Shingles Chase

When Cressida Kroft finally composed herself after reading Lord Amprei's steamy love letters, she got up and closed the door to her office. Her face was solemn. “You’ve doubtless heard the proclamations that the King was murdered, and the reward for the capture of his killer. I wish the Queen hadn’t felt like she had to handle this herself. We could have quietly arrested this Trinia Sabor without alarming the city, but this bounty hunt threatens to ignite the riots all over again. This city is still a powder keg, and all it would take is someone “arresting” the wrong man’s sister or girlfriend to set it off. Do you have any idea how many abused young blondes have already been brought in for the reward? And that’s assuming they don’t decide to just lynch her on the spot. What’s more, my men have already turned away two different bands of adventurers, trying to enter the city to join the bounty hunt. The last thing we need is a bunch of armed outsiders making trouble. How they found out about the bounty so quickly is anybody’s guess.

“But the Queen has made it clear that she’s not happy with how the Guard or the Sable Company handled the recent troubles, and she’s livid over the Hellknights abandoning the city. In fact, there are rumors she might disband one or both of us, and create a new order of specialized guards to bring order. I’ve had a number of Guards resign recently, and I hear Endrin’s lost marines – rumor is they’re being recruited by someone at the palace.”

Kroft paused for a moment, as if unsure whether to continue. “As if all this wasn’t enough, I’m not convinced the Sabor woman is guilty. Sabor is an artist, and she’d been commissioned to paint a portrait of the King. They have a witness - he’s a palace guard who says he saw Sabor slip a powder into the King’s tea after she’d finished the painting, and then she seduced him to not tell anyone. They called Endrin and me in to hear his ‘confession’, but I could see the bruises, missing teeth, broken fingers – he’d clearly been tortured, and I’ve been in enough interrogations to know that eventually a man will say anything just to stop the pain.

“Don’t get me wrong – if Sabor killed the King, I want to see her executed as much as anyone. But I want to be absolutely sure she’s guilty - I don’t want her to fall to mob justice, or be tortured into a false confession.”

She looked the party in the eyes, one by one. “That means we need to find Trinia Sabor before anyone else does. The city is crawling with people hunting Sabor, and they’ve obviously searched her home and not found her. But I still have my sources on the street, and I’ve got a tip she’s holed up in a friend’s place, a flat in Midland at 42 Moon Street. I could send in a contingent of Guards to arrest her, but there’d be a mob following them before they got there. Besides alerting the girl, in that neighborhood it’s a coin flip whether the mob would lynch the Sabor girl, or my men.

“I need you to slip in, capture the girl, and get her back here safe and sound without alerting anyone. If you do that, I promise to make sure she’s questioned the right way, preferably with magic to ensure she’s telling the truth. I’ll also make sure you get the Queen’s reward.”

The group quickly agreed, and within minutes were out on another mission. They had no trouble finding the Moon Street address they’d gotten from Kroft. It was in a densely built section of the city, a place where, at ground level, direct sunlight was a rarity. Above, jury-rigged catwalks, overhanging roofs, lines of laundry, and homemade bridges of rope and boards created a cluttered tangle, a multi-level mess of gutters, upper floors, and rooftops. This was the slum above — the sprawl known as the Shingles.

The building itself was three-story tenement, and that presented a problem. Each floor looked to have about eight apartments, and they had no idea which one might hide the assassin. Jax, Shadow, and Wren went inside, while the others kept watch from the outside. The building had a central stairway leading to the upper floors; around it, were the doors to each of the individual flats. "Should we just start knocking on doors?” Shadow whispered, but the other two looked at him like he was crazy.

Wren had an alternate plan. She started a loud argument, hoping some curious residents would open their doors to see what was going on. “Get your hands off of me, you asshole!” she shouted at a bewildered Shadow. “Stop that! No! Let go of me!” Unfortunately, scenes like this were apparently commonplace in this neighborhood, and no one seemed to take notice. So she tried Plan B. Taking out a pouch of silver pieces, she scattered the coins on the flagstones. “Now look what you’ve made me do!”

Sure enough, the sound of jingling coins was the bait she needed. A door opened, and an apple-cheeked woman poked out her head. “These men made me drop my money,” she explained, shooting Shadow and Jax a glare. “Would you help me pick it up?”

“Of course I would, dearie,” the woman cooed, and hustled out to collect coins. Wren pretended not to notice that she was palming about every third one. “I’m here looking for a friend,” Wren continued as they worked. “She’s just a little older than me, with blond hair like mine – have you seen her?”

“See a lot of girls around here, lassie. What’s her name?”

Wren hesitated. For some reason, she was unwilling to say who they were actually looking for. “Sabrina,” she said after a bit. “That’s her name – Sabrina.”

The woman shook her head. “Sorry lassie. No one in this building by that name. Now – here’s your money.” She handed Wren a handful of coins, far fewer than had been dropped. “I’ve got a wee kettle on, so I need to be runnin’ now.” She ducked back into her flat. Wren stood looking at the closed door – that had been particularly unhelpful.

Meanwhile, Jax and Shadow had gone on up the stairs. On the second floor, Jax carefully studied his surroundings, looking for anything out of the ordinary, but everything looked perfectly … well, ordinary. They continued on to the third floor, which looked equally unexceptional. Jax listened. There was plenty to hear – crying babies, muffled voices, the noises of the street outside – but none of it suggested a hidden assassin. He sighed, and he and Jax exchanged a look. Picking a door where he’d heard the sounds of children, he raised his hand and knocked.

A harried looking woman with dark circles under her eyes answered. She was holding a baby, and two toddlers clung to her legs. Behind her, Jax could see two – no, make that three – more children in the tiny flat. “Excuse me,” he said politely, “I’m looking for my sister. I think she may be staying in this building, but I don’t know which apartment.”

“I don’t know many of the other residents,” the woman said. “What – stop hitting your brother! – does she look like?”

“Well, she’s young, slender, blonde,” Jax offered.

The woman shook her head. “I don’t know – take that out of your mouth! Take it OUT OF YOUR MOUTH! – anyone who looks like that. Sorry.” She closed the door in Jax’s face.

“Well that went well,” Shadow said cheerfully. “Shall we try it again?”

Jax picked another door at random, and knocked. This one was opened by a middle-aged man in a sleeveless undershirt not quite covering his pot belly. “Yo! Wadya want?”

Jax repeated his story about the fictional sister. “She’s quite a looker,” he added. “I’m sure you’d remember her.”

“What’s ‘er name?” the man asked.

Jax thought fast. Like Wren, he was somehow unwilling to share their target’s real name. “We just call her Treenie,” he said.

“Let me ask my mother – she knows everybody. HEY MA!” he bellowed back into the one-room apartment, which couldn’t have been more than 15 feet square. “THERE’S SOME PEOPLE HERE LOOKIN’ FOR A BLONDE WOMAN NAMED TREENIE.”

“Who?” The wheezy voice seemed to come from a pile of blankets on a chair.

“TREENIE! THERE’S A FELLA HERE WITH A SWORD LOOKING FOR A BLONDE WOMAN NAMED TREENIE.”

Shadow’s keen ears picked up the sound of breaking glass from the flat two doors down. “This way!” he shouted, dashing to the door. He slammed into it, and rebounded into the hallway. The flats in this tenement didn’t appear to have locks, but something was barricading the door from the inside. Jax slammed his shoulder into the door with no better luck, but he and Shadow combined their efforts and were able to bull their way into the room.

The one-room flat inside combined all the amenities of a bedroom, a kitchen, and a painter’s studio, leaving little space for much else. A stack of cheese and bread sat on the counter next to several full waterskins, while an easel in the opposite corner held a half-completed painting of an imp and a house drake fighting atop a church steeple. There was a low bed under a single window looking out over the tangled rooftops of the city; the glass of the window was broken, the threadbare curtains flapping in the breeze. Outside the window, a narrow board led to the roof of the building across the alley, and they could see a young blonde woman dashing through the Shingles away from them.

Jax and Shadow didn’t hesitate; they were through the window and across the board in a flash. The rooftop of the next building was cluttered with debris, but they clambered over it with little difficulty. Wren wasn’t so lucky; she’d heard the commotion upstairs and hurried to join them, but now was having difficulty making her way through all the rooftop junk. She was quickly left behind.

A rope ladder led from this building to the next, and they scampered across it. The next building had a steep roof, and its roof tiles were loose and crumbling. Jax climbed halfway up, then hit a tile that gave way under his hand, sending him sliding back to the gutter.

As soon as Shadow had set foot in the Shingles, he’d heard strange voices whispering around him, like the voices he’d heard in Madame Zellara’s first Harrow reading. Now, they seemed to be guiding his every step. He sprinted past Jax, and climbed to the top of the roof with ease. Trinia was just ahead of him; there was a narrow gap in a wall, and despite her small size, she was having difficulty squeezing through it. Shadow grabbed her, and tried to wrestle her to the ground, but she was putting up a fight. Suddenly, the girl went rigid in his grasp. “Got her!” he heard from behind him. Looking back, he saw Wren grinning triumphantly back on the first roof; she might not have been able to cross the Shingles, but her Hold Person spell had.

He and Jax trussed Trinia up, then carried her back to her flat while Wren went to fetch those who’d stayed on the ground. By the time they returned, Trinia was sobbing. “I swear! I didn’t kill the King! I didn’t do anything! He was a nice old man, and he was fine the last time I saw him. I don’t know why they’d say I did such a thing!”

“Then that will all come out,” Wren said confidently. “We’re going to take you someplace safe, where people will listen to what you have to say.”

“No! They’ll kill me! Don’t you see – they’re going to execute me! Please – I don’t want to die! Can’t you help me? Just let me go – I’ll get out of Korvosa and never come back. Please! I’m begging you! Don’t let me die!”

Her pleas were heartbreaking, and sounded heartfelt as well, but Wren was unmoved. “You’ll never be safe on the run. This really is your best bet.” She got out one of the disguise kits they’d gotten from Goldtooth’s mercenaries, and started to apply makeup to Trinia, but the girl was in a panic, resisting her best efforts. “Stop it!” Wren all but shouted, silencing the girl’s sobbing. “You’re the most wanted woman in Korvosa, with a price on your head. Do you want us to drag you through the streets where everyone can see who you are? How long do you think you’ll survive like that?” That seemed to get through to her, and she settled down, although the tears continued unabated.

And so they left the building a few minutes later in the company of a young man with bushy black hair and a somewhat lopsided mustache. The ruse got them all the way back to Citadel Volshyenek, and Field Marshall Kroft. Once again, Trinia began to protest her innocence, but Kroft silenced her. “There’ll be plenty of opportunity for you to tell your story, in front of witnesses. You have my word you’ll get a fair hearing. Guards! Take her to the cells.”

The PCs earned 1,133 XP, putting them at 5,260 XP with 6,000 required for Level 4. We won't meet next week. The following two weeks, Joette & Rich will be in North Carolina, so everyone will be calling in remotely.