“I can see the fire in everyone’s eyes,” I replied after a moment, trying my best not to show the turmoil I was experiencing within. “They’ll do their part, and I’m sure that by the end of the night, Dorian will regret ever being born in Eberia.”
“We can only hope,” Isabella agreed as she turned towards the rest of the room, watching the guild members begin sorting themselves out as they formed into their assigned teams or sat nervously at the tables, waiting to find out what would be needed from them. “I’m praying that the price we pay to put an end to him won’t be too high.”
Higher than we’ve already paid? I thought to myself as I bit down on my tongue, not wanting to start another argument with Isabella.
“Here comes Bart.” Quinn pointed into the milling mass of people as the older thief gently navigated his way towards us. “Ah, he found Goner.”
“Oh, good,” Isabella replied as she turned to look out into the crowd as Goner and Bart came into view. “I’ll feel better when we have him somewhere safer, in case things go wrong tonight.”
“Isabella!” the small boy cried out as he sprang forward to hug Isabella around the waist. “Bart’s told me what happened and what you’re going to have to do tonight.”
“Then you understand why we’re sending you and Bart to be with Quinn’s friend for the next little while, right?” Isabella asked as she looked down at Goner with a gleam in her eye. “We need to make sure that you’re safe.”
“I understand,” Goner said as he pulled away from Isabella and rubbed his face on his sleeve. “I promise I’ll be good while I’m there.”
“I know you will be, Goner,” Isabella told the boy softly before nodding her head towards the older thief. “Be sure to listen to Bart if anything happens when you’re out today; there’s a reason why he’s survived this long.”
“I will,” Goner acknowledged. “I’ll do my best to learn everything while I’m staying with William and pick up all the magic he knows. Once I come back, I’ll be ready to help and do anything, you’ll see.”
“I believe you, Goner,” Isabella said with a laugh as she tousled the boy’s hair and turned her gaze towards Bart. “You’re going straight to Quinn’s friend’s place?”
“Yeah,” Bart answered while waving a hand at the mass behind him. “We have a group heading through the Old District anyway; the two of us are going to move with them and make sure we’re covered the whole way.”
“Good,” Isabella said, then turned her glance towards Quinn. “You’re sure William won’t mind both Bart and Goner arriving out of the blue, will he?”
“Should be fine,” Quinn replied confidently. “I gave Bart a note explaining everything to William and that I would check up on them as soon as I had a chance.”
“We’ll manage, Bella,” the grey-haired thief groused. “If we’re in dire straits, I’ll just jimmy one of the locks in the apartments next door to William’s place and hold out for the night. According to Quinn, they’re all empty anyway.”
“Alright.” Isabella stated with a nod then motioned towards the room. “You two be safe out there tonight. I need to start making my rounds and getting everyone else moving.”
“Take care of yourself, girl,” Bart said in a fatherly manner before moving to embrace Isabella. “Do what you need to do to protect our home, but don’t lose yourself in the process.”
“I’ll try,” Isabella promised in a small voice as she locked eyes with Quinn and me. “I have Lazarus, Quinn, and Molly to lean on.”
“Then I know you’ll be fine,” the elderly thief replied with a smile as he pulled away from Isabella and gave both Quinn and me a departing wave. “We’ll see you when this is all over.”
“Bye, Isabella!” Goner sniffed, giving all of us a wave as Bart turned to leave. “Bye, Lazarus and Quinn! Say bye to Molly for me!”
“Bye, Goner,” I called after the boy, feeling a lump rise in my throat as I tried to imagine what the boy must be feeling, silently hoping that he made it to William’s place safely.
“He’ll be safe with William,” Quinn said as he glanced between both Isabella and me, seeing that we shared a similar expression.
“Yeah,” I exhaled with a sigh as I watched Isabella turn around to look at us.
“You two should double check on Molly and see if she’s put together a plan of attack for you three,” Isabela suggested, her eyes dropping downwards to the clothes that we were wearing. “And see if you can finish patching your armor.”
She looked at us meaningfully. “I have a feeling that we’re going to need every edge we can get tonight.”
W
“Ugh! This thing is fucking useless!” Molly’s voice shouted from behind the door at the same instant Quinn and I entered the guild’s secure information room, having crossed the length of the guild’s headquarters.
Stepping through the door ahead of me, Quinn flinched as something struck him in the face, causing him to throw his hands up in front of him in reflex. “Hey, ow! What the hell was that for?!”
“Ah! Quinn! I’m so sorry!” I heard Molly’s chair scrape against the floor as she rushed across the room towards Quinn, who was now clutching his face. “I was just frustrated and…”
“You throw a mean book,” Quinn grumbled nasally as he stooped down to pick up a small book lying on the ground.
“Hey, that’s Cayden’s book,” I said, noticing the familiar cover as the two of us moved further into the room and closed the door behind us. “Why did you throw it across the room?”
“Because I can’t figure out if it’s useful or not!” Molly hissed in frustration as she motioned for the three of us to sit down in front of the paper-laden desk I remembered from my visit with Isabella. “Having had a chance to look at Cayden’s ledger in more detail, I am thoroughly creeped out just holding the stupid thing. He’s shipped countless body parts, blood, organs, bones, you name it, all across the city for years and years on end.
“Whatever you did to him was too kind, Lazarus,” Molly fixed me with a haunted look. “I know this is all just a game, but Cayden was evil, horrifically so. Given just how real this world is, I can barely wrap my head around what I’ve read in his book. Part of me just wants to curl up in a corner and cry, while the other part of me is just so angry I’m afraid I’m going to hurt myself.”
“Shit,” Quinn cursed as he looked down at the book, then tossed it onto my lap. “I think you should hold on to this, Lazarus, at least until you burn it.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said grimly as I looked back up at Molly. “Is there anything useful at all in it? When I paged through, I saw it mentioned a few safe houses and dead drops.”
“It did,” Molly acknowledged with a nod, and pointed to a large map of the city that had been tacked onto a corkboard behind us. “I marked those safe houses on the map…along with every other safe house that the guild knows about belonging to any of the gangs affiliated with The Damned. I was looking to see if there was any pattern that I could spot from the deliveries to see if there was any one place we could prioritize over the other, but I haven’t been able to figure anything out.”
“Who has been ordering all this…stuff from Cayden?” Quinn asked, a distasteful expression crossing his face. “I know necromancy isn’t illegal in Eberia, but it’s not something that is exactly flaunted, either.”
“To be honest…Cayden has been supplying nearly everyone in Eberia with something,” Molly answered with a disgusted look on her face. “Our guild mostly used him for corpse disposal, but we’ve been known to place the odd order for something more…exotic. The same goes for nearly every other Thieves Guild. I found a few notes in the ledger that I think track back to each of the Noble Houses, too, and that includes the Mages Guild, since they’re practically run by House Denarius.”
“I figured that the Mages Guild would have ties,” Quinn commented with a shrug. “I’ve seen firsthand of what some of the labs look like in the Arcaneum; it doesn’t surprise me
in the slightest.”
“So, what does this all mean for our next steps?” I asked, motioning towards the map on the wall. “Isabella is letting us pick and choose our own plan of attack once the war kicks off, though I’m sure she’s expecting us to be in the thick of it.”
“That’s what I figured too, and I have a few places in mind where we can start,” Molly said as she stood up from her seat behind the desk and waved us over to the map posted on the wall. “Though I have no real idea of what we’re going to find there.”
Pointing to a red tack on the map deep within the New District with several other blue and black tacks clustering around it, Molly began to explain her labeling system as she laid out her plan.
“This red tack is the banquet hall where the noble heirs were killed earlier today, and the blue tacks represent gangs affiliated with The Damned.” Molly pointed to each of the tacks in turn as she spoke. “And the black ones are hideouts or safe houses that directly belong to The Damned. As you can see…Dorian and his group have a pretty dense following throughout the entire district.”
“No kidding,” I muttered in surprise as I looked over the map, counting well over three dozen blue tacks and nearly just as many black ones. “How the hell does he have so many followers? I had no idea that The Damned had this many members or gangs under their control!”
“They don’t,” Molly corrected with a shake of her head. “It only looks that way because they’ve chosen to have a distributed organizational structure across the entire district, rather than a handful of larger bases. All of these hideouts or bases likely only have a few members in each place, which is why I think we should start closest to the hall where the attacks took place.”
“The number of them will make it a hell of a lot harder to dig them out, since these are only the places we know about,” Quinn noted as he drew an imaginary circle around the red tack and counted the tacks within. “Just around the banquet hall there’s what…four, five, six different hideouts within two blocks of the place? Even if we have all four guilds working on this, it’s going to be nearly impossible to be sure we’ve cleared out all of them.”
“I don’t disagree,” Molly said with a nod. “Which is why I think we’re going to have to prioritize the guild bases over the gang bases. If we can remove Dorian from the picture, then the rest of the gangs will get back in line, and if they don’t, we can always pay them a follow-up visit.”
“That’s probably our best option,” I agreed while looking over the map and trying to picture the street-level view of where all the hideouts and bases would be. “Because they’re spread so far apart, any warning Dorian has sent out is going to take a long time to make it to each and every place. There’s a good chance we’ll be able to catch the majority of them with their guard down.”
“That would certainly help,” Quinn agreed as he pointed at a few different spots on the map. “If we can get a few people in position at a bunch of these streets here, we can possibly intercept any runners going out to warn Dorian or any of the other hideouts. Make it easier for us to hide what we’re doing.”
“Oh, that’s a good idea!” Molly exclaimed. “I’ll make sure to mention that to Isabella and see if we can get the other guilds to lend some manpower to help handle it.”
“Have you heard anything from Sawyer, by chance, and his search for Edith? He hasn’t messaged me at all,” I asked while mulling over Molly’s tacks on the map.
“Actually, I have,” Molly answered with another sigh. “And it’s not good news.”
“Why would it be?” Quinn mumbled as he looked up to the sky. “We’re already playing Ascend Online on hard mode; God forbid things get even the slightest bit easier.”
“What’s happened now?” I asked Molly hesitantly.
“Things are getting worse within the city—much worse, actually. Amberwain and Crawridge have…escalated matters between one another and are now enjoying a standoff in the middle of the street in the Old District,” Molly began to explain. “I don’t know who started it, but one of the Houses thought it’d be a good idea to pay a visit to the other House with a small army of armed guards, which forced the other House to reply in kind. Thankfully, the military caught wind of what was going on and managed to head both of them off with whatever soldiers they have left…but they’re all basically sitting in the street and shouting insults at one another now.”
“You have to be fucking kidding me,” I growled as I rubbed my head in disbelief.
“I wish I were,” Molly said sympathetically. “What’s left of the military is just barely keeping the two of them apart, but if either House decided to make a serious push for it, they’d overrun them easily. Sawyer’s also told me that the two Houses have started putting bounties on certain members of the rival Houses, and have pulled nearly every single Hunter in the city to stand by and watch things go to hell. Last I heard from him is that the Amberwain heir’s bounty was well over three hundred gold pieces—dead, mind you. They’re not interested in a live body.”
“So, Sawyer’s pretty much just looking for Edith on his own, then,” I guessed, seeing the frustrated expression on Molly’s face as she spoke.
“He and two others have managed to stick around so far,” Molly told me. “He wasn’t optimistic that they would hang around much longer, though.”
“Did you mention anything to him about what happened down in the sewers?” Quinn asked while pointing at the map. “Or anything about the coming war?”
“No.” Molly shook her head, the motion sending her long hair cascading from side to side. “He’s not an idiot, though, and knows that there’s something big going on.”
“We should probably fill him in about the bare bones of what’s happening and how to get in touch with us,” I said slowly as I stared at the map Molly had put together. “Once we start our attacks, things are going to start getting rough, and if we’re in combat, we’ll likely get locked out of messaging.”
“Isn’t that something we should run by Isabella?” Quinn asked, turning his head to look at Molly. “I get the impression she doesn’t trust Hunters and wouldn’t want any word of our plans getting out.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t see a ton of people lining up to help us,” I answered as I shot a glance towards Molly. “You’re organizing all of this, Molly. What do you think?”
“I think Sawyer should be in the loop, if only a little bit,” Molly replied after a short pause to gather her thoughts. “But we should also let Isabella know; the last thing we need right now is to start doing things behind her back. You weren’t exactly easy on her back at the sewer hub, and I can tell there’s still tension between the two of you.”
“I was angry—no, I’m still angry,” I corrected myself as I spoke. “She barely even batted an eye when Stroud and Smiling Jade admitted to working behind her back with Edith and Ransom, just because of us. She should have stood her ground and told both of the Thief Lords to go straight to hell.”
“Did you ever stop to think that’s what she had you do?” Molly looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “As a Thief Lord, she needs to work with both Stroud and Smiling Jade in a professional capacity and act in the best interest of our guild, even if she wanted to claw both of their eyes out.”
“What do you mean?” I cocked my head at my girlfriend, not quite having expected the response I’d just received.
“You called Stroud, the Thief Lord of the most vicious guild in Eberia, a ‘fucking idiot’ to his face and had him effectively apologize in front of everyone,” Molly told me, holding a single finger up high. “Then a few seconds later, when the two of them offered to pay for Fairfax’s death and you exploded at them, they flinched. Isabella couldn’t have done that, not if she wanted to maintain any sort of relationship with them long term.”
“What?” I looked at Molly in confusion. “Why does any of that matter? It didn’t change anything.”
“Oh boy,” Molly muttered under her breath as she shook her head
at me. “Thankfully you’re handsome…”
“Ha!” Quinn snorted in amusement at Molly’s comment.
“You really think causing two Thief Lords to flinch in fear didn’t change anything?” Molly asked me rhetorically. “If anything, it made them increase whatever they planned to give us, just to make sure Isabella wouldn’t feel slighted and to reassure themselves that she could still control you.”
“Why the hell would they be afraid of me?” I questioned as I glared daggers at Quinn. “They didn’t even know me before today, only by reputation, if anything.”
“You leaped straight into the Gnasher’s mouth and killed it from the inside, Lazarus,” Molly shot back at me. “Sure, if it hadn’t worked out, you would have respawned and it would have been fine, but if any of them had tried it and failed, that would have been it, they’d have been dead forever. You showed them the very thing that they fear about Adventurers.”
“Our immortality,” I stated, realizing what Molly was getting at. “We don’t care if we live or die, because we know that we’ll always have another chance.”
“Exactly,” Molly acknowledged. “They’re afraid that if we really wanted to, we would keep coming after them, no matter how many times they killed us. We would only need to get lucky once and they’d be gone forever.”
“I never thought about it from their perspective,” I said thoughtfully as I realized that Molly was completely right. “From their point of view, Adventurers must be…terrifying.”
There was a moment of silence as both Molly and Quinn looked at me expectantly.
“I think I owe Isabella an apology,” I admitted, feeling a weight shift on my heart.
Hell to Pay (Ascend Online Book 2) Page 21
