On your way north, you head past the same guard post. The door has been broken outwards, and a single nervous-looking guard holds the spectators at bay.
FROBORR: I stop and greet the guard. "I am Twill, humble service of Her Imperial Majesty the Tsarina Ekaterina Alexandrovna Romanova D'vai. I apprehended the wererat miscreants yesterday eve. Perhaps you could tell me aught of what transpired here?"
"You! You're the one who got my friends killed?" He moves to draw his sword, and then apparently realizes just how futile an action that would be. "You want to know what happened?" he spits. "Go take a look for yourself."
FROBORR: "Sir," I say, and look him right in the eye, speaking with total sincerity and conviction, "had I thought there the slightest chance of danger to your compatriots beyond the ordinary call of duty, I would have never left them here. The weight of your comrades' deaths shall remain with me until the day I die. I will never be able to truly repay that debt, but I proceed now to ensure that those wererats never harm anyone again."
The guard seems a bit taken aback, but doesn't say anything more.
FROBORR: I walk into the guardhouse and take a look around.
The interior is fairly thoroughly trashed. Corpses have been removed already, but from the blood stains it's fairly easy to tell where they were.
It's also fairly easy to tell where the were-rats were being held. Two cell doors hang open, damaged beyond repair. Blood stains mark the wall across from one of them.
Oddly enough, though, the damage doesn't seem to have been inflicted entirely from the insides...
FROBORR: Twill is not remotely surprised by this, as wererats are not generally known for their ability to claw through steel bars.
The doors were mostly wood; there's been enough damage done that an uneducated observer would assume they had simply busted out. Given the actual damage, though, it looks more like someone opened one of the doors, and then tried to make it look like they hadn't...
FROBORR: "Intriguing, Kitty," I say. "The question is, did the person who opened the door kill the guards, or did the wererats? In the former case, he was known to the guards or able to persuade them somehow. In the latter, that is not necessarily so."
Twill unaccountably fails to light a pipe at this point.
Kitty remains perched on your shoulder, apparently unperterbed.
FROBORR: I resume my journey to the warehouse.
|