The Lilliad chapter 5

Lilli found Elathor where she had left them, evidently watching the crowd go by. 

“There you are!’ Elathor exclaimed, clasping her shoulder with their claws. The dulled tips put barely any pressure on her skin, but it still made Lilli feel a little uneasy. Survival instincts were hard to overcome.  “What did you find?”

There was no way that Lilli was going to pull out guard property on the street. No one was that stupid. 

“Maybe somewhere private.” She said, quietly, leaning in towards Elathor’s ear holes. “Back to the shop?”

Elathor seemed confused. Something in their face twitched, and she saw that some calculations were being made. 

“Is what we did… bad?”

Lilli just stared.

Elathor stared back. 

“It was not entirely legal.” Elathor modified. 

“That would be accurate.”

“On a scale of one to one million…”

“Bad. Can we leave now, before we get caught?” Lilli surreptitiously turned to check whether any guards were nearby. One was posted on the corner far down the street, watching the crowd for pickpockets or other trouble. He was leaning back on a lamppost, so it was fairly unlikely that he knew anything had happened. 

“How,” Elathor followed her earlier line of sight, and blinked. She noted the multiple sets of eyelids at different angles. Did that mean Elathor had very good vision or very bad? Or did it just mean that they had the cleanest eyeballs around?

She shook the thought out of her head. It didn’t matter. 

“How would you propose we leave, then, Miss Lilli?” Elathor asked, eyes focused back on her. “You seem to be an expert at these things.”

“Quietly, and slowly, as if nothing has happened.” Lilli answered, resisting the urge to check that her daggers were still there, just in case she got caught. She needed to not be suspicious. She didn’t look totally filthy or out of place at the moment, but a glimmer of steel was likely to attract attention. 

There were still lots of people walking by, so she gestured out onto the street and followed the flow of people, careful to stay close to the outside of the street just in case there were. Well. complications. 

Lilli looked back once, to verify that Elathor had followed her. He had, and was trying to keep pace with the fast-moving crowd in his robes. 

It took the better part of an hour to reach the door of the clinic. Upon crossing the threshold, Lilli felt the relief roll down into her soul. She let out a breath she didn’t know how long she’d been holding. 

She was so close to being out of this nightmare. Soon Elathor and his wizardy friends would take this out of her hands and she would be able to go back to her life of being a poverty-stricken, homeless orphan living on the edge.

She felt a bit sick. Lilli had been clinging uselessly to the idea that once this was over that her life would return to normal. But her normal was awful. She lived every day not knowing when or if she was going to eat, crawling through actual sewers to avoid being jumped. 

Was that better or worse than dying of Kthings?

She didn’t know.

Elathor led her back through the cluttered shop, over a pile of massive, glowing silkworms in a box to an area full of books and tables. 

There was no one around. Lilli looked past every bookshelf as they passed. 

“Well, what did you find out?” Elathor asked, stopping at a desk piled high with books and scrolls. Quills jutted out at odd angles. 

Lilli produced the folios from inside her shirt, taking care not to overexpose herself. It felt stupid, because they had probably already seen her naked when she was being treated, but she felt that the situation made it dffferent. 

They were a little bit sweat-stained from their brief containment next to her chest. Elathor took them gingerly and tried to flip through the one on the top. 

There was a long silence. 

“Is any of that useful?” She asked, feeling out of place. “I hope something is. I just grabbed what I could find.”

Elathor put the first folio on the towering pile of books and started leafing through the next, scaly browline furrowed. 

They sighed as they reached the end, and took out the third. 

There was no “aha!” like Lilli had expected. No “well done, Lilli”. Just sighing and flipping of pages.

She was starting to feel a bit put out. At least one of them had to be of use, right? It was odds!

Elathor finished their work of reading, and sat down on the floor. Lilli followed suit, crossing her long, skinny legs. 

“Lilli…” Elathor rubbed their talons over his crest. “You really need to learn how to read.”

She felt ashamed. Lilli could feel the heat rising up in her stomach, accompanied by a tightness in her chest. Her eyes burned. 

She was NOT going to cry. It wasn’t her fault. It was just what was. 

At the same time, she knew that her skin was flushing from light lavender to an ugly mottled blue. She couldn’t hide that biological reaction to shame. 

“It’s all right!” Elathor waved their talons around uselessly. “I’ll teach you. It’s fine.” 

They pointed up at the first folder. “Those are the arrest records for Supreit, last month. From the first day to the third day.”

A talon pointed to the second folder. “From the fourth to the seventh. The third folio was from the eighth to the tenth.” 

They stared at the last folder for a long second.

“That one is just for the eleventh.”

Supreit definitely wasn’t the nicest area of the city, but it wasn’t the worst. It was, however, the one where she found herself walking through the most shit. One time, someone had even dumped their chamberpot on her head. 

“How big is Supreit?” She asked. 

“About 800 people, so far as the city has recorded.” Elathor looked pained. “And it seems that there were about 500 arrests in those eleven days.” They looked around at the folios again. “This city is so unsafe. No one should live here.”

Tell me about it. And think of all the criminals, like us, that they don’t catch. 

“I’m sorry that they aren’t what you need.” Lilli said honestly. “But I did overhear some things that might be more useful.”

Elathor looked up. 

“The guards said that there were a lot more of those…. Kthings, and that the Poureoin District is basically lost to them. And that the Mages College has been given lots of the Kthing bodies to study.”

“Magician’s College,” Elathor corrected blithely, obviously turning that information over. “That is very unfortunate.”

“Yeah, all those people dying.” Lilli felt sad, and a little bit guilty. She was so lucky to not be one of them. 

“No, not just that.” Elathor sounded grumpy. She looked up. They were crossly picking up the folios she had so tenderly stolen and tossing them into a corner. “The College.” 

She felt a bit insulted. That was her hard work, being flung like trash. 

“The Magician’s College? What’s wrong with them?” She asked. Lilli had assumed that all magic users hung out and were at least on decent terms. Didn’t Elathor have to have gone to the College to learn to use magic?

“We disagreed on some things.” A taloned hand appeared in front of her face, palm open. Lilli took it and stood up. 

Elathor was surprisingly sturdy, she noted. 

“What kind of disagreement?” Lilli asked, cautiously, as she removed her hand from Elathor’s. 

“Lilli, I am afraid I’m going to have to ask you to commit more crime.” Elathor stated, not sounding particularly afraid. Or sorry.