46 – Riverside Remedies

Both because of her payment, and because it had turned out Quincy was not quite as guilty as she had thought.

Had he sent people to their deaths at the maneater’s talons? Yes.

Had he done it with the intention of their deaths? No, if his word was to be believed, and Zel’s gut told her he was telling the truth. There was clearly more nuance to his relationship with the beast, but she wasn’t so curious as to pry into such private matters.

With the money safely in Fog Storage, she decided to make one last use of room four to clean her wounds. The room was empty when she entered, a note written in pencil on the nightstand. It read:

I went to Riverside Remedies.

Turn left when you exit the inn,

turn left again at the street corner,

then walk straight.

Zef

A smile quirked her lips when she read it, and she stowed the note into Fog Storage for safekeeping. Finally, she stepped into the bathroom to begin washing out her wounds, but… No water came out when she turned the valve.

“What the hell?” a frustrated exclamation slipped out, followed by a long sigh. She’d already stored the half-empty seal-bottle, but this made her seriously consider retrieving it and downing the whole thing. Deep breath in, deep breath out…

The pain was still decidedly there, but was it really intense enough for her to let this ruin her day? No, it wasn’t.

Perhaps the pipes had somehow become clogged, or far more likely, the bath’s source of water was depleted, if it did indeed run on an Aqua crystal like the sink in the transport.

The stench of blood had dulled slightly after it had all dried, and so, she chose to just go to Riverside Remedies and hope it had a functional bath. Off she went, handing her key to Quincy on the way out. She followed the directions on the note, and as it turned out, the corner that Quincy’s inn was on was still rather far from the riverside promenade.

It was a short while before she reached the promenade, finding herself at a crossroads with a busy bridge across the river at the other side of it. She had no reason to go that way, and didn’t have the mind to take in its wondrous architecture, instead hurrying in the supposed direction of Riverside Remedies. She took notice of two things, though - the river was likely not particularly fast considering the lack of noise, and sight of its other side was significantly obscured by the great number of willow trees that grew within the canal.

Riverside Remedies was everything Makhus had hoped and more. It had been left in pristine condition when its owner left to fight in the war, and all they had to do to get it into reopening-worthy condition was some minor cleanup and restocking. About half of the first floor was taken up by the store itself, with a few supplemental rooms in the second half - a secondary storeroom, a supply closet, a toilet. The lab proper and the main storeroom took up the building’s expansive basement, and Makhus held off on even stepping foot into the lab until everything else had been taken care of - he knew he wouldn’t step foot out of there for hours, if not days, were it as well-equipped as he thought it was.

The upper floor had living quarters for a full family of four, including two bedrooms, a bathroom and a small but decently-equipped kitchen. The household alchemic devices had decently-sized essentia crystals and were in full working condition as far as he could tell, though it would take some actual use to determine whether any malfunctions were present.

The main storeroom was mostly untouched, if a little empty, mostly stocked with rudimentary goods that wouldn’t spoil and weren’t easy to transport - chiefly, a massive butt cask barrel that turned out to be full of Liquid Vigor.

So it was that the two men took to cleaning the store, waiting for Zefaris to arrive and join them. Both of them knew what had transpired the night before, but neither of them knew that the other knew, and so they spent a short while pretending to be annoyed at the markswoman for sleeping in before Makhus slipped.

“Swear I heard some weird moaning from their room last night…” he absent-mindedly remarked, his mind entirely too focused on sorting the empty seal-bottles that the previous owner had left behind to filter what he said.

He realized his mistake well before he heard Sigmund chuckling into his beard and remarking, “Let me guess, you saw the Fog leaking from under the door and popped your auditory enhancement? Was that why you were singing in the bathroom, waiting for it to wear off like an upstanding non-pervert?”

“I thought they were fighting!”

Sigmund only answered with a hearty chuckle, continuing to sweep the floor. They continued to work in silence for some time, until a few minutes past noon the doorbell rang when Zefaris arrived, radiating an uncharacteristic sense of positivity. It was as if she was rid of the ever-present quiet tension that she had possessed for as long as they’d been in the Exclusion Zone.

Neither of them had the mind to question her in regards to this, and she joined them in cleaning the store without more than a few words to ask what needed doing and where to find the tools. A rag, a bucket, some water, and off she went, cleaning dust off the many countertops and shelves.

They had heard the distant, sonorous singing of some unknown street performer, but a short while after Zef arrived, he went silent. A few minutes later they heard him noodling away far closer, just across the river, before he broke out into that sonorous war-cry of a singing voice. None of the three brought it up, but they all took some solace in the existence of someone with the gall to express such patriotism even after the war. Zefaris made her approval of the singer’s provocative lyrics most evident, quietly humming along as she scrubbed away at the shelves under the counter.