Dinadan Noir IX: Back and There Again

The cobbler’s shop was closed. The whole storefront was a wreck. The broken door had been boarded carefully, but the job on the shattered window was haphazard at best. I poked my head in. Bloodstains, scorch marks, a gold tooth, two dozen pairs of ruined shoes, broken racks, a solid slab of worktable broken in two. Nothing much to salvage, but I wanted a closer look… I flew up to the roof, and sure enough, nobody’d bothered to secure the trap door. Carefully, I headed down.

Somebody’d gotten rid of Aagren’s corpse. Moreover, they’d gone to the trouble of half-cleaning the bloodstains. There wasn’t a damn trace of the words that had been there. I filed that away before moving into the shop proper. It looked even worse from inside. The acid had chewed up the walls but good, enough to make me leery of spending too long in the place. A few boxes of materials had been broken open and looted. Something nagged at me, though. I kept looking without knowing precisely what I expected to find.

All of the tools were gone, even the ones that wouldn’t be worth a plug copper.

So Damini had come back here after all. That was a good thing. It meant that I was at least on the right track. Which meant that I’d figured the girl out a little. Which meant that maybe… Bah. Down that path lies naught but trouble. Dames’ll do that to you. If things were as ugly as I was starting to think they were, I couldn’t be mooncalfing over sculpted limbs, fathomless eyes, and midnight hair. Except I clearly was.

Whatever the reasons, I needed to find her. She was the only lead on Aagren I had left. In theory, anyway, I was still trying to figure out who’d killed Arbonne. I had a suspicion Gilgal was going to call me in sooner rather than later, and it was always better to show up with something substantial. The man’s probably the least bluffable being in the Retroverse. Going in and telling him “I’ve gotten involved in some sort of messy Family business on Crypt, and I’m not sure how” would not fly. Like I said, I needed to find Damini. And if I didn’t think Ishtar was enjoying the confusion, I’d have asked the goddess to help keep my head clear when I found her.

For all her ambition, Damini did not, as far as I knew, have ready access to magic. Which meant that she was probably still on Crypt. So. Your shop is wrecked, you have for some reason passed up stealing things from somebody who knocked you out and tied you up, you’ve got your trade tools, a bit of cash, and that’s it. Where do you go?

She was in the third bar I checked, and she didn’t say a thing when I sat down at her table and poured myself a shot. I sniffed at it. “You know, Damini, mushroom spirits are bad for your health.” I downed the shot.

“Prob’ly.”

The bottle was opaque, but it was pretty light. “How much of this have you had?”

“Too much. Not enough.”

A beautiful, drunken woman, and she had to go and be morose. “So, as you can see, you didn’t manage to get me killed.”

“Shove it, Dinadan. You’re all…Gifted…and…stuff. Wouldn’ta mattered anyway.”

“It might have made me forget you.”

“Really? You come chasin’ after me ‘cuz you wanted to forget me?”

It bugged me that she was right. “You didn’t take anything.”

“Not true!” She swayed a little. “I took yer wine. Tashty.”

I sighed, leaned back, and pondered getting a good drunk going myself. “I’m sorry about your shop.”

“My shop! It wash all I had. Least I got my tools. But no shop.”

“You’ve got a keen grasp of the obvious.” It was sharper than I’d meant it to be.

“Shut up, ya lecherous goat!” I was surprised she managed “lecherous” in her state.

“I had you knocked out and tied up, you know.”

“I know. I woulda stayed, maybe. But I had to pee.”

In vino veritas, and all that. “Look, Damini…”

“You wanna kiss me?”

“Of course I do. You’re beautiful. But—”

“Then kissh me!” she took a pull on the bottle. “Or drag me back to your goat cave an’ we can do more’n kish!”

“I’m sorry about your shop.”

“You said that already.”

“I’m stalling.”

“Oh. Maybe you should havva drink!”

I sighed. My higher nature picked the damnedest times to kick in. “Let’s see if we can’t sober you up a bit.”

“I don’t wanna be shober! Why d’you think I’m drinkin’?”

“Come on, Damini. Let’s get you out of here.” I stood up and took her arm. She half-fell out of her chair.

“Alright. Alright. I’ll come with you, mister bard goat man. Not like I got anythin' better t'do.”

She puked all over the moment I got her out to the street. We ducked into an alley and I held that magnificent hair and made sympathetic noises while she puked some more. I was really starting to hate the smell of mushroom spirits.

[—*—]

“I havva headache.” Damini groaned, but didn’t open her eyes.

“Color me shocked. You drank most of a bottle of mushroom spirits all by your lonesome.”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“That, lady, is the story of my life. Drink this.”

“What is it?” She got herself to a sitting position but didn’t open her eyes.

“Water. And a bit of mint. Your breath is atrocious.”

She sipped it and opened her eyes a bit. “Could be worse. Where are we?”

“Welstar, not far from the village I grew up in. I figured we could both use a change of scenery.”

“It’s really…green.”

“You been to Welstar before?”

She started to shake her head, then thought better of it. “Nope. Get to Raji every month or so to do some trading. Other than that, it’s all solid stone and magelight.”

“You could, you know, come back. It’s not like you-got exiled.”

“Back? I just told you I never been here before. Crypt is where I live. Where I’m from.” She squinted. “It’s too bright here. Way too bright. I don’t know how people live with the sun in their faces all the time.”

“You’re hung over. Of course it’s bright.”

I’m not convinced I’ll ever be able to reproduce the noise she made. “I know th’difference between hangover bright and bright-bright, bright boy. Th’grass is nice, though.”

I kept myself from watching her lay back on said grass. “Damini, I need you to come clean with me. How much do you know about what’s going on with the Family right now?”

“You didn’t bring me here to…frolic?”

“Pff. You’re still almost as green as the grass, and I spent the big part of an hour watching you empty your stomach. And people keep ending up dead. I need to figure out what’s going on, and you’re the best lead I’ve got at the moment.”

“Ain’t much of a detective, then.”

“Limited resources. And when I started, this was just about a murder.”

“Aagren’s fishy tart?”

“Yeah. Came to me before she bit it, knowing somebody was after her. Eight hours later, she’s dead.”

“Aagren was royal pissed about that.”

“He say anything?”

“Look, Dinadan, I was just a shopgirl, y’know? Aagren came and went and kept me paid. I kept my ears shut. Part of the deal.”

“Sure. But unless people came in through the roof, you saw ‘em, yeah? Traffic pick up much lately?”

She thought about it for a minute. “Not the normal stuff. Errand boys, muscle…that didn’t change at all. But messengers. Hmm. Yeah. Lots of messengers. That dwarf, McKay, he showed up once. Real short talk, no raised voices. An’ he went right back out.”

“Wait. That was Whale Oil McKay?”

“Aye. That mean something?”

“Maybe. Makes me glad we cut out when we did. Dangerous fellow, at least by reputation.”

“He weren’t the one who sprayed my shop down with acid.”

“True. I’m guessing that was somebody local.”

“Why’d any of the locals come after me?”

“They weren’t after you.”

“Oh.” She sighed. “Oh, yeah.”

“Sorry.”

“So what’re you going to do?”

“About what?”

“Me.”

My turn to sigh. “What do you want?”

“Something better, same as anyone else.”

“You still wanna go to work for the Family?”

“Family and shoes are what I know.”

“I don’t think it’s safe for you to go back to Crypt. Not like I’m the only one who’s got questions for you. I can put you up somewhere nice in Abarack, if you want. Keep it quiet.”

“You gonna come visit?”

“Eventually. But I’ve got other folks I need to talk to. And not in dark warehouses.”