The exploration that followed soon after was nothing short of agonizing. For hours on end, Arthur trudged through the rain-slicked hellscape of the Eastern Borough with his Auspex kept active, tracking the faint traces the carriage had left behind. But he had been forced to abandon that meticulous method roughly two hours into his search.
It was a madman's errand.
The heavy storm was rapidly washing away any residual scents, and in the churned-up streets every set of wheel tracks eventually bled into a dozen others, making it especially hard for him to tell them apart.
Only then did he realise how painfully naive he had been in his earlier deduction. Not only was the relentless rain working entirely against him, but his human brain simply wasn't developed enough to parse the overwhelming flood of smells and sounds pouring into his mind.
With the situation deteriorating, he fell back to the only practical plan that made sense to him: the blunt logic of classic detective tropes.
He began sweeping the docks and targeting every suspicious looking warehouse, straining his ears for the muffled conversations of criminals plotting in the dark. And even if that failed, a relentless trial-and-error search of the entire district was next on the list.
He ran through the slick streets to cover as much ground as possible. Thankfully, his newly enhanced constitution granted him excellent stamina, though he quickly discovered the limits of being a Duskborn. He wasn't a fully realized Kindred and hence lacked their boundless, undead endurance. Every few minutes he had to stop and catch his breath, keeping each rest strictly under a minute to save time, all while trying to soothe the headache caused by constant sensory overload.
As he moved, he was forced to endure the concentrated stench of human misery. Disease, raw sewage, and cheap alcohol burned his nostrils. Three times he had to duck into narrow alleys to avoid roving bands of thugs armed with lead pipes and firearms.
Even at such a miserable hour, pockets of the Eastern Borough were strangely, feverishly active— like a sprawling ecosystem of the desperate. Huddled figures clustered around makeshift fires burning in rusted iron barrels inside abandoned lots. Gaunt, hollow-eyed men unloaded illicit cargo from unmarked barges along the riverfront, their boots sloshing through the toxic-smelling runoff.
From the upper windows of leaning, dilapidated tenements, Arthur could hear the hacking coughs of the sick bleeding into the shrill howling of the wind. Yet beyond these isolated hubs of activity, a heavy, suffocating quiet hung over the broader borough. The vast majority of its exhausted denizens had already succumbed to a fragile, uneasy sleep.
Undeterred, he continued his grim patrol, systematically checking every suspicious building and relying on his heightened senses to pierce the suffocating darkness inside.
Pausing in the shadows, he checked his silver, mint-leaf-engraved pocket watch; it was just approaching 4:44 AM. After scouring about ten empty buildings, his relentless search finally bore fruit and led him to a massive, somewhat abandoned-looking warehouse near the docks. To the ordinary eye the structure looked completely ordinary, and it was nothing short of a miracle that he had stumbled upon it at all. But through the thin cracks in the boarded-up windows, Arthur's heightened senses picked up the faint flicker of lantern light and the muffled, terrified weeping of several women.
A trafficking ring. Jesus Christ
He crouched behind a heap of wooden boards and pulled the revolver from his coat. His pale thumb hovered over the hammer, ready to cock it and go in.
I can't just storm in through the front door, he calculated grimly. Six bullets. Zero combat experience. If there are a dozen armed men inside, my newly acquired vampiric perks won't stop me from getting shot to pieces.
He needed a hammer to smash this wide open, and he knew exactly where to find one.
Retracing his steps a few streets back, Arthur returned to the local constabulary precinct he had spotted earlier. Tearing a scrap of paper from his notebook, he hastily scrawled an anonymous tip in the native Loenese script, giving the exact location of a massive illegal smuggling operation. To guarantee their immediate and overwhelming interest, he explicitly hinted at a stockpile of stolen military firearms. Wrapping the note around a heavy cobblestone, he hurled it straight through the precinct's front window and melted into the stormy shadows long before the angry officers could rush out to investigate.
It didn't take long. Within twenty minutes, the shrill blast of police whistles pierced the storm. Three wagons full of armed constables descended on the warehouse, kicking in the front doors with brutal efficiency. Gunfire erupted almost immediately, the sharp cracks of revolvers and rifles echoing over the roar of the rain.
Meanwhile, the noise slammed in, onto his heightened senses like a physical blow. For a split second the world turned white with blackspots, the sound of the whistles, gunshots, rain and shouting all of it amplified and overlapped until his vision started flickering at the edges. He staggered, gritting his teeth, and forced himself to breathe through it.
Calm down. It's okay. Everything is okay.
It took several long seconds before he finally managed to suppress the violent reaction. In the end he deactivated the ability altogether.
Using the chaotic raid as his cover, Arthur moved to the rear of the vast warehouse. He then scaled a thick drainage pipe, found a cracked skylight on the sloped roof, pried it open, and dropped down silently onto the slightly rusted metal catwalk. Keeping low, he slipped down a short flight of stairs into the second floor which had a bunch of crates was also where he noticed a large broken window. A quick look at the back showed that it opened into the street below.
A possible escape route.
He then continued on descending down the stairs directly into the rear holding area. The space below was filled with several stacks of wooden crates and shipping barrels, many of them draped in heavy tarpaulins. The deep shadows between the stacks offered him perfect cover to hide in. Arthur melted into them at once, the gunfire and shouting at the front of the building had diminished significantly.
It seems like all the trafficker has abandoned their posts in the back, rushing forward to repel the sudden police raid and leaving the rear section unguarded.
But for the next few minutes what he witnessed was a pure nightmare.
Cages, dozens of them. Heavy, rusted iron constructs that should have only been used for livestock, lined the brick walls. Inside them huddled were over a dozen women. Their clothes were torn and soiled; some stared at the floor with vacant, shattered expressions, while others clutched the iron bars, their eyes wide with fresh terror at the sound of the gunfight echoing through the walls.
Stay focused, Arthur told himself, gripping the revolver tightly as he crept closer towards the cages. I just need to find my client's daughter in this mess and get out.
Arthur moved quickly along the row of rusted iron, the heavy dampness of the warehouse failing to mask the pungent stench of despair and unwashed bodies. He scanned the faces, his grey-blue eyes piercing the gloom until he stopped in front of the third cage.
Huddled in the far corner, clutching a torn green wool coat tightly around her trembling frame, was a young woman with short brown hair and dark eyes. Despite the grime and the terror etched into her features, she perfectly matched Abernathy's frantic, meager description.
"Clara?" Arthur whispered softly. He deliberately kept his voice low and steady as he holstered the revolver and fished a set of slim metal lockpicks from his wallet that he had seen earlier while paying the barman. Silently he thanked his predecessor's well-equipped habits.
The girl flinched, looking up at him with tear-streaked, terrified eyes. "Wh-who are you?"
"I'm a detective. Your father sent me," Arthur replied, already working the iron padlock. With a satisfying click the heavy lock gave way. He pulled the door open. "Come on. We're leaving now, before the police figure out what they've actually stumbled into."
Before Clara could take a single step out of the cage, the heavy thud of boots echoed from the corridor leading toward the front of the warehouse. A yellow beam from a bullseye lantern swept across the stacked crates and damp floor, cutting through the gloom and landing directly on Arthur.
He instinctively shielded his eyes with one hand, hissing at the sudden glare, while his other hand dropped to the inner pocket of his coat, fingers brushing the checkered grip of his Webley, ready to take it out.
"I should have known it was you, Arthur," a rough, profoundly tired voice said from behind the lantern.
Arthur froze, momentarily confused by the casual familiarity. As the officer lowered the lantern, casting the light upward to reveal a round, heavily lined face with receding hairline beneath a standard-issue constabulary helmet. Another fragmented memory pierced Arthur's skull.
Officer Thompson.
The memory supplied a bizarre set of facts: Thompson was a seasoned beat cop who was almost always accompanied by his partner, Thomson. The two men were practically carbon copies of each other, same height, same build, same bushy mustaches, and same exasperated mannerisms. Yet, incredibly, they were neither twins nor related by blood in any capacity. It was like a statistical anomaly that the original Arthur had apparently found both amusing and deeply irritating.
Where is the other one? Arthur wondered, glancing briefly into the shadows behind the officer.
"Don't bother looking for him. Thomson is still out there cracking that smuggler's skull with his truncheon," Thompson muttered, correctly reading the shift in Arthur's gaze. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a long, heavy sigh, then pulled the crumpled note from his pocket. "Stolen military firearms, you wrote. Not exactly what we found, is it?"
"You found something much worse, didn't you, Thompson?" Arthur replied smoothly, gesturing toward the cages of terrified women. "And frankly, my tip got you here fast enough to stop it. I'd say the constabulary owes me a blind eye while I escort my client's daughter home."
Thompson's tired gaze swept over the rusted iron cages, taking in the full, horrific scope of the holding area. The lingering annoyance in his eyes immediately hardened into cold, grim professionalism. He holstered his own service revolver and stepped forward, pulling a ring of iron keys that he likely liberated from the smuggler and began working on the other cages.
"Get her out of here, Arthur," Thompson said quietly, his voice losing all its previous sarcasm. "Take the back alley. When the Inspector gets down here, this is going to turn into a bureaucratic nightmare, and I won't be able to keep you out of the interrogation rooms."
"Much obliged," Arthur said, dipping his head in a slight, theatrical nod born from some odd, lingering muscle memory of his predecessor.
He turned to Clara. The girl was shivering violently, her knees trembling so hard she looked ready to collapse onto the damp dirt floor of the holding area. More police would be securing the perimeter at any second. Walking out of here at a terrified civilian's pace simply wasn't going to work.
"Excuse me," Arthur murmured.
Before she could process the warning, he stepped close, slipping one arm behind her back and the other beneath her knees. He lifted her into a princess carry. Clara let out a startled gasp, instinctively throwing her arms around his neck and clutching the wet lapels of his heavy trench coat. She was still a full, solid weight in his arms, his Duskborn nature had not granted him any great increase in strength it seemed. I guess I know now what having Strength Lv.1 means, he noted rather dryly. It means I can carry exactly what I could regularly back home but the constitution rating of Lv.4 meant the burden barely registered as strain.
He felt no burning in his muscles, no shortness of breath. Just the cold, wet girl.
He carried her past the veteran officer, moving swiftly up the ramp to the second floor. His plan was very simple. Instead of risking the main corridors, Arthur set his sights on the large window on the second floor he had seen earlier.
Without breaking stride, he stepped up onto a heavy wooden shipping crate, vaulted onto the wide stone sill and looked down.
The window opened directly over the back alley. A steep twelve-foot drop waited below him, enough to sprain or break a normal man's ankles, especially while carrying another person.
But nonetheless Arthur jumped.