25 - Case One: The Vanishing of Casus Aristedes [Cherno]

The purple baneworm woman froze halfway through measuring around Krahe’s waist, peering up at her, concern in her voice: “Casus? Casus Aristedes? Mamon Knight Silberblut? That’s…”

She shook her head and continued measuring: “Oy, Igaria banish the thought. The whole district will turn into a warzone if Hashem gets his tendrils on a body like that. We’ll get apostles digging their noses in here and they’ll turn the whole place upside-down to retrieve Casus’ body. Won’t have been the first time that they demolished a part of town for something like this.”

“When was the last time?” Krahe prodded. More and more, this place felt like home. It wasn’t unheard of for Gammasec to bring down whole hab-blocs if they thought someone dangerous to Whitestone interests was hiding in there. She’d been the cause of many such demolitions in her past life.

The tailor, having gotten her measurements, went over what she’d written down to double-check before she responded. She slowly led Krahe back into the front of the store as she talked: “In town? That’s easy, some three months back there was an Archon Flash down at Shamrin Avenue 5th. Big fuckin’ ray of that so-black-it-has-no-colour Kenoma shit ripped straight into the sky through the roof, making that screaming noise, the whole shebang. Some genius had tried implanting a load of unrefined Thaumstone into himself or some other sketchy shit, maybe did an outer god cultist ritual, I dunno what you do to rip a new asshole into the banishment veil. Point is he ended up turning into a walking Archon Core, turned the whole building and four families into monsters. Hard to forget warnings about a “potentially mobile B-class Hazard Zone” getting blasted all over the place.”

The bane-saurian cut in at this point, having listened in: “They had a graft-apostle sterilize the place with superheated steam and then compacted the buildings straight into the fucking ground. Bet those lots aren’t even empty anymore.”

Something about the emphasis on the fact it happened within city limits raised Krahe’s curiosity.

“How about out of town?” she asked.

“Jas’raba ripped a fuckhuge Archon Flash straight into the sky three weeks ago, they evacuated everyone they could when they realized it was gonna happen, the line at the gate stretched past the horizon. You must be really new if you weren’t here then.”

Krahe smiled: “I arrived earlier today.”

She was, of course, considering the possibility that her incarnation in Jas’raba could’ve had something to do with that massive “Archon Flash”. Even if the timeframe didn’t seem to line up, she had no way to know just how long she had spent in that weird flesh-cocoon before she came-to.

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Krahe left Kamran’s wearing rugged, dark-green trousers, tailored to properly fit her, with a few spare pairs in the Kenoma Sack.

Her visit to the leatherworker went just as well, though it was far shorter. The place was run by a bearded old man with weirdly long fingers and an extra eye on the left of his forehead. In addition to whatever discount Garvesh’s reference likely got her, the man also agreed to give her some store credit for the boots she’d walked in with. He openly admitted that he would just recondition them and sell them as new. Using her store credit and a chunk of her remaining money, she bought one of the only premade pairs of boots which the leatherworker offered and which fit her feet. Moreover, she had him fashion a holster for the stone tablet from blackened leather to match her gun’s holster. He muttered something about a “nice replica” when she mentioned the gun and thus drew his attention to it.

With these errands out of the way, Krahe took a little while just looking around the city in the search for a quiet place to sit down and think. She searched not merely for someplace out of the way, but a place that would actively provide privacy, such as a hostel just shitty enough that the vast majority of people would gloss over its very existence. It didn’t take long to find one. Just following her old instincts got her there in no time. A somewhat seedy part of town; not the sort of place where one would expect to get shanked just walking down the street, but where one wouldn’t have a hard time finding a middle-aged father of five that runs a backroom gambling ring. Despite the atmosphere of seediness, it was still barely comparable. Even the shitty parts of town were pretty by comparison to Megacity Gamma.

The inn which she found was perfect; cheap, somewhat run-down, altogether uninteresting, staffed by people who didn’t want to be there and clearly didn’t make enough money to pretend otherwise. As far as she could tell, it had maybe ten rooms. Taking a seat at the empty bar, she bought a drink of low-quality cider whose flavor was undercut by a vaguely acetone-like sting, but even this, she enjoyed in a way. It reminded her of home. Zastreon’s equivalent to the swill that broke teenagers would buy to get drunk off of. Indeed, it was a nostalgic taste… But horrid nonetheless. No amount of appreciation for this new world couldn’t do away with the simple unpleasantness of lukewarm alcoholic piss. She took some care not to move her left arm much and just left it by her side with the hand in her pocket, and that seemed to suffice to keep suspicious eyes off of her. Satisfied with the fact that nobody gave a shit about her presence, Krahe committed its location to memory and left. Renting a room right then and there would’ve tied her to the inn, and the risk of a no-vacancy situation with a place like this was all but nonexistent.

Krahe made her way back to the first place she’d stopped; the square where the Zaveshian and Seven Spokes temples both stood, at the behest of that strange woman from earlier.