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Like most problems, it starts with a corpse.
A few more steps into the village and a few more eyes around, and a weird squiggle in the distance in the middle of the road resolves itself into a chair. A table. What looks like a plate, loaf of bread on it, and one un-tapped mug of something frothy.
And a woman, fallen sideways, slipped off of the chair and laying face down on the dusty ground. She does not move. Edward eyes Zivka who eyes Scarlett who checks on Martik and everyone feels like they don't want to be the first one to walk any closer.
The scent is heady here, in the village cross-roads. Bread. Cookfire. Smoke. This whole town has the subtle scent of a bakery in the morning. Did they all spend all their time making those loaves? Why not eat them?
Zivka knows it. It clicks, like the flint of a musket striking home. The <span class="mu-i">hounds</span> - it's been downwind. They've been lured here by the scent and trace of food in the air. And then someone(s) treated them to a meal of arrows.
One of the scraghounds whine loudly and paw at the door of the larger building to the groups right. The old one, the one the Commander rented - village wasn't using it for anything but tool storage, so we bought a few meters of ground and some out of the wind shelter for supplies. There should be six clerks here and six more guards. There <span class="mu-i">isn't</span>. And Edwards hoped for market day hasn't rolled around either.
There's a tension in the air. Something fragile, beneath the wind and the silence, the bubbling of potential.
Wait, hear that? The woman - she just moaned. She's still alive!!
Somehow the distance from here to her seem vaster than it should be. Dangerous. Which is a mite peculiar; this is only a small town in the middle of nowhere far and there shouldn't be danger here. But you're sweating profusely, the lot of you, despite the easy road down the way.
One of the troopers glance at the rooftops and glance down at the dead dogs, arrows punctured through their fur. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. What are the odds those hounds sprouted arrows as a peculiar odd costume for a festival? Low. No. Someone's been hunting them as they come in, lured by the trace of feast in the wind.
No one is here now, of course. So it should be safe to step out into the middle of the crossroad...
