73 - Case Two Closed [Cherno]

“Make me not want to kill you. Say something that’ll make me think you might be useful beyond your grafting skills. I want information,” Krahe said.

“Someone very high up has Damrus Hashem himself on their strings. These so-called Benefactors. They want human bodies, but not for grafting, as I told you already. Who would want such a thing, hmm? Perhaps…”

Krahe saw him reaching for something, or perhaps trying to do something behind his back. Acting on instinct she rushed up to him and buried her hand in his midsection, slamming the Foreman onto his back. Before he could speak or cry out, a crimson glow erupted out of his mouth and bloody tears sent his eyes out of their sockets as his heart was made to burst in his chest.

“I know your type. Opportunistic rat.”

She sighed, rifling through his pockets and trying to pull his voidkey. It snapped right when she found it and got a grip on the thing. On the upside, the Foreman did have nearly ten thousand DDs on him in a storage artifact, and a quantity of liquid Thaumine that would doubtlessly come out to another good-sized sum.

“Any idea who these Benefactors might be?” she asked as she conducted the search.

“There are a handful of options, though it would be best to discuss that elsewhere,” he said.

And so, they left, making their way through the city to the nearest shrine of the Grafting Church - the one where they had previously stashed the motorbike. From there, they swiftly made their way to another shrine, and there did much the same thing as before, stowing the motorbike and hiding themselves away in a strange shrine behind the main one. The iconography was different; rather than a seven-pointed star overlaid overtop a a wheel of the same radius as the star, the sigil in here was a much smaller wheel overlaid overtop a seven-pointed star. A subtle difference, but Krahe knew that it could be significant by the standards of religious iconography.

For a few minutes they just sat, in silence, as the shrine’s priest brought in a small censer, attaching it to the center of the wheel which served as this inner shrine’s sole icon. The wheel began to spin, ever so slowly, when the censer was lit, and the priest was gone, bowing shallowly to Casus and regarding Krahe with a nod.

“You’ve got your belt back. You owe me now,” she said with satisfaction.

“So I do, so I do. Thank you for lending me your aid merely on the promise of my debt. I do not think I could have recovered the Silberblut Coupler otherwise without calling in support from the church. It would have been… Messy. This way, the conflict’s collateral damage may yet be kept to a minimum. If the Hashems know what is good for them, they will let this incident go. If not… The church remains an option. I am sure the mafia’s strongholds could do with a touch of total sterilization.”

“What of the Hashem Family’s so-called Benefactors, then? Share those options you mentioned back in the tunnel.”

It was strange. The incense cleared her head and her sinuses alike, but in a way unique from any other stimulant she’d experienced… Perhaps because there was no stimulation, no rush of energy, just clarity and focus.

Nodding as he leaned forward, Casus launched into his theory: “Baneworms are the obvious choice, but then they wouldn’t be dismantling the bodies. The Benefactors may want to use the bodies as feed-stock for soulbeasts, placing suspicion on ranch owners at the border regions of the Beyond Frontier. A group of savage saurians who still worship their deity may want to use them as sacrifices in an ill-fated attempt at piercing the Banishment Veil for communion. Or… It might be Vedesians. In fact, if I were to make a choice here and now, I would guess Vedesian Evoy; those still devout to their creator-god, Vedesis, who holds them as envoys of her supremacy. Evoy who in their larval stage gorged themselves on the flesh of humanoids are far stronger from birth than those who only consumed other sustenance during the larval stage. Moreover, Evoy who were weaned predominantly on the flesh of a specific humanoid race will grow into a form resembling that race, making it easier for them to assimilate into their host culture… Or to subvert it. There is a kingdom in the east, on the southern coast of the Agertian Peninsula, where the dead are disposed of exclusively by evoy, and they are honored members of the clergy there; the Corpse-eaters’ Guild, they call themselves. Audunpoint doesn’t have such a good relationship with the flymen, but we haven't had major issues with evoy in the recent past either. A fair few of them even hold positions in government and the churches both, but… Vedesian evoy are nonetheless the most likely to be these Benefactors, given that it is their modus operandi to act in such an indirect manner. Baneworms wouldn’t feel the need to place a degree of separation from their own kin, and savage saurians wouldn’t deal with the Hashem mafia at all, they would do the kidnapping themselves. Whether the culprits are a group of outsiders, or a tumor festering within our midst, I cannot say for certain… But I am willing to bet that they are Vedesians, and that is what I will report to the church.”

“So Hashem provides the meat, and the Benefactors provide… What? Funds, presumably, but what else? Is it a purely monetary exchange, or do these Benefactors somehow facilitate Hashem’s continued dominion over Audunpoint’s underworld? Is Hashem even the dominant force in the city’s underbelly?”

“More or less, yes. There are two other significant organized crime groups, but one operates in the realm of simple fraud, and the other cropped up specifically to fill the niches that Hashem hadn’t yet gobbled up. Smuggling, mostly. Garvesh deals with them a fair bit.”