01 - The Price of Talent

by Peter Whittlesey

  After lunch, as much to walk off the sadness as to get useful information, I headed off up the road to the castle. I did this by foot, having disposed of all my trade goods, and because I would be doing it by foot when we made our rescue attempt. It was quite a walk to the castle from the market. While all roads to the castle were uphill, I managed to pick the main way to it, which was quite busy despite the cold winter air. It took me almost an hour to make it to the front gate of the keep.

  The gate to the keep was much smaller than the gate to the town. This one was only big enough for a single cart to get through. This was part of the reason why it took so long to get there, it created a natural bottleneck to traffic heading to the castle to pay taxes and conduct other business with the church.

  Once through the gate’s single portcullis, I got a better view of the inner grounds of the castle. There was an officious looking man attending to all the entrants. When he was done with the person that had been ahead of me in line, he bustled over to me. He was carrying a quill, an ink bottle, paper and clip board.

  “Young sir, what brings you to Caer Nord?” He asked.

  “Uh, I just sold a bunch of vegetables in the market and was told there was a tax for all sales within the town.” I replied, deciding to play up the whole young and inexperienced merchant thing.

  “New at this then? No matter. Head over to that building there, yes the one with all those people waiting in line. That is where you can pay your taxes.” He replied.

  With that said he bustled on over to the next person in line. The building he pointed to was attached to the tower, but off on the side. And as he had indicated, there was quite a line of merchants and their assistants waiting to pay taxes on their goods.

  While walking over to the next line I had to wait in, I examined the castle grounds. It looked very much like a smaller version of Caer Sud. The walls had patrols on them, but they didn’t seem that attentive. The area with the most attention paid was the main entrance through which everyone who had business at the castle was traversing. Peering around the back of the tax building, the hustle and bustle was gone. Just an open yard for grazing horses and a stable. There were also very few guards. So, assuming they didn’t tighten up security at night, this seemed like the best point of entry. Unfortunately, the only entrance to this part of the castle that was obvious was a small door in the guard tower in the back that was closed and clearly locked. Clear as in it was barred and the portcullis was down. That was going to be a problem.

  Unfortunately, the line did move at fairly regular intervals, so eventually my view of the back of the castle was obscured by the tax building. It took another half hour for me to get inside, and during that time I didn’t learn anything of interest about the castle’s security.

  Once inside, I was presented with a view of a room full of clerks. Each had a desk with writing equipment. It suddenly dawned on me that these people would likely need a name to go with the tax chit I would receive as proof of payment. I couldn’t give them my real name, as that would risk discovery should news from Caer Sud have arrived concerning my and Meredith’s escape. I was still mulling this over as I was again confronted by an official sending people to various available clerks to pay their taxes.

  “So, what are you here for?” He asked.

  “Uh, I’m here to pay duties on sold goods,” I said.

  “Oh, another merchant eh? Well, go to the end of the row over there and talk to the clerk on the far desk,” he said before moving on.

  Not knowing what else to do I followed his directions over to the clerk. When I sat down I was surprised to see that this clerk was a young woman. Most of the officials I had been dealing with today had been men of middling years, so it was a nice change of pace. If nothing else, she was easier on the eyes.

  “You’re a merchant here to pay duties?” she asked.

  “Yes ma’am.” I said, and immediately regretted it, as again, she was not quite at “ma’am” age.

  Fortunately she just rolled her eyes at me. The look she gave me indicated I was not the first person to “ma’am” her today, and I would likely not be the last. Still, I was a little embarrassed.

  “I’ll need your name, amount of goods sold and what sorts of goods they were,” she said.

  “Uh, I’m… Donar Janus, and I sold four barrels of root vegetables and 6 bolts of cloth,” I said.

  It was only after I blurted out the name that I realized I had given my father’s name. I had heard him say it to clerks before in similar situations, so I guess it seemed natural to adopt it as my pseudonym. Still, it struck me as being too close to my actual name, since it was the same last name. Too late to come up with a better one though.

  “Well Mr. Janus, SIR, that will be 4 copper for the vegetables and 12 for the cloth,” she said.

  I couldn’t help but notice her over emphasis of “sir” despite our ages being so similar. Payback I guess for calling her “ma’am”. I spent more time thinking of this than on the taxes, which I handed over without comment. Instead, I decided to see if I could extract any useful information from her.

  “Is it always this busy here?” I asked. “I’m fairly new to this region and was surprised at the wait to get in here.”

  “This?” She asked. “This is fairly typical for this time of year. It tends to quiet down towards night. We rarely get any visitors after that, unless a drunk starts a fight down at an inn and gets dragged here by the guards.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought this was so rough a town,” I replied. “Do people get hauled off to jail here a lot?”

  “No, not a lot,” she said. “But those that do get tossed into the jail out back to sober up. Once they have paid off their fine and repaid any damages they have caused, they are released the next morning.”

  “Funny, I didn’t notice a jail on my way in here,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Oh it’s that building on the back side of the castle,” she said. “It’s not all that big, so you’d hardly notice it.”

  “I see,” I replied. “Well, I’ve probably taken up too much of your time. Have a good day.”

  With that I vacated my seat for the next person to pay their taxes. I was so consumed with thought I almost forgot my tax chit, proof of payment of taxes that would likely be required by the guards as I left the city. The tax amount seemed reasonable, especially considering I had made a decent profit on the cloth. If I had only been selling vegetables, it would have been more onerous given the slim profits I made there. Once outside, I walked around the front yard towards the gate, but glanced back at the building the clerk had indicated was the jail. It was a building just like the others, except that it had a single guard standing outside. I made a mental note of where it was, but kept heading towards the front gate.

  My trip back to the inn was uneventful, if equally long. The flow to and from the castle was slackening as the day wore on into late afternoon, but there were still enough people out and about to make the walk a slow one. Once at the inn, I checked the common room to see if Meredith was back yet. Finding she was not in the common room I headed back to our private room.

  The room was empty, so not knowing what else to do, I took off my boots and laid down on the bed to relax and wait for Meredith to get back. I’m not entirely sure when I fell asleep, but I was woken up some time later by the door opening up. It was Meredith, so I quickly relaxed and decided not to get off the bed.

  “Napping are we?” She asked after closing the door. “Here I spend all day doing reconnaissance work and I find you lazing away in bed. Did you at least manage to sell our goods?”

  “Hah! I was just waiting for you to get back,” I said. “And I not only sold our goods for a profit, well a small profit anyway, I also got some reconnaissance in when I went to pay our taxes at the castle.”

  “The castle?” She asked looking a little exasperated. “I thought we agreed I was going to do the reconnaissance work?”

  “I found out tha
t all merchants owe a tax to the church on goods sold in town,” I replied. “It would have brought undue attention to us if I didn’t. Not to mention it would make leaving the city difficult, since we wouldn’t have a tax chit to show the guards.”

  “Well, I guess that makes sense,” she replied. “Regardless, I managed to accomplish some things as well…”

  She proceeded to tell me about her day. She had spent a good amount of time walking around the castle and the few streets directly below the wall. The only entrance she saw that was open was the main one, same as I had seen from inside the castle grounds. She also had found out that while they leave the front gate open at night, it was guarded. This left us with no real means of entering the castle. Fortunately, Meredith had thought of this too and purchased a large amount of rope. Unfortunately, the rope had no grapnel on it for catching on the crenellations of the wall.

  “So, your plan is that we scale the wall with the rope?” I asked.

  “Yup!” She said.

  “Uh, how are we going to secure it to the wall to climb up?” I asked.

  “Well, I couldn’t very well go out and buy a large amount of rope and a hook or whatever could I?” She said. “That wouldn’t look suspicious at all!”

  “I see your point, but it still leaves open the question of securing the rope to the wall,” I said.

  “Tyr, have you forgotten that you can fly?” She asked.

  “Meredith, there’s a big difference between flying between your bed and the floor of your room and up a wall!” I said. “Besides I haven’t practiced since we left Caer Sud!”

  “Bah, you’ll do fine!” She said. “It shouldn’t be too hard anyway, the castle isn’t all that well patrolled.”

  While I was glad that she had faith in my abilities, I was more than a little nervous at the prospect. When I screwed up in my room in Caer Sud, all I fell on was the bed. At worst, I would hit the floor from only a few feet up. Flying up a defensive wall was another proposition entirely. But short of having a better idea on how to get in there, which I didn’t, that was the plan. I decided it wasn’t worth arguing about.

  Chapter 27.

  That evening we decided to keep a low profile. We still went to the common room for dinner, but we kept to ourselves, finished quickly and headed back to our room. We waited in our room until almost midnight, then we collected our gear and left the inn. Meredith was carrying the rope and I had strapped on my sword just in case. Given I could just summon it to my side, it seemed silly, but I found comfort in having it on me. Besides, now that we were wearing our generic guards outfits, it wouldn’t seem all that out of place.

  Fortunately, no one at the inn gave us a second look, and once out on the street, we kept a low profile as we headed up towards the castle. There were only a few people on the street as we walked up. Most of them were in groups in various states of inebriation hanging around the inn common rooms and bars available around the city. We avoided these people as much as we could without being obvious about it. Once we got to within a street of the castle, we turned onto a side street and walked around to the back of the castle wall.

  The streets in this section of the city were mostly empty since it was all residential and the middle of the night. We eventually found a likely place to climb the wall behind a house whose windows were dark. The street was deserted and the castle wall seemed unpatrolled in this section. I was still nervous about flying so high in the air with a rope on my back. But then, it was the only plan we had.

  I settled myself as near to the wall as I could. Meredith was on lookout duty to warn me if anyone was coming up the street. Without a word between us, since we didn’t want to alert anyone to our presence, Meredith gave me a nod to indicate she was ready.

  I then started drawing in magical power deeply. Because it was a cold night, it took extra time to gather the huge amount of power I thought flying up the wall would need. I tried not to let the fact that this was all guesswork bother me. I could tell Meredith was impatient, since she was practically tapping her foot, but this was not something I was willing to rush.

  When I felt like I could draw in no more power, and had significantly lowered the temperature in the surrounding area, I began unleashing it as telekinetic force. It was slow going at first, I gained altitude foot after foot. I was scared the whole time I was ascending that someone would spot us. Fortunately, the higher I got, the more I could see of the dark city, and there didn’t seem to be anyone nearby.

  When I crested the top of the wall, I felt like I had run a very long distance, what with the forces I had been controlling. Still, I had enough energy left to flop down safely on the walkway of the wall. Again, looking around, it didn’t seem like there were any guards patrolling this section of the wall. This seemed both fortuitous and a little suspicious. I realized this town was quiet, but shouldn’t there still be guards here? Regardless, I had a job to do, so I tied the rope to a crenellation, then let it down for Meredith.

  Meredith, it turns out, is quite good at climbing. I would have been surprised, had I not raided the subbasements of the library in Caer Sud with her. I now knew better than to underestimate her abilities. It took her less time to climb the wall than it took me to fly up it. I was a little disheartened by that. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been. Flying is a lot more work than rope climbing.

  Once we were both on the walkway, and huddled in the shadow of the wall, we surveyed the area. We were on the wall at the back of the castle. The stables were just below us and the jail was across the yard from us. There were two small towers on either side of this back section of the wall, both had doors which led, we hoped, to stairways down. This part of the castle was extremely quiet. There did not appear to be anyone patrolling nearby. With this to bolster our courage, Meredith and I headed for the nearest tower so we could get off the wall after collecting the rope.

  Surprisingly, the door to this tower was unlocked. I guess they didn’t feel the need to lock the door on the top of the tower, likely the one at the bottom was locked, just like the small gate I had observed previously had been. Inside the tower there was just an unoccupied sitting area with a viewing window looking out onto the town, and a spiral stairway down. We descended the stairway as quietly as possible, practically on tiptoes. I think we were both unnerved by how easy this was. However, we shouldn’t have bothered. There was no one at the base of the stairs either. It was just two doors, one a heavily locked and reinforced door to the city, the other a regular door, like the one above, leading to the yard.

  As I had thought earlier, the door to the castle grounds was locked. Fortunately, Meredith was there with her small collection of lock picks. She made short work of this door. It was, apparently, not all that complicated a lock. Since it was just leading from the yard to the wall, and likely used only by guards, this made sense. After all, it’s not like there was anything on the wall that was going to get stolen.

  Once out in the yard, and having shut and relocked the door, Meredith and I followed the wall around the yard heading towards the outbuilding that contained the jail. The door we had exited was on the side of one of the guard towers on this section of wall. It was hidden off in a corner between the tower’s base and the wall, which explained why I hadn’t seen it on my previous visit.

  We kept to the shadows near the wall as we made our way around towards the jail. Once we were close to the jail, we could see that they still had just one guard at the door. This one had brought out a chair, and was sitting there and reading by torchlight.

  Seeing the guard, I grimaced, but realized what needed to happen. I reached over to draw my sword.

  Meredith saw this motion, and put a hand on my arm stopping me. She shook her head at me, then she turned and disappeared into the shadows. Well, perhaps disappeared is too strong a turn of phrase. What I mean in she crouched further into the shadows near the wall and headed towards the guard reading his book. Once she was near him, I felt her draw in a moderate amount of magica
l power.

  While she had been creeping up on the guard I was becoming more and more nervous. But, wanting to trust her, and having seen her dispatch our assailants outside the stables in Caer Sud when we were escaping, I stayed put.

  This decision, it turned out, was a good one. She got close the guard nearly silently. This was impressive, but probably unnecessary, as the guard was not paying any attention. When she was near enough, I felt her release her pent up power. The guard started to slump forward into his book. As he did this, she crept up to him, and pushed him back into his chair. This left the guard looking like he was lounging on the chair, perhaps catching a quick nap.

  With the guard taken care of, I crept over to where Meredith was. During this time, Meredith was going through the guard’s pockets. She took both his keys and his money pouch. When I got near her, I raised my eyebrows at her for that. She just smiled a mischievous smile and pocketed the money. Then she walked over to the door, trying keys until one of them opened it.

  Not wanting to be any more obvious than we already were, we quickly went into the jail building and shut the door behind us. In this room, there was the guard’s station and fireplace. The embers of an old fire still glowed in ashes of the fireplace lighting the room with a low light. I could see a desk with papers, likely to document any prisoners dropped off at the jail, as well as another chair and a table with stools around it. Along the walls were a few shelves of paperwork, ledgers and documents.