Dinadan Noir VI: Shoe Shop Rumble

Considering that half the races native to Crypt flew, slithered, or oozed, I was surprised that the cobbler’s shop was more than just a front for the Family. All manner of shoes hung in the properly glazed, squared up window. I squatted on a stoop across the street and watched customers come and go. I had little doubt that Aagren knew I was looking for him. Toth’s goons had found me easily enough even before I went and kicked the hornet’s nest. Whether I’d been recognized at the Abode or not, there weren’t likely to be many satyrs around. I could try and play it quiet, pay a few coins to get some guttersnipe to announce me, but that wouldn’t be much better than going in fast. I could go cool my heels and plan a proper message…

There was another option, too, probably the best one: forget I’d met Arbonne, forget the bits of her strewn all over an aristocrat’s penthouse, and go back to doing my real job. The bard guild couldn’t run itse—well, actually, it pretty much did. My responsibilities consisted of occasional gripe sessions and even more occasional official meetings. Which was part of the reason I’d gone and gotten involved with the Sentinels in the first place.

And part of the reason tiny bells tinkled as I walked through the door into the cobbler’s shop. Their chime got lost in a sudden feminine scream and I got lost in a tangle of dark hair and sculpted limbs.

As delightful as the situation was for me, it didn’t seem to be so for the girl, who got herself untangled in a hurry and plucked a knife from the cobbler’s bench. I could tell at a glance she was beautiful, but the knife she’d gone and leveled at me was enough to keep it to a glance.

“Hullo.” Not my wittiest greeting ever, but a bard can get a lot into even a single word. “Something amiss?”

Black, black, black is the color of my true love's hair. Her lips are like a rose so fair. And the prettiest face and the neatest hands… She was stunning now that she’d stepped back far enough for met to get a good look at her and didn’t seem intent on cutting me. Human, but paler than any elf, with a lean jaw and big eyes that managed to be even blacker than the tumble of her hair. Long arms and legs clad in simple but close-fitting blue.

“Is something amiss?” I asked again, wondering how long we’d been staring at each other.

She jerked her head towards the back of the place. “Aye. Something’s amiss. You come to see Aagren? Go have a look.”

In hindsight, it was idiotic to turn my back on her, but I did, pushing past into what should have been a workroom but was clearly an office. A nicer one than mine, except for the still-glowing purple blood sprayed around the place. When I came in, it slithered to form the words “Think Twice” in elegant script. Cute.

The blood’s erstwhile owner lay in a heap behind the desk, with a tidy hole in his chest large enough that I could have put my head in it without mussing my hair, had I been the morbid sort. Aagren was tall, which for a squidface meant he’d been pushing thirteen feet. There was a lot of corpse. No sign of forced entry, no sign of a fight. Somebody’d come in, done the deed, and left, all with magic a hell of a lot less subtle than the stuff I worked with.

I turned to find the girl’d crept up behind me. “This just happen?”

“Ain’t in the screaming habit, mister bravo, but there was a cursed lot of blood in the air when I heard him hit the floor.”

Tiny bells tinkled.

Standing in the doorway was a dwarf with grease-slicked hair and a hundred plat suit, flanked by my old friends Guido and Nunzio. Guido let a length of barbed chain fall into his hands. Nunzio pulled a heavy, black-studded length of bone from his belt. The dwarf thumbed his lapels and looked menacing. That much I could do, too, and did, only without the lapels.

“Afternoon, gentlemen. Come to check the latest in pedal fashion?”

“You,” the dwarf replied, “were warned.”

“Youse ready for some locution lessons, pretty boy?” Nunzio asked. “I know a great tutor. I call him ‘Mister Club.’”

I snorted. “And here I thought crime required creative thinking.” I hurled a pair of knives, one at each of the thuuls, mostly as distraction. It was the dwarf that worried me. Worried me enough that I reached next for the panpipes at my belt. The goons, bloodied but hardly daunted, spread one to a side. Fancy suit stayed put, though something about the way he shifted his stance set me on edge. I heard the girl shifting behind me and realized she still held a knife. A strategic exit seemed better every second. I started the magic that would take me home…and found myself still standing in the cobbler’s shop with a fistful of Family goons intending violence on my person.

“Well. It’s been fun—”

Tiny bells tinkled, or would have, if they hadn’t been drowned out by the slam of the door coming off its hinges.

I recognized a few faces from the Worm’s Abode amongst the toughs who poured in behind Guido, Nunzio, and the Suit. And I could tell that one of them was about to spray the whole place with acid, the latter trio included. I tackled the girl back into the office as caustic goo ruined most of the stuff in the shop. The girl was a joy to hold, incidentally. “Back door?” I asked.

She nodded, looking not at all frightened by the bloody din on the other side of the thin wall. “Up to the roof.”

An arm reached through the doorway. I had a spell on my lips by the time I realized there wasn’t a body attached to it. “No fight like a fight in the Family, eh?” I kicked the arm away.

“Yeah. You climb ladders with those?” She pointed disdainfully at my hoofs.

“Of course. I’ve got one in my tower back home. You should come climb it sometime.”

She snorted, but there was a laugh underneath it. A heavy, wet thud from the other side of the wall was enough to get the girl moving. She opened what looked like a closet, revealing a wide, sturdy ladder that I could have climbed in my sleep. “You first, mister goat.”

“Still don’t trust me?”

“If there’s somebody up there waiting to bust a head, better yours ‘n mine.”

“Fair enough,” I muttered. There was a trap door at the top of the ladder, and no landing. I listened hard, but couldn’t hear a damn thing over the fisticuffs below. I gave the trap door a quick shove, held it up for a moment. The top edge splintered and I nearly lost my footing as something hit the wood, hard.

“Come on up, goat! I gots yer locution lesson right here! We’ll start ya off easy: crunch da skull.”

Joy. But verily, a bard is never without tricks. “Crunch the skull? No, no, no. Repeat after me: the crunch of lunch comes mainly after brunch.” I threw my voice with more magic than any mundane ventriloquist could muster, putting it ten feet behind where I guessed the goon was. Threw open the door again, jumped up and rolled away. The fool still had his back turned, so I put a knife into it for form’s sake. That got his attention.

“You!”

“Shouldn’t that be ‘youse’, you know, for consistency?”

Nunzio’s only response was a growl.

No messing around this time, it was all sound and fury. We went back and forth up there on the roof, bludgeon against blasting. For all that Nunzio’s skull was empty, it was thick. I hit him again and again and it barely slowed him. He hit me a time or two more than I would have liked. That mace of his had some dark voodoo on it, and the bruises it left were far worse than they should have been, even with the thuul’s strength behind ‘em

Then I lost my footing. Nunzio grinned and took a two-handed grip on his club, lining up a killing blow. Something moved behind him and he cried out, stumbling himself. I scrambled back to my feet and hit him with a concentrated sonic blast, right to the head. It finally crumpled, messily. I saw the girl’s leather knife, then, sunk to the hilt in his thigh.

“Thanks.”

She grinned and shut what was left of the trap door behind her. “Yer welcome. What say we get out of here before the guard shows up?”

I dusted myself off, doing what I could to hide the wincing. “I know a place on Raji that’ll give me a discount on good liquor. And maybe after, we can have a look at that ladder I mentioned.”