Imarë wrote:...the Baron was paying off somebody for reason or reasons unknown. This is what he came to the city for... the person he was paying off did not really want money, he wanted the Baron himself. To this end he caused the robbery. This put the Baron in fear of his life and he fled the city...
My objection to this scenario is: why not ambush the Baron on the way into the city, if seizing the Baron is the goal all along? It makes little sense to lure the Baron into the city with a blackmail ruse, then have to scare him back out of the city to snatch him. To my mind, this argues in favor of Cheryl's hypothesis, wherein Party A (Morgathian? Agrikan?) wants the £20 and later hunts down the Baron when he flees without giving them the dough, while Party B (Sir F and Sir B?) divert the money for their own reasons (upsetting the Baron's plans and leading to his doomed flight). How the LK got in on the action is still fairly murky, as Cheryl acknowledges. But the motive of a single party setting up all this seems incoherent to me: simply lure the guy out of Quste with the money deal and bag him before he gets into Golotha, where things would otherwise get too complicated.
On a totally different topic, does anyone else see the possibility of "Evil Errol" being a sort of theives' cant moniker for "Evil Earl"? Could this still be our Lenesque?