He sighed when he turned the corner. He was hoping the all of the ‘Silverbacks’ would have cleared out by now but there was still one by the door leading up to the flat he needed to get into. At least it looked like he was young. If he was lucky, perhaps his more experienced brethren hadn’t yet instilled in him the routine hostility they seemed to possess when it came to dealing with people of his ilk. Well, there was nothing for it. His paymasters wanted his insight, and up those stairs it lay. Once more, he sighed, and then approached the town guard.

“What is it you want?” the dark haired boy challenged, looking him up and down. He could understand the hesitation for he didn’t paint a picture often seen in the hustle and bustle of Roguvaar. Not so much his race to be honest. Half-Orcs, while they didn’t dominate the population, were also no strangers in the city. However, most of them tended to be members of the underclass with clothes that reflected their station, or mercenaries, whose garb pointed that out as well. And he was neither of those things. His jacket and leggings, while made of hides and containing tribal designs, were tailored. His boots, though understated, were of sturdy cured leather. His hair, while long, was neatly tied back into two long tails using several wide metal bands. That of the latter left on his face had been reduced to a neatly cropped under fringe with no moustache to speak of. Even the leather bag he carried with him, plain in design, spoke of enduring craftsmanship.

“Well?” the armoured figure before him prodded once more. “State your business or be off with you.”

“My name is Azgrum Wintereye,” he began monotonically, slowly reaching into his breast pocket, pulling out a card and handing it to the other, whom he estimated to be no older than 17. “I represent the law firm of Mogglesmeyer, Jeggulsplotch, Gibblesgorp, Gibblesgorp, Gabrinhauser, Banglemocker, Keebercleggin, and Broikalbolk. Here is my card.”

“And what of it? What are you, a messenger boy?” he interrogated. “He’s dead you know, any message you have for him is of little use.”

“I am aware of that,” the half-breed stated calmly.

“Oh, you are?” he bristled, his stance stiffening which attracted the attention of a couple of passersby. “And how is that exactly?”

“The man’s employer, was retained the people who employ me, to look into this matter,” he explained refusing to rise to the bait. Once more he reached into his jacket and this time produced a larger scroll. “That is what I am here to do. This is a writ signed by the city magistrate with his seal giving me permission to inspect the apartment upstairs.”

The youth peered at it and squinted at the half-orc, then shifted his squint between the two a second time. Azgrum wondered if he could even read. He hoped so. It would save a lot of time.

“He has the right of it lad,” one of the onlookers commented looking over the guard’s shoulder. “That’s what it says there. And that is the seal of the Magistrate’s Office.”

“Very well then,” he sneered. “I’ll be checking that bag when you leave, so don’t try making off with a set of candlesticks or some cutlery.” With that, he stepped aside allowing the investigator to pass by.

Azgrum allowed his eyes to adjust to his darker surroundings as he trudged up the stairs. Exchanges such as the one he had just had to deal with were nothing he hadn’t experienced before since moving to the city from his homeland. In fact most times he had to deal with the local guards, it was typical. It was bad enough that he was a half-orc who ‘didn’t know his place’ as they tended to put it when they were being polite. Toss in the fact that he was from a part of the far north that most had only gleaned details of third hand and it only made matters worse. Folks tended not to like that with which they were unfamiliar and he was nothing if not that.

He lost track of the amount of times he had debunked the claims that they ate their dead or strangers that happened upon them. Everyone naturally assumed that they lived on tundra that was a lifeless wasteland of ice. It was simply not true. That was within a couple day’s walk, but their village was actually below the tree line. It wasn’t nearly as fertile as the Noonaenen Plains but there was sustenance to be had in the Kaltervaal if you knew where to look for it. The nearby Lake of Mirrors naturally played a large part in everything that their community, a combination of humans, orcs, and half-breeds like himself, did including providing sustenance. And there was plentiful game to be found in the surrounding pines. But people want to believe what they want to believe he learned. Unfounded whispers of occasional cannibalism made for far more interesting rumourmongering than a much more mundane truth.

Granted, there was a good bit of shamanistic practices Kruz’kath’gar. Faith in the land, the trees upon it, the water that ran through it, that which lived upon it, ran strong in the tribe. This was perhaps was another reason the southerners viewed him with suspicion. And to be honest this aspect of his culture played no small part in his present circumstance. Gunda Illspotter, the healer of their village had seen it early, his spark within. They would call her a hedge witch in these parts, but she was so much more than that to the tribe. The old orc woman apprenticed him ostensibly in the ways of the apothecary but she knew that he had the communing gift.

She had started him chewing the gummy residue of the gareguur root within two months of taking him in. It was an important part of the process she explained. It helped bring a slumbering mind such as his fully awake. He had seen her chomping on it in the past but had never understood the reason why. But once he had spoken with his first hawk everything fell into place. Gunda kept him busy beyond that however, teaching him his letters, constantly training him in the mixing of plants, the recognition of tastes and smells, grilling him on the stories of their people, and the stories of others. Childless herself, she poured all of her efforts into making him the man he became. The medicine woman had even been the one to reach out to the gnome Anderolo Gabrinhouser and arranged for his current position. Apparently she had determined that he was meant to move beyond the Kaltervaal. And so here he was as he had been for the past three years, a half-orc from a faraway place, living in a single room flat, and contracted to a firm made up of eight gnomish barristers as their ‘man of many talents’.

Azgrum paused at the door and squatted down to examine the lock. There were no tool marks to be found. If the killer had entered this way, they had been let in. Taking the key that Gabrinhauser had given him with the address and the writ, he inserted it into the door and entered the apartment. It was quite tidy, almost rigidly so, and an improvement from his own abode. It had two rooms with a larger window facing the side and a smaller one at the back in the bedroom he could see from where he stood. There was a desk with various papers, shelves containing books above it, a small brazier for colder days, and a table and two chairs as well as utensils for eating. A glance through the doorway into the other room found a bed, a wardrobe, a nightstand and a small table with a pitcher, a water basin, together with the requisite items for hygienic purposes atop it. Oh yes, and there was a body on the floor next to the desk.

Jurgyll Pravrik was an accountant by trade who worked for the Roguvaar Trading Company. It was the biggest house in town of it’s kind and, as far as things went, of decent size when compared to others beyond it. “An unimportant man with access to important information,” the northerner mused silently taking in the corpse. He was shorter and slighter than the investigator, who himself was slightly undersized for his heritage. “Dressed like he was still at work too,” he observed squatting next to the body and peering closer at the stab wounds piercing the shirt on his back. Lifting the garment carefully, he examined them closely. He then gently turned the man on his side and looked for further signs of violence, but found none, though it was obvious the man’s blood had made his way out of him through his nose and mouth. Placing him back how he was the half-orc then stood once more and took in the other’s position on the floor again. With a nod, he turned and looked around the room once more.

The chair near the desk was slightly turned and papers were open upon it. “He had been working here when he was killed and ended up falling there,” he reasoned rifling through the documents in front of him. It was what he would have expected to see from one in his line of work, not that Azgrum could decipher in detail what he was looking at. “No, that would be a job for Ryldakita Broikalbolk,” he muttered tonelessly, referring to the gnomish litigant at the firm specializing in such things. He looked at the next few documents sitting below the ledger, nodded and frowned, not so much committing it to memory as trying to fit it into place with everything else he was observing.

He examined the windows next. The one in the bedroom, while small was not of such a size to deny entry to someone similar to the victim. But it had been untouched. Much like the rest of the bedroom it seemed from his initial look. He walked over to the wardrobe and opened it. A whiff of something he had not expected found his nostrils. He knew that smell. Interesting he should find it here. Wintereye methodically went through the various garments hanging within and found an empty hangar in the middle between two jackets and four more at the end. It seemed out of place. Everything else he had seen in the flat spoke to order but here it was absent. He retreated to the main room once again.

One of the chairs at the table for eating had been pulled out. He sat in it and found he was looking squarely at the desk, precisely at the accountant’s back had he been sitting at it. He turned to peer closer at the items on the surface and most of what he thought he would find was there. There was that smell again. It was unmistakable. He picked up a knife from the utensils and once more squatted over the body, lifting the shirt once more. And once more the odor found his nose. “Missed it the first time,” he chastised himself lowly. But now that he knew it, it was most definitely on Pravrik himself but not of him. Of that last he was sure.