Free D& D - Greyhawk - Night Watch by Robin Wayne Bailey Page A

conversationally.
    Garett shrugged. “I’ll wait if you care to make inquiries.”
    But neither had any intention of returning to the tavern. Their scarlet cloaks and star-embroidered tunics meant little in the Thieves’ Quarter after dark. They were not afraid. They just weren’t looking for that kind of trouble tonight.
    Just ahead, three more men stepped out of another tavern and halted when they saw the gleam of Burge’s lantern. For an instant, they stared at the pair of watchmen, their expressions surly, and Garett thought there would yet be trouble. One man’s hand drifted toward his sword, and he tossed the corner of his cloak back over one shoulder to make sure the trio saw that he was armed. After a moment more, the three exchanged dark glances and wandered down the street and around a corner.
    “Lower the hood a bit,” Garett told Burge. His lieutenant fingered a small lever on the side of the lantern, and a thin metal panel slid down a few inches over the glass front, narrowing the aperture through which the light shined. The amber pool surrounding them drew in by half, and Garett nodded approval as his eyes adjusted to the new darkness.
    As they walked farther on, the blackness and the silence deepened. Ramshackle tenements rose on either side of them, old wooden structures barely fit for habitation. In a good wind, they swayed and groaned, and timbers could be heard as they cracked under the stress. In Garett’s memory, two such tenements had collapsed without warning. Seven bodies had been found in the ruins of the first. No one had bothered to excavate the other.
    “We’re bein’ watched,” Burge announced in a whisper. Though he continued to face straight ahead, his eyes raked from side to side.
    “Of course,” Garett answered without hesitation.
    The old wooden boards of Kastern’s Bridge creaked softly underfoot as they passed above the shallow waters of the South Stream. The bridge, named for its architect, was one of the oldest surviving structures in all of Greyhawk, dating from the city’s earliest village days. The square-cut stones that made its supporting arches had been quarried and brought all the way from the Cairn Hills by cart and set in place by hand.
    South Stream made a pleasant enough sound in the quiet night, but a mild odor caused Garett to rub his nose. The stream was a narrow, meandering ribbon that actually began at the upper end of the High Quarter, where it was called, logically enough, North Stream. But as it flowed southward, it collected most of the city’s waste and refuse. By the time it passed under the Black Wall, it was quite unsanitary.
    A few of the poorest citizens still drew their water from the stream’s banks and sometimes fished in it for their suppers, a thought that made Garett shudder, since so much of the city’s sewage also emptied into it. Still, he had seen hungry men do worse. He wondered, though, if Greyhawk hadn’t grown too large for its own good, when it couldn’t take better care of its citizens.
    Once across the bridge, they left the Processional and turned up the Serpent’s Back, a twisting, shadowed street that ran diagonally through the Thieves’ Quarter into the Slum Quarter. Ancient warehouses, long unused, rose on either side of them. Dark holes could be seen in the faint moonlight where the roofs had fallen through.
    “Damn!” Burge muttered suddenly, stopping, and lifting one foot. The lantern revealed the look of disgust on his face as he hopped aside and scraped his boot several times on the ground. A noxious odor wafted up from the spot where he had stood a moment before. “Stepped in somethin’,” he added needlessly.
    “Smells like a couple of fools to me,” a gruff voice said from overhead.
    “Come on down,” Garett invited calmly, not bothering to look toward the source. “I was getting tired of listening to you breathe up there.”
    A lithe shadow dropped to the ground in front of him. In its hands it