The crowd before Drifter, the Regent included, was enraptured as if under a spell.

  No one remained under the illusion that Drifter and Henry Noman were the same person, but he told Noman's tale in a way that made it seem as if he had lurked in Noman's mind. It wasn't that they could confirm every detail, nor that Drifter himself was an authority on the matter. Rather, they had a sense that the truth was rippling out from some deep place in the cosmos and was becoming known through Drifter's voice. It was not a rational feeling, but an odd resonance with the world few had experienced before.

  More than that, though, everyone knew how this story would end: Noman, for some reason none of them yet knew, would kill the elder Regent Edgar Braven. Their trust in Henry Noman had been shattered by the event and further shaken by Drifter's tale, but they still remained unsure how it would reach its gruesome end.

  For my part, I was listening to his voice vibrate through the walls of my cell. The guard and my fellow prisoners gathered as well as they could to listen through my window. That resonance was different for me, as if my knowledge of Noman was scratching at the walls of my brain to escape. I imagine it was flowing to Drifter, allowing him to tell this tale, but his story went well beyond the scope of what I had learned. How many others were filling the gaps in my knowledge? And how?

  I asked the guard to bring me paper and he hurried back with a thick stack and a pen. He recognized as well as I did that we should record as much of this event as possible. Noman's story was one thing; Drifter's telling of it was a phenomenon all on its own.

  Drifter's story continued with Henry Noman musing on how to deal with his cult. The zealots claimed to value law and order, guard supremacy, and severe punishments. But what if he was the criminal?

  He was under no illusion that his words would change anything, or that he was anything more than a figurehead at that point. They had long since departed from reality. In a way, his goal was to bring them back to some semblance of reason, and his idea was to do so by shocking them.

  As far as Noman was aware he was one of the only people aware of the Regent's corruption. In the public's eye the Regent was at worst a neutral figure; he did not intrude on their lives enough to draw their ire, but he also did the bare minimum to improve Beornia. He could be seen as the ideal ruler to some; he was only on the throne as necessary and otherwise he did nothing.

  But Braven was doing something behind the scenes, which gave Noman a justification and an opening. He would use this silent injustice to his advantage.

  His weekly meeting with the Regent started as normal. They discussed reports on crime and arrests, policy discussion, known issues, upcoming concerns, and so on, as they did every week.

  The mood shifted when Henry reported that his guards had raided and cleared out the main hideout of the Hidden Ghost Gang, a group of traffickers they had been trying to track down for years. He said the circumstances of their raid suggested that they knew his guards were coming, so further investigations were warranted. There were not only more of them, but there was a leak in the guard corp.

  This was all partly true. The full truth was that it was a gang that Noman knew was under the influence of the Regent, and he had discussed planning a raid on them with Braven previously. The leak was the Regent himself, and Noman knew it. All he wanted to do was bait his target into the defense of the criminals.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Braven hesitated. An investigation could reveal his connection to the Hidden Ghosts, but so could opposing the investigation too strongly. He had attempted to manipulate the workings of the guards and judges to prevent this, but he had not done enough.

  He ended up putting forth a weak protest: they were small time and not worth the extra effort, they were a waste of resources for a very busy guard corp, they were probably scattered to the winds already. Even Henry, who was looking for this sort of opposition, found it pitiful.

  Noman pushed back. In fact, to escalate the situation, he pushed back too hard. The Regent's pair of bodyguards did not enter the room with them, but they were waiting just outside. They could hear Noman raising his voice at the Regent, which was unusual but not entirely out of character, especially with the increasing stress of dealing with his crazy subordinates. But then they heard the accusation thrown out: "What, do you have something to do with this gang? Were you the one selling little girls to slavers, you son of a bitch?"

  With that Braven was no longer able to keep his cool. He didn't have to take these accusations from a commoner, and an outsider, no less. Lord Braven cared little for the truth of the matter. What was important was that what he said was law, and what Noman did was listen and obey.

  But Noman responded, "Do I need to obey a criminal, a full-on crime lord?" The conversation, if it could still be called that, had become heated enough. Most would say it was boiling over and out of control. The guards outside the room were debating whether they should intervene, as the shouting match had long since passed the point of losing coherence. They were just shouting accusations and insults at each other.

  Had they acted a little faster Noman might have been stopped, and who knows what would have happened to Beorne? But they debated until they heard metal sliding from a sheath, barged in as the Regent screamed, and they only had their own weapons out long after the scream was cut apart by Noman's sword, the Regent's throat sliced open and spewing blood onto the floor.

  Henry turned to the guards and beat them out of the way. While he wasn't known as an incredible swordsman, he was at least better than most of the men under him. He rushed out of the palace, through the inner city gates, through the outer city gates, and then out into the slums where he had a disguise and a horse ready to go. He was far from the city before the chaos settled enough to get a pursuit squad after him.

  The only time he was stopped in his flight was when he passed through the inner city gate, as the news reached those men just as he did. Noman tore through them like a tornado, his blade swinging wildly at anyone in range. It was later clear that he had avoided killing any of the guards; some had broken ribs or limbs, some had deep cuts and painful bruises, but none of them had died. People like Alex took this as a sign of some larger conspiracy, that Noman had some purpose to his actions and had not really betrayed them. They were right, but they failed to get the evidence.

  Lieutenant Even was in on this conspiracy. In the power vacuum left by Noman's departure they planned for him to elevate himself above the other lieutenants, take control of the guard, and oust the zealots. The confusion allowed him a relatively clean coup, with Edgar Braven II promoting him to captain almost immediately after taking the throne.

  Even saw, through Noman and the late Lord Braven, a need to split up the power at the top of Beorne. There were too many ways for it to be abused, and too few mechanisms to recover from said abuse. The new Braven agreed, at least for the Beorne City Guard. Two new captains were selected to serve in rotation, lieutenants had their duties split further to reduce territorial disputes, guardsmen were severely limited in their use of force in their day-to-day patrols, and new investigative branches grew out of the guard corps and the legal system to better get to the truth of Beorne's criminal acts.

  Between Even's leadership, his quiet purge of the criminal guard corps, and Braven's reorganization, the chaos behind the scenes of Henry Noman's tenure as guard captain was at an end. There was an uneasy feeling left with Even, a feeling that there should have been a better way, and that the transition of power had been awfully easy. He was missing something, and he wondered if it had to do with the Regent and his refusal to change the broken power structures that served him directly.

  He wondered this because it was true. In the end, Braven learned too well from his father. And, realizing where Drifter's story was leading, Braven finally ordered its end.