“Featherfall?” she asked. Her voice was getting weaker. “Can you make that light brighter? I can feel it keeping the curse away, but it’s fading.” Donut’s torch was like a blazing sun. She couldn’t make it brighter. “Featherfall wasn’t the one who did this. He’s been here the whole time, hanging on that thing. He was dead when I got here. His body was turned into a dark fetish, one to keep our bodies safe at night. Miss Quill’s the one who has been running the city the whole time. She’s the real magistrate.”
I felt an odd amount of relief wash over me. Miss Quill was the bad guy. We’d killed the correct person. When the system said I’d killed a public official, it was her, not Featherfall. Also, this was like the hundredth time in the last day that the AI’s description of something had been inaccurate. It’d said Quill was the assistant to the Magistrate. It’d said Katia was a human, when she was really a doppelganger. It said Burgundy here was also human, when she was really one of those vampire things. The map labeled all these corpses with an X, when they could still turn into monsters. That was important to know, that we couldn’t trust anything.
But if Quill was the mastermind, why hadn’t the quest ended? I reread what were supposed to do, focusing on the last line.
Nobody knows who they are or where they come from. Find out why.
The quest didn’t tell us to save the women. Or to kill who was responsible. We just needed to find out what was going on. We were almost there. We just had to get it out of this woman before the entire building crashed down.
“Okay,” I said. “So how did you get like this?”
“The elves had me go to their temple, and once I was there, Miss Quill came and got us. She asked us so many questions. I didn’t know why at the time. I thought she was going to take me to the club. Instead, she brought me to him.”
“To who?”
Below, something crashed. It reverberated throughout the entire floor. The smoke bomb had cleared, but the black smoke from the fires was now thicker.
“To her husband. He’s in another place. It’s across the street. It is where the swordsmen guards stay in the evening. He is on the floor above. The guards don’t know he’s there, or they don’t care. They can’t look up.”
“Her husband?” I asked.
I tried to remember what Miss Quill had said about him. It wasn’t much. She’d said he was dead. And that he’d been magistrate before Featherfall. That was it.
“Yes. His name is Remex. He’s doing something, casting a big spell. I don’t know what. He’s not alive, nor is he dead. He’s something in-between, something monstrous. He’s trying to bring himself fully back to life.”
Fuck. Another bad guy. I’d been hoping all the bosses were dead.
“But what does that have to do with you guys?” I asked.
“Do you know what I am? What I have become? I am a krasue. A woman who lived a life of sin. One who died in anger and pain, and returned from the dead. During the day we live and work in this building, working as assistants and in the shops below. Collecting. At night, we are his army, doing his bidding, helping the city elves, whom he has also glamored into his control.”
“Collecting what? And what about the women we find in the alleys?”
“Every time a new skyfowl or chickadee comes into one of the shops in the mall, we are to pluck a feather from their plumage. I do not know why. We give them to Miss Quill.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Donut. Mongo grunted in agreement.
“As to the women… they are those whose sins aren’t enough. They are women who have come to work at the Desperado Club, but when they are brought to Remex, when he twists them, when their heads sometimes fly from their bodies, they do not always turn into krasue. It is not a perfect thing, this transformation. Sometimes they simply die. When this happens, he allows us to feed upon them. Then one of his avatars picks them up and drops them in the alleys. Miss Quill says they have to drop them within a few blocks of his lair. He controls the avatars as if they are his own limbs, but they can’t go far. Not yet.”
“Avatars?” I asked. “Are they other skyfowl? I don’t understand.”
Crack! The rest of the room slumped forward further. Burgundy’s body began to slide away.
“Kill me, please!” she cried as the roof above her started to cave in.
Donut hit her with a Magic Missile in the moments before her body disappeared.
23
I pulled the rope back into my inventory while I still hung 15 feet off the ground. I was very happy I’d figured out that neat trick early on, before having to invest in multiple lengths of the stuff. Still, Donut was right. I needed a better method of going up and down.
I crashed heavily onto the debris pile, though it didn’t hurt like it would’ve before. I briefly wondered exactly how far I could drop before I would take damage. Above, the entire structure trembled. The whole thing was going to fall in on our heads at any moment. We had to get out of here. The X of Quill’s body was there on my map, right under our feet, enticing me. We’d have to dig for an hour to get to her and the neighborhood map, which would be super useful right about now. That wasn’t going to happen.
A sparkle of something caught my eye. A single, charred box sat half-buried in the debris. I picked it up as we fled. It was one of Miss Quill’s glass cases. It appeared unbroken despite being less than a foot from the explosion, which meant this thing was likely enchanted. The char rubbed right off. The plush creature within was an armored man atop a black horse. I peered at the tag, which said “Kimaris.” I pulled it all into my inventory.
The building rumbled as we cleared the distance. We stopped in the street and turned to watch as the rest of the gigantic building caved in. We’d gotten out of there just in time.
“We know what happened to the prostitutes now. We know why they were falling into the alleys,” Donut said, breathing heavily. “How come the quest didn’t finish?”
“We know how they got there,” I said. “We still don’t know why. We don’t have the whole story.” I eyed the dark warehouse across the street. It was a simple, square, two-level building. There were no lights with only a large pair of double doors at the entrance. I could sense him there, on the second floor. Remex. “If we want to finish this, we need to go into that building. That’s the quest.”
A crowd of NPCs watched the municipal building and mall collapse from a short distance away. I looked about in the air, but I didn’t see any skyfowl. There had been dozens of them out earlier, but they were all gone. I had the impression they didn’t like flying about at night. Still, it was unusual.
A single blue dot of a crawler stood there in the crowd. I met the player’s eyes, and he approached us. I focused on the now-familiar name over his head.
“Don’t let him see that fallen oak bracelet on your back leg,” I whispered.
“Why?” Donut asked. “He’s not one of those elves.”
“He’s related to the dead crawler you took it from. He’s also the same guy that killed that boss in the swimming pool. The one that blew up. The Divider.”
“Oh, he’s disgusting,” Donut said as the man got closer. He walked slowly and deliberately. I could see he didn’t have shoes, though I suspected for him this was a recent development thanks to his newly clawed feet. “Someone needs to teach him about muted colors. He looks like someone took Jack’s hat and made an overenthusiastic furry costume out of it.”
“Be nice,” I whispered, trying not to laugh. Jack, the man who had peed on the wall and caused all the chaos on the second floor had been very fond of his orange Cincinnati Bengal’s hat.
“No, I’m serious, Carl. This guy could be the second coming of Chuck Norris, but we can’t have him in the party. People would laugh at us.”