Letter Seven

Dear Sneffles,
I’m writing you this during a pause in the fighting. I honestly don’t know if we’re going to survive this adventure but I have my doubts.

[Wayfarer, if you find this testament on my body, I beg you please make sure it reaches the destination written on the envelope. These are my last words to my sweetheart, my love. You will be handsomely rewarded.]

[And please kill me if I am undead.]

It all started innocently enough. I was cleaning out Majenko’s litter box at my dive when a stone rattled off the window. It was Finarfin and he wanted to go meet the boys at Ye Olde Borer Worm. I had clean forgot we were supposed to be investigating the Queen’s physicians for Kroft. I had a touch of the bug or something because I felt like shit warmed over twice and sautéed with onions.

Worse, Finarfin was wearing that nasty “Old Sailor’s” cologne he favors. His Shelley gave it to him for his birthday or something. I guess he thinks it covers up the smell of the quarter-elves he’s been buggering in his squalid basement under Calistria’s temple. He likes to go on about his bad thing the way insecure people will. He asked why I never talk about my sex life, suggesting maybe I was lacking something important. Oi, I wouldn’t know where to begin with him. I hear you laughing, sweet girl, a sound that rings like a bell.

As you would say, sex is no big deal. Why make it difficult? It’s not a game, or status symbol, or some prop for a fractured psyche, although people make like it is. As both you and I learned a long time ago, fucking is a commodity, pure and simple, like buying fish at the market. Whether swordfish or fin, it all has its price, either in gold or in kind. I find it hard to understand why people lie, cheat, and steal to get it; or break the vows that give our pathetic lives meaning, just for a piece of tail. Something that is easy to find everywhere because so many are so lonely and will settle for so little. But I guess that’s a good thing for those of us who have to make our living that way.

I’ve been having sex, or at least witnessing it, since I was a knee high to a halfling, whether it was holding some drunken sailor’s yardarm straight so he could fuck my older sister, or later, showing the girls in the alley how to keep their johns happy. I admit I had my wild time but I’m 19 now and playtime is over. I only want to make love with people I care about—people like you. As the poet says: "I've had it to here, being where, love's a small thing, a paper ring, a part-time thing." (Which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t plow some of Finarfin’s playmates. As you know, elves fuck like mink.)

(Maybe I’m being too hard on the old boyling. I’m sure he’s just getting over some lingering “turgidity spell” he mixed in the KY last night.)


Anyway, our assignment from our lord and master Kroft was to investigate the so-called Hospice of the Blessed Maiden in Oldtown. First we went to a place to buy some gear and here’s where I made my first mistake—I didn’t buy anything. I know you'll think I'm lying but nothing appealed to me, not even that foxy leather whip I was considering. I fell ill this morning and was not myself. It was just malaise but I almost wished I had the plague because I could have got that fixed. PJ and Bardar both thought I was just hung over, or faking it because I wanted the spinal rush that goes with a healing. So they let me linger, while I wondered which end was going to blow first.

At the clinic we let Finarfin go in as a patient but he had another misunderstanding with an office employee so PJ and I went around back and tried the doors, which were chained shut from the inside—it was the gingerbread house all over again. Fortunately they failed to notice that the doors hinged on the outside so we took one off and I guess made too much noise because a cohort of Grey Maidens showed up armed to kill. Fortunately ’Narf and Bardar were following them and spent a few quarrelsome moments killing them all. I feel badly about it, they were just some working girls trying to feed their families, but it was one those “them or us” things.

Inside there were boxes of beautiful silk cloth. I grabbed a bolt of toppleberry-green extrafine with a subtle golden Desna emblem woven in. [Stranger, give this cloth to Sneffles along with my note and maybe she’ll please you.]

In the next room we discovered a ward full of patients sick with the Blood Veil and several of the Queen’s physicians. We roughed up one of them to get him to talk but he just cursed us in the name of Urgathoa—one of them “Evil Dead” type gods—so Bardar chopped off his “f’ing head,” as he put it. Ma always told me that a bad man may take my money but a righteous man would take my life. I couldn’t blame him, though, after looking around the room where the sick and dying lay in their own vomit and shit, like squatters down by Water’s Edge.

The boys were so worked up they even wanted to off the receptionist in the next room in front of witnesses (what is it about Finarfin and receptionists?) but I talked them out of it.

Upstairs there were more physicians with their “patients,” poor bastards tied to their beds and infected with something very nasty. We dealt with the physickers more quickly than they deserved. Most of their patients were too far gone for us to help. Finarfin, who was burning through his spells like a drunken cleric, used one more to winkle out the big cheese himself, Dr. Davaulus, who was trying to sneak out under a cloak of invisibility. We tied him up and then found the records where they outlined their disgusting program.

Let me get this straight—these are the Queen’s physicians, protected by the Queen’s Guard, making the Queen’s . . . plague? Is Kroft going to bust her or blackmail her? Do I now know too much to be allowed to live when we are done? Remember, the Queen was the one who recommended us to Kroft in the first place.

We looted in a halfhearted way while Bardar berated us about being thorough and checking the elevator before we left. Great idea, holy man. Now we’re facing a small army of dumb, ugly motherfuckers and if I don’t man-up there ain’t gonna be enough left of your Cordobles to put in a spell pouch.

We took the elevator into a basement and there were three doors, each sporting necro tags. PJ set off a trap I could have found and it caught me flat-footed—Me! It sprayed me with some noxious fumes that left me befuddled and helpless for a time. When I caught my breath I set to work on the second door, head spinning, setting off an alarm and calling four thugs on us. So much for the element of surprise.

My head was still ringing from the first dose of bug juice when I caught a second one from the lock I was working on. I shrieked like Danni the gimp when he got caught in the wheelhouse gears. Bardar quickly put some air back in me and I finally got the door open but I was as fried as chelaxian schnitzel. This is where we all miss Burns because I simply can’t fill his run-down shoes.

We found a dank bedroom that smelled of moldy spunk and incense. Rooting around we came up with some nice black gems and an onyx skull that would look good next to your gold one. We trashed some skeletons in the next room and then saw a sight I hope someday to forget: an immense “death battery,” literally a scene of putrefaction kept under glass, used to temper a necromancer’s art. Fucking Rolf! I knew we should have tracked that son-of-a-bitch down the first time we crossed paths. I’m afraid I lost a fine lunch and then used my new human bane rapier to gouge the cork from a bottle of full, robust wine we’d found. I’ve been drinking ever since.

The next room looked like a slaughterhouse, only dirtier. Intestines were hanging across the room like popcorn strings at a party, attached to their still-living victims. Even Bardar couldn’t help the poor bastards. I got Finarfin to hold my bottle of wine while I picked the lock to the next room. There we found live prisoners. They all seemed pretty stupid and weren’t much help. Maybe that’s the kind of people who make good zombies. One of them told us there was a cleric of Urgathoa involved, which means a Daughter of Urgathoa may be nearby and that doesn’t bear thinking about on a queasy stomach. Fortunately, Finarfin convinced one of them to visit Kroft and ask her politely to get her ass down here to help us. I just hope she gets here soon because these fuckers eat their victims!

Now I face the last locked door. There are some very unsettling sounds coming from behind it and the smell is unbelievable. Even Finarfin looks green (or greener, anyway) around the gills.

If we don’t meet again name your son for me,
L,
Cordobles

Next: Finarfin's Ninth Report