Dinadan Noir XIII: Word on the Street Redux

I headed back to Crypt with a fresh well of energy. It’s good to have friends in Gydnia. In the long run, magic’s no substitute for sleep, but a quick boost worked wonders. The running of my brain at its usual speed was a mixed blessing. On the right, I felt much less likely to blunder into accidental death. On the left, I actually had to think about the things Damini had said. On some level, she was right. I kept my hand in the detective business because it wasn’t like anything else, because there was more to it than just outfighting the other guy. Gilgal had asked me, before he gave me my badge, why I was joining. “I like it,” I’d told him, “the finding things out.” And I still did. But there was more to it than that. At least now. I was a long way from the wilder who’d fought off a necromancer with his dad. Now, I could make a difference. Or at least I thought I could. And that was the other thing Damini had been right about—taking down a couple of Family heavies wasn’t going to help. Much. But maybe, maybe, I could do more than take down a few heavies. If I could hit them hard enough, maybe the shake-up might do more good than harm. But I was a long way from being able to hit them that hard, and I wasn’t exactly swimming in time to wind up for a haymaker.

So I went to Borales and improvised, which for me nearly always meant chatting up strangers. I spent the next dozen hours as half a dozen different people—Lucky the stevedore (who quickly learned that zombies rather had that market cornered), Elem the collector of antiquities (who “discovered” a number of pieces of dwarf work, some of them authentic), Jhim the beggar (who nearly got killed), Artan the gentleman adventurer (who could have pleasantly spent a good deal of gold in the theater district), Fank the odd jobs man (who got offers nearly as strange as Artan did), and, most productively, Othar the aspiring assassin. It turned out that Borales was full of opportunity if you were willing to make somebody phoenix food. Not that they’d mention the important jobs to some off-worlder with no real connections (not that I didn’t make up a few), but enough of the heavies were throwing coin around to make life -very- interesting for the folks who’d take it.

Better still, some of the same names kept cropping up. McKay was apparently hiring. Most of the muscle I talked to, even the ones who clearly worked for somebody else, pointed me to the dwarf, or directly to Upal Toth. A few other names came up, people who were looking for muscle, but folks were picking Toth’s horse to win. Most everybody who pointed me towards Toth warned me against signing on with some argus called Z’brzzt. So of course he was the one I tried to follow up with. This was easier said than done. I plied my charms with a will, but only managed to get one rung higher than his secretary. The lieutenant I chatted with (a thuul who looked like he could’ve been built right alongside Guido and Nunzio) was tight-lipped, but his his body language screamed wary interest. He wanted references, background, proof that I could get jobs done. I’m sure I tripped some of his alarms, but I walked out of his office with a follow-up appointment I had no intention of keeping. More importantly, I walked out of there pretty confident about the lay of the land in Borales. It was messy, but battle lines were forming. Fast.

When I went through the same rigamarole in Igneous, names were not so easy to get, and only Jhim managed to get them. Everything was as shook up as Vinnie had said, if not moreso. (I refrained from paying that particular worthy a visit.) Everybody was chattering about Aagren, and who might have done for him. Gero’s name never came up in those conversations, but it otherwise came up more often than I expected. There were others—lieutenants, mostly—who’d shown up dead, with holes blasted in their chests or the more usual stiletto in the eye. Some of the people on the sidelines had stories about an off-world vigilante with a grudge. Most of the insiders, though, they were looking up the ladder. Gero was angry, and his uncles were jumpy, and anybody who so much as whispered disloyalty was getting croaked. Everyone was paranoid. Everyone was toeing the line. And everybody in Igneous thought the trouble was part of some scheme from Borales. I wanted to know more, but lips got tight and I made myself scarce as soon as I realized just how pitched the climate was against outsiders.

Back in my own clothes and body language, I returned to Borales for a few drinks at the ‘Phile. I tipped well, avoided talking to other patrons, and bugged a few of the employees about Arbonne, and about Aagren. They were commendably discreet, and I ended up talking to the hostess once more. She wasn’t happy with it, but she answered a few more of my questions. This time I actually took notes. I found out some interesting things about where her girls (and boys) got their shoes, about the Borales real estate market, and about the latest in popular tunes. I made a few other stops, took a few more notes, then headed home to my boards and papers. It was time to start filling some of those gaps.

Because one way or another, there was a war brewing, and if I was serious about keeping innocents from getting caught up in it, I was going to have to come up with one hell of a story.