I got a line on a government job from an old Legion contact in Ba'Shel.  Working for the Legions sounded a lot safer than dodging them with the coyote work I'd been doing on the Celen border lately so Chewie and I jumped on the opportunity. 

The meet-up for the job was at the Wanton Mullet, an old brothel in Suulon'Ren with an inside as fine and swanky as the outside is shabby.  I'd heard of the place before.  Its run by an old eunuch named Khalil who has a reputation for doing the Lord General's dirty work.   I was introduced to the rest of the crew there, a veteran legionnaire, a monk, a mage-handler and his pet, a knife-man, a man-whore, and a thug; the usual bunch of misfits, low-lifes, and zealots.

I caught Chewie eyeing the mage-handler’s slave as we made introductions.  Chewie is a lot smarter than other dogs and he knows it.  He can be pretty arrogant about it, except when he’s looking for some action, but he gets especially smug around slave-mages.  He seems to instinctively know he’s superior to them, and I think he finds it funny.

The job, as Khalil explained it, would be bloodier than my usual fare.  A group of rogue-mages had used Lord Cheljuk's daughter Anika to steal some magic items from their place of storage and retreated into the wilderness.  The Lord General's spies had tracked them to Sambat, a village in the west desert.  The job was four-fold, rescue Anika, kill Enrik, the rogue-mage leader, retrieve the stolen items, and help Demir, the mage-handler in the crew, capture any rogue-mages he thought salvageable.  Most importantly, we were told that there should be no witnesses.

The trip through the desert was slower than I'd hoped, and it took us three days to get to Sambat, but getting into the city turned out to be pretty easy.  Khalil had given us a wagonload of linen and dried goods in Suulon'Ren, suggesting that we pose as merchants.  Unfortunately, only an idiot would believe that a crew of armed thugs arriving with a single wagon was anything other than bandits.  So, playing to our strengths, we pretended to be bandits posing as merchants in order to sell our stolen loot.  The locals, with a wink and a nod, were happy to play along and try to cheat us out of our stolen wares.

Settling into the local inn for the night, we each did what we could to gather information; The soldier watched in the way soldiers do, the monk meditated quietly, the bladesman carved on the table and did the same, Demir chatted and looked for signs of rogue-mages, and the man-whore pumped the locals in his own way.  As for myself, I asked the innkeeper to send for a whore.  When she arrived, a slender green-eyed vixen named Loren, I did some interrogation of my own.

Loren was less helpful than I had hoped.  Not surprising since she was no more a whore than I was a bandit.  She was a fair actress and clearly had some experience, but subtle clues gave her away, the hint of fear behind her slattern eyes, a moment of clumsiness with an act a whore would well know.  She was probably just a mage apprentice, sent by Enrik to determine if we were a threat to his little coven.

Aside from spotting a few scars that could have been left by slave collars, we learned little of use that night.  However, we did hear of a monument to some ancient religion on the hill above the city.  Since it was the only lead we had, we decided to check it out in the morning.

The monument, when we found it, turned out to hide the entrance to the lair of the rogue mages.  We spent the morning delving through them, capturing what mages we could.  I’ve seen some terrible things in my time, but watching Demir, the mage-handler, collar and enslave his new pets ranks among the most disturbing.  I’ve coyote’d a fair number of mages across the Celen border over the years and can’t help but think of them as just regular folk born with a curse.  Perhaps that’s why I shrink inside when I think of the way Demir lovingly calmed his captives with a soft voice and careful caresses as he stole their free will.

We found Anika and the stolen magic items in the living quarters, along with Enrik and some of his trusted coven members.  At least one mage escaped during the fight, the crack of his teleport spell echoing through the stone passages, the rest, save Anika, died under our blades.  It was grisly work, but not as grisly as what was to come.    

That last part of the job was the hardest for me; to make sure there were no witnesses.  After we finished in the underground lair, we went door to door, slaughtering the town.  For most, we just barricaded them in their homes and burned them in place; others tried to run and had to be hunted.

I didn’t mind the men and women so much.  They could not have been ignorant of the rogue-mage coven in their village and were, at the very least, guilty of hiding them.  The children, however, were innocent, and I could not bring myself to slay them.  Fortunately, by the time we started killing the townsfolk, the coven was alerted to our presence, and the tell-tale cracks of teleportation spells sounded across the city, taking many of the children with them.

I was nearly an hour into the grisly task when I came across Loren, the woman who had acted as a whore the evening before.  She was in the rough-dug cellar of a small stone building, holding a small scared child.  Pale and exhausted from her magical exertions she was startled by my presence, her voice catching as she mumbled a magical incantation over the child.  Should any mage or inquisitor ever search my memories, or look back upon the events of that moment, surely they would see that it was my own exhaustion, that slowed my hand as she first teleported the child, and then herself away from the blood-soaked city.

The trip back to Suulon'Ren was as boring and uneventful as the trip to the village had been.  Everyone’s mood seemed dark after that bloody day in Sambat, and there was little conversation aside from Demir’s incessant praise and scolding as he trained his new pets.  With little to distract me, my own thoughts were dark as well.  I took this job because I thought it would be easier working for the Legions than sneaking around them.  But with a new weight of souls on my conscience, I’m beginning to wonder if that’s really true.