Chapter 12 #2
“So.” Allemud paused as he puffed on his pipe, the pungent scent of tobacco spreading through the small alcove. “Found your way back to Kardonan, and need my help, aye?”
I scoffed. “Not how you think. I’m looking for a temporal witch.”
He squinted at me. “That’s not the way you need to go about fixing your warrant.”
“Not for me.” I rolled my eyes, but the mention of the warrant in my name made my stomach swirl. It wouldn’t be erased simply because I’d accidentally married the golden child of the witch-hunters, would it? How were we going to deal with it?
Not something I could worry about now. With an effort, I turned my mind back to the matter at hand. “I can’t go into detail about why I need the tempo, but I can say there’s no danger to them if they help me.”
Allemud snorted and waved his pipe. “There’s danger to all of us, lad. Did you see the number of folks out there?”
“I did.”
“And did you wonder why suddenly I’ve got so many hangers-on I can barely breathe?”
“Can’t say that I did.” Though now that he mentioned it— Was Dags’s information wrong? Were the witches simply in hiding with Allemud?
“Bah.” Allemud puffed on his pipe as though it had personally offended him. “They’re all here because it ain’t safe out there. People be disappearing.”
“And by people, you mean witches.”
He shrugged. “Mostly, aye. I’ve heard tell of non-witches being gone too, but I don’t keep tabs on them folk, so I can’t say it’s true or not.”
“How many?”
“Enough it’s been noticed, aye? It was one, then two, then five, then ten. Now?” He shook his head. “Too many, lad. Too many.”
I gritted my teeth, reminding myself that this was not my problem.
Kardonan wasn’t my city any longer, and its goings-on had never been my responsibility.
I needed to find a temporal witch, and that was all.
That was enough of a task on its own—I couldn’t add “save the witches of Kardonan” to my list to accomplish in the hopefully short time Kason and I would spend in the city.
“Do you know of any tempos in town or not?”
Allemud looked at me for a few long moments, then shook his head. “Last one I heard of left ’bout a year ago.”
“Great.” I pushed to my feet, disheartened. “If you hear tell of another, send word to me.”
“Where are you staying?”
Oh, this was going to go over well. “The palace.”
Allemud stared at me, his mouth dropping open in surprise. Then he let out a hearty laugh, slapping his thigh. “Got yourself a rich patron, did you? Good on you, lad. Good on you. Mind you keep wearing that hood in the city. There are still posters up with your likeness on them.”
“It hardly looks like me.”
“Eh, it’s close enough. Not too many black-haired sprites around, aye?” Allemud chuckled and waved me off. “You can find your way out.”
Taking the dismissal for what it was, I turned and headed back to the entrance. Stepping into the shockingly bright daylight, I paused to allow my eyes to adjust.
“Mokido Azenas?”
I squinted at the blurry figures in front of me, trying to force my eyes to work better, faster.
They were two male sprites, one with bright-green streaks in their brown hair, and the other with fuchsia through blond, and they wore battered leathers that told a tale of the type of work they did—physical. “Who’s asking?”
“I’ve got a message for you from Muirin the Red. Kardonan’s hers, and she’s prepared to defend it,” the green-haired sprite declared.
I blinked at him. “Who?”
“Muirin the Red,” he repeated slowly, as though I were stupid.
Maybe I was because hearing the name a second time didn’t do anything to jog my memory. “I have no idea who that is, and I don’t care. I won’t be in Kardonan for long.”
“She’ll allow you a day.”
A laugh jolted out of me. “Oh, she’ll allow me, will she?”
“One day,” the sprite with fuchsia hair reiterated.
“Please tell— What was her name again?”
“Muirin the?—”
“Right, Muirin. Tell her I’ll be in Kardonan for the length of time it takes me to complete my business here. Not a second more or less. She can chew on that.”
The sprites shared a look. Rolling my eyes, I pulled my hood back up to cover my ears. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.” I waited a moment to see if they would challenge me again, but they stepped aside to let me pass.
Muirin the Red, huh? As much as I wracked my brain, looking for information on her, I had nothing. I supposed I could go back to Allemud to ask him about her, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t want to cross someone who had thugs. No, I needed a new source of information.
Grimacing, I started in the direction of the one place in Kardonan I’d been hoping to avoid.
It was in an area even worse off than Water Street—a sector of the city that had been largely forgotten since no one willingly went there to do business if you had enough money to spend in the middle- or upper-class merchant areas.
It took me a good thirty minutes of walking to get there, with the shadows getting longer all the time.
By the time I reached it, the narrow streets and alleys were all but coated in darkness. Which was good and bad.
This area of town was known as Slipshod—not its official name, which was something far more refined that no one knew or used, since it didn’t accurately describe it.
This was where the forgotten lived, worked, and died.
This was where I’d called home for the entirety of my childhood and adolescence.
This was where I’d started my reputation as Kardonan’s best witch-thief, and where I was most likely to be recognized by the witch-hunters who frequented it, looking for the ne’er-do-wells on the council’s shitlist.
Slipshod hadn’t changed much since I’d seen it last. Whereas the buildings on Water Street looked rundown and in need of sprucing up to return them to their glory, the architecture of Slipshod—if you could even call it that—had never seen glory.
Each construction was cobbled together with reclaimed lumber, fastened together by however the “builders” could manage.
Structures had been added onto in ramshackle ways.
If a good storm was all that was needed to bring down some of the buildings on Water Street, a strong breath might do the same here.
The buildings had no uniform color, taking on whatever hues the reclaimed materials possessed.
It was a cacophony for the senses, and sight was only the first to be offended.
Smell was next, the odor of refuse and waste even stronger here, combined with the pervasive aroma of rotterweed that too many residents smoked to escape the drudgery of their daily lives.
No one could say that Slipshod was quiet.
The air was filled with noise, from babies crying to children yelling as they ran past me on the street, playing tag or some-such, to drunken men and women arguing nonsense, to a mother threatening her kids to come home “ right this second or be grounded for an age .” As much as I didn’t want to admit it, the atmosphere was familiar enough that my shoulders relaxed from where they’d been around my ears since we’d passed the gates of Kardonan. I’d hated this place so much, and yet…
And yet, home was home.
Keeping an eye out for the witch-hunters who patrolled Slipshod regularly, I made my way to one of my old haunts: The Three-Eyed Dog, a ramshackle pub that served watered-down ale, questionable stew, and all the news I could want about the quarter.
I slipped past the door that might once have been red but had faded to an unseemly orange-pink, unsurprised when no one in the darkened interior noted my entry.
Anyone who frequented the Dog knew to keep their eyes to themselves.
It was the healthiest for everyone. No doubt they’d clocked me, and seeing I wasn’t a witch-hunter, ignored me.
Perfect.
I sidled up to the bar, hopping onto one of the stools—seriously, why did humans make everything so damned tall?
—and ordered an ale when the bartender glanced my way.
The pub was too crowded for me to question the barkeep like I had Dags, so I settled in to let my sprite-sized ears do me some good for once.
I kept my hood up though. It wouldn’t do to be recognized here, of all places.
News of my presence would be sold before I could even take a sip of my ale.
I caught snippets of gossip—who was shagging who, who was stepping out on their partner, who’d bribed the city guard to overlook some minor crime or another.
I snorted to myself at that, wondering if Kason’s siblings had any idea how much the residents of Slipshod subsidized the city guards’ pay. I was going to guess they had no idea.
I was well into my second mug of ale before I heard anything remotely relevant.
It came from a human man who had pulled up a barstool at the other end of the bar a few moments before, settling in next to someone who was clearly a friend.
The two men were older—though likely not as old as they looked—and pale-skinned with gray extensively threaded through their thinning heads of dark hair and lines bracketing their mouths that told of hard living.
“Y’heard ’bout what Red’s doing now?” the newcomer murmured over his mug of ale. He kept his voice low, but not low enough that I couldn’t hear him with my sprite ears, even covered by my hood.
“I heard she’s on something of a rampage,” his friend said.
“Oh, aye, but when ain’t she?” They shared a soft, mostly humorless chuckle, and he continued, “This time, she’s focused on getting the witches under control.”
His friend snorted. “’Bout time someone did.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“So what’s she doing?”
The first man shrugged. “Gods only know. All I know is that there’re a lot less of those buggers mucking up the streets with their magic, aye?”
His friend raised his mug suddenly. “To the Red then. May she get rid of all of ’em.”
“Hear hear!”
As the two men clinked their mugs together, I slipped a coin onto the bar and dismounted my stool.
It wasn’t Muirin’s location, but it was confirmation she was behind the disappearing witches, so it was a place to start.
I was willing to bet all the coins in my purse that if I found a sprite in any alley, they’d be able to tell me where I could find Muirin.
A little less circumspect than I wanted, maybe, but it also meant I didn’t have to drink more pissy, watered-down ale to get the info I needed.
I hopped down the stairs in front of the Dog, my attention on deciding which alley to try. It wasn’t much of an excuse as to why I didn’t see the attack coming, but I supposed I was out of practice. There weren’t many muggings in the small towns I’d been haunting as of late.
The first hit clocked me in the temple, sending me sprawling to the ragged cobblestones.
As I fought to catch my breath and make sense of how I was suddenly on the ground, a booted foot connected with my back.
Pain shot through my torso, leaving me gasping and fighting for air.
I had the sense to fold my arms over my head to protect myself as more blows rained down on me.
I couldn’t even see who was attacking me or how many there were. It was all a blur of boots and fists.
Finally, it stopped. For a split second, I thought perhaps I’d passed out, but the sound of running footsteps told me my attackers had fled.
A high-pitched guard’s whistle told me why.
Huh. First time a guard doing their job was actually a good thing for me.
Not that I wanted to stick around to file a report or any such nonsense.
No—I had an appointment with Muirin. Clearly, she had a message for me, and I wanted to make sure she knew I’d gotten it.