The Conspiracy of Unicorns

by Michael Angel

  The Conspiracy of Unicorns

  Book Nine of ‘Fantasy & Forensics’

  By Michael Angel

  Copyright 2018

  Michael Angel

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  COLOR AND B&W MAPS OF ANDELUVIA

  The Conspiracy of Unicorns

  Book Nine of ‘Fantasy & Forensics’

  By Michael Angel

  Chapter One

  Sometimes I think ‘C.S.I.’ doesn’t stand for ‘Crime Scene Investigation’ so much as ‘Can’t Stand Idiots’.

  This was one of those times.

  “Of all the addle-headed things I have witnessed,” an older man’s voice blustered, “this surely must strike in the gold as the most…addle-headed!”

  “Father,” Sir Quinton said, “please, be still! Dame Chrissie is the Head of my Knightly Order, and she has always had reasons for what she does. Even if they look addled at first.”

  The young knight got a ‘harrumph’ in return. Lord Quinton looked like a burlier – and surlier – version of his son, from his massive chest to his blond mustache. Said mustache was wide and bushy enough to form its own barbershop quartet. Still, the man cut an impressive figure in his cream-colored shirt and bright orange doublet. The image of a half-moon lay upon the doublet’s left breast, proclaiming the nobleman’s loyalty to Lord Ivor.

  I sent a silent thank-you out to Sir Quinton and returned my attention to the task at hand.

  Andeluvia’s summers weren’t quite as hot as those in Southern California, but the heat could get intense. I needed to get my work done before the sun crested the tree line next to Lord Quinton’s castle. In fact, the estate resembled a miniature version of Fitzwilliam’s palace, though without the thick outer walls.

  Polished gray stone peaked with slender turrets and snapping orange pennants shone against a backdrop of dark woodland. Banks of flowers, ranging in color from peach to candy-apple red, stretched in a wide curve around the castle eaves. Scents of sweet pea and honeysuckle hung in the air like expensive perfume. The pleasant smells and sights lent Lord Quinton’s demesnes more than a little bit of a fairytale quality.

  At least until one noticed all the dead bodies lying around.

  Corpses littered the areas at the edges of the flower beds, in some places thick enough to form small piles. Evidence of a massacre, but not evidence as to what had caused it.

  I was trying to find that very thing, but I had a couple of issues working against me. Sir Quinton’s father, mother, younger sister, and half of the demesnes’ staff had come out to watch the otherworldly woman ask for strange things. Strange things like cordoning off the perimeter with a local carpenter’s leftover saw horses. Or having one of the castle’s tables and a couple of benches lugged outside so I had someplace to set up my equipment.

  Then, my equipment kept throwing me challenges. I’d pulled out some of the same gear I’d last used in the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. Slipping on a goggle strap with magnifying lenses, I followed that up with a disposable face mask, slipping the loops over my ears. Both immediately fogged up, forcing me to wipe each item clean. Once that was done, I located the smallest set of scalpels and probes in my toolkit and began poking through my subject’s black and yellow fuzz.

  Lady Quinton, who had just finished shooing away the castle servants, came back to watch alongside her husband. Like the two men, she stood nine or ten feet off to one side from where I sat at the table, doing my best to untangle this latest mystery. Lord Quinton’s wife was a pretty blonde who boasted a generous spray of freckles across both sun kissed cheeks. Given the floral patterns that decorated her dress, I was pretty sure that these were her gardens.

  “I’m afraid that I don’t understand any of this either,” she admitted. “Why is Dame Chrissie playing around with dead bees?”

  “Because that is what ‘forensics’ is all about,” her son informed her. “Poking around with dead things’ innards is what she does to draw in her magic power.”

  Lord Quinton couldn’t contain himself any longer. “Blast it, you mean like…necromancy?”

  The younger Quinton paused for a moment. “From what I understand, it’s very similar.”

  “Well, I don’t like it. Talking to or raising the dead sounds like a cursed art to me!”

  That did it.

  I had to nip this in the bud. Rumors of my being a witch helped keep some of the more annoying people at bay. But things in Andeluvia had a way of spiraling out of control, like the tale that I’d resurrected Lord Ivor with a spell called the ‘Kiss of Life’. That was nothing more than good old-fashioned CPR, but no one outside my circle of friends believed me.

  “Hold on a minute,” I said. The Quinton family gave me a strange look at the muffled sound of my voice. I removed the face mask before I tried talking again. “Look, what I do isn’t magic, whatever you might have heard. It’s science. Right now, you have what, seven beehives up and running, right?”

  “Eight,” Lord Quinton said, after a moment’s thought. “My craftsmen just set up another of your strange contraptions earlier this morning, in the fields to the west. It’s getting easier now that they are used to cutting pieces for your design.”

  “Well, of those eight, this is the only one where all the bees died, correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Suzanne noticed the bees from this one hive were acting strangely on the morning past. Then today she called me to the garden, and this is what we found. Piles of dead insects upon my doorstep!”

  “My flower garden is hardly your doorstep,” Lady Quinton pointed out. “Yet my husband speaks true. On the past morn, I noticed that the bees flew about…well, oddly. Like men who’ve been too long at the alehouse and are groping their way back to their cottage.”

  “That’s not a lot to go on,” I said. “In any case, I need to find out what killed these bees, in case it might spread to the other hives. I’m not trying to speak to the dead, turn them into undead minions, or anything ‘cursed’, all right?”

  Suzanne’s husband puffed his chest out like a strutting rooster. “I certainly hope not! Elsewise, we shall have to snuff out the unholy results of your ‘hive’ with fire!”

  “Right, right,” I sighed. “Got it.”

  This conversation wasn’t really going anywhere fast. I pulled my mask back up and returned to work. I wasn’t an entomologist, casual or otherwise. But I’d dissected examples of pretty much anything that had once walked, crawled, waddled, or squirmed its way across the world. I knew the basics of insect anatomy.

  A quick lance with a pin held the bug in place as I began a careful examination. The magnifying glasses helped make out all the fine detail on such a small specimen. Andeluvian honeybees resembled common American honeybees, so it was easy for me to examine the thorax and the yellow-and-black striped abdomen.

  I found no evidence of trauma to the major body segments, legs, or antennae. Whatever killed this bee had done so without using violence. I also didn’t see anything blocking the breathing spiracles. Many types of toxins could jam thes
e holes in the insect’s side, smothering it. The stinging mechanism was intact as well, which made sense. Bees normally eviscerated themselves as they employed their sting.

  A couple tiny cuts took me through the exoskeleton and into the insect’s innards. From here on, things got trickier for a non-expert like myself. Unlike higher order animals, bees didn’t really have a circulatory system. Their insides resembled an open-floorplan house, where the organs floated in an organic mush called ‘hemolymph’. The lymph was pumped around the body, keeping it nourished and oxygenated, by a simple heart and dorsal artery.

  A faintly rancid smell crept through my mask as I scraped away a layer of lymphatic goo to check the insect’s heart and stomach. It barely registered above a ‘1’ on the Chrissie Scale of Stinkiness (yes, patent still pending), but its alien scent made it seem more noxious.

  Once I put my tools aside, I sat back to think. Everything looked in order, as best as I could tell. The only difference was that the insides of the bug were less ‘juicy’ than the ones I’d worked on before during school prep courses. The guts of an insect typically ran out in a grey-green mess. These barely managed to ooze out, like a blob of half-dried toothpaste.

  “Did you find your answers?” Sir Quinton called.

  I stood up and pulled my mask down. “I’m not sure. Let me tell you what I’m thinking.”

  I talked my way through my insectoid autopsy, from the state of the bug’s body to the strange lack of gooey goodness around the organs. When I looked up, the Quintons were staring at me with expressions ranging from puzzled to grossed out.

  “It is truly spoken,” Lord Quinton gulped. “You are a strange choice for the Head of my son’s Knightly Order.”

  “You’d be surprised how strange things do get,” I agreed. My admission startled the older man. “But this isn’t some random death. An entire colony was wiped out here. If it’s something common to this area, you’ll lose all my Order’s bees. That’ll be disaster for everyone.”

  “On that we agree, Dame Chrissie.”

  I had figured as much. By pledging to the Order of the Ermine, his son had taken on my financial obligations as his own. I had to earn a twelfth of what I owed and present it to the Exchequer within a fortnight. Otherwise, the entire sum would come due. For everyone in the Order.

  In my world, credit card companies only sent you nasty letters. They might threaten to ruin your credit rating. At worst, they’d take you to court and garnish future wages.

  Andeluvian debt collectors were a good deal more direct and personal. The Quinton’s pretty little castle would be seized as payment, and they’d be unceremoniously evicted into the wilderness. That same fate would await Lord Ghaznavi’s family. Only Sir Exton would come away relatively unscathed, as his father had shrewdly disowned him and stripped him of any claim to his family’s titles.

  I put these awful thoughts out of my head as firmly as I could. I had a case to work on here. An entire colony’s worth of unknown death. I’d seen a slaughtered nest of wyverns less than a week ago, and the parallels chilled me.

  Something deep in my gut told me to keep looking, and I listened to it. My personal number-one rule was simple: I always trusted my gut – because it already knew what my brain hadn’t quite figured out yet.

  Once again, the voice of Professor Gerber, my instructor in Trace and Impression Evidence, popped into my head.

  When in doubt, go back to the source! Only then will the scales fall from your eyes!

  The source. And what was the source here?

  “Okay,” I said aloud, “I’m not finding clues on the body. That means I’ve got only one place left to check.”

  Chapter Two

  Of course, as soon as I informed Lord Quinton where I was looking next, the man had to get a few choice comments in.

  “You want to look inside the hive itself?” he asked, amazed. “What possible good could come of that?”

  “If you know what to look for,” I said, “it might tell us a lot about what happened here,”

  I turned and waded through a bed of flowers towards the now-dead hive.

  The kit I’d provided to Sir Quinton had been faithfully copied by Lord Quinton’s carpenters and assembled into a squat white cube containing hanging wooden slats. I picked my way between heaps of dead bees as I stepped up to the edge of the hive.

  Sliding my fingers under the top edge, I located the locking tabs and flicked them to the ‘open’ position. The hive’s cover swung up just like an automobile’s hood. I propped the cover open with a length of wood that replaced the original kit’s metal stay-bar. Quinton’s carpenters really had done a good job matching the original design.

  The grassy smell of honey and fresh beeswax greeted me. In fact, the scent was so strong that I could practically taste the raw honey dripping off a dipstick. Images of the stuff slathered over French toast or upside-down cake ran through my mind.

  But the really striking aspect of opening the hive was the silence. Even when calmed by fragrant wood smoke, a hive was a buzzing, seething mass of insects. Not here, not anymore. The neat rows and columns of hexagonal cells lay intact in their frames, while the bottom of the hive was hidden beneath a carpet of dead bees.

  I pursed my lips in thought. What was I missing here?

  “You see?” Lord Quinton scoffed. “The creatures inside are hardly going to leave you a note saying, ‘This is what killed us’.”

  “Just give her time to work,” his son insisted. “Even you agreed that this was important to all of us.”

  “Only because of your damned oath! I didn’t raise you to become a twice-damned bee landlord! If Dame Chrissie can’t talk to the dead, then I doubt she can figure out a way to communicate with a swarm of insects!”

  A rustling sound came from the nearby tree line. Liam emerged from the underbrush, his proud stag antlers glistening with dew as he trotted over to my side. He gave me one of his dashing deer-bows as the Quintons watched, dumbfounded.

  “As you requested, I’ve spoken to the rest of the hives,” he announced, in his charming Gaelic-tinged voice. “None of them report feeling the slightest bit ill.”

  Sir Quinton elbowed his father in the side. “You were saying?”

  The elder Quinton appeared to be having trouble finding his voice. “I…er…”

  “He looks gorgeous, just gorgeous!” Lady Quinton cooed. A dreamy look filled her eyes as she gazed at Liam. I ignored all the side commentary as I continued to question my friend.

  “Do they have any idea what happened to this hive?”

  Liam shook his head. “They’ve been too busy building up combs and honey, which is what I asked them to do in the first place. Also, hives really don’t ‘talk’ to each other very much.”

  I considered that a moment. “Professional courtesy?”

  “Actually, it’s because bees carry the distinct smell of their hive with them. If enough workers from different hives come into close contact, they immediately start trying to kill each other.”

  That got a snort out of me. “Obviously, they’ve been studying how King Fitzwilliam’s court works.”

  “They did tell me that this particular hive was the most recent to emerge from the forest and take up residence here. It may be that this swarm came from a different – or at least more distant – part of the woods.”

  An eagle’s cry echoed in my ears as Grimshaw descended from above. I quickly closed the hive’s top so that the downdraft from the griffin’s massive wings wouldn’t disturb the contents. A moment later, a blast of wind ruffled my hair as he touched down. The drake’s creamy white wings folded neatly against his muscular golden back.

  This time it was Lord Quinton’s eyes that took on the dreamy look.

  The drake reached up and snagged the device that I’d hung around his neck earlier this morning. The magnetic snap clicked open and the fist-sized plastic rectangle fell into my hand.

  “Mine eyes searched high and low,” Shaw reported crisp
ly. “I saw naught in the area that looked fell, fallow, or sickly. Perhaps thy device can tell thee otherwise.”

  I turned the little device over in my palm and pressed the readout button. All the indicators lit up with friendly green dots. I noted my friends’ curious glances, so I showed them the readout as I explained.

  “This is a handheld version of a gas spectrometer,” I said, as I pointed at the indicator lights. “It senses various kinds of toxic gases. And it’s telling us that there aren’t any in this area.”

  “Thank goodness,” Liam said. “I still have nightmares about the carnage we found in Keshali’s courtyard.”

  Shaw looked thoughtful. “I do not regret running thy mission, Dayna. But had I flown into anything ‘toxic’, wouldst not my death be all the proof needed?”

  I reached up and gently stroked the feathers along the side of my friend’s head, eliciting a purr in response.

  “I’d never send you into something that hazardous,” I said. “Even if you thought it something ‘glorious’. Now that I think of it, especially if you thought it was something glorious. But it takes a lot less poison to kill a tiny bee than a hulking griffin like you. That’s why I needed this sensor. To detect those minute traces of poison.”

  Liam paced back and forth, his sleek form eliciting a girlish ‘oooh!’ from Lady Quinton that we all ignored.

  “That puts the mystery at hand back into play,” he mused. “No poisons, and the hives each reported nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “‘Tis a quandary we find ourselves in,” Shaw agreed. He sat and brought up one of his hind paws to scratch an itch on his flank.

  The drake’s action got me thinking. What if we were looking at an infestation of parasites here? Something that sucked bodily fluids would account for the strange ‘tackiness’ of the innards I’d noted during my bee autopsy. But where were the parasites now? If their victim ceased providing them with food, where might they go?