Options

As soon as he’d left Haywood’s shop, Cowan dropped his façade of boisterous enthusiasm and nonchalance and adopted a more serious expression instead as he began considering the situation that he’d just managed to get himself into.

Normally, he would simply allow someone else, like Haywood, to point him to either a person wealthy enough to be afforded the honour of having Cowan show up and steal a few of his belongings, like for instance Kynon Trelawney earlier that night, or an object that either possessed such extraordinary value that it could be sold on the black market or which a particular client wanted to have into his or her possession, but now Cowan would have to conduct something like a proper investigation, sorting through rumours and gently prodding those connections that he had, all in the hope of coming up with a few good leads. And since the Kettle was a place where rumours tended to be passed around, as well as where the more attractive of his connections were located, Cowan seriously considered paying that particular part of Tharros a visit.

Still, Cowan objected as he began moving back out towards the wider streets beyond the Artisans’ quarters, the Kettle was a fairly volatile place at the moment, and had been so ever since two weeks ago, when Gore, a leading figure of Tharros’ criminal classes and a first-rate bastard, had been found bobbing about face-down in the harbour and with a knife sticking out of his back. There hadn’t been too much bloodshed yet, as Gore’s old enemies and allies, two groups between which the border was not exactly crystal-clear, had been too busy positioning themselves for the coming struggle to take control of as much as his criminal empire as possible, and his old “clients” instead trying to come up with ways in which to preserve their newly won freedom or at least find a new master more willing to cut them a fair deal, but only a fool would think that the near future didn’t hold some bloodshed and **** in store for the denizens of the Kettle.

And then Hayward had mentioned something about there being even more disturbances in the Kettle. The old man would have said something if it had been related to the vultures squawking over Gore’s financial empire, but then maybe he didn’t know enough about it to tell Cowan whether or not that was the case. The old man had never been particularly fond of fanciful speculations, which was probably another reason why he’d gotten to live to enjoy his retirement as best he could, which sometimes looked hard enough to do to make Cowan seriously consider dying young, so if he said that these new disturbances might have something to do with the missing whatchamacallit, then there might actually be something to what he was saying.

Reaching one of the larger streets and walking past a group of watchmen coming the other way without him looking at them or them looking at him, Cowan considered the fact that he’d have a hard time asking questions about the crosier and its whereabouts to most of his contacts. If he discounted the ones that he didn’t have at least of modicum of faith in, that left a relatively small group of mostly women, the majority of which were whores, who would probably have a lot of hearsay to share with him, but little substantial information. The fences that he knew were likely to know even less, particularly when whoever had stolen the crosier was unlikely to be dumb enough to try and sell it just like you would a common trinket.

Which brought Cowan to the possibility of reflecting on his competition and which one from amongst them that might have been able to succeed in actually getting inside the Keep undetected, get hold of the crosier, and get back out again and still not have been detected. The number of people that could pull of a stunt like that couldn’t be all that big, and he might get lucky if he tried finding if any of them had any history of working for people whom could be considered as deserving a place on the list of Horny Hugo’s enemies, amongst which the Trelawneys would rank high.

“Heh,” Cowan grinned at the thought of going back to see Fiorenza again and perhaps pump her for some more information.