by John Ruch
Ashton rose smoothly and paced before the couch of assholes. “I have gathered you here because I have solved this terrible double-murder,” he announced to the glaring, bagged eyes and scowling mouths. “Naturally, you want to know the killer’s identity. But to a master detective, the question isn’t, ‘Who did it?’ The question is, ‘Who can out-do it?’”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he paced. “The killer thinks they are clever and ingenious. The role of the detective is show them that they are not the cleverest or the ingenioust-est…er, very ingenious.” He stopped and opened his palms to them. “It would be a simple matter for me to say the killer’s name. But wouldn’t it be even more convincing to hear them confess on their own? Of course it would.”
He turned to his colleague. “Mieux, please pull that sideboard of wine bottles over here.”
She complied, tugging the rattling furniture with the apple lodged in her mouth. Ashton picked up a spoon from its surface and tapped the bottles to make a crude, off-key tune. Its annoying tones deepened the scowls from the couch.
“We all know that killers can lurk among us by telling lies with every conversation they hold,” Ashton said, gesturing with the spoon like a headmaster at a chalkboard. “But a fact little-known—except to students of crime such as myself—is that if someone lies while they are singing, they cannot avoid a telltale quiver in their voice.” He tapped out the horrible half-tune on the bottles again. “So let’s hear you all sing, one after the other.”
He curled a finger at the debutante, who rose and stood grimly at the sideboard. “Simply sing, ‘I am innocent as a newborn dove, I am pure and full of love,’” he instructed. “To the tune of The Godkillers.”
Ashton smirked as she obeyed while he tapped out the tune. Each of them went through the ritual with varying degrees of cooperation. When all had finished, Ashton crossed his arms against several objections, including from the dominus himself, that they hadn’t heard any especially guilt-ridden vibrato.
Ashton merely smiled and held up a hand. “The confirmation of my judgment was quite obvious. But I understand it is subtle to the untrained ear. However, there is another test that will make the display of guilt unmistakable, with their own hands actually mimicking the commission of the brutal murders. How, you ask? We will repeat the singing—but this time, while also dancing a two-step.” He began tapping on the green-glass bottles.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! Enough!” that middle-aged guy suddenly screamed, a vein bulging in his forehead. “Fine, I did it! Drag me away and lock me up! Anywhere but here with this crazy bullshit!”
“Aha! The murderer confesses!” Ashton cried. He grabbed a throw pillow and immediately pounced onto the man, shoving the cushion into his mouth. “Don’t let him say anything else! The villain may use spellcalling!”
While the others joined in pinning the man down, Ashton slid a silver table knife out of his sleeve and pretended to find it in the guy’s waistband.
“What a cool clue!” Ashton shouted, holding it up as the apple toppled out of Mieux’s mouth in her slack-jawed delight. “He even stole a piece of the dominus’s fine silverware, undoubtedly planning to use it to kill again!”
Meanwhile, the dominus clapped his hands to call in the guards, who bustled the man away. The others stood silently a moment. Then that prick of a butler turned on Ashton.
“Why did he do it? And how did you figure it out? You haven’t even learned anyone’s name!” the butler challenged.
Ashton nodded calmly while his heart pounded, and turned to the couch. “You can all sit here while I give an extremely lengthy explanation of the crimes. Or we can all leave this insane snakepit immediately and read about it later.”
The guests fled as if the mansion were ablaze as the dominus waved permission to the guards. Ashton ignored the butler and distracted the dominus with a flurry of praise, questions, and demands.
“There’s no need to thank me, besides my fee,” he concluded rapidly. “And there’s no time. I must go the temple and make sure the killer didn’t leave anyone else there injured while they sneaked out through the secret passage at night.”
Fifteen minutes later, after a brief pause for Ashton to vomit from anxiety into a convenient flowerbed, he and Mieux were at the temple, questioning a young cleric about the murdered high priest’s investigations into the Leveling. A couple of aurei from the detecting-fee moneybags Ashton had slung over his shoulder improved the priest’s memory. The idea was that flakes of silver sprinkled onto parchment properly inscribed with a magica symbol, then placed near an instance of biddening, would align themselves in a pattern that could be analyzed to reveal its geographic source. Problem was, there had been so many flashes of that nasty blue light, and so fast, the old guy hadn’t been able to fully track one down.
Ashton asked the young priest repeat to the experiment, and was surprised to learn they were experiencing the opposite problem—no one had spotted an instance of the biddening for the past day. Ashton’s mind raced with the possibility that Alfie and Rinka had survived and somehow turned off the evil tap. He insisted they try the experiment again anyway. To the priest’s astonishment, the flakes tugged gently, almost imperceptibly, northeastward on the parchment.
Covering the flakes with the glass dome from a cheese dish as proof against a breeze, the priest took the weird document outside and they followed the course it suggested like a compass needle. They wound through the empty pre-dawn streets, and Ashton began recognizing them. He’d seen them from above during the rooftop getaway.
The trail ended in the very courtyard where Alfie and Rinka had been snatched away. The flakes of silver stood on end, glinting in the first rays of dawn.
“I don’t see anything. What are we looking for?” Ashton asked.
A blue flash knocked them on their asses amid the glittering of silver flakes and broken cheese-dish glass. Suddenly, there were Alfie in his humidity-soaked robe, Rinka with blood-streaked armor and mascara-streaked face, and a small golden beetle common to the Jadal that scurried away.
The priest scurried away, too, while Ashton sat up and Alfie sat down. Mieux squealed and leaped onto Rinka, who caught her easily and held her in one arm against her side, like a power-behind-the-throne carrying the princess regent of some nightmare kingdom.
Rinka’s eyes focused on Ashton, and her grim expression transformed into a grin.
“Miss me?” she said. “Or just my makeup advice?”
As he sat relaxed, his wrists resting loosely on his knees, Ashton laughed easily for the first time in days. “I was going to ask you the same question.”
Ashton, with only a touch of regret at the latest fib, was able to convince Fisarex that his friends had ended the Leveling, but not for her to join them as they continued their journey into the Vast. And Fisarex wasn’t able to convince Ashton to stick around and receive the key to the city, not to mention to her bedchamber. He wasn’t one to settle down, especially in a place where someone might eventually ask him for that lengthy explanation about the murder mystery. Besides, nothing repelled Ashton faster than someone who seemed to genuinely like him.
Or so he half-admitted to himself before plunging into the pre-emptive distraction of fantasizing once more about Elsbeth Steeleye, who was more likely to kiss him with her fists than with her lips. “Ah, well, everything is complicated,” he assured himself vaguely.
The conversation of his companions as they hiked back to the caravan was affirmation of this philosophical insight. The women enthralled each other with their increasingly incredible stories.
“I’m not totally sure we really solved a murder!” Mieux confessed as Rinka, without evident permission, undid her H.R. Kewl pigtails.
“I’m not sure we didn’t commit one,” Rinka replied, shooting a look at Alfie, who remained unusually quiet.
Ashton spotted Elsbeth’s broad green shoulders from five hundred feet away as they approached the circled wagons near the docks. He donned a grin and began thi
nking up the most heroic way to retell the murder mystery. But both faded when he saw the wagon-driver hunched aggressively, a massive hammer clenched in one fist, as she faced off with Lain.
What has that bastard done now? he wondered, quickening his pace. He soon realized that Trelleck, Ninebarrow, and the Arnbold kid were in on it, too, though they hung back cautiously. As the returning heroes interrupted, Elsbeth wheeled on them, and a meow from the ground revealed the source of the dispute.
“The cat is mine!” Elsbeth proclaimed, pointing the hammer’s handle at Mr. Pudgymouth.
“I’ve been petting it. It’s mine!” Lain growled.
“Try to take it, little man!” Elsbeth replied, her braids whipping as she turned her attention back to him.
Mr. Pudgymouth blinked up at them and licked a paw, then commenced washing its face. It is pretty cute, and I could take better care of it than these brutes, Ashton mused.
Rinka intervened, jangling a pouch of keys as a reminder that her desires took precedent, and she desired Mr. Pudgymouth. However, no one matched Mieux’s speed. She darted in and grabbed the growling feline, which stretched grumpily nearly as long as her body.
“He’s mine because I found him and named him!” she cried. “But to be fair, I will let everyone take turns petting him all for themselves for a whole day!”
It seemed a reasonable solution, and was fixed in stone when Ashton employed his dice to determine the schedule of Pudgymouth custody. That matter settled, Ashton absorbed some ribbing from Trath over his makeup, and visited the Trals to wriggle out of an inconvenient marriage promise in exchange for intelligence about the secret passage in the dominus’s mansion. All the while, the caravan prepped for departure.
Squeezed into the driver’s seat next to Elsbeth as they crossed the Pons Cynrica the normal way, Ashton tried and failed to relax.
“Does your head feel fuzzy, too, or am I just overstimulated from my heroic solving of a double murder?”
Elsbeth shrugged and chomped her pine tar. “Your skull-pantry will be stocked with fresher worries soon enough,” she said casually, as the caravan swayed from the bump at the bridge’s end and aimed for the Shrouded Vast.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Telvyr leaned heavily on the handle of the shovel, waiting for the pain in his broken ankle to subside before he filled in the grave.
The night sky was cloudy, the shadows deeper still beneath the limbs of this lone stoneleaf tree in an abandoned pasture. The body in the shallow hole, wrapped in a scavenged bedsheet, looked like ice on swampwater in the lantern’s glancing light.
Telvyr looked across the meadow. A dozen yards away, the horses shifted their feet and made nervous whitters. Beyond them, he could barely see the outlines of the crumbling farmhouse wherein Gratia was scrounging supplies. It was their first stop in the mad retreat from the engagement with Arrowmask’s mob.
Just as his promise to protect his dear daughter Magdeira had been broken, so too his pledge to entomb her in her birth-family’s crypt. Her body was so battered that it was already corrupting; and his was so battered he could dig the grave no more than a couple of feet deep. A family cannot always have the best. Just the father’s best. He tossed the first shovel-ful of dirt onto Magdeira’s chest.
The impact made the cloth over Magdeira’s faceless head shift in a ripple that went on longer than seemed natural. Telvyr hesitated, holding a shovelful of soil over the body. The rippling repeated itself without his assistance, and a curl of steam passed through its stained surface into the cool night air.
Half of the dirt scattered out of the blade before he was able to regain his wits.
He steeled himself against the physical and emotional pain and lowered himself to his knees at the graveside. Impossible that she could yet live—still, he had to know. He unwrapped her head.
The terrible crater in her skull, its shattered edges caked in blackened blood, gaped at him as before, as he had expected to see again only in nightmares. But now steam rose from the long-cooled fatal wound. Telvyr raised the lantern.
Deep inside, nestled within the gore, was a curled pink bit of flesh covered in a tracery of pulsing veins.
A fetus. Growing within Magdeira’s dead skull like an obscene parody of a womb.
He screamed until Gratia ran to the scene, and for some time thereafter.
Then they debated what to do with the prodigy. Gratia urged him to finish the burial, or burn the body. But, no matter how much of an abomination this strange form of life might be, he could not condone its destruction unless it had proven itself destructive.
They carried the body to the farmhouse and laid it out on a musty bed therein. They frequently pulled the sheet aside to check the state of the fetus, and found it growing at a preternatural rate. Within a day, it was so large that they had to extract it lest it be trapped within the skull. They laid it on Magdeira’s motionless chest, an umbilical cord attaching it to the ruined remnants of her brains.
The growth continued in proportion to a withering of Magdeira’s corpse. The infant’s head sprouted a swirl of thin blond hair. In another twenty-four hours, its umbilical cord shrank and detached. Telvyr and Gratia were too stupefied to do anything beyond locating a wandering farm goat to provide it milk. The shroud became swaddle.
A ten-day passed, and the infant grew into a silent child with golden locks and a strong resemblance to her “mother,” whose corpse Telvyr meanwhile buried for good. The farmers had decamped with whatever meagre clothing they owned, so the girl wore sheets and blankets like robes. Her voicelessness aside, she was precocious in her poise and mannerisms. While Telvyr and Gratia sprawled listlessly—always exhausted because they could not stand to sleep for long around the unnerving creature—the girl cooked expertly and walked the grounds with a focused attention. She never played or tarried.
A few days later, she finally spoke her first words.
“Telvyr. Gratia.”
They obeyed as if drugged, taking seats flanking her at the knife-nicked kitchen table as she sat commandingly at its head.
“What do we call you?” Gratia croaked uneasily.
The child smiled. “You can still call me Magdeira. But really, my name is Pwyll. Pwyll Wavebrand.”
“What are we to do, Pwyll?” asked Telvyr, finding himself somehow superstitiously fearful of using his old daughter-in-arms’ name. “Is there a home we can deliver you to?”
“We’ll continue north, of course, into the Shrouded Vast,” the girl replied with an easy yet hollow laugh. “And then we’ll catch and hang those bitches Elsbeth Steeleye and Rinka Svetkov.”
She looked up at him, her eyes glimmering like sapphires. “Won’t we, Father?”
The scattered farms and vineyards north of the Atelrush, whose people still wandered fear-stricken by the Leveling, soon gave way to rolling green hills with only a few wood-cutter huts and ruined post-inns being overtaken by forest. Elsbeth Steeleye’s chest tightened, for she knew these were the foothills of the Harfells, home of the pale-heart cult that had taken Valka, and everyone, and all things.
Yet she had reason to smile also. This forest had stood for no more than three generations, mere sprouts following a clear-cutting, but to her companions it was the wild and beautiful “Shrouded Vast.” Their green-kissed eyes danced and their voices were merry with excitement. Elsbeth smiled and kept her word-chest locked. It was amusing to watch the city-dwellers fool themselves. Besides, it was likely the last time Skógr would give them any cause to laugh.
Two more days of the caravan climbing into hills too steep, too far from water, and too beast-guarded for loggers to touch—that was when they finally saw the true wilds. Awed silence was their response, even from Mieux the Squirrel. The trees were as big around as a Cor Cordum watchtower, and twice as tall. With only their newborn spring leaves, they still cast such shade that Elsbeth had to light the caravan lanterns at midday. The shadows choked out most smaller plants except for acres of emerald moss surrou
nding trunks whose gnarled bark looked like the drippings of wooden candles.
More than once they passed beneath roots ten feet around arching over the Old Way. When the caravan slowed or stopped—as it did more often so Elsbeth could take her ax to a tree-fall blocking the road, or figure a way around root-buckled pavers—they could hear the trees groan in the winds with a sound that Ashton said was the same as ship masts in a storm. The others took to the caravan roof to better see these sights, but Elsbeth warned them against it. She pointed to what the others thought were entire fallen trees along the roadway—mere limbs that these giants would shed from fifty feet up with a crash like thunder and an impact like a god’s hammer. The irondrift-walled wagons could survive such a blow. The skulls of city-dwellers could not.
So they spent more of their time inside the caravan, and Elsbeth and Ashton spent more of it together. This alley-weasel was the last among them she had expected to grow close to. He had the manner of an arch-backed cat: more fur than muscle. But cats have their attractions, too, as she had learned from Mieux’s pet.
Ashton showed panther-hearted trickery in his bold actions in combat—always a sure way to get Elsbeth’s attention. He was pretty in his own tomcat way, too, especially now that he wore a face-paint in shades of lavender.
The makeup he was wearing when they left Calisia had since washed away. But soon after, Rinka caught him stealing her collection of “honeypots,” whatever that was, and had rounded up Mieux and Ninebarrow to help “punish” him with a fresh coat of paint. Elsbeth doubted much force was needed, as Ashton plainly enjoyed preening afterward and kept touching up his lips. Unlike Rinka’s whore-paint, it charmed Elsbeth, seeing an Imperial man wearing decoration usually meant to impress Imperial men.
And he wore it with such carelessness. Ashton was very much a man of his southern city—all coin-flash and hawkers-cries—and yet at times he wriggled out of its rules and left them behind like a snakeskin. Elsbeth was keenly aware that shedding just made for a bigger snake. But she liked him all the same.