Chapter 4: Rule #45 in action. Farewell, Old Man.

Rule #45 “Those who can ... do. Those who can’t ... teach. Those who can do neither ... are usually related to the Guildmaster.”

Tymson was right; normally I would have taken the fact the Watch was paying attention to me as a reason to do something impressive. Or Impressively Stupid as the case may be. This time, however,. I felt like ... well ... I needed to stay out of low society for a bit of time. The story of my flight from the Guilded Ram and then being taken “for a walk” by the Chief Inspector meant that people either were laughing at me, or were suspicious that I was playing informant to the Watch. Either way is not a great way to make friends and influence people in Tortar City’s underworld.

I used this time to make sure my various bolt holes around the city were paid up and still secure. I always joked that there was three things you needed to lay low when the heat was TRULY on: A Fast Horse, a Good Disguise, and a large sack of money. The problem was that the people whose job it would be to track you have reason to track the first, reason to look through the disguise, and can make it too expensive to bribe someone to let you go. Rule #49 said it best. “There’s no such thing as a properly bribed city watchman. All you’ve done is set the minimum it’s going to take to rat you out.” So, while the first thing most folks would do when the heat was on them is leave the city, when the amount of attention to their activity would be the greatest, instead I preferred to wait until my chasers figured I had already left the city, and then decide whether to stay or go.

I still managed to make a bit of a gesture, even though I was pretty much suppressing my larcenous instincts. I decided to tweak the City Watch a bit by taking lunch on three straight days on a bench just outside The Castle, which was the Duke’s domicile and the district home for the City Watch. I conspicuously paid attention to the guards as they came and went. In short, I was Watching the Watchers. Sounds incredibly petty, I know. I wanted them to think defensively against me, not in tracking my maneuvers. They’d have to wonder if I was doing something nefarious with them, and that might mean they hunker down, rather than looking for an excuse to track my every move. So it wasn’t extremely petty. Just mostly petty.

That doesn’t mean I spent all my time being a goody two shoes however. I had suppressed my instincts for larceny, but the Rogue still has to do roguish things every now and then or they get bored. So, I dusted off my Hedier Talona persona. While Arin Wolf probably wouldn’t be allowed into most high class places, Hedier Talona had a credit line at some of the swankier restaurants and shops in the city. Not a large one, however, but enough to pay for a couple meals. It played into my Talona persona, who was related to one of the Merchant Collectives of Karkona. Sure, he was a minor scion of the Talona Collective, but considering that the Karkonians were widely acknowledged as some of the best traders in the Eight Kingdoms and beyond. They were so rich that they apparently bought out the city’s nobles and ran their city as a Merchant Republic. Hedier Talona was welcomed in so many places that Arin Wolf was not.

Truth be told, a lot of my negative views of Nobles came from information I overheard from the high class smoking houses and hideaways the Noble Houses when I was in my Talona persona. Just one example, I overheard one noble telling another that they fully supported their idea of opening a new seaborne trade route to take Spice to the Northern Lands and would invest after the first runs sure success, and an hour later telling someone to up their payments for pirates on the route they would take. So they encouraged someone to take a route, then encouraged someone else to make sure the route was unsuccessfull

I learned a lot that I normally wouldn’t pay attention to as Arin Wolf. King Ibrahim Saulced the third of his line was still ill, and the various factions of the Eight Kingdoms were endlessly positioning to determine who would succeed him as king. The king had no direct heir, as the only male child he had in his youth died young, and the girls he fathered, who married outside the Royal House, were technically outside the path of succession. It seemed like unless one of the matrilineal lines got re-adopted into the royal family, then the House of Saulced would come to an end shortly. King Ibrahim wasn’t making it any easier, by refusing to name an Heir.

I don’t know if it was Royal stubbornness, whether he had no confidence in anyone succeed him, or a macabre desire to see the largest of the Eight Kingdoms dissolve into anarchy and possibly civil war, like that which happened to the Great Emperor Aleksander, who when dying was asked who the crown of the then united Eight Kingdoms should devolve to after him, would only say “To the Strongest.” The wars that followed his death turned the Empire into the Nineteen Kingdoms. Throughout the years that followed, the Nineteen Kingdoms became the Eight Kingdoms through conquest and intermarriage. After 300 years, there’s still Eight Kingdoms only because they signed an agreement to ban armed conflicts between the remaining kingdoms. Of course, that just made all the battles turn covert.

Thallid had mentioned tidbits from jobs he had pulled for various Kingdoms, but he was reticent to talk about the details of those jobs, and advised me to stay away from “The Greatest of Games”, because “while in chess, a pawn can become a king, in the Greatest of Games, a king can be someone else’s pawn, so what would happen if you and I got embroiled in such games? Just another nameless, faceless piece to be sacrificed and swept off the board”. In short, I was good being a moderately good sized piece on a moderately good sized board. After about a week, I felt ok about returning to my old Roguish self, having used up my credit lines at a couple shops to get some new clothes for the Talona persona. However, the world I returned to was not the one I had left.

When I made it to Crab’s Claws, a small port-side tavern that was well frequented by smugglers and those who would use their services, it was quiet. More than that, it was somber. That was unusual. A normal night at the Claws would see at least two sailors ejected through the door. If they annoyed the bouncers, they might not open the door before the second or third time they tried to throw them out it, or if they really were unhappy, they’d skip the door entirely and throw them out the window. Of course, the sailor thus ejected was still expected to pay for the window he broke, and they’d usually take his coin purse to replace it. Since I was still lying somewhat low, I didn’t really push trying to figure what was going on, but decided to track down Kestrel, and get some information. If not information, perhaps some revenge. Revenge always was good.

Kestrel was at the same table at the Guilded Ram I had seen him at previously. I motioned to him from the doorway (not wanting to trigger Kila and Tyranna’s wrath if they caught me in their tavern again), and he frowned but came out. He was apologetic and spoke before I could. “Look, Wolf, I just thought it was funny. The tavern keeper had told me that Kila and Tyranna had already compared notes, and that he wanted me to just keep you there long enough for the girls to find out. That way, they wouldn’t spend all their time ignoring customers, and instead spend it plotting what they were going to do to you.”