Sin & Repentance Read online

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  Brondeburg was a small walled town that held the Copper Pass, southwest of the capital and on the very edge of Stormdrang's domain. Originally built by trade that attracted a warlord to construct a stronghold and tax passing merchants, Brondeburg was well situated to protect its liege lord from invasion across the passes. Lord Wagner and his knights nominally held the Copper Pass in a small watchtower overlooking the mines, but it was Brondeburg and its garrison which was the true power in the valley. The wilderness beyond the pass was claimed land, but only one in a hundred acres ever saw a felled tree or a tilled hide of land. Evergreens littered the landscape, a green wall of timber and needles that shrouded the valley like a blanket such that armies could march unseen until emerging before the watchtower. Mines littered the pass from a thousand claims with lean desperate dirty families hauling their crude ingots to Brondeburg, whose citizens were just as likely to spit in the miner's faces as offer fair prices. The miners took it, and the merchant princes of the town bought the ingots and refined or resold the bars along the Copper Road, hewn from the wilderness before emerging into the heart of Stormdrang. The mines were essential to the production of bronze and steel, a commodity of scarcity considering the Duke's forges rang all day and all night churning out arms and armor for the coming conflict with the Westerners.

  Hunters and trappers worked the lands nearby, only slightly less reviled than the miners of the Pass. These men and women of the wild trapped game and traded pelts with the masters of the city. The town itself was surrounded by a tall wall with a stone base measuring two stories with a log palisade grasping like fingers for another two stories with wall walks at the top and the mid level. The gap between the log palisade allowed for natural arrow slits and only a few desperate woodsmen dared construct a log cabin within five hundred paces of the wall. The land around the city was hewed of all trees and the stumps threatened any cavalry's approach within arrowshot of the walls. The town itself subsisted on the trickle of water that flowed from south to north, downhill through the Shadow Valley while the large manor houses enjoyed private wells, lined with flagstone, sunk deep to the very bedrock.

  "Pastries! Hot Tarts! Get them hot!" The baker's son called out in the speech of Stormdrang, pulling a small iron and cedar cart behind him with a bank of coals on the bottom to keep the foodstuffs warm. Arrayed in a green cloak with a long linen shirt, tight pants and knee high boots with bronze buckles, the youth wore a willow box at his chest held by a leather cord about his neck. Inside the box were copper coins jingling, the morning's sales which sounded as weak as the sun's rays through gray clouds promising rain.

  The streets of Brondeburg bustled, they always did in the morning as professionals left hovels near the wall to work stalls and shops and forges. The smiths and tanners wore leather aprons with stained clothing, and the dozen other professions that manufactured goods from the raw materials of mountains and forests were similarly uniformed. The apron marked a guild member, and the guilds ran the town for their own benefit. A glance could mark a person's livelihood, and Aelias used that to her advantage. One morning she was a tanner, another she was a hunter, another she was a soapmaker. Few looked at face or eye, hair or hands, as even the people of Brondeburg were not a quarter so well acquainted as any common village.

  The lords of Brondeburg were merchant princes with a few hedge knights who acted as captains for the legion of mercenary guards. The Burgher of Brondeburg was an honorary title and chosen by the guilds, but still, his office claimed responsibility for crimes and answered to the Duke in Stormdrang. Everyone knew the Burgher, a fat man called Drico von Mallus who once was a middling warrior and knight but left his honor in his cups. The true rulers of Brondeburg were the Guildmasters, the merchant princes who controlled hides, ingots, lumber and quarried stone. The capital had great need of these resources and the Copper Road was always busy with armed merchant trains; the bandits in the woods proved elusive and strangely disciplined. Aelias' master had his own suspicions, and so she arrived two months ago setting up her front as the soapmaker's apprentice. Weeks of inquiry had led her to the surveyor Guttmacher.

  Aelias dressed the part, a loose fitting linen blouse, a green vest, knee high boots and tight leather pants with a dark blue plaid and lambskin cloak. Under her arm she carried the merchant's satchel from the night sans the coin. She walked over cobblestone streets in good repair, braving the morning crowds as they hurried from domiciles to worksites. The people of Brondeburg dressed well enough but simply because the guilds did not tolerate pan handlers, beggars, or the poor. Aelias passed several knots of town-folk gossiping in front of a Shrine of Elene, some eating tarts, others holding buckets of water, but none spoke about the previous night's theft. Crime was nearly nonexistent thanks to the Guild's policies of keeping out undesirables. The merchant surveyor must not have complained to the Burgher's security agents, screaming the surveyor's guilt but it would not satisfy the Crimson Captain. She needed hard proof, too many had already been imprisoned on suspicion alone.

  The Town Guard headquartered in a square bluff structure constructed by the guilds in the utilitarian style common across the duchy. It was no keep or holdfast, but a municipal building with several entrances and exits. The rooms inside were small and cramped, termed offices for individual officers and large rooms with subdivided cells for the patrol. Under the three story stone structure was the town's prison, which mostly served drunks sobering up and a few others until a repeat offender was sent off to the mines or the lumber mill to work off their debts to society. On the top floor were two massive rooms, the Court Rooms, and a small trio of judges rotated every few weeks to cover the circuit between Brondeburg and the capital.

  Aelias climbed the rough hewn stone stairs and entered a doorway into the massive stone structure, the only ornamentation being square columns supporting the enormous overhang that officers and guards on break took shelter. The moment Aelius opened the door, the first fat drops of rainwater fell from the sky to mutters of patrolmen tapping out pipes laden with ash. The patrolmen were uniformed in a grey surcoat over ringmail and leather, armed with longspear or crossbow, mace and dagger.

  "What do you want?" The clerk was balding, with gray stubble decorating three chins, his uniform straining under his bulk. The desk was built into the wall, such that petitioners stood or waited on benches in the lobby, a stout door studded with iron demarcating the public from the patrol's professional space.

  "Lost and Found." Aelius pushed the satchel through the bronze bars to the Clerk.

  "Where'd ya find it?" The Clerk had a slate ready to write with chalk in hand.

  "The alley between Twelfth and Eleventh, Grim and Scary."

  The Clerk smacked his lips. "When?"

  "This morning. It was just lying there. Saw it on my way to work."

  The Clerk looked Aelius over suspiciously for a moment. "Right. I'll send it to Lost and Found."

  Aelius nodded and walked back out the doors, hitching her cloak's hood up against the drizzling rain. Lightning flashed and distant thunder bellowed, echoing through the streets. She figured the Clerk would enjoy the illustrations in the Surveyor's book. Now her place was to check on the traitor's manse, already well cased days earlier, its routines familiarized. There was enough soap to meet the old man's remaining customers, so she had time.

  The streets were less crowded at this hour of the day, and no one followed Aelius to the wealthier part of town, where large manses and ornate towers vied for social status. The guards were mercenaries, dressed in leather and ringmail, wielding light crossbows, long spears of steel and black ash, and always a dagger at the waist; some might even be former Infantry from Lord Wagner's dwindling garrison. The professional soldiers were always more dangerous than the guild sentries, who could as easily have been a miner or stablehand at one time.

  In other towns or cities, Aelius might pose as a beggar, ignored by the public and not a single person would try to meet her eyes. Beggars an
d pan handlers were not tolerated by the guilds, so in order to keep the manse under her watch Aelius had taken a room with a particular view in The Dark Mine, an inn of some repute despite its name. Her name at the inn was one of her favorites, a traveling minstrel prone to wandering the countryside for long periods of time. Aelius even kept a silver chased flute and could play as well as any Master from the Conservatory. The Crimson Captain demanded perfection from his agents.

  The steady downpour fell unabated when Aelius marked the Surveyor's exit from the manse, accompanied by four mercenaries in dark mail and a black surcoat. The page from Lost & Found had left the grounds twenty minutes prior. Guttmacher might suspect a trap. These four guards with Guttmacher meant eight were left to patrol the manse. She found four guards at the major points, and like clockwork they hit their marks. That means only four were still inside sleeping after the night shift. Aelius left the inn with a side satchel and walked two blocks before approaching the manse from the Town Wall, her black Caledonian Raincloak deflecting the steady downpour. The cloak smelled terrible, but it kept her dry. The alley behind the manse was heavily patrolled, as was the front gate, but adjacent to the manse was another well to do house with its own wall, but considerably less security, just a single Watchman. It was the adjacent property that Aelius threw her grapnel line and climbed over the wall, nimble as a squirrel.

  The adjacent property was stone and timber, the home of a prosperous goldsmith who valued his shop more than his family. The goldsmith also had a series of disputes with the reclusive Erlich von Brum, a landless noble originally of the Capital, banished by the Duke for involvement in a fraudulent insurance company, and also Guttmacher's benefactor. Aelius opened her satchel and removed the brick with the note wrapped around it, found a corner window of the Goldsmiths' house on the first floor and threw with the practiced arm of a vandal. The crash of broken glass echoed through the yard and Aelius crouched low as she scampered along the wall's edge, then leapt over von Braum's adjacent wall, pivoted off the manse, back to the wall, and rolled to the ground. There was a three pace distance between the privacy wall and the manse, just enough to block out the sight of any sentry except at the corner.

  Aelius peered through a window on the ground floor, saw a kitchen but no one else. She made her way to the back door, listening to the sentries yell across the yard at the neighboring Watchman. Aelius unrolled her lock pick set from her satchel, a roll of leather with a dozen different lengths of wire and picks. The deadbolt in the backdoor took all of ten seconds and Aelius slipped inside the manse. It smelled of fresh baked bread and lavender. The floor of the manse was tiled in white marble, the walls gleamed of oiled wooden planks and the plastered ceiling bore several artistic murals depicting landscapes. Several watercolor paintings lined the walls, a swan here, a river there, a mountain further on. The hallway led to the kitchen with two stoves built into opposite sides of the room, with an island in the middle, cabinets lining the walls, and blessedly empty of servants. Doubtless the help in the kitchens were in the front of the house to get a look at the commotion on the walls.

  Aelius slipped up some stairs off the kitchen, taking the narrow stairwell two steps at a time. She crept through the second floor hallway, checking doors. The servants quarters would all be unlocked, but Surveyor Guttmacher would likely lock his door. The master of the manse, von Braum, could be anywhere at all, but she knew from the work permit she had scanned days ago at the courthouse that the master's rooms overlooked the Grand Hall. Aelius found two locked doors on the third floor, a closet and one of the bedroom suites for guests. The lock only took a few moments, and Aelius was inside.

  The room had no window or exit other than the door she had just used. The interior was tidy, with a large four post bed on one wall, opposite was a writing desk and brass edged chair, a dresser, and in the corner loomed a wardrobe and a large table with several chairs. The table was stacked with papers of every kind; Aelius started there, making sure to mentally catalogue the stacks and general appearance before leafing through the parchments. Her eyes scanned survey contracts, maps, and pictographic code, pausing for a moment on this parchment or that map. Nothing on the table sparked her interest; it was a scarecrow. The real goods must be hidden.

  Aelius quickly and quietly searched under the bed, behind the wardrobe, in every drawer of the dresser and the writing desk. None of the drawers were locked. Of course not. There were no false bottoms in the drawers, and nothing was attached to the underside of the desks. She did find a five decade old diary belonging to von Braun's great aunt. She found a cache of silver lutes in a musty leather pouch. She found a rusted dagger. She quickly checked the floorboards for hollows, and quietly knocked on the plaster walls for secret panels. She checked the brass chandelier and the small closet. Nothing. Aelius considered that Guttmacher may have left the manse with the evidence, but then she decided he could not be that stupid. No, it must be here in the manse somewhere, but not in his own room. That left the rest of the manse to scour, and she had no more time. It was the middle of the day and the steady downpour lashed the roof. Someone could notice the water in the back way any moment. Someone could decide to do a room by room search. Aelius sighed, and went back to the closet. There was a panel to the attic in the ceiling, and after two tries, she pushed it open with a dirk as long as her forearm. She clambered into the crawlspace, the sound of the rain on the slate roof drumming into her mind. The only light came from two windows overlooking the sides of the house. After replacing the closet's cover, she crouched low while balancing on the roof beams. A small space was planked over near the window overlooking the goldsmith's property. The windows were dirty at the edges, but Aelius could still see out well enough. The view was directly across from a bedroom window, the curtains drawn aside. Aelius mentally checked the room's interior and decided it to be the goldsmith's daughter's room. Interesting.

  The sentries were back at their points. Of course they were. She couldn't leave until dark without giving the sentries alarm. Two of the Town Guard were at the goldsmith's residence, standing in the drizzling rain. I also would have to wait until full dark to check the rest of the manse. Considering on whose authority I operate, sometimes I wished we Skylarks simply used the local militia or had guards of our own. It would certainly be easier, but we would probably be less effective. We were not even supposed to exist. Aelius stretched out on the small bit of flooring near the window, listening to the rain dance on the slate tiles. The roof did not leak at all. It was quality work.