Chapter 19
Finding the magazines exactly where he'd left them confirmed what Shiro should have already known. But could you really blame him? After ingesting the thing, he'd gone hard, so hard he'd genuinely believed his problem had been exorcised from his system.
Well, that hadn't happened.
The aphrodisiac the priest had sold him had done exactly what it promised, waking up what needed waking.
On that basis, Shiro rated the Morpheus Brew a decent product, one he'd have rated higher if the seller had bothered with the basic pharmaceutical ethics of a proper warning, something along the lines of "will also turn you into chaos incarnate for several hours. "
He wanted to strangle the priest for it.
He also, somewhat against his will, had to admit the man had found himself a perfect cash cow, so perfect, in fact, that some small, petty part of him almost wanted to applaud the audacity.
Until he found something that actually fixed his problem, he'd be stuck sourcing more from a man whose business ethics could generously be described as predatory.
He had no intention of letting the priest have the last laugh, though. Which was why he planned, as soon as possible, to visit the brothel, whose women were bound to understand what was wrong with him a lot better, and might even have a real solution.
He couldn't wait.
Well, technically, he could. He had to.
After the chaos caused by his drunken rampage, Shiro had spent the next five days holed up at the Bower, waiting for it to be safe to show his face again.
He kept his ears open for any fresh gossip about the mysterious lunatics who'd beaten a group in the street before shooting men in a tavern, waiting for the story to finally lose steam.
By now, it had. More or less.
As a bonus, he'd also heard that every brothel in the city, every single one, had reopened its doors the very night they'd first turned him away. The noble's reservation had been abruptly cancelled, apparently leaving them all ready to welcome customers again.
So if he went now, he'd be warmly welcomed.
Now that he was actually outside, on the street, he wanted to rush straight there, but unfortunately, after five days of enduring Chaska's open scorn over what she clearly considered cowardice, today he had to finally deliver on the request she'd been pestering him with, one he'd been postponing: scouring the city in hopes of stumbling onto Nazim's shop.
"This would look good on her, don't you think?" Shiro asked the merchant, who sat cross-legged on a woven stool with a quiet toddler balanced on her knee. She squinted past his shoulder, eyes flicking between the cloth and Chaska's frame, before giving an approving, toothy nod.
Not one to waste a sale, she reached for another piece.
"This would suit her too," she said, handing it over with a polished wooden baton.
It matched the top already in Shiro's hand, just a different pattern, a cream-colored, long, wide-sleeved blouse, the kind half the women in the city seemed to wear, soft gathered linen with floral embroidery.
"This one's cute, what do you think?" Shiro asked, holding up yet another piece the merchant had pointed out with her baton.
"I think we're wasting time here," Chaska complained, sounding like a moody teenager.
That earned her a raised eyebrow from Shiro, who was about to say something out loud but thought better of it, leaning in instead to whisper it to her.
She pulled back a fraction, which struck him as odd.
She hadn't been this guarded around him even right after he'd nearly shot her and broken her collarbone.
Given the timing, he figured it had something to do with whatever had happened during his drunken rampage, something he still couldn't remember. To make it worse, she refused to explain it, which only left him feeling helpless about the whole thing.
He took a breath, then said, "We haven't known each other long, but in the week I've known you, I've counted exactly one, fine, I'll be generous, two sets of clothes on you this entire time. Aside from your winter clothes."
She bristled at the accusation without actually denying it. They'd traveled together long enough that he'd seen the full extent of her wardrobe: the top she was wearing now, one more in red, and a spare skirt. That was it.
"This is enough for me," she defended.
"Where do you think we are, the wilderness? A few more wouldn't hurt, especially for a lady. Also, this looks good on you," he said, and meant it. "You'd look pretty, wouldn't she, ma'am?"
Before the stall owner could back him up, Chaska cut in. "I don't need to look pretty."
"Do it for me, then."
"Why would I do that for you?"
"It's just a saying, but seriously," he said, leaning in slightly. She backed off again, which made him sigh in defeat before continuing, lower now. "You have to admit, your current outfit draws a lot of attention."
He nodded subtly toward a passerby who'd been staring and immediately looked away the moment he was caught. There was a decent case to be made that he himself had been drawing plenty of attention too with his appearance, but only his own agenda mattered to him right now.
Shiro genuinely liked the design of her two outfits. There was something exotic about them. But it took no keen eye to notice that, compared to what most other women here wore, her style ran considerably more revealing.
On their own, he wouldn't have minded. He liked the view, her waist, her navel, whatever glimpse the wind occasionally offered. But they were in a city now. He didn't want to share that view with everyone, and there was the more practical problem of drawing attention.
"Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about.
You skipped the white paint today because you know there are people out there who'd recognize it for what it is—exactly what Maiq was worried about," he said, finally addressing the topic he'd been avoiding.
The paste she usually wore over her tan skin left sharp, untanned lines beneath it, a pattern that might as well have been repainted on.
"So why not go all the way instead of halfway? "
She gave him a stubborn look and said nothing.
"If you won't do it for me, do it for this lady," he tried instead. "She's got kids to feed. Look at her."
The merchant looked briefly startled at the sudden mention, but nodded along quickly, choosing that exact moment to start nursing her son.
"Fine," Chaska surrendered, snatching both tops from his hands.
"I've got matching skirts too," the merchant added cheerfully, pointing one out with her baton. "These would pair nicely."
"Oh," Shiro mused, interested.
Sometime later, his eyes drifted toward a perfume stall whose owner was already waving him over, when Chaska elbowed him sharply.
"That's enough buying useless things!"
"Name one useless thing I've bought." He frowned from beneath the wide brim of his sombrero.
"This jorongo," she said, lifting the edge of the poncho now draped over her shoulders, bought minutes earlier from a merchant whose features carried the same general look as hers.
"It's not useless," he said. "Now you can carry your pistol without looking like a menace to society. Same for me," he added, resting a hand over his own revolver, hidden beneath a similar wrap. "And don't pretend that's not a good thing. You said you wanted to carry those pistols around."
That had genuinely surprised him. When he'd first handed her the three flintlocks, she'd pridely refused them. Somewhere between then and now, she'd grown attached enough to want to carry them on her, which unfortunately, he couldn't let her do openly.
The city wasn't big enough, or armed enough, for the two of them to walk around with guns visible without getting connected to the troublemaker behind a certain tavern shootout less than a week ago.
"That may be true," she said, "but buying things isn't why we're here!"
"We're here to find a kobold's magical shop, I know, I know," Shiro said. "But we're literally standing in the middle of the market district. Feels like a waste not to—"
She gave him a look heavy enough to end the sentence on its own.
"Alright, alright. No more buying random but genuinely useful street goods. Promise." A few steps later, he added, unable to help himself, "I do think it looks good on you, though. The poncho."
"You said that about everything you bought today."
"True. But I mean it about this one specifically. It actually fits you, suits you, the way your usual outfits do. No offense meant of course. Erm, do your people wear this kind of thing normally? I get the feeling they do."
The garment seemed to carry a specific name to her, and he'd noticed she'd put up noticeably less resistance to this particular purchase than to anything else. Resignation, maybe. Or maybe it really was just that.
"We do," she said. "We call it a jorongo."
"Oh, tell me more."
"About jorongos?" She frowned at him.
"About jorongos, about your people, anything, honestly, as long as it keeps me entertained," he said, which earned him a look sharp enough to make him feel obligated to defend himself.
"Hey, if you're going to drag me across this entire city without letting me enjoy a little shopping along the way, the least you can do is keep me entertained while we walk. "
"What are you, a child?" she sighed, long and heavy, before finally giving in and starting to talk, the two of them continuing their aimless search for the mysterious shop block by block as she did.
As Shiro remembered Maiq calling them, her people were known as Andoes, a group native to the western semi-arid region that now fell, at least on paper, within the borders of the Aelorian Empire.
The Andoe had once ruled a vast, sovereign domain, a peerless civilization that had spearheaded human progress across every frontier.
Chaska explained that their mastery had grown so absolute they eventually transcended baseline humanity, branching into something distinctly post-human, entirely separate from the Eruman, the common people native to these lands.
Which is why when an Eruman awakened, they did so into one of the familiar classes: knight, mage, sorcerer, and so on.
The Andoe version worked differently, not just different classes, but an entirely different underlying mechanism, built around a liquid, silver-toned substance their bodies could produce and shape.
Depending on how a given Andoe learned to control it, some used it the way a hydromancer used water, shifting it between liquid, solid, even gaseous states, some apparently even learned to fly with it.
Others channeled it inward instead, enhancing their own bodies.
Whatever application they mastered was what ultimately determined their class.
She explained all of this with a pride she made no effort to hide.
But something else flickered briefly across her face when she added the next part explaining that while awakened Andoe and awakened Eruman had nothing in common, their unawakened, mundane counterparts were essentially indistinguishable from each other.
Functionally, there was no real difference between her and a random ordinary person.
"There was a time," she said, with a melancholy that read less like nostalgia for something recent and more like grief for something that might have been, "when our people had as many Dae Andoes as we had Noroa Andoes."
"What happened?"
She went quiet for a long moment. "I don't know."
Shiro recognized the shape of that I don't know immediately, the kind a mother gives a child asking a question she's decided is either too complicated or too painful to actually answer.
"What I do know," she said, "is that I need to find his shop."
Shiro's eyes drifted, at that, to the bag slung over her shoulder, the one holding the gems, the gold, and, most of all, the skull, the thing he was certain she intended to set down on Nazim's counter the moment they finally found him.