Murder by Magic

by Rosemary Edghill

  It snarled, but it didn’t attack. The thing turned somehow sideways—and vanished.

  Raven didn’t waste time asking questions: another of the reasons we make such a good team. Ignoring Sinclair’s confused stammerings of thanks, the two of us raced off straight to ex–Mrs. Dexter’s apartment.

  After all, I had told the creature to go home.

  The doorman didn’t want to let us in, but he was too frightened of our MBI identities to resist. Ex–Mrs. Dexter really didn’t want to let us in, regardless of our IDs—or, rather, because of them—but she didn’t have much of a choice. We burst the lock with a well-placed gesture and all but forced our way in past her.

  “The children,” I panted. “Where are they?”

  Her eyes widened in horror. “Blaine’s with a school friend. Tiffany—oh my God, Tiffany!”

  There was a roar of wind, then the shrill scream of a terrified child. Not a chance of beating a frightened mother racing to the defense of her daughter, but we came in a close second.

  We found ourselves in a large, brightly colored room like a child’s dream, full of toys and plushy stuffed animals. Larger than my whole apartment, flashed through my mind, but there wasn’t time for nonsense. There, looking utterly impossible amid all the sweetness, was the monster, towering over Tiffany, who huddled in a corner.

  “Mommy!” she wailed.

  Only our quick grab of the woman’s arms kept her from rushing blindly to her daughter’s side.

  Looked like we had been right—and yelling “Go home!” to the creature wasn’t going to work this time. It was home, at least as close to home as it could get in this dimension. And the monster was going to kill the one person who was holding it here.

  Not if we had a say in the matter!

  “Let go of me!” Mrs. Ex was shrieking.

  “Mommy!” Tiffany was wailing.

  “Got any ideas?” I whispered to Raven.

  “Not a one. You?”

  “No.”

  “Damn. I really don’t feel like getting killed today.”

  With that, Raven let go of Mrs. Ex and charged the monster, hitting it low, for all the world like a football player trying to stop the offense. He sent it stumbling sideways, away from Tiffany. Mrs. Ex charged in, snatched up her child, and raced back toward me. I gestured to her, Get out of here! The monster would follow, but at least we’d bought a little time.

  Unfortunately, the monster hadn’t fallen. Recovering with superhuman reflexes, it whirled, catching Raven with a backhanded swing of a hand that sent him flying. My breath caught in my throat—but fortunately for Raven, there was enough carpeting and all those stuffed animals for him to land relatively softly. But he was clearly stunned.

  My turn. I yelled inelegantly, “Hey, you monster!” to get it away from Raven, and hunted frantically for something I could use as a weapon. What, a doll, a stuffed rabbit, a beach ball—what was I supposed to do, play with the thing?

  Whoa, maybe I could. A quick illusion spell brought the bunny to life, grown to monster size. A second gave the beach ball jet propulsion. It smashed into the monster, hurling the creature off its feet, and the bunny came after it, pummeling the monster.

  More time bought. Letting go of the bunny and beach ball spells, I grabbed up the nearest lamp and brought it down on the monster’s head as hard as I could. Damn! The thing’s skull was like concrete! At least Raven was on his feet again, slamming the monster’s head with a second lamp.

  No go. All we were doing was keeping the creature from regaining its feet. That was at least something, but it was cursed frustrating knowing that Raven and I had spells to stun or kill, yet the strongest of them would be useless against a thing that shed magic like water.

  Or like us. With a roar, the monster was on its feet again, brushing us aside like two flies. And of course it was heading after Tiffany. I’d hoped Mrs. Ex would have the sense to leave the apartment, get the hell out of the building, and give herself and us a fighting chance. But no, in true panicked human fashion, she’d just managed to corner herself in the living room. Pushing Tiffany behind her, she stood at bay, a mother protecting her young, a beautiful, brave, primal, and stupid thing to do. Stupid, because all the maternal will in the world wasn’t going to help. The monster batted her aside almost absently.

  “Mommy!” Tiffany shrieked.

  Raven and I exchanged the quickest You do that and I’ll do this glance. He started throwing things at the monster—fruit, the fruit bowl (ow, cut-glass crystal, heavy), books from the nearest bookcase, anything to distract the monster. Anything to give me the opening I needed.

  Yes! I dove past the monster, almost landing on top of Tiffany.

  “You can stop this,” I told her.

  “Mommy!”

  “Tiffany, listen to me!” No, don’t yell, the kid is scared enough as it is. “It just wants to go home, Tiffany. It needs its mommy, too.”

  Which was a ridiculous thing to say about something that had torn off her father’s head. But Tiffany didn’t know that. And she was only five, after all.

  “Mommy?” she whimpered.

  “That’s right. It’s scared”—oh, right—“and that’s why it’s angry. Send him home, Tiffany. Send him home.”

  “Go away!” she screamed at the monster with all the impressive power of a five-year-old’s lungs. “Go home!”

  Yes. Right words, right amount of will—and the monster did that sideways turn and vanished.

  “Mommy!” Tiffany cried, and zoomed to her mother’s side.

  Mrs. Ex wasn’t badly hurt, fortunately, just shaken and bruised, as well as winded from having a five-year-old-child-shaped bullet hit her. But she clung to Tiffany with frantic strength, even as she stared at us in complete confusion. “What . . . ?”

  “Tiffany,” I said gently.

  She turned a tearstained face to me. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t!”

  “Tiffany, honey, no one’s angry at you. We just want to know how the monster got here.”

  “I didn’t . . . It was for Mommy.” Her eyes were innocent. “I mean, Mommy always said that magic was bad, that it had hurt Daddy. I knew it was why he didn’t like me. I thought if I tried very hard, the bad things would go away.”

  And instead, she’d drawn the creature out of its rightful dimension and dumped it here. With the command to kill Daddy’s magic. But Daddy hadn’t had any magic. So it had tried to tear it from him. Then it had gone after the next magic it could find that was related to him, Dexter Arcane’s rival. Next probably would have been the MBI. But we’d driven it back to as close as it could get to its home. By killing Tiffany, it would have broken the link to this dimension.

  Mrs. Ex was looking, understandably, like someone who has just had the underpinnings of her life kicked out from under her. How do you explain to someone that her own prejudices had led to her ex-husband’s death? How do you tell someone like that that her own daughter was a powerful wild talent?

  We left that for the MBI counselors.

  “Not exactly a happy ending,” I said to Raven as we headed back to the office.

  “Not many murder cases have one.”

  “Good point. Come on, Raven. We still have a couple of hours left on this case. Coffee?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. It’s your turn to buy.”

  PART II

  Murder Unclassifiable

  A Death in the Working

  An Inquestor-Principal Jerre syn-Caselyn mystery story by Haef Teliau

  Translation and footnotes by Sommes Vinhalyn,

  Diregis Professor of Contemporary History and Lecturer

  in Eraasian Culture, University of Galcen

  Debra Doyle

  Debra Doyle was born in Florida and educated in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania—the last at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate in English literature, concentrating on Old English poetry. While living and studying in Philadelphia, she met and marrie
d her usual collaborator, James D. Macdonald, who was then serving in the U.S. Navy. Together, they traveled to Virginia, California, and the Republic of Panama, acquiring various children, cats, and computers along the way.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR: Haef Teliau, pseudonymous author of the Jerre syn-Casleyn mysteries, began his writing career during the early period of the Eraasian Hegemony. Although the highly popular series was not overtly political, both the setting—some three decades before the first Eraasian contact with worlds beyond the interstellar gap—and the overall tone of nostalgia for those bygone days suggest at least an unconscious agenda on the writer’s part. One of the book-length works, Death of a Star-Lord, was in fact suppressed during the sus-Peledaen purges of 1151 E.R., though later reissues of the series saw the book restored to its proper place in the sequence. —S.V.

  High summer in Hanilat, and the climate controls in the Center Street Watch Station weren’t working. Again. “I would give a great deal,” said Inquestor-Principal Jerre syn-Casleyn, “to get out of this office for just a day.”

  “The universe hears you when you say things like that.” Station-Commander Evayan tapped Jerre’s desktop with a broad forefinger. “Check your files.”

  Jerre complied and read through the documents with increasing disbelief. “Lokheran Hall? Wide Hills should have gotten this one, not us.”

  “Wide Hills, in this case, defers to Hanilat Center Street with a sigh of profound relief,” the Station-Commander said. “And you’ve been asked for special.”

  “Why me?”

  “Take a look at the victim.”

  Jerre paged through the form. “Deni Tavaet sus-Arial.1 Inner family, senior line. Just what I needed to make my day complete.” He began transferring the documents to a travel pad. “Of your kindness, Station-Commander, send word to the Center Street Circle and ask them for the loan of Rasha etaze2 for a jaunt in the country.”

  “You’ll have to do without this time, I’m afraid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Protocol,” said the Station-Commander. “Look at the file again.”

  Jerre called up the desktop copies; read them; frowned. “Deceased was an unranked Mage in the Lokheran Circle.”

  “And Refayal Tavaet’s baby brother,” the Station-Commander finished. “The Circle claims it was a death in the working. The head of the sus-Arial doesn’t believe them. Hence your country vacation.”

  Jerre couldn’t take Rasha etaze with him to Lokheran, but he could take her to the Court of Two Colors3 for dinner and discussion—purely in the interest of laying a proper groundwork for his investigation prior to departing for the Wide Hills District. Over a shared platter of grilled meats and vegetables at a quiet table, Jerre laid out his questions.

  “The first thing I need to know,” he said, “is why Refayal Tavaet considers himself entitled to a say in this investigation.”

  “The dead man was his brother. I suppose that’s enough if you’re sus-Arial.”

  “Deni Tavaet was a Mage. He would have left the family altars years ago.”

  Rasha looked thoughtful. “Well . . . there’s leaving, and then there’s leaving.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not everybody who goes to the Circles has their name stricken from the tablets and purged from the files.” She sounded a bit wistful. “Some of them even go home for weddings and holidays and things like that.”4

  “And you think Deni was one of those?”

  “He might have been.” Rasha skewered a curl of shaved meat and dipped it into the puddle of sauce. “Or there could have been other reasons.”

  One more thing remained for Jerre to do before leaving Hanilat for the Wide Hills District: he paid a social call on Refayal Tavaet.

  The head of the sus-Arial family kept a town house in one of the most elegant of Hanilat’s residential neighborhoods. Jerre presented himself to the doorkeeper-aiketh5 early in the forenoon and identified himself as Jerre syn-Casleyn rather than as Center Street’s Inquestor-Principal. Refayal Tavaet might have asked the local Watch for assistance in the matter of his brother’s death; but that didn’t mean he wanted its official presence intruding on his household.

  Jerre drank red uffa6 from a crystal glass and asked the head of the sus-Arial, “Why don’t you accept the Circle’s account of your brother’s death? Is there bad blood between your family and the Lokheran Circle?”

  “I hadn’t thought that there was,” Refayal said. “But my brother is dead.”

  “I don’t wish to make light of your grief, but he was a Mage, after all.7 The possibility was always—”

  “I know all about the possibilities.” Refayal’s voice was harsh; Jerre, listening, supposed that his anger and sorrow might well be genuine. “Deni’s private funds and property go to the Circle. And not even Mages are above temptation.”

  The Lokheran Circle lived and worked in a three-story brick building two blocks off the central street of Lokheran proper.8 The Mage who answered was painfully young and earnest, reminding Jerre of Center Street’s recruits-in-training. He made a note to interview her as soon as possible, before her superiors could take her aside and instruct her in what to say; she wouldn’t have been with the Circle long enough to know in her bones which things were spoken of to outsiders and which were not.

  Unfortunately, good manners and standard procedure both required that he speak with the First of the Lokheran Circle before asking to speak with any of its members.

  “I’m Inquestor-Principal Jerre syn-Casleyn of the Center Street Watch,” he said. “My message preceded me, yes?”

  Her eyes widened. Jerre suspected that she’d never dealt in person with a member of the Watch before this, and that she didn’t know whether to be frightened or embarrassed about it. “Yes, etaz—sir. Lord syn-Casleyn. He’s waiting for you in the downstairs office.”

  Grei Vareas, First of the Lokheran Circle, was a stocky, graying man who could have been own cousin to Station-Commander Evayan back at Center Street. Like the young Mage who had answered the door, he wore everyday clothing in the local style,9 a season or two behind the fashions of Hanilat.

  “I’m sorry that Refayal Tavaet is still grieving for his brother,” he said to Jerre. “Nevertheless, Deni’s death was as we reported it.”

  Jerre nodded. “‘In the line of duty’ can be hard for family members to take sometimes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Especially if it’s unexpected . . . Lokheran doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would demand a great working.”10

  “No,” said Vareas—lured into confidence, as Jerre had hoped, by the show of sympathy. “Farming, banking, a bit of light industry. The last great working before this one was back in ’59—the drought year. A fire in the factory district threatened to burn out of control and destroy the center of town.”

  “Before your time?”

  “Almost. I was even younger than Keshaia, whom you must have met.”

  “The little doorwarden?” Jerre took advantage of the opening Vareas had provided. “I’d like to speak with her next, if I may. Purely in the interest of rounding out my report.”

  Jerre met with Keshaia in a small office near the back of the building’s ground floor. The room didn’t seem to belong to any one of the Lokheran Mages in particular; when he asked Keshaia, she confirmed his suspicions, explaining that the Circle-Mages took turns using it for personal business.11

  “Deni also?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “He talked with his legalist and his financial adviser at least once a quarter.”

  Jerre had trouble picturing a Mage with a private financial adviser, and said so. Keshaia was an open and unsuspicious young woman—she really hadn’t been a Mage for very long, he thought—and the artfully timed confidence worked as Jerre intended.

  “Deni was a money whiz,” she said. “He played with it, like some people do puzzles or—or build little models out of kits. For a game.”

  “Was he
good at it?” Refayal Tavaet was claiming that the Lokheran Circle had killed Deni for his private money; maybe Refayal had a point, after all. Younger siblings who’d left the family altars didn’t usually carry a great deal away with them, but a small competence could grow into a sizable fortune if properly tended. Jerre scrawled a question on his travel pad and sent the message off to Center Street with a flick of his stylus, then went back to taking notes.

  Keshaia shrugged. “I suppose. He kept on doing it, and he seemed to be having fun.”

  “It takes all kinds,” Jerre said. “I need some background here. How much can you tell me about the working?”

  “The one where Deni . . . ? Not much. I was there, but I wasn’t a part of it.”

  “How did that happen?” Jerre arranged his features into an expression of nonthreatening curiosity and waited. Given an expectant silence, people were more likely to fill it than not, and Keshaia proved no exception.

  “The really big workings—nobody knows how long one’s going to last once it starts. So you’ll usually have a watchkeeper—somebody who stays out and keeps an eye on things.”12

  “What kind of things?”

  “Trouble from outside. Somebody inside the working getting sick or hurt. Stuff like that.”

  “I see.” Jerre checked his travel pad under the guise of making a note. Center Street had picked up his message; good. “So you—the Circle, that is—knew in advance that this was going to be a major working.”

  “Sort of. Grei etaze warned me it could go on for quite a while, but that was because things might get complicated. It was supposed to be a luck-of-the-town intention, and there’s a lot of threads in one of those, he said.”13

  “But no one expected it to grow into a great working?”

  Keshaia shook her head. “It just happened.”

  Center Street was being efficient today, which was good. Jerre had the reply to his message before the afternoon was out. New information in hand, he went back to talk again with Grei Vareas in the latter’s office.

  “Lord syn-Casleyn.” If the First of the Lokheran Circle was annoyed at having to speak with a man from the Watch twice in one day, he was hiding it well. “Is there anything further we can help you with?”