Travelogue 7 — a small incident in the bazaar

Besides the various stands, there are also ambulant sellers, carrying their merchandise and shilling it to the passersby. One of them gathered a small crowd around him: he was a textile merchant from the Angelic Unison, but also a triton, one of the few that live in the Aether Ocean. He showed scarves and drapes made of iridescent silk, a fabric he claimed his family invented. He said that they have been able to breed caterpillars that make their cocoons inside living oysters, capturing the mother-of-pearls of the shells in their threads. I don’t know much about the Aether Ocean and the strange environment where air and water-breathing creatures can cohabitate, but it all sounded preposterous. But the Triton seller was spinning a nice story and even the skeptic hung around to listen where he was going with all those tall tales. He also had something else to attract and amuse the passersby: he walked around with an octopus that helped him show samples to potential buyers, offering shawls and veils like a well-trained butler. Even the proverbially unflappable Mizanian became intrigued, and the notoriously reserved dwarven lady came forward to take a better look. I was talking with another curious, woman from the Unison, who was incredulous about seeing a pet octopus living outside the Aether Ocean and had to vent her conviction it was all a ruse.

While I was distracted, someone yanked my satchel. I fell and I saw someone sprinting away. Bazim had quick reflexes and grabbed my bag, beginning a thug of war with the thief. The culprit was a halfling man, short as Bazim, with the unsettling peculiarity of giving his back to anyone, simultaneously and perpetually. It’s hard to explain: even walking around him you could never see his face, as everything seemed to rotate to make it so.
While the Thief was walking forward, pulling the strap, Bazim was digging his heels and hugging the bag making all the counterweight he could. I fidgeted all day with one of the stones I bought and now I use it to cast a simple spell: I threw the rock at the halfling’s feet and it shattered in a cloud of fine powder. The thief got scared and left the bag, running away as fast as he could.
I’m not used to doing magic on the fly and a sharp migraine stabbed my brain, like when you eat or drink something too cold. The people around asked me if I needed anything and at to my refusal for help they were quick to go back to their businesses.
While Bazim lent me a hand Lod Neberius started shouting “Guards! Guards!”. He had a thunderous voice and the entitled tone of an impatient patron demanding attention from the innkeeper.
A dwarven guard, with a checkered shirt and an axe dangling from his belt, came to use. He knew some infernal but he was not happy to take our declarations. “So, what’s happened?”. Lord Neberius painted a colorful scene where a deranged individual was not only breaking the law of perspective not showing his face, but also the law of humanity, assaulting a poor girl who bravely used her cunning to scare off her assailant. Not only that! She marked the culprit with a pigment, making catching the delinquent much easier!
“I understand, but was anything stolen? Because if nothing was stolen I can’t do anything”. I was warned that outside the empire law enforcement is sloppy and lax, so I was ready to call it a day, but the viscount had no intention to let it go. As the dwarf kept minimizing the incident and repeating they could not pursue attempted crimes, Lord Neberius embarked on a long and passionate harangue about justice and honor. Each argument the guard tried to calm things down became a step to make the viscount’s grandstanding grander and his high horse higher. From the importance of punishing misdemeanors to keep order to crime as a sign of an evil heart, he rattled off every rhetorical trick and went into theology too, declaring it was his ancestral duty to castigate the wicked and could not rest if malice is afoot. When the Viscount mentioned that he, being an infernal noble, has the right to speak to the Archduke, one of the members of Mizani’s council, the guard surrendered and asked us to follow him to the Marshaless, the chief of the bazaar guards.