The warehouses

“Getting to the warehouse,” You continue on, as the thought hits you once more that you and your men might very well be chasing a mirage. Still, its what you all agreed on after listening to Miltos tell you about it. Even Attalus is in on it, despite raising quite a few objections, moral as well practical.

Miltos was one of your oldest friends, having fought alongside you ever since you first found yourself having become a mercenary, and his **** as a result of a wound sustained in the skirmishes that preceded the siege of Athenapolis was a sad occasion, from which even your copious previous experience of it couldn’t shield you. You recall the two things that he told about you as the infected wound sapped him of his strength, focusing now on the latter of these as you consider the supposed contents of the warehouse.

“You know what I think of it,” Attalus remarks, being careful not to go too far in his questioning of Miltos’ motivations behind telling you about it.

“Yes, I do,” You try not to be hostile to Attalus, particularly since you know that he was as fond of Miltos as you were. And to a somewhat lesser extent, you share his reservations, brought on by Miltos first revealing that he had a daughter in Athenapolis, about which he hadn’t told you before, and then going on tell you about how he’d once served as the right-hand man of one the city’s leading merchants, an unscrupulous nobleman who had made much of his profits through the usage of hidden cellars located underneath several of his warehouses. It wasn’t so much that he used these cellars for storing what he’d smuggled into the city, as to store that which he then smuggled out of it and sold elsewhere.

From how Miltos described it, this nobleman, Prokopios Corippus, had essentially taken control of Athenapolis’ underworld and was using his control of it to buy up the finest items stolen or robbed from his fellow nobles and then sell them elsewhere after having first had them smuggled out of the city. Through the stranglehold that he was supposed to have over Athenapolis’ seedier elements, Corippus had found it easy to buy at prices that were low even by fences’ standards, and Miltos claimed to have served as the leader of the hired muscle that both protected Corippus’ criminal interests and employed violent means to get their hands on whatever stolen goods that some other fence had been unfortunate enough to buy before he had a chance to do so first.

“Anyway, Attalus, it’d be true to form for the old bastard to leave us with the means to make ourselves ridiculously wealthy men as his last act upon this earth, even if it means getting in the way of some spectacularly crazy bastard son of some tight-arsed toff and his equally toffy missus,” Peleus cuts in, with his usual verbal flair.

From what Miltos told you of Corippus, he seems like a proper nutter, apparently being driven into a life of crime by a combination of craving excitement and a desire to prove that his superior blood means that he can outsmart any and all crime-bosses of a more proletarian stock. What’s more, this Corippus has apparently decided to hold onto some of the finest pieces of stolen art and other valuables that have come his way, and is supposed to be using one of the hidden cellars as a sort of treasure chambers.

“Still, it’s a bit strange, him not telling us about his daughter till the end,” Peleus’ follow-up remark is provided with considerable gravitas through its complete lack of expletives, a rarity for him.

“I guess he had his reasons,” Telamon replies, not letting his gaze leave the houses and street-corners laid out in front of you. Miltos was a few years older than you, and you’ve always known that he’s never been as big a spender as some of your fellow mercenaries, but you’ve always scratched it down to him stashing some money away for the eventuality that he’d get to live to be too old for your particular trade, so the revelation that he had a daughter that he’d been supporting financially was a bit of a surprise.

Miltos only told you all these things about the supposed wealth that awaits you after he’d first made you promise that you would do everything in your power to save his daughter, and the risk that Attalus has alluded to time and time again is that Miltos either invented or grossly exaggerated the extent of the wealth hidden away underneath what are ostensibly a group of normal warehouses. He might always have been good enough at telling the truth during the time that you served together, but even if he was telling the truth about Corippus, it’s been years since Miltos left Athenapolis, for undisclosed reasons, and things might very well have changed. You recognize the name of Prokopios Corippus as being that of the head of one of Athenapolis’ poshest noble families, but he might have gone legit, and gotten rid of his secret depositories. At the moment though, the pressing concern remains getting to Miltos’ daughter. From what he told you, she should be of eighteen or nineteen years of age, and at this time and in this city, a woman that age could do with a few men around to protect, even if she does turn out to have inherited her father’s looks.

“Sol,” You’re stirred from your thoughts by one of your men saying the shorthand version of your name.