Every morning I met with Alex and Even in Beorne's guard headquarters, and every morning I lost faith in their ability to get Drifter out of prison the legal way. Beornia lacked a proper constitution, and it turned out that the rule of law mostly persisted based on the relatively magnanimous nature of the Regent. Things went well when the Regent was fair, and anarchy descended on the nation otherwise.

  This was a case where the Regent was not feeling fair, and so the bureaucrats executing his will shrugged at the injustice the guards brought forth. Even finally saw the limits of his power in this city, unable to even investigate a murder of the last Regent against the will of the current.

  That will seemed weak to me, though. Alex and Even would complain about the lack of assistance, but they were rarely hampered by the government officials. Their problem had less to do with the Regency and more to do with their vaguely seditious actions. They saw a cover-up, and they pushed to get access to information normally hidden, and they did so in a way that was too quiet and subtle to really push towards results. They did not want to mobilize a dozen random men to comb through a room of poorly organized records, so they assumed they were being stopped.

  Unfortunately, pushing for results was needed. Drifter's execution was two days out at the time of the events to follow.

  I was running out of time. Orwyn assured me that if I could free Drifter, he could get us out, but freeing Drifter was not a trivial problem. Even more so for a scholar of military history whose worst crime so far had been getting a bit too drunk after exam week in his third year of studies.

  So it was that I found myself in the slums on the outskirts of Beorne. The city wasn't known for an exceptional amount of crime, but the poorer sections of a city almost always had more crime than the wealthy parts. Desperation drives even the best men to crime when it becomes the best way to get food in their stomach.

  I thought it would be relatively easy to find a popular inn, one that even most inner city folks had been to, but no. I had directions that wove through the slums in a chaotic manner and they were vital to navigating the labyrinth of shacks and streets in the area. I ducked into alleys and followed paths through other inns to reach my oddly obscure destination. The Horned Donkey, as it was called, was primarily known for having a surprisingly nice menu, the pub fare people would expect but elevated by excellent ingredients at cheap prices, along with a selection of the best beers and wines brewed throughout the slums.

  It was less known for being the local base of the Blood God Bandits.

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  I walked in and took a seat at a table in the back, a dark corner where the light of the chandeliers and fireplace hardly reached. The barmaid came up to me and asked for my order, and I replied "The owner's special. Hot and fresh." She raised her eyebrow - I was not the usual clientele making that order - and said she'd be right back. A few minutes later she asked me to ensure the ingredients were to my liking and led me to the back.

  The kitchen had a door in the back that led to a staircase leading down - probably one of the only basements in the area, considering the temporary nature of so many of the structures. She gestured for me to descend the stairs.

  Now, my previous impression of the Blood God Bandits was as an unorganized mob clustered around a singular figure of power. Maybe their members in the field were like that, but this operation in Beorne seemed much more sophisticated. Ignoring the secret entrance through a reputable business, the basement greeted me with workers packaging drugs, maintaining weapons, counting goods, filling crates, loading wagons... All this happened under the eye of watchful supervisors not simply trying to keep people on task, but trying to solve problems and streamline operations as they went along. It was like a warehouse running at max efficiency to move goods in and out.

  I was greeted by one such supervisor who asked, "Are you here to take a job or give a job?"

  "Give, I think."

  He nodded and directed me to the rear of the warehouse where some rooms were visible. "Second door on the left. I think she's free but knock just in case." I thanked him and went to the door.

  The door I knocked on was unadorned, no indication that there was a person of power behind it, but the voice that came through the wood answering "Come in" pierced through my mind like few words ever had. It was a voice neither high nor low, not lyrical or rough, but drove right through the middle in a way that sneaked through all my defenses and shook something deep in my mind.

  I opened the door to a simple office, sparsely decorated, with a desk, a few guest chairs, a shelf of books, and a few cabinets presumably filled with papers. The desk was sprawled with papers listing various numbers and transactions, all of it beyond me at a glance.

  Most importantly, behind the desk was a middle-aged woman with cropped red hair and a face covered in scars. She was Olivia, no surname, the vice-captain of the Blood God Bandits, and the one in charge now that Varys had been killed. She was neither a strong presence nor unassuming; rather, she was simply present, unavoidable in this space.

  She glanced up only briefly when I entered before looking back to her papers, but she did speak to me regardless. "You are Virilus Legafil, the man responsible for bringing Varys' body in."

  "I had help, but as far as you're concerned, yes, I am him."

  "And you don't think you're in mortal danger here?"

  "Oh no, I certainly am." I was under no illusions; I should not have been there. "But with my information gathering skills my choices were between incompetent groups and groups that would see me dead. I opted for competence, this time around."

  "And what is worth risking your life for?" While her face still pointed at her desk, her eyes drifted up towards me.

  "It's simple, albeit complicated and dangerous," I answered, "I need you to stop the execution of the man who actually killed Varys."