Utterly Mad

"I need her back here. Not tomorrow. Not today. Yesterday. That fucking quack thinks he can just hold my property like this? Doctor fucking Efram fucking Marsh will regret this shit. It's fucking robbery is what it is." King raved. Catnip and Minx stood before him, listening to the rant for some time before he finally strode purposefully to his safe and took from it a hefty book of water marks.

"A fucking ransom is what it is, and on the most important day of the year. Pay that fucking dink and get Pinky's whore ass back here, double time! My fucking business and-" the two girls took their leave of king without being dismissed. Minx knew that when king really got rolling, he would hold you for hours. He seemed to understand that himself and usually didn't come down to hard on slaves or servants who broke away before he'd had his fill.

It was the first time Catnip had been out on the streets of Pricetown since she had first entered King's Court. As she had thought before, the streets seemed almost uncomfortably packed. She mused on a lesson Quinn and Dervish had tried to impress upon her and her sister, and that was that disease spread fast when people came in close contact with one another. It was why the refugee center always seemed to have more sick people than the farm. Catnip took in the lesson better than her sister of course. Mica had no time for such lessons between goofing off and eating viscera.

They moved between the crush, bypassing a large swell of people on one occasion by taking a detour over one of the towns all to common scrap and Adobe buildings and through the burnt out remains of one of the towns old bars until they found themselves at a building with a simple sign above it's plank walkway.

"Marsh clinic."
"Mislings treated here."

---

King paced his private room. The small circuit he walked was clear on the floor by how clean that path was, and how the rug had begun to wear down under his repeated passage. The chief of security could feel both tension and sickness baking off his friend and employer. "I dream of her." King said. He was afraid of her, Doug could see it in the way he jumped at the slightest thing, or in the sharp glances King shot at the mirror behind the headboard of his grand bed. King was terrified, and it wasn't Pinky's absence from the ball that had him on edge. It was "her."

King had not told anyone his own monstrous tale. About how he had awoken one night from a dream in which he had relived the great burning to find "her" emerging from the mirror above, to find her reaching down to him. A monstrous thing like a desiccated corpse with it's hand and tendrils hanging down and reaching for him like the branches of dead trees in an abyssal swamp. He had fled screaming across his chambers to stumble over a stool and strike his nose hard enough against the door to start it bleeding. "She" had not followed, and from then on he had kept Pinky with him. He believed the albino mislings presence staved "her" off. King was certain he knew who "she" had been once, and "She" had after all held Pinky's kind in utter disdain even before he'd done what he'd done. Pinky wasn't here now though. King simply wondered how long it would be before "she" made her appearance.