Clyde showed Lucius to one of the kuku dens that were in Aliston, like tumors of indolence. The proprietors had done their best to hide the relatively illicit activity, like painting over rotten walls. They had a surface deep popina along the street which did in fact sell food from a shared kitchen. Rather delectable mixes of beans and peppers bound by a tortilla of sorts. There was dreadfully little they could do for the accumulation of wasting vagabonds and drifters that loitered the street with hands out for charity. No generous fools ever came, but they could hardly be bothered to move somewhere more lucrative when the temples would bring them charity eventually. Then, that charitable coin was handed over for the drug.

So, when the governor of all the Misty Isles marched in, nearly every employee of the place nearly died of panic. While it was only his second day since arriving, his description had already made the rounds, and the owner ran to greet him. “You must be Governor Shoalhart!” the man said as he nervously rubbed his hands together and smiled. The poor criminal had a facial infection of the soft tissue that causes his nose to be as swollen as a troll’s, giving him an almost comical appearance. It made it difficult to imagine he might slit a man’s throat for non-payment.

“Solhart,” Lucius corrected him.

“My deepest and most sincere apologies,” the man said, bending nearly to his waist to bow. “But, may I ask how I may be of service to you? I am but a humble tobacco shop.”

Lucius looked around, sniffing the air. The scents in the room were a jumble of smoke and pepper-leaf candles and human sweat. Wherever he looked, people turned away and snuffed out pipes and bowls. They turned their back to him as if to hide. “I’m looking for the local specialty and thought you might have some in stock.”

“The tobacco? Sir?”

“The kuku bud these people are smoking,” he said.

The proprietor paled. “I assure you sir, this is not that sort of place!”

Lucius gestured, and Clyde as well as the trollkin entered. The large man was still recovering, but an untrained eye in a gloomy den couldn’t hope to spot swelling in an arm. Lucius smiled and held up a silver talon, with no idea how much that could purchase. The proprietor preferred to keep his knees bending the normal direction, so he graciously took the payment and handed Lucius a pipe filled with the borderline illegal drug.

The actual legal status of kuku bud was never quite clear. Since it had not yet made its way to the mainland of Vassermark, the king had made no ruling on it. The plant was some foreign problem for foreign people to deal with. That defaulted the ruling to the governor, which at the time was Lucius. He should have inherited the previous standing, but the steward Lamdo said only the growing of kuku bud had been outlawed. This had been a matter of executive convenience. The immature plant could be burned while yet unharvested, an the farmers rounded up. If a user were caught with it, the only means they had of positively identifying the substance was its consumption. That of course made policing it quite hypocritical, so they simply didn’t.

While that made city conflict rare, it did nearly nothing to stem the inflow of kuku bud from the hundreds of unwatched islands.

By this logic, nothing illegal at all occured in the coerced sale of a pipe for the scandalously low price of one silver talon. He should have at least paid three.

The only person who couldn’t be convinced by this argument was Aisha. “You can’t be serious,” she said, holding the flint sparker away from him.

Beneath the manor, a great stone foundation had been built, another boon of the initial funding. This was of course very important for the storage of food, it kept the heat at bay and diligent maintenance kept insects out as well. A set of locking rooms could serve as a dungeon, or a mere respite for privacy, wine, and perhaps a smoke. The deeply cushioned chair wanted to swallow him up with comfort, but the redhead looming over him brought out every firm spot like iron filings to a lodestone.

“I can be, and I am. I figure it’s best to know what I’m dealing with first hand.”

“Not just could it be poison, it very literally is poison!”

Lucius shrugged and picked at some of the spilled plant grindings across the edge of the pipe. They stuck to his fingertips and smelled somewhat like rot. “Okay, but… so is alcohol. And if it’s really bad, my stigmata will cure me.”

Aisha crossed her arms and scowled at him. “You mean your stigmata that left you without an arm for years? Because it only cared about good enough? It could be a slow poison. It could leave you… I don’t know, tired, forever.”

“Not forever.”

“You don’t know that,” she shot back.

He shrugged. “It would only be until the next time I get my body destroyed. And that can be arranged on purpose.”

She pinched between her eyebrows and closed her eyes. After a moment of silence, she said, “What if it just makes you take more risks or something? Make bad decisions in a way that you don’t even know you’ve been affected?”

That gave him pause, and he beheld the pipe like one might appreciate a gilded egg. “Well, I suppose you have a good point there, but that’s why I have you, isn’t it? You have the wonderful position of telling me when I’m making a mistake.”

“Which I’m doing right now!”

“And I’m dutifully listening, but the choice is still mine. Look, Sammy will be down here to track what happens to me shortly. I don’t really expect this will do anything to me. People all over the world smoke tobacco and other things, and that’s hardly a life changing drug. I semi-regularly use amphos root too. I can’t imagine this is stronger than that.”

Aisha huffed and took the seat next to him. “Then at least wait for him to get here.”

“He’s having dinner with Lynnfield.”

“And why aren’t you having dinner?”

Lucius shrugged. “I hear having an empty stomach makes these things hit harder.”

“Who did you hear that from?”

“Master Amurabi, in general. Something about warming up the liver. But, fine. I’ll wait for him to come down. He should make detailed notes regardless. They’d better inform the legislation.”

With that, Aisha at last sighed and gave up the fight. “So, since we’re to wait, I must say that this is the strangest land I’ve ever been in.”

“You only briefly saw Vassermark, and lived your whole life in Giordana.”

“I traveled! My father is a merchant, remember? But still, this might be the first time I’ve seen a town where I couldn’t rouse up a bar with some music. I tried to get a feel for the place last night, but it seemed like the only thing people had the energy to listen to were some melody-less beats. They had one old man tooting away on something like a flute, just to make some noise as they drank. Only one person requested a song, and he was a sailor!”

Lucius nodded and sank into the old couch. He turned his head up at the shadowy rafters and turned the problem over in his head. “The whole chain of islands seems to have a dearth of life. There was only one fight to conquer the place, and every other island just surrendered. They used to have a… I think Lamdo called him a Chief of Chiefs, but part of the surrender paperwork included voyage for him north, and he’s never been seen since.”

“Doesn’t this place have some kind of divine beast overseeing it?”

“Not that we’ve been able to find. Things would likely be easier if we could just negotiate a deal, but here we are: digging gold out and making ends meet. It’s no wonder the nobles back at Hearth Bay thought this would be the end of me.”

“Are you sure it won’t be?”

“It won’t be. I’m just not sure what I have to do.”

Aisha put her hand on his leg. “Well, I suppose there are worse places to be stuck. The climate is warm, the beach sand soft, and there’s no war going on.”

Lucius looked down, pulled from the grand theater of the mind to the moment. “No, no war near us, not yet anyway,” he said, putting his hand to hers. Their tough of hands was always a bit curious for their mismatched callouses. His across his palm from sword work, and hers across her fingertips from working stringed instruments. Neither minded the other’s roughness as they shifted their weight closer to one another. The couch, which was more of a bench, was in no way endowed with the proper comfort for what had entered both of their minds, but that very thought precluded such consideration.

The two of them closed, each wrapping their arm around the other. For a breath, each had the other’s scent. Sweat and pepper-leaf, the second-hand lingering of tobacco. The fruit Aisha had dined upon. Then they brought their lips together. Soft and focused, their entire worlds became nothing but the touch of skin to skin, lip to lip.

“Am I interrupting?” Sammy asked, poking his head into the smoking room.

Aisha had to slide her leg off of Lucius’ lap and straighten her dress. “I thought you would be longer.”

The doctor laughed. “Lynn drank a bit too much, and the servants showed her to her room. That’s a mess I’ll have to deal with later. First though…”

“Oh, excellent,” Lucius said, waving him over. For a moment, he watched as the apothecary turned researcher laid out all manner of tools as well as a notebook. While his two companions chatted about just what was going to be done to monitor what the kuku bud did to Lucius, he didn’t give Sammy the chance to baseline him.(1)

While neither of them were looking at him, he stuck the thin end of the pipe in his mouth, lit the bowl, and sucked in the smoke. A burning like tar seeped through his lungs, searing and biting at his insides.

And then the chemicals hit him.

Due to his stigmata, there was never much variation in his baseline vitals.