“I’m going to get him blackout drunk tonight,” Mordecai said. “Then I can peek at his stores and the newsletter.”
“So we’re doing this, then?” Donut asked. “We’re doing the quest? And this time I will be awake the whole time? Excellent. Let’s solve this mystery. What do we gotta do next?”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s work through what we already know. We have dead prostitutes from outside the city falling from the sky. These women have corpses that suggest they’ve been twisted to death. Furthermore, they have wounds on their shoulders that indicate they’ve been held aloft by something with talons. Possibly a skyfowl. And just a few hours after we said we’d do something about it, the woman who gave us the quest ends up dead. We’re attacked by that crazy elf dude from that gang along with three scary ghost ladies with their guts hanging out. What else?”
“You have those two pieces of paper,” Donut said.
“Oh yeah,” I said, pulling them both from my inventory. The first was Mysterious Letter. It was a folded piece of paper stained red with blood. I opened it.
It was a relatively short letter, written in a language I didn’t understand. The text was all squiggles and triangles. I examined the letter’s properties.
Mysterious Letter.
GumGum the orc had this blood-soaked letter in her possession. It’s in an odd language. Is it a clue? Is it a grocery list? You can’t fucking read it, so who knows?
I slid it over to Mordecai as I examined the next slip.
Gate Pass.
When one walks about the streets of any town within the Over City, the mindless Swordsman guards tend to get a bit squirrely if you’re carrying a corpse with you. When it comes to their black and white view of justice, the rule of law is absolute.
Unless you have a gate pass.
This letter gets the city guard off your back as long you’re not being too overt with your current criminal enterprise.
Pass only works within the township in which it was issued.
The paper itself said, “Gate Pass. The holder of this pass is doing this on my orders. Magistrate Featherfall.”
“That is not what I expected,” I said, putting it back into my inventory. It was basically a Get-Out-of-Jail card.
“I recognize this text,” Mordecai said, still looking at the mysterious letter. He sounded nervous. “I can’t read it, but I know these squiggles. It’s necroscript. It’s something an undead magic user would write out. This is probably a type of scroll. But you can only read it if you have proper skill in the language.”
“So it has something to do with a necromancer?” I asked.
“Maybe, maybe not. But when I say ‘undead magic user,’ I mean that literally.”
“Those krasue head things were undead,” I said. “The system said they were ghosts.”
“Krasue are usually henchmen, errr, henchwomen, for something else. I’m thinking you two might have a lich problem.”
“What is a lich?” Donut asked.
I answered. I knew this from playing DnD. “It’s usually an undead magic user, obsessed with eternal life.”
“Sort of,” Mordecai said. “They’re pretty nasty monsters. They tend to be smart, too.”
“Hmm,” I said, thinking. “What does a lich have to do with those 201st Security Group assholes?”
“Hey, Fitz, darling. Can you come back here please?” Donut called.
The pub owner appeared from the back, rubbing his eyes. He’d obviously been crying. “Yes, your majesty?”
“You said you were afraid that GumGum would get hurt by one of the krasue. What did you mean by that? How did you know about those things?”
I looked at Donut, impressed. I chose not to say anything.
“She told me,” he said. “She was looking out for them fallen women. But she said sometimes she’d hear one, and she’d go into the alleyway even though it was still night. I’d tell her not to go in there. It ain’t safe. But she’d go, and she said sometimes she’d see the krasue in the shadows. She was afraid of them. She had nightmares. But she cared about them women. She had nightmares about one of them falling from the sky and not being dead, and just sitting there and dying, and nobody being there to hold her hand and tell her it was going to be okay. GumGum’s mom had been one of them ladies, you see. A lady of the night, I mean. And she’d died after getting stabbed. GumGum had found her the next morning. Just sitting on the stoop to their house. She’d crawled home and died right there. She’d left a red streak a half kilometer long, and nobody had helped. GumGum had to grow up mighty fast after that. That’s why she had a soft spot for those ladies. The nicest orc you’d ever meet. She smelled something awful, but I really liked her.”
“So krasue are a normal monster for this town?” I asked.
“There’s no such thing as a normal monster for this town,” he said. “But it’s unusual for the undead to rattle about, the magistrate being a black cleric, and all. He can control the undead, so I reckon if he knew about them, he’d banish them floating lady heads right quick. GumGum said she’d complained, and all he did was give her permission to move the dead bodies.”
I exchanged a look with Donut. “Magistrate, huh?” I said. “Do you know where this guy’s office is?”
Donut insisted on placing the picture of Bea on the small table next to her cat tree as she slept. Mongo didn’t appear nearly as thrilled about the framed photograph as Donut. He actually hissed at it a couple times before Donut admonished him.
“Good boy,” I said later, scratching the top of his head. He chomped at the air, electricity sparking from his enchanted fang caps.
I decided not to read. I had those Louis L'amour books, but we had to get up early. Our interview was earlier than usual, and I wanted to check out this magistrate guy before it was time to go. Still, I pulled out the mysterious letter. I stared at the symbols, trying to memorize them.
Even though I’d set up the cat tree on her insistence, Donut jumped straight onto my neck and settled in.
“Goodnight, Carl,” she said.
“Goodnight, Donut,” I said, patting her head.
“Promise me you won’t let me die alone like GumGum’s mom,” she said. “Or GumGum. I guess she died alone, too. She was probably really scared.”
“Don’t worry, Donut,” I said. “We’ll find out who’s responsible, and we’ll make them pay.”
Thwump. Something hit the roof of the inn, directly over our heads. It slid off the rooftop and crashed loudly into the street.
In the morning we’d discover the body of a naked, twisted human prostitute, sprawled out in the alley next to the inn.
Scrawled onto her back in torn, bloodless flesh were the words, “No, you won’t.”
18
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“We’d like to see Magistrate Featherfall, please,” Donut said, using her sweetest voice.
Getting to this office had been a chore. The town’s administrative buildings had no first or second floor, and we’d had to utilize Donut’s Puddle Jumper spell to teleport from the rooftop of a knife shop to the landing entrance of the town hall. She’d recently hit level five with the spell, which had solved the line-of-sight issue. It basically added support for jumping up to a higher elevation when you couldn’t see the ground above you. It was a minor addition to the spell, but one that made it much more useful. The casting delay was also much shorter, now only two seconds instead of ten. Still, hitting level five hadn’t decreased the five-hour cooldown, which was the worst issue with the spell.