Chương 177: Cordyceps Forty-Two

I returned to hang out with the other boys, and discovered that they hadn't even noticed that I was missing. I didn't envy the job of anyone trying to investigate this whole situation, not when there were so many potential witnesses and half of them weren't paying attention to much at all. Then again, it was probably to my benefit that the people here weren't attentive to much. It would make covering my tracks that much easier. Plus...

I suspected that the nobility here weren't used to being questioned about anything. If a bully came up to one of them, would they even give the officer the time of day? These were, ostensibly, the rulers of this city. There was no way that they were willing to subject themselves to an inquiry. Hopefully that would be enough to muddle any pursuit. The poison I used was definitely mushroom-y, and I'd have to be careful moving forward.

Any future targets taken down with the same method would point in the same direction, and that was probably not something I could afford. The party continued on for a little while. The staff served a second course of deserts, this time mostly small pastries and warmer drinks to chase off the evening's growing chill. Some of the adults had clearly been drinking more than their fill of wine and were a bit on the tipsy side of things, but no more than I would have expected from a party of this size.

I could almost feel the news circulating. Shocked gasps, looks of incredulity, people looking around in momentary confusion before they realized that there was nothing they could do. The boys, of course, were aware that something had happened. They just didn't know what. And that, of course, lead to rampant speculation.

"It's a conspiracy," one of them said.

"Obviously Milo's dad is in on it, so's the count, and now they've discovered that someone leaked their plans. There's probably a spy in the house."

"That doesn't go against my idea that they're covering up a murder," another boy said. He was one of the older boys here, a third year at the Academy, which made him all of fifteen with the confidence of a twenty-five year old. Milo nodded sagely.

"I bet I know what it is," he said.

"Oh?" I asked.

"They called Lord Gills up, so it has to be that someone's sick. Maybe Baron Erspell walked through the poor quarters of the city and picked up some sort of weird peasant sickness."

"That's silly," the fifteen-year old said.

"That's not how sicknesses work." I was a little annoyed about the insinuation that just a walk through the slums I'd been born in could make someone sick, but it was probably not entirely inaccurate. Sickness was rampant. Mostly because the very people in this mansion didn't care enough to push for better sanitation and more medical help, but that didn't prevent it from being true.

"Maybe he got one of those gentleman's curses from visiting a lady friend," one of the boys said with a devilish grin. The others 'ewwed' appropriately at the insinuation.

"Maybe everyone's right?" Andrew asked.

"How?" Milo asked.

"Okay, so it goes like this... there's the conspiracy between the lords, and because they want to keep things hush-hush, Baron Erspell visits the slums himself. Of course, their contact would have to be a lady of the night. He spends the evening with her, probably yesterday. Then he comes to this party with his wife, of course. But it turns out that the lady was a counterspy the whole time, and she poisoned him, so he came here, and dies while having a smoke with Milo's dad."

"That could work," one of the boys said. I shrugged.

"Sure, that's as likely as anything,""You don't sound convinced," Milo said.

"I'm not convinced that anyone has died," I said. The rumours continued even as the news itself spread. A few people took it poorly, and I noticed more than one lady run out of the ballroom in tears. Then a group of them came to encircle one older lady in particular. She was led off, clearly confused and dreading something, to a room off to one side. The door was closed, but we could still hear her anguished screams.

"Does that sound like the scream of someone that discovered their husband cheating, or dead?" one of the boys asked. It earned him a smack in the side.

"Don't be an ass. Lady Erspell just got some bad news." The boy huffed.

"Still funny," he muttered. I noticed a few families starting to pack it in to leave. The boys left, one after the other, and once enough people started to leave, it started something of an exodus. The party was officially over, even if no one had declared it. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do from that point on. My original plan had been scamper away, but I wasn't so sure now.

I sure wasn't going to spend the night here though. Then I noticed Count Coller coming downstairs and meeting his wife. They spoke a bit, then she nodded and left the area. He headed towards the front exit and from where I stood I was just barely able to see him grabbing his coat from a hook. He was waylaid by a few others who started to chat him up, however.

"I need to use the washroom," I said before leaving the others. It was incredible how versatile that excuse was. Slipping out of the back, I quickly jogged around the mansion and towards the stables. A number of carriages were being tended to already. Some had occupants, but most were just being checked over by their drivers. The parking situation was somewhat complicated in a way that I wasn't used to. Not only were carriages a lot larger than cars, they had horses.

It wasn't like they could just turn the carriage off and leave it there. The horses needed to be cared for and watched over for however many hours the event lasted for. A few staff members seemed to be hard at work keeping everything orderly, but they were so busy that a boy in the Academy uniform slipping past them wasn't worth their notice. Finding Count Coller's carriage was easy enough, it had his family's coat of arms slapped onto the side. And, of course, the carriage was guarded.

I moved past it as if looking for something else, but there was no mistaking the two hobgoblins working on the carriage as anything other than trouble. Maybe if there was only one, I might have been able to deal with them, but two? Cursing my luck, I moved around the back of the stable, then started walking down the driveway towards the exit. The situation wasn't ideal, but I did know exactly where my target was at the moment, and where he'd be for the next few minutes. Which was an opportunity, of sorts.

I just had to come up with some way to exploit that opportunity. What did I have on me? A few powdered mushrooms and... not much else. Maybe that was enough? The moment I was out of the gate, I looked both ways. To the right led deeper into the part of the city with more mansions. The left led back towards the city proper. Coller was... old money. One of the oldest noble families in City Nineteen, actually. So it stood to reason that his family's estate would be closer to the city itself.

It was the best guess I had. I took off at a slow jog, then stopped and slowed down some ways ahead. The road up here was paved and well-maintained, even though it had little traffic except for nobles travelling about. It also failed to branch out. There was one road in, and one road out of this section of the city, and I could vaguely recall some of the sections at the base of the hills having older fortifications.

There was a section with three sharp turns that allowed a carriage to travel down the cliffs and into the rest of the city. I watched a carriage come around the first corner. The carriage had to hug the cliff's wall to make as wide a turn as possible. There were some bushes there, clinging to the cliff face. I grinned. I had something of a plan, then.

Running up to the wall while there weren't any carriages around, I scampered up the sharp incline, cursing as I collected gravel in my shoes and scuffed my knees against the rocks. Still, I managed to climb up and behind one of those scraggly bushes. When the next carriage passed, it was close enough that I could almost reach out and touch it. Perfect. Now all I needed to do was wait for Count Coller to pass on by. That took a long while.

I sat in the growing dark, deeply aware of the chill of night creeping in while I clung onto a small jar filled with mushroom powder. It was just a tiny amount, enough to maybe spray into a person's face in an emergency. I had no idea if this would work. The clatter of hooves further up the road had me peeking out from behind the bush again, and I found myself tensing with anticipation as I recognized the carriage and the hobgoblins riding it. They came closer and closer, riding along at a peaceful pace.

The only light around now was the carriage light planted next to the drivers.

"Slow down for this bit," one of them said.

"I know what I'm doing," the other growled back. I bit my tongue and opened the jar. Then the horses were right in front of me and my arm shot out. I sprayed a heavy dusting of mushroom spores into the air ahead of the horses. And then they were past, and so was the carriage. I leaned back against the stone wall and waited. It was done in any case, whether I succeeded or not. A whinny from further down the road, followed by some shouts from the driver had my heart leaping up in my chest.

I scampered down the hillside and ran to the edge of the road, only stopping when I hit the guardrail so that I could see what was going on. One of the two horses pulling the carriage was going nuts, its head swaying while it whinied and panicked. The drivers tugged at its reins, but it was too late. It had taken a nice sniff of some of my most potent hallucinogens. The horse swerved into the rocky wall, smashing itself into it, then the carriage. The hobgoblin drivers tugged it the other way. It went that way.

I gasped as the entire carriage charged off to one side, smashed into the guardrail, then rumbled right through it. The horses and drivers screamed as they were sent flying off the cliff. I pulled back. Either the count had made it, or he didn't. In either case, I needed to get back to somewhere warm.

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