Only Villains Do That

I knew, though, I’d be following whatever advice he came up with, purely because I had no other options here.

“Get to the guitar,” Biribo whispered in my ear, “and sing. Sing something in your own language—anything these people won’t understand. And you gotta really sing. Put some heart in it.”

The house guitar, which Minifrit’s employees used to entertain the customers, was sitting propped on a chair nearby, where the last girl playing had set it down when she retreated from the drama. Part of me considered it shameful, abandoning an instrument to save one’s own skin, but at least it worked out for me now.

If, that is, what I was hearing wasn’t pure nonsense. What was he planning to do, defuse the tension with a musical break? At best that would… Then it hit me.

“Blessing of Wisdom?” I breathed, a bare whisper that wouldn’t be audible outside my mask.

“Got it in one.”

That was another matter. I still didn’t know what the fuck he expected to happen, but this was at least something he had alluded to before. I just had to trust him.

Yeah, that was all…

Ignoring the weight of all the stares on me, I turned and stepped off to the side, picked up the guitar, and seated myself on the chair where it had been, making sure to collect the dropped pick before I sat on it. The next hurdle was my heavy gloves, which were part of the Healer disguise but weren’t going to work here. I folded them carefully on my lap, behind the guitar, and began very softly checking the tuning.

“Well, okay, then,” Cauth said, smugness incarnate, and turned back to Minifrit, at whose expression I did not look. I was keeping an eye on the room at large from the depths of my hood, but I’d have had to shift notably toward her to see her face from that position. Also, I frankly didn’t want to face her in that moment. “Ah, ah! You wanna think real carefully about how much you’re gettin’ paid, boyo, and whether it’s worth it.”

Minifrit’s bouncer had stepped up beside her, brandishing his club; another appeared from the stairwell as Cauth threatened his comrade. There was a third somewhere, but I was more absorbed on the guitar than the onlookers. I’d have preferred to tune it a bit more precisely; the strings had loosened a tad from being played all evening, but it was good enough for an emergency.

“You can make it as much trouble as you want if that makes you feel better, doll,” Cauth was saying condescendingly to Minifrit as I strummed the opening chords. “I don’t hate it when they struggle.”

Biribo had better know what he was talking about.

“She can kill with a smile…”

The words came out of me in their original English, projected powerfully enough to be fully audible throughout the room despite my mask without messing up the soft nature of the song, because I am a professional and such vocal control is but a parlor trick to me.

And Biribo’s faith was rewarded. People had mostly shifted their attention away from the Healer to Cauth’s attempted abduction of Minifrit, but suddenly I had everyone’s full focus again. Cauth himself trailed off mid-threat, his stare quickly growing glassy-eyed, and more of his followers than otherwise were swiftly gazing at me with such literally slack-jawed expressions it seemed they might start drooling.

Huh. Don’t get me wrong, I’m good, but there was clearly something else going on here.

Even under these circumstances, I found myself falling into the music as I finished the first verse.

This. This was why I’d kept my English; this was my stuff. I believe above all else that everyone has the right to enjoy whatever music moves their spirit, and to me, it was the American rock from the whole first decades of the genre’s existence. The entire latter half of the twentieth century, from Elvis to Nirvana. It’s not that there isn’t fantastic music from Japan and everywhere else, but this was what stirred my soul to sing, and that is a thing which requires no justification. Some people argue over where the definition of “classic rock” starts and ends; me, I just play it. Billy Joel isn’t even one of my favorites; some of the hipsters and purists may argue about whether he’s rock at all, which is probably why he wrote a song about that. But in the moment when I sat down with the guitar, this was the song that sprang to mind as the right one for here and now. That’s how music works: you do need to study the technique, but once you have that, you have to follow the passion.

My fingers on the strings flowed into the series of arpeggios which followed the initial verse. This was written as a piano piece; you can do on the guitar music meant for piano, up to a point, but it’s difficult. Which is why it’s impressive, which is why I like doing it. I’ve never claimed not to be a showoff.

However, keeping a watch on the room from within my hood, I immediately noticed signs that whatever trance I’d induced was fading. Expressions sharpened, a couple of people blinked and one guy physically shook himself. So it was the voice, not the music. Good to know.

The second verse began, and they all went back under with just a few more lines. Well, mostly. Biribo’s plan became clear as I watched the audience while singing and playing, which fortunately didn’t strain my attention too far. I usually did that while performing; next to attempting a triple spell combination, this was nothing. But while the customers huddling against the wall and Lady Gray’s impromptu army were all staring at me with raptly vacant fascination, Minifrit herself remained sharp-eyed as ever, looking around for a few seconds in clear puzzlement at this state of affairs, but she was quick to take advantage, melting backward from the main room while her foes were distracted.

I was really looking forward to having Biribo explain what the fuck was happening. Was it a gender-based hypnosis? No; both of Minifrit’s bouncers remained lucid and wary, shifting to hover over her as she retreated. Also, while I could only see a few of the Alley Cat’s girls from my current vantage and didn’t want to shift my hood and risk drawing attention to them, I noticed that most quickly and quietly followed Minifrit up the stairs, but Adelly seemed to have been taken in by the effect. Kastrin had to clamp a hand over her mouth and give her a shake to jostle her out of it.

These women were experts at surviving in the rough part of town, and knew when and how to move fast. Every one of them had disappeared up the stairs by the end of the first chorus. Both ground floor exits were still crowded with Gray’s street soldiers, who probably would have been prodded out of their stupor by the women trying to push through them. I remembered that there were rooftop escapes, though. I kept playing, buying them the time I could.

It got to be downright eerie, the way all the remaining men and a couple of women among the thugs gaped at me; their expressions held the strangest blend of intensity and vacuity, not at all the looks I was used to seeing on the faces of people enjoying a musical performance. An artist could almost take it personally.

But I was performing for a purpose beyond my own ego, for once, and I kept at it. I didn’t know how much longer it would hold; I slowed the tempo just a hair, as much as I could without making it sound wrong, since I also didn’t know what might spoil the effect. I kept on to the end of the song, though, buying Minifrit and her employees what time I could. The three to four minutes, give or take, of an average modern song would have to do.

“…always a woman to me.”

It took them a few seconds after the last chords for them to come out of it. For several seconds, that was a slow process of blinking and eyes coming gradually into focus. But then Cauth woke up enough to realize what had happened, and the ensuing bellowing brought everybody back down to Ephemera.

“What the fuck!” he roared, rounding on me after spinning in a futile circle to notice that his men were all dazed and his quarry all gone. “What did you do, you little shit?!”

I slowly and deliberately lowered the guitar. “Not a music lover, I take it? You seemed to be enjoying it a minute ago.”

“Listen here, corebait!” He took an aggressive step toward me, raising his axe.

Still at an even and unhurried pace, I stood upright, and stepped forward as well.

“Yes?”

I could literally see the moment in his eyes when Cauth remembered who he was dealing with, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.

“You think you’re pretty fuckin’ smart, don’t you?” he grated. “You’ve only got so many tricks up your sleeve, Healer. When Lady Gray gets as tired of anybody’s bullshit as she is of yours, they’re done. It’s just a matter of time.”

I could’ve traded bluster with this guy, but really, what was the point?

“Those documents you were showing off,” I said instead. “Give them to me.”

He barked an incredulous laugh in my face. “Yeah? And why the fuck would I ever do that?”

“Come now, you know how this works.” I turned my hood slightly to the side, addressing the whole crowd of bandits. “You lot must take things from people all the time. Surely I don’t need to explain how. You’re going to give me what I want, because of what will happen to you if you don’t.”

All of them stiffened further, several taking steps back. Cauth flexed his grip on the handle of his axe, seeming for once to have no ready reply.

“Not only will you die,” I continued in a sepulchral tone, “you will experience the farthest extremity of human anguish the entire time you are dying. And only if I judge that your price is fully paid will it stop at that. Life, death, and pain are mine to toy with. I can burn you to ash and raise you to full health…as many times as it takes. For the entire rest of the night, over and over, until I am satisfied that—”

“Here!” one of them practically squawked, thrusting out a double roll of paper at me. I plucked it from his hand before anybody else could intercede, tucking the documents inside my coat.

“Jakkin, you sniveling little stain,” Cauth roared.

“Fuck you, Cauth! You can’t do half the evil shit this crazy bastard can!”

“You think you can just come to this town and throw your fuckin’ weight around?” Cauth snarled at me. “This is Lady Gray’s town, fucker.”

I looked at him in silence for a second, then turned to look at Aster. She had drawn her greatsword, and now casually laid it across her shoulders, ready to swing in an arc that could conceivably behead six people in this confined space. Then I looked back at Cauth, and stood there in silence for exactly four more seconds.

I turned my back on him and walked toward the door, Aster right behind me. The main bulk of Lady Gray’s men were still blocking the exit.

They got out of our way.

It was a little quieter than usual out in Yrshith Street. The customary crowds were present, and had not failed to notice a bunch of armed goons entering the Alley Cat; some might have noticed its entire staff escaping via the rooftops. At any rate, folks were watching the doors, and whispers and murmurs started when I emerged with nobody but my omnipresent bodyguard.

“So,” I mumbled almost silently, “you gonna explain what that was—”

“Boss!” Biribo interrupted. “Archer on the roof of the Jugs!”

I jerked my head up in time to see a man in shabby leather taking aim at me with a crossbow. I didn’t know if he was just positioning his weapon to fire or simply a watcher covering me, and I didn’t wait to find out.

Immolate!

He plummeted from the roof in a screaming ball of fire and impacted the pavement with an unpleasant crunch. That kind of fall would probably mess a person up, but fortunately for him he was under the influence of an extremely powerful healing spell at that moment. Not that he probably appreciated it, all things considered.

I had no more time to consider this because at that moment, an impact in my back made me stagger forward.

“Fuck,” Biribo squeaked. “He was hiding in the crowd! Sorry, boss!”

Useless little… Why was it so hard to breathe?

“Hold still,” Aster murmured right in my ear, and then there came a jerk. I enveloped myself in Heal just on instinct, only realizing exactly what happened when I turned around to find Aster holding up a crossbow quarrel drenched in my blood.

Everybody about on the street was suddenly fleeing, except for the guy with the now-unloaded crossbow who had been taking shelter amid the crowd before they abandoned the scene. Apparently he wasn’t quick enough on the uptake to follow suit. Okay, I had to give it to Biribo; crowds were a known weak point of his senses. If somebody was circulating aimlessly with a bunch of other people, the familiar wouldn’t be able to tell what they were up to based on movements alone.

“You shot me,” I said out loud, “with a crossbow.”

Eyes wide, he began scrabbling another quarrel from inside his coat with hands that were suddenly shaking.

“You know what I am,” I stated, striding toward him. “You know what I can do. And still, you somehow decided that shooting me with a crossbow was a winning move. How exactly did you come to this conclusion? Please explain—be thorough, and specific. I really want to understand the thought process behind this.”

Okay, I was veering out of the Healer persona now. In my defense, I was good and mad.

The guy let out a choked sob as he fumbled his ammunition and it fell to the ground. “W-wait! I’m sorry! Don’t—”

Immolate.

Down he went in a screaming column of fire.

“Two enemies, behind and from the right!” Biribo barked.

Aster was already moving, redeeming her failure to put her artifact armored body between me and the crossbowman by sweeping her greatsword in a horizontal arc that the next guy failed to avoid, having been in the process of charging full tilt at me with a sword. He fell in two pieces, one of them with enough intact lungs to scream.

The second was a bit farther behind, enough that he saw this go down and reassessed his priorities. He managed to skid to a stop barely a meter from me, and probably would have turned to flee had I been in the mood to allow it.

Sparkspray! Windburst! Slimeshot!

He staggered backward from the sparks in his face, then was blown backward to impact the wall behind. The last spell was honestly just because I felt like being an asshole. The slime, a thing with about the mass and weight of a watermelon, nailed him right in the midsection, causing him to double over and slump to the pavement. Seeing this, I reconsidered my earlier assessment that this was a nonlethal combat spell. At that range, at the speed at which it was fired…well, I guess it depended where it hit the target. This guy was clearly not breathing. He could’ve just been winded, of course.

Funny how I felt neither curious nor at all bad about this.

Everything had gone right straight to shit. I was now at open hostilities with Lady Gray, which meant that every plan I’d devised for getting the prostitutes of Cat Alley out of Gwyllthean without it being a straight up battle which would surely get a bunch of them killed, was now off the table. Almost two months of work, up in smoke.

Well, if there was no salvaging this anyway, may as well vent my frustration.

“Two alleys ahead, right side, two targets, one with a crossbow.”

Following Biribo’s indications, I beheld the pair of thugs leaning out, one taking aim at me. I took him down with a Slimeshot which smashed him skull-first into the wall behind, causing a splatter of blood. The other one turned and fled at that.

“Next alley after that, left side, four targets, about five strides deep in the alley!”

I walked past it without turning to look, simply holding out my hand and peppering them with bullet-velocity slimes as I went past.

And so it went. No one could get the drop on me thanks to Biribo and the lack of crowd cover, and it didn’t take long for them to recognize futility and stop trying. I left Lady Gray’s assembled street soldiers behind me—fleeing, dead, maimed, Immolated, and in one case blind because I discovered that Heat Beam’s targeting was purely mental and not connected to my pointing finger, which made it very simple to nail him right in the eyeball with a focused beam.

Well before I reached the mouth of the street, the remainder had given up and run from the sight of me.

“Okay, I think we’re in the clear,” Biribo reported as we picked our way through the half-abandoned outskirts of the Gutters minutes later. “We’re still being shadowed, off to the left in the alleys, but it’s just Adelly from the brothel. There’s somebody up ahead who’s moving in position to intercept us, but I think it’s Minifrit.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I owe them an explanation anyway. And speaking of explanations?”

“Right!” He wriggled out of my mask, the sensation making me grimace, and buzzed along beside me in the chilly night air. “I had a feeling you’d get that one, boss—people Blessed with Wisdom who’re musically inclined often do. It’s an extension of the language-processing application of the Blessing! If you sing in a foreign language, and really put your intent and emotion in it, everybody who hears will be able to understand the words.”

“And that mesmerizes them, somehow?”

“It only tends to. The actual magic is just in the translation effect; beyond that, it’s mostly just the combination of how weird it is to understand words you’ve never learned and the hypnotic nature of music itself. That won’t work reliably, boss. It does nothing to people who’re expecting it or prepared, like if they’ve got mental training—anybody else Blessed with Wisdom will already be used to that and won’t fall for it. Keep in mind who did and didn’t succumb back there: the onlookers were just waiting for a chance to leave and the thugs were just doing their job, but Minifrit and her girls were on high alert for a way outta that situation. They kept their wits and took advantage.”

“Mm. Sound unreliable, but…still potentially powerful. Hell, it sure made enough of a difference in a pinch.”

It was something. My first extra Wisdom power. Between that and the fact that Lady Gray’s men were now universally terrified of me, I guess the night hadn’t been a complete waste. It did not feel like a win, though. My plans were in ruins and Minifrit and her girls had lost their income and home.

Well…I did have a place prepared for them, after all.

“Yeah, it’s definitely Minifrit up ahead, boss,” Biribo reported. “She, uh, doesn’t seem happy.”

“No, she wouldn’t, would she.”

I continued in silence, Biribo ducking under my coat as we approached the spot he’d indicated. The half-ruined buildings of the outlying Gutters made for countless excellent ambush points. This one I walked into voluntarily, because it consisted of nothing more deadly than Miss Minifrit stepping out from around a corner to plant herself in my path.

Well, the look in her eyes was fairly deadly, I supposed, even in the pale illumination of Ephemeral night.

“I believe that is mine,” the madam said icily.

“Ah. Right.” I was still carrying the guitar from her brothel. It hadn’t felt right to just abandon it. I stepped forward, holding it out, and she snatched it from my grasp in an aggressive motion. “Can you do anything with these?” I added before she could escalate, pulling the documents out of my coat and offering them as well.

She did not take them, but her eyes narrowed as she realized what I held. “It depends. If they’re forgeries, they have no legal weight. If a judge was bribed to sign them, they still do, but it can be disputed. Not that I am in any position to do so. In either case, I can’t go home without immediately becoming Lady Gray’s personal scratching post. Thanks to you.”

I drew in a breath. “Right. I—”

“Miss Minifrit!”

Biribo hadn’t warned me, so presumably the person who came skittering around the corner was no threat. It was just Kastrin, with Adelly a step behind her, both looking panicked. “We were followed! It’s Cauth and his boys again—they’ve got the rest of the girls cornered in the hiding spot!”

Minifrit drew in a hissing breath, then pointed the stem of her pipe accusingly at me. “You. You will fix this.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I agreed. “Kastrin, where?”

It was just a couple minutes’ dash away, in a disused warehouse from which shouts and screams were audible well before we reached it. I took the lead, flanked by Aster and Kastrin, with Adelly just behind and Minifrit wisely bringing up the rear.

The double loading doors at the front were half-broken to begin with and collapsed into fragments when I impacted them with my shoulder. I burst into the chamber and conjured a Firelight, holding up the ball of flame to cast its flickering orange glow across the entire interior.

The women had been herded into one corner, but no one seemed to have been hurt yet. At my entrance, Cauth and the boys turned to brandish weapons at me.

But this time, I had them all to myself out here. Behind my mask, I felt a truly malicious grin spring unbidden to my face.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” I declaimed, spreading my arms in greeting. “Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Virya?”