hard to say whether this was caused solely by a sense of brotherhood in arms, or perhaps something more. ‘On the one hand, there are sentries on the towers, so it should be somewhere out of their sight; on the other hand…’
‘He was so badly wounded that the surgeon couldn’t fathom how he’d managed to go anywhere at all,’ Bleist finished for the corporal. ‘I reckon we’ll find plenty of answers here.’ He waved the manuscript.
‘We'll have to ask headquarters to decipher it, and that’ll take a while.’ Rex let out a long sigh. ‘The paperwork alone will drag on, not to mention decoding the document.’
‘Unless Leigher orders it,’ Darius said, tossing the book lightly onto the table. ‘Maybe we can sort it out in a couple of days.’
‘It’s our only lead anyway, and searching blindly for some hole in the savannah will take forever.’
‘And that's just one case.’ Bleist sat up straight and began tapping his fingers on the tabletop. ‘The Rocha murder case has hit a dead end. We’ve no idea what’s going on with it, and the number of questions that have piled up around it far exceeds what I expected. Now we don’t even know who the deceased actually was.’ He shook his head, weighed down by the sheer number of problems that had come crashing down on him. ‘If we don’t find anything in the City Watch archives, our only option is to comb through the entire enclave in search of clues. Ugh, and then there are the Quel-naza, who, according to reports, are running rampant all over Bushtabhar, yet nobody’s seen them here. We’ve got nothing on them.’
‘Could it be that someone’s tampered with the reports, just as they did with those relating to the murder?’ suggested the corporal.
‘A one-off attempt to delay any external response is one thing, but regularly falsifying documents is a serious matter that would quickly come to light.’ Bleist couldn't understand how, in the files of the Azure Guard, which operated under very strict rules and relied on cross-checking data, so much
