they were now beyond Bleist’s reach.
The only certain piece of information seemed to be that Caim Rocha, the only person of that name from the village north of the town of Bushtabhar, had died as a result of the plague that raged in 1677. Of course, this did absolutely nothing to clarify the identity of the more recent victim. Ultimately, Darius could only put off investigating the matter until he had consulted the City Watch archives.
The other Guardsmen were no luckier either. Through more and less official channels, they gathered information around the city. Not only about the murder, but also about the enclave itself, the governor, the lieutenant, and all manner of rumours. Darius hoped that by casting their net so wide, they might find something useful regarding the other matters they had to attend to. They found out a lot, but nothing they hadn’t known before. Of course, it came as no surprise that the current governor did not enjoy a particularly good reputation and many people spoke of him almost contemptuously. The lieutenant, on the other hand, was spoken of rather neutrally, or not at all. One could get the impression that the military man remained outside the sphere of interest of the town’s inhabitants, or that Murphy was the one attracting all their attention.
Two days of surveillance of the designated contact points for the agents also yielded no results, and they had failed to make contact with the local network. It was a futile hope, given the Azure Guard’s report of no news, but it was always worth a try. Now all that remained was to check the hideouts described in the documents, though finding them was not as easy as Darius would have liked. For security reasons, there was no map with the locations precisely marked, and information on the places used by the agents had been gathered specifically for Darius’s sake. Unfortunately for Bleist, only four were official and, as described, easy to find; the problem began with those that had already been set up by local field agents. With their
