Rogues Gallery Read Online Free

in the position was a mere fraction compared to Becket’s tenure. No one would consider him higher on the pecking order.
    Young Gunnar Lawson was the senior Dock Master at the Southern Docks now that Maggur had been expelled but couldn’t lay claim to having more seniority than Becket. No, Samuel Becket was the second most important person in the Guild. This position put him in the upper echelon of the city entire.
    Which meant the responsibility and stress were greater.
    He glanced back at the gulls, but he had lost the specific beauty he had been spying before. Oh well. There would be others.
    Back in his office, in the mammoth warehouse, they stored much of the extra goods unloaded on the docks. Becket stopped to admire one of his paintings, picked up from one of his favorite sellers only last week. Its frame propped against the wall next to another work of art, a waist high sculpture he wanted to return. It was a bust of some historical figure but clashed with the theme of his foyer. The décor of his home was important, so he tried things out first in his office.
    The room was cramped. The painting was as tall as the sculpture, even on the ground and almost as wide as his arm span. He looked at the painting, judging its worth. The scene was idyllic, with gentle hills and a stream cutting through a beautiful countryside. The plan was for a rural theme for his foyer, so as to give visitors a feeling of warmth and belonging when they entered his home.
    The current merchant defection wouldn’t help his ability to buy such things. Compiled with the new Guild policies, piracy was on the rise. Another ship taken, another huge grip of supplies ripped off and plundered, stolen by Lurenz. The infamous buccaneer was back to his old mode of operation. It happened a lot more many years ago. Becket remembered the time before Castellan became Guild Master. Piracy was a fact of life back then.
    They dealt with it well enough, counting the loss as part of doing business on that side of the continent. The king never got involved. That was the main area of contention for the higher ranking members of the Guild, but there was nothing they could’ve done about it. That was the attitude.
    Castellan changed all that. With his charisma and charm and strength of personality, he swooped in control of the organization and made them all wealthy. Very wealthy. He had also brokered a deal with the pirates, and they stayed away from their shipments. Goods arrived on their shores as they were supposed to, and everyone was happy. All that changed when he was taken away in chains for a myriad of crimes against this Sea Haven, and their neighbor Janisberg to the south.
    The issue at the moment was that no one knew the exact details of that deal with the pirate Lurenz. Becket had only been a Dock Master a couple of years when Castellan came in and was not senior enough to be privy to that information. At the time it seemed trivial. He, Crocker, Dollenger, another man named Coleson, and Beauregard, Lawson’s predecessor, were too satisfied by the money coming in to question anything Castellan did.
    Beauregard died a few months after Castellan took office under mysterious circumstances. He had been a middle aged man and was found dead one morning in his bed, not a mark on him. There was nothing too unusual about that. Men died that way, but once his replacement, Gunnar Lawson, took over Piers Four, Five, and Six at the Southern Docks, people began to talk. The man was under qualified, and there were those that claimed easy to control and thus why Castellan appointed him. With everything happening so fast and the money pouring in, no one questioned it much at the time, Becket included.
    After the recent change in personnel and the shakeup of their cadre, Becket believed it worthy of thought. What really happened to Beauregard? It was almost a decade ago and Lawson must know something about it since he stood the most to gain. Becket made a mental note to