As soon as Green heard it, he saw plenty of holes in the story. Most obvious was the source of the news: who had spread it first?
And throughout the whole affair, the Mercenary Guild's leadership had been nowhere to be seen. The guild might have been a loose membership organization, but its leaders commanded considerable respect. Had they stepped forward to take control, verify the source, and investigate whether the news was credible, the Mercenaries surely would not have acted so rashly.
That made Green suspect the claim that "General Ernest intends to purge the Mercenary Guild" had come from the guild's own leaders. They had deliberately pushed the Mercenaries out front.
But what were they trying to achieve?
Green sank into thought.
Overall, he had the sense that the guild's leaders were using these Mercenaries to conceal something. It looked like a scheme to build a plank road in plain sight while secretly crossing at another pass. With so little information, though, he could not guess what they were concealing.
The more Green turned it over, the more these Mercenaries looked like cannon fodder thrown out by the guild's leaders. What they were meant to cover for, and what the leaders wanted, remained unclear.
Whatever their aim, though, this was intrigue within the Human City-State. It was unlikely to reach Green.
What intrigued him more was what had happened there to produce such a murky, treacherous situation.
"A general known for his rigid loyalty suddenly launches a coup? Why?" Green ran through the possibilities. "Was he being controlled? Had he been backed into a corner? Or had he uncovered some secret of those above him...?"
Any of those was possible. Most important, General Ernest had evidently refused to sit still and await his doom. He had taken a