“Do you think they might be using the tanks?” Hector asked me.

I considered it for a moment. “Using the tanks to take them… where? Do we think they’re smuggling people out of the city entirely?”

“Our lives just got a lot more complicated if they are,” Hector sighed heavily.

We were currently crouched down between a pair of those massive transportation tanks on Ennis’ property, with the lord’s permission, of course. We were still tucked away, as the servants’ weren’t supposed to know we were here, but it was kind of nice to be sneaking around with permission for one of very few times in my life.

We were all here, the whole team, scattered somewhere among the wagons and brush, all of us watching the graveyard in the dark, waiting for someone to maybe come and steal a coffin.

I’d had better days, honestly.

“I’m pretty sure if they’re leaving the city it stops being our problem. At least a little bit.”

“Is that how kidnappings work? ‘Oops, they left our patrol range, guess they’re just screwed now?’”

I paused. “Maybe? Kind of? I mean, what are we supposed to do if they’re being shipped off to Morrigan or something? We don’t have any authority there. It might not stop being our problem as a city, but I’m pretty sure it starts being above our paygrade.”

Hector gave me a very dull look. “When has that ever stopped you?”

I opened my mouth briefly and closed it again. “All I’m saying is that I hope they’re not leaving the city.”

“Oh, was that all?”

I sighed and rolled my eyes.

“They could also be taking them elsewhere in the city. In the tanks.”

“Potentially,” I agreed, “but don’t you think it would be noticed? At the very least, Ennis would notice one of his wagons missing. The man is meticulous.”

Hector conceded that point as well with a slight nod.

“It definitely bears looking into though,” I said, “assuming we’re even right about the graveyard and the coffins.”

“What if we’re not?”

I thought about that for a moment and then took a breath. “I don’t know. Sometimes these things don’t get solved.”

“I don’t accept that answer.”

“Yeah, me neither.” I smiled at him slightly and then went back to staring into the night.

Time passed, as it was wont to do, albeit feeling excruciatingly slower than normal.

“These things never stop being miserable and boring, do they?” I mused out loud to myself.

“Did you think they would?”

“I had a small, childlike hope and innocence that has now been shattered.”

Hector snorted.

We waited some more.

And then there it was, the slightest movement on the edges of our visions, and suddenly the night wasn’t boring at all. We both immediately moved to attention, keeping our heads down and our eyes fixed on the shadowy figure near to the graveyard’s entrance.

The figure looked around for a moment and then beckoned with his hand. Shortly thereafter, another four men moved out of the darkness and into our view, picking up one of the coffins. We had examined the two of them earlier, before nightfall, and both had seemed to contain corpses, yet these men opened one of the coffins– and dumped out the body. The other pair of men approached, picked up the corpse in a sheet, and carried it off elsewhere.

I exchanged slightly puzzled looks with Hector, until the two men returned, carrying a different body– this one appeared to still be breathing.

They were switching them. I wondered if they were responsible for some of the generalized deaths in the area too, then, in order to have the containers to ship out their kidnapping victims, or if they were just taking advantage of the misfortune. I watched in surprise as they did it a second time.

“Where are they putting the bodies?” Hector hissed at me.

I shrugged. Truth be told, I had a couple of guesses. They could have just been dumping them in a different area from whence they had come; these people weren’t likely to keep that well track of their dead, and a new corpse or two in the morning, particularly as the nights got colder as we headed into winter, probably wasn’t that uncommon. Or, they could have just been putting the bodies in the path of the lumber machines. Gruesome and unpleasant to think about, but I knew from previous interactions with Ennis and his men out here that it happened more often than they liked to think about, and once the bodies had gone through the machines, there was no telling if they were human or wildlife.

The graveyard was there to avoid such inhuman treatment of corpses, but these people obviously didn’t care much about that.

The people they carried over were clearly sedated, but they did stir slightly as they were placed into and then closed into the recently vacated coffins, visibly alive.

“We go now?” Hector asked in a low voice, and I could feel his body tense.

I hesitated. I wanted to know how they were getting the coffins out of there, but if we waited, we risked losing them. Besides, we could interrogate them after. I decided not to take the risk. “Now.”

We rushed them, Hector and I, and I suddenly cursed how far away the lack of cover had forced us to be situated. They had far too long to see us coming, even with how fast we were covering ground. In the back of my head, I hadn’t really expected to see them; I don’t think any of us had. It just seemed so risky, unnecessarily so, to commit such crimes on the border of a lord’s territory.

The rest of my team saw us and followed, but not before the kidnappers reached down and did something with the coffins and then drew weapons of their own to face us.

I wasn’t worried about that; I was worried about the coffins.

“I want at least one alive!” I ordered as we reached them. “Hector, the coffins.”

He acknowledged me with a short nod, and then we were upon them.

It was a very short fight. They were outnumbered, and we were far better at this. We took the first two quickly, Ehud and I ending them within seconds, while Hector did as I had said and went straight for the boxes. The other two seemed to immediately realize they were gone and didn’t give us the chance to take them alive, shocking all of us by simultaneously and brutally cutting their own throats with smiles on their faces.

I stood, frozen. That was not the act of a hired gun, nor the act of a normal street thug. They had killed themselves rather than be questioned? That was the act of a cultist, a zealot.

And then I knew before Hector had opened the coffins what he was going to find.

“They’re dead,” he said, grimacing at the brutality of it. Evidently, what they had done was plunge a blade through the lid of the coffin. The deaths hadn’t been neat.

Six corpses, nothing to show for it. We didn’t even know where they had been heading with them.

I bit back a curse of frustration, Tola, per the norm, not being so restrained about it.

“Ehud, help me search the bodies,” I said dully after a moment. “See if we can salvage something.”

Everyone was quiet, although Jair and Hector also took up searching the two other corpses, with Jehu, Tola, and Will standing watch over us. We all knew this had been a disaster, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was no way we had been going to get the victims back alive. I just prayed the deaths weren’t in vain, though I myself was coming up with nothing from the body I was patting down.

“Anything at all?” I asked the group at large, trying to keep the slight desperation from my tone.

“Maybe,” Jair said.

I immediately turned all my attention to her as she held up a letter; it was stained and dripping with the man’s blood, one of the ones Ehud and I had taken as opposed to those who had slit their own throats. It appeared to have a blade cut directly through the center of it.

I walked over as Jair attempted to unfold the dripping page without ripping anything. It was entirely incomprehensible, no matter how hard I tried, not a relevant word left to be seen, but at the bottom of the document it was sealed– sealed with the symbol of the Chantry.

“Does that mean what I think it means?” Hector was the first to ask.

“I don’t know,” I said carefully, wary of my own presuppositions. “What would the Church want with these people? It could just be that they picked this up on one of those charity missions.” But why would he have it on him? And why would it be sealed? Someone in the Church knew something about this, I was as close to certain as I could be, but this wasn’t the kind of evidence we would need to press in any serious way.

“You’re not going to just let it go though,” Jair said, a bit unnecessarily, but her voice was harsh and not directed towards me. She didn’t like being cheated like this; none of us did.

“Of course not.” I looked down at the bodies and then around at the team. “Hector and I will go report this back to Keeper Ialdi. Would you…?”

“We’ll take care of it,” Will assured me and then immediately took charge. “Jehu, Tola, help me with the bodies; Ehud, you’re the most familiar with the people around here. I hate to ask, but.”

“I’ll do my best to identify the victims and find anyone who might be concerned with their deaths,” Ehud confirmed. “Maybe since we caught it so soon, we’ll have a better idea of where they were last seen with their freedom.”

“Thank you all,” I said sincerely.

“Go report back,” Will said with a smile before waving me off. “It’s what we do.”

Keeper Ialdi was predictably not happy, both about being woken in the middle of the night nor with our news. She demanded a report on her desk in the morning and that we take care of the cleanup ourselves. I assured her we were already on it, and then she slammed the door in our faces. I didn’t blame her in the slightest.

“Hector, why don’t you go ahead and head home,” I told him as we started walking back towards the Peacekeeper Station together. “I can take care of the report, and it’s already late.”

Hector arched an eyebrow at me. “You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m not going to be in tomorrow–”

“You often aren’t,” Hector said wryly.

I acknowledged the statement with a slight nod. I didn’t tend to work the normal hours and my appearances in the office were sporadic at best. Like with most things, being indispensable led to me having an interesting relationship with proper procedure. “So I’ll take care of it,” I repeated. “Go home. Get some rest.”

“You going to get any sleep at all tonight?”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“I’ll get plenty, you know–” I started to say.

Hector looked at me for a moment, and I simply stopped mid-sentence before he said, “I do know you. Always been a real good liar though.”

I smiled very faintly at the irony of that statement before I shrugged at him. “I’ll probably get as much as I normally do.”

“So none.”

“I sleep some. I’d be insane otherwise.”

“Show me evidence to the contrary.”

I breathed a laugh, and Hector smiled before reaching out and patting me on the shoulder.

“Have a good night, Leon.”

“You too, my friend,” I echoed softly, watching as he turned to head back to his inn. I really didn’t deserve a friend like him, and wondered not for the first time how and why exactly he had decided to put up with me for this long. Shaking my head slightly, I headed back to the office and took the twenty or thirty minutes to write up an incident report of the night, leaving it on Ialdi’s desk via picking the lock, and then headed back out, locking everything up behind me.

I had a couple of hours still before dawn, so I slipped into my room back at the inn through the window and spent them staring at the ceiling, running over the days events in my mind and figuring out with whom and how I would broach the subject of someone at the Chantry being involved.

As soon as the first light of dawn started to peek over the horizon, I headed downstairs to continue my thinking in the main lounge, waiting for Ava.

She was up fairly early herself, heading downstairs with a cloak already wrapped around her slender figure, marking her as ready to leave.

I stood as she descended the stairs to greet her with a smile. “You look lovely this morning.”

She blinked in surprise and then smiled. “You’re too kind. Also, I admit, despite your words I wasn’t certain I would find you here so early. I hope you rested.”

I shrugged. “I’m as fit as ever,” I responded instead of answering. “Are you ready to get going?”

“Yes, although I question what sorts of respectable jobs will be available at this hour?”

“You might be surprised,” I winked at her and then offered my arm.

She chuckled softly, shaking her head, and then into the city we went.

“I assume factory jobs aren’t what you’re looking for?” I asked, smirking faintly as I did. “Because those are plentiful out here.”

“I… would much prefer–” She looked at my face and narrowed her eyes at me. “That’s not very nice.”

“What? I thought it was worth offering.”

“Are you going to suggest lumbering next?”

“Maybe.”

“Let’s skip the ones mostly populated by muscular men for a reason, hm?”

“Not your type?” I asked innocently.

“Of job? No.”

“But of men, yes,” I said, with a grin.

“That would exclude you, wouldn’t it?” She looked somewhat pointedly at my athletic but definitely not overly muscular frame.

“Ouch,” I said, mock wounded, placing a hand to my breast. “Yet I’m the one who gets to show you around the city.” I winked.

“Yes, it would seem your Peacekeeper badge has some noticeable perks.”

I chuckled, steering her towards the middle ring of the city where we were more likely to find work that was somewhat less manual-labor oriented. “It really does; you should see the discounts I get for dumplings.”

She breathed a laugh. “Dumplings?”

“Sure. They’re pretty good.”

“I… believe you,” she said after a short moment.

“So, what kind of work are you actually looking for? Any specific talents I should be aware of? Are you the best cook in your half of the houslends or something?”

She thought for a moment, a bit caught off guard by the question, before shrugging. “Nothing like that, for sure. Most seem to think I’m pretty good with people?”

I very pointedly did not look her up and down; that would be rude, though I could see very well why that might be the case, particularly when it came to the masculine half of the population. “I can see that,” I said instead. “We can look for something in customer service.”

“That’s open at this hour?”

“We don’t want the places that are open; they’re too busy for this. We want the places getting ready to open,” I told her, leading her through the twisting streets.

“I’m beginning to be concerned that any job you find me will be immediately lost due to me not knowing the way,” she said after we had crossed a few streets, sounding slightly overwhelmed.

I immediately slowed myself. “Apologies; you’re right, of course. You’re familiar with the general layout of the city, I presume?”

“Outer ring has factories and forests, middle ring is the main living and shopping district, and then the inner ring has all the fancy places.”

“Perfect,” I praised with a grin. “Obviously, the middle ring is what we’re shooting for here, but it’s also the biggest and most sprawling. Fortunately, there are three main roads that run the full circumference of the middle ring– they’re named, aptly, Roads One, Two, and Three, with them numbered outward from the center of the city, so Road Three is closest to home. Follow?”

She nodded.

“The Main Line is the road that goes directly from the outer gate to the inner gate, the roadway on which we started. Its only intersections are the three main roads that I just mentioned, so everything else stems from them. Then there’s plenty of routes and sidestreets, but every single one deadends on the horizontal route, they have to at some point, and the vertical route will always hit one of the three primary roads. So you can always find your way home.”

“I like how you do that,” she said softly.

“Do what?”

“Call the inn ‘home’. It’s… cute.”

I paused, sincerely taken off guard by both the observation and the analysis of it. “... thank you. But don’t tell anyone. It will absolutely ruin my reputation.”

“My lips are sealed. Unless I really need the blackmail material for something.”

I breathed a laugh. “Acceptable. Anyway, right now we’re on Baker’s street. It runs vertically parallel to the Main Line, basically just one main road over to the right, and hits both walls, and thus all three primary roads. It is so named because it has two of the best bakeries the city has to offer, one specializing in pastries the other in bread. They’re expensive, so the nobles primarily keep them in business, which is also why they’re so close to the Main Line.”

“You think I can get a job at somewhere that impressive?” Ava said, stunned.

“No, but I do think you can get a job at the recently opened, neighboring seamstress shop that is hoping to pick up clients off of the bakeries’ business.” I stopped in front of the appropriate door. “In fact, I can almost guarantee it; I know the woman running the place. If this isn’t the job you want, you should tell me before I knock, cause I really don’t want to get her hopes up and then let her down.”

Ava looked at me for a moment. “Why does the Hero of Ildanach know the owner of a recently opened, tiny seamstress shop?”

I shrugged. “I’m personable.”

Ava gave me a look.

I sighed faintly. “Her husband was one of Garret’s men– Garret Anders is the General under whom I serve. I got to know him over the last Skirmish.”

“The one that ended with the Battle of Lorni River?” Ava gasped.

I paused. “You heard about that one all the way over in Ild-Iyer, huh?”

“Everyone heard about that.” She paused. “How did you know where I was from?”

“Iyer’s the one on the Tirnaog border, so I guessed,” I said with a shrug. “But yes. That was the Lorni River Battle. Anyway, she lost her husband in that, and I paid my respects. Tried to help out a little.”

“Still trying to?”

“Hey, you need a job! She needs a hard-working, industrious employee. It seemed like a good match.”

“How do you know I’m either of those things?”

“Ild-Iyer is quite a ways away, and you made the trek by yourself with hardly any money and nothing but the pack on your back. You’re clearly both.”

“.... thank you,” she said quietly.

“You’re welcome. Now, would you be interested in a salesperson position for a kindly middle-aged widow woman who makes absolutely lovely dresses?”

Ava smiled. “I would. It sounds wonderful.”

“Perfect! Then let me introduce you to Mrs. Doria Hrade.” I knocked on the door.

Doria was as ecstatic as I had anticipated, and Ava definitely seemed both to like the older woman and to immediately start thinking about the best ways to do the job. It was a wonderful match, and I mostly sat back and let the two of them talk once introductions were finished.

They talked for considerably longer than I had been anticipating, frankly, with Doria showing Ava the ins and outs of the shop while we were there and explaining to her the job duties. They went so far as to agree she would start the very next day, arriving shortly before opening time. They continued talking past the opening of the store and into the hours of the mid-morning before we finally stepped back out onto the streets, Ava waving and laughing, saying she looked forward to starting tomorrow.

“You seemed to hit it off,” I said in the understatement of the century.

“She’s very sweet. Reminds me of my grandmother.” A momentary expression of sadness crossed her face before she brightened again. “Her dresses are lovely, too! I’m actually kind of excited to maybe learn how she makes them.”

I beamed. “I’m glad it seems like it’s going to work out.”

“Thank you, Leon. I really appreciate it.”

I shrugged. “As you can see, it really wasn’t a problem. Doria is happy to have you.”

Ava smiled and then grabbed my arm and hung off it a bit in a way I wasn’t expecting from the normally so proper and cautious lady. “What now?”

“Well, if you would like, I can show you around the city a little more, particularly this area, so that you feel comfortable with it.” I checked the time. “Unfortunately, I do have that lunch engagement, but we have time, if you’re interested.”

“That sounds wonderful. I’d really rather not get lost.”

“Sounds good.” I took her around the blocks that surrounded her new place of employment, pointing out the bakeries that I had mentioned earlier as well as a few smaller shops that made good and reasonably priced food, in case she wanted or needed to stop for a meal sometime. We had been walking for a little while when Ava spoke up somewhat suddenly.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“You’ve asked me a few, including that one, but go for it. I’m assuming this isn’t on the city layout.”

She shook her head a couple of times, slowly, and took a moment before speaking. “What was the Battle of Lorni like?”

I blinked. That had really not been what I was expecting. “It was bloody,” I said shortly. “May I ask your interest?”

“There were quite a few enlisted from town that were part of that. Most didn’t come back; the ones who did… didn’t come back the same. I would like to understand, if I can. Just a little.”

I paused the walking, gently pulled Ava off the main road to stand with me so we wouldn’t block the flow of traffic. “Lorni was bad,” I said bluntly. “Nechtan thought they could win it there, do what people had been trying to do for, at that point, months. I was still relatively new to the city and the Skirmishes. They had a huge force amassed right across the river, and we knew it. They were just waiting for the rains to be low enough that they could ford it without issue.

“Ildanach got all the people that they could, all the recruits they could muster, and sent them all to Ild-Lorn to sit and wait. We waited for weeks; they waited for weeks. The river wasn’t low enough yet for a mass fording, but it was getting there. We were all on high alert, but it wasn’t there yet, so the watch hadn’t been increased.”

I stopped for a moment, looking at her, seeing that she really had no idea where this was going, had no idea what I was about to tell her. Part of me truly regretted breaking that innocence. “Nechtan sent over a small band, in the dark, at night, no torches or light at all. Half of the band itself was probably lost in the river due to their great care to keep silent and unseen.”

“But you out numbered them. Wasn’t that suicide?”

“It ended up being, yes. But they didn’t come crashing into the camp,” I said almost gently. “They snuck into the backs of the tents, cutting entries through the cloth with their knives, and slit the soldiers’ throats in their sleep.”

Ava gasped in horror and stared at me. “But the– the accords! Isaria’s laws, the–”

“If they had won and we had all died, no one would have been left to tell the Church,” I said somewhat sharply before sighing. “Obviously, that’s not what happened. They made it through a good quarter of the camp, though, before the alarm was raised, and then they fought like mad-men. They’d always known they were going to die; they just took as many with them as they could. The rest of the army came crashing through the river, losing more men in the process, but they got desperate to cover up their crimes.

“It didn’t work, obviously. Ildanach ended up gaining the victory. The crimes were reported to the Chantry and heavy punishments were levied on Nechtan, not to mention most of their army was lost that night to Ildanach’s forces and the water combined. It was a slaughter though, filled with blood and death, and there were a lot of new soldiers in that battle as well. Legends spawn out of events like that, of ghosts and demons. A few people swear that Riftlings were even involved. Those who left alive don’t come out of that kind of thing unchanged. I’m sorry you lost friends there. A lot of people did.”

Ava stood processing that for a long moment, and I didn’t rush her at all. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

I paused, blinked. It had somehow never occurred to me that she should come away from the story with sympathy for me. “I’ve seen a fair bit of war. You do eventually get… not used to it, but. Perhaps more calloused than we really should be. But thank you.” I paused and then checked the time again. “How about you find your way back to the inn so that you know you can get to and from work tomorrow?”

Ava blinked at me and then nodded, clearly grateful for the distraction.

She made her way back without too many problems, and I smiled. “Well done. You feel comfortable doing it on your own tomorrow?”

“I think so.” Ava paused and then reached up and hugged me. “Thank you. For the job.”

I paused and then hugged her back gently. “You’re welcome. I just helped you find it though; Doria is the one who gave it to you.”

“Even so. Thank you so much for your help.” She smiled and curtsied slightly. “I look forward to our engagement tonight.”

I smiled back. “As do I. I’ll see you later.”

“Goodbye.”