "I have the remainder of your fee, as agreed." She hands over an unmarked envelope from the middle of a book on exotic blooms. "I hear you approached Kantonin to add an extra lot to our auction tonight. Do you intend to bid on the main lot?"
I stash the envelope in the jacket of my penguin suit. "I might show an interest. Is there any chance of seeing the item ahead of time?"
"Not before the auction begins, I'm afraid, Mr Gray. The seller insisted. Please, do stay for the gala. You've come all this way."
One floor down there's a main ballroom where Ingrid leaves me to return to schmoozing alongside her husband. The music in here is of a more melancholy sort, designed for a more stately sort of dancing. Merrow's in here, awkwardly orbiting a much smaller dame - Dolores Gilt, one of his actresses who happens to be suspiciously cosy with Senator Benny. One of his actors is in here too - Kent Canapé, making much more elegant footwork with a bloodless hawk of a dame unmistakeable as his current in a growing line of Mrs Canapes. Sephie is smoking by the window, none of the other rich Charlies in here yet brave enough to ask the dame to dance. At one end of the room there's a Fetchling chanteuse in a shadowy black dress and real smoky eyeshadow.
"Well ain't that a real sockdollager," I mention to Sephie, joining her at the window. "They got Renza Brume on for this. I shoulda brought my autograph book. It's not every day you meet a real Mutnemarta girl made good around here."
Sephie tips me a smile. "Just you remember who's driving you home, Detective." She puts the quellizaire down delicately and snakes an arm around mine. "Howard has the auction lots in the library, but they're keeping it locked and guarded. I couldn't spot Mr Slough, but I haven't had time to check everywhere. There's a smoking room and a billiards room on this storey, and a dining room and petit-salon downstairs. He also could be out back, down by the river."
"Nice work. One of us should snoop him out while the other sticks on Gatz until either our backup arrives or the auction begins."
"Absolutely, detective," the dame agrees. "But let's not arouse suspicion by being too hasty with it. For the sake of appearances, we can spare one dance before we split."
I take the lead as Renza Brume begins her latest number, and pray to any ladies listening my feet don't betray me.
"You're a smart one, Sephie Natterlynd."
The shadowy chanteuse has a husky voice like dusk and cigarette smoke.
...
Caught in the shadows Between two kinds of plane. Too dark for sunshine, Too sunny for rain.
Moving on elsewhere, Just to move back again. Caught in the shadows Between two kinds of plane.
Nowhere safe to be truthful, And no soft place to lie. You live in the twilight, And in twilight you'll die.
Harden your heart, girl, Before it drives you insane: Caught in the shadows Between two kinds of plane
...
Away across the river, Axel Webb emerges from Ice Chips Evan's office with a new formidable ally and a real doozy of a promise he might some point have to explain to Gray. The party stays in full swing across the Obol, with no interest in whatever shady deal the prince of this particular underworld has been striking.
Charlie Stoneacre dances an energetic charleston on top of a table, full of enthusiasm and some volume of champagne, egged on by the Dullahan's three prize jockeys, Valentine, R. Cummings and Torsey Tinhorn. A stack of two of chips are spread across the tabletop onto the floor, doubtless from a tiny careless high-heeled kick.
"Hey hey, Axel, these fellaroonis say they know you from placing betskies on the bangtails up at their secret racetrack!"
The huge headless form of Dullahan racemaster Brom Bones steps in front of Axel, blocking his view of the table, and Axel gets the distinct feeling of being scrutinised by eyes that aren't there from beyond Bones's high starched collar.
I've met the lovely couple once or twice before, mostly when Ingrid hired me to scoop out the deal with little Charlie Stone, and they always put up an amiable front that was at least as obviously artificial as their house and garden. I've nothing against the Gatzes personally, they seem like swell folks if you're into new money pageantry - but they're the richest folks in Atramentum, and nobody gets rich in Atramentum without bloodying a few noses and burying a few bodies.
Like any self-respecting gang hideout, Gatz's gang of movers and shakers have a set of doormen at each entrance to keep out the riff-raff, which ordinarily doesn't bode well for me being professionally about as riff as raffs come, but fortunately tonight I came with a ticket that Ingrid Gatz was nice enough to punch for me years ago.
A 700 pound ogre in a 500 pound suit leans himself double so his uncharacteristically well-groomed mug can fill up the whole side window of Sephie's runabout.
"I'm on the list, big boy," says Sephie, breathing cigarette smoke into the goon's big ol' beady eyes. "Natterlynd. Detective Gray is here to see Mrs Gatz about a case, and the other car behind is carrying a lot for Howard's auction. Tell your boss."
Ms Natterlynd manages to rein in her reckless driving enough to avoid leaving smoketrails in the gravel as she drives us up one of the identical mirrored car-paths that flank Gatz's multi-tiered sculpted garden. Party's already in full swing, candlelit tables laid out on each shelf of grassland and the cream of Atramentum's richest crop drinking and dancing in between them hard enough to blot out any uninvited thoughts about tyrants consolidating power just over the border or economic collapse on their own doorstep. Gatz-in-spats's usual cronies: the last gasp of the Gilded Age, desperately trying to ignore the gilt flaking off and the guilt piling up.
Every corner of the garden's watched by one of Howard's boys, poised to refill the giggle-juice any time some swank's wine glass goes empty. Bunch of varnished applecrates strewn around where fox-faced showgirls are performing to the toots and squeaks of seasoned jazz musicians, each girl wrapped in a skirt of tails that may or may not be bona-fide. Howard and Ingrid themselves are probably the distant blots just-about visible surveying the domain from the front landing of the main house, dwarfed by the ancient stack of masonry they're presumably spending a pretty penny to heat and light tonight. Of course, those two can't even see in the dark the way a gink who grew up on the Shadow Plane does, so I dunno how much of proceedings the view from up there even gives them. Maybe they're only standing up there for the fun of it.
I might not ordinarily be at home in a penguin suit, but there's a handful of birds on this particular ice floe I know by sight. A lot of them are gathered around the swanky pool Gatz keeps out on his lawn to give his parties a water hazard.
Slough's Mrs is in there, in an all-black bathing suit that matches her giant hat and the sunglasses stuck over her eyes. Atramentum has never once gotten sunlight at this house, so I figure she prefers to keep her face obscured. Could always be she's still mourning her first husband, but that'd make the bathing suit an odd choice.
Draped fashionably along the poolside next to her is Carlotta Webb, Lukas's own pet black widow. She's so wrapped in silks it'd be hard to tell it was even her from this distance in the flickering candlelight, except that the flickers keep glittering off the web of threads sewed through her skin in some spidery patterns the kid tells me are significant from an occult point of view. Hard to imagine sometimes how a kid like Webb comes outta the parents he came outta. I inherited both of my parents' flaws: I drink too much AND I piss off all the wrong people.
Clustered around the same pool as Carlotta and Ermengarde are a practical who's who of bigwigs I'd rather not see today. Police Chief Casey Blonx and his wife sit humourlessly at a table with the Wagstaffs, the wife of whom is trying to look like she belongs here while clearly raw that her husband is too old and decorated to care. To balance it out, though, there's also a real swanky looking crocodile of a lizardman in a boater who Sephie tells me is THE Mr Mire of Merrow, Goldvein and Mire. I'd go ask for an autograph if only he wasn't hanging at the same watering hole as so many dire hyenas.
Further up the city's longest driveway we pass a table where Inkblot Gazette editor J.P. Grindstone is alternating between hushed conversation with a rich and shady looking dwarf and dictating a story to his gnoll lackey Hunter Jackson. Sephie tells me the dwarf is Mr Goldvein, which just leaves Merrow to complete the trilogy - and I'm assuming he's inside because there ain't a lot of places out here for an ogre to hide.
Bouncing between sites of interest all over the layout like a real industrious bumblebee, disrupting huddles and pulling up the volume wherever anything starts to get quiet, is little Charlie Stone, snatching up champagne glasses and spilling them over rosebushes by dancing too energetically to whichever jazz band she's nearest at the time. No sign of Axel with her, but give the kid time. He's the slow and methodical type. Makes him an odd match for Charlie that way, but I can see why the kid likes her. She's a real sweet biscuit, if you can handle the flavour. Lady Valentine knows I've liked worse choices when I was his eyes.
What I don't see is any sign of Obediah Slough or his magical fish fork. It ain't surprising. Slough never seemed like the party type, from what I heard - he might have needed to come here to save his fortune, but he's almost certainly holed himself up in the quietest part of the house he can find.
The Gatzes are there to greet us in person when Sephie's getaway crate finds itself a spot to stop - right next to a curiously out-of-place halfling bakery van and an unpleasantly familiar Lincoln Concordant. Gatz in Spats takes Sephie by the hand and kisses her gloved wrist with the kind of nonchalance a guy needs to study for decades to master.
"Enchanted as always, Sephie, old sport! You're just in time to tell me where I'm going wrong with my collection of automobiles here; it really feels like I'm missing something to tie them all together! And who's this lucky fellow you're canoodling with? Detective Gray, isn't it? Enchanted, old sport, truly enchanted! Perikins tells me you're here to make good on a check my wife wrote you - how delightfully of the moment, good fella!" He shakes my hand and leans in close. "And you've brought a new lot for the auction, eh, Detective? Helluva move there, sport, I see why the old trouble and strife hired you." He straightens up and leans on a cane, eyebrows raised like a vaudeville comedian. The trouble and strife in question clears her throat.
"Mr Gray. I was beginning to worry you had given up on our agreement - but I see your reputation for closing your investigations remains intact."
"That's what I do, lady. It's the reason people like you still hire me. Ms Natterlynd - perhaps you can watch Mr Gatz's people transporting the auction lot to see it doesn't get mishandled, and we can meet up again after I've had a quiet word with Mrs Gatz here."
Gatz had an elevator installed in his house as part of his ever-unsatisfied dabbling with whatever new line of modernity catches his short attention span. I've walked more stairs than even this stack of masonry has plenty of times, but Ingrid takes pity on me today since I look like I'm made mostly outta knees. A pretty little goblin elevator girl with died-red hair takes Ingrid and I up to the private family rooms on the top floor, where we can talk without competing with the sounds of music and merriment. Ingrid opens up a drawing room and shoos out a jumpy maid - part humanoid, part deer, no doubt hired for her natural advantages in keeping away from the bosses. The drawing room has a fireplace already lit, a couple of cases of peerages and wealthy women's periodicals, a sewing chair for Ingrid and a comfy little stool for me, and a basin carved into the wall in the shape of a skull with tentacles, full of a mixture of what smells to be saltwater and blood. Doesn't take Axel Webb to figure Oz Marsch isn't the only party who tried contacting the Kraken after it went missing, only I'm betting Ingrid never got any results. She has a pretty little ring on like a tentacle wrapped around her finger, which she swizzles around with the other hand as talks.
"What is she then, Detective. However does she make it here every time?"
"She's a witch, Mrs Gatz. Patronised by the kingpin of a fairy racket called the Seelie Court that lays claim to every territory in the city that happens to have a party going on at the time. By the terms of Miss Stoneacre's deal with the Seelie don, she exists in all of them, and only in all of them. Accesses them all out of some sort of fairland inbetween-place called the Green Room. The good news is, the fair folk don't want anything with you other than keeping the party going and livening it up. Other people's joy is a currency this Green Room establishment can cash, with Charlie's help. The bad news is, if there's a way to get rid of her, I don't know it and you couldn't pay me enough to find it. This Seelie Court racket's no small-fry; their don's practically a demigoddess from what I hear. I don't imagine there's a lot of fish big enough to swim with that particular shark -" I'm feeling punchy, so I risk a pointed glance at the occult washbasin in her wall - "and I gather your favourite big fish isn't answering your telegrams lately."
Ingrid Gatz scowls, and covers her ring with her hand. She makes a real careful show of looking away thoughtfully.
"You say this... Fairy creature is... Interested in making deals out of my events?"
She's her husband's wife alright.
"I wouldn't try it, mack. Your hootenannies no doubt give someone like Charlie plenty of opportunity to stir up the kind of dough her patron can make bread outta, but you yourself are probably a bit too straight-laced to keep the favour of the Lady of the Green Room. If you wanted my advice, I'd tell you to stay out of the Seelie Court's way and make the most of the free advertising. Stoneacre's a pretty girl with a big personality; there's probably more than a few at this shindig of yours who came here mostly for her."
Ingrid sniffs. "Thank you, Detective," she changes the subject. "I have the remainder of your fee, as agreed." She hands over an unmarked envelope from the middle of a book on exotic blooms. "I hear you approached Kantonin to add an extra lot to our auction tonight. Do you intend to bid on the main lot?"
I stash the envelope in the jacket of my penguin suit. "I might show an interest. Is there any chance of seeing the item ahead of time?"
"Not before the auction begins, I'm afraid, Mr Gray. The seller insisted. Please, do stay for the gala. You've come all this way."
One floor down there's a main ballroom where Ingrid leaves me to return to schmoozing alongside her husband. The music in here is of a more melancholy sort, designed for a more stately sort of dancing. Merrow's in here, awkwardly orbiting a much smaller dame - Dolores Gilt, one of his actresses who happens to be suspiciously cosy with Senator Benny. One of his actors is in here too - Kent Canapé, making much more elegant footwork with a bloodless hawk of a dame unmistakeable as his current in a growing line of Mrs Canapes. Sephie is smoking by the window, none of the other rich Charlies in here yet brave enough to ask the dame to dance. At one end of the room there's a Fetchling chanteuse in a shadowy black dress and real smoky eyeshadow.
"Well ain't that a real sockdollager," I mention to Sephie, joining her at the window. "They got Renza Brume on for this. I shoulda brought my autograph book. It's not every day you meet a real Mutnemarta girl made good around here."
Sephie tips me a smile. "Just you remember who's driving you home, Detective." She puts the quellizaire down delicately and snakes an arm around mine. "Howard has the auction lots in the library, but they're keeping it locked and guarded. I couldn't spot Mr Slough, but I haven't had time to check everywhere. There's a smoking room and a billiards room on this storey, and a dining room and petit-salon downstairs. He also could be out back, down by the river."
"Nice work. One of us should snoop him out while the other sticks on Gatz until either our backup arrives or the auction begins."
"Absolutely, detective," the dame agrees. "But let's not arouse suspicion by being too hasty with it. For the sake of appearances, we can spare one dance before we split."
I take the lead as Renza Brume begins her latest number, and pray to any ladies listening my feet don't betray me.
"You're a smart one, Sephie Natterlynd."
The shadowy chanteuse has a husky voice like dusk and cigarette smoke.
...
Caught in the shadows Between two kinds of plane. Too dark for sunshine, Too sunny for rain.
Moving on elsewhere, Just to move back again. Caught in the shadows Between two kinds of plane.
Nowhere safe to be truthful, And no soft place to lie. You live in the twilight, And in twilight you'll die.
Harden your heart, girl, Before it drives you insane: Caught in the shadows Between two kinds of plane
...
Away across the river, Axel Webb emerges from Ice Chips Evan's office with a new formidable ally and a real doozy of a promise he might some point have to explain to Gray. The party stays in full swing across the Obol, with no interest in whatever shady deal the prince of this particular underworld has been striking.
Charlie Stoneacre dances an energetic charleston on top of a table, full of enthusiasm and some volume of champagne, egged on by the Dullahan's three prize jockeys, Valentine, R. Cummings and Torsey Tinhorn. A stack of two of chips are spread across the tabletop onto the floor, doubtless from a tiny careless high-heeled kick.
"Hey hey, Axel, these fellaroonis say they know you from placing betskies on the bangtails up at their secret racetrack!"
The huge headless form of Dullahan racemaster Brom Bones steps in front of Axel, blocking his view of the table, and Axel gets the distinct feeling of being scrutinised by eyes that aren't there from beyond Bones's high starched collar.
Monologue 22
Caught in the shadows. That's me alright.
The shadows of a pair of bats and their tower looming over everything in the city. The shadow of City Hall and it's machinations. The shadow of a bloating Kytonian murder empire eclipsing it's way across the plain next door towards the home I had to leave. The shadows of the Underside way down beneath our feet. The creeping shadows of things man wasn't meant to know that I somehow keep getting roped into. The great big shadow of a dragon hovering overhead, waiting to see if I'm worth dropping on. And the ever-present shadow of a dame that I haven't gotten out from under since 1914, and don't expect to start now.
And looming over all of them, the shadow of the Kraken. Everything, in the end, comes back to the Kraken that Ends the World.
"In the end" being the operative words if we ain't very lucky. And I've about had my fill of operatives.
I gotta admit, though. If you gotta be somewhere at the end of the world, there's worse places to be, with worse music, worse booze and worse views. And worse dames to dance with. Every time we turn a heel, it switches up which side of Sephie's face gets the crystal chandelier light skipping across her scales, and which side gets thrown into sharp gloom by the shadowy night outside. Maybe a fella can learn to put up with being caught in the shadows, depending on who he's caught with.
Both sides of her look way too much like Joy.
Howard Gatz seemed eager to relieve his wife of ballroom duties as soon as he registered that Slough's daughter Bel came in here with that villain actor, Edwinton Moses-Smythe. He's a lot classier in person than the face he puts on for the fans, which I guess makes him my own inverse. Belisperenis Slough has the look of a dove with its wings clipped, scared to fly out of her cage only because she doesn't know if she has the strength to make it far enough. Obediah and Ermengarde's pearl of great price. The one thing they've clung to more tightly than all their trinkets and terrible occult doodads. I'd wager a nickel she's the final thing they sell when the Trident money finally runs dry, and another couple of dimes that Gatz in Spats hopes to be around when they set up that auction. Maybe that's the real reason he wants the trident in the first place. Not so much what it means to some frozen god he's dabbled with, but what it means to a rotten family he'd like to pluck the last good apple from.
He's been yakking horsefeathers with the girl over champagne flutes in that witty little way of his for most of an hour, and finally he's opened enough of a chink in the cage to get a slow dance out of her. Sephie tells me there hasn't been movement in the library since both lots were stashed there. Seems she dropped something occult in there when she left. Mind as sharp as her teeth, that dame. I'm sure glad she's on our side. Slough's holed himself up in a sideroom with a real who's who of fellas I'd rather not get seen by today, so tailing him has become a much riskier option. Better to wait it out near where we know both Gatz and the trident are, although we're angling on midnight without any peep of the kid. I sure hope he hasn't gotten on the wrong side of the Cold Hand. He's always been fulla tricks, but so's Ice Chips Evan.
I needn't have worried. Before Gatz makes a move, the other door busts open and the kid gets dragged in, bag and sunglasses and all, on the arm of Charlie Stone, who swings him around into a ball dancing hold by the time she's finished making a beeline for us, and falls into a slightly squint-eyed orbit around Sephie and I.
"Hey, fellas. Kind of a snoozerooni in here, isn't it? Lot more cake-eaters to go around but the hp is real last decade. No offence, Mr P.I., I know you're an oldski yourself. Love the suit! Real sharp. You managed to bag yourself the second-prettiest broad in the joint with it, so it's gotta be good. Hi, Miss Natterlynd. That's a real swell dress! Goes great with the scales. Do you polish them fresh for every party? They're always terrifically shinerooni. I'm Charlie Stone, like the dance, which I invented. My date's here to see yours! We'da dropped by earlier but we had to kick some feathers with Betty Boop and her tippy-tappin' news-box friend and a tubby little cake-eating cutie-pie and that tickbox-shaped gingery picture character that's always doin' a real swell job of putting herself out there on the big screen even despite those unseasonably huge fronts she's got on her, real inspiration for all of us, I mean I already don't got the kind of ironing board got lucky enough to sport but that one I wonder how she can dance without knocking herself over but she does it anyway, and then just the dearest little kitty and the meanest little hotttopped glass-cracker with a flickknife got in on it into the purchase."
You gotta give this to Sephie: she barely bats an eye at the onslaught. "You're very kind, Miss Stone. I've seen you in passing; never spoken much. I'm afraid my cosmetic routine is a family secret." She takes a drag. "Naturally, I assume the first prettiest 'broad' would be yourself?"
Charlie shakes her head with a rattle of beads and feathers. "Oh, no fearski, sure we can all tell I'm the prettiest here but I'm more of a narrow." She shakes her tiny hips in demonstration. "The prettiest broad's that rabbity lookin' moony biscuit dancing with Spats. Never seen her at any parties before, which is a real waste of a face, isn't it?"
She catches sight of a distant flicker of candlelight out the window and gasps. "Ohski-goshski, I forgot this place had a pool!" The tiny whirlwind of a dame breaks the dancing hold on Axel and presses a fingertip to his nose. "Stay right here a second, Axski, I gotta go do something."
There's a flurry of feathers and lemon-scented bubbles, and Charlie's gone. A modicum of seconds later, something hits the pool outside hard enough to extinguish the candles on the nearby tables and give a rough shower to every nearby party-goer.
I light myself a gasper. "Now that we got a moment to fit in a word or two edgewise, what's the story, Axel. What the fuck did the Cold Hand want with ya?"
The shadows of a pair of bats and their tower looming over everything in the city. The shadow of City Hall and it's machinations. The shadow of a bloating Kytonian murder empire eclipsing it's way across the plain next door towards the home I had to leave. The shadows of the Underside way down beneath our feet. The creeping shadows of things man wasn't meant to know that I somehow keep getting roped into. The great big shadow of a dragon hovering overhead, waiting to see if I'm worth dropping on. And the ever-present shadow of a dame that I haven't gotten out from under since 1914, and don't expect to start now.
And looming over all of them, the shadow of the Kraken. Everything, in the end, comes back to the Kraken that Ends the World.
"In the end" being the operative words if we ain't very lucky. And I've about had my fill of operatives.
I gotta admit, though. If you gotta be somewhere at the end of the world, there's worse places to be, with worse music, worse booze and worse views. And worse dames to dance with. Every time we turn a heel, it switches up which side of Sephie's face gets the crystal chandelier light skipping across her scales, and which side gets thrown into sharp gloom by the shadowy night outside. Maybe a fella can learn to put up with being caught in the shadows, depending on who he's caught with.
Both sides of her look way too much like Joy.
Howard Gatz seemed eager to relieve his wife of ballroom duties as soon as he registered that Slough's daughter Bel came in here with that villain actor, Edwinton Moses-Smythe. He's a lot classier in person than the face he puts on for the fans, which I guess makes him my own inverse. Belisperenis Slough has the look of a dove with its wings clipped, scared to fly out of her cage only because she doesn't know if she has the strength to make it far enough. Obediah and Ermengarde's pearl of great price. The one thing they've clung to more tightly than all their trinkets and terrible occult doodads. I'd wager a nickel she's the final thing they sell when the Trident money finally runs dry, and another couple of dimes that Gatz in Spats hopes to be around when they set up that auction. Maybe that's the real reason he wants the trident in the first place. Not so much what it means to some frozen god he's dabbled with, but what it means to a rotten family he'd like to pluck the last good apple from.
He's been yakking horsefeathers with the girl over champagne flutes in that witty little way of his for most of an hour, and finally he's opened enough of a chink in the cage to get a slow dance out of her. Sephie tells me there hasn't been movement in the library since both lots were stashed there. Seems she dropped something occult in there when she left. Mind as sharp as her teeth, that dame. I'm sure glad she's on our side. Slough's holed himself up in a sideroom with a real who's who of fellas I'd rather not get seen by today, so tailing him has become a much riskier option. Better to wait it out near where we know both Gatz and the trident are, although we're angling on midnight without any peep of the kid. I sure hope he hasn't gotten on the wrong side of the Cold Hand. He's always been fulla tricks, but so's Ice Chips Evan.
I needn't have worried. Before Gatz makes a move, the other door busts open and the kid gets dragged in, bag and sunglasses and all, on the arm of Charlie Stone, who swings him around into a ball dancing hold by the time she's finished making a beeline for us, and falls into a slightly squint-eyed orbit around Sephie and I.
"Hey, fellas. Kind of a snoozerooni in here, isn't it? Lot more cake-eaters to go around but the hp is real last decade. No offence, Mr P.I., I know you're an oldski yourself. Love the suit! Real sharp. You managed to bag yourself the second-prettiest broad in the joint with it, so it's gotta be good. Hi, Miss Natterlynd. That's a real swell dress! Goes great with the scales. Do you polish them fresh for every party? They're always terrifically shinerooni. I'm Charlie Stone, like the dance, which I invented. My date's here to see yours! We'da dropped by earlier but we had to kick some feathers with Betty Boop and her tippy-tappin' news-box friend and a tubby little cake-eating cutie-pie and that tickbox-shaped gingery picture character that's always doin' a real swell job of putting herself out there on the big screen even despite those unseasonably huge fronts she's got on her, real inspiration for all of us, I mean I already don't got the kind of ironing board got lucky enough to sport but that one I wonder how she can dance without knocking herself over but she does it anyway, and then just the dearest little kitty and the meanest little hotttopped glass-cracker with a flickknife got in on it into the purchase."
You gotta give this to Sephie: she barely bats an eye at the onslaught. "You're very kind, Miss Stone. I've seen you in passing; never spoken much. I'm afraid my cosmetic routine is a family secret." She takes a drag. "Naturally, I assume the first prettiest 'broad' would be yourself?"
Charlie shakes her head with a rattle of beads and feathers. "Oh, no fearski, sure we can all tell I'm the prettiest here but I'm more of a narrow." She shakes her tiny hips in demonstration. "The prettiest broad's that rabbity lookin' moony biscuit dancing with Spats. Never seen her at any parties before, which is a real waste of a face, isn't it?"
She catches sight of a distant flicker of candlelight out the window and gasps. "Ohski-goshski, I forgot this place had a pool!" The tiny whirlwind of a dame breaks the dancing hold on Axel and presses a fingertip to his nose. "Stay right here a second, Axski, I gotta go do something."
There's a flurry of feathers and lemon-scented bubbles, and Charlie's gone. A modicum of seconds later, something hits the pool outside hard enough to extinguish the candles on the nearby tables and give a rough shower to every nearby party-goer.
I light myself a gasper. "Now that we got a moment to fit in a word or two edgewise, what's the story, Axel. What the fuck did the Cold Hand want with ya?"
Monologue 23
I don't think I'm any good at parties. Everyone else always seems to be having more fun than I am.
Maybe there was a time I was better company, maybe because I was IN better company, and that kinda thing came more naturally - but if so, those days are long gone, and they never left a forwarding address.
Since they left, I don't like parties as much as everyone thinks I should. Feels like there's only ever so many gin-lovers and wise guys you can cram into a coffin before they make things ugly, and being both of those things myself I oughta know.
But I'll tell you something else for free: I think the feeling's mutual. Parties don't seem to like me none either. Every once in a while I fool myself into thinking I'm just being stubborn, and if I just this once swap the ol' trenchcoat for some flossy gladrags and give it a whirl it'll all go okay, but I'll be damned sideways if any such once in a while ever worked itself out.
Either I keep up my guard and waste the whole night waiting for someone to ruin it, or I let it down and get cold-cocked when someone does.
This gala night at Gatz's was rapidly chalking itself up as Exhibit P or Q or whatever letter we're up to now on that particular corkboard. I got too close to letting down my guard, starting thinking maybe we had built ourselves a way out of this whole mess, and right on cue in comes Ice Chips fuckin' Evan, the Shades' own Lord of the Underworld, to teach me the error of my ways one more time. Ladies only know what the creep wants outta me this time, but not for the first time he's gone to the trouble of setting me up to get me under a barrel full of cement. Worse - he's set up the kid in my stead this time. Musta figured I'd finally felt his Icy Mitt enough to stay away myself.
There's no sense trying to outplay him. He's the better player, and the Obol always wins. I can't lose anyone else to that ice-cold shyster.
Sephie's been as much at home in the ballroom as she is behind the wheel, which doesn't surprise me a lot since with her family she was probably born on one. I mighta thought I'd get a little more company in the gloomy and awkward corner from one of the evening's other companions, but no such luck - the ghost of Piper Plighye seems over the moon to try her hand at the celebrity beat, even my deadbeat brother looks like he's enjoying the opportunity to stretch the old muscles on some new rich folks to scam, and while the kid might have started a little rusty on his old lady's primary topic of childhood education, his date was so eager to scrub the rust off for him with her own years of personal expertise and what looked to be a liberal application of lipstick that even after she skipped out she's left him bright enough to dazzle himself. It wouldn't be polite to speculate too deeply on the details of what she did to achieve that for him, but apparently the hours don't tick where she's from, and you don't need the nose of a bloodhound to smell out that any kind of thoughts about having gone far enough down any particular highway for the day don't tend to tick through that gal's bob-haired garret much either, meaning the only determining factor left is what point the kid chose to tap out at unprompted, and that's a question I make a point of not asking. All I know is once he came back to the rest of us he was relaxed enough to enjoy the festivities and breezy enough to wear a feather boa doing it.
All that being what it is, you could be forgiven for thinking it'd be sort of a vindication to see the shoe finally drop on my feelings of bad JuJu about the night when something goes wrong for everyone else too - 'something', in this case, being a Shireside goon the size of a trolley bus who pops out of a cake instead of a chorus line and has his buddies start reventilating the room - but in the end I got no time to feel vindicated; I'm too busy trying to make sure myself, Axel and Sephie haven't opened any new airholes.
Everyone else in the room I think I can take or leave.
Ordinarily I'd be inclined to grab one friend in each hand and blouse it out the nearest window, 'cept for a couple of wooden points: the windows in this room of Gatz's gin castle are the kind that come criss-crossed with lead bars to make 'em a pain for some joker like me to smash outta; and there's a whole ballroom of patsies a door away whose only crimes are accepting a teadance invite and, I assume, embezzlement and tax evasion. If someone doesn't warn 'em before the lead starts flying, somebody's bound to get hurt, or worse, and I can't imagine Dirk Bloodhunter is gonna brush it off if my distinctive silhouette is outlined on a window pane at yet another murder scene. We're only barely out from under the corpses of Jaycrake and the Op.
That troll galoot from the Evendim spatters beautiful confectionary over all of us as he unfolds himself from the tasty surprise, thoroughly wasting a masterpiece of artisanal bakemanship and several perfectly good suits. Cappoferro just barely moves his cane and deflects the only chunk of cake headed his way. Grau sees a chunk pass all the way through his shadowy side, briefly leaving a dollar-sized hole. The rest of us get hit with a sizeable delayed dry cleaning bill, but it's probably the least of our worries.
The troll swings straight for Gatz in Spats, whose massive wealth and witty repartee turns out not to give a lot of defence against a claw to the jaw from a mook that can probably cut down trees bare-handed. Remarkably, the willowy fopdoodle keeps his spats on the ground after the first hit cuts a series of lines right through his lipwarmer, and even dodges a swinging follow-up from a tusk, unless that was just him swaying from the first blow at a real lucky moment. Unlucky for Gatz, Mr Unter still has another arm, and this time Gatz's jaw, like his drinks cabinets, turns out to have more than enough glass to say goodnight to everyone.
Faster than a man his age ought to have any chance of moving, Cappoferro's suddenly crossed the room and seized hold of the case with the fake trident in it. He ain't even running - just walking smartly, and somehow covering all the ground all the same like he ain't squared up to the world right, leaving the empty bottle he was drinking from spinning on the arm of his chair.
I hate this magic shit.
Call me rusty, or tangled up in my own glumness, or distracted by a head full of Ice Chips fuckin' Evan right now - whatever your poison, the fact is I don't colour myself in valour this time. I've barely got a hand on my sidepiece and this cake-session's already way out of hand. But I'll give this to the kid - he mighta just come through a lot of firsts from all over the spectrum tonight thanks to Ice Chips and Charlie both, but I guess he's got his eye on the ball a hell of a lot more than I have, and he reacts even before the world's four most heavily armed bakers get their say. I gotta admit, I could deal with the kid being better at parties than me, but it's gonna take a long time before I can swallow the crow that he might also be better at shootouts.
Axel's aura sight gives him just enough of a head's up that these bakers and their cake have ill intentions to act while everyone else is surprised. He sees Gatz go down but the half-elf gadabout's aura doesn't extinguish, which means he's down for the count but he ain't dead yet. He sees flickers under the doors that suggest both of them have folks right on the other side. A pair of nasty types beyond the hallway door, and a whole gang of more average joes beyond the ballroom one.
He also sees the impression of Charlie's aura lingering in his own - not that he wasn't aware of it already, like a pleasant ghost made of vivid memories. The scent of her perfume, like pine and lilac. The taste of her lips like champagne and lemonade. The soft weight of her body like a bundle of shifting feathers in his arms and in his lap. The wild bounce of her constant movement, like a Charleston that never stops, even with her limbs tangled around him. The touch of her skin like soft rayon against his hands, his face, his hips. Her body always a cosy heat, no matter the exercise she puts in, softeningly warm when he calms up cold and soothingly cool when he flushes hot. Her giggle like clinking flutes, whenever her lips aren't otherwise occupied. Her voice like a piano rag when she chatters breathless in his ear or mumbles playfully into whatever skin she's rubbing her tiny snout against. The sparkle of her magic settling on him like sequin confetti. Livening up his morale and his defences. Maybe by accident. Maybe Charlie left it here on purpose to make sure he lives long enough to see her again. Maybe her patron made sure it rubbed off to make sure he lives long enough to take a deal. Doesn't make much difference in the short term; he was hoping to live a little longer either way.
The little glittering Sheba left him a more physical gift into the bargain, in the form of a flittery purple-pink feather scarf that doesn't quite go with his gladrags but does come with a handy trick hidden in all the feathers. He takes hold of one of them, focuses as best he can through the glittercloud of memories from recent activities he was wearing the boa for, and plucks the little feather out. The boa spits out a firecracker burst of feathers and glitter that swarms everyone within orbit of the plucked quill as he tosses it, coating all the nearest scrapping goons in shine and colour like an oil slick on a sunny day - not that anyone here has seen a sunny day.
...
His purple serge's lingering force of personality bubbles through Axel's body, giving him the little extra heave-ho he needs to shake off the attack. A flurry of heady memories pop across his psyche with a cheerful forcefulness, like her lingering influence wants him to appreciate she'd be happy to know she was helping. The least distracting of them is a flurry of playful words, stitched together by kisses, that he's not immediately sure he remembers how he responded to - there was so much else worth committing to memory at the time: "There's really not a lot of jacks I've let in on this, Axski. I mean, okie-dokie, I don't know how many might have figured it out at one or other petting party at some station down the line, because I'm not the kind of girl that counts, but that ain't the same on account of it's hardly my fault if I'm a teensy bit of a big-time snugglepup - oh, speaking of which, why don't we find a little spot for this right here - and b'sides, every one of them happened to get in the kinda rumpus with their jane the same night it happened that meant nobody was gonna buy any applesauce they were selling over it. Anyhoo, I'm letting YOU see cos I think you're the frog's eyebrows, ya goof, so you better not go telling. After all the tootsie-wootses in the city spent so many years imitating my trademark tiny slat silhouette, can you imagine if just anyone knew that a little of it was only from a flattering dress and a tight bandeau? They'd be crushed, Axski. I'm the It Chicken around here; I got a symbolism to maintain for the rest of the henhouse. They think I'm a narrow tube, garret to dogs, and it makes 'em feel swell to think. I'm letting you in on my very darkest secret right now, you read? So I think it's only fair if you let me know yours too!"
Maybe there was a time I was better company, maybe because I was IN better company, and that kinda thing came more naturally - but if so, those days are long gone, and they never left a forwarding address.
Since they left, I don't like parties as much as everyone thinks I should. Feels like there's only ever so many gin-lovers and wise guys you can cram into a coffin before they make things ugly, and being both of those things myself I oughta know.
But I'll tell you something else for free: I think the feeling's mutual. Parties don't seem to like me none either. Every once in a while I fool myself into thinking I'm just being stubborn, and if I just this once swap the ol' trenchcoat for some flossy gladrags and give it a whirl it'll all go okay, but I'll be damned sideways if any such once in a while ever worked itself out.
Either I keep up my guard and waste the whole night waiting for someone to ruin it, or I let it down and get cold-cocked when someone does.
This gala night at Gatz's was rapidly chalking itself up as Exhibit P or Q or whatever letter we're up to now on that particular corkboard. I got too close to letting down my guard, starting thinking maybe we had built ourselves a way out of this whole mess, and right on cue in comes Ice Chips fuckin' Evan, the Shades' own Lord of the Underworld, to teach me the error of my ways one more time. Ladies only know what the creep wants outta me this time, but not for the first time he's gone to the trouble of setting me up to get me under a barrel full of cement. Worse - he's set up the kid in my stead this time. Musta figured I'd finally felt his Icy Mitt enough to stay away myself.
There's no sense trying to outplay him. He's the better player, and the Obol always wins. I can't lose anyone else to that ice-cold shyster.
Sephie's been as much at home in the ballroom as she is behind the wheel, which doesn't surprise me a lot since with her family she was probably born on one. I mighta thought I'd get a little more company in the gloomy and awkward corner from one of the evening's other companions, but no such luck - the ghost of Piper Plighye seems over the moon to try her hand at the celebrity beat, even my deadbeat brother looks like he's enjoying the opportunity to stretch the old muscles on some new rich folks to scam, and while the kid might have started a little rusty on his old lady's primary topic of childhood education, his date was so eager to scrub the rust off for him with her own years of personal expertise and what looked to be a liberal application of lipstick that even after she skipped out she's left him bright enough to dazzle himself. It wouldn't be polite to speculate too deeply on the details of what she did to achieve that for him, but apparently the hours don't tick where she's from, and you don't need the nose of a bloodhound to smell out that any kind of thoughts about having gone far enough down any particular highway for the day don't tend to tick through that gal's bob-haired garret much either, meaning the only determining factor left is what point the kid chose to tap out at unprompted, and that's a question I make a point of not asking. All I know is once he came back to the rest of us he was relaxed enough to enjoy the festivities and breezy enough to wear a feather boa doing it.
All that being what it is, you could be forgiven for thinking it'd be sort of a vindication to see the shoe finally drop on my feelings of bad JuJu about the night when something goes wrong for everyone else too - 'something', in this case, being a Shireside goon the size of a trolley bus who pops out of a cake instead of a chorus line and has his buddies start reventilating the room - but in the end I got no time to feel vindicated; I'm too busy trying to make sure myself, Axel and Sephie haven't opened any new airholes.
Everyone else in the room I think I can take or leave.
Ordinarily I'd be inclined to grab one friend in each hand and blouse it out the nearest window, 'cept for a couple of wooden points: the windows in this room of Gatz's gin castle are the kind that come criss-crossed with lead bars to make 'em a pain for some joker like me to smash outta; and there's a whole ballroom of patsies a door away whose only crimes are accepting a teadance invite and, I assume, embezzlement and tax evasion. If someone doesn't warn 'em before the lead starts flying, somebody's bound to get hurt, or worse, and I can't imagine Dirk Bloodhunter is gonna brush it off if my distinctive silhouette is outlined on a window pane at yet another murder scene. We're only barely out from under the corpses of Jaycrake and the Op.
That troll galoot from the Evendim spatters beautiful confectionary over all of us as he unfolds himself from the tasty surprise, thoroughly wasting a masterpiece of artisanal bakemanship and several perfectly good suits. Cappoferro just barely moves his cane and deflects the only chunk of cake headed his way. Grau sees a chunk pass all the way through his shadowy side, briefly leaving a dollar-sized hole. The rest of us get hit with a sizeable delayed dry cleaning bill, but it's probably the least of our worries.
The troll swings straight for Gatz in Spats, whose massive wealth and witty repartee turns out not to give a lot of defence against a claw to the jaw from a mook that can probably cut down trees bare-handed. Remarkably, the willowy fopdoodle keeps his spats on the ground after the first hit cuts a series of lines right through his lipwarmer, and even dodges a swinging follow-up from a tusk, unless that was just him swaying from the first blow at a real lucky moment. Unlucky for Gatz, Mr Unter still has another arm, and this time Gatz's jaw, like his drinks cabinets, turns out to have more than enough glass to say goodnight to everyone.
Faster than a man his age ought to have any chance of moving, Cappoferro's suddenly crossed the room and seized hold of the case with the fake trident in it. He ain't even running - just walking smartly, and somehow covering all the ground all the same like he ain't squared up to the world right, leaving the empty bottle he was drinking from spinning on the arm of his chair.
I hate this magic shit.
Call me rusty, or tangled up in my own glumness, or distracted by a head full of Ice Chips fuckin' Evan right now - whatever your poison, the fact is I don't colour myself in valour this time. I've barely got a hand on my sidepiece and this cake-session's already way out of hand. But I'll give this to the kid - he mighta just come through a lot of firsts from all over the spectrum tonight thanks to Ice Chips and Charlie both, but I guess he's got his eye on the ball a hell of a lot more than I have, and he reacts even before the world's four most heavily armed bakers get their say. I gotta admit, I could deal with the kid being better at parties than me, but it's gonna take a long time before I can swallow the crow that he might also be better at shootouts.
Axel's aura sight gives him just enough of a head's up that these bakers and their cake have ill intentions to act while everyone else is surprised. He sees Gatz go down but the half-elf gadabout's aura doesn't extinguish, which means he's down for the count but he ain't dead yet. He sees flickers under the doors that suggest both of them have folks right on the other side. A pair of nasty types beyond the hallway door, and a whole gang of more average joes beyond the ballroom one.
He also sees the impression of Charlie's aura lingering in his own - not that he wasn't aware of it already, like a pleasant ghost made of vivid memories. The scent of her perfume, like pine and lilac. The taste of her lips like champagne and lemonade. The soft weight of her body like a bundle of shifting feathers in his arms and in his lap. The wild bounce of her constant movement, like a Charleston that never stops, even with her limbs tangled around him. The touch of her skin like soft rayon against his hands, his face, his hips. Her body always a cosy heat, no matter the exercise she puts in, softeningly warm when he calms up cold and soothingly cool when he flushes hot. Her giggle like clinking flutes, whenever her lips aren't otherwise occupied. Her voice like a piano rag when she chatters breathless in his ear or mumbles playfully into whatever skin she's rubbing her tiny snout against. The sparkle of her magic settling on him like sequin confetti. Livening up his morale and his defences. Maybe by accident. Maybe Charlie left it here on purpose to make sure he lives long enough to see her again. Maybe her patron made sure it rubbed off to make sure he lives long enough to take a deal. Doesn't make much difference in the short term; he was hoping to live a little longer either way.
The little glittering Sheba left him a more physical gift into the bargain, in the form of a flittery purple-pink feather scarf that doesn't quite go with his gladrags but does come with a handy trick hidden in all the feathers. He takes hold of one of them, focuses as best he can through the glittercloud of memories from recent activities he was wearing the boa for, and plucks the little feather out. The boa spits out a firecracker burst of feathers and glitter that swarms everyone within orbit of the plucked quill as he tosses it, coating all the nearest scrapping goons in shine and colour like an oil slick on a sunny day - not that anyone here has seen a sunny day.
...
His purple serge's lingering force of personality bubbles through Axel's body, giving him the little extra heave-ho he needs to shake off the attack. A flurry of heady memories pop across his psyche with a cheerful forcefulness, like her lingering influence wants him to appreciate she'd be happy to know she was helping. The least distracting of them is a flurry of playful words, stitched together by kisses, that he's not immediately sure he remembers how he responded to - there was so much else worth committing to memory at the time: "There's really not a lot of jacks I've let in on this, Axski. I mean, okie-dokie, I don't know how many might have figured it out at one or other petting party at some station down the line, because I'm not the kind of girl that counts, but that ain't the same on account of it's hardly my fault if I'm a teensy bit of a big-time snugglepup - oh, speaking of which, why don't we find a little spot for this right here - and b'sides, every one of them happened to get in the kinda rumpus with their jane the same night it happened that meant nobody was gonna buy any applesauce they were selling over it. Anyhoo, I'm letting YOU see cos I think you're the frog's eyebrows, ya goof, so you better not go telling. After all the tootsie-wootses in the city spent so many years imitating my trademark tiny slat silhouette, can you imagine if just anyone knew that a little of it was only from a flattering dress and a tight bandeau? They'd be crushed, Axski. I'm the It Chicken around here; I got a symbolism to maintain for the rest of the henhouse. They think I'm a narrow tube, garret to dogs, and it makes 'em feel swell to think. I'm letting you in on my very darkest secret right now, you read? So I think it's only fair if you let me know yours too!"
Monologue 24
After midnight, it seems, is when the Gatz gala starts to get rowdy, which no doubt is why the man himself figured he could keep auction under wraps. Seems Cappoferro's sent his team of never-caked showgirls to keep the party swinging away from the library too, just in case. Tallboy's moll is leading most of the band in a performance that blocks the library door from the packed ballroom while Tallboy stakes out the other one. A conga line has broken out of containment and winds it's way out of the ballroom and downstairs towards the front lawn, egged on by a Charleston number so lively Axel wonders whether Charlie tipped the musicians to play it once she left. Somehow a luxury-sized tin bath has been unearthed from some closet and tossed into the centre of the ballroom, filled with ice and champagne and, currently, Tubby Talarico and Ginger Valentine. Transfixed by the chaos, the house servants don't even seem to notice Fenny Slough sneaking upstairs with no less than three giggling fox-furred showgirls from the entertainment outfit Gatz hired. Edwinton Moses-Smythe is dancing with Kent Canapé a touch more sensually than seems appropriate in view of his current wife.
...
All at once the air is split with the shrill screech of a dozen whistles. Cops barge in and start clomping their way gracelessly up the stairs, some of them peeling off to round up the partygoers on their way. The elevator rattles and the folding lattice opens up, the watchful, unhurried and unsmiling figures of DA Greenleaf striding quietly out with a briefcase in his hand. From a slot at the top corner of the case, a spool of ticker tape gradually winds itself out, accompanied by a mechanical ticking as letters or symbols of some kind are stamped into the paper. Either Greenleaf didn't want to keep his eye off the stock market while he was out, or something else is afoot.
...
All at once the air is split with the shrill screech of a dozen whistles. Cops barge in and start clomping their way gracelessly up the stairs, some of them peeling off to round up the partygoers on their way. The elevator rattles and the folding lattice opens up, the watchful, unhurried and unsmiling figures of DA Greenleaf striding quietly out with a briefcase in his hand. From a slot at the top corner of the case, a spool of ticker tape gradually winds itself out, accompanied by a mechanical ticking as letters or symbols of some kind are stamped into the paper. Either Greenleaf didn't want to keep his eye off the stock market while he was out, or something else is afoot.
Monologue 25
It's almost funny how much of the time trying to uncover secrets and defend the innocent puts a gink at odds with the strong arm of the law. Ain't the first time I've been on the wrong side of a slammer door, and it ain't likely to be the last. I wouldn't plan it for a picnic, but I've slept in worse places. After spending a few months in the Shadow Clink when I was barely old enough to smoke but wasn't going to let that stop me, the low-magic bighouse they got in Atramentum feels almost homely. It ain't quite as neat as my office but it's probably more comfortable than my apartment.
Only big fly the ointment is, we got Kitten counting on us getting that big stone overcoat in Sephie's flivver out where she can wear it to the station, and Lonesome counting on us getting the trident in the kid's bag back to Miss Caine so she can do some kinda Von Creepsula occult surgery to split her into two different people again, not to mention a matter of hours before both City Hall and the godsdamned Velstrac might well be due to be hold secret meetings with a pair of vampire ironmongers that could endanger everyone in the city, or more.
We probably don't have time to wait for Lady Justice to see her way clear through that convenient blindfold of hers, but we also got no chance of getting clean from here while we're in range of whatever anti-teleport measures they put in these metal crates and in eyesight of about half the flats in the city.
Somehow this party ended up even MORE of a disaster than my gut said it woulda been. Maybe I'm getting too optimistic in my old age. I sure hope not. Better dicks than me have gotten their final ticket punched that way.
The thought of a hitch in the big house clearly puts some heebie-jeebies in the kid, and he spends the whole time in the Black Maria in a bright blue funk. Turned himself into a bird when the goons started hauling everyone outta Sephie's dented getaway crate, but it wasn't enough to stop him being grabbed in a huge green mitt by one of the baker's dozen of clubhouse members that surrounded the flivver. Bloodhunter takes a pretty on-the-nose amount of pleasure at forcing his little pigeon feet into a fetching set of iron bracelets which immediately light up with all kinds of magic hoodoo sigils, and the bird turns back into a boy with an abruptness like a bulb blowing out in a badly wired flophouse. No doubt, then, that someone tipped off the fuzz that they might need to arrest a shapeshifter or two.
On the cheery side, it looks like we're in good company. The flats are loading up the wagons with every party guest they can lay mitts on. They quickly separate the kid and I from Sephie and Gatz's personal Bruno, dragging the big lug away between four of them towards where Ingrid Gatz has emerged from her fortress in hushed argument with Chief Casey Blonx, her face as stony as the ediface we're all leaving behind. Sephie, meanwhile, gets caged in Mags Skinner's paddy wagon with the other dames while Bloodhunter locates a separate one for us fellas, since it's important to maintain propriety while you're hauling blood-spattered drunks back to the drunk tank.
Greenleaf evidently has his priorities. They secure Ermengarde Slough real quick, and cage her up with Sephie while she's still in her bathing suit. You can figure she's glowering even behind those peeper-blocking suncheaters. Bel Slough is one of the first folks the bulls drag outta the mansion after the troll and the surviving halflings they caught trying to flee, watered-down eyepaint streaming from her big baby blues as she struggles her dainty pipecleaner arms against the iron grip of the law and alternates in crying for her old man and for Mr Gatz.
My guess is maybe the old man heard her, and managed to get just far enough away from Greenleaf and his magic briefcase before the Lucanetti boys could finish him off. Just as we're getting shoved into the paddy wagon there's a thunderclap and a blast of lightning that shatters half the glass panes of Gatz's swanky dump, and a socking great tentacle of champagne and ice fragments bursts outta the ballroom window, sweeping three cops and a couple of unlucky guests out of the building for a sizeable fall to a messy landing on the greenery below. Hamfist Lucanetti is one of them, tumbling in an arc into one of Gatz's front-lawn fountains, denting it on impact. I wouldn't put chips on that bunny hopping up again any time soon if at all. If this whole huggermugger wasn't an occult violation already, it definitely is now. That's liable to add a shiny nickel to everyone's sentence, if Greenleaf can argue involvement.
As quick as it appeared, the thrashing champagne tendril splashes to the ground in a shower of droplets and ice chips, and the angry thunder dwindles to be replaced by screams and bellows. The flatfoots throw Bel in with the same jailbirds to cling to her old lady, who gives her a begrudging pat without turning her head. Sephie takes it upon herself to offer a more comforting arm in Ermengarde's place. Not long after, the old man himself gets dragged out, out cold, between a pair of orc bulls, his hands manacled with the same sort of shiny sigilled bracelets they put on the kid, dripping a trail of watery brown slime from numerous cuts and plugholes. Bel's banshee impression finds a whole new volume and pitch as they drag her old man past her Black Maria to toss him in the back of ours.
Our travelling companions on the long road to the clubhouse are rounded out by the addition of Tallboy and his three remaining baker chums (Unter being large enough to require a separate transport of his own), Gunther Coots the coat-toting Brasemouth partyboy, who spends the whole time making outraged objections with the tone of a college debate club moot, Tubby Tallico, unusually dour in a ripped tux holding a steak to his eye, Canapé and Moses-Smythe who keep up their movie-star dignity the whole time, having clearly figured a fella of their station isn't gonna be held much longer than it takes to sign the paperwork, and finally Fenny, Slough's cake-eater heir to a throne he never plans to vacate, who gets dragged out red-faced with only his boater to limit his indecency and affectionately accepts Gunther's raccoon coat to wrap himself in, while the girls he was with make strategic and practised use of multiple tails to keep themselves covered as the raid's token lady cops usher them out of sight. From the bundle of trinkets and occult-looking tchotchkes the flats escorting Fenny and his accomplices are carrying out in evidence bags, it looks like Slough junior and his merry band found more than just each other to play with up in the Gatz's private rooms, which is gonna be an extra sock in the jaw for both Slough and Gatz if either of them gets to court.
Finally our carriage is standing room only and Bloodhunter slams the barred door. I take a scan around a prime collection of real grim faces.
"Fellas. Nice to see you all made it out. Real pleased to meet you, Mr Canapé. Big fan."
About everyone else that was in the library or the ballroom and isn't already dead or in critical condition gets matched towards one of the other paddy wagons, except for a few sore thumbs sticking out. I can't seem to lay a peeper on Cappoferro or my nogoodnik brother. Maybe they both got out before the flats closed the net, or else someone with a fancy badge wants to speak to them separately from the rest of us. No peep of Stavro Grau either, but a crackle comes through out of a fancy wireless setup at the front of the squad van that a team outside is closing in on a second moving patch of impenetrable darkness, and since the kid's in the paddy cart with me, I have my suspicions. Casey seems to have kept his own ball and chain out of irons, and Phyllis herself seems to have intervened for Carlotta Webb and the Wagstaffs. Grindstone and his Inkblot pals look to be walking free as a bird, present company excepted, scratching down notes, Hunter even snapping pictures with a heavy camera he just happened to bring along - all of which, if I were the conspiracising sort (and I am), I'd bank on meaning the DA wanted to make sure these arrests could get publicised. With their usual organ grinder unconscious in a big stone overcoat and missing in the eyes of everyone except an ogre who doesn't seem the gabbing type, Grindstone and his boys have evidently thrown in their lot with a new honcho in return for freedom from the slammer and first dibs on the story.
SOMEONE also seems to have greased a palm or two for Dolores Gilt, on account of the Gilt-shaped hole among the guilty gals getting loaded into their separate squad wagons. Canapé's wife raps a couple of flats on the knuckles with her cane and insists on stepping into the Black Maria herself. Angel McKath and her fellow showgirls get tossed in with no respect paid for the tailoring of those octopus dresses. Renza Brume gets a similarly rough treatment which is about what I'd expect from the kind of philistine that the AMPD hires. Betty Boop shares a chastened, sombre look with Hal Newsman, hiding out in the shadow of his boss, as Mags helps her up the wagon steps. Eventually even Ingrid Gatz submits to Casey's stony wall of stubbornness and allows herself to be loaded in, passing off her pearls to her cervine servant girl to lock away in the house before the servants are ferried away separately, unthinkable as it would be for the hoity-toits of Gats'z circle to share a wagon ride with any of the muckier classes. Ginger Valentine is one of the last dames to submit to the hungry maw of Black Maria. Looks like Tubby got his eye in the way of whatever came her way when the ballroom got turned over enough to keep her pretty heart-shaped face and MGM-trademarked heart-shaped figure in one piece, but her wardrobe didn't share the protection, and she gives a whole new screen-worthy performance trying to clamber into a police wagon in scuffed heels while clinging to the shreds of a dress that was already valiantly out of its depth trying to keep everything inside it without a lot of infrastructure. Turns out there's a whole second heart-shaoed birthmark somewhere even tonight's wardrobe didn't show off.
Fenforth's vixen friends move up to help, which means there's a minute or two where everyone in earshot that wasn't already distracted by the occult destruction of the ballroom is instead distracted by a risque tableau of four pretty dames in near-enough the altogether. Canapé and Moses-Smythe shade their eyes with their hats and look away respectfully. Coots nods in intellectual appreciation like a rich gink at an art gallery and nudges Fenny, who hollers out the barred window of the cage, and then turns his head to inform his buddy, "yeah, you can tell she's still not lost all the weight she put on about two decades ago". Outside, a flashbulb lights up the air as Hunter Jackson finds a tasteful enough angle to get away with a photo. Everyone else in the wagon clambers to get a look except for Slough, who remains horizontal and limp, which gives me a moment of privacy with the kid. I shuffle my legs until I can reach my heel - I made a special request to add a little something to the outfit Sephie's dress man cooked up, and I feel like these bracelets are pinching my wrists a little.
"You alright, Axel?"
Only big fly the ointment is, we got Kitten counting on us getting that big stone overcoat in Sephie's flivver out where she can wear it to the station, and Lonesome counting on us getting the trident in the kid's bag back to Miss Caine so she can do some kinda Von Creepsula occult surgery to split her into two different people again, not to mention a matter of hours before both City Hall and the godsdamned Velstrac might well be due to be hold secret meetings with a pair of vampire ironmongers that could endanger everyone in the city, or more.
We probably don't have time to wait for Lady Justice to see her way clear through that convenient blindfold of hers, but we also got no chance of getting clean from here while we're in range of whatever anti-teleport measures they put in these metal crates and in eyesight of about half the flats in the city.
Somehow this party ended up even MORE of a disaster than my gut said it woulda been. Maybe I'm getting too optimistic in my old age. I sure hope not. Better dicks than me have gotten their final ticket punched that way.
The thought of a hitch in the big house clearly puts some heebie-jeebies in the kid, and he spends the whole time in the Black Maria in a bright blue funk. Turned himself into a bird when the goons started hauling everyone outta Sephie's dented getaway crate, but it wasn't enough to stop him being grabbed in a huge green mitt by one of the baker's dozen of clubhouse members that surrounded the flivver. Bloodhunter takes a pretty on-the-nose amount of pleasure at forcing his little pigeon feet into a fetching set of iron bracelets which immediately light up with all kinds of magic hoodoo sigils, and the bird turns back into a boy with an abruptness like a bulb blowing out in a badly wired flophouse. No doubt, then, that someone tipped off the fuzz that they might need to arrest a shapeshifter or two.
On the cheery side, it looks like we're in good company. The flats are loading up the wagons with every party guest they can lay mitts on. They quickly separate the kid and I from Sephie and Gatz's personal Bruno, dragging the big lug away between four of them towards where Ingrid Gatz has emerged from her fortress in hushed argument with Chief Casey Blonx, her face as stony as the ediface we're all leaving behind. Sephie, meanwhile, gets caged in Mags Skinner's paddy wagon with the other dames while Bloodhunter locates a separate one for us fellas, since it's important to maintain propriety while you're hauling blood-spattered drunks back to the drunk tank.
Greenleaf evidently has his priorities. They secure Ermengarde Slough real quick, and cage her up with Sephie while she's still in her bathing suit. You can figure she's glowering even behind those peeper-blocking suncheaters. Bel Slough is one of the first folks the bulls drag outta the mansion after the troll and the surviving halflings they caught trying to flee, watered-down eyepaint streaming from her big baby blues as she struggles her dainty pipecleaner arms against the iron grip of the law and alternates in crying for her old man and for Mr Gatz.
My guess is maybe the old man heard her, and managed to get just far enough away from Greenleaf and his magic briefcase before the Lucanetti boys could finish him off. Just as we're getting shoved into the paddy wagon there's a thunderclap and a blast of lightning that shatters half the glass panes of Gatz's swanky dump, and a socking great tentacle of champagne and ice fragments bursts outta the ballroom window, sweeping three cops and a couple of unlucky guests out of the building for a sizeable fall to a messy landing on the greenery below. Hamfist Lucanetti is one of them, tumbling in an arc into one of Gatz's front-lawn fountains, denting it on impact. I wouldn't put chips on that bunny hopping up again any time soon if at all. If this whole huggermugger wasn't an occult violation already, it definitely is now. That's liable to add a shiny nickel to everyone's sentence, if Greenleaf can argue involvement.
As quick as it appeared, the thrashing champagne tendril splashes to the ground in a shower of droplets and ice chips, and the angry thunder dwindles to be replaced by screams and bellows. The flatfoots throw Bel in with the same jailbirds to cling to her old lady, who gives her a begrudging pat without turning her head. Sephie takes it upon herself to offer a more comforting arm in Ermengarde's place. Not long after, the old man himself gets dragged out, out cold, between a pair of orc bulls, his hands manacled with the same sort of shiny sigilled bracelets they put on the kid, dripping a trail of watery brown slime from numerous cuts and plugholes. Bel's banshee impression finds a whole new volume and pitch as they drag her old man past her Black Maria to toss him in the back of ours.
Our travelling companions on the long road to the clubhouse are rounded out by the addition of Tallboy and his three remaining baker chums (Unter being large enough to require a separate transport of his own), Gunther Coots the coat-toting Brasemouth partyboy, who spends the whole time making outraged objections with the tone of a college debate club moot, Tubby Tallico, unusually dour in a ripped tux holding a steak to his eye, Canapé and Moses-Smythe who keep up their movie-star dignity the whole time, having clearly figured a fella of their station isn't gonna be held much longer than it takes to sign the paperwork, and finally Fenny, Slough's cake-eater heir to a throne he never plans to vacate, who gets dragged out red-faced with only his boater to limit his indecency and affectionately accepts Gunther's raccoon coat to wrap himself in, while the girls he was with make strategic and practised use of multiple tails to keep themselves covered as the raid's token lady cops usher them out of sight. From the bundle of trinkets and occult-looking tchotchkes the flats escorting Fenny and his accomplices are carrying out in evidence bags, it looks like Slough junior and his merry band found more than just each other to play with up in the Gatz's private rooms, which is gonna be an extra sock in the jaw for both Slough and Gatz if either of them gets to court.
Finally our carriage is standing room only and Bloodhunter slams the barred door. I take a scan around a prime collection of real grim faces.
"Fellas. Nice to see you all made it out. Real pleased to meet you, Mr Canapé. Big fan."
About everyone else that was in the library or the ballroom and isn't already dead or in critical condition gets matched towards one of the other paddy wagons, except for a few sore thumbs sticking out. I can't seem to lay a peeper on Cappoferro or my nogoodnik brother. Maybe they both got out before the flats closed the net, or else someone with a fancy badge wants to speak to them separately from the rest of us. No peep of Stavro Grau either, but a crackle comes through out of a fancy wireless setup at the front of the squad van that a team outside is closing in on a second moving patch of impenetrable darkness, and since the kid's in the paddy cart with me, I have my suspicions. Casey seems to have kept his own ball and chain out of irons, and Phyllis herself seems to have intervened for Carlotta Webb and the Wagstaffs. Grindstone and his Inkblot pals look to be walking free as a bird, present company excepted, scratching down notes, Hunter even snapping pictures with a heavy camera he just happened to bring along - all of which, if I were the conspiracising sort (and I am), I'd bank on meaning the DA wanted to make sure these arrests could get publicised. With their usual organ grinder unconscious in a big stone overcoat and missing in the eyes of everyone except an ogre who doesn't seem the gabbing type, Grindstone and his boys have evidently thrown in their lot with a new honcho in return for freedom from the slammer and first dibs on the story.
SOMEONE also seems to have greased a palm or two for Dolores Gilt, on account of the Gilt-shaped hole among the guilty gals getting loaded into their separate squad wagons. Canapé's wife raps a couple of flats on the knuckles with her cane and insists on stepping into the Black Maria herself. Angel McKath and her fellow showgirls get tossed in with no respect paid for the tailoring of those octopus dresses. Renza Brume gets a similarly rough treatment which is about what I'd expect from the kind of philistine that the AMPD hires. Betty Boop shares a chastened, sombre look with Hal Newsman, hiding out in the shadow of his boss, as Mags helps her up the wagon steps. Eventually even Ingrid Gatz submits to Casey's stony wall of stubbornness and allows herself to be loaded in, passing off her pearls to her cervine servant girl to lock away in the house before the servants are ferried away separately, unthinkable as it would be for the hoity-toits of Gats'z circle to share a wagon ride with any of the muckier classes. Ginger Valentine is one of the last dames to submit to the hungry maw of Black Maria. Looks like Tubby got his eye in the way of whatever came her way when the ballroom got turned over enough to keep her pretty heart-shaped face and MGM-trademarked heart-shaped figure in one piece, but her wardrobe didn't share the protection, and she gives a whole new screen-worthy performance trying to clamber into a police wagon in scuffed heels while clinging to the shreds of a dress that was already valiantly out of its depth trying to keep everything inside it without a lot of infrastructure. Turns out there's a whole second heart-shaoed birthmark somewhere even tonight's wardrobe didn't show off.
Fenforth's vixen friends move up to help, which means there's a minute or two where everyone in earshot that wasn't already distracted by the occult destruction of the ballroom is instead distracted by a risque tableau of four pretty dames in near-enough the altogether. Canapé and Moses-Smythe shade their eyes with their hats and look away respectfully. Coots nods in intellectual appreciation like a rich gink at an art gallery and nudges Fenny, who hollers out the barred window of the cage, and then turns his head to inform his buddy, "yeah, you can tell she's still not lost all the weight she put on about two decades ago". Outside, a flashbulb lights up the air as Hunter Jackson finds a tasteful enough angle to get away with a photo. Everyone else in the wagon clambers to get a look except for Slough, who remains horizontal and limp, which gives me a moment of privacy with the kid. I shuffle my legs until I can reach my heel - I made a special request to add a little something to the outfit Sephie's dress man cooked up, and I feel like these bracelets are pinching my wrists a little.
"You alright, Axel?"
CASE 327
Lost Tooth:
Evidence:
Liminality:
Axel BABY! :
Ohski-Goshski:
At the Gala:
Interrogation:
Type
Report, Incident
Lost Tooth: