Arian Guard Found Dismembered

Stock in trade, not keeping to the safe ways, and now that he had all the women from the den hidden away, he had a job to do. Portia was one of them, and he'd placed her in one of the guest rooms, even if she wasn't permitted to sleep on the couch there. It had a fireplace, which he'd lit himself, then directed her to sleep. Madeline, already in his couch, he gave her the same instructions.

When the house was well settled, he made his way back out into the streets, and to the shop. Getting his work cart from the back alley, and slipping into a guise he'd worn when Natali had been poisoned, he and Strophe seeking a cure from the apothecary's own companion. From there, he made a few more stops that had nothing to do with his eventual mission, just stops to throw someone off if they happened to notice a slightly stooped figure in tattered brown dregs of clothing with crooked hands, and a worn out old brown hat.

Then, he was on to the former Boarding House where he had located Portia. The same guard was there, taken down by a dose of capture scent to the face, something the Scribe had learned how to do with stealth back in his Port Kar days. With the fellow out, he was dragged into the cart the Scribe had rolled there from the shop. Collapsing the man's limbs into the cart, and covering him up, he was rolled to one of the various hatches that were a mainstay of Scribe's nocturnal activities. Pulling the other man out of the cart once the hatch was open, the thing closed off in his wake. Getting him down the metal rungs was difficult, but nothing he hadn't ever done before.

Into the nearest chamber he took the guard, who was beginning to stir. With the need for more haste apparent, he strapped the man down on the table in permanent residence in the chamber. By the time he was groggily awakened, the Scribe had already embedded a stave between his teeth, and injected him with enough agent that he could not move a muscle. Feel, yes, but not move even enough to flinch. Time of the essence, the Scribe had to make shorter work of him that he would have liked, because he still had other stops to make before he could return to Stylus.

By the time the night was over, and Scribe had returned to his couch, pieces of the guard had been deliberately distributed to various locations in the city. His head, and heart, to the main city clinic for identification purposes. His arms and legs, outside the garrison, as if to allow his sword arm to continue in service to the city. His torso, to one of the stadiums, muscles taunt from the agent in a way that replicated the man's anatomy in sparring. The remainder of his vital organs, as well as what would prove he had once been a man, attached to the sign that hung over the paga den in a plain rence bag.

Of course, his eyelids were missing from the head.