carl@fire

Rikild didn't understand the strange man who'd nearly stepped on her after knocking her over.

What a bully.

She frowned as she made her way back to the front gate with the on-duty sergeant, Adlard, who'd also been menaced by the tall man with the beard.

She wondered where the great, glowing spear she'd seen him toting had gone.

Rikild wanted to speak with her father again.

She'd known he was unhappy. It had been that way for almost as long as she could remember. The sixteen year-old girl noticed it the most when they were at church, rare though it was that he attended no matter how she pleaded with him to come and be cleansed. The light seemed to go out of his eyes, and he shivered occasionally, his gaze distant as though he were somewhere else entirely.

She loved her father, but he was so difficult to cheer up! Even the sermons that had brightened her days beyond measure had done nothing for the man who had raised her.

She'd tried joining the army after some thought, thinking that if he were to see her following in his footsteps, maybe that—

No. She would not join the army, he'd said. She would have to defeat him in a duel first.

Rikild hadn't wanted to do that. She didn't want to upset him by trying since he'd seemed so opposed.

So she'd joined the city guard instead. That way she could keep an eye on him. And he seemed fine—if not pleased—with that.

Already she'd found him nine times passed out drunk in the guardhouse nearest the front gate. He hadn't been on duty, but he'd claimed he was working that day. The other guards left him alone, leaving him to his apparent misery.

The problem was clearly worse than she'd thought, whatever it was. She prayed for him constantly, though that had done little to help since he seemed unwilling to spend the time to pray for himself as well.

She'd confided in her mother about the matter and was relieved at first to hear that she wasn't the only one who'd noticed it. No, she'd found out, she'd been the only one the rest of the family hadn't told.

They'd thought her too young. They'd been praying for him for the past several years.

It upset her.

She loved her family just as much as any of her brothers, so why was she the only one excluded?

She'd thrown herself into her city guard training, hoping it would catch her father's eye and raise his spirits, that he'd accept one of her regular invitations to attend a sermon from her favorite priest of Dawn.

It hadn't, and he hadn't.

She'd stood atop the wall earlier that day, looking down on him as he managed the city's main gate with an efficiency and finesse that required two guards on the days and times that he wasn't in his spot in front of the city. What was it that bothered him so? What had changed him?

She recalled that he wasn't always like this. When she'd been younger—much younger—he'd chased her around, played hide-and-find, and play-fought with her with a big, dopey smile on his face that she missed dearly. He'd attended church and spoken the traditional prayers to the Goddess of Dawn in the loudest, most commanding voice.

He'd been the best father she could have hoped for.

She wondered if the devils had done something to him in the time that he'd been in the army. Thirty years was a long time to be in active service, or so she'd heard. He'd been all over, too, according to his stories.

Stories that had grown less and less frequent over recent years.

What could she do to help?

She'd prayed for guidance. The answer she received seemed to be that she could do nothing, and that made her miserable.

Her father was a good man. She'd seen how he greeted people, total strangers, in front of the city, chatting with them and making their entrance to Charus City as pleasant as it could be. Even the smugglers and bandits looking to enter the city with forged documents he handled with civility when he was well within his rights and training to beat them until their skin tore and their bones shattered.

The handbook said such things, anyway, but nobody actually did it. Rikild suspected everyone who guarded the gate tried to follow in the mold her father had created of the perfect gatekeeper.

Her father wasn't just good with his job, either. She'd heard the stories of how he'd given to charity, personally donating the most out of anyone in their district for the expansion of the now-massive church her family attended. He'd apparently even taught a short-lived course on what it meant to be a good and decent soldier in the army at some point in the past, refusing to take a single coin for sharing his knowledge with other Dawn-worshipers.

That man seemed to be wholly absent now.

Then he'd appeared.

She'd turned to chat with her sergeant for a moment about the upcoming training schedule—she was due to receive her first unsupervised posting the following week after being chaperoned this week with him as her supervisor—and he'd gestured for her to look down towards the gate once more.

There he was, when Rikild looked back down. He'd towered over her father wielding a spear that glowed with a fearsome light, nearly obscuring the both of them with its intensity. She'd looked through the spyglass, and his attire had made him out to be a noble of some sort. No noble she'd ever heard of, anyway. And with a weapon like that and the nobles' penchant for boasting and showing off, it seemed unlikely that any such man could be from the city.

He'd moved close and shared a moment of words with the city's most well-known gatekeeper, then walked past and into the city.

The strangeness began after.

Her father had left his post early.

It had happened before, on occasion. An emergency or a birthday could drag him off. He'd never worked on the anniversary of his marriage, either, even though that was an oddity which seemed unique to him.

This was none of those occasions.

He'd disappeared out of sight for a few minutes, and a man wearing a helmet had come into view, joined soon after by a second.

Rikild had nearly jumped out of her armor and over the wall when her father had snuck up behind her and tickled the back of her neck like he used to when she was young. He'd laughed, cracking the widest smile she'd ever seen on him, and said that he felt like taking the rest of the day off. Then he'd practically skipped back down the stairs to go find her mother, claiming he wanted to go for a stroll.

Her father had left work to go on a stroll?

Rikild had stared after him in shock.

Was it some divine providence? Had her father, once the most devout of anyone she'd known, finally returned to pray for himself?

Then she'd considered the events and facts leading up to the current situation, just as she'd learned to do in her training when investigating a crime.

Her father had been working at the gate.

Her father been doing his job.

Now her father had left work early to take her mother out, grabbing a pair of guards from the nearby guardhouse to replace him.

She looked deeper at the facts for something that stood out.

There was an obvious irregularity.

The man with the scary-looking spear. What had they spoken about?

Sergeant Adlard had been all too ready to take up her idea to follow the mysterious man, his own suspicions having been raised by the way he'd brazenly carried the weapon into the city. There was no law against it, of course, but there were few who would so casually flaunt a powerful weapon as he had.

Certainly none dressed as he'd been dressed. Or undressed, in the case of the man's feet.

They'd spotted him speaking with an old blind woman near the produce market. Rosa, Rikild recognized her at a glance. She'd always tried to talk the girl's ear off any time she'd come near, seeming to have a preternatural sense for when someone was close enough for a conversation.

Rikild gave her a wide berth nowadays, not wanting to be late for her training shifts again.

They'd watched from across the avenue as the man chatted for a bit, then reached out and took the old woman's head-sized metal can and stuck his hand in it for a moment before placing it back behind her chair. Then he'd started off, walking with clear purpose.

They'd followed him.

People, carts, and wagons alike moved out of the way as he strolled down the middle of the avenue with no regard for the flow of traffic or his own personal safety. While it wasn't strictly against any law to do such a thing, it had caused the guards to frown, at first in concern and then in suspicion when they began to notice a pattern: he never stepped aside for anyone or anything.

He'd passed by a potter's stand—Honest Beatrix's, home of the season-long warranty—and a young woman had dropped a piece of pottery she'd been examining, her eyes going wide as she stared at the ominous light radiating from his spear.

The man had stopped in his tracks for the first time since they'd begun following him.

A moment later, he'd shouted "Make it one hundred coins!" and coins had begun to fall into his hand as though—

The pair of guards had immediately reached for their coin pouches. It hadn't been that long since one of the castle mages had been found guilty of creating a spell to summon coins to herself from within a certain radius, effectively turning her into the city's greatest pickpocket. She'd only been caught when her hubris had grown too great, and she'd gone for a few jaunts through the nobles' district of the city and amassed some hundred thousand coins that had quickly piled up and been easy to spot in her quarters by the maids—or so the gossip went.

This was not that, however.

This was…potentially something that was somehow not illegal?

It had felt like it should be illegal, though. Both of the guards had agreed on that when they'd discussed it in quiet voices as they followed him afterwards.

The ensuing encounter had been surprising, but again—he hadn't actually done anything illegal, unless Walking With Intent To Intimidate was suddenly against the law. That'd turn half the most famous—or infamous—adventurers in the world into outlaws, though, so it seemed unlikely that the law had changed since they'd last checked. They'd decided to stop following him since it was clear he wasn't about to talk; they were also suddenly each very aware that the glowing, magical spear he'd been carrying was nowhere to be seen.

Rikild frowned as she stood up on the wall again, alone for a short while as her sergeant filled out a report on the suspicious man and awaiting the end of her training shift so she could go and find her father.

The strange man wouldn't tell her what they'd talked about, but she was going to figure it out one way or another, even if she had to pray for an entire week without stopping.

What could he have said to her father that she hadn't already?