Charms and Death and Explosions

by Honor Raconteur

  “Had four cups of coffee this morning,” she admitted cheerfully as she scaled the ladder as nimbly as any monkey. “I might be a little wired.”

  “Heaven preserve us,” I grumbled. That explained her overenthusiasm quite adequately. I hoped the caffeine rush would die down soon—before I was forced to do something drastic like make her run laps around the city.

  Jamie paused with her head just below the window sill. In a casual show of strength, she grabbed the iron grate and tore it off, the screws rending in an awful screech of tortured metal. I leaned up as she passed the grilling down to me and grunted at the weight of it, as it was by no means light. Setting it carefully aside, I turned my face and attention back up towards her. “What do you see?”

  “That…is not good. Henri, do you have growth houses on this world?”

  Slowly, I responded, “I am not familiar with that term.”

  “Places that look like ordinary houses on the outside, but a criminal grows something illegal on the inside, turning the entire thing into a greenhouse?” she explained, still peering through the window.

  “Oh. Yes, we do, although fortunately they’re not rampant. I’m almost afraid to inquire, what do you see growing up there?”

  “Looks like fungus. Lots of white mushrooms.”

  Alarm tingled in the back of my mind, sounding bells in a growing klaxon of noise. I knew precisely what they were, because I had detected the use of them in the charm ink several days previous. Seaton and I had remarked upon the stupidity of it at the time, but why hadn’t I questioned the source of the mushrooms? “Roughly three inches tall, perfectly white with no other stripes or blemishes?”

  She twisted to look down at me, eyebrows drawn together in a frown. “I can tell from your face that isn’t good. Do I need to get down?”

  “Immediately,” I rasped. “That’s Destroying Angel.”

  Ignoring the rungs of the ladder, she stepped free of it and dropped all eight feet without issue. Her bent knees took the brunt of the impact, and she straightened, alarm growing over her face. “Wait, that poisonous mushroom thing used in the ink?”

  “First, hold perfectly still,” I instructed, then hit her with three different cleansing charms before examining her magic core carefully. No fissures. Still, I’d have Seaton take a look at her in the next few hours, just in case. “Yes, that poisonous mushroom. It’s considered to be one of the most toxic mushrooms on this continent. Careless contact with it, such as inhaling its spores or coming into skin contact with it, can be lethal. Magically speaking, it’s quite potent if harvested in its seedling state and distilled in alcohol. It makes a very strong base to ink.”

  “Craaap,” Jamie groaned, looking back up at the window she’d just been spying through. “I thought you said they got their ink from a reliable source?”

  “They did. And apparently boosted it with their own farmed Destroying Angel filaments,” I agreed grimly. Mentally, I cursed myself for three kinds of a fool. Seaton and I had assumed that the result of Destroying Angel was from a licensed source, as the ink had been properly purchased from a supplier. We had an invoice stating as much from their files. It had never occurred to me that they would seek to double the potency of the ink by adding in their own crop of Destroying Angel.

  Glancing at me, she said softly, “You couldn’t have known. You thought you knew the source of the ink.”

  “I should have asked more questions,” I denied, still mad at myself.

  “Henri.” Exasperated, she pointed at the second story and the horrors it contained. “What are we doing, right now, if not asking more questions?”

  Well. Put like that, she might have a point. Still, I should have detected something strange about the charms when examining them. It irked me that I had not. But it wasn’t the time to sit about and feel pitiful, either. That dangerous crop on the second story demanded my attention. “Jamie, let’s message Seaton. I do not want to tackle this alone and we need to report it to a Royal Mage regardless. The potency of a crop this size demands such protocol.”

  “Okay. Say, you don’t think that they’ve done this before, do you?” Her brown eyes went large with horror. “The previous shop they had, did they have a crop there too?”

  I bit back the urge to swear like a stevedore. “That is entirely possible. We’ve not heard if someone else has taken over the building. Even if they removed the crop, traces of it could still linger.”

  “I’ll message Evans, he’s got the best magic ability of the group,” Jamie informed me, already striding toward the car to fetch her texting pad. “You tell Sherard about this.”

  I pulled out my texting pad, scribbled in the name of the addressee in the delineated box at the top of the screen, and then wrote quickly, barely keeping my handwriting legible: Seaton. We have Destroying Angel growing on second floor.

  It took him a few moments to respond: WHHHHHAAAAT

  I’ll lock the place down until you get here.

  Coming now.

  Looking up, I saw Jamie biting at her bottom lip, a sure sign that some word had failed her. “Need me to take over?”

  “No, but how do you spell Destroying Angel?”

  I told her, watched over her shoulder as she carefully spelled it out, checking the rest of the message as well. She had done well with everything else. Satisfied, I stepped back two feet and retrieved my wand from my interior coat pocket, putting in a temporary quarantine spell on the building. It might be tossing good effort after bad at this juncture, but policy was to lock down any large plot of Destroying Angels immediately upon discovery. I wasn’t going to argue the point.

  Putting the pad back into the car, she informed me over her shoulder, “Evans says he’s going directly there to double check.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I suppose it’s too much to hope that Garner and Timms disposed of the Destroying Angels properly at their previous location?”

  “I’m personally praying that they just hadn’t planted them.”

  “Ah. Safer bet,” Jamie agreed sourly. Looking at the building again, she crossed both arms over her chest, tapping a finger in an idle rhythm against her sleeve. “Henri. Just a thought, but…you said some of the charms actually caused sickness. Can that be because of the mushroom ink?”

  “Quite possibly. If they didn’t distill it properly, if they harvested mature shrooms instead of seedlings—you catch my drift. A dozen little things could have been done wrong to ill effect. It’s why the distillation of the Destroying Angel mushrooms is government regulated and audited to begin with.” I glared at the building. What an infernal mess.

  “And they had no way of getting up there and clearing out the mature ones anyway,” Jamie added in a grumble. “Or they had a trap door somewhere that we just didn’t find.”

  “I assume the latter. They’d have no way of harvesting their crop otherwise. Or watering it, and it would require constant moisture.”

  “Ah. Good point.” Looking about her, she prophesied in a voice full of doom, “We will be here all day.”

  “For once,” I riposted, already feeling as if the day were a decade long already, despite it not being lunch yet, “I want you to be wrong.”

  She was not wrong.

  It took the rest of the day to clean out the second story, mostly because we had to craft a viable means of entering first. If there was a trap door leading up to it—and there must have been, I’d stake my reputation on it—then it was devilishly clever in design. We couldn’t find it, even with locating spells. Once proper spells were built, it was a far easier task for the professionals to enter, clearing things carefully out and into containment bags before hauling it back down.

  Jamie wasn’t allowed anywhere near this process. She saw the danger as well as Seaton and I did, and chose instead to keep the onlookers well back, explaining the general dangers to them, not allowing the crowd near us.

  I stayed planted near the wagons, keeping track of everything brought out. S
eaton dashed in between the second level and the wagons, double checking that everything remained sealed tight, his expression far more grim than usual. He stopped next to me, sweat beading his brow from the constant activity, his eyes on the clipboard in my hand. “Sixteen bags so far?”

  “As you see. How is it up there?”

  “We’re about halfway through.” Grimacing, he acknowledged my unspoken look at the three wagons resting alongside the curb. “I’ve already called for more. Zounds, Davenforth, I don’t mind telling you that if these two fools were still alive, I’d murder them with my bare hands for this. Stupidity should have a limit.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you.” I tucked the pencil into the clipboard to rub a hand along my forehead, feeling a headache brewing like a gathering storm. “Seaton, I know that we collected all of the inventory from the stores, but that doesn’t account for the charms already sold. We put out an official notice, but….”

  “I put in another one with the Kingston Gazette,” he assured me, the kohl around his eyes smearing with perspiration. “And I’ve asked all of the theaters to announce a health warning for the charms and to notify the police immediately if anyone has one. I can only hope that between those two things, we’ll catch most of them before they do any damage. The person that I truly want to strangle is the one who issued them a business license.”

  “We’re still searching if they had one,” I reminded him. “But we can hardly blame the clerks at City Hall; they’re not able to tell a genuine magical license from a forgery, and we know Garner’s was forged.”

  “That,” Seaton growled, tone sour, “might be true, but I can still be upset about it. Alright, let’s get the rest of this cleared out, then I vote we all go to dinner. Queen’s treat tonight, as we’ve earned it.”

  “Hear, hear!” Jamie called over her shoulder.

  “I swear she has hearing like a bat’s,” Seaton observed to me lightly.

  “I heard that!”

  Pointing to her smugly, he arched an eyebrow at me. “See?”

  Considering the amount of times she’d overheard something she should not have, it didn’t surprise me. Then again, Jamie’s senses were superior to the normal human’s. “So I do. There’s one other issue, Seaton. Have we heard if there were any Destroying Angels in their previous location?”

  “Evans reports there wasn’t. Apparently they had this bright idea after moving into this building. I thank all listening deities for that small favor.” Someone called Seaton and he acknowledged it by lifting a hand before adding, “Stay strong, old chap. We’ll see the end of this in the next few hours.”

  I certainly prayed so. Standing was quickly becoming uncomfortable, the balls and arches of my feet not happy with the constant pressure of staying upright.

  Cleaning was a laborious endeavor complicated by the mushrooms’ deadly nature if someone mishandled them. The wrong exposure would lead to vomiting, delirium, convulsions, liver and kidney failure, soon to be followed by death. Few survived the experience. The magicians carrying out the task understood the risks very well and had suited up accordingly in suits of oiled linens, magically enhanced to repel any invasion of a magical substance, which covered them from the crown of their head to the soles of their boots. They looked rather like overexuberant beekeepers, in my humble opinion. It had to be sweltering hot in the garment, not to mention awkward to see around the small glass visor of the headgear, but not one man even hinted at taking it off.

  “Henri,” Jamie called out to me.

  I half-turned, keeping my place, and found her regarding me with a mix of sympathy and amusement. “Yes?”

  “Christopher’s Steak House?” she suggested.

  My mouth instantly filled with the flavors of a thick, perfectly grilled steak. “Thank you. That is exactly the motivation I needed to keep going.”

  Chuckling, she went back to the crowd, leaning in to answer a question from a child still in his knickers.

  I checked off another three bags on the clipboard, mentally writing a formal report for this in my head, and imagining my captain’s response. He would not be pleased about this. At all. While I understood and shared the sentiment, it did not mean I looked forward to reporting this either.

  Please, please let there not be any further incidents like this one.

  Captain Gregson was not happy.

  Since I shared that sentiment, I gave him a commiserating nod and sigh. Jamie sat in the chair adjoining mine, perfectly peeved, and I had no doubt she would raid my chocolate stash in the lab at the first given opportunity. For that matter, I had every intention of joining her.

  Listing to one side in his chair, Gregson leaned his head against a propped-up hand, weary and aged a decade older than his actual years. “Twenty-seven bags. You’re telling me that you hauled twenty-seven bags of a deadly mushroom out of our crime scene.”

  “Yes, Captain, unfortunately.” Giving a tepid smile, I winced before offering, “There’s two silver linings to this particular cloud.”

  “Please do elaborate, Davenforth,” he encouraged in a growl. “I could use them.”

  Ticking points off on my fingers, I intrepidly forged ahead. “First, it was entirely contained. Fools they might have been, but not without some survival instincts. Because they’d closed off all access to the second floor, no one tumbled into their little farm; otherwise we’d be looking at dozens of victims instead of just the two.”

  “Yes, by all means, let’s avoid a bigger disaster than we have now,” Gregson groaned. “What’s the second?”

  “Because this has basically become a government case,” Jamie pitched in smoothly, “we were able to immediately pull in experts to clear the area out. The bill for the cleanup and the aftercare of treating the building to prevent the spores from infecting anyone else who inhabits the area after this is also on Sherard’s tab instead of ours.”

  Gregson lifted his head, expression lightening. “Truly? Music to my ears. You’re correct, Davenforth, they’re nice silver linings in the cloud. I’ll take them. What about their previous location? You said they had a business on the east side of the city before moving.”

  “Clean,” I assured him, not blind to his open relief. “Kingsman Evans checked it yesterday. They apparently hit upon this hare-brained scheme after moving. I’m inclined to be grateful for that, even as I curse them for thinking of it at all.”

  “I’m just cursing them,” Jamie grumbled. “Idjuts. Those two were not the sharpest eggs in the drawer. As it stands, Cap, we’ve got something of a lead but a very large suspect pool. One of the demolition companies in town has some missing inventory they can’t account for. I was supposed to follow up with them yesterday, but, well….”

  “Things happened,” Gregson waved her on with perfect understanding. “Pick up the trial tomorrow. How big of a suspect pool?”

  “These two did a lot of damage,” she continued sourly. “Half the city’s out for their blood, or at least it feels that way. The guys report that whenever they bring up bad charms, and who our victims are, they get rants and sob stories. Poor Marshall got surrounded by a virtual mob yesterday from half the people working the docks after asking the question, all intent on getting their piece said.”

  “We’ll have to narrow it down by expertise and opportunity,” I stated, inclining my head to indicate my exasperated partner. She was going to eat my stash bare, I could see it now. “There’s simply too much motive in this city.”

  “Truth,” Jamie groaned. “Cap, I gotta be honest with you. We might not catch these guys. And after all the crap the victims pulled, I’m going to lose little sleep over it if we don’t.”

  “I’m inclined to think this was justifiable homicide as well.” I splayed both hands under the sour look he gave us. “I didn’t say that I approved of their vigilante style, just that I’m tempted to murder them myself at the moment.”

  “It’s not like they could call on Batman,” Jamie muttered as an aside.
<
br />   I let the nonsensical words pass. “We’ll, of course, investigate this. If nothing else, I don’t want them to get into the habit of thinking murder, no matter how justified, is a viable means to an end.”

  “At least you understand that,” Gregson grunted. “And I don’t want this car bomb method spreading any further either, although that’s probably nothing more than words in the wind right now—”

  A quick knock sounded on the closed door before it was abruptly swung open and a harried looking McSparrin stuck her head in. “Sorry, Cap. We just got bad news. Dr. Davenforth, Jamie, we got an emergency message from Dockside. There’s an outbreak down there and it looks like it’s magically caused. A doctor just sent us a message asking for help, he can’t lock the area down. He’s asking for anyone who has authority to come help him. Think it’s our bad charms?”

  Jamie leapt for the door, not even answering that question. I scrambled to stay on her heels, fearing that McSparrin’s intuition was correct—this might very well be caused by our victims’ shoddy work. Curse them to the ninth circle and may their souls be hung upon the devil’s bedroom walls.

  “Penny, you know the address?” Jamie demanded as she moved.

  “I do,” McSparrin confirmed. “Doctor, you need any equipment?”

  “Quite a bit of it. We’ll need the wagon for this, it has most of my gear already loaded. Let me swing by the lab and snag my bag.” I hustled toward the lab but didn’t just grab the bag. Instead I paused to grab a small box of chocolates I had purchased two days ago. Pocketing it, I went through the back door and found that both women had already started the process of hitching a team of horses to the wagon. Pitching in, we got the team harnessed in record time and quickly loaded up. McSparrin was quick to get the horses in motion, demanding enough speed that we took the first curve nearly on two wheels. I hung on with one hand, but the crawl of traffic forced her to slow to a more moderate speed.

  “Penny,” Jamie demanded over the din of horns, clattering hooves, and engine noises, “how did you hear about this?”