How many of these guys are there going to be? thought Deputy Springfield, looking at the two men in their opposite cells thoughtfully. They didn’t seem to hold any animosity towards each other, except when one spoke the other always contradicted him, with the condescending tone of a schoolteacher who has just been given a wholly wrong answer to a simple equation. He was just there to observe, in theory. But sheriff Racul had been out a while, and left no word when she would be back, so he had taken to amusing himself.
“Beanpole!” he said, and the Tall Messenger sat up straight. “What colour is the sky today?”
“The sky is green to-day!” said the tall man jauntily. The Blue Messenger, pacing up and down his cell with a ferocious energy, leapt to the bars and rattled them.
“Wrong!” he shouted, then composed himself theatrically. A slight smile appeared on his lips as he declared: “In fact, the sky is grey. It is merely the reflection of the land that makes it appear green.” He gave a self-satisfied chuckle, and sat down.
“You guys really seem to have your facts in order,” said Springfield. “What is the Darklanders’ agenda?”
“War!” said the tall man cheerfully while, at the exact same moment, his opposite number declared: “Peace!”
“Having fun, Springfield?” said the sheriff, the door swinging shut behind her with a clatter.
“No sir!” said the deputy, standing to attention. “Terminally bored sir!”
Sheriff Racul smiled. “Good man. Keep it that way.” She sat down at her desk and opened the top drawer. On top of a stack of papers sat a small hand crossbow, all sleek and black and carbon fibre. It looked like death. She took it out and held the grip in her long slim spidery fingers. A little parcel of bolts, tiny things really, not much more than the size of needles, lay next to it.
She tucked the bow into her overcoat. “I’m going out,” she said to Springfield. “Don’t wait up.”
The deputy nodded. He was used to orders like this. Come to it, he thought Rania reckoned him as quite simple-minded. That was fine by him. Plenty of free time.
The sheriff rose out of her chair, the coat spreading out like a bat’s wings as she made her way for the door again.
“So long, boss,” said the deputy cheerfully. “Missing you already!”
But she was already gone. Springfield chuckled to himself.
“So you fellows can’t agree on anything at all?” he said. To his surprise, both men shook their heads.
“No you can’t, or no you can?”
One of the men, the tall one, extended a finger and beckoned him closer. Springfield laughed to himself. Now who was simple-minded? He was about to blow this case wide open. That didn’t seem simple-minded to him.

“Have you heard? The merchant caravan from Iron Valley is late. Probably got waylaid by the Darklanders,” said an old man to Dr Argo as she wheeled him out of the surgery.
“I’m sure they’re fine. It’s perfectly normal to be a bit delayed, Mr Volgo,” said the doctor. Volgo lit his pipe and laughed.
“It may be, but these ent exactly normal circumstances!” he said. “I can take it from here, doc. I’m not completely useless.”
He rose out of the chair on his many spindly limbs and carried himself away, turning over and over slowly.
“Poor man. His inner ear is a complete mess,” remarked Argo to Kin as she went back into the office.
“It must be hard listening to your own spleen all day. I know mine hasn’t had an intelligent thought in ages,” said Kin. She glanced down at the logbook and remarked: “Deputy Springfield should be in next, for you to look at his Blodwick’s.”
Argo nodded. “Have I got time to change?” she said. Kin shrugged.

An hour passed with no sign of Springfield. More.
“He’s probably forgotten, or that sheriff has got him out running around and he’s gotten confused,” said Kin as Argo paced up and down the waiting room, looking up every time someone walked up the street outside.
“Maybe,” said Argo. “But I don’t like to leave an appointment unfulfilled. I have a duty to the people of this town.” Kin rolled her compound eyes. She’d heard this one before. Argo snapped her fingers. “That’s it,” she said. “I’m going to go find him and drag him here if I have to. I can’t with the waiting any more.”

Rania Racul strolled along the road at the edge of town, feeling the comforting reassurance of the bow stowed in her coat. It was a hot, cloudy day, the sky a cool green, although dark clouds on the horizon heralded a storm down the line. Whether it would be for them or some other poor town she couldn’t identify yet, but she could see fractal arcs of lightning splashing from cloud to cloud, electric blue-purple and hyperactive. The town lookout would have caught that, so there was no need to report it, but she kept a note of it mentally to keep Springfield indoors if it did come their way.
A man was walking towards her from the next street, short and rotund. He had large, wet amphibian eyes, and Racul recognised him as one of the volunteer guard that the mayor had established to keep a watch over the southern half of town. She raised her hand and gave an informal little wave, which he mirrored. What was his name?
“Out a-patrolling?” said the amphibiman. His eyes slowly rolled around to make contact with her. Racul nodded. “Aye aye, things are strange around here so I hear. Buddy of mine says that there’s a Silence in the eastern woods that seems unholy to her. I don’t know about that kind of thing. You think it might be worth a look?”
“I don’t know,” said the sheriff, looking out past the border of the town. This wasn’t a road out of town, just an edge, practically unmarked. It just stopped. When the place had been smaller, apparently there had been a wall, a wooden palisade. Now they didn’t have enough wood to encircle the place if they had wanted to. Walls were becoming unfashionable these days anyway. Towns were getting big enough that the Bad Companies were losing interest in raiding them and just raided the caravans going between them. Mutetown still had their high stone walls, but they were the only ones Racul could think of.
Not that walls would save them, from what she had heard of the Darklanders.

Nobody had seen Springfield, or nobody Argo talked to at least. She had been around the bar; Monte’s Smithy; Ganymede the tailor’s, and the southern lane markets, and nobody had anything useful to tell her until one man remarked, off-hand:
“Did you check the station?”
Of course she hadn’t. She thanked the man and jogged off, trying not to let him see her rapidly reddening cheeks.
She knocked on the door once under the sign of the sheriff’s office. It was windowless and silent. No answer was forthcoming. She knocked again, and shouted: “Springfield! Are you in there?” and rattled the handle. To her surprise, it wasn’t locked like it usually was. She pushed, and the door opened with a slow creak. She heard something scurry away from the light, and peered into the dark room within. Someone had covered the only window in the front of the office with a sewn-together sheet of rags that blotted out the rusty sunlight near-perfectly.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could pick out more of the room: the desk, the file cabinets, the two doors – one on each inside wall of the corner room that she now stood in. Both led into the same back room, she knew, that led into the cells of the gaol. One was slightly ajar.
As she walked past the desk, she noticed a sheet of paper laid out on the top with a hurried scrawl on it. It said: HELP ME.
She shoved through the half-open door and into the black back room. The sheriff’s desk was here: it looked down over the cells in the back of the building. She could hardly see a damn thing. She went to the window, covered by another makeshift blackout blind of sewn-up rags, and tore it open, letting an orange evening shaft of light in that sliced through the black.
The material in her hands was familiar: it was from the clothes that the messengers had been wearing. It was also wet, slick with coppery bluish blood.
There was a groan from the cells. Argo ran down the steps two at a time and through the cells, looking from one to the next frantically. There! She spotted the body, a sprawled, pathetic form in the shadows at the back of one of the cells. The door was hanging open. There was blood on his shirt. It was Springfield.