"Why did you kill Norien?" he asks gently.

"I'm not telling you slime!"

"Oh, I think you will," Enturi mumbles, almost to himself. He lifts the elf's head up from the floor and leans forward, close. His hand caresses the elf's hair as their eyes lock. "You're going to tell me everything I want to know, aren't you?" His voice is smooth, as caressing as his hand. Damn, but he can be creepy as shit sometimes. 

"Yeah," says Calmorien, struggling to find his voice. "I'll talk. Just let me go. I didn't kill the whore."

"Of course," lies Enturi. "Just tell us who did. That's who we're after."

The old elf has been working for a human named Jeamo, who lives outside the wall but has a place here in Elftown as well. A studio, he calls it. It's northwest of here, in another small warehouse on the opposite side of the harbor.

Calmorien knows a little magic, he tells us, which he uses to help Jeamo get what he wants. Jeamo is an artist with exotic tastes, of the darker sort. Calmorien has been helping him satisfy them and arranged the rendezvous with Norien. She had agreed to come to his studio, thinking him a rich and eccentric merchant seeking some sexual thrills, but changed her mind at the last minute and insisted on meeting at the Bouncy Tart. She must have sensed something was wrong. Her mistake was in believing that she would be safe at the whorehouse.

Calmorien had also acquired these three children, and others before, for delivery to Jeamo at his studio. He was to deliver 'the subjects' for use later tonight. He and his bodyguard were packing the last child when we burst in.

Enturi falls silent. He has the information we need. Probably sees no need for further questions. But I do.

I lean in and speak to the sorcerer softly, almost conversationally.

"Your boss, he kinda likes to hurt people, doesn't he? Really gets off on it, right?"

The elf laughs. It's an ugly sound.

"You should have seen what he did to that whore last night. He loves it! Jeamo is one sick bastard!"

The way he says it, all proud and admiring, is pretty grating. But I'm not done yet.

"That whore? I heard you were sweet on Norien. So why her?"

"She could have had a good life," he snarls. "She chose a whore's life and reaped a whore's reward."

Charming. I gesture to Alvar and the other two children.

"And what Jeamo does with these other 'subjects'?" I go on. "He considers himself quite an artist, doesn't he?"

The delivery boy's eyes glint with hungry sadism. He licks his lips.

"Yeah," His eyes are half closed with the memory of it. Calmorien is more than a procurer. He's a cohort in perversion.

"So what's so great about his art?" I challenge.

My rough tone brings his mind back to the warehouse. Contempt distorts his features.

"It's not like you could understand it, gutter trash, with your petty life and shallow perspective. He paints with blood and pain on a canvas of elven misery and soiled innocence."  

"Yeah, that's real special," I hiss back, returning contempt for contempt. "Like I don't do that every day of my stinkin' life." I bring the tip of my sickle to the soft and vulnerable spot on the underside of his chin. Before I even pierce his skin, Calmorien goes into some sort of convulsion, shaking and gasping. He tries to speak, and a rivulet of blood snakes out of one side of his mouth. His body tenses and then relaxes, his eyes making that instant shift to lifelessness that less seasoned murderers sometimes find unsettling.

"-the hell?" I ask. Glancing down the body, I see what happened. Lynae, apparently sickened by his responses, slid her rapier up through his groin into his body cavity, all the way up to his lungs. Great. I was wanting to kill this one. I would have done it slower, though. Show him what it feels like to be painted with blood and pain. Without the numbness of twilight sleep.

"Well, that's that," Lynae says dismissively, pulling out her blade and wiping it off. I nod toward the drugged children.

"What about these street rats?" I ask.

"Can you help them?" Enturi asks the healer. I lift Calmorien's head from the floor by the hair. The dwarf shakes his head.

"I can't neutralize the drug's effects," he says. "It should wear off on its own before tomorrow morning, though." I pull back my left arm, sickle in hand.

Enturi shrugs. "Leave 'em, then."

I swing with the force of my muscle and the curved blade hacks into the old elf's neck. As the dwarf pulls off his cloak and drapes it over the drugged children like a blanket, I saw through the last bit, and Calmorien's body falls away with a thump.