Chapter Twenty-Four: Turf War

+++++Ezra+++++

Ezra still had dreams about Earth, and part of him wondered whether they'd fade in time. Would he forget what it was like to be in a world without magic or would that part of his life be forever emblazoned upon his soul? In his old life, Ezra had rarely remembered his dreams but, since arriving in Medias, he’d dreamt almost every night. He'd even had a high school dream, where he'd needed to go back to high school to finish a course and found himself naked in the middle of the gymnasium in his current body, and everybody had laughed and called him an infernic freak - at least until Anna Glass (whom he hadn't met until college in real life) had showed up and blasted them all away with magic, her eyes glowing the same unearthly pale light that Ezra's did.

In his dream, after Anna saved him from public ridicule and wrapped him in a warm shawl, she kissed his forehead in a way that struck Ezra as deeply maternal - warm and soft and caring. She brought his gaze to meet hers, her eyes unusually large and shining like the sun through a haze of silvery cloud.

"I've saved you - now it's your turn to save me," she whispered.

Ezra awoke with a start, cool and alone in a tangle of sheets. He ran his hand along the mattress, along where Rill ought to be, where she ought to have been curled up against him with her slightly-too-warm body, the gentle sounds of her breath and the feel of her heartbeat filling the empty morning.

Well… barely-morning. He'd been up late the night before and alarm clocks were uncommon in St. Arbalest. A glance at the wall clock told Ezra it was a twenty to noon and he was about to be late to his scheduled rendezvous with Anise.

+++++Ezra+++++

Doc Tichaw wasn't too pleased about Ezra and Berhu sneaking in through the back of his clinic in the middle of the day, but he knew better than to displease one of the districts kingpins… and Plenakton was a kingpin, certainly as far as the authorities were concerned. In fact, liberational revolutionaries were lower than actual criminals in the eyes of the authorities since you couldn’t make much money off of them. And if you were a kingpin in the Old City, then you were serious business. Tichaw was probably paying protection money to the Native Guild (or 'the Nates'), which is what the urmal mafia called itself, but no amount of protection money would allow you to be inhospitable to Plenakton, Gladion, or Stomen Blose, either. And, at least functionally, the 3Z's - the infernic liberation people - and the Nates were on the same side, seeking to address the grievances of the repressed. Conversely, the two borrenkin kingpins were little more than mobsters with leaves.

"Is that what Blose's people are doing strutting around out front? Looking for you?" The urmal physician glanced up from his work of suturing a woman's badly-split lip back together. The woman, also an urmal, looked up at them dazedly, clearly on some sort of decent painkiller.

Berhu shrugged. "Blose is always looking for us. And he always ends up getting a bloody nose and he still keeps coming back. The son of a tree is a sucker for punishment."

"Yes… well please make sure I don't end up on the receiving end of his ire. I'm in the business of stitching people back together, not getting them busted up."

"Sure," Berhu said, though she didn't sound too committed to it.

She'd insisted on following Ezra back to the clinic and, since she obviously knew where the clinic was, there wasn't much point in stopping her. She knew the alleyways much better than he did, anyway, so they actually got there early. They crept in at a five before noon and waited in the back until Anise showed up for their noontime meeting… they avoided the front of the clinic because there was a very good chance Blose's men could peer inside a milky-glassed window and spot one of them.

"Shit," Ezra said. "Anise is going to stick out like a sore thumb out there. Do you think she's smart enough to sneak around back like we did?"

Berhu pondered that for a moment. "Smart enough? The girl is plenty smart. But has she got enough street smarts?"

"No," Ezra said.

"No," the infernic kao-alta agreed. "I'm going to see if I can't spot her from the roof. Don't try to run - I'll catch you."

Ezra didn't point out that he'd already demonstrated himself capable of evading Berhu back in Portside. Instead, he just nodded affably and turned back to watch Doc Tichaw finish his suturing. When he was done, Doc shuffled and handed his surgical tools to his wife to wash - she worked as his assistant during the busiest hours, which were just now winding down. The waiting room had gone from a crowd of a dozen to just four listless patients in the stuffy, sun-suffused area. Doc shuffled to the back, frowned at Ezra for a moment, and took a pull from the apuiha pipe he had sitting on his little apothecarial bench.

He strolled back out, leaving Ezra to tolerate the little wispy wafts of the sweet smoke. "You're next, Mr. Mijats, sorry about the wait. Let me guess, the wife sent you?"

When he knew Doc wasn't looking, Ezra took one of his (well, technically not his) blue-pal notes and slipped it under the paperweight on the desk. He didn't want doc making a big deal about it, but the Mochine-wei clinic definitely needed money. A clinic with no healing decoctions for emergency cases wasn't much of a clinic, and Ezra didn't for a minute buy that nobody around knew how to invigorate one. Something like one in ten residents of the city had some degree of magical cultivation, and it only took a little skill to invigorate a potion of modest complexity - even Ezra could manage it. Everything from Doc's old apothecarial tools, with their cloudy glass and rust-pitted metal, to the stacks of old, slightly-yellowed bandages that Doc had probably nicked from another clinic's rubbish bin, spoke of a clinic that operated on the razor's edge of destitution. Half of what Doc brought in probably went to protection money. They needed money to operate and Ezra still had about a dozen of the ten-stack notes untouched by Fenrik's housefire but nonetheless burning a hole in his pocket.

Just as he'd decided to congratulate himself for selfless charity, Berhu banged through the front door with an annoyed and confused Anise in tow. The infernic dragged Anise about two meters and Doc squared his shoulders, prepared to give them both a chewing out, when Anise had just about enough and nudged Berhu away with a bit of magical push. Berhu barely avoided tumbling over the front desk and turned back to push Anise with some magic of her own when Tichaw broke them up. Good thing, too - as Ezra would soon find out, it was increasingly unwise to engage with Anise in a magical tug-of-war.

"Ladies! Please, no violence in our clinic! This is no place for argument…"

Berhu glanced back to where she knew Ezra was skulking. "If Blose's men didn't know we were here, they sure as fuck know now. Little miss magistress here marched down the street so plainly she might as well have been playing a goddamn coronet overture. Let's get scarce - if we still have time."

"How was I supposed to know? Ezra said to meet here at noon, not prowl around like a sneak thief!"

"No time to argue… sorry, Doc!" Ezra called from the back. He briefly considered leaving another blue-pal, but Blose's men were already at the door, banging away with their big, bark-hard hands… and, truth be told, Ezra was only feeling moderately magnanimous. One ten-stack note was plenty.

They scampered out the back and most of the way down the alley when a broad and hostile-looking borrenkin lumbered out in front of them, taking up the full width of the alley with his hulking torso and thick limbs. Another of Blose's men stomped into the alleyway from the opposite side, the leaves and twiglets of his extremities hissing against the bricks as he entered an alley space meant for much smaller people.

"We got 'em over here!" he boomed with a voice that rumbled like a timpani drum.

Berhu tried some bit of magic - she was a dryad and these were tree men, so it was worth a shot. Small vines grew out from the rough skin of the nearer borrenkin thug, wrapping around limbs and torso with the hiss of slithering vegetation. But the man snapped right through the vines with a wince of pain and made to grab Berhu.

Then, suddenly, he drifted up into the air, up over their heads… and Anise's body pulsed with barely-constrained magical energy. With a frown of exertion and a wave of her hands, the man hit the brick wall of the alleyway at an oblique angle and tumbled toward his partner on the other end of the alley with a yelp of pain and the crack of splintering wood. Then he floated back up into the air about a meter and a half and slammed back down with more cracking and groaning.

Berhu shot Anise an incredulous look. "That's the 5th elevation, is it?" she asked, and she took off down the open alleyway and Ezra and Anise followed.

"We know where your friend is!" one of the borrenkin shouted.

+++++Ezra+++++

To Ezra's surprise, Anise insisted on accompanying them. She had a very low opinion of Stomen Blose, which was why she insisted on accompanying Ezra and Berhu.

"He's a bad person, you know. Like, a serious criminal…"

In Ezra's limited experience, there weren't many unserious criminals. Most of them took their criminality quite seriously, and he was pretty sure the ones who didn't got weeded out from their criminal cohorts early on. Ezra hadn't known any career criminals back on Earth, but in Medias, his experience was that they were willing to work with you if you'd work with them, and they certainly weren't worse than non-criminal psychopaths like Fenrik of Westval.

Ezra approached the goon, a broad borrenkin struggling back to his feet, his left arm clearly injured and oozing ichorous green blood. If he made a lunge for Ezra, he'd find himself very sorry for having tried.

"Okay, where is she?" he asked.

"Mr. Blose wants to talk to you… the infernic with the white-glowing eyes, he said."

"You can't go with him," Anise said.

"I'm new to Medias, not stupid," Ezra said. He turned back to the borrenkin thug. "There's no way in hell I'm going with you… so where is she?"

The man tried to shrug but winced. Dark green borrenkin blood oozed out of a dozen small wounds where his bark had cracked - Anise could deliver a hell of a blow when she had to. Ezra made a mental note to never give her a reason to. "How should I know? Mr. Blose knows, and he'll tell you if you do him a favor… that, and he'll ignore the fifteen stack price on your head - you'll be a free man in the Old City. That's safety that money can't buy."

Anise put a hand on his shoulder. "Ezra, don't…" And, for her part, Berhu was silent - maybe she didn't care about Ezra enough to have much of an opinion.

The other borrenkin - the really broad one - struggled to his feet, wiped a bleb of blood from his mouth, and reached into his coat pocket. He rocked back up into the air as Anise lifted him with her magic, but she set him down when he produced a grainy brown pictograph. Ezra snatched it from his fingers and gave the photo a look - a little square photo, perhaps five centimeters to a side, that clearly showed an unconscious Rill strapped to a table. Ezra didn't doubt its authenticity, as Photoshop didn't exist in Medias and what photomanipulation did exist was laughably primitive to his 21st Century sensibilities. Blose knew where Rill was being kept… and it looked like there were more down there with her.

"Where is this?" Berhu asked. Now she was interested.

"You'll just have to come and find out…"

Anise didn't bother to try to dissuade Ezra again. Obviously, she knew that Ezra couldn't possibly pass on finding out where Rill was, not with the picture right in front of him. Ezra probably would have gone even if he'd known it was a trap.

"I'm coming, too," Anise said. "Try anything funny and my magic won't be so gentle."

They all walked to Blose's place - it was a surprisingly nice redstone building about three blocks from the clinic, with byoun servants and borrenkin muscle conspicuously arrayed around the front. The place was right between the racetrack to the north and the Bloody Pit to the south, making it prime real estate for anybody involved in loansharking and sports betting, which were the legal arms of Blose's operation. Most of their income was probably through racketeering, smuggling, and sports fixing, but as long as Blose payed things forward to the local members of parliament, the constabulary didn't scrutinize things too thoroughly.

Ezra felt uneasy, walking into a situation that had all the makings of a trap, but he had to find out where Rill was, and thus far Plenakton's people had turned up nothing concrete. Blose had actual photographic evidence of where Rill was, and he would divulge where she was or Ezra would make him. How, exactly, one forced a borrenkin kingpin with an army of thugs to so much as lift a finger to help you was a tricky proposition, but Ezra was sure an opportunity would present itself…

+++++Ezra+++++

"I have an opportunity to present to you," Stomen Blose said. This was, in Ezra's opinion, a good start.

Blose was a borrenkin entering his late middle age - you could tell because aging borrenkin bark had a slightly-peeled look and their leaves started to yellow at the tips. That made Blose a bit north of a hundred years old, assuming he wasn't hiding boatloads of magical cultivation - the borrenkin life expectancy was around a hundred and fifty among those with no elevation. He was aging, but he was still imposing, shorter than most borrenkin (which made him barely taller than Ezra) but as broad as any of his hulking thugs, with deep-set dark eyes that glittered like old amber embedded in the trunk of an ancient tree.

"I'm listening, Mr. Blose," Ezra said.

Anise touched his elbow, as if he needed to be reminded of whom he was speaking with. She meant well, though, and Ezra couldn't fault her caution. Blose was not the sort of man one dealt with casually, and anything you owed him was as good as a thrall plug spiked deep into your chest: you would do as he wished or pain was sure to follow.

"There is a price on your head because you walked into Fenrik of Westval's laboratory and walked out with his most valuable secrets," Blose stated.

"I don't have the documents anymore…"

Blose waved his fingers dismissively. "I don't need them. Ezra… may I call you Ezra?"

"Sure."

"Ezra… what would you say if I told you we had more in common than you might think?"

"I'd say I'm listening."

For a brief moment, Ezra thought Stomen Blose was about to reveal that he, too, was an infernic - one of the rare borrenkin bodies whose arrangement of plant matter didn't prohibit demonic posession. But, alas, Blose merely meant that he and Ezra both had a mutual interest. Namely: Blose's fellow borrenkin kingpin, Gladion. The same Gladion who'd provided Fenrik with Ezra's soul stone and who'd attempted to capture Ezra on two or three occasions (depending on how you counted). While Blose and Gladion had certain standing arrangements, that didn't mean they weren't competitors, and Blose realized he stood to gain through Blose's loss.

"How, exactly?" Anise asked.

"Does it matter?" Blose asked. He lit an apuiha pipe and offered some to the rest of them, but everybody else declined. It was common knowledge that borrenkin had to take heroic doses of most drugs to get good effect on account of their unusual half-mammal, half-plant physiognomy. And Ezra supposed that it didn't matter why Blose wanted Ezra to move against Gladion.

"Why me?" Ezra asked. The most likely explanation, he gathered, was that it was a trap to drive him right into Gladion's waiting clutches.

"A little birdie told me you have a knack for drawing the energy out of things," Blose said. Berhu scowled at that, because that meant somebody within the 3Z was ratting out to Blose. But if Blose was concerned about showing his hand, he didn't indicate it… though he might just be high on his sweet smoke. "Gladion's security is lax - I've been telling him to up his game for ages, but he's far too stubborn to listen to the likes of an old coinmonger like me. He's got a guard or two, but mostly he just keeps his real shinies in a heavy safe with a special little thing inside called a draughtsman's eye. Have you ever heard of one?"

Ezra shook his head but, unsurprisingly, Anise knew all about them. "Oh! I've heard about those before. Does he really have one?"

"He does."

"Okay, I'll bite… what's a draughtsman's eye?" Ezra asked.

"They aren't used much in Yuya-Sasetù, but sorcerers back in the old world… the really rich and powerful ones, at least… used to use them in their defenses, and later the militaries started using them. But they take a lot of arcanite and stellite, to make and there's hardly any stellite over here. Basically, the device is a gyroscope and a lens mounted to a little stand with carefully arranged crystals behind the lens. Any bit of movement in front of the device will cause it to move in the direction of movement, and any magical energy detected at the center of the lens, including the soul energies of most beings, will trigger a preset spell. Basically, the energy is drained from the crystals in exactly the way the crystalline converter of a horseless works, and it triggers a spell… well… spells, plural."

"What do you mean?"

"Well… because of how they're made, they don't have to drain all of the energy of a crystal in the way a person does. Instead, like most artifices, they take little sips from all of the crystals hooked up. So the draughtsman's eye casts hundreds of tiny spells per second instead of a big one all at once. That way, it doesn't waste any energy it doesn't have to shooting spells at a whole lot of nothing. But they take really high clarity crystals in my understanding," Anise said.

"So… exactly the sort of a thing that a semi-legitimate crystal dealer might have?" Berhu said.

"Well… whether or not that's the case, Gladion's got one," Blose said. "And I'd like it. For obvious reasons, I can't just go in and take it, and I'd really prefer that he not know it's me who took it. And, while you're at it, you can take as many other things as you like, and they're all yours. Bring me the draughtsman's eye and I give you the exact location of where your friend's being kept."

"And you'll let me inspect the eye!" Anise added.

Blose shrugged, the little leaves along his back rustling against his chair. "I'll give you a few hours with it, but it stays in my possession as soon as it's brought back. Though, for obvious reasons, we'll have to arrange as transfer. You can't bring it back here. What do you say?"

Berhu padded over to Ezra and whispered: "If we could destroy Gladion's soul crystals, it would a be a great service to the cause… you should agree…"

"I feel like we shouldn't be stealing valuable artifacts at the behest of a crime lord," Anise said.

"I prefer 'creative entrepreneur', Miss Derrigin," Blose said amiably. "What do you say we drink to your success?"