Critical Failures V Read online

  “I’m so fucking sorry!” said Tim. “I didn’t realize there was a goddamn line of you waiting outside the door. Griffon gumbo was a lot easier going in than coming out, okay?” He looked at Katherine. “Why didn’t you mention this ‘secret room’ before?”

  Katherine shrugged. “Nobody else was waiting to use the bathroom.”

  “Jesus, Kat. I meant as a way of getting rid of the body.”

  “I didn’t know we were brainstorming.”

  Tim uncorked the bottle he was holding and took a drink. “That’s a much safer plan. We’ll have to do a little cleaning, but it should give us plenty of time to –”

  “Fuck!” said Tanner.

  “Hey! You keep your dirty little dick away from me and my sister, hear?”

  The room suddenly got a lot brighter. Katherine shielded her eyes. “Did somebody pull up the shades? Wait, is it morning already?”

  “Shit!” cried Tim. “Everybody get on the floor!”

  Katherine noticed flames reaching from the floor to the ceiling. “Oh hey, the room’s on fire. Thank god. I thought I’d blacked out at the bar.”

  Tim tugged on her jeans. “Get down here!”

  Katherine joined Tim and Tanner on the floor. She glance back and forth between them. “What are we doing?”

  “Marine crawl to the front door.”

  Tanner shook his head. “No good. It’s more on fire than anywhere else.”

  Tim frowned. “That makes sense. I concentrated most of my effort there.”

  “Why would you concentrate most of your effort on our only way out?”

  “I wasn’t planning on lighting this shit up until we were outside. I was going to toss in a torch after we’d left, and I wanted to make sure it got a good start. How the hell did it already start anyway?”

  Tanner jerked his head back. “It fanned out from the hearth. Some liquor must have seeped in and caught an ember.”

  “That’s some high-octane shit,” said Katherine. “Did you pack any of that in our bags?”

  Tim nodded. “Try not to catch on fire.”

  Tanner cleared his throat. “You mentioned something about a secret room?”

  Katherine started crawling to the back of the tavern, which was also on fire, but less so than the front. “It’s behind one of these sections of wall.”

  “This one here,” sad Tanner, staring up at smoke seeping out through a crack near the ceiling. Grabbing a non-burning section of the right side of the panel, he slid it aside to reveal a wooden staircase leading down into darkness. The air was musty and smelled faintly of sewage, but at least it was relatively free of smoke. “Ladies first?”

  Katherine and Butterbean led the way down the stairs. The darkness subsided after the curve of the stairs revealed the secret room, which had a glowing stone hanging from the ceiling.

  Tim sat in a corner and pulled out a bottle he’d salvaged from behind the bar. “So we hole up here until the fire dies down, then make a break for it?”

  Tanner shook his head as he examined the walls. “Bad idea. This room will only remain a secret for as long as it takes for the rest of the building to burn away. We’re not hiding. We’re escaping.”

  “Through the sewer?”

  “Yes.”

  “The dire rat infested sewer?”

  Tanner removed his cloak and started folding it. “I’m not any more excited about it than you are. It’ll be next to impossible to keep this from getting ruined.”

  “Who gives a shit about your cloak?” asked Tim.

  “It’s a nice cloak,” said Katherine. “It looks good on you.”

  Tanner smiled at Katherine. “Thank you. It’s a little flashier than what I’d normally wear, but it was worth taking Murkwort for everything he had on him. Greedy old wizard would have given me his undergarments as well if I’d pressed him a little more.” He removed a fancy leather scroll tube, a jewel-hilted dagger, two heavily-laden coin pouches, and a few more innocuous items out of his bag before carefully stuffing his cloak into the bottom.

  “Who’s Murkwort?” asked Tim. “Where did you get all this shit?”

  “He’s one of my connections in town. I like him because he doesn’t ask questions, and he likes me because I’m usually in a hurry to dump my stolen loot. He thinks he’s taking advantage of me, but I recognize it for what it is. The cost of doing business in the industry I’m in.”

  “And what industry is that?” asked Katherine.

  “Thieving.”

  Katherine shrugged. “I guess it’s got more potential than fried chicken.”

  “If you know what you’re doing. The only reason the industry remains so robust is because too many would-be master thieves fall into the same traps time and time again.”

  “What traps?” asked Katherine. Being fugitives, she thought it a good idea to take whatever kind of wisdom anyone could offer. She hoped Tim was paying attention.

  “The most common are greed and a lack of self-awareness as to how skilled a thief you are. It’s better to steal a single pie to keep you going another day than it is to get caught trying to steal the king’s crown.”

  “It’s probably not so easy to unload a king’s crown anyway,” said Katherine.

  “You make an excellent point, and one which many an amateur thief would have done well to know earlier in their short-lived careers.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Keep things moving. Do you know how most thieves get caught?”

  “They talk too much?” asked Tim. Katherine was glad he was paying attention, even if it was just to be a dick.

  Tanner smiled at Tim. “In a manner of speaking.” He picked up the ornate dagger. “Take this dagger.”

  Tim’s eyes lit up with sudden interest. “Okay.”

  “As an example.”

  Tim’s interest turned back to his bottle. “Oh.”

  Tanner shifted his attention to Katherine. “As you can see, the craftsmanship is exquisite, the jewels are authentic, and...” He pulled the dagger slightly out of its sheath, exposing an inch of blade, which glowed with faint purple light. “It’s imbued with magic.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Katherine. She glanced over at her brother. His attention was once again on the dagger.

  Tanner pushed the dagger back into the sheath, extinguishing the glow. “Now imagine you were to steal this from me.”

  “One step ahead of you, buddy,” said Tim.

  “Now let’s say you take it to a fence who specializes in exotic weaponry. How much would you demand for such a fine piece as this?”

  Katherine had no idea. She threw out a random figure. “Five hundred bucks?”

  Tanner’s smile faltered briefly. “In this world you claim to come from, you still barter in wildlife? How very quaint. But I was referring to a monetary value.”

  “It would depend on the magical enchantment,” said Tim.

  “Wrong.”

  “I give up,” said Katherine. “How much?”

  “Whatever you’re offered.”

  Tim pulled the bottle away from his lips long enough to say, “Fuck that.”

  “That’s just the kind of thinking that will land you in a cell for the rest of your life.”

  “So if some asshole offers me five silver pieces, I’m just supposed to bend over and take it?”

  “If that happens, you’ve failed long before then. You need to cultivate relationships, establish something akin to trust, prove yourself to be a discrete supplier of quality merchandise. A quality fence is one who knows and understands the risks we all go through, and who will offer you enough to keep you coming back. Too much haggling, too much back-and-forth between fences trying to squeeze every last copper piece out of the highest bidder, and you’ll only make yourself known as a pain in the ass whom nobody wants to deal with.”

  “So wait,” Katherine had another question bubbling to the top. “The cloak, the scrolls, the magic dagger. Did this Murkwort guy extend you a line of credi
t for the money you were going to swipe from Morty’s till?”

  “No,” said Tanner. “While I was out, I had no idea we would be engaging in murder, theft, and arson. This all came from whatever was in the sack I nicked off the gnome.”

  “Frank?” asked Tim.

  “I believe so.”

  “Good. Fuck that guy.”

  Katherine grew cold with apprehension. She took a bottle out of her bag to help combat some sobering thoughts which were now occurring to her. “What sack, exactly?”

  Tanner shrugged. “I don’t know what they were. Some kind of black gemstones with numbers etched into them. They glowed red in the center, so I figured they were magical. Murkwort deals in magical oddities, so I thought he might be interested.” He looked at Tim as if to continue his lesson. “Now maybe I might have been able to get a better offer somewhere else, but in the long run, nurturing my relationship with –”

  “Tanner,” said Katherine. “Please shut the fuck up for a minute.”

  The crackle of flames from above filled the brief silence that followed.

  “What’s wrong with you, Kat?” asked Tim. “You’re pale as shit. Did the Jesus blood wear off? Are you vamping out again?”

  “Black gemstones.”

  “That’s right. I was paying attention, just like you told me. It’s a lot easier when he’s talking about ripping Frank off.”

  “Can you think of nothing that Frank might have been carrying on his person that someone might mistake for black gemstones with numbers etched into them?”

  It took a minute, but Tim’s wandering gaze went to razor sharp focus.

  “Oh fuck.”

  Katherine nodded. “Uh huh.”

  “They’re going to think I...”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Tanner. “I can’t help but feel like I’m missing something. What seems to be the –”

  A crash sounded from above. Katherine hoped that it was just the building collapsing, but the heavy footsteps that followed snuffed that hope right out.

  “Morty? Morty!” It was Tony the Elf. He had a lot more anguish in his voice than Tim felt the death of an NPC warranted. “That little son of a bitch killed Morty!”

  “Why did he immediately jump to that conclusion?” asked Tim. “I mean, it’s true, but given the data that –”

  A dog started barking wildly, very close to the top of the staircase. Butterbean growled and barked back before Katherine could wrap her arm around his muzzle.

  “Shit!” said Katherine. “Do you think they heard –” Tim snatched the bottle out of her hand and ran up the stairs. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  Tim walked backwards down the stairs dumping the contents of his own bottle and Katherine’s in front of him. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m setting the stairs on fire.”

  “Is that your answer to everything?”

  When Tim reached the bottom, he hurled both bottles into the stairs and pulled a set of two bars out of his bag and started clanking them together. They produced sparks, but not enough to ignite the staircase.

  “There’s no time for that,” said Tanner, standing next to Tim, his hand on the lever which made the magical floor disappear, effectively “flushing” the secret room into the sewer. “We have to go now!”

  The din of flames and barking suddenly got louder. The secret door was sliding open.

  A rush of heat blew back Katherine’s hair as the sudden increase in the intensity of light nearly blinded her. The shifting air had brought the flames to the stairwell.

  Tim packed up his flint and steel. “That was easier than I’d expected.”

  “Tim?” a gruff piggy voice called down through the flames.

  “Cooper?” Tim called back.

  “They just want the dice back, man. Don’t make this worse than it is.”

  “I don’t have the dice!”

  “Bullshit! That black dude you left with grabbed Frank’s sack.” Cooper snorted at what he’d just said. Of course he did.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  That was interesting. Tim had moved from half truths to bald-faced lies.

  “Give us the dice, Tim,” Tony the Elf shouted through the crackle of flame and billowing smoke in the stairwell. “Or I’m going to... I’m going to kill Cooper.”

  Cooper snorted. “The fuck you are. Here, say that again with a mouthful of my balls. I’ll kick your scrawny elven – Oh, shit. Right. Sorry. Help me, Tim! He’s totally going to kill me. He gained, like, ten levels yesterday.”

  Katherine raised her eyebrows at Tim. “Can we go now?”

  Tim nodded, then looked up at Tanner. “Flush us.”

  Tanner pulled down hard on the lever, and a large rectangular area of the secret room’s floor faded until it disappeared entirely, revealing a stagnant river of liquid filth below. Katherine tried to brace herself for the smell, but it was overpowering.

  “I can’t go down there,” said Tim. His eyes were wide with terror.

  “What’s wrong now?” asked Katherine.

  “It’s a dire rat.”

  Katherine followed Tim’s gaze. There was indeed one of those giant-ass rats lurking in the river of sludge like a hungry crocodile waiting for some fresh meat. But considering all they’d been through, a big rat shouldn’t have been all that frightening.

  “Don’t be such a little bitch. It’s just a rat. Watch, I’ll take care of it.” She leaped down into the sludge, landing harder than she’d expected, but managing to keep her balance.

  Butterbean jumped in after her and growled at the rat.

  The rat ignored the wolf and hissed at Katherine threateningly, but she shut it up with a good solid kick to the face. While it was distracted, she grabbed it by the forelegs, slammed it against the wall, and lunged at its throat with her mouth, stopping just short of biting into it.

  “Jesus, I can’t believe I almost did that. That would have been so fucking gross.” Katherine shook the thought out of her mind, kept the rat pinned to the wall with one hand, and punched it in the head until its blood and brains started seeping down the ancient brickwork of the wall. It wasn’t hard, exactly, but more of a workout than she’d been prepared for. More shit-air invaded her lungs as she breathed heavily and thought about investing in a weapon.

  She dropped the rat carcass and smiled up at her little brother. “Better now?”

  Tim shook his head, then looked at his feet as clear water and broken pieces of dishes and cutlery flowed past them into the sewer.

  “Tim!” said Katherine. “They’re putting out the stair fire. You have to come down here right fucking now!”

  Tim continued shaking his head. “I just can’t. I’ve got a thing about rats. I – FUCK!”

  Tanner scooped up Tim and jumped down into the sewer. The ceiling materialized above them, blocking out all the light.

  “I can’t see! I can’t see! I can’t see!” Tim sounded like an accidentally tripped car alarm at a funeral. It was embarrassing.

  “Take it easy,” said Tanner. It was a gentler approach than the ‘slap the shit out of him until he calms the fuck down’ approach that Katherine had just been about to employ.

  Tim’s freak-out session was interrupted by a sound like a snapping tree branch, and a faint light radiated from a stick in Tanner’s hand.

  Tim reined in his shit and got his breathing under control.

  “Would you feel better if you held the tindertwig?”

  For once, Tim didn’t seem to mind being treated like a toddler. He nodded enthusiastically.

  “We need to move,” said Katherine. “They’ll be right behind us.”

  Tanner smiled at her. “I don’t think so.” He held up a rod that had been floating next to him in the sewage.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Tim, his voice just about back to normal.

  “It’s the lever that opens the floor.”

  Chapter 4

  Julian near
ly had to jog to keep up with Stacy’s pace. He had no idea where they were going, but she seemed to be in a hell of a hurry to get there.

  “Can you slow down a bit?” He determinedly avoided looking directly at several seedy-looking characters who were staring at them, then picked up to an actual jog in order to get close enough to whisper. “This doesn’t appear to be the friendliest of neighborhoods.”

  Stacy slowed down, but just barely. “If you’re hunting rats, you look in the sewer.”

  “Is that, like, some down home Mississippi wisdom?”

  “I don’t think so. I just made it up.”

  “It’s very clever.”

  Stacy stopped in her tracks and spun around to look at him. “Something on your mind, Julian?”

  Shit. She was onto his Diplomacy attempt, and she didn’t seem any less ready to stab someone.

  At the risk of making himself an even better candidate, Julian cleared his throat and said what he’d been meaning to say since they left the Whore’s Head.

  “I’m not going to help you kill Tim.”

  Stacy blew her hair out of her eyes and laughed mirthlessly. “You and I are that little shit stain’s best chance at surviving.”

  “But you told Frank –”

  “I’ve spent the past couple of days cozying up to Frank and talking shit about Tim. He thinks of me as part of his inner circle. You, on the other hand, he sees as too close to Tim.”

  “I barely knew him before we –”

  “It doesn’t matter. Consider it from Frank’s perspective. You guys all came in together. Frank’s in an us-vs.-them frame of mind right now, and you’re them. Do you remember how he insisted that Tony the Elf bring Cooper along? He needs one of you to help find Tim, and he needs one of us to keep you in line.”

  “That’s very insightful.”

  “I’m wise as shit.”

  “You seemed pretty pissed off too. At least as much as Frank.”

  “I am. Tim’s a selfish lowlife piece of shit, but that’s not justification for murder.”

  Julian breathed out a long sigh.

  “Have you soiled yourself, sir?” asked Ravenus, flapping down to perch atop Julian’s quarterstaff.

  “What? No!” Julian looked down at his crotch for a wet spot. There wasn’t one. “Why would you ask that?”