Daisey in the Sunset District, Part 1

Port Karn, Sunset District, Midday
Daisey wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her working robes. It was hot in the squalid apartment complex which rose four stories above the streets below. There weren’t enough windows, and what windows there were were unglazed, and the air was still, and smelled of sweat, vomit, and less palatable scents. Not even a sea breeze to blow the stench away, unfortunately.
She turned back to her patient, a seven year old girl laying on a pallet, feverish and sweating, her long dark hair stringy and plastered to her skin. She hadn’t responded to any of the treatments that the child’s doctor had given her, and she was getting worse. The boils looked angry: red, inflamed, and crusty around the edges. She sighed. The Spell of Disease Curing would take care of it, but there weren’t enough mages to save everyone. But she couldn’t let the little girl die, just because she couldn’t save all the little girls. But she was here, now, and had the ability to help.
She closed her eyes, and, placing her hand on the girl’s chest, intoned the incantation. In her mind’s eye she could see the arcane glyph-pattern of the thaumic energies as they swirled from her body through her hand and into the body of the frail child. She could feel the effects of the diminishing energies in her body immediately, and she opened her eyes again, looking at the little girl’s face. Motes of pale pinkish light squirmed over her body like hungry worms as they consumed the illness that had infested the child. Within moments, they faded and were gone.
Daisey turned to the little girl’s overwrought mother, whose face showed the strain and the tears of a woman who had spent the last week worried that her daughter was deathly ill. Which she had been, Daisey reflected. She took a deep breath, despite the lingering odors in the room, and said, “Kerri, little Moryn should pull through, although it may take a few days for her to regain strength. Follow Healer Javan’s instructions,” she indicated the man standing next to her, who had been the one to come to her and ask for her help. “He will give you a list of things to do to help her recovery.”
“Thank you, Mage Dubrow,” Kerri replied, obviously much relieved by the favorable prognosis. “Thank you for saving my girl!”
Spontaneously, she dropped to a knee and embraced the hobbit that had saved her daughter. Daisey was taken by surprise, but it happened often enough that she responded politely and returned the embrace. “I am glad I was able to help,” she said, then stepped back as the woman released her.
She turned to Moryn, who lay on the bed, eyes barely open, her face a picture of discomfort. “You’ll be all right, now, little one,” she said, kindly, with a smile. Moryn nodded weakly.
“Good day,” and with that, turned and left the confined apartment, emerging into the hot sun on the balcony, then making her way to the stairs that led down to the lower levels and the ground.
She looked around, scrunching her nose at the building. It was four stories, and shaped like the letter C, with all of the apartments opening onto the courtyard that was enclosed on three sides. The courtyard—and she had to admit that it barely merited the word—was an open area of hard packed dirt, with the occasional weed doing its best to add some greenery and make the area slightly more like a garden. They didn’t do a good job of that. Kids ran around the courtyard, shouting, playing some kind of game involving a fist-sized ball.
The building itself was brick on the lower two levels, and stuccoed wood on the upper two. The roof was red clay tile, many of which she could see were cracked and broken. The stucco was coming off of the underlying wood in chunks and sheets, and while the building was whitewashed, it hadn’t been a recent application, and the paint was flaking and scraped off in too many places to count. The place was run down, and used hard. The forty units that made up the building were housing nearly four hundred people, when they really should have had only half that.
She made it down the three flights of stairs, which only shifted a little under her admittedly light weight. Hobbits were short, and she was no exception at three feet ten inches. Her lifestyle included lots of exercise, so despite her fondness for all eight daily meals, she only weighed a hundred and nine pounds. In hobbit terms, she was a skinny lass. She strode out into the alley that led to Fuller Street, turned left, and headed downhill toward Rust Street.
When she got to the intersection of Fuller Street and Rust Street, she paused, leaning upon her spear, which she used mostly as a staff. After all, it was indeed a mage’s staff, and included the Staff of Power enchantment, and even had an integral powerstone, which she found occasionally useful. She didn’t like how long it took to recharge, but that was the way things were. Of most use to her was the enchantment on it that stored mana, although she took pleasure in the workmanship of the spear itself: six feet of well-seasoned oak, carved with an abstract runic design, with a polished, work-hardened bronze winged head, and a few decorative, colorful parrot feathers hanging from it.
She straightened, looked around at the buildings reaching up two to four stories around her, and decided to have some lunch at the tavern up the street. She had an hour before her meeting with the building supervisor that oversaw the warehouse for the blacksmiths that called Rust Street their homes.
Daisey Dubrow was a community organizer. She did all kinds of things for the people in the Sunset District: talking with them, helping them, advocating for them, and, like today, occasionally healing them. It was what she enjoyed doing; it always had been, even before joining the Port Karn Agricultural Council and the Red Star mages’ guilds. Being a member of two guilds was expensive in dues, but she really appreciated the variety of incantations it offered. Besides, she did make some money doing what she did for the various neighborhoods of the Sunset District, mostly in donations from grateful residents and commissions from the city itself. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to pay her dues to her guilds and give her enough to live reasonably well.
While Port Karn was a big city, mages and their guilds were still pretty limited. There just didn’t seem to be enough of them. There were only seven mages’ guilds in the city, each with their own areas of expertise, and their own agendas. Some, like The Red Star and the Ag Council, helped people. Others helped themselves, occasionally doing so by helping other people, but for Daisey, it was the intent that mattered. The Sentinel Group said they helped people, by providing protection services, but their prices were exorbitant and only a select few benefitted from them. Most of the mages’ guilds were like that, businesses first, and community supporters second, if at all. If she thought about it too long it made her angry, so she tended to try to set those thoughts aside.
Daisey was grass roots. She was idealistic. She was a believer in the power of people. And she was a talented mage. Very talented, albeit young, untested, and relatively untrained. She knew quite a few incantations, but few of them well, and there was a lot more for her to learn. But she didn’t have time for that; the people needed her. Besides, no one else was lighting the streetlamps at night or keeping water supplies pure, so it was up to her.
The Tondene Empire wasn’t a bad governor. If anything, its emperors and empresses practiced a form of benign neglect, for the most part. While there was the usual amount of political infighting, corruption, and power-wrangling, most day to day governance and civil control was handled by local governments, at the duchy level or, more likely, the city level. Port Karn was a grand duchy seat, overseen by Duchess Frida Featherstone. Daisey didn’t really like her all that much; as a mage, she had been introduced, but left unimpressed. The Duchess paid more attention to the nobility than to the people, which, Daisey knew, only made sense politically. It was the high society people who ran the businesses and controlled the economy, which in turn generated all the money. The people just worked for them, eking out a life by the skin of their teeth. She understood it, but she didn’t like it. She had even heard of some nations that let the commoners have a say in how the government was run! She didn’t understand that, or how it might work, but the fact that it existed made her want it for the Empire. She just didn’t know how to go about getting it.
So it was up to people like Daisey Dubrow, people who had the moral strength to eschew high society and help those who couldn’t help themselves. People who didn’t care what High Society did, because High Society could take care of itself.
She shook her head, chuckling at how much she was woolgathering, and scanned the crowds that flooded the street she was standing on. Most were human, although she saw a few orcs, goblins, and dwarves. The orcs, not surprisingly, wore long sleeves and wide brimmed hats, and did a lot of squinting if they weren’t wearing dark glasses or using the Goggles cantrip. Orcs were photosensitive, and tended to be nocturnal when they could. The goblins just looked tired, as if they had been up all night, but it could just be her imagination, knowing that they tended to be more active at night, like the orcs, but not exclusively so.
She heard a man shouting, “Make way! Make way!” as a horse-drawn carriage thundered down the sloping street, and she had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit by the two-wheeled hanson cab as it went past. Unfortunately for Daisey, its wheel sliced through a puddle of questionable liquid, spraying it all over her working robe.
“Bastards!” she shouted at the retreating vehicle and its occupants. “Watch where you’re going!” She tried to brush the muck off of her robes. “Arseholes!” she muttered under her breath. She intoned the incantation for the Cantrip of Laundering. The water from the puddle disappeared, evaporated by the spell, and the mud turned to dust which she shook off. She cast the cantrip again on her small clothes, just in case the splashing water soaked through her robes. They hadn’t felt wet, but she decided not to take any chances. The last thing she needed was some puddle-borne disease. The Elves said that there were little animals that caused diseases that were too small to see. Daisey wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not, but Elves rarely got diseases, and they were the ones that had created the waste treatment plants that grew all over the city, so they must know what they were talking about. They had even developed a fungus colony for the Dwarves that did something similar, except that they didn’t require light, which she supposed made living in their caverns bearable.
She weaved her way through the crowd of busy people, most of which were taller than she, and pushed open the door to a building with a sign above it showing a cracked red bowl: The Broken Bowl Tavern. It was dim inside; most of the window blinds were pulled down low to keep out any stray beams of sunlight that might filter down through the buildings to ground level. Oil lamps hung from a smoky wooden ceiling, shedding enough light to see the plank tables and benches and the wood and leather stools at the bar.
It was pretty packed, being lunchtime, and the two servers were busily carting food and drinks to the patrons, which ran the gamut of racial types. A working-person’s bar, none of the patrons were of higher than middle class, and there were few of those. The Sunset District wasn’t an area of the city that had many of the hoi polloi of society. It was craftspeople, farmhands, teamsters, and other types who kept the busy city functioning. Her kind of people.
She made her way through and between the tables, searching for an empty seat, after letting the bartender put her spear behind the bar, with the rest of the customers’ weapons. This wasn’t some high end tavern with a weapons-check room and attendant, after all. She saw an opening between a pair of scruffy-looking customers.
She took the seat between them, and they shifted to the sides to give her a bit more room. “Hi!” she said, brightly. They turned towards her, nodded, then went back to drinking and talking with their compatriots. One was an Orc, covered in charcoal dust, probably a smith’s assistant or a loader for teamsters that supplied charcoal to the blacksmiths. The other was a Human, bearded, with rings in his ears, which implied, but did not prove, that he might be a sailor. Earrings were common amongst sailors, and while they weren’t unheard of elsewhere, most sailors had them to provide for funerary rites if their bodies ever washed up on shore after drowning in some maritime accident.
Being sociable, Daisey turned to the Orc on her left and stated, “I’m Daisey. What’s your name?”
The Orc started, then turned to her, his eyes flashing in annoyance for a moment before getting his emotions under control. He looked down at the Hobbit for a moment, then replied, “Kratchgûl. What do you want?”
Daisey was used to Orcish blunt speech, so she took no offense at the Orc’s shortness. After all, almost half of the inhabitants of the city were Orcs. “Just being sociable, my friend. And I wanted to ask you what was worth eating here. Anything good on the menu?”
The Orc paused as he considered her question, looking like he was debating internally whether to continue speaking to her. He finally shrugged, and said, “The pottage is good. Has pork in it, and it’s spicy. Filling, too. Ale’s good enough.”
“Thanks, Kratchgûl, that sounds lovely.” And it did, actually. Orcs liked spicy foods, and she had been born and raised in Port Karn, where most of the population was Orcish, and so was used to and enjoyed the heavy use of chili spices. She raised her hand, getting a server’s attention. No mean feat, considering how crowded the table was and how short her arms were.
The server nodded, dropped off his load of beer mugs at a nearby table, and came over. “What can I do for you, miss?”
She smiled sweetly up at him. “Ale, please, and the pottage with pork. I have it on good authority that it’s pretty good.”
The server flashed a quick smile before nodding and stating, “That will be a seven royals for the meal, and two royals for the ale. Pay when you get your food and drink.”
She nodded back at him, and he was off. She turned back to the table, noting that Kratchgûl wasn’t interacting with any of the patrons around him, as if he had come alone, without companions. To her right, the Human was involved in a discussion with two others about cranes and crates, or something. She turned back to the Orc.
“So, Kratchgûl, what do you do for a living?”
The Orc looked down at her silently for a moment, then sighed and spoke, resigned to the conversation. “I work with master Rokash, the smith down the street. He is a steel smith.”
“What kinds of things do you make?” she continued, making conversation.
“Horseshoes, mostly, it seems. Fittings for doors. Nails. Hinges. Brackets. All kinds of things.”
“And how do you like it? What is it like to work for Rokash?” She had not heard much of Rokash, although she was familiar with where the blacksmith’s shop was located.
The orc blacksmith considered the question. “It’s not bad. Mostly it’s hard work, but not difficult. Except sometimes, when working the steel on the anvil. That can get tricky, if you aren’t careful. But then, smithing requires care.” He held up his arm, showing off a hand-sized burn scar. “This can happen if you are not careful around red-hot metal.”
Daisey nodded in sympathy. “That must have hurt!”
“It did. But I got it off my arm quickly, and it healed fast. Rokash used some ointment on it that made it not feel bad.”
“Ah, that’s good to hear,” Daisey said, nodding. “Looks like it healed well. Burns can hurt for a long time.”
The Orc shrugged. “For a little while, but Rokash kept me too busy to notice. And he kept having me put the ointment on it every few days.”
The Orc blinked, as if finally realizing something. “Why are you asking me all these questions?” he asked.
The Hobbit mage smiled. “Mostly making conversation, while I wait for my lunch. Helps to distract me from my grumbling stomach.” She paused for a moment, as if taking the time to decide whether to say more. “And it’s my job to ask these kinds of questions. I am trying to find out which businesses need my assistance, and which people could use my help. I try to make Port Karn work better, in my small way.”
She went on. “For example, from what you have told me, Rokash sounds like a pretty good boss. He treats his employees pretty well, and looks after them even if it costs him a bit of money. He also seems to have taught you that working with metal can be dangerous, and it also sounds as if he cares that you know how to smith iron and steel. Some bosses just expect to have their workers just do as they are told, and some seem to be so callous as to not care about the safety of their people.”
Kratchgûl tilted his head, considering. Daisey could almost see the gears turning in his head as he did so. “Okay, that makes some sense.” He took a long pull from his ale mug. “I don’t mind working for Rokash. I have heard of others who are meaner than he is.” He grinned, his tusks glinting in the lamplight. “But he won’t let you do anything stupid. If you do, he cracks you upside the head to help you learn better. I’ve, uh, learned a lot…that way.” He shrugged, sheepishly. “But not so much any more. A couple of lumps on your noggin and you soon learn to do things his way. The right way.”
“I don’t doubt it!” Daisey agreed with a smile.
Just then the server placed a bowl of pottage and a small loaf of dark bread in front of her, followed by her mug of ale. She fished some coins out of her purse, handing them to the server. Then she dug in. The pottage was a mixture of vegetables and beans, with occasional pieces of pork. It had been ladled over rice, and it was certainly spicy, the heat flowing through her mouth. It would soon cause her to sweat more than the heat of the day had already produced, cooling her off to some extent. While not gourmet, it was pretty good, and as filling as the young smith had claimed.
After lunch, she left the Broken Bowl and made her way to the warehouse where she was to meet up with Hydlen Scrowl, the warehouse supervisor. Apparently, his workers called him “The Scowl”, and she wanted to know why. Was it just his face, his demeanor, or his actions? Whatever it was, she would find out.
The building was near the corner of Rust Street and Middle Street, a large wood building with a stone foundation and wood shingle roof. It stood two stories tall, but because the floors were so tall, it was as high as a three story building. The name “Vyrden and Sons” was painted over the huge main door, in white, which contrasted with the light blue color of the building. In one corner she could see some graffiti, painted in black paint, but it was so messy or abstract that she couldn’t tell what it said. It didn’t matter; many buildings were marked in the same, or similar way. Sometimes it’s almost artistic, although she couldn’t say that about this particular graffiti. Most of the space was taken up by the bays and shelves of the storage area, but one corner had a small office, if the windows on that part of the building were any indication.
Workers moved in and out of the building, carrying long rods of metal, ingots, and other metal stock. Some pushed wheelbarrows filled with charcoal. A wagon, currently not hitched to any team of animals, was being noisily loaded with various kinds of metal stock by a crew of four workers, and two other workers pushed a bundle of metal rods held up by a chain, along a track bolted to the ceiling.
She walked in, her spear butt striking the laid stones of the flooring with audible clacks, even with all of the ambient noises of people moving very heavy, clanging objects around. Most of the workers did little but glance in her direction, being too busy to really engage her. She ignored them pretty much the same way, looking around for someone who didn’t look too busy, or who looked like a supervisor.
She heard shouting. “The six foot rods of brass stock go over there!” a dark-haired, middle aged man yelled at a young man, punctuating his words with a fist to youth’s shoulder.
“Sorry sir!” he was saying, although the older man didn’t seem to be listening. Tears trickled down his cheeks.
“How many times do I have to tell you that the iron ingots go in Bay 3, the copper in Bay 4, and the brass in what bay?”
“Seven? Sir?”
“Oh my stars, he’s finally got it!” He smacked the employee’s forehead with his palm, rocking the man’s head back. The dark haired man took a breath. “And if you are given a load of pig iron?”
“Bay 2?” The young man flinched, fearing another hit; he had guessed and hadn’t known the answer.
The older man looked surprised. “Well, yes,” he said, in a more normal tone of voice. “Pay attention next time, Deevers. I’m sure I wouldn’t have trouble finding a replacement for you if I had to. Now get back to work.”
“Yessir!” the young man, Deevers, replied. He scampered off to his duties, whatever they were.
Daisey figured that the Loud Man was Hydlen Scrowl. She walked up to him as he was rubbing his face with his handkerchief. Probably wiping the excess spittle off of his face, she thought. She stood, waiting for him to finish.
He looked up. “Who might you be, and what can I do for you?” he asked. His expression wasn’t the most “customer friendly” one she had ever seen, and his voice seemed to be filled with exasperation.
“I am Daisey Dubrow,” she replied, “but that isn’t really important. I am more interested in you. You are Hydlen Scrowl?”
He frowned, seeming to scan his memories for someone with her name. He came up blank. She was known around the area, but not everyone had heard of her. Part of her was disappointed that her reputation hadn’t preceded her. “Never heard of ya. And yeah, I’m Hydlen. Supervisor to this lot of layabouts.” He waved his arms, encompassing the whole work crew in the warehouse. He focused on the crew at the wagon. “Get that wagon loaded! You should have been done by now!” He turned his attention back to the hobbit. “What do you want with me?” He cocked his head, squinting, and asked, “Who do you work for?”
Daisey smiled, and replied, “Myself. Mostly. The city in general, you could say. I find problems, and then solve them. And I have heard that this warehouse may have a problem.”
Hydlen frowned. “What problem?” He laughed, “The only problem I have is workers who don’t work!”
Daisey looked around. She saw no slackers, only a bunch of people who appeared to be moving with alacrity and efficiency. If anything, it looked like they were taking more risks in moving too fast than they should for a safe working environment. “They all seem to be working right now.”
Hydlen snorted. “That’s because I just put the fear of the gods in them.”
More like the fear of you yelling at them, she thought. Or the fear of you hitting them.
The supervisor continued. “What’s this all about, anyway. Why do you care how hard my employees work?”
“It’s my business to know how hard people work. It’s also my business how they work, and how the workplace handles how they work. If you see someone who is lazy, how do you handle it?”
Hydlen got a suspicious look on his face. “I tell them to get back to work. Sometimes I yell at them. They occasionally need a firm hand to keep them honest.” A hint of worry formed in his mind. What was this little lady getting at? he wondered.
“I see,” Daisey replied. “And if they still aren’t working to your expectations? What then?”
The hint of worry blossomed into a full flower of concern. “I don’t whip them or anything, if that’s your concern. I need to get back to work.” He started moving towards the large loading door. “And you need to leave.”
“I have some more questions for you, Mr. Scrowl,” Daisey stated.
“I don’t care. You are leaving.” With that, he turned away and strode off, out the main door and into the storage yard.
Daisey stood in the warehouse for a moment, then shook her head and walked out into the sunlight. “Dammit,” she said. She had the feeling he was hiding something. And he seemed very defensive, she thought.

Part 2