• Solo • ...if you do take a thief

[Oram Mednix]

29 Cylus, 721

continued from here.

Oram lay awake in his cot for several breaks after his conversation with Osric, thinking about what he had seen that evening. The “blood everywhere” had been appalling, though not as disconcerting or nauseating to the hunter as it might be to others. He had seen more grisly things without undue trauma. Yet that hairpin of smeared and dripped blood on the smith’s floor had brought harrowing images to Oram’s mind, images of the events that had probably produced them:

Images of the initial blow to the back of the slave girl’s head as she tried to get to the door that led back upstairs, to her master and mistress whose store was being robbed, the master and mistress she thought would protect her, if only she could reach them. Had she called out? Had the smith or his wife heard her? What exactly, had they heard? Single words or phrases shouted in fear or anger? Exchanges? Or just inarticulate noises?

Oram had not even asked the family what they had seen or heard that night. They had been so intent on arguing with one another about whether Tyrma had betrayed them, and the traveler had not been able to bring himself to interrupt them, to try to get them to focus on something else. He was sure a better investigator would have done that.

Images of an assailant forcibly dragging the girl away from the door, probably by the hair, which would explain the dragging smudges of blood across the floor. The pool of blood where he had finally let go and left her to bleed out from her head wound. What did those wounds look like? What attitude, exactly, had the body been in when the wife found it? Again, Oram had not asked, focusing instead on things he could glean with his own eyes, without confronting the witnesses. A better investigator surely would have asked?

Images of the girl, left for dead by the robbers where they had dragged her, but not quite dead, stirring after a time, crawling along the floor, trying once again to reach that door to her masters upstairs. Had the attackers seen this? How did they react? Or had they already fled before the mortally wounded slave stirred? Given the amount of time that must have passed, did that mean that Dyrgen and his wife had not gone downstairs to investigate noises they heard right away, but rather some time later? If not, why not? Or perhaps they heard nothing at first? He had hesitated to ask, because he had not wanted to wade into a quarrel. And now he didn’t know the answers. A better investigator would have found a way to ask.

Oram fell asleep at some point, and woke up as the other bachelors in the boarding house stirred. He did not feel groggy, yet neither did he feel refreshed. Stiffly he sat up and began to get ready to go to his brother’s house, to have some breakfast and wait for Osric’s promised return from his morning errand. His thoughts, while not crisp and lively, were clearer and more sober, less self-critical than they had been in the night. He was not an investigator charged with reconstructing exactly what went down, he reminded himself. That was a means to an end, if it was anything. He was a hunter, and his charge was to find the people who had robbed the smith’s store and murdered his slave. The whys and wherefores were for another time.

Signy greeted him with a much-welcome cup of coffee and some eggs and hash browns. The smell and taste of these things helped liven his mood as well as his thoughts. He still kept those thoughts mostly to himself, though, and so was as so often before not great company for his sister-in-law. It was a long, silence-filled break before Osric returned. He seemed to be in a much better mood himself than he had been the evening before, and Oram guessed as soon as he saw him that he had good news -better, at least, by comparison than the news he had had last night.

Os didn’t keep them in suspense. ”Dyrgen is posting a bounty for the killers. He was writing up the notice while I was there. I’ll help him make copies as soon as I get back. He’s also offering a reward for the retrieval of the stolen items, especially the stolen strongbox.” Oram’s head snapped up at this.

”Strongbox? Nobody mentioned that before!” he complained.

It was then Os’ turn to be surprised. ”I didn’t mention that before? Oh, dear. Well, the smith had a strongbox, identical in make to the one he used to keep his nels for the business, except this one contained letters and keepsakes, I suspect old ones from his wife. It was precious to him. Anyway, the thieves stole that, probably thinking it was the cashbox.”

Oram furrowed his forehead. ”They didn’t get the cashbox?”

Os shook his head. ”Dyrgen takes that upstairs with him every night. I’ve no idea what he does with it, but it’s never in the store overnight. But the other one, the one with the keepsakes, was in the store that night, and the thieves took it, along with the axe and the trinkets.” He went on to finally tell Oram in a bit more detail what those ‘trinkets’ had been: several ornamental knives and letter-openers, some decorative chains, a few padlocks with their keys, an unfinished music box case. The padlocks were probably the most valuable items.

”Those are valuable items, but ones that the robbers may find hard to fence,” Os said. ”They’re recognizable, they’re trademarked, and once the notices are out, they’ll be too hot for most of the fences in town. Or so we hope.” Oram wondered if Osric really knew as much about crime and fencing as he was pretending to, but he hoped his brother was right.

”So the plan is to wait for the robbers to try to fence the stuff in town, and hope they get caught?” Oram asked. ”Is that your plan? What’s that got to do with me?”

Osric grinned. ”It’s part of the plan. There’s more. Remember when we discussed how the robbers might not live in town, but be squatting in a cabin somewhere in the countryside?” Oram nodded. ”Well,” Os went on, ”if it’s too hot in the city, I suspect our robbers won’t fence there. They’ll fence somewhere else. Ideally, they’d go to Almund, but with the roads bad, I don’t think so. They’ll look to fence some place near town, but not inside the walls. Now, who outside the walls might thieves desperate for a fence go to?”

Oram scowled while he tried to puzzle out Osric’s thinking, then his expression cleared with realization. ”Gypsies.” Sometimes, people would simply wander into the travelers’ camp, asking around on the assumption that gypsies would just buy or sell anything with no questions asked. Which was not entirely false, Oram had to admit, but it was simplistic. Smarter, though no less desperate, criminals would look for a more discreet route. And Oram knew then whom Osric meant.

”Your plan involves *Zogs*?” he asked incredulously.

Osric smirked. Oram hoped that meant that his older brother knew what he was doing. ”You and I are going to talk to him,” Osric said; ”I think I know how to get him to play along. If we’re lucky, our thieves may very well just walk right up to us.”

It seemed a lot to hope for, Oram thought, but he gestured for his brother to continue explaining his plan, and so he did…

[Oram Mednix]

It’s for the greater good! Think of the children!

”I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man protested blandly, as he sipped his tea. ”I never traffic in stolen goods.” Zogs looked to be closing in on sixty arcs, arcs which had obviously fed him well, although he was far from obese.

Travelers had a reputation for being thieves, swindlers, fences, generally shady in business dealings. There were reasons for this. Zogs was one of those reasons.

Osric glared at the older man. ”But they *come* to you,” he persisted. Oram sat and sipped his own tea, watching the conversation in silence. Osric had asked his younger brother to let him do the talking, and Oram could see the wisdom in this.

Zogs wrinkled his brow and stroked his graying mustache and grizzled cheek stubble as if deep in thought. ”I have no recollection of that,” he said after a trill. Osric ground his teeth in frustration. Zogs’ eyes twinkled with mischief on noticing this.

Collecting himself, Osric continued as reasonably as he could manage. ”I have reason to believe that somebody will contact you, possibly as soon as today, looking to sell a bunch of items that were stolen from Dyrgen’s shop. There is a reward for their recovery.”

Zogs took a deep, thoughtful-sounding breath and leaned back, running his fingers through slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair. ”Such rewards, I find, are rarely that…rewarding,” he observed. ”Why should I consider your offer?”

Osric’s face flushed and his jaw worked. Oram could guess many of the righteous-sounding things his older brother was thinking of saying: that Zogs would be effectively stealing from one of his own, that the people he would be dealing with were not just robbers but murderers, that he was already on thin enough ice with the elder, that it would be hard on everybody in the camp, but most of all himself, if the Elements managed to catch Zogs in possession of the stolen merchandise. Instead of any of that, he said: ”These goods are *hot*, Zogs. If they weren’t, they’d fence them in town. You’d have a tough time turning the stuff around, especially quickly. This way, you get money right away, with almost no risk.”

These were words that Oram thought were bound to persuade anyone, even someone as cynical and crooked as Zogs, to do the right thing. Yet the merchant acted as if he were still not entirely convinced. Oram chose that moment to speak up: ”We plan to take him right here. Which means you’ll get any gold you pay him right back. Along with any other gold he might have on him. On top of the reward money.”

Zogs turned to the younger brother with a smirk. ”The reticent woodsman breaks his silence!” he exlaimed, his voice all smug amusement: ”To share his few, pithy, well-chosen words! Very well, you have my attention. Tell me what you propose…”

[Oram Mednix]

It’s almost too easy…

Oram cleared his throat. ”Simple,” he began: ”We leave you a list of the goods stolen from Dyrgen’s shop. You send us a message somehow if somebody comes by what you think are any of those goods; you keep who brought ‘em here while we round up the boys. We keep him here while we figure out if he’s our guy.”

Zogs frowned. ”A couple problems I can see already, young Oram,” he pointed out: ”What if somebody comes with merchandise that looks similar, but isn’t actually from your Dyrgen? I’d be scaring off a perfectly good customer. And in your interests: what if the person doesn’t have all the goods? You’ll find it that much harder to-”

”Chances are,” interrupted Osric, saving Oram. ”they *will* bring all the stuff, if they come at all. If they come to you in the first place, it’s because they want to fence it fast.” Zogs made a vague, offended noise, but did not cut Osric off. ”And most of the stuff, especially all the locks and knives, will have Dyrgen’s mark on it. So there’s no real risk of erring. And since we’ll know from the trademark that we have one of the robbers at that point, tracking down any remaining merchandise, along with the other robber will be our problem.”

Zogs grinned at the tinker. ”Sounds like you’ve though this through. Alright, we’ll do it your way.”

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was Cassion. Or maybe Osric’s plan really was that brilliant. For whatever reason, Zogs’ boy came by the bachelors’ shack later that very evening while Oram was playing dominoes with Wig and Clem. ”One guy,” the boy announced simply. ”Most, not all.” Hardly believing their luck, the three travellers got their gear together and began to make their way to Zogs’ tent. The boy went to get Osric next.

Oram took Clem and Wig quietly to the far side of the tent. They poised just outside, listening through the canvas walls. The sky was still Cylus-grey, with no sun, and thus no shadows on the ground; no silhouettes on the tent wall would betray them. A poorly-fed nag with shabby tackle waited hitched before Zog’s tent.

”…can’t you just give me a quote now, old man?” complained a strange man’s voice. ”I’d like to be home before dark!”

”I don’t normally buy these sorts of pieces,” Zogs’ voice came in response, dripping with well-oiled plausibility. ”And I would hate to make you a bad offer. My associate should be here any moment. Two bits….”

”Bad for me or bad for you?” responded the stranger harshly. ”You’d better not be stalling me for the Elements.”

”Don’t be crass,” said Zogs. The irritation in his voice sounded genuine now. ”You already know I don’t talk to them, or you wouldn’t be here.”

Oram saw that Osric was coming now, led by the boy, who showed the tinker in by a back entrance Oram didn’t even know the tent had. How had he missed that?

”Two bits more,that is all,” continued Zogs.

”Not even one bit!” called out Osric, now somewhere inside the tent.

Zogs introduced Os simply as his “associate” and, after some preliminaries, asked this “associate” what he thought of the stranger’s offerings.

”They’re exactly what I’m looking for,” Osric said, just a bit more loudly and distinctly than before.

That was Oram’s clue. With a nod to the other two travelers, he and they rounded to the front of tent and quickly filed their way in.

The stranger, a thin youngish man in shabby looking skins, whirled to face them, his eyes goggling first with surprise, then with rage, then with fear.

”What in the Beneath?” he exclaimed, then whirled back around to face Zogs, who was now flanked by Osric and the boy. ”You bastard! You said you wouldn’t go to the Elements.” He made half a move towards Zogs, but the merchant did something with his hands that made him stop short. The stranger then whirled back to face the three men who stood between him and his escape, his horse. Oram pointed his spear at the man’s face. Wig and Clem circled to either side sporting belay pins. For just a trill, the man looked like he was considering trying something, but then he just lowered his hands to his sides and gnashed his teeth in helpless rage.

”You damn gypsies!” he seethed. ”I knew-”

”-absolutely nothing about this line of work.” finish Zogs calmly behind him. Oram could now see that the fence had a nasty-looking falchion placed on the counter in front him. It was surrounded by an array of chains, knives, tools, and padlocks. Zogs gestured at these items. ”Who tries to to fence trademarked merchandise in the craftsman’s home town? After raising the hue and cry by murdering someone in their shop the trial before?”

The stranger’s thin face must have changed color four times while his mouth worked in a vain attempt to put all his rage, frustration, and desperation into words. While Oram kept his spear trained on the man, Clem stepped forward with a wicked grin and clapped him heavily on the shoulder, forcing him to his knees. ”Put your hands behind your back,” he said quietly to the stranger, who dared not disobey, for Clem was a hulking giant of a man, who looked just like he knew how to work that belay pin.

The hulking traveler, who worked on the docks, knew how to work knots, too, and had the stranger’s hands firmly tied behind him in no time. Wig then stepped forward to relieve him of his weapons.

”You’ll pay for this!” the stranger seethed.

”No”,” said Zogs. ”I expect rather that I shall be paid for this. Hopefully well. But you have other things to worry about.” Oram glanced up at the merchant; he was clearly enjoying this. ”I have not spoken to the Elements, as I already told you, but now you will go with these gentlemen here to do so yourself. Goodbye.”

Clem and Wig -mostly Clem- hauled the stranger then to his feet and escorted him out the tent. The boy followed them, leaving Oram, Osric, and Zogs in the tent, where all was quiet apart from the fading litany of “Filthy gypsies!” and similar insults. Zogs waited patiently while Osric looked over the merchandise the man had brought and checked it against his inventory. After a couple bits, he announced. ”No strongbox, no felling axe, obviously. And we’re short one padlock…,” he seemed to realize something: ”…which is probably on the strongbox. Apart from those, everything is here.”

After marking off the items on the list, Os wrote a few notes on it, while Zogs watched with increasing interest. Then Osric wrote something at the bottom and looked expectantly at the merchant, who seemed satisfied. ”Assuming your smith makes good on your word, this will have been as good a deal as you promised,” he said.

He looked over at Oram. ”What about his horse?” The hunter shook his head. ”I have need of it for now,” he said. ”For my next plan.”

Zogs shrugged philosophically. ”I guess you can’t have everything,” he muttered. He and Osric then began to assemble the stolen merchandise they had recovered, to get it ready to bring it back to Dyrgen for the reward money, which would, as they had agreed, all go to Zogs. Such was the price of Osric’s scheme, or at least of Zogs’ part in it.

Oram, in the meantime headed outside to get his own mule, which together with the stranger’s nag still hitched outside, would hopefully take him to where the other robber and the still-missing strongbox were.

to be concluded...

[Pig Boy]

!	Message from: Pig Boy
	For clarity, the entry for a slave to have been murdered in the smith's shop was supposed to have been changed by Pegasus to a servant. Thus, please assume that all references to a slave being murdered, was actually a paid servant. Thank you.

Player Name: Oram

Points awarded: 10
Magic xp: none

Knowledge:

[Etiquette] Keep up your end of a bargain whenever possible.
[Investigation] You will not always ask the right questions the first time around.
[Investigation] Sometimes it’s better to let a partner take the lead.
[Logistics] A successful operation requires good signals and communications.
[Stealth] Silhouettes and shadows can give you away.
[Stealth] A preoccupied target is easier to take by surprise.

Renown: 5 for investigating a crime and making an assist in the arrest.
Loot: Oram has temporary de facto possession of one Tier 4 horse with Tier 4 gear.
Injuries/Overstepping: n/a
Wealth Points: n/a
Consequences: n/a

Skill Review: All Skills used appropriately to PC's level

Notes: Oram is quite the investigator, even for a relative rookie. I found the details of the murder, and how they determined how the crime was done pretty fascinating, but then I'm a sucker for murder mysteries.

It was clever of the crime-fighting team to deduce that the thieves might just be dumb enough to fence a well known blacksmith's marked merchandise around town. A bit of a lucky stroke, but still it was worth investigating if that ended up happening.

Overall I really liked this crime-fighting story. I hope Oram gets his just rewards for helping bringing these bastards to justice.


If you have any questions, comments, or concerns regarding this review, feel free to PM. Enjoy your rewards!