Battered and bruised and soaking wet up to his waist, Brutus didn’t have the luxury of an excuse for being in the Guard tunnels. It didn’t matter that he was on a case or that he had been one of the most highly decorated members of the City Guard in his day. In fact, those two things would probably get him in even more trouble if the guard who had started chasing him recognized his face from the images posted throughout the various parts of the city where Brutus had been banned.

It had happened five years previously, when Brutus Weaver and Reggie Hunter had been on a particularly tough pair of cases. The two – Bob and Jim as the rest of the Guard liked to call them (alluding to their common Under City upbringing) – had taken on a pair of lower profile cases in the interim as there hadn’t been any murders, kidnappings or burglaries in the previous three weeks to keep them busy. The cases though, one a missing herd of steer and the other a battery against a non-talking member of the royal family, were not low profile in that no one cared (far from it), but they were not the usual death and destruction cases that the pair were used to and things were not going well.

Having split the two cases up, the pair were not having any luck and after ten days of minimal leads and no progress they had decided to join forces and work together on the battery case. The missing herd of steer was important (they belonged to a minor noble) but the beating of the twelfth in line to the throne was the case they were being ridden on for not having solved yet.

It had happened during a Revelry on a Fifth Day celebration. Every week, the young and rich would take the streets and Fourth and Fifth Day to spend what they could find and drink what they could hold in a seemingly endless series of Revelry’s (because the word party was apparently too low class to be used). Brutus had been stuck on dozens of cases related to drunken brawls, late night trysts gone wrong, and poorly handled returns home by Revelry goers when he was on his way up in the ranks of the Guard and the only reason they were stuck with this particular case was because it was someone more important than normal.

Barren Willington Morris’s son to be exact – the Baron being the fourth youngest brother of the King, making young Walter the nephew of the King. He had been stumbling from the last of a series of Revelries toward his carriage, parked innocuously across the street when a trio of thugs had run out of the alleyway and attacked him, beating him repeatedly upside the head with socks jammed with something hard and metallic – the bruises were the shapes of brackets and hinges, likely stolen from the scrap heap behind a carpenter’s shop.

When they were done, they ran away, their faces hidden, and Walter laid in the street for the better part of a half hour before the carriage driver woke and wondered where he had gotten off to. The kid was okay – he’d gotten a broken nose, a pair of bruised ribs and a dislocated shoulder out of it, but the King and his brother were none too happy and the Guard had called dozens of men out on their days off and off of reserve to see to the matter. 

The space between each house was minimal at best, but it did bear the benefit of having no windows as men and women like this had no desire to look into the home of their neighbor. Brutus writhed his way into the space and started shimmying down the alley way, trying to remember which street actually connected to the central district where the royals would be living. He was not sure where Sarina would actually have her abode though so he would first need to find out where she lived. At first he assumed it would be in the inner city, but with a few more moments to consider, it could easily be one of the homes next to where he was standing. Her parents were the richest in the city, but they were still just outer royalty and a merchant.

Brutus considered for a few more moments, drawing upon what had once been an encyclopedic knowledge of the Upper City aristocracy. He finally decided that regardless of how they felt about merchants, even Willemshire’s nobility would allow someone with as much money with Sarina’s father to live within the richer quarters of the Upper City.

He did a quiet loop back out of the back end of the alley and almost screamed in pain when he kicked a can lying on the curb – it shouldn’t have been there. The sanitation in the Upper City was unparalleled, constantly maintained to ensure the utmost cleanliness. It was not like them to miss even a can – it must have just been dropped there. Instinctually, Brutus jumped back into the shadows of the alley just as a man coughed from above, hanging his half drunken, half naked torso out of the third story balcony of some lonely widow’s much too large house. Brutus cursed softly and winced again as he leaned back against the brick of the alley way and the muscles in his body that had only a few hours before been battered and bruised called out in pain.

Waiting in the sliver of darkened alley as he was, Brutus had a few minutes to think things through, to consider what had happened to him already that day. First, he had taken on a case solely because he needed the money and without thinking about what it was the woman in the slick dress had needed from him. That wasn’t like him at all. It was almost too much unlike him. Second, he had been beaten over the head and then battered by Under City goons twice within 24 hours. Third, he had gotten a nice old merchant killed simply by talking to him a little too long about something he wasn’t supposed to know about.

This was not the kind of case Brutus liked to take and it was already giving him a pretty good idea of just how much trouble he was probably going to run into before he got anywhere meaningful with it. Shit, right now he was crouched into a bruised up ball in the side alley of the Upper City where City Guard patrolled four times each hour, on the quarter hour. One false move and he’d be strung up in the central square for everyone within a two mile radius to walk by and poke sticks at. This was not his idea of a good time and he was already running dangerously low on options.

After what seemed an eternity, Brutus edged his head out from the shadows and looked up. The window had been closed and the candle light extinguished. He was free to move and he’d better do it quickly because he hadn’t seen or heard a guard in almost ten minutes – they would be by any time now on their quarterly rounds and if Brutus wasn’t out of the way by then, his return trip would be all too short indeed.

Running his hand over a two day layer of stubble (damn, he kept forgetting to shave) and shuffling as quietly as he could, he stumbled out into the street and up around the bend, into the inside ring of the city. Within seconds he was able to find the old passage ways he’d used when he was in the guard, what looked like basement entrances with elaborate hand locks on them built into one in every six houses on the inner ring of homes. The guard was not appreciated walking around the Inner City at night – it made the nobles uncomfortable, so one of the Guard Captains had installed a series of tunnels under the city about a hundred years or so ago so that rounds could still be made in accordance with the law without routinely angering the men and women who the Guard was trying to protect. It was silly and Brutus had routinely completely about having to climb underground to protect the ingrate slobs who slept so comfortably above them when he was a patrolman.

Rubbing his hair with a sweaty palm and slipping down the moldy stairway into the tunnels below, he touched down none-too-gently and immediately slipped into a nook he somehow half remembered. The tunnels were not lit – it was up to Guard members to bring their own torches – and so Brutus was going to have to operate on memory alone – something his alcohol addled brain was none too keen on – to get to where he needed to be.

Running his hands along the walls and finding the notched he remembered – small pinky sized square notches that told him where to turn and which direction he was walking – he started down the tunnel, trying hard not to step into the often times puddle-damp floor between him and the next stairway. He carefully picked his way along, trying hard not to stumble with his bad leg and hoping that he could avoid any guards.

A sudden splash as someone dropped down into the light pool followed by a shout behind him told Brutus that he wasn’t about to be so lucky this evening. “Hey, you! What are you doing down here?!”

Brutus bit the inside of his cheek and made the only choice he had – he ran.

The Upper City hadn’t changed much in the years since Brutus had been all but exiled from it. The fountains were still shiny enough to scare the birds and the cobblestones were careful done up to look rustic and old when they were replaced every six months like clockwork. Where the Under City always strove to downplay how poor its citizens were, the Upper City did the opposite, creating visions of opulence at every turn. There were no merchants or peddlers of any kind – they had been relegated entirely to the Merchant Quarter decades before and had not returned to the Upper City since – they were occasionally allowed in to see a rich patron or to deal an item upon invitation, but they could not solicit sales in the Upper City or they risked being jailed. Brutus could still remember the first merchant he had jailed when he was a recruit – it was a teenage boy just barely starting his career. He had gotten a cartload of Ice Pears from the North and had assumed the delicacies would sell better among the royals in the Upper City. He hadn’t talked to more than two men and women before he was spotted and arrested. His eyes had been as wide as saucers, scared out of his skull that the stories about the Dungeons were true. Brutus had just shaken his head – he had never seen the dungeons and to be frank wasn’t sure if the rumors were true or not, but he didn’t want to give the boy false hope.
The fact that someone like Sarina’s father had made it in the Upper City was shocking enough. Brutus had seen it a few times of course –a rich merchant is often capable of wooing the last daughter of some rich noble or another merely because of the extra resources and the time to devote. If you have enough money, even royalty will look the other way from your workman’s hands. The merchants rarely fit in though when they arrived. He wondered if McConnell had managed to fit in with the Willemshire elite. He doubted it, but then again, he didn’t want to risk finding out by running into the man. He was in the Upper City for one reason alone. He needed to talk to Sarina.
Brutus tried his hardest to keep from limping too stiffly. The story may have worked on the gate guards but if he pushed his luck, he would soon enough be face to face with a Constable or worse, a Guard Captain. Either would likely find his story wanting and boot him from the city – or worse, they might recognize him and give him a first hand chance to see what the dungeons were really like.
So, he immediately slunk between two narrow row houses. The Upper City was designed similar to how the entirety of Willemshire was laid out, in concentric rings. In the middle was the palace where the King and his family lived along with a few dozen advisers, servants and the occasional outside family member in the King’s good grace. Directly around the King’s Palace were the homes of the highest dignitaries in the land – the Dukes, Earls, and Counts that didn’t have anything to see to outside the city. Most of them did not considering their lack of land but even if they had, they would probably find a good reason to stay in the city and remain busy, if only to stay appraised of the local goings on.
Outside royalty were the homes of especially rich relatives, elevated merchants, and just about anyone that claimed royal lineage but couldn’t claim it but with the coins in their purse. This was a vast majority of the Upper City and their homes were not much nicer than the buildings in the Merchant Quarter. Squared together into long, three story rows, the homes had a short, two span yard in the front with a black steel gate blockading the sidewalk from the entrance. Each gate had a keylock on it to keep out anyone that did not belong. The houses would stretch about a full block back from the street, in a narrow jut to the middle of the double block. Houses were often three to four times as long as they were wide and were stacked upon each other one after another, wrapping around the avenue and toward the royal palace in spiraling circle.

I took the advice of my parents and left the city for a fortnight – spending the time in a country cottage owned by my grandparents on an island south of here. I relaxed, listened to the nimble fingers of a bard chosen for me by a dear friend, and read. It was a relaxing holiday, but it did not last nearly long enough. I returned to the city just a few days ago and I learned just how dangerous that man had been…or at least how dangerous someone assumed him to be.

When I returned from my trip, I found that something had happened in my absence. While I was away, the dirty man with the amulet had managed to get himself killed. But, he hadn’t just been killed – his body had been found in the confines of the dungeons in the Sacred Cathedral, deep within the bowels of the church. A stricken acolyte is probably still in prayer, trying to scrub away the imagery of what he saw there.

I never did see the body, but I heard enough stories of what was found there. He was strung up by his palms, massive hooks, like those used to skewer meat used to grip his flesh and hold it. His body had been burned in many places with strange symbols and characters that few if any knew the true meaning of. The churchmen I talked to told me it was the work of a dark cult – the city guards said it looked as though he had done it to himself, the sloppiness of the marks.

Nothing would have been thought of myself if it were not for the note the man held, a banker’s note of patronage rewarding him with the three hundred coin I promised for his silence. Alongside the note, wrapped around his throat, was the amulet he claimed my father had stolen. I have tried since then to find the amulet but it was taken from the body when it was found and has not been seen since. I hope only that my father was the man whose hands it is in..I also fear that he might have been behind the death of the explorer. I do not know, and I would not push the issue if it were not for the marks left on my bill of patronage – a series of red markings, drawn in the man’s blood. They are surely a threat. I have no idea who they are from or what they mean, but I spent the next two days hidden away in my rooms, a deep chill set in my bones.

Two days later, I left my chambers for the first time to get some fresh air and found myself in the depths of my family’s courtyards, enjoying the cool, crisp air of the final days of summer. I turned a particular corner and stopped nearby the next to last place I would have ever expected to see a small child – beside the thorn bushes and in rags with a small package in her hands.

“Are you Sarina McConnell?”

“Yes.”

“Then this is for you.”

The girl threw a small package at me, no larger than the size of her fist and then ran, to where I have no idea. She had no place to have come from and yet away she went, a tattered young thing. I was afraid at first to open the package but did not want to let such things so thoroughly run my life so in an hour I succumbed to my temptation and tore it open to find a small letter, within a box.

It was this latter that told me to go and see Reggie, who warned me that if I wanted to continue living, I would come to see you, the only detective in this city who would have no idea who I was and no political agenda. So, here I am and I hope more than anything that you are the man your friend claims you are. 

He had an amulet in his hands when he came into the room – one the color of blood – the kind that always comes from a mine in the dirtied badlands of the barbarians or some such exotic locale. It was the kind of thing I had only seen a couple of times in my life, even in the city and though I originally had the niggling thought that it might be a counterfeit, I quickly dispatched my concerns when I saw how it shimmered in the candle light. It was magnificent. 

He, however was not. Riddled with scars and a tuft of greasy, disheveled hair that barely covered the left side of his face, he looked as though he had rolled out of a rubbish heap and not bothered to clean out his teeth, or much of anything else, yet. Of course, he was a liar and a thief but the beauty of the amulet had my attention and I didn’t care.

And when he told me that it was the property of my family – that it had been stolen from the tomb of a Royal Prince and his family by my father in his youth, when he was still making his own fortune – I was mortified. I never stopped to think that his story might be false. My attendants worried their hands and tried to get my attention, but the feverish chill of inherited shame took hold of me and I agreed to whatever the man wanted. He promised me the amulet for the money he needed to fund his next excursion – to a dig site in the southwestern mines of Williance – the ones the royal family had abandoned more than a century ago. I gave him everything and was told I would see him again in two months time. 

Three months passed and nothing happened. My concerns over the amulet had long since been waylaid by the reassertion of my friends and family that I had been the victim of a scam artist – the kind that would spend a fortune to trick a noble in the hopes of doubling that fortune. I was not pleased, but I had learned my lesson and had long since stopped inviting the men and women of the world into my chambers to show me their treasures. 

I took the advice of my parents and left the city for a fortnight – spending the time in a country cottage owned by my grandparents on an island south of here. I relaxed, listened to the nimble fingers of a bard chosen for me by a dear friend, and read. It was a relaxing holiday, but it did not last nearly long enough. I returned to the city just a few days ago and I learned just how dangerous that man had been…or at least how dangerous someone assumed him to be. 

I never saw her again.

At first, it was sport – a way to spend my evenings that would endlessly vex my wealthy progenitors. But, as time passed, I started to see something more in it – an exciting means by which I was able to actually do something. I started to wonder where these poor wretched fools were going when I sent them away, what they were doing after they left the Upper City for their first and likely last visit the rich quarters of the city. It was in this way that I kept myself occupied and consistently busy each evening. During the days I began to grow lonelier as the young men and women with whom I had spent my childhood pretending to be the rich barons and baronesses of the city that many of us would one day be, had started to look at me as though I was carrying the same diseases and scratching at the same sores they did. 

Needless to say, I grew reclusive and rumors began to fly. My maids and servants would bring word of what the other nobles were saying about me – that I was swollen with child, that I had killed a suitor in a blind rage, that I had begun to come down with the vapors and hardly knew my own name. They amused me at first, but soon they began to get under my skin as my reputation that I had never quite cared about started to fade away. 

My parents begged of me to see a doctor, to visit the country, to leave the city, and to most of all stop spending my time seeing the rabble with their little trinkets. There was a man who claimed he could turn salt water into drinking water with a wire plugged into a small machine with multiple turning cogs. Another man came bearing the portrait of a woman he claimed had been the Queen of the Eastern reaches before the world had been formed. She looked like my mother. 

I saw what must have been two hundred of these men and women – at least five every evening for more than a month – before he arrived. The moment he walked into the room, I knew that he had something special in his hands, that he was what I had been waiting for. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I wanted at all. 

You see, the problem with the rich acting out, and the reason so many people spread gossip of the most mundane infractions is that the rich have the means by which to truly act out. When a lovelorn Baron decides he wants to cheat on his wife, no on asks him why he did it or how his wife feels. No, they want to know what he bought, how big was the fight and where he’ll be living for the coming months.

That’s not to say that I was overly expressive with my rebellion. I was just a bit…frivolous and in my frivolity I decided I would seek out a means by which to define myself within my family. Too bad for me and my family that method came looking for me instead.

I never really left my parents’ home, but I did start gathering as many men of intellectual and artistic importance as I could find. More importantly, I sought out those who no one of noble lineage would recognize. You see, my handmaid Clare visits her family in the lower city every three days when she is given leave. I sent with her a message and a small bounty. Anyone who could provide me with something no one had ever seen before would receive my favor and a residence in the upper city.

I didn’t honestly expect to find anyone with an incredibly invention or heart melting masterpiece. I just wanted to make my parents squirm as penniless wretch after wretch trudged through their drawing rooms. I admit it now…it was the poorest decision I could have made at the time. It was heartless and unnecessary. The upper city was full to the brim with men and women whose ideas would lead the kingdom into a new era, anyone of whom needed a patroness with only time on her hands.

But, my hunger for acceptance was matched by the desire to be different and so I asked for the lowlifes and the poor, giving them false hope every evening as handfuls arrived at my parents’ gates wearing the best imitation of fine dress they could find. One man, no doubt a shoemaker or carpenter by the looks of his hands, arrived dressed in a torn and stained yellow undergarment that I could have sworn I threw out myself only weeks before. The man had brought me a rather striking painting actually – a style unlike any I’d seen before, a combination of odd cube-shaped noses and swooping currents of air and water. My hypocrisy showed that much clearer when I turned the man away.

Another hopeful, a girl who could not be any older than me, seventeen at most, arrived with an overwrought version of a telescope. It was long and spindly with numerous tacked on knobs and scopes. She claimed that it would allow me to see the surface of the moon. The sun was still more than two hours from setting though and the poor girl was scratching violently at the back of her head while the servants sweated nervously behind us. I told her to come back another day, that I had pressing business that evening.

I was always a spoiled child. I know that. I never pretended I wasn’t, but the world looks at you differently no matter how well you handle your fortunes. My mother was the fourth daughter of a Countess and my father a moderately well off merchant from outside the city. The two met casually at random during some or another royal family member’s birthday ball. Nine months later I was born, Sarina Bell McConnell, forty-third in line to the throne and the daughter of the richest couple in the city beside the king and queen.

So, things were different for me compared to other children, even for the upper city. I was schooled in my father’s study by one of the premier scholars at the University, an old friend of my father’s from his long past education. I was never left alone in the city, for fear that rabble from the lower city – no offense to your home – would find me appealing and take advantage of my standing by kidnapping me…or worse.

So, I grew up in the silver plate bird cage of the city’s finest veranda’s and drawing rooms, drinking tea with the Queen’s cousins and being courted by the sons and nephews of Dukes. It was an incredibly boring life; to be blunt I was quite ungrateful for what I had been given and started acting out as soon as I was old enough to carry my own purse and command my own servants.

For me, the life of a child of privilege was stifling. However, I used those privileges to attempt my rebellion, defeating my cause before I had even begun. I was trapped in the world I was born into, eager to get out, only because I had never seen anything else. I admit I made mistakes. You must know what it is like though, being trapped in the shell of the regal hypocrisy on the hills for so long that you yearn for anything else to happen.

So, eventually I did act out. I left home and started searching for a means by which to claim an identity for myself. I was reckless and childish and the warnings I’d received for years from my tutors, parents, and servants were meaningless as I strode to see the outside world for myself. That was only 8 months ago.

Brutus lit another candle and poured an extra glass of the lacy, dark whiskey into the only other glass he owned and had the troublesome blond sit in the sturdy assessor’s chair on which he occasionally ate his dinner. She moved nervously at first, dragging her feet through the dust and tapping her toe anxiously, but eventually she settled down in the chair.
The room was small and dank, filled with ants and enough dust to take down an asthmatic horse but it was warm. That little wood stove did its job well; the heat was one of the few things Brutus was willing to admit he liked about the place. So, it didn’t take more than a handful of heartbeats settled at the edge of that chair before the woman stretched her arms behind her and started peeling the heft of the black cloak free of her back.

“Do you mind if I take this off. It’s like a furnace in here.”

Brutus didn’t say anything – maybe it was because he was still thinking about Reggie….or maybe it was the fact that a woman hadn’t peeled any piece of clothing off in his presence in far too long. He reached and took the blackened lump of wet fabric from her and did his best to look the part of a host, hanging it carefully alongside his own meager collection of clothing beside his bed.

“Much better.” And it was much better. Without the veil of that cloak, Brutus could see the sleek body he had almost immediately assumed was there. Dressed in a blood red evening gown that cut just the right amount of inches above her knees, she looked as though she had just left an uptown ball. She also looked as though she had been beaten on the way out the door. Swollen scarlet welts littered her shoulders, grouped together in fours, the impressions of a meaty hand that had gripped too hard.

“Looks like your ‘Reggie’ wasn’t very gentle.”

Her face flushed and the welts temporarily disappeared. “Oh…no, these aren’t from him,” she said, “these are…well, he said you’d help me.”

“Did he now?”

“He said you were the best detective in the city.”

“Now I know he’s a liar. Did he also tell you I haven’t had a case in over 6 months?” Brutus instinctively reached for the cigar in his pocket and stopped…it was the last one. “Or that I have a standing arrest decree on my head if I go anywhere near the upper city…where I’m assuming you just arrived from?”

“You didn’t let me finish. He said you were the best detective in the city who wouldn’t ask questions,” she fingered a fist-sized leather pouch he hadn’t seen appear. “for the right price.”
He eyed the pouch hungrily, the half empty bottle of whiskey and stale loaf of bread reminding him that he was quite willing to withhold questions if necessary. It didn’t change the fact that there was something wrong though. No, not just something. Everything was wrong with this woman. Her appearance, her story, the slender curve of the pale skin above the straps of her dress. She shouldn’t be there. But the money spoke volumes, “I’m listening.”

“No…that can’t be right. I just saw Regg. We had a drink uptown. He gave me this,” she pulled a yellow slip of paper from inside that disturbingly sensual cloak.

Bruutus reached and snagged the crumpled up mess from her hand, not wanting to play cat and mouse with 20 questions. “I’ll just look at that.” The paper was new, some kind of legal script, the kind he’d seen when he was at the city offices all day – the kind they write your disciplinary notices on.

He unfolded it quickly and scanned the contents. It was directions – to his office. They were written in neat little letters, arranged in perfect words that never touched one another. No way Reggie would have written something like this. “Whoever gave you this, it wasn’t Reggie. I’m of half a mind to put you in the street right now.”

“You’d send me back out in the dark alone? Mr. Weaver, please. It was hard enough just walking down here. This cloak doesn’t hide me from the rats.”

“What did he look like?”

“What?”

“The man who gave you this; what did he look like?”

“Reggie…”

“No, it was not Reggie Hunter. What did this man,” Brutus waved the building block lettering in her face, “look like?”

For her part, the shapely blond woman in the dripping black cloths didn’t flinch or cry, she just looked surprised. That look Brutus knew too well of a woman who was used to getting what she wanted being rebuked. He took special pleasure in creating that expression when he was still serving notices and protecting heiresses.

“He was short, shorter than me by about an inch. He had a thick, curly head of black hair and a little bit of hair over his upper lip. He was a strong man – handled his frame well,” Brutus tried not to laugh when he heard her essentially admit she had slept with the little liar. “And he absolutely assured me he knew you.”

“Well, whoever it was, he was not Reggie Hunter. That poor son of a bitch died two years ago next week…” Brutus stopped as he realized that it really was almost two years since Reggie had been stabbed in that warehouse. Immediately he turned to the woman in front of him suspiciously, “now, we just need to figure out who exactly is trying to fuck with me.”