“Capture these two! Do so immediately,” Miss Quill demanded.
The mute suits of armor looked back and forth about the room. Neither of them moved.
“Oh for the sake of the gods,” Miss Quill said angrily. “Look at my desk, you fools.”
The moment we found the dead prostitute this morning, with that gruesome note scrawled onto her flesh, I’d called one of the swordsmen over. I pointed to the corpse, I pulled the Gate Pass—the get-out-of-jail-free pass from the town magistrate—and showed it to the guard. Then I took the corpse into my inventory. I hadn’t known for certain that actually did anything. But I knew if we were going to be waving a dead hooker around, odds were good the town guards would get involved. Mordecai said they had a collective mind. And if they’d already seen me with the body and had, in their odd way, endorsed my ability to have a dead hooker in my possession, then the act of me simply tossing the corpse onto the desk wouldn’t be considered a crime.
Hopefully.
Without a word, the guards turned and walked back down the stairs.
“You useless, worthless, piles of junk!” Miss Quill called after them. She returned her gaze to us.
“How do they get up here anyway?” I asked. “Also, how do all those workers in the shops get up here? Is there a secret elevator? We looked for like an hour for an easy way up and couldn’t find one.”
“Take that with you right now,” Miss Quill said. “What is wrong with you?” She squatted and began gathering up the fallen toys in her wings. But she had nowhere to put them. Not until the shelf was fixed and the dead woman was removed from the desk.
Donut leaped from my shoulder and sniffed at the ground. “This one is getting really dirty,” Donut said, looking at a rat-faced beanie that looked suspiciously like Mordecai’s first form. “And I think the label tore on this one. Carl, stop stepping on them!”
“Stop! Stop it right now! Please, just take it away.” The elderly eagle appeared to be on the verge of tears.
“Take her away,” Donut corrected.
“Let us talk to him, and we’ll bring the evidence to him directly,” I said.
“He’s not here, okay?” Miss Quill said, frantically piling the toys in the corner. She picked one up with her talon and frantically rubbed non-existent dirt off it with her wing. “Look what you’ve done, look what you’ve done.”
I glanced at the closed door near her desk. The door was large, metal, and foreboding.
“He’s really not here?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “He only comes out at night nowadays. Oh my gods, what is that liquid?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not blood. They’ve all had their blood sucked out of them. But their bodies still leak. And smell. It’s really gross.”
Her wings were full of beanies. “Please, please,” she said. “Just take it away. Take her away. I’ll tell him you were here. I promise.”
I reached over and picked the dead woman back up, returning her in my inventory. A milky-white stain of fluid covered Miss Quill’s desk.
“I’m going to be sick,” the receptionist said.
“You better get some paper towels or something,” I said. “My grandma collected these things, and they sucked in moisture like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Don’t you touch anything,” she said. She gently placed the beanies held in her wings into the corner pile. She rushed toward the stairs, yelling that she needed a shirt or a towel.
We only had a minute, maybe less. I rushed to the door to Featherfall’s chambers. It was locked. The moment I touched the door, a notification popped up.
This door is locked. Magically locked. It’s almost like they don’t want you going in there.
“Shit,” I muttered, looking around.
My eyes focused on the top, undisturbed line of beanies sitting above her desk.
“Just tell him we came by,” I said to Miss Quill as we went back down the stairs. “And you’re welcome for fixing your shelf.” She ignored us as she frantically cleaned off her table.
“That was disappointing,” Donut said. “Do you think he was actually in there?”
“I don’t know. Mordecai seems to think he lives in there, but who knows?”
“We don’t even know for sure he has anything to do with it,” Donut said.
“Nope,” I said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to him when he was in his office. I figured if he’s some evil, crazy boss, he wouldn’t go all Freddy Krueger on us in public. And if he’s not the bad guy, surely he’d be able to point us in the correct direction. But I don’t think it’s that complicated. This quest is only a silver one. Plus look at the clues. He’s a black cleric? He only comes out at night? It has to be him.”
“So we’re coming back tonight, then?” Donut asked. “Or did you want to find the 201st Security Group headquarters first?” She paused in front of a store selling robes made for skyfowl. “Would you look at how pretty that is.”
“It’s magical silk,” the young, elven woman said. “It allows skyfowl to stay aloft almost indefinitely.”
“It’s beautiful. I’d love to learn how to fly. Can you imagine that, Carl? Me flying?”
“We’ll be back,” I said, turning to look over my shoulder. I pulled the rope from my inventory. It’d only cost five gold for a thirty-foot length. We’d have to use it to get back to the street. “We’ll talk to him one way or another.”
We still had two hours before our interview. Zev said if we were fighting or in the midst of something, they wouldn’t allow us to get transported, which was why she preferred us to be in a safe room when it was time. Still, we had two hours, and I decided we should use the time wisely.
So we left the city and traveled west, searching for mobs to kill. A few other crawlers were about, but we avoided them. I kept a wary eye for those with player-killer skulls over their head. I hadn’t forgotten about Frank Q and Maggie My. I wondered what race they’d chosen, or if they were even still alive.
I didn’t yet have any proper non-explosive ammo for my xistera, but I had two dozen hob-lobbers. The fuses on the bombs were between six and seven seconds, which was perfect when I was tossing them like they were grenades. But when I was hurling them at 250 mph at a mob, six seconds was a little too long. So instead, I pre-lit ten of them, which took two and a half seconds off the fuse. Both Mordecai and Donut were mortified by the idea of me walking around with lit bombs sitting in my inventory, but it was pretty much the only way I could properly do this with the equipment I had.
We walked past a row of especially decrepit buildings. This particular neighborhood appeared it might’ve been slums before the cataclysm. Donut sat upon my shoulder, and Mongo walked beside us, randomly growling. I’d been alarmed at first, but there didn’t seem to be anything out there. We hadn’t seen anything for fifteen minutes. Then I saw the X on the map, and I realized it was the corpse of a neighborhood boss. This area had already been cleared by someone else, probably a few days earlier.
“Damnit,” I grumbled. “What a waste of time.” I sighed. “Let’s go get the neighborhood map.”
The attack came just as I was about to descend into an abandoned, used-to-be indoor swimming pool. This building had been the Over City’s version of a YMCA, though half of the structure was gone. The empty swimming pool sat mostly outside, exposed to the air. The rotting corpse of a two-headed sea creature sat within. The thing had the body of a whale, but with two long, Lochness-monster-like heads. Apparently the street urchins steered clear of boss corpses. The boss was a level-17 monster called The Divider, and it had been killed by a crawler named Daniel Bautista 2. The boss had multiple, manhole-cover-sized holes in it. The monster’s body was massively bloated, despite puncture wounds. It looked like a balloon from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.