Bilain had barely spoken a word to Ranaie, or held Amaini, over the past couple of days and she had left the tavern early once more. It strained her, but, after the day before, she couldn't face either of them, despite how much she craved their affections. Four streets. The distance between the last fire and her home and family, and she had not rushed to care for them, ensure their safety. She had stayed and protected The Sprawl first.
No other fires had broken out and she had dismissed the Weather Mages before they drank her entire wages in the Timid Fox, with the usual hefty payment for their services to boot. The Watch couldn't afford to call them too often, but they had to. The Weather Mages, and their ability to call down rains upon flaming buildings, were essential to keeping The Sprawl safe.
Too many events played on her mind. Too many occurrences that were outside of her normal duties. Too many things to think about and consider and mull over. Where Bilain should, at this moment, be in her office, reviewing everything, assigning Watch members to tasks, investigating several trails of which she knew not where to begin, she found herself on patrol instead. Criss-crossing the streets and alleyways of her home.
The people had returned to their normal way of life almost as soon as the fires had burned themselves out. Returning to their drinking, their fighting, their debauchery. Little caused such a stir in The Sprawl that could turn their heads from their daily lives for long. Each community fell back to their invisible boundaries, back to the streets and houses where they felt most at home. Where they felt safe.
Few Other-Kin lived in The Sprawl, though some enclaves existed. A group of Dragon-Kin, sitting in the furthest reaches of The Sprawl, to the north before the press of buildings gave way to Ganshorn's Field. Kannai, both former slaves, tail-less and beaten down, and those born free, tended to live individual lives, trying to avoid attention. Fae lived in the uppermost housing, their eyes never far from the clear skies. Even a few Rat-Kin and Toad-Kin could be found in the darkest alleys, the tightest places, keeping to themselves.
For the most part, The Sprawl remained home to humans. Humans from almost every nation upon the continent of Karramon. She had not enough fingers to count the number of cultures that filled these streets, the smell of their foods tickling noses and rumbling bellies. Their different dialects of the Common Tongue giving the sounds in the air a musical quality.
Bilain loved The Sprawl without being blinded to its darker sides. She knew crimes were committed all the time, often under her very nose, but preventing crime was not part of her duties, nor was, up to two days ago, investigating crimes. She and her Watch were there to maintain the peace, to stop crime if they encountered it, to put themselves between brawlers. There was no justice in The Sprawl, only consequences.
Without thinking, her route had carried her from the Watch House, to the site of the second fire where she used her bully stick to pick at the charred remains. Those that had died here were now in the Pyre building, awaiting a return to fire, only, this time, there would be nothing left of their bodies, given back to the Patrons. Four streets. Only four streets from her home. From her husband. From her grandchild.
Her wanderings carried her, then, along twisting, winding streets that appeared to have no order or design, to the site of the first fire and the place where she had encountered the mysterious shadow figure. Here, she tried to remember all that she could of that figure. Tall, strong and shadowed. It came back to those shadows every time. Shadows that hid the figure well. Except the eyes. Eyes filled with pain as they held up the burning beam, allowing Bilain to escape the flames with the haberdasher.
It came as no surprise that no reports of the shadow figure claiming lives came in that night. The Sprawl had become as quiet as it was before, though that was a relative level of quiet. It never truly came to silence. Not ever. Shouts and screams always rang out. Pitiful moans. Raucous laughter and the sounds of bards tumbling from the many taverns in the Ward. Poor the folk may be, but they always found coin enough for drink.
From the site of the first fire, she found herself returned to the place of the incident that required far more of her attention than she wished to give. The stink of the Shcnep accosted her nostrils, filled by effluent and waste from the thousands of folks upon its banks. The Senator had come here for a reason, though she could not, for the life of her, understand why. Nor why she had received orders to investigate it. The man had shown himself a fool by coming to The Sprawl at night, alone, to meet with several, thuggish, unknown individuals. He could not have expected a better outcome.
Again, though, her thoughts turned to that shadow figure. Here, Little Mim had seen them. She was the first to report the shadow figure. No-one had reported an appearance any earlier. Bilain looked up to the perch where Mim had laid, watching the Senator's murder and then the beating and killing of the thugs. That girl could get where water could not, yet the shadow figure had reached that spot with ease.
No-one had bothered to clean away the blood and Bilain ran through the events as Mim had related them with the blood showing those events. She stood where the Senator stood and looked around. He had not given himself a way to escape. Not easily. He knew these men and felt, after a fashion Bilain supposed, safe around them. From here, she could see out across the river toward the Old City, where balconies on run-down, once opulent palaces, stretched out over the river, giving them a sense of floating along with the sluggish waters.
The Senator had fallen where he stood after the first attack. Then, if Bilain had surmised correctly from seeing his wounds, others had continued the attack, even though Yiladry had most like died from the first wound. The entire attack was brutal beyond any need other than as spectacle. As a warning, perhaps, and, if so, to whom? The other Senators of The Sprawl? Bilain would need to speak to them at their earliest opportunity to understand that.
Once dead, or once the thugs had finished slashing at a body that no longer felt the strikes, something had attacked the men. Something fast, strong, as violent as they. More so. Violent enough to break bones, smash skulls and twist heads so hard, they almost took the head from the shoulders. That something, that shadow figure, had attacked with speed, slamming one thug's head into the wall opposite.
Bilain moved to that wall to see the blood and the damage upon it. Low, though none of the dead men could be at all considered short, and the head scraped downwards, along the wall toward the ground. To the other side, the blood was higher, the cracks in the once white mud wall above the height of an average man. A good two feet higher. One attack had come down upon a man, another from below, casting the victim high into the air with some not so little force.
The other thugs were attacked, beaten and killed under more normal circumstances. Taken to the ground where blows rained down from above. Punch after punch until all the men lay dead. If they fought back, their defences were ineffective. If they had tried to run, they had failed. This shadow figure had taken on several strong men all at once and had more than prevailed, they had destroyed the thugs. And yet, something nagged at Bilain's mind.
No weapon. She cursed herself for not seeing it before. Several bloodied knives were found, one for each of the thugs. None of the knives belonged to the Senator. Too simple, not intricate enough, or of the absolute best quality, as any Senator would demand. Knives for the thugs, none for the Senator and none for the shadow figure. They had beaten all these armed men with their bare hands.
That meant training. A lot of training and a dedication to the fighting arts that even most soldiers did not adhere to. She knew she should spend more time thinking about the reasons behind the Senator's murder, but this shadow figure both fascinated and terrified her. The Senator was a fool, in over his head in some political twist or turn. A rival had had him killed, or some prostitute's pimp for the Senator going too far with one of the pimp's girls. The shadow? The shadow prayed upon Bilain's own people and she would not have it.
She would know more of them. She would find them and catch them and put them in irons. The Sprawl was not the playground of some brutal psychotic bent upon killing criminals. Who were they, this shadow, to decide who deserved to live or who to die? For certain, there were times in Bilain's life as a member of the Ward Watch where she had wanted to kill some miscreant, where her soldierly training had screamed at her to despatch the villain, but she had held that urge within, because it was not her place. She was not an executioner and nor could she ever be one.
Her fingers ruffled back her grey hair, the strands falling back into place, curtaining her forehead and she looked up, one again, to Little Mim's perch, only for something to catch her eye. Something new and out of place. From here, she could not see it well, but, with a little help from barrels and boxes dragged from nearby places, she managed to get a deal closer, affording her a better look.
At first glance, it looked like a hole where an arrow had struck and become torn away, but the hole too thick for any arrow she had seen. To make a better guess, she would need to be close enough to touch it but, from here, she could swear the hole made by a crossbow bolt, but a bolt that shot barbs out from the pile. She had never seen such a bolt, nor any crossbow that could fire one.
-+-
With a hasty constructed platform, Bilain stood on boards ready to crack beneath her and Ilivno's combined weight as the Kannai took painfully long moments to examine the hole. With tweezers borrowed from a local seamstress, the Kannai took her sweet time to extract what Bilain had believed she could see from a far lower perspective. With an awe-inspired coo, Ilivno tugged something from the crossbow bolt hole and held her palm beneath it as she showed Bilain.
"It's a splinter, surely?" Bilain frowned as she looked upon the piece of wood between the tips of the tweezers. "There are no signs of metal within the hole?"
"This 'splinter', Captain, is cedar. The wood of this beam oak. And that is not all. Smell." The hefty Kannai moved the splinter closer to Bilain's nose, but Bilain could not smell anything in particular. She shook her head, curling her mouth in question. "Sorry. I forget my sense of smell is more acute, Sir. It's fresh. Fresh grown."
From the platform, Bilain could see at least two other, similar holes, but both were too far above them to construct a platform high enough to examine them. Across the way, above Little Mim's hiding perch, and the other high above at the cusp of the nearest roof. One of the least tall buildings in the surrounding area, only three stories high, that building led to the rest of The Sprawl.
Bilain took the tweezers from the clawed hands of Ilivno and tried, once again, to smell the difference between fresh grown cedar and any other kind of wood. She couldn't. It all smelled the same to her, not helped in the slightest by the normal stinks and stenches of The Sprawl and the filthy river that flowed beside it. How Ilivno could stand it, with her keen Kannai senses, Bilain would never understand.
Taking a long piece of dowel from her belt, she slipped it into the hole left by the crossbow bolt and turned to follow where it pointed, to a higher roof off to the other side. Someone, the mysterious shadow figure, had fired the crossbow from up above to this beam, then had swung upon a rope, down from the roof to the thugs below. Her fingers traced the striations upon the oak beam caused by the rope scraping upon it as the shadow figure had swung below.
The momentum of that swing had sent one man crashing into the wall, lower than his head, because the attack came from above. The other man, the one that had hit the other wall two feet higher than a man's head, had found himself sent flying due to the resulting arcing upswing of the rope. Then, at a sense of rest, the shadow figure had set upon the others at ground level.
Once their murders complete, the shadow had fired their crossbow again, and, somehow, had swung up to Mim's perch to return the girl's precious grape. From there, again, the crossbow fired up to the edge of the roof opposite, where the shadow figure had made their escape, back across the rooftops of The Sprawl.
Except it was all utter nonsense. No crossbow could fire rope thick enough to support a full grown man, or woman, and allow them to swing from building to building, leaving only splinters of cedar from the bolt as evidence. The bolt would tear itself from any wood it had buried itself in. Any rope thin enough for the crossbow to shoot attached to a bolt would have snapped with the addition of even a little weight and crossbows were not so easy to ratchet without anyone seeing it happen, and Bilain had no doubt Little Mim would have mentioned seeing a crossbow.
"Fresh grown?" She smelled the splinter again, despite not having the delicacy to differentiate the smells. "You mean fresh cut, correct?"
"No, Captain, I mean fresh grown. That's why it took some time to extract it." The Kannai pointed inside the hole with a long claw, but, as with her sense of smell, a Kannai's vision was far more acute than Bilain's. "It grew into the oak."
"Forest Mage, perhaps?" Ilivno shrugged at Bilain's question. "Not a Fae with the gifts of their Patrons. No. This 'shadow' is human. Far too big for a Fae. There's little else we can find here."
Clambering down the makeshift scaffold, Bilain dropped the last couple of feet and ignored the complaints from her knees. Ilivno almost jumped from the platform itself, landing upon light feet, the tweezers and splinter still held by one hand. How Kannai had never taken over the world, Bilain could never begin to understand. Instead, they had suffered centuries as either slaves by certain societies, or as the lowest dregs in others.
Bilain couldn't abide with that kind of prejudice, or any kind if she put a mind to it. As far as she felt concerned, people were people and it didn't matter if they had fur, or scales, or skin of differing colours. People were people. Some people were good and decent, some were vicious and nasty, most wavered somewhere in the middle of those extremes. Whether human or Other-Kin made no difference to that.
Ilivno, Bilain had found soon after meeting the girl, had an intelligence she had seen only in scholars, yet had not the will to school herself. Though she had an anger about her, sometimes, hidden and controlled well, her life as a slave had left her with a timidity that did not do the girl justice. She lacked confidence and Bilain sought to help her with that, if she could. Given that confidence and a few years of experience, Ilivno would make a fine Watch Captain. One day.
"I'll take this back to the Watch House, Captain." Ilivno held up the tweezers and splinter and Bilain gave a noncommittal grunt. She couldn't see it proving any more useful than it had. "Shall I send the Sergeant your way?"
"No. I need him to keep questioning people that have seen this 'shadow'. Magic." That last word she spoke to herself, but Ilivno's ears swivelled and her hound-like face contorted into a questioning look. Bilain shook her head. "The way this killer uses shadows and now the possibility of this 'splinter' being fresh grown. It speaks of magic. Rürazar, the Lord of Shadows was said to be a master of many magical disciplines and it sent him mad. If this 'shadow' wields two disciplines, are we dealing with a madman?"
"I could not say, Captain." The big Kannai shivered and, if she had a tail instead of a docked nub, Bilain would have expected it to curl between the girl's legs. "I'm glad The Sprawl doesn't seem to attract Mages. I have no love of them."
Ilivno had mentioned such thoughts in the past but Bilain had never pursued it. She had seen the Kannai's scars, while changing in the Watch House, and some of those scars looked less than natural. She suspected that Ilivno had suffered under a mage in her slave past but she spoke little of it and Bilain would not press anyone to speak of things that brought back painful memories. She would expect no less of anyone else.
For certain, Bilain had painful memories of her own, some more recent than others, but would only speak of them in her own good time and only to those she trusted implicitly. Her husband, for example. Ranaie had often sat, listening to her recollections of a poor childhood, of her times as a soldier, of her worst days in the Watch. He could listen without giving platitudes or advice, not unless she asked for it. He gave her his ear and his shoulder and that often proved all she needed. He was the only person alive that had ever seen her tears.
She looked to the sky, gauging the time. Almost mid-day and she had still not returned home where Ranaie would dole out a bowl of stew, some bread and a pint for her before she returned to work for the afternoon. Amaini would sit upon her knee, trying to thrust her chubby, sticky fingers into the bowl, gurgling and laughing to herself. So little like her mother, who had spent much of her baby years screaming.
Bilain had put her job before them. That twisted in her gut. All she needed to do was to charge someone to check upon her family, make them aware of the nearby fire and prepare them to evacuate, should the fire spread. Instead, Bilain had remained at her post, coordinating efforts that everyone knew to perform anyway, and she knew why.
Throughout that second blaze, she had found herself looking to the inside of the burning building. Not for survivors, or for the places the fire could break out to nearby buildings, but for that shadow figure that had saved her life. She had wanted to see them again in such a desperation that she had as much abandoned her own family. She could make excuses for that, but it came down to one thing. The shadow figure fascinated her and she couldn't decide whether they were a force for good or ill.
"On second thoughts, I'll take that splinter." She took a fresh laundered scarf from about her neck, flattened it out and waited for Ilivno to place the splinter atop it before folding it carefully and placing it within her coin purse. "I've a mind to visit our friends in the Mages' Compound and seek their wisdom on the matter."
"Not returning to the Fox for lunch then, Captain?" Distracted, urging the workers to take down the platform, Ilivno gave that strange, all-teeth, Kannai version of a smile. "Maybe I'll have yours as well as mine. Your husband always holds back the best for his beloved."
Bilain only returned a half-smile at that. So beloved were her family, that she had failed to protect them. True, as it turned out, they were not in any immediate danger, but that mattered little to a heart heavy with guilt. Perhaps it was time to retire from the Watch? She had given it, and The Sprawl, many years of service but when it started taking greater priority than her family, then she had to choose one over the other and, between those choices, her family would, and should come first.
Not today, however. Today she still had a good few hours before sundown and it would take that long to reach the Mages' Compound in the Traders' Ward, continue her investigations and return. By that time, both Ranaie and Amaini would have taken to their beds for the night. All the better to avoid any questions about what ailed her so. Questions she would have to answer truthfully and she did not look forward to that. She could never lie to her husband and she feared the look of sadness that would befall his features when she spoke the truth.