Adventures of the Toadstools
14
JUL/21
Wink was poring over a large stack of yellowed papers in front of her when a slight scratching noise from the hallway outside the room drew her attention. She cocked her head slightly, and then smiled. “I heard you. Nice try, though.”
“Dammit, Stihl, I warned you, she’s got ears like a bat” Niki answered as he ducked around the corner and walked into the room. Wink’s smile brightened at the sight of him, all garbed his finest aristocratic vestments instead of the dark leathers and cloak he had taken to wearing more often these days and looking every bit the handsome young lordling that he was.
Two of the older urchin boys walked in behind him, pointedly ignoring the reams of papers in front of Wink, clearly still uncomfortable with such blatantly obvious heresy. Hobbins and Stihl had been conscripted into the Toadstools in the past couple weeks; Wink had known of each of them by their reputation from her time picking pockets out on the streets. The boys were dressed in tattered rags and looked quite out of place when standing next to a young noble, but their outfits were designed to look wholly inconspicuous out on the streets above. Stihl was a tall, gangly boy of about thirteen years of age who had an almost preternatural ability to read crowds and spot trouble, making him incredibly useful as a lookout. The other boy, Hobbins, was almost sixteen years of age, rather short but nearly as wide as he was tall, with large, flat fists that seemed to be made out of granite. He was the first real “chopper” in their little gang, packing a punch that earned him the nickname “Two Thump Hobb”, since he rarely needed more than two to finish the job.
Wink flashed them all a warm but weary smile, glad to see that they had returned in one piece. “How’d it go?” she asked, “were you able to sell anything?” Wink had hoarded quite a treasure trove during the past month, but finding buyers for these items had proven to be quite the ordeal. Haggarth, the old fence that Toad had introduced her to all those years ago, had long since been caught and publicly executed, and finding new markets to unload metal and magic had proven to be much more difficult than Wink had imagined.
They had managed to sell off the Whithall silver and some of the iron, which had garnered them a sizeable fortune. But, in trying to sell off the magic items and the strange coin she had lifted off of that asshole in the purple armor, they had been met with a lot of suspicion and unwanted attention. Wink had narrowly escaped with her life when she tried to sell that shiny coin to a fat merchant who dressed in fine silks and reeked of spice and greed – he had grabbed her by the collar immediately upon seeing the piece and had promptly called for his guards. He lost a few fat fingers for his audacity, but Wink had only narrowly avoided losing her head in the chase that followed.
That was when they came up with the idea of using Niki, dressed as a wealthy lordling garbed in his House Gardiward finery, to sell the items. A noble would draw much less attention when trying to sell items of value, and only the most foolhardy or rapacious merchant would dare openly strike out against an established House in the open. To further protect themselves, Wink and Niki would populate the area outside of the meeting place with beggars and urchins like Stihl who were tasked with looking out for ambushes and tails. And, if they spotted a tail that couldn’t be shaken, that’s where kids like Hobbins would step in and…dissuade them.
“I managed to sell that golden robe and may have found a buyer for that bracer, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up about that one,” Niki replied, tossing a leather sack laden with clinking ceramic onto the table. Niki then fished a fistful of coins from a smaller pouch on his hip and handed them to the two boys. “Get some food and drink for you and the others. You all did very well today.”
Hobbins and Stihl straightened up and smiled broadly at the complement. Stihl even went as far as to salute Niki before leaving, a gesture that Niki returned with solemn reverence.
After the two of them had left, Niki continued, “Stihl saw the vendor dispatch several shadows after us after I left her. Good ones, too. Maybe too good for a simple merchant to have in their employ.”
“Templars?” Wink asked, her expression darkening.
“No….maybe. Definitely trained. Possibly clergy,” Niki answered as he moved in beside Wink and withdrew a dusty bottle from a cloth sack beneath the table and began prying into the wax seal with his thin dagger. “We will need to let things quiet down a bit before we try to sell the other items, I fear.”
He read her discouraged expression and continued, “A few weeks more. Maybe a month. Two, tops. If we draw too much attention, then all of this will have been for nothing.” He withdrew two clay cups from the sack and poured a glass of the deep violet liquid into each.
“You’re right, of course. Better safe than sorry,” Wink responded in a tired voice, before clinking her glass off of his and taking a long swig of wine. “Wow, that’s sweet!” she exclaimed delightedly.
“The best the Whithall cellars have to offer,” Niki smiled back at her. Then he looked down at the stack of papers laid out in front of her, and his expression softened. “Any luck?”
Wink sighed in exasperation. “No, nothing yet. There’s just…so…much…here.” Pakku’s man had gotten them these piles of ledgers regarding the various business practices, contracts, and holdings of House Whithall, and Niki had gone through them for days, and found that most of them were really tedious and dry: inventories of trade goods and property transfers and economic transactions, all documented in meticulous detail. Niki had been teaching Wink to read some in the past weeks and she had been picking it up rather quickly, but even so, all of the squiggles and lines made little to no sense to her.
Niki had shown her the precise arrangement of letters that she was looking for, writing them out on a separate sheet of paper that she kept in front of her as she worked, and she had spent the past four days scouring through the reams of yellow paper looking for those two words; so far, to no avail. She wasn’t even sure if those words would even be listed among the Whithall holdings any longer, as they may have been scratched out long ago.
They both sat in silence for a minute and finished their cups of wine, before Niki emptied the bottle, refilling both of their cups to the rim. “Easy come, easy go,” he said, ruefully, flashing Wink a sad, purple-lined smile, and setting the empty bottle on the floor beneath the table.
After a long moment Wink spoke up. “I did another reading. I saw Arnia and Ixen this time.”
Niki almost choked on his drink in surprise. “W…Are they okay?”
Wink had a faraway look in her eye, “I…I….couldn’t tell. It looked like they were in trouble. The scale was really blurry, as if it was moving…weirdly. Like the story was being drawn and redrawn. I almost felt like it was happening in real time, like right then.”
“What did it show?” Niki wasn’t sure how this snakereading stuff worked, or even whether he wholeheartedly believed in what the scales purported to show, but this was the first news that they had gotten about their former companions since the two had left Raam on a mission to rescue a princess.
“I couldn’t really tell,” Wink replied. “First it was dark, but I could tell it was them somehow. Then that purple shit seemed to get them in trouble…”
“Tell me he is dead,” Niki interrupted, his voice as cold as night.
“It looked like he might well be headed that way, but that handsome one saved him somehow…he did something with that weird staff. Then there w…”
“Handsome one?” Niki interrupted again, his face flushing slightly. “Oh, the one that seems to be allergic to his shirt?” He flashed Wink a mischievous grin.
Wink laughed lightly. “Yes, that one. The shirtless warrior….so dreamy,” she said, feigning a swoon as she spoke.
Niki lightly punched her shoulder in mock anger. “Get your wits about you. Back to the story, girl!”
Wink flashed him a bright smile and their mood lightened for a brief moment. They both basked in the warmth of troubles briefly forgotten, but the dark pall abruptly returned as Wink continued on with her story. “There were these red eyes, always there. Glowing, watching. It reminded me of that creepy Savior of Raam guy for some reason.” She shuddered at the memory and continued, “Those eyes always stayed there watching, in the center of the scale, and I found I could not watch anything else. I was just briefly aware of Ixen and Arnia and Pakku’s friends, and they were all fighting, but those eyes never moved.” Wink trembled, and downed the rest of her cup in a prolonged gulp. “I had to force myself to look away, so I couldn’t see what the scales were trying to tell me about our friends.” She turned and looked at Niki, with newborn tears birthing in her green eyes. “I felt like those eyes could see me…like they were looking at me directly.”
Niki pulled her in and hugged her close for a long moment and whispered softly, “It’s okay. It sounds like they were okay when you left them. Ixen and Arnia can handle themselves. Arnia is the best blademaster I know, and Ixen has survived a long time with a king’s ransom on his head. They’ll pull through. And those other three…” He trailed off and held her for a long moment more, before finally withdrawing another bottle of wine from the sack at his feet. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s get drunk and forget all about that for now.” Wink smiled in agreement and held her cup out…
After Wink had finally gone to bed, Niki returned to the desk and lit a beeswax candle with the tip of his finger. Once the flickering light had established itself, Niki began looking over the large stack of papers that he and Wink had been poring over for the past many days. Fiduciary Holdings of Lord and Lady Whithall – Raam: Odalisques, Bondsmen, and Debtors. 25th Regnum 1224.23 to 26th Regnum 1228.39. “By the Five, could this be any dryer?” Niki wondered to himself, wiping the wine weariness from his eyes as he began running his finger down the page, scouring the yellowed sheets for those two specific words.
He skimmed the documents for almost half a bell before he finally found them: Tarran Eskew. Niki blinked in astonishment, and reread the words to make sure that he had read them correctly. He had pretty well convinced himself that this was a fool’s errand, yet here he was. “Well, Five be damned; he yet lives!” Niki said softly, barely able to contain his trembling excitement. He had never met the boy, but he had heard Wink’s stories about him and the two of them were currently working to make his grand vision a reality with their Toadstools gang. The document continued, debtor, bond given in payment for larceny. Mutilo. Unfit for housework, confined to mines. Status: Adequate; able-bodied. Term of obligation: Ad mortem.
Niki leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, wishing that he had more wine to work through this current revelation. “He yet lives, what are the odds of that?” he wondered to himself with a sense of surprise and worry. Was this good news or bad? He knew what Wink would want to do, but wondered if they were actually ready to do it? It would be far easier to try to buy Toad’s freedom, but Whithall was notoriously punitive to those who had the audacity to steal from them, which pretty well took that option off of the table. That left trying to break him out of the mines or doing something completely insane like orchestrating a trade for a member of the Whithall family or something. Both options were bad, and likely to be expensive, dangerous, and possibly downright suicidal.
Niki’s head began to pound as he thought through his options, disliking what he found there. “Dammit Toad,” he said to himself, picking the dying candle up off of the table as he stood and began the unsteady trek towards his bedchamber. “Why’d you have to go and still be alive?”