The Broken Isles lotrs-4

by Mark Charan Newton

  While Lan was changing into her freshly laundered Knights outfit, Fulcrom stood browsing the selection of texts on a high shelf, most of them on fishing or local history. His musing was interrupted by a loud thump on the door.

  ‘Fulcrom, it’s Brynd.’

  ‘One moment, Lan’s just getting changed,’ Fulcrom called through to him.

  Lan glowered at him. ‘Can’t you learn to lie from time to time?’ she whispered, hurriedly yanking on her breeches.

  When she had finished, Fulcrom opened the door and the commander strode in sheepishly. Only now, in this calm situation, did Fulcrom realize how striking the commander’s white face and red-tinted eyes were.

  ‘Is everything well, commander?’ Fulcrom enquired.

  ‘As well as can be expected here, yes, but I came to start you up with a few tasks, if you’re willing.’

  ‘Of course, yes. Is this for the Villiren Inquisition?’

  ‘If you want to call it that, yes. At the moment the city is under military law, and I would like to work on a transition to something more stable, local and meaningful. That is, if you are both happy to get started immediately?’

  Fulcrom looked to Lan, who nodded back.

  ‘The Inquisition is just the two of you at the moment.’ Brynd reached into his pocket and pulled out two small leather cases. He handed one to Fulcrom and one to Lan.

  Fulcrom opened his and found an Inquisition medallion inside, much like the one he wore in Villjamur, with the same triangular crucible stamped upon it. The ribbon was black. Fulcrom put it on over his head; it felt good to have one there again, after having discarded his old one in disgust at his superiors in Villjamur. Lan followed suit, smiling then staring down at the medallion. ‘Our deepest thanks, commander,’ Fulcrom said.

  ‘As for what I’d like you to do,’ Brynd continued, ‘well. . we’ve heard reports this morning of a creature being found in the middle of a large new iren. A creature that has apparently killed a child. It’s causing a bit of a stir and the iren has been closed for a while. It seems the whole city is talking about it, and we’re the last to know.’

  ‘Killed a child?’ Fulcrom frowned. ‘What sort of creature are we talking about?’

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ Brynd replied. ‘Come.’

  Fulcrom and Lan, wearing thick robes to cope with the colder conditions, followed the commander on horseback across the city to the iren. The sky had quickly become grey, filled with the promise of snow, though none came. When they arrived, they tied their horses and dismounted in silence, Fulcrom too fascinated by his new surroundings to talk.

  The city was busy, much more so than Villjamur, which surprised Fulcrom. The buildings were old and frail, in much need of repair. Slates were missing from rooftops, some lay on the ground in shattered pieces. On closer inspection there was poverty here, even more than he had seen in Villjamur’s caves, but it was kept to side streets, alleys in which people clustered around pit fires — he could see people’s blankets stacked to one side, food rations piled alongside weaponry. Exotic smells drifted from houses, spices he wasn’t familiar with, colours and sounds that seemed a world away from Villjamur. It could take a lot of getting used to.

  ‘It’s this way.’ The commander led them into a busy thoroughfare and then into an enormous open iren, now up and running again. For a post-war city the amount of trade was incredible: everything from grain and vegetables to metalwork from other islands, from spices to scribe services. The economy was certainly starting to recover again.

  ‘We cancelled pitch rents for the poorest,’ Brynd said proudly. ‘The previous portreeve had privatized the irens — which was public property would you believe — in many districts, so that landowners were taking profits from the traders and the market barely made any money. The prices were ridiculous. We took the irens back, slashed rents, prices fell and now look at the place — it’s busier than it was before the war. I think that speaks for itself.’

  They moved forward through the crowd until they reached a sealed-off military area. Thirty or forty Dragoons were standing casually in a line, but stood to attention when they spotted the commander advancing towards them.

  ‘At ease,’ Brynd called, but they weren’t half as slack as they were a moment ago.

  A gap parted, and the newcomers moved in to examine the scene.

  Fulcrom was admittedly shocked. On the floor was a truly strange creature, in all its gruesome multi-limbed glory. It lay there giving off a strong aroma of decay. He had never seen anything quite like it. Not even the new races who had helped out the refugees on Jokull were so alien.

  Lan cringed in disgust, but Fulcrom coolly crouched down to get a better look. ‘I’m going to ask the obvious — this isn’t part of the local habitat, is it? Something that lives further out of the city?’

  ‘There’s nothing natural about this,’ Brynd said.

  ‘Is it a hybrid creature often talked about but rarely seen?’

  ‘No — hybrids are more coherent, more logical than this. Besides, we’ve done research into what creatures there are and there is nothing like this.’

  ‘Look over here.’ Lan was crouched down pointing to foam surrounding the body.

  ‘Well spotted,’ Fulcrom said. Then, aloud, ‘Who washed away the blood? There are soap bubbles here and here.’

  Brynd looked over to a Dragoon soldier, who answered, ‘A couple of traders cleaned it away, sir, so they could get on with business.’

  Fulcrom sighed. ‘We could have done with knowing just a little more about where that blood came from.’

  ‘You don’t think it was from this thing itself?’ Brynd enquired.

  ‘The cobbles have bloodstains over too wide an area to have come from the creature.’ Fulcrom gestured in a wide circle to denote the extent. ‘And the creature itself does not look as if it has lost that much blood. Not that I know much about the creature’s anatomy, of course.’ Fulcrom stepped around the giant corpse, examining it in detail. Could’ve done with my notebook. . ‘Can someone help turn it over?’

  No one moved for a moment; the soldiers just looked at each other sheepishly.

  ‘For Bohr’s sake, you heard the man,’ the commander called out. ‘Four men, you three and you, one of you get an arm and the rest of you shove from the other side.’

  The four Dragoons moved into place and reluctantly began to try to lift the monster. They struggled a little before giving up.

  ‘Sir, it’s rather heavy,’ one of them said.

  ‘Oh, really — I’ll give you a hand.’ Lan marched to the side with the three soldiers, who looked askance at her. Fulcrom smiled as Lan took hold of the corpse, closed her eyes and gently tuned in to her powers. The creature’s body began to lift up from the cobbles and soon the rest of the soldiers joined in, not to be outdone by her. With them all helping shove it, the thing eventually collapsed onto its front.

  ‘Thanks for your help, lads.’ Lan winked at the soldiers as she rejoined Fulcrom. The men shyly stepped back into line, muttering to themselves.

  The creature’s hairs were soaked with blood, and yet Fulcrom couldn’t help think something wasn’t quite right with the scene.

  ‘Strange,’ he said to Brynd. ‘There are no wounds anywhere on its body, and yet there must have been quite a bit of blood on the floor — until it was cleaned away, of course. So unless the creature has somehow vomited up such blood, which, I have to say, usually has a particular scent not present today, this was made to appear as if it had died here — but I don’t think it actually did. And look.’ Fulcrom crouched down by the creature’s immense hand, which was leathery and clawed, and which had lain by the child’s corpse. ‘If this thing had actually killed the child, why are there no wounds or tissue damage? There are no signs of a struggle. There is no ripped flesh to denote any hunt, not to mention it seems that rigor mortis has begun to set in. . No, none of this sits right with me, commander.’

  Fulcrom tilted his head to suggest the
y step aside, and Brynd obliged.

  ‘Everything here says to me that someone has placed the corpse here deliberately and, given that we’re in an iren, this seems as if it was staged to catch the eyes of as many of the citizens as possible. Someone, somewhere in this city, wanted people to think a monster had come here to kill. Now that presents us with a few questions, admittedly. The first one, where did they get the creature’s corpse?’

  ‘I have a suspicion,’ muttered Brynd, but seemed reluctant to expand on the issue.

  ‘Really?’ Fulcrom asked.

  ‘It’s only a thought, mind you — there’s a factory in the city that specializes in things like this. You could start there, but I can’t see why they would be involved in staging something like this.’

  ‘What makes you say this?’

  ‘They’re business people. And they go to great lengths, generally, to keep such things away from public eyes. No, they wouldn’t want this out here in this state.’

  Fulcrom nodded. ‘If I could take the details of this factory, back in the Citadel, along with any other information, I’d be very grateful, sir. Now, point number two then: if this corpse was acquired, somehow, that leaves the question of why it was left in public view like this. Why would someone create a scene? What is there to gain from the act? And there’s little to follow it up, either — so what was the purpose of something so isolated?’

  Brynd looked around at the iren, which by now had returned to normal.

  ‘Given we’re in a public place, the purpose could have been to get people talking and, possibly, for people to be frightened of the creature.’

  ‘Why do you think someone might want that?’ Fulcrom asked. ‘You know this city better than I do, of course.’

  ‘There are plenty of tensions here,’ Brynd admitted. ‘I had considered, since the war, that most of those concerns were no longer valid — that it was a fear that came from the war itself.’

  ‘This invasion came from the north, am I correct?’ Fulcrom asked.

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘And the alien threat, that’s nothing for people to be worried about?’

  ‘There may well be concerns about those from the otherworld who are camped south of the city.’

  ‘I can understand that.’ Fulcrom nodded. ‘Do you think someone wants to make a point of their dislike of this arrangement?’

  ‘People are going to have to learn how to cope sooner or later.’

  ‘If there’s anything I’ve learned, it is to never underestimate the will of the people,’ Fulcrom replied. ‘They can be overwhelming if a notion spreads wide enough.’

  Brynd sighed and glanced at the corpse one more time. ‘Do you think you can find out who did this? After Jokull, you’ve earned my trust.’

  ‘I will give it my best shot,’ Fulcrom replied. ‘At the same time, I’d like to seek permission to build a team — volunteers at first, most likely — but if an Inquisition needs forming, we’ll need people — perhaps even some surviving members of the Villiren Inquisition.’

  ‘I probably wouldn’t bother with them,’ Brynd urged. ‘Start fresh. Get smart, honest people.’ He marched over to the gathered Dragoons and said, ‘Right you lot, Investigator Fulcrom is hereby in charge of this situation and you’re to follow his orders, do I make myself clear?’

  A chorus of ‘Sir’ came.

  ‘Good.’ Brynd returned to Fulcrom. ‘If they give you any trouble, let me know. This is all yours now.’

  Back at the Citadel, Fulcrom had requested a cool basement room to use as a temporary office. As it happened, Brynd had already located a little network of chambers and antechambers situated a couple of levels underground, beneath the kitchens, and offered them to Fulcrom’s operation. Some of the rooms still contained crates of foodstuffs and bottles of wine hoarded during the war, but a few insouciant Dragoons carried them elsewhere while Fulcrom and Lan settled in.

  In the furthest room from Fulcrom’s intended office, the corpse of the iren creature was brought in. Soldiers stacked packs of ice around the body so it didn’t decay further and reek the place out.

  Fulcrom and Lan studied it in detail and made notes, before abandoning this in favour of a better idea: Fulcrom decided to send messengers to bring in whatever medical staff there were at hand. At first these people protested, said they didn’t want to see any monsters, but Fulcrom went out of his way to charm them into helping him.

  One woman obliged, a plump former nurse with a penchant for art, and who seemed to want something more interesting to do with her days; she set about scrutinizing the beast, humming a little tune as if she was baking. She prodded it and sketched it, and Fulcrom left her to her own devices for an hour or so. When he returned, he asked her if she had found any visible wounds; she’d located none, just a few casual grazes where its body had been seemingly dragged along a harsh surface — such as a cobbled street — and her report confirmed much of what Fulcrom had suspected.

  Lan, meanwhile, set about creating an office out of their intended chamber. She hauled huge pieces of furniture about the place with apparent ease. This had been, in the past, some kind of accounts room, and there were ledgers running way back — books that covered the movement of grain, ore, gemstones and money. She opened them up and was startled to see how intermittent they were; in some of them, whole years of accounts seemed to be missing. Lan acquired a rag, dusted down a desk. She arranged the chairs. She managed to find some scented oil and lanterns to scatter about the place. Within a couple of hours, she had transformed the room from a reasonably large but forgotten dusty corner of the Citadel into a welcoming office.

  ‘There,’ she said to herself, ‘we’re going to do things properly or not at all.’

  Fulcrom came in and his expression pleased her greatly. ‘This looks fantastic, Lan!’ He walked over to the desk, where he immediately began arranging some of the books and pencils into something more orderly.

  ‘You just can’t leave things be, can you?’ Lan suggested.

  Fulcrom smiled. ‘You’ve found a notebook too — excellent.’ He pocketed it and looked around. ‘We can put up some legal texts here.’ He pointed to a shelving unit.

  ‘Yes, and I’ve even found a blackboard you might find useful,’ she said, and lifted up a large, four-foot-wide board. She stood it on the desk, leaning it carefully against the wall. She picked up a piece of chalk, wrote the word ‘monster’, and circled it.

  ‘Your handwriting is messy,’ Fulcrom said.

  ‘Stop being so damn neat,’ she replied.

  Fulcrom moved closer to her and said, ‘And that’s why you love me.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, pausing. ‘I do love you.’

  They said it so little recently, but now things had calmed it seemed more powerful than before.

  ‘We should do something tonight,’ Fulcrom said. ‘Just have dinner in our chambers. No one else. Get some candles, make a night of it.’

  ‘That’d be nice.’

  ‘Just nice?’ he asked.

  ‘OK, that would be great,’ Lan replied.

  ‘That’s better.’

  ‘So have you had any more thoughts about the creature?’ she asked.

  ‘Many,’ he replied. ‘Once I make a detailed sketch of it, I’ll be satisfied that we can probably burn the corpse and be done with it, the poor thing. If it has a soul, we can at least free it. In the morning, I’m going to head to the factory the commander spoke about. I’d like to speak to some people in the irens, too, to see if they witnessed anything out of the ordinary beforehand.’

  That evening they acquired some roasted meats, cheese, bread and even commandeered a bottle of red wine Fulcrom had spotted being carried out of his new headquarters. They had both washed in hot water, and dried off, by the firelight, eating the food in its warm glow, sitting semi-naked together on a bearskin rug.

  They took their time. They ate slowly. Fulcrom enjoyed the fact that he could finally enjoy the lines of Lan’s body — the co
ld conditions had always denied him this luxury. She was wearing a long, dark silk skirt and a wraparound top that only really covered her breasts. He could see her firm stomach as she lay on her side. Her long dark hair, drying in the firelight, seemed healthier than ever. She had trimmed her fringe so that it was as short as he remembered in Villjamur.

  Her skin glowed in the light and she seemed too hot to touch — but touch her he did. He placed a palm on her hips and ran it onto the small of her back. He pulled her towards him so that he lay on his back and she on top of him, her hands on his chest. She seemed more relaxed than ever before, which was the most important thing. He pulled the knot holding her top together and gently slipped it to one side; everything in her eyes told him that she wanted him. He kissed her collarbone, kissed her neck, kissed-

  A banging at the door.

  ‘Are you in?’ came a voice. ‘It’s Brynd.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ Fulcrom spluttered.

  Lan glanced at Fulcrom wide-eyed, then climbed off him, pulled on a robe and sat on the bed with her legs crossed.

  Fulcrom stood up hastily, and shambled over to the door. He looked back to Lan to check she was all right before he finally opened the door. ‘Commander,’ he said. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘Not disturbing anything, am I?’ Brynd asked tentatively.

  Yes. Yes, you are abso-fucking-lutely disturbing something. ‘Not at all, commander,’ Fulcrom replied. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘It’s Lan I’m after actually,’ Brynd told him.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Lan said, coming to the door in a rush.

  ‘Yes, we’ve a bit of situation I’m afraid.’

  ‘Anything serious?’

  ‘That depends on what you mean by the word serious. . Now, I believe you have quite a few powers, by all accounts.’

  ‘That’s true, yes.’

  ‘How are you at scaling buildings?’ he asked.

  ‘Could scale a couple before breakfast,’ she muttered. ‘Why d’you ask?’

  ‘It would appear that Lady Rika, formerly the head of the Jamur Empire and now head of whatever future civilization we’re building, is currently three-quarters the way up the south wall of the Citadel. We’d like to get her back, somehow, without her presence being known to the entire building.’