Hunt of the Bandham (The Bowl of Souls: Book Three)

by Cooley, Trevor H.

  “But what if you aren’t sure by then?” she asked.

  “Bah, I am pretty sure already. I just have one little test to make sure. The first thing I want you to focus on is finding the body.”

  “So where are we going now?” Vannya asked as they left the MageTower.

  “I have a little gathering waiting for us at the center square.”

  They arrived at the square and Vannya saw fourteen students standing in front of the new water fountain chatting with each other. She knew most of them and waved as they walked up. Her friends Arcon and Pympol were among the crowd. The two of them ran up to her when she arrived.

  “Vannya, what is this all about?” Arcon asked.

  “Yeah,” said Pympol. “A messenger arrived at my room this morning with a summons from the council telling me to be here.”

  “Locksher is going to explain,” she said. Ever since they had been censured for their creation of the golem that destroyed the clock tower, the two were always afraid of being accused of something. Locksher had raised his hands and everybody’s eyes were on him. Vannya opened the notebook and took the cap off of the ink cylinder prepared to take notes.

  “Yeah, but why?” Arcon asked. “Is this about-?”

  “Shhh! Just listen.”

  “You are probably wondering why you are here,” Locksher began. “Many of you may have already suspected this for a while, but yesterday I informed the council that I have verified the murder of Cadet Piledon. I know that this is sad news because we all knew him. This is why I need your help. In order to find out who killed Piledon, we need to find his body.”

  There were gasps among the students.

  “Now I know that this is a difficult thing to ask of you, but that is why I requested you students in particular to lead the search. You were all his friends. Since you cared about him, you will be the most diligent. Now, I have assignment slips for each of you with search areas.”

  Locksher paired the students up and gave each of them specific instructions. Arcon had been assigned with a mage to search the gardens, while Pympol had been paired with one of the apprentices to search the storage building. Neither of them looked happy that they weren’t paired together.

  “I expect everyone to meet me back here at noon. Thank you for your assistance.” When the students had left for their designated areas, Locksher walked back over to Vannya. “Well, there go our suspects.”

  “Really?” Vannya was surprised. “But like you just said, they are his friends.”

  “Exactly. Or, well, his friends and his enemies. He was a prankster remember. I have ruled out everyone else that I was suspicious of except Justan and your father. These are the people that are left.”

  Vannya took notes as fast as she could. “So why put the killer in a search party? They aren’t going to be any help.”

  “That is why I sent them all to places I knew the body wasn’t,” he said. “This is the best way to pinpoint who the killer was. Whoever it is will be deathly afraid that I am going to find out it was them and they may tip their hand. Especially when we all meet back here and I announce that I found the body.”

  “You know where it is?”

  “Yes, I verified that last night. I haven’t told the council yet, though. Now what I want you to do while the killer is out there scaring himself is see if you can find it.”

  “O-okay. But why? If you know where the body is and know who the killer is, why go through all of this? Why not just throw him into the dungeon?”

  “I never said it was a man. Could even be you, you know.”

  “I am serious!”

  “Vannya, there is a difference between knowing who the killer is and proving who the killer is. We need to tip their hand,” he explained. Evidently she didn’t look too convinced because a stern look came into his eyes. “I am the professor and you are the student, remember? Learn already.”

  “Yes sir,” she jotted down a quick note. “Where should we start, then?”

  “You tell me,” he said. “If you were trying to hide a body somewhere on school grounds, where would you put it?”

  “You could bury it somewhere.” Vannya thought for a moment. “But it would be pretty hard to hide a burial. Disturbed earth is the first thing a search party would look for. Besides, with earth magic, the wizards would be able to probe the place and find a decaying body on the grounds in no time.”

  “Good. Think of something else.”

  “You could put it somewhere nobody goes and hope that no one finds it for a very long time,” she suggested.

  “Like?”

  “I don’t know, a room somewhere deep in the MageTower? Um . . .” A slight smile formed on her mouth. “A corner of the storage building in a cask marked pickled moonrat eyes?”

  “Now there is a devious mind at work.” Locksher laughed. “Those aren’t bad ideas, but the MageTower is too risky. Too many wizards walking around day and night to sneak a dead body in. The storage building is a decent spot, but Randolph has searched it already so get a bit more creative with your thinking.”

  “You could put it in the garden and use earth magic to grow plants over it, but then the students on gardening duty would notice a new pile of plants not to mention the eventual smell.”

  “Good, good. I like how you are thinking. It’s morbid yes, but that is the way a wizard of mysteries needs to think. Put yourself in the place of the person doing the crime,” Locksher said.

  “Oh! What about a mix of my two earlier ideas? What if you buried the body in a place that no one would ever go? Like in the wall of a new building, like . . .” She turned around and her hands flew to her mouth. “Like the new clock tower!”

  “Very good,” Locksher said. “Nice choice indeed.”

  In the months since the golem had destroyed the clock tower, artisans and laborers from all around had been at work rebuilding it. It was a painstaking process because the wizards insisted on magically reinforcing every stone block or piece of wood or batch of mortar that went into the building. They wanted it to last.

  At this point, most of the structure was completed. Most of the workers were gone now and there were just enough still around to finish the final reinforcement work that needed to be done before they put the clock on top. The council had announced a plan to place a monument to the six men that were killed in the attack in front of it. A whole ceremony was scheduled. The clock itself had been completed just a week earlier and it stood behind the tower covered with cloth until the unveiling.

  “So,” Locksher said, staring up at the thirty-foot-tall structure in front of them. “If you were to hide a body in the clock tower where would you put it?”

  “Now that I think about it, you couldn’t get away with hiding it in the mortar itself. The wizard that reinforced the mortar would detect it as a weakness in the structure. The clock wasn’t here yet, so it couldn’t be in there either. I guess it would have to be inside the tower itself then.”

  “Good,” Locksher said. “Now first you would have to get the body inside. There is only the one door at the base of the tower.”

  They walked up to the door and went inside. The interior of the clock tower was empty, but for a single spiral staircase that would lead up to the clock once it was installed up top. For now, the staircase just ended and they could see the blue sky from below.

  “Not a lot of places to hide a body, are there?” Vannya observed. “Maybe behind the stairs here at the bottom? The thick walls and foundation might hide it from the wizards sweeping the grounds.”

  “Why don’t you check it out?” he suggested.

  Vannya knelt down and rested her hands on the ground. She sent tendrils of earth magic probing through the ground. There was two feet of packed dirt and then solid magically reinforced foundation.

  “No body.” She stood and dusted off her robes.

  “Alright, so one idea shot down. Think on it a bit more. I think you are getting close.” Locksher said.

  Van
nya took out the notebook and stared at it for a moment. She knew it wasn’t buried anywhere. Locksher had already ruled out all the places he sent the other students to.

  “The only thing left would be to destroy the body,” she concluded. At Locksher’s slight nod, she went on, “Alright, you could burn it with fire magic, but that leaves traces too. You also run the risk of someone noticing a fire large enough to burn the body . . .”

  “Keep going,” Locksher said. They stepped back outside and Vannya scribbled a few more notes in the book. It was on the tip of her tongue, she knew it.

  “Any way of using magic to destroy the body leaves traces that wizards could find. That leaves more natural means . . .” She turned towards the mage tower and her jaw dropped. Vannya looked back at Locksher with a large grin. “The perloi!”

  Locksher clapped. “See, I knew you could figure it out.”

  “But how can you know for sure? If the body was fed to the perloi, there would be no traces left.”

  “Which is exactly why it is such an ingenious method. However, what most students wouldn’t know, is that there are ways to tell what a perloi has been eating. Come on, let me show you.”

  They walked over to the moat that surrounded the MageSchool and Locksher peered over the edge. Vannya leaned over and could see the dark shapes that were the perloi swimming under the water. Locksher looked back at her and smiled.

  “You know why the perloi are here, right?”

  She nodded. “They are one of the last defenses of the school. If the outer walls were ever breached, everyone would retreat to the MageTower and the perloi would be activated.”

  “Have you ever seen one up close?” he asked.

  Vannya shook her head and took a step back. She had seen them fed before though and that was enough. Every once in a while, the mages would throw a goat in. The water would foam up and thrash around and the goat would be gone, devoured bones and all.

  “It’s okay, watch this,” Locksher said. He knelt near the edge and stuck one hand into the water.

  She gasped and cried out, “No, wait!”

  Locksher leaned in further, plunging his arm deeper into the water, then stiffened and pulled his arm out of the water. He pulled something else out of the water with him. It was about two feet long and looked like a frog except that its head was very large and round. Locksher held it by the waist. It was slumped over limp and its eyes were closed like it was asleep.

  “This, dear Vannya, is a perloi. They are really fast swimmers,” He lifted up one of its hands and she saw nasty claws on the end of webbed toes. “They were magically designed to be the perfect little feeding machine, too, take a look at its teeth.”

  He pried its jaw open carefully and Vannya saw wicked curved teeth.

  “Now it is asleep right now. All of them are. It’s part of the spell on the moat. They swim in their sleep, that is their habit. The only time a perloi becomes awake is when they are fed. It has to be that way or any student that slipped and fell too close to the water would be pounced on and eaten alive in minutes.” At the frightened look in her eyes, he added, “Did I mention they can jump out of the water?

  “At any rate, they are harmless until they are awakened by the spell that tells them it is time to feed. They are only fed twice a year and for a week afterwards, their eyes turn orange. During times of war, a different spell is used that wakes them fully and they will attack and devour anyone or anything. If they were ever to eat anything human, their eyes turn red for a month.” He reached for its eye, then paused. “Uh, you might want to take a step back.”

  He gently pried back the perloi’s eyelid. The eye beneath was red as blood. The moment its eye was opened, it hissed and squirmed in Locksher’s grip, snapping and slashing. He stood and tossed it back into the water. Its shadow moved around erratically for a moment and then it rejoined the other shapes swimming in their lazy circle around the MageTower.

  “So whoever killed Piledon was somehow able to waken the perloi long enough for them to eat the body before putting them back to sleep.” Locksher said. “Anyone that spent enough time in the library could find out this information if they looked in the right place. This makes Justan look pretty suspicious. We knew he was preparing a report on weaknesses in the school’s defenses. I believe that this is Randolph’s crucial bit of evidence he wants to bring up at Justan’s trial, if it comes to that.”

  “Justan told me about that report, but he never finished it before he left,” she said. “But wait, Justan couldn’t have cast that spell. He had no offensive magic ability.”

  “I know that and so does Randolph. I don’t know how he is going to get around that fact. But he could decide to implicate your father. He could have fed the body to the Perloi after Justan had gone, trying to protect him.”

  “But you said that you knew who did it,” she said.

  “I do. I do. At least I think I do. It just never hurts to look at all angles. It’s part of the job as Wizard of Mysteries.”

  “That sounds reassuring,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

  They waited until noon, while Vannya jotted down theories under his watchful eye, before walking back to the center square. Each pair of students had returned from their fruitless search. They all looked sad and on edge. A few of them looked rather shaken. Vannya supposed that searching around with the possibility that you might stumble upon the corpse of your friend would be bad on the nerves.

  Locksher gathered them all in front of the fountain again. “We are waiting for a few more guests, one moment please.”

  Vannya was surprised when they were soon joined by a few wizards including several members of the high council. Her father, Wizard Valtrek and Master Latva were there along with Wizard Randolph and Wizard Beehn in his chair on wheels.

  Locksher cleared his throat. “I want to thank all of the students that helped in my search today. It is my sad duty to announce that we know the location of Piledon’s body.” There were several whispers and everyone in the gathering waited anxiously for his next words. He paused for a moment to up the tension.

  “We have discovered that he was fed to the perloi.”

  As he spoke, Vannya took more notes, watching his facial expressions and the way he moved as he manipulated the crowd. There were gasps and astonished glances among the students and the wizards leaned their head together talking in urgent whispers.

  “I would like to thank Mage Vannya for pointing the possibility out for me,” he added.

  Vannya’s face turned a bit red as everyone looked at her. Why was he giving her the credit? How did that help his case?

  He continued, “I am also glad to announce that we shall know the identity of the murderer soon. I have had a sample perloi brought up to my study and with some new techniques I have learned, the killer shall be caught. I will announce the results in the council meeting this evening. Please return to your regular class schedules. We will make more announcements after the meeting.”

  Vannya furiously jot down ideas and questions in the notebook. Who could it be? She went over all the likely culprits in her mind and had it narrowed down to three or four possibilities. All of them were unpleasant.

  “Vannya,” Locksher said. “If you would wait for me at my study, I have some things to discuss with you. I will rejoin you shortly. It seems I have some tempers to settle.” He turned and joined the council members, all of whom looked quite angry.

  Vannya went back to his rooms as requested. He took quite a bit longer than expected and that was fine with her because she had a surprise to set up for him.

  Three hours later, Locksher arrived in quite an irritable mood, mumbling to himself. He threw the door open and stopped on the threshold, a stunned look on his face.

  “What have you done?”

  His rooms looked quite different from the condition he had left them in that morning. The piles of books were gone from their haphazard stacks all over the floor and in their place were four free standin
g bookcases each one eight-feet-high, double-sided and made of fine wood. The entire place had been thoroughly dusted.

  “You took so long, I let myself in,” Vannya said, clutching her robes in excitement and looking at him expectantly. “Do you like it?”

  “My books! My system! How will I know where anything is?” he said in a panic, each hand grabbing a handful of the silver specked hair at his temples.

  “Wait, wait! Before you get mad, look.” She hurried over to the shelves and pointed to the end of each shelf. They were lettered the same way that the stacks on the floor had been. “Your system hasn’t been changed, I took careful accounting of every stack, and each one has its own shelf on the book case with room to grow. Don’t worry, they are in the same order you left them in. They have just been taken off the floor. Nothing is out of place, I promise!”