Downtown Druid

Dantes landed as a pigeon deep in Gatemen territory at the southwest gate and walked along the cobblestone and concrete paths caked in mud from the day's travelers, and their mounts, entering the city. There was still a bit of sun in the sky, but it would be evening soon. He rolled his neck a bit and heard a few cracks as he did so. The pigeon form was still new, and sometimes the transition out of it left him feeling a bit achy. He walked openly through the middle of the street. This wasn’t his territory, but he still received a few respectful nods and heard some hushed whispers as he passed through.

It didn’t take him too long to reach Niklas’s base of operations, a massive warehouse. It didn’t have a name, it wasn’t a tavern or a brothel like most of their kind liked to work out of, though you could get booze or a whore if you were so inclined. You could find almost anything there in fact. The Gatemen’s base was more of a large open market than anything else. A chunk of the goods they’d smuggled in, or extorted, or just plain stole could be purchased there. Legal, but hard to obtain goods from inside the city. Illegal goods from outside the city. People more enmeshed in the darker side of Rendhold, which counted for most of it, had their own sources for these things, but this market was for the common man.

The market was busy, with long lines at the different Gatemen all hocking their own goods. This was where a lot of them made the majority of their money. Dantes noted that the prices on everything were higher than usual, likely due to the lower supply coming in. That would keep Niklas and his men in a tidy profit for now, but if the supply problem continued then people would likely find other black market sellers or, gods forbid, find what they needed legally.

Dantes reached the back of the warehouse where there was a small construction of wood built against the far wall. There were a half dozen guards there who stood as he approached.

“I’m Dantes,” he said to the first one. “My man Jayk set up a meeting.”

The guards exchanged glances. One of them, a dwarf, stepped toward Dantes with a smirk. “No guards of your own? No insisting on meeting at a neutral location? You’re new at this aren’t you.”

Dantes smiled. “Not new, just not concerned.”

The dwarf opened his mouth to say something else smarmy, but was cut off by a sharp nod of a different guard positioned behind Dantes. He saw the nod because he was watching his back through the eyes of a sleepy pigeon with a nest in the rafters above.

The dwarf frowned, but went to the small building and knocked twice. The door opened and he gestured for Dantes to go inside.

The room was simple, with a small table, a few chairs, a bed at one end, some bottles of wine scattered around, and a few ledgers. Niklas, the littlest of the Fingers, balanced in a chair as he pushed off the table in front of himself with both legs. He had his hands folded across his chest, the many gold rings on them glinting in the candlelight. His hair was loose, and fell in brown and gray strands down his shoulders, and his pale gray eyes met Dantes’s gold ones as he entered the room.

“Dantes, welcome. Have a seat, have a drink.” He brought his legs down from the table and his chair landed back on its front legs with a thud. He popped the cork on a wine bottle with a small knife and poured some of it into a glass. Dantes didn’t smell anything foul about it with his enhanced senses, and Niklas took a sip straight from the bottle, so he had a sip of it and sat in the chair across from him.

“Niklas. You seem to be doing well out there tonight.”

He smiled. “Oh, you know, we try,” he said with a falsely humble air. “So, what can I do for you?”

“I wanted to talk to you about what you say I owe you. I have finished paying up and completing the deals Mondego had with all of the other fingers, but somehow every time we catch up with what was owed to you, it seems like it's revealed that we owe more than was originally agreed to.”

“Huh, that’s so strange. Well, Mondego and I had a closer relationship than any of the other Fingers did. My smuggling and his own often meant we had to collaborate to move certain goods, just as you have been since you removed him. It makes sense that what you inherited from him would be more than what was owed to the others.”

Dantes recognized when someone was talking in circles, he did it himself all the time, but he was a hypocrite and didn’t much enjoy being on the other side of it.

“I don’t owe you anything,” he said, his tone shifting.

Niklas smirked and he put his legs back on the ground so he could lean forward. “You’ll owe whatever I want you to owe. The moment you pay up, I’ll come up with some other deal Mondego made. It’s not like men like us have a paper trail. No, I think you’ll be paying up to me until all this ‘plague’ business is over, and for a long time after that.”

“Niklas. I’m going to do you a service that I don’t often offer. Say that everything is settled, and I owe you nothing and you won’t make an enemy of me.”

Niklas put a finger to his chin as if he was thinking, then he made a face as if he had an idea. “Fuck you. You’re just another upstart. I’m not Mondego, or some random magister. I’m one of the fingers. You summon your rats, or stab me with that wooden hand of yours, or make a fucking flower wrap itself around my throat and you’ll make an enemy of all of the other Fingers. Rendhold itself will come down upon you with its full might. Don’t make an enemy of you?” he laughed. “Don’t make an enemy of me.”

Dantes sighed. He’d always known that Niklas was going to be a problem. At first he’d been friendly enough, but that seemed to be more related to how much he’d hated Mondego more than how much he’d liked Dantes. Even beyond the extortion, Dantes had other reasons to be wary of him. Like his men meeting with people wearing gold masks, to deliver or receive mysterious packages. He hadn’t fully untangled that yet, but since Niklas had gone this far, that no longer really mattered. Dantes stood up from the table. “I suppose we don’t have anything else to talk about then.”

Niklas nodded. “No we don’t. I’ll be sending my boys to your club next week to collect the next payment. Maybe I’ll come too and take some time with the girls you have there. On credit of course.”

Dantes stood up and walked out of the building without another word. He said nothing to the guards, or to anyone else he passed as he left the Gatemen’s market. Once outside he found an alley and shifted into a pigeon. He flew back to the warehouse, and helped the pigeon whose eyes he’d been looking through warm her eggs in her nest while he waited. Once night had fully fallen, Niklas left his little building and walked toward the market with his guards in tow.

Dantes left the nest and flew toward the building. He crawled inside as a roach and then shifted back to himself, keeping watch on the building with the various vermin around the warehouse to make sure he’d have a heads up if he was going to be interrupted. He began to move carefully to each bottle of wine. He would lift them, turn the tip of his wooden index finger into a fine and hollow point, push it through the cork, and push a few drops of black liquid he had stored in his arm into it. Once he was done he flexed his finger, reshaping it, and being sure that the poison wouldn’t touch any of his flesh. He’d started the poison garden with Clay and Hema a while ago, but this was the first time he’d used any of what they’d made. Hema had a great aptitude for the work, but Clay had been uncomfortable with it.

With every bottle poisoned, Dantes slipped out of the building and flew back up to wait. After a few hours Niklas returned from his rounds. About an hour after that one of his men entered his office to check on it. After that, the panic started.

Dantes slipped easily out of the warehouse through a patchy roof, and stopped.

There was a figure wearing a fine suit whose head seemed to be made of black smoke with only two sharp scars of white that one could consider eyes giving any indication of expression. Those white scars were looking directly at Dantes, even though he was in pigeon form.

He changed back into himself, and looked at Argenta’s pet demon Gren.

“It was me. You can let her know.”

Those white eyes seemed to smile, and the demon disappeared.