D& D - Greyhawk - Night Watch (5 page)

He worked his way through the labyrinthine Citadel and down to the next level. There were more people in the halls here as officers and soldiers checked in before reporting to their assigned watch houses in each of the quarters, as minor bureaucrats from the Halls rushed about with forms, as various other personnel went about their duties.

Garett returned salutes and muttered distracted greetings without stopping for anyone as he made straight for his own office. Not until he kicked open his door without even bothering to try the handle did he realize how angry he felt. The door smashed back against the stone wall and rebounded. Garett blocked it with an elbow, went inside, and closed it quietly. In the privacy of his office, he stood stock-still for a moment and drew a deep breath.

“It’s only because they know in their heart of hearts you’re still prettier than they are.”

Garett hadn’t even noticed Burge lounging in his chair with his feet propped up on his captain’s desk on the other side of the room. The half-elf regarded him with a crooked grin while he drummed the fingers of his left hand absently upon his chest.

“You should be in bed,” Garett said, his tone of voice betraying his own weariness as he took a seat on the corner of the desk and ran a thumb over the pile of reports that came in each morning from the watch houses.

Burge shifted one foot so that the heel of his boot rested on the reports. At the same time, he reached down on the floor beside the chair and brought up a ceramic bottle and two silver cups. He pulled out the cork with his teeth as he slid one of the vessels toward Garett. “I was headed there,” he said, spitting the cork across the room. It hit the far wall and rolled about on the floor. Burge could spit a cork farther than any man Garett had ever seen, even knock an object off a table from ten paces. His skill and accuracy was legendary in half the taverns in the River Quarter. “Then I saw Korbian come in with blood in his eye and Ellon Thigpen right behind him,” he continued calmly. “I figured it would take ’em about an hour to decide to cover it all up, then you’d need some of this.” Without taking his feet from the desk, he leaned forward and filled the cup in front of Garett, then his own. “Go on, it’s the best Celanese in the city.”

Garett frowned, then picked up the cup and sipped. The fine, sweet wine flowed sensuously down his throat, and he closed his eyes, the better to savor its flavor. “Nice,” he murmured as he raised the cup and sniffed the wine’s heady aroma. “Very nice.”

Burge tossed the contents of his own cup down in a single gulp and refilled it from the bottle. “Let’s finish it,” he suggested, holding the bottle out to top off Garett’s cup.

“Let’s not,” Garett answered firmly, pushing the bottle back and setting his own cup down. “We’re going to need rest and clear heads tonight, not hangovers.” He hesitated and stared out the narrow window, the only one in the room. Its shutters had been thrown back to admit the breeze and the bright morning light from the east. The sky beyond was a perfect, clear blue. Yet Garett’s thoughts were on the night to come. “This isn’t over,” he told his friend quietly. “I feel it in my bones.”

Burge took his feet down slowly, rose, and went to stand by the window with his cup in his hand. “Maybe you need some time off, Cap’n,” he suggested, his voice pitched low with concern. Pausing, he sipped from his cup and regarded Garett over the rim before he continued. “Yu haven’t had a night away from here in over a year. You take your duties too seriously.”

Garett frowned again and waved him off.

“A tired man makes mistakes,” Burge persisted, throwing one of Garett’s own favorite aphorisms back at him.

“Then we should both get some sleep,” Garett said, rising to his feet. In fact, he was quite tired and looking forward to his bed. Maybe Almi could prepare him a simple breakfast before he retired. “Tell Blossom and Rudi to come in early tonight, though, ''you, too. Say, just after dark.”

“Slave driver,” Burge muttered with a sidelong glance. He tipped his cup and drained it again. He gestured toward the bottle on the table. “A good Celanese shouldn’t be recorked, you know. Loses its flavor, it does.”

“Then I suggest you take it back to the barracks and share a drop of it with your comrades there,” Garett answered good-naturedly. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the benefit of an elf s alcohol-resistant constitution. Not even a halfelf s. He picked up his cup and poured the remains back into the bottle. The one taste had been paradise. But one taste was enough. “I appreciate the thought, though, Burge,” he added as he bent over to pick up the cork. He wiped it with the hem of his scarlet tunic and tossed it across the room, “"You’re a good friend.”

Burge caught it with an easy sweep of his hand and pushed it back into the bottle. “If I didn’t know you, Cap’n, sir,” he said, collecting both the silver cups in one hand, “I’d think you were a stiff.” He shrugged as he headed for the door, opened it, and paused there. “All right, then. We’ll all check in early this evenin’ to please our cap’n.” He stepped across the threshold into the hall and turned back again. “you comin’?”

Garett nodded and answered, “Shortly.”

Burge made a face. “Uh-huh. I know what that means.”

He gave another shrug and, without looking back, walked away down the long hall that led from Garett’s door.

Garett watched his friend’s back until Burge was gone. Then he moved around his desk, settled himself in his chair, and reached for the stack of reports. He let go a small sigh as he read through the first one. The Slum Quarter, at least, had had a quiet night.

The sun was far above the upper edge of his only window when the captain tossed the last report back onto the desk, leaned back in his chair, and stretched. The breeze blew on his neck as he folded his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. It was a warm breeze, but still welcome. Any breeze that managed to find a way into the Citadel was always welcome. He rose and went to the window. Leaning there, he looked down and south into the expanse of the High Market Square. A number of people with time to spare meandered about the grounds while clerks and soldiers made their way purposefully in a straight line between the High Market Square and the Citadel’s main entrance.

How had he come to this? Garett wondered suddenly as he looked out at the city of his birth. Its buildings and streets glittered in the sunlight. The splendid estates of nobles sprawled around him in this section of the High Quarter, all carefully and beautifully kept, and the tall, majestic grove of trees that surrounded the Lord’s Tomb swayed gracefully under the gentle brush of the wind.

Necropolis, the City of Night, was gone. Greyhawk in the daytime was a matchless pearl.

Yet he knew that was only the view from the High Quarter. In the Artisans’ Quarter, where his parents had reared him—or, worse, in the Slum Quarter or Thieves’ Quarter— the views were quite different. There, even in the daytime, some of the streets remained dark where the tall, crumbling tenement buildings pressed close together.

He thought fondly of his parents. His father, Dranh Garett, had been a weaver and merchant of basket goods. Through hard work and long hours, Dranh had managed to provide a good life for his small family and saved enough to give his son an education. Garett had been their only child. Too late in life, his mother, Naria, had attempted to bear a second child, and it had cost both her and the baby their lives. His father never quite recovered from the loss, and took to drink. One night, while Dranh wandered home drunk from the River Quarter, two thugs accosted him on Horseshoe Road, took his purse, and shoved a dagger into his belly. It took Dranh four days to die.

Garett had been twelve years old. With the help of a family friend, he managed to liquidate all his parent’s assets and belongings and put the money in trust with a reputable moneylender. Keeping only a small sum, he purchased a sword and a horse, a few supplies, and left Greyhawk. At the time, he thought it would be forever.

He still remembered the feeling that had surged through him on that day when he rode east through the Druid’s Gate into the wide world. He had never in his life been outside the walls of Greyhawk. Despite the grief he felt, a sense of wonder washed over him as the entire world spread before his feet. He rode eastward through the Cairn Hills, stopping long enough to see the incredible gem mines nestled there before pushing on to the Duchy of Urnst.

In Urnst, he killed his first man, a road agent who tried to steal his horse one night. The man had come upon him in his sleep, tried to slip the line, and ride away. But Garett hadn’t been asleep, just stretched out quietly by his fire.

Dranh had trained his son to weave baskets, not to fight with a sword. But Garett found, almost to his surprise, that he had an affinity for the weapon. He had not been proud of the killing, but it had pleased him to know that he could defend himself.

He had spent the next few years after that merely adventuring around, wandering without purpose, seeing the sights. He had sailed on the Azure Sea in the southlands and traveled the edges of the deadly Sea of Dust in far-flung Bakluni. From the rocky shores of the Dramidj Ocean he had seen the Pinnacles of Azor’alq, rising slate-gray and as sharp as daggers from the tossing white-capped waves, and he had seen the circling dragons that made their nests there. To the fantastic lands of Oerth he had journeyed, providing for himself a better education than Greyhawk University, with all its teachers and philosophers, could ever have given him.

His tutors had taught him to look into books, to look at the stars, to watch the flights of birds, to note the march of history. But now he learned more practical skills, how to fight, how to survive, how to look into the hearts and souls of men. He fought wars for countries whose names he couldn’t remember. He killed more times than he wanted to remember. The scars on his body were too many to count. He couldn’t remember the exact day when wandering took a darker turn toward the mercenary side of life.

Nor could he quite remember the day when he woke up and realized how tired of it all he had become. But he rose that same day, rode to the nearest port, and booked passage on the first ship that would take him closer to Greyhawk. The journey took months of sea and overland travel. Finally, a boat carried him up the Selintan River from the Azure Sea and deposited him, weary and down to his last silver noble, on the docks of his hometown. That was in his twenty-fifth year.

The moneylender with whom he had left his small inheritance was, of course, dead. The weasel-faced cousin who had assumed the business had no record of any such transaction. Garett only grinned and took it all in good humor. Then he proceeded calmly to smash the man’s place of business. As soon as the City Watch arrived, he asked for a job, and when he demonstrated that he could read and write, they made him an officer.

That had been five years ago, and he had risen fast through the ranks. But, he realized, now he had risen as high as he ever would, and sometimes the memories of those distant, wonderful places he had visited called to

him. He had never seen the Burning Cliffs far up north by the Icy Sea. He had always wanted to see the Burning Cliffs.

Garett gave another stretch and straightened the reports on his desk. There was no point in dwelling on the past, he told himself. He had come home to Greyhawk, and here he intended to stay. He’d traveled enough to learn that he couldn’t make the world a better place, but maybe he could make one or two streets just a little safer.

He closed his door behind him as he left his office and made his way out of the Citadel into the bright day. A strong western breeze blew over him, bringing with it just a whiff of the Selintan River. He accepted it gratefully. The day was already scorching; without the breeze, the heat would quickly become unbearable. Reaching up to his neck, he unfastened the brooch that held his cloak and slung the garment over his right arm.

At the eastern edge of the High Market Square stood the Hall of Justice. It was a long, low building fronted by twin rows of columns carved from white stone that sparkled in the sunlight. Within, Greyhawk’s eight magistrates sat in judgment over those accused of crime, or weighed arguments between litigants in civil matters. Even without a magister to oversee the eight, the courts still continued to function, though it was up to the judges themselves to work out who heard which cases until Kentellen Mar took office.

Adjacent to the hall stood the jail, a much smaller building to appearances, though actually there were two subterranean levels. Only very special prisoners or prisoners awaiting trial were kept there. Most of those convicted of major crimes were either executed, banished, or sent to, workhouses in each of the quarters for a period of hard labor. For minor crimes, usually a heavy fine, or perhaps the loss of a hand, finger, or ear, was the expected punishment. In that way the city saved itself the cost of feeding and housing the perpetrator.

As Garett passed by, a group of prisoners were led out of the jail and into the light by a patrol of seven men and hus-tled toward the Hall of Justice. He watched them go, studying the sullen faces, then continued on.

The Processional skirted the eastern edge of the High Market, where only the most accomplished artisans and vendors of the finest wares were allowed to set up shops. The square was crowded today. Scores of patrician ladies with their husbands and servants squeezed among the narrow rows of open-fronted tents for a better look at the merchandise. It amused Garett to watch these most upstanding of Greyhawk’s citizens elbow and nudge and curse each other as they vied for an expensive vase or a bolt of material the way poorer men might fight over a melon in the Petit Bazaar. His father had sometimes brought him here to sell baskets, and almost always, it was with a sense of relief that Dranh returned home at the end of the day.

“Good day, Captain Starlen!” A bald-headed halfling, draped in soft blue silk, whose belly hung over his belt, waved cheerfully to Garett from a throng of shoppers. Garett didn’t recognize him at all, but he forced a smile and returned the wave as he passed on.