She scowled. “Well you’ll damn well have to keep it together. You’re not the sort of man to whine and go easily. Oh no, you’d spit in death’s eye socket. I’d do the same myself.” Her expression grew serious and she looked away from me. “We’ll figure this out. We have to.”
I smiled for her. The only people who had a chance of being able to help me with my daemon problem were the Arcanum, and they’d rest easier in their beds with me dead. They might even toast sweetroot on a stick over my pyre. The only reason I wasn’t already collared and leashed was that I’d taken great pains to fake my death.
She cleared her throat. “Walker, ah, there is a tunnel. I think somebody has been using it fairly recently.”
I stiffened, palms slicking with sweat at the sight of the rubble-choked tunnel. Footprints were visible in the muddy floor leading down into the darkness. A line of scrapes accompanied the prints, as if something heavy had been dragged through.
“Somebody has been moving goods through the catacombs,” Charra said. “Smugglers perhaps.”
I swallowed and looked at her pleadingly, mentally begging her not to say those next words.
“We need to go in,” she said with regret.
“Only if Bardok the Hock and the Harbourmaster can’t give us answers,” I said hoarsely. One way or another I’d make them talk. Anything was better than going back down there. But if I had to, I would. I owed Lynas everything.
We hauled ourselves out of the pit, dusted ourselves off and headed for Bardok’s shop.
The Warrens are the rocky shore that a tide of diseased and decrepit humanity washed up on when they were shipwrecked by life. Anybody that made any real sort of money would be out of there quicker than a whore could lift her dress for a high lord, if they didn’t squander it all on gambling, drink or alchemics first of course. As strange as it seemed to me, some folk took to the squalor like rats to refuse, revelling in lawlessness and decay. Bardok the Hock was typical of that sort.
He still kept shop in the cellar of one of the older and sturdier tenements that had somehow survived fire and neglect, a full four storeys of solid stonework located northwest of the ruined temple and almost half way to the wealthier streets of Westford. The slimy worm had holed up in there seemingly forever, a touch of the Gift granting him rude health well into his old age. After my father’s death I had sold him more than a few items of dubious origin to fund my way through the Collegiate years.
Under a cracked sign painted with the golden globes of the hockers’ guild, I pounded on the heavy door. Nobody answered but we knew he was in there; he always was. Charra kept watch while I struggled to pick the shiny new lock. After a few minutes of my fumbling she nudged me. “Want me to do it?”
I scowled and pulled out Dissever. “I’m good.” The knife carved through the wood and steel as easily as flesh. Not exactly subtle, but I was past caring.
We descended the steps into Bardok’s dimly-lit, cluttered shop and discovered that it was as much a mess as it ever had been. Black and green mould carpeted one wall and the room smelled of dust and rotten wood. We wove past heaped baskets of hocked chisels, hammers, tongs, spades, tools from every sort of trade, past shelves of pottery and cheap jewellery. I paused at a mound of coats to finger a carefully repaired slit in the wool where a knife had gone in. The brown stain was barely visible in the seams. Pots and pans hung from hooks on the walls and chests of brass fittings, fire pokers and old locks clustered next to the door to his back room.
Charra volunteered to take the first bash at trying to get the old goat to talk. She went in alone armed with the blunt force approach of bribes backed up by threats and intimidation. After a few minutes of eavesdropping it became apparent that there was bad blood there, Bardok having declined her protections recently. Maybe his new benefactors had given him the brass balls he’d never had back when I had dealings with him. Charra began dropping curses every third word and her threats were getting inventive. I amused myself by tampering with the magical wards that somebody had set up for Bardok. Sloppy but potent work, as if somebody both powerful and skilled had set them up in a hurry. They were designed to be activated remotely in the same manner as the city gates and Bardok would have a similar activation crystal on him. As I broke the wards I smiled at the thought of his face if he tried to use it on us. The stored magic now leaking out to fill the shop also served to mask any trace of my own Gift.
“Is that your last word?” she said loudly after they had both been silent for a few seconds.
“Away and fuck a dog, you braying donkey,” he snarled, making little sense, but being admirably offensive all the same. “Get out of my property, you saggy old whore.”
I thought I’d better get in there before Charra killed him, so I shoved open the door and sauntered into a room lit by a miserly single oil lamp on his desk. His room was stuffed to the gills with scrolls, books, sheaves of parchment and artefacts from around the world. On the walls hung a variety of exotic weaponry: a beaked Skallgrim war axe etched with angular runes, an ornate Esbanian gladius, an Ahramish khopesh, and an acid-etched Clanholds broadsword, as well as others unknown to me. Small stone dragon skulls and assorted bones were propped up on a table at the back by a clay tablet carved with the flowing text of distant Ahram. One small statuette of a jackal-headed human was of Escharric origin, hideously expensive and almost certainly smuggled in illegally from a dig site. The old goat would wear clothes until they fell apart but didn’t mind splurging coin on his precious collector’s items, and undoubtedly cared more about them than people.
Charra had risen from her seat, short sword naked in her hand, and was leaning over a wide desk cluttered with odds and ends, scraps of parchment and old crumbs of food. She settled for scowling at Bardok, who had pressed himself back into an oversized red leather chair. He looked old and cadaverous, entirely bald now, the lines of his face set into a permanent scowl.
I slipped on my nastiest grin. “Well, well, if it’s not Bardok the Hock. So good to see you again.”
It took him a moment to recognize my face and the voice. Then his watery eyes goggled and the blood drained from his face. “Oh shit,” he whimpered. “I thought you were rat food.”
Charra remained standing as I eased myself into the creaking chair in front of his desk. “That’s what I wanted folk to think.”
I wasn’t exactly a big fish in a little pond, more like a fat minnow covered in huge and venomous spines that you would do well not to aggravate. In my own element I was as dangerous as any magus in Setharis. “So…” I said, stuffing a smoke between my lips and lighting it from his lamp. I took a draw, then blew the smoke right in his face. “Go fuck a dog, you say? Braying donkey, was it? And we mustn’t forget saggy old whore. Quite the muckspout today.” I looked at his cherished collector’s items on the walls. “It would be a shame if I had to start breaking things.” Sweat burst across his face and he looked ready to throw up.
Amidst the hodgepodge of objects on his desk a brass cone the height of my thumb caught my eye. For a second utter horror overwhelmed me. I suppressed the shudder before he could notice. The fool had an alchemic bomb sitting right there on his desk!
There couldn’t be half a dozen people in the world that had ever seen one: as a Collegiate initiate I’d been earning coin running errands for an artificer magus named Tannar who was conducting unsanctioned experiments with alchemics. His workshop had been a thing to behold, full of strange smells and bubbling liquids in glass alembics, and it was not every magus who could claim to have ventured into an artificer’s innermost workshop. The trouble with the Arcanum, Tannar told me, was that they had spent the last thousand years trying to rediscover the glories of ancient Escharr instead of actually using their brains to invent something new. That sort of opinion was anathema to the Arcanum, so of course that endeared him to me.