Murder by magic: twenty tales of crime and the supernatural

by edited by Rosemary Edghill

  “Negligible,” she said, lying through her teeth.

  Sergei tapped a finger on the space bar, studying the screen in front of him, skimming the list of John Does brought into the local hospitals for unexplained expirations. Of the seven names, two had cause of death listed as lightning strikes. One more had internal damage consistent with lightning, but the cause of death was liver failure—apparently, he had been a long-term alcoholic.

  None of the men matched the description of John Ebenezer. His lips thinned as he entered another search, widening the area to include Connecticut and New Jersey. Assuming Neezer stuck around. Sergei wouldn’t put any of his money on that.

  Behind him, Wren made a sound of disgust, changing the channel without using the remote. They had spent two days driving through the city, walking into homeless shelters and into run-down apartment buildings until she could See the wizzarts scattered there, siphoning the faintest trace off their auras until she could weave a leash from them to her. She had found seven, but had only managed to create three leashes before collapsing from exhaustion. Just the memory of her shaking, sweating body made him angry all over again.

  “Drink more of the juice,” he told her, not looking over his shoulder to make sure she obeyed him.

  The screen displayed a refreshed list of names. Nothing.

  “Serg?”

  He was at her side before he consciously realized he’d heard her voice. The juice lay splattered on the carpet, the glass rolling off to one side, unbroken. He determined that there was no physical danger and cupped her face in his hands, all in the space of heartbeats.

  “I’m here, lapushka,” he told her. The pulse at her neck was thready, and her eyes were glazed, pain lines forming around them. He waited, cursing whatever idiotic impulse had ever led him to agree to this, as she struggled to maintain the connection.

  “Got him!”

  They had lost the first one that morning, the leash snapping before Wren could do more than be aware of the attack. She had cried then, silent tears that left her eyes red-rimmed and her nose runny. She had never been able to cry gracefully. His fingers tightened on her chin. “Easy, Wren. Hold him. Hold him…”

  It was dangerous touching her. The overrush of current could easily jump to him, and he’d have no protection, no way to ground himself. But he wouldn’t abandon her to do it alone.

  Sweat was rising from her skin now, dampening her hair against her face and neck. But she felt cool, almost clammy, tiny flicks of electricity coursing off the dampness, sparking in the air.

  “Ah—yes, that’s it, come on, lean on me… lean on me, dammit!”

  She was chanting instructions to the wizzart, trying to reach into his current-crazed mind. Trust wasn’t high on a wizzart’s list, though, especially for voices they heard inside their own heads.

  A bolt rumbled through her, almost knocking them to the side. Sergei planted himself more firmly, his grip keeping her upright. She’d have bruises on her face when they were done. He’d have them, too, on the inside: lightning burns, internal scarring. Pain ached through his nerve endings. This was insane. For some literal burnouts they’d never have anything to do with…

  For John Ebenezer, he reminded himself. For Genevieve.

  The air got heavy, and he could almost smell the singeing of hair and flesh, of carpet fibers cracking underneath his knees, the fusing of the wiring in the walls, the phone, his computer. A lightbulb popped, but all he could focus on was her labored breathing, the voice crooning encouragement to someone miles away.

  Her eyes, which had been squinted half-shut, opened wide, and she stared into his eyes endlessly. He felt as though he were falling, tumbling straight into an electric maw with nothing to stop his fall. He was her, was him, was the current flowing between them. He Saw through her eyes the wizzart let go, felt the current being pounded into him, flowing into her, and being grounded. He understood, finally, for that endless second the elegant simplicity of grounding, and reveled in the surge of power filling the matter of his existence.

  The wizzart slumped, fell unconscious in a puddle of his own urine. Get him, Sergei urged into her open mind. Find whoever did this.

  He felt her stretch back into the wizzart’s self, backtracking the current that had been pumped into him, striking out like the lightning it rode in. A shudder of anger, hatred, disgust slamming into hard walls, confusion, and time stretched and snapped back, knocking him clear across the room and headfirst into the wall.

  When he came to, the room was dark. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights—they’d blown, each and every one of them. Crawling forward, he reached out, finding the top of Wren’s head. She was curled into a ball, silently shaking.

  “I screwed up,” she said. “I couldn’t get them. It was too far away. I couldn’t reach the bastards…”

  He sat there, in the dark, and rocked his partner back and forth while she cried.

  “It was a good control group,” Sergei said around a mouthful of toast. “Small enough population to monitor, and nobody to care if a few bodies went missing.” He shook his head, less astonished at the ways of mankind than impressed at the planning it had taken. Planning and resources and a certain bloody-mindedness.

  “You’re a bastard, Sergei.” He had dragged her out to have breakfast, but she wasn’t eating. Scrambled eggs congealed on the plate in front of her. Sunglasses perched on the edge of her nose even though the diner itself was shaded and cool.

  He put his fork down. “What do you want me to say? It’s over, Wren. We got too close… we scared them, at least. That will make them pull back, be cautious.”

  “So they’ll just move shop to another town? Sergei, I can’t—” She stopped. “I couldn’t do anything last night. I didn’t have enough juice, wasn’t good enough. We can’t stop them. We don’t even know who ‘they’ are.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, wincing a little as he touched the bandage on his forehead. “We know the how, what they’re doing, the kind of people they’re looking for. A few well-placed words and people will be looking and paying attention. They’ll be able to protect each other.”

  “It’s not enough.” He could see the tears building again and watched her force them away.

  “It’s all we can do.” He didn’t have anything more to offer her. Sometimes all you could do was make sure your own neighborhood was clean. Sometimes that just had to be enough.

  Wren didn’t look convinced. But she picked up her fork, shoveled a mouthful, and chewed, swallowed.

  For him, that was enough.

  PART III

  Murder Most Genteel

  Captured in Silver

  Teresa Edgerton

  Teresa Edgerton is the author of nine novels and a handful of short stories. As her connection with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—not to mention reality in general—is somewhat tenuous, she had no other choice but to become a writer of fantastic fiction. She loves books, gardens, and old, old houses.

  Her most recent novel is The Queen’s Necklace, a big, strange, fantasy swashbuckler that ranges across years and continents with reckless glee. This story is set in an obscure corner of that universe.

  The lady stood with her hands clasped tightly before her: nails scoring the delicate flesh, knuckles as white as her muslin gown. Under a close bonnet with a silky ostrich feather, she looked ill, haggard. Though the face itself was beautiful, the bone structure flawless, there were purple shadows under her eyes, and her skin had the color and transparency of old wax. “There is a man who has wronged me and my family,” she said. “I desire his death.”

  The old man looked up at her from under sparse white eyebrows. He wore his hair unfashionably long, powdered and clubbed behind, and there was a jagged scar on one lean cheek. According to the sign outside his shop, he was an apothecary; he had, however, a reckless, buccaneer air about him, quite out of keeping with that respectable profession.

  So much the better, thought the lady. She had
no use for an honestman. Growing impatient at his prolonged silence, she spoke again. “I desire nothing on this earth so much as his death.”

  “You have come to me for poison,” said the apothecary, making himself busy with something behind the high counter.

  “No, nothing so simple as that. He’s been poisoned before. There are those who believe he’s made a pact with dark, occult forces; there have been many attempts on his life, yet he goes on living.

  “And do not,” she added with a convulsive movement, “suggest that I seek out some bully swordsman, any ordinary assassin. Attempts have been made, I tell you. He has men to guard him now, and he trusts no one.”

  There was another long silence but for a log collapsing on the hearth with a snap and a crackling shower of sparks.

  “You say he has wronged you,” the old man answered at last. “Perhaps you have some recourse within the law? The courts—”

  “The courts are a travesty, the judges senile and deranged. Surely you know that as well as I. There is no justice in Tourvallon—there has not been any these ten years.”

  “And so you turn to sorcery?” said the apothecary. His appearance was shabby—his nails dirty and ragged, the elbows of his coat inexpertly patched—yet a gold ring with an immense rough-cut indigo stone adorned one hand. He smelled of camphor and of ambergris, of dust and chemicals, mildew and tallow.

  “Yes. Someone—someone gave me your name. They told me you could kill anyone—anywhere—anytime.”

  “That is not precisely true. Yet it is possible that I can be of assistance to you. The price, however, is very high. You understand that I don’t speak of payment in banknotes or gold.”

  He made a broad gesture, indicating his small, dark, crowded shop. Some of the stoneware jars on the shelves were cracked; a once handsome tiled floor was scuffed and muddy; yet there was a glimmer of cobalt-blue glass in the shadows, and the fire burned with unnatural intensity. Like the man himself, the room was dingy, but somehow suggestive of wilder, grander things. “If it was material wealth I desired, I’d hardly spend my days in these surroundings.”

  “Name your price,” she answered with a desperate abandon. “So that the man dies, I scarcely care what becomes of me afterwards.”

  By some engineering feat of the Goblins who built the city—long ages before the race of Men rose to knowledge and power—the river divided into two perfect channels just north of the town and encircled Tourvallon like a shining ribbon—a ribbon that sometimes drew as tight a as noose, when the bridges were raised and the Duke sent his mounted troops out into the streets to root out dissent. Yet dissent still flourished: lampoons and scurrilous ballads, printed on cheap yellow paper in smeary ink, appeared on crumbling brick walls and rusty iron lampposts; earnest young men, in attics and garrets, turned out a flood of revolutionary pamphlets.

  “Give us justice,” cried the people, “give us life”; but there was no justice, and life was reduced to a hopeless struggle. The Duke had surrounded himself with a corrupt government and a sinful, luxurious court. Even more than the surrounding countryside, the city suffered. Children might starve, gutters run foul, and disease reduce the population in the poorer parts of the town by almost half, but public monies continued to flow into private coffers.

  Greediest of the greedy, most insatiable of the insatiable, was the First Minister, Prosper de Rouille. When word of his death ran through the city, there was widespread rejoicing. He had gained enemies even among the nobility, for he had robbed and oppressed the rich as readily as the poor.

  In one house, however, the news was received with mixed feelings. Gabriel-Louis-Constant Jaucourt, the Lord High Constable, was entertaining his friend Simon Montjoye, with a late-night supper of oysters and crayfish, when his servant came in with a letter on a tray.

  The letter was brief, but Jaucourt read it twice. “You were wondering, on Monday,” he said to his guest, “why de Rouille was absent from the autumn fete? Out of favor, you asked me then, or out of the city? I couldn’t answer you at the time, but I can now. He is out of this world entirely.”

  “Murdered at last?” asked Montjoye. He raised his goblet of opalescent glass and took a dainty sip of the lemon-scented wine. But under the Constable’s steady regard, he felt suddenly ashamed of his jest. “I beg your pardon. That was in execrable taste.” Montjoye fumbled withthe jeweled eyeglass he wore on a chain around his neck, “if de Rouille had been assassinated, it would be up to you to do something about it.”

  “He has been assassinated,” Jaucourt replied, “though what I can do remains to be seen. The circumstances, it seems, are extraordinary.” Folding the letter in half, he rose from the table and stood with one strong, square hand on the curved back of his chair, looking down at his guest.

  They made an odd pair, the tall, grave Constable and his little frivolous, dandified friend, but Montjoye was at least honest and Jaucourt valued him. “If you wish to know more, you’re welcome to accompany me to Chateau Lezardz.”

  The gaudy third-floor bedchamber was stifling, with the rotten hothouse odor of decaying flesh. Feeling a little faint, Montjoye took out a perfumed handkerchief and held it to his nose, but the Constable and his deputy, Lieutenant Buffon, were men of a sterner fiber and did not even flinch.

  The body was lying between sheets of honey-colored satin, on a bed with four silver posts. There was a long, deadly spike of polished dark ivory piercing his chest and a stain of dried blood on his silken nightshirt.

  “Impaled by the horn of the unicorn!” said Montjoye in a slightly muffled voice. “Who would have imagined it?” He indicated, with one unsteady hand, the delicate spiral of the murder weapon.

  “No, sir. By the carved horn of a black monoceros,” answered the practical Buffon. “The victim, it seems, collected curiosities.” There was an open cabinet made of rare woods at one end of the room, and a gleam of silver and crystal within. “The servants, at any rate, claim to recognize it.”

  “I am afraid that poor Montjoye is waxing poetic,” Jaucourt explained. “or do I mean ironic? No one believes in unicorns anymore or in virgins, for that matter.”

  Glancing over the room with an expert eye, he became all business. “Your letter was somewhat obscure. Tell me everything you’ve learned.”

  Buffon nodded. Leading the others across the room, where the air was somewhat better, he began his account.

  “According to the servants, the First Minister entered this roomthree nights ago, locking and bolting the door behind him. All this was according to his custom—de Rouille lived in perpetual fear of assassination and he never slept but in a sealed room. There were two hired mercenary guards outside in the corridor—he employed six men, who took their duty in shifts—but they were never permitted to enter the bedchamber. Likewise, though he occasionally entertained female visitors, he never allowed any of them to stay through the night—having a fear, it would seem, of being murdered in his bed.”

  “Not without reason, as it appears,” said Jaucourt. “But do you tell me that no one was surprised when he failed to leave his room the following morning?”

  “He had restless nights; to make up for that, he often slept late. The servants had standing orders not to disturb him; not one of them dared to disobey. By evening, of course, his household steward began to fret—but still he was reluctant to act. It was as much as his position was worth, he told me later. And worse: those who knew de Rouille’s habits, the routines of his household, had a habit of disappearing or meeting with accidents after he dismissed them.”

  Jaucourt and Montjoye exchanged a disgusted glance. “Obsessive,” said Jaucourt, “and more unsavory, even, than I suspected. Yet what did it gain him?”

  “Because of all this,” Buffon went on, “no one sent for me until early this evening, at which time de Rouille had been in his bedchamber for seventy-two hours. I determined it would be best to knock down the door. That done, we found the body just as you see it now. There were no signs of a str
uggle, no way that I could see for an intruder to enter the room except through the door, which was of sturdy oak and a formidable barrier. We had the devil of a time knocking it down.”

  Jaucourt began to pace. He was searching the room with more than his eyes, listening with more than his ears. A student of magic—whose time at the university had passed, if not with honors, at least with distinction—he also possessed some slightly ability to receive impressions from inanimate objects.

  But the bedchamber, the furniture, the dead man’s possessions, they were all mute. Unnaturally mute, it seemed to Jaucourt.

  Very well, then, the Constable concluded, Prosper de Rouille had been murdered in his sleep—which explained, at least, the lack of psychic dissonance caused by his passing. But how had the assassin managed to leave no impression?

  There was no answer for that, so far as he knew, so Jaucourt turned once more to his ordinary senses and to more practical questions.

  The only windows were small and narrow, set high in one wall. They were not made to open, and the pale amber glass remained intact. Even had it been otherwise, there was not much chance that the smallest assassin—a child or a Goblin—could squeeze through so tiny a space.

  Jaucourt said as much to Buffon.

  “As you say, sir,” the Lieutenant agreed. “I don’t much fancy the windows as a means of entrance of egress myself.”

  “And the walls are of solid stone—no wooden panels, no secret doors.” Just to make certain, Jaucourt had some of the furniture shifted. The walls behind were blank, solid, impenetrable. When the body was removed, the bed pushed aside, and the expensive figured carpet rolled up, the floor proved equally innocent of trapdoors.

  The Constable knelt down and carefully studied the polished wooden planks, as though he could scarcely believe their silent testi­mony. “A very pretty puzzle.” He rose heavily to his feet, dusted off his knees, adjusted the modest lace ruffles at his wrists, then turned to Buffon. “When do you suppose the murder took place?”