User blog:Masterforger/City Watch Blues - Part 3

"I freaking hate sewer duty," muttered Will, a pale but wiry Lower Guard.

"You're all mouth and no trousers. Shut up and keep your eyes peeled. We were asked to do this by Corvo himself!' retorted Travis, a burly Guard.

"Oh, so if it comes from his royal ass we should be proud?" sneered Will, angrily slashing with his sword at an old river crust stem.

"Either you start being proud or start being dead, you twat. Corvo is a better man then all of the captains put together, and I ain't gonna cross him because I'm too stingy to walk around a sewer."

"Whatever you say," muttered Will, and then swore as his boot fell into a deceptively deep mudhole. He despised working in the sewer, and the fact that now he had to look our for some teleporting assassin didn't make life any easier. The sewers were a maze of tunnels, shadows, emergency flood chambers and canals. They had already passed three old huts with the corpses of dead weepers rotting beside them.

"Shit, someone's dead!" shouted Travis from up ahead, his sillhouette outlined by the few lamps on a canal walkway.

"Idiot, everyone's dead down here," argued Will.

"No! This one's City Watch, and it looks like he died just a few hours ago," said Travis, who was kneeling by the body of another guard. Whoever the dead guard was, he had been stabbed in the throat, his sword still sheathed.

"Looks like he was killed without a fight," remarked Will, who drew his own sword and started looking around.

Travis was checking the dead guard's pockets. The corpse would not need money where he was going. Travis then inspected the man's sword. It was incribed with HEYBURN on the flat of the simple blade.

"Found anything?" asked Travis, getting up from the corpse.

"Nah, the killer didn't leave any footprints, except for two at that guy's feet. It looks like we have found our teleporting friend, though. He musta just snapped in front of the guy and killed him."

"Try and look around the tunnels. He musta come from somewhere, keep an eye out for hiding places with footprints."

After a few minutes of searching, Travis found a couple deep imprints in some sludge inside a large pipe. "Found something!" he called, then lit his Watch-issued lantern and peered down the pipe. "Looks like it comes from up topside!"

"Great, let's go crawl through some more shit," muttered Will.

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They emerged from the pipe onto Bowls Street, a tidy, wide street lined with well-kept homes and full of a small crowd of bustling people. A rail car rumbled past down towards the Distillery district. There were two muddy footprints outside the pipe, but none elsewhere.

"Dammit! He musta jumped from a rooftop! We'll never find him now!" cursed Travis.

"What should we do now?" asked Will, scraping his boots on the ground to get rid of the sludge.

Travis looked up. Behind the pipe was a tall house, devoid of anything but windows on this side. "He probably came from a car, there ain't anything he coulda jumped from on this building, or the others."

Will walked over to a nearby watchman, a low-ranking officer who was resting his hands on his sword, which he had placed point-first into the cobbles like an old knight. "Scuse me sir," said Will. "Did any rail car stop by this pipe in the last few hours, say, since around 10?"

"Not that I've seen," replied the officer. "Been here since 9 o'clock, and all the cars I've seen haven't even stopped on this street."

Will walked back to Travis and told him the news. "He musta jumped off of a car, then," remarked Travis, picking up an old coin. Always lucky to find money, he thought.

"Let's go tell Corvo, then." said Will.