Unlike his deputies, Jag lived in Minroe by choice. You might not guess it to look at him, with his unkempt hair, scruffy beard, and stained and wrinkled uniform, but Jag Dubbispeir was perhaps the finest officer ever to grace the Waymoot garrison of the Purple Dragons. He worked his way up through the ranks, earning every promotion he got with blood, sweat, and more blood. By the time he was made a commander, Jag could no longer count the number of close friends he saw killed in the line of duty, nor how many times he came within an arrow’s breadth (or dragon’s breath, or sword ann’s length) from joining them, but every single one of those memories haunted him. When he finally realized that he had to retreat from this life if he wanted to have any life left at all, Jag chose to come here because, according to every map he knew, nowhere was farther off the beaten track than the tiny village of Minroe.

When he first arrived, Jag was surprised at how big the town looked. The buildings, while weather-worn and of an architectural style that went out of fashion three generations ago, were tall and strong and well kept up. In the last century, Minroe was a bustling mining town, the caverns in the surrounding hills yielding rubies, emeralds, and other gems by the bucketful. When the lodes ran dry, though, the town nearly did as well. The people who stayed were hardy folk who made their livings farming the rocky, uncooperative soil, or collecting pixie cap mushrooms and selling them to Suzailan merchants. They took a great pride in their little town and did everything in their power to maintain it. Of a summer afternoon, it was not unusual to see several neighbors working together to repair the shingles, fix the garden wall, and add a new coat of paint to a building that no one had lived in for twenty years. That’s just how the people of Minroe were, and it suited Jag just fine.

From time to time, friends who yet served with the Purple Dragons visited Jag, though they often seemed most interested in inspecting his deputies for someone worth recruiting. So far, he’d lost a half-dozen fine officers-not to mention the only true friends he had in town-to the Dragons. After all, who would remain in a dying town like Minroe when the Purple Dragons offered to show you the world? Who indeed, except for Jag. Before they’d leave, though, old comrade and departing deputy alike invariably would comment that Minroe was no place for Jag to be. “You’re like an eagle roosting in a henhouse,” they’d say. “A man like you should go out and meet the world head on.”

In his years with the Purple Dragons, Jag met, fought, and killed practically every creature native to the Heart-lands, and a few from other regions, continents, and even planes. Truthfully, he’d had quite enough of it. He figured that moving to a backwater town like Minroe meant that the most dangerous creature he was likely to face was a drunken dwarf or love-sick half-ogre. That illusion was shattered within weeks of his arrival. Minroe’s trouble with medusas is well-chronicled, and talk of it is partly what has kept the town from regaining any of its lost status or population, all this despite the fact that Jag, who suddenly found himself saddled with the position of Chief Constable, successfully brought the medusas under control in less than a month and with only three deputies (all of whom the Purple Dragons soon recruited). Being this far off the beaten track, he came to realize, meant only that he was the sole mechanism keeping the chaos of the wilderness at bay. Today, that chaos expressed itself in the form of a twenty-two foot tall cyclops rampaging through the heart of Minroe.

Jag spat on the ground.

It was no surprise that giants lived in the hills surrounding his sleepy little town. It was an unusual week that passed without one farmer or another running into his office, blue in the face over the fact that he’d seen a hill or mountain giant casting a hungry eye at his livestock… or his daughter. Nothing ever came of these incidents. The giants wanted no troub1e. They lived their tremendous lives in the hills and, occasionally, the smaller ones even visited Minroe to buy large quantities of supplies. They were generally good, if unruly, neighbors.

“Ow!” he was startled back to the here and now by a rap against his ribs, the kind you might get from a mischievous friend’s elbow. Unfortunately, Jag didn’t have any mischievous friends. The headache beat savagely across his brow.

The constable turned, ready to take all his frustrations out on the person attached to that unwanted elbow, but only stared in bewilderment at the empty air beside him. No one was there. Then he felt another dull rap, this time against his knee.

“If you look nose-to-nose there is nothing to see, but mind your feet, Constable Dubbispeir, or you’ll trip over me!”

Jag’s teeth clacked as his chin snapped against his chest, and the pain behind his eyes soared like a Waterdhavian opera. This might have been from changing his gaze so dramatically, but more likely it was the sight of the gray-haired gnome puffing on a long-stemmed clay pipe and gently tapping a walking stick against the constable’s leg.

“Ekhar Lorrent! Gods above, that’s all I need!!”

“You’ve trouble, friend Jag, that much I know. Murder most foul, my wagging ears tell me so. Ekhar is here, set your mind at ease. Together we’ll solve this case, quick as you please!”

Jag covered his eyes and counted to ten under his breath, then looked down at the gnome and said, “Look, Ekhar, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but would you get the hells out of my way? There haven’t been any murders in Minroe since that time Jenna the seamstress found out Taсa Felibrook was having an affair with her husband, and sewed the pair of them into a suit and evening gown.”

“‘The Case of the Tailor-Made Corpse,’ I remember it well. But come now, Jag, have you nothing to tell?” His steel-gray eyes glanced at the debris that surrounded them. The gnome winked and said, “Quite a large corpse I see lying prone over there. Something untoward happened, the scent’s in the air.”

Ekhar Lorrent could be counted on to show up every time things got out of control and blood was shed. He seemed to have a sixth sense about murder. The Fell-brook case was only one of a dozen or so that Ekhar had gotten involved in over the years. The gnome had a head for investigative work, Jag had to give him that much credit. But his knack for being in the right place at the right time and tripping over clues was more than outweighed by the fact that he was so damned annoying.

“I’m only going to say this one time, Ekhar. We’ve had a little giant trouble today. A bit of property damage, a few broken bones, but no one’s been murdered-so go home!”

“No murder, you say? Can it really be true? You don’t mind if I just look about town, do you?”

The constable let out a long sigh of relief.

“No, no. Go ahead. Look around all you like, Ekhar. Just stay out from under my feet.”

“You’ve much work to do, that much I can see. What happened to bring this giant trouble on thee?”

Jag groaned. His headache now encircled his skull like a crown of pain. He wasn’t sure whether Ekhar’s rhyming patter was an affectation or a curse placed upon the gnome by some witch, but the lengths to which the diminutive detective would go for a rhyme was maddening.

“I don’t know Ekhar, and that’s most of the problem. It’s been a quiet few weeks, which is fine with me. There haven’t even been any bar fights for my men to break up. Then, out of nowhere, this cyclops was seen circling the town.” Jag pointed absentmindedly at the dead giant. “It showed up for a few hours each day, crawling around in the scrub brush, watching the comings and goings around town. I think it was trying to be surreptitious. Who knows. Those giants are dumb enough to think that just because their heads are buried in bushes, no one will notice their enormous butts sticking in the air.”