Alice finds the appeal of fight pits baffling. Displaying yourself, your fighting style and strategies, to a crowd of strangers when it’s not necessary to survival – well. It’s an interesting choice, especially in a city like this. She dutifully places Zazzy’s bet for him and takes Merla’s bags, watches Oriros split from the fighters to slip through the crowds, notes which doors the others are led to.
Which leaves her alone with time to spare. Alice drifts away, letting her feet decide the direction while her mind turns to her new escaping trick, the guinea pig comment she made to Flash and Merla, the drawing of the priest. Alice loved drawing, as a child, but Mother always said it was an unattractive talent for a lady of her standing, would tear up her artwork and force an embroidery needle into her small hand. Good little girls listened to her parents, and Alice was always a good little girl, so that was the end of her artistic endeavors.
Stairs lead downward, and at the bottom, a rectangular room holds two rows of stalls and tables. The offerings vary, but all share some degree of unsavory, illegal, or stolen. A black market, Alice’s mind supplies, and she feels like she’s seen one before, tries to chase that feeling to a memory…nothing. Swallowing her frustration with practiced ease, Alice begins to browse. Cursed items, monster parts, pretty sparklies, plants and potions, vials of mysterious substances.
There are two doorways, one with a beaded covering on the far right of the wall in front of her and another in the wall to her left with guards posted at either side. Alice pauses at a table filled with flowers and bottles as one of the guards glances at her, then turns to say something to his partner.
“Hello, dearie! How may Granny Mae help you today?” The old woman behind the table, looking far too kindly for a place like this, grins down at Alice.
Alice smiles her china-doll smile, her Company smile created by Mother. “Hello, I’m shopping for my sister.”
“Well, dearie, I must tell you that although these flowers look pretty, I use them to make rather…unsavory things.”
A glance behind Granny Mae shows the guards still at their stations. “Oh? And what do you make? My sister has uses for all sorts of things.”
Granny Mae chuckles. “I primarily make poisons, all-natural and plant-based! I have slow-acting ones,” she points to the left side of the table, then to the center. “These ones here are faster, for when you don’t have time to enact a lengthy plan. And these,” she picks up a bottle from the right and gives it a little swirl, the acidic green contents creating a small whirlpool. “Are nerve agents and the like, for causing paralysis, temporary blindness, that sort of thing. Applications where death isn’t the primary goal.”
Alice nods appreciatively, glancing once more at the guards. There’s only one now, and he’s a new face. “A very nice collection.”
“Thank you, dearie, brew all of them myself, I do. I like to experiment. In fact, I’ve been working on something new.” Granny Mae stoops beneath the table momentarily, straightening with a tiny vial in her hand. It holds the barest amount of a rich blue liquid. “It’s a truth serum, and I’ve almost perfected it. This batch makes you get, hm, more answers than questions you ask.”
Alice wants it. Oh, how she wants it. “That’s impressive. Are you willing to part with that sample?”
“Well, now, that depends on what you have to trade. I have no use for coin, you see.”
Merla’s bags seem to double in weight, the siren call of unknown goodies, very tradeable goodies. She could take something. Merla wouldn’t notice, at least not immediately, and would she even make the connection? No, Merla is her sister, and those are her things. It wouldn’t be right. Sister, yes. Surely she’d want her to have something nice, something useful. No, stop it, shut up shut up shut up.
Alice clasps her hands together to resist temptation and once more smiles her Company smile. “I’ll have to think on it. I thank you for your time, Granny Mae.”
“Of course, dearie, you take care of yourself now.”
Alice forces herself to walk away, truth-serum-less, toward the beaded doorway. There’s one last stall, a little removed from the others, and as she nears, her nose informs the reason for the separation. Formaldehyde and fresh blood form a cloying aroma that stings her airways but helpfully clears her head. Passing the stall, she sees it’s full of human body parts. Interesting. Perhaps a good place to once more ask someone about the riot that “didn’t” happen.
The hanging beads clink softly behind Alice as she steps through. The lighting is warm and low, casting a glow on…naked people. Oh. Alice feels the blush staining her cheeks as she studiously avoids eye contact and trains her gaze further into the room. At the back is what appears to be an auction block, people in chains being handled by guards similar to those at the other door. Alice notes the setup, ensuring she can adequately describe it to the party later, then retreats back through the beads.
She pauses a moment to let the blush fade, listening to snippets of the fight above over the earring. Someone’s fighting someone, that’s all she can tell. Blush now controlled, she drifts toward the human body parts on display.
There’s a lizardfolk attending the table, so she catches their eye and smiles the china-doll smile. “Good evening.”
The lizardfolk eyes her quizzically. “Good…evening?”
“I am working on behalf of a very important client, and she has sent me to ask some questions before committing to a purchase.”
The lizardfolk stares for a moment before pointing to a hung sign that reads ‘Absolutely no questions.’
Alice frowns, then heaves a sigh. “Oh, well. I suppose my client will have to look elsewhere. She’s very particular, you see, and absolutely won’t commit until she knows what she wants to know.”
“What questions?” The lizard folk’s sibilance nearly catches Alice off-guard, unfamiliar with their kind.
“Just one, really. In regards to freshness. Do you keep your stock fresh?”
“Oh, yes. Very fresh.”
“That’s good, that’s very good. When was your last shipment?” Alice smiles ruefully and gives a slightly helpless shrug. “I’m sorry, I’m not questioning you. You know how ‘they’ can be.”
The lizardfolk nods in understanding. “My last delivery was…about two hours ago.”
“Excellent, excellent. And what about yesterday? Did you get much in?”
“Yes, a few things. Not much.”
“You’ve been exceedingly helpful. I will report back to my client. Thank you very much for indulging me, but clients will do what they do.”
“Oh, yes. I know.”
So, the riot truly ceased to exist for all but a handful of people. Simply erased. Alice shivers slightly as she makes her way back in the direction of the guarded doorway. The guard on watch still has yet to be joined by a counterpart and is terrible at his job. He’s at the table next to Granny Mae’s, flirting with the pretty young man selling innocuous-looking tchotchkes. Alice goes through the doorway and finds herself in an office-type room. Two people are handling some paperwork at desks, thoroughly absorbed in their tasks. Though they’re performing administrative duties, they’re dressed and armed familiarly. The room is well-furnished, utilitarian yet welcoming, with a few poisonous potted plants placed here and there.
Alice ducks into a nook created by a large, shiny-leafed plant atop a pedestal and takes a moment to craft herself some Assassin’s Guild credentials, as she would bet good gold on this being their epicenter and would prefer not to have to fight her way out if she’s discovered. Credentials pocketed, she straightens and steps into the the office proper. There’s a corridor to the right and she walks that way, pausing to study a bulletin board on the wall. It looks to be a contract list, containing five people. The first two are commoners, agitators and class activists. Their lives are worth two hundred gold each, with their hands being the item necessary for payment. Next is an upper-class citizen with little information regarding the nature of the contract. His head is required, worth five hundred.
The last two make Alice still, her mind focus. She stares at the sketch of QuickDraw, noting the accuracy in the clothes and his weapons. They forgot his nose piercing, she thinks absently as her eyes go to the contract details. Twenty thousand gold upon receipt of his head. A small scrap of paper is pinned beneath, cramped handwriting stating an interested third party will give an additional twenty thousand for his shell. One thing is certain, Alice will have to make sure he doesn’t fight as he plans to.
And then, there she is. The fifth contract is for one Alice Creelhand, approximately three feet tall with black hair and violet eyes. Thirty thousand gold for her head. There’s no sketch, thankfully, but Alice casually readjusts the head covering she grabbed on their way out of the theater. She’s worth less dead than married, she realizes with amusement. The contract looks older than the others, though there’s no date to be certain. However, she doesn’t think she was in this city long enough the first time, when she was tracing Merla, to obtain a contract on her life. And she certainly didn’t use her full name. She’d learned enough by then to be more discreet.
With a mental shrug, Alice continues down the corridor. She’s faced worse with less experience, and she has…people now. People who seem to tolerate her and probably wouldn’t want her head cut off by an assassin. The corridor opens into a tavern-like room, with three large, round tables taking up most of the floor space. On either side are private rooms, and the bar claims the back wall, a man behind it doing barkeep-type things. Directly in front of Alice are two wingback armchairs with a low table between them. Like the office, the furnishings are utilitarian but welcoming. The round tables are full of assassins drinking, chatting, and cheating at cards. The two private rooms on the left are taken, and the ones closest to Alice on the right stand empty.
She doesn’t pause as she takes all this in, passing the tables casually toward the bar. The barkeep has an air of danger and power and wears a strange cowl-like thing. Alice slots him at the top of her mental “Assassin’s Guild hierarchy” list. She nods at him, keeping her “violet” eyes firmly on the bar, and makes the universal gesture for a drink. The decision to play mute is unconscious, but it feels right. The barkeep, or guild master, person – Alice decides to call him Guildy in her head – pours her a drink, and she nods in thanks.
The wingback chairs are perfectly situated for pretending to drink while assassin-watching, and Alice does just that. The card players seem to be playing “who can cheat the best” instead of a serious tourney. One of them, a greying man, lithe and well-kempt, looks familiar, and Alice wills her mind to offer her context. Ah, yes. He was at the cathedral. She studies him carefully, noting his features, build, and weapons she can see. Alice watches Guildy, too. Watches him unlock a door behind the bar, go in, come back out, carefully relock it. He does this several times through her people-watching, and Alice is helplessly curious.
It’s a tricky one, even for a sneak like herself. A room full of assassins, a locked door watched over by the guild master himself, a contract on her head. Half of her associates fighting for fun, some resting blocks away. As she weighs her chances, considers her options, Alice begins to feel…lucky. It’s not a native feeling, and it takes her a moment to identify it. A second more of hesitation, then she shrugs to herself and borrows a phrase from Flash: fuck it, we ball. What it means, exactly, she’s not sure. She assumes it’s a translated Draconic phrase, but it fits this instance.
Guildy turns to the door again, and Alice abandons her drink, slinking toward and behind the bar as he disappears into the room. She slips behind some crates and stills, listening to his footsteps go further into the room before stopping. There’s some rummaging, the sound of glass softly clinking, and then his footsteps returning to the open door. Alice is entirely still, a small statue crouched between crates. Guildy reaches the door, she can see him from her hiding place, and he stops. Looks at the door for a long moment – Alice swears she didn’t touch it; she’s better than that – and finally, he continues back into the bar. The door closes behind him, and the click of the lock is the last sound in the settling silence.
Alice waits, counting to two hundred in her head to ensure he didn’t forget anything, then straightens up. The room is dark; there’s no light source without the door open, so she fumbles for a long match and her magnifying glass and makes a tiny, focused light. It’s a storeroom, common-or-garden. Crates of glass jugs, barrels of various drink types, spare glasses, a neatly folded stack of cleaning rags. And yet…Alice feels a draft. The tavern proper is warm, bordering hot, and this lazy swirl of air feels cool, welcome on her slightly flushed face. Perhaps not as common-or-garden as it looks.
The magnifying glass and match combo makes for an awkward light source, so it takes her longer than she’d like to notice the gap between the wall and floor to her left. Closer inspection reveals an uneven stone offset to the right. Alice puts away her magnifying glass and, by the pinprick of light from the dying match, stretches up on tiptoes to press the stone in. With a barely discernible click, the wall swings inward, revealing a room half the size of the one she’s standing in and a staircase to the right leading down.
Lighting another match, Alice enters the new room and quietly closes the wall behind her. She’s in another store room, holding gold and various valuables, but she finds herself surprisingly uninterested in the small hoard. Instead, she turns to the stairway, which gently spirals into black depths. It’s utterly quiet, her pulse drumming loudly, making a grating tune with her breaths. The sense of luck is still within her, and Alice is entirely disconcerted. She is not a lucky person. Still, she’s a curious one. Snuffing the match to avoid announcing her presence, Alice begins down the stairs with one hand on the outer wall to guide her.
Down, down, down she goes, trying to tread lightly while keeping her footing in the darkness. It grows cold and damp as she descends, the air holding a faint trace of wet clay and earth. Finally, light gradually chases away the darkness, and she moves faster down the stairs. They end unceremoniously in a cave-like room lit by luminescent mushrooms and glowing gems. The space is filled with a concentrated force of that lucky feeling Alice has within her, a formidable pressure pulsing through the room. She quickly sweeps the room for people, creatures, and other exits, warily eyeing the mushrooms a beat longer than most would think they warrant.
Satisfied she’s alone and not in immediate danger, Alice focuses on the lone thing occupying the space. In the center of the room is a large statue of a naked woman kneeling on a plinth. Her arms are shackled above and away from her head, which is turned slightly away and down. Her face holds an expression of such sorrow and pain it’s discomforting to look at for more than a moment. The left side of her chest is no less difficult to see. A large, ragged chunk of the stone has been removed, and a flesh heart hangs from the cavity. It’s attached to the statue, flesh and stone woven together in an unnatural display of magic.
“Hello, Lady,” Alice says after she digests what she’s seeing. She gives an elegant curtsy, the Company curtsy Mother taught her, though she knows it looks silly without skirts. “My name is Alice. Although you may already know that since you brought me here.”
Yes. Lady Luck, Mistress of Fortune, as she seems to be known as in this city. The same Mistress of Fortune Alice’s sister said had died. Some approximation of her is still here, in this room under the Assassin’s Guild. Chained, shackled by what looks like a more powerful form of the nullifying cuffs Alice so recently escaped from. The statue towers over Alice’s small frame, the Lady’s manacled wrists hanging many feet above her head.
She frowns, then bites her lip. “I do apologize, Lady, but I need to look at those cuffs closer. I ran into similar ones just the other day. Ah, the thing is, well, I apologize in advance and truly mean no disrespect. In fact, this will probably be the most respectful…scramble…the world has ever seen.”
Shutting her mouth with an audible click, Alice squares her shoulders and nimbly – respectfully – climbs up the right side of the statue, walking up the arm as far as she can toward the cuff. It’s thick, heavily runed, and bears no hinges, as if the cuff had been forged around the wrist instead of fastened. Alice presses a finger to it and, from her own experience wearing similar, gets the sense that it’s not actively doing anything. Odd and interesting. She scrambles down onto the Lady’s thigh and observes the heart. It’s large, larger than a human’s, and as she watches, it sluggishly beats. From this vantage point, Alice can see that the stone surrounding it looks spongier than stone usually is.
Perched on the goddess’s thigh, Alice tries to think. She takes a moment to tune into the earring and tries to hear a snippet of something to tell her who’s fighting. She has QuickDraw and his contract to worry about, too. Something is said about Flash, so she tunes back out and refocuses on the immediate problem. Alice has never been a woman of faith. She understands that gods and goddesses exist, has had interactions with enough of them, yet has never felt connection or need enough to pray. But she cannot, will not, leave even a remnant of a goddess to exist in this way.
Alice reaches out hesitantly and gently touches the heart with a fingertip. A wave of luck, concentrated even beyond what the cave holds, washes through her. She retracts her hand and reaches for her cloak, plucking one of the snowy owl feathers. The feather detaches easily and quivers slightly, eager to be used.
“How do I remove the shackles?”
A pause, then, “free the ensnared to remove the shackles.”
Suppressing a sigh, Alice plucks another. “How do I free the ensnared?”
Another pause, slightly longer. “Destroy the heart to free the soul.”
Oh. Not the answer she hoped for. Alice vehemently does not like this answer, this solution. She doesn’t mind killing, no. That qualm was stripped forcefully from her long ago. And she has never been a woman of faith. But this still gives her pause. Alice looks again at the statue’s face, beautiful, yes, but filled with such profound misery. Looks to the shackles and the sluggishly beating heart. Closes her eyes and feels the luckiness that is not her own, which found her upstairs. The cloak has never once misled her; has saved her life time and again.
Alice takes a deep breath and opens her eyes. “I’m sorry, Lady. I hope this is the right thing to do.”
She smoothly draws her dagger and plunges it into the heart. There’s a pause before a shockwave of pressure rushes out and then sucks back in. The impression of many cords being cut from above in the tavern, further still in the fight pit, and distantly from around the city. Alice stands on a goddess statue’s thigh, her dagger up to the hilt in a heart. Golden ichor flows from it, covering her hand and trailing down her arm. It stays there for a moment, then sinks into her skin. The statue begins to shake, vibrating forcefully, and Alice withdraws her dagger and leaps clear, watching as the stone crumbles, the heart withers. The manacles drop, empty, to the floor.
Alice stares, stunned. She stares at her hand, where the ichor sank in. She stares at the rubble. She stares blankly at her left hand, now holding a gold coin stamped with a four-leaf clover and a skull. She feels…something within her. It’s foreign for one breath, two, three, and then it feels at home; it belongs to her and is her. It’s cocooning her soul. She’s sure of it, though wouldn’t be able to explain it if asked.
Alice is still staring when the cuffs stir and fly toward her, shackling her as they had the Mistress of Fortune. She can feel them starting to drain the new bit of her, the gift of power from the ichor. Sadly for the cuffs and their masters, Alice doesn’t want to be restrained. Almost as soon as they’re on her, they’re again falling to the ground; this time, their runes are burned out and rendered inert.
A distant banging and muffled cursing snaps Alice out of her stupor. Faint footsteps are reaching the stairs, and she’d bet good money it’s Guildy coming to find out what in hells is going on. There’s a crevice in the wall of the cave that’s halfling-sized, and Alice begins to move. A chunk of statue meets her foot – clumsy, clumsy – and she trips, stumbles, falls with a bitten-off yelp. Quickly regaining her feet, Alice notices her new coin on the ground, skull-face up. She feels that new bit of her, the part surrounding her soul, gather and sour.
“Ah, shit! What -” Guildy’s voice comes from above. It cuts off abruptly and is replaced by thunk, thunk, thunk, thud.
He’s deposited at the bottom of the stairs in an ungainly, unconscious heap. Alice picks up her coin and stares at it. Looks again to the bruised master assassin, then back at the coin. Very carefully, the coin goes into an inner pocket. She walks over to the assassin and contemplates him for a moment. Alice doesn’t know the full story and likely never will. What she does know is this man was fully aware of this room, was complicit in the imprisonment of a goddess’s soul – for she knows now, it was the Lady’s soul that remained here – and Alice is not a forgiving person.
Her dagger leaves a bloody smile upon his throat, and she takes his daggers and cowl as small recompense before heading back up the stairs. The cowl possesses some form of night vision, so the journey up takes a fraction of the time. Alice enters the small storeroom and walks back into the larger one, closing the false wall behind her.
“Hey, Bruce, are you okay in there?” Someone calls from the tavern.
Alice crosses her fingers and makes the most manly-sounding grunt she can manage, rustling around crates and clinking together some bottles as if searching for a particular vintage. The ambient sounds of the tavern slowly resume, and Alice sighs. She sneaks as quickly as she can from behind the bar, then saunters through the tables, out past the office, and once more into the black market.
“Hey Alice,” Flash says through the earring. “Can you come get me?”
“Yeah, Flash. Give me a minute.”
Alice stills for a moment, centering herself, before starting toward the exit, her mind turning to the next problem of keeping QuickDraw alive.