Chapter Two Hundred and Seventy-Nine - Ganging Up

“So, are we going to relax, just talk things out?” I asked. I really hoped that they’d agree.

The sylph glanced at each other. They shuffled their feet, and I felt a tingle in my ears that felt like bad news.

Mitchie, who seemed to be the one in charge, more or less, pointed towards Amaryllis. “Her first,” he said.

“Me first what?” Amaryllis asked.

The nearest sylph’s reply was to pick up a long piece of wood from the ground and run towards us while screaming.

“Are you all daft?” Amaryllis snapped. She flung a hand towards the sylph rushing her and a crack-bang filled the mine as a bolt of lightning gripped the sylph mid-motion and sent him convulsing to the ground.

“Don’t kill them!” I said even as I sent more mana into my bucket and moved up between my friends and the remaining thieves. One of them threw a knife our way, but it wasn’t the best or fastest toss. I smacked it out of the air with a swipe of my bucket.

“I won’t kill them,” Amaryllis said. “Just make them reconsider some of the mistakes they’ve made.”

“Get her!” Mitchie shouted, and the sylph next to him took off running after me. Meanwhile, Mitchie himself spun around and ran in the opposite direction.

So much for honour among thieves.

The sylph charging me screamed.

I threw my bucket. It hit him in the face bottom-first with a heavy bonk before bouncing back into my arms. I grabbed it by the lip, and when the sylph came closer, stumbling and holding onto his nose, I brought the bucket down atop his head with a heavy metallic clang.

“Oh, sorry,” I said as he crumbled to the floor.

Awen sighed and stepped around me before kneeling on the sylph's back. She had a rope--somehow--that she tied around one of the sylph’s wrists, then she looped it around an ankle and finally his other hand. “We don’t want them getting away,” she explained at my confused look.

“I’m more surprised you know how to hogtie people,” I said.

“Hog tie?” She glanced down at her knots. “I’m just tying them so that they can’t move.”

“Girls, let’s focus a little, shall we?” Amaryllis asked. “We should catch up to that moron that took off.”

“Yeah, someone abandoning their friends like that, it’s just wrong,” I said.

“M-Mitchie would never abandon us!” the sylph on the ground said. “You’ll regret this!”

I squatted down next to him. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know what we’re going to find deeper in that passage, right?”

He squirmed around so that he was looking the other way. “I’m not telling you nothing.”

“That’s a double negative,” I pointed out. “It means that you will tell us something.”

The sylph squirmed the other way to look up to me. He seemed pretty confused. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Oh, nevermind.” I bounced back to my feet, swept up my bucket, then pointed deeper into the tunnel. “Come on, let’s go see what’s down there.”

We left the two sylph--the one Amaryllis zapped was waking up, though he was a little groggy--and started down the tunnel. It wasn’t hard to follow the rails running down the centre of the passage.

The rails curved into a large room, and ended in a pile of sandbags, the cart sitting there all nice and quiet. Next to that was a wide entranceway, framed by wooden beams. I crept along the wall and the leaned over to peer into the room, folding my ears back to keep them out of sight. Inside was a weird mirror of the inside of the warehouses we were just in a few minutes ago.

Shelves lined the walls, but the middle of the room had couches and chairs, a firepit in the middle was surrounded by a few sylphs, Mitchie among them. Stacks of pallet wood and broken crates nearby hinted at what they used to feed the fire.

A few tents were pitched at the far end of the room, and there was an improvised kitchen to the side as well. Clearly, this camp had been lived-in for a while.

Amaryllis tugged my sleeve and I slunk after her until we were behind the cart. Awen only had the top of her head poking over the metal rim.

“I counted seven,” Amaryllis whispered. “Two of them have gotten past their first evolution.”

“What’s the plan?” I asked. We weren’t exactly great at stealth, so I figured we didn’t have a lot of time to come up with something.

“I’m all for walking in there, spells flying,” Amaryllis said. “They have knives and clubs, and only two of them are on our level. We can take them.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“We’ve fought worse,” Amaryllis said.

“I meant for them,” I said.

She sniffed. “They’re thieves.”

“Ah, thieves don’t usually get treated very well where I’m from,” Awen said. “We’re just here for the grenoil’s stuff, right? Maybe Broccoli can negotiate and convince them to give us all of that, then we leave?”

"After we smash them, we can negotiate from a position of strength," Amaryllis pointed out.

I felt my nose scrunching up as I considered it. On the one hand, taking things that weren’t yours was wrong. Thieves should at the very least be punished. On the other hand, I didn’t want to see anyone get hurt. Then again... “I’d rather not fight if we can avoid it,” I said.

“Fair enough,” Amaryllis said. “But if that’s the case, then you’d better be ready to be extra persuasive this afternoon. I don’t think they’ll be keen on just giving us what we want.”

“They might be,” I said. “It’s not like it belongs to them in the first place.”

"They currently possess it, so I think they will argue that it does belong to them, by default," Amaryllis said.

I shrugged, then stood up and walked around the cart. I didn’t want to spook anyone, so I didn’t make any effort to be quiet as I walked to the entrance of the hideout. “Hello there!” I called. “My name’s Broccoli, and I’m here to, ah, make you an offer you shouldn’t refuse.”

Mitchie spun around and pointed right at me. “That’s one of them!”

“Hello,” I said again. This time I added a happy little wave with the hand not holding onto a bucket. Was there blood on the bottom of my bucket? That was nasty. I made sure to clean it off before anyone could notice.

There was a sylph in the group that seemed different to the others. While most of the sylph in the hideout wore simple clothes, often on the dirtier, threadbare side, he had full leather armour, darkened and covered in little pouches and pockets. He looked like a proper rogue. His hair was peppered with grey, and he seemed a lot more dangerous than the others.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I-I just said, my name’s Broccoli.” Maybe he was going hard of hearing in his old age? “Look, mister, my friends and I are looking for something, and we think you might have it. We were wondering if maybe you could let us take that thing back?”

“Oh?” the older sylph asked. He stalked forwards, the other sylph parting to let him through. He only paused next to Mitchie to pat him on the shoulder. “You think you can steal from the Mitchhum family?”

“Of course not, stealing is wrong,” I said.

He looked baffled. “What?”

“I’m sorry, but it’s true. Taking things that aren’t yours isn’t nice. It makes people very upset. Ah, I’m sorry, but I didn’t ask you what your name was?”

“I’m Marvin, Marvin Mitchhum,” he said. He stood tall and proud before me, which meant he came up to about my chin. “I’m the patriarch of the Mitchhum family, a family on whose ground you’re standing now.”

“Oh, really? Gosh, we kind of broke into your house, didn’t we? I’m sorry.”

Mister Marvin stepped a few paces ahead of me and squinted at me, then at my friends standing behind me. “Who are you? No, not your name, you’ve said that twice already. I mean who are you. Weird foreigners don’t just follow my boys down mine shafts for fun.”

“We’re just some explorers,” I said. “We come from here and there, and now we’re in Goldenalden trying to stop a war. To do that, we need the contents of a crate that you might, maybe, have taken without permission. So if you could give it to us, that would be awfully nice of you.”

“We don’t just give people anything,” he said.

“Come now,” Amaryllis said sweetly. “You’re thieves, you don’t just gather things and let them collect dust, you have to be reselling them to someone. All we want are the crates you stole.”

“And maybe for you to reconsider a life of crime,” I added. I couldn’t see Amaryllis, because she was mostly behind me, but I knew she was rolling her eyes.

“Well well, you want to buy right from the source, huh?”

I glanced back to Amaryllis, and she nodded once. It was probably a better idea to just buy things outright than to fight for them, even if the things we were buying didn’t belong to the people we were buying them from. They’d still end up in the hands of the right people in the end.

Marvin glanced back to Mitchie, then to us. “Fine. Mitchie, go check on your brothers. We’ll see how roughed up they are. There might be an additional fee, for damages, you understand?”

“I guess,” I said. “But your, uh, friends attacked us first. So it was all self-defence.”

“I’m hardly one that’s well-versed in such lawful matters. I couldn’t tell ya what is or isn’t self-defence. But I know that I’m not fond of folk that hurt me and mine,” Marvin said.

I crossed my arms. Mister Marvin was really quite rude.

“So, what’re the goods you’re looking for?” he asked.

“We know the name of the cargo, and probably the numbers on the crate, but we don't know what’s in it,” I said.

“You don’t know? You're going through an awful lot of trouble to fetch something that isn’t yours,” Marvin said.

“We’re doing this as a favour,” I explained. “And, you know, to stop a war. I’m not too sure, but I think wars are bad for people in your line of work too.”

He sniffed. “Wouldn’t know.”

Footsteps sounded out behind us, and Mitchie burst into the room, breathing hard. “The guard,” he said.

“What?” Marvin asked.

He pointed down the tunnel behind him, then to us. “They brought the guard with them!”

There was a split second of calm before everything went to heck in a bucket. Marvin shouted a few orders, and sylphs scrambled across the room. There were more than we had guessed, sleeping in the tents at the back, or hanging around quietly and minding their own. They seemed to know what they were doing as they rushed to pick up a few items and ran towards the back where a part of the shelves covering one wall were moved aside. A second exit?

“Kill the three of them,” Marvin said while pointing right at us.

“Oh no,” I said.

I stepped back as a sylph swooped down from above with a long staff that smacked into the ground, right where I was standing. Another two ran towards us, long knives poised to attack.

“Guys!” I shouted before I had to use my bucket to block a stabbing strike from a knife. The knife planted itself hilt-deep into the bucket and stayed lodged there.

I kicked at the shin of the sylph trying to turn me into a bun skewer, then backed up some more. Lightning cracked and a pair of sylph fell before a third summoned a thick dark fog. Magic!

Of course a few of them would have sneaky magic, it just made sense.

I countered the fog with some cleaning magic, just in time to see a sylph, running around to flank us, step onto a glass caltrop and crash to the floor with a piercing scream.

And then the rattle of armour and weapons sounded out behind us and a dozen guards, with short swords and square shields, formed a barrier behind us. There was a paladin at their head, one who looked very unamused at what they saw.

“Drop your weapons!” The paladin ordered, a shouted bark so loud it made my ears snap back. My hands went numb, and my bucket thumped to the ground a moment before I raised my arms in surrender.

“Oh no, I’ve never been arrested before,” I said.

***