Gamon takes his opportunity to smack Verik with the haft of his axe as he stands, then steps back into close-quarters with another swing to prevent Verik having the space to use his spear.
Gamon's axe knocks Verik soundly across his jaw as he stands and crashes down again on his collarbone. Verik just spits blood as his jaw makes an awful click and prepares to be set upon again.
"Cease this pointless struggle, Verik Vancaskerkin, or you shall be burned in the emberstorm!" Jolon says, the unearthly echo rumbling in his voice.
Jolon's proclamation reaches Verik and shakes him to the core. The man continues to fight, but with less fervor than before.
Aloysia tries to do a tumbling roll to get behind Verik
Then tries to hit the man in the back of the head with the butt of her dagger, .
Verik stabs at Aloysia as she rolls behind him.
Gamon draws Verik's eye and forces him to readjust the haft of the spear to avoid getting a blunt axe to the gut. Verik's height prevents Aloysia from getting a good swing at his head as she avoids the backwards jabs from his spear.
Verik does not like the pressure he is receiving from both sides and adjusts his grip to stab at Gamon.
Verik slips in the small pool of blood forming at his feet, dropping to one knee as his thrust goes wild.
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Gamon, seeing his opportunity as Verik goes down, swings again with the blunted side of his axe.
Jolon holds his position, evidently waiting to see if Verik will fall unconcious with Gamon's blow.
The back of Gamon's axe cracks down on Verik's clavicle and forcing a grunt out of him. He swoons, but remains standing, figuratively speaking.
"You have lost, tshamek. Surrender, and keep what little honor you have left," Jolon intones.
"Cease this conflict! We have the advantage." Cecil calls out. "You're beaten."
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Aloysia lines up for another blow to the back of the head depending on what he says, .
Verik curses and spits blood, "I've cast my lot, now you cast yours."
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Jolon says nothing, but glares at Verik, eyes glowing with iridescent blue flame. He intones something in Shoanti and the whispers rise until they change to a raptor's shriek. The blue fire coalesces in Jolon's hand and rises from it to take the form of a vulture formed out that same fire. It wings over to Verik and attempts to distract him and frustrate his attacks.
Hearing his choice, Aloysia smiles wanting so badly to use the blade end, but knowing it would frustrate the lot she's chosen to pair with. The smile fades, but only a little...
Cecil's ray ghosts across Verik's brow, filling it with frost. The ice numbs him, and combined with the blood-loss and previous damage, drops to the ground, eyes rolling backwards in his head.
Jolon's vulture circles Verik and alights on the counter. The fire in Jolon's eyes dies down and the whispers fall silent again.
"Tie him up the others up. I have spells that can keep them alive."
Aloysia takes out her rope and begins to tie the man at her feet up.
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Jolon moves quickly between the men, stopping the most severe case first, who had been bleeding out all over the floor without having any way to stop, then his friend who had also gone down, and finally checking over Verik to ensure none of the damage was really permanent.
"We should find a cabinet to stuff him into, so he doesn't escape while we're looking around." Cecil suggests. "I admit I'm curious where he gets his meats."
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After performing basic first aid on the three men, Jolon sniffs.
"That will keep them alive for now. I'll heal them completely with my magic once we've investigated the premises. Any evidence we find can help us extract a confession from him. Many men lie about what they have done, but when what they have done is clear, few will lie about why they have done something."
He nods at Cecil's suggestion.
"We'll need to find something big enough for all three of them. At least we will have accomplices they can question to cross-reference Verik's testimony."
The summoned vulture gives a small cry.
The air in this room is stale, stinking of day-old meat and blood. Straw litters the floor, scattered to catch the drips from the meat as it hangs. Meat hooks are affixed to the walls and ceiling on metal rods. To the north is a low blood-stained table and two barrels of salt, while double doors stand in the wall to the south. An iron bar extends through a narrow hole at the top of the doors; the bar runs along the ceiling for five feet before ending at a vertical pole running floor to ceiling.
The floor of this grim chamber is strewn with blood-stained straw, and the reek of slaughter is almost overpowering. The room is a killing floor. Meat hooks dangle from a metal track affixed to the ceiling that allows the hooks and their gory loads to be moved easily around the room. In the northwest corner, a large hammer sits on the floor amid a permanent bloodstain. To the south, a bloodstained grill covers a wide hole in the floor. Just north of the grill sit two large vats of water, one boiling and one cold. Two large butcher blocks stand to the east next to barrels of salt, and in the southeast corner sits a reeking vat of cast-off meat and bones.
Two foul-smelling animal pens take up the majority of this room. Each pen is defined by a wooden fence set with a gate. Inside each is a long water trough and heaps of filthy hay. The floor here is hard-packed earth.
This large cattle pen is open to the air, and the stink of manure, mud, and animal is strong, despite the breeze that wafts through the stockade’s wooden fence. To the south stands a roofed shed containing a straw-filled wagon. There are currently no animals in the pen.
A round table sits in this room, surrounded by four wooden chairs. A stack of cards sits on the tabletop. A cabinet to the southwest hangs open, revealing a tangle of dirty clothes and blankets. Four thin bedrolls lie rolled up against the north wall.
A single large desk stands in the eastern part of this large office, transformed into a makeshift bed by a bedroll and several blankets and pillows. A chamber pot sits under it. A table and three chairs sit to the west; several papers lie strewn over the table’s surface. One of the papers is pinned to the tabletop by an exquisite silver dagger.
Cecil doesn't know much about meats. He wasn't strictly vegetarian, but he could do without it if the stuff was hard to find and as he spends a lot of time writing he's used to living off coffee and crackers from the pantry.
However, when they inspect the holding pens, he is quick to point out the mound of earth.
"Wait, here! Let's take a look." he will scoop the dirt free, pulling the bags out and setting them aside before actually looking at the contents."Ah, they were hiding their profits... actually... there's jewelry in here. Were they robbing people!?"
Aloysia turns up her nose at the killing floor inadvertently putting on an aire of "better than," because she's like that. At the sound of profits, jewelry, and robbing she becomes immediately interested. "What have we here?!" she says with the greed almost dripping off her tongue.
Cecil will pass the bags back to Aloysia as he makes sure that's the last of it. "Here, how much money do you think we're dealing with here?" he asks her.
Jolon takes a closer look at the meat and takes a sniff.
Aloysia smiles as she takes the bags, but the question rings home to her. As she starts rifling through the bags to see what kind of value she can determine, she also starts taking a mental inventory of the shop and what she's seen to get an idea of the more intangible value these men have been generating.
The thinking about how much the property, the finishings, and the like seem to distract her a little bit making it harder to get a solid value on the goods in her hand. However, she feels like she gets a solid idea of what the "business" is worth, .
Aloysia is shocked at the weight of the bag; this business should not be this lucrative. From what could be seen earlier Verik's men were not charging anything more than what the meat would be 'at cost', and knowing the city she would be surprised if more than a few farmers came in on any given day with the turmoil going on.
Assuming cattle and pigs, the most prevalent meat products in the area, are being sold at one and a half times their value with the state of the city the ex-guardsmen would have to be spending and making anywhere between 150 and 300 gold daily just to continue running. Given time to clean this place up and charge more normal rates this could easily be earning around 1000 gold weekly, but was instead run almost entirely free.
Jolon sniffs the meat more closely and then he gasps and stumbles back in shock.
"ANCESTORS, NO!" he exclaims before regaining his composure. "It seems my suspicion was correct: Verik's gang IS supplementing their product with the flesh of people!"
Aloysia starts to frown as she does her mental inventory. "This doesn't add up. This place can produce a decent income, but wasn't. It feels almost like it was being run..." she shudders, "For the people." She shakes off the thought of such a terrible idea. "More importantly, this has got to be a front, they can't generate this kind of income with this shop."
She doesn't quite let go of the bag, mostly out of habbit for valuing the shiny things. But she does get keenly more interested in the surrounding.
[dice=Perception to look for evidence of "extra curricular" business]1d20 + 7[/dice]
"I think I know what's going on, Aloysia," Jolon says gravely. "It would appear that they're murdering Korvosan citizens and chopping them up like cattle. It wouldn't surprise me if that "income" was stripped from the corpses of their victims before...they were butchered."
"Being tricked into eating other people?!" Cecil recoils. "Disgusting! Terrible!"
He hesitates, then fishes a notebook from his bag and jots down a few sentences with his pen. "I really must keep this for a book. Perhaps a romance between a down on their luck butcher and the murderous barber that lives upstairs..." he mutters, trailing off as he gets it down.
Gamon shudders in revulsion, Dear god. Don't go through that bag too closely yet, we want to keep everything in it intact in case it helps us find the families of these poor people.
"Do you think they have records of their spoils? That could help us figure out just what the Hell Verik was thinking, who he was working with, that sort of thing."
While Jolon speaks, the vulture wings over to the remaining meat and helps itself, though notably it avoids the human carrion, before the summoning expires and it vanishes in an iridescent blue flash.
Aloysia's investigation of the area brings her back to the killing floor where the blood trails lead to a grate over a pit. The grate is rusting, but looking down into the pit everything seems disturbingly clean. There doesn't appear to be any of the entrails or gristly bits that wouldn't be sold with the rest of the meat. She doesn't find anything else that would help explain where the money came from.
Peering down the grate, "Would any of you have ever expected a waste drain to be so spotless? I think our investigation leads down there."
Due to the lack of cleanliness the grate itself is rusted and can be broken open easily, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do so without breaking it entirely. There are no signs of traps on or around it.
Jolon taps Aloysia on the shoulder as the grate is broken open.
"Shouldn't we get Verik and his goons back to the Citadel? It'll be easier for the Field Marshall to keep an eye on them in a cell than we will in a closet. And the building will still be here when we get back.
Besides, we don't want an otyugh or something to slip past us while we're exploring down there and eat our arrest."
"Fair point, also we should figure out what we're going to do with this bag of valuables!" Turning to the rest of the group, "Shall we head back?"
"I presume we turn it in as evidence, that the items within may be used to identify the victims and be returned to their families. And if not, then presumably the Marshall will either let us keep them or give us a finder's fee."
While Aloysia had been quite selfless so far, Jolon understood that her patience with selflessness probably only went so far, and sometimes you had to play to one's sense of greed to make it seem like they'd profit just as much from returning stolen goods as they would from keeping them.