Of Salitian Justices, I will say this: avoid them. As well as being skilled warriors, they are politically connected, legally entitled to act as they see fit, and carry seemingly magical swords besides. Unless they present an immediate threat to Inveritus, they simply aren’t worth the trouble that opposing them will cause.

* Shadows of Inveritus tactical manual.

The investigator moved, and Ferrous moved with him.

He was annoyed that he had been found out and even more annoyed that the man had gotten back to his thugs before Ferrous could take him out. Ferrous hadn’t realized that his cover was blown until the man had left. He had been sloppy with how he killed the servants, but he still hadn’t expected anyone to actually figure him out. In his experience, most people just didn’t care enough about the deaths of a few servants to go poking around into them. He certainly hadn’t expected anyone to put together who he was that quickly.

This man, whoever he was, was sharper than Ferrous was comfortable with. Which meant he was probably hired by Branton Vikor, that self-righteous bastard. That wasn’t someone Ferrous could let just wander around. Better to snuff him out, take his face, and then put a stop to this investigation. Of course, Lord Bermont would have to stay out of the public eye for a time while he sorted all of this out, but better that than have Vikor’s flunkies poking around.

So, Ferrous stayed a good distance behind the man and his heavies and waited. He had shed Bermont’s mass and taken the form of an old man, forgettable and non-threatening. He followed them for quite some time, having to steal new clothes and change forms twice in order to avoid being too conspicuous. The man visited most of the bars, inns and brothels in town, rounding up more muscle until he had a group of about thirty men with him. Then they returned to a mid-priced inn in the centre of town and started making plans, presumably to kill Ferrous, though he couldn’t get close enough to confirm this without looking suspicious or killing one of the serving staff, and he didn’t want to do that if he could avoid it.

“Buy you a drink?” a half-drunk miner asked, sitting down next to Ferrous. His clothes were smeared with dirt, but his teeth were white as he flashed Ferrous a nervous smile.

“Yes please,” Ferrous said, biting her lower lip nervously. She wore the body of an attractive young woman with an ample chest and a sweet smile. A real farmer’s daughter type that was liable to attract the attention of men without drawing the eyes of everyone in the room.

The miner introduced himself but Ferrous was only half-listening. She made small-talk almost automatically while she strained to hear what the investigator was talking about without noticeably altering her ears. She was only able to catch snippets.

“Smethers, you and… from behind… Bermont Estate…”

Well, that confirmed it.

“Would you… rent us a room?” Ferrous asked the miner, pausing nervously in the way that humans often seemed to appreciate in their women.

“Oh. Really?” the miner asked. “So soon?”

“I’m to be married soon,” Ferrous explained, making up her backstory as she went along. “But I don’t love him. I’d like to live a little before then.”

The miner ate this up and went to negotiate a room with the innkeeper immediately, apparently oblivious to the fact that arranged marriage almost never happened in Salitos and certainly didn’t happen among the common folk. Ferrous supposed his thinking might have been affected by a lack of blood-flow to the brain.

The miner led Ferrous to one of the rooms upstairs, closed the door behind them, and immediately jammed his tongue down Ferrous’s throat. The miner was sweaty, gross and had terrible breath. Being forcefully kissed by him would have been the most disgusting thing to happen to Ferrous in quite some time had she not eaten most of an obese corpse just a few days earlier. Even so, it ranked high.

Ferrous fought the urge to bite the man’s tongue off and did her best not to seem repulsed. The kiss finally broke off and the miner’s eyes were aflame with desire.

He was going to be disappointed.

“Would you, take off your clothes?” Ferrous asked, struggling to sound interested with the foul taste of the drunken man from her mouth.

While the man’s hands were fumbling with the knots of his trousers, Ferrous stepped behind him and made as if to put her hands on the man’s shoulders. The man seemed happy with this; a shoulder-rub would be nice after a day of swinging a pickaxe after all.

Ferrous made her move. Her arm snaked around the man’s neck, she braced with her other arm, and she started to squeeze, cutting off the blood supply to the man’s brain.

The man freaked out, bucking and trying to tear Ferrous’s arms away. But Ferrous knew her business and, while she may have looked like a farmer’s daughter, the dress she was wearing hid significant musculature. The man was unconscious in seconds.

Once he was down, Ferrous worked quickly, tearing the bedding to make improvised ropes, a gag, and a blindfold so she could store the man without him making a fuss.

The innkeeper would be by tomorrow to clear him out since he only paid for one night, so the man was in little danger of starving and since she had blindfolded him, he wouldn’t see Ferrous change and know she was a skard.

It wasn’t as efficient as simply killing the man, but it was close enough, and Ferrous preferred not to murder random townspeople if she could help it. This time she could help it, so she stuffed the man unceremoniously in a closet, sat on the bed, and waited.

It was hours before Ferrous heard the investigator go to his room for bed. That was lucky, if the investigator hadn’t been staying here and had left with his men or had gone to raid the Bermont Estate that night, then Ferrous would have been sitting in his room all night for nothing. Then again, Ferrous had figured that him staying here was likely, as there wasn’t another compelling reason to use this inn as a base of operations, and that they wouldn’t want to fight a skard at night where their human eyes would put them at a significant disadvantage. So perhaps part luck and part good thinking. Either way, Ferrous would take it.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Ferrous got up off the bed and stretched, shifting his ears back to normal to avoid being deafened by a loud noise. He had shed the women’s clothes and shifted back to the form he had named Tarmigan while he waited. Skard didn’t really have genders beyond that of the shape they were in, but Ferrous had always felt more comfortable as a man.

Ferrous waited until he was confident there was no one in the hallway and padded out of his room. Literally padded. He had taken off his shoes and added cushy pads to his feet, so he made almost no sound when he walked.

Based on when he had heard the investigator say he was going to sleep and where he had heard a door closing, he thought the man was staying in the fourth room on the left down from the one Ferrous had been waiting in. He was better than half sure, but not so good as three quarters. But, luckily for him, he didn’t have to play it by the numbers. He reached the door and gave it a sniff, having shifted his sense of smell to be more like that of a philoweasel. He had the right door alright. He shifted his nose back to human standard, mostly because he felt weird with what amounted to a trumpet on his face, and tried the door.

Unsurprisingly, it was locked. Ferrous had never picked up the skill for lockpicking and people who thought skard could shift their fingers into a set of lock picks had no idea how biology works. None of that mattered much though, as the door was wood with a flimsy lock and Ferrous could shift his mass fairly easily. His body flowed and he became about four inches shorter, repurposing the extra mass into muscle. The process took about half a minute and made his legs tingle something fierce, but when it was done, he had legs like tree trunks and bones dense enough to support them.

He turned off his muscle inhibitors, flooded himself with adrenaline and gave the door a massive kick. The lock broke and Ferrous was in the investigator’s room.

Where the investigator was waiting for him, holding a crossbow.

“Hello Ferrous,” he said, then fired.

Hah, shouldn’t have bothered with the chat. Ferrous twisted out of the way of the shot, which hit the opposite door behind him, and then surged into the room.

And into a cloud of powder the investigator had just thrown at the door.

Pain. Can’t see. Airways closing. Shit.

Ferrous collapsed to the ground, his body wracked with seizures as he tried to adapt to whatever he had just been poisoned with. He had a pretty good knowledge of toxicology, and he commonly went around immune to most major poisons, but whatever the investigator had dosed him with was new to him.

Okay, deal with the symptoms. One at a time.

Shutting off his ability to feel pain was easy. Ferrous only needed to release the right chemicals in his spinal cord. Then he did his best to shift his respiratory system to include a kind of one-way sieve to filter out any further poison, but he was shaking so hard it was difficult to concentrate. He didn’t know how to stop the seizures, but he did his best through them. He was most of the way done when he heard a group of men behind him and then felt a significant pressure in his arms and legs.

He realized belatedly he was bleeding and turned his head to see that the investigator’s men had pinned him to the ground with spears. He started trying to stop blood-flow to those areas to prevent bleeding out, but he was suddenly feeling light-headed.

Ferrous passed out on the floor.

When Ferrous woke up he was in a tight metal box with slits by his head to breathe through. He could see the moon overhead, and someone was carrying him. He tried to move but his arms and legs had been bolted to the side of the box. Trying to move sent pulses of pain through his body, which meant the chemicals he had released into his spinal column were wearing off. He released more and thought about his situation.

Those painkillers would only last a couple of hours, so he couldn’t have been unconscious for any longer than that. Which meant they had a metal coffin ready to go. That, combined with how effectively he had been taken out, meant that they had known he was going to strike at the investigator in his room. Ferrous knew his business, and was confident he hadn’t given himself away. Which meant that the investigator had either made a lucky guess, or he had been two steps ahead of Ferrous the whole time, and Ferrous didn’t know anyone that lucky.

So, the investigator was a whole lot sharper than he had any right to be. That, combined with his slight frame, relative youth and fine clothes, led Ferrous to one uncomfortable conclusion.

He had been captured by Darrian fucking Rane.

The man was some kind of warfare savant, capable of winning battles no one else thought were survivable. He had, if the stories were to be believed, once taken out the well-funded militia of a rebellious lord with twenty men and a goat. Darrian was clever like fire was hot. It wasn’t just an attribute; it was who he was.

“Darrian,” he called. “Darrian, are you out there?”

“Finally awake I see,” Darrian said from nearby. “I thought for sure you were going to wake up when we bolted you in there. Do you not feel pain or something?”

“Something like that,” Ferrous said. “Temporary measure after you poisoned me.”

“Interesting. I’d love to hear how you did that sometime. Right now I should warn you. If you try to escape from that box, I’ve got some countermeasures planned that you won’t enjoy.”

“Oh, I believe you. Branton hired you to find me then?”

“He did. Though to be honest I expected to be searching a while longer. Finding you on the first real lead I checked seems almost too easy.”

“Well, feel free to let me out and I’ll try to make it a bit harder on you.”

“I have no doubt you would. But no, I’d rather keep my head attached to my body thank you.”

Ferrous reflected upon two things. First, that this was a remarkably civil conversation he was having with a man who had him bolted into a metal coffin. And second, that Darrian was bored.

“Is that why you agreed to track me down then?” Ferrous asked. “For the challenge?”

“Partly,” Darrian said. “But also Branton believes you killed the Good King and for that you must stand trial.”

“Do you believe him?” Ferrous asked.

“From what I’ve heard of you and what I’ve seen, yes.”

Ferrous fell silent. If he reached Branton, he was dead. Even if he had his talix with him fighting that maniac would be a worrying proposition. Ferrous might have all the advantages of a skard, but Branton was just really, really good. And he’d likely have all his men with him besides. Of course, that was all assuming he got the chance to put up a fight at all and, given he was bolted into a metal box, that seemed unlikely. His only hope to survive, and continue his plans, was to get out of here before they got to Vikor.

So, time to consider his options. Escaping on his own wasn’t likely. Even if Ferrous could find a way to squeeze through the slits in his box, whatever countermeasures Darrian had in place were bound to be ruthlessly effective. Convincing one of Darrian’s men to help him was slightly more likely, but Darrian would almost certainly have multiple people watching him at any given time, possibly with strict instructions not to engage him in conversation. The best option seemed to be to convince Darrian himself to let him out. He wasn’t too proud to admit that Darrian was substantially smarter than he was, so tricking him wasn’t likely to work. As far as he knew Darrian was a man of integrity, so that ruled out bribery as well. He could try threatening him, but he was hardly in a position to make good on any threats from in that damn box. He didn’t know enough about the man to attempt blackmail. So, he was left with only one real option, and not one he had much experience with.

He was going to have to tell the truth.

“Darrian,” he said. “I’d like to make a full confession.”