8: The Sewers

Hi mum, me again. It doesn’t feel like more than a couple of hours ago that I last wrote, because it wasn’t. It’s certainly all go here in Boegenhafen, and we’ve been rushed off our feet. A great many things have happened since my last letter, some of them frightening, some of them very strange indeed, and some of them downright disgusting, so I suggest you don’t let little Daisy hear this part of the tale, or she will barf (I certainly barfed – Willow).

Remember we had agreed to find the three-legged goblin for Doctor Malthusius and he was going to give us five crowns for it. So the first thing we did was go to the city wall to see where it had disappeared to. We found a small grate in the base of the wall, which I think was for drainage. The grate had been broken open, but it was still very narrow and too small even for us to go through. But we did see some greenish-reddish-blackish blood around the grate which must have come from the goblin.

One thing, though, the smell coming up through the grate was pretty terrible. And we realised that it must lead to the sewers. We didn’t really want to be traipsing around the sewers looking for dangerous goblins, but we had agreed to do the job, and they were going to pay us five crowns, so that was that.

We were glad the goblin was bleeding because we thought that might slow it down a bit. Three-legged creatures are fast, I think, and I told everyone about Farmer Applebee breeding three legged chickens. Everyone in the moot likes a nice drumstick because they are delicious. And farmer Applebee thought that if he could breed three-legged chickens, he could get three drumsticks out of each one, which was a good idea. And so, he ended up with a lot of three-legged chickens running around his farm. But when we asked him what the new chickens tasted like, he said, ‘I dunno, I ain’t caught none, yet!’. That was a joke.

So, as we couldn’t get through the grate, we decided we needed to go into the city and get down to the sewers from there and hope to find the goblin’s trail that way. We found a helpful watchman who took us through the town gates and to a manhole on one of the streets. He opened the manhole and gave us a ladder.

I think we spent rather a long time trying to work out exactly how best to use the ladder, but we eventually managed it. Blume said we weren’t Halflings we were halfwits, which was a bit rude, again, but I didn’t notice her trying to help with it, even though she says she’s an engineer. Then Dreamy climbed down and managed to swing himself across, away from the sewage into a walkway than ran alongside it. Then he repositioned the ladder to make it easier for the rest of us to climb down.

I have to say that when I began to climb down the ladder, the smell was terrible. Willow said it smelled worse than Nanny Poppyseed’s bedpan, which was saying something (it was far worse than that – Willow). Brandy got some garlic and shoved some up his nose and gave me some. But he was already looking a bit peaky, and I’m not sure the garlic helped much. Willow was looking very pale, too, and she and Dreamy got some cloth, which I think was from an old shirt, and tied it around their faces.

I think Blume was going to chicken out of coming down with us, but at the last moment she decided to come anyway. I think she hated the idea but she couldn’t let the chance of earning a gold crown go, even though she keeps boasting about how much money she will have when her father comes back from the Spice Islands.

She quickly changed from her new dress into her old clothes, in the street, and Brandy asked me to report back on her feet, but she was wearing stockings, so we’re still none the wiser. As she was getting down the ladder, she said her dooming was ‘High places mean a low end.’ But, I think, we weren’t in a high place, so that was alright, and also, I think human doomings are nonsense.

Down in the sewers it was smelly, and dark, and cramped, but not in a good way. I tried telling everyone that it wasn’t that bad, but I don’t think I was very convincing. Willow was looking nervous, and she gave Brandy, Dreamy, and me, a healing draught each, that she had bought at the Schaffenfest, just in case we needed it. I don’t really believe in healing draughts, but Willow is the expert and she seemed to think they would work. And if you’re faced with death, you’ll try anything, I expect. And she said Blume could have a poultice, whatever that is.

We decided that the sewers were so dark and twisty that we might get lost, even though Willow has an excellent sense of direction (I do have an excellent sense of direction, Mrs. Chard, everyone says so – Willow), and so Willow got her writing stuff out, and as we went along, she made a map of where we went.

I think Brandy was a bit nervous, too, because he got a bit annoyed at us all for fussing about, and he grabbed the lantern and set off towards the town walls. Dreamy followed him with Willow sticking close to her cousin, and then Blume followed them, and I felt it was the responsible thing to do to go last just in case anything jumped out at us from behind.

After a brief, but very unpleasant trek, we spotted a shaft going upwards towards the light and it was smeared with blood, so we decided it must be where the goblin had come down. And we could clearly see the blood on the walkway on the other side of the sewage channel. We thought we might have to jump over the channel, but luckily the tunnel came to a dead end and we were able to change sides staying on the walkway, and then we could follow the goblin’s tracks further into the city.

But after a bit the blood disappeared from our side and appeared on the other side. So the goblin, despite its wound, had managed to jump across (or perhaps wade through the sewage) and we had to follow it. It was quite a big jump for Halfling legs and we weren’t sure we could make it. As Blume was the tallest, we tried to convince her to stand in the middle of the river of sewage and help us all across one by one, but of course she wasn’t prepared to help us, so we all had to jump for it.

Dreamy went first and just managed to scramble up to the walkway and only got about half a foot full of sewage on him. Then Blume went and she leapt across the gap so gracefully it was very impressive. I asked her whether she did ballet. I think all bigs probably do a bit of ballet. It’s just like dancing but not as fun.

Then Willow jumped across and she made it quite comfortably. And I followed her, and I thought I might fall in, but Willow and Dreamy grabbed me at the last moment, and pulled me across, and I only got a bit of a foot full, too. Then Brandy tried. He is not the smallest dumpling in the stew, and as well as looking a bit nauseous, I could tell he was a bit nervous of the jump, but he took all his heavy things off and passed them over to us, and then made his jump very well. I’m not sure what all the fuss was about.

So we all made it across the sewage river and continued to follow the goblin blood tracks. They made a sharp left turn and then followed that channel for a long way. We all had to walk in strict single file because the walkway was so narrow. We passed many smaller channels that were all feeding this larger channel. I suppose it must have got smellier and smellier but we were all too smelled out to tell. WiIlow tried to make polite conversation but I’m not sure this was the place for it. She asked Blume if she had been down many sewers, and Blume was rude, again.

Brandy heard Blume being rude to Willow but was at the other end of the line. I think he wanted to make sure Willow wasn’t upset, but he had to squeeze past Blume to get to her. And Blume wanted him to squeeze past on the outside so he would be closest to the sewage, and he wanted to squeeze past on the inside, and after a bit of a struggle, they both fell in.

Oh my gosh, I think this was the worst thing that ever happened, and if little Daisy is still listening, she should have closed her ears a couple of minutes ago. Brandy is of course a very large Halfling and he made a big splash in the sewage, and Blume is little for a big but big for us, and she made an even bigger splash, and they scrambled to their feet, covered in Boegenhafen’s effluent, and faced each other angrily, arguing over whose fault it all was.

And then Brandy was overcome by everything, and puked up his last couple of meals, so that made everything worse. I had to look away, but at the same time, I had to look. And I wondered what Foxy Shortbottom would say when Brandy turned up to the Half-measure looking like that in a couple of hours’ time.

Willow wiped Brandy’s face a bit to clean it up, but I think it didn’t do very much for the over all impression. And Willow said to Blume that what goes around comes around, which seemed a little bit mean in the circumstances, but I could understand it, as she was mad at Blume.

And we had nothing else to do but to continue. Dreamy, Willow and I pressed on, but Blume and Brandy held back a bit because they were still more interested in arguing about whose fault the falling in the sewage had been. We were still following the bloody footprints of the three-legged goblin and I was beginning to wonder how much blood it actually contained, but I suppose the third leg gave it an extra pint, or so.

After what seemed like a very long time, but I suspect was only a minute or so, Dreamy spotted a hump of something or other in the channel that seemed to be blocking the sewage flow. And there was a large dog-sized rat sat on top of it. When the rat saw us, it swam off, luckily. As he got closer Dreamy recognised what the blockage was.

It was the poor old dwarf Gottri who we had seen in the pillory a few hours before at the Schaffenfest. And his body had been severely mutilated. It had been cut up very badly and it had had its heart ripped out. Dreamy and I had seen a body in a similar state earlier today when we investigated the crossbowman behind the lawyer’s office. It seems to us that whatever had killed the crossbowman had also killed Gottri. We gave each other an uneasy look, and I wondered out loud whether this thing had been following us about, or we had been following it. But Dreamy cut me off because he didn’t want Willow to hear it for fear of upsetting her even more.

Willow said it was very sad and said that Gottri would have been better off in the stocks. I think she was thinking that as she had paid the dwarf’s fine, then that meant it was partly her fault he was now dead. But I told her it wasn’t as she couldn’t have known what was going to happen and, anyway, she was just being kind.

We wondered whether there might be something on Gottri’s body that we should rescue, maybe a letter to his mother or something like that. Blume then pretended to read an imaginary letter which said ‘Dear mum, I have been eaten by a rat, ow!’ which wasn’t very funny at all. And Willow got mad at this. I think Blume felt bad about that, in the end, and said a blessing to Sigmar on Gottri’s behalf, which was probably nice of her, even if Dwarfs don’t worship Sigmar.

We couldn’t find anything useful on Gottri’s body at all, which is probably not surprising, as I expect the only things he had in the whole world were the clothes we found on his mutilated corpse. We decided that the least we could do was to pull his body out of the shit and rest it on the walkway. That would be something, and maybe we could report it to the watch and they would come and get it. But Blume said the watch didn’t care about stuff like that, and we shouldn’t either.

I think Brandy suddenly realised that everything that was happening would get put in a letter back to you, mum, and he asked me not to put the bit about him falling in the sewer and getting covered in shit in this letter, and I told him I wouldn’t. He said that if I did, then it would go all round the Mootland pretty quick and everyone would be having a laugh at his expense. Then someone would think up calling him Brandyfoot Shitbottom, and that would make everyone laugh, and he wouldn’t be able to go anywhere in the Mootland without people calling out, ‘Hey, here’s Brandyfoot Shitbottom!’ all the time, and saying things like, ‘Brandy’s got a shit bottom.’

I had to agree that that would probably happen coz Halflings like a good laugh about things like that and at the end of the day there’s nothing funnier than someone falling in some shit. So I promised I wouldn’t put it in, but then Willow convinced me to put it in anyway (Yes I did, Mrs Chard, because I thought it would give you all a much needed laugh in the middle of a pretty frightening letter – Willow).

And so, we followed the blood some more and discovered that we had to turn right, now, which meant we all had to jump over the sewage channel again. We were getting a bit better at it by now, and we all made it across.

Now Blume was leading, and Dreamy was carrying the lantern for her, which probably wasn’t a great arrangement as she was the biggest and so she was getting in the way of the light. But suddenly the goblin blood trail ended at a sturdy door set into the wall of the sewers. It seemed a bit of an unusual place to have a door, but I supposed if someone had a cellar, or something like that, they might want one.

There was a barred window in the door at head height, for bigs. So Blume could just reach it by standing on tip-toes. She looked in but couldn’t see much, and she couldn’t see the goblin. Willow decided to slip past us and follow the walkway down a bit more just in case the goblin had gone that way, but it wasn’t long before she came back to tell us it hadn’t.

And so Dreamy and Brandy barged into the door to see if they could open it and after a couple of blows, they managed to break the bolt and force the door open. They burst into a stone-built rectangular room which had a weird design on the floor. It had a large round metal ring that stretched nearly across the whole room, and in that ring there was a big star (it had eight points, I think) painted on it. And every point of the star had a candle in it, but the candles weren’t lit. And in the middle of the star there was a painting of a goat, or a goat man, or a scary horned creature, or something like that. And also in the star there was some writing which Willow later told us said Ordo Septenarius, but she didn’t know what that meant.

And beyond the circle there was a closed metal cupboard that had some dark liquid beneath it. And there were no other doors in the room. But close to our door there were the remains of some broken and chewed bones, and there was a three socketed pelvis among them. And there was a lot of what looked like goblin blood all across the room.

Willow said she would get the pelvis, and Dreamy and Brandy started to go further into the room. We were all going to join them, but suddenly something strange emerged from the middle of the circle. It looked like bits of light, but soon they formed into lots of eyes and tentacles and arms, and it became a huge, monstrous creature.

Willow screamed and legged it, and so did Brandy, and Blume followed them. Dreamy nocked his arrow and I drew my sword, and we stood firm, wondering what this thing was. But as we watched it, it changed shape, and shimmered, and grew more eyes and tentacles, and other strange stuff. It was very confusing. And although it was making an unintelligible gibbering noise, we could hear it talking to us in our heads.

We understood that we weren’t allowed to stay, that the goblin wasn’t allowed to stay, either, but it didn’t understand and so it got eaten. We didn’t want to get eaten, so we quickly backed away. Willow was screaming our names, and Blume and Brandy were running down the walkway, and the creature was making a terrible howling, and it was all very frightening. We backed out of the room, shut the door behind us, and made our way down the walkway.

When we had all got back together, we were cheered by the thought that we had the pelvis as that would be proof we had found the goblin, but Willow said she had been so frightened she hadn’t picked it up in the end. I’m sorry if I got a bit mad at Willow. I was probably a bit mean to her about that (that’s ok – Willow) because that was what we needed to get paid.

And so Dreamy and I prepared to go back into the room and get the pelvis. And, good for him, even though he was very frightened, Brandy said he would go with us. Blume said she would stay behind so she could tell our families how we died. And Willow stayed with Blume to hold her hand.

As we approached the door again, we could hear mad giggling, and strange sounds coming from behind it, and flickering lights were shining through the window. We decided that Brandy would open the door, and Dreamy would have his bow ready, and I would reach inside and grab the pelvis, and Brandy would close the door again as quickly as possible.

So that’s what we tried to do, but as I grabbed the pelvis, one of the creature’s limbs flailed at me and seemed to hit me, but instead it sort of passed right through me, or flickered, or something, and I didn’t feel a thing. Brandy shot an arrow at it and I think the same sort of thing happened and the arrow just disappeared inside the creature’s form. But I had the pelvis, and we ran, and I think brandy forgot to shut the door.

We ran back down the walkway cheering and very pleased with ourselves for getting our prize and getting away from the monster. I even forgot myself and gave Blume a quick hug and got covered in shit.

We were very glad we could leave the sewers and Willow managed to find the way straight back to the ladder. We did have to cross the sewage channel again and I dragged my feet in it again, but by now I was so used to the smell, and everything, I didn’t really mind.

Willow fell right in it, unfortunately, and she was so overcome she barfed up her dinner, so she was in a bit of a state. It was good, though, that we were on our way out of the sewers, and we would never have to go back in them, again.

As soon as we climbed the ladder, we went straight to the river, the cleanest bit upriver of the town, and had a good swim and a nice wash, and it made us feel a lot better. Even though it was cold and not that clean, it was one of the best baths I have ever had, I think everyone else thought so, too.

So, don’t worry mum. Even though it must have all sounded very frightening and a bit disgusting, we’re all safe and we’re all clean-ish. Brandy has to play cards at the Half-measure quite soon, and he reckons his clothes will dry off on the stove of the Berebeli. We might even be able to get a quick nap before we have to go out again. Blume has to meet Sergeant Fate for a drink, but if I were her I’d steer clear of him for a couple of days if she doesn’t want to blow her chances.

This has been an extremely busy day and I’m looking forward to finally getting down for a proper night’s sleep if that ever happens. And it has been a long letter, but a lot has happened and I wanted to explain it all because it’s all very strange, and I bet if you were just to say little bits of it no one would believe you. But put all together like this, I suppose it doesn’t sound that believable either. But I promise you, it all happened. I will write again soon.