by J. S. Volpe
* * *
The nondescript young fellow whom no one had noticed in the tavern earlier that night (or the previous night, for that matter) ended his journey into the heart of Bangle in a dark, dirty alley between an abandoned mill and a blacksmith’s that was currently closed for the night.
The man, whose name was simply Zan, entered the alley from Old Castle Road in a very uninteresting fashion. He didn’t look around to make sure no one was watching him. He didn’t peer into the shadows that filled the alley to see if any dangers lay ahead. He didn’t act nervous or hasty or exaggeratedly insouciant. He didn’t walk too fast or too slow. His hair was a nondescript brown, as were his eyes. His clothes were of a common cut and style. He was of average height and weight, and had no distinguishing marks whatsoever—no scars, tattoos, moles, or anything else. He was just some guy walking along, of absolutely no interest to anyone.
That was exactly how Zan wanted it, for he was a master of the art of not being noticed—an entirely different thing than the art of not being seen, which was practiced by ninjas and thieves and cowards. The art of not being noticed was much more difficult to master than that of not being seen, for it involved being in full of view of anyone and everyone and still being overlooked. When you knew how not to be noticed, people could look right at you, but when asked later if they’d seen anyone, they wouldn’t be entirely sure. They’d think that maybe there had been some guy there, but damned if they could remember anything about him. When you were as good at it as Zan was, you could interact with people, talk to them, introduce yourself to them, touch them and be touched by them, and they wouldn’t really register any of it. You were just an uninteresting social interaction they had to deal with before moving on to far more entertaining—and memorable—matters.
If you’d asked Luornu Tripornu, the young, anxious, brown-haired barmaid at Moe’s, if she remembered a customer the last two nights who had sat in the booth next to the fireplace and drunk exactly two ales each night, she would have mulled it over for a moment, then shaken her head and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
And he had even left her a tip.
Zan made his way uninterestingly down the alley to the mill’s side door. Without bothering to check to see if anyone was looking his way—even if someone was, it didn’t matter; they wouldn’t notice him anyway—he opened the door and stepped into the mill.
He made his way past enormous stone wheels and the rotten remains of wooden contraptions of uncertain purpose, toward the dim light of a half-veiled lantern in the middle of the mill.
Two figures, one tall, the other short, stood just beyond the small circle of light cast by the lantern. Zan walked forward until he stood at a spot on the light’s perimeter that was equidistant between the two figures.
“I’m here,” Zan said in case neither of the figures had noticed him. Given who he was and what he did, he could never be sure.
The two figures stepped into the light. The taller figure was Captain Strang, Zan’s superior in the Bangle Constabulary. Strang was bald, with a neatly trimmed goatee that came to a sharp point. His face wore a stiff, mannequin-blank expression. Someone meeting him for the first time would probably assume that Strang was trying to hide something behind such monolithic blankness, but those who had known the Captain long enough, as Zan had, knew that expression was his normal look. He seemed unable to move his face too far from this default state, no matter how hard he tried. He could have made a fortune at poker if his morals hadn’t been as inflexible as his expression.
The second figure was Chief Constable Avery. She looked like what you’d end up with if you compressed a twenty-foot-tall giantess down to four-foot-nine. There was a sense of great solidity and density about her, as if small moons ought to be revolving around her waist. People who didn’t look at her too closely called her fat, but she wasn’t exactly fat. She wasn’t really muscular or big-boned either. She was just a squat, dense mass of organic material that could shout louder than a goom and could reduce a grown man to a cowering heap of blubber with a single spiteful glare. As a child she had had such a crabby, humorless personality that one of her schoolteachers had privately lamented that little Adriana must have been born with a nest of angry hornets shoved up her ass. Her years spent working for the constabulary and dealing with the never-ending parade of thugs, scum, and psychos that passed through its halls had done nothing to temper those traits.
“What’s the situation on Bastard Jack?” Avery growled.
“Well,” Zan said, “things have gotten…complicated.”
He told them everything that had happened that night, from the time he followed Bastard Jack into Moe’s to Jack’s murder of the horses and his subsequent disappearance into the west.
“Hm,” Captain Strang said, his eyebrows rising a fraction of a millimeter, clearly shocked by this curious turn of events.
Chief Constable Avery said nothing. She just glared at a spot on the floor, deep in thought.
“This is dreadful,” Strang said, his expression evincing absolutely no sign of dread or any other human emotion. “The last thing we need is Bastard Jack, or any member of Bangle’s unfortunately large criminal community, to come into possession of vast wealth.”
“Yes,” Zan said. “It could lead to a lot of trouble.”
“Bullshit!” snapped Avery. “You guys’re thinking about this all wrong. This isn’t a bad thing. This is a good thing.”
“It is?”
“Fuck, yeah.” She saw their dubious expressions and added, “Look, on their way to get that gold, they’ll have to pass through all kinds of dangerous lands—maybe Hump-a-scab, maybe Spooky Swamp, whatever. Fact is, half those guys’ll get picked off by the dangers along the way. Most of the rest of ‘em’ll probably kill each other. Fine by me! Let ‘em, I say! The few that’re left at the end, well, we can round ‘em up when they’re in the Gulch. They’ll be trapped there, at our mercy.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Strang said, waving his hands in front of him. He blinked a few times in dismay. “Are you saying that you’re going to send a team of constables to Ghost Gulch? As you just pointed out, the way is extremely dangerous. It’s also out of our jurisdiction. Why, if any of our men get caught in gorgim territory, it could be seen as an act of war.”
Avery snorted. “First of all, I’m not sending a team of constables—”
Strang’s chest deflated in relief.
“—I’m sending the three of us.”
Strang’s eyes actually widened a little.
“But—but if we get caught—”
“We won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?” asked Zan.
Avery grinned. “Oh, I know a few secret paths hereabouts that no one knows about.”
“Not even you can guarantee that no one will catch us,” Strang said. “It’s one thing to know of secret paths. It’s quite another to assume yourself beyond the workings of chance, fate, and the Twelve.”
Avery waved a hand at him in irritation. “Maybe so. But I’ll say this: Even if we do get caught, they won’t know who we are. We’ll wear regular clothes instead of our uniforms and we won’t carry anything that might identify us as constables.”
Strang’s expressionless face turned toward Zan. Zan just shrugged. The blank face swung back to Avery like some kind of clockwork machine. “I’m still not sure I see the point. I mean, we can apprehend most of these men fairly easily without leaving Bangle.”
“Yeah, but we also wanna make sure that big-ass chunk of gold doesn’t wind up in the wrong hands. Also, and more importantly, there’s the Snowman. Don’t forget, he’s our real priority. With Bastard Jack out in the wild on his own, this’ll be the perfect time for the Snowman to make a move on him. And when he does”—she drove her left fist into her right palm, producing a smack that echoed like a rifle-shot in the vast space of the mill—“we’ll be there to make a move on him.”
