[h2]Tyaethe[/h2]

The vampire kicked her feet against the stonework, letting out a giggle at the segue into discussing their hair of all things. Not that she had any room to talk, if anyone was ever going to be condemned for fighting with truly impractical hair... although, if she was going to play it safe, it would all be buried beneath armour anyway, so maybe she [i]did[/i] have room to speak. Although the hair thing was entirely coincidental as a result of how it [i]worked[/i]...

So, this girl was a mercenary of some description? Someone had paid for her to come out here, and she had arrived [i]before[/i] them... which meant someone had an idea what was going on before the last guard managed to drag his body over to Aimlenn. 

The obvious guess would have been that the mercenaries were responsible for the destruction of the fort garrison but that seemed completely random. Who stood to gain anything by getting one of the fort garrisons violently cleared out? It wouldn't be hard to replace them, just clean up the bodies and wash away the blood; the crown could have it garrisoned again by the end of the week. It wouldn't be any good for smuggling, since that wasn't even the [i]point[/i] of the various forts surrounding the city. Nor could it be because a noble wanted to disguise troop movements long enough to siege the city proper--that was the sort of thing that had been done before, but if it [i]was[/i] the case, it would already be blatantly apparent, since the window of opportunity was so small.

That would mean whoever hired the mercenary knew [i]why[/i] the garrison had been wiped out, before it had ever happened. They knew that something was going to happen to the garrison and... didn't warn them? That didn't make much sense, if you were going to do something to stop all of the slaughter, it should have been easy to send a message ahead so the garrison was at least prepared and didn't leave the gates handily open to welcome their own killer. If the goal was to prevent the garrison from being destroyed by persons unknown, then the mercenaries would have already left as their job was over.

That also still meant that someone would have wanted to kill everyone in this unremarkable fort, and the way the bodies were arranged had [i]none[/i] of the hallmarks of the sort of dark magic that would take advantage of a thing like that. You could even rule out something like one of the most monstrous vampires going on a hunger-induced rampage--they or other monsters would have left a lot less blood and discernible corpses strewn around.

But the mercenaries were still hanging around when they got there--and, unless it was a band of one, the rest must be inside the fort. If they were looking around inside, they had to expect to find [i]something[/i], didn't they? So either their employer was simply taking advantage of an expected apparently-pointless massacre to engage in some petty robbery that couldn't possibly cover the cost of employing a mercenary band in the first place [i]or[/i] the destruction of the fort's garrison was just some other sign of what they were really here for. Since their employer hadn't seen fit to send a warning or tell anybody else and the band was still looking around, either they really didn't want anybody else to know what was going on and beat them in an unknown race, or... this was an accident? Maybe both, if the mysterious employer had thought the warning an unnecessary compromise of secrecy over a [i]maybe.[/i]

"Sharky, what are you looking for?"