by Dave Dobson
My struggles alerted someone in the next room. I heard a chair scrape, and then soft footsteps. The healer came through the archway and walked over to my side, her lips pursed in disapproval. “It would be preferable if you would lie still,” she said. With a practiced flick, she turned down my sheet. I yelped and tried to cover my nakedness with my right hand, but it turned out she’d left me some modesty with the sheet. Barely. She clucked her tongue. “Honestly, Mr. Mingenstern. You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen already far too many times.”
While I pondered what that meant, and whether I should possibly be intrigued or offended, she inspected my dressing, lifting it gently and pressing and prodding around the area. Her fingers were really, really cold. I tried to salvage some small bit of dignity by not flinching. “Surprised you’re alive,” she said. I tried to detect some glint of happiness on her part that I’d exceeded her expectations but found none. She replaced the dressing. “Since you are, I suppose we can use one of these.” She opened a small drawer in the table by my bed and pulled out a ball of brown clay. “Arnaud’s Poultice Mud. Very expensive, and hard to find around here. Didn’t want to waste it if you were just going to die.”
There was a great deal wrong with her priorities, I thought, but I decided the more prudent course would be to avoid antagonizing her. “What does it do?” I asked.
“Speeds healing, sometimes tremendously, for this kind of wound. Prevents putrefaction, usually. Enchanted, it is, or at least Arnaud claims so.” She worked the clay in her fingers, spreading it out into a thin disk. “Mostly river mud from the banks of the Duyenne near Galustrina, plus elm bark, ground pearls, and organs from several kinds of squirrels.” She lifted my dressing, and I saw a sizable sutured gash underneath. She pressed the disk onto my wound. The pain lessened immediately, and I felt tingly all over. The mud was hot, and it bonded instantly with my skin. "Oh, and cricket brains, and extract of goat feces,” she added. I felt less tingly.
There was a tap at the archway. I looked up to see Sophie. “May I see the patient, Domina?”
“You’re the High Inquisitor,” she replied, not unkindly. “Do what you want.” To me, she said more sternly, “Don’t move, you. I’ll be damned if I sew you up again.” She closed the drawer and returned to the main room of the infirmary.
Sophie came to my bed and sat on a nearby chair. “So, tell me what happened,” she said.
I related as best I could the events of the previous day, from visiting Monique, to Bernot’s note, to our ill-fated visit to the Red Rabbit. I must admit to leaving out most of the part about terrorizing the Sestille children. When I got to Bernot’s report, I wasn't sure how much to say. If Sophie had been bought by Marron, it might be better not to let her know what Bernot had overheard and what we now knew, because then Boog, Bernot, and I might all become liabilities better eliminated than tolerated. That certainly did seem to be Marron’s preference. It was a horrible thought, that Sophie might intend us harm, but ugly as it was, I couldn’t rule it out. Bernot’s story and the note I’d impulsively stolen made the unthinkable possible.
On the other hand, perhaps knowing the scorn Marron held for Sophie and for the Inquisitors might shake her out of whatever internal negotiation she’d made to accept Marron’s money. Realistically, if Marron wanted me dead, and Sophie were compliant, then it’s not as if I was in any shape to resist them. Better to hope for the best. The Sophie who had trained me, who I had idolized, would never succumb to the lure of mere gold. I took a deep breath and related all of Bernot’s report.
Sophie listened silently as I finished a brief summary of the fight. At last, I fell silent, and Sophie made no comment, just studying me, her eyes unreadable. What manner of discipline was she contemplating? For surely I had violated the spirit of her orders, if not also their letter, in visiting Monique Lenarre. Bernot’s involvement with Marron was unknown to us when we sought him out, and the battle was not our fault, but I wasn’t sure Sophie would see it that way. Worse still, could she be here to finish the task the fierce masked woman had nearly completed?
She looked down, finally, and cleared her throat. “So, in defiance of my wishes, in contradiction to my orders, you’ve been continuing an investigation I closed weeks ago and specifically ordered you off not a day ago? Merely because you found it interesting, and couldn't let it go?”
I believed at that point that no person before or since had ever felt so miserable as I. I thought of several excuses, of extenuating circumstances, but those words all turned to ash before I could speak them. “Yes, Chief.”
She sighed and lapsed into silence again. At length, she spoke. “I’m sorry.”
“What, Chief?”
“I’m sorry, Marten,” she continued. “You've done exactly what I trained you to do. To sink your teeth into an investigation, and never to let go until you’ve run it to ground.”
“But, Chief. Your orders…”
“My orders were misguided.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t convinced you were right. If you were wrong, you’d be wasting your time, and getting the Inquisitors into needless trouble. If you were right, then ordering you off the case would, I hoped, protect you while I figured out what to do next. Obviously, that failed, due to your willful disregard for my orders, or your tenacity, if you prefer. The situation with Marron is delicate, to be sure, and I suspected that if I let you turn over enough stones, you were bound to uncover a viper. I just didn’t realize how soon it would come to pass. You’ve made excellent progress. I should have trusted your instincts, as I’ve often trusted mine.”
My mind reeled. “But, you’re taking his money,” I blurted. None too politic, I chastised myself.
Sophie chuckled. “Yes, but where is it written that you can’t take someone’s money while working toward his downfall?" She grew more serious. “And we need the gold – there’s no getting around that."
She rose. “Your injury is my fault. I’m very glad, but not a little surprised, that you two survived the attack. You won’t be so fortunate for long, and I fear this won't be the last attempt on your lives. Despite your efforts, I don’t have nearly enough to move against Marron, and unless every aspect of the case is locked down, his position and his friends will save him, and make us out to be fools. He’ll receive the benefit of every doubt, so we must eliminate every doubt. It will not be easy, but if there’s anything at all to this Faeran business you’ve dug up, we need to get to the bottom of this, and quickly.”
She placed her hand on my shoulder. “You need to heal. I need to think. And to figure out our next move. If you would, please stay here. I can protect you in our headquarters, and I’d rather not tempt fate again.” She turned and headed for the archway, then turned back once more. “If you’re up to it, have an apprentice bring you what you need from our library or elsewhere, and see if you can learn anything else about the Faerans and this prophecy. I'll issue you a pass for the Prelate’s Library also.”
“Thank you, Chief,” I called after her. I felt better than I had in days, and I’m sure it wasn’t just the effects of Arnaud’s mud.
21
Invalid
The next few days passed quickly. I seemed to be mending well. Two days after the fight, I was on my feet and walking gingerly around the infirmary. I read a great many treatises by learned authors, but information on the Faerans was hard to come by, and I didn’t learn much that we didn't already know. The cult earned its name from a being called Faera or Fae-Rah, who was either male or female or neither, an ancient evil god of the underworld, or a sinister frog demon, depending on which scholar one found more convincing. The cult was ancient in Gortis, with few adherents, not considered important or threatening other than the odd murder or theft. Its rise to power in Frosthelm a century ago seemed to be a new resurgence, with local converts, not driven by or connected to the Gortian sects. As Madame Lenarre had said, despite remaining fairly secretive, they attained considerable influence in Frosthelm, with many of the noble cl
ass involved. There was the same eclipse prophecy back then as well, although what was prophesized and what form the ritual supposedly took varied from text to text. One proposed an awakening of an army of dead warriors. Another, the summoning of a fearsome ice-beast. A third, a plague of hellfrogs, and a fourth, the emergence of Faera himself (or herself, or itself) onto the land. None sounded particularly pleasant, but none seemed necessarily consistent with the pool’s prediction of fire raining from the sky to burn Frosthelm.
The moon-and-sun symbol was identified in many of the sources. Some also mentioned the Eye of Hrogar gemstone, the Fingernails of the Holy Hermit, the Thersian Crown, and also the Mace of Godron, which had reportedly been recovered and taken as a prize by Prelate Karela herself. I found one other mention of a blue princess of the Golesh tribe. Apparently there had been another unfortunate dead princess found in the Faerans’ possession a century ago. I supposed that if I were chief of the Golesh, I’d hope for sons. The nature of the ritual in which all these bizarre objects would be used was unclear, as all of the leaders of the Faerans had fought to the death or fled, never to return. Only rumors from the remaining minor cultists were recorded, and they were often vague or contradictory. Some seemed to involve amulets, as we’d seen the Faeran followers wear, and some referred to human sacrifice. A grim business. I soon exhausted all of the limited number of histories and official records available to me. The apprentice I pressed into my service did not seem sorry when at last I gave up the search.
Boog stopped by frequently with news. Continued investigations had turned up little about our attackers. The woman still remained stoically silent, but her companion, the one who’d fallen off the stage, had recovered, and he was more gregarious. If he was to be believed, they were mercenaries, in town only briefly, on a break from service at the border. Their leader was the one Boog had fought and slain after I’d gone down. He had found them work, but the others hadn’t been party to the negotiations and knew nothing of their employer. They were to find and capture Bernot and kill us if they could do so without attracting too much attention. They'd followed us from headquarters to the Red Rabbit and overpowered and tied up the little proprietor while we spoke with Bernot. I didn’t imagine we’d be very welcome at the Red Rabbit in the future.
Bernot was understandably nowhere to be found, and he’d left no more notes for Boog. I hoped he was in hiding, or better still, pursuing a rewarding non-rodent-based theatrical career somewhere rather than captured or killed by Marron. The investigation had mostly run its course. An assault on inspectors always took top priority, but all avenues of inquiry appeared to be leading to dead ends. Life in Frosthelm continued apace, as did crime and intrigue, so the inspectors had gradually returned to their other duties.
One late afternoon, I asked Boog, “Are you doing all right, considering?”
“What do you mean?” He chuckled. “Watching you lounge around all day reading books while I work? That’s getting annoying.”
“Well… just that you killed two people.” As far as I knew, they were his first.
“Oh,” he said. “Hadn’t given it too much thought." He placed a huge, callused hand over his mouth, then lowered it. “We’ve been in fights before. I thought we did well to survive, outnumbered and unarmed.”
“Yes, but we actually killed citizens.”
“They were going to kill us! I believe we’re covered in that case. What should we have done, said, ‘Sorry, evil criminals. We'll not be able to fight back. Wouldn’t want to harm you murderous rogues.’ We did right. We did our jobs. We put violent, would-be murderers in jail or in the ground.”
“So you’re proud of it?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“All I did was paralyze one of them, and then I had to be carried home.”
“Not so – without your fake wizard curse, we’d have stayed outnumbered and unarmed, and likely died. You saved us! Maybe you didn't swing the bench, but you killed that man as much as I did.”
I thought about that for a while. I couldn’t really dispute his reasoning. Was I, then, a killer? “I never signed up to kill people,” I said. "That’s not our role. I just…” I wondered what my mother would think of all this. She had been a peaceful, happy woman. Both my danger and my involvement in these deaths would have been shocking and alien to her.
Boog saw my distress. “Marten, we’re officers of the law. There are evil people about. Better that they prey on us than on the citizens, and better that we kill them than they us.” He patted my shoulder. “Be proud. There is no clearer case of justified killing than this, and you performed admirably against a superior enemy. Sophie’s proud of us. The others are proud of us – we’re becoming a bit of a legend.”
He leaned in close and whispered, “Besides, the ladies love a scar and a tale to go with it.”
I snorted at that – my prowess with ‘the ladies’ was most assuredly not a thing of legend. Boog laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. I grunted in pain.
“Uh, sorry.” He patted me again, gentle this time. “But cheer up – you’re alive, your enemies are dead, and you’re a minor hero. Enjoy it a little.”
I resolved to try.
22
Nagging Doubters
Five days after the attack, as I was re-reading a dusty history of Karela’s reign, Gueran ducked his head into my room.
“So, the brave Inspector Mingenstern, in the flesh,” he said haughtily. “Or what’s left of the flesh. I’d have thought you too small a target to be easily struck, but you seem to have managed regardless.”
I sighed. “Thanks for the sympathy, Gueran.”
He snorted. “Sympathy? For being sloppy enough in your investigations to engender assassination attempts?” He laughed. “Or should I rather fear you? After all, I hear from the Sestilles that a diminutive inspector threatened an entire party of children with death. Quite the vicious warmonger.”
I tried hard not to respond to his provocation, but I am not that strong. “How’s the privy maintenance career going for you? You seemed to dive whole-heartedly into your new line of work.”
He chuckled without any real mirth and tapped his chest. “A touch, Marten. But you do not wound me.” He sat by my bed. “I am glad to see you still breathing, though. You do much to keep things amusing around here.”
“I’m happy to oblige,” I said. “Any reason other than amusement you’ve come to see me?”
“Yes, in fact,” he replied, picking a speck of lint from his otherwise spotless uniform. “The woman you captured asked after you. Perhaps she'll tell you something she won’t tell the rest of us, or perhaps she just wants another chance at killing you.” He laughed at his joke. I didn’t. He continued. “Also, I understand from Eggstrom that you’ve had a talk with Sophie.”
“Yes,” I replied, with caution.
“All is roses and spun gold once more?” he asked.
“She seems to approve of our work here, if that’s what you mean. And she sees Marron as a threat.”
Gueran leaned closer and spoke quietly. “Or, she convinced you that she does.”
A few layers of my confidence peeled away. “What are you saying?”
“Regardless of what she said to you, she still cut off an investigation into Marron in exchange for Marron’s money.”
“Yes, but she’s approved me researching the Faerans now.”
“But not Marron, eh?”
I thought a bit. “Well, I’m in no shape to go spying on Marron.”
“You think she’d authorize that?” Gueran sounded angry. “There's no doubt in my mind that Marron’s behind the attack on you, but not a single inspector was assigned to pursue that line of inquiry.”
I thought a bit more. “But… She said she’s wary of Marron. That she was wrong before.”
“And what else could she have said? You’re in too deep for her to continue to stall or obfuscate. She let you dig further, because she had to, but not towards the one who has paid
her off.”
“Gueran!” I said, shocked. But his words found some resonance in my mind. Could it be a sham? Was Sophie that gifted an actor? That deceptive? That sinister?
Gueran leaned back. “It all may be as you say – as Sophie says. Her conversion may be sincere. But consider this – what was the root of the whole matter with Bernot? The amulet. And who now has Novara’s amulet? Marron. Who is getting exactly what he wants, at the expense of our investigations, in exchange for gold?”
I closed my eyes. Gueran’s words were prying open a door I’d thought closed. Did I really believe Sophie now, or did I just want to believe her? I thought back to the note I’d stolen and read. I have done as you asked, under the terms upon which we agreed.
Gueran continued. “Suppose Sophie’s motives are pure. Even so, she’s put us in an impossible place. We can’t act against Marron, or even investigate him, while relying on his money. Sophie should never have placed us in this situation.”
I agreed with him on that point, at least, although I didn’t see where else we’d have found funding. I doubted the Prelate would be willing or even able to double our budget while we repaired the pool. I was thankful at that moment that such unpleasant decisions were not mine to make.
“Soured your milk, have I?” asked Gueran with a smirk.
“A bit,” I admitted. “I have much to ponder. But we have no recourse, really, no matter what Sophie’s true motivations are. What should we do?”
“Ah,” said Gueran. “Finally, you are practical. I say, we must watch Marron, chart his movements and those of his lackeys, find the links between him, these crimes, and this cult of yours, if such exist. But Sophie won’t let us do that, I’ll wager.”