A Parliament of Bodies

by Marshall Ryan Maresca

  “And Mister Heldrin here,” Minox said.

  “Absolutely,” Heldrin said. “I’ll tell you everything I know to help you catch Sholiar.”

  “You know the name of this Gearbox Killer?” Rainey asked.

  “I have a lot to tell you both. Perhaps we should adjourn somewhere so Inspector Welling can eat.”

  Minox felt a chill run up through him—starting with his altered hand and moving through his body. “I’m afraid I must insist now.”

  “Right,” Rainey said. “You know a place nearby, Mister Heldrin?”

  “I definitely do,” he said.

  Minox needed to be almost carried by Heldrin, with Jerinne coming to help on the other side. As they left, Minox glanced back and saw that the Kieran gentleman was already gone.

  * * *

  Dayne brought the inspectors down one of the service stairs and out the private doors to the street, avoiding all the bustle and madness in the Parliament halls and the square outside. It wasn’t lost on him that the back hallways and functionary entrances were probably the exact method Sholiar had used to get his infernal machine of death onto the Parliament floor.

  But even for Sholiar, this was an undertaking like none other. In some grand, horrific way, this was the man’s masterwork.

  Inspector Welling was nearly in shivers once they got him to The Nimble Rabbit. It was a selfish choice on Dayne’s part, as it wasn’t the closest place to get food for the inspector, but it was a place Dayne trusted, and they could speak about the situation away from the prying ears of the Parliament. That was crucial.

  “Dayne!” Hemmit Eyairin jumped up from his usual table, where he sat with the other publishers of the Veracity Press, Lin Shartien and Maresh Niol. These three weren’t mere journalists; they were seekers of truth, even if their more radical politics did not make their newssheet particularly popular on the north side of the city.

  But they were also friends.

  Hemmit came over and helped guide the nearly unconscious Welling to the table. Inspector Rainey and Jerinne joined them.

  “Bread and water, quickly, and then some quick plates,” Dayne called to the server.

  Hemmit, a robust man of simple tastes and pleasures, looked at Inspector Welling’s face. “What’s wrong with the constable?”

  “Not just a constable,” Dayne said. “He’s a mage, and he spent himself.”

  Lin—a mage herself of some small talent—scowled. “A mage in the Constabulary? I’ve never heard of that.”

  “It’s true,” Dayne said. “He—he saved most of the people caught in the infernal machine.”

  Inspector Rainey eyed Lin skeptically. “He’s Uncircled. Is that going to be a problem?”

  Lin scoffed at her, and then spoke with her natural Linjari accent even thicker and richer. “I’m told it’s supposed to be. But I never really understood the fuss about it. Circle rules, circle politics are nothing but a bore.”

  “Really?”

  Lin quickly flashed the tattoo above her heart to Rainey. “I would have avoided joining Red Wolf if I could have. I was told I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Red Wolf?” Rainey raised an eyebrow, but said nothing more. She took a seat next to Welling, grabbing bread from the server and almost shoving it into his mouth. He swallowed it, and then reached for the water.

  After a few gulps, he said, “There’s no need to abandon decorum, Rainey.”

  “I’ve never seen you this bad off,” she said.

  “Then you’ve missed some of the worst moments of the past few months,” he said darkly. “I think I can manage on my own now.”

  The servers brought out plates of charcuterie, cheese, picklings, and mustard. “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Wine,” Hemmit said. “Surely we’ll need it.”

  “You always say that,” Maresh said. “What happened over there, Dayne? We spent a bit of time among the madness outside, but once we realized that no one who knew anything was talking, we decided to leave.”

  “Probably wise,” Dayne said.

  “Can you talk about it?” Hemmit asked.

  “Informally,” Dayne said.

  “It shouldn’t show up in the print tomorrow, in other words.”

  “Newsprint?” Welling asked. “You’re journalists?”

  “The Veracity Press,” Hemmit said.

  Welling nodded. “I’m familiar with it. Prose is excellent. Point of view is unbalanced to the point of being nearly useless.”

  Maresh snorted. “He doesn’t hold back.”

  Welling ignored him, piling meat and cheese onto bread and cramming it into his mouth.

  Rainey took the bottle of wine from Hemmit and poured herself a glass. “You brought us out here to meet your newsprint friends?”

  “Not specifically,” Dayne said. “But I’ve found their counsel and perspective useful.”

  Rainey took a sip. “Fine. You’ve said you know something about the killer. Sholiar.”

  Hemmit raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that the—”

  “Yes,” Dayne said. He sat down, taking a deep breath. “Inspectors, I believe—and after the experience today, I am quite certain—that this killer is the same person I crossed with in Lacanja six months ago.”

  “In Lacanja?” Welling asked. “What happened there?”

  “It began much like it did here. A series of deaths, at first seemingly unconnected, save their gruesome manner.”

  “This level of machinery? Of ingenious engineering?” Welling asked.

  “I don’t know if I want to say ingenious,” Rainey said. “Doesn’t it—”

  “Give him too much praise?” Jerinne offered.

  “Yes,” Rainey said.

  “This killer, whoever he is, is disturbingly sick,” Maresh said. “There’s nothing ingenious about wanting to cause suffering.”

  “Believe me, I would not want to praise him,” Dayne said. “But we would be remiss to ignore his gift, not merely for sadism, but for all manner of engineering and craft. The man who pulled off the monstrosity we saw in the Parliament—”

  “—Cannot be underestimated,” Welling said. “We’re all agreed on that.”

  “Then came the letters to the Constabulary. Written in code. And then he sent the key to crack the code.”

  “He’s impatient,” Rainey said. “Craving recognition.”

  Welling nodded. “I imagine he couldn’t bear that constables couldn’t read his letters.”

  “You may be right about his message, then,” Rainey said.

  “I’m certain of it now.”

  “Message?” Hemmit asked.

  Welling took a moment. “We have reason to believe that his actions here were targeted at Constable Commissioner Enbrain. As his nephew was specifically victimized today—”

  “Right,” Dayne said. “Anyway, at the time this was happening, I was in my second year of Candidacy, serving with Master Denbar of the Tarian Order. Through other exploits, we had gained a small amount of celebrity in the city newsprints.”

  “As you have here,” Maresh said.

  “This got the attention of Sholiar, so he decided to make us his target. He kidnapped the son of a prominent family—the Benedicts.”

  “There’s a Benedict in the Parliament, yes?” Rainey asked.

  “There are four,” Hemmit said. “The Benedicts hold a massive amount of wealth and power in Yinara—more than most of the nobility, save the archduke.”

  “Especially in Lacanja,” Dayne said.

  “How did this make you and Master Denbar targets?” Welling asked.

  “The Benedict boy was the bait to force us to engage with him. Once Sholiar took him, he set the rules. He demanded a ransom, a method of delivery, location—all centered around Master Denbar and me being the ones to deliver it.
”

  “So how did it go wrong?” Rainey asked.

  She had put her finger on it.

  “Sholiar’s ingenuity. He separated Master Denbar and me, and I found myself facing Sholiar with an impossible choice: save the boy, or Master Denbar. And I thought Sholiar, in his hubris, had left me a third option: stop him and save them both. But it was my hubris he was exploiting.”

  Welling leaned in—and Dayne saw that Hemmit and the others did as well. Not that he was surprised—he had never truly relayed this to his friends, save Jerinne. She knew almost all his secrets and shames.

  “What did you do?” Welling asked.

  “I threw a barrel lid at Sholiar to take him down, and release his hold on his death machines. Then I rushed to save both Master Denbar and the boy. But . . . it was too late for Master Denbar . . . and the boy . . .”

  “You failed them both?” This was Welling. His question, astoundingly, did not sound like he was judging Dayne. It was full of compassion.

  “Worse. Somehow, who I thought was Sholiar was actually the boy, rigged up like some sort of marionette. When I threw the barrel lid at him—”

  “You killed him?” Maresh asked it.

  “No. But the boy would never walk again. Never be whole again. Thanks to me, falling for Sholiar’s trick. As for Sholiar, he escaped. But not before letting me know. Mocking me.”

  “So it’s personal to you,” Rainey said.

  “More than just that. I had lost my mentor, was run out of Lacanja, lost my—it doesn’t matter. All of that, I could bear, if he had been brought to justice. But not only did he escape, half the Constabulary force didn’t even believe he existed.”

  “How is that?”

  “I am the only one who actually saw him. Saw his face, heard his voice. The Benedict boy never did.”

  “But surely the murders were documented—” Welling was now quite engaged, or had eaten enough to restore his vitality and pay attention. “Surely that there was a killer, this Sholiar, a name I assume he claimed for himself somewhere.”

  “In letters to newssheets.”

  Welling snapped his fingers. “Perhaps what was given more attention in Lacanja was ignored here. He may have written.”

  “Welling,” Rainey said sharply. “We still don’t know for certain it’s the same person.”

  “The sadism, the mad genius, the engineering,” Dayne insisted. “It’s the same.”

  “And what did Lacanjan Constabulary think?”

  Dayne looked down at the table, taking his glass of wine and finishing it. “A prevailing theory was that Master Denbar himself was the killer. That he engineered it all to raise the profile of the Tarian Order. And that I—”

  Welling nodded. “That you stopped him, but maintained a story of Sholiar to protect his good name.”

  That had been it, and Welling had figured it out. He was the inspector Dayne needed on this.

  “You can see how that’s absurd. Master Denbar is dead, and the killings have started here, in Maradaine.”

  “Where you are, Mister Heldrin,” Inspector Rainey said. “You have to see that you are the common element here.”

  “I recognize that. I . . . I know how all this sounds. But I’m telling you, these killings are Sholiar. He came and did this on the Parliament floor to taunt me. I am certain.”

  “Yes, but—” Rainey started.

  “You could identify this Sholiar if you saw him?” Welling asked, talking over her.

  “Yes, I believe—”

  “Minox,” Inspector Rainey said sharply. “Are you capable of standing now? We need to have a word.”

  * * *

  Satrine was far too weary, given that it was barely midday, but she had already seen enough atrocity and pain to last for the rest of the month, if not her lifetime. And as much as she tried to play off the blow to her head as nothing to be concerned about, her thoughts were spinning and she was having a blazes of a time staying focused on the things around her.

  But one thing she was focused on was Welling, and how quickly he was accepting Dayne Heldrin’s story of this Sholiar character. That was troubling.

  “We need a bit more healthy skepticism in this investigation,” she said bluntly, once she had Welling pulled away from the table at The Nimble Rabbit.

  “You doubt Mister Heldrin’s account?” Welling asked.

  “I think we can’t accept it as scripture,” she said.

  “I understand that, on its face, it has elements of coincidence and circumstance that we would easily dismiss as fanciful in another situation.”

  “And why not this situation?”

  Welling nodded—he was showing that he was taking her concerns seriously. A small thing he had made a point of doing of late. “Mister Heldrin’s account shows little sign of dishonesty. He’s telling us things that are painful to him, and his discomfort in revealing that reads as genuine.”

  “It may be genuine to him, but—” Satrine said. She stopped herself and took a breath. She was about to accuse him of lying, and she had no idea if he was right or not. “Look, I think—it’s awfully convenient.”

  “What is?”

  “That this killer is someone that only he can identify, and that the killer struck in the Parliament, where Heldrin is currently living. We need to look at him seriously as a suspect, or at least a collaborator, just as we need to be looking at the King’s Marshals. No one should be above reproach.”

  Welling thought on this for a moment. “You are correct. Healthy skepticism, until we have further corroborating information.”

  “How are you feeling now?”

  “Stable, if not to full strength,” Welling said. “And you? You are, as usual, minimizing your injuries.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said reflexively. “I think getting Heldrin’s account is useful, but we need to look at every angle. We’ve got several victims to question, for one, as well as interrogating almost every King’s Marshal.”

  “That is an element that troubles me the most,” Welling said. “It’s clear that the King’s Marshals have a significant security problem, if not full-blown corruption in their ranks. We don’t have the mechanism, or the authority, strictly, to investigate that.”

  “What mechanism do they have to investigate it internally? Do they have whispermen?”

  “I don’t know,” Welling said. “If anything, such a problem would have to be handled externally. But the City Constabulary is not normally the body that could do such a thing.”

  Satrine mused. “It would require an organization that could be considered neutral and without bias, and has the approval of the Throne and the Parliament. And you know what group would qualify for that?”

  Welling almost smirked—anything like a smile looked unnatural on his face. “The Tarian Order?”

  “We might need Mister Heldrin,” Satrine said. “But that doesn’t mean we should blindly trust him.”

  “Agreed,” Welling said. “But I do have to put trust in you.”

  “Like you don’t already?” she asked.

  “Of course I do,” he said without hesitation. “But I mean that I need to head back to the stationhouse and face the Inquiry and Miss Morad. Which means—”

  “Questioning the witnesses and the marshals now, while it’s fresh, is on me.” Satrine nodded. “I can handle that, but I’ll keep Corrie on hand.”

  “Leppin and his people should be there by now.”

  “And that other girl—your cousin? The charcoal sketcher you called in.”

  “Have a runner deliver her sketches to my desk. Let’s try to meet back at the stationhouse at five bells to review particulars.”

  She smiled. “I am not spending all night there, mind you.”

  He nodded. “Nor I, tonight, I think. For once, I think it crucial that I go home at the
end of watch.”

  Satisfied with this, she led him back to the table. “All right, Heldrin—”

  “Dayne,” he urged.

  “Dayne,” she said. “You and Jerinne will be coming with me back to the Parliament. Hopefully Leppin will have some of his work done, and we’ll have a bit of order with names and people. Because we have a lot of questions to ask.”

  “You think someone there knows where Sholiar is? Where he’ll strike next?”

  “I haven’t a clue about that,” Satrine said. “But the far more important thing is how he got his machine inside, and how he got his victims into place. And I’d bet you a week’s salary there’s someone in there—be it the victims or the marshals or even someone in the damned Parliament—who knows the answer to that one.”

  Chapter 8

  “ALL RIGHT, EVERYONE take a rutting damned minute!” Corrie shouted over the din of people. There were a few shocked gasps and people clutched at their chests. Fakers, all of them. Corrie knew damn well there wasn’t a person here whose language was just as salty as hers. Now, at least, the whole lot of city Constabulary, archduchy sheriffs, King’s Marshals, military and Intelligence, Yellowshields, Fire Brigade, and everyone rutting else were staring at her.

  How the blazes she got left with sifting through this mess of people in the Parliament, she had no idea. Leppin was on the Parliament floor, checking out the machine and the bodies. Commissioner Enbrain himself was here, but he was nowhere to be seen, having told Corrie and her people to “take care of it” until Minox and Tricky returned.

  Wherever they went.

  “Do I have your attention yet?” she asked. “Look, it’s real rutting simple. I don’t care who you are or who your daddy was, no one walks out of this building without checking in with my people at those doors there. Those are the only rutting doors out you blazing well use, hear? I want names, addresses, and papers if you got them. If you don’t, unless you’re the king himself, you will be waiting until we clear you.”

  A voice cut through the crowd. “And what if you are the prince?”

  The crowd suddenly went down on one knee, and Corrie froze.