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.

Dantes began to reload his pistol as he watched the chaos unfolding around him. He felt almost euphoric as he stood there, and part of him wanted to simply sit and enjoy the excellent work he’d already done. It took him a few moments to realize that the feeling was likely because of the overwhelming amount of dust in the air. It had been years since he had a hit and his sensitivity seemed to be almost what it was before he’d started using it. He couldn’t bring himself to scowl over the unexpected break in his sobriety, but he did manage to pull a piece of cloth from his coat to cover his smile and his nose to keep from breathing more in. He moved to where the dust was being processed. It was dozens of separated sacks with a set amount in each. He considered taking it to sell for a moment, but the time and manpower required made the prospect unappealing. Instead he found a massive tub that had been used to collect rainwater from the leaking roof, and tossed each sack into it. Just as he was finishing, a guard busted through the door with his sword held high. Dantes shifted into a rat, and left him to look over the scene with wide eyes and a look of confusion on his face. Then he slipped out, shifted back to himself in a nearby alley and moved on to the next target.

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As he walked through the docks, passing sailors, traders, and the occasional whore, he shifted his attention to the targets he’d given Pacha. He’d been busy, he’d already cleared both stash houses, and left his newer deputies to finish sorting them out. He was on the way to the whorehouse. Pacha had the look of a man on fire. His eyes were narrowed, searching for any movement, or reaction, his motions were taught and efficient, and he was taking long and invigorating breaths even as he moved forward. Dantes hadn’t expected him to hit so many targets so quickly, but found himself impressed. He would need to catch up. After all, Pacha had only two dozen men working with him at this point, Dantes had thousands.

He reached the second of the storehouses, finding that this one was filled with not dust, but gunpowder, guns, and even what looked like wands and potions. In this case, it really was a house, an old worn down piece of slum that they’d moved into to move goods, likely because it backed right up to a small piece of beach onto which a small-rowboat could land to deposit small amounts of cargo. This operation was smaller than the last one, but the commodities it processed were also very valuable and dangerous. There were only seven men inside, and most of them were divided into different rooms. Two sat in the main room, smoking weed and shooting the shit. Two were sorting the gunpowder upstairs, another two were cataloging the magical goods in a small room off the main hall, and one was watching the front door.

Of the two cataloging the magical items, one was wearing a tarnished triangle and circle pin marking him as a student or at least a former student of the academy. That made Dantes a bit more cautious. He could see an easy, short, but dangerous way to take the place out, and a gradual, long, but safe way to take care of it. He looked around, noting that while most of the docks tended to be crowded, this small house had a good five or so yards between it and everything else. It may have been the aftereffects of the dust he’d inhaled less than an hour previous, but he was feeling a bit giddy and leaning strongly toward the more dangerous and fast option. He shifted into a cockroach, and crawled up the wall until he reached the second story where the gunpowder was being sorted. The two men were working on a large pile of gunpowder in front of them, but had their backs turned to the opened barrel of it behind them. Dantes crawled until he was behind the barrel, and pulled a piece of rope from his pocket. He began to unravel it, pulling a long thread from one end of it. Listening for any signs that the two men were going to turn around.

“You think Terras would join me at the pub?”

“No Dun, I don’t think she would.”

“Why not? I’ve got a lot to offer a woman. I got good money coming in from this job, a place, connections.”

“Two reasons, Dun. One, she’s a half elf, they never go for guys with as much in the mix as you do. Secondly, you have the dick of a gnome and the personality of an Orc with worms.”

“...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.