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“No lights on the streets. Whole Hive's never had ‘em. But it was bright enough by then to move about, sure. No fear of bumpin’ in the dark.”
“Regular eyes? He was a full-blood man child. Don’t rightly recall what color they were. Like I said he had kind of rabbity features, but he weren’t a tiefling or an aasimar.”
An initial probe. He observes the tobacconist minutely, monitoring any change in expression as the story progresses.
“Thank you. Continue. Where did the boy in the street lead you?”
“Was in the cheap side of the Court by then. There’s a bit of it that’s got an outer wall, and then some very narrow ways twisting about inside. There's a hand pump right in the front where you’re liable to see some wretched woman in skivvies and her whole brood around her doing the wash, only just then it was empty. We went inside and down the lane and turned a corner and saw it.”
He inhales sharply.
“It was a nasty business… The smell of it, it was like a butcher shop were set up in a foundry, and with a thunderstorm going on all round. It was so unnatural-like. There was a kind of blackness that stained the street and the walls in splashes that went up eight feet. Looked like a body’d been stood up against a wall and smashed to porridge. Only, the strength of a blow that could do that to flesh… looked more as if a watermelon had been struck by a hammer.”
The tobacconist looks up suddenly in response to the sound of loud voices in the street outside. When, after several seconds, nobody enters the shop and the noise recedes, he continues.
“Anyway, there you were, lying in the thick of it. I guess I must have swore out loud as soon as I saw it, and my man raised a hand at the boy. Seemed certain no deader could be wanted by the dusties with it missing as much of itself as was plainly splattered about that place. And I said something harsh to the boy to that purpose.”
Two or three times there, it’s been the unnamed companion, ‘my man’. Is there some protectiveness going on there? Or is it pride of social distinction? Maybe his read on the situation is too paranoid, and he’s merely failing to make his person-understanding skills sync properly with the shopkeeper.
“How many other bodies were there?”
So, his blood was spilled in large volume, but it replenished within him spontaneously, in the same manner as a Create Water spell. Does that mean he can cut off his own arms and endlessly regrow them? Is there use in that?
“Apart from me, what other shape did you see there?”
He looks sheepish. “Oh think nothing more of that. Was a story I heard once when I was a child. They say there’s a tall and spindly man made of sticks who stalks abroad at night and turns people inside out with his magic. There weren’t nothing in the lane when the boy took us there. That’s for certain.”
He spends a few moments examining his loincloth. The material is darkly colored and rather filthy, but it doesn’t immediately give the impression of having been soaked through with gore.
“I was naked save this garment? Are you sure?”
That’s unfortunate. It implies he was already stripped when the collectors reached him. This whole trip to recover his journal may have been for naught.
He conceals his disappointment.
“In what attitude was my body? Face up? Face down? How were the limbs positioned?”
The tobacconist looks thoughtful. “It was - hmm. Mostly sideways like, in a hunched position. With the head in the direction of the wall that had all the splattering done. Looked at first like one eye had been torn out or at least caked with enough gore as to never work rightly again.”