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2.34 In Which the Dark Lord Has Questions
🕑 Added 2022-01-13 16:34:16 +0000 UTCI had to supply a venue for the procedure, on the grounds that Sneppit’s crew were taking enough of a risk by helping me and she wasn’t about to compromise one of her own secure locations on the surface. That seemed reasonable to me, but since I was away from my own power base and not that familiar with the layout of the Gutters beyond Cat Alley, I had to buy that information from Maugro.
Which would’ve been the end of it, except that Gizmit sweetly thanked him for the kickback Snippit got from him for insisting on that provision, ensuring him a sale. I guess he neglected to account of Gizmit’s spiteful streak and pay her to keep her mouth shut. Maugro didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed, just shrugged and gave me his patented “business is business” grin.
The ability of the goblins to work every possible angle was really incredible. I couldn’t help but admire it, even when it was pissing me off.
“So how much of Sneppit’s leadership have I got up here?” I quietly asked Gizmit as I accompanied her in checking the perimeter and exits from the old storehouse Maugro had found. Behind us in the near distance, Youda was fussing with his chemistry set next to the still-sleeping Olumnach agent, who was tied to a chair, with Zui hovering nearby.
“Miss Sneppit is the leadership,” she said. “Zui and Youda are valuable assets, though.”
“Right, I just found it odd she would send her top people up here without even a bodyguard.”
Gizmit gave me an amused sidelong look, which she had to tilt her head sideways to do. “Clearly Miss Sneppit values her association with you, Lord Seiji. Besides, she generally considers additional security personnel to be extraneous when I’m along.”
“I see.” Wow, that was a much more graceful way of saying “I can easily kill you” than I usually did it. I had so much to learn. “Well, glad to have you. No disrespect to my new…employees…”
“You don’t need to say it, Lord Seiji, I’ve met them.” The boys from the pawn shop had been positioned at entrances and windows to keep an eye out, but they appeared to be mostly just loafing on the verge of falling asleep, except for the guy I had Immolated, who ever since then had seemed to be having a nightmare while standing up. He flinched whenever our eyes met. “Anyway, you have Zui to thank for Miss Sneppit’s investment in this. The boss listens to her and she advocated for helping you. Zui appears to think highly of you.”
That brought me to an actual, physical stop, causing Gizmit to get a few more paces beyond me before she turned to see what the holdup was.
“Bullshit.” I glanced aside to where Zui and Youda were still at work and lowered my voice further; goblins had proportionally bigger ears than humans. “I’m not falling for that, Gizmit. I’ve spoken with enough of my ex-girlfriends to recognize when a woman would casually prefer I was dead but doesn’t care enough to make it happen.”
“Yes, I can believe you’ve had that experience,” she said, deadpan. “Lord Seiji, you’ve only met Zui when she was on edge and defensive from being on the surface, surrounded by tall folk, sometimes with Youda’s safety also her responsibility. She’s the one who usually ends up dealing with the aftermath when one of Sneppit’s goblins runs afoul of humans—which is often the result of dealing with them at all. I think she has the lowest opinion of humans of any goblin I’ve met who doesn’t have a specific, personal trauma related to them. You treat goblins like people and don’t stare down her shirt. Sadly, that’s all it takes to be the best human she’s ever met.”
“How would anyone stare down her shirt? She wears those high-collared—” I stopped, too late. Gizmit was already giving me that sidelong look again, this time with a sly little smile. “Wow, look at that, I walked right into it.”
“Don’t feel bad, Lord Seiji, I lay good traps. As you may recall.”
“Hm.”
“Goblin, human, presumably elf and beastfolk—it seems that men think we can’t tell when they’re ogling. It’s so very transparent so much of the time. It’d be one thing if you just weren’t into women, but someone as used to it as Zui could also tell when you noticed ‘hey, those are nice’ and then didn’t act like a creep about it. Such a low standard to set, but such is the world.”
“Humans, men… You don’t think much of anybody, do you?”
“I have a high opinion of some of the people I work with,” she said noncommittally, “and I am always willing to be impressed. Looks like they’re about ready.”
I glanced over at the center of the room; the prisoner’s head was still slumped forward, Youda was laying out tools on a tray and Zui had a sheaf of paper on a clipboard she was now holding. It just looked like more of the same inscrutable preparations to me. “How can you tell—”
“All right, we’re set up here,” Youda called. “You ready?”
Gizmit gave me another little smile. “I’m a professional, that’s how.”
I opted not to engage any further with that line of thought. Instead, as we drew close to the alchemy setup, something caught my attention. “Hey, are those syringes?”
“They are!” Youda grinned, pleased as always at having his work recognized. “I’m impressed, Lord Seiji! I didn’t think any surface folk on this island would recognize ‘em.”
“I’m from a place considerably less ass-backward than Dlemathlys.” Youda was good people; I didn’t have the heart to tell him how primitive his equipment was. The syringes in question were just little inflatable rubber bladders attached to… “…are those porcupine quills?”
“No idea what a porcupine is. These are thadnecht quills! You gotta boil the venom out of ‘em obviously, but properly sterilized, they work like a charm.”
“Huh. Is it a problem with them being curved? I’ve only ever seen straight needles used.”
“Ah, well, I can see how that’d make for more precise handling, but unfortunately there are no shellbacks on Dount with the right kind of anatomy.”
“Ah. Where I’m from, we just manufacture the needles.”
“Really? I gotta say, I dunno how you could carve a hollow akornin needle fine enough.”
“Me either, I’ve only seen them made of steel.”
He blinked twice. “How?”
Gizmit, Zui, and Aster all cleared their throats in unison.
“Quite right, ladies,” Youda said briskly. “Business before shop talk! Okay, so you’ve dosed this guy with the tranquilizer serum I gave you, right? Shouldn’t be a problem; he’ll be coming out of that within a few minutes, and I don’t expect any reaction with the drugs I mean to use. The tail end of it should ease the transition, and this’ll go smoother if we don’t wake him up before administering the dose. For that reason, though, I gotta choose an agent that acts differently on the brain or we risk an overdose. I got plenty of options, though, so no problem. I’m gonna use two derivatives of starleaf extract, a base calming tonic that you pretty much can’t OD on short of drowning in it, and a smaller dose of an alchemically accelerated version that’s formulated to give pleasant dreams. So this shouldn’t impair his memory, but the dream state can specifically interfere with organized recall. I know that’s not perfect for interrogation, but no solution would be and this’ll at least bypass conscious resistance, which oughta be the biggest issue, right?”
“Whatever you think best,” I said, already lost.
“Ah.” Youda glanced up at me even as he was positioning one of his rough quasi-syringes against the subject’s arm. “No offense, Lord Seiji, but I wasn’t talkin’ to you. Interrogation is its own science, and the person doin’ the questioning needs to know exactly how the subject is drugged so she can properly tailor her approach.”
“Oh. Right.” I looked at Gizmit, who gave me another one of those coy little smiles. “I gave Zui a rundown on what I need to know from him. I presume you have it written down?”
The smile widened and she tapped her temple with one forefinger.
“Well, okay, then.” The man twitched as Youda withdrew the first needle from his arm, beginning to mumble slightly as the goblin alchemist hastened to apply the second drug before he woke up completely. “I’ll just…be over here.”
Everyone was already ignoring me. Youda was holding the man’s wrist while staring at his mouth, monitoring both his pulse and breathing; Zui had her pencil poised to note down everything, eyes alert on the proceedings. Gizmit stepped up to the man’s other side and spoke, and her voice was low, soothing and warm, completely unlike I’d ever heard her before.
“Hey there. You’re all right, there’s nothing to worry about. Can you tell me your name?”
It really was something else, working with professionals for once.
Among the things I’d read online was that torture is counterproductive for the purpose of gathering information; I’d filed that away as an interesting fact, never anticipating I could ever possibly find a real world use for it. The principle was that if you incentivize your victim to say something that’ll make the pain stop, they’ll say whatever they think will please you, regardless of how accurate it is. So, great for extracting confessions, no good for actual intelligence. Supposedly the best way to accomplish that was to work on the victim psychologically and get willing cooperation, which of course takes longer.
I guess drugs help expedite the process.
I could tell Gizmit knew what she was doing, even if I didn’t. She spent a lot of time asking banal questions whose answers I did not care about and Zui didn’t even bother writing down, personal stuff about the guy, his life, family, career ambitions, and so on. Maybe she was coaxing him into a pattern of answering harmless questions, or testing his state of mind? He seemed almost fully asleep with his eyes open, speaking slowly and on a delay, but he did form mostly coherent sentences and didn’t seem resistant to the questioning. At least twenty minutes of this went by without going anywhere useful, but the one time I opened my mouth Zui immediately shot me such a blistering look that I instantly closed it. I dunno how she even saw me; she’d been apparently focused on the interrogation as if anything interesting was happening.
Well, the goblins seemed to know what they were doing, or at least think they did, and I’d gone to the trouble of involving them, so I opted to let them work.
It wasn’t long after that before Gizmit’s efforts started to bear fruit, and it happened so smoothly even I was lulled in. She had transitioned deftly from aimless chitchat about the guy’s work life and gossip about people he knew to details on the Blessed individuals working for Highlord Olumnach. It was so gracefully done I only belatedly realized we had finally gotten to the meat of the interrogation when Zui’s pencil started quietly scratching as she noted down data.
The whole thing took over two hours, but it was easier to sit through once I recognized that Gizmit was indeed in control of the proceedings and competently directing things the way she wanted. She kept her demeanor soothing, actually brushing the man’s hair back or holding his hand in the moments when Youda re-administered one or the other of his drugs as the dosages began to wear off. Whenever there was any sign of resistance, she would smoothly segue back into harmless chatter, bringing up topics she’d already discussed, specifically those she’d learned would lull him back into a positive and receptive frame of mind, and only gradually meander back into the territory we actually wanted once he was calm again.
All of this had an unfortunate side effect I wasn’t expecting. It was one thing to drug and interrogate some insignificant middleborn asshole whose only interaction with me so far had consisted of him being pompous and violent. You could do pretty much whatever to a guy like that and not feel particularly bad. Fuck him, he had it coming.
It became less and less clear-cut, the more I got to know the life story of Calim Flaedthwyct, fencing instructor turned enforcer for Highlord Olumnach, and how conflicted he was about everything. Loyal to his Highlord, yes, out of gratitude for how the man had taken him in and elevated his status, even knowing Caldimer had only done so to engender exactly this kind of loyalty and didn’t much care about him on a personal level. Even so, he had a personal attachment to the family, having been an honest friend to the young Lord Arider and beset by grief and rage at the latter’s untimely death. That actually helped me regain some distance, remembering what a vile prick Arider had been and considering what kind of man would call him a friend.
Calim was the middleborn son of a woman of lower nobility practically sold to a higher-caste commoner because her Clan was financially desperate, disliked by the high and low alike until Olumnach had given him a place. He had married well, to a noblewoman who ensured his social place and with whom he shared a kind of congenial dislike. It was his lowborn mistress he really adored, along with the infant son she’d borne him, about whose future he was constantly worried because he knew what it was like to grow up without a solid place in the Fflyr caste system, and I didn’t want to know any of this.
It was so easy to kill random assholes waving swords at me. When they started having their own lives and perspectives and struggles, things got…sticky.
I wasn’t the only one, to judge by Youda and Aster’s frequent grimaces. Gizmit and Zui remained completely on point, however, just asking questions and writing down the answers, respectively. In and around the awkward backstory I did get what I needed—more of it than I’d hoped, even. Numbers and basic deployments of the Olumnach Clansguard, who I had to acknowledge could probably rout my forces if we gave them an open engagement. Names of officers, of Blessed along with a description of their spells and artifacts, and most importantly an account of the strategies and organization of the Olumnach agents overseeing his bandit forces in Gwyllthean. Getting that kind of intricate detail out of the drug-addled officer was what took the longest, but we got it.
Gizmit finally stepped back, nodding at Youda, who nodded back and then gave Flaedthwyct—I mean, the Olumnach officer whose name I didn’t need to know or want to remember—another shot of something that made him slump forward in silence.
“I believe that’s as much pertinent detail as one session can reasonably extract,” she said. “Lord Seiji?”
“It’s more than I expected,” I agreed. “Fantastic work, people. Please give Miss Sneppit my thanks for the loan of…well, you.”
“If that’s all we need here, then all that remains is to finish this guy off,” Gizmit said calmly. “Do you wish to do the necessary, Lord Seiji, or shall I?”
It brought me up short, I had to admit. After she’d just spent a couple of hours learning the man’s entire life story and talking to him in the gentlest tone I’d ever heard from her, it was utterly chilling how she could be so blasé about executing him.
“Hey, Youda,” I said, turning to him. “Do you have some…potential cocktail of drugs that can erase someone’s memory?”
“Well, I mean…” He scratched his head, squinting up at me. “Actually altering a person’s mind or memories is some pretty powerful magic. You can’t just do it with drugs, that’s not how brains work. Like, sure, there’s a number of things I could do to induce mental damage that tends to erase memory as a side effect. It does other stuff, too. Dunno if it’d be kinder.”
“It’s off the table, anyway,” Gizmit said in a much flatter tone. “Those methods are unreliable at best. Miss Sneppit agreed to the loan of her personnel and equipment, and sale of alchemical reagents, strictly on the grounds that you would take all available measures to ensure her security. The Fflyr cannot find out about our involvement here. Frankly, you’re exhausting any leeway in the arrangement by allowing these five goons to live, and that only because I have your assurance that they are shortly to be removed from the city.”
“Hey,” protested one of my new goons. I noted that the two who weren’t asleep at their posts had wandered in closer to observe the proceedings rather than keeping watch like they were supposed to. I could see Gizmit’s point.
“I know it’s a risk,” I said, trying a different angle, “but I am not being sentimental, Gizmit. My long-term plans involving Clan Olumnach do not include a direct confrontation. That means I need to minimize provocations, which are already going to be considerable enough. It affects my operations if one of his top people turns up missing or dead and the Highlord figures out who was behind it.”
“You’re not the only one behind it, or whose well-being would be threatened by Olumnach’s ire,” she retorted. “We had a deal, Lord Seiji.”
“Executing the prisoner was not one of the agreed-upon terms.”
“Security was,” she said with a hint of open exasperation. “Apparently I was at fault for assuming you would recognize that lesser measures are not acceptable.”
“Do not give me orders, Gizmit,” I said quietly.
Zui and Aster both tensed; Youda hunched his shoulders, avoiding everybody’s gaze.
“You know it’s not as if I can compel you, Lord Seiji,” Gizmit said after a short pause. “The question is whether you consider this guy worth damaging your relationship with Miss Sneppit.”
There was something significant here, I dimly realized. There was the obvious lesson in Gizmit’s work here, that power and domination didn’t require brutal methods, while a gentler approach didn’t necessarily portend mercy or compassion. I wasn’t sure quite how to apply that myself; in general, I was coming away with the impression that Sneppit’s people were a lot better at this than I. In a way, this dilemma was a microcosm of everything I was doing wrong and didn’t know how to fix.
Damn it, I needed these goblins. This was a bridge I couldn’t afford to burn. Leaving aside Biribo’s advice that goblins were a good early addition to the forces of any Dark Lord, I had already come to rely on them and the tendency of the Fflyr to underestimate them, and this was only working at arm’s length. They had real expertise,something my organization lacked—well, except for Sakin, maybe. Plus, after the last conversational tripwire Gizmit had laid for me, I was pretty sure Sneppit and Maugro at least knew about the Dark Lord thing. Knew, and had kept it to themselves.
That counted for something.
I turned my gaze on the slumbering Calim Flaedthwyct. Fuck, why did I have to know his name? I couldn’t escape thinking about his illegitimate child. What would happen to him without a well-bred, well-connected father in the picture?
Then again, did Calim have a penchant for maiming Gutter Rats, the way his bestie Arider had cheerfully talked about doing?
All of this would be so much simpler if those questions had solid answers, one way or the other.
“No,” I said at last. “No, you’re right. Obviously Sneppit is more important to me than this asshole. Youda, do you have something in that kit of yours that’s lethal in a high enough dose?”
“Uh, Lord Seiji,” he said with a weak grin, “it’s a basic rule of chemistry that anything is lethal in a high enough dose.”
“Something painless, specifically.”
“Oh, hell, that’s easy. I can pump him full of a concentrated solution of general anesthetic we use for surgery. Too much of that in one dose will cause the brain to just shut down in a last surge of bliss. It’s not just painless, it’s anti-painful!”
“Sounds perfect,” I nodded. “Proceed, please.”
“You got it, Lord Seiji.”
“That anesthetic is, as he said, used for surgery,” Gizmit said with clear annoyance. “It’s also derived from components that aren’t native to Dount. It isn’t easy to get the reagents.”
“I’ll pay for them,” I sighed, “as we agreed.”
“Selling that stuff in particular wasn’t part of the original agreement.”
“Nor was it precluded by said agreement.” I turned to face her directly. “Meet me halfway, Gizmit. And maybe appreciate that I’m doing the same for you. Most of the people I deal with don’t get that much courtesy.”
“He’s not kidding,” Aster added when Gizmit hesitated. “Our last big business meeting was with the heads of a Clan. The option he gave them was to do as they were told and like it. And they took that deal.”
“Well,” Gizmit said at last, “I’m not sure how thrilled Miss Sneppit will be, but she will probably prefer to err on the side of diplomacy.”
“You know full well she would,” Zui stated. “Reagents are replaceable, even if not easily. We’d have a much harder time finding another…y’know, him.”
“Anyway, it’s moot now,” Youda declared, withdrawing another syringe from Flaedthwyct’s arm. “He’s gone.”
Gizmit sighed but made no further comment.
“I’ll write out my notes in longhand for you, Lord Seiji,” said Zui, holding up the clipboard. “Just give me an hour, and—”
“No need.” I took the papers from her, which she allowed with a brief grimace of dissatisfaction, I suspected only because holding onto them would have resulted in her hard work getting torn. “This is fine. Thanks, Zui, I can transcribe any relevant sections into Fflyr if any of the rest of my people need details.”
“There’s no way you can read that,” Zui protested incredulously. “That’s my personal shorthand, based on Khadzid!”
I gave her my sweetest smile, which only served to visibly piss her off. Wow, Zui really was starting to remind me of some of my exes.
Turning, I made eye contact again with Gizmit, who was now watching me with the kind of blank expression that always conceals intense thoughts. Yeah, she knew. If she hadn’t before, definitely now. All of this was a calculated risk.
“Thanks for your hard work,” I said. “You can tell Miss Sneppit that her assumption is correct…and that her strategy is working. I will definitely remember those who helped me when I needed it.”
“I’ll be sure to pass that along.” Gizmit nodded once, slowly, then smirked. “Your hair looks nice, by the way.”
“Of course it does,” I said with a benign smile. “Miss Sneppit only employs the very best.”
Zui snorted.
Comments
Amelgar
lol, that could also be applied to our good friend Seiji as well ;D
Luker number 5
I mean I like the goblins and can appreciate why they're acting the way they are but it getting close to the line where they're annoying but useful assets then someone I'd want alive.
Ian Tonelli
Morning Chapter! Whoo!
