Clayton knew of Joe Mani's flawed personality when they were still in the cavalry, but today, he seemed to have lost all his manners.
"Have you fallen in love with her?" Clayton asked with confusion. Although Dornishmen were fickle lovers, being in love with such a wanton woman still undermined one's reputation.
"No, not at all. But I bet that she holds some feelings for me."
While answering Clayton's question, Joe's gaze was fixated on Rosa on the stage. "Today when I chanced upon Ms. Rosa on the street, she was selling the tickets. We chatted for some time. The two tickets for the front row seats was a gift from her. I guess that she must have hoped me to snatch the gossamer coat."
Given its negligible weight, it was difficult to throw it too far away from the stage; only the people in the front rows were supposed to get it in their clutches.
Clayton decided that there was some merit to Joe's perception.
"So you have already known her?"
As he spoke, Clayton's eyes darted every which way the spotlight moved, trying to appreciate the artistic aspect of the strip show, but with the stinking smell lingering around his nose, he found it hard to focus.
"No, but she is a Gillardian." Joe almost craned over the scalp of the spectator in the row in front.
Gillardians, an eternally wandering ethnic group, were renowned for their indulgence and mysteriousness.
Clayton never knew whether Rosa was a real Gilldardian or Joe had made it all up to serve as an excuse for his very own indulgence.
"Could you give the gossamer coat to me?"
Shocked, Joe turned to stare at Clayton, "Lieutenant, what's up with you today? I won't pass this opportunity to you, definitely."
Clayton came up with an excuse without a second thought. "I just want to examine its weaving technique. I am going to buy a present for someone. The gossamer coat looks great."
Actually, he wanted nothing more than to see what it was tainted with made it stink as it did.
After taking it from Joe, Clayton was certain that his sense of smell didn't fail him. At the very beginning, the odor pervading the air felt merely half familiar, but now, it, with its pungency whose degree bordering on that of smelling salts, momentarily conjured up an image of his onetime encounter.
During the Lauren War, the front lines once faced a grave shortage of supplies, forcing the military forces to tighten their belts. Later on, this news found its way to the Kingdom's navy, which shipped, to the front lines, a large batch of dried meat that was rumored to date back to the Era of Great Navigations two hundred years ago, which in turn led hordes of originally healthy soldiers to have to swarm to the field hospitals.
The gossamer coat smelt exactly like those chunks of dried meat.
Clayton knitted his brows. He could tell that part of the audience was tinted with the same scent, but he didn't believe that it had anything to do with the spoiled dried meat, which would never become part of the fashion trend.
Their peculiar bearing and smells evoked the rumors about Zombies in him.
The gossamer coat was nice and clean itself, giving off a pungent aroma of low-quality perfume but also reeking of decaying meat.
To begin with, he had brushed aside the perfume's aroma, which permeated the air all around. But he was able to detect it only because the gossamer coat had been spritzed with a lot of perfume.
It seemed that the item's owner was aware of the decaying smell and had purposely covered it up with the fragrance.
Handing the coat back to the fidgety Joe, Clayton got up and left, using an excuse of having to relieve himself. He walked in the direction of the exit of the theatre, yet halfway, he turned back.
"Joe, I suddenly recall some urgent business to attend to, and I need your helping hand."
Joe wore a grimace and held up the gossamer coat, "Oh, please, I am occupied tonight."
Clayton interrupted, "Samuel is waiting for us."
"Is that so?" Joe studied his expression and realized that Clayton wasn't joking before rising while mumbling, "Let's make it quick, maybe we can return at the rear part of the performance."
They walked unhurriedly along the aisle, on either side of which the audience appeared fervent with their gazes transfixed on the stage, whistling and applauding, seemingly oblivious of their leaving.
When their figures finally disappeared into the exit, the dancers on the stage changed their dance poses and turned more coquettish.
They now looked more like lethargic cats rather than snakes before.
After the first man yawned, tiredness, akin to a pandemic, swept over the crowd, who gradually forgot what they had to do, closed their eyes, and hung their heads low.
Before long, all over the theater, snores filled the air.
In the first three rows, the spectators who hadn't drifted into their slumbers froze in their movements, reminiscent of puppets without a puppeteer.
Their joyfulness, desires .... expressions, and positions all congealed at a certain moment in the past.
The seats that Clayton and Joe had taken were left behind empty amid them, out of place by comparison with their vivid sentiments.
The lead dancer stopped twisting her body and hung her hands limp at her sides, shifting her eyes to the exit that the flight of steps led to.
"Why did they look away frequently? Are we seen through?"
A woman in the audience seats pushed aside an unconscious man and walked out from the cramped space that the two lines of seats allowed for.
"Reverend, do we need to catch up to them?"
............
"Huff puff... Huff puff..."
Joe Mani was currently retching against the wall. After they came out of the theater, they dashed a dozen miles all the way to the deserted alley, where they came to a halt.
Clayton was breathing as well as ever but pretended to be unable to do so since Joe looked so miserable and exhausted.
After regaining his strength more or less, Joe, with no regard for his own tidiness, thudded his butt onto the ground crawling with patches of green moss.
"Lieutenant, can you tell me now what was going on back there?"
Before they left the theater, Clayton mentioned Samuel, one of their common comrades who had long since settled into his tomb.
Such an odd excuse would put even an idiot on alert.
"Someone is plotting against us." Clayton gave his conclusion. "Don't ask who they are, but at least I can be sure that the people in the two rows in front of and behind us are under their command, Rosa is also one among them."
Joe didn't pose any questions about his conclusion. Believing their own intuition and luck was a habit shared among soldiers who had thrown themselves into ever-changing, life-claiming battlefields.
After over a decade as a soldier, the fact that Clayton stayed as able-bodied as ever gave proof of his outstanding intuitive prowess.
"Are there so many of them over there? I wonder who you have offended?"
Clayton frowned at his words, "It's the question I should have asked you. You must have hidden something from me. Just ask yourself the question."
By the time he left the seat, using the excuse of going for the toilet, he went to the ventilation opening and took care to smell the air there. What he discovered was that only the front rows contained traces of the same cheap perfume scent, including the row they were in.
For sure, a cheap perfume could be popular among ordinary folks, but if the spectators clustered in the specific rows were spritzed with the same perfume, there was sure to be something fishy.
Given that Rosa, the lead dancer, gave Joe two tickets for the front seats and tossed the gossamer coat, purposely in a veiled manner, toward Joe instead of snatching him directly, Clayton assumed that they were trying to cause as little commotion as possible while serving their own purpose. For an unknown reason, they preferred to artfully control them. And after achieving their purpose, they would supposedly wipe them out in a way that no other people would notice anything suspicious.
Even though Joe brought him a clue of the Extraordinary world, an yet unknown trouble arrived at its heels.
Clayton's words reminded Joe, apparently, of the force behind the scenes. Now, he wore a grim but also embarrassed look.
"Yes, perhaps I know who it is."
"So who it is?"
"The Holy Grail Society, a mystical organization. I think they are the only ones who have a score to settle with me, but I have never expected that they will chase after me all the way to Dorne. "
So, there was a non-governmental organization boasting supernatural powers... Clayton strained and contained his excitement. "How did you get entangled with them?"
"I stole something of theirs back in Taunton..."
Clayton held his forehead. When they were still serving the military, he knew of Joe's pilfering habits, which, unexpectedly, stretched into these very present days.
Wait a minute, steal something?
Clayton immediately grasped something. "So the Ring is the item you have stolen from them? If such is the case, I will return it to you tomorrow. Try you best to reach a settlement with them. If you need money, I can help."
Since they hadn't launched a blatant attack on Joe, Clayton believed that something was holding them back and there existed room for a turnaround.
At the mention of the Bishop's Signet Ring, Joe showed a more awkward expression. "It's just one of them..."
"One of them?" Clayton was almost shocked beyond words, "How many items have you stolen on earth?"
Now, he had made up his mind that if the situation was too messy, he would let the matter run its natural course.
"There are only two items. But I can't return them, because I have broken one of them." Joe straightened his back and grew more and more frank as he said,
"The Holy Grail Society is an evil organization, they committed crimes and exploited the devotees to do their bidding. In order to punish them, I have stolen their stuff. So I will definitely not reach a settlement with them. This is something about my dignity and righteousness."
Astonished, Clayton stared at him.
That sounded pretty much like a decision by a real man. All Clayton could do was respect it.
"Of course, it's up to you. But since you have just returned home and they are already setting up a snare, they seem too fast in actions. Are you sure that those in the theater are not your foes in Sasha that you have put on the warpath in the past?"
This question hunched Joe down with more embarrassment. "Alright, put it this way, I had returned home two months ago. But I ran out of money by then, so I didn't come to you, feeling too ashamed. For now, it seems time for me to leave once again..." his voice grew thinner and thinner.
This piece of information was reconciled with the facts.
But Joe, evidently, had no idea what weight class the Holy Grail Society was in.
With resignation, Clayton released a sigh. Even though he was in the dark about the organization as well, he could be sure that the Holy Grail Society had a considerable bag of tricks in searching for their target in such a large city.
"What do you plan to do? Go look for a sheriff to hold them down?"
"I am afraid I can't. Without evidence, the sheriff force is not authorized to send these foreigners back to Taunton or to jail." Joe dusted his backside off as he walked toward the mouth of the alley, where the lamplight poured onto his upper body.
"I am going to hole up over the next few days and come up with a solution to leave the city. Tonight sucks. And I have got you swept up in the trouble. I'm sorry, Lieutenant. The next time we meet each other, I will buy you a dinner."
Clayton stood on the spot and saw his figure disappear from sight.
...............
"Good day, Mr. Bello. You seem to have stumbled upon some worrisome issues, don't you?"
His female assistant, Charlotte, was a young woman. Fresh from the Department of History at Sion University, she took a job at Rusty Silver Coin, whose business situation hinged heavily upon her reservoir of knowledge and persuasive sales tactics.
She was currently touching up her makeup with a small mirror and, out of curiosity, glanced at Clayton from time to time.
"I'm considering writing a letter to an off-putting person and seeking her help by surrendering to her." Clayton was wiping dust off the display cabinets with a piece of sponge while absent-mindedly listening to Charlotte's comforting words.
The Holy Grail Society would surely attempt to search for him.
Or, more exactly, all the people who had engaged with Joe.
After turning it over in his mind for half a night, Clayton reached a new conclusion.
Last night, he figured that the Holy Grail Society possessed a certain special method in hunting for a person, such that they managed to locate Joe and allured him to Broken-Winged Angel.
However, there lay an even worse possibility: Joe Mani's movements had been tracked since he left Taunton; only when he arrived in Sasha did the organization finally decide to capture him.