Chapter 28: 26 – Old Quarter

Eventually, after nearly half an hour of following Strolvath’s unwavering lead through the city’s tangled veins, he stopped at a steep staircase from the bottom of which loud music and hollering echoed. At the top of the staircase, around some sort of board game, sat three men who looked as grizzled as they looked old, their snow-white skins tanned to waxy hides and their bodies covered in scars. They wore a mixture of modern mass-produced clothing and articles from military uniforms as archaic as themselves, hand-woven striped shirts and hand-cobbled steel toe boots, they even each had a distinct belt wrought of different leather to the others. The most imposing of the three had leg-plates of the same make as Zel’s, though his bore so many scars and scrapes that not a single contiguous surface was left upon them.

Each of them bore a sabre at his side, and each of them a firearm - one a wheellock rifle on his back, one a belt of four sparklock pistols across his chest, and one a sparklock blunderbuss on the side opposite his blade.

At their approach, the three men turned their heads from their game and rose to their feet, barring any access to the stairs with razor-sharp stares and hands hovering near their weapons. They made no effort to conceal their battle-ready stances, each overtly placing his weight on the heel of his left foot - neither did they conceal their recognition of Strolvath.

Aged though they were, they moved not like old men, the muscles which coiled beneath their hides were not those of rickety grandfathers. These were men amongst men, tempered by age, doubtlessly having grown old in a profession where men die young. With but a glance, Zelsys felt that they weren’t just strapped with weapons for the looks, that they were some of this city’s last surviving true warriors. Why they were here, she couldn’t know - perhaps they’d stayed behind knowing their peers would die, or perhaps they had been rejected from service for one reason or another.

Each of them wore rather impressive facial hair - left to right a meticulously-groomed mustache, an imposing full beard, and a goatee pointy enough to cut glass with. Two of them had greying black hair, while the man in the center had gone entirely white despite the fact he exuded the most powerful presence. Were she to guess, Zel would point him out as the trio’s leader. 

Her mind had already assigned them nicknames according to their facial hair, for that was the easiest to distinguish about each one at a glance - Stache, Whitebeard, Goatee. 

And still, Zelsys towered head and shoulders above the three of them.

Whitebeard regarded Strolvath with a friendly, if cautious eye, and spoke with the exact voice Zelsys had expected. Deep, old, and wizened. Like a cannonball rolling across a ship’s deck.

“My my, which star has fallen from the heavens to make the First of the Victory Demons grace our little speakeasy with his presence?” he prodded, then immediately turned his ice-cold gaze to Zelsys. “And dragging a foreigner in tow, nonetheless.”

The beginnings of a word came from Strol’s mouth, but Whitebeard cut him off: “Shut. I can still smell the Tar on you. I’m not having you puke blood on the cobbles.”

Once more, his gaze turned to Zelsys, “Besides, I don’t need affirmations of your trust. Tell me girly. Why do you think you should be allowed to take so much as one step down those stairs? How do I know that you’re not working for occupanionists or somesuch?”

Yet again did Strolvath pipe up, and yet again did Whitebeard cut him off, his voice hardened and cold, “Don’t. Let her speak for herself. Go on, I’m listening.”

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The thought of simply displaying her cleaver crossed her mind, but then, she didn’t expect that to be the sort of convincing this old man wanted. So it was that she raised her good hand, so that Whitebeard could see the back of it. 

“Under my fingernails is blood from more Pateirians than I can be bothered to count,” she said.

“Lost your arm to some zipperhead then, I take it?” Stache grumbled a question. That was when she noticed that he was missing most of his right hand, as he crumpled what was left of it into a facsimile of a fist.

“Something of the sort,” she nodded to him.

She knew better than to go freely disclosing the events that had transpired in the dungeon.

“How’d it feel? Killing that many people?” probed Whitebeard. There was no accusation in his voice, only cautious curiosity.

Zel couldn’t help but jokingly respond: “I wouldn’t know. I’ve only killed locusts.”

He stared up at her, then looked down at Strolvath, then back at her, a smile slowly pushing its way to the forefront of his face. The three old men started laughing amongst themselves and uttering phrases in Ikesian so archaic and heavily accented that Zel didn’t even try to understand, opting to just follow in their stead down that cramped, murderously steep staircase into the earth.

Liquor, tobacco, body odor - the perfume of an old pub. That stench filled her nostrils halfway down the stairs. A few stairs more, a right turn, a short walk through a tunnel so low that she had to bend down just to pass. There was no bouncer before the door at the end of that tunnel.

It was a slab of solid metal upon which Whitebeard knocked a brief staccato, prompting a slot to open up at eye-height. A pair of cautious eyes from past the slot swept over them, saw that Whitebeard was with them, and shut the slot. 

Clanking and metal scraping against metal sounded from the other side of the door, and it opened with nary a sound. Or perhaps it did creak, but the ironically raucous noise of the speakeasy drowned out what noise the door did make. Whitebeard and Strolvath exchanged brief utterances in Old Ikesian, and the three men made their way back down the tunnel. 

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