Still moving silently through the back alleys she found what she was looking for, a night soil cart. The two men were busy collecting the refuse outside a disreputable bar which gave her enough time to throw the corpse on the back and make a dash for it. It quickly sank into the waste, so that only a few claws and tufts of hair were visible.
Kari wandered nonchalantly down the streets again back to her small set of rooms in Mrs Ling’s house. Even though the moons were well and truly out, the small wrinkled woman was still awake and knitting in her rocking chair. Mrs Ling had rented out the top floor of her house for years, ever since her husband had died. The story she liked to tell was that he had been a pirate and had stolen her away from the faraway place she was born. In reality he had been a cloth merchant and retired to the city with his wife only to die two years later.
“Good evening, dear. How are Bill and Rosie?” She looked up and smiled, her face rearranging its wrinkles, some stretching and others compounding. After Kari’s mumbled reply, she went on to say, “Leave your shirt out and I will wash all that demon blood out in the morning.” When Kari’s eyes widened in surprise the little old lady just smiled again.
Since being mystified by both Mrs Ling’s kindness and apparent knowledge of exactly what Kari did was nothing new to her by now, Kari gave up and went to bed, though not before leaving her shirt out.
*
“So you’re just going to swan in here after I have done all the hard work, glance at my notes, and then command me about like your own personal slave?” Kari had had enough, and it was only half past nine in the morning. She had technically been on shift only half an hour, but had been summoned to the office at six that morning by the snobby elf sitting before her and then commanded to do all sorts of demeaning things. This was the last straw. She drew the line at bringing freshly brewed coffee for the elf.
“I am reviewing the information you have gathered thus far, and bad handwriting and poor hygiene aside, your notes seem to be quite thorough,” he replied haughtily, not even looking at her.
“What do you, mean bad hygiene? I wash every day!” She exclaimed, then thought about what he had said, which had in fact been a sort of compliment if in a back-handed elf way.
“If you wash every day, then you wouldn’t smell of sulphur,” He did look at her then, but not at her face, instead perusing the dented breast plate, slightly frayed sleeves of her padded surcoat and patched trousers of her uniform. He, however, was once again impeccably dressed, in a long blue robe that skimmed the floor. His hair had also been done in a practical yet incredibly intricate braid that reached down to his waist.
“Well at least I don’t look like I’d tumble over in a breeze.” Yes, she thought, got you on this one.
“No, of all the things in this room Corporal, you are the least elegant,” he replied, not at all flustered or even seeming to care what she had said.
It took a moment for Kari to realise he had, yet again, insulted her. She was about to rip his face off with her claws when a thought occurred to her, “So, Elathir, why can’t you just track the demonic artefacts?” she said, trying to steer the conversation away from her personal deportment.
“Because every time we get close to discovering where the items or substances came from, everyone we wish to speak to suddenly disappears,” Elathir said through gritted teeth. His demeanour had changed from annoyed tolerance to downright malicious rage.
“So you failed,” Kari had found a nerve of her own to strum.
“It is not failure when everything you had vanishes and everyone who originally looked into it dies in one attack.” His eyes seemed to glaze over in memory. “Four elves went into that farmhouse, none returned, and the explosion killed the animals in every field for a half-mile radius. Another four to add to the list of murders by your kind.” The last part he said with genuine hatred, he didn’t even try to hide the expression of disgust on his face.
“What do you mean ‘my kind’?”
Before he could answer, six men were carrying something large and heavy on a blanket into the room. Immediately following them was the smell, which caught up quickly and then decided to greet everyone in the room simultaneously. The men seemed not to notice the chaos the smell was causing and placed the big, heavy blanket down in the middle of the room. When they moved back she managed to have a good look at the mess covering it.
It was an Azri, and it was covered in...
SHIT!
Chaos reigned for a few moments more, the panic palpably rising in the room, until the elf strode through the throng with the chief.
The elf said a few muttered words and a light breeze started to circulate, making the air slightly more tolerable. Everyone started breathing more deeply again.
“Someone killed a demon,” Trollock stated. The room seemed to agree.
“The night soil men found it in their cart. They thought it was a man at first, but once they wiped the shit off it, they saw what it really was,” Plond explained in his plaintive, I-hope-I’m-doing-this-properly voice. “I took statements from them, then loaded it into an empty cart to bring in here.”
“Did they see who put it in the cart? Or what time?” the chief grilled him.
“No, they only discovered it when they went to dump the night soil in the pits about an hour ago,” Plond replied, still looking like a rabbit caught in the lamp lights.
The elf chose at this point to speak. “I think, as the leading demon expert, that I should examine the remains.” Seemingly as an afterthought he added, “notify me when the corpse has been cleaned,” and with that he walked off, back to Kari’s files.
The excitement seemed to have passed now, especially since someone was going to have to wash the thing, and that usually was left to the ones stupid enough to still be hanging round when the chief was sure you had something better to be doing. Kari hadn’t moved since she had caught sight of the red skin.
“Thank you for volunteering, Corporal True.”
*
It took Kari an hour to clean all the filth off the demon, and then a further twenty minutes to try and clean the filth off her uniform, an extra five minutes to give up on that and then ten more to change into something clean. All the while, she tried to figure out if there was a way of once again hiding, or preferably destroying, the body without losing her job. So far none of her ideas had held any water. Kari was sure that no one would believe that a dragon had flown out of hell especially to eat this dead demon, or anything involving a sea monster as although sitting next to a tidal river, the City was in fact twenty miles from the actual coast. She resorted to praying to every god she knew of that her involvement would not be discovered. By the time she had finished she was not only still smelling of sulphur and shit, but was also a nervous wreck.
Kari carried the gigantic corpse into the former interrogation room, now Elathir’s office. She laid it on the table, completely forgetting to pretend to be weaker than she actually was. If elves were capable of showing surprise, this one did.
“You seem to have hidden skills, Corporal.” He gave her a long