by Guy Antibes
Pol didn’t understand. “Why not?”
“Scene of the crime. We are going to find out who did this, so we have to inspect the place where he was beaten up.”
“Like me and like Siggon?”
Val nodded. “I’m sure they are connected, but with King Colvin’s reticence, we will do our own investigation. I can’t see who it would be other than your brothers. They probably want to continue punishing you through him.”
“Life was too quiet,” Pol said, feeling disheartened by the dishonor of the assault on his best and possibly, only friend.
Val led him out of the castle and onto the streets after gathering knives and a sword to distribute on Pol’s body. Val had clearly come to his rooms fully armed, along with a long thin rod that he twirled in his fingers. Val spoke to the guards for a few minutes as Pol rubbed a bit more sleep from his eyes.
“What is the rod for?” Pol asked.
“I’ll demonstrate in due time.”
The point on the end of the three-foot rod didn’t look very sharp, so Pol didn’t think Val would use it as a weapon, but then what did Pol know?
They passed an alley, but a woman stepped out. “Sir Gasibli? I was told to wait for you here. I’m glad you’ve finally come. A thing like this doesn’t make a lady feel very safe out on the streets of Borstall.”
The woman looked overdressed beneath the black knit shawl she had wrapped around herself. Val spelled a ball of flame about the size of his fist. The light splashed on the woman’s face revealing more face paint than Pol had ever seen on a lady of the court. This woman must work in an unsavory line of work, Pol thought. He hesitated to even think the word for her profession.
“Over here,” she said.
Val moved the flame in jerks as he tweaked the pattern towards the entrance to the alleyway.
“I take this little lane on my way home from work. Generally all I have to do is watch out for garbage, but tonight I tripped over the boy in the dark.
“Stop,” Val said. He knelt down and looked at the ground. “What kind of pattern do you see?”
Pol stood over the light, which Val had made brighter. “Those two lines. They dragged Paki in here?”
Val nodded. “That means he was out before they brought him here.” He glanced at the woman and pulled out his purse and laid an Imperial gold eagle on her palm. “For your trouble. You should be getting home.”
She gave a remarkably lithe curtsey to Val and scurried down the passageway.
“Note her shoe prints. They will be over the ones we’re looking for.”
Pol hadn’t thought of that.
“We’ll head back into the street and see where Paki’s scuff marks start. Keep to the side of the alley.”
Val kept the light jerking ahead. Pol thought he could do that, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He concentrated on finding clues. Pol walked on one side of the alley and Val on the other. Their own shoe prints had covered some of the others, but through it all, the long line of Paki’s shoe heels kept going all the way out the alley.
“They end here,” Pol said.
“Tell me more.”
Pol got down on his haunches and looked at what the prints might say. “They backed a vehicle into the alley and lifted Paki. These are deeper right close to the wheel marks, right?”
Val used the rod to verify what Pol pointed out. “More,” Val said.
“These carriage marks, no they are thick, so it’s probably a cart with thicker wheels. The men got out and removed Paki.”
“What do you notice about the cart?”
Pol didn’t know what Val was getting at and shook his head. “I don’t know much about carts, other than they aren’t made as nicely as carriages.”
“See this one wheel mark. Is it straight?”
“No, it wavers. What does that mean?” Pol asked.
“A wobble. Find enough variations from a normal pattern, and you discover what personality the cart has.”
Pol furrowed his brow. This was so new to him. “Personality?”
“What makes it different. If it is different enough, you might be able to tell it apart from others. Think of it as a variation of a pattern. You’re a budding magician. I think you know what I mean. Look here.”
Pol followed the rod to a section the wobbling wheel. “The iron rim is held by nails? Is that different?”
“It is. Usually the rim is made of a piece and slipped over the wheel while hot. Heat makes the iron rim bigger. When it cools, it fits the wooden wheel tightly. This is a somewhat common repair of the broken rim of a wheel. They just slice a break and nail the ends of the rim to the wood.” Val pulled out a piece of paper and a charcoal stick. “Draw the pattern of the nails. It’s certain to be unique.”
Pol had no idea what unique was, but he did as Val asked. “This is different?”
“Five nails on one side and four on the other. One of the nail heads has cracked off, see?”
Pol looked down as Val shifted the light closer. “Oh, the middle one.”
Val nodded. “Let’s go back to where the woman found Paki. Keep looking at the footprints. When you find something unique, point it out to me.”
“Variations on any kind of pattern?”
Val grunted his assent, and had Pol measure footprints and some of the boot heels. Pol found it easier to draw the ones going back out of the alley. He ignored the shoe prints of the woman, Val, and his own.
“Isn’t there an easier way of doing this?”
Val nodded. “They do it differently in Yastan, but then they have more resources. They would make plaster casts of the prints, but once day comes, everything here might be obliterated with more foot traffic.”
“Oh. The evidence will be gone.”
The man grunted again. Pol thought that rude, but he had to admire Val for his detection ability.
“Where did you learn to do this?”
Val smiled as if recalling a pleasant memory. “Working for Ranno.”
“But you stopped?”
The smile faded. “Personal reasons. Too personal to be telling a young lad like you.”
Pol knew when to change the subject. “Isn’t that blood?”
“It is,” Val said. “No blood until now, so they beat Paki while he was unconscious. Your friend didn’t even know they were going at it, most likely.”
Pol examined the ground. “Maybe four of them?” He looked at the footprints on the collection of papers he now held.
Val nodded. He poked his rod around a bit and closed his eyes.”
“Are you performing magic?”
Pol’s bodyguard nodded again. “Picking up patterns.” His eyes popped open. “No sharp instruments, just blunt weapons, but they can draw blood easily enough. There’s nothing more to see in the dark. Let’s check in on Paki before tucking you in for what’s left of the night,” Val said.
“Can Malden do your kind of magic?”
Val snorted. “I hardly can do anything compared to him. He is one of the best.”
“Then why is he in Borstall?”
Val shook his head. “You’ll have to ask him.”
~~~
Chapter Twenty-Two
~
PAKI DIDN’T LOOK HE WAS GOING TO DIE. Pol had already seen that happen and didn’t care to lose Siggon’s son. Malden had already left by the time they entered the castle’s infirmary. The lone healer on duty showed them to Paki’s bed. He didn’t merit a private room like Pol did.
His friend didn’t move. The injuries had swollen his face, so Pol barely recognized him. So that was what Pol had looked like when Landon and his thugs beat him nearly senseless.
“Do you know how to heal?” Pol whispered to Val.
His bodyguard shook his head. “I can close wounds and join a blood vessel that I can see, but that’s about it. Not trained for that, but you pick up things, you know.”
Pol didn’t know, but he nodded anyway.
The healer drifted to their si
de.
“How badly was he?”
“Bad. Malden performed another one of his miracles. I wish he’d spend more time with us. He complains about a loss of energy.” The woman shook her head. Pol didn’t know if it was out of disgust or dismay. “The poor boy had both of his legs broken. His chest was nearly caved in. You can see how they treated his face. There is more you can’t see. Malden will be back before noon. He says he did enough to get Master Horstel through the night and the magician said he needed rest.”
“He won’t wake up?”
The healer shook her head. “That won’t happen. Magician Malden put him to sleep.”
“Time to go,” Val said.
They walked back to Pol’s rooms in silence until Val spoke up, “Tomorrow, instead of knife practice, we will go look at carts. I guess that a castle cart was used since the guards had no record of Paki leaving.”
“They have records?”
“Especially of boys who get into trouble.”
“Me?”
Val nodded. “You and Paki are probably right at the top. The other boys are servants or the children of high-level courtiers that have apartments on the grounds.”
Pol didn’t know of any who had young children, but Pol didn’t know as much about the castle as he might have, since it had never interested him. Val had only been at the castle for a short time, yet Val already had figured out the list and that there were other boys. Pol felt pretty useless, but then Val thought he needed to learn, and that’s why they walked the empty streets of Borstall before the sun rose.
~
“Up!” Val said, pulling on one of Pol’s feet. The sun streamed into his bedroom, but Pol could barely pry his eyes open. “We have work to do.”
Pol struggled to sit and rubbed his face. “What work?”
“Carts. We need to look at lots and lots of carts.”
Pol threw on his court clothes. “Will these be acceptable?”
“Today, they will be.”
Pol staggered into the sitting room. Val had littered the floor with the sketches they had made earlier that morning. “Do you want me to make sense of this?” Pol asked.
“Think of it as a pattern to solve,” Val said. “Did you know the very best Seekers are magicians?”
“What is a Seeker? I haven’t heard of them.”
“That’s what we call ourselves, Seekers. We make sense of things by seeking a pattern.”
“Investigators? Like what guards do?”
“More or less, but on a higher level.”
So you’re a Seeker, not an assassin?”
Val smiled, barely. “I am many things, and a Seeker is one of them. I am teaching you what I know.”
Pol noticed that Val didn’t say he wasn’t an assassin. The man remained irritably opaque. Pol smiled at his mental turn of the phrase. “You want me to be a Seeker?”
The man shook his head. “I am not interested in whatever you become, but I want you to learn what Seekers do. You are a prince. Princes aren’t seekers.”
Pol didn’t know how to respond. His mind was still muddled from lack of sleep. “So we will Seek this morning?”
Val pointed to the papers. “Remember these, especially the pattern of the nails in the cart. Our mission this morning is to find it.”
“But I want to see Paki,” Pol said.
“You will. He’ll still be in the infirmary when we return. You may rely on that. Poor boy.”
“Why is he poor?”
Val responded with a smirk. “Because he isn’t going to learn as much as you will this morning.”
Pol needed some food, so they ate in the kitchens before setting out. Paki’s mother stopped by.
“You haven’t seen Paki, have you?” she said.
Pol blinked in alarm. “No one told you?”
She gave Pol a blank stare. “No, My Prince.”
“He’s in the infirmary. Someone attacked him last night, but Malden has been treating him.
Her eyes grew. “Magician Malden is caring for Paki?” She tore off her apron and told the others that she would be gone for awhile. She put her hand on Pol’s arm. “Thank you, thank you for letting me know, My Prince.”
Pol watched her run out of the kitchen. “No one told her,” Pol said.
“Not very kind, do you think?”
“No.” Pol felt really bad that he had to be the one to tell Paki’s mother; however, her eyes brightened when she found out Malden had seen to her boy. That made Pol less guilty about Paki’s attack. It was certainly the result of his being Pol’s friend. He had to set that aside for a bit, since Val and he had a job to do, a task that probably no one else cared about, but Pol did.
They ate well and left for the gardens.
“We look at the most obvious places first. The simplest explanation is usually the best.”
Pol thought criminals would be more devious. “Why?”
“When we think too much about what the criminal would do, we overlay our own motivations, our own tastes and values. Criminals generally don’t think the way we do, so what do you think happens?”
“We head in the wrong direction, a direction of our own making?” Pol knew that had to be the correct answer. Mistress Farthia had taught him something similar when they talked about good and bad rulers.
“Good. I won’t have to teach you that. Most criminals don’t think any more deeply than others. People will think of the simplest solution first, so we look for an easy answer, and it’s more often right than wrong.”
Pol kicked at a pebble on the gravel walkway in the garden. “I learned that concept from someone else.”
Val nodded. “Learn to pull in all your knowledge to apply to a problem. It will help you detect a pattern.”
“As long as we don’t use our own bias?”
“Generally that’s correct, but if we are stumped, sometimes we have to introduce our own bias to shift our perception of the pattern and once we do, we have a chance of finding the right one.”
Pol shook his head to get his confusion out. “I thought you said we go for the simple, first.”
Val patted Pol on the head. “Everything is a bit more complex than you might think. Simplest first, and then you can complicate things.”
Val continued to confuse Pol until they walked into the garden storage yard. Three carts stood, unhitched, in row. Pol looked at the tracks that led to the carts, but they were backed into place and what the horse hooves didn’t obliterate, the last of the two wheel tracks did.
“Inspect, while I ask a few questions,” Val said, as he gave Pol his iron rod. It was heavier than Pol expected.
Pol took the measurements and compared them to the notes he remembered on the paper. They were all the proper width. He looked all over each one, but couldn’t see the tracks on the underside of the wheels where they touched the ground.
He tried to push the carts forward, but couldn’t summon the strength.
“Just a moment,” Val called to him while the bodyguard talked to one of the gardeners. Pol nodded to the man, who he knew when he worked with Paki for a bit before the Emperor came.
Val and the gardener, Jed, moved each wagon just a bit. None had any nails.
“Not these,” Pol said, somewhat disappointed.
“Jed’s pretty sure the fourth and missing wagon had a nailed wheel,” Val said.
Pol put his hands on his hips. “Then why did you have me check the wheels?”
Val put his arm around Pol’s shoulder as they left the yard. “The gardeners like you, but you are still a fourteen-year-old and their prince. Words don’t come quite so easily to a member of the royal family.”
Pol didn’t quite know how to take that comment, but he just swallowed hard and let Val tell him what the gardener said.
“Paki spent a little extra time late last night cleaning the tools and oiling them. He was probably taken an hour or two after sundown, after he finished most of his work. There were a few pieces left undone, whi
ch meant he was abducted towards the end of his task.”
“How can you tell that?”
“Simple. If a boy is supposed to finish a task that he usually completes, but doesn’t, what happens to the pattern?”
“It is disrupted,” Pol said.
“The kidnappers tweaked a natural pattern. So we aren’t looking for Paki to have left in the middle of the night, are we?”
“No,” Pol said. “Any time after eight hours after noon?”
Val nodded. “You do catch on, eventually. We’ll need to talk to the guards again. They only looked at the late-night logbooks.”
The guard at the gate sent them to Kelso Beastwell’s office. The Captain of the Guard hadn’t arrived yet, but the clerk pulled out the logbook
Val put it on Kelso’s conference table and pulled up a chair for Pol to sit right next to him. He opened the log up and flipped the pages until they reached a few pages from the end.
“Look at the entries. There is a time, a description, and those who enter and leave.”
“I’ve never been stopped.”
Val gave Pol a disgusted look. “The guards won’t stop nobles if they know who they are. I’m sure they miss some people, but they wouldn’t miss a garden cart. You’ll be on the logbook for the early morning guard shift.”
Pol didn’t question Val, but they ran down the entries together. Only two carts were recorded, and none of the entries declared the cart to be from the gardeners.
“That doesn’t mean anything. How is a guard going to distinguish what part of the castle the cart came from?”
Pol looked at the time. “When did the gardeners last see Paki?”
Val smiled. “That’s more like what I want to hear. What would be the pattern?”
“Smuggle Paki out of the castle after dark, but not so late that their departure would be particularly noticed.” Pol looked at the two entries. “The later one. That must be it. We write down the names of those who left with a cart, and then we can get closer to what happened, right?”
That got an approving nod from Val. “So, do you know these two men?”
Pol looked at the names and frowned. “No. I have no idea who they are.”
“Who might?”
“Who might what?” Kelso said as he walked into the room. “What are you doing here looking through one of my logbooks? They are sacred to me.” Kelso put his hand over his heart.