Tales of Tanlien: Rhiannon - Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The next day I was woken by a shrill-voiced youngster outside my window, accosting my neighbors and me. It was the ungodly hour of just 'fore noon, and I admit to being a little grumpy as I opened the door to the scamp to quiet his screeching of my name at the top of his lung.

He was an ugly little breed, with too much gnome and goblin in him, and that did not help my disposition any. Scowling, I took the message from him, and tossed him a copper pfennig before slamming the door in his sneering face.

The note itself was from Baldur, asking to meet with ASAP. Sighing, I crumbled the paper into a ball and flung it into the fireplace. I used a poker to make sure the ashes were unrecognizable, then headed back upstairs to dress.

A few minutes later, I was out the door and headed to the meet. It only took me a few minutes to realize I had acquired a tail. She was not that good, and as I bent down to adjust a buckle on my boot so I could get a good look at her, I sighed with disapproval. She was overly eager and excited to be on the hunt, and she screamed Gold Lantern in big letters.

It was almost pathetically easy to lose her in the crowd and I ducked into a corner pub to down a pint as I watched her walk past me with a confused look on her face. The pit stop made me late, but it served Baldur right.

When I finally reached Paulen's Emporium, a run-down little pawn shop, Baldur was already red in the face and frothing.

"I said 'ASAP' Tan, not sometime or when you feel like it, but NOW!"

"Can it, Baldur," I said calmly as I walked past the ex-soldier and entered his back room. I plopped myself down in one of his chairs while he followed and sat at his desk in a glower.

"Well?" He demanded.

I shrugged. "I had to hide from a tail in a pub."

Baldur covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head. "And you probably just had to have a drink or two while you were there?"

"Possibly. Didn't anyone ever tell you that knock-outs with pink hair don't make the most inconspicuous agents? Goddess, how could I not see her?" I was enjoying myself now. It was always good to get the upper hand with Baldur to diffuse his massive temper, and pointing out one his new recruit's inefficiencies was a good way to deflect his ire from me to her. I grinned smugly and settled into my chair.

"Well, it was one way to test her, and she was supposed to wear a hooded cloak or a gods-be-damned scarf... did she really go at it with all that blasted hair for everyone to see?"

"Every glorious strand of it."

"Fucking prima donna bards; the lot of you will be my death some day!" Baldur ran the Portico chapter house for the Gold Lantern, a secretive group that collected intelligence on the comings and goings in the Free Cities. Kind of a Neighborhood Watch for the territories, but we weren't blue haired old ladies spying on the neighbors from our window. The main goal was to make sure the Free Cities remained free.

There was a lot of wealth in the territories, and many of the cities sat on some pretty impressive resources, so there was always a danger of either the Tesserae Empire of the Kingdom of Decellos trying to invade, or just as bad, one of the city warlord's trying to annex some of the cities into a kingdom of his own. We kind of like the autonomy the Free Cities enjoy, and we use the intelligence network to maintain it. We rarely take direct actions ourselves, but we do see to it that the information we collect gets into hands of someone who will.

Personally, I think "puppet masters" would be a better name for us then the "Society of the Gold Lantern" but I was never given a vote. The society existed long before I was born, and I entered it after Rhinegar, my old mentor, died. Turns out he had been grooming me all along to take his place in the Gold Lantern. But that's a story for another day.

Anyway, the Gold Lantern used a lot of bards and merchants and people like us because we had greater access to what is going on than most people. Call it a side effect of living life on the road and making coin telling stories. People expect me to be up on current events, and so no one takes it amiss when I probe them for rumors, gossip, or just plain news of the day. I'm supposed to be nosey.

What they don't know is that I distill what I gather and pass it on to Baldur. In turn, he takes all the information his agents gather and passes it on to someone else. Beyond Baldur, I don't know too much of the society's leadership or hierarchy, and that's the way they, whoever they are, like it. Every once in a while, I get specific orders, perhaps to be attentive to particular kinds of rumors, or to make sure a certain scroll with certain information, just happens to find its way into the hands or pockets of a certain warlord or prince or guild leader.

It's a living, and not a bad one, I suppose, if you like excitement, intrigue, and adventure. The only thing that really marred it was the fact that Baldur and I didn't care for each other. But since he was the factor here and Portico, and I had no plans to make any other city my home, we were stuck with each other.

The only times we truly had a problem was when Baldur's goals and mine did not match. Like now.

"Damn you to the Three Hells or whatever primordial cesspit you crawled out of, Baldur!" I was shouting at him, angry at his newest orders. "I am not taking on an apprentice! Not now."

"And I said you are!" Baldur roared right back, nostrils flaring. "And she's not an apprentice, she's your new partner! Junior partner."

She? "Oh no, not her... I'm not babysitting some nobleman's daughter playing spy on a lark. And I don't have time for this; I have business of my own to attend to in--"

"--in Decellos, yeah, I know," he sneered. "About that, I need you to do something for me while you are there."

"What? This is none of the Society's business; it's a personal issue between me and Tovar. Hell, you weren't even interested in him last week."

"Well, we are now." Baldur slumped back in his chair, he choler fading as our tones levels off into guarded animosity. This did not make any sense. Last week, the only thing he knew about Tovar was that he was a Kingdom slaver. Now the Society has a mission there?

"What's changed?"

Baldur rearranged the papers and scrolls on his desk in an unconvincing attempt to stall. It failed. "I forwarded a report about his presence here in Portico to the Society, about him posing as a troubadour, with the regular report. It apparently struck a chord with someone who noticed Tovar had done the same act in a few other cities here in the Territories. One or two of the those other reports mentioned he was asking after a silver haired bard. Named Tanilen, in fact."

He paused to let that sink in a bit as I slumped back in my chair. What the hell?

"There's more. Tovar's dossier back at the Society has a little more in it than our files here have. It appears that for the last six months or so, he has been entertaining some very highly placed members of the Kingdom nobility and perhaps even a minister or two from the government. He's playing a new game now, more than he has in his past. The Society wants you to find out what that is and how it mixes in with his trips to the Free Cities."

I steepled my fingers on my chest as I took in the situation, playing it for all the angles. What was going on here? What was my Rhi involved with? None of this was making any sense to me, least of all where I came into it.

I could almost understand why Rhi was asking after me in the old cities, flattering myself that she wanted to see me again, be with me after all these years, but then why would she leave so suddenly right after finding me? And why would Tovar be helping his mistress find her old lover?

"None of this makes any sense!" I groaned at Baldur as I buried my head in my hands. "First she shows up in my life after ten years, and now the Society thinks there is a grand plot behind it all? Why, for what reason?"

The watcher was edgy. Her superiors would not be happy if she failed in her mission now. That thrice-damned bard had been so easy to keep track of earlier, when he refused to move from that despicable tavern on the waterfront. And the dark-haired ones' house too. She had thought perhaps the bard and the lady were lovers, but he left there and had not returned, going to what she learned was his own residence. But then, today, he had disappeared.

She returned to his home and had waited for him there. Relief flooded through her when he came back, but it was only for a few moments, then he was gone. The watcher easily kept pace with him as he made for the gates on a gray gelding. Good, he was leaving already. It had taken him long enough. Now to just make sure he got where he was going...

Continued in Chapter 4