Chapter 34
Luna walked through the city’s underground. It smelled the same as before, of stale beer, pipe smoke, old sweat, and the faint herbal undertone that every black market seemed to cultivate regardless of the city.
She’d entered through the herbalist’s side entrance an hour after splitting from the group, while Alsen and the others were still preparing for the dragon audience. She couldn’t care less about the lizard.
She tossed a smile at the old woman. “I’m paying this time. I’m taking that, that, that, that, also that, add that, and a whole lot of that.” She pointed across the shop.
With a smile, the woman started gathering the herbs. “I suppose the herbs you bought last time worked well on the young mage. It must have been quite the night.”
She wished. Well, technically, it was quite a night, just that he was passed out, rather than in the sleeping bag with her. “It went all right.”
“Be careful though, young miss. With all the talk of the harbinger, we need to all be careful.”
Luna almost jumped out of her skin. “The… harbinger?”
“Oh, yes, yes…” The woman kept collecting the herbs. “Terrible news, the harbinger of the gods. The whole city’s talking about it now. You and the noble boy need to be careful.”
Luna couldn’t believe her ears. What happened when they were gone?
The woman gathered the herbs. “That will be forty-seven gold.”
Luna cleared her throat.
“Twenty-two gold.”
Luna gave her the are-you-kidding-me look.
“Six gold.”
Luna rolled her eyes. “That’s still a robbery.” She drew a few coins from her pockets, and tossed them on the table. “Keep the change.” She gathered the pouches and tossed them into her backpack.
She left, this time for an inn.
With Alsen staying at the pink wench, she could get a proper inn. Luna went to the most expensive part of the city, stopped by the Diamond Tree Inn, and booked herself a room. The best one, too. It spanned the size of an apartment, featuring creative furniture, art, even a shallow pool.
Much better. She dropped her backpack but took her spear, and headed back out. Even in the inn, as she was passing through, she heard the word harbinger being uttered.
How did that happen?
She dove into the underworld
The fishbone marks led her through familiar alleys. Past the herbalist, down the side street, through the courtyard with the cup sign. She skipped Kallas’s shop this time, heading deeper into the network of passages and basements that formed Vellhorn’s unofficial economy.
The first tavern she entered was crowded. Low ceiling, thick smoke, the usual clientele of thugs and drunks. She ordered a drink, leaned against the bar, and listened.
It took less than five minutes.
“...I’ve heard the harbinger’s returned. He just walked in through the main gate like nothing. What’s the city guard even doing?”
“Do we even have a city guard?” someone else asked back. “Never thought I’d say it, but we could use one.”
Luna’s ears pricked. She turned her head, just slightly, toward a table of three men in laborer’s clothes that didn’t fit their hands. The one speaking had a scar across his knuckles. Not a laborer.
“Coming back from the mountains, I heard,” the second man said. “The drakes themselves ran in terror from him.”
“They probably flew.” Both men chuckled.
“Still, who makes drakes run?”
“… the harbinger.”
No fucking way. Luna sipped her drink. The ale tasted worse than it looked.
The harbinger. She’d heard the word precisely once before today. At Kallas’s shop, he called her that.
He was right, sure, but how did that get pinned on Alsen?
She remembered Kallas’s shop’s guard. Did he overhear that, but then connected it to the wrong person?
Luna finished the drink, left a coin, and moved to the enchanter’s shop.
She knocked, a man opened, she entered. Kallas sat behind his table, etching a rune into a shield. The guard shrank back behind the door.
Kallas’s face brightened up. “Of what service may I be to you today?”
Yep, it was the guard. He had mentioned it somewhere, and the rumor spread. “Hey.” She smiled at the runesmith. “Can you etch indestructibility runes or something similar?”
“But of course.”
She took the spear from her back. “I need one such rune on this. It’s holding together more by chance than anything else.” She walked to his table and put it down.
He picked up the spear with reverence befitting a holy relic. “I will postpone my other work to have it done by tomorrow.”
And he was going to do it without pay, wasn’t he? She felt bad about it. She had to accidentally drop a pouch with some gold when she was leaving. “Thanks.”
He bowed slightly, and she left.
Two streets down, a cramped gambling den that operated behind a butcher’s shop. The back room held eight men playing cards and one woman smoking a pipe in the corner. Luna slipped in, sat near the woman, and ordered another drink she wouldn’t finish.
The conversation here was louder, less guarded.
“I was there,” a man at the card table said, throwing down a hand. “At the guild. The day he walked in. The air turned to mud. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, nothing. The whole room froze. Every drink in every glass went still.”
“One mage doesn’t do that.”
“The harbinger can. And they call him an F-rank. It’s ridiculous.”
“My cousin works the reception at the guild. Says Maggie nearly pissed herself.”
Laughter. Luna hid her smirk behind the rim of her cup.
“That’s not even the worst of it. You hear about the mountain? The explosion?”
“Everyone heard about the mountain. The shockwave rattled half the windows on the north side.”
“That was him. The harbinger. He’s walking around with artifacts that can level mountains. And Verathras summoned him for a private audience.”
“The dragon is scared.”
“Dragons don’t get scared. He called him to measure him.”
“The harbinger walked out alive, so the dragon got scared, I tell you. Scared.”
Luna set the cup down. This was going to be a problem.
If people viewed Alsen as some supreme threat, they were eventually going to do something about it.
And that eventually could come real damn soon.
She moved through three more establishments over the next hour. A flophouse with a basement bar. A shop that sold legitimate herbs in front and the actually useful ones in back. A fighting pit where the audience bet on rats.
The story was everywhere, told with varying degrees of accuracy and embellishment. The facts remained consistent at the core.
It didn’t matter anymore if anyone was spreading the rumor. It was already everywhere.
The irony was beautiful.
Alsen wasn’t even really showing off, aside from the whole Arleria dumbfuckery. But he got pinned as the harbinger of the old gods, the embodiment of their revenge upon the world that chased them out.
And Luna was just the girl that traveled with him. Less important than his backpack. Nobody looked at Luna twice, because nobody had reason to.
In a way, she loved it.
Nothing brought as much safety as subtlety. Though, to be fair, someone could have mentioned the incident with Torben’s group. That should have made it into the rumors.
It didn’t, apparently.
She left the underground, and found herself a nice rooftop overlooking the market district. With her legs dangling over the edge, she thought. Her brain worked better when on a roof. Her other organs too, but that was secondary right now.
The city spread below her, lanterns dotting the darkness in uneven clusters. Verathras’s hoard glowed faintly in the not so distant city center, the gold catching whatever ambient light remained.
She needed to figure out if the rumors were harmless or if anyone was planning to do something about it. People might recognize her as the mighty harbinger’s servant, though.
She had to look a bit differently to investigate anything meaningful.
Luna dropped from the rooftop, landing in the alley below without a sound. First, she went to Arleria’s. She didn’t even bother closing her window, so Luna climbed the wall with ease, and slipped in.
A nice apartment, overfilled with magely bullshits, but that was to be expected. No couch, and only one bed, so that wasn’t great.
But she did buy the drugs for Alsen, so she dropped the two pouches on the work table stained with dried blood. Arleria probably healed him on it.
The healing was useful. Whatever she was going to do to him in the bed wasn’t.
With a frown, Luna left through the window. She went shopping.
Back in the temple with the scorpions, she pocketed way more gold than anyone noticed. She got herself a bit more jewelry, as she never had enough of that, and she went to get new clothes.
A rougher blouse, cheaper fabric, dyed a faded brown that she would never normally wear. A leather vest, second-hand, with stains that spoke of honest work. Trousers that were slightly too big, cinched with a rope belt. Boots that were slightly too worn.
She took it back to the inn. There, she changed. Now, she had to do something about her hair. She always wore it loose, so this time, she tied it up into a ponytail.
The last part was her face. She focused.
Partial transfiguration. One percent.
She focused the adjustments into her face.
Her cheekbones broadened a bit, her eyebrows stretched, her nose grew a touch, her jawbone enlarged. Small changes, but enough to not look like herself.
The muscles over the bones shifted to accommodate, pulling her expression into something subtly different.
It didn’t feel good at all, though. She hated the pressure in the face. She could also push it more, but that didn’t feel necessary.
Most likely even Alsen wouldn’t recognize her. He didn’t look at her nearly often enough, anyway.
She headed out.