Chapter 36
Luna moved through the underground with her new identity. Nobody reacted to her, though admittedly, she didn’t put on the perfect disguise. She refused to compromise on shoes, so she wore rather expensive leather wraps.
They were dirty enough to not be noticeable, hopefully.
First stop was the tavern with the cup sign. She ordered a drink, leaned against the bar, and listened.
The harbinger talk had evolved since yesterday. The raw fear and speculation had crystallized into something more structured. The conversations weren’t just gossip anymore. They were planning.
“Three D-ranks,” a man at a corner table said. His back was to her, but his voice carried. “Maybe four, if it’s true Savnoj commits to it. Plus whoever else his guild can scrounge up.”
Savnoj? Luna frowned. He probably had enough of a name to be behind this.
“Going to need a lot of D-ranks,” his companion said. “You saw the sky. You felt the shockwave. The harbinger’s for real.”
“That’s why we’re getting the shackles.”
Luna’s ears sharpened. Come to think of it, these two blokes likely were from Torben’s group. That one had a bone to pick with her, and easily with Alsen too.
“Dragon-bile-forged,” the first man continued. “The real ones, not the knock-offs the bounty hunters use. They sever the connection between the mage and their mana. Completely. You put those on a mage, and he can’t light a candle.”
“Where does one even get something like that?”
“Savnoj’s got contacts. Supposed to arrive today, maybe tomorrow. The caravan from Easthollow.”
Luna sipped her drink. Magic-blocking shackles. She knew nothing of dragon bile, so it might work against mages. And someone in Vellhorn was procuring them specifically for Alsen.
This sounded pretty bad, actually. If they were getting shackles, then they were going to make a move.
And knowing Alsen, he was going to be out cold, drugged up to attempt dream walking.
She could tell him. He would try to explain it to them, maybe succeed, probably not, but then they would go after her.
The harbinger talk had too much motion to be stopped. One had to be found and brought to… justice?
She had to find someone who knew more. These two grunts likely only overheard parts.
She finished the drink, left a coin, and moved on.
The second tavern yielded more of the same. A pair of different men, also likely Torben’s group, discussed the shackles in quieter tones, mentioning that the adventurer’s guild itself was involved. Maybe even officially.
By noon, Luna believed the information was accurate. In different words, everyone told the same story.
Harbinger, shackles, get him tomorrow at the latest.
She had to move fast.
Two inns later, she spotted a familiar face. Theron and Marena sat by a table, munching down a late lunch.
They looked just like when they traveled together to the vault. They even talked normally, tones stable, as if nothing was wrong with the world.
It brought an unwilling smile to her face.
In a strange way, she missed them. They were fun, in a way. More fun than ever-meditating Alsen.
With the inn packed full, it wouldn’t look strange for her to sit next to them. She hollered she’d have the sausages with bread for a meal, and sat at the same table near Theron. “Sorry,” she said, lowering her voice a bit. “The other tables are full. Hope you don’t mind.”
“It’s fine,” Theron said. “I’m Theron, and she’s Marena.”
“Oh, nice, hi, I’m Narcy.”
The waitress brought her a plate with three sausages, all much smaller than the ones she saw on other plates. She tossed a silver coin to the waitress.
Luna started eating as if nothing was happening.
As if they’d never met. Theron and Marena talked about wild boars, for some unfathomable reason.
She needed to probe. “You two look like adventurers,” she said casually.
“I’ve heard a lot of talk about this harbinger thingy. Is that something you’re handling?”
Theron looked up. “Usually. Where’d you hear that?”
“In the inn yesterday. Other adventurer types were talking about it. Got me a bit scared. A couple of strong-looking guys talked about this harbinger as some huge problem. I’m just an apprentice tanner here, so something scary enough to startle adventurers is really scary to me.”
“Don’t worry.” Theron smiled. “It will soon be all solved.”
Luna bit into the second sausage. Ah, she really wished he didn’t say that. This implied he was involved. “That’s great. Thanks! It’s awesome to have adventurers around.”
They ate, and so did she. Their conversation returned to wild boars.
She spotted another familiar face. Derell. He walked in, stood by a bar for a few minutes, chatted up a random-looking thug, and then headed out.
Luna quickly gobbled down the last sausage. “See ya.” She left.
Derell and the thug didn’t look around. She caught up to stalk them in short order, and followed them. No one paid her attention. Not that Derell would recognize her if Theron and Marena didn’t.
They entered a touch less shady inn. Savnoj already awaited there, sitting by a table by himself. Derell and the thug sat next to him.
Luna hollered for a beer, and sat down two tables away. She listened.
Due to the distance and residual noise, she couldn’t hear everything.
But she caught a few snippets.
“The delivery is arriving this afternoon,” Savnoj announced after they dealt with the pleasantries. “The harbinger’s with your mage.”
“Yeh,” Derell spat. “At least she’s got him pinned down for now. He’s wounded too.”
Savnoj nodded. “That should be of help. Won’t she make trouble?”
“Nah. Arlie knows what’s important. She fancies the fucker, but not that much. She’ll understand. She’s smart, you know.”
Luna got her beer, paid a coin, and sipped from it.
“I do.” Savnoj smiled. “What of his attendant?”
“She’s gone with the wind. Hates everyone but herself. No idea where she’s at, but she won’t be at Arlie’s.”
“And we need to make sure she can’t find him,” Savnoj added. “Not until it’s too late.”
“You’ll take care of that, I suppose.”
“I will.” Savnoj grabbed his beer. “Cheers.”
They drank.
Luna emptied her beer, and left.
This was a really big problem.
She headed to the market, and shopped for writing tools and parchments. Many parchments, which could be folded into little messages.
She brought it all back to her inn, undoing her transfiguration as she got close. Her face finally stopped pulling on itself. So much better.
She sat down by the table, and started writing. Each parchment had the same text: ‘Harbinger tonight. In the guild at midnight.’
Alsen woke to the sensation of his left arm trying to murder him.
Not metaphorically. The pain started at the shoulder, rolled down through the elbow like a slow detonation, and terminated in his fingertips with a tingling, electric sharpness that made his teeth clench. He tried to move the arm. The arm declined.
He lay in the chair where he’d fallen asleep after he allocated his skill points. Sunlight slanted through the window at an angle that suggested early afternoon. His throat felt like sandpaper, his head throbbed with the residual punishment of the herbs, and his left arm burned.
In a new way now, with sharp, hot pain. A localized fire centered on the inside of his forearm, exactly where he had formed the line of powder last night.
Right, he’d forgotten about the whole arm thing in the heat of last night’s moment.
He looked down. The skin on the inside of his forearm, already mottled with the yellowing bruises of the old injury, now featured an angry red streak running along the vein.
The powder residue had caked into the micro-tears in the skin, the ones Arleria’s healing hadn’t fully closed yet, and the herbal compound had seeped directly into the damaged tissue underneath.
He had snorted psychedelic drugs off an open wound. He shouldn’t have done that.
A sound from behind the partition caught his attention. Arleria stepped around the partition. She wore her house clothes, the loose blouse from the night before, her dark hair pulled back in a way that emphasized the sharp lines of her jaw and the sharper lines of her expression.
She looked at him like a surgeon looking at a patient who has just pulled out their own stitches.
“Good afternoon,” Alsen tried.
“Is it?” Arleria crossed the room to the worktable.
She picked up one of Luna’s pouches, the one Alsen had opened and used.
She held it at arm’s length, between her thumb and forefinger, as if it were a dead rat.
“Because from my perspective, the morning started with me finding my patient unconscious in a chair with an unknown herbal compound dissolving into the arm I’ve been reconstructing for days.
It’s afternoon now, after his majesty finally woke up. ”
“I can explain.”
“You introduced an unidentified psychoactive substance directly into damaged tissue through open wounds.” She set the pouch down with a deliberate click.
“There is no explanation for that. There is only the fact that it happened, and the secondary fact that you are unbelievably lucky that the compound didn’t interact with the healing matrix I’ve been building in your ligaments. ”
Well, he was lucky. No point in denying that. “Did it?”
“I don’t know yet.” She walked to him, pink light already forming around her fingers. She took his arm without asking, and the scan started. Her touch was professional, precise, and entirely devoid of the gentleness she usually brought to his treatments.
The scan pulsed through his forearm. Alsen watched her expression shift as the diagnostic mapped the damage.
“The inflammation is superficial,” she said after a moment.
“The healing matrix is intact. You are, as I said, unbelievably lucky.” She released his arm.
The pink light faded. “The compound did accelerate blood flow through the damaged areas, which means everything I healed yesterday is under additional stress. If the tendons partially detach again because of this, the repair timeline extends by weeks.”
“I’m sorry.”