War of the Posers Read online

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The days of the Heavy Purse being so busy that there wasn’t even standing room inside were gone, but it had built up a loyal clientele and basically always had a steady flow of customers. Some of the people were starting to look familiar to me, and I must have looked familiar to them, because when Klara and I walked inside, we got plenty of waves, nods, and other gestures of recognition. I did my best to smile back at everyone, and then took my seat at the end of the bar.

  Penelope was there in a flash with a mug of ale that she sat in front of Klara.

  “What’ll you be having?” she asked me.

  “Ale is fine,” I replied.

  She nodded, and got a wooden mug for me as well.

  “Is Matthew around?” I asked.

  “Think it might be a bit early for that,” she said, glancing through the window to the outside world, either making a judgement call on the daylight or trying to find a clock that wasn’t there.

  It made me think we should get a clock installed in our square. That seemed like something the neighborhood would appreciate.

  “Titus?” I asked.

  “Oh of course he’s around. Talking to a cook,” she said, leaning back.

  “Part of the expansion?”

  She nodded. I pretended not to notice her picking something out of her teeth and flicking it onto the floor.

  “Well, when he’s done—“

  “I can send him over,” she said with a nod, and went back to being the bartender in charge.

  I looked around the tavern, and noticed the hulking presence of Mornax sitting in the corner nearest the bar. He gave me a slight nod, the metal tips on his horns glinting in the light as he did. I sipped at the ale. It wasn’t strong stuff — it was closer to water than beer, to be honest. At least the beer that I’d drank the few times I’d snuck them. Even still, I didn’t like drinking the light stuff. I would have had water, or lemonade if all things were possible. Anything that was refreshing and delightful after a long day of not getting done what it was I wanted. And it wasn’t even evening. It was late afternoon if anything.

  Titus came strolling down the bar about fifteen minutes later, and leaned back against the back wall.

  “You look smug as hell,” I said.

  “Feeling good about the expansion,” he replied.

  “You find a cook you like?”

  “Three of ‘em.”

  “You need that many cooks?”

  “Probably not, but it feels nice to be spoiled for choice for once.”

  “Ah. I get that.”

  “My most beautiful and understanding wife mentioned to me that you wanted a moment of my time.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Is this a sarsaparilla conversation?”

  “Might be.”

  “After you,” he said, gesturing to the door leading back to the store room. He leaned back and shouted toward Penelope, “Going to the back.”

  She shouted something back, but I missed it, already deep into the storeroom.

  Titus appeared a moment later shaking his head. “You’d think I pissed her off somehow,” he said.

  “I think you probably did,” I replied.

  “And just how—“

  “More a theory than anything concrete.”

  “Bah. What’s the thing you want to talk about?”

  “The Iron Silents.”

  “Our nemesises.”

  “Nemesi?”

  “That sounds closer to correct. What about them this time?”

  “I think I found something we can use to start building our plans around.”

  “A criminal gang directory?”

  “That would be much better than what I found.”

  “It really is a shame they don’t make one.”

  “We could start.”

  “Seems a mite bit risky — not exactly much in the way of reward.”

  “True. No, I found a building that is owned by a company that also owns the land where the Iron Silents built their torture chamber. Where they, well—“

  “Tortured you?”

  “Murdered me repeatedly.”

  “Sounds like torture.”

  “It’s not on my list of experiences to repeat. The building is a brothel in Old Town, closer to the original castle—”

  “The Gilded Garden?”

  “You know it?”

  “I’m a happily married man! Of course I don’t know it. I’m just aware of it out of professional interest. They tend to serve the same drunks as I do. Sometimes.”

  “So what do you know about it?”

  “Not that old, opened maybe two years or so. They got a good reputation from having, oh, how do I say this politely, exotic offerings? Kitsune-girls, Half-Ogres, that sort of a thing. You think they’ve got something to do with the Iron Silents?”

  “I do.”

  “Because of the land ownership thing?”

  “Also because of the name of the holding company that owns them. It’s a play on something famous from Earth. And since the Iron Silents make such a big deal of their Earthyness, it’d be one hell of a coincidence.”

  “Seems like a poor choice on their end.”

  “I think it’s an arrogance thing. They’re thinking no one will get it. And if someone from Earth did get it, they’d try to recruit them.”

  “Did they try and recruit you?”

  “Yeah. About the same time as they were trying to buy this place.”

  “Any reason you turned them down?”

  “I mean, I don’t want to belong to any gang that’d accept me as a member.”

  “Hah.”

  “Nah, Etta told me about them. And basically my first experience here was watching them kill her over and over like they wound up doing to me. I don’t want to belong to a group like that.”

  “She experienced the same thing that you did?”

  “I don’t know which one of us had it worse, but we both got to experience the joys of multiple deaths in rapid succession.”

  Titus tisked as he scratched his hairless chin and sat down on a crate of mugs.

  “Owning both properties wouldn’t normally get me to believe in your theory. But the names thing... That’s different. I don’t suppose you know about how many of you Earth types there are here.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Rough count?”

  “I know Etta, myself, and the Iron Silents. And I don’t even know how many of those assholes there are. I’ve only encountered three so far. There could be more, that could be it.”

  “I’ve only encountered you and Etta. Given that I’ve lived here quite a while, and run in circles where I feel I would have run into at least a few more if your kind was common, not elves, but—“

  “I get it.”

  “Right, well, you can’t really say that someone would mistakenly come up with that sort of a name.”

  “Unless they were only tangentially connected to the Earth folk of the Iron Silents. Came up with the name that way.”

  “Ah, but the connection would still be there, and that’s what we’re looking to explore and exploit, right? If they’re connected, we win. However they’re connected, we win.”

  “I suppose that’s a way of thinking about it.”

  “It is the way of thinking about it, because that’s the truth of the matter. If the brothel owners are at all connected to the Iron Silents, looking into them gives us a way to look at the Iron Silents.”

  “So what’s the next step?”

  “We need to get them under observation. Which, unfortunately is Matthew’s department.”

  “Why unfortunately?”

  “Because he’s not here.”

  “He will be though, right?”

  “Sure, but he’s not here right now.”

  “I wouldn’t really say that’s an unfortunate thing instead of something that’ll be remedied in the very near future.”

  “Eh, I’m a man of the pr
esent.”

  “So what do you think I should do?”

  “Wait for Matthew to get here. Then tell him.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Bit early in the history of our little group to already start stepping on each other’s toes. And I doubt we’re up against the sort of time crunch where we need to run out of our home, our bit of safety mind you, and immediately go watch a brothel. Not that I would necessarily mind watching a brothel, just, well, it would be up to you, then to explain to my wife why I would be visiting the Gilded Garden.”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  “Beautiful, then.”

  He gave me a jaunty smile as he hopped off the crate, and moseyed back out into his bar. I followed a moment later, and sat back down on my stool.

  Annoyed.

  Now I was stuck waiting, once again. Waiting in the space where I hoped Nadya would show up with Matthew. I was going to look desperate. I didn’t want to look desperate. It’s not a good look.

  Fuck, I thought.

  “Titus,” I called out. “You tell him, I have a thing.”

  “A what?” he called back.

  “Thing,” I shouted, and exited the building.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I had a little plan of action. It wasn’t much, but it was mine, and it was a thing to do that wasn’t sitting around waiting. That was the key element to the plan: not waiting. I went down the street, turned the corner, down that block, and stopped at the butcher shop there. I’d seen it in passing a few times, but since I didn’t do any cooking myself, I’d never had cause to stop. Today was the first time I had a reason to purchase raw meat.

  The place didn’t have a clever name — everyone just knew it as the butcher’s on Lucktight Street — but there was a sort of aged elegance to it. Like generations of Old Town residents had depended on the Butcher’s on Lucktight to provide them quality cuts of meat. Inside, right up against the window, cured meats hung down to entice customers inside. All sorts of sausages and the like hung from the ceiling. Behind that was a small open area that was tiled, and gave customers a bit of room to stand in front of a large counter. Beyond the counter, past where the butchers were standing, were meats on display. It looked like the meat was resting on ice, but it didn’t seem like the ice was melting. The counter, naturally, was butcher block, and clearly had been well-used throughout the years. The butcher himself, a large man in a clean white apron, stood at the far end of the counter. He wrapped a large cut of red meat in brown paper, tying it closed with practiced ease.

  “Help you?” he asked as soon as he’d finished with his previous customer.

  “I need a pretty big cut of meat,” I replied.

  “More’n what you see here?” he asked, gesturing behind at the various cuts of meat laid out in his display.

  “Yeah.”

  “How big, what cut, what meat?”

  “Meat kind is, uh, not as important as size.”

  “What you be feedin’ this to?”

  “That’s, uh—“

  He smiled, and leaned all the way over until I got a good up close look at his nose hairs. “Some kind of monster?”

  “Well, um—“ I started, but then he just laughed, a deep and satisfying belly laugh.

  “Bit o’fun with you,” he said. “Looking for a whole animal?”

  “Do you have any?”

  “Course I do.”

  “I still need to carry it, but, uh, big.”

  “Horse? Cow?”

  “Cow.”

  He gave me a nod, then stepped off his platform and went into the back of the place.

  I was alone in the shop, and that meant I took a second to lean over the counter and peer at the ‘ice.’ It definitely wasn’t ice. At least, not in the way I was used to it, in terms of ice being frozen water. They were more like rocks that looked like ice, and gave off cold. But it wasn’t freezing the meat either. There had to be some measure of magic involved. Always assume there’s magic — that was just the way things worked in Vuldranni.

  The butcher popped out of the back door, holding a hoof in one hand, the rest of the animal’s leg and thigh draped over his shoulder. He heaved it up and over, slamming it down on the counter with a dull thunk. There was no fur or skin covering the meat, but it was clear some sort of trauma had taken place with this particular animal, because there was a lot of muscular damage.

  “Now,” the butcher said, “I can’t exactly sell this, can I?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “I’m clueless about, uh, butchering.”

  “Does it look good?”

  “No.”

  “No one wants to buy this to feed their family.”

  “I mean, maybe someone desperate?”

  “You think desperate people be coming into my shop?”

  “If they’re desperate, they’d probably go anywhere they could to get food.”

  He chuckled. “Guess you got me there. Right, I could discount it and sell it to someone who is desperate. What I’m aiming to do, on the other hand, is maybe sell it to someone who might be feedin’ it to something what might not have such curated tastes as my usual customers.”

  “Ah.”

  “In particular, whatever it is you’re keeping and not feedin’ right now.”

  “At a reduced price.”

  “Being that it is not up to my usual standards, that is exactly what I’m offerin’. Two gold for all this.”

  I was about to say that it seemed like he should be paying me to take the meat off his hands, but something clicked in my head. I thought of The Godfather again. I realized that because this was my neighborhood butcher, because this man was certainly a fixture in this neighborhood, this was a prime time to start doing what I could to bridge the gaps of niceties, to make sure that my neighbors liked not only me but those who were associated with me: my guild.

  “That sounds fair,” I said.

  The butcher seemed a bit surprised, but then caught himself and smiled.

  I pulled three gold coins out, and slid them onto the counter.

  “Bonus one to wrap that up in paper,” I said.

  He winked. “No charge for that.”

  “Then a bonus one for your cheery demeanor.”

  “Ha!” he barked, but the three coins disappeared just the same. He snagged the haunch off the counter, and then put it down next to his paper. After a few pulls off the big roll of brown paper and some magic with string, I had a huge package in front of me. That looked more than a little like a leg. But at least it wasn’t, you know, raw flesh hanging out. “You got a name, elf?” the butcher asked.

  “Clyde Hatchett,” I said. “I live over above the Heavy Purse.”

  “Oh?” he asked. “Heard some good things about that pub. Decent?”

  “Come over,” I said. “I’m happy to buy you a pint, let you decide for himself.”

  “Might just do that, Master Hatchett.”

  “And your name?”

  “Gust Buld.”

  “Good to meet you,” I said, and then hoisted the leg up and over my shoulder. “Have a lovely day.”

  I walked back the short distance to my home above the Heavy Purse, almost happy enough to whistle a little tune while I carried the leg on my shoulder. But my mood worsened as I got closer to the building. I wasn’t about to admit it, but the whole issue with Nadya was weighing heavily. And I wasn’t mature enough to actually work through it so much as push it down deeper.

  The leg and I went up to the third floor of my building, my former gym. It was now, or would be in the future, theoretically, Nadya’s lab and the current home of one Hellion the mimic.

  I pushed the door open and peeked inside.

  The workout gear left behind by Etta was still in place, as was a chest. A large chest that seemed to have eschewed the gilded trappings it had developed most recently. Instead, this was a more utilitarian model with iron banding and dark oak planks. It looked pretty normal. I mean, it was still
out of place because it was a chest in the middle of what was very clearly a workout room, but as far as chests go, at least it wasn’t on the ceiling.

  “Hiya Hellion,” I said.

  The chest didn’t move, and yet I had the distinct impression the mimic was watching me intently.

  “Glad to see you’re back on the floor.”

  No movement.

  “I thought you might be hungry.”

  An eye opened up on the chest. Just one, off to one side. It looked at me, and I felt like, were there an eyebrow, it would be arching in pleasant surprise.

  “See, I don’t know how often you need to eat. Or how much you need to eat, for that matter. But I figure you need to eat.”

  Another eye, and the lid opened ever so slightly. My little mimic was excited.

  “So, uh,” I pulled the haunch and leg around my shoulder to present it to Hellion.

  Two eyes— then three, then four, maybe eight, were all open and looking. A dark purple tongue was just inside the lid, in danger of sneaking out.

  I untied the string and unwrapped the paper, then took a step back, revealing the meat.

  “All for you,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind that it isn’t alive, but it’s the best I could do.”

  The mimic darted across the room remarkably quickly on tiny little legs, until it was about six feet away from me. Then the huge purple tongue launched out and wrapped around the leg. In one motion, Hellion threw the leg into his mouth and started chewing.

  As gross as it was watching the mimic eat, the noises coming out of his mouth were worse. Bones snapping, gristle popping, and this weird sort of humming that I took as the mimic expressing pleasure.

  I gave as best a smile as I could in the situation. I was almost tempted to pet the beast, because there was this sense of it being a pet, but then I caught sight of the mimic’s teeth. All thoughts of being cuddly to the thing were instantly ripped from my head by a primal sense of survival. I backed away, making sure to keep my eyes on Hellion’s eight eyes.

  A feeling of gratitude seemed to radiate out from the mimic. I wondered if I was just imagining it, or if the mimic actually had some sort of ability to project its feelings into my head. That could be a really dangerous thing. Also, amazing.