Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy-Eight - Pay for It

We walked into Thorade’s Munitions’ and discovered the front lobby was empty.

Or at least, empty of people. There were lots of things to poke at and see. The walls had racks and racks of different tools of war. Most of these were crossbows and the like, with one wall displaying individual bolts with a variety of mean-looking heads.

There was a counter to one side laden with teeny-tiny miniature ships that had teenier-tinier ballista on them, clearly as the focal point of the models, as if to show prospective ship captains the kinds of armaments they could buy here for their own ships.

“Oh,” Awen said. She pointed to something and I followed her finger to a wall with diagrams.

“What is it?” I asked.

“That kind of repeating crossbow mechanism? That’s what’s at the front of the Redemption,” she said. “It must have been made here.”

“Hrm,” Tharval said. “That’s the little skiff tied up in your airship? Then that’s possible. Thorade’s Munitions make cheaper gear, but the quality isn't terrible. Plenty of smaller ships carry a couple of their emplacements.”

That made some sense, I figured. “Do you know anything else about them?”

Tharval stroked his beard, then shook his head. “Not much. Respectable mid-level crafters. Good at mass-producing things. Not the most ingenious bunch, but they’ve made a decent thing or two.”

Right, that made sense. The dwarves especially seemed really fond of mechanical workings.

Just then, a dwarf stepped into the room from the back. They looked a bit frazzled, with tufts of beard sticking out this way and that. They paused on seeing us, scanned over our entire group, then locked their attention onto Amaryllis.

Then, they let out the kind of sigh that only someone working in customer service could before muttering, “another one,” under their breath.

“Hello!” I said, summoning up as much good cheer as I could. “You look a bit busy, but, ah, we had a question or two.”

“Hello, and welcome to Thorade’s Munitions. We’re a little busy at the moment,” they said, trailing off leadingly.

“We’re looking for a Baron Vonowl,” I said.

They winced.

“To arrest him.”

That cheered them right up. “Oh, really?” they asked. “Well, I can’t imagine what the good baron has done, but I can lead you right to him.”

I blinked. "Wait, he's here? Now?"

"Yes indeed!" The dwarf seemed unable to contain his grin. "Please, follow me!"

He began striding toward a door labelled EMPLOYEES ONLY.

I traded glances with my friends. Awen and Caprica looked surprised, while Amaryllis was grinning viciously and Tharval rubbed his hands together.

"Well, let's not keep the poor kid waiting," he said. "We came here to stop Vonowl from buying weapons, and the easiest way to do that is to deal with him before he can buy them, isn't it?"

That got us moving.

As soon as we crossed the doorway, the nice veneer of the storefront disappeared. Pretty stone flooring was replaced by metal grating and the walls lacked any decorations other than posters of scantily clad dwarves using their beards to cover themselves up and gazing at the viewer in ways that made me blush and look away.

The main factory floor of Thorade's Munitions was a busy, loud space, with dozens of dwarves and a few elves working big, complex machines. It smelled nice though. A lot of the ballistae they made had wooden frames, and a whole section of the shop floor was dedicated to woodworking, so despite the dusty air, the scent of freshly sawn wood was pleasent.

We passed a machine that seemed entirely built to raise up an anvil-sized hammer and sent it down onto a car-sized anvil, and another which consisted of a whirling mess of interlocking gears and spokes just asking for someone to stick their fingers in.

I imagined that they didn’t have much by way of safety regulations in the Storm Towers. Or if they did, they weren’t being applied here.

We found the baron, as well as a pair of harpy guards and a small gaggle of unhappy dwarves standing at the back of the shop.

kicking up a fuss, wings flapping as he hurled a lot of not-very-nice words at a shorter dwarf, one with a long dark beard densely woven with beads. The dwarf's stern face and twitching eye told me they didn't appreciate the Baron's spittle-heavy style of debate.

“Thorade!” the dwarf guiding us said. “We have more guests.” They were clearly working hard to mask some of the glee in their voice.

Thorade, who seemed to be the one Vonowl was lecturing, looked over our group with brows knit and mouth set in a frown. Then they spotted Tharval and Willowbud and their eyebrows rose up.

“I’m quite busy at the moment,” the baron said. “I’m sorry, but your business with Thorade will have to wait.” He looked me right in the eye, then turned back to the dwarf he was talking to.

Did he not recognize me?

I was a little upset, actually. I thought I was a pretty memorable kind of person. Oh well, that was okay. Maybe not being recognized just then was for the best?

“I’m sorry, Mister Thorade,” I said. “We didn’t mean to intrude or anything.”

Vonowl snapped around and glared at me.

Oh! He recognized my voice!

"You moron!" Vonowl spit out, "Can't you see that this is a lady?"

Or maybe he didn’t. I was having a lot of highs and lows at the moment. “Um... actually, I’m really bad at telling dwarves’ genders apart.”

He sniffed, then pointed to Miss Thorade’s shoulders. “The hips and shoulders on a female are wider. They’re very slightly shorter as well. And, of course, the hair of a female dwarf’s beard is curly, whereas that of a male tends to be straighter. How can you not know this?”

“That’s... actually really helpful, thank you,” I said.

“As thanks you can leave me to my business,” he said offhandedly before turning back towards Miss Thorade.

"Um, actually, our business is with you," I said. “See, uh, we want to arrest you? Please?”

The baron paused, then turned to give me a stare. “You what?”

“You really don’t recognize me?” I asked. “Last we saw each other was at that big tower with all the pirates working with you. You’d kidnapped a bunch of nobles and stole a few ships, and I was there with my friends and the sylph army? This was only like, a few days ago.”

Vonowl narrowed his eyes at me, his feathers ruffling up. Thorade threw some sharp glances between us, and my friends all spread out behind me.

Miss Thorade gave the baron a very hard stare. “Pardon me, baron, but when you mentioned that you wanted my equipment for the purposes of pirate defence, did you mean defending against piracy, or were you planning on using our bows to defend the pirates?”

"Are you accusing me of lying?" he snapped at her. "Don't listen to these fools. The noble house of Vonowl would never stoop to piracy." He turned back to me. "And you! What is this slander? Arrest me? I've done nothing wrong."

"Well," I began, "You did kidn-"

"Stop lying!" he cut me off. "You whiny little rabbit-eared child! I strive only for the betterment of harpykind, and I won't let you stand in the way of that! If you're talking about arrest, then I ought to have you imprisoned for defaming my good name!"

“Oh, shut up,” Amaryllis said. “Your name’s good for nothing.”

He squinted at her. “Who are you?”

That got Amaryllis to bristle quite prettily. “Me? I’m Amaryllis Albatross, you feather-brained incompetent.”

I had never been happier in my life to hear Amaryllis drag someone into a bickering contest. Very deliberately, I refocused on Miss Thorade. “Sorry, you don’t mind if we arrest him, do you?”

The dwarven lady tugged at her beard, but then shook her head. “No. My Business Sense was hinting that I wouldn’t be paid by this man, in any case. Though you are distracting my workers.”

That was true, I noticed a number of heads poking up from around and above the various machines in the shop. It seemed that even dwarves were keen on being busybodies when there was good gossip about.

“We’re sorry for the likely loss of this contract,” Willowbud said. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

“You’re Willowbud, aren’t you?” she asked. “And that makes the irritable grump next to you the infamous Tharval.”

“Infamous is still famous, whelp,” he grumbled at her.

She sniffed. “I heard that you’re insane, with the occasional flash of genius only a madman would dare to have.”

“Hear that, Bud, I’m a genius.”

“Yes, that was the part of the statement that really caught my ear,” Willowbud replied. “In any case. We should take the baron somewhere a little more discreet, I think.”

“Where?” I asked. “We don’t exactly have cells on the Beaver.”

“Bah, we have cells at the Exploration guild,” Tharval said with a dismissive shrug.

There was a pause.

"Um, why?" Awen asked. It seemed like a very sensible question to ask.

“Because some of us aren’t good with our drinks,” he said. And that seemed enough explanation for the rest of my friends. Except for Amaryllis, of course, who had devolved her argument from a catty back and forth to a tirade of insults which was gaining in loudness with every mention of someone’s hatching and the quality of their plumage and ancestry.

I patted her on the back. “Hey, it’s okay, we’re going to arrest him now.”

“Arrest implies a certain amount of legal authority,” Caprica said. “This is more of a... citizen’s detention.”

“But we’re not citizens here,” Awen said.

“A... non-citizen detention. You know what, I’m just going to work hard to not think of things in legal terms for a while. I feel like doing that might be bad for my mental health.”

“That’s the spirit, princess,” Calamity said.

Seeing as how we were more or less all in agreement, I turned to the next potential source of problems. The baron’s guards. “Hi,” I said to the two. “I know that you’re basically being paid to take care of the baron here, but we kinda need to take him away for a while. And we’d much rather not have to fight.”

The two bodyguards looked to each other, then to our group. I imagined that even though we were mostly a friendly bunch, we might have been a teensy bit intimidating, under the right light.

“Also, your boss is broke,” Calamity added. “Unless nya got paid in advance? No? Oh, that stings. Well, live and learn, huh?”

I walked up to the baron, and then patted him on the shoulder. He flinched back. “Don’t touch me,” he said.

“Oh. Well, okay. But only if you agree to walk ahead of us and not kick up a fuss. You’ve done some very mean things and I think we should do something about that.”

“If you want, my boys can whip up a pair of cuffs or fetch some ropes real quick,” Thorade said.

“You’d betray me, Thorade? After I brought you so much business?” Baron Vonowl asked.

“You haven’t paid me yet either,” she said.

I made an itty-bitty mental note to make sure I paid people in the future, because it seemed like not doing so led to people being rather unhelpful.

The baron protested quite a bit as we tied his wings up against his sides (Amaryllis suggested against tying them to his back, harpy shoulders not being the same as human ones, apparently). We wondered about gagging him for a while, mostly because he was being extremely vocal about... well, everything, but that felt a little rude, especially when the only thing we could gag him with were the socks that Calamity volunteered with rather more glee than appropriate.

With the baron all tied up, we pushed him along ahead of us. Willowbud apologised to Miss Thorade, who charged us a token sum for the ropes, and then we were off.

Crossing the Storm Tower with a rather unwilling, tied-up baron in our midst, one who constantly shouted about how we were scoundrels, kidnappers, and other more vile things, was a little tricky.

We tried to stick to less popular routes, but that only helped so much.

What helped a lot more was the strange amount of authority Willowbud could exude whenever he wanted. I had to wonder if it was a skill when we ran into some guards and he persuaded them that this was all Exploration Guild business and that they should keep on doing their jobs... but elsewhere.

“Once we have you in a cell,” Amaryllis said. “We’re going to have all sorts of questions for you.”

***