The Tail and The Bridge

A Niklos Kaunitz Tale

Intrigue was something Niklos was use to. Gangs practiced it. Bosses practiced it. The streets of Marienburg were full of it being practiced.

But the intrigue of “The Institute" was something else altogether. This was Guild and Noble intrigue. The kind of Intrigue Niklos was use to was much simpler with often more brutal ends. Already the members of this Institute had left him charged with a lead lined box of wyrdstone for a couple of weeks. Two weeks longer than he wanted the charge once the contents were no longer speculation. On his part or his “friends" part. 

Niklos's “friends." In the last month, what was simply four citizens of the Empire thrown into a common lot has become service to intrigue in service of more power, with or without wyrdstone or sorcery or the touch of gods, good or ruinous.

Niklos's shoulder and elbow were finally healed after a lightning strike, clearly of sorcerous origin, at “the arcane Turm." The Institute had an Elven name for the “tower." He just called it the Turm. 

The chirurgeon said his arm was broken and for the last month insisted on a splint and sling that left him poorer. It was hard to find the kind of work he was used too: intimidation. A cripple wasn't going to be all that intimidating, especially if that work was to get payment for loans owed or just to loosen or silence tongues. His new limp from a trip on a cobble curb wasn't giving him hope to return to work soon. How he tripped was going to remain a secret in as much as he could keep it one. Others knew, but he could manage their tongues.

Niklos stretched and bent his elbow and swung his arm in a big circle to loosen the tightness that plagued him hourly from the once broken bone. He quickly looked around to make sure he wasn't going to swing his arm into a stranger.

Niklos locked eyes with a woman across the street. He forgot what he was doing, forgot to breathe, forgot to clear his swing, and completeh a few circles, opening and closing his hand. Niklos knew her immediately. Not in an intimate or romantic or even friendly sense of knowing a woman. No, her face was seared into his memory: the last time their eyes met, her's were wrapped in a grey hood of the Red Triangle.

Niklos still didn't fully understand what the Red Triangle was or who would join its ranks of frog worshipping cultists, but they seemed very interested in the Turm and the sorcery of the machines in its highest levels. Seeing the eyes of this woman was enough to remember. Niklos's stare was one that aided him in his profession, “menacing" some called his stare.

The woman turned and started running away from Niklos along the edge of the street. Niklos sprang into a run, squinting at the pain in his ankle, shouldering someone away and immediately pushing another with a sweep of his arm.

A bridge was just ahead, cluttered with market stalls and a few permanent structures that formed archways and made tenements and shops of poor or near poor peasants and journeymen alike, while providing the city's watch gates and bars at either end in times of need. The woman was agile. Hugging the edge of the street she was unimpeded by the crowd that Niklos was pushing himself through or wincing with the stabbing pain of each forced step of the hobbled run he could muster.

Niklos saw an imaginary route to intercept this woman, but she was getting to the archway faster; the crowd nor his ankle were cooperating with him. Niklos heard a wake curses behind him. She turned the corner and he ran head long into men and women channeled by the archway. He could see her, but he was going to lose her. Then she ran into a mountain of a man that grabbed her by both shoulders, almost lifting her.

Niklos felt he had her now. She was yelling something and pointing back toward him, her eyes panicked and wide. The man looked up and saw Niklos simultaneously letting the woman go. She darted around the man and disappeared. Niklos could care less about where the woman went as the giant man was making a straight line to him. 

Something about the man made people clear out of his way, still more seemed to know he was about to use his giant hands and a fight was nigh. Niklos quickly sized up the man and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, wrapped his fist around a pair of knuckledusters. A street fight was more to Niklos's liking. It wasn't like intrigue. It was visceral and questions immediately answered and rarely had lingering outcomes. Rarely.

Niklos slowed, limping a bit as the man now fully intended on putting a stop to the chase. A few calls for blood rang out. Niklos intended on making this a short fight by making this big man fall. Enough street fights taught him a few tricks. And Niklos, some what proudly, was known as someone that could punch well above his height and weight. 

Big men are sure bets versus a limping street thug. There was shout from the crowd. The big man swung and Niklos went under the huge fist and landed a solid blow on the man's inside right knee. Something popped, or snapped, or cracked. Niklos understood little about the body other than when fighting: what hurt and hurt the most. He left everything else barbers and chirurgeons, much like his arm. 

The big man gasped in pain and fell to the broken knee with another painful shout. The crowd gasped. Niklos looked at the man's face, twisted in pain, but there was something else: fear. He was gasping and each gasp came with new pain. The man rolled over in writhing pain, then stopped. Dead still. Dead still in a half crawl, one leg askew, both arms under his chest, and his head extended on his thick neck frozen in a gasping panic.

The crowd ran to the fallen man. Someone shouted a name. Niklos quickly forgot it. He was trapped in a crowd of possible friends to the man he had just killed, unintentionally he noted to himself. A call for the watch was shouted.

Niklos saw only one way out of the crowd and off the bridge, literally off the bridge. Niklos limped quickly to the bridge's edge and barely had time to assess his next actions or remember he could not swim. The canal water looked about 15 feet down. A short dinghy that was pushing itself on a tiller could only have placed there by Ulric himself. Niklos's fall from the edge of the bridge could not be mistaken for a jump and landing on his back atop large folds of oil cloth was more accidental than maximum effort.

Niklos's vision blurred. Someone looked over the edge of the bridge just as the dinghy slipped beneath its arch. Niklos gasped to catch his breath and rolled over, falling between the oil cloth and dinghy's gunwale. The pilot looked at him with a surprise but continued plying the dinghy in the current. A rock, thrown from the bridge, splashed next to the dinghy. Some shouting, more objects, including a shoe that fell into the bilge, were thrown at the dinghy that now caught in the rush of water between the pilings. The pilot pressed on, waving to Niklos to keep his head low. Niklos followed his orders.

Intrigue seemed to remain interested in Niklos. Descriptions of the limping and bearded murderer would circulate and he would have to lie to a lot of people, “It wasn't me."

fin

A typical Marienburg bridge on the canals with markets.