This was not at all how things were supposed to go, no, not in the slightest. Lord Quoth would be wroth with him beyond imagining, thought the stranger named Jago, if that creature should catch wind of what was happening in the village of Osak. The great wyrm had been good to its word, bringing news of the approaching stranger to the people of the humble village, and a small crowd of humans, elves and a few jafts had met him on the road just shy of the village, leading a brilliant chestnut brown steed by the reins out to him for his inspection and approval.
And they had looked at him, one and all, like he was some sort of visiting lesser deity. A cursory look at these folk told him all he needed to know as he feigned inspection of the horse; each of these people had a small tattoo of some sort on the back of their left hands, a stylized white dragon’s head. Hevka T’Chall seemed to have led him to a village that revered him as some sort of patron being, and he had come with its direct blessing.
Lord Quoth will have me hanged by my intestines for this, the stranger thought dismally. Best to take my beast and be gone.
“This is a fine animal,” he said, reaching up to stroke the horse’s neck. The beast pulled back from his touch, however, its eyes wide and whirling like he brought the touch of pestilence itself, and the onlookers made startled noises and moved to calm the horse. “It doesn’t seem to care much for me, though.”
“Think naught of it, my lordship,” said one of the blue-fleshed jaft men, a burly fellow adorned in a simple tan jerkin and tattered gray trousers. “Great Hevka warned us that Cord here might not take a shine to you right off.” The jaft extended a massive hand toward the stranger, who took it to shake, wincing at the crushing strength in the man’s hand. “I am Torm Knock-Skull, Mayor of Osak, Thane of Hevka T’Chall. Welcome, Jago of the Flame, Walker of Worlds.”
The stranger felt his stomach twist in on itself. “The wyrm told you of my travels, then,” he asked gently. Torm nodded his head slowly, signaling for his people to turn the horse about and starting back toward the village, which didn’t look, from its outskirts, to be a hamlet of any kind of notable size.
“He did indeed,” said Torm, keeping a respectful arm’s length from the stranger as they walked together back toward the village. “He said you were as one of the disciples of the Great God of Pathways, Guirdejef, but not quite like them. Tell me, if you are allowed, how many worlds have you walked in your time?”
Jago was struck quiet, never having really bothered to make conversation with any mortal long enough to have this sort of question posed to him. He gave it a moment’s due consideration before offering a response.
“When I think it through, six,” he finally replied. “Though, I am counting the realm in which resides my master as well. To tell the truth, I have not much explored that territory.”
“One does not stalk the streets of the worlds of gods, no,” said Torm with a sagely shake of his head, hands clasped behind his back as they passed between the village’s outermost residences. “Will you lunch with me, Walker of Worlds,” the mayor asked as he halted just in front of what looked like the village’s lone saloon, squaring himself to the stranger named Jago. “I would consider it a great honour.”
“You don’t even know me,” Jago observed, eyebrow raised. “Why would this bring honour to you?” The jaft smiled broadly, revealing a set of teeth that had seen better days.
“Great Hevka has not stopped to speak directly to our people in almost three years,” said the mayor reverently. “And now, because of your arrival, he not only came to us, but spake with us in request! You are the cause of great joy for the people of Osak, my friend, and we would return that happiness with no less than a good meal before sending you along.”
The stranger didn’t know right away how to react. These people were offering him kindness, friendship even, and for nothing that he had done directly himself. There had been one occasion, long before, when he had manipulated an entire country in another world into thinking him some sort of god, bringing him jewels and food and women to gain his favour. They had been terrified of him, and for good reason; he’d burned one of their cities entirely to the ground over the course of two days, an overkill response to a handful of their warriors identifying him as ‘other’ and trying to kill him.
But this was vastly different from that circumstance. The people of Osak weren’t afraid of him. Above that, he sensed a sizable amount of magical power in at least one of the onlookers who had come out to greet him with the horse and their mayor, who himself looked like he could tear the horse’s head from its neck without even breaking a sweat.
He had no reason to trust this setup; they were being genuinely nice, and he didn’t know how to react to genuinely nice. Opting to go with the flow of things for the time being, he offered Torm a half-smile and said, “Lead on, then, and let us sup.”
**
“Can you at least tell us what he’s under arrest for,” Dren asked the constable at the broad, polished oak desk in the front room of the station house. No sooner had the company arrived in Bios than a full contingent of constables in half-plate armor had surrounded them, weapons drawn, and demanded that Andrei Dolstov disarm and surrender to arrest. The minotaur freelancer had dismounted and gone about the laborious process of removing all of his weapons and armor, Dren and Holly and Norto all babbling confusedly at the guards, who ignored them roundly. One of the officers, a stout golden claw tribe werewolf, had clapped irons on Andrei’s wrists, shot a warning look at the humes and cuyotai as he shoved Andrei toward the other guards.
“You may follow,” the golden claw had barked, and so they had. The group hadn’t traveled far, only a couple of blocks in the benighted city streets, to a squat stone building that served as one of the constabularies of Bios, a large ‘3’ stenciled on the wall beside the broad double doors fronting the station.
The desk sergeant, another minotaur wearing a sleevless vest and matching chain shirt, looked up at Dren, Holly and Norto with a bored, half-lidded stare, his paperwork in a neat stack between his heavily tattooed arms. “Look, kid, I don’t know the specific charges, I just know we had a warrant out for him,” he said with a yawn. “You want to know the details, ask her,” he said, hooking his pen over toward a human woman in what appeared to be a full dress uniform sans armor.
The woman looked up from the file cabinet she was leafing through at the trio, her left eye not quite able to open all the way due to heavy scar tissue on the left half of her face. Some wide blade had left its permanent mark there, and the hair atop her head didn’t start for a good half an inch along her scalp on that side. Beyond the obvious damage, she was a remarkably handsome woman, late twenties, if Dren didn’t miss his guess, and looking natural in the dark blue trousers and dress coat of her office. A pair of silver bars stood on her epaulets, and she gave them a nod, coming toward the door that separated the front vestibule from the officers’ area behind the front station desk.
She extended a hand toward Dren, a thick folder tucked under her left arm. “Captain Dean, Third Station,” she said. Dren took the offered hand, and she indicated that they should follow her into the station. She guided them through another doorway off the vestibule, along a dimly lit, narrow corridor, passing several offices until finally she stepped to her left out of view, revealing a kind of lounge area. “Please, sit,” she said, indicating several chairs and a loveseat, upon which Dren and Holly naturally slid beside one another, Norto opting to flop down into a cozy-looking leather armchair with a grunt.
“Thank you,” said Dren, sighing.
“Tea,” the captain asked.
“Please,” said Holly.
“Got any ale around here,” asked Norto. The captain gave him a withering glare, and he put his hands up defensively. “Tea’s fine, miss, sorry.” The captain ducked out for a moment, returning then and sitting opposite Dren and Holly. Dren noticed that the lounge they were sitting in appeared to be reminiscent of a waiting room at a healer’s practice, rather than at a jail or law enforcement station. There was even a faint hint of sage lingering in the upholstery.
“The charges, against our friend,” he prompted. Captain Dean cleared her throat and opened the folder in her lap, revealing a moderately thick pile of papers within. On top, Dren could make out a profile sheet, complete with a Mage’s Eye printing of an image of Andrei, face-on and profile shots.
“Well, he’s had a few here in our fair city over the years,” said the captain, eyes down on her papers. She flipped over a page. “The first one was about fifteen years ago, drunk and disorderly, public urination,” she read, going down with one finger on the hand-written report. “He served three days in our lockup at Station Four for that. Then two months later,” she said, flipping the page. “Drunk and disorderly, destruction of municipal property, served two weeks here in Station Three. A year later, drunk and disorderly, public urination, minor assault on a barkeeper who tried to cut him off.”
“I’m sensing a pattern here,” Holly muttered, taking Dren’s hand in her own.
“Then we’ve got a drunk and disorderly, resisting arrest, and destruction of municipal property,” the captain went on, now flipping to the last page in Andrei’s weighty file. “However, this most recent one here is, let’s see,” she said, squinting as she looked at the last page. “Oh, a nice little double-whammy, yup, adultery and improper disposal of a corpse.”
Norto let out a belly laugh as a private came into the room with a tray of tea, giving a cup to each of the travelers in turn before ducking back out of the lounge swiftly. The captain quirked an eyebrow at the smithy, who just guffawed even harder. “Sorry,” said Norto with a shake of his head. “I’m just imagining that big, dumb sonofabitch plowing a dead body and then throwing it in the tub or something disgusting like that. Gets all high-and-mighty with me, then it turns out he’s some kind of necrophiliac or somefin’, you know?”
“And how would that be amusing,” the captain asked stoically. Norto just waved her off, giggling to himself childishly. Captain Dean turned her attention back to Dren and Holly, closing the folder and tucking it aside on the seat by her hip. She leaned toward them, elbows on her knees, and said, “I was the officer assigned to issue the warrant, I remember this very well. It was about two years ago. Your friend Andrei had been carrying on an affair with a woman by the name of Jennifer LeBlanc, an affair that her husband, George LeBlanc, learned about through neighbors. When he confronted her, Jennifer killed him. She panicked then, I imagine, and asked Mr. Dolstov to help her get rid of the body.”
“Where did he try to put it,” Dren asked, mortified.
“In the back of a wayfarer’s wagon when the troupe was getting ready to leave the city,” said the captain, shaking her head. “A couple of our people spotted him late at night, thought it looked suspicious. He beat my men unconscious and fled town, so we had a warrant issued if he should ever come through here again.”
Holly and Dren exchanged a quick look, then faced her once more. Holly asked, “How serious is this? How much time could he be locked up for?”
“Well,” said the captain with a sigh, leaning back in her seat and taking the tea cup from an end table by her right elbow. “Adultery is barely even enforced anymore, but George LeBlanc was one of our City Councilmen. His daughter Abigail wanted the law thrown at Mr. Dolstov’s head as hard as possible for it, back when this all happened. But she doesn’t even live here anymore, so that sort of goes by the wayside.”
“And the disposal,” Dren asked.
“That’s slightly more serious,” said captain Dean. “We had a real problem with necromancers in this city not ten years back, and a lot of folks around here still remember how bad it was. An improperly disposed of corpse is still trouble just waiting to happen to a lot of them. He’ll either have to sit in a cell for a month, at least, or pay one hell of a fine.”
“We don’t have a month,” Norto said, finally chiming in helpfully for a change. “We’ve got to get up north, into the mountains. We were only going to be stopping up here in Bios for a few days before pressing on.” The captain sipped her tea and stood up, holding the saucer and cup daintily. For a woman who looked like she’d lived pretty rough, it struck Dren as an odd visual in the moment.
“I’ll have a look through our fine guidelines and see what I can come up with,” she said. “You can go speak to Dolstov, I’ll tell the holding sergeant to let you through and have private Menker take you back. I’ll come let you know what I’ve decided shortly.” She left them then, the trio silently considering what they’d just learned about their freelancer companion.
A few minutes later, the narrow fellow who had brought them their tea returned to lead them to the holding cells, which were in the basement of the building. A set of creaking wooden steps led down from a broad sliding door in the officers’ assembly area behind the front vestibule desk, and at the bottom stood another desk, much smaller, manned by a scowling lizardman in silver and black brigandine armor. He pulled a small lever set in the wall by his desk, returning to the magazine he was idly perusing, and a door of iron bars, standing just behind him, slid to the side, admitting the hume smithies and cuyotai mage to a wide aisle with lockup cells on either side.
Several of the cells were occupied by groaning, snoring forms, and down in the sixth cell on the left side, Andrei sat hunched on a sturdy lower bunk, face in his hands. Dren tapped on the bars of his cell, and the minotaur looked up, heavy bags under his eyes, the right one looking sunken in and bruised. “What happened,” Dren asked abruptly.
“I may have suggested that the lockup sergeant’s mother was a gecko when he brought me down here,” Andrei replied with a snort and a grin. “He didn’t take it kindly.”
“Do you take some kind of perverse joy in pissing off everybody you come into contact with,” Holly blurted out, pinching the bridge of her snout between her eyes in clear exasperation.
“I wouldn’t call it ‘perverse’, exactly,” Andrei replied. “And before anybody launches into any kind of lecture about how I need to learn how to control myself and my impulses,” he said, standing from the bunk and approaching the bars. “Let me remind you that if I wanted, at any point, to just walk out of here, these bars wouldn’t exactly stop me.”
Norto scoffed at this, but fell silent as Andrei gripped two of the bars and bent them with a metallic squeak far out of true, then bent them back into position with the same swift effortlessness. “I suppose that’s fair,” Dren muttered. “The captain said she’d come down and tell us what kind of fine and/or sentence you’re looking at as soon as she checks the books for a guideline.”
Andrei nodded, returning to his bunk and sitting down with a heavy sigh. “Well, whatever she decides, we should take a minute to discuss the plan for the rest of this little mission of ours. Now, I know that you might not like what I’ve got to say here, Dren, but I have my reasons.” The minotaur freelancer took a deep breath, hanging his head a little as he let it out. “I think Holly and I should head north into the mountains, and you and Norto should remain here, in Bios.”
Dren just blinked mutely at him for a moment, giving Holly and Norto each a confused look before returning his attention to Andrei. “And what would your rationale be for this decision?”
“Don’t take me wrong on this, Dren, but the two of you are smithies, not warriors,” said Andrei plainly. “We’re going to be approaching a dragon in those mountains. There’s a pretty good chance that we’re going to get pretty dinged up at the very least. Those mountains are host to chimeras, trolls, stonebeasts. There’s even been rumors making the rounds for the last few years that there’s a troke lumbering around up there in the form of a goat until travelers get too close.”
“And you think the two of us will just be a liability,” Dren said with a huff, folding his arms over his narrow chest. Andrei shrugged and nodded as if to say, ‘Well yeah’. “We’re not helpless, Andrei.”
“Now lad, maybe we should take this to heart,” said Norto, hands on his hips. “Fighting’s not what we do. We’re smithies, you and I; we make the weapons and arms so’s ‘at others can do the fighting, eh?” Dren wheeled on the older hume, the vein in his forehead throbbing visibly, neck muscles standing out as he thrust his head toward the man he’d ‘prenticed to.
“Well of course you’re dandy fine sitting round here on your ass,” Dren snapped. “Puts you right back in your natural environment for the gods’ sakes,” he said with a sniff. Holly put a steady hand on Dren’s shoulder then, half-turning him to face her directly.
“Dren, sweetie, he’s right,” she said gently, shaking her head a little. “I’m sorry, but I agree with Andrei on this one. The two of you just aren’t prepared for the kind of dangers we’re likely to come across in the mountains.” She framed his face with her hands, running her right thumb along his smooth, young cheek slowly. “Will you promise to stay here, in Bios, until we come back? For me?”
Dren’s lower lip quivered, and she could see the beginnings of an indignant tear forming in his eye, but the young smithy clenched his jaw tightly, sniffed, and nodded subtley. “For you,” he said shakily. “I promise.” He closed his eyes then, and the two pressed their foreheads together for a moment.
“Ugh, come off it,” Norto grumbled low, going stiff as a board as a huge, unfriendly hand shot out between the bars and clamped down on the back of his neck. His eyes rolled toward Andrei, who just glowered at him with half-lidded eyes, his free pointer finger up against his lips in a shushing motion. Norto nodded as best he could, and Andrei withdrew his hand.
A few minutes later, captain Dean approached them from the holding sergeant’s desk, a clean sheet of parchment in her hand. Holly, Dren and Norto squared themselves to her, and Andrei clasped the bars of his cell door, pressing close so that he could get a look at the scarred human officer. The captain cleared her throat and held up the paper, giving the company a brief nod before looking to the sheet.
“Andrei Dolstov, for the crime of adultery, you shall be fined in the amount of thirty gold coin, and serve a sentence of three days imprisonment here, in the cell you presently occupy,” the captain declared. She cleared her throat, then pressed on. “For the crime of improper disposal of a corpse, you shall be fined in the amount of sixty gold coin, and serve an additional two days imprisonment in this cell. Do you wish to protest this sentencing or finding?”
All eyes swung to the freelancer, who seemed to be contemplating a response. Finally, he took a step back from the bars. “I do not protest, though I request a singular statement for the record,” he finally said.
“Certainly,” said the captain.
“Let the record reflect that I did not know that the woman I accorded with was married,” said the freelancer, folding his arms over his broad chest, cocking his head to the side. “I’m not a complete scumbag.” Captain Dean pooched her lips thoughtfully, nodded, and took a pen from one of her pockets, jotting quickly on her parchment.
“So the record shall reflect,” she said, turning on her heel to depart. Before leaving, she said over her shoulder, “The three of you will have to leave now, but he can have visitors between nine and thirteen candles each day until his sentence concludes.” When she was gone, Andrei gave Dren, Norto and Holly recommendations for where to claim lodgings in the city, asking the cuyotai mage to come by the next morning so he could go over a list of required travel supplies for her to secure before his release. When she had agreed at last, the trio left the station, heading toward the southern public stables to retrieve their essentials from the wagon before going to get rooms to stay in the city.
As soon as Norto grabbed his own bag from the back, he frowned at Dren and Holly. “You two go where you want, I’m not staying in any fleabag knockdown that scruffy bull has ever called ‘home’,” he said with a snort.
“Well, should we meet up here in the mornings, then,” Holly asked. “Check in with each other, until Andrei and I depart?” Norto shrugged but nodded his ascent, then took off without another word, leaving Dren and Holly hitching up their bags and heading out into the streets by themselves. “So, do you want to grab something to eat before we fetch a room,” she asked with a smile.
“Sure,” said Dren, letting her lead the way. After a few yards, he tilted his head to one side at her. “You meant rooms, didn’t you?” She slipped her hand over his and gave it a squeeze, flashing him an impish grin, drawing him closer to her side.
“No,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows. “I meant ‘room’.”
Is "Quoth" the same Quoth of Amelia City fame?
Definitely. A fictional character spanning its' authors fictional universes is not to be trifled with.