Downtown Druid

Book 2 Chapter 42: I'm Supposed to Count Things Now?

Dantes approached the young boy who stood guard outside of one of Mondego’s new warehouses. He was a mutt, with some clear dwarven and orcish ancestry given the near full beard and tusks despite his youthful features. When he saw him, he lifted a hand to his mouth as if to yell, but Dantes held a gold coin to his lips while shushing him. The boy’s eyes widened at the gold piece that glinted in the sunlight, and he nodded to him. Dantes flipped the coin to the boy who deftly caught it and went running, only barely having the sense to put the coin away before he did so to keep from being mugged on the way home.

Dantes stood at the entrance to the warehouse. ‘Warehouse’ was a generous distinction. The building looked to be what remained of an old fishery, but now it acted as one of the handful of new stash houses that Mondego had moved to since Dantes had sent Gavain at his largest one like a bullet from a gun. Inside he noted ten men, and four women working to unload a shipment of dust that they’d just offloaded from a Frasheid boat. They were armed with the standard array of thugish weaponry. They had clubs, knives, a few pistols, and one was concealing a wand in their boot.

Dantes cracked his neck and summoned his will, gathering a mixture of vermin with his mark. He lifted one of the hammers that Felix had given him, one that could break the anti-vermin enchantments completely, and gently tapped it against the invisible force which surrounded the building. He could feel a change in the air around the structure as he did so, and the hammer itself collapsed to dust. Felix had only been able to make around one of those per week, making them far more valuable than the keys, and on top of that they were single use. Still, Dantes wanted to show strength. There was no purpose in hoarding goods and never actually using what advantages he had. He knocked on the door and stepped to the side of it, drawing his pistol and aiming it as he did so.

He watched through the eyes of Jacopo who sat peering in through the far window, one of them approached the door cautiously with a heavy club wrapped in iron at his side. The man pushed the door open and leaned forward out of it when he realized that no one was standing there.

Dantes put the gun to the man’s temple, and pulled the trigger.

The man’s body crumbled, and in that same moment Dantes sent in his vermin through all the nooks and crannies in the building to assault those that remained. Pigeons flew in through a hole in the roof and pecked at eyes, rats clawed and bit at whoever they could reach, and roaches swarmed over all of them causing them to scream in fear.

One woman, wielding a pistol, managed to bring it up and aim it vaguely in Dantes’s direction as he approached, but he extended his wooden hand and knocked it away as she pulled the trigger, causing the shot to go wide. He then pulled his hand back, shaped it into a point, and extended it through her chest.

A half-Orc screamed out in rage and threw himself onto a pile of dust causing the air to be filled with a thick cloud of it. He then charged Dantes with a dagger in his hand.

Dantes was blinded, but his improved senses meant that he knew exactly where the man was. He drew his stiletto and crouched to the left, slicing at the man’s ankles and causing him to fall where the rats and roaches could better attack at his face.

The majority of the remaining men and women ran, and Dantes let them go. Killing them was a waste of favor, will, and energy. The last of them that tried to kill him, lunged at him with a dagger, but was stopped when Jacopo had a weed growing through the floorboards wrap around his leg and trip him. He then sent his cousins to feed on the man as he screamed.

“...that was three things.”

“What? I’m supposed to count things now?”

“Have you... have you not been measuring the gunpowder as we pour it?”

“Fuck no. Who gives a shit if the dwarves get shorted.”

“The dwarves. Our boss Finn. His boss Mondego.”

Dantes finished what he was doing and stood up just enough to stick one end of his makeshift fuse into the gunpowder. He took out Tel’s finger and lit the other end of it, then quickly scurried back up the wall as a roach before shifting to ratform and standing a couple alleyways further back down. He and Jacopo stood there for nearly a full minute.

Dantes looked at him. “Maybe they found-”

The explosion went off and the ground seemed to shake even as wooden debris, bones, and meat began to rain down all around them. When things settled Dantes stretched his mouth wide open in an attempt to clear the ringing from his ear and shook his head. Jacopo had instinctively dove into a deeper pocket.

Dantes stepped far enough out to see the building now in ruins. He smiled. Only a few more warehouses to go.