Dead-end Job
BR-R-R-RING!
My eyes flickered open. For the briefest of moments, I stared at the room around me in dull confusion. This didn’t look like my flat…
BR-R-R-RING!
My head throbbed. I finally remembered; I’d moved. This dank, musty hole in some gods-forsaken wall had been my home for the past few weeks.
BR-R-R-RING!
Something clicked, at last. That would be the telephone! For as convenient as I’d found that damned device when I’d first arrived, it had proven to be little more than a constant thorn in my side. It continued its tooth-rattling song as I rolled out of bed, doing my best to clear my bleary vision as I unsteadily waddled my way over to its place on the wall.
“Worthless piece of junk…” I muttered to myself as I lifted the earpiece and did my best to put on an air of professionalism. “What’dya want.”
My best is nothing to write home about.
“Vann. Pleasant as always,” the voice on the other end chided me. That would be Maeve, one of the hardest-working dispatchers on the force. “I take it you had an enjoyable night?”
Images of that ‘enjoyable night’ flashed through my mind. I apologized mentally to the telephone for my earlier curses, as at the very least it prevented Maeve from seeing my face right now. “I’d rather not dwell on that. You called for a reason, yeah?”
Her tone sobered immediately. “We’ve got another corpse in the lower reaches. Too old for the spirit mediums, but the head is intact this time. They’re asking for you on the scene.”
Another one? The last incident had been only a few days ago. I say ‘incident’ because my superiors refused to refer to them as murders until it could be conclusively proven that it wasn’t just a ghoul crawling up out of the reservoir in the night. It was a fair enough consideration, I supposed; there certainly didn’t appear to be any pattern to the victims, and the deaths had all occurred in the same general district of the lower town. I’d only been called down to see a body down there once, though unfortunately the mind had been too far gone to be of any use. “What’s different about this one? The Lord Justice hadn’t seemed particularly impressed by my efforts last time.”
“They don’t tell me things like that, Vann.” I could practically hear her shrug through the earpiece. “I was told to get you over there, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“Right, fair enough. Give me the address. You can tell the officers I’ll be there shortly.”
As I stepped out of my office, I was met by a solid torrent of rainwater pouring down from the polished stone overhang above my door. Ifreannbéal might be smack in the middle of a desert, but all that means is that the rain it does get is brutal and unrelenting for its mercifully brief duration. I sighed and pushed through it, bracing myself for the chilling blast as my clothes were instantly soaked through and my hair was plastered to my head. The rain beyond the liquid curtain was lighter - scattered and thinned by the vast network of walkways and utility rails that criss-crossed the Pit above me - but considering my thick, woolen coat had already been rendered worthless by that initial deluge, it was little consolation.
I hated this place. Not too long ago I’d been a medic-turned-investigative necromancer from the small Duwallish city of Bodenfurt, a lovely little town with an unfortunate number of eager ladder-climbers in its justice system. That’s the only way I can see that anyone like me would end up in a Dwarven sinkhole like this, really. Ask one too many questions, raise one too many victims some higher-up wanted to stay quiet, and suddenly you’re a prime candidate for ‘representing the spirit of Menschen, Dwarven, and Gnomish goodwill and cooperation’ or some such rot. Not that anyone cared about one meddlesome detective being dumped into Mordrekain’s city-sized garbage pit in the first place; it just looked better that way in the record books.
I did my best to push those thoughts from my mind, into the vault with the rest of my darker memories. Dwelling on them for the thousandth time since I had first arrived in this nultouched place wasn’t going to do me any good. After all, I had a corpse to go look at.
Despite my best efforts to find something else of interest to occupy my mind on the long, winding walk to the lower town bridges, my mood had improved very little by the time I reached the scene. I did, however, discover an interesting little fact: focusing on not thinking about something is not much different from thinking about it. As I rounded the last corner and came upon the circle of officers keeping pedestrians away from the body, the glares I received from them suggested that things were only going to go downhill from here.
“Don’t recall asking for help from some bumbling giant,” growled the nearest lawman. He was a balding, heavyset dwarf with his silver beard woven into the chain belt around his waist to keep it out from underfoot. The fact that it also served to draw the eye directly from his face down to the holster at his hip was likely not a coincidence.
“I’ll be sure to mention that to your superiors next time they call me down by name, short stack.” I brushed past the men between me and the corpse, ignoring a few muttered threats and hateful comments, and got down to business. It was instantly apparent why I’d been called: There was no way that this had been a feral beast attack.
The body was in surprisingly good repair, considering it was dead. A hole had been blown through this poor woman’s chest, obliterating the heart outright and providing what was sure to have been an instantaneous, painless death. It looked like rats or other vermin had been pecking at her face and hands since then, but that was more or less irrelevant. For a hole as clean as the killing blow had been, only a firearm of significant power could be the culprit. Besides, as far as my job was concerned, I only needed the brain intact.
“What do we need, here?” I called to the crowd behind me. “Identifying the body? Pointing fingers? Time of death?”
Short Stack was the first to respond, seemingly offended that I would dare ask him for information. “Just get the stiff upright and tell it to spill everything!”
“You might be surprised to learn this, but magic actually requires some degree of effort,” I said calmly, not looking up from the corpse. “I realize you’re probably not familiar with hard work yourself, but I can't last long enough for this 'stiff' to dump her whole life story on us. One she's standing, we're going to need a clear plan of attack.”
His reply of indignant sputtering was cut off by one of his colleagues. A younger woman from the sound of her voice. “We don’t know what the story is. A name would be a good place to start. And… maybe show the dead a bit of respect, eh?” I could all but feel her twitch as I pulled aside the body’s blouse to investigate the mortal wound more closely. Glancing back, my eyes were met by the most disapproving glare I’d ever encountered.
“I know my business, thanks.” Nevertheless, I returned the clothing to its original position and rocked back on my heels. Even if I were the lecherous type she seemed to think I was, such distractions would be incredibly counter-productive to my casting. I took a moment to take a few deep breaths and clear my mind, letting the sound of cascading gutter water wash everything else away. So prepared, I braced myself, closed my eyes, and began the spell.
Images flickered into my mind. War-torn bodies of friends and allies. I went through the motions of blotting out their faces as best I could, but it never ceased to rattle me to my core. Those experiences had become the pattern; the model on which all of my modern healing was based. I’d had little choice in the matter. I’d honed my craft on stuffed dummies and cadavers, but the last great war against Stirge had been where I’d truly been tested. Forged in the fires of battle, as my new dwarven neighbors would say. Too flowery a phrase for such horrors, I think, but no less true. My jaw hurt from clenching, but it was important that I keep myself emotionally detached, as much as it pained me to treat those memories - those people - as little more than diagrams for my art.
I steadied my breath and interposed the body before me onto my memories. Even with my eyes closed, I could sense the wounds on it and see them in my mind’s eye. I imagined them sealing shut, being wiped away as if they’d been chalk drawings on a pristine sculpture, and then the magic happened. Energy poured into my mind. It’s a sensation that’s all but impossible to explain, but immediately familiar to any who have dabbled in magic. Even with decades of practice under my belt, it was sometimes still all I could do to hold onto my thoughts as power from the divine plane flooded through my head and into the body on the ground. Sweat joined the rain already coursing down my face. My hand wavered in place. Slowly, wisps of green light appeared from the edges of the corpses wounds. Several officers pointed and murmured in what could have been surprise or interest or fear as these wisps formed thin, glowing strings that wove themselves into fine meshes which proceeded to lash themselves across the wounds I’d pictured in my head.
I lost track of how long I crouched there, willing the body whole again. It could have been seconds, or it could have been several minutes. Whatever the case, as the spell reached its conclusion and my brain stopped imitating a high-pressure valve, the chill of my wet clothes and the pounding in my head finally began to set in again. I opened my eyes and returned to the land of the living. More importantly, so did the corpse.
She sat up slowly and stiffly, her wet hair splayed around her vermin-gnawed face. The hole in her chest was still plainly visible, but ethereal green energy coursed within it where the flesh had once been, a ghost of her unmarred body. Had she still been alive, it would also serve as a water-tight bandage and expedite healing, but as it was, it largely served to fool her magically-reanimated mind into believing it was well enough to function. Her eyes retained the fog of death, but she appeared to be able to see regardless, judging by the way her eyes flicked across her surroundings.
“Easy now,” I said, trying to keep my breaths measured enough to sound calm and reassuring; a difficult task given the effort I’d just expended. “You’ve had an accident. Do you remember your name?”
“Name?” She whispered. “My name… is Moira?” She sounded unsure, but more than that she sounded slightly drunk, as if her mind was in a haze and her tongue wasn’t responding the way it should have. That was typical of cases like these. After all, the mortal mind isn’t used to operating without the soul to guide it, and for as long as her body had been resting before my arrival, it had likely undergone the early stages of decomposition. For her, being a bit dazed was an excellent sign, all things considered.
“There’s gotta be a million Moiras in this city!” Short Stack scoffed. “You got a surname?”
Her eyes drifted up to the man, his derision lost to her addled mind. “Yes, I… It’s… My surname…” She stuttered as if panicked, but neither her tone nor her demeanor changed. “I can’t remember. It’s as if… Holes. In my head. In my…” Her hand drifted to her chest.
Her incoming existential crisis was interrupted by a distant crack. With the way the labyrinthine halls, walls, and bridges of the Pit distorted sounds from the surface, one could be forgiven for assuming it was thunder from up top. For what it’s worth, I might have too, were I not so new to the city, and had I not so recently suffered flashes of the past I generally preferred to forget. With practiced reflexes, I hurled myself to the ground just in time for a small, wooden crate to explode into splinters right about where my head had been.
The officers’ weapons were out in a flash, with shouts of “Shots fired!” and “Eyes up; shooter!” filling the air. I’d dodged the first shot, thanks almost entirely to the distance from which it had been fired, but I was still out in the open, sprawled out on the stones in the middle of an open city street. Cover was sparse, and what existed came in the form of more crates and one small garbage wagon. If the crate from a moment ago had been any indication, those weren’t going to last for more than a shot.
“Quietu above, if I die in this fetid hole in the sand...” Pulling my feet up under me again, I grabbed Moira - the corpse, rather; folks seem to think it's improper to treat the dead as if they are the souls that once inhabited them - and bolted for the nearest crate. The lady officer had beaten me there. She seemed shaken. Not scared, necessarily, but it’s not as if anyone, officer of the law or not, starts their day expecting to be fired upon by an unseen sniper.
“No one has a weapon like that down here…” She was muttering to herself. “There are permits. There would be records!”
“What, not every day someone throws together a high-powered Rifle as their First Work and decides to test it out by taking pot-shots at the local constabulary?” I probably deserved the slap that followed.
“No, you idiot, don’t you realize what this means?”
I was about to respond, undoubtedly with some more grade-A sarcasm, when our cover decided to spontaneously transform into a cloud of wooden shrapnel. I screamed. The officer screamed. I’m pretty sure Moira’s body screamed just because all of the cool people were doing it. We scattered like spooked rabbits.
“Everyone out!” I heard Short Stack yell from behind me. “We ain’t getting wrapped up in Pit Fiend business!”
My heart plummeted. The Pit Fiends were a ruthless syndicate made up of what had once been a motley assortment of disparate gangs and crime rings back in Ifreannbéal’s formative years. Based on the short briefing I’d received when I’d first arrived, no one messed in their affairs. They were too large, too well-equipped, and far too disciplined for even the combined police forces of the entire Pit to take on. If it was one of their guys behind these killings - not to mention the very real possibility of my imminent assassination - I no longer had allies. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a single person in the city who would be caught dead helping someone the Fiends had marked for death.
“That’s not right…” The corpse muttered from behind me.
I skidded to a stop behind the garbage wagon. The smell was awful, but at least there was a decent chance the masses of waste would stop a bullet in a somewhat less painful fashion than the wooden box had.
“I should… shouldn’t I?”
The corpse was still talking. I turned to comfort her, quiet her down a little, only to find myself alone behind the wagon. Looking down to where I was quite clearly still holding her hand, I noticed that her hand - and the forearm attached to it - was literally all I was holding.
“This should hurt.” She stated simply. Standing some five meters away, Moira’s body looked at the oozing stump where her right arm had once been. “This… and this, as well.” Her gaze shifted from her shoulder to the magically-sealed hole in her torso. “These wounds…”
“Get to cover, you worthless cadaver!” I screamed at her, but whether she could hear me through her stupor or not, she seemed unfazed by my words. Similarly, the bullet that whizzed by her face, taking her left ear with it, did little more than give her another wound to paw at.
Wait… I thought. He shot at her. There’s no way he doesn’t know where I am, but he shot at… “Oh gods damn it all.”
In my selfish panic, I had immediately assumed that I was the only target of this distant gunman. I was the outsider, after all; the unknown element drawn into a case that was so much bigger than I’d known. It only seemed natural, didn’t it? But that wasn’t what was happening here. I wasn’t being shot at because I was dangerous to someone. I was being shot at because she was!
I dashed forward, praying to every god I knew that the assassin might drop a bullet while reloading, or sneeze just as he pulled the trigger, or perhaps die from a sudden heart attack. Anything to keep my head from being blown from my neck by a high-velocity hunk of metal. There was another crack. I closed my eyes, spread my arms wide, and prayed a bit harder.
The gods, as they so often do, decided to interpret my prayer in the most painful and inconvenient way possible.
The moment I hit Moira’s dumbfounded corpse, wrapping my arms around her and making ready to dive behind the shattered debris of the last crate we’d tried to hide behind, a red-hot slug hit my leg. I screamed again as the bone snapped and my foot twisted beneath me in a blinding jolt of pure, unimaginable pain.
I missed the space behind the crate.
In fact, I missed the ground altogether.
Plummeting over the bridge's guardrail towards the deepest, darkest depths of the Pit, the last thing I heard before losing consciousness was the damn corpse.
“Am I… dead?”
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