Tales of the Cold Frontier 2 (Patreon)

Kell carefully held the door open as he hobbled inside the shop, his ankle still tender and the doctor who'd come out to look at it saying he'd have to wear a brace for a week. It had been three days since he'd gone out of town and met the grifas, Izidorius, and Kell finally had a chance to head to the butcher's.

“Hold on, jus' a sec!” a lightly accented voice called out from the back of the shop, moments before there was the sound of metal biting into wood.

Leaning heavily on the cane the doc had loaned him, Kell looked around the shop, mindful of the few iron sanguar coins in his pocket. He had been considering heading down to the docks to try to convince some of the fishermen to part with some of the heads of their day's catch so his mother could make a stock. But maybe this butcher had some scrap bones?

Kell’s musings about future meals were interrupted as a door leading to the back of the shop opened up and a heavily scarred curana wearing a leather apron stepped out, wiping his hands with a towel. Kell swallowed nervously, curana bore a strong resemblance to cougars and mountain lions, but combined with their reputation for being impulsive and quick to anger, as well as the burn scars that covered most of the butcher's face and left one eye a pale white, and Kell was feeling quite justified in his nervousness.

“Welcome to th' Burnt Tooth Butchery, how can I help you?” the curana asked with a grin, the burn scars on his face making it look far more threatening than he probably intended.

Very much not wanting to anger the man known for possessing magic that let him set things on fire and a temper to match, Kell spoke as politely as he could, "M-morning, sir…"

There was a solid 'THUNK' as a cleaver buried itself into the door frame. It wasn’t close to Kell, a good three feet separated them, but it was still far closer than he'd have liked. The butcher's face was twisted into a furious expression as he pointed a clawed finger at Kell.

“Now you listen here, boy. Don' you ever call me 'sir'. I damn well work for my pay,” the butcher snarled.

"S-sorry," Kell apologized.

The butcher took a deep breath, “Nah, I'm th' one who needs to apologize. Jus' gotta lotta bad memories tied to that word.”

“Were you in the War?” Kell hesitantly asked, since it was the only explanation he could think of.

“Nah, wasn' old 'nuff. But tha's history, whatcha need from ol' Trino?”

“Oh, um… I wanted to ask about a grifas that might have brought in a bear a few days ago.”

The curana, Trino apparently, hummed to himself as he thought, “Don’ get many grifas or bears. Bear's a tricky meat to work with, worms are common enough that you have to cook the meat all th' way through, but they also don't have enough fat this time of year to keep it from drying out.

“The grifas on the other hand… what's he look like?”

Kell gave a short description of Izidorius, but by the end, Trino was shaking his head, “Haven' seen any grifas tha' looked like tha' since moving out here to the arse end of the world. Sorry I can' be more help. Anything else?”

Disappointed, but not surprised, Kell thought about the earlier thought he'd had, “How much for some bo…”

Kell trailed off as a pair of men, one a human and the other a positively massive curana, entered the store, dressed in fine clothes. The kind of clothes that only those who worked for Vanius Limpwing could afford.

“Ah Four Divines, not this leechspit again,” Kell heard Trino mutter under his breath.

“Trino, my boy, you know I don't want to have to keep coming out here,” the human man said with mocking condescension.

“Well it ain't my fault ya work for a puffed up, crippled stool pigeon tha' don' seem to get what 'no' means. I said it half a dozen times already,” Trino snapped before pausing and turning to look at the big curana. “Half a dozen means six.”

The bigger curana responded with a very rude gesture, while the human seemed annoyed, “Look Trino, I've been nice so far, but this is your last warning. Pay up, or…”

“I ain't payin' wha' I don' owe, and I don' owe your boss the paper I use in the outhouse, let alone a single rusted sanguar. Now unless you're planning on buying something, I'm tellin’ ya to leave my shop, ya sanctimonious pieces o’ poorly picked leech eggs,” Trino snarled, sounding like the wild cat he resembled and his accent thickening the longer he spoke.

The big curano let out a rumble and put on a pair of brass knuckles, the human reaching into his jacket. Kell hobbled over to a corner, not wanting to get in their way, but Trino just gave a predatory, fang filled grin. Before letting out a screeching yowl, the sound accompanied by the wailing of tortured metal and a gust of wind. The two men, their hands flying to their ears to try to protect themselves from the sound, like the wail of the damned, before the gust hit them and blew them out of the shop.

Trino stopped as soon as the two men fell out onto the street, hopping over the counter and stepping up to the door, “An’ stay out!”

Taking a moment to work the cleaver he’d thrown when Kell called him ‘sir’ out of the wall, Trino whistled a jaunty tune to himself as he went back behind the counter and turned back to Kell. Seemingly uncaring at the fact he’d knocked two men into the muddy street with a scream, he turned back to Kell and asked, “So, what were you going to say before you were so rudely interrupted?”

Kell looked at Trino, before turning to look at the door, his confusion etched on his face. He’d heard that Trino was a fire mage, so how’d he do something with both air and sound? And where’d the metal sound come from?

“Ah, right, that,” Trino said, a bit sheepishly. “You knew tha’ I’m a mage, right?”

“Yeah, my mother mentioned it… when she told me to… never come… here…” Kell trailed off as he winced, realized that he was going to be grounded even more than he already was for his hike that resulted in the bear.

Trino snorted in amusement, “Well, boy. Let me tell you a bit about magic. There’s four kinds: sanguine, phlegmic, melancholic, and choleric. I myself am a choleric mage, but I can also do some sanguine and melancholic magic too. Can’ do any phlegmic, would only hurt myself if I tried.”

“What’s the difference?” Kell asked.

“The old Imperium Mages would have a bunch of big, fancy, words for it, but at the most basic: which humor is used to fuel the spell. Before you say anything,” Trino held up a hand as Kell opened his mouth, “I don’ mean joke-humor. How the word came to mean tha’, I have no idea. But I’m talkin’ about th’ four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Everyone’s got all four, but sometimes a person’s got the ability to use some of them to affect the world around them. Mages.”

Trino paused his explanation to duck under the counter, coming up with a metal milking bin that had scrunched down like an accordion from the Lonely Revolver, the saloon Kell’s older brother worked at. Trino shook it while holding it next to his ear, before muttering under his breath, “Ah Four Divines, not enough left to bother.”

Trino turned back to Kell and motioned to the warped metal container, “This here was full of pig blood, and my little show a moment ago ate up all of it to fuel the spell. But, since empty space ain’ something nature likes, this got smushed as it tried to fill up th’ now empty inside.”

“What about the… biles?” Kell asked, thinking back to when Izidorius had made the crude leg brace and healed his leg.

“Yellow bile’s used to fuel choleric magic, my particular gift, and is best known for settin’ things on fire. But it’s also used in some of the oldest industrial forges, ‘cause before the more recent methods were discovered choleric magic was the only way to mass produce metal in any real quantity. Black bile, which is used for melancholic magic, is much more… how should I put this… direct? Melancholic magic doesn’t do subtle; everything about it is strong, rigid, an’ about as blunt as a piano bein’ dropped on yer dingleberries.”

“…can it also heal?” Kell asked, ignoring the crude description and thinking back to what Izidorius had done.

Trino gave Kell a curious look, “Yeah, how’d you know?”

“The grifas I was asking about, he healed my ankle some.”

Looking at Kell’s ankle, Trino blinked in surprise, “Ya said a grifas healed yer ankle?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Nothin’, just unusual. Most grifas mages can’t use melancholic magic, bein’ sanguine specialists. He do anythin’ else? Or just the bit o’ healin’?”

“Uh… he dried out some silvery muscle stuff to make a splint around it?”

“Alright, so that would make him either a melancholic or choleric mage,” Trino muttered before shaking his head, “Anyway, I can do more choleric magic with less yellow bile than someone who specializes in melancholic or sanguine magic can, but I gotta use more blood or black bile.”

Kell had a lot more questions to ask, but a glance at the clock showed that it was starting to get late, and if he didn’t want his Mom to get angry, he’d better have something to show for coming here, “Do you have some soup bones? I’ve got a few sanguar.”

“Well let me head on back and I’ll see what I can do for ya.”

[hr][/hr]

The two looked at each other nervously, Vanius was not forgiving about failure, but what they’d learned would hopefully be enough to let them live. They’d overheard enough throughout their time in Vanius’s employ to have made some realizations after Trino used his hell-gifts on them.

“S-sir?” Markus called out as he knocked on the door.

“Markus, Baerun. Enter,” Vanius said, his voice slipping through the air, smooth as a viper.

The human and curana glanced at each other before opening the door and entering Vanius’s office. The warm red wood of his desk was illuminated by a crackling fire in the fireplace, Vanius standing in front of the large windows looking out over the bay his taloned hands clasped behind his back.

“Have a seat, gentlemen,” Vanius said, not moving from his position. Still, both men sat in front of his desk. “Do you know why I sent the two of you to collect protection money from the butcher? Instead of sending my much more reliable knee-breakers?”

“Boss…” Markus began, only for Vanius to cut him off.

“I wasn’t finished,” Vanius snapped, barely turning his head to the side. “I sent you, because Trino is a Divines-damned chloric mage in his thirties. Do either of you country rubes know what that means? How many mages do you think die before their thirtieth birthday? I’ll give you a hint, for chloric mages it is a very large percentage. I sent the two of you because I assumed, wrongly it appears, that you’d have the common sense to use some subtlety!”

It was now that Vanius turned around, his eyes blazing with fury as he stared down his two henchmen. Stepping up to his desk, he picked up a piece of paper before continuing, “Since I was mistaken, that you can’t employ anything more subtle than announcing your intentions to the world and being promptly humiliated, I have little use for you in my higher ranks.”

“We overheard a kid mention someone!” Baerun said, the massive curana all but throwing himself to his knees.

“Congratulations, you are not deaf. Now as I was saying,” Vanius continued, picking up a cigar as he did.

“They mentioned a grifas named Izidorius!”

The cigar in Vanius’s hand snapped in two, his hooked beak opening in a snarl as he turned to stare at the cowering men. “Everything you heard. Now.”