HS&S:WT Short

[sabremeister]

Part 3

Sergeant Terney entered the Guard House at the head of his squad of six. He clapped his hands, blew on them and rubbed them, to get some feeling back into them. He’d been on the Dock Gate all day, with a cruel north-westerly blowing in all day. He unclasped his greased leather cape and shrugged it off, before saying to his men, “Alright lads, that’s it for the day. Dry out!”



His squad, all large hard-boiled men, were mostly already fumbling out of leather gloves to sign in their halberds with the armoury; they chorus-mumbled a general thanks, various good evenings and enquiries as to whether each other were going to the pub for a few in a minute. Terney left them to it, and made his way to the squad roster, where he marked them all as off duty. He was turning to head to the locker room when a captain appeared at the head of the stairs.

“Terney! I need to see you!” she called, and was gone.

“Just a sec!” he half-called back. He went to intercept his men. “Hang around for a more minutes, lads,” he told them, “’er Upstairs wants to see me, might mean we need to go out again.” He ignored their moans and muttered swearing, and headed back towards the duty room, climbed the stairs, and knocked on the Heim Captain’s office door. “What is it, Captain?” he asked.

“Sit down, Sergeant,” she invited. She remained standing, peering out of the window that overlooked the rear courtyard, and the other squads from around the city of Tasal coming in in the early evening light. “Have you had any word from your son?”

Oh, so that was what this was, Terney thought. “No, Captain. Not since his assignment started.”

“How long ago was that, again?”

“Seven weeks now,” Terney replied, after a moment’s thought.

“Well, we thought it would take longer anyway, didn’t we?” the Captain half-asked to herself.

“Have you had word, Captain?”

She turned from the window and sat down. “No. Not as such. But we have received reports from contacts, that someone bearing the description of Rothsun’s wizard has been trawling pawn shops, jewellers and fences, looking for something.”

“Do we know what?”

“The reports say just that he was looking.”

Terney bit back a curse. “Do we know if he’s looking for anyone?”

“Does he know who the thief is, you mean?” Terney nodded. “We don’t know. Obviously, Rothsun and his household can’t actually confirm that it’s missing, so there is no mention of an intruder, thief, suspect, or anything. I’m sorry.”

Terney closed his eyes at that, and breathed out through gritted teeth. “Alright.” He opened his eyes. “Do we know anything new?”

“I’m sorry, Sergeant. I know you hoped your son would join the Day or Night Divisions, not the Heim Division. I know you, and a lot of the other officers, don’t really consider the Heim Division proper Guard work. To be frank, with his physique, I wouldn’t have expected him to want to join us, either. But he volunteered, and he passed the tests.”

“I know. I know that what he’s doing is just as important – probably more so – than what we do. But, he is my son – it’s hard, knowing he chose to put himself in danger.”

“You don’t consider your own job dangerous?”

“Not as dangerous as being a Night owl, certainly. Look, I’ve been a street officer for how long? Forty years? And I know that, Day or Night, it’s a rough, tough job. But it’s a sort of tough that you can deal with, you can learn to deal with things as and when they come. But the Heim Division …” He trailed off.

“Yes?”

Terney took a deep breath. “You sneak around. You pretend to be what you’re not. You regularly go into situations where, if you’re caught, you stand a good chance of being dead two seconds later – for certain. At least on the street, you stand a fighting chance. As a Heim, you don’t even see it coming most of the time.”

“All true, broadly. You told your son all this?” Terney nodded. “As did I. As did, I am sure, every one of your Day Division friends. And still he volunteered. He chose to join us. We don’t take those who are forced upon us.”

“I can’t help thinking he’s gone already, though.”

The Captain nodded sympathetically. She stood up and circled the table, kneeling before him, a companionable hand on his shoulder. “He’s not. If he had been caught, the ring would have been recovered. We can be pretty sure that the ring is no longer in Rothsun’s possession – why otherwise would Mathis be combing the city for signs of something ‘small, valuable, and not technically stolen’? We know that Rothsun’s daughter is about the same age, and that she has shown a propensity for thieving. It may not be stealing, technically, if she took the ring, even acting under instruction from your son. And he’d be wary about showing his face if he does indeed have the ring. He’s probably lying low, waiting for a convenient moment to report in. He’ll be alright – especially if he’s convinced a Viscount’s daughter to effectively elope with him.”

“I don’t want to be father-in-law to nobility,” Terney growled, a smile beginning to form.

The Captain stood. “It may not come to that. Anyway – if you haven’t heard anything from Ander, and I haven’t either, there’s nothing more to say really. Good evening, Sergeant.”

Terney stood. “Good evening, Captain.” He marched out the door and down the stairs. His squad were waiting around in the duty room, looking bored. “’s alright lads, false alarm. We don’t have to go anywhere. Except the pub, soon as I get this bloody kit off. Anyone coming?”