Underkeeper

The monstrous beaver creature barreled toward them like a runaway horse. Conjuring fire here was a bad idea, but he wasn’t fast enough with anything else. Clearing the incendiary influence of his investiture out of a spell on the fly would take too long.

Deciding to take the risk, Bernt raised his pyromancer’s wand to cast. Or, he tried to. Just as he moved, he found himself pushed against the moist, cold wall by Josie as she squeezed around him in the narrow tunnel and planted her feet.

Bernt could only watch, dumbfounded, as the creature bore down on her, driving a bow wave of unmentionable filth in front of it. Was she trying to get herself killed?

Before it could reach her, Josie opened her mouth and screeched. The sound was high-pitched, penetrating, and deeply, fundamentally, inhumanly wrong. Bernt’s blood froze in his veins and painful, horrible memories consumed his mind. The terror of running for his life in a dark, trap-riddled maze. That awful moment of despair he felt waking up bound and captured by an enemy. The yawning chasm of grief that opened somewhere in a little boy’s chest as he realized that his mother wouldn't wake up, that she wasn't going to wake up.

The creature felt it too and it stopped. It tried to back up awkwardly in the confined space, but Josie pressed forward and lashed out with a bare hand, her fingernails suddenly long, dark, and radiating an icy, psychic cold that Bernt could feel from three steps away. They left only shallow cuts in the beast, but depth didn’t matter.

The monstrous rodent whined pitifully, a low tortured sound as it continued to back up. The sound turned into a growl and back into an agonized, shuddering whine. A few seconds later it collapsed down into the sludge, its head going under, and went still.

Bernt stared, disbelieving at the scene. Josie shook her clawed hand, restoring it to its normal appearance and turned back toward him. She looked at him with an expression of actual human concern and Bernt wondered what he must look like.

“I’m sorry about that. I couldn’t let you throw around fire down here.” She gestured around vaguely, still breathing hard. “Too dangerous with the gasses.”

Bernt nodded, still too rattled to talk. He wondered for a moment how she’d known that he was about to cast fire magic, but decided that it wasn’t worth it.

Instead of answering, he did what he should have done in the first place with a backed-up sewer. He collected himself and hummed out an aeromancy spell, sending a soft breeze down the tunnel. It wouldn’t continue for long and it wouldn’t help much with the smell, but it would at least clear out the worst of any flammable gasses while they cleared out the blockage.

Josie was still looking at him, waiting for a response.

“It’s fine,” he said, even though it really, really wasn’t. “What was that thing?”

“Not sure,” she shrugged, stepping toward the corpse to get a better look. “But I sensed two different souls, so I’d guess some kind of monstrous parasite, or a spiritual possession or something.”

She poked at the pile of unmoving fur with a booted foot. Nothing happened.

Collecting himself, Bernt moved to join her and then sent his light out ahead of them.

“Uh. Is that a dam over there?”

Sure enough, the creature had actually dammed up the sewer. The blockage was built from a collection of garbage, sticks and leathery hides that it must have somehow stolen from the tannery above. Bernt sighed. This was going to take them hours to haul up and out of the sewer.

“Skins…” Josie said, thoughtfully. “Hold on a second.”

Turning around, she sloshed back over to the beaver monster and tugged fruitlessly on its pelt, first on one side, then the other. She obviously wasn’t going to be able to move the huge creature, it was far too heavy. With a quiet sigh, Bernt moved to help her. Before he got there, however, Josie stumbled backward, splashing water all over the front of Bernt’s robes, dragging a wet, disgusting hide back with her. It was massive, bigger than an expensive blanket and very much the wrong color. While the beaver had been brown, this fur had a distinctive golden color, like that of a mountain lion.

“Ha!” the warlock crowed. “I knew it! It’s a skinwalker. Or an accidental one, anyway.”

Bernt stopped and frowned, trying to ignore the black water seeping into the front of his robes. “We don’t have skinwalkers. And there’s no way that was a person.”

“No,” Josie said, waving away his protests. “I mean it was a beaver wearing a ritual hide. It probably just crawled underneath it at some point. I'd bet ten gold marks that the tannery up there probably works with the Berserkers’ Guild. Berserker armor uses soul magic to harness power from other creatures. These kinds of hides are probably a raw material for them.”

Bernt just stared at her with wide eyes. “What? How do you know this stuff?” There was absolutely no way that something like this wouldn’t be a guild secret. If they knew that she knew… well, the guilds didn’t manage to keep their secrets for hundreds of years because of their light touch. It could mean her life. And his, now. She’d just… casually told him!

Josie shrugged. “I can sense souls. Most berserkers carry around traces of three or four of them, at least. I couldn’t miss it if I tried.”

“Yes.” Bernt hissed. “But why would you tell me?”

She smirked. “I thought mages loved learning secrets. Besides, who are you going to tell?”

Bernt took a slow breath and reminded himself that mages did, in fact, love learning secrets. And besides, all the best secrets were dangerous to know. She hadn’t even gained any leverage by telling him. It wasn’t as though she was going to blab about this where the berserkers might hear.

This was good. She was practically doing him a favor. In fact…

“So…wait a moment,” he said, examining the hide, “you’re saying they use animal souls to enchant their gear?”

“I suppose?” Surprise registered on Josie’s face at his sudden change of attitude. “Sort of. Ritual slaughter and some enchantment afterward, is my guess. And that’s before the Berserkers’ Guild does whatever they do to it.”

“Hmm, alright.” Bernt said, dragging the heavy thing past the carcass of a now surprisingly normal-sized beaver. “Let’s get all of this stuff up into the street. I’ll find us a cart and we’ll move it all out to the garbage incinerator.”

“Isn’t that a bit inefficient?” Josie complained. “There's a garbage dump down here, less than a half-mile away!”

Bernt smiled humorlessly. “There is. But any garbage recovered from the sewers is considered hazardous waste. And hazardous waste goes to the hazardous waste disposal incinerator.”

Besides, if everything went to the incinerator, the tannery wouldn’t question a missing skinwalker’s hide. Bernt wasn’t really interested in using the thing as it was – there was a reason that skinwalkers were mostly just remembered from stories. They had a tendency to go insane, which seemed fair if it really worked the way that Josie made it sound. But… well, if the berserkers had found a way to make it work for them, he at least wanted to see what Grixit thought about it.

Josie grabbed an armful of garbage and started hauling it out.

“So, are you going to tell me how you got a demon to serve you for years without paying its price?”

“I didn’t ‘get her to serve’.” Bernt replied. “I just asked her for help and she helped. She was down in the sewers already anyway.”

Josie scoffed disbelievingly. “They don’t do that. Demons have prices. You must have given her something.”

“No, I didn’t.” Bernt said, annoyed. “Unless you want to count a roof over her head and a warm place to sleep. But it wasn't a trade. I just took her home.”

The warlock turned to face him, clearly planning to argue, but he quickly cut her off with a question of his own.

“What happened to the guy who summoned her, anyway? Your boss told me the Solicitors would take care of it. No other demons have come for Jori as far as I know, but I never got an update, either. Did you catch him?”

“I’m not authorized to share that kind of information” Josie said in the rote tone of someone who was used to saying that exact phrase to people several times per day. “You’ll have to submit an information request with the office.”

Bernt groaned quietly. This was going to be a long day.

–-------

“So, how did it go?” Ed asked as Bernt handed him his reports for the day. He looked over to the corner of the room, distracted by the sight of Gnugg scrubbing at the floor with a small cleaning brush. Farrin must be worried about keeping him out of trouble again.

“A mutant beaver built a dam underneath the Dyer’s district,” he said, sinking down into the chair opposite Ed’s desk. “There’s a dumping citation for a dyer who thought we wouldn’t notice blue dye pouring out of the sewers. We also cleared a couple of smaller blockages in that weird neighborhood on the western edge of the district that always has issues – no clear cause there. Oh, we also found an abandoned campsite, probably goblins that already moved on. I wrote up a note for the guards, but they’re not going to do anything.”

Ed nodded. “Alright, good. How did the warlock do?” Josie had excused herself a few minutes before as they passed by the Solicitors’ office – apparently they had cleaning facilities that could handle even an underkeepers’ laundry. While they were all technically supposed to end their day at headquarters, there was no need for her to walk all the way down there and back up.

“Fine.” Bernt admitted a little grudgingly. “She’s efficient and walks through a sewer as if it was a freshly cleaned street. She can fight, too.” He swallowed uncomfortably at the memory. “It’s kind of scary, actually. She… uh, she doesn’t like me very much. At all.”

At first, Bernt hadn’t wanted to work with her because she was a solicitor. The Solicitors had threatened Jori, and clearly they still wanted to control her. That just didn’t sit right with him. Now, though, it was more personal. Josie made him uncomfortable – and not because she was a warlock. Not just that, anyway. She’d spent the whole workday snooping, asking personal questions about him and Jori. When he was willing to answer, she responded to everything he said with some combination of disbelief and disapproval. It was rude and he’d tired of it pretty much immediately.

“Do I really have to work with her?” he asked. The question sounded whiny, even to him – it was embarrassing to realize that she’d gotten under his skin.

Ed laughed dryly. “Son, I think you’ve spent too much time hanging around like-minded people. Not everyone is going to like or respect your choices or your way of looking at the world.”

Bernt scoffed. “I know that! You should see the looks I get when I walk down the street these days – or when I try to apply for a lease!”

“Sure, but none of those people will ever actually make you think and ask yourself important questions.” Ed said seriously. “This is going to be good for you. It’s important to learn to see yourself from other peoples’ perspectives and to learn why they think the way they do. I don’t really know much about the girl, but the same is probably true for her.”

Bernt clenched his jaw in irritation for a moment. He did need to learn more about warlocks, if only for Jori’s sake. He was letting his personal feelings get in the way, and he wasn't sure he could afford that anymore.

“Alright,” he said grudgingly and got up to leave. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

If he wanted to get anywhere in life, he'd have to live with far worse than a little skepticism.