Chapter 72: Chapter 72 – Steady Hand

There were a lot of things that I missed about my old world. Having well-insulated buildings, running hot water, not having to walk everywhere – but the biggest thing that always threw me for a loop was trying to get in contact with someone. I was used to having the whole word in my pocket. A phone that could reach anyone, anywhere, anytime. This world didn’t have mobile phones. If you ever needed to speak with someone there were only a few ways to catch their attention. You send them a letter and hope that the local post office receives it, you send a courier to their home with your message, or you look for them and grab them while they go about their day-to-day business.

I didn’t have a PO box. I was always moving from city to city. Nor did anyone have any reason to send me mail. I wasn’t going to pay the monthly fee for something I wasn’t going to use. If I wanted to see Vincent again, I needed to make myself obvious and hang around where his men could be found. I posted myself on the last safe road between the poor and middle-class district, grabbing a pale of cider from a tavern and waiting outside.

I counted. It took an hour from my arrival until someone collared me.

He was a big burly bloke with a shaved head and a face like a slapped arse, “Hey, you’re Ren, right?”

“Who’s asking?” I already knew who was asking. He was wearing one of the Well’s Street armbands around his bicep.

“Vincent wants your help with another job. Nothing complicated. Told me and some of the others to come look for you.”

I rested my empty tankard against the windowsill and stepped forward from the wall. “I’ll hear him out.” The gangster escorted me through one of the nearby alleyways and into the lower district. Vincent wasn’t far away – he was sitting on the step of a small house squeezed between two other buildings. It was so narrow that three people couldn’t stand side by side in front of it. Was this his place?

As always there was a burning stick clenched between his cracked lips, “Hey buddy. Am I lucky to see you again.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“A little bit of the old intergang rivalry. We’ve been scoping a warehouse that the Fernwell boys have been working out of. Been planning to do a hit and grab some of their stuff for a while now, but the guy we put in charge wants another thief on the job. When he heard you were in town and that I already knew you, he begged me to come grab you.”

I thought back to what Cass told me when I met her in the tavern the day before. Was this the big robbery job that Darrin was trying to get off the ground? “It’s Darrin, right? I know him. He was getting his feet wet a few months ago in Exarch’s Bend.”

Vincent laughed, “Oh, is that the case? He told us that he’d done a lot of work before.”

“Rogues start stealing as soon as they have a set of working fingers. But he’s new in comparison to me.”

“I guess that’s why he was so insistent on bringing you along. His boss told him that you were in town, and he got all doe-eyed about it.”

“Cass pitched it to me, but she didn’t tell me it was for you. He’s already set everything up?”

Vincent blew a thick cloud of smoke up into the air through his nostrils, “Yeah. He’s got everything. Guard patrols, floorplans, escape routes. Shouldn’t be too tough. They’re trying to hide it from the guardsmen, so they don’t wanna’ draw attention to themselves with heavy security.”

And in a town like this those guards would know the names and faces of the regular criminals. If you posted a thug outside the door, that’d arouse enough suspicion to get the place searched. If what was inside was illegal you could say goodbye to a lot of money. I didn’t know what this other gang was sitting on.

“What’s the story? Just doing it to screw with them?”

“Sure. We’ve been trading shots with each other for years now, but some rumours started getting out that they’ve got something very expensive in there. Darrin managed to get it out of some guy that it’s medicine they smuggled in from Sull.”

“Sull?”

“With the war going on trade’s been cut between the Federation and the Kingdom, got me? Turns out that the people making potions in Sull were selling them over here because there ain’t enough demand back home. A bunch of those alchemists got drafted when the war kicked off, and all of their stock got dumped onto the market at discount prices. Some crazy bastards went over there and bought a bunch, and snuck it through the fighting. The profit margin should be pretty crazy.”

 I scratched the back of my head, “Why the hell is there no demand for healing potions in Sull?”

“I don’t know. I heard from some people that the Sull army has a bunch of trained healing mages that handle that sorta’ thing. Could be a load of old bullshit, as far as I know. Bottom line is, if half of that building is filled with them, we want to get our hands on them.”

I suppose that made some sort of twisted sense. Economics wasn’t an entirely rational animal in the first place. Whatever the reason, the medicine was here. It had been so long since I had broken into a building that I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. I had so many other priorities going on in my life recently. It sounded like a nice palette cleanser, plus another great opportunity to curry some trust with Vincent.

I wanted to push him for details on William’s enlistment papers. Asking him about the blackmail randomly now would make him suspicious, I needed to steer our discussion in the right direction. “Alright, sounds like a good job. Bit of a change from fixing fights though, isn’t it?”

He laughed, “Yeah, yeah. None of us know the first thing about breaking into somewhere proper like you do. That’s why we asked for Darrin’s help in the first place. He’s been showing us the ropes, and he’s taking the lead when we actually pull it off.”

“You’re in good hands. Especially if you have me with you as well.”

I hadn’t worked with Darrin yet. I was just saying it to keep the conversation moving. Even the most experienced rogue could be a liability if he had a bad attitude. Hopefully Cass had drilled some humility into the guy after I left the Bend.

“You’re in?”

“I’m in.”

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Vincent rubbed his hands together gleefully, “Fantastic. We’re gonna’ make off like bloody bandits from this. Darrin’s actually back at one of the safehouses right now, you doing anything?”

Aside from deceiving you? “No. Lead the way.”

The safehouse was a minute’s walk from where we were. It was an unassuming looking residential building, with curtains drawn over every window to keep people from peering inside. We ascended the steps and entered through the front door. The main landing was half-occupied by a stack of crates and boxes. They’d occupied the living room with a large circular table, which was covered with notes and a map of the warehouse.

Before I even had time to acclimatise myself, Darrin was reaching out and shaking my hand. “Ren! Great to see you again. Cass was worried sick about you.”

“Hey Darrin. Hope you’ve been keeping yourself busy.”

“That I have. Let me give you the lowdown on this job.” He motioned to the map that had been placed onto the table. The warehouse was located on the corner of one of the city’s many public squares. That meant there was a large open area out front with little coverage. Behind it was a dense cluster of homes and businesses that formed a tangled jungle of streets and side roads. Red sewing pins had been placed around the perimeter of the warehouse.

“These marks here are where the guards are posted. Judging from how many come in and out when the shifts change, I think we’ll have four on the outside and two on the inside.”

All in all, it was some very high-quality work. Darrin had clearly erred on the side of caution, meticulously prepared and studied their defences. I rapped my fingers against the table and leaned in to get a closer look, “What are you going to do about the guards?”

Vincent explained, “We don’t wanna’ kill nobody. Too much heat from their friends and the guards if we do. Darrin said that we can knock them out cold and tie them up inside. I don’t rightly know how that works myself.”

“To knock somebody out you have to cross a certain threshold,” Darrin explained, “It’s based on how much HP you have, and how strong and frequent the blows are. Putting it simply; say you got a guy with fifty HP - twenty percent of that is how much he can take before he loses consciousness. Since non-lethal weapons do less damage, you’d need to clobber him good.”

“Never heard of that,” Vincent said.

“Well, your average ‘mortal’ can only push their HP so high. In fact, the numbers are so low that most people don’t even try to calculate it. You take a bad hit from a weapon, or you get floored by a trained fighter, it doesn’t matter much what that threshold is. We’re weak versus some of the nasty things that are out there in the wild.”

Vincent didn’t get what Darrin was saying. A normal human’s HP was so low that the real value of that factor was almost irrelevant in all situations. Even me, with my hugely buffed stats, could only take so much punishment thanks to the twenty percent rule. It was easier for someone to knock me out than to kill me. A trained pugilist striking me a few times in the face was overkill. I didn’t fancy my chances being hit with a blackjack either.

It was an absurd thing to think about – that something as varied as being left unconscious could be drilled down to a loose rule like that. It was more complicated than what Darrin had said. There was a diminishing return factor with increasing HP pools, plus the interference of some types of armour that could soften blunt attacks.

“I… guess,” Vincent offered with a shrug.

Darrin sighed, “It’s not important. Just hit them really hard with the blackjack and drag them off before someone notices.”

There was no guarantee that anybody would report an ongoing robbery. People were extremely callous. Running halfway across the city to find a guard on duty was too much effort. When crime was happening all the time around here, people were less likely to give a damn. As long as it isn’t their property that’s being stolen. People brawling in the street was also regarded as a ‘not my’ problem.

He carefully placed yellow pins next to the guards, “Me and Ren can handle these two out front. The others are isolated and should be easier to clean up. When we’ve taken care of them and tied them up – we can take our time looting the place.”

Vincent nodded, “I already have boys on standby to ferry the stuff outta’ there. Like a well-oiled machine.”

“A machine?” Darrin repeated.

“You know, like one of those fancy arse printing presses. The workhouse lads say that all the time. It’s when something is going real easy.”

“Oh, okay.”

I snickered to myself. These guys would shut down if I told them about half of the technology that they could look forward to in the future. It was odd how the people working on them came up with the exact same turn of phrase as my old world though.

“Ren, are you in?”

“Yeah, I’m in.”

“Great.” Darrin looked me up and down and frowned, “By the way – why the hell are you dressed like you’re going to war?” We still had time to chat before we went for the job. I reached over and grabbed him by the shoulder.

 “Do I have a story to tell you.”

 With some details excluded, obviously.

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