Chương 40: Ardark after Dark

Two men in hooded cloaks walked through the dark streets of Ardark. You might call them hoodlums. They whispered among themselves in the typical fashion of partners in crime.

"This sucks," the one in the gray cloak said.

"Why'd that demon and his crew in Lorelark gotta go and get themselves captured? Now we gotta fill up the shortfall."

"More work for us," the one in the brown cloak replied.

"I could use the overtime."

"You're getting overtime? They didn't tell me about overtime."

"Did you ask?"

"How's I'm supposed to know I gotta ask?" graycloak protested.

"We're both out here doing the same work, and you're getting paid more than me? How's that fair?"

"If you don't ask, you don't get," browncloak replied.

"The bosses are running a business. They aren't gonna volunteer to up their own costs."

"I gotta look into joining one of them unions," graycloak grumbled.

"Don't be talking like that or you're gonna wind up joining thems in the cages instead."

"This is the problem with the Ardark job market. It's an employer's market, so we gotta do every dirty job they tell us to do. I'd rather be selling pumpkins than kidnapping people, but there's a thousand people applying for every pumpkin job, and I've got bills to pay, ya know?"

"I know, friend. We're all in the same boat," browncloak said.

"All I'm saying is, I wouldn't be doing this if I had enough money to cover the bills. Maybe the city could give out a little coin to people looking for work so they can have them some standards, you know?"

"But who gets to set the standard?" browncloak pointed out.

"Maybe the city will turn around and say, 'There's this perfectly good kidnapping job, why aren't you taking it?'""They wouldn't do that," graycloak said, though he didn't sound so sure of it himself.

"And it isn't like they'd be advertising it as a kidnapping job either," browncloak continued.

"The two of us, we didn't have to do any kidnapping before tonight, did we? We were perfectly respectable vandals. Just a bit of smashing up stores and demolishing wagons of merchants who dared to cooperate with the watch. Good, cathartic exercise, and nobody got hurt."

"It's when they change the job description on you that's the problem," graycloak agreed.

"Like tonight's job. How are we supposed to tell who's a local and who isn't?"

"We'll just ask them," browncloak replied.

"They'll have no reason to lie."

"No way will anyone fall for that."

"Fall for what? We're just two harmless guys striking up a friendly conversation in the middle of the night." They continued on for a moment in silence. The streets were deserted save for the two of them. That wasn't the case a couple of blocks over, where the unlicensed alchemists liked to peddle their wares. But that's why they were over here instead of over there. When you were planning on committing a crime, it wasn't good to do it around potential witnesses—even ones who were commiting another crime.

"Did you hear that?" graycloak asked.

"Hear what?" They both stopped and listened.

"I don't hear anything," browncloak said.

"What if it's the watch?"

"You know the watch hardly does night patrols anymore. They haven't got the funding."

"If it isn't the watch, then it might be someone dangerous," graycloak whispered nervously.

"Like a mugger." Browncloak strained his ears.

"There's no one there."

"I don't want to get mugged," graycloak said.

"I've still got payments left on these boots."

"There's two of us and only one of them," browncloak said.

"How do you know there's only one of them?"

"Have you ever heard of muggers working in pairs?" browncloak pointed out.

"The unionized ones might." At that moment someone came into view. Judging by the person's height and build, they were probably a teenage girl or possibly a young woman. When she turned in their direction, her face remained obscure in the shadow of her hood. Taking the opportunity to strike up a friendly conversation and determine if she was an appropriate kidnapping target, graycloak called out, "Hey, you! You're not from around here, are ya?"

Amberlin's plan for catching the kidnappers in Ardark was the same as the one she'd used in Lorelark. Why mess with a formula that worked? That's why she'd bought new clothes and dressed up like a poor traveling merchant, since according to the watch captain, the kidnappers here were targeting visitors to the city. To help sell the ruse, she'd brought a couple of coins with her and jingled them in her cloak pocket as she walked.

Just to give the criminals an extra inducement to target her over some real, defenseless merchant. Early into her patrol, she passed by two cloaked men skulking in a dark alleyway. Pretending not to notice their eyes digging into her, she walked past while vigorously jingling her coins extra loud. When the alleyway men didn't pursue, she continued on her way. If they weren't kidnappers, then it wasn't any of her business what they were up to.

Going by what the watch captain had told her, with the cutbacks on night patrols, there had been a surge in illicit alchemy. Over the course of her walk, she must have come across four or five other groups like that. One of them even approached her, saying, "Are you looking for a happy potion? Arthritis medication? We've got it all!" She politely turned him down and he left her alone. But then out of a sense of curiosity, she turned back and asked him, "Do you do much business like this at night?

I mean, wouldn't you get more customers during the day?" The alleyway peddler shook his head.

"More patrols during the day. Plus the merchant cartel cracks down hard on unlicensed dealers."

"But you need to have some customers, right?"

"You'd be surprised," he replied.

"Lots of people with trouble sleeping needing a quick fix." She nodded.

"I had a neighbor named Mrs Whittaker. She complained about her arthritis keeping her up at night whenever the weather changed. She started saving a double-strength dose for those occasions." The peddler said nothing. Something else occurred to her.

"Once the bandits are cleared out of the Lorear Hills and Ardark gets its supply of alchemical ingredients again, won't that leave you out of a job?"

"The highwaymen have been good for business," the peddler agreed.

"But my cousin umpires at the equestrian club. She won't be getting much work until a shipment of replacement polo sticks comes in."

"What has she been doing in the meantime?"

"She's retrained as a hairdresser. Lots of real estate agents getting new haircuts because of the pomade shortage."

"I'm glad to hear some good has come from this," Amberlin said. It occurred to her that someone who spent his nights hanging out in a dark alleyway might have a clue to offer about the kidnappers, but before she could ask, the sound of battle rose in the distance. The peddler ducked back into the shadows while Amberlin broke into a run. She had to get there quick—it could be a kidnapping attempt. On the way she passed two men running in the opposite direction.

They'd removed their cloaks and were slapping at the spots where the fabric had caught on fire. There were two other men up ahead. She recognized the alleyway they were standing outside. It was the first one she'd passed earlier tonight, where she'd tried to tempt the two hooded men with her jingling coins. But the ones there now were a lot taller than the ones before. The original pair must have been the men who'd just fled after being set on fire.

She crept closer to listen in on what this new pair were saying to each other.

"Can you believe that?" one of them said.

"Since when do muggers work in pairs?"

"What is the world coming too?" the other one agreed.

"The way they were standing there, I thought they were selling illicit alchemy," the first one said.

"That's what I thought too," the second one replied.

"I was hoping to buy something to help me get to sleep tonight."

"Yeah, I was going to ask if they had something for my arthritis." Though she couldn't see their faces under the hoods, she recognized their voices. They were two of the bandits that had been captured after attacking her caravan on the way to Ardark. For them to be loose on the streets, they must have escaped from jail. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. She had to take them back into custody before they hurt more people.

While she'd muffled her footsteps to sneak out of the inn, she'd removed the spell afterward, as her goal tonight had been to attract attention, not avoid it. Unfortunately this allowed the two escaped bandits to hear her coming.

"Hey, I recognize you," the first one said.

"You're one of them caravan guards!" The second bandit was the one Amberlin had chased down during the ambush, and he was anxiously tugging at his companion's arm.

"Hey, let's get out of here." She pointed at them.

"Surrender now or run. It's your choice!" She was hoping they'd choose to run. It had been an exceedingly boring and cakeless day, and she needed some action to make up for it. The first bandit scowled.

"Who are you to threaten me, you twerp?"

"Wait!" But it was too late. The hot-headed bandit launched a fireball at her. Amberlin smoothly kicked it up into the sky.

"How—" But his companion was already pulling him along by the arm.

"Run. If you want to know what's good for you—run!" Something in his voice finally got through to the hot-headed bandit, and he joined his friend in a full-footed sprint away from her. Amberlin gleefully followed, looking forward to a nice, long chase.

Elsewhere in the city, two hoodlums were approaching a teenage girl.

"Hey, you!" the one in the gray cloak called out.

"You're not from around here, are ya?" Maelle panicked. She'd heard about this human tradition. Sometimes when the economy wasn't good, humans went around picking fights with other races and sometimes even each other. Since prices were high in Ardark at the moment, she took that as a sign of an ailing economy.

"Don't worry, sirs," she tried to assure them.

"I'm just passing through. You can think of me as a tourist." They looked at each other. One of them turned back to her and said, "We like tourists. Why don't you come a little closer and we can have a nice, friendly conversation?"

"No thanks, I'm not into conversation," she said, trying to backpedal. But the men were already closing in on her. Maelle turned tail and ran. She'd heard that human courts always sided with the locals, so she didn't want to risk hurting them in a fight. With the hoodlums in hot pursuit, she realized what she did wrong. While tourism could help with a lagging economy, high prices could be an indicator of a different sort of problem.

In those instances an influx of tourists could actually make the inflation problem worse, as it meant more money competing for the same products. Instead of a tourist, she should have claimed to be a traveling merchant. If only she'd paid more attention in her classes, she wouldn't be running away from trouble right now.

Back at the inn, Boots had escaped through the open window shortly after the Pet did. This time he didn't follow after her, as he'd already spent all afternoon doing that. He just wanted to explore this new city on his own for a while. Unlike the other city, this one had a lot of dogs and cats out and about. One of the perks of this small form was that he could get close without scaring them away.

The animals turned out to be friendlier than he expected, and he was able to follow a few of them around to some interesting spots. One of them, a pleasant little gray tabby, showed him a way up onto the rooftops. Once there they spent a long moment on the clay tiles watching the moon together. He was about to head back down when he caught a glimpse of something approaching from the sky. It was much too big to be a regular bird.

Curious, and also hoping it was something delicious, he continued to watch as it got closer. Once it got past the tall walls that enclosed the city, it dipped down between some buildings. Boots ran along the rooftops and made his way over to the spot where it had disappeared from sight. At that point he dropped to the ground and sniffed around for the scent. He picked it up right away—the most recent smells tended to be strongest. In it he detected traces of woodland.

His chest swelled in anticipation as he began the hunt.

Virdis was always careful never to land near the safe house. There was the ever-present risk of being seen in flight, so he always landed shortly after clearing the walls, unmanifested his wings, and walked the rest of the way, taking a long, circuitous path to throw off any potential tail. His search for Marina hadn't borne any fruit. But there was always a chance that the marshal had already made her way into the city and was waiting for midnight to visit the safe house.

He just had to be there when she showed up. Being a Draegorian agent posted in foreign lands, posing undercover as a lizardkin alchemist, he'd developed a sixth sense when it came to being tailed. At the moment the scales on his neck were pulling tight—a sign that his unconscious had picked up something being not quite right. He looked around, but all he saw was a harmless little house cat. He strained his ears but couldn't hear anything else.

He hastened his steps and listened closely for footsteps that were out of sync with his own. If someone was following him, there was always a chance they were skilled enough at magic to have [Muffle], so he turned down a couple of side streets and then quickly slipped into an alleyway and waited. Absolute silence. He sneaked a peek out of the alley and only saw the cat. That's odd. Had he been mixing his potions wrong, or was that cat staring at him?

It approached confidently, and as it got closer, he felt an intense uneasiness in his gut. He'd hunted powerful creatures before. Wyverns were great sport, though you had to be careful because the strongest ones had magic to rival an archmage. If you paid enough attention, you could tell which ones had more than just fire in their bellies because they exuded an aura of a sort. Not everyone was sensitive enough to pick up on this outside of combat, and Virdis certainly wasn't. Not consciously anyway.

But inside every dragon was a lizard brain, a holdover from a time before their ancestors took to the skies. A time when they were small and earthbound and prey. Right now that lizard brain was screaming at him to get far away from this cat. Maybe it was the potion sickness, but he gave into that instinct and ran. A Draegorian Guard should be ashamed to be running away from a cat. But so long as there was no one around to see, there was no one around to know.

He spared a glance back and saw the cat chasing after him. This only made him pump his legs faster. He was tempted to manifest wings and fly away. But he didn't know how many eyes had been drawn to the commotion he'd been making. He may have let out a few panicked cries on the way. He told himself that it must be a hallucination. That anyone woken up by the tapping of his talons on the paving stones and then stuck their neck out the window would see only him in flight from the wind.

He'd had some serious potion sickness before and knew how powerful the delusions could be. Like one time he drank a bad batch of home-brewed happy juice and spent three days in a panic over how the Bet-on-Wood banking system meant that one day he'd be unable to withdraw his money because the bank didn't have enough gold left in its vaults. In a panic he went ahead and withdrew all his savings and stowed it in the safest place he knew—in a secret mountain lair home guarded by a dragon (the monster kind).

Unfortunately when he next came to check on it, the dragon had been slain and all his gold was gone. Luckily he'd only been starting out as a young soldier, so he didn't have much to lose yet. Ever since then, he'd been meticulous about cleaning his cauldron between batches. The cat was still following him. But he knew what he had to do. He would run some laps of the city and get the potion sickness out of his system. With any luck, the cat would disappear before midnight.

Havlo flew silently and invisibly over the city. According to what he'd learned from the priestess, it seemed likely that the merchant cartel had a link to the kidnappers. He'd set out tonight to search for clues in their offices and warehouses. The first one he'd broken into hadn't turned up anything useful. But there were two more major warehouses within the city to try before he would have to turn his sights on a more difficult target. He was passing over the slums when he sensed a mana presence.

Normally that wouldn't be much of a concern, as there were plenty of mages in every city, but what troubled him was that this one was up there in the air with him. He'd been maintaining his own mana presence at silver level, but now he pushed it down as far as it could go to evade detection. Luckily the other person's mana suppression wasn't as effective as his own, so he'd been able to sense them from farther out than they could sense him.

But their mana suppression did make it hard to tell exactly what tier they were. While [Flight] was a Tier 9 spell, mages of that caliber were so rare that it was much more likely to be one of the races capable of natural flight. On the other hand, their [Invisibility] almost certainly came from a spell, which made them Tier 7 at least. This left no doubt that they were an archmage. There was a way to peer through their veil, but it would require him to cast a high-tier spell.

The flux would quickly alert them to his presence, and he wasn't prepared to reveal himself. He decided to follow them at a safe distance to see what business they had in the city. It was a sidetrack from his mission of finding the traffickers, but his gut told him that there could be a connection. For a third-circle demon to be involved, there was almost certainly an archmage somewhere above.

The mana presence flew toward a commercial district, where it dropped behind a row of shops, which were all built into one continuous building where each had their own separate internal space. He watched from the air when a door to the back of the building opened, nothing walked through, and the door closed again behind them. These sorts of shops usually had a store room at the back. From what he could tell from a distance, the door had a simple lock.

But a mage of this caliber could have layered hidden defenses within. Havlo landed out the front side and saw that the shop had its signboard removed. There was no way to see inside, and the front entrance was probably as well-trapped as the one at the back. If he wanted to see what was happening inside, the safest course of action was to wait until the archmage left. Then he could take his time to inspect everything. He was considering his options when he heard a faint cry for help.

If he didn't know better, he could have sworn it sounded like Maelle. Regardless of who it was, it was sounded urgent. He dashed over to the intersection. The road ahead of him curved around, but the cry had come from the road to the left. He looked down that way to see, with no uncertainty, a fearful Maelle being pursued by two hoodlums. They were coming toward the intersection, unaware that he was standing there under the effects of [Invisibility].

It would be a simple matter to stop the hoodlums in their tracks with [Force Wall] to allow Maelle to escape. But because the mysterious archmage was so close by, there was a chance they would sense his mana flux. He could reduce the flux and therefore the risk of being detected by allowing the hoodlums to get closer first. A shorter casting distance required less mana and leaked a lot less.

In fact Maelle had a safe enough lead that he could just wait for her to run past and put up the [Force Wall] right beside himself. He'd settled on that plan and was prepared to execute it when there came another cry—this time from behind him. He turned to see a lizardkin man running like his life depended on it. The man was clearly delirious, possibly the victim of unlicensed alchemy, and had spotted Maelle and the hoodlums, and was waving at them, shouting nonsensically, "Your Highness!

Don't come this way, Your Highness! There's a killer cat, Your Highness! Run for your life!" Clearly it would require a second [Force Wall] to keep this deranged individual away from Maelle. But then there came a commotion on the third street. Two men came running around the curve, and he recognized them as two of the highwaymen that had been bailed from the city jail—the ones he was meant to bring to Lord Wanderbilt.

Not wanting to waste this opportunity, he would need a perfectly timed [Earth Bind] on each to trap them without leaking too much flux. Four spells, all at Tiers 5 and 6, in quick succession, with precise placement and timing, tightly woven in order to minimize flux and remain hidden from the mysterious archmage behind him. It wouldn't be too difficult as long as he stayed focused.

But Maelle was staring through Havlo's invisible body at the dragonkin man, whom she seemed to have fixated on him as a potential source of aid. Instead of realizing how dangerous an intoxicated man suffering from hallucinations could be, she seemed to be running directly at him, shouting, "Help me. Help!" He could time his [Force Wall] to separate them, but she was running so desperately fast, colliding with a [Force Wall] like that could be dangerous.

He'd have to slow her down a bit with a well-controlled [Air Strike]. That's a fifth spell, requiring fine control to get it right without hurting her, but it's only Tier 2, very simple— A new person emerged from the curve behind the bailed bandits, an individual he would recognize anywhere, as they were the most important person in the world. Her strawberry-blonde hair radiated warmth under the [Light] hovering beside her. The two of them locked eyes. A quizzical look passed over her face.

She motioned for him to step out of the way. Havlo felt his plan crumbling away with the realization that Lady Amberlin could see him through his [Invisibility]. There would be no way to explain away his spellcasting. His mind raced trying to find a solution to all the problems closing in around him until a cat collided with his face.