Chapter 120: The City Watch

The three Beast fangs found beneath sacks of charcoal led Darric to a problem much larger than one wagon.

By the following afternoon, the Watch had traced the shipment back through the western storage yard, questioned teamsters, checked warehouse rentals, compared gate records, and discovered that at least four suspicious wagons had left Althoff during the previous two weeks. None had declared Beast materials.

Two had carried charcoal, one timber offcuts, and another empty grain barrels supposedly being returned to a merchant outside the territory.

Darric spread the records across Raymond’s desk and tapped the repeated names with one finger. "They aren’t stealing everything from one place, my Lord. Some materials appear to come from hunters selling privately before inspection. Others may have been purchased from workers handling government stock. They’re combining small amounts, hiding them in ordinary cargo, then moving them out through different routes."

Raymond frowned. "So we’re not looking for one thief." Darric shook his head. "We’re looking for a trade."

That distinction made the investigation considerably harder. The smugglers understood Althoff’s procedures well enough to avoid obvious checkpoints.

Hunters were supposed to register kills and submit commercially valuable Beast materials for inspection before legal sale. Government-owned stock passed through controlled releases.

Mana-bearing materials required additional examination. Yet charcoal wagons, construction carts, food deliveries, timber loads, and empty merchant vehicles moved constantly through a city still being built.

Inspecting every wagon would strangle commerce before catching anyone clever enough to change methods. Raymond asked whether Darric could place men around the likely storage yards instead.

Darric gave him a tired look and replied, "With which men, my Lord? I can watch the western yards or increase patrols around the Central Market. I can put men at the Beast-material yard or keep enough in the Historical Core to answer disturbances. I cannot do all four properly."

Raymond looked at the city map on the wall and finally saw the problem Darric had been managing around for weeks. The Althoff Watch had been created for the old town, when the settlement occupied a fraction of its current footprint and most residents recognized one another.

Now 5,143 people lived across expanding districts.

Construction sites stretched beyond the old walls. The Central Market attracted merchants, workers, farmers, hunters, and strangers every day. Warehouses contained increasingly valuable goods.

Caravans arrived from outside the territory. Roads extended toward farmland, quarries, forests, and future defenses.

Raymond asked, "How badly undermanned are you?"

Darric folded his arms. "Badly enough that if two tavern fights, a theft, and a warehouse complaint happen together, somebody waits."

Boris could provide soldiers, and for several days he already had. But when Raymond called both men into the Council chamber, the difference between their responsibilities became obvious.

Boris pointed toward the outer approaches on the map and said, "My men can reinforce gates, escort dangerous cargo, and respond if smugglers turn violent. But if you put soldiers permanently inside the market checking licenses and chasing pickpockets, you’re using troops for work they weren’t trained to do."

Darric nodded. "A soldier sees a suspicious wagon and thinks about weapons or an ambush. My men need to ask who owns the cargo, whether the manifest matches, whether the merchant has a permit, whether an inspection mark is valid, and whether the same driver appeared in another complaint three days ago."

Raymond leaned back. "So one protects the city from threats. The other protects the rules that let the city function." Boris smiled faintly. "That’s a cleaner way to say it, my Lord."

Raymond decided not to create another grand institution simply because Althoff had discovered another problem.

The Watch already existed. It needed to grow with the city. Darric received authorization to expand recruitment from reliable residents, experienced caravan guards willing to settle permanently, and former soldiers whose skills suited civilian enforcement better than battlefield service.

Boris offered several veterans no longer ideal for campaigning but still disciplined and physically capable.

Darric immediately warned, "I don’t want men who think wearing a badge means winning every argument with their fists."

Raymond nodded. "Then don’t recruit them. I want people capable of stopping a fight without starting a second one."

Recruitment would include basic literacy where possible, knowledge of city regulations, evidence handling, arrest procedures, report writing, and enough commercial rules to recognize obvious fraud.

The expanded Watch would also become visible. Members received dark practical coats marked with the Althoff crest, numbered metal badges, and standardized equipment appropriate for patrol work rather than battlefield armor.

Four permanent Watch posts were designated: one in the Historical Core, one beside the Central Market, one serving the Residential District, and one near the Warehouse and Logistics District.

Darric remained Captain of the Althoff Watch, with senior watchmen assigned to each post. Their responsibilities were written plainly: theft, assault, public disturbances, market fraud, investigations, smuggling, enforcement of city regulations, prisoner handling, and support for the Magistrate Court. Serious military threats remained Boris’s responsibility.

The smugglers became the expanded Watch’s first test before most recruits had even received badges. Darric did not order random searches across the city. Instead, his men reconstructed the route.

The charcoal wagon had collected its load from two suppliers, but only one used the western storage yard where the false renter had disappeared.

Gate records showed that three earlier suspicious wagons had departed during the same watchman’s shifts, although questioning suggested negligence rather than bribery.

A warehouse laborer remembered sealed bundles arriving after sunset aboard a hunter’s cart. Another witness remembered the same cart near the Beast-material inspection yard two days earlier.

Darric’s men followed the hunter, checked legal sale records, and discovered he had registered only part of several kills.

That hunter eventually led them to a leatherworker who purchased uninspected hides and concealed higher-value claws, glands, horns, and mana-bearing organs inside legitimate workshop deliveries. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

The leatherworker sold those materials to two traveling merchants who paid below legal market value but above what hunters received after fees and inspection costs. Neither merchant wanted the delays, records, or scrutiny attached to valuable Beast materials. The network was not enormous.

That almost made it more dangerous. It had grown quietly inside ordinary commerce, using legitimate carts, rented storage, real businesses, and people who each handled only one piece.

Darric waited until his men had enough evidence to strike several locations at once. Watchmen entered the western storage yard while another group detained the leatherworker and a third stopped a wagon before it reached the western road.

Hidden beneath bundles of cured hides were sealed containers holding Beast blood, claws, fangs, two small cores, and several organs with enough residual mana to require inspection.

The merchants protested until Darric produced copied warehouse records, witness statements, and the hunter’s signed testimony.

"You can explain the rest to the magistrate,"

Darric told them, signaling his men to secure the cargo. "Carefully inventory everything. If it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen."

When Darric reported the arrests, Raymond resisted the temptation to congratulate himself. He had done almost nothing.

The Lord’s Eye could show recognized roads, warehouses, mapped resources, construction, population concentrations, and other territorial information, but it did not tell him which charcoal sack contained a fang or which merchant whispered an illegal offer behind a workshop.

People had solved this problem: watchmen comparing records, clerks preserving manifests, witnesses remembering carts, and Darric connecting information.

That pleased Raymond more than personally uncovering the smugglers would have. Althoff was beginning to detect its own problems.

Several evenings later, Raymond sat alone with reports from the strangest weeks of his rule.

Althoff now had the beginnings of a Magistrate

Court, more reliable property records, standardized weights and measures, business licensing, commercial regulations, anti-corruption procedures, clearer revenue rules, coin-testing services, and an expanded City Watch.

A few months earlier, his greatest concerns had been starvation, mutiny, winter, and whether everyone would survive the next Beast attack. Those problems had