13: The Adel Ring

So, mum, I think I will end up sending this letter in two halves, because I think so much is happening, I won’t be able to fit it all in one envelope.

Over the garlic mushrooms with too much garlic we had discussed going up to the Teugen house and posing as window cleaners, again. It would only take a few minutes to go back up there, but as we Halflings like to do, after a meal, we stretched out the conversation and there were many digressions and much debate about what we should actually do. This wasn’t helped by none of us knowing what was really going on.

Blume still seemed to think we were hunting the sewer monster for which she would get paid a hundred crowns if she brought it to Doctor Malthusius. Brandy seemed to think that something nefarious was about to happen and it was up to us to stop it. Dreamy was all about protecting Willow from whatever it was. I didn’t really know what was happening, and Willow didn’t seem to mind what was happening, but was just going along with the rest of us. And she interrupted our conversation to visit baby Elsa in her parents’ cabin, who had been remarkably quiet for our stay in Boegenhafen. Blume said she had often heard a squealing baby, but then said that was Willow not Else, which was a bit rude of her (I don’t think I squeal like a baby – Willow).

I had a word with Josef who said he would be leaving the next morning, so this was our last evening in Boegenhafen. I think I kind of like it here, despite some of the strange things that have been happening. But strange things have happened everywhere we’ve been, and as we would be heading back to Altdorf the next day, strange things had certainly happened there. Josef said he would be glad to have me as crew for the voyage back down the Boegen, and he would be happy for the rest of us to help out, even Blume. Even so, I knew we might be out late tonight, so I made him promise not to leave without us.

It took us a good hour of chat on the Berebeli to work out what to do, but by the time we had got back to the Adel Ring we still didn’t have a clear plan, and it was past sunset. Our window cleaning ruse seemed to become less believable with every passing minute.

We were talking about the idea that there might be a new secret temple under the Teugen vampire house and that we should find it before anything could start to happen. We spent some time on the ring looking for sewer entrances, but we couldn’t find any. Perhaps, as Blume said, rich people don’t need sewers because they eat better food than us, but she didn’t put it as delicately as that. She really is becoming increasingly crude and I think perhaps her airs and graces are put on.

The Adel Ring was quite busy with some wealthy people taking evening walks, often with bodyguards, and lots of watch were about, making sure they were safe. I think we might have stood out a bit. In the middle of the ring was a big park called the Von Saponatheim Gardens. It was locked up for the evening, and I think only the local rich people are allowed in, but Willow found she could squeeze in between the bars, and the garden made a good place to hide and watch the rest of the ring. Willow got distracted by all the plants and flowers, anyway.

It was not long before we saw the large figure of Franz Steinhaeger crossing the Adel Ring (he lived just across the way) carrying a small package wrapped in cloth. He had a couple of bodyguards in tow and so we decided not to talk to him, especially as he had rubbished Blume’s idea for importing Shaffron.

There were a couple of servants on the gates to the Teugen compound and they had a quiet word with Steinhaeger and then let him through. Unfortunately these were not the same servants that had let Brandy and Blume do the window cleaning earlier. But we went up to them anyway. We had the great idea to pretend that Blume had been sacked for poor window cleaning, (which meant her Sigmar-awful window cleaning from earlier had been good foreshadowing) and that Brandy was coming along for remedial cleaning, with his boss, me, and a new window cleaning assistant, Dreamy.

I like to think that we got into character and inhabited our roles and were very convincing window cleaners. But in any case, they wouldn’t let us in. But when we were talking to them, we noticed a couple of heavily armed and armoured soldiers in Teugen livery stood further back from the gate.

While we were doing that, Blume noticed another well-dressed man crossing the Adel Ring carrying a similar package to Steinhaeger’s. She wrapped her blunderbuss in her cloak and pretended it was a similar sort of package, even though it didn’t look anything like them, and told him that she was going where he was going. The person didn’t seem to want to interact with Blume and hurried on.

And then she picked on another similar package carrier. She said that she was delivering her package on behalf of her master and that they should go together. This man walked on too, and when he got to Teugen’s gate he pointedly told the servants that Blume wasn’t with him, and so they let him in, but not her. She told them about her package, and they offered to take it off her hands, but she of course refused and had to walk away.

So Blume retreated back to the gardens, and spoke through the railings to Willow. She had the idea of taking the place of one of the guests, but that would mean waylaying them, putting them out of action, taking their package, and then pretending to be them. This was a very bold move and she decided that she would wait by the Ruggbroder house and wait for a Ruggbroder to emerge and attack them.

Soon enough, though, the gates to the Teugen house were closed, and it was clear that had any Ruggbroders been going to the meeting, then they had already gone. Undaunted, Blume stayed hidden underneath the steps to the Ruggbroder house until she was moved on by a watchman.

We left Blume at the Ruggbroder house, and all slipped through the bars of the gardens and had a chat. The garden was a good, hidden place to watch the Teugen  house from, and if we moved around a bit we could also watch the other houses in the ring. We decided that something nefarious might happen at midnight, and that if we saw nothing happening at the Teugens by about half elven, then the temple must be in the Teugen house and we should attack it by storming the walls.

So I ran back to the Berebeli to get a couple of boat hooks and some rope so we could use them to climb the tall compound walls. Willow talked about getting all the Lowhavens together and making an army and attacking with them, but Brandy explained that wasn’t really how the clan worked, and they were more low-key than that. And Blume eventually came back and sat outside the garden (she was too big to squeeze in) and loaded her gun.

We talked about the prophesy that the mad man on the docks had shouted. I’m not sure why we were paying so much attention to him, but we were. It might be because he said something about seven and then we discovered the Ordo Septenarius. But we hadn’t really spotted any nines. Blume made up something about four, which the man hadn’t mentioned, but she insisted he had. And Willow said that perhaps the man who isn’t a man meant a vampire. And we all agreed that was probably true. So maybe there was something in it.

We also talked about the warehouse that they said the three-legged goblin had been found in, warehouse number four, and that it might be a good location for the temple. Blume and Brandy said they would go down and check it out. I thought about investigating the idea of a warehouse where the goblin had not been found, by people who had not found it, numbered with a number nobody had said, being the location of a temple that probably didn’t exist, and pretended I was too tired from collecting the boat hooks to  go with them. I’m sure it was a good idea, however.

We also thought about telling the watch about everything, but decided they probably wouldn’t believe us, and they would be on the side of rich locals rather than poor strangers. The others lamented not having an inside contact in the watch, but I think even if I had stayed in the watch for the full two days (instead of the two minutes I actually lasted), I don’t think I would have risen in rank high enough to order the watchmen to help us out.

Brandy and Blume reached the warehouse and discovered that it was all locked up and dark and the windows were too dirty to see through. They used the crowbar to try to force the main door and they managed to get it to move a bit, but then spotted a lantern coming towards them from the dockside. Brandy quickly darted down a dark alleyway and told Blume to follow him. I’m not sure exactly what happened next, and it is a bit unbelievable, but as best as I can make out from Brandy and Blume’s confused accounts after the fact, is that Blume got it into her head that Brandy was trying to entice her down the alleyway for impertinent and possibly licentious ends, and that (even more unbelievably) she was such a lady that she was above that sort of thing. So she adamantly refused to go down the alleyway leaving her to be discovered by the lantern wielding figure.

The figure, an old watchman with a white beard, demanded to know what Blume was doing. And Blume, so demure that she dare not venture into an indelicate alleyway, told him she was having a pee. The watchman told her to do it in the river like everyone else, but she said she was bursting, and she was currently in full flow.

Suspecting foul play, and Blume was certainly being foul, the watchman pulled out a cosh. In response (I don’t believe she was actually peeing at this point) Blume levelled her blunderbuss at him and demanded to be allowed to relieve herself in peace. The watchman shouted, ‘thief’ and whistled loudly. And then he smashed her across the head with his cosh. Seeing this, Brandy slinged at him, but his stone missed, and Blume, just as haplessly, tried to hit the watchman with the butt of her blunderbuss.

Blume’s protest that all she said was that she wanted to have a pee and he started whistling, was cut short as the watchmen hit her again and she fell unconscious. Then he called down the alleyway to Brandy that he should take his friend and go home. After a bit of hesitation and some hiding Brandy walked out and agreed that he would. And then the watchman’s two big dogs turned up, making him glad that he had. Blume soon regained consciousness and Brandy was able to feed her some of Elvyra Kleinestun’s healing draught, which seemed to word remarkably well, and she got to her feet.

Meanwhile back at the Adel Ring the gates to the Teugen compound opened again and a number of people left, carrying their packages. I was glad they did, because I had not been looking forward to storming the compound at midnight. There were five people carrying packages, and they had a number of bodyguards between them. We recognised Franz Steinhaeger and Friedrich Magirius among them, so I followed Steinhaeger and Willow followed Magirius, while Dreamy kept an eye on the Teugen house.

Following Steinhaeger was a bit pointless as he only lived across the way and went straight to his house. Willow contrived to bump into Magirius however. She got out her sketch book and pretended to be sketching and bumped into him. Willow told him she was sketching as she would be leaving town tomorrow. Magirius said that something had happened, and he would like her to come round to his house in the morning. He looked pensive and rattled. And luckily too preoccupied to wonder why Willow might be sketching at night. Willow came back to tell us and thought that perhaps he had just found out that Teugen was a vampire.

Meanwhile, the watchman had watched Blume and Brandy leave the warehouse district, but as soon as they were out of sight, they agreed to have another go at breaking into the warehouse. They agreed that what had just happened had never happened and if it had happened it had actually happened to Brandy and not Willow, and they agreed never to mention it again. And Blume said she was starting to trust Brandy and that maybe they could be friends.

At the warehouse, this time they went for speed, with Brandy quickly breaking a window and Blume helping him climb through it. Brandy lit a candle and could see that inside the warehouse there were just lots of stacks of crates with no room for a secret temple and no hidden rooms or anything like that. And so they headed back to the Adel Ring.

As soon as they got back Brandy told everyone, in Mootish, that Blume had peed herself, and though she couldn’t understand, she guessed what we were all laughing at and got mad at Brandy and gave him a punch. And then she denied everything, but you have to wonder how she knew what we were talking about if it wasn’t true.

Then to distract us, Blume told everyone how they had beaten up a watchman and let his dogs maul him to death, or something. It wasn’t very believable. I could see that Blume had lots of cuts and bruises on her face and head, and I asked Willow if she had anything to put on Blume’s head. And Willow said, ‘what, like a hat?’ I don’t think she’s really cut out to be a doctor (I am, though, Mrs. Chard, it was just a misunderstanding – Willow). In the end, Willow just kissed it better, but I don’t think it could have done much good (I think it did – Willow). And Blume even volunteered to fill out one of Willow’s feedback forms, and although she did give her a smiley face, it wasn’t a very big one.

After a good while of sitting around in the Von Saponatheim Gardens with nothing at all happening, we started thinking about climbing the Teugen’s wall for a better look at the house. Dreamy was a bit reluctant, but asked Blume very gravely if she would look after Willow while we were gone, and Blume said she would. She was in no state to be going herself, as she had just been beaten unconscious by that watchman.

So Dreamy, Brandy, and I went around to the back of the Teugen compound and used the boat hook grapples to climb up onto the top of the wall, and then down into the Teugen’s garden. They had a gazebo that Brandy remembered from the window cleaning, so we aimed to land behind that.

I thought we would just be watching the house from the wall but Brandy decided to jump down and approach the house. And Dreamy went with him because that seemed to be his job. I told Brandy that I should probably stay back on the wall to guard the ropes but he said he thought we should all do it together.

I explained to him about making fences because when you make a fence you need someone to dig the holes and someone to put the stakes in. If everyone just digs holes then you just end up with a ditch. But Brandy seemed to think that meant we should all dig a ditch together and insisted I come with them. I think he had got carried away with his adventures in warehouse number four and was getting a bit overconfident. So I did climb down into the compound with the other two, but before I did I pulled the rope up on the outside so no one walking past would see it.

As we approached the house, we could see a dog asleep on the floor outside the back door. Brandy still seemed determined to try to get into the house. Dreamy was standing quite a way back, now, covering us with his bow, and I explained to Brandy that I should probably stay back, too.

I did join the watch, which was quite brave, and then I left after a couple of minutes. But then I also sneaked into the Steinhaeger offices when I shouldn’t have, and that was brave, even though I sneaked out again pretty quickly. And I pretended to be a table-ling and got into the merchants’ guild, and that was brave, even though I ran out again, straight away. So now, I think it was brave enough going into the Teugen complex, especially with the heavily armed guards we had seen, and the sleeping dog, and everything. And now was probably a good time to leave.

But before I could explain all that, Brandy had gone up to the back door and sneaked past the dog. The first thing he saw in the house was three dog bowls. Instead of wondering where the other two dogs were, Brandy decided that they must have just one very thirsty dog.

Meanwhile, back in the garden, the clouds parted, and Willow and Blume could see that Morrslieb was very big in the sky, and its reflection in the park’s fountain was even bigger. And as they watched the moon seemed to take on a more skull-like appearance, and the face of the skull became very clear. And then the moon face skull monster thing seemed to look at the pair of them and lick its lips.

And, if that’s not strange enough, mum, although they may have been exaggerating a bit (No, we weren’t. That was exactly what Blume and I saw – Willow), Brandy made his way through the Teugen house and got to the bottom of the stairs in the entrance hall. He looked beneath the stairs hoping to find a stairway down to the cellar, or something like that, but there was nothing like that. But then he noticed a flickering pink light coming from the top of the stairs. I imagine it was not unlike the flickering pink light that surrounded the sewer monster. And then he heard footsteps coming down the stairs, and saw the stern boy that Blume had described earlier.

Brandy tried to apologise for being there, but the boy spoke to him and when he spoke he spoke with many voices at once. I’m not sure what that would be like, but that’s what Brandy said. And the boy said to Brandy with his strange voices, ‘I think you really should have left well enough alone.’

Anyway mum, I have to finish this letter so I can fit it in the envelope, but I will tell you the rest of the story soon. This is just like when Posey Meadows fell over Miller’s Bluff and was left hanging onto the side of the cliff. Nobody knew what was going to happen next.