Thankfully in the end they settled for two twenty-six and were willing to hang around for two days for us to gather the necessary funds. The three of us agreed to donate an extra gold to the ransom fund. Getting access to the remaining company funds, the Grey Haven Manor contract down payment and the bequest the captain left in his will were straightforward. As was getting the mercenary Guild to payout the ransom policies for those prisoners that still had them. Selling the mercenary company formation license was a little bit more complex but what we had the most difficulty with was getting some of those who had pledged money to the ransom fund to actually hand it over.

To access the remaining company funds and the down payment we first had to prove that sergeant Winter was the highest-ranking surviving member of the company. One of the documents Lieutenant Kevin Harris of the Bloody Clock Mercenary Company had provided us with was a list of all the deceased members of our company whose bodies they had recovered.

As this had been verified by the relevant authorities the document served as those individuals' death certificates once we lodged them with the Mercenary Guild. We had already informed them of the situation with Lieutenant Barnes and they were satisfied that while all the facts were not yet known he and Gerald Flick had absconded with company funds.

Once Sergeant Winters was recognised as the highest-ranking member of the company he informed them that the company was being liquidated. Since luckily the company had no debt or to be truthful any remaining assets the liquidation process went very smoothly. We then transferred the remaining funds to the Bloody Clock Mercenary Company.

The captain like so many of its members had filed his will with the Mercenary Guild and with it also named as his executors the probate of his estate was quickly dealt with. Surprisingly the captain was not the only deceased member of the company to leave something to it in their wills. A further six gold coins and fifty-seven silver ones had also been willed to it. This didn’t include further sums of money left to their friends from the company. I had been left a total of ninety-three silver and fifty-six copper by three individuals.

We decided to use the further funds left to the company to make up for the expected shortfall between the funds pledged to the ransom fund and those actually paid in. We would then use any remaining funds to organise a wake for all those we had lost and the company itself. It wasn’t really suitable to hold the wake now when so many of our number were still prisoners and by the time they were released and had made their way back, it was likely that some if not all of us here would already have found employment with another company and headed out on whatever contract they were embarked upon next. Thus it was regrettably decided to hold the wake at the end of the campaign season when everyone who wanted to was likely to be able to attend.

Having the Mercenary Guild payout the ransom policies of the members of our company with them to their captures only required that we provide the guild with the list of their prisoners that they had provided us.

To tell you the truth selling the mercenary company formation license wasn’t really all that harder than the other things, it merely took a lot longer. That was because it required the input of the Mercenary Guild’s headquarters which like the Imperial and provincial Bank was located in the once great city of Liban. The city had for nearly three thousand years been the capital of the Empire of Telondia before it fell over a thousand years ago.

Its last Emperor had abandoned the state worship of Telondian and invited some God whom nobody else had ever heard of to take over the guardianship of Telondia. Whether or not this god exists or if any other God had in any way influenced the Emperor's madness the result of the invitation was silence on their part.

Why the last Emperor whose name had been stricken from the historical record had done such a thing was not recorded. The response of Telondian was however and it was perhaps some historian's claim a little bit over the top, after all, he could have just simply struck the offending emperor down with a bolt of lightning or something similar.

What he did instead was to invite the eight so-called Tribal Races, that lived outside the empire, to attack it. Other than the Tribes of the far South who rarely if ever leave their icy home they responded to this invitation enthusiastically.

For twelve long years, they tore down the once proud empire and if it wasn’t for the fact that they didn’t particularly get along with each other its inhabitants would perhaps never have recovered from what befell them.

In the end, the figure known to history only as the Saint with the big cahoonas was somehow able to soothe the anger of Telondian or perhaps some say it simply died out on its own. Whatever the reason the surviving Tribals returned home triumphantly loaded down with loot and perhaps for some a taste for such things.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Anyway, these days Liban is a small city-state purposely independent of the Three Kingdoms and one republic that over the years had replaced the dead Empire. It is now bereft of the Imperial trappings and monuments that once were to be found there. It was still however home to the headquarters of some once empire-wide organisations such as the Mercenary Guild.

Most mercenary company formation licenses were ancient documents that had been drawn up long before the Empire had fallen and contained a long list of the names of countless mercenary companies that had formed under its authority. As the original documents had mainly seen better days they were held in the vaults of the Guild’s headquarters. The actual license in the possession of the various mercenary companies or stored in the regional mercenary guild vaults were merely copies of these ancient documents.

This meant that every time the license was to change hands it had to be verified that the copy of the license actually corresponds to its original one and is not simply a forgery. This of course all takes time as while the process has yet to uncover a forgery since it was first put in place during the first turbulent years of the recovery of the lands that had once made up the empire, it is more than a simple formality.

While that process was being undertaken sergeant Winter convened another meeting the following midday to inform everyone how the negotiations had gone and begin the process of collecting the money pledged by the members of the company to the ransom fund the day before. Everyone of course turned up except one individual who seems to have fled in the middle of the night.

For his sake, I hope private Jason Dorff has simply decided that the life of a mercenary is not for him and decided on a new career elsewhere. after all, I am sure Sergeant Winter will at least try to get him blackballed from the Guild.

Of the sixteen individuals present at the meeting besides the three of us who had already transferred the pledged funds eleven of them were able to also transfer what they had pledged. As for the remaining five three of them requested permission to visit the mercenary guild to collect the money they had pledged.

Since it was possible to transfer the funds without actually visiting the nearby chapter of the guild thanks to its close proximity what they actually planned to do was one of two things. Either they planned to flee without playing or go to wherever they had buried their money and simply dig it up.

While possible the first option seemed unlikely to me for the simple reason that they had not done so previously and also because the main weapon in the sergeant’s arsenal prevented them from doing so. This was of course the reference without which a potential future mercenary company they were looking to join was less likely to offer them employment.

Now a reference written by a mere Sergeant was in no way compatible with that from an actual officer but it was certainly better than no reference at all and they knew that. Thus the sergeant granted them permission to visit the guild and off they went, returning a few hours later with the full amount they had pledged.

This left two individuals, Privates James Keen and Boyd Walsh who both unleashed that most unexpected of things, the hard luck story. The two privates in question were as chalk and cheese, Boyd who was in his mid-twenties and quite quiet had joined the company shortly before I had. James who was in his early thirties had done so at the end of last year’s campaign season and he had quickly gained a reputation for being the biggest gossip in the company.

I didn’t really know James but I had once spent three days straight with Boyd and nine others waiting to ambush an enemy that never showed up. He might have been quiet but he was also a bit of a degenerate gambler and while not as bad as some members of that sad fraternity he like all of them was also prone to long unlucky streaks. After the birth of his first child a year ago, a girl he had tried to quell his addiction but he still fell off the wagon on occasion.

He had last night pledged two gold coins but he now claimed that he could only afford half that due to his daughter having taken sick a month ago and his wife having to buy medicine for her. He might have spoken the truth but it was also possible that he had gambled away the extra gold perhaps even last night.

James on the other hand who had pledged three gold now said he couldn’t even afford to give more than twenty or so silver. The reason he give was that he had discovered it missing when he had gone to retrieve it from wherever he had buried it. This also was possibly the truth but equally could be a lie.

The fact is that with the extra money provided in the wills, we didn’t need the money pledged by these two individuals but not paid out. However, that wouldn’t be fair to those who had given the full amount they had pledged and might even lead in one extreme to violence being visited upon one or both of them.

To prevent this we had, or so the sergeant claimed, no choice but to investigate their claims. Thus he dispatched corporal Wentrope to pay a visit to Boyd’s wife to see what she had to say on the matter. He then had James lead me to his former hiding spot to see what if anything I could find to back up his story.

What I found when we got there were a good half dozen freshly dug holes in the ground which needless to say proved nothing conclusively. They could have been dug by someone who wasn’t completely sure where to dig either because they never knew in the first place or had simply forgotten. Equally, they could have been dug by James to try and divert suspicion from himself.

The two of us naturally returned to the meeting long before Wentrope and were informed that a search of James’s bunk and barracks hadn’t turned up any money.