Chapter One hundred forty-six – Hare’s the Thing

Pandy had to waste two heals on the Boss before he was able to answer Augustus’s questions, and since her Mana still wasn’t regenerating, that annoyed her more than it probably should have.

Several of the thugs were also pretty badly injured, though as far as she could tell, none of them were dead, but since she had just under three hundred Mana left, she wasn’t using it on them unless it looked like it was that or final rites.

Augustus was trying to get something useful out of the Boss, who just kept his eyes locked on Pandy, and whimpered whenever she so much as glanced in his direction. Really, it wasn’t that bad. He’d stabbed her, after all.

“So what were you supposed to do if Ms. Wellington showed up?” Augustus asked again. He kept repeating the same questions in slightly different ways, but so far the Boss seemed incapable of making anything up, and his story hadn’t changed.

“I told you,” the man said irritably, grimacing as he shifted. His gaze caught on Augustus’s blood-soaked shirt, then flicked to Pandy, before flinching away. His tone shifted from irritation to pleading. “I just run a gang. A little one. But I can…I can get people to do what I want, so we made money, and that drew the attention of the Exchange. They hired me to do a few little things for them, you know? They got me some things, the powder, that made my magic work even better, so then I could do bigger jobs.”

He glanced around, eyeing the darkness warily. “They brought me one of those spiders. Said it would obey me. Nobody questioned it, because sometimes what I do works on animals, especially with the powder. But this spider, when it bit people, they got sick, and anyone who spent enough time around ‘em got sick, too.”

“But not you,” Augustus said.

“Not me,” the Boss said, frustration creeping back in. He’d answered this before, too. “My boys and I, we drank this stuff they gave us, and we never got sick.”

“And this ‘stuff’ is back at your hideout,” Augustus said, suddenly sounding tired.

The Boss got up enough gumption to sneer. “Wouldn’t help you anyway. You’re a dead man walking. Once you’re bit, there’s no savin’ you.”

Augustus sighed, and Pandy stepped closer to him, worried that he really might be feeling worse. Their prisoner’s eyes grew huge as she advanced, however, and he scrabbled back against the wall he sat in front of, his hands cupping his nether regions protectively.

“We haven’t ever had anybody try, though!” he squeaked. “Mike got sick, but nobody liked Mike anyway. We just packed him in with the others.”

“And brought them here,” Augustus said. “But where were they taken?” The Boss opened his mouth, no doubt to deny all knowledge again, but Augustus wasn’t having it this time. He’d been holding one of the knives they’d taken from the fallen men, and now he raised it to prod the soft flesh beneath the other man’s chin. Pandy’s eyes widened, and she started to move closer again, but the chancellor shook his head ever so slightly.

Leaning forward, he growled, “I know you know. People like you love to know all the information, especially whatever they’re told not to shove their noses into. They took them to towns nearby.”

The terrified prisoner let out a squawk. “If you know, then why are you asking?”

“Because I don’t know why,” Augustus said, leaving on his knife just a bit. Pandy wanted to squeak herself as a drop of blood flowed down the edge of the blade, but she bit her lip and kept it in.

“People came to get them!” the Boss managed, though he had to mumble in order to avoid digging the blade in any deeper. “They have families, friends. When they turned up, someone always came to get them. So the people who found them got sick, the people who took care of them got sick, and then their own people got sick. We were just supposed to take anyone who’d be noticed. Anyone someone would want back.”

His eyes flicked to Pandy. “Except her. They said she probably wouldn’t come, but if she did, we were supposed to set the spider on her. Don’t give her a chance to fight back, they said. Just bite her and leave her to die.”

Augustus shook his head. “You said she wasn’t supposed to have an elemental any more. What kind of elemental?”

The man froze. “I didn’t mean that,” he whispered. “It was a mistake.” He looked from Pandy to Augustus, his face utterly white. “There’s worse things than dying.”

And that was it. According to Pandy’s Shifting Faces countdown timer, it took just over forty-five minutes for the first of the mirror-helmeted knights to appear. During that time, the Boss would occasionally say something about just being a small-time gang leader, but he wouldn’t let another word slip about who had hired him or who – or what – he thought Pandy was.

This left Pandy, Augustus, the self-proclaimed petty criminal, and several motionless minions moldering in the murk until silent, armored figures slipped up beside them. One approached Augustus, and didn’t quite salute, though Pandy would have sworn its gauntleted hand started to swing up toward its brow. More figures took hold of the Boss, who looked even more terrified, if that was possible.

Augustus stood, and Pandy thought she was probably the only one who saw how heavily he leaned on the wall the Boss had been pinned against. She sent him another Minor Heal, but he only recovered eight HP, so his weakness probably had more to do with the poison or, just possibly, whatever had caused the continuing absence of his elementals.

“Did you get the rest of the prisoners?” Augustus asked softly, and one of the knights nodded. “Good. Keep them quarantined until we can figure this out. They’re contagious. According to our friend over there, it takes time to catch whatever it is, but I’m not sure I believe him. There should be some kind of potion that prevents illness back at the Rabbit’s Den tavern, which may help us come up with an antidote or cure.”

The knight nodded again, then moved over to their companions. More and more of the armored figures had appeared, each one with a globe of light attached to their left shoulder, behind a small metal protrusion that Pandy had assumed was part of the armor, but which also served to diffuse and reflect the light around them. There were at least twenty knights here, and she assumed more were helping the former prisoners. They were all but silent, moving through the dark space like silver ghosts. She might have thought they were robots except that every now and then one of them would jump as they encountered one of the hidden spiders, which was then dispatched with large amounts of prejudice.

“We secured the boat,” one knight said as they approached. This one was a bit shorter than most of the others, though not the shortest overall. All of their voices sounded a bit the same, with a sort of hollow depth to them, but Pandy thought this one seemed slightly familiar. Until someone proved otherwise, Pandy decided to assume this was the same one who had been with Augustus when he entered the empty not-a-library where the library should have been.

“Any clues?” Augustus asked, already moving toward the sound of water.

The knight hesitated, then said, “Sir, are you certain you should-”

“Any. Clues,” Augustus asked again, not even slowing, and the armored shoulders rose in what was probably a silent sigh.

“No, sir. It’s just a boat. A punt, to be precise. The ‘river’ is barely three feet deep, at least as far as we could check, and there’s no real current. It was probably just an easy way to smuggle things beneath the city. We’ll have to see if it leads anywhere other than the tavern,” they said, settling in with their hands clasped loosely behind their back as Augustus paused, staring down into the dirty water.

“How did we miss this?” the chancellor muttered to himself. He crouched and picked up a stone, tossing it out, into the dark water. The rock sank, barely leaving a ripple behind. Pandy half-expected some monster to rise up in revenge for this perceived assault, but the ripples of water brushing against the shore were the only response.

“We weren’t looking for it,” the knight answered, though Pandy had assumed it was a rhetorical question. “The city guards would have to have called us in, and either they didn’t notice, or they’ve been paid not to notice.”

“Meaning we missed that the guard had become either incompetent or corrupt. Either way, this is still on us,” Augustus said, lips pinched as he stared down the narrowing tunnel that the long, flat-bottomed punt must have traveled through. Four poles lay in the bottom of the boat, one end worn smooth by the grip of countless hands, while the other end was rounded and rough from contact with the bottom of the river and the stones that lined the shore.

The knight took a half-step forward, hands falling to their sides. “Sir, you haven’t even been-”

Augustus shot them a look that froze their words in their throat, then turned to Pandy. With a sigh, he said, “It seems that one way or the other, Ms. Wellington is gone. I’ll have to claim I fired her, or perhaps that she quit suddenly. If someone is this desperate to silence her, it could endanger the students, and that’s not an acceptable risk.”

Pandy looked down at herself. Her yellow dress had definitely seen better days, but she’d just ordered a whole new wardrobe. She was wearing Clara’s boots! What was she supposed to do now? Who would teach Thaniel and the others? Admittedly, almost anyone would probably do a better job than she had so far, but surely no one could care about them as much as Pandy did. Was she going to be relegated to the role of Thaniel’s pet again? That would undoubtedly make Thaniel happy, but now Pandy had been able to stretch, to become herself in a way she hadn’t even in her previous life – which was a funny thought, especially given that she was living a borrowed life while wearing a borrowed form.

Augustus reached out, raising Pandy’s chin with gentle, albeit slightly sticky fingers. “Don’t worry, I have a few ideas about what to do. This particular version of you will just have to go away for a little while.”

Pandy started to nod, then stopped. She liked Augustus, maybe even liked him a lot, but he wasn’t her boss. Maybe he had been, in some way, but hadn’t he just fired her? And she had her own ideas about what she wanted to do. Well, she would have her own ideas. Soon. Maybe as soon as she could read the stupid Changelog and have a little chat with Keros. She wasn’t just going to agree with whatever Augustus thought she should do, without even discussing it first.

So, rather than meekly giving in, which is very much what original-Pandy would have done, new-Pandy said, “A week. I have things to do in a week.”

He grinned at her, almost as if he was glad she hadn’t just knuckled under. Actually grinned. Beside him, the Knight of the Royal Eagle twitched in their metal shell. “A week it is,” he said. “I hear we have a festival to attend then, anyway.”

Reminded, Pandy’s eyes widened, and she felt her lips stretch into a matching grin. Yes, she definitely had a few ideas, and if she couldn’t be Ms. Wellington anymore, then she was about to find herself with a lot more time on her hands to prepare. But first…

“Let’s get you cured,” she told him, and his smile faded, to be replaced with exhaustion.

“Yes,” he agreed. “That sounds like an excellent idea.”