Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

The old merchant had been thrown through the front window of his shop, the window shattered in the middle and dozens of cogs and wheels lay littered throughout the snow – their bits and pieces carving out small divots in the mud off the curb of the street. His guards were nowhere to be seen, but Brutus had a feeling that they were probably no better off inside the shop. Dozens of men were standing around the dead merchant in shock. They all knew exactly who was laying dead in the street and while a small giddiness probably rose in the back of the throats of many of them at the death of a rival, fear must have permeated most of them as well. Cribbly was a powerful man – probably one of the five most powerful in the city after only Ausmasann and the King and a couple in the city guard who few knew the names of.

Brutus turned immediately and left. Was it the same men who had come to see Brutus before? It was unlikely that he Ausmasann would be so brazen – at least not openly. He began to wonder if it was not Ausmasann at all who had threatened Brutus’s life but someone who had hired the gang leader. But then, who was powerful enough to hold sway over the essential leader of the Under City. Brutus pondered these questions as he weedled his way through the streets back toward the Upper City gate. It was more imperative than ever that he made it through now. He needed to know what the hell was going on.

Almost without thinking, he bumped into a merchant wearing a rich suit of royal purple – ruffled cuffs and a pompous feathered hat on the back of his head. He was clearly distracted and did not notice Brutus coming and barely noticed him bump into him, or him nabbing the blue pass that had been sticking slightly from the Merchant’s wallet in his side satchel. The man was clearly not from the city, had just received his pass and would not be recognized by the guard. Brutus cursed as he stepped crookedly on his ankle on a chipped cobblestone. It might just work…if he could survive the walk a bit longer.

In five minutes, Brutus had managed to straighten himself up to look somewhat decent, decided on a good story and had disheveled his hair a bit more to ensure his face could not be recognized. A quick glance in a shop window revealed that he would probably make it just fine but he wiped a bit of mud under his eyes just to be sure.

He stumbled from around the corner and directly into the line of sight of the guards. He held up his blue pass and made sure to stumble even more than he already was.

“Whoa…whoa, state your name.” One of the three guards stepped forward, his massive forehead and even more massive axe making it apparent that he would probably always be on gate duty. He looked confused already.

Reaching deep into his almost twenty year old training, Brutus called up as good of a Freulian accent as he could muster. The southern nations of the continent were well known for their flamboyant, often times churlish accents and men – the women of Willemshire swooned for them and the men were hard pressed not to punch them on sight. “Oh my, it was horrific. It was awful. The humanity of it all. I must be through. I must see my patron immediately.”

“Oy, what happened to you then?”A second guard had stepped forward, this one wearing the rank badge of a sergeant. He was the leader of the three and had probably seen a bit more time at the gate than the others. It was him that Brutus needed to convince.

“O’er at Cribbly Steelweavel’s shop – a horrific murder. Bodies are everywhere and I just barely escaped. Brutus was playing the odds that the news of Cribbly’s death had not yet reached the guards. My name is Francois Francisco. I have just arrived in Willemshire and had yet to sell my wares. I was set to meet with Cribbly this morning and barely escaped with my life. The assailants were giants, horrific men.”

“A Murder you say!” The guard captain was shocked. Brutus suppressed a smile. This was going perfectly.

“A vicious murder. Carnage everywhere. I must say I barely suppressed my tea from this afternoon. I cannot remember the last time I have been so shaken. I must see my patron.”

“You do not look like a merchant…” the guard captain stated, not forecefully, but offhandedly. He was clearly distracted. A second later, he had waved off the third guard to check on Cribbly’s, to see what had happened.

“My clothes were rent and torn by the attackers. My saving grace was the appearance of a City Guard at the last moment. He scared them away and I was able to escape. I took a set of clothing from Cribbly’s shop, the first thing I could find – it is barely decent, but it will have to do until I can see my patron.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Sarina McConnell.” Brutus held his breath, playing a hunch here and hoping that it worked.

The guard captain looked more closely at the blue pass. They still hadn’t gotten around to listing patronage and sponsorship information for foreign traders on the passes and he was more than a little grateful for that.

A moment later, an out of breath city guard member appeared around the corner and nodded his head emphatically. The guard captain swore under his breath, “You go through. I need to see to this.”

The gates were cracked and Brutus stumbled through them for added emphasis, making sure to play up the clear and apparent damage done to his leg. As much as he wanted to collapse in relief, he knew he could not just yet. He had a certain royal patron to see – there were some serious questions to be asked. 

Freelancing

The Upper City hadn’t changed much in the last six years. The only entrance to the gilded inner city – the core of the king’s power – was the sixty foot marble staircase located in the center of the merchant district. The massive portcullis gates sitting about twelve feet in front of the stairs kept anyone from the Under City from entering. The merchants more or less had a free pass to enter and leave as they please but it still required a blue mark from the City Guard to get through. It would not do to have a merchant with negative views of the Upper City getting into the King’s Palace at will.

Something in the back of Brutus’s head remembered part of Sarina’s story. How had she managed to get men and women from the Under City into her home to present things to her if the gates were up. Had she instructed them to let anyone in asking for her? Would the guard even do such a thing? He didn’t know any longer. Six years was a long time in Upper City Politics. Willemshire was the capitol of a very small nation but it had dozens of royals – the aftermath of the first King Willem trying to expand his influence – awarding fiefdoms and titles to anyone that would come to live in the city and bow before him. A handful of royals didn’t technically own any land – rather they were Dukes of streets and Barons of gutters within the cities – contrived titles to give them more power than they technically ever had. It was amusing to a man like Brutus who had been born on a farm outside the city and had only spent time in Willemshire as a result of his high test scores to enter the Royal Guard Academy. He had ended up in the City Guard only after a few poor decisions with the sons and daughters of royals in the Academy.

While it was probably rather unlikely that anyone was going to have forgotten Brutus’s face if he was to go through the main gates, he didn’t have much of a choice. Now, he just needed to figure out how to get through. He had the benefit of a swollen face and a bloodied chin – the problem of course was that he had a swollen face and a bloodied chin. The guards given gate duty weren’t bright but they knew when to draw lines. It probably wouldn’t work to try and get through this way without a plan.

Instead of bursting through the gate without a plan, Brutus decided to return to Cribbly’s shop – the old man would have a way to get him through the gate. The thugs may have beaten him senseless, but they hadn’t robbed him – so he still had the coin on him that Sarina had given him – at least 125 coin still in his jacket. Another 350 was buried behind his woodstove back home and the rest was either in his belly or in the whisky bottle laying on the floor beneath his palate back home.

It took him longer than expected to get from the gate to Cribbly’s shop. The streets were more crowded than normal for as early as it was. Men and women were milling about while most of the shops still hadn’t been opened. He couldn’t see ahead very far – his left eye continuing to swell, now blocking most of his vision on that side – but something clearly had them around.

It didn’t take long for him to find out what it was – laying in the street face down, his neck twisted at an impossible angle and his clothes torn around his chest was Cribbly. 

Freelancing

He limped back to the table where he had dropped the unopened package with the Inscription copies and found it missing. The desk was pulled sideways, probably from when they burst into the room and he checked behind it. Heaving a sigh of relief, he fished a partially torn and muddied package, complete with a swarm of fire ants on it, out from behind the desk and dropped it down on his bed. He tore open the wrapping and scanned the first inscription, a vivid image of the crime scene Sarina had described.

The man she had originally described to him was nowhere to be seen. In his place was the crumpled remains of a human body. The body had been carved into a dozen different pieces but still somehow left in one solid whole chunk – a marked part of the Rituals. The eyes had been removed and his scars had all been split open with a surgeon’s precision. The right side of his scalp was missing, his limbs were splayed in a cross with chains wrapped around each ankle and wrist, pulled taught so that bones were sticking out at the elbows and knees – in at least one case bursting through the skin.

Brutus pulled the second inscription out. There should have only been one inscription of each shot. But, the package contained two of each – for a total of eight inscriptions. Usually, the magii would only do a single inscription and then have it verified before printing. There were two completely different sets here and each one had slightly different details in it.

Whereas the first set had the bright red circles of the Rituals littered across the skin of the dead man, the second did not show those circles. In fact, the second still contained the amulet Sarina had described and her promissory note was still held in the man’s right hand. He had been altered. Whomever had found his body had changed the scene to make it look like he was killed by the Salmites. It was not a ritual killing – the man had been tortured to death. Whether it was by the Salmites or not did not matter. How Steadman had gotten the original inscriptions was a mystery in itself. Usually the magii would not have let something like this remain in existence. It was embarrassing for them.

Brutus tossed the pile of inscriptions down on his bed along with the notice from Ausmasann. It was a red letter day already – he had a murdered blackmailer, an angry gang boss, someone impersonating his dead partner, and one hell of a bloody headache. Shaking his head at first gently and then more viciously, he almost reached for the second whiskey bottle he’d bought the night before. Instead, he grabbed his jacket, folded up the inscriptions and stuffed them in his inner pocket. Trying to wipe as much blood as he could from his face, he straightened up, took a deep breath and made a decision that he knew he was going to regret. There wasn’t much of a choice any more though – things had just gotten a whole lot messier. 

Freelancing

Just got back from DC and Inauguration last night. What a crazy three days – overwhelmingly worth it but crazy nonetheless. I’m in that mess of people somewhere near the Washington Monument.

Freelancing

He dropped the package on the furnace, the seal of the hidden rose starting to appear on the crease of the paper. It was from the City Guard as he had suspected, which meant it was from Steadman. Brutus had to admit that much at least – the old man was bloody good at what he did. Hadn’t taken him but 12 hours to get the inscriptions copied and sent his way. Probably figured the sooner he did it, the sooner he’d be done with Brutus, at least for a little while.

Instead of opening the package right away, Brutus tossed it down on his desk and sat back down on his bed, stretching his back and reaching behind him as if there was something important back there he needed. He didn’t feel up to getting the day started just yet, but things were in motion now. The longer he took to crack the case, the more time he’d give to whoever had killed the treasure hunter to find and get him…or Sarina. Plus, there was the whole matter of Reggie. He would need to find out who exactly what impersonating his old partner.

What he didn’t need was what happened next. About three minutes into laying on the bed and telling himself to get up and open the package, his door was busted down and boy was it ever. In an explosion of shattering bits and pieces of the door – splinters flying across the room in a spray of partially rotted wood and chipped paint, a pair of men dressed all in black – wrapped in cloth from head to toe with only their eyes and noses appearing above a vacuous hole where their mouths should be burst into the room. They were carrying large cudgels, and a length of thick braided chain link.

Before he could so much as roll off the bed, they were on him. The larger of the two men put his knees into Brutus’s neck and whipped the chain around his chest, pulling hard and wrapping it under and around his arms twice. They flung him up and onto his busted old chair, chained it all together and then dropped him onto his back.

The second man approached with the cudgel in hand and a vial of grey liquid in his other. The vial, swirling wickedly in his palm was filled with little specs of brown that could be any number of dangerous or disgusting things. If Brutus was luck, it would be urine and feces – if he wasn’t…well, he didn’t want to think about it.

Biting down on the side of his cheek to keep from crying out in pain – the chains digging deeply into his shoulders and sides, Brutus swallowed the pain and spat at the man standing over him. “Who sent you?”

“An old friend,” was all the man said before he uncorked the vial and poured it down Brutus’s throat, which was somehow wedged open.

Before he realized why or how, he had swallowed half of it and was gagging on the other half. It tasted almost sweet – lemony with a hint of cinnamon. And then his tongue went numb. He saw something pulled out of his mouth – a small wire contraption that had been used to hold his mouth open while the man poured the stuff in.

The numbness quickly spread to his jaw, and then his limbs. In a matter of seconds, he couldn’t feel any part of his body. His eyes were still open and his ears could still hear, but the physical sensations of blinking and of sound going in and out of his ears was gone. He couldn’t feel a thing and yet he was perfectly aware, and the pain jumped out at him – even more powerfully than it had before. 

Freelancing

He dropped the package on the furnace, the seal of the hidden rose starting to appear on the crease of the paper. It was from the City Guard as he had suspected, which meant it was from Steadman. Brutus had to admit that much at least – the old man was bloody good at what he did. Hadn’t taken him but 12 hours to get the inscriptions copied and sent his way. Probably figured the sooner he did it, the sooner he’d be done with Brutus, at least for a little while.

Instead of opening the package right away, Brutus tossed it down on his desk and sat back down on his bed, stretching his back and reaching behind him as if there was something important back there he needed. He didn’t feel up to getting the day started just yet, but things were in motion now. The longer he took to crack the case, the more time he’d give to whoever had killed the treasure hunter to find and get him…or Sarina. Plus, there was the whole matter of Reggie. He would need to find out who exactly what impersonating his old partner.

What he didn’t need was what happened next. About three minutes into laying on the bed and telling himself to get up and open the package, his door was busted down and boy was it ever. In an explosion of shattering bits and pieces of the door – splinters flying across the room in a spray of partially rotted wood and chipped paint, a pair of men dressed all in black – wrapped in cloth from head to toe with only their eyes and noses appearing above a vacuous hole where their mouths should be burst into the room. They were carrying large cudgels, and a length of thick braided chain link.

Before he could so much as roll off the bed, they were on him. The larger of the two men put his knees into Brutus’s neck and whipped the chain around his chest, pulling hard and wrapping it under and around his arms twice. They flung him up and onto his busted old chair, chained it all together and then dropped him onto his back.

The second man approached with the cudgel in hand and a vial of grey liquid in his other. The vial, swirling wickedly in his palm was filled with little specs of brown that could be any number of dangerous or disgusting things. If Brutus was luck, it would be urine and feces – if he wasn’t…well, he didn’t want to think about it.

Biting down on the side of his cheek to keep from crying out in pain – the chains digging deeply into his shoulders and sides, Brutus swallowed the pain and spat at the man standing over him. “Who sent you?”

“An old friend,” was all the man said before he uncorked the vial and poured it down Brutus’s throat, which was somehow wedged open.

Before he realized why or how, he had swallowed half of it and was gagging on the other half. It tasted almost sweet – lemony with a hint of cinnamon. And then his tongue went numb. He saw something pulled out of his mouth – a small wire contraption that had been used to hold his mouth open while the man poured the stuff in.

The numbness quickly spread to his jaw, and then his limbs. In a matter of seconds, he couldn’t feel any part of his body. His eyes were still open and his ears could still hear, but the physical sensations of blinking and of sound going in and out of his ears was gone. He couldn’t feel a thing and yet he was perfectly aware, and the pain jumped out at him – even more powerfully than it had before. 

Freelancing

The next day, belly still full of the remains of a fresh bottle of whiskey – bought with Sarina’s Upper City coin – Brutus was jarred out of bed by a series of rapping knocks at his door. At first happy to ignore them, he soon felt the uncomfortable surge of adrenaline that told him something was wrong. Those were not inquisitive knocks – they were angry and someone was about to burst through that door angrily, asking questions and demanding answers.

Brutus leapt from under the covers, ignoring the surge of nausea that followed. Grabbing his tunic and tossing It over his head, he dropped to his knees and fished out a short sword from beneath his bed, the edges of it a bit chipped, but the blade as smooth and true as it was the day it was forged. He tied it to his belt loop on the same trousers he had fallen asleep wearing and stepped warily to the side of the door, keeping his hand on the hilt of the sword the whole time.

“Who is it?” He asked gruffly not trying to keep the sleep and drunkenness from his voice.

No one answered but the pounding stopped. Whoever it was had started thinking and wasn’t ready to burst the door down quite yet. Brutus took the opportunity and ripped the door open, surging forward into the street where he’d have more room to move if it came to blows. His sword in hand and his feet planted squarely beneath him, he stood facing a pair of relatively clean, but still scraggly looking thugs. Their faces were unshaven by at least a week and their hair was loosely tied behind their heads underneath the oily remnants of derby caps. Their clothes were clean but were of poor stock – nothing of the Upper City there, and probably nothing of the Under City’s darker denizens.

“What do you want?” Brutus demanded.

Looking shocked and a bit out of sorts, the smaller of the two men – whose whiskers were starting to droop from above his lip and who had what looked like three and a half fingers on his right hand – stepped forward with a package in hand. “We was asked to deliver this to you, master.”

Brutus dropped his sword a bit and held out his left hand, taking the package from the man’s clenched fist.

“Why were you trying to bang my door down?”

“We was told to make sure you got it, no matter what. You weren’t answerin’.”

Brutus grunted derisively and dropped his sword the rest of the way. “Well, you got me up, so get on your way.” He gestured for them to leave him alone and walked through, back into his room, the open door having let in a good deal of cold air.

For a second, he wasn’t sure they would leave. Soon enough though, the two trudged away – Brutus was sure he heard one of them say, “cheap bastard.” He had money but he wanted to keep it that way. It didn’t go far when you started paying delivery men – if Steadman was that cheap, so was Brutus.

Freelancing

That particular day, Cribbly Steelweavel was standing behind the main counter of his shop, surrounded by cogs from a recently dissembled grandfather clock. The man was always pulling something apart and putting it back together. In the fifteen years Brutus had known him, he had never figured out if the old man was looking for something or just enjoyed seeing if he could it to work again.

The shop itself was stacked to the rafters with boxes full of random junk – there were springs and bolts nestled in with scraps of yellowed dresses and jewelry boxes. Nothing seemed to be of any value, nor did there appear to be any sort of organization to the random boxes of junk. Yet, Cribbly was said to be one of the richest merchants in the city – whether that was from the exorbitant prices he charged for his information or some other, more secretive method of gaining wealth was hard to imagine. Brutus rang the bell at the door signaling he wanted to talk to the old man and not simply peruse the piles of junk (somehow organized by Cribbly but impossible to make heads or tails of for anyone else).

Cribbly had a healthy mane of silver hair that hung loosely around his neck, thick to the middle of his back and wrapping deep around his jaw. It barely failed to connect across his chin, the beard that could have been instead wrapping above his lip in a bridge of sorts. It was a strange look and at least a half century out of style, but then Cribbly’s bent over posture and wrinkled forehead said that he had been around for much longer than that. The sagging bags under his eyes were a deep shade of purple and hung loosely over his cheek bones, but the eyes they supported were as sharp and penetrating as a hawk’s. Aged or not, he didn’t miss a whole lot.

“Brutus,” it wasn’t a question. Just a casual statement identifying his patronage.

“Cribbly – I have need of your vast fountains of knowledge.”

“So does everyone else? You can pay?”

“Of course. Do I ever come up short?”

“Not of late, but there’s a first time for everything. Word has it that you’re living in an even shabbier hole in outhouse that is the Under City than you were last time.”

Brutus cursed under his breath. The old man tended to know entirely too much. “Things have been a bit rough of late. Picking up though. I’m on a hot new case as we speak.”

“The merchant’s daughter from the Upper City?”

Brutus bit his tongue to keep from exclaiming. How had the old man already learned about that? It had only been a few hours. “Something like that.”

“You probably need to know about that amulet they’ve been making such a big fuss about.”

“That would be most of why I’m here ,yes.”

“Well, I can’t help you.”

“What?” Brutus was actually a little shocked. If there was one thing you could count on from Cribbly, it was consistency. He always had information and he was always willing to sell it. “Why?”

“Things are a bit complicated with this one. I’d advise you to steer clear.” Cribbly looked up for the first time from the cog he had been working on. The grizzled sausage fingers he’d been using for decades to pull things apart were gripping a small wrench tightly. He held it up and pointed it at Brutus. “You don’t want to get mixed up in this kind of thing.”

“What, the Salmites?”

“Bloody Salmites are the least of your worries. Those stinking boils are puss on an ass’s prick. You’re going up against power here – real power.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Listen, Cribbly. I have coin. I can pay you double if you want.”

“No sale. You’re not getting me mixed up in this mess. Find someone else to talk to.”

“Cribbly…”

“If you’re not buying something, get out. You’re scaring away the other customers.”

Brutus turned and saw the empty street outside the door. It was highly unlikely that he had scared away anyone, but Cribbly was clearly not going to work with him on this one. Had someone gotten to him or was he really just that afraid of what he knew. It was unnerving. If there was anyone that you could count on not to let things get to them it was Cribbly. The old man was the most reliable, and generally best informed person in the city – that included the Spiders in the Guard – the king’s personal cadre of informants and spies.

But, it was clear that if Cribbly didn’t want to share information, he wasn’t going to. Brutus spotted a pair of heavy set men with shoulders like ham hocks standing in the back room. They were watching him carefully, the question in their eyes – are we going to have to beat you out of here? Brutus obliged them with an answer and turned to leave. He’d be better off without having his skull bashed in just yet.

Freelancing

Brutus spent the rest of the night doing some careful inquiries. He didn’t have the kind of time he needed or the access he once enjoyed to go into the Upper City where the actual killing had taken place to ask real questions, but Brutus knew better than anyone in Willemshire how to ask questions that didn’t sound like questions.

He started in the merchant district where he’d met up with Steadman and then fanned out, stopping occasionally to ask a local merchant rumored to know the Salmites if he had heard anything out of the ordinary from the Upper City. In general, his questions were a waste of time. He knew he wouldn’t learn anything from anyone, especially if someone really was a Salmite, but he didn’t have anything else to work with just yet and he needed to wait to see what Steadman came up with.

However, while asking bakers and jewelry dealers if they knew about something they either had no idea about or would openly lie about was a waste of time, there was at least one person he could talk to that was never a waste of time – for more than a few reasons. Cribbly Steelweavel was as flamboyant as his name would insinuate. No one thought it was a real name – in fact, there had once been a pool put together by Cribbly for those that wanted to take a guess at his real name (he never openly denied that it was his name, but he was all for the sport of having people guessing). Two hundred local merchants, drunks and gang members had entered and not one of them had won – ironically, no one had thought to put “Cribbly” into the mix to see if the old man would admit it.

The owner of a junk shop at the top of the Merchant circle – a series of shops that run around the hillside of the city – Cribbly had always been well known for his fine taste, extensive network of information and ability to get his fingers into every crooked pie in the city. If something was stolen, borrowed, or forged in Willemshire, there was a chance that Cribbly had heard something of it. Of course, squeezing that information out of him could always pose a few problems – mainly the high cost he tended to exact. Not to mention the roundabout way he would tell anyone much of anything. It was hard enough to get a straight answer out of him. Trying to get him to tell you in no uncertain terms what you needed was downright impossible. 

Freelancing

“I got hit up by an old friend.”

“Liar. You don’t have any old friends. What do you want?”

“I need some information.”

“I figured that. I don’t come down here for my health.”

“Sarina McConnell? You know her?”

“I might. Daughter of some puffed up merchant?”

“That’s her. She went and got herself in the middle of some mess with a dead man in the dungeons.”

“Ah, that girl. Yeah, I heard a bit about that. Big mess of things at the guard house. Lots of coin passed through fingers to keep us from questioning her. What do you got to do with it?”

“She hired me to find out who killed the dead man.”

“Waste of time. We already know.”

Brutus raised his eyebrow but didn’t say anything, letting Steadman continue.

“Bloody Salmites. Drug him down there and ritualized his body for some bloody rite. We caught one of them this morning trying to sell the amulet. Bugger tried to claim he never knew about no dead man – just found the amulet in the street.”

Brutus nodded, pondering the situation over. It did sound like a Salmite ritual – the kind of thing that could happen. Salmites got themselves mixed up in all sorts of social spheres – even the royals. Wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear they got a few in the Upper City. It was an easy excuse. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? It’s easy. Man’s stupid enough to blackmail a royal. A few carefully placed words and the Salmites up top pick him up for their ritual. It’s pretty bloody simple if you ask me.”

“No, there’s more to it than that. Don’t ask me how I know.” Brutus couldn’t tell Steadman the part about Reggie. It was hard enough getting anyone from the guard to talk to him. Start bringing up his dead partner and he could kiss these meetings goodbye.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“I need to see the inscriptions.” Brutus knew the inscriptions, copper plated recordings of the crime scene crafted by the Guard’s Crafters would be the most detailed way of reviewing the crime scene.

“Now that’s a tough one. Even for me.” Steadman took a deep breath as he said it.

“I know, but I need to see it myself. I think something else is going on. If I’m right, more people are in danger.”

As much as he didn’t like Brutus and as little as he wanted to help, Steadman respected one thing about him – his instincts. No one, even the most angered, unruly of the guards would doubt Brutus’ instincts on a case. He was the best detective in the city at one time and a little bad luck and a whole lot of Whisky didn’t change that.

“That’s going to be hard.”

“That’s why I contacted you.”

Steadman didn’t respond, but Brutus knew he would do it. The old man always came through.

“You’re going to get me kicked out one of these days.”

“Always room in my office for one more.”

“Would rather bleed out in a Hash Den.”

“I’m wounded.”

“Not likely.” Steadman put down his still full mug, and tipped his hat to the barman. The barman nodded back and Steadman started to walk away. “I’ll contact you by tomorrow.”

Brutus nodded back. “I appreciate it.”

“Don’t. I ain’t doing it for you.”

“Who for then?”

Steadman didn’t respond though. He just walked away, pushing through the swinging doors back out of the bar. It was the most Brutus usually ever got from him and it was about as much as he could hope for. Now, hopefully he would find something good in those inscriptions.

Freelancing