Torris Corozad is perhaps the most talented weapons expert and swordsmith that her country has ever seen. She is also the leader of a band of runaways and vagabonds that hides out in an abandoned monastery on the border between two rival countries.
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K E L L E N T A R R H A D B E E N carving a man's knuckles out of the flesh of his right hand when the alarm bells began clanging through the streets of Duinthraul.
They were loud and piercing, echoing across every nearby building and alleyway, causing the inhabitants of the overcrowded city to drop whatever they were holding and to shove their fingers into their ears.
Not that that would do much. The bells were much too loud to be blocked out by such a simple gesture.
The only other time Kellen could remember hearing their ringing was when he was very young, indeed, back when the Apietans were still bold enough to venture close to the northern border. He had no earthly idea as to why they were being rung now, but he was going to find out.
He dropped the still slightly warm hand that he had just now severed from a thief whose body was now blocking the cobblestone street. He put the two large knuckle bones he had managed to salvage into a pouch at his waist and turned toward the center of the city. He briefly considered dragging the body to a back alley somewhere, but dismissed the idea as soon at it had come to him. The man was likely too heavy for him to be able to move with ease, and besides, another bloody corpse in the streets of Duinthraul was not an altogether uncommon sight.
The bells continued to sing out their panic-inducing alarm as Kellen wiped some blood on his breeches, unsure of whether it was his or the thief's. He turned his boots toward Duin-Carr, the fort that lay in the geographical center of the city. Duinthraul itself was designed like one huge stronghold, with an impossibly tall, extremely menacing outer wall, dotted with watchtowers, cannons, and gun turrets around its roughly circular border. Houses, shops, restaurants, brothels, and pubs- the structures which preserved the life of the city- were on the inside, and in the center, immediately outside the walls of the fort of Duin-Carr, was the inner city. This was where the barracks, armories, training facilities, and dormitories of The Warchief's Guard lay, their architecture blunt and decidedly not decorative.
Kellen was headed directly for the Fort. He needed to determine what the situation was, quickly, and then he wished to figure out if he stood to gain from it.
As he approached the soaring vertical planes of Duin-Carr, he pondered his plan of attack. Normally, he wouldn't bother with the guards and watchtowers, and instead would simply scale the wall and drop into whatever room he needed to visit. This is how all of his torrid affairs with various former Chiefs had worked.
However, the walls of the most impregnable fort in Ebellum, in the center of its most heavily defended city, had not been constructed to be scaled by mere murderers. Besides, Kellen didn't even know why the alarm had been triggered, so he wasn't sure where to start looking.
Through the front gate he would go, then.
As luck would have it (or wouldn't, for that was to be determined by the outcome of this interaction), Prett Balge, a man who ran in the same gambling circles as Kellen, was milling about the fortifications in front of the portcullis. He supposed that must mean that Prett was on guard for the day, though he didn't know what kind of blithering fool would employ Prett to keep watch over anything. He was a renowned pickpocket and drunkard, however, he didn't have a severe criminal record, as far as Kellen knew, and he mused that that was about the best an employer could ask of you in Ebellum.
