Underkeeper

“Sir, don’t you think this is too much?” Josie asked, putting the note down on Radast’s desk. “You’re framing her as a cute, friendly neighborhood mascot. She’s a hellfire-throwing demon who seems to have just barely discovered the concept of empathy. I don’t want to downplay that achievement, but I think we have to keep the story realistic enough for people to swallow. I mean, she still harvests the soul residues from any of the dead she can get her hands on. There are rumors out there about that as well – it’s not so subtle that there haven’t been witnesses.

Radast shrugged. “Have you heard what’s being said out there? A bit of hyperbole won’t make a difference. We're going to give it a try. It’s not really about telling a specific story – we’re just trying to push public sentiment into the right direction. We can always adjust the messaging a bit if it doesn’t take.” The Chief Solicitor leaned back into his seat, steepling his fingers. “We don’t have an unlimited amount of time to work with. We need to reassure people, keep them from thinking purely in terms of black and white. That’s hard enough when it’s just those priests from the Temple of Balarian in the streets trying to incite the populace against us. The enemy has shades and watchers in the city, and their influence isn’t so subtle that people haven’t noticed. We have to keep our message as simple as possible if we want to get anywhere, so ‘little friendly demon mascot’ is what we’re going with.”

Josie nodded resignedly. “Alright. I’ll go and brief solicitor Bartholomew and he can get it out to the pubs.”

With a respectful bow, she turned and made her way down the stairs toward Barty’s office.

She didn’t like where this whole propaganda campaign was going. The controversy didn’t bother her – that was always going to happen. She was honestly surprised that it wasn’t worse. While some of the temples seemed to be responding with alarm to the positive sentiment building for Halfbridge’s local celebrity demon, others had left it alone so far. Torvald, who admittedly wasn’t associated with a specific temple, had especially surprised her. He had gone so far as to sit down and chat with Jori, though he still seemed a bit uncomfortable doing it.

No, what bothered her was how innocent and altruistic they were making Jori out to be. Sure, she really had saved some lives, fighting that warlock, participating in patrols and even saving the adventurers down in the dungeon before the Duergar got here. But they weren’t being honest about the how and why.

Josie liked Jori – she was fun! And she’d learned a lot just by talking to the little imp about her life. But because of those conversations, she also knew that Jori’s pro-social behavior was only really genuine toward the people she considered her friends. Outside of honoring bargains she genuinely didn’t understand basic moral standards, most notably why killing strangers would be wrong. People would feel betrayed and lied to when the truth came out, and Josie didn’t want that.

She would have preferred to tell the truth. They had a demon in Halfbridge who had learned to form emotional attachments. That was groundbreaking all on its own and it should be treated as such. Radast’s preferred narrative might help them in the here and now, but she couldn’t see how it wouldn’t lead to problems in the longer term.

–-------

“Look, I can help!” Bernt said, holding up his left hand. “It’s not quite as powerful as it was, but I can cast Banefire just fine with my left hand. I don’t need to be sidelined like this, especially with Kustov off doing whatever his new secret project is.”

Fiora shook her head. “Bernt, Ed would have taken you off of combat duty no matter what, even if everything had gone well with your new investiture. You don’t need to prove anything here, he was just griping. You have to get used to your new normal before you can be a reliable asset in a fight. It’s standard procedure for war mages, and good sense for anyone.” She shuffled through a stack of papers in her hands, looking over them with a worried expression. “Besides, we didn’t really have time to train a lot of the new underkeepers properly, and we’ve had all the mages down here fighting the duergar for weeks. It hasn’t really gone that well – the sewers could use some attention from a real professional. Things are piling up a bit.”

Bernt sighed. He should have known. At least he could get something proper to eat, assuming at least that Cal hadn’t run out of mystery meat and cabbage.

“How bad is it?”

–-----

Bernt’s boots made little splashing sounds as he turned onto the narrow street down by the docks that led to the tenement he used to call home. Black water had poured up out of the sewers into the street, giving the dingy neighborhood a smell to match its reputation.

The place was nearly deserted, but he could see someone wading through the muck a block away, most likely trying to get to higher ground. Bernt sighed. He could clear the blockage, but the street would probably smell this bad for weeks – at least until they had some proper rain. A few days’ worth at least.

Ignoring the stench, he made his way down toward the nearest storm drain. He was going to have to use a hydromancy spell to force water through whatever obstruction was down there, and that was not going to be fun. Water was by far Bernt’s least favorite element to work with – the spellforms for it didn’t align in a way that made sense to him, so memorizing and reproducing them properly was a nightmare.

At least he had a better focus now than the last time he’d done this.

Reaching down into the muck, he hauled the grate covering the drain up to give himself better access. Then, he gripped his staff in both hands and dipped the end down into the water to trace out runes in odd circular patterns. It still felt awkward channeling mana from his left hand, and he had to be careful not to activate the spell prematurely.

Someone like Uriah could do this in his sleep, despite the fact that the man had never finished his first augmentation. But Uriah wasn’t here – he’d moved to Loamfurth to escape Ed’s ambitions for the Underkeepers. It was going to take Bernt minutes just to get the spellform shaped correctly.

“Bernt!” called a familiar voice from a window. “I knew you had something to do with this!”

Trying not to lose his concentration, Bernt activated the spell, forming a circular current in the water below and then driving it up to run downstream as close to the tunnel ceiling as possible. Ideally, it would force water through the obstruction near its weakest point and begin tearing it down. The dammed up waters behind should, at that point, go a long way toward clearing out whatever was down there. They were barely a hundred strides from the sewer mouth here, so the debris didn't need to get flushed very far.

He heard it when the obstruction gave way – a low rushing sound that sounded from a short way further down the road. He breathed a small sigh of relief and looked up.

Rina, his old landlady, glared down at him from a window. This wasn’t his old building. Did she own the whole street?

“Hello Rina.” he said, his tone almost polite. She’d evicted him from his former apartment while he was out a few months earlier. The money he’d spent living at an inn while he fruitlessly searched for a new place had more than erased the money he’d saved by choosing to live in such a small, dingy room in the first place. “I had something to do with what, exactly?”

“All of this shit in my street, obviously!” she snapped. “This place has been a cesspool for nearly a week. Inveron’s boys from the pub tried to clear it a few days ago so the customers would come back, but the water came back up the same day. You’re telling me that happens all by itself?” She scoffed. “Now you’re here, doing what? Checking on your work?”

“I’m doing my job.” Bernt gritted his teeth. He wanted to tell her what she could do with her shitty street, but that wasn’t going to improve the situation here. And it wasn’t as though he could reason with the woman. There was nothing to be gained talking to her at all. Although…

“It resealed itself the same day?” he asked. “When was this?”

The middle-aged slumlord stared at him with narrowed eyes before finally answering. “Two days ago.”

Bernt cursed to himself. He was going to have to go down there and look.

“Where have you and your friends been? Ignoring your duties and consorting with goblins, I hear! And Demons! We hear things here, too, you know. We know what you’re trying to do, spitting in the eyes of the gods with your filth!”

Ignoring Rina’s ranting, Bernt walked a bit further down the street, past where the actual obstruction was, to the nearest sewer access shaft. Opening it, he climbed down, and cast a torch spell to get a better look at the situation down in the sewer.

Water rushed by in a torrent, though the water level had already sunk quite a bit. His spell had worked, but he needed to make sure that the obstruction was fully cleared. Normally, he would have waited a few minutes up in the street, but he found that he preferred this to remaining within earshot of his former landlady.

Within a minute, the flow began to slow and Bernt put a booted foot down into the water to gauge its depth. It still reached up to his ankle at the shallower sides that were technically meant to function as a dry walkway. Good enough.

Heading back upstream, Bernt kept a close eye on the ceiling of the sewer tunnel. It was dry here, but the ceiling on the far side of the obstruction would be completely wet, so it should give him a rough idea of where exactly the sewer had been clogged up. As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered.

Two big pipes emptied into the sewer from opposite sides here, leading in from the large, ugly tenement buildings. While the sewer itself looked clear right now, Bernt shuddered in revulsion when he caught sight of what was causing the problem. The pipes on either side of the tunnel were completely blocked by a translucent, gelatinous goo that roiled hideously within them. As he watched, it began to pour itself out of the pipes and along the walls as if testing the environment all around. The sight was disgusting, even for him and he had to swallow down his gorge and look away.

Slimes didn’t have most of the traditional five senses like natural creatures did. Instead, they relied on touch and taste to interact with their environment and consumed organic matter to fuel their growth. These slimes here had likely done a lot of growing. They could eat almost anything, and slimes in the wild had been known to strip the fields of entire villages if left unchecked. They would also consume people and animals if they could creep up on them unawares.

Fortunately, they weren’t terribly fast, and they didn’t do well in arid environments. Still, Bernt wondered uncomfortably just how many of these things he’d just inadvertently sent down the river. Then again, that’s what he would have had to do regardless. Slimes were heat sensitive, but it wasn’t as though he could boil an entire sewer’s worth of water.

Backing up, he focused on the problem at hand and raised his right hand. This was a complication, but also an opportunity. Slimes were magical creatures, and he needed to know what that meant with regard to his new investiture.

Without using any spellform at all, Bernt poured mana into his right hand unguided. White, liquid fire filled it – his sorcerous perpetual flame, but more than that. It also carried the influence of his first burning rain investiture. He wasn’t sure exactly why it worked, but Pollock had posited that the investiture woven into his mana network would naturally insert itself into any active spellform, whether he consciously shaped it or not. He could feel the heat of it on his skin, but it didn’t burn him. He still didn’t understand why that was, exactly. He’d have to see if Pollock had any guesses.

With an overhand motion, he flung it at the nearest slime, much the way that Jori wielded her hellfire. It impacted with a satisfying sizzle and the slime began to shiver and wriggle oddly. A moment later, steam hissed from it and the entire thing lost cohesion, collapsing into a sticky puddle. The fire, though, didn’t go out. It spread up the pipe, eating through the slimes inside.

Alarmed, Bernt extinguished the spell before it got too far away from him. Who knew what would happen if the fire came out the other end of the pipe? He would have to get inside the building and clear it from the top down. Still, it had an interesting effect. He tried it again on the other side, with the same result. Who would have thought that such a dangerous spell would offer such simple, practical utility in everyday life?